Category Archives: Personal

The Escalation of Pointy Stabby Things

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Today I managed to sell more knives than I bought, even though I was very close to buying a couple.

Today was the Japan Knife Guild annual show. As has become tradition/habit/syndrome, I met my Canadian friend and we spent time roaming around the show. It was one of the best shows we’ve attended and we guess that 85% of the tables had something that made us pause and think rather seriously about finances and financing.

Before we started roaming around, though, I sold him four knives I no longer wanted. I’ve sold him other knives, too, which kind of makes me his dealer. (More on that later.)

One of the things about collecting knives (well, anything actually) is the way your interests change and escalate. You start off with a couple cheap knives and mock anyone who spends more than $50 on a knife. You tell yourself the $10 knife you have does everything you need and it couldn’t do more if it cost more.

Then you see a $60 knife you like and buy it. You tell yourself the knife has everything you need and the money you spent is worth it. And, hey, the better steel actually holds an edge longer than your $10 knife. The crazy people are those who spend more than $100 dollars on a knife.

However, every time you break a $50 dollar mark, it resets you to the next highest $50 mark. This means that, all of a sudden, $100 doesn’t seem that unreasonable because it lets you try better steels and handle materials. This continues to escalate until you’re looking at $1,200 custom flippers made from Damascus steel, Zirconium and Timascus and thinking “Well, it’s only $100  more than the last one I bought so that’s not too bad.”

The problem is, at that point, knives cease to be tools and become jewelry. Are you going to cut apart a cardboard box with your $1,200 handmade knife or your $50 mass-produced one? Are you really going to take a $1,200 knife camping or hunting even if it’s called the XYZ Hunter Flipper? I admire you if you do, but I doubt you will.

In my case, my purchases didn’t escalate that far, although they did escalate. As I’ve said before, as a form of tithing, I decided to buy knives from small makers, some of them just starting out in the business. This drove up the price substantially. I also, however, acquired some used from small makers I admire.

My most expensive knife, for the record, also included a stake in the company. (Disclosure: I don’t get dividends from all sales, only from sales of limited edition knives I choose not to buy. I also have the option to sell the stake, which is represented by the first limited edition knife.)

As for my friend, he also ended up not buying anything, although he plans to order one for his father. The only thing he bought was my four unwanted knives.

This purchase surprised me, though, because after buying a good quality fixed blade knife a couple shows ago, he swore off cheap knives, or as he calls them “crap knives” and has decided to focus on high quality makers.

Luckily for him, I also happen to have a couple of those around.

Don’t Report the Crime if You Don’t Have the Time

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When I was in Albania I got to take part in the investigation of my own mugging.

All I really wanted was my money reimbursed.

Some time during my second year in Albania I got offered a free ride to Skopje, the capital city of the (Former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia. I’ve probably written in down somewhere, but I can’t remember the names of the people I traveled with. He was somehow involved in the development community and she was his translator or employee (to this day I still don’t understand the relationship). They gave me a tour of some interesting sites and then told me how to get a bus back to Albania.

The bus arrived in Tirana after dark and I proceeded to the Hotel Arberia, which was my home away from home. About half way between the bus and the hotel, a man I’d seen lurking near the bus approached me from the front, at the same time his accomplice tried to grab my bags.  I was carrying a book bag and a small carpetbag. I locked my arms together and held on to both bags whilst having my arms and shoulders kicked. Since they’d seen me get off an international bus, they knew I had a US passport and were hoping for a quick store (which is why no knives were involved.) Luckily, it was winter and I was wearing a heavy coat that absorbed most of the kicks.

In the end all they got was my decoy fanny pack–which I carried for moments like this–and some cash that I’d lazily stuck in the decoy.

To get the cash reimbursed from the Peace Corps I had to fill out an official police report. Unfortunately, the person I was supposed to meet was on either a vacation or a honeymoon and I got the wrong person.

Important tip: when dealing with a bureaucracy, never get the wrong person.

This complicated things. The other complicating factor was one of the policeman who’d interviewed me had seen one of the muggers on the street before he mugged me. I was then invited to a late night investigation/man hunt which involved walking with the police and saying “not him” “not him” “not him” and going into bars to check out the patrons.

I kept mumbling that I didn’t want justice; I just wanted my cash back.

In the end, I had to go back to the police station where I eventually found the right person and I got my money reimbursed. The police never found the perpetrator and I never saw him again.

The only catch was, a month later I got a note from the police saying I had to be present at a hearing and if I wasn’t present I could go to jail. The hearing had taken place three days before I received the note. A few phone calls later and everything was cleared up.

Or there’s still warrant for my arrest in Albania.

History in Bytes of Bites

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I think, when the issue is carefully considered, that selfies and lunch portraits make more sense than paper diaries.

A picture of the squid you ate for lunch with the caption “GIANT SQUID!” doesn’t seem all that different to me than recording what you ate in a diary. “Ate squid for lunch. Delicious. Texture of slimy leather.”  The main difference is time. Tweeting a picture of your drink next to your face is much faster than writing “I had a Pina Colada at Trader Vics. My hair was perfect.” (The photo is also less cliche and easier to understand than my handwriting.)

Similarly, a picture of your bloated, red-eyed, tear stained face with the phrase “Life after bitch” is much more effective than endless whinging about your break up and about how she didn’t appreciate you and “What does she see in that p&#@k anyway! I mean, besides a good job and lots of money and perfect hair and great fashion sense and his own private jet what’s he got that I haven’t got? I mean, like what’s a private apartment in Paris when you’ve got my wit and, well, my wit?” (Oh, like you’ve never been dumped for someone like that before.)

Granted, part of the problem with electronic files and storage is that the formats are always changing. I’ve spent many hours moving files from one format to another and making and storing various back ups. (I also now have no way to read old floppy discs.) If we can’t find a way to extract the old data, we lose large pieces of history, but I’m sure some enterprising soul is already working on that problem.

Selfies and photos of your lunch and photos of the jerk on the train and of the great sunset, when taken together, are a terrific record of a life. Even better, they’ve got color and expression.

Now if I just had a better filing system for it all.

 

Rites of Passage at a Self Service Station

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A few years ago, I watched She Who Must Be Obeyed and father in-law pump gas for the first time in their lives.

It was fascinating, and vaguely familiar, to watch as they figured out how to choose the flavor of gas they wanted and pre-pay and then get stuck on what to do next.

Eventually I had to get out and help them.

Until recently, all Japanese gas stations have been full service in a 1950s sense. As you pulled into the station, an attendant would direct you to an open pump and then an entire team of attendants would descend on your car. They would wash the windows, check the air in the tires and, give you a towel so you could wipe the inside of the windows. If you didn’t smoke, they would give you air freshener beads to put in your ash tray. When they were finished and you’d paid, one of the attendants would block traffic so you could get going again.

However, a number of oil shocks eventually caused some gas stations to experiment with self-service so they could eliminate overhead. This was such a big deal it made national news. Now that people have figured out how easy it is to pump your own gas, the call of the lower prices has slowly driven out the full-service stations. There are still a few, but they have a lot of competition.

By contrast, when I was in the USA, I only went to a full-service pump once, and I only did that because I was in a hurry and it was the only pump open. I was met by an attendant who was one part bored and one part shocked that anyone had actually come to use the pump. He washed my windows and he may have checked the oil but that was pretty much it.

Lately, Japan has also discovered self-checkout lanes at large grocery stores, although it’s still at the phase where a nearby attendant is needed to deal with any issues.

Idle Hands Are the Devil’s Remote Control

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Back when I was single, in the middle of winter, I used to watch crap television simply because it was in English.

Not only would I watch the crap television but with a little help from Japanese TV scheduling, I invented binge watching.

First you have to understand the pull English language television has, especially if you’ve just come from Albania where all TV shows were in either Albanian or Italian and included such gems as Disco Club Albania, where every week couples danced to “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” as part of a contest that never seemed to be resolved, and Detective Extralarge, which is, well, a show with Philip Michael Thomas  that exists that was made. (And you have to keep reminding yourself, as you watch it, that you are awake and not in a nightmare.)

The effect of this is so powerful that on a trip to London after several months in Albania, my friend and I almost missed new years because were mesmerized by CNN news and the pilot of Melrose Place, which remains one of the worst hours of television I’ve ever survived.

But it was in English.

Then, when I got to Japan, in the middle of winter I found myself bored and one of the devils over my shoulders made me reach for the remote. I stumbled across a Beverly Hills 90210 marathon on one of the cable channels. I watched it pretty much straight through, with a couple hours sleep mixed in. This is when I invented binge watching. I would continue that tradition through pretty much the bulk of the series. It was a terrible train wreck of a show, but not quite the point where it was classic and campy.

But it was in English.

Since then I’ve gone through fits of binge watching. I tried watching The Walking Dead (summary: boring, soap opera, boring personal issues, boring, HOLY CRAP ZOMBIES. Insides are now outsides. SHE”S EATING HIS STOMACH! Boring, soap opera. Repeat.) I gave up on that.

Recently, I watched all the episodes of Inspector Morse (which inspired me to my latest big writing project) and most of the episodes of Waking the Dead, a British CSI that had a few great episodes but was generally loud and annoying and I ended up skipping to the end after a while.

But it was in English.

A World of Choices With Five Bubbles

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When I was in Albania I decided I wasn’t in enough debt so I decided to study for a Ph.D. when I finished my Peace Corps service.

To do this I had the interesting joy of applying to graduate school from a developing country with a dodgy mail system. My mad plan, and some day I’ll go into full detail about how mad it was, involved getting a “regular” Ph.D. in a school with a strong creative writing program.

Somehow I managed to acquire applications and the money to pay for applying (see first paragraph about debt) and ended up applying to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) which had a good creative writing program that included the late, great Barry Hannah, a connection to William Faulkner and John Grisham’s plantation. To do this, though, I had to take both the ordinary GRE and the subject specific Literature in English GRE.

Luckily, one of the books I received from Norton Publishing was a college algebra book. I was therefore able to what I’d been unable to do at university: learn math above the basic level. This helped me do well on the ordinary GRE.

The Literature in English test was more difficult because it tested both breadth and depth of knowledge. Also, incorrect answers actually counted against my correct answers. At times it was better to not answer a question than to risk getting it wrong.  Luckily, I had an entire library from Norton to help me review.

Unfortunately, because I was in Albania, I had to take both tests on the same day. Since, at the time, both tests were about three hours long, I spent a long time in a chair filling in bubbles.

I ended up doing surprisingly well on the GRE, even in the math section, and did pretty well on the Literature in English. Luckily, I happened to be familiar with a couple of the works in the analysis section. I did worse in the part that had poetry conventions. “Is the following an example of iambic pentameter, sprung rhythm or boogie woogie do wop?” (Something like that. My choice, for the record, was F for “Who f@#king cares?” which means I didn’t answer it.)

At the end of the day, the entire world had five bubbles next to it and I found it difficult to answer a question without being tempted to choose D All of the Above or E None of the Above.

In the end I managed to pass both tests and was accepted to Ole Miss which was an interesting time of the kind you curse your enemies with.

The Things Best Left Unremembered

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One of the things you should never do is Google your childhood.

One thing people my age (who grew up in the USA) like to do is lament the loss of the great Saturday morning shows in the 1970s. We are convinced that modern Saturday morning fare is crap and we were the few, the happy few.

This is mostly because we remember how the shows made us feel not how they actually were. We also tend to remember the theme songs. We also don’t realize how demented we’ve become because of them.

The king of all shows was The Krofft Supershow. We mostly remember it for hosting a bunch of other shows. What we didn’t remember was Kaptain Kool and the Kongs. When you watch this, you will understand why we blocked it out.

Having watched this once, I then forced myself back into very dark places, I first dared explore one of the shows that first gave me an inkling of, well, puberty, Electra Woman and DynaGirl.

The song is still catchy and the main actress still, um, electra inspiring. (I should also add that Judy Strangis aged well and/or had a good plastic surgeon.) If you want to explore true madness, however, search for an actual episode. (Electra demented.)

The other shows, and probably the ones with the best theme songs were Doctor Shrinker (warning the acting is terrible and lead woman is named BJ).

and Wonderbug

Unfortunately, this greatness was ruined in Season 2 when Bigfoot and Wildboy and Magic Mongo were added to the line up. And then it was completely ruined in Season 3 with the addition of the Bay City Rollers.

Now, those still wallowing in denial will point out that all the networks had their own line up. One channel gave us superheroes with Shazam! and The Secrets of Isis (come on, how many of you, for a brief second, think “Oh Mighty Isis” when you hear news out of Syria and Iraq? My hand’s raised) but these were just badly acted, not demented. They also didn’t have catchy theme songs.

In the end, I suppose, what current Saturday mornings miss is the variety of twistedness and dementedness. Well, maybe that’s because we’ve become so demented we don’t remember. Whatever the truth, the theme songs aren’t as catchy as they used to be.

The Man in the Moon and the Skunk in the Trailer Park

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One thing I have to say about lunar eclipses is that I like them better in the early evening than late at night.

Three years ago an eclipse came way past bed time. I got our oldest up to see it but her reaction sounded something like “ghermst hawpsdt kkelwost jeislwowks, daddy (yawn)”.  I still don’t know if she was impressed or not and I know she doesn’t remember it.

This time we had the entire family taking shifts running outside and checking the status of the moon. Eventually I dragged out my big camera and zoom lens and spent a lot of time hugging a light pole (shut up) to get something resembling clear photos.

Back in the mid-70s, when I lived in Colorado, one of the coolest things we did was stay up late to see a lunar eclipse. I had a smallish telescope that was reasonably useful but mostly I remember it being a clear Colorado night. Being at 6,336 feet helps a lot with astronomy because the air is thinner. Living in a rural area helps, too, because there are few lights.

The best part was, once the moon started to go dark and bloody, I got my first good look at the Milky Way. I still remember being impressed by it. In fact, I wouldn’t see anything like it until I was in Albania. (Third world city, few lights.)

I remember staying up to see another eclipse, but what I don’t remember was which viewing had the skunk. Everyone was keeping a safe distance and although I saw it move behind someone’s trailer, I wasn’t having the “man that stinks” reaction everyone else was having. That was the first time I realized that I wasn’t smelling things quite the same way as everyone else. A few years later, I’d realize I couldn’t smell at all.

The next total lunar eclipse in Tokyo is in January/February 2018 with another coming at the end of July. If we’re still here, it’s a date.

Literature as a Second Excuse to Travel

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When I was in Albania I got a chance to spend some of George Soros’ money.

First, though, I nearly wasted some of it.

I’ve written before about how expatriates go through a cycle of culture shock, almost normal, culture shock, almost normal. The worst usually happens about three months in. Until then, you live in a kind of “this ain’t too bad” euphoria.

In my case, the euphoria led me to get involved with too many extra projects. I agreed to help out with the Open Society Fund for Albania (Soros)’s  new University Guidance office, the sole purpose of which was to help Albanians go to US or UK universities. I would sit there several hours a week and help Albanians apply to universities.

I also agreed, through a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, to proctor a selection test for teachers at an educational university in another town.

Then two things happened. First, I saw the office I would be working in and it would basically be, a chair, a desk, a couple books, a computer that didn’t work and me helping students. I knew they weren’t going to be ready for the grand opening but they planned to proceed anyway.

Second, it turned out that the selection test would be the weekend of the grand opening. I would have to say no to something.

At this point, culture shock and panic took over, and I opted to go to the selection test without telling the OSFA (Soros) I wouldn’t be around. The result was that I was pretty much fired from working with them, although my outstanding culture shock nourished denial skills made me think it was mutual.

The funny part is the selection test was cancelled. Instead something bizarre happened, but that’s another story (and one I’ve actually told too many times).

A couple years later, the OSFA (Soros) was looking for projects to fund and I submitted a proposal for a series of lectures I called “Teaching Literature as a Second Language” that I hoped would convince Albanian teachers to start using more literary works in English as a Foreign Language classes.

I got, roughly, 200 dollars for the project and that covered materials and travel related expenses. In the end, I traveled to three cities and did one lecture (which amounted to a brief history of books they’d never been able to read and a plan for how to use them). In two there were complications that stopped the lectures.

I then proceeded to shock the entire OSFA (Soros) by actually filling out an after action report. Apparently these were so rare that the person who received it didn’t appear to know what to do with it.

I tried to get more of George Soros’ money, but the OSFA (Soros) never got interested in giving me any more.

Second Time Around With A Different Plan

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For the record: We are happy to report we survived the typhoon and that school was cancelled.

This month my goal is to hurt my daily opportunity to work on this blog.

I’ve written before about how I took part in a Monthly Challenge where participants were encouraged to adopt a new habit or drop an old one for one month and see what happens and how they feel. At the end of the month they decide if they are going to keep the habit.

In my case, I decided to try a consistent 11-5 sleeping schedule, even on weekends, which was a lot better than my four hour(ish) random sleeping schedule. To help accomplish this I also decided to stop drinking coffee after lunch.

After the month, I’ve found that with the more consistent sleep pattern I’ve had more energy and been more productive in the afternoon–especially at work when I have a free hour–and after work. (The exceptions are if I have a high-carb lunch, then I get sleepy for a while.) It also gives me time in the morning to exercise, do some writing and plan my day and I’ve found myself less grumpy at work (although the company I work for is trying to make up for that. Long story involving a typhoon and bovine scatalogical materials.)

Now that the 30 days are over, I’ve decided I’m going to keep the habit.

The problem is, now when I get home I’m still in my “damn I’m sleepy” after work schedule where I sit down in front of the computer and read news and generally waste time for a couple hours.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself much more restless during this time. Therefore, my goal this month is to eliminate the after work internet and focus on writing projects and more reading.

The problem with that is, after I’ve written a couple hours, I don’t have much energy left for these daily entries. (That happened this weekend when I spent the better part of each day writing.) Also, if I never turn on the internet, it’s kind of hard to write a post for it.

That means I’ll have to experiment with when to write these–which mean’s I’ll probably continue to start them at 10 p.m. or so Tokyo time and hope I don’t have as many typos as I usually have.

By the way, I encourage everyone to try to the Monthly Challenge. Try giving something up for a month. At the end of the month, you can change back or keep going.