Having been at the Times for eight months now, I’ve finally experienced first-hand one of the few occupational hazards of an office worker.

I spent the better part of Friday in bed, nursing a lower back that’s not only seized with shooting pains but also complete rigid. This ordeal began on Monday morning, when I woke up from an awkward position that must have pinched a nerve in my lower left back. The occasional sting lingered through Thursday, when I covered my back in Salonpas patches after getting a Valentine’s Day lunch with Rich.

Pulled forward and cut in half.

Friday morning—I awoke to a back condition that had intensified from occasional stings to constant, radiating pain. After calling in sick I frantically found a doctor in Chinatown—an old, Chinese, and very unattractive version of Doctor House from the hit television series.

I’d like to blame my occupation for this injury, but unfortunately it’s clear that the fault lies with myself. Being so neglectful of simple office stretches and exercises put me at risk for the carpel tunnel syndrome of my entire body.

While lying in bed waiting for the Ibuprofen to work its magic, I got to pondering the conventions through which people interact with computers and office equipment. There’s definitely much to be desired about being in an office space. Qualms about temperature regulation aside, I think it’s an awful shame—and awfully unnatural—that so little physical effort is exerted in doing work digitally.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing quite like setting lead type in a galley, or pulling a printing arm on a silkscreen press. That said, the professor who teaches lithography at school is very fit. Getting down and dirty in Photoshop or Illustrator is merely hunching forward for a close look at a few pixels. Kerning characters is just a few keystrokes’ worth of work. Offices seem to be where one can momentarily forget the fundamental relationships that exist between physical labor and work. A day’s work on the computer is simply disproportionate to the physical demands of wielding a keyboard and mouse.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

It’s the kind of film my dad would have put on and enjoyed one weekend afternoon, while I watched only half-heartedly.

Having seen it on the big screen, I’m enamored with the film’s characters, the numerous blunt but effective symbols, and the lethal simplicity of the story’s tensions and conflicts.

One of its foremost charms is the excellent soundtrack. Scored by Johnny Greenwood, it highlighted all the subtle nuances of the film that the visuals alone could not have, as all great movie soundtracks do. It swings between blaring cacophony and barely audible sighs, gently tugging the viewer along. Every note and chord couldn’t have been choreographed more appropriately.

With oil as one of the most vital interests in this country, it’s hard not to look for the parallels between oil and blood. It’s there and, as always, it’s extremely gratifying to find.

While the blood of the land and the blood of humans are comparable in this film, and even synonymous perhaps, Anderson conjures a pristinely innocent image of both as potent fuels which moves man and machine—for any means, and for any end.

This blind efficiency is likewise reflected in Daniel Day-Lewis’ character. Oilman Plainview possesses an abundant and bottomless greed, a capacity to realize every one of his needs, and the utter willfulness to sate every one of them at whatever cost.

As Plainview’s wells suck the oil from the ground, he steadily drains trust and humanity out of his relationships with others. As a man who detests “explaining himself,” it seems only appropriate that his adopted son should be deaf. They are father and son who speak and hear very sparingly, for different yet oddly similar reasons.

Though gripped by an unshakeable repulsion for humanity, Plainview seems to simultaneously possess a secret knowledge about people. It makes sense that a man whose profession it is to know so much about things under ground should also know something about the things above it, and the frail and hazardous barrier in between.

And, it’s delightful to see that as weary as Plainview may appear, he never loosens grasp of his property or his pride. Limping on in his despair and old age, he still retains a shrill sense of dignity tarnished only by the passage of time. An obstinate and impenetrable man of spectacle, Plainview punctuates the final moments of the film with an impatient “I’m finished!”—a proclamation as spiteful, bold, and filled with glee as one of his monstrous oil wells set aflame.

I first met Tankut Can in sixth grade, when I had started attending Collins Elementary. Since then we’ve gotten close and drifted apart repeatedly. Tank was the star pitcher of our high school’s baseball team, and is now an avid handball player. He just completed his physics major at UC Berkeley. Though we’re flung far apart, I was still able to get his permission to post this essay he had written during sophomore year of high school. Of all of my friends’ writing, this is one of my most favorite.

When the World just doesn’t feel comfortable…

Existence begins with a little itty-bitty dot. A One-dimensional universe explodes and gives us multi-dimensions. This universe that has spawned our human race, that has let us evolve into such a dubiously superior species, has also forgotten some things. It has forgotten to give us each lots of money. The universe, in all its power and might, forgot to give us each cable television and a really nice car. While it was at it, it should have assigned every person a card that specifies who their true love is, so we could have been pimply and in love. And most important of these trivialities—one thing the universe forgot in its random evolutionary scheme, that goes deeper than materialistic wet dreams, is to give us a way to shatter mountains without shattering ourselves.

Whenever I want to go somewhere like Utah, the Sierra Nevada Mountains are there. When I want to visit new places, especially when they’re high altitude, I’m forced to overcome miles and miles of mountains. Mankind before me has made it somewhat easier to scale these steep hills by paving cement roads, but that only helps so much.

Driving through the range brings one to consider all that is majestic and wonderful about nature, all that is powerful and superior; and then it makes one feel how one possesses none of these character traits: that one isn’t majestic and wonderful, powerful or superior. One realizes, while admiring nature, that one is infinitely inferior to nature. As one’s car climbs these immense hills, one’s ego and self-esteem plummet into the deepest depths of earth. When one psychologically experiences this, one wishes to physically emulate the sentiment, and hide somewhere safe. Such a terrible obstacle it is to pass a mountain.

Thus, it seems only fair that evolution should have by now provided the superior human species with a means to bring these mountains down to size. Possibly a means to make these large pieces of rock many, many smaller pieces of rocks, each the size of maybe one’s fist. If this were accomplished, nobody would feel intimidated and belittled by foreign mountains: they would be nothing more than small little rocks that anyone could pick up and throw far away.

As it stands, the only real way we can reduce the immensity of these sentries of stone is by TNT, but this also can only do so much. Even if arbitrary mountain attacks were legal, an occasional explosion here or there on a mountainside would hardly affect the monster, let alone reduce it to a pile of rubble; so this method is essentially ineffectual.

Mountains are the real menace in society; and letting the human species randomly evolve to have no power or control over these massive monuments is evolution’s major flaw. It is power I demand now from the universe. I call forth to evolution, and the law of probability, to give me, in maybe a million years or so, the power, once and for all, to level these terribly oppressive mountains that make me feel so diminished.

He’s the star of a short drawing series that I did last weekend called One Hundred Views of Fred.

The title of this series references Katsushika Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji. Completed in 1832, Hokusai’s colorful and meticulous woodcuts immortalized a national symbol in an array of scenes and contexts. His images have since been borrowed and re-appropriated time and again all over the world.

One Hundred Views of Fred is not so meticulous. It is a hasty manifestation of my long-standing interest in multiple perceptions of people and how they are described by our own experiences and through storytelling.

I think the internet is an appropriate place to put all these little drawings, since so much character-pushing happens online. Growing up as a manga and video game fan, my first pockets of interest in the internet developed in the growing numbers of fanfiction and other fan generated media. It was in these collectives that the most popular comic and video game characters assumed new lives—ones that played out in the hands of their admirers.

The readership took on the role of author of the material they consumed and breathed new meaning into it. This is difficult to do in real life, because characters in real life retain authority over their persona simply through living. Each person can only allow so much of themselves to ever be present to others at any given point in time.

I guess this is if there’s no stalking involved, which I also think is an excellent idea for a video game.

Since embarking on the research for The Shirt Project, however, the news has become a resource I can’t get enough of.

The struggle in Myanmar, the subject of our second and next shirt to be printed, is a story that I’ve been steadily turning and teasing on paper. It seemed impenetrable, as the long Wikipedia article would suggest. The protest and subsequent crackdown is just another episode in a series of repetitive events that have been unraveling for the past five or six decades.

But as the complex relationships between Myanmar’s people emerge from the stories, it’s difficult not to feel a trace amount of empathy. Myanmar is a country that detests its administration as much as it needs it. Not unlike a dysfunctional family, and only so different from our own. The reality of the monks’ and working class’ struggle becomes diluted in photographs, sound bytes, and the written word. Every unit of energy spent in their struggle against the junta forms a particle in a news story, articulated and packaged for consumption.

The themes in Myanmar’s story which shine through this process, however, are all too familiar. All the haunting elements—escalating gas prices, a superstitious administration, and a largely uninformed population—find subtly altered, mirror versions in our country. The only difference is that here in the States, we are able to wait out our government until next year.

The story that encompasses Myanmar’s contention between its people and administration is not such a different flavor from the American one. They are here, and they are being told… even if no one is listening.