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.

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.

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.

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.

Grades K - 6

There are… two people, Alex and Anthony, who I still talk to in this category but one of them I find myself talking to much less than the other and I’m not really sure why that is. I think it has a lot to do with my location and the amount of hours of overlap we have. For whatever reason, I catch Anthony on IM much more often and for that we seem to have stayed in better touch. This is a pretty weak excuse though and I think I’m going to try and do better in keeping up with Alex. That said, I wouldn’t hesitate to ask these guys if I could crash with them and whenever I’m in the same town I make a point of looking them up. In fact, I’d probably count them by all of those numbered conditions, with the possible exception of talking to frequently and regularly for Alex, but I already talked about that.

Grades 7-8

I’ve separated middle school because these were years I spent going to a charter school instead of my local public school. Geddes and Ani I’ve kept up with a lot. I think for both of them I’ve had a particularly strong friendship on account of having spent time living with both of them on separate occasions while abroad. I’ve gone out with Ani in at least 3 different countries, 2 for Geddes. I imagine that if anybody were to ask me my thoughts on having gone to Parker for these two years of my life, I’d be able to say that the best thing I took out of it were the friends I met there. Nobody does though, because who talks about middle school? There are a bunch of other people I met in Middle school and I’m Facebook friends with a heap of them but I’ve lost touch with nearly all of them. Occasionally somebody will pop up but none have been so persistent. The one special case from the Parker years is Nathan, who did invite me to his wedding and I nearly booked a flight to attend but ultimately decided not to make the trip from China back to the US. We’d already drifted a lot at that point and now I think even more so.

LPC, as a camper.

Simultaneously, at least with a resolution of years, I went to Summer camps through middle school where I met a lot of cool people. I kept in touch with them for a few years after, and later as Facebook swept the globe, I became internet-friends with a bunch of them. Unfortunately that’s about as far as it went.

High School (9-11)

I returned from Parker with a fresher set of eyes and a bunch of people who I never really knew at all before became friends. Now many years on I don’t keep in good touch with most if not all of them. This group is characterized by occasional Facebook birthday wishes and me keeping track of at least where in the world everybody is these days. Stacey showed up in Beijing for a while, for example, and while she was here we hung out a bit, but then she left and my staying in touch has dwindled to the same nonexistent level as before. Here again though there is one notable exception. Jerry and I basically met in high school, although we weren’t really friends then, we both ended up going to college in Illinois and largely due to the Internet we got to be better friends. Earlier this year I attended his wedding, sadly as only one of a few representatives of Jerry’s life before Illinois, which I hardly count as myself.

Summer @ Harvard

I met a lot of cool people, and kept in touch with none of them. I retained almost nothing from the courses I took, however, I did learn a lot outside of school, and still have fond memories of playing frisbee with the now-zillionare and then self-declared asshole Mark Zuckerberg.

College

Of course I met lots and lots of people. I still keep in touch with a lot of them through occasional written letters, IM chats, and emails. Now that Skype seems to be a household name among my peer group, I’m even speaking with some of them in spite of the timezone differences. Some old roommates are definitely among the stronger ties from Chicago: Mike, Ben, Cassie, Kim, Jesse. I’m not sure why I never really kept up with Juan. I practically lost touch with him while still in Chicago as soon as we were no longer roommates. Other people I met through the housing system placing them on my floor such as James, Adrianne, Annie are the most frequently kept up with of them I think. To a lesser extent, there’s Viv, Pete, Alex and Jess who I am in touch with too though a bit more intermittently. I don’t think I made a lot of lasting friends through classes. Lots of Facebook friends but not really people I’d make a point of meeting up with if I was traveling and nearby. There were some people I met through clubs though, mostly Doc, such as Kate and Yana. I try to keep in touch with Kate because she still seems like she’s doing way more interesting things than I am, and recently while spending time researching (playing) some Facebook games for work, I got back in touch with Yana who I’ve discovered is now in the same hemisphere as me. That’s not to say I’m in better contact as a result, only that if I ever decide to visit Cambodia I probably would look her up. I feel like I’ve forgotten somebody who I have been in touch with recently but oh well.

LPC, as a counselor

I went back to LPC, as a counselor, and though it remains to be seen if these friendships will fare better over time than those from being a camper, they do currently benefit from being much more recent. I still chat with Tobi from time to time, and occasionally fire emails to Robert. If I were going to be visiting SoCal I’d probably try and get in touch with Hannah but I feel that’s already drifted too much.

China

This period I think is possibly overrepresented among my Facebook friends, due only to the fact that by the time I met everybody here, Facebook was quite widespread. There are a few people who no longer live in the same city as I do but I would still try to look up and say hello to if I was in the same city. Aaron, Wong, Dan, Jonmichael, and Greg. But among the people I know now who are currently in Beijing and I actually see fairly often (meaning more than once a month), I am not sure who I’d say are my close friends. Sarah is certainly among my better friends in Beijing though.

There are a lot of people here I’m not going to enumerate who I would invite to a party, for example, but I’m not really sure how much I would consider them close friends. A lot of people I am friends with here are, for lack of a better term, friends of convenience. More on this later.

Others

There are other people who I keep in touch with but didn’t meet in normal circumstances. Katt I have never actually met but while I was in college I talked with kind of a lot. Well, not a lot, but, she was somebody totally outside of my in-person social circles and so I talked about things I wouldn’t have talked about with anybody else. Miranda now I exchange emails with more often than anybody else but I have a much tougher time imagining myself just hanging out with. This is very much for me a penpal situation. Another weird case is Zack who I’ve technically known since I was 1, as our parents are good friends, and for the first half of my life, we’d always go to each other’s birthday parties. Through high school we drifted a bit, and then during and after college we met up a couple times, only whenever I was in New York. Since coming to China though I’ve pretty much lost touch.

Friends of convenience vs. the other kind of friend.

The last time I was in the US, I was getting driven by my aunt to the airport to catch a flight to Austin for Jerry’s wedding. During the ride, we talked about a lot of things, but one thing that stands out in my memory is some remarks she made about two different kinds of friend. There are friends of convenience and then there’s another kind. For the most part, everybody starts out as a friend of convenience, because you meet people who it’s convenient to. After a while though, things change and some people drift away, some faster than others. The ones who don’t, or who do so much more slowly, they’ve become the other kind of friend.

I don’t feel like I can really say if somebody is more than a friend of convenience until the friendship is tested by somebody moving away and so it’s hard for me to say much about the people I know now in Beijing. I imagine somebody will be upset at being considered a friend of convenience but too bad.

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.

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.

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

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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.