I'm as bad about it as the next, I admit it, and often shut down socially in the face of someone else's boasting. I call them a braggart, and revel in their bad taste. Yet it seems that people are systematically shamed by society to be almost embarrassed of their accomplishments when it comes to receiving the praise of people outside their family. To accept recognition with anything less than meekness, makes you self absorbed and overconfident.
I'm may only be saying this because I'm in Japan, where the standard comment from most parents is that their kids are 'not smart' regardless of the kid's actual mental acuity, but I won't pin it on Japan alone.
What I'm really trying to say is, I wonder what it's like to receive an award and say "I deserve this". I don't think I've ever done it.
Sometimes I wonder if operating a train feels like living a life of destiny and fate.
The track to your final destination stretches out in front of you eternally. Often you make brief stops at somewhere interesting, and can look around, but soon find yourself moving off to somewhere else. Ultimately your every action is predictable and determined to the second by the soft clicks of that reliable pocket watch kept safely in your coat pocket.
It comforts me to think that the tracks have switches.
When you're walking with headphones on, and that song you love kicks in with its steady beat, bum tik bum tik, and you just strut like you own the sidewalk.
This effect is greatly heightened when you are wearing a collared shirt with the top button liberated. Loose your tie like it's casual Friday and turn on the swagger.
I've done almost absolutely nothing for the last nine days. This is the direct result of having a lot of time, little money and no work. Golden week just happened, and I didn't go anywhere. I was in Nagoya.
As a result, I decided to utilize my time between sleeping and drinking to get some things that I needed. In order of acquisition, I got a new desk, some new sunglasses, and a coffee maker. In order of importance, I got a coffee maker and who cares what else.
I've been experimenting with my new device, and have since learned how to make a sludgy concoction as dark as the night. I call it my home brew, and it won't put hair on your chest, but instead sizzle it off in a dramatic display of weird science. In a way I am a little sad that I can drink coffee at home now, as I hadn't realized what a big part of my day going to the coffee shop had become. It was a great place to creepily people watch from behind my book.
So with all my free time at home now, I have returned my attention to the business of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. My mourning period for the beleaguered underdogs of Ottawa has passed, and I have regrouped my wits to reassert my zealous fandom towards Washington and their struggle to defeat the very team that killed my precious Sens.
I'm not sure when it happened, but the NHL's website has officially been promoted to the status of 'out of hand'. I've been frequenting that website for the past four years, and the steps towards ridiculousness must have been so gradual that no one could have noticed until it was too late. And in that moment of realization, of true and utter hopelessness, I realized my true calling. As if from trumpets on high, I knew that it is inevitable: I must become a writer for NHL.com.
I'm talking about the puns of course. Every single NHL article written now hides behind a title laced with bad taste. They all follow a very simple formula too: name, hyphen and word fragment. For example, my blogs can only be deemed Sean-sational! Get the picture?
Now you see why I must work for them. I've been doing bad puns since I could talk. In university, my roommate and I sat in our kitchen and riddled off bad fish puns for a half hour on a snowy evening. It was a halib-good time, even though I got the feeling he was pickerel-ing on me. I even slipped one in the title
So that's it, I'm immediately going to focus all future efforts towards becoming a template writer for NHL.com. From what I've seen, you don't even need to be good, or know stats, or have any idea who players are. It also helps to talk about the mid-second period in the first paragraph, then transition into the late game to finally conclude with a recount of goal that had no bearing on anything during the mid-first. Unless the title writing position is its own gig, then I'll just do that and have a coffee.
I decided to try my hand at a title pun for a front page tab. Just imagine it is Christmas or something. I'll also add in some annotations.
Also thanks to those that read my last post, and send me some good ideas on what to do. You can view those challenges by click on the tab to the right of the screen. If you have yet to give me any good ideas, then do so now.
This isn't working like I had wanted it to. I wanted to post a lot, and I didn't want it to be simple, mindless recounts of events, though I probably haven't even done enough of that. Let's change things up a little bit. On this, my 50th post, I will make a decree for change!
Let's make post size smaller, but periodicity much more frequent. Let's have more input from the people reading this, tell me what you would like me to do - send me on a task to get a certain photo, visit a certain place or meet with certain people. I am inviting any and all suggestions, serious or otherwise. Make a request.
Either post a comment or send me an email to my full name @gmail.com. I will create a page of challenges, and then I will go about trying to make them happen. Give me a little bit of purpose in my free time. I feel like I have a lot of the latter, and too little of the former.
On my part, I'm going to try and post something every day, or as close to that as I possibly can. Probably not full posts, although from time to time those will still occur. Sometimes it will be really simple thoughts or maybe pieces of fiction and often just ideas. I would like to expand the utility of my writing, and in that way perhaps make it something I can use with more versatility in the future. Help me out and feed my addiction. Ridiculous requests are ok, IF the goal is attainable without me breaking any major laws, or find me in a situation in which I morally will be unable to recover for many years. No murder or prostitutes.
Starting this Monday, the 7th of May, I will start posting frequently. Please help me out.
Recap:
1. Give me ideas, requests and challenges for things to do.
2. I will use my blog more frequently, and if there is a single dedicated reader out there (Hello Mom and Dad!), you will find yourself with a content overload!
Peace in the East,
Much Love,
Sean
Examples:
Dear Sean, Whom I adore, I think you should ________________.
I'm lying in my bed. It is a rainy, spring night, fourteen stories above a highway of tracks. Trains rumble by subtly. The noise is soothing and rhythmic. It is expected, and in that way comforting. When a distractive noise becomes a constant, its absence is the bother. The air is sweet and cool, with a hint of fragrance. It smells like warm things to come, an Ocean not far, and that crisp odour of a rain not long past. Wind blows through the partly opened window, the cross breeze created by the slightly ajar balcony door. It is late, too late to hear the goings on of anyone's daily life. Yet in that void creeps the night noises of a city in slumber. The lone car drives quickly down an empty street, accelerating loudly. A drunken couple talks nonsense, stumbling home to their empty, waiting beds. And amidst it all, the ever constant, a train rumbles by softly.
Shift.
I am sitting in front of a large glass tank. Inside the transparent walls, exists an artificial world made of real creatures. They swim by methodically. They swim by rhythmically. They swim by with out a glance, or a thought, or a care. A turtle makes a wide circle, it's path the span of the tank, not a inch of circumference wasted. The fish are more erratic. They swim faster, they change direction more often, they are less and less consistent in a way proportionate to their size. The smallest abandoned the notion of a circle outright, and swarm in tight lines. Back and forth. Back and forth. A shark swims in a disjointed way. Diagonally, slightly up with a list to the left. The little fish don't like this. Back and forth. I picture the tank from above. I am looking down on a city, everyone with a path. Who makes the wide arcs of a turtle? Which of you is the back and forth of the tiny frightened fish? Who will claim the title of the listing shark? They're not that much different then people. Then I walk away, and realize that at least I can walk away.
Shift.
I am in a dimly lit bar, surrounded by smokey vapours and that comforting smell of old bottles. My company is little, but diverse. An androgynous, mouth breather straddles the bar cautiously. Next to her sits a sack of a women idly pulling on a lit cigarette. They are both playing audience to a thin, reedy, caricature of a bartender, who gives me the last dregs of the Kirin at a hit to his wallet. The bar is small, and in that way lovely. There are no surprises behind corners, and no corners to be surprised around. It is a tiny bar on its surface, and deeper than most in other ways. I sit in a thick leather chair and open my book. I drink slowly. I am the absence of urgency. The bartender looks at me reluctantly, imploringly; an alien reading a book is bad for the night life.
Shift
I am in a train car, enveloped in the noise of a language unintelligible, or maybe misunderstood. A man sleeps by my right shoulder restlessly. I am poked and prodded by the jerking fits of an active napper. Smoke and perfume is in the air, cigarettes and the mask of something sweeter; fake and manufactured. It half works and creates something less than the sum of its parts, not as intoxicating to me as either scent alone. I suck on an empty beer can and its empty insides gurgle sullenly. The drink isn't a crutch or a release, but a luxury allowed in a country not my own. I lose myself in the noise again. I recognize the tones of normal conversation: anger, joy and urgency among them, yet the sounds hold no weight. I touch lightly upon moments of understanding. I catch words and phrases like I'm eavesdropping through a thin wall; the sound is muffled. It slips away swiftly, my comprehension, and I am alone again in a sea of people. Alone in the least lonely way possible.
Shift, I am in a classroom, I am in a busy train station, I am in a coffee shop draining the last of my drink. Bottoms up. The scenery flickers, and I am the static visitor to this world's many vistas. The extreme constant. The world is my moving picture show, and it comes to me.
I hope you liked that. I kept everyone waiting long enough that I figured I should write something beyond the standard 'been here, seen that' regurgitation. Good things come to those that wait. In answer to your questions, yes these are all real scenarios that I have experienced in the past few weeks, and I just took the liberty of adding a little dash of artistic license. I'm not even sure how you sit at a bar cautiously, but my word that lady was doing it.
I went to the aquarium last Friday, and it was an aquarium. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I don't think I've ever been to a real one before. I really do like zoos and things of the like, but the general impression I got from Nagoya Aquarium was 'sad'. I spent a lot of time sitting creepily in the back of dark rooms watching things swim in circles. Sometimes I enjoy going places with others, but something about my rainy Friday solo trip to the aquarium was positively haunting. I can be alone.
The bar is a tiny thing just minutes from my house. It boasts a dense, smokey, atmosphere, and sports a crowd of people that often come off manic or manic depressive. They never pursue conversation with me, and there are rarely more than two patrons at a time. I like this. It is obscurely located down a side street, and I find the little nook absolutely charming. Quaintness, but not in a lame way.
Train rides are exactly as I described them, I just don't always have a beer. The first paragraph is every night from my room since I started leaving my window open, give or take the rain. I could always hear the trains, but they were a rattling, distant thunder before, instead of the distinct rolling melody I hear now. I have also gained those other nuances of the night - the traffic, the inebriated, and I desperately wish for crickets.
I'm in the full swing of teaching time now. There are children. They hug me, and bother me and make me smile. I like some of them more than most, and I like all of them more than I honestly expected. They're children, and I can't get mad at them for being so. I get more annoyed at adults who pay for conversation classes and then don't speak.
I am content. I am busy, but I am not wishing to be elsewhere. I'm not rushed to live my life. Sometimes the easiest way to adapt to a new situation is to be completely absolute of self. Then after a little ado, the situation finds itself forced to bend around you. Knowing who you are in every possibility is the ultimate flexibility.
However, being who you are in every possibility is the ultimate challenge.
