Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
A Sense Of History
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2006 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I was reminded of things that have happened in the last nine years, and happened to mention to Joel that I've known Seth for about that long. And then I ran across Alexei's old diary from Japan in 2001.
If you ever get a chance to take the monorail in Tokyo, please, by God, do it. I felt like I was five years old, my face pressed to the window pane, watching as Tokyo, the real Tokyo, jewel-bright and faster than light, unfolded in front of me...It sounds dumb, but something about today (we didn't do anything out of the ordinary) just failed to terrify me....
This place is so internally contradictory that it tends to defy description. Just about any statement that I can make about Japan, I can either negate or contradict and the statement is still true...
It can be nice to think about the long-term, backward and forward.
