Bytes of Life -- June 27, 2000

Death of a Shirt

My clothes want to die.

They yearn to be put out of their misery... I can hear them now... crying out silently in the blowing wind. For mercy. For the painless solace of oblivion... for the Clothes Graveyard.

In the morning, out of the shower I go. I put on my clothes and begin.. to sweat. The fabric hangs limply on my body. The relentless humidity saturates both cloth and skin. And my clothes begin to moan. The wailing lasts all day long and ends when I peel them off my body at the end of the day and jump into the shower... but then..

it's the washing machine!

The Japanese washing machine is cruel. It tortures clothes with its harsh spinning and cold water. Even the mesh bags everyone puts their clothes in are of little help. (I'll show you guys some pics of this tomorrow.. Yes, I know you're just sooo excited, aren't you?) If the washing machine doesn't destroy the elastic in your clothes, hanging them out to dry surely will.

Oh, my poor clothes.. I can see them right now... on those cheap plastic hangers.. being stretched... hanging there so lethargically.. you know, like a rubber chicken that's been used in one too many gags and now isn't much use for anything else except stretching it and snapping someone on the buttocks? (Oh.. never done that?) It's like that, only ten times worse. They are the butt of the joke of Japan's 'technological revolution'. GPS satellite guidance systems in their cars/ hanging their clothes out to dry. Hmm. Something wrong with that.

The hangers are murder on shirts. That's what I lost today. One of my favorite shirts. A casualty of a war I cannot win. Too many hours hanging wet out there on a hangar. I tried to think... if I spent one day out of seven hanging limply on a plastic hanger I'd pray for death, too. Well, today my beige polo shirt got a one-way ticket to the Clothes Graveyard -- where clothes that have been thoroughly defeated by the Japanese washing machine go to rest.

"I never thought I'd make it!" cried the stretch-collared shirt. "I thought I'd be stuck out there forever!"

With a wistful look I tucked the shirt gingerly into the bag and closed my closet door.

You guys can thank Forlaetan for today's entry. She emailed me today and kindly told me to get my ass in gear and start writing again. She's such a doll! Anyway, yeah, here I am. I didn't fall off the face of the Earth, nor did I have any exciting, action-packed adventures. I've just been too tired to write anything worth reading. So, in the interest of sparing you good folks from writing while under the influence of sleepleessness, I have abstained from journalling.

But now I think I'm going to get back on the horse again. I've got some catching up to do and some neato things to tell you guys. The highlight of last week was making a deaf student understand me by her reading my lips while I was speaking Japanese. It was quite a thrill! It's a little unusual to have a deaf student (there is an actual deaf school in Wakayama City), but there she is. She's very bright. She's in the pen pal club, too, and on Tuesday I helped her open up a Hotmail account so she could email her penpal in the States. Goddam!! Sometimes, this job makes me feel great!

There's more to catch up on so I'll write another entry tomorrow. That is.. unless I fall asleep at 8 pm again.

Oh, yes. I've moved. At long last, I have come to a land free from the tyrannical Pop-Up! If you haven't seen the new design for my front page, click here. I meant it to be temporary (until I figured out how to make kewl kanji mouseovers), but seeing as how this page takes significantly less time to download it may become more permanent. We'll see. The only thing that's missing from my page right now is the "Links" page. I've got to redesign that, but it should be up fairly soon. I've also added some J-Pop to the Jukebox, some classics from my journal entries.

I finally went to the doctor yesterday. I have little faith in Japanese doctors to do much more than read the standard results from a blood test, so I gave him some blood and am supposed to go back on Friday to find out if the computer found anything. I thought I was getting better, but when the sleeplessness came back with a vengeance this past weekend, I had had enough. So after my Monday morning classes I took the rest of the day off and headed off to the doc's office. He took a lot of blood this time. I don't rememeber any doctor pulling out a syringe that size to take blood for a blood test, then fill the entire thing. I laughed out loud when he finally withdrew the needle... there was just a tinge of giddiness. Maybe that was just seeing the needle... who knows? I hate needles. He gave me some more sleeping pills (which I took last night and they didn't work). Other than that, there was nothing he could do, he told me. We'd have to wait for the results.

In the meantime, I am a walking corpse. That's only a slight exaggeration. You know that tired you get after you've been walking a really long time, but you keep walking anyway? And you're so tired that you kind of can't feel your legs anymore so it doesn't matter if you keep walking or not? Well, that's me, but like all the time. Sucks, huh?

I'm not sure if I hope the doc finds something really wrong with me or not. If there is something really wrong, it can probably be treated and I can get back to feeling like an actual human being again. Though, if it is something serious, more than likely I don't really want to deal with it. But if it's all psychological, then ... what the hell, you know what I mean?!? Goddamit.

OK. So the results are in from last week's poll. It seems half of you don't know what Dynamic Fonts are (which is actually a good thing, meaning that you didn't know what I was talking about when I was talking about the download prompt when coming to my page which means that you already had it and weren't bothered by it). About a fourth of you didn't like it.. why exactly, I'm not sure. But I'll take a stab at it... I think most of you were just paranoid about security issues. So, from now on, I'll use Dynamic Fonts only sparingly, and I've changed all the links on all the pages with Dynamic Fonts to link back to Truedoc's font player which comes with a VeriSign authenticated security certificate. I hope that eases the misgivings some of you had about the plugin you are prompted for when you first load my page.