21st Century and Century 21

Current Music: Why God Why?, Miss Saigon -- Complete Symphonic Recording

I'm reading, on the advice of C's dad, "The World Is Flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century", by Thomas Friedman. It's about globalization, supply chains, India, China, etc. etc. Good current-events stuff and great writing. I opened randomly to pg. 205 and saw a title that sucked me in: "India vs. Indiana: Who is Exploiting Whom?" and read a funny thing about a weird instance here in Indiana about an unemployment office having its software development outsourced to India, with lots of mind-bending consequences about how we think of the complicated pluses and minuses of globalization -- or "flattening" of the globe. Next, I randomly turned to pg. 276 and read the first few pages of the chapter "This is Not a Test", whose thesis seems to be that the U.S. is currently facing a crisis of deciding how to cope with the flattening world. I found this paragraph hilarious. It's in the context of how it's harder to get Americans to rally around a flattening-based cause that is more subtle than, say, a nuclear threat from the Soviet Union:

But today, alas, there is no missile threat coming from India. The "hot line," which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the "help line," which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hotline might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Mikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the UN, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in From Russia with Love. There is no Boris or Natasha saying "We will bury you" in a thick Russian accent. No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: "Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?"

No Rajiv, actually, you can't.

I like this style -- easy to see why it's a bestseller. I've always taken it a bit personally when jobs that should go to Indianans get outsourced to Indians.

In other news, I started looking at condos for sale today so that I can move out of this apartment; rent keeps rising so it's probably going to be the same price soon as a mortgage payment on a shiny new condo. It actually might be cheaper to have moved! A helpful Iraqi woman I know gave me the name of a Century 21 realtor to talk to. So the hunt has started. But at one point I got sad thinking of moving myself into a nice new place, and I wrote a bit to my friends to understand what was happening; I'll paste some in here.

I looked at condos on a web site and found some nice ones that looked perfect and are just blocks away from where I am now. So I was pretty excited, but then it surprisingly made me sad because I didn't want to be doing so without a significant other. Perhaps this is one of the things that has made me put it off for so long. I think I really like the idea of "settling down" and moving into a house with some girl; I enjoyed moving into a new apartment with someone before because of the domestic bliss it seemed to provide.

Something I read a few weeks ago I suppose makes this clearer for me too: I read in this book on "being a man in the modern age" (Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man, by Sam Keen) that whereas we used to have standardized "coming-of-age/becoming a real man" rituals (i.e. the tribe makes you go off into the wilderness and survive on eating roots for a month or something), we've sort of eliminated such silly things but the idea still persists in milestones such as, in particular, getting married and buying a house. That's one of the key manhood-achievements. And realizing this, I notice that I get this bizarre feeling of "failure" as I think of moving into a house sans femme -- visualizing the move-in itself leaves me with this feeling of having "skipped a step" (such as the getting married part) and, hence, it makes more concrete the idea that "I'm alone".

Of course, much of me is excited about the prospect of owning my own place -- it seems better financially and the new place will probably be more fun to live in that my current apartment. And there's something nice and "manly" about it. It's just that it seems much more lonely to live alone in my own place instead of a more transient apartment. But that, of course is silly, and easier to deal with now that I realize what was causing it.