“Throughout the worst of the pandemic I, like everyone, thought of the many things I’d failed to appreciate back when life was normal: oh, to be handed an actual restaurant menu; to stand so close to a stranger that you can read the banal text messages that are obviously more important to him than his toddler stumbling off the curb and out into traffic…”

―
David Sedaris
Happy-Go-Lucky

//

If anybody has the energy in this pandemic to write about this pandemic, it would be Sedaris. A collection of personal essays, you can expect the usual offbeat observations, sometimes drily expressed. He is always interesting and given the details he inserts, it makes me want to keep a journal, an audio record even, but perhaps I am meant to live my life more prosaically.

This is a wonderful record of the pandemic years. Everyone’s experience is of course different, but some of the broader themes are there, soothing to see in the written word.

//

“Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic canceled the tours I had scheduled, I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.””

“I daydreamed about going to gigs, seeing arthouse cinema, having intellectually stimulating conversations, and being in the midst of the next great literary movement. I could not find any of this at home. My classmates and I were brought up on the belief that nothing was more important than securing a job that would eventually buy us a flat, a basic human right that had become nearly impossible for my generation, and these jobs were usually soul sucking. Hong Kong’s brand of capitalism makes it easy to live in a place and never engage with it.

I thought that when I eventually became an adult I would be one of those people who power-walked in heels across the bridge of the International Finance Centre in the central business district.”

―
Karen Cheung
Impossible City

//

This is one person’s memoir, from a person who lives in Hong Kong. Some things are more universal and familiar to a Chinese person who grew up in South-east Asia. But at some point, the unique, thorny situation of being a relatively younger Hong-Konger in the 2010s becomes a puzzle. It is an unenviable place to be, and Cheung captures the heartache and despite all the difficulties, the hope of her generation.

Capitalism, belonging and forces that insist on bearing down on you instead of letting you be. What a heady mix. I enjoyed the book, and appreciated Cheung’s writing and the way the chapters jump around. It is a little disjointed but life is like that.

//

“I caption photos with #wanderlust unironically, chatting up fellow backpackers and believing that they could serve as conduits through which I could understand more about a world of which I had seen so little.

At the two on-campus Starbucks I rotate between, I keep tabs on tech sites and start-ups, holding on to the millennial delusion that a good business idea or a new app could radically improve our world. Being loud online on issues like climate change and racial inequality lets me pretend I’m part of a global conversation, yet at enough distance for it to not affect my daily life.”

“It was in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe that it would be anything but awesome.”

―
Chuck Klosterman
The Nineties

//

This book was awesome to read. A child of the nineties now has a book that accurately captures the feeling of that era. I found myself nodding at various sections, and then I laughed at having taken this book a little too seriously. But well, it is really nice to chuckle at the caricature of a person who absorbed too much of the 90s vibe – progressive but not too much; hopeful but not too optimistic. And oh, the days of being a nobody, with no pressure to be on brand, to even have a personal brand…

//

“The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool…. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.”

“No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”

“The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions.”

–

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain

//

This reads like a thriller. The focus on the Sacklers humans involved make it very readable, and among others, the points made that stick out to me are: (1) the playbook for Librium in the 1960s – claiming that withdrawal is not a sign of dependence but intensification of the underlying condition, thus justifying a higher dose of Librium; abuse comes from using the drug in non-intended ways: blame the user, not the drug – was used for Oxycontin decades later. And it worked for the Sacklers again, for decades. (2) the timeline. Oxycontin came into the market in the early 90s, and it was only in 2018 that the more serious repercussions came in when the Massachusetts AG decided to personally name the Sacklers as defendants. The multi-district litigation eventually culminated in the Sacklers stepping down, and a settlement sum in 2021 from Purdue Pharma that exceeded $4b. But, and there is a but, Purdue Pharma had already pled guilty in 2008 for lesser offences (pertaining to how they marketed the drug) and yet, it continued to sell the drug and in the 2010s also entered various other markets.

The number of years this went on for is quite staggering. But investigation and litigation can take time, especially if a litigant manages to get a court order for documents to be sealed/ destroyed upon the resolution of a case. Richard Sackler’s deposition in a settled case was somehow unearthed, and reading a transcript may have less impact. Transcripts cannot convey tone or facial expressions. I was very amused to learn that John Oliver hired actors to play Sackler and read out the transcript.