Working for the weekend

Marina Del Rey sunset

I’ve been in Los Angeles for business since the beginning of November. I have a nice apartment just five minutes from the famous Venice Beach. The weather is beautiful—there’s no better place to be in November than sunny California—but I spend pretty much all day every day in a recording studio. Even Saturdays. I only get Sunday off to enjoy the great outdoors.

And the outdoors are great. Check out some more photos.

I’ve only been in the US for two weeks at this point, so I’m still going through a little reverse culture shock. Of course there are good things, like the food. I’ve had some great Mexican, Greek, Indian, Thai, Italian, Chinese, etc. meals that either don’t exist in Japan, or would cost at least double. (The exchange rate is certainly in my favor right now.)

But one thing I can’t stand about LA is the traffic. If the roads are empty I can make it to work in about 7 minutes, but going home the other day took over 30 minutes. In absolute terms that’s not bad at all, but a 300% variation in transit time? If I had to deal with this every day I think I’d go nuts. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Japan’s public transportation.

Moving along

Yokohama by night

It’s been quite a while, so quick update:

• I left my CIR position in Ikata and took a job in Yokohama, localizing video games.
• I’m in Los Angeles on business for most of November. Sunny California is a good place to be in November!
• I moved my blog to… here!

So there you go—the last few months of my life summed up in three sentences.

Spring is here

Onomichi sunset

It’s been quite a while since my last substantive update, so I’ll keep this brief.

• I ran my first half marathon. It was just a practice run for an upcoming competition, but it was great. Unfortunately I soon afterward hurt my foot and had to sit out the actual race.
• The last ekiden (relay race) of the season was yesterday. I managed to run 5k in 19:59, which is probably the fastest I’ve ever run.
• I decided not to recontract, so some other lucky person will get to come and internationalize this pubic hair on the right testicle of Japan.
• I’m thinking I want to go to China to study Mandarin for 6 months or so, but I’m having a hard time choosing a school. Any recommendations?
• This weekend I’ll be biking across the Shimanami Sea Route (link fixed), a series of bridges connecting small islands in the Inland Sea between Shikoku and Hiroshima. I took the above-right picture last November from atop a mountain in Onomichi on the other end of the route. Onomichi is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. In the future when I’m independently wealthy and have villas and vacation homes all over the world, the first place I’m going is Onomichi.

The speed of sweat

Jesus Journey is my personal trainer.

I discovered something important yesterday. While during the sweltering Ehime summers I struggled to improve my running speed, after having barely run at all for several weeks I was able to easily beat 7 minutes per mile for 4 miles, with hills, twice this week.

I think the key must be heat dissipation. Not only is it hot here in the summer, but it’s also horribly humid. The high water content in the air prevents your sweat from doing its job, i.e. evaporative cooling, so you just get hot and wet. It’s hard to run when you’re overheated. But now that it’s nice and cool and dry in the evenings, it’s much easier to run without feeling like you’re wading through lava.

In case anyone cares, the “Running” playlist on my iPod goes Journey → Journey → Journey → Journey → サンボマスター → The Postal Service, and then I forget.

I am alive

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. I am alive and with all my limbs; no one I know was hurt in the bridge incident.

What little blogging I have been doing has been on mixi, in Japanese, so I figured no one who reads this one would care. Since I’m back home on vacation now, I may translate over some of the more interesting posts.

“What’s going on”, the short version:

• One year of JET down, one more to go. I’m not so enthusiastic this time around.
• I didn’t win any of the translation contests I entered.
• WarioWare: Smooth Moves is the shit.
• The best recent Japanese novel that probably won’t get translated to English is War with the Next Town Over (となり町戦争 Tonarimachi sensō). It was also made into a movie that probably won’t be released outside of Japan.
• I’ve run over 250 miles since I started using the Nike + iPod thingy last summer. My fastest 1-mile is 6’41″.
• Indulging my fetish for standardized testing, I took and passed Level 2 of the Japanese Kanji Aptitude Test (漢検2級 Kanken 2-kyū). That’s the highest level that most Japanese people ever bother getting. Now I have yet another way to alienate the locals.

Another ekiden failure

I ran another ekiden this past Sunday. It was the Seto Ekiden, a mostly local event with sections of pretty similar length to the one I ran previously. Since the beginning of the new year I’ve been training as regularly as my legs allow it, and so I was hoping to perform a little bit better this time. At the very least I wanted to be able to finish without slowing to a walk.

But, true to form, I of course failed spectacularly. Here’s how it happened:

First of all, my alarm clock failed to go off.

George

I’ll tell you what happened. I bet he got the AM/PM mixed-up.

Nope, it wasn’t the AM/PM since my alarm clock is my cell phone and it uses a 24h clock.

Jerry

My money’s on the snooze. I bet he hit the snooze for an extra 5 and it never came back on.

Nope, it wasn’t the snooze. I don’t think the snooze function ever gives up on my phone.

Jean-Paul

Man, it wasn’t the snooze. Most people think it was the snooze, but no, no snooze.

Jerry

AM/PM?

Jean-Paul

Man, it wasn’t the AM/PM. It was the volume.

Nope, the volume was set fine. The alarm is plenty loud even if the phone is in silent mode.

The problem was something that could really only happen on a device as complex and advanced as a Japanese cell phone: I figured I’d just get up at the same time I usually do for work, but I forgot that the “Work” alarm was set to only go off on weekdays.

So I woke up about 15 minutes before I had to meet the team, put on my running outfit, raced to Lawson to pick up some rice balls, and downed them as quickly as possible while walking to the meeting place.

Upon arriving I found that I had been moved from section 2, the flat part, to section 1, the hilly part. That also meant that I had about an hour less to digest.

The race started at 9:30 am in the bitter coastal winds. I was doing fine for about 10 minutes, then all of a sudden my stomach cramped up—the rice balls weren’t gone yet, and they were angry. I slowed to a walking pace, being passed by junior high and elementary school students, in front of the whole town which had for some reason turned out to watch.

Pathetically limping along, I was quite relieved to see the finish area—only to realize that it was the halfway finish area for the juvenile division (which runs the same full distance but divided among twice the runners). I got a good laugh from the crowd when I tried to pass my sash to my teammate who wasn’t there. The second half sucked about as much as the first.

Days later my stomach still feels weird, and I was really dogging it when I went running today. I suppose no matter how awesome the iPod + Nike exercise measurement system is, it doesn’t make you an athlete.

Here we go again

Sadamisaki Lighthouse

If I was a less cynical man, I might say that this picture symbolizes a new beginning, a fresh start for 2007. In actuality, it doesn’t symbolize anything but my harrowing journey to the edge of the known universe, where this god-forsaken lighthouse stands. M came down from Tokyo to enjoy a little country living; little did she know she’d nearly disappear from the face of the earth into the choppy ocean waves.

I broke down and finally picked up a Nintendo DS Lite along with two games: Tokoton Kanjinō (とことん漢字脳, a Kanji practice game) and Animal Crossing. I’m enjoying it, but the hunger for even newer, more exciting games is already ripping through my insides.

I spent New Year’s Eve at a coworker’s house. He and his family treated me to dinner, and I joined them in the ritual first-temple-visit-of-the-new-year (初詣 hatsumōde). Then I taught his kids the card game Shitboot, which they now know and love by the literal Japanese translation, クソ長靴 (kuso nagagutsu).

While watching episode after downloaded episode of Law & Order: SVU, I’ve been pondering whether 2007 will be a good year, or merely the same as every other year—namely, not horrible but nothing to write home about. Can a jaded man become un-jaded? Do they have that yet? If we can put a man on the moon…

A brownish Christmas

I’m in Japan! …still. While everyone else is back home or traveling, I’m still at the edge of the known universe, writing New Year cards and losing relay races.

To be specific today was the Sadamisaki Ekiden, a relay race from the tip of the peninsula up to the next town over. I was originally entered as an alternate, but for whatever reason I was put in at the 11th hour. I had section 5, a 4.6km chunk connecting my neighborhood to the one on the other side of the mountain.

4.6km isn’t bad when it’s flat, and when it’s not so cold that my asthma acts up, or when I don’t have to wear a uniform with short shorts even shorter than my boxers. I ruined my team’s lead, getting passed by two people and almost a third at the end.

But it’s not all that bad. After all, in the Alternate Worlds theory of quantum mechanics there must exist some universe where I won. Or you could postulate a universe where I still sucked, but losing was considered a higher honor than winning. Or just consider this same universe under CPT translation, and it looks like I won going the opposite direction.

So. Racing on Christmas Eve. Yep, it’s a party around here. And I have work tomorrow. PAAARTAY!

Sea bream, Nintendo, and beer

Sea bream's last hurrah

This is going to be a very random post. Please bear with me.

The picture is of a sea bream that had been sliced and diced and fixed in a grotesque position, its dead eyes cutting into one’s soul like a laser through a marshmallow. It was present at my welcome party, stoically offering up its flesh as sashimi for the enjoyment of my drunken coworkers.

I recently visited a store called Hard Off. You heard me. There are a number of chains of used goods stores in Japan named “x Off” where x ranges from “Book” to “Hard(ware)” to “House(hold goods).” At Hard Off they have used electronic hardware of all kinds, including “junk” items, at garage sale prices, that may or may not work. I gave in to the dark side and picked up a Super Nintendo and a bunch of classic games for extremely cheap.

I was recommended a brewery by someone who I’d be honored to call a colleague. It was a little pricey, but the service was excellent—my 12 bottle sampler arrived two days after I sent in my payment, on a holiday, and because I was out at the moment the delivery guy called me on my cell to arrange a pickup. The beer? Quite good. Infinitely better than the standard Asahi, Kirin, Suntory, etc. crap.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the other JETs in the area. They’re all really nice, but I’m worried that I might be repeating some of the same mistakes I made at Keio—specifically, not making enough of an effort to get to know the locals. On the other hand, the locals have blown me off 3 times in a month, so screw them.

Apple recently issued a battery recall, and mine fell into the recalled group. My replacement arrived today, eliminating extended battery life as one possible benefit to upgrading my old iBook to a MacBook. Would someone like to break into my house and steal my iBook? Let me get some theft insurance and back up my data first; then we’ll get this show on the road.

I haven’t gone running for a couple weeks, with the excuse that I don’t want to aggravate my shin splints. My apartment is instantly filthy the moment I stop cleaning it. I’m planning a Halloween event of some kind for my elementary kids but don’t know where to find any pumpkins.

My kingdom for the energy to run, a perpetually clean apartment, and a field full of pumpkins! Oh yeah, and a new MacBook.

Honai in the mountains

Honai in the mountains

It’s a chore to get off my peninsula and onto the mainland. After wheezing my way up a mountain and through a tunnel, I found this view of the nearby town of Honai.

Honai is actually now a part of Yawatahama. They merged to save on administrative costs, just like practically every small town in Japan. This makes JET placements quite deceiving—you may be placed in “Yawatahama City,” but if that part of the city happens to be the former Honai, then you’re not really in the city at all; at best it’s a nearby suburb with all of the associated difficulties in transportation but without the yuppie feel.

I’m going to rant about TV for a bit now. I’ve complained about TV before on my blog, so let’s get the overlapping content out of the way: News shows.

Yesterday everyone was worried that typhoon 10 was going to hit the area; as a result, my plans to see the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie were canceled. It ended up being a bunch of nothing, as the typhoon swerved west into Kyūshū instead.

This morning I was watching the news when they switched to a weather update on the typhoon. You’d think they’d have some fancy on-screen graphics with nice, colorful icons and animations showing a map of Japan with an overlay of the typhoon and its course. Or, failing that, large, bright, crisp LCD displays showing the same. What did they show? Some guy’s PC monitor with Internet Explorer displaying an ugly version of weatherchannel.com. To illustrate his description of the weather, he clicked around, going from page to page. You are on TV telling us about the weather. We can assume, therefore, that you are a weather professional. At the very least, please maintain such an appearance.

Other things that enraged me: A news report about the recent popularity of completely unnecessary cosmetic surgery for kids. They didn’t say it in so many words, but basically 90% of the kids are forced into it by their idiotic, self-serving parents. They did mention that a strong trend in this is divorcees who want to make their child look less like their former spouse. I wanted to vomit, then throw the vomit in the face of the woman they interviewed who forced her perfectly acceptable-looking son to get a ridiculous operation to make his eyes look more Western.

There was something else too, but I forgot it.

My job is looking up—One of my superiors actually seems interested in having me translate the town website, so I’m slowly plodding through that. I’ve discovered that most of the people in my office are quite skilled in just looking busy, and any excuse I can find to talk to them is welcomed by a half hour of chitchat. Oh, the joys of government bureaucracy.