Entries this day: Awake State_of_My_Life speech1 speech2

Awake

9:52am JST Tuesday 23 September 2003

brain is a blank slate. Tossed a few texts back and forth on my phone with stephanie. she said hi in the middle of the night while I was sleeping so I texted her back; I knew she had a doctors appt today; wondered how that went. This concept of Stephanie saying HI from some thousand miles away gives me a hint of future things. I have stated that I'll know I'm in the future when I can contact or be contacted verbally (and visually, but that's harder for me to imagine) by any of my peeps in realtime from anywhere in a chat type way. I wonder if we could just speak and have a chat with similar parameters to an AIM chat: users can walk away or whatever, making the chat super slow. verbal "hey what's up?" might be replied immediately or never acknowledged or blah blah.

Stephanie seems to be doing rather poorly and likened herself to the movie Girl, Interrupted, a movie which I have not yet seen. I don't really understand what might be going on with her; but I hope she can feel better / normal soon.

Hey i didn't write a state of my life address this month.

State of My Life

10:01am JST Tuesday 23 September 2003

State of My Life Address

• One of my students asked me if I am normally patient. She was (I believe) referring to the patience required to teach. I think I'm patient when I teach, but I'm not really patient in the rest of my life. I silently want to pass all the hordes of stone-faced Japanese shuffling up/down the steps in the train station; I want my train to be here right now; When I'm alone I walk in high gear all the time. I always try to optimize my path, not waste any time. Continually have a dialogue in my head defending my decisions. (that's a different story)

• I have given my email address out to a bunch of students. Probably 20 or so. Almost all women. But not for overt (here I am suddenly defending my actions. Why is it all women? Cause I'm more comfortable flirting with women than I am with men. Cause I want attention from women moreso than men. Even though I want to bring the New Warrior Training to Japan, I have spoken almost exclusively to women about it.) sexual connections (what's optimal here; to stick to my rule that parenthesis should be removable and leave a sentence intact, or to make something legible in other contexts? or just leave it hanging cause I've gone so far off topic?)

• I am now living in Frank's old room. The tatami room in our apartment at 101 Bell Wisteria in Tarumachi (between Tsunashima and Okurayama stations), Kouhokuku, Yokohama (near Tokyo), Kanagawa, Japan (small island east of China)

• I've been working lots on memorizing a difficult speech in Japanese. I'm impatient to do that now.

• Stephanie, my homegirl at Kawasaki, left Nova/Japan after five weeks.

• Oh, I remember the point of number 2 above: I have been giving more energy to bringing the new warrior thing to Japan. But the rate at which I'm moving would make it a multiple year project it seems. Fuck that. If somethin's gonna happen, it's gotta happen now. Or close to now. Sometimes I just throw myself at a project and forsake everything else, but projects never (rarely) keep my attention for long. Seems that my journal has captured my imagination for the longest time.

• right now all my energy goes to the speech. except for right now when I'm writing and elsewise when I'm at work. I'm really happy that the speech will be over soon after janette arrives; I would hate to be distracted by that when she is here.

• janette is coming soon! 3.5 days. Holy shit.

  (in a good way)

speech1

5:18pm JST Tuesday 23 September 2003

Just spent about three hours grinding and drilling through my speech with Atsuko, the Japanese woman who wants to be called Liz. Definitely thankful for her time. Definitely scared about my speech. Definitely can keep charging through. Went to Mister Donuts where there's not a no-smoking area, but a no-smoking time; before 5pm it's no smoking. She changed (simplified) a lot of my speech, which bugged me at first, but jeez louise it's gotta be simplified or I'll never get through this shit.

speech2

11:34pm JST Wednesday 24 September 2003

Miki and Kaori get special thanks for their help with my speech. Miki and I ate and speeched at a ramen shop (all ramen is hot ramen) until Kaori arrived and we went to a Jonathan's in Musashi Kosugi. Work work worked on my speech and made some headway. They alterred/trimmed it even more for me.

Egad what an agonizing night.