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the new place Thursday August 28
i cannot reiterate how much i like my new apartment. it's clean, it has hardwood floors, i have nice roommates who appreciate aesthetics the way i do, it's cheap, and it's in sleepy urbana. just where i like it.
the lack of cockroaches really helps out, too.
i apologize for the digression and the icky imagery. i'm going to really enjoy living here, and most of the tenants of our building obviously feel the same way: out of five apartments, ours was the only one not to be re-signed. i might just have to put off going to japan just to live here...well, we'll see.
one thing that i didn't realize about apartment living, though, is the consideration of neighbors. in the house, i knew all of my neighbors, and could ask them to turn down music or whatever without feeling bad about it; oddly, i never needed to do such a thing in that old shack called 705. but here, with wooden floors and radiator heating (paid for in the rent!), sound tends to travel. i found this out a couple of days ago when i was still unpacking.
all of a sudden, it was highway to hell. or was it big balls? oh, i don't even remember. but it was AC/DC. i'm sure of that -- it made me think of dad immediately. the basement apartment was blaring AC/DC, and i could hear it clearly as i unpacked my desk items. out of nowhere, i heard a woman's voice (knowing that a man lives downstairs):
"Ohhh, that hurts SO much...Owwww...."
this began approximately forty-five seconds into the song, well before the main riff got going. the woman's voice continued to express pain, but it wasn't unintentional; you could tell from her voice that she was willingfully being harmed, so i didn't knock to see if everything was all right. eventually, the music ended and the voice ceased complaining about the pain. there are only two possible solutions here:
(a) my downstairs neighbor is into s & m, and his girlfriend likes to be hurt in bed. this scenario is possible, as i know every now and then we all like to get our bedroom freak on to classic AC/DC tunes. however, i think it is unlikely in light of (b).
(b) my downstairs neighbor is running a tattoo parlor out of his apartment. this would explain the woman's voluntary pain, and his selection of loud music to attempt to cover up the evidence of such pain. if someone heard about his services, he could be fined for not having a license...i bet they license that sort of thing...yup. right here.
so really, what happened? let's hear your version of the story in the comments.
help me Monday August 25
i apologize for the brevity of this post.
it just occurred to me that i have three jobs, all of which need a lot of my time right now, and i have school too. therefore, i don't know when the next time is that i'll get to sit down and have a serious post, but it will probably be next week, early.
it'll probably be about my thoughts on the upcoming semester, thoughts on cara being in spain, etc. well, i don't want to get ahead of myself.
move out Friday August 15
i went crazy in the process -- but we have successfully moved out of 705 w california. for some pictures, click here. things said about my roommates may or may not be true -- use your best judgement.
japan part ii Wednesday August 13
i think i've found one of my future jobs. i was reading the strokes website for news to say on the radio, and they as well were on tour in japan (reference yesterday's post). and then they give mad shout-outs to their translators, who led them in and around japan and tokyo during their two-week tour of the island country.
man, i could do that. i should get the hookup on that. working with a rock band on tour translating stuff. i bet i'd get to meet a lot of interesting people.
japan rawks Tuesday August 12
i've noticed recently that japan is, "cool". outside of my own personal interest and study, japan and japanese culture is often portrayed as something foreign and unreal, and today particularly i invested some time in thinking about it. my conclusions follow.
foremost, we've got the sushi thing. if you live in the united states now, and you don't eat sushi, you're not cool. side note: much like chop suey, california rolls are not authentic sushi. i'm not saying you have to like everything; specifically, i'm not a big fan of the salmon eggs wrapped in seaweed -- the texture creeps me out. i'll give a thumbs up to this cultural deviation in the states, as sushi is really tasty; i'm all about the globalization of good food. we'll work on getting better, fresher fish in the midwest.
i know that not everyone is into this -- and some clearly state their opinions otherwise -- but we also have the display of chinese and japanese characters (kanji) on tattoos, t-shirts, and hats. personally, i think it's great that you're getting the symbol for "love" tattooed on the side of your neck (i truly saw that once), but ask yourself this question: would you do it in english too? language is language, and just because there is some symbol representing it doesn't make it any more or less of a word. it doesn't have some amazing, transcendental meaning that is embodied in the character that we don't have in english. so do yourself a favor: if you really appreciate "love", "friendship", "together", or all the other ones i see all the time, get them in english. spare us.
for my radio job, one of the things i often do is go to band websites to investigate tour dates, news, and album information. today i ran across the rooney website; rooney is a debut band who is being pushed really really hard by the record company. i guess that they feel their take-you-back sound will take over the current quagmire of awful rock music that saturates the market today (c.f., linkin park). either way, all of their pictures are from when they visited japan via osaka, and all of the captions say ridiculously inane things. it appears to me that the record companies are banking off of the very same "america is cool" thing in japan that makes us say "japan is cool". they market our bands there, and to a small extent, sony music does the same thing the other way -- don't tell me you don't know who ayumi hamasaki is. i mean, please.
point is, we're being culturally played against each other because of a mysteriousness and curiosity associated with the other. reference post-war reconstruction if you want the answer why, i spent an entire class just scratching the surface of it last spring.
so my general hope, then, is that people who say "japan is cool" truly have some reason to be saying so. but it won't happen -- when i came back from osaka, i sat next to a retired couple on the plane. they loved japan, and they'd been back like 6 times in 10 years...and i knew more japanese and more about the culture than they did.
ah, america, the land of bakana gaijin.
top ten Thursday August 7
top ten things i hate more than having this damn mosquito bite on the top of my foot:
10. having a mosquito bite on my ankle
09. when my feet stink just because i wear sandals
08. times new roman, any size
07. comic sans ms, any size
06. having my chinese food eaten by roommate(s)
05. losing my green baseball cap
04. moving everything i own twice between leases
03. those plastic containers that small personal electronics like cd players come in that you either need a hatchet or a leatherman to open
02. being stung near the eye by a bee
01. writing a twelve-pager, turning it in in class -- only to be handed the six-page final exam -- due the next day.
disarmament Saturday August 2
i am not happy about this.
last semester i took a class entitled "japan at war and peace", and a full third of the class was focused of the effects of the only nuclear devices ever unleashed on humans. coupled with two weeks of discussing the cold war and nuclear deterrence in my political science class this summer, i have become completely anti-nuclear. international cooperation and collective security enable us, multilaterally, to control nuclear arms to the point of extinction -- but no one is going to do that without us taking the first step...and we're going the other way.
i'm disgusted.
