Values

Ikuko Smith taught me that me that Japanese people judge others by the way they wring out a washcloth. “It says a lot about how a person was raised.” That was a new thing for me to be self conscious about, but addressable. Unlike my technique for eating corn-on-the-cob. This Iowa boy is stuck in his ways, and I haven’t been able to replicate Ikuko’s typewriter-like technique. Returning to the washcloth— I appreciate this ethic. Many of us who care about neat cable management, clean figure design, pristine surgical preps, organized code, and so forth, share some set of values. It’s not perfectionism— that’s not the right word. It’s some sort of respect for little, humble things. Respect for care.