I have a fridge! Finally I was able to buy perishables :) Found the sweetest brand of milk. Yeah, so it is like, 4% milk, but the logo is so awesome…I had to buy it.
It`s Monday and I have the most painful knot in my neck/left shoulder area. I want to post more today but it will be in small bits as I am kind of uncomfortable. For now…enjoy the milk.
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Many of you know that I like to name my computing devices after breakfast foods. My new mobile which I posted about here (or probably just a scroll down the page if your clicking finger needs a break) has spent the first few weeks of its new life as a John Doe. This is unacceptable, especially considering that it, out of all my precious ones, has the most obvious name coming.
From today, the official name of my mobile is……………orange juice. Or “oj” for short but I`m debating whether I want to do that. I like saying “juice” too much.
So orange juice can now feel at home with waffles, syrup, and the memory of pancakes, who is still in Vancouver and has possibly been exorcised from the body it was living in (by that I mean the PC was possibly reformatted…but the memory continues).
My story telling has been a little crappy lately. I get tired out from all this information absorbing and when it comes time to summarize, my brain is mush. But for archival purposes, and for your reading pleasure, I need to try harder.
So, I can`t remember last week too well. There was the field work and that was really exhausting (again because there is so much thinking to do), but good. On Saturday I decided to see this artpiece by Makoto Ishiwata, Vacuum Packing!: Heartbeat. I suggest checking out this link for the details and the concept behind the work. Basically, you put on a protective mask and climb inside this structure. The artist takes your pulse and a beat to the same time plays from speakers surrounding the structure. You are given a button to press. Once to the start the work and possibly again if you PANIC!
In Vacuum Packing!, the air is sucked from inside the structure and the membrane surrounding it starts to close in on you. The space inside gets smaller and smaller and you feel pressure from all sides. All you hear is sucking and the loud beat.
It was a really incredible experience. Scary at first, but very comforting inside. My biggest fear was that the membrane would pop like a balloon but that didn`t happen. Then Atsu, a friend from work who also came to see the piece, tried it and a piece of the membrane (or skin ??) did pop! It was quiet surprising but he was okay so that is good. Definitely a fun time. Ishiwata-san had an initial version of Vacuum Packing! that used a coffin/closet form for the structure. Here are some pictures of that.
After seeing the piece, I went to the Shimokitazawa area in Tokyo. I read that it was a popular area for artists and young people and that it was. Though there were not as many art supply stores as I would have hoped for. Still…pretty cool. It was similar to Commercial Drive in Vancouver, but bigger, more adhoc, and with more stores and people. There were also many more vintage stores and good ones too! Clothing was organized and much of it looked unused. I guess maybe some people prefer that soapy used feel…but I don`t like it when you finally find an awesome jacket and then you find the huge stain on the elbow. My final purchase: a belt. Yay! And I was lucky too…went to some non-vintage stores as well and tried some belts. Haha…yeah the Large size might fit but they do not stock them. I also found a Lush store but I didn`t go inside!! I can`t believe myself. The logic I used at the time was, “oh, that`s not new”…but now I am wishing I would have gone in to compare products and prices and possibly get some maaaahbar. Oh well.
Other highlights…I can`t think of so many right now. I spent Sunday at a 100￥ shop (there`s this awesome one near my apartment) and at home cleaning. Yesterday I was in Yokohama for some fieldwork. Most of my time was spent in Yokohama station and the surrounding shopping centres (which are also in the station as far as I can tell) but I also wandered the streets around the station a little too. My next step today is to analyze some of my observations from yesterday so I won`t get into them now.
I will end here with my next purchasing goal: a Nintendo DS Lite. I found an application for Japanese-English dictionary. Terrific! But very impossible to find (the DS Lite)…they get sold so quickly here. It will be quite the quest.
…but I tried to deal with it in a calm manner. This morning I went on a bus adventure. To get to work I can either take a bus the whole way, or take a train almost the whole way and a short bus ride for the rest. The downsides of the train+bus route is a) the train requires 1 transfer, sometimes 2, b) it is more expensive, and c) it takes longer. The downside of the bus option is that there are only 3 buses I can catch in the morning, and 3 I can catch in the evening. I`m such a “I`ll leave when I leave” person that I often take the train+bus. The only frustration with this is that there are 3 buses that I can take from the station to work. Two of them take me all the way and 1 only part way. The rest of the way is a short walk up a hill. This latter bus comes more often than the other 2 (that would take me all the way to work) so I often use it and walk the extra bit.
This morning I took the train and on the way to the station my knee started acting up so I didn`t want to walk that last distance uphill. I waited for a number 4 or 6 because these are the two buses that I can remember going to NTT. I took the 4 but basically, it was going in the opposite direction of work. I couldn`t tell at first though because I am horrible at recognizing streets and determine direction here. I should really buy a compass…seriously. Luckily the bus only took me as far as the station before the one I just got off at. So I got back onto the train and redid the whole bus thing…turns out that there is 4 that leaves from stop 1 and 4 that leaves from stop 2…I had the wrong stop.
As a result I came to work an hour after I thought I would. What`s the point of this though? Oh…that the train system is great. I love it! Buses are a little more confusing though. They have numbers, but people refer to them by their destination names. It takes a while to catch onto the names and the kanji and even then…I am used to thinking of buses in terms of numbers.
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I guess I have not yet written about experiences on my first day of field work. There was a lot of information and many questions to deal with. I have been using most of my energy to process the data into usable work notes, not write about it here. What I will write about are my negative thoughts on the “success” of my work and whether or not it will translate into good research and design ideas. I just had a revelation that pulled me from these negative thoughts – yay!
On Friday I made note of some advice for myself: 1) get out of my head and end the analyzing, 2) be patient and watch. I felt that I was missing out on interesting social patterns in the public. If I could just sit in one spot for a very long time and pay close attention to everything, some remarkable and translatable insights would eventually surface.
But I was just reading this paper, “The Limits of Ethnography: Combining Social Sciences for CSCW” (Shapiro, D., 1994) and something was totally clarified for me (I don`t know if this was from the paper or from my processed version of it). Basically, I was expecting to have things jump out at me, things “so common yet weird that they are weirder”. Most of the observations I made seemed sloppy and obtuse. I was worried that everything I observed would be biased by all the “strange things from Japan” websites I looked at before I came here. “Oh look…bikes don`t get stolen…and there is another girl in a maid costume”. I mean, of course, these things are interesting…but are they what I went out for?
What I should be looking for generally is how people construct social order. This is not found only by searching for the weird and different, even though they can make for some interesting stories and pictures, but also in considering the mundane and everyday.
What I didn`t really get was how I can also look at myself as a reflection of the everyday. We are all continuously observing and analyzing social order so that we can determine how we should act in particular settings, mostly with the intentions of “looking good” to someone or everyone. How do I behave in train stations and department stores as a reaction to my interpretation of the social environment? When am I uncertain over how I should act? What does this reveal about the social order?
I have to be careful here because I risk jumping back into my head and relating everything to myself. But I think I was wrong before, when I thought that I would have to completely lose my identity to be aware of interesting things going on. How I construct my identity is a key source for observations on how *things* happen *here* (intentional vagueness in that last part).
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