05.30.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:00 am by Max
Looking back on my high school years, I went to a pretty good school. A private boys’ school (oddly, “private school” in American English is “public school” in British English), one of the best in Canada.
I was quite the angry, antiauthoritarian young man in those days. And while I enjoyed learning at school and reading books and the like, I didn’t possess an aptitude for homework. I guess you could say that I didn’t have the right attitude; I lacked sufficient love for learning. I wasted a lot of my time in high school. (Youth is wasted on the young and all that.)
I mean, not only could I have applied myself more when it came to my studies, but I also should have tried more to be a member of my high school community. I suppose I never felt like I belonged.
All these thoughts withstanding, with more than 15 years of hindsight, I now understand that there are many things that should have been taught in high school. There were social lessons, hard lessons, that I learned after high school. And maybe the subsequent landings could have been cushioned if I had been better prepared for life’s important lessons.
Here, then, are some of life’s important lessons. Why aren’t these courses taught at high school?
1. Ego Moderation 101
Or how to get a handle on your ego. Why wasn’t I taught how to be more patient, how to control my anger better, how not to always consider my own needs before the needs of others? Why didn’t people tell me that I wasn’t the center of the universe? That there were other conscious, feeling entities in the world besides me. That I shouldn’t always think of my own needs first and foremost?
2. Financial Management 102
Why didn’t we have teachers telling us the need to get started right away with our personal retirement savings plans (known as RRSPs in Canada)? Why weren’t we advised to watch out for the incessant nickling-and-diming (as in, that which is practiced by the banks—think gouging ATM fees) that equates to a slow drain from our bank accounts?
3. What Really Matters 103
It has taken me a long time to realize that the things that really matter are the things we often take for granted. Health, life, friends, family, relationships, loved ones. Come figurative judgment day, that sack of gold under your bed might as well be a sack of shit. That time you spent raising your children is priceless. Is this a personal truth that each person must arrive at individually? Is it something that cannot be taught?
4. Empathy 104
Now that’s a word the meaning of which I didn’t even know come high school graduation. Empathy is a key virtue, and many of us have precious little of it. The next time you are standing in a long line at the bank, stop your fretting, shifting, and sighing for a moment and ponder the others around you. Impress upon yourself how everyone else in line is itching to get their business done as much as you are. Take a minute and think about the bank teller, who is probably tired after spending hours on her feet dealing with impatient, irascible customers who only give a shit about their own needs.
Yes, there were a lot of things they didn’t teach us in high school. And today was only a partial list of courses.
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05.21.07
Posted in Fan Mail? at 9:22 pm by Max
Apparently, someone from India likes my site—never mind that I haven’t updated the Bloopers portion for ages. I literally have scores of images on my server, just waiting to be put onto web pages. Another task on the backburner. Anyway, A.N. from India writes in with what he calls a “howler” [emphasis in the original]:
Dear Mr.Max— I find your website interesting. I had earlier sent a mail on the captioned subject. Any way am writing about a conversation with one of my teachers that took place 45 years back. During my first year in college we had regular chemistry classes in the lab.The tutor in charge was well known for his lack of english knowledge.Still it did not deter him from speaking in horrible english. Once I had to visit the lab several times.This man wanted to reprimand saying why i am roaming about the place so often. But the exact words expressed by him are as follows : ” Man,why are you rotating the laboratory?” Immediatwely all of us present at the lab burst into laughter.
And, in another email, my correspondent relates “yet another howler”:
Dear Mr.Max– Got ur mail and thank u for the same. Now I am going to relate as to how my typist suddenly provided comic relief on a day when there was tremendous mental tension. As an official of the income-tax dept. I was computing the Income of a Yarn merchant.
I had dictated to my stenographer a three page assessment order to work out the income of the businessman. In the process the word “yarn merchant” occurred at dozen places. When the typist brought me the order, I could notcontrol my laughter. T.he mental tension vanished in seconds. The reason : Instead of “yarn merchant” the gentleman had typed at dozen places YARN MERCHANT” .I can tell you honestly such unexpectedhumour can cure hypertension . Hope this will make smile a bit . Letme sign off saying adieu–[name omitted] from India[.]
Well, I liked the first entry better than the second. I’m not so sure that the misuse of block letters constitutes a “howler.” Nevertheless, it is fun to get mail from faraway places. And I would have to agree with A.N.’s assertion that humor can cure hypertension—“stress,” in other words?
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05.20.07
Posted in Crosscultural Matters at 12:04 pm by Max
I’m a big fan of humor, and thus I like to try teaching it in my ESL classes.
Getting Western humor across to East Asian students, though, can be quite a challenge. For instance, “Yo mama” jokes don’t generally go down well with Koreans, most of whom are rather Confucian minded.
I think that video can often help get the point across. YouTube comes to the rescue, giving us a good example of a “dumb blonde” joke.
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05.17.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:16 am by Max
It’s official.
Just as I suspected, I do indeed have allergies. Since last summer, I have been given over to fits of sneezing and a nose that runs like a leaky tenement tap. It turns out that I’m allergic to the shit of those asshole little dust mites—microscopic things that live all over your house and love to eat the dead skin cells we humans shed in large quantities.
Until recently, I was taking over-the-counter medication that worked pretty well before, but suddenly it stopped being very effective. During the last couple of weeks, I was spending—wasting—up to an hour a day managing my nose, sneezing multiple times in a row and going through numerous handkerchiefs, which my wife had to spend time washing. Not to mention the fact that I felt miserable—yes, yes, I know other people in the world have much greater hurts. Add to these problems the worry I had that the pseudoephedrine I was taking every day probably wasn’t too good for me. The result was that I finally found the motivation to drag my ass over to an allergy clinic.
The doctor was young, open-minded, and easy to get along with. I was glad for that. I’m highly reluctant to have to be stuck with a doctor who (1) thinks he knows everything, (2) isn’t up on current research and doesn’t believe in lifelong learning, (3) doesn’t listen to the patient carefully, and (4) doesn’t like his patients to ask questions.
I am now back to normal thanks to the new meds I’m on. I was so fucked up before, I cursed my nose and sinuses for the pulpous, bulbous, puffy, useless mass of leaky tissue they were. I couldn’t breathe through my nose, I couldn’t smell anything. Who needed a goddam nose? Now that Mr. Nose is back to normal, I have to say, “Sorry, nose. You came through for me.”
Another item on the agenda is student vids.
Information technology has allowed me to connect with my students in new, neat, different ways. Email being one, video being another.
I’ve been busy at night lately, doing a lot of video editing. I certainly don’t have to put in all this extra effort; it’s not part of my job description. But as you probably know by now, I like preserving information; I like creating records of my students’ lives (and, by extension, my own life). It will be cool if my students will still be able to watch these videos 20 or 30 years from now.
Here are the videos I took of my Canon students playing a word-guessing game: Masako, Aki, Tetsuji, and Kouki.
Here is a video of Masaru K., a student I teach on-one-one on Saturdays. My other student on Saturday, a Mr. T. N., didn’t want his video to be made public; I respected his wishes.
Finally, see a video of young Holley with her birds (one of which, sadly, recently passed away). Funny enough, tomorrow is my last lesson with Holley after almost two years of classes; it turns out she’s too busy with junior high school for after-hours English.
Like ’em or hate ’em, these vids are here to stay—at least for as long as YouTube exists.
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05.11.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:43 pm by Max
I watched this video on YouTube and it provoked a number of thoughts. Here is what I wanted to post on YouTube (but my comment was over the character limit).
This video provokes a lot of different emotions in different people. However, one has to make a distinction here between three critical, but separate, responses.
The first issue is the revulsion some vegetarians/vegans feel at the practice of eating animals, period. The second is the horror that many meat-eating people experience due to the consumption of cats and dogs, intelligent animals which have a special place in many people’s hearts. The third issue is the fact that the animals in this video are being treated with extreme inhumanity—indeed, as some commenters averred, one could say the animals are being “tortured.”
I myself consume meat and I fall into the third camp. I believe that animals should be treated humanely up until the moment of their slaughter. Call this oxymoronic if you will, but we all have to die one day. And PETA calling for meat-eaters to give up meat is not a realistic goal.
In the States, I think a lot of animal suffering is borne of modern agrobusiness’s thirst for the almighty buck. But in this video shot in South Korea, the callousness of some of the animal handlers is clearly demonstrated. Living creatures should be accorded reverence, or at the very least respect.
If you read the comments posted under the video on the YouTube site, you will see a lot of anger, much of it outright fury, and little of it logical discourse. This comes as no surprise, considering the general state of comments on YouTube. But I think that with this issue in particular, namely the eating of dogs and cats, there is an unfortunate conflation of opinions from people with widely different beliefs. People expressing outrage at what is shown in the video should make clear which of the aforementioned three camps they belong to. Not to clarify one’s stance is to weaken one’s cause.
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05.10.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:08 am by Max
Today’s theme is that there is no theme. What follows is just a bunch of different thoughts all jumbled together. Thoughts that have been floating around in my head and yearning for an airing.
1. I haven’t been writing too much on this blog lately. But I’ve been consistent with my workouts, getting in three sessions of weight training a week, and also writing a bit here and there on my Body Blog. And I’ve been working hard producing videos of my students. And, I’ve been trying hard to be a good dad. All this, and I’m not getting much sleep. But my mood is reasonably good, and my energy levels are high. I know my nutrition is on track. Without the right food and the right amounts of it, I would be crashing right now.
2. This is old news, but Anna Politkovskaya was murdered not too long ago. Her death has stuck in my mind, though, because I read one of her books a few years ago, and it really moved me. Her book on the war in Chechnya, A Dirty War, gives the reader a really good idea of how bad things are over in that part of the world.
3. Although Groundhog Day is meant to be an optimistic movie, I remember Bill Murray’s character stating emphatically that “[p]eople are idiots.” Sometimes, you’d have to agree, especially in the case of people who mutilated stingrays in a twisted attempt to show their grief over the death of Steve Irwin, aka “The Crocodile Hunter.” Senselessly killing wildlife is the last thing Steve would have ever wanted.
4. I spent several years of my life teaching English in South Korea, and I was often told by Koreans how lucky I am that I am a native speaker, since my kids will grow up fluent in English. Upon hearing such praise, I swelled with pride at my assume unassailable linguistic superiority. But now, ironically, I’m kind of worried about how good my kids’ English is going to be. Already, since my wife is raising them, they know more Japanese than English. An American I know who has a Japanese spouse and a (ten-year-old?) half-half son related the following story to me (not verbatim): “I think my son’s English is getting worse. Yesterday I asked him, ‘So, how was school last week?’ and all he could say was ‘Last week? Last week?'”
5. National Geographic Magazine memorably plays down the danger of shark attacks:
Sharks bite fewer people each year than New Yorkers do, according to health department records. And you are far likelier to drown in your bathtub or be murdered by your spouse than you are to die in the jaws of a shark. [Click for whole article.]
6. Here’s an excerpt of a recent conversation between me and my wife. It shows how indirect and elliptical Japanese can come across to us Westerners. Unlike my wife, when it comes to most linguistic interchanges, I fancy full frontal directness.
– Wife: Are you going to work out today?
– Me: Yup.
– Wife: But you worked out yesterday…
– Me: Your point being? [I had to prompt her here or she wouldn’t have continued.]
– Wife: I wanted you to stay home and help out with the kids…
7. Mickey and Milo are crazy about blowing soap bubbles. Shiho loves using bubble games as a way to occupy them. Mickey in particular walks around our pad at all hours of the day with a (usually empty) bottle of soap and a bubble blower. As well, both the kids, and again Mickey in particular, are constantly into playing with toothpaste and toothbrushes. Mickey frequently has a mutilated toothbrush and an empty tube of toothpaste in his hands. He reached up near the kitchen sink the other day and palmed my wife’s new toothbrush and munched it up good. Shiho was a little upset because she had to open a new package.
8. There are several things I don’t like about Time Magazine, notably their hypocrisy. They are unable to present a single, unified editorial voice. For instance, they often talk about the need for peace and how we should do good things for the planet. But then an article last year on ways to relieve stress mentioned firing a machine gun on a range in some remote Southeast Asian jungle. Time Mag needs to get its priorities straight.
Kudos, however, to Lev Grossman for his April 16, 2007 article entitled “The Hyperconnected.” Grossman talks about how we’re addicted to our digital gadgets:
I have a full-blown e-mail problem too. I frequently override the little notifer app that checks my G-mail for me once a minute because an e-mail could have arrived in the intervening 60 seconds [emphasis in the original].
Grossman goes on to lament our—and why have I never heard it expressed this way before?—“dependence on a continuous flow of electronic attention to prop up our egos.”
Yes, yes, yes. You hit the nail on the head. It’s all about our bloody egos. The reason I check my email every five minutes. The reason I need people to read and comment on my blog. And on and on. I’m glad someone else besides me realizes the problem here.
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05.04.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:23 am by Max
Childhood is such a special time in our lives. Perhaps childhood is even more special to us adults than it is to our children.
When we watch our children play, we can, for a moment or two, recapture how it must have felt to be a child. Or maybe that’s not true.
Maybe what we’re actually doing when we watch our kids at play is longing once again for the innocence, the ignorance of evil, the blissful circumscribed reality of childhood. I don’t think that children necessarily enjoy being innocent and ignorant of evil–indeed, how could they, since they only know what they know? Certainly, though, we get a vicarious thrill from watching them exist in their a state of innocence.
I remember very little about my childhood. I have very few memories from before the age of five, and I seem to remember precious little of my preteen years in general. I can, however, for a brief time, relive my childhood by watching my own children frolic.
Why do we get old? Life is so darn sad.
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The first issue is the revulsion some vegetarians/vegans feel at the practice of eating animals, period. The second is the horror that many meat-eating people experience due to the consumption of cats and dogs, intelligent animals which have a special place in many people’s hearts. The third issue is the fact that the animals in this video are being treated with extreme inhumanity—indeed, as some commenters averred, one could say the animals are being “tortured.”
I myself consume meat and I fall into the third camp. I believe that animals should be treated humanely up until the moment of their slaughter. Call this oxymoronic if you will, but we all have to die one day. And PETA calling for meat-eaters to give up meat is not a realistic goal.
In the States, I think a lot of animal suffering is borne of modern agrobusiness’s thirst for the almighty buck. But in this video shot in South Korea, the callousness of some of the animal handlers is clearly demonstrated. Living creatures should be accorded reverence, or at the very least respect.