Not Even Remotely Close (Wait, Does that Make Sense?) to Being under the Volcano

It looks like our volcano, Shinmoe Dake, won't be going away any time soon. But I guess volcanoes aren't exactly like the tap in the kitchen sink. Apparently they've evacuated everyone within a few kilometers of the volcano--probably less because of any fear of some kind of "Krakatoa, East of Java" event than the simple fact that the air isn't fit to breathe...

I mentioned in an earlier post that last weekend we had a nice load of volcanic ash dumped here in Miyazaki. I kinda thought at the time that that would be, more or less, the end of it. Wrong. Not washing my car (which, by the way, is so covered with bird shit and the usual scum that accumulates from driving around) last weekend is making me look more like a genius than the lazy fuck I actually am. Well, I did make sure my wife's car got washed... Maybe I don't care that much what my car looks like, which could point to deep-seated psychological... Oh, yeah, the volcano...

So, for a couple of days things were pretty "normal" here in Miyazaki. I think it was Wednesday that I began to notice a certain dusty tang in the air, a dustiness that's still here. It's nothing like the major dump last weekend. This is a very fine dust that doesn't bother the eyes (or, not mine anyway). You taste it in the air, a bit like when you walk into a place where they grind metal or something.

It was around Wednesday that I noticed everything outside looked different. I haven't heard anyone else comment about this, but a) there's a very fine layer of very fine grey dust all over everything outside; I imagine that it's accumulating, and b) there's a very fine cloud of dust floating in the air. Everything outside looks different to me.

It's the light. It's reflecting differently off surfaces and it's coming through a fine haze of dust. As I mentioned, it seems like I'm the only one who notices it. I really notice it. But then, I curse the light every time I take a picture... It still sucks, by the way...

Artsy-Craftsy

Having spent a few days away in a foreign country... Wait. Having spent a few days away from my family, the powers that be... Wait. Never mind who or what "the powers that be" might be, they're just not me, OK? Yeah, I'm white and I'm male. But I'm not a "power that is". Or whatever.

So I was away for a few days last week. That, by the irrevocable laws that (I assume) govern families throughout the universe--past, present, and future, means I have to spend some "quality time" with my kid this weekend. The same kid who's recently taken to giving me sidelong glances whenever I speak, as if I were some hideous creature from another planet, and not the loving father who, just a few short weeks ago (by my reckoning) could do no wrong in her eyes. (She's started hanging around with friends from school lately. Girls, you know?)

Anyway, tomorrow morning I'm supposed to take this little girl-thing to the local community center, where nice community center-type volunteers are going to show us how to make our own lovely Christmas wreath. Wow! (If you imagined me writing/saying that "wow" and really meaning it, you are no friend of mine...) I know, with dread certainty, that I'll be the only man (or the only so-called "grown man") there. It will seem to me as if the entire city of Miyazaki has been somehow emptied of "men."

Times like this are almost enough to turn me religious, if only because the notion of "hell" becomes a little more plausible.

But why do I feel this way about such an apparently innocuous activity? Pleas to my wife about being uncomfortable in a roomful of girls/women fall on deaf ears. "I've never heard you complain about teaching English to class full of 18-20-year-old nursing students," she says, clearly oblivious to my professional realities. "And what about that waitress that used to come here for private lessons? You didn't seem to mind being alone with her in a room for two hours." I thought about "the waitress" for a moment...

Clearly my wife (nor, likely, you, gentle reader) will have none of my bullshit.

Fact is, I'm not a very artsy-crafsty guy. It's not that I dislike it, or anything. I just really suck at it. What I see "artistically" in my mind's eye simply will not come out through my hands. I can (or, at least I think I can) do a lot of things. But I can't draw a picture of... anything. Or make a nice Christmas wreath.

My kid can draw pretty well, though. And if she's not too embarrassed by my presence, maybe she can help me make a half-decent Christmas wreath...

Note to Self

Next time the Winter Olympics are on change your start page in Firefox so you won't need to see depressing crap like this cluttering every square inch of your computer screen:

U.S. stuns Canada
Team Canada falls to U.S.
What's wrong with team Canada?
U.S. Hockey stuns Canada
Waking Its Neighbors, U.S. Upsets Canada
Groan, Canada, groan
Marty Brodeur blows it against the Americans

Bleh.

Note to Self

You haven't been playing drums/music at all lately. Best get on the horn to the guys and get some jammin' together before your brain turns completely to mush. Yeah, Miyazaki (and probably most of Japan) kinda sucks when it comes to gigs for middle-aged guys doing classic rock shit, but there's always the rehearsal space. Playin' is playin'. Get that bass drum pedal you've been pining over for the last few months. Spend the money and you won't want to see it wasted gathering dust in the closet. Get those practice CDs done up and pass them out to the boys. How can you hope to make them see your musical vision of "post-psychedelic death folk" if you can't give them some idea of what it might sound like? Buy some new sticks. There's nothing like holding a brand new, un-nicked set of sticks... testing the weight--which one for which hand? ...testing the balance for a nice, loose grip... a few light, tentative taps on the snare and hats... Now they're nicked...

Possibility.

One, two, three, four...

Not Deep

You'd think that after doing the same job for a few years you could sort of just switch into "auto-pilot" mode. I find, however, that the longer I do something the more I begin to notice all the things I could or should have been doing. And, of course, when you turn your attention to one thing, some other thing usually suffers for it.

Hardly an original thought, but that's about where I am these days. Between things I have to do and things I want to do... And things I both have to and want to do. Better than being bored, I guess.

Damn YouTube

I got nothing to say these days, and no pictures to post, so I thought I'd look up some tunes on YouTube and basically coast a bit. Doesn't look like it's gonna happen tonight. For some strange reason I can watch videos that are embedded (so it seems) everywhere except on YouTube. When I go there and click a video they tell me that I need the latest version of Flash. I've downloaded and installed the piece of shit about 20 times now, but I still can't watch a video at YouTube. This also means, of course, that I can't embed anything.

Now I'm left with writing about how I've got nothing to post about. It's like the Seinfeld of blogs: a blog about nothing. A more clever person might use this as an opportunity to complain about YouTube, but I don't really see the point. I mean, it's not like we pay for the fucking thing, so why complain if it's an utter piece of shit once in a while? Well, it's really an utter piece of shit more than once in a while, isn't it? But it's free, so complaining about it probably comes across as being a bit ungrateful. And seriously, shouldn't we be grateful for all the wonderful things YouTube has given us?

Wow. I'm already tired of talking about YouTube. Lucky I wasn't posting about American Idol or something! Speaking of shit, isn't American Idol a bit like three (now four?) losers sifting through a pile of shit and debating which one is the tastiest? And I thought teaching English in Japan was a tough gig! Just goes to show, no matter how bad off you think you are, there's somebody in a worse situation. I mean, I have the luxury of changing the channel, but those poor saps have to act like they give a shit... And that fucking "music"... Please...

I can see this post beginning to degenerate. Soon I'll be railing against people who hum to themselves as they walk down the street or something. You can't really hear them, but you just know they're humming some awful tune... This time of year probably some Christmas tune... Damn them... If you're going to walk down the street humming tunes there should be a law that says they have to be White Zombie tunes or something... I could live comfortably in a world like that...

Conference

In Shizuoka for a work-related conference. Wandering around, clusters of gaijin, each doing their dutiful best to ignore the other.

When you register for one of these things they always give you a bag. Kind of like soccer players getting a cap for their international matches. I've been "bagged" several times, but I don't know if this one counts because it's in Japan. The bag usually contains a bunch of promo crap from text book companies and such. I give the pens, notepads, and other useful stuff to my daughter. She seems to like collecting my name tags, as well. (Recently I found one of my conference tags in which she'd crossed out my name and wrote her own above it. This little girl is worth more to me than the entire world.)

I guess I should be careful what I say. Not everyone is as carefree and irreverent about the theoretical underpinnings of their profession as I am. I'm a skeptic, and I'd be a piss-poor one if I didn't put what I do under the same scrutiny as I'd apply to right-wingnuttery, religion, UFO's, ghosts, and my own beliefs about anything, your beliefs about anything, and generally anything at all (well, except the primacy of the Stones).

Some ideas are better than others, but there are a shitload of bad ideas out there.

You might think that someone whose job lets him support his family and drink beer in so many cool places should probably whine about it a lot less. You'd probably be right.

I'm struggling to reconcile the notion of a restaurant/bar with hundreds of beers from around the world with Pinnochio playing on the wide screen. And Tokyo Ska Paradise playing through the speakers.

I once met a guy in a bar who happened also to be an "English teacher." He'd recently got his PhD in EFL or something. It was amusing to hear him tell me how I was "enculturing" my daughter by speaking to her in English (i.e. the idea being that language=culture; I can't honestly imagine a more ridiculous piece of shit masquerading as "theory"). I'd been telling him how I was teaching my daughter to use chopsticks...

I Want...

...a cigarette...

Lost in Translation

Last week some kind of virus or Trojan horse or some damned fucking thing disabled my computer at home (the one I'm using right now). All I know is that I was at work when it happened, and my wife was on the computer. I, of course, am not the type of guy to engage in the "blame game."

So I take the thing into the shop, knowing that the warranty expired long ago, and sensing that something is horribly wrong with my PC. ("Blue screen"? Heh, this was black screen, baby, and the mouse was moving! Yeah...). I tell My Guy at the shop (hey, he's the only one there with enough guts to approach and engage the "foreigner"--he's My fucking Guy!) what's up. He boots my box up and sees that I wasn't shitting him. He writes a note on a small piece of paper and hands it to a chubby guy with glasses who's sitting behind some kind of master console with several keyboards and monitors hooked up into... something. His fucking head, for all I know. The cyborg takes a look at the paper and makes a very subtle slashing motion across his throat. Right.

My Guy tells me that my computer has "some kind of virus or Trojan horse or some damned fucking thing" (in Japanese), but that they can fix it for 15,000 yen. That's somewhat less than a new computer, so I say "OK!" When I inquired about data loss due to the virus and the general purging of my PC, My Guy said that I wouldn' t lose any data...

Oh... OK.

In fairness to My Guy, I don't think he was lying or trying to mislead me. Last night when I got my PC back every single file--photos, mp3s, whatever, they were all still there, intact. This was good. The bad part was that the computer system itself had been rolled back at least a year (maybe two). If you don't know what that means, well, imagine losing all, and I mean fucking all, of your settings for two years.

Still don't know what I mean? OK, you lose Firefox and any other non-Microsoft programs. You lose all your bookmarks. All your passwords/cookies are gone. Chances are, you don't have a good firewall or any anti-virus software. Every click of every web page is a reminder of what you have to update/download/whateverthefuck. It sucks.

Game On!

I'm kinda tired of blogging right now. Usually when I say that I start back up again the next day (or sooner), but I've noticed that it isn't as fun when I try not to swear too much and/or give a shit whether I'm taken seriously. (What, you haven't noticed how hard I've been trying? Jeesh...)

And hockey season has started.


Go Bruins!

Nothing

I've got nothing on my mind this week. Absolutely nothing.

I need some strife...

One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I usually try to get back to Canada every couple of years--keeps my mom happy, my wife and daughter enjoy the holiday, I get to hang out briefly with a couple of old friends, that sort of thing.

We decided a few months ago that maybe we wouldn't go this year, mainly because of schedule-related stuff, and partly because of the expense (it costs about twice as much to fly to Halifax and back as it did pre-9/11--there's the free market in action!). When the swine flu stuff came along it was basically icing on the let's-stay-in-Japan cake.

I confess that I've still, somewhat secretly, been toying with the idea of finding a way to go. Or at least I was until today. It seems that this week alone there have been 32 new cases of the (ahem) dreaded swine flu in Nova Scotia. That's pretty much put an end to any thought I had of making it back home this year.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not personally paranoid about catching the flu (and really, that's what we're talking about here, isn't it--the flu?). No, I'm worried about the hassle of coming back into Japan (a country with confirmed flu cases) from an area with confirmed flu cases.

If that sounds weird, well, that's just the way it is.

Tonight...

Tonight, still jet-lagged, I'm staying put in my hotel room. I have, of course, the necessary libations to offer the gods of travel (and my own bottomless depravity), but still... I can't shake the feeling that I'm somehow being beckoned to a more interesting place, a better place... Oh, alright, a fucking fun place. Someplace like this...

It ain't easy being an aging rocker...

Land of the Freak

It ain't gonna happen, but here's where I'd like to be when the clock strikes twelve...



Probably better than where you'll be too...

Typhoon

In a slow year for these things, the year's first typhoon is blowing through Miyazaki. I don't know if it's because the typhoons here are a lot less intense than the hurricanes that blow through the American cities some friends of mine live in, or if construction methods here are superior, or whatever, but I've yet to feel any sense of emergency during one of these things (and I've been through at least 20 of them in the past 10 years).

No, no emergency. Just bloody inconvenience. The dog hasn't been out for a couple of days. My daughter's kindergarten (and probably others) mis-timed the whole thing and canceled tomorrow. This, of course, means that either me or my wife will have to take a day off work. My wife is a "part-time" (i.e. practically full-time with no benefits) nurse, so she doesn't get paid holidays. I'm a university teacher with full benefits, and second term doesn't start here until October (so I have nothing pressing to cancel). I may be a selfish bastard, but I know a losing argument when I see one. I'm staying home tomorrow. With crap weather outside. With a dog that by this time is ready to start eating her family. With a 5-year-old daughter who by this time is about ready to burn the condo to the ground. It's amazing the amount of energy that gets pent up from staying inside just for a day or two. Believe me, I know. That's what beer is for. Hey...

Brutality, Animality, Fatality... Mortal Kombat in HELL(o) Kitty Land

One of my duties as the father of a 5-year-old daughter requires that I take a yearly trip into the bowels of Hell to do combat with Hello Kitty. I'm leaving now.



I'll be gone for a couple of days, so nothing but a few automated pic posts until I get back. If I make it back alive...

The Cheese. It Burns!

While I don't think I'm a particularly graceful guy in my daily physical movements, I do pride myself a bit on not being a klutz. I'm rarely the guy who knocks over drinks, steps on peoples' feet, that sort of thing. On the rare occasion, however, when events (or my own stupidity) conspire against me, the results can sometimes be spectacular or disastrous (or both).

A few days ago I woke up hungry. I don't usually eat breakfast (coffee and smokes for me, thanks!), but on this day I decided I needed something to eat. I should probably be honest and say that my hunger was probably connected to the massive hangover I was... experiencing. Like most guys (I believe), I have a few "instant sustenance" recipes that have always served me well in situations of I-must-eat-now.

On this day I decided to put a slice of cheese on a piece of bread and throw it into the toaster oven. While this was toasting away I made instant coffee. (Hey, do you want to wake the fuck up, or do you want to "savor the flavor"? Go savor the fucking flavor at Starbucks, elitist scum!) Very conveniently (ahem), my coffee and melted cheese toast were ready to go at the same time. I carried them into my work room to eat and drink while checking e-mail and stuff.

Now, I'm not really sure how this happened, but as I was sitting down to the computer the toast with the melted cheese somehow started slipping off the plate it was on. I'm hungover, I'm in the process of a) sitting down, b) setting a cup of coffee on my desk, and c) trying to get this damned bread that's about to fall on the floor under control. If I'd simply let the toast fall to the floor, things would have been OK. But I was fucking hungry...

I made a kind of flipping motion with the plate (my undoing), hoping to catch the bread in mid-flight. All this accomplished was me flipping the toast so that now it was cheese-side down. My ass landed in my chair at the same instant as the now-upside-down melted cheese toast landed on my knee. My summertime-short-pants-wearing knee. The next one or two seconds were very educational...

The bread almost instantly fell to the floor. I observed, however, first with interest, and then with horror, that the cheese was stuck to my knee. It was fucking hot! And it was burning my knee! My knee was on fucking fire! I started to scrape the cheese off my knee. Small parts of my knee were coming off with it. "What the fuck," I thought, "this can't be happening!" It was happening. It did happen. And it fucking hurt.

I'd post pictures, but I don't want to gross anyone out. I haven't gone to a hospital because of the relatively small area of the burn (and I checked on the web: looks like a second-degree burn). The knee is a shitty place for a burn. It's reminded me of how often I actually bend my knee. Let this be a lesson: avoid melted cheese when you have a hangover.

Homesick

Listened to Sloan's new album on the way to work today. Saw a story on the web about a guy I used to play with in one of my first bands. I see that one of my old watering holes has "pitcher and pizza" for $12.50. Hmm... beer and pizza on the sidewalk of Spring Garden Road... Halifax in the summer...

Fuck it. Back to work...

Tired

I'm tired of all this fucking rain...

Sick and Tired of Waking Up Sick and Tired

My sinuses have been really bothering me for the past couple of weeks. It hasn't helped that I've also been very busy. I went to a specialist this morning, and he confirmed what I'd already suspected: I've got some kind of infection that has spread throughout all the empty spaces in my head (believe me, we're talking a dimension unto itself here). I got a prescription, so I'll see how it goes over the next few days...

While I'm here I might as well talk a bit about something else that has been annoying me for, oh, about the last 10-15 years. I'm sick and tired of "false dichotomies", and I'm especially sick and tired of the false dichotomy of nature and nurture (or the environment, however it's currently expressed in "learned" circles these days). Let's get one thing straight from the get-go, OK? There is nothing, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, anything in the entire universe that can properly be called "unnatural." "Nurture" (or whatever) is simply a mode of nature, because nature is all there is.

When people call this or that "unnatural" what they really mean is that it's "disagreeable" (to the one speaking). I suppose this does give us some idea of the speaker's attitude about a given topic, but it's not really conveying much in the way of factual information. Others may actually be referring to the "supernatural" when they call something unnatural. This may give us some indication of the speaker's mental health, but (again) it's not really very helpful in matters of fact.

Basically, if anything actually exists, it cannot logically be "unnatural." Of course, it's only natural that many people are confused about this.