Hiromi_X

I was on the bike again today, and it was really uncomfortable even at 9 pm. The people in cars around me -- or at least the ones in the newer models -- were coasting in air conditioned comfort. The road was crowded with vehicles with one passenger only.

This kind of lifestyle isn't sustainable, people driving around everywhere by themselves in a car. I opted out of this, but in that process, I'm subjecting myself to some discomfort. I could've taken the bus instead of riding my bike, but not all the bus stops are shaded, and the buses vary in frequency. I could be out in the sun for hours if I took the bus.

I am committed to viral change, but sometimes I wonder how this can be possible. How can I sell people on a carless existence? It's very uncomfortable to live this way in south central Texas. I was downright miserable today. I can't say that I'm glad to be in this mental state, but I can't bring myself to own a car anymore. But who's going to be on board with me?

An obvious solution is improved public transportation and the cessation of this fucking insane overbuilding of roadways combined with better city planning. Ahahahahaha! I'm not asking much at all, am I? Frankly, I don't see the gubmint helping me and my kind on this issue any time soon.

In the meantime, how the hell can I keep up my hope?

Maybe I can convince people to give up their cars from October to April at least?

Just to be clear, I don't mean to scold any of you readers who ride around in a car by yourself. But this is an issue that I think needs to be talked about, regardless of people's feelings. It seems to me that our political leaders avoid this very conversation because they don't want voters to feel bad about themselves and their consumption and lifestyle habits.

Anyway, I'm going to be taking a short blogging vacation for Memorial Day. Y'all enjoy your weekends!

Posted by Hiromi at 1:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Mongo lift body weight. Mongo ride motorcycle. Mongo go to Whole Foods to buy humanely raised chicken legs. A very cute meat counter attendant does double take as Mongo walk by. He then blows off another customer who was talking to him to help Mongo. Mongo ask about chicken raising practices. Mongo get chicken and Italian pork sausage. Mongo go home.

*sigh*

It's not like I'm determined to get into the meat counter guy's pants, but it would be nice to have a flirtation. I just don't know how to do it.

:(

Posted by Hiromi at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I'm becoming more and more committed lately to the idea of viral change. Richard Dawkins might call what I'm talking about a meme, and an article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine likened urban violence to a virus. Both of these ideas are similar to mine. The amount of shit that needs to be fixed in our world can be pretty overwhelming; given the scale of our problems, our individual actions seem pretty puny. But I honestly believe there are no empty gestures. I believe that if I act consistently, whether in reducing the amount of natural resources I consume or simply kind and considerate and shit and generally raising the tone of social interactions, someone else will pick up on my actions. And then that person will spread them as I did.

I've absolutely no proof that this actually works, but I'm going to treat this as a grand experiment on my part. Who knows? Maybe soon the world will be full of foodie motorcyclists.

Posted by Hiromi at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Worlds collided yesterday. I went to Wal-Mart.

It was an interesting cultural experience. I avoid Wal-Mart for a number of reasons ranging from my objection to their business practices to the overall depressing atmosphere there. There are few things less aesthetically pleasing than a Wal-Mart. I haven't been there in years. However, I have had crap luck in finding a good oil change pan, so I said "Fuck it" and went. I was an alien there, just like I felt like an alien when I went to Z-Tejas, a local yuppie shithole here in Austin. Wal-Mart ain't the only place I'm an alien. Anyways. The nexus which brought me, the alien, to the world of the denizens of Wal-Mart was my oil change self-reliance. Here. I draw a Venn diagram for you:

Okay, look, I realize that I am risking sounding like an elitist asshole and that even though I bitch about being "poor," I still have the luxury of deciding where to spend my money, but Wal-Mart is fucken depressing, people. I absolutely cannot stand to smell popcorn and fake butter when I shop for things. I hate bad lighting and disorder in the aisles. I don't mind quaint clutter, but I do mind impersonal, institutional clutter.

I had my backpack with me, and so did not get a plastic bag. As I walked out of the store, I was asked for a receipt. I've never been suspected of shoplifting before (whether or not I actually have is beside the point). Feeling oddly pleased about being singled out for a security check, I proudly handed over my receipt to the "greeter" who asked me. When I rode out of the parking lot, I must have run over about three or four of those giant plastic disposable cups of drink. I proceeded out of the parking lot and onto a giant concrete slab of a highway lined on either side with anonymous strip malls and storage units. I was so glad to return to my leafy piece of central Austin.

As much of a leftie as I am, I must say I can't really relate to the working class folks who go to Wal-Mart. And unlike certain presidential candidates, I don't particularly feel like pretending I can relate to them. Does this mean I look down on them? No. Does this mean I think I'm better than them? No. Being unable to relate is not a sin.

I mean, shit, do we really expect presidential candidates to be like us? Come on, they're all exceptional in terms of ambition, drive, whatever. They're not regular, "average" people for chrissake. Who cares if they're like us? They don't have to be. They just have to *listen* to us.

Posted by Hiromi at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

My sister called me and my other sister last week to let us know that this weekend was the last weekend that Lucy (Lucy the hominid; Australopithecus afarensis, to be precise) would be in Houston at the Museum of Natural Science. So I got picked up at the ungodly hour of 8 am on Saturday for the trip to Houston. I'm still afraid of getting a flat tire or something on my bike, and am therefore reluctant to go on a long road trip by myself.

There's something special about seeing the original, seeing the thing itself. I couldn't help feeling a tingle in my spine when I saw the Rosetta stone at the British Museum. I made a last-minute detour to Florence during my trip to Venice to see David and the Birth of Venus. I had no idea the Birth of Venus was such a huge painting; it almost knocked me on my ass with its spectacular colors. In addition to satisfying my food obsession, I travel to see The Original; Original Sightings in my collection also include the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa, and the bas relief sculptures in Angkor Wat and the haunting disheveled beauty of Ta Prohm. It's one thing to know about beauty and wonder; it's another thing entirely to see it in person. It's like the objects themselves have power. When you are close to them, you can almost see the hands of the people who worked on them. You can feel their ghostly presence.

It was likewise wonderful to see Lucy. Seeing her bones in person was different from reading about her. I imagined the ligaments that held bone to bone, the tendons that held muscle to bone, and the blood that fed them. What sounds came from her vocal cords to emerge from between the carefully arranged jawbones in the display? What thoughts were contained within the delicate, curved bones that remained of her skull?

When I come across such powerful objects, I like to take a long, initial look. Then walk away, then come back. Look at one part. Walk away, come back, look at another. I don't just look and leave. I have to keep coming back to look again.

We went without my sister's two boys, aged 4 and 18 months. Honestly, it was kind of a relief to just be the three of us.

I feel strange, though, about my attitude toward my nephews. When they were wee babies, I loved to hold them, cuddle them, and sing stupid little songs to them. But now that they're toddling about, they're a pain in the ass. I hate playing little games with them because you end up doing the same goddamn things over and over and Over and OVER. It drives me batshit, so I tend to avoid playing with them. But it makes me sad that I'm That Kind of Person.

I'm reminded of this conversation from The Last Crusade:

Indy: It was just the two of us, dad. It was a lonely way to grow up. For you, too. If you had been an ordinary, average father like the other guys' dads, you'd have understood that.
Professor Jones: Actually, I was a wonderful father.
Indy: When?
Professor Jones: Did I ever tell you to eat up? Go to bed? Wash your ears? Do your homework? No. I respected your privacy and I taught you self- reliance.
Indy: What you taught me was that I was less important to you than people who had been dead for five hundred years in another country. And I learned it so well that we've hardly spoken for twenty years.
Professor Jones: You left just when you were becoming interesting!

I want my nephews to hurry up and quit babbling like idiots and learn adult speech and develop an attention span so we can have interesting conversations.

However, my Great Northern Migration will occur in about six weeks. Now I wonder whether I've blown my chance of establishing a base with my nephews with my standoffish behavior in recent months.

Why do I have to be such a fucken oddball??? Why can't I be Good Auntie???

Posted by Hiromi at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The topic of veiling in Muslim societies came up at work today. I tried not to groan aloud. There's nothing worse than half-informed conversations. It was mentioned that some Muslim women like being hidden from the male gaze. One woman said, "I feel so sorry for them [the women]. They grow up brainwashed by their traditions."

I replied, "In some other society somewhere, people are sitting around saying of Americans, 'I feel so sorry for them. They grow up brainwashed into believing they are the center of the universe. Can you imagine believing that the raw pursuit of self-interest is a virtue?'"

In some of the societies that require veiling, women aren't allowed to go to school. Bad? Yes. But what sins are we guilty of? We Americans and our lifestyle are the driving force behind the carbon output that's behind climate change. We're talking droughts and possibly famine on a large scale here. But try to get people to change their habits to reduce their contribution to carbon output, and you find yourself up against a mindset that frames consumption choices as rights.

Posted by Hiromi at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I take the bus to work on days when I don't feel like riding in the rain. I've noticed that the majority of bus riders tend to fall into two distinct categories: lower-income people and college students. The remainder of the people are cyclists, the occasional tourist, and random people like me.

I don't like traveling during rush hour anywhere near UT. College students tend to have absolute shit manners on the bus. For chrissake, when it's crowded and people need to get on, move your ass to the back of the bus and make room for them! But no...the students stand their ground, stare vacantly into space, and pretend to not notice what's going on. They either cluster annoyingly at the front of the bus near the entrance, blocking other people trying to come in, or else they refuse to move past the rear door located in the center of the bus. Some stand in the area in front of the rear doors and lean against the partitions that separate it from the seats, blocking people trying to get off. I can never understand what's so weird about standing in the aisles in the rear of the bus. There are handholds. It's exactly the same as standing in the aisles at the front of the bus.

I believe it's more than a matter of simply lacking good manners. These motherfuckers are totally unwilling to undergo a little discomfort for the sake of others. It escapes them that they share the bus with other people. It's the same kind of goddamn selfishness and entitlement that drives people to consume, consume, consume, get the biggest, get the most opulent, at whatever the cost to others.

Sometimes, I really do wonder whether people have the capacity to change and stop wallowing in their comfort zones.

Posted by Hiromi at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

When I cut someone off, I'm pretty successful at cutting them off. Even the guy in my first serious relationship -- the guy who dumped me for someone more "appropriate," who I spent a year or more pining for, a year in which my depression-induced weight loss put me at middle school-levels -- when that guy contacted me by email twice, once last year and again about a month ago, I didn't acknowledge receiving them. I went from achingly thinking about him non-stop for about a year after the breakup, to intermittent thoughts, and then to my current state of affectionate indifference. By that I mean I don't hate or resent him, and I will always, always appreciate him for being there when I most needed someone. I believe in the goodness of his heart, but I simply don't want, or need, to go back.

As for The Ex-husband, a person who most definitely lacks a good heart, I had to learn to squash any thought of him for the sake of my sanity and happiness. Any thought of him would inevitably lead to intrusive memories of the abuse and spiraling hatred of him and his creepy family. But last night curiosity got the better of me and I found some info on him online. Apparently, he has a girlfriend now. I prevented myself from discovering anything more specific than that. It pissed me off momentarily.

It wasn't jealousy. I mean, yuck. What I felt was anger that he wasn't living in sackcloth and ashes and whipping himself with nettles in atonement for how he treated me. I wanted him to live under the torment of realizing that he'd never, ever get anyone nearly as good as me.

But I'm making progress -- those thoughts lasted for maybe an hour at most. I don't want to waste any mental energy on him. He's taken enough of my life. Although I have to admit to a lingering hope that he catches a glimpse of me in public, sees what a fabulous, gorgeous badass I've become, and then drops dead.

Posted by Hiromi at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)