A couple of years ago, a young man named Joe Murphy died from a rare and nasty form of cancer. I didn’t know Joe. Rather, I knew him only from the podcasts he co-hosted and I was a fan. During his illness and after his death, fans of his work made a wikipedia page for him. It was quickly nominated for deletion due to lack of appropriate citations for Joe’s noteworthy-ness. Fans rallied and added sources to the claims made in the article.

While researching this post, I did a quick check on Joe’s page and found that it had, in fact, been deleted:

“Article was nominated once for deletion in 2007 and kept with the assertion that material added during that AFD satisfied notability concerns, However, a review of that sourcing indicates that it does not. One is an obituary in his hometown paper, one is to an XM Radio page that no longer exists (Joe Murphy is not found in a search of the XM site), one confirms his nomination for a podcasting award (he did not win) and one is a band’s blog (not a reliable source). There do not appear to be independent reliable sources that are substantively about this person, rather there are many blogs and podcasts that offer tributes following his untimely passing. Wikipedia is not a memorial and the gentleman does not pass WP:N or WP:BIO. Otto4711 (talk) 13:37, 10 May 2009 (UTC)”

Clicking on the link “not a memorial” brings up the following:

“Memorials. Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others. Subjects of encyclopedia articles must satisfy Wikipedia’s notability requirements. Note that this policy does not apply outside of the main article space. Whilst using user space to create a memorial is generally not acceptable, limited exemption applies to the user space of established Wikipedians who have died. At a minimum it is expected that they were regular contributors, and that more than one tenured Wikipedian will have used the deceased user’s page (or an appropriate sub-page) to add comments in the event, and after verification of, their death.”

Ok. Fair enough. At the same time, it does seem like the barrier for entry for celebrity-hood is becoming transparently thin. The recent spate of celebrity deaths shows a distinct hierarchy of status, with Michael Jackson at the top and Billy Mays hitting close to the bottom, and yet there has been more than enough material written about both men to qualify for Wikipedia articles easily. The thing is, to take those two examples, Michael Jackson single handedly remade pop music and helped turn music videos into an art form. Billy Mays was a pitchman. He made commercials. (And please note that I am not disparaging Billy Mays at all, I’m merely using him as a recent example.) What Wikipedia’s “noteworthiness” really means is media appearances. Which seems terribly skewed away from people who are actually noteworthy towards people who are merely known to more people, publicly, than the rest of us.

Slate’s recent Culturefest (the Everybody’s Dead Edition, posted July 1, 2009) seems to be pondering related ideas. The three hosts spoke about the modern obituary and how the internet has changed the obituary pages. While they had a number of good points, throughout the whole episode, I found myself thinking about Joe Murphy and Wikipedia. I started to wonder why there was not a resource for the rest of us, why the “little people” should not be remembered as fondly, nor as publicly as celebrities, for whatever value of celebrity one happens to have.

A quick search revealed two sites: Wikiobits and Wikibios.

Wikiobits says of itself: “Wiki Obits has a one simple goal: We live to provide a one-stop site where you can find obituaries and biography information for every person on earth – dead or alive – famous or not, celebrity or not.” A great idea, but at the moment it is a piece of basic Wiki software with very little customization. There is very little to distinguish it as a service or directory. As a test, I ran a search on Michael Jackson and got a table full of biographical data much like I would expect from raw number search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared rather than an article collection like Wikipedia.

Wikibios, on the other hand states right on the front page: “Our belief is simple: you don’t have to be a famous celebrity to have a life worth documenting. That’s why we created WikiBios, a place where your friends become the storytellers of your life.” Which is an idea I can get behind. The problem is, is that for now at least, the majority of pages I came across (using the random bio button) seem to be yet to have been filled in by the person’s friends and families. It also illustrates another problem which is that wikis are, by definition, editable by the public at large and, here on the internet, the public is not always as kind and friendly as it might be.

So, while I applaud the efforts, it’s still not what I want. Aside from the issues of getting and maintaining an audience share not to mention the kind of brand recognition that would make these viable, long term solutions, I’m not sure if this is an area that is not better served by LiveJournal or FaceBook or Google Profile. it seems that those three brands have the audience and name recognition to be able to add obituaries / memorials as a valid part of their service; I know there are instances of both LJ and FB users being memorialized on their own pages after death, yet even those are not perfect – they don’t give friends and relatives and fans the chance to both eulogize and research the deaths of their friends in that if you were not connected to that person before their death, you may not be able to access their page on the social networks.

What I mean is, a few years ago, I lost another friend. He was someone I had known well in high school, but had not seen in several years. Then, at my sister’s wedding, we reconnected. A few months later, I read the obituary in our hometown newspaper and there were still so many questions I had that have never been answered. And I have no where to turn. Rob was not anywhere media-ized enough to show up on Wikipedia, nor was he, to my knowledge, on LJ or FB. So where do I go to write about and talk about my friend? Where do I go to read what others have written? If he did, in fact, have an LJ or FB, once he was gone there was no way for me to be added to his friends list so that I could see what others were saying and doing, in short, without a wikipedia page how will anyone know he existed?

Perhaps Google will step into the breach. Perhaps LJ or FB or WikiObits or WikiBios will do something that let’s us all eulogize and memorialize those who were like us and of us and who were never on t.v. long enough to get a Wikipedia page of our very own.

cook |koŏk|

verb

1 [ trans. ] prepare (food, a dish, or a meal) by combining and heating the ingredients in various ways.  • [ intrans. ] I told you I could cook | [as adj. ] ( cooked) a cooked breakfast.  • [ intrans. ] (of food) be heated so that the condition required for eating is reached .

2 something Joel is really, really bad at.

And yet I try. Last November, I bought a Brinkman’s 3-in-1 smoker, steamer, and bar-be-que. I have used it five times now, with various results. The first use was grilling a couple of steaks shortly after having bought (and cured) the grill. The second time was for the Christmas turkey. The third through fifth times were this past month, cooking for my family and a few friends.

The results were, as I said, varied. During my first attempts with the grill, I stuck to tried and true recipes I gleaned from the internet and followed religiously. The more recent attempts, however, were more experimental.

We had some friends come over and I attempted two (huge) steaks and a bit of grilled shark. I abstained from the internet and instead went for a bit of a steak sauce marinade and lots of lemon and orange juice squeezed over the meat while it was cooking. The steak was really good. The fish was ok, without being stellar.

But that’s not really important now. What’s important is why I have been trying to cook.

I’ve always been a big guy. In the last two years though my weight has gotten absolutely out of control. Cite the usual reasons – a desk job, a long commute, eating fast food in the car, not taking enough time to exercise, etc. etc. I decided that maybe if I learned to cook, I would begin eating better, possibly less, and that the activity would be good for me as well.

Prior to this my cooking experiences were less than promising. Starting with the Intro to Cooking class I took as an elective in Jr. High where I learned very little that I retained save for how much I enjoy Waldorf Salad and that my friend CJ was kind of an idiot. (It’s a whole other story.) My cooking ineptness culminated in an incident where in I almost burned down the house of the girl I was dating while trying to make her pancakes for breakfast. My cooking, in other words, all the way through high school, college, and after was pretty much limited to things that came out of cans or boxes and involved less than three steps.

In fact, according to my college roommate Chuck, anything that involved less than three steps was not technically cooking. It was merely food preparation. He had a point.

Now, for full disclosure, a good part of my wanting to learn to cook was fueled by my addiction to Top Chef. I’m incapable of watching something I think is cool and not wanting to try it. I watch Miami Ink and I want to get a tattoo. I watch Deadliest Catch and want to take a year off to go work in the Bering Sea. And when I watch Top Chef, I want to be able to cook.

I began where I always begin, the internet. YouTube in this case, looking for cooking videos that I could follow. One of the videos I came across was Gordon Ramsay bar-be-queing buffalo meat as hamburgers. The idea seeemed simple enough, and even if I couldn’t get hold of any buffalo meat, the other things Ramsay incorporated (dicing a red onion into his mince, topping the burger with buffalo mozzarella cheese) seemed like things I could do by myself.

So, while I mainlined the first two seasons of Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word, I began shopping for a grill. My wife and I had bought a house the previous August so it seemed only natural to wait until we had gotten everything unpacked before buying anything new. As anyone who has ever moved can tell you, unpacking can take years and I eventually got tired of waiting and bought a charcoal grill.

While this brought me great acclaim and several dozens of “man points” from my friends, the somewhat cumbersome and wasteful nature of charcoal grills made itself apparent and the grill sat unused for months at a time. In the meantime, several cookbooks appeared on my Amazon wishlist and remained unpurchased. Especially as my job changed suddenly and the copious free time I had had vanished in the night.

Still, learning to cook and cooking for myself, remains a goal. The cookbook I have been reading about and most want to try is The Ratio. The idea behind the book is that the professional kitchen cook or chef uses certain ratios in their cooking, even if they’re not aware that they’re doing so. Therefore, by teaching the novice cook to use these same ratios, anyone can learn to cook. Personally, this concept fits fully into my idea of geek – that anyone can learn to do anything given enough time and patience.

Two weeks ago, I managed to cook some really nice chicken on the grill for my family for dinner and did so without specific aid from the internet, merely with some tips I half remembered from watching various cooking shows. My wife was quite pleased, both that she didn’t have to cook and that the expensive grill was seeing more than one use per year. So I’m planning on trying again soon.

However, there are things I have learned about myself in the attempts so far:

1. The fun is in trying, most times I could care less about the final result. In fact, I’m usually planning the next assault while still enjoying the fruits of my labor.
2. It may take me six months or a year to get around to it, but I will get to it and try it eventually. Whether this is cooking or learning javascript, it will happen someday.
3. I have to do it myself. Give me all the advice you want, it won’t make sense until I have royally cocked it up all on my own. That’s when your advice will make sense, now that I know how not to do it.

Where I go from here, I’m not actually sure, but I’m looking forward to giving it a go.

Trying another post from the iPhone, this time with photos.

Yesterday, my wife and I went to put flowers on her dad’s grave. He’s interred at a beautiful temple / cemetary near our house. We took a quiet walk around the grounds and I took a few photos, keeping others privacy foremost in mind and being respectful.

Anyway, here’s a photo of one of the small Buddah statues that surround the grounds and some of the flowering trees that are omnipresent.

I took the photo with my iPhone, using CameraBag and the Helga filter.

Nevermind this post. Seriously. This is just a quick test of the WordPress application for the iPhone. We’ll have to see what this looks like and take it from there.

For a bank holiday, today ended up being a long day if a fun one. We started this morning by having the Shinto priest come around and bless the building site, us, the chief construction worker, and our joint effort. He had my wife and myself hold a wooden pick and smack it into the ground three times, and then the carpenter dude did the same. Then we (wife, mom-in-law, me, carpenter dude, salesman dude, boss dude, priest dude) each had to lay a green leafy thing on the alter and that was that.

So that was good.

Then, after, we made it back home to rest up a bit, then Mayumi and I went out to a BBQ with a lot of friends in a park near one of the guy’s house. Two hour drive due to holiday traffic, but more food and beer than could be believed once there and we ate and drank way too much.

So that was good.

Then, when the sun was looking like it was thinking about setting soon, two of the guys endeavored to teach me how to play cricket and after swinging the bat a few times and bowling a few times, I can see where it might be a good game. Even if, like baseball, playing is much more fun that watching.

So that was good.

And now I’m going to bed. Which is good.

Quick post: My friends and I have recently been playing D&D. All of us played back in the day, and were quite surprised to learn we were all D&D geeks. Well, life being what it is, getting everyone together for extended campaigns is hard to swing.

To try to make things a bit easier, I just picked up a copy of the official Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures 2 person starter set. The minis game seems to be much more focused on combat, rather than a campaign, which should lend itself to shorter sessions.

Anyway, we’ll see. But I am looking forward to trying it.

Sometime recently, when I had my head turned, Kitsch came back in a big way. Something about the goofy, weird, vaguely obscene, plasticky junk that was turned out by the truckload in the beginnings of the modern era just appeals to…well, people today.

The reason I say people is there seems to be no easily defined line separating who likes kitsch from those who don’t. After all, it’s popular with thirty-something hipsters, aging baby-boomers, falsely nostalgic teenagers, pop culture junkies, graffiti writers and modern artists, etc. etc.

And the point? There is none.

Just that last January I got a dashboard Hula girl from Archee McPhee’s for my dad, for his birthday, as a gag gift. He loves it. Stuck it right in his truck. Then, last month, when visiting friends, they gave me a cojoined pair of wrestling Sumo guys* to go on my dashboard. And then, another friend sent me a dashboard Buddy Christ from Kevin Smith’s Dogma. Which is actually on my desk, but still.

I would write that the current kitsch fetish was confined to dashboard iconography, fuzzy dice, and other car decorations, except that I’m starting to see a lot more garden gnomes and pink flamingos than I used to.

In fact, I think that’s what I’ll try for Dad’s next birthday. A pink flamingo. Just because.

* Not my flickr photo, unfortunately, but a good one!

Several weeks (months?) ago I picked up a brick of Sculpey at the art supply store. I had no real ideas for using it in mind, it just seemed like something fun to play with. (Yeah, I know, I can justify expensive polymer clay, but not Legos. It just…well, it makes sense to me.) Since then, I have played with it a lot, but, with the exception of making a base to support an old pocket watch, thereby turning it into a miniature clock, I have not made anything worth keeping. Or blogging about.

So I’m trawling the internet for ideas. First and foremost in the search is Flickr’s Sculpey tag. The only problem here is that 90% of the photos seem to be of jewelry people have made from various Sculpey products. And while I have nothing against these sorts of projects, they’re not really what I’m looking for.

I know I would like to do some sort of sculpture.

In fact I have a fantasy (not like that pervert) of being able to sculpt a designer toy. I’m a huge fan of all the art toys that have come out in the past few years, things like those designed by Touma and Tokidoki. One of my longstanding favorite series is the Vimobots by Mimoco.

Even a lot of the independent artists and illustrators I like are getting into the act.

And that’s what I would like to do. Really. No joke. I just think that is a really cool form of art that has come into its own in the past couple of years and something I would like to try. But I like inspiration and technique. The latter I can learn, the former though…well, that’s where trawling the internet comes in. So I guess, for now, it’s back to fishing and hoping that inspiration will rise up from the murky depths of the web.

Several people seem to have followed the move to Tumblr as a single place in which to read all my collected postings and doings around the internet.  However, there have been some complaints as to the dual nature of the posts:  the actual posts and essays vs. the one line tweets and links.  So, I have split them up.

For the time being and until it changes again, posts, essays, articles, and anything else longer than one or two sentences will be cross-posted to smiley.tumblr.com.

All one line bookmarks, song recommendations, tweets, jaikus, and whatever else, will be cross-posted to smiley.jaiku.com.

In the meantime, I have received more than a few queries as to why this blog has yet to be updated with a meaningful post and whatever happened to that whole 25 – 30 thing anyway?

And the answer is, well, two things:  one, I had originally intended to write the stories as close to the truth as possible, only changing names and distinguishing features, and two, I got sidetracked.

The first part is the more easily explainable, if not the easier to understand.  Basically, it became too painful in some cases and too embarrassing in others to write the stories I wanted to write.  There are too many people who would know exactly who and when I was writing about, even with disguises and name changes, and that could be unfortunate for a lot of people, myself included.  In addition, some events I had thought I was well past turned out to be very painful, still, in the act of writing them down.  I found that I had, and have, no desire to post what I have written (which is a fair bit, actually).

I’m not sure what I will do with it all yet, whether it gets re-written into semi-autobiographical fiction, or if I just figure to hell with it all and post it as is.

In the meantime, there is good old excuse number two.  I got sidetracked.  While all this non-blogging was happening, I started working on a novel, longhand, in a notebook.  It is slow going, but going very well.  I think I might actually have some idea of where it is headed…but it has surprised me once or twice already.  Once the longhand draft is finished, I’ll do a proper first draft on the computer and then we’ll see where we’re at.

(I’m using a trick called zero-drafting.  The longhand version is sloppy, uses telling instead of showing, and is all in first person.  The point is to get dialogue and basic plot points down, rather than working on details or nuances.)

So, yeah, that’s that.  Thanks for being patient and don’t worry, there will be stories on this site again, eventually.

Just a quick note:  I have a new site up at smiley.tumblr.com.  This new site is a Tumble Log, which means, basically, that almost everything I do on the web, whether it is photos, an essay, random links, whatever, is sent to and re-posted on my tumble log.

The site is hosted by Tumblr.com; from the front page:  “Tumblelogs are like blogs with less fuss.”

The RSS feed for the tumble log is here:  link.

Well, after having managed to post almost daily for 2006, I think I’m at a record low for the number of posts on this blog so far this year.

The only thing I can offer by way of explanation is that I have been doing a lot of writing, just not on this project.  I have been writing and submitting like a madman, although there is very little progress to report as of yet.

I hope to get back on track writing some essays (including the Twenty-five to Thirty stories) soon.  In the meantime, just, uh be patient please.

Did I say essays? I mean stories. Of course I meant stories. And by stories I mean that these are mostly true with some events slightly shifted in time and two or three minor characters shuffled into one, or vice versa. The conversations recorded in this story are not word for word, but are generally reconstructed from my faulty memory and journal entries. The club really existed and I spent a lot of time there during my first few months in Japan. I have a lot of good memories, and some not so good memories from it and tried to give you the pertinant details of the joint. I hope you enjoy this story; feel free to leave comments or e-mail me with critiques, questions, or just random feedback.

One final note, some names have been changed or omitted to protect those who wish their privacy. Thanks.

The Place had Picture Frames but No Pictures in Them
Twenty-Five to Thirty

“Mate,” she said, the seven gin and tonics slurring her thick Aussie accent out to the point of near incomprehensibility, “if he weren’t here, I’d be taking you home with me.”

I pulled my drink back from my mouth before I could dump it on my shirt as I felt my jaw drop. Not so much out of shock as out of pain. ‘He’ was my new roommate, assigned by the head office just a few weeks before. He was a nice guy, just my worst nightmare – younger, smarter, more confident, better looking – and to have Dee slur out her ranking of us stung more than I wanted to admit.

“Have you told him that yet?”

“No. He’s with her.” The pout on Dee’s face did nothing to restore my lost pride.

“Ah.”

“C’mon. Dance with me.”

“Dee, you can barely stand up.”

“I know. Maybe I’ll just sit dow—oh shit. Students.”

“Haro!”

Dee straightened, as much as she could, and tried to clear the slur out of her voice. “Hi. How are you tonight?”

The girl was probably a few years younger than us and much less drunk. She had that look of shiny innocence that so many Japanese girls seem to have; the one that makes so many Western men into drooling morons, myself included.

“I’m…happy!”

“Ah. S’good.” Dee was losing her battle with gravity and I found myself being pressed into service as a convenient wall.

The girl looked at me. “Could I have your name please?”

“Hi. I’m Joel.”

“It is nice to meet you.” The girl held out her arm, awkwardly straight and unnatural. I shook her hand briefly, replying “S’nice to meetchu too. What’s your name?”

“My name is Sachiko. Sa-chi-ko.” She made a spreading gesture with her hands, pausing at each syllable. I recognized the gesture as one I had seen the other teachers, my new co-workers, use to give the correct pronunciation on longer words.

“Sachiko, I’m going to the bar. Would you like something?”

“No thank you. I’m going to see my friend. I thought I should say hi to Dee Sensei.”

“Thank you Sachiko. I’ll see you in class.”

As we stumbled our way to the bar Dee aimed a drunken slap at my shoulder that ended up smacking me in the chest.

“The fuck was that for?”

“’Cause you…you’re turning into one of them. You know. One of those guys who has to fuck every Japanese girl that walks into this place.”

“What? No I’m not. Besides, you want Ted, not me.”

“Trying to buy her a drink. You never get me a drink.”

“I bought that one. And make Ted buy you a drink.”

Dee looked sad. “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad.”

“S’alright. What do you want to drink?”

“I’d like another G&T. I’ll be back.” She stumbled off towards the toilets.

I leaned against the bar and signaled to XXXXX, the Russian bartender that I had met for the first time the night before. She came over with a smile and a shouted “Hey!” that I barely heard over the music.

“Hey.” I answered back. “Can I get another G&T and a whiskey-coke? On my tab? Jackie okeyed me for one yesterday, I think.”

“Sure.” She smiled again and wandered back down the bar.

The bar itself filled up the back wall of one room of a place called the Raven.

Alternately dance club, pool bar, karaoke joint, pub, and darts bar, the Raven was home to most of the expats in Utsunomiya from the hours after work closed to about four in the morning. Most nights of the week, barring Sundays and Mondays, you could find anywhere from a half-dozen to a couple hundred people, most non-Japanese filling the place – sitting on one of the couches or throwing themselves around the dance floor. Jackie, the owner, made sure that her staff, all of whom were also foreigners, were able to speak English and Japanese; most could speak Portuguese as well, catering to the large Brazilian population who would come in from nearby towns where they worked in factories for wages most Japanese would describe as pathetic.

The mixing of the various tribes of non-Japanese was in no way easy. Fights between various hot-blooded groups were, while not as common in some countries, far more usual than normal for Japan. Jackie kept things as international as possible, keeping multinational billiard rules posted above the coin operated pool tables and a drinks list written in four languages.

XXXX brought the drinks over as Dee came back from the restrooms.

“You won’t believe it,” said Dee, “there’s some bloke having a shag in the ladies.”

I grinned. “Well, makes for an interesting time on the pot, I guess.”

“Yeah. Makes me horny though.”

I was saved from having to make any sort of answer by Ted leaning on the bar next to me and taking a sip off his bourbon.

“Hey,” he said, “what are you two doing?” He sing-songed his way through the sentence, somehow conveying that whatever it was that we were doing, we should probably stop it immediately and hope that our parents never found out.

“Dee just say someone shagging in the women’s restroom. We were wondering if that someone was following the rules of rhetoric.”

Ted just looked blank.

“You know, proper volume, repeating everything three times, asking rhetorical questions?”

Dee picked up the joke. “Is it good? Is it good? Is it gooooood?”

Ted laughed. “Nice.”

Dee groaned. “Jayzus. Who the fuck brought them in here?”

Ted grunted a non-response and I asked “Who?”

“Those girls. They won’t speak Japanese to you and their English is crap. You two will like them; all the other boys around here seem to anyway.”

“What’s with you and not liking Japanese girls anyway?” I glanced at Dee out of the corner of my eye and put my glass to my mouth, taking a sip of my drink while I took in the scene.

“I like some of them. It’s you boys that fuck me off, mate. You lot always want to go out and shag them all, but you won’t even look at us round-eyes anymore.”

“Hey, now, Dee, give us a chance, why don’t you?” Ted gave her a disgusted look and pushed himself away from the bar. He started walking toward the far wall, where more of our friends were talking, but was set upon by the gaggle of young women Dee had been talking about. I saw Ted smile as the voices floated over, full of “where you come from” and “could I get your name”. I looked over at Dee.

“You know…”

“Yeah. Look, I’m sorry mate, I’m just about pissed is all.”

“Pissed?”

“Drunk. Bloody yanks.”

“Didn’t know that one. Pissed means mad in the States.”

“Yeah, it can mean that at home too, but it usually means drunk. I think I’m off.  Got an early tomorrow and I need to get some sleep.”
“You alright getting home?”

“Yeah, we’re in the safest country in the world!” She smiled and gave me a hug, then got her jacket and walked out. I turned back to the bar and signaled XXXX.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Uh, is the kitchen still open?” She nodded. “Chicken basket please.”

Richard sat down next to me. “Hey mate, how’re things going?”

“Yeah, good. It’s all a bit weird though.”

“How long have you been here now? About a month?”

“Yeah. Every time I think I’m beginning to get a handle on things, it just ends up  I get more confused than before.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it. Get yourself to studying, get a girlfriend, you’ll be sorted.”

“Done the one, don’t really know enough about the latter, I guess.”

“Just don’t force it. Ask around. There are lots of good girls around here.”

“Alright.” My chicken basket arrived.

XXXX said, “800 yen.”

“On my tab please.”

Richard said, “A tab already Joel? That’s a bit dangerous.”

“I dunno. Just seems to be the done thing though and I always like to blend in. Besides it’s not real money, is it.”

“Not real money? In that case…” Richard reached a hand across me and grabbed a piece of chicken. “You’ll not mind if I have this then!” He laughed and raced to the far side of the pool table as I made a fist and started as if I was going to chase him before shooting a mock glare and returning to my seat.

I took another look around the bar, soaking it in, letting the music and smoke and voices in multiple tongues and booze and sex and adventure wash over me.
People came in and people left and eventually Jackie herself came up to me and said, “Mate, we’re gonna close up. You know the drill.” I laughed and said I did, thanking her for the warning. I joined the throng of people making their way out the door. Someone bumped my shoulder and a friend said, “What shift are you on tomorrow?”

“Late,” I replied without looking up from the stairs I was walking down.

“Me too. Cheers mate, I’ll see you then.”

“See you.”

I got my bike unlocked and moving, away from the milling crowd and down the long street to my apartment. Twenty minutes later, the sun was just beginning to peak out from between the tops of houses and apartments and I let myself in my front door, laid down on my futon, and slept.

Over the past few months I’ve been feeling a bit, well, blogged out.  Maintiaining a post a day blog takes a toll and I just feel like I have more important things to do.  However, as we move into the third year of this blog, I kind of feel like this has some momentum and I don’t want to take it down and start over somewhere or even just, not blog for a while.

So, I have been thinking about it all, and I have some more thinking to do, but, in the meantime, I’m going to continue posting here, but the pace is going to radically slow.

The one thing I can promise is that there will be a series of essays, collectively titled “Twenty-five to Thirty” about my first five years in Japan.  I intend them to be part travel essay, part memoir, and part diary.  It’s a project that I’ve been thinking about and writing about for a while, and I thought that this currrent bout of blogaise (see that was meant to be a clever combination of “malaise” and “blog” but every time I read it I think of sauces) might be a good excuse to create a deadline and force myself into some more focused writing.

Anyway, long story short, there will be essays about me, in Japan, on this blog every 1st and 15th of every month, starting on the 15th of January.  In between will be the occasional post pointing to my other involvements on the web.

If you’re still here after all this, thanks.  I really appreciate it.

And now, to get this year started, two links:

My latest painting, “Summer” is up at Painted Toad, and, if you want a list of all the places and spaces I can be found out here on the interwebnets, take a look at  the Mighty Toad’s Googlepage.

Apparently, I am neither rude nor unkind, neither acerbic nor pointed, only that I am, perhaps, on occasion, a little too honest.  It is not that I said anything that was not already known to everyone in the group, merely that I said it at all.

Naturally, I consider this a step up from previous indiscretions.

Life moves on.

A Christmas Eve post:

We had dinner at Mom-in-law’s tonight.  We bought a whole roasted chicken that I managed to carve, without inflicting damage on anything save the bird.  MIL made mashed potatoes and M made gravy, so that was good.

Presents were exchanged.  I gave MIL a DVD player and the Japanese version of “Shall We Dance” and M gave her a new 5 Year Diary; I gave M Eigozuke (Steeped in English!), an English training game for the DS and she gave me “Red Steel”, a yakuza fighting game for the Wii.  M and I managed to surprise each other with some small, for the sake of coolness gifts.  I scavanged the used toy stores and managed to get her a “Fone Bone” figure from the Bone comic book series and she gave me a light up bath duck.

Yes, at 31 years old, I finally have my own, glowing, rubber duckie.  Life is good.  Some small amount of Christmas Joy has been returned.

Off to watch DVDs now.

Happy Emperor’s Birthday!

I often think that we Americans should declare a moveable holiday based on whomever the current president is.  However, for that to be effective, we would have to prove that the current president is a) the legitimate president, and, b) was actually born instead of being spawned from the deep receces of Hell itself.

Yeah, I said it.

I have been in need of a mission of late.  Something to clear my mind.  Something completely inconsequential to focus on.  To that end, I have begun collecting these.  Are they cheap?  Yes.  Are they stupid, little, painted pieces of plastic?  Yes.  Will I be ebaying these very same collectibles someday?  Yes.  Are they driving me out of my recent irritablity?  Yes.  Enough said.

The thing about a wardrobe based around black T-shirts and jeans is that it is good all year ’round; it is suitable for any occasion; it makes dressing a no-stress event.  I had forgotten that.  I even went so far as to experiment with [shuddder] pastels.  But that is finished now.  The black T-shirts are neatly hung in the closet, the jeans folded on the shelf beneath them.  All is not right with the world, but it is one step closer.

For the record:  Bah fucking humbug.  I think I manage to detest this season a little more every year.

Great Robot Overlords, but I love teh interwebnets.

At the moment, I’m listening to a couple of podiobooks (free audio books in podcast form),  Brave Men Run, by Matthew Wayne Selznick and The Rookie, by Scott Sigler.   They’re both excellent so far and I highly recommend them.

But that’s not what I’m writing about tonight.

What I wanted to write about was the novel (sorry) way that Scott Sigler is promoting his book.  The Rookie is a far-future science fiction story and it’s also a football story.  Yeah.  The story revolves around a young quarterback named Quentin Barnes, who has just been drafted into the equivalent of the major league, called the Galactic Football League in the story.

Again, the story itself is not the point tonight.  Mr. Sigler has built a seperate web page for the GFL and updates it with new stats after each chapter has been uploaded or aired, for lack of a better term.   The site has news stories as well as mascos, logos, and images from each of the teams in the GFL.  He has also had a full line of professional football style  merchandise created for the main team in the story.   As if the above weren’t enough, the author has held post game interviews in Second Life with his avatar guised as the protaganist and Mr. Sigler playing the role for the duration of the meet-up.

All of this strikes me as using the internet’s fullest potential to market a property and I think it’s fantastic that this author is using these tools and opportunities to find new ways to promote himself and his work.  This is the kind of thing that makes my little geek heart gush in so many ways; this is what I hope more authors take upon themselves to do.  This is what I want to do, just as soon as I get my book written.

Warning:  In this post, I do very little, save bitch about my job.

Ah.  December.  The air is cold, but dry and sunny; things are winding down for the year.  Project deadlines are up and everyone is rushing to get all their business taken care of before the end of the calendar year.  Parties are being scheduled and presents are being purchased.

And my students are overwhelming me with questions about Christmas in America.

It’s hard to explain why this irritates me so much, but it’s a combination of naivete, insensitivity, and ignorance compounded through bad television.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that they are not asking because of any of those things, they’re asking out of natural curiosity and a genuine desire to understand an alien culture better, but the way the questions are phrased sometimes has me tearing my hair out.

Naive question:  “Why do Americans believe in Santa Claus?”

So now I have to explain that most people don’t and the ones over the age of say, twenty, maximum, are generally considered crazy.  Also, it’s only kids, but each child is different and believes until a different age, depending on upbringing and religion.  Etc.

Insensitive question:  “Why don’t you go home for Christmas?  Don’t you miss your family?”

Uh, yeah, of course, but the reasons are private and I don’t feel like sharing them with a classroom full of students.

Ignorant question compounded by misconceptions from tv viewing:  “Do all Americans really fight with their families at Christmas?”

How the hell do I answer that?  How about “Yes, but not like they do in the movies or on t.v. and for reasons that are too complicated to be explained to anyone not in their family or who has known that family for decades.” or, maybe, “No, that’s only in the movies.”  Answer one is too complicated, answer two is too simple.

It’s only the eighth and I’m tired of Christmas already.

Kinda hard to believe, but it’s true.  This post, this post right heah, that you is now perusing, is number 600 on Left From Seattle.

I should get some kind of award for that, right?  I mean, do you have 600 posts on your blog?  Are they as pointless as mine?  Full of a lack of noteworthy information?  Excruciating in their navel-gazing goodness?

I didn’t think so.  Yeah.  I rock.

To say that I have a green thumb would be an excellent example of either irony, or outright lying.  M isn’t much better.

However, we decided a couple of months ago that we really needed some greenery in our home.  We were just tired of plain brown and off-white, the colors of any new apartment, and wanted something to help give the place some life.

So I bought a small tree for us.

The local shopping center had a special in their garden section for aquatic plants that were meant to be placed in small balls of pre-packed undergrowth for several months, possibly years, until they were big enough to be transplanted into a soil-packed pot.  The tree is, two months later, growing well and is currently four inches tall.  It has begun to send roots all through the undergrowth and, if it continues as it has, should be ready for transplanting this summer.  We’re quite pleased.

A month or so ago, we bought a three pack of cacti at the Ikea in Chiba.

Two of them are doing very well.  One, unfortunately, seems to be a bit too susceptible to the cold and is not doing well at all.  We’re doing our best to keep him in the sun, with minimal water (so as not to freeze the roots at night), but he is still fairing poorly.

But, hey, three out of four isn’t too bad, right?

That’s the debate at the moment.  I would like to get a few larger plants for us, to put in other rooms; something larger than the four miniscule plants we have now.  I would like a bamboo tree or a bonsai tree or something.  M says we should wait and see if we can keep all four alive through the winter before buying more.

She’s probably right, but it would be nice to get a few more green things in the apartment before the grey sets in next month.

This morning I deleted several hours worth of programming that I hadn’t gotten around to watching yet.  A lot of other things got deleted as well.  A lot of projects got taken off the back burner and just filed away to be dealt with or not dealt with well at some other date.

I had been feeling slightly overwhelmed by all the various things that I like to do and want to do and just decided that I wasn’t going to play that game.

I’ll be keeping a few TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and My Name is Earl, and there are still some projects I’m working on, like trying to write a novel, but not much else.  I  intend to just relax and do what needs doing for a while instead of obsessing over what I should be doing all the time.

I hope to, anyway.

Still no energy after the simultaneous high and low of the test, so I have just been taking a bit of time to work on some of the projects I have lying aroung – projects that take some time anda few resources, but very little brain power.

In this case, I’ve been working on the archives for this site.  There are over 500 posts for the past two years and several photos, drawings, random linkings, and all the other detritus that blogs accumulate in their existence, and I have been trying to get them cleaned up and into book form.

This isn’t a money-making scheme or anything like that, this is just a project to give myself a nicely typed, bound copy of my journals, basically.  This blog has been at least a fragment of my daily life for the past two years and I like to go back and read the posts sometimes, but online archives are actually not the best method for doing that a lot of the time.

Anyway, it’s just one of those things to occupy fingers and brain cells until full functionality is restored.