August 2006 Archives
I had a weird dream this morning.
I was present on the set of the Andy Griffith show. The pilot show, actually. But it was an alternative pilot. Andy and Opie - and Opie's younger sister (no sister in the actual show, by the way), whose name I didn't know, had just moved into town. But it was a dangerous, paranoid town, and the expression on Andy's face betrayed his worry.
He said to Opie, something along the lines of "I've got two thousand dollars here to get us started, and that's all we've got." He then placed the whole sum into Opie's six-year-old charge, but as to the nature of the charge I'm unsure. Deposit it into the bank? The point is, I knew that somehow poor Opie was going to end up losing the money, and that he was feeling very anxious about taking the money. Andy, for his part, was also anxious, because if Opie were to lose the money he would feel responsible as a father for not properly educating his son. I remember thinking something along the lines of how this situation perfectly captured the contrast between notions of personal responsibility and responsibilities for one's inferiors between Japan and the west. Now, though, I'm not so sure that this comparison makes any sense.
All during the dream, incidentally, I, as the narrator, was afflicted with an annoying condition. My teeth were oversized - like ten times the normal tooth size - and so big that I could not even close my mouth. I was struggling to pay attention because I wanted to close my mouth, but the upper and lower rows of teeth in my mouth kept colliding and preventing closure. Wearing away the enamel.
I woke up pretty soon after this. My left arm had fallen asleep and it was all pins and needles.
When I was a little boy I had a recurring bad dream that periodically plagued me. I had a kind of twin, but not a twin in any conventional sense. This twin was a temporal twin; he followed me in time doing exactly what I had done five minutes before (or some sort of set amount). In fact, he was less like a twin and more like a wispy shadow projected into the past. He looked exactly like me, except that he was semi-transparent, like the Casper or Scooby-doo ghosts from the cartoons. A little John with an alpha channel, in other words. I had the sense that he wasn't even really conscious; he was simply compelled by the universe to do all of the things that I had done, and didn't really possess any normal free will.
The catch, though, was that, were the real John and the shadow John ever to come into contact, I knew somehow that the world would end. I'm not talking about the death of just the two Johns; I'm talking the end of the universe for everyone. So that was a big responsibility to bear.
So I always had to stay ahead of the shadow John. Which doesn't sound hard, since I was always ahead of him by five minutes... but moving and making sure I didn't intersect with shadow John every five minutes became very stressful. I tried a few tactics at first. For example, in the beginning I thought that I should run as fast as possible to evade shadow John; I'm sure that you can see where this is going. Unfortunately, I've never been a great runner, and I soon lost my breath. But it looked like the coast was clear. Wheezing, I rested a few moments. Before long, shadow John came running my way at full speed. Incredulous, I retreated a few paces, certain I was witness to inexorable apocalypse bearing down on me. Finally - of course - shadow John stopped a few feet short, out of shape, doubled over, gasping for breath. I was relieved, but ashamed. Rventually I learned to save my energy - and my dignity - by moving slowly, and by always keeping my double in sight.
The dream, naturally, invariably ended when I somehow ended up touching shadow John, where I would wake up with a start. The worst part of the dream was not the actual contact, but rather the event horizon when I realized that I had just before set into effect a course of events that would irrevocably lead to contact. For example, standing too long at the mouth of an exitless, narrow hallway, and then going in. There's no escape from that. The feeling was pure regret.
It occurs to me now that this concept might make an interesting video game. What do you think? Shadowjohn: the Evasion. Well, I would play, anyway.
Well, Heather and I spent last weekend moving all of our stuff to Ann Arbor. Most of our things are here now, but there are a few medium-sized items that remain. Like a dresser and a mirror. And a bike. And some other stuff.
Speaking of bikes, I was able to finally buy mine today. Or rather, the bike I ordered came in. It's a pretty sweet ride! Well, not really... but it will do the job. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Ann Arbor is ranked #3 in the nation for cycling, according to Cycling Magazine or something. I didn't actually catch the name of the magazine, but you get the idea.
The University of Michigan campus is a bit bigger than I expected. It's not really feasible to walk from the North Campus - where most of the engineering is - to the Central and South Campuses... one must ride a bus or bicycle. In the winter, I think cycling is not feasible. But luckily, with a UMich picture ID, bus rides are free.
I had a meeting with Professor S. J. at the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science about the class that we're teaching. Mainly it's him, but I've been asked to teach of the classes, if I recall. Mostly graphics stuff, but also a segment on working with interactive fiction engines. Should be a treat - I'm really looking forward to it! Oh, the class is about computer game design - EECS 494. At the end of the term, students hand in their own games. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of games the students come up with!
I still haven't registered for classes. I guess I'd better do that. There are a couple courses that look really interesting, including Natural Language Processing, and another course that's cross-listed with Linguistics. The recommended course load for a GSI is two per term, so I'll probably stop there. I'm thinking about auditing a course, though.
Tomorrow morning, I'm headed off back to Ohio to attend Heather's tenth class reunion. She asked me to not wear shorts or any holey or offensive t-shirts. I wonder if she's that lucky?
;)
Interesting but flawed piece on Cafe Hayek the other day. In this entry, Don Boudreaux extolls a NYT op-ed piece - a flaweder piece - by Barun Mitra (original NYT piece):
But like forests, animals are renewable resources. If you think of tigers as products, it becomes clear that demand provides opportunity, rather than posing a threat. For instance, there are perhaps 1.5 billion head of cattle and buffalo and 2 billion goats and sheep in the world today. These are among the most exploited of animals, yet they are not in danger of dying out; there is incentive, in these instances, for humans to conserve.
First I would like to point out that three of the four species Mitra cited - cattle, goats, and sheep - are domesticated species. While there are some feral varieties, the fourth species - buffalo - also exist widely as domesticated species. One might advance that, if only we were able to domesticate tigers, we could save them. But this relies on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of domestication. One can't just grab a species from the wild and contain them - this isn't domestication. Domesticated species are genetically disposed to domestication. It would take generations in order to domesticate a species, and those are under the best of circumstances. Jared Diamond has argued this in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and that all species that are likely to be domesticated have already been domesticated for thousands of years. From that book:
That is, domestication involves wild animals' being transformed into something more useful to humans. Truly domesticated animals differ in various ways from their wild ancestors. These differences result from two processes: human selection of those individual animals more useful to humans than other individuals of the same species, and automatic evolutionary responses of animals to the altered forces of natural selection operating in human environments as compared with wild environments.
Sheep, goats, cattle, and to some extent buffalo would not even exist today were it not for the presence of humans. Not to mention dogs, cats, pigs, horses. Tigers and humans, in stark contrast, are not coevolutionary - at least not to the initimate extent that domesticated animals are.
Even if we were to overcome this problem of domesticity, another ugly consideration rears its head. If we take tigers out of their environment, then they will soon cease to be tigers. Commoditization of the animals will effect selection pressures that are wildly divergent from the pressures found in tigers' natural habitats, and if we were to place a human-selected tiger - given a sufficient number of generations - back into the wild, they would be less successful than the original tigers. It's easy to imagine humans selecting tigers for pretty, bright stripes, instead of attacking ability.
Of course, all of our interactions with the environment have far-reaching implications. We cannot avoid that; already we've drastically reengineered our environment, and we will continue to do so. And I'm certainly an exponent of adjusting economic forces to get people to do what's in our - and the tigers' - best interest long-term; but I think that Mr. Mitra's proposal is extremely short-sighted.
My sister Kelly had a great article published yesterday in the Philadelphia Enquirer! Check it out:
The life lessons of softball season
Way to go Kelly!
I've been thinking a lot about Sex and the City with my new post-No Logo brain.
So, there are four main characters in this series. There's Miranda, the tough career woman who negotiates to work only fifty-five hours per week at her law firm - that is, after having her baby. There's Samantha, the sexually-liberated (some might say promiscuous), cutthroat public-relations person and social engineer par excellance. There's Charlotte, the innocent, naive golddigger with a faintly (idealized) southern US value set.
And then there's Carrie, the main main character, whose exploits and mishaps we follow most closely of all. Carrie is the nexus of the three other characters' extremes; the personality Goldilocks. Carrie is just right. Based simply on the amount of time given to Carrie in the series, the show is projecting the image that she is a kind of middle-of-the-road ideal. Her character traits reflect this as well. Yes, Carrie is the type of woman that all young women should aspire to be, the show subliminalizes. The modern feminine archetype. And part of that ideal is fixed consumerism - Carrie regularly buys $300 and $400 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes. Consume, all ye, and be happy, The Lord said.
When Heather and I were in Ann Arbor last Sunday, we decided to make a brief stop at Ikea - my first-ever visit to that store. That brief stop somehow turned into about an hour. Talk about a total consumer experience! The walking areas have been designed so as to herd the masses of people around as many products as possible. Limited store volume, but seemingly infinite consumer-product interaction surface area. A consumerist fractal! We were all heads of cattle, walking through there. They even had arrows on the floor to guide us to our next consumerist adventure.
One of the most interesting things that I saw in the store was a huge wall painted with the phrase "You have the right to ENJOY dining with your friends and family entertaining your friends at home." I took a picture of it, but my motherboard fried in transit from Japan so I can't download it and show it to you. However, green_eyed_girl on flickr has taken a series of photographs inside Ikea - I think the very same Detroit-area Ikea that Heather and I visited - and one of those photographs shows that very wall:
There are several such right-affirming walls in the store. As Americans, they appeal to our strong sense of personal rights:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Emphasis mine. In other words, it's your God-given right to blah blah blah... and you don't want to mess with GOD, do you???
Another fascinating aspect of the Ikea experience is the in-store restaurant. A lot of stores are doing this these days:
Total brand experience. Ikea has created a whole lifestyle. Brand living is good living. I only wish I had a photograph of the capacious children's playroom, in which the corporation inculcated the impressionable youngsters with consumerist ideals, ones that naturally are compatible with Ikea's brand.
It wasn't lost on me that this was a Sunday, after church. In fact, one thing that struck me was the remarkable diversity of the consumers in the store. I saw people of all races, speaking multiple languages, but all in pursuit of the American Dream. We all came from different cultural backgrounds and traditions, but we were all there for the same thing. This is where people really came to worship.
It's all diabolically clever on the part of Ikea. It garners my grudging respect.
On my way back from Japan, I spent a few hours - in an exhausted, spaced-out state - in Detroit airport. One thing really struck me: the vocalization of the airline annoucements.
"This is the final boarding call for Northwest flight 123 bound for Cleveland, Ohio. Passengers please have your boarding pass ready and ..."
The content wasn't remarkable. It was instead the way in which the speaker intoned. There was very little variability in terms of the pitch of her voice - maybe it covered a third of the scale. I would go so far to say that it possessed a markedly detached quality. Cold. Almost as if the speaker didn't truly care about the welfare of the passengers on the plane. Almost as if they were mere statistics.
Earlier in that same airport I had a related experience. After customs had finished up from Narita, all the passengers heading on to domestic flights were obliged to undergo additional security screening. Of course, this meant long queues, and the necessity on the part of the personnel to herd a large amount of extremely heterogenous people through narrow channels - efficiently. A big man was managing the flow at the front of the line. Every so often - maybe every minute or so - he let three or four people through, at which point they would go to separate lines to be scanned by the metal detectors, and he would again stem the queue. When I got to the front of the line, he extended his palm in my face. Stop, it commanded - but the man's pronounced lack of eye contact told a more expansive story. "OK, go though. Have a nice day," he beckoned, without a smile, and again without eye contact. He had failed to interact with me on a person-to-person basis. Intentionally.
This kind of attitude permeated the character of all airport personnel. And yet, I don't think they were trying to be cold for coldness's sake. I have an alternative theory.
Naturally, I expect that the stresses of herding large masses of people, and the added stresses of heightened security, impact the attitudes of airport personnel. But I think that their apparent aloofness or coldness - no, detachedness is the best descriptor - is a function of something else. Airports are models of bureaucracy. It's easy for a customer to suddenly become extremely inconvenienced. I think the workers' detachedness is a kind of a coping mechanism, and maybe even a partial remedy, to these inconveniences. "I am so sorry that these circumstances have befallen you," the workers' voices and actions implicity intone, "but after all I am acting in the capacity as an agent of this airport, and these are the airport's policies, for better or for worse. I do not have a choice in the matter. Were circumstances different..."
Japanese intonation at airports, in contrast, are much more variable, and the workers' behavior absolutely ooze with sincerity, in many regards. But then again, Japan is a society in which this capitulation to family, company, bureaucracy, state, and nature is firmly embedded in its culture. So much so that there are phrases that capture this state of affairs - shouganai and shikataganai - that one can hear on a daily basis in Japan; it's almost as if shouganai is a mass, Jungian commiseration of the sad state of circumstances - c'est la vie doesn't quite approach its richness. So much so, in fact, that even I find myself thinking in such circumstances. I've started to live a shouganai life. It's contagious.
For some reason, I haven't been able to get consistent access to my blog. Finally, this morning, I was able to get through. Weird.
I left Tokyo Monday morning, after a night of heavy carousing with my buddies Sunday night. We started the evening at a delicious izakaya and finished off with some karaoke. It was just great to see them one last time, but of course I was pretty sad at the end. Thanks guys!
I returned to Ohio on Monday evening. My internal clock has not quite adjusted... I'm still pretty jetlagged. Last night, I went to bed around 6:30 PM, I think. This morning I woke up around 3:00. Today Heather and I are driving up to Ann Arbor. I've got an interview up at the university, and after that we're going apartment hunting. I'm going to be exhausted, I think. Fortunately, the interview is at 1:00, so I should be energetic enough to leave a favorable impression on my interview... but as for the apartment-hunting, I think I'm going to be dragging all day.
Heather and I are also excited to try some food while we're up in Ann Arbor. As it turns out, one of my old bosses at Pyramid attended U of M, and he had a bunch of restaurant suggestions, including Zingerman's Deli and Blue Nile, which he described as North African cuisine. I'm very excited about that.
All right - I need to keep this entry short so that I can prepare for the day. More later.
Two more days at work left. Tomorrow is my last day, and then after work I've got a soubetsu-kai, or a going-away party, put on by my boss and a few coworkers. I guess about twelve people will be there. I don't really look forward to these things. In fact, I dread them.
But Monday, I'm out of Japan forever. Of course, my leaving is bittersweet. There are times that I don't want to leave, and there are other times when I can't wait to get out of here. But I think my leaving will coincide with a point in my up-and-down cycle where I want to leave.
Sunday, the day before I leave, I'm getting together with some friends for a final izakaya and karaoke experience. I'm really looking forward to spending my last full day in Japan with my good friends.
So, I guess this will be my final blog entry. In Japan, that is. I shipped my computer this morning, so no more entries until I get back.
I'm sure you're waiting on the edge of your seat.
