Look what I found

I was going through several of my old journals today, just the ones from the past few years, reflecting on how I've grown and who I've become since starting college and my adult life. And after finding this poem I wrote while bored at work one day, I realize that I need to brush up on my vocabulary! (Although I think I was studying for the GRE at this time, to be fair). And really, I need more art, adventure, and creativity in my life. I mean, after all who doesn't!

Friday, June 12, 2009

The city stands a mile high above
and Man has made his Babylon today.
To reach the heav'ns, to prove perfection's lie
- an ephemeral state of seeking out
the higher faster stronger ways for all.

Pedantic airs, occluding love and worse:
ignoring nature's diatribe to Us,
the World - Our human taciturnity,
a non-response to the dear mother earth.
Oh, fate and destiny will have revenge.

Man lives, a microcosm of all life.
Eternity all emotion consumes.
To love with no reciprocating force,
One man stands high above adversity.
What pain, what anguish shows us now, the Way.

But one Man makes all hearts to suffer more,
that one Man, he can't Love to save a life.
How One man loves, one Man cannot, He loves,
but not one Girl. Attenuated here
she falls away, for ignorance is bliss.

one Girl stands high above the city miles
and miles into the sky. She now looks down
to see one Man, but Oh, she sees the World.
Come down to meet One man who teaches Love.
one Man and Babylon have been destroyed.

Personal Space

Okay, one of my favorite professors posted this Freakonomics article on facebook, and I could not resist the urge to comment on it. A good portion of the American population has at one time or another flown in an airplane. And as times have gotten rough for the major airline corporations in recent years, it seems that someone brilliantly thought that decreasing the space between rows in order to add a few extra seats to sell for revenue was a great idea. I have flown a fair amount in my lifetime thanks to the fact that I grew up on an island smack dab in the middle of the largest body of water in the world with all my relatives residing tens of thousands of miles away, and I like to think that I know a thing or two about how airplanes have changed over the last twenty one years. And one of the biggest changes I have noticed is in the decreased amount of personal space alloted to each customer that rides an airplane (outside of first class, of course). I used to be able to comfortably rest my arms on my tray table and lay my head on them to nap on longer flights. But in the past several years I have not been able to do this (nor have I grown). And as this personal space has gradually been taken away from me and from any other normal patron of the airline industry, I have increasingly noticed and been offended by other patrons, particularly those sitting in front of me, who decide to recline their chairs, taking away even more of my personal space on those flights. And as luck would have it, it seems like the only person who decides to recline their chair in the area I choose to sit always happens to be in front of me.

Personal bubbles are real, people! And when you invade someone else's bubble on an airplane by reclining your chair, in order to retain a comfortable sense of personal space, that person then has to recline their chair, starting a chain reaction. This is where the Freakonomics article brought in the question of altruism.

I think the choice to recline one’s airplane seat is a great example of natural altruistic tendencies. Reclining one’s own seat increases his comfort, but only at the expense of the person directly behind him. Then, in order for that person behind to increase his own comfort level back to what it was before the person in front reclined back into his space, he must now recline back into the space of the person behind him at the expense of that person’s comfort, and so on. An experiment observing this behavior may be a better measuring stick of natural human altruism tendencies than the Dictator game or similar games since the behavior could be observed in real time and without the behaviors associated with knowing one is being observed in a laboratory.

Altruism is a natural human tendency. But selfishness is as well (i.e. survival of the fittest). And when individual capital is at stake, when a person has paid for their seat on a plane, does that make them feel entitled to that certain amount of personal space so as to get mad or irritated when someone tries to take it away from them? Is altruism sometimes lost in instances like this because we are fighting for something we paid for, a specific product we expected to receive? I think this definitely has a lot to do with it. Although sometimes seat recliners are just irritating on the basis of decreased personal space alone.


So then why is it that people are so particular about the atmosphere that they travel in? Sure, some plane rides are longer than others and it is definitely nice to be able to retain a comfortable amount of personal space when you have to sit in the same spot for 9 or 10 hours. However, I have seen these same selfish instincts kick in on all sorts of public transit having been a regular patron of the Honolulu and the Los Angeles Metro transportation systems for years and years and years. On the bus, people want to keep to themselves. Of course, if you strike up conversation people are more than willing to share a conversation or two with you in general; I learned this from an interactive transportation planning homework assignment I had to do for Mike Woo's class (former City Councilman in LA). But for the most part, people are happy to be left alone when they are in transit. They choose the seat or the spot that they view to be the best that they can get at the time they board the vehicle, and they plug in their headphones, read their books and magazines, or nod off in their own little worlds not expecting to be bothered by anyone else. And when they are bothered beyond the occasional casual conversation, it is irritation. Almost a violation of a social norm. But on buses, you can't recline your seats and invade someone else's space in that sense. It really takes a crazy person talking to an imaginary being (which has happened several times in my personal experience) to cause the kind of discomfort that the reclining of a seat causes on a plane. 


But knowing this, am I (or even are you) going to stop reclining your seat when the person in front of you pushes their seat down into your lap? Alas, I don't think I will. I won't be the first to do it, but because I was raised in this fine country full of individual rights and personal property, that tiny bit of space is mine by right when I purchased the plane ticket, so I think I will continue to reclaim my space by reclining also when (not if, but surely when) this happens to me again. I feel guilty, but what can you do? Where does the cycle stop? In such an individualistic nation, we are accustomed to having a certain amount of personal space, and without it life is uncomfortable. And boy does comfort mean a lot to us all.

I Love Maps!

I've been spending a lot of time this week cleaning my room and putting up posters and pictures I've been meaning to decorate with all year. And it's almost crazy how half the things in my apartment have to do with maps and travel! I have recently come to the realization that I am obsessed with seeing the world. Geography is my one true, undying love. Travel is my passion. There is nothing that would make me happier to see these places for myself and to imagine the history that has taken place there. Travel combines four of my absolute favorite things: geography, history, cities, and adventure.

To give you a sense of exactly how obsessed I am, here's a brief overview of some of the things I have in my room as proof.  I have a huge national geographic map I've had for a long time which shows where I've been throughout the world. There's a couple hand drawn maps of the human features of the Greater Los Angeles Area (which even shows the LA Temple! - see image to the right) and of the World. There's a framed copy of a historical map of Oahu painted in watercolor just above those next to my bookshelf, and there's a wall sticker of the London skyline spanning the entire wall above that. I have little trinkets from trips I have taken on my bookshelf including a Mardi Gras mask from NOLA, a small statue of liberty toy from NYC, an Aztec wall hanging from Mexico, and a mini hand painted fan from Chiang Mai, Thailand. There is a wall sticker of the Golden Gate Bridge on the other side of the room along with my collection of smashed pennies from places I've been on a small wall shelf near my small, wooden poster of the Eiffel Tower. I just put up a beautiful copy of this historic map of important places in Paris (see below), and each year I buy a travel themed calendar of a place I have been longing to go. This year, it's "1000 Places to See Before You Die." I won't spend any more time boring you with more details of what I have up right now, but you get the picture, right?

I never realized how passionate I was about these things until I was dying because I might have to reschedule my first ever trip to Europe - again! Both because of high airfares and a lack of travel buddies. It seems like such a silly thing to be upset over, but seriously my entire life has led up to this obsession. My family has never been wealthy enough to truly take a vacation so all my life I have fantasized about what it would be like to visit the canals of Venice or to walk the original square mile of the city of London. As a kid I loved reading random articles in the Encyclopedia and I always stopped to read about different countries and the people who made them famous. Czechoslovakia is one of the most memorable articles I have ever read. I was very young, but it was cool to recognize how the world is constantly changing around me at that age as I knew the country had split in two since that Encyclopedia was published thanks to my first snazzy map of the world given to me for being a member of National Geographic Kids' young explorer team (I was chosen to do cool activities they sent me each month, probably for research and advertising purposes). Geography and history came alive to me through imagining what it would be like to travel to those places and to relive those times.

Visiting Jackson Square in NOLA

I suppose it also did not help that my dad works at the airport and used to bring home tourist magazines for us kids to play with all the time. I loved looking at the pictures of hotels imagining what it would be like to stay there and do all the things tourists did in Hawaii. I never knew what it was like to be a tourist at home for a long, long time (mostly because it's expensive!). Even though I have been to Thailand and Ohio several times growing up, we never really stayed in hotels or acted as tourists ever. So I kept dreaming of places like New York City, London, and Versailles. And the more I could not travel, the more I wanted it and the bigger my dreams became. In the tenth grade, I even joined a state student government program called the Secondary Student Conference because I wanted to stay in a hotel for three days in Honolulu during the event. Sure, I loved the work I did in student council. It paved the way for new (but smaller) passions and causes in my life such as education policy and urban planning. But what I loved the most about my new "passions" was that I kept finding ways to travel for free to new and exciting places. I fundraised most of the money for an alternative spring break trip to Mexico. I received academic funding from USC to attend a planning conference in New Orleans. BYU recently paid my way to Seattle for a sociology conference. And in high school, the state paid for me to go to Philadelphia for a national student council conference. I am proud at how savvy I have been at finding ways to see new places and experience new cultures. But I still can't wait for the day that I can experience leisure travel. Hopefully that day will come soon.

I have only recently come to realize this obsession that I have had for most of my life, and it really makes me wonder how it is that people develop passions for things like travel or animals or art or anything at all? Isn't it such an odd thing, contingent on life experiences and the circumstances we are born into? But most people do have something that they are passionate about. Is it something we need in order to make life meaningful as humans? Are these passions modern society's way of replacing the fanatic, obsessive sense of religion people once had until a few hundred years ago? Durkheim might have something fascinating to say on the subject of such passions replacing the old kind of religiosity that was central to life in the past. Sure, people can be and are religious these days. But really I think he was talking about the presence of something big that governs one's life. For instance, someone whose passion is dancing might have a life that revolves around their rehearsal schedules and competitions. It almost dictates their life schedule, and they need it to be happy. For me, I am constantly planning a new trip, whether or not it is realistic, trying to see if I can make Europe or any other sort of travel happen. And now that I live in the mainland, it has been awesome to take road trips! Eisenhower's highway system has given us so much power to travel and access to the rest of the 48 states. The biggest issue with travel, however, is that I don't like to travel alone. What's the good of travel if you don't have someone to share those unique experiences with? In the end, we are all social beings after all, and our passions have to play into that.