mp3 player

here i am today listening to my mp3 player on my way to work, country joe and the fish is playing, it's interesting how reality is filtered by music. i originally got this cheap player to work on my crappy cantonese (audio lessons) but the lessons only took 500MB of the 2Gigs. with the extra space I put on music, which distracts me from actually studying. oops. but its like living in a soundtrack, i am one of those odd people who sometimes mouths the words along with the song. and i even move along with a really good groove. yeah, i know. that's really sad, huh? haaaha!

flickers of a flashback

i am sitting on my floor in my tiny appartment in america on bill mcdonald parkway. i dont know yet, but living on the floor of this tiny appartment will be good practice for living in tokyo. it's rainy, and i'm writing a poem about my endless days in this town. an eternity that all too soon came to an end. i pause and look up at my window and feel the sound of the fresh rain. i remember thinking i loved the smell of newly fallen rain.

audioblog 01

I'm not sure why, but I couldn't get my first audioblog to embed in this post. (Yeah, I am creepily inspired by Diego to audioblog. Yeah, so I'm a copycat. Sue me! haa!)

I talk about rain and play some clips from music I've been running into these days. If you can play OGG files play this, otherwise most people should go here to stream it (in slightly less quality) from the internet. Cheers

trash man

It's been a series of unfortunate events. Four weeks ago I didn't have too much trash so I was lazy and thought "I'll take both weeks out next week" but the following week my boss changed my schedule so my day off was on trash day. I ended up being out around town and didnt take my trash out. And the same problem next week. Thats too much garbage so I decided to stay home and watch movies on the fourth week of no garbage out. And just my luck! They were doing construction on my road so no one put out garbage that week. It's been over a month. I have a nasty pile of garbage bags I wanna throw out! This is sad. It's kinda something ya shouldn't tell people, huh? oops!

asimulation?

Tonight I'm thinking about cultural asimlation. I have always wanted shop people to stop giving so many bags when I go shopping, its such a waste so I usually make noise when staff try to put my 3 things in 8 bags. But tonight when the quiet old man at the 24 hour discount mart carefully placed and wrapped my cheap things in too many bags, I couldnt bring my self to complain. I wondered, on the walk home, if thats somehow what cultural asimulation feels like... I think I'm still going to refuse a bag for a candybar though, no matter what!

mcdonalds conversations

Sitting at McDonalds waiting to meet someone. On my left and right two young professionals are talking on their cell phones.

The man on the left, jeans and a stylish jacket.
"Dadadadon dada"
pause
"No at the end put another da."
pause
"Left right left right, like rhythm"
pause
"Yeah, next dandandan. No like the last one. Yeah."

I guess he was dictating music over the phone. The man on the right, expensive pin striped gray suit. Briefcase up on the counter where we are all sitting, phone charger plugged into a provided socket, wallet open revealing his company ID which boasts that his company is a "green printer" company.
He makes a lot of quick calls, in bursts.
First,
"hello? yes, we should check that Club Invaders is available. OK? Right. Have a good one."
Second,
No greeting at all simply "Find out? Ok. I'll check if we can do that."
Third,
Seems to be talking to an answering machine. "This is Omura. I know I've called a lot this month." His confidence seems to waiver, he takes a breath. "I was just wondering if you could call me back? Thanks, have a good night."
He fades in to silence for about 20 minutes fiddeling with a few forms on the counter. And then begins his fourth phone call,
"Sorry. Hello, sorry about calling this late at night. Sorry. Yeah. It's about this witness testimony...Yeah, I don't understand what I put on page 2, line 3, yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand, yeah, yeah. I understand. That's ok right? Not in such a hurry. A fax would be OK? Well, for now I'll just write it. OK, if I dont understand again I'll call back. Right. Thanks. Goodnight."

Fifth,
"Hello,"
he laughs,
"Basterd. So what should we do? OK. Next time. See ya."
What was that second guy's conversations all about? A drop in the ocean of daily external noise. Take a moment to listen as it fades past.

anti-anime & time travel

I have recently noticed that I am quite "anti-anime" in my thinking. I intentionally avoid watching Japanese cartoons, and when someone I really respect talked about watching some I started to think about why. I remembered my scary room mates in college that would non-stop watch anime all day, every day. When they went to class they would leave the TV on playing anime and if I changed channels or anything they would get mad, because they wanted to hear and see it the minute they walked in the door. I kid you not. But added to that, when ever my Japanese friends came over they would ignore them. You would think you would want to talk to people who come from the land that produced your desires, but I guess they were too busy watching anime. Too busy infact to even clean their dishes. Now I'm a dirty person, but when you share a kitchen with people I expect a little bit of cleanliness. No luck there. They would leave ALL their dishes in the sink, every last one. At first I would wash their dishes for them, but I finally had enough and said (while they were watching anime) "I'm not going to wash anymore of your dishes!" and one of the two really responded, verbatim, "It's OK, we'll just buy new plates next time we go shopping." Gong! What the heck. A final oddness was they would often watch really creepy almost porn-ish anime. And I'm liberally minded. But public cartoon porn is just weird. So basically these guys gave me psychological damage apparently, because I have always kind of avoided Japanese cartoons after that. Well, after being inspired by the blog post previously mentioned, I decided to check out something. A few days ago I had stumbled (literally) across a review of a Japanese anime movie titled (in English) "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" and so I gave it a try. My first non-forced not super mainstream Japanese cartoon (i.e. not Akira, Princess Mononoke, etc) It was cool! It was childish (no more than an american G rating I'm sure) I guess, and few plot holes bugged me. But I saw an old school Indian Jones movie after that, and even that had some big plot holes, so I started thinking that movies can be kind of like watching a dream, they don't always make total sense when you scrutinize them, but we can have a lot of fun if we just let go and just enjoy it. The movie itself is based on a time travel story (no surprise, read the title!) but it is more than that, it explores relationships and life, like most good Japanese movies.
And continuing on that time-travel theme (must admit I have an interest in those kind of movies I guess) I saw an awesome independent film. If you like to think when you watch movies, please watch "Primer" And this film gives such inspiration to independent film makers everywhere, it was made for about US$7000 and its awesome. Makes you think, it looks cool, a bit of a geeky flavor, and had a nice complex but satisfying plot. Coolness. Big thumbs up on this one, if you can find it.

sleepy eyes

Here I am thinking about silly things again. I really want to get back into making things, kind of like being the student, not the teacher, I guess. I want to create, to make, to experiment again. Creation is one of those things that some people desire and some people could care less about. I'm one of those "gotta make stuff!!" kind of people. So because of that, I'm thinking about buying a camera that is the new high quality ones, its cheap, its small, and maybe I can make some stuff with it. A movie? Who knows. This is like a rant, but with no energy, and directed to myself. Anyone else have that "must create" fire inside?

Speaking of which, I just realized I didn't blog about my digital camera passing away. And although I have some more archived and not uploaded yet, until I get a new camera there wont be too many more photos to share. Although there are quite a few up that I havent publicly mentioned before, and since I always seem to blabber on about new pictures... check out some new ones, if you haven't already.

Just click on the thumbnail above to jump on over and take a look.

turn the page

Lets try to recapture the whispy fog that was my experience of last night...

I boil water. Pour some into a small cup of instant curry udon noodles. I pour the rest into my yutanpo (plastic hot water bottle to warm up my bed) I convince my self to cut short my Wikipedia editing spree. I gulp down the hot noodles, puffs of my breath visible in the cold room. Turn out the lights and curl my knees against the yutanpo. It feels like I'm in a bathtub. The heat is soothing, I'm alive. But I can't sleep. Its 3, but I cant sleep. I got work tomorrow. I want to sleep. Eventually sleep pulls me down to a room with crickets and celery...

The picture is the view out of the window at work today. Nice blue sky.

odd english

I have been really busy doing nothing, and I almost never update this blog. So this is an update from my cellphone in an attempt to start updating more often.
Since I am at work (having lunch) I'm thinking about the English language. It's such a strange language. "Take off" means to remove something like clothes but "take on" means to challenge something, NOT put some clothes on like you'd logically think. "Put on" is the choice of words used for wearing clothes, but oddly "put off" means to do something later, and so we have to use "take off" as that asymetrical pair in this case. And continuing along this chain of reasoning, shouldn't "stressed out" mean a reduction in stress... I mean, the stress is going out right? Why does it mean an increase in stress? Shouldn't that be "stressed in" or something? And don't even get me started on "catch up" to some one. How am I supposed to logically deduce that means to match speeds with you? Or on the other end of the spectrum, how about created words that are too simple? "Fireplace" used to annoy me that way, the place where you have fire. Genius, pure genius. Or how about the area in Canada n
amed "Newfoundland" ...oh! Don't tell me, was that land that was recently discovered? You don't say! Language is one of those things that if you start thinking about it long enough, nothing make sense and it all seems quite odd.

And in an unrelate random final note... did you know elephants have a 22 month pregnancy period and that the typical birth can last about 11 hours! Freaky cool.

things i bet you didnt know

1. If you see an ethnic Korean online chat or BBS and you see people add three Ks next to their message, they arent an evil member of a white supremest klan, they are instead phonetically representing in English the way Koreans write snickering in their language on the internet. Really.

2. It's cold right now. I sleep with a big red plastic hot bottle (or rather bottle I put hot water in to) that Japanese people call "yutanpo" it helps me sleep, but if I roll over and it touches my belly, it makes me too hot and makes me have weird bloody dreams. Odd, I know. So I have to wrap it in a blanket layer so I don't overheat.

3. I would love to live in this Stanford torus style space colony station.
Yeah I know its super geeky or whatever. But living on the inside of a donut shaped world that is slowly spinning in space, with a glittery space backdrop, soft light filtered through solar mirrors and lush artificial landscaping, with the horizon stretching up and away from you on both sides. Nice, beyond words!

4. I haven't written a poem in awhile, I really need to get more creative.

5. I want to know what happened to 15 year old Gertrude Seifert and her 17 year old loverman. Who're they you may ask? Here they are:



Still confused? Well, recently I have been a bit addicted to "deep diving" on the internet again. Even thinking about starting up a blog about it. Recently on some of my expeditions I've been digging up massively ancient newspapers, this one is "The San Francisco Call" from April 1, 1910 (page 3, to be precise) ...Still confused a bit about who they are? Let's read the original text:


LOVER IGNORANT
OF HER DEPARTURE
Maid Who Eloped With Boy
Will Be Taken Abroad for
Indefinite Stay
SAN DIEGO. March 31
Gertrude Seifert, whose sensational elopement with Thomas Foreman, aged 17 years, Tuesday startled San Diego, was removed from the custody of the jail matron at 2 o'clock this morning by her father and mother, placed on the Owl train without being given a chance to communicate with boy lover and today is speeding eastward to New York-city and Germany for an indefinite stay. Thomas Foreman, kept in ignorance by the jail matron, at noon today had not learned of the move. During their elopement young Foreman held a pursuing posse at bay with his rifle. They were captured only after an exciting chase through the brush. The lad did not surrender until he was covered by the guns of the deputy sheriffs, and then only to protect the girl. - - - The elder Seifert promised to let them marry after his daughter had spent 18 months abroad, but this may have been only a subterfuge.


forward forward

So things seem to be moving forward in the work department. Positive. It'll all be OK, I suppose. But thats boring. What else is new? Well, not much.

I did upload billions of pictures to my album site, check them out if you want. Tons of pictures of when Evan visited me, when my mum came for a visit, and all sorts of other stuff. I have even more to upload, but haven't got around to it yet. (On an unrelated technical note, I changed the current look of my blog. It doesn't work in IE, so I might change it again, but I currently use firefox so it doesn't bother me. End of unrelated technical note.)
It's been getting really cold here in Tokyo, but winter is cold in many parts of the world so I wont bother to say much about that. In fact, I'm really unsatisfied with this blog post. I almost pressed cancel, but whatever a diary is a diary. So here we go.