7:16 AM GMT+9:00, December 21, 2003, Tokyo, Japan
I think I'm still drunk. I don't think I've ever been as drunk as I was earlier tonight. I also dropped far too much money, but I suppose in a way it was worth it. I'll elaborate, maybe, when I sober up. One more day of school. That sucks.
6:24 PM GMT+9:00, December 27, 2003, Tokyo, Japan
A few random thoughts for today:
I need a soundtrack to my life, complete with sound effects. If I turned around, it would be in slow-motion, and probably violins, depending on the mood I was aiming for. If it was to go do something, it would be accompanied by drums and such to give a sense of impending competition and ultimate victory. Every time I would look at a girl, it would also be in slow motion, the lighting would shift so I could only see her and her me, and romantic music, whatever that is, would play as I walked over there in slow-motion. Or if she was far away, it could be in that fake hard-cut time-lapse thing that people seem to like as well, because I'd look cooler that way. Life needs to be as dramatic as a movie. Well, to be specific, when things dramatic happen, like
almost dying on Mount Fuji, I need this to be documented so people can understand the depths of my existential suffering. Whatever that means.
It snowed last night in Tokyo, but that was after hailing. This may not seem like such an amazing occurance to most people, but coming from California, where we have some of the best weather in the world, no exaggeration, this is a pretty ridiculous kind of thing to happen. Sometimes we get frost, but never snow that actually stays. There is still some snow now, which tells you that it was cold enough through the day to keep the snow from melting. That's a bit too cold for me. We're talking temperatures in the 30s, which is just not right.
My Japanese is improving at a rapid rate, and I'm far better than I was before I came here, but it still does not satisfy me. I don't think I'll be satisfied until I'm basically fluent. I wonder if my eventual goal of being fluent in four languages is even possible in a decent timeframe. I suppose there's no way to say for sure until I try.
I make snap judgements about people within a few seconds of meeting as a general rule, and most of the time I'm right. To elaborate, when I hold a neutral opinion about someone after a few seconds, then I'll generally get along with them. If I don't like them, I probably never will. There are always exceptions, of course, but this holds pretty true. Is this bad? I suppose it kind of is, but I think everyone does it to some extent. I'm just willing to admit it, that's all, even if that makes me look really bad. My ranking system is very simple: there are those I don't like, and those that I may or may not like. And that is what I mean by a snap judgement. It doesn't mean I presume to know much of anything about that person, nor their personality, but there are a lot of conclusions one can draw from just the way someone carries their clothes and their person.
I love talking to people, but not all of them love talking to me. That's fine, I probably didn't want to talk to them anyway. My policy is that if someone doesn't want to talk to you, don't talk to them. They're too busy with themselves to talk to you, so it's best not to bother them, and leave them in their own little world.
Random bits of news and facts:
Toshiba has developed the world's smallest hard drive, holding 3 GB of memory in something just 0.85 inches in diameter. So now people can download high quality porn to their phone instead of low quality porn. The world rejoices.
South Korean professional gamers can make upwards of $100000 a year, but have to constantly be practicing. Those poor bastards.
Winamp 5 has been released. I'm going to grab it as soon as I get home. It's Winamp 2+3, that's why it's 5. Nullsoft is great.
I did my first private tutoring lesson yesterday, and here's what happened. I talked to this girl for 2 and a half hours, half of the time in Japanese, she bought my lunch, and then gave me 5000 yen for my troubles. I don't know if I should ever leave this country.
9:51 AM GMT+9:00, December 18, Tokyo, Japan
Here I sit in the computer lab, because class was cancelled. More specifically, the first part of class was cancelled because the teacher is sick, and I don't think anyone is going to the second part of class because it is boring. I know this information does not affect anyone that reads this, and likely you want the minute or two of your life back that you spent reading this, but I'm pretty bored, and I don't want to walk outside into the cold. The low today is supposed to be 5 degrees Celcius, which I think is somewhere in the low 40s for Fahrenheit. It's not warm, I'll tell you that.
I've noticed that when I don't get enough sleep, I develop the ability to ignore my alarm completely. This is not very good, and I think it perhaps is a sign that I should go to sleep before 2 in the morning.
Only a few more days until winter break, and I can sleep the sleep of the just. Or something like that.
1:36 AM GMT+9:00, December 12, 2003, Tokyo, Japan
The temperature here is at a point that doesn't exist in California, which is just wrong, for many reasons. I don't have winter clothes, because, well, to put it simply, winter doesn't exist in the Bay Area. I thought it got cold in Berkeley, but the low today was 45F, and it's going down to 40 over the weekend.
Fuck, it's cold.
2:57 AM GMT+9:00, November 22, 2003, Tokyo, Japan
Funny things happen when people you know personally read thoughts that run through your head. While the original idea was to be able to put anything I wanted out here, there are certain things that I simply cannot write, for fear that it will come back to bite me in the ass later. This causes me problems when I want to write certain things, but it also gives me another topic to muse on in a manner that hopefully comes across as contemplative.
First off, however, I should explain my earlier rant. To keep things short, I'll summarize. That rant was the culmination of weeks of secondhand smoke, complaints about Japanese music/videos, complaints about the food, the train, the bicycles, the people, the language, incessant trips to Roppongi (the foreigner capital of Japan), general inability to speak Japanese or English, and general bashing of America. I should note a few things. First, not any one person did all of these things, but combined, they did them many times over. Second, it is not so much the trips to any particular location that bothers me so much as the fact that going there is, in a way, avoiding the real Japan. Last, I am no nationalist by any means, and I don't hold that much love for the country in which I hold citizenship, but for all its faults, it is not a bad place to live. As such, I will only agree with the verbal abuse the US suffers to a point, after which I can't help but take offense. I may not be Caucasian, but I am American, and that will never change.
Now that's out of the way, I can talk a bit about social norms. My brain isn't working too well due to the time of day, so I'll keep this short, and expand upon it later if the desire so arises.
We all lie every single day, whether directly or indirectly. For the sake of simplicity, I shall define the withholding of information also a form of lying. Whether this is semantically correct or not, I do not know, nor do I care. It is not related to the argument at hand. Why do we do this? To be polite, mainly. We don't tell the guy across from us that his gut is beginning to hang over his belt, we leave it be. If he wants to live in his fantasy world where it is in fact not doing so, then who are we to take him out of there? You say things like "excuse me" and "thank you" not so much as expressions of gratitude or contrition, but as phrases that must be said in particular situations.
We say "excuse me" when what we really mean is "get the hell out of my way, you fat fuck." See the difference? If we told everyone what we thought, what we
really thought, society as we know it would collapse. Because we have rules, we are free to worry about other things other than how to deal with calling someone's son a "mistake."
How does this relate? Well, there are certain pieces of information I must withhold from certain people because it is not my place to divulge it, I don't want to get involved, and I see no reason to rock the boat, as it will. Is this honest? Not entirely. Is it justified? Within the context of today's society, I would say with absolute certainty, yes.
9:21 PM GMT+9:00, December 6, 2003, Tokyo, Japan
I'm going to procrastinate from writing my badly organized first and final draft of a developmental sociology essay to let you in on what's passing through my head right now. I frequently forget what I'm thinking about, however profound it may be, and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen again. However, and this is funny in the same way tripping over your own feet is funny, I seem to have forgotten what I wanted to write about in between realizing that I wanted to do it and opening this text file to type it out so I could preserve it for posterity. That is a whole issue in and of itself.
I tend to forget people's names with a very high frequency, and I wonder sometimes if I'm offending people by doing so. I sometimes worry about myself. What I mean is that I don't do things with a whole lot of passion, and while I enjoy the company of some people, I don't really get that attached to anyone, at least anymore. If we go back to all the talk of power I've had in the past, this gives me a kind of power, but at the same time it can leave me a bit adrift. Yeah, I don't want to be the pathetic guy who can only think of one girl, but at the same time, at least he has something to live for. I always say that the meaning of life is exactly what you make of it, but I haven't quite figured out what my meaning is. Perhaps my meaning is to search for it, which could be profound if it didn't arise from apathetic musings upon the state of my own insignificant existance.
9:31 PM GMT+9:00, December 6, 2003, Tokyo, Japan
If you'll note the time stamp (albeit my own time stamp) you'll note that only 10 minutes have passed since the last bit. This tells you two things (assuming, again, that my time stamp can be trusted): the first is that I type pretty fast. The second is that I'm really trying to procrastinate. I only know one person who can out-procrastinate me, but he's had more practice at it than me. In any case, and I almost forgot what I was going to write again, I was musing on the existance of cliques and how much they sucked. However, I just realized something.
Cliques don't exist simply to make you feel bad about yourself because you're not part of one, they are mainly a way of organizing the people you know and smoothing your social life. Wait, hear me out here. I almost ran into this problem in Taiwan because I made so many friends, but because they were all in the same school, it was easy to move from one group to another. What problem, you ask? Why, the problem of knowing too many people and not being able to devote enough attention to anyone. I have mentioned this before, in the context of saying that you have to pick your friends carefully, because you don't want to waste your time on someone unworthy of it, but now I realize that is just the same as saying that you need to form your own clique, to the exclusion of others.
Granted, they hurt the loners and oucasts, but frankly, I can't help that. If you are socially maladjusted, do something about it. I did. Wait, before you lynch me, I'm not just trying to be an asshole. If truly believe that unless you have some deep-seated chemical imbalance in your neural network, you are capable of socially adjusting yourself so that people will want to be around you. It's not a question of can, it's a question of want. Motivation is key, and that applies to everything.
But I digress. Getting back to the issue of cliques, I am rapidly approaching the point where I will know too many people. I have 55 numbers and/or emails in my phone now, and only two days on the weekend with which to deal with many of them. Add into this the girl I may or may not be dating, my new part-time job, my possible private tutoring job on the side, the aikido club, and the billiards club, I have about three seconds to deal with each person. Oh, there are worse problems in life, of course, but I'm not bitching. I'm merely making an observation. My problem is that each of these people in my phone is someone I'd gladly spend time with, but I simply can't do it for everyone. This is not to say that all of these people are clamoring for my attention, but they are not unwilling to join me if I'm doing something.
So what about cliques? Simply put, they are a way of organizing the people you know into more easily digested groups to think about. You know that if you talk to this one particular person, you'll also see these other particular people. This makes a previously unmanagable number into something you could possibly count on both hands, depending on the situation. Without this, shall we say, organizational system, we could not deal with all our social connections. Hey, you learn something new every day.
