What to Write, What to Write

Ah, yes, nothing is probably the correct answer. If I just write whatever crap comes into my head when I have a free moment you will just get a rambling stream of crap.

Deciding what to write seems to be the hardest thing for me. Make that second hardest. The hardest thing is dealing with the ongoing doubt that whatever I finally decide to write is a worthy topic to write about. This wouldn't be much of a problem if I was in the swift tribe, but I am not. It takes me a month or two, maybe three, to write a few thousand words. During those long weeks, every time I sit down to try and write, the nagging doubts come to visit: Is this really worth writing? Do I really want to keep writing this? Maybe if I did something else it would be easier.

Luckily, although I pretend to be morose, I am a terrible optimist. I can usually convince myself that I want to keep writing. Which is what I am doing now (not with this post, but with a story I'm trying to write).

In other news, I believe I have discovered a use for blogs: They can be used to keep writers from writing books about writers who can't think of something to write. Instead, the writers can write about not writing in their blogs, and save us all the trouble of reading about how writers can't write. Unless you read writers' blogs, but then it's your own damn fault now isn't it?

Fly Away

Here I sit in this Starbucks analog, Tully's coffee, in Narita, where I haven't been since I first came to Japan almost nine years ago. Through the wonders of international connecting flights, I have roughly three hours to kill before I need to even approach the departure gate, and this after having walked very slowly to the check-in counter and wandered very lesurely from there towards the first sign of hot caffinated beverage vending.

I look out over a cavernous hall, dusty latticework over the check-in counters, cattle gates and rails for efficient packing and separation of humans. A slightly battered but still efficient machine for expelling people from the country at high velocity. (Somewhere, elsewhere, is the reverse image, the catcher's mitt made out of customs officials and luggage carosels, for capturing those intent on entering Japan, and making sure they are legitimate, or at least have the proper paper cards stapled to their passports.)

I wonder how long I will be able to keep my Japanese mode alive. It is already under assault by close cropped blond hair and strangely chunky looking American airline logos. The staff of this coffee shop are helping me fight it off, in their way, by saying konnichiwa every time someone walks past, and failing to be able to negotiate any deviation from the standard script of coffee sales in English. I like that. I don't need coffee sales in English yet. I'll get enough of that at the other end of this flight.

And look at that, my coffee is already gone, and only twenty minutes spent.

Translation

Do not forgive translators, for they know what they do.

About fifteen years ago, when I was an otaku, I remember watching an episode of Maison Ikkoku, a romantic-comedy sort of anime. In this particular episode one of the characters, a charismatic, macho tennis coach, offers to take everyone to the beach in his car. However, it turns out he can't drive because they want to take a dog along and he has a paralyzing fear of dogs. Instead the lead female character (and owner of the dog) drives. At the time two things about this episode struck me as indicitave of the mysoginistic nature of Japanese society.

One was that people were startled the female character had a driver's license. Maybe that point was a little indicative of sexism, but not as much as I thought. It turns out that firstly, you can get by fine in Japan without a driver's license. Public transit is actually useful, (unlike in my home town) and Japanese cities are often arranged so that it doesn't require a long drive to get to, say, a supermarket. Most things you need will be withing walking or cycling distance.

Secondly, getting a driver's license in Japan is an insanely expensive and drawn out ordeal.

These two factors combine to make it actually pretty common, even today, for an adult not to have a driver's license. (For some reason it didn't register as so significant that the other main male character in Maison Ikkoku, a university student, didn't have a driver's licence, which would be quite unusual in North America.)

The second sexist point that struck in my mind was when a young boy exclaims admiringly that the female lead "drove like a man." Again, this is indicative of a bit of sexism, but not in the way I thought. The problem is translation. Probably what the boy said was "otoko mitai unten shita", which, sure enough, translates roughly as "drove like a man." However, in Japanese driving "like a man" doesn't imply driving 'correctly' the way it does in English, instead it means driving aggressively, possibly even recklessly.

(Somebody with better Japanese than me will no doubt turn up momentarily to point out that I am completely, utterly wrong.)

There is still sexism in that women are expected to be polite and cautious while men are expected to be aggressive and reckless, but I do wonder if perhaps English is the language showing sexist tendencies here, with the positive implications of a phrase like "like a man". Or perhaps it is me showing my sexism by thinking that the phrase carries a positive implication at all.

Yes, we are all individuals!

I'm not.

Some people might say it takes a rare individual to realize that they utterly unimportant and ordinary. I don't think this realization is particularly rare. The reason people laugh at the guy who raises his hand and says "I'm not" in that scene from The Life of Brian is not just the incongruity of a single person standing out from the crowd by being the only one to say they don't stand out. Most people, I think, recognize at some level that we have all been in that crowd, that we are all in crowds of one sort or another at all times, and that Dennis (the "I'm not" guy) is right when he says he's not different. He's only saying what is true for any of us, and which we already know (but saying it with impeccable timing).

Then again, my friends tell me I am an optimist.

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
what oft was thought, but never so well expressed."
-- Alexander Pope

In broad strokes the actions of any of us are both incredibly predictable and completely inconsequential. People who know me well might be surprised to hear me say that, as I also believe strongly in the value of each human being (or other sentient entity), and in seeming contradiction to the above, the uniqueness of each person. But the difference is in scope. Each of these ideas (that we are unique individuals of great value and that we are interchangeable particles in history of no individual consequence) can be true as the same time of the same person, because they address different scales. On the scale of history I certainly do not matter. To proclaim otherwise would be hopelessly grandiose. Even limiting ourselves to the here and now I do not matter to such a large segment of humanity that, by any objective measure, I might as well not exist. Even the actions of the rich, powerful and famous will disappear into history. If Newton had died in childhood Leibnitz would have gotten credit for discovering calculus, and life would go on. Even those things which seem overbearingly huge to us right now are hiccups in history, and it will all be gone in the blink of an eye, as the Atlantic grows just a few meters wider.

However, there is another scale, the human scale of one to one interactions, with my friends, colleagues and even random strangers on the internet. In that tiny circle around each of us, we do matter and we are unique, important individuals. And, after all, we each live in a universe of our own, centered, by necessity, on ourselves.

People deal with this in different ways. Most of us, most of the time, just ignore the big picture, because, in the end, it ignores us. Periodically someone will be outraged that nobody around them 'realizes' how utterly banal it all is, they will rant and shout, or mope and groan, or perhaps take up 'mischief' (also known in some circles as 'wankerhood') in order to wake people up. And the raging individuals, too, are part of a crowd, gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists in unison.

There is no escaping your insignificance. A few decades as a single speck out of billions swarming over a mote lost in space. There's no significance in that, no matter what you do, if you insist on taking that kind of perspective.

But nothing requires you to take that kind of perspective. There is nothing more natural about looking at your life through a backwards telescope from the surface of the moon. The distance between your thumb and forefinger is just as natural a measure as any other, and the few hundred people you know are no less significant that the billions you do not. You are the center of the universe. There is no escaping your importance and responsibility.

This, too, is not a unique realization, but one that is useful to remind ourselves of from time to time.

Trolls

It is a strange feeling to watch as a person describes being deliberately provocative, even rude, as a deeply important task taken up by the best and brightest in order to deflate the self-importance of others.

I have seen it, more than once.

The self-described 'troll' pronounces the vast majority of humanity (that is, one supposes, anyone who responds negatively to their prodding) 'sheep', dim-witted followers. The non-trolls are not smart enough, it seems, to see how important it is to be crass and disruptive for the sake of it, how pictures of naked women inserted randomly into a discussion of authentic reproductions of USAF flight jackets reveal the essence of the human condition, and, of course, too blind to have seen the human condition for themselves. In other words, the 'troll' vastly inflates their own importance, creating in themselves a perfect parody of that which they claim to defeat, and seemingly never realising that the reason they are reviled is not that they shine a burning light on uncomfortable hidden truths, but that they are tediously repeating the obvious, when they say anything at all.

This post is, of course, my own failure, justifying those 'trolls' in their sense of rebellion. I am one of those blinkered, close-minded guardians of conformity that they have set themselves against, and by rejecting their declaration of war as delusionary I only confirm, for them, the importance of their task. So I do it here, where at least it will do little harm.

At Least She's Honest

A conversation with my four-year-old daughter:

"I'm thinking about putting the laptop computer on top of that cabinet over there."

"Hmm."

"Will you promise not to play with it and break it."

"No Daddy, I'm gonna break it."

Titan!

Oh, yes, there is something I am a bit excited about. Cassini flies past Titan next week.

Maybe you, dear reader, are not excited by exploration of other worlds. I know a lot of people who aren't. But there is just something that moves me when I see a giant vista taken from a hilltop on a whole other planet. I hope Titan turns out to be more than just an orange haze. Maybe there will be fascinating shades of yellow and red haze as well! Woo hoo!

Venus
"Roger Houston, we're on the ****ing Moon!"
Standing on Mars

I love that stuff.

Mumble Mumble

Obviously I don't believe in regular blogging. It doesn't seem to be something that demands my attention very often. That, and work almost always drains my energy until I don't want to do anything at all after I get home.

Now, today, when I get home with a little tiny echo of a desire to talk about something, I find I have nothing to talk about. Not surprising really. I've been at work all day after all, and who wants to talk about that?

Typhoon Season

I fly a fair bit, more than once a month. Today I took a flight to Tokyo. It has been exactly one week since the last flight I took, also to Tokyo, and like last week I'm flying back in the evening.

Today is also the third time that I've flown through a typhoon. I've never flown directly through one, of course, but through the edges. I remember the first time. I was right in the front of a jumbo jet, just behind the nose cone. I could hear the rain pelting the front of the plane as we punched through.

This time there was a chance that the typhoon would run right over us at exactly the time I was supposed to be taking off, or so it seemed when I looked at the Yahoo! typhoon tracking page, but apparently it decided to skip Fukuoka and head for Korea instead.

The wind was strong anyway. Low running clouds skudding across the sky. Is skudding a word? It seems like it should be, and it should describe what it was those clouds were doing. Anyway, they were skudding, and I happened to look out the window of the plane while we were waiting on the tarmac just in time to see another plane take off. As it rose into the air it suddenly turned, angling into the wind to keep on course. It seemed, for a second like it might lose the fight and be blown backwards, but of course it continued on, eventually disappearing beyond those skudding clouds.
That's not something you want to see happening to a passenger jet, especially when you're next in line.

Well, I survived. Our jet too jumped into the air and was grabbed, forcing the pilot to perform the same angling across the wind that I had seen. We also got to be shaken, pushed up, and slapped down. Down is the worst. It makes you grab the seat, which seems awfully flimsy as you are partially lifted out of it. Then you tighten your seatbelt for the tenth time.

The kids behind me didn't help either. They screamed. It was basically the kind of screaming you get on a roller coaster, but there was just a little bit of real fear, that maybe the plane was going to keep going down, because this roller coaster has no rails.

Eventually we got up into smoother air, although there were still a few moments when we got a shaking, just so we don't forget who's really in charge. Now I'm sitting here waiting for the flight home. Those clouds are still skudding. It's a good thing I like flying so much.

Random Thought

One of the real benefits of modern cellular phone technology has been to make all those people who wander around talking to themselves appear to be sane.