See How the Spiders of Jazz & Emoticons Weave Through Our Parallels?

First things first. In terms of the increase of my personal happiness, measured by looking not only at myself but also at the people who play a role in my life, the most important event of the past week was without a doubt Hiromi's show in Amsterdam. OK, I wasn't there, but I was delighted to read my friends' responses to the concert which, as expected, was completely fabulous. At the same time, her new CD was released in Japan last Wednesday, and though there are promos scattered around my mom's house in Amsterdam, I am in Japan, so I bought the CD, which is, as expected, completely fabulous. I don't think I need to stress my fandom of Hiromi much more, but if you're at all interested in the future path of music as it is being woven by today's young musicians, you have to check her out. On that topic, I wanna get a hold of Tony Grey's new album as well.

Still on the topic of huge amounts of happiness and music, I received my longed-for CME VX6 on Thursday night and was very happy to play around with it for an hour using various virtual instruments, until I had the relatively likely bad luck that flashing the firmware of the board went wrong: I 'bricked' the unit (from the single fact that that verb is in common use on the official CME forums I knew the risk was not small). But, I'm on good terms with Mr. Suzuki from Tokyo, the only distributor of CME in Japan, so tomorrow I'm sending the board to him by freight collect and he'll send it back, working, within a week. Frankly, the board has so much potential that I don't care if I have to send it to Tokyo 4 times before it works - it's going to be worth it for the SWEETness I'm gonna get out of it. (The pic is from before the bricking.)

Today was one of the laziest days so far. Internet addiction is a wonderful day-filler for the days after the nights in which you danced intensively for 6 hours, though I would've liked to study some more. Anyhow, last night I went to a club I hadn't been to before, Mojo West, up in Kitayama, which is slightly more north than Misa's place. Nice club, good music, and great dance entertainment from a bunch of shows and an awesome bboy team battle. The reputedly best bboy of Kyoto, one of the older guys around the scene who graduated from college and therefore doesn't hang out with the rest of 'em that much anymore, has a certain air about him that I find hard to describe but which had a profound effect on me. Dressed in black shoes, training pants and t-shirt and wearing an expression of relaxed arrogance, this guy managed to give me goosebumps during the battle. I'm pretty sure getting goosebumps from seeing a breakdancer is not a very normal thing, so he's obviously not a very normal guy. And a bunch of other bboys who I'd talked to while everyone was drunk at last week's dance circle drinking gathering were eager to repeatedly invite me into the circle - much fun. I want to focus more on floor moves for my house in the near future, so hanging out with bboys is a very good thing.

Twice during the past week I spent a large part of the night at Akio's place. He's a terrific locker and the guy I first talked to when I approached the dancers in front of the gym during my first week here (the guy on top on the pic with me and 2 dancers). Drinking and chilling with my dancer friends is one of the best ways to improve my Japanese; though I barely understand a quarter of what they say to each other for the speed and localized slang, it's a terrific aid in remembering everything I learn in class (since I'm really only learning useful, frequently used things) and catching up on the slang usage, as well as slowly catching on to the way sarcasm, boy/girl conversation and other subtleties are used in Japanese.

The first of these two times, Saturday night after the drinking gathering, I told them about what's going on between Misa and me. Finally! The reaction was hilarious; one of the girls immediately started asking me very detailed things about our sex life (and recently greeted me with "and, when have you last done it?" when I arrived at practice), and of course everyone was impressed by how the chance meeting between Misa and me on the very first day I went to the dancers (3 days after I arrived in Japan!) led to something like this. That night, about 8 people crashed in Akio's 1-room apartment, and we had a jolly good time. Around 1, I started feeling the effect of drinking too much random alcohol and eating a ton of different kinds of snacks, so I had some fun in the bathroom and actually passed out there for an hour (having decided that I wouldn't be able to make it to the club and dance after all, though I'd agreed with Ikeya to have some fun that night), after which I returned to the living room. At this point, most people were about to go to sleep, but fortunately they weren't very upset by me coming back full of energy and starting to ramble about all kinds of stuff, using words that were unintentionally interpreted as having a very sexual nuance and resulting in me being a Very Quoted Person at the subsequent dance practice. I did upset the cutest girl (who's one hell of hiphop dancer as well), but Misa told me that she always gets mad when people don't allow her to sleep and she gets over it fast.

Summer's approaching now! The days are getting longer, I spend most of the time in my room in underwear only, and I especially enjoy the warm nights. Sitting by the river, biking to the train station from the club or getting up in the early morning have become very pleasant. So what's the plan for this summer? Well, seeing as how I have a huge entrance exam directly after summer...I'm trying to find out when it will be exactly, and what I need to know in terms of physics. Though I'm going to sorely miss my Japanese classes once they're over (and will do everything I can do follow some more once I begin with the Master's, even if that means taking an extra semester or so for my Master's - hell, I'm *being paid* to study, so the longer the better), the extra time will allow me to get serious about revising all the physics I know (sounds scary). But I'm definitely going to Tokyo, probably at the end of August so I can catch a jazz festival (Hiromi!), for around 2 weeks. I need to visit Koki, Aki, Sono and Sonoe, and I can't wait to finally see the big city. Hopefully Mark will come to Japan around that time as well, and we can fulfill our promise of climbing Mt. Fuji together, for example. But other than that, I need to save a lot because I have to leave this dorm in September, and moving house requires a lot of money this time. Furniture, 3 months' deposit, key money...so after having bought my sweet keyboard, I need to save for that.

Alrighty, it's getting late and I need to be in good shape for my first karaoke session tomorrow, so I'm off to take a shower and chill. Catch y'all later ~ (and do know that your comments/e-mails are really appreciated).

Hand-washed minutes with Nature's Absurdities

Hahaa, everytime I tell someone "come on, we're in Japan..let's [insert various ideas]!", I almost drop my jaw in disbelief. After such a long build-up, I'm actually, really in JAPAN. The mere idea is absurd, isn't it?

Misa was gone this week (quick 12 days of partying with old international friends in Spain), so I got a chance to chill in my room (anime) and catch up on some kanji I was required to know to join the class I'm in (love kanji), but mainly to chill with my international buddies. Get this, some details on the people I hang around:

* Jordanian guy who thinks gay people might as well be killed because they're unnatural and who would commit suicide immediately if it was proven to him (by God I guess) that there is no afterlife, because that would make this life on Earth entirely pointless (here's where I'm hesitating to consider my point of view 'superior' to his in a positive/negative sense) - he's also like my best buddy here;
* Kenyan dude whose wife back home is expecting him to bring back home a second, Japanese wife (we've already had some excellent situations with Japanese girls where this was not-so-subtly brought up by others);
* Zambian guy who so far seems to adhere perfectly to the definition of a "care-free chiller";
* married Mexican man (family is in Japan, he keeps talking about other girls though) whose speech is hilariously similar to that of Pedro in Nap Dynamite;
* giant Tunisian Muslim-turned-existentialist-partier who denies all the crap in the Qur'an but still considers himself a Muslim (he studies international law - imagine the smile on his face when he realized the inevitable legal problems of the Kenyan dude gathering wives from around the world);
* rich Russian playboy with more than two agendas;
* Finnish guy who's the only one on this list who hopelessly tries to convince the rest to respect the various Japanese etiquettes, who adores everything I suggest to him (books, music, food, etc.) and I can't wait for his parents to bring his bass from Finland so we can start jamming;
* other Mexican guy who is trying hard to get some but is the only one in Japan without a cellphone (he stores their numbers on the Russian guy's phone)
* Thai people called Ek, Tyranny and Titinart (who's canceling her scholarship - without consequences - to accept another one to study in 4 different countries in Europe/the world for 2 years .. starting in October! 4 months of royally paid vacation left for her in Japan!). There's a standard 3-step procedure for determining if someone is gay in Thailand, I recently learned.

Yeah, last Friday's riverside drinks & discussions were VERY interesting, as I think you can imagine by now. Friday also involved Aoi Matsuri (see pix), another of those 'traditional festivals' without clear purpose (not even online have I been able to come to an understanding) but with plenty of photography occasions and tons of Japanese making grateful use of them. This one was particularly solemn, with a magnificent parade walking through town for 6 hours without any speech, music or performance going on. If it weren't for the grand weather, I'd have found it very eerie.

(of course) I went clubbing last weekend as well; bunch of shows by people from the circle. This was by far the fullest night at club Grind I've seen so far, but I danced a lot anyway. One of my buddies DJs a lot on these nights, and I like his style. He claims he samples for fun; since I create beats for fun, I have an interesting proposition for him that I'll discuss next Saturday at the all-you-can-drink dancers' gathering.

At home, Tareq, Ari and I took the initiative to spice up life in our dorm building by starting to actually use the great big Common Room and its facilities. We got 6 others to help out in the payment for a Wii (+controllers & games), we're going to organize poker nights evenings (room closes at 22:00, roffle), play table tennis and basically get people who are in their rooms doing crap like cooking, studying and calling their family anyway to come together and have a blast.

I'm gonna order this weekend, SWEET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111..............

Zanzibar .. I'd like to go there one day ...

...

8 hours and 15 minutes left to Wii inauguration, time to do some stuff. To everyone that's seeing Hiromi in Amsterdam on Monday ... have fun ^___________________________^

A soul swims in the deep house of this life // an introductory glance at my corkscrews and loopholes

The past week has largely been about increasing my consciousness. I talked a lot with Tareq and Benkei about religion, politics, science, ethics, and philosophy. Nighttime online reading provides the comfort of knowing there are other people dealing with these issues on the same level. Not that I've been doing that much nighttime reading though, since I've been spending most of my nights with my girlfriend or out in the club.

I'm very happy to be studying cosmology, in "retrospect" (i.e. for reasons I didn't see coming that strongly before, though they were always important). In fact, the past 6 months of not studying physics have been very conducive to my motivation to continue with it. In fact, I can't wait, and I am really hoping my skill hasn't decreased that much in 6 months. I'm going to try really hard to reach a respectable level within a short amount of time anyway. Speaking of time, it's like I become more ambitious as it passes. I'm experiencing many new things - and experience is one of the criteria for a "meaningful life" in modern life, so that's cool in itself. But at the same time, the more I experience, the more I want to do, and I get caught up in a sort of roller coaster.

This roller coaster generates a very powerful feeling, which I've come to experience frequently but irregularly over the past couple of years. It's energizing, motivating, and satisfying. It is in fact the all-encompassing feeling that I call life. And to put it in a certain perspective, I am very satisfied with the idea that this all-encompassing feeling is the product of my brain, which is the product of many years of biological evolution. BUT !

More than before, I am exploring the limits of science. Not so much the theoretical limits at the moment, but the limits of science today. For example, I was reading a forum discussion about the probability of extraterrestrial life. And I came to realize that even though the universe is extremely huge beyond comprehension, abiogenesis (a word I learned this week) is actually far from scientifically understood. The Wikipedia article on Abiogenesis is inspiring; so many theories, so many experiments, I get the feeling that we will eventually come closer to understanding this extremely fascinating process. But at the moment, things are much vaguer than I had imagined. I am now entertaining the idea that the probability of extraterrestrial life might be much smaller than my astronomy and cosmology-inspired gut feeling has taught me so far. Let's see where I'm headed the next couple of years.

I don't believe in the afterlife. Strictly speaking, I have no idea what happens when I die, and I have no idea what is really happening in life at all. Of course I am living my daily life very clearly, and I really feel like I "know what I'm doing" to some extent in this way: I want to experience as much as I can, travel the world, make music, try drugs, EAT all the food in the world, get into the HEAD of the Japanese people and who knows what's next, be good to the people around me and continue walking the path of life I constantly feel like I am finding. But beyond that, I am completely in the dark, directly opposed to my friend Tareq who shares much of the same thoughts and feelings with me, but motivated directly by his belief that the God of the Qur'an exists and, most importantly, that there is an afterlife that provides meaning to this life on Earth (we're having some really good discussions - he sleeps with the light on, I like the bewilderment of total darkness). I am completely lacking his kind of convenient idea (I believe it is nothing more than that, at least in the form he believes in), and I am teaching myself to live with this absurd ignorance, to take away the absurdity and make it straightforward. I have accepted it to the extent that I am living a very dedicated and happy life even though "there is no point" as far as I know, and this is already really, really, really good.

To summarize what I am thinking about tonight, life, the universe and everything is REALLY extreme. Fact is stranger than fiction, by a HUGE margin. I am on a quest, I feel like I am going forward every day of my life, and sometimes I can't fall asleep because I am so excited to be alive.

.......................................

Golden Week is just over. I went clubbing, saw full-speed horseriding archers hitting and missing non-moving targets to the backdrop of one of the most famous Shinto shrines in Japan, visited Kobe (where I had a terrific evening with some friends of Benkei's, who are almost triple my age, crazy in the way that I hoped mature Japanese people could be, and paid for plentiful Japanese food and Scottish whisky), walked through thousands of red gates whose meaning is still obscured to me (I am really wondering what the average Japanese person knows of the fundamental elements of Shinto religion, because they are definitely not obvious to a stranger like me), and spent a couple of relaxed nights at Misa's place.

I love.