Great Minds Think Different

There’s an unexpected side effect of patronizing a library, which is that it affords you occasional, strangely intimate glances into the lives of other people, without you ever knowing who these other people are.

The way this happens is through stuff that previous book borrowers leave in books. Like a lot of people, apparently, I take the approach of using library checkout receipts as bookmarks. And, like a lot of people, I don’t always remember to take them out before returning books. So sometimes, I open a book and someone else’s reading habits fall out. More than once I’ve discovered other interesting books from these. It works sort of like Pandora for books.

More fascinating, however, is when people leave in pieces of paper other than checkout receipts. Recently I found a sheet of paper from a hotel notepad. The hotel was in Texas. Did someone take this book with them to Texas? Did they go to Texas, take the hotel’s notepad and bring it back here? I don’t know. I’ve also found a shopping list.

Most recently, I found a note from one person to another. It was in a book about Pittsburgh: part history, part guidebook. Apparently two people were going to take a trip to Pittsburgh together. The note was from one to the other, listing things from the guidebook that they could do, and expressing great excitement.

This was very weird for me. It was like eavesdropping on a private conversation with pillow-talky undertones. It’s not even clear that the message’s intended recipient saw it. Maybe the note’s author put the note in the book and the recipient just returned the book without opening it, which makes this whole thing even weirder. What if I’m the only person other than the author who read this note? Then I’d be sharing an oddly close connection with this person, whom I’ve never met, I’ve never seen, whose name I don’t know. But from the type of thing this person was excited about seeing in Pittsburgh (mainly off-the-beaten-path residential neighborhoods), I have some idea of what kind of person they are.

I’m probably thinking about this too much.

Now, though, I’m trying to devise a plan to use this communication channel proactively. Basically I have the power to send messages to people, targeted by taste in books. There’s a lot to think about here. How could I make this communication channel two-way? (Out-of-band communication, like writing a book-message containing an email address, would be cheating and would take all the fun out of it.) And what would I say? I’ll have to ruminate on it.

I recently came to the conclusion that if, in the next, say, 10 years, I get the chance to live in Japan, I will take it.

(BTW: I will strive to avoid making this post entirely about me, because I am a boring topic, and nobody likes a self-indulgent blog post.)

For the longest time I’ve assumed that if I moved to Japan, I would swiftly die. Unable to communicate with anyone, I would be rendered helpless, hopeless and isolated. Overwhelmed by the inherently stressful nature of life in Japan, I would succumb to the ineluctable forces of language barriers, zillions of people, and stomach ulcers.

I thought this up until two months ago, when I actually spent two weeks in Japan, having not been there for at least five years previously. And shockingly, I found the whole thing very pleasant. Maybe it was because I was traveling with someone fluent in both English and Japanese, but I remain convinced, however foolishly, that if I were left to my own devices and had to avoid swiftly dying in Japan, I could.

I’d had horror stories in my head, told to me by what I thought was “a bunch of different people”, but I now remember to be just one excessively negative person. The horror stories generally revolved around the constant presence of a meaningless cacophony in a passively hostile society. There were always too many people around. You couldn’t understand anything, and couldn’t make yourself understood. It was so crowded. There was no space. Everything was expensive. On and on.

I’ve since realized that I’ve only heard such horror stories from one excessively negative person, and that the rest of the accounts I’ve heard of living in Japan (as a non-Japanese person) range from mixed at worst to overwhelmingly positive at best. That one person was making a critical mistake: trying to adapt her surroundings to match what she was used to, instead of adapting herself to match her surroundings.

Yes, Japan is very different from Western Europe. If you try to live a Western European existence in Japan, you’re doomed to failure. The food is different. The buildings are different. The society is different. Obviously the language is different. Even the tiny things you never think about, like ironing boards, are different. (Japanese ironing boards stand about a foot off the ground — you’re supposed to use them kneeling down. Also, they’re tiny, to save space.)

It’s a matter of changing your expectations. If you judge the quality of the food based on how similar it is to Western European food, well then of course it sucks. For example, Japanese people really should never have been allowed to get their hands on the concept of pizza. If you try eating pizza in Japan, then you’ll rapidly become convinced that the universe hates you. You have to let go of Western expectations. Once you do that, you’re set. The one lasting impression I have from my most recent trip to Japan is that if you’re having a subpar gastronomic experience there, you must be putting some serious effort into it. You have to really try to find poor-quality food in Japan, or else you have to have a seriously wrong definition of quality.

For the two weeks I was there, excluding breakfast, I almost never ate the same kind of dish more than once. (And to all my readers who conflate “Japanese food” with “sushi”: despite eating about 20 different types of Japanese food, I never once ate sushi.) All of it was invariably great or better, all of it on a higher plane of quality than I’ve been used to in the US. Uncharacteristically, my happiest memories of this trip all center around food, not trains. I had a couple of culinary experiences that I have no words for other than “foodgasm”. The best was at a sukiyaki restaurant on the top floor of a building on the central plaza of Kyoto. When I first bit into the meat, I literally gasped. Normally very reserved about showing enthusiasm for anything, I had to try very hard not to giggle and moan as I ate.

Every night I went to bed feeling pleasantly fat and vacantly happy. More than once I was squarely sloshed on good sake. But the most incredible part was that every lunchtime and dinnertime, we could wander around and choose a restaurant pretty much at random, with total assurance that the food would be excellent. Even the tiniest hole in the wall was guaranteed to be great, more so because you could watch your food being made and maybe chat with the cooks as they made it.

What I was trying to say without too much irrelevant gushing was that I am not worried about starving to death if I lived in Japan, or even about being dissatisfied with the food. In fact, if I had to choose a cuisine that I had to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Japanese hands-down. (Real Japanese cuisine, though — not the bogus pseudo-Japanese stuff they have outside Japan.)

I imagine it’s much easier to let go of your expectations when you’re just visiting than it is when you’re moving there long-term. I say this only in fairness, because I really think I could enjoy life in Japan without changing my mindset at all. Sure, I can’t speak Japanese very well, which is a major downside, but the upside is that I would be forced to learn it very quickly, and I can think of much worse things than being forced to learn a language. But I like good food. I like big cities and large crowds. I like good public transport and a conspicuous lack of car culture. Strangest of all, I had an indefinable sense of being at home in Japan.

Japan really isn’t my home though. I lived there from birth until the age of 18 months, and then never lived there again. I’ve visited a handful of times before — few enough to count on two hands. None of these visits lasted longer than three weeks. Japanese was the first language I spoke in life, and I spoke it exclusively until about age 4, at which point I switched to English. English is obviously my native language, but I do still retain native speaker-like instincts in Japanese. It almost feels like Japanese is a native language that I know very little of.

But when I walk around in Japan, I feel deeply comfortable. I don’t fit in there and I never will in the same way that a fully Japanese person does. But when I was there, nothing bothered me. Things that might seem odd to a Westerner, like the near-complete lack of swinging doors in residences, seemed eminently normal to me. Being there felt natural and somehow right.

I know consciously that Japan is not my home. Belgium is. But I bet I could eventually feel unequivocally that Japan is home, and if I get the chance, I’ll try.

Last night I had one of the stranger dreams of my life. Perhaps you can understand what it’s about better than I can.

I was standing in a field next to a dry creek bed. On the other side of the creek were some power lines. The power lines were riddled with little birds making lots of bird noise. There were also some hawks cruising around. I’m not sure how I knew they were hawks, but I definitely thought they were hawks, even after one of them dived onto some prey near the ground in the manner of a peregrine falcon. The hawks were generally sort of snapping at the little birds, occasionally grabbing them. The little birds didn’t seem too concerned by this, which I thought was rather odd.

Then there was the mind-bendingly bizarre part. I watched this one particular hawk. It landed on a power line, directly above another wire where there were three little birds perched in a row. I knew (somehow) that the little bird on the right was the mother of the other two. The hawk’s feet were literally a couple of inches above these other little birds’ heads, but they didn’t seem to notice. Then, the hawk just sort of casually bent down, grabbed the middle little bird in its beak, and flew off. It was a very lazy beak-grab, sort of in the manner of a person absently chewing a pencil. Anyway, the hawk flew off a little ways and then settled on a pylon, where, after struggling a little bit, it swallowed the little bird whole.

I kept watching that hawk. It stared around regally, then took flight and cruised around aimlessly for a bit. Eventually, it landed back above the remaining two little birds, who were still oblivious and had apparently not noticed the absence of one of them. The hawk stared deliberately down at them, first one, then the other. Then it hopped down, between the two little birds. It turned to the child bird and lazily beak-grabbed it. But it just stood there, holding the bird in its beak. Then the mother bird suddenly noticed the hawk and started yelling at it in a very strident manner.

Now I remember finding this next part absolutely unbelievable: the hawk, after a few seconds of being yelled at, let go of the child bird (which did not appear to have noticed anything), lazily turned around, opened its beak impossibly wide and ate the mother bird. It was the motion that was the strangest part. It opened its beak, positioned its head directly above the mother bird, and then just moved its head downward. GLOMP.

I remember it all very vividly, probably because it was so very remarkable. I’m mildly concerned that I may be insane on the inside. But I tell you what: if in a future life I come back as a hawk, I aspire to be like this one.

I’m skeptical about this proposal for a high-speed rail system in California. The proposal’s cheerleaders point to the success of high-speed rail systems in other countries, most notably Japan, France and Germany. I think there are fundamental differences between the two areas that will mean a HSR system in California won’t be as successful.

The reason ultimately stems from the fact that the distributions of population in these areas are fundamentally different. Let me elaborate.

• First, it’s pretty clear that high speed trains need to travel long distances between stops in order to be effective, otherwise they never get a chance to attain high speeds, thus defeating the whole purpose. So stations need to be pretty far apart.
• Given that stations need to be far apart, it’s likely that, in order for a given person to get to a station, they’ll need to use some other form of transport, such as other public transport, or a car.
• In California, especially in the corridor where the HSR system is proposed, the population tends to be concentrated in a few dense urban centers, with some gaps filled by vast uniform areas of suburbs, and other gaps filled with unbuildable nothingness. For example, the path between San Francisco and San Jose is a big strip of relatively high-density suburb, and the path between Santa Ana (part of the Los Angeles conurbation) and San Diego is very sparsely inhabited. So how will HSR riders get to the train station? The public transport in suburban areas of California tends to be so sparse as to practically be nonexistent, leaving driving to the station as the most attractive option. Then this leaves the traffic congestion problem.
• In Japan, HSR stations are located in the ludicrously dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of merely extremely dense “suburb”. So there are huge numbers of people who would have to travel fairly far to get to an HSR station. It works out because Japan has such fantastic auxiliary public transport. Most people live within a short distance (or at most a short bus ride) of a (conventional, low-speed) train station, and the quality of Japan’s train system is unparalleled in all the world.
• In France and Germany, HSR stations are located in the dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of very sparsely populated countryside. Suburbs as they exist in the US mostly don’t appear in Europe. Any non-urban area that is dense enough to have a significant population and doesn’t have a HSR station is generally well enough served by the nearest city’s public transport that getting to the HSR station via public transport is viable.

Imagine me, for instance. I’m going to be living in Palo Alto pretty soon. Suppose this Californian HSR system exists, and I want to go to Irvine. How am I going to do that? First of all, here’s the map. Apparently there’s a Redwood City/Palo Alto station, so I could hopefully get there by bus (crap though the VTA bus system is). So that’s good. But then the problem arises at the other end of the trip: the only reason I’m going to Irvine is to visit somebody who lives in one of those heinous, abominable suburban subdivisions where the nearest public transport stop is in a different zip code. (This is potentially a real scenario, since I do know someone there, and he lives in a subdivision whose name is, no joke, “Meadowood”. When I think about it I throw up in my mouth a little.) He lives so far out into the suburban sprawl that there’s no hope of getting there other than by car. If this were pretty much any of the world’s other major HSR systems, I could take public transport end-to-end.

So we’ve encountered a failure of the sort that happens with far lower probability in the European systems (needing to get somewhere beyond the reach of public transport). At the beginning of that hypothetical journey, suppose the Palo Alto station doesn’t exist and the nearest HSR station is San Jose. Then we have a failure of the sort that couldn’t happen in Japan: I’d have to take public transport to the San Jose station, and the public transport would suck. The most reasonable way would be the laughable Caltrain.

In sum: much of the population area served by the HSR system has either poor or nonexistent public transport coverage, leaving driving as either the preferable or only option for getting to an HSR station. If the HSR system is as heavily used as people expect it to be, this could actually end up increasing traffic congestion in the areas around HSR stations, as people drive to the station to board. If they were driving to their actual destination instead of taking the train, they’d be getting on the nearest highway, which would at least keep traffic more even.

The ultimate cause of California population centers’ poor or nonexistent public transport coverage is the fact that a good deal of it is suburban sprawl. I can’t think of any successful high-speed rail system in existence which operates in an area with similar population distribution. Even the US’s existing high-speed rail system, Acela, operates in the Northeast, along a route which is a series of dense urban centers. There is some sprawl with poor public transport coverage, to be sure, but not to the degree there is in California. Besides, it’s very debatable whether or not Acela is successful in the first place; the unfavorable population density and poor public transport might be why it’s not doing so well (and why intercity rail in general doesn’t work well in the US).

So it’s a problem to which there’s no good solution. California has suburban sprawl, and that’s neither going to go away nor get decent, viable public transport coverage anytime soon. Even if good public transport could magically be willed into existence in the suburbs, I highly doubt it would see much ridership, since car culture is basically one of the pillars of suburbia.

What are the odds? In my first and last years of college in Pittsburgh, the Steelers win the Super Bowl. The first one was a terrible game, but this one was possibly the best football game I’ve ever seen. Both were possibly never-to-be-repeated opportunities for wanton chaos and destruction in an urban area.

The game itself was surprising in many respects. The Steelers defense was not itself, except of course for the James Harrison pick-six. And the Steelers offense found some kind of hidden store of competence and saved the game when it was do-or-die. NBC showed a statistic near the end of the game: Ben Roethlisberger, in his career, has 17 game-winning drives in the 4th quarter or OT, which is the most in the NFL. I don’t know how many opportunities he had to make game-winning drives, without which that statistic loses a lot of its meaning, but apparently he’s been the NFL’s leading comeback kid and I haven’t noticed. Whatever else he may have been so far, on the Steelers’ last scoring drive, he was Joe Montana.

The Steelers’ last scoring drive has got to go down as one of the best in any Super Bowl. History on the line, the Steelers’ offense had the opportunity to redeem themselves for an entire season of inconsistent performance. They repeatedly converted third downs. Roethlisberger somehow managed to throw passes accurate to within inches while under hot pursuit.

And the play that won it all. Another unbelievably accurate pass. And a picture-perfect catch. That kind of catch makes highlight reels even when it doesn’t matter, when the game doesn’t matter. That play is surely going to get a name. Maybe even the drive will.

I don’t know if it beats Eli Manning’s pass to David Tyree last year, or if the drive beats that drive, or even if the game beats that game. But it at least deserves to be mentioned in the same breath.

Against this backdrop, the many examples of monumental idiocy that went down in Pittsburgh seem almost justified.

Rushing out of our house onto the street, screaming and yelling, seeing screaming, yelling, Terrible Towel-waving crowds charging down the street toward us.

Charging down the middle of the street towards Oakland, the crowd growing ever larger, exchanging celebratory hugs, high-fives and pickings-up-off-the-ground with random strangers.

Screaming and gesticulating at the poor lone CMU police car trundling up and down Forbes Avenue.

The noise — no cars, just thousands and thousands of voices.

Seeing the incredible crowd at the University of Pittsburgh. People riding on other people’s shoulders, waving Terrible Towels, screaming.

The fireworks set off in the middle of the crowd. Chunks of trees detached and set aflame.

Police in full riot gear standing guard outside the Cathedral of Learning. Apparently that was off limits.

Drunks climbing up trees and traffic-related structures, destroying signs and traffic lights.

People chucking flour out of dorm room windows above the street.

Six dumbshits flipping over a car right in front of some cops. I didn’t see this happening, but I turned and saw the car on its side, then a drunken idiot came blasting past me with a cop hot on his heels. Then the cop emerged from the crowd, dragging the drunken idiot on his ass.

People smashing ground-level windows of Pitt’s main library. NOT COOL, GUYS.

Cops on horseback standing stoically, keeping people off the unlit back streets.

Guys riding the panther statue in front of some Pitt building.

More fireworks and flaming tree fragments.

Cops on horseback materializing out of nowhere on Bigelow south of Forbes. Retards throwing beer cans at them. Cops and horses unperturbed.

Cops start to move in on crowd. Crowd panics and scatters.

Me actually running away from mounted cops. This was pretty much the cherry on top of the night.

Horses proceed down Forbes, followed by a bunch of motorcycles and a crowd of cheering people. They proceed past what looks like a bonfire in the middle of Forbes. A press of people surges towards it. It looks like an entire tree is blazing in a dumpster, along with random other detritus including wooden Public Works road barriers. People run around and throw more crap on the fire.

Chaos ensues as people shove back away from the fire, saying “tear gas”. Panic spreads.

Turns out there is no tear gas. Someone either saw the flying toilet paper rolls and mistook them for tear gas grenades or just figured they might stir some shit up.

Big column of smoke rising into the sky. Eventually it turned much thicker, opaque and white. We decide to leave.

Trudging up Bigelow towards Fifth, through smoldering debris, as if it were a battlefield.

A guy strolling down the middle of Fifth Avenue, playing the Steelers fight song on a trumpet.

The delirious, incoherent coverage by the local news. The anchors barely able to keep it together or get actual words out.

Man, that was excellent. I’ll miss this city.

I promise I’m writing some real content.

In the meantime, I’d just like to note that this blog is now getting a bunch of search hits, mostly on the strength of one search term: “702-696-9696″. This is the number you call if you’re in Vegas and you’re looking for a good time.

The Internet is great, but sometimes it makes me want to bury my face in my hands forever.

I feel that everyone should eventually see Las Vegas. This is where you can see the dark side of human desires and urges. In fact, much like there are cheap and fancy restaurants, there are cheap and fancy places to indulge your vices. Looking at what’s available here, you wonder how anyone can stand to be here – but you can’t ignore the flocks of people who come here year-round.

Vegas starts offering up temptations the moment you set foot on the ground. There are slot machines in the airport. In accordance with state law, they have signs on them that inform people under the age of 21 that they are forbidden from loitering near gaming areas. These signs are often in locations that would make it inconvenient to actually obey that particular law, for example in the baggage claim area. Once you get over the flashing lights and obnoxious 1980s-video-game-esque noises and look around at other things, what you’ll mainly see are ads for various forms of easy, passive entertainment, ranging from magic shows to “intimate” nightclubs, from Cirque du Soleil productions to “Thunder from Down Under, Australia’s Hottest Export”, a group of creepily muscular shirtless men.

Once you step out into the desert heat, you will wander into the sights of shuttle operators looking for easy pickings among clueless tourists. Despite the fact that almost all the hotels offer free shuttle services to and from the airport, swarms of independent shuttle outfits (basically, a guy and a minibus) will happily shuttle you to your hotel for $8 to $15 per person (plus tips, which, as you are less-than-discreetly reminded, constitute half of the driver’s income). The most successful operators are the ones who flag down tourists most loudly; when we got there, it was most definitely a one-man show as an exuberant crazy Russian man overwhelmed several meek Latino drivers.

As we went from the airport to our hotel, there was a gradual progression along the spectrum of classiness. The airport is right next to the Strip, the area surrounding a main thoroughfare where all the big-name resort hotels are: the Bellagio, the Mirage, the MGM Grand, the Venetian, etc. Between the Strip and downtown Vegas, there’s a sort of no-man’s land where all of the low-end establishments are. The space between shabby, run-down motels is stuffed full of pawn shops, gun shops (“Try a Full-Auto for Free! $20 off on Purchase”), porn stores, strip clubs, and bail bondsmen. This is not the sort of place where you come to feel good about human nature. This is like dragging the contents of the deep, dark, base, slimy, reptilian part of the human brain into the daylight for all to see, and letting all of the city’s poor people live in it.

From the hotel’s lobby, you have to go through part of the casino area to get to the rooms. It isn’t long before the casinos start to grate at your mind. They make loud, carnival-like beeps and boops, and blink their tacky lights. Entranced gamblers sit at one-armed bandits, endlessly cranking the handle, staring at the reels which never line up. They keep cranking and staring anyway. Some of these gamblers smoke cigarettes or cigars, making the air faintly blue and your clothes and hair stink. A quick glance at the ceiling reveals a black camera bubble literally every few feet. Those make the atmosphere of the whole place subtly tense; you know that one wrong move will have intense men in suits at your side within seconds, firmly removing you from the premises.

After a bit of exploring on the Strip, you come to realize that all of the casinos are exactly the same; they just have differently-themed hotels wrapped around them. The casinos are like infestations of tackiness at the ground levels of fancy hotels. Upstairs is a slightly sane world. Downstairs is where people willingly hand over their money in order to, most likely, never see it again.

Most of the hotels’ themes are just tacky; some of them are blatantly offensive to me, mainly those of “New York-New York”, and “Paris Las Vegas”. These are basically all of the characteristics of those cities that stand out in the popular imagination, condensed into a single building and then pumped full of slot machines. According to Vegas hotel designers, New York consists mainly of tall buildings, the Statue of Liberty, and pretzels. Paris consists of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and a street filled with cafés. I’m surprised they exercised enough restraint to avoid using baguettes as decoration. In a shining example of the things people on either side of the Atlantic have in common, both Paris and New York have casinos at their cores (bet you didn’t know that!). But in both hotels, I displayed a bit of indignation in the appropriately local form: in New York-New York I occasionally said, “Whaddaya TAWKIN about” loudly, to no one in particular, in a slightly over-the-top Brooklyn accent, while in Paris Las Vegas I kept up a constant stream of French muttering, periodically raising to normal speaking volume and hand gestures when I saw some particularly blatant affront to Frenchness.

Outside, the other major form of vice rears its head. On the Strip, billboard trucks drive by, bearing advertisements for “Hot Babes! Delivered To Your Door in 20 Minutes! (702) 696-9696″ or “Ooh La La! Sensual Nightlife Revue”. On the sidewalk, sketchy Mexicans hawk cards to passing pedestrians; the cards have pictures and phone numbers of scantily clad ladies with names like “Candi”. There are occasional newspaper vending boxes; while in most cities such things contain USA Today, the ones here contain even lower forms of reading material: entire catalogs filled with pictures and phone numbers of scantily clad ladies.

Really, though, Vegas isn’t lacking in scantily clad ladies who appear in droves without any phone calls being made. Of course it’s hot here, so I can understand wearing light clothes, but honestly, there is rather more cleavage visible while wandering around the Strip than there needs to be. It only gets worse later at night, when the people on the street stop being families, with their familial wholesomeness, and start being single-gender groups of rich, toolish-looking young people who seem to be here solely for the nightlife. Where, in some cases, by “nightlife” I mean “getting some”.

Night is actually the time when Vegas is at its most alluring. The Strip is lit up with the glow of zillions of wasted watts. The sidewalks are filled with excited people (most of whom, it has to be said, walk far too goddamned slowly). The people are generally younger, more attractive, and display cleavage more shamelessly. The place hums with activity in the big-city way that I find comforting. Plus, both times I was on the Strip by night, I was there to see a big-name show, so I was mentally receptive to the entrancement.

The food we ate also put me in fine spirits. Normally a frugal sort, I decided before the trip to temporarily gag the part of my brain that worries about spending money. I’m not stupid, though; I did this in such a way as to leave active the part that balks at gambling. I just turned off the part that worries about spending money on, for example, good food and electronic toys. On the first night we were there, we ate at a buffet in a hotel. The idea of these is that you pay a rather exorbitant sum up front and then serve yourself from a wide variety of foods, and you get infinite refills. Along with the penny pincher, I shut up the food snob in me; determined to get my money’s worth out of the buffet, I just indiscriminately swept up any food that looked good, paying no heed to the fact that I had sushi (Vegas buffet sushi, no less) next to Chinese sweet and sour pork next to mashed potatoes next to a big slab of medium-rare meat. I hit pretty much every station in the buffet, eating until I felt like a very fat man. The next night, we went to the Capital Grille, a national chain of quite fancy restaurants specializing in steak. Aware that I was going to be spending upwards of $30 on my entree, I didn’t even look at the prices. I got a giant slab of just-barely-seared tuna; it was dark red and melted in my mouth. I did find fault with it (it came with “ginger rice”, which is an awful idea, and the ginger sort of overwhelmed the flavor of the fish), but it still left me once again feeling like a very fat man – a very contented fat man. Even when the check came, I was feeling too blissed out from the heaps of good food to care that the total for three people was $200 before tip.

This is a digression, but I have to get this off my chest: tipping sucks. I can sort of understand the custom of tipping in a restaurant, since the quality of service can vary a lot and it can be nice to have leeway to express an appropriate amount of gratitude, but what’s the deal with tipping, for example, drivers of shuttles from hotels to airports? In our case, the shuttle was operated by our hotel; it’s a service they provide to guests supposedly for free. When we got off at the airport, the driver unloaded our luggage from the back of the minibus (collecting handfuls of bills from other passengers in the process), and as he handed us our last suitcase, said, “Tipping is allowed, fellas,” which we had already gathered from the sign inside the bus that said, “Gratuity accepted, and greatly appreciated”. We pretended not to hear, since we were tired and irritable and had had an extensive discussion the previous night about the idiocy of tipping culture. When the driver didn’t see us immediately reaching for our wallets, he said, “No tip?”, spreading his hands and staring at each one of us in turn, wearing an expression that looked as if we’d just pissed on his mother’s grave. So really, the situation is: “Gratuity accepted, or guilt-trips administered”. The three of us, slightly reeling from the asshat’s audacity, turned and left without further explanation.

Seriously, why have we evolved this culture of giving people bonuses for doing their goddamn jobs? This guy’s job is to drive the goddamn bus from the goddamn hotel to the goddamn airport; presumably the hotel is paying him to do that, so why should we feel obligated to give him more money for doing exactly what we have already paid the goddamn hotel to pay him to do? And if the extra money is actually necessary for him to make a reasonable income, why not just make the extra payment mandatory (instead of tacitly mandatory, such that non-payers get treated very rudely) and drop this goddamn pretense? Jesus Christ. I know it’s partly that driver’s fault for taking the lack of a tip with very bad grace, but seriously. It’s an absurd practice to begin with.

For me, the Vegas experience was a mixture of good, bad and enlightening. I think it’s the kind of thing I only need to do once; anything beyond that is just decadent self-indulgence or belaboring points that have already been made. I know there is plenty of sleaze and waste in the world; I think I can better comprehend the scale of it now. I also had a lot of fun for some of the time. All in all, I support Vegas’ continued existence; aside from the very useful function of parting fools from their money, it is something people should see, for a wide variety of reasons.

I’m now just about halfway through my time here in Sunnyvale. Today, for the sake of getting outside and getting a little exercise, I took what was essentially a random walk, except on a bike, through the expanses of suburban Sunnyvale near where I live.

South Bay suburbia is considerably more attractive than the suburbia I’ve seen in some other places, most notably northwest Miami. Part of it is the weather, of course, but mostly it’s the quiet, peaceful, green happiness of the place. No two houses are alike, as opposed to the rigid, anonymizing sameness of every house in the Miami community where I’ve spent time. Trim little front yards in front of cute little houses, with kids’s bikes on the front step and cozy little nuclear families inside…this is where some people’s American Dreams happen.

As I meandered through the streets, though, I realized that what I was inside was a comically fake name like “Meadowcreek Estates” short of being exactly the type of suburban purgatory that I fervently hope never to end up living in. Never mind that the houses are all different — that’s not what matters. What matters is the reduction of influence from the outside world to a muffled, barely present hum. What matters is the streets and houses full of people who are boring enough to want to be here. What matters is that nothing will ever happen here.

I know that’s a source of great comfort to some people. That’s precisely why they come here — the unfettered scariness of the real world will not come in here and bite them. The carefully cultivated monotony here is relaxing; it means there are far fewer things to worry about. It’s a safe, sheltered, controlled environment to raise kids in. Who knows, when (if) I have kids I may see these things as virtues and be eager to come live in suburbia. Right now, though, the idea of that happening is so distant that it seems impossible. I want to keep it that way for a long time, too. I don’t want to be sheltered from the real world. I like the real world. It’s more comforting to me to constantly be around whatever activity a city brings — it reminds me that time is still moving forward, that life is progressing, and that the world is keeping going. Suburbia’s stasis bubble is disconcerting. How does anyone remember that they’re still alive in there?

For now, give me a big, bustling city any day. I’m pretty sure the only reason I’m OK with living where I do right now is that there’s a definite end in sight. I’ll be leaving on August 17th; the plane ticket is booked. I’ll be going back to the comforting, funky, urban crowdedness of Pittsburgh.

The specific place where I live is actually pleasant in its own strange way. When I first got here I was appalled and started counting down the days. Now that I’ve been here several weeks, it has grown on me. I like my apartment because it’s at the end of a dead-end street off a somewhat main thoroughfare (Homestead Road). My street is a nice little pocket of quietness away from the clamor of traffic on Homestead and beyond. However, it’s not the same as the subdivision-like time-standing-still zone I biked through today. There’s actually quite a bit of activity in the street in the evenings, as kids play and adolescents loiter. I dodge around them as I ride home every night, taking joy in the fact that there is an actual community back here that’s active and lively. It makes me want to join in; alas, all the groups use either Spanish, Chinese or Korean as a primary language, which handicaps me somewhat. It also helps that my street isn’t part of a big square of samey suburbia (like the square bordered by Homestead, Wolfe, El Camino and Lawrence Expressway, where I was wandering today). My street is completely anomalous – it’s a little spur between Homestead and 280, all by itself. The buildings are run-down (identical, unfortunately, but it doesn’t bother me much) and the residents not affluent, distancing this little corner of humanity yet further from the suburbia I’m repelled from.

Nonetheless, if I were settling down here for an indefinite period, I would be less upbeat about it. Everything nearby is the kind of suburbia I don’t like, complete with strip malls outside its insulating boundaries. There are two strip malls at the nearest major intersection, both full of fast food chains. The nearest building higher than two floors is miles away (actually, I think that might be the Apple offices, which are four floors high). In short, my street’s improvements over suburbia are marginal. It’s good enough for the summer, but not beyond.

I probably won’t touch it again till after the summer’s over. It may come out eventually. Just not soon. Sorry.

Turns out, after spending 8 hours a day at a computer, the last thing I want to do is spend more time at a computer. So I don’t. So the software doesn’t get written.

From the department of meta: this is a really pointless post. I don’t have much to say these days.

I love airports. Nobody actually wants to be here, but here we all are. We line up, grumble, avoid eye contact, and count down the minutes. When we have to interact with people, we make it as quick as we can, like taking off a band-aid. The whole process is a big ritual. The need to get around makes people do the most bizarre things.

The absurdity of the whole situation of an airport gives rise to some great comedic moments. What’s funnier than a kid on a leash? How about a kid on a leash who’s being unnecessarily dragged and jerked around by his older brother. “Go over there!” says the brother, pointing. The little kid obligingly runs that way, perhaps thinking that way lies escape. The leash goes taut and the kid performs a fantastic pratfall, both his little legs swinging out in front of him, and landing squarely on his ass. The kid scrabbles and flails while the brother reels him in to repeat the process. I’m tempted to ask the brother if I can have a go. Idly I wonder if there shouldn’t be some legal prohibition against me having kids.

The scary thing here, though, is that among all people who shouldn’t be parents, I’m not that bad. Scarier is that some of the people worse than me actually have kids.

I also get a chance to observe what I call “the dumb”. For example: an obese person who orders ten dollars’ worth of food from McDonald’s (which, at McDonald’s prices, is a ton of food) accompanied by a very large (and pointedly specified) Diet Coke. Such exercises in pointlessness make me a little bit sad inside, but not sad enough to stop me from laughing at them.

Speaking of McDonald’s, there seems to have been a shakeup of the staff of the one here at PIT. (I come here every time I’m at the airport and get a vanilla milkshake – one of the few things on their menu that tastes good without making you die of grease.) Maybe it’s Minority Immigrant Communities Month: where the staff previously consisted of native Pittsburghers, black and white, it now consists mostly of Vietnamese and, of all things, Turks.

At an airport like Pittsburgh there aren’t as many opportunities for this kind of thing, but one of my favorite things to do in airports is identify foreign languages people are speaking. I heard some Russian while I was in the check-in line, but that’s all I’ve heard so far.

Interesting flights on this trip. The first leg, from Pittsburgh to Newark, was in a Bombardier Q400 (formerly the DHC Dash-8). These aircraft have always struck me as odd. They’re spindly, ungainly things. They look like really lanky people with their legs sprouting from their armpits. I did not have a good experience in that aircraft either. The knowledge of its less-than-stellar safety record hung over my head even though I normally don’t spare half a thought for that sort of thing. The greatest part was that in the course of that flight, I got elbowed in the face three times. The first time was by the old lady who sat next to me. She was putting something in the overhead and for some reason her elbow ended up in my face. The second time was from a passing flight attendant (that one hurt, being at rather high velocity). The third time was from some random guy during the getting-off-plane aisle chaos. It’s a new personal best: elbowed in the face three times in an hour.

Let’s talk about that old lady. I understand that I’m young and cute and harmless-looking, but this does not mean that I want to be friends with everyone. Especially random old ladies, wearing too much bloody perfume, who happen to be sitting next to me on planes. Especially if they blithely force my elbow off our shared armrest and proceed to spread their newspaper all over everywhere, well into my territory. I took advantage of the situation to read some of the NYT for free, especially an article on Flemish nationalism in small Belgian towns. I tried to reclaim the armrest, but that was a losing battle. I had to push against either a really scratchy wool sweater, or creepily cold old-lady skin that is roughly two sizes too large for the person it covers.

The best part: this old lady’s accent changed from Pittsburghese to Midland English over the course of the flight. I swear. I can’t get upset over this, of course, since I do it myself (on purpose) with some regularity, but what gives? If she was doing it on purpose, shouldn’t old people be mature enough not to get a kick out of stupid games like that? If not, then seriously, what gives?

In Newark, I was surprised to discover that there is such a thing as bad frozen yogurt. I thought the stuff was all pretty much the same, but no; this was actually bad enough to make me consider not finishing it. Chalk that up as something new I learned today.

On the flight from Newark to San Jose, there was a movie. It turned out this was “27 Dresses”. Now, I am the type of guy who enjoys “Sex and the City”, but I have my limits. Fortunately, it was one of those flights where the headphone jack has two poorly-fitting sockets, so I couldn’t have listened to the movie even if I’d wanted to. I tried an experiment though: seeing how much of the movie I could figure out without sound. Turns out 27 Dresses is one of the most predictable movies I’ve seen in a while: given the trailer and a few random snippets without sound from near the beginning, I predicted the plot’s development and ending perfectly.

Not listening to a movie’s audio makes it easier to separate good actors from bad ones. I find with the good actors, you can’t figure out their exact words from just visuals (body language and facial expressions), whereas with bad actors you can. That might seem like I have it backwards, but I think that’s the case because the good actors have the necessary depth to be able to say something conveying one emotion while silently emoting another – the “real” one. Bad actors can only manage one layer.

Disappointed with the quality of cab service. I hop in a cab at the airport, and say, “I need to go to [my street]; it’s near the intersection of Homestead and Hollenbeck in Sunnyvale.” Homestead and Hollenbeck are reasonably major roads in Sunnyvale; even though the cab seems to be based in San Jose, Homestad and Hollenbeck are two roads that you really should know. They both show up yellow in Google Maps. The driver didn’t know what I meant; I had to tell him how to get here. This stands in stark contrast to, say, London. Give a London cabbie the name of any street inside the M25, and he’ll instantly know where it is and what’s the best way to get there. Give the name of a landmark inside the City of London, and he’ll know where it is and what’s the best way to get there (as well as which landmarks you’ll pass along the way). Seriously. This is a requirement to become a London cabbie. They are the most incredible urban navigators in the world; they have learned the Knowledge (that’s really what it’s called). There’ve been studies showing that as London cabbies go through the, on average, three years of rigorous training to learn the Knowledge, the parts of their brains responsible for spatial reasoning grow measurably. This is how hardcore London cabbies are. Would that all cabbies in the world were like that.

Would like to say that it’s totally hot here in a good way, but it is actually just really high temperature.