My relationship with technology

Owning technology is like having a boyfriend.

Honeymoon Phase:
I got my first ever Mac product, an iBook G4, and I was in love. I loved it’s white glossy cover, the crispy click click sound the keyboard makes and the long-lasting battery power that seem to just never die. Celebration of the novelty.

Knowing him more and loving it:
I started spending a lot of time and began finding out all the cool stuff I can do with the iBook. I’d go out shopping for softwares to pimp the whole thing up. And yes, whenever I have to be somewhere with my laptop, I’d show it off and am proud of it. Sony Vaio? puhhh, my iBook is better.

Time for flaws:
I started finding tons of them. I found that I cannot use MSN at the same time as Microsoft Word or else my computer will freeze. I cannot type Chinese on my Powerpoint or else my computer will freeze. I can’t listen to iTunes and use iPhoto at the same time or else my computer will freeze. What the hell is wrong with you iBook?!

Still patient:
But I compromise. I came around to you. I stopped chatting when I use Word, I never type Chinese on powerpoint and I never listen to music and edit my pictures at the same time. Happy now?

Can’t take it anymore:
Why do you still freeze on me?! God I hate you! I slam my iBook shut and throw it far into the corner of my bed.

But I still need you:
You suck, but I need you. I can’t work without you, I can’t update my iPod without you, I can’t do anything without you.

After a while:
I took a long glare at you and realized…you’re not as white as I thought you were, you’re becoming lazy because all you do is freeze on me. You’re getting really big and fat, I can’t carry you around with me anymore. And then when people ask me about you, I go “Yeah I have a Mac, it’s alright, nothing special.” I don’t think I’m in love with you anymore iBook…

Time to move on:
I didn’t want to admit that it’s over with my iBook, but when I saw that new white glossy Macbook sitting in the store window…I knew it was really over. Yes it’s time to move on.

I’m like this with my Nokia Phone. I’m currently in the “I still need you” phase with my Nokia N81, give it one more year and I will be spotting for a new replacement.

Relationships are complicated. Let alone ones with technology, it won’t last, it never will. And don’t even try talking monogamy with technologies…

Word

I was told to write a blog about Spaghetti. I blame my hot red pants that I wore yesterday, the redness inspired Dube, our Nike Account Director who, out of all the things he can think of, thought of the word “Spaghetti”. So here goes.

I love spaghetti. I used to be crazy about spaghetti, especially Spaghetti Bolognese, I even remember telling my mom I wanted to eat Spaghetti Bolognese the rest of my life and nothing else. Obviously she called me stupid and told me to fuck off. Then, I watched the movie Patch Adam with Robin Williams and saw the scene where an old woman asked for her last dying wish to swim in a pool full of spaghetti…then I got grossed out and hardly ate spaghetti since.

Many years later, I picked up cooking, and cooking pasta is one of the most basic thing to start with. I’m not going to go on about the details of cooking pasta because it’s boring, but I brought that up because that’s when I began calling any Italian noodle dishes Pasta. It helped a lot because pasta sounds much more sophisticated than just the word spaghetti itself, but also because it doesn’t remind me of an old dying woman swimming in spaghetti noodles that people put in their mouth. (Don’t get me wrong I love old people but swimming in food is a bit weird)

So basically, when a word is replaced with another word, a lot of things can change – for the better. Try it, it works!

The Great Conductor

Two years ago, I sat 3 meters away from Zubin Mehta as he conducted his way through Beethoven’s Symphony No.5. I watched him wave his wand and the strings crescendoed while the brass diminuendoed. I saw the entire Vienna Philharmonic sway hypnotically under the conductor’s spell. Zubin’s eyes were closed but his senses were awake. When the piece reached it’s climax, you know he did it again.

Zubin Mehta is an Indian classical music conductor who was awarded “Lifetime Achievement Peace and Tolerance Award” by the United Nations. He’s so amazing that he became honorary citizen of Florence and Tel Aviv. I do wonder though, how amazing do you seriously have to be that a country would award you an honorary citizen?

I watched Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic on a music cruise – yes I go on lame holidays but I love it. It was a cruise set to visit 6 countries on the Mediterranean and in each country we get to watch different classical music performances from different orchestras and different conductors. Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic were the special guests of the cruise, they stayed with us for 2 weeks and put on a final grand performance on the last stop which was in Barcelona. On the cruise we were allowed to watch them upclose as they rehearse, and that was when I sat just 3 meters away from my idol. It was funny in a way, watching them rehearse in their holiday clothes, as opposed to them in tuxedos.

I remember, while I sat there, that when I was about eight I wanted to be a music conductor. Back then, I thought being a conductor meant I’ll know how to play all kinds of instrument, and because of that I will be allowed to lead an entire orchestra. Then as I grew to understand more about music, I learned that to be able to conduct, you must have the ear and the the senses to hear and feel how you want your music to be heard. It’s about understanding the person who composed the music, why he composed it and what he’s trying to express. Then you take on all that and turn it into magic.

Zubin Mehta looked like he was struggling, as if he was possessed by the composer of the piece he was conducting, and it will not leave his body until every single audience had grown goosebumps from it. I watched him sweat, his blue polo turned black by the end of the rehearsal, and all the while I wish I was him. I wanted to be immersed into sound of beautiful music knowing that every control is at the tip of my wand, and with each stroke, I am able to provoke emotions out of not just the audience but the musicians themselves. After all, they are the ones physically making the sound.

We all know how powerful music can be, but conducting it is another level beyond. To have an effect not just unto yourself, but also unto your subject and then the surrounding is awe-inspiring because you know you’re the one exerting this magnificent power and you’re creating a ripple effect from it. And I think that’s how powerful planners can be, when they’re possessed by truths and sweating out insights, and then conducting/inspiring creatives while they make great work.

Zubin Mehta during rehearsal

Final performance in Barcelona with Lang Lang as guest pianist

That's my head back there on the piano with the Yale Chamber Music crew

That's me, again

The Human Experience

Rarely do movie trailers make me cry. Hold. This is not a good way to start this post. First off, I’m sure for those of you who know me well and those who haven’t quite yet, the way I set up my blog pretty much gave off the emotional side of me. Yes, I am a softy and my heart often speaks louder than my mind.

I cry in a lot of movies, no matter sad, happy or just simply touching, but I don’t cry in movie trailers, no no. OK, maybe once, from a Thai TV commercial of an insurance company about love, life and death that left me tearing in the movie theater with 100 other people. And don’t you laugh, Thai ads have a way of either making you laugh so hard till you cry, or cry so hard till you laugh.

So I stumbled upon this movie trailer of a documentary a long while back, but today it found me while I was researching on something completely irrelevant (but of course work related). The documentary, The Human Experience, is about 2 brothers in search of answers, answers to questions we always ask: Who are we? Why are we here? What is life? What is the meaning of life? etc. Yes it’s a bit of a cliche, the topic had been used too many times that the next time you see a movie, hear a song or even an ad that touches upon it, you might just want to vomit.

But, what captured me was the fact that first, this documentary won 16 awards, SIXTEEN! and 12 extra official selection for movie festival screenings. That is super impressive. Tell me if you’re not amazed by THIS:

The second thing that captured me was the way this movie trailer was set up. It takes you on a journey of global suffering- from natural disasters to diseases, from economic crisis to political warfare, from simply being homeless to richly spoiled. The quote the trailer used from Martin Luther King, Jr. “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” in regards to human destruction and then quickly followed by the question “Did we forget what it means to be human?” absolutely blew my mind.

We’re constantly caught up with our own lives, of course we usually think of ourselves first before anything. But sometimes instead of looking straight or down as you’re walking, its nice to stop and look up at the sky, or sideways at the people, just to notice the other things happening around you. This movie trailer reminded me that so much of the things we do especially in advertising, that though it’s very crucial to understand your client, the business and the consumers, everything else is also as important even if it is irrelevant to the work. Because eventually and essentially, everything matters, everything is connected.

The Human Experience, though just a trailer right now, made me feel like if I watch this documentary, my eyes will be opened to a much bigger picture of the world, from geography, history, culture, communication, relationships to misunderstandings, greed, suffering and so on, all of which contributes to who and how we are today. Surely this trailer is nicely edited, but I am a huge sucker for nicely anything. I can’t wait to watch this documentary, lets just hope it’s as good as how I hope it is!

Watch the trailer and let me know what you think.

Evolution vs. Adaption

My brother came upon an article on the New York Times that explained why Asians flush when they drink alcohol. Interesting read I must say. Basically about thousands of years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and discovered that the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol. The spread of the new gene is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.

What’s interesting about this is that, we’re not aware that we are continuously evolving, even researchers and scientists assume that we’ve ceased to evolve from the distant past simply because we’ve adapted. We learned how to protect ourselves from cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But with this new finding, it proved that we are STILL evolving!

So what does this have to do with what I do? I’m new to planning, or basically advertising in general. I’ve been saying that for the past 18 months working at W+K but bear with me, there’s still so much I don’t know and still so much to learn. Sometimes I come into work and ask myself, what am I doing today? how am I going to do it? and seriously, what for? I’m still trying to get a better bigger picture out of the things I do but I still can’t quite grasp it yet. One thing I’ve realized after interning in the planning team for a year before becoming full-time is that, there is absolutely no rule or standard or a guidebook to how planning should work. It’s rather amusing coming into advertising without really knowing where to start and then wondering what next steps are before you slowly begin to figure them out yourself (sorry if I digress but I’m getting there). So when you start figuring things out, you’re basically adapting. You’re getting used to how things really do work within the agency. You automatically go ‘ah yes, got to do all the research first, maybe set up a focus group or one-on-one interviews, do all the desk research, get all the right facts, carve out observations, come up with a pov, etc’, of course it’s not always in this order but with this kind of getting used to, you’re unknowingly falling into a thought system.

Then here’s my point, or rather, question. Do we all adapt to the way as we fall into an invisible system? No matter how bright, sharp, and quick we can be, do we react to briefs in the same systematic way? I mean, our instincts become less of an instinct but rather a course of adaption to the things that should be done. What about evolution? Is it better if we evolved in the way we think and the way we tackle challenges based on ‘local conditions’, as in social, economical, geographical and everything else that affects our responses to clients’ business problems. This post is rather confusing, adapting and evolving sound like they supplement each other, but to me they are different in the sense that they each have 2 very distinct roles. Adapting is all about getting used to the way things are and the way things work, but evolving is about growing and transforming to a better fit, for the lack of a better word, of survival. Adapting is catching up and evolving is shaping up. I think ultimately this musing is really just for me to stop adapting and start evolving.

I’ll end this post with a picture of a typical Asian that flushes when consuming alcohol:

Yes, that's me.