Kenka

So last Saturday at work I apparently got in a fight with Emi, my J-staff, who called me lazy under her breath and mentioned something about my observation. I called her out on it and she snapped at me after trying to ignore me. I called my manager and told her about the incident immediately afterwards. She wanted me to hand out tissues, and I said I would after I finished fillign out my kids forms, which I hadn't had time to do, despite my two no-shows earlier that day because I was helping out Christian with learning his kids materials since it was his first day doing them. I asked if that was ok, and she said yes. Anyway, I told her I was going to finish marking my files, and was like, "You JUST had a free!" and then called me lazy. I more or less got in her face about it because I don't stand for that kind of thing when it's not deserved.

Apparently she had to talk to her manager about the incident too, and now we're not talking. Oh well, no big deal.

If you're so emotionally unstable that you're willing to let your personal life affect your attitude at work and take it out on other people, namely me (she spends most of her time at work in the office snacking and complaining about her diet/constantly shifting dramativ relationship with her boyfriend), then you can go fuck yourself. She's manic half the time, encourages us to be lazy, and then comes down on me when she's in a bad mood all of a sudden and doesn't get what she wants immediately. Whatever. Eat a dick.

Life's good out here other than that, though I'm poor from making reservations for so many things, and rent, and trips, and bills and blah blah blah I'm gonna have the most boring social life for a while, i.e. this entire year apart from my many vacations. It'll be a challenge, but hey, I need a challenge to stay on my toes.

Dreams of Kingship

I had a dream last night that my family and I went to Slovakia on vacation, and that we went to see the King of Slovakia speaking. Yes, the King. I don't think there IS a king of Slovakia, but, whatever.

Anyway, I wanted to sit in the front row to hear him speak, so we did. Now keep in mind this is taking place in like, an old theatre, and the King is on stage talking, wearing you know, an OLD school King's type outfit, with the red velvet cape and everything, kinda like the Burger King kinda King. But he's young, a generally cool guy, and we even get to see his throne, which was behind the curtains, which doubled as a harpsicord/organ type thing on which he played an interested little tune that rather impressed the audience and in particular my mother but was in fact wrought with minor errors that were probably the result of my brain, much like how you can't really read in dreams, but I still noticed anyway.

I wanted to be there because I wanted to learn about the history of my family, learn of any heritage to my last name. I wanted to talk to him in private after the shower, or like raise my hand mid speach and ask him there, but the opportunity came when, during the course of his act or whatever, he needed to go outside and do something and I got picked to go along with him. So we're walking along outside and I tell him what I'm interested in, and he asks me my name, and I tell him my last name. He's quiet for a second while we walk and then his phone rings, being a historically dressed but in reality technologically up-to-date kind of King, and answers with, "Zahorcak here. Yes?" thusly answering the question of my bloodline. The way he said it though had a much stronger 'tch' sound though, but I figure that'd probably be the case anyway, so no big deal. I was happy.

Shortly after the dream regressed into normal dream melting type stuff where some giant (like 25 feet high) caterpillar thing (exactly like a giant Carrion Devourer from WoW) came out from backstage and someone managed to lure it outside and then kill it by, much to my surprise and then in-dream-mocking, he swam across the river over and over with the thing chasing him until it got tired and drowned. I said to the man, "THAT was the first thing to cross your mind?? 'Oh, look! A giant worm thingie's broken into this show I'm watching! I know, I'll get it to chase me then swim back and forth across this river until it gets tired and doesn't come up anymore! Brilliant!" But I suppose I shouldn't complain since it did in fact work.

Dreams are weird. Additionally, it makes even less sense because my last name means Foreigner in Slovak, and thusly I doubt one with my last name could ever be king. Except by conquest. Which would be cool.

This Isn't Funny

So I had my mid-contract evaluation today at work, I went to Kashiwa, correct branch the first time around(!) and it went fine. We had a little seminar for the new kids lessons for April 2007, which are an attempt to actually maybe teach the kids something at all whatsoever, rather than simply parroting English like they have been, both at Nova and in life in general. Best of luck to us all in this endeavor.

Anyway, after work today Jenn was like, hey wanna go out for a drink? So we made our way to the Hub, where, in keeping with the odd trend I've noticed recently, we ran into three or four people and another three or four showed up about 20 minutes after we arrived. At my table were Quinn, Jenn, Sarah and myself, followed by Sarah's boyfriend/fiance/husband later on. I of course shortly started in on my signature game, "Tell me a story" which has had increasing success, especially among this particular group of people, i.e. they've all got some crazy fucked up lives prior to moving here that are worth hearing about over drinks.

Anyway (I need to find a better way to start paragraphs), eventually the story rules came around to this: Quinn, tell us a story involving you, Japan, and fire.
Innocently, Quinn starts in on his story.
"So, this one time, I was in Hiroshima, and"
And we all started laughing. All of us. We're all going to Hell.

My Own Crusade

K. My butt-sore emo-unstable period has passed and I'm back to my normal, why the hell should I care at this point, self.

After a little gameplay, some football and some manic refridgerator cleaning, I'm back where I should be, and I'm pumped listening to a little Coheed and Cambria, who are still pretty much the greatest band alive.

I cleaned the shit out of that refridgerator. I cleaned it good. Since I've gotten back, I've been on this ridiculous cleaning streak that continued this morning with the fridge. The other day I was taking a pee and I got so disgusted all of a sudden with the state of the floor and toilet and surrounding areas that I just took everything out of there, snagged the mop and went to town. I had to do some srubbing, and sweeping, and uh, filth removing, including but not limited to the actual scrub brush that's in there that's filthier than the toilet itself, which is now encrusted with the crystaline urea of 4 years worth of inhabitants.

After I finished cleaning out the bathroom I figured I should hop in the shower and wash off the filth which had made its way onto my person, at which point I figured I might as well clean the shower too since I started cleaning early to have time to finish before having to get ready for work. I scrubbed the everliving shit out of the shower too, including the floor which had this nice marble look to it but which in all actuality is just plan light grey. Huh. Never would have though. Anyway, the damn thing glows now.

So the fridge today was the next logical extension of my Cleaning Crusade, given the age of certain dipping sauces which had managed to corrode the glass which at one point contained them and coagulated like platelets among other the bottles, forming an impermeable oyster sauce barrier that has represented the door of my fridge since the first day I moved in. Once this was out of the way, I emptied about 5*10^6 bottles of old salad dressing, bbq sauce, wasabi, and other unknown but similarly pungent sauces, emptied the rest of the fridge, cleaned the shelves, threw out old crap, and reorganized the remains to better suit the newly appropriable space. I give it, I dunno, a week before it's back to square one. I also hope I didn't throw out anything that wasn't really rotten yet, but oh well. Sacrifices must be made in the name of progress, right?

I wonder what's next, since everything I'm cleaning occupies shared space and so far my room remains untouched....for now.

Transcripts

I got college thrown back up in my face again today. To be completely honest, it's almost funny when this happens now, because it means that either they've held a grudge for 4 years now or we've fallen out of touch and never really had a chance to clear things up, such that the possibility of certain things being true is still real to them. In either case, that someone can hold a grudge that long when they weren't even involved is funny to me because it shows me what kind of person they are, and that people could know me for 4 years without ever clearing up their doubts is a little funny to me too. What isn't funny is the thought that over those 4 years I gave them something to affirm their suspicions.

It used to bother me a great deal when people would bring up my past with me and hold it to me like it were the present. I've let that go, those people are as much a part of the past as the ideas they present, and it's not really my job to bring them up to speed anymore. But it has made me think a bit on why I came to Japan, and why I'm so happy here. While not the whole reason, I'm coming to understand the truth in what I'm about to say.

What I like about living in Japan is that the people I meet know who I am, and I'm not constantly forced to explain myself or patch things up. I hate to feel like an escapist, but, a great deal of my relationships back home are tainted, and there's not a lot I can do about that anymore. It would be one thing if I were a fucked up person who moved from place to place fucking things up, thinking the whole while I just haven't found the right place when really it's me that's the problem, as would be the classic escapist case.

I learned what I should have from my situation, I grew, I went through Hell and back and I'm a better person now. The problem is that you don't get to reset things and start over, even if your approach is new. It's like your GPA, more or less, in that failing a couple of semesters in a row is gonna drop it quite a bit, and getting a 4.0 for the rest of the time doesn't wipe the slate, you still have to work with that average. The marks on your transcript are still there.

So instead, you transfer to a new school, and get good marks the whole time you're there, and when you look at your transcript there and it's all clean and good, you can be proud of yourself for what you've accomplished without having to constantly be reminded of how poorly you're apparently capable of performing. The difference in this analogy is that you didn't transfer to another school only to flunk out again.

My life here is amazing, even if it's boring sometimes. I'm nearly out of debt, I'm travelling, have great friends, am genuinely happy, learn something new every day, get paid to chat with people, and have made healthy relationship choices. What would I want to leave here for?

I realize now that it's not so much people holding me to my past that I want to get away from, though I AM tired of it and would rather not deal with it. What I want to get away from is my past itself, who I was or what I was a part of. I don't want to be around it because there's a subconscious drive internally on my part and externally on the part of my friends to meet the stereotype and standard they have of me, which is less than who I am, and I no longer ever want to be. I recognize the power of social norms and seek to use it to my advantage rather than hold me back.

Habits

In Context, they give an analogy to help you understand and let go of things you always seem to come back to.
Here is what they say:
They say, "Every situation, every habit you have, there's something you benefit from, or like, or take pleasure from. The idea is that you will not let go of something, regardless of if it's bad, as long as there's pleasure being taken from it. To illustrate this point, I present the following analogy:
Here's a $20 bill. Sweet action. Now, forget about it. Ignore me as I place it in this wad of newspaper. K. Now, I'm gonna throw this piece of garbage away and take out the trash. No problem, right? It's garbage.
But no, your mind isn't on the garbage part, but on the cash inside that you know is there, even though I told you to ignore it."

Now, the classic psychological approach used by most people, consciously or otherwise, dictates that this situation is governed by a cost/benefit analysis weighing whether the amount of money is great enough to warrant digging through the trash to get it.
The problem is that we are incredibly overconfident in our own sense of discretion. The newspaper analogy is weak, because, well, for most all but the rich, there's not much shy of a dime or a nickel or a penny that isn't worth reaching into the top of the trash to recover.

So let's switch it up. You're in a public bathroom and you see a bill in the urinal, or toilet. Are you gonna retrieve it? How much before it's not worth it? How much are you willing to rationalize to get the value out of that cash? Basically, for me, if it's a bill, it's worth it. I'll wash it off and call it good. How about you? Would your answer change if you were alone in the bathroom? If it were crowded? I encourage you to really consider this.

K, how about if there's a $20 bill with dog shit on top? You get the point. Smoking is a $10 bill covered in lung cancer, fatigue, stench, etc. Yet we still smoke. So either the bad isn't as bad as we make it out to be, or $10 is worth a whole lot more than we think.

The problem is this situation is flawed, especially when we apply it to driving forces, like chemical addiction and, well, instinct. Most people who have habits to kick fall into one of these two categories. "David, how come I can't quit smoking/drinking/shooting up?" "David, how come I keep coming back to this asshole guy/girl all the time?"

Well, chemical addiction is difficult because it becomes instinct, it becomes an unconscious drive, on par with eating, breathing, drinking, and reproducing. Ever watch Trainspotting? Yea. There's no amount of shit not worth wading through.

So if chemical addiction is on par with natural biological instinct, then, is it such a stretch to see why you can't stop coming back to whoever, regardless of how shitty your relationship is? You're fighting against the single strongest biological drive there could ever be, to reproduce, i.e. have sex, at any cost. Your body is gonna find ways to get you in a position to have sex, regardless of mental trauma. It's clever like that.

So how does one overcome that? That's the big question, I guess. Context will tell you that you have to separate what you like from the situation, then discard the things you don't like. Now, it's not like one can extract the pleasure from nicotine without taking on the addiction/other bad stuff, or have actual sex without a partner, or satisfy one's desire to hold someone without having to be intimate, or for that matter, extract that money without dealing with the shit, so what is one to do?

Either relinquish your desire for those things or replace them with less harmful versions, i.e. deal with withdrawal pains and quit, or find something else to do, e.g. chew gum or find a new partner. Replacement is clearly easier than just quitting, but people aren't phenomenally good at picking good replacements, e.g. cigarettes with chewing tobacco, one psycho/abusive partner for another, strikingly similar psycho/abusive partner who was easy to come by because you know the ropes.

So here's the question one must ask when approaching a problem situation rationally:
"What is it that I'm getting out of this I'm not willing to let go of, and would it be possible to obtain whatever that is outside of this particular avenue, in a safer/more reliable/healthier way, or, could I just give it up altogether?"

The problem is it requires you to be rational. And then to actually DO something, or, NOT do something, as the case may be.

I Like It Here

I really do. I'm realizing more and more that I love living in this country.

On a slightly dorkier note, I finally got my epic mount in WoW. Why, you ask, am I so proud of this uber dorky acheivement? Because it was hard as hell, and the actual day I spent on Monday getting it was basically the most stressful thing I've done in recent memory. Harder than most things I've done in real life in a long while. Sad, isn't it? Now that I have it though, I feel like I've really actually accomplished something in-game. God I'm such a dork.

I need to invest in some gas for my gas heater, either that or I need to invest in a girlfriend. This space heater just isn't capable of producing enough heat to actually keep my room warm, or much anything else that isn't directly in front of the thing. It's essentially a waste of electricity, but I've ranted about this before, this time last year. I'm coming up on my one year anniversary of living in this apartment too, come to think of it. Weird how all that time has already gone by.

Anyway, since I've been back I've been happier by the day to be back. I hope that doesn't go away. Even though it's winter and it's cold, and I have about 10 pounds to lose before I'm happy with my physique again. But I'll get there and I'll be happy no big deal.

Lol I haven't really done a good job of describing why it is I feel so good about being back, but, I just do. That's all for now.

Nothing To Come Home To

It's kind of sad to me that over the course of my vacation home I had to let go of what hope I had of romantic interest with 4 different girls. Now, that's not to say I exactly had them on a string, cause, well, that's just not right, but, what I mean is that I had hope there was the possibility for something and I discovered when I got home, that, well, there was none.

Makes me frustrated I guess because these people made me feel like I had a place back home, a reason to want to be there, but, increasingly, I realize I have none. I'm sorry, but, there's nothing in America for me anymore, not right now in my life. I wanted there to be the spark of something, but with one noteable exception, there was nothing.

I was talkin to J yesterday about how I'm happy to be back in Japan. She told me there's nothing for me back home and I agree with her. I was talking to Greg the other night when we were out after someone asked him how long he planned to be here and he said, "I'm here, man," and I realized that Dave, Ty, Greg, J, they're not planning on going home. This IS home.

Is Japan home for me now too?

Every time I leave the country, I remember saying that I wanna go home even less.

Another Good Day

Yesterday was a good day. Woke up after a hard night drinking without a hangover, and spent the day walking around Yoyogi Park, Shibuya, and Harajuku with J, with a pitstop at the New Sano Hotel in Hiroooooooo.

Great weather, nice company, good day.

Back In Action

I'm only just back and I'm already trying to keep myself as busy as possible, which I think of as a good thing. I made plans immediately after getting home to hang out with J after work on Friday, but that didn't work out, and yesterday I went out after work with Greg to Shinjuku, which turned out to be us meeting up with Ty and his buddy Cory who's in town from the States, Dave B, Hillary, Rebecca, Christine, Andy, Greg and myself going to a Wara Wara on the West side of Shinjuku station and drinking it up something awful.

We got in there, and ordered a course meal with nomihoudai, and the fun started. I think I consumed at least 4 whole grapefruit as a result of the number of grapefruit sours I had. Somehow, and much to my great personal satisfaction, we were loud, and always had something to talk about the entire time, without fail. That was good. It was a blast.

BUT the karaoke machine didn't have any English songs, and that was a problem. After our nomihoudai finished we cruised out to a real karaoke bar for a quick hour of the good stuff and really belted it out. I missed karaoke, to be honest, it's the logical end to the night. I think America needs to adopt the Karaoke Bar concept. Actually, you know what, I ought to look into opening a chain of Japanese style karaoke bars when I move back home. I don't think it would take TOO much convincing to get people into them, especially as an afterhours kinda thing.

Anyway, J called me drunk last night and so was I, it was a funny conversation. She called me again at like 8:45 this morning, who does that? Seriously. You don't make a social call on a Sunday at 8:45 in the morning. It's just not done. And who vacuums at 11 at night? Really. But having said that, I was talking to G about how I think how absurd she is is actually kinda cute, in like a, her behavior is so far removed from anything I would consider normal that it's interesting kinda way. And she is cute, even if she is absurd.

Winter Coat

Ugh. Stupid winter and one's biological predisposition to put on weight.

It's a good thing I resolved to lol, join the gym. Like everyone else in the whole world.

Go go gadget weight loss plan!

Good To Be Back

My cat is desperately trying to get ALL of my attention at the moment, and that's really all I need to say it's good to be back. But, everything else says it for me too. It's weird that I feel more comfortable now surrounded by the Japanese. I made my way home with the greatest of ease, and just kinda smiled at how familiar everything seemed, and how much of the Japanese I hear walking around that I actually understand every word of now.

The flights back were easy enough. There was some fog surrounding SFO this morning which was causing delays, so thanks to arriving at the airport several hours early, they put me on an earlier flight to San Fran. Other than that, everything was routine and easy. I reluctantly relinquished my cell phone to dad, and I know that since leaving I've probably gotten at least a dozen calls and text messages from people who either didn't realize I left today or didn't know exactly what time and were just responding to the messages I sent them from the car on the way to the airport.

Now that I've been back home once though, my perspective really has changed a bit on being here. When I was home on vacation, I finally convinced myself to just say fuck it, these people don't know me and they're never going to see me again. That was liberating. There's no reason I can't do that here, where it's all but guaranteed they'll never see me again or notice to realize it's me. So, I'm gonna start having some more fun.

Also, I've got this feeling like I wanna keep the ball rolling on certain things, like, say, cleaning up my shit and having things organized a little better. Saving money, planning my trips, going out with my friends more, things like these have become increasingly important over the last few weeks, as I realize more and more what makes my time here special is doing stuff when I have the chance, rather than putting off opportunities in favor of relaxation by myself at home.

Dad sent me the better part of $1200 today, to cover my plane ticket which I've already paid off and the check I got from my grandmother. After reviewing my monetary policy a little I decided the best thing to do was to immediately do away with just about all of it and pay off an entire credit card in one shot. Every time I'm willing to just bite it and do that, it's months that I don't have to send money home. What I'm going to need, come when I move back to America, is money in my pocket, somewhat moreso than I need zero credit card debt, which I'll have either way. So any time I have the chance to take large chunks out of it, I'm going to force myself to take it. The less money I have to send home each month the better, especially given how much travel I'm gonna be doing and how much that's gonna cost me.

Happy New Year!

Ack! First entry of 2007. Oh my. Good luck to us all.

New Year's Eve was all right. During the day I went through the garage and dug out my stuff and located a couple of things I had been wanting to find, like the address of my old host family, who I promised myself I would get a hold of. So now I need to send them a card and hope I hear back from them. Before I left to go out for the night, my dad made some inappropriate comments during dinner and I more or less walked out on dinner. I quietly ignored comments by Owen, mom, and dad, but, I got sick of it. I'm not gonna yell at them or anything, but, it's just immature.

Also made clear to me was that this blog is read by my brother and dad both. Howdy. I'll be converting my blog soon to a format which is more, how can I say, appropriate, to having family memebers, and as my father points out, potential employers, see.
**Scratch that. Apparently, the brilliant programmers at Blogger haven't yet devised a way to make individual entries private. This is a phenomenally dumb thing. I will email them and complain.

Anyway, the actual evening was fine. I met up with Jenn in PDX, had some drinks with Jimmy, Mike and Erin, her friends, at the Four Points hotel, and then went to the Hotel Lucia downtown, met up with some more people, and moved on to The Thirsty Lion across the street from Kell's. We were there through the countdown. Afterwards we met up with Nina at Kelly's, and after a while went back to The Lion cause I forgot my card and license were there as tabkeepers.

We went back to the hotel, and come to find out Erin had fallen in the room and hit her head, cutting it open in back and bleeding more or less all over the place. We were up until 3:30 cleaning up and washing her off. Fun stuff. Happy New Year!