State of My Life

It's 2005. Now when people ask for my age I say 35.
My days old counter still can't do predictive calculations; I have to make guesses to figure out when people will be certain ages in the future.
I'm still living near Motosumiyoshi in (Tokyo) Japan. Millenium House #20. Jen still lives there, but there has been some turnover recently. Riki is gone; Jo is gone; Gus is gone.

Living in the building now: Jen, Roger, Katrina, Shoko, Jeff, Colin, Dean, Richard, Jackie, Dave, Yuki, Ikumi, Aaron, me, and one new guy who moved in between Dean and me.
I'm still working in the quintark industry on weekends and working at Gaba three days a week. I have a few favorite students at Gaba who have been coming consistently: Naotoshi, Makiko, Kozue, Mari, Kyoko, Mieko and maybe others who have slipped my mind.

Just yesterday I told Kozue that I'll be leaving in March. She seemed a bit shocked and said she would have no teacher after that time. I was touched.
Hitomi and I have broken up. We had a problem during the holidays and I used it as an opportunity to just say no. I offered to be just friends with her, but that is difficult for me.
Right now we are in a bit of a fight I think because I fucked up and tried to hide from Jen that Hitomi and I are meeting today. Hitomi, I imagine, felt marginalized, and, I believe, is now angry about it. I offered to talk about it tonight with her if she wants; I know I errd.

I feel sad about it; this (work) is not a safe place to cry. I think I'll go get some chocolate to change that.

5:28pm

(update)

All has been forgiven.
I've still got my PowerBook G4 with 30 gig hard drive (1.5 gigs free) 512 megs ram, 14 inch screen (with dirty scrapes from the keyboard) and a short-lasting battery and bent power supply connector. I won't likely consider getting a new computer until I get resettled somewhere next year.
On my computer, I've got 6 gigs of video taken by Jesse's video camera when he, Takako and I went riding our bikes out at a park near our neighborhood. Kawasaki Todoroki something something I think is the name. I've been working on editing it into a movie of sorts, and have converted some of the clips nearly into a something with a plot.
I'm using Firefox as my primary web browser and gmail as my primary email account. I've used 48megs used in gmail. Firefox is pretty kick-ass in its interface. Gmail's interface kicks ass, too. Since its inception in April 2004, it offers 1 gig of space at no charge but to place email-targetted ads in the border of the page. I rarely notice them.
All my journal entries are indexed automagically with the core code that Fred wrote into different categories. These are currently used: runes, dreams, excited, sleepy, nihongo, gateway_data (not listed in the index). These are not really, but were important to me in the past: ultimate (frisbee), YRUU, KTRU, skate.
This is a couple weeks after the monster earthquake-induced tsunami smashed cities around the Bay of Bengal. I am greatly planning to go to one or more of those cities starting on 26 March.
I have no pets, except Spot in Houston, who, as far as I know, is fine.
I officially have no girlfriend, but Hitomi is still helping me study on occasion, which means I am still choosing to deal with the choice between sex or not. Argh.
I've been listening to Hemisynch CDs in the Gateway series from The Monroe Institute. So far, I've been able to consistently find Focus 10 (mind awake, body asleep) pretty quickly. A few times I have felt an expanded awareness that he calls Focus 12, and sortakinda I have felt hints of vibrational body-leaving feelings.

I haven't listened to any of the exercises past Wave III / Freedom 4: Five Questions, which I pretty much slept through. I zipped through Wave II more quickly than Wave I.

I've found that doing exercises in the morning, soon after I've woken up from a good sleep, results in the most consciously coherent experiences.
Recently, I've been in touch with janette more than before recently. We both definitely still miss each other. I believe that if I just "give up and go back to the US now" that I won't feel fulfilled or something. But there is definitely a big urge to do that; to go back to that (near) unconditional love situation with janette.

I'd also like to go back to Virginia and West Virginia for an extended period. I love the energy of my family there.
At 2 week to 1 month intervals, I've been hanging out (individually) with KG Miki and Satoko. I know them both from Nova. KG Miki and I went out a lot last year, but didn't go out with Satoko at all last year (due to her having moved to LA for the year).
I've been in pretty close email contact with Fred. I talked to Ma recently, and to dad, but overall recently, I've chatted more with Ma than dad.
I wonder if I can use a different part of my brain to find suitable mates. Or run a different filter. Instead of is-she-cute filter, use the does-she-lighten-my-spirit filter or something more awesomely worded than that.
I'm planning to go to Hokkaido with Hitomi in February. Today (10 January), I came one inch away from telling her to cancel the trip after we were sending pointless emails back and forth about watching a fucking movie that we've both seen before. I just pinned down a time (1pm) to meet Miki on Wednesday so I offered to meet Hitomi at 7pm that day.
I've just been searching for ways to volunteer for the tsunami. I've found only two so far:

i-to-i Global Crossroads

And I found two notlong.com shortcuts that were already taken. As I write this, I haven't seen them yet.

maps videos

(4:05am JST Tuesday 11 January 2005: I've seen them now)
Most recently I've read Bill Bryson's _A short history of nearly everything_. Next I'll read Dan Brown's _The Da Vinci Code_.
The quintark business is struggling. OM may have to shut down operations while things are retooled.
The building across the street has been unveiled, but isn't completely complete yet. It's no longer hidden behind the big canvas sheets, though.

Jen reckons that it's ugly. I think one wall is boring (solid white brick with a single small window per floor) and another face is pretty cool; (doors and staircases angling down in a stack. The top staircase is actually a slide. I'm going to slide down that slide.) I haven't really seen the other two sides.
I'm getting overall sick of Japan. I'm ready to leave.

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Talking to Seth

9:18pm JST Monday 10 January 2005

Seth, who recently dyed his hair black and forgot to shave his moustache, and I are talking about quantum physics and shit that is just out of my mental grasp. Awright.

I need to remember to find the name of that CD from KTRU.

3:11am

Found it.

artist: Life is Meat
title:  Discreet Meat
label:  self released by Chris Connell

Seth seems to be pretty cool. We traded book titles and favorite musics and several things we've read about quantum physics and the nature of reality and stuff. Chowed and chatted at Skylark, a cafe down in Musashikosugi station.

Near the end of our meal, a dude came and sat near us in the non-smoking section and went to light up a cigarette and I was like, no and went over to him and hit/patted his shoulder and pointed at the sign. "smoke over there please."

That's the first time I've ever done that. I'm glad I did it.

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fight club

3:17am JST Tuesday 11 January 2005

Watched Fight Club tonight just to see if I agree with my original impression that it's not that great. I agree that it has some good social commentary, but I take *great* offense at it trying to say "oh hey, they were the same guy," which is just ridiculous. The only character for which they could have been the same guy is the girl. There are so so many other scenes where they couldn't have been the same guy that it's just offensive to suggest that I ignore such details and just enjoy the movie.

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jen and I

3:20am JST Tuesday 11 January 2005

Jen and I ranted about OM today, trying desperately to explain to Richard just how amazingly offensive and insensitive OM can be in his daily blatherings. I try often to accept and love OM as a person, but dammm it's hard.

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the love boat

3:22am JST Tuesday 11 January 2005

Watched a bit of a soft porn movie (that Jen turned on and then left to go sleep) with the guys remaining in the room. It highlighted a lot of what I don't like about Japan. From what I could understand of the Japanese, a woman was hot and heavy with a guy in bed and then she chose not to continue. He got mad and sabotaged their ship (then jumped overboard). The remaining three passengers (including a woman) got pissy at her for not putting out. In fact, the woman led the charge. Horrible! To put in my head anger if another person says no to sex? What an awful message!

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zzzz

(4:02am JST Tuesday 11 January 2005)

I started reading _The Da Vinci Code_ last night. I consciously decided to read as long as I possibly could so that I could go back and read it again and see how the different states of my brain would interpret the same words. I fell asleep reading around 4am.

11:02am JST Tuesday 11 January 2005

I just re-read the last part of what I read last night. Two sections were interpreted differently. I hadn't noticed how Silas' teacher answered Silas' "how will I enter the church tonight?" question, and I thought Silas' spiked cilice belt was around his waist, not his thigh.

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