planning relaxation

the end of ramadhan is closing in. next weekend is a double-long weekend, and those of us who do not need to "balik kampung" have made our plans to exit the smallest of the asian capitals in search of relaxation. in my case the plans are a trip to asian bohemia. the trip has been suggested, tentative, mostly-committed, replaced, tentative, mostly-cancelled and finally booked. the expected relaxation is based on the prospect of being able to order foods and have them resemble the origin cuisine, as well as sitting in a brew pub and playing checkers. it is sad that i need to fly three hours to a country with a barely working economy to get fresh beer and an acceptable italian dinner.

this morning started with a quick dash to the embassy for a visa. the standard method of doing this is to have a travel agent have a runner pick up and drop off your passport. these professional line-standers, make the process appear simple and efficient. the busy professional focuses on their work and life while someone else negotiates the bureaucratic minutia.

this didn't work for me for two reasons, first is my general horror at the idea of handing my passport over to anyone who leaves eye contact. my passport is my history, and my future, i have no interest in having it lost because i was too lazy or spoiled to stand in a line. i keep my passport in two places, locked in a safe and hung around my neck. the need to hand the passport over to a face behind a glass wall is stressful, but to hand it to a random guy on a motorcycle who i don't know, that one is just too much for me.

the second reason is that my malaysian IC expires this week. i have been approved for my new IC, have the visa in my passport and am now ready for step three in the process. step three is where i need to give my passport and IC back to the government for the second time in the process. this will allow them to swap one piece of plastic with my picture and title for another. i need my passport and IC to keep me legal in malaysia. a secondary, but real, benefit is that as i enter and exit i get to use the "expat" carpeted lane, rather than the "other passports" cattle queue. with the exception of blocked lanes caused by the abu dhabi womens cricket team, having this express lane is major plus.

so the morning was planned for a quick dash. the embassy "officially" opens at 9:00, so i went to have a coffee and do email before that. i had visions of slipping in after the initial rush, paying to expedite the process from the standard 2 day, to the much more convenient "right now visa". the fees are paid in RM, and compared to the simplicity of getting a entry visa in the bali airport, they are expensive. then again, the visa i just got for china was even more expensive, could it be the more communist a country is the higher they have jacked up the fees?

when i pulled up to the embassy at 10 AM, the crowd of visa waiters sweltering in the sun could be seen from two blocks away. they were pressed against the locked gate, and spilling into the street. i avoided the crush and sun, but that put me at the back of the line. by the time i got a deli-counter number i was 30 tickets back in the queue. given the complete lack of respect for the ticketing system, people just forcing their way to the window and conducting business, it was clear that the quick dash was out of the question.

all in all, it's done; step one, that is. the "right now" visa is apparently no longer available. the clerk told me it was never possible. i reminded her that she was the one that helped me with it two years ago. she smiled and said, "it is no longer available, they now must to go back to vietnam for processing". the salary impacts of taking away the chance to process "expedited" visas locally was a source of pain; if the grimace of regret that accompanied the smile was any indication.

i need to return to have a hopefully approved visa added to my passport. that is two days in the future. in the mean time, there is work-work that will more than fill up the week, an IC to have replaced and i noticed a lack of open space in the passport. it looks like i need to go to the american embassy and get the second set of extension of the pages in the past 4 years. visas that take up a full page are a serious waste of space. needing a new set of pages is one more impact of planning a relaxing weekend away.

wednesday morning is then another sweaty wait at the communist embassy with no visible security, and then a trip to the capitalist embassy where service is smooth and easy, but the process to pass though security is a minimum to two scans and the prospect of a cavity search. the communists have a thin wooden door, and the capitalists have ten foot thick walls. i am not really sure which system is better, they both have elements that could help the other.

can someone explain to me why i am not using a line-stander? this really is a lot of process so i can go to a comfortable cafe and have breakfast that includes sausage made from the animal god created for the breakfast plate. relaxation, simplicity, cafes on the lake, brewpubs, pho and music CDs for RM 1 (USD 0.28)....

yup, its worth the process.

toppatha muffin

i was watching sea-angel eat a muffin this morning, it was wrapped in a tall sheaf of paper and was presented as one cone like shape. the comment was that the muffin was strange, the fact that it was pink was enough for me to know that, but it was the taste and shape that caused the comment. it made me think of the top-of-the-muffin episode from sienfeld, part of which was the hint that taking the top of the muffin, the part most agree is the best, and leaving the bottom is a sign of upper-class greed and veblenish conspicuous consumption.

i have recently made a change in my morning habits. i have stopped stopping for a pancake and a series of chawan kecil and have replaced that with a faster stop for bungkhus caffeine in the malaysianized-seattle style. along with my americano i have found a banana chocolate chip muffin is the perferred source for morning calories and taste. but i have also found that much like the second round of espresso at the bar, the bottom of the muffin is just too much.

i love this muffin, it's better than the muffins starbucks has in the US. those are overly sweet or sadly low in fat and taste. starbucks here is also sadly halal. this is strange to me given the clientele in my sbux who are almost exclusively chinese and expat. the store i am going to is one of the first sbux in the country and has a small but loyal following. i have tried to argue the logic of catering to the market and providing something in some locations that will make the customers you have happy, while not impacting those you don't have. maybe i need to do some market surveys to prove the point, someone needs to lead this charge.

the muffins are good, but just too much. i don't want them smaller, but i have not figured out what do to with the bottoms on the days that enjoyment is second to calorie control. i was reviewing a document with someone, and offered the bottom of the muffin. as a gentlemen, i could have offered the top, but i did not expect acceptance of the offer, and the top is honestly why i purchased the muffin. there was acceptance, with a questioned look of "just the bottom?" she then proceeded to finish the bottom with a gusto and clear appreciation for the sweetness.

so this is the question i have been going over in my head? is it better to offer to share the bottom of the muffin or to suppress the pains and keep the bag closed until you are past the difficult point of sharing what might not be seen as a genuine offer. my grand mother would have said that i should have offered to top of the muffin and eaten the bottom. i could have, but the thought of passing on the top and taking the bottom would be all the more painful if the top was then brushed off. offering to share comes with the triple risk of acceptance, displeasure or rejection. we are taught that acceptance of an offer is a good thing, but when the top of the muffin is involved, do you really think that is the case?

the odd taste and shape of the pink muffin is clearly that there is no depth of muffin culture in the country. a few malay-ified chains are bringing muffins in, but the roots of this penetration are not deep enough for people to know the difference between good and bad. the choke hold of paper wrapper had done the ultimate harm of making the entire muffin into the less prised "bottom-of-the-muffin". the bakery has come up with a way to counter the culture of gastronomic greed that comes from focusing on tops which have naturally exploded out of the pan and cooked with wider exposure to the ovens heat. these higher demands produce the better quality of the exceptional tops.

the cramped version we saw was sadly malaysian. kept encased in paper, hidden from the heat, not allowed to expand and grow beyond the restrictive wrapper. no one in an open and honest environment would actually want a bottom only of the muffin, and here we have the clear example where rather than having the exceptional allowed to show itself, all are being kept in the lowest common denominator restricted space.

if you won't help me get starbucks to carry a breakfast sandwich not built on chicken hotdogs, please help me with this. let people know that malaysians will not except bottom of the muffins only. help create a culture where its acceptable to have tops and bottoms.

if you help, i will listen to my nana and be more open with my muffin. i won't just offer the bottom, it will be the fair (or at least game theory based) "i split, you pick", or even the other way around. team work is needed when dividing the top of the muffin.

driving tension

standing in a airport store; i am watching those around me to make their purchases, last minute items with the local city name emblazoned on them. trinkets taken as memories or nearly forgotten gifts for others. it's not uncommon for me to be doing more than one thing at once. cafes, stores and queues are such natural places for me to consider life and profile the lives of others. both are done in the background, happening as the foreground moves past seemingly by itself.

holding a postcard (to be used as framed art) and and a hat i will probably never wear, i look down and see a book that grabs my attention. "traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)" by tom vanderbilt. i shift my overweight messenger bag on my shoulder and consider the cost of schlepping one more paperback halfway around the world.

i began this trip with nearly empty bags, i am leaving with them stretched to the limit. a starbucks mug purchased as a "personal cup" for my daily caffeine break was left behind to ensure the tension of the zipper did not exceed safety specs. i am down to carrying items on my back that should have been stowed as checked baggage. but i am standing with a growing list of last minute purchases, and this last one promises to explain why we are the way we are. there was really no choice in the matter, the weight of a paperback never out weighs the promise of enlightenment.

first admission first, i regularly switches from left hand drive to right, i have been known to drive at double the posted speed limit and i have taken to reading gender and ethnicity in my temporary homeland by viewing the car and driving style from a distance. i was also carrying three new books on lie detection through microexpressions, a subject i learned about by watching psychological-CSI series "lie to me". i have also written a previous post on auto profiling. i take all of this to mean that i am trying to better understand people; including myself. here is a book that will show me how to read people even better at 73 miles per hour.

the scope and breath of this book is amazing. there are discussions of driving in the US, amsterdam, australia, china, india and random other places over the world. the fact that i have experienced the traffic in so many of these places first-hand made the conversation all the more interesting. a point well made in the book is that driving styles are cultural and are based on the rules and order of the larger society. driving may be a universal skill, but it is also a newly learned one which take cues from the drivers social environment.

there are an amazing number of things to take away from this book, many are completely counter-intuitive. an example is that a bicyclist who uses hand signals is more likely to be hit by a car, which goes against all road safety lessons i have learned and taught. the reasons, proven by studies referenced in the book, is because the drivers would actually see the cyclist as a person and begin to seek eye contact. this both slows their reflexes and brings them closer to the cyclist. this desire for eye contact is touched on throughout the book, and comes with a revelation that humans have evolved to travel at no more than 20 miles per hour, above which we lose our ability to track items and make effective use of social cues to ensure safety.

over 20 miles per hour we also begin to sample the world rather than reading it fully, this filtering process allows us to lower the amount of information we take in from the stream of input passing by our windows. as we go faster we selectively disregard elements of the environment, including road signs, pedestrians and other cues which do not trigger the risk warning systems tuned by evolution to warn us of approaching dangers.

the major point i walked away from the book with was that driving is boring, which most humans have a low tolerance for and to compensate we do two things. the first is to zone out during the act of driving, going into a semi-trance where we may simply not remember how we got from one place to another. these blank spots appear to be tied to driving while tired, suggesting that we are not zoned out as much as moving rapidly while napping behind the wheel of a very dangerous object with both mass and velocity. this is a scary suggestion for one who does as much tired driving as i do; and yes i do have moments of "how did i get here".

to counter the boredom we find ways to add driving tension, by making it more challenging. someone might choose to do this by increasing the speed, closing distances between ourselves and other vehicles, adding handphone conversations, email or IM exchanges or scanning for music on your ipod. for some of us in the lower extremes of boredom tolerance, or is that the upper extremes of fast-task-switching, we may elect to do multiple of these at once.

i was absently considering this as i drove home this week. i was listening to blues on the ipod, having a conversation with someone in the office and cruising down a street i manage with little conscience attention. that is when the motorcycle cop magically appeared at my side window, then slowed to point at my headlights. i have been waved at multiple times for my "always on" head lights, but it looked like this time i was getting pulled over. after stopping i found that the issue was not the headlights, but that driving while on a handphone really is illegal in malaysia. i then discovered that i should have gotten a local license 3 years ago, although i know of no expat who has ever done this. it has never come up when negotiating prior speed traps.

the indian officer and i had a nice chat. i showed him the book on traffic from my bag, told he that he was right to give me a ticket because it was a distraction. i controlled myself from explaining that i might actually be safer with the phone conversation because otherwise i would be without the tension required for me pay any attention to the road. i heard myself think, "you know officer, i could be asleep at the wheel, but speeding and using the phone keep my ADD at bay and allow me to be safer". my recently acquired filters kicked in, finally i may have learned that less really is more.

in the end, the officer asked me if i "wanted to compromise". shockingly this didn't mean i could pay the fine (tip) immediately, just that i should use the hands-free i had in my bag, if i needed to talk and drive at the same time. i was let go with a handshake and a smile. i drove away hoping to bump into my new friend in a cafe soon, i would like to have a longer conservation about traffic over a beer.

the way we negotiate driving is cultural, it may be related to language in the way we perceive the flow of information and expect things to follow rules so we can only half listen. adding tension might be the same way some play with words to add irony or dual meanings. needing to modify the level of complexity might help you deal better with the chaos and pace of the world around us.

but sometimes adding the tension can also help you to make new friends; unless you drive into a bridge abutment.