Japanese Journal 2: Why I Love Kanji

“I love kanji.” It may seem strange to hear from a foreigner. Aren’t kanji what make learning Japanese impossibly hard? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to learn Japanese if they stopped using kanji?

Quick background for those who don’t know: Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are both alphabets, with ~50 letters each. Kanji are Chinese characters, and there are 2200 of them in common use. Not only that, each kanji has multiple different ways it can be pronounced. This is understandably a point of annoyance with foreigners trying to learn Japanese, and even among native Japanese speakers.

“I love kanji.” It may seem strange to hear that from a 外人 (がいじん, foreigner). Aren’t kanji what make learning Japanese impossibly hard? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to learn Japanese if they stopped using kanji?

I can ask similar questions about 敬語 (けいご, honorific speech), 高低アクセント (こうていあくせんと, pitch accent), or any other thing that notably distinguishes Japanese from English.

But first I’d like to know, who is the person who picks up Japanese—a language so obviously distinct from English that before you can even start speaking, the writing system is intimidating—and then proceeds to complain about the ways that it’s different from English? If you want to learn a language that’s easy for an English-speaker, learn German!

So right off the bat, there’s the reason that I don’t dislike kanji. It’s a critical part of the language, and I signed on for it when I signed on for the language. But I haven’t said why I might love it. Isn’t that kind of a strong claim to make? I don’t think so. I’ll go ahead and make that claim! 漢字は大好きです。I love kanji. (I’m sure you can tell, I used rather a lot in that sentence.)

Here’s my main reason. I’m learning Japanese because I adore the culture. Maybe it was the fact that my dad rewarded my siblings and I for doing chores with episodes of Wolf’s Rain and Tenchi Muyo, but I’ve always liked Japan.

And language reflects culture. Japanese people use kanji because they stole them from China, then altered them to fit their purposes. We English-speakers did the same thing when we stole the Roman alphabet from, uhh, the Romans. And along the same vein, Japanese people use 敬語 because they’re a very polite people, with a highly stratified society built on respect.

In short, I love 日本語 because I love 日本.

That’s one reason. But I’ll go a step further than “I love kanji because it’s culturally important”. I’ll say I love kanji because it’s linguistically important, too.

Us English-speakers are used to only one half of what turns out to be a two-sided coin of writing systems. English uses a “phonographic” writing system. If you can parse the Greek, that’s “sound writing”. English, more or less, writes symbols that translate to noises. We then translate the noises to meaning inside our brains. Two of the three Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are phonographic, just like English. (Actually, they’re easier than English, because they’re phonetically consistent: か always says “ka”, whereas the letter “a” in English sometimes says “ah”, sometimes says “ay”, sometimes says “uh”, etc.)

However, there’s a different kind of writing system: a “logographic” one. Logographic writing systems include hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and kanji. They don’t represent noises, they represent meaning. If I say a little box like this 口 means mouth, because it kind of looks like one, then I can say that this 言 means speak, because the lines are words coming from the mouth. Congratulations, you now understand how kanji (and Chinese characters, they’re the same thing) are put together.

The benefit of phonographic systems is that it’s really easy to pronounce words once they’re written down. The drawback is that unless you happen to know what the sequence of noises means, being able to say the noises out loud doesn’t do you any good.

On the other hand, as an avid student of kanji who occasionally forgets the readings, I frequently end up on the other side of that coin: “I know this word means outside, but I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce it.”* In other words, logographic systems do a great job at telling you the meaning, but they tell you diddly for pronunciation.

If we step back and think logically, both of these systems have advantages and drawbacks. Ideally, the best way to do a language would be to combine the two, so we can have a best of both worlds, and reading some text can give you both the meaning and the pronunciation, to some extent. Maybe, in our imaginary perfect language, the central meaning of a word is conveyed using a logographic system, and auxiliary things such as conjugations, for which pronunciation is more important than meaning since the meaning is so abstract, we could use a phonographic sys-

Wait.

Japanese already does exactly that. The central meaning of a word is conveyed with kanji, whereas verb and adjective endings are written in hiragana. To make our lives (as 外人) even easier, there’s a third writing system for words that Japanese stole from other languages (90% of which are stolen from English). If you write ぱーちぃ like that, I’ve got no idea what word that is. I don’t recognize it. But if you write it like this パーティ, it’s like the text is screaming “turn your English-speaking brain back on!” at me, and so I do, and I sound out the katakana and figure out that パーティ means “party”.

So you see, instead of thinking “oh god, there’s three different writing systems, that’s so complicated, I’m going to die, I can’t learn this”, you should think about the reason why there are three writing systems. Humans are lazy. We don’t make our lives complicated for no reason. If something seems needlessly complicated to you, maybe you’re just thinking about it the wrong way.

And that is why I love kanji.

*In case you were curious, the kanji for “outside” is 外 and, by itself, it’s pronounced そと. You might also notice that this kanji is present elsewhere in this essay: a 外人, foreigner, is an “outside person”. Literally, that’s what the kanji mean.

Japanese Journal 1: My Linguistic Background

My native language is English, like most people who live in America. However, unlike most people who live in America—and probably unlike most people who live in any country—I had an interesting choice in second language: Latin.

I spent around ten years studying Latin, starting with Rosetta Stone Latin (yes, that exists), and culminating in the AP test: a high-stakes exam taken in American high school that’s equivalent to a college course. If you asked me to write an essay in Latin, even now—when I haven’t touched a single Latin word for nine months—I could probably do it. Well… if you let me use a dictionary to supplement the vocabulary I’ve forgotten, I could.

Basically, to the extent that a person can be fluent in a dead language, I was. (Don’t believe me? I got a 3 on the Latin AP exam. I got the exact same score on the English AP, which I took in the same year.)

To be fair, dead languages are exactly like living ones in most major areas. They’ve got grammar and writing systems and vocabulary. Even pronunciation! Some scholars, who obviously have nothing better to do with their time, have reverse-engineered Latin pronunciation from root words and poetry. There is only one thing dead languages don’t have. Conversation.

In all my time studying and speaking Latin, I never had a single conversation in it. I translated Vergil’s Aeneid and Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and yet I don’t even know how a Roman would say “um”. They never wrote it down!

This gives me a very strange handicap when I try to learn a third language, because my third language, like my first, is living. I know how to say “um” in Japanese, because there are real Japanese people I can talk to who say “um”. (Well, えと.) And in my third language, I can have conversations.

The problem with conversations is that they happen fast. When you write, there’s a moment where you can stop to consider what word you want to use. When you write, you can go back to edit what you’ve already put to paper. But when you talk, there’s none of that. You have no time to think, and it’s all permanent.

My brain, which is used to having time to think, does not like this.

“What,” my language-processing center yells at me, “are you asking me to do? When you made me learn a language before, you never made me come up with words so quickly. You gave me a moment to think, okay, which word do I use here. You’re moving your mouth too fast! I can’t keep up!”

I pat my language-processor on the head to try and calm it down. I say to it, “You seem to do it perfectly fine when I speak English.”

At this point, my language-processor storms off in a huff and refuses to speak to me anymore.

I write this dialogue because there seem to be two types of language learners: absolute beginners, who have no idea what fluency in a language looks like, and seasoned language veterans, who know what fluency looks like and just have to figure out how to get there with this new language.

I’m in a strange middle-ground. I can tell you exactly where I stand on the fluency scale as it relates to reading comprehension, translation, or listening. But if you ask me about conversation, I have no idea where I stand (though I assume it’s towards the very bottom). Further, I have no idea how to improve.

From here on out, I’ll be cataloguing my journey of trying to figure out how to do the fluent-in-a-living-language thing. All such posts will go in the category “japanese”.

I tried to not write this for some time, but unfortunately, I have too many thoughts and my hands can’t stay off the keys. I believe my thoughts are restless ghosts who wrongfully inhabit my brain and desperately wish to be somewhere, anywhere, else. So, I’m giving them a home on this electronic page. I can only hope that these restless spirits may become useful to someone.

Something Hurts. What Now?

Our educational system does a pretty terrible job at teaching the majority of important life skills. The general retort seems to be “those things are the parents’ job to teach”, but that doesn’t generalize: what if the kid’s parent doesn’t know? What if the kid doesn’t have parents? It’s a silly argument.

One of the most basic things that our education system fails to teach is how to take care of yourself. If you have an ache or pain, is it serious or not? If it isn’t, what palliatives should you use to mitigate the pain?

Today, I’ll be discussing all those things, and also some easy remedies you can use to prevent potentially costly problems.

Diagnosing Problems

  1. What hurts?
  2. What kind of pain is it? (i.e., is it aching, shooting, stabbing, etc, and how bad is it)
  3. How long has it been going on? (this includes whether it’s constant or intermittent)

That’s it. Three-step system to help you diagnose your pain. Here are some illustrative examples of how it works.

What hurts? The back of my head. What kind of pain? Moderate ache and stiffness. How long? Pretty constantly all day. This would be a tension headache, caused by knotting of the muscles in your neck. When you use muscles, the muscle fibers get torn apart a bit. If you don’t stretch properly after a workout, or if you stay in a position that uses a muscle for too long, that muscle doesn’t mend correctly after it’s torn. This causes the muscle fibers to get tangled, or “knotted”.

What hurts? My ankle. What kind of pain? Severe stabbing when I move my foot in a particular way or try to stand on it. How long? Since I fell a few minutes ago. This would probably be a sprain. You can distinguish a sprain from a broken bone with two factors: 1, a sprain is much less painful. My skating coach fell and broke her ankle, and described it as so painful she couldn’t stop screaming. 2, a sprain will only hurt when you try to move it, whereas a broken bone will hurt constantly. Still, there are very minor breaks (called ‘fractures’) that can feel more like a sprain; fortunately, there’s an easy test. A sprain will feel better after a few days using the RICE method (see the next section); if a fracture isn’t mending easily, it will take longer, and in that case you can see a doctor for an X-ray.

What hurts? My eyes. What kind of pain? A moderate ache, like there’s pressure inside my head. How long? Constant for a few hours. This is a sinus headache, likely caused by a minor head cold or some environmental irritant. Your sinuses run from your nostrils up through your forehead and around your eyes, such that sinus pressure can result in headaches.

So you see, first you match your symptoms up to a cause. If you don’t know what something means, ask people. Look stuff up and do research online (using reliable sources of course). This way, you can build your own library of pains and causes for them.

The next step is to match up the cause with the way to heal it.

How to Heal

Muscle pains, as characterized above by aching and stiffness, can be remedied in four ways. You can do all of these or just some of them.

  1. Take two 200mg tablets of ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, which means it reduces swelling. Knotted muscles tend to get swollen since blood can’t move through them normally. Ibuprofen is also an analgesic, so it helps relieve pain.
  2. Stretch the muscle out. If you don’t know how to stretch it, look up “muscles in the [body part that hurts]”, find the specific muscle or group you need to stretch, then look up stretches for it. The internet is a wonderful thing.
  3. Give yourself a massage. This will not feel nice, but it will ease your pain. First, get into a position such that you’re not using the muscle. Some muscles are easier to not-use than others: for your leg you can just sit on the ground, but for your neck you’ll have to rest your head on a steady surface (your knees, a countertop, etc) in such a way that you can still breathe. Then, press into the muscle, starting at one end and working toward the other steadily. If you feel a lump, that’s a knot. Put a little more pressure on it. Keep pushing on it harder until it starts to give way. If it slips out from under your fingers, don’t worry, just find it again and push on it some more. If it starts to feel like you’re going to get a bruise, stop with that knot and keep moving. After you’ve either rubbed out the knots or can’t work on them any longer, you’re done.
  4. Put a heating pad on the muscle. This is best used in combination with stretching and/or massage, because heat relaxes the muscle, but doesn’t inherently remove any knots by itself.

For sprains (i.e. knee, ankle, etc) or other kinds of strain, use the RICE method. For this, it is important that you do all the steps.

  1. Rest. Stop using that part of your body. Sit down, lay down, generally use it as little as possible. Rest will help it to heal. If you’ve sprained your ankle, say, use crutches to get around if you need to. (Crutches are not expensive, they’re like $10-20. I own a pair, and I’m young and broke.)
  2. Ice. Grab an ice pack, or simply a bag of frozen veggies in a pinch, and put it on the affected area. Leave it there for about 10-20 minutes, then take it off for the same amount of time. Repeat for the first day or two after your injury. When you injure something, your body sends lots of blood to the area to try and mend it, but your body does not know the meaning of the word “moderation”, so it frequently sends too much blood and the area swells up, making it actually harder to heal. Ice works to fix this because your body doesn’t want its blood getting cold, so if the area is cold, it takes the blood back to a warmer part of you so that your core temperature will stay the same. It’s the same reason the blood drains from your hands and feet when you’re outdoors in the winter. Important Note: ice hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. Don’t put thick towels under your ice pack until it doesn’t hurt anymore, because then it’s not doing any good. You need nothing more than a thin sheet to prevent frostbite.
  3. Compress. If you have Ace bandages, use them to wrap the affected area. If you have a compression sock, that’s even better. If you have neither of those things, buy some Ace bandages. It will serve you very well. Compression works for pretty much the same reason ice does: it helps stop inflammation. Be careful not to make your bandages too tight; it should feel like a necktie, not like a noose.
  4. Elevate. This is yet another method to remove excess blood from the area. (Yes, all of this is necessary. I told you your body has no idea what moderation is.) As a rule of thumb, you should elevate the injured body part in such a way that it’s above your heart. Do this as often as you can manage it, but unlike rest, you don’t need a great reason to stop: “I’m sick of this for now” is enough.

Middle and outer ear infections are the least problematic types of ear infections. You can treat them by disinfecting them.

Middle ear infections are characterized by aching pain in the ears and/or difficulty hearing, and are remedied by doing something to disinfect the ears. Use either isopropyl alcohol or hydrogen peroxide solution: you can find both at your local drugstore. Just stick some in your ear, leave it there for a few minutes, then drain it. Repeat 3 times daily till it goes away.

Outer ear infections are characterized by an itching or redness on the external, visible bit of the ear. You can fix them with antibiotic ointments.

If either of these things doesn’t go away within a few days, you probably have a more serious infection and need prescription antibiotics. Further, if you’ve got symptoms like fever and nausea, that’s probably an inner ear infection, which is very bad, see a doctor. (I sound like a warning label on a pill bottle, sheesh.)

Ingrown toenails are best treated early on. If you notice a stabbing pain in your toe when you walk, employ this remedy straight away. If you let it get bad, the surgery to get the nail removed is $150-200, but on the other hand, you can buy all the supplies to fix it early on for less than $10.

  1. Grab some toilet paper or tissues. You’ll need less than one piece. Get a pair of tweezers, a pencil, or some other relatively pointy object. Finally, get some epsom salts, and a container big enough to fit your foot in (you should probably buy one specially for this purpose, since you don’t want to use the container for anything else afterward; epsom salts are toxic).
  2. Fill the container with very hot water (slightly hotter than you can stand to stick your hand in) and mix in the appropriate amount of epsom salts (it’ll say on the box, but it’s probably about a quarter cup of salt to a gallon of water or something). The mixing process will cool the water down slightly such that it’s now about as hot as you can stand. Stick your whole foot in and soak it for half an hour or something like that. Your foot should get super wrinkly.
  3. When you’re done with that, take your foot out. Rip off a tiny corner of your toilet paper or tissue, wad it up, and shove it under the offending ingrown toenail. Shove as much as you can under there, then wait. The pressure from the wadded-up tissue should push the nail up, and since the epsom salts have softened everything up, this is an easy enough job.

Go through this process in full every day until your toenail pokes right out where it belongs, and in the future, don’t clip your toenails too short.

Sinus headaches and sinus problems in general (including a stuffed-up nose as a result of a cold) can be remedied with a very strange but simple method: neti potting.

A neti pot is a small piece of plastic or pottery shaped like a squashed teapot. There are two holes: a big one in the top that you put the saline water into, and a little one at the end of the elongated spout that you stick up one nostril. Here’s a modern one with a fancy soft tip that comes with saline packets.

Basically, what you do is you fill it with saline solution (I know the exact formula for this one since I do it so often, I’m very susceptible to sinus problems)—1/4 teaspoon salt to 1 cup water—and stick the spout in one nostril, doesn’t matter which. Tilt your head to the side and tilt the neti pot up such that it’s pouring the saline into your nose. Since your nose and sinuses are actually just one long tube, the water will wash out all the gunk and come out the other side.

Make sure you tilt your head forward and lean such that the water isn’t coming down your throat and out of your mouth. (Oh yeah, those are connected too. Basically the whole human body is one long meat hose.) It might take some work to get right, but it’s not difficult. If I was able to get it right at age six, you can do it.

Also, if the saline doesn’t come out the other side the first time, don’t worry. That’s just because your sinuses are too blocked for the saline to flow through. Just drain the saline from that side (lean over a sink, then wipe your nose) and switch to the other side. Pouring saline in from both sides will help to loosen and eventually dislodge the gunk that’s causing the congestion and also probably the headache/infection/post-nasal drip/whatever else. It’s weird, but it works.

As with the pain to cause relationship, you can do research regarding the cause to remedy relationship. Just understand that companies want to not get sued, so they’ll tell you to go to a doctor if anything even potentially bad might happen. Look up “home remedies” before you go hit the UrgentCare.

Questions, comments? Any good remedy you’d like people to know? Add it to the comments section below!

Why You Should Learn a Living Language

The benefits of learning a language are numerous. Bilingualism in general has many mental benefits. The research that demonstrates these things, though, doesn’t tell you a crucial point: all languages are not created equal. Specifically, living languages are very different from dead ones.

I spent, depending on how intensively you define the word “studying”, between four and ten years studying a dead language. I started around age seven with Rosetta Stone Latin (yes, that exists), and studied intermittently through elementary and middle school before taking four years of intensive high school Latin, culminating in the AP test. With the exception of two brief classes in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, the vast majority of my experience in learning languages has been with a dead one.

Last year was my final one taking Latin. After a little while, I detoxed myself of the apathy I’d acquired for anything resembling school, and I kind of missed it. Silly, right? Missing studying vocabulary lists? And maybe it is silly, but it happened anyway. So, intermittently in accordance with a busy schedule, I took up Japanese.

Immediately I was shocked by the differences in learning methods. First, a living language necessitates pronunciation. My proficiency with Latin was orders of magnitude greater than my current proficiency with Japanese: circa last spring, I could read and understand complicated books written in Latin. I read the Aeneid and the Gallic Wars in the original, which is immensely difficult: they’re huge, thick books with tiny type and long, complicated sentences. By contrast, I can hardly form simple sentences in Japanese.

But you can get to where I was in Latin without ever speaking a single word out loud.

Seriously! I learned nearly everything from written words on a page. I read silently, studied flashcards silently, translated silently. I only ever spoke a word of Latin aloud under two circumstances: I was in my one-hour once-a-week online class and I was reading a passage aloud to the class; or my linguistically-inclined brother had asked me the Latin word for something.

By contrast, the veritable instant that I began my study of Japanese I was talking. To an empty room as a pronunciation exercise, but still. The pronunciation actually mattered. I watched Japanese cartoons (commonly called anime) and repeated what the characters were saying under my breath. “Nan desu ka?” a character on the screen would say, and I’d mutter under my breath, “nan desu ka”. I learned so much vocabulary this way, and I learned it painlessly.

That brings me to another point. With a living language, there is media in that language. It’s possible to learn words and phrases purely from watching and reading content. With a dead language, this method of “learning by input” is impossible: there is no content to consume. There is no anime in Latin. I learned exclusively through exhaustive memorization of grammar. It was boring and uninteresting, and now, six months or so after finishing my studies, I’m hard-pressed to remember most of it.

The combination of these two factors—lack of pronunciation and lack of auditory input—made me feel less like I was actually fluent in Latin, and more like I was simply knowledgeable enough about its inner workings that I could basically deconstruct it like a puzzle. I think that, even at the height of my Latin knowledge, if I’d been teleported back to Ancient Rome and met with a native speaker, I could not hold a conversation.

In other words, I didn’t speak the language, I could only deconstruct it.

To hammer in this distinction, let me ask you a question: do you know what a pluperfect is? No? Here’s an example: “We had arrived.” I guarantee you use the pluperfect all the time, but you never knew what it was – and you never needed to. But with Latin, I was backwards. I knew the grammar and all its terms inside and out – if you asked me what the pluperfect subjunctive ending in the third conjugation was, not only would I have understood you, but I’d also have been able to supply the answer. However, I had literally never used any of those words in an actual conversation.

This is the most important difference between learning a living language and learning a dead one. If you learn a living language, you will come out of your studies with an ability that is practically useful: the ability to have conversations. You don’t come out of studying a dead language with that. You only come out of studying a dead language with the ability to deconstruct it.

What does all this mean for you? Take a closer look at the article I linked at the top. The reason bilingualism is helpful for improving mental acuity is that “both languages of a bilingual speaker are constantly active to some degree, even in strongly monolingual contexts”. Aka, the auditory and visual processing for both languages is always online. This makes the biggest difference in conversation, where the bilingual person’s brain has to continuously figure out which language it should use to process information: “this difficult selection is made in constant online linguistic processing by bilinguals is that the general-purpose executive control system is recruited into linguistic processing, a configuration not found for monolinguals.”

But wait, didn’t I just get done saying that one of the chief differences between living and dead languages is that you can learn a dead language completely without ever having a conversation?

Yes. That is exactly my point.

If you’re planning on learning a language for purposes of improving your mental abilities, I highly recommend learning a living one. Looking at the reasons behind the statement that “bilingualism improves your brain”, it seems to me that learning a dead language is much less likely to benefit you than a living one.

Plus, we shouldn’t deny the benefit of having conversations with others in their native tongues. To quote Nelson Mandela, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

My Dad, Epic Pumpkin Carver

From the title you might think my dad does those kinds of crazy intricate designs in negative space using the relative thickness of the rind. He doesn’t do that. Instead, he gets pumpkins he thinks have “character” and gives them kooky faces.

Here are this year’s pumpkins: the normal one is my brother’s.

I helped scoop all the glop out of all of them, down to the rind. They look more like gourds than pumpkins on the inside, with lots of seeds so tightly clumped together that you have to cut them out with a knife. The white one even has eerily green flesh.

This is the fun part. Most people would probably put a squashed face on the side of the green pumpkin, right? Not my dad. He put the face on the top, using the stem as the nose. Here he is carving:

And here’s the finished product.

The back kept falling off, so I put some toothpicks through it so it’d stay in place. We can just put the candle through one of the eye holes tomorrow.

Now onto the white one! Weird pumpkins are always way harder to carve since their rinds are so much tougher, so we don’t have a ton of pumpkins. This white one in particular was really hard to carve. But we made it eventually:

And this is the way in which my dad is the best pumpkin carver I know. Not because he makes the fanciest designs, but because his pumpkins are all memorable and weird. Our Halloween is never gory or gauche; it’s simple and classy. We don’t put gravestones or severed heads in the yard. We have a figure in a silk gown peeking out through window curtains, we have a dragon skull on the front step, we have a candelabra on the piano and a real metal sword on the wall. There are no obnoxiously large fake spiders waiting to scare trick-or-treaters, only my dad in a long fancy cloak sitting by the door and reading Edgar Allen Poe’s collected works while haunting piano music plays in the background.

That’s his aesthetic, and the pumpkins are meant to fit that.

The Importance of Support

Being Jewish was always something I felt like I was in the abstract. I had a different culture than most people, I celebrated different holidays, I had a different native country, my family spoke a different language. I was different, sure, but not in any way that mattered.

Otherwise, I’m just like every other American. I celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks. I stay up late on New Year’s Eve watching the ball drop on TV. Unlike many Jews, I even celebrate Christmas: my dad grew up Christian, so we decided to maintain the tradition from his side of the family. Being Jewish never got in the way of these things.

When I told people I was Jewish, I was sometimes met with confusion, but rarely with hate. In fact, it happened so infrequently that I can recall each individual instance.

This is why I was so shaken when I heard about the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. I didn’t understand how this man could look at a bunch of people who celebrated our holidays like he celebrated Christmas, who had a native culture and history like other Americans might be Irish or Norse, but who were also American citizens just like anyone else, and decide we must be eradicated off the face of the earth.

How do you look at my family on Rosh Hashannah, smiling and laughing and passing around a brisket like many families would pass around a honey ham on Christmas, and decide that “all Jews must die”?

I don’t think I can hope to know, but I was scared nonetheless.

I personally am relatively safe. I go to a different synagogue which doesn’t happen to be in a Jewish neighborhood, and I only go on high holidays when they have a decent amount of security. Everyone I know personally, even those who go to the Tree of Life, is okay. But though that diminishes the fear for the personal safety of those I know, it doesn’t do anything about the more general fear I have for my people.

If you’re a member of a majority culture, you may not understand the strong bond between members of a minority one. Try to think of it as if all Jews are members of the same extended family. (Technically speaking, with Jews in particular this is actually true; you can only become Jewish by marriage or by being the child of a Jewish family, so all Jews are in some sense related.) So, though nobody I knew personally was killed or injured, many members of my extended family were. And that feels pretty awful.

There is a light in the fog, though. It’s the reason I decided to write this essay, as opposed to many others I could have written around a similar topic. And that light is the fact that a lot of people, all of them goyim, have been asking me questions like these.

“Jen… are you okay? I mean I know you weren’t in it but… anyone you knew?”

“Hey, you okay? Cole mentioned you live near Pittsburgh.”

“Is your family safe?”

I’ve never had so many people asking after me before. It was really nice to know that so many people cared. It helped me to realize that, in the words of my skating coach, “Those who hate are a small percentage of the country. The people who love are so many more in number and power and we will always win in the end.” Just because one man thinks that I shouldn’t exist doesn’t mean that everyone thinks that.

This is the importance of support. And it’s not just about mass shootings that make national news; it’s about every crisis, big and small. If you ask one simple question, “are you okay”, you can lift one straw off someone’s breaking back. You can make their day that much more bearable. If you ever question whether or not to reach out to someone going through hardship, do it. Reach out.

It really does help.

Landing Pages: Critique, Compare, and Contrast

Hey guys! Today, I covered the design, usability, and copy of two different websites. I did a bit of a compare-and-contrast between the two, talking about my first impressions of each page, what I found annoying about the designs, and what could be done to improve these issues.

Here are the websites I covered, so you can poke around if you want:
Loom
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Rubber Duck Debugging: What It Is and What It’s For

Debugging in general is the act of fixing errors (called “bugs”) in computer code. Rubber duck debugging is the act of debugging by explaining your code to a rubber duck.

That’s a simple enough explanation, but why would you want to do that?

Have you ever heard the phrase, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself”? The concept is that if you truly understand something, you can explain it to someone who knows nothing about it.

This isn’t just a test of understanding for concepts you already know are sound. You can use the power of explanation to find problems with concepts you came up with yourself. If you explain your logic to someone who knows nothing about it, you’ll be forced to start over from the logical beginning and explain in simple terms.

When you’re the one who created the logic, you can sometimes accidentally accept unreasonable assumptions without knowing it. If you then have to explain the logic, though, you’ll need to spell out your assumptions. And if those assumptions aren’t reasonable, you’ll know it right away.

The best part of this is that it doesn’t require a human. Your brain is good enough at personifying inanimate objects that explaining a concept to another human who simply isn’t replying is functionally interchangeable with explaining it to a rubber duck. So, a lot of programmers explain concepts to rubber ducks (or stuffed rabbits, in my case) instead of inconveniencing fellow humans.

So. What is rubber duck debugging? It’s using your brain’s powers of explanation and personification to fix logic problems.

Rubber duck debugging is hardly the exclusive domain of programmers. Anybody who can use language can explain something to a rubber duck (I don’t even have to say “anybody who can speak”, because I’m sure rubber ducks understand sign language). Writers do it to fix problems with their story plot, for example.

So if you’re ever working on a tricky problem, try stepping back and explaining it to a rubber duck.

The Value of “Just” Showing Up

My siblings are pairs skaters. Every day, they wake up at 5am to skate for three hours. Sometimes, after returning home to do school and work, they return to the ice rink to skate again. Even when they don’t skate twice a day, they frequently do an off-ice workout in the afternoon. They’re devoted. They’re serious.

Still, they’re hardly the best team out there. They are now at the third-highest level, and will stop being competitive before advancing, because they started late. Unlike many skaters, who devote all their time to the sport, my siblings have significant academic commitments which they refuse to sacrifice to spend more time on the ice.

And yet, they get to Nationals. Recently, even, a few internationals. They didn’t expect it, but it happened. How?

They “just” showed up.

Putting in the effort every single day to keep up with the blistering pace of competitive figure skating is hard. The age brackets for the levels work such that if you’re not putting in as much effort as my siblings are, you just plain don’t get to be competitive. Sorry, have a nice day! The requirements for pairs are even harder, because not just one, but two skaters have to be devoted enough to put that much time in. Not only that, both of them need to be good at doing jumps – if you’ve ever watched the Olympics on TV, you know jumping is hard.

My siblings get national and international assignments, because they are one of less than twelve pairs teams at their level in the country. They show up. There’s no “just” about it.

They say it’s not enough to just show up. But is that really true? To “just” show up, you need to have the necessary skills to get in the door, you need to be reliable and consistent, you need to be able to put in the work every day. That’s valuable. That’s important. And those are skills a lot of people don’t have.

When people hunt for jobs, the focus is on the job-specific skills: what programming languages do they know, how proficient are they with Excel, do they have the appropriate certifications, etc. And those are important. But many job-seekers act as if those things are all that matters.

In reality, being reliable and dependable is just as important. There are tons of people who have the job-specific skills, but who aren’t reliable. They get tired, they get bored, they see a shiny object, they would rather be doing something else. They don’t show up. If you “just” show up, you can be better than them.

Show up.

The Painter On His Way to Paint

For this piece, I copied this Van Gogh painting for the most part. However, I decided that I would add in Van Gogh himself, on his way to paint the piece.

To properly represent both Van Gogh’s painting and likeness, I wanted to do a copy not only in subject matter but in art style and technique. As such, I painted this in oils using a palette knife (like the one on the right in this pic). In total, I only used two tools for this: a palette knife, and the small paintbrush I used to sign it.

I worked back-to-front: I painted the sky first, followed by the distant landscape, then worked forward until I finished with Van Gogh himself. Since things in the back are overlapped by things in the front, I painted the things in the back first and painted the closer things over top of them.

Painting Van Gogh in there was hard, but not for the reasons you might think. I’m very solid at figure drawing, so drawing a human was pretty easy. The problem arose from trying to paint Van Gogh in his own style, when he wasn’t a central part of the piece. He did self-portraits (actually he did tons), but he painted himself as the center of those pieces. Here, I was trying to paint him small, as almost an afterthought.

As such, I tried to copy Van Gogh’s style of drawing figures, with not a lot of success. At first I did him in the style of his self-portraits, but it was too detailed and realistic. I was very happy with this first version artistically, but it didn’t fit so I scrubbed it out. I tried to get some vibrant highlights and shadows in the second version, but that still didn’t quite fit stylistically. Finally, I just blocked in some color and gave it an immensely simple white outline where the light was coming from. That seemed to do it, so that’s the finished version.

This painting is for sale! Get it now for $250 plus shipping. If you’re interested, contact me!