About 11 years ago, just before moving from Yamagata (I assure you, it’s in the map…look it up), I was able to contact a few Tsukuba-based Filipino students and researchers who were members of the Filipino Association of Students in Tsukuba, more commonly known as FAST. Coming from a place where there were no other Filipino students, I was overwhelmed by the warm response from the people I have yet to meet. One of them warmly welcomed me to the community, and proudly told me that FAST was one of the most active Filipino organizations in Japan. Finally! After three long years of being stuck in the mountains where my only interaction was with books, Japanese students and lifeless machines (not necessarily in that order), I could finally be part of a Filipino community…in Japan! I could weep in joy.
Monthly Archives: May 2011
Efficiency
Years after being integrated into the so-called “shakai” or Japanese society, there is still one thing that baffles me to this day. It is the unwritten but generally accepted practice in the workplace to work past the specified number of working hours. The practice of zangyou, or overtime.
For me, extending beyond the working hours is NOT a reflection of how diligent you are, or how dedicated you are to your work. It is a sign of SLOPPINESS, because you are not efficiently making use of the full eight hours or so allotted for work. That should be ample time. That’s already 1/3 of your day allotted for work.
For some reason, people here seem to think that the longer they work on something, the better the results they will produce. It goes way back in school, I believe. I saw for myself how graduate students would sit at their desks the whole day, only to produce a one-paragraph abstract at the end of the day. It would have taken me an hour to work on it, so it was a real mystery to me why so much time was wasted on it.
For some people, time = effort, and so the longer you work on something, it means that more effort went into it. But if you were just staring blankly at your monitor for hours and not really doing anything, how could that be called work? Unfortunately,the quantity of ‘effort’ doesn’t always translate to the quality of work.
For some people, working to the point of exhaustion is the rule, not the exception. Work is not done until you’re literally dragging your feet away from the office, and finally arriving at home just to take an o-furo and then sleep. Well, I think it’s idiotic. You only have one body, and if you abuse it, someday it will get back at you. And as for those who have families, I think it is unfair to deprive your spouse and children of the quality time that they deserve. It is not surprising to see the breakdown of families here, because people do not know how to spend time efficiently at work, leaving little or no time for family.
In principle, I stick to the working hours and extend only when necessary. I am a full-time mother (and currently single parent) so I have to make use of my time in the most efficient way possible. I think it’s only fair, to put in exactly as much as what is demanded of my time at work, and to get a fair payment for that.
That’s a simple equation.
A Fine Line
Someone I know recently deactivated her Facebook account for the simple reason that she got too depressed, because of hearing and knowing about what other people are doing with their lives. “Everybody else seems to be having a great time, busy with their own affairs…everybody else except me.” Does that sound familiar?
Call it a Facebook-induced depression. Compared to yourself, others may seem to be having the best time of their lives, may it be personal or work-related. The comparison becomes more acute when they post photos of places where they have recently traveled (where you haven’t been to), talk about scrumptious delights they’ve tasted on the other side of the continent (at a place you can only dream of), discuss excitedly parties they’ve been invited to (and unfortunately you weren’t), etc., etc.
Of course there will always be comparisons. It’s the way it’s always been. How different is that from bumping into one of your friends and hearing about his recent promotion at work? Or bumping into your girl friends and hear somebody discussing her future travel plans? The only difference is that now, we are being passively and speedily updated with the affairs of other people’s lives, and all those activities will automatically appear on our walls whether we like them or not. (Unless of course you’ve resorted to hiding them from your wall forever. Life is too short to be bugged by people with annoying online personas.)
The thing is, it’s quite hard for me as well to identify which ones are “sharing” and which ones are mere “flaunting.” There is a very fine line between the two. Perhaps there are indeed “genuine” posts whose main objective is to simply share. But no matter how innocent the objective of those posts may be, no matter how pure the intents of the poster could be, it will never be that way in the eyes of the person at the receiving end. We are all guilty of looking at other people through colored glasses, each tinted with our own prejudices and biases.
And then there are the so-called subtle posts. For instance, why should I change my status to reflect which airport I am currently in? What will that piece of information actually mean to somebody among my FB contacts? If they were my family, they didn’t need to be informed about my whereabouts; being my family they are already supposed to know. So it seems to me that the object of those status reports is to passively inform others how “hip” one is, say for being a jet-setter (side note: hip is when only few persons do it. If everybody else is into it, then it’s not hip; it’s ordinary!). Or perhaps to impress upon others about how hectic your schedule is, to gently remind your so-called ‘friends’ what a very important a person you are. Personally, I find it annoying that people would even bother to post status updates on their FB wall on how busy they are, to the point of noting down every single thing they had to accomplish in the coming days/weeks/months. If they’re so busy, then what the heck are they social networking for?
What we need to remind ourselves is that FB only provides a snippet of how people want others to see them. And even that is a very, very unbalanced projection of their real lives. Just take a look at the majority of photos uploaded everyday: travels, parties, happy family affairs, all projecting that warm and happy, fuzzy feeling. Does everybody feel that happy all the time?
We also need to remind ourselves that everything that gets posted online have been filtered. Only the good stuff goes. And besides, nobody really wants to read about the negative stuff anyway.
Fortunately, there is one good thing we can rely on when we become too exhausted from trying to decipher the fine line in FB: go OFFLINE. Believe it or not, the world will go on. Who knows, you may even find a better thing to do with your time.
Faith
A few days back, a memory from my high school days came back to me, out of the blue. I wasn’t even thinking about anything in particular. It was the time when somebody brought a supposedly miraculous Sto. Nino to school, much to the delight of the Catholic teachers and students. I, being non-Catholic, immediately felt out of place amidst the palpable excitement that gripped almost everyone else in our class. It can perform miracles, they said. One of my teachers then promptly urged me to go forth and be healed, and never mind that I wasn’t sick or anything like that. He was referring specifically to the fact that I, being exceptionally nearsighted, wore eyeglasses, and supposedly even my nearsightedness could be cured by the miracle team that came to town.
I have nothing against Catholics, mind you, but you have to understand the context of the environment I grew up in. I was raised in an entirely different dimension of faith that didn’t involve worshipping stone images of anything, much less a purportedly miraculous one. And in fact it was a challenge to grow up having a different “religion” from everybody else’s. But I got along well with everyone, or at least that was how it seemed to me.
I immediately raised my objection to the idea. It wasn’t just that I didn’t believe that it had healing powers that could cure my myopia (I was already a budding skeptic way back then), but precisely because it would go against everything I was raised to believe in. Daddy would surely disinherit me, for sure.
But my teacher insisted: “What would you lose if you tried it? You have everything to gain.” Not exactly his same words; note that this happened more than two decades ago, so the memory is a bit rusty, but the message was essentially the same. Basically, he was telling me to just suspend my beliefs (or lack of it) for a brief second and just take a leap of faith. After all, if I did gain my normal eyesight back, then I’d rise out of the situation as the real winner! That would even make a believer out of me, who knew.
Well, I didn’t let myself be coaxed into it. I was too stubborn, or perhaps even scared. It would have been great to actually put it to test, now that I think about it. I just buried the incident within the deep recesses of my memory, and didn’t even think about it anymore.
Until now.
Should there be a moral lesson in this story? Well, for one, it’s that teachers don’t know everything. I’m quite appalled to realize that the principal of our school had even allowed something like that to happen in the first place. Was there anything remotely academic about it, that it had to take place within the hallowed grounds of our public school? Was the student body even consulted about it? If I were to go back in time, knowing what I know now, I would probably raise a ruckus.
Ah, the things that you learn in two decades. Or, the things you lose in two decades.
It’s so easy to fall into something, as long as there’s a promised gain. Faith is believing that there’s an eventual gain somewhere, sometime, somehow. An afterlife without sorrow or misery, pain or death, suffering or torment. A life full of blessings, because nothing happens without a reason, and everything is preordained. A life in a capsule entrusted to the care of a higher Being.
It’s all yours to gain, as long as you believe.
As for me, I have indeed remained myopic and I’m still wearing my eyeglasses. My eyesight has probably even worsened over the years. But one thing I know, though, is that where faith is concerned, I am now willing to shift my focus on what is immediately in front of me and try my best to see beyond.