Post #14 5/12/09 Grin and Bear It, Boys. Grin and Bear It.

5/12/09

So, lately I’ve been reading this book (which shall go unnamed) in my English class. Actually, it’s a play but you catch my drift, right? Anyway, in said book there is a character whose…how do you say this…“natural tendencies” have elicited a very distinct response from me and the majority of the class. What is this “distinct response” you might ask?

Annoyance.

Sheer, agonizing, torturous annoyance.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I get annoyed very easily. Heavy emphasis on “very”. Which is probably why this particular character in this particular play just about did it for me. (I know, I know. I need to give her a chance, let her tell her story, etc. And I’m trying, I swear I am. But there’s only so much trying I can do.) And if you know me at all, you know that the smallest things can tick me off.

An example: the IPhone

What about the IPhone? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s the applications. The billion gazillion applications that only worsen our addiction to technology. I’ll be sitting on the couch in front of the TV, just waiting for the commercials to stop so I can get back to watching whatever show I’m watching and BAM! An IPhone ad pops on screen promoting its newest application. The car finder, the bird identifier, the level. And I’m sitting there going, “Are you serious? You’re serious?” I just don’t understand. I mean, we have brains. Use them. Use that 3 lb. organ that has developed over the past 90 million years to remember where you parked your car. Take a picture, draw a map, anything. Just don’t rely on your phone to do it for you. (That doesn’t mean I hate Apple. I swear, Mr. Jobs. In fact, I have an Ipod.) I’m sorry, I’ll stop. The applications are just one of my pet peeves.

Now, I’m sure we’ve all been in this position. Being trapped with that certain someone or something that knows the exact combination of button-pressing that will send us careening right over the edge. Of course, if they’re especially good, they can drive you so close to the edge that you think you’re about to snap but right when you’re about to get there, they reel you back in, leaving you teetering dangerously over the point of no return. It’s almost like an art albeit a cruel one.

So, for those of you who, like me, have difficulties dealing with our pet peeves in more positive ways, what’s next? “Life has a lot of cages. People living and working shoulder to shoulder get aggressive, aggravated and annoyed. It happens to all of us, and it’s our nature to react poorly.”

What to do, what to do…

I guess, to me, the most logical answer would be to simply ignore the things that tick us off. Easier said than done right? I mean, we can’t always just up and leave whenever we get annoyed by something. But there are other things we can at least try to avoid.

When that fails, breathe. Think happy thoughts. Favorite movie, celebrity crush, whatever floats your boat. Imagine that you are somewhere else, anywhere else besides where you are at that very moment. And whatever you do, don’t snap.

Don’t.

Resist the pull of the dark side.

I know it’s hard. Believe me, I know. But hey, we just have to deal with it.

Post #13 5/5/09 Battle at the Box-Office

5/5/09

It’s coming.

You can feel it in the air.

It’s gonna be epic.

Well, maybe you can’t really feel it in the air but you certainly can see it and it certainly will be epic.

To what exactly might I be referring to? The…wait for it…

SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS!

Alright, who’s excited for this years summer movie season? I know I am. We got Harry Potter, Transformers, Ice Age, Public Enemies…the list goes on. Movie lovers’ paradise awaits you.

That is, if the current recession hasn’t caused you to put a hold on unnecessary expenditures. (Although I think any expenditures on Harry Potter or Johnny Depp related material isn’t “unnecessary”. Actually, it might even be crucial for survival.)

So, just how is this economic catastrophe going to affect our summer movies? Well, I suppose it could go both ways.

See, “when the economy is suffering, people want to escape their troubles, and going to the movies is a fairly affordable luxury.” You head to the theater with a group of friends, watch a movie, then go and hang out at a nearby restaurant or someone’s house. Sounds good right? That’s definitely how I love to spend my summer. Plus, you get to chill in an air-conditioned room that’s far cooler than what it would’ve been if you had stayed at home for about 3 hours. So, why not?

But then there’s the down side. If you haven’t noticed already, theaters have been hiking up ticket prices since…long before the recession, actually. (If you don’t believe me I have a whole ticket collection dating back to 2003 that begs to differ.) General admission has nearly doubled from $5.50 to $9.75. And while that may not yet be in the realm of “This is completely absurd. Why do I even bother going to the movies when I can buy the DVD later?” for some, for the other half, these prices just to see a two and a half hour movie have already passed the point of no return. And then there’s the little issue of pirated versions, leaked online versions *coughWolverinecough*, and so on and so forth.

Will movie sales suffer? I guess it all depends on just how much we love this year’s movies. Because, in my humble opinion, High School Musical 3 was absolutely horrendous and yet it made over $42 million. Why? The answer may be evident to some; people liked the movie. And if people liked the movie, it doesn’t matter if the world is going to pieces all around us; it will make money. I guarantee it. My point being: it’s not over until the fat lady sings-- I mean, until the fans have spoken.

So…where does this leave our blockbusters in-waiting? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

And let the summer commence!

Post #12 4/28/09 Accents: Can't Do Them, Don't Try Them

4/28/09


Wednesday April 22, 2009. Fourth period English. We’ve just opened our literature books to a copy of the Declaration of Independence. We groan as the sheer volume of words meets our eyes. We know what comes next: we’re going to read it. Our teacher offers us the hints of a smirk, amused and at the same time exasperated at our reaction. I can just imagine her thoughts: Of course we’re going to read it. This is English class. Amidst our complaints, one of my classmates has a suggestion.

“We should read it with accents!”

A cacophony of opinions immediately resound throughout the room. Our teacher laughs as do several other members of the class.

My immediate reaction: Hah. You’re funny.

My reaction once I had the chance to fully process the sentence: Oh, please no. I’m begging you. Reading the thing is torture enough; don’t make me go through it while listening to about 30 horrible variations of a British accent.

Do I hate British accents? Heck no. Actually, that’s as far away from the truth as you could possibly get.

See, I have this little thing that if I wasn’t American I’d be British. Why? Well, to be completely honest, a big reason is because of their accents. I’ve always (and I can’t stress that enough) adored the English accent. And the Scottish. And the Australian. And…well, you get my point. There have been several occasions when I’ve even tried imitating a Scottish, Australian, and Irish accent to name a few with my friends but those attempts failed horrifically so I now restrict myself to a much more private audience: myself.

Now I have another little story. So, I was on YouTube the other day just looking up videos and I stumbled across an interview of one of my favorite actresses, Yvonne Strahovski who happens to be Australian. As I was scrolling down the list of comments, I found one, by an Australian, that interested me. Here it is:

Haha, me and my friends are always talking in an american accent (its usually
always the southern american accent :P) and we love it! i would love to have an
american accent but i'm stuck with an aussie one

Now, I’ve always had the absurd idea that no one wanted an American accent. In fact, my reply to that previous comment was exactly that. Why would someone with an accent as cool as an Australian one ever want an American accent? It’s so…boring. I mean, we don’t have fantastically awesome pronunciations for words like “fish and chips“ or “no”, which, as parodied by another great actor, Zac Levi, is pronounced in Australia as “naeiou”. But then again I suppose it’s a matter of perspective.

This leads me to my next point. We all seem to want an accent other than our own, for the most part at least. Australians want American, Americans want British, etc. Agreed? So riddle me this: why is it that foreigners are, in general, so good at imitating an American accent while we lousy Americans couldn’t copy a decent foreign accent even if someone phonetically recited the pronunciations to us? Really. It’s a mystery me. And I’m not even talking about foreign actors playing Americans in movies and TV shows (Who are phenomenal, by the way. Have you heard Hugh Laurie and Christian Bale’s American accents? One word: whoa) Take my Australian cousins, for example. They have pure Australian accents complete with words like “mate” and “bloody” in their daily vocabulary but can switch to near flawless American accents in a second. I, on the other hand, managed to get out, “Hey, mate.” before my cousins burst out laughing at my ridiculous rendition of their accent.

Personally, I have a have a theory as to why exactly this is the case.

American TV is popular, right? Not only here in the U.S. but around the world as well. I mean, I went to the Philippines over Christmas break and I was watching “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy” along with my cousins. “And American TV is so popular that the UK independent Channel Five is starting a new digital channel called Five US, which will show nothing but American programming.” So it’s safe to say that shows like “CSI: Miami”, “ER”, “Bones”, and all those other primetime programs that we love so much are just as popular abroad as they are here.

But what about foreign shows? Do you ever see much of them on our channels? No, right? Personally, I make it my duty to watch some BBC World News and an episode or two of “Extras” and “MI-5” which are both British shows but it’s not like you can just tune in to ABC and see a mob of MI-5 agents led by the dashing Matthew Macfadyen take down a group of terrorists in the London Underground (which is basically what they do on “MI-5”).

Because of this, it seems that foreigners get much more exposure to our American accents than we do of their accents. Therefore, they’re able to pick it up a lot easier since they’re so familiar with it. Our exposure to English, Irish, Scottish, and Australian accents, on the other hand, are limited to the occasional British news correspondents stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan and, of course, dear, sweet Simon Cowell.

Pathetic? I sure think so. What’s up with that, America? Are we that conceited that literally the only thing dominating almost every other channel is our oh-so-phenomenal accent? That we even expect foreigners to perfect our accent when we can’t even say something as simple as, “Hey, mate.” with a decent imitation of an Australian twang?

*sigh* This makes me sad.

Answer to riddle: Both of them! Kevin is from Scotland and Simon is from Australia. Gotcha didn't I? Haha.

Post #11 4/21/09 The Real Life in the ER

4/21/09

Enter Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, Princeton, New Jersey.

45 year old pregnant Caucasian female is undergoing exploratory surgery. Suddenly, a monitor that had been beeping regularly only a second before, emits a warning. Doctors look up in alarm.

DOCTOR 1
It’s the mother. She’s in v-fib.

DOCTOR 2

(with defibrilator)
Charging! Clear!

DOCTOR 3
(steps away)
I’m clear.

Doctor 2 administers one shock. Nothing.

DOCTOR 1
Looks like asystole. Paddling isn’t gonna do anything.

DOCTOR 2
It’s fine v-fib. I’m going again. Clear!

DOCTOR 1
We’re gonna loose them both. Clamp!
(takes clamp)
The surgery’s not doing this to her. The fetus is.
(moves to cut umbilical cord)

DOCTOR 2
Step away, House. I’m going again.

DOCTOR 1
The only way to save her is to cut off the anchor holding her
down.

DOCTOR 2
You keep going, you’re gonna get electrocuted. Clear!
Doctor 2 administers second shock.

DOCTOR 1
(jumps away from table)

Nothing.

DOCTOR 2
Going again! Clear!

Doctor 2 administers third shock. Normal beeping resumes.

DOCTOR 3
Heart rate’s returning to normal.

Believable? David Shore and Katie Jacobs sure hope so. And why do they care? Because, they’re the creators of House, M.D., the show from which the above scenario was taken. No, there really isn’t a Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in Princeton, New Jersey and no, there really wasn’t a 45 year old pregnant Caucasian female that went into full cardiac arrest 15 minutes are being put under while her attendings worked furiously to revive her. The entire thing is completely fabricated.

This is just one example of the many medical dramas that air on our primetime channels. As procedurals, these shows more-or-less strive for one thing: medical accuracy. “We want to be as accurate as possible," says Marc Platt, executive producer of ER. Unfortunately, these shows often fall short of their so called goal. “Experts say medical dramas often inaccurately portray organ donation, the range of doctors’ expertise and nurses’ roles, not to mention the level of hospital romance that takes place.” Yes, Grey’s Anatomy fans, that’s right. Hospital life isn’t anywhere near as glamorous as the show depicts. The same goes for ER, House, Private Practice, and whatever other medical dramas there are out there.

You can try your very hardest to make your show as close to the facts as possible by having on-site medical advisors who are real doctors but the truth of the matter is that the only way you’re going to make that happen is if you shoot at an actual hospital with actual doctors. Because Drs. Gregory House and Derek Shepherd aren’t real people; they’re fictional characters played by actors and it doesn’t matter how many years their show has been on the air. They don’t have a medical degree. QED: they usually have absolutely no clue what half of the words they say on screen really mean. Like… “He could just as easily have too much dopamine as serotonin, but if it’s dopamine the cyproheptadine will kill him.”

Now, you can imagine how crushed I was to learn that there really isn’t a Department of Diagnostic Medicine in actual hospitals like how there is on House. Because if you know me at all, you’d know that I adore that show and it was actually all of those hours spent watching House berate his team for their so called “idiotic ideas” then miraculously come up with the diagnoses in the final act of the show that prompted me to seriously consider becoming a doctor.

But alas, as my mom likes to say, “It’s about 25% fact and 75% entertainment.”

3/7/09 Forum #5 Homemade No More

At the end of "The Restaurant Owner", Huang Xiaoqiang is depicted making chaoshou. Not with a machine or an army of workers slaving away in a factory but with his own two hands and a chopstick. This brought to mind an episode I saw of "Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations", a cultural food show in which Bourdain travels the world, sampling various regional dishes and delicacies. In this particular episode, Bourdain travels to China and witnesses a quickly fading art: the creation of noodles. Like Huang Xiaoqiang, the man making the noodles uses no modern technology. With his bare hands, he creates a slab of dough with flour and duck eggs then uses a giant bamboo pole as a sort of rolling pin to flatten the dough so that he can form the stringy substance. Just as his father taught him and just as his father's father taught him, and so on for as long as the family had been making noodles.

These two instances really got me thinking. There really aren't too many things nowadays that can honestly bear the title of being "homemade". Because now, no one makes apple pie from scratch. Who does that? That's what Marie Calendar's and Baker's Square are for. But this is also a sad reality. The fact that these traditions are slowly but surely being erased from our world. The fact that there will definitely come a time when we rely solely on machines or on others to create what would once be considered as "homemade". The fact that we are basically loosing our ability to create something that has been passed on from generation to generation.

And that just makes me sad. Because I love homemade lumpia as do many other people, I'm sure. And if I'm the only one who can make them in some 30 odd years (because my mom made sure that I can make them), that won't be too much fun.

Post #10 3/31/09 When East Meets West

3/31/09

So I was flipping through the latest edition of Newsweek over the weekend, trying desperately to find something, anything that wouldn’t be such a pain in the butt to blog about. And as I was flipping the pages into the late hours of the night, a single word caught my eye.

Irish.

Admittedly, that one word wouldn’t spark very much interest from many people but with me it’s a completely different story.

I did not fully understand the dread term “terminal illness” until I saw
Heathrow for myself. ~Dennis Potter, 1978

I guess if you’ve never been to Heathrow International Airport you wouldn’t really get that quote. I have though. Back in the summer of 2004, I went on a trip to the British Isles as part of the People to People Student Ambassador Program. I’ve always loved traveling so naturally I jumped on this opportunity to see a part of Europe in a heartbeat.

So, I flew into Heathrow with a group of about 20 other students on June 23, 2004. Then, get this, we had to take a bus just to get from one terminal to the next. That’s how big that airport is. People use mass transport to get from one place to another. Anyway, in that other terminal we hopped on our connecting flight to Dublin, Ireland, the country of potatoes, U2, whiskey, and Colin Farrell.

Now, I’ve been to many different countries in my life but Ireland is definitely one of my favorites. Why? Well, that’s an excellent question and in all honesty, I don’t think I can even do my own answer justice in this post. I only stayed in the country for four days before boarding a ferry for Wales but in that small amount of time I completely immersed myself into the Irish culture. Food, sports, dance, you name it.

Like Peter Hessler after being thrown headlong into the very heart of China, I was awkward at first, hesitant. Despite the fact that I had traveled internationally in the past, the thrill of being a foreigner in a strange country once again took me by surprise. I didn’t know the customs, places, or even the strange jargon spoken by the locals with their sharp, distinct accents. I mean, yeah, it was English but try making sense out of something like, “Leave your rucksacks in the coach, please and be sure to pick up your rubbish.” while suffering from jetlag after an 11 hour flight.
Yeah. Exactly.

I was, quite literally, a fish out of water, gawking and gaping at all the different sights and sounds. And if that wasn’t enough to clearly mark me as a tourist, my conspicuous American drawl stuck out like a sore thumb among the slew of Irish accents. I can’t even remember how many times a friendly and inquisitive Irishman came up to me and asked, “So, you’re American?” Aye, sir, I sure am.

Nearly five years later, as I sit reading River Town back in a more familiar setting, those feelings of being completely out of place come rushing back. True, I didn’t need to learn a totally new language just to communicate with the locals (although British English is arguably its own language altogether) nor was I stuck with only one other American in a foreign country but I understood what it was like to be the foreigner everyone talked about with the accent everyone was fascinated by. I got that. Because while Hessler was one of only two white men in the Chinese province of Sichuan, I was one of a few Asian students traveling through the strange country that was Ireland. Ironic, wouldn’t you say?

But amidst the sideways glances and passing smiles, I found myself mesmerized by the land and scenery. Reminiscent of Hessler’s own attitude toward the Chinese countryside, I reveled in the majesty of Ireland’s lush hills and brisk seaside. Coming from an area in which nothing remained green for long, seeing the verdancy of the land amazed me beyond all reason. It really was like stepping into another world altogether. A world that I wouldn’t mind at all being stuck in for the next 100 years or so. There were no electrical lines, billboards, or any other reminders of 21st century life. Just…the simplicity of the land.

One particularly striking memory I have is of a hike I took one day in a place called Glendalough, literally “Glen of Two Lakes” in the Irish language, “renowned for its early medieval monastic settlement founded in the 6th century by St. Kevin”. Dusk was barely settling over the lake, the mountain fog slowly creeping down the hills. The temperature was dropping but despite this, my friends and I were determined to continue our trek. So, we kept walking, right through an ancient cemetery with crumbling tombstones and unkempt grass until we reached the lake’s edge. By then, the hazy mist was hovering over the water’s surface, the biting cold fiercely attacking any inch of exposed skin. But as I stood there, taking in the rolling hills poking over the top of the fog and the murky water below, I forgot all about the screaming protests of my freezing body and realized that this was about as good as it was going to get.

Post #9 3/24/09 Budui!

3/24/09

“Budui!” It meant, literally, “Not correct.” You could also translate it as no,
wrong, nope, uh-uh. Flatly and clearly incorrect.”

Uplifting, right? To be told, point-blank, “You’re wrong.”

Yea, right.

No doubt some would find this Chinese custom extremely disheartening. As Peter Hessler illustrates in his book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, “You were right or you were budui; there was no middle ground.” To Americans, this concept of flat-out criticism is relatively unheard of. If someone’s wrong, they’re corrected but in a gentle, cautious fashion. This is especially true in the more elementary years of schooling. After all, you never hear anything like this on the campus of a grade school:

Student: *raises hand* Did I do this problem right?

Teacher: No.

Am I right? See, conversations like those most often go a little more like this:

Student: *raises hand* Did I do this problem right?

Teacher: Well, that was a good try but you forgot one little step…

See the difference? Americans are just too nice. I mean, I’ve heard of some pretty, how do I say this…interesting customs from other cultures that the Western world would be completely scandalizied by.

Personally, I side with the Chinese. Why pussyfoot around it? They’re going to end up crushed anyway. Might as well get it over with. It’s like pulling off a band-aid. You do it fast and with a clean jerk. The sting of budui is sharp and quick but you learn to get over it. However, pull that band-aid off slowly and you’re in for about ten seconds of pain as the detestable adhesive is gradually pried from your skin. Likewise, words of gentle correction may sound more appealing from the get-go but once you hear them you spend your time cringing as you wait for the “but” of the sentence.

So, why all this sugarcoating? I mean, the bottom line is going to be the same no matter how eloquently you phrase it. “You were wrong.” Now, you can either cry about it or take active steps to change your next attempt. Actually, I think this way would be much more effective. After all, no one wants to get shot down again and again for yet another failed attempt. So, they try even harder as Peter Hessler did in his endeavor to not completely butcher the Chinese language. They try harder which leads to fewer wrong attempts which ultimately results in them no longer being wrong. There’s no sugarcoating, no roundabout open-ended banalities aimed at stroking our ego as opposed to criticizing it. Just the plain, honest truth.

In fact, this is actually an underlying principle in psychologist B.F. Skinner’s theory about learning: negative reinforcement. “In negative reinforcement a particular behavior is strengthened by the consequence of the stopping or avoiding of a negative condition.” What does this mean in English? Well, basically for the purposes of this blog, the “particular behavior” could be anything someone is learning: tying a shoe, graphing hyperbolas, memorizing vocab words, etc. The negative condition is hearing someone tell you that you’re wrong when you screw something up. People don’t like being told they’re wrong (considered from a psychological standpoint as an unpleasant stimuli) so they try real hard to not be wrong, thus avoiding the unpleasant stimuli. Pretty soon, whatever it is they’re learning is engrained in their head, having connected the fact that if they do it right they don’t have to hear someone tell them that they were wrong.

I know it’s a bit confusing. I actually had a rough time figuring all that out when it came up in my psychology class.

Yes, it’s a bit harsh. But hey, the world isn’t made of sunshine and daisies anyway. No reason to delude ourselves any further.