Friday night.

Two years ago today, I crossed the Canadian border after driving for four days straight from Seattle to Toronto. (What can I say, I love roadtrips.) It’s rare to have such clear delineation in one’s life: exactly two years to become a permanent resident, to fulfill my contractual obligation, to pass the immigration purgatory, to become a Canadian. What a strange journey this has been…

I’m finally allowing myself to dream a little. At any given point over the past 731 days (leap year, remember?), some part of my mind was always wondering, “What if?” What if I accidentally crossed someone important and got fired and had to go back to the States? What if my entire job got outsourced overseas? What if, what if, what if? And now… Now I can’t help but wonder. When all is said and done, maybe I’ll go on a sloooow and leisurely roadtrip around Canada, without any tight deadlines or the nagging awareness that I have only so many vacation days remaining. Maybe I’ll spend a whole week doing nothing but studying circuits and electronics all day every day until it finally clicks. Maybe I could walk every single street in Toronto, trying to spot every cool piece of graffiti, every improbably beautiful old building.

So many choices. This feels so good…

In more mundane and down-to-earth news, this week has been pretty entertaining. A gigantic freighter lost power when maneuvering the Suez Canal, and it got stuck in the worst possible way. It’s been blocking the whole canal for days now. About 10% of global trade can’t move because of that. There are viral memes, parody Twitter accounts, jokes (“at least your mistakes can’t be seen from space”), and hilarious commentary on a single bulldozer trying to excavate enough sand from the freighter’s bow to hopefully nudge it just a little. Years and decades from now, this single event will be an anchor in our cultural memory, and we’ll look back and laugh and laugh and laugh. This also highlights once again how fragile our world is. Granted, you’d have to have ridiculous resources to intentionally sabotage the Suez Canal, but still – the fact that the entire world commerce can be decimated so relatively easily… Heh. Between this, and the fact that an entire jet can go missing without a trace (MH370), and a virus like covid19 shutting down the entire world, I hope more people will become if not cynics then at least skeptics. This world is far more fragile than it appears.

In covid news, the US has set yet another daily vaccine record (3.4 million doses in one day) while Brazil sets a dark record of its own, with 3,650 recorded deaths in 24 hours. (And those are just the official figures.) Such strange and terrible discrepancies…

Have yourselves a safe weekend, eh.