Msondo's Journal

Time:

12:42 am.

Soy un pollo.

I find myself less connected with what I preceive the be the "contemporary" definition of America. Perhaps America is, as the book I'm reading describes it to be, a qualitative ideology of moralistic principles more than a quantitative product of geography and history. I can't help but see beyond the symbols and focus on the pure facts. If we should judge a man on his actions rather than his words, should that not apply to a nation as well?

Regardless of where I am, I'm here in America, not far from the Canadian border, in a tiny cabin deep inside the forest. Oddly, the quirky resort we are staying at has Wi-Fi. Whatever this place is, be it Washington State, America, or Earth, or whatever label fits, this place is beautiful and I'm happy to be here... relatively alone, in an aesthetic paradise a couple of hundred miles away from "home".

I met a woman at a gas station earlier today, somewhere outside of Concrete. We spoke in an awkward mix of Japanese and English. She told me today was a special day for her After giving her a confused and curious reaction she produced a certificate stating that she became a legal citizen of this country today. I congratulated her but felt bad in a way because she said all of her family in Japan had died and that this was the only place she had left, that the people she knew here were her only family she had left. Whatever her reasons, I wished her the best of luck here.

We sat in a field in the middle of the mountains watching an amateur fireworks show and eating watermelon. I guess it was the context, but I enjoyed this show more than most I can remember. The only others I can remember that topped it were the random times I was with family on the holiday and my cousins and I spent the entire night (and our money) blowing up fireworks illegally in the neighborhood. Also, July 4th 2003 was amazing as I took a plane just as the sun was setting across the country and saw fireworks shows virtually the entire trip. As I was riding the train into San Francisco with my friend we saw one final show over the bay and then got drunk watching Big Trouble in Little China.

Long ago I decided that "countries" do not exist, only people do. I still stick by that belief but for whatever its worth I'm happy to be here, wherever "here" happens to be.

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Time:

11:48 pm.

I moved away from the design industry because I hated wasting my creative energy on advertisements and other corprate crap. Most paid creative gigs, at least the steady and well-paid gigs, are for corporations who are trying to sell you their products and services. What's pathetic are the egos that many in the industry have. Give somebody a Mac Book, a copy of Photoshop CS3, a black turtleneck sweater, and a title like Art Director and suddenly you have Pablo Fucking Picasso, the abstract surrealist prick who designs Walmart banners for a living. It's pathetic.

What's worse, is that you start to feel as if you never really do anything unless your name is tomato and you patent entirely new subsets of aesthetic trends. A designer simply creates the packaging that wraps and helps sell the accomplishments of others.

That isn't to say that I totally hate the profession. Some designers do earn my respect. It's possible to make a decent living. But such opportunities are rare and often fleeting when they do appear. It's a limited profession, however. A designer will never earn the respect a traditional artist would get, much like a DJ would never get the respect a real musician would get.

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Subject:	Cue the Republican Machine
Time:	10:34 pm.
Music:	grateful dead - uncle john's band.

I haven't talked a bunch about politics lately... not here, not to anybody. It's odd, it's an election year afterall. The truth is, though, I've kept politics in mind. I guess I have just been too preoccupied with other things to really feel like writing any of my thoughts or even talking to my political friends about all of this. I have been studying economics and environmental science over the past year: two subjects deeply in bed with political discussion. The ironic thing is that, unlike politics, there really isn't such a polarized field of chess. Rather, both are sciences that have their facts. People can use these facts, pretend they aren't there, or they can try to twist them to fit their agenda. Either way, the facts don't change.

It's no secret that I'm an extremely liberal person. I took on the classes with an open mind welcoming the possibility that, armed with new knowledge, my ideologies might change. Conservatives tend to sing praises of the "free market" and sound fiscal policy. The environmental issues that abound are supposedly plagued with doubts. After all of this I've learned that neither liberals nor conservatives get economics right. And those "doubts" about enviornmental issues are actually more "lies" than anything else. The science supports most of the ideas the liberals have. In fact, most liberal opinions don't go far enough into the realities of human-impact on the environment. Also, the biggest impact isn't so much on the environment, but on our own species. Environmental science has been, perhaps, the most eye-opening and most depressing subject I have studied, with of course the big exception being American foreign policy.

That brings me back to what I wanted to document here... it's regarding the election. Clinton is pretty much on her way out, at least for the presidential candidate. It seems as if the Republican attack machine was finally switched on and aimed precisely at Obama. In fact, judging from the talk radio shows today, I think all the Republican salespeople out there all received the same memo. The four shows (I was in my car a lot and for some reason had it on the conservative talk station) I heard all kept playing the soundbyte of Obama's pastor saying how fucked this country is.

And it is totally fucked. Read a book on foreign policy if you don't believe me. We have consistently committed genocide during the entire extent of our history. If it wasn't against our own people (the natives, the African slaves), it was against others (Latin America, Asia, Africa, Middle East) If I could find a priest who was that passionate and who spoke so much truth I'd probably actually be interested in going to church. This priest is enraged because he obviously knows how fucked our past and present is and he wants people to understand that. And it's funny because the attack is not even on Obama, but his "priest" or whatever he is. It's old news and it didn't have much impact (he smoked Clinton) on him. They are rehashing this old story because it probably enrages the conservative demographic that tunes into these shows and have already decided to vote for McCain (and amuses people like myself.) It's just amusing how every show... and I listend to four... had the same soundbytes and were all talking about this topic, which as far as I know, is already a few months old. It's the only "good" thing they got, and it's already stale in the mainstream media.

I also changed my mind on the whole "should Hillary still be running" thing. I figured that in the end, this was a good thing for the Democrats. It helped them dominate the news. I don't think it really hurt the election because we're still in the primaries and I figure the only people who care at this point are the people who are fairly political and are probably going to vote a certain way regardless of what happens. It also is like a form of competition, in an economic sense. It forces each candidate to refine their platform and perform to a maximum for us, the political customers. Either way, I'm sure there are a ton of people who, come November, think they will only be voting for either Clinton or Obama because McCain has been mostly out of the headlines (unless you dig through the political section of whatever news source you read.)

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Time:	12:02 pm.
Mood:	amused.

Why we hate Apple...

I try to stay neutral with PC hardware but I have always had this bad vibe about Apple and especially Apple fanboys. Anyway, we have had our first experience with an Apple product: My dad received an iPod Shuffle as a gift a while back. He decided he would never use it so he gave it to us. Kimya is learning Japanese and she recently purchased a suite of mp3s designed to help her study for the JLPT 2 exam. She figured she could load the mp3s on the Shuffle and use it as her study tool. Simple enough, right?

We open the Shuffle packaging and are impressed with the simple, elegant packaging (although not at all eco-friendly.)
She hooks it up and try to copy over the files. She copies the files over to the device. Later, she tries to listen to the files and nothing. The files don't play.
She takes time to read the fancy instruction materials and is informed that she must install Apple's iTunes to load music into the device. Ok, WTF? Why?
Whatever. So she tries to install iTunes but she can't because it isn't compatible with her OS! WTF?! She is running 2000.
We find the last version that supported 2000. We install it and without her permission it starts loading her entire library. WTF? But it didn't even find the Japanese mp3s she was trying to load. And when we import them the system obviously doesn't know how to support Japanese characters so they get placed randomly into the music database making it impossible to find them among the hundreds of other mp3s.
iTunes goes off on its own and tries to do things without our permission like looking for album art. We're not able to stop this, either.
So when she finally gets access to the software she tries to delete the mp3s from the iTunes library and gets a message that says something like "if you delete files from iTunes it will also delete them from your iPod." WTF? Why? I didn't ask you to do that. WHY!?!?!
At this point we haven't successfully loaded any mp3 files into the shuffle so we proceed. The iTunes software then informs her that the Shuffle needed a software update. She clicks on ok and the software tries to update. After the update iTunes no longer recognizes the Shuffle. We close iTunes and reconnect the Shuffle. iTunes says we have connected a corrupted device to the system. WTF!?!??!
She fiddles with the device a bit and now the device gives us a strange error message (a series of green and orange lights). It means either the device has no songs or is corrupted. It does have songs, though, because when we plug it in it displays the Japanese mp3s. Maybe the device doesn't know what to do with the filenames? Why would it matter, though? It doesn't have a screen.
She is still messing with it trying to get it to work. No luck. She is considering either hacking it or giving it back to my dad. I tried iTunes long ago and found it to be an extremely bloated memory hog that had limited features, did not support high DPIs, did not support non-Apple DRM, and crashed frequently so I have no interest in installing it on my system.
Update: After trying a few other things (including just loading 'normal' Western language mp3s) the device still does not work. So she is on a page trying to identify the "generation of her iPod model" so she can get the "iPod reset utility." They actually have a utility just for that? Wow.

Over a year back she bought another mp3 player. It cost the same, has a screen, and has the same capacity of the Shuffle. Here was the installation fiasco with that device:

Connect it with its built-in USB port and copy the files.

That's it.

If only Apple had put as much thought into the design of the device as they did the pretty packaging. I had been flirting with the idea of buying a Mac Book Air, just on the aesthetics of the device. If the Shuffle is any indication of what to expect from Apple, then nevermind.

Kimya is a computer engineer. :P Aren't these products designed to work without a huge amount of technical expertise? Granted, the instructions have been straightforward but I'd rather take a functioning product with cryptic technical garble over a pretty-packaged non-functional POS anyday.

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Subject:	slowly disconnecting
Time:	2:22 pm.

I stopped watching TV several years ago. That isn't to say I don't look at TV from time to time. We have HD Comcast which is "free" as part of our condo contract. The HD channels are beautiful on our TV. I'll turn it on from time to time, especially late at night when I'm too tired to think but not tired enough to sleep. Even watching stations I used to tolerate such as PBS or Discovery is almost unbearable now. Have TV documentaries been dumbed down? Everything on Discovery seems to be a stupid reality show where the abnoxious hosts are like "LET'S BUILD A BIG ASS MURDERCYCLE YEAH!" or "LET'S BLOW STUFF UP WOO!" There is another show I see at the gym sometimes, probably on AMC or A&E or some other channel I used to think of as "high brow". It's about people who get tattoos. They always have some "story" behind their tattoo. The stories are usually stupid and corny. Do people really find that entertaining? Even a PBS documentary about cancer I saw the other night annoyed me because of all the cheesey ripoff special effects like the "suddenly fast then super slow" tracking and extreme angles that had nothing to do with the scene.

I also am not watching as many movies as I used to. I used to go almost every week. I haven't been in at least a month, probably two. We check the new movie listings and for the past two months there hasn't been a single new movie that has interested me enough to want to go check it out. Seattle has a ton of great art house theaters. Even the foreign and art house films showing here all seem stupid, or predictable, or boring.

For a while it seemed cool to say something like "I don't watch tv." Now the trend I have seen is that it is cool to say "it's lame to say I don't watch tv and I actually watch tv." I personally just don't care. I still enjoy the radio, for example. Games are fun too. Luckily, I guess, I don't really have a ton of "free" time to waste so I am not worried about finding ways to forget I'm living.

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Subject:	the fake food court
Time:	10:45 pm.

There is a genre of restaurant I never knew existed until I began working in the financial district. I guess the best way to describe it is the "fake food court." It's a fast food restaurant with several counters. Each counter offers a different type of food. For example, you might have a grill counter, a sandwich counter, and a pay station counter. Another word you could use to describe it would be a corporate food trough.

The food is typically bad. Take Mel's, for example. This was the first place I ate at when I started working in the FD. I had seen it before but there were often lines outside the door and never bothered to go in. It's across the street from the new office and the first day my coworkers were feeling adventurous and decided to cross the street to give it a try. I ordered a BLT from their sandwich counter. Imagine two fistfuls of bacon stuffed between two pieces of bread and rumors of lettuce and tomato. Now, to be honest, the idea of two fistfuls of bacon is enough to make me weak in the knees and drool like a baby but there is something wrong about the bacon Mel's uses. Bacon is like sushi for me. If it is ok then it is usually great, but if it is wrong, it's disturbing. If bacon came in grades then the bacon Cherry Street uses in their BLTs would be "grade A organic" and Mel's would be whatever grade you would grade bacon if it came from laboratory grown hogs force-fed animal by-products and hormones packed into an endless array of 1'x1' cages under noisy flourescent lights. Their bacon is burned beyond a pleasant crisp and probably cooked in Quakerstate. It must sit in a warming tray all morning, properly acquiring that artificial warmth familiar to anybody who grew up eating food from public schools.

This food is particularly flavorless. It's obvious that these restaurants are designed for one thing: profit. Costs are cut in every possible way, except those burdened by the end consumer. Top off your meal with a carbonated sugary beverage and a bag of chips or mass-produced snack cake and get out the door because these restaurants never have proper seating areas.

It amazes me that you'll sometimes see 100 people in one of these restaurants. Yet, next door in a tiny independent shop like Cherry Street that serves up decent espresso and flavorful sandwiches, the lunch rush is never more than a handful of people.

Today I visited another such place... I think it was generically called "Food Court." It had a place called "Chutney Express." I had known about it for a while but never bothered. A coworker and I had discussed Chicken Tikka Masala and I remembered that this particular food court had an Indian-themed counter. It was a big mistake. The food didn't resemble Chicken Tikka Masala. It certainly didn't taste like it. To top it off, I'm feeling sick to my stomach. Even an hour at the gym and one of my organic salads hasn't been able to wash away the bad juju. Gah.

Lately, I have been in the mood for cabrito. I think whenever I make it back to Texas I'm going to try to score some serious cabrito. The thing about Texas is that we would never actually buy that kind of stuff from a restaurant or store. Somebody would buy a live goat, keep it around for a while, then on some special occasion there would be a feast of cabrito to enjoy. Everybody would eat so much goat they would get sick of it and we wouldn't touch it until somebody got married or got out of jail or did something else that warranted a celebration. I remember killing my first goat when I was 12. It was in the middle of summer in Hearne, which is this tiny hick-town between Dallas and Houston. It was probably 100 degrees outside I was so traumatized by the experience I didn't notice. Anyway, we were under the shade of a giant tree, probably a pecan tree, which was a convenient place to hang the goat while we "cleaned" it.

I've never seen a goat in Seattle.

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Subject:	eeee!
Time:	10:56 pm.

Wow, I feel like an adult.

We bought a car today. :) It's a 2008 Jeep Compass. We got it fairly loaded with the Rallye package (includes 18" black rims), a 9-speaker 450 watt stereo, leather seats, power moonroof, etc.

The car seems to elicit strong emotions, particularly from car bloggers. People either love it or hate it, I have not really seen anything in between. Those who love it praise its odd style and fuel economy. Most bloggers, however, think the car is hideous. Many have criticized Jeep for "watering down" their brand with this vehicle. It's not as off-road capable as say, a Cherokee, but I don't intend on taking up rocky mountainsides and I doubt the majority of Jeep owners actually do that. Jeeps were popular back in Dallas where the nearest off-road opportunity was at least 3 hours away and judging by the pristine exterior, they never found it.

I don't get the "ugly" thing, though. It's funny, Gema and I are crazy about the car and we are both artsy people. Both of us have, at some point in our lives, have worked in creative fields. Go figure. ;P

I'm looking forward to doing a ton of hiking and probably getting into skiing and snowboarding this winter. :>

We already have another car that gets polarized responses, our 92 VW Cabriolet. Some say it is ugly, others love it. I still get offers, mostly joking but some serious, of random people wanting to buy the car from me.

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