On a slightly related note to some current research thoughts, in December I received my first batch of 100 mooCards. My intentions were to use them as business cards. Given that I will not be at NTT forever, and not be at UBC forever (god I hope), I made them a generic Meghan card with my email address and a link to this site.
A few weeks ago I was at a meeting and was presented with my first opportunity to hand out my cool new cards but I totally couldn’t. Possibly because the meeting was fairly formal (I wore my new brown dress pants…I bought brown dress pants in Japan because…they fit…but they look the same as my highschool chemistry teacher’s) but this ran through my head: “which one do I give???!!! are there any vulgar pictures on them I can’t remember??? this might take too much time…I have to select!”.
MooCards are too personal for business-card-ing. Each one shows a little piece of what I have seen. The variety too. Different pictures have different meanings to me and choosing them can’t be random. The best thing for me to do would be to let the receiver choose but I don’t think that fits the business card exchange model. Perhaps I need an automatic MooCard dispenser. A small camera could detect the crispness of the receiver’s suit(clothing) and dispense a properly themed card.
Archive for January, 2007
above me at work
I just realized that in my whole time here I have not looked up at the ceiling directly above me. Not once! I don’t know…there could have been a spider there or something. What other spaces do I not look at?
Reminds me of something that amused me as a child. That game of put something in an obvious place that might possibly be overlooked by people on a regular basis and then be amused by the length of time it takes for people to notice. Most commonly spaghetti on the wall.
I am a little stumped on summarizing something at work at the moment. I could do something else but knoooow I should finish this. Oh but if one of those tiles dropped down followed by three people in purple glittered spandex I would be so entertained.
blind 15 minutes
Lately I have been thinking about my senses become duller and duller as I age. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, recollection, taste – not losing them but they are not as intense as they used to be. Actually sorry, I am using my conclusion as an introduction to something I will tell. I was not really thinking about the above in a highly conscious way at all. I just told myself the other day that I wanted to shower blindfolded and see (or hear, smell, taste, touch) what happens. In the shower I normally first wash my face with my eyes closed. Today, once I reached the point of feeling no soap security, I still did not open them again. I kept them closed until I was out, dried, back in a housecoat (it is Saturday) and sitting in front of open waffles to write about the experience. Below are observations/thoughts of note in mostly chronological order:
For most of the shower I found that I was replacing my vision with mental images of the shower around me. Not necessarily the important things like where the shampoo and conditioner are and don’t knock over that can of shaving cream but things like the colour of the shower curtain and the fact that a vent is above my head.
At moments the urge to open my eyes was very strong. Maybe dehydration from last night’s drinking had something to do with it. Right now my eyes feel dried up and tired. I want to exercise them, stretch them, open-shut, and open-shut, and wide.
I had thoughts of falling asleep. My mind was being tricked into thinking it was bedtime because the go to sleep signal (shut eyes) was given. My breathing also became a lot slower, sometimes stopping and I had to remind myself to take bigger breaths.
Most things in the shower I could do with ease because I have memorized the body movements. I got thrown off trying to find my sponge hanging from part of the shower fixture. I was looking for the fixture first and got lost on the wall. I always get lost on walls…lose my perception of distance up/down/left/right.
(Side story: when I was younger we visited some family friends and stayed overnight. I stayed on the top bunk in a room with a girl the same age as me. During the night I slept-walked off the bunk and ended up on the floor by the closed door, next to a dresser. I woke up and could feel the door, feel a wall, feel something wooden beside me, but everything was dark and I could not remember where I was. I was trying to find the doorknob…maybe there would be light outside the door. But I was lost on the wall and the door – could not remember how high a typical doorknob would be placed. Pawing at the wall I panicked and resorted to screaming for help. My mother came. The next morning I came to breakfast with a very very very red face.)
I faced my first real challenge after the shower. It was time to put on face cream and I use a type that requires application of two liquids from two bottles of identical form and one should go on before the other. How do I tell the difference? It took me a couple of moments, holding the hard bottles in my hands, to realize that I could shake the bottles and distinguish them by the density of liquid inside – one was more watery than the other. This made me think a lot about the details that we store in our minds that are not so frequently accessed.
Actually, another problem that I faced before coming out of the shower was the issue of product quantity. How can I tell the amount of shampoo or conditioner being dispensed? It was complete guesswork. In my head there was no information on how long I should squeeze the bottle, what a certain amount might feel like in my hand…I have always calculated this using only visual information.
Movement out of the shower and into my room was harder. In the shower I was in a confined place and could easily make mental images of the space around me. I was comforted by constant walls. Coming out of the bathroom, there was uncertainty in space beyond my arm’s reach. To compensate, my mind made walls around me. Moving in a wide space I was still mentally in an area similar to that of the shower – perhaps even smaller.
The room smelled sweeter than before. I finished drying, put on my housecoat and sat down at my desk. Reaching for waffles, I found its coldness right away. Something was on top – one of my Japanese books. I moved it over thinking about how I was using it prior to having a shower. This made me think about relying on recollecting past actions/events when you cannot use visual information. We see the states of things with little processing in the conscious mind…the eyes guide. Is this blindness good for exercising 思い出すこと? (=omoidasu-ing… I like the Japanese word because 思う is to think and 出す is to take/send out…it creates a better image of recollecting, remembering, collecting thoughts, bringing thoughts up.)
Now I have the window open. A cool breeze is coming in. I can feel it intensely on my bare feet. The air is sweet with the aroma of my shower products and the sun makes things glow.
My mind feels refreshed. There are still brain cramps from drinking last night but it is refreshed in terms of thought generation. I am not thinking the same thoughts that cycled over and over before my shower and I feel as though I have a quickly reflex to act on ideas. Heh – this can be a good OR bad thing but in my case I think it is currently good. I tend to get ideas, think yeah that would be interesting, but then not act on them and instead occupy myself with the useless chatter in my head (ex. my teeth are too crooked, I need to buy more milk, etc).
Two thoughts that came and were acted on immediately:
(1) I looked around me and thought about photographing junk piles and signs of usage around the home to capture activities and experiences in spans of mundane time. The pictures below are this morning:
(laptop
a Halls that will never get eaten because my cough is gone
folders with papers to read for thesis
FANCL receipt for face cleansing products I spent too much money on
an empty pack of のど candies that I have recently become addicted to (remainder from my cough experience)
a box that the vase from my glass blowing experience was shipped in – it seems like such a good box I can’t part with it so it is now the base of my FANCL calendar – reward for spending so much money on their products in hopes of virgin-like skin
a red plastic bag that feels too good to throw away
the USB cord for my camera
mail concerning the 10k race in 3 weeks
a catalogue that was subscribed to by former resident of my room….I’ll have to write about its contents another time)
(when I look at this picture I can remember the dreams that I had before the bed obtained this state. it was a really deep comfortable sleep. in the morning I did not want to get out of bed.)
(2) I started to write this in my usual manner – going straight through from beginning to end – then remembered that I would forget all my thoughts a third of the way through and stop writing. So I quickly made points of everything I thought about. I always think I should do this when I write but still, usually I don’t and then I get writer’s block and then I stop. The above was successfully constructed using the first-make-points method
I don’t know if this end bit is related to my 15 minutes of blindness but I think I will continue to incorporate periods of blindness into my routines in order to sharpen my dulling senses and refresh the lesser used functions of my brain.
my name
Yesterday was meetup #3 with the karate club. Oh boy it is hard to do those moves when you can see your awkwardness in the mirror. But people are so helpful. Near the end of practice they were helping me “understand” the form I need for side kicks. At one point I think one person was helping me balance while 3 others held my leg up trying to bring it backwards in a direction it currently doesn’t think it can go to. I need a lot of practice and more flexibility and some more core strength would help too.
If things work out I will eventually buy a karategi (I think that is what it is called…karate training uniform). Most of the people in the club have their names embroidered on their karategi and they told me I should think of kanji for me name. Why not use the katakana (メーガン ドイッチャ）? Because you pay per character and it can be written in fewer kanji characters. So I have thought about this before. I think I know how it works of course I could be horrible wrong or unaware of some rules but…first I break my name down to: me – gan – do – i – cha and then I find kanji with readings of those syllables. Again, I might be totally missing something but…this is just to entertain myself. Taking my first name and a kanji reference book I found the following kanji for me:
目 (eye)
芽 (sprout)
and the following for gan:
岩 (rock)
岸 (coast, shore)
頑 (obstinate, stubborn)
願 (prayer, wish, vow)
丸 (circle)
元 (origin)
眼 (eye)
顔 (face)
含 (include)
癌 (cancer)
鴈 (wild goose)
Now for many of the above symbols, gan is a Chinese reading of the symbol. I don’t know if Chinese readings are typically used but I think you can use them. So what are good and meaningful combinations? 目眼(eye-eye)? 目顔(eye-face)? 目癌(eye-cancer)? The eye kanji would be good because it is very simple. But combinations of sprout might be more meaningful like, I am 芽願 (a sprout’s prayer). 芽頑 uses the kanji for “stubborn” which is typically viewed as a negative word but is it always negative? Stubborn can be firm, strong, steady. I am a stubborn sprout meaning that I am firmly rooted.
But am I?
Anyway, I will have to think about this one for a bit. Will probably also want to consider the aesthetics, recognizability (is that a word), and my ability to write the kanji.
mushmarsh
last night’s *poof* in my head while trying to fall asleep: mushroom and marshmallow tempura
imagine this: (thank you mushroom-uk.com)
made with mini mushrooms.
I don’t know why I thought about this and I was not particularly craving it just imagining. It could work…mushmarsh. Has any one tried deep fried mushrooms?
In case that unsettled your stomach, here is something a little tastier. If we look back a bit more than two weeks we might land on my birthday. It was a Friday and luckily my supervisor had planned an afternoon group party at his place for that day. Him and his wife (a friend whom I’ve enjoyed a number of Japan adventures with) prepared the most delicious feast for (around) 10 of us. We started in the afternoon and I think I finished around 9pm. Given the proximity of my birthday and of the other intern’s, Mayumi made an amazing cheesecake. I have to share a picture….isn’t it fit to be in a magazine?
Closing the party up around 11pm, five of us headed to karaoke and we managed to find material for singing pleasure until 4am. Then I caught the first train home and happily hit the pillow with my head. It was an incredible day and I am so thankful for all the people who I was able to share it with.
Since that day: I sang at another small concert, learned about a small part in the complex world of Japanese comedy, joined a karate club, made plans to take off on an onsen get-away, cancelled those plans, jogged 10km for the first time too painfully slow,…
(oops on review…I guess I mentioned this yesterday in a post I completely forgot about. Did I mention that my hair is turning white and my memory going?)
…made a wicked chicken/egg donburi, hit an izakaya with fellow interns followed by more (you guessed it) karaoke, got a demo accepted at an domestic conference in March, and actually got into an episode of some Japanese drama cause I sort of could understand what was going on.
The next few weeks are dedicated to the launch of operation Get Thesis Done (GTD) and my training for February’s race…what will I wear?? Do you carry your own water? Fanny pack? Should your close be tight fitting and race-star looking? Do I need stripes?
Any stories of personal 10km experiences are much appreciated!!
I think spam actually makes me depressed. Even with spam filters – it is still there. It is an infection. The filters just tylenol to ease the pain. It bothers me so maybe not because of current inconveniences, but because of what it says about the future of communication technologies. There is a wealth of possible channels to create but how much will people abuse them and will good prevail? That and spam reminds me that all too often things boil down to money.
How much money does spam generate for itself? How much money is spent controlling spam?
On another note, something that makes me happy – I jogged 10 kilometres this weekend. I have to write out kiiilllooooometres because it makes it look longer :P It took me tooooooooo long but at least below the time requirement needed to enter February’s race. I was really really scared of that race because I didn’t know if I could do the distance let alone make good time. Now I know that I probably won’t make good time – but I think I can finish. The next three weekends will be spent learning how to pace myself. On Saturday I intentionally went slower and took a few walking breaks just to make sure I didn’t exhaust myself before getting home. The thing I didn’t lose energy so much as my hip started cramping up and my knees were hurting – I think probably because I was jogging more than running, my feet spent more time on the ground thus there was more impact to my hips and knees…no? Maybe, maybe not. I will try to quicken my pace next weekend and we will see what happens. Still a little scared!
On a completely different note, I am becoming more and more and more intolerable to food of the onion and garlic variety. If I have too much garlic I will wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back to sleep because of the bad taste left in my mouth and the aura of garlic smell that I know clouds my body. Yeah garlic is smelly but onion? Yes onion too. The good thing is that Japanese food does not commonly have too much garlic or onion. The bad thing is that most people like garlic a lot and future turning down of stinky rose-d food might be a put off. The good thing is that I can avoid garlic breath and spending 30 dollars on the Kiss Me Meter.
It’s all random today as I am getting things randomly done but at least, I think, getting things done.
Expression I learned at my lesson the other day (probably old school saying):
彼はかめればかむほど味が分かります。
(kare wa kamereba kamu hodo aji ga wakarimasu)
Meaning sort of “concerning this person…the more you chew on him the better you can come to understand his flavour”. I like it.
starting to learning kanji?
Lately I have been on this kick where I suddenly want to learn a lot of kanji. Not that I didn’t want to learn it before but it seemed a little impossible. Thought I would just focus on the learning to talk and listen part. But while conversation is the sweet sweet cherry pie filling, kanji is the crust that holds it together. K – sorry, food analogy used because I am hungry right now. Though if I were to pick something to eat it wouldn’t be cherry pie.
Kanji is incredible though. Studying the characters is like a game in finding meanings, combinations, and ways to remember. Each symbol has maybe one base meaning and one or two or three or four or…usually 2-3 pronunciations. A kanji will often be used in other words that are either heavily or sooomewhat related to the base meaning so when you learn the loose meaning of a symbol, you can start to gather what a word you don’t know might be about. Some examples I like:
自動車 (jidōsha) = automobile, 車 (kuruma) = car (?for short?)
自動 (jidō) = automatic, self-motion
販売 (hanbai) = sales, selling, marketing
機 (ki) = machine
together 自動販売機 (jidōhanbaiki) = vending machine
OK I guess I could find more interesting examples with some little time spent on the DS but to paint a picture without too much effort on my part.
I wanna become a kanji nerd. If there is one thing I will do in my life it is learn them all. Why not?
soggy box
If what I could write about was like going to a party, I’d be showing up naked for that party and while I might entertain and it would be the most honest thing for me to do, I don’t know if it would be socially acceptable and it could haunt me the next day.
Things in this box have been slow. There is a lot I could potentially fill it with but it all seems too personal. Lately I’ve been debating whether it seems too personal because it is or because I am too scared and retreating into myself.
Or it might be because I don’t have Internet in my apartment or because of this whole actually being productive for most of an entire day thing.
I have thoughts of shutting things down, closing the box. But I don’t want to. I need an outlet. But is this it? Lately I am lacking a satisfying way to express myself. I am racking my brain to find out what that new way will be.
I am a little scared that it is just me getting older and jaded and not so expressive.
My song today (thanks to younger bro): Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “The Skin of my Yellow Country Teeth”.
wedding dresses
So I am not drunk anymore but I have been so preoccupied with my New Year’s resolutions…
heh
Actually one of them was to think less about things when thinking is not doing. Perhaps the reduced thinking affects my writing.
But today at lunch I was asking a coworker about her wedding dress which was delivered to her house yesterday. It got me thinking about how it is too bad you only wear the dress once. I considered – if I get married, how often will I try my dress on again and again after the wedding date? How much will it make me cry if it stops fitting?
Then I started thinking that we should have some type of special occasion garment that we can wear for parts of all life’s special occasions and it remains the same throughout our entire lifetime. What would it look like? A superhero costume naturally. I’ve contemplated what my superhero costume would be a number of times but this time I actually thought about the permanency of it. Would I wear a skirt and high boots? What would my colour be?
I might design one, have it made and wear it for like…15 minutes during my possible wedding ceremony. Then, if by chance I were to get a divorce, I think it would be the most hilarious thing to wear again at the lawyer’s office.
