a history of me

(that's right, Zelda reference)

You'd think I'd be psyched, what with the end of the semester coming up and a trip to Japan in just four months. Frankly, I'm a little uneasy.

1. I've got a lot of work to finish in the next week and a half, including four final exams.


2. I bought tickets to tomorrow's Yankees/Blue Jays game and they're predicting rain.


3. The Yankees are not playing very well.


4. I've still got this damn furuncle

Of course, there are bright spots.

1. I have plenty of time to finish these assignments, and my recent grades have been awesome. Plus, one of my finals is a take-home!


2. Even if they rain out, I'll still be able to amuse myself (and my friends) in New York City.


3. It's not even May yet, so the standings don't mean shit.


4. um, well, there's no real upside to a furuncle. At least it's not cancer?

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While most international events are ignored by our media (unless they involve the U.S. in some tangential way), you may have heard by now about the unfortunate train accident in Amagasaki, Japan. At least 91 people are dead and hundreds were injured when a crowded train derailed and hit a nearby building, the worst accident of its kind in forty years. I was reading this new article in the NY Times that offers a kind of update/opinion concerning the crash. It suggests that the operator of the train (a young man with less than a year on the job) was probably speeding to make up for lost time.

What bugs me about this article is that it simultaneously "gushing" over the efficiency of Japanese trains and condemning them for being too anal to accept a delay of two or three minutes. Sure, the article quotes some opinions (the journalist isn't just pulling this idea out of his ass) but offers no counterpoint at all. The trains are always on time, it seems, so this poor sap tried too hard to maintain that ideal and people died as a result.

I'm not buying it. My Japanese teacher brought up this story in class yesterday and mentioned a theory I hadn't heard before, presumably because no Western journalist has advanced it yet. She said that the young train operator had a "computer brain," meaning he may have been spending too much time on his computer and consequently began to disassociate himself from reality. Sounds a little strange, yes, but I'd rather have discussion than a hasty conclusion.

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Not that my hopes were high to begin with, but here's another insightful piece from The Onion about a growing hazard facing Americans students abroad.

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In one week my classes are over.
In two weeks my finals are over.
In seventeen weeks I arrive in Japan.
In fifty-six weeks (give or take a day) I will return.
In 103 weeks I will graduate from college, 660 weeks after I began.

I guess time really does fly.

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The best thing about having your own website is it offers you a platform to speak out against issues that are of particular concern to you but most people don't really care about. So I'm going to take this opportunity to complain about last night's episode of Robot Chicken.

If you haven't seen it, Robot Chicken is a stop-motion animated TV show that premiered in February. Each episode is really short (~11 minutes) and the segments are presented in a rapid-fire style. Some "skits" are essentially one punch line and may be only a few seconds in length. Typical episodes contain at least one or two segments which last a few minutes each and resemble a "normal" comedy skit.

So last night's episode featured a parody version of an E! True Hollywood Story on The Incredible Hulk. It was pretty funny as it portrayed the Hulk as an actor who had trouble finding work until he ran into Bill Bixby and then they found success together. They were depicted partying hard, throwing up and snorting coke together. Good clean fun so far as I'm concerned.

What pissed me off was when they came to the subject of that terrible Hulk movie directed by Ang Lee. At first, they were making fun of the fact that Ang Lee's movies are overly-sentimental and boring, which I won't argue. But then they start making fun of him racially which is fucked up. He spoke with a heavy Chinese accent and used broken, fortune cookie sentences. To add cultural ignorance to the fire, he even compares the Hulk to a haiku. For the record, Ang Lee is from Taiwan. Yes, he speaks with an accent but he went to college in the U.S. and speaks English very well. He certainly wouldn't feel the need to reference Haiku which is from Japan.

I'm offended here because mocking Ang Lee racially is both hateful and lazy. It's so simple to mock him as a director, why did they have to turn him into a degrading stereotype? Would they have mocked Spike Lee by dressing him in chains or having him speak like Rochester? I doubt it.

And before I get any hate mail let's make something clear: I'm no prude or a censorship junkie. I'm not crying about "protecting children" or "indecency." If they want to make fun of Asian people like that, I will fight for their right to do so. But I think people who use these kinds of stereotypes don't fully consider the ramifications of it. Yeah, sure, it's just supposed to be a "joke" and I'm being too serious. I just think that representation is a very powerful tool.

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