The Economist obituaries

This sounds horrible to say but one of my favorite sections of The Economist are the last-page obituaries. It's the last page, which is tasteful (who wants to read an obituary slammed between "Britain" and "Business"?), and often features a photo that remains seared in the mind for years to come.

The stories told are usually -- though not always -- of people I'd never even heard of until picking up that issue, only to realize what incredible, eventful, magic lives they'd led, filled with drama and struggle and triumphs along the way. It never feel sad for some reason even though they're dead: whether they die old or before their time, The Economist has a strange way of writing the story in such a way that it feels more like a joyous celebration than anything. 

It gets me thinking about this life. How do I wish to live? I don't want to be the kind of famous person who gets written about after death in The Economist (though most people wouldn't mind) but reading these life stories does get one thinking about what the heck I'm achieving here. For the time being, it would sound something like this:

"After a lifetime of surfing Etsy, writing and publishing some random stories that didn't net her very much profit and putting up illustrations on an obscure blog, Yukirat died at age 85 after being crushed by a large mahogany bookshelf." 

That would really kind of suck. If it were "crushed by a large mahogany bookshelf filled with her own (successful) travel-themed novels and books", that would be pretty cool. 

So what do I stand for? I loyally donate to causes like homelessness and poverty, hoping one day to help out in much bigger ways. Yet I've chosen a treacherous career path that would pretty much keep  me a low-level donor until I become a mogul of some sort and monopolize the market. Really, being a writer today is a lot like picking the guitar in front of the train station: you get to live doing what you love, but don't count on retiring early.

I don't want a nice house, or nice things, or even children. A car is superfluous. Even a coffee-maker is irrelevant. 

I've always hated excess. Having more than necessary is irritating. Everything I spend time on lately, I do so wondering if this is something I'd consider a very good use of my finite and limited youth, and all things considered, partying, shopping, cultivating my online profile (ugggh) and obsessing over my body seem like colossally dumb ways to squander that time. Blogging is different.

What I do want is an interesting life. To have seen and experienced a lot of things that capture the imagination and set the soul on fire. I want my eyes -- declining as they are in sight -- to soak up as much beauty as they can from all four corners of the world. I want to have started something new: there are a lot of impasses in the world. I want to come up with a solution theory and implement it as a new model for others to improve upon. I have stories boiling in my head that I want to get out on paper and post online, or publish if anyone is willing to read them. Obviously, the family and partner and dearest friends have to be taken care of. That is actually a full time job in and of itself when one wants to do it perfectly. 

I'm writing one out in my diary. It's pretty much the kind of life I think would be awesome. The thirties and forties especially. Of course, God has plans. I'm not a planner, but dreaming up a rough manifesto of the kind of life I wish to lead makes me feel a lot better somehow. 

Things I find more fulfilling than Facebook

I avoid FB whenever possible. Outside of work-related things, I try not to post anything at all. Here's why.

Life is very finite. I don't know if I will die at 35 or 89. Since the very beginning of its popularity, I've thought Facebook's founder has questionable morals, and I think the low-grade emotional payback (for me anyway) of sharing stuff on FB and getting likes does not in any way justify spending crumbs of this finite time on earth I can't get back on that page whose billionaire founder I find to have poor values. But it's so prevalent that even while opposing it I find it easy to sucked in.

 Its core function is as a news feed. If in Arab Spring, it's useful for political means too. But I refuse to do anything on it unless it's necessary and work-related.

Things more fulfilling than Facebook:

Learning Arabic (with Maha!)
Learning Mandarin
Running
Blogging
Drawing
Painting
Tumblr
Twitter (really)
Planning tours of foreign countries
Meditating
Donating money
Revisiting LeMonde
Revisiting Asahi.com
Stretching
Relaxing
Etsy porn
Comics
American Scholar
Granta
Skyping parents
Skyping friends
Making jewelry
Fantasizing about making clothes
Cleaning room

Beauty

I'm fascinated by faces. Sometimes, though, I feel like a "beautiful" face starts to become meaningless after awhile because it all falls under the same template. It's easy to draw a photogenic person without thinking. But if you try to really force yourself to think what makes a person beautiful, you see it has a lot to do with expression. Kind eyes, smart mouth are my criteria. It's true that a lot of people who are incredibly smart actually don't have it written on their faces (Dostoyevsky wrote in Notes from Underground how furious he was that he looked stupid), but that's an important part of beauty in my eyes. But even more, kindness. Regardless of features and symmetry, there is something inherently attractive about someone who has the strength of character to be kind in a generally savage world. 

Live your life, live your life

Listened to an interview with Maurice Sendak and bawled my eyes out. I remembered when I was a child, when I was so moved every day by the beauty of this world that all I wanted to do was communicate it to the rest of the world. I've never liked organized religion but I do believe in God and see divine beauty in all things every day. Just this morning I was at a Starbucks (only coffee shop open at 7am on a Saturday in this area) and felt so troubled observing the faces of the people around me, and the things in the cafe, wondering where all the beauty I used to see went. I wondered how I'd changed that the ordinary people who used to look so special and fascinating now just looked like yuppies and uninteresting folk, whether it was this part of the world that was this way or whether I'd changed. I thought about how I woke up this morning at 5am dead tired but thinking about work, dreaming every day these last two years about work, and realizing how much I'd forgotten for so many days in a row to simply live this life.

Only in Yaletown: "I hate birds!"

It's a pretty brazen statement, actually. Really? All of'em? 

From Mali to Joyce-Collingwood, Vancouver

I feel so terribly sick, tired and weak right now: don't take health for granted. this is the first time that an ailment has lasted more than a week, and that a simple good night's sleep didn't improve anything. But in that time, some interesting sketches of around Vancouver. this is of two African Canadian Muslim ladies walking around Joyce-Collingwood. Really vibrant and colourful (that word sounds racist sometimes, sigh) scene, so good to see. Oy. Flu. 

Vancouver Douchebags: the art douche and rich douche

 I received some feedback that I haven't been doing enough updates of the VD section lately. I prefer to post nice or inspiring people, but admittedly the bad ones are the ones who stick out the most.

So here are two memorable ones: two very different types of douchebags. The first one is this guy I saw lining up for the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit on Tuesday.

I think it was either Tuesday or opening night, but either way a huge lineup snaked around the Art Gallery. This young guy with long hair and droopy eyes was going on about how his dad had really good connections in the art world, and was whining that he "can't believe" he was lining up like common folk. He tried to convince his date to leave the line and go right up to front desk to ask to be let through first.

Rather than being impressed by him, though, his pretty (and sensible) companion scowled and held her ground that she was going to remain in queue, and that he can go off by himself if he wants. So he did, and after two minutes, came back to the queue, whining that his connections weren't at the desk that day.

 The girl just rolled her eyes. Imagine if she'd gone with him, they would have lost their spots altogether.


The second one was this really well-dressed young guy in a suit. He was foreign -- maybe French -- and had that ridiculous CG skin like you see on models, as well as a suit that was straight out of GQ magazine. He was the kind of handsome guy who'd turn a lot of heads when walking the street, but he mainly caught my attention because of the ridiculous cell phone conversation he was having with a workmate.

You could tell that he was supposed to have been somewhere at the time of the phone call, and he'd flaked out without telling anyone. It was clear that the person on the other end of the line wasn't too pleased, but he made no apology and made up some vague excuse about something else to do that day.

The woman on the other end apparently requested he give the manager or someone a call to explain why he was absent, and for a split second he looked on the verge of requesting his interlocutor to apologize on his behalf. He probably figured that was a dumb idea, but dragged his feet symbolically by asking if she could maybe look up the number of the guy who was probably pissed off right now waiting for him.

Dude is on an iPhone 5. What's preventing him from looking it up himself? And what would he write that number down with, even if she did tell him what the number was?

It was all too obvious that he was making this lady do it for him because he thought the task was beneath him to begin with.

She must have said no, because there was an uncomfortable pause. He then replied, "Well, can't you Google it?"

After some back and forthing, the woman must have said she'd look his number up because Mr. Suit Model gave a sleepy "Thanks so muuuch" and went back to squeezing his girlfriend's butt.

The guy's face reminded me an awful lot of this other really pouty and spoiled five-year-old kid on the bus with his Filipina nanny on the 99 B-Line. The way he was refusing to do anything she asked him to, and ignored her entirely when she asked him to say thank you or pick up something he dropped or stop kicking the seat, and the superior look he shot her from time to time signaled that even at five or six years old, he'd absorbed the attitude of people around him (probably his parents) that she was poor and he was wealthy. Even at that baby age, he knew on some subconscious level that this woman was his family's servant. Something about his sullen look as he glared at his nanny was different from that of a regular kid being a brat.

It was pretty unnerving to watch. Parents, if you have enough money to be hiring a nanny, please afford the time to teach your kid some respect.

Newtown, movies, gun violence

So sitting through movie trailers to see Django, the first thought that crossed my mind was: for all the lip service people give to the unspeakable horror at Newtown, Connecticut, Americans will never, ever, ever in a million years get rid of mass shootings until they change the way they think about guns. Every single movie in the trailers has men whipping out guns, cradling guns, admiring some impressive stash of firearms, shooting as casually as walking down the street. And the endless gun firing, just endless shooting. I say no less than 30% of all the noise in those trailers was the sound of guns firing off, it's just like white noise.

I've sat in movie theatres in other countries before. NOWHERE ELSE do I see the same insane fetish for guns in other cultures (except maybe Yemen or somewhere outside the OECD). Every American hero is a crazy gun nut. Every idolized figure in an action movie is shooting guns for half the movie, without so much as a minute's worth of focus on the victims kille.d

You show that shit day in and day out, and wonder if people don't begin thinking about enacting that themselves? I can't imagine the horror that the individual families went through after Virginia Tech, after Newtown. But will America ever stop its mass shootings? Nope. Not while these kinds of movies remain normal. 

2013 RESOLUTIONS

1. Stop thinking of worst case scenarios all the time. 
2. Organize, clean, respect myself and my stuff. 
3. TRAVEL!!!!!
4. Harness luck. 
5. WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Black cats in the backwoods