Two Boxes (and the non-existence of time)

There are many ideas that people accept as so completely obvious that anyone who questions the status quo is seen as being a little mad. I'm sure that anyone who thought space was anything more than a vast black nothing full of heavenly bodies was completely reasonable up until "dark matter" was hypothesized by scientists. Of course, dark matter isn't a fact, nor is there any direct evidence of it. It's something scientists made up to explain the unexplainable while figuring out the way the universe works.

At any rate, when you question what is utterly obvious to the vast majority of people, it's hard to make others understand where you are coming from. When I say that I don't believe in the existence of time, I find it a little difficult to explain to those who can't even begin to fathom such an absurd notion. Last night, I was having a talk with a student about the future and whether or not she believed that people could tell the future. When she asked me if I believed they could, I told her that it was complicated because I didn't believe time existed, so it's not a matter of predicting what has not occurred.

After the lesson, I was thinking about how to frame this feeling about time in an understandable and clear way. When I explained it to the student, I drew a time line of our life which is like an arrow shooting forward from birth to death. Our conception is that that is how we experience life. We move in one direction and we can't go back nor can we change the rate at which we move forward. The best I could explain to her at that time was to consider the smallest measures on that line as chopped up little slides what we existed in and were blind of the slices ahead of us. That is, we were walled off from the past and future, but they were still there.

Later, I thought about this again and a better example came to mind. Consider that there are two boxes on either side of you. You don't know what is in one of the boxes, but you know something is in them. You are given an item from the "future" box and you experience it. You can touch it, see it, smell it, or even taste it if you want. When you are finished with it, you put it into the other box, "the past". Once you put the item into the past, you can never access it again. Would you say that the box full of the past was empty because you couldn't see what was in it or access its contents? Do you really believe the "future" box is empty because you cannot see what is inside of it? My feeling is that just because you can't access the contents of the boxes, it doesn't mean they cease to exist. Time shapes how we experience this existence, but it is a construct that exists to feed us experiences in a manner which will not overwhelm the fragile body's sensory mechanisms.

This is how I view time. Because of the limits of our perceptions (due to our nervous systems' inability to process multiple "dimensions" without suffering a complete mental and likely physical overload), we can't have access to everything at once so we can only access life in a limited way. It's as if our bodies are designed to be "handed" items in a fashion that they can process so they can still function in this reality rather than being inundated with all experiences (past and present) at all times. I don't believe that means those experiences are gone, but rather that we aren't allowed to access them for our own "protection".

This relates to both predictions and past lives (if you believe in such things). Some people, perhaps because they are capable of handling it or have a capacity which is uncommon, have access to the contents of the boxes that we don't. The extent to which that access is distorted, however, is always an issue. That is, just because they can reach into those boxes, it doesn't mean they can clearly and accurately experience what is in them as they are fighting through a construct which is meant to protect our reality from others, so such things are rarely presented without the distortion of the psychology of the involved party and less than 100% clarity is present while processing them. The results of any such access will almost certainly be skewed (sometimes very badly) by the zeitgeist the person lives in and their own psychological need to view things in a particular way.

This is also, incidentally, how I believe ghosts, spirits, and other strange things show up for some people in our reality. I see it as a form of dimensional "leakage" which occurs when two entities (people) have a sensitivity to one another and can interact. Most of them are terrified and react accordingly. That is, they try to force one another out of their respective realities. Such experiences are inevitably full of perceptual distortions as well. Consider that a "ghost" that is telling someone in our reality to "get out" may be experiencing the other party as a similarly invasive and terrifying "ghost" in their reality.

I could be wrong, of course. I've never had an experience with a past life memory or what might be considered a significant premonition, nor have I ever seen a ghost. However, I'm not prepared to utterly dismiss those who have had such experiences as all being self-deluding, psychotic, or simply liars. Scoffing at them and waving away their experiences is a handy way of explaining away the unexplainable, but I question the psychology of the need to do this. Mainly, I think that it's rooted in arrogance and self-centeredness. That is, if it is unusual and I haven't experienced it, it didn't happen, so that person must be crazy or a liar. While I am sure that some people have psychotic breaks or neurological problems which cause them to see, hear, and experience things (as I've worked with such people before), I'm not prepared to believe that is always the case.

I don't believe that time doesn't exists as an explanation of the unexplainable, though it somehow does end up explaining some things. Though I guess that if I did make it up to explain the unexplainable, I'd be no different from those who made up dark matter to fill in the gaps of their theoretical notions of how the universe works.

Paper Thin

I once read that the children of alcoholics often grow up to be very sensitive because part of surviving the dysfunctional environment of their homes involves anticipating moods and reacting to them in a manner which diminishes their suffering. If this is so, it would also explain why so many children of alcoholics are also prone to addiction themselves. Increased sensitivity means increased emotional pain and addiction often is a means of emotionally anesthetizing yourself.

My father is an alcoholic and my mother probably has had some sort of undiagnosed depressive disorder for most of her life. Growing up with both of them, I recall moments of difficulty and tension and trying not to get on the wrong side of either of them for fear of bringing on more misery. I'm guessing that part of the reason I worked so hard at school was to keep them happy with me and show that I was "good" and therefore not deserving of the verbal wrath that sometimes came my way.

I've forgiven both of my parents for the damage they did to me as a result of how damaged they are. Neither of them has changed much, though my father has gotten a bit better and my mother worse as the years have gone by. I realize that they are in pain, too, and that they never meant to mess up their kids by their actions. They were just doing what they could to cope, and sometimes that involved random spreading of their misery to available targets without even knowing what or why they were doing it.

Unfortunately, growing up in the way I did coupled with perhaps some genetic predispositions has left me thin-skinned. I tend to be hyper-aware of the environment around me and the actions of people toward me. This is almost certainly a lingering response pattern to how I grew up. I'm still looking to anticipate how the people around me are going to behave so that I can alter my actions such that I will endure the least possible emotional pain.

Fortunately for me, my husband is a calm, placid, emotionally stable person who extremely rarely has any sort of negative response to anything I do or say. I can still read him like a book from his tone of voice or small changes in body language, but what I tend to read are things like 'he's about to ask me if I'd mind making coffee' or 'he's tired or out of sorts' right now, but hasn't even realized it himself yet. Those who wonder why I get effusive about how wonderful my husband is may understand a bit better now. He's emotionally a warm, comforting blanket to someone who grew up being emotionally (though fortunately not physically) beaten up.

The main problem for me with being so thin-skinned and overly attentive to how I'm regarded is that I live in Tokyo and I'm not Japanese. Living in an environment which is over-stimulating at best and around people who are constantly reacting to you because you are different can be very hard. Part of the process I continue to go through in Japan is to build a psychological wall between myself and people who I encounter. Every time I leave the apartment, I have to consciously decide to try hard not to pay attention to them and how they are reacting to me. This wall is necessary not only to protect myself, but to stop me from building up anger toward them for stolen glances, gawking, pointing, and commenting rudely in Japanese about the gaijin while laboring under the incorrect assumption that I don't know what they're saying or doing.

It took me a long time before I even decided to put this wall up. While I knew I was sensitive, my initial response to people who behave in ways that cause me pain was to be angry at them and react with angry looks or by saying or doing something to try and get them to stop. Essentially, I was trying to "fight back", but the truth is that you can't control other people in this way and it's completely energy-draining to even try in a city as big as Tokyo and when you stick out like a sore thumb in a culture which has serious issues with anyone who is obviously different. It was exhausting and ineffective.

One of the things that I realized some time ago was that this need to put up a wall between me and the Japanese around me was fueling my lack of desire to learn to speak or read Japanese better. Not understanding completely actually made my life easier because it shut me off from pain. It's much easier to build a wall when the voices around you are just noise and not actual communication. It also gave me an excuse to put a buffer between myself and any potential cross-cultural issues because someone else always did the communicating for me. When I worked in a Japanese office, my Australian boss, who spoke Japanese quite well (despite his protestations to the contrary at times), was my protection from all sorts of problems. At home, my husband did the talking when it was necessary. I used both of them as protection from possible pain and stress, and it has worked really well from that angle.

For years, I've successfully lived in a bit of a cocoon to keep my paper thin skin protected to some extent from the pain I might suffer from those around me. While it might seem that a person in my shoes might come to regret this insulation, isolation, and willful effort not to fully engage in the environment around her, I don't regret it one bit. It's what I needed to survive, and I don't know what sort of emotional state I'd be in if I hadn't had my various "buffers". The difference between people like me and people who have a thicker skin is that I am living in the equivalent of a cultural downpour with painful hailstones bashing into me and they are experiencing a light sprinkling of rain. They didn't ask for, earn, or build their ability to not experience everything with the volume turned up to 10 anymore than I asked to be the way I am. That's just the way it is, and they can't know what it's like until they have lived a few decades in my shoes.

The good thing about realizing why you live your life the way you do is that it gives you the ability to choose another path of coping. About a year ago, I started to dabble in Japanese study again because I know at least some of the reasons why I tried to shun improvement for so long. There are other reasons, and there are even some pretty good excuses (like I actually rarely need to speak it, oddly enough), but the bottom line is that I was setting the terms for how I dealt with life in Japan so that I could have a filter against pain. I'm changing the type of filter I use, and hoping that I end up all the better for it.

Information Aggregators and Intellectual Property

There are many types of blogs out there and I read a fair variety of them. One type is an "information aggregate" which collects news and information from sites of interest to its readers and presents it in smaller bites with a link back to the original posts or articles.

Virtually all of the Gawker Media sites are such places which collect news gathered by others or form content based on user input and then offer up samples or opinions based on that news. Very little of its content tends to be original pieces researched, written or extrapolated from its writers' personal experiences, though at least some of it is. One of the best and most useful sites on the web, Lifehacker, is a part of Gawker's suite of sites. Lifehacker's editors and writers keep an eye on what is new and useful and distill that information for us so we don't have to follow things like when Google changes gmail or find useful articles that help us live a greener, cheaper life.

While I believe that a lot of information aggregate sites perform very useful services to readers and drive traffic to the sites which they cull information from, I have concerns about what they represent and the trends that spawn as a result of their form of presenting content. At their best, such sites provide such a small thumbnail of the content of the sites they poach from that interested readers have no choice but to visit the site the information originated from to get more information. At their worst, they steal so much that there is no need to click through to the parent article and give the people who worked hard to create the original content their readership.

The point at which a site which recruits editors to spend their days gleaning "news" from other sources treads over the line from promoting those sites to stealing their intellectual property can be a tricky one. How much parroting of content can one do before they've reduced the chances that the reader will feel the need to move on to the original source? Additionally, there are issues of profiting from the work of others at play. If the New York Times writes an article and parts of that article are featured on an aggregate site, does that site have the right to profit from what it has gleaned from the New York Times when the Times never agreed to allow any part of their article on that site?

This very issue is currently being dealt with on the Apartment Therapy web site as the New York Times has asked them to remove all posts related to Times articles. Like Gawker, Apartment Therapy is host to a suite of sites and derives most of its content from users and searching for articles and other posts related to their core content (interior design and home life). Unlike Gawker Media's sites, they tend to show more of the original source articles and write less involved editorials or opinion pieces to accompany the information they reproduce.

The comments section about the article linked in the previous paragraph is full of people talking about both sides (including myself). Personally, this entire situation is a kissing cousin of an issue which has aggrieved me for quite some time and that is bloggers who create nothing unique, but ride on the coattails of those who do. In the case of aggregators, they do this for profit. In their defense, many of them are performing a valuable service and are helping out the sites who they showcase. Without a doubt, any site featured on sites like Gawker's are going to see a huge (almost certainly welcome) upsurge in traffic.

In the case of individual bloggers, most of them do it for ego-driven reasons. They want attention and they either have nothing in their lives which they feel is worth writing about, or they are too paranoid about privacy to expose their lives for the sake of receiving the desired attention. They mine other people's sites for content to piggyback off of, more often than not doing so by picking up on an issue someone else has spoken about and pontificating on why they are wrong.

The bottom line is that much of the blogging world is like a parasite to true journalists. However, I must hasten to point out that sometimes the blogging world is represented by people who are actually amateur journalists themselves. For the sake of clarity, I will say that I call anyone a "journalist" who writes uniquely about something rather than using someone else's work in whole or in part or as a springboard for a counterpoint piece. (And, incidentally, I'd be more impressed with people who wrote counterpoint pieces if they spent more time making their own points rather than reading something else and then and only then finding something to say.)

The parasitical nature of a lot of blogging doesn't have to be a harmful one. Sometimes the "parasite" assists the host, as it were. However, by and large, I think that is not the case. Those who create unique content invest a huge amount of time or money (or both) in their work and the fruits of their labor are regarded as an information larder for anyone to raid because of claims of "fair use". The problem is that the liberal sampling of professional journalistic sources by bloggers and aggregators undermines the need of readers to seek out the sites which created that information on a regular basis. In essence, if I know I can rely on a site like Apartment Therapy to point out any lifestyle article in the New York Times which concerns topics like design, home organization or cooking, I have little incentive to visit the Times site regularly and skin through their entire list of articles. This in turn reduces the chances that I'll become a regular reader. Apartment Therapy could be siphoning off readership by being too reliable a source of information on articles of interest.

Additionally, while I think aggregators and even private bloggers sometimes do a great job of finding far flung sites and bringing them to the attention of readers, many of them rely far too much on external sources rather than developing their own content. Aggregators do this because it is far cheaper to hire editors to scour the web than writers to create unique pieces. Bloggers do it because their lives are tedious and its hard to find something interesting in their own experience to write about on a regular basis.

While aggregators claim that they want to help the sites they point to, the real reason they showcase the web sites of others is that the more new posts you put up, the more page views you get and the more ad revenue you generate. Using more unique but high quality content is less profitable than semi-regurgitation of the existing content created by external sources.

The bottom line is that those who use the content of others to fuel their blogs are serving to remove the profit from and incentive to create unique content from the sources they mine. At the end of the line if such a trend continues is a diminishing pool of original writers, journalists, and reporters as it becomes increasingly more difficult to make money from your hard work. While aggregators and content poachers are likely indifferent to the harm they do as long as they gain more profit by their efforts, they are essentially contributing to the demise of the sources from which they derive most of their content.

Not Wanting a Long Life

Recently, I asked a few students an interesting question off of one of the Facebook Memes that's going around. This question was, "would you want to know the day you're going to die." To be fair, this is hardly a question that originated with the banal interactions we have with one another on Facebook. In fact, it's a philosophical question that I recall talking over with my friends during late nights back in college and high school.

Most people say they don't want to know because then they'd have to think about it for the rest of their lives. The main benefit of knowing only comes from knowing you have a relatively short time left because then you can modify your lifestyle to maximize enjoyment of that time. Since no one wants to know they have little time left, most of us would rather forgo that possible benefit for the larger comfort of uncertainty.

This issue has come up in the past with students because of the plethora of fortune tellers around Tokyo. A lot of my students have gone to them from time to time and one of the things they are sometimes told is how long they will live. One of my students said she was told she'd live to be 70-something, but she felt that was too long because life was too hard. Recently another student told me that she didn't want to live past 60 because she didn't want to live with diminished physical capacity.

In a country where people enjoy the longest life spans in the world, I find their responses curious. It's especially odd in some ways because so many people in Japan who I've spoken to about what happens after you die believe that we face oblivion. They clearly are not thinking that there is some comfort in an after life. I also find it interesting that men don't seem to have the same reaction to the question as women. Maybe women in Japan see a long and lonely road ahead as they outlive their husbands, or perhaps their lot in life is such that they don't feel particularly satisfied with the circumstances of their lives. Or, and I think this may hold a more relevant clue, women are so responsible for taking care of their husbands (even in equitable relationships) that they see a future full of the burdens of old age without any of the restful benefits of retirement. One thing I will note is that the students who don't want to live a very long life do not have children. I wonder if having kids changes the way in which people view a longer life because they know someone will be responsible for looking after them.

Unfortunately, the number of people I teach is too small to reach any conclusions, but it is an interesting question to ponder. I can say that it always makes me a little sad when someone tells me they don't want to live that long, though I honestly can't say I want to live to be a gnarled shadow of myself unless my husband makes it there with me.

Lesson Therapy

Let me start off this post by saying that I am not a monkey. That's right. I'm not a gaijin monkey who performs for the student during lessons to entertain them. It's not that the students and I don't have a laugh from time to time, but it's not because I'm slapping fins together and balancing balls on my nose. My demeanor with students is very casual and relaxed. I ask them questions or have them do textbook material and I allow them the time to answer and speak. Occasionally, they volunteer a question and I answer. That all sounds pretty natural for lessons in language practice, but you'd be surprised how many people treat it like monkey hour.

I feel it was necessary to get that out of the way before I say that one of my students told me at the end of a lesson today his English lesson was the happiest time of his week for him. If you think this is my way of boasting, then I will also add that this fellow currently has a very difficult life situation. His mother is ill and he has to take care of her and his sister is in the hospital dying from the big "C". It's not like I've got a lot of competition in the happiness department.

That being said, I do believe that, for several of my students, having lessons with me serves a meaningful purpose in their lives which has little to do with language skill improvement. Since returning to private teaching after a little over a decade of office work, I've come to realize that there are some people for whom their English lessons are a psychological lifeline. They offer a type of interaction and mental stimulation which they cannot find elsewhere in their lives. In particular, students who are opinionated and outspoken have a chance to speak out to someone who isn't going to judge them or ostracize them for their ideas.

Like many people around the world, a lot of my students spend their time working and operating in relatively small circles. They have friends, but they can't always have the types of conversations with friends that they need or want because they have to keep certain things to themselves in order to not be considered strange or risk being ostracized. One thing I've had to adjust to is the idea that having a conversation lesson which is just me sitting down with a person with an emotional need, having a cup of tea or coffee and "having a chat" isn't shirking my responsibility as a teacher. The fact of the matter is that I'm accepting that some of my students need more of a therapeutic encounter than a boost to their English skills. This is particularly so for some of the older, unmarried ones.

The truth is that these types of lessons, depending on the student can be much harder or much easier than doing a real lesson plan with a textbook there to provide structure, direction and momentum. When you're responsible week in and week out for carrying on a "chat" with the same person who has no obligation whatsoever to initiate anything, you have to work hard to make sure there's something to talk about. For the aforementioned student who said his English lessons were the happiest time of his week, I often have to do 20 minutes or more of preparation to make sure I have enough current event and topical information on hand to keep the "chat" alive. After 75 conversations with the same person, it's not so easy to avoid retreading the same talking points territory.

Right now, the student I am focusing on in this post is incredibly lonely because both his mother and sister are in the hospital, though he isn't the only one who I believe comes to me for social interaction more so than skill building. He spends his days at home or visiting his relatives or hanging around his house with nothing to do. He says his other friends are still working either part-time jobs or full-time, but he's not able to pursue such things because of his age and familial responsibilities. I have a sense right now that I'm pretty much all he's got to perk him up these days and that makes me sad for him.

I think a lot of people who take English lessons are fulfilling a range of emotional needs that can't be fulfilled in their lives otherwise, but the fact that they are doing so isn't nearly as obvious as a few of my students. I wonder if the structure English language learning in Japan has been built around this need just as much or more than the need to improve language skills which are so poorly taught here. In a country where people are always saying "do your best" (gambatte), going to a psychiatrist is uncommon, and putting on a false happy face is common, and where there is a fair bit of conformity and homogeneity, English teachers may be performing a variety of therapeutic services including exposure to cultural diversity, companionship, intellectual stimulation and cathartic expression.

Proof of "God"

Recently, I was reading a very reasonable and well thought out debate on proof that God exists and whether or not there is such proof or if it is even possible to prove that God exists. For me, the main problem with questions of "proof" of any concept is that there is an assumption that humans are equipped to experience any given entity or material and their inability to experience it means it does not exist. In particular, if we can't see, smell, feel, hear, or taste it or invent a mechanism that can translate a phenomenon into data which we can apply one of those senses to, we say it cannot be proven. This is the unavoidable flaw when science tries to "prove" metaphysical concepts. It is limited to what our meat sacks can comprehend, and we're hardly the best instruments. If "God" is out there, we may be no more capable of comprehending it than a tree is capable of having a conversation with us.

The other problem is that people are constantly framing "God" concepts in their own image, and I don't just mean the psychological concepts like judging people or issuing rules to run their lives. There may indeed be some sort of greater entity that set the universe in motion and is monitoring every action that goes on, but that doesn't mean it is paternalistic or concerns itself with what goes on in our lives beyond some sort of perception that changes of some sort are occurring. Whatever "God" is does not have to be some single entity looking after our welfare. It could simply be something that spawns energy or reorganizes it or has some sort of imperative to see matter and energy manipulated into different patterns or frequencies. If that is so, it doesn't mean that that entity has no interest in our improving ourselves or our world, but rather that our achievements mentally, emotionally, or spiritually bring about that entity's desired changes to energy or matter.

We can't prove it, but I think there is far less value in proof than in thinking more expansively about the concepts and what they mean to our lives than in seeking proof. If there is any "proof" to be had, it won't come as a result of prognostication and fulfillment of a prediction, scientific research, or personal experience. It'll come from an analysis of trends and looking for a certain pattern of interaction both in the way civilizations and people change across thousands of years and by studying the interaction of matter and energy on an atomic level.

The Rage of Our Age

As the sub-prime meltdown was unfolding and as the current sinking of economies worldwide is dragging more and more people down with it, I've noticed that there are a lot of angry young people who feel that the boomers have gobbled everything up and left nothing but a big economic mess for young people. Most of us who are younger than 50 are unlikely to enjoy the same level of lifestyle as our parents. In particular, we seem to be in a situation where we will not be able to buy property and expect it to help smoothly pave the way to retirement. In fact, most people feel they will be lucky to stumble down a dirt road considering the collapse of the housing market.

I can't say that I know what is ahead. I tend to think it'll get better and that it'll happen sooner than most people expect. That being said, I must say that sometimes I also get angry about some of the things which I view as disparities between economic conditions and opportunities for our parents and those for ourselves. This anger is completely wasted of course, but it is not irrationally rooted.

Sometimes it makes me mad that people who have retired complain about younger generations not doing better and blaming it on their inability to control their spending. While I have no doubt that this is true for a lot of people, not everyone who is finding it hard to prosper is failing to live modestly or work hard. The truth is that a lot of older people have built their prosperity on real estate. That is, they bought houses which appreciated in value greatly and have been able to cash in for retirement. The amount of appreciation on more recent purchases, with a few exceptional areas, is less than that on homes bought 40-50 years ago.

My point is that a lot of people who cite hard work as the reason for their comfort at retirement actually just got lucky that they were buying in their era and not ours. They didn't necessarily prosper because of hard work and scrimping and saving. That was actually what our grandparents did, not our parents. Some of them just bought homes, others became landlords of one sort or another. Some simply checked out at the right time before the stock market bubble burst. In fact, a lot of the, supposedly inspirational, stories about people who became millionaires despite never working at very high wage or professional jobs emphasize frugal and simple living rather strongly and whisper and vaguely mention in a footnote at the end of the article that there were also real estate purchases. Such people can't stand as an example for us since our era is unlikely to yield such opportunities to increase investments ten fold (or more).

I'm not whining because I won't end up rich when I retire, because I've never been in a position to consider much investing anyway. That's not because I don't have a little bit of money to play with, but rather that I have been living in a foreign country on a mental lease that I renew three years at a time rather than staying in a place I expect to remain in. Rather, I am complaining because of the amount of blame that gets tossed around and the arrogant presumption that anyone who hasn't set themselves up for a comfy retirement has not lived in a manner that suits their income level. What is more, I'm probably more than a little jealous and resentful to see people who get to coast on their buying-based luck later in life, while I will be working until I no longer am capable of doing so. Going by a lot of the comments I see on various articles, I'm certain I'm not alone.

Behind Every Apologist

Lately, there's been a bit of a flap amongst those who are paying attention about an article in the Japan Times (an English language newspaper here) from an 72-year-old teacher who asserts that discrimination is "right" for Japanese people. I'm not going to talk about the article as it speaks for itself, albeit rather inaccurately at times as some of the "examples" that are cited are factually incorrect.

Recently, my attention was brought to a response to this article by a particular blogger who I used to follow. This blogger was someone who I tried to be supportive of and assist during some difficulties during her early time in Japan, but she had some emotional problems and I decided it was best to separate myself from her and stop following her writing. I was directed to a post by her today, however, that supported the article.

At first, I was really angry. Somehow, reading this made me feel as if my energy and good intentions were wasted on someone who clearly did not deserve them. After all, if you advocate the random suffering of others based on prejudice (which is itself based on superficial and arbitrary factors), then you're sowing a bit of karma for your own random suffering. I wanted to write a response making my feelings clear, but I didn't have the guts to do it and was apprehensive about spreading negativity to no useful end.

After stewing and ruminating on this a bit, I reached some realizations about apologists in Japan. While I already knew that Japan very much does not have the market cornered on prejudice and discriminatory behavior, I do believe that it is somewhat rare among developed countries in that there is little or no societal imperative to censor one's bigotry or prejudicial responses to those who are different from oneself. This last thought propelled me along a line of thinking which has been most enlightening and educating. It made me feel that all of the emotional turmoil I experienced over this situation was worthwhile, as something meaningful was gained.

There are a lot of foreigners who are apologists for bad behavior in Japan. I always felt that this was a form of self-loathing, the manifestation of immense insecurity, or intellectual bending over backwards in order to assimilate with the culture (if only in their own minds) because of weak ego integrity or self-identity. The realization I reached was that the desire to rationalize and justify discrimination against one's own ethnic group is something else entirely, at least in some cases.

Those of us who grow up white in countries that are predominately Caucasian grow up with guilt over any feelings of prejudice that we experience. We may find ourselves growing up next to neighbors of a particular ethnic group and be rubbed the wrong way by them until we form a prejudicial stereotype of that ethnic group. Essentially, we experience the concept of familiarity breeding contempt. This prejudice cannot be acted upon because our culture instills in us a strong sense that such feelings are wrong and should not be acted upon, particularly if those feelings are possessed by someone who is from the majority holding most of the power in the culture (in many cases, the Caucasians). That doesn't stop people from having those feelings. It mainly stops them from expressing them or acting on them. I'd be surprised if there were any people in multi-ethnic democratic countries who didn't repress feelings of bigotry at some point in their lives.

Imagine those people coming to Japan where they are now the minority that is the target of unfair prejudging. For some people, this is a situation which they feel is unfair and they rage against it. They apply the empathy that they felt for minorities back home to themselves now. They develop a better understanding of what it is like for an entire group of people to be punished for the behavior of a random few. For others, the response is different. For them, this situation is an opportunity to express their repressed prejudice without appearing outwardly to be bigots. If you advocate discrimination against a group other than your own which is treated unfairly, you're a bigot. If you advocate discrimination against your own group, you get the intellectual satisfaction of flexing all your justifications for being a bigot without appearing to be one. After all, saying your own group should be treated with prejudice doesn't make you a bigot.

I realized that behind every apologist is a repressed bigot. Being a minority which is discriminated against in Japan allows you to advocate discrimination freely and provides a visceral satisfaction for the inner racist to trot out all the arguments she'd like to make for her prejudices without having to deal with any of the guilt or accusations she'd experience if she made those arguments against minorities back home. In the end, I realized that anyone who advocates discrimination against foreign people in Japan isn't acting on any beliefs in regards to prejudice that they didn't already have before coming here.

(If you want to know more about the article and read an intelligent response, you can check out Black Tokyo's reply.) Google Reader recommended this blog to me about 3 weeks ago and it's a real winner.

The Old Year, The New One

I've said before that I don't make New Year's resolutions, and I don't and I didn't. I think change has to be gradual and built up to, not declared and seized by the throat. At least I believe that is the case if you want the changes to actually stick.

Depending on how you look at time, I'm either "only 44" or "already 44", and I've learned from my own life that change, particularly internal personal change, is a long, difficult and slow road. I'm not the person I was when I was 26 or 30, but I'm probably pretty much the same person I was last year. The only question is whether I've inched ahead over the last year or crept back. I'd say that in most ways I've inched ahead.

On a personal level, 2008 was, by and large, a very good year. Nothing spectacularly bad happened and that probably makes us rare compared to a lot of people who had a very bad year, particularly economically-speaking. Nothing spectacularly good happened either, but if I ask myself some important questions about personal growth, I'd say it was certainly an improvement over the previous year. Those questions mainly would be about whether I was spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually richer this year compared to the person I was in previous years, and I believe I can say yes on all three counts. By no means am I perfect, but I think I'm better than before on these points. I ask about these points because I think they're the only ones that can possibly be carried with me after this life has ended, if anything can be carried and if there is anything after this.

On a more concrete note, I will leave you with my very first meme. I have avoided memes in the past, yet I enjoy reading the replies others give in them. I guess it's simply the idea of interviewing myself rather than writing out what I have to say which has made me resist, but I'll say that I'll give that little emotional barrier up this year.

This was most recently pinched from Helen, but I've seen it on many other bloggers sites recently as well. I'd enjoy seeing this on everyone's site if they have the time or inclination to do it:

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
Visit a Japanese shrine on New Year's Day.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't make resolutions.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, and I'm pretty sure they're all happy about that given their respective ages and situations.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?
None. I didn't even leave my neighborhood last year.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
Better health. More free time.

7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
November 4, 2008 - the day Obama was elected.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Managing to cook most everyday rather than ordering take out food or delivery once a week as had become a bad habit of ours.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Being too dependent on my husband for the vast majority of my happiness.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
No.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A new and very cheap PC a month before my old one died.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My husband's. He has the patience of a saint and rock solid emotional stability.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
The press and media, who have seemed to delight in spreading as much gloom and doom as possible and lowered their standards steadily.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent and food.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
The announcement of Diablo 3.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
None, as I don't listen to music.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder
About the same.

ii. thinner or fatter?
About the same. (You can tell a woman created this meme by the presence of this question.)

iii. richer or poorer?
Richer

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Creative work.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Reading the Internet.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I worked and knew I'd be working.

22. Did you fall in love in 2008?
I'm always in love with my husband. This never changes.

23. How many one-night stands?
Now I can tell this was written by a single woman. :-p Not applicable.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1955, which I discovered late this year.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No.

26. What was the best book you read?
Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
None.

28. What did you want and get?
Kindness, compassion, and friendship

29. What did you want and not get?
Better health.

30. What were your favorite films of this year?
No new films really jumped out at me.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I don't remember well, but I think I was just lazy and had my husband do everything.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
A new and healthy body.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
I could care less about fashion (and this is the third sign that this meme was written by a woman).

34. What kept you sane?
My husband, sister, and friend, Shawn.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Oh, please. (Now I wonder if this meme was written by a 15-year-old girl.)

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
I've spent most of my year trying not to get too stirred up politically, but I'd say that the lack of adequate welfare policies to assist the poor, homeless and those suffering job losses in several major developed countries has troubled me on and off all year.

37. Who did you miss?
My former boss, Darryl.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
One of my new students who is fun to discuss a variety of topics with.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
That death comes as a surprise no matter how old you or those around you are. No one leaves this existence happily of their own volition.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
This is tough since I don't listen to music anymore.

Justifiable Conclusions

Several weeks ago one of my students told me that a friend of hers, who is also Japanese and 31 years old, married an American while residing in Texas on what I'd guess is a student visa of some sort. This is certainly not peculiar on the face of things. The odd thing is that the man she married is 24 and still a student, and her friend only works part-time. That means she married a person with no income and she herself has a limited income as a teacher of some sort of musical instrument.

My student did not approve of this arrangement and felt that her friend, well, actually one of her acquaintances from high school, had acted imprudently. I'm sorry to say that I'm just as guilty of judging the people in this situation without knowing much about them. I judge them by their age discrepancy and employment status (or lack thereof). I reach conclusions about her motives based on the circumstances and his intelligence and sophistication based on the fact that he's from Texas and married while still in school.

This post isn't about whether or not my conclusions are reasonable or justifiable, but rather about the fact that I shouldn't be judging them at all. While the circumstances are peculiar and appear ill-advised, I don't know either of these people except a few bare bones facts. Beyond that, their life choices aren't there for me to weigh in on and I'd hate it if someone had done the same thing to me when I chose my partner. Okay, the truth is that other people did do the same thing to me when I chose my partner.

In fact, it's been so long since the CH and I first fell for each other and our relationship so wildly successful that I rarely reflect back on all the warnings and fear for my future that were sent my way back when I fell head over heels for a guy I'd never even met face-to-face or talking to in real time. For those who weren't following my old blog and don't know this tale, the CH and I were penpals who exchanged cassette tapes and talked to each other back in the days before VOIP, instant messaging, or even e-mail. Friends to whom I revealed the situation felt I was making a huge and glaringly obvious mistake, particularly when I went off to Japan to spend a month with this person whose eyes I'd never looked into but to whose voice I'd spent countless hours listening.

Given the surface facts, I'm sure my friends reached what they felt were justifiable conclusions, but they were wrong. They didn't know him at all and perhaps they didn't know me well enough. They certainly didn't know what it was like when we interacted. So, I'm going to wag a finger at myself for judging this couple who I've never met based on a few facts and try to remember that the same was once done to me and everyone's expectations of the worst were wrong then and I'm probably wrong about this couple now.

All I Want For Christmas

When I was a kid, all I wanted for Christmas was toys. A tree with a boatload of wrapped gifts filled me with excitement. When I was a young adult, the shine started to wear off a bit, but I was still pretty happy with getting big ticket "toys" like a stereo or tech gadgets. As I entered my later 20's and 30's, I felt a hunger every year to return to the excitement I used to feel at getting and giving "stuff".

I'm pleased to say that the transition is complete and I don't have a desire to receive things at all anymore. I still have a desire to give, but I'm satisfied to do so in relatively small, but non-perfunctory ways. My choices are based one what I think people might enjoy but can't obtain for themselves easily (or at all), not on impressing with packaging style or price tag guesses.

This year, I did "receive". One of my students gave me pound cake. Another gave me a small bunch of flowers. Another gave me apples, another a giant butter pear, and yet another persimmons. My husband got wine, cookies, and chocolates from his students. My sister gave me much needed articles of clothing. It's nothing big, but it's more than I expected and as much as I could have wanted.

The only thing I really want at this time of year is more time with my husband, and that is what I'm going to get. Starting from tomorrow, he'll have 12 days off and we'll have the luxury of spending most of the day together during that time. I'm still working during some of the holiday, but by and large we'll have a plethora of hours together. Having time with the people you love is really the best gift. Getting over the materialistic part of Christmas helps you appreciate that.

I hope everyone has a really wonderful time with whatever free time they have this Christmas. :-)

The Chicken or the Egg

When I was studying psychology, one of the points we discussed was whether or not biological responses followed psychological reactions or whether the psychological reactions were the result of biology. That is, when you are scared into a "fight or flight" reaction, do you first experience the release of adrenaline and then feel fear, or do you feel fear then the adrenaline is released?

At the time, I recall thinking that it didn't really matter all that much. I also thought that it was an odd question to ask as I was sure that feeling preceded neurochemical release. As I look back on the question, I realize that there may have been a deeper issue to explore. If biology precedes psychological responses, then our emotions and responses are mere slaves to our internal chemical processes. The fact that people often experience mood swings in accord with things like hormones and blood sugar levels definitely supports this idea.

On the other hand, I don't know that we can say we are slaves to our biology. As I sit here typing, I'm slowly being overtaken by post-meal sluggishness. I know my tired feeling is being set off by biology and I wonder to what extent I can reject that response and push my body and mind not to act on this all too common response to having recently eaten. Soldiers have been trained to effectively maintain their core body temperature in freezing water. They can suppress their need to shiver and keep their trunk warm so that they will not experience a slowing of their heart rate so rapidly. If we can "think" our way out of biological response, surely this would encourage the idea that our feelings and mental application are masters of biology rather than the other way around.

I wonder if, in the end, the entire question of which comes first is at its heart a debate over a mindset that reduces man to the sum of his chemistry or one that elevates him to master over his particular biological domain. One viewpoint renders us powerless and the other grants us a great deal of power over ourselves. What is much more interesting to me than which is true is what would motivate a particular person to embrace one theory or another. These days, I'm much more inclined to view us as capable of influencing our biology should we apply ourselves to doing so, particularly when it comes to mastering emotions and responses to stimuli.

Surrendering Control

Yesterday, one of my students showed up with a nasty welt across her right hand. It looked like she had a rather severe accident with a car door or raked her hand across something, but it was actually a long, nasty crescent-shaped burn. When I asked her how it happened, she said it had to do with oden. Oden is various vegetables and fish stuff floating in a boiling hot vat of smelly liquid which is often sold in convenience stores in open vats when it gets cold. I don't like it, but most people (even foreigners) love it.

An oden-related accident is no surprise because the places that sell it have to keep the liquid hot to keep all the airbourne bacteria falling into the open air boiling boxes at bay. I figured she probably tried to snarf it down too rapidly and spilled some on herself. The story was actually a little different.

She told me she safely transported her oden home and planned to eat it later by microwaving it. She also said that her dog, a bulldog, loved oden and that if she ate it while her dog was around, the dog would sit next to her as she ate and drool at her or bark to beg. So, she waited until her dog was asleep and microwaved her oden. Because she was trying to hurry and eat it as fast as possible so the dog wouldn't smell it and wake up and come over to beg, she yanked it out of the microwave and spilled it on her hand and burned herself badly. The dog woke up and she ended up feeding most of it to the dog anyway.

One could be flabbergasted at how a person could surrender control of their life to a dog in this way. I certainly would not try to gobble down a favored dish clandestinely to keep a pet from begging for it nor would I feed most of it to the pet when I failed, but I do think we all allow the expectations, wishes, and actions of others to control us. Sometimes this is a form of loving accomodation which is good for a relationship as surrendering control shows someone you care more about their needs than your own. I'm guessing this is why my student, who I think loves her dog more than her husband, did what she did. Sometimes though, we surrender control out of fear of the consequences if we do not or as a result of our own insecurity when it comes to asserting our needs. I know I've been guilty of both of those.

I told my student that it was a good thing that she didn't have any children. If the behavior of her dog was enough to have her caving in like this, I can only imagine the influence children might have on her.

1965 or 2008?

Awhile ago, the CH started asking his students a question about the world they'd prefer to live in. He asked his students if they would prefer to live in the social environment of 1965, where the roles of men and women were more clearly divided, or if they'd prefer to stick with the social situation of 2008. Unsurprisingly, most of the men chose 1965 and most of the women chose 2008. In 1965, men still operated in the world of lifetime employment while the women were at home supporting them as wives and mothers. It was a time when men were men and women were trapped in the limits society imposed upon them.

Most people feel that the world was a better place in their youth and older people often lament that people were more civilized back when. Personally, I don't have a sense that people were any better when I was younger. I think they're just obnoxious in a different way now compared to the past. I do believe there was a time which predated my birth by a fair amount of time when people were taught more rigid notions of social interaction and "manners" which discouraged them from indulging their emotions every time someone bumped into them or treated them rudely.

Some Americans have balked for quite some time at the idea of rules of manner. The main reason for this is that many such rules evolved as a means of showing deference to status in other cultures and we like to pretend we are all equals. One way to assert your equality is to not treat a person with false respect simply based on perceived status. Personally, I feel this has been a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Good manners are about treating others with the same level of consideration and kindness you'd like to be treated with, not showing that someone is owed some level of deference.

Growing up, I wasn't role-modeled any manners at all. Neither of my parents ever said "please" or "thank you" to me or my sister for anything, though they at times insisted that we do so. In fact, as an adult, I have never once received a word of gratitude for anything I have given or done for my parents. Every year, no matter what Christmas present I sent them, they always complained about it. If I sent coffee, it was the wrong kind. If I bought clothes, they didn't really need them or the style was lacking. If I sent candy, they really didn't want more sweets around. Eventually, I just gave up and relied on my sister's opinion that candy (I send See's) was good because my parents always ate it up and enjoyed it, even while they complained about having received it and never offered a word of gratitude.

Because I so rarely experienced good manners from my parents, and the children around me were cruel and obnoxious (as kids often are), I don't have some idealized sense that the world was a better place way back when. If I could choose between now and an era from the past, I think I'd be pretty indifferent to whatever the cultural landscape was regarding how people treated one another or the conditions we live in. Grudgingly, I'd have to say that we probably are better off now world-wide as a species than we have been for quite some time in terms of material quality of living and the potential to control health, food supply, and energy resources.

While there are a lot of problems with resource management and the environment, our ability to deal with them is much greater than ever before. Yes, people are starving and suffering all over the world in various places, but that was happening at every stage of human history. The difference now is that we are more aware of it than before. It used to be that people died from disease, war and starvation somewhere else on the globe and we had no idea what was going on. Now, we know every detail and have the technology to intervene in at least some cases. So, if I could choose any year or time to live in, I guess I'd choose now, but mainly because I can't find it in myself to idealize the past, no matter how much I'd like to be able to do so.

Cheating

Sometimes I read bulletin boards devoted to the interests of women. One group of such boards is located at iVillage. The topics of greatest interest to me are the ones that deal with relationships. Lately, I've been looking into a topic that the CH and I have discussed between ourselves as well as with students. That topic is "emotional affairs."

For the rare reader (of course, all of my readers are pretty "rare" in that there aren't that many of them) who doesn't know what an emotional affair is, it's when two people are in love, but do not physically consummate their relationship with illicit sexual congress. With the potential to contact strangers from every hemisphere on the globe as well as friends and acquaintances from down the block through Internet-based methods, more people are probably having emotional affairs than ever before.

Most of the time, these relationships consist of people having intense conversations, flirtatious text exchanges, and sharing deep levels of emotional intimacy. Often, the depth of relationship is measured by information shared with the "other man/woman" that cannot be shared with one's spouse. The "other" extracts satisfaction from knowing they are chosen to share in secrets to which the spouse is denied access as well as the recipient of compliments and appealing innuendo.

On the message boards, people will ask if what they are doing is cheating because it is not physical or they ask if they are justified in their actions because their spouse is failing to fulfill a need. The latter is often the rationale for actual physical affairs. That is, if a person fails to meet the sexual needs of his or her partner, the deprived spouse justifies an affair by citing that failure as the motive for cheating.

My views of relationships in terms of how other people conduct them are pretty broad. My feeling is that all commitments have to be defined by those who are taking part in them. If people want to have "open marriages" where they are free to engage in sexual behavior with others, that's fine as long as they both freely embrace the idea and all latitudes are applied equally. I would say the same applies to emotional affairs or whatever else people want to do.

The only thing I think is out of bounds in any relationship, is hiding a relationship of any kind with a third party from your partner. If you hide it, then you are doing so because you know that you're operating outside of the concept of your commitment to the relationship that the two of you decided upon or that you both generally feel is the norm for your culture. One of the reasons why I have no problems with my husband's friendships with other women, including an ex-girlfriend whom he was once deeply in love with, is that no aspect is ever hidden from me. Of course, I also trust him completely, but that trust is confirmed and upheld by the transparency with which he conducts other relationships.

I believe cheating is the ultimate act of selfishness and cowardice. In all but a very few rare cases, people cheat in order to keep their cake nice and safe which having a snack on the side. If you're unhappy in your relationship, you have three choices. One is that you work on the aspects of your relationship that make you unhappy. Two is that you formally break up or divorce. Three is that you recognize the shortcomings of your relationship in meeting your needs and be upfront with your spouse about your need to go outside your shared concept of your commitment to one another and seek satisfaction. The third option is rarely exercised, but I believe that if you feel you have to grant yourself the latitude to have an affair (emotional or otherwise) to satisfy yourself, then you have to offer your spouse that same possible avenue of satisfaction. The main reason people don't pursue these options and decide to have secret affairs is that they're trying to selfishly have everything for themselves - faithful, supportive spouse and torrid affair with the other man/woman.

While I accept any sort of open relationship among other people, I couldn't accept such a thing myself because that isn't the sort of concept the CH and I share. We're both of the mind that mind, body, and soul are shared to the extent possible between us. However, our deep devotion and commitment to sharing as much as possible has been the driving force behind my being open-minded about how other people conduct their relationships. I realize that the intensity of our bond is unusual and odd compared to most people's relationships. In fact, I've been made aware on multiple occasions that our devotion is pretty freakishly intense. If we can be unconventional, then I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say it was okay for other people have whatever arrangements suit them. However, I don't think many relationships are served favorably by deception, double standards, or lying.

Faith

Most people think of faith as something you have in a deity. However, faith applies to all areas of our lives. One can have faith in other people, in the future, nature or in technology. We can even have faith in our routines and the routines of others who interact with us in our daily lives. More often than not, we don't even think about our faith in such things as long as it isn't shattered by some event. The lack of faith in many of the aforementioned things, incidentally, results in cynicism.

For a person who has grown up under far less than optimal circumstances (i.e., me), sometimes it's very difficult to have faith in anything. Lately, I've been trying to build faith in some things in order to calm my all too frequent fears about the future. One of the things I want to have faith in is the idea that my financial life is going to be fine. When you grow up poor, it's easy to fear financial ruin, especially when your parents were constantly living at the brink of ruin and made no effort to hide their anxiety about money when you were too young to rationalize that anxiety and could only internalize it on a pure emotional level.

Since the nature of my work situation is unpredictable, I have to actively work at keeping my faith in financial security alive. I try to boost this idea with an underlying faith in two other things. One is that karma will eventually repay me for the kindness and generosity that I extend to others. The other, much greater faith I'm trying to nurture is in the idea that there is "enough" work, money, opportunity, etc. for everyone and that, if one does not try and grab more than one's necessary share of such things, these things will naturally flow one's way. I try to see jobs as a river that sometimes flows hard and strong my way and sometimes weak and slow, but I want to have faith that there will never be less than I need. However, I also have to be careful not to confuse what I "need" with what I "want".

Recently, I referred someone to my former company who I knew without a shred of doubt would be good at the job. Before making this referral, I had the nagging idea that doing so might end up resulting in my getting less freelance work because I had benefited in the past from the fact that my successors had been troublesome employees. However, the person I was referring deserved the security and my former boss deserved to work with someone who I knew would be a delight to work with. Initially, it looked as if setting aside my fears and doing "the right thing" was also going to end up rewarding me as I was told I'd be asked to do a lot more work than usual. In fact, one of the Japanese staff members and my former boss came by my apartment and this appeal was made in person.

Over the last several days, changes to the plan have been made due to the ambitions of a particular Japanese staff member. Most, if not all, of the work that seemed to be on the horizon is evaporating rapidly and it is somewhat depressing. To cope with this (very likely) letdown, I've been trying to convince myself that I may have merely wanted this work rather than needed it and that things are coming together as they are to make sure more important needs than mine are being met. That is, possibly the new staff that were hired needed the jobs they're getting more than I needed the extra income. Still, my faith that good acts go rewarded and in the ebb and flow of that river of opportunity have been rattled a bit. However, I was incapable of making any other choice. My values would not allow me to protect my own interests at the expense of another and I still have faith that those who do so ultimately do not prosper.

Sometimes I wonder if my attitude about taking as much as I need rather than as much as I want and making the choices which are "right" rather than selfish is what separates me from people who society views as truly successful. That is, if I were the type of person who protected my own interests first and foremost, I might have been wealthier and/or risen to a higher position in my work. I'm sure that one element of ambition, besides a need for status and the approval of others, is a certain drive which compels you to get as much as you can, even when it is far more than you actually need.

The CH has often said that we should live our lives bearing in mind what the world would be like if everyone lived the way that we do. If everyone grabbed as much work as possible so they could be a little more financially comfortable and others had less opportunity than they needed because of that person's desire, then the world would be an imbalanced place. Of course, this applies to all thing from material possessions to food to energy to work. When we take what we need rather than what we want, we leave more for others to take what they need as well. If everyone lived that way, I'm sure the world would be a better place. I have pretty solid faith in that idea.

The Divorce Calculator

Via Digg (I know, I shouldn't be looking at Digg), I came across a link to a divorce calculator. The calculator uses census data to determine the likelihood that people who share the same background, characteristics and history as you will divorce. I guess the idea is to shake people out of the lala-land mindset they tend to have when they marry. After all, no one ever marries thinking that divorce is likely... at least they don't if they're sane.

While I'm sure people will say everyone feels they are an exception, I'm certain I will never divorce. The CH and I are just too compatible and into each other to ever part. Hell, I hate it when he has to leave the house for work and we're apart for hours. I'm not even very happy with the fact that he has to leave the room to go to the bathroom sometimes. ;-) I'm probably the only person in Japan who feels one of the "up" sides to living in a tiny apartment is that I can see and talk to my husband almost all the time when he's home because neither of us has any privacy.

At any rate, the interesting thing about these calculators isn't so much that they tell you the chance that you will divorce, but rather how changing a few variables effects the outcome. The stats that are used are:

1. gender (Female)
   
2. whether or not you have children (if you are female) (No)
   
3. the year you married (1989)
   
4. your education (university graduate)
   
5. your age when you married (24)
   
6. how long you've been married (19 years)

For a person in my situation, the chances of divorce are 32%. However, if you answer "yes" to the children question but leave all of the other stats the same, the chance of divorce drops to 23%. This would seem to point to the idea that women would divorce more often if they didn't have kids. If I leave all the stats the same as my original information, but lower the educational level to "high school graduate", the chances increase to 39%. The biggest difference though comes if I, again leaving all the stats the same, lower the age of marriage to 22 or younger. If I do that, the chances shoot up to 66%

I did truthful stats for my husband and it said his chances are 22%. I'm guessing this is mainly because he's 2 years older than I and the older one marries, the less likely it seems one might divorce. When I increased the age (for a male with his stats) to marriage after 33, the chances of divorce dropped to 12%.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn't met the CH. I'm guessing there's a decent chance I might have ended up divorced since that seems to be what has happened to about 1/3 of women in my shoes. There are two things of which I'm absolutely certain that can be said about my life if I hadn't met my husband. One is that I never would have ended up living in Japan. The other is that I never would have known such happiness with someone else. Of course, fact 1 has had no effect on fact 2, but both are the direct result of having met the CH.

Sustainability

A few weeks ago, I took one of those on-line "sustainability quizzes". If you've never taken one, it's a series of questions which asks you about your lifestyle and then tells you how many planets it'd take to sustain your life if everyone lived at your level. The idea behind such quizzes is to encourage people to live lower on the hog in order to improve the environment.

This is the second such quiz I have taken and it always turns out that it'd take between 2-3 earths to sustain my lifestyle. Both times, this shocked me because I do not live high on the aforementioned hog. In fact, this year, I was considering my wardrobe and pushing myself to tough out the mild winter with no heavy sweater, no coat, and only 3 long-sleeved shirts. I didn't want to buy new stuff if I could get by with layering what I still have because I didn't want to waste money or resources if it wasn't absolutely necessary.

To be honest, hearing that it'd take 2.8 planets to sustain my lifestyle made me angry. I live in a very small place which uses little energy to heat, cool, and light. In fact, I daresay that few people in developed cultures live in less square foot per person in the household than my husband and I do. I don't shop as recreation, I conserve water and energy, I cook most of my own food from basic ingredients, and I recycle everything possible. I can't compost, but the city does that for Tokyo residents anyway.

After taking the second quiz, I wondered what it is that I'd have to do to require only one planet for my relatively modest and unwasteful lifestyle. Is my coffee, dairy, and chicken consumption really that destructive such that it requires 1.8 more planets than this one to support? I discussed this with the CH and he said that the problem isn't that we are wasteful, but it's rather a matter of math. If everyone on this planet lived as we did, it wouldn't be sustainable. In other words, past a certain point, it's about the number of people, not the position one lives on the hog. If the population keeps ballooning, pretty soon the only way that we'll be able to meet our needs with only one planet will be if we all live in dirt huts, eat rice and beans, and share the same book with our entire community. The resources are finite (or shrinking), but the population just keeps growing so everyone's sliver of the pie keeps getting narrower and narrower. We all have to use less and less as the division keeps whittling down each person's share to an ever smaller amount.

Several months ago, I was reading a blog where a woman wrote a piece about "breeders". She was essentially asking if it was irresponsible for people to have a lot of kids in this day and age and she got a lot of comments from mothers who, of course, said they felt that it was not a concern. One of them said that she had six kids and felt that, if she didn't have a lot of kids who would put a strain on resources and therefore more resources would be available for the rest of the planet, everyone else just would consume more. This sort of attitude seems based in naivete, or willful ignorance, of the seriousness of the problems at hand.

It's pretty clear that it's reached the point where everyone is facing a serious degradation in lifestyle if the entire population does not begin contracting soon. It's not a matter of lowering lifestyles or living with less, but a matter of everyone (and I mean every single person) adopting a standard of living that many would find unacceptable and/or some people dying because there's not enough to go around and they drew the short end of the stick resources-wise. By U.S. standards, much of my current lifestyle is already unacceptable - no car, hanging laundry out to dry, no central air, limited water use, very small living space - and it'd require 2.8 planets for everyone to live at my relatively modest level.

The situation seems pretty hopeless to me because the solution clearly is going to be for no couple to have more than 2 kids for the foreseeable future, and that's not a factor I personally can do anything about. No matter how much I freeze because I question the absolute necessity of new clothes or how much time I spend showering by turning the water off and on to conserve resources or how many winters I shiver through or summers I sweat through, it's not going to be enough. About the greatest thing I can and have done for the planet is to remain childless.

So, I'm buying a sweater and some new clothes. I'm done actively suffering for the planet and debating every purchase as if I were personally responsible for every tree that is cut down and every strip mine that is dug. Though I'm still going to do the best I can not to be wasteful, I see no point in putting myself through any real hardship for a problem to which I'm powerless to control the main contributor.

Yes, I'm Happy

I know that people are sick to death of the American election so I won't go on about it. I'm happy with the results, but cautious about my expectations. What happens from now depends on how the American people respond to future proposed changes. Since the end of World War II, Americans have been reluctant to buckle down and do without and I have to imagine that there's going to have to be a lot of that in the future if things are to get better. The pendulum is swinging back to the left after lingering for what felt like an eternity on the right.

The thing that resonates most with me today is that:

• 146 years ago, slavery ended
• 44 years ago, Jim Crow laws which mandated "separate but equal" ended
• 41 years ago, anti-miscegenation laws ended
• Today, a man who was born of a union between an African man and a Caucasian woman was elected president of the United States by a sizable margin.

The next time someone responds to the topic of Japanese racism with claims of how the U.S. has problems, too, I'm going to send them a psychic punch in the teeth. Yeah, there are still problems in America, but clearly they can't be that bad.

Honestly, I got teary thinking of the progress in thought processes that have been made to obtain the result of today's election. Most Americans may still see color, but clearly, it doesn't matter that much to them in estimating a person's value, intellect, or ability.

Reality is just a concept

Recently, I've been reading a book called "Walking Through Walls" by Philip Smith. Like the book I previously mentioned by Adam Nimoy, this book is another memoir from a son about his father. The difference is that this book is well-written, compelling, and detailed. In both books, it is clear either covertly or overtly that the sons are daunted by their father's success. However, Philip Smith's father was not a famous actor. He was an interior designer. He was also a psychic and capable of healing people by touch. This is not something the younger Smith was entirely pleased about when he was growing up and the book is written from his perspective of having had such a freak as a father.

I've read a large smattering of books about people who discuss metaphysical issues including past life remembrance, channeling, and the nature of existence. If you've read any of my past prattling on this topic, you may conclude that I eat this stuff up like sweet, sweet candy. That would be a reasonable, but incorrect, conclusion. The truth is that I approach each and every book (not that there have been more than what can be counted on my fingers) and concept with skepticism. In fact, I cannot even say at this very moment that I have a solid belief that any of what I read is true. That being said, I also do not have a solid belief that it is false.

I've pondered the motives behind writing some of the books which have had a great influence on me. The first of such books was Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss. Weiss is a psychiatrist with a strong medical background who initially approached the larger questions in life from the same hard-edged view as many with lives deeply steeped in science until he encountered a patient, a nurse, who seemed to remember her past lives under hypnosis and was able to tell him things no one should have known about an infant son who had died.

While reading his books and others like it, I always find myself asking the same questions. They are:

• Are these books lies and fabrications to gain notoriety and money? Do the writers really gain more from the books relative to the professional losses incurred by putting forth such views?

In the case of some of the books, the answer about the loss is that there is far more risk to their careers in printing the books than not doing so. For Dr. Weiss, who was (and may still be) a successful mental health practitioner, writing such books could have ended his career and made him a laughing stock. The same could be said of Philip Smith, though as a former editor of GQ and an artist, the risk would be far less. For others, who seemingly built careers around their books rather than adding writing them to their activities, the answer would seem to be that they mainly have potential personal costs rather than professional ones.

• Are the writers of these books delusional? Warped? Mentally ill? Are they really experiencing what they think they are seeing or are they hallucinating?

As someone who studied psychology and experienced the absolutely firm belief in distorted perceptions of reality of mentally unstable people firsthand, this is a serious question. The answer is that it is absolutely possible that people who channel or commune with spirits in any fashion are essentially hearing and responding to voices. Some of those voices would undoubtedly be brilliant and offer incredibly intricate and unusual perspectives, but that doesn't mean they aren't a manifestation of a controlled psychosis.

In some cases though, there would have to be collusion in order to validate some of the statements that have been made. For instance, in one of the Seth books, Jane Roberts, her husband Robert Butts, and another witness claim that the entity they call Seth made her fingers grow longer and fatter in front of them to prove his existence and ability to manipulate reality. This "parlor trick" was done to prove to them that he was not a delusion of Jane's, but an external force communicating through her. Obviously, either Mr. Butts and the other witness would have to lie in support of Jane's delusions, or they actually believed to have seen a change in her hands because of a form of contagious belief, hypnotism, or shared psychosis.

• Are the writers of such books bending facts to conform to their mindset? Is there anything objective proving what they have stated?

This is another definite possibility, though it mainly applies to writers like Dr. Weiss who, for the most part, report the actions and statements of others. We all bend events and statements at times to give our perspective a little more credibility. If you want to believe something badly enough, evidence is everywhere.

That being said, it's important to bear in mind that many of the less pie-in-the-sky writers of these types of books are just as skeptical as non-believers. They need validation as much as those who have never had their experiences. The best example of someone who tried as hard as possible to objectively verify her experiences was Jenny Cockell. She sought out children of a past life and talked to them about her memories. She didn't do this to prove to everyone else that her beliefs were credible. She did it to convince herself.

• Am I being persuaded by rational-sounding voices because I want to believe what they're saying?

Of course. If anyone answers this question in the negative, they're deluding themselves. No one is capable of being utterly objective. Even science is subjective by seeking to interpret data as is most desired and by choosing to measure only that which supports the proposed theory. If science were a perfect, objective system, scientists wouldn't disagree with one another.

In the end, it's difficult to know for sure what is true when it comes to the metaphysical claims unless you personally experience something profound. Even then though, you can't know for sure that you're not the one having some sort of hallucination, losing touch with reality, or just had one bizarre moment when your mind told you something that didn't really happen. Mother Theresa rather famously had a religious experience early in her life which motivated her to become a nun then never had such an experience again. She mentioned later in life that she was frustrated and sometimes disillusioned that she had never been reassured in such a fashion again about the path she'd taken in life. I'm sure she reached a point where she doubted that the original experience was real at all. She admitted her faith wavered because the experience did not repeat itself.

I'm not quite cynical enough to believe that there are so many people out there who are calculating enough to swindle people with their stories, though I am cynical enough to believe it happens sometimes. In the case of Philip Smith, I do believe he's telling the truth about his father and what he recalls of his life with him. I can't say that the truth he recalls was the reality that occurred, but I don't think he's making it all up. I also have to believe that, given how many people his father helped, it would be very easy for one of them to come forth and call the son a liar if he made so much up.

Everyone lives a different reality and I think you can't experience something if you don't want to or if you rule it out as a possibility. Your perspective defines your world as much as your world shapes your beliefs. You accept what fits your worldview and reject what doesn't. I believe the writers of some of the books I've read about the nature of existence happen to believe things many people do not and that's OK with me. It doesn't make them liars, and it doesn't make the people who doubt them correct.

I've come to learn, thanks to a random article on the front page of Wikipedia about a half year ago, that the way in which I approach such issues is in line with one of the things Jainists believe. While I don't believe their dogma, I do share the belief that truth is dependent upon your point of view. I also embrace the idea that we're all a little wrong, but leave open the idea that we're all a little right.