Air Conditioner

The Japanese word for air conditioning is simple.......it's Aircon! One of the many words in Japanese drived/ taken from English, which include Pasakon (personal computer), knife, and pizza.

Recently in my office, it's been freezing, which is unfortunate because as I stated previously, it's been the hottest days of the year recently, so the contrast is huge from going to the oven that is the outside to the refrigerator that's the inside. It's gotten pretty close to catching-a-cold territory, to be honest. It's not cuz the air conditioning is broken: no, no, it's working quite well blasting cold air into my face and causing my feet to be cold despite me wearing socks, it's that someone, a human being, decided to set the temperature lower to compensate for the excessive heat outside. Compensating led to overcompensating, and unintended consequences resulted. And instead of wearing shorts and enjoying the summer, I'm spending the hottest days of summer indoors with a blanket/ jacket shivering because it's so cold. A truly backwards situation.

The simple lesson from this is: don't overcompensate. We as humans want to fix things, which is good, actively change the situation for the better, but we also tend to go to extremes to do so, and swing it to the other end. No taste in one's food: add salt, but could become too much salt. See traffic ahead while driving on the freeway? Get out at the nearest exit and take a detour......but then end up spending more time than you would have done just staying the course (happens to me all the time).


One of the sillier things I've been overcompensating for recently is the treatment of bugs: I used to be the kid unfortunately when I was little who went outside and killed ants by stepping on them or drowning them, marveling at how much power I had over other living creatures. Recently, though, due to my girlfriend and others' attention to animal rights I became more aware of them too, and sort of agreed with the concept of not killing any living things. This included trying not to eat too much meat, even possibly fish because fish are living too. More maddeningly, i went out of my way not to kill bugs in the home, choosing to try to cup a spider in a receptable and leeting it out in the wild. All of this lasted about one day. Some might disagree, but I think we as humans live in a world where ife and death interchange all the time, every second and every minute of every day. Unfortunately as bigger organisms in the world, we have to destroy living organisms just by lving an breathing, as we inadvertently step on bugs when we walk outside, we swallow 8 spiders a year in our sleep (or 30, according to my gf, which seems like a big difference from 8) and bugs will always splatter on our windshield when we drive a car. That is the natural cycle of life, and to overcompensate and decrease my quality of life for that is overcompensating. Sure, one doesn't have to hunt down flies and spiders all the time with a newsapper or flyswatter like when I was a kid, but killing one or two because a spider's coming right at you is a natural side effect of our existence.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan