perception! perception! perception!

i was eating a grapefruit near a trash can in my cubicle. i accidentally dropped a slice in the the can, and intuitively retrieved it back. having the grapefruit in my hands out of the trash can, i was asking myself how i should deal it with - dump it back to the can or eat it. eating it would give myself a perception of eating dirty or contaminated food. but if i dropped it on my desk, i would grab it back and eat it right away without much thinking. it's said that toilet bowl is cleaner than office desk per bacteria count. i only dumped tea leaves in it this morning and the trash can liner was recently replaced. so, it'd be more sterile and much much cleaner than the toilet bowl. by that rational, i ate my grapefruit from trash can. :-)

perception does bother people, including myself. something would bother someone more than others. i was reading a post on a hong kong discussion board. a young man was buying a HK$17 lunch from a restaurant which catered to school kids. for some reason he was ashamed he bought such a cheap lunch and was afraid of being seen by coworkers. that did happen. his coworker saw him; walked by; smiled and left. then he said he was ashamed and would feel better if he bought a HK$32 lunch just because it's expensive.

when i was a college student, i ate a 1-dollar whopper every meal without buying any drink. so, i only paid ~$1.05 with an ice water. sometimes i would have a moment to think that i should buy more because the burger place was expecting people would buy a drink and fries to go with it. that's how they might make a profit. by not doing so made me feel a bit awkward. was i taking advantage of the burger place? sometimes i would also ask myself if i was taken advantage of by their strategy - a strategy to entice u to come in and to make you feel guilty of not buying more.

similarly, tipping at restaurants in america would usually be 10-20%. we are conditioned to do so because this is how waiters/waitresses make their money; because restaurant owners only pay them minimum wages. but why do we need to pay them so much tips when it's the owners' responsibility to pay them? it's argued that customers can pay waiters/waitresses per their performance. that argument is only partially true. but some studies found out that tipping is more about how the person who does the tipping sees themselves in the mirror than how the person perceives the service that they got. in order words, it depends on the customer's personal image of themselves. it doesn't depend much on the quality of service by the servers.

the world is not strange; but inhibited by strange people with ever changing perception. in the old days, thrift is considered as a virtue. thrift now is considered as a 'sin'. giving is not about how much you appreciate other people. giving is about how you appreciate yourself or how much you want to tell the world that "i m rich". very strange indeed. perception! perception! perception! perception rules!

john robbins & industrial farming

i didn't know how ignorant i was about industrial farming till i listened to john robbins. john robbins was the son of the founder of basket robbins. he could have all the wealth; yet he walked away from it.

he wanted to live in a world of sufficiency instead of scarcity. by being sufficient, you don't need to have everything. you don't need to have a lot of things. it's actually those who feel they don't have enough need to have a lot of possessions - money and food. it's the insecure feeling that drives us to have more. at the end we are consumed by our insecurity. the more money we have, the more scared we are if we lose them all.

when it comes down the food, we want to have good delicious food and cheap food. we do not get educated of how food (esp meat) is produced. industrial farming is a word that i learned about only in the last 10 years of my life. i previously thought that meat was produced in a pasture where happy california cows came from. then, i learned a little bit about industrial farming of animal.

farming was never a word that i would use for animal. i always thought it's a word only associated to plants. it shocked me. then came veals. i loved it for its tenderness and its taste. when i listened to john robbins, i was shocked even more. i was shocked to learn that calves are separated from their mother at birth. they are kept in a confined stall as wide as their shoulder. they are chained to their neck. they are kept in such a way that movement is restricted as much as possible. it's where the tender and the lighter color meat comes from.

the industry changes a little per wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veal). however, that method of raising calves for veal is only outlawed in 5 states with california being one of the them. however, the law is not effective 2013 in california.

it's depressing to know how we treat those animals for our consumption. everybody wants to save a few dollars here and there for something we think it's more important. i m having the same struggle. as a middle class american, i m richer than 95% of the people in the world. yet my greed and my insecurity still push me to want more. i want everything. yet i might lose the most important thing of my life - conscience.