bigliketheskyinmontanaisbig.

There's a lot of work to do... and very little energy with which to do it.

on mixi

je suis ___
ich bin ___
watashi wa ____ desu.
I can only guess at spanish, but:
yo soy____

on mixi now.

idiot's sleep.

snow, river, originally uploaded by notnato.

indecisiveness is killing me.

I've made it to 28, and the worst mistake I've ever made involved a bumped head. Living slow and steady has served me well, but it's high time I got hasty.
I'm gonna win this game. And there aren't going to be any buzzer beaters.

anzen

anzen, originally uploaded by notnato.

ahem. I like this blue.

and that scoundrel with the eyepatch has gotten me thinking about how I spend my days... and nights. What's worse than writing this blog about how I'm writing a blog, and not doing something more fun?

Recently, I've been bouncing the numbers around, and thinking about what's going to change with the new job... except that that's a lie. I've been bouncing the numbers around for months and months, if not years, thinking that some new horizon will be open by this new trickle of cash. I imagine I'm not the only one who does it, but I'm pretty sure it's a symptom of a deeper anxiety about money. I earn plenty now, and I'll be earning more soon. I just need to really convince myself of that.
Until I do convince myself, I've been trying to trick myself into thinking around the money. So I asked myself a question. What if I had all the money I could use? How would I be spending my time?

Honestly, the only thing I could come up with was sex.

I'm not sure if I should be upset about that, and try to expand my horizons post-haste, or if it really is what I want.

If the latter is the case, why am I NOT out there doing something about that?

If the former, how do you even get interested in new things at this age?

the telos of the internet.

ok, I need to warn you. if you don't like having your mind blown, DO NOT CLICK PLAY.

something I was thinking about: I like some crazy things. even when it's not blaring through my tiny headphones, a part of my mind is humming dan deacon. Half of my mind is usually spinning around like a rainbow colored drill bit... so why am I so boring?

a thin sheet of plastic.

Just now, I thought to myself, "I'd like to listen to 'Roscoe' (from Midlake)". Except I was already listening to it.
Much of my life resembles this moment. and then posting it to a blog.

lunch =

4 eggs
3 potatoes (small)
1/2 onion
5 cherry tomatoes
salt
olive oil


(urp)

the balck fly in my chardonnay (whining and bitching presented in white on white)

so, I've got a brand new bag, right? I'm running down a little checklist in my mind, and I can't find a single way in which the new job won't be better than the old one.

but I'm feeling kind of bummered out over some other stuff. Because really, the better the overwhelming majority of my life goes, the more glaring the shortcomings are... and the more my internal excuses are revealed as hollow.
When you drill yourself with questions like "if not now, when?", and you still feebly produce worthless delay tactics, you begin to wonder. Am I even capable of doing what I want to? What on earth is holding me back?

Brother, I don't know. I haven't got a clue.

I'm being brainwashed. 不可抗力

What follows is a shocking expose of the powerful forces at play in the Japanese education system! (In a few half assed sentences)

I've always taken a practical approach to the language, and have stuck with whatever works. That meant half-hearted uni classes at first, then Heisig, then cram books for the JLPT, and now, it's cram books for the kanji kentei. Because of this pragmatic approach, I've always sort of mistrusted those archaic and old fashioned words that pop up on banners and the sides of black vans playing the marshal beats of the 30's and 40's.
Since I've started to cram for level 4 of the kanji kentei though, I've had to stand toe to toe with those 4 character beasts that agrammatically express some piece of traditional wisdom. And it feels like they're winning. They're cheesy. They're trite. and I have come to respect them.
Like a really clever bit of marketing from the "old values" PAC, they have found a peripheral, but important niche in the kanji education system. So I have to memorize them, and their definitions (which are standardized across dictionaries!). I have to read these things to myself over and over, inexorably absorbing a 300(0) year old system of justice and value. I can't help it. I'm entranced by phrases like 不言実行, 一意専心, and 油断大敵. (Just like I probably was by the spectre over europe, or the labor theory of value a decade or so ago.)

and I'm a damned fool if I think it's gonna get me a sniff of anything I really want.

case closed. good work detectives.

Have you heard? I got me a brand new job!


In a couple weeks I'll be starting my new job as a translator. And with that the cat is out of the bag.

the world before 6-7-07/ the world after 6-7-07

Hi!

Tomorrow is the "big day" for the mystery. I think I'll be able to spill the beans tomorrow evening, and we will enter the post 6-7 era, where everything changes. I say that as a joke, but in every joke there is some truth... (banana who?)

I'm a dude in his late 20's who is frustrated with the his life so far. Of course I mean to change. Those little goals*, moving to tokyo, the mystery, they're all parts of a whole. "The mysterious thing" just happens to be the 500lb gorilla riding the elephant in the room... a linchpin shaped gorilla.


*BTW, I managed another goal. 10k in 44:45 on a real, outdoor track.
remaining goals: back flip, body weight benchpress, save a certain amount of money, pass KanKen lvl 3.

self-indulgent crap.

caveat = I know the irony of tossing an epithet like "self-indulgent" around in a place like this.


the omnivore's dilemma started off pretty good. There was something to learn in the first however many chapters of it. About corn, and fast food, about the impact of some of our dietary choices, about "organic" food, about the polyface farm, and some of the possibilities for sustainable agriculture. Imagine my surprise when, immediately after leaving the farm, Pollan turns the whole thing into a stream of conscious blab fest. Any attempt at informing or even gratifying the reader is cast aside while he coughs out his hunting stories in some righteously smelly prose. He puts himself in the center of a world of people much more interesting than him, and unsurprisingly, insists on casting himself as the star. We're left with the wonderful conclusion that he had fun making this book. F you mister pollan.

an even steamier pile of self-indulgence is "fear and trembling", a film product of (quelle suprise) canal plus. If you think you'd enjoy watching an effectively racist portrayal of life inside a japanese company by a lady with a grudge, this movie will help you rethink that. The lady is a self-obsessed fudge-up. At the beginning of the film, she does something super, and gets in trouble, and she spends the rest of the film failing and failing and failing, and blaming it on her environment. She's so worthless by the end of the film that I feel like the good deed at the beginning was a out-of-charactrer flourish to convince us that she is lovable in some way. The author tries and tries to use this editorial authority to make her case, but the ridiculous japanese caricatures that she puts to celluloid are such 2-dimensional stereotypes that it reflects much worse on her. Also she's belgian.