What's in a kanji?

We gave our son the middle name of Seiji, after my paternal uncle. Needless to say, I think that my uncle was a great guy. He was genuinely happy and really took care of us nephews, even though we weren’t good at speaking Japanese when we were growing up. But he’s lived something like 20 years of his life in a hospital due to a serious case of polio. And before that he was hit by a truck. I think it’s fair to say that his name didn’t get a fair shake, so I told myself and my wife that if we had a son, one of the names we’d give him would be Seiji. As we signed the birth certificate, we didn’t yet know what the Chinese characters for Seiji were. Recently, when my dad came for his first visit he showed me the kanji, and then we had some fun looking up what each of the characters meant. To our surprise, my kanji book defined the character for “Sei” as “conqueror” and “ji” as “thou”. Hmmm, not really what we had in mind. There was, fortunately, a lesser used definition for “Sei” – “collector of taxes”. Hmmm, worse. As usual, there was something lost in translation. My parents assured me that my grandparents didn’t name their Seiji in hopes that he’d become a war monger or an IRS agent. I guess some assurance comes from the fact that the conductor Seiji Ozawa uses kanji in his name. I guess …

Physical limits

One of the first things I noticed after our son was born was that when he was breastfeeding, he had to pause between gulps of sweet sweet breast milk in order to pass gas. I would have thought that such basic bodily functions could easily be joined into one motor movement. So I tried it myself a couple of times, met with failure, then proposed to our friends that it was physically impossible (‘cause if I can’t do it after a couple of tries, parsimony says it’s impossible). Pushing out a fart requires some tension of the stomach muscles, which inhibits swallowing, was my rationale. Our friend Kevin was skeptical, and after two seconds of what could be called thought (he was nursing a decent hangover) he claimed that he could do it. Now, Kevin is one of the most athletic guys I know, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he could do something that me and my one month old son couldn’t do. The next weekend at his bachelor party, he claimed that he did it a few times. I didn’t see any proof but I thought about it a little more then figured out the strategy. For those dying to be enlightened, read on. You see, farting can last a good second or so, and during that time, after you’ve made that first critical push and maintained some muscle tension, you can free up your mind to tell your body to swallow. You can’t get a hernia doing this sort of stuff, right? That’s impossible.