Neat

Confession time again. When I don't have time (that is, most of the time), I tend to turn my desk into a haven of messy work space. One desk, no filing cabinet, and countless documents, letters, and manuscripts bumping together, frantic as atoms. On many days, I simply pull books out of a jumble of messy documents. Well, my reputation of being a messy guy grows in proportion to the height of the piles on and around my desk. Usually, three days is about all it takes for the piles to grow big enough to block my view of the computer screen, at which point another pile will sprout elsewhere.

Dealing with the mess on my desk is as much fun as visiting the dentist; no one will ever want to share this private bit with others. Conjure up an image of taking showers in the seventh- or eighth-grade gym. It's really about opening the insides in front of everyone, who could see your everything or your lack of everything.

As is often true with embarrassing story in our life, we will grow out of it eventually. For heaven's sake, I'm getting less and less guilt-ridden about the way I tolerate mess. Albert Einstein put it this way: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?"

Truth be told, I have been lately reading A Perfect Mess, a book that inspires me to learn that our bedroom is a pretty good place to maintain a mess. For those of you who think otherwise and struggle to keep a perfectly neat bedroom, I see no reason why you should miss this book. As the book captures the heart of it, making a bed when you get up in the morning is like tying a shoe after you've taken it off.

Scary

"I want to go to Hong Kong," my nephew Ethan says firmly. "There is so much fun."

Why the high praise? In the eyes of a seven-year-old second grader brought up in the United States, everything here unleashes his creative process. New things sparkle. Synapses sizzle. That alone is enough to let his creative juices run like spilled ink; Ethan wrote a funny article for his school newspaper after visiting Hong Kong. (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/echow/www/newspaper2009.pdf)

No matter how many times I read it, I always chuckle when I read the wonderful piece about how eerie our elementary school sounds.

"They have no play structure and grass on their playground, imagine… isn’t it scary?! They don't have snack time and "show and tell", imagine… Isn't it scary?! We can wear anything to school but they have to wear uniforms, too bad."

Among the details Ethan chose to capture was this gem describing the stifling education bureaucracy here. Which is a pretty exact description of the educational system among Asian countries in general.

We dare not tell Ethan, for instance, that the Japanese education ministry had strict requirement to stipulate the exact height of school desks, which has been adjusted upward four times since World War II as students' average height has increased. The detail is specific – it's amazing, actually.

Ahem, sure enough, the way we teach our students matter-of-factly is even more amazing. Our first lesson in strict format came the hard way. Think about the arithmetic lesson at elementary school. The very first thing we learned was the sacred rite to draw a vertical line at seven spaces from the right side. This area, seven spaces in width, is meant to be the box for students to think and work out the arithmetic answer. Boys and girls have been taught to toe the line. Seven spaces, no more and no less. Period.

When it dawns on me that this rule of seven burned indelibly into my mind after so many years, I can't help but shudder.

Contagion

How often, when you visited the hospital over the past two weeks, were you asked to take temperature and wear mask? The answer, of course, is often, when everyone seems to be on high alert for human swine flu. If you still aren't convinced about the panic, go and read the posters put up in the hospital elevators: they are now teaching us the recipe - if there is one - which is called cough etiquette.

Regardless of the controversy over the need to quarantine people, most of us are afraid of anything that can spread like a bat out of hell. Swine flu, mad cow disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hansen's disease... Omigod! The list of contagious possibilities is lengthy and, yes, horrifying.

Well, our tendency always is to get overly serious and paranoid, I must say. You're probably thinking that everything that spreads is bad, but it isn't. In fact, I have come across quite a number of good examples recently.

Investigators at Harvard Medical School, for instance, had documented in a part of the Framingham Health Study just how the smoking cessation by a friend or coworker spreads through close and distant social ties. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study highlighted the network phenomena whereby groups of interconnected people stop smoking in concert.

This study dovetails with another "offspring cohort" of the Framingham Health Study, this time published in the British Medical Journal, reporting that happiness is contagious. When the scientists analysed the data looking for happiness trends, they found that happy people passed on their cheer to connected people they didn't personally know - and this transferred happiness lasted for up to a year.

To look for clusters of happy people in the social network, the same group of researchers are now studying happiness contagion in Facebook. Believe it or not, they noticed that people who smiled in their Facebook profile pictures tended to have other friends who smiled.

If you don't believe me, think about the old adage, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone."