The past few weeks had been tough. My mom fell and fractured her back. Although she is still in tremendous pain, she is recovering. She will be discharged on Thursday. I will return to Lancaster to spend a couple of days with her.

Last night my heart ached once again after finding out my oldest son broke my trust once again. Since we banned him from using his iPad in the day, he snuck it into his bedroom to use at night. For a very long time, he didn’t want to sleep alone. Now he just wants to sleep by himself so he could do things behind us.

When asked if he played during the night, he denied. Unfortunately, the evidence was right on his iPad. I gave him an opportunity to come clean, but he didn’t and that broke my heart and trust. I increased his ban for two months and that when all hell broke loose. He claimed that no one loved him or cared about him. He hated his life. He hated me. I made his life miserable. My eleven-year-old boy is no longer a kid. He is breaking out of my space. He told me to get out of his room and he didn’t want to see me anymore. That was a wake up call for me.

Later on when we both calmed down, I came back into his room. I asked him if he meant what he said. Fortunately, he said no. He was just angry. I gave him a hug and he held on to me tight. I told him I have never stopped loving him. I apologized that I made his life miserable. I asked if I could sleep with him. He held my arm and rubbed my skin like he used to do when he was a kid.

I watched him sleep and thought about our relationships. The lockdown has been tough on all of us, particularly on him. During weekdays, my wife and I have to work; therefore, we simply can’t do much with them. Even on weekends, we have nowhere to go. When they weren’t using their screen time, they were biking, playing water, or creating LEGOS. Then they would get bored.

I decided to make a change in our relationship. I wanted to try a less strict approach, especially in sibling rivalry. I wanted to show more caring and less yelling. I went to sleep tired, stressed, and overwhelmed. I woke up the next day and decided to start fresh. I woke up the kids and drove them to buy some Einstein bagels. To my surprise, my oldest son wanted to come along. After that he played nicely with his younger brothers. He didn’t make them mad. They watched TV and played military games. They built bases and stations. The younger kids loved it when the oldest brother made up games and let them participate.

At bedtime, I thanked him for his amazing behavior. I don’t know how long it will last, but I am grateful. I will do my part to make our relationship better. I hope this will be a new start for us.

He claimed to make America great again. Instead, he has made many of us dumb as fuck. I am noticing more and more Vietnamese Americans believing the coronavirus is a hoax created by the Democrats to take him down.

It’s dangerous. It’s beyond misinformation. Over 50,000 cases a day is not a hoax. It’s the pandemic, stupid. It’s lives and deaths, not Democrats or Republicans. It’s science, not politics. It’s sweeping the world, not just America. The rest of the world doesn’t give a fuck if he gets re-elected or not. We need to get our head straight. He is making us sick—not great.

Wearing masks prevents the spread of the virus and saves lives, but it has become politicized because he doesn’t want to wear one. They compare the face mask mandatory to the act of communism. Have they forgotten how it was like living under the communist? Has too much freedom made them become so ignorant? They rather put themselves and their family at risk than masking up.

I didn’t realize how deep fake news, racism, and homophobia ran in our community until he became president. He brought out not only the white supremacist, but also exposed the ugliness hiding in the Vietnamese-American community. We have lots of work ahead of us to right our wrong, but I am hopeful seeing the young Vietnamese-American generation stepping up to help fix these issues.

Saturday morning, before leaving my house in Virginia to go visit my mom at the rehab center in Pennsylvania, I wanted to say goodbye to my kids. At 9:30 am, Đạo, Đán, and their cousin Khôi were still asleep. They had a sleepover. As I looked around the room, I found their iPads with battery drained. I suspected they stayed up and played video games again. I told my wife to talk to them when they wake up.

She asked them and all three of them said no. They were sleeping and didn’t play on their iPads. The day went on as nothing happened. I called my wife to get the scoop and she told me what they told her. After dinner, she pressed them again and Đán blew the whistle. They stayed up and played into the wee hours. When my wife told me the story, my heart sank. They lied to us the second time. At least, Đán confessed. Đạo and Khôi made me furious. Khôi is not my kid so I don’t have anything to say to him. Đạo disappointed me. He lost my trust for the second time. What we discussed the last time meant nothing to him. How can I trust him if he lied to me? If something happens to him outside of this house, how can I know for sure if he tells me the truth? For example, if one of his friends at school accused him of stealing, how do I know that he would tell me the truth? How can I defend him? I would have no doubt about Đán because he tells the truth. He still doesn’t seem to understand the importance of being trustworthy. I am deeply hurt that I can no longer trust my own son.

My wife and I argued over this issue. She doesn’t see it as a big deal because kids go through stages. Lying is unacceptable no matter how old they are. If they think they can get away with small lies, they will commit bigger lies, which will put them in deeper troubles. We cannot help them if they are not being truthful to us. I am frustrated that I could not get that point into Đạo’s head.

Đán is banned for a week from using his iPad and Đạo is banned for a month. I told him that his lies got him into deeper trouble. I gave him an opportunity to come clean. Whatever he had done behind our back, he could tell me now. He admitted he used his iPad at night after Đán fell asleep. I was mad, but glad that he tells the truth. I truly hope he has learned his lesson this time.

My wife and I don’t agree on everything. Every now and then, we still argue over the use of profanity. I don’t disagree with her that good writings don’t require obscenity. Unfortunately, my writing is shitty. I don’t write to make a living. I write to make sense of my life.

I have been criticized for using profanity in my writing because I am “educated.” Nguyễn Thanh Việt has a PhD and he cusses like a motherfucker. In reference to the use of “Kung Flu,” he tweeted, “If you’re an Asian American who supports Trump, guess what? You’re a fucking idiot.” Even a professor uses profanity. I respect him more just for that.

I will defend my use of profanity as a form of expression. When I like something, I would say, “That’s good.” When I really love something, I would say, “That shit is fucking amazing.” As long as the profanity doesn’t directly apply to someone—unless they fucking deserve it—I don’t see a problem with it. If my kids say to me, “Fuck you, daddy,” I would slap the fucking taste out of their fucking mouth (just kidding). If they say, “You’re a fucking cool daddy,” I would be cool with that. It is all about the context. If you find my language too vulgar, don’t read. I don’t write for anyone but myself. I don’t write for any publication, I write on my own tiny corner of the Internet.

In Vietnamese culture, “educated” people are to be looked up to as role models; therefore, they can’t use foul language. Although I never claimed to be “educated,” I find English liberated me from the two sides. English profanity can be poetry if used correctly. Hip-hop lyric is an example of that. On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to use Vietnamese profanity. For example, “Đụ mẹ” literally means “fuck mother.” It is simply too disrespectful to use. One time, an adult cussed at me, “Đụ mẹ mày” (“Fuck your mother”). I was eleven and he was probably in his 30s. We were either playing or joking around and I didn’t even hear what he said, but my mom heard it. She was furious. She came up to the guy and yelled in Vietnamese, “You want to fuck his mother? I am right here. Come and fuck me if you dare.” The guy apologized. I will never forget that scene.

Vietnamese profanity is so vulgar that Vietnamese people have to come up with creative ways to say it. Using double entendre is one of the methods. Let’s say, when you call someone “khôn liền” (“smart instantly”), you imply that they “khiêng lồn” (“carry pussy”). The celebrated poet Hồ Xuân Hương was notorious for using these types of hidden meaning in her work.

I hope that I make myself fucking clear on my use of profanity. If I come across uneducated or vulgar, I am and I don’t give a fuck. If I come across as angry or hateful, I am definitely not. I just wanted to add some emphatics to my average writing. If you have an issue with that, go fuck yourself. I am just fucking with you. You know I love you.

If you want to find the quick tutorial, scroll down to the bottom of the article. Here’s some background of the issue I faced.

Last night before going to bed around 10:30 pm, I made a tiny mistake that kept me up until three something in the morning. I logged into iLoveNgocLan.com’s WordPress Admin to post an article. Instead of doing what I intended to do, I changed the encoding for pages and feeds from iso-8859-1 to utf-8. I also set the template header to <meta charset="utf-8">. Vietnamese text still rendered fine until I made a new post. Every word contained question marks. When I edited an existing article, it also turned into question marks.

I freaked out a bit and went back to change back the encoding for pages and feeds. I freaked out a bit more when the option had disappeared in the Settings Reading Screen. It turned out that WordPress has removed that option in version 3.5.0. I suspect that the option was still there because it was set to iso-8859-1 instead of the default utf-8. I edited wp-config.php to change the encoding back to define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1');. To my dismay, all the Vietnamese texts displayed black diamonds with question marks. It appeared that going back was not possible; therefore, I googled to find out how to convert latin1 to utf8, something I should have done a long time ago.

In my search, I came across Varun Shrivastava’s “How to Fix Weird Characters Seen on WordPress Blog?”, which seems to be straightforward. I follow his instructions using phpMyAdmin. I exported the existing database into UTF-8 encoding. I created a new database with UTF-8 Collation. Then I imported the data back into the new database. Unfortunately, that didn’t solve the issue. The question marks still showed up on new posts, edited articles, and new comments.

Then I followed WordPress’s documentation on “Converting Database Character Sets” using the new database I just created. I ran the following SQL command in phpMyAdmin to change the default charset of the database:

ALTER DATABASE MyDatabaseName CHARACTER SET utf8;

It worked, so I ran the following SQL command to change the default charset of individual tables:

ALTER TABLE wp_posts CHARACTER SET utf8; 

Then I ran the following SQL command to run individual columns:

alter table wp_posts change post_content post_content LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8;

Unfortunately, I have to run TEXT, LONGTEXT, TINYTEXT, VARCHAR, ENUM for each individual column for each individual table. It would be a lot of work to do manually and when I got to TINYTEXT, it wiped out all the body text from the article. I gave up and went to bed around 3 something in the morning.

I woke up again around 7 am and tried to figured out what I else I could do. I opened up the SQL file I exported a few hours earlier and performed a find-and-replace to convert latin1 into utf8. 19 instances were found and replaced. I created a new database in phpMyAdmin and imported the new search-and-replaced file. To my surprise, it worked as expected. Take a look at iLoveNgocLan.com. I created new posts, edited old posts, added new comments, and the text came up normal, no more question marks and no more black diamonds.

Essentially, to convert latin1 to utf8, this is all you need to do in phpMyAdmin:

1. Export your existing database to your local machine
2. Find latin1 and replace with utf8 on your local machine
3. Create a new database in phpMyAdmin with UTF-8 Collation
4. Import the SQL file from your local machine to the new database in phpMyAdmin
5. Run this SQL command in phpMyAdmin: ALTER DATABASE MyDatabaseName CHARACTER SET utf8;
6. Edit your wp-config.php to point to the new database and edit define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
7. Update the meta tag in your theme’s header: <meta charset="utf-8">

That’s it. I don’t know why this method isn’t available already. I wonder if there’s any drawback of using this method, but it seems to work for me. I am not a MySQL expert. In fact, I don’t have much confidence in messing around with it. I lost several hours of sleep, but the learning experience is worth it.

I rewatched Reloaded and Revolutions. The special effects and animations on these both films are astonishing. The sex scene in Reloaded was hot. The battle scene in Revolutions was mind-blowing. As for the story and the script, the first one was still superior. I am definitely looking forward to seeing the forth installment in 2022.

This week’s photos featured graffiti arts with the message: “Fuck Trump.” He has been fucked by the Supreme Court two times in a week. The poll numbers are slipping and some Republicans are turning against him. Let’s hope he’ll get fucked this November.

Spike Lee’s new joint for Netflix takes four Black-American veterans back to Vietnam to recover their soul and gold. The journey takes on a dark path once they found what they were there for. Lee joined forces Black actors (Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) with Vietnamese actors (Johnny Trí Nguyễn, Ngô Thanh Vân, Lê Y Lan, Nguyễn Ngọc Lâm, and Sandy Hương Phạm). Lindo gave an unforgettable performance. He looked so damn menacing in the red MAGA hat. Perhaps you don’t want to fuck with a Black veteran who voted for Trump. It’s missed opportunity with one-sided perspective.

Yesterday I received a generous contribution from a reader. As an independent blogger, I feel appreciative and encouraged. Blogging has become a passion of mine. I am not a writer, but a designer who writes. Blogging has allowed me to express myself through words without filter. I could write whatever I wanted. The freedom is both hypnotic and hell-raising at times.

Although I have invested time and effort into my blog, from designing to writing, I hesitated to ask for support. I don’t want to change the way I write if I have people paying me. Fortunately, it has not been the case. But then on the flip side, why the hell not? I will never know if I never tried it out. Whether I get support from readers or not, keeping my blog up-to-date will not change. Writing has been a way for me to deal with many issues in my head. If nothing else, I can improve my writing. I still trip up on English grammar, but I am getting better. I still make Vietnamese spelling errors, but I am relearning them as I write.

These days, I do cross-posting on Facebook as well. I want to share some of my thoughts to family and friends who do not visit my blog. On Facebook I have 230 friends, which is a much smaller audience than my blog. I pull in about 12,000 unique visitors a month on my blog, but I have no idea who they are or where they come from. I do not have any third-party tracking script on my website. I have no like button and no comment section on my blog. It is just me writing my life away. Facebook is different because it is Zuckerberg’s platform and not mine. All my content belongs to him and I don’t feel easy about it. The good thing is that I can simply turn off the switch and everything will be gone. Most of the content I shared on Facebook I already have an archive on my blog.

If you find me deactivating my Facebook one day, you can always find me on my blog. My blog is where I keep most of my writing. I wanted to thank everyone who had contributed to my blog. If you’ve moved to do so, here’s the link.

I signed myself up for ice skating lessons at the MedStar Capital Iceplex. I wanted to learn the proper techniques. I decided to skip level one and start at level two since I already knew the basics. I went to the first session yesterday after work.

The instructor was fantastic. She made ice skating look effortless. She emphasized the importance of having a good posture. She showed us how to shave the ice for us to learn to stop. She demonstrated the snowplow stop and the hockey stop and advised us not to do the latter until we learned the former. I already made the mistake of learning the hockey stop on my own. She also showed us how to fall without hurting ourselves—fall on your back pocket. She taught us to do backward swizzles. I haven’t even learned forward swizzles, but I managed to do fine. I need to practice that on my own.

The session was only half an hour long. I wished it was longer, but she gave us enough materials to work with on my own without feeling overwhelmed. I am glad I signed up for it. I can’t wait to come back next week. I also need to invest in a pair of ice skating shoes. I still don’t know what to get.

While I was waiting for our session to begin, I talked to a friendly lady. She moved from Atlanta to Arlington for her new job. She works at the embassy and she will be assigned to Sài Gòn for two years. She is now learning Vietnamese. I offered to help if she wanted. I told her I wanted her job. I asked her why she wanted to take ice skating lessons and her answer was just to try out something new she hasn’t done before.