Category Archives: Life and Stuff

That Place I Do Not Go Except When I Am Here

1 Reply

Am I a hypocrite, desperate or simply practical?

I only ask because it seems that the only place I don’t have standards is the middle of Tokyo.

It often surprises my Japanese students that 1) I never eat at McDonald’s when I’m in the USA and 2) that I never go to Starbucks for a coffee.

I explain there are much better options for both fast food and coffee in the USA. Most Starbucks in the USA full of caffeinated writers plugging away at computers, abusing the free Wi-Fi and taking up all the seats. Someone merely sitting and having a coffee is either waiting for someone or ran out of battery in one or more electronic devices.

I say that, and mock that, yet, here I am in a Starbucks in Tokyo. I’m fully caffeinated, plugging away at a computer, abusing the free Wi-Fi and taking up one of the seats.

In my defense, because Japan for the most part by-passed portable computers and cellphone users got used to high data plan bills, it has precious little free Wi-Fi. Finding a place where you can plug in a computer and do some work without worrying about your battery dying. (re. this updated review) is difficult. About the only places you can do this consistently are McDonald’s (if you have a Nintendo DS); 7-11 stores and Starbucks. Even my cellphone provider has a “free Wi-Fi” service for which they charge a monthly fee. (No, I’m not making that up. I think in this case “free” means “you are free to use it at your leisure after you pay us.)

Luckily, right now this Starbucks is nearly empty. That’s a nice surprise as this store is usually the second busiest in the world after the Starbucks at the CIA headquarters.

That said, even if it fills up, as long as I have a comfortable chair at the table with the outlets, I usually don’t feel too guilty about taking up space.

Am I a hypocrite, desperate or simply practical?

Yes.

Swiss Army Traveler–New is Not Always Better

Leave a reply

I bought it because it was called a Traveler and I was dreamy and pretentious enough to believe that described me in the months before I went to Albania with the Peace Corps. At least, I think it’s called a traveler, it might be called something else, which says a lot about my mental state in those months before I went to the Peace Corps.

Whatever it’s called, and for the sake of today’s post, I’ll call it a Traveler, that Swiss Army Knife has been my constant companion in my travels and I like that old, 1991 or 1992 version better than the recent versions.

I won’t go into the specs except to say it has a large blade, small blade, scissors, flat head screwdriver, can opener, cork screw, leather punch and knobby hook thing. It also has a toothpick and a pair of tweezers.

I’ve used the blades a lot and the big blade is starting to get that over-sharpened/badly sharpened look old knives get, but I still use it and still carry it to the in-laws. I’ve also gotten lots of use out of the scissors, the leather punch, the screwdrivers and the corkscrew. I still have and use the original toothpick and someday may actually clean it. I like the Swiss Army Knives better than other multi-tools because the blade is usable. On others the blade is secondary to the pliers or the mess of screwdrivers (that’s a technical term).

However, after I moved to Tokyo, I couldn’t find the old Traveler. I was convinced it got thrown out during the move and eventually gave up looking for it and bought a more modern one. It had all the same tools, but came with an attached key ring that I found annoying as it gets in the way of using the blades. I’ve attached a lanyard to it mostly as a way to find it quickly in my emergency kit bag.

Several months after I bought the new one, I found the old one and I know it’s odd to befriend inanimate objects, but I did feel as if I’d renewed a friendship. The old knife has been around the world with me and together we survived Albania, Turkey and an interrogation in Greece.

Recently I’ve added another Swiss Army Knife to the holdings: a smaller blue Alox Cadet. It is thinner and only has four tools and because it has a shorter blade it MAY be legal to carry in Japan. (Note: I won’t carry it until I confirm that). I like it but it has that key ring thing, which I may just take off and be done with. I’ve kept the other knife 25 years (minus a few months where I couldn’t find it) and at no point did I wish it had a lanyard or a key ring.

I’ve actually used the knobby hook thing more than either of the key rings.

Family photo:

Family photo: The old Traveler is in the middle;the newer one is at the top; the new blue Alox Cadet is at the bottom.

 

Eating the Whole Thing and Then Some

Leave a reply

My unofficial weigh-in this morning was 85.3 kilograms/188.05. This means I’ve lost about 28 pounds since I started this lifestyle change 98 days ago.

That will almost certainly not stand after tonight.

Because I’ll be working Tuesday, my actual birthday, the girls decided to have my birthday dinner tonight. I have generally avoided cheat days, although I couldn’t resist sampling the resurrected meatball sandwich at Subway here in Japan. (The return of the meatball sandwich means Subway is no longer dead to me.)

She Who Must Be Obeyed asked me what kind of cake I wanted “tiramasu or chocolate cake” and my first reaction was “yes” but my second reaction was “chocolate cake”.

The result was a chocolate cake made from 60% cocoa chocolate topped with frosting made from the same. SWMBO got a good glaze over the cake, but didn’t like the top and covered it with cocoa powder.

The reaction to this was a debate between the devils over my left and right shoulders:

Right Devil: He’s almost reached his weight goal he shouldn’t mess it up now.
Left Devil: But chocolate cake.
Right Devil: He can eat a little but not too much.
Left Devil: BUT CHOCOLATE CAKE!

In the end I decided to do my weekly weigh-in a day early and  go easy during the day so I could go for it at night.

The main course was a 10 ounce sirloin served “freshly stabbed’, a couple steak fries, some bread and cheese, a couple fried oysters, and a lettuce/cucumber salad with olive oil and a little lemon juice as dressing. Oh, and there was wine, too.

I did eat less than I normally do on occasions like this. I only ate a couple steak fries. I cut back the bread and cheese and the slice of cake was a third smaller than usual (although it was still pretty big). I did drink the usual amount of wine, though.

Tomorrow’s weigh-in will be interesting to see.

 

 

Rest and Recovery Days Gone Bad

Leave a reply

Today was supposed to be a lazy day. The plan was for a do nothing but write–“write” being loosely defined as “any act that occurs at my desk, including game playing”–day. Unfortunately, although it kind of worked out that way, there was a twist.

Things started out well, more or less. I woke up later than usual, but after some coffee I got right to work. I wrote for a couple hours then took a break for breakfast and wrote some more.

After that I took a break to play a game and then was supposed to start making lunch. The twist was I got my migraine spot followed quickly by a migraine. I made lunch and then worked and, ahem, played through the migraine, but having a dull ache in the side of your head tends to steal away the rest and the recovery part of rest and recovery day. It’s one thing to be lazy and have a shameless good time doing it, it’s another to be lazy because someone is grinding a sharpened icicle  into your right temple and you don’t feel like doing much.

Even after taking medication and drinking more coffee, I still felt kind of blah, even though I didn’t get the full pain, just a hint of it. I got some of my pages done and played a little, but mostly I just sat around and pondered how awesome it would be to do something productive while my head went “as if”.

Now it’s bed time and tomorrow I’ll face the migraine hangover, which is a bit like walking through the day partly asleep. You know something happened that’s now over. Although  you don’t feel sick, you lack energy.

By the time I get my energy back on Monday, I’ll be back at work, which isn’t fun at all.

 

 

Unconnecting the Connected Ears

Leave a reply

Lately I haven’t had the patience to listen to my iPod Touch.

I do not know why that is. As I’ve written before, I don’t listen to music on it very often but I do like to use it to listen to podcasts.

The problem  with podcasts, especially the few that are published every day, is I find myself getting bored with their formats and, in some cases, with the voices of the hosts.

For example, I used to listen to The Candid Frame. It is a photography podcast hosted by photographer Ibarionex Perello. He’s got a great voice, one of the best names on the planet, and brought on a great variety of different types of photographers. I binge listened at first, but one day I just got tired of his format. I still recommend him, and might one day go back and check him out, but I find podcasts are a bit like beer, booze or snacks: they are fun at first, but once you’ve had too much, it’s hard to go back and have just a little. Even days later.

In a couple cases I got tired of the hosts’ voices. They are either too nasal or too booming or too German. Those I can still listen to sometimes, but I don’t.

This time, though, I think I’ve just grown tired of having voices in my ears when I’m walking around. For a while, my routine was listen to a podcast until I got to the station, then leave the headphones in and read my Kobo Reader while on the train. I’ve increased my reading, but am not enjoying the podcasts.

Instead, I listen to a handful of regular podcasts when I’m at home on the computer. I still listen to the Pen Addict, Write For Your Life, and a few others, mostly because they have enough variety that I haven’t grown tired of them, but I listen to them at home.

I don’t know how long this will last. Some day I may put the voices back in my ears, or I may start listening to music again. That mood won’t last long, but it will come eventually.

One Page Two Page Wall Crash No Page

1 Reply

On day eight of the National Novel Writing Month I hit the wall in a bad and merciless way.

The wall, as near as I can tell, is the moment where your old habits show up at your house like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and announce they are “not going to be ignored“. There’s that game you haven’t played in a while and there are those articles you were going to read and there’s that book you haven’t been reading.

Unfortunately, at this point in the cycle, the initial feeling of inspiration and invulnerability is no longer enough to provide the willpower to carry you through the daily task (which can also include marking student exams). But, you still feel guilty about not doing it and can’t concentrate on doing anything else for very long.

I played the game a bit and then went back to writing. When I tired that I found myself writing a few lines and then drifting off in “deep thoughts” and then falling asleep (a temporary return to bad sleep patterns might be part of that).

It got so bad I even tried exercising.

Now, it’s also possible that this is a reaction to what I’m writing. Kimberly, my internal editor, is trying to get attention by telling me that the scene I’m working on is crap and not letting me enter the zone of “no mind” necessary to finish something like NaNoWriMo. The secret of NaNoWriMo is to always think “yes, I know it’s crap, but I’ll worry about that in post”.

I tried skipping the scene and starting a different one. That worked for a page or two, until the deep thoughts came back and I started falling asleep again.

I managed to finish 7 pages or about 1,295 words, which puts me at an average of 1,665 words a day, which is slightly behind the usual NaNoWriMo goal of 1,667.

Tomorrow’s another day, but the wall is real.

 

Air Shows and Neighbors

Leave a reply

I was kind of rude to a guy today because I was trying to watch a free air show.

We live along one of the approaches to the Iruma Air Base, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force base and that means we constantly get fly-overs from transport aircraft, helicopters and the occasional fighter.

Once a year, though, if the weather’s nice, we can see the practice for the annual Iruma Air Show. Fighters and transports fly over head in formation and some demonstrate combat tactics. On November 3–Culture Day–if we look to the West we can see parts of the air show itself.

Today She Who Must Be Obeyed came back from work and mentioned that we should go out and see the planes. It turns out we got to see a large portion of the performance put on by Blue Impulse, Japan’s version of the Blue Angels/Thunderbirds.

We saw lots of hearts made from smoke and lots of loops and, then, all of a sudden some guy on the street was asking where I was from. Because I was, for a brief time, considering going into the U.S. Air Force as a pilot; because fighters are just cool gadgets and I like cool gadgets; and because I figured he was either selling religion or crap, my initial reaction was “I’m from fuck you.” (For the record, I didn’t say that. I said I was from the USA but didn’t actually look at him at first.)

Eventually we figured out that 1) he’s from Germany, and 2) he’s been my neighbor for 14 years but we somehow never managed to meet or see each other. For most of that he lived down the street and around the corner and up the hill, but for the past year or so he’s lived across the street and we still didn’t see each other. That surprise was what prompted him to interrupt our free air show.

Eventually he went off to exercise, which is good, because about two minutes after he left, four Blue Impulse planes flew over head. It was pretty cool to meet him and pretty cool to see the planes, too.

 

Cheering for the Discount if Not the Team

Leave a reply

The Japan Series baseball championship ended a few days ago and I’m pretty pleased with the results. Although I don’t follow baseball that closely, I do follow it here in Japan. My favorite team name is the Carp (because Carp) but my favorite team is the one with the best discounts.

Japanese baseball teams are owned by corporations that use the teams as marketing more than as sources of income. (The main source of income actually seems to be fees earned from sending Japanese players to the US Major Leagues.) As a result, the Japan Series was the Fukuoka SoftBank (telecommunications) Hawks versus the Tokyo Yakult (probiotic dairy product) Swallows. The Hawks won their second series in a row and that means several days of product discounts at every company affiliated with SoftBank.

This is pretty good, but it was better when the Hawks were the Fukuoka Daiei (department store chain) Hawks. When they won the Japan series in 1999, the discounts at all their stores were excellent and several items were priced at. She Who Must Be Obeyed cheered for them in 2003 in anticipation of the discounts. (They won and there were discounts.)

The discounts were also good at the fast food chain Lotteria when the Chiba Lotte (food and chemical) Marines won.

There are, of course, teams you hope will never win. For example, the Hanshin (electric railway) Tigers and the Yomiuri (media conglomerate) Giants, are right out. Yes, they are the most popular teams in Japan but what do I get when they win? I get nothing. And nothing don’t buy my love. (Something like that.)

In the future I’m hoping to see a series of discounts, er, a series championship from the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham (food processing) Fighters (because tasty dead animal flesh) or from the Hiroshima Toyo (actually Mazda) Carp (because cool name and car stuff).

Until then, I’ll try to enjoy the SoftBank related discounts. I’m hoping if they three-peat they’ll offer some discounts on their smartphone plans. It’s only a coincidence that I want that and that they are my phone provider. Well, not it’s not.

 

Bringing the Pain On Myself

1 Reply

I can’t decide if I’m thinking too much or not enough.

Once again, against my better judgement, I’ve decided to do another National Novel Writing Month. I almost didn’t, but then I did. To make matters worse, because I found I did better when I wrote by hand last year–more or less–I’ve decided to write this year’s novel by hand. This has its advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest disadvantage is that I eventually, if I wan’t to make the novel work, have to learn to read my own handwriting. This is more annoying than difficult but it’s still annoying.

There’s also the problem of word count. NaNoWriMo allows participants to use the Lorem Ipsum random text to validate novels, but that requires actually counting handwritten words. I’ve decided to use the DIY notebooks I made several years ago, mostly to clean them out and free up the space. For several days over the past months I counted the words in my morning pages and reached a rough average of words per page. One page equals about 190 words, although I’m going to count them as 185 just to be safe. This means, because each pad is 65 pages, one pad is around 12,025 words. I’ll need to use a little over four pads to finish the 50,000 words.

The original stack of 50.

Most of these are gone now ,but I hope to get rid of the rest this November.

This doesn’t clean out much, now that I think about it.

The advantage of the pads is that I can write anywhere with them, including on the train and, hypothetically of course, in class while my students are working. (Not that I would ever do that. No. Of course not. Of course I wouldn’t…) I won’t have to worry about batteries dying or software crashing or start up times.

I’ve also decided to use my TWSBI Diamond 580 as my “official” pen. It’s already my workhorse pen; it holds a lot of ink; and I usually fill it with a “bulletproof” ink that dries quickly and doesn’t smear when it gets wet.

A dirty pen and whiskey in a dirty glass. Bad ideas ahead.

The business end of the TWSBI 580 in front of bourbon: the generator of bad ideas that seem like really good ideas

If I run out of ink, well, I can probably find a couple other pens lying around somewhere.

 

 

 

All You Can Eat But Can’t

Leave a reply

I’m beginning to suspect that She Who Must Be Obeyed is trying to kill me. Or she’s testing my resolve with this lifestyle change I’ve been attempting.

Our youngest is also trying.

I had part of the day off today, as did our youngest and She Who Must Be Obeyed so we trekked down to LaLaPort Fujimi, a large new mall to do some shopping. It turned out that, thanks to a miscommunication from my part time job I couldn’t shop for much (that’s another post) but we could afford to eat.

Unfortunately She Who Must Be Obeyed had her eyes and stomach set on an organic all-you-can-eat restaurant called SaiNoKuni. This posed a couple problems

1) Our youngest wanted to go to a place called Sweets Paradise which is an all you can eat dessert restaurant. She was not happy when she discovered we were going organic and savory.

2) I’m skeptical of the “organic” label in general and in Japan I’m pretty sure it means either “expensive food” or “grandpa didn’t piss on it” (which is why there’s a local field we’ll never buy carrots from).

3) It’s all you can eat.

Normally a buffet restaurant wouldn’t phase me and the owners would be more afraid of me than I was of them, but this time was different. They tend to be pasta and bread heavy and that meant I needed a better plan than “more more more”.

I skipped all the pasta and all of the bread and tracked down as much meat as I could and then went back for vegetables. Luckily they had an excellent salad bar with three different kinds of spinach and a special on Iberico pork.

I didn’t resist the vanilla ice cream and added a couple slivers of brownie (barely enough to fill two tablespoons) and an equally small sliver of cheesecake.

At the end of the hour, I realized I’d eaten more at one sitting than I’d eaten since we’d been to the in-laws in August. I felt it for a while and then haven’t felt hungry since.