この悟り(This Satori)

This song is always playing in my mind. / Now I can share it with you.

2011-09-20T18:33:00.002+09:00

Moved By Modern Media / Twitter and Google

2011-03-15T20:02:00.001+09:00

Since the quake, I have been totally addicted to watching the news. I am watching it on my phone or my computer or with a normal TV. But I have noticed that I am watching less and less TV news and more news through live streams like Nico Nico Douga.

When the quake first hit, I didn't have access to a radio or a TV. I didn't have anyway to easily get news without searching Google news on my phone, but I signed into twitter, out of habit perhaps, to say that I was ok and I saw a steady stream of news from people directly or retweets from news organization.

I think I was just as informed as someone watching tv. Then, I saw a tweet about the NHK World Live app for the iPhone and I was waiting outside in the cold watching nearly flawless streaming video on my phone.

The more I watch the news through twitter, the more I see calls for volunteer translators to translate things like procedures for decontamination after exposure to radioactive materials etc. I found myself compelled to try and work on these. Google documents has proven to be an amazing, AMAZING tool for this kind of cooperative work. Someone shares a document to the public and tweets the link saying they need the Japanese in the document to be translated into English and instantly dozens of anonymous users are in there. You can see others cursor as it hops around reading and translating and there is a chat on the side to discuss the material.

The set up by the person requesting the translation is important as well. They post a line that says "Verified by a second translator" and a check box or an underlined YES/NO that starts underlined under no.

Take for example this document, which I worked on myself this evening. The whole document was translated by myself a several others just a few minutes after the request was posted. I am amazing at that kind of quickness.

All of that made possible by Google Documents and Twitter. What an amazing age we live in.

News Websites / Call for Translators

2011-03-15T15:19:00.003+09:00

The following is a post I posted on another blog but thought I would share more widely. Enjoy:

Hello everyone. I am glad to hear from so many of you that you are ok. Everyone else that hasn't posted yet are you ok? Please tell us your story.

My sister came to Japan for a week and just flew home yesterday. It was just a 9 day spring break trip but we did a lot. We went sight seeing to a lot of different places and that is what we were doing on Friday when the quake happened. We were visiting the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural museum when this happened:

I was unable to use my phone of course and as many of you probably know already (so many of us are iPhone users) that the internet was working fine. I was stuck outside without a tv and i got all my news and updates from people via Twitter. I couldn't SMS anyone so I got in touch with my friends and family through Twitter and to some extent facebook and skype.

For iphone users, if you don't already have the "NHK World Live" application for your phone, you need to get it. It is 24-hour live news for free. It was amazing to have that open and running while I was stuck outside in the cold for several hours.

I wanted to give some more informatoin about news networks, there are several channels running in English and Japanese giving 24-hour news coverage.

In English, NHK World Live has a web stream as well located here:

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

And in Japanese you can view NHK and their feed about the quake and news in general here:
<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://live.nicovideo.jp/watch/lv43212662"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;NHK総合（１ｃｈ）【東北地方太平洋沖地震・特別対応】&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Lastly, there have been many international and Japanese twitterers calling for volunteer translators. I have been trying to help out myself but anyone else who can read English and Japanese who wants to help out, please do!

You can do so by watching the feed on Twitter here: http://bit.ly/JPQuakeFeed

Or this blog here on: http://jpeq311.posterous.com/

From the Great Vast Ocean, A Pearl / Engaged

2011-01-07T08:09:00.003+09:00

This is going to be a fairly short blog entry with more pictures than usual.

Last night, I proposed to my girlfriend Monica and she said yes. Here is the ring!

We don't know exactly when we are going to get married yet but we have talked about it for a while. She knew I was planning to propose and thought it was going to be on her birthday coming up. Well, she was right! So, I had to switch it up because I feel like a wedding proposal should be a surprise.

And a surprise it was!

I proposed just before bed. Every night we discuss interesting things we have read or heard or thought about during the day. It is romantic every night with her, but last night more so.

The ring is a Japanese pearl from the waters near Kyushu and Okinawa. Monica likes pearls, but we first hung out and got to know each other on the beach in Takanabe, Miyazaki (Kyushu). I don't really know how long it takes for a pearl to be made but I like to think that from that day the pearl was growing in the water just out to sea from where we were walking in the sand.

Thanks to everyone for all the congratulations wishes on facebook, skype and twitter.

And lastly, here is a picture of her. I am not sure I have posted a picture of her on here before but this is a picture of her at a wedding for a friend of hers in Hawaii last year. She is, as always, trying to make a funny face:

Life Updates / Teachers College

2010-12-04T13:57:00.006+09:00

I have been thinking about posting some of my thoughts about going to the countryside to see an old traditional-ish Japanese wedding. It was the smallest town I have ever been to in my life and it was really beautiful to picture old Japanese life in a valley between tall mountains. But I was too busy to post it when I got back and then I couldn't recall everything I wanted to discuss.

So today, it is Saturday and my day off. I have an office drinking party tonight to go to. I am relaxing and taking it slowly with coffee this afternoon.

Things are going to get very busy soon. I want to just report a few new developments in my life in this short blog entry.

The biggest thing is perhaps the one I can say the least about. My girlfriend, Monica, and I have been dating for about four and a half years now and living together for about 3 years. Next month, around her birthday I am going to propose to her. She knows this is coming, but doesn't know the details so I can't say too much here now. To those of you who know some of the details, please remember to SHH!

Number 2 is that I got into Columbia University's Teachers College in Tokyo. I am going for a Masters and I start around January 22nd. I haven't been super busy with work recently, but I have been lazy in all of my spare time. Pretty soon, I will not have that luxury. I will once again have 1 or no days off during the week and I will be doing homework when I am not in class or teaching classes. It is a little daunting to think of the work ahead but I am really excited about being back in school again. I have had a few months off since finishing up my work at Keio University.

I don't know why, but I love taking classes and I love being involved in academia. I have been making gradually more and more money in teaching although less than I did on JET, but once I get this degree I should really start feeling like an adult!

That is all for now. More information as it comes up and I will try to write more about my trip the countryside if I get a chance.

I am super excited about going to Columbia!!

Early Orientalism / Smaller but Still Larger

2010-10-10T17:47:00.005+09:00

Orientalism

Recently, I have been tweeting a lot, of course, but I haven't really blogged regularly at all. I have found myself sometimes writing a string of tweets to capture an idea or to speak to something that doesn't fit in a a single tweet. I have decided that instead, I will not, not write blogs just because I don't think the idea is deep enough to be a long blog entry. If I have something I write to write a little about and won't fit into a tweet, instead of stringing a few tweets together I will instead write a small blog entry about it. Since I am using www.twitterfeed.com anyway and the blog post will be put onto twitter where someone who wants to read it can and someone who doesn't won't have to see a giant string of tweets.

Last week, a teacher of mine from Keio University sent me a message asking me if I minded helping her younger sister out who works for the NHK International Radio department and wanted help becoming more fluent with her English. I met her sister and talked to her at first in only English and then as the topic got deeper Japanese. Then when the conversation got deeper and my Japanese alone couldn't handle the depth, I ended up using a mix of English and Japanese. I feel like my English is getting worse recently and my Japanese is getting better but neither seems to be enough to express certain ideas easily.

I didn't have any great ideas for how to make her more fluent but since she expressed a great interest in reading English-language books and silent studying by herself, I suggested we read a book at the same time and discuss it together. She offered to pay for the books and last night I recieved an English and a Japanese version of Edward W. Said's Orientalism. She has already read it in Japanese, I think, but wanted to discuss the ideas in it with me.

I decided to read it in English first because it was originally written in English. I will read it in Japanese later on.

The book is a long essay about how the "West" used to think about the "East" as "The Orient" but the place didn't really exist as Europeans and Americans perceived it. I am only about 30 pages into the book so far but it is pretty interesting. There is a lot of talk about how the idea of Orient and Occident allowed the British and French to colonize parts of Asia and allow themselves to feel superior to the Asians by use of (perhaps unintentional) falsehoods. I am not sure of the scope of this but there is a lot of description of how so and so took over somewhere somewhere and then power shifted and so and so was forced to leave somewhere somewhere by somebody somebody and how that affected the perception but still missed the reality of the "Orient".

Out the Window

I am reading all of this while drinking Iced Earl Grey tea at the McDonald's by Omiya Station. The internet isn't set up yet at my new place yet and I wanted to try and download some stuff. One of which is an old version of the game Civilization. At the end of Civilization it shows you a color display that shows where the civilizations started and how their control and influence spread or diminished across the world. It is really interesting to see this in timelapse and at the end of a long game it is particularly interesting to see it and remember what you were doing in your civilization at the time that colors on the map are shifting.

I would love to see something like that about the history of Earth. Humans come out of Africa and spread around and Europe and Asian civilizations start. The Native American civilizations are initially isolated but Spain, England and France spread around the world and control areas like India. India switches from one color to the next and then back to its own color again but the shade is different cause the society's structure is forever changed. Orientalism is just about mostly the past 200 or so years but I would love to see it go back farther toward the Agricultural Revolution.

Daydreaming about history, real ones and fake, I will go back to reading.

Float On / Solidarity in Solipsism

2010-06-06T21:14:00.000+09:00

I rarely write short blog entries but I wanted to write this down real fast and then get back to doing homework.

I am progressing though my homework rather fast while listening to songs I haven't listened to in a long time. I still have a lot to do though.

I quit Muji this week. I have started the preparation for working a new job. There are no more days off left in this semester of school. It is just a homework, test heavy straight shot till the end of it all.

It is 9pm and I am drinking coffee.

People at work were really mean to me today and I wonder if it is because they knew I turned in a 1 month "I quit notice". I came home tired and not feeling well from my bad day knowing I had to just do homework until I fell asleep. I get home and felt rejected at home a little too because I wasn't in a good mood.

I am progressing well in my homework though and I can't feel like a little like Nietzsche (on a vastly tiny tiny tinier scale)

He was pressed out of society for different views and was likely sick of it and literally sick with syphilis. But he sat down and closed himself off into his study and wrote until quite literally he was in too much pain to write anymore. I am only in the slightest of physical pain and there is no way the slight reject I have felt tonight in any real way compares to his experience, but it seems like that feeling of rejection translates into the vigor in which one can write and study.

My hands are on paper writing about the Meiji Era of Japan but my mind is holding hands with my special someone walking on warm sand at Aoshima Beach on the Miyazaki coast. Modest Mouse plays in the background.

Of Futures / Of Distance Education in an International World

2010-05-31T06:07:00.002+09:00

It is about 5:30 in the morning. I have been awake for about an hour or two trying to fall back asleep.

Monica is still asleep in the other room and my tossing and turning was waking her up and she was making little half-asleep annoyed noises. My mom is visiting me and staying at my place. This is her second time in Japan and she is exploring a lot on her own because I am busy with school and work.

I have been having a lot of problems recently trying to figure out what to do. I know my last blog entry was really vague and didn't talk about most of the options my teacher was explaining to me. But since then I have received a lot of extra information. I went an information session for Columbia Teacher's college and I met some really nice people telling me about how teaching English works and how lucrative it is. I met a guy who had a master's in philosophy and he was explaining how hard it is to be a successful teacher of philosophy in this modern world. The demand for philosophy teacher's is few and far between and in Japan especially it would be hard for a foreigner he said.

I talked with several people and they all said I am wasting my time working a job that has nothing to do with teaching. I should be teaching now, even if it isn't at the college level just so that I have as much experience as possible when I apply for degrees.

They also suggested that I get a master's and then begin teaching lower level college classes while working on a second master's or a PhD in order to start moving up in the academic world. That as about a week or so ago and I have been thinking about it ever since. There is a university in Kanagawa that seems cheap and good and respectable where I could start working on a relevant master's but it is rather far away and if I don't do most of the classes online I would probably have to move.

Sidenote: I don't know how I feel about online courses but I know of a lot of people who are successful who did at least one of their degrees online and as the world gets used to the Internet more and more each year an online degree holds more and more weight.

Sidenote 2: I don't particularly enjoy my job right now. The manager is a bit strict (not necessarily to me but just in general) and the job stresses me out for no apparent reason. I really like the Muji store but I don't ever really enjoy going to work. Whereas my job in Miyazaki as an English teacher, I may not have been super excited about going to work (cause work is work after all) but I enjoyed what I was doing and I wasn't stressed or insecure all day long.

Anyway, so yesterday I was working and being stressed out about it. I get off work and I notice I had a missed call from a lady who runs a business English school. I applied there in... when was it February I think? She said I passed the interview and she would love to hire me. She also mentioned the pay and it seemed fairly high (definitely more money than I am making now) and the schedule was fairly flexible and the job expressed a decent amount of freedom. She, however, said she couldn't hire me cause there were not presently openings but in a few months they were moving to a new location that was bigger where they could take on more students and therefore require more teachers. When she called me yesterday, presumably she was looking to hire me.

That is why I woke up so early this morning haven't been able to go back to sleep. As far as I see it, I have at least 3 options.

Option 1: Quit Muji, take this job and hopefully they can get me an extension on my visa. While working this job I work my ass of at a master's online and then once achieving the master's I move on to college level teaching.

Option 2: Quit Muji, take this job and hopefully get the visa blah blah blah. While working that job attend the school in Kanagawa. Take classes online when possible to reduce having to commute 1.5 hours each way to the university, get a master's and then move to college level teaching.

Option 3: Quit Muji, move to Kanagawa, attend that university mostly in person (I imagine) and hunt for a job teaching in the meantime down there.

Mostly, I would prefer not to move. I really like where I live, moving in Japan is expensive and just in general regardless of where you live it is just a pain in the ass. Plus, if we move it puts Monica in the awkward place of having to look for a job in Kanagawa too. That is while living an hour and a half away and before we have found a place to live.

I suppose all of this depends on if that lady hires me and how much the job there will actually pay. And regardless, it looks like I won't be working at Muji much longer because I need to be getting as much teaching experience as possible etc.

A lot to think about still but it really seems to be coming together a little better now!

And if anyone has any information or any experience to relay about having taking classes online or degrees online I would love to hear about it!

Benefits of Experience / Input-Output Gap

2010-03-19T19:50:00.000+09:00

Today, I went down to Keio to meet with the professor that has been helping me out the most. She was really nice and didn't say anything bad about me missing the deadline for the Ryugaku Shiken. She kind of made a joke and just brushed it off.

I went to talk to her expecting it to be maybe half an hour or an hour long but she talked with me for almost two hours. We started off just with some smalltalk and chit-chat about my new job at Muji. Apparently, she is a big fan of Muji's things and actually served me tea and a Shu-Creme with Muji cups and plate-ware. She gave me some advice on using my polite Japanese at work.

Then I started to tell her about my concerns for getting into grad-school and the procedures for it and how it might different in America and Japan. I am not going to go into all of the advice that she gave me here because there is too much for me to cover point-by-point and I want to think about it a little bit before I make my decision. I will probably post a few times pointing out where I am in the thinking process.

Anyway, she gave me bunch of tips and pointers on the way to go about going to grad school and some advice on what would be lucrative as a foreigner in Japan. She said that there are lots of foreigners in Japan making good money teaching English but very few of them are ESL certified and that if I decided to postpone the Philosophy degree for a little while because I fear it isn't practical or couldn't support me and a family years down the line that getting a masters or a PhD at a Japanese University in ESL (but the classes are in Japanese etc), I would have a leg up on nearly 100% of college level English teachers, Japanese, American or otherwise. That is an option that seems pretty promising.

I told her I wasn't particularly interested in teaching English and she asked why. I tried to say why but I couldn't really put it to words in English let alone Japanese, but as I tried to explain why to her I realized why. When I was in middle school, I was forced to learn Spanish. I had no interest and just did enough to pass the classes and move on. I don't speak any Spanish as a result and didn't like it being forced on me. I think, teaching English in at the middle school in Mimata for three years, I felt like I had become the Spanish teacher teaching me in middle school. I was teaching a language to kids with no motivation to learn English and with no grasp of how it might benefit them. They might years later realize, oh that would have been nice to pick up and feel bad that they didn't try, but regardless they feel now that they are being forced to learn something that doesn't really have any meaning to them.

But my teacher told me that at the college level, it is only people with interest in English in the classes. They are free to pick another language or topic as their focus and if they happen to pick English they have, hopefully, the drive that I felt when I started to seriously study Japanese in college. Also, she said her degree originally was in Social Studies and she "accidentally" became a Japanese teaching because her interests in social studies etc lead her to teaching about Japanese culture. Culture without language doesn't work and language without learning the relevant culture is misguided if not impossible. She says she thinks of herself more as an ambassador then a language teacher.

She also made jokes a few times saying that the barrier for Japanese people to go overseas is really high because they are so bad at English. She said, "Help us out a little!"

Also, she gave me some advice in general for studying and helping me out as a person. She said perhaps I haven't experienced any real troubles or hardships in my studies and perhaps that is why i don't, but she suggested that I need to put a little thought in my products. She says that I have all this input and my understanding of Japanese is really good but that my output isn't at the level of my understanding. This gap between my input and output shows that I have a lot of talent and skill but I lack a focus or am perhaps just lazy in my work. She is so right. It is that kind of devil may care attitude that has let me be late and miss deadlines. I could last minute and half-assed write a paper and still get good grades on it. Things have come easy for me but my teacher says she has noticed that I am like that and wants me to make a little more effort. I think I am going to make an effort to do so.

It's scary! My teachers have finally caught on to the fact that I try to half-assed breeze my way through shit!!

As I said before, I will write more after letting all of what she said process a little more.

Missing Deadlines / Nondecisions

2010-03-15T12:01:00.003+09:00

Monica just left for work. I was going to go with her and on my way home pick up the application for the test I have been meaning to take. I was planning on taking the test that qualifies me for graduate school in Japan. Passing the test proves to any university that my Japanese is good enough to engage in research at a college and graduate level program conducted in Japanese.

This morning while she was getting ready for work i casually opened up the website to double check where i can buy the application an research how to get there. Then to my surprise I noticed that the deadline for the application was last Friday. Gakkari (Japanese onomatopoeia for sad-shocked-horror).

I don't know how I did that, i said to myself. Then in my head i immediately started making excuses. I was working my new job! I was busy training for the new job! Before that i was looking for a job! All of these things are of course true, but there is no way i should have missed this deadline. It just seems like neglectful laziness and I am really shocked that I did that to myself.

There is a second test for it later this year but it happens in November and my visa expires before that. In theory, I could file for an extension of my visa blah blah blah and then be in the country working and saving money until the November testing session. My new job, Muji, seems to be going very well so its possible i can just switch to a working visa backed by Muji and then there would be no issue.

Thinking about that makes me a little less worried overall but it misses what i think is the deeper problem here. My willingness to be lazy while the approach of these deadlines which help me move closer to my dream approach. I would say it was self-destructive if it weren't for the fact that I was too lazy to do anything willingly to hurt my dream.

I was talking to Monica about this a little before she left for work and I think part of this was my subconscious. We have been talking about getting married, having Lemon and getting a house together etc. That is my dream too. Since meeting Monica my dreams have doubled. I originally just had the one dream of going to graduate school in Japan, getting a masters and then eventually a PhD and becoming a professor. I want to be a great professor, I love the scholarly life or at least how it looks in my head. My second dream is a house with Monica and Lemon. In reality, recently I have been reading less books that aren't for school. I read everything assigned to me for class but then in my spare time I play magic or video games saying that I am relaxing after having done my work. This is true but in Miyazaki, I used to get off work and read books. I read novels and other books. Recently, I have gotten good enough at Japanese to read Japanese novels with pretty good understanding, but since school went on break I simply haven't read.

Before the school semester started last year, I was talking to a teacher, Misaki-Sensei, who I wasn't close with at the time. We had just met and I was asking her questions about graduate school and telling her what my goal was and how it was supposed to work in my head. She, who knew nothing of my level of Japanese, of my work ethic or really anything about me at all was kind of harsh and said that I needed to work hard and improve my written Japanese and various other things. It was a little kick that I needed and I worked and studied really hard during the semester cause she scared me. She also told me that it is difficult, as it is in America as well, for people to go to grad school in a field they didn't study for their undergraduate degree. Meaning I could probably do Philosophy or Japanese. My goal originally was to do Philosophy but sometimes I wish I was involved in something a little more practical. The philosophy I was interested in was always very psychological in nature and I told Misaki-Sensei that i was thinking about going into Psychology instead of Philosophy. She told me that might be more difficult.

In the back of my mind, (I think I have mentioned this a few times before) my two dreams have been conflicted. In order to hurry the dream of a house with Monica and Lemon, I need to be making money, working and starting my career. The faster I do these things the faster my Monica-Lemon dream comes true. But my other dream, the professor dream, it seems that it is getting pushed farther and farther back and then I have started to doubt myself and my ability to achieve it. During the break in school, often in the shower I have daydreamed about getting a job at a university just teaching English or something. Maybe getting a job at a publishing company or a newspaper company translating the news into English or vice versa. That way I could live in Japan, with Monica and start making money, potentially real money, by say... the end of the year.

In contrast, the professor dream starts when I pass that test, then get accepted into a school and a philosophy or whatever program... then 2 years after that I get my masters... then I have to find a school that will hire me in a fairly obscure field and support me in my research... then I will be making terrible money for a few years until I get tenure... and then god, what, like 5 years from now maybe Monica and I could get a house and start thinking about having Lemon? I will be like 32. Monica will be like 34. Is that too late? Should I just start working some other job now?

These thoughts in the back of my mind I think have been making me more lazy and postponing a decision or some real effort. Monica said these hard decisions should force me to be more decisive instead of being indecisive and I agree with her. They should, but since they were in my subconscious or whatever they didn't and I have gotten lazy and missed this deadline.

This Friday, I have a meeting that I requested with Misaki-Sensei to help me figure out what I need to do in order to pull the graduate school thing off. I requested the meeting with her before I noticed that I missed the deadline. Actually, I requested the meeting when I still had a chance to MAKE the deadline. I will be embarrassed to tell her that I missed the deadline but I will tell her and she will likely be harsh to me about it. But I respect her for that and I think it will be things that I need to hear. I need her advice and I want to have as much information on this as I can so I can really figure out how to make both of my dreams happen.

Misaki-Sensei herself got an undergraduate degree in social studies and was trying to do a job with that before changing her mind and switching somehow to being a Japanese teacher and she seems very happy with the decision. Maybe she will be able to tell me through her own experiences the ways and means to do this.

I will write more when I have figured this out a little bit more.

My First Day Of Work / Muji

2010-02-24T21:31:00.002+09:00

I posted on Twitter a while back that I finally found a job. I have been looking since i moved to Saitama but I hadn't been able to find one. Then I received some unemployment money during the time that I was taking classes. Then last month school ended and I made finding a job my main priority. Also, my last check from unemployment office also came and went.

I interviewed with a few places and the only one that called me back asking me to work for them was one of the places I wanted to work at the most: Mujirushi Ryohin. Also know simply as Muji. It is a Japanese store that prides it's self in eco-friendly, simple yet very trendy and beautiful products. I can't actually think of a good way to describe it in English very well and they actually have stores in America now so I will just direct you to their English site so that you can see for yourself:

http://www.muji.us/

Today was my first day of work, but mostly I just went in to sign my contract. There were two college age girls that were also there signing their contracts. Then we listened to the store manager read from the store's policy manual. There is a lot about how they want to make efficient and clean looking products that still look nice but don't produce waste. They are really good about packaging their products without excess plastic or wrapping. You can find more about this policy here if you are curious: http://www.muji.us/about-muji/

Anyway, during my interview they asked me about why I wanted to work at the store and "Why do you want to work here" style questions. But then toward the end, the interviewer asked me a few questions to make sure that my Japanese was good enough for the job. I told her that I was confident about speaking but my handwriting isn't the best. I told her that in class I have to write everything by hand so my Japanese symbol writing is getting better and that if I write slowly I can write pretty well. Within a week they called me so they must not have feared my bad handwriting.

Today, I had to take notes in English and Japanese in front of the store manager and the two girls that were also being hired. I was really nervous about my first day and about working with costumers in my fancy Japanese. I didn't have to work with customers today but perhaps worse, I had to write stuff! I really wish there was a way to start from scratch and get better handwriting...

However, the manager was really nice. She even wrote out a few things especially for me so that I knew the right way to write them. It was good that she was being that nice and tolerant but it was also a little embarrassing that she felt the need to do that.

After some of the paperwork was finished, the manager stressed the importance of all the people hired at the same time bonding a little so that we can all help each other learn the ways of this new job. It struck me as a strangely Montessori process but I guess shouldn't really surprise me because Muji seems to really have everything worked out. For example, when we showed up today they gave us a canvas bag to use when were were shopping at Muji. We have to wear Muji clothes and use Muji pens and stuff while we are on the clock but get to purchase these things at a discount. They are trying to push the customers to bring their own bag for the sake of the environment so they have all of the employees use these Muji canvas bags and in fact ban us from using plastic or paper bags when purchasing Muji products.

My next day of work is Monday. I have a few days off until then to read the employee handbook and make sure I can read it all. I am really looking forward to working this job! It isn't fast paced. It is mostly keeping things in order and operating the register. The layout of the store and all of the merchandise are things I would want to have myself and on top of that, they will teach me to fold clothes and arrange things the way it is in the store. It seems like a peaceful place that will help me be a better person.

I will write more as I learn more about the job and after I have experienced it a little more.

Edit: I want this cat so bad. I can't stop watching this video.

The Ocean in a Shell / Wait For Me

2010-01-24T16:30:00.002+09:00

Yesterday was the last day of semester. I did well on the test and believe I did well overall in my classes this semester. I am getting close to applying for grad school with confidence in my ability to study difficult Japanese topics in Japanese. I am not sure if my English is holding water though...

Monica and I are both home sick. We got a cold or the flu or something. Monica is asleep now. She took some cold medicine and started feeling medicine heady and cold. I think she has a fever but I don't feel like I have one.

I started playing Final Fantasy 7 a few weeks ago. For years, people had been telling me that it was one of the best games ever with a great storyline and that seems to be true. Monica and I bought a PlayStation One a while back and so I had a few weeks off in December and I thought maybe I should finally get around to playing Final Fantasy 7 although I am about 13 years late. I have been recording my experience on Twitter by posting a few pictures I took of the game. The quality isn't the best because I am taking pictures of the TV with my iPhone.

Here are a few if you are curious:

I was listening to podcasts in bed for a bit while Monica was sleeping and I started to browse the internet and I happen to come across a website talking about Moby. It has been a few years since I bought his last album so I decided to see if he had another album out. To my surprise he had 3 albums out since the last one I had. I started to look up more information on them and to try and download them to see if they were any good. I haven't listened to them yet but I hope they are as good as his other albums.

This got me thinking. Time seems to go so fast sometimes but only when you aren't really looking. I have often discovered albums by artists I like have come out without my knowledge despite the fact that I am always on the internet, reading news and browsing miscellaneous websites. How is it that I missed these releases? Then I started thinking about, strangely enough, St. Thomas Aquinas.

I took a philosophy course on Medieval Philosophy which I didn't really enjoy very much. It mostly involved proofs for the existence of God and the philosophy of the Roman Catholic church during the Medieval period. But one thing that stuck in my mind was a story that the teacher told us about St. Thomas Aquinas. He was working for years to make these proofs for the existence of God and got a lot of renown for it. As he got older and closer to death he supposedly had a dream about a little boy on the beach. This little boy dug a hole in the sand and found that there was a little bit of water in the bottom. He took a seashell and ran to the ocean and filled the shell with water. He took the water and poured it into the hole attempting to fill the hole with water.

The little boy the proceeded to go back and fourth between the hole and the ocean carrying water to fill the hole. When St. Thomas Aquinas awoke, he realized that this boy on the ocean was him. He was running to the ocean of God and taking a little piece back to the hole. The water in the hole he could understand but he could never take the whole ocean and fit it into that hole. He took this to mean that he could never in his lifetime understand all that there was to God, let alone write them down in books or proofs.

I, of course, don't believe in God but that story stuck in my mind because if you replaced 'God' with 'the universe' or even just 'the world' I feel like that. I have moments where I am trying so hard to take the ocean with my hands and understand it but there is always more information, more to see, more to do, more to learn... more than I could ever write. It feels overwhelming some times. When Monica was living in Takanabe and we were first getting to know each other she said something that I still remember very clearly. She said, "I lay down in my bed sometimes and thinking about how the universe is spinning... and it just makes me dizzy..." I knew exactly how she felt. At the time that feeling scared her and perhaps it still does. It scares me too at times and I really like to admit it. But rather than feeling scared I am usually just awed.

Outer Space has always made me feel like that a little bit. But it mostly makes me feel comfortable. All of the times I have felt dispair or sad or all of the negative things that happen to me in my life tend to be things that are all in my head. I have never been attacked by a bear. I have never been held up at gun point. I have never experienced war first hand. I haven't even ever broken a bone.... All the problems I have had were thought or emotion based and that is why Outer Space makes me feel calm.

When I see that vastness, I try to understand it and I think about how vast the vastness is or logically can be, but I fail to do that. I fail to comprehend it and I fail to comprehend what failing to comprehend it means and I am left thoughtless and blank. But in that hole there is a little bit of water at the bottom...

Imperfect Vessels / Memory Erosion

2010-01-19T19:57:00.004+09:00

I write a blog every month or so. I post something on Twitter or Brightkite several times a day. Monica used to use twitter and posted a few times a week. She doesn't really use twitter anymore but she says that she might get a Facebook or use twitter more once she has her art going and is trying to market her work.

A few days ago I had some one say to me that they felt it was rude when I was twittering in the presence of other. I will try to keep that in mind and keep it down when I think people might find it rude but I cannot help the desire to record my life. I have been thinking about that for a while and trying to figure out exactly why that is.

It seems fairly simple when you look at the history of humankind. Since the development of language, every culture with a written language has tried to record daily life or at least the major events of the time. The entire premise of archaeology and history is based on the face that we could find some record of humans from an earlier time. The people back in those times certainly felt that they had something in their life that was worth recording even if it was the most mundane of things.

I don't have any delusions that one day I will be famous and my blog entries or tweets will have any historical or archaeological value. But I feel in a way that I understand the nameless historians of the past that felt they needed to record the events of their time. I am not famous and doubt I ever will be so there will be no one interested in checking on my daily life once I am gone. No one will keep a record of my life and the only records that will be left the ones I wrote myself or the government records of my birth, marriage, the birth of my children and my death.

Just like those nameless historians, they felt a need to write and record even if it doesn't really make sense. I have nothing major to record like change of leadership in the so and so empire, but nevertheless I want to record what I see in my life.

I cannot really explain that feeling but I think it has to do with my bad memory. I don't particularly have a great memory and as I get older it is bound to get worse and worse. I have to write down what I want to get at the store when I go (or honestly I put it in my notepad on my phone) or I won't remember everything I need. I usually come home and realize I didn't get something major.

I wish for a better memory.

Recently, there have been a few podcasts and articles online that I have read talking about memory. There was one on NPR's Science Friday where they interview Noble Prize winner Eric Kandel about memory (http://bit.ly/7NLbBu). There was also a podcast a while back on NPR talking about the virtues of being able to forget. If we had perfect memories, the host said, we would never be able to get over the sad times in our life. If we had a friend that died, our memory would perfectly capture that moment and we could recall it whenever we wanted and perhaps it would feel as if it had happened yesterday. This could be a terrible hindrance to our life. It went on to say that in this modern age of digital media and computers things like Facebook and Twitter maybe have negative consequences to our lives if say, we posted a picture of our self drunk once and then our boss at a job 10 years later came across it and we were fired. I do believe that there could be problems from this perfect memory that I have often found myself wishing for.

But the podcast said a possible solution to this was a more organic model for information on the internet. Perhaps you could upload a photo and set it so say, only last a year. That photo would, after time, cease to be and then 10 years in the future could cause no harm to you. Real memories work like this some what except they gradually degrade instead of turning off after a certain of amount of time has passed.

As most of you know, I am afraid of blood to a huge extent. I pass out if I see a lot of blood. Two years ago at my health check for the school I worked at in Miyazaki I passed out just giving blood for the blood test. As a result of this, I have always, in the back of my mind, wished that I was a robot. If I broke my arm I could just go to the shop and get a new one. If i feel on the street I wouldn't bleed I would just have a scrape that I needed to weld back into shape later.

Robots are of course digital and they would have a memory similar to a computer and therefore they would have a perfect memory. I like to carry electronic devices around and batteries to feel like mine isn't a body of flesh. Certainly, if they were struck or lit on fire the memory could be erased but for the most part their memory is perfect where as a humans memory is imperfect in the sense that during normal operation the memory degrades. I have often wondered how a society of people or robots with perfect memory would work. If a crime was committed there would be no ability to forgive or forget without implementing some form of self-deleting records as was mentioned in the podcast. But that raises other problems innate to humans and our natural desire to want to record.

I have also always be fascinated by written language and words and I originally wanted to become a university professor so that I could write. I want to write essays and novels. I would have loved to be a reporter in modern times as well as in the past. Whenever I see an old movie where someone goes from one country to another to learn there language and write back to their country to explain what was happening I feel nostalgic for a time I have never lived in.

I got a little sidetracked there but I think that sums up while I like Twitter. It is an easy to use way for me to built my own personal history. It is not a cry for attention (I don't think) and even if I had no followers on Twitter, I would still use it and write. Just like a still write my blog despite only a few of my close friends and family members reading it. It is to some extent a way for me to stay in touch with people back in the States but really it is just a way for me to write my ideas down.

I want to write a book one day. I don't know exactly what it will be about. But maybe in a few years I will reread a lot of my blog entries and tweets and find that I had a book idea that was hidden away, even from myself.

Logarithmic Me / The Other

2009-12-04T16:10:00.007+09:00

Timelapse movie: The Alps -- part II (night) from Michael Rissi on Vimeo.

(Via BoingBoing http://bit.ly/7MGZUR)

The wind blows cold and then it is winter.

School is going very well and I am getting grades that I am satisfied with. It was surprisingly easy to switch from being a teacher to being a student again. I was placed slightly lower than i expected to be placed but the classes i am in right now are suited pretty well for me. I believe i should have been put in a higher level because I know most of the words and grammar that we are using in my classes. I have also passed the second hardest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test and should be taking the hardest this year but missed the sign up deadline.

I should be trying hard to find a job but i feel sometimes like i am too busy already with homework and my personal life. Monica has been back from America for some time now and is actually getting ready to go to California for Christmas. We have been surviving of of my pension / unemployment checks from the Japanese government and it has covered us for the most part in our expenses but the transition from having a big healthy paycheck every month to the small amount i am able to get now has been kind of hard.

Most of the money i spent on entertainment i had previously spent going out to eat at restaurants. I miss Chinese food a lot, especially because it is so much better in Japan than in America. But I find that i cannot really justify spending the money on it.

While Monica was in America i was playing Magic every weekend or so at the Lunatic Moon Convention and others but school started and I have been playing less. I still try to play at least once a week. I have made a decent number of friends in Tokyo but since i live in Saitama (about 30-40 minutes away from Tokyo) it can be a little rough getting to events that they go to. I have a blog in Japanese about my adventures playing Magic located here: http://bit.ly/lonelysandbar

I have been thinking a lot about time recently. I read a few articles (that you may have noticed from following me on Twitter) about the recent theory that came out that makes Einstein's theory about space-time outdated.(For your reference: http://bit.ly/8sSSSF )I have not seen a lot of the details published but I am looking forward to reading some of the criticism of this theory. I think the author of the theory, Petr HoYava, will become a household name if his theory proves to be sound.

I was walking to school this morning listening to a podcast about near death experiences. (Via StuffYouShouldKnow: http://bit.ly/4wZd8o ) Yesterday, I listened to a story about numbers and how humans are born to think about numbers logarithmically but we learn in school and from our parents around the age of 4 of so to instead think about numbers in integers. (Via Radiolab: http://bit.ly/4vqPIY ) It is a fancy trick that has helped do a lot of things from economics to science. But there is still a discrepancy in our brains when we try to understand large numbers or abstract scientific concepts. I wonder how our perception of time is shaped by our understanding of numbers. Perhaps we would hardly notice time without having invented integers to refer to time with.

I hate being late. Working at Laser Quest, James, our manager taught me that if I am not 15 minutes early I am late. I still live by that rule today. Which is funny because I am totally laid back when it comes to so many other things. If someone tells me they are going to meet me somewhere at 7 and show up at 7:20 I could hardly care as long as we would make our 7:30 appointment.

I have also noticed that many people are scared when they think of time on a vast, geological or galactic sense. They don't like to think about or picture a time when they don't exist perhaps. I noticed today that i really enjoy thinking about things on a vast scale. I like to picture the Last Perfect Day that Carl Sagan talked about when the sun millions of years from now burns out enough that it loses its outer layers of gas and the Earth's atmosphere boils away. The Last Perfect Day is the last day that water is a liquid here.

Perhaps, that is why I am 26 and I am not totally sure what I can do in a practical sense for this would. I have dreamed since i was in my teens about working in a university dreaming up lofty and one could easily say impractical theories. I still want to one day write a book about those things. But reading works by John Dewey and others about pragmatism made me feel like a dreamer who would never accomplish anything.

I still love philosophy. Discussing it, reading about it, pondering it, but we are not living in the days of the Romans and Greeks anymore. Science and Philosophy used to be linked in a way that one who studied one would study the other. The impractical philosophies were linked to since in a way that you could produce something useful in daily life. My degree in Philosophy leaves me feeling smart and open-minded but i don't feel like i have any practical skills.

I find myself fascinated by computers and modern media but i feel like it would be too late to try and do Artificial Intelligence or programming now. But i read documents online and listen to podcast about psychology, the human mind and how machines are different. I want to research the human brain but I only have a little bit of experience in that and if i were to transition into computers or psychology now i would have to do a series of undergrad classes first.

I am already 26. Monica and I are going to get married in a few years. We want to have a daughter. But we are currently both unemployed and I am how many years away from being qualified to teach at a university? Honestly, let me know please cause I don't know how long it is going to realistically take. Probably like another 3 years. Then I want to eventually get a PhD and I'll need to work for years to get tenure at a university. Thinking about time in integers of years is harder sometimes.

But logarithmically and biorythimically I love where I am in life now. I am learning in school. I am reading Japanese books. I can understand most things said on Japanese TV. They challenge of living life outside my native language is still rewarding. Japan suits my personality well. Living here has shaped away some of the parts of my personality that didn't like. I feel more balanced and I feel that i am living moment to moment in a Thus Spoke Zarathustra "The Other" kind of way.

Speaking of which, I got distracted just now and googled "Still! Still! Did not the world become perfect just now?" and this is what showed up. "Nietzsche and Asian Thought": http://bit.ly/6GNsY7 This is exactly the kind of book I want to write, thought I find myself thinking and dreaming in fiction.

Darwin Defence / H.G(enocide). Wells

2009-07-15T11:57:00.003+09:00

Yesterday, i was home alone for a while and doing dishes and laundry. I was listening to an episode of the SETI Team podcast. It was really enlightnening and it had some challenging ideas about how we evolved the way we did. Like last time, I found this very interesting and listened intently to the whole thing. Last time, it talked about how cooking was a way we are different from the other species on this planet. This time, it was something else a little surprising.

Diseases, viruses and parasites have improved our lives.

Yes, that sounds a little crazy. Everyone is talking constantly about how should try and rid ourselves of the common cold, influenza and AIDs. Actually, this week is supposed to be my last week of classes but school was canceled because a few kids who just got back from the school trip have tested positive for "Swine Flu". That means that all this has come at a very relevant time for me.

The idea is rather simple but a little counter-intuitive. For example, they say Alzheimer's disease is one of the easy examples. Alzheimer's is apparently way more common in Western people like Europeans. It is far more rare in Asians. The genes that make your prone to having Alzheimer's disease later in life are actually really amazing at preventing... get this... the bubonic plague!

At the time, so many Europeans were dying of the plague it seemed at times that mankind would die out. But of course a portion of the population survived and went on to live despite the plague. Many of these people are carriers for Alzhiemers disease. That is because of a relatively simple genetic mutation that causes people to survive the plague in the short run, but eventually get Alzheimer'sdisease. But at the time, the average lifespan of a human being was way shorter. Therefore, for most people with that mutation, it seemed like a benefit without a downside! They would die by 40 or maybe even 30 and hey, they survived the plague! People have lived with this mutation for hundreds of years without noticing a downside until recently. When you are over 60 or so you get Alzheimer's.

The genetic conditions for the disease were there the whole time but it didn't manifest until our societies lifespan was dramatically increased. We think of Alzheimer's as being a horrible disease that kills people in a rather inhumane way. That is, by making them lose there memory and eventually their brain ceases to function. But again, this has been a wonderful set of genes for a large part of human history.

This brings many modern diseases into question. We say that things like AIDs are terrible and that is not in question. Everyone would like a cure to be found because there are so many people dying. But at the same time, it is hard to ignore that it is a part of our natural evolution and it could be causing good things for our future or it could be a by-product of something wonderful from our past.

For example, people have diabetes now and it is bad. Many people die from it each year, but the genetics and the diet that now cause diabetes actually in large part have help humans survive the ice ages of our past. We wouldn't have come this far as a species without diabetes. Yes, people right now hate it and wish we could cure it but we really should thank it for being here in the first place or we may very well have all frozen to death.

An interesting sidenote, the fact that diabetes helped us survive the ice age was discovered by accident when researching a frog. This frog in particular lives in a cold part of the world where each year it survives the winter by freezing solid and then thawing out the next summer. It does this by basically going into a diabetic shock that temporarily allows to freeze solid without dying. Frogs are both cute and genetically very awesome.

I was listening to WNYC's Radio lab this afternoon and they were talking about Darwin. A british biologist was talking about how his 6-year-old daughter saw a patch of flowers on the side of the road and said to her father, "What do you think those flowers are there for?" He wasn't certain how to answer her because she was young and he didn't want to give the seemingly nihilistic answer that, "they are not there fore any reason." So he asked her what she thought the flowers were there for. She said they were there cause they were pretty and they attracted the bees and the bees make honey for the people, that is what the flowers are for. He told her no, the flowers only purpose is to make more flowers and to pass on its genes. He feels like she understood him on some level, but I am not sure she would understand that until she was odler.

It is interesting to think how to raise a child in that situation. We want to be honest to our kids as much as possible but is passing on information like that while they are young helpful? I am not going to try and answer that question because I honestly have no idea. I would like to think that they would be more able to understand it when they get older if it was explained to them when they were young, but I am not sure if that is actually true. Honestly, they will probably just be confused about it and but content not knowing. When they are older they will have a bigger curiosity for that kind of thing. As an atheist, I will probably not speak about purposes for things like that or tell my kids about the meaning of life. Instead, I will insist that we are the meaning makers and different things mean different things to different people. Kind of a 'Nietzsche for Kids' approach if you will.

This is perhaps getting a little off my original intent for this blog entry, but that biologist on Radiolab mentioned something I didn't know. Having never read H.G. Wells' New Republic I didn't know that Wells used Darwin's 'Survival of the Fittest' (which keep in mind Darwin never said, it is just a famous paraphrasing of his work) to justify or at least permit a form of passive genocide. There are some scary lines about getting rid of the yellows and browns and blacks...

But anyway, next time you get sick instead of being upset, try and remember that that disease may be the reason or at least be part of the reason that we are still in the world today. And if you have diabetes and this global warming becomes and ice age well... you lucky bastard.

What Makes Us Human / Cooking As Science

2009-07-01T10:33:00.003+09:00

Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast by the SETI Group. It was the second part of a two part series about what makes humans unique from the animals. The first part covered the things that were traditionally cited as being unique in humans that have since been found to be true in many other animals. For example, they say that our brain size or language or our tool use is what makes us human. But we since discovered that may animals use simple communication and linguistic tools. We have discovered that whales have larger brains than us. We have known for a little while now that monkeys can use tools, but even some birds have been discovered using tools. There is a small South American bird that fishes worms out of wood by using a stick and there are crows in China and Japan that wait by the side of roads to throw nuts out in front of cars.

One of the new theories was something that caught me by surprise, but makes a good amount of sense. This is the theory that cooking makes us unique.

My first question was this: Certainly, I cannot think of another animal that cooks. But why is that significant?

It is significant because cooked food is more nutritious and therefore supports a life that requires more calories. These calories allow or brains to work harder and our stomachs and intestines to work less. The obvious reason that cooked food is more nutritious is because it is softer (if it is not overcooked that is!). This allows our stomachs to spend less calories in the digestion process and therefore we have a higher net total of calories gained. The second reason is that heating and cooking food breaks down and denatures proteins and other things so that they are more efficiently processed. If we eat raw meat we gain calories but perhaps from only like 40% of the food. If we denature the proteins by cooking them we get something more like 60% (these are not factual numbers, but I am just trying to express the general idea).

I found this very interesting. The podcast went on to say that in other animals like primates and birds, the ones that could more efficiently digest their food have larger wingspans or are smarter. Likewise, the ones that have small bodies and aren't smarter have to hunt less for food because they are gaining more nutrients from what they are getting. This allows them to survive a little bit better in their environment.

The podcast went on further to suggest (as SETI is want to do) that if we encountered another intelligent or one smarter than us, they are likely going to have found a way to use the extra energy in their environment (e.g. fire) to predigest their food. They will also likely have a lot of genes that allow for digestion of various different things. For example, humans can digest starches when most other animals cannot. Likewise, our bodies don't have to contain a lot of the organs that other animals need to obtain what they need from food. We cook our food so that we can digest the same amount or more with out multiple stomachs or extra intestines, stomachs etc.

There are some interesting implications that come from this. Of course, there are many kinds of animals that have complicated social structures, but they suggest that human society was greatly influenced by the need to wait between the time that food is found and when food is eaten. The fact that we kill a deer and then cook it allows for many opportunities for the food to be stolen by another human or animal. Therefore, our social structure became deeper and our language became more expressive.

Alone the same lines, I have been watching a TV show that many people who are a fan of Japanese anime may already know. The show is Full-Metal Alchemist. The show is about two brothers on a journey to restore parts of their bodies that they lost during an Alchemy experiment that went wrong. Alchemy is kind of like their magic in this world. They use it to make cities or things. They stop problems with alchemy like Samantha in Bewitched used magic to get the dishes done. There was a line in an episode I watched recently where they comment on how the first forms of alchemy started with cooking.

It occurs to me that the first science may well have started with cooking. I know that the creation of tools like bows and arrows, spearheads and flint knives could also be considered the first science. But real chemistry and physics probably started with cooking. We found that eggs changed when we applied heat and so on and so on.

This has forever changed the way I look at something I experience daily: cooked food! I hope everyone else found this interesting!

Alternate Presents / Phantom Tears of a Possible Future

2009-06-16T15:56:00.002+09:00

Last night I had a dream that felt so real. It was a really emotional
dream and it was surprising how much I cried in my dream. When i woke
up, i knew instantly that i was a dream but it left me with a funny
feeling that i couldn't really shake.

My friend Mike had sent me a letter and it said he was getting married.
In real life, i know he is dating someone but in my dream he wasn't
marrying her. He was marrying some other different girl that i never
saw in the dream and her name was never mentioned. But i flew home from
Japan to see the ceremony. Monica came with me. We arrive and we put
on fancy clothes. She had a beautiful red dress and red shoes. She
finally found the red shoes she'd been dreaming of.

The night started well and it was a pretty standard wedding ceremony.
There was a dance in the dance hall attached to the chapel. Monica and
i danced and discussed or future together. We were happy and would
occasionally embrace and kiss and occasionally we would talk about how
we felt like it was a celebration of us and not a celebrate of Mike's
marriage. We joked and laughed and i welled up with emotional.

There were drinks being had and later on i found myself in the lounge
outside the dance hall with Mike. We both had loosened our ties and
were a little sweaty and tired from dancing. He said something that i
can't recall, but it was about how we had come to where we are now. He
said something else about how we used to be the way we were. Even if
this really happened, i am not sure i would be able to remember exactly
what he said because of the high emotions in the room.

We both stepped forward and hugged each other really deeply. I said
something like, "We aren't kids anymore i guess Mike. This really
proves it. We have to really be adults." He agreed and we both cried
together. I felt like an adult then. Actually, after reflecting on it
more through out my day today, i cannot think of a feeling where i felt
like more of an adult. There is no time in my actual life, my real life
where i have felt so much like an adult. I don't feel like i am as
mature in my life now then i felt in that moment of my dream. It was a
good feeling and i can't really say why. It is a little like my whole
life was practice up until that point and when i was to leave that
wedding the real life began.

I hope to feel that feeling again soon, in my life, my real life. I am
ready to do something with my life. These past few years in Miyazaki,
my improvements in my Japanese have definitely been my practice for my
life as a student in Tokyo which will be practice for my life as a
professor. I am almost there. That dream was like a little gift from
an alternate present or perhaps from my real future. It was a little
taste to inspire me and motivate me. I know that kind of real life
might still be a few years of graduate school away but I am so close. I
am so so close.

Badly Drawn Me / What True Romance Is.

2009-06-05T18:51:00.001+09:00

Badly Drawn Boy is a wonderful artist that has a kind of sad tint to all of his music. It has been a long time since I regularly listening to his music. It is a beautiful kind of Jazz spin-off acoustic music. It is hard for me to explain.

I have been stressed out recently about money and getting into grad school. It turns out, both of the universities that applied for I got into. That is despite having been late a day in one of my applications and being told that I didn’t included something that I needed. I thought that I had included it. I gave up on getting into Keio University because I felt like I couldn’t please them after that. I got into Sophia University and I was very happy. Sophia University was my second choice in Tokyo but I was happy to get to stay into Japan.

Now that I have gotten into Keio University, I am filling out the papers for matriculation. I have had a very hard time getting a wire transfer done from the states so that I can pay my tuition. Today, I went to talk to my boss today for advice on getting an apartment, thinking that I had the paperwork under control. I was more concerned about whether it would be difficult for Monica and I to get an apartment together unmarried and with our being foreigners. My boss told me that she didn’t think that would be a big deal. But that lead into a discussion about the length of my visa. It turns out that my current visa ends on July 30th. I swear someone told me along the way that we were given some leeway time after or job ended to finish things up in our apartments and otherwise.

At that point, I didn’t really know what to say. My plan was to go ahead and get an apartment in August and move in a month early. I planned on going back to the states to visit California with Monica and to see my own family in North Carolina. My boss told me that she wasn’t sure I could rent an apartment if my visa was going to end in a few months or didn’t extend for a year so I can make a contract with the realtor. That was pretty scary but then she was explaining a little bit more of how the system works and it looks like we would have to be out of the country or fly out of the country on the 30th of July and my visa for Keio University would start on the 5th of September. That would mean a whole month in the states and that would be pretty fun. But it means that I would probably have to show up in Japan without an apartment but potentially a temporary 1 month apartment and then during that month have to go find an apartment. That doesn’t seem so bad but it was not what I planned and it makes moving in hard and it would be hard to have our stuff stored and then shipped to us in Tokyo or something. I don’t know how that is going to work.

The other thing is Monica’s visa. We are trying to find a way to have her stay with me in Japan. She says that if we weren’t together she would probably just go back to the states and that scares me. It makes me feel like I am an obstacle in the way of her future or something. We have been talking about getting married. I have never talked about anyone I have been with about getting married, though I have never been with someone like her before. I have been in a relationship for so long with someone who I felt such a deep connection too. I love her so much and find myself reaching for ways to express that and find myself having to use analogies about stars, great distances or the wide embrace of the sea. However, none of these analogies actually capture the depth of my love for her.

We have always said that we have no interest in having kids. That was at least up till a few months ago. Actually, it’s getting close to a year ago that we figured out what we would name our daughter if we had one. And we would have a daughter. We do not want to raise a boy. We are going to name her Lemon. And we are probably going to get her a different last name because we both are uninterested in changing our current last names. Her middle name is still undecided. This shows how serious we are about each other. I just turned 26 though and I am just about to be starting an intense language program followed by several years of grad school. I have always said that I would get married once I got my life together.

I have been listening to a lot of the Savage Love Cast. He says a lot of things about sex, love and marriage that I respect. I think that too many people get married to early. They have not figured out what they are going to do with their lives and they have a lot of steps to climb to get there. They may find it doesn’t work that way and they ran into a dead end. They have to go back down a few steps and climb back up in a different direction. I am getting, I think, to the last couple of stairs on the staircase and if I succeed in grad school I will be able to get a job as a professor at University here in Japan. This has been my dream for the last 5 years or so. I feel so close to it and yet still very far away because I know it will be several years before I have a degree qualifying me for such a position. I am not even totally sure that my Japanese language ability will stand up to the challenge yet.

I know I say this a lot in my blog, but I don’t really know where this entry is going. I am just trying to write a few things down in hopes that they will help me figure all of this out. I have to find an apartment and I have to find the next step on the staircase. I can very realistically see myself married to Monica in a few years But I am not quite ready to get married yet. I have talked to my mom and my sister about this a little bit recently. My mom loves Monica and at times I feel like she likes her more than me. My mom doesn’t know the answers either and she doesn’t claim to. I find her honesty very refreshing and even if that means she doesn’t have the exact words to make me feel better or to help me find that next step it makes me feel safe. My sister loves Monica too and would love to see us married, but she said quite simply, “When you are not ready you are not ready.”

That doesn’t mean that in a year or so I won’t be ready. I think Monica thinks that because I am not ready yet means that I won’t ever be and that is not true. I don’t think it is true. I am worried she thinks that it means that don’t love her or that she is flawed and I am struggling to show her that I do love her and that I don’t think something is wrong with her and that something is preventing me from marrying her. It isn’t like that at all. I think she agrees with me that people get married when they have their lives together for the most part and we are not at that point yet. That doesn’t mean we are going to break up and that doesn’t mean that we won’t work together to help each other get or lives together. That is a play on words. It is not a very articulate one but it shows that like Badly Drawn Boy says, “One plus one is one.”

I used to listening to Badly Drawn Boy when Monica and I first started dating. I wanted nothing more than to be with her but she wasn’t sure of our relationship and we were on strange footing living far away. We would ride the train to each other and we would have a great time together and not want to be apart but when we were apart she wasn’t sure if she was ready to be in a relationship. I was in limbo for a while with her not knowing if we were going to be able to be together and the whole time I was listening to Badly Drawn Boys music thinking of stratagems to be with her.

Now, I am sitting on the couch while she naps. I want nothing more than to be with her. I am seriously thinking about marriage. I am thinking about how much I love her. The footing is strange here again. We only have a place to stay for another month, our visas are about to expire. I am hardly apart from her except for when I am at work. When I am at work I want nothing more then to be at home with her. I was in limbo about grad school. Now, we are in limbo about an apartment and a visa.
Johnny Walker is cutting cats open to take their hearts and their souls. Just this time, he is explaining his plans to me in Japanese. I am going to be listening to more Badly Drawn Boy in the near future. But while Monica is asleep I want nothing more than to just sneak into bed next to her and say look, this is going to be ok. We are strong and we love each other. We are smart and we can do this.

But I can’t. When she is sad she has to be alone and she has to take a nap. She will talk to me about this more soon, but now I just have to sit alone listening to Badly Drawn Boy with my heart beating really fast and a tear in my eye. I want to finish the next chapter but I understand enough Japanese to know what the gory details of what Johnny Walker is doing to those cats.

I am scared and the person that calms me down the most is in the other room asleep.

Full Circle / 12 of 12

2009-05-15T10:24:00.001+09:00

I am in such a good mood today. This entry is an attempt at figuring
out why. I woke up today at 6:40. I usually wake up at 5:30 and go
catch the train. I leave the house at 6:45. There is no way I can make
it on time so I send an email to my boss saying I wanted to take an hour
of my saved time off this morning so that I am not late. She says it is
no problem.

I get up and I start getting ready, I wake up Monica who is usually in
bed when I leave. We start getting ready for work together and we are
watching the shows we normally watch. There is a horoscope feature of
Mezamashi Terebi, the morning show we always watch. But it comes on
after I am normally gone, so I never see it. Monica usually text
messages me to tell me where I am on the horoscope. I am a Gemini. She
is a Capricorn. She is number one today. Everything is supposed to go
well... She is going to have a really good for various reasons. I,
however, am ranked number twelve. Twelve of twelve. But I was in a
good mood and I say to Monica, "I don't know how that is supposed to be,
I feel pretty good and I don't have a busy day scheduled today…" She
says, "Well, you are late for work…" She's right. I am late and I hate
to be late. Whenever I am late I have tons of anxiety about it. But
today for some reason I didn't.

She leaves for work while I am still packing my bag up and I go down to
catch another train to head to work. I am rereading Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami. I read it almost 3 years ago in English. The book
was originally written in Japanese and I found a cheap copy of it at
Book-Off (a used book store) this past weekend. I picked up and read
the first page without any problems and I was shocked. Could I actually
read this deep philosophical book in Japanese? I, apparently, could. I
have been reading it on the train and after dinner a little bit each day
since. If it was an English book I would be very far through but my
reading speed in Japanese is about a third of my reading speed in
English, so it is a little slow going. But I understand almost every word.

On the train this morning, I get to the point where my favorite
character appears. His name is Nakata. He is 50 something mentally
handicapped man. He is humble and polite and has the ability to talk to
cats. He gets money from his brother and the government to survive but
makes money on the side finding peoples lost cats. He is really good at
his job, obviously, because he can go and ask neighborhood cats if they
have seen the missing cat around.

Reaching this part in the book I find myself grinning, hugely on to
myself. There train is by no means full, but there are a good number of
people on it. I wonder what they think of me, a white guy from America
reading a famous Japanese book and grinning like a fool. At this point,
I realize I have come full circle.

I arrived in Japan in August of 2006 to work 3 years. My 3 years is
almost up. On the airplane from America to Japan, I started reading
Kafka on the Shore in English. I landed and in my first few weeks I
found little time to read because of the excitement of starting my new
life in Japan. But I started reading it slowly again and I was making
new friends. One of those friends, was a Japanese-American girl named
Monica. She was reading Kafka too. We didn't notice this at first. I
was about 40 pages ahead of her. We started hanging out all the time
and talking about Kafka… of course we start dating and we have been
dating for almost 3 years now.

Now that my time is coming to an end here in Miyazaki, I find myself in
a weird position. I don't really want to leave Miyazaki Prefecture
because I have come to love it here. Changes can be so subtle or so
big. I am reading Kafka, again. In Japanese. I am reading Kafka on
the Shore in Japanese almost exactly 3 years from when I read it in
English in deep anticipation of my new life ahead of me in Japan.

My feelings about the book are the same. Beautifully written, the
characters are all so deeply intriguing. The way the cats talk to
Nakata about the how cats see the world strikes me as so profound still.
It feels like I am reading it in my native language because my
understanding feels so fluid. When I catch myself sometimes and say,
"Eric, this is Japanese. You are reading Japanese. It's not your
native language…" I am shocked. My Japanese is perhaps where I wanted
it to be when I first came to Miyazaki. I think I probably wanted to be
more fluent than this, but this is a huge milestone.

When I started reading Japanese books for the first time a while back, I
started reading things like The Little Prince or the Disney Aladdin
books. They were kid's books that were written in easy to understand
Japanese. I always wanted to read deeper philosophical books--Murakami
books. Or there is this neuroscientist that is often on TV talking
about how the brain works. I want to read all of his books too. But I
couldn't. I was frustrated by my confusion when picked those books up
and I saw that half of the words I didn't understand. More than half
perhaps. Being able to just pick up and read Kafka on the Shore like
this (without a dictionary on hand at all times) is like I have finally
made it up that long staircase. The one I have be climbing for years
now waiting to get to the place where the philosophical discussions
where happening. But I got caught up on the stairs playing with the
kids who had no interest in reading the top of the stairs. Aladdin and
The Little Prince are slinkys that I pushed down the stairs and chased
after. Kafka on the Shore is the knocker on the door at the top of the
stairs. I am almost ready to walk inside.

Pie Charts / The Economics of Me

2009-05-13T15:07:00.000+09:00

I’ve been doing pretty well these days. Life has been good. But I spent a lot of money on my new computer and in paying applications fees for the universities I am trying to attend. I paid money to my loans back in the states and I found myself without almost nothing left over. I knew a long time ago that I was horrible with money. I am having a hard time really finding the direct root to this, but it seems to be linked to the lifestyle that I have.

Since I was about 14 or 15 years old, working at Laser Quest in Charlotte, I got into the habit that entertainment money was money spent eating out. Almost everyday after work, I would use my money to go out to eat with my coworkers and friends. It seems a little ironic now that I was working that job mostly to have money to go out with the good friends I made of my fellow employees. But then I entered college and I didn’t know how to cook. I started going to restaurants and hanging out with my friends there. My habit of food as entertainment continued and perhaps got worse. Also, I found myself going to a lot of the same restaurants that I was eating at during my Laser Quest days.

When I first came to Japan, when I was living alone, I felt like my paycheck was huge and didn’t know how to spend it all. I spent about 30,000 yen ($300) a month on my phone bill, talking to Monica, because I didn’t understand the plan and didn’t notice it was that high because it came out of my internet bill. The company that ran my home phone was the same as my internet company. When I learned to read the breakdown of the bill, I was shocked that I had spent that much for so long without noticing it. I don’t really have an excuse because I should have noticed my internet bill was unreasonably high.

Monica and I moved in together and my bills went down by a significant amount, but my transportation cost a lot more. An hour’s drive worth of gasoline and/or train tickets later and I was in roughly the same boat. But I bought an iPhone and my phone bill went up again. Monica and I started hanging out with our neighbors and spending more money eating that I had in Mimata. So I ended up roughly the same. Until my apartment with her really started to feel like home and we invested in books and furniture and other things. I had paid off my credit cards while living in Mimata, so I should have had extra money but I didn’t because of buying those household things.

I have a little bit of money in a savings account. But it is no where near where it should be. It is honestly a little embarrassing and pitiful that it is so small. I keep telling myself, at least I’m out of debt (except for student loans…). But that is hardly feeling like enough.

If I get into school in Tokyo, Monica and I will be moving to Tokyo. I will be a college student with, hopefully, a part-time job. Monica will get a part-time job too. Our income will be so, so small compared to what we are used too. Our apartment will cost about the same and our bills will probably cost the same too. I am going to have to find a different form of entertainment because restaurants are more expensive in Tokyo.

We looked for apartments online. They are way cheaper than we had originally thought, but they are really small still. We are going to have to make due with less things and learn to budget. I am worried that we will not learn how to do that, but we have to. We either learn to survive like that or we starve to death.

My father is going to loan me the money for tuition and things. I am going to try and become a university professor one day and hopefully that will be a decent living. I hope to be able to pay my father back and still be able to go to restaurants every once and a while. But it will be good to have broken myself of the restaurants-all-the-time habit.

I downloaded an iPhone application that is supposed to help me keep track of my expenditures and see where my money is going. I used to track things in an excel document but I haven’t done it in over a year and a half. I want to scare myself with how big the pie section for eating out really is. But I am broke right now. Payday is a week away and I bought the iPhone application anyway. It cost 600 yen ($6) that I could have spent on transportation or food instead. That is proof that I still have a lot to learn…

がっかり　/ Slower Than Light Speed

2009-04-20T10:31:00.003+09:00

Last Wednesday, I mailed out the first of my applications for grad school. It was for a school that was not my first choice but was my second choice. Everything was done on time despite me waiting till the last minute before getting the application filled out. Today was the due date for my first choice school. I had gotten most of it together, or so I had though, last week. I had not filled out all the paperwork but I had all the medical checkups done by the doctors and I had ordered all the transcripts and received all of the recommendation letters. I was planning on sending out the application on Friday of last week.

As I was getting the application together, I realized that I was missing a document that I needed. It was called the Pledge Form. I had not looked through this document in detail but seeing the description of it I thought it was just me signing a pledge to the university to uphold some kind of code of conduct blah blah blah… But when I opened it up to start to fill it out, I realized my mistake. It was actually a document that was showing my father or mother or some other guarantor to help me pay for school or to be a contact in case something happened. The due date for this to be received is today.

I emailed my dad and sent him the form but he had trouble opening it because of a lack of Japanese language support. I contacted him over the weekend and I faxed it to him. He filled it out and scanned it. Then he emailed it to me. This all happened at about 3 in the morning here in Japan. I lost some sleep to this but also to anxiety.

Today is Monday, the 20th of April. My friend George’s birthday. It is also the Columbine Disater’s anniversary and Hitler’s birthday. It is the day before payday and it was the due date to RECEIVE these documents. In my head, I thought it was supposed to be received on Tuesday, but that doesn’t make sense cause I knew that Tuesday was the 21st and therefore payday. Yet, somehow I still thought I had until tomorrow for my application to be received. When I realized that today, I panicked a little bit. I checked in the fine print of the document to see if it said that it had to be postmarked by that date. Sophia university, for example, requires that there documents be sent by registered mail and postmarked by the due date. The applications can be received after the due date if the postmarked date is correct. But my first choice university says that the documents have to be received by the due date.

I asked my coworkers if there was a same day service offered by the post office in Japan and they said they thought it existed. So I rushed down to the post office and asked them if they could get this envelope to Tokyo by the end of the day. They said it wasn’t possible and that the fasted method was by 10 tomorrow morning on the 21st. Sad. I bought a money order from the post office for the amount of 100 dollars. That is the application fee and I thought I would just try and mail it anyway and see if I got lucky and they accepted it late through some miracle.

But I remembered that there was a Kuro-Neko service down the street. It is a Japanese fedex like company. I ran down there and was like can you get this delivered by today? They, sadly, told me the earliest would be tomorrow in the afternoon. So, I ran back to the post office and I had them send it so that it arrived by 10 am on Tuesday. A day late. I am hoping that maybe they will accept it as it is postmarked by the due date. But I am not sure they will. I feel like my 100 dollar money order will go to waste. I feel like I have no chance at getting into that school now.

I am really upset now because I only was going to apply for two schools, my first and second choice. Then I would have two chances to get into grad school. Now, all of my eggs are in one basket. I have one chance to get into school here..

Let’s hope I get lucky.

Update:
I just called the school and told them I wanted to let them know that my application would be late. I told them I had a problem getting the Pledge form printed and that I was very sorry it was not arrive in on time. The lady spoke kindly on the phone but her response was, "Our policy is that the materials must arrive by today. The screening of your application will be effected negatively by late arrival."

I suppose that is good news because they will actually be looking at my application. Or it at least sounds that way. Even if I am effected negatively by my application being late, there is still a chance that I will be accepted if they really liked my essay or if my grades were better than everyone else that applied.

I know that is very unlikely thought. Sad.

Welcome to English World / Quantum School Bus

2009-04-17T14:41:00.001+09:00

Today, I had my first classes of the school year. In Japan, the school year starts in April and runs till March with breaks every few months or so. My classes were with a few of the other English teachers for the first year of Jr. High kids. I suppose it translates into 7th grade in the states. This is the grade level that starts studying English so these kids don’t even know the alphabet yet. They may recognize a few words in English when they are written down but they have no knowledge of phonetics.

One of the teachers who I thought was kind of a hardass gave a really good speech during the class. This was in Japanese, of course, to make sure the kids could understand his inspiring words. The speech was called “Welcome to English World.”

He said that they should think of English as a metaphor for learning in general. There are tons of things written in English in Japan and they likely cannot read most of it. They may see these things and wonder what they mean. If they are really curious they might ask someone or look it up. Many students say that there is no reason to learn English and many teachers say this too. Most Japanese people do not leave Japan so they don’t really need for survival. But in his speech he said that only speaking Japanese they can speak to only so many millions of people. Japan is a small country, it makes up a tiny portion of the worlds people and Japanese is not spoken outside of Japan so in a sense they live in a very small world. They are surviving but they could do more than that.

As they study English, they will learn what the English signs or the English on their shirts mean. But more than that, they will be able to have conversations with people from outside the “Japanese” world. The English world is bigger and it has many things in it the students will probably want to understand but that they don’t even know exists yet.

The speech made me want to study more. Not just Japanese, but everything. There are so many things I want to know but don’t ask. There are so many things I want to know but don’t know who to ask. It was inspiring to hear him say that to the students and announce that he was there for them to ask questions too.

I want Einstein to show up and say hey Eric, ask me whatever you want. I would settle for Steven Hawkings or George Lakoff though.

In science you learn so many things that broaden your world view and can change your life. With physics, I learned that as I move faster, running to catch the bus I am slowing the time in the world around me. Without knowing this, I could catch the bus and my life would go on, but knowing it enriches my life.

Guilt Tripping Myself Out / New Computer

2009-04-06T18:32:00.003+09:00

Yesterday I caved to a huge pressure that had been building up for a long time. Ever since I came to Japan and saw how little of the software here was supported on Macs I wanted to get a new computer. That goes hand and hand with the bad timing in which I purchased my Mac. Just after buying my iBook G4, they came out with the Intel-chip-that-can-run-windows-too! MacBooks. I missed this by about 4 or 5 months. If I had waited that time, I would likely not have bought a new computer yesterday.

But I was thinking for several months now that I should just suck it up and buy a cheap used laptop. They have this store called HardOff here (no they are not aware of the way that sounds to native English speakers!) that sells used hardware and furniture. I have only been there once, but I have been to many other recycle shops like it. I knew that I could get an older, used laptop that runs windows in Japanese that would solve all of my problems. But Monica bought a new computer and it was a Mac that could run windows and Mac os so I had no real need.

I went into Best Denki, a store similar to BestBuy and I walked past this tiny little computer. It didn’t have a CD or a DVD drive at all. It was just a tiny little computer with a tiny screen and a tiny keyboard. It was faster than my old iBook and it was kind of a bare minimum machine. It didn’t come with any software or anything. I figured I could get all that stuff online later because the price was so cheap! It was around 480 dollars.

Monica thought it was cute too. Because it was so small and it was likely hard to use it had a touchscreen LCD screen. She was playing with this for a really long time and she decided that despite having a new computer herself, she should get one of those tiny computers. Though, she ultimately decided not to get it because it was hard to type on. I tried to type on it myself but it was not working well. My fat fingers were hitting 2 keys at the same time no matter how much I tried.

I had already become certain that I would buy a new computer though. I stepped to the side and looked at some that were slightly larger and that would have an easier keyboard to type on and I found one. I will post pictures to my twitter so that you can see it later. It is white like my old iBook. It was only $470.

It is hard to adjust to using windows again for the first time in I don’t know how long. I mean, I used windows at work a good amount but I have not needed to use any of the advanced settings or do any software installation and set up. I am relearning a lot of what I used to know. I am still planning on using my other laptop for syncing my iPhone for everything but podcasts. So I am not abandoning Macs all together. Overall, I still like Macs significantly better, but I wish they would build little tiny computers like the windows ones they sell in Japan. Also, they are still significantly more expensive and if I had more money I would have just bought a new Mac that could run windows too.

But the price was right so I bought a windows machine. The horror. But honestly, even in the newest operating system for Mac and the newest word processors for Mac there are not all of the features for Japanese word processing and Japanese language support as there is on a windows machine. Macs simply have made a slow start in Japan and the support backbone for Japanese Mac software is simply not there. The operating system will be a pain in the ass to deal with, but at least I will access to everything I will need and get better word processing.

On a side note, there was an earthquake yesterday. It was a 4 on the Richter scale. This was the first one that big in three years. That isn’t the big news though. The big news is that it was the first earthquake that I have ever felt! I was doing the dishes and Monica was sweeping our living room floor. We both had our headphone on. We took them off and just stared at each other wondering what was happening. The Monica asked, “Is this an earthquake?” and my response was “I have never felt one before!”

Sorry that isn’t the most interesting story… The whole thing only lasted like 30 seconds or so. There was no damage or anything. The epicenter was off in the ocean, so it didn’t reach us in full force.

Other Brains / Bird Calls

2009-03-30T12:26:00.000+09:00

I know that this is relatively common knowledge these days. So pardon me if this just sounds stupid. But I had a microepiphany just now.

I wrote last week about how the teachers in Japan get transfered to different schools this time of year. The people who are leaving come by my office in the board of education and they announce that they are leaving. They thank everyone and then they leave. The last day of work is tomorrow for them. The speeches they give are often very simple thank you’s and nothing more but a few people give relatively long winded speeches saying how many years they were here and all of the things that they learned during their time here.
 The kind of Japanese that used during these speeches is rather formal and it is not the kind of Japanese I am used to hearing or using. But I have learned to understand it pretty well. One of the younger teachers is transferring after 3 years from an elementary school in my town. He spoke so fast that it was kind of hard to understand him, but despite this and his formal tone I found his speech clear and well thought out.

This got me thinking that it is basically impossible for me to speak both quickly and formally in Japanese. I can do one or the other (although not well), the combination kind of makes my head feel like it is going to explode.

While thinking about this during his speech, I remembered some things that I heard on WYNC’s Radio Lab and studied in psychology classes. When you are learning a language, your brain builds passageways that are in your linguistic center and they form certain structures based off of the language. So, you could say that a speaker of English has a certain general structure based off the sounds English uses. They also have memory and the knowledge in them for how to move to make those sounds. The grammar also becomes set and hardwired in your brain. That is why it is hard for native speakers to explain the rules of English. They are in you, you possess the knowledge of what is right and wrong grammatically, but you can’t put it to words cause it is just a structure within you.

Therefore, Japanese also has it’s own structures in the brains of native Japanese speakers. The guy giving his speech speaking at fast speeds so clearly has a different structure in his brain so he can do things that are impossible for me to do. I may be able to train myself to do but the amount of hardwiring a native speaker has may be impossible to achieve. I will have some kind of a Japanese-Language-Center spinoff structure in my brain. It won’t be as good as an original but it will get me by.

During the speech, I started picturing brains and neurons firing and I looked at his head and I was picturing what it was like in his brain. I floated away on those deep thoughts and sadly, I missed the last part of his speech cause I wasn't paying attention.

Speaking of missing things. I used to claim I wrote in this blog because I wanted to record thoughts, memories or feelings that I thought I might not be able to fully maintain. Of course, even writting them down here doesn’t mean I will read this and produce an exact replica of those feelings and memories, but it would be nice to see what I wrote about how I felt at the time.

I used to write myself notes to try and capture the moment and then write more about it later in this blog but I found that difficult to do. I would often write it down and lose it or I wouldn’t have paper with me so I couldn’t get it written. I would then just do my best to remember and so many little moments like my above microepiphany would be lost. Sometimes I would get really creative. Once, while driving I recorded myself saying:

“A machine on the ground,
Puffs the sky, makes the clouds.”

Because I was looking at a smokestack and how the smoke trailed off and became indistinguishable from normal clouds. It struck me as strangely musical.

Twitter has been a great tool for me because I can post all of my thoughts instantly and as they are happening. I am sure that the sheer number of these moments recorded have increased because of twitter as a tool. But it has had a detrimental effect on the amount of blog entries I am actually writing. More moments captured, but less actual words written.

I think that is what attracts me to Twitter so much. I fell in love with Japanese because of my love for Haiku. I fell in love with Haiku because it is an attempt at capturing a moment in a few simple lines.

I just wish a Twitter entry wasn’t called a tweet. I don’t want to have to say “Oh, I was just tweeting.” It makes me sound like a bird.

Party Season / A Greater Understanding

2009-03-27T09:08:00.004+09:00

Here in Japan, the end of the fiscal year is coming fast. This is the time where there are a lot of people changing jobs, retiring, switching departments et cetera. As a result of this, i have had very few classes. I have been foraging around trying to get the information i need and the forms i need to sign up for graduate school. Monica is thinking about taking a position in Tokyo so i might be going for my Master's in Tokyo rather than Kyoto. With that sudden change, i have been stressing myself out worrying about the upcoming deadlines for grad school.

Because i have no classes at the Jr. High that I work in, I have had a few classes at elementary schools and at kindergartens. Yesterday, I went to a kindergarten with my coworker Karen. It is a school that i have only been to maybe 3 times now total. So i don't know the teachers well or the students well. Actually, the last time i think i went to that school was over a year and a half ago, so the students i would have known have all moved on to elementary school.

We gave an hour or so long presentation about American and Australian (Karen is an Aussie) food, culture and so on. It was basically the stuff that kids would like. "This is a giant hot dog!" and all of the kids yell "I want to eat that!" It is by no means hard work, but it can be taxing because of the age of the kids. They are so cute though and I have many cute and funny stories that I want to tell you guys here but I will just pick a few of my favorites and i will also tell about one boy that was a little menace.

First, we played a came called Corners. In this game, you take 4 things that the kids know how to say in English and put them in the 4 corners of the room. For example, we used Watermelon, Pineapple, Grapes and Corn. These are some slightly harder words that the kids know. We were playing with 4 and 5-year-olds. There was probably something like 25 of them, 3 teachers and then Karen and I. One person stands in the middle of the room and counts to ten. Ther person counting isn't allowed to look but they can listen to the sound of the kids walking or running to know where there are a lot of them. Then they name one of the corners and all of the kids in that corner are out. The remaining kid after you go through that process a few times is the winner.

Karen was counting and I was standing over by the corn at the wrong time and was out. I sat in the middle of the room with the other kids that were out. This one little boy comes over to me, without saying anything and sits on my lap, smiles and then gives me a cute innocent kiss on the cheek. Then sat down next to me like nothing happened. It was a really innocent and genuine kindness from a total stranger and I was moved a little bit. I told Monica about how nice that little boy was and her response was "Was the kiss just in a cute little kid way or was it in a gay way?" I told her, "i don't know?" and then we both laughed.

Next, there was this little girl who has one of my favorite Japanese girls names. 椿. Tsubaki. It means camellia (the flower) or it can mean a tea grown in the mountains. She was really into understanding the way people work, how things work and how rules worked. For example, I said to her as playtime was coming to an end, "Someone left that ball out. Where does it belong?" and she took me by the hand and kind of shook her head as if to say "What are we going to do with you, Eric? You don't even know where the toys go!" Then she walked me over to the ball, told me to pick it up, walked me over to the toyshed. Instructed me on how to open the door, showed me the basket where that kind of ball belonged, and as we were leaving reminded me that the door has to be shut. Then, she told me that she heard I was eating lunch in her classroom and showed me where her class was and brought me a seat. She is one of those kids that really wants to be an adult already. It was very cute.

There was another little boy who didn't hang out with me very much, but he often would come up to me and ask me questions. The questions he asked were all very similar and he was shocked that I didn't know the answers. It really shows the developmental stage that some of the kids are in, where they can't understand a standpoint that isn't their own. He came up to me and asked, "Do you know my dad's name?" and I told him I didn't. He replied, "It's Yuta" and gave me a look as if to say DUH and walked away. He came up later with another little boy and he said, "This is Yuki. Do you know what his mother's name is? She's really famous around here." I told him I didn't know what his mom's name was and he gave me the same look and then said, "You should know these things Eric. His mom is Yuko!"

Lastly, the boy that was really annoying. This kid had too much energy to sit down and was running around like a crazy person. He also was really violent and I had to constantly tell him to calm down and that he can't hit people. He came up to me and instead of shaking my hand like the rest of the kids, he promptly punched me in the balls. The teacher ran over to him and took him away and yelled at him.

Later, I was on the merry-go-round with Tsubaki and her friends. It was this weird merry-go-round that had seats. I would push it really fast and all the little boys and girls would laugh and then tell me to change direction. I would grab the bars and throw us into the other direction. The violent kid comes up to us and hops on the merry-go-round and tries to sit in the space between the seats where your feet are supposed to go. Tsubaki yelled out to the teacher and informed her of his improper use of the merry-go-round and she came and pulled him off. He started screaming and yelling stuff like "It isn't danergous to ride like that let me go!" and the teacher would tell him "Yes it is!"

A few minute later, out of no where, he comes up and punches Tsubaki in the back and tries to drag her off the merry-go-round. I grabbed him by the arms and lifted him up and personally walked him over to the teachers and told them what he did. Then they came up to see if Tsubaki was ok. Crazy! That kid probably hurts animals and is going to be a serial killer.........have I been watching too much Criminal Minds and CSI?

Last night was the going away party for the Jr. High that I work at. There were two English teachers that I work with leaving and it was a sad night. These parties can be so sad for the teachers who are leaving and going to other schools. I think I have written about the system here before, but every 3 or 6 years or so the teachers in my prefecture get transferred to another school to "share the wealth" of their teaching skill to all of the citizens. I don't really think I agree with the system, but it is what it is. There is one English teacher that I dislike and have hoped for all of my 3 years here that she would be transferred away and yet, she is still here.

One of the English teachers was not sad to leave at all. She is going to a school much closer to where she lives and it is a smaller, less stressful school. The school I work at is the biggest Jr. High in the whole prefecture and as a result is a pretty busy and hectic place. There were many jokes about how teachers are sad to leave even though they were upset about being sent here in the first place. They always point out how it made them stronger working at a school like this and many of them cried. This English teacher wasn't sad at all and was one of the only ones who didn't cry or at least get worked up.

The other English teacher that was leaving was not switching school but actually moving to Australia to do an exchange program. She was sad to leave of course but she has a great opportunity ahead of her and it was her choice to do the program. They are not legally allowed to tell the students they are leaving until it is officially announced and she gave a great speech about how her students are saying things to her like "Don't leave, ok?" "We will miss you a ton if you go, so don't go ok?" and how she knows that she is leaving them through a choice she made. It makes her sad because she doesn't want to leave her students here. She just wanted to experience living abroad. She had to be strong and not cry in front of them otherwise they would know she is leaving.

There is a lady that helps set up the school lunch every day. She is an office working but volunteers to help out with the lunch. She has only been at my school for a year but she and i became friends very quickly. She talks about her sons or we discuss cultural differences over lunch. There are always many other teachers around but she and i have little conversations like that everyday.

She is changing schools and actually be in the same town at another school that I occasionally go to but we won't see eachother everyday. There is a part in the evening where everyone goes up to the people leaving, says something nice to them about the time they worked together and wishes them luck. Then with a little "cheers!" they move on to the next person. When I got to this lady she said, with tears in her eyes, "I guess we can't have lunch together anymore!" It was very sad. At the time, I didn't know which school she was transfering to, but when I found out that she was just going down the street I went up to her and said "You aren't going too far! I still eat lunch there occassionally!" and she smiled.

There was a math teacher who is my own age. He is one of the "part-time" teachers that hasn't reached officially teacher status and despite the title still works full time. He was here for a year and is moving to a school in the city where I live. So he won't be too far from me either. He and I often talk about video games or tennis and things like that. We had always said we should play tennis together or go out for drinks sometime, but because I always had to catch a train home we never had that chance. I went up to him and said that since he is in my city now we should be able to go have that drink or play a game of tennis or two.

Another teacher gave a speech about him on stage. This turned into him roasting the junior math teacher. He said all the funny things that they had done together. The senior math teacher was really funny in his speech and the younger math teacher was balling from the beginning. The senior math teacher just kept going and would periodically get a little choked up or distracted by the junior teachers crying. Then during his own speech, the junior math teacher would stop crying periodically and then say something funny in a normal, noncrying voice and then resume crying after his punchline was delivered. It was hillarious.

I really feel like this year's going-away party was sadder that the last two. Perhaps, I was sadder because this is my lsat year too. But I think it was just my Japanese impoving. I understood so much of the speeches and was surprised when I realized I got most of the jokes. I also had more knowledge about the office this time around and i understand the office dynamics more. My train ride home was filled with good memories my time there as I drifted in an out of a semidrunk sleep.

I wonder if they are going to have a mini party for me when i leave...

Saint-Exupéry / It's Ok, It's Only My Body

2009-03-18T13:33:00.002+09:00

I just finished rereading The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry for the 3rd or 4th time in the past 3 years. I have read it twice in English and one and a half times in Japanese. This is probably one of the only books i can read over and over again with total awe.

This last time, however, i read the About the Author section at the back of my English copy of the book. The truth about his life and the similarities to The Little Prince are shocking and the story of his life hearkens back to a time that i can hardly really picture. But the story of his life is inspiring and filled with some of my favorite things. I have written in this blog a few times about some people that i respect and admire to the point of being personal heroes but few of them live lives that i could say i want or would have wanted to live.

Saint-Exupéry was a pilot first and foremost and that has inspired basically all of the books he has written. The Little Prince is no different as the story of the prince starts with a man who survives a plane crash into the Sahara desert. This too is based on the] 2 plane crashes that Saint-Exupéry survived--one into the Sahara and the other toward the end of his life in Guatemala. Saint-Exupéry flew planes before World War II as a mailman. He was delivering mail and packages from France to Northern Africa often under gunfire because of hostile African-European relationships.

Anyone who has known me for a decent amount of time knows that i am obsessed with the concept of a postal service. The fact that you can stick a stamp on something and put it in a box and it is taken across the world to someone else shocks me. In this day and age, no one really writes letters anymore and that is sad. But it doesn't surprise me. With email and such it is hard to find a reason to write a letter or take the time to send something through the mail. Instead, you can just have it delivered at light-speed to the person via email. But the molecules and the atoms that you touched aren't going to be touched by the receiver. The smell of another city, country or world doesn't get sealed in the envelope. There is no envelope. In fact, the whole nature of email works on the concept of copies and the transmitting of copies. That just isn't the same. I have a collection of envelopes. I would be somewhat interested in a collection of stamps. I love sending mail but i find often i don't have the time.

I have often fantasied about being a mailman, but the times are not right for it. Few people send letters, letters don't hold sway. The important messages, the urgent ones are all emails (or phone calls). Furthermore, the economic world has changed to the point where i cannot see myself as a mailman. But i picture myself holding and delivering letters happily every day, dreaming of the mysteries written inside. I am honestly fascinated by communication in general, but letters have become the paragon of communication for me.

Saint-Exupéry risked his life to deliver the mail and that earns deep respect from me.

Another thing i am crazy about is deserts. I get lost in deserts in my dreams, but it is always happily. There is something about the sand on a desert and on a beach that is so beautiful. I used to have a reoccurring dream that i was in a desert with an old wall. It starts really low to the ground and gets gradually taller and taller. In the dream, i would start at the shortest part and try and walk like a tight-rope walker all the way to the end of the wall. I inevitably fall and have to start again. I would walk that wall for hours in my dream and i had that dream a few times a year for at least 4 years.

One of the reasons i am a fan of Aladdin, Prince of Persia and other stories or games of that sort is because deserts are a magical place of mystery to me. I don't know why. Perhaps, it is because of the barrenness. The hope for an oasis. The seeming endlessness. I don't know. They are just the epitome of beauty and mystery.

Lastly, there is a little bit of mystery about Saint-Exupéry's death. I suppose, that isn't exactly true. We know roughly what happened, just not the details. He was killed by the Nazis but his body hasn't been found. He fled to America during the invasion of France and wrote The Little Prince and many other books while living there. But despite bad health (from his crash in Guatemala) and relative old age for a solider, he went back to fight the Germans. He flew out of Corsica on July 31st, 1944 (only a year after publishing The Little Prince) never to return.

Fallen Heroes / The Future Ain ’ t What It Used to Be

2009-02-17T10:21:00.001+09:00

Yesterday, I received the results of my Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). I took it in December of 2008. I took the second hardest level. I had taken it the December of 2007 and failed. Having not studied for it in 2007, I expected to fail. But I studied very hard in the second half of last year and I am currently still taking classes with a private tutor.

Recently, there have been several times where I have felt my Japanese was really good. It made me feel like something good has come from my studying. For example, I had purchased a book called Summer's Sad Haiku about a year ago. This book was pretty interesting when I could understand it but for the most part it went unread. I picked it up again last week and found that I could read basically all of the book! This is not to say that I could get all of the funny parts or even understand the meaning of all of the Japanese characters but on the whole I could read the book. I was really proud of myself.

But I failed the JLPT for the second time. The test has 200 total points and I fell 5 points short of a passing score. This was significantly higher than last year and significantly closer to passing. If I take it again this June when it is offered, I probably could pass.

With my Japanese tutor, Maki Sensei, I had been studying for the Japanese Proficiency Test for International students. This test only has one level. If you pass your japanese is good enough to get into a college in Japan. This test has different types of questions and includes a writing portion. The second hardest level of the JLPT, that I have failed twice now, is supposed to be slightly easier than the test for international students. I had a feeling that even if I could pass the JLPT, I would be incapable of passing the test for international students.

In anticipation of failing the test for international students, I had been researching intensive Japanese training programs at universities that I am interested in. There are two that stand out in Kyoto--Doshisha and Ryukoku. Doshisha is the school I really want to get into. They are both schools that teach Japanese literature, language, religion and philosophy. But Ryukoku is kind of a religious school that leans towards a sect of buddhism that I am not interested in. These intensive training programs are designed to help you pass the test for international students and offer programs for the students to be recommended into admission as a normal student at their university.

The admission process starts in about a week and the application submission deadline is sometime around the end of April. That said, I really need to work myself to getting the applications to both schools filled out and sent in. I need to also get myself studying more.

I have banned myself from reading English books in an attempt to force myself to read Japanese books. I placed this ban about a 6 months to a year ago. But I have found myself primarily reading manga (comic books). These are entertaining and my japanese is improving as a result. But they are by no means academic books that will lead me toward passing these tests and into a career in academics.

I need to be stricter on myself when it comes to studying. I need to really work harder and spend more time on it or I will not be able to achieve my goals. During the day if I have a few minutes where I am not in class (or in the seasons where I have very few classes), I find myself online reading news articles or articles on Starcitygames.com about Magic: The Gathering. During this time I really should be studying or doing something more productive. The internet is such a huge distraction and I need to find a way to over come it.

Speaking of the internet, a few months ago there was a lady on Fresh Air with Terry Gross speaking about how people's study habits and lifestyles are affected by the internet. She pointed out that more and more people have access to vast amounts of information but studies have show that our attention spans have dropped to low levels. We are surrounded by information but it is unlikely that we are actually processing it. I feel like this is very true for me. I read a ton of things online but I definitely do my share of skimming. Instead of reading the important stuff, I often read unimportant things that are entertaining. I think I should take up meditation again as a way to build my concentration.

If I read Japanese textbooks like I read Star City Games, I would be so much better off.

Lastly, I wasn't blogging when Michael Crichton died. But I wanted to say a few things about him here. The last English books I read (before the ban) were his books. I read Timeline and Next. Ironically, Next was his last book. He has been my favorite author since I was about 10 years old. I was always looking forward to his next book because all of his books (even the worst ones) have been great and fascinating reads. He was a hero of mine and is one of the people that inspired me to be a writer.

It is funny to think that I came the conclusion that I should be a university professor because I wanted to be a writer. Recently, I have thought too much about what it will like to be a professor to remember that it was writing that brought me there. I need to remember that and use it as a focus to bring me back to the productive person I used to be. If I can write one book that is as good as Michael Crichton's worst book (Prey!), I will feel like a success.

On a Leaf / On a Train

2009-02-16T08:58:00.000+09:00

The other day I was riding on the train going to my Japanese class. I was thinking that I needed to get back into blogging in English and talking about important things that happened in my life again. Since the time when I stopped blogging I wondered how many ideas or thoughts I had lost or forgotten because I hadn't been recording them.

The following thought started on the train two weeks ago and I thought of again today:

In the history of my life in America. Most of the time I was living in roughly the same area. I had gotten used to the roads, the layout and the people living there. Whenever I made a new friend, and they too had been living in Charlotte for a while, we had an automatic background of things we could mutually understand by virtue of our understanding of the area.

When I went out and made memories they were so often overlapping other memories. My mind was like a disk where I had something saved on it. Then on the same structure I saved something else. When I went to a place with multiple memories it was like viewing a picture that had been double or perhaps triple exposed. My memories overlapped and I could experience a series of different emotions based on what had happened there.

This morning on Fresh Air with Terry Gross (I don't know when the original aired but I listened to the podcast of it this morning), Joss Wheden was on talking about his new show, The Dollhouse. In this show the main female character volunteered to have her memory erased and reused for 5 years. She was getting paid to fulfill men's fantasies. She had new memories artificially created in her head. After a night on the job she would be erased and an new memories would be inserted. Each time she went out she was a different person living a different life. It made me think a lot about memory and free will.

Having long ago given up on free will, The Dollhouse reminded me of all the reasons I felt that free will was impossible. Where would this girl's free will show up given that she was making "choices" built off of her memories? But then she after being given different memories and she would act totally different because she had in essence become another person. This is no different than the rest of us. We are all limited in our "choices" by our memories.

But that is getting a little sidetracked I suppose.

When I came to Miyazaki I had no memories of the land. I, of course, could see, say, a field and all of my preconditioned responses to fields would come up. I could say, remember a time when I was young and I had gone out in a field, my foot slipped in a hole and my ankle bled the whole way home. But that is different. In Charlotte, when I would turn down a road, I had a complex mental map of the area. I could picture how the roads led into each other and how they would take me to where I wanted to go. Even if I was to get lost I could picture where I was relative to the places that I knew and have a general idea of where I was or at least how to get back to where I knew.

In Miyazaki, I had to start completely from scratch. This experience has been completely unique. I have visited other places in America, say New York or Seattle where I had no knowledge of the area. But I was with people who knew the area and I could read the signs or buy a map. In Miyazaki, I couldn't read all of the Japanese on the maps and therefore couldn't really figure out where I was relative to objects around me. Most of my friends, initially, were other foreigners who were in the same boat as me or had built only a small mental map of the area.

I would drive down roads and I could remember what they looked like but if the taxi dropped me of on the side of the road, I would have been hopelessly lost. This was a curious ignorance that I cannot really put into words. It took a long time to get used to the area but I now have a fairly extensive mental map of certain parts of Miyazaki. If I happened to get lost, I can find my way back to places I know just like I could in Charlotte.

To take this a little bit further and to apply it a bit... I think this is one of the reasons Monica and I get along so well and why I am so happy with her. That is as a supplement to her personalty and otherwise completely fascination mental prowess. She and I started in Miyazaki at the same time and on a similarly blank map. We learned the city together and the prefecture as well. When I went to a restaurant I had never been to, one that I had no pervious memories of or experiences at I was off my mental map. I went to most of these places with her, we were building new memories and recording them on our mental maps. In a way, most of my memories of Miyazaki will be memories of Monica.

This reminds me of a theory I read in a book a long time ago. There are many stories of people falling in love as a result of some kind of tragedy. Say, you were on the titanic and it started to sink and everyone thinks they are going to die. And in fact, most of them will die. Then a pair of people come together who were strangers or knew each other but were not romantically interested in each other. They struggle together and they fled from the Titanic or the burning building or whatever other horrible brush with death. This is a realm where they both in the blank territory of their mental maps. They go through this horrible experience together making huge mountains on their mental maps. Going through this together makes these memories indistinguishable from the person they shared the moment with. Then when it's over they kiss or full in love.

Keanu Reeves kisses Sandra Bullock at the end of the movie Speed.

Then despite their mutual trauma being over they find themselves with a long lasting love.

Monica and I have not gone through anything quite as drastic as surviving a sinking ship and therefore likely don't share the HUGE towering mountains on our maps that DeCaprio and that red head would have. But we have spent more time in area devoid of experience so the end result is much the same.
Even in another place where we both had or one of us had memories of the land, our natural affinity for each and the qualities that we love in each other would have almost certainly brought us together. We would have been together happily much like we are now. But, I think, something about the situation we found ourselves in has brought us closer than we should have come at normal speed, but would have gotten to eventually. We have had our natural mental and physical attraction amplified by the lens of location.

Just like like a bug on a leaf floating down a river I may not have been in control of the way I came to fall in love... but the scent of the breeze, the rushing sound of the water and the stars in the water reflecting from the sky above look beautiful from where I am standing.

Defence of the Presidents Daughters / Filling Out Applications

2009-02-09T13:09:00.005+09:00

I had the strangest dream last night. Monica and I were watching This American Life (the tv show) season two. There was an episode where there was this Iraqi man who was setting up a booth that said talk to an Iraqi. Then they filmed all of the people that came up to talk to him. So perhaps I had Iraq on the mind. Anyway, here is my dream.

The dream started with me on a helicopter. But like in many dreams, i am seeing things from my own perspective. I cannot see myself walking around, nor can i see my hands or feet or anything for the most part. It is basically like a first-person shooter game. We land and i walk out. There is an Iraqi man there who greets me and shakes my hand. I can speak Arabic apparently. I tell him that the presidents daughters have arrived and they are on a good will mission here. You see, this is before the current Iraq War. I don't know if these girls in my dream are George W. Bush's daughters because i have never seen what they look like. Or even if he has 2 girls. Really, I am not even sure if he has kids at all come to think of it. But in this dream, he had 2 daughters. One was 4 and the other was 8 or so.

They were trying to prevent the war from happening. They showed up to show that America was not going to try and invade Iraq and that Saddam wasn't that bad. He would let 2 little girls come and hang out in the palace, see the sights and the amusement parks etc. then let them go. I know this doesn't make much sense. But it gets worse.

I follow them around. I am some kind of special agent, body guard type. There are a bunch of guys dressed in military uniforms with that desert camouflage style color on. I didn't get to see myself in the mirror or anything but i imagine i was wearing something similar. The girls get tired after going to some water park and giving some little speech outside where people cheer that the political relationship between Iraq and America would improve after their peaceful visit. One of the other military guys i worked with said something about how the people are talking about how their can't be a war after this visit went so well.

He was wrong. Night falls, the girls go to sleep. This guy brings me a special radio and said there is something urgent coming in from the general or someone really high ranking. That person said that the president gave orders to nuke a military center outside of Baghdad. The war was going to happen apparently, but it was going to be rather covert. I was told that it was a staged attack to make it look like it wasn't an American nuke and that the Iraqis wouldn't realize that we had done it. But when they retaliate against who they think launched the attack it would be Americas chance to fight back and kill Saddam etc.

I hated to hear that news. It was really fucked up of them to do something like that especially when the presidents daughters were in town. Of course, the city area that we were in wouldn't be affected. The blast wouldn't reach here because the nuke would go off far enough away. After all, that was kind of the plan. America wouldn't launch a nuke so close to the presidents daughters would they?! Apparently they would.

So, i ran to the room where the younger daughter was sleeping. She was in this weird pink story book style nightgown. I poked her cheek to wake her up and i told her that we had to get out and that everything would be ok. I told her that i personally would be defending her if anything was to happen. I told her that no one was trying to hurt her but the situation outside was getting bad so all we had to do is leave as quickly as possible. She nodded, seemed scared but didn't say anything. I ran across the hall to where one of the other military guys had already woken up the older daughter. We we discussed quickly how we were supposed to get them back to the helicopters and someone suggested that we separate them to maximize the safety of the plan. Something like that. I don't remember the explanation.

So i took 2 other guys with me. I sat in the backseat of this Hummer style vehicle with one guy in the front with a rifle and the other guy driving. I don't think i had any guns on me at the time. Or I didn't think i did. We arrive at a checkpoint. The bomb had gone off shortly after i went to wake up the younger daughter and the guards at this post had no idea what was going on. They knew there was some kind of attack and everyone was saying "nuke" in Arabic. I told them that US had nothing to do with it but just to be safe we were trying to get the daughters out of the country as fast as possible. They nodded and let us by. Phew.

Farther up ahead there was a path that we had to take on this side of the city to get toward to the helicopter grounds. There was another checkpoint that we had to get past. The city was getting thinner and thinner as we approached the periphery of Baghdad. We approached the guards and told them the same story as before. We didn't attack you, we just want the presidents daughters safe blah blah blah. They were way more panicked and they didn't seem to believe us. But after some convincing they let us through. The path was big sand dunes on both sides of a little thin straight pass. We set off going down the middle. There was a few little side roads going off to hotels and whatnot just past the dunes.

After they were pretty far behind us we noticed that they were driving at us. Fast. We thought that someone, maybe Saddam himself, had figured out what was going on and were going to try and attack us. They started firing on us and i told the presidents daughter to get down. The guy in the passenger seat with the rifle started fire back on them and must have gotten one of the guys driving behind us cause one of the 2 jeeps crashed into the sand dune and stopped following us. But then he was shot and they were gaining on us and we were obviously out gunned so we pulled off one of the side streets and ran up into this weird hotel thing. It wasn't huge, maybe 4 stories or so max. But it looked to be in good shape.

The soldier in the front seat was dead. We weren't marines so we just left him there and ran into the building. My radio started to go off and i was trying to talk to them as we ran up the stairs to the second floor. I had the presidents daughter on my side and i was holding her one handed. The guys that were chasing us never showed up downstairs. They just were watching us from a distance. I knew that meant something bad was going to happen. Like we were going to get bombed in that building. Also, even stranger, there was no one in this building.

As we were arriving on the second floor and started to look out the window some weird voice came through the intercom system in the hotel. It said that they knew we were responsible and that we would die for it. The floor gave way and the other soldier that was with us fell onto the first floor and died by hitting his head on some tables and other things on the ground. I had a split second to react and jumped and pulled myself up onto the windowsill with the presidents daughter. I radioed for help but no one was near enough to come rescue us. They said that they would send some people over to get us as soon as possible and they were watching the skies for a bomber or something that would come and take us down by demolishing the building.

They radioed us again a few moments later saying they were getting close and we had to find a way to get down to them as they were just going to try by real fast, grab us and drive off so as not to be chased or fired on by the Iraqi soldiers that were at the other entrance to the hotel. You know, the ones that were just watching us.

I told the presidents daughter that we had to get down there. So we would have to try and jump onto the tops of these 2 palm trees that were outside the window. She agreed. But she protested and was scared. But she handled it like a trooper and we jumped (i don't know why i didn't carry her then too) onto the tops of 2 separate palm trees. Then i instructed her where to put her feet and how to side down the trunk of the palm tree so that we could get to the hummer below as it came by.

She handled it like a trooper. Pretty amazing for a 4 year old. We were picked up by the hummer and we drove away. I praised her for how well she was doing given the situation.

We arrived at the airport and we tried to get in. The guards were totally willing to let us in. They were like "hurry hurry you have to get her to safety!" We met up with the other team with the older daughter. They apparently had no trouble along the way. Of course.

Saddam showed up. He was up on the second floor balcony and the place was crawling with Iraqi troops. He lead us in and was like this way this way and was acting all nice. Offering us all these things. Offering the daughters some Iraqi toys (dolls i think). Then he turned on us. Told them to fire, told them that we nuked them blah blah blah.

Out of no where i pulled this military grade shotgun. With a canister explosive launcher on the barrel. I ran the daughters to safety and a gunfight broke out. I kept trying to get a canister explosive near Saddam and the troops above us on the balcony but it took me a few tries. Saddam had run away though. I started sneaking around shotgunning the Iraqi troops and Saddam snuck up on me. He said that he was watching and i should be out of rounds. Then he started firing this pistol at me and i had to run. I got around behind a column and pulled out a pistol. I started to fire at Saddam but he was moving really fast. Eventually i got word that the other troops had used my canister bomb's explosion as a way to sneak the girls out to the helicopter. I could see them through the glass behind me. I checked how many rounds i had fired from my pistol.

I shot a few more rounds near where Saddam was hiding. Couldn't get him. But then i turned around and shot out the glass, leaped down to the run way and ran over to the helicopter just as it was taking off.

The presidents daughters both made it out ok.

Crazy dream huh? I remember it so vividly. I remember thinking it was like the game F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon. The way i was moving and firing the gun looked like that game. I don't really know where most of where that dream came from. My imagination confuses me sometimes.

Back to reality. I have been researching a lot about grad school and Monica and I have been talking a lot about figuring out what to do about our future. We both really want to stay together and she is planning on coming with me to Kyoto when i go to grad school. We are both going to get part time jobs. She is going to do art while i get in class, working on a portfolio etc. in order to become a paid artist. I really think she will be very successful one day because she has a ton of skill.

But the entry into grad school is worrying me. Both the schools i want to go to have applications due at the end of April. Then they announce if you are accepted into the school at the end of May or June. That gives me approximately one month to handle shifting my visa, figuring out where were are going to live etc. It just seems so late. I have like 1 month to figure out how everything is supposed to work. During the time that I am supposed to be getting ready to move out of our current apartment.

And all of that is still contingent on my getting accepted into the school. I also have to prove that i have enough finances to support myself there for a year or 2. Yikes! I have to get my applications ready for both schools, in case only one of them accepts me. I have to apply for financial aid. I have to study for various Japanese tests. I know i am not flooded with classes between now and then (its almost spring break etc) but i am mentally swamped.

But as always, talking to my mom makes me feel better. Monica is also worried about these things, but overall seems more positive than she even realizes herself. The prospect of living with her, mutually fulfilling our dreams is such a great thing to have that i am going to work my best to achieve it. I feel like i can succeed. So i determined to push beyond my lazy habits and get all of those things worked out!

One last little side note. I have realized recently that my computer and my iPhone software and files are all supremely organized. I wish i could have that kind of order and take that much satisfaction in cleaning our apartment as i can in keeping my computer in order.

Oh and...

New hair cut.
Same old silly face.

New Years Resolution / A Bit For Publication

2009-01-07T12:02:00.003+09:00

It has been a really long time since i have written a blog in English. I think it is somewhere around 4 months actually. I had been also writting a blog in Japanese about some of the stuff i was encountering in my daily life and my thoughts on them. I wrote this in Japanese for practice and it went pretty well. Shoji, my Japanese teacher from college was reading it and helping to correct my Japanese. It was a pretty good experience but it was hard to keep up with because I am lazy.

I have been thinking about that a lot recently. I haven't gone for a run in a long long time. I had been too busy with work and too sleep deprived to go play tennis like i used to do. Over winter break, Monica and I just watched movies, sat around in our kotatsu (a table with a heater under it and a blanket built in to keep the heat in) eating. We left the house and walked around a bit but not very much.

I probably weight more now than i ever did in my life. I hadn't eaten meat for something like 7 years and i have maintained my ability to eat large portions of food but now the food is filled with fat and cholesterol that i previously wasn't consuming. But all that said, I am a healthy weight and i am by no means grotesque. While that is certainly something, it doesn't take away my anxiety about health. Being healthy still doesn't change the fact that i am less healthy now. I was always afraid of bodily things like blood, veins and the like and that pushed me to stay away from things like too much sugar. But eating meat now and not exercising is stressing me out a little bit.

One day after a dinner party where Monica and I ate a ton of meat (to the point that we both reeked of smoked boar meat [by the way, i don't like boar meat! It was gross]), I made the suggestion that we walk down to Starbucks, get a snack and then just walk around to the places that we wanted to go. It went well, it felt good and it made me want to be more active again. It's surprising how much you feel sick all the time if you are virtually immobile. But I walk to the train station in the morning and i ride my bike to work once i get off the train. I have been using this as an excuse too much.

I have been studying Japanese really heavily and I am really excited about going into a university in Japan. I feel though, that i don't have enough time to get all the studying done that i need to succeed. That is not for lack of time. This week, for example, i have had no classes and a tiny amount of homework. Instead of getting in some extra studying (actually today i got in some extra studying, but yesterday and the day before) i just played around on the internet, looked at Magic: The Gathering articles, played with twitter and such.

I don't want to sound like I am really stressed out or anything. It is just that I am tired after getting home late from a drinking party with my coworkers last night. My life is actually really awesome. I am living in a country I love, in a city I love, with a girl i love. The only thing i could ask for is a little bit more motivation and more language skills!

Whenever i feel stressed about my language ability something seems to happen to make me feel much better. For example, i studied really hard last year and took up private lessons in Japanese to prepare for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) and I went to take it and was disappointed. I thought i would have been more confident leaving the testing facility because i had studied so hard, but instead i felt like i hadn't tried hard enough. But looking back on it i do think i have a chance to pass. Anyway, so on the second day of the year, Monica and i were invited to go to visit a vice-principle's house and to have dinner with his family and friends. He is kind of a renaissance man and has many hobbies and seems to know a little bit about everything. He was talking to me about my interest in haiku and philosophy. Afterwards, Monica complimented me on my Japanese saying that she was impressed that i was able to express my feeling on the subject so well. I hadn't really thought about it much but looking back i am very pleased that i was able to do that. It gives me a lot of hope.

That said, my reason for writting this blog entry is this: I want to announce my new years resolution. I want to be less lazy and to exercise more. I also have set out for myself a rather concrete (and perhaps faintly achievable goal). My goal is to get a haiku published in this haiku magazine that Monica and i receive. Wish me luck everyone! I also am going to try and write more down in this blog.

Down Where the Moonflowers grow / This Feeling Has No Name

2008-09-16T09:26:00.003+09:00

Today is one of perhaps only two or three times living in Japan has been a burden. As is common knowledge among my friends and family, when i have a problem with the relationship i am in i usually talk to my male friends about it. I am realizing recently that close male friends are not something anymore. In America, I had Paul and Mike among others who i could hang out with to calm down. But in Japan i have male friends that i play tennis with and i have mail friends that i play magic with. These friendships are little more than a year or a year and a half old and because of the language barrier are relatively shallow. This does not mean that i couldn't talk to these people about deeper personal issues in the future its just that i cannot now.

A few months ago, my neighbors Gabe and Paul were my close male friends in Miyazaki with me. Because we all were English speakers and foreigners in a Japan we had a lot of similar experiences and such to bring us together and quickly. They know what my life is like here. If i had a personal problem in Japan, certainly i could talk to Paul and/or Mike about this but as they have little understanding of my relationship with Monica in Japan they would not be a source of relevant advice. Gabe has gone back to Chicago and i haven't talk to him since he left. I have hear from Paul a little bit since he went back to Ireland. The two of them knew me and Monica together for a year and would be the best to talk to about this...

She closes up when shes upset. I talk too much when I am upset. This is likely a bad conbination because the silence is killing me and I just get annoying i am sure as i try to talk to her. I want to give her time alone so she can think about whatever it is she wants to think about. So she can feel however it is she wants to feel. But i don't want to seem distant. I don't want to seem like i don't care. I don't want to seem like i am leaving or running away. I don't want to be gone when she is ready to talk...

I wish i knew how to deal with this better. Since i was a child, when my mother was upset she would lock herself into her room and it would drive me crazy. I would try and talk to her and work out whatever it was she and i were fighting about. I would get really upset and i would cry and pace around. I would go hang out with my friends and maybe talk to them about what happened with her. Then after a few hours or a few days she would come out and she would be able to talk to me calmly about whatever we were fighting about.

You would really think that after 20 something years of this that i would know how to deal with it better. But instead i stay quiet for as long as i can and then i do something stupid and try and start conversation.

I guess this is one of the pains i must endure as part of my sacrifice. I don't want to live in America so i found a place i like better but i have to start from scratch linguistically and with friendships. I used to always say to Paul and Mike that i wanted them to come with me to Japan and it was because i know that kind of friendship is rare and takes years to forge. I value them very highly and i still to this day wish they were here. I wouldn't be so lost if they were here. I don't want to have to choose between the country i want to live in and the girl that i love and want to be with forever. These are two of the things that are most important to people and definitely me. It would be like someone saying "Would you like Oxygen or water? You can't have both!" yet of course they are both essential.

I can't help but believe that i will end up ok. I know that i can survive this but i fear the worst case scenarios. I want to find the words that i can say or the things that i can do to fix this and i believe that i can do that. I still have optimism shining bright somewhere but you can see it. My sun is covered by moon. I just hope it moves out of the way before all the seeds i have planted wither away.

Quantum Physics / A Magnet for Brain Power

2008-09-12T09:01:00.002+09:00

Over a year ago, i wrote a blog entry about the black hole under Europe. I joked that it would be the end of the world but honestly felt that it wouldn't be. Although, i think that is likely a more spectacular end of the world scenario then what is more likely to happen...

Well, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started running on Wednesday of this week. The world didn't end. We didn't swallow up the Earth with vacuum energy or a black hole.

Since my life is relatively ruitine here in Japan (and i don't mean boring or bad. I am really really happy right now). I have to use this blog for some exciting and thought provoking news.

Check it out here!

Tragety averted / iPhone in Hand

2008-07-28T10:03:00.000+09:00

Bam.

iPhone / The Story of How the US Navy Stole My Cell Phone

2008-07-22T09:56:00.003+09:00

This past weekend, Monica and i were out doing errands. We had basically given up on finding an iPhone as we went to about 4 or 5 stores and they were out. Also, no one knew when the next shipment would come in and it just looked like it was going to be unlikely to get an iPhone for a while.

We went to a Softbank Moble store to try and find one anyway. We were near one and we thought, hey, it couldn't hurt. Plus, i wanted to change my internet plan for my current phone to one that would save me some money. So we walk into the Softbank store and immediately these 2 foreign guys turn to me and say, "Hey, you speak English right?" Yeah, i responded. They were looking to get a prepaid phone because one of them had walked into the ocean with his cell phone in his pocket and when they went back to wherever they were living they were going to get it replaced but they wanted a temporary phone.

I told them they couldn't get the prepaid phone at the Softbank store because they are only being sold at convenient stores like 7-11 etc. They packed up their stuff and left after thanking me. They didn't even say goodbye to the lady who was diligently trying to help them. She, however, thanked me for helping them out.

She said that they don't have any iPhones but that other stores still may have some and that we shouldn't lose hope. So i changed my internet packet plan and then asked them if they could call a store they thought might have an iPhone. They did and the store just down the street had one 16 gig iPhone in white which was exactly what i wanted. But they only had 1 and Monica wanted one too. We walked down to that store and we talked about who needed the iPhone more. Monica probably needed it more for her job and i really just wanted it for novelty and the fact that it was cool. She didn't want white but because we might not find another one she thought maybe she should go ahead and take it. I didn't mind if that happened but she didn't want to get a white one and then a black one comes available.

So we get to the story and the lady says that hope isn't lost and said some reassuring words about a 16 gig black iPhone for Monica and she decided to let me go ahead and take the white one. I start filling out the paperwork and the lady is saying things about how its going to go through etc and i felt really confident that i was going get it. Then, those 2 foreignors walked in. They had gone to a few convenient stores and they had not found any prepaid phones. Monica and i decided to help them get one as we were waiting for the computer to process all the information and so we walked to another 7-11 while talking to those guys in hopes of finding a phone for them and do our good deed for the day.

Turns out, the other guy had lost his phone as well but when we pried him for information it turns out he was on top of Mt. Fuji and wasn't able to make calls and so he got angry and threw his phone off the mountain, never to be recovered. Isn't that dumb? Turns out the 2 of them are US navy men in Nagasaki prefecture. One of them, not the dumber one that lost his phone to a Mt. Fuji rage, but the one who went in the ocean with his phone was working as a mine clearer. He worked with people in the Japanese defense forces and with Korea etc. to clear out ocean mines left over from old wars. It seemed like a helpful job and i was glad someone was doing it so i really wanted to help this guy out.

But they didn't have any ID issued by Japan so they couldn't get a prepaid phone. Turns out there is a special Softbank store on the base that they work at and thats how they got phones with only US Military id cards. They were out of luck. But i had this thought. I was getting the iPhone so i would no longer need my cell phone. He had his simm card so he would put it in my phone and it would work like it was his phone all along. So i backed up my information on my phone and then gave it to him to try out. He messed with it for a bit and then thanked us and left. We thought it would have been nice if he gave me something for it. Like some money or whatever because technically it was still being paid off slowly from my bill... but i didn't want to be like hey, pay me for it because it would kind of take away the niceness of my deed. But i was going to take something if they offered. They didn't.

Then, tragedy struck. The approval process is apparently pretty strict for an iPhone and i was going to need to give credit card information to them in order to get the iPhone. I don't have a credit card, but i had a US debit card and i thought that would be enough. But cause i had no money in my account, it was declined. I haven't used that account in a while but i was transfering money home cause i will be there on a short visit soon. But the lady at Softbank was really nice and said that since she had my paperwork i was able to have them hold the iPhone and wait for my money to go through in the transfer and then to try and get the iPhone again with money in the account. Otherwise, i would have to sign up for a Japanese visa linked to my bank account and use that card to apply.

Sad huh. I gave away my phone and got nothing for it. In fact, i got mildly punished because i got a shitty loaner phone cause the Softbank lady saw me give my phone away trying to be nice. I can use this phone and it's not that bad, but it still felt like my good deed was getting punished like that old adage. But there is still hope, maybe i will get an iPhone pretty soon. Also, Paul in Miyazaki is leaving in a few weeks and he said i could use his Softbank phone once he leaves. And his phone is pretty cool so i will be pretty happy if i just end up with that phone.

But the whole ordeal put me in a bad mood. It's the worst feeling when you do something nice and something bad happens to you in return. It took a day or 2 for my bad mood to go away but i am actually seeing the whole thing better now. It's making me laugh and it gives me that funny story about how i lost my phone to Uncle Sam's boys in blue.

Crazy, huh?

I have spoken about cycles before / But this time i feel it. I feel it.

2008-06-23T01:16:00.002+09:00

It's one seventeen in the morning right now. My finger hurts. I cut my nails to short and it got infected and i made it worse by bowling last night. It was bleeding afterwards.

So, i was just in the bathroom, dipping my finger into the cap of a hydrogen peroxide bottle. The peroxide spilled out into the sink and mad a sizzling noise that i first thought was coming from my finger. At some point, when i was still living at home i became obsessed with hydrogen peroxide. i heard it could clean your teeth and make them white so when i was like 12 or 13 i started mixing it into my mouthwash. I had already used it for years to clean out cuts. When i was a little kid, everyone used to tell me it would sting and hurt. They would tell me to be brave an strong and it would heal faster afterward. It never hurt and i always liked the sting.

I am the same as my father. When i was a little kid, he always had a bottle of iodine in the shower. It emptied out so slowly that i felt he barely used it. A whole bottle would last a year i would think back then. I asked him once what it was for and he said it was good for cleaning out cuts but i never liked the way it looked. It was black and milky. Hydrogen peroxide is clear and crisp almost like sparkling water.

I bet if i went to his house today he would still have his iodine in case he got a cut and he would clean it out in the shower. He would get peace of mind from this and it would heal faster. I always thought his iodine was so strange and i have never seen a bottle of iodine anywhere except in the shower he used. I almost felt like it was some secret kind of solution that only he had or that was archaic and he had held onto. But overall, i just thought it was strange. I thought it was his paranoia and perhaps in the ignorance of my youth. The world felt like a safer place back then. I never swore that i wouldn't turn out like him, i never swore that i wouldn't have my antiseptic of choice waiting for me in my bathroom always. I just thought it was so strange back then, that it never occurred to me that i was going to be like that or that i was like that.

The chemical has changed. I still prefer hydrogen peroxide to iodine solution. But in essence, i am realizing the strange that i took for granted was really the normal of the future. I haven't thought of iodine for years, but here, tonight. No, this morning. Stressed cause of paperwork for grad school. Up about 3 almost 4 hours past my normal bedtime. I am troubled by all of the little things that i have to do tomorrow on what will probably turn out to be a pretty easy day.

But as i have always found, optimism prevails. Though, at this moment it has not made me less stressed thinking about iodine instead of errands, i feel perhaps closer to my father than i have ever felt. No, not closer. But more like him than i ever realized i was and i understand perhaps better tonight than i ever have how he feels.

Recapitulations / The Lonely Sandbar

2008-06-10T14:50:00.004+09:00

Hello everyone! So it has been like 8 months or something since i have written my last blog. That is shocking. The thing is, thats not entirely true. For the past month or so i have been writing a blog in Japanese through the Japanese equivalent of myspace which is called mixi. So, my attempt at philosophical musings or recaps of my daily life has not been making it back to you guys in the states. My apologies! So let me give you a little bit of an over view for what my life has been like in the past few months.

The biggest and happiest thing i have to report (though many of you probably know this already) I moved in with Monica! We have been living together since December of last year and things are wonderful. Many compromises have been made and a few things are still being worked out. Mostly, what i mean is that i am not the neatest or the tidiest of people. Oh and apparently, in the summer heat things stick to my bare feet and that freaks her out. But i appreciate her a ton and living with her has been spectacular so far. She has helped me form the healthiest, most fulfilling and deepest romantic relationship in my life.

Recently, she and i have been so busy with work that we have been very very lazy when we are at home. We have watched 4 seasons of CSI on DVD in the past probably 2 months and have watched a ton of Arrested Developement. I sprained my ankle and have (because of rain, my ankle, and just being lazy) have been exercising way less. I am not by any means fat, but i am getting out of my comfort zone! Monica and i have wii fit but barely used it so we have made a decision to try and exercise more. We also have been taking ballroom dancing lessons but haven't gone in a while.

Most of you know this, but probably a year and a half ago (maybe more) i started eating meat again. Those of you who know me as a pretty strict vegetarian know that i ate a ton of food, it was just that there was no fat content in anything that i ate. Part of the reason i have been gaining weight is because my eating habits as far as portion size haven't significantly gone down, but i am eating much more fatty foods, namely meat. When i was back in America for Christmas last year i didn't eat meat though i did eat fish. That was because my opposition to meat was more moral about the conditions of meat production in the states rather than an overall feeling that eating meat was wrong. But i do still think if i ate significantly less meat that i would be healthier or at least a bit thinner!

Anyway, Miyazaki City where i now live is pretty far from Mimata Town where i work. I am driving about an hour to work and an hour back each day but i am getting all of my work done and i am staying late many days to help out with after school things. Speaking of which, last Thursday my English club at Mimata Jr. High started up again. I ran it last year for 2 semesters and will be doing it for the whole year this time. I made a blog for the English club located here. Feel free to check it out and if you are interested in communicating with my students please let me know! I can give you permission to post on the site and perhaps they will write to you! The club is all girls and me and most of them are 7th graders so their English level is kind of low. They are just formally starting to study English now so if you do participate please be patient with them and with me!

Last summer, when Paul and Melanie came to visit me in Japan, i discovered a store that sold Magic cards. I had played magic for a long time since before High School and then stopped. I picked it up again at university and then stopped. I played casually for a while with Monica and a bit with Paul while he was here. Then i found a few of my American friends in Miyazaki on JET were interested in playing too. I played casually with them. But then i made a glorious mistake.

I discovered a group of people that play magic inside of Miyazaki! Japanese people that is. They play more often and they play the more sanctioned and less casual forms of the game. I inadvertently awoke the old magic obsessed, nerdy nerdy demon inside of me. I went crazy for a little while and spent way too much money. That was because in order to keep up with the players with larger card collections i had to spend money. But i realized i was slightly out of control and having achieved a sizable collection of cards here in Japan, i have toned it down a lot. I plan on not spending any money on cards for a while and instead i will just trade the ones i have for the ones my Japanese friends have.

I qualified for a Japanese national level magic tournament last month that will be held in October i think in Fukuoka City. Wish me luck!

That just about sums the major happenings in my life! I hope all is well. Oh wait, one more thing. My sister is in Nicaragua now, but no where near Lake Titikaka. Check her blog out, here!

Scattered Fall Showers / Cycles

2007-11-06T15:23:00.000+09:00

Rather than start with excuses for not having written a blog in a long time, like i have done in the past, i will instead jump in with some substance.

It is autumn now, the flowers have mostly died, the trees leaves have gotten color and are starting to fall. The skies are rather gray and the temperature is getting colder and colder. I am realizing, through this rain, how much i have always liked autumn and winter more than i thought.

For some reason, i have always preferred the way i look when i have a long sleeve shirt on. So when winter comes or even as the weather begins to get cold i would put them on and wear them. It would be very hot and i would often roll the sleeves up so as not to become sweaty, but regardless i felt like i looked cool. Short sleeve shirts, though i definitely own my fair share, i felt were less fashionable. I would tend to wear 2 t-shirts during the summer to make up for this. I often put on short sleeve shirts now, but i will have a long sleeve shirt on top of it or below. Thats the way i like to dress, i can't really explain it.

But i like hot weather, i like the lush green of plants and clear blue skies. I like that i could be outside and it would feel good. Too hot has never really bothered me and too cold definitely has.

With some thought put in this recently, i realized that hot weather is sublime in the Nietzsche way, way it feels good and doesn't feel bad but isn't an exhilarating experience. Being cold and finding warmth is like surviving a situation you thought was going to kill you. There is a rush when you come shivering inside after being out in a cold rain. The heat rushes over you and you aren't yet warm, but your skin tingles as if you were coming out of a coma or your muscles were recovering from atrophy.

The uncomfortableness (my spell check says comfortableness is a word, but adding the un in front takes away it's word hood despite the meaning being clear) of cold is a negative, regaining worth is a positive, perhaps a positive 2 or 3, if we were to assign them statistics. I would say then that while all summer i am comfortable, i am comfortable at a 1 and the peak bobs up and down only a shallow degree. The fluctuating cold and warmth of winter is something i have grown to appreciate as i age.

I was listening to the most recent podcast of This American Life, it is about resting with peace and i believe is actually called that. In it 2 men give stories of their mothers deaths and how they are coming to terms with it. The first was present for his mothers murder and the second was warned, years ahead of time, that is mother was going to kill herself. In fact, she told him herself for years how she was going to do it. Ira glass says to very insightful things in that episode that have helped me contemplate hot and cold, life and death.

The first, thing he said is that in an instant, just an instant, your life could completely shift in focus. The man who at age 10 saw his mothers murder, was going to pick up a friend as his house with his mom when a random act of burglary turned into murder. From age 10 on, he has thought about murder and crime every day at least about a few dozen times. He cannot say that he ever feels safe. He lives a successful life with his family and his career but there is that dark ring around him, just one of his tree like rings of growth at the center of his being. It is good to be aware that things can change that fast.

The second, was that the mother of the second man killed herself as she neared 80 years old because she didn't want to go senile or lose function and force other to take care of her. This is noble in a sense and i can apprieciate her desire. At initial reaction, i think many if not most people would be repelled by the womans idea just because it includes suicide in it. But when you listen to more about her perspective on it and the way she talked to her family and friends about death, i feel that her understanding of life and death is probably much more advanced than mine. I can appreciate her act of suicide as a noble thing much in the way that can acknowledge the Camus style suicides of people trying to take existential control over the most unconquerable thing for humans, mortally. Over the course of 30 or so years she thought about her death and was happy with life but had to find a degree of comfort with her perspective of the circle of life and death. I confess, i know of the presence of death, but i assume it is distant and occasionally attempt to ignore its existence. (That sentence strikes me as ironic because death is perceived as an end or a ceasing to be yet i just referred to its existence with a positive use of the to be verb.) I hope to have a better understanding and appreciation for death that the greats like Camus, Nietzsche, Buddha, (Gnostic) Jesus, some of the Haiku greats like Basho and the 2nd man's mother.

In an attempt perceive as much as i can before i die, i am trying to do Basho's daily practice of writting at least one haiku per day to keep his senses and mine keen.

Here are a few i have written in Japanese recently.

寒い地で
年取った花が
神を会う
(written 10/16/2007)

Samui chi de
Toshi totta hana ga
Kami wo au

In the cold earth
Old flowers
Meet the gods.

And today i wrote,

親しい木
期限が切れた
秋時雨

Shitashi ki
kigen ga kireta
aki shigure

that familiar tree
it's time is up
Autumn rain

Awesome New Song / Samurai Soul.

2007-09-26T15:51:00.000+09:00

A Lack Of Time / A Bit Of Color

2007-09-25T22:18:00.000+09:00

Hey everyone. So sorry. I have been crazy busy and i haven't had time to write anything. I had sports day and speech contests. I have worked about 2 hours of over time everyday and last weekend was my first weekend in the past 3 weeks. I pulled so many extra hours.

Monica and I went to Kagoshima, the prefecture below Miyazaki. We went to the Aquarium and saw whale sharks (Jinbezame in Japanese), dolphins and hundreds of other aquatic animals. It was awesome. We visited our friend Curtis who lives on an island with only 10,000 people (1 other foreiner). I don't have time now to really go into it, but it made me think of how weird life would be to live in that situation. Or even to grow up in that situation. His island has power generators but they use wind and solar a lot. They have 3 of these huge huge huge wind towers and they are about to build like 16 more across the island and it will be almost entirely wind powered.

My team, the white team won on sports day. I had a headband tanned into my face and everyone made fun of me.

I can't imagine knowing everyone in the town and growing up in such a small and tightly knit community.

Monica and i rode the ferris wheel on top of the main train station in Kagoshima. It was really close to a volcano and the view was amazing.

So, that should leave you caught up some.

Bad Day / Things That Could Have Happened...

2007-08-23T09:48:00.000+09:00

Yesterday was the worst day I can remember in recent history. I have a tendency to, even when bad things happen, remain optimistic and happy. But yesterday so much happened at the same time that I couldn’t maintain that focus. This was such a radical, though temporary, change in my personality that the people close to me could tell something was wrong. Monica, my girlfriend, couldn’t tell exactly what it was and so she was upset, thinking I was upset with her or something. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

My day started with me not sleeping well. I had a dream that Monica died in a car accident and that I went back to America on leave for a month or so to grieve. Monica and I have been dating for almost a year and I have a huge affinity for her. I honestly am not sure how I would handle her sudden and unexpected death. As much as I don’t like America, I’m probably not suited to grieve here in Japan.

On my way to work, with he disturbing images of Monica’s accident still lingering in my head, a high school girl rode her bike into the side of my car. I was not moving at the time and she was not hurt. She quickly rode off and I got out of my car but she was gone. This left my heart beating really fast because although I had not hit her, in fact my car was completely stopped, but I felt like I had hit her. In my panic, I said pretty much nothing but hoped she would say she was ok. When I got out of my car, I tried to say something but I probably just grunted or spoke English that she wouldn’t have understood. In times of trouble you always resort back to your native tongue.

At work, I actually had a pretty good day. I was occupied with translation and advising. I was helping an English teacher translated speeches for a speech contest for one of my favorite students. Her speech was very well written, in Japanese, and I wanted to follow up with making it really good in English.

But in the early afternoon my phone broke. My cell phone has a lock setting and I can’t do anything while it is locked. But the lock would not disengage. So I could see when I was getting calls and mail and the display for who was calling or mailing. But I could not read the messages or answer the calls. This was the worst day for this to happen because if something actually had happened to Monica, I would have had no idea.

I got a new cell phone but the process made me late getting up to Monica when I was scheduled to meet her and then go visit a restaurant that is closing. We arrive late when we are usually the early ones. But along the way I took the highway. I have a tendency to go way over the speed limit, like most drivers in Japan, while on the highway. The speed limits are very slow and almost no one is on the rode. I get to a tunnel and one of the 2 lanes is closed, directing you over to the left lane. We get reduced to about 20 kph and drive to the tunnel in medium traffic. I look to the right and realize why the lane is closed.

A car had hit the side of the tunnel and flipped. There was broken glass and paint from the car spanning a decent distance on the walls and floor of the tunnel. I arrived just in time to see the medics covering a body, probably dead, with a white sheet and then preparing to load it into the back of the ambulance.

I called Monica with my new cell phone, whose battery was dying cause it was just opened. She answered and I said I saw a dead body just in time for the next tunnel to come up and my connection to die. I called her back and she seemed kind of panicked, probably rightfully so.

I slowed down and drove the rest of the way to her much more carefully. But my heart was pounding and I had images of my dream car accident and the real life car accident flooding my head.

At dinner, things were good. I was feeling bad but I tried to communicate and joke and be happy like I normally am I think for the most part it worked. I don’t think most people noticed I was feeling bad. This is not to say I was trying to be fake and show a happiness that was not there because I realize it sounds like that. I was relieved that Monica was alive in real life and that I made it safely to her and to dinner. I figured that things could only get better and they were getting better. So I cheered up a good bit.

On the ride home, Monica was able to tell that I was feeling off in someway. She thought that I was mad at her or that something was bothering me and I assured her I wasn’t mad at her or anything. I told her that my bad day was still lingering. Her happy mood went away because I was feeding her my bad aura. We got home and we talked and talked and as I was telling her again I wasn’t mad at her I told her chronologically my whole day.

This is when I realized that everything was in such a way that things had compounded on each other and were similar enough to feel like part of the same foreboding incident. My dream was disturbing but I could recover from it. But the bike girl, I don’t recall what she looks like and honestly when I recall what was happening I just seem Monica’s face from the car accident dream. The communication blackout today, like I said before, happened at the worst possible moment. The mail I was receiving from Monica could have been “plans cancelled, I’m in the hospital” and I wouldn’t have known. That’s why my priority was to get a new cell phone quickly (which by the way, I did entirely in Japanese and by myself!). Then seeing the car accident and the dead body was not identical to the way things happened in my dream but it was similar enough to be disturbing. Horribly disturbing.

I’m at work now. I had a great talk with Monica this morning and we giggled and laughed. It’s good to know that here, she is alive. Even though right now, across the silent phantasms, in some other world I’m in America grieving for her passing.

The Flavor Of Electric Town / Hanbaiki-Mania

2007-08-17T08:42:00.000+09:00

I don't know if bloggers these days even have to do this given the number of useless posts across the Internet, but this post is going to be useless. However, i hope it will make you laugh.

Many of my friends have come to Japan to visit me or have been to Japan in general. The rest of you have heard from my how good Japanese vending machines called (hanbaiki or jido hanbaiki or 自動販売機) are. If somehow you missed me ranting about the convenience of getting whatever drink you want whenever you want even if you are surrounded by rice fields, here is the newest installment in hanbaiki joy:

Ramen Vending Machines

Putting Clouds In Jars / 自由意思

2007-08-16T15:28:00.000+09:00

Some of my friends back home are kind of depressed right now for various reasons that I won’t go into. But thinking about that and reading various works of Haruki Murakami has got me thinking about those times. People tend to start really thinking about what their lives mean during that time. They start checking for signs around them and really looking for guidance. Some people don’t like guidance because they prefer to trust their own experiences so instead they try and organize their thoughts. This is perhaps an impossible task, hence today’s blog title’s metaphor. You cannot ever really hope to understand everything about yourself. You are in constant shift and that is why Buddhism tells you that there is no you. That’s why your concept of you is an illusion. Your brain strangely working against you.

But that is such an amazing thing. I wrote a paper once that I have referenced occasionally on this blog about the nonexistence of freewill. And I wrote about how people are afraid of that kind of world and say they certainly are not living in one. Now, bear with me for a second because I cannot think of how to logically connect to my next subject here, so I will come back to this freewill thing in a second. Haruki Murakami, my favorite author (or co-favorite author with Michael Crichton), gave an interview recently where he said he feels like he is getting more Japanese as he gets older. He has written many books about characters living in Japan and has said that this is because he grew up in Japan. But many western themes are found in those books and they are flooded with western philosophy, music and culture. He wrote most of his books in the 80s about the 70s and 60s when American culture was playing a huge role in the new culture of Japan. The Beatles had hit when Murakami was in college. All of his books were Japanese in as far as they were in Japan with Japanese characters speaking Japanese to each other, but they were so western in the topics of discussion.

As he grows older and more Japanese he says he is exploring parts of Japan he previously hadn’t. His book “Kafka on the Shore” he said was an exploration of the Japanese spiritual religion of Shinto and his newest novel “Afterdark” is about Tokyo. But its not about Tokyo in the way that Norwegian Wood was about Tokyo. Norwegian Wood talked about Tokyo but mostly just as the characters were passing through it. Afterdark, Murakami says, is more about the city. The amount of people in the city and all of the different kind of cultures amaze him. There are more types of people doing more types of things that anyone could reasonably hope to understand. Murakami has spent so much of his life in Japan that he said he had to return here to have any chance of understanding anything. He is more rooted in Japan than perhaps he realized. Perhaps, I am more rooted in America than I realize.

Afterdark explores some characters that don’t exactly seem like main characters (keep in mind I say this only having read the review). It is Murakami’s attempt at exploring the layers of Tokyo’s culture’s subculture’s subcultures.

Even without freewill I find myself amazing at the diversity of things and people in the world. Even in Japan where you have bought into the stereotype that everyone is the same and that diversity is a minimum, the diversity is staggering. I have a deep love of Tokyo and I couldn’t really put words to it until today. A waterfall didn’t choose to be a waterfall but I think its beautiful. A starry sky didn’t choose to be either, but it too is beautiful. People amaze me. Even people I don’t like amaze me. In college, people were shocked by this given how vocal I was about their being no freewill. They say that people are amazing cause they choose to do things and if I take out the choice people are not amazing.

But when I see people in Tokyo, crammed together in such a small place, living such extremely different lives I feel like I’m staring at a deep far off sky. Some stars are blue, some a red. Some will supernova, some won’t. I don’t understand them anymore than I understand the people on a Tokyo subway but god, thinking about what they could be and wondering how they could work is so beautiful.

The pictures from today are from the photo library of the Mainichi English Newspaper here in Japan. They are more related to this blog than at first glance.

I would apologize for confusing blogs, but if you are still around reading these then you must be used to them by now.

He Knows Where Home Is / The Other Me That Is A Hero

2007-08-08T10:21:00.000+09:00

I was listening to a podcast the other day called Radio Lab out of New York Public Radio. It is a really cool show about science but told in a really fun way. The 2 hosts of the show are clever and witty and they play funny sound bites like some regular disk jockey but the topics are always intellectual and scientific.

The other day they were doing a show on sleep and dreams. They were talking about how the brain sends out these waves that kind of wash over the entire brain and soften the pull of the days thoughts. During this time the strongest thoughts soften but remain firm and the useless and unnecessarily information that your brain accumulated is washed away. This sharpens your necessary neural networks but removes the menial stuff and is why you can often the next day forget what you ate for lunch or what time you did something.

Then they moved on to talk about how dreams occur during this time. The brainwash manipulates the various thoughts that occurred from the day and the stronger things stick out. For example, if you had a car accident you might have trouble sleeping that night because you would be repeating or seeing this over again because it has a high emotional content. Therefore it is not easily washed away and is left as perhaps the strongest resonating thing after and during the brainwash. Which brings me to an interesting question that was not addressed in the show.

For me, whenever I dream a dream where I feel like I am at home, I dream of a home that I haven’t lived in for over 10 years. When my family moved from New York to North Carolina, the first place we stayed at for a long time was a house on Coddington Place near the Costwold area. This house we lived out for the main part of my childhood. This is the house that I made my first best friend at, took my first girlfriend back to and all of that. This house holds probably the deepest and lengthiest memories and emotions from my life. So when I have dreams, I always return to that house. I have the same room and I hang out in the play room. But the me that I see is the me today. Yet I still sleep in bunk beds and have comic book posters etc on my wall. The computer that I use in my dreams is my old old old computer that I remember thinking was so modern because it came with a cd-rom back when floppy disks were all the rage. Yet, it has all the modern internet and capabilities in my dream.

I am reminded of one of my favorite Post Secret postcards from www.postsecret.blogspot.com . On this postcard it has a picture of a tree with a house nearby and it says “I want to go home but I don’t know where that is yet.” It occurs to me that the only time that I felt like I had a home in the truest sense of the word was when I was young and living on Coddington Place. In my youth I could go home and feel like that was my room because it had been my room for such a significant portion of my life. Since then, I have had various “my room”s but none that lasted that long. I haven’t lived in the same place for that length of time and I have had significant growing up and development in other places since Coddington but it doesn’t really compare.

And I suppose, like the post secret, part of me is still looking for a home. But its not really a thing that I think about too much. My living location is in constant flux because I am trying to figure out what to do with my life. I have defined goals but I am not certain how to achieve them. I would like to stay in Japan but I haven’t worked out a way for that. Even if I stay in Japan, I don’t think I would be in Miyazaki forever. I might go to grad school in Tokyo, or Nagasaki or Kyoto or hell, maybe even Hokkaido. The fact is simple, I just don’t know where I will end up. It isn’t something that really bothers me or even really comes up that often. I honestly don’t remember my dreams that often and when I do it is usually me fighting some unconquerable odd. I have dreams where I am a spy consistently or once that I was fighting a war in Mexico vs rival drug lords. Not that I was trying to stop the drugs from being trafficked, but more that I was trying to stop war period. I do wish war would stop, but in real life I don’t feel that I can make that much of a difference. And I don’t believe that I have the physical or mental prowess to say, show up at a war zone during a conflict and single handedly put down the resistance.

But in my dreams, I have the courage and the ability to do those things. I have of a clear sense of what I have to do and I have a good understanding of where home is. But in reality, its probably my brain washing those thoughts around in my brain. During the day I read the news and I wish I could do something about it but have no clear picture of what to do. I build up connections and networks in my brain about those ideas and they get swept under the rug at night as I rest.

Or perhaps, if quantum theory is correct. I’ m a commando in some other universe. I go to Mexico or Iraq, survive some impossible situation and come home, to Coddington, at night to dream about what life would be like, reading the news about the world in an office in Japan, unsure about what to do about life's problems.

The Burden Of Moving / Takanabe Remembered

2007-08-06T16:28:00.000+09:00

It’s strange to think about the way that things change in subtle ways. The roads that are so familiar and that I have driven on so many times have all of a sudden become the roads I used to drive on. My reason to be there has moved and I have the same reason to be but the there has shifted. I went to see you but now we will go together to see the city.

I remember the drive back home in the morning where I was barely awake. I remember all the thoughts floating around in my head while you slept back there. Cities are as alive as people and now that I will go back there less often it is as if I lost a close friend.

I remember walking with you at night and talking to you about how much character the city had. Your city is still your city but you have moved away. Long distance relationships don’t really last so how will you and her get along now that you live in Miyazaki City? I hope her feelings aren’t hurt and I know you will visit when you can. The turtles will hatch. You moved to Takanabe too late to see them last year and you moved away too early this year. They are your turtles but they aren’t your turtles anymore. You lived there when they were laid but you wont live there as they hatch. But we both know how much you care about them. Let’s go together and see them off to sea.

From Lost In Translation / To Using A Map To Get Around In Translation

2007-07-31T09:38:00.000+09:00

Yesterday, i signed my contract that allows me to stay in Japan for another year. Yesterday was my last official day of my first years contract and that means that i have officially been in Japan for exactly one year.

Its hard to really describe how my vision of Japan has changed. Japan doesn’t seem so different any more and the language is no longer very intimidating. When I first arrived I had this fear of being unable to express myself in the ways that I want or of getting lost in a situation that I was unaware of how to fix. Since last year I have gotten used to not being able to express my feelings all the time. Those of you who know me well in the states will probably find it strange that I no longer am voicing my opinion in every situation. This is perhaps mostly because I am incapable of always knowing how to state my opinion, but it is also because the Japanese culture has seeped into me. There are many situations where it would be in appropriate for me to jump right in with how I feel. So it works out as a coincidence when I both shouldn’t and cannot say my thoughts.

As far as not being able to get out of a situation, that hasn’t happened once. My Japanese is sufficient enough to cover me. However, there are a few situations that I feel I would not be able to handle. Like a car accident or being pulled over by the cops. I don’t know the best way to handle the politeness and the apologies necessary. In the states, depending what I got pulled over for I think I could get out of at least my first speeding ticket. Here, I’m pretty sure I would get the ticket.

As far as my language skills improving, I think the biggest thing I have gained is the ability to be less afraid of making mistakes. I am still surprised at how shy I am in Japanese only situations or with Japanese friends. But I also am able to piece together words and phrases that I studied in school but didn’t completely understand how to use. I feel like I hear something and I decide I want to learn how to use it or what it means. I look it up in the book and I understand in theory and then over the next week or so I hear it used and it just clicks. But it’s kind of a slow process. It happens one or 2 words or grammar points at a time.

My initial thoughts about learning Japanese in Japan was: “You are in Japan, you don’t need lessons you will just pick it up from daily use!” And this has proven to be both correct and incorrect. I have picked up a lot of conversational skills and my listening skills have improved. However they are not where I would have wanted them to be after one year in Japan. Its kind of difficult that in school you are taught the Tokyo dialect of Japanese and Miyazaki dialect is actually quite different. For example, the governor of Miyazaki Prefecture right now is a famous comedian named Higashi Kokubaru. He is famous all across Japan and has made Miyazaki very famous as a result. He is from Miyazaki originally and is known for his Miyazaki dialect and accent. I got a bracelet as a present from Monica’s sister (thanks Lisa!) and it has his picture on it and a sentence in thick Miyazaki dialect. I had no idea what it said. Monica has cultivated a good Miyazaki accent and a vast Miyazaki vocabulary and she told me it says “You gotta do something!” roughly. But I would have never guessed in a million years that it said that. So I still have a good amount of knowledge to collect.

So I have decided to start taking Japanese lessons. Jana recommended a woman to me who has very good English and does private tutoring on the side for people wanting to learn Japanese. There are a good amount of other JETs that go to her and they all say she is a good teacher. I think there are few complaints about her in general and so I am getting excited about taking classes.

I, somewhat irregularly, write haiku in Japanese. I am watching a lot of Japanese TV and soap operas to learn words. I study on and off. I have started playing Magic: The Gathering in Japanese. I found a store that sells the cards. I hope to learn more Japanese my second year here than I have in the first. I also want to use some of this space to thank Monica for being a living guidebook and dictionary for me in some situations. Everyone tells me you should talk to me more in Japanese and gradually we are doing that. You are wonderful and so thank you.

Next. I am finally starting to work out my money problems. There are definitely a few things I can do better, but my mother has helped me figure out how to plan more correctly with my finances. I have paid off one of my 2 credit cards in the year that I was here but I have developed no actual savings. With my college loans deferred till December I hope to develop a small amount of savings and to pay off a significant portion of my other debt. I at this point only owe $100 to my predecessor. So in America I have effectively one bill: my credit card. As far as being purchases for myself this month, I have bought a few packs of magic cards. Well, probably like 9 for a total of about 50 bucks. So I guess that’s not too little but it’s not that big. This month I didn’t even have to send money back to America to pay bills! I had enough in my US bank to cover it. High Five me.

There is another typhoon coming. I found this (http://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/) website in English for those of you who are interested. It’s the second one of the year and it too is heading right for me. Some luck, eh?

The Inner Wind That Poisons The World / But All Things Are Natural

2007-07-25T15:02:00.000+09:00

It is currently summer break and so much of my time is spend at my desk in the Board of Education doing nothing. I often read magazines or articles online (generally nerdy stuff). Today, I was reading an article in The East magazine written by Oshima Yutaka. The article is titled “Battle is left to the Lord”. It is an attempt to understand why war is such a common thing in human history and seeks to explore a way to move beyond war.

This article contains a quote from Arther Ferrill’s “The Origin of War”. Arther Ferril discusses how it only takes a few societies that are prone to violence for violence to spread across the world. Granted we are talking about things around 20 thousand years ago…

So Arther argues that mankind is struggling at this time for survival and it is doing that hunter-gatherer-style. The humans who, likely randomly, evolved to be more aggressive may have found survival easier because they would be more likely to hunt and kill creatures to survive as opposed to the societies that would scavenge more. Then as they started to flourish they would find themselves surrounded by tribes of more peaceful humans. The aggressive genes would allow them to attack those other humans for food, land and reproduction (usually in the form of rape, Viking style). Thus, the more pacifistic genes die out in favor of the aggressive genes and the aggressive genes are easily propagated due to the babies born from taken women.

This could be especially troubling if the aggressive tendencies evolved early, before humans spread across the globe. That way the aggressive genes would have been in all of the societies when the spread occurs. It seems that in all likelihood, this is something that happened because there are people in ever society that is prone to violence. Or on several separate occasions, aggressive genes evolved independently.

The article at the end then turned to both Buddhism and Christianity to make a plea for people to not enact “Justice” on people for their transgressions. It says that America is perhaps doing that now with the war on terror because the problems that largely caused the initial terror attacks have been wholly neglected. He does this by showing that Buddhists recognize everything, including the Earth itself, has the potential to be a Buddha. In this, people should be good to each other and to the environment as much as possible and to try and resist and not reward those aggressive emotions.

Through Christianity it says that people should focus on the parts of the bible where Jesus says that God will be the one in charge of “Justice” and that humans can focus on other things and aggression will likely subside.

These are both 2 great, though different, ways that people should think about violence. I would like to think through these methods violence can be overcome, but the power of genetics is so strong. Plus, violence has penetrated every society despite the presence of one religion or another telling that violence it is wrong. Perhaps, in the history of people, violence has proven to be a better survival trait than religion!

I tend to think of myself as one of the lucky few that has few genes prone toward violence and an environment that reinforced my peaceful nature but I think there is violence in everyone. Back when the world was small, everyone got a piece of the genetic pie. Though I have never been in an honest to god fight, I tend to play video games containing fights or war, enjoy movies with a bit (or sometimes a lot) of violence in them, and the books I read often mention war and violence. Even when I am reading a philosophy book or a Murakami novel there tends to be at least one character who talks about war in some profound way that puts it hand down my genes (sorry for the pun Paul).

I wish I had something profound to say about war other then describing how its so far reaching… maybe if I come up with something better it could be the topic I use for my first book.

Though, I doubt my first full-length book will solve the world’s number one problem.

Proximity / Touch Your World

2007-07-10T18:38:00.000+09:00

Hey spider. It’s Eric. You may have seen me laying around inside just beyond the window. My bed is over there laying on the floor. I know you do a lot of sitting around up there so during that time I’m certain you’ve seen me.

I know we haven’t ever spoke before and we are hardly aware of each other. It’s for that reason I know you are probably going to hate me. You see, I have to knock your web down soon. I won’t kill you, I promise. I hold nothing against you personally and I want you to live. Hell, you honestly help me out a lot. I know you must love eating and catching bugs many of which have tried bite me. Your web, so delicately placed outside my window probably takes advantage of this. So thank you. I don’t know how long you have been there but I have rarely been bitten and you are largely responsible.

But the world is larger than you know. I don’t know where you were born or how far you traveled to come here but I assure you it goes beyond that. But don’t take my word for it, look up at the stars. It’s much larger than I know too.

I don’t know the finer points of web building and I don’t know anything about the way that bugs taste. I have only eaten a few and none of which were on purpose. It was only when I was driving my car with the windows down.

oh, you probably don’t know what a car is. …I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Ask one of your friends, because I know occasionally spiders make webs in them. Some spider is bound to know.

Anyway, in short, I don’t know much about life as a spider, but you don’t know much about life as a human. Just as you could never teach me about web spinning I couldn’t teach you about cars or taxes or books. I sometimes wonder even if I really understand them. But I certainly don’t know how to explain them to you. And because I have come to apologize for the destruction of your web, I know I am in an awkward position to ask for your sympathy and understanding.

But you see, I just don’t have any space. I have to go to work each day and I have to wear clothes. Yes, some of them are finely woven but I didn’t do that myself. I am not a master weaver like you. I have to wash my clothes and keep them clean or the other humans think that I’m dirty or strange. It’s just something that we all have to do. Likewise, we all have to have a place to live. I know you just go as you want and you put a web up wherever there isn’t a web, but our laws aren’t the same as spider laws and I have to live in a designated place that I pay for with the money I get from work. I have to wash my clothes and live here to go out to get money so that I can have a place to wash my clothes and live.

So this is my home and no other human is allowed to stay here if I don’t let them. If there is a bigger and stronger human who wants my home there is a system in place to protect me. But because of that I only have one place to hang my clothes. So tonight, after I do my laundry, I have to hang my clothes on the pole you have attached your web to. It’s the only laundry pole I have. I assure you I will knock the web down slowly and I will give you a chance to get down safely.

You know spider. I respect you. You make a new web every night and wait diligently. Maybe there is some hesitation on your part but as far as I can tell, there is none. Sure, someone can come at any point and tear it down, but you seem to live happy and without fear. Generally, I think I work pretty much the same as you. I try my best when I can and I am rarely unhappy.

But sometimes, habit fails. Last year, I ran about 5 kilometers everyday after work. It felt good and it was a regular thing so it was almost hard not to do it. And it was good for me too. Just like you and your web, it’s your habit that lets you so easily build it a new every night. But the winter came and it was cold. So I stopped running. When the weather warmed up again I bought a bike and I started biking to stay in shape. But when the rainy season came and I stopped that too.

I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in sins. I bet that you don’t either. So I think we are on the same page when we say that nothing is unforgivable and that in time all things change. Maybe by some standard, I’m committing a sin against you by destroying your home but I cannot see another way around it.

Yet, there is still more I can learn from you and I will keep you on my mind as I wish you luck and send you on your way. I don’t know how to explain what you have taught me today. There are things I used to do that were healthy and good for me. Things I practiced or thought that I feel were both healthy and happy. But sometimes the weather gets in the way. A storm outside blows my head around and makes me dizzy with crash of lightning. I change inside too.

Last year, around this time, I wrote a lot of stories and I fell in love. This love came resolute with storms and beautiful weather alike but always changing. I enjoy it to this day and it makes me happy and makes me smile but you know, spider, I haven’t written in a while.

I’m still the same as I was, but different somehow. You will be the same with a new web but somehow different too. This letter I am writing is for you. I will print it as small as I can and send it with you on your way. If what I have said comes with no meaning to you, that’s fine. Perhaps meaning for myself is all I need but it is pretty to think that it also has meaning for you.

I’ll be a better person tomorrow spider. I will attempt to wake up on time, go to work and be diligent. I will try and keep writing spider and tomorrow I promise, I won’t knock over any webs.

Plenty of Tigers / Not Enough Gasoline

2007-06-20T16:13:00.000+09:00

So today is a day of unique first experiences. The day started off fine. I have no classes today because there were special visits by people from the board of education, other schools and parents. They wanted to appear to be operating on a normal day and to have regular lesson viewed. My lessons are bazaar indeed because there is a lot of English spoken. …and a foreigner acting crazy.

Yesterday I found out that I have a bunch of random bills and I was drained of all my leftover money. Luckily, tomorrow is payday so I was not that upset or worried. But I wasn’t pleased with suddenly having to spend money I was planning on using when my friend Paul and my sister Melanie come to visit me this Sunday.

Part of the problem is that cars in Japan are unnecessarily expensive. Every year you have to pay “shaken”. It looks like the word shaken in English but should be pronounced “Shah” like the Shah of Iran and “Ken” like Ken and Barbie. This is every 2 years and functions like inspections do in the states except that for my car its about 1000 dollars to pay for shaken.

Additionally, there is a national yearly car tax which I thought I had to pay a few months ago but actually have to pay for this month. They told me I was going to pay it soon like 2 months ago but I only got the form yesterday.

So I don’t have any money today. I had 1000 yen (about $8.75) and I went and bought food for dinner last night and for breakfast, lunch and dinner today. No problem. I have about 400 yen left in my pockets. But I was low on gas. My car has a red mark at the bottom that marks when you are low and my needle was above that so I thought I was fine. My predecessor had run out of gas twice, once on the highway at 6am. So I know everyone thinks Americans are reckless with cars and cannot drive. Jana told me she thought maybe there was something wrong with the needle a while back but I never thought twice about it because it appeared to work fine. It went down when I drove and went up when I got gas. When it got close to the red mark I filled it up again.

I guess it had never been THAT close to the red mark. Today, driving home to make myself lunch, my car started sputtering and then died. This was embarrassing for a few reasons. First of all, there was an old Japanese couple running a small shop across the street from where I was. They kept looking at me sitting in my car with my hazards on and I know they were wondering what was going on and debating offering me help. I guess the idea that I might not speak Japanese intimidated them. Besides, they could see I was using my cell phone and probably assumed I was ok. The road wasn’t busy or anything.

I called Jana and I said “Hey, you are going to make fun of me for this but…” and I told her what happened. I also mentioned I didn’t really have money and asked to borrow a couple bucks in order to survive my trip to work tomorrow and today. She had class so she couldn’t come help me. She told my supervisor and he came and got me in a K-Tiger.

You heard me, I said K-Tiger. No he didn’t come to get me in a transformer. There are 2 classes of cars in Japan, K and S. K cars have yellow plates and are small with small engines. They are merely passenger vehicles and are slower and smaller than S cars. S cars are for people with large truck, SUVs or faster small cars (small but their engine is big). My car is an S plate. It is small but has a large engine and moves pretty fast. Well truck in Japanese is toraku, a copy of the English word truck. Japanese people like to shorten words so they call the K-tora. Tora in Japanese means tiger in English and thus, after big of fotching around with it, Monica and I have started calling them K-Tigers.

So my supervisor, Kanemaru, shows up and asks me what happened. I told him I thought I was out of gas but the arrow was pointing above the red mark and he confirmed that that was true. He said, with a laugh, that the girl before me had broken down twice and I told him yeah I know and that I was embarrassed. He said don’t be. Apparently, he has had issues with his car too. When I first got here he had a fender bender. Apparently he had a lot of trouble getting his license and he also has gotten tickets etc. He likes cars, basically.

I told him I didn’t have any money on me and he said I could pay him back tomorrow and we went together to buy some gas. My car is filled and I’m fine. I’m a little wiser too. I know to stay the fuck away from that red mark and I have another reason to try and be better with my money. I was afraid that I would get to the office and people would ask a lot of questions but luckily no one did. I’m not sure anyone knows but I feel like I followed my predecessor’s footsteps and it lead to a dirge. Haha.

On a bright note, I got to drive a K-Tiger! It was a white one that pretty much looks like a miniature white pickup truck. The real exciting part is that it was a stick shift! A manual! I drove my first manual car in Japan! This was kind of scary at first. As you probably know, in Japan they drive on the opposite side of the road than America. Also, the steering wheel is on the right side of the car and the gearshift is in the center. That means I had to shift gears with my right hand!

It wasn’t that bad, it was actually pretty fun. The weirdest part of all was that the numbered gears are in the same places. First is up and to the left, second is below that, 3rd is in the middle with fourth under it and 5th is to the top and right. Same as the states but its my left hand doing it!

In a nutshell, a bad thing happened today but joy and laughter triumphed.

Lastly, here is the picture I meant to post about the wind turbines.

Another Year / Even Darkness Fuels The Living

2007-06-19T16:05:00.000+09:00

I want to start this entry with a bit of news that I cannot seem to correctly classify. Is it good news or is it bad news? I can’t really tell. The blackhole under Europe that I wrote about a few months ago and its risk of ending the world has been delayed. They will attempted to get the particle impactor online and running sometime next year instead of this August. That means that for the next year that I will be in Japan, the constitution of the Earth should remain intact. I mean, humans could wipe themselves out before then but at least I don’t have to worry about the Earth collapsing under the pressure of a thousand dead stars.

And yes, I re-contracted to stay in Japan for another year. I am not positive that I wrote about this in my blog so for those of you that are wondering, I will be in Miyazaki Prefecture for another year.

I have been writing down a few ideas recently that I wanted to talk about and most of them I have forgot or lost. But I will get a few of them together here.

First of, my Middle School is under construction. I wrote a little bit about this when I first moved here. My town is surprisingly wealthy and the school is the biggest Middle School in the prefecture and the 3^rd biggest school period. They are building new buildings on campus to better accommodate the students. So everyday I go to work and I see the men and women at work. They installed this weird device that kind of looks like a radar tower. I have taken several pictures of it but my memory card on my phone has malfunctioned twice this week so you will have to wait for the picture.

It has 4 blue rectangles with the shorter sides facing up. It is rigged with solar power (PV Cells) panels lower down on it. It never moved so it lead me to just guess that it was some sonar type device. It was obvious that it would rotate the blue rectangles, I just assumed it wasn’t powered on. Well. I was wrong. It is not a radar system.

I came to school one day last week and the wind was blowing hard. The rainy season has started in Japan and it has rained nonstop for a few weeks now. The sky is in perpetual darkness, but life is abundant and plants are sprouting up everywhere. They turned the thing on and I was shocked at its purpose. I asked someone and they said it was a wind and solar power generator. My new school building will be powered by the sun and by the wind. The blue panels rotate around when the wind blows and if the sky is clear and the sun strong the PV cells drain power right out of the sunshine.

How cool is that? Japan is a clean enough country and certainly it has its share of ecological and environmental issues but the countries that need to be powering their schools off the wind should be America and china. Yet still, high five Japan. Seriously. The wind is especially strong this season and year round you will get more then the cost of building the generator for certain.

Second topic. The field next to my apartment has been growing rampant recently. But they chopped down all of the random plants growing there and with the rain it has been flooded. I drove home the other day to witness a weird tractor like machine that was planting patches of rice in the water. It was putting them in a very straight line and so I enjoyed watching the rice machine.

Every night now I hear frogs croaking outside. Hundreds maybe thousands of them. Occasionally I drive on the road and swerve to not hit the frogs. It’s a great sound and since I happen to be a fan of frogs, I crack my windows at night to hear them. Last night, it was silent the whole evening. I was a little surprised because earlier that day I was shown tadpoles growing in pots and basins left to catch the rain outside an elementary. It seemed to me that all the croaking and hopping around was making the frogs very successful but it was utterly silent.

What happened to all the frogs?

But then it happened. Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, a thunderous roar of frog noises came from outside my window. I giggled a little and found the frogsong strangely soothing.

There is so much wildlife out here. Richie pointed this out to me and made me more aware of it. The soil is healthy and covered in bugs, both good and bad for gardening. The diversity is amazing though. In America, during my childhood, I saw bugs sure but I think I could count on my hands the type of bugs I saw regularly. But in Japan that number is dwarfed. Virtually everyday I “discover” a new species. The frogs are just one sign of this.

Thirdly. The Japanese healthcare system is remarkably better then the American healthcare system. The American system is not a national health system so people feel they cant afford it. Japanese people are basically all covered by the national health system and that includes any foreigner working in Japan, namely, me.

Americans often use the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In Japan, they don’t fix things that aren’t broken per se, but they definitely are more of a fan of preventative maintenance.

For example, I often have stiffness and pain in my neck and my back. Its not a big deal and I have dealt with it without complaining for years. It was never anything serious and nothing I ever though to go to the doctor for before. But in Japan you can go to the doctor for minor things like this for free basically. There is a bone doctor down the street from me. Without an appointment, I can go in and get a massage and a chiropractic adjustment for 550 yen. That’s $4.46 at the current exchange rate. I go once a week now and my neck problems are better. They were easily lived with before and they are even more so now.

I feel like a human. People in America are treated like machines. They let you run until you stop running, then the fix it so you run again, bare minimum. In Japan, it’s more wholesome and holistic. Seriously, a 45-minute to 1-hour massage once a week for 550 yen is amazing.

Kobe Photos / Almost A Year

2007-06-03T18:49:00.000+09:00

It's almost been a year since I first came to live in Japan. It's hard to believe. Take a look at these pictures of Kobe and let me know what you think.

I miss you all back in the states.

Kobe Japan and The Earthquake The Foreigners Caused

2007-05-31T16:11:00.000+09:00

So today is my father’s birthday! Happy Birthday Daddy! I just got back last night from a trip to Kobe, Japan. It is home to perhaps the most famous kind of beef in the world. Their cows are massaged and treated better than most people are treated in the world. Well, until they are slaughtered and eaten. I took pictures and I will show them soon.

My birthday was Monday of this week and I turned 24. I am almost a quarter of a century old. A year or so a go I wrote a blog entry about being intimidated by becoming 24 because many of my favorite artists, scientists, writers etc… were very distinguished by this age. In fact, I found 24 particularly intimidating because Donovan actually retired from a successful career in writing and performing songs to explore the world and fulfill his personal philosophy. Sigh. So I haven’t accomplished that but I’m doing very well. I am walking the stairs to the tower of dreams and 24 should be a good age even if I didn’t achieve what great minds have achieved.

Hell, there are more scientists and writers (Einstein, Murakami etc…) that were older when they were successful.

I also want to point out that on my birthday, my first in Japan, Miss Japan won the Miss Universe Contest. This is the first time since the 50’s. You’re welcome Riyo Mori.

I visited Chinatown in Kobe and the Foreign Buyer’s club headquarters… I went to a series of boring meetings. It seems to me that most of the JET community is crazy. They are a group of either just the creepiest, weirdest people from their respective country or the most egocentric person who can ceaselessly talk about themselves. When talking to JETs I don’t know, I’m usually freaked out by them or just ready to not listen to them. I know I have a tendency to come off as egocentric and I definitely am egocentric to a certain extent, but I definitely enjoy dialogue and debate. These are the kind of people that you try and relate a similar experience and they cut you off to tell you another unrelated story of theirs.

I tend to not use headache medicine or take medicine at all but I took headache medicine Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning. This is unheard of for me. Today, my first day back I have no headache. Coincidence? I think not. Kobe was wonderful but it would have been nice to spend time there without having to sit through seminars that don’t really teach you anything and just spit out theory from Psych 101 about learning styles that anyone who has a college education should be aware of. Also, that many JETs (and perhaps that many foreigners in general in Japan) tends to cause this uncomfortable furthering of the stereotypes of foreigners. And I don’t mean the good ones. For example, we stayed at an amazingly expensive and huge hotel on a small island near the heart of Kobe. It had multiple buildings in its complex and restaurants that you cant walk away from without having spent less then 100 dollars. There was a wedding party there in suits, kimono etc… There was a business meeting where everyone is dressed to the nines. There was a dress code in the handout for JETs telling them to wear Business Formal, suit and tie etc… I would say at least 70% of JETs at least once went to the meetings in jeans or without a collar shirt or in flip-flips, dollar store, slave-labor Wal-Mart plastic flip-flops.

Every nice restaurant in town was flooded and over crowded by the artificial foreign population increase. Foreigners were rude at restaurants, struggling to communicate with waitresses and waiters (after a year in Japan you think you would be able to point to something and say “this please” in Japanese even if you didn’t study the language formally!) Japanese people are accommodating. Even the ones that didn’t really study English and have never been abroad attempt to speak English to their customers in this situation while the JETs here for a while still have picked up no language. It seems to me that this would happen without even trying. Is it possible to do less than not even try?

To sum up my frustrations, the JET program is a wonderful program designed to internationalize Japan. They pick very good people often. In fact, the best collection of JETs I have seen appears to come from Miyazaki. I have been lucky enough to meet great JETs locally who dressed professionally and are simply put assholes. There are wonderful and amazing JETs in every prefecture and I high five them for trying and for being quality. I don’t want them to think for a second that this blog is about my frustrations with them. I love them. But the ratio appears to be 10 jerks for 1 quality teacher. I would recommend JET to all of my friends. Especially Mike and Paul and Jeromy (if Jeromy and Paul found themselves suddenly unemployed) and Jaime and Ashley and anyone else I have been close with. They would help push the ratio of quality up.

Not to mention, I, trying very hard to work here in Japan feel like I’m overpaid and under worked. It seems like it’s the story of my life as I played Warcraft 3 in the computer labs of UNCC for 2 years of college for more money then the other TA’s who didn’t have administrators rights to the network like I did. But the even this weekend was a waste of Japanese tax payers money. It was an excuse for JETs to get drunk and eat Kobe beef under the banner of internationalization.
Sorry for a much lower than average degree of sunshine and optimism. I needed some catharsis to a stressful 3 days in Kobe. We will soon resume our normal broadcast of Eric’s cloud-free skies of happy things found in even dark places. I.e. a will to live after reading the depressing works of Sartre, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky or the pleasure of living a life without freewill and responsibility.

Spring Is For Lovers / Puss Knocking Boots

2007-05-23T14:53:00.000+09:00

I was reading further into my book on haiku and I came across something rather funny that I wanted to share with everyone. This blog entry is about haiku but in a much lighter and comedic then the last one (which attempted to be profound and to have pride in me).

There are a lot of haiku on each page. Most of them are pretty famous ones that have to do with the pictures that are on the page. The picture is supposed to inspire you to write a haiku. Well, there was one of a cat sitting on the ground near a fence with a forest in the background. The first line of the second haiku on the page was koineko (恋猫). This word literally means love cat, or amorous cat. It then explains that this is a season word for spring because spring is the time when most cats go into heat and are running around town. This is not a joke it's based in fact. There are cats everywhere there days and I often hear them outside my window making crazy noises or simply meowing. Monica and I were simultaneous laughing and creeped out one night a week or 2 ago when we heard 2 cats having sex behind a local restaurant.

So, I thought this koineko word was hilarious. Hey, its spring. Hey, there are koineko outside right now getting their purr on. Why not try and write a haiku with the word koineko in it? So I did:

恋猫は The love cat
俺見なかった didn’t see me
眠いかな I guess he's tired

Yeah. You know why he’s tired. Feel free to laugh here. Also, it would be right to make fun of me and call me dumb. Cause in this case, I was definitely being dumb.

5, 7, 6... shit. / The World Changes

2007-05-22T15:11:00.000+09:00

I realize that most of the people who read my blog will already know about my interest in haiku. It would be an easy way (albeit a crazy one) to explain my trip to Japan by saying “I like haiku.” This is because in short, my interest in Japanese comes from my interest in Japanese thought and the mindset of the famous haiku writers. This said, yesterday I struck a triumph for myself and for my dreams.

I wrote my first haiku in Japanese.

Yep. That might sound ridiculous given the amount I have studied Japanese or it might sound quick. I’m not sure. The problem I have found is that a lot of haiku is perceived by westerners as strictly being about the syllables. But this is not exactly the case. It is more important to make it roughly 5, 7 5 and to include a seasonal reference. Haiku are supposed to be about seasons and raw experience though even the pros stray from that. I have been guilty of trying to be too about the rules with my attempts at writing haiku and I have fallen into the western “its all about the syllables” trap. Most of my free time day today was spent reading and translating from a book trying to figure out exactly how the 5, 7 5 is counted.

Monica loaned me a book called roughly “How to Make Your First Haiku”. I have joked to myself called it “Haiku for dumb foreigners”. That is however, not its real title. Basically, the Japanese writing system has a thing called hiragana. It looks like this: ひらがな. Each one is a syllable. For example, what I wrote was hiragana in hiragana. Hi, ra, ga, na. Easy right? Right, right.

But...

But there are some hiraganas that are really syllables in the English sense. For example ん is basically an N in English. An N by its self would not constitute a syllable in English, but does SOMETIMES in Japanese. Well, really its supposed to count always but in practice doesn’t. For example, if you are writing a haiku and you get almost all of what you want to say perfectly, but you have oh shit, 18 total syllables instead of the 17. You can get away with the 18th in there if it's an N.

This little thing has driven me crazy though. I wrote a haiku and sent it to Monica who liked the idea I wrote about, but pointed out I had my syllables off. I went and looked and if you counted the N then yes, it was off by 1. Sad. But to confuse things, I found a bunch of famous haiku that had the extra N in there and were allowed to slide. I was confused. In my haiku instruction book it doesn’t really tell you how to count the syllables. It gives you the obligatory “hey, you know 5, 7, 5 right? Ok, lets move on to style and practice making haiku from these pictures of things out in nature.” This makes this book amazing in the long run but for today simply confused me.

So Monica, kind natured as she is, helped me find new words with the right syllables and that even more explicitly expressed what I was trying today and so I wrote 2 haiku in Japanese now total.

For the first the first one, I avoided the N entirely and made sure to find words that didn’t use that hiragana symbol. Sigh.

Here it goes:

May 21st, 2007,
寂空に In a lonely sky
小さい雲が the small cloud
一つだけ is by its self.

May 22, 2007
日没と The sunset vs.
蛍輝き The firefly’s glow
光輝戦 A battle of splendor.

What do you think?
The first one doesn’t have a seasonal reference without trying to be a stretch. The second one does—firefly.

This isn’t the first step to live my dream and it isn’t perhaps the biggest, but to me I feel I’ve climbed a big mountain and come down smiling.

Novels About Normal People / TV Shows About Kings

2007-05-17T21:31:00.000+09:00

I was just watching some TV and people were debating the amount of damage that has been caused in the abuse of government by the Bush administration. My whole life I had heard adults talk about the major issues of their generation, the Vietnam war, the shooting of JFK and that’s the kind of thing that sticks with them and shapes their lifetime.

I was thinking. I think that September 11th is the kind of thing that obviously will be talked about to the children of the generation that funds my social security (sigh, if only it would still be around to feed 64 year old me). But that conversation will be pretty short. The longer conversation and the deeper stories will have to do with the current administrations control of America.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they are still trying to fix “my generations” issues. I wonder what the stories that the people in England told the neighborhood kids when Britain stopped being an empire. Will it be like the story Americans tell their kids about the time the USA was number 1?

I’m realizing these days how much I'm a news junkie. I listen to at least 4 different NPR podcasts a day and I’ve recently started watching the news in Japanese. I don’t understand all of it but I have found that I can pick up a few new words and it’s good listening practice for the news I already heard about on my iPod.

I vote. Yeah, of course I vote. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. But I’m not exactly sure how I get by with this much news in my system and without doing more. I left America because I don’t like being associated with what it is doing. But in that, I gave up a lot of my ability to try and make changes (if I ever had that ability). I know I was never into politics as far as joining a party, grabbing a candidate and taking a side. I have never time to try and get a specific person elected. All I have done was stay informed and make educated votes when I can. Certainly I can do that from Japan and will continue to do so. But I can’t vote in Japan.

There is less happening in Japan that effects the world as much and maybe that’s a good thing. Japan isn’t doing the horrible things to the world America is right now. The fact that this is because it has less power is perhaps besides the point. I vote and have not been represented in America so I make and spend money for a country I have no chance of having representation in. Even if I became a Japanese citizen and was voting here what effect would that have. I’m not sure I would be able to be as informed in Japan because of the language barrier.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this thought. I’m reminded of the book Kurt Vonnegut wrote a few years before he died “A Man Without A Country”. I often feel like that. I’m associated with America and many people in Japan ask me what America is thinking when it does the things it does. My response is usually a sigh and then “I don’t know, that’s why I left.”

I left. Yeah, but what exactly does that make me? A coward? A hedonist? Probably a little of both. I’m not really fighting for America because I don’t really see anything worth saving. Instead, I took my active lack of representation in government and left to a country where I am passively less represented (as in America I vote and don’t get represented, Japan I don’t vote and don’t get represented). I enjoy the environment I’m in very much. The money I spend goes to companies I don’t feel are connected in some kind of little ‘e’ evil. I’m pained by the politics I listen to everyday but get some kind of satisfaction from my high degree of well informedness. I’m no more active, but I guess I’m just writing tonight out of my confusion by my lack of political activity while simultaneously being surrounded by it.

Einstein called his imagination thought experiments. This poorly written and strangely organized blog entry I’m going to call a thought experiment. I think its ok if this entry doesn’t make sense to anyone, I’m just as always trying to figure myself out. Sorry Einstein, I didn’t mean to associate my desultory rant with your colorful and quixotic genius.

A Breach of Context / Smear the Ink

2007-05-10T20:51:00.000+09:00

It struck me today how strange the concept of language really is. I was trying to translate some aspects of American culture into Japanese for a presentation I am giving on Saturday. There is so much of Japanese and English (and almost certainly every language in the world) that is related to context or to common usage that is not strictly or formally language. To learn a language you have to understand the cultural context as well as formal structures. Additionally, you have to learn the language to truly understand a culture.

But the problem lies within nuance. Languages are largely nuance. In America, I rarely realized this because of the context of my life. The people I knew, even if I spoke strangely, had be around me long enough to understand what I mean by things and to therefore gather what I meant with my words. But someone even just a tiny bit removed from my network might not understand at all. However, language in general works that way.
Japan is an old country, literally thousands of years old. It’s strange to think that so many dialects could exist in such a small country relatively speaking. For the size of California it holds so many different dialects and mini-languages within it. It’s possible for someone to speak their kind of Japanese out of context and it not be understood by a Japanese person on the same island. If you know much about Japan you will understand that the biggest island, Honshu, holds both Tokyo and Osaka. They speak entirely different dialects and its entirely possible for someone to speak Osaka style Japanese in Tokyo and not be understood. It is not my understanding that the same could be said of California.

I believe that different in language comes from the age of Japan. Long ago, when things were more separated, before the time of trains and cars, it was possible for someone in Japan to grow up rather isolated from the other parts of the island. And so for thousands of years it was the case that language had a divergent evolution. Think of English in America and English in England. It’s roughly the same but after a few hundred years its noticeably different. But take that, add another thousand years and then compartmentalize it a bit further.

So it’s so strange to mean that communication is ever possible. That might seem like a jump, but if you think about how close-knit some networks it wouldn’t be that hard to believe that a family would be completely and utterly (and often) unintelligible to their literal neighbor.

Though making progress in my understanding of Japanese and given that there are times where something just completely clicks and I am flooded with knowledge, there are a significantly more frequent lack of comprehension.

Rarer still is the beautiful work of literature. In English, I have found many people and many works that I admire. They have dug into the box and pulled out one of the endless and forever changing puzzle pieces and set up a beautiful picture. Sure the puzzle could have been put together in a different way, but something about the way it is makes it beautiful. Surely every language has this kind of thing. But even more impressive is a work that strikes you as amazing despite a translation. Beautiful words in English don’t always sound beautiful in Japanese.

But once, maybe just once, I will find a golden egg, or a 4-leaf-clover. Throw a dart and get a bull’s-eye. Witness lightening strike twice, translate something correctly and beautifully or see a brilliant cosmic event, a supernova, a falling star, the birth of a planet or a single perfectly formed flower.

My New Project / Wikiality

2007-04-24T14:41:00.000+09:00

Mimata Town has a wikipedia entry that I have recently discovered. I have lived in Mimata for almost a year now and I never bothered to check wikipedia for it before. I find that strange.

As you can tell, there is no information on there currently. I have downloaded the Japanese language entry for Mimata and it has a substantially larger quantity of information. Part of my language practice now is going to be to translate that into English and then put it on the page for Mimata in English.

Keep an eye out, offer suggestions and Paul you are probably going to be able to offer me a good amount of advice on organization / webdesign tips. All of which are welcome. Everyone, please email me suggestions.

Fathom Seer / The Alchemist

2007-04-23T22:55:00.000+09:00

What exactly is it about the human understanding that seems to think that knowledge is hidden everywhere? Sometimes I feel as the wind blows or as the bird sings outside my door that they know something I do not.

Many wise men and women have written books that speak of secrets and quests and things that people can find that they once did not have. In these stories there are always unknowns and mysteries to be found in places that their language is not spoken. It could be a foreign country, the bottom of the ocean, the past, or into outer space. People say it is the endlessness of the human imagination but perhaps it is mans ignorance to believe knowledge is hidden under the cover of every book, under each stone or in the breath of every wind.

Maybe people believe in God or gods because that gives them some justification for the feeling that knowledge is hidden there, within everything just beyond perception.

I’m just following the omens. When you don’t believe in designed fate or freewill, everything is an omen and everything has meaning. I came to Japan to learn Japanese. I want to learn Japanese because I cannot understand it and it seems somehow that there is knowledge hidden in the strokes of ink on a page written by a lonely man as he traveled this country hundreds of years ago by foot.

Can you find treasure digging in the desert with a spoon?

I've bet my life on "yes".

People Say Justin Timberlake Is Gay/ But He Made Britney Spears A Ho And That's Pretty Cool

2007-04-13T19:58:00.000+09:00

Funniest thing i have seen in a while. I miss good SNL

The God Particle and The Black Hole That Lives Under Europe

2007-04-10T20:28:00.000+09:00

Is something wrong with me if I get half an erection when I hear the phrase "Particle Accelerator?”

Starting in August of this year, the largest particle accelerator ever made will start operation. The potential outcomes of this are numerous. It is taking particles smaller than protons and putting them with more energy then a speeding city bus. Then it adds millions more of these and smashes them all together. One potential outcomes of this, and it sounds like a joke but I assure you it is not, is the destruction of the world. Seriously, that is listed on the official write up of this experiment. Never before has mankind ever witness this much energy being released in a small place. The energy created is more then our nuclear arsenal and has the risk of creating of black hole under the center of Europe. But physicists claim the most interesting result would be nothing. That would prove that physicists missed something.

The experiment is attempting to develop the Theoretical Higgs field and potentially the Higgs particle. This particle is nicknamed the God particle because modern theorizes that this particle is the reason why things have mass as opposed to not having mass. Think about it. Yeah, mass exists we all know that. But why? Physicists have no answer as to why mass is real.

So, in August, keep your eyes out for strange things. The protons will race from Switzerland to France and back at almost the speed of light. I’m excited. Are you? I’ve always thought it would be interesting to see the end of the world.
By the way, this blog is not a joke. This is real. You can listen to it on the NPR; World Story of the Day podcast for 4/10/2007. Available free from iTunes.

This Feeling Has No Name / A Drop Water, A Lifetime.

2007-04-09T20:52:00.000+09:00

There is not official name for this. I checked. But for as long as I can remember I have had a fear of silence. I remember working at laser quest and when I was in the back of the maze, it didn’t matter how dark it was, I was ok. I wasn’t afraid. I was more then ok. I loved it. But whenever the music was off, I was uncomfortable to say the least.

When I was about 15 years old, I went through a depression that I can’t describe and I did the opposite of what most people do: I avoided medication and drugs of all forms. I wasn’t sure what they would mean for me in the years to come and I didn’t want to ruin who I could be because of my depression.

I looked for truth in religion and I found none but that was a relief. Buddhism spoke to me of the flexibility of the universe and how perception was so flexible. That felt better, I felt good. I started meditating and my depression went away.

I did it in silence and temporarily I convinced myself that silence was no longer scary. It didn’t help that since around when I was 15 years old I had a cell phone. I was always within arms reach of a conversation tool. It doesn’t help that I have had an iPod since basically when they were invented. If ever it was quiet or I was busy doing something I had the option of putting on music or later podcasts to cover myself in connectivity almost proving the Buddhist philosophy that all things are connected. Silence while doing the dishes becomes a lesson in the blanket from I Heart Huckabees.

Today, I experienced a weird flashback of this fear of silence. I cannot recall the last time before today that I felt I was in complete silence.

I was really stressed today at work, which is ironic because classes haven’t started yet. I was worried about all the preparation that was ensuing and how tomorrow I have a class in the evening that I was struggling to come up with an idea for.

I came home and I sat down. I don’t have very much money and everyone was busy tonight. I wanted something to leave me stress free and I couldn’t find a way to do it. My main way of doing that is to see someone, talk to some, etc. I’m far from depressed and my life feels perfect it was just that tonight I was really in the mood to have company, especially a special something who is far away tonight. But that wasn’t in the stars as the proverbial they always say.

I got online and I started looking for something to entertain me and I started listening to podcasts and for some reason it wasn’t working tonight. Other nights, this was more than enough and I was beyond content.

I took a bath.

I took a bath alone.

I don’t recall the last time I had done that. It was shockingly quiet. You can’t take your iPod in the bath with you and I don’t have any easily portable speakers.
At first, the water was going and splashing it wasn’t so quiet but then it stopped.

As blank as the break between 2 paragraphs. I didn’t really know what to do and I felt silly to have that kind of neurosis. But I remembered the meditation and I realized how far I had come in my fear of silence. I had a mini mediation session there and I felt better. I found peace and felt relieved of stress.

It made me wonder why I stopped meditating on a regular basis. One of the original reasons I wanted to live in Japan was because I wanted to experience Japanese Buddhism. I am here and have been for a while but the reality is my Japanese isn’t good enough to do that.

When Tim and David were here, we went to a temple in Kamakura. There was a speech happening in Japanese to the students and I could understand pieces of it. It was a monk, shaved head and living in the temple. The people he taught came in on scooters or bikes after their normal life jobs came to study the philosophy. So much of my being desires to be able to do that and largely that is unavailable in America and besides, I don’t want to live in America.

My mini meditation tonight is going to continue to be done in the future and I think it will add to my already satisfying level of contentment. One day, I hope to sit in a room and in Japanese hear philosophy or Buddhist poetry and perhaps I will die happy once I have been in a haiku creation circle and the people who have studied haiku their whole lives.

I want to write something beautiful and small. I want a monk to read it and say nothing. He will just smile and in that silence, I will not be afraid.

お花見　/ A Lifetime Searching For The Perfect Flower Would Not Be Wasted.

2007-04-03T10:23:00.000+09:00

Spring has come with its many colors. The color I have been seeing the most of is offwhite and grey. What they say about april showers isn’t true in japan. In Japan, April showers bring April flowers. The storm and the sun overlap and grow flowers in massive numbers. But the sky lingers grey even during the light of day.

I got a new bike. It’s blue and I bought it from my favorite store, Muji.

Sunday, the first of April, I’m in my apartment and my door gets a knock on it. I had just gotten out of the shower and I freaked out. I had woken up late and so it was around 1pm. Monica had come over and while I was in the shower didn’t answer the door because it was my place and she didn’t want to freak someone out.

I was going to just ignore it but then someone shouted out “Erikku! Erikku!” from the other side. I looked through the peephole and I saw one of the ladies from my language class for adults. She apparently knew where I lived because of the previous English teachers living in Mimata. She was out for a walk and decided to stop by and say hello. She offered to take Monica and I on a ride to show us the Cherry Blossoms (called 桜 Sakura). We had planned to meet up with Rachelle and Richie already to go and view them, but the poor weather and impending rain had us stay home.

I called Rachelle and asked if she would be interested on a from a car tour of some local parks, we could see the flowers and stay dry at the same time. She was down and headed over, Richie opted to stay home. My students name is Kawasaki-San but she told us to call her Kimi-chan (a cute play off her first name). Monica and her talked in Japanese a bit and Monica said that she would like to take us on a driving tour rather then a walking tour. Too bad Richie wouldn’t come… He missed out. The Sakura trees only bloom for a week or two before they fall off and fruit.

We drive down this crazy road in Mimata where there are Sakura trees lining the sides the sides of the road. It was absolutely stunning. The Japanese call flower viewing Ohanami. It is famous and everyone does it every year. The picnic and drink under the flowers and dance and have music playing. The weekends rain hindered this less than I would have expected.

We walked around and saw so many flowering trees, bushes and plants that I was overwhelmed at the size and beauty of a park I didn’t know existed. If you have seen the movie The Last Samurai, you have a clue as to how important Sakura are to the Japanese. I walked through a bit of history and saw ancient trees bloom. I lost myself in thoughts of who may have seen flowers fall from the same tree as me throughout the expanse of history.

I Have Had Many Blog Titles Talk About How The World WIll End. But Know I Know How It Will For Real / I'm Not Normally A Doomsayer, Honestly

2007-03-27T14:50:00.000+09:00

Hey Eric,

Thanks for the Haiku the other day. It was a gem.

I understand your concern about the blood test. Here at the kencho, a nurse
puts a tournaquet around your arm, gives you a rubber cylinder to squeeze,
sticks in a needle in the biggest vein he or she can find, and fills a vial
about the size of a stick of lip balm. The process generally takes less than a
minute, and at the kencho takes place in large gymnasium with no curtains or
beds. Jana can probably give you more details about the procedure in your
office.

I personally have stronger objections to carrying a little bottle of my own
urine around all morning.

Whether or not you are required to do the blood test will be left to the
discretion of your kacho. The first step would be to discuss it with your
supervisor and explain your concerns.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Henry

Firestone Eric wrote:
> Question. Im completely hemophobic and anything more then a finger prick
> to take blood makes me have anxiety attacks and / or pass out.
>
> How much blood do they take? what is the procedure and is it completely
> manditory?
>
> i lost sleep the night jana told me we had to give blood. It sounds silly
> and stupid im sure, but giving blood has been a big deal since i was a kid.
>
> God forbid i ever have to react in a crisis situation...
>
> -eric
>
>
> >From: "Henry Adams"
> >To: miyazaki-ken
> >Subject: [miyazaki-ken] Annual Medical Check-ups
> >Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:51:54 +0900
> >
> >Hello,
> >
> >The beginning of the new fiscal/school year in April is accompanied by
> compulsory medical check-ups for teachers and public servants, including
> JET participants. In the hope of easing your mind about what may seem to
> be an unnecessarily invasive procedure, I'd like to share some information
> with you about the examinations.
> >
> >Q: Where will the medical check-up take place?
> >A: This depends on your school or office, but usually all staff members
> will go to the local public hospital (not to a private clinic), register,
> and then be checked by the doctor and nurses one by one.
> >
> >Q: What exactly will they do to me?
> >A: The doctor and nurses will check the following:
> >1. Weight
> >2. Height
> >3. Eyesight
> >4. Hearing
> >5. Your urine (for diabetes)
> >6. Blood pressure
> >7. A blood sample (for anemia, red blood count, blood density and the
> state of your liver).
> >8. Your heart (with an electrocardiogram-心電図 shindenzu)
> >9. Your lungs (with a chest x-ray)
> >
> >Q: What is an electrocardiogram?
> >or
> >"Hey! Those are the kanji for "heart" and "electricity"! Are they trying
> to electrocute me?! Is this another ill-conceived Japanese invention like
> the denki buro?"
> >A: An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a test that measures the electrical
> activity of the heart. The electrical impulses made while the heart is
> beating are recorded and usually shown on a piece of paper. The
> electrocardiogram records any problems with the heart's rhythm, and the
> conduction of the heart beat which may be affected by underlying heart
> disease. The information obtained from an electrocardiogram can be used to
> check for different types of heart disease. An ECG reveals rhythm problems
> such as a slow
> >or fast heart beat. It can also demonstrate thickening of a heart muscle,
> for example due to high blood pressure and is also used to see if there are
> too few minerals in the blood.
> >
> >Q: How is the ECG performed?
> >A: Usually, the ECG is taken while you are resting on a bed. Up to 12
> self-adhesive electrodes are attached to the skin on your arms, legs and
> chest. The test is completely painless and takes less than a minute to
> perform. After the test, the electrodes are removed. The results are
> displayed on a paper print-out.
> >
> >Q: Is the ECG dangerous?
> >A: When the test is administered to you while you are resting it is
> completely harmless.
> >
> >Q: What's the X-ray for?
> >A: The X-ray is used to check for signs of tuberculosis, which is four
> times more common in Japan than in the UK and New Zealand and 10 times more
> common than in the US. It can also be used to check for early indications
> of lung cancer.
> >
> >Q: Is the X-ray dangerous?
> >A: Nowadays in Japan, with the use of very small doses of radiation to
> produce high quality X-ray images, the risk of cancer after a properly
> supervised X-ray examination is extremely small; so small as to be of no
> consequence to any individual. However, if you are pregnant or suspect you
> may be pregnant it is better to refrain from having an x-ray as it could
> harm the fetus.
> >
> >Q: Do I have to have the medical check-up?
> >A: By law, all workers in Japan in both the public and private sectors are
> required to have an annual medical check-up
> >
> >Q: But I had an X-ray less than a year ago, I don’t need another one!
> >A: If you really don't want to have the chest x-ray then you should speak
> to your supervisor first. He/she will try and encourage you to have it
> though, as the Kocho sensei of your school or the Kacho in your office is
> by law, responsible for the health of all his/her staff. All Japanese
> workers have the medical check-up every year without question. In Japan is
> is viewed as a service provided to the workers by the employer.
> Occasionally, JETs choose to opt out of having the x-ray, but this depends
> on your s
> >chool or office.
> >
> >Please contact a Prefectural Advisor if you have any questions.
> >
> >Henry Adams
> >Miyazaki Prefectural Government
> >International Affairs Division

Directness / Out Of Context And Without Precedent

2007-03-19T14:16:00.000+09:00

Yesterday was the Volunteer Festival in Mimata. This festival had a lot of upstanding citizens showing off their compassionate skills by giving blood among other things. Jana and I were giving away free (authentically French) crepes and I was talking and playing with kids and adults about America. I brought my Devil Sticks and I was teaching people how to use them. Jana, who makes amazing crepes, was making amazing crepes.

The day was very fun and easy going, much less stressful (for me at least, I didn’t have to make crepes all day long) than the previous festivals that I have worked. It was a relaxed atmosphere because everyone was a volunteer. The group of people to the left of Jana and I was a group of students from East Miyakonojo High school. They were volunteering to show people how to use wheelchairs and were trying to bring on more awareness about people who need to use wheelchairs. Wheel chair in Japanese is 車椅子. You say it “Koo Roo Ma Ee Sue” Those of you who have studied Japanese will realize that the kanji for it mean “Chair Car.” That makes me laugh.

So, two of the girls that were helping people with wheelchairs saw me playing with the devil sticks and I heard them talking about how they thought I was doing it. I then asked one of the girls if she wanted to try. She said yes and then proceeded to be hilarious. She kept saying, “image training” in English and then closing her eyes and pretending she was doing using the devil sticks successfully. Then we laughed and she acted all serious and said that I class they learned that if you can visualize yourself doing something difficult, you are more likely to succeed in doing it. I have read research about that and know that it has been shown true in various psychological studies.

She was not very successful with the devil sticks but she and I started talking. It turns out I taught one of her younger brothers who is going to go to the same high school as her starting next semester. She is will be a senior and he will be a freshman. We are talking about the differences in English and Japanese and the cultural differences between America and Japan when she says, “I have to talk about something serious.”

I have to say, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but whatever I did expect was completely and utterly incorrect. I think I was expecting a joke but I was shocked when she starts confessing her inner feelings about life and love and other topics. Many people I know who teach high school in Japan tell me how hard it is to get students to talk in class about anything and she defied all the stereotypes of shy Japanese people and shy teenagers but just coming out with serious personal conversation.

I don’t know how to translate this well but she said, 「自分は自分が大嫌いです。」I didn’t believe her and I half giggled cause of my expectation that this was going to be a joke. Translated, it means something like, “to me, my own self is something that I greatly dislike.” Basically, “I hate myself.” She insisted that it was true and said that she had cried earlier that morning. I didn’t know what to do and I realize now where my Japanese language skill is really lacking.

On a slight side note, I have decided that I will feel confident in my Japanese and feel fluent when I am able to have this type of conversation with someone in Japanese without hesitation and with minimal mistakes. That’s because right now, and this is totally the truth, I didn’t even know what words to begin to say to her in Japanese.

Anyway, I basically told her that at her age many people feel that way and it wasn’t anything to really be worried about. I told her life would be better. She told me she believes that too but that it’s hard. She told me she wanted to grow up and help people and do all these things but didn’t know how or what to really do with her life and that she would go to college soon and wasn’t sure how to handle that.

I didn’t really know what to say and I felt really nervous and uncomfortable. In English, I think I could have handled this situation fun but I just could find the words because they were just not in me. A bunch of kids showed up and I got distracted helping them and this girl helped me for a bit with it and then she went back to her station. I didn’t get much time to talk to her until after the festival.

Jana and I finished up and cleaned up and started to pack up the van. Our supervisor had given blood and passed out somewhere (I’m not joking.) and we didn’t have the keys so after we cleaned up we laid down in the grass and were talking when the girl spotted me and came up to us. She sat down and started talking to me but Jana took over. A) Jana is a girl so she knows more of what a girl at age 17 would feel and B) Jana knew more of the words to say to her. It was really sad how much I understood but how little I was able to really create sentences to help out. Jana said a lot of the things that I wanted to say but didn’t know how too. The girl started talking about people and couples and love.

Jana was explaining her perspective of Japanese relationships and relationships across the world and I think around that time, the girl started crying. The girl’s friends saw this and came over and were cheering her up while I listened and while Jana offered the good advice and the girl said something about how she was sad but felt like it would be better. At one point, she said that there was a guy that made fun of her for seeming half Japanese. Jana and I thought this was complete bullshit cause she doesn’t look half Japanese at all. Her hair is slightly lighter than other Japanese girls and she has a round face but she looks Japanese. We didn’t understand that part. Jana told her to feel better because we both think that half-Japanese is good. Jana said that 2 of my favorite girls from my life were half Japanese, basically. I was completely in love with Sara for long while and she was half Japanese. And now, I’m totally crazy about Monica who while being 100% Japanese is half Japanese in a way because of her being from America. The girl giggled at this.

The girls friends said that Jana and I were good friends for her and Jana and I both gave her our email addresses and said that if she has a problem she can talk to us. She hasn’t said anything yet, but I was really impressed with her. Jana said something like smart people are the ones that see problems everywhere and being smart is good. So seeing problems everywhere is in a way a sign of her being a good person. Amen sister.

P.S.
Jana really is kind of like the older sister I never had. Our relationship is often like we are siblings where we are affectionate to each other but still hardcore pick on each other. Its fun. Oh and, I know these pictures probably all seem out of place, but I wanted to post more of the pictures from Tim and David’s Visit and I had a few pictures of the Volunteer Festival, so pardon all the seeming-out-of-context-ness.

PostSecret Always Makes Me Feel Naked / Did I Mail That In?

2007-03-15T14:42:00.000+09:00

I was a Murakami Character / 15 Minutes of...

2007-03-14T15:12:00.000+09:00

This is going to be a little late but as they say, better late than never. Last Wednesday, exactly 1 week ago, I went to Tokyo. Tim and David (my good friends from Charlotte) came to for spring break and to celebrate our mutual friend Kojitsu’s birthday. They arrived on Monday in the afternoon and I showed up Wednesday morning.

We spent almost the whole day Wednesday traveling around Kamakura. I have spoken about Kamakura before about 2 years ago when I first came to Japan. But since is virtually an entire city of famous shrines and temples, I was able to enjoy a lot of firsts with tim and david. We visited all of the major things that we needed to like the giant Buddha statue known as the Daibutsu. We hiked around town and took a bus to correct a mistake that we had made.

We were all tired by the end of the day. Tim and David were jet lagged and I was tired from waking up really early to get to the airport make my flight. We played a variant game of UNO that made me miss Combat-UNO. In the one we played we would substitute rules that we invented at the end of the game. The player to win would get to pick a new rule. The next night, we stayed up until like 4 am playing. It’s more fun than it sounds.

The next day was a crazy day. Kojitsu had to go to work so I switched into tour guide mode. We woke up relatively early and went out onto the trains. We went to Shinjuku to go up the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building and took pictures of the city during the day. The weather was very beautiful so that Tim and David got some pretty amazing pictures. From there we went to Harajuku and went shopping and siteseeing in the famous parts of the fashion district. This was the first trip to Japan where I bought basically nothing for myself. The only thing I got for myself was a C.C. Lemon cell phone charm. It is filled with a bubbly weird liquid and has these little plastic balls that float around in it and look like bubbles. Man, C.C. Lemon is good shit.

From there we went to Meiji Jingu which is the Emperors shrine. It was made over 100 years ago and is still used and maintained today by practicing Shinto priests. Jingu is the word for a giant special shrine. This started off all well and good but ended up amazing. David turns around and says, “Oh my god, I think that is Sara Jessica Parker!” I turned and looked and low and behold, it was her! We weren’t 100% sure at first but we got closer and heard her voice and we knew, instantly. It was her. Later on we semi stalked her while she filled out prayer cards and put them up at the shrine. Tim watched where she put the cards and we looked at them. They were unsigned. But we had noticed all these cameras set up on the roads and we realized that they had been set up to capture pictures of her.　　As we were leaving we saw more people setting up cameras and we saw a man snapping shots of her as she fake smiled and was leaving. We don’t blame you Sara. Paparazzi are bad.

Kojitsu is a huge fan of her and of Sex and The City. We told him that we saw her and he semi freaked out after a small bout of not believing us. That night we were all very tired and did dinner near by Kojitsu’s apartment and then went to a local bath house. Tim and I got massages and it was great. We all planned on going to sleep right away but as you already know, we UNOed until like 4 am.

The next day we went around Tokyo to places we couldn’t make. With Kojitsu by our side, we went to Asakusa’s famous shrines and many other famous places. That evening we saw Eriko and a friend of hers from work. We went out to dinner for Kojitsu’s birthday and did karaoke afterwards. I have done karaoke with gay guys before but never in such overwhelming numbers. I was not use to the over abundance of Madonna and Backstreet Boys that was waiting for me. I sung a few Japanese songs and a few English songs. Eriko and her friend sung some of my favorite Japanese songs by Puffy Amiyumi. Great great band.

But the highlight of my day was really in Asakusa. There was a couple of comedians working for a Tokyo TV company that was going around asking foreigners to write Japanese Kanji characters. I wrote the symbol for fire and the symbol for stone. They asked me if they could speak to me in Japanese and I said yes. They then asked why I wrote those symbols and I told them my name was Firestone. They thought it was a nickname and laughed, but when I explained that it was my real name they thought it was a very cool name. Then they asked me about why I spoke Japanese and what I was doing in Japan etc. I told them and was kind of joking around the whole time. Later they told Kojitsu that they thought I was funny and they were going to put my interview on TV. I don’t know if it is going to make it nationally, but I used to joke about getting on Japanese TV. But a few years ago when I first went to Tokyo, I made jokes about trying to make it on Japanese TV by protesting George W. Bush’s complete idiocy. But instead, I get to be on TV showing my own idiocy.

So, that was my story about my 15 minutes of fame. Hopefully, this will blossom into a film career or a career on Japanese TV. Haha. I knew I should have taken that S.J. Parker sighting as something auspicious!

Astronomers / No More Stars

2007-02-23T15:23:00.000+09:00

I have been rereading Cosmos by Carl Sagan and it’s definitely an amazing book. By the way, there is something secret and special about the title of this blog entry. 5 points if you can figure out what it is by the end. I have only read the first 2 chapters again but it just makes a person feel small. But I find that both troublesome and liberating.

The amount of which humans make up the universe is minimal. And it states that if you are to insert an atom in 1 in a billion trillion trillion (10 to the 33rd power or a 1 with 33 zeros after it) that we would find ourselves in a recognizably close proximity to another atom. It is, probably obviously, an overwhelming feeling because it furthers such disheartening questions as “why are we here when we could just as easily not be here?” and “Do I have no meaning when put against the backdrop of unfathomable number of stars?

And the first and only real answer I can think of is of course, you don’t mean anything and yes you could just as easily not be here. The number of atoms you possess (or rather are consisted of) are utterly unnecessary for the rest of the universe (or potentially the multiverse) to exist. But that can be liberating. There is no decision you can make that is the end of the world (well, perhaps I should say of existence, because George W. might be capable of ending the world in some clumsy, ignorant act of self-righteousness). Also, it lets you look beyond, in a way, the questions of what is the meaning of life and allows for what many of the French, German and Russian Existentialists insisted was true: Humans make meaning of out the world, not the other way around.

More on this as my reading continues.

On to a more realistic and pragmatic discussion, near my apartment something has developed. Litterally, overnight a Seven-Eleven convienient store has been built. I kid you not, yesterday afternoon after work I drove home past this location and it was an unkempt plot of grass with a sign on it saying that it was for sale. I woke up this morning and drove past it on my way to work and there were people loading refridgerators and stocking shelves with food. I did a double take. Having woken up not an hour before I thought perhaps I was mid-dream. But it was real. Not only had the field been paved overnight, but the building was there and a very tall sign was erected out front. This makes it now the closest convenient store to my house, beating the Lawson down the street. The Lawson is slightly farther than a quick walking distance, letting me narrowly escape the possibility that I want a snack or drink in the middle of the night and go for a stroll that would cause me to spend money unnecessarily.

Now, perhaps a 5-minute walk tops to this 24-hour wishing well (as in I put my money in it and never get it back, and wish that I had it in my pocket!), I will be forced to quench my thirst and cure my tiny, very bearable hunger at all hours of the night. Where previously, laziness and not wanting to drive kept me home and kept the coins in my pocket, sheer overwhelming proximity and 40-watt-light-bulb-magnets are going to pull me out of my home.

Carl Sagan was right of course, a billion trillion trillion chance of being near another planet if randomly inserted into the universe, but apparently a 1 in 1 chance of finding yourself next to a Seven Eleven. I don’t know how the math works out on that, but Sagan’s ghost is getting thirty. Luckily, I have an appalling amount of freshly purchased tea.

5 points to any of you who noticed the two titles of this blog entry are anagrams for eachother.

Jappocalypse Now / Photo Journal

2007-02-18T16:44:00.000+09:00

So, i have been unbelievably busy these past few weeks because of things due for the end of the school semester. There have been about 4 events that i have worked and i have a series of pictures that need to be shown from them. The first of which is by far the strangest. If you haev seen the movie Naushika of the Kingdom of the Winds? Well, its a lesser known movie by Hayao Miyazaki who made Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Well, there was a festival called the World's Children festival where about 200 children came dressed in various costumes to celebrate and explore carnivals and traditions of the world. These 200 5-year-olds had amazing costumes and my original idea was to go as one of the characters from the Naushika movie (who wear gasmasks cause of the hazardous environment in which they live). But the constume i bought wasnt really the right size and so i couldnt comfortably wear it. Also, i thought it would potentially scare the children. Instead, i went as a crazy looking old man with a fake bald head and glasses that rear-view-mirrors built into them. They were very popular with the children.

The next photos are rather unorganized and are not listed chronologically. Basically, if they are of children in crazy looking costumes or westerners in crazy costumes they are from the carnival. If they are pictures of peope either dressed in kimono or traditional clothes they are from a cultural festival. But if the people are dressed normal, it was people visiting the culture festival. The ones of me dressed normal are to showcase my new glasses. The one to the left of this is an example of one of those.

These girls are on left are 2 sisters. They are the oldest and the second oldest of 4 sisters. They are all very friendly and smart and these 2 are basically my favorite students. They both danced ballet at the cultural festival and were taught by Jana. The one of Jana with a little girl in front of her, is of the youngest of the 4 sisters. They are both good at English and will be very successful at life.

Many of you remember Setsubun from last year around this time. I dressed as a red demon at the Smith Academy of Language and this year for Setsubun I was teaching at Nagata Elementary School. These children were talking about the evil they wanted to get out of their life and were all hillarious. Some of them wished for less homework, but one 4th grader wished to get rid of her shyness for when "Eric-Sensei" comes back to the school. It was very cute.

This if the corner, albeit a sideways shot, at the Culture Festival. Jana and I made an attempt to smooth the relationship between America and France through the UN. If she and I were president and Prime Minister respectively, I think the world might be better off.
These are from the cultural festival. These 2 girls were very shy and didnt want me to take their picture but their mothers insisted that they smile and let me take their picture. They are elementary students and 100% bad ass.

So, that is the past 2 weeks of my life. I am happy to report that despite being so very busy that I am enjoying my time here in Japan. But I occassionally forget that i am in Japan. For example, I will be at a store or school or walking in the street and someone will say my name or ask me a question in Japanese that I understand and reflexively respond in English. It always makes me feel stupid but leaves me plesantly surprised. Also, when I am driving or looking around I often forget that i am in Japan and when something reminds me (like driving on the other side of the road) I smile at my success of arriving where i wanted to be.

I am not dead but i am however covered in milk and afraid of bird flu.

2007-02-01T18:45:00.000+09:00

Today was my first day teaching at Nagata Shogakko. It's a small elementary school near a beautiful gorge, river and forest. Mom and Melanie, you were there and its where mom was trying to make you take a picture next to the fake metal birds.

Setsubun, which is actually Sunday, was celebrated today and they requested that I come in and talk about Easter. Setsubun is a holiday where the head teacher or principle dresses up like a demon and comes into the school and the kids, dressed like little demons too, throw 'magic' beans at the demon to ward off evil spirits. The idea originated long ago in Japan as a way of cleansing your home for the new year by warding off evil spirits. Spring is coming soon so they celebrate Setsubun around this time because winter is fleeing.

Last year, Ashley and I went to the Smith Academy of language (also an elementary school) and I dressed up as a demon and the kids threw simulated magic beans at me. I will repost pictures of this so that you can have a refresher. I probably posted pictures about it last year ad nauseam.

Anyway, I taught about Easter because they asked me too. They asked me to play Easter games and explain about it because one of the teachers thought it was similar to Setsubun in that it welcomes good spirits in the new year. I told her she was wrong in the nicest and politest of ways but that Easter is coming up soon and is fun for the kids. Not to mention, she already had planned and told the kids that we would do an Easter egg hunt.

So I show up with bunnies on an egg hunt pieces of paper for the children to color (its embarrassing I couldn’t find a shorter way to say that) and a hand-written note to myself on what to say about Easter. I decided to avoid Jesus in my discussion much like I do in my everyday life.

The hunt went very well but a 1st grade boy who was fucking adorable in the first place looked like he was going to cry because he broke one of the eggs. After that, I went to the principles office and talked to them about the differences between American holidays and Japanese holidays. The fact that I could participate in that conversation made me pretty proud of my Japanese skill.

I went upstairs and taught the 4-6th grades and they were all very friendly. One boy had a habit of talking to me in rapid fire speech which is hard enough as is, but on top of that would talk to me in mostly Japanese little boy slang. I had to ask him to slow down a lot. But ironically, it seemed as if he couldn’t understand my Japanese either. he asked me to repeat myself several times but it annoyed these 2 girls in the class who would shrug their shoulders and repeat exactly what I said in the same words and I feel, the same pronunciation. I don’t know what made it hard to understand.

I ate lunch with the 6th graders after playing a few games with them and we talked about living in Japan vs. living in America. It was kind of funny that most of the children in the 6th grade class were born and lived originally in Osaka. It struck me as strange that so many people in the same area moved from the same native city to tiny little Mimata.

The funniest part of the class was when it was ending. The teacher told the 6th graders that they would be seeing me next year at the middle school. One girl goes “Oh my god, he’s a middle school student?” and everyone laughed, called her silly and then told her of course not, obviously I was a teacher there and she giggled. Later, they told everyone else that worked at the school and they were all very entertained. I knew I looked young, but that younger than I would have said as a joke!

At lunch time, I spilled milk all over myself and one of the kids made a pee-pee joke. It’s strange the things that are universal.

I got reading glasses kind of. My eyes had been hurting me at work and after a long day of typing or using the computer. I went to an eye doctors and they told me my vision is fine but I could get glasses that had a light filter that would protect my eyes and have UV protection while driving but that doesn’t have a prescription or anything. I ended up spending way too much money on them cause I tried on all the fancy frames. That coupled with sending a ton of money home to pay bills has left me with literally almost no money till payday. I am trying to get my credit cards completely paid off as quickly as possible.

I will post a picture of my new glasses soon.

So, Monica has informed me that it has a tiny perscription. My glasses that is. i don't really notice a difference when i look through them, so who knew?

Broken Flowers / Edward Scissors Hands

2007-01-04T11:28:00.000+09:00

My mom and my sister spent a good amount of time in Japan with me over Christmas and New Years and although we fought just like families are designed to do, it was great seeing them. They both want to revisit Japan and have me come back to the States for a visit. I told them to hurry back to Japan.

After they left, I drove up I took a car full of food and Matzo Ball soup ingredients to Monica's for a 2 day movie watching fest. We both rented a series of movies we wanted to show eachother and an amazing pair of days went by.

We talked about Japan and work and live in general and most of all we talked about what we wanted from all of those things. We came to an understanding and an agreement about the future that we are both very enthusiastic about. She is feeling mentally healthy and that makes me happy.

I feel like some kind of magical aluminum foil because whenever something gets roughed up, I am maleable enough to smooth back as well as before.

For the first time in my life, I saw Edward Scissor Hands. I knew a good deal about the movie before seeing it because of the 16 years having passed since its original run in theaters. It was cheesey like most movies made in the early 90s or late 80s are, but still it had a resonance that lasts into the future and a charm that makes me wish I saw it years ago. Johnny Depp might not have been as funny or as "hot" as he is percieved today, but there was still a subtle genius in his feigned innocent smiles.

I recommend everyone see Broken Flowers with Bill Murray. Great movie for anyone who has ever had a sexual/romantic relationship ever. I want of Bill sitting in the rain under a tree with pink flowers in the graveyard.

Oh a funny side note, this is the best piece of news I have read in a long time.

2006 / So This Is The New Year And I don't Feel Any Different

2007-01-01T11:59:00.000+09:00

Last year i spent new years in Shizuoka basically at the foot of Mount Fuji. I went with Jaime, Kyle and Eriko + family to the shrine the next day and got the best of possible fortunes from the fortune teller. It said my love life was going to be enjoyable and good and that my life would in general be amazing. A good year to rival my best of years.

That's retrospectively very true. I had a series of nice interactions with girls and and some of the closest and most intimate of my life. I am not sure how 2007 will hold up but I satisfied with my female companions of this year so thank you.

Also, It was perhaps the best year of my life in that the longest term goal I have known myself to ever have had came true. Since iw as about 10 years old i was trying to move to japan and try living life there. This year, 2006, I was finally able to pull it off and so far it has been amazing. Thank you 2006 and thank you to The Postal Service for their Transatlanticism album and the first track from which todays opening title comes from.

I wish the world was flat like the old days, so we could travel just by folding the map.

The Death of Saddam Hussein / 100th Blog Entry

2006-12-30T20:09:00.000+09:00

Sigh.

I am with my mother and sister watching CSI on my couch when I decided to check the news. It appears that about 10 hours ago Saddam was put to death by hanging.

Sigh. I am not by any means pro Saddam or anything like that, but I am anti-death penalty. I am by no means anti-muslim or anything like that, but I feel like the cycle of violence in the Middle East is far from being over and Saddam's death was just a foreshadowing of this. The fact that killng was used as an example of why not to kill or as vengence for previous killing shows me that the spinning top of violence still has many many more revolutions to go through before stopping.

I realized today that some of my previous decisions that didn't work out as planned and seem as if I should have done the opposite thing. But at the time I did the best I could with the information that I could. When you realize something like that, you wonder if you had the information you do now if you would do a different thing. The decisions I am making now, should I consider that despite how they are feeling that they might end up as the wrong thing later? This is ironic because of course it's already a part of my consideration of whether or not to act in such and such a way. To see the future won't help. Most people think time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of time and I can tell you they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm. I think my mind is already made up but I haven't figured out exactly what that means. This is a just a thought experiment that may sound confusing and nonsensical, and most certainly is, but all in all I am still left wondering: if yesterday was two days ago tomorrow, will the day after tomorrow be today or yesterday?

100th entry came and went.

New Poetry / Beautiful Decay

2006-12-29T11:23:00.000+09:00

It's hard to sleep on old memories. It's hard to stop thinking about your skin, still in my bed where I lay, giving life to colonies of small animals. The past is the past but isn't set in stone. The past is as in flux as the future but I remember touching your flesh, more complete and warm but it fed a certain life into me too.

I hear your thoughts and your voice in a rythme that probably doesn't exist.

The sea was an enormous idea, rain falling silently over its vastness / 6 weeks, 1 day late.

2006-12-27T09:42:00.000+09:00

I just finished reading Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. Another great book filled with genius ideas and beautifully worded sentences.

There is no one in my office today, it's winter break and school is out so i have nothing to do. I have been reading more in the past few days than I have in a few weeks. I have covered myself in episodes of CSI purchased from iTunes and podcsts from NPR. The past month, after Thailand, was a strange cloud of emotion drifting across several climates by a gentle wind. Sometimes it rain, but mostly it was mildly sunny with scatter clouds.

It's silly, but it's not possible to live without regrets, even if you know things cannot be any other way then they are now. But part of me wonders what would be different if I had finished this book earlier and talked to Monica while its pages were fresher in her mind.

Regardless, the thing I would want to change most about my life now would be to have more sleep, better sleep, or a better sleep patern. I am tired of being tired.

Since the weather has gotten colder, I have exercised less and that adds to my lack of energy. I smile and enjoy all the day that I am awake, I just wish i had more vigor in my bones more ability to dance... dance... dance...

She told me that people don't just disappear. Oh, really? I thought. No, anything can happen. This world is more fragile, more tenuous than we could ever know.

Return From Tokyo / Sniffles and Sneezes

2006-12-21T09:50:00.000+09:00

I am back from TOkyo. Many stories, no time to write about them.

I feel like i have strep throat. I hardly have a voice at all. My nose is runny and I keep coughing. Tomorrow I am supposed to teach children about Christmas at a kindergarten. I hope my voice returns.

Recently, perhaps I have acted like I have had everything figured out already. Perhaps, I acted like she had to figure stuff out, not me. I know we both need to figure stuff out and I hope we both have the patience to allow ourselves and eachother to do that. I am a very patient person and my patience is no where near up. Keep learning about yourself Eric...

...and Monica.

More Partying In 3 Days Then In All Of College / Stranded In The Middle Of No Where

2006-12-12T14:26:00.000+09:00

Thursday night of last week, I went to the dinner party with the male teachers at Miyamura Elementary School. The principle is from Okinawa (I think) and is amazing at English. He wanted me to make friends with the English teachers so that he would be able to have better teachers at his school.

We talked mostly in Japanese but in English too. I taught them some English jokes and new vocabulary. It was a lot of fun. They mentioned that they like karaoke and asked me if I was a fan. I told them it wasn't my favorite but that it could definately be fun. We talked about the differnt songs that they sung or that I sung and they asked me if I was able to go out the next night. I had no plans.

The next night we met at a local Izakaya (Japanese Style Bar) and drank and talked like the night before. 4 female teachers who wanted to meet me showed up too. They were all very nice and we talked about America and Japan. The highlight of my entire night was when they asked me why I came to Japan

I explained to them that i studied Japanese culture and philosophy in highschool and college and that writtings from people like say Issa and Basho, 2 very famous haiku masters, I felt was some of the most simple but insightful works of litterature I have ever read.

They were surprised that i knew about the Japanese asthetic terms Wabi and Sabi. They asked me to explain it to them to prove I knew the terms, but I couldn't in Japanese. I tried to in half English, half Japanese but I couldn't. Frustrated, but confident I understood the terms, I read them a haiku i wrote in English and then translated it into Japanese. I told them in English the 5, 7 , 5 works but translated to Japanese it doesn't.

I read:
Mist over mountains
Cold wind blows over to us--
The start of Winter

They all were shocked. They clapped and told me that I must be smart to be able to understand Wabi Sabi without being a native Japanese speaker. They told me my poem captured Wabi Sabi and applauded me for wanting to be able to write haiku in japanese.

I felt so good. It was like I was intellectually satisfied and it overflowed into a physically good sensation. My goals and my desires from Japan were to experience the country, learn Japanese better, and to live a life more like Issa and Basho. Their daily haiku writting ritual enhanced their lives and the lives of people for centuries since. Haiku is more about self-knowledge than anything else and for the first time, I really felt like that was what I was achieving.

I went out to karaoke and I sang mostly beatles songs. It feels good to pretend you are Paul McCartney.

I got home and went to a language camp the next morning.

The camp was very cool. The house it was at was near an onsen (hot springs) down the road from Mimata on the way to Miyazaki City. It was built, by hand, by the man who owned it. He grows his own food and only buys from the store things like meat and fish and occassionally things for sauces that he doesn't make himself.

He was a hillarious and nice man and the camp went smoothly. He taught us a bit about how soba (buckwheat noodles) was made because he made his own and was very proud of that fact. The camp went smoothly and was basically an excuse for students to get experience in English and other languges and to see and talk to foreigners. In short, to help internationalize the area.

It was very fun but relatively uneventful. Everyone called my Firestone. Thats the first time in Japan that has happened. I tell everyone to call me Eric because it is easier to say in Japanese syllabals but they insisted on calling me Firestone. Telling me it was such a cool name.

That night, Saturday night, Sayuri (one of my Japanese friends) and a group of her friends took me out. They wanted to go out drinking and drink we did. If you are keeping track, thats 3 nights of pretty heaving drinking a row. Yikes. I never even drank heavily 2 nights in a row. Yikes.

Luckily, I don't get hung over easily and had no bad side effects from drinking the next day(s).

We went to a bar at like 9pm and it was a bar where 2 of Sayuri's friends worked. They were both bartenders and would sing karaoke randomly. Basically, this happens a lot in Japanese bars. The bartenders in smaller bars are paid to be your friend. To talk, to party with you. It's not extra pay but it's just an extra step in their normal nightly requirements.

They are usually good at this and very fun. Both these guys were particularly hillarious. They kept trying to talk to me in English and asking me questions about me and my perception of Japan. They asked me about New York and North Carolina and America in general. They requested karaoke songs and were always quick to refill my drinks (most of these bars are all you can drink and this one was no exception). I drank mostly beer but I had a Gin-Lime that was more sweet than sour and a Macha-Milk that was quite good. Macha is the kind of tea they do in tea ceremony. Well, a Macha-Milk is a milky tea with alcohol. If you like tea, you would love this. Especially, if you want the taste of alcohol to be absent in your drinks.

I sung the beatles and a few slightly older ladies in the bar got a huge kick out of it. In Japan, everyone loves the Beatles. These women weren't really old, but were probably mid-thirties and couldn't get enough of me. They thought it was hillarious that I was singing English and Japanese songs and that I was talking and making jokes in Japanese.

My favorite song (and basically the only one I know all the words to) is by a band called Begin. I don't understand the complete meaning but the song basically translates to The Luck/Fortune of The Island People. It's basically a song from Okinawa that got popular a few years ago nationwide in Japan. Everyone, EVERYONE knows the song. That's how I picked up the words, basically someone always sings it at karaoke.

I was trying to work up the courage to sing it alone cause i have never done that. I always sung it with one of my Japanese friends or with a Japanese, English teacher that I worked with. Sayuri and her friends kept saying don't be shy, don't be shy! So I sighed, and typed the song into the karaoke machine.

It came on and all the Japanese people looked at eachother in the bar to figure out who was singing it. When I stood up everyone cheered and held their glasses up. Everyone was yelling stuff at me about how my pronounciation was good and stuff. Also, the song is like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, because their are parts where the persons not singing yell out random stuff like "like a lightbulb" but in Japanese (「僕が生まれた…」). And no, they don't litterally say like a lightbulb.

Afterwards, I complained about how fast the song and everyone made fun of me. The song, is in all actuality, quite quite quite slow. If it was English and that speed I would have agreed and said it was quite slow, but the fact I had to read the Japanese off the screen made it feel like it was moving very very quickly.

They high-fived me and told me that I did a great job. It was another wonderful night.

Sunday morning, Monica requested that I go with her to a taiko (traditional Japanese drumming) competition. She said to only agree if I wasn't hung over. I wasn't and taiko is often amazingly cool and entertaining. We went to taiko and then to an Indian (like Bombay, not seminole Florida) restaurant in Miyazaki City.

We missed our friends who were performing in the competition becasue we got lost for 1.5 hours. We didn't realize one road touched the same other ride twice and were in the wrong part of town not aware of why the map seemed to be entirely unapplicable.

The Indian restaurant is amazing and the food comes out hot hot hot and spicy like I enjoy it. (I don't know why I am enjoying repeating words today, but I definately am) And I made a funny observation. I noticed that if I am talking to anyone who doesn't look Japanese I default to English because, for example, my experience with people from India is limited to English conversation in America. So, the Indian man at the restaurant came up and talked to me in Japanese, of course, but for some silly reason I was shocked.

I have also learned not to just walk up to random white people and speak English because there is a good chance they speak say French.

When I started to have to go home, Monica dropped me off at the trainstation and the train was running late. The man behind the counter told me that I could still make the transfer so off I went. at Minami (South) Miyazaki Station I was supposed to transfer onto a train that stopped at Mimata but continued on till Nishi (west) Miyakonojo. So, I had 2 or 3 minutes to transfer trains. I glanced at the board and was trying to figure out which train was right and I thought i figured it out. Then suddenly, the doors on it started to close and I James Bond style dove inside.

I figured I glanced at the board correctly and didn't think twice. I have never made a train mistake in Japan, until that night. I started listening to the new This American Life on my iPod as if all was right in the world. Probably about 30 minutes later, I noticed a sign going by for the station we were currently stopping at. I didn't recognize the name. I know all the station names on the way to Mimata.

I ran outside and took my headphones out and I asked the station attendant where I was. He informed me i was on the line going to Nichinan. Meaning I was going East instead of South for the past say... half an hour. I told him my mistake and he said that he was sorry but since it was late and I was on a less popular train route (because its through the goddamned wilderness) there would be no trains going back to Miyazaki that night. I asked him what should I do and he said go check the bus schedule outside the station and I might be able to get one back to Miyazaki. He said if not, I could take a cab but it would cost like 60 dollars. I had only like 40 dollars worth of Yen on me, not preparing for such a distaster.

I look around and I can't even figure out how to get out of this station. Turns out, there is no out. The station is basically just a place with a sign in the middle of a seemingly endless series of ricefields. He pointed to a dark, barely visable path between 2 such fields and I gave him a "you've got to be kidding me" look. Then i asked if i should keep riding to a different station and then get a cab/bus and he said it would just get more expensive for the taxi and he couldn't gaurantee a bus.

I walk down the between the fieldsn and a few random houses to a 2 lane road and a bridge. I look left, no lights. I look right, no lights. I walk left and can't find the bus schedule. I keep an eye openned for taxi's. None. In fact, I saw only 2 vehicles past and they were shipping trucks. I turn around to try and go the other way to find the bus schedule. I find it and there haven't been buses for a least an hour and won't be till the next day at like almost 8am. I sigh a "please god let there be a taxi nearby sigh" (a type of sign I was not aware existed) and then kept walking that direction, cause i did't know if left or right would have better results. Hey, at least this one had the bus schedule.

I walk and walk and I start mailing Monica's cell phone telling her i might need a place to stay and informing her of my unfathomable, ineffible stupidity. She says she is perfectly willing to be my hero and get me from the train station if I can make it back to a place she knows and even tries to find where I am on a map based on my hideously uninformed bits of information I had to offer her.

While waiting for her to call me back, cause she has more minutes on her phone plan than I do, a dog starts barking at me. A deep and forboading bark and I hear running around near me and can figure out where it was coming from exactly. Dogs in Japan are notorious for barking violently at non-Japanese people.

I half panic and run and then answer Monica's phonecall when I am confident the dog is either unable to or uninterested in following me. I pictured a cartoon dog saying in a Japanese Country Bumpkin Accent (registered trademark) "get off my land foreigner". This calmed me down.

Ahead, I see lights and it turns out it's a hotel. I go inside an talk to the man inside and am pleased by both the warmth and the light. I hadn't seen light in a while. I was wandering around in total darkness trying to follow the road by the feel on my feet. I got him to call me a taxi and one came. I told the guy to go to Miyazaki but to only go as far as my Yen would take me. He gave me a discounted rate because I was a "nice guy" (an English phrase Japanese people know and throw around meaning a range of things from Nice Guy to Handsome or as I have been told at least twice, "nice guy, you know like you look like David Beckham") and took me beyond where my funds should have allowed, he dropped me off right at Miyazaki Station. Monica showed up and I stayed at her place, took the next day off work and went home the next day. Shocked at my ability to have screwed up a simple action that I had done dozens, litterally dozens of times before.

Quote Of The Year / Marsha Leigh

2006-12-10T09:45:00.000+09:00

"Hey, relationships aren't usually for our sanity"

A Stillness In Time / My Old And New Anthem

2006-12-09T18:44:00.000+09:00

Jamiroquai
From: Return Of The Space Cowboy

There's a stillness in time
Which I cannot define
Does your heart bleed like mine
For a place we can go
Where the troubles of our time are far away
And I had all my life in front of me
Now my darkness days are trouble free
There's no place where I could rather be
Than this journey of discovery.

I found love in that way
And I'm never sad, and I'm always glad
Anything you give me today
I will be thankful for
People find it hard to be strong
Cos they don't know where they're coming from
There was nothing let to do but hang on
For a stillness in time.

If you find that something's going wrong
Look around at what you're running from
There are so many wondrous things for you to see
If this world is turning too fast for your head
Just remember how bad times can roll instead
You can wait a thousand years in line
For that stillness in time.
.

Personalized Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shifts / Carl Sagan's Last Perfect Day

2006-12-08T09:01:00.000+09:00

I took an extra hot shower yesterday to feel refreshed before going out with the guys last night. I was thinking in the shower how strange it is that perspectives are so easily changed. In the shower, i was thinking of all the things i have to finish before going to Tokyo next week, but going to Tokyo is so mundane sounding now. Last year, months in anticipation of visiting Tokyo was driving me crazy and i was so ready to leave to visit that i was a little mad.

But now, having lived in Japan almost 6 months, the idea of going to Tokyo sounds more commonplace and regular. 6 months ago and it would have been a spectacular idea. Also, if most people in america are offered the chance to go to Tokyo it would seem almost like a venture into outer space or a journey to the future. You hop in your enclosed, metal craft and fly past the arctic circle and land on the moon.

My perspective has shifted almost entirely. Tokyo is amazing and i am definately excited but it would seem stranger for me to go to New York City. Because, as many of you know, i don't believe in freewill its hard to justify morals. The things i have done in my life felt morally right because of the reasons i had at the time. It's strange to think that just a few years ago i wasn't drinking alcohol at all. It's not that i drink often or a lot, but the me back then would be surprised by my current perception of alcohol.

I have been watching a lot of CSI that i have purchased from iTunes (invention of the century). Many of the serial killers or the people who kill i believe are acting out some deterministic cycle or series. I am not saying that killing or murder is right but i am saying is potentially unavoidable. We have the shape the environment in order to make fewer murders happen. When Curtis went to jail after doing something stereotypically evil, i felt like he should have done that and if i could have stopped him from doing that i would have. But in a sense, i still viewed him as the same person even if i felt he should never be allowed out in public.

I have become aware a potentially egoist move that i have taken. Having ceased believing in will and volition, it is almost like i have become less active in trying to shape the world. I could be more politically active in the states, trying more to fix what i feel is broken, but instead i have moved to a place that i feel is less broken even if not less corrupt. It's a plsce that my natural tendencies are more compatible with and therefore living is easier (except for the language barrier, which i am picking away at with a spoon).

The people who believe in freewill are the ones running for office and i feel like they are necessary. Everyone acting out their own individual roles are the ones that shape the environment of the human lives. I may have been one of those people if i believed more in my ability to choose. I am less angry at the bad things that happen because i feel in a way they have been unavoidable. People are people, they are imperfect and they get angry and feel war will solve things. I can't help that. The groundwork for that kind of thinking was set in brick and mortar years before my heart first beat in the rythme of my slowly fading drum.

But change happens, small changes. Revolution happens. The prime minister isn't allowed back in Thailand, Saddam gets hung. The cogs in the wheel push forward until the oil runs out and it sparks fire and it crumbles. Then it rusts and from its death thousands more things will be created and destroyed.

Sporefrog has always been right.

In terms of Magic:The Gathering (sorry non-nerds, this will seem cryptic), I no longer think in terms of a pure blue deck. My ivory tower philosophy has subsided and i believe more in terms of all green. For a while, i played with Madness and did blue/green. But I starting to be more naturalistic, more Wild Growth, more evolution. Less Counterspell and more Overrun. Less Force of Will and more Birds of Paradise.

The people running the revolutions and heading the countries are the brighter, hotter bluer stars. I than am more red or yellow. They may be easier to see at night and more easily remember, but they burn out too quickly; going supernova a few 10's of millions of years faster than the smaller cooler stars. Maybe my shift has prolonged my life. But still, like the book Cosmos says the last perfect day will come. Even our yellow star, The Sun, will lose its ability to control its thermodynamic shell and expand out and boil the Earths oceans. Recently, Steven Hawkings said we need to flee Earth and colonize other planets to fight off extincion.

I wonder if that will happen before my body dies and my cell inflate from the water inside and my mind fades because i never had control of my biochemical shell.

What happens when it is the dream that wakes and the sleeper that fades into memory?

Whispering In The Ears Of A Sleeping Giant / 懐かしくて、嬉しい。

2006-12-07T09:47:00.000+09:00

Nothing terribly special has been happening in my life. I have been busy with school and coming home to relax and watch CSI or read a book. Monica and I talk a lot on the phone and i am listening to her thoughts about herself and what she needs for her. I offer her words of encourangment and support but there are times she wishes i could be mean to her. Sorry, I just can't do that, it's beyond my capability given my starting point and the information I have gathered since birth.

Tonight, there is supposed to be an office party for the English teachers at Miyamura Elementary School. The principle is very good at English and told me that he is interested in the English teacher being better at English. So, last week he told me that they should go out with me to practice English. I gave him my cell phone information and they are supposed to call me, but i have not heard anything as of yet.

I am looking forward to going becasue he said many of the English teacher are male and approximatley my age. I am still lacking male japanese friends. Therefore, I am well on my way to speaking Japanese like a girl. Not to mention, male company would be nice to have close by. The only male JET that lives drastically close to me is Richie and I love him to death but perhaps don't have enough in common to have the male heart to hearts I am used to with Mike and Paul Haag. Or long ago, the ones i had with Jeromy.

My Japanese female friends have been very busy and I have hardly seen them in the past month. Hiroko is in Kyoto this week, making me very jealous. I told her to send me pictures, but I haven't recieved any yet. But anyway, this Saturday night, after a long day of day of working a language camp, they are taking me out. They said they haven't ever gone out drinking with me and want to. They are worried that I am lonely and say that they will make me genki (lively, energetic, happy) again. Saturday night should be a lot of fun too.

I have said it before to many people that I am happy living in Japan and love it here. But there are times where I wish i packed fewer clothes, books and movies and took my friends with me instead. But I don't think Paul would come out of a suitcase alive if he and Mike were crammed in there together.

The only times in my life that I can remember in my life where I have no been happy was when I was depressed around the time I was 15 (feeling like i couldn't change the wrongs of the world, but I have since learned to accept that and cease believing in right and wrong), when someone dies, or when I have issues or confusion with a girl.

I am definately happy in my life now, but i am feeling a bit nostalgic and off. Paul wrote me an email yesterday and I talked to him about his Ex-Wife some. It reminded me about one of my favorite ways to have fun and relax. Going out to restaurants and talking to my friends about life, philosophy, news, politics, relationships and even the simple things of life too.

In Japan, my Japanese is improving and i am starting to be able to discuss these things, but I am in a deep state of withdrawl from having it everyday and in copious amounts. That doesn't mean I am not happy or unsatisfied, but i feel still that i am in a transitional period of my life. Not that anything in life is every constant, it's instead that I am more aware of the changes on this grain of sand falling in the hourglass.

Across the galaxy, a great beast sleeps and dreams the universe. Whisper in his ear and your wishes come true.

Go On, Do What You've Got To Do. I've Got My Dreams You've Got Yours Too. / Come On, Borrow My Clover

2006-11-30T08:55:00.000+09:00

Well, So It's Over. We Had Great Times, But Now What Of It?

Yeah Um. So it's basically that simple. It's not going to work now, it might work in the future. Nothing is ever certain and if it is it doesn't last long.

You know how i feel and i know you feel the same way, even if we have bad timing.

I've got the memories and the letters and you have my scent in a bottle.

Let's give being friends an honest chance.