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1.24.05/02:43 dancing on the edge
And my family got me wonderful presents. My mom got me a studio-quality microphone, and Aunt Mar got me a sweet giant book of Japanese artwork and a certain ps2 game. And Stephie got me a set of rocking shot glasses and some mixing utensils.
Kyou wa, ichinichijuu Maria-chan to ishou ni itakatta. Kimi hontou ni aishite-ru. Mainichi kimi no koto o kangaete-ru. Kimi ga nai de boku ga nashi.
I think I'm just prone to tragic birthdays. When I was 12, my grandfather died on my birthday. Last year, I had to spend it all alond 'cause Grandma was in Indiana and Dad was in Turkey. And this year, the Steelers proved to us that you can only stumble ass-backward into victory so many times before your luck runs out. Still, a pretty good season. Omedetou! 1.20.05/00:45 karma squared So Mr. Briggs said he'd post another one of my articles for the politics section of BBspot.com. Look for it sometime soon, it's called 'War on Terror Ends in Surrender.' It's got a really positive message, I think. Also, I'm thinking of re-doing the peachycomics logo. This one's getting pretty old.
Here's a black-and-white picture of my room. A careful observer might look at the guitar and postulate that the image is reversed, but it's not. I'm just left-handed. Unless I'm in a mirror.
There's this program I have for this page that tells me what web sites send me hits and what search strings lead to this site. Some of my favorite searches that lead people here are: 'girls spreading there legs,' 'how to rid your house of spiders,' and 'mario time machine.'
On the list of referrer sites there's some girl's livejournal where she has her own list of Nara Sensei quotes. It's good to know I'm not the only one who thinks he's quotable and awesome. I'd post the link but I don't know her and don't want to subject her to unwanted page-viewing. If she's you, I'm a THIRD year student, by the way. Anybody who can survive second year deserves to be acknowledged for it. 1.17.05/18:16 got air, got dirt, got water We will pretend for Grandma's sake that I didn't spend an hour on the phone on a long-distance call to Australia yesterday. More good news for her is that she won her 1st round of appeals against the siding people. Now she's up to $3500 and they're trying to get her to settle for two sheets of siding and paint. Why this guy is refusing to just admit he's an idiot and shouldn't have started tearing siding off the wrong house and pay to fix it to her standards is beyond me.
And I came to the realization the other day that I don't hate Maroon 5. 'What could possibly justify that?' you might wonder. I will explain. We need to put a matter like this in the form of an equation of cool points versus suck points:
Maroon 5 is a soulless MTV suck band: -25 points Videos are not very innovative: -10 points Lyrics/rhymes are pretty teh suck: -15 points Total Suck Points(Negative Cool Points): -50 points
But there are, surprisingly, some saving graces that I have to factor into this equation. Maria really likes them, and she has them programmed as her ringer. I have good associations of being woken up next to her by 'This Love'. And hearing it on the radio during certain other key moments gives me good associative memories as well. Let's add this in.
Woken up by Maroon 5 ringer: +10 points Positive associative radio memories: +25 points 'This Love' is a pretty catchy song: + 5 points Played a show in Osaka (didn't go): +10 points surprise! cover of 'Pure Imagination': +25 points Total Cool Points: +75 points
Basically, my love of the original 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' and the fact that they covered one of the songs from it is their saving grace, netting them a grand total of 25 cool points. Not close to my personal total of 17,208 cool points, but jumping out of the negative numbers is a good start. We don't have time for me to show you the equation how I determined that one, but you should just place faith in my judgment and mathematical skills. 1.14.05/00:31 muddles of pudd Outside the Cathedral there's a large sidewalk, twice the width of the ones on the street, paved with sheets of rock cut into rectangles and fitted together instead of concrete. In class I was looking out the window onto this sidewalk, and I saw a huge puddle of muddy water encompassing the whole width of it.
Students would approach this puddle and react in a number of different ways. The most common solution was to try and stretch one's legs to the shallow islands in the middle of the puddle, but once they got halfway across and stuck they resigned to taking one muddy step.
The second approach was for the student to island step as far as he/she could and then make a jump for the dry edge. You could actually see them deliberating about whether or not to do it, but in the end they had to.
There were, of course, the fringe students who made up the remainder of the puddle-crossers. Some of them just kept their normal pace as if there were no giant mud puddle, ruining the bottoms of their pants. Others avoided it altogether by walking onto the grass where it wasn't muddy or puddlized. Kids from this last paragraph are my heroes. 1.11.05/22:09 looking the gift horse
[give] dirty rhyming poem
Thing one is that my Aunt found a paycheck from before I left. How I failed to notice that I was short 175 bucks is beyond me, but I'll take it. My only concern is if I will still be able to cash it after such a long lapse of time. I might have to get it reprinted, but that will be one thing I do this week that IS worth my time. Oh, and here are the rest of the Japan pics.
[japan pictures] august to december '04
1.9.05/21:28 akemashite omedetou goziamasu! That means Happy New Year. I guess the next obvious thing would be to explain why there haven't been any updates and why December is still clinging to the bottom of this update. The December thing is because there are only a few posts so it will be more convenient to just lump these two months together.
The other one is a little more complicated.
So check this out, about two weeks ago I was doing System Restore to bring my computer back to a time when it wasn't completely infested with spyware. While it was System Restoring, I got impatient and turned off the computer, thinking it would just revert to the way it was before. Bad, bad idea. So after that it refused to do anything after I turned it on, just a black screen and a cursor. No Safe Mode, no nothing. No passing go, no collecting 200 dollars.
So I installed Windows XP again and now I have two versions, but only one works. On this functional one, I have to reinstall all my programs again. While I was chatting to Ramesh of Dell Technical support figuring out how to fix the no booting thing I accidentally partitioned my hard drive and did some other unmentionable things to this poor computer.
It seems okay now, though.
And today was a very lucky day for me, which you'll already know all about if I've done the next post by the time you read this. That one might even have pictures. 12.29.04/00:50 making out in japanese That's the name of a book I saw in Barnes and Noble today. Eric was talking about it in Japan but when I looked through it there didn't seem to be too much super-exciting stuff in it. Most of it I should already know. But it is more useful than Japanese Street Slang or Zakennayo.
[japanese love song] 31 sec 10 MB .wav
Here's a video of me strumming the ol' geetar and singing a song I wrote the other day. Click here for the lyrics and a rough translation into your own language, if your own language is English. If not, then you probably can't read this.
I think I'm going to try and sell some sketches of mine on e-bay. I'm going to wait until I finish a few more to set it up, but if you follow the link below you can see some of what I've already got. I don't know what to set as my starting bid or reserve or even what I'd expect to get for them. What would you pay?
[sketch gallery] (explicit image warning)
And I'm happy today. I got a Christmas card from my girlfriend. When I figure out how to dial her number, I have some phone cards too. Should be pretty awesome. Anybody know how to call Australia? I sure don't.
I bought three Roald Dahl books today. Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, Switch Bitch, and Tales of the Unexpected. From that last book, four or five of them were made into episodes of Alfred Hitchcock presents, so they might be a little familiar to you. Wonder what Mr. Dahl would think of Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka? Probably he'd like him better than Manson... 12.26.04/21:10 kanojo ga inai to sabishiku naru Wheels keep on spinning round, spinning round and round. Yeah, that's what Mr. McCrea says, and I can't argue with him. CAKE are like my children--I may not approve of all the decisions they make, but I love them anyway.
[30 seconds of maria] 10 MB (.mov)
And you know who I miss? My girlfriend. Plane tickets to Australia are EXPENSIVE. I'm about 1400 dollars short of my goal. I might have to start pimping, or dealing drugs, or pimping drugs, whatever that means. Here's a video of me putting her on the spot one day when she came to visit me at Kansai Gaidai. No subtitles.
What did I do today? I 'shouted Teresa' along with 67,000 other people at the Steeler game. You might think I'm not into that, but think about it: free tickets, beer, time with my dad, and the chance to wear a yellow hat and not look goofy.
What's not to love?
Now that I'm home and lonely I'm finally starting to get depressed enough to write again. I wrote a song (in poorly grammaticized Japanese, no less!) that I will probably post sometime this week and this dirty poem that a 14-year-old girl told me was hot.
[like a grape] dirty non-rhyming poem
I didn't get much stuff for Christmas this year. It was more about big things like tuition and books and car insurance and paying off my bookie so Larry doesn't come here and shatter my kneecaps again. 12.23.04/13:44 fuyu no soozi = tanoshimi Today has been a day of cleaning and vacuuming and dusting. Maybe you thought I didn't have such capabilities? If that was something that you were thinking, then I apologizing for derailing your train of thought. 'Tis a busy week, this week.
[tour of the basement] 10.1 MB (.mov)
I can put up more movies now I think, now that it doesn't take two or three hours to upload them. This makes me happy and it should make you happy too. Everybody benefits from the new technology and the application thereof, of said technology.
And I've been trying to think of the best way to present all this information about Japan. Maybe just another picture page like I've done for Florida and Indiana? Perhaps I should write a short story about it...I'm not sure yet. So when I figure that out, whatever format that becomes, it will be posted.
12.16.04/12:17 symptoms of peachycomics withdrawal
You want to know what Japan was like? It's tomorrow there. Literally and figuratively. If you ask a random person to tell you where the station is, they will draw you a map and offer to walk you there. You don't tip at restaurants.
But it's so much more than that.
And in many, many ways, Japan is exactly like the US. Anything you can get here, you can get there. If you go there thinking you'll be sitting on the floor all the time and that social situations are ridiculously complicated, you will be disappointed.
Here's a quick overview, though. I stayed with an awesome host family, went to Kansai Gaidai University, and met a wonderful, cute Japanese girl named Maria. Not a very Japanese name, but I mean, she writes it in kanji. You can't argue with something you can't read... |
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Yeah,
I disgraced myself today. Twice. But I'm not complaining.
When I was at work this morning, my good buddy was trying to get me to
skip out for a bit and go to the Dirty O and get a beer, but I didn't do
it. That would be one more piece of insubordination I don't need on
my record. Not that I have any right now, but I'd like to think I've come
close a couple of times.
And my 21st birthday is
on Sunday, the 23rd. Jesse said he wants to take me to the club, but
we'll see if that really happens. I have a feeling Monday is going
to be a very long and hazy and headachy kind of day...
I'm
ecstatic that I finally found a copy of Super Mario
RPG. After 3 years of searching and the rape of my computer
by tons of spyware and false hopes and all that jazz, I can finally play
it again. Before the Nintendo lawyers sue me, let me point out that
I own the cartridge. I'd play that but the battery is sucks and my
SNES has long since died. It was lucky enough not to suffer the
firework explosion fate of the NES, though.
