little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

yachtsmen

Our family was the type to recycle calendars. We’d buy twelve, no, sixteen month calendars (more economical) and after the year and a half elapsed, I remember my father cutting the pictures and putting them in discount 8 x 11 frames as artwork. One year in particular had sailboats. Nothing spectacular, just a bunch of colorful yachts floating in the ocean, under the Golden Gate Bridge - stuff you would give co-workers for a delightful, yet awkward, company Kris Kringle. My father meticulously cut out several of the pictures, then proceeds to hang the ugliest one in my room.

My picture had no colorful sails, no pictures of sunsets with boats - it was an action shot of a crew of fifteen, tying ropes and untying ropes and everyone generally looking miserable.

“Why did you give me this one?” I asked.
“They work hard.” He says it in English, to accentuate his point.

They work hard. Which pretty much describes my father in a nutshell. Work hard, pay your dues, pride yourself in intensity and productivity and efficiency. And it pissed me off - while everyone seemed to have Nintendos and go out to the movies with their friends, here I was, a fucked up, melodramatic teenager stuck with a no-fun having paternal unit that I couldn’t relate to at all. I was going to rebel. The second I turned anything like him, I declared, I would point a gun to my head and pull the trigger.

See? Told you I was a melodramatic teenager.

Fast forward twelve years. I’ve just worked another twelve hour day on what has been weeks, no, months. In preparation for Yahoo! Assassins, I’ve spent late nights and weekends coding and planning and debating and, yes, I’ve had a sleepless night or two. I recently drove up to the club my boyfriend spins at after dropping a co-worker off, where my friend chides me for working too hard.

“The project is wrapping up,” I say. “I’m paying my dues.”

And BAM! Cue the memories of the calendars and the sailboats and the yachtsmen panicking on their little boat, neatly framed in a portrait in my bedroom. It’s occurred to me that in my steadfastness that I would never, ever be like my father, he of the iron will and high work ethic and even higher temper, I’ve taken some of that from him. Albeit a little cattier, of course, but still. And to my horror, I can actually understand why he acted the way he did when I was young. But like my father, I am a stubborn bastard, and I’ll never actually admit to it. But I understand.

Regarding Assassins, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and even if this project falls on its face and fails miserably (which I hope it doesn’t do, of course) I think I’ve realized that I can be passionate about something that doesn’t involve pop culture or making fun of episodes of Entertainment Tonight. And it might be naive of me, but I’m hoping something good does come out of this in one way or another - whether it’s directly from the project I’m working on or what I’ve learned about myself from it.

I’m paying my dues, so to speak.

It’s amazing how much we better understand our parents as we get older, isn’t it?

I agree with your dad about a good work ethic, because mine was similar.

it is our blessing and our curse, but regardless our fate to become our parents as we age.

likewise, our children will become us. now theres a headfuck.

I can mostly relate. I say “mostly” because when I was growing up, my dad was all “work hard! make something of yourself!” and nowadays he’s all “you work too much, don’t work so hard, life’s too short to get swallowed by work.” Doh.

Amazing how that happens, isn’t it? Well, at least it’s good for your career. Just don’t forget to relax, too!

My father is going on at me to drop the course I’m taking and go back to work. Even though he’s seeing the job offers around are paying less than my unemploymnet pay, and even though he seems to understand I am finally getting a proper knowledge on what I’ve been doing by plain ‘guesswork’.

I don’t remember what your dad does for a living, but I know that you really love what you do and you manage to have a number of hilarious moments in the midst of a 60-hour workweek. I think that if your dad had conveyed passion and enjoyment in his work when you were a kid, the message would have come across a lot faster than this decade-or-so time delay…But I SO know about turning into my parents. It’s quite disturbing at times.

I think I’m the only person in the world who wasn’t an angsty rebellious teen. Seriously. It’s messed.

As for Yahoo Assassins… I saw a story over at Engadget today that I think has shed a bit of light on what you’ve been up to, young man!

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”
This will be my favorite phrase at SXSW when I leave for Texas tomorrow.

In the car this morning, Andreas and I got stuck trying to turn left. There was a school bus stopped and loading children on the sidestreet we were trying to turn left onto, and so we had to sit there and wait for the bus.

“Well, we’re in a pickle,” I said.
“No big deal,” Andreas said.
I took it up a notch: “No, we’re definitely in a pickle!”
Andreas sighed and let me have my moment with myself thinking I was funny.
“THERE IS DEFINITELY A PICKLE HERE!” I ranted. “…AND WE ARE IN IT!”

“You sound just like your dad,” Andreas said.

And he was right. I share my father’s penchants for moments of faux-hysteria.

Once upon a time there was a movement of people, called the “labor movement.” It was founded around a notion that people should have reasonable work environments, conditions and hours. That work shouldn’t “be” life, but rather a “part” of life. People fought very hard for an 8 hour work day. The success of these people folks was hard won - in fact, the Russian Revolution originally began as a strike by women for better work conditions and an 8 hour work day - others joined in and so it began. I’m always mystified at how people give that all away without blinking, willingly, for a bit of dead labor in the bank…

Hey, I do that. I mean the calendar thing. The pictures are so shiny.

My dad never did…but I’m just like him in a million different ways, and I’m glad for that, now that I’m old enough to have to do stuff for myself.

Thanks for the post–good stuff.

Hmm, ninja assassins eh? I think Apple’s been working on something similar, you’d better hurry your project to market…

http://www.crazyapplerumors.com/archives/000276.html

Zuzu, that’s such a misreading of Ernie’s post that I can’t help but butt in. “Work” can mean many things, but at its best, it means pushing your talents really hard to accomplish something you believe in. Sometimes that can be done in eight hours or less per day, but often it can’t. While I’m not saying that Ernie “owns his labor” in any sort of Marxist sense, he’s obviously committed to this work for Yahoo! in a way that most wage slaves aren’t. How can that sense of accomplishment be a bad thing? He’s clearly accumulating more than “dead labor in a bank” (i.e., money; he may not even accumulating THAT much of that), and deserves our admiration (and at least my envy) for finding something he things is worth working hard for.

My parents did exactly the same thing with calendar pictures! Random, nondescript 80’s floral prints.

(”Floral prints!” What am I saying?!? They were flowers in plastic pots…)

What frightens me is that we still have them around somewhere. Framed.

I suppose I needn’t add that my parents are Asian too…

Man! After reading that, I had a moment of sympathetic nostalgia– immediately followed by an image in my head of a plastic star flying through space with a little rainbow trailing, and a little blurb beneath quipping “The More You Know.”

Great. Ernie blogs are turning into NBC PSA’s in my head.

um, i still cut up calendars. i have calendars i’ve been saving since 1992 in case i want to cut them up. what is it with calendars? too hard to let go of the past year? an attempt to grasp the ungrasp-able expanse of time? shiny pictures?

i am helpless to resist calendars.

ernie is a funny guy.

i will turn into my parents.

this is what i have learned today.

Sooooo… is the framed picture of the yachtsmen hanging on your cubicle wall for inspiration?

i do that with all my calendars. although, mine happen to be pictures of hot men usually naked or nearly so.

Here’s to the light at the end of the tunnel. And Yahoo! Assassins not falling flat on its face.

Ernie, you should hang up the actual CALENDAR. Wasn’t Assasins supposed to launch last year!?!?

those yachtsmen must have had some shore leave time?

Did he mean the yachtsmen or the yachts? How frustrating is it to be a yachtsman, you scramble to catch and utilize uncontrollable weather to move around in split mediums, and you get to go (hopefully forward). The reward though, is that these guys do this by choice. Sailing is by far one of the most relaxing things.

Nice blog you have here!
Thank you

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