autumn tactics

今日も有難うございました。これだけで幸せ過ぎます。

感謝です。

Thank you.

This week is an off-week artistically. I was hoping to have the house spic-n-span to hit the ground running next Monday, but work this week has slowed things down a little bit. Tomorrow is a big day at the office, and it’s looking like I’ll miss out on the Sumidagawa fireworks festival again this year… really wanted to go, but, duty calls.

MOST important this weekend is getting thank you cards in the mail for each and every person that took the time to come out and see my show. One thing that my mentor Randy Pausch always stressed was the importance of hand-written thank you notes for people. In this day and age especially, the personal touch counts, and an artist is nothing without his audience.

Thanks guys again, I promise to have as beautiful Japanese as I can muster in the mail for you this weekend.

Keiko, have a lovely time in Thailand, scout it out for me!

今週があっという間に終わって、もう週末と信じられない。先週と同じに、仕事が終わったら飲みにいって、心の底から疲れました。筋肉が痛い。頭がふわふわ。11時まで寝ていたけど熟睡できなかった。

今の問題が80％ストレスと分かってるけど簡単に直せない。今日楽しめるように努力します。

So I’ve already written more in the last week than I have in the last month, and I’m not even on vacation. What is the cause of this you may ask? Well, I’ve been lugging the VAIO around with me a lot in the lately, so I can manage my exhibition notes on the fly. I’ve also been riding on trains a lot, with all these trips back and forth from Enoshima.

The weather has been flip-flopping the past week, spring to winter. Tomorrow are forecasts of snow. I’ve caught a cold. The website’s database server has been misbehaving (it’s miracle if you’re still around to see this). Work is bearing down on me. I’m woefully behind schedule for all of my big three projects for the year.

Things could be better.

But then again, things could be much, much, worse.

So, we do what we can. We do our very best to apply time management techniques to our time, and strive to make life better in at least one way, for ourselves and for others. Every day.

Tip: Start in ProPhoto, deliver in AdobeRGB.

It’s still cold in Tokyo, despite a warm break several weeks back. The sakura are in bloom, the sun is shining, and my rose bush is singing.

The blog and gallery have gotten intolerably slow the past several months, I am convinced IPowerweb is trying to host too many databases on this server. ::sigh::

I’ve gotten a kick start to photography recently, partly due to work and partly due to sexy new tech.

I won’t say anything until it’s in print, but suffice it to say retouching is a rabbit hole I’m not so sure I want to fall down. Simmering on the back burner is my Lightroom 3 Beta eval. Like other famous software of note, the simple stuff is hard and the hard stuff is simple. Still, it’s leagues better than just manual file renaming and Windows Explorer. Huzzah for metadata and ratings!

Now if only I could have a host that would serve you photographs before you close the browser in frustration.

I believe I have made it through my journal backlog all the way up to the my European trip, save a copy entries on the back of random napkins and flyers. I hope to round those up in the next couple of weeks, but for now I just have all that thinking from the end of the year to type up and I should be solid.

In the meantime photographs from Berlin and Amsterdam are finished, so you can start with those or rummage through the blog archives from last August to December.

東京。最大の首都。

何百万人のサラリーマンがいるんだ？たった一人の幸せは何？お金？嫁さん？プラモデル？

いや、違います。

イカ納豆、モロキュウ、ゴーヤー玉子とじ、とサッポロ生ビール。

はい。幸せ。

So it’s 2010. In the end of December I went to Seattle on business and then a week later had my first live musical performance in roughly twenty years, and then a week later I went to Berlin and Amsterdam for my third European excursion. I have fifty pages of notes in my Kellogg’s journal, as well as seven rolls of film, but for that you’re just going to have to wait a little. In the meantime here are my new year resolutions.

The tangible:
1) I will have at least two photo exhibitions this year, one of which will be at a private showing
2) I will produce at least one EP length album of entirely new music produced

The intangible:
I will be more at peace with my decisions in life, both personal and professional, and towards this more honest with myself and others. To thine own self be true.

So by some sort of miracle I’ve managed to get on the plane with a window seat and no serious ill effects. I’m a little hung over but given that I got only two hours’ sleep on a wide assortment of twelve drinks, I’m doing pretty damn fine. I didn’t get a number of things into my bag that would have been helpful, but packing Thursday was the smartest thing I’ve done in ages and I do have the essentials.

I ask myself how I ended up with such a precarious balance of self-destruction and success, but truthfully it was just a complete lack of judgement coupled with a virtually non-ending string of good luck. VERY lucky: lucky I didn’t say anything more self-centered or obnoxious to my co-workers, lucky I somehow paced myself drinking through the night; lucky we didn’t all split up at midnight and call it a day, lucky we went back to The Hub, stole a good table and the girls we chatted up were just the right level of drunk to screw around with for hours. I must have bought a lot of karma in sending those nengajou (New Year’s cards), because I was just on fire from the minute we left the office last night until I walked down the boarding ramp. What adventures lay in store for me now?

Pure. Unadultered. Mayhem.

I’d write about it, but the crusted sunburn of my victory is far too sweet for words. I am just going to sit here and let it slowly waft off of my skin while the mind reels in nirvana.

December means bounenkai end of year parties. Alcohol, mayhem, and people you’ve just met. Oh yes.

I have a new keyboard. This keyboard’s space key should work 100% of the time. The last keyboard’s did not. You can imagine how no space key would impede writing. Japanese was especially frustrating because the conversion key from kana to kanji is the space bar. Oh yes, it was most impossible to do any sort of writing at home.

Mail, blogs, chat, GOOGLE!

Time after time again I had to CTRL+C a space from some random web page and then CTRL+V it between every word. Maddening. Yes.

But I’m back. Slightly crazed, but back. Expect much more writing (tonight I want to get at least three posts in.) This again is a good time to recommend the RSS, because these entries are dated retroactively. A feed will inform you of them nonetheless.

Huzzah for space bars.

Things have gotten sort of jumbled up again lately. Another cycle of increased madness at work consumes my minutes, hours, days, nights, and more things than I can remember go left undone. This is supposed to be a very special month, at least I thought it should be, because it’s the last month of my twenties. Good bye glorious decade of self-awareness and experimentation. Where do I go from here? So many questions. Such a half-assembled mess…

I haven’t really ever found a place that I call home
I never stick around quite long enough to make it
I apologize that once again I’m not in love
But it’s not as if I mind
that your heart ain’t exactly breaking

But if my life is for rent and I don’t lean to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine
–Dido

So August has ended with Nature Wind (which I’m in the process of scanning, so please wait a moment), and now we are already a third the way through September. Have I been working overtime? No, not since August. Have I been spending a lot of my non-working time drinking in September? Yes; for better or worse, yes.

I ventured to CEDEC last week and took a rare trip to Chinatown in Yokohama. I got to hook-up with dear friend Hirota-san again. Saturday I went to the park with a friend and played guitar in between cranberries and sips of wine. Then Saturday night I went to Hirano’s Venetian dinner party. It was a bit of steep investment in terms of money (sixty dollar entrance fee), and time (an unbelievable five hours), but somehow my sanity didn’t degrade noticeably and I ended up scraping by with a terrible headache and rolling in bed Sunday.

This week I’ve been out drinking three nights in a row, and honestly considering I’m leaving for Vietnam tomorrow morning, I think I’m just going to call it an early night (which isn’t to say I won’t be meeting someone for drinks… it’ll just start at seven-thirty as opposed to ten).

September is the month of aki-aji beer in crimson and gold cans, of the Dara Dara Matsuri (ginger festival); of lying in the cool morning sun and eating kaki (crisp persimmons). September is a number of vacation days, of cat-sitting for my best friend while longing for another dazzling rave.

September is the last full month of my glorious and storied twenties.

Work has reverted to the Saturday/Sunday combo mode again temporarily, so most of my plans this weekend were squashed. However I did manage to leave on Sunday around 4:30 so I could visit my friend Daisuke’s restaurant in Edogawabashi. He’s in the process of renovating the new building for business, and selling excess dishware in the process.

I met some new people and made friends. It’s hard for me to remember names off the bat until I get someone’s personality lodged in my mind, so I try to associate faces with kanji (brother 聖也、sister 麻衣、father 弘).