Cultural Differences

I went to a party tonight with my nerd friends, and it was good fun.  Lots of Asian people, and Aaron and I pretty much were the only white people (Yair and Jamie were there too).  About half way through the night we walked down the block over to our friend Jon's house.  Jon is also Asian, and after we walked in we starting going down into his basement.  About halfway down though, Jon's mom pointed at Aaron's shoes and said something along the lines of "take your shoes off please."  I realized at that point that I hadn't taken my shoes off either, but all of our friends had.

What's notable is that the white people (Aaron and I) weren't conditioned to take our shoes off when we entered houses as guests, but all of our Asian friends took their shoes off immediately.  This is something I've noticed with almost all of my Asian friends, and when I brought it up in our group we figured out what the difference was.  From our Asian friends' point of view, it was a simple cleanness thing, "I don't want my floors to get dirty so take off your shoes" is implied.  But for Aaron and I (although Aaron may have a different interpretation) a host has to direct the guest to take off their shoes, in order to allow them to be more comfortable in their house.  When you take off your shoes, you're saying a lot in our culture.  Taking off your shoes is very casual, not something we would do in a formal situation.  Taking off your shoes is also a sign that "I'm going to be staying here for a relatively long period of time."  I wouldn't take my shoes off if I knew I was only coming into a house briefly and then leaving.  Also, importantly I think, it's a power thing.  I'm not allowed to get comfortable in someone else's house unless they tell me to.  It would be bad manners to come in and plop comfortably in a chair in a stranger's house, I would sit a little more formally and gingerly.  Likewise, it's bad form for me to take off my shoes to make myself comfortable in your house without being told to do so.

The friends that I'm talking about are primarily Chinese, and speak Mandarin with their parents.  So I'm wondering whether this phenomenon is something that's just anecdotal, or whether it's really true.  People of all races feel free to throw in your interpretations, it can be a little cultural experiment.  It's interesting though how clearly cultural lines can be drawn with such a little thing though.  And (assuming my analysis is true) that little thing is a manifestation of a lot of other differences; for my Asian friends it was a simple cleanliness thing, but for me there was a whole guest/host power dynamic at play.  So comment with your thoughts, and add any other little cultural differences you've found over the years.

Good Things

First off, woo 2000 pageviews!  It's not really a large number, but it's exciting I think.  In other news, Homecoming tonight was actually impressively fun.  Dancing wasn't so bad, not too awkward, and I liked seeing my friends and hanging out with people.  Hopefully they'll keep doing this dance for the years to come, I imagine it was a pretty good fundraiser too.

Anyway, good things.  There's that adage, "good things come to those who wait."  I think I'm really starting to discover that that is load of crap.  First of all, just look at the verb: good things come.  Really?  Good things never come, they hang like ripe fruit on the top branches of the tree; yeah they might be delicious but it'll be a pain in the ass trying to get up there.  Good things don't come, but maybe good opportunities do.  Every once in a while I'll meet someone and wonder later what would have happened if I had tried a little harder to get to know them.  In relationships, in business, in life, I think really the good policy is to go for what you want.  Waiting for a good opportunity to come along is perfectly fine, but sometimes you have to realize "hey, this might not be a perfect situation, but I've got to work with it."  Wait for the door to open, but don't be too afraid to stick your foot in the crack before it closes on you again.

I probably spend too much waiting around, but that's mostly because I can't decide what I want.  It's hard to go for something when you don't know what to go for!  College decisions are going to be ridiculously tough I'm sure, and the application process is a serious pain.  I really need to start getting more motivated, the hardest part is getting up to those first few branches and then it's just a little climbing for some sweet goodness.

Speaking of waiting for good things to happen, this work isn't going to "happen" if I keep waiting around.  That's all for tonight!

I already know how this show ends.

Have you ever been watching tv, and you realize that since you're coming close to the end of the alloted time for a certain show, you must be getting close to the climax, or that there must be some plot twist soon?  You realize that, and then you're kind of disappointed, because you've figured out what will happen next.  That's how I feel about high school right now.  Everything I do has this fatalism to it because I know soon I'll be done with high school and I'll be moving on to college.  Some people call it senioritis, but it's sort of more pervasive than just "oh I don't want to do my work" and it's not that I don't want to do my work.

Soon we'll have our apps in (and it can't be soon enough) and there will be a lot less stress, and then eventually we'll know which colleges we'll be going to.  After that I feel like there's just a waiting period, where we'll be awkwardly between worlds while we wait to go to college.  And going to college really will be entering a whole new world.  Maybe it's just my impression because of the classes I'm taking, but I feel like I know almost everyone that I'm going to know in the high school.  Interactions have been played out, and now a lot of my friends have settled into comfortable couples.  Not that that is a bad thing, but I'm just starting to get really impatient for change in my life.  That's part of why I did drama this year I think; I wanted to try something really new and different (and I'm really glad I did).

Going to college will give us real opportunities to totally reinvent ourselves.  Maybe I'll try being Martin McCool, and speak with an Irish accent, just to see how it works (I doubt it will).  We'll meet totally new people, people who are completely different from the people we've gotten used to.  I've lived in New Jersey all my life, and I've hung out primarily with my particular brand of nerd-friends for as long as I can remember.  Who knows how different I'll be, and the truth is that I probably won't be different at all, but the point is that I can at least try out being different.  Maybe I'll still hang out with nerds, but I'll at least try to hang out with different kinds of nerds.

All this is part of the reason I want to go to a bigger school.  And when I say bigger, I mean 5000+.  Our high school is around 2400 people, and that's only in 3 years.  If I'm feeling socially claustrophobic here, then I'd definitely like a bigger school when I go to college.  I understand though, the danger of getting lost in a big school.  Maybe that's part of the problem at EB.  It's hard to join different groups of friends, because I just don't know anybody in those groups.  Drama was doable because I knew I could hang out with Kat or Alex at least, and now I've found that I really like everyone in drama.  I'm sure that would be the case for a lot of things, but it's really difficult to just throw yourself into a group of strangers.

That's the beauty of college though: everyone starts out as strangers.  For the first year at least, there aren't groups, there aren't cliques.  You never have to worry about feeling like the odd person out in a group of people who are really close, because there aren't any groups like that yet!  I remember my first few days at UPenn last summer, I surprised myself with how outgoing I was.  It's amazingly easy to just go up to whoever you want and say hello.  No one knows your history, no one knows how weird or awkward you were when you were a little kid (because we all really were).

I guess though that I shouldn't wish Senior year away.  To be fair, I am enjoying it so far, even though it is a total pain sometimes.  And while I'm looking forward to change, I'm sure that in a year (or even a few months) I'll be wishing that I had a little more time to spend with these awesome people in EB.  For better or for worse, I'm stuck with you people for another year, so I might as well enjoy it!

And hey, even though we know how the movie will end, it can still be fun to watch.

Hair

As those who see me daily know, I recently stopped shaving for about a week.  I ended up with blonde fur all over my face (and yes, some of it was red. I am indeed related to Finn McCool).  Eventually I got tired of it (too itchy) and I shaved it off except for the sideburns, which I left to grow for the play.  Speaking of the play, I also haven't been allowed to cut my hair, because our costumer wants my hair to be longer.  My hair was needing a cut when she told me that, and now it's a lot longer than it's ever been.  It's fun, if a lot more work in the morning.  It's starting to get curly now, which is new.  I'm not sure whether I like it, but I do feel like it has a little more character than my short hair.

My beard experience was kind of interesting.  There was plenty of face-rubbing, some nice some whatever and some kind of awkward (Jon P. Chen!).  Ultimately though I shaved it off because I felt a little silly with facial hair when I still view myself as a kid.  I remember being on the bus once and seeing a kid get off who had scraggly weird facial hair and thinking "that kid should really not have a beard."  I was getting worried that I was turning into that kid, and since Saturday I was going around selling ads in the playbill for drama club I felt that I should look a little more professional.  Dealing with adults who could really grow beards when I had my blond and red fur (although it was definitely more than fuzz, I feel justified in calling it a beard except that it was light-colored) felt a little odd.  

Reactions to facial hair are different depending on who's reacting.  I felt that adults would probably think I looked like a silly kid trying to look older.  Guys kind of had mixed reactions, but mostly interested since most of my Asian friends (luckily in my opinion) don't grow much facial hair.  Some girls liked it, some girls though it looked dumb.  Shaving it off was a good decision, it had gotten too long and itchy for my taste.  Whether or not I'll be sporting in the future is something I'll have to see about, maybe if I get lazy again I'll let it come back.  Either way though, I'm definitely not going to be cutting my hair or shaving my sideburns any time soon, so it should be fun to see how those turn out!  

Blogsplosion!

So remember how I mentioned Anna over at Ordinary Asian and Indraneel at Indraneel the Senior?  Another awesome person has joined the blogging family!  Kat at Kattack!  It's an incredible and awesome BLOGSPLOSION!!

I'm related to Finn McCool

Recently I've been noticing a lot that I am really tall.  I'm about 6'2' or 6'3", which puts me pretty solidly above average height-wise, and I've probably got like another inch or two to grow.  I'm thinking 6'5" will be what I stop at.  My height comes from my mom I think, she's around 5'11", which is tall for a woman.  If you've read my blog you'll know her maiden name is McCool, and there's a giant in Irish myth named Finn McCool.  Her dad used to joke with her and tell her that they were related, and that's why she's so tall.  I kind of like that idea, that I'm related to a mythical hero, and I guess it would explain my height (although I think I'd probably be taller if I was descended from a giant (yeah sub-parentheses to point out the descended pun!)).

What I hear a lot though is that I don't actually look that tall from far away, like I'm built like a normal sized person, but that up close I'm all of a sudden (the? I never quite got this idiom) huge.  I like that I'm only tall when I want to be and I don't feel uncomfortably tall in most situations.  I don't have the tall guy slouch that I see on a lot of tall people, like they're trying to make themselves shorter, mostly because my mom would always yell at me for my posture (thanks mom).  Good posture adds like an inch to your height, and I feel like standing up straight changes your whole attitude and demeanor.  You can be more commanding and powerful, or protective and comforting.  However you choose to use it, good posture definitely makes you feel more confidant.  

Being tall is a big part of my personality (see, more puns!).  I think the reason I've been feeling that so much lately is because I've been hanging out with more short people lately through Drama Club (not that you guys are all short, but there's more underclassmen in that group than any of my other groups of friends.  Although some of you are really short).  In my other groups of friends I have taller friends (shout out to Pam Larsen because she asked me to!), and I've been thinking about how our height and other physical things contribute a lot to our personalities.  I feel like I have a tall guy personality, I'm confident and kind of aggressive, but in a kind of relaxed way.  I think we kind of are shaped by the kind of person we seem to be, we grow to fit the personality expectations created by the way we look.  You can look at a person and say "oh that person is a nerd" or "an introvert" or "a jock" or "popular" etc.  And generally we're right in those assessments, because I think they become sort of self-fulfilling prophecies.

If you look at little kids and the way they interact, I think there's a natural propensity for them to organize themselves according to surface assessments.  "Oh that kid looks like me" or "dresses like me."  And who we become friends with really shapes who we are.  Our friendships shape our value judgments and our personalities, and our friendships are shaped (at least initially) by surface judgments.  As humans I think we're a lot more superficial than we think.  It's something I noticed in doing things like Model Congress and Model UN.  You have large groups of kids trying to get things done, so it's a good chance to figure out the way we work.  It generally happens that some people become leaders, as would be expected, but surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) most of those leaders I feel are the more attractive people.  We're much more willing to approach attractive people, and for some reason we often defer to them.  If you look at leaders of countries or things like that I think that they're fairly often more attractive than average.

That same attractive bias was visible when I did NJSP interviews too.  It was a small group of kids, and I felt like the group that were ultimately picked were on average more than normally attractive.  It's not an absolute rule by any means, but more attractive people tend to be more confident and assertive.  Our attractive bias probably comes from our mate-selection instincts, so athletic looking people, attractive people, and people who seem smart (sometimes) have an advantage in groups of peers.

Generally I don't make normative statements, but I wonder whether this is something we should try to fix.  I think it's an inherent part of our nature and our society, but I think there are still ways around it.  Like I said, the attractive bias isn't an absolute rule, but we still rely a lot more than we think on initial impressions and superficial judgments.  It's not really something we can fix, but if we understand it we can try to avoid that kind of thinking for ourselves (although it's often still unavoidable), and we can also use it for ourselves.  I was taking an SAT course, and one of the tutor's points was that studying for the SAT is really valuable, because it's much easier to improve your SAT score than it is to improve your GPA, and in terms of college acceptance they mattered about the same.  Whether or not his point was valid, the same principle could be applied to our surface appearance.  There are a lot of things we can do to change our looks, some drastic and some minor, although a lot of them only require a little bit of effort.  I'm not saying that we *should* value surface appearances though, I think it's bad policy to be shallow, but I'm saying that *since* a lot of our society is very shallow, at least subconsciously, we should try to use that to our advantage.

No matter what, I still think we are heavily shaped by the expectations placed on us based on superficial things like physical appearance.  If we recognize that, I wonder if we can change that.  Every once in a while you'll meet someone who surprises you, who completely blows your expectations out of the water.  So while sometimes we get bad situations, there are some people who are able to move past that.  I don't claim to understand that, but I can at least say I admire it.

As for me, I don't think I can change the fact that I'm related to Finn McCool.  Tall is in my blood, so I have to be happy with it.  And as for shaping my personality, I am who I am and I don't think I can do much to change that.

Dog Walks

I told Anna this post would be about my height, but that's the next one I promise.  I just got back from a walk with my dog, and it is wicked cold outside.  But I actually like that.  The cold is really refreshing, makes the world seem crisp and sharp, in focus.  Summer heat just makes everything lazy and wet, everything seems like you have to move through a haze.  Maybe that's why Southerners do everything slower than we do up north (or so I hear).  Tonight was a special example too; there was no cloud cover and the moon was full and bright.  I felt like the sky was naked without the clouds, and I could see the constellations above me, plus a few clusters of small lights that I really found cool.

I really love walking my dog.  It's good thinking time, which I really don't get enough of.  Not that I don't think during the day, it's just that I really need a nice calm space to do really good thinking.  My problem is that I'm a very distractable person.  When I start thinking about or doing some particular thing everything else stops mattering.  It makes it really hard to remember to do particular things, like talk to a teacher or hand something in or go to a certain meeting.  In the hustle of school and life I focus on what's happening and I forget about the other things I have to do.  Walking the dog is a good time to decompress, take a little while and think or whistle along with some music (one of my favorite things to do, I love being able to whistle).  It's really relaxing, except for when you have to pull out a plastic bag and hold your breath.

Tonight I also saw a couple of kids walking on one of the streets near my house.  It was a group of guys, probably younger than me, just walking around I guess.  I didn't know what to say or how to interact with them as I passed them, so I just kind of smiled and nodded and kept walking.  There's this sort of general rule about the difficulty of greeting people.  There are three parameters for the awkwardness equation: age, level of knowing them, and how many people there are.  I might also throw in sex, but that doesn't impact it nearly as much as the other three things.

First is age: it's much harder to say hello to someone closer to you in age as a teenager, whether they're slightly older or slightly younger.  Adults aren't hard to say hello to, there's a kind of politeness protocol that makes it almost rude not to say hello.  Level of knowing the person you pass on the street, in the hallway, etc., also can change the way you acknowledge them.  If I know someone close in age to me well enough to talk to them one on one, I'm definitely likely to talk to them.  On the other end, if they're a complete stranger but look friendly or in a good mood I'll say hello too.  The hard part is the middle section, the people you kind of know, but haven't ever really talked to.  You know them too well to give them the stranger "hi" with a smile, but not well enough to say "Hi [name]."  The last one's kind of obvious, but the more people there are the harder it is to say hello.  You're unsure of who to make eye contact with, so you're forced to sort of awkwardly look away.  It's made worse if they're a group of people talking to each other.  You feel you shouldn't interrupt their conversation, and you generally feel sort of outnumbered if your alone.  That said, if I even have one other person with me it suddenly becomes a lot easier to say hello to people.  It's probably a power thing, a sort of instinctual reaction.

Long hallways are the worst.  You see the person coming, it's unavoidable, and you have to somehow avoid eye contact or you have to time your eye contact just right so that you acknowledge and say hello to them just as you get within a few feet of them.  If you say hello or make eye contact too early, you have that awkward few seconds where you're walking past each other but neither party knows what to say.  A conversation is out of the question, you're both going somewhere, but the "hi" didn't do enough to fill that awkward silence.  I want to be more friendly though.  I like putting myself out there sometimes, smiling at the stranger and saying hello.  I always enjoy when it happens to me.  Even if you can't say hello to everyone you pass, I always make it a policy to at least smile.  When you look happy you're a lot more approachable, and I think that happy people are more attractive too.  Plus it just feels good to get a smile, and when they're genuine I think they're infectious.

Gloves are always a good idea on dog walks by the way.  My hands are still stiff.

Long time coming

Wow so I haven't posted in far too long.  All this month!  That's what being a senior does to you, free time is consumed by college essays.  So I have a lot of posts to, er.. post tonight.  I've got two Board of Ed meetings posts to do (which I might irresponsibly compound into one) plus some fun personal posts (which I might do first).

So this post has got to thank my friend Anna over at As Told by Anna Banana.  She just started her blog because my friend Indraneel over at Indraneel the Senior recommended she try it out.  She knew about my blog, and so were now all awesome blog-buddies.  Plus I needed that kick in the pants.

Oh by the way, I just thought I'd mention, I'm watching Lie to Me right now (amazing show by the way) and I just noticed something that I found very cool.  The whole premise is that he can read peoples' faces, and see when they're lying, and he's edgy and fun.  Altogether pretty well done.  What I noticed though is his office.  It has a really distinct glass motif, and almost all of the walls are see through.  It's a really good tie in with what he does, you can't hide when you're with him, physically or psychologically.  Cool stuff I think.  On to my first real post of the night!