Snow Days, Low Days

Sendai got hit by a huge snowstorm last night, which would be unusual even in the middle of winter but is exceptionally rare in March. I didn't take any measurements, but it looks like at least a foot of wet, heavy snow so far (it's still going as I write, though the pace has tapered off somewhat).

It struck me as odd that twenty years ago, when I was attending a school insteading of working in one, this would have been cause for celebration, as it surely would have meant a day off, to be spent sledding, throwing snowballs at the other kids in the neighborhood, and drinking hot chocolate. Nowadays, not so much. The Japanese take education far too seriously to cancel school just because of some slippery roads, even on a day when no classes were scheduled, and when I arrived this morning several students who'd come to school to take part in club activities were shoveling out the parking lot. And while Sendai looks pretty in the snow, it sure isn't much fun to commute through under those conditions, and all I could think about this morning was how the next few days are going to entail dodging slush banks and hidden puddles and probably arriving at work with wet feet anyway. Chalk another thing up amidst "lost delights of childhood".

Yeah, Great Idea

In an effort to close budget shortfalls, a small-but-growing number of school districts nationwide are apparently going to a four day week. This is so sad, and so indicative of serious problems in American society, that I simply don't know what to say. Research may not have been done on the question, but any teacher can tell you that the less time kids have to study something, the less they're going to learn, and American kids need more time in the classroom, not less. If they don't get it, it quite literally threatens the future of our country - you can't run a modern democracy with an ignorant populace, and you can't run a modern economy with an ill-educated workforce. If we're not willing to put money and effort into educating our children, that's what we're going to end up with.

I think that in many cases local authorities do do a better job of solving a community's problems than statewide or national ones, and I generally prefer on many issues decentralized power structures that devolve as much power as possible to that level. Events like this are enough to convince me that education is an exceptional case, however. If we cannot provide our children - all of them - with the opportunity to get the education they'll need to keep America up and running as a society when they reach adulthood, we are failing as a society, and there's no other way to put it.

My Take On The Oscars

Sadly, I don't see nearly so many movies as I used to, since Japanese theaters tend to be pricey and short on foreign movies that aren't blockbusters in the vein of Avatar and 2012. Of this year's Best Picture nominees, the only ones I've seen are The Hurt Locker, Up, Inglourious Basterds, and District 9. Though Inglourious Basterds wasn't far behind, I think The Hurt Locker was the best film among those four, what a great war film should be - tense, well-drawn, and richly characterized rather than brash or showy, and illuminative of the difficult moral dilemmas of war without moralizing. I don't mean that as a dig at Tarantino's film - he does about as well as anybody can at making cinematic art out of B-grade pastiche, and Inglourious Basterds is no exception - but merely by virtue of its stylized pulpiness his movie compromises its ability to make a really impactful artistic statement. These two films were also the only two of those nominated for Best Director which I saw, and it's a really a hard call to say who did a better job there - the movies are so different that it's tough to compare them. The Hurt Locker was certainly a smaller, less ambitious piece, but Kathryn Bigelow carried it off near perfectly. Inglourious Basterds, on the other hand, was more of a mixed bag, feeling a bit overstuffed despite some absolutely exquisitely staged set pieces and Tarantino's usual crackerjack pacing. I can't say it would have been an injustice had Tarantino won, but Bigelow was certainly deserving.

I've also yet to see most of the performances that were nominated for the various acting categories. I'm happy to see that Christoph Waltz won for his performance in Inglourious Basterds however. Nazis on screen are at this point so old hat as villains that it's hard to play the type memorably - who can top Ralph Fiennes as Amon Göth in Schindler's List? - but Waltz's ruthless, suave, relentlessly manipulative sophisticate is as memorable as any.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to catch up on the movies I missed at some point.

On Casual Sex

I find articles like this one mystifying. I'm as much in favor of gender equality as anyone of my generation, and on balance, I think the sexual revolution was a good thing. What I don't understand, however, is the need of some feminists and sexual liberation advocates to deny that there might be any tradeoffs whatsoever associated with greater sexual openness, or that sleeping around just because you can might not be the healthiest option for some women (or men). Indeed, arguing such in the wrong crowd may very well get one branded a moralist and a prude at best, a closet patriarchalist at worst. This dogmatic attitude is deeply unfortunate, both because, like the social conservatism it decries as overly enamored of female chastity, it treats a woman's sexual life as a sociopolitical football rather than a matter of individual choice, and because it ignores some very real problems with promiscuity.

While the author of this article claims that it's been proven that engaging in casual sex is not psychologially harmful, this does not accord either with my personal experiences or with how actual people seem to behave in the real world. I don't move in particularly conservative circles, and while I haven't polled them I'd venture to say that almost none of my female friends are intent on saving themselves for marriage or anything like that. Nevertheless, with only a few exceptions, they don't appear to be particularly interested in screwing around, as opposed to trying to find a boyfriend for at least the semi-longterm. When they have had engaged in casual sex, it's been either a.)because they were drunk, lonely, or otherwise impaired, and a matter of regret afterwards, or b.)because they really didn't realize it was casual (or convinced themselves it wasn't casual) at the time, and only found out afterwards that the partner of the day wasn't interested in anything more serious (many men I've known are somewhat less than decent human beings, and will take advantage of this, whereas as others are merely immature and self-centered, and don't think about hurt feelings and messy aftermaths tomorrow when they have a chance to get laid tonight.) The fallout I've observed in such incidents has ranged from bruised feelings and awkward, unpleasant vibes between the involved parties up to and including terminated friendships, but it has certainly been real. I'm not a woman, but my own personal experience was similar - in the aftermath of a painful breakup, I had an alcohol-lubed one-night stand with a female friend that left me feeling hollow, emotionally drained, and disappointed in myself. Growing up as I have in a culture in which men are lauded for engaging in casual sex, I can definitively say that these feelings didn't result from any kind of social censure - had I told any of the men I socialized with at that time about them, I suspect they would have told me (whether they believed it or not) that I was lucky, and wondered what the big deal was. But it was a big deal for me, because I was (and am) a romantic, and I always thought an act so intimate ought to mean more than a few minutes of fumbling pleasure, and the fact that I hadn't lived up to my own ideals left me depressed. If that's true for me, heterosexual male, who by cultural consensus ought stereotypically to revel in shallow and transitory sexual pleasures, I'm sure it's true of at least some women, who by a similar consensus stereotype are thought to want more. If someone finds an experience messy, complex, and hurtful, it seems presumptious to tell them they ought not to have those feelings because they don't accord with your ideology.

Then we have the famous problem of the sexual double standard - the so-called "virgin-whore" dichotomy. A lot of the men I know, even highly promiscuous ones - a voracious sexual appetite, it seems, is often incompatible with self-awareness or a functioning sense of irony - consider a lengthy sexual history a huge turn-off in potential long-term romantic partners. As patently unfair as this attitude is, it persists, and the more we know about human psychology, the less tenable the feminist position, that such attitudes are merely a relic of the patriarchal past and can be ironed out of the male psyche given sufficient enlightenment, seems. For my own part, I too for whatever reason share the preference for a relatively chaste mate. I don't levy any particular moral judgment against women who choose to sleep around - their bodies, their choices, etc. - but a learning a woman has a history of such behavior pretty much torpedoes any romantic interest I might have had in her. I don't know why. I can try to intellectualize it by saying I don't want to be just one more in a long procession of men, or that I think of myself as a special jewel that only a truly discerning woman will appreciate. I can chalk it up to experience, saying that in my dating life women too ready to sleep with me have often turned out to be carrying baggage that made them less-than-ideal girlfriend material (which is true). I suspect, however, that the reasons are deeper and more visceral than that - that given the choice between two otherwise completely identical women, one who'd had three previous partners and the other thirty, I'd choose the former - why, I'm not sure, but I would. I don't feel it's fair to hold a woman to a standard I couldn't live up to myself, and that's the other reason, besides my romantic temperament, that I haven't slept around even when I've had the opportunity to do so - four lifetime partners at the age of thirty, three of them women with whom I had real relationships. Nevertheless it appears for me, as well as many other men of my generation, that growing up in a post-feminist world has not eradicated the desire to marry a "good girl", and rooted as this preference may be in the evolution of the human mind, I doubt it ever will. I suspect women are highly aware of this phenomenon, and know that acquiring a reputation for promiscuity is a sure way to turn off potential long-term suitors. Hence, regret about actions that may lead to them acquiring such a reputation.

All of this is to say nothing of the fact that casual sex carries risks that, regardless of whether people desire to wish them away, can't be ignored. Sperm and eggs have proven stubbornly unwilling to observe the distinction we have decided as sentient beings to draw between sex-for-pleasure and sex-for-procreation, and unwanted pregnancy is pretty much always an ugly business. Then there's the issue of venereal disease. As much as modern medicine can do, it can't cure 'em all, and an unlucky person might find themselves debilitated for life by something they catch from someone they'll only seen once in their lives. And so on. If sex is analogous to other leisure activities, it is more analogous to skydiving or bungee-jumping or high altitude mountain-climbing than to watching t.v. or reading books - a thrilling activity that carries real dangers with it. To deny such, or even downplay it, is foolish.

Sex is a complicated subject, best treated by women (and men) as a matter of individual conscience and prerogative, not a means a pawn in the game of gender-politics chess. Some women may want to sleep around, or dance on a tabletop in ass-baring chaps a la Christina Aguilera, and more power to them, but for those don't, well - I have trouble reading that preference as a betrayal of feminism, or a sign that such women have been successfully slut-shamed into "re-domestication". I thought, after all, that feminism was about a woman having the right to do as she pleases.

Still Canada's Game

One of the most enjoyable things about the Olympics was the men's ice hockey tournament, which of course culminated in Canada besting the U.S. 3-2 in overtime on a Sidney Crosby wristshot for the gold medal. Disappointed as I was in the defeat of my countrymen (who had without much lead time turned themselves into a hard-working, close-knit, and formidable team), it hardly induced a feeling of crushing depression in me. Yet, this is what my Canadian friends would have faced had their team failed to claim gold in their national sport. As I have learned firsthand from the Canadians I've known, almost without exception nice people all who turn into raving, nationalistic lunatics when it comes to their hockey team, there is no analogous sporting passion to that which Canadians feel for hockey in American culture. Sure, baseball and basketball were both invented here, and we want to be the best at those, but losing to, say, Japan or the Dominican Republic in the former, or to Spain or Argentina in the latter, is not a matter of national shame. Nor is beating them a source of national pride. One is just something that happens and is disappointing, the other something that happens and is gratifying, and that's it. In Canada, with hockey, it's different.

As a result, in addition to disappointment, I also feel relief, that my friends will not have to deal with the kind of disappointment that is born of only that kind of frustrated passion. I really do hope they enjoy winning the gold medal, rather than merely treat it as something to be relieved about; they deserve it.

The Winter Olympics, Twitter, David Foster Wallace, and the Psyche of the Elite Athlete (I Hope This All Ties Together)

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the things I found most interesting about the just-concluded Winter Olympics was the way that new technology has altered the way in which we watch the events themselves, and view the athletes who compete in them. As I don't have a working t.v. at the moment, I followed much of the competition on ESPN.com, which, among other innovations this year, introduced a live Twitter feed to relay posts from various people in the sporting media in addition to some of the athletes themselves. Ostensibly, these posts are little stream-of-consciousness snippets of their writers' thoughts and impressions, brief snapshots from the perspective of those competing in the games. If that is so, I find them fascinating, not so much because of the contents, but because of what those contents say about the mindframe of elite athletes.

Anyone who has at any time closely followed sports has become accustomed to the peculiar idioms of sporting cliché, which are the vernacular in which most athletes communicate. We've all heard statements like "we want to go out there and give it 100%" or "we want to go out there and execute" so many times that any significance they might originally have had, or any insight into the game they might once have provided, has long since drained away. When we watch an athlete being interviewed, whether they're being questioned by a reporter on their way to the locker room at halftime of a contest or answering questions in a post-event press conference, we expect these answers as routine, and don't infer all that much meaning from them. Some of us even suspect that those giving them don't really mean them, that they consider their words as devoid of significance as we do. What the ESPN.com Twitter feed tells us, I think, is that this impression is incorrect, or at least incomplete.

While there was an occasional nugget of insight or glimpse of complexity among them, for the most part athletes seem to post to Twitter employing the exact same banalities that they use with the media - i.e., "my teammates gave it their all", "great effort by X", etc. , despite the fact the intermediary of the sports journalist, and all the attendant rituals that go with a postgame interview, are no longer part of the equation. One must of course be careful when generalizing from such a concise format, and I suspect that in some cases athletes may merely desire to keep things simple and uncontroversial, or not know what to say beyond the obvious - is there any reason to suspect Evan Lysacek knows anything about womens' ice hockey, after all? - but I also think that to a certain extent, a phrase like "giving it 100%" is something more than a cliché to them. I'm not sure if "belief" is really the correct word, particularly in the sense of its conventional meaning - mantra might be more like it - but it is something that is an intrinsic part of the way a successful competitor thinks about his or her sport, and repeating it has a helpful effect.

In my own experiences with organized sports, brief and undistinguished as they were, I sometimes encountered this phenomenon. When I'd be in the weightroom working out with the other guys on the football team, or doing conditioning drills with my basketball teammates, we'd often encourage each other with similar phrases, which I always found faintly ironic and ridiculous. A lack of any extraordinary athletic talent is without doubt the main reason I could have never succeeded in sports beyond perhaps playing for a lower division college team, but even if I'd had such talent, I suspect I could not have succeeded as a world class athlete. To be an elite competitor seems to me, to a certain extent, to require that one engages in a certain type of narrowly-defined self-delusion. One must believe in one's own gifts unquestionably, and be willing to entirely attribute one's successes to them - (cf. a skier who wins a race by two hundredths of a second attributing a nearly insignificant margin of victory to his or her own superior talent and drive, rather than the luck of skiing on faster snow or avoiding having to ski into a headwind). This is as likely a delusion is not - it is just as probable the deciding difference in this case was the weather or the conditions of the course as the skill of the respective skiers - but it is a necessary one. If one thought of winning not as one's own achievement but merely a matter of luck, it would be difficult to muster motivation to work hard, and to continue to compete through stress, pain, and adversity, when another defeat is the most likely result (after all, only one person/team can win any particular competition). However, at the same time, one cannot allow one's self to believe the implicit corollary there - that one's failures are also attributable only to one's own talents or lack thereof. It isn't necessarily a bad thing that failure discourages us ordinary people - if we fail wretchedly at something in life, and particularly if we do so repeatedly, it may well be a sign that we just aren't very good at it, and ought perhaps to be redirecting our talents toward some other activity. If an elite athlete reacted that way, however, he or she never would made it to elite status, because sporting competitions being the chaotic and unpredictable things that they are, every competitor, even the most talented, fails numerous times on their way up, just by dint of injury or bad luck or not giving one's best performance in a big event. To reach the top of the mountain in any major sport thus requires not only prodigious talent but also a temperamental imperviousness to the discouragement that failure usually brings. A competitive streak is not enough to achieve such imperviousness - one needs not only to want to win badly, but to resist coming to believe that failing to do so means one isn't good enough. That means not indulging in too much introspection about one's own endeavors - start to think too hard or too abstractly about them, and drive and focus on the goal suffer.

Thus, I suspect, the tendency of athletes to focus on seemingly empty verbal talismans like "giving it 100%". Say them enough, and it helps you maintain the focus you need to succeed, enjoy the sense of accomplishment when you win, and block out the pain of disappointment when you lose. I recall reading the David Foster Wallace essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart", in which the author expressed his disdain for the former tennis star's autobiography, and his dissatisfaction with the genre of sports memoirs in general. Wallace complained that Austin's book, and sports autobiographies in general, are inevitably poorly written and lacking in self-awareness and anything resembling insight into what makes a great athlete great, and ultimately concluded that it is perhaps only spectators who can articulate what the concept of athletic greatness means, by virtue of their removal from the arena. I think the first part of that conclusion is correct, but not necessarily the second - it seems to me that to achieve athletic greatness on the level of becoming an Olympic champion, or winning a U.S. Open, one has to forfeit a certain amount of introspection as the unaffordable distraction it may be.

Back to blogging...

Well, promises to the contrary notwithstanding, I took my annual two month break from creativity during the winter months this year, and was somewhat chagrined to see that I hadn't posted since December 19th when I logged on - I really must see about moving to a warmer, sunnier climate, or at least getting some UV lamps for my living space, because the winter blahs seem to get worse every year.

I just watched the conclusion of the Olympic Womens' Figure Skating finals, and while I didn't see gold medal winner Kim Yu-Na skate, I did watch her primary competitors, and except for Japanese-American pixie Mirai Nagasu, who was too far back to catch her anyway, they all made noticeable mistakes, so I'm not surprised she won the gold. Based on her performance from the short program the other night, she deserved to - she clearly looked like the best skater in the field, just faster, smoother, and more graceful than everyone else by a mile. People here are a bit disappointed that Mao Asada only ended up with silver, but nobody denies that Kim was the better skater. Knowing the Korean sense of nationalism, and disdain for all things Japanese, somehow I can't see people there being such graceful losers were the skate on the other foot.

I have also been following Olympic results on ESPN.com, which helpfully provides Twitter feeds for various athletes and media personalities in Vancouver - if you want to know what Apolo Anton Ohno thought of the womens' hockey final, in 140 characters or less, they've got you covered. I've got some thoughts on media coverage of sports in the age of Twitter percolating, but figure I'd best ease back into writing with a shorter post before I attempt to articulate them.