To create a little flower is the labour of ages - W. Blake Proverbs of Hell
Tuesday, August 1, 2000
Ah, new month, new beginnings. Now that most everybody has hit the road, I might be able to give my liver a break. However, if last night's revelries at the Celtic Heart are any indication of the upcoming year, I'm doubting that it's gonna be a long one.
Thought I'd play with shades of grey this month - no particular reason, so don't start sending me emails asking me why I'm so depressed or if I've become a Goth or some such nonsense, ok? I'm not and I'm not. Despite the fact that all the kids have gone, I'm not particularly upset about it - the new bunch all seem fairly nice (although I'm gonna have to seriously renovate my friends pages... damn), summer is here and things are going great with Kaori. But don't worry, I ain't gonna get all mushy on you.
 I don't know why, but for some reason, the Gashlycrumb Tinies just popped into my head, so I thought I'd share. I also highly recommend 'The Bug Book'. Who knows? Maybe I am a Goth after all.
No, wait.
I'm not.
Wednesday, August 2, 2000
Happiness and jubliation. Tomomi gave me my birthday presents last night. One of them is a great shirt, and the other one is this puppy. I's a happy boy. Even though it's stinking hot and unbearably humid again today. Winter's gotta be coming soon. I don't know what I was thinking when I opted to spend the entire summer here. Foolish boy that I am.
I've been working on an outline for "Hotaru" - though I've yet to start writing it. I also need to figure out exactly how I want to illustrate it... sure wish I could paint. For those of you not in the know, "Hotaru (Firefly)" is an idea for a book and subsequent web page that I had. It's basically a sort of gesture of appreciation for the folks here in Kyuragi - a 'thanks for having me' if you will. Although I should try to move out of the planning and into the writing soon if I want to get anywhere near finished by the time I leave. I guess I could always send a few copies back over here.
I dunno. This is something that I've been mulling about for a while now - the concept of nesting story within story within story. I just don't know where to begin; the idea that I have strikes me as being beyond my abilities at the moment. Sure, I could just sit down and pound something out, but I feel that there should be more to this. Which is why I thought about making it a webpage. It requires a certain amount of audience response and interaction. As I was poking around some of my dustier bookmarks today I ran across a link to a storyteller's guild. I'd forgotten all about it - a while back I was surfing through storyteller sites looking for some poetic inspiration and I never really gave it much thought at the time. While I don't think that "Hotaru" in its entirety will translate well into the oral medium, any of the stories within could be told as a separate and disctinct entity. Why not? I've always been fascinated my folktales and folksongs; and I'm sure most people would agree that I can spin a fairly decent yarn when the mood takes me.
Still stuck in the contemplation/imagination stages, though. Give me a little while to get my motor running. Oh yeah. I also came across a mistake from way back in May. I mentioned that Noah sent me a fat, phat site called Soulbeat - it's actually Soulbath. Whoops.
Tuesday, August 8, 2000
Hmm. Busy. Not sure what I've been doing to be so busy, but I just haven't had any spare time recently. Or maybe I have and I've just squandered it. Wasting time at school today, I came across a couple of interesting sites: Billy Joe Bob's Home on the Internet Range, which is great fun; and an L. Ron Hubbard Page, which is a lot of hogwash. I'd highly reccomend checking out his biography if you'd like to see how to truly edit your life's history with style and panache (I especially like the image of Ronny climbing out of a cave to show the local people that it isn't haunted - he's got a look on his face that just screams "Y'all are just a buncha dumb-ass ignorant savages, aintcha?"). And I thought I was full of shit. Still, if it keeps folks happy and out of my hair, that's fine with me.
Well, I was going to rant and rave about all this stuff myself, but I found someone else who's done it for me. Though at times it seems like some sort of personal vendetta... it's all too intense for the likes of me. I'll just hate everybody on my own time in my own way and be done with it. That's the problem these days, isn't it? I've always felt that if you're going to speak out against something, it's best to get informed about both sides of the subject. In cases such as this, I'd have to be reading for years to gather enough information to be able to speak intelligently on this. I'd rather just sift through the info and keep my belligerencies to myself. Besides, I don't like to get too obsessed about anything - it keeps me from flitting randomly from subject to subect.
To wit: the group of strange men in suits who just walked into the computer room here at school. They're not really doing much of anything - a couple are chatting and eating lunch, one is disassembling a printer on the far side of the room and the last one is sitting and staring off into space. It's all very peculiar; shame I don't have a webcam. I suppose I could just ask them, but that would spoil the mystery. Hmm.
Thursday, August 10, 2000
Wow. Took me 5 minutes to remember what day it was. I hate that. I even got plenty of sleep last night. I've obviously done some serious culling of brain cells over the past month and a half. Oh yeah, I found out what those folks were up to. They were giving a seminar on computer use in school for teachers who are basically computer illiterate. Not as exciting as I hoped. Then again, very little is as exciting as we'd like it to be - one of life's little joys, I suppose.
Sitting at home last night and flipping through old photos of my friends back in Canada - I couldn't help wondering what I had lost by coming over here for such a long period of time. Not that I regret coming here in the least, life here has been unbelievably good and I'm not sure I'll be ready to go in a year. Three years is a long time though; I know that in coming here I've grown in so many ways that I can't help but wonder if it is even possible to go back home again. I'm desperately curious to know how those that have gone are doing - I'm hoping they'll give me the scoop on what to expect from return culture shock (basically how to deal with being surrounded by large pink people...).
Damn. Three interruptions in as many minutes. Work has caught up with me - I'll have to finish this later.
Monday, August 14, 2000
Harrumph. There is nothing more annoying on a Monday morning than receiving an email from a friend you haven't heard from in ages, writing them back - trying to bring them up to date on what's been happening in your life, clicking the 'send' button only to discover that either the computer has crashed or the server has disconnected you, but you can't tell which because it's all written in Japanese. What a beautiful day this is.
Again, I seem to have let the entire week slip past without working on this little endeavour. Maybe I can get so slack that all I'll have to do is write one-word entries every month or so. Anyone complains, I could just tell them that they aren't intelligent enough to understand what lies beneath the esoteric surface of my page. Or that the entries are actually fractal equations reduced to a bare minimum - all you have to do is add water and bam! Instant web page.
You know - some mornings it just doesn't matter how much coffee you drink - the haze persists. Wandering through said haze always seems to bring my thoughts to strange and wondrous places. Or palsys... went down to Nagasaki on Saturday to catch the Sky Jamboree with Kaori and Yajin - found two new Japanese bands to like: Kemuri (smoke) and the Zubons (pants). Both are a kind of ska/punk mix. Good show, despite the fact that it was outdoors and unbearably hot beneath all the crowd surfers. Came back home aching and tired, but unable to sleep due to residual adrenalin: twitch, twitch.
Damn. Unlucky surf day. Came across nothing of note, except maybe some books I'd like to order. No exciting new pages, no great images to steal, no wonderful anecdotes... nothing. Some days are dull days, I suppose. Guess I'll have to go play outside.
Tuesday, August 15, 2000
 I think I'm deevolving. Do I not look like a gorilla or chimpanzee in this picture? This was taken at a beach party last month; Kyle (the kid - son of Jason, proprietor of Swaggy's) was pretending to be a Power Ranger and I was the unfortunate bad guy. Basically he would run up to me, slap me in the kisser and I would go flying. It was kind of fun, actually. Nothing like a few prat falls to make a kid's day.
Was helping out over at Inakamon last night. I'd forgotten why it was I wanted to get out of the service industry. It wasn't bad or anything; I actually had a lot of fun - but my legs were killing me by the end of the night. The layer of sweat and grease covering my body by the time we shut things down was also fairly unpleasant, to say the least. Yup, lazy work is the work for me. I prefer to break a sweat in my own time.
Friday, August 17, 2000
Well. Been trying to get this update uploaded for three days now. Stupid servers at school have been denying me access the whole time. Hell, they crashed again once today. I wonder what the hell is going on? Well, at least it's the weekend. Making an overnight trip to Kagoshima with my teachers - we're going to some famous hot spring to get buried in some hot sand. Sounds delightful... in a masochistic kind of way.
 In the meanwhile, I've stumbled across a couple o' sites that I think you should check out. Ever have a question that you just can't find the answer to on your own? Ever need some guidance? Ever read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The True Meaning of Life right here. Something a little less esoteric for you? Ever wonder how it is Movie Stars get so disgustingly wealthy? And so on... I think the moral of the story is that it is time to get down to some serious updating. Yikes. Or I could waste a few more hours at Sodaplay - it's just too much fun throwin' that lil'dude around.
And I wonder why it is I never get anything done. Most of the time when I could be working on this page, I'm busy poking around random websites or discovering new extremes (not for the squeamish - I'm warning you). What I should really be doing is studying Japanese. The exam's in December and I've gotta be able to sight read roughly 1000 kanji to even have a hope of passing. What am I doing? Not to mention the sheer absurdity of the grammar, listening and reading sections. I must be a sucker for punishment - I got creamed in last year's exam. What with the punishment the past couple of months have dished out, I wonder what kind of shape my brain is in these days. I figure I've culled a few too many brain cells for my own good - hoping there are enough surviving to replenish the population or I'm toast.
But let's not fall into a mire of self-abuse today. I don't feel like it. I've been using my typewriter more lately - ever since I discovered that it wasn't actually broken: there was a bit of plastic caught in one of the mechanical pieces that was gumming the whole thing up. No idea where it came from. I am of course not even close to being as productive as I was in university, but I feel I've taken the first few steps back towards that road. Hotaru is still floating around in the caverns of my cerebellum; I'm hoping it finds its way out. It came up in conversation the other day - I'm taking that as a good sign in that it suggests that I'm serious enough about this project to be able to mention it to other people... or maybe I'm just trying to get it kickstarted, whichever. Most things usually don't see the light of day and are quickly swept away by the currents of other thought. Sometimes they are lost in the flood of daily events - such as the ones I'm about to have; gotta run to the post office before it closes. Today's digital creativity is at an end. Time to return to the tangible world.
Monday, August 21, 2000
Hooray for payday! Nothing like walking into the office with a few hundred yen in your pocket and walking out with 1000 times that amount. I'm sure Kagoshima would have been a lot more fun if I had some dough - and if it hadn't rained the whole time. Still, it wasn't a bad trip - just tiring. I still don't understand why we had to get up at 7AM just to wait on the bus in the parking lot for an hour... maybe I'm just dumb. Came back all excited to see Kaori only to find out she's come down with the flu - so I spent the evening studying kanji and watching TV instead. Ah, these the halcyon days of my youth! I'm sure someday I'll be able to look back and not remember a damn thing.
Came across a picture of a huge cock today. Thought some of you out there might get a kick out of it. It kinda reminded me of the horse picture that Lucy once sent me... no, I don't have it anymore. Been discovering the joys of image search engines; there are some strange birds out there. I wouldn't reccommend typing in seemingly innocent words like hamster or peanut butter or even Jesus into them. You'll be shocked and amazed at what you come up with. Though it's often good to shock and amaze yourself every once in a while. It keeps you on your toes. Then again, there are those out there who would argue that living your life in a sort of cryonic torpor is the best way to go. Ignorance is bliss and all that. I was rambling on about TV and apathy the other day - maybe indulging in a little self abuse as well. It's just series of random thoughts all sort of run together; it isn't edited, nor will it be - so don't expect any revelations or some such.
Come to think of it, my whole life seems to be fairly random at times. Have I arrived here consciously or by sheer fluke? Have I taken the road less traveled? I suppose everybody must feel pretty much the same way. I had another 'Japan moment' in Kagoshima - it's been a while since my last one. I was standing in a tiny cement washroom (so small my shoulders burshed either wall) that was stiflingly hot listening to a woman wail (not sing) karaoke in the room next door. "How odd", I thought. "For me to be urinating in a cramped john in a hotel atop a mountain in Kagoshima, Japan; sweating like a monkey as a woman whom I will never meet is screaming in the room next door - and I am about to return to a seperate room and do the exact same thing." I call these 'Japan moments' - events that in and of themselves are really not that peculiar, but they somehow manage to convey the feeling of utter foreigness that comes from living here. They can be quite mind-numbing when they happen. It's kind of hard to explain if you've never experienced the sensation - it would be like trying to explain pain to someone who has never been hurt. They creep up on you when you least expect them - seeing Hello Kitty Maxi Pads for the first time, hitting your head on yet another low doorway, having a man try to give you money in a WWII museum for no conceivable reason, the list goes on. I suppose these things occur to indicate just how different this land can be. After two years, it gets pretty easy to take a lot of these things for granted. I'm curious to see what returning to Canada will be like. I can't imagine having 'Canada moments' - though I know I undoubtedly will.
Anyways, I'm rambling. I've got plenty of no work to do - so I'll study kanji instead. Only 104 more days until the exam. That's roughly a term - I should be able to cram for that long...
Wednesday, August, 23, 2000
I hate my school's server! I hate it I hate it I hate it! I swear, the connection timeout is roughly a minute... it's absurd. Grr.
Met Kaori's folks last night. I don't like meeting parents for the first time. I always feel like I'm being sized up like a piece of meat. Never a pleasant feeling. They seem like nice people though, definitely on the interesting side of the tracks, but nice. They did however make me sing karaoke, which is definitely cost them in the brownie points department. I think that qualified as another Japan moment. Do strange things like that actually happen to people? I mean, how often does a guy find himelf singing Born To Be Wild to his girlfriend's parents in a snack bar at 3 o'clock in the morning? That can't be a common occurrence. Either that or I had some very peculiar dreams last night.
Regardless, I guess our relationship has now pretty much been sanctioned by her father, which is nice. I've heard tell that most folks don't bring their boyfriend/girlfriend home until 'round about proposal time... and don't be getting any crazy ideas in your heads out there. It's only been a month - one hell of a month, though.
Speaking of months, why didn't anyone mention the glaring error in my archives links? All month I've had a link to August 2000 instead of July. I can't believe no one noticed. Oh well, it gave me a chance to glance back over the past couple months. Some of those entries were rather brief, weren't they? Good thing I found my voice (or fingers, as the case may be) again. Or does excessive length (or garrulousness, as the case may be) simply equate to boring? Quality over quantity - a nice thought, but an awfully tired cliche.
Friday, August 25, 2000
Been cramming kanji for the upcoming Japanese Language Proficiency Exam all this week. Just realized today that there are discrepancies between the list of kanji that are on the exam and those that are included in the vocabulary list. That's annoying. Here I am, trying to get a handle on the 1000 required kanji when I discover that there's a good chance I've been cramming the wrong ones - which is fine, considering it's bound to come in handy sooner or later, but it's a waste of time as far as the exam is concerned. I'm starting to have second thoughts about writing this thing - how relevant is it? I realize that if I want to get a decent job in Japan, I'm gonna need that little piece of paper that says I am competent in Japanese - but why should the exam cover kanji and grammar that even the teachers in my school let alone the general population don't understand? I don't know how many times I've been stumped trying to figure out a reading only to find out that it's so obscure that nobody else knows it, either. Bullshit, I say.
But let's not let my bitterness run away with me here. Those who know me know that I think all examinations are fairly absurd and no real measure of a person's ability or worth. Take science exams, for example: does it really matter if you can spit out Avogadro's number or the kinetic coefficient of friction for water at standard temperature and pressure? Ain't that what reference books are for? Or English Literature exams: write as much intelligent-sounding bullshit as you can in 2 hours on a 2-line poem by Ezra Pound. Bonus marks for big words. Geography: what kind of rock/cloud/river is this (100 points)?
Ok. Enough. I'm not really that bitter about it - it's all Japanese. I don't recall being frustrated studying other languages, though. Must the be the abstract nature of kanji. I had a conversation with Chris about kanji a long time ago - he was wondering if our thought processes when it comes to language are at all similar to those of the Japanese. I guess he was wondering if we had the ability to completely understand the ideological nature of kanji - and if we could, would our thought processes change as a result? It's all so metaphysical. Hell, my head is starting to spin already.
Monday, August 28, 2000
Summer vacation is wrapping up and the school is in a frenzy of preparation for the upcoming opening ceremony. That's not what I want to talk about though. No, I've something else on my mind. Namely the fact that I done crashed my second car in less than a year - and again, I've done a great job of it. My pimp daddy car is going to the great parking lot in the sky. Shit.
The story goes a little something like this: I was driving home after hanging out in Karatsu for Jackie and Julie's birthday celebrations, I had just dropped a bunch of folks off in Kitahata and Hamatama and was heading home for a well-deserved night's sleep. Unfortunately I wasn't going to get it. About three quarters of the way home, a mischievous grey cat leapt out of nowhere and made a mad dash across the road - I swerved, narrowly missing the cat but ended up caroming off the guard rail. Which would only have caused minor damage to my car, had it been a regular guard rail... but it wasn't. This particular guard rail was not a permanent structure, but rather one that was being used to block off a bridge that had been dismantled; as such, it's foundations consisted of large concrete blocks which jutted out about 6 to 8 inches from the guard rail. Damn.
To make a long story short(er), I'm in the middle of so much tooth-sucking I feel I'm caught in a typhoon. Found out that my supervisor never arranged the insurance papers to cover damages to my car, so I'm up the proverbial creek as far as finances are concerned. However, there were no injuries (cat included, the little bastard) and the only real losses are the car and a chunk of my pride. Hell, I think some good even came out of this misadventure - I think it brought Kaori and I closer together. We talked about it for a long time the following night and both agreed that the car and the car and the insurance claims were all of secondary importance as far as we were concerned. We were out with some friends at a yakitori last night and she mentioned that she's planning on getting her scar fixed while I'm back home for Kevin and Mandy's wedding.
For those of you who don't know, she has a scar on her left cheek from a car accident she was in 3 years ago. It's noticeable, but not bad at all. I told her that I actually kind of liked it, that you could hardly see it and that she was still beautiful. Her reply: "Well, I guess I'll be more beautiful, then."
Damn. That girl gets any more beautiful, I think I'm gonna have a heart attack.
Wednesday, August 30, 2000
Uh-oh. The month's almost over and I haven't thought of a new format for this here page yet. Of course, this is only a problem if my lame-ass useless server ever decides to work properly. At the time of typing, I've tried unsuccessfully 15 times to connect to my server - if I ever get this thing posted, I'll let you know the final tally. It's so damn frustrating.
Sitting down at my desk this morning, I felt the first twinge of post-JET anxiety - it's gotta be way too early for that, it's not even September yet. I mean, I've got a year left to figure out stuff - that's got to be plenty of time. But I know it isn't. Making a resume(do I even remember what one of those looks like?), looking for a real job-job-type-job, finding a place to live, possibly going back to school, having to decide whether to do all this in Canada or Japan... yuck. This is gonna require some serious thought, which is something I don't think I've ever been terribly good at. God - three years here. It seems so surreal; seems like just the other day I was getting off a plane in Hong Kong for the first time. What a strange thing to do to oneself, set yourself up for goodbyes all the time. True, you do get more than your fair share of hellos, but it's still a hell of a thing to hit yourself with.
And suddenly I get something else to think about. I've just been named as the direct cause of a series of nightmares experienced last night by Kaori. What? I'm not up to figuring this kind of stuff out today. The past week or so has been rather trying - what from car crashes to dogs near death to trying not to think about next year... what else is coming? I shudder to think. Although looking at that last sentence might offer some insight to the source of the nightmares - I hope. I can't think of anything else that I might have done to cause them; but keep in mind that I am a boy. Boys seem to be notoriously stupid when it comes to figuring girl-related things out. Or at least I seem to be. Guess it's time to hop on a train out to Karatsu. Maybe I can study some kanji along the way... whee.
Thursday, August 31, 2000
It's the end of an era here - Zou has closed its doors. I'm gonna have to find a new hole to hide out in now - that sucks. Speaking of things that suck, Kaori was pulling my leg about the nightmares. Damn.
Riding back on the train this morning I�@found myself thinking about  homing pigeons for one reason or another. How the hell did they figure out that pigeons had that kind of ability? I mean, you've got to be spending a lot of time with the birds to realize that they'll always return to the roost. Still, it strikes me as slightly inconvenient to have to lug these birds around just so you can send scraps of paper back home. Precursor to the laptop, I suppose.
The world is an awfully strange place altogether, if you stop and think about it. Take something as common as bread, for example. Who figured that one out? Some farmer hanging out on his farm just up and thinks "Hmm, what if I take the seeds from this here plant, grind them up, add a couple of eggs, some yeast and pop it in the oven for a while... well, wouldja look at that?" Or coffee? The process of picking, drying, roasting, grinding and then steeping is a fairly esoteric one - and these are jut simple foodstuffs. What about radio? Television? Organ transplants? What? I tell you, I'm nowhere near that inventive.
I know, I know, these are all products of countless generations of trial and error, study and sheer dumb luck. What really blows my mind is thinking about in how brief a time we have gone from hunter-gatherering to chips and a coke at the corner store. Huh?
I wish this was more coherent - unfortunately the computer lab is currently filled with sceaming 15 year old kids. Just a tad distracting. Whatever - these thoughts are just random bits & pieces anyhow; I'll post my thesis on he sheer absurdity of sociological evolution later on.
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