Cetaceus

I’m engaged in a number of unrelated ongoing labors. The most laborious task that’s befallen me is my current job, which involves scanning documents for foreign medical graduates applying to come practice in the U.S. It’s one of those jobs that so temporary I did it for about 4 or 5 months last year (before economic salvation came in the form of those 3 islands in the north Pacific known collectively as Nihon), and have returned this Fall and Winter for more. Last year, we were able to listen to music, and I would wile away the data-entering hours by challenging myself to listen to the entire Anthology of American Folk Music all the way through with no breaks, or take in hours and hours worth of pod-casted Princeton University lectures on subjects ranging far beyond my usual interests.

This year, we don’t have that luxury, so aside from the random sarcastic email that comes over the intra-office network, breaks and listening to the OL’s talk about their children, the job is something akin to carrying big rocks from one pile to another. Actually, I’d rather be busting up rocks that scanning documents, really. At least then I could sing.

The second and far more satisfying labor that I am daily engaged in is working on my statement of purpose for graduate school applications. I’m an assembler when it comes to writing, or at least academic writing. I take notes all over the place, put all the text I come up with into the computer, and then arrange, rearrange and weld the pieces together until they make something pretty and compelling. I then revise constantly, taking things out, putting things in, deleting entire sections of text, and so on. While this may sound tedious and confusing, I’ve found that when it comes to academic writing, this sort of thing is the optimal system for me. It’s particularly strange in that regard because my thoughts are usually quite scattered, and yet I find this textual balancing act both satisfying and productive. I often liken this process not to Sisyphus, but rather to Jacob wrestling the angel. In particular, I think of that Gauguin painting of Jacob and the angel, the one with the three bonneted women watching, and the huge fields of color. I imagine that this sense has something to do with my wanting to be engaged in this personal/textual struggle, wanting to see the results and to make something out of it.

Today at work I came across this snippet of text, preserved in a Dean’s Letter of Recommendation for a Soviet medical student, dated January 20th, 1988:

The student has improved her political knowledge by systematically studying notes of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, and resolutions of the Communist Party and Soviet Government

We often get things like this, mostly embedded in the early parts of college transcripts from students old enough to have gone to school in a former Soviet Republic. Among my favorite recurring, unremembered, courses are “Principles of Scientific Atheism,” “Reading in Scientific Communism,” and best of all “Politics.” The latter seems the most lonely and potent to me.

I’m prepared to make no claims nor draw any insights from my semi-frequent textual/electronic run-ins with these things. Suffice it to say that they are more intriguing than not, and I try to imagine whoever the student is (I often have their pictures), sitting in that class, wondering what they made of the whole thing. I’ll wager that the single thought that recurred the most was “I just want to be a doctor.”

I have yet to go back into my “myspace” blog and remove all of my Japan posts, and just about everything else. It is my intention to leave those online shores for these greener pastures. Like a good Marxist, I’ve long dreamed of owning the intellectual means of production, and so to make a long story short, here we are.

Mostly, I was extremely disturbed (more so than I had already been for vaguer reasons) after reading this article a few months back about Rupert Murdoch’s dealings in China. Among other things, when I found out that NewsCorp. would be including a button in it’s “myspace” China version to allow people to rat each other out to the government, I personally felt as though it was high time to sever my own active relationship with that site. Frankly, the idea of sharing the same space, real or online, with that kind of activity seriously calls into question just about all of the values that I consider integral to who I am and would like to be, as well as the world that I would like to imagine attaining some day.

There are other reasons for wanting to just start and run my own blog, but although it may sound silly, it was reading about NewsCorp’s increasingly close relationship with the authorities in Beijing that made me decide to finally do it. This more recent article about Murdoch’s publishing a travel book put out by the PLA further added to my unease, not to mention Murdoch’s, shall we say, “flip-flopping” on the role of mass-media in fostering democracy when there’s a large amount of cash to be made in the Chinese market. The initial article also contains a great quote from America’s favorite Australian on H.H. the Dalai Lama, echoing the CCP’s absurdly hyperbolic party line, which I find unsettling to say the least.

So, it’s time for lunch and my introductory post has become an indictment of Rupert Murdoch. I think we’re off to a good start.