Category: doooooom!

There Might Be Something To This

On one of my free days while in the world class city of Singapore, The Good Man and I had occasion to visit a little touristy spot called the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum in Singapore’s Chinatown district.

It is a profoundly beautiful place, filled to the gills with statues of various forms of the Buddha.

Along one wall there was a display of what they called guardian Buddhas.

So, based on your sign under the Chinese Zodiac, there was a Buddha assigned to be your guide.

Ok, fair enough. Each guardian was rendered in a beautiful, colorful statue and surrounded by tiny Buddha statues.

So while I don’t always believe in stuff like the zodiac, Chinese or otherwise, I figure if there’s a benevolent entity who is going to be on the look out for my often troublesome self, well, why not give that at least a passing nod, hey?

I walked down the line of Buddhas, all gazing out into space, showing different hand and tool configurations.

All are beautiful. Kind looking. Strong. Compassionate.

Then I came across the Buddha that represents me:




Yeah. I, um, called him the Red Ass Buddha until The Good Man told me to cut it out since that’s disrespectful. I said most Buddhists I know are very calm and have a great sense of humor. He wasn’t buying it so I stopped.

But look at that face! The snaggly teeth. The blue skin. The stick in his hand and what is that? A cat-o-nine tails or something? And the flames? Oh the flames!

My goodness. He’s quite a high maintenance looking Buddha. It was sort of odd to see this guy as just the day prior I had well and truly ripped one of my under performing suppliers a brand new pooping chute. I had later felt a couple moments of remorse about it.

Then I saw this guy and was like “No, I was right to do what I did. Red Ass Buddha would approve.”

So I snapped a photo and put some money in the donation box under his area.

Then The Good Man and I moved on to the next guy. The guy who represents The Good Man:




Yeah. That calm guy. Hands all up in a mudra. Mellow colors in a shell behind him. Thoughtful.

That’s my man. To a tee.

Looking at these two statues sitting side by side became sort of a metaphor for our relationship.

Me all red ass and reaching out with that bapping stick to whack some folks around. The Good Man all calm, thoughtful and serene. The yin to my yang.

Maybe, perhaps, kinda sorta there might be something to this whole Chinese zodiac thing?



Images Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the far right column of this page. Taken with an iPhone4s and the Camera+ app.



I’m an alien. I’m a legal alien.

I’m a New Mexican in Singapore.

What a whirlwind visit I’ve had here in Southeast Asia.

I think I’ve lived a year in a week and on Sunday, my last day in residence, I have a lot of thoughts going through my mind.

I have had some of the best food of my life. I have sweated more than I thought my pores were capable of. I’ve felt more at home than anywhere I’ve visited. I’ve felt more alien than anywhere I’ve ever visited.

I’m not sure where to even begin speaking about it all and rest assured over the next weeks and months it will slowly come through my writing. Or, perhaps, even years. My mind and Muse need to ruminate over it all.

But let’s get down to basics.

After eight days and twelve thousand miles away from home, I need some Mexican food.

On Friday as I visited with my ex-pat friend now living in Bali, we agreed that Mexican is just one thing you don’t get here. You can find just about everything else, but Mexican is a no.

While shopping the enormous Mustafa Market in the Little India district of Singapore (it truly is a store where you can find anything), I happened to stumble across this:




While Old El Paso is my least favorite brand, it’s at least something, right? Salsa! Here! Yes!

Only.

No.

Turn over the jar and you see this:





Made in Spain? For General Mills Switzerland?

Remember that old Pace commercial: “New York City!?! Get a rope…”

Yeah. Times a thousand.

I shan’t be sampling the Spain/Swiss salsa. I’ll simply have to enjoy another day of chili crab, delicious laksa, chicken rice and everything else wonderful here and then next week I’ll see about getting my chile meter back up to green.



Misspelled, in Any Language

Ok, I gotta vent out a beef I have with the internet.

While it’s a wild and wonderful place, it’s also hell on the English language.

Ok, let me step back, I do enjoy a good LOL Speak as much as the next guy.

But that’s all in jest, right? I like to torture the English language once in a while myself. I love words and putting them together in different ways and seeing what happens.

I can make fun of the language because I respect it so much.

Here’s the cranky part…over the past week, I’ve seen five, yes honestly five different misapplications of the word voilà.

Now, someone might quibble with me that the word voilà is French and not English so what’s the big deal? Who cares if it gets misued?

I do.

Like avant-guarde, bon voyage, cul-de-sac, critique, and faux pas before it, the word voilà has been adopted into the English language.

And so when I see it spelled wah la, walla, wall ah, waalaa, whala and other variations, I end up grinding my back molars into dust.*

I don’t know why, of all the poor grammar and misspellings out there in the wild web, this one bothers me so much. But it does.

So for those who wish to use the word voilà but can’t seem to sort the spelling and that little accent thing over the a, might I suggest the following internet meme words for your use:

Bam
Badabing!
Blammo
Bazinga
(ok, moving out of b expressions….)
Shazam
Ta-da
Zoiks

And many others. Or hell, make something up. I respect something made up so much more than a gross misspelling of an innocent word.

Suffer the little letters, come unto correctly spelled words.






*A phrase liberally borrowed from my rock star cousin and used without his permission



On The Grid

I love this article simply because of the headline:

How Your Brain Is Like Manhattan

The Good Man and I have long debates about cities set on a grid. The very town where I grew up, Albuquerque, has a beautiful easy to navigate grid. I always figured it was due to the city’s start as a military town that roads are well organized into either north/south or east/west.

So simple. Easy. Really tough to get lost.

I gripe about the Bay Area and these roads that are all angled off to Joneses, changing directions midway and stopping suddenly. For example, there is an exit off of 101 where you have to choose the north or south bound exit. However…the road actually runs east west.

Combine this with California’s lack of mile markers and only sporadic use of street signs and I can go from zero to bonkers in about three seconds.

One of the many reasons I love Manhattan is that it’s set up on a grid. Navigating makes sense! A hayseed like me had zero trouble in the big city knowing where to go and how to get there. I never, not once, got lost while in Manhattan. And if I’m not worried about how to get there, then I relax and enjoy the journey.

The Good Man, on the other hand, has a brain that’s a lot more fluid than mine. Where I’ll draw a straight line, he’ll make expressionist art. He don’t need no stinking grid roads, he has a powerful innate sense of direction and an even stronger sense of joie de vivre when it comes to getting lost. He sees getting lost as a fun adventure. I see it as a teeth gritting bit of fear and misery.

Meanwhile both my brain and my road preferences tend to be a little more like the gorgeous city of Manhattan.






Image from Grush Hour.


Old Technology Gets a New Boost

Somewhere back in the early 2000’s, right around the time that Apple came out with video chat, the use of desktop video conferencing took off. Or, I should say, tried to take off.

I was commanded by my leadership at the time to procure a camera (laptops didn’t come equipped with cameras like they do now) and to begin having meetings in video form.

And I did. For a while.

It was a new toy and we all played with it and then, we got bored. Suddenly no one was logged in. Cameras were quietly disconnected and stowed in a drawer. And we went back to the usual phone call, chat or email way of communicating.

Fast forward to this week. My new leadership has commanded that I procure a camera (because our company security demands that the one on my laptop be disabled) and sign up for a brand spanking new desktop video conferencing service.

Per the long winded training I was required to complete, using this “new” technology will promote productivity (oh really? When we’re wasting precious minutes in meetings fiddling with cameras and asking “can you see me ok?”), enhances cost savings (because I just spent $100 of the company’s money to buy the “approved” camera) and reduces carbon emissions (except when I’m taking antibiotics).

The Good Man and I have been debating why video conferencing doesn’t catch on. While it’s nice to see the other person in a conversation, it’s not natural. Everyone just feels a little awkward.

Last evening, I was watching an edition of BBC World News and as they went to field reporters in many far flung countries, it became quite clear that they were using Skype or something similar to do these televised reports. No more camera and a camera operator.

As I watched these reporters, I began to realize why video conferencing is awkward. No one knows what to do with their eyes. Instead of face to face, eye to eye conversations, you get a lot of shifty eyes, and shifty eyes make for uncomfortable conversations.

The most natural fix for this is to look the camera square in the eye.





However, that’s natural for the people on the other end, for the speaker, it feels weird to speak to a lens. You are inclined to look at the screen to see the person you are talking to. That’s how humans communicate.

So you get this instead:





And then, of course, there are the multitaskers. Not only are they not looking in the eye of the camera, but they are also not looking at the screen where the other image is located.

It’s something like this:





And this:





And this:





*sigh*

Well, whether I think this is a good idea or not, I’ve been commanded to video conference, both in my one to one sessions with my boss and in our staff meetings.

And so I will.

This, however, severely limits my ability to wake up fifteen minutes before my 8am staff meetings, shamble down the hall, fire up my home machine and take the meeting on the phone with frazzled hair, still in my nightgown, while eating breakfast.

Damn you UK-based Boss Man! : shakes fists toward London :

(I’m reminded of an episode of the Jetsons where Judy had a videophone mask for those very bad hair days. I need that.)





Image is a screen grab from a YouTube clip of the Jetsons




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