milemarker addendum

In the last few days, the idea of reintegrating my various online selves has seemed tempting.

But for the most part, I'd been thinking about my reddit persona, my twitter persona and my "ostensibly real" facebook persona.

Each of those are modern social-networking identities, that communicate with the intention of interacting, rather than just blogging out ideas, unilaterally.

This blog identity is a lot older than the other three, and especially before 2007, revels in ideas.

Not sure if and when it will really make sense to reconcile them all--beyond of course, in me, the existing human dude.

Part of me worries that I will actually be interested in pursuing politics in some capacity in the future, and that having all of the ill advised things I said in anonymized persona linked to a public persona could be bad news.

But really, I should be working on taking pictures of the ephemera of my Japan decade to sell them to strangers.

July 9, 2014 milemarker

It's not just me. Blogging seems to be dead. Even writing posts saying you're going to come back to your blog now, or someday soon is passe.

We write on facebook and twitter now. We don't post unless we have a picture or can squeeze our thoughts into 140 characters.

So, its little surprise that this blog has sat dead for so long. Realistically, it won't be "alive" for long. I'm writing this entry because I popped by and looked at some of my old entries from 2006 and before, then my more recent entries between 2007 and 2010, and felt a little embarrassed.

I used to mix a little snark in with a great deal of philosophical curiosity and concern with "depth" topics. Somewhere not long after moving to the big city, I seem shallow, over confident and hopelessly mired in what was immediately in front of me. I became a less interesting, less thoughtful person.

Maybe I'm on the road to rectifying that now.

After 8 years in Tokyo feeling like I had somehow won the prize, I'm finally leaving -- hopefully to pull myself out of this particular set of distorted circumstances, and maybe accomplish something.

Today, though, I'm home sick, and the biggest task I'm going to accomplish is taking pictures of some stuff I need to sell or give away before I leave this city, country, cycle of desire and gratification, etc.


If for some reason writing publicly and at length about my daily thoughts becomes an appealing prospect in the next several months, this blog might become the story of a:

35-year old law student
in Texas
experiencing reverse culture shock
trying to reconcile his beliefs developed in exile with the "real America"
and thinking hard about money

Writing, who knew?

I haven't paid any attention to my writing for a long while -- except the writing that was bound to make me money directly.

That's made me a worse translator than I meant to be at this point in my career, and has left me with no secure foothold of talent to draw on. A couple blog entries isn't going to solve that problem, but I need to be working on it, one way or another.

Of course, my day to day paychecks still depend very much on how well I write (again, not especially well), but I'm also staring down the barrel of the single more important piece of writing I've put together in a long, long time: my PERSONAL STATEMENT for law school applications. 

So, while I tread water and worry about my visa, I'm going to try and write a bit more often, in a more freeform idiom than the sort of translation I usually grind away on. I'm gonna blog.

No time like the future

Work and a couple of non-work things put a squeeze on my time over the last week. Everything plan-like about my life took a break for a week, including this here bloggy thing.

Should be back on the rails soon.

A small bout of nostalgia (written 9-10-09)

Today, I want to write something about my life, and its overall trajectory. Well, that sounds a bit grandiose. All I really want to say is that I feel a little better about America lately.

Three things in particular have gotten me feeling that way.

First, “the public option”; having become a freelancer, and having really no interest at rejoining the salaried workforce, insurance comes out of my pocket. In Japan, my current monthly cost is about $280, thanks to a COBRA-like setup. My monthly cost would be a lot closer to $500 if I were on the public system due to the salary-based cost structure. Stateside, I’d expect to pay $500 or more (though I haven’t researched that number at all), despite my relative youth and good health. If the public option happens, self-employeds like me can look forward to somewhat better rates (is my understanding), and all I have to do is leave again before they finish up the Obama Death Camps. It would be a lot easier for me to go back to school and get a graduate degree if I knew my insurance costs wouldn’t be higher than my tuition.

Second, cheap shopping; I’m going home for Xmas this year, just like last. And just like last year, I plan on doing some shopping for non-perishables that just cost way too much in Japan. On top of the list are supplements, fancy-schmancy toiletries and software. Shipping anything to Japan is prohibitively expensive, but cramming it into a suitcase when you’ve already planned a trip is essentially free. But all of the machinations involved in buying the stuff via my underfunded American bank account get me to thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to just live in the place where things are reasonably priced? Well, “living” there is a lot farther than my mind wants to take it, but it would be nice to pay less than $5.00 a pound for ground beef.

And last, Mythbusters; what can I say, I like the show. I like the guys. I like the IDEA OF the community the show stands for. I am seriously deprived of light-heartedness, optimism and DIY creativity here. There’s not a lot of open or secluded space to go around either. I heart the hell out of Tokyo, but I’ve been a little more open-minded about America since bittorrent delivered me a big dose of life-affirming America (i.e. Mythbusters eps).

So what does the future hold for my strained relations with my homeland? Damned if I know. I don’t expect I’ll be giving up on my adopted home in Japan any time soon, but I juggling some numbers to see if there are circumstances under which I could spend some time in the states without spending a fortune or dismantling my Tokyo life.

Then again, spending a couple weeks at my folks’ place every now and again takes care of my shopping needs, and Mythbusters is a lot more charming that “the real thing” with the added benefit of being downloadable. Health insurance, I’ve already got.

There are some things that make sense for me to do in America: learn to drive, learn some other skills/ attend grad school, live more cheaply, work on my English skills and spend more time with the broader family (to name a few). Lacking a strong and specific reason though, I’m not quite in a hurry to spend a lot of time at home just yet.

Suzumebachi OMGRUN (a "thing" I wrote)

I started writing 500 word "things" for writing practice a while back, and figured I may as well dump some of them onto here. Looks like I wrote this one 8-17-09

No more ado:

Suzumebachi OMGRUN

I read once that Americans have a special hatred of insects. You see insects cropping up in American horror/ sci-fi movies an awful lot more than in other countries. The theory in this article was that the great American bug phobia stemmed from the days when insects could easily wipe out a farmers livelihood. For people in remote areas that could easily mean starvation. The same article said that these new world bugs were a whole new level of hardcore for the colonists.

I don’t know exactly what kind of badass insects those puritans were up against, but I’m scared shitless of the Suzumebachi (Giant Asian Hornet). As the English name implies, these beasts are anything but small (see photo http://gaijinlore.blogspot.com/2006/06/suzumebachi.html). The neurotoxin in the suzumebachi’s sting kills a handful of people in Japan every year. So they’re not only physically disturbing, they’re actually dangerous.

Usually nature only gives a creature one trick: camouflage or poison or “being a grizzly bear”. The suzumebachi has three: size, poison and better PR than two of the Beatles. I see some sort of “beware the mighty suzumebachi” reenactment at least once a year on Japanese TV, complete with scary narration and scary music (and terrible acting). Usually some old dude who didn’t even notice he was stung, and then barely made it out with his life.

Despite their television presence, I had never been exactly sure what suzumebachi look like. To wit: a couple of weeks ago I was in an outdoor bath and a couple of these fellas (http://mushi-taiji.cocolog-wbs.com/mushitaiji/2008/08/post_1f26.html) showed up. Giant? Check. Hornet-like? Check. Asian? Check. It turns out my identification was false (they were a species of horsefly), but I really though I had encountered the dread suzumebachi. Add to this threat the facts that they were really aggressive and I was really naked. The perfect storm of shitlessness.

In the end we also barely made it out with our lives.

I actually just had another incident with a misidentified suzumebachi, this time in a dream. In the dream I got stung in the neck by this giant hymenoptera-lookin’ bug. The shock woke me up with a start and left me thinking “was that a suzumebachi?” for the first couple seconds of wakefulness. After I figured out that it had been a dream, I went to check wikipedia anyway. Look at the length of the Japanese page (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B9%E3%82%BA%E3%83%A1%E3%83%90%E3%83%81)! I’m sure there’s a lot to say about suzumebachi, but this page is longer than the article on WWII (not really).

I was hoping to find some hints as to how to tell the impostors apart from the real suzumebachi and some way to deal with them. Based on what I’ve read the most practical solution is to run away as far and fast as you can anytime you see, hear or or intuit a bug or a leaf that looks a little like a bug. Better safe than sorry.

Postscript: Google tells me that there’s a Naruto character with the last name “Suzumebachi”. That’s dumb.

The grave, and coming back from it.

I last posted in...APRIL 2009?

You shouldn't be surprised to hear that a lot has happened since then. Man on the moon; Berlin wall goes up/ down; Black guy elected president of U.S.; Wired published that issue with the secret puzzle from the Lost guy, etc.

Another recent development is that writing has become more central to my career, as has my lack of writing ability. After careful consideration, I've decided to become a better writer.

So, here goes. I'm gonna learn to crawl/ walk/ run here on my weblog.

binge and...

Howdy. I've decided to get a Facebook account. Yowza.

And I'm using twitter now.

And Flickr and Blogger and Last.fm and probably some other social stuff I don't even know about.

And as a change of pace, I'm planning on putting together something of a cohesive identity online, where I use my name and avoid talking about things that I should probably avoid talking about. Maybe.

This blog, whose days have been numbered since forever, will probably stay the way it is. A disused junk bin for ideas I just can't develop all the way. The new spot will be nicer. and better written. promise.

The plan for now is to pull all that crap together. Blow the cobwebs of the blogging center of my brain and get to it. (if "it" is writing semi-seriously in order to polish my style)

For now, good night.

Resume Breathing.

I've been out of sorts for a while and in the last couple of days I've had a few epiphanies about why.

It's not the right time to bore you with them, but I'm working my way back to my old, less unlikable self. Slowly.

Nate

goin home yall.

Yeah, we made it
Just by the skin of our teeth Perfection is over, the Rave is over
Sheffield America is over, The Fear is over, Guilt is over, please leave the building quietly
Bergerac California is over, the hangover is over, Men are over, Women are over
Cholsesterol is over, Tapers are over, Irony is over
Bye bye bye bye



home

One hell of a sentence.

自分は、この人間の世の中において、一生その意識に苦しめられながらも、しかし、それは自分の糟糠のつまのごとき好伴侶で、そいつと二人きりで侘びしく遊びたわむれているというのも、自分のいきている姿勢の一つだったかもしれないし、また、俗に、脛に傷持つ身、という言葉もあるようですが、その傷は、自分の赤ん坊の時から、自然に片方に脛にあらわれて、長ずるに及んで治療するどころか、いよいよ深くなるばかりで、骨にまで達し、夜々の痛苦は千変万化の地獄とはいいながら、しかし、（これは、たいへん奇妙な言い方ですけど）その傷は、しだいに自分の血肉よりも親しくなり、その傷の痛みは、すなわち傷のいきている感情、または愛情の囁きのようにさえ思われる、そんな男にとって、れいの地下運動のグルウプの雰囲気が、へんに安心で、居心地がよく、つまりその運動の本来の目的よりも、その運動の肌が、自分に合った感じなのでした。

I like Dazai Osamu. And one remarkable thing about this sentence, he avoids both ambiguity and repetition. In Japanese, that's a feat. One I finish this book, I'd like to see what Donald Keene made from it.

starting today.

Last year(!), 2008, I had this big ambitious list of stuff I wanted to do... but I don't feel like I got at it until at least mid year. In the end I only accomplished about 35% of my stated goals. This time, I'm starting today. Jan 2.
1. one hundred pushups
I totally expect that the 100 pushups thing will be a breeze and that I will be done by the end of february... the only reason I'm gonna let that deadline slip is sickness.
2. Kanji Kentei
I just registered to take lvl. 4 (it counts up to 1) of the Kanji Kentei (Japanese Character test) in late february. I expect that this is already within my abilities, really. Still, it seems worth solidifying that to set the stage for lvl 3. I plan on scheduling lvl 3 as soon as I get my results from lvl 4 (10 days after the test).


ALSO.... I may not close down this blog just yet. I have this half-formed idea about "being good" that I feel like chasing down. I think I'm going to keep this blog going to keep working on a few things including this idea. I'll keep my clean laundry here.

The dirty laundry will be in that other place.

dear 2008, get fucked.

Wow. That year warn't no good. "2008: Plague Year"

No point in laying out all the bad stuff that went down. Instead, lets just call it a potent dose of reality that put me a little closer to "my place".

I had a bunch of goals, as listed in this here post. This year I came really close on the fitness ones (and blew the pull-ups away); barely even thought about the study goals; read about 1/3 of the books (got a couple days left to add to the tally there); and the other four were a failure too.

So with a little further ado, my last resolution list! Like I said in the last post, I'm closing up shop here. From here on, I'll probably make occasional photo posts from my phone or somethin... but don't expect any more of my sloppily written blather. I'm putting that somewhere else, somewhere anonymous. Needless to say, I'm not gonna point the way.

/ado.

I'll fill these in as a think them out, but here's the broad outline for the year's goal.

Fitness:
100 pushups in one go (doing about 45 right now).
50 pull ups
10 pull ups with 40kg burden
15k in 1 hr (Ive never run more than 10k).
110 or 120kg bench press x 1o (I was doing 90kg x 5 two weeks ago).

Japanese:
Kanji Kentei 3kyuu (gotta make a realistic goal here, or never succeed).
Something else concrete.

More alcohol:
learn to drink wine
drink some scotch... learn to drink it?

Housekeeping:
something concrete

Grooming:
one haircut every month
Something else concrete

Savings:
A set number for the year... but I'm not sharing that with yall.

Re-stop biting my nails.

Books, English:
Henry James (something)
Saul Bellow (something)
King James Bible
Ulysees
I, Claudius
Catch 22
rabbit, run
thomas mann (death in venice + something else)
faulkner (something)
100 years of solitude

Books, Japanese:
More Dazai (I like him quite a bit)
koizora
The last 2 akutagawa winners
kokoro
a modernized tale of Genji
some women's manga (what the fudge are they thinking?)
more to follow


I'll fill in the concrete parts as I think them up

Turn out the lights, set yourself on fire, say goodnight.

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be travelling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see.
But, if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.

Bye, bye, its been a sweet love.
Though this feeling I can't change.
But please don't take it badly,
'Cause Lord knows I'm to blame.
But, if I stayed here with you girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you'll never change.
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Lord help me, I can't change.







Saa, 'bout time we packed it in, don't ya reckon? Lately, I have felt a bit like blogging, but I done wrecked this one up. Next blog, I'ma try to put a bit more effort and a bit more "me" into my writing... and a bit more stuff I don't necessarily want my acquaintances to know about.

I believe I'll make one last entry on this ol' feller, before sending him to a big farm upstate.

One last "resolutions/ resolve" post.

Can't sleep

Testing out iPhone features instead.

The new Oscar Wilde.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/phil_collins.html

choice bits include:

"When I go on Japanese Airlines, I really love it because I like Japanese food."

and

"Another time, we had three days off in Australia, so we went out of our way to fly to Ayres Rock."

It's like a whole new Phil Collins has been opened up.

a happy note in the mail.

My former landlord = a dick.

The story is long and makes me grumpy to retell, but it looks like I'm gonna pull out the win on this one.


The second to last chapter of this overlong story looks like this:

I got a request for payment today in the mail. She's taking my whole deposit and want $300 bucks on top of that.

But, I've got the receipts for the stuff she threw away and lied and lied and lied about. ($220)
I believe I have the receipt for cleaning the air conditioner on the way in, to make her claim on cleaning it on the way out totally unreasonable ($50)
And the Toshima Tax office has pretty solid evidence that the cleaning company threw out government mail (prison = checkmate).

I believe that there is also at least one more false charge in that bill ($80), on top of the totally trumped up story that I put all the marks in the floor. If I had been more careful on the way in and taken some pictures, I'd be able to shoot that one down in an instant.


Just to make sure that there's no confusion, I think I'm going to issue my landlord a
bill for the missing stuff, including the day I had to take off to go to the tax office because my government mail had been thrown out.
Anyway, a win for the good guys... or at least "my team".

taking a break from igoogle.

So, they've got all these neat new features for igoogle... if you don't mind giving up a third of your page to a navigation system that adds nothing. I do mind.

I'm gonna spend some time looking at alternatives, but my hopes aren't high. I expect in the end that I'll have to put up with google's igoogle usability downgrade just because the next best thing is still lightyears behind.

One other thought on the matter. With a less usable iGoogle, Gmail is no longer as valuable to me. you can get your gmail via pop, right? Which is to say that "the cloud" looks a lot less appealing to me all of a sudden. If I can't rely on my information and interfaces being stored remotely, I'd much rather have them on my side.

Just so we're clear...

I appreciate order. But I keep a messy house most of the time... doesn't bother me.

My coworkers are for the most part meticulously neat, because they are Japanese. And their idea of a logical structure makes wonder if there wasn't peyote in the water supply they grew up with.

It's amazing the questions that don't get asked.

So, am I complaining about my job on my blog? Perhaps.

perhaps

who is it you think you're talking to?

I cherish advice from people who are better at things than I am.

Less so from people who aren't.

Not at all from people who haven't even got an idea what I'm up to.


That's why I really resent lessons on how to live from older folks... especially those whose lessons include "you can't just have fun all the time".