Food aside, just about everyone complains about the Chinese.

I recently watched a documentary, Last Train Home, that made me regret some of the things I've felt, thought, and maybe even written about my take on the Chinese.

Conservatives simply hate the Chinese because, well, they're communists. Many liberals have trouble with them because of human rights issues, and I think Americans all over the political spectrum are upset about financial things. True, a lot of that is just hysteria and it's also true that buying US debt is simply us acting as their bank, but we all got excited about Japanese investment a couple decades ago and human nature hasn't changed at all since then.

I avoid buying some Chinese goods some times simply because I often want to use something like a screwdriver more than once. If it's something I expect to use once and throw away, like paper towels or eyeglasses with plastic lenses that are going to become less useful every time I use them, I often go with cheap.

This upsets people who think whenever I do that I'm supporting a slave state. While this may be true, it's more the government of China than its people that I think most have trouble with. That documentary, Last Train Home, changed my thinking about the people.

Dramatically.

I don't know what Lixin Fan wanted to do when he made his film. I rarely about things like that choosing, instead, to let the work speak to me for itself. He may have wanted to show us how the people suffer or it may have just been to show us the largest human migration on the planet.

What I got out of it was a deep appreciation for how the people in China struggle to survive and better themselves, things I cannot fault them for. Peasants living on farms have no money and (not surprisingly) want to get things for themselves and their families. To get any money at all, they have to move to cities, work in sweatshops that allow those with little or no education to assemble things, and live in horrifying conditions.

This film, by the way, shows us one such family.

After making the heartbreaking choice to leave their children, mom and dad scrape out a dismal life only to return, as most Chinese do, home to celebrate Chinese New Year. In a touching scene, they give their teenage daughter the present of a phone, and I tear up even now just thinking about it.

It's easy for us in America to take our way of life for granted. Seeing how the other 95% of the world lives is always humbling, especially since those of us who were born here had nothing to do with it.

I can no longer turn my nose up at Chinese goods, not knowing that someone, somewhere in China needs a job so they can pack their meager goods in a cardbox suitcase to travel and hope to live as well as I do.

My heart isn't stone.

I have neighbors whom I've never met and who obviously know nothing about me. Oddly, I think about them quite a bit.

You see, it's like this: I use them frequently when deciding things.

Let's say I want something, an event that happens quite a lot as it turns out, that someone else wants, too. We both want it, but only one of us is able to get it.

Since I want it, I have a tendency to think I should be the one to get it. That other person, no matter who they are, probably feels the same and probably ignores my wants, knows nothing of them, or somehow feels more justified in getting it than letting me have it.

At times like these, I try to remember that third person, that mysterious neighbor. I want whatever it is and so does the other guy, but since I'm rather involved in the result, my decision making process is heavily skewed. I want it and, often enough, that's more than enough reason for me to think I should get it.

The third person doesn't care which one of us gets it; he or she couldn't care less. I try to remember that and to use that to assist my own thinking. If some third party doesn't care if I get it or not, why should I?

Unless there's some compelling reason, which is hardly ever the case, it's better you should get it than me.

There may be some evidence the recession is less than I thought.

Early each weekend morning, maybe just to test my dog's alertness, someone will sneak over and drop a flyer or business card on my porch advertising some service I not only don't want but can't afford. Usually these are for lawn care of home repair, but menus from local restaurants show up as well.

I've thought, more than once, about taking that as a job, but since I don't speak Spanish I can't make any progress with those doing the delivering.

This morning, however, I got something I've never seen before: a missing kitty notice.

 

Someone, and I don't think they hired anyone to deliver these, evidently walked up and down the street alerting people to their missing cat. It's always heartbreaking to see these, but they're usually just stapled to telephone poles, and what makes me the saddest is that I never learn what happened.

This leads me to fear the worst, but that's something else again.

What struck me immediately about this particular flyer is that it was in color. I can imagine easily the frantic mood that led to the kitty's owner deciding to let everyone know about the missing pet, and having returned one or two during my life, it's easy to imagine the emotional reunion they're hoping for.

What I thought about more, though, was the expense of printing up, say, one, two, or more hundreds of color flyers. It would take a lot of time, most of a night, maybe, if it was done at home and the flyers didn't look to have been run off at Kinkos, but I don't know.

I don't know if that's a sign of the amount of love the owners have for their pet ("The hell with the cost, they need to see her coloring and what she looks like!") or something else. Many moderns cannot even think of pictures as anything but color. They might only have a color printer, which is likely, or they may even work somewhere that gives them a discount on toner.

At any rate, it does show one reason why Honey may have received her name, and I hope that she's already back in her loving home.

Some of the things I've learned are things I'm happy about. Not all of them, of course, and maybe not even many, but a few of them I've are ones I'd even pick and not just because very few people choose them.

While hearing and reading are common enough, my experience has been that not many people actually listen to what's being said or limit their reading to what is actually on the page. It seems to be a large part of the human experience to add ideas in, to read between the lines, and end up understanding or hearing things that were never brought up.

Listening or reading carefully, I admit, is much more work than jumping to conclusions, but it's something I was taught to do and I'm glad it's part of me. I rather like not hearing "that was a stupid thing to do" and not misunderstanding that as "you're stupid."

Then again, I also assume (without any reason to) that most people are as careful about what they say, how they tell things, as I am, and I have a sneaking suspicion that's rarely the case.

A second very rare quality I have is, for lack of a better word, patience. Every day I'm bombarded with a lot of claims, but I've learned to resist the temptation of believing everything I hear just because it lines up with things I already believe.

One reason for this was my (questionable) education. While studying philosophy may not have been a particularly sound decision as far as, you know, work goes, for me (at least), it got me to learn how to think and exercise my mind. Subject matter aside, philosophy is taught by presenting some idea and then challenging it. First you learn to understand what someone is saying, then you learn what the problems are with that position.

You cannot do one without the other.

I remember some professor when we were studying the ancient Greeks telling us something along the lines of "You can't just say that he's wrong because modern physics has taught us that the world's not made of fire, earth, water, and air." To argue against the position, you have first buy into his argument, comprehend what he's saying, and then using the rules of his world, see what's wrong with it.

So, the first thing I do is try and understand someone or something on its own terms. Only then can I see what's wrong with it.

Part of this, and a real learning experience for me, came early in my work life. At the time I was working at Lockheed (in their credit union), and someone intentionally or not misheard something about $600 toilet seats. Maybe they read something and only understood the words toilet seat, or maybe they thought they were being cute by calling it that.

In any case, the media exploded and people began shaking their fists about this obscene fleecing of the US government.

And, on its face, it sounds like an absurd idea to charge the taxpayers $600 for something you can get at Home Depot for about ten dollars.

Lockheed, of course, tried to explain things and sent all us employees and probably most of the media memos pointing out that the item in question wasn't a toilet seat and explaining their side of the whole thing: it was a custom part that covered the entire toilet assembly, it was a part so ancient the whole thing had to be built, again, from scratch, &c &c &c.

That little thing taught me, especially when hearing something outrageous, not to make any decision until I hear the other side. There's almost always another side, and while it's quicker and maybe more fulfilling to hear or read something that shows how bad those other guys are, it's rarely true. The truth of such things, of just about everything, contains both one way of looking at it and another.

"The truth is rarely plain and never simple." -- Oscar Wilde

It's not wrong, but that doesn't mean I don't notice it and either shake my head or grin.

I mean, I know language changes and that's fine, but some times I think the world runs ahead of the words we use to describe it, maybe just out of habit. It's a simple word, about, but I think it's not comfortable with today's digital world, which can be pretty damn exacting.

It might be just me, but I think of about as being pretty fuzzy. I'm about six feet tall, but if you were to measure me, you'd get another number. I live about five km from the ocean, it's about nine in the morning and about twenty degrees, but careful measurements would show all those numbers to be wrong.

And that's the thing.

I learned to tell time back before there were any digital watches. One of the first things I noticed when I got one was that I was unconciously mentally translating its numbers to hands on a clock to understand what it was telling me. I'd read 8:47 and picture it so that I'd know what time it was, but I also noticed something else.

If that glance at my watch came from being asked what time it was, I'd answer 8:47 and just read off the numbers. If I looked at my watch to learn the time, I'd translate the numbers and understand the time to be about a quarter to nine. I'd be less accurate, but would come up with something I could easily understand.

The same thing happened when driving. While a digital display of 38mph gave me more information, a glance at a speedometer with a needle would show me I was a tick under forty which usually was all I needed or wanted to know. The more exact number was closer to the truth, but a glance at the old dial model let me know I was going about forty, a figure that's nice and round and easy for me to understand.

It's also the way I talked. If asked, I'd say it's about quarter to nine or I was going about forty, but what's funny is how our language is now being used to talk about exact numbers while still using the old word about.

I mean, I can almost tell when someone, especially some commentator on TV, is reading from an exact digital display but continues to use our old familiar language. In the real world, in our normal lives, we use about to give an estimation about things, but I think it doesn't fit well with actual, honest answers. It seems to me a guy racing a bicycle can be going about forty or can be going thirty-eight, but not about thirty-eight.

He is going thirty-eight, not "about thirty-eight." You can tell me it's 2:27 or about 2:30, but saying it's about 2:27 just sounds silly. I think that's just lazy, using our common word followed by reading off the actual answer.

And, yeah, it kind of bugs me.

It may be saying something about me I'd rather keep hidden, but I've been thinking about disappointment.

It began by my wondering if a balanced life would be one that contained as many disappointments felt as it did disappointments caused, only to realize there's no way of knowing how much disappointment I cause. I'm aware, sometimes painfully so, of the disappointments I feel, but there's no telling how often I cause them.

I think it's fair to say that pretty much every time we're disappointed we feel it. If we don't, we're not really disappointed. What we do with those disappointments, how we respond to them, is sort of interesting, mostly because we can blow them out of all proportion. This can lead to painful rants, boring conversations, and blog entries, but I guess it's sort of human to feel upset when things don't work out the way we want. The higher we hold ourselves, maybe, the more likely we are to make a big deal out of them.

How we respond to the disappointments we cause, at least the ones we know about, tells a little about us, too. The more highly we think of ourselves, I think, the more likely we are to slough off the disappointments we cause, most often as being the other person's fault or failing.

I respond fairly poorly to disappointing others, by which I mean depressed. That's pretty much my reaction to everything, though, so it's probably no big deal. I can become a bit frantic if I think about all the disappointments I cause and don't know about, so I try not to do that.

Disregarding them entirely seems to me to be awfully conceited and as counter-productive as obsessing over them. Still, many of the disappointments I've caused haunt me, though that may be a bit dramatic. Some have had real, serious consequences, but those are just the ones I know about. I think I'd be fooling myself if I didn't think there were others, just as huge, that I never knew about.

Who knows how my life might have turned out if I hadn't disappointed some certain person at a critical point in my life? All I can do, I guess, is try to be a good Russell and trust that people will forgive me much more than I do myself.

I own a dog, which may explain why I think about them from time to time.

On a walk with him today I became somewhat preoccupied again, wondering about how he views the world. Dogs communicate, a little, through their various barks and things, but I believe it's true that they don't have language.

Which gets me to wondering.

I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty dependent on language. To be honest, I can't imagine going more than a minute or two without using a word or two to think about things, but I think my dog has managed to go through his entire life without thinking about anything using any words at all. I cannot fathom what such a life would be like.

An early scene in the movie Brainstorm featured an advanced technology that let people experience what was going on in someone else's head, in this case, a monkey's. They didn't spend much time on that, but I wonder if we could even begin to understand the thinking of anything that didn't use words.

How does my dog view me? I know he looks at me, but it's unlikely he knows my name as well as he seems to know his own. Then again, I don't pay enough attention to what first goes through my mind when I see someone I know. I doubt I first think "Rob" or "Debi," but I might. It's simply too quick for me to notice.

Still, I do wonder what my dog thinks hampered as he must be by having no language. Is life, for him, a series of sensations? Of instinct? Does he simply ignore everything that falls outside his limited view of the world?

He must be able to identify some things, but doing so without having names for them is beyond my ability to understand. How he sees the world is a mystery to me, and I have no idea how much overlap there is between his view and mine.

Still, when I'm not wondering about his dreams, I wonder about his waking hours.