My friend Sean has had arthritis since he was 17. His own body turned on itself, and has crabbed his joints and crippled his movements. The bones in his spine are too chalky to hold him up. His knuckles twist like old tree roots, and he can’t hold a book. He’s allergic to most pain medication, and the wet Irish winters warp his joints even more. It’s got so bad that a few years ago, in his middle forties, he had to retire from the work he was born to do in order to stay at home and nurse the pain.

When we’re talking, he often has to stop and go somewhere else in his mind. That’s when his face takes on a rigid cast, and while I wait for him to come back I can see the lines that suffering has drawn. They’re different from the usual laughing, talking, and frowning lines. These ones come from holding still, not from moving. He can’t stay in one position for long, and sometimes, when it’s very bad, he’s short with the three children whom he adores.

Arthritis isn’t who he is. It isn’t what he talks about, unless he’s asked. Only rarely does he pick morphine over lucidity, and apart from those moments when pain demands every scrap of his attention, he has great time for the world (as he’d say himself). For the buzz of Stephen’s Day at the races, he’ll make the private bargain of a week of extra suffering. For an eighty-mile car journey to see his granny, he sets aside three or four days payment in a currency only he can exchange. If he can’t sit through the whole school musical to see his daughter play Sandra Dee, he coaches himself to sit for twenty minutes.

When he was a teacher, he knew every twelve-year-old’s love interest, and it mortified us and drove us mad. But he also knew our fears and fights, and watched out for us. He still does. He likes to do things for people; quietly, if he can.

Arthritis isn’t who he is, and yet I’d guess his close relationship with suffering has given him a sense of the riptides that pull others down. A way of listening, maybe, or a different strain of patience. A curiosity about the places he won’t get to see, or the experiences his disease has put on a shelf he can’t reach. Whatever the quality, it has won and kept him dozens of friends, from three years old to ninety. And never for a moment, I believe, has any one of us thought the price he has paid for that extra layer of understanding was worth it. Not a minute of that pain.
(more…)

Two strangers arrive at Tim’s cabin the morning after Thanksgiving. Bill has a fox-colored pageboy and bright blue eyes. He’s strong, and his face just misses handsome before it veers off into unsettling. Jerri has long, tired blonde hair, and wears high-heeled sandals that wouldn’t do well in the February mud up there.

Bill wanted to show her the spot where he lived 25 years ago. There were just three houses in Sal’s Canyon then: Sal’s own homestead; a nearby place with a sign that says “General Store” above the front porch (it’s not a store); and the little shack that Bill rented above the golf course. It burned down long ago, so he’s finding out who lives here now, in these newer cabins.

Sal was a character, he says. Must have been in his fifties at the time. He was still teaching shop in East Palo Alto. “I remember him coming home, complaining about the students —‘Jesus Christ, kid, did ya learn nothing here? You wrote ‘Fuck’ five times on the wall of the boys’ bathroom, and you spelled it wrong every time.’” A ladies man, Tim offers, and Bill shrugs that well, he thought he was. As to whether he was successful, Bill couldn’t say.

Bill grew up on a dairy farm in Oregon. Fourteen cows in an open barn system. At dawn he and his brother would milk, and after school there’d be hours of chores: more milking, cleaning out the barn, and foddering the herd. In the winter they’d be up in the night, calving. In summer, they’d cut and pitch hay. The milk ran through a Rube-Goldberg system of funnels and filters and cooling channels in the barn, and when the churns were filled they’d haul them into the truck and take them to the dairy.

“The churns would run down on rollers, and when the last churn had gone through, we’d be allowed to balance on the rollers in our sneakers”—he mimed a skier’s crouch—“and ride them all the way to the end. Then they’d give us a pail of fresh cheese curds, for free. Squeak, squeak.”

“Sounds like an industrial accident waiting to happen,” says Jerri. “Sounds like OSHA wouldn’t have much to like about that whole set up.”
(more…)

There’s yet another iPod billboard above the post office on my block. It’s more or less the same one they’ve been running for four years now.

Dancing to music that no one else can hear is below air guitar on the dorky scale.

“You are an honest man, and do not make it your business either to please or displease the favourites. You are merely attached to your master and to your duty. You are finished.”
—La Bruyere.

“In 1800, just 20% of Americans had an employer other than themselves; by 1900, the figure was up to 50%, and by 2000, 90%.”
—Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety.

When I was growing up—in a decade when condoms weren’t for sale in Ireland and the Jesuit church in Limerick hadn’t yet been sold for redevelopment—there were things that my friends agreed on. Variously, they had to do with ideas about sex before marriage; God; gays; who was a fine thing; who was a knob; and the tampon-virginity link. In the school canteen, where we tested our collective worldview through a fog of rancid chip-fat and condensation, we adjudicated that having sex might be okay as long as you were in college, really in love, and had been together for x months or years—where x took as long to solve for as the quadratic equations in our copybooks.

We took an inventory of symptoms of what “really in love” was going to feel like—trusting scripts more than swoons, as if already knew we were just trying this stuff on. We were in a hurry to get complacent, and when the boyfriends finally ambled in, we ticked off the weeks and months we’d been going out, racing each other to anniversaries. Though we sat around noting matronly truths about the nature of fellas, our commitment was to each other. Twenty years later, we all admit that for all the love talk, no boys from that time ever cost us anything like the girls who dumped us as friends. And everyone had one of those.

I didn’t agree with the canteen worldview, but it rarely occurred to me to say so. Not when I loved being in a warm little gang, at an age when everything was either hilarious or horrific. It took so little to nod along, and then take my own dogma from the stack of imported Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire magazines in my bedroom. As far as I knew, none of my friends read them, and I didn’t mind. It was the tribe that got me up to go to school every day.

People talk most about what they are hungry for, sketching their lack in words. At fifteen, it’s sex. In Dublin today, people go on (and on) about money and houses. In San Francisco, we talk about time, balance, and community. And in the corporate world, people talk about passion.

At my kitchen table the other night a friend blurted out her annoyance at a job interview experience that day.
“He kept asking, ‘What are you passionate about?’ And I just didn’t feel that was right in an interview. So intrusive. Whenever I tried to deflect it, he’d go, “No, really, what gets you out of bed in the morning? What’s your passion?“

Her complaint sparked the others.
“Oh god,” said someone else, “I worked at this company where they’d come up with all these words we were supposed to embody. And they installed them as screensavers, so if you stopped typing for a bit to think about the next paragraph, ‘Passion’ and ‘Excellence’ and all the rest would start floating down your screen like Tetris blocks.”

“I like my work. I’m good at it. I try hard. When did that stop being enough? When did it have to be my Passion? I just got married. There are things in my life that are really important to me. But they’re not necessarily all part of my work life, and I don’t want to bring them into a job interview.”

“It’s like, you’re not allowed to have a private life any more. They want to own all of you.”

“I think they started doing it because it took some of the responsibility off them. Let’s face it, there’s no loyalty to employees. We’re just not set up that way any more. So if someone has to lay you off, now they get to feel that this is your Passion, so you’ll just go and pursue it somewhere else. They get to feel better.”

“After all, it’s your Passion. That means you’d do it for free, right? So no need to worry about you, or worry about your family life when you’re there at all hours.”

“Except…”

“Except…nobody gives you those screensavers if you work for Doctors Without Borders or you’re, I don’t know, a fourth-grade teacher. Or a midwife. That’s where it goes without saying. It’s when you’re sitting in a cube, doing your best at a corporate job even though it’s not saving the planet—that’s where they’re going to start talking about Passion. And if you don’t join in…”

“If you don’t join in…”

What? What happens if you don’t join in?

If I were 15 in San Francisco today, instead of twenty years ago in Limerick, I probably wouldn’t spend afternoons sitting in a smelly canteen talking about life. I’d be too busy polishing my collection of Passions, ready for inspection by the college admissions officers. Instead of going along with really-in-love, I’d be pumping an interest in soccer into a fervor, or turning a trip to Mexico into a passion for international relations. I’d understand that, just like really-in-love, passion was just a code for getting to what you wanted. Not a lie, exactly, more of an…augmentation. I might even have noticed all those tip-off intensifiers—real love, genuine commitment, authentic passion—that admit fakery is possible, even likely. And I’d be well-trained by a culture in which all manner of passion is faked.

As usual, Paul Graham says it well in this essay addressed to school leavers:

And what’s your real job supposed to be? Unless you’re Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word “aptitude” is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name “passion.” I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a “passion for service.” The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.

From “What You’ll Wish You’d Known”

It makes me sad. Cranky, too. We’ve used up so many great and needed words this way, and passion is a sacred one. It’s the language of Abelard and Heloise, Petrarch, Anna Karenina, Beethoven, and Oppenheimer. It belongs to lovers, artists, and worldchangers—who rarely need to talk about it, because they live it—and it means something more than “kick it up a notch.” We have good words for what we need—curiosity, enthusiasm, craftsmanship, and dedication. Let’s stick to them, and save passion for when we (really) mean it.

Most consumer technology companies are founded by young or youngish men. They’re funded by men who live in the same world.

They do best when making stuff for themselves. Take Vindigo. The original service, a Palm-based city guide, was made by smart dorks who didn’t like not knowing where to go in the big city. With Vindigo in hand, that tribe still wouldn’t know the latest underground bars, clubs, and restaurants, but they’d have directions (and, crucially, reviews to parrot) for the places that had already surfaced. Creators and audience understood one another, and it’s still one of the best mobile phone applications available in the US, though little known, and underused these days.

Juno, like Vindigo, hired the kind of people who later graduated to jobs at Google. Juno’s requirements were strict, but not sensible. Unbelievably, SAT scores counted. Experience didn’t. Ivy League GPAs were verified, but common sense wasn’t. This would have worked if the service were based on spotting tiny arbitrage opportunities, like their hedge-fund parent company. Instead, Juno provided free, dial-up email to millions of people who had never before used the Internet. The idea was audacious, and in theory the numbers worked.

However, Juno employees worked in a glass tower 26 floors above Times Square—opposite MTV, and in the same office as P. Diddy, back when he was Puff Daddy, and Every Breath You Take played in every elevator. Those microscopic glitches our hedge fund brothers searched for? That was about the scale of our intimacy with customers. All we knew was, we were doing them a favor—hey, it was free—and that the product they bought most often from our daily bombardment of direct-sales ads was religious clip art.

This was just proof that they were weird. And most likely hadn’t gone to Yale.

A switched-on French colleague railed shortly before he left that it seemed everyone wanted to “do strategy,” and nobody wanted to go to the warehouse to figure out the best way to get these people the religious clip art they had paid for. Solving the technical challenges of serving ten million people was (rightly) valued, but learning about their lives was not. We spent our energy on odd things—getting fervent about serial commas in intranet articles, or designing “error message” advertisements to trick people into upgrading to paid services. Or “doing strategy.” (As Joel says, “no one at Juno owned anything. They just worked on it.”)

Well, that was extreme, and that was ten years ago. Still, it’s left me with an interest in figuring out how people make things for people who aren’t like them. Walking around the Yahoo! offices in Sunnyvale last spring, it was clear that, though they still call it a campus, that internet generation is older now. The majority are the thirtysomething dorky guys I’ve always liked. And Yahoo!—like Google and others—has done well with the services that matter most to their staff as users: Autos, Finance, Personals, Instant Messenger, Video, Maps…

Where I get interested is in the efforts of tech founders and organizations to move beyond their tribe. In their efforts to hire, or at least get to know, people who are different. The Yahoo team I worked with last spring are little on the margins—“a bunch of moms,” they called themselves, maybe ten years older than the surrounding engineers. They’re designers, in a technologists’ world. And they wanted to work for customers that Yahoo hadn’t yet talked to. So they found some, visited them, and picked their brains. They made prototypes together, big looping sketches that filled walls. They spent time showing them how older services actually worked—even instant messaging is always new to someone. Eventually they gathered a bigger group—sixty representatives—from this tribe that doesn’t surf the web all day. For ten days, they lived at Yahoo!, while the “bunch of moms,” their engineering allies, and some executives with big ideas listened, answered, explained, and asked. There was no fancy method, just people getting to know one another, then sketching, building, and testing ideas together. They produced good work. Also some Princess Leia skits, but that’s another story.

The “just moms” were curious, self-deprecating, and tenacious as Borat. It’s to Yahoo’s credit that passionate entrepreneurs have a place to live, and room for a real life to draw from. I hope they succeed.

If you don’t take the time they took to explore unfamiliar ground, it’s hard to sound real. Here’s what today’s Valleywag pulled from an article on a recent launch—Yahoo’s Food portal, as it happens.

Just Wait Until Forbes Writes About Yahoo! Sex

• “Brown has been working with food for most of the Internet’s history.”
• “Yahoo! media and entertainment head Lloyd Braun hired Brown because ‘[Braun] identified “food” as something he wanted to do.’”

• “‘He saw the food marketplace as under-served.’”

(For the record, this is what real sounds like: Meetup’s Scott Heiferman on his stint at McDonalds.)

Is it fair to say most tech founders think they’re smarter than everyone else? I hope so. They need that shell of arrogance to weather all the doubts and threats and blows to come. (And besides, they’re often right about being smarter.) That belief is probably a necessary condition for facing startup odds.

It’s also a conviction that limits their reach, from what I’ve seen.

What I look for now are the ones who, in action and conversation, can make others feel more smart, valued, and heard, not less. Staff, family, friends, and allies first—they’ll need them, to get through the brutality of birthing something new. Then customers. Mena Trott has that quality, as far as I can tell with an outsider’s eye. That’s why her new blog/community service, Vox.com, addresses with such warmth and respect people who aren’t visible to the Valley tribe.

Of the six billion people in the world, it’s amazing how many still fall into that category.

“If you don’t speed up, cars will run you over. Hell, cats will run you over.”

That’s what Bob, the Bay Area Motorcycle Trainer told me. He’s probably right. Especially as I’m learning to ride in mountain lion territory.

I have a 1982 green Yamaha Seca, bought from Craigslist and patched up with eBay parts. It cost $650, which is less than the price of the new glasses I just bought. The mirrors are from Brooklyn. The new tachometer is from Florida. The rear brake light is from the Kragen in Sunnyvale. The replacement clutch lever, broken when I dropped the bike doing a “low-speed manoeuvre” (a 5-mile an hour U-turn in a redwood cathedral), comes from—well, I don’t know where Tim got it, to be honest. Motorbikes are his department, as books and chocolate bars are mine. Shortly after he bought the green one for me, he picked up a red Seca II from my Bernal Heights neighbor, and then, a few weeks ago, added a blue Kawasaki KLX650 Dual-Sport when we realized the winter rains would soon muck up Sal’s dirt road.

Tim pores over the Motorcycle Owner’s Manuals (“Got a question? Ask MOM.”)He sits up late on a cellphone dial-up connection to eBay, and spends Saturdays afternoons cleaning the carburetor so that the green bike no longer hiccups like a drunk. He rarely falls into the gumption trap. He guides me, at 30 miles an hour, to the DMV parking lot in Los Gatos, where I practise unsteady figure-eights on the driving test course. In return for his patience, I try to be a good sport about riding motorcycles.

The first time Tim drove his red bike from my neighbor’s house to his shack, an hour and a half south of San Francisco, he sent me a delighted email. After two years of Silicon Valley commuting—did you know that rich people can lead such depressing lives that for two hours a day, reading vanity license plates counts as distraction?—he’d regained some of his old spirit.

“I felt like I was describing a line on the curved surface of the earth. Like I had reconnected to the sights and smells of my surroundings,” he said. It helps that Route 280 is carved through beauty, and that the Skyline Boulevard, which coils above it to his home in the mountains, is a famously spectacular motorcycle ride. Woz lives up there.

I don’t share Tim’s passion yet, though we took the same weekend training course. I lack his physical confidence, and I don’t have an understanding with these mechanical beasts. But still I like my bike—a bit—though it often scares me to shaking.
My first outing was on a rutted, hilly dirt road: the mile-long driveway to Tim’s cabin. I revved for ages in the workshop, pretending I was getting started. Tim’s landlord, Sal, scratched his head, and inspected the bikes. We like to hang out together, Sal and I. He has a mechanic’s curiosity, but he was dubious about this project. “My youngest boy was killed on a motorbike when he was 18,” he said, off-handedly. “Thirty years ago. Little 125cc thing. On his way home, this woman just cuts him right off. A stupid thing.” He went back to turning wood for the cabin of his new-battered cruiser boat, the one he’s going to take up to the Seattle Lakes for a joyride. Without looking up, he added, “He was supposed to have had my truck that day.”

Then he wiped off his hands and asked questions about the engine, which I couldn’t answer. Told me to be careful. But there’s no telling people to be careful, is there? The truth is, I’m so cautious that I’ll loop right around and meet danger coming backwards. The truth is, it won’t be lack of care, but lack of competence, that will test the stiff padding on my rider gear. And as a long-time acoustic bicyclist, I can hardly believe how little motorcyclists can hear from inside those cheek-squashing helmets. How much can care make up for deafness?

(Sal complains about deafness all the time, too. But he’s eighty years old, and his favorite hobby is making huge termite piles with his earth-moving equipment.)

The most terrifying part of motorbiking, I find, is the loneliness. It’s easier to face danger when someone else might be in charge. The only way I made it down Sal’s Canyon was to shout at myself as loudly as I could, coaching like a dad who just took the training wheels off a daughter’s bike.

“Okay. Okay! Okay! You can do it. That’s the girl. Brave girl. Take your hand off the fucking brake. Let it GO. (Screw you, pothole.) Clutch! Clutch! Don’t look at that rock. Don’t look at the creek. Look where you want to GO. You’re going to make it. That’s the girl. Good…”

I heard my coach’s instructions, and my own dad’s voice, raising in spite of himself, as he tried to teach me to drive in the Raheen Industrial Estate on wet Sunday afternoons. I sputtered down the dirt track, past the nudist camp, and out onto Alma Bridge Road.

Crawling around the Lexington Reservoir in first gear, a spandex man passed me on a racing bike—going uphill.

It’s motorcycle territory, those beautiful swooping backroads in the Santa Cruz mountains, and the biker tribes are friendly. Dirt-bikers, dual-sportsers, cruisers, choppers, and hogs all offer the same low, one-handed greeting, even to me, even though I can’t return the wave for fear I’ll fall off. The dirt-bike kids wear the outfits I should have: bright, armor-padded Kevlar, and Flash Gordon boots. The old lads on Harleys wear leather vests in the summer, and soup-plate helmets. The sports bike guys look good, padded up for brawn. Me, I was sweaty in heavy gloves, jacket, helmet, and boots in beach weather, and by summer’s end, my gloves stank.

It’s unsettling to realize how much I’m de-gendered on a motorbike. Putt-putting up a hill, I look like some skinny, nervous guy on an old rice rocket. I can’t cute my way out of a damn thing, and though that’s never been a mainstay of my survival skills, I confess that I’d like to be able to fall back on it when my incompetence is so marked. Once I lost my nerve on a steep hairpin bend, and abandoned the bike to cry on the shoulder. Once I fell off. Once (last weekend), I went 35 miles an hour on the highway.

Since those first forays, though, I’ve got a little better. Leaning into a turn, when I already feel unbalanced, still doesn’t feel good or sensible to me yet, but my brain can make me do it. Instead of sitting meditation, I take big, slow breaths on the green Yamaha Seca, feeling the flow of pushing my mind to its limit and keeping my body as quiet as the redwood cathedrals I pass through.

While Tim hunted tachometers, I found unworn Emma Peel leathers on eBay, offered by a guy who was bitterly selling a gift bought for his “now EXXXX-girlfriend. Tags attached.” Toe tags? No matter. Nothing like playing dress up to bring me around to a new hobby.

Tim says that in the parking lot at the Los Gatos Safeway, the yummy mummies check out guys in motorcycle gear—the pads are placed, after all, to flatter that silhouette we cavewomen are primed to respond to. More affectingly, he says, middle-aged guys in expensive SUVs give him an unmistakable look: wistfulness, envy, maybe even regret.
“If it weren’t for these little shitheads…” he imagines them saying about the kings of the carseats, whom they serve faithfully.

Today, at the gas station, a middle-aged Russian guy approached Tim as he filled up my bike. Maybe he thought he’d found a fellow Russian—that used to happen all the time in Brighton Beach. He used to ride, he said, and he missed it. In the Urals. They traded stories for a while. His $60,000 car shone nearby. “How much was it?” he wanted to know, nodding at the tinny little bike. Tim told him—about the price of dinner for two in Manresa, down the road. Freedom was that cheap? He backed away, amazed.

My year of chicken bus travel didn’t fully prepare me for chicken sashimi.

I’m still a rube at international business travel, which makes up in interest what it lacks in opportunities for sloth. The locals have to talk to me, for one thing, instead of politely looking past me like the grubby backpacker I still am at heart. Better yet, they get to choose my menu. Instead of noodle stands and Mr. Donut, there are yakitori business dinners, in which a whole, dismembered chicken is served to each guest over a ten courses, starting with chicken sashimi and working through skin, gizzards, liver, and lights to the feet. These were well-bred Japanese chickens, which probably had their own electric backside-washers, just like the Westin. Not one of the skewers tasted bad, but the squeamies made it gruelling. Was it guts or culture that revolted against chicken sashimi? No matter: when a Wonderbread dinner guest loudly Ewwwwwed each skewer, I felt obliged to make a good show. My host was a delightful Japanese man, who had learned English many years ago when a packaged-goods company brought him to suburban California for remodelling as an American marketer. He was a good guide to the equally exotic worlds of Tokyo business culture and giant multinationals, and for him I would stare down chicken faces. It reminded me of Alexandra Fuller’sta struggle to explain in Mozambique that she is vegetarian “…in a part of the world where the opportunity to eat a whole rat is a rare treat for millions of people.” As I dipped a skewer of chicken ovaries into the plump, raw yolk that might have been their last project, my colleague S. quietly passed me her undrunk beer to get it down. That’s teamwork.

The next morning, my hotel room smelled like chicken. S., K., and I swapped slightly hysterical emails about a lunchtime trip to Hermes to check out the new ChickenBirkin bag.

For days, the rain had lashed Tokyo so hard we took to calling it Ty-soon Yamashita, a weather system that warped umbrellas, soaked trouser-legs, and dissolved taxis. But the sun came out on Sunday morning, and after a week of sky-high meeting rooms, corporate sushi, and Heavenly Beds,(TM) I escaped my hotel for several hours before the evening flight back to San Francisco. I didn’t have a map, a guidebook, a watch, or a phone: all burdens lift on foreign strolls.

I’ve heard that “gaijin,” the Japanese term for Caucasian, translates as “pale ghost.” True or not, I take it as an invitation rather than a slur. My ghost floats above obligations, buoyed up by the kindness of strangers. My ghost is curious, fuddled, and peaceful. My ghost is illiterate, and has nothing to say.

Traveling ghosts don’t need temple tours, when the mundane has already become the stuff of exotic little victories: choosing a breakfast, washing a t-shirt, getting lost, or getting home. You can voyage on a subway as well as a cruise ship.

Because I liked the name, I caught the metro to Yoyogi Station, studying the passengers for clues. The streets were hushed, and for want of a plan, I drifted into the conbinis to look at candy and condoms and left-to-right magazines. These 7-11s and FamilyMarts are three or four to a block, and inside strip-lighting burns off the fog of Sunday hangovers. The familiar-strange packages are pretty, but they are lined up with no extra art. It could be Jersey, with smaller beverages and fishier snacks. Outside, the spaces between convenience stores are studded with vending machines selling more of the same: Georgia Coffee, Pocari Sweat, and the medicinal Healthia. In a gaming arcade across the street, a schoolgirl waited her turn as her friend mimicked a melody by pounding fat buttons with two fists. Cartoon-decorated facemasks hid their expressions. The girls were silent, but the dancing game characters were pink and hysterical.

A nice man directed me to Yoyogi Park, the quiet end, where I got my bearings by eavesdropping as an English teacher told his guests that Harajuku was at the far side, down a gravel path lined with trees. I dawdled, filling up on green, birdsong, and crunch after a fortnight of planes, glass, and carpet. At a temple grove, an old man in a grey suit sang loudly at a tree while three companions clasped their hands and looked on. A bridal party tottered out in kimonos, and didn’t look at him.

At the far end of the park, crowds poured out of Harajuku Station, where the gothic lolitas and cosplay tribes show themselves. Think of a Tim Burton version of Rome’s passeggiata. I’d wanted to see them—my office is filled with Tokyophile design colleagues who come here to reload inspiration—but Harajuku seemed to be running on habit and hawkers, like Carnaby Street in 1970. This is the place where kids in elaborate homemade outfits (used to?) gather in hope of being spotted by coolhunters. Now a stout American woman in shorts took a picture of two girls grinning in front of a McDonald’s sign: Jon-Benet Ramseys with pink hair, bought corsets, and bad teeth. Gaggles of them roam the narrow street, their looks as carefully matched within each group as a hit-factory girl band. At first glance, I thought they were all about fifteen, but behind the kawaisa some were almost as elderly as me.

It’s Hallowe’en as I write this, and I’m thinking of the five-year-old friend who insisted on going out tonight as a Dead Cheerleader, with persnickety requirements for each detail of her outfit. Harajuku is like that, with its fruit-fly trends, unfelt punk, and cheerful goth-in-a-box parading. It’s still fun.

In the KDDI Design Studio—a concept gallery for a mobile phone carrier—they bundled me into a Formula One racing car and took my picture. Upstairs, cameras taped two girls dancing to lights that flashed on the floor of a closet-sized room. When the music stopped, they stood awkwardly for a few minutes while the footage was mashed into a personal “Promo Video” that was beamed to their phones. They peered at the screen together to see their transformation into instant J-Pop idols. I half-expected them to shake the phone dry like a strip of passport photos.

In another booth, a medical-looking camera scanned my face to choose a pre-made phone avatar. I hoped to be assigned “Happy Artist,” from a catalogue of lively hairdressers and attentive hostesses, but instead my face was morphed into “Charismatic Shopgirl,” with big manga eyes and red hair. The boys’ catalogue offered a more exciting range of possibilities. On the street, though, things looked different. The girls ran the show, preening and giggling as they flicked through clothing racks in packs, while the boys looked on, in twos and threes, ignored by the Charismatic Shopgirls in spite of their lizard shoes and skinny pants. They looked good, but not as good as the construction workers, with their balloon pants and split-toed shoes.

Nearby Omotesando, the newest of several shopping districts, looks like a fat Fall issue of Vogue turned into a streetscape. You flip past Armani, Christian Louboutin, Dries van Noten, Zac Posen, Paul Smith, and Hermes—names big and small, hot and cool are there, their stores gorgeously staged and hoping to catch the eye in a parade of gloss. In the Omotesando Hills Shopping Center, Escher escalators deliver people up, down, and sideways into luxury. They sell French chocolates, sexy stationery, buttery boots, and slithery dresses. No babywear, homewares, or bookstores break the parasitu spell. We were droplets in the current flowing through the stores.

The parasitu are my Japanese counterparts; single, childless women of marriageable age, for whom living for the moment means carrying their own volume in shopping bags back to bedrooms in their parents’ homes as often as they can. They throng Omotesando, a fuck-me-booted army with cedar-colored hair (though the most stylish among them, instructed by the Korean hair magazines, seem to have gone back to glossy black—and not before time.)

“Watch step,” said a young guard in a beige uniform and gloves, whose only task was to warn people about a two-inch drop as they joined a queue to inspect the latest Sony mobile phones. Hundreds lined up, studying with friends the Sony Style posters that showed a hundred new cover designs—limited editions by musicians, designers, and animators. Watch step. Watch step. Watch step. If they looped around the Tensaguard barriers long enough, they’d get a moment at the display wall where the real phones hung in clear packages, ready to be grabbed. Another guard—a young woman—posted at the other end of the two-inch step, prepared them for the ascent to the cash register, in case the excitement caused a stumble.

No one does this stuff better than Louis Vuitton, the firm that taught Japan about luxury retail. Louis Vuitton started as a maker of gentlemen’s traveling trunks, and to me that brown monogram canvas still looks like it smells of Old Spice and Imperial Leather, like the aftershave kits I sold in Cassidy’s Chemist the Christmas I was 16—but this seems to be a minority view. 94% of Tokyo women in their twenties owns some item by Louis Vuitton, according to the Saito Research Institute. A few years ago, the CEO claimed that 46% of all Japanese women owned a Louis Vuitton product.

What non-essential branded product is owned by 94% of San Francisco women? A Gap t-shirt? An iPod? A tub of Haagen-Dazs? Nowhere close, I’d guess. Though I’d never want a Vuitton bag, my business crush led me to spend a few hours studying their stunning stores (though, characteristically, it wasn’t the clothes or bags, but rather the oversized illustrated company history on the top floor of the Ginza store that kept me the longest, browsing from the era of carriage travel to the NetJets age.) What does it mean when Charismatic Shopgirls and Lively Hairdressers and even Elegant Gothic Lolita are willing to find the money for a $3,000 purse, or ten—and join a quarter of a mile queue for the privilege of paying for them, as they did when the latest store opened?

All week I’d groused that my little team of colleagues and I hadn’t come to Japan; we came to Brandistan, where every experience was mediated and labeled, from the time we rolled out of those Heavenly Beds to the the turn-down service. We trooped around the Apple Store and the Sony Store; and ran through a downpour from Hermes to Louis Vuitton. We drank Coca-Cola beverages and ate dinners conceived by international chefs. In my hotel room, I caught snatches of CNN. Brandistan is an independent world beyond international borders, with its own language made entirely of proper nouns, and its own tribal customs and loyalties. By the end of a five-hour walk, I suspected we weren’t the only ones who lived there.

I’m off to Tokyo on bidness tomorrow. Woo! Thanks to fellows like Marxy, I’ll feel like I’ve been there, even if I never get to leave the Roppongi Hills Mori Sky Studio conference rooms.

I’m a consultant. That means, in theory, that I’m paid to give advice, but our clients are bright as dolphins, knowledgeable, and often creative, too. The art lies in engineering epiphanies—designing experiences that let them play with possibilities, then come to their own conclusions. From time to time we remind them that in these sessions they’re allowed to be people as well as professionals—parents, cranks, fans, shoppers, readers, patients, advocates, and voters. Then we stand back, holding out snacks, sticky notes, and Sharpies. It’s harder than telling people what to do.

It’s got me thinking about the nature of good advice, and how much of it lies in timing and delivery. When I was younger, I wanted to be a teen-magazine agony aunt. Interfering in other people’s problems, at the safe remove of a tear-stained letter, would play to my wisdom and worldliness, I felt. I hadn’t counted then on knowing less each year. At least my expanding ignorance has made it easier to hold off on giving advice, even when I fixate on the women who wear leggings and shouldn’t, or the futility of fake butter. Sometimes I want to force my friends to read some article in Oprah magazine or Valleywag, or try my new favorite something, or start meditating, but mostly I leave them alone.

Fifty-odd years ago, an English clergyman who was also a trained psychologist found his congregation shocked by the suicide of a young mother. He announced from the altar that he intended to open the vicarage for people to come and discuss their problems in complete confidence, so that such an act might be prevented in future. So many people came forward that his drawing room filled up each night. The “church ladies”—the local volunteers who kept the parish running—began to organize shifts to offer tea and sympathy to the people waiting.

An strange thing happened. The clergyman/psychologist discovered that people felt better even before they spoke to him. Some didn’t even keep their appointment—they thanked him and went home. The simple act of unburdening to a sympathetic church lady, who offered no profound analysis or advice, was enough. It wasn’t flattering to a professional counsellor, but he was wise enough to shush his ego. His discovery led him to found the Samaritans, which trained volunteers all over the world to listen quietly, supportively, and anonymously to people who needed to talk themselves through a crisis. “You never know,” is their training mantra—that, and “Just shut up and listen.” It’s among the best advice ever given, and the hardest to follow.

And yet. Good advice is like beef jerky, or poems off by heart: you may not want it right away, but miles down the road you’re glad of it. Good advice makes sense of your past mistakes, and if you’re lucky, saves you a few steps forward. I spend hours looking for the stuff, but rarely think just to ask for it.

So here’s an experiment. There are so many people who read this blog whom I look up to. There are more still whom I don’t yet know. Some of you have already given me free advice, like “It might be time to start teaching,” or “Think about ordering your list of heroes,” or “Check out the San Francisco Streetcar Festival.” So here are a few questions for you.

What was the best advice you ever got?
Did you take it?
What advice—on anything—would you give me?

You can answer here in the comments, by email, on your own blog, or the next time I see you for spaghetti and meatballs at Emmy’s.

(Asking for advice is intimidating. I just discovered that.)