• Stuff I emptied out from my apartment: 56 sq. meters’ worth of furniture, art, daily life crap and assorted paraphernalia.
• Stuff I still owned after distributing everything else to friends, family and random strangers: 6 small boxes (books and some clothes).
• Stuff actually in my possession and not currently sitting in a basement until I have a home again someday: 1 suitcase.

The first metric tonne is always the hardest to part with… After that it just comes off naturally.

This morning, I sat through the last written test of my life.^(*)

^(*) Don’t get all excited now: I am far from done… Still got a couple reports and projects to hand in, not to mention thesis defense(s) in the coming months/years. Not to mention JLPT in December and any other such certification test I may ever be foolish enough to apply for… Still:

The last written test of my entire existence!

A tightly-packed ball of childhood holiday nostalgia just for you…

(more…)

Things I officially cannot — or shouldn’t be able to — do at work without my magic magnetic ID card:

• Walk past security in the lobby.
• Get on the elevator to my floor.
• Go to the bathroom after 7pm.
• Walk in or out of my office after 9pm
• Access the building’s gym.
• Access the lab room and play with my little robot friends.
• Access the lab room and play Wii Tennis on the lab’s 20 mile-wide plasma screen.

Damn you Big Brother…

Her: You know: vodka grapefruit and mini-twix does not make for a proper breakfast…

Him: Oh yea? Well, waking me up for sex at 5am to kick me out of bed by 6 does no make for a proper wake-up either.

You know there are serious problems with your motivation levels when you’d rather spend the day reading up Agrawal’s [sublimely elegant but entirely irrelevant] PRIMES is in P paper than do actual work.

Much drinking and bonding with old Japanese geezers around beer and yakitori in the dark confines of Shinjuku’s seediest Golden Gai and Shouben Yokochou’s 6-seater bars. Learning outrageously offensive Japanese war songs (unfortunately forgetting most of it amidst next day’s hangover).

Going dancing in the middle of Tokyo typhoon #4. In fact a pretty mediocre Dubsteps/Drum’n'Bass party with few dance-friendly melodies and much drug-friendly excruciatingly boring bass lines (god, I hate hardcore Drum’n'Bass). Had fun with friends nonetheless. Woke up to torrential rain, earthquake shakes and some wonders about a possibly upcoming end of the world. BTW, am I the only one to have noticed how often earthquakes seem to occur concurrently with typhoons, no matter how scientifically implausible such a connection sounds? Or am I just high? Or both?

Went and saw a movie at Tokyo’s one and only Lesbian & Gay Film Festival with Eriko. Had pictures taken by the official event photographer of myself mingling at the pre-screening party amidst Eriko and her lesbian friends. Expecting to see them plastered all over next year’s official website, if not before. Not sure how that might help my style with the ladies. Not that I looked gay or anything on them: I was wearing that very manly embroidered white silken shirt and tight-fitting designer jeans.

House party at Klaus’ with twenty-some attendees, each speaking over 2 or 3 languages, none the same two: nearly sounds like a math problem. Ate Asparagus pizza. Examined the spirit of Japan with drunken Japanese boys. Sorta missed my last train and had to go beg for shelter in the neighbourhood.

Apparently acceptable topics for hairdresser smalltalk in Japan include: how long have you been in Japan, do you like Japanese food, do you like natto. Oh yea, also: what do you think of Japanese girls’ small breasts.

(more…)

Because this phase of intense self-absorbed navel-contemplation passing off as thoughtful meditation just isn’t about to end now…

the Good

• Last week’s blitz-vacations in London were everything I needed (quite possibly a few things I didn’t need too). I unfortunately didn’t have time to travel to the countryside and say hi to the family (hi auntie, sorry I didn’t make it), but I got to catch up with many longtime-not-seen friends, met a few cool new people etc.
• This week, funding was approved on a research internship I had a applied for, back in February. As a result, I will be spending the Summer in Tokyo, perfecting world domination plans and my army of killer robots at the NII. That is, if I don’t decide to drop out and retreat to a Zen monastery instead. And it is far from excluded at this point.
• I’m “brilliant”. More to the point: I am no longer the only person in the world to publicly hold that unflinching opinion of myself (see below).

the Bad

• Being “brilliant”, I am therefore “way too smart to be wasting time on such trivial matters as those affecting my mood and the quality of my work these days”. Sayeth a certain advisor of mine.
• “Fuck you”, or a somewhat equally disparaging and hardly more articulate variation on the term, may have been my reply to said advisor and coincidentally depositary of a good share of my academic future.
• Despite today being the first day of final exams week (more like the French equivalent of post-grad quals, actually), I have yet to open a single revision book or prepare for any of it. The cause may lie in aforementioned trivial matters of the heart or, more likely, in the sudden realization that I might be heading the way of that very advisor’s somewhat pathetic, if highly regarded in academic circles, life and career.

the Ugly

• In fact, for reasons I can’t fully fathom (although there sure are a couple leads to follow), I seem to have caught the academic-self-doubt bug at the most unbecoming time. I honestly don’t think I will act on it, but the fact I can’t bring myself to even find interest, let alone try and revise for those rather important exams, seems a pretty efficient passive-aggressive way to get there nonetheless.
• Irony of ironies, I think I may have done pretty well today in spite of my utter lack of preparation, which still leaves the question open for the remaining 4 exams I am to take (not to mention, yearly lab project, due next week).

I suppose I still have ten hours (sleep notwithstanding) to acquire a motivation, snort 10g of crushed Red Bull powder and catch up on two weeks worth of revisions.

Will I ? Fuck if I know. Suspense is killing me.

Have you ever noticed how, sometime, you feel so great about life that the most catastrophic news barely manage to scratch past your happiness before slipping away unnoticed…

But then, when things have come crashing down and you feel utterly miserable about everything, inside or outside, you cannot bring yourself to care, let alone rejoice, about the sort of good news you’d been waiting with baited breath for months until then.

All that in an endlessly repeating sequence, it seems.

I think we need a name for that strangely cyclical phenomenon…

Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.

Desiring to show his attainment, he said: “The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realisation, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received.”

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth angry.

“If nothing exists,” said Dokuon, “where did this anger come from?”
Zen koan

Qualche volta, la notte, quest’oscurità, questo silenzio, mi pesano.

E’ la pace che mi fa paura. Temo la pace più di ogni altra cosa: mi sembra che sia soltanto un’apparenza, e nasconda l’inferno.

Pensa a cosa vedranno i miei figli domani…

Il mondo sarà meraviglioso, dicono. Ma da che punto di vista, se basta uno squillo di telefono ad annunciare la fine di tutto?

Bisogna di vivere fuore dalle passione e altri sentimenti nell’armonia che c’è nell’opera d’arte reuscita, in quell’ordino incantato.

Vodremmo reuscire al amarci tanto, da vivere fuore del tempo, distacati…

distacati.
La Dolce Vita

Back from London. Now I’ll be taking a break for a couple days. See you later.

Wherein the author unabashedly stares at his navel while describing in painfully boring details his past and current academic endeavours under the guise of introducing some of the topics bound to become a fixture of this blog.

As morbidly obsessed faithful readers of this blog may remember, I made a decision 18 months ago to go back to school and try for one of these fancy post-graduate degree in Compooter Thingies.

As it happen, my original bachelor was mostly centered around Mathematics and Physics, two sciences that turned out to make for infinitely more entertaining conversation topics than university majors (also, it was sorta interspersed with half a dozen other totally unrelated course of studies). Having come to develop uncontrollable rash-like allergic reactions to the mere mention of either topic, it sounded wise to shift the focus of my academic pursuits over to a slightly different major. Hence Computer Science, or to be exact: Artificial Intelligence (which is, to paraphrase some guy, as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes). As for the “going-back-to-university” thing altogether, it was mostly motivated by the pointed realization that, of the entire spectrum of available jobs, university student was the one I was most happily fitted for: After being a corporate droid for many years, a beach bum for another couple, I figured being paid a [rather mediocre] salary to work on cool research projects while learning semi-interesting things, sounded like a very fun way to pass time before retiring to a desert island in the Indian Ocean. That and the possibility that I may one day be responsible for the enslavement of humanity under the cold, merciless dominion of superiorly intelligent thinking machines.

(more…)

I dunno if this week’s forecast of warm temperatures and summery sunshine, coming after a full month of rainy Winter in August, is Parisian Gods’ way of saying “Look, I’m sorry for what happened, I’ll treat you better from now on”…

But if it is, then consider this my most heartfelt “Too little, too late” break-up letter.

I think I may have solved two mysteries at once.

A clue?

It’s small, got round ears and no longer scurries above my ceiling…

Also, it doesn’t pay rent.

Any suggestion on Disney-sanctionned ways of ridding one’s home of uninvited critters? that doesn’t involve camping out in the middle of the leaving room day and night, flashlight and hammer in hand?

This morning before work, I had to put my bank in Paris on the phone through to my bank in Tokyo.

I seriously don’t know which one of the two spoke the least English.

Heard last evening, on the topic of male g-strings:

FdM: “I could never wear a g-string.”

N: “How would you know if you’ve never tried?”

FdM: “Look, I can’t even stand to wear flip-flops.”

I wish I could say that’s the weirdest thing I heard that night.