It seems that lately reality's bleeding into my dreams, and reality's got a bit more of my dreams in it than I particularly care for. It kind of adds to life being even more surreal than it usually is, and given how surreal life is on a normal basis, it seems like it's only a matter of time before I find myself at the bottom of the rabbit hole thinking to myself "well this is a jolly fine mess to be in."
I've an odd feeling about this week. It feels as if after this week, there won't be anything left. That is, I'll think to myself "Hmm I've got another four days of day passes for the train, maybe I'll go wander around to some random spot and have myself a bit more of a sightseeing trip," but it doesn't feel real. Like the time will never come, things will simply blink out of existence by then. It doesn't really make sense, I know. It probably won't make sense for a while, but it seems these things have a strange way of unfolding in such a way that after I look back I have one of those "ohhhhhhhhhhhh...so thaaaaat's what it meant" things. Damn you 20/20 hindsight!
In other news, I've been thinking over a few things lately. Take, for example, music. I was having a chat with Jon about music, and he mentioned how he doesn't like pop music because it's so flat and boring, rarely deviating from the ABA structure. For those who have had better things to do with their time than learn music theory, ABA structure means you can divide your song up into three distinct sections: a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning and the end are the same. Hence, they share the letter "A," and the middle part that's different gets the letter "B." You can contrast this with some other pretty standard pop music which has a bridge in the middle of the song, resulting in something more like ABCBA structure (a beginning, a chorus, a bridge, repeat chorus, end with the same thing it began with). Of course, given that he's (usually) a pretty intelligent guy, I imagine that he meant that as a bit of a simplification (or, more correctly, I'm hoping he meant it as an oversimplification, because otherwise he's just an idiot, and nobody likes having an idiot for a semi-roommate). Putting the blame on ABA structure seems a bit unreasonable, seeing how you can take a look at classic, well received pieces which aren't just the latest trash pop, and some of them also follow ABA structure (or ABA' structure).
But talking to someone about music like this could go on for just about forever, and my carpal-tunnel syndrome induced fingers are getting rather tired so it seems like I should go get some sleep and hopefully, one day, reduce the degree to which my eyes are bloodshot to something more manageable.
And now it's time for a weeklong adventure of strange and wondrous places (only they're not so strange, seeing how I've been there before...but hopefully still wondrous, though last time they weren't quite so magical).
So with that, a good night and farewell for another week or so!
My roommate Jon met up with me at Umeda today after I got off work to go eat at this omurice (think omellette + rice + some topping) there that has this monster omurice weighing in at a kilogram(!) of food. Afterwards we ended up wandering over to the bookstore to kill some time and burn some of his money (until he starts bitching about not having enough money and how he can't eat...again). We were browsing around the English books, having a conversation that went something along the lines of him saying that nobody in America reads, and me saying that it wasn't thaaaaat bad, there are still folks who read (looking at Erica). There was this woman who happened to be browsing the books next to us who overheard our conversation (given how I have to tell Jon from time to time that he doesn't have to project his voice so much since I'm standing right next to him, this isn't exactly surprising) and interjected for a bit, talking to Jon (and only marginally to me) about literature.
Now you see, Jon's the kind of guy who says 99% of the women he sees here are ugly (okay, I'm being unfair to him...98%). He also rarely, if ever, socializes with women (except for this one time when we were in Kyoto, with this one girl...but her name is best left unmentioned, lest terrible horrible things should happen). So here he was, having this nice little conversation with a Japanese lady who was clearly trying very hard to express herself (and doing a good job, she was pretty good at English) and he was clearly trying to limit his vocabulary a bit so she would be able to follow (and doing a good job, she seemed to be getting along alright). It was a nice, pleasant conversation (granted I was sitting on the sidelines trying not to get in the way, since doing so would probably be the closest thing to cockblocking I could do, given how often he actually talks to a girl...even if she does look old enough to possibly be his mother). One of those "wow aren't Japanese people nice, they're not as introverted as people say that are" moments.
Time passes. We bid our goodbyes to the lady, and it's off to the train to head home.
He and I start up a conversation on American Beauty and whether or not there was some sort of deeper meaning to the scene where the guy's dad busts in on him and catches him filming Jamie naked (I didn't think there was any), and Jon begins to kick one foot up on his knee. Apparently, he tagged the guy sitting next to him ("apparently," because otherwise the following exchange becomes a bit hard to follow). The guy taps the offending foot, and Jon, taking the hint, puts his foot back down. The guy asks in Japanese "Are you Japanese?" to which Jon naturally replies "No, I'm American," at which point the guy switches gears and starts talking in English. "Your manner is very...bad." Jon gets this dumbfounded look on his face, and I sit there with a quizzical eyebrow furrow, but we decide to kind of let it go. A few moments pass and the guy turns around to us again and says something to Jon about Japanese people not liking something (I kind of zoned out since it didn't have much to do with me, and having worked deciphering broken English all day I was in no mood to continue doing so), but it wasn't exactly the most encouraging thing to say, given how Jon turned to me afterwards and whispered "wow...it's the opposite extreme" (I assume in reference to the woman we were talking to earlier).
I wonder if that little episode was a cultural difference thing, where having a leg up on a knee is considered rude, or if Jon actually tagged the guy, or if maybe the guy was just a bit ornery. Regardless, it was rather awkward, and hence the title of this entry. Now back to regularly scheduled diagraming and laying out hardware. Yeehaw.
In case I've never said it before, I will say it now: FAT sucks. FAT16 sucks. FAT32 sucks.
Is a robust file system (maybe one with journaling, I've got over a gigabyte, I can easily spare a couple megs for the journal) too much to ask for in a consumer-level portable audio player?
This is a bit of a quick synopsis of my trip to Kyushu and the western part of Japan. While I had intended on writing something longer, my memory is already starting to fade and I want to catch what I can while I can.
Day 1: Okayama
I went down to Okayama to meet up with Jason and Paul, after a bit of a disconcerting encounter with my manager. I went to see Okayama Castle to kill time while waiting for them. It's a really dark, almost black color, and is often called the Crow castle, as a bit of a counter to Himeji, which is a really pure white and is often called the Heron castle. The garden in back, Korakuen, was closed by the time I got there, sadly (but that's okay, I got a chance to go there later in my trip). Eventually I met up with Jason and Paul, and we headed over to the youth hostel I had reserved. We neglected to find food, and didn't realize it'd be so out in the boonies, so we survived on a piece of beef jerky and making flour cakes (i.e. frying a mixture of water + flour in a frying pan). Of course, the flour we found lying around, the water was from a faucet, and we spotted some random butter packet in the otherwise empty fridge at the youth hostel to make the two small things with. It's always fun to see how little you really need to survive.
Day 2: Yamaguchi bound
We were going to go to Tottori to see the sand dunes, but since the travel routes didn't work out well we ended up just traveling all day to Yamaguchi, whereupon we saw lots and lots of country on the six or seven hours we spent on the train. It's fascinating to see old style Japanese houses dotting the mountainscape with rice fields sectioned off in neat little areas. So un-city. So peaceful. Eventually we got to Yamaguchi, where we discovered that there are some train stations which are no bigger than a few table-lengths, with only one turnstyle, and only one stationmaster. No machines, no magnetic card readers, nothing. Totally boonie-ville. After we spent the night at a youth hostel there, where we mostly froze, we woke up the next morning to the sight of a completely white landscape. Snow had fallen, was falling, and it wasn't like the snow here in Osaka which somewhat flitters down while fading away into nothing, these were huge snowflakes cascading down like fragments of a wayward star to gently clothe the ground in white, without an imperfection or footstep in sight until I came to put one there. Beautiful. The lady who ran the youth hostel made us sakura mochi, too, because it was 3/3, which is Hina-matsuri (Girl's day). She gave us some really good tea, too. I wonder if I'm getting old, I'm beginning to favor tea over soda.
Day 3: Shimonoseki to Fukoka/Hakata
We headed down to Shimonoseki, the last city on Honshu, the main island of Japan. From there, Paul and Jason let me indulge in my taste for strange things and walked with me underground through a tunnel that led to the northernmost city on the Kyushu island, Kita-Kyushu (North Kyushu, isn't that creative!). From there we started hunting for a train station so we could go the rest of the way to Fukuoka/Hakata (two gigantic cities, right next to each other, so they kind of merged into one). It turns out that after walking for a kilometer or two that the station was a long ways away, so this lady that Paul randomly asked for directions gave us a ride there. A completely random act of kindness. As she dropped us off she gave each of us some snacks, saying that she had bought three of each of them, just right for one for each of us. As she drove off the way she came (i.e. she went completely out of her way to help us complete strangers), I couldn't help but think to myself what a horrible person I am in comparison, and how much more work I have ahead of me. Eventually we made it to Fukuoka and Hakata, where we fooled around, relaxed, and ate at the yattai's, which are little shack-ish things people put up at night to sell food. As it so happens one of the ones we ate at was where an episode of London Hearts was done, which was kind of neat. Kyushu ramen is awesome. Hakata is famous for it's women, and it most certainly seems true to me. There's a marked difference between Osaka women and Hakata women. Kyoto's supposed to be pretty famous for it's women too, but I haven't spent enough time there to really know (maybe one of these days...). We stayed at an uber-high class capsule hotel here, which was a nifty experience. You sleep in this little box, with a curtain you can draw. When I was telling my English tutee about this she laughed and said "but you're huge! How can you fit in those? Could you sleep well?" Little did she know that those are actually pretty roomy, and the place we stayed at had free porn (but since porn is censored by the Japanese government, it was all mosaic-y. Darn). And just to make things entertaining, Jason spilled some milk in one of the capsules...one can only wonder what the cleaning staff will think of that. If I were to do JET, Fukuoka/Hakata would definitely be on my list of places I'd like to be.
Day 4: Nagasaki
We went down to Nagasaki the next day, and saw Peace Park, the atomic bomb museum, some of downtown, and generally absorbed some culture. I wanted to take a stop at the reliefs they had of the 26 Christians who were crucified there during the banning of Christianity by the Japanese government some centuries back (two of the people crucified were twelve years old), but we got caught up doing other things. The atomic bomb museum was depressing, and a bit of an injection of reality for our trip. Peace Park was neat, seeing the big statue they have, and all the cranes that were folded lining the area (something that was started by a little girl who had developed leukemia due to exposure to radioactive fallout, who believed that if she could fold 1000 cranes that she'd be cured. She died before she could finish them. After that, others took up what remained). There's a fountain there that is in the shape of wings. Paul got a nice picture where the water's coming up behind him and it really looks like he's got wings. After that we went to the downtown area, where we tried some Nagasaki-style food, which is a mixture of Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese food (Nagasaki was the only port open to the outside world when the Japanese government cut off all contact to the outside world back in the 1600's). The Chinese influence was really obvious, especially in their sara-udon and chanpon dishes. The Portuguese side came out in their kasutera, which is like pound cake, only it tastes slightly different. Later that night we went to our crash space for the night, which was at this hot springs place called Ios where we slept on the ground in the middle of a huge living room-ish area, next to arcades. The sounds of "daijobu da~" never ended. The next person to say that to me is going to get stabbed repeatedly :P It was up on a mountain, and looking down on all the night lights of Nagasaki was beautiful. So much beauty on this trip, it's ridiculous.
Day 5 & 6: Beppu
I wanted to go to Mt. Aso (an active volcano, yeehaw!) and climb it, but the route was really roundabout, so we ended up going to Beppu, which is famous for it's hot springs. The route we took got us there pretty late in the evening, so we just rested and relaxed a bit the first day, continuing the sight seeing the following morning. We saw some of the jigoku hot springs ("the hells"), which are way too hot to bathe in, but are neat to see because they've got all sorts of colors (we saw the blue ones and the red ones). After that we went down to the sand bath, where we had to wait an hour before having our turn. But! It was there that I discovered this spot in the waiting room where a sunbeam would hit juuuuuust right and keep you at the precise temperature ideal for napping, with a gentle breeze coming in from time to time. The hour flew by, and it was time for the sand bath, where we were basically buried in really warm wet sand, like you might do at the beach, only this was much, much nicer because the temperature was kept pretty constant. So while I lied there, body warm and covered in sand except for my face, a breeze blew by, lending cool breath from mouth to lung to all over, while I looked up at a clear blue sky, endless and infinite, and let the world pause for a moment to enjoy the peace. Definitely recommended for anyone who happens to pass by that way. After that we took a ferry to Matsuyama, where we spent the night. To pass the time on the ferry we played some cards, and decided to make it interesting by gambling with "seconds outside without a shirt" (it was freezing outside). In the end we all had about a minute's worth of time out there, all the while screaming "who's god damn idea was it to do this crazy shit? what the fuck were we smoking holy shit it's cold god damn it who the fuck's idea was this?" with a huge smile and laughter painting our faces. I stopped for a moment to think about how often we take warmth for granted once we got back inside. Sweet jesus it was cold. Once we got to Matsuyama we poked around for a bit, then headed to our capsule hotel (a ghetto one this time) to stay, and enjoyed the ghetto Japanese businessman life for a bit.
Day 7: Miyajima and Hiroshima
We took a ferry from Matsuyama to Hiroshima, whereupon we took another ferry down to Miyajima, which is an island right next to Hiroshima. This place is famous for it's torii, which is this big gigantic structure in front of shrines I can't describe very well. The shrine there is pretty famous, too, because at high tide it looks like it's floating on the water, and the torii looks like it's magically suspended. We got there at low tide, though, but that didn't mean things weren't interesting! We saw all sorts of people go there to dig up oysters from the beach (now that's fresh!), and we engaged in a bit of digging of our own. Jason ended up with two oysters and a sand crab before we moved along to play with deer (I got assaulted by one) and mess with their heads a bit. We also had some famed Hiroshima-yaki, which is like okonomiyaki, only Hiroshima-style (it has fried eggs and a pancake-ish thing, as well as soba in it). We ate at this restaurant where it included kaki (oyster) and they had some hotate (scallop), as fresh as fresh can possibly be, rich and abundant with the flavor of the ocean. The lady who cooked our food for us was nice to us, too, giving us six scallops for the price of five (since splitting five between three people gets kind of tough sometimes). Later on we went to explore in Hiroshima, and stopped at the Atomic Dome (the atomic bomb exploded right above it) and took some eerie-feeling pictures. We stayed at a youth hostel there, where we ran into Aiko and her friend (Sachiko?), whom we had met back in Tokyo during the summer. Completely random, it really is a small world. It was nice to catch up, though, and take some time off from hectic running around to just chat for a bit.
Day 8: Heading back
Paul and I parted ways with Jason, who was staying in Hiroshima with relatives. Paul and I hopped on a train and started on the six hour trip back to Osaka (for him, six and a half to Kyoto), and spent a few languid hours just looking out at the scenery passing by. I couldn't help but think to myself how this country is so fascinatingly split between the big cities, like Osaka and Tokyo and Fukuoka and Hakata, and at the same time it has endless countryside nestled in the mountains and oceans.
It was an educational trip, a relaxing trip, a fun trip, and it'd be great to do it all again.
I'm back in Osaka from my trip across the western part of Japan. The places I recall going to off the top of my head include Okayama, Yamaguchi, Shimonoseki, Kita-Kyushu, Fukuoka, Hakata, Nagasaki, Beppu, Matsuyama, Miyajima, and Hiroshima. I'll probably get around to putting up pictures and such later, and maybe some details on fun things that happened and other strange occurrences, but this is all contingent on whether or not I get motivated enough to do anything (and seeing how it's warming up outside and is starting to turn into that wonderful time of year when it's warm enough to walk around in a t-shirt but not so hot that you sweat and the breeze blows by just right over your skin around your head and flows between your fingers like fine silk it's unlikely that I'll want to do anything but sit outside under a tree and read a book or two or three or four or more).
The most immediate thoughts I recall having during the trip:
- Doing what's convenient versus doing what's right keeps coming up in my life. Especially in the little things. Always got to remember to do the right thing and not just what's convenient for me, because this world most certainly was not made just for me.
- It seems like the further away you get from the cities the nicer people become. After the kindnesses that have been shown to me on this trip, it's become more apparent than ever that I'm a terrible, horrible person. I've much to work on still.
- There's still so much beauty in the world and the people who live in it that it's hard to stay bitter for very long.
- I could be happy, deliriously happy, living out in the country tending a field with a mountain behind a house which I built (maybe with the help of a few friends, who's kindness would be returned of course). But it seems that the city is the life that is meant for me. Going on camping trips will have to do for me.
And now it's time for two weeks of down and dirtiness with hardware and coding. Hack away! Arrrr matey!
There was this picture book called Tuesday that came out when I was in elementary school. I can't really recall if it was first grade, or second grade, or some other time around then, but it was the hottest of the hot books. Once a week we'd be taken to the library to check out books (as a class of course), and anyone who was anyone made a mad dash for that book if they could. I recall getting my hands on it at some point, or maybe I borrowed it from a friend who had borrowed it (maybe from another friend who had borrowed it), and there was this picture of frogs flying around. I'm not sure why, but that image sticks in my mind. If you were waiting for me to get to a point, I'll tell you now that there is none. It's just a story. A story about a picture.
And there are all sorts of pictures. Big pictures. Little pictures. And it seems so easy to lose focus and look at a big picture in a little picture way, or a little picture in a big picture way (or maybe some other confusing looped way).
Like thinking about why you're going to school. Why you're going to get a job. Why you're going to have kids. Looking at the big picture. But look at the slightly larger picture and you're just another life of six billion...how unimpressive. Look even bigger and the entire human race is just a blink of the eye in the earth's existence. A bit bigger and the earth is a blink in the eye of the universe's existence. A bit bigger and the galaxy goes away too. And you can keep expanding your picture, looking bigger and bigger until it seems that nothing matters because eventually the universe will either become so dispersed that thermal energy will be insufficient for anything remotely close to sentient life, or it will collapse back in on itself only to explode once more and start the cycle again...which might be just another part of a something else that has yet to be fathomed.
Or let's go the opposite way. Why you're going to school. Why you're doing what it is you're doing each day. Why it is you make the decisions you do. Why it is the way you think you do. But let's take a step even further. Your brain is sending signals to your body parts as they react to external and internal stimuli. Or how about the synapses in your brain are firing off. Or take a look at each individual neuron, or any of the other cells in your body doing what it is they're doing. It probably doesn't seem like they've got much of a purpose to them, just plodding along doing what it is they're supposed to be doing. Or dig a bit further to the reactions of the molecules. Poke further down into atoms, then to quarks. Hit quantum thoery and keep digging in deeper looking for answers to why things are the way they are.
But as you dig deeper and expand wider it seems like it's talking to a six year old who does nothing but ask why why why and you try to answer as best as you can but it doesn't take very long for you to run out of reasons and all you can tell them is just because. And maybe there is no reason, and there is no answer to the question why. Why does the earth revolve around the sun? Because of gravity and the particular way in which the other planets and cosmic bodies are aligned such that the gravitational well grooves so that the earth spins around and around in an elliptical shape (only the more refined mathematicians and physicists will probably yell at me and tell me I'm wrong...and I probably am, but it's 3 am and this is only a train of thought and not a fortified declaration of truth). Well certainly there is gravity, but why? Because there's mass. But why? Tracing back further and further into time and space and folds of reality and we come to...what? Another event. But why this event? And we chase further and further, but all we come to are events events events! And events don't really answer the question of why, so much as they answer the question how.
But while it'd certainly be nice to have answers to these questions at some point you can't help but wonder if there is an answer, and further that if there is an answer, if you can understand it or figure it out. But there are all sorts of ways to deal with this problem, and it's late, and I've only the energy for one quick one because it's simple.
Take the worst case scenario (or maybe it's not the worst, depends on what you value). Assume there is no answer, or if there is we can never attain it, try as we might. But still we're left with our lives, with the decisions we make, and the things we do with our lives. Why are you going to work? To get money so you can eat, to help better the world. Why? Because you're human and need to eat, and it's a good thing to help people. Why? Because you're human! It's not about to change! Just let it go, man! You've got plenty of reasons and plenty of justification lying all around you if only you stop trying to expand the picture or shrink it down too far. Sure, we're all going to die eventually, but that doesn't change that you've got a chocie about what it is you're doing with your life right now, that you can try to make a difference, that you can do your best. Sure, your cells are dying by the millions on a daily basis and there's nothing you can do about it, but you're still alive, still functioning, so there's still hope for you. So stop tripping yourself looking for answers in places where there aren't any, and find the answers lying right before your eyes. It's so easy, it's hard. Paradoxical, just like so many other things. Unlike so many others.
That's life, baby.