I once watched a hummingbird die slowly over several minutes, its frantic breaths gradually transforming into shuddering, haltering gasps, ending finally in a prolonged, almost exaggerated exhale.  This was of a whole different quality as witnessing the sudden – sometimes violent, sometimes public – deaths of animals.  I was sitting in the front of a brown Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera as it powered roughly over a full-grown retriever that had made an impulsive choice which turned into the decision of a lifetime.  It had been stranded in the grassy median of a six-lane road by its owner:  she having jogged spritely across the road, turning back to encourage him along;  it diving once, twice, into the road, each time startled back onto the median by the passing cars;  she waving at it laughingly, calling out to it (You silly goon!  Hop on over!);  it taking a determined plunge into the narrow gap between our car and the car in front, it folding under the front bumper improbably, awkwardly, with a yelp sharply interrupted;  me feeling the texture of its bones – breaking, skidding, dragging – under the floorboard, under my adolescent feet, too young to have been driving, too old to resist glancing surreptitiously back at the road (“Objects in mirror are closer than they appear…”);  she screaming, screaming, kneeling, screaming, shaking, screaming;  my mom, agape, noiseless, breathless, hand covering mouth, foot on gas, too late to stop, too horrified and ashamed to stop;  me forcing my gaze away from the blood and the hair to the screaming, the incessant, choked screaming;  we never speaking of this, not at the time, not ever.

Sudden, violent death leaves no room for reflection.  I don’t even remember the dog’s color.  (The girl, however, was blonde.  That I know.)  I recall the sensations and sounds of that day, but I feel nothing for the dog other than a vague undercurrent of guilt and inevitability.

The hummingbird’s death was, as I said, of a whole different quality.  I was eating lunch in the quiet corner of a cafeteria at work, my table abutting a floor-to-ceiling window exposing the bright, mildly breezy day.  In the middle of my meal, paying no particular attention to anyone, looking purposefully occupied with the deliberate chewing of my food, I heard a light, muffled tap on the window, as if a small marshmallow had been flung against it.  I would not have noticed this but for my awkward idleness and the stillness around me.

An emerald hummingbird now lay on the cement footing at the base of the window.  Its back was arched, its head yearning away from me, its neck exposed and delicately, almost imperceptibly, fluttering.  There was none of the majesty of all the mid-flight photography I had seen of hummingbirds.  Its wings rested against its side.  It was not darting flower to flower, holding motionless in spurts as if the air itself was solid.  The magic had gone.  It breathed heavily like a sprinter just across the finish line, bent over, heaving, every breath fully in and fully out, his entirety pulsing as one large heart.  The hummingbird’s breaths came faster than I would have believed plausible but for its size.  Perhaps the same lightness that allowed for wings to beat fast enough to blur would permit gulps of air twice a second after all.

I looked at the hummingbird, the two of us each alone on his side of the glass, bound together by the awe of what was sure to come.  Its breathing began to slow and stutter.  What did it feel at that moment?  Was there only pain, the kind of deafening, omnipresent pain that overwhelmed thought, demanded all attention?  Or was the hummingbird possibly beyond feeling, enveloped in the kind of quiet solitude left by eardrums blown after an implacable crescendo?

The hummingbird’s breaths became shallow and sporadic, making it hard to decide where one ended and the next began.  It seemed every shuddering exhalation could be its last.  What was certain was that I would be the only witness of these final moments, moments within what I presumed was, until minutes before, a blissful, lighthearted life flitting nectar to nectar.

At this moment I swelled with an intimacy unexpected.

* * * * *

We typically grow close to others through sharing a lifetime of experiences.  Familiarity seems almost prerequisite to intimacy.

There is however a frightening, awful intimacy that floods the void between strangers who share a terrible secret.  Show me quickly before she comes back.  Let’s kill it.

In these moments we recognize that the particular person with us is irrelevant.  What matters is that someone – anyone – also knows what we dare not tell, what we will unavoidably recall at the most inopportune of times, what must always color and distort the way we see other experiences that remind us of this, the awesome, dreadful moment.

* * * * *

The hummingbird barely moved now, each of its breaths separated by increasingly long periods of stillness.  Did it sense that I was right beyond the glass, close enough to touch it, powerless to save?  I was about to witness one of only two experiences universally shared by the living.  I opened my mouth to speak.  I wanted to stand.

Stay.  At last, the hummingbird kept its secret no longer.  I am dying.

Its feathers moved subtly, spontaneously.  The breeze could go on animating it, but to what purpose?  This was no bird.  This was a green marshmallow with a long protrusion thrown against glass.

I rose, moved it to a shaded corner under flowering rhododendrons, and went back to work.

Below is my toast.  The first three sentences have been cut off, but I’ve included the full transcript below.  Congratulations, Neil & Kelly!

Ladies and gentlemen,

It’s a privilege to celebrate this happy day with all of you. I’ve known Neil since college. He’s one of the most considerate people I know. To see Neil and Kelly so happy together is proof that good guys do win and that life is beautiful.

In addition to his great sense of humor, Neil has his peculiarities. I was the one who first convinced him to try lettuce. We were at Subway. After taking a few thoughtful bites, he looked up and declared, “I can’t believe I went through life without trying lettuce.” To this day, he still gets lettuce in his sandwiches.

Months later, I offered him tomatoes. He politely refused. “Have you ever even tried tomatoes?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “but they can’t be good.” As if that explained it all.

Neil didn’t even like Paris the first time, when he went alone. It’s true!

Then he met Kelly. And things began to change. Neil began to try more things. Eat more things. Adapt to shifting plans with a spirit of adventure. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like he went skydiving, Rocky Mountain climbing, or spent 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chew. But he did love deeper. And he spoke sweeter. Mexican food, a favorite of Kelly’s, now had a fighting chance. It seems love is great enough to conquer even cheese, and possibly tomatoes.

After all, life is a great adventure. It’s about sharing experiences with people you love. Seeing Neil with Kelly has shown me how we can encourage one another to explore the unknown. If that’s not the power of love, I don’t know what is.

Neil’s a big fan of music, so I tried to find some profound insight from the radio this morning about how we should capture life’s fleeting moments and take chances. It’s a lot to ask of a radio in 15 rushed minutes, but here’s the best I could do:

Lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance
Opportunity comes once in a lifetime.

Remarkable the type of sage advice you get from 106.1 KISS FM.

To help you seize life’s opportunities, I bought the two of you a few gift certificates: to go skydiving (with Skydive Snohomish), Rocky Mountain climbing (well, actually, a three-day Rainier hike with REI), and – I assume you know this – there’s no bull named Fu Man Chew. But I’m told there’s a bar in Pioneer Square that has a mechanical bull, so I got you a gift certificate for that as well. I’m sure you can beat 2.7 seconds.

Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses with me. To Neil and Kelly:

May you live long, happy, fulfilled, and leave nothing on the table.
May you do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.
May you spur each other on in life’s great adventure.

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance – I hope you dance.

I hadn’t previously used a bank drive-thru in my adult life.  It always seemed a bit passé, the type of thing you’d expect of retirees in Cadillac Devilles.  Why bother with the sliding drawer, the calcified creak of the metal snake as the teller adjusts the microphone, all the potential pauses and misunderstandings of human interaction, when you could instead slide a card, press a few buttons, and move on?  I only deviated from my plan to park in front of the ATM at the last second, mid-arc in the minivan, once I considered the logistics of keeping a three-year-old safe mere feet away from a busy parking lot while juggling a wallet, two checks, a secret four-digit pin, and deposit envelopes.  Perhaps better to let the steering wheel unwind an inch and drift into the drive-thru.  Boy stays buckled, dad turns small sheets of paper into tiny magnetic fields in some distant computer.

Before today, I never understood why my mom always took my brother and me through the bank drive-thru.  There were always lines.  Maryland was hot.  But today I understood.  Perhaps somewhere she, too, changed paths mid-arc in order to juggle her many responsibilities.

That was twenty five years ago.  I was my son’s age.  My mom was mine.  An actor was President.  The Soviets were bound to end the world any day.  It was unthinkable that Knight Rider himself would one day dance on the Berlin Wall.

Twenty five years.  Everyone shifted one seat over in life’s musical chairs.  When the music stopped, life didn’t have a seat for my grandfather – my dad took his.  My son joined in at my previous seat, my seat in Childhood, my seat in the back of a sweltering Nissan Sentra wondering why we seemed to visit the bank every other week, wondering why we always waited in that drive-thru instead of just going in.

There’s a photo of my mom taken when I was a toddler.  She is young.  She is beautiful, confident.  Beaming with the optimism of being thirty.  Would she smile that same smile at double her age? Could anyone?

Did she dream the same things for me that I dream for my son?  Did she also sit contentedly for an hour watching me play in the sun? How would she feel looking at that photograph today?  Have the years failed the brightness of her youth?  Did life reward her as deeply as she had expected?

* * * * *

“What does that sign say?” my son asks, pointing to the printout taped to the green glass of the teller’s booth.  I notice a coffee machine right next to her monitor and wonder whether it’s just for her, alone at her perch, or whether other tellers come back during breaks to pour from the same pot.  This matters more to me at the time than it should.

“It lists the things you can do at the drive-thru.”  I quickly scan the sheet and summarize.  “Withdraw less than $1000.  Deposit cash and checks.  Verify balances.  Anything else and you’ll have to go in.”

“Next time, maybe you can take me to the ATM machine.”  He adds the superfluous “machine” like most adults do.  Like I do.

“Sure.  Let’s try that next time.”

I take my receipt and turn towards home.

I’ve left the original post as-is below, but I’ve removed the actual PDF file from this site.

— original post below —

I’ve just published my first children’s book, That’s Not My PC, now available on Amazon.  It’s a parody of a series of great children’s books published by Usborne that started with That’s Not My Puppy.  The series’ format is simple:  in each page, the narrator highlights one characteristic of the object on the page which identifies it as someone else’s.  (“That’s not my PC… its keyboard is too gritty.”)

That’s Not My PC is a parody of this series meant for the Internet generation.  It even contains 14 bonus pages of games and puzzles!

Please spread the word! It makes a great gift and is an excellent conversation piece.

I received an exercise bike via UPS recently.  Below is pictured the state of its arrival (I am not making this up):

As if in knowing acknowledgement, the delivery guy had circled the phone number on the UPS note where you call to complain about damaged deliveries.  He at least seems to have a sense of humor.

In the meantime, I leave you with two pictures.  The first is all about  globalization.  You’ll see that I’m pointing at the bottom-right corner of a sign that explains a key historic building within the Forbidden City.  Until about 1911, no civilian had ever seen the inside of the Forbidden City because only the emperor and his staff were allowed.  Now anyone can visit and see the hidden gems of history.  Well, that and the logo I’m pointing to in the sign:  it’s an Amex symbol.  That’s right –Amex has managed to get its logo plastered on every sign in the Forbidden City.  Globalization at its starkest, I suppose.  Next thing you know, Tide With Bleach will be sponsoring the Washington Monument.

The second photo is just for fun.  It’s an outdoor statue outside of the Jin An Temple in the heart of Shanghai.  Outdoor statues have been gaining popularity both in Shanghai and in the US, as far as I can tell.  Hours of entertainment.

When you run across the occasional theater, you discover that their prices are extraordinary.  Normal tickets are about $12.  This may not sound like much – say, if you live in Manhattan – but college graduates in China often earn under $15,000 a year.  $12 is, in local prices, “ridiculous.”

Then there are the $50 seats (not a typo).  Some theaters in China, like the ritzy theater in the Grand Gateway mall, have “VIP” tickets that cost $50.  You essentially sit in a glass-enclosed box, much like movie stars do when attending stadium games in the US.

Not that I actually know from experience.  $50 is a wee too much for me to spend on one movie (a five minute bathroom break would cost the price of a latte!).  I’m also not sure why you’d want to go to a theater just to sit in an enclosed box all by yourself.  Isn’t the whole point of going to the theater to share an experience with the audience?  If I wanted a completely silent box with no one near me, I’d rather watch at home.

Which brings us to why theaters are so scarce and expensive in China.  They used to be all over the place, and cheap, from what locals tell me.  But in recent years, the advent of DVD piracy has decimated the theater business.  Why pay several dollars to watch a movie in a theater when you can pay $0.80 (not a typo) on the street to buy the DVD?  This is essentially the thought process that Chinese citizens underwent in the past decade.  As cheap pirate DVDs became available, less people went to theaters.  Theaters started closing down.  The remaining theaters had to charge more and more in order to justify staying open.  As movies raised prices, even more people fled to pirate DVDs.  This self-reinforcing cycle has now driven the movie theater business to its new equilibrium in Shanghai:  one theater for every several hundred thousand people, each charging $12-50 for tickets.

If there’s one thing that’s interesting to a computer scientist in China, it has to be the bit about intellectual property rights.  As everyone knows, pirated software and pirated DVDs are everywhere not only in China, but in most of the Far East.

[As an aside, there are cases, albeit limited, where piracy actually seems to fill a legitimate niche.  Here's an interesting case I ran into recently.  Employees of Microsoft are allowed to download any Microsoft product for business use through an intranet site that's notoriously slow when accessed overseas.  Coworkers from Thailand tell me that downloading a large product, such as Visual Studio, can take many hours (or in some cases even days).  It turns out that if you're a Microsoft employee in Thailand and want to install a large Microsoft product, it's faster to simply buy a pirated version of the product from a local store.  It takes ten minutes of walking and costs about $3.  Once you buy that disc, you can share it with all your coworkers so that their installations also go faster.  Isn’t this an odd case of data-transfer arbitrage?]

Back to China and DVD’s.  You can find pirated DVD’s on many streets in Shanghai.  In fact, most pirate establishments are so formalized that they have their own store, many as large as your local Blockbuster.  The types of pirated content include major Hollywood movies, entire seasons of popular TV shows, as well as a huge collection of Chinese movies and TV.  You can find just about anything.

Pirated movies range in quality both in how they’re distributed and in the original recording source.  For instance, the cheapest movies are the ones that actually come on CDs (VCDs).  The more expensive ones come on multilayered DVD’s (and “more expensive” is a relative term – we’re talking the difference between $0.80 and $1.20).  As for source recording material, television shows are often recorded straight off the network with commercials cut out.  The best movies are recorded directly from the source DVD, but the worst ones are recorded by filming the movie in a theater with a portable video recorder.  Somewhere in the middle are the preview editions of movies which studios send to critics prior to a movie’s release.  These often come with watermarks prominently displayed in the movie (“Property of Warner Bros.”).

This leads to interesting moral dilemmas.  For instance, I subscribe to Netflix in the US.  For several dollars a month, I have the right to stream most US TV shows onto my computer.  However, studio distribution laws don’t allow streaming into China (thereby, funny enough, encouraging piracy).  I can bypass Netflix’s attempts to detect my location using VPN services (such as Witopia), but it’s arguably more efficient just to buy the pirated DVD’s.

Similarly, most major networks (e.g. NBC) now allow you to stream recent shows for free.  But they don’t allow access from outside the US.  This, once again, poses a moral dilemma for US citizenry worldwide.

I’ve always paid for my digital music as well as for movies and TV shows.  However, the restrictive usage rights demanded by major corporations in the US have the side effect of tempting me (some might say encouraging me) to pirate the content.

I’d happily pay for access to the  material (and continue to do so).  But let’s take a lesson from Shanghai’s movie theater business:  we need to carefully structure our digital rights laws to encourage and enable legitimate use, not to further encourage piracy.

This was taken at Carrefour, a huge French conglomerate that’s popular in several Asian countries.  Two things were novel (to me) about this shopping cart:  a) it was on an escalator-ramp, which allowed for carts to move from floor to floor, and b) the wheels magnetically lock once you push the cart onto the escalator.  This latter feature is just so clever.  No struggling with the cart’s weight!  (When I first encountered this unexpected feature, though, I thought that the cart had gotten stuck somehow.)

The second picture is a billboard that I photographed inside a mall (the JLife Mall next to what used to be Shanghai’s tallest building, the Jin Mao Tower).  Call me a bigot, but I’m not sure that everyone gets the warm fuzzies when a sign claims to help you “enjoy” a “German dental experience.”  Are the Germans famous for dentistry in a way that I’ve not heard of before?

Then we have several food-related photos.  The first shows the cafeteria where many Microsoft employees eat.  The photo was taken at 1:20 pm, a time when in the US you’d still expect many people to be eating.  But as you can clearly see, the cafeteria was abandoned at this time.  No one would sell me any food, even though it was within the official opening hours of the cafeteria, because the workers were all eating and cleaning up.  In Redmond, you’d have employees eating well through the afternoon.  The China employee culture is very precise when it comes to lunch time.  People don’t eat at 11:50.  They stop heading to the cafeteria at 12:20.  The elevators are impossibly jammed at precisely 12 noon.  It’s like an unspoken agreement here.

The Lay’s chips, you’ll notice, are “Ziran Steak Flavor.”  I love market customization – like 7-Elevens selling tea eggs in Taiwan, or KFCs selling passionfruit juice in China.  The potato chips were pretty tasty.  Speaking of KFC, the one above is one of the most uniquely-decorated I’ve seen.  It’s on the famous West Lake in Hangzhou.  The Colonel sure gets around.

What’s a story about China without something being broken?  Left, you see a child seat.  The safety buckles are all broken, and the seat furthermore features several choice pinch points for little fingers.  What makes this seat truly awesome is that it’s essentially the same seat that we’ve been given in many restaurants, both native and foreign – complete with broken buckles each time.  In fact, I’ll go on record for saying that we have never once used a child seat in a Chinese restaurant that had working buckles.  This suggests perhaps some design feedback to the company that makes these seats (or alternatively, some feedback to parents who care about their children’s safety).

The red button you see on the left is meant for emergencies.  It calls the police or the guards in your apartment complex (you’ll remember from a previous post that there are guards everywhere in China).  It’s a sort of “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up” type of button that features prominently in multiple rooms in many apartments.  The red button would be a pretty awesome idea – if it actually did anything.  I pressed an unlabelled one when I first got to Shanghai.  Nothing happened for days.  It reminds me of several friends who I’ve talked to over the years who, when dialing 911, got a busy signal.  Does this bother anyone?

These last two highlight subtle humor in language and culture.  “Wall Street English” is a huge chain that offers English tutoring.  They have video ads that feature hip Asian people confidently proclaiming, “I speak English – Wall Street English.”  This is perhaps only bested by their main competitor, “English First,” which loves featuring billboards of an Asian woman tied at the wrist with thick rope to a white man.  I guess it’s supposed to be a we’re-in-it-together sort of thing, but it strikes me as… odd.

Lastly, the trash cans.  Kudos to the Chinese for having trash cans that typically come separated between regular trash and recyclables.  This is a great move.  But you’ll note the particular recycle bin on the right is labeled “Unredeemable.”  True in literal meaning, comical in connotation.

Today, in a simple Beijing restaurant next to Tiananmen Square (motto:  “What tank treads?”), I ordered a Hot Coke Ginger Lemon Drink.  I confirmed twice, thinking that I must misunderstand the menu, then absolutely had to order this most creative of drinks.

As promised, it was Coke, but served boiling hot, having had fine threads of ginger cooked in it along with a few slices of lemon.  Coke, ginger, and lemon are, I’m happy to report, three great tastes that taste great together.  It was truly the most creative preparation of Coca-Cola I’ve ever been served.  (Coke, for those of you keeping track, averages 200+ 8-oz. servings per American per year.  The American Dental Association should positively own stock.)

The concoction was served fresh, with the hot Coke still fizzing.  One must consume it within the first few minutes of its production lest its inherent fizzy-ness be lost in scalding heat.  The ginger added delicate treble notes to the Coke’s slothful, sticky alto;  the lemon added carefree highlights at the onset and retreat of the main melody.

I’m told by the waitress that it’s quite a common drink in China.  I suppose by “common” she means “you could spend six months here without ever hearing of it.”  She claims that it’s often had during colds as a way to clear the sinuses.  All Chinese school kids no doubt want to get sick, and often.

The folks at Coca-Cola Enterprises are probably delighted by this development, which hearkens back to the early days of Coke in the 1900′s when its traces of cocaine were billed as revitalizing to the health.

All it needs is a clever name, like those of most alcoholic drinks, where the name guarantees half the success.  How about something enigmatic and insider, conveying a chummy sense of knowing camaraderie whenever it rolls off the tongue, like “Moses Simpson Coronary?”

Coke.  Enjoy.  Always.  Now, piping hot with ginger and lemon.  At your local Beijing restaurant.  Ask for it by name.