Asian time

Some books -- some thoughts, in fact -- get stuck so deeply in my mental crawl space that there's just no way to extricate them, however I might try and whatever amount of time might pass.

This happened with a book I read as a freshman in college twelve years ago: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1). The inextricable part comes from the Introduction where de Beauvoir asks:

"'What is a woman?'... The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: 'I am a woman'; on this truth must be based all further discussion."

How do you identify yourself with one characteristic? The idea has never left me. If Facebook or MySpace allowed only a one-word descriptor on your profile, what would you choose? If I were to do it, I'd have to say, "I am an Asian-American."

One foot in Taiwan, the other foot in the U.S. That's how I think about myself, to greater or lesser extents depending on the situation or time of day, but the thought's never far from the fore. Sometimes it just creeps up on me, as it did on the plane ride back to Detroit after Thanksgiving.

Reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (reviewed here), I got to this passage:

"Everyday life is defined not only by what we do, but also by who we are with.... Cultures differ in terms of how much a person is influenced by others.... For example, traditional Hindu persons were not considered to be separate individuals as we think of them, but rather nodes in an extended social network.... In our time also, compared to Caucasian children, those from East Asian backgrounds are much more aware of parental expectations and opinions even when they are alone -- in psychoanalytic terms, we might say that they have a stronger superego."

From personal experience I'd have to say this is true. Sometimes I think about myself as infected by culture, other times gifted by it, but I'm always ready to defend it, always ready to discuss it. Am I the transmitter of an old world to the new? Or am I the Shiva of my parents' culture, the passageway of their genes but nothing else? How will I feel if I have children -- insha'Allah -- and they don't want to learn anything of Taiwan? Is that fate, or is that choice?

There's a sampling of my Asian-American stream of thought, muddy as it is. But if I feel conflicted about the whole thing, at least I can take comfort in knowing I'm not alone (explanation here and here):


Footnotes
1. You can find the entire text of The Second Sex translated from the French at a web site that I can't endorse for obvious reasons.
2. But I can endorse Tak Toyoshima's site as great place to start digging into Asian-American culture.

Thanksgiving Notes to Self

And just like that, Thanksgiving's over for another year.

Rather than tell you about my family's gathering outside of Washington D.C. in any detail, I thought I'd instead share the notes I was making to myself over the weekend.

Item: Convince my friends to take Thursday and Monday flights too.


I recognize that as a graduate student I probably have more flexibility in my schedule than 95% of the working population. But if you have the flexibility, why not travel some 12 to 24 hours later than the rest of humanity? While my friends scurried to the airport this year, I was relaxing -- chillaxing, even -- in my apartment. The downside? A quiet night at home on what should have been one of the big party nights of the year. Darn it.

Item: "Free-range" is not the same as "better tasting".

My parents and I stayed with my older brother who lives in the Maryland countryside. He's currently on an organic / buy-local kick, and we arrived around 4 pm to find an uncooked free-range turkey. Into the oven it went, and four hours later, I was having my first taste of a turkey whose life my brother described as "happy". Funny, it didn't taste any different from all of the other turkeys I'd ever had. But then again, maybe I just like the taste of hormones and antibiotics.

Item: Plan activities for Friday and Saturday.

As enjoyable as it was catching up with folks and frater Thursday night, by Friday we were all just sitting around doing our own things. You can make an argument that families bond over Quantity Time and not Quality Time like Al Franken does. But having traveled a total of 3000 miles just to see each other, we should have done more over the weekend.

At one point, I ended up taking out my camera and taking pictures around my brother's house. Like this one:


I call it "Little Trash Can Crosses the Road".

And this one:


I call it "Big Tree Reaches for the Moon".

Item: Backup DVDs.

But all was not lost. I'd brought a couple of DVDs with me, having long ago assumed the role of Hunter-Gatherer of Movies My Parents Would Like. Over the years I've kept a keen eye on the types of movies my parents like, and so far my list includes Westerns, Jane Fonda, Mr. Bean, and Korean soap-operas.

The night before I left, I'd bought previously rented versions of The Alamo and The Aviator. The Alamo was the safer bet, but the disc turned out to be too scratched to play. The Aviator went over well with my dad, but the parts where Leonardo/Howard locks himself in a room for days at a time somehow reminded me of graduate school. Hmmm.

Item: More gratitude next year.

In the end, what was it all about, Thanksgiving? Snapshots in time that line the avenues of the mind. I wish I could remember more of these days.

Happy birthday, Jimi

Nearly every day I take the stairs in a certain stairwell in Medical Science Building II where I work. The hilly topology leads to the ground floor being called the fourth floor. I'm on the sixth.

Having used this stairwell for as long as I have -- five and a half years now -- I've long noticed details most people would pass by: a fluorescent tube being out, duct tape on the hand rail, that sort of thing. One thing I've started noticing this year lies between the fourth and fifth floors, in the middle of the first flight. In fact, it's so distinctive that I can't not notice it now.

What is it? A shoe print.

But not just any shoe print -- a shoe print in the eerie likeness of Jimi Hendrix. And not just any likeness of Jimi Hendrix, but the shot used on the memorial cover of Rolling Stone magazine, published October 15th, 1970, soon after his death September 18th, 1970.


Were I zealot, I might put flowers on this step. And a sign that said "Jimi" so people would know what the flowers were for. God knows people have done more with less.

But I'm not a zealot, so I'll just blog about it and invite you to check it out for yourselves if you're ever around here. And by the way, as of this Monday, happy 65th, Jimi. Requiescas in pace.

Stop the insanity, truly

For my unabashed geek friends...

Today I learned to hate the toy industry.

Showing its willingness to squeeze every possible dollar out of the American public, the industry and Hasbro in particular has released new items this holiday season that have left me wishing I'd never learned how to open a web browser. For in that browser today I saw this: Star Wars characters made into Transformers.

I kid you not.

Witness this monstrosity:

What is that? I'll tell you what it's not. It sure as hell is not Han Solo.

And this:

What's that? It sure as hell better not be Chewbacca with some weird radial pattern over his crotch.

No, it gets better. Do a little origami on these two abominations of engineering and you get something that resembles the Millenium Falcon:

Yes, Han Solo and Chewbacca combine to form the Millenium Falcon. What do they do all day while locked in this lovers' embrace? I hate to be all Texan about it, but sorry, pardner: Han Solo and Chewbacca do not and should not have any more contact than is necessary to punch each other in the shoulder (1).

Another disturbing issue is that included in the box come "Han Solo and Chewbacca miniature pilot figures". Think about it: they get in themselves to pilot themselves. I haven't been this freaked out since I learned about the Enlightenment idea of the homunculus, the "little man" that gets carried around in spermatazoa. Or, to put it another way, the little you inside of you (2).

But beyond these ideas, I'm also just plain inclined to agree with the Amazon reviewer who called these toys a "chick repeller". It's hard to imagine how $35 could drive away anyone bearing XX chromosomes faster, your mother and aunts included.

So this Black Friday let's band together, you and I, and let our voices be heard. No more toy mashups!

Footnotes
1. The exception being after Han Solo gets tortured when he nearly collapses and Chewbacca catches him
2. Check out the Family Guy episode "Emission Impossible" for an illustration of the homunculus idea compliments of Stewie Griffin.

The horror! The horror!

You know the drill. Parent brings child to mall. Parent pays money, puts child in lap of complete stranger. Child goes hysterical. Someone snaps a picture. It's a beautiful thing, really.

The LA Times is currently hosting contributed photos of Santa Claus sittings gone horribly wrong in a feature called "Scared of Santa". If you have a moment today, check it out here.

Among the wonders you'll see is my current favorite (credit one Janet Henderson, "mother" of Graham):


Somebody save him! Who started this bizarre American tradition anyway? Enjoy!

Thirty in Ann Arbor

Entirely possible
I've been here too long

Long overdue
Has come and gone

Seen the scene grow obscene

I'm trying to finish
Honest, I mean

But I'm saddled and addled
And a little more than tired

Been to other defenses
Still waiting for mine

But I'm saddled and addled
And a little more than tired

Martin Luther had ninety-five theses
I'd be happy with one of these pieces

Tired of the ins and arounds of this peregrine town

Smoky imposter lounge
Flavor of the week
Cover band up front
Kiss kiss on the cheek

What do you do, really, that so

My God, T.S.,
I'd be happy with Michelangelo

One day I'll go
Think fondly of these times
From my condo in Redondo
Squeezing juice from the limes

Random observations

Today, two random and unrelated observations.

First, the most affecting moment of the Michigan-Ohio State game -- I vote for Mitch Albom's elegy to Bo Schembechler during halftime. Maybe you had to have ESPN to see it.

On Schembechler's impact: "He may not be watching, but he'll be everywhere you look."

Albom may catch flak for being overly sentimental, but no one strikes the flint of remembrance like a good eulogist and Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie) may be one of the best.

Secondly, a vague feeling made concrete -- Zingerman's co-founder Ari Weinzweig. Separated at birth from Flaming Lips front man Wayne Coyne? Consider:


I'm sitting in Zingerman's Next Door, and this is what passes for inspiration.

Words of the day

This morning I was trying to put together a piece of work known in academia as a research statement. Akin to a cover letter in a normal job search, a research statement gives employers in academia a sense of what you've done and where you're going with a bit more personality than you can get across in your curriculum vitae which, by the way, is what the rest of the world would call a resume. Leave it to people in academia to use unnecessary Latin.

Anyway, I'd hit a wall. Literally, I was doing the Jack Nicholson thing from The Shining, you know, where he types pages and pages of the same thing: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Except in my case it was something like "In order for the immune system to respond specifically to pathogens, it must first be able to identify pathogens as foreign." Over and over again, down the screen. You could have walked in on me, looked at my laptop screen, and given me the Shelley Duvall reaction:


Somewhere between staring off into space and staring at the screen, I got to thinking about old Christians. Seeking inspiration they'd flip open the Bible to some random page, plunk a finger down, and see what passage came up. Whammo, instant inspiration! The divine equivalent of ramen noodles. In medieval times (not Medieval Times), people would do the same with Virgil's Aeneid. There's even a word for this kind of thing: bibliomancy.

But what's the equivalent for me, 21st-century Stew? Where's my inspiration?

Then it hit me: "word of the day". Put some random element in the writing. Couldn't hurt.

Googling "word of the day" brought up -- no surprise here -- lots of hits. The top five sites had these gems:

"Inexorable" from dictionary.com -- "not to be persuaded or moved by entreaty or prayer"

"Cozen" from m-w.com -- "to deceive, win over, or induce to do something by artful coaxing"

"Albatross" from wordsmith.org -- "any of the Diomedeidae family of large, web-footed seabirds"

"Sandboard" from oed.com -- "a board or tray sprinkled with sand in which numbers, letters, diagrams, etc. can be traced or obliterated, often used as a teaching aid"

"Exuberant" from nytimes.com -- "extreme or excessive in degree, size, or extent"

Hmmm....

"I tried to cozen the exuberant albatross from my sandboard -- 'Shoo!' I said -- but it was inexorable." Well, that doesn't sound like it belongs in a research statement.

"I cozened my cousin into getting me a new sandboard, but he said exuberantly, 'The albatross is inexorable.'" Oh my God, I thought, I really have gone crazy.

UPDATE (12:40 pm, 11/16): By the way, you can dabble in some bibliomancy for yourself by going to one of the random Bible verse generators online. I prefer this one because it seems to include the Old Testament as well. Or, for a more secular experience you can just consult a random word generator like this one. I got "calculates". What did you get?

UPDATE 2 (11:50 pm, 11/16): Flickr fans might be interested to know that one of the site's co-founders has done some bibliomancy herself. Like mom used to say, if you can't be creative, at least be in good company. (No, she didn't really say that.)

Pop this

For my bioinformatics friends...

This afternoon I had a case of the munchies and decided to microwave a bag of popcorn.

I followed the directions exactly: This side up, Listen for two- to three-second pauses between pops, Shake the bag, Careful with the steam.

Still, the bag was only two-thirds full. A lot of unpopped kernels at the bottom. Disappointing.

Clearly the manufacturer messed up.

The brand? Pop Secret.

Perhaps they should have gone with Pop Open Source.

Make a wish

Funny -- I always seem to notice 11:11, especially in the morning. Maybe because it's still early enough in the day for me to make a wish for the rest of the day. Or maybe I've gotten so used to my daily routine that my body anticipates lunch with a timed influx of digestive juices. Or maybe I just think it looks funny on these newfangled digital clocks.

Whatever the reason, apparently I'm not the only one who notices 11:11. In 2004 a movie came out with the same name. It's also the name of a teahouse in Atlanta and a theater company in Boston. And New Age groups here and there assign the numbers spiritual significance as well.

I have no affiliation to any of these groups or causes, but I do know from my friend AMM that 11:11 is a good time of day to make a wish. And now, here we are on November 11th, 11/11. So, to all of you, I express my wish, that you have a peaceful moment at some point today and offer into the ether a wish of your own.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

Christmas morning

Waking up this morning was like waking up on Christmas. Eager to see what had happened overnight, I bounded out of bed and woke up the computer and the TV. I rubbed the dry blur out of my eyes and scanned the screens.

Relief.

It hadn't all been a dream. The Democrats really had taken control of the House, and the Senate, if still undecided, was at least looking good.

But then I scanned the rest of Detroit Free Press front page and saw the results of Michigan's Proposal 2 which would ban affirmative action in public colleges and government. By a 58 to 42 margin, Michiganders approved it.

That was like waking up on Christmas morning and finding the cat had puked on one of your presents.

I fazed back to South Louisiana, to the students I'd taught eight years earlier where poverty was endemic and the best jobs to be found in the area were at the casino. White students by and large went to the local private school leaving black students to attend the public schools. Could anyone live there, as I had for two years, and believe all of this town's children were on equal footing?

UPDATE (1 am, 11/09): The Associated Press has called the Virginia Senate race for Democrat Jim Webb, giving Democrats control of the House and the Senate. I can hardly believe what I'm feeling right now, but is this actually... hope?!

Visiting home

This weekend I was at home, in Texas, visiting my parents. With both of them pushing 70, it's getting hard not to see each visit as significant, as something I'll want to look back on later.

Case in point #1. Saturday night we were out at a restaurant in the nearby suburb of Richardson which features a large Asian population and is probably as close as you can get around Dallas to a Chinatown. The local alumni association of my dad's alma mater, National Taiwan University, was having its annual meeting there, and though dad was nice enough to consider my attendance "up to me," every time I'd answer in the negative he'd come back with, "Are you sure you don't want to go?" I got the point.

Because he was singing with some of the other alums as part of the evening's program, my dad left for the restaurant a little earlier than my mom and I. This gave mom and me a little bit of time to chat one-on-one as we made the half-hour drive to Richardson on our own. It turned out that I slept most of the way there, but coming back after dinner and the program, I found myself more awake. My mom liked to talk after these kind of events anyway.

"Dad was so happy you came. He was joking with everybody. It was a good time in his life when he went to Tai-Da [National Taiwan University]."

I nodded and replied that, yes, I remembered when his family got the sign made declaring that he'd been accepted to Taiwan's number-one university. For a town as small as my dad's was -- it hardly shows up on the map -- getting such a sign made to post outside your storefront was a big deal. My mom went on.

"He never learned Pekingese [a dialect of Mandarin], because he grew up in such a rural area. He learned it at Tai-Da. Even today he makes mistakes while speaking Mandarin."

I had to admit to myself, I'd never heard that about my dad before. We continued on home, and bands of light came and went through the interior of the car as we passed under street lights. I wondered how many other details about my dad I might never hear. I thought of how I didn't speak Mandarin at all.

Case in point #2. Sunday afternoon we had some time to while away, and I proposed we go look at HDTVs. Mom and dad have been talking about getting one for years, and I've been feeling like the time is right.

As we walked around the HDTV section of Circuit City, I casually spouted off details as they occurred to me. LCD, plasma, 1080p, DLP. At one point my dad asked me how long these TVs last. Dependability was a big thing with them -- the current TV had been in the house since the mid-1980s. 50,000 hours, I said.

Later on, I found myself walking next to my mom. She mentioned how she and dad wouldn't live as long as the TV, that I'd be getting the TV eventually. I shushed her.

Yet the damage was already done, at least damage in the sense of an idea that sears itself into your brain. I'm reminded of what people say about permanent marker ink on skin: it never gets truly washed off. Your skin just eventually sloughs away. So it goes with ideas that don't need to be repeated because they are, like permanent marker ink, indelible.

To think you're buying a TV that will outlast your parents and become your own inheritance -- that is a terrible thing.

Poetry as time capsule

Here's a poem for all my advanced degree-holding brothers and sisters:

He never was a silly little boy
Who whispered in the class or threw spit balls,
Or pulled the hair of silly little girls,
Or disobeyed in any way the laws
That made the school a place of decent order
Where books were read and sums were proven true
And paper maps that showed the land and water
Were held up as the real wide world to you.
Always, he kept his eyes upon his books:
And now he has grown to be a man
He is surprised that everywhere he looks
Life rolls in waves he cannot understand
And all the human world is vast and strange --
And quite beyond his Ph.D.'s small range.

That's Langston Hughes' poem "Ph.D." I jotted it down the summer after I graduated with my bachelor's degree, as I was looking for things to share with the students I was teaching in summer school as part of the five-week training institute for Teach For America. I thought it might have meaning to me someday. And now it does.

When grammar goes bad

Yesterday afternoon I was driving from Ann Arbor to Detroit -- on my way to represent Teach For America at the Sigma Xi conference at the Renaissance Center downtown -- when I passed a billboard on I-94 that made me do a double-take and almost drive off the road.

You might be wondering, What was on this billboard? I'll give you three guesses.

[Pause] Ah-hmmm, no, no, and no.

The correct answer was "a truck." The intended message seemed to be that this model had a lot of interior space, but the only space I saw was the one between the ad writer's ears. The wording went like this:

"Everyone gets their own space"

Sometimes it's hard being one of these people that actually knows English, and by that I mean real English, not mamby-pamby feel-good MySpace English. This was one of those times. I was stunned -- stunned! -- that no one in that company's chain of command said, "Let's not drop thousands of dollars on English that's -- what's the word? oh yeah -- wrong."

The error? Not matching numbers. "Everyone" should be followed by "his" and not "their" because "everyone" is singular. The straightforward test is to substitute "he" for "everyone" and check that the new sentence still makes sense. "He gets their own space". What? Absurd. "He gets his own space." Ahhh, much better.

The ad should therefore read: "Everyone gets his own space" or the more PC "Everyone gets his or her own space". Of course then you've lost the toughness that comes with beating up on grammar. But beating up on grammar is like being a sixth-grader with an overactive thyroid beating up on a first-grader in headgear. Get your kicks some other way, buddy, like thinking up better slogans.

Another foray into fiction

Longtime readers of this blog -- of which I count three, maybe four -- know that occasionally I get a hankering to write some fiction. Like a muse that rides in on a mustang, inspiration comes and there's nothing I can do but get on and see where she takes me. Strange places sometimes.

"In the final analysis, we are unable --"
"drug, VY-4837. While effective in th --"
"associated with metabolic syndrome --"
"effects, the most serious of --"
"depression, agitation --"

Taggert flipped the charred piece of paper over. It was roughly the size of a playing card, and the writing had been made in longhand with a fine-nibbed pen. The back was blank save for empty grid spaces.

"Detective! Find something over there?"

Taggert turned his head while keeping his back to the voice and pocketed the piece of paper.

"No, just yesterday's news. Sports section."

He stepped over the blackened tabletop which lay at his feet and gave a half-effort at surveying the scene. Around him lay melted plastic bottles, glassware that had shattered from the heat, blackened boxes that once housed computer equipment. Everything was soaked, but a few piles on the ground still smoldered and sent up thin trails of smoke. He walked back toward the voice.

"Officer, I don't think we're going to find any documents. These people kept all their records on computer. Box up anything that looks like a computer and make sure it gets to CL."

The sun was overhead now and shining through the skeleton of the building. It came hard at Taggert, but the shadow it cast disappeared on the soot-covered melamine. Taggert took one more look around, lifted the police tape behind him, and stepped out, wondering what he was going to do next.