独りぼっちのChristmas

So it's Christmas Eve. In Japan, that means a number of things:

- a romantic date (a la Valentine's Day back home)

- fried chicken (no lie - there was a line 30 people long at KFC tonight!)

- strawberries (what would Christmas Cake be without fresh strawberries?)

- an extremely limited set of Xmas songs playing in stores (after hearing three different renditions of "Rudolph" consecutively (in one store!!), I was REFRESHED to hear "Jingle Bells")

- enormous plastic Pokemon boots being sold at supermarkets, presumably full of candy and crap plastic toys (reminds me of prepackaged Easter baskets back home)

So although the specifics may be a bit different from what we have back home, I don't think anything differs so substantially from what Christmas has become in America.

I spent a quiet evening home alone (most of my friends are gone for break) and threw together what I could for a Christmas Eve dinner. Roast pork was the main entree, along with some mashed potatoes I made from scratch and a melange of sauteed root vegetables and peppers. I need to get some decent dishes one of these days so I can do a better job with the presentation, being that I don't actually own, for example, a plate.

I know the people who read my blog are all over the religious spectrum: Buddhist, Shinto, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, atheist, Sukyo Mahikari, and probably a few others in there. So I'll wish you all a merry Christmas, and if for some reason you take offense at that, just remember: perhaps we can't all agree on our concepts of god and humanity, life after death, or sin and redemption. But fried chicken and Pokemon are a part of all of us.

Unintentional Haiku

So... I guess you know that you truly have some yamato damashi in you when you start haiku-ing without realizing it.

From an email I wrote today:

Sooo hungry...
No breakfast or snack today,
Just a bowl of snot.

As an explanation, three of my friends didn't make it to work today - nasty stomach bug going around - so I didn't take any breaks with them down in the cafe like I often do. I also had kind of a small lunch today, with the most eventful part of it being a little bowl of grated nagaimo - a type of potato which, when grated, produces a viscous slurm the consistency and color of mucus. As a result I'm much more hungry than usual at this time of day.

And as a pronunciation note, the word "sooo" has to be pronounced emphatically, so that the listener can really feel the three syllables "So-o-o".

After I sent that email, I realized that I had inadvertently composed a haiku!

Evidently I got my wabi-sabi workin' and my wa be flowin' yo.

Google search results

Hmm... ok, so the latest news here is that my friend Linda's blog comes up as the first result if you do a Google search for "tabehoudai" and "kyoto"! (tabehoudai means "all you can eat"). Heh, doesn't do much to break my stereotypes of what those Canadians do with all their spare time. Actually, if you think about it, I suppose that statement could be taken two ways, but that's ok - either one works.

The best I could do was "crazy vancouver takoyaki party"... :P

It snowed! Or so I hear.

Allegedly we had a small flurry on Monday. One of my friends claims to have seen it. Unlike me, he has a window in the office where he works. Actually, in his lab everybody has like an 8-foot desk and a huge 30-inch flat-panel monitor if not two. And you know I never exaggerate. I had like this 8-inch monitor before I scavenged and fought to get a slightly bigger one (haven't measured but I think it's an 8.25 incher), and I have maybe 2 feet of desk space although that can change as I sometimes get relocated with about 3 minutes' notice. But I wouldn't even consider trading places, because in my lab I get to be surrounded by a Jawa's paradise of half-disassembled robot skeletons, a veritable graveyard of robots that once were. The giant, defunct cylindrical body of a robot long since rendered obsolete greets me every day by my door with the slogan "Everyday robot" emblazoned on its now-headless chest. Inside my room, a black humanoid hulk sits across from my desk, slumped against the wall, its innards spilling out of its torso, a cascade of connectors and controller boards dangling unused from a rainbow tangle of ribbon cables. But not unlike in the rainforest, the death all around is only one part of the eternal cycle of life. Even as old disused wheeled bases, piles of burned-out motors, and old servers that were state-of-the-art when "Wayne's World" came out, sit in the hallway awaiting their eventual fate in the dumpster, so too do stacks of crates against the wall hold the promise of new life - shiny new infrared distance sensors still in their boxes, brand-new wireless network hubs, hot new video capture boards, virgin CPU's that have yet to be socketed, and stacks of servos and anodized aluminum body frame parts still in their bubble-wrap. The unending cycle of sa-ta-na-ma continues. Assembly, Maintenance, Disassembly, Reuse of parts. All a part of the enormous conversion engine: in comes a steady flow of coffee, research funding, and Canadian interns (well, the coffee is pretty steady at least) and out goes a flow of academic papers, source code, and Canadian interns (they kinda just pass through the system like corn). And in my little corner of my little server room I reside, doing my own little bit to keep my little part of the engine greased and running, surrounded in my little world by piles of circuit boards, snarls of colored wires ending in obscure plastic connectors of all types, boxes overflowing with servos, cables, RFID tag readers, heatsinks, and power supplies; shelves heaped with hard drives, DV tapes, webcams, transceivers of all sorts, and giant robot batteries; around me sit enormous database servers, a 3D printer, small-scale machine tools, walls of little plastic bins full of electronics parts, screws, bearings, pink staplers, and the like, workbenches cluttered with tools for cutting, soldering, and measuring, and some sort of - what is that, anyway? It's like a heavy 3-degree-of-freedom industrial robot arm but has a mannequin's head mounted on it with pink shredded PVC hair - your guess is as good as mine.

Code, compile, run, debug, code again. Breathe in, breathe out. Sa, ta, na ma. Birth, life, death, rebirth. Gyana, Shuni, Surya, Bhudi. As it is with the robots, as it is with our code, so it is with our lives, wheeling our way through the circle of seasons. I wonder when it will snow again.

Arboreal irony

This is a little bit hard to see, so click on the image to see a bigger version. I went to a park on Sunday in Suma, west of Kobe, and I encountered these two trees were there. On the left is a Japanese maple, and on the right is a "Juugatsu-zakura" - an October cherry, which apparently only flowers in the fall.

To anyone who has spent any time in Japan, this is a shocking juxtaposition, as the fiery hero of fall brandishes his vermilion foliage against an unlikely opponent, the undisputed champion of spring, wielding her delicate but poignant blossoms, blushed with the faintest suggestion of pink. Yeah, it's hard to see the blossoms in the picture. Keep in mind that this is an October cherry, and it's already what, like the end of November...

Anyway, big a cappella show coming up - I'll probably have more time for blogging once that's done.

Geography / 地理学

Great conversation with this guy Tomo on Tuesday night at the Moon Walk in America-mura:

Me: "So where in Osaka are you from?"
Tomo: "I'm from Hirano-ku. Do you know where that is?"
Me: "Um yeah, I think so. It's in the north, right?"
Tomo: "It's actually the southernmost ward in Osaka, past Tennoji."
Me: "... oh."
Tomo: "So where are you from in the US?"
Me: "I'm from New York."
Tomo: "Oh, that's great! So you're really close to Vancouver, then!"

この間アメ村のバーで友君って言う人と話して：
俺：大阪のどこからですか。
友：平野区。それはどこか知っている？
俺：多分。なんか北の方ちゃう？
友：ちがう、大阪市の一番南の区。天王寺よりむこう。
俺：。。。あ、そう。
友：アメリカのどこから来ている？
俺：ニューヨーク。
友：あ、ええな。じゃ、バンクーバーの近くやね！

ATR CEO BBQ vs. IBL

So everything turned out fine on Friday. I found my license, rented a truck, and got the kotatsu home, despite torrential rains. I was a little bit nervous about driving on the left side, but the only really tricky bit was making sure I turned into the lane on the correct side of the divider. Oh, and squeezing around motorcyclists on the narrow roads. Yeah, all in all I probably only broke about 7 or 8 traffic laws in a 1-hour period. :P

This weekend I went to a party at the house of the president of ATR. It was interesting... I once went to a party at the spectacular home of one of the CEOs of Sapient, who owns an entire peninsula on the north shore, including several islands, many tiers of gardens and patios, an enormous mansion, and of course a dock where he keeps his jetskis and other watercraft. The house on its rocky promontory towers over the relatively modest mansions of several other CEO's of high-tech companies living across the bay, a bold statement of corporate success and financial power.

President Fugono, on the other hand, lives in the woods on a little hill near Nara. Actually his place is surrounded by other houses, but he and his brothers own a big (by Japanese standards - maybe 2-3 acres? Hard to tell how far the woods extended) chunk of undeveloped land right next to his house, and the trees kinda block out the neighbors. It really felt more like a relaxed barbecue party back in Jefferson than a corporate event in Japan, with muddy paths connecting clearings in the woods, people sitting on logs and chatting, and kids fishing in the pond for crayfish.

I thought it was really cool that the president of a high-tech robotics research company in Japan, who I assume has the means to support any lifestyle he likes, would choose to live in surroundings so similar to the way my parents and all their friends back home live. This guy even has his own little mini-backhoe - apparently he dug the pond himself and uses the backhoe to keep the trails clear.

So once again my life experiences come full-circle and I find that a journey of thousands of miles, across cultural, linguistic, and intellectual barriers, brings me home again. I guess the Institute for Better Living is on to something after all. :)

Why we need Eddie Van Halen

Hey, so I know I haven't posted in a while. Been busy. As if you couldn't guess! (笑)

Honestly I don't know what it is... either (a) my available time has decreased, (b) my list of things to do has increased, or (c) my time management skills have atrophied. I constantly find myself overwhelmed with time commitments.

Anyway, quick summary of the recent past. I went to Tokyo last weekend to see an outstanding performance by up-and-coming pop vocalist Sawaka (http://www.sawaka.com) and then spent a day shopping for hair accessories at the mall. Yeah, I know... It's an addictive habit, and I'm trying to quit.

This week's Osakapella rehearsal was a lot of fun - the entire group was there, and we sounded pretty good! We have a gig on Sunday in Nakanoshima, so we reviewed our set. Given that we haven't even practiced a lot of these songs since August, I was pretty impressed. Good vibes. Hope things continue this way!

Furniture. I continued my quest for some sort of organizational drawer unit for my room as well as a kotatsu for the winter (a Japanese kind of coffee table with a quilt around it and an electric heater underneath, so you can put your legs under it and eat oranges in the winter). I think I found the one I want to buy, but of course transportation is an issue. Since I'm never home, having the store deliver it isn't really an option. They do let people borrow their small trucks, though, and I do have an international driver's license. So this may well be my first chance to drive in Japan! However...

1) To buy an organizational drawer unit, I need to be able to transport it home.
2) To transport it home, I need my International Driver's License.
3) To find my International Driver's License, I need to clean and organize my room.
4) To organize my room, I need an organizational drawer unit.
5) See (1).

And that is why we need Eddie Van Halen!

Birthday celebrations ... The thrilling conclusion!

ごめんね、最近全然日本語書いてへんな。もう午前二時やから短いバージョン：誕生日のピックニクの後で一つの小さいディンナーパーティーして、アルビンとリンダリンダとキャムがめちゃ美味しいもん作ってくれた！その後の土曜日めちゃ楽しい餃子パーティーやった。新しい友達も来たし、長ーく会ってへん友達も来たし、ケーキ二つもくれたし、とってもいいパーティーだった！囲碁ももちろんやって、その後ﾋﾞﾙ･ｱﾝﾄﾞ･ﾃｯﾄﾞｽﾞ･ｴｸｾﾚﾝﾄ･ｱﾄﾞﾍﾞﾝﾁｬｰって言うめちゃくちゃ好きな映画を見た！俺とキャム以外はみんな寝ちゃったらしいけどな。(>_<)

So I'm still way behind in documenting everything. I'll try to keep this less wordy and more photojournalistic. The short summary - Thursday night, a quiet dinner with my Vancouver buds back at Alvin's place. Alvin, Linda, and Cam threw together an outrageous meal complete with log roll birthday cake for me! You guys are so awesome.


As the winds started to pick up Friday night (in a figurative sense, of course) Linda helped me out with planning the menu and doing the shopping for Saturday's party. Alvin provided hardware - frying pans, mixing bowls, a cutting board, and his laptop (handy, because it doubles as a cutting board. yes, I'm just being silly). The plan was to get gyoza stuffings and chop them ahead of time, so that as guests arrived they could start folding and puckering the gyoza into their mature form. Then throw them in the pan, sizzle, steam, and serve. We planned for the worst, buying ingredients for something like 280 gyozas, using seven different recipes. Hauling the stuff back to my house was like stocking a fallout shelter in preparation for a nuclear winter. My fridge was stuffed beyond its capacity, and what vegetables would not fit were piled around my kitchen.

After all that shopping, nobody had any energy for chopping, so we gave up on preparations for the evening. We needed to save our energy for carrying a mikoshi the next morning (I'll write about this in a separate post).

Skip ahead to 2pm, when we were supposed to get back from the mikoshi festival. No, actually, why don't we skip ahead to like 5:30pm, when we actually DID get back. :) Everybody went to their respective homes to refresh / get dressed / crash from the physical exertion. I frantically cleaned my room and dashed off on last-minute shopping runs. Finally 7pm rolled around. Yuki and Yuki and Yuka show up, I hand them knives and cutting boards and veggies. More and more guests show up and join in the maelstrom of chopping and mixing. I'm running around, either meeting people by the station (several people got lost trying to follow my directions - my apartment isn't in the most obvious location) or mixing drinks for people, occasionally tag-teaming in to chop some nira or garlic.

There was a great mix of people there - my old friends Peter and Miki showed up, as well as one of my completely insane Japanese coworkers and an amazing international mix of other friends. Two different groups of friends brought me birthday cakes, too! That was really awesome, and actually it was a good thing because we had way too many people for one cake.

After a couple attempts, I had all the candles out (hey, I'm getting on in years! and aerodynamically speaking, it's much more difficult to generate sufficient flow velocity when you're trying to cover the 90 degree span containing two cakes with a single breath... and you're inebriated. ;)

That brief interlude over, the flow of the party swept back into full force, steam and oil flying from the kitchen, with trays of folded gyoza sweeping in and trays of cooked gyoza coming out in their place. The flow of it all was greased with alcohol and conversation.

I got some great presents - some funky socks, a rare piece of abstract art, a takoyaki cooker that I'm now obligated to use at my next party, and a Hanshin Tigers jersey! This was like 4 days before they lost their fourth straight game in the Japan series... guess I'll have to wait till next year to wear it. (yeah, right - like there's ever an off-season for Tigers pride in Osaka!)

So, being surrounded by good friends, with good music on the iTunes shuffle list, good food in my tummy, and good alcohol in everybody's cups, I decided to get the party started, so to speak, and I busted out the go boards, awww yeah! (Wish I had a pic to put here!)

Long story short, after some crazy action on the go boards and some spinning-flying-how-the-hell-did-he-launch-himself-in-the-air-like-that dropkick-on-my-neck action, we all settled in to watch Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, an excellent finale for the evening since half the people there were starting to zone out anyway. The Japanese people didn't understand it, the Chinese people had never seen it but were only present and awake for like 5 minutes of it, and the Germans were lost somewhere in the torrential 4am downpours outside. Cam and I were the only ones completely aware of the movie, and we both were chuckling 30 seconds before each funny part, and nobody had any clue why. I translated the first 10 mins or so of the movie for the people near me, but ... sometimes you've just gotta be there, ya know?

Anyway, it was all in all a worthy party to kick off my alleged adulthood. Thanks to Cam for taking pretty much all of the pictures here. Anybody else got pics? I was too busy partying! Thanks especially for this picture on the left here with all the beautiful ladies! Little fantasy of mine - ah, if only every day could be like that!

Oh, wait, it is...

Measuring my progress

Thank you for all the birthday wishes! I had a wonderful party Saturday night - will post some photos "when I get around to it" ;)

On that note, !!! NEW PHOTOS !!! 新しい写真 !!! I just posted some photos from my first birthday party. Scroll down or follow this link:
Birthday Celebrations... Part I

Anyway, today I want to share a small personal triumph from work. Lately I've been working on a couple projects, one of which involves writing a little app that compresses video files. I'm still a bit of a newbie to Windows programming (most of my hardcore techie days were spent in front of a UNIX prompt) and until this month, I've been shunning the world of windows, writing text-based console apps whenever possible.

Lately, though, I've been learning more and more about Win32, MFC, and .NET, and for this project I decided to write a very simple window-based utility. So simple, in fact, that all it does is pop up a window with a status bar to let you know how far along the program is in the compression process.

At long last, yesterday, after many days of trials and errors and the diving-through of pages and pages of online documentation about DirectShow, timers, Windows message-passing, and darker, unspeakable things, I finally got my app working, WITH A PROGRESS BAR! I was so excited I took a screencap so I could share it with all of you. :)


Perhaps I'm still far from being an 31337 cyb3rh4x0r, but ... it's progress!

The Inevitable March of Time

I watched the counter roll over as I sat on the train coming home from a cappella practice. 0:00:00 10/20 ... I can't believe I'm not in my 20's anymore!!! What happened to my youth?

Well the answer of course is that it's still here. :P I'm not going to be changing anytime soon. Maybe I'll try to keep my room a little cleaner and stress a little less about stuff. Heh, I feel like I'm making New Year's resolutions.

Maybe I should wear a shirt and tie to work tomorrow because I'm a "grown-up" now.

I guess the first step would be waking up in time to not have to sprint for the bus like I usually do... :P

Insomniac Trip

I need to document this while the feelings are fresh in my memory. Tonight was the strangest night... I've been on this inexplicable high, maybe it's tied to the temperature (which has dropped for the first time to a level at which I've had to button my overshirt) or to the fact that I overslept for work today (got way too much sleep last night - something like >9 hours!) and have been in this zone ever since... not sure. Not chemically influenced as far as I can tell, unless somebody slipped something into my miso soup. ;)

My breathing has been kinda fast, although my pulse rate has been normal. My whole consciousness has been bouncing back and forth between these giant fleece-covered beachball-like ideas and feelings... Every time I try to come down they buoy me back up, like when somebody throws a quarter into a swimming pool and you try to swim down to grab it, but the pressure builds in your ears and your natural buoyancy fights all of your efforts to get down to the bottom... eventually you give up (or even grab it) and inevitably float back to the top. That's been me tonight. Try as I may, I can't come down.

Went out for a walk in the cool autumn air - was hoping that would calm me down a bit. Instead it was this psychedelic voyage through a reality crafted of light, shadows, whispers, ideas, and feelings. Here are a few snapshots of the evening:

I was walking along a wide brick sidewalk firmly planted upon the earth, but overwhelmed with the feeling that it was only a flimsy veneer held up by a thin framework of structural supports, the entire surface of the earth was all like that, held up on a teetering trelliswork to exactly the height where it would meet my feet.

Walking past a waterfall by the local park, I was struck with the sense that all the stonework and trees around me were immaterial, fuzzy, noncorporeal. The waterfall before me was the only pillar of solidity in the shifting fluidity of the world around me.

The stars above stood out brilliant and solid as nails in the night sky, their coldness and solitude piercing into me like silver threads pulled taut wherever I walked.

The songs in my head... no fewer than three at once. As I listened to them, the window of my auditory perception grew wider and wider, and I could see/hear deeper patterns in the music, and even see how they lined up. I could look/listen to broad swaths of music, like scanning the pages of a book! I toyed for a while with lining up songs (all playing in real-time of course) to synch up certain chords, and then I would let them slide forwards and backwards to line them up by emotional content. As soon as I let a song go with my conscious focus, though, its tempo accelerated until it slipped away. Only by grasping a song and holding it down was I able to listen to it at normal speed.

I saw bicycles parked in the plaza in front of the train station, but they were more than just the physical objects of bicycles. Instead, I was aware of them as mere projections into a 3D space of the 4D paths of their riders. Imagine brilliantly colored lines of neon purple, green, orange, yellow, blue... each streaming out along the roads and up into the hills, one line behind, tracing the entire history of the rider's life, every step, every experience since birth, and one line ahead, shooting into the future, looping back and forth over every daily commute to come, launching off into the unknown places where life will take them. Now picture a spaghetti network of these lines, winding through spacetime, mapping out the lives of all the people of the neighborhood, the city, the prefecture, the country... all the lives of those who came before us, and of those who have yet to be born of couples who haven't even yet met... or maybe they're just friends and have no idea that they'll have children together someday in the future. Now slice a 3D "plane" through this model, like grasping a pile of shoelaces and snipping it off with scissors to look at the cross-section. The points that remain are marked by those bicycles.

As I walked through a wooded area, I had an intense feeling of duality, one face of the reality around me feeling like walking on a sound stage. A dull, muted quality of sound surrounded me, and all light felt like it was being radiated from sources very close to me. The other face of reality felt like I was in a huge, unfathomably enormous cavernous space, every light projected in from infinity, and every object around me, every molecule, was suspended in the middle of that infinite space on a tight, invisible wire. Psychologically it made me feel claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time.

Everywhere I walked, I was surrounded by the songs of crickets, and I was acutely aware of their phase differences, the pulsating and beat frequencies of their interference. But on returning home to my apartment block, I was greeted by the most amazing symphony of insects that I've experienced. Certainly the cicadas of summer were outstanding, but in my current perceptual state, I felt like I could hear every individual cricket in the surround-sound amphitheater of the parking lot. Not only could I hear each one, playing its own carefully orchestrated part in the vast symphony, but I could see the sounds streaming by. They left tracks in the background silence, like the star trails you see when the Millenium Falcon jumps into hyperspace, sonic trails that I experienced through a sense I never knew I had, an audiovisual laser show symphonic extravaganza, a musical masterpiece anchored on the 60-cycle hum of the power lines that guided my path home.

I really hope I can fall asleep tonight...

Birthday celebrations ... Part I

In anticipation of the commencement of my fourth decade of life, my birthday celebrations began on Sunday with a picnic in Nara park! Saturday brought ominous torrential downpours of rain, but it was just a bluff. Sunday was a beautiful day... the air was the perfect temperature for outdoor frolicking, and the sunlight had this beautiful golden quality to it that lit up Todaiji like a postcard in the background.


I threw together an avocado salad, Alvin whipped up a chicken pasta salad, Linda made something loosely based on the concept of the potato, and other people brought various sushi, salads, and picnicky snacky things. Of course I brought my 4-liter tank of shochu too, which Yuki helped me out with. ;)


Besides my ATR buddies Alvin, Linda, and Cameron (an enigmatic character who, although he as only been in Japan for like a few days, has already mastered Japanese homestyle cooking, run the entire tokaido from Kyoto to Tokyo, built his own traditional Japanese house from scratch with no nails, and founded his own Buddhist temple),
Toshiko and Hiroko from Osakapella, and Yuki, we had some rare guest appearances by Keiko and Luke (with their 8-month-old daughter Aisa), Haru-chan (Maki's friend), and a surprise appearance by my old friend Philomena, the crazy pink-clad English girl whose dad used to do acupuncture with bees in China, and who did the JET program with me, but who is back in Kyoto as a researcher!

Unfortunately, although the weather was perfect on Sunday, the ground was still very wet from the day before. I wore my flat-bottomed sneakers, and I must have lost my footing and hit the ground like 5-10 times. Fortunately I had anticipated this and wore my trail pants, so all was well. :)


We played out in the park for a few hours, while Alvin and Cam kept us entertained with their mad soccer skillz, and then packed things up to head back as the sun began to descend. I suggested that maybe we should go for some karaoke, and everyone else agreed ... that it would be more fun not to do karaoke but rather to go back to my place and keep partying. ... ... ?!?!?!?!

Keep in mind here that I have never really invited anyone to my place and it's a total disaster area... but we went anyway. Pizza was ordered, drinks were mixed, wineglasses were smashed, settings on my computer were tweaked (?!?! what kind of dork goes to a party at somebody's place and changes their Windows taskbar settings and Firefox toolbars? Somebody erased my web history too. I wonder what kind of sketchy websites they were looking at during the party... ?!?! ) and a good time was had by all.

Anyway, the cleanup procedures have been completed, and we're all anxiously awaiting Part II on Saturday!

BSOD!!! 久しぶり!!

So I'm working on some longer posts about my trips and parties over the past few months. Been kinda busy with work, though. Anyway, I thought I'd share this with you... I got a Blue Screen Of Death yesterday for the first time in I don't know how many years. (Yes, I've been doing very naughty things with my system configuration and driver files!) Anyway, in this picture you can see all the important things in my life - my coffee mug, my iPod, the two Robovie eye cameras I use for testing my video software... ok, maybe it's not ALL the important things in my life :P

最近ちょっと長い文書を書く途中なんやからブログに何も書いてへん。仕事でもなんとか忙しいいし。でもこれは見せようと思ってんからちょっとアップした。昨日めちゃ久しぶりにBSOD（ウィンドーズの青いエラーの画面）が出来ました！(システムファイルにいろんな変体なことしているから!）後、この写真に自分の人生のすべての大切なものも見れます!コーヒーカップもiPodもロボットの目のカメラも。まぁ、大切なもののスベテじゃないかもな。：P

Been feeling a little under the weather lately. I skipped Japanese class and a cappella practice this week so I could get some rest. Feeling a little more genki today, so hopefully I'll be in good shape this weekend for my "Party while I'm still young" pre-birthday picnic party in Nara Park!

最近ちょっと元気ない。昨日アカペラの練習も休んだし、おとといも日本語の授業も休んだ。でもいっぱい寝れたから今日は割りとよくなっている。ほんだら今週末の「若いうちにパーティーするぜ！」って言う奈良公園の誕生日前のピクニクパーティーに元気を出すように頑張る！

English revelation of the day: When someone is in a state of "consternation", would you say that they are "consternated" or "consterned"? The correct answer is "consternated", as a dictionary search revelated to me today.

Insight of the evening

I was going to go to sleep tonight without posting anything to my blog, but... well, this insight just hit me as I was about to go to bed.

I may be so busy that I never have time to cook,
I may only take my garbage out once a month,
I may have thrown out some eggs today that expired before my sister's birthday (in August),
I may never be able to find the time to study, or sleep, or update my blog,
I may be terrible at returning friends' emails,
I may have so many acquaintances and so little time and attention to share among them that what relationships I've maintained are all characterized by infrequent, shallow interactions,
I may not exercise as much as I should,
I may start more projects than I finish,
I may have my eyes so set on the stars that I lose my footing and fall in the mud,

But...

I do floss regularly!
=)

Quiz: What's Your Japanese Subculture?

This was a very silly quiz, but my result was too funny not to post! Follow the link at the bottom to take the quiz yourself.

You Are a Henna Gaijin!

You're not Japanese, but you wish you were! You can use chopsticks with your eyes closed, and you've memorized hundreds of Kanji. You even answer your phone "moshi moshi." While the number of anime videos you've seen is way higher than the number of dates you've been on, there's hope. Play the sexy, mysterous gaijin, and you'll have plenty of Japanese meat.

What's Your Japanese Subculture?

Vanilla Sky and More Farewells

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Feel free to post comments complaining about the fact that I don't update my blog enough! ;)

ごめんな、しばらくなにも書いてなくて。文句あればコメント書いてください！；）

Anyway, the latest in my life:

とにかく、最近の出来事：

- I got my contract at ATR extended! After all the back-and-forth and negotiations, things are finally settled. I'm going to be here until the end of March 2007! Seems like a long way away, but "time flies like an arrow", as they are so fond of saying here.

仕事の契約をのばした！2007年の三月末まで日本に住む事になった。再来年何って遠く感じるけど「光陰矢の如し」やろう？（あっている？時間が飛ぶって事。）

- Three more of my friends moved away. Luv, Dyah, and Benazeer have left ATR, causing another series of sad goodbyes and crazy sayonara parties. In fact, most of my weekend was consumed by Benazeer's goodbye party and the subsequent hauling of suitcases and boxes, sweeping, scrubbing, and emptying of rooms, and separating and dumping of garbage. We moved most of her stuff to Linda's room - i.e. down four flights of stairs, up the hill, and back up four flights of stairs - and a lot of the rest went overland to my place, atop the far hill beyond the station. I got a futon and some tequila out of the deal, so it wasn't bad.

後、先週また友達が三人（ラブとディアとベナジア）帰国しちゃった。また悲しくて、また激しくパーティーして、またバタバタ引越し準備助けていた。実は週末ほとんどそれで過ごした、荷物運んだり、ごみを捨てたり、部屋の大掃除したりして。でも布団もテキーラもそれでもらったから文句言えない。：）

Poetic moment of the weekend:

Saturday morning - I stagger out of Benazeer's place, still drunk, exhausted, incoherent, craving sleep. I look up. The eastern edges of all the fluffy clouds scattered across the lightening sky are lit up with the pastel hues of sunrise, playful pinks, greens, and oranges slowly being washed away by the golden warmth of the sunlight. I stop to drink in this impressionist vista until the beeping of the UPS in the back of my brain warns me again that I need to shut down my system cleanly in a futon before my backup power runs out.

Saturday evening - System rebooted and fed, I head back down to help with the moving preparations. Looking up again, I am greeted with the same fluffy clouds, but this time the colorful light paints their western edges, as the red sun with its spectacular following of gold and yellow clouds majestically bows out for the evening and retreats below the buildings along the horizon, brush stroke by brush stroke taking its colorful light show with it, giving the first evening stars their cue to step boldly out into the breeze of the cool autumn evening.

No time to translate this into Japanese at the moment... I'll get to that later.

Great quote about me!

"Not many people can be like you... without drugs." - my mom!

The 文化祭 at my old 高校

なんか、ちょっと日本人の友達と話して、みんな｢ブログは英語ばかしやから読まれへん」って言っているからこれから毎回英語も日本語も書くことにする。下手やけどなんとか頑張るわ。

Hey, so it's been a little while since I've written. I'll chalk that up to being too busy for my own good, and to not having time to upload photos (currently #1 on the "How Can I Improve My Blog" poll). I promise I'll put up some pictures soon!

ちょっとお久しぶりですね。右のアンケートの一番皆が見たいって言っている物は写真なのに、最近忙しくて、写真をアップする時間がなかなか時間出来なくてさ。でももうすぐ載せる、約束する！

Last weekend was the culture festival at the high school where I used to teach. It was great. I haven't been there in a long time, and I only knew the 3rd year students, but it was so cool to be there. At these festivals, each class puts on some sort of production - usually the seniors do plays, and the other students do either performances like dances and taiko drumming, or they set up a room in the school to be a cafeteria, nail art salon, horror movie special effects studio, movie theater (showing a movie they made, of course), house of horrors, costume play photo studio, or anything else they can imagine. I wish we had such cool events back when I was in high school! By the way, this particular school always does an outstanding job with their school festivals (the cultural festival, the music festival, the athletic festival) - they are all pretty standard events, but I've taught at other schools and wasn't nearly as impressed. The scale of the projects, the quality of the work, and the passion these kids put into what they do is extraordinary.

先週末前の教えていた学校の文化祭に行った。チョー懐かしかった！なんか、今の三年生しか会った事ないけどそれでも、文化祭に行くのは懐かしかった。劇とかダンスとか和太鼓とかを見て、いつもちょっとうらやましい。アメリカの高校ではこう言う事見た事ない。しかも、特にこの高校は文化祭や音楽界や体育祭は毎年すごく頑張る！ほかの学校でも教えたことがあるけどぜんぜん違う、雰囲気が。この学校にめちゃあたまええ子いっぱいおるし、みんな毎日一生懸命夜遅くまで頑張るし！

I noticed one thing, though, and this wasn't just an artifact of this year's festival, but this year I particularly noticed it. I saw two plays and two dances, and all of them involved guys cross-dressing as girls (and sometimes vice versa too). I guess this was the first time I realized it was sort of a standard thing here. That must say something about Japanese culture, and the role that costume plays in defining identity or something, but that's the sort of thing that humanities majors write about so I don't think I can come up with anything too deep. I think it says something about the flip side of conservative Japanese society, and it also shows, I think, how much they lack the homophobic undercurrents here that flow through American culture.

そのとき、一つの気付いた事がありました。今年だけの事じゃなかったけどただ今週初めて気付いただけ。劇を二つ見て、ダンスも二つ見て、その中で女の服着ている男性やたまにその逆も多かった。そして思い出して、確かに毎年なんかおかまのことが多かった。それは、何か日本の文化の深いことかも知れへんけど、それは文系の人の書きそうな論文。理系だから深い結論はできないけどなんと言うか、日本の控え目な文化の裏側の一部だし、比べるとアメリカの文化の方の同性愛をの嫌われている事をはっきり分かるって感じ。

It was great to see my old students and coworkers again. A number of alums were there, too, who had been students back when I first started teaching. It was great to catch up with them, although it also made me realize that I really need to keep studying Japanese - there was like a 20-minute stretch of conversation about politics that I couldn't follow at all!

I actually started Japanese class this Tuesday, so hopefully I'll be able to work up to that point. Anyway, like I said, I'll post pics soon. Right now I'm busy getting ready for our big camping trip this weekend!

元生徒と元同僚に久しぶりに会ってよかった。卒業生も数人いたし、最初に日本に来た時からの友達もいました。いろいろ話してすごく楽しかったけど、やっぱり20分ぐらいの政治的な会話をまったく理解できへんかった。勉強がんばる！

実は、火曜日日本語の授業が始まったからそのレベルまで上がれるかも。わかんないけど頑張る。兎に角、もちょっとしてからまたブログにいろいろ写真貼ると思いますから楽しみにしていて。今は今週末のキャンプの準備しているからその後でまた何か書くね！

Breaking up is hard to do...

これをブログに書くかどうか最初は悩んでいたけどやっぱり自分の人生の大きい事だし、みんなにどせい知らせなきゃならないし。日本語がうまくないけど言いたい事は、先週すみちゃんとお別れでした。三年半一緒に過ごしてたので、別れたくても別れたくなくてもつらい事です。あまり言えることはないと思う。楽しい事たくさんあったし、大変な事もあったし。思い出を山盛り一緒に作りました。アルバムにも写真いっぱい。

真ん中の文節は英語で読んで下さい。難しくて翻訳しない。

つまり、寂しがる。っていうか、寂しがっている。ほんまに。しかもすみちゃんには今別れの事意外にも色んな大変な事があるから特に今は友達からのサポートがとっても大事。（もう、まったくうまく日本語かけへんな。こんなに真面目な事ならもっとスムーズな言い方で言いたい！）しかし、僕の方は、まぁ、最初の数週間大変やと思うけど取り合えず一歩一歩で人生を進めるように。恰もよし、ここでサポートしてくれるいい友達も出来たし。

たまに人生に荒波がありますが、そのとき必死になって船具を持って、風波を通るまでに歯を食いしばる事しかない。

So, I wasn't sure whether to put this in my blog or not, but it's a pretty major event in my life, and I'll have to tell everybody sooner or later. For those who don't know yet, Sumiko and I broke up last week, after 3 1/2 years together. I don't know if there's much to say. We had some great times together, we had some difficult times together. Lots of memories, lots of photos in the album.

All the parties we had at her place in Tsuruhashi, potluck smorgasbords served on cardboard boxes in her tatami room; fancy romantic dinners overlooking the city lights; not-so-romantic cheap ramen dinners when we just couldn't agree on where to eat before all the restaurants closed; exciting adventures seeking out ancient temples and castles; badly-planned adventures that ended in confusion and tears; all the a cappella concerts and nights of karaoke; all the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies we had to go out to the countryside to see because they were sold out in Osaka; frozen toes in the cold of winter and dripping sweat in the heat of summer; the countless cups of green tea at her little kitchen table, and the countless games of go on my little coffee table; the Chinatown bus; the trips up to Camp Bob. That just barely scratches the surface.

I will miss her a lot. I already do. Any of you who know her, she's going through a lot at the moment (not just our breakup) and I know she could really use your support and friendship right now. As for me, well... the first few weeks will be pretty rough, but I'm doing my best to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and I've been fortunate to make some great friends here who are really supportive.

Sometimes you have to cross some tumultuous seas in life, and you've just gotta grab onto the rigging, hold on with your teeth, and sail on through it.

Typhoon 14

So for the second time since I got here this summer, a typhoon hit Japan. Once again, corporate emails trickled down from the top, announcing that tomorrow might be a "special holiday" if public transportation were shut down. Once again, plans were rescheduled. Hatches were battened down. My long-awaited first Japanese class was canceled. We clenched our fists and gritted our teeth and cowered in the corners of our waribashi houses, fearing the worst...

and ...

...

nothing. No wind, just a little rain. One of my friends down in eki-nishi claims that the wind blew a flowerpot off her windowsill, but up where I live the air was still and the crickets were singing. Just like the last typhoon, it was a bit disappointing after all the build-up.

But although it was a bit of a let-down, we were fortunate that it didn't come our way. Reading the news (and friends' emails) later, it sounds like Kyushu and western Japan got hit pretty hard - 40 inches of rain, 110,000 evacuated, 9 people dead, flooding, landslides, homes destroyed - but the storm veered away to the north after that. By the way, it's interesting - CNN.com keeps referring to it as Typhoon Nabi, but the Japanese don't name their typhoons. They give them numbers (then again, they give people numbers here too), so this was Typhoon 14. Nabi is the Korean name.

The sunset last night was incredible, though, and I think we owe it to the typhoon's atmospheric churning. A jumble of every sort of cloud imaginable - long, narrow, heavy, low cumulus clouds shorn apart by crosswinds, tiny puffy white clouds scudding along under big, lumpy stratocumulus sheets of grey... and as I left work, the setting sun lit it all up, like a spotlight stabbing through the dark to light up a stage! The sky exploded into a psychedelic light show, ragged, twisting snarls of clouds bathed in gold and red, the sky behind them radiant in every color of the spectrum! Higher up, two clouds parted to reveal a sliver of a crescent moon, escorted by two brilliant pinpoint stars. But the most surreal part was the eastern half of the sky, which was taken up by huge, looming, low-hanging clouds lit up with a rich glowing orange, casting the world below in an unnatural light, an eerie twist on the familiar, like wearing ski goggles in summer.

I scrambled home to grab my camera, but by the time it was in my hand, the colors had all dripped down and settled in a deep pool on the horizon. In futility I snapped a few pictures of the place where the sunset had been, but it had somehow lost its magic, like an apartment the day after a party, with its piles of half-empty plastic cups, crushed nachos, and sticky pools of unidentifiable crud on the floor.

The 関ジャニ∞ Boy Band Experience!

So as fate would have it, a friend of mine managed to get free tickets to see Kan-Jani-8 (Kan-Johnny-8?) in Osaka yesterday! I'd never heard of the group before, but they're apparently a pretty well-known 8-member teenage-heartthrob manufactured boy band. My friend Kern is quite knowledgeable about these things, and I learned a lot about this industry from him.

First, there are apparently two huge "talent" agencies that mass-produce these manufactured bands - one does only girls (Tsunku's operation, with Morning Musume, Aya Matsuura, Melon Kinenbi, etc.) and the other does only boys (I think it's called "Johnny's", and they produce bands like Arashi, SMAP, Kinki Kids, and this one).


So apparently their audition criteria when recruiting members for these bands is as follows: (1) Height, (2) Looks, (3) Coordination (dancing ability). Note that "singing" is not one of these criteria. Apparently singing is considered to be a "nice bonus", but since almost every song these guys do is sung completely in unison, it's no problem to discreetly fade out a mic or two.

The show was an interesting production - it had a bon-odori (summer festival dancing) theme, and the stage in the center of Osaka-jo hall was decorated with paper lanterns and surrounded by a crowd of probably 500 girls dressed in colorful yukata. The crowd was an interesting mix, too. Out of probably 10,000 people in the audience, I believe there were exactly 2 guys, Kern and me, surrounded by a sea of starry-eyed screaming girls with a median age of about 15, carrying their homemade uchiwa (Japanese fans) covered with glitter and declaring, in brilliant neon colors, their love for band member X or asking him to blow them a kiss.

So we were sitting there, waiting for the show to start, and suddenly a chorus of high-pitched screams came reeling through the crowd, building in volume like a jet engine warming up for takeoff! The hysteric fervor around us was reminiscent of Beatles or Elvis concerts, and I wouldn't have been surprised to see some girl pass out next to me. Assuming the band had come in, I looked around but couldn't find them... Then I saw what the screaming was about - On a video screen in the corner of the arena, they were showing a ramen commercial starring some of the members of the group... This much reaction for a ramen commercial? I shuddered to think of what might be coming next.

Then the lights went out. Across the arena, little colored lights came on, as all the girls broke out their electric glowsticks. The thousands of little colored lights were really quite beautiful, like looking at a Christmas tree from the inside. Anyway, soon the inevitable came. The music came on, spotlights stabbed through the dark, highlighting the band members standing in the crowd around the stadium, and the girls erupted into a frantic cheer that, well... I'd imagine that if a fleet of alien spacecraft had just energized demolition beams to tear apart the Earth, it would sound something like that.



So they sang a couple songs, and then the show settled into a pattern that seemed like a TV program. There was a girl acting as MC, asking questions to the different band members, and then they had several groups come up to do different dances. At first, they had all the yukata girls on the floor walking around the stage doing an obon dance while some guy from Kawachi sang some traditional Japanese song for the occasion. The various dances for the evening were diagrammed out in our programs, so a lot of the people in the audience were following along. It was kind of interesting because the rhythm was based on 10, not a multiple of 4.

After that, there were six different dancing groups. Elementary school, junior high, and high school kids came on stage and did different kinds of dances while the guys in the band stood in the raised center of the stage behind them. Occasionally one of the guys would pout and a whole section of girls would scream until they went sterile. Sometimes the guys went down and danced with the little kids for a bit. Some of the dancing groups were a little -yawn- and some of them were pretty good. The last group was from Kyoto, and they were billed as the "best amateur dancing group in Japan" - The Kan-jani-8 guys left the stage when they came on, and they put on quite a show - huge musclebound guys waving enormous billowing flags covered with Chinese characters, scantily-clad girls dancing in outfits that defied categorization - sort of a cowgirl thing meets 80's fashion but with Chinese-looking embroidered silk dragon capes. The music was reminiscent of a Dream Theater rock ballad, and the singer had this awesome grinding voice that sounded like he was born to be in a heavy metal band. It was great - halfway through, he announced that he actually teaches third grade at an elementary school!

That group is called "Kansai Kyoto Imamuragumi". Here's a pic from their website (the URL on the picture is the group's blog)


That group was really good, but it was actually the act before them that stuck in my mind. After all these high school kids dancing around on stage with their hip-hop moves and whatnot, this group of mostly older women (hard to tell - upper 40's / 50's? It's "oba-chan" in Japanese.) and a few older men came on stage. Before the show had started there had been a group of older women on stage in kimono, doing a traditional obon dance, and I was expecting something similar, but then the electric guitars kicked in... The song went something like "Osaka no obachan, rock! rock!" and indeed, they were gettin' down! It was sooo awesome to see these old ladies (and guys) shakin their thing and putting the youngsters in their place! めちゃ感動した！

So finally the band came on - not too much to say about that, it was about what you'd expect. Kinda funny, though, there were some guys who sang most of the time, and there were a couple guys who hardly ever sang. One of them only chimed in when they needed a blood-curdling "Yeah!!!" It was entertaining to watch. For one song, there were all these complicated hand motions that the guys were doing, and as I looked around, I realized that the backdrop of glowsticks around the arena was whirling and pulsating to the dance, in exact unison! さすが日本と思った！

Anyway, I had never thought I'd go to a show like this, and it was definitely a unique experience. :)

Farewell to the colors of summer

the stale, hot wind of a late summer's eve
cuts off the song of the crickets and cicadas

colorful memories
the vivid reds and blues, yukata bijin
crowding to the bridge
keitais in hand, reaching through the crush of the crowd
capturing the moment, the brilliant flower-fire, yellow and violet
the orange sun
burns through the evening clouds
orange cones
marking the endzones

the thrum of the taiko, the dancing of obon, the frisbees wheeling through the sky
footprints in the earth tell the story

footprints melting away in the september rain

Half a world away from Katrina

And so, just as I had been talking about the thin veil of civilization... wow. It's sobering to realize how one rush of wind and water can overturn the foundation of the world for thousands of families. Following the hurricane disaster news from here evokes the same emotions that I felt while following the 9/11 news from my old high school in Japan four years ago. The same sort of detached disbelief and struggle to gauge the sheer size of the event compared with, say, the big earthquakes a few years back in India or Iran, or with the war in Iraq, or the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 20 million people. All of these things are on such a huge scale compared with most of the things I think about in my daily life - do I need to buy bread tonight, do I have my train card with me, where did I put my watch, which shirt should I wear today? And then something like this blows away my sense of scale. It's kind of an irrational feeling, but I feel like I should be home taking care of my country or something. Not that I would be involved in the relief effort if I were back in the States (although a part of me has always wanted to do that sort of work). It's just a sort of general feeling of irresponsibility - what am I doing enjoying myself in Japan when something like this is going on back in the US?

DirectX drivers and the human condition

Just a thought I had while wrestling with an ugly issue with my DirectX drivers... I think that some of us, especially those of us who use computers for a living, tend to take for granted and somewhat trivialize the difficulty of setting up a computer and the fragility of the balance of programs, settings, drivers, and such that keeps a computer running. I realize, of course, what's involved in setting up a system, but I think it usually takes longer than I expect, even though I've done it so many times.

It's like childhood. For what is childhood anyway, but installation of software and tweaking of settings? Parents install moral drivers in their kids and try to inoculate them against adware, spyware, and viruses, and then they send them off to school where they get the most recent versions of basic utility programs and codecs installed. One thing we tend to trivialize, though, is the difficulty of the installation and setup process - the fights on the playground, the fundamental misunderstandings, the learning of boundaries through trial and error... Once we pass that point, it's easy to write it off as "elementary school" or whatever, but at the time these things are enormously significant, emotionally overwhelming, and sometimes traumatic.

So, also, are the snags we hit when installing a system. We try to uninstall one driver and install the next, something we think should be a straightforward process, and Windows grinds to a halt in the middle of the next boot. One month, one year later, we think nothing of it, but at the moment, well... you're down with chicken pox and can't go to school. Nothing to do but pull out of your daily routine, go to the doctor, get some calamine lotion and candy corns, boot into safe mode, and tweak away at your registry settings and drivers until you get over it.

And so, too, it is with civilization. Often we take for an eternal and impregnable fortress that which is but a thin veil of rules, rights, and a gambler's trust that hold together the delicately-balanced patchwork of society. And talk about a costly and painful setup process... look at the reinstall we've been working on in Iraq.

Somehow I think the unbalanced way in which we perceive these things is related to our tendency to desire permanence. We tend to minimalize the transient in our minds and give undue weight to steady-state conditions because we feel more comfortable doing so. Or maybe not... I'm still not completely awake or coherent - merriment and karaoke trumped an early slumber once again last night. I just wanted to throw this down on paper, so to speak, before it slips my mind.

とうとう日本語が出てきた！

今まで日本語はまったく書いていないからちょっと入れようかなと思っている。でも英語で書いた文をそのままで翻訳すると面白くないし、間違えたら英語べらべらの日本人の友達が笑っちゃうからちょっと違うことを書こうか。(まぁ、多分どせい笑っちゃうけどな。）
さぁ、今週末なにしていたっけ。。。金曜日ちょっと難波で買い物して、久しぶりにTokyu Handsに行った。妹の誕生日プレゼントを探していたけど面白いものいっぱいあったのにいいプレゼント見つかっていない。そして、アルビンくんとリリーちゃんって言う友達が週末広島に行く予定だった、青春１８切符で。そいつら大阪駅から夜中0:03出発するつもりだったから大阪で一緒に食べた。びっくりドンキーにつれて行って、美味しかった。リリーはチェリー味のビールを頼んで、ちょっと甘かったけど美味しかった。でも蚊がいっぱいおったから早く食べてでた。
土曜日は、珍しく予定なかったから家で風呂掃除や洗濯やそんな感じな事をして、ちょっとジョッギングもした。Oh yeah, can I just say? I went jogging on Saturday, and I was working my way through all the twisty little roads in my neighborhood, when I found a little path through this tiny park. It was nice... beautiful green pines standing before a backdrop of a cloudless blue sky, the whole scene bathed in the golden glow of a summer afternoon's warm sunlight, the natural vista broken only by the "Beware of Perverts" signs every 20 feet... WTF?? Japan is so weird. ごめんね、英語に戻っちゃった。（笑）なぜ家の近くの公園とか高校でこんなにいっぱい「痴漢に注意」って書いてあるかんばんあんのかな？そんなにいっぱいおる？めちゃいなかなのに、そのかんばんを見たらここは世界の一番痴漢が多いとこを思っちゃう！ But I digress...
また家帰って、大阪に行って友達とカラオケした。がんばってまたウルフルズの｢ラブラブ一直線」を歌おうとしたけど
やはり難しかった。速いとこでなに言っているかまだようわからへん。読もうとしたけど速すぎた。インターネットでも歌詞見つからないし、どうしよう。でもやっぱり新しい日本語の歌を歌えるようになりたい。次「ガッツだぜ」しようかと思っているけといつもウルフルズばかしやから別のグループにしようかな。Rip Slymeをめちゃ歌いたいけどめちゃ無理やろう？Def Techも難しいと思う。平井けんかな？どの歌がいいかな？コメントで意見をおねがいします！：）
今週友達が二人帰国しちゃう。ウッサマくんって言うテュニジア人と前言ったアメリカ人のリリーちゃん。ウッサマの送別会は今晩なので、リリーは明日。寂しい、寂しい。
よし。日本語でやっとブロッグ書いたね。：）

Happy 10th Anniversary, Montego Bay!

hmm... so much to talk about, so little time before I should really go to sleep! I'll try to keep this short (which is the standard lie with which I start everything I write ;)

By the way, thanks for the responses to my poll so far. I think this post falls in the philosophy category, and I did take some good pictures, but I don't know how to get them off of my phone, so I won't be able to post them quite yet.

So, two topics to talk about today. Or should I say, two insights. But they're not deep enough to call insights... more like stray thoughts. My brain seems to do a lot of work when I'm not asking it to. But then again, what does "I" mean, if it's not my brain? Suffice to say, my brain's putting in a lot of unpaid overtime, so to speak. Connections. Maybe they're connections, like that TLC show.

Connection #1 - Full Metal Alchemist and Montego Bay's 10th anniversary

Anyway, the first connection. I went with my friends Alvin and Linda this week to see the "Full Metal Alchemist" movie (it's an anime about two brothers who are alchemists, looking for the philosopher's stone, and a lot of sort of philosophical reflection on the principle of equivalent trade in alchemy and in life). I enjoyed the movie, although it seemed kind of short - I essentially watched the entire 52-episode series in one weekend when I was stuck in my room with food poisoning last month, so... well, anything would seem short after that! Anyway, back to my point. The movie was cool, but the plot wasn't really what made it cool. The thing that was great about it was seeing all the old, familiar characters again. One of the characters even died in the original series, and the character that was in the movie was his corresponding persona in a parallel world... it had nothing to do with the original character except that it looked like him! But it was a lot of fun to watch anyway.

The reason I bring this up now is that tonight, I went to a party in Osaka to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Montego Bay, the bar I used to go to regularly when I lived in Toyonaka. It's a great little bar, and as my friend Adrian describes it, it feels kinda like you're in some guy's basement. Very casual, very friendly. I haven't been back there since I came to visit Japan in November.

Anyway, I went to this party. It was fun. I think I knew about 30-40 percent of the people there. It felt a little weird, because I don't really get up to Toyonaka much anymore, so I probably won't be hanging out with these people much (in the same way that, really, how much can develop and change in a 90-minute movie, compared with a 52-episode series?). The great thing, though, just like with the movie, was seeing all the old, familiar characters again. Pretty much everybody I had ever met at Montego was there, even this guy Tomi, who had moved away years ago but came down from Tokyo for the party! Life has moved on a bit - a lot of my old friends are married now and whatnot, but we partied it up just like the old days, and we drank and danced until the last trains loomed near.

Actually, a little too near. I ended up running the whole way from the club back to the JR station, making it to the platform with just two minutes left before the last loop line train ... that connected to the last Nara-bound train ... that connected to the last Kyoto-bound train at Saidaiji. This is the third night in a row that I've taken the last train home, and I've finally memorized all the key schedules!

So that was connection #1. Connection #2 needs less background to explain.

Connection #2 - my iPod and life in general

On the way to this party tonight, I again cut things as close as I possibly could (as usual), and ended up running out the door and down the hill to catch the train into Osaka. These train rides tend to take a while, so I always bring my iPod with me to help pass the time. As I jumped the last four steps going down to the platform and hurtled myself into the train just as the doors were crashing shut, I instinctively switched on my iPod and realized that its battery was pretty low. I'd been neglecting to charge it for the past couple days (so many things to charge! Two cell phones, an iPod, and my camera!) and its battery meter was already in the red.

So, I thought, I could listen to it for the ride into town and have nothing to listen to on the way back, or I could conserve energy and just sit in the uncomfortable silence of the train for the next hour. Of course I chose the former... chances were that there would be some juice left on the way back, and if not, I would probably be exhausted and drunk anyway. So I switched it onto shuffle. Beastie Boys ... Sarah McLachlan ... change trains at Saidaiji ... DJ Micro ... Fatboy Slim ... Carmina Burana ... Louis Armstrong ... Darude ... shuffle is awesome ... Def Leppard (wow, haven't heard them in a while!) ... Milli Vanilli ... Kuraki Mai ... Public Enemy ... change trains at Tsuruhashi ... B-52's ... a song from Bill and Ted ... Jim's Big Ego ... finally arrived at Osaka. Battery level critical.

So the lesson we almost learn from this is that, when you don't take the time to charge your batteries, although it doesn't really stop you from doing the things you're going to do anyway, it sometimes means you have to do them without any background music. And of course when I talk about "charging batteries" and "background music", I mean those things in the most general, metaphorical sense possible (but if you've read this far you probably realize that).

The reason I said "almost learn" is that, in the end, my batteries lasted for the entire train ride home, including the walk to the only convenience store in Takanohara that's open until 1am, so I could get some seaweed-covered fish-filled riceballs, which are the PERFECT epilogue to an evening of beer and dancing! So yeah, somehow I managed to just make the last train, and my batteries just lasted the whole way. Someday this will ostensibly cease to happen, and I will ostensibly learn my lesson. Until then, carpe diem!

Tsutenkaku Tower and Shin-Sekai

So these entries are a little out of order, but I don't think that is really important. By the way, feel free to comment on any of these posts, and please fill out the survey to the right! I want to provide you with the most fulfilling blog experience possible, and I need your feedback!


Anyway, last Saturday I met up with Ken, one of my ex-students, and his girlfriend, and we went to Tsutenkaku, which is a tower in south-central Osaka. For years I had known of its existence - it's a well-known symbol of Osaka - and back when my friend Caroline used to live near Namba station I would catch glimpses of it on the way to her apartment, but I had never actually gone there.

Standing 103 meters tall (about one-third of the height of Tokyo Tower), Tsutenkaku was originally built in 1912, but it was destroyed in WWII, and the current incarnation was rebuilt in 1956. It's located in an area they call Shin-Sekai, the "new world" - a 1950's vision of a hopeful future. However, the glitz and shine have faded on this now somewhat grubby neighborhood, and the surrounding area is quite sketchy by Japanese standards. It kind of reminded me of the creepy broken-down amusement park where they had the showdown with Nicholas at the end of the Care Bears Movie.

We went up inside, and it afforded a wonderful night view of Osaka, to the backdrop of of a marvelous orange moon (which I spectacularly failed to take a decent photo of). We could see Ikoma mountain to the east, the Ferris wheel near the aquarium to the west, the faint glow of Umeda hidden behind some tall buildings to the north, another Ferris wheel which we suspect is the one at Banpaku-koen to the northeast, and ... whoa! Tennoji was RIGHT THERE to the southeast. Tennoji?? I've lived near Osaka for over three years, and Tennoji was always far to the south of Namba in my mind. But there it was, right in front of us, and we had just walked from Namba minutes earlier. It was one of those moments that reconfigures the geometry of your internal representation of the world, synapses crackling as fast as they can to re-render this abruptly-reshaped map and send off alerts to memory centers holding data with dependencies on its basic spatial constraints. Heavy stuff. I needed a drink of water.



Of course, no reconstructed inner-city observatory tower would be complete without its own graven idol. Billiken, a wooden sculpture of a fat, smirking, pucker-faced dwarf, sits upon its wooden throne, standard Japanese shinto money-box at its feet for people to throw coins into and clap and pray. I think rubbing Billiken's foot was part of the ritual too, judging by the extraordinary concavity of its right sole. Carved by an American as a gift, Billiken's inscription (not visible in this picture) reads "The god of things as they ought to be". Or rather, the left side reads "The god of", the center panel reads "things as they", and the right side reads "ought to be". The reason I point this out is that apparently, whoever made the souvenirs for Tsutenkaku neglected to realize there was writing on the two sides. Everything from the omamori (good luck charms), to the 3D cast iron models of Billiken, sport only the words "things as they", a statement more mysterious, certainly, than the sound of one hand clapping.



On the way out, Ken and I discovered, nearly forgotten in the back of the visitors' center, cracked blue paint from a past age peeling off in splinters, two actual fun-house mirrors! What they were doing there I don't know, but it fit right into the Care Bears image that had already fixed itself in my mind.

By the way, much like the old Hancock building in Boston, the lights atop Tsutenkaku signal a forecast of the coming weather. Unlike the old Hancock building in Boston, there is no catchy rhyme to help you remember what the different colors mean. The diagram here shows the nine possible combinations. By the way, I'm getting some of these graphics from this Tsutenkaku website. There are some great "Engrish" explanations of things in here, so check it out if you have the time and inclination.


Anyway, after a dinner of greasy Chinese food bathed in tobacco smoke in a little restaurant at the base of the tower, we skirted around the city zoo to get to Tennoji station to catch the train home. On the way we passed several open spaces full of sleeping homeless people. This is a very uncommon sight in Japan, and it was a little scary - as we were walking through one pretty dark alley, we passed this naked guy just sitting there, staring at us and talking to himself. As we walked on around the zoo, captive animals called out to us in hopeless anguish from inside their concrete prison walls. "This is Shin-Sekai," they were saying. "This is the new world."

Some thoughts on the lowly cicada

Today, I turn my thoughts to the lifecycle of the cicada. Several times over the past few weeks I've reflected upon them, and last night I had another thought.

First, of course, the facts. Depending on the species, cicadas live underground as nymphs for anywhere from 2-17 years (the most well-known are the 13-year and 17-year cicadas) before emerging to the surface to hatch into their winged forms, and sing their mighty resonant song for 4-6 weeks before their little lives come to an end. You can research this stuff on the web - the specifics aren't necessarily relevant to my point.

The cicadas in Japan are an overwhelming presence in the heat of the summer. Their throbbing symphony of buzzing envelops you like a silvery rain as you walk outdoors, and taunts you through your window as you sit in your sweltering room, awaiting the evening retreat of the oppressive sun. In the mornings, they were even substantially louder than my alarm clock! Now that the summer is approaching an end, though, their numbers are dwindling, and their song is but a faint echo of what it once was, lacking the overwhelming punch that was its hallmark, like a muzak interpretation of Guns 'n Roses.

The obvious analogy that first hits anyone, I think, is the brevity and intensity of the cicada's life. Its song lasts but a few weeks, a reminder of the transience of life and the ephemeral nature of all we hold dear. Much like the sakura blossoms in spring, they are a reminder of impermanence. We often lull ourselves into a false sense of security, fooling ourselves into thinking that the things we have established in our lives - our situations, our relationships, our belongings - are permanent, but nothing lasts forever (even cold November rain).

Ok, so that's one way of looking at it.

The other day, I saw a poor little cicada frantically flapping about, crashing into walls and trees, panicking as it realized that it had reached the beginning of the end. Cicadas are rather loud as they wrestle with their impending doom, and this one was clattering about with great fervor. I found myself cheering it on, "fight, little one! squeeze out every sweet moment of precious life that you can before the darkness overtakes you!" Futile, of course - its fate had been decided since the beginning - but still, it put on the most spectacular show, navigating the concrete barriers of my apartment complex with a wild passion, crashing violently into one wall only to roll over and launch itself into the next. Again, it's the same kind of theme - impermanence and transience, but watching this had a much more profound effect on me than mere philosophical musings among the song of the cicadas beneath a tree in a park.

"Sometimes you've gotta take life by the lips and just YANK!"

But last night I was walking home after having said my farewells to yet another departing friend, this one a connoisseur of "enhanced experiences", let us say. Perhaps this was why I began thinking again about our small friends, but from a different perspective. Consider - they spend 17 years underground and 4 weeks aboveground, and all we think about is the relative brevity of their adult life. What about those 17 years? Do they not go about their daily lives as a grub, squidging about in the dirt and roots, garnering nourishment and ... well, garnering more nourishment? My point is, after 17 years of that, a cicada has to be pretty used to its lifestyle. After 17 years it knows its little underground world pretty thoroughly inside and out. It has its daily routine, knows the good places to go suck on tree roots, and is master of its domain. We don't give this part of its life enough credit.

Then, just as it's starting to think, "well... looks like I only have 4-6 weeks left to grub about in the dirt", it suddenly finds itself crawling up out of the ground and bursting forth into a world of brilliant colors, surround sound, incomprehensible depths and distances, new smells, flavors, movements... sensory overload! Not only this, but suddenly its exoskeleton bursts open, and it finds itself with ... wings? Absolute three-dimensional freedom! Held back by none of the restraints that were taken for granted in its old world, it is now free to explore, to fly, and to drink in this technicolor extravaganza of a world it could never have even dreamed of!

Scale this now to a human lifespan, and consider what it would be like if you could live the last 6 months of your life experiencing the analogue of this, a hyperdimensional experience of sensory input you now cannot even imagine, suddenly and unexpectedly unbound by the physical restraints of this world and free to fly through space and time! Oh, and incidentally you also have a mission in this synaesthetic swirl of color-sound-taste-music to mate once before you die, an activity which, scaled up by the same factor, would last for five full hours, the intense, passionate climax to this unexpected new life you have miraculously discovered!

How about some farewells to kick things off?

So it's kinda funny - I'm just settling into my new situation here in Japan, but as the summer ends a lot of the interns I work with are leaving ATR to go back home.

When I first got here, I was a little frustrated that everybody at work spoke English and the only people I hung out with were foreigners - one of the reasons I came back to Japan was to get better at the language, and I spoke less Japanese here than I had back in Boston! As time went on, though, I started to realize that a lot of the people here are really cool, multitalented, diverse, intelligent, introspective, inspired, hilarious, and often fairly strange in unique ways. It's been a long time since I've been surrounded by people like that, and I'm starting to realize how sad I am that they're going to be leaving soon.

Of course, ATR is kind of a crossroads for international, multidisciplinary research types, and although there are a lot of amazing people here, nobody expects to stay too long. At the same time, though, I feel like I've connected with some of these people at a really deep level, and I wish we could be together for a more substantial length of time...

Tonight we had a going-away party for a few of the people who are leaving next week. We went to karaoke and I learned a new song for the occasion - "Love Love Icchokusen", by Ulfuls (my favorite Japanese band, whose concert in Osaka next weekend is unfortunately sold out). There are some really fast parts, though, that although I had practiced and practiced, I just couldn't sing real-time under the influence of alcohol. Actually, I could barely sing them _not_ under the influence of alcohol. And to be fair, I wasn't able to find the lyrics online, so I kinda transcribed it at work by ear and tried to memorize what I had heard, which was for the most part nonsense Japanese. So you shouldn't think that I suck that bad. I think I pulled the song off fairly well, although one Japanese girl showed up to the karaoke session, which really threw me off - I thought I'd be able to BS my way through all the parts of the song I didn't understand. ;)

Anyway, I guess sometimes you cross paths with people, and you know that those paths are going to diverge before long, but you just have to make the best out of the time you have together, and live those few weeks as intensely as you can. I've had to say goodbye to so many friends though. It would really be nice to have someone stick around for a while. Yeah, like I'm one to talk, moving off to Japan like this. Whatever, you've gotta have fun, right?

Right... so anyway these are some pictures of our last crazy karaoke night together.

A few haikus to start...

Hello out there! So I decided that it's high time I joined the blogging world. My new job keeps me so busy that it's hard to keep in touch with all my friends, and there's SO much that I want to tell everyone!

Anyway, I sat down last night and wrote some haiku to kind of summarize how life has been going for me since I moved to Japan last month. Here they are, with annotations as appropriate:

Used coffee filter
Dried out in the kitchen sink
It's time to slow down

This is the one that got me started - I got home last night after work and found an old coffee filter lying in the sink - the filter and the grounds were bone dry, and I realized that I've been so busy lately that not only have I not had time to cook at home, I haven't even had time for coffee in the morning... I think that filter was from about a week ago! I think I'm going to make a concerted effort to slow down a bit and regain some balance.

It's hard, though... I really enjoy what I'm doing at work (building and programming humanoid robots, for any of you who were wondering) so I tend to stay pretty late. I really don't mind working long hours, but it doesn't leave much time for other things in life.

A trembling servo
Redesign its control loop
And drink more coffee

So for one of my projects I'm building this stuffed animal (not really sure what it's supposed to be - the girl I work with just keeps telling me "It's traditional Japanese ghost.") which has servos in it to move its arms and head. One of the problems with the servos and controller boards we use (or maybe all servos do this?) is that they tend to twitch back and forth slightly as they try to stay still. This is kind of annoying in a stuffed animal, so I rewrote the code to cut the power to the motors when they're not actively in use. The other night, though, I was on my nth cup of coffee for the day where n was large, and looking back and forth between the shaking arm of the doll and my own hand shaking over the keyboard, I had a "moment" - it was kind of like in Return of the Jedi where Luke looks back and forth between his own damaged mechanical hand and Darth Vader's.

A memory leak
Manifestation of sin
How much time is left?

So for those of you who don't know, as a program runs, the computer has to allocate chunks of memory to hold variables and objects that the program uses. After that memory is used, it needs to be freed so that it can be reused. Sometimes this is automatic, but sometimes you need to do it by hand. A common problem that happens when programming is that you forget to free up memory that has been allocated. If this happens many times (say, inside a loop) then the program starts to take up more and more memory as it runs, until the program exits or the computer's memory is full.

For one of my projects, I've been writing control software for various sensors, which collects data from the sensors and sends it to other programs over the network. A few days ago we started running it at the Osaka science museum, where we have humanoid robots that guide people around to the various exhibits. In the last few days before the project went live, we were doing overnight test runs of all our software to make sure it was stable over long periods of time. During those tests, we discovered some memory leaks. Since we had so much work to do, though, we really only had time to fix the worst ones. Practically speaking, if a program leaks 10 megs of memory over 8 hours, it's not a problem on a system that has 512 megs of RAM.

Generally speaking, though, memory leaks tend to be the result of sloppy programming. In many cases, if you're just going to compile your code and pass the program off to someone else, they'll never know how well- or poorly-designed your code was, but in this case it's clearly visible. The indelible evidence of your sin is exposed for all the world to see, with no time left to cover it up. I feel like this was a rich metaphor for many aspects of life, but I don't want to ramble too long. Next poem:

The convenience store
Closes at 9:30 sharp
Convenient, for them.

This is just one of my little frustrations with the place where I live. It's way out in the sticks. There are no bars and no karaoke near our station, and even the convenience stores close early! Of course, it's probably a good thing that there aren't many distractions because it helps me focus on work, but ... 9:30? Come on.

Anyway, there's my first blog post. I'll try to get some photos up here at some point too.