Tragic Beauty

For me, the word that best describes the novelist's view of the world is tragic. In Nietzsche's account of the "birth of tragedy," which remains pretty much unbeatable as a theory of why people enjoy sad narratives, an anarchic "Dionysian" insight into the darkness and unpredictability of life is wedded to an "Apollonian" clarity and beauty of form to produce an experience that's religious in its intensity. Even for people who don't believe in anything that they can't see with their own two eyes, the formal aesthetic rendering of the human plight can be (though I'm afraid we novelists are rightly mocked for overusing the word) redemptive...

I hope it's clear that by "tragic" I mean just about any fiction that raises more questions than it answers: anything in which conflict doesn't resolve into cant. (Indeed, the most reliable indicator of a tragic perspective in a work of fiction is comedy.) The point of calling serious fiction tragic is to highlight its distance from the rhetoric of optimism that so pervades our culture. The necessary lie of every successful regime, including the upbeat techno-corporatism under which we now live, is that the regime has made the world a better place. Tragic realism preserves the recognition that improvement always comes at a cost; that nothing lasts forever; that if the good in the world outweighs the bad, it's by the slimmest of margins. (Jonathan Franzen, "Why Bother?", How to Be Alone: Essays)

Patience

You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. Perhaps indeed you carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming, as a particularly pure and blessed kind of life; train yourself for it--but take what comes in complete trust, if only it comes from your will, from some inner need of yours, take it to yourself and do not hate anything. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

Strongly Stated, Loosely Held

In keeping with professional forecaster practice, my opinions are strongly stated and loosely held--strongly stated so that clients can get at them to conjure with, loosely held so that facts and the persuasive arguments of others can get at them to change them. My opinion is not important; it's just a tool. The client's evolving opinion is what's important. Your evolving opinion is what's important. If you're reading this book just to reinforce your present opinions, you've hired the wrong consultant. (Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, 21)

Interrelationship

I believe it was two winters ago. I was in Taiwan having dinner with a friend and his parents. As we were finishing dinner, my friend and I were getting ready for our night's festivities. My friend's dad told us before we headed out, "Have a good time, but remember, your body is not your own. It was given to you by your parents." What a funny thing to say, I thought at the time. As I talk to my nephew on the phone, though, and hear his toddler voice, as I see my sister's features in his photos, I get this feeling that nothing could be more true. Your body, a gift from your mommy and daddy to be respected and cherished.

More Sports, Less Gym

That's all.

2010, Year of the Tiger

I was getting my hair cut today by a middle-aged Chinese woman. We were chatting. She asked me my age and went on to comment that I must be a Tiger according to the Chinese zodiac calendar. She prophesied good things for me in the year ahead, which was nice to hear.

I got to thinking about the twelve-year cycle that the Chinese zodiac calendar runs through. It's comforting to think about time in cyclical rather than linear, sacred rather than profane terms. Rather than a straight-shot march through the years, a cyclical imagination of time gives me an anchored sense of continuity. 2010, Year of the Tiger. The next one after won't be until 2022. Puts things in a different light.

Themes

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of my company was recognized for her leadership as one of the top 100 women in the hedge fund industry. She wrote up a speech to accept her award and distributed the transcript internally. In her address, she identified key themes that have run consistently throughout her life and career, and she concluded by urging others to do the same. It is an exercise in introspection and self-awareness that serves to guide one through life's decisions.

I have written in this blog, on and off, for a little over a year now. Reading over old posts, I can identify a couple themes that have been most prevalent in my mind for at least the past year or so.

1) Living probabilistically. For me, thinking probabilistically is a way to deal with the limits of individual agency, a mode of thinking that encourages one to confront randomness proactively by tweaking those variable that are within one's control. The focus is not on short-term variation but rather on long-term properties.

2) Intellectual humility. Having deep conviction in my own fallibility, I try to approach problems and questions from the perspective of discussion and not debate.

3) Responsibility. About a month ago, a high school friend was in town visiting, I was hanging out with her and her friends in my apartment, and conversation grew more intense and drunken. A guy threw out a comment about being answerable only to yourself and how you should pursue whatever career it is that makes you happiest. Invariably, I get a very strong and negative reaction to such comments. I believe in relational being, and I believe in a notion of responsibility that supersedes the individual.

4) The beauty and richness to be found in stories, especially those that connect in unexpected ways.

5) The power of ecology as a metaphor. For understanding cities. For understanding policy-making. For understanding people. Currently, I obsess over the idea of triple bottom line thinking and what I am now going to call Maslow's ecology of needs.

For now, I feel pretty comfortable with these themes being drivers of my personal growth for the years to come.

Yikes. There is such a thing as too much introspection. And indeed, you, my imaginary reader, are beginning to make me blush self-consciously. Too much sincerity. Too little sarcasm.

"Relationship Science"

Yesterday, I read The New York Times Magazine's feature on marriage.

In line with the thinking of my previous post about cities, the salient question for me is, What kind of a problem is a relationship?

With language reminiscent of that used in The Corrections (Franzen), Elizabeth Weil describes her marriage variously through the lens of economics, psychoanalysis and military strategy.

Economics:

[Marriage is] an environment of scarcity, it's "a barbaric competition over whose needs get met"; it's "two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one."

Psychoanalysis:

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir.

Military strategy/Politics:

...I began seeing Dan as my adversary, the person against whom I was negotiating the terms of our lives.

Perhaps we'd been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. (emphases mine)

The problem to me seems to be that Weil approaches her marriage much as she would other facets of her life, that is, with the same industry and the same resources at her disposal. She says as much: "...I started wondering why I wasn't applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseum, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this."

In regarding her role in her marriage as a "project," Weil tries to dissect her marriage and analyze it as she would other problems. She tests hypothesizes. She gives herself exercises and homework assignments. She appeals to expert advice: marriage counselors, sex therapists, psychoanalysts, relationship scientists. There is even mention in the article of a "Love Lab," where one purported expert claims 94 percent accuracy in predicting whether a married couple will last longer than six years.

Absurdity in my ears. Management consultants get assigned to "projects," not life partners. Being in a relationship is fundamentally a different kind of problem than a work project, an investment decision, a weight-loss plan or an international treaty. It is an area of life in which our maximizing tendencies come up against a wall and our typical modes of thinking meet their limits. Thinking otherwise can be of real detriment.

I think Weil's efforts to grow in her marriage are admirable. But something about the way she sets out to improve her marriage strikes me as deeply wrong. Something in my gut tells me that we need to draw upon a different set of resources when thinking about matters of the heart. As a culture, we have let the language of economics and politics infiltrate our thinking about relationships. We increasingly regard love as something that can be demystified with the right application of analytical tools. Despite our best efforts, relationships resist demystification, rightfully so in my mind.

What kind of a problem is a relationship? What are the implications of how we choose to answer that question?

Are You Interesting?

Ben Casnocha writes a lot about interesting-ness: what it means to be interesting, how to be interesting, how to determine quickly whether someone else is interesting. Sometimes, I like what he has to say about the topic, particularly when he says something along the lines of, "The way to be interesting is to be interested."

But for the most part, his thoughts leave me a little bit peeved. Who are all these people that Ben comes across in daily life that he deems so uninteresting? Does he meet so many inexcusably boring people that he feels compelled to write about how to be interesting so regularly?

At one point in my life--namely, during the intellectual awakening of my adolescence--I would sneak away from social gatherings to read James Joyce. His words--"Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilization has been reared." (Dubliners 91)--sent fireworks off in my head as I exclaimed to myself, "How true and how sad it is that so many people muddle through life in zombie-like fashion!"

So I admit it. I've made my fair share of snap judgments about people I find uninteresting and not worth my time. But, taking a break from Joyce, I started talking to people and took a stab at understanding others. Everybody's got a story to tell, obstacles encountered and overcome, dreams foiled and realized, hearts broken and filled. Looking back, I regret every single time I have written someone off as being uninteresting.

Back to my question: Are you interesting? Yes, you are.

A Sense of Place

1) My grand-uncle was born in Dong Shih, a small farming town in the central highlands of Taiwan. He grew up speaking Hakka, the dialect of his parents, and Japanese, the language of formal schooling during Japanese occupation. My grand-uncle has lived through colonialism, World War II, forty years of martial law and an economic miracle that saw Taiwan engage the global economy at unprecedented levels. While his beginnings may have been humble and provincial, his knowledge of the world is vast and his experiences diverse. My grand-uncle forged a career as a successful businessman, but as life would have it, his wife became ill at a young age and was largely confined to the house. He refused to leave his wife's side and never once left the country even as opportunities for travel became commonplace and it became clear that my grand-aunt's health would neither worsen terribly nor substantially improve.

A couple years ago, my grand-aunt passed away. So at the age of seventy, my grand-uncle left Taiwan for the first time in his life to go to Japan. Upon his return, I was eager to hear his impressions of the wider world, what it was like for him to step off Taiwanese soil for the first time. With a proud grin, he responded to my inquiries, "Taiwan is a great place to live."

2) A couple weeks ago, I participated in a tour of the Village Bottoms district of West Oakland, which for over half a century has been the object of systematic marginalization. I moved to San Francisco about a year ago, and I must admit that I know embarrassingly little about the Bay Area and its history. Fortunately for me, the leader of the tour, Marcel Diallo, a Village Bottoms native, intimated vast and deep knowledge of the neighborhood. Every block we walked he infused with rich history. For years, he has labored to revitalize the neighborhood for which he harbors obvious love. At a venue that Marcel has toiled to designate as a cultural space, there hangs a portrait of his grandmother. On the portrait reads a quote from Marcel's grandmother: "When I sat for this portrait in 1951, West Oakland was one of the few places we as Black folks were allowed to live. Today I wouldn't leave the Bottoms if they paid me."

3) I was talking to a colleague the other day trying to figure out how she landed in San Francisco after growing up her whole life in Michigan. She told me she had been ready for something new and wanted to experience for herself all the hullaballoo about San Francisco. Three fantastic years, she tells me, she has been in San Francisco. Now she's itching to move on to something new again. "You can only do Bay to Breakers so many times. You know what I mean?"

Goals

I attended a climate policy conference some weeks ago and I was super impressed by a bunch of the speakers but one in particular. Holmes Hummel. She is young, confident, articulate, personable, a Congressional Science Fellow who teaches at Berkeley and consults on carbon-pricing policymaking. After the conference, I reported my impressions to a friend of mine and we came up with the following life goals:

1) Be articulate.
2) Be impressive.
3) Have shit together.

Ideally by age thirty.

Spring Forward, the (Tragedy) of Suburbia

In Quito, there wasn't much in the way of seasons. Total daylight varied by maybe forty-five minutes over the course of the year. There was a rainy season to be sure and a dry season as well. But four, well-defined seasons? Forget about it.

Now that I live at a higher latitude, things are a bit different. The days are lengthening noticeably. The golden sun dips into the ocean progressively later each day. Freezing cold mornings, blue skies, warm days, my goodness! it's spring! and what a feeling! What does springtime conjure up in my mind?

Lazy afternoons spent soaking up the sun on Parrish Beach... But more than that, with a Proustian bent, I remember whizzing down hills on a bike in the neighborhood park in Denver suburbs, breathing pungently fresh air mixed in with the occasional gnat, breezing by cattails that lined the creeks streaming by. I remember rollerblading, playing street hockey in the cul-de-sac only a couple blocks away from home, collapsing onto a friend's lawn in exhaustion and being overtaken by the itchiness of rolling around in grass. I remember throwing tennis balls against the stone facade of my house, diving to snag erratic rebounds so that I could play baseball like the Big Cat, Andres Galaragga.

What is it about these pleasant childhood memories spent outdoors in springtime air? They have such a suburban hue, or stench, depending on how you look at it. Subsidized by cheap energy and the interstate highway system. My nostalgia for life in Denver 'burbs, though, is not tinged with any sense of guilt. Hell, I think I'd still like some day to raise kids in the kind of safe neighborhood in which I grew up. I want it all. I want to tread lightly on the environment, I want all the material goods that come from industrial development, I want the safety and sense of space that comes from living in a suburban neighborhood...

Ahhh...springtime!

Game-Changer

When it comes to pub quizzes, the iPhone (or the Blackberry or the Google Phone) is a serious game-changer. Cheaters!

Bloated Stomach

I write now with a bloated stomach. I really can't help it. The food here is good, but that only begins to explain why I stuff myself so regularly when I am in Taiwan. Another thing is family. As my grandfather is fond of saying, "Food tastes better with more people." That's a crude translation from a much more elegant Chinese saying, but it does the job.

Ever since I was a kid, having a "healthy appetite" has been touted as a great virtue. On my way to getting a second bowl of rice, I'd have people complement me for being a "big eater." After my vertical growth stalled and took on horizontal dimensions, people could no longer call me a "growing boy," but the ethos of "big-eating" is hard to shake.

I chalk it up to my ancestors, who were Hakka farmers in the highlands of central Taiwan. I am only a couple of generations removed from a genuinely farming generation. As I am told, food could be hard to come by in those days. Thus "Have you eaten yet?" is the common greeting even today, taking the place of "Hello," or "How are you?"

Well, hell yeah, I've eaten today!

In the Taiwanese movie, "Eat Drink Man Woman," almost all of the important scenes are filmed around the dinner table. That is much the way that my family in Taiwan operates; social time is structured around meals. Lunch at 12:30; Dinner at 6:00. En punto. Eating is a family event, not something that you do hunched before a television set or over paperwork sitting on your desk at work. And to not eat your unreasonably large fill would be unappreciative. So, when I come back to Taiwan, I guess I eat to catch up on all of the meals I have missed with my relatives.

---

After disembarking flight BR017, I claimed my baggage, hopped a bus to the High-Speed Rail, took the two-hour train ride to Kaohsiung, then took the KMRT to the central train station, before finally walking ten minutes to arrive at my grandfather's house. Both the High-Speed Rail and the Mass Rapit Transit systems are new additions in the last couple of years. When I first started coming to Taiwan with my parents, one of my uncles would drive the four-and-a-half hours from Kaohsiung to the international airport in Taoyuan to pick us up. Obviously, some things have changed.

Upon arriving at my grandpa's place, I was greeted with an empty living room, where my grandpa spends most of his time. After looking around a bit, I found him in the backyard with a grizzled beard tending to a bonsai tree. Some things haven't changed. Not yet.

The Hub of My Travels

At some point during my fourteen-hour flight earlier today, I started thinking about the number of times I have flown to Taiwan. It's hard to count, but my guess is about twenty times in all. Movie selections were poor (House Bunny being the only title I can remember), so I had my TV screen set to the interactive map option that gives you all the flight info you could ever want.

I started imagining superimposing my life's travels onto the map. I've lived in a bunch of different places--Englewood, CO; Kaohsiung and Taipei, Taiwan; Swarthmore, PA; Quito, Ecuador; San Francisco, CA--and I've obviously visited even more places. If I drew a line to represent every single flight I've ever taken in my life, I think an interesting pattern would emerge. And the most interesting part of the pattern that I never truy realized: the Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan would certainly look like the central hub in my network of flights. I've only ever lived in Taiwan for six years, and I don't even have citizenship in the country. But I suppose it is, as the hub of my travels, more than any other place my home.

It's a strange thing for me to say. Because after flying in and out of the island for over twenty years, I cannot say that I have grown up with the place. Every time I return is a Proustian encounter: accumulated years of aging and change, as in the wrinkles of Marcel's grandmother, reveal themselves abruptly suddenly and render the familiar thing momentarily unrecognizable.

Naruto Marathon

I am all caught up now, I am emotionally drained, but it was worth it, and one thing is clear to me: I must train harder.

Thank You, David Brower!

I went hiking with my sister this weekend at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Unbelievable scenery.

At the end of one trail, we found ourselves on a beach with huge waves crashing in and sending clouds of mist into the air. Right at the edge of the water, there was a guy staring out at the vast expanse of the Pacific. From where I saw him, he was no more than an outline of a figure facing the ocean with a hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun. There was such simplicity in the image, a solitary figure in awe of natural beauty, just a couple of meters removed from the unfathomable strength of the ocean waves. As familiar and archetypal the image was, it struck me as immensely strange as well. He was so clearly outside the regular grid of routine, utility and worry in which we spend most of our time...how does one explain the type of appreciation embodied by a guy mesmerized by the ocean?

David Brower was the conservationist most responsible for protecting the Point Reyes area.

Unexpected Connectivity

During my freshman year in college, I was sitting at a cafe, Kohlberg Coffee Bar, reading To the Lighthouse. An elderly couple approached my table and sat down. They were just passing by, the older woman was an artist and her husband was accompanying her to see her exhibit at the school’s gallery. They saw that I was reading and asked me what I was studying at school.

"English Literature."

"Do you write at all?"

"Well, I’ve tried before. But every time that I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to put together more than a couple of pages. So I’ve written some vignettes, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to wrap my head around an entire story."

"Unexpected connectivity."

"What?"

"Yeah. Have you ever listened to Beethoven’s fifth symphony? Well, it is the perfect example of unexpected connectivity. Each movement in the symphony stands on its own, seems different from everything else. But by the end, you’re made to recognize the unexpected connectivity in it all. Keep on writing, and you’ll find unexpected connectivity."

There is something so beautiful about the idea that no matter how one wanders through life, how incongruous the different stages of man may appear, some thread weaves through it all, a running stream through which all of life’s experiences may be reflected, that brings life into one coherent whole.

I tried listening to Beethoven's fifth symphony and finished listening to it none the wiser.

The Milky Way

I don't know that I've ever seen the Milky Way with my own two eyes. This bothers me. While I am by no means a hardcore outdoorsman, neither am I a stranger to the smells that a fresh rain unleashes from the earth. In fact, I derive much of my spiritual sustenance from moments of "Einsteinian wonder," moments when you are put face to face with the largeness and beauty of the cosmos through nature.

The night sky invites its undeserving gazers to ask age-old questions. It sends a chill down my spine to think that humans have been staring and wondering at essentially the same constellations since, well, the beginning. But I was at Safeway the other day, and I saw the front cover of a National Geographic magazine, a night-time, bird's-eye view picture of a city, a rationalized grid of orange light. The editor's letter was about a small town in Virginia that is known for its view of the night sky, and the controversial decision of the town to install stadium lighting for high school football games. Isn't it strange to think that something as ancient and revered as the night sky has become a tourist attraction? A thing that a town can become known for? Isn't it strange that I have only seen the Milky Way in pictures that I studied in elementary school?

I associate stars with the silent chill of night air, when one cannot help but shiver--from the coldness of the darkness? or maybe from the smallness of one's existence? It troubles me, then, that when I look up at the night sky--on those few clear, chilly nights when light conditions permit--I can only recognize the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper and Orion's Belt. In a way, I suppose, this is nice. The night sky allowed to be a mystery, a spectacle that evades scientific classification in my mind. The stars unnamed and unknown to me. But the fact remains...I don't know that I have seen the Milky Way with my own two eyes.

I have always been fascinated by the different ways in which today's environmental problems are framed. Some describe the environmental crisis as a problem of awareness and consciousness, others point to the limits of technology and capitalistic growth. More recently, people like Al Gore and Thomas Friedman frame the problem as a policy failure and have advocated for a Coasian solution, a price signal placed on carbon emissions. Mark Wallace, in introducing his book, Finding God in the Singing River, describes today's environmental problems as fundamentally "a problem of the heart." It is this last formulation that I can't seem to get out of my head. How do humans relate to nature? Are we to be its benevolent stewards? its domineering masters? its helpless victims?

In Al Gore's famous climate crisis slideshow, the photos that he shows of melting glaciers are truly harrowing. Presented with such pictures, I invariably react with a mixture of thoughts and emotions. We did this? Changes of this magnitude are the result of industry and human activity? Is this really possible? There is such a profound hubris in the imagining. We did this, and now we need to try to fix what we have damaged. Weather, previously the exclusive playground of the gods, now rendered a human plaything. There is something deeply offensive to me about talking about global warming, or about our relationship with nature, in this way.

There are people who yearn for some imagined era when humans existed in harmony with nature, or who romanticize the relationship that exists between humans and nature in developing countries that have not yet been falsely weaned from Mother Earth. The irony being that companies from developing countries are invariably dirtier and more hurtful to the environment than their first world counterparts. Such romanticizations make me cringe. Have you ever been to a developing country? I want to ask. Have you seen the litter and the careless disposal of waste?

I don't know. Perhaps it can only be helpful to exaggerate our abilities to manipulate nature. Much like it can only be helpful to believe in the persistence of personal agency in the face of external constraint. Maybe, despite all odds, something profoundly human will triumph. It is a nice thought at the very least.

But jeez, the Milky Way. Surely something is amiss.

24-Hour Fitness

"Do you like to be challenged?"

"Yeah, sure, of course."

"Well, for just $99.99, you can get five one-hour sessions with a personal trainer. What d'you say?"

About two weeks ago, I signed up for a seven-day free trial at 24-Hour Fitness. And so for a week straight, I politely declined offers for protein shakes, personal training sessions and a paid membership. Meanwhile, I enjoyed all the benefits of membership without shelling out a single dime. Really duped the system, I did.

Two days after my free trial expired, Julie, the sales agent who was put in charge of my account, called me up with news of a promotional $29.99 monthly rate. Craving "challenge" and wanting once again to "be part of the club," I decided to sign up. Dollar-a-day health? Fine. I can afford that. What? There is a $49.99 initiation fee? Well...hmm...let me think about this for a second. Oh! It's only $49.99, and it's a one-time fee. Access to locations across the country and across the world. Well, in that case, sure, sign me up!

Okay, I admit it. Julie, the little devil, she got in my head.

Inside the gym are twenty treadmills lined up against a window that overlooks a busy street. Each one of these treadmills is outfitted with a control panel that lets you regulate your pace and incline, as well as monitor your calories burned, distance run and time elapsed. On top of each control panel is a 15-inch LCD screen. They probably call it a personal entertainment center, but I skipped out on the informational tour so I'm not really sure. All you have to do is plug in a set of earphones, and you can browse through any of the three channels that they offer (CNN, ESPN and some other cable channel), and enjoy watching TV with audio while getting a full-body workout. Or, if you're not one for TV, you can bring along your iPod and listen to your very own music library during your workout.

I don't own any earphones, I am a bit ashamed to say. So, as I jog on the treadmill, I watch the number of calories I've burned climb slowly through two-digit totals and finally break into three-digit territory. I'm all business when it comes to taking care of my body, let me tell you. Meanwhile, I also browse through the TV options. Today, there is AC360 on CNN, a college football game on ESPN, and an episode of Family Guy where Peter Griffin has two plungers suctioned on to his man-boobs such that he has a pair of truly killer nipples. Anderson Cooper, muted by my lack of earphones, is rendered comical as he gazes ever so intently into the camera.

Here, I think to my nerdy self, is negative liberty at its very best. Freedom to choose without having to impose or intrude on others. My privacy and my personal space so fiercely protected. Never will I, in this gym, need to compromise my television-viewing or music-listening preferences. Never will I have to suffer through the eccentric musical tastes of another.

Once, during a particularly busy hour at the gym, I had to wait in line to get on a treadmill. I tried to make small talk with the girl that was waiting in front of me, "Is it always this busy at this hour?" I didn't realize, but she was listening to her iPod, so she couldn't hear me but could tell I was trying to ask a question. Removing one side of her earphones, and making it very clear how much of a hassle this was for her, she looked at me questioningly, accusingly. "Nevermind," I said apologetically. Peeved, she looked away, put her earphones back in and resumed her waiting, arms folded.

On to the weights. In the area for free weights, the walls are lined with full-length mirrors to feed the vanity and insecurity of the area's image-conscious frequenters. I am doing bicep curls today, so I position myself in front of the mirror and start counting reps. I exaggerate my exhalations to emphasize my effort. When I discover the faint outline of a vein popping out from my upper right arm, it is all I can do to stop myself from screaming out loud in self-congratulatory elation. Weights equals dates, I remember my college buddy telling me. I quickly look around to see if anybody else noticed my personal triumph. Nope. Nevertheless, I know that through furtive glances or sometimes outright staring, everybody is checking everybody out. There might not be much in the way of conversation to be found at 24-Hour Fitness, but let's make no mistake, this is a community of health-conscious individuals. There is no escape from being looked at here.

When I was teaching in Ecuador, my students were always curious to hear about what it is like to live in America, but I was always at a bit of a loss as to what to say. Once, we were watching the movie About Schmidt together as a supplement to reading The Death of Ivan Ilych. There is a scene in the movie where Jack Nicholson's character walks into a Dairy Queen to buy an Oreo blizzard. "American culture is so weird!" one student blurted out. We laughed disgustedly at the scene together. The interaction between Jack Nicholson and the DQ employee was so commercial, dehumanizing, impersonal, scripted. The brightness of the colors, the oppressiveness of the DQ uniform, the confines within which the interaction took place...it was all so offensive and repugnant to the eyes of my Ecuadorian students.

Today, with a sweaty towel carelessly adorning my neck and shoulders, I mosey my way past customers, attendants and personal trainers, and, as I open the door onto Davis Street, I smile. "Well, kids," I think to myself, "this is what it is like to live in America."