SPUMTECH
Reasons why I didn’t write much bollocks for my journal last month:
Leaving teachers Teachers out, teachers in. It happens every year and this time I found I had grown completely desensitised to the whole thing, much like how eating Japanese food has slowly enabled me to tolerate vinegar and mayonnaise (both are things which I hated before Japan) or the way that listening to the struggling, halting English speech of the live news translator on TV has made me completely politically apathetic.
Anyway at my main school, 2 teachers left this year, one being the music teacher. I was pretty sorry to see him go, seeing as he was the only music teacher out of the four I have worked with who was enthusiastic about me joining in with music club. You see, a typical inaka Junior High School music club will be primarily wind and brass instruments, thus it naturally makes NO SENSE to let the experienced, violin-playing ALT join in what would be his ONLY musical indulgence in this tiny village, since a string instrument would likely destroy the delicate harmony of wind and brass in their making of randomly out-of-tune OOM PAH PAH sounds, probably resulting in the collapse of space and time as we know it. Fortunately, the aforementioned music teacher thought it would be a cool idea to get me involved, and it worked out great for the time he was there as it gave me a good chance to get more involved in school outside of the English class and we all managed to make some fairly music-like sounds. That, and it gave me the opportunity to meditate on the near-perfectly stereotypical poetic justification that the FATTEST kid in school also happens to be the one who plays the TUBA. Anyway, I’m hoping that the new music teacher involves me in the same way other than saying “oh you play the violin!” and following it with a prolonged, awkward silence.
Song writing And you all thought it was just an empty statement. Well, I’ve been working on the music and have come up with 5 songs of varying quality and level of clichéd chord progression / lyrical content. It’s mostly laid-back acoustic guitar stuff, and I would describe my ’sound’ thus far as “John Meyer being given a handjob whilst driving a Fiat Panda on a street riddled with potholes” although I have been wanting to experiment more with purely electronic music just so I can use titles like “Spumtech Photon Explosion” and “Fission Jizzblast Tingling Orgasm Machinebot”.
People taking up my time I just never have the heart to say “no” to a Japanese person who has gone out of their way to invite me to something, no matter how genuinely disinterested I am in the activity. A lot of this stems from the fact that I am a terrible liar and could never think up an excuse on the spot without giving away some obvious, cross-cultural clues pertaining to the fact that I am talking absolute bullshit, such as looking panicked, then going “Uhhh- ” for 5 minutes until a cartoon lightbulb suddenly appears above my head with a “ding!” allowing me to proudly state my freshly made up previous engagement.
Website projects Stemming from the creeping fear that I will leave Japan with absolutely no tangible transferable skills whatsoever apart from being able to speak Japanese like a 60yr old farmer, I have started to beef up my web portfolio once more. I have taken on a couple of projects for other people and am developing stuff for mobile phones, as well as building an application for OS X that will serve as a proper GUI for my content management system. If you didn’t understand that last sentence then you are probably one of those normal people I read about in books.
A general kind of apathy for all you bastards Coupled with an unhealthy fixation on the curious events unfolding in my guestbook.
I have been watching way too much TV The irony! Yeeeeess my love-hate relationship with all forms of Japanese televisual entertainment has been tipping dangerously towards the “love” side for the last couple of months. I find now that I have some shows which I will absolutely never ever miss, if I can help it - most notably SUIJUU, a comedy sketch show incorporating other sub shows such as One Night and Kokoriko Mirakuru Taipu, featuring, amongst other things, a robot monkey that says “nyuu!” at the end of every sentence, and a guy in a kind of Admiral’s outfit who goes mental at people then breaks down crying.
I bought Pokemon Fire Red In a move which brings my coolness rating crashing right down to below my circa 1995 fat, long-haired, heavy metal era, I bought a Pokemon game on a whim. I have concluded after playing it for a few hours that people who really like this game are idiots, and I would rather sit in a bare room for all eternity stuck in a continuous loop of trying to complete the Atari 2600 version of E.T. and dropping anvils on my testicles than have to spend another minute tediously levelling up some pink ball with eyes so as to beat a bigger pink ball with eyes.
I have been getting so pretentious that it has become hard to keep track of all the things that annoy me If there is one thing that this website has achieved, apart from bringing me notoriety as “that JET bloke who loves himself, fricking arsehole wanker titface”, it has elevated my levels of cynicism and criticism to beyond the levels at which most people find tolerable in real life. Leading my daily life has now become a constant battle with myself NOT to make some stupid, demeaning comment or over-analyse things, like measuring the distribution of red skittles to green skittles in any given pack of skittles, prefixing anything I don’t like (which is everything) with the word “stupidpieceocrap” and re-arranging the names of friends and co-workers into offensive anagrams.
It MUST be my period.
c
awesome