4 November 2005 (2 Kheshvan 5766)
In the place where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life in the north of Japan, I knew almost all the neighbors within a radius of hundreds of meters, and some of them frequently visited us spontaneously with no prior appointment. This was one of the things I really missed when I lived in big cities in Japan before moving to Israel last year, though I enjoyed my privacy. Perhaps it is not by chance that I could make friends only with two of the numerous neighbors I had in several apartment houses where I lived, and both of them were from other countries. Living in Israel, at least in Jerusalem, has both advantages, i.e., spontaneous communication and mutual visits on the one hand and privacy on the other.
This week I finally had a chance to meet a neighbor of mine who tortured me with his recorder. According to a letter I received from him a few weeks ago I understood that he is a new (?) roommate of the woman who used to bother me with her piano. In his letter to me he invited me to visit him and talk about how to solve our problem. Since I was rather busy, I only replied him a letter instead of visiting him and also invited him to visit me. He respected my invitation and came to my place spontaneously this week.
Although there are naive people (e.g., some leftists in Japan) who believe that it is always possible to solve problems through dialogs between the two parties involved, my experiences have taught me that there are people with whom it is impossible to negotiate at all. Fortunately, my spontaneous visitor turned out to be a very nice person with whom I could immediately find a common language. We somehow managed to find some solution to the conflict between his playing the recorder and my suffering from its noise.
Afterwards we continued to talk about something we really love, i.e., music for the recorder, especially works by Telemann and Handel. I also found that he is a student of the musician whose concert impressed me more than that of anyone else in Israel (Michael Meltzer at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem). Back in Japan I could share my pleasure of Baroque instrumental music with a number of people, but here in Israel he was the first person with whom I could do so. He was kind enough to propose me a lesson in the recorder when I told him about my dream of studying to play it (or the clarinet for klezmer music). Anyway I am glad that we could come to mutual understanding (and hopefully respect, too).
11 November 2005 (9 Kheshvan 5766)
We have three kinds of attributes: 1) those we cannot change (e.g., when and where we were born from whom, where and how we were brought up, our DNA, etc.), 2) those we cannot generally change, though we can in some special cases (e.g., our physical skeleton, sex, etc.), 3) those we can generally change of our own will (e.g., our physical fitness, character, knowledge, occupation, etc.). I may like or dislike someone because of the third type of attributes, but I would never ever dislike anyone solely or mainly because of any attribute of the first kind. Although being liked by someone else generally gives me a good feeling, whatever the reason is, I have always felt rather awkward when approached by someone, though positively, because of one of the predetermined attributes that are beyond my control.
This week I had a very bothering experience of being disliked and avoided because of some unchangeable attribute of mine by someone I have to see on a regular basis. What is really disturbing is the fact that she has this attribute herself. How do I know that this is the reason for her disliking and avoiding me? She pretended as if she did not have this attribute, and this was as clear as day (and is ironically one of its typical derivatives). In other words, her self-denial was extended to me, too.
In my opinion no one is more miserable than a person who tries to deny or hates what he or she cannot change and pretends as if he or she did not have it. I am sorry that I was a victim of someone else's self-hatred, but I am even more sorry that she cannot accept herself as she really is. Such a person not only looks ugly and ridiculous to others but also harms him or herself.
18 November 2005 (16 Kheshvan 5766)
Word processors, especially in the form of Microsoft Word, must be the most commonly (often exclusively) used - to be more precise, abused - offline tools for average users of personal computers. There is no doubt that they have contributed to making computing closer to those people who may otherwise have stayed away from it. However, the mindset that underlies them, i.e., WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get"), has blurred the important distinction between the logical structure and physical layout of text documents, making it extremely difficult for the majority of non-geeks to benefit from the more sophisticated world of WYMIWYG ("what you mean is what you get") and resulting in the proliferation of websites with terrible bloated HTML/XHTML codes, which, alas, probably constitute more than 90% of the whole web.
WYSIWYG word processors are trying to accomplish these two separate tasks simultaneously, but they generally fall to the ground between two stools, at least in the hands of the majority of users. I regularly receive many text documents authored with word processors (mostly Microsoft Word to my great regret), but almost all of them are really badly marked up structurally on the one hand, and the layout is amateurish at best and often makes it difficult to read the textual content on the other, thus, together with the fact that they are saved in a binary proprietary format, raising my blood pressure enormously.
It is often the case that in text-related authoring the physical layout is irrelevant, thus unnecessary. It is really absurd to use word processors even in such a case as so many people do. This is like swimming in the sea with a suit. This "fat" also makes the core task of editing pure textual data quite inefficient. I have been trying to induce so many people around myself to start using text editors in order to share with them the comport free from this "fat". But the majority of those who only know the world of WYSIWYG seem to hesitate to leave their "comfortable" world, turning a deaf ear to what may sound Greek to them. This may be none of my business, but not only they but also I must suffer from it.
It is perhaps not until one has learned how to manipulate unstructured text with a sophisticated text editor that one can distinguish the logical structure and the physical layout of text documents and then starts authoring them in a sophisticated and efficient way even with a word processor. For the majority of people the first step to this is to unlearn all the bad habits and mindset they have acquired through self-taught word processing, but to unlearn something old is far more difficult than to learn something new from scratch. Therefore, I strongly believe that the first lesson in computing should be how to use a text editor and not, God forbid, a word processor.
When I was still living in a WYSIWYG "cave", I often wondered why many publishers and editors asked us to submit our manuscripts as plain text documents. Now I really understand why. It is far more convenient to receive text documents with no physical layout than with half-baked markup and layout. It is really lamentable that this requirement has become rather uncommon, and many editors mandate the exclusive use of Word format, which in my opinion is the worst format because of its binariness and proprietariness even if the structural markup and physical layout of a document in question are impeccable.
PS: As of this writing, my favorite text editors for Windows are EmEditor (for non-Hebrew documents) and Taditor (for Hebrew documents). Both are highly recommended.
25 November 2005 (23 Kheshvan 5766)
There is a baffling contradiction between one of the fundamental tenets of Judaism, the resurrection of the dead, which must be influencing not only the religious but also the secular, and the rampant neglect of physical fitness in Israeli society. Personally I consider my own body as something I borrow temporarily in the present reincarnation, so I try to treat it carefully just as I do so with books I borrow from libraries. However, many people do not seem to think this way, or even if they should think so, they at least do not seem to put this thought into practice. Ironically, the more religious they are, the more neglectful they seem to be of their physical fitness in spite of the above belief, though there are enough secular people like this, too.
There are two ways of neglecting your body, i.e., passively and actively. You can neglect your body passively by not exercising it sufficiently and regularly. Any faculty we have, be it physical, intellectual or emotional, becomes moribund if we do not use it for a long time. Unless you are a professional athlete, it is generally enough to invest even less than half an hour every day to minimize the effect of aging upon your stamina, flexibility and muscular strength. Running, stretching and isometrics are what I do on weekdays for these three respectively.
What I often feel like turning my eyes another way from is how so many people neglect their bodies actively, or choose, whether consciously or unconsciously, to do harm to their own bodies by eating so unhealthily. Harmful eating habit can be both qualitative and qualitative. I am often perplexed to see the paucity of foods on weekdays on the one hand and the abundance of foods on shabat and festivals on the other here. Unfortunately, few people seem to be able to control their own stomachs on the latter occasions, hence end up overeating, partly as a way of socializing with other family members and friends. Not being used to eating the so-called dessert or anything sweet since my childhood, I often feel not only sorry but even disgusted to see people eat dessert, which has no nutritional value, after such heavy traditional Jewish meals on shabat and festivals. To me all these even seem like a kind of vandalism by people who have lost their innate ability to listen to what their bodies really want.