WTB Central Air

...so hot....work...turning into sweatlodge....

Now don't get me wrong, I love the heat, always have, but man. I'm a sweaty bitch these days. You know it's a bad thing when my room is the coolest place in my day.

Matsudo schools don't have air conditioning except for the teacher's room, so, it's all as one might, in this eco-friendly green-minded era, consider calling it "natural cooling" or "wind-powered air conditioning" maybe even "occasional wisp of warm, but still cooler than the room, air, that leaves you longing for that time you worked in a grocery store and could go hang out in the walk-in freezer".

Should I melt, I bequeath to you, my internet journal, my Husky brand utility knife.

In My Garage, I Feel Angst

Ever since I had access to a computer, I've dabbled, made attempts at writing some music, mostly electronic, using various programs that were available at the time. I remember way, way back when, using MOD Editors to write the simplest of techno, using an editor, that, now that I think back on it, wasn't so bad, and not nearly as confusing as the stuff I look at today.

The stuff I look at today, mainly, is Garage Band, a program that's native to the Mac OSX, and is pretty powerful in terms of what it can do. But the shitter is, as I experiment around with it, there are hundreds, thousands maybe, of samples and loops available for use, and so many of them are either too complex or too unique to use in conjunction with basically anything else, at least as far as my limited creative instinct tells me. When I find a loop I like, it's not really a loop so much as a clip from a fully orchestrated song, which is completely useless to me because it makes me conform to the key, modality, instrumentals, and tempo of the clip in order to be able to use it. And what's worse, a lot of the tracks they have are like finished products that are 45 seconds long.

How on Earth is anyone supposed to use that stuff to actually write a song? And how would someone directly inputting anything to the computer via a real instrument use those things to do anything useful?

So I sit there staring at the screen, the part of me that wants more than anything to crap out the decade or so of music floating around in my head, and once again, I have no way to get it out. All I have are thousands of clips that sound really cool, but aren't what I'm thinking. No clip or package of pre-recorded clips could really ever be what's going on inside my head. So how do I get that? I'm lost for an answer now, because music writing programs aren't going to get simpler really. Some sort of direct input device, like a USB keyboard, would be useful, but what about drums? I don't mind using software to write a drum track, but I guess I haven't found that feature yet, or know if it even exists, to be able to just sit down and hammer it out.

Ugh, I dunno, I'm just frustrated. I've always wanted to write electronic music. But even when I do write something, it's always so simplistic, it never sounds like real techno, and I hate that feeling like I'm better off just humming it. I hate feeling like I'm a great listener, have a great imagination, but am incapable of writing anything of any real quality, or at least, that doesn't sound like something you wrote in your freshman year of high school for your music theory class.

So, for now, Garage Band gets my big ol' "3 gigs of frustration" seal of anxiety.

Big in Japan

Or at least, in Matsudo.

Went to the Shin Matsudo festival on Sunday with Saki, and was surprised by the number of my students I ran into. I guess I shouldn't have been, but it was cool nonetheless. Every couple of minutes some group of kids would come up to me and poke me, say hi, giggle, ask me for money, etc. I was kinda surprised by the number of kids that were all "money please!" but what really got me was when more than one of them actually dove into my pocket in search of coinage, a few attempts of which were successful. The usually gave it back, however, when I didn't put up too much of a fight. Haha guilt factor.

The biggest shock for them was that I was with my girlfriend, and that I didn't make any attempt to hide that from them. A couple outgoing JHS gals remarked with visible, uh, what's the word in English, damnit I'm forgetting my native tongue, zannen, that so-and-so would be shocked to hear the news. I have little doubt that every kid in any school anywhere knows that I'm taken now.

I ran into Koizumi sensei as well, and she lured me and Saki into playing the little waterballoon fishing game they had going on. I managed to snag 4 of them before my hook broke, much to her and Saki's shock and amazement. Especially since Saki only got two. Mwahaha. I gots da madd skills. I'm all up in your festivals, winnin your prizes.

Every day since school's been out I've ran into students out and about, which is just weird. I guess most of the time they'd be at school so I wouldn't see them, and now that they're on summer vacation, we're all out at the same time, so it makes sense.

I went out on Friday with a bunch of the people from the kokusai kenshu-kan from Senshu University where I did my study abroad in 2003. It was really cool to see thm again, especially since my Japanese has gotten much better, and I can basically talk about whatever I want now, and understand whatever they're saying too. The reason for the little reunion is that Tomomi is back in Japan for a little bit, an impromptu visit, so we call got together to say hi. We went to karaoke, and then went to a chanko-nabe restaurant until late. For those of you who don't know, nabe is a kind of stew, the chanko variation of which is basically just a more massive version that sumo-wrestlers eat to pack on pounds. Good for groups. Couldn't imagine trying to eat that between two people. Saw some familiar faces tho, always good. Saw the gal, Midori, I almost, but never, dated. For a moment I was tempted to wonder what things would have been like, but it never went any further than that. That's a first, so, good signs abound.

Saturday, what did I do Saturday...hell I know I did something. Went out....or something....oooh wait, lol the Kenshu-kan thing was Saturday, what did I do Friday....oooh ya, went to D's with Nathan for a chat and some Mexican food. That's right.

Sunday after festival I stayed up late with Saki playing drinking games and talking in my room. Odd, that for how many times she's stayed over here, that was the first time we had ever done that. Anyway, was good fun, until we played the evil dice game of retarded drunkeness, and I wound up much like the title suggests one would. So, Saki got to see me drunk, and then it was her turn, and we opted to just talk instead of dig ourselves sick, lol.

Monday we basically slept in, and spent the afternoon playing Parappa the Rappa until she had to go home. I know, I know.

All this week I'm coaching for the speech contest, wooo. It's just like all those wonderful, wonderful lessons I had at Nova teaching JHS students for their Eiken exams. They never went well either. Except this time around I get the benefit of being able to speak Japanese, and the Japanese teacher is there with me. Kinda fun, come to think of it, since so much of what I do is a joke anyway, I can actually teach a bit now. I hope I have a chance to leave a good impression on the teachers.

It's hot these days. I'm sportin a nice little sunburn I managed to pick up in 45 minutes of walking along the river with my shirt off. I've offically busted out the Cool Salon, which means summer has offically started. The official start, in case you don't know, is when it's hot enough for even me to be uncomfortable. Dave, however, managed to get like 2nd degree burns on his legs from going to the beach on Saturday. That boy is a lobster. His calves and ankles are swollen from the burns. Gotta be careful out there, folks.

In other news, my computer kick an exorbitent amount of ass, my girlfriend is kinda hot, I got a haircut, I weigh 74kg (I'll let you do the math), which, to my chegrin, is up 1.5kg from December, but then again I was impoverished at that time, and I got Diablo II to work. We took down the first 4 bosses of BT in the first 3 days ever being there, and I topped DPS on Supremus, which is just monumental. My trip to America is 2 weeks off, and I still have no idea what all to do when I'm back. I'll be 26 sometime in the near-ish future. Yuck. But, everywhere I go, as long as it's in Matsudo, people know me. I'm big in Matsudo.

Stupid Blizz

Today was my first day back at Kogane Kita JHS, and it was nice to be back. Given, I thought that when I returned to Icchuu as well, but it was actually nice to see everyone again. Also, it's nice to get back to finishing up at 2 instead of 4:30 every day.

The summer speech contest is coming up, and so the day to day load I have at work is steadily increasing as I morph from regular old teacher guy to full fledged speech contest judge, advocate, advisor and coach. I've gotten a pretty resounding "you have absolutely no choice but to immerse yourself in this 100%" from my company, probably as it's the closest thing to work a JHS teacher ever gets, but that doesn't mean I'm stuper stoked about it. I mean, ya, this will be the most English I will have ever heard from any of my studets, bordering on the best English I've ever heard from them either, but, I can't stop this kind of odd resentment in the back of my mind at being forced into it without ever really volunteering. What gets me to comply is that the days I have to come in and coach are still technically contract days, so even though I feel like I ought to be on vacation since there are no more classes, I suppose it's only fair I have to work. Both the coaching and the contest itself are days that are included in my contract. Oh well.

Since there are only three weeks of classes in July, all my elementary school visits are crammed into the span of a week, starting tomorrow. That means I have to kinda think fast, a la my ES sub days, and come up with something viable for each school every night before I go to bed, much like tonight. I have a 15 minute segment during tomorrow's lessons where I have to teach something of my own, which realistically is a piece of cake since it's not the whole lesson, just 15 minutes, so it's really not so bad.

It's Tuesday night tonight, server maintenance, so in my boredom I started looking around for a solution, and decided to see if I could get a copy of Diablo II to play since I really do miss a good single player game and don't really have a console to mess around on. But, after several failed attempts to purchase the game online from the Blizzard store, where it's available for direct download, I gave up. I'm guessing it's something about me living in Japan, and attempting to make the purchase from here, as my credit card transactions wouldn't go through. Ugh. I hate when I'm forced to try to do something productive with my evenings. I'd rather just go to bed, except at the time it was like 7:30pm and that just won't do for a bedtime. I could go online and download the games via p2p, but it would take a long time and I just cbf to do it anymore. There was a time I would, probably still would, but I was kinda looking for instant gratification so meh, whatever.

Saki and I are going to America in just over a month now, and I'm excited about it. I'm really looking forward to showing her around. I'm also looking forward to providing her with a whole week off work, something she hasn't had since she started working at the hospital. I know the stress weighs on her, and I'm glad being with me has given her this chance to take some time off to relax.

Other than that, I'm typing this on my new desktop, which kicks ass. I'm happy, essentially have all my bases covered, and things are going well for the moment. Yada yada yada