 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Month: August 2004
Beach Party II
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
You know what: I like my life
Beach Party
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres…
As promised, here is a first update on the progress of the previously mentioned no-roommate project.
And I am ashamed to say that there isn’t much progress altogether.
You see, after briefly considering adult movie-making or experiments in urban anchoretical life as chief occupations for my week-end, I finally settled on a much more pedestrian — yet of proven entertainment value — plan. A plan essentially centered around a few easy concepts such as: alcohol (preferably cheap and plentiful), friend(s), cultural exploration of new neighbourhoods (through random sampling of bars and izakaia) as well as, potentially, use of substances and sex (on same requirements as alcohol).
In that case, you may ask, why am I sitting in front of my laptop on a friday night, typing this while most obviously not partaking in any of these activities. And that is a very legitimate question.
Home Alone
My roommate is leaving on vacation this morning. Gonna go spend a week in the bled and two weeks in Paris.
That means I have the place for myself and an endless array of options unrolling before my eyes:
I could have a few people over and finally shoot that “movie” we’ve been meaning to do for a long time now… although we would first need to get ahold of the gerbils and the fifty pots of Nutella chocolate spread required by the plot. Not easy to find authentic Nutella in Tokyo, especially bulk quantities.. I can see the Nutella (and maybe the goats too) being an issue.
And do not discuss the brand choice or offer some cheap local alternative: you do not expect me to compromise my artistic vision because of some measly geographical impediments.
Alternatively, I could just stock up on frozen pizza, rice and a case of Lychee-flavored Fanta (best. flavor. ever), turn off my cell phone and avoid any interaction with the outside world for a week or two. As an optional part, homemade brownies with uncle Herb special secret ingredients might be added to the plan. I can see some potential in that.
One thing is sure: the whole skipping-the-shower part is not likely. I will definitely be sticking with my four showers a day. At least as long as Tokyo’s average temperature persist in hovering above neuron melting-point temperature.
Anyway, we shall shortly be figuring out the best use to make of our newly lowered social responsibilities and concomitant increase of living space. If it involves anything funny and somewhat legal in at least a few US states, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Spinoza Encule Hegel (A Sec)
Busy is a pale euphemism to describe the current chaotic state of my life right now.
If I tell you I am currently a full-time music producer and arranger, full-time VoIP server architect and full-time applied mathematics student, you might get an idea of what I mean. And there is no mistake in the previous sentence: the word full-time is purposely used three times because I am very much supposed to be doing each of these occupation full-time. Which is kind of a problem given that Earth rotation period seems to be stalling around 24 hours these days. Factor in my current involvement with WordPress development as well as my attempts to keep an appearance of social life by making regular expeditions with friends to nasty local watering holes where we proceed to get absolutely plastered on cheap sake… and you have a mathematical impossibility the likes of which even Gödel would give up on.
Since there are only so many hours of sleep you can remove from your daily schedule before permanent psychosis sets in (I mean, real psychosis, not the milder form of borderline psychopathic behaviour I usually retreat to on a good day), and since I also decided that food could not safely be removed from my daily essential needs, I had to cut down on other activities. As a result, my news readings has long fallen from many hours of intense paper scrutinizing, down to a 30 second scan of my RSS feed list and a few occasional glances at online news articles, every other week… As for TV: I have barely ever watched it in my life and the only TV set of the house is currently stored in my roommate’s room where neither of us ever turn it on, so it isn’t much of an issue.
So we can safely say that I know close to nothing about the big (and small) events of the world these days, except for the rough outline (Bush has not yet declared martial law in the US, Ishihara still hates foreigners and Tokyo maintains a precise average daily temperature of: “very hot”)…
Hell, for all I know, the War of the Worlds has already begun and I am talking (writing, really, but anyway) for a bunch of unmanned computers sitting atop the ashes of what used to be the proud western civilization, while Godzilla is busy fighting evil alien spaceships off the coast of Japan.
Kurokuwoku Orenji
 |
 |
 |
Went for a drink in Golden Gai…
“Being the adventure of a young man whose principal interest is…”
Keitai Post
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Judo and Japanese
The night was an interesting one to be in a sports bar, since, along with the important rugby game, Judo finals were on in Athens. Judo being one of Japan’s stronger discipline in the olympics, one half of the place was packed with Japanese fans (many of them still wearing yukatas and jimbeis from their evening watching fireworks) cheering for the Japanese competitors, while the other half was occupied by mostly-gaijin rugby fans rooting for the All Blacks (the place was definitely big enough to fit everybody happily).
Since both girls’ Tani Ryoko and guys’ Nomura Tadahiro brought this year’s first crop of gold medals to Japan, the mood was definitely upbeat. And while I usually loathe most sports on TV, Judo can be really entertaining to watch: especially if you compare a mere 5 minutes of intense fighting and people flying all over the place to, say, three full hours of painfully boring commercial-laden graceless ball-pushing by slices of 10 seconds.
Watching Judo here made me realize something really interesting that had completely slipped my mind up to that point: when I first arrived to Japan, I actually spoke much more Japanese than I thought.
My level of Japanese back then was a resounding zero. nada. nil. If you were to exclude the three weeks of rushed crash course readings and the few notions Yutaka had been kind enough to try and impart on me, I had absolutely no knowledge of Japanese whatsoever until I set a foot in Narita for the first time in my life in October 2002. At least that’s what I thought. But yesterday, I realized that, without knowing it, or more exactly, without remembering it, I had known a whole bunch of Japanese ever since childhood.
See, as a kid, I could not be bothered much with sports… particularly the kind that required you to build some form of “team spirit” and where smashing your opponent’s head in the concrete was not considered the principal objective… if said sport involved the use of a ball, then I downright hated it. Don’t ask me why, I just couldn’t stand soccer, basketball, handball, to say nothing of hell-spawn cricket.
My parents, instead of spotting an obvious display of what would later bloom into my current fully asocial psychotic personality, decided I just needed to have some kind of regular physical activity that didn’t involve being nice to my fellow schoolmates and gave me to choose between judo or ballet dancing…
Well, we all know how parents are: just pick one thing and they’ll give you the other. bastards.
[lang_jp]昨日は日本が柔道で二つ金牌を勝った。
日本に来た時、日本語を全然喋れなかったと思った。でも子供時、ヨロッパで日本語を勉強したの！
フランスで柔道をしながらいっぱい日本語の言葉使った：”初め”や ”それまで”、”待って”、”技あり”、”一本”。これは全部柔道の競技で使う。[/lang_jp]Continue reading
The Keitai Effect
We all know about the contagious power of yawns…
One only needs to start yawning in the middle of a crowd to get everybody else yawning in return. This can actually be quite fun if you suddenly decide to fuck with people’s head and discreetly yawn at people during some large meeting (I know, it sounds really stupid – it is – but try it one day, you’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll get the whole room yawning).
In Japan, though, there’s a much more interesting variation on that theme: Cell Phone fidgeting.
Anybody who’s lived in Tokyo will have no doubt told you about the principal characteristic of the average Japanese commuter: an uncanny ability to instantaneously fall asleep as soon as they hit a train seat, doubled with an instinctive knowledge of when to wake up, the very second their train hits their stop home.
Most of the time, though, they are not really sleeping: merely building that legendary Japanese force shield of indifference around them. Western people tend to do the same, but they need a book or a cd-player to help them fake complete absorption in their own world… Japanese do not… they just seat, half-close their eyes and doing so, ostensibly tell everyone they do not care what happens in the car until their destination. Guy next to them wanking on his tentacle porn manga, leecherous salaryman gawking at them from across the car, passenger falling asleep and drooling on their shoulder: nothing will wake up the Japanese commuter.
Except for one thing…
どうしたの？