Saturday, September 30, 2006

fightin' words

I consider myself to be a person with a fairly mild temper. Honestly, I think about the only things that usually piss me off are racism and sexism. So I was walking home from the station, looking up at the sickle moon in the dark sky thinking about how beautiful it looked hanging above my little town. And I come up behind two middle age guys, one pushing a bike, and the other walking along beside him talking to each other in Japanese. I couldn't get around, so I walk behind them for awhile, but they are slow and I am tired, I want to go home. So I say "Excuse me!" but they just keep talking, ignoring me, so I say with not enough tact "You're in my way." and they step aside but the fatter man, who was walking alongside the man pushing his bike, mutters in Japanese "Noisy foreigner." and I couldnt help it, I had to retort with "Shut the hell up." (In Japanese of course.) Because maybe I'm noisy, but does he have to bring the race issue into it? As I'm saying that and walking past him, he lurches out and digs his fingers into my chest and flings me against the rock wall on the left-hand side. Swearing loudly and twisting out a brutal command for me to shutup if I know whats good for me. I dont like to be threatened or attacked by idiots, so I dont back-down, I yell back "Racist bastard, get lost." And he lifts his hand up to hit me and says as much, so I yell something about the police and kick my foot out against his leg, not in a violent way (that would have only started it off more) but in a "dont hit me" kind of way; not painful, but strong enough to let him know I wasnt interested in a knuckle sandwich. His friend is urging me to get out of there, to go home, and so the older fat man takes up on that and tells me to "go back to america, pig" or something of the sort, and I tell him again he's racist. He acts like he will get violent again, but I dont want to tell this guy its OK to harass foreign people so I just yell "racist asshole!" at him (which I guess isnt the smartest idea for my long-term health). The short fat-man starts swearing at me in bad English, and so I join with a few English swear words, but I dont want to turn this into an empty-anger macho festival. His friend by now is frantically making motions of "drinking" when his friend isnt looking (doesnt want to piss him off, I guess), trying to calm down the situation. So I guess he's just some drunk dork (or atleast thats a good enough reason for his social backwardness) and so I bark something sharp, and head off with the fat man streaming insults behind me.
Kind of creepy to think this happened at my station, I hope I dont get some fat-gangster stalking me or something. Racist freaks.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

magic airwaves

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (arthur c. clarke, author) I feel a bit like I'm in some sort of magical land. I bought a laptop yesterday; boot it up and it starts instantally sniffing the air and finds 7 local net gateways, three which have unlocked doors. pop snap crackle, I'm on the net... endless data-streams... for free, through some magic voodoo called wi-fi. coolness. more to come later. its now time to go to work... woo!

Sunday, September 03, 2006

my place in the world

I've been thinking a little about my relationship with this world I exist in. (I have a lot of thinking time with no real TV, no computer and not even a radio. Cant wait to get a PC!)
Me and Japan. I dont feel like a "Japan Geek" and in fact tell myself I am not crazy about the country. With that said, I feel myself disagreeing in my head, with many of the foreign teachers about Japan. (And I'm sure they might read this, so to be clear that wasnt meant in a really negative way.) For example, semi bugs (cicadas) are hated by many of the teachers because of their shrill buzz in summer. I heard several conversations about how they cant understand how Japanese people can appreciate the bugs. But I like the noisy sound of those bugs. Yeah, its annoying but it connects me to all my other summers and reminds me how quick summer always really is. I could go on about these bugs, but the main thing I wanted to point out was my difference of opinion.
Me and dreaming.
I think of myself as being almost always half lucid when I dream. (Lucid, if you dont know for some reason, means that you are aware that you are asleep while you are sleeping.) By saying that I am half lucid, I mean that somehow I always have a sort of awareness of being in my "night movie" and its like an adventure through a land that somehow I know is a dream, even if it isnt as clear as that while dreaming. I sometimes have full lucid dreams, but not as often, so I recently used some information on the internet to try to push my dreams into full lucidity more often. The opposite has happened so far. My mischievous subconscious has used the information to "pretend" to have lucid dreams, that are still only half lucid. For example, last night I thought I woke up (that was part of the dream, unknown to me) and could feel myself being dragged back to sleep. I told myself (who was actually dreaming at the moment) that this was perfect timing for having an incubated lucid dream, I would just stay aware that I was falling asleep while I fell asleep and I would be lucid. I thought I fell asleep, although it was still a dream, and the "lucid" dream was washed out and not vivid (like its supposed to be) so I thought it was my mischievous subconscious messing with my "dream view" because it knew I was falling asleep. It was more twisted than that, my subconscious tricked me into thinking I was having a lucid dreaming when instead-- wrap your head around this one-- I was dreaming that I was dreaming lucid. Eventually after several attempts at dream-control didnt work right, and instead of seeming lucid the reactions seemed like what happens when you are in a dream (random and bubbly), my mind got a little confused, I suppose you could say I had a lucid moment inside my dream of being lucid, and so I decided to wake up and reset the process. This time when I woke up, I really woke up, and I could think clearly enough to realize the first time I hadnt really woken up and the following had been a mischievous trick I had played on myself. Yeah, its a true story, I have a very odd way of thinking which shows itself in my dreams I suppose.
 
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