02-01 – 1:25pm

02-01 – 1:25pm

Well, here we are. Made it to February. I’ve been here over three months now. Is that weird to anyone else? Has it become normal to anyone else?
I have to start packing now. I’d have started doing my laundry today but Ash beat me to it, and now the hangers are taken. But basically I gotta get all packed up before Monday. It kinda seems like this last month went by in kind of a haze. It’s not that it went by quickly, but, all the days seem to have bled together. I can’t really tell when what happened. But here I am in February, and soon enough many aspects of my daily life will change. And mostly for the better. Having internet is going to drastically change my daily life here. And in a month and a half, I’ll have money: two things I keep coming to again and again. Can you tell I’m getting antsy?

My attempts to stay under budget have been seemingly successful, though yesterday despite my better efforts I was forcer to break my ￥10000 note, and in the process got sucked into buying delicious nutritious fruits and vegetables, which in combination with my cigs put my about 300 over budget. Right now I’m still under budget by about 27%, but the rest of the time until payday will be days I essentially have to spend money. My next day off I will be moving, and I am working overtime the other of my days off. But at least that means that March’s paycheck will be handsome.

But enough about all that. I’m only writing about money and moving because I’ve been deliberately depriving myself of other forms of stimulation.
I ran into Gabe on my way home from work Sunday night and joined him for a beer with Matt. That was nice, since he paid.

Yesterday I spent most of the day organizing my music still, I nearly got it complete, and this morning I finished it. Right now I’m taking my new Smart Playlist for a test drive, with a great deal of success. It’s not really so elaborate as it is painstakingly thought about. But I can switch back and forth between one that includes harder music, like screamo and metal and hard rock, and a slightly more universally palatable one without.

Now, you might ask yourself, what on Earth possessed me to organize, group, genre, and rate 2,372 songs on my computer? Well, I’m sick of not being able to get a, you know, really good playlist going. And there are so many songs about which I’ve forgotten, and through this process I’ve essentially listened to clips of every songs on my computer. I’ve become re-familiarized with almost all my music, which is fantastic. I, like most people I imagine, go through phases with music, and it’s not that the songs aren’t good anymore, I’ve just started listening to newer music. So now I can go back and start hearing all these songs I used to listen to but had forgotten about. Like Madd West’s Your Friend is Ugly, a hip hop comedic masterpiece.

Now, obviously I didn’t listen to ALL of it, I skipped over just about everything in the Rap, R&B, Hip Hop-type categories, as well as all things Techno. I don’t even know how I got all that rap on there, I imagine Kirk had something to do with that. And Greg helped with the techno, but, I don’t need to listen to most of that. I don’t know why I don’t just delete most of the rap, but, that would involve listening to a lot of it and seeing if I actually wanted to have it. I kept it in the first place cause people would come over when I was in the fraternity and want to listen to (c)rap, and would either download it or complain until it found its way onto my compie. So I just gave it all 1 star and left it at that. If I make a rap or techno playlist, the starts won’t factor into their selection.

Ok, enough of that. Today I go back to work and start the real super penny pinching to make sure I stay as far under budget as possible. Blah blah blah now I’m just typing to kill time.

11:25pm

Following the LiveDoor scandal here in Japan, the value of the yen has dropped about 3 to the dollar. The yen, days before the scandal surfaced, had risen to ~￥114.4 to $1, breaking the to $1, breaking the ￥115 barrier which had held for so long. Now, in light of the multi-billion yen value loss from LiveDoor and the consequential market adjustment, the yen has fallen to ￥117.65 to $1. Now, three cents to the dollar doesn’t seem like a huge, life changing amount, but consider when every month you send home ~$375. ￥42911 vs. ￥44118, a difference of ￥1207, ~$10. So, every time I send money home, I pay service fees, intermediary fees, recipient fees, and $10 more bucks now because the yen is worth less. These are things I have to consider.