When your name sounds anything like “Vladimir Vapnik” or “Alexey Chervonenkis“, you just should not be allowed a career in mathematics by the cliché police.
No offense meant to our Russian mathematician friends.
My friend Scott (he of the once-a-year updated blog), once coined a term to describe that all-too-common affliction of the garden-variety blogger: the way one single little item will clog your entire production line and delay infinitely the publication of your next post. He called it weblocked, which is as good a term as any other. And guess what: it happens a lot around these parts. It goes a long way toward those long stretches of blog silence, where the more I wait, the harder it seems to find an angle to break back in.
So in the spirit of clearing my current bloggage (and also because I really don’t have the time), allow me yet another life update potpourri entry, hopefully the last one in a while.
Paris hasn’t changed over the Summer. Still mostly cold and grey on an average day. Still offering a wide variety of options to liquor oneself up. Which sorta makes up for the previous part. Also has free bikes, which is way cool.
Vélib’ is easily the best thing to happen to Paris in a long while. Dirt cheap, ubiquitous, self-service, bike stations now cover every inch of Parisian sidewalk. Which means I rarely, if ever, step into the subway or bus anymore (rainy days aside). Biking amidst Parisian notoriously psychotic car drivers is not as fear-inducing as I thought it woud be, although it requires staying alert and attentive to your surroundings at all times. Unless, that is, you are drunk, riding full speed at two on a bike, down the Montagne Sainte Geneviève (that hill atop of which sits the Pantheon) on to the next bar. But we know of no people who would do such a mindblowingly stupid thing.
Of course, this being France and perfection being neither human nor French, this wonderful system has its downsides, one of which is the many bureaucratic hoops and near-month-long wait, one has to go through in order to receive their one-year subscription card. Still waiting for mine (and living off weekly passes in the meantime).
Winterish temperatures have also finally arrived. Which had for first consequence to keep me in bed the best of last week, waiting for my usual seasonal bout of flu to pass. But now that my tissue consumption has gotten back under the metric-tonne-a-day, I have finally come to give some limited appreciation to the cold albeit rather sunny outdoors. I don’t know if it’s me growing soft or cough syrup acting up, but I swear: breathing in the fresh crisp air on a cold Parisian night nearly makes me feel all mushy inside these days. I have turned on the heater at home nonetheless.
Shortly before I started hacking my lungs out, I did manage to attend a couple miscellaneous social affairs and cool art-related thingies. In particular, I had a really good time during the yearly Nuit Blanche celebration, spent in the north of Paris where a friend was showing her paintings. I do suspect spending the night outside discussing contemporary artists’ sexuality in relation to their art, with only a light jacket and some whisky to fight off the cold, might not be completely unrelated to aforementioned health problems.
Somewhere amidst the 20-points list of excuses for my being remiss from this blog all this time, is my official decision to sign up for JLPT 2-kyuu this year. What can I say: I like pain. The test takes place at the beginning of December. By even the most optimistic estimates, I will fail by a long shot, but I figured paying the 60 euros signup fee was the best way to kick my ass into some hardcore Japanese studying for the next two months.
Of course, being a geek first and foremost, I immediately concluded that 10% of my precious 50 days of revision would be much better spent on coding a nifty Japanese drill application. Also, because I am a geek 2.0, this application is on Facebook. But I swear it doesn’t suck (at least not as much as all those vampire/pirate/ninja bollocks). Trust me, if you are studying for JLPT, or even if you are just learning Japanese for fun (mind-boggling as the concept might be), this app is all you’ve ever dreamt off.
And now that I’m done selling it, I guess it is time for me to go back to using it.
I promise I’ll try to post more frequent, if succinct, updates for the near future.
… for me at least.
These are times of project wrap-ups, end-of-stay work presentations, last drinks with friends and last cozy nights with more-than-friends. I have practically shaved my head and started packing my luggage. Next weekend I fly off to Bangkok for a couple days: not so much for relaxation as for a very necessary transitional break before resuming six months of intensive studying in Paris. Vacation time is over. Not that it was exactly vacation to begin with, but what’s ahead is sure to make this ending Summer feel like a slice of paradise in comparison.
Actually, I am not dreading return as much as I thought I would. I know those six months aren’t gonna be much fun, but the mere fact that they have a specific timeframe and the knowledge that I’ll be done at the end of March, helps make it all feel like a sort of extended vacation to Paris. And Paris is much more enjoyable if you feel you are visiting than if you actually live there. Parisian life is a different form of fun that only appeals to me, given the certainty that it won’t last: fancy dinners out, cozy wine-sipping evenings at home, opera season, art exhibits, cocktail party crashing, overwhelmingly beautiful architecture on every corner, drunken bar-counter philosophical debates… All so typically Parisian, overly sophisticated fun… that after a while makes you yearn for simpler, more natural ways of having a good time. Which is when I will be about done with my current academic pursuits and will gladly move onto another period of my life, presumably far from Paris, without regret or bitterness. So, timing is perfect, it appears.
Plans for next year are still deliberately very vague. Much less definite as they were at the beginning of this Summer. I no longer know whether a Ph.D. is the necessary path to what I later want to achieve, in fact, maybe university research altogether, isn’t. Or perhaps it is my field of research that needs revising. Throw in a couple very tempting offers, brought over to me lately, that I would be a fool not to at least consider…
Part of my Summer here was coloured by the fact that college friends I hadn’t seen much in ages, now work and live in Tokyo. Hanging out with them coincidentally reminded me of an essential conclusion of those years, that I might have lost sight of otherwise: The fact you have the abilities to do something doesn’t mean you should, and definitely doesn’t mean it will make you happier. Back then, I once did the mistake of picking what most people seemed to hold as a universally enviable life/career path, only to quickly realize that most people’s idea of happiness in life probably didn’t match mine and therefore neither did their conception of how to achieve it.
Friday night’s Birthday Party was brilliant indeed.
Even though I am still here for another couple weeks, it had a certain feeling of grand season finale: what with the improbable juxtaposition of characters plucked from miscellaneous episodes of my life: past, current and hopefully future.
The mood and settings weren’t unlike the last time we had a party at Cozmo’s, in a good way. This time around: no drunken ex-girlfriend discussing the size of my manhood with friends, but lots of friends and friends-of-friends having a good time and mingling across groups, much drunken DJing with Atsushi and Ian (escaped from Sapporo for the weekend), unexpected gifts and free drinks pouring on me ceaselessly and, most of all, Hako clad in her geisha kimono bouncing around to the music, being her usual upliftingly cute self…
A very drunk subgroup essentially made of Ian, Deny, Rie and myself then headed out for Shibuya’s very own no-name bar (aka the Chandeliers Bar, aka the Red Room etc) whence the merriness kept on going until (very) late, although we shall keep the late remainders of that evening under an opaque veil of virginal mystery.
Expectedly, the following Saturday was a bit more low-key. Movies huddled on a bed most of [what was left of] the day. Hawaiian burger lunch/dinner in Shibuya. Fruity cocktails in Harajuku. Early sleep at home.
Sunday afternoon was both Saeko’s and Etsuko’s birthday party, as well as the day of my own actual birthday. All duly celebrated in much fancy wine-drinking and buffet-eating at a gorgeous floating restaurant in Shinagawa. Some of us then went for tea and dessert nearby and I finally left to attend my own birthday dinner in a more intimate settings.
I had purposely kept my evening very mellow and was just planning to meet Rie at Araku for a couple drinks around 9pm. Noticing how unusually busy the place was for a Sunday evening, we realized that day was Golden Gai Festa: 5,000 yens would get you a pass that’d let you get into most of the tiny Golden Gai hole-in-the-wall bars with no seating charge and one drink free. Additionally, you could ask for your card to be stamped at each place and get some sort of reward upon collecting all 30-some stamps (presumably a very fresh wet towel to alleviate next day’s massive hangover). The festa had officially begun at 1pm and by evening, a lot of people were actually already on their way home. With only three hours left to go, we still decided to give it a go, figuring it was as good a way to cap the day as any other…
We didn’t regret. It was the best bar fun we’d had in a long time. Everybody was friendly and having a good time: a great mix of ages, styles and interests… We got to see a dozen such tiny bars with their peculiar themes and strange decoration before finishing the night at Albatross‘ Golden Gai branch: same cool people and cozy atmosphere, marginally more seating space (say, 10 people instead of 6)…
The rest of the week was predictably spent recovering and catching up with work. Still managed a couple drinks with Sandy in the middle of Thursday’s wild thunderstorms, discussing relationships, God and viruses… Also met up with the lovely M. yesterday, just long enough to learn that her favourite way of procrastinating at the office involves talking dirty to her coworkers, all the while pondering what “only 60% of what he wanted” could mean exactly, in the context of an overeager Italian suitor’s love nest…
Unfortunately gotta do some work-related stuff all day tomorrow, so no big plans this weekend. As of now.
It appears that I am geared to turn sixteen at the end of this week (I started counting the years backwards a while back).
In celebration, a couple merry friends and I, will be drinking, spinning records and being a general nuisance to the gentle people of Shibuya, on
So feel free to pop by and have a drink or ten with us !
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.
Stuff is piling up way faster than I can find time or motivation to write it out. Let’s try to see if we can remember some of the main events of the past couple days. Keitai pics are coming soon too.
Left Tokyo for the barren wilderness of Yokohama’s suburbs, joined Miss Sin, Sandy & family for some authentic Blues tunes in Japanese at Blue Corn.
Went to a birthday party at what might very well be Tokyo’s most obscure bar. Luke had mentioned something about the place being something like “an apartment/bar”… Aya’s directions included stuff like “ring #401 and tell them you’re a friend to get in”. After being let in the most residential-looking building of the most residential-looking neighbourhood of southern Tokyo, after ringing the inconspicuous apartment door, after walking past the doorstep, taking off my shoes and being shown to the end of a long corridor, I was fully expecting to walk into the Tanaka family’s apartment living room: I found myself standing in the middle of an actual unlicensed bar, complete with couches, hardtop bar counter, DJ booth and people ordering food and drinks as if they’d be sitting at their local dive. The place had its own business cards and is called The Hidden Lounge. Definitely go check it out if you ever have a chance.
Had a meeting and chatted with Ashimo’s dad. Just work and stuff, but had to mention it and gloat, given how absolutely utterly über-nerdly cool that is.
Had a housewarming BBQ party of sorts at my new [temporary] place in Shimo-takaido. Blended industrial quantities of margarita and mojitos. Took half the party with me (leaving Tracey behind with the other half) just on time for last train to Misakiguchi beach, Kanagawa, where we arrived just after midnight…
You know you have made it to the real Japanese wilderness, when the one and only combini store in the area is a fifteen minute walk and closes at night. Twenty minutes walking through fields in complete darkness, much laborious searching along the coastline (with some serious flashbacks to the days of trying to locate underground Californian parties in the most improbable locales) and we finally found our Japanese neo-hippie Eldorado. By all accounts, it was definitely worth it. Much dancing and partying on the beach was indulged until morning and beyond (for some). Beach parties still are my favourite.
Less fun, was the nasty eye inflammation I had neglected to take care of all weekend, finally upping it a couple notches on Sunday morning, making for a hasty return home, nearly blind and rather pitifully hanging onto Rie’s arm for directions. Lead the following Monday to Masako&Nordine’s kindly taking me on my first visit ever to a Japanese medicine man and my learning to say “acute inflammation of the iris” and “what the hell were you thinking waiting so long before consulting” in Japanese. Much Atropine eyedropping and laying at home in the dark ensued.
Recovered about just in time for T’s glamorous birthday party at Golden Gai’s Araku. Stood the crazy heat and spent the night being merry with the better half of Tokyo’s gaijin and gaijin-friendly shock troops.
Capped the night with much drinking outside of Golden Gai’s seediests with Rie and Jim. Jim’s stories sound straight out of a Murakami (Haruki) novel. Except he has got pics to back it up.
Had drinks with Yi at our usual Shinjuku hangout (where she is slowly starting to become a regular herself). Since both 5-seat bar and upstairs room were packed, we got to enjoy the truly surreal sight from the rooftop makeshift lounge. Sitting with our drinks in the middle of Shouben Yokochou, except outdoor, looking down on hundreds of tiny ramshackle bars, Shinjuku’s high-rise blinking neons above in the distance and absolutely not a human soul in sight. A truly weird Mary Poppins in Tokyo-moment.
Also: drinking, firework, drinking, food of all sorts, drinking, art expos, drinking etc.
Upcoming: more of the same. My birthday party on the 24th in Shibuya: much drinking, partying and live electro tunes to be had (come on all, you’re all invited !).
Spending the night drinking in Aoyama and dancing in Shibuya until morning with Deny and friends, 6 hours after landing in Narita.
Yoshida-san at Albatross, casually wishing me a welcome back, asking how I’m doing, as if it had not been two years since the last time I sat there ordering a drink.
Soon-to-be-official-geisha Hako-chan, demonstrating her shamisen skills at a tiny Shibuya izakaia, before going on a drunken quest for some old Pink Floyd albums at nearby Tower records.
Sheer serendipity and Saeko’s MBA program being located 6 floors down from my lab in the same Jimbocho building.
Drinking our asses off with Yi, Jun & co., enjoying Kaikan Hotel’s Beer Garden’s “All you can drink” formula until the very last minute (and the last dozen hastily ordered pints).
Tokyo clubbing. Receiving a freshly removed pair of lacy underwear adorned with the wearer’s phone number. Having never asked for it in the first place.
Hello, I am back within reach of Interweb technologies.
As it turned out, a silly software glitch made my parting promise of auto-posted goodness a complete lie. Actually, all for the best, since honestly, they weren’t the most mesmerizing pieces of writing…
After a short stop at an undisclosed south-east Asia location where I was to acquire some new secret power after undergoing mysterious ritual ceremonies, I am now in Tokyo. Currently working as a visiting researcher for a government-funded organization until late September, devising new and better ways to enslave the human race and take over the world.
I am not quite sure what’s in store for this blog over the Summer, seeing how I resumed my Japanese blog (no point clicking if you do not read Japanese, also even less point clicking if you are learning Japanese, given the appalling level of grammar on display there). Keeping one blog updated is hard enough as it is, let alone two of these things. I might keep this one at a casual pace for the Summer, with mostly photographic updates (as soon as I’ll have set the keitai blog back up again).
If you happen to live in Tokyo and feel like getting together for a glass of shochu or twenty, by all mean get in touch: anything that’ll give me an excuse to slack on my work duties these days…
I’m off to greener shores for the Summer.
Funnily enough, update frequency will be the best it has been in a while, since I am leaving behind a couple inconsequential pre-posted entries to fill space at regular intervals until I regain full access to 21st century technologies.
Estimated resurfacing time (in a different location, but with the same standard of sharp, yet insightful, educational writing that you have come to expect from this blog) in a couple days or weeks. Possibly more, if some loose rooftop tile prompts me to embark on a spiritual quest to discover my totem animal by moving to a Nepalese buddhist temple.
Meanwhile, have a picnic or two on île Saint-Louis on my behalf.
Names and situations have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent (me). For clarity purposes, some bits that may have been merely thought at the time, are fully spelt out here.
A bit over a year ago, last class of the semester:
Prof. Travoltus: And I wish you all a successful career and might see you again one day, shall you decide to go for a post-grad in AI.
Dave: Does that mean you are involved in that curriculum too? Oh god, no.
Prof. Travoltus: Indeed I am. And don’t worry, I hate your guts too.
Dave: Why, thanks. You are quite a tool yourself.
Prof. Travoltus: You little arrogant piece of self-sufficient shit. Don’t you think I didn’t notice your constant sneering at every other one of my [very unfunny] jokes and comments, all semester long.
Dave: Same to you sir. By the way, 1970 called and it wants its corduroy bellbottoms back. ’said you could keep the pungent cologne, though.
Because this phase of intense self-absorbed navel-contemplation passing off as thoughtful meditation just isn’t about to end now…
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.
Sara: Yea, he is a bit strange, very moody, the autistic kind, you know… talks a lot, all the time…
Dave: Autistic? talks a lot? That doesn’t make sense… Wouldn’t an autistic temperament imply that he is overly quiet and keeping to himself most of the time?
Sara: Absolutely not! What are you talking about? He’s autistic… Has those weird fits of enthusiasm, gets excited about the smallest things, you know, the way autistic people often behave…
Dave: OK. You aren’t making any sense. We can’t possibly be talking about the same definition for autism, real or pretend.
Sara: Autism??? Who talked about autism, he is autistic: he makes aut, he’s an autist… He paints mostly.
Dave: Oh…
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.
As you may have noticed, pictures are back in full force on this blog. This rebirth is due to my finally caving in to the trend and buying one of these fancy new cellphone things. One of those that come with a color LCD and, gasp, a camera.
I was until now quite happy using my antiquated prepaid cellphone (about 50×100 pixels of monochrome goodness and such cutting edge features as “call”, “send SMS” and even “address book”), until I started gathering last year’s pictures, for my yearly New Year’s Card project, and realized I had close to none. Even though I own a reasonably nice and compact digicam, and use it sometimes when I feel artistically inclined, it just isn’t the same as a camera-phone…
I was never a big fan of cameras, especially in group settings. Actually I suspect the “let’s take a souvenir photo” bug is mostly a female thing, and tends to grow hundredfold with motherhood. But going over all the drunken (and less drunken) pics I took during my stay in Tokyo, with my trusty keitai, I realized how much I liked having those around. To me, they are nothing like the sort of pictures you take with a “real” camera. Cameraphone pics, for one, are lower quality (especially mine, since I purposely downsample them in order to use less bandwidth when sending them over email), which means you treat them differently: being lo-fi, badly lit or with a strong visible grain is expected and nearly part of the journalistic charm of the medium. The other aspect I noticed with myself and friends while in Japan, was the psychological difference: people usually do not react to a phone the way they do to a camera. Phones are slightly less intrusive and allow you more easily to take pictures without breaking the flow of social interactions; with a camera-phone, even usually camera-shy people tend to be more exuberant and less self-conscious. It is possible that Japanese society is special in that respect, considering how ubiquitous camera-phones have become there, but I reckon things will be moving in a similar direction everywhere…
Anyway, from now on, you can expect a fairly regular influx of live views from my life in Paris. Incidentally, this will help me fill my quota of diary-esque entries on this blog, without having to resort much to boring “did this, did that” text entries. I liked the balance I had found with the older keitai log format, with tons of pointless but short photographic entries on one side, longer verbose rants on the other.
For now, enjoy the pretty random pics of drunken friends and Parisian locales.