Maybe Fewer Laws to Obey

Years ago, walking through the Old Town section of Pasadena, my hometown, I saw something that has stuck with me over the years that I think points to at least part of the reason why we in this country are experiencing the divide we are. 

It was at the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and Raymond.  The intersection has a pedestrian scramble, where traffic is allowed to go East & West, then North & South, and then all vehicle traffic is stopped to allow pedestrians to cross in any direction to get to where they want to walk.  

When the motor traffic is allowed to flow pedestrians are supposed to wait until the vehicles are stopped and their WALK signal lights up.  This is to allow the vehicles to make smooth turns without having to wait or worry about people crossing the street.  Unfortunately, while I make a point of waiting to help the system work, other people will cross in the direction cars are going, forcing cars to wait to make their right hand turns, backing up traffic behind them.  

Long ago, relatively soon after the system was established, I remember standing at the southeast corner of the intersection waiting for my turn to cross when I noticed this “old guy,” who might have been only a little older than I am now, crossing with the traffic.  His wife, standing on the corner behind him, called out to him.  

“Henry!  HEEN-REEEY!”  

“Wha—?”  He waved his hand over his head without looking back and kept walking.  

“You’re doing it wrong?  Henry!  Ya hear me!  Look at the sign!”  

Henry looked up, finding one of the diagrams posted there showing how it was supposed to be done.  

He waved his hand over his head again, this time in the general direction of the sign he’d just spotted.  

“Ya can’t obey ALL the laws!”  

Henry kept strolling across the street.  His wife, hesitated, shifted back and forth, and then sprinted after him as fast as she could to catch up.  I’ve always assumed that she was afraid of what trouble he might get to on his own if she waited until the pedestrian WALK signs came on.  

The United States is, without a doubt, the country where individual liberty and the sanctity of personal choice is most supported.  It is the one thing, at least in our shared stated language, got right.  And it’s our best political ideal that we export to the world, finding proponents everywhere that work to make such ideals of self-determination real for them and the people of their countries.  It is one political concept we got right.  

Mostly.  We mostly got it right.  

Where I think we experience problems is when it becomes unbridled.  Or is never questioned, especially when the concerns of society or a group comes in contact with it.  

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Japan.  It is a country that has very similar laws as ours (we created their constitution for them after World War Two, modeling it on our own), but have a very strong sense of social and group responsibility.  The term they use is 集団意識, shuudanishiki, which means “group consciousness,” or putting the harmony and smooth running of the group ahead of your own personal desires.  

When I was younger, I thought that personal liberty, being able to say or do whatever you wanted without fear of reprisal or censor was the idea.  And I still think that it’s vitally important to ensure that we do not become like some autocratic society where “right thinking” is necessary to survive.  

But it was during my first trip to Japan back in 2007 when I started to reconsider that position.  

It coalesced for me walking back to my hotel from the Pacifico Yokohama Conference Center where I was attending the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) being held there.  I had been attending some of the after-convention parties usually thrown during the week.  It was late.  Or rather, very early.  About 2 AM.  I was strolling back to my hotel when I reached the Sakuragicho train station.  There, hanging out in front of the station entrance were three or four teenage girls, Junior High School to High School age, laughing and chatting with each other.  

Immediately, I started looking around.  Looking to see if there were any shady characters scoping out the girls.  I remember thinking something like, “IF I had a daughter, and IF I found out she had been hanging out in front of Union Station in Los Angeles at two in the morning, I would tan her hide something good to make sure she didn’t even think of doing anything like that again.”  

My thoughts can sound a lot like the way my dad spoke when I was growing up.  Especially if he’d caught me doing somthing like this.  

After a couple of moments, I stopped searching for danger.  Because, it came to me, there wasn’t any.  The girls didn’t feel threatened because there was no threat.  And that was because the Japanese sense of shuudanishiki had created a society where the threat was significantly less than it was in my country.  

That was when I made the decision that, IF I could get my country to move toward a more group/societal way of thinking, and IF I could motivate the Japanese people I met to move their country to have greater tolerance and respect for individual differences, then the societies of BOTH countries would be “better.”  Would improve their balance between individual freedoms and group/societal harmony.  

I can’t say that I made it my life’s goal.  I can say that, given the reaction to such simple steps to protect others from Covid, such as wearing masks and refraining from gathering in groups, we here in the U.S. have made not strides forward in this regard.  We probably took several steps backward, in fact.  

It is not an EITHER/OR proposition.  To me, it is an act of respect.  Of caring.  Caution and concern over how what I do may impact others.  I did not visit my family at all this holiday season because I don’t know with certainty that I wouldn’t carry something to them that would do them harm.  Not the type of present I want to bring with me.  

Right now, this country seems to be in the worst shape overall when it comes to the virus.  The highest rates of infection, the most deaths, the most people hospitalized.  Other countries where people are more inclined to comply with government guidelines, like Japan and South Korea, are doing much better.  Right now, politically, we’re more divided and angry with each than since 1860, right before the country nearly destroyed itself in a bloodbath that last almost five years and killed more people in combat than all the wars we fought from the American Revolution to the Korean War combined.  A division where I feel we’re losing the ability to even discuss our differences because we have already convinced ourselves that “they” are wrong. 

With 2021 right around the corner, combined with my efforts to be more optimistic and proactive in my efforts to change the circumstances of my life, I’m going to dedicate myself to my still firmly held belief that things will be “Better” if we think about how what we do will impact others before deciding what it is we individually want to do.  I’ll do my best to move myself in that direction.  And I’ll encourage others “over there” to do the same.  

And I won’t have to worry about “obeying all the laws,” because we won’t need so many laws anyway if we do.

What Has Been Gained in a Year of Loss

 This blog entry was inspired by a story I heard on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

2020 has been a year of loss.  Millions of people have lost their jobs.  Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives.  The country seems to have lost the ability to make a smooth transition of government after a fair election.  IFor jobs and democracy, I am hoping those losses are temporary. 

My personal losses haven’t been nearly as bad as others, but I’ve felt them.  At the beginning of the pandemic I lost trip to Japan, something I have been doing and look forward to every year for the past several years.  I had tickets to see a game at the Chiba Lotte Marine Stadium, completing my quest to see games in all of the professional baseball parks in Japan.  This year was to include a quick side trip to South Korea, my first to that country to start a quest to see games in all the ballparks there.  The loss was so keen that I felt the need to tweet about what I would have been doing on each day of the trip back in April had I been able to go.

More importantly, I lost hope for the future.  The lockdowns due to the virus made me believe that any opportunity to get closer to a life I would want to have was lost.  I imagined myself coming out of the pandemic with nothing left to do but wait until my life ended.  Pretty bleak.

In the story on NPR, they reached out to people to find out, in a year with so much loss, what they had gained.  I listened to the people interviewed talk about the things they now have in their lives.  

A young man with a debilitating disease moving to another state and regaining the ability to laugh and dance again because of the doctor he found there.

A woman who had poetry come back into her life after attending a zoom class with other poets put on by a local community center.

A man getting the determination to finally quit smoking.

A woman who is a self-described atheist deciding to go to chaplaincy school and finding her calling after losing her previous job.  

After listing to the story, I decided to take some time and see what I have gained this year.  Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. 

For one thing, I’m better off financially.  With no where to go, I’ve been setting aside all the extra money I can, and increased my 401k contribution by a few percentage points.  And without having to drive into the office every day, I’ve saved a lot of money on gas.  It’s directly a result of the conditions created by the virus, but it’s a plus.  

Better than that, I’ve returned to writing.  At the end of 2019 I was frustrated and depressed about the state of my writing.  I didn’t see it going anywhere.  I felt like I was wasting my time.  But then, about the time of the first lockdown, I decided to try again.  I decided to at least finish the two novels I had been working on before.  I’ve now completed the outline to finish a rough draft for my science fiction novel, and I’m reading my fantasy novel’s rough draft, taking notes to create a revision plan for it.  And I’m writing my blog again, working to update it (about) every week.  

Deeper than that, I gained a determination to change my outlook.  It was another NPR story about optimism that made me want to make the change.  It made me realize that my pessimism was an expression of a feeling of helplessness, rather than being firmly seated in a more pragmatic outlook on life.  I decided I didn’t want to be or feel helpless any more.  

So now, every morning when I write in my journal, I end the entry with a three line affirmation, inspired by the group Optimists International: 

“I will be strong so that nothing will disturb my Pease of Mind.  I will be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.  I will take every opportunity to make progress (in my life).”  

I don’t always succeed in being stronger than fear, or preventing things from disturbing my peace of mind.  But every morning I remind myself that this is how I want to be, and I write down the ways I’ll try to embody this outlook in my coming day.  

As the Japanese say, 七転び八起き. Nana korobi hachi oki. “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”  

If I’ve gained an increased ability to keep getting back up after taking a fall, then I’ve received something very good from this year after all.  

My Best List for 2020

As 2020 comes to an end (FINALLY!), I decided to participate in the year end tradition of making a “Best List” of my own.  In this case, the Best Shows that I Saw This Year.  

Before I present my choices, I felt the need to present some caveats as to where my choices came from and how I came to pick what I did.

First, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my viewing is through some streaming site.  I watch broadcast TV for one hour each week, and that’s the new show, “This Week” on Sunday morning.  So, there is no broadcast TV show on my list.  Nor anything that might have come out in a movie theater in the first three months of the year.  The streaming services I use are Netflix, Amazon Prime, Rakuten Viki, VRV, and YouTube.  Rakuten Viki is a site specializing in Asian movies and TV shows.  And VRV is a site for Japanese Anime.  

As one could probably tell from my selection of streaming sites, I watch more Asian shows, particularly Japanese and Korean, than most of the people I know.  You’d probably have to talk to someone who lives in Osaka or Seoul to find someone who watches more of these dramas than I do.  

My favorite genres are Science Fiction, Romance, Suspense, Fantasy, and some Horror, especially if it has zombies.  If your tastes run to something in another genre, then you probably won’t find much of anything here to like.  

I’ve decided to list my ten favorites divided into Movies, TV Shows, Animation, and Documentaries.  I picked the three best for each category and ranked them, presenting them in reverse order.  

These are not necessarily shows FROM this year, but shows which I’ve SEEN this year.  One of the benefits of streaming sites is seeing things that were made years ago, breakout shows for certain artists, the things that made them famous, and the like.  So if I list something from years ago, it’s only because I only saw it this year.

So, here we go. 

Movies

3) Witch: Subversion - Korea.  On Netflix, For Rent on Amazon Prime.  2018.

A High School student with a mysterious past has that past catch up with her after she appears on a televised talent show.  The movie is a comic book hero’s origin story, focusing on the main character’s efforts to deal with the effects of what was done to her in a secret government laboratory.  What makes this so good is the relentless sparkling actions scenes, and the performance of Kim Da-mi, the young actress in the lead role, who has gone on to do other notable performances, including a major role in one of my favorite TV shows below.  A sequel was scheduled to be made and/or released this year, but I’ve not heard what the pandemic may have done to affect that.  

2) Romance Doll - Japan.  Streaming on Netflix.  2020.

A sculptor looking for work gets hired by a company that makes life-sized sex dolls.  He meets his future wife there when she comes to model for the company’s latest product after she is told that the company designs breast implants for patients that have undergone mastectomies.  This is the story of their romance and marriage and what happens as he tries to keep the secret of how he earns his living from her.  This is a beautiful romance about how keeping secrets can drive two people in love apart.  Yuki Tanada, who wrote the book it’s based, also wrote the script and directed the film.  I was crying my eyes out for the last twenty minutes of the film.  I bought the novel to read in its original Japanese.  

1) Parasite - Korea.  On Hulu, For Rent on Amazon Prime.  2019

Class differences is a common theme in Korean movies and TV shows.  But Parasite’s examination of what these social structures can do to people is biting.  Deep enough that the imagines stay with you long after the movie is done.  It is always satisfying to see a Best Picture that really deserves the title.  

TV Shows

3) My Mister - Korea.  Netflix.  2018.

A middle-aged man who is going through the motions in his life and a young woman who is trapped by her life’s circumstances to have greater responsibility that she can handle become involved with each other when a package intended to frame and remove someone else in a company power-play is mistakenly delivered to his attention because he has a similar name to the target.  I call this show a “love story” though not in the traditional romantic sense.  It’s about how caring for someone else can help you learn to love yourself more.  It is tense, heartbreaking, and uplifting by turns.  The two main characters are portrayed by Lee Sun-kyun, who was featured as the wealthy father in Parasite, and the singer Lee Ji-eun, more commonly known by her stage name, IU, showing off her acting skills.  

2) Itaewon Class - Korea.  Netflix.  2020.

A young man named Saeroyi, on the verge of graduating from High School beats up the rich classmate that killed his father while driving drunk.  The rich classmate avoids punishment through his father’s connection and Saeroyi goes to prison for attempted murder, seemingly ruining his chances for life.  The show follows the young man as he fights his past and the efforts of the rich classmate’s father to keep him in his place to achieve his dream over the course of the next fifteen years.  Another Korean show with class differences as its theme, but one that is more inspiriting and uplifting.  The name of the show comes from a section of Seoul known for the wide variety of people from around the world that live there.  It also features Kim Dal-mi, the actress from Witch: The Subversion portraying the character of Jo Yi-seo, the brilliant, and somewhat psychopathic college drop-out that joins forces with Saeroyi to help him achieve his dream.  I downloaded the theme song, Starting Over, because I loved it and this show so much.

1) It’s Ok to Not Be Okay - Korea.  Netflix.  2020

A selfless care-giver at a psychiatric hospital, Moon Gang-tae, becomes the object of affection of a popular writer of dark children’s stories, Ko Mun-yeong, after he stops her from stabbing an escaped patient that ruined her public reading of her latest work.  Over the course of the sixteen episodes we see the two wrestle with their emotional and psychological problems as well as the relationship developing between them.  The backstory gets a bit “tangly” as the unknown connection between the two and their past loses comes to light, but Seo Yea-ji’s portrayal of the psychotically self-obsessed Ko Mun-yeong is mesmerizing.  And Oh Jung-se gives a standout performance as Moon Sang-tae, Gang-tae’s older brother with autism.  I’ve been wanting to write about this show since watching it since the story structure of the relationship between the two main characters is a near perfect example of a thematic relationship between the Protagonist and the Impact Character should be set up.  Look for a more detailed explanation in a coming blog entry.  

Animation

3) After the Rain - Japan.  Amazon Prime.  2018.

A young high school track start loses her sense of direction in life when an injury seemingly ends her running career.  Leaving the track team instead of going through rehabilitation, she develops a crush on the manager of the restaurant where she works part-time, a divorced middle aged man who has also given up his dream in life, which was to be a novelist.  She confesses her feelings to him, which starts a poignant relationship between the two as they teach each other to heal themselves.  I was a bit leery when I read the description of the story before watching After the Rain, but the story is very touching and sweet as it pairs Akira’s (the girl) damaged hopes with Kondo’s (the man) faded dreams.  The friendship they develop helps each of them to heal.   

2) Aggretsuko - Japan.  Netflix.  2018 to 2020 (continuing?)

The background characters from Sanrio’s Hello Kitty universe come to life as office workers.  Retsuko, an anthropomorphic red panda, is a stressed out mid-20-something OL (office lady) who is tired of her job but is too debt ridden to get out of it.  Her only release is to go to the karaoke studio after work and scream her lungs out singing to loud, angry death-metal songs.  The episodes are short, about 23 minutes each.  The stories are genuine, both touching and satirically funny.  The characters are cute and adorable.  There are three seasons on Netflix plus a Christmas Special.   I have heard of a fourth season being made, which I hope is true.  

1) Star Trek: Lower Decks.  CBS All Access.  2020.

The ninth series in the Star Trek universe, and the first animated series since the ’73-’74 Stark Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: Lower Decks follows the life and career of Becket Mariner, an trouble-making ensign on the USS Cerritos, and her friends and crew mates as they boldly go to places at least one other starship has gone before.  Becket’s life on board the Cerritos is complicated by secretly being the daughter of Carol Freeman, Captain of the Cerritos.  This show is a MUST WATCH for anyone that is a Star Trek fan.  It is well-written, drawing characters, races, and situations from all the previous Star Trek series, poking fun at the universe while paying homage to it as well.  This show alone makes the subscription to an extra streaming service worth it.  

Documentaries

3) Little Miss Sumo - Japan.  Netflix.  2018

A short nineteen minute film that introduces us to Hiyori, a twenty year old woman following her passion to become a sumo wrestler even though the traditions of the sport say that women aren’t even allowed to stand in the performance area.  Watching this film reminded me of the time I met a Japanese woman that came to the United States to learn to become a sushi chef because in Japan she was told that, because she was a woman, her body temperature was too high to properly make sushi.  A snapshot of someone trying to change the world to fulfill a dream.  

2) Queer Eye: We’re in Japan - United States/Japan.  Netflix.  2019

The members of the Queer Eye team go to Tokyo to help people there with their life style choices.  I never watched Queer Eye when it first became famous, though I was fascinated by the idea (and secretly thought from time to time that I would be a perfect candidate for the show).  When I saw the listing for this series where they go to my favorite travel destination I had to give it a watch and very much enjoyed it.  Style isn’t so much about looking a certain way as it is about expressing yourself openly in how you live.  

1) Pandemic - United States.  Netflix.  2019.

A six episode documentary made just months before Covid became a household world about how to fight the “next pandemic.”  I saw this early in the year, before the first set of closures in Los Angeles county took place.  It focuses on several different people dealing with some aspect of fighting a disease outbreak, such as a doctor working in a rural medical center, the woman in charge of coordinating New York City’s pandemic response, a man working for the WHO in Africa trying to curb and ebola outbreak, and a woman in Oregon trying to fight a law forcing her to get her children vaccinated.  In between, there are scientists and doctors talking about how and where pandemics start and what we need to do to prevent them from happening.  Watching this while the “next” pandemic was upon us, I wondered why it is that people only react to potential disasters when they become less potential and more actual. 

That’s it for me.  Let me know what your favorites were.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

I’ve been working on an idea for a short story based on the cross-country trip I’ve alluded to in previous posts.  This is the trip I took after graduating from college, traveling from Utah to North Carolina to see my sister get married.  The one where my car broke down twice, where I lost almost all of the possessions, after which I spent a year living in North Carolina trying to get the means to return to Southern California and start over.  

My reason for writing such a story was to put it a box in and place it on a mental shelf.  To understand what this trip did to me in order to move past it and do a better job of creating a life of my own choosing.  A “Better” life than the one I have now.  As I’ve been contemplating this story, an unexpected realization came to me.  

I may already be living in the Best of All Possible Worlds for myself.  

I remember hearing once that optimists believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that pessimists believe that optimists may be right.  And certainly, I see truth in that saying.  From the pessimist’s point of view, certainly.  But I think I’m starting to understand the position of the optimist as well.

While pondering that trip, thinking about how I could have changed things, if I could go back in time, for instance, and warn my fresh out of college self about what was going to happen and help him avoid it, I’ve always assumed that if I could have avoided the people and the disasters I encountered on that trip, then my life would have been “Better.”  I would not be as risk adverse as I’ve become.  I would be more daring.  More positive.  I would reach for my dreams more wholeheartedly.  I would have more love.  I would be happier.  

But another thought has crept into my calculations since the Thanksgiving I spent with my buddy from college, and the talk we had about the trip and how I was before and after.  My friend reminded me of the letters I sent to him while stuck in North Carolina.  How I wrote that I was determined to change my life so I would never be that unable to help myself out of a jam again.  I had forgotten about writing the letters.  I do remember that sentiment, though.  It had become something of a mantra in my life at the time.  

With this in mind, had I found a way to avoid disaster on that trip, reaching my family without the dramatic loss of money and property I’d suffered, what would I have done then?  With this in mind, had I found a way to avoid disaster on that trip, reaching my family without the dramatic loss of money and property I’d suffered, what would I have done then?  Would I have seen my sister get married then driven off to New York and pursued my dream of becoming a professional actor, going on to fame and fortune?  Achieving the Best of All Possible Outcomes? 

Or…  I would have faced other disasters.  Maybe even greater, more dangerous ones.  I would still have been as ill-equipped to handle them as I was before reaching North Carolina.  I would still be just as ignorant of that inability.  Would I have been able to recover enough had my car broken down somewhere near the Jersey shore instead of the Kansas plain?  I don’t know.  

And I never will know.  Because we only live in this world, the dimension that you and I share.  Physics tells us that in each moment of our lives alternate realities are created.  Copies of ourselves are made based on the changes, the choices, that are faced in each instant of our existence.  But a condition called “decoherence” prevents us from experiencing what those alternate selves are feeling or experiencing.  We only have access to the set of circumstances that our consciousness bifurcated into at that moment when this reality was created.

We can imagine all the ways our lives might have been different if we had made different choices, or had different things happen to us.  But we can never know with certainty that our lives would have been “Better.”  Those imaginings come from looking at the parts of our circumstance that we don’t care for and wondering where it was that we lost out and how could we have prevented it.  

So…  And I hope I’ve lead you to this point well enough for you to follow me to this point, this life, this existence that we have right now IS the Best of All Possible Worlds.  Because it’s the ONLY Possible World we have.  Rather than review it and focus on its flaws, comparing it with imaginary dimensions that can never be proven to be real, and which can’t be accessed even if they are real, I think I want to find a way to look at it and say, “Yes.  This is the Best Possible World for me.  It’s where I am after all my efforts to live a life, which I tried to live to my best ability.”  

Even if a Best of All Possible Worlds is not quite what you want, it doesn’t mean it can’t be made Even Better.  And instead of spending energy trying to figure out how it could have been changed to be even better now, a plan that can never be executed anyway since traveling back through time is as impossible as reaching into other dimensions, it would be better to spend that energy making this Best of All Possible Worlds into the Even Better Possible World.  Because we are committed to traveling through time into the future. 

The basic story idea I’ve come up with…  Not really an “idea” yet, more like a kernel of an idea, revolves around a service in the far future based on a quantum computing AI.  I pick quantum computers because, if they can be made to work, would do so by reaching into multiple alternative realities to do their computations.  And this service would be a decision making app that people would subscribe to in order to help make better decisions.  They would enter the choice they face and the AI would reach into these alternate dimensions to run simulations, which would be presented to the subscriber in a virtual reality where they could see and feel the result of a particular choice.  They would then be able to decide which of the simulated futures was the one they most wanted and make their choice as to what they were going to do.  

The theme would be something along the lines of how even with this service, even with the data showing that it had a high rate of accuracy in its predictions, it still couldn’t show you what your other choices WOULD HAVE BEEN.  It would be a technological replacement for one’s own imagination.  A tool to help you imagine the outcome better.  And no matter which choice you made, you would STILL be in the Best of All Possible Worlds.  To deal with as best you could in the here and now. 

It’s kinda rough, I know.  But I can always do something to make it a better idea.