Author: Aaron Weber

In which I see many things

Three anecdotes:

On the way to work the other day I saw a very pale girl with very long purple hair and a tiny tiny black dress walking up the street. I wanted to stare but the light turned green. I wondered where she was going.

At work I saw a red bumper sticker that said “If this sticker is blue you’re driving too fast.” Get it? It’s a joke about the Doppler effect. See, if you approach the sticker at close to the speed of light, it causes the red wavelengths reflected from the sticker to appear blue, so if it’s blue, you’re going about a hundred eighty thousand miles an hour too fast, and… let’s just say I work near MIT.

Last night at around ten I was on Mass Ave and I pulled up next to a man and a woman on heavily-customized Harley Davidson motorcycles. I said nice bike, and the guy looked over at my scooter and said “… thank you.” The woman looked over and laughed and then we all laughed and she said “that is a nice bike.” I said, “It works.” They roared ahead but of course we were all in traffic so I kept up with them all the way from Harvard to Porter, the three of us taking up both lanes.

That’s pretty much the highlights of the week there.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, people are at their best. Something bad happens and people rise to the occasion. They suffer, but they overcome, and it is a tale of triumph and beauty. Other times, people suffer and overcome, and it’s not beautiful at all. It just sucks. They don’t see things in a new way, they don’t learn an important lesson, the stress doesn’t inspire them to new heights of creative achievement or heroic endurance. They keep plugging away until they drop, and then they rest a little, and they get back up and plug away some more. We all know there’s no point to anyone pushing this rock up this hill, but what the fuck else are we going to do? You can’t just leave it there and go back to bed. Can you?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that every day for awhile now I’ve been waking up and wishing I hadn’t. And every day I get up, with more or less prodding from my girlfriend and the hungry cats. And every night I lie in bed and try to make my mind shut the hell up and it won’t. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, and it’s not that I enjoy it all that much, but it makes everything else go away for awhile.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I hate this feeling, and it’s not inspiring, and it’s not pretty, and I’m not overcoming or triumphing. I’m just slogging through and I’m fucking sick of it. Eventually it will go away and I’ll feel better. And then eventually it will come back. Things will go on like this for fifty or sixty years, and then I’ll die, and someone else will have to deal with the design-win pipeline spreadsheet and the hosting invoices and the cat hair clogging the radiators. Circle of life.

Book Review: Japanland, A Year In Search of Wa, by Karin Muller

After Bookdwarf finished with Japanland it was my turn. I’m most of the way through it now. Outline: hardy American, documentary filmmaker, world-citizen, and individualist Karin wants to truly understand wa, the Japanese concept of harmony. So she arranges a host family through her judo teacher, and stays for a year and tries to understand Japanese subtelty. She is not a subtle woman: she is outdoorsy, outspoken, unable to follow directions, can’t cook or clean, and is single past the age of 30. Big no-nos.

She obviously loves the country, but also strains against its insistence on order and obedience, and she definitely highlights several unflattering examples of the human cost of wa. In particular, she travels to a shrine in northern Japan to film a weeklong retreat of a spiritual group known as Yamabushi. Most of the attendees are older men, newly retired, some sent there by their wives because they have nothing else to do and just get in the way around the house. Retired guys out in the woods getting in touch with themselves, each other, and nature are not unfamiliar to American society, but she describes the men as desperately in search of meaning in their lives now that their salaryman days are over:

One man retired less than a week ago. He began working for his company at twenty-one. His commute was two hours and thirty-four minutes each day. I do the numbers. Five days a week. Fifty weeks a year. Thirty-nine years.
“You’ve spent twenty-five thousand horus on the train,” I say. “That’s nearly… three years, night and day.”
He gets very quiet. I leave him alone.

As the passage illustrates, Muller is not always the most sensitive to the feelings of others, and her portrayal of Japan is, while appreciative and honest, not 100% positive. I am sure that this comes as a great disappointment and dishonor to her host family. I was glad to see that while she is critical of some aspects of Japanese society, her self-assessment is also unsparing: she certainly doesn’t shy away from discussing her cultural miscues, which range from comical to genuinely painful, especially when she offends someone she respects and scrambles ineffectually to apologize.

In all, Japanland is balanced and well-written. Recommended.

Weekend Pastime

This weekend Bookdwarf and I went to sit on Motorcycles at Riverside Motorsports. We liked the Bonneville but she really fell in love with the Monster 620 Dark. Conveniently it is also the least expensive bike. You can’t see in the picture but it has a matte-black finish and a low seat-height so that short people can ride it. There’s even a matte-black helmet that goes with it. We didn’t buy one, of course. The trips to the stores to sit on motorcycles are ways of sating the motorcycle lust. They are substitutes for actual spending of money.

I mean, we might eventually get one. First she has to get a license. Then we have to wait until someone sells one used on Craigslist Motorcycles, because hell if we’re buying new.

There was also a farmer’s market and some fresh strawberries. But mostly I was excited about the sitting on big expensive equipment, more than I have been since I was eight and got to sit on a tractor.

Wolly Bulli

Brainshare 2005 is in Barcelona and since I might have a chance to go, I figured I’d try and get a reservation at the avant-garde restaurant El Bullí. No luck: they’re booked at least to the end of 2005. Reviews say it’s the hardest restaurant in the world to get a table at: open half the year, for one meal a day.

Maybe I should consider The French Laundry, which is perpetually booked 2 months in advance– every morning there’s a window of about an hour when people basically just hit redial like they’re calling a radio show, until the reservations book (and presumably waitlist) is full. People make pilgrimages to this place. From across the country. For lunch.

But I can’t plan a meal that far in advance. It’s just not within my ability. I don’t know if I’m going to be hungry at seven this evening, much less whether I’m going to be interested in flying to San Francisco, renting a car, driving out to some suburb, and paying through the nose for a ten course meal on August 20th.

I guess the odds are pretty good I’ll be hungry at some point in August though. That’s a bet I’d make.

Media Commentary, Houses, Fucking

For awhile I’ve been wondering when the Boston Globe and the New York Times, now that they’re under the same corporate management, will begin to move their news coverage together– when the Globe will begin to look like a regional edition of the Times, basically. Well, they’ve started with the web sites: The Globe now uses an annoying registration system, just like the Times! Whoo!

And you’ll need to register to read this article about how the Boston-area foreclosure rate is way, way, way up: nearly fifty percent in the past year. That’s more than the price of homes, you’ll note, which up some slightly-less-astronomical percentage.

And to round out the trio, news about how people are angry about the way some people fuck: people hate gay people in the US and also in Spain, which is not entirely the fun-loving kinkster’s paradise that Pedro Almodovar always made it out to be.

Letter to the Editor

Romney is backing a new bill to keep uppity queers from getting hitched, and the PAC supporting it is called Vote on Marriage. Because, you see, they want to put civil rights to a vote. I’m not really opposed to the voting– any law in this country and in this state is a combination of judges, lawmakers, and people, and fighting about stuff is how it gets resolved. But the fact is, they don’t want you to vote “on” marriage. They want you to vote against marriage for some people. They want you to vote for hate. My concern is less over whether it’s voted on, adjudicated, or legislated over, and more over whether the just decision is made.

As always, in situations like this, I return to the standup-comedian approach, because humor is how many people deal best with things that make us uncomfortable, and the gayness does make people uncomfortable. Hence the slogans like “I approve of gay marriage if both chicks are hot.” So I sent this letter to Romney and a similar one to the Globe, reiterating themes from previous letters I’ve sent to both of them.

You may be appealing to social conservatives by opposing gay marriage, but you are certainly not doing any favors to economic conservatives that voted for you. Legalizing gay marriage has brought a great financial gift to Massachusets: gay weddings. Happy couples and their celebrations have helped to boost the economy through wedding gifts, hotel stays, party hall rentals, and catering expenditures. In addition, a reputation for tolerance attracts creative and innovative people who will fuel the future economic success of our commonwealth.

Banning gay marriage would drive gay couples to Vermont and Canada for their weddings, taking dollars out of local pockets both straight and gay. If we increase regulation of the wedding industry at the risk of harming the economy, we will prevent the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from competing with Canada on a level playing field to host the gala weddings of the coming century.

Media Bias, Horrible Situations

Or, What’s the matter with Kansas? In which some guy runs a dingy women’s health clinic in the inner city (a.k.a. abortion clinic, since too few people go for actual preventive medicine or birth control), and gets accused of all sorts of horrible things by his employees, and loses his license.

Right wing media reports: HE EATS BABIES

The local free weekly provides a nuanced (a.k.a. “unread”) take: A bad doctor in a bad clinic becomes a straw man for the anti-choice crowd to push way too much regulation onto one particular procedure. The mainstream media mostly ignores it. What I want to know is, when is my health-care provider going to start offering discount prices on Wednesdays?