1. No understanding of how to stand in line and wait one’s turn
2. Lack of the concept of a personal bubble
3. No privacy when using public bathrooms
4. Spitting
5. Arguing as a publicly condoned form of communication
6. The way traffic works (which is to say, precariously and entirely dependent on twitch reflexes)
7. General lack of regard for others’ well-being (unless they are a potential source of money)

Delicious food and uber-friendly relatives (who try to give us even more gifts of delicious food) aside, bad public manners has been a constant theme of our trip to China. Being Chinese-born but American-raised with “Western” standards for acceptable public behavior in tow, I spent my fair share of time getting annoyed at it all. Once, sad to say, to the point of getting into an argument with someone for cutting in line. Yang and I also spent an embarrassingly considerable amount of time at the Expo conspiring to get back at people for misbehaving (none of the solutions, which ranged from bitch-slapping to cussing them out in English, seemed quite right… though they would have been pretty cathartic).

Despite that it annoys me to no end, bad manners doesn’t seem to be much of a problem here. People here are inured to it. They actually get kind of annoyed in return when I protest, for instance, someone squeezing in front of me to use the bathroom stall for which I waited 10 minutes. It’s like there is some mutually acknowledged unsaid agreement that if we all be equally rude to each other, there are no hard feelings, and by speaking out I am upsetting the established social order. And everyone knows that, in China, one just doesn’t upset the established social order, ever.

The fact of the matter is, as my mom and grandmother took turns explaining to me, China is still largely a poor agrarian country. Though the face it shows to the world is that of a modern, wealthy country with gleaming cars, cities of gravity-defying architecture, and Westernized attitudes and lifestyles, something like half of the Chinese people are still living as farmers with a subsistence income. Even the city people who’ve “leveled up” in society are only 1 or 2 generations away from living life in a farming village, where people sometimes have to fight tooth and nail for basic life necessities like the right to a water source. It’s no wonder that most of China still does not get the concept of “waiting one’s turn” or “letting someone else go first.” Moreover, living conditions in a rural Chinese village are still fairly rough, sometimes bordering on, uh, foul. (Jia’s stories of cheerfully riding home on top of a truckload of manure spring to mind.) There isn’t money to build walls with hinged doors around toilets, and nobody really cares if you spit (a.k.a. add your share of organic matter) off to the side of a corn field.

The rapid growth of China’s economy is for reals. (I saw it with my own eyes!) In a mere 20 years’ span, it went from a manufacturer of bad toys to having a major hand in global monetary flows.  But 20 years doesn’t really give people time to develop a new set of social mores to fit the BMWs and 5-story deluxe shopping centers. Urban China looks like a post-industrial country on the surface, and that gives people (me included) expectations that it should behave like one. But it’s still got the heart of a battle-scarred farmer used to struggle and hardship. Maybe these things will change eventually, or maybe they won’t. But that’s my home country for ya.

Here’s also what I learned today: I’m now getting into that fun stage of learning programming where I pretty much know how to write the code to make stuff happen, but I don’t quite know all the subtleties of how the machine actually uses the code. The above was just one of many examples of this, where one minute I am chugging along confidently and the next I am utterly baffled, clueless, and like totally flipping out. They say love is a roller coaster ride. Try learning a computer language.

I just spent this entire evening of 5 hours doing nothing but sifting through the Internets instead of getting things done. (There, didn’t that sound suitably whiny? Anyhow.) Usually when I come home from work, I expect to Get Things Done, and by that I mean draw in my sketchbook or make progress on any of the 5 projects I have going or learn some more AS3 or finish a book. But instead, tonight, I read Google Reader. I read Google Reader’s 1000+ unread entries for 5 hours straight, interspersed with link-swapping via IM and Twitter-monitoring. While Blipping songs. And Wikipedia-surfing. And petting the cat.

Judging by tonight and the frequency with which tonight’s scenario has occurred over the past 3 months, I have pretty much become Web 2.0’s bitch. But now is not the time to feel self conscious about having potentially earned a new stereotypical designation. Now is the time to think carefully about why I do this, why I feel compelled to sacrifice hours of my life at a time to basically what amounts to info-hoarding.

Actually, I think that’s the core of the reason: I do this because I feel an imperative to info-hoard like none other. And I feel this imperative because I’ve come to believe (and been taught to believe) that, in order to be a truly inspired producer of cultural capital, to be a damn excellent artist or designer or whatever you want to call it, I must first and foremost be extremely well-informed. About everything from molecular gastronomy and its impact on European urban tourism to the mating rituals of the lesser paradise fowl. Because you never know—inspiration pops out of the most unexpected stimuli. Perhaps out of vast reserves of raw knowledge, some rare and lovely wisdom will crystallize.

(Thinking this, believing in this, has become so second-nature to me that I am almost positive I have already blogged about this before, but the blog search engine tells me nothing so far has been written. So onwards I go.)

This is what fuels my Google Reader marathons. But invariably after these, I feel tired and not at all like I have learned much of anything. For a while I was pondering why this is so. I can’t help but feel that at least part of it is due to the fact that my brain does not retain fleeting facts or topics very well. Some people seem to be able to capture and store a great percentage of the topics that pass their way each day. I’m not one of them. I usually read, react, and soon after forget.

But then I realized that not many people who go on visits to the blogosphere read to retain—it is far more likely that they read to entertain. Rather than look for stuff and then try to incorporate it into their way of thinking forever, most people probably just have a good chuckle or raised-eyebrow moment, and then let it go. My other friend Eileen says she keeps a category labeled “bored” in her Google Reader, and this is by far her biggest category. Whereas, come to think of it, I am never really bored—I am never really bored because web-hopping feels less like a casual last-ditch way to pass the time and more like a monumental task, like reading 12 chapters before you go to bed. Even while I have fun doing it, it is nevertheless fuelled with the imperative to learn, learn and hoard and incorporate, so that one day I can become as smart as Stephen Sagmeister or as perceptive as John Maeda or as witty as Paula Scher.

But it doesn’t work. Ask me if I recall even 5 things that I saw within the past hour. Five is the below-average standard for items cached in short-term memory. I can recall only two. Ready? Fountain throwies and World Builder video from Vimeo.

This is what you get, Tina, from self-imposed force-feeding.

Oy vey. Maybe this is not the right way to do this.

I am pretty much an impatient person when it comes to self-expectations. This is probably my biggest problem on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes impatience is warranted—you kind of need it on the job if you want to complete something on time in a programming language you barely know—but other times it’s a big handicap, and I need to get better at recognizing when it is.

So all this rambling has lead me to the conclusion that my mega-surfing sessions need to be… made less mega. I can’t have too much at once, because if so, I find myself so frantic to ingest that I barely digest, and as a result, after five hours, there isn’t much to show for it. Whereas if I’d spent the five hours drawing in my sketchbook, learning the Renaissance-y way through painstaking hand-drawn gestures and notes, I’d retain a lot more, and have some wonderful sketches to show for it. Or if I’d read a book on any one single topic… sigh.

But I still need at least some of the crazy variety that the internet offers.

This raises the question of how to possibly take in the internet (and the world, by proxy) in small enough chunks.

It is (they are) so, so, soooooo big.

Oh man, thinking about that kind of size makes my knees feel weak, like standing in an endless field and experiencing some kind of horiontal acrophobia.

Perhaps that is a question for an other day. I’m tired, and tomorrow there is work. Off to bed!

EDIT: Tangentially related article about design’s place in the world of information – “not everything is design, but design is everything.”

Before, I would spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to shade correctly, how to create a certain effect in Photoshop, how to draw the human body, etc. Now I spend the majority of my deciding between serif vs. sans-serif, humanist vs. grotesque, red vs. slightly orange, big vs. small, photo A or photo B, javascript or actionscript, etc. etc. The question is no longer “how,” but “why” this one element or style or whatever is better than the alternative.

I think a lot of things came together to abet this transition, among them primarily the huge assortment of free Photoshop tutorials on the fabulous, crazy Internets. Now I don’t have to really learn how to do anything anymore – if I desire a certain effect, I just look up the appropriate page from my vast Delicious bookmarks collection and get the info I need right away to recreate the target look. Likewise, even though I know fairly well how to render a human figure by hand, I never really will need to, because iStockphoto.com has a ridiculously large collection of human vector figures in any imaginable pose, to be had for just a few dollars and a click. The amount of readymade resources in the design world are bafflingly huge. No wonder nowadays I find myself pondering “why” rather than “how.”

Perhaps this is just another difference between how an art-oriented mind vs. a design-oriented mind operates. Art more is about the visual expression of the unfamiliar or original. Design is about the arrangment of elements (implied: preexisting) to make something pleasing. A long time ago, I thought art and design were quite similar in process because they require many of the same visual skills, but now more and more, I’m reevaluating this belief.

However this doesn’t mean the two can’t mesh, as I would always aim for – it merely means that each discipline has a lot to learn from the process of the other. For instance, I wonder if the design process is not limiting itself by focusing too much on picking and choosing between preexisting elements. I know that there are designers out there who go all out and make/experiment with everything from scratch, but that’s not the way it is taught or practiced at a lot of firms, including the one I work at. That is something I would like to take away from the art mindset more.

Sometimes its good to be aware of what you are doing, how you are operating on a day-to-day level, what conventions you’ve fallen into and others that you’ve abandoned. Which is why I write these rambly entries, I guess. =)

This was the first year I have been able to actually go, and Yang was also there. I had never seen a Revels performance before, though I’d been hearing about it extensively, as my company has had a very close relationship with them and designed a lot of stuff for them in the past. (I even got to do a logo comp for the Revels SummersDay festival, back in my internship days.) I was very excited to finally get to see them performing.

Revels is a tradition-inspired song, dance, and story performance company. They are nationally based, but have a pretty big presence in Boston. Their work is largely focused on celebrating the seasons through joyful family-oriented events/shows, and they take cues from a variety of different ethnic traditions. The Christmas Revels in particular seems to be focused on European traditions, which makes sense as it’s Christmas. Every year the Christmas Revels has a different theme, but there are some unifying recurring elements such as a Mummer’s Play and a Lord of the Dance audience-participation dance. Last year was a spectacular Balkan theme, which Carol says was absolutely stunning and soul-stirring but apparently not very well-received because it was too “esoteric.” (Yeah… what??) So this year they really toned it down. The theme/plot was a loose rendition of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, which is essentially a love story, but Revels adapted it to be more of a portrait of a traditional English village celebration of Christmas.

The performance was centered on one of the themes of the book, the dichotomy of tradition/past and innovation/future. Though I found the heavily-accented dialogue hard to understand (costume beards too thick? ^^;) I managed to gather that the light plot was about the arrival of a new harmonium (a symbol of progressive technology at the time) at this little quaint village, and there was an altogether spirited outcry by the townspeople against it replacing the charming old quire and boisterous caroling/mumming tradition. In the end, cherished tradition won over of course, and the children got their parade, and there was much caroling and dancing both joyful and somber.

It was a charming performance through and through, and though I knew close to nothing about English villages and old-school carols, I found myself belting out the lyrics to Donna Nobis Pacem next to a very expertly harmonizing Yang (and, on my other side, co-worker John, who was mumble-singing for all he was worth). Unlike any of the other holiday-season shows I’ve seen in my entire life (and I think I’ve seen a fair share), this one was truly “toned down” in many ways. The costumes were not fabulous by any means, nor where there awesome displays of stage pyrotechnics (there was some snow and dry ice, though), nor dazzling displays of virtuosic skill. There was just good, solid charm, and some beautifully rich singing voices. And, after you walk out of there, you realize you don’t need any of the showy fabulous to really feel fabulous about the season and all it entails.

Additionally, I think the show raises an interesting and forever relevant question: that we should all carefully  consider, as the relentless march of time continues, what things we should keep and preserve for posterity. We should question whether new things can rightfully replace the old just by virtue of being the “latest and greatest.” The answer that Revels proposes is a resounding “no.” That there are traditions that bind together and warm hearts, like songs requiring a crowd’s unified voice to sing, and dances that remind us of the rigors and challenges that humanity has overcome, and all that good stuff, that we should definitely keep. And I think, after seeing Christmas Revels, they are right to believe so.

Happy Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice, 2008 world… here’s to hoping 2009 is just as songful, danceful, and joyful for all… if not more.