wondering

walking to the station to ride one stop to work. the walk from the new place I'm staying at (yeah, my boss moved me again) to the station is about 50 minutes. that gives me plenty of time to think so i am walking and typing something on my cellphone.

i am thinking about...

if a friend comes over to our house we let him or her use our spoon or chopsticks but of course never our toothbrush. why? they both go in our mouth, after all. i asked some high level students, and one student had the very clever answer that we wash our spoons and chopsticks with soap but we dont do that with our toothbrushes. very good point. but then i started to wonder, why dont we wash our tooth brushes with soap? dont we want clean tooth brushes? culture is fascinating.

also wondering why i just bought an energy drink when i'm not sleepy. well, that answer is easy. the cycle of caffeine addiction has begun just like last time i lived in japan. its hard to pass on something that brightens up your day. supplements replacing the natural. hmm...

two houses

Welcome to my second appartment. Like I've said before, i dont like to talk about work unless it bubbles over into my real life... and this case, works kind of effecting my life again. I got transfered to a different district of Japan. It's too far and I didnt want to move out here so my boss is providing (in otherwords, I dont pay) a place in the same area as work. After work I'll sleep there, my days off: back to Tokyo. Its kinda like a hotel. It already has a fridge, bed, sofa, and stuff. Its total countryside so its a lot bigger than my tokyo place. Regretfully its about 30 minutes walk from the station. That sucks. But fun to officially live in two places.

moments

Just a quick post to say nothing more than I finally got around to uploading about 61 new pictures to my photo album (in the album, click "next" on the upper right to see more). For Some reason the photo album service mixed up the chronological order they were in... but thats kind of like my memories of these events (stretches over the last few months) all kind of jumbled... so enjoy as it is, wander through some of my memories. (and of course I never stop updating my cellphone album, thats why I have unlimited bandwidth on my phone. So that I can update it a million times a day. Dont forget to check that out if you like pictures since I get about 1 hit per picture, not sure why I bother to update it, mostly for my memories I suppose. Was this another ad for it or what?!)

rain & music

Standing here outside listening to an old Japanese punk band on my mp3 player as it drizzles.
"I wanna be as beautiful as a rat,
you cant understand the beautey in a photo"
I guess something is lost in my translation to English.
Next song starts,
"I wanna sing the never ending song for this F'd up world."
Love this song. That one kinda works in translation too. Its still raining and I'm still standing here waiting for my late friend. A life continues, one moment after the last, a cascade of seconds.

Earthquakes

I dont like earthquakes. Its not that I hate them, its just the uncertainty of whether or not the floor will give way or the ceiling will cave in that bugs me. We just had a fairly large one and then a few minutes after that a huge one. At first the official world record keeping website listed it as a 7.1 but they have now officially downgraded it to a 6.8. None the less it was a shaky one. My bookcase was wobbling like it was drunk, my TV threatening to dive down into the pool of my undulating floor. I remember thinking "wow, if a earthquake totally smashes my new iMac, that would be really ironic since I just got it" Yeah, I know, a rather odd materialistic thought.


In other news, my friend (on the left in the above picture) Suah came to visit me here with her cheerful friend Soyoung. It was really fun to show some Korean friends around Tokyo again. I didn't really clean up my house enough to have two female guests though, it was a bit too cluttered, so they forced me to clean up more. I plan to upload some pictures of their trip and many other things soon. For now those who want media should continue to feed off my live cellphone junk.

And a final word about how to listen to me talk for literal hours about random stuff. Me and my friend Nicky have recently started up an audio blog, although it might become a video blog in the future. It's basically a variety show. We have a topic each weak, and we review media and talk tech, but basically just letting you listen in on a conversation between two old friends. If you are interested, check us out at Pizza Bento!

applereligon

You can never recapture a moment but you can create other similar moments. Or thats what I'm hoping. I have been wanting to get back into making movies since, well, since the day I stopped. I used equipment in college to make some independent filmy things, and I found it fit me perfectly. I must be visual because it litterally feels good making a script or concept and seeing that become something. In anycase, we used Apple Macs at school and in my attempt to recapture that which is not recapturable, I splurged on a nice iMac from America. It should be here in about a week (as a side note: the apple store in Japan, Ginza, was really not helpful. I wouldnt recommend going in to talk face to face with those silly weirdos.) What I find funny is how culty the Apple brand is. Those of my friends with macs are "welcoming" me as if I was born again or as if I found the path to nirvana. Most of my friends with out macs are shocked at my purchase as if I had commited some deep sin against
society. Its really quite silly. A computer is simply a tool to express our hearts. But I guess humans too often get their identities mixed up with their tools.

money

I dont like to feel like a capitalist pig, so I try not to want money too much. When the company I was working for went under last winter I lost over 3 months of pay. I tried not to worry about it too much, even when I was down to about one rice triangle a day. It's not like that anymore. I'm back to eating four times a day. And yesterday I was stressing a bit about expensive bills, when suddenly I noticed that the Japanese government had given me 80% of my lost wages. Its as if I was forced to save money. I plan to get back into making movies again, as a hobby of sorts so I guess its good timing.

Winter is starting to melt away. I wonder how fast we'll jump into summer this year? At work, I got transfered to a branch in the state of Ibaraki, not even in Tokyo state. One way, its over an hour from my house plus waiting time between trains. That aint cool. Want to transfer back to Tokyo but I guess that aint gonna happen anytime soon.

six am rain

So many of my blogs I am sitting here infront of a computer at a ghastly hour at night/in the early morning. And thats where I find myself again. Unable to sleep yet again, I'm sitting here trying to wind down into dream-land. I had a great day. Started the day off with getting a cool postcard from my American friend Candace, then I recorded video for a video blog project I'm trying to put together with another American friend, Nicky. (More details on that soon!) Then I was in happy Wikipedia edit mode for a few hours, had okonomiyaki (Japanese egg pizza is the common explanation for that food) with super cool Japanese buddy Kayo, and although I was too sleepy to be a good conversationalist, it was fun. She is becoming a teacher, so she is looking so professional these days. After that I came home and was going to surf youtube (I have a very geeky life, OK!?) for a bit, but I ended up chatting on the computer with a few American friends I hadn't chatted with on the computer for years and years. Life is good, I guess. The sky is bright outside now and the rain is still pelting the windows. My head is spinning, I'm too tired. It's time to really fade away for tonight.

late night rumbles

So it is about 3:30 in the morning and they are still doing violent loud construction on the road outside. Seems to have settled down in the last few minutes, at least for now. Hope I can get some sleep, but before that I thought I would put a few thoughts up.

Over here in Asia (at least, maybe the same in other parts of the world) it's really common to walk into a video store and see "sequels" to movies that haven't come out yet, or "versions" of movies that don't have any of the same actors. They look like American movies, but they aren't quite right. I have always wondered about them, but never sat down and watched any. Well, until yesterday when I saw "War of the Worlds 2"... yeah. The first one was an odd Tom Cruise movie that tried too hard to be what it was, for a budget of over 130 million dollars. yeah 130. But "War of the worlds 2" is actually a sequel to a different low budget movie, with a similar title. And they are classic B movie crapola. Mockbusters are what they seem to be called. Designed to lure audiences into renting or buying them when the big name blockbuster isnt currently available. But I couldn't help myself, I enjoyed it. Now I guess it's good to remind anyone reading this that I am a big fan of B movies. That maybe influenced me. But the never ending cliches, the special effects that would have looked bad on a late 1990s TV show, the acting that was for the most part stage-actor sounding, the alien spaceship sets that looked like painted sheets; it all added together to make a fun movie. They are almost a satire of the idea of movies, or atleast the idea of Hollywood movies. It was painful at times, but painful in the way eating cheap candy is. You like the sugarhigh, but you know you are mainly eating artificial flavoring. I would be proud if I could have a movie production studio that could make half of what these guys are doing. Of course, I would make weird artsy strange movies though, that wouldn't rake in the money like their mockbusters are doing. These movies are mainly made by the production company The Asylum, if you are interested.

I also watched the original Logan's Run tonight. That is a good chunk of scifi movie, although I found it quite ironic that the special effects in this movie (which I guess was a fairly big budget at the time) were quite cheesy. The long-distance shots were clearly a plastic display model, and the outfits of the people were clearly 70s sexy sci-fi movie clothes, instead of any logical social construction. And the plot holes, the massive plot holes, rained down on this movie like a storm. (How 1000s of people who have never seen an animal and believe they aren't eating flash suddenly be expected to become violent omnivores? and is there anything to eat since the oldman said the fish died? well, the old man did have a lot of cats. and there are green bushes, I guess they could eat the cats or the plants, but how will they know which plants can be eaten or how to cook a cat? Why didnt the runners just try to brake the walls of the dome if they knew they were escaping? And did I really just see someone in the crowd give the spock sign for the camera? OK. If you havent seen the movie this rant just made no sense.) Don't get me wrong though, it's for sure a classic movie. I think I'm also pointing out a movie doesnt have to have 130 million dollars of modern special effects to be watchable.

In a technical note, I have found some more posts from years ago. I have filled them into this diary, so those who like to backsurf into the past can now read some of what I was thinking (in Korea) in 2005. If I ever find the other missing posts (or if you have any saved?!) I'll be sure to add them in there. The diary only goes back so far, my old online diary from 2002-2003 has over a 100 posts so importing that into here would be a lot of work... something for a different day.

Well, the construction has fallen quiet. Creepy quiet. I guess that means its time for dreams.

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