A few notes for today.
[Parenting videos on YouTube]
I watch a lot of parenting videos on YouTube.
I'm not parenting — I'm not even married — I just watch because kids are cute.
Videos of boys around two or three growing up steadily.
When I browse Instagram too, I notice how careful they are in the comments and in the captions on posts.
For example, when a kid gets a haircut: "○○-kun doesn't like the cape (the smock that keeps cut hair off the body), so we took it off for this photo." Or: "The bandage on his forehead is from when he fell the other day — it's already healed, but he likes it so he keeps wearing it."
I figured that if they don't put up that many disclaimers one by one, the comments fill up with people saying "Poor ○○-kun!" and "That parenting method is wrong!" — and it looked exhausting.
Personally, just watching cute kids' parenting videos makes me happy, so there's no room for third parties to stick their oar in — and lecturing about parenting from above seems outright unhinged to me. But the world is full of weird people.
I remembered an education economist saying that because everyone has been through education, the field gets flooded with subjective, off-the-mark comments and criticism based on personal experience — and thinking that was a bad custom.
[A clever interview]
I met up with colleagues from my previous job. We'd struggled through a hard stretch together, so the reminiscing bloomed. One story stuck with me: a member said the deciding factor for joining was that in the hiring interview, after being told "I think you're definitely going to succeed someday," they got a talk that raised their perspective. Another member went, "Wait — I got that too!" And of course I'd heard it as well, so I thought: that's a sharp strategy. I still respect that interviewer, so there's nothing negative about it — in a good way, it was a sly move.
[Novels I've been reading lately]
What I've been reading recently:
Saburo Kajiyama, The Toyotomi Dynasty
Ryo Asai, Living in Search of a Reason to Die
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
All of them are good.
The Last Tycoon I've only just started. I read Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams," was struck by how beautiful the writing was, and this is my third book including The Great Gatsby. Benjamin Button was Fitzgerald too, huh. The movie was boring, but reading that theme as prose would probably feel totally different.
Ryo Asai is the kind of writer who sells whatever he writes — Kirishima, Bukatsu Yamete yo, Star, Seiyoku, Nanimono, and so on. When it comes to ensemble pieces, at least among younger writers, I don't think anyone tops him. That said, I haven't read enough novels lately to say that for sure — if you have recommendations, tell me.
The Toyotomi Dynasty is a book about the inner workings of a huge auto group modeled on Toyota.
You can tell they interviewed a lot of people inside — it's almost exposé-level, and wildly entertaining.
It's incredibly fun, and some depictions are probably extremely close to fact — but it's still a novel, and bashing Toyota to pieces based on it is out of bounds. Still, Amazon reviews are full of "This novel exposed Toyota's wrongdoing! Toyota is evil!" and that kind of crude dismissal makes me weary.
(Looking back now, a lot of my blog is just writing from different angles about how I'm bad at that kind of dismissal.)
[Thinking about starting YouTube]
I felt like trying YouTube, shot a silly ~15-second short, and sent it to a few friends. They reacted with "Funny!" — but one friend said, "I showed it to my girlfriend and she looked completely blank and didn't laugh at all," and I got embarrassed and immediately came back to my senses.
Worse, when I sent it to a LINE group with another friend, they read it and ignored it.
I almost published a mysterious video that didn't even qualify as an in-joke to the whole world. Close call.
That's all.
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