Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

There is no point in sugarcoating it: I did not handle my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine well. Even though people say the first dose should lead to anything more than some arm pain afterward, my reaction was much more severe. Aside from the thumping arm pain that lasted a better part of a month, I found myself sleeping the whole day the day after and even a part of the day after that. Considering that those who reacted badly to the first dose tend to also react heavily to the second, the anticipation for fevers, pains, and worse have been with me ever since I had the injection a few hours ago.

A small L-shaped counter with six seats, a long cabinet crowded with bottles of alcohol, and two TVs playing old movies and music videos...the little hidden bar is simple enough that one could mistake it for a nightspot in rural Africa . But this little bar was in the back of a nondescript office building in a nondescript neighborhood in a nondescript part of Japan. For 18 years, the owner of the bar ran the place by himself, relying on the old regular customers who have grown to know him personally as they came in week after week, month after month, for chilling and quiet chats.

At first sight, Squid Game  has a lot against it on the road to global popularity. It is unabashedly violent, refers to some idiosyncrasies of modern-day South Korea that many people around the world may not be familiar with, and does not stack its cast with the young, beautiful, and famous. Yet, what has been termed as the South Korean version of The   Hunger Games , speaking directly out against the evils of social stratification by taking class schisms to its extremely violent logic end, has somehow become the biggest original series in the entire history of Netflix.

The setup at one of the University of Tokyo's bigger conference halls is also designed for a major event. Hundreds of staff members checking paperwork, rows of chairs for people waiting their turn, and elaborate signs and partitions to direct the flow of traffic have turned the normally empty conference hall into one that serves a single purpose: an assembly line of getting as many COVID shots into people's arms as possible in a short time. The massive amount of human and physical resources, not to mention the planning, that went into the affair certainly displays the dedication of the university to its staff and students.