Angry Rant is Angry

There are 212 posts on this blog (and 218 in my other snack reviews blog). I can say with confidence that there are no angry posts on the snack blog since food, unless it is being hucked at my face by an angry mob, doesn't really angry up my blood. On this blog, any time I complain with a bit of fire in the blood, I tag the post as "whining". There are three such posts tagged on this blog and even those three are more like a very low simmer on the blood boiling scale.

The "There's no rule, but..." post garnered a bit of attention, and one of the commenters labeled me as "angry" because of it. The truth is that I'm not an angry person, but I'm also not a robot that drifts through the day providing programmed responses to stimuli without any sort of emotional response. When dumb things happen, or when I've had an especially hard time of it and something unpredictable and frustrating happens, I get mad, and I may drift into hyperbole or fail to express myself in an optimal fashion. This doesn't make me an angry person. This makes me human.

The truth is that I used to be pretty angry because my life has generally been a hard one and I live with pain on a daily basis (which is an emotional burden you can't imagine until you've lived with it day-in and day-out), but I've labored long and hard to control my temper and to mellow with age. And, honestly, I've done very well as my husband can attest to. For me, letting loose and actually having a proper rant is a rare and brief period of letting myself go in the interest of blood pressure control and free expression. The absurdity of someone reading that one post and reaching the conclusion that I'm angry, hate Japan and should leave should be apparent to anyone. They can more reasonably decide if I'm an angry person after they've read all 211 other posts on this blog and the more than 500 posts on my former blog. Even then, the picture of my character wouldn't be a true one, but it'd be a lot closer than judging me on one post.

The truth is that most people don't blog about indifferent experiences unless they are doing a diary-style blog, something which is rarer these days because of other outlets like FaceBook and Twitter which afford people with a chance to note experiences in their daily lives as they occur. Most people blog about something they have some sort of emotional reaction to whether it be happiness, anger, or curiosity. Mostly, I blog about curious experiences because that's what I think about most of the time. I'm actually happier far, far more often than I'm angry (by a country mile), but I'm pretty sure no one wants to hear about how the angels sing, the sun shines beautifully, and life is a wondrous cloud of love every time my husband comes home from work and once again shines the light of his soul directly onto mine (this happens on a daily basis, folks, I'm utterly smitten as my long-suffering sister can attest to). Hey, but if there is a demand, I'll start posting about that.

I also have a lot of gratifying conversations with my Japanese students on an almost daily basis, but I can only share snippets with people on occasion due to time constraints and a concern for protecting the privacy of the students. Also, honestly, how interesting would it be if I posted, "had a nice chat with a lovely student today" five times a week every week. Let me just say it now and then everyone can assume that is the case unless I say otherwise.

So, for the record, angry rants are angry. That's kind of the point of them. They don't define me, but if you choose to believe they do, then perhaps you shouldn't be reading this blog because I'm not going to pull any punches in responding to any commenter who judges me based on such limited contact with me.

Not Getting On Each Other's Nerves

A few weeks ago, one of my students told me that she had a fight with her husband and went off on an extended bike ride to cool off. I asked her what the argument was about and she described a situation to which I could very much relate. She said she wanted to talk about something she was interested in with her husband after he came home from work, but he was tired and not in the mood. She persisted and he got angry, then she got angry.

Like me, this particular student works freelance from home, though unlike me, she actually makes a full-time living from it. Her husband, like mine, works outside the home and puts in some pretty long hours. One of the things you find occurring when you're home all day and your partner is out working in a box somewhere is that he comes home overstimulated and tired, wanting nothing more than to zone out and be left alone while you want to talk about whatever has been floating around in your head all day. There's a big difference in your energy levels and how much stimulation your nervous system has had or needs.

When I first quit my full-time job (about 3 years ago now) and had no or few private students each day, this was a bigger issue because I was sitting at home most of the day and only talked to my sister or my friends very early in the day (due to time zone differences) and spent the rest of the day in relative isolation. When the CH got home, I was ready to pounce on him with a conversation and he was in desperate need of a decompression session. He spends all day talking to people so this is no small surprise, and spends the half hour before he gets to our door on a crowded train or station being bombarded with noise and buffeted around by other people who don't look where they're going and expect you to move to accommodate them.

In short order, we worked out a system whereby he came home and I left him in peace for about 15-30 minutes until he was ready to talk. Generally, I just wait until he starts talking to me of his own initiative. I imagine that this arrangement would not have been worked out so quickly if we hadn't been married for so long or didn't have experience identifying and working out solutions to such things. It also helps that we're both confident about our feelings for each other and don't take the need for a certain arrangement which excludes the other personally. Of course, the exclusion isn't a physical one. I don't have to leave the room or anything. I just have to leave him to recover from the stress of the day and the commute for a short time before engaging him in conversation.

I wonder at times if this may be a bigger problem for couples in Japan than those back home because having a larger house makes it easier to find a place to "escape" to areas where conversation can be avoided without necessarily making it clear why you're doing so. In fact, I wonder if people may develop patterns to adjust to their need for isolation without even being aware of why they're doing it in a larger home. In our apartment, the only rooms sufficiently isolated from one another that one can't hear a conversation or be spoken to are the bedroom and the bathroom.

Since I now have more students and freelance work compared to when I first quit, this is far less of an issue than before. I spend several hours talking to people so I don't really need to pounce when the CH gets home. However, one thing I take away from this experience (and my student's situation simply reminded me of this) is that there's usually an easy fix for the problems that arise from people living together if both parties communicate and surrender their neuroses and willfulness and just address the issue at hand.

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.

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.

Rote Memorization and Literacy

I'm not sure if studying psychology gives one an interest in understanding the underlying causes of things or vice versa, but one thing about my time in Japan is that it has offered me the opportunity to find new human behavioral puzzles to ponder. For instance, why don't the Japanese wear shoes in their homes? The Japanese like to conclude that they're such wonderfully clean people by nature. As someone who grew up in a multi-cultural society that embraces nurture over nature, that's an explanation I reject. Japanese people may be clean because they grew up in a culture which embraces cleanliness at a deeper level, but it's no because it is encoded in their genes. The best guess is that it has to do with the fact that they have eaten, slept, and sat on the floor during their history and what is on the floor is of paramount concern. If they'd have developed furniture which had legs, they might be wearing shoes inside as well.

Before anyone protests that they are Westerners and also do not wear shoes inside, let me say that this isn't about wearing shoes in the house (and keep in mind that the usual temperature of one's area has a huge impact on this point as well). That's actually a topic I addressed in my previous blog. It's simply an example of a cultural difference which is interesting to reflect on past the self-important or self-deprecating conclusions that are usually offered as explanations for behavioral differences.

Recently, my husband and I have been listening to psychology lectures (for university classes) and one point the lecturer made was that memory is influenced by literacy rates and the availability of reference materials and the perception of intelligence was related to the ability to memorize. In the middle ages, for instance, people with excellent memories were seen being important and very bright because few people could read and write and books were in scarce supply. The lecturer also noted that, because of ready access to information via the Internet and modern publishing techniques, we no longer see the ability to remember facts, quotes, passages, etc. as a reflection of intelligence. If we can access the information at any time, then memorizing it is a waste of mental energy. We have come to value what we can do with the information more than retaining it perfectly.

Anyone who has taken a few moments to look at the Japanese education system knows that one of the biggest features is an emphasis on rote memorization. Teachers want nothing more than for students to commit facts to memory and spit them back out when tested. There is a rigidity to Japanese thinking as a result of this which makes teaching languages cumbersome. Japanese people are conditioned by their education system to endorse the idea that their is one right answer to each question. I've actually had students insist grammatically incorrect sentences must be right because they followed some pattern the student learned which a teacher said was the "right way". Japanese learners are most comfortable when everything follows the rules, expectations are clearly understood, and there is a correct reply that they can offer which you have given them previously.

The converse of this is that students often become uncomfortable in situations where the answer was not clearly given, but is hidden in the overall content or must be derived logically from the given information. Time and again, I've had students insist the answer simply was not there because it was not overtly stated. They don't naturally make inferences because that is not something they spent a lot of time doing in school and aren't accustomed to doing it. That doesn't mean they are incapable mentally, but rather that they were simply not taught to do so and, in fact, they may be punished in school for doing so in some cases since they are taught not to question the teacher's answers or assertions.

(Note: I speak about general tendencies here and not about specific people. Clearly, there are exceptions and people are located along a continuum in their tendencies, so please don't pepper my comments with anecdotes that "prove" I must be wrong. I reach these conclusions based on having dealt with teaching and working here for two decades and also having been coerced to structure information in textbooks I wrote to cater to the most comfortable way of learning for Japanese people rather than the most effective way for speaking English well.)

I never really thought much about the value placed on fact regurgitation in Japan except that I felt it had to do with status, authority figures, possibly linguistic patterns, and Japan's political history. Yesterday though, the point in the lecture about the value of memory and literacy rang a new bell in considering this issue. Becoming literate in Japanese is a fairly daunting task with 2 phonetic alphabets of over 50 characters and thousands of logographic characters. Literacy itself is only achieved through a daunting amount of memorization and it takes about 4 years more for a Japanese child to reach the same level of reading that a Western child, who only has to deal with 26 characters, to memorize.

I started to wonder if another part of the high premium placed on memorization is the time, complexity, and difficulty the Japanese must face when becoming literate. If the perception of intelligence, the ability to memorize and literacy rates are related, then a culture where one has greater difficulty mastering the written language would certainly place a premium on memorization. While Japan currently has one of the highest literacy rates (if not the highest) in the world, that wasn't always so and this is a culture where changes in priorities come at a glacially slow pace. Even if the value of memorization when weighed against the value of a more analytical or deductive way of learning has diminished, there is likely a cultural precedent which will keep the focus on rote memorization in place.

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 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.

Misplaced Anger

Several days ago, one of my students related a story to me which had a familiar sense to it. Though she's Japanese, her experience transcended cultural boundaries and emphasized for me how some human responses are a common part of our psychology.

She told me that she had had a car accident where her car had been side-swiped by another car. The accident was entirely the fault of the other driver and he admitted it. On that day and at that time, she hadn't planned on being out driving some place. She told me she had a sense that something might happen if she did so, but also she had other plans for her time which included studying English. The reason she was driving was that her husband had an appointment and insisted that she drive him to it. She wanted him to take a cab because the appointment was a professional one and he could write it off anyway, but he complained about the timing and how a cab may not pick him up in time to get him to the appointment on time.

When the accident occurred, my student was upset by what happened, but she was angry at her husband, not the man who hit her car. She blamed him for the accident because he pushed her to drive him. While it is certainly true that she wouldn't have had the accident if she hadn't been driving, it's not as if her husband was responsible for what happened, nor could he have reasonably expected such a thing might occur. What she was really angry about, and the accident provided her with an opportunity to focus and express that anger, was that her husband had pressured her to do something she didn't want to do. She felt she couldn't reasonably refuse his request or complain about it so she didn't show her frustration with him until the accident provided a better excuse to be mad.

This pattern is one I'm acquainted with mainly as a victim and also as the "abuser", but far less as the latter than the former. My mother was the queen of misplaced and displaced anger. Any time she grew frustrated or angry with one thing in her life, she picked a convenient target and let loose with verbal abuse. If she was late, it wasn't because she had misplaced her purse and wasted time finding it, but because she had to "waste" time rounding up us kids and getting us in the car. Never mind that we were ready to go before her and sitting around waiting for her to locate her carelessly placed handbag and eventually wandered back to our rooms to play with something while we waited for her to be ready. As the years went by, my mother's logical connections for misplaced anger became increasingly far removed and ridiculous, but the pattern of always finding a way to blame someone else when she was frustrated by the normal and unpredictable ebb and flow of daily life remained firmly in place.

When the CH and I first got married, I'm sure I did a similar thing where I blamed him because he made a choice, recommendation, or asserted his preference and I followed his lead and something bad happened. I don't recall any specific instances of doing so, but given the nature of these things, it would be no surprise if it happened on multiple occasions. Some time in the first five to ten years or so of marriage, either with his feedback or on my own, I realized how wrong this was and made a conscious effort to feel my anger and frustration and even express them in various ways, but not to use the CH as a target. At the very least, if I'm going to be upset, I'm going to be upset for the "right" reasons and not blame him for an unpredictable consequence. Of course, it helps that the CH does not force his choices upon me or attempt to coerce me into doing things I don't want to do.

I consider it quite the blessing that I no longer am the frequent victim of misplaced anger now that I live away from my family. The CH, and this is one of the many reasons I praise him so highly all of the time, is not prone to anger, let alone getting angry with me for something which isn't my fault. In fact, it is so rare that he shows anything approaching actual anger that it's always a great shock to me when I see such a look on his face. I'm sure that his calm nature has paved the way for me doing a much better job of controlling my anger and becoming angry less often and I'm immensely grateful.

When I consider my upbringing and my married life, I'm profoundly struck by how the people you live with and who interact with you on a regular basis can bring out the worst or the best in you through their behaviors. My mother role modeled a lot of bad behavior for me which I brought to my marriage. Fortunately, the combination of my husband's behavior and my insight and self-reflection allowed me to overcome that and grow in a better direction.

A Better Me

Sometimes I sit in lessons and think about nothing but the clock. I struggle not to dart my eyes over at it every 3 minutes to see how much time has passed and I hate it for showing that the last "10 minutes" was actually only 5. After a few stolen glimpses, I start to wonder if the student's know when I'm looking (I think they do) and I feel bad about the fact that I may be sending them the message that they're boring or I don't enjoy the time with them.

The truth is that sometimes they are boring and sometimes I don't enjoy the time with them, but it has nothing to do with the students. It has everything to do with what happens to be going on inside of me. There are times when I just don't feel like teaching or talking. There are also occasions when I don't feel especially well, am tired, or have to pee and just want the lesson over with so I can go lie down, veg out, or empty my increasingly weak and shrinking bladder. And frankly, controlling a conversation by asking all the questions, keeping it rolling, and focusing mainly on what the student wants is something I don't always look forward to. On the occasions when I'm not in the mood, I sit around hoping that the students will be appreciably late or suddenly have to cancel the lesson (because then I get paid for doing nothing).

When I feel like this, I have to push very hard to be what I call "the better me." That's the me that has to keep repeating that the person I'd like to be wouldn't want the students to lose their money without getting anything back for it because of an unfortunate situation which causes them to have to cancel. That's the me which issues reminders that I'm being paid to do everything I'm struggling to do and that all adults have to do their job whether they enjoy it or not because the whole point behind "work" is that it's something you'd generally prefer not to do with your free time. After all, if people loved such things, they probably wouldn't need to be bribed to do them with a salary. The real imperfect, flawed me feels guilty for watching the clock and wishing the hour would just end when I'm being paid to sit there, teach, and talk to nice people while others are doing back-breaking labor or repetitive work for half my wages or less.

One thing I realized a long time ago is that the road between the personality I want to have and the one I really have isn't as long a one as I might think. If I work consistently at taking the necessary baby steps to get from who I am to who I want to be, the change will happen slowly but surely. It's all about mental impulse control. The hardest part is getting started and working yourself into a pattern where you don't allow the impulses to have free reign over your emotions or personality. For instance, when you want to become a more patient person, silently fuming at the old lady who takes 5 minutes to pay for her purchases by only opening her purse after the transaction is complete and then digging around for change for an eternity isn't going to contribute to making you more patient.

It's the little experiences which are where you start laying the foundation for becoming a better you. If you keep at it, one of these days, you'll find that you aren't fighting the impulses as often or as hard, and one day in the distant future, the impulses won't be there at all.

Extrapolation

The weekend before last, the agency that refers students to me called and asked if I'd accept a 13-year old girl as a student. The girl had lived in the U.S. for awhile and (they're guessing) has relatively advanced English ability. The agency hadn't had any direct communication with the girl herself. They negotiated through her mother so they couldn't tell me much about her. They speculated that she was probably studying so that she could maintain the level of fluency she acquired while living in the U.S.

After about a week, the agency said that they'd confirmed a trial lesson with the girl and gave me her mother's name, e-mail address and phone number. They didn't, however, tell me the girl's first name so I asked them what it was. It's at this point that things get a bit strange. They told me that the mother wouldn't tell them the girl's name because she was too "cautious".

The trial lesson is scheduled for this afternoon and I'm not sure what to expect when the girl is supposed to show up at my front door. I have a suspicion that the mother will show up with her and may even ask to sit in with the lesson. If I were teaching in a classroom where the mother could unobtrusively observe from the back of a large room, I wouldn't care about this, but that isn't the case. I teach in a 9' x 9' room which is closed off from other rooms to air condition it more efficiently. There is no "unobtrusive" way for anyone to observe.

Of course, I could be wrong about the mother horning in. I have quite the tendency to panic and extrapolate the worst in any given situation. I'm one of those people who thinks I'm going to prick a finger, get an infection, be given drugs that damage my other limbs and end up a quadruple amputee. It's a tendency I've been endeavoring to reign in for years now with some success. In odd or very uncertain situations, however, I tend to gravitate back to this type of self-defeating tendency.

I know these situations are supposed to be growth experiences and I try to see them in that light, but sometimes it's difficult. In 98% of situations where I play out the worst outcome in my imagination, things turn out to be just fine. In one particular case in my past though, it was as bad as the worst I imagined and I think that still haunts me. That was a situation which I talked about in my former blog where I feared refusing to work on my day off might get me fired, and it very nearly did.

Ultimately, this tendency is part of a defense mechanism which I'm sure I developed as a child growing up in a family with a lot of emotional instability from a depressed and neurotic mother and an alcoholic father. If you can predict the worst possible outcome at the beginning of a situation, you can defend or protect yourself. Though such behavior served me well as a kid in a family with problems, it no longer serves me in most cases and tends to cloud my judgment. It's like an old battered shield that I still raise in times of uncertainty even though I no longer live in the heat of a battle.

Griefers

When we were kids, one of the tests of our concentration and dexterity was to simultaneously pat our heads and rub our stomachs in a circular motion. I'm not quite sure of what is involved in accomplishing this feat, but most people can do it (for awhile, at least) though there was always a kid who couldn't manage it in a group that gave it a try. Given that most kids couldn't keep it up for long, I imagine it's about focus.

Over the weekend, my CH demonstrated incredibly good concentration as he was relaxing and playing one of our favorite multi-player on-line games, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (LOD).


If you look at the picture, you can see that he's got each hand on separate mice controlling two characters on two different computers simultaneously. I have enough trouble controlling one mouse with my left hand, let alone keeping tabs on a mouse's action in a game. The only thing that makes this a little more manageable is that the characters he controls move close enough to one another that he can track them both on one screen.

My husband was controlling two characters at once because he wanted to "rush" them. Rushing means that the player wants the characters to advance and develop as quickly as possible. This is a fairly common thing to do when someone has played a game for a long time and no longer enjoys the lower level play as it isn't very challenging once one becomes proficient in the game.

In Diablo II: LOD, one of the fastest ways to rush is to join what are called "public" games because the experience comes faster if the game has more players (8 is the maximum). A public game is open to anyone who wants to join so you end up playing with strangers. Playing a multiplayer game with strangers can be a very enjoyable experience or immensely disheartening. Sometimes you get chatter which is witty and fun and sometimes you get ugly, racist nonsense or unnecessary criticism of other player's playing ability or character "wealth" (or lack thereof).

The biggest pitfall to playing a game with strangers is that many multiplayer games have the possibility of allowing "griefers" to ruin the game experience. A griefer is someone who goes out of his way to cause difficulty or destroy the game playing experience for others. One of the most common ways this is done is for a vastly higher level character to enter a game with new characters of very low level and declare hostility on them. The high level character is well-equipped and has between 10-20 times more life (hitpoints) as the characters he's trying to kill. There's no challenge in killing the other players for griefers. In fact, they aren't interested in challenge, they are only interested in causing others to suffer.

In Diablo II: LOD, there are several ways to grief. One is to go hostile on players and hunt them down and kill them or to go hostile and cause a bunch of formerly cooperative players who were enjoying a good game together to abandon the game. Another, more subtle and insidious way, is to find out what sort of quest a player is doing and then complete the last portion before they can fulfill the steps leading up to the final challenge. Doing this disables their ability to complete the quest. Last night, my husband experienced this when someone blocked the entrance to a chamber where players were to face a big boss that had to be killed. A team of griefers actually performed this. One of them went down stairs to kill the boss and the other stood in front of the entrance so other players could not get through.

I've often wondered why griefers do what they do. Why would anyone extract pleasure from spoiling the fun of others? When you don't operate from a similar mindset, it's hard to grasp their motivation. I've always concluded that it's just like any other form of bullying where a person preys on a weaker party to feel powerful and compensate for their feelings of low self-esteem and self-worth. A lot of griefers justify their behavior by claiming they're "training" people for the fact that they'll have to deal with jerks in real life. However, I believe this is a weak justification and is telling of the fact that the griefers themselves have suffered unfair attacks in other areas of their lives. They seek to rationalize their pain by viewing it as a helpful process rather than their projecting their anger onto innocent targets just as someone else has done to them. It helps them distort their reality so they don't have to feel like victims and gives them a feeling of power to couterbalance the helplessness they felt when they were victims.

When I've discussed this on occasion in gaming forums, I've been accused of making too much of anti-social behavior in situations which "don't matter." That is, behaving poorly in an arena which is virtual and has no real consequence aside from upsetting people who are trying to relax and have fun isn't the same as behaving badly in real social environments or "real life." I agree, but not in the way the argument is meant.

I believe that real morality and personal ethics are conveyed only in situations that are of little or no consequence. If you have something at stake (social rejection, promotion at work, possible arrest), your ethics are not under any real test as you are acting for reward or out of fear of censure and not from your moral center. I think that the way you behave when no on is looking and when you can't be held accountable is a reflection of your true ethics.

Dealing With Critics

One of the web comics which I frequently read has been engaged in a bit of the sort of drama which is so unique to the type of relationships the Internet allows us to develop. Some time ago, a fan created a blog which is devoted to commenting on the artist's strip. The title of the blog makes it clear that the analysis is of a decidedly negative bent, though I do believe the author is attempting to be fair in his assessments.

This critical blog probably would have toiled in anonymity for the most part except that the artist linked to it from his own site. He sent droves of his fans to a site he hated and feels personally attacks him and very likely legitimized it rather than kept it marginalized. I can't say for sure why anyone would send their supporters to read the contents of a detractor, but I'm guessing it had to do with a feeling of helplessness at being criticized. This artist has had issues in the past with any negative comments that have been voiced in his own site's forums such that he sometimes can't bear to read the forums and sometimes indulges in ad hominem attacks in response to certain comments. If I were to guess, I'd think that he hoped that he could use the power of his supporters to combat someone he views as an enemy. In other words, he feels less helpless if he directs his fanboy attack dogs after the blogger.

At the moment, this has not helped in the least. In fact, the attention to the situation has only increased the readership of the detractor's site. In response, the artist has offered a bounty (free original artwork) to anyone who can give him the real name of the blogger running the site. This is where the situation starts to sound as though it could get out of hand. Trying to track down a person's real name borders on stalker behavior, and, depending on the intent once such information is in hand, it could potentially turn to a situation where a crime is committed or the blogger's real life is interfered with in some fashion.

I can understand why the artist is so frustrated. No one likes to be criticized about their creative endeavors, though some people certainly can tolerate constructive criticism admirably and view it as a means of improving their work. It must feel doubly personal though to have someone devote an entire site to nitpicking one person's work. The worst thing you can do, however, is make your readers aware of your detractors' work. When I worked on my former blog, there were a few people who went out of their way to piggyback on my writing by posting retorts to my posts on their blogs rather than coming up with their own unique content. They attacked me and my views. These people linked back to my posts (because they had to show their readers what they were disagreeing with), but I never linked back to their posts as I knew that ignoring them was the best course of action. In fact, I only found out what they were doing through other resources or people as I didn't read their sites.

That's not to say that my situation was analogous to that of the artist I'm talking about. No one set up an entire site to refute me (at least not that I know of, thankfully), and I don't believe I can compare my body of writing to this person's career as a cartoonist. After all, he makes a living out of what he does and my work is merely an outlet. However, I think the same principle applies. You should simply ignore such people. The more attention you give them, the bigger they grow and the more power they have over you.

As to why someone would choose to publicize the enemy, I believe he's afraid that the criticism is valid on some level or to some extent. Perhaps after doing a strip for so long, he's afraid he's lost his touch or ran out of creative steam. It's a doubt that has been echoed to varying extents in various blog pieces and write-ups that he's done. Attempting to stop a critic who may be echoing unconscious (or conscious) fears may help him feel empowered to silence the ones that are brewing in his own mind.

I don't know for sure what goes on in someone else's mind. I do know that I enjoy this artist's work and would be sad to see him do something (like interfere with his critic's real life) which causes his career to be messed up. I also know that any actions we take out of fear (and that includes self-doubt) are bound to send us off in the wrong direction in life.

Faces

Remember the wind-up toys you used to get as a kid? They'd be lifeless and you'd give the key a turn and it'd go gangbusters for awhile and gradually slow down until it ground to a halt. You'd wind it up and the process would start all over again.

I often feel like a wind-up toy when it comes to my energy levels. I'm fine for a certain stretch of time (usually about 5 or so hours) then I start to drag and then crash. When the crash comes, I will eventually get a second wind. Perhaps there's some giant cosmic hand in another reality putting a key in me and winding me back up again. I wish it would have installed a longer lasting spring so I'd get through more hours before I run down. At the very least, it could pay attention and re-wind more often.

Now that I'm at home all the time, I can go lie down for a bit when the crash comes. It's an unadulterated luxury being able to lie on your own bed when you're tired in the middle of the afternoon. While I lie there with my eyes closed, I try not to think about anything. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy at these times to just fall asleep and take a nap. Most of the time, I can't fall asleep and my mind drifts a bit in a place between being fully awake and asleep.

Back during my few years in Japan, I used to have a strange sense of connecting to home during these "lie downs". It wasn't that feeling people sometimes have in sleep where you wake up and are surprised to be in your current locale. It was more of a feeling of an energy filament tethering me to the energies of my family and familiar things back home. Sometimes it felt as if I could "sense" the other side of the planet where I grew up as I lay there, a tiny spec on the other side. As some time went by, the feeling of this connection disappeared.

Starting about 10 or so years ago, I started to have a very different experience when I closed my eyes during one of these resting sessions. It started after I tried some meditation exercises (and failed at them) and has been recurring ever since. During one of my meditations, I saw faces vividly. The faces were of people I had never seen before. I also once saw an exceptionally clear stone totem figure which resembled the shape (though not the size and design) of an Olmec head. I remembered well enough at the time to draw a picture of it, though I believe I threw it away later on for unknown reasons. Though I haven't done these exercises for a very long time nor have I actively meditated, I've found that I often see a variety of faces when I'm lying in bed with my mind set adrift.

These faces have different ages, expressions, ethnicities, and looks. They aren't animated in any way and are similar to snapshots, though they don't feel as lifeless as a photo. I don't know where they come from, though I have my theories. When I see them, I don't try to think too hard about them as I've found attempting to "seize" the image and burn it into memory tends to make it slip away. If you've ever seen a slide-show which is supposed to show a subliminal message by slipping in an extremely brief glimpse of something, it's a bit like that. Often, if I'm not trying too hard to think about or remember the faces I see, there will be a succession of several of them in a session. Generally, by the third one, I'm focusing too much on what I'm seeing and they stop.

I've seen a lot of faces and pictures in my life and it's possible that the review that happens when I'm adrift between consciousness and unconsciousness could just as easily be explained as my mind tiptoeing through the file cabinets of random memories to occupy itself. I wouldn't say that's impossible though I would see it as a curious coincidence that this only happens in this particular situation and that the faces don't appear in any sort of context or with any background.

The faces always appear as if being illuminated slowly from out of darkness and then fading back into it. I'd think that sensory memories would hold truer to their original context than that as most sensory memories are interconnected in a cluster of sensory information. This is why a distinctive smell makes you remember a place or feeling associated with it rather than it just being a familiar smell in many cases. It makes no sense that images would be stripped of their backgrounds in such a fashion if it is mere memory of pictures I saw in books or magazines as a child which are flashing back to me.

I don't know for sure what it is, but it neither troubles nor comforts me that it happens. I never think about it before I lie down for a rest. In fact, I often forget that it sometimes happens until it has actually occurred. I'm guessing that even going so far as to write about it may make the notion close enough to the front of my mind that it will likely stop happening for quite some time, but, I guess it's too late to worry about that now. ;-)

First Impressions

First impressions are tricky things. They are often regarded as memories being written on the blank canvas of a scrap of your mind. What they really are is reality having a tete a tete with your expectations. Depending on how you were oriented toward something before your first encounter, your first impression will be more or less favorable.

When I first arrived in Japan in 1988, my image of Japan was that it was populated by quiet, polite, efficient people who lived in clean technologically-impressive surroundings. My expectations, particularly in light of the fact that the port of entry was Narita airport, were unrealistically high. This was no doubt a reflection of the overall impression of Japan in the U.S. in the 80's as an economic machine of awesome technological prowess fueled by super hard-working, monumentally clever people who were kicking our asses in world markets. I will offer a few words to those who were as naive as me at that time. Few countries are as bad as your negative impressions or as good as your positive ones. Barring areas with serious problems, every place has good and bad points.

As someone who teaches from her home, first impressions are frequently on my mind both in terms of how I'm viewed and how my apartment is regarded. Do the students think my place looks "dirty" (as the Japanese are often prone to believing about anything which shows wear and tear or its age is "dirty"? Am I what they expected? Was the lesson content as expected?

Through time, I've come to realize that how my place and I am perceived is based not on any objective information, but rather on the students' expectations and prior experiences. Those who have never met a foreigner or have limited experiences with them approach me differently than those who have traveled or lived abroad. When people have most of their experiences with foreign faces through a television screen, they form unrealistic expectations of appearance and character. They are more likely to expect you to be an entertainer and more attractive than average because their notion of "average" is so skewed. Similarly, those who have lived in old rundown places or have a greater variety of experiences with different apartments tend to see my place differently. Mind you, I've never quizzed people about their impressions of my apartment, but random (socially appropriate) comments do get made from time to time which clue me in.

The students aren't the only ones who have expectations based on prior experiences. Over the weekend, a new student came to may apartment, and before he came, I was forming my expectations of him based on the vague information I had been given about his age, job and study history. I have far fewer male students than female ones and I'm wary of men as students in general for a variety of reasons. I'm slightly nervous about them coming into the house when I'm alone, but I realize this is relatively irrational considering that they are sent by an agency so someone knows that they are coming here and when. Those intent on harming others generally don't leave such clear tracks to allow themselves to be traced. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have to spend some time talking myself down from what are no doubt mostly irrational and paranoid concerns. That being said, I did have an interview with a really creepy man at one point who was sent over by the agency so it's not unheard of that strange men make their way into the system. Fortunately, the new weekend student was a very nice, professional person who had lived in the U.S. for several years. He was expressive and friendly and spoke English at quite a high level.

First impressions are important, but I believe it's important not to fuss too much before making one. While we can do everything we can to make the best possible first impression, the other side of the equation is as or more important than how we actually present ourselves, and there's nothing we can do to control the context in which other people receive us.

At least one other person "gets it"

I've been told that Japan is "wasted on me" by people who have only ever admired it from afar or as tourists. This comment is elicited because of the following facts about my life in Japan:

• I'm not mad about Japanese food. I enjoy some of it, dislike some of it, and am relatively indifferent to most of it. I'm the same way about the types of food in the U.S., so it's nothing personally directed toward Japan. For example, I also dislike steak and hamburgers.
• I'm not the least bit interested in anime, manga, cosplaying, or any of the other otaku-related pursuits.
• I don't have a burning passion to visit every temple and gate in every major tourist area.
• I don't care about onsen.
• I have insufficient interest in traditional arts (flower arranging, tea ceremony, etc.) to get involved in them.
• I am female and not a lesbian and therefore don't drool and act like a sex-starved post-pubescent dog at the sight of young Japanese women.
  

Given all this, people think I'm getting nothing uniquely Japanese out of Japan. The problem is that I can't possibly make them understand what I'm getting because they are too obsessed with what they're getting (or would be getting) from Japan to see anything else. Well, I also don't care enough to try and make them understand, but I do care enough to write about someone who does understand (aside from my husband and myself).

People believe that all of the value in living in a foreign culture is to be extracted from the most superficial and obvious aspects. I believe there is also value in understanding how the culture develops and where and why people have divergent thinking. Today, I had a student tell me something in her lesson to the effect of 'sometimes I think about the psychology of why Western and Japanese people think so differently.' She told me she found it fascinating and enjoyed pondering it. Yes, she gets it.

Most people look at cultural differences as a means to an end. That is, they want to either understand so that they can do business effectively or fit into the culture when they live in it. I have nothing so pragmatic at the core of my curiosity. I want to know why this lump of human clay took this shape and that lump formed in another place took another shape. I think by knowing what formed the basic personality structure of a person, I can inhabit their (mental) reality a little better. It builds empathy, compassion, and understanding for the emotional language people speak.

As an example, I can say that I have no interest in the fact that people bow instead of shake hands or in how low they bow. I am interested in why they're bowing and why they bow differently to different people and why they conform to this cultural expectation. And when I say "why", I don't mean that I want a pat reason like they are not comfortable with physical contact. I want to know what about their culture has made them uncomfortable enough with physical contact to choose bowing and why they don't like to hug each other when making contact with other people in acts of affection is one of the greatest visceral joys of human existence. What pushed this out of them?

Of course, there's no easy answer because not everyone is the same, even in a relatively homogeneous culture. The answers are complex and scattered all over the place in the language, the history, and the behavioral norms. It's a huge puzzle that you could work on for a lifetime and never find all the pieces but I think it's worthwhile and far more interesting than visiting maid cafes or having my picture taken in front of umpteen temples. That's just me though. And now another person "gets it", and that makes me happy.

Getting What You Deserve

Back before my CH was the angel that brought the sun which warmed my spirit and brightened my days, he was my pen friend. During the brief period of time when we weren't over the moon about each other, we each made a list of the attributes we both felt should be present in a perfect mate. The discussion of this list may have been fueled by a latent attraction or the fact that the CH long before he was my CH had gone through an emotionally difficult break-up with a girlfriend. The types of things he did and did not want were foremost in his mind when considering what went wrong, particularly since his ex is a nice person and they got on so well before it all went wrong.

When we compared our list, I recall that we each listed 10 items and that he fit 8 of my criteria easily and possibly all of them in some sense. The only one he felt somewhat strongly did not apply to him was "ambitious," though he probably saw "ambition" differently than I did. I wasn't hoping for someone who was going to become a doctor or join the peace corps. I was thinking mainly of someone who wanted to engage in some sort of "professional" work. In other words, I was hoping for someone who didn't aspire to no more than working in a local gas station or convenience store and spend most nights at locals bars getting sauced then cheating on their wives by sleeping with their sisters-in-law. That was the way that most of the local males in my area ended up. Though the list is lost forever, I do recall that certain things were not on it. Being attractive, tall, rich, having high status, and an impressive education were all absent from my list. Mainly, I wanted someone who was intelligent, emotionally stable, funny, kind, communicative, affectionate and attentive.

I often tell people that they get the spouse they deserve based on their priorities and I completely believe that is true. If you get someone who is a shallow gold-digger, then your priorities in choosing your mate landed you that type of person. It will likely come as no surprise to anyone that many people (from my own culture, I don't say this to Japanese people) disagree with my assertion in this regard. The most vigorous disagreement comes from those who have had bad break-ups and divorces. I'm sure such people feel as if they were wonderful and were tricked, taken advantage of, duped, or witnessed a dramatic change of character when everything went wrong in the relationship. Such people are likely misunderstanding what I mean when I say you get the spouse you "deserve" though this is likely due to my choice of words. I certainly do not mean a person with a bad spouse is a bad person who "deserves" the pain of a rotten relationship. It's more the case that the way in which they rule out certain parties and include other parties results in them getting the person they ended up with. If you're going to reject good people in favor of people who have shortcomings, then you deserve the one with shortcomings. More often than not, beauty is the reason those shortcomings are ignored initially.

Note that I have rarely met anyone who didn't put "attractive" on their list of priorities (near the top or at the top) except my husband and I. That is not to say my husband isn't as cute as all get-out and doesn't have the kindest face ever to exist (even my students will remark immediately after meeting him that he has "kindly eyes"), but rather that that was a "bonus" and not a requirement of my loving him. Inevitably, anyone who puts physical beauty on the list defends this choice by saying that it is natural for humans to want beauty and that you can't marry someone to whom you are not sexually attracted. This is true, but the fact of the matter is that beauty is one of the worst criteria for choosing a mate in modern culture where producing off-spring is not the most important result of the relationship and relationships revolve around higher order needs than putting bison on the table for dinner.

What most people either don't realize or simply fail to consider is that every positive "yin" you get in a person's character will come with a negative "yang". Ambition often brings single-mindedness, a lack of attention, and one's partner appearing lower on the totem pole than a job. My CH's laid-back nature (which I adore) brings a certain amount of laziness and a lack of ambition. Fortunately, these things don't trouble me. In fact, one of the ways in which I have become sanguine about aspects of my mate's character which initially troubled me was to realize that they were the flip-side of the coin. I couldn't have the things I treasured in him without some of the things which may not make my life the easiest. If I can't live with "tails" coming up once in awhile on the character coin, then I can't have "heads". You have to appreciate the good aspects of your partner enough to be patient with the not so good ones or you're simply being unfair.

One of the lessons I teach is about relationships. Part of the lesson is asking the student what they value in a partner. After hearing their lists, I try to impress upon my students that they can't have it all. I also try to dissuade them from making appearance the highest priority by letting them know that beauty lasts 20 years at best and then you live with only the personality. It's the structural integrity of the house that matters, not the attractiveness of the facade.

All of these thoughts about relationships were initiated when I saw pictures of Joseph at Tame Goes Wild with his fiancee. He's getting married very soon and seeing pictures of him and his bride-to-be planting a tree before leaving England for Japan further fueled my belief that they are going to be the type of couple who deserve each other in the best possible way. I met Joseph when he worked as a temporary worker at my former office and he was quite a different person then compared to now (as was I, I'm sure). He's aspiring to be a positive person who contributes to the world in the best possible way and I hope he and his *Twinkle* spend the rest of their lives working together to do all the good things they dream about doing. I'm sure the world will be a better place for their union.

Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. *Twinkle*, and many happy returns!

Kind of Down

For the last two and a half months, I've done nothing but complain to my CH, my sister, and my pal the wombat stuffer about how hard I've been working. I kept saying how great a relief it was going to be to finally have some free time. Well, now, I've got that free time and I'm feeling a bit depressed.

It's been so long since I've had the time to do things I want to do that I've forgotten what those things might be. I'm forced to consider what I want to do and find myself coming up rather empty and feeling as if I'm lacking in direction. In fact, I've been having one of those pesky first world citizen problems where I find myself questioning where my life is going and what I'm doing with it. As near as I can recall, the last time I had a sizable chunk of free time, I read Wil Wheaton's "Just a Geek" in two days (a good read written by someone who realizes how he is now self-aware and can admit he wasn't when he was quite famous and successful). I'm pretty sure that my goal isn't to read more, however.

After a bit of hard thinking, I remembered that my goal when I quit my full-time job was to "get healthy" both mentally and physically. I'd say the mental part is coming along pretty well. Most of the trauma of working with an erratic company president whose whim-based management style infused life with tension and a distinct feeling of insecurity has worn off by now. The physical part is coming along much more slowly, though I can now do 30 minutes on a treadmill if I can lean on the handles and my disaster area of a back doesn't have to make too great of an effort to keep me vertical.

At any rate, I'll admit something and you can judge me as you will. I don't have any career goals. I used to have some, mind you, but I don't anymore. I once wanted to be a counselor or therapist, possibly even a psychologist. I planned to work for awhile and then go to graduate school. I even applied to and was accepted into two schools (one was Ohio State University and I can't remember the other). After I worked with really crazy people for a few years and saw that the answer is almost always pharmacological rather than through any sort of talk or guidance, that notion withered away. I didn't want to go to medical school nor did I want to simply be the person whose task it was to evaluate whether or not someone should be taking psychotropic medication or not.

The truth is that most people will opt for a handful of pills rather than do the hard work of changing their behavior and that's assuming that they even possess the capacity to change. Many people who are in the mental health care system are pretty far gone. Those who aren't in the system rarely seek help because it's expensive and their insurance won't pay if they're not so far gone that they are endangering themselves or others, or they simply think psychology is a crock and can't do anything for them that they can't choose to do for themselves. My experiences in the real world of dealing with mental health left me disillusioned and a little bit afraid. Being a woman and working with disturbed people is a dangerous business.

After coming to Japan, I found that I was really interested in desktop publishing and learned all about the minutiae of working in print media. That would have continued to have been a goal, but, as I'm sure many have noticed, print media is a wilting industry. Even before print media sales started dropping like a stone, the demand for people who knew their way around Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop was dropping off as everyone with a nephew who could use Microsoft Publisher felt a monkey could do layout so they didn't want to pay much for higher quality work.

Also, while I enjoyed such work, there were always serious creative limits involved. Every time I did a project, people who had nothing to do with the actual work of doing a layout had to have their fingers in the pie of how the creative aspects were carried out. From font choices to graphic styles, someone who did nothing more than lean back in a chair and make frivolous choices based on aesthetic whims would override a cohesive design plan such that the end result was a compromised mess of too many (and clashing) fonts and absurd mixtures of illustration styles. In the end, books always ended up a crazy quilt of poorly mixed elements because various people who were higher on the totem pole then me insisted certain things be their way. Any talk of balance, design grids and use of aesthetic white space flew out the window in favor of cramming as much as possible onto the fewest pages and catering to the pet font and picture choices of the higher ups. Some of the books I was involved in making turned out so poorly that I'd be embarrassed to offer them as samples of my work.

Once again, the reality of the work quashed the dream. Any fulfillment I might get from these types of work was seriously undermined by the environment in which the work was done. After quitting my office job, I realized that most of the positive points connected to any career goal is going to be redirected by reality. The only true way to find fulfillment is to do it outside of the framework of pay. Once it becomes a job, someone else has a say in what you do. This applies even if you are your own boss since the customer's whims and sales figures will then dictate what you should and shouldn't do. Once money is involved, you're someone else's bitch.

That is not to say that I think this is a terrible situation or that I'm bummed out that my dreams have gone unfulfilled. In both cases, I think that the goals were met and then I moved on. Mainly, I think I've just come to realize that the goal is less important than what I walk away with from the experience. Knowing this, however, has made it hard to be overly ambitious or fix a hard target on a future path. For now, I'm pretty satisfied doing what I do teaching and writing. It's not lucrative and it may not have a lot of glamor attached to it, but I do learn and grow and use my skill and wits. It's challenging and rewarding.

I think the reason I'm a bit down now though is that the process and pace of just being a better person and expanding my knowledge and experience through interacting with others and doing modest creative work feels "small." It's also rather hard to measure progress when the goal is "be better than you were in every way." The empty time that I have now makes me ache a bit for a bigger boat to hook my anchor onto than simply "being better." However, part of what I want to be mentally is the sort of person who is just OK with being the way that I am now rather than the type of person who has to have some grandiose life plan or big goal that I can announce to the world.

The Power of Negative Thinking

Meditation is proven to relax people and have an effect on their bodies and minds. This is a scientific fact, not some sort of new age pie-in-the-sky holistic notion. Despite this fact, most people find it difficult to meditate and I'll admit that I am one of them. Every time I yell, "quiet you!" to my chattering mind, it sticks its tongue out at me and goes back to yammering away.

One thing that we don't realize though is that we are almost certainly meditating everyday in ways that we are not aware of. Meditation doesn't have to mean that you are clearing your mind and thinking peaceful thoughts. All it has to mean is that you are repeating a thought again and again until it has a tangible effect on you. Many people don't realize it but they are engaging in destructive and highly negative forms of meditation as they ruminate on the current state of affairs in the world and continually consume media which imprints a variety of troubling mantras on them.

In this day and age, we find that the most popular mantras relate to prices going up, quality of life decreasing with little chance of it ever going up again, and a negative outlook for jobs as globalization undermines our marketability. If repeating notions and thoughts of peace and tranquility relax your body and ease your spirit, imagine what repeating such negative notions are doing to them. You may literally be talking yourself into being sick in both mind and body.

I'm not suggesting that people forget reality and pretend undesirable changes are not at hand. I'm suggesting that they be aware of the fact that listening to and repeating the mantra of how bad things are isn't helping the situation and it's almost certainly skewing their perceptions such that they are going to feel worse no matter what the real impact on their lives such changes have. I suggest turning off the news and skipping the web sites which harp on negative changes and focusing on the reality of the quality of your daily life. Live (responsibly) in your reality and not some hypothetical future.

For most of us, our reality includes a great deal of comfort. I'm not talking about drawing comparisons between our lot and the lot of those living in starvation and poverty. I'm talking about the multitude of little joys we can experience that are so easy and mundane that we forget the pleasure they bring us. The average lifestyle of a lower middle class is often equal to or greater than that of kings in the middle ages. We forget the luxury we live in because we're surrounded by a mantra of disappointment at the luxuries we cannot have and the gloom and doom of the entire world.

So, turn off the negative mantra and try and replace it with a positive one. It may not make the world's problems go away, but it will make you happier with what you have.

Studies in Human Nature (Amazon Vine)

Though I have abandoned adding new content to my former blog, I haven't shut down the ability to add comments so occasionally I'll get a notification from Blogger that a new comment has been posted on an old entry. Lately, I seem to be getting more traffic on a post about Amazon Vine (a program where Amazon shoppers are offered occasional free items in exchange for their reviews of products).

The original post about the Vine seems to be the only one that people find and it was made around mid-September of 2007. Despite the fact that the date of the post is at the top and easy to see, people don't bother to look and see if there was an update, nor do they consider that my opinion may have changed since that post was made shortly after the program's rocky start. I felt compelled this morning to add a notation to the top of the post clarifying that there was a follow-up for those who are too myopic to figure things out.

The interesting thing about the newest comments to that antique post is that the new ones coincide with some changes in the Vine program. Some of the old members are being booted out and new members are being asked to join. Before I get any further, let me say that I wasn't one of the old members who got kicked out (at least not yet) so I'm speaking dispassionately here. Invariably, newcomers to the program are hostile toward my initial negative impression of the Vine (which was later modified in a later post where I gave Amazon credit for fixing what was wrong). They're very defensive as they are pleased to be offered things for free.

When I made the initial post, I got a lot of nasty responses from people who accused me of all sorts of imaginary (and fraudulent) acts. It wasn't just territorial protective behavior of the hand that was feeding them free stuff that motivated those responses. They wanted to ostracize me from the Amazon Vine community in the hopes that I'd get fed up enough to simply opt out. The idea is that the fewer people who stand in line for the pie, the bigger the piece of pie for those who remain. You see, the Vine has only a limited number of freebies to give away, particularly of the choicer and more expensive items and it's a real free-for-all during the first minute (literally, the first seconds) the items are posted to get at the small handful of big ticket items.

This competition and petty behavior is not simply something I see in the comments I'm still getting on my former blog. It's also indicated in the way in which Vine members are voting whether reviews of other Vine members are helpful or not. Though I have no idea if it is true or not, it is believed among Vine reviewers that Amazon evaluates the current crop of Vine members by their ratios of "helpful" to "unhelpful" votes. In order to make other Vine members look bad and increase the chances that they may get the boot, some people are suspected of going through and clicking "no" next to any Vine review other than their own in order to ruin the ratios of other reviewers.

Now that some of the people who were asked to join at the program's inception are being let go, another side of those who praised Amazon and the Vine program is emerging. Those who once were kissing the toes of Amazon and castigating the likes of me for not counting my blessings are mad. There is talk about never buying from Amazon again and feeling betrayed now that the supply of freebies has stopped.

This situation has displayed a variety of things which interest me about human nature.

• Some people will behave unethically if they believe it will result in their getting more and others less (the consistent and arbitrary "no" votes).
• Some people will attack others without a basis in logic or reason for a small and hypothetical chance at more (commenters to my old post).
• It may be worse to give someone something for free temporarily than to never give them anything at all as a sense of entitlement develops and they will turn on their benefactor (the members who got kicked saying they are not going to patronize Amazon anymore).
• The most materially rich of people can sometimes display the most greed for things they don't need and may not even desire (the fact that all Amazon Vine members are regular buyers who have written reviews in the past so they clearly have money and goods).

Being a part of the Vine program has really afforded me an interesting perspective on behavior and it's probably something I'll remember long after I've forgotten whatever free stuff I've gotten.