A philosphical question to keep you busy while I revisit the land of the Frozen North.
It's polite (and expected) that when a student slides open the door to the teacher's room, they say," Shitsureshimasu." (Excuse me for interrupting.) This ritual is very important-I've seen every student who's ever come near the threshold do it, and a few weeks ago, when a student did not do it loud enough or with enough of a bow for the teacher's satisfaction, they stood and instructed him for 5 minutes.
Today I have the odd experience of being the only teacher in the hideaway (I heard something about garbage, and cleaning time was suddenly still going on after the bell, but why explain things to the foreigner?) Anyway a student stuck their head in, said the required words, and inquired whether such and such a teacher was present.
So So a question for you… if there are no teachers in the teacher’s room, does a student still say “Shitsureshimasu?*
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The Demise of Dating and the Rise of the Hook-Up Vampire
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/opinion/13blow.html?_r=1&em
I ran across this interesting article today (as well as Frank Rich’s opinion piece on why Bush is to blame for everything from the leak in the kitchen sink to original sin, but we just… won’t… go there…) and what really got me thinking is a point that was probably intended to be a side note. The author speculated that one of the factors that led to “hooking up” instead of “dating” was the group-think mentality; Supposedly one of the pros of “hooking up” is that it “emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating and, therefore, removes the negative stigma from those who can’t get a date.”
I’m 23, and thus livin’ deep into the hook-up culture and trust me… it doesn’t make you feel like any less of a loser. Sure, maybe in the “olden days” you were only one of your friends without a date Saturday night-you were at home washing your hair instead. But you could stay at home, and remain some of your dignity-no one would know for sure you didn’t have a date unless they were paying specific attention. Now, you go out with a group of friends-most of whom are hooking up with others in your group of friends, and now you’re the singleton stranded in the middle of a social orgy.
Using group friendships to hook-up also creates another very uncomfortable social situation… divided loyalties and awkwardness. I’ve bounced in among a couple of groups throughout college, and hooking up always managed to leave a deep dramatic scar on group dynamics. With serious dating, if two members broke up, one of the members would inevitably leave the group. This was sort of the expectation-one person would get to “keep” the group of friends. In-group dating has boundaries and rules that you are expected to adhere to while in the group, and while dating.
But the very spirit of hooking-up is to avoid boundaries, and avoid social contracts. “It’s just sex.” “It’s just us hooking up, it doesn’t mean anything.” And yet if partners are not exactly on the same page about what is going on between them, there will be hurt feelings. Since there are no social rules, the partners remain within the group, and the hurt feelings poison most of their dynamics. “Why didn’t he call me after?” “Why is she so jealous I’m hooking up with this other guy?” “Why will he have sex with me but not date me?” Who do the rest of the members side with-supposedly this was just a “hook up,” how did it turn into such big drama?
There are a myriad of reasons I prefer dating over hooking up. I cannot for the life of me figure out how a person can drop their pants to a near stranger (hook-up) but somehow sees conversation over a salad as a horrifying experience (dating.) Furthermore, I believe hooking up depends almost entirely on physical appearance and superficiality; dating allows you to get to know the person one-on-one. You would pass right over a person who is a 7 on your physical attraction scale for someone who is a 9 in the hook-up culture, even though if you “dated” both, you’d discover the 7 is a 15 on your overall emotional/intellectual scale, and the 9 a 2. I think the hook-up culture is exactly what it sounds like; a model you use to get sex. If you are attempting to use as a springboard to dating, as most of my peers are (“I’ll sleep with him a few times, and he’ll see I’m so good in bed he’ll date me!”) you’re barking up the wrong tree.
One of the comments said you can use the group setting to get to know a person, but this is a fallacy. Well, it’s a fallacy if you’re planning on spending any time alone with this person. If the rest of your life will be spent in a group setting, you’ll be fine. I’ve observed over and over people who are one way in a group setting (cheerful, energetic) then do a 180 when confronted individually (withdrawal, quiet.) Likewise, I know people who go the other way-terrified and shy in a group, especially if there is a stranger around, yet engaging and interesting when spoken to one-on-one. If you seek out partners based only on these group dynamics, you’re gonna pass right over those individuals.
Another Hydra head of this “hooking up within the group” usually is that your hook-up will be a friend; maybe one who you’ve had a crush on for a long time, or one that you just happened to get very drunk with. I think a relationship CAN blossom out of these situations, but from my personal experience, I’d say it’s rough at best. If you hook up with a friend, and it leads no where, it’ll put serious strain on the friendship, and the friendships around it. Or let’s say you just keep hooking up without making a commitment, and then when you do find a partner you WANT to make a commitment to, they might be too freaked out by your best gal friend that’s making the relationship a little too crowded.
That said, one of the few pro’s I see in hooking up is one of social regulation. If a person in your social group does something truly heinous and unacceptable, it’s in the group’s best interest to punish them, either through shunning or some other social penalty. Your friends are much more involved in the outcome of your hook-up/relationship because they have a vested interest… if your relationship sinks, your group has a good chance of going down with it.
I ran across this interesting article today (as well as Frank Rich’s opinion piece on why Bush is to blame for everything from the leak in the kitchen sink to original sin, but we just… won’t… go there…) and what really got me thinking is a point that was probably intended to be a side note. The author speculated that one of the factors that led to “hooking up” instead of “dating” was the group-think mentality; Supposedly one of the pros of “hooking up” is that it “emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating and, therefore, removes the negative stigma from those who can’t get a date.”
I’m 23, and thus livin’ deep into the hook-up culture and trust me… it doesn’t make you feel like any less of a loser. Sure, maybe in the “olden days” you were only one of your friends without a date Saturday night-you were at home washing your hair instead. But you could stay at home, and remain some of your dignity-no one would know for sure you didn’t have a date unless they were paying specific attention. Now, you go out with a group of friends-most of whom are hooking up with others in your group of friends, and now you’re the singleton stranded in the middle of a social orgy.
Using group friendships to hook-up also creates another very uncomfortable social situation… divided loyalties and awkwardness. I’ve bounced in among a couple of groups throughout college, and hooking up always managed to leave a deep dramatic scar on group dynamics. With serious dating, if two members broke up, one of the members would inevitably leave the group. This was sort of the expectation-one person would get to “keep” the group of friends. In-group dating has boundaries and rules that you are expected to adhere to while in the group, and while dating.
But the very spirit of hooking-up is to avoid boundaries, and avoid social contracts. “It’s just sex.” “It’s just us hooking up, it doesn’t mean anything.” And yet if partners are not exactly on the same page about what is going on between them, there will be hurt feelings. Since there are no social rules, the partners remain within the group, and the hurt feelings poison most of their dynamics. “Why didn’t he call me after?” “Why is she so jealous I’m hooking up with this other guy?” “Why will he have sex with me but not date me?” Who do the rest of the members side with-supposedly this was just a “hook up,” how did it turn into such big drama?
There are a myriad of reasons I prefer dating over hooking up. I cannot for the life of me figure out how a person can drop their pants to a near stranger (hook-up) but somehow sees conversation over a salad as a horrifying experience (dating.) Furthermore, I believe hooking up depends almost entirely on physical appearance and superficiality; dating allows you to get to know the person one-on-one. You would pass right over a person who is a 7 on your physical attraction scale for someone who is a 9 in the hook-up culture, even though if you “dated” both, you’d discover the 7 is a 15 on your overall emotional/intellectual scale, and the 9 a 2. I think the hook-up culture is exactly what it sounds like; a model you use to get sex. If you are attempting to use as a springboard to dating, as most of my peers are (“I’ll sleep with him a few times, and he’ll see I’m so good in bed he’ll date me!”) you’re barking up the wrong tree.
One of the comments said you can use the group setting to get to know a person, but this is a fallacy. Well, it’s a fallacy if you’re planning on spending any time alone with this person. If the rest of your life will be spent in a group setting, you’ll be fine. I’ve observed over and over people who are one way in a group setting (cheerful, energetic) then do a 180 when confronted individually (withdrawal, quiet.) Likewise, I know people who go the other way-terrified and shy in a group, especially if there is a stranger around, yet engaging and interesting when spoken to one-on-one. If you seek out partners based only on these group dynamics, you’re gonna pass right over those individuals.
Another Hydra head of this “hooking up within the group” usually is that your hook-up will be a friend; maybe one who you’ve had a crush on for a long time, or one that you just happened to get very drunk with. I think a relationship CAN blossom out of these situations, but from my personal experience, I’d say it’s rough at best. If you hook up with a friend, and it leads no where, it’ll put serious strain on the friendship, and the friendships around it. Or let’s say you just keep hooking up without making a commitment, and then when you do find a partner you WANT to make a commitment to, they might be too freaked out by your best gal friend that’s making the relationship a little too crowded.
That said, one of the few pro’s I see in hooking up is one of social regulation. If a person in your social group does something truly heinous and unacceptable, it’s in the group’s best interest to punish them, either through shunning or some other social penalty. Your friends are much more involved in the outcome of your hook-up/relationship because they have a vested interest… if your relationship sinks, your group has a good chance of going down with it.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Who Killed the Electric Car? Those Darn Redneck Rural Idiots, That's Who!
If there is no other benefit to living in another country, it’s this: living in another country grants you insights into your own society you might have missed out, either because you were living in the middle of the forest so you could only see the trees, or because you had nothing to compare it to.
This economic crisis has just been loads of fun, though I’m still expecting the sky to fall at any second. I’m being flippant, of course-I do not have a mortgage, or a family, or a retirement plan. I only have a college loan, and whatever expenditures I rack up in the present. There is also something to be said for working for the Japanese government. The Japanese business “culture,” until recent times, really leaned towards lifelong employment. If you got a job there, you had a job there for life (unless you quit.) This came with the disadvantages of hierarchy and at the expense of maybe turning you into a salary man slave, but lay-offs were unheard of. This has been changing (the loss of permanent employment is one of the reasons for all the crazies dropping children off of high rises, so says Japanese newspapers), but the attitude is still pretty prevalent in government. Even with Japan in a deep recession (according to the BBC World News, Dec. 9th podcast) JETs have a guaranteed job.* If they choose to terminate the position because of lack of money, they’ll wait until after you leave, and just not hire a new person. Also, learning English, and learning it from a native speaker, are such a hallmark of the Educational board, for every high school position they slash, they make one that’s elementary-school specific instead.
Anyway, I’m prone to reading far too many English newspapers, and a recent editorial in the New York Times sent me on a thinking spree. In it, the author discussed how the government should let the Detroit 3 fall through, and not bail them out as they did the banks. (My call is Congress was leaning towards no bailout, until the current strike in Illinois by workers who were laid-off sans benefits, because the Bank of America, who received-what was it?-$25 million in bailout money cut off credit to their company. Now Congress might look really stupid… or class-ist… if it bails out the well-to-do money lending banks, but let’s the blue collar auto industry swing.)
The writer spends enough of the article drooling over electric cars and opining how Car 2.0 will be to the iPod what Car 1.0 was to the CD player (or something) to get a hefty amount of criticism in the comments. I actually read the articles for the comments-I wish every article came with them equipped. (I’d have quite an earful to give on the Greek rioters.) For years, my generation has been told over and over how awesome electric cars are, how clean, how efficient!, and that if the Big Bad 3 just hadn’t killed them, we’d be saving the environment and there’d be world peace and all that. I agree that there needs to be a deep infrastructural change in America, but the more I hear of the electric car, the more I think it might not be it.
Living in Japan, I’ve come to love the train system. It’s pretty efficient, reliable, and cheap. Railways cover much of the nation, it’s very organized, and it’s often regarded as one of the best in the world. However, here in Shikoku… it’s still not very popular. The majority of people I see riding the trains are either children/teenagers, or elderly people. This might not be true in and around the big cities, but for being a society that is world-renown for their trains and their biking, there are still a heck of a lot of cars. I’d wager that if high schoolers didn’t have to travel to their school, buses and trains would lose half their revenue.
I bring this up because several comments remarked on how Japanese car companies are whopping American butt-and yet Japanese companies don’t make hybrid or electric cars either, even though the nation is small enough that one of the biggest draw backs to electric cars might not be noticeable (because of the weak battery power, they are very short range.) The places cited by comments as “electric car paradise” is Europe. I can’t speak for that, as I’ve only lived in the US and Japan, but I can say this… comments also, I’d estimate 70% of the time, add in the same breath as “Europeans are so much more enlightened and awesome and wonderful because they have electric car companies” that America would be so much better (ie, like Europe) if we just rode our bikes more.
It suggests to me that one of the biggest impasses we face as a country is the divide not only between the rich and the poor, but the urban and rural. Uh… you ever lived in a town that was not a major city? I imagine riding your bike in Seattle or Chicago is a heck of a lot more efficient than riding it in the middle of Wisconsin. A bike ride from my house to the university took about 20 minutes, in good weather-and I lived pretty close to the university. One of the biggest annoyances of living in Japan IS my reliance on bikes. You can’t carry a whole lot, the weather isn’t always agreeable (in 6 months, I’ve gotten caught in more rainstorms and come home soaked than I care to count), and it takes half an hour just to go to the bank, grocery store, and back home because they’re in such opposite directions.
I don’t know the future of transportation in the US, but living in Japan has certainly given me an interesting angle on it.
And to anyone that suggests that as a rural resident I should be forced to ride my bike for hours just within my town in the below-freezing weather and four feet high icy conditions of Wisconsin because YOU didn’t want to bail out the auto industry and YOU live in a comfortable city where everything is close and handy… just… shut up.
This economic crisis has just been loads of fun, though I’m still expecting the sky to fall at any second. I’m being flippant, of course-I do not have a mortgage, or a family, or a retirement plan. I only have a college loan, and whatever expenditures I rack up in the present. There is also something to be said for working for the Japanese government. The Japanese business “culture,” until recent times, really leaned towards lifelong employment. If you got a job there, you had a job there for life (unless you quit.) This came with the disadvantages of hierarchy and at the expense of maybe turning you into a salary man slave, but lay-offs were unheard of. This has been changing (the loss of permanent employment is one of the reasons for all the crazies dropping children off of high rises, so says Japanese newspapers), but the attitude is still pretty prevalent in government. Even with Japan in a deep recession (according to the BBC World News, Dec. 9th podcast) JETs have a guaranteed job.* If they choose to terminate the position because of lack of money, they’ll wait until after you leave, and just not hire a new person. Also, learning English, and learning it from a native speaker, are such a hallmark of the Educational board, for every high school position they slash, they make one that’s elementary-school specific instead.
Anyway, I’m prone to reading far too many English newspapers, and a recent editorial in the New York Times sent me on a thinking spree. In it, the author discussed how the government should let the Detroit 3 fall through, and not bail them out as they did the banks. (My call is Congress was leaning towards no bailout, until the current strike in Illinois by workers who were laid-off sans benefits, because the Bank of America, who received-what was it?-$25 million in bailout money cut off credit to their company. Now Congress might look really stupid… or class-ist… if it bails out the well-to-do money lending banks, but let’s the blue collar auto industry swing.)
The writer spends enough of the article drooling over electric cars and opining how Car 2.0 will be to the iPod what Car 1.0 was to the CD player (or something) to get a hefty amount of criticism in the comments. I actually read the articles for the comments-I wish every article came with them equipped. (I’d have quite an earful to give on the Greek rioters.) For years, my generation has been told over and over how awesome electric cars are, how clean, how efficient!, and that if the Big Bad 3 just hadn’t killed them, we’d be saving the environment and there’d be world peace and all that. I agree that there needs to be a deep infrastructural change in America, but the more I hear of the electric car, the more I think it might not be it.
Living in Japan, I’ve come to love the train system. It’s pretty efficient, reliable, and cheap. Railways cover much of the nation, it’s very organized, and it’s often regarded as one of the best in the world. However, here in Shikoku… it’s still not very popular. The majority of people I see riding the trains are either children/teenagers, or elderly people. This might not be true in and around the big cities, but for being a society that is world-renown for their trains and their biking, there are still a heck of a lot of cars. I’d wager that if high schoolers didn’t have to travel to their school, buses and trains would lose half their revenue.
I bring this up because several comments remarked on how Japanese car companies are whopping American butt-and yet Japanese companies don’t make hybrid or electric cars either, even though the nation is small enough that one of the biggest draw backs to electric cars might not be noticeable (because of the weak battery power, they are very short range.) The places cited by comments as “electric car paradise” is Europe. I can’t speak for that, as I’ve only lived in the US and Japan, but I can say this… comments also, I’d estimate 70% of the time, add in the same breath as “Europeans are so much more enlightened and awesome and wonderful because they have electric car companies” that America would be so much better (ie, like Europe) if we just rode our bikes more.
It suggests to me that one of the biggest impasses we face as a country is the divide not only between the rich and the poor, but the urban and rural. Uh… you ever lived in a town that was not a major city? I imagine riding your bike in Seattle or Chicago is a heck of a lot more efficient than riding it in the middle of Wisconsin. A bike ride from my house to the university took about 20 minutes, in good weather-and I lived pretty close to the university. One of the biggest annoyances of living in Japan IS my reliance on bikes. You can’t carry a whole lot, the weather isn’t always agreeable (in 6 months, I’ve gotten caught in more rainstorms and come home soaked than I care to count), and it takes half an hour just to go to the bank, grocery store, and back home because they’re in such opposite directions.
I don’t know the future of transportation in the US, but living in Japan has certainly given me an interesting angle on it.
And to anyone that suggests that as a rural resident I should be forced to ride my bike for hours just within my town in the below-freezing weather and four feet high icy conditions of Wisconsin because YOU didn’t want to bail out the auto industry and YOU live in a comfortable city where everything is close and handy… just… shut up.
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