What a week!

What a couple of weeks it’s been! I’ve been running around at work like my hair (what’s left) is on fire. That and visitors, and meetings, and presentations to prepare, and more local travel. Whew! The worst is behind me for the moment, and it’s back to what passes for normal.

In spite of my best intentions to really work the supplementary exercises of the Wu family style of Taijiquan into my daily doings, I find that the real center of gravity for my personal practice is the 108 Standard form.

When it comes to working on the 108 Standard form, there is practice and also performance. What we would do in class as a group, when we all do the form together is what I am referring to as performance. Breaking the form down, trying to get every small piece of it technically correct is what I’m referring to as practice.

Up until I got back from Japan, when I tended to do is to run through the form once as a performance with the intention of working in the refinements I’ve been taught in the appropriate places. While I try to get each movement right as I go along, my emphasis had been on relaxation, alignment, and pacing.

What I’ve been up to lately, is to just slow down, and break each sequence down. I try to remember and implement every refinement I’ve been given, and work it into my movements. Yes I still put a premium on staying relaxed, because that’s a requirement of getting the movements right, as is alignment. I’ve been leaving the pacing for when I’m in class.

As a result, my form has not only improved, but I’m finding my ability to maintain the same pace as the rest of the class has improved as well.

I’ve also recently been introduced to the 4th of 12 forms of push hands practice that the Wu family teaches. You always are supposed to begin with #1, which is the most basic, and work your way through to #12, which I think is free style.

Even though I only get to practice push hands for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, about once a week (we practice push hands in class most of the time, but not always), I’m getting better at it.

My older daughter is still unemployed and very frustrated in finding work in her field. I still can’t fault her efforts. She usually makes it to the last round of call backs. She’s sending out tons of resumes, and applying on line all over the place.

For my youngest, high school volleyball season is just starting. They will have a very competitive team. All things being equal, they should go deep into the playoffs for the state championship. Several schools are looking at her to play volleyball in college. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we can find a good fit for her so she can continue to play at the next level without compromising her education.

My associate M.E. Hom of Collaboration360 Consultants [collaboration360.blogspot.com] recently developed a "Strategic Assessment" process that is based on the strategy principles of Sun Tzu's Art of War. Its general approach enables the implementers to use it in any situation.

Half of the game is being able to take stock of the situation around you. Once you really understand your resources, limitations, and can define the problem, you’re half way home in finding a solution. But how?

Sun Tzu said that the general goes into the temple and makes his assessment, then goes on to outline some of the major factors the general must take into account. Well said, but most of us mortals could use a little more guidance. That is where this Strategic Assessment process comes into play.This is the first time that I have ever seen Sun Tzu principles organized in a way that makes sense to a normal person. Take a look and see if this process doesn’t help you get a handle on some of the issues in your life that you’d like to develop a strategy to tackle.

Getting in the Way

Below is an excerpt from a martial arts blog entitled Bujutsu Blogger on how our ego gets in the way of our achieving excellence in our training. One of the ways our ego manifests itself is that we want to see the world the way we want to it to be, not accepting how it actually is.

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full post. Please pay a visit.

The only way forward is “muga” (無我), no ego, and "mushin" (無心), no-mind. Snaggy likes to talk about that a lot, and I am starting to see why. As he puts it, ego gets in the way of living in the moment, in the now. Without muga mushin, there can be no refinement because things like rushing will always get in the way. This is not abstract Zen philosophy, this is the difference between going through the motions and training to fight.

Speaking of accepting the world how it is, the remarkable Randy Pausch died today. He was the author of the best selling The Last Lecture, which was based on a Youtube video with the same title. He made a real contribution.

For myself, my next post will be from Japan. I am leaving in a couple of days. Besides taking a lot of Japanese language material with me, articles I've printed out that I've been meaning to read, and I have the newest issues of National Geographic and the Smithsonian. I also brought a couple of books. One is Shogun by James Clavell, and the other is The Nobility of Failure, by Ivan Morris.

I'll be working on my presentation material on the plane (a 13 hour flight!) until my battery dies. I'm thinking of opening my presentation with:

"Detroit kara tobimashita, shoshite ude wa tsukaremashita yo!"

"I flew in from Detroit and boy are my arms tired!"

Great Pictures: Lumpen Orientalism

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to a blog entitled "Lumpen Orientalism," where can be found some truly great pictures. Please pay a visit.

Three Years

It was nearly three years ago when I began blogging here at Cook Ding’s Kitchen. There have been over 25,000 hits.

For starters, there are those who wonder who the heck is Cook Ding? Cook Ding is a character is a story by Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zi) in the Inner Chapters section of his eponymus book, which is one of the foundational texts of Daoism. Here below is a translation of that story:

A cook was butchering an ox for Duke Wen Hui.
The places his hand touched,
His shoulder leaned against,
His foot stepped on,
His knee pressed upon,
Came apart with a sound.

He moved the blade, making a noise
That never fell out of rhythm.
It harmonized with the Mulberry Woods Dance,
Like music from ancient times.

Duke Wen Hui exclaimed: "Ah! Excellent!
Your skill has advanced to this level?"

"What I follow is Tao,
The cook puts down the knife and answered:
Which is beyond all skills.
"When I started butchering,
What I saw was nothing but the whole ox.
After three years,
I no longer saw the whole ox.

"Nowadays, I meet it with my mind
Rather than see it with my eyes.
My sensory organs are inactive
While I direct the mind's movement.
"It goes according to natural laws,
Striking apart large gaps,
Moving toward large openings,
Following its natural structure.

"Even places where tendons attach to bones
Give no resistance,
Never mind the larger bones!

"A good cook goes through a knife in a year,
Because he cuts.
An average cook goes through a knife in a month,
Because he hacks.

"I have used this knife for nineteen years.
It has butchered thousands of oxen,
But the blade is still like it's newly sharpened.

"The joints have openings,
And the knife's blade has no thickness.
Apply this lack of thickness into the openings,
And the moving blade swishes through,
With room to spare!

"That's why after nineteen years,
The blade is still like it's newly sharpened.

"Nevertheless, every time I come across joints,
I see its tricky parts,
I pay attention and use caution,
My vision concentrates,
My movement slows down.

"I move the knife very slightly,
Whump! It has already separated.
The ox doesn't even know it's dead,
and falls to the ground like mud.

"I stand holding the knife,
And look all around it.
The work gives me much satisfaction.
I clean the knife and put it away."

Duke Wen Hui said: "Excellent!
I listen to your words,
And learn a principle of life."

This has been on of my favorite stories.

I had just recently changed jobs when I began this blog, and have just recently changed jobs again a few months ago. I am still with a Japanese company, and am once again surrounded by Japanese colleagues who are encouraging me in my study of their language. My progress is slow but steady. This will be a life time study to achieve any fluency.

My oldest daughter has graduated from the university and is now officially unemployed. I can find no fault in her efforts to find work in her field though. The opportunities are few and the competition is fierce. I am sure that something will break her way soon. She’s had four interviews with one company. She’s supposed to hear something this week.

My youngest daughter just finished a successful club season in travel volleyball. The summer camps have begun, and we look forward to a successful high school season for her senior year. She has some small schools interested in her playing volleyball for them. I am cautiously optimistic that we’ll find a fit for her. The main point is her education. If she can play at the college level and get some money knocked off the school costs to boot, then it’s a no brainer. The question is no longer can she play in college, but whether there is a good fit or not.

My wife and I will be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary. As I look back on our life together, I look forward to our retiring together in about another 10 years or so. We can clearly see the day when our oldest will be out of the house on her own. In another year, the youngest will be off to college. Just as it was when we first started out, it’ll just be the two of us.
I am approaching one year of training in the Wu style of Taijiquan. I have learned the sequence of both the 108 standard and 54 round competition forms. I have been introduced to the “24 forms”, the supplementary exercises of the Wu style, and I have also been introduced to the first three of the 12 basic types of push hands exercises.
It’s been very good for me. I feel great. I am relaxed, and clear headed. I feel strong.
For my second year of TJQ training, in addition to continual refinements to both the 108 and 54 forms, I hope to refine the 24 forms and better integrate them into my personal practice, especially the standing practice; as well as learn more of the push hands sequences (with whatever skill level I can bring). I am not really interested in adding any weapons forms until after my youngest graduates from high school. So my priorities are: form refinements, integrating the 24 forms into my personal practice, and going deeper into push hands practice.
With the coming of the warmer weather, I haven’t been lifting weights or walking on the treadmill as much. I find myself outside doing yard work a lot. Truth be told, I’d rather get my exercise that way. As the seasons change, we change the way we live our lives. This is one of those changes. I have also come to accept that I don’t get as much reading done during the summer as the winter, which makes one less thing I can make myself crazy about.

With the economy the way it is, especially here in Michigan, there are a lot of vacation homes for sale. I’ve dreamt of living on a lake for years. We’re looking, but also realize that taking on a vacation home is taking on another obligation (payments, taxes, maintenance, time to get there and back, fuel, etc.). I can tell you that the prices aren’t as rock bottom as the news might lead you to believe; at least for the listings we’ve looked at.

Speaking of the economy, in the yin and yang of things, I see a lot to be encouraged about. In Michigan, especially SE Michigan, when the automakers do well, we all do well. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed much over the years. The Detroit 3 (who used to be known as The Big 3) are all making painful changes that they really should have made years ago.

When people start buying cars again, it will be like rain in the desert around here.

One of my favorite stories from Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zi) is the story of the fighting cock:

Chi Hsing Tzu was a trainer of
fighting cocks for King Hsuan.
He was training a fine bird.
The king kept asking
if the bird was ready for combat.

“Not yet”, said the trainer.
“He is full of fire.
He is ready to pick a fight
with every other bird.
He is vain and confident
of his own strength.”

After ten days he answered again,
“Not yet. He flares up
when he hears another bird crow.”

After ten more days,
“Not yet. He still gets that angry look
and ruffles his feathers.”

Again ten days.
The trainer said,
“Now he is nearly ready.
When another bird crows,
his eyes don’t even flicker.
He stands immobile like a block of wood.
He is a mature fighter.
Other birds will take one look at him and run.”

The other day a friend of mine sent me an article on Tiger Woods, the golfer. A portion of the article is to be found below. The topic of the article is Woods' amazing focus and concentration when it comes to golfing.

He just won the US Open on a bad leg. His leg had just been operated on. His doctor thought he should be on crutches, not golfing. He managed to pull it together and beat everybody else.

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article.

The Frozen Gaze

By DAVID BROOKS

Rocco Mediate’s head swiveled about as he walked up the fairway of the sudden-death hole of the U.S. Open on Monday. Somebody would catch his attention, and his eyes would dart over and he’d wave or make a crack. Tiger Woods’s gaze, on the other hand, remained fixed on the ground, a few feet ahead of his steps. He was, as always, locked in, focused and self-contained.

The fans greeted Mediate with fraternal affection and Woods with reverence. Most were probably rooting for Rocco, but only because Woods, the inevitable victor, has risen above mere human status and become an embodiment of immortal excellence. That frozen gaze of his looks out from airport billboards, TV commercials and the ad pages. And its ubiquity is proof that every age finds the heroes it needs.

In a period that has brought us instant messaging, multitasking, wireless distractions and attention deficit disorder, Woods has become the exemplar of mental discipline. After watching Woods walk stone-faced through a roaring crowd, the science writer Steven Johnson, in a typical comment, wrote: “I have never in my life seen a wider chasm between the look in someone’s eye and the surrounding environment.”

The coverage of him often centers upon this question: How did this creature come about? The articles inevitably mention his precocity (at age 3, he shot a 48 on the front nine of a regulation course) and provide examples of his athletic prowess: Once Woods tried out four drivers that Nike was experimenting with and told the lab guys that he preferred the heavier one. The researchers thought the clubs were the same weight, but they measured and Woods was right. The club he’d selected was heavier by the equivalent of two cotton balls.

But inevitably, it is his ability to enter the cocoon of concentration that is written about and admired most. Writers describe the way Earl Woods, his lieutenant colonel father, dropped his golf bag while Tiger was swinging to toughen his mind. They describe his mother’s iron discipline at home. “Old man is soft,” Kultida Woods once said of her husband. “He cry. He forgive people. Not me. I don’t forgive anybody.”

Tiger was the one dragging them out on the course to practice. At age 6 months, he was put in a baby chair and had the ability, his father claimed, to watch golf for two hours without losing focus.

As an adult, he is famously self-controlled. His press conferences are a string of carefully modulated banalities. His lifestyle is meticulously tidy. His style of play is actuarial. He calculates odds and avoids unnecessary risks like the accounting major he once planned on being. “I am, by nature, a control freak,” he once told John Garrity of Sports Illustrated, as Garrity resisted the temptation to reply, “You think?”

And for that, in this day and age, he stands out. As I’ve been trying to write this column, I’ve toggled over to check my e-mail a few times. I’ve looked out the window. I’ve jotted down random thoughts for the paragraphs ahead. But Woods seems able to mute the chatter that normal people have in their heads and build a tunnel of focused attention.

Writers get rhapsodic over this facility. “Woods’s concentration often seems to be made of the same stuff as the liquid-metal cyborg in Terminator 2: If you break it, it reforms,” David Owen wrote in Men’s Vogue.

Then they get spiritual. In Slate, Robert Wright only semi-facetiously compared Woods to Gandhi, for his ability to live in the present and achieve transcendent awareness. Analysts inevitably bring up his mother’s Buddhism, his experiments in meditation. They describe his match-mentality in the phrases one might use to describe a guru achieving nirvana. He achieves, they say, perfect clarity, tranquility and flow. We’re talking about somebody who is the primary spokesman for Buick, and much of the commentary about him is on the subject of his elevated spiritual capacities.

And here we’re getting to the nub of what’s so remarkable about the “Be A Tiger” phenomenon: He’s become the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude.

The ancients were familiar with physical courage and the priests with moral courage, but in this over-communicated age when mortals feel perpetually addled, Woods is the symbol of mental willpower. He is, in addition, competitive, ruthless, unsatisfied by success and honest about his own failings. (Twice, he risked his career to retool his swing.)

During the broadcast of Monday’s playoff round, Nike ran an ad that had Earl Woods’s voice running over images of his son: “I’d say, ‘Tiger, I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.’ And he hasn’t. And he never will.”

You can like this model or not. Either way, the legend grows.

Know Thy Self!

Nosce Te Ipsum is an interesting blog that you can find by either clicking on the title of this post, or on the links over on the right.

From "About this blog:"

I’ve put this blog together to serve as a kick up the arse for my Meditation / Qi Gong practice. Finally I’m going to get my finger out and start practising properly.

The long and short of it is that I’ve had the book 100 Days to Better Health, Good Sex and Long Life for 6 years and I’ve never got further than 20 days into it! This time I’m definitely going to do it all, and hey, if that goes well maybe complete the second book too!

I’m not a hippie meditator! I’ve been doing martial arts for 22 years (time just carries on passing by! Just gotta carry showing up and training…); trained with KGB, GSG9, Police, Doormen and Bodyguards among others (I still manage not to be very good at it though!). If I have to say I follow any kind of meditative ’school’ it would have to be Mantak Chia’s as taught by Kris Deva North and Eric Yudelove, and also Glenn Morris’s Lightening Path way. As far as the Martial side; anything that’s not flashy, works under stress/pressure/(when I’m drunk!) and not for sport, is all good in my books!

Anyway, that’s more than enough about me, it’s the practice that matters and Hopefully there’ll be lots of posts about that!

Please pay a visit.

Diet Food Sports Weight Loss Blog

No, not this one.

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to a new acquaintance, who runs the Diet Food Sports Weight Loss Blog.

Don't be put off that it's in Japanese. The blog contains a large number of very interesting links that are worth following. Please pay a visit.

What You Don't Know

Several years and a couple of jobs ago, I frequently worked with the general manager of the microcontroller division of the company I worked for. While I'm glad I didn't ever work directly for him, I didn't care for his management style, I learned an awful lot from him.

Among the things I learned was not to be in an unnatural hurry to make a decision or to reach a conclusion. Sure, if you have a deadline looming, you have to decide, but to do this prematurely wasn't usually a good idea.

Rather, he said, take the problem or situation and turn it over and over. Look at it from every side and try to slice it every way you can. You might now find the "answer" you were looking for, but you might find something else perhaps even more valuable: understanding.

Take every nugget of information you have with a grain of salt. Every fact should be held as tentative, as there is always another shoe that may drop.

When you have to make a decision, go ahead and use the best information you have available to you at the time, just be aware that what you think of as the truth might change and it may be helpful if your plans are flexible enough to change as well.

A friend sent me an article from which I've posted an exerpt below. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article. It's a pretty good read.

For the Chief, a Little Skepticism Can Go a Long Way

By KELLEY HOLLAND

A NEIGHBOR of mine has eyes in the back of her head. Sometimes she can tell without looking that her children are doing something off limits — eating cookies just before dinner, shedding backpacks on the kitchen floor — and she tells them to stop without even turning around.

It’s a handy little skill for a parent. But for managers and corporate leaders, it is essential to be able to see problems lying just out of sight.

If leaders “don’t look at things a little skeptically, they can find themselves in trouble,” said Jay Lorsch, a professor of human relations at Harvard Business School.

Senior executives and directors “have got to be able to smell the smoke,” he added. “They have to have a certain level of cynicism and skepticism.”

Or as Andrew S. Grove, the former chief executive of Intel, put it in the title of one of his books, “Only the Paranoid Survive.”

Unfortunately, there are a host of reasons that leaders do not necessarily get all the information they need.

Simple human nature is part of the problem: No one likes to hear bad news, no matter how useful it may be. Managers who appear to blame the messengers bringing word of, say, poor sales or a competitor’s inroads, can easily discourage future reports.

Niko Canner, the managing partner of Katzenbach Partners, a consulting firm based in New York, said that when an employee comes to him with news of actual or potential problems, “I try to deal with bad news in a way that I get more of it rather than less.”

That entails thanking his informant, then discussing ways to resolve the problem and — as a final step — setting aside time in the future to discuss how the problem started. That way, the people delivering bad news realize that they will not be punished for their candor.

Even when top executives vow to be accessible, though, it can be a challenge for subordinates to reach them.

A top executive might say that “I’m very clear that I have an open-door policy,” said Craig Chappelew, a senior manager at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C. “But for me to even get in, I have to get past the front desk, get a badge, and get past two levels of administrative assistants. I think they confuse open-door policy with interpersonal approachability.”

In a leadership skills assessment that Mr. Chappelew has given to nearly 1,000 top executives and hundreds of their company directors and subordinates, most of the executives rated their interpersonal skills highly. But those who reported directly to them rated them as only average in that area.

The executives also rated themselves as adept at strategic planning, but their company directors saw that as an area where the executives were also not very strong.

“From two perspectives, these senior executives are missing the boat,” Mr. Chappelew said.

In some cases, very senior executives are just too far removed from day-to-day operations to see developing problems. Exhibit A: financial executives who have been blindsided by mortgage-related problems at their companies.

Some senior executives also believe too ardently in their company’s long-term projects — complex new technologies, for example, or drugs in development — to see their flaws.

And in certain situations, executives may not realize that their onetime confidants have either clammed up or have taken sides, and thus will convey little or none of the bad news the executives would benefit from hearing.

Clearly, leaders who wait for bad news to come their way are taking a major risk. That’s why some leaders regularly seek out news, both good and bad.

Lew Frankfort, chief executive of Coach, the leather and accessories company, is unrelenting when it comes to monitoring company operations.

The company spends close to $5 million on consumer research annually. When Mr. Frankfort arrives at work each morning, there is a sales report for each North American store waiting on his desk. He receives reports on worldwide sales every week, and he and his senior executives reassess each unit’s business outlook monthly.

He says he runs the business on what he calls an “exception” basis: “To the extent that there is a significant variation better or worse than expected, we drill in to understand that.”

MR. FRANKFORT says he is also “a big advocate of management by walking around.” He visits stores once or twice a week, introducing himself to customers only as Lew. And he has questions lobbed at him at regular lunch forums focused on broad topics like business development and growth opportunities.

Writer's Block

Wordless.

Struggling to find

Just one cohesive though.

At a blank piece of paper

I stare.

The Road to Mastery

A friend of mine sent me these three quotes, which I think are very good.

Being the Beginner's
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few." ---Shunryu Suzuki

The Student Emerges
"He is now forced to admit that he is at the mercy of everyone who is stronger, more nimble and more practiced than he."
---Eugen Herrigel

To Achieve the Expert Level
"He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon ninety as half the journey" --- Japanese Proverb

Quirk

I just put up another link over at the right. You can also click on the title of this post.

It's for a blog entitled "Quirk." The description from the site reads:

It’s about Emerson, fencing, painting, writing, absurdities, aikido, politics, spirit, rock ‘n’ roll, Thoreau, science fiction, beauty… and getting down with my bad side

It's terrific. Please pay a visit.

China: Inside the Dragon

This month's National Geographic Magazine is a special issue on China, entitled China: Inside the Dragon. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the appropriate section of the online version of the magazine.

The pictures are outstanding. A whole issue's worth of them. The print version is worth keeping around for some time to come.

China is a very large country with a long history encompassing many different cultures. This issue tried to impart a sense of that depth and variety.

Please take a look, or better yet, get the print version.

Enjoy.

Random Thoughts

Spring appears to have arrived. I am almost ready to drain the gasoline out of my snow thrower. I remember having snow in May however.

A friend of mine who is a project manger brought up the topic of randomness to me the other day.

I think that our lives are surrounded by randomness. Most things are out of our control and it’s an illusion to think that we can control any significant portion of those things outside of ourselves that can affect us.

You get a new boss, the company gets sold, a crack dealer moves in next door, a loved one is diagnosed with cancer. Can you have contingency plans for every cotton picking thing that happens in your life? No. Even if you attempted it, the effort in planning; in planning to plan, would elbow the time you have for actually living out of the way. What kind of life would that be?

You can develop yourself to be open minded, resourceful, and well grounded. You can educate yourself and be informed. You can be organized so that you are not working at cross purposes to yourself, and to increase your efficiency within a certain scope. You can develop skills and expertise in certain areas which you can then apply in a “strategic” sense to exert some temporary leverage over a specific situation.

You can watch trends and observe rhythms to try and use them to your advantage, or avoid their ill effects. You can’t rely on history though, to predict the future with absolute confidence.

You’re never going to have complete, perfect, unchanging information. You have to do the work, to increase your odds, but you can’t guarantee the outcomes. Sometimes for better or worse, outcomes can be completely unexpected, especially when unintended consequences are brought up.

I can’t stand the initiative that began back in the 80’s and 90’s to drive companies through “processes.” QS, ISO, TS, all of them. Reduce everything in the workplace to make people inconsequential and plug replaceable. It sounds great on paper, but in reality, people develop expertise and a process can never capture all the variables. With thinner and thinner workforces, the idea of people being plug replaceable in reality goes out the window as individuals become recognized to have essential expertise. All the process documentation is good for is when that expert is lost, to provide his replacement with some sort of baseline on which to build his own expertise.

As far as project management goes, even the best laid plans are going to go awry as soon as activity commences. People are involved. No more explanation needs to be offered.

The role of the project manager at the end of the day is to find ways to mitigate and compromise all along the way to achieve the desired, stated goal. Planning from a top down perspective will allow the project manager to identify some (never all, unless he is omniscient) places where the risks of the plans becoming undone are greater than “normal;” in a disciplined, organized way. Within a limited scope, the PM can be assured of the plan’s “correctness” which indeed can be all the difference between success and failure.

A great book on how randomness affects our lives is one that I’ve recommended before, Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s influenced my thinking a lot.

http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Markets/dp/0812975219/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208521256&sr=8-1

Another great book on unintended consequences is Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Things-Bite-Back-Consequences/dp/0679747567/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208521299&sr=1-1

I haven’t written about my Japanese Language study in a long time. When I first began, still with the former employer, the Japanese assignee with whom I worked was very encouraging. He appreciated the effort I was putting into it. When he went back to Japan, he was replaced by a couple of new assignees who didn’t like the idea of a gaijin learning Japanese at all. They wanted to preserve their ability to speak among themselves in front of us.

With the new company, I am finding my self once again working with Japanese assignees who are delighted to see a gaijin attempting to learn their language. I’m getting back at it pretty steadily and making progress.

My oldest daughter is graduating from college next weekend. It just seems the other day when she first entered high school! Where did the time go? The job market is tough. I hope she is able to find something local, so she can live at home for a while and save some money. I’m sure things will work out.

My youngest daughter is right now a junior in high school. Several smaller schools have expressed interest in her playing volleyball for them when she graduates. She’s got good grades. She is active with a lot of leadership activities at school. I am cautiously optimistic that if she wants to play in college, that she’ll be able to.

The new job is going well. They are keeping me very busy, but I feel like I’m getting somewhere with all of the activity. My only frustration has been getting all of my gadgets working properly together, and getting passwords and activation of all the systems I need to work with. This company is much further along the curve in the understanding the home office in Japan has regarding how business is done in North America than my old company. It’s still a Japanese company however, and it is still a challenge.

My taijiquan practice continues to go well. The ideal thing would be to train with a group for a couple of hours everyday, so you could get significant regular time practicing push hands. Reality is far from the ideal. I find it’s still a struggle to fit in practicing my forms as well as the supplementary exercises and still attend to maintaining an ordinary life. I know that I am not alone with this. It’s a common issue with anyone studying a martial art. 80% of the time we spend practicing will be on our own. It’s our own self practice and what we put into it that is going to have the greatest impact on our progress. On the other hand, push hands practice is a high return investment on building taijiquan related skills and 15, 20, or 30 minutes once a week can only give a taste of what that practice is really like.

I’m managing to practice either the long form or the short form every day. I try to fit the various supplementary exercises in whenever I have a few free odd moments here or there. I like being able to do that because I hate to waste time. If I’m going to do nothing, I want to do nothing on purpose, not because I’m just sitting around and can’t figure out what to do with myself and time just passes. Time is going to pass one way or the other. We can choose what we’ve done with ourselves while that time passes.

I think a key point is making taijiquan practice a part of one’s everyday lifestyle. You can’t do this by force. That would be working at cross purposes to the very concepts upon which taijiquan is based.

Habits are a part of our lives, for good or bad. I’m finding as busy as I have been since starting the new job, plus just doing some other things after work, that I’m not on the internet nearly has much as I had been previously over the past several years. I don’t consider this as necessarily a bad thing. It’s good to uproot your habits from time to time anyway.

Cook Ding’s Kitchen has exceeded 20,000 hits!

A guy at work is getting married in a couple of weeks. It reminds me that my wife and I have been married for 24 ½ years. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re getting along better now than I can ever clearly remember. As our kids get older and start to embark on their own lives, this is nice. Real estate prices being what they are, we may just yet get that lake house I’ve always wanted. Sitting on a deck overlooking the lake, waiting for the kids to drive up. That’s what I want in my future.

In the meantime, the nights are getting warmer. I just picked up some firewood. A nice fire on the patio tonight seems like a good idea.

The Bloom is Off the Rose

China is having a rough year. The had an extremely rough winter. I think we'll be hearing about floods and food shortages as a result. There are the human rights protests that will probably reach a crescendo at the Olympics. The world wide price for rice is going through the roof. The pollution in China and the environmental damage being done is probably nearly the worst on the planet.

The Chinese economic miracle is also having some issues. There are cheaper labor pools that are taking business away from China. Partially due to the way the Chinese have manipulated the yuan / dollar exchange, they have a big pile of dollars ... that they have to spend in the US to get any value out of them.

And then there is the Shanghai stock market. A friend sent me this story from the New York Times. I have an excerpt below. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full story.

To See a Stock Market Bubble Bursting, Look at Shanghai

By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — A year ago, investors like Guan Ling were ebullient. Chinese share prices had climbed over 500 percent in the span of two years, setting off a nationwide stock buying frenzy.

When experts periodically warned about the possibility of a bubble, prices would dip temporarily then soar even higher, breaking records and inciting another mad dash to snap up equities.

“The market was going wild,” says Mr. Guan, 49, who a few years ago closed his real estate company to invest in stocks full time. “Everybody was talking about how much they had earned, how much more they would invest, and which stocks had jumped 20 times, or even 30 times.”

That was last year. The Shanghai composite index has plunged 45 percent from its high, reached last October. The first quarter of this year, which ended Monday with a huge sell-off, was the worst ever for the market.

Suddenly, millions of small investors who were crowding into brokerage houses, spending the entire day there playing cards, trading stocks, eating noodles and cheering on the markets with other day traders and retirees, are feeling depressed and angry.

"These days my family quarrels a lot," says Zhang Liying, 55, a retired hotel waitress who with her husband invested all their savings in the stock market. “My husband asked me to sell; I wanted to hold for a while. Now my husband condemns me as so stupid that we lost our family’s savings.”

Si Dansu, 68, and a retired engineer, is even more distraught, but she blames the government.

“I devoted my whole life to the country. I went to the countryside after graduation, and worked as an engineer in a Shanghai factory until retirement. I invested almost all my savings and retirement fund in the market 10 years ago. But now I’m totally penniless. All my stocks went down.”

Other parts of Asia are as bad, or worse. In India, stock prices have plunged 31 percent in Mumbai; they are off 31 percent in Japan and a whopping 53 percent in Vietnam, another booming economy. Angry investors have burned a securities regulator in effigy in Mumbai, and some are in tears in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

“Some of them have cried,” says Nguyen Quang Tri, 74, a retired cement company manager who was visiting a Ho Chi Minh City brokerage house this week. “I have my own equity, but most of the people here borrowed money from the bank.”

The market mayhem began after concerns grew late last year about inflation at home and an American financial crisis. Now, even though China’s economy is growing at its fastest pace in over a decade, stock prices have fallen back to earth, crushing small investors on the way down.

Few experts say the stock plunge is a major threat to growth in the real economy here. But there are worries that a prolonged downturn could reverberate through China’s financial markets — especially since a large number of corporations had aggressively shifted money, sometimes secretly, to play the market.

By some estimates, 15 to 20 percent of the profits reported last year by publicly listed companies in Shanghai that are not involved in banking or finance (which usually invest in stocks) came from stock trading gains.

Companies with primary businesses like selling electricity, or even sports jackets, were moonlighting by trading stocks, hoping to bolster their earnings.

“Companies had a lot of excess cash,” said Jing Ulrich, a market analyst at JPMorgan in Hong Kong. “And a lot of that cash did leak into the stock market.”

But the big companies were following the small investor. JPMorgan estimates that 150 million people in China were invested in the Chinese stock market as of the end of last year. That may still be a small slice of China’s 1.3 billion people, but it is a huge new constituency, and it has led to the birth of both a new source of potential popular discontent and a new lifestyle: the diehard investor.

Chen Donghao is one convert. A 22-year-old recent college graduate, he is now a fixture at a Shanghai brokerage house.

In April 2006, when he was still a student majoring in art design, his family gave him about $70,000 to invest in the stock market.

It was an ideal time to get in.

“When I started the stock market was around 1,700,” he says, noting that today, despite the drop, the Shanghai composite index is still up at about 3,400. “I made a lot of money. So since the beginning of this year I decided to open a restaurant. I’d like to open a chain of famous restaurants in Shanghai.”

Shopkeepers, real estate brokers, even maids and watermelon hawkers are said to have become day traders.

A new version of the national anthem made its way around the country last year, beginning, “Arise! Ye who haven’t opened an account! Pour your gold and silver into the hot market!”

The anthem went on: “The Chinese nation faces its craziest time. The passionate roar of our peoples will be heard!”

People responded. Here in Shanghai, brokerage houses with giant electronic screens started to draw huge crowds, including many retirees who were content to spend the entire day transfixed by the sight of rising prices.

In some brokerage houses, entire floors are divided into small and midsize rooms that investors camp out in, from opening to closing bell, with their lunch bags, knitting gear, playing cards and newspapers to help them feel at home.

Only now, many investors cannot bear to look at their screens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/business/worldbusiness/02yuan.html?ex=1207886400&en=8688a10f40e82fbc&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Chinese Strategy in Business

As more and more western firms find themselves out maneuvered by their Asian counterparts, executives are hoping to turn of the the Chinese characteristics, a long historical in depth study of strategy to their own advantage.

I've been publishing the famous 36 Strategies in installments for a couple of years now. This is barely scratching the surface. Simply reading the Art of War, then setting the book aside isn't studying the subject.

To pull this task off, often a seasoned consultant is needed. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to one. The proprietor has a long history in the study and application of Chinese strategy.

A Clear Mind

A friend sent me these articles. I usually just post an excerpt, but this is short and very very good. Note that the links to the original articles at the New York Times will be found at the end of each one.

These two articles both describe interesting aspects of the mind, which applies equally to martial arts, zen, daoism, ... you name it. Enjoy.

Pitching With Purpose

By DAVID BROOKS

A few years ago, a former professional baseball player mentioned a book that had made a great impression on him. It was called “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching,” by a sports psychologist named H.A. Dorfman. I read the book one spare evening, though, as you may have noticed, I’m not a pitcher — and no major league organization has expressed interest in making me one.

The book left an impression on me too, mostly for its moral tone. Dorfman offers to liberate people from what you might call the tyranny of the scattered mind. He offers to take pitchers, who may be thinking about a thousand and one things up on the mound, and give them mental discipline.

Others are eloquent about courage and creativity, but Dorfman is fervent about discipline. In the book’s only lyrical passage, he writes: “Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”

His assumption seems to be that you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, then he will also discipline his mind.

Dorfman builds that structure on the repetitiousness of baseball. It’s commonly said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any craft — three hours of practice every day for 10 years. Dorfman assumes that players would have already put in those hours doing drills and repetitions. He urges them to adopt their own pregame rituals. He notes that Trevor Hoffman, the San Diego Padres closer, walks from the clubhouse to the dugout every game in the fourth inning and moves to the bullpen in the seventh.

As a pitcher enters a game, Dorfman continues, he should bring a relentlessly assertive mind-set. He should plan on attacking the strike zone early in the count, and never letting up. He will not nibble at the strike zone or try to throw the ball around hitters. He will invite contact. Even when the count is zero balls and two strikes, he will not alter his emotional tone by wasting a pitch out of the strike zone.

Just as a bike is better balanced when it is going forward, a pitcher’s mind is better balanced when it is unceasingly aggressive. If a pitcher doesn’t actually feel this way when he enters a game, Dorfman asks him to pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

Dorfman then structures the geography of the workplace. There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe — on the mound and off the mound. Off the mound is for thinking about the past and future, on the mound is for thinking about the present. When a pitcher is on the pitching rubber, Dorfman writes, he should only think about three things: pitch selection, pitch location and the catcher’s glove, his target. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should step off the rubber.

Dorfman has various breathing rituals he endorses, but his main focus during competition is to get his pitchers thinking simple and small. A pitcher is defined, he writes, “by the way the ball leaves his hand.” Everything else is extraneous.

In Dorfman’s description of pitching, batters barely exist. They are vague, generic abstractions that hover out there in the land beyond the pitcher’s control. A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

Dorfman once approached Greg Maddux after a game and asked him how it went. Maddux said simply: “Fifty out of 73.” He’d thrown 73 pitches and executed 50. Nothing else was relevant.

A baseball game is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. But Dorfman reduces it all to a series of simple tasks. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent isn’t at the center. The task is at the center.

By putting the task at the center, Dorfman illuminates the way the body and the mind communicate with each other. Once there were intellectuals who thought the mind existed above the body, but that’s been blown away by evidence. In fact, it’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the mound.

And by putting the task at the center, Dorfman helps the pitcher quiet the self. He pushes the pitcher’s thoughts away from his own qualities — his expectations, his nerve, his ego — and helps the pitcher lose himself in the job.

Not long ago, Americans saw the rise of a therapeutic culture that placed great emphasis on self-discovery, self-awareness and self-expression. But somehow the tide seems to have turned from the worship of self, and today’s message is: transcend yourself in your job — or get shelled.

A fitting reminder from opening day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/opinion/01brooks.html

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind

By SANDRA AAMODT and SAM WANG

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.

Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.

Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.

What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.

In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.

On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.

Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.

Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html

Almost Spring

I am nearing the end of my second week on the new job. All things considered, it's going well.

Between learning new products, new customers, and new systems, I sometimes feel like I trying to drink from a firehose. It'll all come together in time, and no one is putting any undue pressure on me, so I think everything will be fine going forward.

Most of the friction I have encountered is getting all of my newly issued gadgets up and working together. The laptop I am working on is a refurb. It's a temporary until one of the new models comes in and gets set up for me. This one is pretty slow and has a few ... quirks.

I have it set up where I can input in either English or Japanese. The trouble is that it tends to switch modes randomly. I might be typing up a storm and end up with a page of hiragana encoded gibberish.

I had installed my favorite Japanese - English - Chinese dictionary, Wakan, on it. While going through some of the many parameters I could customize, I accidentally changed the language of the menus, and controls from English to Polish. That was interesting. I tired uninstalling the program and re installing it. That didn't work. When I re installed it, there must have been a file left over somewhere that insisted that all the menus remain in Polish.

I finally crawled through it and changed it back.

The wireless doesn't work that well. At home right now, I have a 50' ethernet cable strung from my home cable modem, over a railing, and down to the family room where I am right now. I just can't maintain a connection to my wireless access point.

But all of this is getting smoothed out. I got a new Blackberry today and was able to get my contact list down from my Yahoo account and onto my laptop.

Taiji practice is going well. We've been working on the 54 Round Form in class. I'm now 2/3 of the way through learning the sequence. It's certainly related to the 108 Standard form whose sequence I recently finished learning; but it's ... different. Different enough to cause me some confusion when I work on one, then work on the other.

Wu Style Taijiquan has a LOT of material and I'm already wondering how anyone manages to practice everything, and I'm only at the beginning.

My oldest daughter is going to graduate from college next month. Right now she's down in Florida for a few days. It just so happened that after she had planned to go down there, she got a call on a resume she had submitted to a Florida company. So she's not only going on vacation, but on a job interview as well.

I had hoped that she would be able to find work locally, live at home and save some money. However, jobs are slim pickings here in Michigan right now. If she ends up in Florida, I guess we'll just have to visit her. A lot. Especially in winter.

It's snowing again. We're supposed to get another 2 to 5 inches over night. However it'll be well above freezing the next ccouple of days so it won't stick around. If it's not sticking around, I'm not shoveling it.

I've read that this has been the snowiest winter in Michigan since they've been keeping records. We've haven't really had a huge amount all at once, but it just keeps on coming. I'm ready for spring.

Almost Spring

Lone Goose
making his way
over a frozen lake
through a snowstorm, wearily
in March.

Beginnings

I started a new job today. I had ten days off, I am very relaxed, but it was time to get back to work.

I am working for another Japanese company, a competitor of my old one. This company is much further along in adapting to the competitive norms of the North American Automotive market.

My youngest daughter plays travel volleyball. We attended a three day tournament in Indianapolis over the weekend. There is some interest in her playing in college from a number of D2 and D3 schools. With a little luck it will work out that she'll be able to study what she wants at a good school and continue to play volleyball, which is her passion.

My oldest daughter is going to graduate from college next month. I can't believe time has gone by so quickly. With hope, she'll find a job locally so she can live at home for a while and save some money. Besides, she's been away at school for a long time. I want her back. I want her to live at home for a while before she goes off and begins her life on her own.

In my taijiquan class, I've begun learning the 54 Round Form. As a "round" form, this looks more like what you'd expect a taiji form to look like. It's also a fast form. Where the 108 Standard form is usually done very slowly, the 54 Round Form is done at a very quick pace.

Spring is just around the corner.

Of green
dreams in winter,
thawed brooks purl anew.
Phantom sunflowers touch the sky
Waking.

Learn Chinese in Four Days!

... at least that was the assignment given to the reporter who wrote the article that I am posting an excerpt from, below. It's an interesting read about different "crash course" type approaches to learning a difficult language like Chinese. For what it's worth, my own efforts to learn Japanese has had it's highs and lows. Today, after about 3 years of effort, I am a little better than survival, and would border on conversational. I can understand the meaning of about 5oo kanji, even if I don't always remember the way to pronounce them all of the time. As I'm beginning a new job with another Japanese company, I'm redoubling my efforts to become first truly conversational, and eventually fluent, in Japanese. Check out the full article by clicking on the title of this post. It's a fun read.

Four Days Fluent
Elisabeth Eaves, 02.21.08, 6:00 PM ET

Mastering a foreign language is so difficult that diplomats and academics spend years doing nothing else. But the business world--or at least my editor--lacks that kind of patience.

"Eaves! You're good with languages, right? I want you to learn Chinese in three days. Yes. Three days. Do whatever it takes. And, yes, there will be a quiz at the end." He seems to find this funny.

Unreasonable, to be sure. But impossible? Maybe not. I manage to wrangle an extra day out of my boss, so I now have four days--or a total of 96 hours--to learn as much Chinese as possible. The plan? Total immersion. I would get a tutor, flashcards, movies, even subliminal learning tapes. My iPod would rotate Chinese vocabulary, my computer would run language software and I'd do my shopping in Chinatown. I would even ban our Mandarin-speaking intern from addressing me in English.

On the bright side, I do actually have a good ear for languages--I speak French and Spanish and studied Arabic for several years. On the other hand, Mandarin bears no resemblance to any language I've ever studied. I can't muscle my way in, feeling for familiar words and phrases.

First stop: My local bookstore, which carries 13 audio-learning packages, including Speak in a Week!, Mandarin Chinese in 60 Minutes, 15-Minute Chinese and, for those whose schedule demands an even shorter period, Now You're Talking Mandarin Chinese in No Time. There's also Learn in Your Car Mandarin Chinese and In-Flight Chinese, which says on the box that it "covers everything you need, and nothing more"--apparently for customers worried they might learn too much. It's tough to choose between "no time" and "instant," but I settle on Instant Immersion.

Early in the morning on my first day, I boot up my computer and install Rosetta Stone, a popular brand of language software. It says it teaches "the same way you learned your first language," which means that it uses only the foreign tongue. The program flashes images while saying words and spelling them in pinyin, the Roman-alphabet version of Chinese. Then I have to remember the words and match them to the images myself. Unable to recall the syllables, which sound completely random to my ear, I get all the answers wrong.

I calculate that it took me the first six or so years of my life to acquire fluent English, with constant exposure to the language. At this rate, if I used Rosetta Stone all day, every day, I could speak Chinese like a 6-year-old by 2014.

On the subway ride downtown, I listen to Instant Immersion. With the exception of "mama" and "baba," no sound reminds me of anything. It's like an aural assault of jarring sounds, and so far I feel discouraged.

At 9 a.m., I start my first private session at Berlitz, the 130-year-old language school. Berlitz is a serious place. It would never make insane promises about three-day Chinese. Nor, probably, would they ever accept assignments from a possibly deranged editor. Indeed, the professionals at Berlitz were highly reluctant to let me cram their five-day Immerse and Converse course into three, but I telephone frequently, begging and pleading, and eventually they relent.

My first teacher of the day, Duncan, spends three hours just working on my pronunciation, and in particular tones, the great bugaboo of Chinese-learning. The situation is this: Chinese is a tonal language and the various tones are sort of like musical notes, with each one radically altering meaning. Any vowel can be pronounced as a single note; or falling from a higher note to a lower note; or falling and then rising; or rising from a lower note to a higher note; or without any tone at all. So "ma" pronounced the various different ways means different things. One is "mom," and one is "horse." Get the intonation wrong and you're calling your mother a horse, or worse.

Consonants are no picnic either. For instance, a sentence that to my untrained ear sounds like "shuh shuh shuh," is in fact made up of three distinct words. The third word, "piece of paper," is pronounced "zhjr." As far as I can tell. In the third tone.

My afternoon teacher, Mr. Huang, refuses to speak English to me, which I think is great. I'm a big believer in immersion. That's mainly because I'm lazy and immersion doesn't require memorizing verb tables or long lists of vocabulary. It's all about passive absorption.

We begin conversing. Or at least, we begin exchanging sentences like "Is this a pen?" ("Zhe shi yuanzhubi ma?") and "Yes, this is a pen." (Shi, zhe shi yuanzhubi.") It's hard to imagine using these sentences in a real-life context, unless I am dealing with a blind man. Later we move on to more useful phrases like "Is the large chair red?"--"No, the large chair is gray." Major progress! At 2:30, I am elated. But at about 3 p.m., my mind shuts down, refusing to accept further information.

Nevertheless, I soldier on. At home, I pop one of Chinese movies I've rented, Beijing Bicycle, into the DVD player. I try not to look at the subtitles. The plot goes something like this: A guy has a bicycle. It gets stolen by a second guy and a third guy buys it on the black market. The first guy steals it back. But then the third guy steals it back from him. They keep stealing the bicycle back and forth for the rest of the movie, sometimes pausing to beat each other up. I'm not picking up much Mandarin, but I feel like I might be gaining profound insights into Chinese culture.

Immersion may be a passive way to learn, but there are even lazier ways, and I am determined to try them. I ordered a compact-disc set from a company called InnerTalk, which is designed to teach Chinese subliminally. The company specializes not in language but in self-affirmation messages, and its titles include tracks designed to help listeners quit smoking, lose weight, even grow larger breasts. If InnerTalk's tapes can accomplish all that, teaching me one of the hardest languages in the world should be a snap. The copy on the packaging explains: "Hidden affirmations enter your mind without conscious interference such as doubt, fear and so forth."

Another Day in the Rat Race

“The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.”

- The opening words of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The one constant thing we can look forward to in life is change.

The Japanese technology giant that I work for has decided to spin off the semiconductor division (my division) into a separate company. From the way they are organizing this new company it will not only be easy to sell off, but to break pieces off to sell piecemeal.

This rat has noticed an ice berg clearly in our path going forward and has found a new ship; with a promotion, and more money.

It’s another Japanese company. I can still put my fledging Japanese Language skills to some use. They are a lot more stable, having their genesis from a joint venture/spin off several years ago. They’ve made it and have achieved the critical mass in the market I serve to garner future success.

The local office is a much larger operation than the one I left. At a previous job I worked very closely for several years with the director for whom I’ll be working now.

It’s all good. I am enjoying basking in the warmth of this good fortune … for now. I have been dragged around the block enough times to know that I should bask in every atom of this good fortune because as sure as yin follows yang, these good times aren’t going to last forever.

At some point, the Universe is going to say to itself “I haven’t messed with Matz for a while,” and decide to have a few laughs at my expense.

I’ve quoted the Old Farmer Story many times on this blog, and it is certainly appropriate here. If you click on the title of this post, you’ll be directed to many versions of this story, with links that will lead you to perhaps find your own wild horses.

A man named Sei Weng owned a beautiful mare which was praised far and wide. One day this beautiful horse disappeared. The people of his village offered sympathy to Sei Weng for his great misfortune. Sei Weng said simply, "That's the way it is."

A few days later the lost mare returned, followed by a beautiful wild stallion. The village congratulated Sei Weng for his good fortune. He said, "That's the way it is."

Some time later, Sei Weng's only son, while riding the stallion, fell off and broke his leg. The village people once again expressed their sympathy at Sei Weng's misfortune. Sei Weng again said, "That's the way it is."

Soon thereafter, war broke out and all the young men of the village except Sei Weng's lame son were drafted and were killed in battle. The village people were amazed as Sei Weng's good luck. His son was the only young man left alive in the village. But Sei Weng kept his same attitude: despite all the turmoil, gains and losses, he gave the same reply, "That's the way it is."