Letters from Lisa

…and asked her for some happy news
She just smiled and turned away…

Quick, quick! Two points: what song is that from?
Ten bonus points: who’s he singing about?

Nothing quite like a gorgeous and warm sunny day to lift your spirits. Took a while for the positive energy to seep in. Remind me, please, not to read the newspaper… it’s just depressing. I’m simultaneously infuriated at the folks in charge of our government, horrified on behalf of suffering innocents, or discouraged by some new scientific finding (did you know that for every 16 point increase in a woman’s IQ, there is a 40% drop in her likelihood of getting married?) and let’s not even TALK about what happens if I turn on the television. Oh yes, it’s incredibly tempting to switch on the information networks to find out what everybody thinks about everything, and what they think about what everyone’s thinking, and what so-and-so thinks it MEANS that everyone’s thinking what they’re thinking, and before you know it the whole thing’s spiralled way out of reality. Want to know what I think? I think we should fire about 90% of the TV pundits and put on something else, anything else, Backstreet Boys videos for all I care, because at least they’re not telling people what to think. Why are we watching people argue and comment and give their $0.02 worth, when this is not actual information? It’s the equivalent of your Aunt Ginnie and your Grandma Mary spouting off about property taxes and those darned Japanese at the dinner table, except on cable news Aunt Ginnie wears a bow tie.

I want to go back to Ingram Island. There, I’ve said it. It was awesome to be that disconnected from all media - to actually focus on what was going on directly in front of me, rather than worry about something out of my control like a societal trend or statistic. Plus, there was lots of sunshine. (Even some liquid sunshine.) I didn’t sleep all that well, but I didn’t need an alarm clock to wake up, either. My body rhythms adjusted to the rising and setting of the sun. I’m not doing as well living indoors and waking up hours before it gets light out.

And don’t get me started on this daylight savings nonsense. It’s just as silly as having half hour time zones (I’m looking at you, Australia! You too, India!)

OK, yeah, I’m still cranky. You don’t get over a bout of media malaria so fast.

Oh, and:
2 points: American Pie
10 points: Janis Joplin

I’m so proud of my class today. We held a class election, and the results were very interesting. I told them that I wished grown-ups could be this mature, because:

• No one complained about who won or lost — there were a few long faces, but everyone congratulated the winners, and nobody gloated.
• There was no negative campaigning or smearing (not that I would have allowed that, if they’d thought of it — but they didn’t)
• Although the kids were split into political parties, very few of them actually voted along party lines (the minority party won three of the four positions).
• Several kids wanted to know what else they could do to be involved in student government, since all the elected positions were filled. They didn’t treat it as a power thing or popularity contest at all.

I don’t think the kids actually expected that the idea would go this far — it started off as a recess game, with the class pet as the prominent front runner. The kids held a fake election at recess, where one candidate came away with 10,000 extra votes and some election personnel tried to deny access to polling places. Some feelings got ruffled, and I told them that if they really wanted to do this, we were going to do it right, and if not, we were going to drop it entirely. Wisely, they decided to go for it.

We had a big class talk about elections and elected officials, and came up with a list of duties for class officers (my favorite was petitioning the principal for extra recess time). It took some convincing to get them to see that the class tortoise really wasn’t qualified to be president of anything except his tank, but in the end, we didn’t put Lucky Jr. on the ballot. Instead, his supporters became known as the Tortoise Party. They had a clear majority — 7 members to the Tiger Party’s 5 members — though obviously not a mandate. We had a few irregularities at the polls this morning (someone tried to vote for all the candidates, instead of picking one for each position) so we ended up having to do a run-off in the presidential race.

The current group’s term is up in January. Then we’re going to do mid-term elections. Meanwhile, our new president’s first official duty is to appoint a judge. (No term limits for the judge — it’s a “lifetime” position! I hope he chooses wisely!) The new nominee will be announced next Friday.

I can’t tell you how much easier it is to teach about government and elections without an overblown circus of rhetoric, fear-mongering, and vitriol to have to explain. And I can’t tell you how much I wish the grown people in charge of our country had enough sense to act more like little kids.

If you read memoirs or travel books in the slightest, I highly, highly recommend River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. The author is in Fuling, a small Sichuanese town where he and a fellow Peace Corps volunteer are the only two non-Chinese and where most people have never met a foreigner before. He writes about his struggles with learning the language, what happens when his students reinterpret Robin Hood in a Chinese context (Robin generally ends up being sent to prison for re-education), and how he eventually comes to appreciate and understand his Chinese colleagues, neighbors and fellow travelers.

I’m almost finished with this book and sort of sorry to see it go.

I could spend hours shopping at Pearl River Mart and get into a ton of financial trouble! They have beautiful notebooks and papers, decor items, clothing, and TEA! Next time I go there I am going to make sure that I’m thirsty so I can get a pot of tea in the little cafe upstairs.

The Typical American Doesn’t Exist

Yes, I think national stereotypes are often wrong. I don’t think there is a single stereotype that could describe a typical American, although I think there is a vague collection of “types” that might be found here. Even those are probably far off the mark. You simply can’t come up with effective descriptors for such a wide, diverse group of people.

Let’s take New Yorkers as an example. If I said someone was a “New York” type, I’m sure most people would come up with a collection of traits that describe New Yorkers, depending on whether their experience of New York was from Sex and the City, getting jostled in Times Square, being a Red Sox fan at Yankee Stadium, or whatever. Perhaps there are personality traits attached to it — “New Yorkers are rude” or “New Yorkers are liberal”.

But whenever you look at a group, you start seeing layers of complexity. In order to make the stereotype true, you must confine it to a smaller subset of the population — and once you look at just them, you again start to notice subtle (or not subtle) differences and variations.

In order to make a generalization you have to filter out a certain level of complexity and information — and that would be fine, except people often forget that they’ve filtered, and think that their generalization is always true or accurate. It isn’t.

As an American in Australia, I got to hear a lot of perceptions about “Yanks” and what we are like. A number of people qualified those perceptions by saying, “But we wouldn’t assume you’re like that.”

Actually, I think Australians are probably the most accurate about what their national character is, since it’s their cultural imperative to be blunt and honest. I wonder if they were included in the study.

tags: Stereotypes

5. Taking taxis instead of subways or buses — especially when you don’t have a good reason, like that you’re lugging large suitcases or traveling somewhere that the subway doesn’t go. So you want to satisfy your craving for sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on an uncomfortable, dirty seat with an irritable driver? Isn’t that what the crosstown bus is for?

When you consider that you can ride the subway from one end to the other for $2 — and transfer to a bus without paying any extra — it does seem a little odd to be paying about that much for the first minute and a half of your cab ride, doesn’t it?

4. Leaving your windblown umbrella skeleton in the street for other people to impale themselves upon or simply trip over. First of all, umbrellas in general bring out that old fuddy-duddy side of me that screeches, “You could poke somebody’s EYE out with that thing!” Maybe it’s just because I’m tall, so most people’s umbrellas are just about aligned with my eyeballs. But it’s one thing to use your umbrella to block the rain, and quite another to treat Park Avenue South as your own personal umbrella graveyard. Even in areas where people are generally good about throwing trash into actual trash cans, there’s this weird mental block about leaving broken umbrellas on the street.

3. Lighting a cigarette and then waltzing down the street, distributing its detritus into the wind and not taking a single puff. I don’t understand the point of this. Why should I inhale more of your cigarette than you do? I understand you’re not allowed to smoke indoors, but you can’t make the argument that you’re satisfying a cigarette craving if you’re not actually inhaling it. (Insert your own Clinton joke here.)

2. Sprawling out with one’s legs spread wide apart on subway seats and benches, and therefore taking up several seats instead of just yours. Are you riding the subway or having a gynecological exam?

1. The tendency to have communication near-misses — for example making a comment to someone out on the street, or even out of your car window, that you wouldn’t actually say to the person if you had the opportunity to actually speak to them for more than a few seconds. Getting a drive-by compliment is an odd experience (my favorite is the time someone leaned out his car window and yelled “Not bad!”… is that supposed to be flattering?) but my general feeling is that people are too insulated and detached to actually talk to a stranger, especially anything beyond complaining about the slowness of the trains.

Pity.

tags: New York City, subways, smoking

During parent teacher conferences, I always end up doing more talking than when I am actually teaching. So I’ve just finished yet another cup of hot tea. I can’t afford to lose my voice today when we have auditions for the show tomorrow. I’m not the one auditioning, of course… I need the voice for crowd control. We’ve got 30 kids in the theater club!

I lost my voice for the first time when I was 10. I was in sleepaway camp, participating in the time honored ritual known as Color War. Although, being politically correct, our camp called it Olympics instead. Now if the Olympics featured a bunch of hairsprayed, nail-polished ten year old girls wearing identical brand name color-coordinated short shorts and avoiding kicking the soccer ball because they might get grass stains on their designer sneakers, the name would make sense. There was the blue team and the white team - those were the camp’s colors - and we earned points for winning games against our opponents, but also for cheering and being enthusiastic. One cheer went:

Be! Aggressive!
B-e aggressive!
B-e! A-g-g! R-e-s-s-i-v-e!
Be! Aggressive!
B-e…

Years later, I found out what “aggressive” meant.

Anyway, I was having a miserable summer, and here was my chance to do some screaming. Needless to say, I eventually wore my vocal cords ragged. Yet I continued screaming. I croaked and rasped through the last two days of Olympics, accumulating countless imaginary points for Good Sportsmanship for my team. Just like everything else at camp, no one really noticed what I was doing, unless I was messing up in some way. So I don’t know if the screaming really helped our team score.

But man, did it make me feel better.

Another continual strain on my voice has been theater. You would think that my vocal training and years in performing would have offered some level of expertise against vocal cord strain. I finally wised up, senior year of high school, and defected over to the altos instead of killing myself by straining to be a soprano. I should have done that years earlier — I’d have learned to sing harmony sooner, and I probably would have enjoyed chorus a lot more, because I wouldn’t have been sitting in rehearsal going, “God, there is no WAY I am going to hit a high G today! What was Mrs. Foster THINKING??”

The single biggest insult to my voice, though, was West Side Story. (Also the biggest compliment, but vocal cords don’t really care about that, now do they.) I pushed myself beyond anything I had done before, and managed to overwork myself so completely that I almost couldn’t do the last performance. I didn’t even ask the director if I should change the songs around so that they were more manageable — I just went and did it. The next year, one actress in the show had the music teacher change her solo into a lower key so that it’d be easier to sing. Now why didn’t I think of that?

Ever since then, I’ve had steady trouble with my voice. When I have even the slightest cold, the first thing that happens is that my voice drops an octave. Then, if it progresses, I start to squeak and cough. I start downing copious amounts of tea (be fair… I do that anyway) to stave off the inevitable croaking phase. If I’m lucky enough to be able to nurse my throat back to health over a weekend or vacation, the problem eventually dissipates. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no way around talking at normal volume when you’re teaching. One particularly bad winter, maybe two years ago, I actually had to call in sick because I couldn’t talk.

But not to worry. I always get my voice back. Sometimes I don’t even realize that it’s returned, until I catch myself humming or singing and suddenly notice that it’s comfortable and easy again.

Things I Like As An Adult That I Would Have Hated As a Kid

• eating salad for lunch or dinner
• drinking tea (especially the combo in my cup right now… green tea mixed with brown rice)
• oatmeal
• straight expresso
• olives, artichokes, hearts of palm, and other “yucky” salad ingredients
• wearing a scarf
• taking long train rides
• going to the opera
• going to bed early

Things I Loved As A Kid That I Still (Sometimes Secretly) Love

• eating all the marshmallows out of the hot chocolate
• beads, sequins, and glitter (though perhaps in less overwhelming quantities)
• getting dressed up, as long as my shoes are comfortable
• writing plays and stories
• sending and receiving letters
• painting pottery
• chocolate mousse
• coffee that’s almost more milk than coffee
• picking apples
• decorating pumpkins
• jelly beans, M&Ms, Skittles, Doritoes, and other candy that’s “bad for you”

found at www.common-place.org

I was in Union Square yesterday when I saw the T-shirts for the first time. (The guy behind the counter, trying to sell merchandise, yelled after a potential customer, “You’d be helping the Indians, man!”)

Later that night I was in a Native shop and saw the same merchandise. So clearly this is starting to make the rounds.

The orignal shirt

An article about it

Wildly popular in Indian Country ever since U.S. troops invaded Iraq, the shirt was only beginning to make the rounds in December 2001. Even then, we got the joke. Seen from Indian Country, the folks at the Department of Homeland Security are the hypocritical descendants of terrorists, themselves.

Just something interesting to ponder. I haven’t quite got my viewpoint settled about this — but I think it’s a part of the dialogue that this country should be having, and is not.

tags: Homeland Security, Native Americans

Here’s a fascinating story from the New York Times Magazine: Meet the Life Hackers

In a study of office workers and how often they were interrupted, a startling pattern emerged:

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

In this kind of environment, it’s not surprising that anyone with vulnerability in their attention system self-identifies as having adult ADHD. The environment’s attentional and memory demands are so huge that it’s difficult to keep up. How can anyone get anything done under these conditions?

Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don’t. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

I believe that the modern home, as well as the modern office (and to some extent, the modern school) is set up this way. A good percentage of our attentional resources is devoted to keeping tabs on all the tasks we’re supposed to do, and which ones we’ve started or put aside or buried under a pile. We never get the satisfaction, the flow, of working through one thing to completion. Even watching television is like this. Just when you’re getting into something dramatic, often at a climactic moment it breaks for commercial.

I am not one of those people who blames technology (even television) for the rise of attentional dysfunction in children, but at the very least, that doesn’t help.

(By the way, I’ve worked with MANY children with ADHD who can’t sit still long enough to watch a whole TV show — therefore I know for a fact that they are not spending hours sitting in front of it, having their attention span shortened. Now video games? That’s another story. And another post.)

I would love to see the tech companies take this research about interruptions and attention and memory, and apply it to creating an operating system or software that specifically works for people who have attentional or memory issues. That kind of adaptive technology would be a huge advance.

tags: ADHD, assistive technology, corporate

Classes in Chinese Grow as the Language Rides a Wave of Popularity - New York Times

A few quotes from the article:

The number of Chinese language programs around the country, from elementary school through adult programs, has tripled in 10 years.

This is encouraging, since the general aura around language instruction in the United States is that it’s too expensive, unnecessary, or a frill compared with other subjects. Just the fact that ANY language program is being started in elementary school is great news.

I grew up around a lot of speakers of Asian languages — Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — and they were all taught English, but there was never any awareness that English-speaking kids could learn to communicate with them in their native tongues. I even remember people at my school complaining that it was “rude” when the Asian kids spoke to each other in their native languages, leaving the English speakers out. Well, here’s a thought… figure out what they’re saying!

(Although to be frank, when I was in a summer school music program, some of the little kids in the class were coming up to me complaining that their classmates were insulting them in Japanese or Korean, but they couldn’t prove it. So — in a very immature move — I taught them some big English words to say back. “Oh, yeah? Well, you expectorate!” And do you know it worked?)

Then there was this tidbit:

The Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, ranks Chinese as one of the four most time-intensive languages to learn. An average English speaker takes 1,320 hours to become proficient in Chinese, compared with 480 hours in French, Spanish or Italian, the institute says.

I can believe this. I am studying Mandarin right now, and everything about it is challenging for an English speaker — most importantly getting used to the different tones, and not having a Western alphabet or an “alphabet” at all.

I do want to clarify one thing though — that it’s one of the four most time-intensive languages to learn for Westerners. If you did a survey of people who spoke, say, Asian languages, English would probably rank up there as one of the most difficult for them. In fact, English has far more complex spelling rules and vocabulary and grammatical exceptions than most Western languages.

(But we expect all our immigrants to learn it well at the drop of a hat.)

The program I’m using to learn Mandarin is on CD only — it doesn’t teach written communication. So I’m learning that separately. I’m really fascinated by the characters and hoping to get my hands on a Chinese calligraphy book. But the purpose of learning the language is to speak with the people when I’m there next summer, so the calligraphy might have to wait.

My mom tells me that when I was in preschool, I used to sit in the bathtub mimicking the sounds of the languages I heard out on the playground. I was around a lot of Japanese, especially, and a little Chinese. I could have been fluent in at least one Asian language if my school had offered it!

Will be here working on a book or two.

I was born on October 13, 1977 at approximately 11:10 am.

This is me as a little kid.

And this is what I look like now. (I’m at the piano.)

This is a map of the Great Barrier Reef featuring the Howick Group. If you really squint, Ingram Island is in there somewhere!

The next images are courtesy of Heather. Some are just plain scenic — others made me cackle hysterically when I first saw them!

a captured loggerhead turtle

Emily with a very important piece of equipment

Sam with one of our many gourmet meal offerings in the al fresco dining area

More to follow!
(Thanks for the pictures, Heather, hope you don’t mind me posting them)

In case you’ve ever wondered exactly how long it takes to go from 178th st-Port Authority in New York City across the George Washington Bridge, I can tell you.

It’s exactly the length of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

Two highlights from the Chinese embassy website regarding visas and entry regulations:

Any person suffering from a mental disorder, leprosy, AIDS, venereal diseases, contagious tuberculosis or other such infectious diseases shall not be permitted to enter China.

(Mental disorders are infectious?)

Here are some general application procedures:

Step1 Pick up a number before you sit down and wait until your number called.

Step2 When your number called, you can approach the first available window, either window1 or window2 to present application or make inquires.

Step3 Pay fees between 1:00-3:00 pm on the date for pick up. Line up before window 3 and pay the fees(needless to pick up a number).

Step4 Pick up at window 4. Check your visa, passport and document before you leave.

These folks ought to run the Department of Motor Vehicles!

I am proud to announce that lisafischler.com now features an interactive bulletin board devoted to all things writing!

You can join in the fun by clicking here!

Unless you’re an AOL user. In that case, copy this address:

http://lisafischler.com/bulletinboard

into a new browser window. AOL does something strange that may interfere with using the board. (I know… I have AOL too. Grr.)

Hope to see you all there!

Scientists: Everest only 29,017 Feet

My favorite quote from the article:

Chen said the data did not mean the mountain had shrunk since it was last measured, but that previous measurements were less accurate.

Right, because otherwise people might think that Mt. Everest is shrinking. Maybe it has osteoporosis? That sounds like the makings of a Monty Python sketch, doesn’t it?

Actually, there IS a Monty Python sketch about Mt. Everest. It features an ascent up Everest by the International Hairdresser’s Expedition.

Favorite quote: Well, things have gotten so bad that we’ve been forced to use the last of the heavy oxygen equipment just to keep the dryers going.

(Warning: the sketch contains some pretty out-in-front stereotypes and explicit language. As if I have to warn you that Python contains explicit language? Hmm, and notice I didn’t say “mature” language!)

There are other Python sketches about mountaineering (not archived on the web, alas). In one, a group painstakingly advance along a busy London street. In another, Sir George Head interviews a man who would like to join his expedition to climb “both peaks” of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I don’t plan to do any mountaineering at all when I visit Asia next summer — though I am considering one or two possible itineraries that would take me to Everest Base Camp. I don’t plan on going any higher, as I don’t think that knocking 12 feet off the top will really help me very much.

And no, I’m not taking a hair dryer either.

Q: I hear you tried cooking something tonight. How did it go?
A: Shh, I’m trying to pick the garlic out of my teeth.

Q: That good, huh?
A: Put it this way. I am not going to be unseating an Iron Chef anytime soon. On the other hand, I was able to eat it without getting sick. So that was a plus.

Q: Any other fun projects going on during your vacation weekend?
A: I thought I’d lounge around watching conservative hand-waving over this Supreme Court nominee who isn’t even a judge on FOX News.

Q: What do you think of President Bush’s latest choice?
A: What do I think about ANY of President Bush’s choices? John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, that bozo at the helm of FEMA — those were all winners, weren’t they? If this lady were more of a religious fanatic, most conservatives wouldn’t have a problem with her. The “lack of qualifications” they’re objecting to have to do with ideology, not judicial experience. By the way, can we change the subject? Talking about Bush gives me high blood pressure.

Q: You’re really not going to watch FOX News, are you?
A: No. I am going to watch VH1.

Q: You can’t fool me. I saw your dad’s jazz records strewn all over the floor again.
A: Shh, don’t tell him. He’ll think I’m the one who scratched them.

Q: He doesn’t even listen to records anymore. No one does. Haven’t you ever heard of iTunes?
A: No, because I was stranded on a tropical island.

Q: People had iPods on the island. You are such a liar.
A: Fine.

Mixed Signals On Subway Threat Puzzle Many via Yahoo.com

What caught my attention:

“Look, it is very different being an analyst in Washington looking at data as opposed to being here in New York where you have to take responsibility to protect people’s lives,” Bloomberg said, defending his decision to make the threat public.

Emphasis added to note the implied statement, that the feds are either incapable or not willing to take responsibility to protect people’s lives.

My instinct says to go with Bloomberg. After all, we saw how right Homeland Security was about Hurricane Katrina, didn’t we? They failed to anticipate a problem and mobilize a solution. Interesting how they then want to turn around and criticize New York City for — gosh! — anticipating a problem and mobilizing a solution.

However, I am riding the subways completely as usual. I’m reassured that at least someone is taking care of things and on the ball, even if it’s not the less-than-swift folks that Bush appointed back in Washington.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled banality.