What dread at even attempting this! Nearly 800 pages of poetry, Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel is a travel narrative about Odysseus, set immediately at the end of the Odyssey, at which point he has arrived home, slaughtered the suitors around his wife and kingdom and set his household straight. Domestic bliss, however, just isn’t his thing after a life on the seas, so he forms a small crew and leaves Ithaca, never to return. Just as a travel narrative this book is pretty intense: Odysseus sees and tastes everything, and the book ends with him at the furthest limits of the earth, dead upon an iceberg at the south pole. The thinking behind the book is so much broader than the journey, with a philosophical scope stretching from the pursuit of hedonism, to uber-menschian transcendence of values, virtues and vices, to the foundation of a new way of life after casting off these shackles, the death of god, to nihilism and back again to Kazantzakis’ and Odysseus’ goal — pure and total freedom.

This book was hard, and not in a tricky, I don’t get it sort of way like the other big Homerian book, Ulysses. Page after page of poetry is tough going and Kazantzakis can be a little long winded at times. There is one 30 page digression in the middle that made me stop reading for a couple months because I wasn’t interested. On the other hand, page after page of Odysseus reflecting on the best sort of existence really challenged my own feelings about birth, death, and how to spend the interim. I would read certain passages and close the book, thinking, “What the fuck am I doing, sitting here reading and surfing the internet? Is this life? How do I want to die? The book is hard because Odysseus isn’t an ubermensch like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: he makes mistakes and he changes his mind. This makes him much more sympathetic and at the same time, makes his exhortation to live life and pursue freedom, to give up hoping for another day, life after death, a reward for your toils, to acknowledge that all is passing and transient. Unlike the Buddhist notion of transience, which causes monks to withdraw to avoid both pain and too sweet pleasure, Odysseus swallows everything while he can and moves on, unsated.

So, the book had a profound effect upon me. Whether any of you scant readers will every pick it up is highly questionable: I know of few books that are more intimidating in their density and as challenging in their ethos. 33,333 lines of poetry rewritten 7 times over — I sure hope I can do something that cool.

It’s almost impossible to give you the best of the book in a short passage, but here is one I liked. Odysseus and his crew fell in with a rebellion in Egypt only to be imprisoned. The Pharaoh is a simpering weakling, but as the crew await execution, there is a request among the prisoners for a witchdoctor to soothe the nightmares and melancholy of the Pharaoh. Odysseus, with a mask of his totem god strapped to his back, offers to go and perform a dance.
He shuffled through the first steps of the sacred dance
holding his hands outstretched as though he begged for bread,
then slowly passed with mournful grace from lord to lord.
A strident whining bubbled in his quivering throat
as though small orphans wept with far, convulsive sobs,
and his mud-tattered rags flapped in the scented air.
The smiling archons marveled at the stranger’s skill
in aping the uncaressed small orphans softly sobbing,
the sickly tramp who went from door to door and begged.
Then like a tiger crouched to spring, he clenched his fists,
raised one foot high in air like a curved twisted paw,
and as his neck grew taut and his teeth flashed in darkness,
the carved mask of his god thumped on his back and groaned.
His feet leapt as in a rage and drummed on the hard ground,
his savage hands pulled tightly at invisible bows
and unseen arrows whizzed with speed in the moon’s glow.
This was no simple dance: war sprang in the rose shrubs,
black crows perched on the feasting boards and hoarsely cawed,
and the king gasped and leapt, by shadowy arrows struck.
The archer’s rage calmed down, his throat relaxed, and sobs
pierced through the night like wailing maids who tore their hair.
The slow dance dragged and crawled, and now lean cripples roamed
and limped upon the earth, for the cruel war had stopped,
and blind men fiercely groped the ground with their bent staffs.
The lords laughed unabashed; in their mind’s eye they saw
their maimed slaves coming from the slaughter, stooped with spoils;
only amid moon-shadows, far in the dense grove,
a girl recalled her lover and softly began to weep.
The lone man fell and bowed down low at the king’s feet
then slowly, slowly mounted like the ascending sun
so that when the court dames and revelers finally saw him
they shrieked out, terror-struck, for on the archer’s face
was tightly wedged his grinning god’s fierce, hideous mask!
The king screamed and reeled backward in his archons’ arms:
“Ah! That’s the seven-times-reborn sun-demon’s face
that struck me in my sleep! Help me or I’ll go mad!”
But when the steward charged with wrath to seize the dancer,
the quailing king shrieked out again and stopped him short,
for as Odysseus fixed God’s mask on his fierce brow
six pairs of flames leaped from his arm-joints, head and feet.
Then all minds crashed, veins swelled with fear, the whole world shook,
and the man-killer, seizing his black hilted sword,
leapt in a frothing dance about the monarch’s tables.
A wide-eyed, tall intoxication blazed in his head
as his feet whirled him on beyond both life and death
where he no longer whined, or fought, or wept, or begged
but touched the black soil like a god till the stones smoked.
Then all at once he stood stock-still before the king,
broke in harsh laughter and fixed him with his mud-filled eyes.
The startled youth, conceived in an orgy, reached his hands,
but with a thundering cavern-roar the sly man yelled:
“Good is the quail, the blackbird, and the turtle-dove,
but of all birds I like the eagle, the cross-eagle, best,
and most of all when it holds a king’s head in its claws!”

Tags: kazantzakis, odyssey, Reviews, Books

My buddy Naben and his band Bend Sinister put out their second CD, a 5 track EP, a few days ago and it is available on iTunes. Go forth and purchase! This is my favorite song from the album and the video has been getting some play on Much More Music.

Well it took me 20 hours, but I gulped down the rushed prose of the last HP book and now we can all move on with our lives.

My review? It was all right. I couldn't remember a lot of details and Rowling did little backstory. The same bitching, whining and totally inappropriately timed jokes that made me hate the characters in the last couple books continued. The story resolved somewhat satisfactorily. However, there is a huge plot gap, as well as the fact that the pivotal hinge of everything happened a whole book ago and was easy to miss, that required Rowling to "set the record straight" according to NBC. You can read it here if you finished the book with the same WTF expression that I had.

But all of that is garbage. An author should never have to say, once a reader finishes, perplexed, "oh well what actually happened was..." What the hell is that? We're talking about fiction, not some event you attended and poorly reported on. If you need to explain it, it ain't working, just like a bad joke.

Whether she's a victim of massive fanpressure, of boxoffice deadlines or is just not the writer she was when she started out with a compact and honed little novel, I don't care. Thanks for the escapist fantasy -- I'm off to read something more important.

Tags: Books, harry potter

Went out drinking with an old student last week and ate some damn weird stuff.

In order of ascending weirdness:

--fried and battered chicken gristle - I've had this before. Not bad.
--saba, a kind of fish, in a can - the staff took the lid off, added a little soup stock and heated it. A can of tuna was also on the menu.
--dried and then roasted manta ray fin - this was chewy as hell but it went well, as many japanese have assured me since then, with the saké I was drinking.
--semifrozen octopus pieces in a slush wasabi sauce. This was the strangest combination of tastes ever. Chewy and a little crunchy yet slimy. Spicy but very cold. I couldn't wrap my head around it and only managed to eat a few pieces.

What weird food have you eaten recently?

Tags: food

I've switched over to php architecture - if you bookmarked www.wendingwayfare.com, you need to rebookmark it as www.wendingwayfare.com/index.php. Also, I took out the wacky "summarize" feature on the RSS, which just garbled the text anyway. Now you can enjoy in the reader of your choice!


Edit - nevermind the rebookmark. I deleted that file on my end. Uploading this post took less than 30 seconds! Whee!

August has roared past and it hasn't been the best of months. I've somehow managed to piss off an old friend back in Canada without really knowing how, lose a couple students and nearly lose another today, drop out of contact with some friends here (are you alive Tad?) and generally feel as though the tides are flowing against me.

Part of the frustration has been in patching together something of a social life nearly from scratch. I didn't realize how much I had been depending on Aeon for socializing until I left and became well acquainted with solo saturdays. That's been depressing.

Another big issue was my schedule. I've been using Apple's iCal because I often use email to schedule classes; the problem, however, is that I can't take it with me. This resulted in a hungover Perrin riding his bike over the mountain for a lesson only to arrive and find himself early. 4 hours early. That same day was plagued with the anxiety that I was going to miss another lesson because I couldn't remember the time. Turns out that was irrelevant: I had recorded the wrong time in iCal anyway and waited fruitlessly in Starbucks for over an hour.

So I am going back, after a year's romance with a PDA to a paper planner. I loathe the whole sync process. One change to either the computer or pda schedule and you have introduced either a) error or b) the necessity to sync again. Syncing is also a time-swallower at nearly 5 minutes a pop depending on what I sync. And so when the sync cable broke, so too did my will to screw with that anymore.

Anyway, Rapidweaver just put out a big update so it may upload faster for me. Last time I uploaded it took 2 hours - hardly the smart uploading they were touting for this version I bought. I changed some settings - someone (if someone is actually reading this ill-updated generalist blog) please leave a comment as well - I want to see if that is different too.

I went into the unknown of self-employment tremulously: Would I make ends meet? Would I meet my own end? Would meat end in my refrigerator? Would the whole thing spiral into shame, debt and terribly broken analogies?

I’m happy to report that while I have been driven to a few new extremes, the bills have been paid and life is fresh and interesting. Being handed cash at the end of nearly every lesson is a blunt reminder that I just exchanged my time for a very distinct number of credits. At all of my previous jobs, I walked in, laboured for several hours and staggered home. The two week and one month pay schedules, I have become convinced, are designed to divorce the notion of money from time spent. If people were paid every evening they’d look at their meager fistful of dollars and say, eight hours of hell for the price of a couple cases of beer? This has to change! The discreet envelope every two weeks, or worse, the bank transfer, make payday feel like salvation, as workers with threadbare accounts raise grateful eyes to “he who doleth out weekend beer month.”

The bulk of my time is spend in cheapo classes, mainly because I will take nearly anything at this point. They don’t amount to much per hour, but together they add up to a substantial sum and the hourly wage is better than Aeon, although my travel time between lessons subtracts from that. On the other hand, a few lessons are so ridiculously more lucrative that they are accounting for as much, if not more, thank the scraps here and there. It makes for a strange experience, getting a raise and a paycut alternately, going from class to class.

But that awareness of time = variable amounts of money has been quite valuable. On the other hand, I’ve had a few negative experiences: bicycle roadrage as I spend about 2 hours on my bike a day, tightwad students that require reminding when it is time to pay, no days off, and general uncertainty. I suppose I can transform those situations into positives: daily exercise is good for me, I’ll drop the tightwads eventually as I gain better paying customers, a lack of days off is my own poor scheduling decisions, and uncertainty, well, anyone who needs certainty might as well have one foot in the grave already, because that’s about as much certainty as any of us get.

The question, invariably, when I say I worked 15.5 hours last week (not including prep and travel, which pushes it up to about 25 hours) is: “What do you do with all that free time?” The answer - fix the damage done by my fucked work schedule these last two years. I have been cooking and eating more balanced, regular meals. I’ve been reclaiming time for reflection. I’ve published a new article and written most of another one. I’ve been reading four books at the same time. Scratch that, five. I’ve been working on finding new work and better paying work. I’ve participated in a 1200 year old festival and organized my house at last. I’ve declared war against all jumping spiders and cockroaches. I’ve woken early to dawn and the sun alighting upon the tops of gravestones.

It hasn’t all been good, if I am going to lump the cockroaches into the “good” paragraph. I’ve become reacquainted with loneliness. I’ve suffered numerous rejections to my requests to hang out from people far more busy than I am. I’ve been bummed out that a few of those “busy”s have really meant, “not interested pal.” And perhaps most importantly, I have had to take a serious step back from my highspeed—always a tad late—snarling at people with shrieking bicycles—daily commute.

All that said, I am really happy to be done with Aeon and to be on my own. It is liberating and challenging at the same time. Stay tuned.

Tags: Teaching, kyoto, English

As some of you may know, I have recently become self-employed, although it sure feels like unemployed when I look at my schedule. I had just begun to think about how to organize my finances when Matt, in his quest to escape financial retardation, hit upon a highly praised book and gave it to me for my birthday. That book is Your Money or Your Life. The title comes from that antiquated highway robber threat, but in this book it takes on a different layer of meaning - for many of us, we have to choose between money and life (i.e. time, happiness and everything else that isn’t work and cash) but when we choose money because “everyone’s gotta make a living” we end up feeling like we are “earning a dying”.

The book attacks the concept of money from both the philosophical perspective and the nitty-gritty of saving pennies. One of the core concepts is that money isn’t power or esteem or even time, because you surely cannot swap it back to get more time. Money is a representation of what we have traded our life energy for. That $20 bill represents 4 hours of our lives spent working to earn it. But wait, you say, no one makes $5 an hour. I’m making at least $12 in (insert random job here). Dominguez and Robin push readers to find their real wage after calculating all the time spent getting to and from, dressing and shopping for work clothes, bitching about work after work, decompressing and taking escape holidays and THEN subtracting all of the costs of work, from expensive lunches and drinks from the pop machine to part of the cost of maintaining your car and having a nice office outfit.

The results are pretty shocking. I felt pretty good at making over $20 an hour at Aeon, but that wage was cut down to $8 when I factored in all of the extra work I did and the expenses of going there. This piece of information is critical because it lets one see exactly what you are selling yourself for. And, as an extension of that, knowing that a $40 night on the town actually cost me 5 hours, not 2, at a job that I wasn’t ecstatic about, makes the purse-strings tighten up considerable.

The other angle of the book, now that the reader is feeling somewhat miserable about how cheaply they are prostituting themselves out to company X, is to show how we can all live on much, much less money. So much, in fact, that some of his example people started earning more money by quitting their expensive jobs and working closer to home or doing all those expensive things we pay others to do for us. The authors take the reader through several ways to account for every single penny and then to look at how she feels about spending 30 hours of the month on a shoe habit or on boozing. From that feeling, frugality is internalized, not by unrealistic, external spreadsheet budgets that are as easy to break, but by a shift in values. So while that doughnut habit of mine is becoming less attractive, I don’t feel bad about spending $150 a month eating out with friends because that’s a really important way for me to enjoy both good company and great japanese food. Spending money on books is foolish because I currently have more books that I can possibly read in the next year. Spending more money on dates and girls is an absolute necessity if I want to actually get a girlfriend, and I value such a notion as getting laid here and there. Essentially, the authors are aiming at the idea of enough. True fulfillment is at that tipping point where less would leave you wanting and more wouldn’t matter - it is up to us to take a long look at how we spend our money and see what is enough and what is too much.

While some may feel this is all just stingy penny-pinching, it is, in my view, an affirmation of life and its transience. If I have to work to earn money to live, I am going to put that money to its best use, towards the best kind of life. For a guy who used to say that money was evil and soul-sucking, this book has really changed how I earn and spend money, how I spend my life. Highly recommended.

Tags: money, Resolutions

No amount of benevolence spares gargantuan cockroaches with the audacity to fly at me and make me dance with the heebeejeebees and then display such foolishness as to hide beneath the toe of an unworn shoe.

PS - Kiss your evening goodbye - I give you "whose line is it anyway?" on youtube.

Tags: Bugs, ohaka house

There are a variety of starting points for this review:

--Remarking that the most pivotal writers in several stages of my life have been K writers -- Kipling as a child, Kazantzakis in university, and now it seems, Kerouac and Kapuscinski.
--Starting with the current assault on reporting and investigative journalism as newspapers become merely parts of media empires trying to make a buck.
--Pointing out weird synchronicity - as I sat drinking tea in Kyoto, learning about Kapuscinski and his life for the first time, he lay dying in Poland, his Africa battered body to succumb that day.

Kipling, Kazantzakis, Kerouac (to an extent) and Kapuscinski all share something other than a letter - each writer is an explorer and evokes a sense of wonder for the places they trace. Kipling, my favourite childhood writer, was an Englishman born in Bombay, and most of his life’s work deal with the strange and fantastic, the jungle and Indian culture (the Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and Kim being the most famous).
Kazantzakis, my favourite writer period, wrote the ur-voyage poem - over the course of 12 years he penned a sequel to The Odyssey that is twice the length of The Iliad and the Odyssey combined, all in verse. The poem (which I am still reading, but nearly finished) follows Odysseus’s journey to the ends of the world and the philosophical limit of human being, transcending vice and virtue, God and hope.
Kerouac is another famous traveller - both geographically and psychedelically. Although I have only read On the Road, I enjoyed his pursuit of something elusive across the American landscape and the new cultural ground the beats were breaking.

And then there is Kapuscinski. Investigative journalism ain’t what it used to be, as large newspapers shed subscriptions left and right while the successor to print media, so-called citizen journalism on the net, often merely amounts to armchair commentary on what has been read in the Associated Press. But Kapuscinski! In the 1960s and early 1970s he was the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency under communism. So, if Poland wanted it’s own reporting, rather than buying it from another country, Kapuscinski was the man. You may see on the news — “and now let’s turn to our London correspondent”. Kapuscinski covered Africa. All of it. Not only that, but his book, The Soccer War, is a refreshing take on journalism: while Western journalism strives for objectivity, apparently the tone of Eastern Europe is more personal and more poetic license is permitted. Kapuscinski has been criticized for taking poetic license but that same license to bend facts creates a better sense of narrative and moreover, allows poetry to enter into the otherwise dry reportage of conflict in the faceless continent of Africa.

After reading The Soccer War, I couldn’t believe that the bleachblond bimbos and this crazy Pole are in the same field of work. The various chapters cover a handful of the 25 different coups, wars or revolutions that he was present for. He shows you the bars of Leopoldville in Congo where Lumumba first spoke, the foreigners’ hotel stormed by gangs of furious men after Lumumba’s assassination, the airplane from the UN whisking them into the apparent safety of Burundi, the jail cell and deadline to execution he faced when he arrived there. Kapuscinski crosses the road that no white man could cross, beaten, robbed, doused in benzene and nearly immolated. He crawls along the uncertain border between Honduras and El Salvador with a soldier that only wants to take boots off of corpses back to his family.

All of his episodes stun the reader at both the barbarity of man and the insanity of the author, driven to go where the action is and avoid life behind a desk at all costs. Most importantly, they helped put a face and character to the vastly diverse nations of Africa, and did so far better than the latest report on Sudan.

Tags: Journalism, Books, Resolutions

Well the internet is back, life is slow and easy and I've had a week basically off. I taught nine classes in my first week for a big ole' $300 and it sure felt relaxing. My apartment is in order and all set up, I'm done with Aeon - so what in God's name am I going to do with the 15 waking hours surrounding my lonely lessons. Hell of a good question!

Aside from the obvious "work more" (and I do need to work about twice as much as this to get some forward momentum) the plan is to write, take photographs and explore. Throw in a little Japanese there too. While my older compatriots here think 25 is still time to screw around, I'd like to give some shape and focus to my life, not to mention get back on the wagon regarding my goals for the year. Anyway, stay tuned.

PS - here's a little nugget of advice: strong Peppermint soap should only be used on the tough thick skin of the hands and torso. I'll leave you to imagine the rest.

Tags: internet, life, kyoto

kaa kaa! whuufff .... gnnnunng...gnuuugngn ka,kakkkakakka!

She lives!

Being without internet is a grim existence indeed. Take a snapshot in your mind: Perrin turns his back on the glow of his open laptop like a spurned lover and stares out through the rainwashed window, over the stony graveyard, into the howling darkness.

Anyway, it has been three days since I left Aeon and I am still pretty stunned. It's like a vacation, minus the imperative to go somewhere and do something. On the contrary, I feel compelled to not spend money, as that will dwindle quickly. In an effort to do so I have begun a logbook for all of my expenditures - what a shock! I am a serious sugar addict. I don't down can after can of coke, but I have found that I almost always end up buying some little sweet treat here or there. I've been cooking a lot more recently too - that has lead to the discovery that I want to eat sweet things even when I am totally full.

So, ....... sorry girl just jiggled by on the running path ....... I bought 3 bunches of overripe bananas and froze them, which I hope will help curb this addiction more healthily.

If I want the slightest chance of uploading this I'll have to do it now - this wifi ain't fast.

3 days and counting until hookup time... the internet, that is.

I was riding my bike up the street towards a housewares shop - Super Savers - that I was looking for. As I rode up, a girl rounded the corner onto the street and put something pink down next to a stop sign. "Did she just non-chalantly place some trash on the street corner?" I asked. As I came up behind her it was in fact a juice box. I rode by, disgusted, but then, disgusted a bit at myself, I turned around and picked it up.

The girl, you she, who had headed up the street and disappeared, was wearing a yellow Super Savers jacket. I parked my bike, put the drinkbox into my shopping bag and entered the shop. What was I going to do? Confront her directly? Say "wasuremono" (forgotten thing) and hand it back to her?

I found the pot I needed and then spotted her down an aisle, stocking shelves. What to do? I slunk around the corner and watched her from behind as she took stock from a box and put it on the shelves. My chance! She turned away and I lightly tossed her trash into the box of new merchandise. Heart pounding with glee, I managed to negotiate buying a pot and I dashed out of the store. Victory!

Life here is proving to be ... interesting.

Let it be said that squat toilets are tricky. I hunkered down to do some business but suddenly realized my pants were horribly in the way for the coming onslaught of pee and had to kink the hose, so to speak, while I nearly fell over. Meanwhile, the cheap door to my apartment (right next to my bathroom door, which I had left open) decided to open itself and expose my idiot behind to the hallway. I pulled the bathroom door shut and managed to finish.

Hastily pulling the main door shut, I walked out into my main room with my pants half-on right into the middle of a funeral that had started 20ft away. Duck for cover! Luckily unnoticed.

The morning of my first stay overnight I was forcefully made aware of my new sleep schedule - early. Dawn is at 6:00 and while I don't get any direct sunlight in my north-facing window, I get a lot of light. Not having curtains doesn't help that much, but once I leave Aeon I am excited about getting up earlier and going to bed at a decent hour.

Tags: Apartment

Brain, meet beer. Beer, I am sure you are already acquainted with Mr. All-You-Can-Drink; he'll be our maitre d' for the evening. Brain, this is All-You-Can-Drink - you may call him Can - a close friend of his. The relationship will become apparent in good time.

Brain, I'd like to introduce you to Karaoke. She's not from around here and her name is pronounced Care-ah-okay. She'll be dancing with the ever vivacious Mr. Vocal-Chords, although I suspect that he'll retire before she will. He's eager but doesn't have much talent, you know.

Brain, you of course know Legs, over there, near the band. I'd like you to keep an eye on him, because what he does always affects the rest of us. If you let him get pulled in by that tart, Latin Music, we'll never see him again. I also ask you to keep him from New Dancing Shoes. They look like trouble.

Ah... Mr Sense, so nice to see you again. What's that you say? Looking for Brain? Why I have him here with me right now. I beg your pardon. That rapscallion and Mr. Brain look nothing alike. Good evening. Really, what an allegation, especially from such a reputable figure in society. Mistaking you for that troublemaking Phallic fellow. I personally turned him out 30 minutes ago.

My name my good lad? Surely you jest. Ego, at your humble service. I do like to throw the parties but they always attract such riffraff. Come with you and Can to the bathroom? I can't imagine what to discuss but very well.

What's this, I say, unhand me! You go to far Messieurs Beer and and All-You-Can-Drink! Mr. Brain, you do bear a resemblance mmmmmmpf! Save me Sense! Ooof!

Roight. Where were we? Cop a feel on Consequence, that prude? Roight, deal.

Tags: partying

I just bought the upgrade for Rapidweaver 3.6 and one of the features is faster uploading times. I had to upload the whole site again, which I think took over two hours. I'm trying again now - one of the big annoyances of RW has been slugass uploads that chew up my internet and computer's resources, so hopefully it will work better.

Tags: Software

This has totally stunned me. Can the Bush dictatorship get any worse at all? THIS is reporting.

History and I have a strange relationship other than that it, you know, made me. I've always shied away from reading history to a certain extent due to bad experiences being beaten over the head with dates, statistics and countless individuals. Kyoto, from the Cities of the Imagination series, takes the 1200 years of history here and splits it up thematically, rather than chronologically. The chapters are arranged in loose historical sequence (from the founding of the city to the shogunate, or military rule, to the time of geisha etc) and move more or less chronologically as well, but the focus on theme made the city's history a lot easier to grasp.

And what a history! Kyoto was the focal point for more religious subdivisions than Martin Luther could shake a stick at, and this book helped me get a bit of a handle on the various breeds of Buddhism in Japan. The book also details the birth of Zen in Japan, the rise of the tea ceremony, the history of the geisha, what life was like during the aristocratic Heian period (about 1000 years ago), and most interestingly, the role Kyoto played as a centre for poetry and other arts.

Now that I have read it, I feel that traveling anywhere (not to mention living somewhere) without a sense of the history of the place is the height of folly. Find a copy, get inspired and come visit me here!

Well there goes April! Right, so I got sick twice, wrote and submitted 2 writing projects, organized and prepared for my first bike tour and then fucked right off for said tour for a week. Life does have a gearbox and I feel like I have been running in overdrive since Kayla came to visit in April. It was this feeling of chaos and clutter that made hiding out in my new apartment with a beer and a book for 5 hours on Sunday such a treat. Rain was cascading down along the mountains and pelting the graves outside my window while I ate snacks and tried to figure out just where in world I was and where I was going. Didn't reach a verdict but the snacks were good.

The continued acceleration of leaving my school and trying to find extra work to ease the transition is going to make sitting in my new minimalist apartment by the graveyard without an employer in a foreign country feel like hitting the earth at terminal velocity. Full stop. I cringe at such whole-sale change, but wince at the alternatives: staying at my psychotically busy school with its unpaid overtime (got home at 10pm last night, thanks), 30 a week schedule stretched out with long breaks into a 40 hour fulltime commitment.

So the future holds a few things: free time, less money at first, more money hopefully later, freedom. Being my own man. Not handing over the bulk of my wages to the headquarters committees who pick their noses through every inconsequential decision. I hope to start writing a Kyoto book once my schedule is loosened up. Either way, things are going to change for the better around WW headquarters - stay tuned.

Well it has been a month since I noted how I am doing, so let's do it again!

--Writing. Not getting along with people at work sure helped me write a lot a couple months ago! Better relationships are good though, so I won't complain about that. Kayla came for a visit as well, and that, combined with losing 3 staff members within a month and the huge desire to be outside and in the springtime sunshine, enjoying the cherry blossoms in their fleeting beauty... Anyway, it has been stupid busy. So I haven't been writing daily, but I have published my first article ever, lined up another for publication, and have been asked to write a third one, the longest yet! I also submitted some poems to Tyler's journal; I got a form-letter reply saying they'd contact me so who knows what's going on with that. Either way, it is a submission done and with the one I do this April, I will be on pace for submissions.

--Reading. I knocked off The Tipping Point, and GTD. I am still staring at The Odyssey and dreading the enormity of the reading to go. It isn't the novels, it is the poetry anthologies. Anyway, deal with that later. I am swapping out Lost Japan for another book I already have and which is more pertinent to my current situation: Kyoto by John Dougill. So far it is a great account of the immense history this city has. I am not a big fan of "and in 1209 such and such said this and so and so reacted by writing a thinly veiled haiku" history style; fortunately this book divides the facets of the city by theme and traces the themes over time. I also got my hands on a free copy of On Writing by Stephen King, so I figure I'll read that instead of rereading If You Want to Write.

--Japanese. Nothing doing. Lameness. I am going to go to a pretty secluded island for my vacation this spring though, so I am planning a big cram session before I go. Hopefully I'll come back after having some good language experiences and will be further energized.

--Photography. I am behind by about 300 photos, my new memory card seems to have a bad sector which corrupted a whack of photos from Kayla's visit, but on the plus side, the weather is great for photography, I love photos of cherry blossoms, I bought my first tripod set up last weekend and I started taking my first night photos, which turned out badass. I'll likely have no problem shooting over 200 during my 9 day vacation as well.

--Work. Work at Aeon is totally fricken crazy right now. Combine that with the extra Saturday lessons I am doing, plus the occasional sunday open, and my last full day off was nine days ago. Thus we have the reason for an apartment in total disarray. Good money though, and it helps the transition to whatever it is that I am going to do after Aeon.

Before you go anywhere near the next drink machine, read this, notes from the "debate" about the toxicity of Bisphenol A, a petroleum product used to make tin cans and plastic drink bottles. I like how newspapers continue to call any discussion with more than one side a debate. "Environmentalists and ExxonMobil CEOs square off: What causes global warming, burning petroleum products or hippy love vibes?" "The debate rages: should a ten-time convicted rapist go free? Hear from disinterested street idiots and the rapist himself."

The article in question does pretty much the same thing. The Globe writer points out that there are several studies linking Bisphenol A to breast and prostate cancer, as well as hormone imbalance and developmental problems in children. Representatives of responsible companies call the scientists crazy, discount the type of rats used. Scientists go on record saying they are removing every ounce of plastic from their own homes; the PR man nods thoughtfully and then points over our shoulders, shouting, "Hey look, an eagle!"

Why do we have to keep listening to the other side when we know it is all bullshit? Why does anyone even go to a "Press Conference" when Tony Snow is giving out answers? Why do the 98% of scientists that agree that global warming is true and dire get the same coverage as a nutjob with a fat cheque from Exxon?

Democracy and free-speech. With the magnifying effect of the internet, we are not only at the mercy of the idiocy of the majority, but also the victims of every minority adding a new opinion to the pile for us to consider and weigh equally against all the rest. The scientific community may be in 99% consensus, but the variety and time spent on other opinions by the press, even when we know they are wrought with unadulterated bullshit, makes the issue at hand seem like a debate to the average Joe who has barely noticed what is going on.

So then what? Should newspapers do our thinking for us? Should we turn to news sources that we know are biased in alignment with our own ways of thinking? No, I don't think so. But for crying out loud, point out the lies and bullshit. Add a skeptical footnote, like "by the way, Mr. Suit A actually works for the tobacco companies in question." "Today, Tony Snow said something that was confirmed as true."

"Bush delivered another speech filled with abstract notions today, attempting to appeal to his middle-age evangelical idiot support base. Cheney spouted unrepeatable lies and the braying of a ass was heard. End dispatch."

David Allen and his methodology, Getting Things Done (or GTD, in common parlance), has gained a cult following among a distinctly male half of the self-help book genre - Productivity and Success techniques. Websites abound concerning productivity, such as lifehacker.com and 43folders.com, but through them runs a current of GTD obsession (43folders is named after the number of folders needed to operate a GTD file system).

So what's the big deal? In order to avoid "proselytizing", as my Dad called it, I'll avoid the juicy exclamations. Basically, GTD is a way to capture loose thoughts. In the book, Allen argues that stress is due to unfulfilled obligations, any time we think to ourselves "oh, I need to do this, or I should do that." It doesn't matter that we can't DO such and such a thing at a given time -- like remembering to fix the sink while in the middle of a business meeting -- the obligation part of the brain has little sense of time and hence thinks we should be fixing that sink all the time. Have you ever remembered something, and then forgot it, and then remembered it again and thought, "Shit, I already remembered that!" only to forget again? That is a source of stress.

One of the basic pieces of GTD is total capture. It doesn't matter how big or small an obligation is that is rattling around in our heads -- all of it needs to be put into a trustworthy system so that we know that we don't have to keep reminding ourselves of the same thoughts and stressing out. One of his best quotes is: You never need to have the same thought twice, unless you happen to like that thought.

So, first, you collect everything you see around you that could possibly have some sort of hold on you. "Dust the lights." "Call Darren RE birthday" "Clean up classroom" "Start to look for new apartment" "Replace old underwear" These are all possible obligations. Once you have gotten everything from your surroundings, you dump out your brain, writing down every single thing that occurs to you as needing to be done.

By now you have an intimidating mountain of notes in an inbox. Allen's next stage is Process. From here, you got through all of the items, asking a few key questions.
1 - Is it actionable - that is, can I DO something about this. If not, it is either Trash, Reference, or saved for Someday.
2 - If Yes, What is the next action?
3 - If the action is shorter than 2 minutes, Do It.
- If the action is longer than 2 minutes, Delegate It to someone else, or Defer it, that is, put it off until you have time to spend on it, OR Drop it - decide you don't really want to do it.

For example, I look in my inbasket and there is a magazine and a note saying "Charity coming to Japan? Timetable." The magazine is not actionable, it is reference. On to the shelf. The note about Charity is actionable. What is the next action? Write Charity an email. Can I do that in two minutes? Maybe but I'd like to write a nice one, so no, I'll put it off (Defer) until I have time for some emails.

Repeat several hundred times.

The result will be that you have a handle on every single project, big or small, that is weighing on your conscious, and the next action step to move it forward. This turns the most amorphous mass of confusion, the most intimidating task, into a series of small bites and a great roadmap for successfully doing what we want to get done.

The book has a lot more to say, especially about planning projects, and about considering what needs to be done regarding life and our existences on the planet. I won't go into that here. I will say though, that in the year since I first became acquainted with GTD, I have gone from an unorganized uber-procrastinator to someone who knows what he want to do and how to do it. On top of that, I'm able to make priority choices about leaving projects for tomorrow because there is a full inventory and nothing is going to blow up if I relax a while.

... and the bandwagon makes its last stop at my front door. This book has been very popular and widely read -- rightly so -- it presents a new way to see how the world changes in an accessible format. Basically the book covers a variety of examples of epidemics, of sudden, often unexpected changes in culture, crime or prevalent attitudes and traces them to the idea of the Tipping Point. We usually use this term to describe the moment when the tides turn: "The tipping point came when the Canucks killed off a 5 on 3 penalty in the 3rd." Gladwell's usage is different, and if I criticize one point of his book, it was that his alternate usage wasn't totally clear to me until I had read most of the book. For him, the Point is not the moment of shift, but the place, the fulcrum upon which the tilt happens, and how, if a little pressure is applied at this place, dramatic change can occur.

One of his examples came from crime in New York in 80s. A new police chief came to town at the height of violence and instead of cracking down on the violent crimes he focussed on the subway. All of the cars were stripped of graffiti and weren't allowed to operate with any on them, cops patrolled the stations more frequently and groups of 10 plainclothes cops lurked at ticket gates to bust farecheaters. The results were stunning - a 66% drop in crime over the next decade. Why?

Gladwell spends most of his book outlining the reasons, but there were a few main points:
--Grafitti, a slight offense, establishes an atmosphere for further crimes, as does farecheating. If something small is permitted, something bigger will be attempted. Arresting and charging ordinary people who tried to escape paying fares established zero tolerance from the ground up, not between violent and more violent crimes.
--Arrests at ticket gates nabbed a lot of wanted felons, taking them off the street, and forced other minor felons to be straight, at least for the subway, thereby encouraging further honest behavior.
--By focussing police attention on the subway instead of violent crime, the city government removed one of the primary environments and breeding grounds for violent crime.

That's pretty much it. Without gobs of extra cash or personnel, the fortunes of NY City were reversed with the right kind of pressure applied to the right place. I really enjoyed his writing, and compared to the poetry I have been slogging through, it was breezy, fascinating stuff. His book also made me think differently about how my own mind works, as well as consider how a few people, with the right message, at the right time and place, can fundamentally change the world. If the concept of a cultural epidemic can be understood, maybe it can be harnessed and directed for the common good, which is the challenge Gladwell leaves us with.

I'm still deciphering a best practice for storing big photos, but here is my second big batch of Raws. I got a new 2gb card in the mail today so that will alleviate a bit of my uploading hassles.

Enjoy the new shots in the gallery!

My friend Kayla is in town, so I'll have to put WW on hiatus for the next 5 days. In the mean time, look forward to reviews of The Tipping Point and Getting Things Done.

So... awesome.

So Windows Vista has been out for a little bit now, but I haven't even touched it yet, for every public computer I've used has stuck with XP for the time being. I read Digg, and although that site has a heavy Mac/Linux bias, it still seems that Vista is a nightmare of heavy-handed antipiracy measures and a shiny ripoff of MacOSX from two years ago.

Back when XP came out ... 5 years ago? ... I upgraded because Millennium was such a piece of garbage, and the press about XP was that it was an improvement. I don't seem to be hearing the same - on the contrary - I keep hearing of school boards, large companies or government sectors that are switching to free versions of Linux in order to avoid the cost / hassle of upgrading to one of Vista's many versions.

Incidentally, the expansion from 2 versions of XP to 5 versions of Vista seems to have affected the lure of getting any of them, which is, we will recall from that TED video I posted, the paradox of choice.

So what's the deal, Windows users? Is it too expensive? Are there two many versions? Are you waiting for the first service pack to come out and fix the inevitable wave of problems? Is upgrading too much of a hassle or too dangerous?

I've felt recently that the attempt to actually do something cool instead of just putter along in the status quo actually attracts problems. February was more or less a nightmare: dealing with Grandma Jo and my breakup drove me into socialization overdrive to stave off feeling down, one of my few friends left the next week into the silent vacuum of California, relationships deteriorated around work with my manager in the hospital for a month and everyone stressed out, trying to do to much in too little time made me late for two private lessons, my house went nearly a month without a good cleaning.

November was pretty much without comment yet two months later February goes all to hell. Irritating.

I've had a few successes, despite all this. Let's do an overview.
--Writing. My daily writing hasn't been great this week, but before that it was pretty solid. It helped that the previous two weeks I was fucking off and writing when I should have been working; I really can't continue to do that, so my writing time needs to be elsewhere. The great news, however, is that I submitted my first article to a local magazine and it should be published in april. I am also going to send something into Ty's Pine Beetle Review, as soon as my editors get back to me.
--Reading. I've read six books so far, which would make it seem that I am on pace to finish the whole list in time. Unfortunately I have been knocking off mainly the easy ones, so harder reading lies ahead. I am about half done The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel and so far it is good, so good in fact that it makes me want to be a sailor... well, nearly. I am also rereading Getting Things Done and listening to an audiobook by the same author, whom I can thank for what little control I have over my life right now. I'm going to be meeting up with Matt at the end of the month, so I have to finish The Tipping Point by then and give it back to him.
--Photos. I am really behind so far. I think I have shot 600 instead of 800 right now, and there are two main problems. 1) my cards, combined, don't hold a hundred photos, so I either have to delete as I go and make room, or constantly swap and dump. That's annoying. 2) I have yet to figure out a fast and easy system for importing photos, deleting junk, editing the good ones and importing the lot into iPhoto. I guess the realization is this: if the photo isn't good enough to take the time to edit, it should probably be deleted or kept just for the "I was there, I did this" factor. That means that my photography and editing skills still have a long way to go, as most of them don't seem worth editing.
--Work. Teaching privates has been ok, but my coworker opted to stay longer so I can't count on that income right away. On the upside, I can go on Japanese EI for three months at 60% wages to help cover my bills for a while. The real challenge here isn't finding work - there are gobs of teaching jobs - but finding good work. I'd ultimately like to be working at a college or doing some contract writing work, but I have to do some figuring to get there first.

Studying Japanese and exercising have both basically sucked. I am going to change my Joe's goals system a bit: if I go two days in a row not doing something, the penalty will be doubled. Similarly, if I can go a week without missing something, that goal will be doubled for a day. I think I'll also raise the bar too: from now on my goal is going to be +5, as +4 is a bit easy to do.

So what's to come on Wendingwayfare? Next week I'll have my review of the Getting Things Done methodology and potentially some new photos. I'd also like to do a location spotlight, so keep your eyes peeled (or subscribe to the RSS feed).

Wow - something good actually came from going to Aeon Headquarters! I discovered the book-swap bin, which I then proceeded to raid for a copy of Hey Rube as well as McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In order to save money, I am going to swap this one for the one I had plan to read - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'll get to it if I have time.

First, let it be said - I Understand All Now. I understand Ty, over at TRR, and his weird use of capitals, the random streaks of totally non-sensical hyperbole. It is all Thompson. Reading the first page of Hey Rube nullified an aeon of Ty and I arguing over style.

Which isn't to say I like it. I just know why Ty was writing that way. Anyway, Hey Rube is a collection of semi-sports-related rants that ESPN.com paid Hunter to write. I found myself drawn into the book even though over half of the material was boring. It was like a captivating person describing lint -- you are still captivated even though the material is dull. The main theme of the book was sports, or more specifically, sports-gambling. I found Hunter's autobiographical antics to be humourous, but the sports talk itself wasn't very interesting unless he was being really vituperative.

But then, sprinkled in like fragments of what I am pretty sure his other books are like, were his "digressions" on Bush, the new war on terror and the decline of America. These sections were by far the most insightful and interesting, and while they gave me a taste of what his style is really like, he usually cut himself off with a "whoops! I seem to be wandering...", feeling some sort of obligation to actually talk about sports.

This book was overall ho-hum, but if other books he has written are permitted a narrative longer than a couple pages and deal with a more interesting topic, you can count me in.

Have I beaten all of you over the head about TED yet? Have I harangued and ordered you to go to the website, to subscribe to the RSS feed? Well here's a video to watch at slugass Youtube speeds, just for a taste.

My first encounter with Chatwin was through advertising: my journal of choice, the Moleskine, is labeled "the famous journal of Hemingway, Picasso, Chatwin". It wasn't until I stumbled across In Patagonia in a Vancouver used book store that I connected the vaguely known writer (Chatwin's The Songlines is one of Dad's favourites) with the marketing scheme.

I started the book pretty excited, as it was one of my first real forays into travel literature, a genre I am interested in contributing to. The verdict? Confusion and disappointment. The book details Chatwin's quest into Patagonia (the southern tip of South America) because of a scrap of "brontosaurus skin" his grandmother had, which had come from a cave in Patagonia. As the first few chapters reveals, it was actually the skin of an extinct sloth. My confusion comes from the narrative. The book has two modes: it follows Chatwin's route through Patagonia and recounts his encounters with the locals, or describes the historical detail around a figure that he pursues through various interviews and history books. Both were unsatisfactory.

The travel/exploration side of exploring South America was a bit letdown. I was intrigued by Patagonia, as I really had no clue as to what was down there. My impression was of mountains, natives, Spanish, and mist but little rainfall. To my chagrin, I discovered that Patagonia is full of British, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German and Boer settlers, most of which were there to escape the World Wars, the Cold War, their own personal histories. So settlers, and sheep. Sheep, sheep, sheep. Chatwin wanders from exile sheep-farm to exile sheep-farm, and I really couldn't help but feel both bored and that he had somehow missed out on the vitality of the native peoples, which are generally described only as sheep-thieves, as victims of small-pox epidemics or of missionaries, or as nameless, faceless peons, servants and "tame indians". (the vitality of the natives could be my own fantasy, as they are continually described as drunks) Instead the book focuses on these poor souls trying to recreate Wales or wherever, fighting against Marxists, anarchists, indians, or other landowners. Reading all of this was a let down, as though a mysterious spot on the map was revealed to be just as boring as the rest of the world.

The other mode the book operates in is the description of historical figures who factored into the area somehow. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, two famous train robbers from the States, were a couple of the main figures, as was a leader of an attempted revolution and the self-proclaimed king of Patagonia (in exile). These historical figures were fairly interesting, but often I found that my understanding of their roles was limited by my total ignorance regarding Chilean/Argentinean politics in the last century. I had to Google Péron (Juan and Evita, you know, don't cry for me Argentina etc -- thank you Madonna!) to fill some basic gaps. I don't expect to be spoonfed, but I felt that I missed out on some of the references that other people would have understood better. Also, some of the historical figures seemed to have been tossed in just for the need for material. Near the end of the book Chatwin interviews several people about a barber that had recently committed suicide. I felt, as I read, what the hell is the point of telling me about this random dood?

And that became the overall theme - a lack of a theme. I often felt vaguely interested, but soon the little investigation would end and Chatwin would move off to another town, in which he would introduce a new character and finish his biography just as quickly. Overall, I've realized that a day by day account of people and places is really boring if there isn't some sort of pattern, theme, or clear conclusion. There doesn't need to be a moral to every story, but let there at least be a story that unites the book more than just the fact that he wrote it all in one area.

Just trying this out.

And these videos are pretty funny.

12 hours later I emerge, grimy with sweat and pixels, bearing the efforts of my labours: two edited photos.

Despite my dad's pesterings, I had long avoided using any photo editing software. I found fiddling with colour to do more damage than it was worth, editing for blemishes often looked heavy-handed and unnatural, and I had hangups over messing with the "reality" that my camera captured. Any pro photographer will tell you that's silly, of course. A camera is just a device that captures light, and its functioning is just as subjective as our own eyes taking in and making sense of light. I still feel that I want to capture what I saw, but now I have realized that I need photo editing to make that happen, because my camera can't do it all on its own.

Anyway, I've been riding the lappy for the last 5 hours, screwing around with the site design and I am fed up. These colours and fonts are a bit "happy" but I think the site will function better on browsers this way.

Oh, and check out the photos.

Carousel is unfortunately not going to go beyond a trial issue, such was my disappointment. I'll first say that the journal is put together well and that the art was pretty interesting. I'll counter that by saying that there were all of 2 poems that I a) understood and b) therefore enjoyed.

Those of you who know me know that I enjoy poetry, but as I read more and more currently produced stuff, it is becoming apparent that my tastes are out of fashion. I'm not going to type out any example poems because it would be bad for copyright reasons and annoying to have to look at any of these poems again. Nevertheless, the breed of poetry that Carousel has chosen to espouse is the obscure, obtuse, post-modern variety that glories in its own artistichoodiness. That doesn't mean I like sugary, moralistic, reductive, Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soup slop -- on the contrary. Even though I can talk poetry, I want to be able to walk into any poem and feel moved somehow, that I understood something, and that further rereading will only deepen my appreciation of the piece. I don't want to have to consult my Dictionary of Obscure and Oblique Literary Reference to figure out where a quote is coming from. I read the whole issue twice, and reread several of the poems further to make sure I wasn't been hasty in my dismissal. Instead I only became more certain that most of the writers were completely high on their own bullshit. Writing like this, with its Ezra Pound "make it new" obsession, has thrown out any notion of storytelling, narrative voice or evocative metaphor in favour of the "look how bloody weird I am" competition that has gripped the art world now and then.

No thanks.

Last weekend marked a week as a single guy, so I threw myself into socializing in order to avoid the emptiness of my apartment. That Saturday was a national holiday - Setsubun, the traditional beginning of the new year - I succeeded to an exhausting level. Friday night I went out for dinner with a colleague and got the lowdown on another shitty relationship in my environs. I got home at 2:30 and crawled into bed, sleeping a scant few hours before I woke to teach two private classes. I mistook the starting time for the second class, and without checking my pda, I dashed off through traffic to arrive on time, nearly getting hit by a car I didn't see on the way.

That started a theme that has continued throughout this week - danger. Last night I was nearly pinched by a car that was backing into a parking spot because I thought it was pulling out instead of pulling in. This morning I was startled by a car pulling up to an intersection suddenly and I nearly fell into the river when I collided with another cyclist whom I was attempting to pass and who didn't see me. After that a pigeon made for my face in kamikaze style. I've decided to spend the rest of the week moving slowly.

Anyway, grateful that I was still alive, I took advantage of the good lighting and visited Fushimi-Inari Taisha, the shrine with a whole ton of red gates in order to take some pictures. It was interesting to return with a different camera. I shot better pictures by and large, but I felt a bit hindered by the length of the lens and really craved something wide to capture the scene better. Here are some photos from last year and this visit, check out the difference in the photos.

After that shrine I headed home for lunch and started watching Great Teacher Onizuka. This ridiculous anime is basically about an ex-gang leader and major slacker (yet somehow a third rate college graduate) who figures he'd like to be a teacher and make school fun again. Through some trials in actually getting a teaching position, he ends up at a school and is put in charge of a class that is legendary for its bad students. So far it is totally funny, but it does have a large does of horny adolescent humor involving highschool girl panties and other such sexual innuendo, so I don't think it is really for everyone.

I watched a few episodes and then headed off to meet Jenny and Stacy. We had a couple of drinks and then headed to Yoshida-jinga, one of the big shrines in Kyoto, because it was host to a large festival and bonfire. We ate and spilled a variety of food and then ended up standing around the fire until after 2am. I had a chance to talk to some more long term residents and become more confident that they are all varying shades of bonkers.

The next day, Jenny, Stacy and I met again to check out some temples. I shot a bunch of pictures, but I really only took one good photo, the one you are looking at right now. After that we went out for dinner (and a bottle of wine) and then hit a cafe for absinthe. I don't quite understand the mystique around this drink. The popculture understanding of it is that it is hallucinogenic. I am not sure about my experience. We had one, but it wasn't lit on fire or mixed with sugar (which you are supposed to do?) and it tasted like sambuca mixed with toothpaste. Stacy said that her only reaction in the past was brighter vision. Since she told me that, I am treating the following experience with a bit of skepticism. The next bar we visited (in order to drink sangria) was a Spanish joint with walls painted in red and blue stripes. Either those colours shouldn't be put together or the absinthe was doing something, because the border between them was hurting my eyes.

So that was Sunday. Monday was another private class, Aeon, and then an evening out for coffee with a really sweet student. A relatively early night, home at 11:30. Check out the photo galleries for images of what I am talking about.

Edit: I just found out that my camera raw isn't supported by my version of Photoshop, so the galleries will have to wait a little. Go bittorrent go!

Everything pretty much goes out the window when emotion rears his ugly head, so I'm happy to have just escaped last week and all of its drama. I have gone onto a full-scale socializing offensive in an attempt to enjoy life and spend as little time at home, and my wallet will attest that I have been successful. Last weekend was the traditional New Year's celebration here in Japan (they do also celebrate Jan 1st) so I was out past midnight or nearly so for the previous four nights. I hope to post some pictures tonight or tomorrow.

Regarding the goals:
--Writing daily has been, by far, the most successful. I've been writing and reading about 30 mins each minimum, which is not too shabby. It isn't 2000 words a day, a target I read about online recently, but it is an improvement.
--The book list. The Odyssey is so damn big! I am a third done, but I decided to start reading In Patagonia just to be able to write a review sooner.
--Taking photos has gotten a lot harder, but I have hit my target for January. I've realized that my lens length has some creative limits, particularly because I usually like to take wide photos, not portrait shots. The portraits I have taken are great, but they really require getting into people's faces, something I am still not very good at. In addition, the winter lighting in Japan is pretty dreary somedays and I am getting tired of photos of temples. On top of that, I've decided to shoot in RAW, that is, shoot in an uncompressed, unprocessed format in order to learn how to use photoshop creatively. The problem is that my cards can't hold many RAW photos and I spend a lot more time uploading.
--Submissions. I have been putting this one off, but I can't for much longer. I have a few poems I am going to submit soon, and I think I am going to aim for a cheap print publication, rather than a famous one or a 'zine (how I loathe the term).
--Work. I have now have 4 private students, accounting for about $300 a month. If a couple coworkers give me theirs upon leaving this number could double, though the hourly rate isn't fantastic.
--Japanese. This one hasn't been good. I think, like I tell my students, that I need to pick a specific time to study.

All things considered, the month has been decent. My strong points have been writing, reading and photography, the weak ones exercise, Japanese and submission. And with that, I am back at it! Look for photos soon.

Turns out that the worst day of the year got delayed in the mail, coming a week behind schedule to coincide with me breaking up with my girlfriend and the death of my great grandma Jo. I cancelled my private class and told the school I wasn't coming in, losing out on the same $240 I was touting last monday. Moments like those really emphasize the distance, the unmitigable distance that separates me from those who matter most, the distance that, in moments of crisis, becomes impenetrable to the best of our telecommunication devices.

I knew little of my Great Grandma. She was stubborn and liked to be difficult. I recall her not understanding my sloppy Canadian English, remember her sitting to watch fox news down in a Californian trailer park of sorts, remember her kindness when I was 17 and saw her last, despite my blindness of grief at being away from my first real girlfriend. I remember her phone calls wherein she always asked, "is this Dylan?" getting me and my brother mixed up, phone calls which stopped coming without me noticing.

So here I am, an ocean away, my most ancient living ancestor now dead. I didn't know the extent of her senility, that she scarcely remembered her son when he saw her last, didn't know her or what she did with the last 20 years of life, what she thought or felt, where she came from. I can conjure all sorts of sociological theory about broken genealogies with trans-Atlantic migration, all of the reasons as to why the average Canadian's sense of self is cobbled together from pop-culture and a malformed sense of being from 'over there' historically. Ultimately, I just feel like a shit grandson, the terminus of an ancient chain spanning back into the past whose opposite end just lost another link into the gaping maw of vacuum, the gears of that most terrible machine.

Perhaps I mourned myself in advance, that 3 short generations hence my great grandchildren will just as soon veg out in front of that era's opiate of choice as learn a little of their ancient patriarch, who toiled to create a world for them, who knew just as little of his own ancestors. For the indignity of hollow memory, that final fading resting place for us all, I ask for forgiveness, Josephine.

Time to give a little love. My friend Naben's band, Bend Sinister, has put out their first music video and it is pretty cool. If you are around Vancouver you can see them play fairly frequently - as for another Canadian tour, I don't think one is in the works for the moment, but their site has all upcoming show details.

Some blogger am I, forgetting to post about something relevant and then doing it in retrospect. If you hadn't heard, monday was calculated to be the worst day of the year. The main reasons are: the parties are all over, the visa bill from xmas shopping has just arrived, and most initial steam from a resolution has been lost by this point.

Mine was pretty great! I taught a couple hours in the morning and then headed to work until 9. The total daily (7.5hrs) wage, about $230CAD, is more than I have ever earned in a day, so that felt good. Then I dropped off some teaching materials at the home of a truly inspirational duo - Tad and Anthony. I met Anthony this summer and he is the guy that has hooked me up with some classes and given me a lot of kickass advice. He's also the guy that inspired me to ditch my job situation, because he, doing private lessons exclusively, works 3 months, then takes 3 months off to travel, year round. Tad is his tagteam partner, and he stays at Anthony's place when they switch. It isn't often that I meet someone with whom I have a lot in common, but this was epic. We talked hiking gear, travel, teaching, English lit (same degree), Macs, Mac software, personal productivity, the same sites we both have RSS feeds to -- it was shocking. Normally I would tenuously venture, "Have you heard of Getting Things Done?" But not only had he heard of it, he was implementing it with damn near the same software, freeware, pda and pda sync set up as me! He was reading the same geeky sites about Getting Things Done and similarly waiting anxiously for that stopgap program destined to come out soon.

I dropped by at 9:30 and ended up staying until nearly midnight -- not a bad Blue Monday at all!

Before I even begin, let it be known: I am a rabid Dahl fan. I read nearly all of his kids books over and over as a child, however, it was with some trepidation that I started into his adult fiction. I wasn't sure if the same guy who wrote naughty children's books would be the same for an adult audience. I started reading this book about a year ago, slowly working through the stories, starting with the shortest ones as I would often be reading before bed.

I'll just go ahead and say that they are delicious, electric and disturbing. His stories largely fall into a few well defined camps: stories set in WWII (in which he was an RAF pilot), stories about assholes we end up liking anyway, stories that start out ordinary and end very very sinister, stories of science gone awry, and stories with a great, often funny, twist. Actually, the majority of them have twists, but the last category is for ones that aren't WWII, assholesque, sinister or scientific.

I ended up liking the stories about antiheroes, tricksters, scammers and infamous womanizers the most. For at least a quarter of his 50-odd stories I palpably quivered with tension as I tried to read without skipping ahead, having to go back paragraphs again and again as my excitement grew. A couple others shocked me so badly that I couldn't stop thinking about them, and I couldn't decide whether I thought "oh, that poor bastard. That sucks so much." Or, "That is hilarious. He totally had that coming." Really, both were true, and it is rare that a writer can create such tension not only within the story but within a reader's emotional response. A couple stories were duds, but this was largely because I felt that the twist was just too cruel to the protagonist or came too early to be a shock. These, however, where huge exceptions. The vast majority bred sympathy and lulled my senses so easily that each story still had an effect upon me.

Matt, another fan, said he read Dahl's stories a little at a time because the endless twists can become repetitive. I don't quite agree, but I do think that the book should be read a little at a time to better savour the stories, and that a reader should skip around instead of reading all of his war stories or sexy ones all at once (and they do sort of form clumps in the books that make up the collected). Before reading the last story (the last one in order as well) I reread one previous to it that I thought I hadn't. Even though I knew the result, I still really enjoyed watching Dahl craft the buildup to that moment, so for me at least, these twist stories bore rereading.

If you want to get a taste of his writing, find a copy of this book and sit down with one of the following great examples of the 5 different subgroups mentioned above:
Parson's Pleasure
Beware of the Dog or They Shall Not Grow Old
The Butler
Genesis and Catastrophe
The Great Automatic Grammatizator

Now that I have this list, I urge, nay, order you to go out and read these!

***Preface - if you do not find Japanese anime or "cartoons" even remotely interesting, just close the window, or skip down to another post. I am about to lay down the geekery.***

Honestly. Honestly. It never ceases to amaze, the effect of good writing over bad. What am I talking about? Why, anime of course! I just finished watching Episode 110 of Bleach, a show that has valiantly endured B- filler for the last 50 episodes, 50 episodes of tortured idiotic dialogue, of slow and ill-measured pacing, of failure to respect character, of idiotic "well, since we have to sync up with the manga original again sometime we can't do any really cool shit and then end up being out of whack" total nonsense. It is as though the animation studio responsible for writing the filler episodes set out to do it in such a substandard way that no thunder could possibly be stolen from the creator's writing skills.

In a word, 110 was vindication. Vindication for sitting through all of that, waiting for something interesting to happen. Watching was a shock -- I kept thinking, the episode has to end soon, too much stuff has happened. The plot is moving at an exciting pace! But it carried on, was badass, and I recommend it. Watch from 1-67, then 109 on. (Lunar fansubs are the best for the former run) We are back, and Naruto is nearly there too!