autumn tactics

Though the particular date often escapes me, summer always brings the terminal feelings associated with my anniversary of living in Japan. Another cycle is spent; I’ve been here five years. I don’t know what is right anymore; I act but with so much less anticipation. I’m so tuned and adept at certain things but so blind to a myriad of others that I used to entertain. It’s like being in a crowded room with hundreds of people talking all at once but over time you unconsciously develop the habit of filtering them out one by one, until it’s as if you’re the only person for miles.

The first place I lived was a weekly mansion in Takaido. I bought a used mint green Ralph Lauren oxford for five hundred yen and I wore it to work the first day after nicking my Adam’s apple shaving in the morning. The photographs I took then were beautiful to me, but now looking at them I can hardly believe that they’re mine. It’s like seeing yourself at a party as a stranger.

I am exhausted, completely exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally– in every way imaginable. A single pint of beer makes the following day almost intolerable. It seems that 85% of my life is muscle memory, and my brain is eternally drugged. I keep thinking to myself, if I just eat a little healthier, if I just change the position I sleep in, or how I hold myself when I walk, it’ll all come together and I’ll feel like I used to, like I barely remember.

I’m learning, but how much and at what cost I can’t keep track of any more.

Too tired to sleep…

[I just noticed that this is post 700. Seven hundred in just a little over five years; though the last nine months the rate has really slowed.]

The summer that never was continues and life passes me as I sit in a puddle of convenience store sandwiches, canned coffee, and unshaved Fridays.

I will be working like this for probably another five weeks. I am stalling on using the GPU to export pixel shader contents directly to memory. Thread safety and frame rates follow me into my dreams where I ask my artists once again, are they _sure_ that the alpha is cleanly feathered in all of the UI textures?

Sample photographs are back from the ST801, and unfortunately it seems that the iris blades will not close, leaving the camera perpetually locked at F1.8. This did cost me a roll of Centuria 400 and I should have checked the mechanics of the camera before taking any pictures. Now I have the task of dismantling the lens in hopes of repairing the aperture control.

I am going to try very, very, hard to get to a highly talked of party at the end of the month, which as my good friend Futoshi says will provide, “some really great photographic material.” It is the weekend before _the_ milestone though, so my hopes of making it are waning.

A significant period off is rumored to occur in the next two months. The thought I could stop working and actually go somewhere seems unreal; I am hesitant to believe and even if it did manifest it would most certainly fall dramatically short of my expectations for the fabled multi week time off game developers supposedly get after a big project. Nevertheless, I am starting to study Italian again…my first instinct was a multi-country crawl through central Europe.

Today I am going out to the east side of town to get some precision tools for the Fujinon lens, and see an exhibition of the Japanese master painters. I also need some honest to goodness epiphany for planning my next collaborative show. We meet today and hopefully will make some significant headway towards a concept we can be invigorated by.

So…tired…natsubate.

I promised myself I’d go to bed as soon as I came home tonight, because tomorrow is going to be another very long day. However, I do so little outside of work, I have to spend a few minutes doing something, just to break it into two pieces, you know? So this post is really nothing more than filler to you, sorry. It means a lot to me though, to be and and say. Hopefully I’ll have a day off this weekend and I can catch up on some production.

One might try to paint a picture with water colors on the blue sky, but it is impossible. And it is also impossible to dry up a great river by the heat of a torch made of hay, or to produce a crackling noise by rubbing together to pieces of well-tanned leather. Like these examples, people should train their minds so that they would not be disturbed by whatever kinds of words they might hear.

They should train their minds and keep them broad as the earth, unlimited as the sky, deep as a big river and soft as well-tanned leather. — from The Way of Purification

Today is July 3rd. I don’t remember when I last wrote, but it seems like yesterday, whatever that means. Releases to client fall like rainy days and it’s a miracle I remember to pay the utility bills.

Tomorrow is America’s Independence Day, 232 years from when a group of influential Anglo-Saxan landowners decided they’d had enough of being controlled by a group of other influential Anglo-Saxans several thousand miles to the northeast across the Atlantic Ocean. Of all the major holidays I’ve had to abandon since forsaking social security and the right to bear arms, the Fourth of July is probably the most derelict. I’m always working late, but there’s no marketing support for it in Japan, so it comes and goes with only a mid-compile passing thought of so many teenage romantic entanglements amidst fireworks.

Tomorrow Chub-Du has a concert, as does a minor band that has shown interest in hiring me for photography (which I have badly managed). However, I’ll make it to neither as the gaming industry is one of the most underdeveloped, taxing, and grossly inefficient wings of software development. This is no cause for alarm, however, as I’ve long since acquiesced to the fact and simply accept is as being inevitable as mortal death.

In any case, I have two independent productions on the board right now, though the first is quite tenuous for lack of definition. If anyone is interested in providing artistic consul, I would be much obliged. You may leave comments or mail me.

Ikuno Oribe said, “If a retainer will just think about what he is to do for the day at hand, he will able to do anything. If it is a single day’s work, one should be able to put up with it. Tomorrow, too, is but a single day.” — Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, seventh chapter

The longer I spend wrapped up in work, the more disheveled I become and the more frustrating the moments of free time are. It’s when I take a step off the merry-go-round that I realize how much time has passed and how many virtual dishes have piled up in my personal life.

How many dozens of rolls of negatives are piled up on my desk?
I haven’t replied to that person in three months?
The friend’s concert I missed was when?
…
Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t put too much stock in our relationship either then.

Every time I wake up on a Saturday at noon and do a quick mental check on how many promises to myself I’ve broken, I feel sick to my stomach and roll back over, pulling the blankets over my head once more.

Why can’t I have the strength to be able to sort through all the perishable parts of living and consume them by value, in turn?

I’ve been slogging towards another milestone at work, the third such hellacious one this year, and less than thirty days since the last. I lay down new features and design revisions to my libraries as fast as countless legions of content creators can swoop down on them, testing little and barely carving out the absolute minimum to make it run. And it comes in an office where the thermometer reads 95 and builds are broken all day long from a trail of bungling and sufficient specification all the way back to 2006.

But, as they say, the show must go on. And it will go on, and I do all that I can in the 80 odd minutes between getting home from work and brushing my teeth for bed. Only an angel keeps me together and my dreams alive with an eyedropper of hope.

Here are some pictures I took with the Holga last year and just managed to get scanned the other day.

It’s two o’clock on Thursday, I’ve been in the States for roughly seventy-six hours so far. I’ve been more agitated by minor things than I really think I should, it’s a little surprising and disappointing, actually. But there’s a lot of Buddhism-inspired analysis that can be applied to that. I have new socks (beer mugs and shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day), and a nice clearance sale oxford from Old Navy. I’ve eaten cheese, drank Coppola wine and Harp Ale, and eaten for sustenance but without much thought.

I’ve been able to meet several of my friends from graduate school, including Elan, Shawn, Ray, and Brenda. It’s been a road of minor, mild successes and learning, but I think that’s really all I could hope for. Although, it really bothers me to be relegated to using a fork for eating salad. I really should have brought some chopsticks with me.

I’ve been up and down on the kigen scale today…small victories including getting my monochrome Visor working with keyboard, small failures including not correctly updating my email or contact information when HotSyncing. Yes, I can blog, yes I can take notes in session (eight megs free and padicty on the fritz). I love trains and the Keisei line. Okada-san and I talked about many things foreign and domestic. No, I did not bring ukon with me, no, I do not plan to get drunk. Yes, I type HTML tags into my entries directly, yes the plane took off an hour late due to malfunctioning weather report software at the Narita control tower (thank you Windows).

I’m performing the dustpan-organizing that always happens when travelling or making a visit to doctor… receipts and bank statements to the trash, blog entries from curled pocket notepad to Visor. Ah, but so fresh, so new, so many old things reoccurring. No, there’s hardly a soul to meet this week, but a wander, some exploration, some photos, a lot of listening, and hard, stingy hotel mattresses.

At least I have Masa’s Eaton vol. 11 mix to see me through it all.

It’s Friday. It’s 8:30pm. I’m at work. Why? Ok, here’s your options: a) I have work that needs to be done, b) my apartment was taken over by a gang of Siamese cats, c) I really have nothing better to do. Answer: d) all of the the above (but replace ‘gang of Siamese cats’ with ‘laundry basket suffering from stack overflow’).

So I should probably get some friends. I have a couple, two. And you have to reserve them about 2+ weeks in advance. There’s lots of things I’d probably enjoy doing (in boredom I made a list of things that make me happy), but not by myself. The only things I really like doing by myself are taking photographs and thinking. So I’ve been doing a lot of those lately (in addition to the requisite downloaded anime’ and movie watching). The TV I bought comes tomorrow morning. 213.48 USD. I wanted to spend less, but my boss was with me and he told me what a fantastic deal it was. It really is. It’s 21-inch flat screen with S-Video and digital inputs. Which is nice, because I can hook up the ever-amazing multimedia demigod of a laptop I possess. That in additon to the Playstation and Super Famicom (currently sans power cable). I have a digital cable jack in my room, but I’m not sure I want to use it. As enlightening it may be to bathe myself in the fountain of local culture that may spring from there, I think I should be focusing on more esoteric and soul-serving forms of recreation right now. Damn kharmic imbalance.

But I want to go to the beach. A lot. I want to go to Tokyo Disney Sea. Very much a lot. But these sorts of things usually aren’t done alone (at least not without the sepia-toned shade of voyeuristic pursuits). I have three days off in the middle of August for summer vacation. That with a weekend is five (thank you Math Rabbit). I’d like to do something relaxing, fun, a little extravagant, and maybe even with someone else. We’ll see. It may very well manifest itself as a 5-day jaunt into the country to write poems, take pictures and think a lot about mankind’s fate to live a life of suffering. Or I could just stay in bed and eat lots of convenience store food.

I’m pretty tired….think I’ll go home now.