Halloween Day

The leaves are starting to change color. I feel like they’re quite a bit later this year, and I also think that the grapes disappeared faster than usual this year. I really don’t want to go climbing tonight, but the weather is perfect and I haven’t gone in a week so I really have no excuse. Except maybe that I am really sleepy, but I expect that will fade during my next class period.

I wore my pirate costume to school today. The kids were astounded that I would wear something so strange *during class*. I don’t remember well enough for sure, but I don’t think it would be too strange for students to wear modest, non-inhibiting costumes in America. Although that does sound like a bit of a dress code nightmare, so it’s probably not usually allowed.

I started reading the Tim Keller book on Proverbs. It’s not great, but it’s very bite-size and thus easy to read, as well as being moderately thought-provoking. I was reading several chapters a night on the three or four nights that I actually read, but I decided that the meditations were good enough to warrant more thought, and thus I should read them more slowly and deliberately. So now I’m working on waking up earlier to have some time to read and pray. I hope it works out.

Revisiting sewing and mechatronics

After being gung-ho about DIY for a week or so, I did a little more research on the feasibility of various things. Sewing seemed to be fairly useful, but my research suggests that only formal clothing is economical to make, and that would require a high level of skill. Most other items would probably be cheaper to buy as well—sewing would only give the ability to customize more. On that thought, considering how much difficulty I have finding clothing that fits in the states, I’m not so sure that it wouldn’t be worthwhile. So anyway, I haven’t given up on the idea, but I’m less enthusiastic about it.

I looked more into the Arduino and mechatronics. The projects look interesting, but not very practical. I think I would have enjoyed them a lot in middle school or high school, but if I’m going to spend a lot of time on something, I would prefer it to be more useful. Home automation does sound worth trying, but if that’s the only thing then I’m not sold.

Yesterday I didn’t go to the gym because it was cold and rainy. I played some more Streets of Rogue, but the time amount was reasonable. I finally cooked my quince, which was very satisfying. The fruit is like a slightly tangy and very fragrant pear—it was delicious, and putting it in my oatmeal this morning took the dish to a completely new level of deliciousness. Also, I emailed scans of my identity to Liberty for the second time. If I don’t get a response by Thursday or Friday, I’ll try chatting with them again.

I saw an article on yahoo about how Pontius Pilate wasn’t as bad a person as we usually think, and it triggered me. Rather than seeming evil, he is, I think, one of the most relatable characters in the Bible. He was under enormous pressure, and yet he sought every excuse to pardon Jesus. In the end he even declared Jesus innocent, but he wasn’t morally strong enough to actually release Jesus. Surely there would have been riots, people killed, maybe even Pontius himself. And if he hadn’t been killed, he surely would have lost his governorship, and then where would his family be? There’s more I thought about, but my memory of the details is a bit sketchy so I’ll leave it at that.

DIY

This morning I had a particularly good thought session. It started in the shower when I was thinking about how I had used OKCupid for nearly 10 years and yet had only met three, soon to be four people through it. Thinking these thoughts now though, it’s not as interesting as it was this morning. I realized and remembered that in these thought sessions I often tell myself about my life as if I’m a stranger, in a way to present aspects of my life in a certain light. I remembered enjoying my thoughts all the way until I got to school, but I don’t remember any of if except that I was hoping I would arrive on time (I did).

Ah, I remembered a little bit. I was thinking about how little I get emotionally attached. There were two girls that I liked in my teens that made me feel exhilarated sometimes and depressed others, but since then I’ve hardly felt that, despite having a girlfriend and seriously pursuing other girls. I suppose I did feel exhilarated once or twice with E, but since there was little sign that she felt the same way I don’t think I ever got my hopes high enough for them to drop.

Anyway, today the class observations by the school official ended successfully. The fourth class didn’t go very well as usual, but I wonder if part of it isn’t my attitude. I really try hard in that class, and do my best to elicit a reaction for the first fifteen minutes, but I tend to give up after that because I rarely do get a reaction.

Even though I knew I had to get up early for a stressful day, I ended up playing Streets of Rogue until almost midnight last night. I created a character that was powerful enough that I think it will be able to finish the game, but I had enough willpower to stop when I did instead of playing the last five levels to do so.

Yesterday I thought a lot about DIY stuff. I would like to make that a kind of goal for my life now, but I’m not sure how practical some of it is. I hope to build my own home eventually, but I’ll need a lot of practice. I could also make my own furniture, but I’m fairly sure that it will end up being very heavy, somewhat expensive, and probably not very pretty. The most practical DIY skills are food-related: gardening, cooking, and preserving, although the practicality of the latter depends on the produce available. I investigated CSA around my parents’ house, and while there were farms that seemed to offer CSA, no details were available. Sewing seems like the most practical of the non-food related activities, as the materials and tools are fairly cheap and there are many, many things that I could do with them. However, I’m skeptical that I would be able to procure decent enough materials to actually make my own clothes, which is what I would really like to do. Pottery requires an expensive pottery wheel, a kiln or at least access to one, and it can mainly be used only to make dishes and cups. I was interested in glass-blowing, but it seems like aside from glasses there is nothing practical that one can make in a hobby setup, and the tools are quite expensive. Car maintenance would also be a useful thing to know, so I’ll look into that, but that would only cover things like changing oil and rotating tires. Brewing seems fun and possibly the only way to consistently acquire mead, but it’s not a cheap setup either and the product is a luxury, so it’s low priority. Finally, I found an interesting guide about messing with electronics. I’m not sure yet what this entails, so I’m looking forward to learning more about it, both what is possible and how it might relate to work as an electrician.

Internet Morality Lecture

I have a lot of thoughts in the morning about all kinds of things. Maybe it’s because I spend an hour doing mostly physical things like showering, making breakfast, cleaning, and going to school. Someday I would like to try recording my thoughts as they come in the morning. The problem is that I think this will take time, so ideally I would do it when I don’t have work. But if I don’t have work, I’m unlikely to have the same kind of routine, and therefore I won’t have many thoughts. It’s kind of a catch-22.

This morning there was a lecture about internet morality at the junior high school. The speaker said some really thought-provoking (刺激的な?) things. Some of them would not be well received by an American audience. For example, he said that “if you do something bad in Japan, you’ll definitely be caught.” This was mainly within the context of internet crime, but even there I think it’s a stretch to tell a bunch of junior high students something that is so unlikely to be true. Another one of his points was that we ought to think about how others feel when we show them how much fun we’re having. When we brag about traveling or having a nice smartphone or computer, think about the feelings of people who can’t have those things. I appreciate this thought, but I’m sure it would encounter a lot of resistance in America.

The speaker had some good ideas too, though. His keyword was 置換的思考力--the ability to exchange ways of thinking. Normally I would think that the internet would facilitate the exchange of different ideas, and I still think that it can. But the speaker made a good point that people with similar ways of thinking tend to gather together, and the internet certainly does make that easier as well. Then, he said, if these people continue to associate with each other, one begins to think that everyone has the same thoughts, and therefore one can become dismissive when encountering a different perspective because most of one’s interactions are with that group of people with the same perspective.

I think this is true outside the internet as well, in a school. It’s quite common for students to only interact with other similarly-aged students (in similar situations) as peers. Teachers and parents are authority figures, and because of that there might be resistance to their ideas. It would be nice if students could exchange ideas on an even level with a greater variety of people. In America this probably tends to happen at university. I think it would be beneficial for middle and high school students to be exposed to this sooner, first so that they might not be so strongly influenced, and secondly so that they can appreciate their present life more.

Because of this lecture, I also resolved to be more careful with digital information. I am usually conscientious about it, but now I think I should be more cautious about using real names and signing up for questionable websites. Not that I do that much, but I think I have done it in the past.

Saturday I went to the Halloween festival in Shiojiri. It was fun to see so many of my students, although I didn’t know what to say to them most of the time, and somehow I kept forgetting that it would probably be okay to speak Japanese (especially if they weren’t trying to speak English). Oh well. That night I went to D’s apartment for a game night. We ended up playing Streets of Rogue, which was hilarious at times and a bit tedious at others. It seems like a great co-op video game, but there was something that didn’t feel quite right about it somehow. Maybe because we didn’t split the roles very well and were more content with chaos. Anyway, after that we talked and watched a few youtube videos until 3:30 AM. That’s the latest I’ve stayed up this year probably, and I wasn’t even that sleepy until I got home. The next day though I was a zombie in the afternoon, so much that I decided to cancel my climbing session.

I spent most of my free time on Friday and Saturday on Oxygen Not Included, but somehow on Sunday I decided that I had had enough and I wanted to do something more real. I went to Cainz Home to search for inspiration, but didn’t find anything. I finished the day playing Streets of Rogue until a bit late, but I managed to unlock the last two characters and I discovered something that should make future runs a bit more fun. However, I’m hoping that when I get tired of that (which should be soon) I’ll be able to find something more realistic. For example, I enjoyed listening to the lecture today and writing my thoughts about it—it would be nice if I could do something like that every day, or at least every other day. It seems unlikely though. Also, I need to study for the JLPT.

Purposeless

In the end my day off finished without me getting a haircut. I went to the Indian restaurant with Wyatt, went climbing, and did a bit of cleaning. The climbing session was good, but my fingers were still in pain from Tuesday. Honestly they feel better today than they did yesterday (though they’re still resistant to movement). Hopefully they’ll be recovered by Sunday when I go climbing again.

I had some trouble sleeping last night, and for one of the first times in my life I think my back is sore enough that I would appreciate a massage. Yesterday I bought some candy that I wanted to try, and it was good, but I think it gave me nightmares, or rather it made me very anxious so that I woke up many times expecting to have to get up and I probably tossed and turned a lot. I have mostly cut out candy from my diet in favor of chewing gum, which is surely a good thing. It helps that there isn’t any really delicious candy available to me, unlike in America.

Today it’s really rainy. I strongly dislike walking to work in the rain. I don’t remember doing it at all in France, maybe because I seldom had to walk more than a couple of minutes thanks to public transport. In Russia I think the sidewalks were wide enough that I didn’t have to worry about cars splashing me. I remember it being really wet when the snow mostly melted, though, and jumping over puddles. One time I slipped in the muddy slush and kicked it onto a couple of people standing outside a convenience store. They were very unhappy with me.

I decided that I need to reevaluate my purpose. I have a direction in getting my master’s and trying out being an electrician, but once I get a job, then what? I don’t really have anything to work for. Thinking about this, I resolved to try harder at investing in my spiritual life. Last night I read a devotional that mom bought me for about 15 minutes. Honestly, I barely remember anything now, but it was interesting enough that I don’t mind trying to continue it.

This weekend is the Halloween party in Shiojiri. My pirate costume is nice, but I would like to procure a beard and maybe an eye patch or hook if possible. But that would mean going to Matsumoto in the morning, and I can’t really see myself being motivated enough to do that. We’ll see.

Double holiday week

Last weekend it was raining hard on Friday and I felt tired, so I postponed my Matsumoto trip until Saturday. That day I went and bought some new clothes—two turtlenecks, a sweater, a cardigan, and a pair of shorts. I’m pretty happy with them. Next I met my friend around 4:15. She wanted to meet in the afternoon, but in the end we weren’t really sure what to do until dinner. We ended up going to a sports bar, ostensibly to watch the Australia vs. England match, but we mostly just talked and she didn’t get to watch much of the game. Next we went to a Japanese-French fusion restaurant. We tried escargot—it tasted fine, mainly garlic and butter, but the look and consistency was not very nice. It was very similar to a chewy mushroom, but I couldn’t convince myself of that and only ate two. We also had curry, which was good but not special.

This week is a weird week. Yesterday I was off work to celebrate the new emperor of Japan. I wasted most of the day on Oxygen Not Included, but I did manage to go shopping, make dinner, and I had a nice climbing session too. Today is a normal Wednesday, but tomorrow I’m supposed to be off as well. I’m feeling really guilty about it, because I don’t think I should be, but at this point the only thing I could do is tell my boss, who might make me come into work on some project at the eikaiwa.

I keep flip-flopping between happiness to be in Japan and a desire to return home. The fact that it’s not solely the latter is, I think, a good indication of how much I enjoy being in Japan. But I also keep thinking about finding a job making something. I’m probably idealizing it, and I need to find some way to make it more real so that I don’t make it such a be all and end all based merely off thoughts in my head.

Almost every Sunday for the past two months I have been planning to go to church, but I have yet to actually go. There are several reasons I think. For practically the entire year I have been unsatisfied with morning devotions, and have barely done them. Next, I have fallen out of the habit and simply find it easy to stay in bed. I don’t want to have to explain my absence, because I don’t think I have a good explanation. And finally, I simply don’t want to continue to experience the frustration of failing to establish meaningful relationships with people.

Allergies

I thought I was going to get sucked into the new video game, but in the end I get tired of it at a pretty healthy rate. I’ve got four more character unlocks left, and they are all difficult. I really want to get the zombie, but that means beating three levels with the vampire, and I’m not keen on that character, so I get frustrated within 2 hours. With that in mind, I think I can go climbing tonight.

I haven’t done well with studying Japanese lately. On Saturday or so I got tired of the story that I was reading, and I haven’t picked up a new one since then. I found one, but the level is fairly high so I want to read it at home with my browser extension helper, and I haven’t started it yet.

This weekend I’m going to go to Matsumoto on Friday night, hopefully not too long. It is supposed to rain on Saturday, so I can’t really do anything interesting, but I might go clothes shopping for the first time in four months.

Last night I had terrible allergy problems and felt like I only slept a couple of hours. It’s baffling and frustrating to me that I can’t seem to do much of anything about this problem, and it’s likely that I’ll have it for the rest of my life and won’t be able to treat it, even though it’s an unnatural reaction.

Kiso-Fukushima bike trip

I’m disappointed in my lack of writing production lately. I’ve been busy at school—while I used to have at least one entire class period of free time, lately it’s been used up with class prep so that I’ve only gotten one free period per week. Eventually I’d like to get to the point where I write regularly even if it is at home, but at the moment I’m still distracting myself too much to put time into that.

I had a long weekend, and while it wasn’t as productive or adventurous as I had hoped, it could have been worse too. There was a huge typhoon, apparently the strongest in sixty years, so it rained all day on Saturday. I had planned to do a bike trip, but people kept warning not to go outside in the typhoon so I stayed home all day. Then it also rained on Monday too, and since that was forecast, I changed my plan to a one-day bike trip. I went to Kiso-Fukushima, which I had been to before, about 43 km away, so about 90 km round trip. It took me 2 hours 45 minutes to come back, which I did with minimal resting. I stopped in Naraijuku to buy some souvenirs, and in Kiso-Fukushima I went to the supermarket to browse, so altogether the trip was about 7.5 hours.

Kiso-Fukushima is a really beautiful town that reminds me of Markarth, my favorite city in Skyrim. It is closely hemmed in by mountains and is very hilly, but also has several bridges going over streams. Overall, it was a great trip, with the worst part being a 2 km tunnel just after Narai with a narrow footpath. Aside from that, there was very little difficulty or danger. My only dissatisfaction was that I had to come back the same way I went.

I thought as I was biking that perhaps the main deterrent from my making these trips was because I have tried to sleep four times in my hammock and have not succeeded once in sleeping more than four hours. The prospect of physically exhausting myself only to set up camp and have a sleepless night is hardly appealing, so maybe traveling without the intent to camp will motivate me more. Granted, then I’ll have to pay for accommodation, but biking will save nearly half the cost of travel in addition to providing a reason for the travel.

However, this revelation may have come too late. There’s only one more long weekend left this year (I think), and I really want to use it to go to Nagoya. Biking to Nagoya would probably take two full days, and I’d like to have more time than that. January and February are really cold, but if I get a nice weekend without snow then maybe I can bike somewhere. Most likely though, if I want to take a decent trip, I’m going to have to wait until the end of my contract.

In other news, I bought a game yesterday that was a lot of fun called Streets of Rogue. I spent too much time playing it and ended up not getting my hair cut. I’m also still playing an idle game. I think I’m probably too excited about the both of them to commit to going climbing this evening as I had planned. But I’m also still really sore, so maybe that works as an excuse.

Social weekend

Last weekend was rather unusual. On Friday I went to Matsumoto, originally intending to join a very large party of ALTs and a few of their friends, but the non-ALTs were the ones meeting me at the station. The crowd ended up being too large for several of the places we intended to go, so we wandered around Matsumoto for nearly an hour before settling at a place. The non-ALTs and I ended up sitting separately, but that was quite alright with me.

We drank expensive drinks and chatted. The girls (which mostly made up the group) kept saying I was cute and calling me “prince”. It was embarrassing and I didn’t know how to respond, but I can’t say that it was unpleasant. The prince part came from my trying to explain NC to them, showing them the Biltmore House. They then assumed that it was my house, hence “prince”.

The next day I went to Matsumoto to do karaoke with two of the girls from the previous night. It was fun, and the karaoke room was nice and relatively inexpensive, but the mics didn’t work very well. Anyway, after that we went to a pub and watched the rugby game of Japan against Samoa. It was a fun night.

However, it means that my social network has expanded, and with it the corresponding social expectations—meaning responding to messages, which I am terrible at. I am also concerned about stirring up romantic interest. I’d rather avoid that at this point, less than six months away from leaving.

I started playing a stupid idle game, and I’m spending a bit too much time on it despite the fact that it is supposed to be an idle game. Soon though I should either get to a point where I can make it more idle, or get tired of it.