So I've had quite a bit more time for thought lately, due primarily to my new 1-hour commute to work. I've come to a few realizations:
1 - Time is flying WAY faster than it should be.
I was looking down the long, empty street in front of my company the other day, feeling the stillness of the lonely midday silence outdoors, isolated by thick stone walls from the frantic activity taking place in all the research labs around me. A memory welled up from my hitchhiking adventures across Japan, and as a car appeared on the horizon, I felt the urge to stick out a thumb and follow the highway where it would take me. Then it struck me... I did that almost FOUR years ago! Where did all the intervening time go?!
(Of course, I know where it went - those memories haven't vanished or anything... Scaling rocky mountain peaks in the Andes with Chris... offroading in the Israeli desert with Yaron, Max, Jake, and Assaf... weeknight Risk games with Dave and Dave and Lauren... crazy weekend trips down to New York on the Chinatown bus... camping trips to the Adirondacks... expeditions to Lake Biwa... festivals, fireworks, house parties, Ultimate games, Saizeriya lunches, late night conversations in front of Lawson, intense a cappella rehearsals in grimy basement music studios, all-night clubbing in Minami, picnics in Nara, performances in funky Osaka restaurants, ... and of course database administration, SQL, C++, Java, debugging, deployment, source control, data visualization, sockets, serial protocols, threading, deinterlacing, installing cards, soldering connectors, machining laser scanner mounting brackets, calibration, map-matching,
reverse-engineering badly commented code... omg, was the last 1/3 of that all computer stuff?)
2 - Working overtime in a room with no sunlight is bad for the psyche
I love my job, but I don't think my circadian clock approves of all-day fluorescent lighting. Especially since so many of my good friends left, and our random midday chat breaks no longer happen, I'm feeling the need to actively push back against the gradual negative effects of overwork on my psychological health.
3 - Three seems like a good number to set as a goal for the length of a list.
Not too big, not too small. Three shall be the length of the list, and the length of the list shall be three. Four items shalt thou not list, nor shalt thou list two, excepting that thou then dost proceed to three.
And thus, I announce my latest project. The "T3A list". Every so often I will make a post on my blog, listing three awesome things that I did or observed that day. I thoroughly believe that there is endless beauty to be experienced in every moment of life, even when things really suck. It's all about your outlook. On a deeper level, I believe that (a) by talking about these things, they become reinforced in our minds, thus helping to shape our memories which in turn define our identity in a more positive way going forward, and (b) the act of sharing these experiences with friends and random strangers on the web only increases the amount of positive energy in the world, and I really feel like positive energy is something that is lacking in our world, with depressing news, inequality, war, fear, and cynicism all around us.
I won't pretend that I'll be able to do this every day, but it seems like it should be a fun project.
So I'm going to cut back on making negative comments about Japan (or America, or humanity in general, or even bad haircuts), and I'll try to put up a quick T3A post every few days, sharing the brilliant gems of beauty and harmony that I encounter on my adventures.
(The acronym "T3A", for those of you who are wondering, stands roughly for "3 Awesome Things", but in the tradition of French acronyms like "SI" the letters have been creatively rearranged.)
5 comments:
"(The acronym "T3A", for those of you who are wondering, stands roughly for "3 Awesome Things", but in the tradition of French acronyms like "SI" the letters have been creatively rearranged.)"
Which tradition ? and what is SI ?
T3A. Wonderful. Cheered me up this morning and motivated me to stop surfing blogs and get back to work! Isn't that great? :)
In the past, I would have passed it off as a kind of cheesy Dr. Phil-type of self-hypnosis technique, but I've come to realise that those cheesy techniques do kind of work. It's all about creating that mindset.
The silliest things do it to you: for example, I recently got my own desk at university, it's just a old desk in a lab full of machines, but it makes me feel like I have an office, a space that's mine, and this in turn creates the obligation to go there everyday and do some graduation work. Self-hypnosis.
David >
SI is the International System of measurement (meter, kilogram, second... as opposed to a system that uses normal units like inches, hogsheads, and footpounds-per-square-furlong). However, in French they like to amuse themselves by putting the words in the wrong order, and thus the abbreviation is "SI" instead of "IS".
Another example would be the French acronym FIFA, which inexplicably stands for "International Federation of Association Football" and hence would be spelled "IFAF" in a normal country. :P
Freerk >
Glad you appreciate it. :) Yeah, it does sound a little on the "Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley" side. I also would have dismissed it in the past, but I think my outlook on life has changed a lot in the last few years.
I wonder if that comes from living in Japan. You don't see a lot of cynicism and sarcasm here, like you do in the US. It's not that they don't have the same level of frustration and problems, but people express it very differently. I think maybe long-term exposure to that attitude has made me more open to things I may have considered cheesy in the past.
Haha, but at the same time, I am an engineer, and I don't see it so much as a warm and fuzzy feelings thing, but more like a calculated attempt at deliberate mind-hacking. :)
You probably won't be surprised to hear that the T3A list reminds me of a Japanese TV show. It's called "The Best House 1,2,3" and it features a panel of celebs taking turns presenting their lists of the best 3 whatever-they-can-think-of, to see who can come up with the most interesting thing.
For example:
- The biggest 3 dogs
- The 3 prettiest transsexuals in Japan
- The 3 most expensive desserts in Japan
And so on.
I also think it's funny that while an awful lot of people use SI, very few know the term. Probably because it's French.
While I'm sure you had your tongue firmly in your cheek during the whole "French people like to put words in the wrong order" thing, it IS funny that so many French acronyms end up looking like jumbled English acronyms; the real reason of course being that we've stolen so many words from the French that it often seems like the same language with a twist. So the "Systeme Internationale" becomes an "International System".
Dora >
Hmm... good point. I'll be sure to include the occasional story like that if one happens to me, which hopefully it won't.
Particularly if it has a good picture with it. ;)
Kern >
Ah, Kern... only you, only you. :P Never heard of that show, but it sounds interesting. Maybe I should get a TV, someday "when I find myself with free time." :)
And let's not get into the topic of where my tongue has been. For heaven's sake, my _parents_ read this blog!
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