Productive packing
August 6th, 2008In the last few days I have spent tedious hours on hold with British Telecom trying to cancel my service, and more hours wrapping various possessions first in tissue paper, subsequently in t-shirts, and finally in rubber bands with index card labels (very eco-friendly, I thought — I haven’t used any bubble wrap at all, and I have to ship the t-shirts anyway).
Of course one benefit of all this tedium is heightened anticipation of my coming freedom, but there was practical and artistic benefit as well: Practically, I learned that you can dial 170 70 in the UK and an automated service will tell you what number you are calling from. This is useful if you only got a phone line because British Telecom requires one to get broadband service (and so can’t remember your own phone number); according to the BT operator, it’s also useful if you are over at someone’s house and want to know your host’s phone number (I thought this was shady advice from BT). On the artistic side, while improvising a carrier for my formal cufflinks, I unintentionally created a Domo-kun-like monster.
When I was in San Francisco on short notice, I had to buy some new cufflinks, so I went to the Pink store and bought three versions of the same cufflinks in red, yellow, and blue. When I was back home in Tokyo, a friend of mine saw them sitting together on their little tray and said, Oh, it looks like a stoplight. I didn’t think it was funny at the time, because I know that Japanese people call the bottom light of a stoplight “blue” (and the stoplight itself will tell you in its mechanical voice when it’s safe to walk: ”Ao ni narimashita,” which means, “It turned blue.”)
But when I was packing them today, I realized that what is strange is not that the Japanese word “ao” refers to stoplights — in fact, it’s easy to imagine an English color word like “sea-colored” that could refer to a range of things that are blue or green. It is strange, however, that someone looking at bright blue cufflinks would think that they looked like the green light of a stoplight. Does using the color-word blue for green things influence perception, or is Japanese perception different from mine? (They call the sun “red”, too, and little kids in Japan drawing a sun will choose the red crayon.)
