autumn tactics

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.

The Merriam-Webster word of the day for the 13th was “sanctimonious”, though I didn’t realize it until just now. This is fitting, however, as it was the topic of last night’s diatribe. As it always is with diatribe nights, morning isn’t quite as dark, especially if something (half) works when I have long since given up expecting it to. For the third night this week, I slept fitfully, and daylight bore the nauseating haze of exhaustion from rest. But, I swore I wouldn’t be late and hurried again, so I got up anyway (calling in sick is really out of the question unless I physically am unable to move). Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have a delicious and fortifying breakfast. And although I didn’t feel much like eating it, I did. Perhaps it’s the reason that I could hold a one hour conversation on display list caching and buffered vertex data.

The boulder has rolled back off of my throat and reverted to its normal resting place over my groin. Now I can eat more spinach, pumpkin, soy, and egg and read about the great lake Baikal and assemble a couple more half-finished ideas before I floss and then retreat to the collapsed scaffolding that protrudes from my monitor to bully my temples.

[I was in a good mood before I started writing this, I swear.]

…

[Ok, I listened to a little Primitive Radio Gods and Oasis, better now.]

float fFar = 1000.0f;

When people ask what it’s been like working in Tokyo, I am at first at a loss of words. Stumbling over what should be said, or what the topical accoutrements of life in a metropolis of twenty million are like, I make apologies for my slackening grip on the English language. But the truth is I can’t really say what it’s like in any language, because there aren’t any words for it. But having been back for a handful of trips and a dozen encounters with faces from the past, I’ve finally generated a stock answer, which sums it all up: humility. Just that: how small I am, and how ineffective at changing anything I can really be. Humility to the point of only an eggshell-thin ego.

Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later that night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, “Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”

I look at the world. I look at a lot of things and think. I think a lot of things. I see things and think that they disgust me. Sloth disgusts me. Failure disgusts me. People who weakly indulge disgust me. People who turn to fat, processed sugar, alcohol, and perversion disgust me. They disgust me so, and yet, I am one of them. I too, race home from work every day in frustration, frustration for what I didn’t get done, how today was like every other day, how nothing ever changes, and I am powerless to alter that. Frustrated, I race home reckless and selfish, loathing the construction and the cars and the stoplights which I pass in a fury, always one honk or stumbling pedestrian away from a fitful explosion of all this disgust, failure, and rage. And then, just before home, at the point of my “sanctuary”, I think of trash, of the trash my body craves (or is it my soul), the filth of things processed, cheap, and satisfying for all of five minutes. The masturbation of mankind that I need to push the nagging stench of my own failure out of arm’s reach for an hour before I give up on the things I said to myself that I’d absolutely do; to go to bed in exhaustion, oversleep, panic my way to work so my boss doesn’t give me a hard time and I can do it all again for another fourteen hours.

The hypocrisy of my own bigoted standards is as putrid as my outlook. I ride down the street, sweaty, my mind terminally broken to the point of not being able to concentrate on anything, and thinking of a dozen pedestrian things that will drown out any flicker of a noble idea. Then I see the broken souls. The shuffling, inebriated, dregs (foundations) of society that live in a bottle amid stained flannel, searching for the same five minutes of ignorance, hoping that two and two makes five and another shot of cancer-inducing sordid anesthesia to numb out the realization of now.

No, when I go back to the States, it’s all just a facade, and I don’t even try that hard to keep it up anymore. What difference does it make what anyone thinks anyway?

Every day and every night some are born to sweet delight, and every night and every mourn, some to misery are born.

Today was the first day in a long time that I left work with a truly clear conscience. My performance lately has been abysmal, and it’s most certainly an attitude thing, where difficulty hamstrings confidence which drives me in to a downward spiral of being able to think clearly, rest, etc. But, in any case I woke up fairly early today, and had time to prepare breakfast and lunch, in addition to getting a shave and the trash out. That and the cold front that swept in last night put me in a good mood, and it went up from there. Of course I’m never ecstatic to get home from work after midnight, but with a couple more days like today, I may actually have a day off before the show next weekend.

My bullet list is down to the finer points, and though there are question marks still hanging around for some things (like how I’m going to get all this oversized lumber to Odaiba without it getting destroyed), all of the difficult things should be taken care of in the next seventy-two hours. It’s hard work, and there are as many mundane steps as there are inspiring ones. The crux of this weekend is securing printers for the more professional bits, and doing in theatre what we call a “technical rehearsal” with props, before going off-book next Saturday. I suppose what I’m looking forward to most is building the “set”. There’s something very satisfying about assembling something out of wood and metal. I only hope I can match a fraction of the quality my father would produce if he were handling the affair.

I checked the prints at Horiuchi yesterday, for the most part they looked pretty good. It’s going to cost me an arm and a leg, but this is my first show, and all things considered I think it’s going pretty well. Although I maintain a subdued appearance now (I’m almost 27), I have no doubt that come next weekend, I won’t be able to sleep from all the energy streaming out of my pores. They’ll have to peel me off the rafters before striking the set. It won’t take much of an effort for me to generate the effervescent caricature of myself I’m thinking of playing at the show. I wonder kind of advice Roger De Bris would give me in preparing my repertoire.

Today is Thanksgiving. Like any other day, I struggled with waking up for work, hungered for more than I had time to eat, and arrived home some thirteen hours after I left. In the meantime, nearly every one of my kinsmen and compatriots is waking up to spend four days away from stress, worry, and strive to focus on family, friends, and good fortune. This weekend also marks my being in Japan for six months. I won’t be cliche’ and say it seems like only yesterday, though I will admit I wish I had made more inroads socially and done more non-work related things. I suppose all I can do is endeavour to continue a cumulative acceleration towards a more perfect balance with my life. There has to be a way I can make my programming tasks evaporate more quickly and with less pain.

Along those lines I think that despite the hated “weekend warrior” rut I’m slipping into, I may have a solution to the sporadic blogging. It probably won’t come until Christmas though, because I can’t seem to find one easily here. In the meantime, I’m still collecting all these sticky notes and reverse-sides of defunct schedules that bear the larva-like jewels of my nascent hobby.

So today please give thanks for being alive. In the blissful company of your loved ones, or across the sea on your own.

Lying on a park bench in a small gravel playground, I get to think. As usual I’m bushed from two until about six. Functionally, I’m trying to sleep, however, I’m probably getting more out my mind running around than actual rest. It’s these delirious tired moments that my memory is prone to cough up something I haven’t thought about for years. Hell if I know why, but it’s usually the kind of events psychologists say forms your personality.

Anyway, lying on this bench completely beat I think about the kids that may come to the park while I’m there. They’re almost always little kids, and accordingly are accompanied by their moms. I can imagine the little Japanese children seeing this 187 cm tall shaggy dude in wore out thrift store clothes, sprawled over a bench, perhaps dead. It would probably freak them out, I think it would bother me if I was a little kid and some sketchy dude was in the park unconscious. So I think about the kids running to tell their moms, the moms worrying amongst each other and telling a shopkeeper, the shopkeeper calling the police, the police telling the immigration agency, and the immigration agency calling the embassy to tell my consulate to get my bony ass out of Japan, because you can’t sleep on benches in parks in the middle of the day. I actually envision the electricity going through the telephone lines from Japan to Washington so the local authorities there can be made aware. [I later think they probably don't have telephone lines strung up over the ocean, so it must be done with satellite, but before satellites how did you call Europe during the war? So there must be lines under the ocean, so I think of all the video games I played where you had to go under the ocean to find something and how freaky it was...etc...you get the idea].

After an ambulance drives by with sirens on a couple streets away, I jolt out of daze and start thinking about something else. I remember how nice playing in the park was in summer when I was a kid, and subsequently how I don’t remember being so tired as a kid, but then again playing ball in the park near the local elementary school. So I think about playing ball at all kinds of places: the park, the field behind my high school, the quad in front of my first year dorm at Virginia. In all these places I think it was always me and like one of my friends. Neither of us were very good at the time, and I always had a complex that if other kids came by and wanted to play. Virtually every boy was better than me and more aggressive in sports, and the ones that weren’t didn’t like chucking the ball around anyway. So I was always worried that some big kids or older kids would come and ask if they could play too, or worse invite themselves in. Then they’d throw the ball too hard and I’d drop it, and I’d get all choked up and throw it weak, or in some crazy direction. And when I wanted to go, they’d want to keep playing, and I’d be afraid to ask for my ball back, so I’d have to wait until _they’d_ gotten tired of it and left already. This was a very serious problem for a number of years, but hell if I haven’t even half-considered it since I was 17. Anyway, I can throw the ball decent now, not great, but decent. I’m not afraid of people asking to throw with anymore, but they never do so it doesn’t really matter. It’s probably a big part of my subconscious and my confidence stuff. Probably.

Anyway it’s been like over 20 minutes now I think I better go back to work, so the boss doesn’t notice I’m gone, and so the little kids and moms can come back and play in the park; and so the immigration office back in Washington doesn’t get that phone call, because I _know_ they’ve got enough stuff to deal with already.

So work this week has been rough, really rough, and it’s only Wednesday. So rough, that after my small company of 11 got confirmation yesterday that we have indeed won a _very_ big contract, everyone went out together to celebrate in traditional Japanese style but me. I felt like I was close to either breaking down and crying or throwing up from the stress. In 27 hours of work (two days), I fought many more losses than victories, and this is the “easy part” of the project. One way or another, it’s supposed to be finished by 9.30 (having started 9.1), so I guess that’s the one (and only) positive aspect of it.

Anyway, the only way this really affects you is that I haven’t posted on time, so coming up right now is Saturday’s post, delayed. Here’s to month #3…

Somewhere between pages 403 and 414 of C++: The Complete Reference I began to nod off. Maybe it was the bottle of bad wine and an oversize Kirin that predated the crawl into bed at 3:00 the night before. Or maybe it was just the 3-hour stream of oldies music from my CD-ROM climaxing with Staying Alive.

Causality aside, I was in some kind of daydream. I think I’m almost always under some kind of delusion, but for this entry’s purposes I had an afro the size of Dark Helmet and there was more than one deep, passionate yearning for a velour-covered waterbed.

My monitor and my brain are perhaps too similar…we are both very sensitive to invisible radiation from light-emitting electronics. While my 19″ Mitsubishi has the lusted-for ability to be free of such interference via the binary operation of turning any nearby television off, my mind suffers from far more residual effects; namely dreaming only in 16 byte-aligned granules. It tortures me at night and leaves a fallow haze of nausea over my body for the rest of the day. It’s ironic that the inorganic, digital behaviours I yearn for are exactly those that give me grief.

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.