Jump Rope 2: Jump Harder with a Vengeance

If you were at any time a Japanese elementary school student, it’s practically a given that you can jump rope at a professional level. I am not even joking. Japanese kids can jump rope like it’s their job. The public school system, subsidized by both the government and the jump rope industry, is largely to thank for this, as they make jumping rope a three-month-long mandatory P.E. staple. Prizes are given out to those who can jump rope the longest, resulting in kids jumping in class, starving during lunch, and wetting themselves on a regular basis. Learning to run while jumping rope is an important skill to learn at this stage in development. The highlight (or, for me, the lowlight) of the year is the school-wide competition that marks the end of the jumping season. This is where kids break out their Nike Shox, trash-talk dictionaries, and carbon fiber jump ropes and proceed to double-jump until their arms almost fall off. This routine is repeated ever year, so that the average elementary school graduate has (roughly) over 13,000 hours of jump-roping experience and no rotator cuffs.

Double-jumping, passing the rope beneath your feet twice in one jump, is not an easy task for a foreigner like me to accomplish. I never was able to do it, and this relegated me to 45th string on any and every jump rope team and exposed me to repeated kickings of sand in my face. You see, Japanese kids have refined jumping rope to a surprisingly deep level, complete with many different jumping styles, such as Aya Jumping, alternately crisscrossing your arms with each jump, and Kousa Jumping, in which you keep your arms permanently crossed while you jump. At the higher levels both of these techniques are combined with double-jumping, resulting in a whirr of activity that turns a cord of nylon into carbon-hardened steel and a mere elementary school child into its martial arts master, no doubt employable at a thousand different sushi restaurants nation wide. I, meanwhile, was off in the corner, spitting out sand and trying to synchronize my body so that both feet lifted off the ground at the same time.

For those less inclined to individual competition, jumping rope could be turned into a group exercise through utilization of the O-nawa, or large rope. This rope, held by one person on each end, was rotated slowly, the goal being to see how many kids could hop in and synchronously jump. I, of course, was still working on my coordination so I usually was relegated to be a holder, since I was tall for my age and could move my arm in a more or less consistent circular motion.



Japan, however, wastes this potentially profitable natural resource, as once the Japanese student graduates elementary, jumping rope is never spoken of again. It is treated as a stage in life that one must go through and then move on, much like soccer is considered in the US. It’s something that, regardless of how good you get at it, you must discard it and grow up. This means that now is the prime time in my life to get good at it, so I can reclaim some lost dignity from my youth. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some Shox to buy and some sand to kick.




Dann writes from his home in Minnesota where, unfortunately, his mediocre rope-jumping skills are his main way of keeping warm.

Nike, Iggy Pop, Shock Advertising, and Cleaning Up Public Space

If you follow my posts much, you know that I enjoy a good round of Guitar Hero. While Guitar Hero has been a source of new music for me from time to time, it has also helped me look at advertising habits at a deeper level, albeit indirectly. It was from playing Guitar Hero that I recognized this song (Iggy Pop’s “Search and Destroy”), and that allowed me to subsequently find the following Nike advertisement on YouTube.



That ad showed on NBC in 1996, during Game 6 of the NBA Finals. I was nine at the time, and was in the throes of Michael Jordan idolization. A family friend had taped Games 5 and 6 and mailed them to my family in Japan. The Nike ad only played once, but I watched the whole game so many times that the ad is permanently branded in my memory.

The content of the ad no doubt had an effect its sticking with me, too. Below is a haunting shot of a camera smashing at second thirty-one. That scene stuck with me more than any other.

The guy barfing is pretty dramatic, too.

The overall impression that I got from this advert was that sports was painful, hard, and punishing. There was very little glory depicted, and I certainly didn’t get the impression that Nike was the brand of winners. All the athletes involved wore Nike clothing, from Carl Lewis completing a successful jump to the guy on the ground trying not to be trampled.


Throughout the length of the video the two-second gratuity-shot of Scottie Pippen’s sneakers is all that really tells you that you’re watching a Nike ad. I remember those shoes well, though I never owned a pair because I thought they were ugly.


All this to say that this was the first instance of watching TV that made me uncomfortable. As I saw it, Nike had put together montage of people failing at sports and getting hurt in the process, all to sell a product. It was the first piece of video that I was fascinated by, because of the fast editing and pounding rock song, but didn’t actually like. The whole clip kinda made me nauseous, actually. Maybe the flying blood and the aforeinserted barfing guy had something to do with it.


This feeling, the feeling of “Why am I excited by this when it disgusts me?”, I think, is good to retain. So often we see things that annoy or shock us, but we are too jaded by a lifetime of media exposure to really care. There are biological ways we react to things, ways we don’t know about but advertisers do, that can catch us off-guard. A recent example might be this vile divorce ad.


It catches you off-guard just enough so that you might consider the possibility. We don’t need this kind of advertising here, there, or anywhere. These are the things we should search for and destroy.




_DZ

In Which I Write 3000 Words About My International Peer Groups

We all know what the word “peer” means. Our teachers and parents use it often. We hear the terms “peer pressure” and “peer review” and know how to react. There's usually no question who our peers are - they are the people around us in our age group. Everyone is your second grade class is your peer, but not every second grader in your county. Second graders in France are not your peers, unless you’re a French second-grader.

It is these people (peers, not the French) who have the most influence over us as we grow up, exhibited linearly in grade school and then exponentially in high school. Our peers influence what we wear, how we talk, and what music we listen to. We know where we fit in amongst them; who’s cooler than whom. It is painfully obvious who fits in and who doesn’t, but we certainly don’t imagine that there are people who don’t feel that they belong in the peer group. Of course everyone is included, the logic goes. We say you are one of us, so you are. We compare ourselves to you, so you have to do the same.

Yet as a missionary kid growing up in Japan, I never felt I belonged in a set peer group. I was never purveyed that acceptance. My situation, though, is rather unique in that I had a few different groups from which to choose as my peers.

At an early age I was whisked off to Japan - a white missionary kid in an Asian country. I had three potential groups to choose from: white kids, Japanese kids, and missionary kids (MKs). All three of these groups seem equally large when you’re a missionary kid, though that idea of course seems silly now.

The straight-forward choice is that I should have decided to fit in with the Japanese kids. After all, I spent almost all of my elementary school years in Japan, going to both Japanese kindergarten and public elementary school. They were my classmates - my peers. I spoke their language. This was really the best choice, but I didn’t take it for reasons explained later.

The worst choice was to consider the white kids in America as my peers. Even though they looked like me, I only saw them once every four years due to the missionary home assignment cycle, and kids change a lot in four years. Yet this was half of my peer group. See, I had the unfortunate lot of being born in June. American schools run the school year Sept-May, so people born over the summer, myself included, are tacked on at the end as the youngest in the class. Japanese school, however, runs April-March, meaning that kids with June birthdays are some of the oldest in the class. That was also me. The result was that, because of my family’s moving schedule, I enrolled in American first grade, completed seven months, and then enrolled in Japanese first grade. (The later result of this is that I only attended two months of fifth grade, but that is irrelevant.)

If I had not taken Japanese first grade, I think I may have adjusted to the Japanese as my peers. My parents would have explained that I was a big second grader now and that is what second grade was, like how the Japanese did it. I would have accepted that and everything would have been fine. The problem was, I had my American first grade experience to compare to this new Japanese first grade, and I liked the American one much, much better. I knew the kids there looked like me and that I fit in with them. American kids were cool and played with cool toys. Japan, I soon thought, was the opposite of cool. I had to speak a different language. Kids at my school, kids who played with less-cool toys*, all pointed and giggled at the little blond kid. Hence, pretty much my entire Japanese elementary career was spent comparing the “crappy Japanese system” to my “utopian American experience”. Very early on I forged a massive superiority complex; I saw myself as a super-gifted and special kid forced to live in a system that was so far below him it wasn’t funny. Since I saw myself this way, it was only natural that I developed a feeling of learned helplessness. I was stuck; I wanted the American kids as my peers, but they were no longer around.

I tried to deal with this by finding other white kids around me, other missionary kids, and using them as the other half of my peer group. The problems with this were that A) I only saw them a few times a year and B) I didn’t confine my peers to my age group. As long as they were missionary kids, I saw them as peers. As stated earlier, our peers influence how we behave as we grow and mature. My cues as to how to act, dress, and talk, then, came from two sources - my memories of my “peers” in America, and my fellow missionary kids whom I saw but a few times per year. With these two groups largely absent, I spent a lot of my elementary years alone.

Since a good chunk of peer interaction is comparison on a daily basis, and I didn’t have that, I saw myself as constantly behind the times. Every time I hung out with missionary kids they had newer, cooler shoes or were throwing around a new slang buzzword that I didn’t know. I was constantly playing catch-up, which only added to the frustration of being stuck in Japanese school. Not only was I stuck at school with kids who weren’t my peers, but I was on the low side of cool every time I was with kids who were. Older MKs got to do stuff that I could not, and I would look at that as my failure to meet some universal standard of cool rather than just, you know, because I was younger.

This inability to consistently engage with people I considered peers cultivated my belief that what was important was owning things that cool kids had. In order to be cool, you had to have what the cool kids had and dress the way they did. It never occurred to me that they were probably just as insecure as I was, or that they were influenced by others as to how to dress or act.

I’ll acknowledge here, then, that, yes, I was completely unaware that experiences I had were not universal. I grew up thinking that I had a super-vanilla, mega-boring life, and that every other MK got to have way more fun then I did, all the time. It didn’t occur to me that I had had experiences that others would envy. I assumed that every MK had everything I did, plus more. So thus, I was determined to make up that difference. This obviously never happened, because we can’t all have the same life experiences.

With sixth grade came the rotation of one year in America, and I was anxious to get back to my “real friends” and my “authentic” peer group. I was enrolled in a private Christian school full of kids who looked like me - the same kids whom I had learned with as a first-grader. I had a lot of catching up to do, but that was the easy part - I just had to buy (or get my parents to buy) the right stuff. Having my own interests took a backseat to what I thought would make me cool. Soon my room was full of basketball gear and apparel, street hockey equipment, Tech Decks, Beanie Babies, a portable CD player, sports trading cards, Hot Wheels cars, and vintage American coinage. From a fridge full of Gatorade to Atomic Warheads in my mouth and Lee Pipes on my legs, if I thought it would make me more American, I wanted it. Though this strategy would prove to fail as a long-term strategy in the near future, that failure was not something that my sixth-grade self had to face, because I moved back to Japan after a year.

The four years between ages twelve to sixteen, my family’s third term in Japan, marked what I like to call the Span Of Floundering and Alienation, or SOFA for short. Seventh grade was the year that I was enrolled at the Christian Academy in Japan (CAJ), a school for missionary kids - a school of, that’s right, my peers. I had gone for twelve years without a set peer group, and now I had one with which I had to interact every single day. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know how to act on a daily basis around kids whom I knew to be exactly like me. I was white, spoke two languages, had lived in two countries, had lived in the Japanese system and had educated parents, just like most of them. I couldn’t use the excuse of being white (as I did in suburban Japan) or the excuse of being a missionary kid (as I did in the US) to explain why I did things my way to these CAJ kids, and buying stuff alone wasn’t going to get me accepted into their group. I had to learn how to interact with a peer group, my peer group, in a dynamic, flowing, relational way. I never thought that I could be part of such an intimate peer group and all of a sudden I realized I could be, if I could only figure out the cryptic rite of passage. The SOFA was marked by my consistent failure to do so.

Why was this so hard for me to do? A small part of it was, no doubt, my lack of access to unlimited money with which to buy my acceptance. Another (less tongue-in-cheek) part of it was that a large part of my class had grown up together through elementary school, and it’s always hard for an outsider to break into a close-knit group. The biggest and most glaring problem, though, was that I was a teenager who didn’t really know how to make friends. In America I had made friends with the children of my mom’s friends, or with kids who had wanted to hang out with the “kid from Japan.” I had kids practically lining up to talk to me, and could pick and choose those to whom I would grant my friendship. In Japanese school I was pretty much a loner who made a different new best** friend every year, though I think they may have befriended me out of pity. I had four, maybe five kids who I enjoyed hanging out with and would rotate among them every few months.† The missionary kids I hung out with I saw as friends by default - their camaraderie not unlike that enjoyed by prisoners of war.

Seventh and eight grade were the years when my superiority complex was destroyed. I realized that I wasn’t some superkid who everyone wanted to hang out with. I had to earn my place in the peer group. I wasn’t some, as Tyler Durden puts it, “beautiful and unique snowflake.” I was floundering. I had to find my niche, my talent that set me apart. Most of those two years was spent by myself, trying to make myself special, and I tried a lot of things. I wrote for the middle school paper, ran for student government, and acted in plays. I taught myself some BASIC programming and spent countless hours learning my way around the Internet, Windows 98, and Mac OS. I played soccer, basketball, ran track, and wrestled. I wore skate shoes, rode a Razor scooter, sagged my jeans and backpack, and used adult language with increasing frequency. None of that seemed to matter, though, because I still didn’t watch the right movies, listen to the right music, own an MD player, wear the right clothes, or get invited to any sleepovers. I wasn’t popular with girls.†† I wasn’t cool.

Ninth and tenth grades, the later half of my SOFA, were less tough times because I had, in effect, lapsed back into helplessness and resolved that I wouldn’t be able to weasel my way in with my peers. I had to look out for myself and find my own friends. The few close friends I made happened to be those who also, for various reasons, didn’t conform with the normal social peer group. We were the rebels, I suppose - the fringe participants. I was still active in sports and extra-curricular activities, though most of the time spent outside those was spent alone. I had a girlfriend‡, but she dumped me after a month. I cared less about school and more about computer games. I slowly gave up on trying to buy stuff to fit in. I listened to my own music and read my own books. Looking back now, I see that I still had suppressed resentment over being in Japan, because I remember eagerly anticipating the move back to America for my junior year of high school.

Junior year brought with it two revelations: that I was an emotionally stunted person (surprise!) and that I was much less rooted in America then I had led myself to believe. My emotional state was a result of the previous two years, during which I had idealized the military and its lifestyle. Basically I believed that showing emotion was a sign of weakness, a sign of being out of control. My subconscious helplessness that showed signs of bubbling up was suppressed by feeling that I could be in control of my feelings. Since emotion is something you have to cultivate, suppressing it for long enough will diminish your overall ability to feel it, and the early signs of that stage were beginning to manifest in my daily demeanor.

My parents sent me to counseling for it, which I thought was weak but went anyway. After a few sessions my counselor was seriously considering putting me on medication, but I eventually started opening up to him. It was actually an extraordinarily pleasant experience, and now I believe that everyone should have at least three months of counseling. It didn’t help, though, with fitting in with my peers.

Going to high school in America made me realize that there were indeed many aspects of my life that kids with no overseas experience could simply not understand. Many of my habits, mannerisms, and ways of thinking were notably different. Being in America made me realize that I could not refer to myself as “American” as a way to validate my actions. I had to accept that I was, most likely, more Japanese than American.

This I accepted, and my senior year back in Japan was marked by a time of personal growth as a self-confident person. I thought I knew where I fit in in the world and therefore was comfortable with myself. Looking back, I think I was fooling myself and just hiding behind my girlfriend. I had a steady girlfriend during the entire year, a cute Asian a year younger than me, and she was my life. We were together all the time, which meant that I didn’t have to worry about interacting with my peers to gain validation. I had her, and she thought I was awesome. I ignored my peer group, life seemed good, and I proceeded to end high school.

I wish I could say that this story has a happy ending, but it really doesn’t. I still struggle to be comfortable around people my own age. My SOFA mentality still bugs me. I’m fine around kids even one year younger or older than I am, but if someone graduated high school in 2005 like I did, they should prepare for me to feel awkward and inferior around them for no real reason. It’s pretty frustrating that I still feel this way.

So what do I think could have made a difference? Not repeating a grade might have helped. That was where I got the superiority complex and accompanying helplessness. Not being enrolled in a private bubble school in America might have helped. It was there where I had kids line up to interact with me. Those might have been things my parents could have changed. But what could I have changed? I could have not used my skin color (in Japan) or my international experience (elsewhere) to excuse myself. I could have faced the challenges that I chose to ignore or maybe completed my senior year alone in order to grow more. But I didn’t. But you know what? That’s OK, because I got through it and am able to look back on it and learn from it now. I don’t have any regrets, because having regrets means that I’m not comfortable with who I am now, and that’s not true. I write my experiences down so that others, so that you, can learn from them and perhaps find meaning in some experiences in your own life that you have missed until now. The journey is long, and you shouldn’t have to walk it alone.




*This part I suppose I can blame on my parents, who never really let me indulge in the fad-oriented Japanese youth culture. I never had a NES, SNES, N64, Tamagotchi, Digimon, battle pencils, or a battery-operated plastic train set. I never played Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh, never watched Dragonball, Ultraman, Power Rangers, Kamen-Rider, or any animated television series, and never read a single manga series while in elementary. In general, I never watched Japanese TV, and thus was left out of the hype surrounding the newest toys. To this day, I can’t recall a single Japanese toy commercial. To be fair, though, I did have Mini Yonkus, a few hyper-yo-yos, and a ton of LEGOs.

**Or “only” - whichever you prefer.

†Three, if you only count full names that I can remember. Kobayashi Akihiro, Yoshino Yuya, and Nakao Soutaro.

††This is probably still true.

‡She was Japanese, attended a different international school and was a grade younger than I. I did not see her as a peer.


_DZ

Fort Hood Shootings as a Step Towards Gun Control?

In the wake of the terrible incident at Fort Hood, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tells us not to jump to conclusions without getting all of the facts. (CNN.com)

What's most interesting about this article is the following quote from the senator:

"Once we have ascertained all the facts, working with our military leaders and law enforcement officials on the ground, we can determine what exactly happened at Fort Hood today and how to prevent something like this from ever happening again." (italics mine)

Really? Because that seems far-fetched. Either Sen. Cornyn is an idealist who makes promises he has no intention of keeping, in which case we should ignore him, or he is laying precedent for increased government intervention in civilian and military affairs, which upon hearing should perk our ears. He's talking about increased gun control, basically. The only way to ensure that this never happens again is if the US bans guns outright. And as I've mentioned before, I am a fan of banning guns.

This isn't a "failure of therapy" nor a "unfortunate oversight". This is emotionally disturbed people having access to guns. "Re-evaluating protocol" won't fix this. As long as you allow people access to guns, there exists the possibility that they will use them on other people.



"Guns don't kill people. People kill people. And monkeys kill people, if they have a gun."

_DZ

Ramen Noodles - Junk Food as Art

Ramen noodles seem to have a bad reputation here in America. Maligned as the food of poor college students and those seeking empty carbs, ramen is looked at merely as warm junk food. The producers of popular ramen, such as Maruchan, don’t help either when they price a block of ramen for less than 40¢ a package. Drop a Kennedy, heat some water, stir and cover. A meal in thirty seconds! As a man who grew up in Japan, however, I know that there is much more to ramen than that. Most American ramen is a disgrace to ramen as I know it.

The Japanese love their ramen. It is a ubiquitous food throughout the country - a Japanese microcosm of the global dominance of McDonald's. That means that, yes, there is the budget-quality stuff available there too, but it is referred to as “the cheap stuff” rather than just “ramen”. What the Japanese usually have in mind when they talk about ramen is the stuff that you find in restaurants. This is my mindset as well. To get good ramen, you go to a restaurant.

Every ramen noodle shop makes their ramen a little bit differently, according to the standards of the target demographic. Average prices for a decent bowl of ramen range from ¥280-¥550 ($2.50-$5), while niche ramen restaurants can charge upwards of ¥980 for a bowl. Prices, of course, also reflect ingredients used, and a good rule of thumb is that the more expensive the bowl, the more meat/higher quality meat is included. Pork is the preferred meat, and it is sliced and placed on top of the noodles. Two or three slices is common, but I have seen as many as six.

The number of different ingredients that can be added to ramen is staggering. Vegetables, seaweed, soy sauce, eggs, meat, fish products, and myriad spices are all fair game. Most common ramen offerings will have a few slices of fatty pork, seaweed, a slice or two of kamaboko (a processed seafood product), and a sliced vegetables.

As I mentioned, a factor in making good ramen is the amount/quality of the toppings ingredients. The variation in noodle texture and quality, however, also contribute to making a good ramen. Some shops hand-make their noodles, which ensures quality at the added expense to the customer. Other places just buy dried blocks of noodles and boil them. These noodles are generally stiffer and harder to chew.

The main part of the ramen that separates the good stuff from the bad, though, is the broth. High-end noodle shops guard their broth recipes like Colonel Sanders guards his herbs and spices. Drinking the broth after finishing the noodles is an integral part of ramen consumption, and is how you tell the good stuff from the ordinary stuff.

I would go so far as to say that a good bowl ramen noodles is an art form. It is junk food, yes, but it is also art. Don’t believe me? Well, America has an equivalent junk-food-turned-art: the barbecue. Thousands of cooks all across the States slave over making the best-tasting sauce to slather onto fatty meats. Sure Arby’s makes a BBQ Roast Beef, but if you wanted a foreigner to get a good taste of “American barbecue,” you would send them to your secret local hole-in-the-wall joint, or maybe to a respected restaurant like Damon’s Grill. They might as well get the good stuff.

And just like there are BBQ fanatics, there are ramen otaku. One of my high school youth group leaders was one - a guy who traveled all over Tokyo in search of good ramen restaurants. That was what he enjoyed doing, and he wouldn’t hesitate to steer you in the direction of a good ramen shop if you were looking for food in the area.

One nation’s junk food is another one’s passion. Just like American chefs pour time and effort into their BBQ creations, so do the Japanese into their ramen dishes. Ramen is more than just a cheap college food, it is an honored national staple. There may not be many ramen restaurants here in America, but I think the arty-junk-food spirit is vibrant here, and it causes me to smile every time I pass a barbecue stand.


_DZ

Apparently They Make Color-Safe Bleach

I stumbled across the YouTube trailer for the movie Juno the other day, and had forgotten some of the pure gem lines that that movie has. The trailer can be seen here.

Mark: Why do people think yellow is gender-neutral? I don’t know one man with a yellow bedroom.
---
Vanessa: Well, Juno, your parents must be wondering where you are. You might want to head home.
Juno: Nah. I'm already pregnant, so they figure nothing worse could happen to me.
---
Juno: You're shorts are looking especially gold today.
Bleeker: My mom uses color-safe bleach.

Truly, this is better living through chemistry.

_DZ

Corporate "Expertise" and "Beneficial" Beverages

I don’t buy soda very often, but occasionally I will buy some 12-packs if they are on sale. One such recent sale had me snapping up some Diet Coke Plus (marketed with slogan “We include the “L” so you don't make a wry face^®”) which, as far as soda goes, is right up there behind root beer. Despite the colorful logo it seems that Diet Coke Plus has a hard time selling, because the advertising copy writers are now digging deep into their reserves of “phrases we can use to sell sugar water.” A quick picture of the box will explain what I mean.

Refreshing. Uplifting. Hydrating?
It’s true. Research shows that all beverages contribute to proper hydration. That means that whether it’s your first can of the day or your afternoon pick-me-up, Diet Coke Plus helps you stay hydrated all day long. So stick with the Diet Coke Plus taste you love. Your body will thank you for it.

While it’s true that drinking fluids does hydrate you, claiming that Coke is an efficient way of doing so is a lot like saying that smoking cigarettes "contributes to air inhalation and lung expansion," or that eating Twinkies "contributes to reducing hunger." It is technically true, but it’s not, as soccer players would say, in the spirit of the game. Appealing to the lowest common denominator, human health, is not an effective marketing strategy. Neither is suggesting that drinking carbonated soda in the morning is normal. Not even if you have an accompanying website.

Coca-Cola appeals to research, but they don’t tell who’s research. Their own? An independent third-party’s? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Because they are an multi-national corporation, surely they can be trusted, right? After all, they have statistics, so they must be the experts.

Corporations claiming expertise is hot-button issue with me. A while back I went to a seafood restaurant. While I was being seated I was assured that a server would be with me shortly, and that they would be a seafood expert. Much to my astonishment, a teen-age girl soon arrived, menus in hand. Now, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but, having visited a world-class fish market years earlier, I already had a pretty ingrained image of what a “seafood expert” was. This girl, on the other hand, might not have known how to pronounce ‘cichlid’. My prejudice can perhaps be best portrayed in this Venn diagram.

Calling everyone who works for you an “expert,” whether in seafood restaurants, car audio installation booths, or cheap bars, doesn’t make me want to recommend your business establishment to anyone. I want to decide, to make the judgment, on whether or not you employ experts.

There’s a clerk at my local Hollywood video who "researches" so many movies that she writes her DVD rentals off her taxes as a work expense. She can recommend five other movies that you may like based on your current and past selections. If someone I know needs some movie variety, I’d send them to her. Likewise there is a hole-in-the-wall yakitori restaurant in Tokyo that I enjoy that was recommended to me by my friend, who himself is friends with a yakitori connoisseur. It is truly delicious, and it took two experts (the chef and the connoisseur) to allow me to partake in excellent yakitori.

But it’s not just the corporately-instituted “experts” that bug me - it’s the unique naming of employees by corporations in general. Some companies do it rather conservatively, like Wal-Mart (“associates)” and Target (“team members”). Other places do not fair so well. I don’t care what anyone says, putting ingredients that I ask for on my sandwich for me does not make someone a “sandwich artist”.

These days, corporately-bestowed expertise practically precludes actual knowledge or significant ability. Rather, customer-recognized expertise should be honored, and hopefully it is at thousands of businesses around the country. Is the flood of so-called “experts” a passing symptom of global corporatization, or a portent of impending mediocrity? Whatever it is, I think I now need a vitamin-enhanced water beverage with which to rehydrate myself.




_DZ

give po’ man a break