Stuff that happened

Earlier in August, Kylea’s parents visited all the way from New Zealand. We spent a couple of weeks together catching up and hanging out.

Kylea’s parents blessed us with a brand new BBQ as a housewarming gift; an extremely generous gesture! Having lived in apartments for ~12 years, I never owned a BBQ. As such I was super stoked, and probably BBQ’d a little too often in August.

A week into the in-laws’ visit, Kylea and I went to the hospital for an ultrasound. That’s right, we are going to have our first child!

At the ultrasound, we were able to see a little peanut-shaped human moving around inside Kylea. It was surprisingly agile and flailed its tiny arms and legs around a lot. It was surreal to think that I was looking at the first photograph of our future child.

It was awesome to be able to tell the news to Kylea’s parents in-person. They were both incredibly excited and we fired up the BBQ to celebrate 🌭.

What I read

This month I tried to read The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi.

I read 50% of the book before I ultimately had to put it down. I kept reading hoping it would get better or that I’d learn something, but it just never did. The author touches on Alderian psychology which started off interesting, but as the book went on it just sounded more and more generic.

I also couldn’t stand the format in which it’s written. It’s written in a dialog format between a student and master, and the whole back-and-forth conversation sounded contrived and borderline cringey.

If you enjoyed this book, I’d love to hear why. Perhaps the dialog format prevented me from enjoying and appreciating the meat of the book; either way, I lost patience with the book and moved on to the next one on my reading list.

After giving up The Courage to be Disliked, I picked up Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

I only had time to read half of it however, so I’m going to write about it next month.