Cotton-Pickin’ Days

Since when did it become fashionable to be snarky? Being snarky and sarcastic was cool as a teenager, but now it just seems petty and annoying. To use snark as a way to gain attention and popularity doesn’t appeal to me in the least. Extremism makes the most noise but it’s still noise.

In particular, the rise of mommy blogs proclaiming themselves to be the queen of snark turns me off. Bashing one’s own family or fellow parents, however lovingly or in the name of fun, can still hurt. I can’t count the number of times I’ve teased someone only to have her take it as jibing.

I’m no goody-two-shoes. I can see the hypocrisy in a situation or note the ridiculousness of people’s behavior. Cynism is a part of my filter too. When it comes to my relationships with other people, though, I don’t rely on snark to get me “in.” I try instead (and don’t always manage) to understand things from their point of view rather than rolling my eyes and criticizing them.

Snarkiness is en vogue now. It makes me chuckle on occasion but it’s more likely to make me wince. Encouraging snark by promoting it to stardom doesn’t make for a nice world and I, for one, don’t intend to join in. No one will gain my respect and admiration by being funny at the expense of others. My friends will be those people who do their best to cultivate love, compassion, patience, and generosity.

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My blogging energy is running low this week because of the tension and anticipation accompanying the move of my About Weblogs blogs to b5media. I’m stressed even though I can’t do anything more than refresh the screen once every two minutes to see if the blogs are set-up in their new homes. Shai and the other technical folks are doing it all from importing content to template design and installation. The rest of us bloggers are just holding our breath and keeping our fingers crossed.

For a busybody like me, it’s hard to stand aside and watch others do the work. If I could keep myself busy doing something to help, I’d probably be hyped up by the adrenaline instead of worn down by the waiting. I’ve been this way as early as grade school. For instance, during school concerts, I’d strut around trying to look busy and important to push aside my nervous feelings.

Whenever I can do something to help, I do it. I open strollers for struggling mothers, hold the elevator doors for delivery people, and ask crying women (haven’t met a crying man yet) if they’re ok. Some people might think I’m an annoying busybody in which case I apologize. But I genuinely want to help and have no ulterior motives.

I believe society would be a safer and more pleasant place if we looked out for one another. Not in a meddling, nosy kind of way, but with the small things that help ease our passage through the day. In fact, blogging is one of my small contributions to a better world.

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My part-time helper hates to waste food. I’ve caught her a number of times saving food that I had intended to throw away or worse still, eating it. She stores the half-cup of cooked rice left in the rice cooker overnight; scraping every last grain out into a plastic container, and putting it in my fridge until it grows mold. Or, she’ll pour the dregs of day-old oolong tea into a cup and drink it herself. And, she has also gnawed the bits of meat stuck to soup bones that have had all the nutrients cooked out of them. When I tell her it’s ok to throw the food away, she tells me it would be a waste.

Unlike my helper, I feel no compunction about wasting food. Instead, I have the bad habit of eating the last portion left on the plate even when I’m not hungry. Marv left a handful of penne arrabiata tonight and although I was stuffed to the hilt with ravioli montanara and bananas, I finished it anyway. In these instances, I’m more worried about my expanding waistline than I am about wasting food and money, or destroying the environment. Maybe I should stop being so self-centered.

According to Dr. Mercola’s blog, more than 40 percent of the food grown in the U.S. is wasted or lost which adds up to a minimum of $100 billion a year. And, he says that at least half of the food thrown away in homes and restaurants hasn’t gone bad and could still be eaten. The biggest culprits are convenience stores, restaurants, grocery stores, and other commercial outlets.

While I believe in every person doing their part, I don’t know how much of an impact it would make if only private individuals made an effort. I vaguely recall someone I knew arguing against private citizens recycling because it would make very little impact unless industry and corporations also took part (can’t find any supporting link, though, so she was probably talking out of her a**).

In any case, I should re-think my attitude towards leftovers and try not to gag so much when I put away food for another day. This is where Stephen’s dog would sure come in handy.

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Upon returning from a quick supermarket run today, Stephen and I found our water cooler standing in a puddle of water. The last time this happened, I was on my way to California. Luckily (or unluckily), our flight was delayed by several hours so I came home to wait only to find a pool of water in our entrance hall. It might have turned into a lake had I not come home to put a stop to it. Both times the leak was caused by a defective water bottle.

When the water delivery guy came to give us two new bottles, he took out the one with the hairline crack and asked if he could dump the water away in the sink. Busy wiping up the water on the floor, I told him to go ahead. A minute later, I realized that it was a total waste and ran to get him some pots and pans to catch the water. More than 10 liters of purified mineral water must have flowed into the pipes, gone forever. I’ve been feeling guilty over it all day. Even if I had kept the water in the bathtub, it would have been put to better use.

Jon Markman of MSN Money wrote in January that clean, bottled water was the number one most important thing survivors of the Kobe earthquake and South Asia tsunami needed.

The central problem is that less than 2% of the world?s ample store of water is fresh. And that amount is bombarded by industrial pollution, disease and cyclical shifts in rain patterns.

Markman recommends investing in water commodities especially when it becomes more precious than petroleum, the demand of which will most likely decrease as new technology becomes available.

Consider these facts from the World Water Council:

• 1.4 billion people do not have access to safe water.
• 2.3 billion inhabitants lack adequate sanitation.
• 7 million people die each year of water-borne diseases, including 2.2 million children under the age of 5.
• Daily water use per inhabitant totals 600 litres in residential areas of North America and Japan, and between 250 and 350 litres in Europe, while daily water use per inhabitant in sub-Saharan Africa averages just 10 and 20 litres.
• In the past 100 years, the world population has tripled, but water use by humans has multiplied six fold.

I may skip my shower today as penance for the water I wasted.

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On a planet of almost 6.5 billion people, most of us still like to think we’re unique. Not only are we exceptional, people should make exceptions for us. This kind of attitude is making society more selfish and less sensitive to other people’s needs.

I’m a great example. Every Tuesday, a local restaurant has a two-for-one offer on pizza or pasta. The menu says that you can have two of the “same type,” which I think is ambiguous wording. When I call to take advange of the offer, the staff always tells me that I have to order two pizzas that are exactly the same. And I always argue that two pizzas of the same price would make more sense because two pizzas with the same toppings would be overkill. They always give in and tell me that they’ll make an exception “just this one time” because the kitchen isn’t busy.

I don’t know what the point of the promotion is so I don’t know if it’s a way to give a special offer and at the same time reduce the staff’s work load. The point is that my attitude is representative of everyone’s attitude towards the service industry. Wherever we go, we expect to be catered to and in precisely the way we want, no matter how unreasonable and regardless of the rules.

FuturePundit’s latest post suggests that American high schools start too early for adolescent circadian rhythms which peaks in the afternoon. The solutions that he and others suggest are to change school hours or perhaps completely get rid of a structured school environment in favor of independent study or home schooling.

Technology should be used to allow kids to adjust their learning schedules to their body’s circadian rhythms. The use of pre-recorded high quality and high resolution lectures would allow kids to watch lectures on difficult subjects when their minds feel keen enough to handle difficult material. Our current regimented method of marching kids through a series of fixed time length classes strikes me as a hold-over from the factory era. Lecture delivery could be done electronically at any time of the day or night. A kid who has a hankering to just listen to hours of biology on one day and hours of history on another day ought to be able to do that as long as all the needed material is viewed. Or if the kid wants to watch physics lectures only after 9 PM then make it easy to do so.

Notwithstanding the fact that kids in Asia have far longer hours of regular school, cram school, and tuition, I think this solution would work only for a select number of high achievers. I don’t believe it would work for the vast majority of kids who lack parental guidance and motivation. Schedules help people stay focused and are good training for the real working world.

No matter how much we may wish companies to have flex hours, there’s just no way to get things done in an orderly fashion without having set times during which everyone is able to meet and exchange ideas. The same goes for school. Having the same daytime hours during which everyone gathers is not just for academics but for social functions as well, such as orchestra or sports.

While I do agree that it’s difficult to force everyone to proceed along at the same academic pace, that is why there are different classes to choose from. Not every sophomore is in honors geometry, some are taking algebra while a few are in AP calculus. There is enough flexibility in the system to accomodate each ability level.

As much as I disliked high school, I think it taught me how to tolerate the people and activities I found most annoying (which was pretty much all of them). With society becoming ever more driven by the me mentality, tolerance for different opinions and beliefs is decreasing. Technology, such as the Internet, encourages increased isolation and association with people who have the same exact beliefs. I am as guilty of it as anyone.

How can 6.5 billion people all have it their way? It’s not going to happen and we’d all better learn
to deal with it.

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Five Facts About Africa

• Africa is the second-largest of the Earth’s seven continents - covering about 30,330,000 sq km (11,699,000 sq mi), which makes up about 22 per cent of the world’s total land area.
• Four of the five fastest land animals live in Africa - the cheetah (70 mph), wildebeest, lion, and Thomson’s gazelle (all about 50 mph).
• 90% of all malaria cases are in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The world’s biggest hospital is in Soweto.
• The world’s largest diamond was the Cullinan, found in South Africa in 1905.

Despite these fascinating facts, I know depressingly little about Africa.

I’ve read Guns, Germs, and Steel in which Jared Diamond hypothesizes that at the dawning of civilization, Africa’s geographical location was less than optimal. Diamond suggests that Africa’s climate and the lack of animals and crops that could be domesticated made everyday struggles in Africa even more difficult than in Europe and China. Thus, technological innovation, especially with respect to weapons of war, was practically nonexistent. This lack of modern weaponry made it easier for other civilizations to conquer Africa with “guns and steel”. The conquerers then brought germs that further weakened the African population. (I read the book more than 5 years ago, so I’m not sure if I have all the details right. And I don’t necessarily agree with everything Diamond proposes.)

I also know that HIV/AIDS is decimating Africa’s population. I’ve been fortunate to make contact with who is currently working in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). I also have a new LJ friend, , who has been in Mayotte for a while. And I’m hoping that KKB, a friend and fellow epidemiologist, who is working on vaccination programs in Africa and elsewhere will start a blog sometime.

Today, I finished reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver in which she tells the story of a missionary family in the Congo. The story is set in the 1960’s during the unstable years following the DRC’s independence from Belgium. I have never appreciated the mystery, splendor, and terror of everyday Africa until I read this book and now I want to know more.

It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived (in Atlanta) I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness. I mentioned this to Anatole, who’d long since taken note of it, of course. “The air is just blank in America,” I said. “You can’t ever smell what’s around you, unless you stick your nose right down into something.”

“Maybe that’s why they don’t know about Mobutu,” he suggested. (Mobutu was the corrupt former dictator-president of the DRC.)

Vietnam has not yet been scrubbed clean of its smells. I’ll be taking a deeper whiff of the world from now on, including Africa.

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Marv and I celebrated our first anniversary as a couple in 1994 by going out to a nice restaurant in Palo Alto, California then to the newly opened Wal-Mart across the San Francisco Bay in Union City. It was the first Wal-Mart I had ever been to and I was excited to go because it was the largest store of its kind in the area and I’d heard that the bargains were unbeatable. Not that I had much to buy as a college student. I think I only picked up a pair of leggings.

Since then, I’ve decided that I prefer Target especially after hearing about Wal-Mart’s unfair employment practices. Now there’s another reason for me to avoid going there–Wal-Mart TV, their in-store TV network which is the fifth-largest in the U.S. after NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. I can’t imagine anything more annoying than having to dodge the 42-inch (107 cm) screens placed all over the store bombarding customers with ads of all kinds for junk food, movies, rock concerts, and even corporate messages designed to improve Wal-Mart’s public image.

Here’s where the TV-B-Gone would come in real handy. (See previous post.)

The New York Times, February 21, 2005

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Like a cream puff amongst day-old bread, the plump young Vietnamese woman waited at the check-in counter with three dorky Taiwanese men. She was inexpensively, but trendily decked out with a full face of make-up and bleached hair twisted into small braided sections leading into a chignon. At a quick glance, she looked like a submissive bride, but looking more closely, you could see the annoyed look in her eyes, the surly twist of her mouth, and the sullen expression on her face.

Her father-in-law approached me and asked if I could help lead her to the right boarding gate for our flight to Ho Chi MInh City. They seemed genuinely concerned about her even though her Mandarin Chinese was good enough to communicate. While waiting in line to clear immigration and still in view of her entourage, she didn’t say much. After some questioning, I learned that she had been in Taiwan for almost a year and had a two-month-old daughter under her mother-in-law’s care while she visited her family in Vietnam for eight days. As we waited, I continued to wave good-bye to my parents and cousin through the clear plastic dividing walls. In contrast, the Vietnamese mail-order bride studiously stared ahead and didn’t look back even once at her husband and father-in-law.

Her demeanor changed completely once we cleared the immigration counters and were well out of sight of family. Without any prompting, she started ranting about her in-laws in very good colloquial Chinese complete with mild swearing. She told me that her labor had lasted five days at the end of which her doctor took pity on her and performed a C-section. During her hospital stay, her mother-in-law never visited her. Within weeks of giving birth, her mother-in-law made her go back to work as some sort of hostess–bar or restaurant, I’m not sure. When she returned home from work at 2 a.m. each morning, she was expected to clean the house and take care of her daughter.

When she wanted to return to Vietnam to visit her family, her mother-in-law refused to let her bring her daughter along and told her that if she went, she wouldn’t be welcome back to Taiwan. Her mother-in-law also only gave her enough for a one-way ticket so her father-in-law was the one who gave her the rest of the money needed for to return to Taiwan.

We went through the baggage x-ray area and she was stopped. The scanners had picked up something in her bags that needed to be checked. The suspect items turned out to be three metal fish de-scalers for her own mother in Vietnam who was a fishmonger. Is this the life she was trying to escape when she decided to offer herself for sale as a mail-order bride?

Down at the boarding gate, she showed me a picture of her baby daughter. She said that she couldn’t afford to bring her daughter because it would cost $100 USD. Then she asked me how much I had paid for Stephen’s ticket. I didn’t have a clue because Marvin had taken care of everything for me. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t know. She was probably astounded by my stupidity and couldn’t imagine having a marriage like that.

By now, I was eager to get away from her because her talk was getting nastier and I didn’t want her to learn anything about me. I managed to ditch her as I followed Stephen around while he played with two other children and we boarded early along with other families of small children. When we deplaned, Marv was there to greet us and expedite our passage through Vietnamese immigration and customs. She tried to tag along with me then but I redirected her to the proper lines without explaining why Stephen and I got special treatment.

Vietnamese mail-order brides are becoming more common in countries like Taiwan, China, and Singapore. As the women in these countries receive more education and become more financially independent, they are reluctant to marry anyone who is lower on the social ladder. Hence, men without much education or social status are sometimes forced to turn to mail-order brides. Also, the sex ratio problem in many countries, especially China where m
en will outnumber women in the next decade, makes finding wives difficult.

In Taiwan, mail-order bride businesses are now allowed to advertise on TV. The average price for a Vietnamese mail-order bride is about $10,000 USD including paperwork. Marv tells me that it is about $5,000 in Singapore. Many mail-order brides arrive finding that their lot in life hasn’t improved much. Just like the woman I met, they’re expected to work long hours at the family business and bear children rapidly. They’re also kept under tight control because many of their predecessors manage to run away and “marry up” or return to their home country. Perhaps that’s why this woman’s mother-in-law kept her baby in Taiwan.

There were many instances during this last trip to Taiwan that reminded me of how lucky I am to be living such a privileged life. Meeting the Vietnamese mail-order bride was a unique reminder.

For more discussion of mail-order brides in Asia, see FuturePundit.

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I’m not a big fan of either Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston, but news of their separation really stunned me. For the past several years they’ve been all over TV, magazines, and all other forms of media, and appeared to be totally devoted to each other.

Break-ups, separations, and divorces are always difficult, but I think it’s worse in their case because they were always proclaiming their love for each other and telling everyone, including strangers, that they had a glorious relationship. In my opinion, being wrong is just as embarrassing.

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“Boats are used to deliver relief goods, but pirates are a real concern off the west coast,” the U.N. Joint Logistics Center said in a report on tsunami relief operations in Indonesia. (Emphasis added.)

– ABC News
Yes, pirates still sail the seven seas. They especially like to cruise the Strait of Malacca, bordered by Malaysia and Singapore on one side, Indonesia on the other.

Pirates have plenty of opportunities to plunder the over 40,000 merchant ships travelling the ocean. These enormous ships worth millions of dollars carry almost all of the consumer goods and other raw materials that support the global economy. Now they have the chance to steal food, medicine, clothing, and other necessities from people who have nothing.

In Anarchy at Sea, a primer on ocean commerce and other ocean-related human activities, William Langewiesche wrote,

The sea is a domain increasingly beyond government control, vast and wild, where laws of nations mean little and secretive shipowners do as they please–and where the resilient pathogens of piracy and terrorism flourish.

I hope the crew of the tsunami relief ships shoot the pirates on sight.

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