Shack in Japan

What Smartwool Doesn't Want You to Know

My feet get really, really cold in Tokyo. They occasionally got cold in the states, but back in Oregon, if it was as cold as it gets in the evenings here (It's 37F / 3C right now), it probably meant I was snowboarding. Most of my body handles the cold fine. I tend to run hot (if a Japanese person is chilly in a sweater, I'm warm in a T-shirt) and layer, and the chill is a non-issue. My feet, though, freeze the minute I step outside, and if I spend a good amount of time outdoors (say, riding to Waseda), they can take half an hour to warm up once I get inside. It sucks.

I tend to believe there's a technological solution to most problems, so I went out searching the internet for a fix for my cold feet. It looks like I might not have the best circulation, but I've got pretty good nutrition and exercise, and I don't overtighten my shoes or use excessively thick socks, so there's not much I can do in that department. Insulated Timberlands or work boots are a possibility, but they're expensive and limited-use. That left socks.

I was looking for the best, warmest sock I could, cruising outdoors sites for reviews, when I happened on a mention of Vapor Barrier socks, and how they leave anything else in the dust when it comes to warmth. Perfect! With a name like "Vapor Barrier," they've got to be chock-full of advanced sock techology, right?

A vapor barrier (VB), it turns out, is not a trademark, but a fancy name for a plastic bag that goes between your skin and your sock. You can buy commercial versions, and they're a little more anatomically shaped, but the basic concept is to put a thin, entirely non-breathable material right against your skin.

At first glance, this goes against everything I've been taught about outdoor clothing. I wear fabrics as breathable as I can, because I know the evaporative cooling from sweat-drenched clothes can give you hypothermia. Why the heck would I want to trap moisture?

The answer is obvious enough that I felt stupid for not seeing it earlier. Sweat only cools you down when it evaporates. As long as you have a nonbreathable barrier between your skin, there's no chance for evaporative cooling to occur. Moreover, the more humid the air around you is, the less you sweat (that's why humidity makes the air feel warmer; your body can't cool itself as easily). A vapor barrier blocks evaporative cooling, maintains a humid climate around your body so that it reduces its sweat, and keeps you comfortably warm (if a little clammy).

I understood this in the abstract but wanted to try it for myself. On the way home from Waseda, I grabbed two mini grocery bags from the co-op, put my feet in them, then put on my socks and shoes. Riding home, I was amazed- I didn't feel the cold biting at my feet and freezing them solid like it usually does. Instead of thinking about frostbite, I could appreciate the amazing sunset on the Sumida river (I really need to bring the camera out to Asakusa in the early evening sometime soon). Taking my shoes off when I got home, my feet were a tiny bit moist, but nothing more than if I'd come back from a jog or taken off hiking boots.

There are places the vapor barrier technique works better than others. Unless you're standing in one place for a long time, or facing very, very cold weather, a VB shirt or pair of pants would be fairly uncomfortable. Your core has great circulation, sweats a lot, and is usually the first part of you to overheat (plus, since VB's go right against the skin, taking it off and putting it on again would be a bear). I've never had problems with cold legs, and with a windbreaker or light jacket, my torso never gets cold. Feet and hands, though, are perfect for vapor barriers. With little muscle mass (hence little sweat) and poor circulation, they are the hardest to keep warm, and when you use a VB, they don't produce so much moisture that it gets uncomfortable. I've been wearing normal leather gloves on the bike, and never had any issues so far, so I haven't done too much testing in that area.

The whole plastic-bags-against-your-skin feeling is not the best (clammy and kind of slippery-feeling when you walk), so my next step is going to be to figure out a more practical VB sock solution. The simplest is to just wear a thin nylon sock right below the barrier, but there are a few companies making cheap VB socks with internal fabric linings, which sound pretty good to me.

A final thought from thebackpacker.com:

So now you ask, "Why aren't outdoor magazines raving about VB's?" Economics, my friend! Do you think that outdoor clothing manufacturers would continue to spend tens of thousands of advertising dollars in a magazine that runs articles touting the virtues of a 5 cent alternative to the $200.00 - $300.00 whiz-bang parkas being advertised?!

So much for giving my money to SmartWool or Hot Chillys- I'll be riding to school tomorrow wearing two Waseda Co-Op shopping bags under whatever socks are clean, and I'll be happy as a clam.

Vapor Barrier reading.

The article I original read on VB clothing at thebackpacker.com

The Wandering Knight on Ultralight Backpacking Clothing.

Stephenson's Warmlite, specialists in VB clothing.

Writing in the Age of Distraction

The internet is the best thing that's ever happened to the communication of ideas, and the worst thing that's ever happened to their articulation. It's great for research, broadening your horizons, instantly finding a hundred perspectives on an issue, and grabbing quotations and facts easily and quickly. Good blogs can save you time and hassle, make you wiser, or flip your worldview around, and the best content floats to the top on a wave of links, diggs, and tweets.

Unfortunately, it sucks for writing. Most bloggers (and many non-bloggers, if you count email and online office suites like Google Docs) spend their time writing just a single temping mouse-click away from twitter, google reader, alltop, and all sorts of sites that are easily to mentally classify as "research," but which really just give you ten open tabs and ten different thirty-second-attention-span ideas. I always have a hard time writing coherent blog posts; it's much easier to get my urge to communicate out in a few tweets, a picture or two on flickr, and maybe a Facebook wall post.

If I look at all the times I've gotten in a groove and pumped out a paper or a blog post as quickly as I think I should be able to, they always happen when I'm offline. I know I'm more productive when I'm disconnected, but when the internet's a click (or Quicksilver trigger) away, it's tough to resist. That's why I was so happy to find these tips by Cory Doctorow, blogger extraordinaire over at BoingBoing (especially since I'm in the middle of finals and final papers, and productivity is actually kind of important). None of them is revolutionary on its own, but together, they constitute the best advice I've found on managing to articulate coherent thoughts in a time when everything comes at you in 140-characters, three minutes, or captioned pictures of cats.

• Short, regular work schedule

  It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there's always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn't become a habit). 

• Leave yourself a rough edge

  When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work.

• Don't research

  Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.

• Don't be ceremonious

  Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.

• Realtime communications tools are deadly

  The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention. The more you can train your friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

There are a few more tips and a preface in the full article; go give it a read. If you like Doctorow's style (who doesn't?), you can find him over at BoingBoing.net, or penning novels and nonfiction at his personal website, Craphound.

These all do a lot for me. Going from blocking out time by the hour to setting 20-minute goals has gotten me writing a lot faster, and the 'TK' trick just wrote me most of a five-page comparative literature essay in two hours. Once I've researched or skimmed my materials enough to know what's conclusions I could support if I put my mind to it, I just pump out an outline off the top of my head, turn that into paragraphs, and deal with the editing and citation later. I've also been cutting back on the IM/facebook a lot; if I've got something to say to someone, I pop it off in an email or add it to a to-do list. I don't want it clogging my brain, but a quick IM can easily turn into a two-hour conversation.

One more trick that's been working really well for me lately: separate your to-do's into things that require creative energy, and things that don't, and do each when it makes sense. I write and study as early as I can, and if I'm in a groove, do everything I can to keep attacking long-attention-span things. I do emails, edit pictures, file taxes, and do the tiny-but-boring things on my list in between facebook, twitter, reading, and the occasional video or phone call. Things that don't take attention don't require their own mental space in the same way as, say, studying Kanji or writing an essay.

If you're reading this in a reader or email, check out the real thing. I tweaked the layout, sidebars, and design a bit to make the blog (hopefully) prettier and more usable. Things I'm still not totally happy with:

• -typography (I don't know what to do with the text in the nav bar)
• -width (it's begging to be about 100px wider, no?)
• -sidebar ordering (not so much unsatisfied as much as indecisive).

Any thoughts? Let me know in the comments!

Setagaya Street Fair

This is from a little ways back, but every year in Setagaya (just past Shibuya on the Den-en-Toshi) there's a giant, multiblock street fair, with vendors selling everything from the tastiest street food you've ever eaten, to handicraft pottery and jewelry, to kimonos, to elaborate rubber-band guns.

Note about this last one: these high schoolers were selling things to raise money for Cambodian schoolkids, and to attract attention, one of them had the bright idea to wear a dress (with tissue-stuffed bust). The aesthetic was adorable, but it couldn't have been over 5 degrees out- in sweaters and coats, we were all ready to run home for dessert and hot cider.
 
Full set on flickr.

Asakusa to Waseda on a Bicycle

I biked to school for the first time today, on my spiffy pink new Giant, and I never want to get on a train again. The trains are nice, reliable, and wonderful if you're not in a state to be riding across a city, but I had forgotten how much I love dodging traffic, using my legs, and seeing a city's surface, rather than just the inside of its train cars. The ride takes me past Asakusa, with its poop-topped Asahi Beer building, through "Electric Town" in Akihabara, and alongside the JR as it snakes down TK river.

Looks like a turd, no? I don't get it. The building on the left looks like a glass of bear with a foamy head on top, but the giant gold poop is entirely inexplicable.

Google maps told me it would be about a 14 kilometer ride, which I put at an hour or so. I figured I might get lost, though, so I left an extra half hour. I was pretty confident about finding my way, since my directions used a straight shot south along the Sumida river, a little wiggle over to Iidabashi, and then Waseda-dori all the way to the school.

I was having a great time for the first ten minutes of my ride- there was a freshly-paved bike path, a nice tailwind, and I was cruising along faster than I expected. At some point, though, I realized that I didn't see the buildings I expected on the other side of the river, and asked my cell phone where I was (it doesn't have GPS, but they use cell towers to triangulate your position with pretty adequate results). It put me about as far south as I had expected, but a few miles of big, congested streets to the east. My house is on a sort of peninsula, bordered by a wide river on each side, and I had picked the wrong one.

Spatial awareness is impossible in Japan. I can find my way anywhere in San Francisco on a bike, I've got a general sense of Portland, and if I go to most new cities, I can get online and figure out the layout of the downtown area enough to get where I want to get without much hassle. No luck in Tokyo. Gridded streets are nonexistent, the signage sucks (really, really sucks), and especially out in the suburbs, the tiny roads wind back and forth, completely disorienting me. It doesn't help that you spend a lot of time in train tunnels; my brain tends to position myself relative to the station where I disembark, which is sometimes 180 degrees opposite to the station where I boarded.

I need to find a good bike map, but neither the bike shop I bought my bike from nor google seem to know anything about something like that. I think I'll be able to make my next commute pretty quickly, rather than the 2+ hours it took today as I learned the route, but for future expeditions, I definitely need a navigation aid. I'm not shelling out for a GPS, so maybe a map and compass makes the most sense. Tokyo seems so huge when you take the trains, but once you hop on a bike, it shrinks tremendously. Especially in my backwater suburb, where it takes an extra transfer just to reach any major subway or train lines, a bike doesn't take too much extra time, and is a lot more fun.

More thoughts on bikes here once I've ridden a little more. For now, here's my route to school:

It's about 13-14 kilometers. I think I'm going to test out a few different routes the next few times I go, because this one's simplicity (first follow a river, then train tracks, then a single road) intersects with an unfortunate amount of foot and auto traffic. I think finding some side streets for the worst parts is a good plan.

I figured that the bicycle would be relegated to a school commute for the most part, since drinking and riding is a recipe for a fat ticket or a cracked skull, but I recently found that most train stations have cheap, 24-hour bike parking (usually for about $1-2 per eight hours). Excellent! Ride your bike into town, have fun, and pick it up the next day.

American Night: Beef and Potatoes

Tasty times at the Koyama house tonight. We had my older sister and her husband over, and to mark the occasion, my host mom served up mashed potatoes, garlic bread, and the most delicious, melt-in-your mouth stewed beef.

Takeshi (my host sister's husband) at the computer, dad running around doing stuff. He and I were trying to resize the family computer's hard drive partitions, but qparted kept telling us it was going to delete everything on there.

Mashed potatoes just begging to be eaten. Mom subbed some cream in in place of the butter, which made for a beautiful texture.

Beef marinated in a stew of soy sauce, a dash of sugar, spices, and the secret ingredient: black beer. We used the french break to scoop up every last bit of it on our plates; it would be a shame to let any of the tangy, wonderful flavor go to waste.