I’m currently reading a book entitled We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The book describes a dystopian future similar to that of Orwell’s 1984. In actuality, Orwell drew most of his inspiration for 1984 from this book by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I’m going to refer to the author of this book from now on as simply YZ, since typing out the romanized version of his cyrillic russian name is, quite simply, ridiculous. Anyway, this book was “published” in 1920 or 1921, I can’t remember which, but it was during the time when the communist ideals and the marxist government systems were gaining popularity and power. This work seems to be a satirization of the mechanization of man YZ sees the communist party attempting to accomplish. He looked at Henry Ford’s factory assembly lines for cars, and realized that they were a heavy influence on the minds of the communist party leaders. Those who wanted the society to work together and to become something other than humans, those who wanted the society to become machines.

The story is told through the main character’s seemingly journal-like entries. He records these because he is the builder of a spaceship which is supposed to send media and material supporting and explaining the views of their state and the extreme level of efficiency they have achieved and what sorts of things they need to do in order to achieve this. The main character, D-503, sees the world through a series of equations. Almost everything he thinks of has to do with the math behind it. When he is invited by a person to come to an auditorium, he looks at the mathematical probability of being asked to that specific auditorium by that specific individual. Everything to D-503 seems to be an equation.

Right towards the very beginning of the book, he looks at the sky and sees that it is clear. He thinks this is a thing of beauty because it has no clouds that make it mathematically imperfect. He thinks the love of clouds by his ancestors was incredibly silly, why should one be interested in suspended water vapor?

YZ very obviously does not actually share this view, and embraces and promotes this view to the extreme in this book in order to satirize the direction in which he thought his society and country were going. It is plain from some of his other works that he does not actually support this view, and looks at those automatic human beings as dead and not alive.
“It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.”

I really like the views put forward in this book, and I am only a few chapters into it, but it has gotten me thinking if our society isn’t so much like the dystopian society of the book. I feel that our society has a need to quantify everything, to force everything down into simplified expressions and equations. To make formulas for success. Efficiency seems to be the most highly revered ideal, and entropy, the most feared and loathed force in the universe. We are constantly attempting to rearrange our surroundings. We want to take the random groves of trees in the forest, cut them up to our specifications, and then build houses from them. Houses which were made from plans drawn up from architects. Architects, who were no doubt students at one point in time, and were told which the most efficent buildings are. What shapes need to be put together. What materials should be used for waterproofing and what angles work best to keep the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. What types of designs make the best use of limited space in a city; what designs make the best use of cheap materials in the rural areas.

Architects who believe X1 + X2 + X3 = A good house, where X1, X2, and X3 are things such as money saved on heating, ease of obtaining the materials required, and price, among a good number of other things. These architects take this equation and turn it into different equations and schematics. The entire thing is a fight against the process of entropy.

Perhaps that last example wasn’t necessarily the best. I am not an architect, so I can only guess as to what things seem to govern most architects. I have developed my knowledge of architecture almost exclusively from that famous work of Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead.

I find other things in the life I currently live similarly formulaic, however. In school, we’re given a set of guidelines and rewarded a GPA at the end. Assuming every student is given the same mental faculties, we’re given an equation such which seems to be:

hours spent studying + accuracy of notes taken in class + attendance = GPA

 

We’re given these types of equations all of the time. Almost everything in our daily lives can be resolved down to equations that somebody or another taught us. Susceptibility to tooth decay = sweets eaten - (brushing + flossing). Even when we do the simplest actions such as tying our shoes, we follow a strict set of steps which has been given to us and handed down as knowledge from our parents and our grandparents. It’s yet another algorithm, a set of steps in order to make sure that your shoe does not fall off. Take the two strings, cross them, tuck one string under the other, pull tight, take one string and fold in half, wrap the other string around the midsection, pull through. It’s a set of steps that we’re given and we follow mindlessly, not realizing that it’s an algorithm. Not realizing that it’s programmed into our systems. We do these kinds of things each day.

 

Organized religion is another thing that seems to me to be another set of equations, another set of steps to meet an end. A procedural method for saving your eternal soul. It seems to me that modern Christianity has also fallen victim to this set of steps, to these rituals and these predefined steps which must be taken in order to become a Christian. Even as an evangelistic tool, the current-day church hands out a booklet entitled The Four Spiritual Laws, which outlines a procedure which, when followed through correctly seemingly equals spiritual salvation. The equation is something like this:

Believe in God

Believe in Jesus

Pray to Jesus to forgive your sins

Have faith that Jesus will forgive your sins

Go to church

Perform actions and deeds which show that you are indeed a Christian

Behave in the way that Christians behave

 

While I don’t disagree with all of it, I think that spirituality and having a relationship with God and with your soul is a lot more than a set of steps. People in Christian circles are always asking “are you saved?” “are you a believer?”. If the answer to this is “I have prayed to become a Christian,” then it’s accepted and taken for granted that you are a Christian. It’s also accepted that once you become a Christian, it’s not really possible for you to ever not become a Christian, and that if you stop exhibiting the behaviors of a Christian, that you were never really saved in the first place.

 

This is confusing to a lot of people because they are taught that if they say the prayer that they are saved. Unfortunately Christianity cannot be curtailed or codified into an equation as simple as the one that the church has to offer. It’s not that the Bible and the message of salvation aren’t true, it’s that they cannot be truncated into something as simple as a four-page booklet and a five minute speech given at a bus stop at 9:24 p.m. at the bus stop at the Allen Street Gate.

 

Our society seems to live by equations. We live by the bus schedules. I know that I personally seem to run my life around the bus schedules. It’s an extremely simple if-then statement.

 

IF(I get to the bus stop before one of the times listed on the bus schedule) THEN

I will get on the bus and I will make it to campus on time

ELSE

I am out of luck and I should probably start walking

END IF

 

Quizzes and tests are other examples of this sort of pervading mathematical mentality. These exemplify the biggest lie and fallacy that the schools teach children, and that is the falsehood that performance can be measured numerically. The falsity that the answers provided to a set of trivial questions listed on a sheet of paper can accurately reflect the performance of any individual. This formula is spread all throughout our society, and I think that you or I would be hard-pressed to find someone who has no experience with this system. Unfortunately, this system, as is the system of the Four Spiritual Laws and simplified evangelistic Christianity is one again completely invalid. The formulas and requirements for meeting these kinds of goals do not and cannot actually capture the soul of a man or the extent of his knowledge and expertise.

 

An interesting development is that it seems that teachers and professors are learning more and more that this rote memorized learning of tests and quizzes isn’t accurate. They have attempted to discard the old algorithm for academic success and are attempting to implement a newer one. This algorithm is called “Problem Based Learning.” This algorithm, PBL, for short is definitely an algorithm. It appears on the outside to be something new, something free. Students working on projects. Since you take out the completely obvious formulaic elements of the old system, then the new system must not be formulaic, and must encourage more freedom and flexibility.

 

Unfortunately just because an algorithm is different does not mean that it is not an algorithm. And if an algorithm cannot be applied to solve something, then changing the algorithm and deluding ourselves into the belief that it is not an algorithm isn’t going to actually help. I remember my CAS 100B class and the presentations we were given on “PMOPS”. PMOPS is the Procedural Model for Problem Solving. It is how to solve problem-based learning questions. It was a list of step by step instructions of things to do and steps to take in order to accomplish a goal. This to me is a clearly defined set of instructions, or, algorithm. It had a list of things for a group or individual to do in order to tackle the problem. It leaves the student to significantly freer use of his resources in order to accomplish the tasks set aside for him, and I think that it is better suited to achieve the needs of our current-day students, but I do not feel that it is completely right. I do not believe that it will work.

 

Those that are dead-alive do not make errors. They are completely procedural. They follow instructions given and do not make mistakes. Those people are the people who our society and our schools and our religious institutions make. They produce only dead things. Those who are alive-alive produce living things. Unfortunately it seems that there are fewer and fewer of us left.

Something that has interested me since before the movie “The Matrix” was a twinkling in the Wachowski brothers’ eyes is the idea of a virtual world in which the users interact as if they were actually living their lives there. One thing I’ve realized for a long time is that many online computer games do a good job simulating certain aspects of life in a virtual world. First person shooters, allow you to take on the role of someone else. For example, in counter-strike you can be a virtual counterterrorist agent fighting terrorists (or vice versa). Many games let you live out certain fantasies, but few “games” have been very all-encompassing.

Games such as World of Warcraft or Everquest preceding it have done relatively good jobs in creating fantasy world which are quite encompassing. You have the ability in these worlds to go around and buy and sell items, to make things, to sell the things you’ve made, to go on quests, and it’s very open-ended, but it does limit you on many things. You can’t own property, not everybody who is using WoW can see everyone else due to the split up of servers, the goods you can make are generally quite poor to what can be found in dungeons or rare boss drops, which forces you to primarily be a fighter instead of becoming a professional tradesman.

A couple of “games”, I use the term game in quotes because they are much more than games, have attempted to emulate life in it’s entirety. As far back as middle school, I was involved in a simulation named ActiveWorlds. ActiveWorlds was really the prototype for all that has come since - all of the alternative virtual lives. You could either be a tourist, or, if you paid (or obtained a stolen account in some of the less reputable places in ActiveWorlds)  you could own property, message people, shop for real-world goods, and just explore, make friends, and engage in an alternative life.

The simulation which has taken over and with wild popularity has largely replaced ActiveWorlds is a technology called “Second Life”. It’s free to get an SL account, but for premium membership you have to pay. People have started doing amazing things with SL. One of the key features is in SL you can own land AND property, and also there is the ability to create objects through a highly capable object editing system. The clincher is that SL “linden dollars” can be converted to or from US$, which enables characters to pay real money for virtual objects, including land (there is a booming real estate business in SL - people have actually become real estate agents in SL and have been able to completely support themselves in the real world with the money they make from this), clothing, almost anything imaginable. People have created video games within SL which have been taken up by real-world producers and been created. People have actually made half-decent movies performed all by virtual actors in SL.

Anyway, it’s not totally there, and the controls are pretty wonky, but the future is here sooner than we might think.

Also, if any of you want to get an SL account (again, it’s free) and join me in a virtual Jonathan Coulton concert www.jonathancoulton.com, it’s on the 14th in second life, and he will be streaming live from an undisclosed location in the real world. Should be a blast!

Society seems to be creating larger and larger cities, while also rapidly expanding suburban areas. As the world’s population increases, so will the amount of people in our cities. Unfortunately with more people, there is a higher demand for resources of all types. Today I will be focusing on the demand for water.

Fresh water is incredibly important for mankind. We drink it, we clean things with it, we bathe with it, we even remove our waste with it. 2/3rds of the earth is covered with the stuff, but unfortunately most of it is not drinkable. Fresh water, is at a much higher demand. One daily activity which uses a large amount of water per person per day is bathing.

As time has gone on, bathing has become more and more regulated for the amount of water it uses. Originally most people took baths, showers came along later because they were quicker and because they used less water. The original designs of showerheads used a very high volume of water to wash an individual, but showerheads are evolving to use less and less water. There are “super saver” showerheads, and low-volume showerheads. Actually taking a bath is not nearly as commonplace as it once was, and shower times are being cut shorter and shorter. In order to save on mounting water costs, landlords are putting in these super saver showerheads, and trying to get their tenants to use less water.

Within 200 years, I think we will see another sort of revolution in bathing. With more demand on the water supply, water prices will rise, and there will be demand for a type of showering which uses less water. Hence, I propose a rough idea of the shower of the future:

The shower of the future will be very quick, possibly lasting around 1-2 minutes. I envision a design like a carwash where the shower will have multiple openings and will spray the individual from all angles. A quick rinse will serve to spray off dirt or any large materials. This will be followed by a misting with a soap-type cleansing substance. Finally, there will be a longer rinse, in which to clean all of the soap off. They might use towels or there might be some sort of air-drying process.

I envision the shower chamber as becoming smaller and more cylindrical, in order to conserve space, and also in order to surround the individual from all angles with jets. The jets will be of a pressure sufficient to wash with, but will not be so hard as to be uncomfortable. It will probably be an entirely enclosed unit, with temperature and other controls accessible from a console inside of the machine. The user will simply have to get in, turn it on, and be cleaned.

Well, I finished In Watermelon Sugar just a few minutes ago.

It’s a very sad book about a girl committing suicide from a broken heart, and a guy getting frustrated in his relationship and cutting off without a reason.

It has some very beautiful segments in it, and a lot of segments that really don’t make any sense to me.

It’s worth a read if you don’t really have anything else to do. It’s not too long - finishable in an afternoon or so.

You know, one nice thing about this week is that I haven’t really had a whole lot to do, other than chat on aim, on the phone with steph, and go to the music man tonight with robert. Most of my time has been free, just sitting around waiting for interesting AIM conversations, so I’m finally breaking myself away from sitting in front of this infernal contraption the whole day. Now I can take my tablet PC and sit with that on the ground beside me, and I can read while waiting for people to talk to.

Yeah yeah yeah, I’m on AIM all the time, but can you blame me? I don’t get a whole lot of social contact here.

Anyway here’s the books I’m reading and my current progression through them.

Freakonomics: halfway finished - don’t know if i’ll wind up finishing it anytime soon, it’s more of a book that you pick up and read pieces of, say ‘wow I hadn’t thought of that before,’ and ignore for a few days. The only thing is I’m not a huge econ fan.
Mere Christianity: 1/3rd completed - I really like this one, and when I’m feeling inspired to think about spirituality from a philosophical perspective, I pick this one up and read. Once again, not a sit down and read it cover to cover book.

In Watermelon Sugar: Halfway through - I expect to finish this book either today or tomorrow. It has some really beautiful lines, and I understand most of the plot, but a significant amount of this book still escapes me. I’ll let you guys know when I finish it how it was.

T.S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats: I pick this one up when I need some lighthearted poetry.

Anyway I went to the library today to pick up a couple more books since I’m going to finish In Watermelon Sugar quickly, and would like some more cover-to-cover books, so I picked up:

The Mouse that Roared and The Fountainhead.

At least I won’t be bored on the ride to chicago. I leave tomorrow - I need to set up my laptop so it’s running windows (right now it’s running suse enterprise 10) so that I can also catch up on some anime.

YEAH!!!

One difference about girls is that most of them are afraid of turning into their mothers. In my family, my mom is afraid of turning into her mom, and my sister is afraid of turning into our mom. This isn’t exclusive to my family, however, and I know that there are a lot of women out there who are deathly afraid of becoming their mothers. Recently on MSN Today, there was an article about “11 things that women never tell their husbands,” and there was also one that said “11 things that guys never tell their wives,” and one of them for women was “We are all afraid of turning into our mothers.”  The thing about guys though is that they did not list “afraid of turning into their fathers” as one of the things they don’t tell their wives. (Although number 6 or so agreed with the women’s list and said that men were afraid of their wives turning into their mother in laws).

So why is there a difference? Why are women afraid of their matriarchal heritage, while males are not afraid of their paternal heritage? In fact, it is quite the opposite with a lot of guys, they strive to be like their fathers, and even to outperform their fathers - to surpass them. Ken Griffey Jr. wasn’t afraid of turning into his father - George W. Bush wasn’t afraid of turning into his father. In fact, most guys tend to follow in the footsteps of their dads. Sons carry on the family businesses that their fathers ran, college students go into engineering because their fathers were engineers, auto mechanics were introduced to cars by their fathers - the list goes on.

So why does this fear seem to have such a large gender bias?

I would like to argue, although I by no means am sure that I am right, that this is potentially because of the changing role of the female in society. Over the last couple hundred years, the role of women in society has changed drastically. In the 1920s, women were granted the right to vote, and then jobs opened up to women, college started allowing female scholars, and instead of the stay-at-home-raise-the-kids role of the female, it has now become very similar to the male role in society. Women are going out and getting good jobs, earning money to support their families, and this whole female independence thing is really becoming a large movement. I think that part of the female fear of “turning into our mothers” is partly a subconscious fear of a loss of independence, and a return to the days of their mothers where they were significantly less powerful in society.

Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Murphy was running. Running to clear his mind. Running from his past, his life, his friends, his stresses, his achievements and his failures. Running from the wake of himself. It felt like if he stopped running, a wave of himself would overtake him. As his strides took him out of the artifical day of the undercity his lungs gasped full of fresh air. Cold air. Cold burning air that filled his lungs to the point of bursting. It was a good burn. The burn meant that he was more alive at this point than he ever would be during the civic daycycle.

The places he ran through were nice, there was some actual grass, and a clear of the dark grey sky. Humanity had long since replaced the stars with this opaque shield in its quest to defeat darkness. He could faintly see what he thought was the moon. Since it was a full moon, this was one of the few nights that it would be possible to make it out with the naked eye. Usually it was not strong enough to produce enough of an effect that it was visible.

He was glad to be outside. Being cramped inside all day forced to work on net codes and management of millions upon millions of lines of ancient code… code that never seemed to be designed properly, code that never had the right focus. Code that almost always would have been significantly easier to write from scratch. Unfortunately, the code running the net, like the city outside it were too similar. The city had been built on top of earlier cities seven or eight times. The deepest parts of the undercity were said to be over two hundred years old.

He realized that work was catching up with him. He leaned forward and sped up in an attempt to distance the thought from him.

He always set a timer for running. He wanted to make sure that he would be able to have enough energy to make it back - wanted to make sure that he would not wind up stranded in some part of the city he did not know. This time he had set it for half an hour. Half an hour out, half an hour back. One hour total. “Much more than anyone else I know could run,” he thought. He tried not to think about the hour. Tried not to think about the hour that he would have to be up at.

He ran against time.

He ran against fate.

He ran against himself.

He ran against the world.

He ran against existence.

Once, he had read an old book by a man named Albert Camus, titled “The Stranger.” Upon the initial reading, he hated the main character for his apparent disregard for all human values. Lately he had been growing to begin to think that Camus had the right idea. He wished he could merely exist and decide things based upon his whims.

Tonight, with the streets vanishing under his feet, he finally could. The timer beeped.

Murphy ran on.

Running through the dark alleyway, he could feel the cold air rushing past his skin. Step step step step step. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left, right, in for four steps, pause for two, in for four steps, out for four. In through the nose, out through the mouth.  When he first started running, he had no rhythm, now, the rhythm was everything. Running was a dance, his footfalls like a metronome as the solo wound up in intensity.

Bobsolo had always been decent at running. He was tall and lanky with long legs and seemingly endless stamina. He had always been able to get up and run a kilo or two, even without exercising very much. As a child he ran around all the time, playing, but as he got older, the places he could run grew fewer and fewer. He also lost interest in exercising when he was realized he could travel the world in his own mind when connected to the networks. Travelling had nothing to do with the physical body, except possibly for the barriers one set forth in his own mind. People didn’t run much anymore, since they didn’t really have too many reasons to leave their homes. The only ones that did were the few caretakers of the “mechanical maids” - a collection of various “dumb” robots which performed simple tasks. Some washed windows, others vacuumed, and still others would make rounds to pick up litter, keeping the city clean. Other than these few, the alleys were desolate yet clean - at least in the heart of the city where the affluent lived.

It was a about twenty miles from his residence before the first signs of poverty were found. Riding the maglevs, it would have zipped by in about a minute and a half. The maglevs only went from city to city, and only in the industrial districts, carrying the middle and upper classes to and from their jobs. The lower classes rode in a subway, stopping every couple of blocks to let people in and out. The undercity was home only to the lowest classes of people; those still considered homo sapiens.

Solo was light and graceful, a perfect example of the transhuman. At one point in the evolutionary process, the differences between man and machine were clear. Nowadays, in 2185, there was no more difference. Man and machine had been blended, forged together, to create one symbiotic being. One symbiotic being that was now running through the alleys of the outer city. The alley dead ended up ahead. Without losing rhythm, he leaped up a few feet from the wall, pushing downward and throwing his body up as his right foot collided with the brick impediment to his path. His hand crested the top, his cut-off glove met the corner with grip… he pulled, swinging his entire body up and over.

y=-x²+12, a perfect arc.

One two three four Pause two One two three four blow it out through the mouth. As he bounded through the flickering lights of the outer city, he felt completely and wholly alive. The twilight of humanity’s continued battle against the dark pulsed and hummed as electricity pulsed like humanity’s heartbeat.

Translated by Kazuo Uekura           The 1992 Boston Marathon was held on April 22nd, "Patriots' Day" (a holiday in Maine and Massachusetts.) I joined this marathon last year as well as this year. The Boston Marathon in spring and the New York City Marathon in fall, these two races are the greatest pleasures in my life in the U.S. Some of you might have watched these races, often broadcast on TV in Japan, too. Similar to the New York City Marathon, the Boston Marathon doesn't have a "go and return" course with a turning point, but it has just a "one way" course from one place to another. The starting point is a small town in the suburbs of Boston, Hopkinton, and the finish is in the center of Boston. When you feel that the goal is approaching after about a 30- kilometer run, you have to tackle with the famous "Heart Break Hill" in Boston which is coming into sight. This naming of the hill might sound a bit exaggerated, but you'll notice what a tough hill it is after actually running it yourself. Running up the hill is not so hard, but after reaching the top, it'll get arduous itself. You climb up the hill with all your energy, encouraging and saying to yourself that there's no more steep hills after this and that now is the time to endure. After a short break when you've got to the top and you think the rest is the flat course leading to the downtown of Boston, the sudden fatigue thuds into you as if it were waiting for you to come. This fatigue resembles the middle age crisis around 40. The instant you reach the age, when you can have some rest after clearing the difficulties in the 20's and the 30's, the crisis falls upon you with a thud. (Some people might never understand how it is without actually experiencing it though.) Several gentle slopes in the town, which are far less equal to the "Heart Break Hill" in steepness and length, start torturing you. I felt so this year as well as last year. Especially this year, the rapid rise of temperature exhausted me.     My record of this year was 3 hours and 38 minutes, which was 7 minutes slower than that of last year. But the starting point is so crowded every year due to the narrowness of the street, and it takes us over 5 minutes actually to start running after the "Go" signal. Taking all these things into account, I guess my record this year is not so bad. Anyway all of us come from Boston to this small, starting town on board the coaches chartered for us runners, and we wait here for the 'Go' signal at noon. This little, suburban town, populated by some 2,500 people, comes to be overflowed for a couple of hours with the "enthusiastic runners" reaching the approximate number of 8,000, who join the race from every corner of this country and the world. Literally it is a big festival held once a year in the town. Hopkinton is a typical residential suburb that one can find anywhere in America and it has nothing outstanding from a stranger's viewpoint: one church, one high school, one fire station, and one short main street. After passing along the main street with a gas station, a pub, a real estate agency and a florist , you'll find nothing but an endless series of cozy houses with front yards. Every house looks well attended and the lawn in the yard is decently trimmed, but there exists nothing to stimulate your imagination. Neither extraordinary gorgeous mansion nor extremely shabby house attracts your attention. This row of houses looks as if to insist that the most valuable virtue in life is not to attract people's attention. This community happened to be chosen as a starting point simply because it is located exactly 26 miles or 42 kilometers from Boston, otherwise it would remain as if it were dozing with no stranger's care, which this town seems to hope for after all. But participating in the Boston Marathon for the last two years brought me to this small starting town and gave me the chance to observe this peaceful town carefully. America was in the midst of the Gulf War when I ran in the Boston Marathon last year. Everywhere I went in America, I saw yellow ribbons, the Star-Spangled Banner, and patriotic slogans. It was not exceptional here in Hopkinton, which was seemingly peaceful itself. In the yard of a house near the church, I found an old jalopy, a Chrysler Dodge, with 'SADDAM' painted on the hood. Next to the car, a hammer was placed. Think the jalopy is Saddam Hussein and hammer it until you feel satisfied. One hammering was one dollar. With the collected money, I heard they were going to raise the funds of the scholarship for the youngsters in the town. I don't know who hit upon this idea, but it was rather popular and even while I was watching, several town people paid one after another one dollar, took the hammer, and banged the car with all their might. I doubted whether it might be a suitable spectacle for the starting town of the dignified Boston Marathon, but it was inevitable, I thought, judging from the fact that this country was 'at war.' This year I visited Hopkinton, thinking that there wouldn't be such a thing any more. But to my surprise, a similar car was placed in the same place. I could not help suspecting it was the same car, for the shape and damage degree was quite similar to that of the car last year. Probably it was a similar but different one fetched from somewhere. A car that had been hammered so terribly last year could not serve as their banging target again. Anyway I found no message painted on the hood this year. A hammer next to it and a signboard saying "One Pounding, One Dollar" only reminded me of last year. It also told, just as I guessed, that the collected money was to be used for the scholarship. A runner asked a middle aged man standing aside "Is this a Japanese automobile?" Mumbling for an instant, the man replied that "Um…I don't think so." As far as I noticed, no one hammered the car for one dollar this year. Smashing an automobile with a hammer is, I think, only an outlet for stress and it needs no specific reason, but now I've realized that we need some more practical motivation for hammering after all. If they had found the words "Japanese Car" written on the hood of the car, some of them might have paid one dollar and pounded it with a hammer. Or they might not have. I can't say anything definite about it, for it is only the matter based on an assumption. But anyway the old car, waiting for someone to batter it, was tinged with some ominous atmosphere of violence. In the atmosphere was involved 'something' grave which cannot be transmitted by words or expressed in messages. That is why the middle aged man beside the car had to murmur, "No…Um.." after a short interval to the question given by a passing-by runner, instead of giving back a definite, quick reply that "No, this is not a Japanese automobile." Behind his silent interval, I guess, there lies some vague consciousness that "It is no wonder even if' this is a Japanese car." His "um…" must be the words unspoken and the message not expressed. Generally speaking, American's sense of antipathy shifted from Saddam Hussein to the Japanese economy this year. This shifting is very obvious in any field of the news media. The newspapers are fully loaded with the letters from readers and the editorials denouncing Japan and the Japanese. But average Americans, except for the local automobile workers, will not yet pound on a Japanese car with a hammer. They are just listening carefully for the untold words hidden in the air and intercepting the unwritten messages. Nevertheless, just one time I actually experienced something nasty because "I am Japanese." It happened when I asked them to switch the car I rented at an Avis in Honolulu because of its brake malfunction. A clerk said to me, "How can you foreign Japanese have such an impudent face, coming into our country?" But there is no relation between the malfunction of the brake and the fact that I'm Japanese, and the words just left me at a loss. Since this incident, I've been avoiding Avis as much as possible, but it is a story that happened five years ago and has nothing immediate with today's rising antipathy against Japan. My Princeton is a calm residential town having the university for its center and inhabited by wealthy people. The people here are either rich or intelligent, or both, and they show no apparent hostility toward the Japanese. But Trenton, a little way from here, has a GM factory in the suburbs and there happened the Japanese-automobile-hammering caused by the layoff of a number of employees due to a large scale operational reduction. A "Buy American" rally was held by the factory workers in front of a Toyota dealer on Route One. Therefore something like this is actually developing in some area of this country, but it doesn't spread as far as this quiet, snobbish town of Princeton. You can see a lot of Mercedes, Porsche, Lexus, Saub, Jaguar, and BMW cars here. No other town has so many foreign cars. Princeton is indifferent to the "Buy American" movement. The only anti-Japan message I have found in town so far is the "Japan-bashing" sticker shown in Figure A. It was put on the back shock-absorber of a rather old big-sized American car. The car was ahead of me while I was waiting for the traffic signal to turn green at an intersection near home. At first sight, I could not figure out what it was, for the center red circle was too small. So it looked more similar to a Japanese box lunch with a red pickled plum on the center of rice than the Japanese national flag. It must be like the Figure B, if it is properly drawn. It gives us the message "Stop Japan." Figure A shows nothing but "no bringing in a Japanese lunch with a pickled plum on rice." I doubt if the company selling this sticker knows the Japanese national flag correctly, and they might have made it too easily, "drawing a red circle on a white background anyway." This kind of easiness implies something comical, though. No doubt the sticker looked more humorous to me than Figure B. But either way, it is not very agreeable     This way within a year, the American people's feeling toward Japan has become worse all of a sudden (I feel it's getting a little better in the recent one or two months though), and I'm often asked by Japanese, "Isn't it tough to live in America?" When recently I was talking to a Japanese female student studying at a university in Pennsylvania, she said to me "In my childhood I spent a few years in the States and after going back to Japan, I was still in favor of this country, but this time coming back here again and after living for a while, I've come to feel that I love Japan after all. How about you, Mr. Murakami?" Asked by her like this, I feel quite puzzled how to answer her question. That is because I think there is no great basic difference in our daily lives, whether you live in Japan or in the States. Of course, it might depend on the age or the social status of the person in question. If one lives in a foreign country in the early stage of life, he or she might be more likely to be influenced by the external conditions and disturbed emotionally. It is quite natural. That is the usual way with younger people. But as for me, there is no remarkable difference in the attitude of everyday life. Here in America, you might meet unpleasant scumbags who make you sore sometimes. You might suffer the invisible racial discrimination. The barrier of a different language, irritatingly enough, might lead you to be misunderstood by someone else. You might encounter someone arrogant or someone too stubborn to have some flexibility. Someone might be always finding fault with you. All these kinds of human relationships might frustrate you to some extent. But you have to remember the same kind of things will happen to you in Japan nearly as often as here in the States. Now I recollect several occasions in Japan when, frustratingly, I couldn't even make myself understood in Japanese. You will find quite a few scumbags in Japan, too, as you know. I imagine that the percentage that these nasty, arrogant, speaking-ill-of-others people occupy among the one hundred nonselective will be almost the same in both countries, if examined carefully. That is also the case with the percentage of the kind or the interesting people. If asked whether I have some difficulties in living here in the States as a Japanese, I will admit that it is true. But I suffered various sorts of discrimination even while I was living in Japan. Before becoming a writer, I was running a bar and coffee shop in Tokyo, and I experienced disagreeable things once in a while. When I was trying to find an apartment, the real estate agents often rejected me by saying that "Oh, you are in the bar business. No, no, we have no apartment to rent for the people of that kind." Even after becoming a novelist, I came across the similar rejections when finding a place to live in. "We only rent for the people who belong to the big companies listed in the Primary Tokyo Stock Market.." Compared with the unforgivingly severe history of racism against foreigners or non-Japanese in Japan, the discrimination that I experienced might not be even worth telling, but it is nothing but discrimination after all. You will not figure out how the discrimination is until you stand on the side of the discriminated. Undergoing this kind of hardships in the course of life weakens the value of alternative thinking whether "I prefer to live in Japan" or "I prefer to live in the States." If I were young, I would choose one from these alternative preferences. But as a matter of fact, I'm not so young anymore and I've been trained to think in a more practical and skeptical manner. My only possible reply to the question that "Isn't it tough to live in the States?" is "It was also tough for me to live in Tokyo." I know quite well that nobody expects such a reply as my answer though.         Continue reading at     http://www.shimonoseki- cu.ac.jp/~uekura/haruki/umeboshi.html

I realize that I haven’t updated in a week. I’ve been extremely busy with all of my different activities. I’ve been trying to keep up the polyphasic sleep lately, but I’m struggling a bit. My core sleep has gotten too long - 5 hours a night, and I find myself accidentally missing naps. I need to refocus myself on this and make sure that I can make the sleeping cycle which I have set for myself.

I volunteered at concessions once again this saturday, and wound up making the hot chocolate and running a cash register. I had never really run a cash register before, so it was a very interesting experience. I think it was quite worthwhile though, because I got to experience a different position in the concessions stand. I want to do every job in concessions at least once, so that if I become stand manager, I’ll understand what is required of every person.

Anyway - tonight is asian film club and tommorrow is a bonfire social after turning point.