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)

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)

Some questions:

1) Scenario 1: A man makes a fortune from stealing from people. He passes that money on to his children. The rightful owners of the money demand it back. Should the children give it back, even though they themselves didn't steal it? Why?

2) Scenario 2: If you answered yes to #1, can the rightful owners demand it of the thief's grandchildren? Or the rightful owner's children from other descendants of the thief?

Posted by Hiromi at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

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)

Granted, this is nothing new: yet another poll revealing Americans' lack of general knowledge. The poll was conducted by some thinktank or other that bemoans the fixation on standardized testing in reading and math in public schools and promotes the teaching of liberal arts. The NY Times highlighted this comment on that page:

The sad truth is you don't need a knowledge of history or literature to succeed in almost all jobs. Haven't noticed any discussions about the Treaty of Westphalia at my workplace lately, and I work for a university.

I don't have any criticism of the commenter; instead, what bugs me is that the he is responding to what's probably the #1 justification for teaching liberal arts: It Will Help You Succeed. Critical Thinking Skills Are Valued By Employers.

Those are, I believe, the most persuasive arguments to most people for a liberal arts curriculum. But there's more to life than making money. Of course, having money and financial security is a good thing, but what about being a well-rounded, fully engaged citizen? Call me old-fashioned, but I think there are more worthy pursuits than self-interested consumption.

And yeah, you can learn things by doing in addition to reading. But your personal experience is necessarily limited; however many things you do, you do it from your point of view and through your eyes. When you do things like read novels or explore art, you get to see the world through another's perspective. When you do those things, you're not just engaging in a dialogue, you're getting into someone's head. It's the closest you can come to living another life. You not only deepen your perspective, you widen it.

The other day, I encountered someone who said that things in the past are over and done with, that there's only one logical reason that things occur, and there's essentially no point in going back and analyzing past events to figure out why they happened. In other words, there's no point to studying history. This guy has the right to vote, by the way, which is a little worrisome. No, I'm *not* saying there should be an educational requirement or intelligence test in order to vote. What bothers me is his unwillingness to be anything but ignorant.

Posted by Hiromi at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I wanna be a carefree motherfucker, but life keeps kicking me in the ass.

For fucked up reasons I won't go into here, I can no longer get health insurance through my employer. I've never not been without health insurance. The thought of not having any is damn scary to me, so I've been shopping around for individual insurance. As a result, I've been spending more time than I'd like filled with teeth-grinding fury and righteous bile.

Cheap insurance is cheap for a reason. It sucks. For someone with a number of "pre-existing conditions," most of these aren't an option. I take damn good care of my health. I've exercised regularly since I was a kid. My diet's pretty damn good; I even eat quinoa for chrissake. But I do go to the doc fairly frequently for shit I can't help, and I'm on a number of meds, so a policy with a $5000 annual deductible -- the ones that I can afford have ridiculous deductibles -- isn't going to cut it.

Jesus.

To me, health care is a fucken right, just like education is a fucken right. I'm well above the official poverty line, but here I am, falling in the gap between the have's and have-not's.

I can't exactly quit my current job and look for another job that has insurance. For one thing, when you have specific skills, you can't just happily transfer here and there. But it seems that in this country, your worth is measured by your potential income. If you can't afford insurance, well, I guess you can just get sick and die. Or else go into bankruptcy if you refuse to die and instead run up huge medical bills.

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm committing the deadly sin of "whining." In my bleeding heart liberal mind fog, I forgot that I'm the captain of my fate, the puller-up of my bootstraps. It's on all of us, alone, individually. Each and every one of our miseries is a direct result of personal failure. We're not meant to look out for and care for each other. To each his own. Only the strongest survive. Anything other than that is godless communism.

I guess all us sad sacks just need to find a better job. If we don't have the capacity to acquire marketable skills, or if the skills we have don't command a high wage, well, then, too damn bad I guess. We'll get winnowed out. Survival of the fittest and all. After all, the market determines who is fit, and the dictates of the market are no less than holy writ. So maybe we can get second or third jobs. Sad sacks like us don't deserve some quality of life. We're cogs, we're grinds, we're fucken worker bees, who gives a fuck about us.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The BBC reports here on an overweight boy taken from his mother by child protection services because she overfed him, something that has been done in approximately two dozen other cases. The reasoning is that allowing a child to become obese is a form of neglect.

While that's happening in the UK, I can see that sort of thing happening here. It is just creepy, how far the "For your own good" argument for greater regulation can go. These arguments seem particularly powerful when they involve medical or public health issues; the presence of statistics and data from studies bolster the appearance of benignity or neutrality: We're Just Trying to Help. As a doctor quoted in the article stated, "The net result is that the kind of moralising the obese and overweight have always suffered has somehow become institutionalised."

Posted by Hiromi at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

There must be a vibe today -- I'm chiming in with a post on "racist" humor. Before falling asleep last night, I was watching a Whoopi Goldberg special on Bravo. Toward the end, she tells three jokes, the last of which she says might anger "The Community." I perked up here, being a member of a "Community" myself. She tells two parrot jokes (not relevant here), and then ended with this joke (my typing can't capture her delivery -- you'll have to substitute her voice in your mind as you read):

Up in heaven, there was a little black baby. He was flying around happily, and then he sees God.

"Hi God!" he says.
"Hey there" says God.
"God," he asks, "can I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"Then I'll go over there!" ::Whoopi as little baby flitting over to God::
"God, since I have these little wings on my shoulders, am I an angel?"

::comedic pause::

"No nigger, you a bat."

I cracked right up, and am giggling as I type this. After she told that joke, she invited the audience to think about why they laughed, or why they didn't.

As best as I can tell, I laughed because
1) The surprise factor. God isn't supposed to say mean things like that to a baby -- one humorist (I can't remember who) once said that one essential element of comedy is surprise, to provide an unexpected ending to a narrative. Also, given her phrasing of God's reply, could God be black? Another surprise perhaps, given the persistence of received images of him as bearded old white man?
2) To build on the surprise factor of #1, isn't it also an amusing commentary on how persistent certain racial perceptions are despite our attempts to get rid of them? This isn't to blame or scold the audience, simply to remind us of the prevalence of these ideas; they're part of the ether, so to speak.
3) She "transgressed" current standards of sensitivity. (Please, I must ask that no one use the loaded pejorative "political correctness"), but
4) Would it be funny if a comedian of another race/ethnicity had told it?

What do you guys think? I hope this can be discussed calmly and without rancor or dismissiveness of people's "sensitivity" -- remember, walk a mile in a man's shoes, 'kay?

Posted by Hiromi at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

I'm a cat person. I loved our family kitties to a ridiculous extent. The little creatures were part of our family. And like many indulgent pet owners, nothing was too good for our kitties. Including their food. They got nutrionally balanced food. Food good for their fur or digestive system and special formulas for elderly cats. I never wondered how those foods were formulated.

This article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine was a rude suprise. Here's an excerpt:

I had been told that in the basement of the animal-science laboratory building at the University of Illinois, Dr. George Fahey kept a colony of strange-looking dogs. At Fahey’s orders, each of the dogs had undergone a surgical procedure to string a length of tubing from its intestinal tract to a clear plastic spout that stuck out its side. Fahey, a professor of animal and nutritional sciences, could open a spout by hand, fill a bag with whatever happened to ooze out and calculate how much the dog had digested before whatever it had not digested could move farther through its body. The plastic tubing was inserted in the ileum — the exact spot where food absorption ends and fermentation by the microflora and bacteria of the lower bowel begins. Given a large enough sample of any dog food, George Fahey could calculate how much vitamin or mineral or fat or sugar would enter a dog’s bloodstream and how much would be irretrievably lost. Fahey has spent his career investigating the metabolism of domestic animals, and his research has helped define the nature of pet food.

In addition to his dog colony, Fahey supervised a number of other nutrition laboratories in the university’s department of animal sciences, and for the most part his workaday hardware consisted of the various contrivances necessary to measure how much food a pet might or might not digest. Thus the baroque collections of viscometers, desiccators and pulverizers, the vials brimming with dog excreta laced with acid, the racks of test tubes filled with cat urine, the containers of canine and feline gastric fluid and the retorts of dog and cat blood. The largest of his labs contained a walk-in refrigerator holding glass jars of secret-coded dog and cat diets, experimental feeds of the future that in their present states resembled nothing more than heaps of brown dust.

The names of the pet food companies that use the information Dr. Fahey produces were not named. The fascinating thing -- and it's appropriate that this topic should come after my Cloaca post -- is that much of his research revolves around producing dog poop pleasing to humans. I mean "pleasing" as in regular, compact, and tidy -- can't have incontinent dogs, or giant splattery messy poos. I imagine the same goes for cats, with perhaps even more urgency.

Very few of us live on farms and produce our own food. We live in cities, and get our food trucked in for us, already picked, already slaughtered. Same goes for our city dwelling pets. They don't hunt; we put their food in a bowl on the floor. When they do hunt -- like when cats, according to their nature, stalk and kill songbirds -- we disapprove. Their owners should know better. These aren't wild animals; they're meant to live in our houses and eat politely, just like us.

I hadn't thought of the ways that, apart from their domestication, our pets are positioned in a man-made hierarchy. Sure, they eat the leftovers from our factory farming processes, the glands and organs and odds and ends that humans don't eat. You can draw a parallel betwen that and how people in earlier times might have tossed a scrap or two to their animals. But our pets today eat their daily meals thanks to the suffering of a lesser class of animals. Unwanted animals get tubes inserted into them and ground up after death to make sure those lucky to be counted as members of the human family may eat well and not inconvenience us with the true messiness of their existence.

On the other hand, super-elite pets can exist guilt-free. The article mentions a dog food that is completely organic and cruelty-free. It costs $7.50 a pound, so the great unwashed mass of pets will eat the food produced courtesy of a troubling animal-testing system. It's absolutely creepy to me, how we made their world mirror ours.

Posted by Hiromi at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

If you want to see independent or art films in Austin, you'll generally go to the Dobie Theatre. It's right up against the campus of UT Austin in Dobie Mall, which is a high-rise dorm (I guess for rich students) with a small complex of shops on the bottom floors. It's essentially part of the campus, as it runs seamlessly into it.

So I go there the other day and went through the mall on the way to the theatre, and spotted an IKEA! An IKEA mini-outlet at a university! Also, driving down Guadalupe, the street that runs right in front of the plaza in front of UT's clock tower, I saw a sign on one of the buildings that said, "Starbucks Coming Soon!"

Is it just me who thinks this is weird? Aren't universities supposed to be incubators of new and different ideas? Aren't they supposed to be eclectic? Don't the people who study and work at universities want variety and difference? Hell, why don't the business school students run a coffee shop on campus? Or maybe they're too busy trying to get hired by some mega-corporation. No future in small local business, I suppose.

Maybe I'm some kind of dinosaur the last of whose kind was found in the 60s, but the arty movie theatre is, to me, appropriate for a university campus. But fast food franchises? Corporate coffee? Mega-stores? Isn't a university a community? These things are antithetical to fostering a community.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid, seeing corporate boogeymen everywhere.

Posted by Hiromi at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

"DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM???"

You know those ridiculous movie scenes of some privileged person expressing their outrage at their mistreatment with the above statement? I felt like that this morning. I wanted to bellow that phrase at the incompetent morons at this franchise dental clinic. That is not a place I'd normally go. Franchising is a concept which just doesn't sit right when applied to health care in my opinion. Discount healthcare seems a bad idea, but I couldn't get an appointment with my usual dentist until October, and this was just x-rays and other routine shit, so I scheduled an appointment yesterday for today. I was off today for other reasons, so I thought, why not.

There's something dismal about that place. My usual dentist works out of a converted house in central Austin. He kept the porch intact as well as other cool features of the original house, including the original wood. The lobby was the living room with nice plushy furniture. The staff are friendly and smart.

The office I went to is located in a charmless strip mall off IH35. The proletariat workers ignored me when I came in. I stood at the counter for a full minute before anyone addressed me. The lumpen patients sat in hard plastic chairs in a dingy lobby with stains on the dreary grey carpet. There were no separate rooms for each patient; instead, they were lined up in chairs like a beauty parlor. The tile was showing cracks. They kept me waiting for an hour. After I said I had waited long enough and told them I was leaving, they rushed me through a half-hearted exam that left me feeling like a dog or cat getting its teeth checked by a vet. The hygienist didn't speak to me. She roughly poked around my mouth and jabbed my gums. She stabbed my lip at one point.

I walked right out after that. I shoulda run out long before, but this was my only day off. Anyway, I know my insurance covers exams with no copay, so I just left. They later left a message on my cell phone that I needed to call back for my "treatment plan". HA! After the way I was treated, do they think I'm stupid enough to let them dig deeper into my mouth? Actually tamper with my teeth? I later googled them and uncovered all kinds of negative customer reviews. No wonder they could schedule last minute appointments.

This is another way I'm a member of a privileged class. Although I don't have shitloads of disposable income, I'm used to living and being treated a certain way. I know that I don't need to be treated that way, and I will not put up with it. I also have the resources (good health insurance, and more importantly, knowledge) to find alternatives. But many people don't. And that depresses me more than the crappy exam I got.

Posted by Hiromi at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

One thing I hear a lot from Europeans and Asians is this: "America has no history."

When I hear this, I counter "American Indians have been around for thousands of years."

They'll pause, look thoughtful, and usually reply along the lines of "You don't see palaces or temples, and there aren't nearly as many ruins or things like that compared with Europe/Asia."

So I guess history equals things like architecture, texts, and durable works of art.

Update: In case there's any misunderstanding, the people I talked to aren't necessarily racist or bigoted; nor are they unintelligent. I just found their remarks to be worth some thought.

Posted by Hiromi at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I read a few things about doping and "cheating" in sports that bugged me for about a week, but I couldn't really say why. Here are some excerpts from the NY Times article (click on "continue reading" if you want to see the whole thing):

Here's the problem: The confluence of scandals might suggest that sport has reached some shocking nadir, at which celebrity, commercialism, multimillion-dollar salaries, doping and bad behavior have won out over authenticity and integrity in the pursuit of athletic excellence. But has it, really?

Reasons why it's not a problem: The legitimacy of competition, after all, has repeatedly been cast into doubt for more than a century.

"Don’t give me any of that ‘Chariots of Fire’ stuff; cut the box of Wheaties bull...There’s nothing pure about it. The noble cause is all gone. These guys are entertainers, period, in the money sports. They’re not role models.”

I'm not a huge sports fan, but this bothers me. Maybe I'm one of very few -- the fact that sales of tickets to sporting events and viewership of sports events on TV have not declined with increased scandals suggests that most actual fans don't give a rat's ass. But it's not just about sports; the above reasoning say things about society as a whole that bug me: 1) entertainment is all about "spectacle" (balls hit out of the park, etc.) rather than something that requires thought, 2) cheating or dodgy performance enhancement has *always* been around so why whine about it, and 3) "fair play" and "good sportsmanship" are childlike values with no function in The Real World, especially The Real World of Business and Entertainment Where The Stakes are High.

While part of me is an unapologetic elitist who rolls her eyes and mutters "no one has ever gone broke underestimating the taste of the American public" when seeing previews of summer blockbusters or the proliferation of fast food restaurants and strip malls, the larger part of me believes -- or wants to believe - that people can and want to be challenged. Or am I being silly -- do sports fans in general genuinely prefer spectacular feats of brute strength and endurance over subtle demonstrations of skill and technique? Are they unmoved by the discipline and dedication it takes to perform at top levels?

In the end, I believe in the purity of sports and all other human endeavors. If people want nothing but spectacle, I don't give a fuck -- I think we all deserve more than that. I think that providing entertainment that requires thought is -- dare I say it -- good for us. I hate cynicism; often, it's nothing more than a lack of imagination. As someone who is trying to learn how to live after attempting to die, many things that are worthwhile are so because they're difficult. The journey there is an eye-opening wonder, and there is nothing like finally arriving at your destination completely transformed. Maybe those who argue that cheating doesn't matter and it's all just spectacle have never experienced that.

Continue reading "Ethics are for wimps" »

Posted by Hiromi at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Here, it seems like people go through the day with teeth gritted, and when the slightest thing goes wrong, they blow up. I've always felt that I was different, and to an extent, that's true. A friend from work who used to work in Bolivia told me of a conversation she had with a Bolivian friend about her trip to Switzerland. He asked her incredulously, You mean, the buses and trains are never late? They're always on time? She answered, Yes. He replied, How boring! You always know what's going to happen! I sympathized with this; I hate regularity and schedules. That's one reason I loved travelling alone. I woke up each day not knowing what would happen.

Last week, my family and I took a car trip to Hilo (we were staying on the Kona-side). On the way there, we stopped by Tex Drive In, a little restaurant famous for its malasadas, which are Podagee (Portuguese) donuts similar to sopapillas or beignets. They're deep fried balls of yeast dough dusted with sugar. I wanted those and a loco moco, the pure incarnation of which is a scoop of rice topped with a hamburger patty and an egg over easy and brown gravy all over (shut up -- it's delicious).

Anyway, there was a really long line of locals (good sign) and it took forever to get our order placed. Even though the place was really busy, they weren't moving fast at all. For instance, when I asked for forks, the guy (who appeared to be one of the owners or managers) gave a friendly smile, said Oh, I need to go to the back for those, and strolled to the back. They all WALKED SO SLOWLY, and kept on talking story with the customers, which made them walk even more slowly. It took a while to get all our stuff. The food was all very good, though.

This wasn't bad service; it was people operating on Hawaii Time. Nobody complained. Instead, they just took things as they came good-naturedly, knowing they'll get their tasty meals eventually. I, however, had my teeth gritted and wanted to shout, Where's our fucking bento??? Get those goddamn forks NOW!!! But if that place were to get "efficient," it would lose something. I was a little disillusioned that I've internalized the now-now-now, keep-on-the-goddamn-schedule mentality that I loathe, but there it is. I'm the child of my environment, but only partway. I prefer Hawaii Time to Mainland Time.

The ATM in the little convenience store attached to our condo complex kept malfunctioning, but the proprietor had no idea when the repair guy would show up. When telling us this, we joked, Oh yeah, he's probably surfing, and he smiled and said, Hawaii Time. Before my surfing lesson, the instructors were off doing something, but that was okay. I got the full lesson in the end, and had a good time watching other surfing students and people on the beaches playing around. We had to shop for necessities at a very large big box retailer with an unpleasant reputation, and it was as crowded and congested as the ones here, but there was no franticness or frenetic-ness.

Now that I'm back, I'm having trouble describing this pace of life. Hawaii (or at least the Big Island) is totally different from the mainland. It's not just about stunning natural beauty, although that's a big part of its magic. It has its own music, its own language, and its own style of living. It's no mere place or vacation destination to me. While you arguably can find ocean just as beautiful as Hawaii elsewhere, to me, those aren't *my* oceans because they're not part of my soul. I have wonderful childhood memories of Hawaii rendered holy by a lifetime of longing. Those happy memories sustained me through some ugly times. And better still, my experience there met or exceeded expectations. There was no disillusionment, as there often is with these things. That's why I still feel so cut off from my surroundings now. It's so quiet here. There's no sound of the ocean, and that makes me sad.

Posted by Hiromi at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I know you all know what I'm talking about -- 32 people dead. Being unable to handle the inevitable TV frenzy, I scanned the print news for information. And sure enough, there were comments that smacked of prescription: people demanding why Virginia Tech didn't do more to protect students (do I need to point out that it's a school, not a military installation?), that Virginia has some of the most lax gun laws, and the inevitable description of the gunman as a "loner." We're going to hear calls for greater campus security, the drawing up of emergency plans, stricter gun control laws, surveillance of weirdos, and education on "how to detect warning signs" of imminent rampage.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that random attacks by psychopaths cannot be prevented by these broad measures. No, I'm not saying that we should be mere sitting ducks; I'm saying it's a mistake to put us on constant red alert. All I can say is that there is a dual element to human existence: while our brains, which some might term the pinnacle of evolution, produce amazing works of beauty, they also produce acts of depravity beyond anything produced by the lesser brains of animals.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (42)

Then they come for your labia, your anus, and now your nipples!

By "they" I mean the commercial colonizers of the Land of Private Lady Parts.

I have Rufus to thank for the news flash. To get to the article, click on the ad they tell you to click on, and then click "having trouble viewing article" below the ad.

As if pressure to jack up boob size weren't enough, now women are told to worry about nipple color! The above Salon article reports on the hue and cry over a new product: nipple rouge. As explained by a spokeswoman for the company, "Women want nipples to be pert and fresh-looking...[f]or a long time, the idea of a ripe, rosy nipple has been considered appealing and alluring." Ha!

As a consumer, it's a stupid product, a lame attempt to get some mileage out of an obscure product line. Nipple makeup defeats the whole purpose of nipple allurement. Who wants their nipples to just be looked at? And it's "kiss proof," but who wants just a peck on the nipple?

It merits a mere eyeroll from me, but others see darker designs behind nipple painting. The author of this article in New York Magazine calls nipple paint "one more sign of the stripperization of the Everywoman," and quotes NOW president in New York Sonia Ossorio as stating, "I can barely keep up with keeping my nails manicured, much less this nauseating onslaught of new beauty standards. While women are spending their energy, time, and money getting their areolas just the right shade of pink, the Supreme Court is getting more conservative and closer to taking away our long-fought right to reproductive choice."

While it goes without saying that one might tint one's nipples and still find time to pay attention to reproductive rights, and that it's uncertain whether one product by one company constitutes an onslaught, this story nevertheless brought to mind other examples of alleged Lady Parts Colonization.

Vaginal rejuvenation and labial makeovers, for instance. This was one of the first to catch the attention of the media; here's a second article. As with most cosmetic procedures, there are "legitimate" reasons for vaginal/labial surgery, including botched episiotomies, severely loosened vaginal or pelvic floor muscles, and labia minora enlarged enough to cause physical, not aesthetic, discomfort. There *are*, however, disconcerting aspects to the aestheticization of body parts -- minor flaws are made matters of huge concern, and the results stress uniformity. Check out these before and after labia photos: many of the results look weirdly juvenile.

In any case, according to the Salon article, very few women are actually having the procedure done. The New York Times article is notable for its lack of actual numbers. The author quotes surgeons who say their business has quadrupled, but let's remember that going from two patients to eight qualifies as quadrupling. Other vague phrases include "remarkably amazing patient interest." This sounds like self-promotion on the part of the surgeons, not an actual surgical trend. It seems that the high profile of labiaplasty was attributable to a proliferation of ads or promotions alone; this does not constitute "colonization" to me. Also, does anyone remember the brief flurry over anal bleaching? This turned out to be mostly urban legend born of rumors heard by magazine editors from other style mavens who heard it from...you get the picture, and a few letters to sex columnists. In my own anal bleaching research, I came up with one sort-of documented example.

Panic over Private Lady Part colonization takes away from the larger issue of unattainable beauty standards. These standards bother me because they don't square with my idea of what a good society is like. I don't like living in a society in which even models can't be seen au naturel. Examples of how models are altered to conform to standard:

An interesting commercial for Dove's real beauty campaign.
Before and after model shots: here (click portfolio, then agree, then before/after) and here.
One of the best before and after sites: this has made the internet rounds several times.

But on the other hand, does any of this really mean anything? Now that I think about it, are these indicative of societal expectations for real people, or expectations of images of people in print media? Does anyone really expect actual people to look this way, or only simulacra of people to look this way?

In any case, I want to see real people both in real life and more often in the media.

Which is why I'm concerned about stupid beauty products and procedures; in my view, Hiromi the Consumer has much more power for change than Hiromi the Voter. How can I make society a happier place for women to live? By changing my consumption patterns to encourage the formation of an alternate corporate culture, 'cause let's face it: the public sphere is dominated by Evil Corporate Motherfuckers. I can shout as loud as I like, but only my money gets heard.

Posted by Hiromi at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

I did something unthinkable today -- I got up at 8:00. And then I went to an early yoga class. It was cloudy, cool, and misty, and when I left my house, there were cyclists and joggers by themselves, in pairs, or in groups. Otherwise, the streets were deserted. I think that by that time, the all-night drunks and their ilk have already gone to ground. It seemed like only the hardcore health nuts were up. Even at my nuttiest, when I was running six miles and lifting weights all week long, I did that shit in the afternoon.

The early yoga class was likewise hardcore. It was 90 minutes, people had all kinds of specialty yoga towels on their mats, and the class wasn't even in English, except for the occasional "exhale," "inhale," "shoulders away from your ears," "relax your neck/jaws." The instructor was Scandinavian? German? and was conducting the class in...what? Sanskrit? Urdu? Anyway, clean living actually feels really good. I figure if I keep doing this shit, I'll live to be over 100.

Posted by Hiromi at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I wish every day between March and October could be like this. It's bright and sunny and happy, it's in the 50s now, and will get into the lower 60s in the afternoon. It's a lazy day, the kind of day in which the best thing you can accomplish is accomplishing nothing. But here's what we do, instead:

I took a spur of the moment day trip yesterday to Houston to hang out with my sister and my nephews. It was beautiful, so we decided to go to the zoo. As did everyone else in Houston. It was so un-Houston-y yesterday, cool with low humidity. But instead of sitting on a front porch, we were all sitting in cars. Loop 610 was wall-to-wall cars. Then, when we got to the zoo, it was warring strollers, with people carting around coolers, having armed themselves with every form of indoor comfort to protect themselves from exposure to the day and the outdoors and each other.

The problem with finding personal comfort and a sense of being "at home" in a modern society is not a new one, and one that I've addressed many times before, but yesterday it hit home yet again, and I proceeded to bore my sister to death with my observations.

I was reminded of this quote that I came across recently:

The need for economic growth in a developing country has few if any economic springs. It arises from a desire to assume full human status by taking part in an industrial civilization, participation in which alone enables a nation or an individual to compel others to treat it as an equal. Inability to take part in it makes a nation militarily powerless against its neighbors, administratively unable to control its own citizens, and culturally incapable of speaking the international language.
Ernest Gellner, "Scale and Nation," Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3 (1973): 15-16.

The above quote resonated with something I saw in a documentary about immigration the other day. The producers had interviewed a man who came from a Kurdish community in Iran. This man volunteered with a labor union that worked to promote the rights of migrant workers. He said that when he was in Iran, he and others wished their country could be more modern, but when he started working in such a country, he began to doubt such feelings. While he admired the material comforts and relative security of modern countries, he said that the people around him were nevertheless miserable and constantly racing forward simply to stay in place.

I also thought of a scene from my favorite travelogue, Catfish and Mandala. The Vietnamese-American author, who went on a bicycle tour in Vietnam, befriended a local tour guide in Saigon. The guide promised his mother on her death bed to make something of himself. He used the small amount of money she left him to enroll in English classes, and then a special school for tour guides. He ended up making more money per month than college graduates in his country. In his head, there is a laundry list of "dirty Vietnamese habits" that he steels himself against: whiling away hours and hours in coffeehouses smoking, working odd jobs, playing soccer in the streets, allowing his sandals to flap loosely on his feet, mud between his toes. These dirty habits mark those Vietnamese destined to remain in poverty, while the newly-born yuppie tour guide patterns himself carefully on the wealthy foreigners who are his clients.

Since the late 1990s or so, the Japanese media have been fixated on the "freeter" phenomenon. A freeter (pronounced fu-ree-tah in Japanese) is a young person between 18 and mid-30s who for whatever reason simply drifts from one part-time position to another and does not seek full-time employment. Needless to say, this phenomenon is of concern to many mainstream Japanese who worry about the future of these young adults and by extension the future of their country. What will happen to Japan in the hands of such unmotivated and directionless individuals?

There was a word that was used to describe "the Negro": shiftless. The characteristic of "shiftlessness," rather than structural racism, was what lay beneath the inability of "the Negroes" as a class to get ahead socially and economically. My point is, skin color aside, "shiftlessness" is not compatible with modernity. Shiftlessness, driftlessness, daydreaming, watching the wheels, dropping out, just hangin' out -- these have no place in modernity. And that is why even our leisure time is so stressful. And I wonder, is this a necessary price to pay for pensions, health care, air conditioning, and good nutrition?

Posted by Hiromi at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)