Hey this thing is on! Only two and a half hours or so after that last post, Hendrik offered me cookies!
Thank you!
“Hrrr hmm…” {lowers voice} “…did you hear? Meghan could use a new hairdryer.”
OK, that’s the end of my third person-ing for a while.
Speaking of falling, I saw a friend who was off to some event, the dessert bringing kind. Someone else was carefully holding a bag of hers on its side. What’s in there? Oh…it was an apple pie but two steps out the door I slipped and fell and now it’s a half-squished apple pie.
Aww poor thing! It was a freshly baked pie too! Out the oven, out the door and then that’s it - the pie becomes crippled. But it tastes the same, she could still bring it. Yes it does taste the same. I suggested that she should offer it has apple crumble and then people will not notice the difference.
Then an even better name came out: apple schlepenfahl
I’m sure that joke has been used for as long as apple pies have existed, but I just woke up from a nap and need something to chuckle about.
Heh, snowball effect. I wrote “woke up for a nap”. That may have been me in year 2 of graduate school. Just kidding, but really, I like that expression.
…I actually forgot about a piece of chocolate I purchased the other day. That never happens to me. You know those kids that have Halloween candy at Easter? Well - that was definitely never me.
Below was possibly…a little negative and I am tempted to delete but…maybe instead of getting rid of pain the aspirin here makes me a little loopy. I’ll keep it there as a reminder. I am wiped, checking in soon. Was watching an episode of Samurai Jack and wondering why the first four minutes were filled with shots of planets, space, and howling wind sounds. Then a character talked and I realized I was watching my screen saver. Seriously - 4 minutes.
I am doing apartment cleaning and considering things that need to be gone before I leave (to avoid a mad scramble in September). I can only take a large suitcase, a large backpack, and large tupperware container, a small backpack and a carry on suitcase of things back with me. OK so I don’t need to worry too much but…
…the old shoes can’t come with me. No matter how attached I feel to them.
This morning I threw away the keds (March 2006 - March 2007):
Bought the week before I came to Japan and worn until I came back to Vancouver a year later.
More heartbreaking, I through away my Sugar shoes (August 2002 - sometime winter 2007):
They were purchased when I visited my sister in San Fran that many summers ago. I could probably still get another year or so out of them but really, I have not worn them much since the fall and I don’t flatten well for packing.
Actually as I wrote the above I thought about shoe bronzing but that would be heavy and bulky still. Then I thought - oh - I totally should have taken them apart and at least made something with them (something flat). To late…darn it.
Today - I used a hex editor for the first time.
K so I’ve had to deal with hex before but this is like…I used a hex editor.
If you spend a lot of time on computers or programming this might be a fairly insignificant event for you but for me - there is some strangeness to it.
Luckily it is helping me find answers. I am battling with character encodings in Java. I have to convert text (possibly Japanese) encoded in iso-2022-jp to utf-8 and it is only half working. Some characters (mostly hiragana but a few kanji) are showing up as ???. I’ve been able to figure out that in my program, characters are been properly converted from iso-2022-jp to their Unicode values. So it is a problem when going from Unicode to utf-8.
I’m sure this was really interesting for you all…
Oh! Last night after work I missed a train by a few seconds and in my frustration I bought this strange hot sweet red bean beverage from the station vending machine. I can’t remember the name but I will try to post a picture tomorrow. It was nice at the time but on reflection I don’t know if it is necessarily good to consume habitually.
Lately I have been thinking about my senses become duller and duller as I age. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, recollection, taste – not losing them but they are not as intense as they used to be. Actually sorry, I am using my conclusion as an introduction to something I will tell. I was not really thinking about the above in a highly conscious way at all. I just told myself the other day that I wanted to shower blindfolded and see (or hear, smell, taste, touch) what happens. In the shower I normally first wash my face with my eyes closed. Today, once I reached the point of feeling no soap security, I still did not open them again. I kept them closed until I was out, dried, back in a housecoat (it is Saturday) and sitting in front of open waffles to write about the experience. Below are observations/thoughts of note in mostly chronological order:
For most of the shower I found that I was replacing my vision with mental images of the shower around me. Not necessarily the important things like where the shampoo and conditioner are and don’t knock over that can of shaving cream but things like the colour of the shower curtain and the fact that a vent is above my head.
At moments the urge to open my eyes was very strong. Maybe dehydration from last night’s drinking had something to do with it. Right now my eyes feel dried up and tired. I want to exercise them, stretch them, open-shut, and open-shut, and wide.
I had thoughts of falling asleep. My mind was being tricked into thinking it was bedtime because the go to sleep signal (shut eyes) was given. My breathing also became a lot slower, sometimes stopping and I had to remind myself to take bigger breaths.
Most things in the shower I could do with ease because I have memorized the body movements. I got thrown off trying to find my sponge hanging from part of the shower fixture. I was looking for the fixture first and got lost on the wall. I always get lost on walls…lose my perception of distance up/down/left/right.
(Side story: when I was younger we visited some family friends and stayed overnight. I stayed on the top bunk in a room with a girl the same age as me. During the night I slept-walked off the bunk and ended up on the floor by the closed door, next to a dresser. I woke up and could feel the door, feel a wall, feel something wooden beside me, but everything was dark and I could not remember where I was. I was trying to find the doorknob…maybe there would be light outside the door. But I was lost on the wall and the door – could not remember how high a typical doorknob would be placed. Pawing at the wall I panicked and resorted to screaming for help. My mother came. The next morning I came to breakfast with a very very very red face.)
I faced my first real challenge after the shower. It was time to put on face cream and I use a type that requires application of two liquids from two bottles of identical form and one should go on before the other. How do I tell the difference? It took me a couple of moments, holding the hard bottles in my hands, to realize that I could shake the bottles and distinguish them by the density of liquid inside – one was more watery than the other. This made me think a lot about the details that we store in our minds that are not so frequently accessed.
Actually, another problem that I faced before coming out of the shower was the issue of product quantity. How can I tell the amount of shampoo or conditioner being dispensed? It was complete guesswork. In my head there was no information on how long I should squeeze the bottle, what a certain amount might feel like in my hand…I have always calculated this using only visual information.
Movement out of the shower and into my room was harder. In the shower I was in a confined place and could easily make mental images of the space around me. I was comforted by constant walls. Coming out of the bathroom, there was uncertainty in space beyond my arm’s reach. To compensate, my mind made walls around me. Moving in a wide space I was still mentally in an area similar to that of the shower – perhaps even smaller.
The room smelled sweeter than before. I finished drying, put on my housecoat and sat down at my desk. Reaching for waffles, I found its coldness right away. Something was on top – one of my Japanese books. I moved it over thinking about how I was using it prior to having a shower. This made me think about relying on recollecting past actions/events when you cannot use visual information. We see the states of things with little processing in the conscious mind…the eyes guide. Is this blindness good for exercising 思い出すこと? (=omoidasu-ing… I like the Japanese word because 思う is to think and 出す is to take/send out…it creates a better image of recollecting, remembering, collecting thoughts, bringing thoughts up.)
Now I have the window open. A cool breeze is coming in. I can feel it intensely on my bare feet. The air is sweet with the aroma of my shower products and the sun makes things glow.
My mind feels refreshed. There are still brain cramps from drinking last night but it is refreshed in terms of thought generation. I am not thinking the same thoughts that cycled over and over before my shower and I feel as though I have a quickly reflex to act on ideas. Heh - this can be a good OR bad thing but in my case I think it is currently good. I tend to get ideas, think yeah that would be interesting, but then not act on them and instead occupy myself with the useless chatter in my head (ex. my teeth are too crooked, I need to buy more milk, etc).
Two thoughts that came and were acted on immediately:
(1) I looked around me and thought about photographing junk piles and signs of usage around the home to capture activities and experiences in spans of mundane time. The pictures below are this morning:
(laptop
a Halls that will never get eaten because my cough is gone
folders with papers to read for thesis
FANCL receipt for face cleansing products I spent too much money on
an empty pack of のど candies that I have recently become addicted to (remainder from my cough experience)
a box that the vase from my glass blowing experience was shipped in - it seems like such a good box I can’t part with it so it is now the base of my FANCL calendar - reward for spending so much money on their products in hopes of virgin-like skin
a red plastic bag that feels too good to throw away
the USB cord for my camera
mail concerning the 10k race in 3 weeks
a catalogue that was subscribed to by former resident of my room….I’ll have to write about its contents another time)
(when I look at this picture I can remember the dreams that I had before the bed obtained this state. it was a really deep comfortable sleep. in the morning I did not want to get out of bed.)
(2) I started to write this in my usual manner – going straight through from beginning to end – then remembered that I would forget all my thoughts a third of the way through and stop writing. So I quickly made points of everything I thought about. I always think I should do this when I write but still, usually I don’t and then I get writer’s block and then I stop. The above was successfully constructed using the first-make-points method
I don’t know if this end bit is related to my 15 minutes of blindness but I think I will continue to incorporate periods of blindness into my routines in order to sharpen my dulling senses and refresh the lesser used functions of my brain.
This week’s omiyage is from Australia. Chocolate koalas and too cute to eat quite yet so mine is sitting on the desk. I named it Moo. It smells strongly of chocolate. Very strongly. Testing my willpower. Actually it is not so much that I want to eat the chocolate. I have eating a good quantity of chocolate in my lifetime and unless someone weird allergy is developed between now and death, I expect to eat a lot more. But the smell tickles my brain in the most interesting way. I can almost pinpoint the nerve (or ) that fires off the yummy chocolate signal.
update: It appears as though my heater is indeed broken.
second update: Moo died.
So I have been naming my pages instead of numbering them. This notebook is men’s names. Next will be female names. Achieving alphabetical ordering of pages with the first letter of each name. My notebook is 60 pages…I am at V and I don’t know what to do after Z. Guess I could combine men’s and women’s names but is that a very moral thing to do…in the same book?
It’s fun learning which names come to mind before others. Even more fun is learning which names come to mind first, but I can’t write them because…I just can’t.
I came to “U” and “V”. “V” instantly brought up Victor but “U”…I have written this post and I still cannot think of a men’s “U” name. Can someone help me? I keep coming up with things like, Uruguay but…that’s a country. If I know someone who has a name beginning with “U” and I am not remembering it at the moment…I am sooooo sorry. But I am stuck!
As I finished up that last post, it occurred to me that sometime in the past…oh I don’t know how long…I had acquired the habit of saying I am busy. I’ve said that a lot in life and when things are not so busy I say, “oh things are pretty good…not much going on you know…”, but lately - always busy. I was curious as to how much I riddle this site with mentions of being busy so I searched “busy” and excel-ed the results:
Now, I don’t think I could take this to court or anything - there are too few sample points. But it still speaks something to me. I am also guessing that if I were to include my “busy” utterances over phone conversations and text chats, my data set would escalate into something very much statistically significant.
Please note that the Aug 2006 mention is not this post.
Sorry folks, Meg won’t be writing much until she learns how to reform her solid self as she is now floating around as a cloud of evaporated sweat. The view is great but her cloud self can’t quite process the spectacles she sees.
Seriously, I am dehydrated from sweating so much today. The heat is not bad - I have experienced heat before - it is the humidity and I think I lost five pounds on the way to work.
I took yesterday off to become reacquainted with my goals here. Got some good thinking and organization done and this morning I am, although very sleepy, very motivated. Unfortunately I find that my current music selection is not quite matching my motivation. I think I need something new. If you read this, can you recommend an album in the comments? Preferrably something not depressing. I also started another personal project yesterday. I will write more about it once I get past the first stages. Still, I would like to share something so here is a poem I wrote:
CRUNCH CRUNCH *slop*
how I love your milky goodness
with comforts of the couch
and voices tuned out
each body unified in my mouth
I wish I could savour your morning moments
but you are quick to retire
I must take before you die or
I’ll be left with one sad bowl of SOG
Many of you know that I like to name my computing devices after breakfast foods. My new mobile which I posted about here (or probably just a scroll down the page if your clicking finger needs a break) has spent the first few weeks of its new life as a John Doe. This is unacceptable, especially considering that it, out of all my precious ones, has the most obvious name coming.
From today, the official name of my mobile is……………orange juice. Or “oj” for short but I`m debating whether I want to do that. I like saying “juice” too much.
So orange juice can now feel at home with waffles, syrup, and the memory of pancakes, who is still in Vancouver and has possibly been exorcised from the body it was living in (by that I mean the PC was possibly reformatted…but the memory continues).
Probably followed by another week of hell….then maybe one more.
I am dreading March and it’s only February but I have a history of dreading March.
It will all get done though, well the important part of “all” at least, I can finally smell it.
The great thing about times like these is that you finally remember all those passions and dreams and projects that get pushed to the back of your head when you actually do have time to work towards them. Now if I can remember to write them down this time…
Anyway, funny thing that I realized this week (well I had known about it for a while but thought it was hereditary until being clarified last weekend) - I totally break toilet seats. When I was a kid, I always sat on the toilet sideways. In both the ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ washrooms, the counter and sink were right next to the toilet. I would sit sideways so that I could conduct experiments with various bathroom products in the sink. Growing up, I didn’t lose the tendency to approach the bowl from an angle necessary for sideways sitting. My attack has always been one from the side with this final twisting motion to keep my legs at 12 o’clock. That added torque causes the seat’s bolt-and-nut assembly to loosen and eventually, the bolt-and-nut assembly’s plastic housing becomes worn and the seat can no longer be tightly bolted down.
This has happened to every toilet in places I have lived in for longer than six months. OK so that’s only 4 toilets but statistically, there is a high probability that if I don’t change my entrance, I’ll ruin more seats.
Don’t worry, it’s unlikely that I will break yours. The damage only occurs through repeated exposure.
