Trials and Tribulations of Country Club Accounting

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accounting, country club, golf, membership fee

My husband and I joined a local country club last summer in order to play golf. The family club membership fee is more or less affordable (unfortunately it just covers two of us since family members older than 18 are not included). The members are required to spend at least $50 a month to support the club restaurant, which is fortunately pretty good. Initially we made an arrangement so that the fee can be taken out of our bank account directly; but soon we stopped the arrangement to avoid the double charge. (The first experience of being double charged was rather frustrating.) Now we pay by writing checks.

Today I called up the Country Club office so that I’d be able to mail the check to cover the membership for February. Then I was surprised to know the fee included the restaurant dinner cost that we already had paid at the time of dining. Nevertheless, I decided to write a check to cover the amount indicated by the secretary/ accountant, since our next credit-card statement would clarify their mistake.

These experiences related to the club membership fees prompts me to wonder if the accounting at a small country club is a murky affair. The murkiness may be due to the fact that the members who are rather old but well-to-do may not pay close attention to their accounts to the extent that they do not notice any irregularities. Or perhaps, it may be due to the fact that the country club owner hires one of her/his relatives or friend’s relatives who may not be particularly competent. In either case, I think the members should be more attentive to their book-keeping.

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Hikikomori: A Japanese Phenomenon?

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Daisuke Nagai, hikikomori, Hiroki Hasegawa, Japanese drama "Date", NEET, Sore Kara, Soseki Natsume, the intransigent economic recession in Japan, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen, Wall Street Journal

The Jan. 27 issue of Wall Street Journal carried a small article on hikikomori, shut-ins, titled “The Fight to Save Japan’s Generation of Shut-Ins” in the Health and Wellness section. This social phenomenon of some young (10s to 30s) people closing themselves into their rooms without getting out of their houses is generally considered as peculiarly Japanese, though the phenomenon is also observed in “U.S., Hong Kong, and Spain.” According to the article the word, hikikomori, itself “has been a household word since the 1990s.” In Japan 1990s is the decade that started an intransigent post-WWII economic decline after the economic bubble burst in 1990. It is not necessarily the case that if a word for a particular phenomenon does not exist then that phenomenon does not either. But, the creation of the word itself means the phenomenon became much more noticeable, suggesting its frequency. The cause of this phenomenon has not been clearly identified but if one considers the phenomenon from the historical perspective one may tentatively say that it has something to do with the economic problem in Japan.

Coincidentally, a Japanese comedy drama series ridiculously titled as “Date” started this winter season, starring Hiroki Hasegawa (fearlessly bravura performance) as Takumi, a 35-year-old hikikomori, who initiates an adventure of finding a spouse who can support him economically because he is worried that his mother who hitherto has supported him is becoming physically weak. This drama somewhat helped me theorize a possible cause for the emergence of the young hikikomori people in Japan: hikikomori people are a historical by-product of the economic bubble in 1980s, which encouraged many Japanese to become cultured and genteel, and its sudden burst in 1990, which made the society more competitive, thus more cut-throat, frightening some very gentle people.

Takumi is a university-educated hikikomori though in the drama he is called NEET. (NEET is a British acronym meaning “not in education, employment, and training”; so technically he is also a NEET like all other hikikomori people. I wonder if in Japan it is allowed to ridicule NEET, whereas it is not allowed to make fun of hikikomori; after all, ridiculing is a lot like bullying.) Meanwhile Takumi himself defines his situation as kotouyuminn, a high-class man of leisure, exemplified in the character of Daisuke Nagai in Soseki Natsume’s novel Sore Kara, And Then. (It’s not clear if the creator of this drama understands the social and historical context of the existence of men of leisure, which suggested the sign of ruling class in the 19th century as discussed in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class.) Like Daisuke who trivializes his spiritually corrupted former classmate’s economic and personal difficulties as a result of having worked in order to eat, Takumi does not work and spends most of his time reading books and watching films in order to become a highly-cultured person. (Since this is a comedy the books include comic books and films include anime.) The implication here is that people who work to survive tend to become damaged as people because they sometimes have to tolerate the willful exploitation and bullying of their employers, including their surrogates. The catch in Takumi’s situation is that because his family is not economically well-to-do he can’t even go out to socialize (which costs money) unlike Daisuke who is supported by his father, a wealthy businessman. (By the way, Soseki himself became a kind of hikikomori when he was a pecuniarily-handicapped government-sponsored student in London, which he hated for its most ruthless expressions of rampant capitalism. He wrote: “The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant years in my life. Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves.”) Once a person starts staying at home, a womb-like place away from the “dangers” of the outside world, he or she may get stuck in that place. Obviously, for some reason Takumi’s mother, who makes petty income by offering an art class for children, has not pressed him to get out in order to adjust himself to the real world. (His father is deceased/ absent.) So Takumi has become hikikomori so much so that he gets dizzy and sick in the crowd when he has a date in an amusement park.

Pope Francis on Birth Control

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capitalism, Catholic church doctrines, family planning, Filipinos, Karl Marx, overpopulation, Pope Francis

Pope Francis, who has been delighting some alienated modern Catholics with his plain-spoken ideas and statements relevant to the world of the 21st century, has just made another controversial remark on one of the seemingly fossilized church doctrines on average people’s lives: the family planning. On his flight back from the Philippines on January 19, Pope Francis said to the reporters that Catholics should not feel compelled to breed “like rabbits” and they should instead practice responsible parenthood. He was responding to a journalist who said that many Filipinos believed that their poverty was caused by overpopulation. (Needless to say, most controversy was generated by the pope’s vernacular way of speaking about reproduction, “like rabbits.” However, I consider the gist of his statement remarkably enlightened for a person in his position.)

Like many secular and rational-minded people I thoroughly agree with Pope Francis’ statement on family planning. Children are not the gifts of God or gods. Parents are solely responsible for the existence of their children. At this time in human history when the medical technology can minimize the mortality rate of newborns, humans do not have to reproduce like rabbits, frogs or other creatures of natural kingdoms whose reproductive systems take it consideration that most of their off-springs do not survive in the wild. It often seems that the unbridled advocate for reproduction is one phenomenon of war-prone society; conversely it often seems that unbridled reproduction is the cause of war for limited resources. I believe most of the social problems in both developed and developing nations could be alleviated by limiting the number of children a woman is often compelled or coerced to have due to religious doctrines and/or social expectations. On the one hand, by de-stressing their reproductive social function women can explore their humanity in other areas; on the other hand, by having smaller number of off-springs a family can allocate more available resources (including their time and attention) onto each of existing children. It is true that parental attentiveness and care may not necessarily result in the happiness of each child due to historical, social, and natural variables, such as natural disasters and political insurrections; but, on the whole, it seems that children with full parental love and attention are happier and better-adjusted to reality as individuals than those who have been neglected.

There are only limited resources available to humans on earth. In order to live in a manner more harmonious with nature (because humans depend on it) humans should control the reproduction. Capitalism may require more consumers for its expansion, but even capitalism, in which “All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned” according to Karl Marx, has to co-exist with nature. If the earth should get used up, decimating the possibility for sustainability of humankind and other organisms, capitalism itself will die out.

Dangerously Shallow Field of View

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camera lens, imperfect human faculties, Oliver Sacks, shallow focus

The other day after coming back from the grocery shopping I realized that I had forgotten to buy a jar of mint jelly. So after taking the purchased groceries into the house from the trunk of the car, I hurried back to my car. As I got into the car, I checked if I had one of my shopping bags (these days the stores do not supply free bags to their customers in order to minimize trash) on the passenger seat. Then, I hit the lower side of my left eye with the corner of the car door. I immediately went back to my house to place ice cube to my face that was hit by the top of the car door. I was a little scandalized by the ineptness of my movement. How could that happen!? Was I moving my body in such an inattentive manner that I did not realize there was a heavy metal object right in front my eye? I believe my vision worked like a camera lens which blurs the object very close to it when focusing on the object further away. My vision was obviously solely focused on the passenger seat so that I did not realize a dangerous obstacle that was close to me physically. Human eyes are supposedly more flexible and adaptable than camera lens. Did my vision faculty lose that adaptability? I do not remember that this sort of clumsy blunder happened before. But as Oliver Sacks often tells us our memory is sometimes unreliable (for instance, he wrote a story about his discovery that one’s memory is not always reliable based on his own fallacious memory about a childhood event that actually never happened to him).

It is always disappointing to realize the imperfections of human faculties. The bruise under my left eye is a sad evidence for such fallibility.

American Sniper: American Masculinity

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American Sniper, Black Hawke Down, Bradley Cooper, Earnest Hemingway, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thierty

As the weather forecast predicted it was dark and rainy day today. Since my husband wanted to see American Sniper we went to see the movie at the nearby multiplex. The theater was packed with people. Unlike many other recent films we saw its audience demographic consisted of more older men than women. Usually matinees are dominated by older folks probably because they are more cost conscious (the matinee shows cost slightly less).

The film started in the usual media-res format: Chris Kyle, performed by almost unrecognizably bulked-up Bradley Cooper, was about to shoot a young Iraqi boy who was told to take a rocket-shaped grenade by his mother. This taut scene quickly cuts to a flash-back of the American sniper’s childhood hunting experience. This scene reminded me (and perhaps others) of short stories written by Earnest Hemingway, thus connecting Kyle’s narrative to the very American brand of masculinity. His childhood memory was most certainly inserted into the narrative of American Sniper in Post-9-11 Iraq war to explain the moral justification of the sniper’s military job: Chris kills dangerous people who are about to kill his fellow soldiers. As his father demanded in Kyle household, the boys had to grow up to be sheep dogs that protect sheep from bad wolves.

The first 20 minutes of the film did not really strike me as promising due to its workman-like editing that almost revealed the way the film sequences were shot, but gradually it became more interesting because it communicated how it was like to fight in Iraq in the early 2000s.

To sum, the film reminded me of a few superior films that dealt with American military conflicts in recent years, such as Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty. But, American Sniper was the most “patriotic” and American.

On a Crisp and Sunny Day

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AlQaeda, beautiful scenery, Belgian, Blaise Pascal, Boko Haram, golf, Iraq, ISIS, jihadist, Kashiwagi, Nigeria, Pensee, Syria, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Washington DC, Yukio Mishima

These days it seems the world is erupting with violent political conflicts: Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Qaeda affiliates in France, ISIS affiliates in Belgian, an ISIS wannabe in Washington DC as well as ISIS in Syria and Iraq. All these armed conflicts or would-be conflicts are perpetrated in the name of a religion. But, obviously they are more motivated by their desire for power grab. They want to be empowered in one way or another. For instance, even a suicidal jihadist leaves a video message proclaiming his religious conviction though it seems to me fairly transparent that what he really wanted is his personal “empowerment” as well as what he considered a concrete sign of his existence on earth. As Blaise Pascal said in Pensee, it may be the case that “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

Such a world condition is thought- as well as anxiety-provoking, but certainly it is not debilitating. I try to enjoy life as much as I can. For instance, my husband and I enjoyed playing golf yesterday since we had an unusually crisp and sunny day for the Pacific Northwest in wintertime. It was sunny without clouds. It was not warm but the chilliness was the invigorating kind. As expected there were many other golfers on the golf course, and it promoted sociability. From the golf course we could see the snow-covered mountain and the blue estuary. It was indeed picture perfect. The problematically resentful character, Kashiwagi, in Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (I think this novel illustrates the terroristic mind quite well, by the way) said, “Beautiful scenery is hell, isn’t it?” Though such a paradoxical statement is interestingly thought provoking, in reality I think beautiful scenery is heaven. The serene beauty of the sea, the mountain, and the sun, made me feel calm and even provoked a sense of gratitude for being alive, connected to such a beauty of nature. Since we had other scheduled appointments we could not play the usual 9 holes (we could play 7 holes), but playing golf on a crisp sunny day made us feel happy. I wonder if I am an escapist. Perhaps.

French Culture and Skepticism

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anti-authoritarianism, Charlie Hebdo, Descartes, French Revolution, Salman Rushdie, satire, scientific thinking, skepticism, the largest political rally in French Hisory, the Reformation, The Satanic Verses

The terrorist attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher super market that killed 17 people galvanized French people to show up in a massive protest rally on January 11th. Many media reported at least 3.7 million people showed up for this anti-terrorism rally in Paris that included foreign dignitaries, such as the British Prime Minister, the German Chancellor and the Israel Prime Minister. Many of the attendants were wearing slogans, such as “I am Charlie,” and “I am Jewish,” expressing solidarities to those who were the targets of terrorist attacks. The attack on the journalists of Charlie Hebdo is the latest of the physical attacks (threatened and actual) on the people who expressed criticism or skepticism on the hyper-pious attitude of some Muslims, which started with the death edict placed on British writer Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini for writing a satirical postmodern fiction The Satanic Verses. I found it interesting that this rally was the largest of political rallies in French history. Since the past terrorist attacks on Jewish establishment did not incite such an outrage among the contemporary French I think this level of outrage was caused by the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo. Then, I wondered why the murderous attack on the satirical weekly roused the French so much as to make this anti-terrorism political rally the largest one in French history.

It is generally considered that philosophical modernity began with Descartes’ skepticism that questioned even his own existence. (Needless to say, Descartes was French.) This sort of thorough skepticism led to the development of scientific thinking, which refused to accept the existing ideas as true without testing the veracity or functionality of these ideas. Meanwhile this level of skepticism as well as the scientific thinking severely devalued the religious ideologies. It seems the case that the ruling classes, whether theological or political, did not have to worry about their subjects’ minor skepticism, when majority of people were kept illiterate and ignorant. (For instance, people might have distrusted a neighborhood merchant’s calculation of costs but they generally believed the theological or political foundations of their societies.) But, once people’s literacy and learning started to develop beyond the necessities of their daily needs, they started to question the very foundations of their societies. This phenomenon first happened in the west in the form of theological or political revolutions, such as the Reformation and French Revolution. So, one would say that the people who grew up and were educated in France, the land of Charlie Hebdo, should be well versed in the attitude of skepticism, if not scientific at least in theological and political skepticism. The satirical literary genre is deeply rooted in French culture. Thus, the French reacted to the latest attack on their cultural tradition of skepticism and anti-authoritarianism with force.

Intruders in Our Backyard

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chain saw, homeowner's association, neighborly harmony, tree-cutters

As I was folding the laundry I heard loud chain saw noises under our window. I opened the venetian blind and saw nothing. The noise seemed to come from our front yard. I thought our neighbor who moved to the next door about 2 years ago was again cutting something – not a tree since he had cut down all the available trees. I went down to our kitchen and was a little shocked to see a red-helmeted man taking off the branches of the wild cherry tree that was sticking out into our backyard. This person was in our backyard without informing me about it. Then, I thought my husband again forgot to inform me about a workman whom he hired to do some job in the back yard. Then, I noticed that he was not alone. I saw another red helmet peeking out behind the tall cherry tree, and then another red helmet bobbing up behind our backyard fence. I called up my husband to inquire into these chain saw wielding men. It turned out these men were hired to cut the cherry tree by the “homeowner’s association” that viewed the old wild tree dangerous. As they removed the branches one by one, some of these branches knocked down the fence that separated our backyard and the common green belt. When everything was done with a big thump of the falling tree on the commons the workmen fixed the fence. I asked my husband if we should tell the association that they should have told us about their decision to cut the tree. But my husband disagreed because they did not cut a good fir tree that was right next to the cherry tree in the green belt; he does not want to cause unnecessary trouble. We often accept somebody’s unreasonable behavior for the sake of maintaining neighborly harmony.

The First Skiing of Season

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global warming, skiing resorts in Washington State

One weekday my husband and I decided to go for skiing so that our bodies would become acclimated for skiing. Our area is full of great mountains where skiing is possible; however, due to climate change or global warming the area skiing resorts have suffered from the dearth of snow this skiing season. When our usual skiing resort opened in late December, finally, we no longer had time to go for skiing. But, since we plan to ski in Japan this winter we are pressed to find the time to go for skiing.

We got up early so that we could arrive at the skiing resort in good time (it usually takes about 3 hours to get there from home). As we drove through the villages at the foot of the mountain we were a little scandalized to detect no sign of snow. We began to wonder if what we saw on the skiing resort website was erroneous. As our car climbed the mountain even around the chain area where we normally stop the car to put chains on the tires, we did not see snow. We saw only the fierce white water caps on the river water that runs alongside the mountain road. The tree-canopied mountain road was beautiful, but there was no snow. However, a little later when our ears began to pop we began to detect the presence of snow. Each time we passed accumulated snow on the road-side we exclaimed, “Snow!” So, it was quite a relief when we started seeing snow all over. Certainly there were many patches of exposed ground, but nevertheless the slopes were skiable. And the sun was shining! The slopes were glorious with the blue sky, the white snow and the green trees. We had a great time.

Diversity and Unity in Language

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disappearing languages, John McWhorter, world languages

John McWhorter wrote in a Wall Street Journal article “What the World Will Speak in 2115”, “by 2115, it’s possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet, as opposed to today’s 6,000.” It’s not clear why “we may regret the eclipse of a world where 6,000 different languages were spoken as opposed to just 600,” but as he continues: “there is a silver lining: Ever more people will be able to communicate in one language that they use alongside their native one.” I wonder if easier communication among more number of people is vastly superior to observing more languages. I suppose people who used to use each of 5,400 languages for communication would regret the decline of their language but it is a little hard to believe that all of us will regret the disappearance of 5,400 languages. True, fewer numbers of languages may suggest fewer ways of seeing and living. But, is it necessarily bad? Wouldn’t a fewer languages for communication superior to merely recording the fact that there are more ways of seeing and living? In biological/ zoological sciences, the diversity of species is often considered superior to a limited number of species because it suggests flexibility thus more opportunities for survival in changing environments. I wonder if more ways of seeing and living would entail a greater likelihood for human survival.