I've been writing a lot more in another blog I started just recently. It's written in Japanese, so it probably won't be of much use to the folks who read this one, but I started writing in it as a way to practice Japanese. For the curious, there's a link surreptitiously placed in the links section, but for the lazy folks going to http://japan.ieatchildren.com should get you to it. Alternatively, you could try skipping directly to it at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~aoshi/osaka (but damn that's long).
Unlike this blog, though, I'm pretty clear on what the readership of that blog is; particularly, my lab. What I wasn't very clear on was how deep the penetration was. For example, I knew that at least two of my labmates read it, because they've left me comments before and I go out with them from time to time. Another one eventually made his presence obvious when he posted a comment as well. One of the first two guys showed my research team leader my blog, so maybe he's read it before as well. Earlier today one of the professors came to (jokingly) tell me not to try to learn Japanese from the blog of my research team leader because it's terrible Japanese (conveniently ignore for a moment that my Japanese is infinitely worse).
When I'm writing in this blog, I don't have any real idea of who reads it. That it's written in English makes it that much more accessible amongst those living in the US, so if nothing else there's at least the illusion that it's "out there." But with the blog I keep in Japanese, the only readers that I could possibly have are people in my lab (and anyone they pass it to, but why would they do that). It seems like knowing this should change what I'm willing to write down in my blog...but it doesn't. I write in essentially the same way I do in this blog: most anything goes.
While I can come up with all sorts of possible reasons that's the case, they all seem to be giving me a bit more credit than I'm due.
In the end, I figured it's probably best to try and live a life where you don't need to hide anything you do. If nothing else, it's an ideal to work towards.
Today was a beautiful day; blue sky, gentle breeze, flowers blooming along the walk.
Everything you imagine spring to be.
The sun was warm but not overbearing, just enough for a light bit of sweat on a pleasant walk towards the center where my bike had been confiscated (for parking in a no-parking area). Enough for me to overlook finding out that my bike hadn't been confiscated after all, and had actually been stolen.
The breeze was like when I was at Kyushu, rushing in right when you find yourself wishing for it most, sweeping the heat and unrest away as it caresses your cheek and reminds that it's okay, there's nothing to be worried about. Nothing to be worried about at all, even after my attempt at asking a question during class ended up in an awkward episode that eventually led to me going up to the blackboard trying to explain what it was I was trying to ask to the teacher, in front of the rest of the class, in broken Japanese, and still not being understood.
The flowers that lined the walk were in full bloom, drinking the sun's life and breathing the wind's love. Flowers in the shape of joy, the color of laughter, and the hue of a smile. Multi-faceted and multi-colored and multi-multied. Varying personalities and tastes, chameleon enough to cover the void and emptiness that comes after bridges are burned.
********************************
I've been thinking the past few days...I wouldn't mind just staying here. What does the states have to offer me? What is waiting, there, for me? What hold does it have over me? What draw does it have to keep me for the rest of my days?
Nothing. Not a god damn thing.
I can pretend to care, but what's the point. I don't. It doesn't matter to me. Doesn't mean a god damn thing. Nothing means a damn thing to me right now.
Transient existence. Transient words. Given enough time, it all becomes a lie. People change; it shouldn't even need to be said, of course they do. All the promises of forever and always eventually turn to dust, with little to do but to be washed away in the river Styx, baptised anew.
But we like the drama. Just look at that last sentence. All sizzle and no steak. All style and no content. Hollow words for a hollow person.
Don't romanticize the past and make it out to be something it wasn't.
The simplicity is the brutality.
And to all the people who've been goodly enough to bear with me to this point, I will make this clear, in time. The disarray just needs a moment to settle back down.
Burning bridges falling down,
Falling down, falling down
Burning bridges falling down,
My fair lady.
So there's this blogging software package one of the guys at the OCF wants installed. It's called b2evolution. I downloaded the package, wrote an installer script for it, etc. etc. and have been trying it out on my own webspace.
Thus far, it sucks.
1. I haven't given it a fair amount of poking around yet, but blogging software shouldn't require that much poking around. MovableType went up with hardly a hitch, and all it took was filling in a few fields of where to write the files and such...hardly a big deal.
2. I've been looking for how to delete the default blogs they have in b2evolution for a while now and damn it for the life of me I can't find where it is. MovableType has a nice little link right in front of the blog that's labeled pretty clearly. No such luck in b2evolution.
3. The default color scheme is massively broken (at least on my machine). It looks really nice, I was all excited about it when I first say it, a really nice pearl white scheme. Then I tried typing in text. "wtf?" I thought to myself, "nothing's showing up but the cursor's moving." Turns out the text comes out in white too. Blaaaaargh this is extra bullshit I don't need to deal with when setting up blogging software.
4. The buttons and such of b2evolution look real nice and all, but the default fonts and the way the actual text is laid out looks amateur-ish and gaudy. MovableType's looks much cleaner, slicker, and more polished, and because of that, it feels easier to use.
I'm not sure if I want to take the time to hack through PHP code to get it to behave the way I want it to. The actual configuration of both b2evolution and MovableType don't differ that much....b2evolution just doesn't do what it advertises it will do. Maybe my permissions are off? I somehow doubt it, but eh. I'll give it another swing later. Maybe I'll take the time to start writing a Python version of blogging software one of these days.
Python's so much sexier than PHP.
I had a bit of an entry in progress a moment ago. I decided it was too long winded and in much too great a state of disarray to be worth reading; so I deleted it.
I'm usually someone who thinks that if you're willing to put it out once you should keep it up, even if you don't agree with the thought later, or want to retract it, because allowing it to exist in that form is admitting that you once felt like that, that you were one like that. If you don't agree with the thought later, add something. If you want to retract it, say so. But don't erase it and try to get away before anyone notices because that's just hiding from yourself. Life involves being wrong a lot. Trying to run away from it only compounds the problem.
(switching gears)
It's spring time. Granted, towards the end of spring, but there's still some left.
Spring cleaning time. Time to take all the madness, all the mixed-up criss-crossed cobwebs of past relationships and misunderstandings and all the nights spent crying your eyes to sleep and wash them away with a fit of how-I-hate-to-leave-you and but-I-love-him-I-must. Away, away with all the tear soaked kisses and embraces which last only a brief moment with all the emptiness of forever-partings to come after.
Just don't forget that the hard decisions of today are tomorrow's past melodrama. It's easy to get caught up in the moment and swept up into each rounded syllable and the rhythm of sweet stabbing words, and you've got all of foreverafter to pay for the impulse of here and now.
For a while now I've been thinking to myself "man laying out hardware kind of sucks, it's so hard to see any of it in action and debugging it based on waveforms is such a pain..." Now, it seems I might be switching back to software coding, and I find that I'm motivated to work with laying out hardware again. The imminent loss of opportunity must be spurring me to action, as loss seems to have a tendency to do.
At the same time, I'm catching myself thinking things like "Wow look at how portable this implentation is, that's amazing!" or "Wow, the modularity of this package and the way it all interfaces together is nifty!" etc. etc. I can feel the cohesiveness of my thinking begin to crumble into lines of code rather than natural language...
entity life is
port (
clock, reset : in pressure;
senses : in input_sensors(5 downto 0); -- for the little endian people in the world
motivation : in integer;
work : out level);
end entity life;
Back to coding....
I'm told that Japan's a really safe country to be in, with one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Seeing how comfortable people are with walking around by themselves at the dead of the night (I can't count the number of times my midnight excursions have included running into random girls walking around by themselves), I'm inclined to think that this place must really be that safe. Granted, there are some more unscrupulous places where it's rather dangerous here, but by and large it's rather safe. I don't think Jason, Paul, and I would have been offered rides back when we were at Kyushu if this country wasn't at least a moderately safe place to live in.
That said...
When I was a kid of about 6 or 7, my friends and I used to play this "game" where if we were walking along the streets and a car drove by, we'd scream "drive by!" and dive down onto the ground.
Ahh America.
Food tastes good again, so eating is no longer something I have to force myself to do so I can stay alive.
I'm getting tired again, so hopefully sleeping will no longer be something I have to try to force myself to do so I can maintain some sort of cohesive state.
I went to Black Veil's 4th anniversary party last night (which is still continuing on to today morning, i.e. now, which will be followed by me sleeping away the afternoon). Nothing quite like a bunch of people dressed from as little as a leather bra and cloth-y g-string to as much as a gothic lolita dress dancing around in a fashion that completely ignores the beat of the music to get me up and out of a funk. Even though everyone dances the same damn way (as soon as the beat drops and you have a synth pad holding a note, you can be sure that several pairs of hands will go into the air in some pseudo-floaty thing. Eesh), it's fun to go out and do my own thing because apparently, at goth clubs the world over everyone dances in a way that's just kind of going back and forth on two feet, while I've gotten rather used to LA-style goth clubbing, which those who've been unfortunate enough to have been dragged to one by me before can (probably still) properly visualize. It's therapeutic, getting out there and tearing it up for a while, getting all that pent up energy thrown out into the wild to mix it up with some curious mixture of cologne with perfume, sex with sweat, lust with envy.
It seems that people don't like to go clubbing alone, but curiously I have a funny tendency to run into people who do. Last time I went I met some random Australian girl who decided to go by herself (whose name I inquired, then promptly forgot). This time I met a girl from Italy, and I thought up a little blurb about her whilst I was walking home; it goes a little something like this:
We bumped into each other in a fortuitous encounter which you were neither expecting nor I planning for (but this is redundant). I'll move my nose to your hair, lips to ear to tell you my thoughts and you'll return the gesture, trading screams amidst the noise to try and communicate through the din and roar. You'll tell me about life in Italy; how Venice is like going back in time to the 17th century, and is best experienced around February during Carnival. I'll tell you about life in America; how LA seems like a really angry place, and though SF is also a rather big city it doesn't seem to harbor as much anger and is a great place to visit. We'll talk about such things, and whether respect or honesty is the more important virtue for a significant other to possess, and the flaws and shortcomings of the Japanese male/female, and what it is that you do and I do and you want to do and I want to do, and you'll slide yourself into the crook of my arm while we'll sit around without dancing because the bass is turned up way too high so that while EBM usually has a bass that's strong enough to slap you across the face to make sure you're aware of it, with the extra boost the bass doesn't so much make you move as much as it beats you over the head repeatedly until you cry uncle, uncle!
And yet through all of this I don't inquire your name, nor you mine; and all we part on is a see-you-next-time. Your time is even more limited than mine (you've only two months left; I, three), but what does this matter to people like you and I who are so comfortable with the transience of all this that it's nonsense doesn't even begin to faze us?
*******
That said, some random things I saw:
* A LOT of foreigners. It's like they all came crawling out of the woodwork or something for tonight's party.
* I met a random fellow named Shin, who seemed to have gotten pretty irritated with me getting the bulk of the attention of the girl from Italy (that place where Erica will be going; go to Venice Erica!). I'm strangely unmoved towards pity, since it seems he snagged himself a foreign girl later in the night.
* One girl in little more than a leather bra and cloth-y g-string (see reference way above) riding this other girl who was wearing...something I can't even remember because the randomness of her bring ridden kind of overruled everything else.
* This girl (that I also saw last time) who vaguely reminds me of Karen Kuo, only in this really tight pleather body suit/dress thing (it's great watching someone try to move when the maximum distance one foot can be from the other is all of about....3 inches).
* Some random guy who was a few inches taller than me. What the hell I didn't know they made them that big in this country.
* This one girl who was wearing 90% see through materials. Too bad she was ugly (and I mean like...ugly ugly. Blech)
Now with all that said and done, looks like I've had my fill of lollygagging about with empty wants and wishes, and it's time for me to get my life back in gear. Yeehaw, here we go!
I'm not quite sure where to begin.
It seems that lately, people are living up to my every expectation of them. This leads to my every expectation being fulfilled, but at the price of my every hope being dashed to pieces. If you're curious about how that works, it goes something like this: I've begun to expect people to fail.
You tell me all these things you'll do, how your actions will prove your convictions, and that you'll change, you will! But we've already danced this dance and I still remember what came of it. We've come full circle back to the beginning. Again.
You say we'll go out tomorrow and you can meet me whenever so long as we get back by 4 so you can get to work on time. So I say sure, that's fine.
But you'll call me at 6:42 in the morning to tell me you won't be able to make it and that maybe we can go to our second plan instead. So I say sure, these things happen, it's okay. You'll tell me you'll meet me at 1 and I say sure, that's fine.
But you'll call me at 12:17pm to tell me you'll be about half an hour late. So I say sure, these things happen, it's okay.
But you'll call me at 1:26pm to tell me something came up and it's going to take a while (a nice, long, indefinite "while"). So I say sure, these things happen, it's okay.
But you'll call me at 1:40pm to tell me you just got back together with an ex yesterday and some things happened and as much as you hate to do this you ask me if it's okay if he comes along. So I say sure, these things happen, it's okay.
And so we'll meet, an hour past due, and I'll smile and listen to you talk about things with your ex, and we can forget about unrequited feelings for a moment and pretend to just be friends.
I suppose what you said about sums it up: "人生に色々なことがある" I suppose these things happen.
But all I can do is sit here under a tree while I throw my head back and laugh at the ruthless absurdity of it all. I have a difficult time staying angry for very long. This entry doesn't have any of the sultry fire and venom which thoroughly flowed through the words when they were congealing in my head; it's just kind of empty, like a window without a breeze.