Speak of the future...

Just a little after writing yesterday's post I happened to check the BBC News website, and lo and behold: US 'no longer technology king'. So it's happened already. I wonder how long it will take until the reality sinks in here. One day, there will be a lot of wounded national pride here - especially because this is the only Western country I've been in that, well, has any significant amount of national pride outside the soccer world cup. National pride is very last century and, frankly, not very compatible with globalization. It may be very easy to say for a person who regards citizenship as a red tape game, but it's true. Nation-states probably won't disappear, but their importance is declining. Fortunately for America, not everyone is blind to this problem. Curtis Stalbank makes fun of the implications of nationalism in the 21st century in his op-ed I'm Prepared To Give My Life For This Or Any Country on The Onion.

In a sidebar to the technology article, I saw that the BBC reports that Nordics show way in sex equality. Yet another matter that the US is assuming they are leading the world in, when they are in fact in need of playing catch-up and don't even realize it. As the Swedes would say: Högmod går före fall.

Generation e - or x?

I've been listening to a radio station I created on Pandora Internet Radio from the song Encore Un Fois by Sash!. (It was a huge hit in the 90s in Europe.) So, I've been getting a mix of trance and goa, mostly, and listening to that while calculating things from some data has made me think about The Future and how it's imagined in different cultures. I come back to this from time to time, because as a young global person it's hard not to notice how people imagine the future and how they see their role in it may differ a lot from how I see it. When I listen to electronic music in general, whether it be trip-hop, trance or drum and bass, I feel like I'm striding into a new global world that will overturn the world of my parents. I feel like I belong to a new generation that understands the globalized world and globalized technology better than my parents' generation did, and we're moving the world in new directions. My work is to discover new things. To discover new science, I am also seeing the world socially in a new way. I feel like a vanguard of change. But when I look around, I don't feel connected to those my age around me. They don't seem to be interested in new ideas and visions of the world, nor aware of that the world has changed in the first place.

It's striking to me how there is an almost absence of ideas among young people in America of what the future will be like. No bold visions of instant metal connectivity to the internet via implanted wireless cards in your head. No huge LCD screens in public. No visions of a Brave New World that we are building. And no alternative vision. People - young and old alike - seem to lumber on in some kind of certainty that tomorrow will be like today, except perhaps will bigger televisions and smaller mobiles. No one seems too aware that those smaller mobiles will likely be developed outside the US and then imported here, nor that the best mobile telephony standards weren't developed here. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that technical vocabulary isn't used very much here, not even for something as commonplace as mobiles. Very, very few Americans know what an SMS is. They say "text message". Very few of them know what a SIM card is, nor what SIM cards have to do with GSM and (not) CDMA. American mobile companies' websites don't even use these terms - multiple band phones are referred to as "international phones", making it difficult to know what you're buying. Even calling them to ask is difficult, because the service representatives don't always know either. I've never heard anyone mention - in conversations or in news broadcasts - anything about 3G.

Many of my friends listen to the same music that their parents listened to. There's nothing wrong with that, per se. It's good music that has stood the test of time better than I expect many bands and songs currently getting airplay on the radio here to. However, there is no new youth movement. Without raves and rave culture, their parents know and understand everything that they do. This generation isn't creating its own voice. There is no new dream to replace the dying American Dream. No one plans for a future where we travel more and more. Both generation e and the Erasmus generation are missing in action. Young people in Europe and Australia, and to at least some extent Asia, are creating a new vision around PLUR (Peace Love Understanding Respect) and meeting to celebrate it in clubs and at raves worldwide. Americans are left out. Indeed, many Americans, especially older ones, seem to view the world through the lens of that it's still the '70s, and those damn hippies are still around. People who care about the environment must be damn communist hippies, not rational (and often conservative!). Very little transformation of that pop culture imagery has occurred. Americans overall seem very blind to just how much the world has changed, in so many ways, since the 70s. They seem almost stuck in the past.

Sometimes it feels like the winds of change are blowing all around, except here, where the air is stagnating. While young people elsewhere area learning how to wind surf, people here are suntanning. Suntanning can be nice and all, but there's only so long I can lie on a beach. I can't help but get the feeling that when the waves and winds of globalization hit the suntanners on the beach, it will be a very cold shock indeed. It seems like when people here get hit by spray from the waves, they think it's raining and ask for an umbrella. The day it is no longer possible to think it's just rain, and it's painfully obvious a tide is coming in, what will they do? There's no vision now, how can you construct one while you're busy scrambling in suprise?

Relationships to food

This morning, I stopped by the new postdoc's office to offer some settling-in support. He just arrived from Germany, where he got his Ph. D., although he's Spanish. His wife is here in the chemistry department, so he wanted to come here, and my advisor is old friends with his advisor. I mentioned not bothering to eat American food, and he said they'd already reached that conclusion and are eating at home, just like me. I recently saw dealing with American food likened to shellshock. That's probably not far off the mark. It's definetly a shock when you first come here/come back here. It's almost like a caricature, with mountains of food served on serving-platter-sized plates and half of the menu fried. Supermarkets are huge, like the Americans themselves, and carry meter after shelf meter of processed and frozen food. You actually have to find the fresh foods among them. Then your eyes glaze over, and you only see the fruit and vegetable, bread, meat and dairy sections and consider the shelves between them transport stretches. But every so often, something happens to revive the original shock, like eating out at a restaurant and being faced with so much food that eating feels like a chore or you plain lose your appetite. Sometimes I feel like a child in a world where everything is adult-sized, because living here is like being a child again, where everything is too big for you, and you need special kid-sized versions of everything. Except I'm not going to 'grow up' and find everything sized just right this time. Whoever said that Chinese are obsessed with fresh food must have been an American, because I've never seen a country so uninterested in fresh food. (I thought Chinese supermarkets carry a lot of preserved and frozen food.)

I didn't have leftovers to bring for lunch today, and I forgot about it until this morning. After missing two buses, I was so hungry I went out to eat, albeit grudgingly, because I'm tired of American junk food and didn't want to pay a lot of money for something I don't like. I walked another route than I usually do, and walked past a Chinese restaurant called 萬家香, I guess roughly translated into English as 'The fragrance of ten thousand home kitchens', and had a look at the menu. I saw 黑椒牛肉 (black pepper beef), which I have been looking for here but haven't seen yet. I didn't see 魚香茄字 (I've seen it translated as fragrant eggplant, but the literal translation is fish-smelling eggplant - fish-smelling sauce doesn't really smell like fish to me, but it's one of those common fixed-recipe sauces you can put on all kinds of things), which is one of my favorite dishes, but I figured they can probably make it whether it's on the menu or not. It was in a small, unassuming strip-mall-like set of storefronts - the American version of a hole in the wall. So I went in and ordered black pepper beef. I got the usual compliments on my Chinese, and the usual "You speak like a Beijing person!" comment. (I add 兒 (like an American 'r') to many words that don't have them in pure putonghua (gong1 yuar2 公元兒 instead of gong1 yuan2 公元, mer 門兒 instead of men 門), and use forms of words that are Beijing dialect like zhar4 這兒 and nar3 哪兒 instead of zhe4 這 and na3 哪) I asked if there was tea, and there was. As I sat down, I noticed I was the only Westerner in the restaurant. And then I felt at home.

I got free soup and my food was called out in Chinese, not English. It was a distant proximity. America and China were mixed. It was an American hole in the wall where I was the 外国人 wai4guo2ren2 (foreigner - but its reference point in Chinese is always China for me, whereas in English it's not so clear, even though 'foreigner' in English has taken on some of the connotation of the Chinese word for me). Free soup for Chinese skills, and only the real foreigner - who walked in later - got their food called in English.

I realized while eating my food that a 外国人 is exactly what I was there. Not American, not Swedish, not European. My Chinese tells people I'm from Beijing, not where the genes for my pale face and tall height came from. I've thought about this in China as well. I broadcast my third-cultureness in being a foreigner who speaks putonghua with a Beijing accent. Everyone knows I'm not like them, but I'm not like other foreigners either. It's a very comfortable place to be.

A Day in a TCKs Family Life

I often eat breakfast on the phone with my mother, because both of our jobs are independent to the point of being lonely sometimes. This morning, my father was still at home, because he had a flight to catch mid-morning and figured he could save time by working from home instead of going in to the office. He was in a talkative mood and asked to talk to me. I told him about my automatic coffeemaker, because he's stubbornly insisted on brewing coffee the old-fashioned way, he mentioned he flew over the city I live in yesterday and how convenient those flight times were, we talked about what kinds of financial holdings outside the US you need to report to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service, the American tax agency), whether the divedends from my mutual funds in Europe are big enough to need reporting (which I didn't think, because I've never seen any information on that I should, and they're not large enough for me to be taxed for them locally), and then he said he had to go to Peru, and he handed the phone back to my mother.

Global Culturati Community and Forums

Last night, I found an interesting online community called Global Culturati. It's small right now, but it has message boards, something I wish my page had. When I first found out I was a TCK, I had an intense need to talk to someone else who was. Perhaps this can be like a Usenet group for talking and connecting, but one that people might actually find. I hope the community continues to grow and discussions develop further. I joined up. Let's see where this goes.

Waging Peace

The Globalist has reprinted parts of a speech by de Villepin to the UN Security Council before the war in Iraq began. I wish the US would have listened. The US is dangerously out of step with changing global realities that they are both subject to and help shape. They also seem to have forgotten - or never learned in the first place - the lessons that Europe learned the hard way in the past 500 years or so, especially in the 20th century. Europe shed volumes of blood and tears to learn the value of peace and of diplomacy and negotiation, and the impossibility of waging a humane war. There is no need for the Iraqi people to teach the Americans with their own blood and tears the same lesson.

The US military could be a wonderful, positive force in the world. If it were used to save civilian lives in places like northern Uganda, to save children from being child soldiers, to save women from rape, to enforce the arrest warrants of the International Criminal Court to bring perpetrators of crimes against humanity and genocide to justice in a legal due process, its capacity for death could be used in the most constructive way possible. Alas, this will never happen as long as nation-states and their military organizations conceive of themselves as agents only of their own national good.

Every country needs to understand that our fates are all linked together, and we need to behave accordingly. Some countries have understood this better than others, but none as fully as I think is needed in the future.

Concert traditions

I recently attended a concert by the National Philharmonic of Russia, conducted by Vladimir Spivakov. The highlight of the evening was Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18. I played that piece as a second violin in an orchestra that was a fusion of professional and student players, and it was a blast. Being there, hearing the piece that I've played myself (but not nearly as well as the National Philharmonic), made me think of concert traditions here and there.

When we lived in Sweden, I learned how to play the violin and eventually became the concertmaster of our school symphony orchestra. My parents, my mother especially, considered theater plays, operas and concerts as Events To Go To, and brought me along when I was old enough to sit still and at least somewhat appreciate it. As a result, I was brought up in the cultural tradition of especially symphonic orchestras in the Western tradition. Or perhaps I should say European tradition. I have noticed before that outside Europe, in or out of Western countries, people do not have the same set of cultural rules for proper behavior as I do. Now, Sweden never has been one of the great centers of cultural influence in Europe, and for most of its history has been somewhat of a backwater, really. If one can acquire that set of rules for proper behavior there, odds are good they're general for Europe.

When I walk into a concert venue, I feel underdressed unless I am wearing something significantly nicer than I would wear to school. Now that I'm older and am generally expected (more in my head than by my actual American environment) to dress better than as a child, the difference is less marked, but it remains. Men are lucky; they can go from work to a concert, since suits are suits. But I should be wearing high-heeled shoes, either fine pants or a skirt, a blouse, and some jewelry. A dress is even better. (It should be noted this is difficult during large parts of the year in Sweden, where anything presentable when it comes to shoes is miserably too cold to wear outside - so one has to bring two pairs of shoes. One just cannot clomp into a concert hall in winter boots of the sort that are actually practical in Sweden in winter.) When I walk in, I straighten up and hold my head high.

Elsewhere, I can slouch or have unbrushed hair while obsessing over some calculation at work. In a concert hall, I cannot. One must speak discreetly, exercise one's best manners, and carry oneself with some pride and dignity. It's Eurocentric ideas of proper behavior and dress full blast. Children are scolded or corrected when they slouch, when they put their feet up on the seat in front of them or when they speak loudly. And here, I know from an honest examination of myself, there is little tolerance for other customs. Children and foreigners are only excused for their natural ignorance for so long. Failure to behave according to the proper norms will result in social outsidership. To the extent that the norms change, they change slowly, as modernity changes reality. Entrance to this world is contingent on the right dress and the right behavior. Those children who do not learn will slowly be rejected as they become older as being of lower class or as a little uncultured. Foreigners who do not learn will be declared resistant to integrate or a little ignorant, regardless of skin color - Americans in shorts and t-shirts need not apply. And those children who never had a chance to learn will certainly be looked upon as lower-class adults, no matter how much money they have - at least while they're in the concert hall.

My mother has often whispered to me about someone else's improper behavior to make clear that I should not do the same. The negative implications of not knowing how to behave never needed explaining. It was in her voice, and others' faces. What to wear, when to applaud, how to applaud - it's all culturally transmitted as part of a system of social codes to use to communicate in a concert hall.

People with different cultural and socioeconomic perspectives may have different opinions on this. Personally, I am torn. Perhaps this is one of the most difficult issues for me to consider from a global perspective, because this concert culture is absent elsewhere, and I'm not sure what an appropriate equivalent tradition might be. I have only grown up with the European view, with nothing to counter it.

On one hand, this is a European tradition. On the other, European classical music is known, played and studied worldwide. At what point should what was a local tradition change into a global tradition? At what point does considering a previously local tradition a global one become imperialism? At what point does continuing to consider a previously local tradition that is spreading elsewhere local become imperialism? I do not know the answers. I'm not sure I know how to start answering. In part, this is because I know I do not know non-Europeans' relationship to classical European music, not even the Americans'. I will never fully know, because I know the European relation all too well. (Including the disinterest that most young people have in it.)

My best impression is that in the States, very few people are raised with anything resembling my experience of playing in a symphony orchestra in high school. Instead, as with so many things European and/or old, it seems to be something Americans use to declare themselves "cultural." I recently ordered coffee from Gevalia, who clearly has an excellent cultural advisory team for North American operations, because in their coffee catalogue they do not only sell coffee - but all kinds of other things (that Gevalia has no expertise in making, I have to note), including something called "Coffee Treats Recipe and Music Set", described as "A delightful duo: luscious recipes to serve with coffee and music to enjoy while baking them. Includes a CD (made in USA) of Bach's Branderburg Concertos Nos. 2,3,4 and 5, with recipes for ginger scones, lemon poppyseed bread, health nut muffins and more, a total of 16 recipes (imported)." Now, I've never been served lemon poppyseed bread anywhere but the US, and I certainly don't know a lot of Europeans who spend their days listening to Bach and making little coffee treats. The most European thing about this set is that it includes recipes insted of mixes or ready-made cookies. Gevalia is already pumping Americans' perception of anything European as "refined" for all that it's worth. I can't blame them, from a profit point of view. However, it may say more about Americans' ideas about European cultural traditions than it does about Europe.

At the concert and ballet performances I've been to in the US, it's obvious that many or most of the audience do not feel the finger of shame pointing at them for improper behavior. From the program selections, it is also evident that many or most of the audience has not been exposed to symphonic music or ballet to any great extent. I've gotten the impression that audiences here go for light entertainment or to be able to claim that they are "cultural" and/or "refined". This is rather ironic to me, as in the process of trying to be refined they are busy excommunicating themselves from the European tradition they are trying to belong to. It is also clear that there isn't enough people - at least not where I have lived, but I hope it is different in at least New York - that know the European traditions to pass them on to audiences and performers. There is nothing wrong with not knowing the European tradition - after all, where would one learn it other than Europe? - but pretending to be part of it is just silly. The European concert tradition isn't very flexible. Either you conform to it - and accept the judgements of others for improper behavior - or you do something else.

Here is where I am not sure what to think. The thought of accepting the behavior of some Americans (and therefore other non-Europeans) at concerts and ballets makes me wince. After all, this is a tradition we are talking about. Symphonic concerts are not a supermarket commodity you can order in any color you want. This music has a rich tradition, both of composers, virtuosos and of study and technique. Those who study, play and listen to it today are continuing the tradition, perhaps even as they change it. If you learn to play the violin, you will play in that tradition. You will be taught norms of beauty and of skill. You will be taught what to do when you want to applaud someone when you have a violin in one hand and a bow in another and have no more hands to clap with. You will be taught how to show the conductor respect, and will learn how s/he shows respect for you as a musician. As an audience member, you will be taught how to let the musicians know that you appreciated what they played. You will be taught how to ask the orchestra to play more after they are done. You will be taught how to welcome them and how to show any previous high expectations of them. You will learn how to let a particular solist know that they played well without interrupting the music. The norms of behavior also fill practical functions of communicating between a mass of people in the audience and the orchestra both as a whole and in parts. To throw out that communication in the name of diversity wouldn't help anyone.

However, as classical music is studied and played outside Europe, perhaps it's not fair to ask either musicians nor audiences to be familiar with the full European tradition. It is a tradition of the sort that is transmitted fully from person to person, not on paper or by general descriptions. It is also a tradition embedded in a larger general set of ideas of behavior. My parents attended a concert by Li Yundi - a piano prodigy that's probably the best pianist I've ever heard - in Chongqing. It was the first leg of a world tour, starting with several stops in China. Li Yundi is from Chongqing, and therefore he started his tour there. They said that the concert was breathtaking - my mother, who never liked Chopin very much, suddenly became a fan of Chopin when played by Li - but that despite requests for parents to keep their children in order, there were children playing and yelling at the very front of the hall, disturbing the music. Our reactions were to be appalled. Apparently this was also Li's reaction, because no children were allowed at any of the subsequent China concerts. I do not know where Li studied music, so I don't know whether banning children from the concerts came from Chinese or European thought, or both. But it is conceivable that he is part of the European tradition of classical music. In that case - what does it mean for a Chinese musician trained in the European tradition to ask Chinese audiences to conform, at least nominally, to European norms of concert behavior? Is this expansion of what was previously exclusively an European tradition into a more global and less exclusive tradition? Or is this cultural imperialism?

My practical solution, perhaps characteristic of the cultural switching I do anyway, is to apply the original cultural traditions, no matter who is edging into their territory or where those people are located. If European classical music is played somewhere, I expect all people present at the concert, European or not, to use the European traditional standard of behavior. I don't see it as being different from learning to play the erhu and sticking to traditional Chinese music, or following folk music traditions when playing folk music, or becoming part of the style of African traditional music. But what the ideological implications of my solution are, I'm not sure. Sometimes it seems declaring certain things to be Europe's way or the highway isn't accepted, and there certainly is a danger in doing so. But in a sense the tradition is a meritocracy - if you master the tradition, clearly you are part of it. Li Yundi and Vanessa-Mae (Chen Mei) are examples of ethnically and culturally (in the case of Li Yundi) Asian people who have been accepted and acclaimed as continuing European traditions. It is hardly the case that whiteness or Europeanness is a passkey; the system functions in fact in part to distinguish between some white Europeans and other white Europeans. It has developed during a time when almost everyone residing in Europe was a native, white European. Colonial and post-colonial (as well as revolutionary and post-revolutionary) debates about European classical music are recent and can perhaps be left behind, if not completely, then in large part for a more global and simultaneously inclusive and exclusive view of traditions. Perhaps one day, we will lose the epithet 'European', and it will just be one musical tradition among others that are widely practiced, but one that must be adhered to in order to be said to be part of it.

The End of Faith

I finished Sam Harris's The End of Faith yesterday. His central thesis is that faith itself - the practice of believing something without proof - is extremely dangerous and ought to end. It was piecewise an extremely scary book. The book emphasizes that it is only by reason and evaluation and discussion of facts that we can obtain knowledge of the world. I have been moving in the direction of these ideas before - as a scientist, of course I believe that reason and "experiment" is the best way to gain knowledge of the world - and my main reason for not being religious is the line of thought in the book. Harris argues that once the truth of a religious text that claims infallibility in all its parts, as they all do, it then follows that one must be a religious fundamentalist in order to follow the religion. In my brief stint with religion, that was what I felt as well - to be logically self-consistent, I would have to be a fundamentalist. At that point, religion conflicted with my sense of reason and ethics, and I considered being moderate.

Harris continues to argue that religious moderates "betray faith and reason equally," in that they invoke secular knowledge as justification to ignore religious directives. As he puts it, religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and religious ignorance. Why don't Christians actually kill everyone who "takes the Lord's name in vain?" Well, because it seems so crazy, right? You can't kill someone just for that, it's very Middle Ages. It runs against our current sense of ethics. But the Bible explicitly instructs Christians to do so. Harris gives the Bible quotes for punishment for breaking the Ten Commandments, for example: Leviticus 24:16 mandates that the punishment for taking the Lord's name in vain is death. I say "Oh god" as an expression of surprise or disappointment fairly frequently. Therefore, under Christian theology, I should be killed. The punishment for working on the Sabbath is also death (Exodus 31:15). If the Bible is the infallible word of God, everyone who's ever worked on a Friday night or a Saturday should be killed. Everyone who's committed adultery should also be killed (Leviticus 20:10). I doubt that any Christian today would advocate actually doing this. (If there are, I am very afraid, give that there is a high likelihood they're in the country that I currently live in.)

The intolerances built into Christianity, paralelled by intolerances in other religions, are to me ethically repulsive. Harris elaborates on this as a central part of showing why religious faith is dangerous. He does an excellent job of showing how beliefs lead to actions, and follows by showing that holding beliefs that compel people to commit murder and other atrocious acts of all magnitudes, which makes religious beliefs dangerous as they all contain ideas that encourage violence. As another example, the Bible also advocates having me killed for being an atheist. In medieval times, the Church logically noted that the Bible has several suggestions for eradicating heresy. Apparently, a literal reading (which is necessary if the Bible indeed is the infallible direct word of God) requires heretics to be killed. Even worse, Deuteronomy requires that anyone refusing to take part in such killings also be put to death. (Deuteronomy 17:12-13) These parts of the Bible caused the Inquisition, hardly a pinnacle of morality or good for either Christianity, Europe, or humanity at large. The wtich-hunts were caused and enacted similarly, along with persecution of Jews, and as we all know those were equally dark times for humankind.

He also delineates how similar problems plague Islam today. Harris goes through various demands that Islam makes of its adherents that make it virtually impossible for a Muslim who truly believes that the Koran is the infallible word of Allah to live in peace with non-Muslims, as well as that the acts of Muslim terrorists makes perfect sense if one accepts what the Koran and the Hadiths say: "Nothing explains the actions of Muslim extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam." There is much to be said on that topic, but I don't want to type out all of it here. Readers who are interested are recommended to read the book.

In addition to religions, he also takes a side-swipe at secular ideologies that demand the abandonment of critical reasoning and proof. National socialism and stalinism are use as examples of terrifying movements where a key part of the movement was unquestioning obedience to a leader and taking the leader's word as truth.

I could not bring myself to accept large parts of Christianity on moral grounds, and as Harris points out, I was using secular ethics to reject it - and recognizing the strain on my psyche of accepting something without proof and the logical inconsistency in rejecting some religious teachings but not others on non-religious grounds, I could not bring myself to be religious on either ethical nor logical grounds.

Harris does not see religious moderates as benign, however. "The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivalled." (p. 20, emphasis author's)

Harris also anticipates some counter-arguments, many of which I would have used, in a section entitled The Danger of Wishful Thinking. He writes, "He [Paul Berman] notes that the twentieth century was a great incubator of "pathological mass movements" - political movements that "get drunk on the idea of slaughter". He also points out that liberal thinkers are often unable to recognize these terrors for what they are. There is indeed a great tradition, in Berman's phrase, of "liberalism as denial." [...] Because they assume that people everywhere are animated by the same desires and fears, many Western liberals now blame their own governments for the excesses of Muslim terrorists. [...] Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians. Rather than being a simple expression of anti-Semitism (though it is surely this as well), this view is the product of a quaint moral logic: people are just people, so the thinking goes, and they do not behave that badly unless they have some very good reasons. The excesses of Palestinian suicide bombers, therefore, must attest to the excesses of the Israeli occupation." (pp134-135) I have to admit, I think like that. I haven't considered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in those terms, but I definetly have considered Muslim terrorists in that light. Surely, they must be crazy in the medical sense, some chemical imbalance or something that makes them different from "regular" Muslims, who surely must be as secular-minded as European Christians.

And this brings me to my great mistake. For most of my life, I have been immersed in a secular environment where going to church other than perhaps midnight mass on Christmas because the candles are pretty, if you can be bothered to sit through a long mass just for pretty candles, is seen as a sign of serious and unusual religious commitment. The kind of religious commitment that might be viewed as a barrier to serving in public office or in the PTA. The kind of religious obsession that might cause people to go through life with a hidden agenda, trying to manipulate people. When I was a kid in the US, my parents went to significant efforts to keep me away from American Christians, despite that they are religious themselves. In Sweden, the Church is most appreciated for maintaining pretty graveyards. My parents are religious moderates, and I suspect rather typical of Nordic Christians. And here is the root of my mistake: Nordic Christians either have substituted large parts of the Bible and previous Church teachings with secular humanism or cede authority on actions to secular humanism. I am completely mystified, for that reason, by the idea that religious people might actually be religious, in the sense that they swallow religious teachings whole. I did not seriously entertain the idea, prior to reading this book, that millions of human beings, millions of educated, otherwise rational human beings, could suspend all rational judgement when it comes to right and wrong. I even found out that the United States is far more religious in the fundamentalist way than I had understood or perceived, again because I could especially not imagine that a well-off, well-educated country could suspend critical thinking when it comes to right and wrong. My lens of the world included - and probably still does a bit - that people are basically secular. I am clearly wrong.

This ties in with another book I read recently called "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" by Susan Moller Okin. The main thesis of the book is that granting group rights to minorities must be very carefully examined, as such rights run the risk of granting minorities rights to oppress women, effectively denying them their rights. That also relates to my experiences this past year with immigrants and expatriates from very sexist cultures in the West. Universal human rights supercede any religion and any cultural tradition. Religion is no excuse for oppression and immoral behavior, and neither is culture. My previous tolerance of intolerance can be dangerous. In protecting my rights as a human being and in being an ethical human being, I must judge faith and culture under the same criteria; neither can be worth respect unless they embrace peaceful, tolerant coexistence.

Irshad Manji's take

As always, pretty funny and to the point. I especially appreciate this:

"To judge the root problem here, let us first determine how the cartoons became an international incident. Last September, these comics ran beside a story about the hurdles encountered by a Danish author in finding someone - anyone - to illustrate her children’s book about the Prophet. Every artist she approached declined the job out of fear of having to contend with Islamist extremists. [...] We Muslims love to lecture about the need to assess touchy matters - such as offensive Quranic verses - ‘in context’. The context in which the Muhammad cartoons first appeared suggests that frustration, not malice, was the motive."

Looks like the illustrators asked to help with the book were right. These riots certainly send the message that one ought to be afraid of the extremists. But just as with 9/11 and the London bombings, we cannot let extremists control our everyday lives with fear. That is giving them power. We - all of us, muslims and non-muslims - cannot let them control what we do.

Freedom

The more I think and read about the cartoons, the more strongly I feel that there can be no case made for that the cartoons should not have been published. The same points are made over and over again in commentaries, and regardless of circumstances basic cornerstones of liberal democracy cannot be sacrificed by Denmark. It is regrettable that people got so upset, but no outsider has the right to tell Denmark to change its system of government, of which the cartoons are a small by-product. If it were acceptable for non-Danish muslims to require Danish press to conform to their ideas of right and wrong, we would have a world of chaos and oppression of all by all. What Denmark does is Denmark's business - and if Danish muslims wish to change their country because of the cartoons, they can, because they are Danish. It it their country to change. However, I suspect that most do not, because by being Danish they most likely also prize liberal democracy just as much as danish atheists and christians.

Neither does Denmark as a whole, which isn't even involved other than indirectly, speak for the entire West. No one has the capacity to speak for millions and millions of people of different cultures, different histories and different languages as a unified voice. As a Western TCK, I am actuely aware of this. There are huge cultural variations within the West, and a commitment to that pluralism is especially prevalent in the European Union, which could not exist without such pluralistic acceptance. Even within every western country, there are regional sociocultural differences of all kinds. A reality of globalization is, as Friedman puts it, that "No one is in charge." Everyone reading this has probably noticed that America and Europe disagree on a lot of policy issues, as well as have different basic value systems in many ways. (Not to mention Americans eat more crap.) There is no monolithic West any more than there is a monolithic set of muslims. The political leaders of Western nation-states do not even really speak for their entire populations, let alone one person speaking for all of the diverse Western countries!

It pisses me right off when people see the West as the US, the UK, Germany, Australia and France - there are many other Western countries that are distinct from the bigger ones! My ancestors were not in any way, shape or form involved with colonialism other then as initial explorers who got pushed aside by the bigger countries. My ancestors did not have anything to do with slave trade, holding slaves, building empires, smallpox, or any of the other atrocities committed by Western nations. They haven't got the bomb now either, they don't fund secret prisons or give guns to rebels they support nor engineer elections abroad. They have no military bases anywhere outside their territories and few within them. I'm not saying they were so noble that they didn't want to. They probably did. But their histories took other paths, because their countries were small and relatively powerless. Just as in the world wars. Finland fought a war of independence, because they did not have resources to do anything else. Sweden sold ore to the nazis because they knew they didn't stand a chance in a fight. Estonia got taken by the Russians because they did not have enough resources to fight them off, and no one assisted them. Poland has been split and occupied many times by neighboring countries. The perspectives of small countries are NOT the same as those of big countries! So how can little Denmark, which few of the people who are pissed probably can find on a map, suddenly be a spokescountry for the West? Small European countries get ignored and confused with each other by non-Euros all the time. I have yet to meet a Chinese who knew off the bat where Finland is. Sweden and Switzerland get confused all the time in both the US and China. I bet you about 1% of both Americans and Chinese know Lichtenstein even exists. But we all have our own national histories, languages, and traditions, which we take great care to distinguish from our neighbors. Part of the reason non-Anglo European countries reacted so strongly to America's stance on Iraq is exactly that - to make it known to both the Americans and everyone else that the US prez and the UK PM do not speak for Europe as a whole as well. We have our own voices, expressed in our own media, and we will use our plural voices to whatever end we think is right. If that doesn't please the US or anyone else, then too bad. We have our own national heroes, our own popular culture, our own fashion and music... our media reflect our debates, in our languages, for the benefit of no one but ourseves and our own democratic process. Small Western countries are not some sort of tack-on onto the larger ones. We do not just follow, we create our own destinies and determine our own actions.

Any Huntington-style reading of what's going on is supplying all kinds of assumptions that are not there. How can there be a fight between two entities that do not exist?

It gets more complicated...

I wanted to see the cartoons for myself, and although I haven't found them yet, I did find some other interesting things...

"Earlier this week, imam Abu Bashir appeared on BBC World showing a caricature of Mohammed with a pig's snout and ears to representatives of the Arabic League. Bashir falsely claimed that the caricature was one of the 12 Jyllands-Posten drawings."

"Since then a number of offensive drawings have circulated in The Middle East which have never been published in Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten and which we would never have published, had they been offered to us. We would have refused to publish them on the grounds that they violated our ethical code."

Die Welt has the cartoons, and of course, discussion. I found a very well-written commentary that makes the basic point: "Es gibt kein Recht auf Satireverschonung im Westen." [There is no right to be spared from satire in the West.] Asking for anything else is asking for special treatment. Period.

"In der westlichen Welt regt sich nach anfänglichem Verständnis Widerstand: Die Zeiten der Inquisition will man nicht in islamischer Form wiederkehren sehen." [In the West there is aaccording to initial understanding agreement: we do not want to see the Inquisition return in an islamic form.]

After seeing the cartoons, I see absolutely no reason for getting so upset. It may be my deficient sense of what will offend religious people, but I really fail to see what there is to even demonstrate peacefully about, let alone burning flags and embassies. I am confused and unsettled.

Addition: After thinking about it some more, I think because of Europe's religious past and the atrocities committed, we feel it is very important to be able to criticise religion openly and even harshly if necessary. (And therefore, we are angry that others reacted to violently - it was just a couple of semi-satirical drawings, not even serious - and we reserve the right to be harsh if we need to) Blindly following a leader - any leader - is dangerous. My mother has told me that when I didn't clean my room as our agreement was when I was a kid, she would sigh and think, "At least she doesn't blindly do whatever someone asks of her." We have specific, detailed, historical reasons to be suspicious of religious leaders' motives. After readon those commentaries and Smittenbyu's comment, I think we are seeing contemporary reasons to be suspicious of religious leaders as well.

Addition II: Found a blog written by an Arab-American who gets to the point quickly.

Addition III: Chirac is an idiot. I'm starting to agree with dad. "French President Jacques Chirac, however, focused on the European media, condemning decisions to republish the cartoons as an "overt provocation"." Also, this is the first time Condi's talk appeals to me. That alone makes me worried I'm making a big mistake somewhere. Must read more about what exactly she's saying.... but it's possible she's making good sense for once.

The Cartoons and Cross-Cultural Communication

Yesterday, I was reading opinions on the Danish cartoons on BBC, and had some opinions that I wanted to write in my LJ. I sign on today, open BBC - and am greeted by this:

"Embassies burn in cartoon protest

Syrians have set fire to the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus to protest at the publication of newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. "

Say.. WHAT? I just finished writing a comment in shirou's LJ about the cartoons about whether or not Islam is more violent than other religions... and this really, really isn't the way to convince people that Islam is a religion they can deal with having next door. 1. No torching of embassies, for any reason, will make you look good. Especially, it will not make you look peaceful. 2. Torching of an embassy which isn't involved in the row REALLY doesn't make you look reasonable in any way, shape or form. Hey, look - if you can't keep straight which country you're pissed at, why are you expecting us to give your religious icons special treatment? Who knows if we can even be held responsible for telling them apart? Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, old guys in beards - who the hell knows who's who? Same shit, right? Especially in countries that are so secular.

Which brings me to the point I was thinking of yesterday. I think a root of the cultural miscommunication here is both sides not being able to imagine what living in a country that's very secular/religious is like. My experiences with the US have shown me that many Americans who are themselves secular have learnt, often by fear, to not offend Christian ideas. They have an uncanny intuition for what's going to piss them off, an intuition which I lack - because while I was here, my parents provided a buffer and in Europe, things are secular. Secular in a way I don't think Americans can really imagine, perhaps unless they've been expats for 10-20 years. (Or TCKs, of course, but then they're not American per se either.) If a European prime minister said anything involving "God, "bless", and the name of their country there would be a media frenzy and probably instant loss of re-election. Just for starters. I think in a similar but more extreme way, also supported by some other interpersonal intercultural encounters. I don't think that people who grow up in a socially controlling environment, especially where the control is done under the guise of religion, can imagine what living in an environment where that control is lacking, in this case being freedom of press.

However, that does not mean that both sides are equally confused. Au contraire. A large part of the democratic nation-states are (at least limited) universal human rights and freedom of speech, movement, press, etc. This is especially true in Europe. This has the consequence that we have countries in which all kinds of things get criticized all the time, including by children, by women, by ethnic minorities, by all kinds of people. No one is supposed to have a duty to shut up. Every day, major Western newspapers run political satire drawings. Every day, the leaders of the free world get made fun of by their citizens and each other. In the States, people are more reluctant to make fun of religious figures because it is a very religious country, as mentioned before. However, that is not the case in Europe, where the cartoons were published. One of the comments, by Dr Yunes Teinaz, was "We respect the heroes of other religions and we would expect the same from the followers of other religions and ideologies. No Muslim, for example, is allowed to portray a picture of Jesus." Let me be very clear: Europe cannot be criticizing some religion as compared to its own, because Europe is secular, not religious. I don't believe in either Jesus or Muhammad. Make fun of either, I don't care. Teinaz - and probably many others - are assuming that everyone is religious, which is blatantly untrue in the case of Europe. Just like I've said before: Muslims have a much better case to argue deliberate and unjust exclusion in the US, where Christianity enjoys such a prevalent, accepted and privileged status, than in Europe, where most people are thoroughly secular.

Sometimes the litte, everyday details make things more clear than the grand scheme. I remember standing around with a group of girls in 4th grade on the schoolyard, gossiping. (The kind of thing I eventually always got excluded from, but anyway.) One of the girls said, "Did you know that (name of boy) believes in God??" with that tone that little Swedish girls use when they are socially outcasting someone. (I know that tone very well.) We laughed at how silly he was to believe in something of which there is no proof. Later, in high school, I always knew who in my circle of acquaintances was Christian. It's odd, so you remember. They... go to church. They... pray. Like in the middle ages or something. Even so, they never mentioned it in conversations. If they hadn't admitted to it, (admitted is the word that first comes to mind) I'd never have known. My parents are Christian. I know, because my mother told me once when I was about 14. My parents thought that it was important that I make up my own mind. They asked me to get confirmed so that I would at least know what Christianity was before I rejected it. You will never know that my parents are religious from meeting them. They never say anything to betray it, because to them it is private, to be kept to themselves. I think a large part of it is that they know that if they talk about it, they alienate others - meaning they create conflict, dissonance, problems. They don't feel a need to talk about it, so why cause the problems?

We had religion instruction in school. In the beginning, it was Christianity specifically. The thought behind it was that because Christianity had historically been part of Europe, it was useful to know some of the key concepts and myths of Christianity. That was exactly what it was. In 4th grade, we started building little paper huts in the archetechtural style used in then Palestine around the time of Jesus' birth. We were told that Israel used to be called Palestine, which was news to pretty much all of us. I remember thinking, "why would you want to switch names for the same country?" We were told about the Roman empire a little bit. But we spent a lot of time making the huts. It was fun, because I liked arts and crafts. Later in high school, everyone had to take religion class to graduate. Religion class now being knowing the basic tenents of all major world religions. There was no religious religion class offered, ever, and no one ever mentioned the idea. It did not occur to me that religion might be taught as a religion in schools until I came back to the US. Looking back, anyone in the PTA who had brought something like that up would probably looked like a religious fanatic, trying to brainwash children. That's not wise in Sweden - you will be permanently outcasted for being antisocial for that sort of thing. People will talk, news of your fanaticism will spread.

Hell, you look a bit fanatic for going to church (As in, christian church) regularly, which no one except old ladies who want company does. No one's going to trust someone who's so obsessed with religion to be able to set it aside and be secular when they need to. And this is Europe's historical religion. Muslims may get some more flexibility out of concern that people are not accepting enough of multicultural differences, they may get less because they are Other - I don't know how it all works out, but I do know that religion is not close to Europe's heart. It's not part of people's lives, their concerns, their social undertakings, their thoughts... I know more about Christianity than most of my Euro friends. Laughing at a religious figure or leader is just like laughing at a secular figure or leader. After all - if there is no God, then all power religious figures and leaders hold is just as secular as that which politicians hold. People being religious and supporting one person (male, of course) or other is just like being an ardent political supporter of someone. Your choice, whatever, blah. Won't stop anyone from laughing at satire of that person. The cartoons was drawn and published in Denmark, for amusement of the Danish - and the cultural context in which that happened is not intended to offend muslims. Period.

And then conversely, I'm still not used to the very prominent political role that religion plays in the US. I guess fundamentally, I still hold it for so self-evident that for a non-uniform society to work, it must be secular that I expect religious people to adjust their behavior accordingly. They don't, a significant part of the time. I know I'm not capable of imagining living in an even more religious context, and especially not an extremely sexist and controlling religious context. I have no idea, and for that I am grateful. However, if muslims are anything like American christians, they take offense so incredibly easily on religious matters because the religious is political to them, and hence confusion over what the prime minister of Denmark could do about the row. (To me, clearly, the prime minister cannot and should not do anything to interfere with a newspaper's right to publish whatever the fuck it wants as long as it's not committing a crime.) Well, too bad for both the Americans and the Muslims - you do not have an universal human right not to be offended by people who don't share your religion, or even better, don't have a religion at all. The international community would only have a case to ask something of Denmark if universal human rights are being violated - and they very simply are not. If you don't like the cartoon, don't look at it. If you freak out easily, take some ritalin or something. If you can't handle being made fun of, justly or unjustly, you simply can't handle living in this world. You may be hurt, of course, but burning embassies and calling for the death of the cartoonists is just a little too far. And not to mention... Jyllands-Posten apologized for any unintended offense already. Don't be torching embassies when you got your apology! What else could you possibly, reasonably expect?

Race and Identity

I'm reading an interesting book called Culture Moves about black identity and culture and how competing visions of it are expressed. It's very interesting, because the US is unique in that it has 'built-in' racial tensions like very few other places. In most other places, race lines conincide with nationality lines, which radically alters the discourse. It's an insight into a part of one of my countries that I cannot direcly experience, but that is such a big part of it that it's not really fair for me to say that I know this country without at least knowing the elements of that.

Deshi Men

Interactions with people have made me think about patterns and deep-seated problems with sexism and very destructive ideas of masculinity. All but one of the deshi men I have had to work with or otherwise be in close proximity to have had obvious sexist opinions, ideas, and concepts, which they have not hesitated to express and act on. If the deshi women I've met have such ideas, they don't push them on me. It is not only degrading, it is also problematic in another way: what is the appropriate way to frame this situation against a background? I think my answer is my moral principle number one: sexism is always immoral, regardless of cultural context. And when the sexists left their countries to come to one of mine, the burden of cultural understanding is on them. I get to do something about this one, because they came to my culture. That's also part of what pisses me off, because these people come to my country and spit in my face. I'm starting to understand how the neonazis and the Republicans can build such support for something really stupid - if enough people feel threatened, they react instead of thinking. I knew that intellectually, but I'm experiencing it emotionally as well. I just want to slap people, because they should know their place - next to me, not above me. Man, if you try to stand above me all you do is make it easy for me to bite your ankles. Cause there will be biting. I'm thinking that deshi men need to be treated like men from the Middle East - proceed with utmost caution until they show themselves to be able to interact with women in a good way.

I'm seriously considering giving automatic bonus credits to Western European men for being more respectful. Thing is, they've pissed me off plenty too.. just not in the same, insanely ridiculously completely unapologetic ways as others. Including American men. I've heard some sick shit come out of the mouths of American men.

And I have to admit... it feels good to think 'go to hell' straight off, because then I don't have to go through the same thing I've gone through for most of this academic year: give them the benefit of the doubt, be polite when they're asses, be polite but curt when they try to make you their mom or try to order you around, and they stay the hell away from them because they're so annoying. Every time here so far. K at Knox was fine - never had any problems with him - but man. Every single deshi guy I've had to deal with more than in passing since then has been a needy, unaware ass of some kind. I'm sick of this shit. I'm sure there are nice guys out there but they're going to have to prove themselves first.

Understanding the World

After writing that last post, I realize what exactly feels so incomplete about people with strong convictions about what the world is like - cynics, activists and optimists alike - that don't have a global focus. How can you claim to understand the world when all you've ever bothered trying to understand is a small part of the world? How can you be so sure when you're basing your conclusion on a small, rather arbitrarily selected part of the world and part of all possible human experiences? You may of course restrict your claim to the subset of the world you did consider, but I have yet to meet a person who does so.

To some extent it is human to assume everyone is like us - and on some levels, they are. Everyone can be happy, sad, melancholy, hopeful, distraught, anxious, scared, delighted, humorous, cynical, whatever. The chemicals running through our brains give us a lot in common. But as everyone knows, that's not exactly the end of the story. Circumstances create large variances in what being a human can be like. It just seems like this is a mistake we've made so many times that we should have learnt to spot it by now.

White, straight American men often write as if their experience is the human experience. Then white, straight American women point out that the white, straight American men are forgetting that being a white straight American woman isn't like being a white straight American man. And then black, straight American women point out that being a black straight American woman isn't like being either a white straight American man not a white straight American woman. And so on and so on, ad infinitum. Shouldn't it be obvious that after a few examples like this, you can see a more general pattern? What the world is like depends a great deal on who you are and who you were when you were born and where you were born? And therefore, making a claim to understanding how the world works without having at least tried to consider the range of human experiences is just silly?

Personally, I see the answer to how the world works as a piecewise solution. The differences in human experience are too great to say something in general that is valid for everyone, but if you do it piecewise (maybe groupwise is a better term here), you can have some hope to getting it all in, and different people can explore the different groups. Then when we've gotten the different pieces, we can put them together into some sort of overview, and probably go back to revising our first theories and so on. But the point is that every one of us only experiences one small slice of what being human is like - so how can anyone think they have it all figured out based on their own experiences?

Personal Belief System Belief #2

Knowledge is not power in itself, but it is the root of power.

If you don't know what's going on, you can never be anything but a pawn at best. Controlling a situation requires understanding what's going and why it's going on as best as you can. Including when the situation you're trying to control is your life situation. If you don't know why things are the way they are now nor how you can change them, you have ceded control of your life to other people, entities and chance.

There is no such thing as too much knowledge or too much thinking. Thinking may not be easy and may be painful, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

Sudden Realization

I just really realized something that I've heard said many times while writing a paper about deposition of thin ruthenium films using atomic layer deposition: gender relations really are much more relaxed in the Nordic countries than in the United States. Here, people make things so much more difficult in a very subtle way. And that's what you pick up on in the air, elsewhere too - the more tense everyday gender relations are, the more sexist a culture is.

So now I have to ask myself: If I ever have children, would it be immoral of me to raise them completely outside the Nordic countries, knowing that? Or completely outside wherever I think gender relations are the best, if that isn't the Nordic countries at that point?

Photos

I recently set about putting my photos in albums, and as I was sorting through my photos I realized that taking photos is very important when you move.

My pictures of Beijing are of my Beijing. Pictures of my favorite parks, of the walkways I used all the time, of the bike lanes I used to rollerblade on. Pictures of my friends' apartments. Pictures of me and my friends where we used to go hang out, or out on a special occasion. Even things tourists would take pictures of are different - my pictures of Tiananmen are of me and my friends standing together, laughing, in front of the gate lit up at night, a memory of the night we went out together to say goodbye because I was leaving for college. I have a picture of the subway train arriving. I have a picture of my bus, silingsan lu. I have pictures of the little boats on Beihai lake I always loved watching. Other people's pictures will never be the same, and most other people here see Beijing as somthing remote and exotic and not really real in the same way New York is.

I used to feel the same about my parents' pictures of Frostburg when we lived in Sweden. Everyone else's ideas about America came from movies and TV. Their images were of a controversial big country far away. My pictures were of everyday life. My picture of the White House has me riding on dad's shoulders when I was 4. I have pictures of my kindergarten, pictures of our house and of me playing with my friends. No wild car chases and no Beverly Hills 90210, but my America. I still have Christmas tree decorations I made at Beginnings, by Montessori-oriented kindergarten. Now that I'm back, they don't play the same role anymore. Everyone knows what everyday life in America is like, because we're all living it. Now, they're just childhood photos, not exotic childhood photos, but I'm happy I had them when they were something to hang on to almost as proof. Kind of like I hang on to my Beijing photos now.

Beginners and Taking Advice

It was recently suggested to me that a large part of my annoyance with a recent power struggle stems not only from the situation per se but also from the fact that the other persons involved are at a very beginning level of understanding cross-cultural life, despite extensive experience. I've realized that's absolutely right.

I'm sick of people talking about multiculturalism and multi-kulti and tolerance and all that, when only an extremely small minority actually has really thought about it. It's starting to seem like most immigrants and other migrants lack even the most basic intercultural skills, even after decades away from "home." It never occurs to them that maybe they don't get it, so they never will, because they won't try to learn because they think they've got it. And I'm sick of being understanding because they're so incompetent. Why is it my responsibility to always be the one understanding? Why isn't it in part their responsibility to learn?

In part I'm probably bitter because I became oppressively marginalized and these people just keep doing what they've always been doing like they have blinders on. How the hell is that possible? How the hell do you avoid noticing what's being shoved in your face every day? And how the hell can you be so damn sure that you get it? I worry about that almost every day! How can I know? I can't. And so the observation never ends.

Sometimes I just feel like smacking people when they just refuse to notice that their cultural norms and behaviors from somewhere else really don't work. And there just doesn't seem to be anywhere where people generally get it! Americans may be clueless in many ways but no one else seems any wiser when it comes to negotiating difference in their personal lives. Others may have more perspective on themselves as a country, but as members of a culture, not so much. Everyone thinks they do, but I'm lacking evidence that they do, while I have heaps saying they don't. People can spend the majority of their lives in a host country and never get that they don't get it. Some are always worse than others, though, and it would be interesting to see a study of which cultures have the most trouble learning a new one.

I just wish I could talk to someone who sees this too. The European Far Right has nothing to worry about - people can't change even when they want to. The immigrants can't change Europe asnymore than they can change themselves at a core level. The first step to recovery is admitting there's a problem, and everyone is agreeing that there is none.

What I want to do with my life

I want to look forward. I don't want to look toward the past nor toward the sides to see what everyone else is doing. I want to make my own circumstances and make my own life. I want to create my own niche in life. And ideally, I'd like company on the way.