Listen to the Rain

一羽の鳥が鳴いている
名前のない空に私を探して
優しさで編み続けた
ゆりかごで明日へいこう
晴れの日も雨の日にも
あなたを守るために

"Your voice is my guidepost / A lone bird is crying out / searching for me in the nameless sky / The kindness I've woven / into a cradle will bear me into tomorrow / On clear days and rainy days too / So I can protect you."

I've listened to that song roughly two hundred times in the last day, so it's definitely on my mind.

I went to the discussion about Violet Evergarden, my notes about which I posted here, and unlike the time when I went to the discussion about Your Lie in April, this time I broadly agreed with everyone's else opinion. We talked about the beautiful art--here's one of the standout parts, where Violet walks on water (very briefly)--the emotional journey that Violet makes over the course of the show and how her almost-robotic demeanor in the beginning serves her later growth, how glad we were that the Major didn't come back at the end and undo most of her development, and how great the music was. I'm in agreement with all of that, and now I want to track down the light novel the anime was based on. I've heard it's full of anime bullshit--in a pseudo-European setting, Violet Evergarden fights with an eight-foot-long axe named "Witchcraft" with which she can deflect bullets--but you know, some anime bullshit is par for the course, I guess. And it'll be good Japanese practice.

Earlier this week I saw on Twitter that there was an exhibit at the Art Institute called The Mezzotints of Hamanishi Katsunori closing today, so after work on Thursday I went to the Art Institute's free day. I didn't get any good pictures of his work, but you can see some examples here. Apparently mezzotinting is layering black over the canvas and then scraping it off gradually to lighten certain areas. Maybe that's why some of them seemed almost three-dimensional, popping off the canvas in a way that I definitely couldn't capture with my iPhone camera. The art is part of the museum's collection, so maybe it'll rotate out on display again soon.

I did take this picture elsewhere in the Japanese art section of a sakura tree. It's that time of year:

( 桜 )

Tomorrow--today Japan time--they're release the new Imperial Era name. I'm actually kind of in suspense. It's going from 平成 (Heisei, "Peace Everywhere," from a Chinese classical reference, apparently), to...who knows. 昭和 was also about peace, so maybe it'll be another peace reference? I can't wait!

Live update, as I am writing this: 令和 reiwa. Maybe "Peaceful law"? It could be "Commanded to peace," but that seems harsh for an era name.

My book club has been reading Sin in the Second City, about a Chicago brothel at the turn of the 20th century. The most mind-blowing part of the book is the claim that the verb "to get laid" comes from the Everleigh Club, the aforementioned brothel, about which patrons would say they were "going to get Everleighed," and after the club's closure the Ever was dropped and the spelling changed. I always figured it was from "to lay down"! Language is amazing.

That's everyting that happened lately. I spent most of this weekend watching Violet Evergarden--I left it all for the last minute and had to watch the whole thing last night and this morning--went to Starlight Radio Dreams on Friday, stopped by [Bad username or site: @ twitter.com name=]'s apartment briefly on Thursday to eat some of her surfeit of dessert, and otherwise there's not much to report.

Less week seems more laid back at the moment, but we'll see!

I went to get a trim today at the hair salon and every single stylist in the salon said that they were jealous of my (waist-length red) hair.

Also, I found a new theme song.

"Nightcore - Tir Na Nog (Lyrics)" (Watch on YouTube)

So yesterday I was looking up the lyrics of the Hymn of the Fayth from Final Fantasy X, and after a bit of searching, I found a page that listed them as:

Ieyui (pray)
Nobomeno (savior)
Renmiri (dream)
Yojuyogo (child of prayer)
Hasatekanae (forever and ever)
Kutamae. (Grant us peace)

And I thought that can't be right, unless it's an invented language. So I decided to look up 祈りの歌 (Inori no Uta, "The Song of Prayer"), the Hymn of the Fayth's Japanese title, and see if I could find more information on it that way.

The first page I looked at, I found this picture and looking at it, without reading any of the other text, suddenly everything made sense:



I always thought the words of the Hymn of the Fayth were nonsense, but apparently they're based on a syllable scramble! The song is sung from top to bottom, left to right, red part, then green part. That gives the lyrics above. But if you read it left to right, top to bottom, then it's actually Japanese and reads

Inore yo
Ebon-ju
Yumemiyo
Inorigo
Hatenaku
Sakaetamae

Which translates to:

Pray,
Yu-Yevon
Dream,
O Fayth
Without ceasing
Make us prosper.

That's where the lyrics above came from.

Of course, all this is in the wiki article about the song, so I could have just looked there. But I didn't, and I'm happy I figured this out.

Current mood:



I've been having a pretty bad week, and I've said so before, and people have been very kind when I have. And then, my brain immediately leaps to one of three possible options:

People Who Didn't Say Anything: It's because they didn't care at all, and probably wish they had never met me in the first place so my whining wouldn't assault their ears.
People Who Said Something In Public: They're grandstanding, making sure to demonstrate their compassion publically. It's all performative.
People Who Said Something In Private: They have an ulterior motive, either not wanting to break their friendship with schoolpsychnerd, not wanting to cause any other rifts among our mutual friends, or it's pity without any actual care behind it.

You can probably see how literally anything anyone says to me can get shunted into one of these three boxes, which makes it pretty difficult for me to hear what's being said. It's like conspiratorial thinking, where evidence proves the conspiracy, unrelated evidence is bent to fit the conspiracy, and lack of evidence just shows how effective the conspiracy is.

I'd like off the conspiracy train, please.

it's that old recurring dream where you're drowning
flailing your arms out, fearful and frantic
and black waves are curling and pounding
down onto your head somewhere in the Atlantic
through the fathoms below you a shadow
is gliding up towards you with singular purpose
and hundreds of thousands of gallons
of ocean froth and foam as it breaks the surface

its black eyes find you almost at once
you can't hide, swim away or take air into your lungs
to scream for help that won't come

Let's talk about the last year!

I guess the biggest change from the perspective of this blog is that I started actually posting here again. I got inspired by RPGs--as is often the case, I admit--and started my Dungeons & Design series, and I think it was mostly the fact of posting those that got me into the habit of posting about other subjects. There are other factors too, like how I have enough down time here and there at work that I can write posts in notepad, send them home, and then post them. I also stopped friend-locking everything and started defaulting to public posts, even when they're about my life. It's essentially security through apathy--I can see how many people visit my blog, and on an average day it's a couple dozen. I post all these updates to Facebook and Twitter and the truth is that most people don't care. That may be a little sad, but it certainly tells me that the excessive care I was taking about talking about anything remotely personal is unwarranted. Whatever I say will mostly just get lost in the flow of the internet anyway, unless people are specifically looking to read it.

I was hoping that we'd be paid back by at least one of the people who owed us money this year, but it didn't happen. Aggressively didn't happen, in the case of the Japanese Pension Office. Or perhaps passive-aggressively? Regardless, it led to some tight moments at times, especially during the summer, though I do admit that some of that is because I refuse to touch the principal. Now that schoolpsychnerd has a steady paycheck from her internship everything is okay, though I admit my grasping miserliness does mean I'm less happy with our finances that their absolute quality should lead me to be, but overall it's been on an upward trend. And maybe someone will actually pay us this year. A man can dream.

Work continues much the same as it has been. I had my annual review and did better than I did last year, and my job's bureaucracy and policies means that I'll get an automatic raise and a yearly bonus commensurate with my performance. It's theoretically possible that we won't get the bonus, since the amount and whether it occurs at all is based on the AMA's overall performance during the year, but I haven't heard of anything that would indicate that it's not coming. Even if it doesn't, I'll still get the raise. The benefits of working for a non-profit with no shareholders!

In terms of personal improvement, I took up programming! I originally thought about doing it back in May and was given a lot of resources, and later took a Coursera course that I wrote all about. I've even seen found an implementation of Python for the iPad, and since I have my iPad with me all the time at work, I can get that and then have time to bash my head against programs at work as well as at home! Indeed, during my interview for the job I was asked if I knew anything about HTML or programming and I had to say that I did not, so if I can actually learn programming to a useful level I can hopefully get a promotion. The end project was an implementation of Asteroids, and I'd love to do a lot more to work on it than I had to do for the class to keep my hand in, but what I did accomplish is reasonably impressive, I think.

Also, studied Japanese, but on that subject I'm less confident. I maintained my ability, and that's about it.

Last year, I told myself that if I maintained the weight I had reached in August (~77 kg) for a whole year, I'd go get my wedding ring resized because it's rather large now and I'm kind of worried that it will slip off at some point. Well...I did maintain my weight, but I didn't actually get the ring resized--see the above-mentioned grasping miserliness. I also linked up my new iPhone's M7 chip with LoseIt and started tracking my steps and apparently my average number of steps per day is...5,218. Out of the 10K that's recommended. Exercise is healthy basically no matter what, and getting that number up is something I'd like to improve on in the future, but so far I'm doing pretty well on that front.

I made much more of an effort to be social in 2013. In 2012, I think I had the tendency to hermit a lot more, turning down people's invitations and not really inviting anyone over to schoolpsychnerd and my apartment. I'm not sure what exactly it was. It might have been some remaining difficulty with adjusting to the pace of social life in America vs. what it had been like in Japan, maybe some Anxiety Cat--there's a really old one that I thought fit me really well that said something like "too nervous to talk to people, come off as arrogant or standoffish"--maybe just my typical introverted personality, but this year I tried to avoid falling into the trap of staying home all the time. I like to think I succeeded, or at least reasonably well. And it turns out that traveling out to other places isn't really that bad, even on a work night. I tend to apply the maxim "past performance is no indication of future results" to social events if I'm not careful, in the sense that sure I had fun the last time I went to a party, and the time before that, and probably the time before that...but what about this time!?!? That's not a productive attitude to take, honestly. So this year, I made sure to try to shut that off at the pass. Once I get out of the house, then inertia takes over and I'm not exactly going to turn around halfway there. And it turns out that my friends are awesome people and fun to be around to an extent that far outweighs the annoyance of having to change my physical location. Who would have thought, right? Obviously, this has always been true, but it's convincing that little voice that's the trick, and in 2013 I beat it into submission. Or at least, I inflicted grevious wounds.

All in all, it's been a pretty fantastic year, and I'm looking forward to what 2014 will bring.

I realize that posting song lyrics is incredibly emo and so early-2000s as to be aggressively unhip, but it's pseudo-tradition for me, so:

A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin'
Now the days go by so fast
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think that I could be forgiven...I wish you would
The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think you might come to California...I think you should
Drove up to Hillside Manor sometime after two a.m.
And talked a little while about the year
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her
And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
And it's one more day up in the canyon
And it's one more night in Hollywood
It's been so long since I've seen the ocean...I guess I should...

( lyrics )

And it looks like it will be, too.