217 - Belittling what other people choose to learn or do because we don't understand it

I'm acquaintances with a guy who I haven't been to school with or spoken with in a while. I think the reason we drifted apart and no longer talk came down to my fondness of contemplating different subject matters in great detail, for long periods of time, while he preferred to keep conversations simple and avoid overthinking the things we talked about. He would complain to me about the work we had to do in class, and ask me why we had to read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy or 500-page Dickens novels, and when I asked him in return why he was having such an awful time, he would tell me that it was because he hated authors who went to great lengths to describe the different sceneries, writers who kept the plot going for far too long with all the twists and turns, and who used old-fashioned and unusual vocabulary and sentence structures, and incorporated themes and symbolism that he couldn't grasp without someone else pointing them out to him.

I respected his way of thinking, I understand the appeal of it, and I wish the world was simple too. The bigger the phenomenon (e.g., love, life and the pursuit of happiness), the simpler I wish it was. But I believe from a very early stage in our lives, we are meant to learn to adapt to the complicated, mazy reality we live in. And one cannot be afraid to expose oneself to knowledge and experience, because otherwise, we will forever be naïve.

A lot of people tell me that they hate science and maths because the concepts are so abstract and dealing with numbers and equations is just too confusing. Some people tell me they don't get art, because it's hard for them to grasp on to the idea of actually reading an artist's expression and finding meaning through their painting or sculpture. One person once told me they disliked economics, because the way economies work most of the time is in a sporadic, seemingly senseless manner - prices rise, productivity falls, import spending increases, but government taxation decreases, consumer spending goes up, then prices go down when they were going up to begin with...

As for me, I find the study of politics and history very complicated. The same goes for music theory. I'm actually afraid to expose myself to theoretical music, because as a kid, I never played any musical instruments and it was just too hard when I finally tried it. Musical theorists and skilled instrument players astound me and I could never do what they do.

On the topic of music, I have another old acquaintance that once said to me he hates music, all forms of it, in all genres. He thinks it's all noise, and he thinks it's stupid that mankind have conceived of 'such aural abuse', as he called it.

It really, really gets on my nerves when people disparage what other people do and know just because it's different. It's definitely not okay to undermine what science, art, economics, politics, history or music does for society, just because it's too complicated in our point of view. Without any academic facet of the humanities, and the sciences, and the arts, our world just wouldn't function properly. Although it is alright to state your disinterest in particular subjects, calling psychology pure crap, or art pupils too stupid to do anything else, or science and maths students too geeky, or the study of philosophy too convoluted, does nothing but demonstrate a great deal of insensitivity and narrow-mindedness.

Without all the other people in the world that don't lead your life, you'd be dead. The world ain't simple, and they make sure it works for you. So, be a bit more acceptant, please.

177 - People who videotape lectures

The life of a university student is quite interesting. We are finally adults, responsible for our own money, time, property, physiological well-being, and general lifestyle, emotionally mature, with a supposedly more developed mental health, while also carrying the rights to marry, to vote, to work, to join the army, to drive, to travel abroad without parental consent, to drink, to smoke, to have sex, to gamble, and the list goes on. We choose how we want to live our lives, and in university, that largely includes the way we want to learn.

No longer must we conform to the timetable of high school, be obliged to attend classes, consult teachers about class content, have lunch at a reasonable hour, sleep at a reasonable hour, do our homework on time, or spend hours and hours studying for our tests. We are free of all obligations, our duties are for us to define. We can skip all of our lectures and seminars, we can forget about studying, get wasted every night, sleep in every morning, eat junk food everyday, revise for our examinations at the very last minute, and give less than a rat's tail about our assignments. The only drawback about that game plan is the fact that we would fail at the end of the year, and that's quite a lot of money to send down the drain.

One key thing that you may find different, is the fact that you don't need to take notes down anymore - it's not required of us anymore - as adults, we decide if it's necessary for our tertiary education. We can just sit there, cross-armed the whole time and put the gift of memory to good use by listening intently, taking it all in and deeply engraving it in our heads, or we could leave an audio recorder on the lecturing stand for aural replay on a later date.

But if you really wanted to capture the entire essence of the talk, if you really wanted to experience the lecture like it was exactly once again, you could get a video camera, and tape the whole damn thing.

I thought I've seen some stupid things in my lifetime. This girl put a video camera on the lecturing stand, to tape the professor giving the talk, and the reason for this was that there was nowhere else to put the camera. With the soft, cotton-filled, round-edged seats in the theater, the chairs were useless when it came to balancing anything on top of one of them. She could have just held the thing in her hand the whole time instead, but she probably figured she needed both hands to take down notes. The one thing she didn't figure beforehand was the fact that the lecturer didn't exactly stay at the stand, or in any one particular place.

In fact, the lecturer moved almost everywhere except the lecturing stand. When the professor was standing on the right, the girl student was happy, and she sat there - not listening to the professor - but always eying her precious visual project to make sure she was capturing the video (i.e., being distracted). When the lecturer walked over to the left-hand side of the lecture hall, the girl would get up from her seat, and turn the camera towards him. And then the professor would turn, and walk back in the opposite direction to the right-hand side.

This went on for about ten minutes, and the girl had gotten up seven times. She finally figured - she would have to stop getting up and sitting down - so she found a plastic chair and sat right next to the lecturing stand. This only gave her easier access to her camera, and she would tweak the angle at which her camera was pointed repeatedly at around one tweak per minute. She wasn't even listening to the man. The guy was telling us very interesting things, about the Azande people of Central Africa who believe in witchcraft, who purify their newborns by holding them over smoke, and whose criminal justice system involves determining a suspect's innocence in a crime by observing if a poisoned chicken dies or survives after ingesting a toxic substance.

And this girl wasn't listening to any of this. She kept adjusting her lens, tending to her sacred angle that had to be pointed at the professor at all times. She was distracting two hundred or more other students, and let's face it...

Why waste one hour or more in the future by watching it on tape?

You can just pay attention the one time, the first time, and that's the only hour of your lifetime that that lecture would take out of your time. If you videotaped all of your lectures, you would effectively be taking the same course twice, spending twice the time listening to the same content twice, not forgetting the fact that you would have to spend additional hours more dealing with the technology and the hardware.

Why bother?

This is a classic case of people trying too hard, but achieving less.

170 - Having no common sense

Just recently, I discontinued my post as a bartender in a Belgian restaurant. I was so good by the end of the three months in which I worked that a part of me didn't want my first ever job to surcease. The restaurant I worked at was already a little bit understaffed, and I felt like I was abandoning a team, like an integral cog in the Belgian machine.

Seeing as this company has treated me well, I agreed to help train this one guy who was hoping to replace me in the bar. He came in for a lunch shift to try out, because lunch is an easier time to go through everything than dinner, due to fewer customers. I thought it would be fun for me, to run through all the morning, afternoon and closing duties with him, to guide him, and to encourage him, and to observe, in an evident way, how much I actually learned in the short space of three months.

By the end of the lunch hour, though, I wanted to tear my hair out.

Speaking honestly, and by that, I mean without exaggeration: he was soooooooooo bad at this job. He would open a bottle of still water, pour a glass of Coke and produce a cup of coffee, and for every little thing, he would bring it to my face and ask me, "Is this okay?"

Uh, hello? It's a glass of Coke. You put ice in a short glass, pour the Coke in, and place a slice of lemon on top. Easy, quick and simple.

As for the coffee, you get the jug of filtered coffee, pour it in a coffee cup, place it on a saucer with a small coffee spoon. A bit more complex, but nothing a full-grown man cannot perform, right?

But come on... to open a bottle of water? You get a bottle opener, position it on the bottle cap in any number of ways, apply some pressure to achieve some leverage, until the cap pops right off. Voilà, the bottle of water has been accomplished. Not exactly rocket science, now, is it?

For each and every small detail, he would ask me to confirm that it was okay. But you know what the funny thing was?

The funny thing was that the stuff he brought to the pass were not okay. He put iced lemon tea in a short glass, when the diameters of the lemon wheels are practically the same as the height of the glass. Where's the fun of poking three lemon slices to the bottom of a short glass that's already filled to the brim with ice?

And why would you place a lemon slice garnish at the bottom of a glass of Coke? Does that not defeat the purpose of using it as a garnish? It goes: ice, Coke, lemon... not lemon, ice, Coke. Can you remember that? Is that going to be alright for you to handle?

And you know, even your still water has fault in it, because the order asked for sparkling water. The two words are quite differently spelled, maybe you have ADHD?

And listen to this... He poured the milk, and the brown sugar, into the coffee, for the customer, before he served it. Some people may not want milk, some people may not want brown sugar, and everyone doesn't want you to stir their coffee for them. They might think you're poisoning their drinks.

Oh, my God, I thought these things were common sense??? I THOUGHT THESE THINGS WERE COMMON-DUH!-SENSE. You don't have to work in F&B at all to know these sorts of things. All you need is a brain.

It's funny because the trainee told me that he prepared well for this job. He told me he's worked in a few places before, and has taken a bartending course.

You don't need to take a course to tend bar. So, what, if you memorize two hundred cocktails? Chances are people are going to ask you to pour a beer, or get them a glass of Coke, and, uh, maybe have a chat? Bartending is not that glamorous of a job, and it's not always about fancy bottle juggling and mixing drinks. 98% of the time, you pour a beer, or you get them iced water. So, what the Hell, if you memorize two hundred cocktails? And if your school is so good, tell me, is that how they taught you to serve iced lemon tea at the Bartending Academy?

The job is about customer service, and confidence, and quick thinking, and you can't learn these things at school.

But most important of all, and I suspect the case is the same for all fields of work, to be a bartender, it requires common sense. Imagine if you were a customer, and serve drinks like you're serving your own mother. All you need is horse sense, and the rest is simple.

81 - Close-mindedness

My friend, Sarah, and I are at the Hong Kong Central Library and as she's currently leafing through books on the Cold War, I'm taking this opportunity to write today's post while she works.

Sarah seems a little paranoid and thinks I might be writing about her. She's asked me whether or not I'm writing about her cold sores or her boots or perhaps the way she searches for books. To be honest, I do take issue with the strolling around the library searching for the book because that's what the Dewey decimal system and the library catalogs are for. I mean, right now, I could just as easily write about her swinging her arms as she walks, the way she tiptoes to reach books on higher shelves or perhaps the way she crouches or squats to reach books on low ones. Personally, I do those things too, but much more quickly... when nobody is around... because I'm weird like that.

But anyway. Nah. I won't write about her, but she does serve as inspiration for today's idea.

One thing I've always admired about her is the fact that she always has an opinion on everything, i.e., she's never at a loss for words. Like me, she gets how it is to have a versatile taste in different areas of life and you can always count on her to speak up about something or be open-minded enough to listen to you.

There are many people I know that lack this quality. They're narrow-minded and too comfortable with being just comfortable all the freakin' time. They're happy to be another sheep in the herd and find the black sheep (me) very unsettling. A guy like me can obviously communicate with them, and can understand their points of view, but when it's the other way around, I can't tell them anything because they either wouldn't know what to say or wouldn't want to say anything. They don't care that they're ignorant, and they don't hate the fact that they are small in this world. They don't want to know or have more because what they know and have now is decent enough and they'll turn their backs on any opportunities they might have to learn something new.

I have grown from being the baby born in Hong Kong to the teenager that just loves to expose himself to more and more. I want to travel the world in the future, be a forensic anthropologist, a doctor, a Hollywood writer... I give every television show and movie a chance just for the chance to learn something new. I'll try any food, I'll read any book, magazine, comic or blog. I blog because it's a great way to meet people. I don't dislike any of my subjects at school, say it's boring or "stupid", just because it's new, just because it's difficult.

I don't give up and I like learning at school, and in life, and I think that close-minded people are missing quite a lot by being content with their experiences and knowledge that they have already. People who lack flexibility in their breadth of view and rigidly adhere to their own life need to give the wider world a shot.

This doesn't just apply to my friends and me and my little life in Hong Kong.

On a far greater scale, close-mindedness, lack of tolerance, and unwillingness to take in other ideas is the major instigation of war and political upheaval nowadays. I'm no expert, but take the Cold War as an example: communists and capitalists, both unreceptive to each other's different approach to dealing with the economy, cause a death toll that's still being counted now (does anyone have an estimation?).

Library closing, have to end here. Close-mindedness, do you hate it too?