The Milkmaid of Human Kindness

BBC Arts: The Secret of Drawing

2011-07-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

Wonder where I can find the whole program. This is episode 2.

Neil Gaiman in "Arthur"

2011-07-07T19:45:00.000-07:00

That's what I need, a Neil Gaiman sneaking around and popping up pint-sized in my meals to remind me to keep keeping at it the comics.

Also, wow, when did kids cartoons get so sophisticated about publishing? Haven't caught episodes of Arthur in a long while, I guess.

Portland

2011-07-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Took a trip to Portland, Oregon this past weekend.

Pyramid Hotel

We stayed at a Red Lion Hotel with a mildly Asian-inspired and lavish exterior and convoluted interior, where the elevator to our floor was so well hidden that we felt glad for the portability of our small bags and suitcases. We also noticed the presence of Latinos in matching black suits all throughout the building, passing us on every floor, every stairwell, hanging out in the lobby and parking areas, a few with their families (not in uniform), and mostly lined up in front of the hotel ballroom waiting to be let inside once the door opened. Obviously a convention of some sort was taking place, nothing so curious as, say, Mr. International Leather, though when you see endless people dressed up uniformly to each other but dissimilar to yourself within an opulent maze of a hotel, it does eventually feels like you’re a visitor on a planet in some sci-fi movie. We could hear the beat of dance music when we returned to our room late at night, and one afternoon while walking by the open doorway of the ballroom, I heard the enthusiastic voice of a speaker and saw the projection of a slide on a screen with the word “DISCIPLINO” and an image of troops standing in a line. It didn’t take long to guess the event (the Spanish branch of Amway is apparently called Equipo Vision) and for me to wonder, just how much was earned by those who recruited the overwhelming amount of people for this weekend event? At least everyone got to party this holiday.

Etc.

Pleasant things also happened. Attended the Portland International Raceway where I watched formula race cars buzz by the bandstand, sometimes spinning out or performing passes to elicit gasps and cheers from the small but loyal crowd. Matt and I hung out with Ben, who recently moved into town, to check out the Living Room Theater and Ground Kontrol classic arcade/drink spot. Fun hangouts, both. Other notes: Admired the exposed brick and faded business advertisement painted on the warehouse-to-loft conversions in the Pearl District. Walked alongside the river where an assorted variety of natives and visitors chilled in the park, while rows of bikes with front wheels propped up over railings facing the water looked as if they were watching boats go by and under the bridge. Music from the jazz fest was heard that evening. The weather stayed sunny all weekend. Felt like a proper vacation.

Twenty Eleven. Spring.

2011-04-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Another momentary life shift, another realization of how much time can pass, and a reminder to start noting things down again. Round and round the cycle goes.

New Home Yet Unnamed
As of January, I've left The Dome and moved down to a more central rental in the 'burbs. So less ants, turkeys, goats, and cows to greet me on the drive home, less mountain scenery and windy dirt roads. Sniff. However, there is at least a thriving lemon tree and plenty of flowers and greenery blooming in the backyard of the new homestead. This is the boon of living in an area once covered in orchards that should not be overlooked: even the boring landscape of surburbia provides a gardener's paradise where everyone can take stabs (with shovels in dirt, of course) at the art of growing stuff. I've only kicked at dirt sulkily and plucked and gobbled up stuff midgrowth, but, hey, I need to focus my creative energies.

Oh, getting back to the house, totally worth mention is the built-in spout in the kitchen that pours instant steamed water for tea! Oh my god! Ice cubes dispensing on the one side, steamed water on the other: as a friends says, it's like I'm living in the future. Well! I'd expect no less from living in the Silicon Valley.

The Price of Free Time
At present, I've found myself at a pause between job contracts--something that always causes a customary if not totally irrational amount of freaking out until I let myself recognize that, well, I also have opportunity to relax and pick up neglected projects again--so there've been cookies baked, sketches started, and a testing of ten minute face mask products from my cabinet that I had never tried or remembered trying in a very long time.

Woe is me for having this newfound opportunity to recreationally apply beautifying substances of questionable properties onto my skin! Within the less than ten minutes that the stuff's been on my face (the stuff being sulfur based), my eyes are moved to endless tears, the snot is flowing, and all I can do is wait out the lingering ocular pain after washing everything off. Yes, the bottle stated "Avoid contact with eyes," but clearly I am too out of practice to mind such practical instructions. I now type these possibly final words before I become completely stricken with blindness.

Fail Storm
Eyesight regained. Related to blindness:

Epic Braille! It'd be nice if the braille on the sign also spelled out the same thing. I have checked, and it does not.

The same line of thought also led me to this blog which I'm sure has been around for ages, but since I chuckled while scrolling through people's comments and the snowball of FAILs possible from a single failed FAIL post, I'll give it a good linking.

Evil Eye
Finally: In trying to remember my contact prescription, I had to look up what O.D. and O.S. stood for. I find out that O.S. refers to the left eye... the ocular sinister. Ho ho! What vile visions swirl within that orb? Man, left hands, left eyes. It's the side of the devil, you know.

So, if you notice any missing fruit or flowers in your frontyard, it's only your fault for building your house on that side of my path.

Misc. notes

2010-09-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

of no importance and in no particular order:

1) I’ve become an ant carrier. The Dome has been attracting trails upon trails of ants during the summer (sigh), so I've become careful to avoid starting parades in my room by hiding away food and to always check for passengers before I leave the house. Yet there’s always one brave little scout that ends up wandering onto the top of my desk at work or crossing the expanse of my dashboard while I drive down highway 101. It's like a new ant every day coming out from who knows where. If I were more generous, I would try to drop the buggers off on a potted plant or some nice outdoor terrain in dutiful pro-immigration fashion. Or better, I would carry them along with me all day, then finally return them back home to their colony so they could rush over to their ant pals and go "Oh shit, guys! You'll never believe what I've seen!" and continue to relay their survivor experience. That might actually make me feel like a nice big person, at least until they started taking over my leftovers again when I wasn't looking.

2) It never ceases to shock me how quickly strawberries develop the white fuzz. After only a brief sit on my office desk inside of its plastic container, I already notice the beginnings of a two o’clock shadow and the smell of inedible berry that goes along with it. Yuck. "You age like a strawberry" will become my new insult.

3) I passed the one year anniversary of my return to California last month, once again becoming a Californian for all intents and legal purposes. Woo! Of course, my first instinct after all that achievement was to high tail it to somewhere else so that I could once again become an expatriated Californian because, honestly, it feels more fun to be an outsider. I will never grow out of this phase.

4) I was watching a SyFy channel show with an episode about building futuristic robots, and one thing that Michio Kaku considered essential to program into a smart, human-like robot was “common sense". It sounded a bit funny to me since it didn’t seem like that trait even came standard with all human brains, but I could be wrong.

5) At long last, after years of being just a geek in the crowd, I’ve scored a spot at SF's APE. I'm a geek at a table! Printed materials of mine in the hands of strangers who won't actually buy them! I’m nervous and excited and have less than 6 weeks to prepare.

OK, that last one is at least important to me. Wish me luck.

Summertime..

2010-06-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

Recent animation projects. Hopefully the Flash plays successfully.

Link-itzky

2010-04-28T06:28:00.001-07:00

Just so it doesn't look like there's nothing going on during periods of nothing here, here's a link to an interactive online presentation I made for a class about the multi-faceted Russian Jewish artist El Lissitzky.

Something about that last name always makes me plop in an "n" where one is not needed. Lissinzky.. Lissintsky.. dang, what's the dude's name again?

I'll start a new label too, since "drawings" doesn't really reflect this sort of exercise.

Unrelated but equally notable inside comment: I owe a letter to someone named Wendy. :)

Baby got backlog.

2010-04-19T21:48:00.001-07:00

Read Letter Day
A week or two ago, I happily came upon a collection of letters written by James Thurber at a used book store in downtown Mt. View. Never heard of the guy before buying the book, but the cartoon illustration on the cover caught my eye and a random sampling of his correspondences made the book feel too good to put down. Guess you'd have to expect a certain degree of wit if the man wrote for the New Yorker. I should like to travel back in time to the 1930s and become his friend, just so I could then move far away and have him write fantastic and funny letters to me. Then while I waited for their arrival, I could also put on bias-cut gowns and dark red lipstick and run off to catch Cole Porter musicals. Wouldn't that be the bee's knees?

Dome, Dome on the Range
Seems with all the time that's passed, the previous November eulogy could have been a proclamation of the end of blogging. If you were to ask me how the past four months have been, I would have spewed a string of theoretically self-descriptive if not entirely interesting-sounding nouns like "Work, school, traffic, work. You know... (throwing in a rhetorical pronoun and verb combo)," though trying not to forget about some substantial changes during that time, then wondering if those changes carried enough substance and impersonality to make them worth mentioning to an internet at large and normally running out of time before I could write any of it down.

When you start second guessing your freedom to blabber at no one in particular and to have those words immortalized forever within the hallowed logs of Google, that, my friends, is when you realize you've hit a rut. Time to once again dig or swim or symbolically struggle your way out before it's too late. So goes the cycle and the circular arm motions, frantic and sometimes months long in length.

Wherever you are out there, you who are ever patient regarding my refusal to keep you updated with Facebook stats or to bombard you with tweets and other means of internet socializing deemed appropriate for our time period and for the quality of my news, let's quickly back slap and hug one another, grab two imaginary beers of our choice, and start talking. Or... I'll do all the blabbing this time, and you'll listen through the entire thing, and I'll make like I'm having the greatest conversation of my life. I can even try to be as entertaining as James Thurber, though not as famous or blind.

I am mostly employed these days. School has led to work, and work happens at a large galaxy wayfaring government institution with enough hours and a pay rate to provide me just enough funds to travel to and from my own rented space unshared by the 'rents. So, yes, I still maintain residence in San Jose, though now escape to a hideaway up on the foothills of Mt. Hamilton, forty minutes away from Lick Observatory. The house I live in has a similar geometry to Lick, and has been dubbed, without my renter's consent,"The Dome."

To avoid disclosing too many details to any unsavory types who might be reading, I can provide a link to instructions for building your own similarly shaped structure. Simply enlarge the pattern according to your own body proportions and personal space needs, and voila! Home sweet dome. The rest of that website is a pretty nifty collection of other easily assembled shapes and geometrically obsessive (geobsessive?) ideas for shelters, chairs, and playground equipment. Not that you should add up shapes and tents and assume that I live in a tiny yurt with four other people, two cats, and a dog; The Dome is more on the side of a proper house. Inside, I stay in a bright yellow room on the 1st floor where I can stare out at foliage and have my bed alighted by aforementioned cats and dog (usually accompanied by loud wheezing, hacking, and general breathing sounds from all three. Must be rough being a domestic animal out in the countryside). Sometimes I also stand outside and look down at the other farms and city lights of San Jose below.

Why did the turkey cross the road?
Good question, and one I get to ask on my occasional treks up the mountain. Sadly my reflexes aren't enough to catch it on camera while driving along the curves of the road, but I did manage this one shot after a mass crossing.

Crappy non-iPhone cell camera. Ah well.

Cleese to Chapman

2009-11-22T20:10:00.000-08:00

As I've started to pay closer attention to Monty Python again with the documentary currently running on TV, I also discovered this eulogy John Cleese gave to Graham Chapman back in 1989.

Fresh (and Fried)

2009-11-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

Encountering this declaration at the Quickly bubble tea shop in Cupertino led to a sudden uplift in spirits.

That's right! Who care if nobody else notices all the energy and meticulousness and love we put into making the fresh thing that matters to us, as long as we care and can derive a direct form of satisfaction from that labor.

It made me guzzle my milk tea and chew my boba with honest and renewed vigor.

Ever since moving back to California some three months back, it's been rather difficult to get back up to speed with the Marxist-sounding pride or online journal jotting with so many long bouts of pondering and heart wrestling to mold post-Japan life into shape getting in the way. The months have involved lots of job searching, odd-job taking, longterm future projecting, deciding what job skills might need brushing up, weighing the risks worth taking... also recognizing that I share this process with so many other intelligent and talented people who'd also been let go from their previous occupations. Then also I had to sing and dance in front of the family about what their precise demands were regarding my presence in their lives. Though my mother would have me on the "stay" side, it seems the results of that would be more constrictive to my adult sensibilities than could be justified for economic purposes.

So are you really the one, California? You with your troubles and financial baggage and huge question mark to offer me about where we're headed. I like your warmth and familiar feeling, but I still find myself fantasizing about so many place I've yet to discover and the unimagined possibilities that might lay outside of what most folks in-state can conceive. If security is merely an illusion, if stability can't be guaranteed for anyone especially at a time like now, then what good is it to just sit and wait and let your fresh fries grow cold?

Words to Chew On

Been reading a couple of good, philosophic finds at the library... ah yes, English books for free again!... starting with the first one found by accident.

Reporting the Universe by E. L. Doctorow-- I hadn't read his fiction before this book, but these essays are absorbing and digestible as they let you consider what it means to be a writer. For Doctorow, as he describes in one essay, the writer is a generalist by nature and by trade, but being general grants the fluidity to wander through all sorts of different disciplines and is part of having the ability to imagine and report the unseen or unknowable. (Jacks of all trades rejoice! And get to writing...)

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford--This one goes in the direction of specialized trade labor, but also giving mad props to vocations that involve your hands and problem-solving skills to repair or create a tangible finished product. Certain types of smart folks might just find greater intellectual satisfaction in "blue-collar" work, an idea I find myself agreeing with more and more over time. Crawford made fresh. Who care? He do.

In the Mission

2009-09-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

Books

Recently finished rereading Watchmen by Alan Moore, which I do find myself appreciating more the second time around when I'm older.

Picking up where I left off nearly a year ago with Indigenous: Growing up Californian by Cris Mazza. I love her autobiographic account of scavenging and hunting and living off the San Diego land back in the rural 50s. The roughness and self-sufficiency (born in part out of necessity) of her family's lifestyle inspires Laura Ingalls Wilder-type images in my head, and it's fun especially to think about it happening in fairly modern times.

Coffee

Almost hitting the two month mark since returning to the south bay. It's not been as painful as I thought, even if I'm still feeling like I have to make myself fit in again. I used to believe there was a contradiction between hipster culture and the Bay Area, based on natural logistics like how hard it is to build up grime when you have too much space between your buildings and across your streets, or how practically everyone drives an enormous vehicle so that the roads feel like a continuous monster truck rally, or how even despite my best efforts at deliberate ignorance I'm so hyper-aware of iPhones and trendy tech gadgets. I mean, I can still reach out towards our northern hipster hub, San Francisco, but as it's been about ten years since I've been back on home turf, I've yet to really know my way around even San Jose. As it turns out, though, downtown SJ's got its small but impressive lineup of open art galleries during First Fridays, and coffee shops like Mission City Coffee Roasters and Crema Cafe provide the proper ambiance for affecting nonchalance while I type away on my laptop.

Eggs

The job hunt continues (boy does this entry feel familiar...), and I'm feeling the unemployment statistics hit home with the repeat cycle of applications, interviews, and no responses. However, I'm widening my sails and enrolling part-time in classes at DeAnza College where I seem to get along pretty well with the mid-30s back-to-school Asian lady crowd. Seems my age bracket has shifted, but just in time where I'm once again a junior among my peers. I started to realize that many of my classmates are undercover four-year college graduates looking for some change. Feeling kind of normal really doesn't feel so bad.

A quick scan of job posts on Craigslist also reveals that I'm now on the last year of life where my eggs are fresh enough to donate to eugenics... I mean, fertility assistance programs. Short, skinny, scatterbrained genes anyone? But, aw man, another get-rich-quick card played too late. In some donation cases, I only qualify to give eggs at the age of 29 if I've given birth to at least one previous child. My heart bleeds for that poor hypothetical baby who would've been grumpily dragged around by me onto the El in Chicago or squished next to the groceries in the front basket of my granny bike as I pedaled through Hamada. Hopefully later on in life I can provide a satisfactory explanation to my less-than-optimum kids about why I chose their slowpoke, post-20s eggs over their supersiblings', and then proceed to accept blame for the fact that they get picked on by classmates and can't run a mile in under seven minutes. But later on they'll get over it and we'll possibly cry and it'll make for good TV drama the moment I write it all down.

Ads

I don't know why it only occurs to me now when I'm rummaging the web for work, but I find the internet so completely swamped with ads, with anything dubbed a networking site framed with services on sale, with each internet search result sending me straight to sponsored blogs, and where just about anywhere I check for online thoughts I also have to find ads decorating the left and right hand columns, bannered across the top, and also slipped near the bottom of the page for good measure. It's quite maddening because now that I'm so aware, I can't ever stop noticing them. It drives me bonkers. I have to run and hide in those few 'net places where there are no rectangular strobe lights telling me I've won or smiley-faces screaming, "No way!" at the top of their electronic lungs to scare the shit out of me.

Help!

Mark that date!

2009-09-09T11:19:00.001-07:00

Another from my favorite kid show, Square One.

Quite Literally (or, I Dream of Meme)

2009-09-01T23:40:00.010-07:00

Finds via my friend Doug and perhaps via another friend before him. Nothing like passing on (and on and on...)the internet knowledge.

Music videos, the literal version!

A-Ha - Take On Me

Beatles - Penny Lane

Also, a timeline of memes, all in one handy dandy list, so you can find your favorites starting from 1970.

Guantanamera

2009-08-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

I've had this song stuck in my head for a while now, whoever knows why, and perhaps I can make it stuck in yours as well.

do you know the way...

2009-08-11T01:47:00.011-07:00

A recent exchange while viewing Pan's Labyrinth at my friend Kim's place, where conversations unrelated to the movie somehow drifted towards name altering:

Thomas: Hey, did you know there's a guy with the name "Hubris?" Like the actual word "hubris." A Vietnamese guy.

Me: Really?

Thomas: Yeah. Ryan Hubris.

Me: Weird. [Pause. Gaze remains glued to the TV screen.] Is he a writer?

Thomas: [Face stays transfixed on the movie as well.] No. But he founded Lee's Sandwiches.

Maybe you have to be Californian to really appreciate the reference to the oft-visited dollar sandwich shop of our childhood, but I'm finally processing how California my surroundings have become since Friday, following all the apartment cleaning and farewells and final worldwind tour of Japan during the weeks before.

Now here I am. Back in the bay after all these years. It's totally weird, dude.

Never underestimate, however, a family's ability to set you straight to task the moment you step back onto the homestead. Without too many details, and only just after dropping down my suitcases, I've already a few major things to square away for the folks before I can return to my usual tombloggery. With unemployment in tow, I'm determined to keep my mood as high as the prices on the tags and menus surrounding me, so will surely keep you posted on new comics and other things as they develop. Deep breath.. here we go!

More milk to come.

Enter the...

2009-06-25T01:32:00.005-07:00

... and Let the Joyful Journey Begin!

Oh goodness, is that July I see peaking from the horizon? I'm going to have to quickly recover the remnants of my deteriorated English before the onset of August, and will attempt to do so... now!

So, a little more than one month left. Now is the junction for where current things start to end and new things start to start. All these goodbye speeches to colleagues and welcomes to the incoming successors have to be written out. The more natural goodbyes to friends must soon be said. All the while, my stuff goes in shippable boxes or back into suitcases or gets handed out and I whittle the past down to a portable size. How did I get here again so fast?

I think it's a guarantee that once I step off the plane in the states, I'm going to feel like a foreigner all over again. All I anticipate about my future right now is based on the news headlines filtered through my iGoogle account. The economy is getting worse! Housing will stay low! Brace yourself for doom and gloom! Some things to that effect. It's enough to give an expat cold feet right before touching ground, though the problem is global enough that I wouldn’t avoid these conditions even if I high-tailed it to another English teaching gig somewhere else abroad. Really, the time is at hand to puff up, steer home, and charge straight at that unknown, hollering something at the top of my lungs... like "THAR SHE BLOWS!" because it makes me feel so massive and rolls off the tongue so nicely. Perhaps once I'm surrounded by the daily living conditions of friends and family, it’ll all start looking a bit more realistic, and the anticipated problems should become visibly manageable. Trying to view the U.S. from where I am now still feels like scrutinizing Big Foot through a telescope from the top of a tiny, closed-off tower far away in the forest on the other side of the globe (and in the extended version of this mental image, I also wear a wizard's hat... and start cackling in a Rita Repulsa villainess-like fashion... and then I’m quickly done with the parenthetic stream of consciousness aside.) Anyway, it’s hard to get a full, or attractive, picture of things to come just from readin' da papes.

As we know, however, I’ve been asking for a challenge, thus har it blows as requested.

That’s not to insist that there’s been only stagnancy and boredom since any previous rant. Though the choice weighed heavily on me for quite a while, there have been some undeniable benefits to staying the second year here in Japan, and overall I’m glad I made the choice to do so. It’s difficult to gauge exactly when the humps were finally crossed... my friend Austin was right when he told me that initial Japanese comprehension and then fuller Japanese comprehension come in two very separate waves... but language acquisition played a huge part in shifting life towards near-normality. At work, even if I can’t always say exactly what I want to say, just being able to pick up the banter between students or the mumbling of teachers next to me or enough about a school lunch "crisis" of Halloween pudding showdown magnitude to lend a helping hand has, strangely enough, helped me to feel like a real teacher. The other teachers have also conceded to my teacherliness after two years, and we’ve gotten past those points of awkwardness I used to dread in the morning before heading to work. Now it’s more like, "Hello so and so-sensei! How not weird and perfectly typical of us to greet each other as equals today!" Definitely the entire process would have been quicker and easier from the start if I could have studied a little Japanese before flying over, and if there was a way to fast-forward from where I was language-wise then to this point in time, I’d have boarded that temporal express train. Yet it was still worth my time to take the extra year... or at least six to eight months of it... to gain this measurable feeling of improvement that can’t really be experienced as a native speaker.

In taiko, my drumming repertoire recently upgraded to tossing and catching my drumsticks and doing a few ballet twirls in time with the music. Aw man, I can't just barbarically beat on drums anymore because now I have to demonstrate grace as well. My limbs clearly oppose this change. Last month, our small but mighty band of women got to play our taiko set on stage at the big deal Bunka Hall in Hamada. Stick juggling hadn’t yet been incorporated into our routine, but I successfully if inadvertently added my own impromptu drumstick throw at the crowd for all to marvel at during the performance and on cable television afterward. It didn’t bother me that much really, I thought everything else up till then still looked pretty good, but the audible gasps from the audience made the mishap rather momentous and priceless. Little did they know that a spare stick lay secretly tucked away beneath my drum, all ready to be whipped out with panache. Wha-cha!

Fireflies!

Hotaru season during June was my favorite time of year in Japan in 2008 and won again this year as the all time greatest thing about living in this country. Once the sun completely set, we drove up deep into the mountainside. We parked and then walked along the riverbank, to discover an entire stretch of water lit up by these slightly green, gently flickering orbs that transformed the riverside into a fluid mirror of the star-lit sky above. Even if you turned around, you’d see the glowing dots decorating the forest trees. The fun part is catching a firefly between two hands and seeing the cavern of your palms light up green. Felt pretty damn magical.

Finally,

Got to spend some pleasant nights staying in this week, receiving the birthday greetings from afar (hooray and thanks!) and spending one the evenings watching the movie Proof, filmed in Hyde Park and on the University of Chicago campus. I immediately love any movie that takes me back to the past where I can go, "Hey! I know where that is!", but stories about families pulling through and going crazy together have an especially special place in my heart. I also ended up liking Gwyneth Paltrow's performance. While I'd still refuse to hand her an award for any attempt she might make at being a boy, she's rather convincing and endearing when it comes to playing frumpy, intelligent, and emotionally frazzled. Alright Gwyneth, you got me this time.

Spring... stay! stay!

2009-05-23T21:42:00.010-07:00

Brag Hag

To any comments about how technologically immersed I am out here in Japan... uh, yeah, I wish. Alas, the Japanese countryside is an entirely different creature from the Japanese big city. Tokyo? Nowhere close in distance nor in flavor to Shimane prefecture, despite all the expensive and ostentatious construction work written about in east coast US newspapers. Especially considering that I work in a school where I can count myself fortunate on days when the duct taped-together printers decide to work properly. Ayup. Technology. Maybe my cellphone is the only cooler-than-yours toy I have, at least for the stupendous price of FREE. Okay, so in that case... haha! That'll learn ya.

Alright, another thing I'll boast about in Japan... I found out that on Saturday when I'm scouring the supermarket at 8:30PM for a quick late dinner fix, I can pick up some end of the day ready-made sashimi plates for around 100-120 yen ($1 or so) each. The Japanese higher-than-mine standards for freshness means I can make a meal of some fine, cold pieces of raw fish sliced the very same day with a side of ready-made seaweed salad for under $5. Haha, again!

Finally,

an animation to check out: Waltz With Bashir.

It's about a filmmaker who served in the Israeli army and sent to Lebanon in 1982 when he was nineteen years old, and who now seeks to piece together his broken memories from the war by interviewing others who also enlisted in the army and witnessed to the same events at Sabra and Shatila as young men. The movie combines hand drawn backgrounds with your usual Flash animating (Adult Swim has more or less killed Flash-fluid cartoon watching for me) to create, at least this time, some very cool and attractive visuals. It's also not often that you can find a movie able to approach a war with consideration to both sides. Here, without trailing too far from the intended exercise of memory searching, the audience comes to recognize the brutal effects on the Palestinian people, too.

No particular reason,

2009-05-18T03:42:00.002-07:00

was just in the mood for this.

Springing back.

2009-04-07T00:20:00.014-07:00

What is it about sunny warm weather that brings about right-mindedness? Oh, sunshiny day of possibilities! I feel the freedom to move around and revel in the rootless life again. The here and now is mine all mine, and I can throw myself about in it as I choose.

Nearby the apartment.

If only feelings of being alive could be bottled and consumed on the days when it'd be entirely easier to fade away from the world. Not to forget that I'm slowly counting down the months till I have to return to whatever unpredictability awaits on the other side of the Pacific and trying to prepare for the future as best I can. But if warm temperatures be the trigger for positive thought process, there's room for optimism... and a bit of childish wandering off.

Check out the sakura and other countryside views of the season (taken on a less warm and sunny day a week before, but still in the spirit of things):

Ye olde cherry blossom.

Down by the riverside in Misumi.

Close up of a different type of blossom (any botanists?)

Here stands, prepped on crutches, the oldest living tree in Misumi. Maybe even in Shimane prefecture.

Old folks under the old tree.

A river overgrown with yellow flowers.

Also over spring break, despite all the "satellite" launch warnings, I got to do one week of traveling in South Korea. We arrived via an overnight ferry from the city of Shimonoseki, about 3 hours drive southwest from Hamada.

The bullfighting festival in Cheongdo. The bullmasters(?) get their bulls to lock horns by stringing rope through the bull's noses and then pulling the animals' heads close together.

Other countryside sights in Cheongdo.

Street market eats in Daegu.

A coffee shop/spa with fish that like to eat the dead skin off your feet. It's as ticklish as it sounds.

Having a blast with a Glock at a nearby shooting range.

Oh, the drama.

From a pizzeria devoted to women. Nothing says love like a box of pizza.

Guards stand stiff and halfway concealed at the demilitarization zone.

Dedicated to my cousin Quyen. Seems Pooh's known to do a little unwinding in Seoul.

b'dum

2009-03-11T01:01:00.016-07:00

Thoughts for the day... hmm.

Yeah, the milk's been drying up of late, as my pal Kim has summed it up quite effectively, and that's partly the persistent cold weather stiffening up my hands so that I can't type, and mainly a lack of exciting things happening in the oh-so-bustling city of Hamada. Most of the school events this year have been variations on all the stuff from the previous years, though things always shift around a little bit depending on the combination of personalities involved. The ripples of novelty are becoming smaller and smaller, though, and the two-year cap on my Nihon no incubation period has been feeling undeniably the right choice.

Eigo Boost

Well, now that the YES-WE-CANaanites have simmered down (though their words still waft around the hallway only to be caught on occasion like the faint smell of bathroom air... you can't can the CAN, i guess... sorry), one student has emerged out of the catchphrase cloud displaying in proud colors a remarkable interest in practicing her English conversation skills with me... and only me! Well, because there really is only me with that kind of free time. Anyhow, I have this policy in my head to not show favoritism towards any one student simply because they're smart or cute or strange in the right ways because that's too easy to do and just not cool, but this particular second grader has diligently shown up at my desk almost everyday during the lunch break with dictionary in hand and a whole lot of enthusiasm. Despite us being equally broken in the other's native tongue, the conversations flow quite naturally. It's awesome. It's a wonderful addition to my work day, and requires such minimal effort on my part that I can't help but wonder if this might be karmic rebound for all the previous year's shoot-downs. It could also be that she's just a real cool kid. I'm thinking that might be more the reason.

Blast Off

To be honest, if it weren't for the bit of newness like that here and there, the daily stuff would probably be unbearable. I've recently felt my already small world cave in a bit too close for comfort, pushing some nasty sensations too near to the heart, and all I could do for the long run was straighten my back, readjust my face, and learn how to breathe properly again. Changes are happening, though, and just as before, it involves a few old friends leaving by the end of the month. Yet this time, I'm not moved to feel sad as much as relieved and glad, knowing that their going away allows for their world to expand as much as it literally stretches the latitudes and longitudes of the friend circle, forcing everyone to grow.

Maybe that just sounds stupid, but the secretive and suffocating nature of the city I live in creates a perfect launchpad for departure. Saying farewell and letting go means someone gets to escape the petri dish and can live their life and make mistakes without so many of the witnesses or evidences of the past always in view. Soon it will be time to buy my own ticket out of here. Inward breath...

Hamada on the map, and how...

2009-02-25T05:36:00.008-08:00

This is from a while back as well, but my little city in Shimane apparently made the New York Times. The local expats were all a tizzy over our sudden moment of non-obscurity, though not for any flattering sort of reason, if according the article we're to be an example of the frivolities of economic stimulus packages.

Did you know there's a city in Japan called Obama? Now, "Yes, we can," has also become a grammar point for one of my junior high school classes, as well as the one demonstration of English speaking ability from just about every student and teacher around. "Yes, we can Yes, we can Yes, we can!" Yes, I certainly see that you can. I should rejoice their enthusiastic demonstrations of verbal capability to the foreign teacher, but God help me.

month old fish eggs

2009-02-10T00:28:00.012-08:00

The BOE wanted me to make a button design based on the following:

In case you don't know, like I didn't, that's what karasumi (the Japanese delicacy, mullet roe) looks like. OK! So, here was my quick, end of the day attempt to cute-ify the thing:

the low low low-res version...

I wanted to give my roe some awesome 80's hair... *snigger*... but figured the joke would be lost in translation, so opted for generically tubular and happy. Anway, my Japanese colleagues seemed to find the design as it was acceptable, and thus it shall be turned into buttons to adorn the collars of the few and proud Japanese students who are part of the Karasumi group. Yatta!

V.D.

2009-01-21T06:17:00.003-08:00

I've decided I'm proud of the result of this one too, so will therefore give it a good posting.

Feel free to come out and attend if you can.

"Rabbits"

2009-01-21T06:05:00.012-08:00

Forgot to throw it here.

In[con]sequential #10:

holidays a comin'

2008-12-04T04:50:00.008-08:00

Starting to get the seasonal fuzzies. Ahhh... I miss the overwhelming Christmas atmosphere back home.

Watching one of these on the internet led to watching a bunch of other similar examples of tract house DJing, but the following has to be the favorite... and one that anybody from the early 2000's UCLA college days can appreciate:

Wait for it.... wait for it.... BOOM! Tee hee.

jiggles and giggles

2008-11-26T03:58:00.005-08:00

Also to update, photos from sumo in Hiroshima are up. Yeah! More available here.

seeing red

2008-11-26T02:40:00.015-08:00

Let's start with the red carrot. I attempted two shots at two different locations in order to impress upon you the multi-faceted quality of this vegetable.

Discovering the giant red carrot at the grocery store today made me inexplicably happy. It doesn't look especially special, perhaps, just from the photographs I've taken. It doesn't taste any more unusual than your typical orange variety, to be honest. Yet, I saw it there contrasted against the eggplants, and suddenly I wanted it more than anything else in the store. So, I went ahead and bought what I wanted. What a wonderful feeling.

Earlier on the flipside, English died a little. The students are heading into exams tomorrow and Friday, begging the question, just how many "midterms" are there in a year? Anyway, protocol had me checking grammar drills with the students as they tried to translate Japanese phrases aloud into English, and for one class that was all the teacher had me do. If the students found it too difficult to translate just from reading the Japanese half, they were then allowed to read the English portion to me. However, half of the students couldn't even read. So, I ended up sticking out my finger and blocking parts of words on the page so that students might try sounding out the parts. My heart broke as I handed out OK's to kids for being able to pronounce "succeed" and "alive" without having a clue what either word meant or what section of the Japanese phrase it translated. This teacher who would normally glide through the textbook never bothered to check up on their students' abilities to use basic phonics. Since I'm scheduled at one of my elementary schools tomorrow, I won't be able to follow up on the issue until next week after tests are over.

That's the stuff you encounter out here sometimes. Either certain teachers are overly-sensitive about how stressed and pressured their students are by parents and other teachers, which is true, and thus decide to gently and unchallengingly ease the students through the less important subject of English, or the teachers themselves really don't appear to care about the language. While in the end it may not matter, or really shouldn't, to my own value as an educator, having been hired strictly to provide input for one sole subject, the self-worth takes a small beating.

So then what? I guess just keep on interjecting ideas half-expecting them to be shot down later, and, with frustration in tow, dive right back in and start swimming against that current. Unlike last year, however, I can take the process in stride (or stroke?), and it does feel like the school is becoming gradually more receptive. Those kids and teachers won't be let off easy. Right now, I've some phonic cheat sheets and a side writing project in the works for the students who might make an effort to learn, and damned if I'll let others casually if inadvertently ruin the positive mental state I've worked so hard to achieve at work.

snow pie

2008-11-19T00:05:00.006-08:00

As per tradition, I must enter in an entry for the first snow of the season. Like last year, the bit of flurry decorated the sky more than it did the ground. However, there are some mighty chilly winds blowing through even now, and it's keeping things cold and winterlike. So, I'm huddling by the heating unit at home gathering courage before I suck it up and head on out the door again later tonight.

Earlier during work today, I received a request from my friend the school nurse to double-check her English translations of a play written by another friend of hers teaching at an elementary school in the mountains. A bit of correcting phrases with red ink eventually led to me being filmed while enacting the script with stuffed animals and puppets. How proud I feel taking some responsibility for a production where one of the lines is "I need to go poo-poo," followed later by... "Then Oshyosan (the priest) went to poop. And while he was pooping..."

The poo is essential to the play you see. In the end, the evil Onibaba (an old lady that eats children) in the play is reborn (our chosen English word) out of the Oshyosan's poo as a fly. That needs no further explanation, does it? C'mon it's Japan, afterall. The most poo-obsessed country out there... and if you don't believe me just google "Japan" and "poo" and I'm sure you'll get a shitload of hits. Literally.

Anyway, I'm a little afraid what will happen if that video ever ends up shown to the wrong people. Like my friends. I know those people would never let me live it down.

The things you do for the children...

Wednesday workdays mean Tuesday nights

2008-11-05T01:28:00.010-08:00

The expats are a cheering over here in Hamada as throughout our humpday afternoons we watched the results for the presidential election via the internet. Part of me is still nervous about the days to come, waiting for all the rhetoric about change and new futures to actually produce some results... I'm naturally skeptical of big talkers with vague proclamations... so what am I doing following American politics, right?... but the more working class-minded (and only slightly more socialist) approach to the future definitely fills me with some positivity and general good feeling.

The event also warms my insides with thoughts of Chicago. I wish I could have been there in Grant Park to see all the excitement while Tuesday night was taking place. Four years entitles me to feel some hometown pride, right? I can remember the days of listening to crazy Alan Keyes while commuting around the south side, trying not to drive straight into baby carriages, carrying babies, that southside mothers love to push out ahead of themselves in order to barge across the busy street. Those were the days. While browsing around the net on the history of the candidates, I even stumbled upon the fact that Obama casted his vote at his alma mater, Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School, a little school in Hyde Park where I used to work part time through U of C's Neighborhood Schools Program. Well! What d'ya know? So, as corny as could be, the revelation made my day just a little bit more special.

However I'm not so proud of my voting state of California right this moment. Good to see that Prop 2 is a yes, but holy bullcrap, has Prop 8 won by a slim margin as well? So we in Cali believe more in the freedom of chickens than we do gay and lesbian people? How goddamn conservative is this state? If yes-voters can miss the underlying cruelty behind dictating another person's ability to choose and making laws just to officiate how different a person should feel because of sexual orientation, why should I believe that some of same voters can empathize with poor li'l poultry with any ounce of conviction? It's completely fucked up.

local travelsthesia

2008-09-24T07:28:00.006-07:00

A few trips within Japan this summer have resulted in a bunch of photos, finally available for your viewing pleasure. I'm vague with the location and action specifics for now, I know. Come back in a few and more should be sorted. I lag, I lag.

1) Japan Summer Tour 2008. Trekked with a friend through Hiroshima, Shimane, and Okayama prefectures. Climbed Mt. Fuji, came back down, and finally headed to the big city offerings of Yokohama and Tokyo. In my case, as captured on film, that mostly means public parks and laundromats.

2) Echigo-Tsumari. A roadtrip north from Tokyo into Niigata prefecture. Therein began a scavenger hunt for public art inspired and mostly produced out of the raw materials and delapidated building remains in various hideaways throughout the countryside. Found out about the whole thing by chance here. This is the official site.

3) A little bit of Kyushu. Two weekends ago, I decided to go solo and head west for 3 days by train and bus into the Kyushu region of Japan. It's between 3.5-8 hours from Hamada depending on your route and vehicle of choice. Stopped over in Fukuoka City and later Kumamoto City, and wanted to reach Mt. Aso, but didn't get far enough in time. Notes collected during the journey to be posted soon.

The End.

2008-09-22T02:34:00.008-07:00

Not literally. Just a title:

Wasn't sure whether to put this up, but I felt obligated to at least finish it after I got started. Whatever you want to read into that.

Also, check out this BBC article about new attempts to conduct research on near death experiences and astral projection. Who knows?

I brung yous some flowahs..

2008-09-09T05:47:00.012-07:00

Show and tell.

I was quite proud of this latest flower arrangement. Mainly because of the stem of peppers that look like Christmas lights.

That's my instructor's house in the background.

Unrelated, here's a new running comic for the Black Taxi, a local Shimane publication. For some reason the preview is rather ghostly, but maybe that can be fixed later.

Yes... "internalization." The lack of "tiona" is oozing with intention. Wink wink.

home.

2008-08-22T00:01:00.024-07:00

It's been such a long time since I've used this thing.. tap, tap, tap, 1, 2, 3... ahem, ahem, ahem. Hello.

My internet is finally back after moving to a new apartment and having to wait two weeks for the local Yahoos to start up service again. Also, I took a few weeks off for local travel and another week to just plain catch up with folks I managed to click a bit with near the end of my 1st contract year. The end of the yearly cycle has also meant, unfortunately, that a few close friends have now returned to the western hemisphere. Perhaps too cleverly I scheduled my period of travel away from Hamada during much of the final goodbyes and apartment/school switchovers, so by the time I checked back into the 'hood, the old folks were gone and I was left only with Total Difference.

Change and life have become synonymous enough that I ought to be used to the entire process by now, but I'll still miss 'em.

As I marched straight into August, I also braced myself for some further shock and despondency due with the recognition that I'd willfully extended a slightly restricted state of existence for another twelve months... with language limitations, stagnant job situation, shallow dating pool, and remnants of 60s gender values all inclusive. Getting to and past July 30th, the anniversary of my initial arrival, really hadn't been the smoothest process. More correctly, I filled quite a few months with a number of doubts that lead to a few mini-meltdowns and to Oh Shit! What Am I Doing Here? Oh My God, I Signed On For Another Year! I Must Be Crazy and Am Totally Putting My Life On Hold For No Good Reason! type freakouts of capital letter proportions. As blogging clearly shows, the past five years have provided fertile headspace for a lot of self-questioning. My mid to late 20s period is starting to get really old.

Yet, despite all the buildup, anticipation, quarterlife drama, whathaveyou.. I came back to Hamada, to the solitude and slowness of countryside suburban life, to my own approach to how life runs and what I secretly think feels normal, just to figure out that, aside from a few sad notes of absence here and there, I actually felt fine.

In fact, I felt comfortable.

Maybe it's the new apartment. As mentioned earlier, I recently moved to a new place, much more spacious and closer to the ocean than the previous one. Residing in The Box in Chicago did wonders to acclimate me to SMALL and DARK as possibilities for daily living, but man oh man, to have multiple rooms and light(!) during the day is tremendous. I still even get one room with tatami mats, so there are qualities of what I liked from the last apartment intact.

Here are a few shots taken in the immediate vicinity on a gray day. Not all gray days are bad and this one felt quite nice. I can literally walk 30 seconds from my door to get to the water.

Narrow road leading to the waterfront.

Row of other houses lined along the sea. I don't know for certain what to call those stone blockades that look like jacks, or whether they're meant to break the waves or what.

More water and a jacks bridge in the middle of the bay. There's a memorial of some sort on the right. Not sure dedicated to who yet.

Viewed from the 2nd floor of my building, in front of my door.

A nice cementary nearby (you can see it better if you click). It's not scary or unusual for the dead to reside close to the living in Japan.

Other changes have happened since the start of August as well. My mental state lightened with the increased luminescence, and I've just felt more at ease again both in and outside the apartment. I started trying out more Japanese speaking with more Japanese acquaintances and friends. Even certain people who I haven't felt too much fondness towards and had been thickening my skin in preparation for their presence have turned out not so bad, just given more time to see their better side.

Maybe there's a maturation process that's miraculously happened over this past year. Whatever it is, as long as I can keep it up once school officially starts and I'm back to the daily grind of what I can and can't do with language teaching, I feel like things will be okay. Got to also start the wheels-a-grinding in switching my career path and planting myself into the proper job before I get back to California.

For now, it's off to meet my sumo-fanatic friend for a bike ride and tea. Yay, I'll finally get to see some sumo within the upcoming year. Hoo ya! Slap happy fat man action.

And you know, really all this time, I was just trying to figure out a way to insert that last sentence.

boiz & berry (pi)

2008-07-16T03:05:00.008-07:00

Hey, so, totally at random I stumbled upon the MySpace of a Brighton, UK band called Beauty Skool Dropout. Catchy. I like. Then there's this song:

Racist hipster shtick at its best, but I have to say, with the multitude of serious and satirical things about often-pathetic white dudes suffering from yellow fever (video discovery courtesy of cousin Quyen) it's strangely comforting to see yer typical white/yellow gender roles switched. Though the bias here seems more towards upstairs Asia... damn, where's the love for a Southeast Asian brother? Hmph. I'll keep poking around for another accidental find for you guys.

Frenetically speaking,

2008-06-29T05:05:00.006-07:00

sometimes you're just in that mood.

from Japan:

Polysics - I My Me Mine

from Britain:

David E. Sugar - We Weren't Put Together

after-solstice solace

2008-06-26T02:07:00.015-07:00

Junebug

It's Rainy Season now and has been since just before last weekend. It'd be more correctly called Gray Sky Season, or to be frank, Chicago Most Days Season. Swollen clouds. Moisture. We had a bit of luck this afternoon though with some summer-appropriate sunlight, which then breached the way to a crisp, clear sky filled with stars in the evening as I was leaving my ikebana teacher, and friend,'s house.

My mood got a much needed lift. Sparkling things up above, flowers in arm. Four more weeks of school left and then it's not-school season, and even if that means office time for the bulk of the summer, I get to look forward to a friendly visit, Mt. Fuji, a bigger apartment, and maybe some sporatic road trips. I can't wait to finally relax and not always have to think in timeslots and schedules.

Then again, having just typed that and thinking it over, maybe that's not really meant to end either. Sigh. Well, I'll slack off what I can.

Hooray...

Turning 28 turned out to be quite nice though. Thanks out there for making me feel not so far away. :)

Nihongo o Shabby-ru

I've been harboring this thought for some time, but now I'll say it straight: my Japanese sucks balls. It's been almost a year now, and as much as some foreign people will make the same complaints about their own abilities with a level of modesty veiling their, in actuality, limber tongues in a fashion that only proves just how Japanese-proper they are (bleh, yeah whatever to propriety), I am most certainly not one of those people. However, I am quite content to struggle with my non-language ability with certain Japanese people that I've come to befriend, and I think it's proving to be a huge boost in self-esteem as the inability to communicate can be one of my biggest insecurities. As I keep trying to insist with the students in class about English, you gotta struggle with the suck if you're ever gonna get any better... hehe, i'll leave that visual right there for you... but it only works if you keep forcing noises out of your mouth. I'm glad though that there are those who can make the process of attempted conversation easier. And it actually turns out rather enjoyable. So, gambate! Keep trying... hai, hai, hai. Yeah, yeah, yeah...

Buzzkill

I recently discovered this plug-in bulbous device for releasing some sort of liquid repellent in the air to kill all those damn mosquitoes that have been harassing me with their awful whiny buzzing all this past month. The plug-in's been working pretty well so far. Yes! Victory is finally mine again. God, I've missed uninterrupted sleep at night...

Happiness comes in electric pods.

"Hair-Brained"

2008-06-12T06:02:00.004-07:00

Wednesday's hash

2008-05-27T18:41:00.006-07:00

Peon's Paean

Today is Sports Test day at my school, so all the students and teachers have gathered outside to bake in the sun, swing their limbs around, and await judgment on the demonstrations of their physical abilities. No suggested bitterness in that sentence, is there? Or lingering memories of presidential fitness awards either? I'm currently staging my sit-in protest and watching proceedings from the cool of the teacher's room. Man, it's so anti-authority it hurts. I'm not particularly fond of the word sport when it's passed through the concept of P.E., and far less thrilled when it's attached to a word like test, especially given its weight in this country. Just gotta wait till September rolls round again. At least, so far, no one seems to have noticed. I'll count that as a successful rebellion.

I Dream of Dreaming...

As those slippery slopes go... sigh... I haven't been so productive of late during my weekday evening hours outside of Japanese, taiko, and ikebana because I've now been sleeping. Recently, I've been having these long sequences of dream that, for once, play out with actual beginning and ends and a semblance of a plot running everything in between. Maybe it's got something to do with me watching the 1st season of Arrested Development and having a rather good model for continuity within fragmented, episodic stories (I think the show works best watched in order with no commercial interruptions). Anyway, the dreams are quite clear now though the memories afterwards are not... argh! Need to start writing this stuff down. Even still, I'm waking up with that sort of feeling that you get after you finish a movie in a theater. Kind of groggy, but genuinely entertained. Like I got my full R.E.M.'s worth. The venue of sleep is truly underrated.

The Heat is On...

Summmer is approaching, and I've tapered my traveling plans in hopes of providing opportunity later when funds are replenished, more friends are free, and I've got a bit more sketchwork done. Just two more months and it'll be a year since I moved to this country. Then one more year of incubation left. I've the sneaking suspicion this next year's going to fly by even faster than the first. Time to get down to business.

Puffery

I experienced flashbacks of high school and the Santa Clara DMV yesterday when I had to reapply for a driver's license to legally drive in Japan before my international license expired. Luckily, ten years later, it only took the first time to pass, despite a few failed moments to honk my horn on cue (who ever though big blue signs with lightning bolt looking sound wave drawings were so easy to miss?) and some needed reminders from the examiner to turn the keys in the ignition. Oh, hah, right! Oops. Though I'm proud to say I kicked some obvious ass on the super narrow S-shaped and Z-shaped courses where you have to do some tight maneuvering to keep your tires from slipping into the dips running along both edges of the road (3 drops, you're out!) and your car from　bumping into yellow foam beams that hang along the sides and are meant to swing (and deduct your points) when you tap them. Helps to live in a hood with narrow streets like mine where you're dodging old people, children, bags of trash, and other cars, mostly with old people inside them behind the wheel, on a daily basis anyway. Life in Japan is just one big constant video game, really.

Mind those roadside gaps.

Afterwards, there was cheer and applause and issues of congratulations, and I greedily pocketed my new piece of plastic. Then it was straight back onto the granny bike for another day of junior high.

Yes, peas.

2008-05-10T00:42:00.012-07:00

A quick shoebox entry.

With the help of a new friend last night, I rediscovered some old 70's cartoons of British persuasion that I used to love watching. And maybe, just maybe, they mighta had some influence on the stuff I do now... ;)

If you're around my age and ever saw Romper Room back in the heyday, which my brother and I would catch at about 5AM or 6AM on the weekday mornings, you might have seen this one cartoon about a boy named Simon. Like with Newton's Apple, the theme song for the show managed to stay with me and was the main reason I was able to recall it now:

Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings

Also, this one from darkest Peru:

Paddington Bear
I'm totally enamored with the sketched 2-D cutout world. Hooray for the days before the slickness of computer drawing. Both the show and book use to always get my mouth watering for marmalade (though we also found an advert with Paddington changing up his usual spread with Marmite... I sorta have to agree with the pigeon's response to sampling the squeeze. :P)

A switch from Paddington to Poddington. This 80's show I never saw, but I do love peas.. and this one cracks me up way too much to ignore. Especially Soap-Pea with his Harpo Marxist hair, Scottish accent, and bottle of Dew.

Poddington Peas

I don't explain 'em, I just like 'em.

Uncle Cuong part 2 (unfinished)

2008-04-26T02:11:00.007-07:00

I really dislike posting things incomplete, but I'm not sure how soon I'll get to a scanner after today, especially since I'm going to take my Golden Week opportunity to wander off somewhere. Wow, the holidays again already? You best believe it.

Though the one thing about showing stuff in progress is it gives chance to comment on any changes that can be made. So, please, feel free to input. Then I can get back to putting things aside and moving on.

First three panels here. Or also over there on the right (hopefully it's obvious).

#4-#7:

Sorry, and thanks.

strings and strands

2008-04-19T13:39:00.009-07:00

strings

I woke up this morning remembering first grade. It was one particular day where each student in every class at Bowers elementary school was given a small sheet of paper to write down our name and school address on one side, and a small message of some sort on the other. That part I don't recall, maybe I just scribbled down a modest "Hello! I hope you find me!"or something similar in my usual reserve in profundity and word choices. We then attached these papers to the ends of strings with the other end attached to helium-filled gold-colored balloons. After the balloons and papers were prepared, all the teachers and students congregated outside at the playground to prepare for the Great Launch. The principal instructed us in a countdown of 10 to 1, where at 1, we'd all open our hands and let go of our balloons. Of course, one or two mislaunches drifted on by while the principal was speaking, but once it got down to 3 ...2 ... 1 obscured by whoops of unadulterated excitement, we unleashed our strings en mass and watched as our bunched together balloons floated effortlessly into the sky, slowly separating with changes of the wind, carrying with them hopes and possibilities of correspondence with all manner of far away places. I stared until every last balloon completely vanished from sight.

I remember too I had eaten a cherry and had been tossing the seed around in my mouth with my tongue. In the excitement of the launch, of course, the little ball ended up rolling down my throat, and I spent the rest of that day thinking about trees growing in stomachs and whether or not my balloon might make it all the way to the other side of the world. Maybe somewhere in Europe. Or Istanbul. I wondered if they could read English there.

About two or three weeks later, we heard through the PA that two lucky students had gotten their addressed papers sent back to them. Both from people residing somewhere in California, though parts of the Bay outside of Santa Clara. This was quite thrilling though neither was mine, but all the same, I wasn't expecting my Turkish recipient to know what to do with my personal message to him anyway.

The next year, it was decided that launching balloons was a bad idea because of the likelihood that the rubber remains would end up inside of sea birds, so that was the only time that I got to make an attempt. Maybe it was enough.

strands

For those who've been insisting on it (yes you, Kim), and also for those who haven't, I finally cut my hair again. Before and after:

It's a nice familiar sensation.. the nonhair. :)

"Uncle Cuong"

2008-04-16T08:02:00.003-07:00

more to be added here later...

isolated sentiment jotted down a week ago to no one in particular

2008-04-14T02:55:00.014-07:00

lo(holes)g(holes)ic

The inner world sometimes does a pretty mean job of discoloring the outer world. So I find. The outer defined here as the world at large, everything objective and visceral. Just everything out there. Everything that moves forward in one direction despite what any particular inner world may believe, read or critique or attempt to explain or fight or disassociate from. It's a place where you learn to coexist with other inner lives that each follow their own maps to make their own outward contributions and to reach their own finishing points, that all mashed together and given blanket titles creates a portrait of a grand scheme, a great whole of humankind. Something like that. Given this whole and these parts, sometimes in the attempt to find connection between inner beings through contributions not so objective, involving a base medium like emotions, it can become a bit confusing. It's hard to figure out which resulting ideas belong to others, which maybe just to me. Sometimes, too often, I'll start self-projectedly detecting feelings like world weariness from those I interact with, though I may not realize this for a while where it's coming from. In reality, people might feel tired or awkward or frustrated, with no effort to hide these feelings, in response to an isolated incident and as part of normal human configuration that occasionally fails at stoic firmness despite the best efforts in the face of unwelcome changes. Usually, those sentiments don't adhere to anything permanent, don't extend past a certain point of reason. I don't know why it is then that my own shoulders start feeling heavy, and I frequently walk away experiencing their initial sadness, carrying it along for hours and days past the point of expiration, and then seeking retribution for the fact that I may have been the cause, I may have some hand in making things better. At least by absorbing it and understanding, I can do something to help make a difference. To make things better. For who in the end? It seems, really, only for myself. Whatever collected pool of bodily chemicals that dictate such thoughts and wax and wain in cycles creating the need to combat visible tiredness, sadness, or unease by making amends, compensating, bucking up, attempting to fix problems that maybe only exist in my own mind, these chemicals don't seem to let up, and sometimes they won't even free up room for me to breathe or relax, and just keep returning and haunting and sabotaging the power to emotionally detach while my brain pushes harder to analyze and crunch out reliable solutions. These two entirely different mental processes occur at the same time completely segregated from one another, until the one crosses the line and assumes full control without pause or mercy, cigar in mouth and red flag in air. The victorious force will then hold reason hostage during the long pauses of early morning where all I can do is sit there completely emptied of the desire to just get up, just stand up, and, c'mon, please. please! you'll be late!, just get ready for work. The weight bearing down on me is jarring, physically binding, sounds preposterous in writing, but is undeniably felt. I want to shatter to pieces. But I can only wait out the mental siege and wonder, how many other people feel this? For so many mornings for so many years? How many others experience this same thing but never say a word? This is my own first time with words. It sounds like describing a stranger.

I think a lot. "Overthinker" is the earned title. But it's not so much the line of thinking that make me buckle or stare off or fail to budge. Rumination itself doesn't allow for blips... because the world is quite logical I like to believe, everything can have a reason and answer, and if you don't know what you want you should ask more questions and dig deeper, refine your search, expand your perspective that's what I'd always argue... Whatever this is comes from a weird inner explosion that, given any free reign, would have me sobbing in a curled-up ball or amorously freefalling into the arms belonging to the next handsome face, neither of which would come from the same place or would bring about the needed satisfaction. Neither of which happens entirely in the end to even tease at relief because I wouldn't melt away after that. I'd still be there.

Perhaps, this is all what you could call being crazy.

I assign it all to chemicals rushing around inside my body; given the predictability at this point, I stand firmly by this notion. However, I refuse to have the realities of these feelings invalidated, as certainly anyone else who experiences these surges might want others to recognize. The only request I can ever make of anyone who witnesses these moments or sees these words, the only thing I can ask is: don't walk away. Don't be afraid. Don't turn your back. This cyclical, downward spiraling nothing that ends up being something to stifle, to grip and strangle... just me.. it doesn't want to feel alone. And none of this would I ever say to anyone on bended knees or with folded hands. I've trained this self-righteous pillar inside to stand erect even if my body only bends and cracks. But I need your solidarity to mirror an inner pillar and convince me that one still exists. Just say, "everything's okay even if it doesn't make sense."

I just want to feel like there's enough sense in that.

No scanner blues.

2008-04-08T06:02:00.012-07:00

It took a bit...

I worry about there being some redundancy in posting the full image here as well as up on the other site, but I guess if it's easy enough to click a few buttons to make the .jpg's pop-up, might as well.

It's also been a while since I've hit this particular site and overquoted lines from the cartoons therein, but check out a recent good 'un on Homestarrunner about webcomics. Still plenty of life left in those 'toons. Feels like college all over again.

Met all the new teachers at school today. It was nice to not be the nervous, confused person trying to get themselves oriented this time. New faces have a way of giving the work environment just that tiny extra zing to make another year of school seem a bit more inviting. I'm glad for that, as those small prickles of doubt had crept their way into my head over the past week again. Changing faces, and places too... I sit in a new spot in the teacher's room now... means that the workplace can't be an entirely stagnant environment. That's the hope I'll stand by at least. As long as I can keep those feelings separate from the time I spend fishing for other adventures out here. Plus, I finally have my own computer station with internet. Woohoo! Oh, a worldwideweb of possibilities await.

I pity the foo'!

2008-03-31T21:10:00.011-07:00

OK, back. Happy April 1st. Foo'.

Uploaded some pictures from the trip. Also did a mass amount of laundry and house cleaning today that working then monologuing then packing then rushing off to catch a six hour bus didn't leave me time for. While acting out in true domestic fashion, I sucked in the air of solitude and thought, ah! Just me at last! No more crowds, no more running male commentary from the two travel companions, no more sense of obligation to look at everything historic within a given time frame! If this be bliss, me hanging around the apartment all day, singing along to modern poppy Vampire Weekend (nice and fluffy), and getting kicks from turning leftover eggplants, garlic, and shredded cheese into a satisfying meal, that only means I need to slot days like this into my life a little more frequently.

Damn, son. Might as well cinch an apron around your waist and call you Martha. Or Lucy.

Yeah, well, call me girly and I'll still kick your ass.

There are more details from the trip to give.. the pretty pretty pink sakura, the Osaka neighborhoods, the capsule hotel stay. Lots of monkeys. My brain's currently stuck in present mode though, so while I build up the will to recount the past, you can just hit this Flickr link to get you to Kyoto and Osaka.

No tricks involved. Well, perhaps.. none except for... this!

And if that was the first time for you, then I am officially not the last person on earth to learn about this video.

ends and odds

2008-03-23T05:51:00.003-07:00

Happy Egg Day!

No religious hullabaloo for me today, but a rather eventful Sunday nonetheless. Today, along with other JETs in Shimane prefecture, I performed the Vagina Monologues in Matsue City. Our version of V-Monologues pulled stories from A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant, and a Prayer, a collection also edited by Eve Ensler. My reading was "Blueberry Hill" by Christine House. The turn out for the event was much smaller than the amount of effort put into the show, but the performances themselves went quite well. Though it's never as apparent to people in the audience as it should be, a lot of heart goes into these voluntary productions. It injects you with a lot of spirit to be around these women and men on and backstage, whatever the turn out.

Tomorrow is closing ceremony at school. This marks the end of the academic year for students and for some of my teachers. After that, students move on to the next grade and some of the teachers get shuffled off to new schools. The yearly changeover of faculty is a bit strange for me to process, seems you can't allow yourself to get too attached to working with any one instructor, but for now all I'm anticipating amongst the English sensei is one new person added to the current four. A woman as well, and the other four seem pretty excited. Should hopefully be a good year to come.

Tuesday marks the start of spring break. I'm headed back towards Osaka and Kyoto in hopes of finding sakura and exploring the more famously traditional parts of Japan. If I'm lucky, I'll have lots of pretty pictures to upload later when I get back.

Spring is in full effect now. There are some chilly evenings, but overall, the weather is warm and the sunny days outnumber the rainy ones, so it's kind of amazing to think that the eight month marker has past. Thoughts of California drift in my head often.. there's so much going on these days. Weddings! Babies! Vaginas! (that is, for one particular OBY/GYN resident... ;)) I hope someone saves something for summer 2009.

Remember, summer 2009. It's a good time, y'all. Plan your life changes for then. :)

No milk today...

2008-03-17T03:20:00.009-07:00

... just a Herman's Hermits video.

I love watching those dancers dancing in the background. They're so peppy. Moves like that should never go out of style.

Okay, maybe a little milk:

I'm getting a little off the weekly release mark and may have to switch to a biweekly schedule once I'm caught up. For whoever's keeping track.

Happy Pi Day!

2008-03-13T15:38:00.005-07:00

This year, we celebrate in Adventure Time. Algebraic!

Rhombus!

Last year's Pi Day video. Still one of my favorites.

I want to say more, but I'm running off to see my students graduate. Catch ya later.

Lifted from the correction pile.

2008-03-05T06:02:00.014-08:00

Jotted down a few dialogues that caught my fancy today. They're written by students who were asked to follow an asinine script from their English textbook. Yeah, I said it... but really, the kids and teachers don't always get much choice in the matter. Today's topic is "Shopping."

The basic copy/paste format goes something like this first one:

A: May I help you?

B: Yes, please. I'm looking for pants.

A: What color are you looking for?

B: Pearl white.

A: How about this white one?

B: I like the color. But it's too big for me.

A: Shall I show you a smaller one?

B: Yes, please. Oh, this is nice. How much is it?

A: It's 3000 yen.

B: OK. I'll take it.

Yep, as you know, that's how you shop in English. I do appreciate the color selection, though.

This one made me chuckle:

A: May I help you? What are you looking for?

B: Cheese!

A: What kind of cheese?

B: All cheese--

A: Mr. Takano from Hamada please come to service counter.

B: Oh no!! It's me!!

This last one for all I know the students were just being lazy and stuck whatever phrases in. It's brilliant. You don't have to agree with me, but I think David Ives would be proud.

A: May I help you?

B: I'm just looking.

A: How about this one?

B: I'm just looking.

A: How about this one?

B: May I try this on?

A: No!!

B: Why?

A: No!!

B: Why?

A: How about that one?

B: No! I like this.

A: No!!

B: Why?

A: How about that one?

B: I want to come back home.

A: No!!

B: Bye.

A: No!!

B: Why?

A: Bye.

B: Bye.

"Kerosene" and "Aunt Phuc"

2008-02-28T07:01:00.011-08:00

Wanted to make sure I nailed a post on Leap Day. Success!

Comics cont'd.

It's a bit tricky trying to readjust back to the originals' brightness/contrast... I'm stuck dinking around on the work scanner (all in Japanese). Bear with me.

Also, I'm currently getting things back together at Right Hand Drawn (link available under the "My Sites" menu at right), so hopefully all will be live and thriving by this weekend.

Don't that sound familiar to three years ago? Just keep trusting, and I'll keep finishing.

"middle school boys are from mars"

2008-02-18T04:07:00.008-08:00

So I wanted to try out journaling life through a slightly different format. No punchlines or anything yet... This is from some months back, but I finally threw some ink on and gave it a quick scan. Not-so-quick and dirty.

*6th panel: "Dame!" = "Bad!"
8th panel : "Sumimasen! Gomen! Gomen!" = essentially, "Excuse me! Sorry! Sorry!"

splash.

2008-02-13T00:51:00.014-08:00

Currently reading Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi.

As obligatorily noted on my version's cover, it's now also a major animated motion picture out of France. Haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm certainly into the book.

Asa wa yuki ga furu katta. It snowed again this morning... and through most of the day.

My nose dripped plenty of snot through most of today, too. It was the very liquid kind that just dribbles out of your nostril no matter how insistently and annoyingly you snort to keep it back. And even after you've blown some out. I seem to have caught my first cold for this year, my second since I moved to Japan. Thankfully, no one at work has forced a sick mask on me yet, so I do politely try to keep my germs to myself while I muddle through the day, drip dripping alongside the coffee maker.

Later, during lunchtime.... cause that's when all the action seems to happen...

Well, it'd been about four days since I've been working at my regular junior high school because my job is divided between my main school and two elementary schools, so I was sizing up some of the older junior high boys during lunchtime as they came to pick up their food bins (don't know what to call these containers) to bring and serve lunch to the other kids in their homeroom class. For some reason I had the breakthrough of, Whoa, these kids are tall! Because really they are, and not by some malnutritional Asian standard. These mountain people pack some serious centimeters. The girls aren't far behind either. I was nearly squashed behind a group of guys monkeying around with each other, and afterwards fumbled a question out at the science teacher about whether the students had suddenly hit growth spurts since last week, cause damn if they didn't seem huge all of a sudden. Most likely my skewed perspective came from looking down at kids who only go up to my navel (yes, that is possible) for so long. You get to measure their height precisely by the fact that those little ones insist on standing ever-so-close to you, even when you have an activated nose.

What's the lesson learned? I don't know. Japanese children grow like fish.. super tiny to monstrously huge. Retaining the exact same proportions throughout the process. No, not really. But, yeah, just feed 'em balls of fishy stuff like what we get in school lunch. It seems to do the trick.

think think think... chew chew chew...

2008-02-01T02:05:00.000-08:00

The recontracting period came round. The time when JET Programme participants pass in their sheets stating whether or not they plan to stay for another year. I think all eigo no kyoshi can agree that it's a very difficult point in time to make that sort of decision. You're at the six month marker where things feel more familiar, you know what you like about life and the job and what bothers you. However, everything still rests on the verge of change, and six months won't predict what a further eighteen months will bring.

So I tossed and turned through the night every night for a week, handed in my "Yes" on Wednesday, and tossed and turned some more up until today.

Part of the reason was knowing that I'm not a kid anymore. If you're college bred, you can be fed the idea that life needs to fit into some sort of grid or time line that has you earning X amount of money, settled down with person Y, and owning Z properties by age 30. Even among some of the twenty-somethings out here, I can sense the urgency to nail those life track deadlines before it's too late. Otherwise you waste your youth and your time.

I remember too how a few people weren't shy to condescend my choice to do JET before I left for Japan in July. I'm not dumb enough to miss the gap between earned income and degree expectations; I know what they imply.

The more you follow through with the realities of a day to day, though, you start to recognize that impatience and self-effacement are kind of a waste of youth. Or rushes you too much into decisions you're not entirely ready for. Time after college taught me far more than higher education did about what it means to live... how to emotionally process uncertainty, how making choices can both increase opportunities and worsen lingering anxieties, how to monetarily keep yourself together without falling back on the folks. The path from LA to Chicago to Hamada has obviously been a shifting one, maybe more lateral in progress than I'd like, but never entirely unstable, and one where I can say I took full responsibility all the way through. So I do actually pat myself on the back for going abroad now without any of the fresh-out-of-college-what-do-I-do? butterflies and with just the awareness that I get a shit ton of travel time and Asia all around me.

But I also don't feel flighty enough to forget that many relationship shifts happen between friends and family because of distance. What I neglect for another year may not be there when I come back. Although with the friends I still talk to, it doesn't seem I should have too much to worry about. To be honest, the more I think about it, I'm kind of a lucky butt. Even my mother seems to be doing alright these days, and I can honestly believe her when she says so.

Eh, anyway, so I'm teaching for another year. Just because there's time enough to create the proper segue back to the states and to the people I care about. The world's still opening up more options.

And I'll be back to posting more pictures and things soon, too. So there should something more interesting for you to look at next week..

...promise.

got a whale of a tale to tell ya, lads

2008-01-23T23:27:00.000-08:00

Snow today. There've been a few snowy days before this one, but none that I counted carefully because the stuff failed to stick and melted away within a few hours. This morning's bout disappeared as well. However, the snowfall looked pretty damn dramatic and elicited the proper "oohs" and "so pretties." Therefore, to continue in my wintertime tradition, I'll record the fact that it happened.

For lunch, we ate whale. I'd already been chewing without a care in the world on some mysterious deep fried purple squares that tasted kind of like meat and kind of tasty when the teacher next to me pointed out the origins. Then I stopped and had to think about it for a moment. But wait, I said, aren't whales endangered? The teacher didn't know. She told me that today was the anniversary of Hamada school lunch, so maybe that had something to do with the menu choice. My sense of moral dilemma got lost in the explanation, and in confusion and utter despair, I just went ahead and finished what remained in the bowl, leaving myself to reconcile later the damage I had done. Now, I have to drive out to the beach this weekend to physically Save a Whale in order to set forth oceanic justice and restore natural order.

Anyway, I do feel a little bad.

A bit of show...

2008-01-18T02:44:00.000-08:00

To start a new sidebar Label... here's the 2003 summertime spectacular I stayed months after graduation doing the couch circuit in LA just to finish. FINALLY posted on a blog:

Sketchy

Well worth the wait, I know.

Also, in case you missed it and care to read, you can check out more recent added "notes" from the Vietnam trip in the "Archive" sidebar over there on the right. Whatever I add, they'll all be lumped together.

Gettin' all organized... Thanks for your attention.

videos for thought

2008-01-13T18:40:00.001-08:00

A few months back, a friend of mine brought up how the North American economy is founded on debt and how our asses are owned by the Federal Reserve. Today I finally found the video by Paul Grignon that introduces these ideas and makes it all very clear.

It's an animation explaining how we've come to find ourselves within a well-crafted money system floating on fiat currency and fueled only by promise. While this provides context to why we're always paying and borrowing loans and how strategically managing debt and interest becomes the way to survive within this economic framework, it also turns out that the only way to maintain this system is to continue to increase national debt to no real end. Watch the entire video. It's pretty fucked up.

Paul Grignon - Money as Debt

Equally engaging was a series of videos made by this other guy, Greg Craven, that I discovered through a Yahoo news article (and rarely do I care about what I read from Yahoo news). He's just a high school science teacher who decided to take on the topic of global climate destabilization and all the thousands of critical reponses from viewers he received afterwards head-on by himself in pure Man vs. Internet fashion.

This is the original 1st video:

Greg Craven - The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See

He then made some response-to-feedback videos called "Patching Holes (1-3)," but most of what he says seems to be covered in this single sequel video:

Greg Craven - The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See 2

After that, Craven went on to produce an entirely organized and indexed "How It All Ends: Expansion Pack"(the beginning video is, in fact, the "Index") series that backs up every last point of his arguments originating from "Terrifying Video." The whole movie collection is more than a little obsessive... maybe even terrifying in it's own way... but the amount of dedication from one guy with nothing specific to gain for himself is pretty awesome.

Hey, if YouTube has to be all about me staring at your webcammed face, at least have something thoughtful to say.

Or at least be singing Numa Numa...

notes, p.3

2008-01-13T18:39:00.001-08:00

12/30

Vietnam ain't exactly what my mom said it'd be anymore. Just outside the Saigon city limits out in the open dirt roads, where the crowds clear out except for the dirt-covered citizens selling things in baskets a bit too close to the cars, as Chuong and I buzz along on his motor scooter, we can see all manner of tall buildings under construction behind big signs promising a future full of skyscrapers and supermarkets – a future of commerce and high-end residences. These sights are nothing short of abrupt, though the food vendors with their basket don't seem to notice anything from across the street.

My cousin and I are headed towards some wilderness to gawk at trees and animals, but the bulk of what constitutes life for the people in this part of the country appears as urban in intention as any American big city I've ever lived in. It had been about two years since Chuong ventured around this area, and even he can't recognize any of it now with all the new concrete divides and street lights at the intersections. For me, it feels a little ridiculous realizing how all the preconceptions of Vietnam I've nurtured are ages behind this modern day version.

I guess the countrywide renovation isn't entirely clear from the vantage point of our family's quận. Though many brand new second and third floors can be spotted growing out from older buildings throughout Saigon, seeing the peddlers equally spread throughout the streets earning just enough to last from day to day, it doesn't feel like grand changes lay in the future for everyone. I welcome this contradiction when walking through the local market and sitting LOW to the ground to enjoy a bowl of noodles at the soup stand, but as my aunt tells me, “people smile on in the outside, but inside they are not that happy.” How could you blame people really? It’s quaint and all for me to witness and photograph these scenes where things feel closer to the life I imagined my parents lived, but more than a little disparity exists between the country's “growing” economy and most people's static living conditions. As proves true in any big city, gentrification is never intended for locals.

While I make these observations, I often feel so self-conscious carrying such a big clunky camera with me. Seems whenever I'm with my aunt and whip the machine out, she has to explain to the person whose fruit I'm photographing that “it’s her first time here. Everything is strange to her,” as if I couldn't be any more out of my element.

I know she doesn't intend this just for me. Plus, I'm not the one to stick around after two weeks and hear whatever comments these people have to say about the odd little Việt Kiều "from Japan" later on. Still, it's hard to figure out what's natural to do sometimes in an unnatural situation, and harder still when a spotlight's thrown on the fact.

***

In the parts of the city where everything's been done up to look all ritzy and Las Vegas spectacular, I can see huge wedding parties taking place with loud music and loud displays and crowds of people pouring out of the banquet halls, taking pictures with the bride and groom, or trying to grab a taxi because dinner has ended and they need to beat the rush home. Everyday it seems I pass at least three nice cars decorated up with flowers all ready to pick up the bride and whisk her to an alter somewhere. My cousin tells me that lots of people wait until the end of the year just before Tết to get married. Over the few days, these receptions and cars become so commonplace of a sight, I begin to wonder if it isn’t a little too easy to find a spouse out here. I end my curiosity immediately after that thought.

***

The ending of the 31st feels much more matter of fact this year. I go with Chúc to a News Years concert to watch a full line-up of famous Vietnamese singers perform, but by 10PM, we're back at home and everyone's retired to their separate spaces, and all I hear is the soft murmurs from Chuong and Chúc's TV set in their room. Even the neighborhood is remarkably quiet for once. I lay down on my mattress and, for the first time in ages, close my eyes and let of the rest of world count down for me while I nod off.

1/1 - 1/3

With the coming and passing of the January 1st New Years, my aunt and uncle seemed thrilled to start educating me about preparing for Tết. I notice that my relatives continue to ask me the same kinds of questions I get asked in Japan: “Can you eat this?” “Have you ever seen this before?” “Can you understand what he/she just said?” I suppose if owning up to not knowing a few of those things really gives me something to learn, it's okay to be bombarded. Can't complain about the variety of food they keep feeding me.

The rooftop cat joins me in the afternoon when not much is happening except for the baby wailing. I’ve established my favorite spot for note taking, which is right in front of the door to my room where I can lean my back against a wall and dangle my legs on the stairs.

Here, because of the way the house is built where the roof of the central part of the house is disconnected from the roof of the spare room, sunlight can stream in and I’m somewhere between being indoors and outdoors. The cat also gets easy access.

I write down my notes while she leaps down from above and rubs up against me, giving me a little undeserved credit for the pampering she receives hanging around this place, until she finally stretches out to take a nice nap.

***

At night, my cousins find a little free time and take me to some of the nicer cafes in the city. A few of the districts have pretty fancy looking stores, all touting international brand names. The young people I see biking and walking around dress up like Forever 21 just exploded onto the entire population. Man, so that's where that aesthetic comes from...

***

I ask my uncle about the place where my mother used to work when she was a case worker for delinquent children and their families, so I might be able to photograph what the spot looks like nowadays and send a picture home to her. My uncle happily offers to take me, warning that it'll be another one hour motor scooter drive. I'm perfectly fine with that. However, after some thinking out loud, he finally decides that it wouldn’t be worth the trip because everything has actually been demolished and reconstructed after ’75 and giải phóng. My mother’s child service program, in particular, was sponsored by the US government, so there's no chance that any remnant of that building remains. Photos I’d take to send home would bear no resemblance to what she remembered.

My romanticized notions of connecting the present to the past and linking myself to my mother falls flat with a gorgeous thud. There's little room for poetry in politics, I guess.

notes, p.2

2008-01-11T04:08:00.001-08:00

12/26

My uncle, Cạu Cường, shares some tea with me from a big insulated plastic pitcher. It's a light but bitter brew made from dried leaves stored in a brown paper package. The pitcher's meant to last him the entire day, and there is no shortage of tea or stories this morning, as he recounts with great sweeps of his arms and wide-mouthed laughs all about growing up with a single mother (my grandpa had died when he was thirty while fighting in the army) and three older sisters each with very different mindsets. He got along best with my mom, the two were the youngest in the family, and were the closest in personality. Likemindedly, they'd often get into trouble with the older siblings.

Your mother was a mischievous one, he tells me. One time when she was a child, she reached under and plucked an egg right out of a chicken, right in the middle of its laying. Can you believe that? It wasn't even all the way out! Immediately, I feel quite proud of the genes I've inherited.

The teenage years were filled with clashes between the younger and older sides. Since money was scarce, funds had to be prioritized and there were heated battles between conservatism and self-expression. My uncle thinks back to one instance when he bought a pair of fashionable bell bottom pants, something he'd saved up for for many months. The tinge of anger remains in his eyes when he tells me how one day, one the aunts and my grandmother took out scissors and cut them short to make them less ugly. Here's a man that's been through quite a lot of struggle since the Communist encroachment, and I can only peripherally guess how a mind can cope and piece together so many deep impressions from the past, but I feel glad these family stories, and this particular moment that brings out the younger man in him, persist as some of the stronger ones.

I look around and try to imagine all these now-50-somethings running up and down the steep staircase and through the open entryways, all wrapped up in 60's attire and angst. Trời ơi trời, he tells me, this house was always noisy; always filled with laughter or yelling. But yes, he footnotes quickly, that period together was also very short. For most of their lives, the siblings went to their individual boarding schools, nunneries, or workplaces, or eventually married and moved away with their husbands, though sometimes later returning to this house bringing along their babies, my older cousins. Each new little one introduced merriment and their own share of problems between my mother, uncle, and aunts too.

Then, after giải phóng, life abruptly shifted and that's when the family separated permanently, hundreds and hundred thousands of miles apart.

My uncle pulls out some pictures from the cabinet. He retains a few of his wedding, even some from when he was quite young during his boyscout days, and some more recent photos of my cousins from Norway, two who've visited and stayed at this house before. My uncle also lets me take a look at the original black and white photographs of my grandfather and grandmother. I get to see their faces for the first time.

I want to find more photos, but Cạu Cường tells me frankly that we really don't have any photos of the family beyond the few. Creating a visual history that you can thumb through isn’t a priority when you’re financially struggling. Outside of special occasions, the rest was left undocumented.

Undocumented. I suddenly comprehend a little more clearly and frantically try to grab at the stories still free-floating in my head, but only in time to find that some of the details my uncle gave have already eroded away.

***

The house remains, at least, as a sign of our family's own kind of fruitfulness. Many people and animals have been raised here. My uncle owns two dog and, before these two, owned a previous dog who was very intelligent and well loved and had a good fifteen year run. The family also tends to a cat who lives out on the rooftops but checks into our house for dinner. At fourteen years old, she's already spawned many litters of kittens and continues to have boyfriends wailing their awful tomcat howls late in the night after her. The cat's own scratchy, constant meowing doesn't cease until she gets her rice. In the living room sits a small aquarium of little freshwater angel fish. My uncle even used to own birds. All these creatures at one point coexisted at the same time.

Of course, plenty of children have grown up in this house as well. Not just those in our family, but neighborhood children my aunt and uncle have helped to raise from just a few months to about five years old.

It's no wonder I felt so comfortable immediately after arrival.

***

In the afternoon, my aunt, Mợ Phúc, takes me out to the outdoor market place a quick walking distance away. I follow her through some unbelievably narrow alleyways that all interconnect like a strange maze, and I am impressed at how easily my aunt navigates through. People in the neighborhood resting out on the street watch as we pass. Even without holding my camera, I feel so obvious here, even more so than I ever felt living in Hamada without having to say a word.

The mosquitoes don't appear so discriminating. They do their mosquito business all over me with as much zeal as the Japanese variety. The resultant bumps are just as red and just as abundant on my arms, legs, and even on the bottoms of my feet. I feel like I'm scratching myself raw, around the bites of course, but I can only assume that by the time my skin becomes thick enough and my blood salted with enough nước mắm so the mosquitoes stop drawing near, it'll be just about time to go home.

Photos of some of the things mentioned can be found here.

Now... three trips.

12/27 - 12/28

I meet up with good ol' pal Kim, also on her winter break, and go with her family out to Vũng Tàu. Boiling eggs in hot springs, eating exotic foods of questionable legality, and bumming around beaches and lighthouses ensues.

12/29

With Chuong, I ride a Honda bike and ferry to Cần Giờ and the Vàm Sát ecological center. Before we get to check out various bats, fish, crocodiles, crabs, and heaps of monkeys, my cousin and I travel for a good hour on a slippery and bumpy dirt road, and we even meet a rather evil dog that decides to chase after us for a brief stretch. I'm a little too concerned with keeping my legs out of the reach of its jaws during that time to take pictures of that animal.

1/03 - 1/04

I go with my aunt to Phan Thiết. The beach here is where my mom caught a fishing boat to leave the country back in '78. Kind of strange to see the setting 30 years later. I wonder what she would think now if she were to come back.

Phan Thiết used to be very poor, but now there's a strip of hotels that line the beach and vendors walk around selling shellfish and bánh bột lọc for you to eat right by the ocean. There are also sand dunes nearby composed of naturally red sand where tourists flock.

It's all resorts now, these beaches. So many changes on the surface that successfully hide away traces of the past war and of current poverty. It's difficult to argue, though, how naturally beautiful the countryside looks out here and how calm the scenery can make you feel. The Vietnamese natives I'm traveling with have known the realities of change for a long time now, and if anyone's entitled to hold onto feelings about the past, they are. They, however, feel no bitterness today, so I can only allow myself feelings of peace as I step into the ocean water and let the waves swallow me whole.

notes, p.1

2008-01-09T00:15:00.000-08:00

12/24/07

I'm sitting at Kansai Airport in front of my departure gate, waiting to board the airplane that takes me to Saigon. Had spent the previous two days wandering around Osaka with friends, so it's strange to suddenly be alone, not knowing what to anticipate from this point onward. I know little about my uncle's family or how they even look. My aunt, his wife, told me over the phone during the only conversation I'd ever had with her that they made a sign with my name written in green. Do you know your cousin Hoài? You’re uncle is the older mirror image, she tells me. He’ll hold the sign. Ah, OK, I say. The two parts should be enough to find you.

There’s over an hour before the plane's scheduled boarding, so I kill some time rummaging through my backpack, fingering my ticket, flipping through books and papers brought along for such occasions. I eyeball the few other people sitting and wandering around, noticing in particular a woman with long blondish-dyed hair wearing a short gray faux fur coat, a miniskirt, and thigh high boots with spiky heels. She swings her hips a little as she passes by. All poise atop those tiny heels. A personality profile instantly whizzes through my head, admittedly not so flattering, but I stop my judgments there remembering my own frumpy librarian getup. We're just totally different people.

The woman picks a seat right next to me and puts down her bag.

As she settles in her chair, I straighten myself and look up at her to offer a polite smile. She smiles in return.

"Bietonamujin desu ka?" she asks. This is the first time in ages I've not been immediately Japanese to someone. I nod. Judging by her amused expression, I must also look a little surprised, and she then says, “Chị có biết nói tiến việt không?”

I reply that, yes, I can speak some, brokenly.

She tells me this is her first flight back since leaving Vietnam for Japan over seven years ago when she traveled abroad to find work. It's also her first time going on an airplane by herself, and she's a bit nervous. I go, hmm. Then I try telling her that it’s quite a brave thing to do. This seems to make her feel better. She asks me if I'm flying on my own, my reasons for doing so, and then my reasons for being in Japan, so I explain it all as best I can with my grab bag of Viet vocabulary unaided by English inserts, wondering if the pasted together phrases actually make any sense. She absorbs my responses with nods and smiles; she fidgets and I can tell she’s rather antsy to get on the plane soon, but her eyes show she's tuned in and genuinely eager to process my efforts at speech. We ask each other's ages. It turns out we’re only a year apart. The discovery seems to cement things.

Over the next hour we exchange descriptions of our families, places to see, friends we’ve made. She laments her own broken Vietnamese, though for all I can tell it sounds far from bad, and I just keep letting thoughts run freely out of own my mouth in all their awkward construction. It’s been a while since someone’s made it this comfortable to try talking.

I finally ask her name. She says it's Phuong. She shows me the Japanese version of it, something that reads closer to "Fong," and we compare how Japan and America transform our country’s lovely, meaningful Vietnamese names into phonetic disasters. The boarding announcement finally interrupts.

After I find my seat on the plane, I wave to her as she continues down the aisle to a seat further back, telling her that maybe I'll catch her after we land. She says, OK, I'll talk to you then.

It's the last we get to see of each other.

***

Onflight, I watch a TV news story about Pocket Film– films made on cellphones.

***

My aunt is right: my uncle looks just like my cousin. I catch a glimpse of the older Hoài with the sign with green writing waiting in front of the terminal crowd, and suddenly everything’s turned out okay.

***

First impression of Saigon streets on Christmas Eve – whoa, this place is nuts. Crotch rockets everywhere. The taxi swims slowly through the flood of people on bikes, honking and somehow maneuvering without hitting anyone. The amount of store fronts and signs around us feel endless. I tell my aunt that this place looks a lot like Bangkok, just maybe denser and a little dirtier and perhaps far less orderly. All this chaos definitely looks not like Japan. Can't believe I’ve finally made it here.

We arrive home and my Vietnam relatives immediately give me the special guest treatment. They are relieved I can speak some Vietnamese, though are quick to point out its low quality. I pretend that makes me more special.

For dinner, they prepare a glorious spread.

They pour forth red wine and the constant questions about what I can eat and keep insisting that I try this! try this! be sure to have some of this with some of that! Between cracking shrimp and rolling rolls, I describe for them how I much I’ve missed fish sauce, and my uncle laughs when I say that the thought of it makes me weep. They prepare me on all the other delicious foods I can look forward to in these next two weeks.

Later that night, they send me out with cousin Chuong on his Honda to check out the city. I keep my helmet on my head and my knees tucked in while he zooms around the streets. We catch the lights and crowds of people gathered at the edges of the sidewalk or at the parks, just hanging out in their tank tops and shorts and thin button up shirts and flip flops. At one point, there is absolutely so much traffic congestion that we can only stand there in the road, stuck in the middle of a horde of Honda bikers, getting high on exhaust as Christmas pop music plays in the distance.

Once we finally make it out back onto the clearer areas, we zoom again past countless food shops, clothes shops, and grand scale coffee joints. People chilling everywhere. Saigon definitely stays up late.

***

I settle into the spare room on the 2nd floor of the house that they’ve set aside for me. There is a mattress and clothes rack all prepared. I’m a little taken aback about how much personal space I’ve been allotted, but my uncle tells me that the extra room is typically left empty anyway; my aunt and uncle prefer to unroll their thin reed mats on the living room floor downstairs and sleep there.

Endless noise fills my first restless Vietnamese night. The ambience starts with my baby nephew’s cries, transitions to snoring adults, then into the neighbor’s hollered conversations, to tomcats yelping terrifying mating calls, to twilight dogs barking... and at some point somewhere around 6AM, eyes left half-open, I realize I had finally drifted off to sleep and am being stirred awake by the sounds of the family getting ready for the day.

12/25/07

I climb down the steps to the kitchen. My uncle greets me and whips up a cup of coffee with condensed milk. I look at the cup with the thick hot drink and realize I'm consuming cà phê sữa đá again. Oh, my. Today is going to be a good.

"Merry Christmas," I tell him.

A few hours later, Chuong's wife Chúc takes me on a ride on her own Honda through the streets of Saigon, pointing out some major sites for me to photograph.

This Phở 2000, a joint made famous when former President Clinton stepped in for a bowl.

According to my cousin, this is an exact duplicate of the original Notre Dame cathedral in France. I haven't bothered to check whether or not that's completely true yet. However, I love how this Gothic centerpiece of austerity and power is accompanied by palm trees. How very Vietnamese.

Waiting at the light.

In anticipation of an upcoming trip to the beach, she also takes me bargain shopping for a Christmas swimsuit, flip flops, and sunscreen.

Yup, feels like the holidays.

Shot later that night from a rooftop coffee place.

Daft Punks and Sharp Pens

2007-12-12T01:04:00.000-08:00

Took me a bit, but here they are.. shots from the Daft Punk concert at Makuhari (12/8/07):

A clean shot of the duo off of my friend Blake's camera.

Pic taken by my shorter self amidst the crowd.

Blake's again.

Overall, it was a pretty sweet set that, yes, brought back a bunch of the hits from the two albums that made 'em cool in the 90's (nothing seemed to get the Japanese crowd more excited than belting out One More Time!), but spliced up and thrown it into some new stuff. The venue was a huge concert hall that fit plenty thousands of people, in this case mostly Japanese, of course, with every tenth person being an obvious non-Asian foreigner. It actually felt a lot like hanging out at UCLA. heh

My travel pal and I also took in some of the Tokyo cityscape during the rest of the weekend. We both realized how much we missed tall buildings, neon lights, and way too many fashion freaks on the street. I even felt a wave of what I could describe sheepishly as "longing" while riding through the subway. Oh, grimy smelly CTA with your breaking down engines and doors and weirdos on board, deep down secretly I still have feelings for you.

Sigh.

A Bic bit:

This is courtesy of my friend Doug (and from Mark before him). Could be the ink, could be the reviewers are all in cahoots. Either way, online pen strokes of brilliance.

Oh, the weather inside is frightful

2007-12-04T04:11:00.000-08:00

This morning was reported to be 3 degrees. Celsius that is. That sounded awful chilly until I checked my Google conversions and noted 37.4 Fahrenheit, which by wimpy Californian standards is Oh my God, mind blowingly cold! but thankfully rugged Midwestern living (ho ho) has gotten me used to waiting for buses at outside temps of -15˚C (5˚F). So it still ain't the worse I could handle, and I will brag brag brag about it all the live long day... and freeze freeze freeze on my bike and in my apartment during the nighttime regardless. Bravado can't fully take the bite out of a chill, so I'll just keep the scarf wrapped over my mouth.

At school, the students dutifully march around their unheated buildings in Meiji era uniforms as directed, and especially stoic are the girls with their knee length skirts and calf socks and goosebumps in between. Poor things. It must be quite a sight to catch the foreign teacher walking around with trench coat and scarf on the entire day as if she was preparing to face a blizzard tearing through the hallways. Those open spaces are certainly draft tunnels, and Japanese style schools have successfully defied alteration over the centuries. Then again, nothing brings about the spirit of the season like gathering round the kerosene gas stoves with the children, warming our legs and hands as we huddle side by side... before the other teachers arrive to open all the doors and air out the accumulated toxic smell.

For homes, the Japanese have developed an electric blanket/table unit called a kotatsu to keep your lower half warm while you... sit around a table. Seriously, it would never have occurred to me to combine the two, but I suppose it makes quite a bit of sense if you think about it, since that's probably where you'd spend the bulk of you waking time during the cold months.

My apartment doesn't have a kotatsu, it's just not big enough, so my tactic is to do a big blanket dive whenever I sense the chills a chasin'. I so love nestling under a hill of cotton and flannel. I've noticed though that I also have this unfortunate habit of kicking off my comforters during sleep. So all my careful layering is completely thrown out of sequence and lopped on the side of the bed, and I end up waking up in the middle of the night shivering and coughing. What the hell is up? Why can't my subconscious(?) self get a clue that this helps neither of us to either continue frolicking through dreamland or to be able to get up in the morning without so many dying-like groans. Such a lack in cross-brain communication. I can't deal with this relationship.

Maybe I should also start learning how to use my air conditioning/heating unit. (Bravado lets out a sigh... aw, dammit.)

Now listening to Latyrx. Bay Area represent! 90's represent.. and, yes, still it's hard to process that the bulk of my 90's experience is now over a decade old. Quiet, already.

Starting Friday, more 90's and music... in Tokyo! Off to see Daft Punk. Woohoo! Will tell you about it after this weekend.

Recap

2007-11-27T06:54:00.001-08:00

Man, this month rocketed by. I glanced down at my keyboard for a moment, picked my nose a bit then looked back up and, suddenly, it was the end of November. What gives? How did this happen?

I did learn earlier this month how unkind government officials can be to those related to their own people. Also, how much you really can come to take for granted a country like Japan and it's requisite politeness and kindness towards the linguistically ignorant until you encounter the willful, mean-spirited type of ignorance of those running certain embassies that need to give you a VISA for entering their territory. Oh, how great to be an American in those instances. Perhaps a sentiment like this will only one day cause backlash given the current conditions in Happy Obliviousland (the one besides the US) with its condemnation of freedom advocates, but, yes, my veil of naivete is getting tugged off. Perhaps that's a good thing.

Back in Hamada, temperatures have been going down, though gradually, faltering occasionally at warm, with leaves changing color as promised by all who nihongo de hanasuru.

Some attempted shots with the camera phone:

This is from the top of a small mountain hike in Mito, the area where my friend Ryan lives.

Trying to get a clearer shot of the leaves. Can't really do the real thing justice.

Outside view from inside an elementary school. Caught a rainbow that day. Sorry it's a bit fuzzy.

From the other side of the building.

The emerging vibrant colors are quite distracting during classes when I sometimes find my eyes drifting towards the windows onto the view of the lush mountains that surround my junior high school. We're all just waiting for snow to arrive and dust over the deciduous rainbow; by then El Toppo'll hopefully have snow tires on and be satisfying my constant urge to head for the hills.

Speaking of impulse, in step with the wannabe-Beat inside, I began reading Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac this month. To add to the cheese, I even bought the recent republication with a cover drawn by Norwegian comic artist, Jason. Jason already tips the awesome scale by himself, so how could I pass this combination up? Even without judging by the cover, this current read hits the spot. I love the Beat Generation and this book and not for any proposed profundity in purpose or efforts at spirituality, but just the desires and antsiness of the protagonists feel real no matter what time period you live in. Phooey to living by society's mode of responsibility. Get on your feet! Take to the road! Take to the woods! Oh man, that's definitely where it's at. Plus Kerouac is like one of the kings of run-on sentences. Those who've been rolling their eyes, once their eyes stop rolling and reposition back onto the screen, must comprehend why he's got a particular gushing fan.

A transition now to fragments.

I followed up on an invitation mentioned a while back, and gained a full stomach, warmth, a sample of nostalgia, and a potential new reader. He may be a Grateful Deadhead, but there's nothing dead about his adventurous spirit.

When you travel, you inevitably meet other travelers. It's amazing how this unspoken system with its amorphous network works. You don't need freakin' Facebook. You just find each other. You click. Whatever trust you chuck out ends up coming back some way or another. Think I'll keep holding my faith in that.

I felt rather down a few weeks ago, though later felt a little better again. The worse sadness is seeing the thing inside yourself that you can't control, no matter how many times you've recognized and labeled it, eat away at an experience that should otherwise be simple and happy. To see another person frustrated by what already frustrates you can hurt quite a bit. Maybe someday someone who truly has the ability to understand will press their finger to your brow, trace the creases, and somehow read a message that unfolds the rest of their arms to loop them around you, tie you down in place with no intention of letting go.

Maybe.

Till then, just follow the autumn rainbow up through the hills to whatever glorious sunsets that await.

Feels good to breathe free.

point. less.

2007-11-15T07:08:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you find yourself forcibly humbled.

Lack of speaking ability does eventually get to you, and it seems that in Japan and Vietnam I'm not going to win. I can't stand there with any American ego because no one can understand a damn thing I say in the only language I can feel reasonably mature.

It's rough depending on kindness.

Cali

2007-11-13T05:47:00.001-08:00

Where my heart's at right this moment.

Joni Mitchell - California

Hippies optional.

WAR.... and buns on wheels

2007-11-10T00:54:00.001-08:00

OK, about time I posted something Japanese. Got this off the boosted videos from YouTube:

There's about 6 "episodes" total to watch if you follow the YouTube link. Yeah, we're talking tanks that look more like featureless skull marshmallows set to wheels and voiced by Alvin and the Chipmunks. Their white squishy heads are spose to be rice balls or Japanese buns of some sort. [referenced off this blog.] Snack buns on wheels... makes a little more sense, right? It keeps getting more cutesy and even kind of bothersome on some levels, if you think about cartoony inserts of war, Iraq, Fidel Castro-lookalikes, and tanks that breed and bottle feed baby tanks... Of course, I still keep watching cause it's got visual appeal I can't deny.

Sigh. So confused.

Speaking of Japanese bun cartoon characters, here's a really big one with the little kids, Anpanman:

Yup, bean paste bun guys who save people and feed them chunks of their head. (at around 4:40.) "Hai! Dozo." "Haha!.. numnumnum.. Oishi!" Looks pretty damn wholesome to me.

Holidays...

2007-11-09T03:45:00.000-08:00

Going to Viet Nam for Christmas. Tickets are booked. Main thought that follows: I need to get a VISA fast.

Other feelings: I dunno. It's kinda trippy. Didn't think I'd commit to making the trip so early during my Japanese career. Just started talking with my friend Joanna one day about holidays and families and my traditional route to snowless California every winter season. This year I had 2 weeks, but no plans, and no immediate desire for another 17 hour timezone shift. So, out came the idea. Yeah, go visit the family in Viet Nam. It'll certainly be warmer. Sure, hell, do it. Fine. Done. Uh, how much was that again?

I'm flying on my own on this trip, but I won't be alone. I'll meet up with an uncle and aunt when I arrive. As a bonus, pal Kim will be there for part of the time with her family, too.

Overthinker that I am, I'm a little anxious.

I understand the country as my motherland, but not my home. I don't feel some deep-rooted connection because I've never experienced growing up there. I didn't have to flee from the Communists by boat, or rebuild a life in a country where I barely spoke the language like my mother did. I know to respect and celebrate or get riled at injustices within Viet Nam's borders, but that's about the extent of my honest feelings. Most Vietnamese kids have been ushered back to the country via family vacations, a few people like practically every year. It's easier for them to feel close to home. My own folks possess no desire to revisit, and as horrifying as purists of Viet pedigree might find that idea, I think my parents have their valid reasons. Even if their decision ended up influencing how I feel about the journey now, it's not something to blame.

Besides, it always made sense that, as a person with a specific heritage, it becomes more your responsibility to open up to other people's cultures, not just cling to your own as the end-all to your existence. Why fucking settle for a limited perspective? Especially when you're practically spoon fed multiculturalism in the states.

At the same time, I find myself having to stick up for my cultural identity in a place where so many Japanophiles and natives who look like me easily ignore its significance.

So possible "connection" to come? The brain could probably swing that way. And I don't say this to sound flippant, as much as I'm not trying to be too serious about the matter. That's not the point.

Just glad I can say, for once, it will happen.

Break. Distraction. That sort of thing.

2007-11-05T03:57:00.001-08:00

Things currently on my mind, and don't ask why:

I love the smell of scalded milk. An obvious remark given the entire layout and title of this blog, but to be honest I'd never had any overwhelming love of milky/creamy things until the last few years (though it's still not the reason for this blog's name). Either way, I might feel obligated to amend the subtitle above as my gaseous-response-to-lactose has altogether disappeared now that I drink milk with school lunch all the time. It's like finally getting a superpower back. Haha! There's no stopping this Asian now! If only alcohol were as easy... I've also been nursing a bit of a cold during these past busy weeks, so one of the comfort beverages I've turned to is good ol' hot milk & honey. Mmm. I heat up the milk in a saucepan then pour it into my mug, and the transfer creates a delightful sizzle in the pan and a warm release of aroma. It almost replaces whiffs of brewing coffee as a top favorite.

I also love the taste of pumpkin soup. An obvious choice given the time of year when pumpkin is pretty much the flavor in everything. More correctly, pumpkin spice ends up in every consumable product imaginable. Last year it was pumpkin spice coffee, pumpkin spice beer, pumpkin spice in pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin spice muffin (when it wasn't banana), pumpkin spice in pumpkin pie... mmmmm, pie... I probably ate a couple shakers' worth now that I think about it, just because I couldn't resist sprinkling a good amount in my morning brew at the coffee additive counter anytime I found the stuff left out. Somewhere around December I finally became pumpkin-spiced out. This year has been a lot of drawing and talking about pumpkins (or at least the Japanese variety, kobacha),

[linked from this website]

though no eating. こばちゃのスパイス ... chop, chop, chop goes the language butcher!... hasn't been sprinkled or mentioned even once. However, I finally bought a jack o' half at the grocery store and made a soup for additional autumnal comfort. Just your usual squash soup, but all the sentimental seasonal thoughts came rushing back in one steamy bowl. Ahh.

That was it. Back to class prep and Japanese homework.

Seeing Green, Red, and Yellow

2007-10-31T05:54:00.000-07:00

So a last-minute-planned Halloween came with multiple returns. I dress up in not one but three costumes, each for one of three different events. The first was a makeshift frog outfit composed of a green dress from my closet and a frog hat courtesy of a fellow JET and her lucky turn at the crane grabbing machine at the bowling alley. This green piece suit I wore to our elementary school kid event at the Board of Education. Second costume was a makeshift devil outfit, made possible by a 100 yen devil horn headband and red clothing and tights from home. Nothing exciting, but it was fun to run in up and down the school halls alongside the special ed kids while they trick or treated for candy.

The last was the "main" costume (i.e. the one for going out and boozing it up). Off to Matsue City I went to barhop with other JETs dressed up as:

Can you tell what it is?

Give up?

It's a lemon shooter! ...

A lemon shooter. You know, this.

In case you're wondering, the folks in the above photo are pregnant Britney Spears, a pirate, Amy Winehouse, a seemingly possessed alcoholic drink, Courtney Love, and the top portion of a deviled egg (yolk's on her skirt). So I wasn't the only food pun that night. Egg's also the one providing these glamorous photos.

Crack whores, pirates, and puns.... I'll spare you the rest. :)

The Miseducation of Ichiban Chugako

2007-10-24T01:11:00.001-07:00

Late last night, I took it upon myself to become ambassador for the great city of Chicago. To supplement the next day's sannensei class (8th/9th grade class in Ameriterms) on asking/giving directions for trains and buses, I harked back to my own train traveling experiences and whipped up a map of my former home. Gettin' my rotten vegetable shield ready... go ahead and click on the image to expand:

Believe it or not, I'm actually quite proud of the result. (Boo! Hiss! go the native Chicagoans.) Yes, I even made sure to include the world renown Lake Michigan whale. Only just a few train stops... and perhaps some major train lines... have disappeared in translation. You do remember the Bob stop on the Orange Line, at least? Cause my feeble brain didn't recall any of the other ones between Midway and downtown despite so many past commutes. Blame aging. You might also as well assume that Wrigley Field (née Stadium to further abet translating) is two stops from my old place rather than one, as the students did. And yes, really, Adams is that far north on the Loop.

I have this uncanny sense of accuracy when I do maps around 11:30PM. Secondly, I have no shame.

As the seed of an idea was planted from the late night online conversation with reaching-notorious-status friend, Wendy, I continued mapping and drew directions for how to get from my house to our junior high school, Icchu. So, here we have it. Some trans-Pacific directions for you as well.

I wish that in the end the class had been left with more than ten minutes for these two photocopy masterpieces. Just so I could gloat over the awesomeness of inventing a Mystery Road (named after the other teacher) that leads from Tokyo to Hamada. Just to have no one in the class make any comments about the fact or about anything else for that matter. And boy is that becoming a familiar teaching experience. But I simply would not have cared because when my students recite in their bored stacatto English, "Could you tell me how to get to Midway Airport?" I'd holler right back, "Heeeeells, yeah!"

Move over CTA. In Hamada, I am the transit authority.

Puddin'

Today was also Pudding Day for school lunch. Halloween pumpkin pudding to be exact. Yum yum! This meant that all the junior high thugs who normally ditched school to beat each other up came round campus to collect on dessert cups. That further meant that teachers were sent out to man their stations amongst the salivating, custard-deprived students, so all was quiet in the teacher's room during noontime, and I was left to eat alone and wonder where the hell everyone went.

After the end-of-lunch bell, one of the English teachers finally returned. She explained the whole situation to me, and then described some of the fights that broke out over dessert, just as anticipated. Nothing like the holidays to keep Japanese instructors extra busy.

So remember kids: pudding is a right, not a privilege.

Strollin'

The best afternoons are the ones where you get off work and the weather is so perfect you have to allow for a little meandering before going home. This particular autumn day required especial savoring, and I decided to send my bike down the less-explored small streets and alongside the river so I could spot orange coy fish and the sunlight gleaming off ordinarily dull water. I still had Halloween and witches on my mind for one of my classes, so I stopped in on a small shop that sold brooms among other various household knickknacks. It ended up being a fortuitous stop; the owner of the shop saw me browsing and approached me to ask something I couldn't understand, so I responded with my hopeless "Wakarimasen," and he then asked me if I spoke English. It turned out that he was an English tutor in Hamada who had lived and worked in San Jose, CA back in the '70s. Wow, small town and small world. He then introduced his wife, also an excellent English speaker, and they chatted with me a bit before sending me away with a phone number and invitation to stop by again one day for lunch.

I swear, as much as other JETs tell me how commonplace this becomes, it never ceases to brighten an already decently lit day. However, I really do want to start equalizing my Japanese usage with my Japanese acquaintances' enthusiasm and exercise of English. Maybe then I can start giving more accurate descriptions of the places I come from. Just in case my map making skills ever falter.

Big Love for Big Joy

2007-10-22T04:47:00.002-07:00

First, a semi-late announcement: I have a car! A beauteous.. cough... white, soccer mom friendly Toppo BJ. Uh, that stands for "Big Joy" for all the easily amused out there (which includes me. *snicker*). In honor of Alejandro Jodorowsky, I call it El Toppo. This actually works perfectly with the Japanese mispronunciation of the spelling.

Soon after the car, I bought myself a plug-in radio device for my iPod, so El Toppo has officially become a fully equipped roadtrip vehicle. I christened it on its first day with a 2 hour drive (at 50km/hour mind you) to Izumo City to see some Afro-Japanese drumming,

and then two weekends ago to Hiroshima for the Sake Festival in Saijo. More fun and shenanigans to mention in depth later on.

Just yesterday, I was listening to the radio during my drive on the way back from Masuda, the southern neighboring city in Shimane prefecture, and I tuned into one of the only two stations I'm able to get. Luckily, I caught a public radio-type interview with a French accordian player. The music in his segment was dubbed "French cafe music" and sounded very much like the stuff you hear in Amelie or in French music compilation CDs you buy for your mom during Christmas. Anyway, I liked his stuff. What I liked better was listening to the dialogue in French and Japanese with the guy speaking in French while one of the Japanese ladies translated and discussed his comments with the other two DJs. No bragging of any sort on my own language abilities, but it's amazing how much you can piece together from fragments of multiple languages. I guess it also doesn't hurt that English has invaded so much of both, at least in terms of music. Le Francais can't get too snobby 'bout that one. Kind of cool to realize that much comprehension could happen.

I've also been Halloween lesson planning these past weeks, raiding the local Trial (think Nihon no Walmart) and hyakuen shops (think dollar store but WAY better) for potential Halloweeny goods. Normally I'm talking the death out of the holiday like two months in advanced, but I really haven't had much time to think about it this year. What?! Horrors and sadness! Damned this general busy-ness and work-related fatigue! It's really not the most outstanding holiday in this part of the world, to be sure, but we do teach it to the little kiddies as part of their English education. So at least lesson plans keeps my beloved #2 holiday within my realm of things to do, even if I'm not plotting my own costume with the same intensity. Thus, I still get to mention it here. A couple of group-related themes are in the talks with other JETs, though. Might not be too late for me. I'll keep you posted.

more ol' school PBS

2007-10-09T05:15:00.001-07:00

Yay! Can't seem to get enough of finding snippets of the old shows I used to watch on channel 9 (PBS in NorCal)...

Newton's Apple was this kind of low-key one where they'd answer science related questions sent in by viewers at home. Didn't quite have the memorable visuals and humor of shows like Square One, except maybe that bespectacled host guy who seems to have a face worth recalling... and maybe the spaceships and cows and CPR in that episode preview were pretty hilarious too. I don't really remember very much. However, the part I always liked and retained about it was the catchy theme song and the accompanying animation.

It turns out that the Newton's Apple theme is taken from Kraftwerk, a band I didn't start hearing till much later in life. Dang, physics nerds are hipsters at heart. If you don't believe that, get a load of these über kühl 70's German kids bobbing their heads to Ruckzuck:

Das brett ist krass. Voll der Hammer!

[German slang courtesy of BBC]

My Faborite Subject

2007-10-02T02:21:00.000-07:00

It's true: kids can be cute. Stories about kids are always the same, they're cute they're so cute, they say the dum... er, darndest things! Sometimes the most involuntarily clever things, too. Of course, it's the smart asses who make the most of a limited vocabulary that I like best.

Asked to write some poetry using some god awful textbook examples that I refuse to type out, a couple sannensei (3rd grader=9th graders US) decided on the topic of their mothers. How sweet. One of the boys was quick to point to another boy saying "He loves... his mother," switching his finger direction to a third boy midsentence. The third boy retaliated "He loves his mother!" pointing back at the other two. Ah, boys, your mom does maybe.

One sannensei has gotten to bellowing "Hyoon! Oh, Hyoon!" everytime he sees me in the hall. At least they're learning my name. Sort of.

In one ichinensei (1st graders=7th graders US) class today, students delighted in saying "Social Studies!" in the most exaggerated accent possible. You have to hear to appreciate it. "I don't like SOCIAL STUDIES!" followed by riotous laughter.

Other class highlights:

"I LIKE JAPANESE!" Damn straight you guys seem to. That one apparently is an easy one.

"HAMBAHGAH!" to which I correct, "hamBURGER" and my overdoing of the "UR-ER" sounds sends a couple students into hysterics. I now get requests for "two hamBURGERs, please" anytime I see them.

Or when asked to write what he did for summer break, one student wrote:

I went to the river in August.
I jumped there.
My friend Ikeda drowned.
The view was ugly.

Perhaps only after seeing so many "I went to training camp. It was interesting" in succession can you appreciate that one. Invention always gets an A+ in my book.

AQUAS (8/6/07)

2007-09-21T02:09:00.000-07:00

During Obon holiday (お盆, day of the spirits of ancestors), fellow JETs Greg, Lauren, Neil, and I took our day off work to visit the AQUAS aquarium just north of Hamada. If you've ever been to any aquarium in any other place in the world, it's kind of the same stuff. AQUAS had your usual array of native and imported fish with specific emphasis on whatever sealife and aquatic issues that bear the most importance to where we live. That sort of thing. Some marine biologist out there reading this probably wants to slap me right now. No, seriously, it was educational.

Three favorite photos...

First, flying fish. Because they look cool both inside and outside of water. They're also one of the special delicacies of my prefecture. Hey there, Delicious.

Second, stringy jellyfish. Ick, imagine getting stung by one of these guys.

Third, and best of all, a rather despondent shark. Yeah... thanks for noticing. Go ahead and giggle at my expense. Sigh.

The sympathetic other fish looks on.

The main attraction we traveled to AQUAS for were the belugas. Just for them, we waited in a long line, obediently entered our stadium seating area, stood, and listened intently to the lady with the classically high-pitched genki Japanese woman voice (hereby the C.H.P.G.J.W.V.) tell us things I couldn't understand while we watched the "white whales" bounce basketballs, get cuddly with their diver trainer, and finally(!) blow bubbles from their mouths.

[Oh, that guy to the right is not the narrating lady. I think he's just motioning for us to sit down and shut up.]

Ta Da! Bubbles! Alright!

Go ahead and laugh if you want, but I will willingly fall for such gimmicks. I also want a pet beluga now.

Miniature Life, Part II

2007-09-21T02:00:00.000-07:00

Wheels

So, to get around, my Board of Education (BOE) has provided me with my very own set of wheels. Here she is! Ain’t she a beaut?

Granny bikes are fairly common as your two wheeled way to get moving, aside from motorbikes and perhaps cooler looking bicycles that come in brands like Panasonic. So far, I’ve taken this bad boy (yes, it’s a boy granny) around to the grocery store, home goods store, to work at my junior high, and to the Hamada waterfront. Even after taking a few wrong turns, ducking into the wrong tunnel or heading down the wrong side street, thanks to the way the city is built, I’m soon enough looped back to City Hall or some other identifiable central point towards home. I’m predicting maybe in another month of leisurely exploration, I should have the area down pat. By bike, it probably takes about twenty minutes tops to get from one side of Hamada to the other. Small town.

You feel it too when you find yourself easily bumping into fellow foreigners at the depato, or have some of your students recognize and wave at you while your waiting at a crosswalk. It’s not to the point of being claustrophobic, but it’s certainly a new feeling for me.

The main thing I’ve had affirmed by living in Hamada, which I also learned a bit backpacking through Europe, is that small town maps are sorta crap. At least in terms of scale. Just set foot outside and wander, greet those you know, and by the time you look down again at the map in your hand, you realize you've made it about two thirds across the page.

Miniature Life (8/2-8/8), Part I

2007-09-21T01:31:00.000-07:00

浜田-shi or Hamada City is on the western side of Shimane prefecture. It has a population of just over 60,000, a big chunk of that old people, and a Wiki entry that pretty much includes all I just typed and some more. Hooray for the internet to pick up where laziness leaves off. My Board of Education also made extra sure to provide me all sorts of pamphlets, maps, calendars, and area guides giving vivid & fully illustrated descriptions, of varying usefulness, about my new place of residence. One of the Hamada tourist booklets has a cover that proudly touts the slogan "Blue Sea. Green Earth. Radiant People... A City Steeped in Culture. " What an occasional and flattering thing to be told how radiant you look this evening, and how even better to know that you are surrounded by 60,000 people who'll glow all day long while soaking together in heritage like so many beautiful bags of tea. Guess they put me in the right place.

Anyhow, I have decided that I like it here. There is most certainly a sea and some very close by points at which to approach and gaze at salted water, small rivers that run through the city with comparably small bridges for me to cross over them, and mountains blanketed in trees in the background almost anywhere I look that's not the ocean. The people here are nice in that overgeneralized Japanese-people-are-so-polite! sort of way, but I think it also helps that we coexist in a small town only mild concerned about crime and crazies. Even if a bit of both still exists. However, no more big city paranoia to keep me up at night. Maybe my only major worry comes from tiny mosquitos (蚊, "ka") buzzing around and covering me with bumps like no American 蚊 could ever do. I especially hate having that whiny buzz in my ear wake me up in the middle of the night. Shudder.

Now, we discuss my new home… The Box 2.0 (Thanks, Wendy!).

So, as luck would have it, space-wise, no upgrade for me. Sigh. However, I’m still right in the center of town, more or less, and close to work (though living pretty much anywhere in Hamada feels like close to work). It’s a one person apartment that includes an open kitchen area, a six tatami living/sleeping area, a pod bathroom, and a small balcony where I can hang my laundered clothes. There's even an associated parking spot outside... if only I had a car to claim it as mine.

The picture above is my living/sleeping area. You can see the traditional tatami flooring and paper sliding doors. My BOE was gracious enough to provide me all new tatami mats, so for the first month or so, every time I opened my door and hollered “I’m home!” I was greeted with a thick steamed cabbage-like aroma that then clung to my clothes and bags when I’d leave for work the next morning.

Did I mention how hot and humid the summer weather is in Hamada? Summers in Japan are freakin’ hot and humid, and in just the right way to cook up any organic matter you might leave out. For that reason, there are mighty concerns in this country about mold growing in your house, especially under tatami. That’s why Japanese people get in the habit of airing out their futons during the day after rolling around on ‘em all night long on the floor. Alas, you don't also pull out your tatami. They do sell all sorts of special cleaning sprays at the home goods stores to help delay the tatami rotting process. Should try to make that shopping trip one of these days.

But, yes, matter-of-factly speaking, everything about this new apartment is small, small, small. At least it turned out I didn’t need to bring much to get life started. The shelving in the apartment was actually built by my very crafty JET predecessor from New Zealand. She also made tons of clothes (or I should say "heaps" rather, like the Kiwis and Aussies do... she made heaps of clothes) , artwork, and various other crafts during her year living here, so hopefully I inherit some creative vibes with the homestead.

All my kitchenware came with the kitchen. It seems that any household necessity you can think of is a miniaturized and in most cases plasticized version of what you’d see in America. I have no full-sized oven, but a microwave/toaster oven and a broiler compartment inside my stovetop. The size of the kitchen units go well with the small food portions you typically buy at the grocery store; it seems the culture is based on daily meal planning rather than weekly, so that’s probably where some of the hype about how expensive it is to live in Japan comes from. I’m finding out that the idea of high cost really depends on what expenses you compare, like pasta sauce or gasoline, especially if you come from a big city. One fascinating-for-a-while concept for me was how fish is cheaper than chicken here. I’ll just splurge on the corn shells and salsa and start busting out some fish tacos.

My bathroom is quite literally a linoleum pod. I do at least have a Western-style toilet, no squatter for me, thankfully, though sadly no bidet or ass-jet function either like at Keio Hotel. Aw. The space in my personal loo is cramped, but at least it works. I’ll settle for that.

Tokyo, Part II

2007-09-18T04:57:00.000-07:00

Landed.

The electrolit mecca. It’s a strange thing to find yourself in a place that you maybe only talked about visiting for years among friends. I imagined Tokyo as this awesome city frequented by either the really cool or the really dorky. Depending on how you feel about big cities and the abundance of electronic toys and cutesy graphic designs on posters, packaging, and just about anything with a surface. Kitsch or die! The moment I finally stepped out onto the streets of Shinjuku to explore, the crowds of people and the urban excess were instantaneous, and I remember my first thought was precisely... yeah, this feels pretty fucking cool right now.

Picto-recap of some things I saw. The sampling's perhaps not the most exemplary, and are mostly street scenes… but check it out.

Alley way.

Crossing the street.

Already behaving like the natives.

The ever busy Shinjuku eki.

Oh yeah, my toilet! Not something I saw in the streets, but in the Keio Plaza Hotel. Bidet and ass-jet functions all inclusive.

Other discoveries included lots of Pachinko parlors, lots of neon signs that appear out of nowhere at night, and lots of free tissue paper handouts. Numerous shopping opportunities to shed newly acquired yen, which I did on a belt and an ice blue Nintendo DS + dictionary/translator cartridge. Yet there are also enough small alleys and side streets free of Engrish invasion to make you feel that, while it was high-end Asia, you're still definitely in Asia now (and not planet Mars or something equally hyperbolic). My all-time-favorite Tokyo find that I now sorely miss: Hokkaido Milk Steam Cake at a corner AmPm. Oh man, the perfect combo of milky sweetness, angel food cakey thick but fluffy texture where the pastry pulls apart with almost snap-like softness… Shimane prefecture’s konbinis have yet to show me an equivalent confectionary. I should probably look for it directly in Hokkaido. More on Shimane later...

Next two days in Tokyo, I went on outings with new JET friends Zahra, Jane, and Ryan via subway train to check out different parts of the city.

I stopped by Harajuku. Yes, that one area hyped up by the likes of Gwen Stefani.

It was perhaps a little too early in the morning to get the full affect of the high fashion scene, but there were a few wandering Gothic Lolitas here and there to help create the proper atmosphere. Zahra and I also stopped by a large Shinto shrine, in time to catch a ceremony, and later a procession of exiting priests.

One thing I’ve learned about Japan is that no matter how remotely stationed you might be, there is no shortage of well managed shrines to ring up and collect your blessings from the gods or to pay homage to the deceased.

Last day in Tokyo, before departure to the airport to head to my hometown, with Ryan and Jane I ventured one train stop past Akihabara to Asakusabashi. There we found another large temple and an attractive stretch of outdoor market. At one of the shops, I had my first sampling of rose ice cream. The first few licks feel like eating potpourri, but after a while, it actually starts to taste pretty damn good. While wandering back to the train, we also came upon a Bandai HQ. Figurines abounded both inside and outside the building, so plenty of opportunity for touristy photo ops... which I don't currently have... give me some time to steal some from the other two. :)

Ah, but just as quickly as we were whisked into Tokyo, the next day we were soon enough escorted away again to the airport to fly us out to Shimane-ken and, for five other ALTs and myself, to Hamada-shi.

Next: Settlin’ in.

Tokyo, Part I

2007-09-15T23:24:00.001-07:00

Take Off.

Let's start with the flight out of LAX to Tokyo. Yes, as promised by those who've flown before me, the lunch spread provided by Japan Airlines was quite impressive. My lunch included tasty eel and rice, a side of salad, a side of meatball, and a cheesecake. Plus complimentary Kirin! And, of course, coffee to wash it all down at the end. Ah... living the good life.

Dinner was something quite similar in size, and something I no longer remember, but I'm sure there was more complimentary beer and some green tea thrown in there. In between, I watched movies and TV, sniffled a little during Tokyo Tower, and killed some time playing knock-off versions of solitaire, Tetris, and Shanghai on my own personal little entertainment screen.

Finally we landed at Narita airport. By then my stomach had already been stuffed for twelve hours to near explosion (stewardesses really know how to sedate a person), but there was no time to hesitate or head to a bathroom. Immediately, we began the chaotic stampede through customs, straight to baggage claim, and finally to the buses whisking our belongings and selves to the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo proper.

The JETs got lots of directions along the way. Whoa, the end of the line! Yeah, get it right, stupid foreigners.

I boarded my bus and sat next to my new friend Jane from LA. During the drive, our vehicle met up with another bus painted all around with images of Thomas the Tank Engine and filled inside with a bunch of little school kids and their teachers. As our bus passed theirs, we JETs waved at these kids, who in turn became visibly thrilled by the whole idea of us doing such a thing and waved back. We ended up driving on the same route for quite a while, our buses taking turns passing one another, and each time our windows met up, the students lept up and waved. About six or seven greetings later, we mature adults were getting a little weary of the game, but it looked like the school kids were ready to up the ante themselves.

We eventually made it to Tokyo before any pants came down.

Startin' Over

2007-09-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

This is now the space for current going-ons in Japan. The only problem is I haven't logged anything for the past two months (lots of traveling and lack of internet.... and perhaps some laziness), so your first few will be back-logged logs. If you can overlook the time stamp discrepancy for now, I promise I will have things up to date soon. Hooray!

2007-04-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Milkmaid will soon be rockin' it in Japan.

2006-12-09T08:41:00.000-08:00

Hey. Old Don Hertzfeldt!

2006-11-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

A ring I stole (or the picture at least).

Worth 2 carrots. Awesome.

Taken from a gent named Amit Agarwal's blog: http://labnol.blogspot.com/

2006-11-04T07:41:00.000-08:00

I want to start shoeboxing all the neat things I find throughout the internet. So easy is it forget what fascinated you for days on end before you abruptly lost it for something else.

From last night... my piqued excitement from this video and the actress Tilda Swinton.

Orbital - The Box.

The actress again as painted by her husband John Byrne, from the National Galleries of Scotland site:

Any actress or actor who's willing to explore androgynous self-presentation but still maintain that sort of poise and intelligence makes for one alluring individual.

2006-11-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

Continuing presents the next hardest part. Just have to take things one obstacle at a time.

Where to start? Interests maybe. I could name books and movies and such... at some point I'd like to begin putting up work of my own. The longer I sit there and quietly hold on to ideas and home mades, the less interesting they become. I suppose it's best to lay things out in their most current, potentially uninteresting, but at least acknowledged state. Lay it down, and move on. Someday it won't even wait for a second thought.

I'm working at confidence. Confidence in recognition? With so much vagueness, who else reading could follow anyway? This post is the point of transition... that's where I'm starting. The beginnings of change and revealing.

It's better than nothing. For now.

2006-07-26T21:27:00.000-07:00

Why is starting the hardest part?

There, that wasn't so bad.