Tokyo: tenth day

Trainblogging again on the way home from Tokyo, heading into the sunset. For the first half-hour or so out of Tokyo, the train follows the coastline; as when travelling along the Mediterranean coast of France/Italy one gets tantalizing glimpses of the sea between the tunnels. [Written on Wednesday, but I was too tired to post it. It's funny, I am not having any of the usual jetlag symptoms, but I am tired all the time.]

I was mystified for a while by irregularly-occurring flashes of diffuse reddish light, off in the distance, well above ground level. Were they aircraft warning lights on hilltops shining through low cloud? Eventually the train changed direction and I worked out that they had been caused by the sun reflecting on pylons and posts by the trackside, which were themselves flashing past too fast to see.

I've taken many photos from the train, one or two of which might turn out. I have quite a few shots of sound-protection walls and the broad and featureless sides of huge buildings, and a surprising number of shots of the insides of tunnels. The Shinkansen goes so fast that there is no warning at all of these things as they approach. Even the tunnels come as a surprise: on the ICE one usually has time to note the ground rising before the train plunges into darkness; here the first you know of a hill is when you dive under it.

I guess I won't see the peak of Fuji-san this time either: we aren't yet in Mishima and it is already pitch-black outside. I saw the base of Fuji on the way to Tokyo: even with its shoulders lost in clouds it is unmistakeable, not just tall but broad, truly massive. It's very much bigger than any other mountain in Japan, a sumo wrestler among schoolboys.

Tokyo was … well, where to start? It was many things: "huge" is one; "new" another; "exhausting" a third. There was simply too much choice for such a short trip. I found it hard work in a way that Kyoto wasn't. I certainly had more luck in finding English-speakers in Kyoto. (That is probably statistically insignificant, btw: I guess that every foreign visitor to Japan goes to both cities; given the cities' relative sizes those N visitors encounter, and infect with the meme of English-speakingness, a far higher percentage of the population of Kyoto than of Tokyo.)

I walked around Akihabara last night, checking out the otaku/manga/animé/geek culture. At first I was taken by the stores selling electronics and gadgetry (e.g. a tiny shop selling only sixty different types of electricians' pliers) but eventually the animé/manga scene captured my attention. The stores selling manga/animé figurines were a revelation. I'd heard about them, about the collectors and their seriousness, but I wasn't prepared for the reality. There are differences of quality and purpose (for want of a word) in the figures that even an outsider like myself can see, and the prices reflect this: from around 800¥ for a simple, static, two- or three-inch figure, to 2500¥ for a six-inch articulated figure with exchangeable heads/hands/accessories (i.e. different gestures and facial expressions), to around 5000¥ for the Gundam weaponized cyborgs that we Westerners call "Transformers," and on upwards to 20000¥ for a seriously creepy foot-high too-young-even-for-Lolita figurine.

Most of the smaller stores specialized in a single animé "franchises;" in the case of larger stores these were displayed on different floors. I'd guess that there is little overlap between the fans of e.g. Evangelion and those of Gundam, or between them and the fans of Dragonball and the Sailor Moon imperium. Not to mention the Star Wars imperium, which is nowhere near as present in Japan as in the west.

When I first started walking around Kyoto, looking at the Japanese, I thought that Japan looked like Second Life; having been to Akihabara and Harajuku, I now think that SL looks like Japan. So much of the common dress and appearance in SL is rooted in Japanese styles: the thigh-high boots, the straps and buckles, the stripes of fur along the touchable edges of jackets and boots, the mini-skirts that are hardly more than wide belts worn low. The "sexy schoolgirl" is common in Japan, but then she was already an erotic archetype in England thirty years ago so that doesn't really count towards my view of SL. (There sure are a lot of them, though most seem to be in their early twenties. I admit to enjoying the six or more inches of bare skin between the tops of their over-the-knee boots and the bottom of their miniskirts.) Even the tiny heads and bulging muscles of many male SL avatars have a Japanese root: most male action-animé characters have heads far smaller than their biceps. (Bishonen and yaoi animé characters, and the male supporting-cast of animé featuring women, are improbably good-looking but do have realistic bodies.)

In sadder news, I left my kangol (flat hat) on the subway train on the way back from Ueno, so I'll have a chance to investigate a question that puzzled me all last week: Kyoto is full of hat shops, I noticed at least six of them while walking around — yet nobody wears hats. No-one. So who buys all the hats, and what do they do with them? Is there a secret indoor hat-fetishing scene? A mystery.

One more point about the JapanRail pass: I forgot to mention that you should allow at least forty minutes to have it validated before you first use it. In Tokyo there is a special office for this near the Yaesu central exit; in Kyoto it was just a desk (singular) in the ticket office, where a young woman struggled valiantly against the tide. And note this too: visitors to Japan, especially those who don't speak Japanese, should allow a good fifteen minutes extra time in each station for getting lost and misdirected (or rather correctly directed to a misunderstood goal).

Kyoto is next, I'll pack up and get ready.

[Later: An amusing thing happened during the subway journey home to Uda-san's B&B. While standing around on Kyoto subway station platform waiting for the train, I was approached by a pair of Europeans with a map and a problem: Which train should they take to get to their B&B, and how would they go about finding it when they got there? As it happened we were heading the same way, so we talked for a while in the train. I was able to tell them roughly what to do, and how to go about getting the information they'd need to get to the rest of the way. Being able to help them promoted me from "stranger" to "insider." Nice.]

Quickly

I have 19 minutes to post something before going to work. (I start at noon on Fridays to accomodate a meditation/discussion group thing that Susan runs in SL at 10am my time.)

Work has been utterly crazy lately. The concrete work is falling behind schedule, the steelwork is being held up by the façade contractors who can't get themselves organized, they are being held up by the electrical engineers who keep discovering new things that need to be cabled up. That we have been asking the steelwork and façade contractors since February to send us detail plans for approval is somehow irrelevant to the fact that they cannot send their unapproved plans for fabrication today. And all of this is of course the architects' fault.

Anyway.

I had a really nice day so far. Went to bed early last night (before midnight, for the first time in ages), got up early, went to the post office to collect two books from Amazon, and took them downtown to my favourite cafe on a nameless square to open. Perfectly blue sky, gentle breeze, birdsong, temperature around 28°C which is in my opinion all it ever needs to be.

I bought two books on virtual worlds, which will feed into Susan's workshop this summer. Zach Waggoner's "My avatar, my self" is about the construction of identity in real and virtual worlds, and how these affect each other. Edward Castronova's "Exodus to the Virtual World" seems to be primarily about how RL and VL will be affected by the withdrawal of the time and money that we VL'ers are not spending in our RL environments. It seems like he will have a lot to say about happiness too:

For every happy, fulfilled person, how many are there who are bored, frustrated, unappreciated, defeated, unhappy? There's quite a lot of self-medication going on. Whatever people learn in schools, it doesn't seem to be leading to stable homes, happy childhoods, and emotionally grounded adult lives.

I'll be in Canada in less than a month. Sis and BIL are getting married this summer, after twenty-five years together. There will be a small but select ceremony and celebration, with only the most immediate of family in attendance. Various other plans are afoot too, including a further meditation retreat in Halifax (after Malta, and in the place of San Francisco in April).

Harpier cries, 'tis time, 'tis time.

Woodpecker

Wondering how to
count the syllables of "&"
drove from my mind the

slow soft tap-tap-tap of a
woodpecker in the cool mist.

Or: Don't let a technology distract you from the use you wished to make of it.

Life is going well, mostly, but still far too much work. Haven't had a day off since February 25th, 71 hours last week. One more week of this madness, then we'll be done.

Weather is warming up, but I've said that before so I will say no more. Birds are active, the goldenrod is in bloom, crocuses came and went. And so it goes.

Broken

I broke a molar two days ago, while eating a carraway seed roll. A piece of tooth the size of a small pea broke off, and is now lying on my kitchen windowsill. I'm not quite sure why I put it there, I do know that it can't just be glued back in place, but throwing it out felt wrong. (As far as I can reconstruct the events, a seed got wedged between teeth and acted as a tiny crowbar when I bit down.) It doesn't hurt, which makes me vaguely uneasy even as I am thankful.

At this point, I have to interrupt myself to give some backstory. We have two more weeks to get the tender documents written and published, and are working insanely long and hard at it. Last week set a kind of sad record: 67.5 hours at work. That amount of concentrated effort doesn't just wash off during the twelve-minute walk home downhill, not even when I see an urban fox trotting down the empty street before me at 1 a.m. as has happened twice now. Even at 2 a.m. it takes me at least an hour of tea and/or yoghurt and/or reading, to relax enough to be able to go to bed. I haven't been in Second Life in a week, I find that too strenuous after working so long and hard.

I had a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep that night, between worry about the tooth and residual stress from overwork. I lay in bed half-awake, my mind whirling in a strange paranoiac-critical state that I would not hesitate to describe as delusional if it had happened while I was awake and functional*. I found myself in conversation with the dentist, in affect not "imagining" the meeting so much as remembering something that hadn't happened yet. She said that the tooth was irreparable and must be removed, and suggested an implant.

I asked her whether it was worth all that bother and expense, "given that I am not going to be alive much longer."

Well.

That shook me awake, really awake. I was so disturbed that I considered getting up again and going online to talk to some friends who I knew (hoped) would be there. I talked myself down from the horror, telling myself it was just a moment of madness caused by overwork and exhaustion (true enough), and managed to go to sleep after a half-hour of reading.

Where the hell did that idea come from? On the one hand, I never thought that I would ever live to be as old as I am now (not that I expected to die, I just didn't think I would age), and I have certainly always lived as though life and youthful strength would be infinitely available; on the other hand, I was told by a reputedly infallible reader of tea-leaves in Boston that I would live to be 88. (She also said that I would be successful and happy but not rich, which so far is running 100%.)

And now, the punchline. Once this set of documents is finished, we'll have a few weeks' off. I was thinking about a trip to Israel, and had got as far as mailing some friends to pick dates and places. Right now, it looks like I will be giving my holiday fund to the dentist instead. Damn.


* Ignoring for the moment that one definition of being awake and functional is not being in a delusional state.

Plus ça change...

I would blame my three-week silence on the pressures of work etc, but regular readers know that there have often been such lacunae in recent years. I apologise to everyone I've been ignoring, all the bloggers whose posts that I haven't been commenting, all the birthdays I have forgotten (or worse, remembered and then put from mind because I couldn't deal with it). My behaviour upsets me at least as much as it does you.

Work has changed direction. I stopped the translation for half a year after the mess last summer, with them wanting me in Münster and then withdrawing the offer shortly before we signed contracts. Last month I realized that I had (relatively) enormous debts and no chance to pay them back without doing more or different work, so spoke seriously to G and U about my work in their office. The theoretical 20 hours a week had been creeping upwards, reaching an average of 35, which was a break-even level but no chance to repay or save anything. I explained all this and said I'd need to cut back to a real 20 hours in order to take a second job, terribly sorry. They thought about it overnight and made a counter-offer: 45 hours a week, slight raise in the hourly rate, and a productivity bonus guaranteed for 2009 that would let me pay all my debts.

I have to admit, that option hadn't occurred to me. I took it, and am now working fulltime and fairly happily. But it means that my lovely mornings at home have gone, so I am seriously behind on my blog- and book-reading, riverbank-walking-down-to-ings, and Second Life play. A fair exchange, perhaps; in any case I was glad to take it.

With the change in hours has somehow come a change in my style and manner. It feels as though I've shifted up a gear, or crested a hill and am now running on the level. I've started taking the job more seriously, sometimes arriving first and often leaving last, and am taking on more management and steering. Much of the technical discussion with structural engineers and HVAC planners and others that ilk, now devolves to me, and to my surprise I am enjoying it.

Second Life is changing direction too. I have stepped back a bit from the meditation group discussions, which lately had been more philosophical discussion than meditation. I often couldn't follow the sense of the conversation, for example the idea that the image of a chair on a screen is not distinguishable from the one that you are sitting in right now, dear reader, and I found that stressful. I have joined some more traditional groups to get back to calm and centering: "Sit down, shut up, just breathe."

Time for work. Let me leave you with a truly marvellous video (a genuine cinema short, btw, 16 minutes long) called Validation which offers exactly what the title says. Highly recommended, do watch it!

Shabbat shalom, dear friends. I do think of you fondly, even in my silence.

Struggling

We still haven't managed to produce a convincing project for the competition that has to go to the printers on Friday morning. Damn and blast.

Heard from the organizers of the first competition: thrown out in the second discussion round. Ah well. I care more that our run of six at-least-an-honourable-mention's in a row has been broken, than that we didn't win this particular competition.

Strange dreams: last night I was walking around a silted-up Victorian-inner-city harbour, Manchester or the like, with a friend. She jumped into the murky, frond-infested waters and simply disappeared. Two others who were with us jumped in after her, but I couldn't swim so stayed on the quayside. She later IM'ed me (incorporating Second Life abilities into a dream based in real-life) to say that she had knocked out her front teeth and was ashamed to be seen like that, so had climbed out elsewhere.

Weather continues warmish (14°C or so) but rainy.

Despite all that, I am mostly calm and peaceful. I'll have more to say about this after I spend the entire weekend asleep.

That is all.

Busier than something that's really, really busy

Started work on the competition at 9:30, straightening out the plans for the final cut. I have recommended several times that someone should count off the rooms against the programme to be certain that we have included them all; this advice is politely rejected because we wouldn't have made a mistake like that, oh no no no. Foolishness abounds. Given that the team is divided geographically between Stuttgart and LittleHillsideTownInWürttemburg, with roughly half of the rooms are being laid out in a new building by Flunky No. 1 here and the rest in an existing building (part of the competition) by Flunky No. 2 there, it seems to me blindingly obvious that at least one room will be duplicated, or worse: left out. You may hold your breath for the shock horror when it is discovered that we haven't included everything and how could I screw up that badly?

Then home at 3pm for four hours' work on the translation to placate the Münsters who are breathing down my neck (telephonically but none the less distressingly) about deadlines and contracts and penalty clauses.

Now blogging and sniffing about in the Internets before heading back to the office (!!) for a few more hours' work on the competition. Haven't been to bed before 2am since Tuesday of last week; only twice because of fun and games. I must be mad.

This competition too will be judged and reported on before Christmas.

[Updated at 3:44 a.m.] Back from the office after an 18-hour working day. It's looking pretty good, coming together well. But the rooms still haven't been counted and I guess that at this stage doing so would only bring us news that we don't want to hear. So to hell with it.

Twenty-six down, four to go.

In-between

I decclared myself to be in need of fresh air and movement, so went for a walk that happened to take me past a supermarket, so I did some shopping and came home. Blogging now briefly in case I'm not back before midnight to post a legitimate "November 10th" entry.

We appear to have decided on the shape and arrangement, and have quite possibly fitted in all necessary rooms in more or less the right arrangement. The rest is just a hard slog but without much more thinking, so it should go well and quickly enough.

Gotta go. More later, possibly; else Sunday morning.

[Updated well after midnight: I forgot to mention: this morning, walking uphill to the Bauernmarkthalle I noticed that the rain that had been falling by my house had become snow. The air and ground were too warm for it to accumulate, but still: it was the first snowfall of the winter. Hooray.]

Ten down, twenty to go.

Pleased

Spent most of the day (well, from noonish onwards) transcribing a single eight-page screen formular and its associated object actions (i.e. how a button knows what to do when you click on it) for the Münsters; packaged that up and sent it off.

To the office for two hours during the afternoon, to discuss both competitions with G, U and the two new hires who will remain anonymous for the time being. The second competition is floundering in waffling indecision, due in my 'umble opinion to too much theorification and not enough butts-on-chairs time. Architects have a horror of signage and would like to pretend that an ideal world could function without it, and therefore that this world must function without it. This leads to long and futile discussions of urban-planning theories and viewing angles and suchlike, whereas out here in the real world we all know perfectly well that the client will tack up a half-dozen signs the second your back is turned, dear Architect, so just suck it up and let us move on to something important, please.

I have sadly, after much struggle, decided not attend Princess' birthday jamboree tomorrow. It's just irresponsible to walk away from the competition for three days (I'd thought it would be one and a half days, with a single overnight stay) less than two weeks before it has to be handed in; and the Münsters need to be fed regularly to keep them happy. Sigh.

And now, to bed—well before midnight! [Updated] Wrong! I looked into Second Life "just for five minutes" and spent an hour chatting.

Getting busy

We have three weeks left on the first competition, and therefore four-and-a-half weeks left on the second (though I will have relatively little to do with it, hopefully only two hours a week oversight and a week of half-days helping with the submission drawings). A database customer wants to hire me for a day to update their systems. The Münsters are pressing for visible results, to be submitted weekly. And to cap it all, NaBloPoMo is about to start again.

The next thirty days should be very exciting.

The odd thing about all this far-too-much is that I am relieved and pleased to have discovered just how bad it's going to be: as though, knowing the worst, I can now make plans and start dealing with things.