It’s been a while since my last blog entry. I’ve been trying to keep a low profile lately. My attempts to steer myself towards a less stress filled lifestyle has not really been achieved. On the contrary, the busy days literally and imaginary have made me ill again.

The realisation that I get ill a lot is worrying. I hear a lot of people saying they never get ill, or haven’t been ill for years… I used to think I was one of them. Unfortunately, that’s far beyond the case. I seem to be ill at least a few times a year; sometimes in the form of mild fatigue, sometimes full on fever. On this occasion, I forced this on myself.

Year-end. It’s the time of year when there’s a lot of parties, drinks, events and so forth. This year, it’s also extremely busy work-wise. Admittedly I don’t do that much over-time, but I have had to work 6 days a week a lot lately. Feeling below average is just cannot figure. Denial of the cold weather, denial of feeling a little unwell. Going out with no jacket when the temperature was close to freezing. What started off as a slightly sore throat turned into a chest infection, runny nose and muscle ache.

Anyway, after attempting to recover by taking a half day… I marched in to work on Monday morning… only to be told to go to the clinic, and if I insisted on working, to work from the other office – the one that’s near empty. I was banished. The result of which, I was persuaded to take a day off work. So, along with the national holiday (Emperor’s birthday), I’ve been resting at home for the last couple of days. I have not stepped one foot out of the house, nor have I got out of my pjs. Do I feel better? Maybe. Then again, it’s prob all the drugs I’m on.

The Bounenkai Season

Bounenkai – literally a gathering to forget the past, otherwise known as the year-end party. I held my own bounenkai / christmas / birthday party last week; invited a few friends and booked out a snazzy little bar.

It ended up being a little different to what I imagined; the guest list was mostly made up of friends from work and a few key members weren’t able to attend. I don’t really know what I was expecting. I did have a great time catching up with old friends, and hanging out with workmates outside of the office. …but… something was missing.

I have yet to truly feel the Christmas spirit since I moved here. It’s just so different. No family gathering. No Christmas turkey. No presents under the tree. It’ll be just another day at work.

Now that I’m back from my self-imposes exile. I guess I’ll be writing another post around year-end/new-year. I’ll most likely reflect on a year sprinkled with a few memorable moments and showered with all sorts of lows.

Merry Christmas everyone! I truly wish you have a wonderful festive season!

まじ、だせー！なんでさ、あんなに友達が俺のこと興味見せてるのに、超詰まらない行動ばっかするの？色々質問とか聞かれてさ、趣味とか好みとかさ、正直の答えろよ！てか、趣味何なの？料理とか言ったけどさ、最近してねえし。テニスとかサッカーだって趣味というか運動だし。週末といえば、フェースブック拝見したり、本読んだり、テレビ見たり。洗濯。掃除。アイロン掛け。

まじ、俺の週末はもっとさ、旅行とか、ドライブ、買物とかしてぇ！

一面しかない俺は詰まらない人間でござります。はしゃがないしな、日々どんどん真面目になってしまってる。

好きな食べ物：　日本カレー、インドカレー、パドタイ、ファヒータ、チーズ、など
好きなデザート：　ストロベリーショートケーキ、ティラミス
好きなスポーツ：　テニス、サッカー
好きな和曲：　コブクロ、キマグレン、Soulja、Ｙｕｉ、Ｅｌｌｅｇａｒｄｅｎ、
好きな洋曲：　Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Five For Fighting, Twista, Feeder

外見：　ロング・ストレートヘア、笑顔、
中身：　会話が合う人。英語が話せる。自分をちょっとひっぱてくれる人。やさしい人。ちょっとおっちょこちょい。

って感じ。。。

恋は一生一度。。。なのかね？

BBQで上司に説教されて、あの時は全然気にしてなかったんだけど、the more I think about it, the more I wonder… what the hell am I doing? Where is my life going?

I know my blog entries tend to centre around the same topics over and over again. I understand how boring and dull my life must seem to you all. I wish I could write about something more interesting. I wish I could be more positive.

I like to think I used to be an outgoing, happy kid… but to be honest, that happy self probably went into hibernation a long long time ago. 最近は本当に楽しいって思ったのは何度も歩けど、正直those happy times are so shortlived, it scares me. The moment, we 解散, all that happiness slips aways って感じ。超情けないな。

These moments of fragility are so frequent these days, it seriously adds to the never-ending stresses that I seem to create for myself. It’s a vicious circle.

In my life, I like to think that I have priorities… family, friends, work, etc, etc… but then, sometimes I think, what the hell is the point of having priorities if they don’t make me happy. Seriously, I can’t explain this.

Does being a 社会人 mean that conversation revolves around work, weekend plans, romantic happenings (if any), vacation plans… ok, I have no idea what other conversation there is, but life feels a little stale recently. I think I need a little more excitement… nothing crazy, but to be honest, I think I need something that really gets my heart racing.

You know, sometimes when you have that feeling of wanting to let your frustration out by punching something? or maybe, screaming at the top of your voice. The feeling of being trapped in this shell, self created or imposed by the environment I’m in, it’s tiring.

Honestly, I do not regret for a single minute the decision to come over here. I just want to be able to show that my life is just as great, if not better, than everybody that remained in London. At the moment, the only reason for my life being better is, I’m in Tokyo, you lot aren’t. But seriously, that’s shallow… The screaming I want to do… I don’t want it to be about frustration, stresses, etc.. I want it to be about my fantastic life… the awesome things I’m doing…

I’d hoped the past week would kick start something, change something… all the events I went to, all the people I met up with, everything… and nothing. Meeting up with new friends, friends from work, uni friends, old friends from 5-10 years ago…. all of it was fantastic! I really did enjoy seeing everyone. Catching up, shooting the breeze, whatever. I hate to say this, but I want more.

Unsatisfactory.

In Other News

In other news, I bought a new laptop. After 5 years of serving me extremely well, my laptop finally died. Over the years, I’ve made some adjustments like, adding new RAM, remapping my keyboard to work around broken keys, putting up with a dodgy sound system, living with an extremely noisy, most likely loose, fan…. and the final straw… the screen losing all brightness – not completely dark but, so dark that you can just about see the outline of a window.

Anyway, I bought the new studio xps 13. It’s snazzy, yes. But I still miss my old laptop. I mean, after 5 years, I had it set up near perfectly. Shortcuts, applications, settings, etc. I have to redo all of that.

I previously spoke up having near everything backed up online. Admittedly, I started that as I forsaw the day that my laptop would die. However, getting my new laptop I was faced with a difficult choice. After near 4 years working, studying and living on Ubuntu… was I going to install it on my new laptop or not? I mean, study is no more – work is at work, and living? well, living is just the internet, email and the occasional editing of some document. I don’t play games on my laptop these days… programming is mainly limited to work… I’m going to try migrating back to Windows. A heavily modified Windows environment obviously. Trying to integrate as much of the best features of linux into Windows is going to a mighty difficult task, but it’s a challenge I’m going to attempt to tackle. To be honest, being such a new computer, I reckon Ubuntu would still have a few quirks it would need to sort out… plus, the latest release has been full of bugs. In a few months time, either I would have successfully migrated to the cloud, or I’ll be installing the next release of Ubuntu, or maybe 7?

Either way, it looks like it’ll take me a few weeks to get used to this new machine.

Anyway, to all the geeks out there, I’d just like to say…

svn-ing your entire computer has its challenges and is frustrating at times, but it can be worthwhile. Admittedly, it’s near impossible to have compatibility with Windows and Linux on the same repository, plus, I have yet to successfully test this out across multiple machines, but it’s a lot easier than the stupid network drive set up. The damn thing keeps losing connection every time I try to bloody copy a large file and it’s too damn laggy to stream media off!

Finally…

I’m currently in the middle of watching the Robocop: Prime Directives mini tv series. It’s メチャ懐かしい！ I think I’m turning to the past more and more often these days…. so not good.

In similar news… I was talking with a friend about actresses that are our types… we couldn’t really name any recent ones *shock* we realised that we’re old enough to have lived through more than one ‘era’ … are we from the Bullock, Kidman, Aniston, Ryan, Roberts era? Does that era include Portman, Johannson, Jolie, etc? Either way, to have lived through more than one era for anything, be it movies, tv series, politics, music… that is a scary thought!

I had a bit of a shopping spree last week. Kind of retail therapy but not really, as it wasn’t very theraputic… I bought 4 new games:

1. No More Heroes (Wii)
2. Wii Sport Resort (Wii)
3. Pikmin 2 (Wii)
4. InFamous (PS3)

I have yet to play anything other than 1. but I’m really looking forward to inviting some friends round to test out the Motion Plus thing on Resort. Will most likely blog about it once I do. But yeah, No More Heroes is turning out to be pretty interesting.. will review that too soon!

Anyway, last words…

Who the hell reads my blog these days anyway?

Although recent events has seen a shift towards a more interaction with the “locals”, despite living in this country, I spend the majority of my time isolated from its people.

I’ve realised that this has had one major drawback. After the initial rapid improvement of my communication skills, I’ve hit a dead-end. We had to do some goal setting earlier this month – I decided that it’d be a good idea to improve my business level Japanese. I think that’s going to be quite a challenge considering I have a massive tendency to fumble my words whilst speaking Japanese. I was telling my friends yesterday that “just as I was getting ready to leave, a colleague spoke to me”… I got the first bit of the sentence out but totally screwed up on the second, and only managed to get my point across after a long pause. This is not good.

Practice really is a major force in keeping things ticking over… everything from sports to just speaking. Time to practice!

It’s strange how a day can flip your world upside down. Maybe it’s just one of those days that comes by every once in a while but then again, sometimes those odd days can draw out into a week, or a fortnight.

Last night I was thinking, maybe those dreams you have, that people have, sometimes disappear… will that boat sail away eventually? Am I just becoming too passive with the way things are right now?

I guess with all that uncertainty around me can rattle that inner strength.

It started to make me wonder where home is. I want to go home. Where is home.

I wish I had someone I could call up for a quick drink.

Recently I’ve been obsessively chewing more gum, drinking more coffee, eating more junk snack food…. so can’t be a good sign. seriously, maybe the title of this entry should be “unsprung”

My luck is really not with it lately. Having convinced myself that I can take care of myself and that I don’t get ill easily, over the past week or so my health has rapidly deteriorated. All the fatigure and the stresses from the past few months has boiled over just as Christmas week approached ending me up in the state I find myself today.

First of all it was the sore throat and the concussion-esque symptoms. The following day was the severe stomach pains, which I initially thought was just hunger. Lastly, today I find myself wearing an eye patch.

The stomach pain has been put on the back burner for now – I’m sure it’s still there but there are more pressing matters. I recently started noticing that my eyes were quite sore and that they would occasionally go a bit cloudy. Despite those signs I continued to wear my contact lenses believing that my eyes would push through it and settle each day; I was wrong.

After my driving lesson and the quick stop to buy some ski-wear for the coming season, I decided to pop out my contact lenses as they continued to feel uncomfortable; that decision was the final step in the destruction of my eyes. I half blindly managed to get myself back home, but after dropping off my shopping, I realised that I should visit A&E as it felt pretty bad.

Unfortunately, Japan does not have the NHS, and I soon realised the inefficiencies and inconveniences of a paid health service. Having grabbed a taxi to the nearest hospital, I find out that they were in their end-of-year break and that no doctors were around. The staff there were completely unhelpful and I paced up and down the pavement outside considering my options.

Finally, I ended up at an eye clinic run by one of my mum’s old friends, where I was swiftly told that my eyes were scratched all over. The image they showed me looked worse than sandpaper. Apparently, soft contact lenses soften the feelings of the eyeball being scratched and that once they are removed the pain hits you like a steam train – that was the feeling I had when I decided to remove my contact lenses outside the sports store…. I couldn’t open my left eye and my right eye could barely be opened either.

Seriously, so far, this winter season has totally sucked. I mean, I don’t mind going to work and I really appreciate all the birthday messages, and the drinks, but all the other crap besides that has been pretty awful. The collapsing health, the lack of a turkey dinner, presents, family…. very low key, but more low than key than I would have liked!

Having said that, as I mentioned the other day, I really enjoyed the Christmas drinks I had and I’m truly thankful that our paths crossed. I’m also extremely thankful for the birthday lunch, which was super expensive but top class!

I guess despite the mess I find myself in, I’m thankful for all the small things that have brightened up my week!

I finally got around to adding up my expenditure for the past few months. It was ridiculous! I started panicking over whether I would be able to continue to sustain this standard of living. First, I subtracted regular monthly costs, such as rent, phone, internet, etc from my pay. Other costs include, food, dry cleaning, hair cuts, as well as daily lunch. I think I may need to start doing my cleaning and ironing at home, eat combini-lunches and cut my hair less?

Having said that, it’s the sort of panic that is more to do with the lack of savings rather than my expenditure outstripping my income. Though, I do have to be more conscious of my spending.

The last couple of months have obviously included spending for settling in – furniture, tv, phone bill etc. I won’t be spending that much again for a while, but I do seem to end up going on spending sprees for clothes. I need to step back from this “elite” lifestyle…. or a pay raise?

The list of stuff I still want to buy:

• Nintendo DSi
• DVD/Blu-ray Player
• New laptop
• DSLR Camera
• Book case/shelves for my room

I think they’ll have to wait for a bit. Ahhh!!

Family

I met my cousins and uncle yesterday for the first time in ages. I’d met one of them last year when she came over to London but I hadn’t seen the others for over a decade. I was so worried that I wouldn’t recognise them at all. I ended up phoning them up at the station when I was pretty sure the group standing yonder was them… I was right. But yeah, my uncle hadn’t changed a bit. My cousins, I have no recollection of so it was nice to catch up with them again.

But yeah, that family drink A LOT! After dinner, we went to another bar – it was one of those places where they have labelled bottles for each customer… they had one. God, the bartender keeps topping up your drink. I can’t remember the name of the place, very secluded, quiet and regulars only kind of place. Wow, I’m hungover today.

Something inspired by an acquaintance…

My Johari Window

Current view:

Having gone to bed last night feeling totally drained I slept in until 11am this morning. A lie in well deserved? I don’t know.

Anyway, the plan for the day was to relax, recuperate and possibly re-motivate myself to do some project work. With less than a week to go until presentation day and a few more days after that until project submission, today really was the one and only day for catching up with some rest. …and rest I did. The day involved relaxing in front of the tv, watching random tv programs, playing some wii and watching the football…. but between all of that I felt the exhaustion still seeping through.

So, a nap was in order… I ended up sleeping from around 3 til 5 again. I think the 40+ hour day over the weekend combined with all the stresses over the past few weeks must have really taken its toll. It’s funny how you don’t notice these things when you’re in the midst of it.

Tomorrow, the stress piles on again…

At the end of many exams, I have walked out knowing that I have not done well. There have not been many I have walked out confident that I would be getting a top grade and I believe I left those days behind me along with my A-levels, school uniforms, classrooms, school lunches and all those happy memories of my DC days. The increasing regularity of post-exam depression and realisation that although I may not have failed the previous 2 hours I had done pretty damn badly is in itself quite depressing.

To date, I can recall 2 exams which I have known from even before putting pen to paper that I would do extremely badly in. The first was AE Maths (Advanced Extension). The second, S&M – that’s Simulation and Modelling, a 3rd year Computing Course.