One Last Wave

So I stopped posting here a few months ago mostly to focus on a new site, But I Also Have a Day Job, where I blog about the hazards faced by creative people like me who also have to keep the bills paid.  If you’re a long-time reader or first-time visitor here, check it out, or follow me on Twitter @IantheRoge.

A Wave of the Hand has meant a lot to me for a really long time, and I honestly wish I still had time to post random fun bits of writing here.  I started this blog in the days after college when I needed a way to channel my creative output in a way that other people might actually see.  If I had an idea, knowing I had this blog as an outlet pushed me to develop that idea, revise it, and see it through, rather than just thinking, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to write about that scene in Better Off Dead where Roy Stalin calling Lane ‘buddy’ emphasizes what a jerk he is?” Without this blog, that idea would’ve fizzled out and become nothing.

We all need practice to get better at things, and I needed practice writing.  I wish I’d written more when I was in high school, and in college even, but I didn’t really write much at all during those times.  Maybe that was because I arrogantly thought that I was already good at the creative thing I wanted to do just because I’d had some early successes, and that when future projects came along I’d be good at those too through some magical gift I had inside me.  Yeah, right.

In real life things don’t work that way.  You only get good at writing (or at anything) by doing it so often that it becomes second nature and the ideas themselves become your real focus.  This blog helped me make that happen.

This blog was also vital when I was in Japan, a place of incredible adventure that I also found fascinating and sometimes shocking.  My entries on Japan were my first real attempt to not only understand Japanese culture, but to share it with people in a way that would make them as interested in it as I was.  A lot of themes from these posts made their way into my Japan novel, which I couldn’t have written if it hadn’t been for this blog.

Then there was the way this blog let me engage with people (both friends and strangers) in a way that was simpler and more removed from the social media information overload.  I’ve always wanted to make things that people would enjoy but that also made them think, and this blog showed me what that felt like. 

I also met at least one friend through this blog who saw it and reached out in real life, which was also the first time that something I’d created and shared had a real impact on the world around me. That was pretty cool.

Lastly, keeping this blog helped me stay organized—I made posting here a priority and planned out the time to make these posts happen.  I’ve always been good at working in more structured environments (e.g., school), but that got a lot harder when I didn’t have that structure anymore and had to both set my own assignments and get them done.  (Some Advice: If you can do these two things well, you can do anything.)

This blog’s done so much for me, yet so many of those things are in the past now.  Sometime between then and now I realized that I didn’t need this blog for those same reasons anymore, and that I needed other challenges instead.  Life stops being interesting if we don’t keep trying new things, and I never wanted this blog to feel like a chore.

It did seem wrong, though, to just abandon it without a proper send-off, so if you’ve been hanging around here a long time, thanks for reading, and I mean that.

And if you’re new here, I don’t always wax this sentimental, so check out my new website, or the older Wave of the Hand entries here.  Either way, I hope you find something you like.

Never stop moving, exploring, or trying new things.

Peace out, everybody.

In Which Our Hero Discusses Japanese Monetary Customs With a Junior Teller at Wells Fargo

Japanese 2000 yen notes (worth about $20 US), featuring the Shureimon gate (front) and Lady Murasaki Shikibu with a scene from The Tale of Genji (back).

INT. BANK LOBBY – DAY

IAN is buying Japanese yen from a young TELLER behind the counter of a bank lobby whose ceiling is exorbitantly high. The TELLER counts out the notes, which IAN then considers.

IAN: Do you mind if I trade in some of these two-thousand notes for a few five-thousands? Japanese people don't really use them, so they'd peg me as a tourist.

TELLER (surprised): Uh, I didn't know that. (checks computer) Sorry, we don't have any other yen here.

IAN: That's fine. It'll just be like I started using two-dollar bills everywhere.

TELLER (oblivious): Oh. (Pause, after which he begins to speak from a clearly rehearsed script.) Now, will you be using your debit card in Japan?

IAN (tilting his head in the Japanese manner of not wanting to correct someone): Not this time—Japanese businesses don't really take cards. They're still a cash society.

TELLER (wide-eyed): Wow, I didn't know that. I take it you've been to Japan before?

IAN: Yeah, a little bit.

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Time to take a trip—my first time back in Japan in almost five years. Feels good to be doing something exciting again, to be going to a place where daily life will be just a little bit more challenging.  That's the kind of thing that makes you sharper.

Lots of changes coming for 2016. I finished a novel last year, finished grad school, and started doing more things that matter. Blogging also still matters—putting things out there in a form more substantial than a Facebook post or tweet keeps me sharp, and keeps the ideas flowing.

Been working on a better place to do that than Blogspot, though, which has become the blogging equivalent of AOL Instant Messenger (out of fashion, but technically still around). Stay tuned.

I Tried to Write Something and It Was a Failure

Three weeks ago I got one of the best ideas I’d had in a long time—it was funny, spoke about a meaningful subject, and would permeate with energy when read in front of a group.  I planned out the idea for a full two weeks, jotting down jokes and clever turns of phrase as they came to me, and confident in exactly how the final product would sound.  (This is the fun part of writing, where everything feels easy and perfect in the idea stage.)  When my schedule finally settled down I set aside a morning where I would type out an actual draft to make real, and this is when things changed.

Sometimes when I start writing I’m filled with energy and know exactly how I want those first few sentences to sound, though other times I stagger in my opening and find the rhythm as I go.  This was one of those times when the beginning felt weak but I knew I could iron out the tone and pacing over the course of writing, and so I continued through a sloppy opening.  It was a dull, stiflingly humid morning, and in my kitchen where I write my air conditioner hadn’t yet driven in enough cool air from the living room to make a difference. I’d also become aware of a sharp, weighty headache that caused me to lose focus every few minutes, though I knew that if I could just get past those opening paragraphs and start adding the jokes I’d already written that everything would be fine.  I thought again about how good the piece would sound when finished, hearing sections in my head (fragments of sentences, mostly, or certain dramatic climaxes) that rekindled my confidence and drove me to continue.

My headache, though, was getting worse, and when I added in the jokes from my notebook they felt out of place, like I was trying to beat life into an otherwise stagnant piece of writing.  I thought about things I needed to do that day and how late I’d slept, and tried to remember the glorious rhythm of the piece as I’d rehearsed it in my head, trying hard to summon the energy, the humor, and the bitingly sarcastic voice I knew would make it a success. 

I don’t remember when exactly I lost faith in what I was writing; I think for a long while I believed that a few rounds of revision could smooth out the rough prose, the inconsistent voice, and the overly long paragraphs, but then this hope fizzled out and left me wondering whether to abandon the draft and return to bed (it was still very humid in that kitchen) or to finish and commit to paper the ending I’d planned.  Those last two paragraphs were the hardest—hard because I didn’t believe in the piece anymore, and was writing for the sake of finishing something I’d started, and I knew that no idea, no matter how clever, could save the piece now.

When I typed out the last sentence I felt sick from fatigue and defeat; the piece would need a complete overhaul that required I start it again from scratch, which I did not at that point (and still don’t) know how to do.  It bothered me that the piece was a failure, and I didn’t write anything after that for a long time. 

I find myself wondering what lesson can be learned from this experience, what I can take from it that will make me a better writer, and what I can explain in this final paragraph that will uplift and educate you as readers, but I don’t think there’s any lesson to be learned here, and any attempt to churn one from this story will come across as childish and trite.  No—failing to write that piece was just something that happened, like breaking a shoelace or finding mold in your sour cream, and now it’s done with and should be forgotten—not in that repressed memory kind of way where later on you cringe upon recalling this thing that bothered you, but in that way where you can’t quite remember what you ate for breakfast the previous day but could probably recall it if someone asked you and you concentrated for a short while.  It was just a thing that happened.

Low-Stakes Fun

I think a lot about writing purely for low-stakes fun (e.g. this blog) and how I don't do it as often as I'd like anymore.  I still keep a journal, which fulfills my need for personal reflection, but I miss pursuing more of the random ideas that spark into something more worthwhile than a Facebook message, but less tangible than a short story.  The things this blog used to be full of.

A big part of this has to do with my being in graduate school (where I've been for over a year), where such writing is hardly encouraged (long story), and social pressures tend to favor a more professional discourse of literary fiction (if such a term even has meaning anymore) published in magazines of note (or those that purport to be of note) to build one's CV (which, unlike a one-page employment resume, concerns itself chiefly with length).  Before graduate school, before work on the novel even, I made more time for this blog and for other low-stakes writing that kept the ideas flowing, kept me writing actively.  I spend more time writing now than I did then, though most of what I do now is novel- or larger project-related work, which in many ways I find disappointing.

Does this shift represent a maturing move toward more important endeavors, or a dwindling of my creative energy in favor of a more regimented structure?  To even phrase the problem in this way disgusts me.  Why can't I continue to work on a myriad of projects, fitting each one into its proper place on a smaller or larger scale that suits that individual idea?

Time, mostly.  There's never enough time.

Have to keep trying, though.

Daily Grind (or, What I've Been Working On Lately)

Few things bore me more than hearing about other people's writing habits, but here are a few words about mine:

Summer's here, grad school classes are done, and aside from some paying work not worth mentioning, I've been living out an entirely self-motivated schedule, something I've been working toward for a long time.  My biggest task is finishing the novel (the current draft, anyway) once and for all, a goal that's nearer now than it's ever been.  Mornings are good for that, a chance to wake up, plan a point of attack while in the shower or frying eggs, and sit down at the computer (internet cable safely unplugged) until lunch.  Getting started can be rough, and reading a few pages from an old favorite (most recently Catch-22, Murphy, Lucky Jim, The Mezzanine, or Something Happened) helps get me motivated and starts the words flowing.  Reach a stopping point, eat lunch, and schedule the next novel-writing day.  Repeat until done.

Having more time also means more devotion to side projects - undertakings both necessary and dangerously distracting.  Foremost has been this year's Art Swap project, more complex than I'd planned, but moving toward an ideal that combines both writing and graphic art.  (More on this later, though my last entry sprung from an Art Swap outtake.)

Then there's been my real and always arduous attempts to get more of my writing out there (like, in places where people can actually see it).  For a long time, I've been torn between how much time to devote to creation vs. self-promotion: given our limited creative energy, does submitting and researching publishing outlets detract from the (more important) process of creation?  This question's hounded me for a long time, but I've realized that I spend far, far too little time on the distribution end of things, especially since the two tasks occupy different portions of the brain, can be done at different times of the day, and aren't mutually exclusive.

So I've been delving into realms both traditional (fiction slush piles) and non (podcasts, literary essays, travel fiction, etc.) in hopes of snagging some bites.  I left one success sadly unmentioned: Sam Roman was kind enough to feature my short piece, Korean-Man Purse, on her new project, Non Finito, the journal of unfinished writing.  I was glad to help Sam out (getting this thing started meant a lot to her), and I found...relief in sending out a scene (and a character) from the novel that ended up on the cutting room floor. Jackson did a lot to form the first draft's quick pacing and irreverent tone, and if all goes as planned, we haven't seen the last of him.

I've also let my personal reading slip by the wayside, and the stack of unread books next to my bed recently rose to rival my nightstand in height.  Reading's always been important to me, and I felt disgusted at my inability to prioritize it against grad school assignments.  Highlights of my return to the page include The Loved One (a solid comic novel by the underappreciated Evelyn Waugh), Don Delillo's White Noise, and a supermarket crime novel (i.e. a crime novel set in a supermarket) by my last workshop teacher Sean Doolittle (here's his actual webpage, not a Wikipedia entry). 

Of my last month's reading, though, I most recommend Steve Martin's Shopgirl to anyone looking for something smart, funny, and incredibly observational.  The Shopgirl movie's good, but the book is better, while also being a fast read (barely over a hundred pages).  The absurd commentary of Steve Martin's storytelling makes it all work in a way that's just fun to read.  Here's a piece:

Jeremy took Mirabelle on approximately two and a half dates.  The half date was actually a full evening, but was so vaporous that Mirabelle had trouble counting it as a full unit.  On the first, which consisted mainly of shuffling around a shopping mall while Jeremy tried to graze her ass with the back of his hand, he split the dinner bill with her and then, when she suggested they actually go inside the movie theater whose new neon front so transfixed Jeremy, made her pay for her own ticket.

Wish I'd written that.

Community's important too, and long, solitary days have led me to venture out to SP CE (pronounced "Space"), Lincoln, Nebraska's own poetry studio and writer's workshop group (prose and all hybrids welcome).  It's been good having people to talk writing and just share observations with a few hours a week, plus interacting in an environment that's primarily about the work itself, and not what it can do for one's professional career.

That's all for now.  I won't lie - I miss this blog tremendously, and as my entries become fewer and online traffic merges from blogs to Facebook, what I post here has become even more focused toward an audience of one (though Google still rates me as an authority on people who hate being called "buddy").  I've also been inspired by my former roommate and partner-in-writing-crime Randall's return to blogging with the creation of his Magic the Gathering-inspired card game 21 Others, which he's been writing, assembling, and testing.  No one stays away from the process for long.

Someday, I imagine, I'll have a bona fide website (or at least a Wordpress one) with pictures, more links, and a flashy design scheme, but for now, I'll just keep posting stuff here.  You know, because it's fun.

A Very Special Wave of the Hand 250th Post Listless List

Things I Currently Possess At Least 250 Of (in no particular order)

• Grains of rice (in 25-pound bag)
• Dollars (in bank account)
• Gas in gas tank (in ounces)
• Blank pieces of paper (for printer)
• Lined pieces of paper (in notebooks)
• Feet of thread (in sewing kit)
• CDs (blank, purchased, and accumulated from mix CD swaps)
• Dollars (in Monopoly money)
• Pieces of shredded cheese (cheddar, monterey jack, colby jack)
• Articles of clothing (if a pair of socks counts as two articles)
• Problems (with apologies to Jay-Z)
• Staples (from jumbo-sized box purchased on school shopping trip in 1995)
• Tissues (collected from Japanese street advertisers)
• Posts (in blog)

Thanks to all you readers out there, and here's to 250 more.

New Look, Same Wave

This blog's design has been badly due for an overhaul since 2008, and today I finally gave it one.  I'm in a new state (Nebraska), I'm back to blogging regularly, and this seems as good a time as ever.

It's impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when things in life go stale.  While the process is gradual, initiated changes must come suddenly.  I'll get the timing right someday.

Any and all comments welcome.

Plagiarism is Not Cool

If you’ve ever had something you’ve cared about stolen from you unexpectedly (because all stealing is unexpected, really), maybe this story will make more sense.

Three months ago someone posted an anonymous tip to my blog linking to another blogger who’d taken text from one of my entries, Fuck Your Impractical Hipster Room Decorations.  Her entry copied, nearly verbatim, the paragraph I’d worked the hardest on: a summation of why I despise the artificiality of curated rooms and would rather live in a space that has personal meaning rather than one I can show off.  Ironically, the plagiarist seemed to have missed the point of my discussion, as she’d posted the text in question beneath photos of her new bedroom, which included such hipster staples as a derivative of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, women’s shoes placed on a shelf for decorative purposes, china dolls proudly labeled as vintage, and a notebook with a bird on it.  She had moved into a new apartment and wanted to show it off.  She also wanted everyone to know that her decorations were genuine, not fake.

I sat at the computer for some time, thinking at first that it may have been a coincidence (it wasn’t) or a mistake (no), and, when denial had run its course, trying to decide what to do.  I searched her blog, finding photo-filled trips to island resorts, demonstrations of make-up application equipment, endlessly narcissistic pictures of herself in slim-fitting vintage clothes, and pictures of food from trendy restaurants.  I became distraught, hating this hipster fashion model who had stolen from me and from others (English was not her first language, and the quality of her prose changed drastically from entry to entry) and was now making money through blog advertising and paid entries about the make-up products and restaurants she praised just a little too highly.

This was my mistake.  Looking back, there were three reasons why it was easy for me to become as emotionally unhinged as I did:

1. She came from a different country
2. Her blog had a higher readership than mine
3. She was a hipster

When we’ve been wronged by people we don’t know very well, it’s easy to choose a focal point like gender, race, social status, level of affluence, career path, or level of success to get angry at rather than confront the injustice directly.  When we know people better, we see past all of those things and can hate them for who they are, rather than the superficial qualities they embody. 

After my mania cooled, I set to work.  I wrote her an e-mail requesting nicely that she take my words down or give me credit.  When she didn’t reply I wrote more e-mails, sent her Facebook messages, and posted comments to her blog that never made it past the Awaiting Moderation stage.  My messages started out firm, then escalated to twistedly sarcastic and mocking prose of the sort I unleash on others in moments of frustration.  The girl never replied to my comments, a reminder that we live in a world that finds it acceptable for such correspondence to go unacknowledged (an infuriating reality for anyone who has ever had to look for a job).

Taking some advice from Stu, I contacted the plagiarist’s web host, since they would be legally prohibited from hosting content that violates copyright law.  Through the magic of social media, the plagiarized article was actually posted on two different sites: Blogger and a Wordpress-template domain.  Blogger is, of course, hosted under the Google umbrella, and a few quick links lead me to an amazingly user-friendly form showing applicants how to report a violation.  I filled out the form and within two days Google deleted the post.

I celebrated, cheered, and rejoiced that there was justice in the world.  I sent the plagiarist a gloating Facebook message pointing out that her Blogger entry was gone and requesting that she remove its twin.  In retrospect, I did this more to assert my moral superiority than to produce a tangible result, but it felt good.  I needed her to know that I was better than her.

When no tangible result was produced, I hunted down the second blog’s host using Site Trail, which tracks webhosting and other, less relevant information for websites.  I researched online plagiarism, how to find it, and how to report it.  I wrote an e-mail to the host’s abuse department.  When nothing happened, I did more research and found, buried deep within the cavernlike Terms of Service, a law office that handled copyright complaints and compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the American ratification of an international treaty protecting copyrighted material.  In densely-worded legalese, they cited six items required to report a copyright violation. 

1. Your signature (or your lawyer’s)
2. A link to the work that was stolen
3. A link to the site that stole your work
4. Your contact information (e-mail address, regular address, and phone number)
5. An honest statement saying that you believe your work was stolen
6. Another honest statement saying that you didn’t lie about items 1-6

To see the official, difficult to read versions of these items, click here and scroll down to section (c)-(3).

This time I wrote both an e-mail and an actual letter.  Two days later, the second entry was gone too.  I’d done it; something bad had happened, and I’d fixed it.  My work was safe again. 

What have I learned from all this?  Proper procedure for reporting copyright violations, for one thing.  (I hope that my experience, along with the Digital Millennium Act guidelines above, can be of help to someone.)  The foolishness of stereotyping people, rather than simply hating the things they’ve done, for another.  I’ve also seen, once again, the futility of attempting to contact someone who, as Kyle Reese says in the first Terminator movie, can’t be bargained with or reasoned with.  But most importantly, I’ve seen that there exist in this world many laws—voluminous, overly specific, and written in language that defies comprehension—that will yield results provided we follow the instructions carefully.  This is best done without emotion, as if the action were as routine a process as stamping a letter or signing the back of a check.  There is no use getting vehement or lashing out.  The solution might just involve filling out the right form.

Frequently Asked Questions About "A Wave of the Hand"

Q: Are you still blogging?
A: Yes, though not as frequently.

Q: Why aren't you blogging as frequently?
A: I've been busy with other writing projects. Also graduate school applications.

Q: So, are you abandoning this blog?
A: No.

Q: Is this like a hiatus?
A: Not really. If there's a word for a sort-of hiatus when people do something less frequently, that's what I'm doing. (Note to Self: Invent reverse dictionary.)

Q: How frequently will you be blogging?
A: Once a month, until about February. Maybe twice a month if I get some good ideas.

Q: Why February?
A: That's when the last of the grad school applications are due.

Q: Why once a month?
A: So there aren't any unsightly gaps in the list of months on the right of the page.

Q: Why is that important?
A: Because if some months are missing, people might think I'm taking a hiatus.

Q: Won't people see this FAQ and realize you're not taking a hiatus?
A: Yes, but people tend not to believe everything they read in blogs.

Q: Why is that?
A: Because saying you're going to blog is an empty promise. Actually blogging fulfills that promise.

Q: Then why write this FAQ if people aren't going to believe anything that's in it?
A: .

Calamity Cash and the Town With No Name: A Success Story

My good friend, former roommate, and fellow writer Randall Nichols just released his own indie comic, Calamity Cash and the Town with No Name, a collaboration with artist and fellow West Virginian Justin Cornell 4+ years in the making. This is a success story of the kind you don’t often see in the post-college abyss: a writer and an artist, both contending with their own responsibilities and commitments, harness the time to produce a full-length comic over a period of years. This is evening and weekend warrior shit at its finest, and now they’ve invested the capital in their very own print run. That’s why you should buy it.

"Calamity Cash & The Town with No Name" Synopsis:  The mother/daughter vigilante team of Tana and Cal Cash are on the run from an Afro-rocking, Kung-Fu assassin, and have been forced to make their last stand in a nameless desert town hiding a unbelievable secret - every last citizen is in the Witness Protection program! Out of gas, low on ammo, and with their backs against the wall, Calamity and Mama Cash become the town's unlikely protectors, but with friends so quickly becoming enemies, and old enemies becoming friends, is the whole place doomed to burn around them? And will our heroines be the ones to light the first match? A modern-day action/adventure western with words by Randall Nichols, and art by Justin Cornell. "Calamity Cash & The Town with No Name - Pt. II" (25 pages, $4.50 w/shipping).  [from The Mojo Wire]

If that doesn't wow you, here’s another reason to buy: Randall’s work is witty, bitingly observational, and he portrays his vagabond, struggling twentysomethings with an insightful sincerity that never stoops to melodrama or cliché. Based on my dealings with the writer, I can guarantee you that this is going to be good.

One more reason: copies are only $4.50 (including shipping!) signed by the author and the artist. Click here or on the picture above to go to Randall’s blog, The Mojo Wire, and purchase via Paypal.

For those of you still reading who haven’t yet clicked above, I’ll give you another chance to buy Randall’s comic now.

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It’s uplifting to hear that, in a world teeming with mundane distractions and lacking the financial and emotional support so vital for creative work, projects like Calamity Cash are getting finished instead of abandoned. Projects like Cash need an audience willing to shell out the few bucks necessary to keep them coming, but lack the marketing resources of a large publishing house to spread word of their existence to an overcrowded market. To know that so many projects have gotten off the ground through Kickstarter and other grassroots campaigns is inspiring, though even the most promising or awe-inspiring of projects is doomed to failure unless people know about them. I look and listen to the advertisements surrounding me on a daily basis and find that most of them feature products I already know. Yes, Coke is a sweet drink, Planet Fitness is a badass place to work out, and Old Spice makes you irresistible to women. Mass advertising, though its secondary purpose is to inform, first and foremost inundates us with those products profitable enough to warrant support while the smaller ones struggle to get noticed. How many amazing comics, novels, blogs, musicians, movies, webcomics, animated films, photographers, architects, dramatists, and other media could we discover if only we had the means?

Randall realized this long before I did, and, for a significant period after we left Bennington, blogged, Tweeted, Facebook shared, and generally talked about as many of his friends’ projects as he possibly could, to the point where his social networks obsessively centered around the achievements of others. My own meager work failed to escape his attention, as he tweeted a lot of things from this blog and eventually devoted an entire Mojo Wire entry (featuring one of the most unflattering pictures of me ever to grace the internet) to my metablog project Corporate Takeover. When asked about his constant sharing, he said that his friends were doing great things and he wanted to help in any way he could.

Creative pursuits (especially writing) are isolating avocations, and for those of us lacking contacts, the chances of getting your work noticed can be frustratingly slim. We owe it to ourselves to harness those resources available to us, but we all need friends willing to shout our achievements from the metaphorical rooftops of social media and weekend drinking sessions. We also owe it to those friends to return the favor without being asked.

So again, buy Randall’s comic for a measly $4.50, or explore the blog to read about its long, arduous history. For those who enjoy samples, try some of his fiction: New Hooverville, Arches, and more . Or take a peak at the writer himself during our more formative years:

Revenge is sweet. Thanks for the support, man.

A Thought

I've been mulling over the idea, recently, of starting a new blogging project far greater than Corporate Takeover in that it would take up an entire blog, be written by a fictitious character whose view of topics would be drastically different than my own, and take place in a world completely outside my current reality. It would also make fun of hipsters pretty bad.

Perhaps one day you'll see the start of it here, without knowing what it is, and assume the voice is mine. On that day you may think that I've lost my mind. Or, if you're easily taken in by pretentious arguments, you may think I'm making a lot of sense. Or, if you're a casual skimmer, you might not even notice. Stay tuned.

On One-Night Stands

In the left-front pocket of my pants I carry a small notebook in which I write things I'd like to remember. These things may include, but are not limited to, names, quotes, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, physical addresses, roughly-sketched maps, ideas for the novel, ideas for short fiction, ideas that could be placed within fiction that hasn't been conceived yet, ideas that could be placed within nonfiction that hasn't been conceived yet, reading recommendations, passcodes of various sorts, and the occasional To-Do list. The other day I opened to a recent page and found this:

Blog idea: On one-night stands

Usually the sight of this kind of note is enough to jog my memory back to whatever I was thinking of at the time. However, in this instance, I cannot think of what I could possibly have meant to say about one-night stands. I don't think about them often (the concept itself is rather cliché), but I do make the occasional one-night stand joke that may or may not be funny.

Someone told me several months ago (citing Spike TV's MANswers as a source) that women in Sweden have more one-night stands than women in any other country. I have never been to Sweden, but would like to visit.

Why I Blog

Back in college, I gradually became aware that though I had a lot of ideas for things to write, almost none of them ever made it on to the page. Most of these ideas (then, as now), were snippets, short pieces, or isolated moments that had no proper place. Instead of developing these ideas, I'd think about them for a length of time ranging from a few minutes to a few days, and unless I could develop them into a short story or integrate them into a project for a class (which almost never happened) I'd forget about them.

I started this blog as motivation, knowing that I'd be more likely to develop these ideas if I had somewhere (however isolated) to put them. I certainly write a lot more now than I did four years ago, so in that sense, the blog is a complete success. I always intended it to be more of a working studio than a finished gallery, with the goal that some pieces from here would eventually be revised, removed, and other homes found for them. Unfortunately I've never been very good at finding other homes for my writing. Call that a goal for the future. One of many.

Sometimes I worry that now I spend too much time writing things to post here, where I should be working on bigger projects (e.g. the novel or the Carcrash Parker adventure game) or smaller ones that could have a wider appeal. I could never be like John Wiswell, who posts hilarious, thoughtful, and clever fiction daily while still managing to develop other work. With real world problems looming large on the horizon, writing time is limited. That I might not be using it wisely is frightening.

But, I go back and forth on this issue a lot. It's always better to be writing something than to be writing nothing, and I'm in a much better place now than I was four years ago. I wonder if I'll ever be able to solve the problem of how to open up my work to a wider audience, and worry that I might spend too much time searching and not enough time writing.

This blog still gives me a forum to develop ideas, so I'll keep it around. The trick is how to expand. It's a problem with many solutions. All I need is one.

Inactivity

It's weird to be back. My first day outside of Japan, and even on the plane out of Narita, I felt uneasy and intimidated surrounded by all white people. It's strange not to always be the tallest, or the biggest, or the loudest in the room anymore. All of this takes some getting used to, and in Australia I found myself gravitating almost exclusively towards Japanese tourists to make conversation.

Everything seems to move really fast back in America, and I find myself overwhelmed wanting to look, listen, and respond to a million stimuli, most of which I would have simply ignored before I left (the opposite of what happened when I first went to Japan). It's like when you say the same word over and over until it loses all meaning, and then say it again a few hours later; the sound has a new freshness that your brain couldn't respond to on the sixtieth repetition.

Look for some updates within the upcoming weeks, though I'm not sure what effect my newfound unemployment will have on my posting frequency. I've had a few people asking me about the third and final Tale from the Japanese Workplace, and I assure you that it's on the way.

On Oversimplifying "Karoshi"

I have more than once been accused of oversimplifying topics in this blog that are complicated enough to warrant entire articles or lengthy essays in order to completely explore them. I like to keep things (fairly) short on here to fit (what I can only assume is) the span of the average internet viewer, which I'm afraid has turned much of my nonfiction writing into one-sided snippets that never allow the reader to become fully informed. To write proficiently about the topics I'm interested in, especially those related to Japan, requires more time and a higher word count than I've been allowing my entries.

With "Karoshi," however, I never intended to give a complete perspective of the Japanese habits of overwork, though I'm afraid some people might read it that way. I wrote it in an attempt to capture the horror and cruelty of the Japanese business world that I'm surrounded by every day. I see it in my own workplace, in the textbooks I teach, when I talk to my students about their jobs, in books about Japanese daily life, at the bank, on the street, and even in my own fiction (where do you think Corporate Takeover came from?). There are things here that irk me terribly, and the business world is one of them. I wanted to recreate the pain I see on people's faces after long, stress-filled days at jobs they're afraid to leave. I wanted to shock people the way I was shocked when a girl I knew suffered a nervous breakdown at her job and had to be sent back home. I wanted to scare people the way Orwell scares them in the final chapters of 1984. The way the business world scares me sometimes.

So, to do that, I oversimplified things. My dictionary translates karoshi as "death by overwork," which in English is a perfectly reasonable way of describing that end just as we might use "death by dehydration" or "death by vomiting" to describe a mode of death without a more convenient term. Overworking can cause death or serious health problems for Americans just as readily as it could for Japanese, and I certainly don't mean to imply that some linguistic barrier prevents us from recognizing that danger.

Perhaps my attempts to shock and horrify are best left to fiction, and not just my entries here that routinely blur that line. For all my talk of disguising fiction as fact, and vice versa, sometimes it can be detrimental to the way people read about unfamiliar cultural topics. It makes it much harder to recognize hyperbole. But in all seriousness, I want to address a topic as complex as Corporate Japan as honestly and thoroughly as I can in whichever medium is best. You haven't heard the last of me on this one.

Beyond Belief

View from Kitayokodake in Nagano prefecture.

I'll always remember that the greatest compliment someone ever gave me about this blog was that he couldn't tell what was real and what was fiction anymore. I've done a lot of experimenting here, and realized that I feel more comfortable now blurring the line between the two; leaving readers to decide for themselves like an old Fox gimmick show. Merely recounting my daily life would be too boring for even the most dedicated reader to face, whereas most of my pure fiction has always seemed to me trite, petty, and (at its worst) moralizing. The longer I stay here, the fewer inspirations I have for observational essays on Japan, which also in retrospect appear to have little to say beyond my very limited (and often flawed) viewpoint. I might be saying this because I've been reading Nick Hornby's 31 Songs and am blown away by his uncanny ability to describe the different layers of how we experience music; which simultaneously drives me to capture Japan in the same way and destroy every nonfiction piece I've ever written.

Of course, I would also be wise to take a cue from Randall and most other bloggers out there and share more of the cool stuff I find around the net (slightly biased in favor of things my friends are doing, of course). The problem with this is that most of my online time is spent in communicating with friends, or pursuing strictly goal-oriented tasks like buying birthday presents or tracking down that exact U2 music video I have a sudden demanding urge to watch again. Outside of these activities, I frequently feel an urge to unplug, not surf the net for cool stuff, hence my lack of interesting things to link. If I had more in the way of external stuff to post here, you'd probably have to wonder whether it was fact or fiction.

A Very Special Wave of the Hand 150th Post Clip Show

I am not sure why people I know have a preoccupation with seeing me intoxicated.

I’m not going to be cliché and say that I don’t know what I want to do with my life, because that’s not true—rather, what’s thrown me off most is the loss of structure now that for the first time in seventeen years I don’t have formal education to plan my life around.

“The Dude” is really lazy and doesn’t seem to have a job, this is evidenced by his writing a check for creamer in the first scene in the movie. If he had had the money to pay for the creamer, he wouldn’t have had to have written a check to pay for it.

IAN. (Scanning menu) How about garlic? The garlic pizza’s wicked strong; it’s great.
TIFF. (Disgusted) No thanks.
IAN. How about pineapple then? Do you like Hawaiian pizza?
TIFF. I like pineapple, just not on pizza.
IAN. (In disbelief) Have you ever tried it?
TIFF. Yes.
IAN. Do you have any other suggestions?
TIFF. I don’t really care.
IAN. Mushrooms?
TIFF. Yuck.
IAN. (Slightly frustrated) Why don’t you suggest something then?
TIFF. I don’t really have a preference.



Vocabulary Word for the Day: triorchous (trī-'ör-kis), adj, having three testicles.

I was so taken aback by the idea of someone willingly sticking such a thing up their ass and not even getting paid for it that I was speechless.

Indiana Jones V (working title)
Scheduled for 2012, an aging Indy must outrace an army of Cuban revolutionaries on the trail of Noah’s Ark while attempting to save his failing real estate business.

The chief unwritten duty of a substitute is to keep students from wandering the halls, since today’s students have an obsession with leaving the room that borders on the pathological. Every day they swarm at me with their countless requests; and I have yet to figure out whether they actually need a break from the confines of the classroom (where they must sit for the excruciating period of fifty minutes), or if they exercise their right to leave just because they can. They ask to go to the bathroom, the nurse, to get a drink of water (I see fewer Nalgene bottles than I used to—coincidence?), to go shoot hoops at the gym, work in the hallway, make phone calls at the office, or go to the cafeteria to stuff their faces with Smores-flavored Pop-Tarts and king-sized cans of Arizona iced-tea. One would assume that Kearsarge consists chiefly of dehydrated, diabetic, hypochondriac students with microscopic bladders.

"Mr. Rogers, have you given anyone a detention today?"
"...Day ain't over yet."

In the short storty “To Build a Fire” By Jack london,” A man is walking to camp. He Has to walk in sevendy five degree Below zero wether. He tries to biuld a fire to warm up But it is on segsecful. Jack london thought man can’t beat naturl.

I like mocking people instead of complaining about them. One of my favorite online activities is making fun of the Adult Gigs on Craigslist (my latest find being an ad by the world’s biggest Lord of the Rings nerd looking for a woman willing to have her vagina and the surrounding area painted to resemble the Eye of Sauron for the laughable sum of twenty-five dollars).

“Utilize” holds the exact same meaning as the word “use,” but the former term is often utilized by people to appear more important.

“What about when you go to Japan? I bet you’ll meet a girl there you can marry.”
Everyone brings this up when they find out I’m going to Japan; as if it were a requisite of the teaching abroad experience to return home with an exotic Japanese bride in a kimono and slippers. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Yes it will!” She becomes noticeably excited. “Unless you’re....”
Her eyes suddenly become wide and she covers her mouth as if she has just heard an adult tell a lewd joke and needs to hide her understanding. She chooses her words carefully: “...unless you’re like my mom’s friends up the street!”

10:25: Buker announces that he can successfully hit the Boat Wash sign thirty feet away with a rock, then spends the next twenty minutes attempting to do so. The challenge takes even longer because he must hide his rock and look professional every time someone walks by.

In the quest for emotional fulfillment, we’re our own worst enemy, forced to tread on, regretting the decisions we’ve made, and driven to mind-bending extremes by thoughts of what might have been.
The other day I saw the first season of Kids in the Hall on DVD for ten dollars but did not purchase it.

There are the alleys and the side streets, the suburban blocks and the overpasses, the zig-zag intersections crossing every which way, and the narrow one-ways where cars squeeze between one another and bike-riders of all ages reign supreme; convenience stores and vegetable markets and electronics stores and hair salons with outrageous prices posted outside the windows next to restaurants with plastic food replicas in glass cases alongside tiny luncheon houses with long counters where businessmen and young people sit alone munching noodles with pachinko parlors on every street that draw my eyes with their colored lights and loud noises (for everything in Japan seems to flash, flash, FLASH! turning the streets into epilepsy-inducing spectacles that would put even the most spectacular American laser light shows to shame) and there are arcades too in the red (pink?) light district where the strippers dressed in skintight outfits stand outside calling out to the Japanese businessmen on their night out and still more posters list the girls promoting promises of pleasure inside and other shops that must sell sex next to the famed Love Hotels that charge by the hour and now all of us are getting wierded out and it’s time to turn around....

Those rocks [have/are] floating!

A familiar face at last.

Japan is filled with things like this that don’t function the way I’m accustomed, and thus turn even the most routine tasks into elaborate adventures. Is that slot on the subway ticket machine for inserting coins or for dumping out change? I had to push a button to open the door to the restaurant, but will it close again automatically? Where does the fabric softener go in my washing machine? Is this really flour I’m buying? And how the hell do I work this fucking rice cooker?

But it was always the world of old Hollywood that he created most vividly as his passion added a zany realism to a subject that in the wrong hands could become little more than a sequence of names, dates, and deteriorating celluloid. You could almost hear David O Selznick fast-talking his way to the top and see D.W. Griffith peeking down the blouses of the underage girls on set. That was his world, and to sit in a Steven Bach class or to read even a single page of one of his books was to lose yourself in that magic.

Q: Do Americans prefer Coke or Pepsi?
A: Both are equally popular. Most Americans will usually choose one or the other based on their mood, though they usually drink Moxie instead.

Me: In English, what do we call someone who doesn't eat meat, doesn't eat eggs, and doesn't drink milk?
(pause)
Another student: Allergic.

Sadly, Takahashi’s date comes to an embarrassing end when he prematurely ejaculates all over the backseat of Jake’s car and has to spend his New Years Eve wiping semen stains off the leather interior.



The juxtaposition of these vitriolic mysteries with a catalogue of the mundane only heightens our awareness of his intent. By discarding our preconceived notions of what a blog should be (for instance, in over one year of blogging the author only once stoops to answering a meme), the reader is granted leave of any exhibitionist prejudices, awareness of the mundane, or outmoded diversions. Reading this blog also makes you cool.

Man fishing in reservoir—how do you say "Any luck?" in Japanese?

I find most sensible individuals associate the word “corporation” with massive, inhumane, robotic, cold, merciless, unforgiving, ever-expanding, stubborn, bureaucratic, treacherous, manipulative, scheming, labyrinthine, unwieldy, selfish, antagonistic entities bent on tormenting the defenseless individual at every possible opportunity....I hope that one day I too have the opportunity to use this superbly loaded word in my own writing.



When I was a kid I had an older sister I don’t talk about very much. Her name was Sharon. When I was four years old we were playing at our house in Bridgeport, and our mother went inside to use the phone. Sharon and I were tossing a purple rubber ball back and forth when one of us (I cannot for the life of me recall who) let it bounce into the road. Sharon dove out to get it and was instantly struck by a brown van careening around the corner, her limbs twisting brokenly around her brittle body as her blood spattered a line across the pavement. (The image of her flying helplessly into that cracked road haunts me still when I see cars braking abruptly on urban streets.) In a panic I screamed and ran into the house where I was unable to explain to my mother that my sister had been suddenly killed and was never, ever coming back.

Ever watched dried seaweed expand in hot water? Trippy

Last month I took a trip to Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures, in a region of Japan occasionally referred to by locals as the Kanto (I am not sure of the meaning of this word, but according to my Japanese dictionary, it may be derived from the word kantoku, or film director). Above you can see a cultural snippet of Japan from Oyama city in Tochigi, where electricity races down the wires faster than attractive girls fleeing a cosplay convention. Tochigi is famous for its gyoza, a small dumpling-type food that was probably brought over from China a long time ago (like most things in Japan that aren’t anime or co-prosperity spheres).

If you could be transported to any period of history, but only for a day, where would you go? In this scenario, nothing you do in the past can possibly affect the future in any way (including if you ran into your past self and gained the knowledge that you would someday be transported back through time for a day) because the time-traveling would be completely inconsequential. We’re also assuming that you can go to any geographical location, but not that you can embody any social status of your choosing (for example, were you to go back to the Middle Ages you couldn’t make yourself a king, but you wouldn’t necessarily be a poor peasant either, you’d most likely live out the day as a citizen of honest means, assuming that your current status is basically equivocal as such).
New York during the 1920’s.

A yellow-skirted maid in Akihabara handing out flyers for what I can only assume is some sort of prostitution front.

Today, over the course of the workday, I became aware of why sending kamikaze pilots to their deaths for the good of the country was a uniquely Japanese phenomenon in WWII.

“In which the author threatens to take away the chair of a twelve-year old student constantly hovering near sleep”

It is difficult to describe the stiff, uncomfortable atmosphere of a Japanese meeting; particularly on the days when some unseen committee at the Head Office has contrived some elaborate procedure for classroom management and passed it on to the Branch Managers, who’ve passed it on to the Head Teachers, who are holding a meeting to pass it on to the foreign teachers, who will promptly ignore it as soon as the meeting is over.

When Blogger was first acquired by the Erochikan Corporation, I wasn’t worried at all and ignored the news just like everyone else. But now I’ve noticed that [The following opinion is solely that of the writer, and does not necessarily represent a truthful or substantiated view of the topic under discussion. In the interest of providing the fullest treatment possible, certain passages have been flagged for removal and are currently undergoing revision. We appreciate your patience. Please check back soon for an updated, higher-quality version.]

Egregious feelings of overwhelming dread and moroseness are experienced by me as I lay in bed attempting to achieve vertical stature but lacking the capacity, for today is Monday and the awareness of my deadline looms over me like a choking sickness. Strange hoarseness of breath is exhibited when I go online knowing that some vicious notification of chastisement and ridicule awaits me. I break into cold sweats as I scramble through conflicting rules, categorically quadruple-checking every line for accidental transgressions that threaten my well-being. But that’s all in a day’s work. I write in a blog.

When I say it like that, it sounds like I'm having one hell of a week.