“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life…

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, ‘casualties may rise to a million.’ With individual stories, the statistics become people–but even that is a lie, for people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears?…

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

And life that is, like any others, unlike any other.”

–Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Photo: From no man is an island by murplej@ne

From Executive Brief:

“…thousands of white-collar jobs are being shipped to developing economies as companies search for ways to lower operating costs. These white-collar jobs include customer service, R&D, documentation, and not to be missed, software development. Various emerging markets have since been competing against each other in the race to sell (the capabilities of) their armies of engineers, scientists, and accountants–to name a few–to companies based in the North America, Western Europe, and developed Asian economies.

“Because of the increasing number of jobs being off-shored, even those who first supported off-shoring wavered in their conviction about the advantages of shipping back-office operations abroad. Furthermore, there is much talk about workers’ rights, economic damage, and low-quality of work because of outsourcing. “

Is outsourcing purely evil? Is India the only available outsourcing destination? Is China the only other outsourcing destination? Continue reading here.

Image from inju.

Freedom of choice, tolerance, security, and a great sense of belonging or solidarity played the biggest roles in the life satisfaction of people from the happiest countries in the world, according to World Values Survey. A strong correlation between wealth and happiness still exists, though. Majority of the top 10 are from Europe, joined by countries from Latin America, and then Canada. Denmark is still the happiest place on Earth (GDP Per Capita: $37,400), while Zimbabwe is the most depressing (inflation rate at 2,200,000%). Our happy country is 38th in the list, with a GDP next to Switzerland (7th happiest with GDP per capita of $41,100), but with 84 million more mouths to feed and per capita income of $3,400. I guess that our tolerance for corrupt politicos, gossips and traffic, penchant for borderline insane religious beliefs, and having strong family ties make up for what we lack in the money department. We may be 122nd in the purchasing power parity list, but hey, we’re not doing so bad when it comes to finding reasons to be happy…somewhat.

From BusinessWeek:

“…freedom of choice and social acceptance are the most powerful forces behind national moods. ‘Money’s pretty powerful, but it’s not the whole story,’ says Inglehart, though he maintains that a strong correlation still exists between high standards of living and happiness measures.

“Generally, a rising global sense of freedom in the last quarter-century has eclipsed the contribution of pure economic development to happiness, he says. This is especially evident in developed countries with stable economies, where the freedom of choice gained through wealth has made people happier—not necessarily the wealth itself.

“What’s more, ‘there are diminishing returns to economic progress,’ Inglehart says. In poorer countries, happiness can be linked to solidarity among tight-knit communities, religious conviction, and patriotism, which probably explains the happiness of some relatively poor Latin American countries,’ he says.

“Social tolerance is another important factor in how happy a country rates itself…’The less threatened people feel, the more tolerant they are,’ says Inglehart. Tolerance simply has a rippling effect that makes people happier. “

Further readings:

The 10 Happiest Countries
Happiness Viewpoint: It Doesn’t Take Much
What is Happiness?

Citibank ad photo by tantek.

I am an impulsive book buyer, and my weekend is not complete without a foray into Powerbooks, NBS, or the bargain book stores. That explains the number of books that have accumulate on my desk, overflowed to my bed, and added an extra weight to my already heavy bag. This month, I bought more than my share of books as if I didn’t have a long backlog to deal with already. And then there are the bookmarked chapters book24x7.com, thanks to the (step-)mothership, for domain knowledge and tech blogging stuff. (Yes, Allan and Yuliya, I am reading up on loads of stuff.)

I want to read at least 25 books/year or about one book every two weeks. The 25-book goal may not be possible at all for this year, but the one-book-per-week objective may (may!) still be salvaged. I’m in the middle of reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods while a bookmark has been stuck for over a month now in Stephenie Meyer’s The Host. I just lost interest halfway through The Host because it’s too convoluted in so many parts, and there are too many soliloquys that should have been cut off. I think that Breaking Dawn is the last young adult title that I’m reading in a long time.

There are more titles in my “to-read” list that I still have to buy and make the time for. For August, and maybe September, I have the following books to finish, and the backlog does not even include those that I bought in the early part of the year. Thank God for Book Sale because I can get my hands on titles that NBS or Powerbooks had ran out of, or are priced too steeply for my budget. Fully Booked has a decent collection, but books are more expensive by P20 to P80. I’m going to give the swanky branch on Bonifacio High Street a visit one of these days, though.

• American Gods, Neil Gaiman (currently reading) - Ex-prisoner Shadow meets an old man on a flight to his wife’s funeral. The old man, Wednesday, hires Shadow to be his bodyguard and since then, nothing has been normal in former prisoner’s life. The story works on the premise that gods also joined the thousands of people who migrated to the America, and these gods still live among the populace.
• Geek Love, Katherine Dunne - Not necessarily about geeks as the cool kids in the hyperconnected world, but about freaks who were genetically designed be born with physical defects in order to appear in the family’s circus business.
• The Other Side of the Story, Marian Keyes - Mostly about another circle of friends who have reached a fork in the road. Keyes’ books are difficult to come by around here, and she comes up with pretty decent chick lit, i.e., not the typical girl-meets-dashing-boy story. The other Keyes book I read, Last Chance Saloon, is a choc-ful of laughs about a circle of friends in their 30s who are confronted with their respective last chances at love and happiness. The best part of the story is that the gay couple is the happiest of them all.
• In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant - From the New Yorker: “The novel, narrated by Fiammetta’s servant, a dwarf, chronicles the pair’s horrific scrapes and their dizzying triumphs, which include Fiammetta’s becoming Titian’s model for his “Venus of Urbino.” Along the way, Dunant presents a lively and detailed acccount of the glimmering palaces and murky alleys of Renaissance Venice, and examines the way the city’s clerics and prostitutes alike are bound by its peculiar dynamic of opulence and restraint.” Courtesan is Dunant’s follow-up to her outstanding debut set in Renaissance Florence, The Birth of Venus. This is the Renaissance in its artistic splendor, grimy alleys, religious conflicts, and power struggles.
• The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl - As a group of young men from Boston, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, translate an Italian poem, they find themselves on the trail of a serial killer who tortures his victims in ways that are similar to passages from Dante’s Inferno.
• The Thirteenth Tale, Dianne Setterfield - From Publishers Weekly: “Margaret Lea…is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman’s tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle’s twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children’s caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield’s sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she’s a real reader and makes a terrific narrator.”
• The Biographer’s Tale, AS Byatt - There is no other way to describe the gist of this book other than that it’s a multi-layered swipe at “poststructural literary criticism, to introduce arch observations about the current fad of psychoanalytic biography (Publishers Weekly).” Read: an intellectual masturbation on how a biographer profiles his subjects.
• The Physician’s Tale, Ann Benson - A bioterror attack nearly decimates the population of the U.S. and leaves Doctor Janie Crowe and her husband, together with a small band of survivors, to struggle with their lives. Seven centuries earlier in Europe, a physician, Alejandro Canches, deals with a similar situation at the height of the black death and must make an ethical–but possibly dangerous–choice in order to survive, as well as save the king’s illegitimate daughter.
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt - There is murder and its subsequent high-profile trial; there is the circus of Savannah, Georgia’s interesting characters, which include a voodoo lady, a transsexual, and the town’s aristocracy. Berendt’s travelogue and eventual murder mystery investigation was turned into the 1997 film, starring John Cusack and Kevin Spacey. And let’s face it–the book has one of the most intriguing titles in many years.
• Crooked Little Heart, Anne Lamott - This is as much about tennis as it is about an unspoken competition between Rosie, who has to confront her awkward adolescent years, angst, and fear of being stuck in second place, and Simone, Rosie’s attractive, popular and skilled former doubles partner. This looks like a young adult read, but at least it’s about tennis and not mythical creatures.

Unoriginal:

Note to whoever made the my|Phone ads: Please don’t insult our intelligence by passing your ads off as originals, assuming that consumers will not know the similarity to Mac ads anyway. I haven’t switched to Mac and I think that Globe’s iPhone 3G deal is insanely overpriced, but I don’t see myself getting a my|phone anytime soon especially because of this dumb attempt at advertising. *coughplagiarismcough*

“The ‘Peter Principle’ states that ‘in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; the cream rises until it sours.’ People who show competence are promoted whether or not they are qualified to perform competently at the next level. Eventually they go beyond their limits, become incompetent, and stop getting promoted. Macbeth, a success as a military commander, rose to become an incompetent king. Which is to say, ‘nothing fails like success.’

“Final Placement Syndrome is what the ordinary sociologist calls ’success’ …frustration occurs as a result of promotion, because most people who are promoted genuinely wish to be productive.”

Tea Berryonce made an observation along these lines: What if you are good at something but you don’t want to be promoted because then you will be distracted with managing people instead of actually being productive? There are people who are very smart and very skilled, but they don’t enjoy being “stage moms”. And then there are those who only bullshit their way through. The problem is, the PTBs only see the value of the bullshitter and not the talented, productive one. And so you accept the promotion because that’s the only way that you can get more perks.

My Zen master says: Practice still makes perfect. Patience is a virtue. Make frequent trips to the coffee dispenser.