Category Archives: Random

Tex Mex From Tubes and Speaking Nicely

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I’ve mentioned before that after I left Albania I was looking for a job with the least amount of responsibility possible. I therefore took a job at Taco Tico, a regional Tex Mex fast food restaurant.

Unfortunately, because I was older and allegedly wiser, I was put on a fast track to shift manager. When I started, my uniform was a polo style shirt and a baseball cap and my job was to not muck up orders on the cash register, not mess up giving out change, clean stuff, and speak nicely to people. The people included fellow employees and customers. It turns out that neither was necessarily easy to speak nicely to.

Customers, especially, have this unreasonable expectation that things should be served promptly and that everything should be clean. However, you should not attempt to make things clean whilst any customers are present. I had a guy tell me he didn’t appreciate me slinging dirty water and a mop around the restaurant whilst he was eating, even though I’d been instructed to go out and clean up the ruins of the lunch rush. Oddly, I managed to say something along the lines of “Sorry, sir. I’ll do that later.” instead of pointing out that he was unreasonable git eating ground meat from a plastic tube that looked like a giant frozen turd and had been delivered by a truck driver which meant that some dirty water on the floor was probably the least of his worries.

I was made shift manager without having to take a test, much to the anger of a few employees who’d been trying to get promoted for quite a while. Basically the store manager was using the test–which involved memorizing the exact grams and ounces of each ingredient in each dish–to filter out the employees who worked hard but he didn’t think were particularly bright. As a result of my promotion, I got more money, a short sleeve button down Oxford shirt, a clip on tie and responsibility over money and napkins. Oh, and more resentment from fellow employees–especially when I told one he had to stop ringing up an extra 50 cents worth of sour cream and other toppings on orders in order to run up the bill on obnoxious customers in the drive-thru.

My only “Really? Are you serious? Really?” moment came when I had to teach one kid, whose dad was making him work to pay for the insurance and gasoline on his awesome car (an early 1970’s something or other muscle car), how to wash dishes and use both a broom and a push broom. (I remain shocked that anyone would not know how to do any of those, but he was a fast learner and a good employee.)

I also got a lot more scrutiny from my boss, who seemed intent on the idea of me eventually moving into proper management. I, of course, said, “No, damn you. I’m going to get a Ph.D. in literature. That’s where the real future is.” (That actually turned out to be a better decision than it sounds as that boss was eventually fired for messing about with the menu too much. More on why I don’t have a Ph.D. some other day.)

All in all, I was glad I worked fast food at least once. In fact, I believe every person should work fast food and/or retail jobs at least once in their lives. It teaches you a lot about people and yourself, It also teaches you to avoid ever working fast food again.

You Just Keep on Having Tantrums Over the Borderline

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Right around Christmas of 1993, for reasons I don’t fully remember and still don’t fully understand, I traveled with a friend from Albania down to Athens, Greece. I remember that she was heading back to the USA for a vacation but I don’t remember why I was tagging along. (Let’s just say there was some history there and a novel would be required to explain it.)

The first trouble occurred when we were crossing from Albania to Greece. We had to depart the bus and stand in line at a passport office. When it was my turn, the Greek border agent looked through my passport with contempt (remember, I was coming from Albania and no one in the Balkans likes their neighbors). He then found two visas from Macedonia (now the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) which I had visited earlier in the year. That’s when things got absurd.

The Greeks didn’t (and still don’t) recognize Macedonia, partly because they are convinced that naming it after a region in Greece implies ownership. The closest parallel I can give is if Mexico suddenly declared that Northern Mexico was now called Texas and that its natural capital was, and would some day be again, San Antonio. The Greek border guard then proceeded to have a temper tantrum in my passport. He crossed out with ball point pen all references to Macedonia in my passport and stamped the visas with “This Crappy Bullshit Fake Country Not Recognized by Super Awesome Greece” (something like that). He tossed the passport back at me and sent me on my way.

After my friend departed, I decided to visit Istanbul and caught a train to Thessalonika. The part of the city I was in was beautiful but because I was only there overnight I didn’t get much of a chance to explore. I did wander around the coast a bit and see the White Tower, but then, as I was wandering around, I found a cinema that was playing Sliver and I bought a ticket.

That’s right, boys and girls; I was in the area that received Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians and I watched a crap Sharon Stone thriller because English.

The next morning, I took a train and a bus to the Greek/Turkish border. This one looked more like a gas station and I expect that some of the Greek signs actually said “Last Gas for 1000 kilometers”. The border guards came on the bus and collected our passports and then went back in the gas station. A few minutes later, a guard returned and asked me to step off the bus and led me into the gas station. I was then subjected to my second official interrogation by the police (the first happened on my 21st birthday.)

Now keep in mind that I was tired and cranky and that my mother has always cautioned/cursed me that my mouth would eventually get me in trouble and there I was at a gas station/border crossing facing a border agent who barely spoke English and his translator (a fellow passenger) who spoke only a little more. The cards, therefore, did not look to be stacked in my favor.

The agent first asked why I’d visited Skopje (Greece’s word for Macedonia). I explained that I’d lucked into a free ride there. (He looked at me as if I’d just explained why I’d killed his dog.) That was strike one. He then asked why I was in Albania. I explained I was working for the US Government. Those were strikes two and three. I explained about the Peace Corps, the whole time thinking “Do you know what Greece would be without my country? The shittiest part of Turkey.” Miracle of miracles, I didn’t actually say that, though, and the guard finally sent me on my way.

A few minutes later (with my passport back in hand) I was standing next to the bus when the guard came back to get me. I just waved him off and got back on the bus. He didn’t follow and I never went to jail. I eventually got across the border and into Istanbul.

I had a great time in Istanbul, even though I celebrated the ringing in of 1994 by myself. My hostel was halfway between Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque and every place I wanted to visit was within walking distance. (Ironically, given where I now live, I had no interest in crossing the Bosphorus into “Asia”.)

To get home, I climbed on board a bus to Albania and got ready to face the frightening legend of Turkish border police. Keeping my mother’s caution/curse in my head, I kept replaying the most brutal scenes from Midnight Express over and over in my head with a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack. I was convinced that something I’d bought would turn out to be an antique and I’d go to jail. And because I was thinking that, I’m pretty sure I looked guilty.

We had to take our bags off the bus, set them on the ground and open them up for the guard. When he got to me, I couldn’t help but tense up. He asked if that was my bag. I managed to say only “yes” instead of “Yes, and the two kilos of hash taped to my body are mine too!” He nodded and moved on and that was the end of my Turkish border guard encounter.

I still don’t know if I should be disappointed in that or not. I still kind of wish I’d tried to smuggle something out, though.

Neither Blood Nor Cannons Nor Something to Set Your Watch By

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After I finished my first three years in Japan, various confusions and misunderstandings and regulations required me to leave and surrender my work visa and then come back to the USA and get a new work visa. Instead of going straight home, I decided to complete my trip around the world and go home by way of Europe.

Luckily, Eddie, an old Peace Corps Albania friend, was doing a Fulbright Fellowship in Slovenia so I stopped off to visit him and his wife (who may or may not have actually been his wife at the time. Long story and lack of long term memory). Ljubljana was great and a pair of young journalists introduced us, over cheap beer and plates of meat, to everything there was to know about both the band Phish and Northern Balkan Politics. Having been in Albania, we weren’t surprised to learn that Northern and Southern Balkan Politics were  identical:

1) Every country hates the country it shares a border with.
2) It’s always the other country’s fault.

While I was in Slovenia, I decided to take a day trip to Zagreb, Croatia. Zagreb had a lot more to do but wasn’t as picturesque as Ljubljana. Zagreb is a busy mall; Ljubljana is a quiet coffee shop.

I started wandering about aimlessly, taking pictures here and there and enjoying the old Gradec district and the surprisingly tacky St. Mark’s Church in St. Mark’s Square. Eventually I stumbled across Lotrscak Tower (which apparently means “Lacks Vowels” in Serbo-Croatian).

Every day at noon in Zagreb, as a way to scare the crap out of tourists and thus identify them for census purposes, a cannon is fired from LacksVowels Tower. The tourists jump and the locals use it as a version of a talking clock (At the KAPOW! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?! the time will be twelve o’clock) and set their watches by it.

I remember reading about this cannon when I was in elementary school, and vaguely remember a line drawing of one person jumping and another checking his watch. When I realized what LacksVowels tower was I was actually kind of excited and went inside to see the cannon room. That was all cool but what wasn’t cool was that, for the first time in hundreds of years, the cannon would not be fired because the cannon man was on vacation. Basically, if the story I was told was true, one man had been firing the cannon for decades. The only time he’d taken a vacation, his replacement had somehow injured himself/lost a hand firing the cannon. As a result, he hadn’t taken a vacation in over 20 years. When I was there, he’d apparently agreed to take a vacation only if the cannon went unfired until his return.

I remember feeling kind of mad, and to this day I’m still disappointed. It’s the equivalent of going to London and not hearing Westminster Chimes or the ear splitting screech of taxi brakes.

 

Stinking After Three Days Rotten After Seven

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I am, it turns out, not a particularly good house guest. I know this because I’ve spent a good portion of my life living with people who weren’t my family and the reactions have been mixed.

This all started when I was at Kansas State University. At the time, K-State had a summer program–the name of which escapes me–that was modeled after the US Peace Corps. We were assigned to various small towns in Kansas and took special courses that required us to work together as teams to learn about the town and who the key players in town were and what our town’s prospects were. We traveled to the town a couple times to do research and then we assembled all that information into a report that served as our final grade. We then spent the summer in the town living with locals who’d volunteered to host us and doing the work the town had brought us there to do.

My first town was Oskaloosa, Kansas and our team was responsible for helping promote the county as a retirement area for affluent retirees–or as I dubbed it: move here, build a house, spend a lot of money, die. (Yes, that’s exactly the spirit that makes me so loveable to have in your house.)

The problem with me living with other people, even if I follow all their rules, is that the introvert in me pretty much just wants to be left alone. With my first family, I thought that keeping to myself was the best thing to do. I’d stay out of their hair and just be part of the furniture. In retrospect, however, this made it seem as if I only joined them for meals which pretty much made it seem as if they were my servants. It didn’t help that at least one member of the couple had a grand vision of us all being very much like a family. This person never understood that this was pretty much how I behaved around my own family.

My next two hostings were nearly ideal. In Kansas City I was housed with Mary Ann Flunder and her family. She remains one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met and her family was busy enough that I had a lot of time to myself. She did her best to get me to network with the some of the people she knew, but I wasn’t smart enough to recognize a good opportunity and how to exploit it. My last hosting was in Jetmore, Kansas. My host was a single man who was always away from home working. I think he was home barely five days the entire time I was there. Basically his casa was mi casa (that’s like modern Spanish or something) and I had a great time, even though our job was to help develop tourism around a reservoir that had no water in it. (I think it does now.)

What really woke me up was my host family in Albania. Once again, I tried to keep to myself and didn’t realize I was basically being rude. Eventually I was moved out of their place and, through an incredible comedy of errors, ended up homeless and housed in a hotel that had been nicknamed “the monkey house” when it housed visiting Chinese but had become known as the “hotel death” after someone had been killed there. (Yes, that’s right, the Peace Corps housed me in a place called “hotel death” which pretty much sums up our Country Director’s opinion of me.)

From there I ended up living with a US professor and his wife for a couple months whilst I found a permanent place to live. She was especially sympathetic because she’d been abandoned when she was young and felt a certain kinship with me. They remained friends long after I left Albania and I’ve always dubbed them “Mom and Dad Two”. Eventually I got a place of my own and became the proprietor of a rather grungy hostel.

I get along better with She Who Must Be Obeyed’s family, although I still rebel, sometimes without even realizing it, against Japan’s group orientation. The hardest part is convincing them that they don’t have to entertain me. I’m not actually bored, just boring.

 

Breaking Up is Harder to Do

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If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing! You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your short-wave radio, your karate outfit and your unicycle, and we’ll go inside and watch TV. –Homer Simpson (The Otto Show–Season 3, Episode 22)

The above quote pretty much sums up a good portion of my life and the fate of a good many things I’ve tried. Granted, there were some things I forced my way through that ended up not being worth doing–for example, reading all of Ullysses; all of Finnegan’s Wake; all of War and Peace; and getting good at Civilization II and Civilization: Call to Power (although those last two are debatable; also it’s debatable whether any one actually reads Finnegan’s Wake or simply experiences/survives it. As someone in the book says: bababadalgharagh
takamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoor
denenthur-nuk–and that’s a direct quote).

This is especially true with sports (and some artistic activities). I quickly reach the plateau where you have to start learning the hard stuff and practicing it again and again. I’m not one of those guys who gains motivation to do better from failure–interestingly, a lot of the guys who did didn’t mind failing in school, but if they failed on the football field they were driven to do better. I, on the other hand, start rationalizing reasons not to keep doing the sport–and I’m really good at coming up with those excuses. Pretty soon, the running shoes and track spikes have been put away next to the basketball shoes and the baseball glove and baseball bat (which are next to the art book and the calligraphy brushes and one or two woodcarving projects).

I remember early on forcing myself to go to calligraphy class on Tuesday and karate class on Friday. Eventually, after a series of cancellations by both me and my teacher, I stopped going to calligraphy and started going to karate on Tuesdays instead. After I moved to Tokyo, I delayed finding a new dojo, but after a year or so away, and some weight gain after my ski injury (another long post that I’ll save until winter) I had no problem getting back into karate–even after I re-injured my knee.

I still feel the urge not to go, especially right now when it’s hot and muggy and I’m performing with great crapness in my style (that’s a technical term). Today I was running through excuses–I’m sick; I have a migraine; a migraine is making me sick; I’m busy; I’m sick of being busy and it’s giving me a migraine (see, told you I was good at that) and instead decided to just go and slog through it. (I was good half the lesson and dreadful the second.) I’ve even learned to force myself to go to practice during exams because even if I do badly, the exercise helps relieve a lot of stress. As I may have said before, I never want to go, but I’m always glad I went. (Actually writing these daily entries can be a lot like that, too…)

This is the secret I never got when I was in junior and high school or college playing intramural soccer: sometimes just turning up is enough to make it all worth it, even if your lack of skill gives the coach hives and mild heart attack. At the very least, it gives you something to write about. Or as someone says in Finnegan’s Wake: Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

Blood Lust and the Art of Making Bad Bugs Good

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A couple posts ago I mentioned that one of the more entertaining things in Albania was watching bugs fry at the Taverna Tafaj once they got a bug zapper. Today I thought I’d talk about the Great Albanian Fly Massacre.

In Albania, I started out with a host family and then, for complicated reasons deserving of another post, ended up de facto homeless for a while and stayed a month here and there with a couple fellow expatriates and through part of winter with a fairly stern lady and her daughter and their other boarder before finally finding  a place of my own.

Because I had a place, and despite it being a good walk from the center of Tirana, and because as I’ve mentioned before everyone had to come to Tirana for immunization shots and money, my apartment ended up as a kind of hostel for several friends.

However, because there was a large trash pit behind my apartment building, my apartment was also a tourist destination for large groups of Albanian flies. (Note: To any entomologists out there: I know that’s not their real name; no, I don’t know what their real name really was; shut up.)

One summer, my friends Nancy and Eddie were in town for business and/or shots and we were basically hanging out in my place as we were either waiting for something to happen or were too hot and lazy to go do anything. Either way, we were suffering from the heat and humidity and the sudden infestation of flies.

The fly infestation was bad enough that we were constantly brushing them off our faces and away from our ears. Finally, one fly too many tried to settle on my face and I got tired of brushing them away and something deep inside snapped. I remember feeling a sort of frustrated rage (similar to what I now get dealing with computers) rising up. I rolled up an Albanian newspaper and started swatting flies and the walls, on the ceiling, on furniture, anywhere. My goal was to turn them into “good bugs” (As my mother is wont to say: the only good bug is a dead bug.) At first there were enough flies to turn two at once into good bugs.

After about five or six kills, the glare of crazed joy in my eyes and the fun I was having inspired Eddie to roll up a paper and join the massacre. Nancy didn’t join the killing but directed us to flies we hadn’t seen yet. We went off into other rooms to find fresh kills. I remember that Eddie also had a glare of crazed joy. I also seem to remember him getting more kills despite starting late, but that’s because he’s from Georgia where most insects were invented.

By the time the blood lust settled, the mangled corpses of over 80 flies decorated the walls of my apartment. It took a while to clean the mess up (meaning I didn’t clean the mess up for a while) but the cathartic release was well worth it.

Also, survivors must have got word out to other flies (everyone knows flies talk to each other) to avoid the crazy human because I never had a fly infestation that bad again. All I had was a few teenaged flies buzzing my apartment on a dare. Not that many made it out. (See, I told you something snapped.)

The Invasion of the Little People in Green, Orange and Red

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In an earlier post about the World Cup and my strange connection to soccer, I neglected to mention one of my direct connections to soccer which is odd because it’s the only one to which I can pin a specific date: May 26, 1993.

Basically, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, Albania managed to pull itself together enough to field a national soccer team and compete in World Cup qualifying. A couple teams had already come and gone but the one that got me occurred when, for reasons I don’t remember, I headed down toward the stadium and encountered a bunch of sunburned, freaked out people dressed in orange and green.

They were followers of the Republic of Ireland national team and lot of them had just stepped off a bus from Corfu, Greece where they’d gotten too much sun. Others had just stepped off the plane direct from Ireland and were pale white and freaked out. Because I was cleaner than the average Albanian, not hitting them up for cigarettes and/or money, and because they interpreted my shirt (which I thought had blue stripes) as having green stripes, I was immediately declared a member of the tribe and shanghaied to act as translator. They paid my way in (100 lek or about a dollar) and started handing me cans of beer.

Who was I to say no?

It was my first experience with football culture and the groups of people who follow the team around. One woman, who eventually became a pen pal for a while, planned to follow the team all over Europe. I didn’t ask how they afforded all that, but years later met someone who said, even if they were on the dole, they’d been saving since the last World Cup to follow the team.

The group I was with carried a flag with “Hill 270 is here” on it (or maybe 271 or 272 I don’t remember and my journal from that time is buried).  Whatever the number was, because they had Irish accents I didn’t fully understand the explanation of what that meant (Ahh, havingitalittletingwedofordelaods”) but I gleaned it had something to do with a pub. As I drank more and came to understand Irish better, they explained some basics of the game (Ayedeyaredoinmoredenjustrunninoutderdeyare) and some rule changes. If I understood them correctly the powers what are had either changed the rules or were about to change the rules to prevent goalies from picking up kicks from their own teammates. This was apparently supposed to speed up the game and encourage scoring. (Mission accomplished. ???) There was also talk of making the goal bigger and shrinking and or eliminating the penalty area or the goalie’s box or, ah, hell, UhI’llbehavinanoderbeerderbroder.

My favorite moment was when an Irish midfielder made a weak effort to get the ball past an Albanian midfielder. One of the Irishmen I was with yelled “Commitment, WhateverHisNameWas. We need a little commitment.” He and another Irishman then made eye contact and said “UhAye, we need the bleedin’ Commitments.”

Albania scored first but ended up losing 2-1 thanks to a free kick and some very dodgy play on a corner kick (at least the Albanians thought so). Here are the highlights from Spanish TV as shown on Albanian TV. (Warning, they are in Spanish and there are some scrambled bits.) You can almost see me at around 1:50-52. I’m in the shadows a couple rows above the flag on the far left.

The Hill 270 flag was stolen by some random Albanian whilst the Irish were celebrating and, after a brief fit of anger, they all just decided to make a new flag with “Hill 270 is here AGAIN” or something like that.

I drank a few more beers with them and got them back to their bus. I stayed in contact with the one lady for a while and then lost touch. It happened during one of my many transition  phases during my service and it cheered me up. I was having a great time I did.

 

Survival and Purists and Groups of Skinny Dippers

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When I was in Niigata, one of the things that got me through three years was the weekly gathering of the handful of teachers in my area.

Every Wednesday the five of us would meet on the train platform at Itoigawa station and take the train to a nearby onsen (hot spring bath). The ladies would head to one side and the gentlemen would head to the other where we’d go through the ritual of stripping naked, cleaning up, sauna, cold bath, jacuzzi bath, outdoor bath and then cleaning up again. We’d do this pretty much rain, sleet or snow–the onsen was actually at its best when it was snowing lightly. We enjoyed this so much we even invited visiting family members to join us–although we were requested to leave names out of all future discussions.

After that, we’d recover with a beer and then head to Naojiro’s, a bar run by a terrific guy who spoke English and was very patient with us and our loud English speaking foreign ways. We’d eat and drink as a group until a couple of us had to run for the last trains and that pretty much got us through the rest of the week. Even as an introvert, I was energized by these gatherings. We also were suspicious of one of the new guys (after several staff changes) when he didn’t join the Wednesday gatherings.

This is in contrast to the Peace Corps which holds that you should be looking to locals for your support group and they do their best to force that by dropping you off by yourself in a site and saying “do something photogenic that we can use in promotional materials” and “don’t embarrass your country.”

If you were near groups of other volunteers, you had to hope you weren’t near the purists who sought to so thoroughly immerse themselves in the local culture that they would barely speak English to you when you saw them. To make matters worse, their pronunciation was much worse than they seemed to think it was and they thought speaking soft and fast made them sound native. (All it really did was make them harder to understand than a native.) A typical conversation with a purist went something like:

Me–Hey, dude, long time no see!
Them–Frdap, holtan mikentanan, Doayayne. Kratt kratt moltantan brackan?
Me–Dude, I have to speak that crap every day, let’s relax a bit.
Them–Doayane, makartely hop hop shi makartely sey. Krappat nikata fortan nikto.
Me–Sorry, dude. Gotta run. Great seeing you, though.
Them–Krdap, mikenora, Doayayne.
Me–Fuckez-vous mikenora, dooshbackan.

(Note: this language was created purely in the mind of a madman for illustrative purposes only. Any resemblance to any language, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

Now it’s true that most Peace Corps gatherings involve lots of complaints about being in the Peace Corps (it’s the toughest job you’ll ever love having completed but completely hate while you’re doing it.) This makes a lot of the gatherings tedious versions of the Four Yorkshire Men:

A–My village elders set fire to me every night and make me run around fetching gasoline.
B–LUXURY! At least they provide you some heat. Mine make me sleep on blocks of ice, even in winter. With no blanket, either, I tell you.
C–In my town they give me a blanket and then kill me and take it away again.
D–My town makes me teach without textbooks.
A–Stop talking nonsense, D. No one could ever be that cruel.

The same thing usually happened in gatherings of teachers in Niigata, too. But for our Wednesdays, we could usually keep the complaints in check. It was enough for misery to have company. And no purists around, just great people.

 

Snappy Clicky Pointy-Shooty Things

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Another thing you can blame on my father is my interest in cameras and photography.

For a few years, dad ran a photography business on the side and gave me my first camera: a Chinon, which is Japanese for “piece of shit with lens”. (No, really, look it up.) I don’t remember the type, although it was probably a CM-3 or a CM-4, but what I mostly remember is not liking the zoom lens he gave me.

Eventually, and I don’t remember when, he gave me a Canon AE-1P, which was a much better camera and pretty much solidified my interest in Canon cameras. I used it off and on through university and two trips to England and into the Peace Corps where, in two years, I only took a handful of rolls of film.

(Note to people under a certain age: cameras used to be loaded with rolls of silver-embedded strips of celluloid that, through a chemical process, recorded light and, through another chemical process, could be printed as pictures.)

(Another note to people under a certain age: People used to print pictures and display them on their walls.)

Eventually, I moved to Japan and, surrounded by lots of new camera toys–including a six-floor camera store full of them–I rekindled my interest in photography. I used the AE-1 more and bought a cheap twin-lens Texer Auto Mat medium-format camera. Also, after watching a late-night TV show about Yasuhara, a small camera company making rangefinder cameras compatible with Leica lenses, I made my first large internet purchase and got on the waiting list for T981(Ichishiki). I liked that camera a lot, but mostly for the Leica lenses.

However, our oldest arrived and brought with her increased demand for more and more and more photos. When she suddenly became mobile, and harder to keep in focus, I traded in a bunch of stuff and upgraded to an autofocus Canon EOS 1V which was a professional level camera and remains one of my favorite cameras ever.

Although I liked the 1V it was too heavy to carry around, so I bought my first digital camera, a Concord Eye-Q 5062AF which was reasonably priced at 20,000 yen (about $180 at the time) and took great pictures in daylight. (It was useless in low light.) The important thing about this camera was it showed She Who Must Be Obeyed the usefulness of digital cameras, especially when all we had to do was take a picture, upload the files and send them out to friends and family to alleviate the constant threats of violence (all, it should be noted, directed at ME, not at SWMBO. #yesatme).

Several years ago I finally took all my analog camera equipment (which at the time included the EOS 1V, the Texer, the Yasuhara and three of the cameras my dad had owned when he had his business) and traded them in for Canon EOS Kiss Digital X (known as the Digital Rebel XTi i North America because what guy would buy a camera called Kiss if it didn’t have demon paint and a large tongue and couldn’t bite the heads off bats?)

Since then we’ve been 100% digital and have saved a fortune on developing costs, except when I found some old film in a box back in the USA. I bought a Canon PowerShot G9 because I got tired of carrying the Kiss in my bag (which, I realize, sounds kind of dirty) and bought She Who Must Be Obeyed a digital camera she, quite frankly, has zero interest in. (Her basic argument is that it’s my job to take pictures, not hers. End of argument.)

I still try to remember how I got by with only 24 or 36 pictures at a time and try to imagine what covering a sports day here in Japan would be like with a film camera. I do miss the EOS 1V, but don’t miss the size.

In fact, the only thing I truly miss from the film days is the little canisters film came in. They are great for carrying change and storing small things.

Wired Wi-Fied Connected Always in a Crowd

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When I was in the slow process of smartphone shopping, my colleagues kept emphasizing how the phone–whichever one I chose–would change my life. They said it would be like a new addition to my family that would consume my time and slowly but surely consume my attention. I pointed out that I’d already had some of that experience after I got an iPod touch and started using it to check my email rather than wait for the squirrels in my old Windows desktop to wake up, smoke a cigarette and climb on the big wheel. They said, no, I would never be the same.

As you might imagine, none of this worked well as a sales pitch. Although their voices said it all as humorous warning, the cult-like gleam in their eyes said “join us join us join us join us join us”. What made it worse wasn’t even their fault: the introvert in me was pretty much going “we don’t join groups we don’t join groups”.

After I bought the phone they started chanting “we accept him we accept him one of us one of us gooble gobble”

Smartphones pose an interesting problem for introverts. Being connected to people via computers and email is no problem, because it’s easy to step away from the computer. Laptops in your bag have to be turned on. A regular cellphone is no problem because, except for a lesser ability to send text messages, its primary purpose is to make phone calls and no one actually uses cellphones or smartphones to make phone calls anymore which means you can still be alone.

Smartphones, though, provide a much different level of connectivity that is almost like having too many friends and family members living next door and across the street and upstairs. If someone has a question, they just hop over for a few minutes and an hour later they finally get to the question. You can be hit with text, chat, social media, social media chat, pictures of someone’s lunch, pictures of someone else’s lunch on the train platform, tons of pointless political bullshit–because the topics that aren’t discussed in polite society can be summarized in a meme or an article and quickly posted with no actual discussion.

It’s all vaguely fascinating, and it teaches you a lot about your family and friends but we introverts are, in many ways, selfish. We want interaction on our terms and I imagine a great many of us are looking for that dark corner in  the social media night club to hide in for a while.

Whilst we’re hiding there, we can check Twitter and Facebook.