Various

This week I have mostly been counting down to pay day. While I haven't been eating mayonnaise sandwiches and drinking only water, I have been tightening my belt, so to speak. I have however been enjoying tofu with kinako (soy bean flour), sugar and milk. It tastes like Weetabix.

Today I enjoyed the luxury of a haircut and bought a book, The Brothers Karamazov. I have started to read it and I am not sure whether it is a weird translation or just that Dostoevsky was ahead of his time by eighty years or more. It's a 130-year-old book but it reads like it could have been written last week. Marvellous so far.

My redraft of the novel is gathering pace and I think I am on the final draft now. It seems to be a matter of tidying up rather than rewriting whole sections (touch wood).

Now to put my laundry away and make the bed so I can sleep in it.

Snow again

While the snow was a big surprise when it started coming down last month, it has not been a pleasant surprise lately. Today, coming home from work I had to waddle in order to arrive home without slipping and falling into the path of oncoming cars.

My girlfriend is deeply unhappy and very busy and I wish I could be there to comfort her when she needs it. Then again, I seem to be proving myself to be quite inept at comforting anybody, even myself sometimes.

I finished Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby last week and enjoyed it immensely. This week I am reading the local library's English copy of Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies which also seems to be rather good if totally different to the Hornby book.

Picks

Pictory - Neighborhood Treasure

One of my photographs is featured in the current Pictory showcase, Neighborhood Treasure. My photo is number twelve. Check out the showcase because all of the photos that aren't mine are great. I am biased toward my own. But yeah, check it out. It costs nothing but time you'd spend on Facebook.

Scary

Today I had the pleasure of my first visit to a certain kind of specialist.

Yesterday I had the displeasure of finding a lump. You can't really say the words "a lump" without the connotations of "early death" or "have you seen 'Terms of Endearment'?" I tried not to worry. Work was a very welcome distraction. Sleep didn't really come last night, and I just lay in bed entertaining dark thoughts about terminal illness. People cried. Unable to afford a funeral I jumped into a volcano.

I do not have anything to be alarmed about though. It's a stupid disease (but embarrassing).

I feel like I am born new. There is no waste to this any more. There will be more exercise and more fresh fruit and vegetables in my new lifestyle.

I finished the novel's draft on Monday. This next draft should be somewhat quicker.

I Certainly Am Foreign

I wasn't going to post this but I need to rant and rave about it.

In the last week I have been racially abused (verbally) twice. It's quite unusual. In the last year and a half since I returned to Japan, these have been the first incidents. I don't count staring by children in the street as incidents because I know I cut quite a striking figure: I'm tall and have blue eyes, therefore as close to Hollywood come to life as most kids are going to get. I'm an uglier, low-budget Steve Buscemi B-movie figure.



Both this week's incidents involved use of the word 'gaijin' which, for some of us international residents but not myself, is akin to the n-word. While I personally prefer the use of the word 'gaikokujin', I don't believe the word 'gaijin' is always used with racial discrimination in mind; some of my experiences have it equate as a simple adjective like fat, skinny, tall, short, etc. but whenever racial abuse toward foreigners in Japan crops up, the word 'gaijin' invariably does too.

The first incident involved an old geezer on a bicycle who shouted "Sukebe gaijin!" (Pervert foreigner) at me as I walked with my girlfriend near Shinjuku Gyoen. I was shocked at first, then joked about it, quipping "How does he know?" After that, maybe five or ten minutes later when my brain finally engaged, it really hit me as a downer.

My girlfriend told me not to take it to heart. "Most Japanese would be angered by him." I know she's right. It's the hatred in his eyes that really caused me the hurt. I like to think Japan is home for me and I normally feel settled here. It's only when things like this happen that I realise that my being here does actually depend on the whims of the government and the demand for English teachers. That there are a minority of people here who resent my presence is not a surprise but it's always surprising when it's made known in public.

The second incident was last night on my way to the dry cleaner's. A woman waiting for the bus called me either a "henna gaijin" (weird foreigner) or "iyana gaijin" (irritating/loathesome foreigner). Still being kind of hung up on being abused in Shinjuku, I called her out on it and asked her what she said to which she pretended to be in thrall to her headphones. Frustrated I called her a "dasai baba" (hard to translate for me but basically trashy middle-aged woman) and in English a "stupid fucking bitch".

Anyway, it's not like whiteys like me get a raw deal in Japan, it's just that ignorant people are unpleasant sometimes. Were I to experience the racism and fear that tall, black men face, whether I'd still be here is debatable.

Cat Cafe

I come from a family that dislikes cats. I always used to get a bad feeling from cats too; whenever I entered a room where there was a cat, the cat would dash out. I took this as distrust and had been ambivalent toward cats.



My girlfriend is very much a cat lover. Because she was down a bit last week we went to a cat cafe. It gave her a big smile and gave me a chance to play with my camera and shoot some film.



I can't imagine a cat cafe opening in England. I think the main obstruction would be the health and safety madness: we have laws that allow litigation for the slightest thing so most businesses have to be over-cautious. It's a shame, because I'm sure it's the closest some people will come to owning a pet. I suppose it's like a hostess club or English language school where rather than sitting with a beautiful lady or a strange foreigner you sit with a docile cat. Marvellous. And probably cheaper.

Seeing Culture With A Sweet Tooth: Saint Valentine's Day

It's that time of year, the one where the price of roses quadruples and where young men with pimpled faces and pure, unbridled romance hurl themselves into oncoming traffic. Saint Valentine's Day, once the day to remember an imprisoned Christian and others persecuted for faith, is now the day of love, innuendo, flowery poetry, flowers themselves.

And in Japan, it is the day of chocolate.

Previously I've been ambivalent about Valentine's Day. I used to be almost terminally single, especially as a teenager and in my very early twenties. At school and work, the people who received the most Valentines day cards were invariably the people that you hated (and envied on that one day) the most.

In Japan, even if you're single you still get to celebrate because guys get given giri chocolate by women at work and sometimes (though rarely) school, basically a platonic gift. If you're not romancing on Valentine's Day you at least get to comfort eat the best food for that purpose.

Part 1 Part 2

How to improve your life

You know what really annoys me these days? Productivity blogs. Why? Cos they're almost cultish in their devotion. Many was the time I would read posts, trying to find a quicker way to do something other that is meaningless, dull and adds little or no quality to my life. Now they're like a whole industry and you know what? They have no wisdom to impart other than "Relax. Too much stress is bad. Throw away the crap that you don't need." And people read through the same advice recycled ten different ways and reposted with addendum on a bunch of other productivity blogs. Then "Buy the book that is basically this blog but maybe some other stuff we wrote so people who read the blog don't feel like total mugs."

The only help you will ever need by Marc Jones.

Be healthy. This means do exercise sometimes and get fresh air. Don't eat just chocolate. Walk sometimes. Don't smoke. Try not to drink, and certainly don't drink enough to get a hangover.

Relax. Stress is bad. Nothing matters. If the apocalypse happens tomorrow, nothing you have done will really matter, nor will anything you haven't done. So you burned some bridges. Wow. Don't worry. If you really are worried, try to change what you're worried about. Eliminating all stress is unrealistic but try not to stress about the minutiae.

Throw away the crap you don't need. For those in the West, there's EBay. For those of us in Japan there are Yahoo Auctions or second-hand shops or the dustbin. You don't need it all. You don't even have the room for it.

There probably isn't a shortcut. Persevere. Life's a bitch.

Buy my book. There isn't a book, certainly not for advice, but you can always email me if you want to get my address to send me some money. About a million quid would do.

Ramble

In place of any structure I was going to put into this post I think I'm just going to ramble.

My week has been one of minor illness, anpan, Earl Grey and reading due to said minor illness.

Normal service is being resumed, slowly but surely, even though I have yet to type out todays self-imposed mandatory 1000 words but have managed to eat an entire pack of anpan and a bar of chocolate in a sitting.

You should consider checking out Light Plays Tricks as well.