Glad I Live in Tokyo

I am so glad I live in Tokyo because there are many fine things to do in this city. For the price of mere shoe leather you can have yourself a genuinely interesting time just wandering the streets.

One of my bugbears about Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK was that it was a bit sneering of Sunderland even though Sunderland, a city with a poor number of restaurants and only one actual nightclub that one would deign to enter these days, has produced vastly superior culture (Futureheads, Frankie & The Heartstrings, Field Music). Tokyo is less sneering despite having more to sneer about and has a truly anything-goes culture.

Practically on my doorstep there's a photo gallery come dining bar that is absolutely lovely. F1.0 Blue Moment has great staff, great photos and Orion beer on tap.

I had a great time.

I Can't Keep Track of Time

Sitting there with your notebook, you sit, revisiting the past, whether weeks, minutes or seconds ago. When you write about the future, it's as you imagined it seconds ago. The pencil cannot keep up with the mind and the mind cannot keep up with time.

Every medium you choose is limited. Photographs, video, sketches, words, mime. Every expression is linked to an impulse moments before. The electrons in the brain, the electrons on the screen. The movement in the nerves, the movement in the muscles and the movement on the page.

Who needs a title when you have ennui?

All I want to do is relax and I am looking forward to the public holiday on Monday.

This week I watched Tsotsi which was violent and I probably understood an eighth of the dialogue and about half of the subtitles. But I did enjoy it.

Went to a festival last night and it was good (festival food, beer, izakaya afterwards for cranberry ume-shu sours).

Working myself ragged ends soon. Please, please let it be soon.

Note to self: I Am My Own Cheerleader

"Wasted time is wasted destiny."

Get cracking on the book. Working overtime is not an excuse because no matter how hard you work or not you still end up writing about the same amount anyway. Seriously. You can manage 3000 words a week which makes it only 2 months to get a first draft done. And while you're at it, it wouldn't hurt to print out the novel you've already finished and send sample chapters off to a few more agents.

Study Japanese if you aren't writing. You like both and you might as well do something productive instead of spending endless time on Flickr. It will only be more useful.

And try to be on the internet less. Remember when you were subtitling: get online after, not while, you are working.

Keeping Busy

I did think that after the Japanese test I would ease off on the Japanese study but so far I've been keeping it up. I do have papers to mark for one of the university classes I teach but that's something else entirely.



I was at a university when I had some girl sit next to me on the bus and try to have a conversation with me, in a mix of Japanese and English, about fifteen different subjects in as many minutes. To say that I was unamused would be a massive understatement.

After all

The test is over. It was perhaps the hardest test I have ever taken, harder even than Introduction to Biochemistry in my first ever undergraduate year. I took the test at Tokyo University's Komaba Campus, which looks pretty from the front but turns into the ever predictable 1960s mess of half-arsed, cut-price, fake-Bauhaus cubes that scar most campuses in most countries.

After the test I went for a pint with a colleague. Yesterday I enjoyed myself and indulged in the English language by picking up The Brothers Karamazov again and listening to a ton of recently reactivated English music (the Undertones, Elastica, The Cardigans, Cornershop).

But I have still studied. I even reviewed stuff in both my grammar book and picked up my list of all the kanji.

So it goes

I saw the Japan vs. Paraguay game and while it wasn't totally shambolic (like England) it wasn't exactly compelling football for the entire duration.

I just finished a mock Japanese test, and while I didn't get the pass mark, I at least improved my test technique and I didn't suck badly enough to want to off myself by burning alive in a pyre made from my Japanese textbooks and magazines.

Teaching tomorrow and Saturday and then comes the JLPT N2 test.

Related posts are: Reasons to Study a Language, Study in Progress, Crap, and I Think I'm Learning Japanese.