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So, it’s been a few days since I got back from my trip to London. It was only my second trip back since I moved here and as with the previous trip it was a rollercoaster of emotions… a really predictable one at that. Anyway, before the trip I was raring to get back to London – see my parents, see my friends, go to China Town etc etc…. I get there and I’m like “meh, it’s London, nothing different compared to Tokyo right…” – as before, it took me a few days to get back into the spirit of being a Londoner and as soon as I did, I really did not want to leave! Catching up with friends, drinking at the local watering hole, eating Chinese… seriously amazing! Anyway, I fly back to Japan and as soon as I land I start noticing all these annoying little things about the country; All these small things that I had “gotten used to” over the past year just came blaring back at me. Things like in the baggage hall, the constant repetitive PA telling people to fill out their customs forms… the constant repetitive voices of the ground staff reminding us to check the baggage tags to make sure the bags are ours… on tv it’s the constant loudness! I think this country does not know when to shut up.

Anyway, to summarise, I had a fantastic time in London and I keep wishing I had the same atmosphere and social network in Tokyo. Admittedly, that would be difficult considering my history here is eclipsed by that of London. Good friends don’t just appear and great friends are an even rarer thing. Yeah, I think that’s the main thing. It’s not so much I love London, I mean I really do, but it’s more the people I know there.

F1

Actually, today I was watching the F1 Japanese grandprix, it was an exciting race and I enjoyed watching it except for the stupid commentary. The constant reference to Toyota being on their home turf, Button being in his second home (his gf is half Japanese), the Japanese driver that finished last… soo much “patriotism” or what I would just categorise as misplaced enthusiasm. F1 is about the driver not the nationality on his passport. I really don’t care about the driver in last place, and I would prefer referring to the 2nd place as Trulli and not Toyota… it was afterall him in the driver seat.

Signs

Weird thing happened in London. Over the short period I was there… including the short hop to Belgium with my parents… I saw 3 newlywed couples still in their wedding gear… all happy and lovey-dovey. On the gangway to the plane home, HSBC had their usual advertising posters – this time it had photos of marriage with some slogan next to them.

Seriously, disturbing if this was meant to be a sign. If it was, then at least point in the the right direction. You need two people in a wedding! … also, I’m not planning on getting married that near in the future!

Reboot

So, back in Tokyo. I feel I need to reboot my life here. As one of my friends pointed out, I need to be less negative… although that wasn’t exactly referring to my life… time to fight

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?

So, graduation week has come and gone, with me now firmly sitting back in my Tokyo apartment ruefully reminiscing the days gone by. A 2 week break would have been a lot more relaxing but unfortunately I don’t have the accrued days this year to do that.

Anyway, I can’t change the fact that I’m back; nor the fact that the weather in Tokyo seems just as bad as it was in London, except + a few degrees of warmth. It’s cold enough for me to wear a jumper. Then again, that could be because my body clock is screwed up and it can’t keep itself warm.

Graduation Day

Graduation day started off bright and early with an effort to beat the undoubted queues for collecting the gown and getting the official photographs taken. Unfortunately I misjudged the willingness of people to arrive early and found that after arriving at 8:30am, I was done by 9, leaving me with 2 hours to spare before the actual ceremony started!

It was fine though – it gave me a chance to speak to the multitude of friends and acquaintances that I ran across. Despite it only being two months since I had left the country, in some cases it had been a lot longer since I had seen them last. Now, I’m wondering when I’ll see some of these people again.

The ceremony itself was a somewhat dull affair with the Rector giving a slightly politically toned opening speech regarding the economy, research funding, university admissions and so forth. The speech was followed by a somewhat drawn out naming of each graduand as they walked up on stage to be officially turn in to a graduate with a handshake. There was approximately 1000 people graduating in the morning ceremony, with an equally large number in the afternoon ceremony. Thankfully, I was called up quite early on so any nervousness I may have had evaporated and I could “concentrate” on the magnificent day.

Post-ceremony was much the same as pre-ceremony with a lot of mingling and talking to various people. Photographs being taken and stories being swapped. Drinking featured throughout the day with the champagne reception and then a trip to our old haunt, the student Union.

The day did not creep into the night as much as some had envisaged with many people heading off with their families for dinner. A lot of us were too tired for them to return and the night to continue… another time perhaps?

Friday

Friday was a two part affair with the early afternoon spent with a couple of school friends down at the East India Club. We were all suited up, which was a slightly bizarre feeling considering we were just there to play snooker.

Anyway, the afternoon soon turned into evening, where I ran across London to meet up with my Japanese uni friends. One of them had never had fish and chips before so I insisted I take her to eat some. We went to George’s, which was not exactly the closest place but I vaguely remembered it being pretty good. I hope everyone wasn’t too annoyed by the long walk to and from the eating establishment! The food was soon chased down by drinks at first, one of my favourite pubs on Portobello Road and then a trip cross town to the Sports Cafe. Despite being semi-aware that my flight was the next day, I thoroughly enjoyed the night out although I should probably have been more restrained in the amount I drank.

The Flight

There was a couple of school groups on the flight back to Tokyo. They weren’t loud or annoying so they didn’t bother me too much. I was curious though… the distances these kids go now for school trips is unbelievable! The furthest I think I went with my school was Western Europe on a history trip!

Talking of trips. I went to see Blood Brothers, a musical tragedy, where over half the audience in the lower stalls were school kids! Lucky them! I do remember going to see Oliver! when I was at school though – we went to see one of our friends in that.

Parting Thoughts

Now that I may back in Tokyo – with the daunting prospect of heading in to work tomorrow. I can’t help compare the two great cities of East and West. Here are a few small things I’ve noticed:

Escalators: stand on the right, walk on the left vs. stand on the left, walk on the right
Toilet seats: A cold toilet seat really does wake you up in the morning, no heated seats in London!
Night Bus: 24hr system of London is superior to the lack of night time transport in Tokyo.
Culture: London has museums, theatres and history which can not be matched in Tokyo
Food: Tokyo has great food. In London, you have to pay a premium for that kind of luxury.
Smoking: Tokyo should really introduce the smoking ban, it makes a huge difference on a night out!
Friends: my social network in London will be difficult to surpass out here in Tokyo but I really do need to give it a shot!
Parents: they never do stop lecturing you and giving obvious advice whatever age you are!

So, the graduation photos are up on FB, with others to follow shortly. Now, to recover from jet lag as quickly as possible so this week is not too hellish!

Tonight is probably, baring a miracle tomorrow, that i’ll have internet at least until I head into work on Monday. I’m collecting the keys to my new place tomorrow and along with that moving most of my stuff in.

I can’t really imagine what it’d be like living there with furniture and having settled down but I can envision the first few weeks being quite tough. As there is absolutely no furniture except a number of left electrical appliances I haven’t decided whether to stay there tomorrow night or wait until at least my futon arrives on Sunday. My grandparents were slightly paranoid that I wouldn’t be there to pick it up on Saturday so decided that Sunday would be the safer option…..despite the fact I’m picking up the keys on Saturday morning.

Anyway, I can just about picture the apartment furniture-less with just the 1 futon spread out in my room for the first couple of days. Monday, my brother moves his stuff in but the lounge will still have nothing. There is a counter/kitchen table but no chairs, no crockery, no kitchen utensils…

Having no internet will also make it somewhat difficult to order furniture online. I may have to resort to late night shifts at the office to take advantage of the net there….hopefully the sites won’t be blocked.

It’s all a major source of stress, which I’ve been trying to limit recently for various reasons.

The inset is the floor plan of the flat. I’m not sure whether it’s accurately to scale but the J means “jo-” (畳) and is a traditional measurement for room size. The alternate reading of the Kanji is “tatami”, from which you can probably guess the history. The dimensions varied from region to region but I think they’re standardised to 1.65m x 0.75m for property development.

There’s a whole range of traditional Japanese measurements, which can still be occasionally seen in use today, much like the Imperial measurements of the UK. One system still in use even by government officials is the traditional era names in place of the de-facto common era counting. Anyway, enough about that.

Tomorrow is the big move to Tokyo. I can’t 100% say that I’m looking forward to it; there is a small feeling of unease, but it’s definitely going to be a big move!

Anyway, I’ll try and post some pics up as soon as I have internet set up there…if not before, somehow…

I always feel terrible, absolutely awful afterwards. As well as the expected gaping hole in my life, the feelings always have more than a hint of annoyance at myself. So many things go through my head, so many things that want to be said and so many things that need to be said. Yet they remain unspoken. How can something so wonderful, so warm and so important be this complicated.

Last night I had the Plain White T’s song “Friends Don’t Let Friends Dial Drunk” playing in my head. It’s a great song and there are some good lines in it…one in particular, my mind kept screaming at me. The line got a bit morphed but the jist of it was there. It cut me up and knifed me a million times before I fell asleep.

Anyway, as most of you know I had a party on Saturday. It wasn’t quite one of those parties which turn into everlasting memories that I had built it up to be but I had a fantastic time. So many of my old school friends turned up that I wasn’t expecting. It definitely boosts the confidence when so many friends turn up. You feel loved. But yeah, due to my craziness and idiocy I ended up staying awake for around 40 hours but yeah… more later