It's All About The Mystery

The population of Cupertino, California reminds me of a five-star hotel in Bangalore. There are a few Asians. There are heaps of Indian software engineers. And there are a small number of caucasian Americans who look like they don't really belong here.

On weekends these Indians take turns bringing their families (or, in the case of my hosts, their college buddies) to The Mystery Spot. The primary attraction of this place is that they have a canteen (isn't the word "canteen" redolent with the smell of the British Raj?) which sells hot Indian food. For $1 you can pop a plate of dal-rice or a besan laddoo. A close second to the canteen in its power to draw in the Indian crowds is the Mystery Spot itself.

This is a tourist attraction crafted with delightful cleverness. The claim is that in this place space is warped and gravity works erratically. Strange forces push at you. Small round objects roll up a slope. Tall people shrink. And there is not a sngle mirror or smoke machine in sight. The enthusiastic tour guides demonstrate these unique phenomena and spin theories of carbon dioxide vents and magnetic field anomalies. The Indian software engineers take it all in silently with keen eyes and furrowed brows. If you strain very hard you can hear their brains humming gently as they try to work out the real secret that makes the magic trick work.

The Mystery Spot is a shining example of the American talent for infusing drama and fun into anything. Domestic air travel is a contrary instance of them sucking all the excitement out of an experience that used to be all about pleasure and adventure. I have remarked before about the bigness of the USA. The distance from Boston to San Francisco is about the same as that from Boston to London, and so the flight takes about the same amount of time. The resemblance ends there.

I don't like being asked to pay for every single bag I want to check in, regardless of weight. I hate undressing for the security checks. The whole ritual of removing my jacket, belt and shoes and then putting them back on is inconvenient and undignified. I'm thinking of buying a velcro traveling suit that I can unfasten with a single sweeping gesture, like one of the male dancers in The Full Monty.

I do like to get my meal served on a tray with each individual item of food clevely pacakaged in its own little receptacle; but on my US Airways flight I had to make do with a "buy your food on board" service. When in mid-flight a shaggy-haired and overweight guy in an indeterminate steel-grey uniform tapped me on the shoulder I was first startled and then baffled. I tried to work out whether he was a steward or a pilot while he made small talk about the t-shirt I was wearing. In my mind I was wondering whether we would not all be better off if he would just go back to flying a plane or selling pretzels to passengers.

I am convinced that the best way to travel in this country is by road. That way you can skid along a coastal highway and stop occasionally to look out over the Pacific. And you can bend down to gape at the seaweed washed up on a rocky beach. Giant, 15-foot stalks of seaweed as thick as a man's arm.

That's the thing that redeems this country for the traveler: they screw up their airlines like noone else but then they make up for it by nonchalantly tossing unique oddities at you when you least expect them. There's always the chance of something new just around the next bend in the road. Now if I could only find the store where they sell those velcro suits...

Point That Bottle Away From Me!

"Here, let me open that. Of course it's easy. I'll just..."
(pop!!!)
 "...Oh my eye! I'm blind!!!!"

How many champagne-swilling morons are there in the US? About 1500. I know that because the American Academy of Opthalmology recently announced that every year one and a half thousand people suffer cork-related eye injuries. You have to wonder about these people. What kind of jackass points a projectile weapon at themselves before pulling the trigger? And just how idle do you have to be to keep count of all these suicidal projectile-pointers?

I'm surprised that none of them have yet made it to the Darwin Awards.

For those who don't know, and can't be bothered to follow the link, the Darwin Awards are a celebration of those who did the human race a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool through sheer spectacular stupidity. Unfortunately for our species, the eye is not a reproductive organ, notwithstanding the fifteen hundred or so people who annually sheepishly confess "I accidentally %@^&ed my own eye with a cork". If it were, then their numbers would have steadily been culled at every Christmas party, every wedding, and at the end of every motor sports event. As it stands, though, they remain monocularly capable of perpetuating the existence of their own kind.

Our only hope is that one day they will all join the NRA and start cleaning their handguns.

Oooh, This Stuff is Tingly!

Phoebe the dog woke up and sniffed the air; something was different about today. She barked quizzically a couple of times, but I pretended to still be asleep in bed. So she got up and skidded downstairs to investigate by herself.

At first everything seemed the same around the house except for the silence, which was smothering.

Then I opened the door and that's when Phoebe saw that the world had changed overnight. The ground had turned crunchy! And it had a new smell, like ice. And it was white! How very strange....

Phoebe rolled over experimentally to see if doing that felt any different from yesterday. And it did, it was pleasantly cooling. As was this powdery stuff that was settling on her coat of hair. Some bits landed on her nose, and that was a bit tickly.

There were certainly a lot of birds around. That was a change too, she hadn't seen any birds for the past several days. A chipmunk flitted behind some trees in the near distance; for an instant Phoebe thought of giving chase but for now this new sensation underfoot was far more interesting.

So she rolled over some more, and then tried running. Even that was not the same. This new stuff on the ground made her skid a little at high speed. The other dogs seemed to be rather nonchalant about what had happened (except for one hyperactive poodle that was running in supersonic circles). Could it be that they had experienced this before?

Well if they had, then this was nothing to worry about. So Phoebe went back to doing what really matters: sniffing at bushes, cracking twigs, and waving her tail at anything that moved. After all, this might be the very first snowfall of her life, but that was not going to distract her from the serious business of being a shaggy dog out for a walk on a Sunday morning.

Laws of Nature

There are some things you can't mess with. Gravity. The ocean. The 10-minute rule.

What's that, you ask? Let me explain by way of example. Pretend it is a day when you need to leave work no later than 5 in the evening. No, lives will not be lost if you don't leave by then, but you do really really want to leave by 5. So, late in the afternoon you're feverishly wrapping up all the little to-do items that you can. It's nearly time to leave now, and you're about to hit the "Send" button on the last email of the day so you can start to pack up. And then it happens. At 10 minutes to 5 your door is darkened by someone who steps in to talk about an issue at work. He says he'll take "a minute"; instead, he stays for sixty.

It's as if someone sent a memo: "Dear colleagues of Mahogany, today he has plans for the evening. It's up to us to ruin them. Will one of you step up and be a jerk? Will one of you walk up to him at precisely 4.50pm and proceed to trap him in a rambling, frustrating, endless discussion about something that no sane person would really care about? You would? Thanks, we knew we could count on you!"

And so the trap is set.

But where there's an ocean, there is a boat. Where there is gravity, there is anti-gravity. (Don't scoff, I know for a fact that there are alien spacecraft interred in Area 51 that are powered by anti-gravity drives). And where there is a 10-minute rule, there is a 30-minute stratagem. From now on, I will plan to leave 30 minutes before the time that I plan to leave.

Let's see how long I can fool the universe.

November Reigns

There's something very comfortable about padding upstairs in my socks, glass of wine in hand, and settling down at my keyboard. I still have the tropical spirit running through my veins (and no, I don't mean rum); but I'm learning to make my peace with the winter.

A good pair of gloves help. I am grateful to them every time I take my dog for a walk in the morning, especially if it is in the subzero conditions we had last weekend. I've been in cold weather before, I've even been in cold weather in Boston before. But this is the first time that I've stepped on a clod of earth, heard it crunch under my feet, and when I picked it up I found that it was half an inch of soil sitting on four inches of perfectly formed ice.

There was more ice on the car windshield on Friday morning. I turned on the de-fogger and watched it melt slowly. I almost wished it wouldn't melt, so that I could keep staring at each perfectly formed crystal, and at the flawless snowflake pattern that stretched right across the glass surface.

We're expecting snow next week. It'll be my first snowfall. When it comes, I intend to go outside and turn my face up to the sky like a walking cliche. After all, cliches exist because they mean something.

It's good to come home from the office, get out of my car, and feel a slap of cold air on my face. It's a welcome reminder that there is a real world and that nature does not bother with protocol.

But most of all I like stepping out on a clear night. I like to look at the stars frosted onto a perfectly black sky. And if the moon is full it turns the trees into mysterious, faintly silvered silhouettes. I still have the tropics running through me, but I can see how a person could get used to this.

Shifting Winds

I have a feeling that something significant is going to happen in America. I get a feeling of forces gathering, of a society that is taking a deep breath before stepping out into a time of change. It’s not any one event that makes me feel that way, it’s more an accumulation of occurrences.

The obvious one is the election of Barack Obama as president. Perhaps my view is coloured by living in Massachusetts, a state so liberal that it was the only state that did not vote for Nixon when he ran for President in 1972. And you have to worry about the weight of expectations on him when 2 out of 3 Americans said in a recent poll that they expect the country to be better off by the end of his term. But I think it’s got to the point that this expectation will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In any case, there is more to the gathering storm than the tailwind that propelled Obama on his trajectory to the White House.

There’s the current economic situation and all that that could lead to. It’ll lead to job losses of course, and hardship for many. In just the past few weeks it’s got to the stage where I can see local businesses shutting down around me, and people losing jobs as a result. But there’s more. It feels like the country is poised to change its consumption patterns. A year ago restaurants were advertising the great deals you could get on extra-large portions. That's changed. Today I saw a TGIF ad promoting "the right-sized portion at the right price", and that's only the most recent of the small-portion / low-price ads I've seen on the television.

That's just the beginning. Imagine what could happen if the big American car companies do go bankrupt (as many fear they will soon), and credit remains expensive, and so does fuel. Will American decrease their usage of cars? Will we see the demographic momentum reverse direction and move from the suburbs back towards urban centers? If it does, that would be a profound social and cultural change.

And that’s not the only social and cultural change in the offing. Apart from voting for Presidential and Congressional candidates, voters in 3 American states voted against legalizing same-sex marriages. Ironically, that seems to have sparked a tremendous burst of support for a movement in favour of such marriages. The demonstrations across the country in the past week suggest to me that it’s only a matter of time before same-sex marriages are recognized across the country, and it may not be a matter of very much time at that.

So what do a change of Presidency, an economic recession, and a challenge to social norms have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing, except that they are simultaneous in time and place, and therefore they cannot help but affect each other.

This has happened before, and not too long ago. In 1990 it was the Soviet Union which swore in a new head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev. Movements for democracy and independence from the USSR spread like wildfire across Eastern Europe. Saddam Hussein ordered his troops into Kuwait, sparking American intervention. And just like that we saw the end of the cold war and the making of a new world order.

It is, of course, impossible to say that that’s the sort of momentous change that awaits the world now. But there is one thing that I think is clear: we have some exciting times ahead.

The Soul Of A City, Part 2

Singapore houses four million people, but no two of them live in the same city. A city isn’t made of tall buildings; it’s made of the people who live and work and play in them. You might walk among the same buildings as I do. But for every person you know that I don’t, for every person whom you speak to that is a stranger to me, your city is different from mine.

So my experience of revisiting Singapore this week wasn’t really about going back to familiar places, it was about returning to familiar faces.

Stretch the thread of a relationship over a great distance, and it starts to fall slack. It’s a delicate thing, that thread, and easy to neglect. You don't notice the neglect until one day you try to pick it up and discover that it’s lost its suppleness. It’s a sharp and instantaneous realization when that happens. You listen to your conversation turn polite, you recognize the palpable disinterest that’s impossible to hide, and in a flash you realize that you now have one less friend and one more acquaintance.

I was pleased to come away from Singapore without any new acquaintances.

The best friends help you learn something new. This week I found out I can enjoy art even when it is disconcertingly abstract. I discovered the quiet pleasure in sharing an afternoon with a friend and their family, just watching them be a family. And in a single evening I realized that friendships may be born in many ways, but they are shaped and defined by the vulnerabilities we choose to reveal to each other; that you can tell how important someone is to you by how bad you feel because you weren't around to help them; and that it's useful to have a shrinkable head.

I'm back in the US now. But I can feel each taut thread of friendship that pulls gently at me. One end is in Boston, and the other end is in a city that I once lived in.