I will start off by saying that this, again, will not be a fully-coherent, well-balanced essay. I have a couple different memes that I would like to present, linked with two or three recent events in my life. I'll try to keep it short enough to avoid "word indigestion" as one of my glib critics has described it. Perhaps subsections will give the reader ample time to chew thoroughly and swallow.
A Blog Post A Day
I have been reflecting, lately, on the nature of my writing. NaBloPoMo has pushed me past a barrier of sorts, the boundary defined by the limits of my natural desire to write. When blogging once a month, I save up ideas and photos until I'm just bursting to blog about them. Then the writing comes easily. This month, though, after a week or so of blogging every day, I felt I'd written myself dry. And yet I am dragged forward, bound by the shackles of my vow to continue writing. Each day I squeeze out more ideas, thoughts, memories, and connections, and it has taught me about both the limitations of my vocabulary and the limitations of my readers' attention spans. Thus from here on out, I will try to pay more attention to my writing and try to keep it more tractable.
The Conceptual Hydra and Forest of Ideas
According to three of my friends, my essays are incoherent. Rather than focusing on a single point they ramble and spread, like a swarm of disinterested thought tendrils, touching on concepts briefly, and then getting bored and moving on again. I don't deny this. The way I see the world, everything is deeply connected in countless ways to everything else. Every idea, every observation, is painted on the canvas of the mind in a blend of common colors, patterns and conceptual textures. When we recognize these underlying patterns and see how they connect ideas to each other, it becomes evident that the universe of ideas is an enormous interconnected web. Every link we follow leads to many connections, each of which in turn leads to many more. A conceptual hydra. Try as we may to hack off its heads and come to a conclusion, many questions and connections spring up in their stead, and I find myself writing and writing until sleep threatens to overtake me.
I think of this web as a forest. We are all standing in a dense forest of ideas, spreading out for miles around us, and each of us is familiar with different, though overlapping, areas of this forest. Some paths in the forest are well-traveled, though some are seldom trodden and require a guide. Other areas have yet to be discovered. When I write, I am guiding you on a day trip through parts of the forest I have seen. I realize that I can't show you every tree, but it brings me great joy to show guests to some of the beautiful sunny glades and deep gorges I have discovered in the forest, and I sometimes linger longer than planned. I will certainly try to have you back by sundown, though. Tired hikers tend not to fully appreciate the beauty of nature.
Static ideas, though, can get boring. The boulders I showed you last week are no different this week, but a new sapling I discovered just up the hill from here, is.
The Decision to Move
Today's sapling is a decision I need to make in the next two weeks. I've been waiting for a room to open up in this apartment complex in Morinomiya, where two of my friends live. It seems like a good location in terms of accessibility to civilization - it's on three convenient train lines, it's a 20-minute bike ride from either of the two main shopping and nightlife centers in Osaka, and my commute to work would be roughly an hour, compared with half an hour by bicycle from here. Moving there would help satisfy my longtime desire to live "in" a "city". Where things are happening. Connected with the pulse of civilization.
Nothing is perfect, though, and the apartments there are nowhere near as wonderful as my place here in the sticks. The place I'm considering moving to is smaller, without the wonderfully spacious balconies, kitchen, and bathroom I have now. It's also located near a refuse-burning plant, and when the wind blows the wrong way, you can smell it. In fact, this is still pretty good for the price. In reality, the cost of rent would normally prohibit me from renting a huge apartment like the one I'm living in now - spacious, bright, with clean air and a symphony of birds, cicadas, and crickets chirping outside - except that it's a company apartment and I can live here cheaply in relative luxury.
Luxury, but not civilization. As I said in my first blog post, the convenience store closes at 9:30. I suspect that the half-hour bike ride to work is going to become quite unpleasant as the cold of winter closes in. In addition, there are no restaurants or bars to speak of here, and, perhaps more significantly, most of the people I know who live here, inevitably move away. I don't have a solid, stable community to connect with. That may be inevitable as a foreigner in Japan. I don't know. However, I've felt restless and unsatisfied lately, and often I have thought that moving might help.
I seem to have neglected to mention thus far that yesterday, a room did open up on the 21st floor of the building where my friends live, overlooking the spectacular night view of Osaka Castle Park and the skyline beyond. I reserved the room. If I take it, I can move anytime before January 13th, but I need to make the decision in the next two weeks.
Introspection
Decisions like this lead one to question one's values. Whose standards am I judging myself by? Am I the spoiled prince, afraid to give up his cold, sterile castle to join the lively peasants living their lives to the fullest in the village down below? Or am I the country mouse, longing to take part in the fantasy of city life, only to be disappointed and bitter when I encounter the reality of it? Should I follow my parents as role models, and run away as far as I can from the noise and chaos of city life, or should I follow the advice of my old mentor Hiroshi Ishii, and choose what I perceive to be the high-risk, high-return option, so as never to look back regretfully at the path not taken?
Of course the "responsible" choice would be to stay here. I would save a few hundred dollars a month, which I could put towards retirement (or commuting to Osaka for a cappella rehearsal... :P), I would have fewer chances to go out and spend money, since this place is a ghost town by the time I get back from work each night, and I could spend more time focusing on work, since I'd save that extra hour a day in commuting time.
But where does one draw the line between preparing for the future and living for the moment?
Coda
Life is a sculpture, a symphony, a work of art, and I'm hesitating over whether to throw a bold stroke of paint over some delicate details I had just finished a few months ago; whether to write in a wailing electric guitar solo over the subtly textured harmonies I composed for the violins and violas. The decision of where to live is only one part of this opus. Career, social life, music, and blogging are all elements of the multimedia composition I call my life.
At this point, I was planning to take you up an interesting side trail, exploring some ideas I have been discussing lately about how the information age has changed our lives, but I can see the sun is already quite low, and we need to get back before sundown. I'll show you that path another day.
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