Reading, and Writing

I just finished organizing and dating what turned out to be 15 journals I've written since the summer I came to Japan.














(I just noticed #1 has slid underneath #2, maybe because it's shy. After all, it's the oldest of the bunch.)

Wow. Feels good, and I'm not quite sure why, but I have an idea or few. This is the stuff of stories. This is the basis of a book (or many).

In other news, I'm on page 416 now in Murakami Haruki's "1Q84." I won't say anything about it, though I have some things going on in my mind. Almost time for Book 2! I want to order Book 3 before it comes out next month and I go back to LaLaLand.

Listening to some old Japanese music (as in I got it much earlier in my stay here). It's nice. I'm hungry. I think I'll go eat something.

Bought

I bought a pair of black, corduroy pants today. I've been needing a new pair of pants for a while. So this is good. I also bought this:













It's a blanket, rolled up.

And holy moley, I'm listening to the CD I made of all my own material a few months ago, and, man, it is intense. If you want to know what depression and angst sound like, there are a couple of tracks you can listen to for that. Not that there aren't happy and peaceful songs on it, nor that the intense songs are purely sorrowful without any other feelings mixed in. It's quite a complex pastel color palette of emotions.

Oh My Gosh!

Look what I just found on my way back from another driving course in preparation for taking the license test this Tuesday?















There's a used book store on the corner down from my house and I saw some nice-looking books with those slide covers, so I decided to check them out. Before long, names I recognized from Modern Japanese Literature class senior year popped up, starting with Kawabata Yasunari. I got excited and kept looking and eventually found Mishima Yukio and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, too! The only thing left to determine whether I would buy them or not was the price - after all, these may be used but they were nice books. I went into the store for the first time and asked the guy: 100 yen each. That's about $1.20 for each 300-500 page book of classic modern literature each. YES, very YES.

I don't even know how well I can read these, but I was excited to see a couple of stories I recognized from that class or from having read the English version, and that was enough to get me going. Still, I still am not anywhere near the end of 1Q84 by any stretch of the imagination and I also bought a new book recently called Muri (「無理」), which is about the lives of five people living in a small town in Japan being forced by the government to merge with other small towns, a trend that's been very common lately during the recession and pretty much only benefits the government while disrupting the economies and societies of the towns. There are so many things to learn about! I feel like a total nerd, in the best way. I am so excited, not only by learning new things, but just at the possibility of learning new things!!

Another Awesome Thing about Japan

This:














I went into a local clinic without an appointment, was seen and diagnosed within 45 minutes, went to the pharmacy nextdoor, and got enough cough medicine, two different types of antibiotics, gargling medicine, and throat lozenges to last me forever plus a thermometer for 2,200 yen, the equivalent of about 24 dollars. Plus, I also got this neat little calendar for free.












Now, of course, I'm sure you're all wondering why I had to go to a clinic, which brings me to the not so good news. I've got some kind of fever. On the upside, though the doctor didn't tell me it was necessarily the H1N1 flu, and even said if it goes down by tomorrow with the medicine he prescribed me it might not be a full-blown flu. Good thing I caught it early. Actually, I'd had a little bit of a runny nose for a couple (to a few) weeks before, but I thought, Hey, you know, it's probably fine. And it was, until yesterday, when I actually started to feel like I had a cold. Alas, I started to feel sore and a little feverish today and I had to decide that my usual anti-sick method of drinking lots of water, eating lots of oranges, sleeping a lot, and spitting a lot wouldn't suffice anymore. I guess I showed some good judgment (for once)!

This comes at a pretty bad time (though I guess there are no good times to get a fever), when I need to schedule a driving course, meet an interesting person I met when going in for a job interview last Saturday (a fun, interesting story in itself), go see an incredible show on Sunday, and take the driver's license test (again) next Tuesday. Well, I'll just hope it's a 24-hour flu and get all the rest I can.

But, I'm fine :)

THIS is why white people are out of control:

This guy lives in the same prefecture as me and all the way up to Halloween was posting Facebook status updates excitedly talking about how he was going to dress up as a "ghetto black guy because in jland that's okay." The comment he left under the top picture was, "damn you cant tell we both are coated in black oily camouflage makeup, i like how akinas lipstick is way overdone hahaha."

This is the kind of shit that is very obviously NOT okay, and obviously, this white guy (from the U.S.) knows it, but he's taking advantage of the fact that he's living in a country where people don't care.

This is what people are talking about when they say they're wary of comedians of color making fun of people of color because, even though it's funny as an inside joke, white people end up flocking to those kinds of comedic shows so they can laugh at people of color, too, and not feel guilty about it, because "hey, they said it themselves."

This is also why it's hard to think of white people as more than drifting entities without any time-hardened set of values to anchor them and keep them from simply floating from one thing that makes them happy to another. It's hard to think of them as mature or as having any real conception of the world outside themselves.

When I see this kind of stuff, it just reinforces in my head that yes, white people are always on the lookout for any chance to do what feels good to them. This guy was in a country that doesn't have a problem with blackface, so he decided he would do blackface, too, not even for any real reason except that he can. And I think again of what seems to be the general guideline for the typical white person: if it feels good, if it's "self-expression," if it means you're "free" to do whatever you want, and if it gets you ahead, it's a good thing.

Not surprisingly, this guy is also constantly putting Facebook statuses up about how frustrated he is with his job as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) on JET and how backwards Japanese people are. This considering he signed up to do two years of the job and makes about 3,000 dollars a month doing nothing, as any ALT can.

I understand that this entry might offend some of my friends and readers, and in the past I've refrained from putting up entries that expressed frustrations like these in the interest of not upsetting anyone, but the pictures I posted up above are of things that really happened, and my frustrations with them and the system that continues to cater to and elevate white people across the world, producing and justifying these kinds of situations, are real and valid.

No, this one white guy is not an exception to the rule that most white people understand the way things are now but every now and then you just get one of those bad ones. He's not an anomaly. His behavior is completely in line with the attitude I've seen exhibited by nearly every white person I've met while in Japan - that since they aren't confronted with racism in the way they used to be and since they now see themselves as "the minority" (It's amazing how fast they take it upon themselves to adopt this label) they don't need to give much thought to racism. This white guy is only another example of how many white people do not have any concern for the way racism affects peoples' lives and, without being forced to behave in a civil way or at least pretend they care, will sink to the lowest levels without reflection or remorse.

(Also, I know it's also important that the girl, Akina (?), is also doing blackface, but I think she might be Japanese, as in lived in Japan up to this point, which incites a whole different kind of frustration that is different than what I've expressed above.)

I made okonomiyaki today.

I made okonomiyaki today.




















I put bacon and kimchi in it. It was good, if I do say so myself :)

Tonight was the third time I've bought and cooked with meat (after using shrimp in my fried rice two times). I really thought about it for a long time and almost didn't buy it, but I didn't want to just put kimchi in the okonomiyaki, and after not being able to find any blocks of mochi, I felt time's pull and just went with the pork. It tasted good, though. Maybe cooking with and eating meat is like murder, and it gets easier every time.

Really, though, it feels good to be getting a handle on basic cooking now. Once you get the sense of things, you can pretty much carry it into anything else and even stuff you thought was completely unrelated to stuff you've made before becomes easier. That was a long sentence.

No update for a while, huh. Sorry 'bout that.

Tonight, I felt the mood again. That mysterious mood that seems to come on when the lights are low (this time, I had just a lamp on my desk switched on). I felt it (listening to Lotus Plaza and Deerhunter), overcame a temptation to laziness, and felt better for it! I took out my Spanish newspapers, which I had been using for practice, and drew on them with pens and colored pencils. It's back! So, now I have some new decorations to put up around the place, in addition to my Rody sheet and unagi-don (teriyaki eel rice bowl) poster. Mmm.

Canela

Recently, I suddenly got the urge to drink some canela (I don't know why, but I like the way it looks in italics), so I was very excited in my search for cinnamon sticks at the market today. After mucho, mucho looking I was about to finally give up (toward the end I even thought there might be some hope in the "ethnic" (ohmygosh so problematic) Asian food aisle. "Hey," I thought, "maybe those Thai people use that stuff, too, I mean, you never know..." It wasn't there.). When suddenly I found it!

I was so excited I bought two packs! So I get back tonight, and you know, as things start to wind down, I decide to go make some canela to warm down the evening, and...






What the F is that?!









Serious! They call that a cinnamon stick?! That thing's not even as big as my middle finger! And what with all its curls nicely wrapped up into itself, how's any flavor going to find it's way off of this thing!? It's so hard! And thick! And unflaky! And the smell! Agh! It makes me almost gag just sniffing it! It smells like someone sprinkled cinnamon powder all over these things. Seriously, what can you do with cinnamon sticks like these?? Where's the mustiness? The subtle, almost-not sweetness (or even complete lack of sweetness!)? That woody, earthy taste? I don't want to drink a cake, for crying out loud.

Blegh. Well, anyways, I decided to give it a try. At ten minutes in, then's barely any brown in the water. At 15, the water's pretty brown, but tastes just like tap water. Let's see where we're at now.







Looks dubious.








Well, I'm going to give it a try. Will report back in the morning...

Ugh, I just tried it. It's going to take some real experimentation to make this work. I could've just boiled some tap water and sprinkled cinnamon powder in it for this...:'(

Oh well, back to The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, so I can feel like I'm reading one of the spooky stories my family tells whenever they get together. :)

The Dokuros

I can't explain how, but I feel like The Dokuros have been a huge influence on me.

Ever since I started listening to them, their music's just always felt like it was part of my life. Whenever I think of bands that've influenced my musical styling, they're always one of the first to pop into my mind. This, even though I myself can't really see much resemblence between the music I make and the music they made.

Maybe it was when I first bought one of their CDs about two and a half years ago that I started to open up to the wonders of pop music. When I first saw them live, their combination of weirdness with good, catchy rock hit me slowly, crept up as I watched them, sandwiched between the screaming noise groups I had come to see that night at U-La-La in Kyoto. I'm so glad that that first psychadelic duo wasn't selling any CDs, leading me to buy The Dokuros' just released third album on a good feeling. This may have been the beginning of the breakdown of my musical elitism, my movement from overwrought principles of creating "new" music to releasing music that feels good and right.

The Dokuros make music that just feels good. And for people who feel more at home with a lifestyle separated from the mainstream, it feels really good. But it doesn't feel to me like a crusade to progress; it's music that fits different parts of our lives, and brings people together. And if it blends genres, is psychadelic, and screams its head off at the same time, it's just the way they, and we, feel.



And man, listen to that singer's voice! I remember listening to that third album of theirs for the first time and thinking they had gotten a man to sing the first song - a very weird-sounding man. Then, as I listened to the rest of the album, I started thinking it had to be one of the coolest and most unique singing voices I'd ever heard! It's one of my musical dreams to be able to sing a mix of that style and my own.

There's also something about their style, their dress, in the way they carry themselves on-stage and off. For me, it feels if anything like the granting of a musician's dream (or them granting it for themselves). Starting the band as first-years in college, they've changed members a couple of times, gone through huge musical change, and continued up until somewhere in their thirties. And the attitude of it all is still so normal. Rather, almost because of all they've done it seems normal. Watching them, and talking to them, you feel like you're witnessing proof that some people do just make music for a living. And not "a living" as in making end's meet - I'm sure every member must be working a separate job to support themselves moneywise - but meaning in their free time, to fulfill themselves, they make music and feel so enlivened by it that they continue to do it for years and continuously give more creativity and life to a community of people over time. That is amazing.



I got to meet The Dokuros a few times since I first went to see one of their shows (and completely failed) after coming to Japan this time. If I saw them after their shows, sometimes it was fun, sometimes it was awkward, sometimes it was really funny. I ended up getting to know the drummer the most. We talked for a while after their last show, before the drummer and lead guitarist were to leave. Turns out she's traveled a lot. We talked about L.A. and Mexico. She said L.A. looked like it was made out of jewels and that she liked Mexicans because they're おおさっぱ,　ozappa, or don't stress about the details, completely different from the typical Japanese and also both positive and negative. Before I left that night I bought the last CD and record I didn't have by them and said bye to them together for the last time.

Since then, I've seen the lead singer/guitarist and bass player play a show as a duo, which was pretty good, especially since they played some of the new stuff The Dokuros had been working on as a band before they broke up. But, やっぱり, it wasn't the same, without the lead guitarist, and without the drummer - the whole mood and atmosphere was different. The lead singer's loud personality was no longer countered by the chill drummer's observing expressions, nor the cringingly shy lead guitarist's demeanor, and even though I hung around at the venue for a little while after the show, I didn't really talk to them that much.

Since then, I haven't gone to see The Dokuros, though I recently checked their site and saw that the singer and bassist are still playing shows as a duo act and are sometimes joined by the rest of the band from the halfway through the performance. I'd like to see them again. I've been out of the music loop for a while, and it might be good for me to get back into things and start saying hi to people again. I think it would be nice to say hey to The Dokuros again, and see where our talks go this time.

http://www.myspace.com/dokuros

Their myspace only has their most recent songs up, which, while good, don't give the listener a taste of their louder, more rockish side. If anyone would like I can send them those songs, too.

So, how have they influenced my life, musically and otherwise...I don't know. But I definitely feel it. I think sometimes, that if The Dokuros' influence suddenly started becoming apparent in the music I was making it would be a cool, exciting, and satisfying thing to notice. But, I think it might even be better if I never knew where it was coming from, nor to where it was going.

Mm

Haha, well, I meant that last post to be a self-deprecating joke more than anything else (you know how I love those), so I hope no one thought I was like depressed and cursing the day which bore me.

In other news, I have been making this a lot lately. With only one new kitchen item, my new stock of corn tortillas from home, I can make this, my POWER BREAKFAST!!
















And with a little more extra something I brought from home...SUPER SALSA POWER BREAKFAST!!
















Just bought a new fresh batch of eggs and potatoes last night, so these babies are going to be making their appearances very often now. Mmm. Nothing transforms some normal, everyday scrambled eggs like some good, fried tortilla strips. Ironically, since I started eating these, the situation described above and in the last post began to develop (or decompose?) into a more confusing state, so maybe these delicious meals have actually sucked my power rather than given it to me, like some sort of mouth-watering, digestible succubus. Worth it? Hmm...

Also, I just applied to a job as an officer worker at an international center in the nearby biggish town. It would be really cool if I could get it; the only thing is this is like an actual...Japanese job. I'm going to be competing with Japanese people for this job. Granted they'll be other college students and recent college grads, but that still kicks the difficulty level up quite a bit (Haha, when I first saw that, I thought, 'Oh well, that'll work to my advantage since I'm not straight out of college!' Next thought: 'Uh...you're still not much different.'). I sent in the application yesterday, but in one month I'm going to have to take two tests: an English exam (in Japanese), and a general education test...in Japanese! So, I better get studying for that last one. From what I've seen of books that help you prepare for those...it looks a wee bit challenging for a non-native Japanese speaker. We'll see, though. The pay isn't even that great, but the job looks really interesting and I need anything I can get.

Besides that, I've been doing private tutoring for the past 10 days or so at about 20 bucks an hour, one hour a day. That has been awesome! Basically like hanging out with a friend and helping her with English conversation and interview practice for an hour. If I could get enough people to be able to make a secure living off of that, well that would just be fine with me. I don't need a lot of money, just an interesting job and enough finances to keep me stable while allowing for some fun things. I suppose I'll get going on those fliers and cards now then!

A friend of mine who works at a nearby restaurant recently saw me writing in my journal while eating there and asked me about it - I realized: I write in my journal nearly every single day. I've been writing in a journal since I was a kid, and especially often since I got to college, and since I went to study abroad. Every once and a while I look back on an older journal and see what I was thinking. Haha. It's interesting. Before, I would often write with the idea of keeping a record of things. Since coming to Japan this time, I've written often to alleviate the loneliness of not having anyone to talk to (more around this time last year up until winter) and now to guide me through and help me think out the situations I find myself in. Writing in my journal has really become an anchor in my life. And I like it.

Night Yudachi

(Smokey & Miho, Summer Rain)

Night yudachi watching. A yudachi is a usually sudden downpour that happens in the summer in Japan. They've been happening on and off all day long here, and the one going on now seems like it's going to be lasting quite a while.


















































































































One of my favorite things to do since I got to this apartment has been to sit out on the step that forms where the inside floor meets the balcony and watch the weather - the sunset, the sunrise, storms, snowy landscapes.

Now, it appears the fates have seen fit to bless me with at least this one, beautiful summer rainstorm before I move on from this to another place. This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, experienced, and been in from this view.

夕立, a sudden shower

Yudachi are beautiful
in a very special way.

Tottori

I took a trip to Tottori today.
I've been meaning to come back here since I first was there briefly at the end of last fall. I'll leave it at that and let you see for yourself.
























































































































































































And we're back home!

I brought my guitar so I could have a good jam on the beach. It was pretty nice, but I was hoping to come up with something a bit more...mind-blowing? In any case, it was nice to sing and play my guitar on that wonderful, cool seaside. I found myself playing a lot of continuous tremelo picking for long periods while singing in high then low ranges over it. Pretty soon I felt like I had done enough of that though, especially considering the last 30-minute behemoth of straight up-down strumming one chord with roaring hums and throat sounds layered over it I did the other week. That was good. Very good. But now, it may be time to move onto something new?

Which leads me to the recent change in the music I've been listening to. I think it started with The Kinks and some of The Rolling Stones. Then, I finally downloaded a ? and the Mysterians album. Then The Plugz. And now, I've dug up Devo and B-52s from the depths of my music library. On the other hand, I also got out some Sonic Youth and Lila Downs recently, too. So...but I suppose you can see in what direction this is going. I remember seeing my parents' B-52s albums when I was a kid and thinking, Wow that's funny-looking, I can't imagine my parents liking something weird like that. I mean, I didn't really get interested in it then. But oh...now I can understand. I feel the connection!

I've actually been wanting to go more in this music direction for a while, but for some reason, momentum has been moving me toward another one of my sides. Well, the top is off now and it won't be coming back on. I have an idea of the kind of music I want to make when I get back home, and it's not like anything I've made this far.

I'd like to go to Tottori again. Los Prisioneros Greatest Hits downloading (wish I could get some of their actual albums though). How does Rock Lobster get so dramatic(-ish)-sounding all of a sudden.