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Contact
I'm
out of touch.
In
so many ways, I've lost contact. With my friends. With the
important things going on in their lives. Missed a couple
birthdays, haven't emailed some of them in months... my
family... my parents.. my adoring little brother and sister,
in whose eyes I can do no wrong, but of whom I am so unworthy
to be a brother to... my college brother who has finally
achieved a stable, rewarding relationship... same with my
old college buddy, Luke,
the lone gunman, who has finally found happiness, which
I found out about by reading his website...
And not
the least of which, I've lost touch with myself. With the
real reasons I'm here and what I hope to get out of this
year, these choices, this life...
I'm starting
to realize that I've been in a hazy funk for a while. Sleeplessness
is debilitating. It is draining and annoying and frustrating.
It has a profound affect on you physical and psychological
well-being. Sure, I've written and gone to work, and seen
a few people. I might have even appeared normal. But I've
felt wrong. I still don't feel completely right,
but I need to make a change in some of my habits now.
The sleeping pills I'm taking are effective.. sometimes.
If I didn't know for sure that I was asleep for eight hours
every night, sometimes I'd swear that I was not asleep at
all. But for the most part, they do work, but for some bizarre
reason, I look more tired than before. Is that possible?
I have
to get in contact with some people. Old friends, old acquaintances.
Soon. A flock of JETs will leave and new ones will come
in in July. And I have to be honest with myself when I say
that I won't see them ever again. Damn. That feels so...
solid. Permanent. But it's true. Oh, we may keep in touch
for a short while (hopefully for longer than that), but
they'll have their lives and I'll have mine.
I've
got a few partial-bonds to deal with. Y'know... people who
you've met and talked to at length a few times and you just
know you could be really good friends with them, but for
some reason you just don't find the time to call them up.
A few partial-bonds and a couple full bonds are leaving
Japan at the end of next month.
To start
this off, I've gotten together with a few JETs I don't really
see a couple times this week. I learned that they went to
see Himeji without
me. I've been there before, but I really wanted to see it
again and they knew that... but it had been a while since
I last spoke to them so I guess it didn't occur to them
to invite me. And I don't really blame them.
Lament of the Pop-Ups
Yes,
you've noticed by now that my site is now sporting ugly,
cumbersome pop-up ads. My pop-up free benefits expired at
the beginning of March, but I was hoping that my account
had been overlooked. That I'd slipped through the cracks
and would enjoy a pop-up free zone until I moved to another
domain. But, alas, it was not to be. What I'm more worried
about is the fact that, technically, not only am I supposed
to have pop-ups, but my account is supposed to be 7 megs
less on space. I've been checking links but they haven't
deleted anything... yet. If the bums at Network Solutions
release the domain name I've been waiting for on schedule,
I'll be able to move within a couple weeks.
Digitalism:
Revisited
OK, so
I mentioned before how wondefully
efficient the average Japanese retail worker is not, so
you might not be surprised that I got my camera last Friday
by walking into the store on a hunch and seeing it, plain
as day, and most certainly not out of stock, sitting on
the shelf. I asked them why I wasn't called and nobody seemed
to know, though they did apologize profusely, of course
(it's probably just because nobody wanted to call the foreigner).
I bought the camera, but not a decent sized memory stick
(they included a measly 4 meg stick with the camera which
holds about six pictures of high-quality), then. I went
back for the stick a few days ago. It really is quite a
nice camera. The zoom on it is fantastic. But the lens does
make the shape of the camera somewhat odd. Trying to buy
a camera case for it was a real problem. I still don't have
a proper one.. I'm using my old camera case which never
really fit the other one anyway. It's a little bulky and
I can't really fit it into my pocket like I would the Fuji
camera, but it's great in low-light settings (the Fuji camera
was not) so I can't complain.
Now you'll
be seeing lame-ass pictures of me going about my day, snapping
photos whenever the whim takes me. Why? Because I
can. hehehe Today you see how I get to Towa JHS.
A mismatch of routes, isn't it? Wacked-out streets, a bike
path along the train tracks, and I have to cross three other
train tracks. If I'm hauling ass (which I usually am), it
takes me about 10 minutes to get there. Not bad at all.
Next week is Takatsumi JHS. I take the train and walk along
rice fields. Picturesque. You'll like it.
The Scare
The
first thing I do in the morning is check my email. Yes,
I freely admit it... I am an internet addict. I check email,
hotmail and stock quotes. It's routine. I usually leave
my computer on overnight because I'm usually using the internet
just before I go to bed and right after I wake up. Anyway,
so I get up, move the mouse to start up the hard disk, and
nothing happens. There are two multicolored static bars
along the top and bottom of the screen.
Uh-oh.
Ctrl-alt-del...
nothing. Hurmph. I press the restart button. Familiar re-boot
sounds. OK. A screen comes up. A variation on the feared
"Blue Screen of Death", the blue screen was filled
with exclamation marks and a few other assorted characters.
Shit. Fiddled around with it for a while. Dammit. Late for
work. Go to work. Contemplate disaster scenarios all day.
There's about 7 gigs of stuff that I need on that drive.
Oh, man.
Just
think about it, folks... what would you do if your computer
suddenly died a sudden, painful death? What would you lose?
Emails and addresses? Projects? Photos? Internet bookmarks?
Irreplacable writings? 1.5 gigs worth of MP3s? Fantastic
monitor wallpaper of the illustrious Senna
Matsuda? My neighbors,my
friend Aya, and my supervisor are all going through the
same thing, their computers are having major malfunctions,
too.
I cut
out of school early and raced home to tend my sick machine.
I rebooted it twice to no avail. I hoped it was my monitor,
so I hauled my tower upstairs to hook it up to my neighbor's
monitor to see if that worked. No go.
"Jeff,
why are there happy faces all over the screen?" Lesa
asked. There were indeed happy faces inbetween the exclamation
marks. Hmmm. Odd. The 'Happy Virus'?
Then
I took it back downstairs to swap the hard drive with the
one I replaced it with in January. Hmmm, that's interesting.
SAME screen. OK. I'm all right. That means it's NOT the
hard drive. It's salvageable. What could make the monitor
all messed up.. hmm... what could... !! The video card!
Could it be?? I madly scour through the boxes in my closet
to find my old video card. An operation later and I had
the old one installed. Boot it up... works PERFECTLY.
Crisis
averted.
It does
run significantly slower now... going from 32 megs of video
to only 8 will do that. But it works. I'll buy a new one
soon.. either from an electronics store here or maybe off
of Ebay. That friggin card cost me about $100, which is
cheap for a 32 meg card, which is maybe why it was so short
lived (I have to stop being such a cheap bastard).
I have
only a month before the old JETs leave, but I'm going to
take this one step at a time. First, something simple. I'm
going upstairs to my neighbors' apartment and have some
'chicken goop' and maybe watch a movie. Then, rest. I'm
going to go to sleep and not open my eyes for 13 hours (nice,
prime number there). Then, I'll get up, eat something, and
write an entry about the absolute mayhem that is going on
at my neighbor's school. You guys won't fucking believe
it. Then, I'm going to sleep again for 12 hours and then
go to work. My body is going to get some rest even if it
doesn't want to. If I don't feel better by Monday... well,
I'll decide what to do then.
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