Entries this day: Catchup Racquetball State_of_My_Life_Address jumpers

Catchup

9:27am JST Thursday 6 May 2004

I'm off today; my first day off after 12 days of working. After the very last lesson, for a moment I thought, that wasn't so bad. Then, hey man, what are you thinking?

Thanks to wearing shoes in Japan a lot, I've got atheletes foot on my right little toe. Ouch. When I was barefoot all the time, that *never* happened. Silly shod society. Hitomi (with her phone (of course)) sent me a picture of what medicine I should buy for it; I'm thankful for her help.

Jesse and I are supposed to play racquetball today. I'm looking forward to it; I haven't run around and played for a long time. No ultimate in Japan.

I've got my student tracking program working well enough for me to clearly benefit from it. And my 12 day run is up, but it will be useful starting on Saturday.

Racquetball

4:54pm JST Thursday 6 May 2004

Racquetball was really quite fun today. Fun enough that I think I'll get a membership at the gym. It's even pretty close to my house; maybe a 8 minute walk. I've never wanted a gym membership because "working out" is boring as fuck, far as I'm concerned. But the pickup game of racquetball we played today was great.

When Jesse invited me, I had assumed it would be just me and him playing. (Like I had always done in the US. Not that I had played a lot; I think the last time I played was with Maggie near the end of our college days which would make it 1993 or 1994.) When we got to the place, there were all these people there (*) and I was like, yipes; what do I say? how do I act? with just a vague overview of all the rules of Japanese social customs scattered about my head. Just before we went into the court where three men were playing, I was like, "Jesse, tell me the rules not the rules about the game but about social interaction here," and he was like, "no," and started to go inside. Then he was like, "just follow me and stay quiet."

Fucker, I thought, but his advice was pretty much perfect; I had just been scared for that instant.

Subsequently, I figured out why. I don't remember ever having played a game with more than one person in the court. Once I figured out the extra rules, it was easy. The extra rules were easy: line up in the back of the court and stay out of the way of the ball. Two players at the front of the line play one point. Loser goes to the end of the line. Winner serves against the next person in line.

(*) quoting kT, but it's exactly what I thought

The social interactions were even easier. I don't think Jesse knows the names of any of the guys who were there.

State of My Life Address

5:17pm JST Thursday 6 May 2004

State of My Life Address

1. My bicycle is still AWOL.

2. I live in Nakaharaku, near Tokyo, Japan.

3. I work for Gaba full time, and have no other sources of income.

4. It takes me about 20 minutes to get to work, including a 7 minute walk.

5. I still have and love my Apple Powerbook G4 667MHz with 30G HD and 512M RAM.

6. I have no pets except my cat Spot who is happily living with Jennifer in Houston. Each time we email each other (me and Jennifer; not me and Spot), we mention Spot. Recently, he found a new box that he likes to sleep in.

7. I don't have a car. (I have an aversion to learning to drive in Japan; I don't plan to be here forever and I don't want to learn how to drive on the left hand side of the road. (For this logic to work, it means I plan to go back to the US, and not settle in OZ or left-hand-driving European countries.) Fuck messing up my driving skills in the US.)

8. I don't have a girlfriend or even a female friend with benefits. I'm no longer kissing on Yuuko. But we're still friends; she and I are going to a movie tomorrow.

9. Recently I asked Sally if she'd like to visit me in Japan (as part of her graduation celebration) and she didn't seem adverse to the idea. I wondered if she and I would hook up if/while she's here, and I even wondered about me settling with her in sunny Southern California. But since the first couple of emails after my invitation, she hasn't emailed me back. I know she's super busy finalizing her thesis and stuff, but there's still a part of me that's like hey man, why haven't you written me back?

10. I've got no credit card debt, but I owe like (!)

    5:39pm

    6:48pm

    (!) I got the good idea to shift my finances a bit. I've got just over 1000 dollars in my account in the US, but it's below the minimum balance allowed before they charge 9 dollars per month for the benefit of their great service. SO, since I basically don't use that money, given that all my CC debt is paid, I'm going to transfer 1000 dollars to whom I'm indebted and move the just over part to my free bank account (no minimum balance, no fees, Washington Mutual) where I can use it to pay for my cellphone in Japan.

    This idea feels good; it feels right.

    Yay.

11. Today is/was my first day off work after a 12 day stretch, the end of which included working during Golden Week, a week with 4 Japanese national holidays, during which many Japanese take the week off from work. I hoped a lot of them would take some time to brush up on their English. Many did, but not as many as I thought; it's all good though; I was pretty fuckin' tired on a lot of those days (given that I didn't really change my sleep schedule to accomodate longer working hours).

12. I've had hints of feelings in my mind about this overall Japan experience like, okay, this is boring suggesting a desire to get out of here, and when I thought about going to China, to do the same thing, but in Mandarin, I was like, oh man; I don't want to go through all this again..

13. And as a result of that brainwave in my brain, I had a glimpse of life-pattern recognition. Like I realized that if I run off to China, I'd just be trying to run away from "boringness" here, which is really a result of what I create, so it would be me running away from myself.

    That's when I started thinking that I need to take more risks.. not to just make things less boring or more exciting, but to *do* something.. I can't quite articulate it. Like in order to do something amazing for the world, I need to meet more people, get out and do things that I like to do; find my thing; generate some positive momentum.

    But it need not be (needs not to be) a frantic maelestrom (?) of activity, but guided, thoughtful actions toward some better something, that I haven't figured out what that something is yet. So how do I get there?

    Or, how do I figure out what it is I want to do?

14. This past week I didn't really study a lot of Japanese. I worked on my student tracker for most of my time off work (and got it working pretty well), so I didn't really give myself a lot of time to work. I hung out with Hitomi for a night and got some practice in that way. Overall, my Japanese skill is definitely going up.

15. Jesse and I have been playing hackeysack during many of our shared breaks at work. His hackeysack name is Turbo Stall. Mine is Dr Kick.

16. Carla, my favorite teacher at Kawasaki Nova, is no longer in Japan, but on a round-the-world trip starting with Beijing. Clayton went with her for the first part of the trip. I'm really excited for them. She was pretty much my last contact with Nova social events, so I may not go to any more of those.

17. Recently I've seen the movies Appleseed (with Jimmy, great graphics, but not a great story), Kill Bill 2 (with Jimmy, excellent movie), and Drumline (with KG Miki, okay movie; good drum stuff).

jumpers

1:22am JST Friday 7 May 2004

Watching Discovery Channel's show on The Free Runners and I'm like, "aww man; I can do half that shit."

But, good for them on it.