pantsfarm

2008 feels like it flew by.

Shortly before the start of 2008 I decided that I wanted to pay to live somewhere that was not my parents’ home. It was in the first week of 2008 that I actually moved all two of my bags into my current residence. It wasn’t a huge move, it’s between 5 and ten minutes by bike to get back to their place, and lately I do that ride almost daily since I still use the gym in their building.

It’s not the first time I moved out and the positive results that come with moving into a place not at home were not new or unexpected for me. However, in moving in with a bunch of new roommates I was taking a pretty big gamble. However, a year later I’d say that it’s really worked out quite well. I live with a really cool group of people from varied backgrounds. I don’t want to put out personal information about what they are all up to in this publicly viewable place though, so that’s all on them.

I’m still working with the same animation studio I was a year ago and we’ve been through a few different projects in that time. The biggest thing through the year was Google’s Lively which launched back in late Summer, although Google’s shutting that down around now. I’d say more about this, but, I’m not really sure what will become of the work we did when Lively closes or if I’m allowed to talk about it.

Unfortunately, since Lively launched and we were basically done with that project, the things I’ve been doing at work are pretty much all secret and stuff I am bound by NDAs on. I will say that we are still working with cool people doing really impressive work and so I really do look forward to the next time there’s a public launch of our product. Other big things my company has worked on in 2008 were EA’s Dead Space however I was not very involved in that project.

My responsibilities at work have shifted around a bit as projects have come and go, and I’ve been doing a bit of scripting work on the side to help my team out on some of the repetitive tasks they have faced. In doing so, I’m definitely getting a better understanding of the workings of and working in Maya, but in spite of this I still have a long way to go before I can say I understand how the team does what they do.

Less personally, 2008 saw a lot of turnover in people around me. Friends came to Beijing to visit and then went home. Friends I met here moved on to the next place for them. My youngest sister Cara came to Beijing for a couple months starting in Autumn after tightened restrictions in Europe prevented her from getting renewed papers. Having her around was a lot of fun, but then as suddenly as she arrived, she was off again. As of yesterday though, it sounds like there’s a strong possibility she’ll be headed back this way sometime in 2009.

The 2008 Olympics happened. They were fun but living in Olympics Beijing was like living in a strange alternate version of Beijing which only existed during the Olympics. Remembering them now is a bit like recalling a particularly long, interesting, and vivid dream.

I went to a handful of events, ranging from exciting (USA vs. Serbia semi-final men’s water polo) to confusing to the point of boredom (Modern Pentathlon equestrian event) to freaking awesome (Swimming on the day that Phelps beat Cavic by .01 seconds in the 100m fly [NYT Olympic blog post from then]). That day was especially freaking awesome because I went with a bunch of swimmers who knew one of the USA gold medalist swimmers personally so I actually got to spend the day wandering around Beijing with Ricky Berens, gold medalist and world record holder in the men’s 4×200m freestyle relay.

Equally awesome but considerably less publicized to my knowledge were the 2008 Paralympics. I went with a group to the murderball finals between the US and Australia and it was fantastic.

I went to some shows in Beijing, they were all fun but none were exceptionally awesome. Memorable names include Air and Kanye West.

I did only a little bit of travel to new places this year, visiting Japan for a long weekend and seeing Dandong on the Chinese side of the North Korean border. I traveled to the US a couple times, first for fun and then the second to attend a friend’s wedding. And finally there was a trip for Thanksgiving and a memorial service for my Grandfather.

I think that about covers what’s been going on for me this year. I’ve been mostly in Beijing. I visited New York (USA), Dandong (China), Ishinomaki and Sendai and the surrounding area (Japan), Boston (USA), San Francisco and Berkeley and a bit more in the bay (USA), and Austin, TX (USA). If I went anywhere else, evidently it wasn’t memorable enough. I am not counting the many hours I spent sitting in the YVR (Vancouver, Canada) airport as a real visit.

I watched a lot of movies, read a few books, and listened to a bit of new music. None of that stuff was really a big deal though.

Earlier in December, I looked at some archives of my old blog from many years ago and noted how 8 years ago I was spending a lot of my time in the same ways I am now. Some things really never do change I guess.

Reminded / inspired by my friend Ani’s post referencing The Aims of Education address I thought to go back and reread some of them including my own.

Originally, I wanted to go through and read a lot of the addresses, perhaps starting a year or two before the one given at my orientation, and then read all of them through the current year and make some notes about trends and differences in what the stated aims of education are.

This pretty much fell apart after I reread the speech from my year because I found myself with too short of an attention span and a desire to go write a blog post right away. And as a note, loosely, the aim of education is itself, there is no other aim, being more educated is just better, and/or as I vaguely recall from one of the addresses I saw, being more educated makes you a better lover. I’ll try and come back over this next week and actually read through more of them and take notes properly.

Should anybody else feel up to the task though, the addresses can be found in the University of Chicago Record’s archives which are conveniently online in pdf format. Since the aims are given during freshman orientation at the end of September, it’s usually quite easy to identify which volumes/numbers have them.

Last week, not even, last Saturday was a memorial for my grandfather, Henry Lewis Stadler.

I didn’t think I was going to be that moved by the occasion but when my grandmother suddenly asks me to say something (which was kind of not ok, even though I said it was) I found myself much less able to speak than I had expected.

I feel like it wasn’t even entirely true what I was saying. I mean, it was true, in that we did talk about what I was going to do, and he did encourage me to go and do it, to some extent, but not in the way I was imagining as I struggled to say the words I did. I feel now like I failed to really communicate what I was thinking in the way that I had wanted to.

This ties in a little bit with the conversation I had with my father the following day about how at memorials and during eulogies and other such occasions, people are made out to be saints, doing no wrong. Of course it’s not that we want to remember people by their misdeeds but nonetheless I feel like usually those are conveniently omitted at this kind of gathering.

Nonetheless, it was a strange experience for me to be sitting there surrounded by family and friends and hearing about my grandfather’s life in a way that I hadn’t really heard before. My own experience with him was in many ways both profoundly different from the people there (that is, different from the people who knew him when he was young) but also very much the same (the way I saw his later life and other people did was not so different).

Henry is for me the first person close to me who has died. I’ve still never been to a funeral, for that matter. I guess in that sense the whole experience has caused me to consider my own mortality in a way I never did before. Is that such a big leap to make? It makes me uncomfortable to think about my life having concluded and though I hope that it’s a long way off, I ‘d like to be able to consider it differently as I get closer.

In the process of reading a few blogs of people I don’t know, I’ve come across more than one instance of people writing friend inventories. A couple things I noticed in the course of all this reading about other people’s lives:

1. The kind of person who does this sort of thing seems to usually be a person with few friends.
2. Definitions of what a “friend” is vary a lot.

Depending a lot on how I decide to answer #2 I either fall into our out of the category of people with few friends and presumably having that as a reason to be bummed.

When I drop the phrase “friend inventory” into Google, the first result I get is some career-oriented blog which puts forward the following conditions for close friends:

• You have been friends with the person when you were not professionally involved with the person.
• The person knows the part of yourself you dislike the most.
• The person returns your calls in 48 hours.

Other conditions for friendship that get tossed around things like

1. somebody I’d tell my secrets to (and vice versa)
2. somebody who I could count on to get my back
3. somebody I’d be comfortable calling up and asking for them to float me a grand
4. somebody I’d call if I needed a lift to the hospital
5. somebody I talk to frequently and regularly for hours
6. somebody who’s wedding I’d attend or would invite to my own
7. somebody who I would ask if I needed a place to crash

I’m not sure what metric I will use when considering who I consider my friends these days though. I do however automatically exclude family from this list. Certainly there’s a bunch of family members who would pass easily these various arbitrary requirements

Starting with the 3 given conditions for “close” friends, I don’t think I would fare so well. I’m not sure what anybody would say if I asked them what they thought I most disliked about myself but I’m pretty sure that if anybody could get it right, it’d be be a lucky guess. I’m not even sure how I would answer that about myself and I’m not the kind of person who has really talked so much about my insecurities to anybody. I’m sure I’ll have slipped some small comment in while talking to many different friends but probably not the same tidbit to everybody. It’s good to tell people things, I just spread it out over lots of different people.

On the other hand, a great many of the people I know will get back to me in under 48 hours and I’ve never been very good at making friends through work. I think the latter part has a lot to do with the fact that all my real jobs have been in foreign countries where I am in the tiny minority of foreigner, native English speakers.

As for the other conditions, some of them seem much more applicable to me than others. The first, for example, doesn’t seem as relevant because I don’t feel as though I share that many secrets. That’s not to say there aren’t thing I share with some people and not with others, but… well, maybe I do have secrets. I feel like the secrets I do share are in some sense governed by which sphere of my life I know a person from. It’s not that it’s a secret that I try to keep, so much as it is some shared knowledge that I share only because of how or when I met that person and so it rarely if ever comes out anywhere else.

Enough consideration of conditions of friendship, I want to get to inventorying. I’m going to go through this from memory and chronologically. [Read more →]

These days I feel like I could easily sit down every day for a week or two and write 500 words about things I don’t like or that make me angry. Sometimes I do. Maybe I should try and channel that into something productive like NaNoWriMo.

I’ve just now finished reading Michael Pollan’s recently published piece in the New York Times Magazine titled Farmer in Chief.

While I was reading it, I had a brief moment where I was gripped with a visceral fear. I do not often find myself dreading the future as I did just now. I’m not really sure what caused it, maybe it was just a vague and unspecified fear of change, fear of an unknown future in which maybe I’m going to live through food riots in my time.

I don’t know, I’m overreacting and now that I’m considering it in retrospect I feel like instead of dread I kind of want to figure out how to get some land to my name in the middle of America and then how to make it productive.

I was talking to one of my roommates earlier this week and she was saying how she had such a terrible day or something. I don’t remember the exact details however at the time I thought she was maybe complaining a lot and somehow I ended up making the statement “but you have so much to be grateful for!”

After that, the tone of the conversation shifted a bit as I tried to explain what I meant, and I remembered how a while ago, in some book I was reading, I read about the idea of a gratitude journal. The basic idea is every day, you write down three or five or however many things (pretty much totally arbitrary) that you are grateful for. This could be something like “nice weather today” or it could be “the test came back clean!” or whatever. Big or small, it doesn’t matter, it’s just to get into the habit of thinking about and writing down the good things that are going on.

The search results linked above do give me the impression that the entire idea has taken much stronger root among a more new-agey crowd with whom I do not really identify so well. However, back when I first moved to China, I did keep one for a while (checking the dates, it appears to be from November 06 through the middle of January 07). I can’t say for sure if it did have a profound effect on my sense of well being but I do think it was a positive exercise.

I think the main thing about the idea that resonates for me is the notion that I don’t usually stop to notice when things go well, only when they are going crappy. By stopping and actually identifying things that are good, it fosters this much stronger sense of awareness of the things that are not bad which in turns leads to a different, more positive, perspective on things.

Anyhow, at the end of the whole conversation and explaining this, I suggested she give it a try for a couple weeks, so when that’s done, I’ll ask her what she thought.

Cavendish Banana

Australia - The Cavendish Banana, 57, Australia, died October 12, 2011. The last commercially viable Cavendish plantation succumbed to Panama disease race 4, surrounded by its offspring, after a valiant many-years and global struggle with the disease. Services will not be held worldwide at 10:30 AM GMT October 15 with representatives from United Fruit and Standard Fruit (Chiquita and Dole respectively) presiding.

The Cavendish was born in the early 1950s after the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel, succumbed to Panama disease race 1. It was chosen as the successor to Gros Michel due to good performance in transportability, shelf life, ability to grow in Gros Michel’s old plantations, and a variety of other factors. Guided by the strong hands of Chiquita and Dole, the Cavendish ascended to global acceptance and the throne passed easily to this young, supposedly disease-proof strain.

Originally hailing from South-East Asia in regions of China and Vietnam, the Cavendish has been successfully raised in tropical locales all around the world. Bananas remain a popular choice for subsistence farmers due to the lack of need for replanting coupled with consistent fruit yields through many seasons.

The Cavendish was preceded in commercial death by the Gros Michel, and is survived by a number of new hybrid and more-resistant cultivars, such as the Goldfinger.

I was reading about bananas, in the assorted links below and I thought it might be interesting if there were an obituary for the Cavendish, which is evidently in some danger of not being so cheaply available the world over. Of course, an obituary for the world’s favorite fruit would probably need to be taken on by a better writer than myself, as this would be entirely too little to do it justice. I’d nominate Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World.

1. Yes, We Will Have No Bananas - Op-Ed - NYTimes
2. Can This Fruit Be Saved? - Popular Science
3. Cavendish banana - Wikipedia
4. Gros Michel banana - Wikipedia
5. Banana - Wikipedia

Last week I went to the US and spent a week running around frantically meeting with friends for meals, drinks, coffee, shopping and pretty much whatever other occasion could be made up for the purpose of catching up with friends.

Shortly before departing, I wrote a post pondering changes in people. Then, during one of the lunches last week, I found myself enjoying a burger in some nice place in Boston talking about all of our mutual friends from back in elementary school and which one’s we’d kept up with and where everybody was so many years later. One friend in particular, he’d gotten married and at the same time, largely cut himself off from the people he knew in high school. Sitting there at lunch, we thought it was kind of weird and unfortunate, that he’d gone off and basically separated his old life from his current one.

While running around the rest of the week, I noticed that depending on the crowd I was with, I behaved a little bit differently. When I got together with the guys I’ve known since I was 12, I regressed a little more towards the kid I used to be then. Not dramatically so, but looking back, I feel like I was acting differently with them than I did with other people, the friends I made years later, or different still from how I was when with cousins I’ve known basically since infancy.

In all situations, I assume there is some core person who I am, but I feel like there are subtle, if not necessarily externally perceptible, changes in how I behave. Even if unnoticed by those people I’m with, it’s not something that escapes my own introverted self-scrutiny. I felt different, even if I wasn’t acting it. The core person changes over time, this being the subject of the earlier post, and when I get together with these friends I shift back in different ways, perhaps closer to the person I think they will remember as me.

Sitting on the plane back to Beijing, I thought of a new explanation for the friend who cut himself off: what if I didn’t like the person who I was at some earlier stage, or as an extension, the person who I became when I spent time with people from that time in my life? If that were the case, maybe I too would just let the old friends go. This doesn’t sit well with me, maybe because I don’t like the idea of disliking any episode of my life prior to now so much that I’d try and force it to completely disappear from my memory.

Of course, examining closer, I realize that my memory as always has been working to make me think better of myself than I perhaps really am. Not even a year out from leaving Shanghai, I’ve almost completely lost touch with the people I knew there, and I’m not even trying to ignore them, it’s just neglect. Maybe I’ll stop blathering here and write all those Shanghai friends and acquaintances to see what they’re up to now.