Oooooooooooooh

The perks of living on your own:

You get to eat wondrous meals (such as delicious, moist oboro dofu mmm) whenever you make them.

You - oh, excuse that - You get to eat mediocre and/or not very delicious meals (such as the miso stir-fry thing I just made ohhh) whenever you make those.

You get to listen to "In the House - In a Heartbeat" at a loud volume and have to stop writing your blog post for a while because you are overcome with having to throw your head back and forth to the music as it gets more and more intense.

Well, the last one you can do anywhere, really. But I just thought I'd throw it in.

And yes, (k we're out of the "perks of living on your own" section now) I was inspired by a tofu cafe I went to in Kyoto, and yes, I did buy various, assorted tofu goods from its nearby shop including oboro dofu and soy milk and tofu tare (sauce? marinade?) and tofu dumpling type things, and yes, I did seek recipes from the cafe's website, and YES, I did use one to create a delicious oboro dofu, which I have now made twice and for which I am thinking of new ways to make it better and even more numsaflex (yummy).

Tonight's meal's taste reminded me of when I first got to Japan and started cooking with Japanese ingredients (or really cooking period). I'm getting the impression miso isn't really ideal for frying and maybe I just stick to using it in soups and the like. Anyway, it's not like tonight's dinner is that bad. I mean, it tastes alright, and it's dinner, right?

RIGHT!?

Yeeahhh.

Wow, the soundtrack to 28 Days Later is depressing. Who would've thought? Oh, but it has a motif, as I just noticed! This little thing that comes at the end of "In the House - In a Heartbeat" that always sounded okay but a little out of place is actually its own song earlier in the album! Cool. K, but really, this is too weird listening to this without watching the movie, and it's making me feel like I'm in a life-and-death, fight-or-flight, end-of-the-world situation. I like hyphenating words sometimes. And things like that.

Oh yeah, the thing I wanted to talk about today: karate. Yes! I am taking karate lessons now, and it kind of wound up as a private lesson that the sensei teaches right after his class with the little kids ends. It's sweet. I was really surprised when I remembered, and all the feelings came flooding back (in)to me from some wellspring somewhere within, how much I love martial arts and practicing them. The workout is just so awesome to me - getting good excercise from doing bodily motions over and over again always trying to execute them better. I love the feeling of exerting myself physically and mentally at the same time like that. Plus, you can tell when you're doing it right and getting better. Actually, I think I can tell that more now, being much older than when I did martial arts in middle school or around then. In any case, I love practicing martial arts.

And karate is way different from kali and kickboxing, which I did before. The kicks are crazy! and the stances and punching styles! Oh man, it's really fun and exciting to learn (even if I got a rude awakening/surprise about how much less flexible I've become (I always prided myself on being flexible before!), though it could also just be that I never much used the muscles these kicks utilize when I took martial arts lessons before). Anyways, I always feel really energized and alive when I finish karate lessons, so that is awesome. I can't wait to...just keep going to class and doing karate pretty much, haha. However, I can't go to next Monday's lesson, because...

I'm going to Taiwan! Hurrah! Thank you for your suggestions on places to go and things to see, everyone who gave me those. I don't really have any idea of what to expect, but I'm excited to see where one of my good friends has chosen to be his home for this year and experience what he likes about it.

I finally started doing this idea I've had for studying Japanese for a while now. I found a website with something like 3,500 kanji (still not very much) that categorizes them by grade levels and has really extensive information on them, including what seems like all their different readings. SO...I'm starting at grade one, from the very beginning, and going over all the kanji for which I know the main ways to read and use, but now I'm focusing on all their obscure readings or on certain basic kanji for which I just don't know certain readings because you don't use them that much. That was confusing, sorry, but going with the spirit of leaving things just as they come out of my head, I'm going to leave that the way it is. The long and short of it issss (I never use that phrase) I've studied super high level kanji for the challenge and because I'm curious, but something that's always been in my mind is, "Hey, it may be good to keep learning harder kanji and all, but wouldn't it be cool to learn all the ones used in everyday situations, like on trucks and signs and buildings and stuff, and just be completely comfortable with kanji in my daily life?" Yes, it would be. So now, I'm going over all the everyday kanji! And it's interesting and rewarding! So there's that.

Um, anyways...no pictures again this time, sorry. I do have some I'd like to post, but never seem to have time when I get around to writing in this old thang. You can have this one for now?













(Hint: I searched, "little tiger.")

Also, Mono is awesome. I just listened to "Memorie Dal Futoro." Good, good, good.

That's about all for now. I might not update again until after I get back. Oh yeah, I also felt pretty good today when I was able to reserve a seat on a bus to the airport and a hotel room for the night before without missing anything the people were saying or having to ask them to repeat anything, and that's with all that crazy polite language (敬語ぉぉぉぉ！) (except for this one thing the hotel clerk said which I still can't figure out). But, uhhh, yeah. Good day. I spent a lot of time looking out from my balcony. Goodnight.

Brother

Well, it most certainly has been a while, hasn't it?
Tomorrow will be exactly one month since I last let you all in on what I was doing in this thing we call life and this possessive I use called my.

First things first, I've gone through a huge musical change, or maybe just what feels like one. Listening-wise, I've rediscovered AU and gotten way more into them than I was when my sister and I first bought those two CDs at their amazing show at the Smell a year and a half ago (?! Oh that was an awesome time. It was there I learned about closing my eyes and imagining scenarios to the music from my sister. :)). Before that, I was listening to the Dokuros a LOT. Pretty much all the time. I went to a couple of their shows in nearby Kyoto and Osaka and actually got to know them a little bit, which was really cool. I had the sad and happy honor of getting to see their final show before their guitarist and drummer left. It was an awesome show and felt really weird for me. They've shaped my musical life ever since I first saw them live by complete chance opening for Oshiripenpenz and bought their CD without any hint of how much I would get into them. That was like two years ago. Seeing them play their last show right in front of my eyes was like an end of an era for me. It made me think of how they'd influenced me up to that point, how my music'd changed up to then, and how we all were going to go on to new things and change even more from here on out. Anyways, quite an experience.

So yeah, the Dokuros' new album, 「遅い昼食」(Osoi chuushoku) is really good (came out last summer) and really shows them making their own style even more (one reason why it's kind of a bummer their time to stop come now). I own all their released material now and that's been making up a lot of my listening material for the past month or so. AU happened this week. So did Atlas Sound, another "band" (artist?) which I had listened to in passing, really liked, but never got super into. Atlas Sound is awesome. "Dog Named Apollo," "Lost and Found (for A.O.)," and most of all "Monochromatic" are my favorites and highest recommendations right now.

Ummm...ゆらゆら帝国! Yura yura teikoku is amazing. I just got ahold of another CD by them, called "Sweet Spot," and it's pretty awesome. I've definitely got to hear more of them. I might see them live in a month or two if I can.

A friend of mine asked me to burn her a Bjork CD, and in the process of looking up what songs I thought she'd like I listened to a whole bunch of Bjork I'd never listened to before. I'd actually not really listened to her at all...but now I love Verspertine and some others. I also made myself a Sapo/mariachi mix which was one of the best ideas I've had lately because I put it on and went driving around all night long into the next city over on dark roads through fields and nothing lit by car lamp. It's amazing how down you can feel without knowing why and how alive you can feel when you listen to something nostalgic and deeply connected to you. I just kind of forget all these things that are a part of me somewhere deep inside. It's nice when I remember them again and put them in the forefront of my life.

Listening to a mix CD sent to me by a certain friend with awesome music taste in L.A. :)
'sgot some good mariachi and a bunch of other cool stuff I can't really describe.

So yeah, lots of mariachi for driving, mostly Javier Solis and Los Camperos. I love "Tres Regalos," though, and the rendition Pedro Fernandez does of it. Lots of Verspertine, AU, Atlas Sound, and mix CD at the apartment right now.

Edit: Oh yeah, Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective is amazing. One of those albums I rarely listen to because when I do I have to be ready to jump around my apartment throwing myself into walls rolling around on the floor kicking around screaming and crying with happiness and joy.

I've been making crazy progress (?) with music. Vocals coming out, lots of songs with them as the lead. I've been making a lot of environmental recordings (?) of places like railways and Tofu Cafes in Kyoto. I made a couple of songs over this past month which I am really happy about. Really excited about. I've started releasing my emotions in very interesting ways that seem oddly me. They make for enjoyable, interesting music I can get into, and maybe other people can, too.

Well, I'm actually getting close to my preferred bed time of 10:30 now, soo...
I mean, I don't have to take a shower cuz I took one earlier today so I can go to bed pretty soon, but...yeah...sorry, I should get going pretty soon, ya know?
So I'll just say a few things so I don't end this post without any other updates besides what's been going on in my musical life (There they are again, those two words!).

Works been getting more and more enjoyable. Life in Japan's been getting more and more enjoyable. I realized I've been in the crusty clutches of some pretty harsh culture shock or something of the like for the past couple o' months. I could write a whole entry just on that, but for now I'll just say it sucks. Hah. Aaand, I'm hopefully on my way up and out of it. I've started to come to terms more with the way things just are here instead of getting really antagonistic about them. It's interesting, all the other English teachers I know in this city have been going through the same exact thing, though they may be at different phases of it than me.

Oh, the hottest news on this side of my apartment is that I'm going to Taiwan in a week. Woo. I suppose I will see how much Mandarin (I'm not even going to try Taiwanese) I can learn in 6 days. I'm happy I'll be staying with a good friend of mine who's living in Taipei, studying Chinese and teaching English. I bought my ticket last Saturday! I can't wait to go!

Thinking about what I want to do in the near future, grad school keeps popping up as the most probably option. I think it should be possible to concentrate my interests into a possible research topic by the time application time starts. I'm going to actually send out those emails I was gonna send out like 3 months ago to my professors and see what kind of stuff I should get going on to get ready. Still, I have reservations. I'm always filled with this urge to increase my knowledge of different, varying fields, to make myself more useful and applicable to different situations. Grad school just seems like the complete opposite of what I want to do with myself in that it limits your expertise and knowledge so much to such a specific area. At least, that's the way it seems to me now. I was frustrated with that my last year of college, so I can just imagine what it'd be like at grad school. So, it seems a bit rushed, when the kinds of things I really want to do now are enroll in some kind of Spanish course in a Latin American country (preferably Mexico, but I'm not sure how things are going over there right now), focus completely on music and art (which I could do for the year until I go to grad school anyways...), and...I don't know. Many thoughts. Which is good! Man am I thankful for all the opportunities open to me.