Category Archives: Personal

‘Tis the Season to Humbug and Complain

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I usually don’t get moody during the holidays (that’s usually reserved for October) but I’ve been out of sorts lately. A lot of odd little pressures have added up.

One of the pressures was the karate test that was scheduled for tomorrow. I’d practiced some, but not enough and after a careful assessment of my skill level and my quantity of practice, I decided to withdraw from the test in the most clumsy manner possible. Although I’d made up my mind in my gut (so to speak) to withdraw very early on, I still held out some hope/denial that I’d pull things together. Then, right at the last minute, I withdrew. Part of it is that I haven’t been having much fun with practice this year–lately it’s started to feel like a job–and I can’t help but feel I’ve got as good as I’m ever going to get at it.

(I also need to teach my sensei how to use Gmail on his phone AND his tablet which would have helped the clumsiness. Long story.)

The other stresses have involved family and work. I’ve said before that I’m tired of not working where I work. Recent revelations have made that a bigger issue, or at least made me think about it more (it will take a long post to explain all that). That said, some of the revelations have been positive and it’s still a pretty easy job.

I’ve also got a sneaking suspicion that She Who Must Be Obeyed wants to move back to her hometown. Mother of She Who Must Be Obeyed has been doing well after her surgeries, but the thought is always there nagging away at her. I think it would do the girls good to be out in the middle of nowhere with some land to help maintain. (Actually, it might do me some good too, now that I think about it.)

That said, I’ve also learned never to make long term decisions when I’m in a mood like this. Next year, I’ll go back to karate practice, or I won’t. We’ll move to Nou or we won’t (probably not until our oldest finishes junior high), but I’ll decide that when I’m less moody–a period which lasts for five minutes every couple of months.

The Great Big House of Stuff

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Today I got to go to one of the most dangerous places in the world and managed to spend less than I’d planned.

Because the trains were finally working normally (more or less) I managed to get down to Tokyo and do some Christmas shopping. My store of choice, when electronics are involved anyway, is Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, which is an eight story (plus at least one basement level) Mecca of gadgets cameras and stuff. It is to camera what Gart Brothers in Denver used to be for sporting goods.

My favorite YC branch is actually in Shinjuku. It’s spread out over several buildings and has one six floor building with nothing but cameras and camera stuff. (In fact, you could supply an entire photography business, complete with old school darkroom equipment, simply by starting at the top floor and moving down one floor at at time.) The main store is three buildings connected by a maze of narrow halls and short stair cases where the floors don’t quite match.

Unfortunately, the Shinjuku branch, for all its creepy charm, is a difficult place to actually shop, especially as its layout is confusing to the employees too. YC Shinjuku is better for getting lost whilst window shopping than for Christmas shopping. The YC branch in Akihabara, on the other hand, is well laid out and bright and, for the most part, the employees know where everything is. If you get hungry, it has restaurants on the 8th floor.

Unfortunately, the things I wanted were on different floors and I had to make my purchases in the correct order to take advantage of the credit points earned from the purchases. I paid cash and started with the items that gave the most points (10% of purchase price) and then worked my may to the ones that only paid 5% or 1%. This helped me pay down the larger ticket item.

Now II have to hide stuff for a week.

The gifts themselves shall remain a secret. All I shall say is tablets and games. (Oh, and a new iPod touch for me.) At least that’s the start.

Christmas Can Wait for Karma and Attitude

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Today I started to go Christmas shopping, but the the Japanese train system wouldn’t let me. Then a couple eye rolls from a teenaged girl made me reconsider Christmas all together.

I think that’s called karma.

My plan was to leave the house at 9:30 and go shopping for the bigger ticket items and then sneak them back in the house. However, our oldest was feeling under the weather (thanks to a headache) and it was decided she should stay at home to rest. (Not decided by me, I should add.) Despite this, my trip to Tokyo was cleared because although She Who Must Be Obeyed would be out in the morning, she’d be back by lunch.

I ended up leaving the house around 10 and heading to the station. As soon as I reached the station street, I knew there was a problem as lines of people were gathered in front of the station. A sign in front of the ticket gates explained there’d been an accident involving a person (suicide) and that the trains had stopped just 11 minutes before.

Having been through this before, I knew nothing would happen for at least an hour and a half. (After a suicide and/or accident, the police stop the trains until they can conclude an initial investigation and clean up some of the mess.)

I went home and thought about going out later and then decided that tomorrow would be better as everyone would be back in school and sneaking things in would be easier.

Then, during the evening, our oldest decided to have several “Teenager Moments” involving selective hearing, selective memory, stubbornness, denial attitude and eye rolls. As a result, her Christmas present may simply be the return of her Nintendo 3DS. As I like to point out to her, usually after an eye roll, if she thinks I’m annoying now, she has no concept of how annoying I can actually be when I want to. I even make sport out of it. Just ask my students.

If you’re keeping score: My leaving late caused me to delay departure which caused me to miss the last moving trains which caused me to delay the shopping trip which led eye rolls and attitude which is making me double check the naughty list and rethink the shopping trip altogether. That’s definitely karma.

Bah humbug.

The Awful Very Bad No Good Crappy Day

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No matter how you look at it, today was a crappy day. The best thing I can say about it is it could have been worse (in a loss of limb, loss of life sort of way).

Whatever happened, my crankiness level still would have been at 11.

The crappy day actually started last week at karate. I was hoping to move practice to Saturday (yesterday) so that I could attend the girls piano recital today. Instead, before I even got to ask the question, my sensei announced that Saturday would be a special practice for the higher level student (who is also taking a test) and that I wasn’t invited. To make matters worse, Sunday practice would have to be early because the athletics center was shutting down at 8:00.

This meant I couldn’t attend the piano performance and then rush to the station at the last minute as I’d planned to do. I either had to cancel the practice or skip the performance. With my test next week, I couldn’t skip the practice.

I told She Who Must Be Obeyed about this and she was not pleased as it meant she would be in charge of the cameras. The last time this happened, she failed (after a comedy of errors involving an unattended child and a dropped program) to get a video of our youngest’s rhythmic gymnastics performance. She was relying on me to run the video this time. I told her I couldn’t go and she went “Hmmm” which is Japanese for “this is going to end badly” and “I must break you”.

Then, soon after I woke up today, I got my migraine spot. I popped a couple aspirin, drank some extra coffee and waited for the pain. I wouldn’t be able to practice as much as I wanted.

She Who Must Be Obeyed tried several increasingly angry approaches to convince me to change my mind, even suggesting I could see part of the performance and use a taxi to get to the station. Unfortunately for her (and for me) the migraine had already made me sociopathic and cranky. I said, once again, that I couldn’t go, and suddenly became He Who Disobeyed She Who Must Be Obeyed. (aka MUD)

My morning was spent listening to She Who Must Be Obeyed trying to get a teenager and a nine year old ready to go somewhere. (Not a good thing when you have a migraine.)

I practiced karate some and then took a much needed nap after the girls left. Unfortunately, when I got to practice, I pointed out there was an entire section of my test that I’d never actually practiced. The result was two hours suffering through a migraine and an hour of being shouted at for being incompetent.

My crankiness took over right at the end of practice and I’m surprised I didn’t get the punch I probably deserved. Luckily my “I stopped giving a shit 10 minutes ago” quote was in English. (All they heard was “I stop blah blah shit 10 blah blah blah.”)

Tomorrow the migraine will be gone and I’ll feel human again. Until then I can only hope She Who Must Be Obeyed managed to get some video or my name will be a lot worse than MUD.

The Glorious Blue Flame of the Good Stuff

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One time, when I was in Albania, I set my fingers on fire to test my beverage.

I’ve mentioned before that when I was in the Peace Corps, raki was one of my favorite drinks. It’s basically a form of Ouzo, with a faint anise/licorice flavor, but with a lot more punch. It tastes good both at room temperature and chilled, and, for reasons we never understood, didn’t deliver a powerful hangover. Instead, you spent the day after stuck in slow motion.

The traditional way to test the quality of raki was to dip your fingers in it and light your fingers on fire. The bluer the flame, the better the raki. I did that once–but more on that later.

My best Raki experience involved a weekend that, in the short run, would cause me a lot of problems. However, at the time, I had a lot of fun.

I went to Elbasan to proctor an entrance exam for a local university. I was supposed to stay at a local hotel managed by the gregarious and funny Abdul (not his real name). However, as soon as I arrived in Elbasan, Abdul informed me the entrance exam had been cancelled but that I was welcome to stay at the hotel a couple nights.

The next morning, Abdul took me a to a local vineyard to see how Raki was made.

In a nutshell, grapes are crushed in a concrete vat and left to rot. At some point, and this is a key step, the rotting mess attracts flies. Eventually, though, even the flies are disgusted by the rotting mess as it swells up out of the vat and move on to a fresher rotting mess. Finally, the rotting mess deflates back into the vat and it’s time to distil it.

Because I was apparently the first American to ever visit the vineyard, I was given the honor of the “first drink” from the still. It was still a bit warm and was awesome. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, because I was the first American to visit, every Albanian who worked there or who was visiting (all 9 or 10 of them) wanted to toast with me.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, there were only two glasses. I got one and everyone else shared one and took turns toasting with me. My glass was refilled for each toast. This meant that by 10:00 a.m. I’d had 10 or so glasses of raki and had developed the power to fly and shoot laser beams from my eyes. (More or less.)

This remains one of the best experiences I had in two years in Albania. I didn’t test the raki by lighting my fingers on fire. I’d do that later and discover I was drinking high quality raki.

It wasn’t as good as that trip to vineyard though. That was real quality.

Sticky Floors for Algernon

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It’s been said that a bad dress rehearsal leads to a good opening night. Whoever said that never had to deal with a sticky floor on opening night.

A couple hundred years ago when I was still in graduate school, I took part in the play Flowers for Algernon (based on Daniel Keyes’ Novel.) I portrayed one of the doctors (although I don’t remember if I was Dr. Nemur or Dr. Strauss. I think I was Strauss.)

The production was directed by a fellow graduate student who was submitting it as part of his Master’s degree requirements. However, he had a couple handicaps. First, there were other major productions going on meaning the acting pool at Kansas State U had been spread thin and 2) he wasn’t particularly well liked in the department which thinned down the acting pool even more. (That’s how I was able to get a substantial part.)

As a result, he had lots of first time actors, including the lead actors, and a cast that was much bigger than it needed to be. This meant he had to spend a lot of time doing “trust” activities and exercises that got us working together as a team whilst simultaneously trying to teach the bulk of the cast how to act.

A few never quite got it down. One woman had one line “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes” but could never get the inflection down. It always came out as “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my OWN eyes.” (As opposed to someone else’s?)

A lot of stage acting is based on listening and being in the moment. Although you practice lines and blocking, the way a person delivers a line can change the entire scene. If you’re expected to have an angry reaction to an angry line, but the other person says their line calmly, you have to react the scene you’re in, not the scene you practiced. If you don’t, it looks weird to the audience. You have to simultaneously know what you’re supposed to do but can’t anticipate what you’re going to do. When it works, it’s brilliant and you see why people like acting.

However, as a group we didn’t work together very well and things didn’t look good. I didn’t even tell my family about the play because I expected a disaster.

Then, oddly, the disaster came, but it actually kind of worked out.

On opening night, as we prepared to go on, we were informed that the stage manager had made a huge mistake. He’d used glossy black paint to prepare the stage instead of matte black paint. This made the stage sticky. As we walked we made ripping-Velcro noises and if we stood in place our shoes stuck to the stage making quick exits difficult. However, in the spirit of “the show must go on” we were told to make the best of it.

The results were great. We started cutting out our blocking which mean we had to listen and observe and basically be in the moment. I remember one scene where I was supposed to turn away from a character then turn back and deliver a line. Instead, since my shoes were stuck to the floor, I stayed facing her and changed the way I spoke instead.

Audience members from the department told us we were the most focused cast they’d ever seen. It felt great on stage, too.

Unfortunately, the next night the stage was back to normal and we went back to being ordinary.

 

 

The Collecting and the Dumping

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If history is any indication of the future, anything I’m currently collecting is ultimately doomed.

In my life I’ve collected model cars, Star Wars stuff (a technical term), stamps, vintage paper back books, and a few rare books. Now I have a small collection of knives and pens.

I typically start a collection with righteous fervor and very little discretion. The goal is to collect shiny pretty things. Actually, that should be the plan because well made shiny pretty things may actually hold their value, but what ends up happening is I buy what can get my hands on without any consideration toward future value except in the form of “yeah, I’ll totally sell this for a profit some day” without actually knowing what’s worth collecting.

I ended up with milk crates full of plastic wrapped paperback books with cool covers, lots of interesting stamps, lots of plastic model cars and lots of dolls, er, action figures and action figure sets. Now, I have several pens and two small dry boxes full of various knives.

Eventually I reach a saturation point where I just stop caring. It’s as if I move them from point A to point B one time to many and get sick of it all and decide to dump them. This overrides the sentimental value and the sunk cost fallacy, or the hope of making money on the transaction. In the case of model cars, I’d stopped building them and just dumped them to someone I knew would be interested in them. The paperbacks I dumped just to be rid of them.

Occasionally, the energy involved in selling things causes me to keep things I’m no longer interested in. For example, I still have a bunch of stamps partly because I have no clue how to sell them and no interest in wasting any more time on them. (Of course, I haven’t decided to throw them out or give them away yet.)

The only thing I actually didn’t dump was the Star Wars stuff, which I sold at what it was worth to other doll, er, Star Wars stuff collectors at the time rather than at fire-sale prices.

The knives I’ve sold have made their money back partly because a big chunk were acquired at a great price from another collector dumping part of his collection. Now that I know what I like, the things I don’t are on their way out which, for me, is a huge improvement. I’m also looking to sell most of my old pens to keep the collection from growing beyond a handful of pens I can use on a regular rotation.

In the back of my head, though, I’m wondering what my next collection will be.

Slow Slow Fast Faster Never

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Now that I think about it, I have to blame acting for my struggles in karate.

I was pretty good at acting in university because the nature of the way actors prepare for plays suited my learning style.

When  you first start working on a production you’re given your script and start memorizing your lines. As you do this, you work up your character and start filling in the history the play doesn’t give you.

After that, you are walked through the blocking and told where to stand and when to turn and as you do it the director is making changes.  It’s fair to say that for the first month you’re memorizing stuff but none of it is expected to be perfect. The perfection comes later and culminates, if you’re lucky, in a crappy dress rehearsal that panics everyone and usually produces a good result on opening night.

It’s a slow process that I actually like because it gives time to learn things carefully and to learn any changes.

Unfortunately, in sports, and especially with my karate sensei, you’re expected to get things perfect after only a few tries. Any more than that and you’re wasting time. With my sensei it’s “Watch one; Watch one again; Do one; Screw one up; Do one again; Patience is lost.”

This is especially true as we approach my belt test. If I do badly, it’s  reflection on him. Me emphasizing “no, really, I suck at this” doesn’t help. I also have a hard time practicing techniques by myself. Sure, I can practice the basic moves but it all falls apart at speed. It’s the difference between learning your plays in basketball and actually running them in a game.

The other issue I’m having is that December is a bad time for belt tests as I’m marking exams for my job. On the other hand, the May test is bad because it comes after March exams, Spring break; and the start of school.

Luckily, I’ve had some time this weekend to review and a couple weeks to memorize. Now if I can just convince my sensei a bad dress rehearsal is a good thing.

So Productive It’s Scary and Must Be Suppressed

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Today I was productive enough that I almost finished marking one batch of exams. I’ll bet the last little bit takes me all day tomorrow to finish.

Today I had three basic tasks: pass back exams to 3rd year high school students and have them laugh at me about seeing next terms (long story) and then hand in their final marks; collect 2nd year exams; and sit around waiting for final marks to come back for final approval.

This plan left me with a couple choices: bail and go home and never come back leaving one colleague to check my final marks and correct any errors based on my notes; go home and come back around 4:00 and wait for final marks (which typically arrive an hour after deadline); or stay at school, mark exams and wait for final marks.

I chose the latter, which actually surprised me. I started with the worst part of the exams (the long writing on the back) and then marked the rest. By 3:45 p.m. I was 90% done marking when a shocking thing happened: the final results came back early. I quickly texted my colleague who appeared right as I hit send. (And you doubted my wizard powers.)

The final check involves making sure the OCR machine scanned our sheets correctly. If it did, we just write “OK” and run away as fast as we can.

I checked the marks, packed my tests and ran into the cold. Now I’m at home not finishing marking. Unfortunately, the quick arrival of the final marks interrupted my flow and it’s scientifically impossible for me to get it back until tomorrow.

To make matters worse, the devil over my left shoulder is reminding that because I don’t have that much to do there’s no rush. The devil over my right shoulder is going “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”

My goal is to finish all that in the morning and be done for the weekend until the next batch of tests arrive on Monday. Before that, I’ll probably find a few other things to do.

There is Some Joy in Dullsville This Day Only

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There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it.
—Andrew Jackson

I had nothing to do today after school and, with apologies to the former President of the United States, I had a pretty good time.

Tomorrow exams start which means I’ll be entering a cycle of denial, wishful thinking and distraction that should be a lot of fun.

When it come to having lots to do and not doing it, I am the master. For example, when I was in graduate school, right at the end of the term when exams were coming up, I had essays to mark and papers to write, I would bake cookies.

In my defense, it was an experiment to see if the Nieman-Marcus cookie recipe included in a family cookbook was actually good.  (Note: it is, but I recommend replacing one cup of butter with a cup of sour cream.) Also in my defense, I would pass the cookies around the department at Ole Miss, mostly to keep myself from getting fatter than I already was at the time.

Now the distraction can involve games and writing and reading. Oh, and there’s the binge watching of whatever random TV show I decide to watch. (In the past: Dexter, NCIS, Only Fools and Horses, Red Dwarf, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) Occasionally I will read something, too.

To try to prevent the binge watching from happening, I’ve stocked up on back issues of various podcasts and things that can be enjoyed without needing to turn on a computer. Turning on a computer, mind you, in and of itself is not bad, it’s the “well, let me check my email first” and the “well, a couple quick World of Tank matches won’t hurt” and the “Well, it’s too late to do anything now, I’ll just take care of this in the morning.”

That cycle ends with the “Holy Crap is that what day it is? I need to finish!” phase.