Benjamin Abroad

Exit, stage right

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:52:51 GMT

This is my last LJ post - I'm moving my internet presense to a real-live blog. I'll keep checking in here to read my friends' LJs, of course.

The first two posts are already up, with more on the way. Check it out at http://AmericanUmlaut.blogspot.com

A tummy ache

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:43:32 GMT

If your tummy hurts, do the following: measure half the distance from your navel to your right side, then about the same distance downward. This should be just above the jutty part of the hip that pokes out over the tops of skinny girls' impractically cut designer jeans. Press your fingers into that spot, hard. If it hurts, donotfuckaroundgotothedoctor. It's important to note that you should check this even if you think you have a stomach ache. It turns out the nerves in your abdomen are not very good at localizing pain, so it's good to make a manual check, because if your tummy ache turns into a ruptured appendix before you get to the hospital, you will have a very shitty week.

I performed the poke test on my own sexy jut Saturday morning, after two days of increasing pain. Ultimately, it was Wikipedia that saved me from the joys of septic shock, learning the location of my appendix was enough to convince me to schedule a doctor's visit before the wedding I was supposed to attend that night. After a five-minute examination, the doctor rushed me into her car and drove me to the hospital herself. I was rapidly passed up the ranks from nurse to assistant doctor to doctor to head surgeon and anesthesiologist, each of whom took the opportunty to stab a finger into my vestigal digestive tissue and ask me if it hurt. It hurt.

Within an hour of my arrival in the hospital I had signed the necessary waivers (there are more ways to die during an appendectomy than I thought there were ways to die) and worked myself into a proper panic at the thought of being put under narcosis for the first time in my life. Then the doctors did something really nice. They gave me the blue pill. I have retroactivelly dubbed it the pill of universal constipation, because within a minute I didn't give a shit about anything.

The prep room was a source of enormous entertainment for me. While I waited, I played with my EKG and blood-oxygen saturation levels. I held my breath to get my oxygen down, then breathed too fast to get it up. I relaxed and got my heart rate down to sixty beats per minute, then moved my arms around and got it up to eighty. Then I figured out that I could make a "pulse" on the machine by flexing my pectoral muscles (where the sensors were attached). If the doctors looked at my readings afterward, they must have been surprised to see my pulse go from sixty to three fifty in a matter of seconds.

The beginning of narcosis is fun. First your lungs get numb and tingly like you've just taken a really hard bong hit. Then the rest of your body starts to fade. I told the anesthesiologist that I was feeling a bit dizzy, and I don't remember what he said.

I woke up with my brain in ten pieces and reality coming at me in hazy flickers like a bad radio signal. Had the operation started? I heard a fragment of German, and realized that I understood it. Cool trick. I touched my stomach and felt the bandages, so I knew I was done. I remember the awareness of being wheeled through the hospital to my room, but I don't remember it actually happening - the drugs they gave me left most of the day like that, fragmented images and half-remembered impressions, like I got the tenth layer of carbon paper and some jackass took off with the orignal copies.

Sunday morning I woke up feeling surprisingly good. I had three holes in me - they opened up my belly button and stuck a camera and a bike pump down the rabbit hole (they pump you up like a basketball), then punched tiny little holes in my sides for the tools. But I wasn't in much pain, as long as I didn't try to use my abdominal muscles for anything. Since that first morning, I haven't needed so much as a Tylenol for the pain.

Ever since I woke up that morning, I've been thinking about the fact that we just take this sort of thing for granted, that we don't die from appendicitis or smallpox or a thousand other things any more. In my room in the hospital were me, another guy with his appendix out, a guy with a compound fracture in his leg, and a guy with a badly mangled hand (got a cramp in his leg while operating a circular saw). Left up to nature, we should all be dead by now, and the routine, assembly-line manner in which modern medicine is able to save lives shouldn't diminish the wonder of it.

It is done

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:41:29 GMT

I'm Benjamin Stürmer now. I have an umlaut! Yay!

And I have a brilliant and beautiful wife who is with me in Lüneburg today, visiting some friends of hers before we leave again to head to Denmark for the rest of our honeymoon.

The wedding was brilliant. My buddy Marcus served as witness and wrote an excellent translation of the speech (I don't know how to translate Standesbeamter... we'll go with) the guy from the Office of Marrying People delivered so that my family had subtitles without Rose or I knowing what the contents of the speech would be ahead of time.

My little brother served as best man (we divided best man and witness into two jobs, because I wanted William to be my best man, but he's not old enough and doesn't understand German), and cut quite a handsome figure in his suit. William has gone, in the last three years, from being a little kid to looking like a grown up man. That impression flees quickly when he opens his mouth, though; his sense of humor is still very much of the Bevis & Butthead variety.

Alltogether we had about thirty guests. After we wed we had a little picnic on the grounds and got a guided tour of the windmill (very, very cool; the whole thing is still made out of wood). Afterward was tea, then a barbecue at Rose's family's place until the wee hours of the morning. Then off to our fancy shmancy hotel room downtown.

And now I'm on my honeymoon! We'll go back to real life in a week. Until then we'll be hanging out in a little cabin on the beach, playing board games and chilling out with nothing to do for the first time in half a year for both of us. When we get back it begins again; I will have to start preparing for my trip to Japan in October (it looks like it's really going to happen) and we both have to start making plans for our church wedding next year, which is going to be a lot more stressful to organize than the much smaller celebration we had this time.

Transformers

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:20:40 GMT

I just watched the first episode of Transformers (on YouTube) for the first time since I was a tiny, tiny child, blissfully unaware of the fact that one of my favorite television shows was a thinly veiled half-hour toy commercial. Watching now, I think the writers must have realized how silly the whole thing was. From the first twenty minutes, the following choice quites:

"There's not enough energy in these conductors to last a cortex!"

"Hang on to you crankshaft, I'm shifting to overdrive!"

The Decepticon ship has been like ten feet behind the Autobot ship for the last five minutes. "Detectors report: we are being followed!"

"G-forces... they're dragging us... down!"

The Decepticons have been walking for hours, finally stopping near a random pile of rocks. Says Megatron: "Stop here. These rocks will serve as our base of operations."

Having pumped what looks like six gallons of crude oil. "We've done it, we've done it, we've got the energy! We can go back to Cybertron!"

Geeky academic coolness

Wed, 14 May 2008 17:24:35 GMT

I love being ass-deep in academic nonsense.

In 1837, Oshio Heihachiro incited a peasant riot that left 20% of Osaka burned to the ground. He died in the aftermath of the riot, but he had committed a crime, so the penal custom of the Tokugawa government required that his corpse be preserved in salt while he stood trial, so that the sentenced corporal punishment (in this case crucifixion) be carried out afterward.

Evidently any corporal punishment would be carried out on your corpse if you didn't survive to your own sentencing. So for two hundred fifty years of Japanese history, if you were bad enough you could get the shit beat out of your corpse.

I have created life

Wed, 07 May 2008 19:24:37 GMT

Today I went out to my balcony garden and pulled up ten of my radishes. They are enormous, about three times as big as I would expect store-bought ones to be, and they are somewhat spicier. I'm very proud of myself; there's something special about putting a little black speck in the ground, then watering it every day for a month and a half and having food at the end.

Two of my peas have just started flowering, so probably by the time my next batch of radishes comes up (I'm re-planting them tomorrow or the next day, I think), I will have peas getting ripe as well.

Spring is wonderful.

Benny does a meme!

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:08:30 GMT

Taken from QCJeph.

1. My username is _____ because ____

During my year on exchange in Japan I had a Japanese girlfriend for several months. On a trip home to visit her family (who did not and were not allowed to learn that we were dating -- hilarity ensued), her father spent one night at dinner dreaming up kanji to match my name. He came up with 紅蛇眠 -- crimson_serpent is a not-very-accurate translation of the first two characters. More accurate would be "really dark red snake", but that wouldn't be nearly as cool.

2. My name is _____ because ______.

My name is Benjamin because, I shit you not, my parents were fans of M*A*S*H. Alan Alda's character was called Hawkeye, but his real name was Benjamin Pierce.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.

I had to go look at my page to see what I called it... I suppose "Benjamin Abroad" is fairly unimaginative. Of the last four and a half years, I've been in a foreign country for three and a half -- first a year in Japan, then a year back home, and the last two and a half years in Germany.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

I named it "Come Through My Cellar Door" both as a play on the children's song "Say Say Oh Playmate" that I used to love doing the hand-jive to and because I had just watched Donnie Darko, in which the idea that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the English language comes up.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.

For about three months last year I drew a web comic called Benny & teh Ninjaz. It was a critical and financial failure, but it was a huge amount of fun and made me aware that, amazingly, I too have a creative urge. There's not a lot of the artist in me, as anyone who saw the strips knows, but what little there is takes a lot of joy in seeing that icon wherever I have posted online.

This is what working looks like!

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:21:31 GMT

It is a curious fact of my current profession as computer programmer that much of a typical work day consists of me staring intently at my computer monitor doing nothing at all.

I just spent the last three hours doing exactly that. I had a bug come back from testing on a page I wrote a few weeks ago. I understood the bug. I understood why the bug was happening. But I couldn't figure out how to make the bug stop happening. So I sat and stared at the code block, and stared, and stared, and stared. In my brain I probably came up with fifteen or twenty different plausible solutions until I found one that would actually work.

I work hard, but it amuses me to think of how that process looks from the outside. I open a bug report, open a page of code, and sit, doing nothing, for three hours. Then I write six lines of code and send the page back for testing.

I love my job :).

I have a funny girlfriend

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:22:53 GMT

As I'm having trouble finding something on my university's webpage, she says "Want me to look? Three eyes are better than one."

Then she comes over to me. "Oh I'm sorry. I shouldn't be laughing at your disability. Do you feel discriminated?"

AxBx?

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:42:32 GMT

We have warp. We have weft. We need a third parameter for weavings into the third dimension. My proposal: Widge.

In Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, all Japanese behavior follows logically from three basic precepts. Hierarchy is the warp, obligation the weft, and circles of behavioral constraints comprise the widge.

Sometimes, I think about stuff...

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:55:22 GMT

Read this. It is not awe-inspiring SF, but it is very good SF and the longer you go into it, the more interesting it becomes. And it's free, on the Internet. How badass is that? In the last weeks I've read several complete comic books, followed the political news from at least three viewpoints and studied and practiced a three thousand year old board game together with people from every corner of the planet.

I think it's easy not to notice how utterly different the world is post Internet. And we're obviously still in the transition phase. In the 90's I remember people talking about how one day our whole house would be networked and the refrigerator would text you on your way home to remind you to pick up milk. I never found the idea very compelling, but even if it happens, that's just iterative. A world in which any person has instant access to the collected knowledge and writings of the entire human race, that is revolutionary. A world in which geography becomes utterly meaningless is revolutionary.

I think a lot about things like this. In my mind the advance of technology is mostly awesome, but I worry a lot about the communication revolution actually hindering our ability to communicate with others. Imagine a liberal, European-style Protestant discussing the nature of God with a Huckabee-style American Evangelical. I can easily imagine the entire conversation consisting of argument over the most fundamental aspects of the reality in which the conversation is taking place. Because those of us who get our information about the world via the Internet have the ability to pick and choose between so many sources, it is surprisingly easy to find yourself in a Bush-style echo chamber, hearing nothing but the kind reassurance that all of your opinions are correct. I think a political conversation between someone who gets their news from the Drudge Report and someone who only reads the Daily Kos would be similar to the religious discussion I imagined before. How do you overcome that?

God hates the world

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 11:13:55 GMT

Sing along!

More awesome band names

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:12:58 GMT

Permafrost Turkey
The Coprolites
Gravitational Bovicide

The pieces of my life...

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 10:22:44 GMT

are coming together in magical ways. This happens to me frequently. I seem to have been blessed with a life that changes and presents me with interesting opportunities every time I start to feel like I'm in a rut of some kind.

In the last two days the following has happened to me: I have been recommended without having been told about it for a four-month scholarship to study in Japan. I have had an offer e-mailed to me to try out for a slot on a Japanese TV show. And I've been told by my favorite manager at my job that if I want to do more programming work that I do now he might be able to find something for me.

Do things like this happen to other people?

In other news, I hit my first genuinely miserable day of winter depression yesterday. It was triggered by a situation where I think I have a genuine complaint, but certainly didn't warrant the way I spent that night and the entire following day feeling. I was so deep in it that when my professor told me he was recommending me for a full-ride plus scholarship for a semester in Japan, I could barely even bring myself to say thanks. It was only today, with my brain hormones seeming to be hovering around more normal levels, that the import of that hit me. I could be back in Japan this time next year.

Not being in Japan has been really hard for me. Nothing less than what I have with Roswitha would have kept me away this long -- I think almost every day about how much I want to be back there. Obviously, my two years in Germany have been awesome and in my third I'm going to earn a master's degree and get married, so there are no complaints on that front. But I love Japan, and I'm utterly thrilled to think that I will finally be able to mark a day on my calendar and count down to my return.

Also, I might be on tv! Squee!

To my friends back home:

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:48:57 GMT

What the hell did you guys do with the Dollar!? A Euro is worth $1.44 now!

Keep it up. Hopefully the Bushies can wreck the economy even more before the Dems take over. If we reach a 2:1 ration I may just take out a loan in Euro to pay off my student loans before someone smart gets things working again.

Crazy reading binge

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:43:16 GMT

I've been reading a lot lately, even for me. Am currently in the midst of three projects:

The Complete Sherlock Holmes. The only time I turn the television on during the week is when "House" comes on. I simply cannot miss an episode. Since the character Gregory House is so heavily based on Sherlock Holmes (misanthropic geniuses with drug problems who solve mysteries using deductive logic for $300 please, Alex), I decided quite a while ago that I should grab myself some of the books. I actually found the complete set at a discount book shop downtown a few months ago and started reading it late last week -- I'm now on the third book, and it's consistently excellent. The first two books were the same formula; five or six chapters of Holmes and Watson, then about the same narrating the back story of the crime from the perspective of the perpetrator. The third book is a collection of short stories. As mysteries go, they sometimes lack much satisfaction, as the clues aren't there for you to think about until Holmes does his deduction tricks at the end of the stories, but the characters and the writing are lovely.

Japan in the London Illustrated News. If you are interested in Japan, this book is an excellent investment. It is an investment, though; it costs about $200! I snagged a copy for free in exchange for working at the Frankfurt Book Fair a few weeks ago, and have been diligently reading a few pages a night ever since. The book is simply a copy of every article published in the London Illustrated News between 1853 and 1900 that had anything at all to do with Japan. Reading about things like Perry's arrival and the Dutch settlement at Deshima from people who were actually there seeing these things gives you a completely new perspective on nineteenth century Japan.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. If you are interested in Japan or cultural anthropology in general, you probably have already read this book anyway. I'm a kind of late arrival on the scene of actually studying Japan as opposed to just the language, so I'd never even heard of Ruth Benedict (the author of the volume) until I started studying in Düsseldorf. This book is a pretty amazing piece of scholarship; Benedict was charged in 1944 by the US government with providing them a profile of the Japanese culture, so that they would have a better idea what to expect in terms of how long the Japanese would fight before surrendering and whether they would be able to adapt to democracy. Obviously, she couldn't exactly head over to Kyoto and spend a year soaking in the ambiance, so she collected all her information from Japanese in the US and westerners who had spent time in Japan prior to the war. The book is a very famous classic, which is why I say you've probably read it if you're interested in Japan, but if you've missed it I can whole-heartedly recommend grabbing a copy.

So much to do...

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:22:49 GMT

I'm insanely, insanely busy right now. I had two weeks of more than full-time work, then almost a week in Brussels working about 14 hours a day as an interpreter, then came back and worked 10-hour days for five more days. Yesterday I went to work but actually spent most of my time working on Rose's and my budget to get us through the next few months (moving is spendy business), and today I am now back from work but working on another side job that I picked up correcting a 16-page sociology paper.

And that's actually what I wanted to write about right now. This paper is an atrocity. I feel bad, because I'm sure the girl must be really proud of herself for having written a 16-page scientific article in a foreign language, but there are entire paragraphs where it is impossible to tell what she intends to say. I'm doing my best to correct it, but it really would have been easier if there were a German version so that I knew what she actually intended.

Mocked by my own better half

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:03:54 GMT

Rose finds a spoon under my backpack, then holds it up and starts walking around my room waving it and crying out in her squeeky Benjamin-mocking voice "Oh where are all my spoons!? Who took all my spoons!? I can never find a spoon!"

In which Benny gets a gig

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:02:14 GMT

From the 7th to the 11th of September, I will be in Brussels, attending the Indigo art exposition as the interpreter of a design artist. It's my first paying gig as an interpreter, and I'm excited beyond all reason.

Also, I get to use the word "gig", which is one of my favorites. Yay for fun words!

No mo' emo!

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:08:59 GMT

They didn't forget me after all!

Well, I think they actually did, but at any rate they came today with a card and sung for me and I got my present. And my card says "Happy Birthday" in Japanese. My office mate used Google Translator and it actually gave him the right result.

I feel better now. I don't need to be the center of attention all the time, but once a year or so is nice :).

Being emo...

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:37:36 GMT

We have this silly but fun tradition at work that whenever anyone has a birthday, everyone at the office pitches in two Euro to pay for an Amazon.com gift certificate and they come and sing Happy Birthday in their office.

I joined in September, so I had to wait almost an entire year before my turn came. During the course of the year I figure I pitched in about €80 for other peoples' birthdays, even though everyone told me I didn't have to, since I'm a student. I wanted to be part of the team. That's a big reason why I like work, I like to be a part of a group.

Only now my birthday has come and gone, and evidently I am not to take part in this company tradition. No card, no singing, no gift certificate. It wouldn't be a big deal if no one cared that it was my birthday at work if it weren't for the fact that I'm the only person who works here whose birthday was ignored.

This hurts a lot more than it seems like it should. I feel like I'm being excluded from my team, and I've worked really hard to be accepted here.

I'm back!

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:24:41 GMT

I have returned from the land of Bangers and of Mash. I have many interesting stories to tell, but at the moment I'm both at work and suffering from some sort of horrible allergic reaction to the local vegetation's sex life. Stay tuned.

Also, this is awesome

On nerdiness

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:06:26 GMT

This article is a fascinating perspective on the phenomenon of the nerd from a racial perspective. The premise is that nerds are "hyper-white", in that they are a subgroup which fails to absorb Black American culture like mainstream whites do.

Food!

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:31:13 GMT

I just wanted to post this real quick because I can't stop thinking about how good it was.

Saturday, Rose and I bought a whole salmon trout. I deboned it but left the head and tail on, and we put together a stuffing based loosely on a recipe I found on the internet. It was made of butter, crushed croûtons, sunflower seeds, avocado, garlic, and very finely chopped mushrooms and onions. The fish was filled to near-bursting with the stuffing, covered loosely with foil and baked for 20 minutes at 180 C. Then we added diced tomatoes, eggplant, mushrooms and zucchini* to the baking dish and covered the fish with a sauce made of 150 ml sour cream, the zest and juice of half a lemon and a pinch each of salt, pepper and sugar**. The whole thing got covered in foil again and put back in the oven for another 20 minutes.

The result, served with American par-boiled rice, was astoundingly tasty, and it wasn't even very much work. Except for deboning the fish; I'd never done that before.

*Language geekout: Why are tomatoes and mushrooms generally countable nouns, whereas eggplant and zucchini are generally used as uncountable nouns?

**Language geekout two: I just noticed that I've started leaving out the comma before the final "and" in a list, British style.

Nerv

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:52:13 GMT

My life is beautiful, but my annoyances are legion. I'll spare you all except to comment on a single one of them. And this is even edifying so fails to qualify as simply a rant.

Everyone learns that "proper English grammar" when you include yourself in a list of names is to put yourself at the end. "Roswitha and I are going to the store." Instead of the "Me and Roswitha..." that despite being perfectly understandable has been thrown in the Bad Grammar Bucket.

The simple use of the "X and I" construction doesn't bother me. It's when the "X and I" aren't the subject but are rather the object of the sentence that it pisses me off. If you say "My mom gave my boyfriend and I a rubber phallus the size of the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile for Christmas," you are simultanously (1) making too much effort to use correct grammar, (2) failing despite this to use correct grammar at all and (3) sharing much too much information about your personal life.

The correct formulation would of course be "My mom gave my boyfriend and me a rubber phallus the size of the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile for Christmas." If you said it the first way, but took your boyfriend out of the sentence, it would sound plainly wrong*.

*unless you are Jamaican; they actually use "I" instead of "me" in the Caribbean dialects, which is why "Redemption Song" starts "Oh pirates yes they rob I, bring I to the merchant ship".