This week seemed like an exercise in things not happening quite how I thought they would, which was frustrating. That being said, things seemed like they progressed somewhat in a bunch of different areas, which is always good.

The week started off with the thank you speeches from my graduating sempais in the lab, and then a party after that. Sadly for me, the thank you speeches (seminars, really) were pretty much all in Japanese, so I understood very little, even though I knew enough to know I wanted to know what was going on. Somewhat hilariously, one of my sempais’ advice was to keep a diary/journal. That’s the same advice my grandfather gave to everyone at his 70th birthday, actually. So it has somewhat inspired me to keep working on this journal of mine, make sure that I record my life and thoughts as I go along. I’m bound to forget a lot of it later, and it provides me with a good tool to review things. Anyway! The seminars were fun despite my not understanding a whole lot, and the afterparty was also a lot of fun. Some of the previous graduates of the lab had come along as well, and I got to chat a bit to Abe-san, who works for Google Japan. Neat stuff! I tried some interesting drinks (I can’t say that I really recommend yuzu-shu) and generally had some laughs with everyone, particularly with Tatsuya, my tutor, who doesn’t speak that much English… yeah, figure that one out. After the party, about half of us headed down the road to another little bar to have a couple more drinks and some more conversation. It was great just sitting back and chatting to people, even though at times my Japanese seemed to fail me. Luckily most people there spoke fair English and could fill me in! Tatsuya at some point decided he wanted a middle name – his suggestions were “Sparkling” and “Premium” and as hilarious as they were, I couldn’t come up with a different one that would be appropriate for him.

This week’s “personal projects” day was actually Tuesday, and felt really good. I picked up some free shelving from a guy off of craigslist, did some washing and worked on my own website. The front page of my site now siphons a preview of the latest journal entry and has a little list of the things I’ve got going on. While this may sound small, it was a bit of a pain to get working properly! I also updated some of the text on some of the other pages and generally felt good about having something on my site updated, given how much I neglect it. I watched a few interesting things as well – an episode of a new anime that I like, Koukaku no Regios, the final for Battlestar Galactica (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and the trailer for the live-action adaption of Blood: The Last Vampire, which I am really, really looking forward to.

I went to my first basketball practice since I left for New Zealand this week… my legs were not thanking me in the days that followed. Still, I had a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to going again this coming week. Unfortunately I didn’t know they were going out drinking afterwards, and couldn’t go with them, I needed to haul myself back across town and get to bed. It was around 1am when I sat down to have some dinner that night. Something else happened that I thought was hilarious on the way back – I got mistaken for a model. When I was passing through the Komaba area (where there are a few photography studios), I randomly started walking with and talking to a photographer from Columbia named Eri (I hope I spelled that right), who mistook me for a model heading home from a shoot. Hilarious! Anyway, we chatted for a while since we were headed in the same direction and on the same train, and agreed to meet up on the weekend. As it turns out, that didn’t pan out, but hopefully I’ll see him next weekend. Always good to have a new friend.

Things with my research this week have been slow. I’ve made a few more changes to my survey system and put it up online so my Dad can have a look at it and hopefully help put together the initial batch of survey questions, although I know he’s busy over in the UK so I don’t know how much he’s going to be able to do. Again, this week was a lot of busy-work, which was a bit frustrating. But I did make some progress, which was good.

This week also saw the first round of me trying to pay my bills and figure out next month’s. Had to deal with the busiest I have ever seen the bank – at one point it was 22 people in line ahead of whoever next wanted to see someone… yeesh. Rent, electricity, insurance for the new city ward, gas… actually I still haven’t paid the gas yet, I was mistaken about what I got in the mail. Apparently they send you out a little receipt-thing first, then the bill later. Oops. In any case, I’ve been trying to talk to who I need to in order to get the right paperwork to do everything automatically, since I really don’t want to have to fumble through paying these every month if I don’t have to. Hopefully someone will be nice enough to help me read and fill out the application forms when I get them. Oh, on top of that, I confirmed with my department office that I get my next scholarship payment on the 30th of April, which is after I need the money to pay my rent. Looks like I’m going to have to be very careful about my food and not get as much furniture as I thought I was going to, so my place is going to remain fairly stark for a while yet. I guess I’ll need to really solidly work out if the groceries I’m getting is helping offset my meal costs as much I thought it would. A little hard to say, since I know the biggest savings is going to come when I get my gas range and can cook proper meals.

I didn’t get to speak to Anastasia much this week, which was a bit of a shame. She’s been busy with exams and helping out with her sorority and so on, so we haven’t had a lot of time to talk. I did manage to talk to her a little bit during the weekend, which was great. Hopefully next week we’ll be able to connect a bit more, it’s been a bit rough lately dealing with the distance thing, and having more regular/lengthy communication can certainly help with that.

This weekend was also supposed to be my first hanami, or cherry-blossom watching party. It’s a big deal here in Japan, people get together under the cherry blossoms and have drinks and good times. It’s such a short period of time that they have a blossom-watch on the news to let you know which parts of the country have the blossoms for the few days that they do. Unfortunately for me, the blossoms haven’t quite come in yet, so the people I was going with cancelled… well, postponed until next week, in any case. Only problem is that I don’t know if everyone is going to be able to get together next week, but I guess we’ll see. I moped about this for a while – my plans for the weekend just all kind of came undone. Other than a little bit of work on my money management tool (I added proper currency switching, for those that care), I did manage one thing this weekend – I got some furniture. I got a cheap sofa, some plastic drawers for the closet, a CD drawer thing (which I suspect I won’t use for CDs at all) and a little chair. All of it needs a bit of cleaning, but it’s more stuff that I need. Now instead of looking empty, it just looks like I haven’t set up properly yet… but hey, it’s progress!

Ok, so it’s fairly safe to assume that while I have extensive notes, going back and writing entries one by one is something that I just haven’t been doing, even on a weekly basis, so this journal just gets further and further behind. To that end, I’m going to start moving forward starting from this week, and hopefully I’ll have the fortitude to go back and actually add in all the intervening entries, as a lot has happened since May last year.

That being said, this past week hasn’t exactly been one of my best to kick things off again. It started with being a complete write-off, actually. I stayed in bed and mostly just watched tv. Things of late have just been really hard to deal with. I feel a lot like it’s just been overwhelming and while I know the feeling will pass and things will get better, it seems like scant comfort when everything in my world is just stressing me out to some degree. My research is behind where I want it to be, my new house is still very empty and not even functionally where I want it to be, Anastasia is still in another country, my sleep still hasn’t settled fully and on the whole, I’ve just been feeling crap.

This week I mostly went to uni and did busy-work. A way of distracting myself to keep myself occupied with something that was at least marginally productive so I didn’t feel like a complete waste of space. But, nothing particularly significant in the major areas of my life other than a good chat to my Dad about my research on Tuesday. I got a new train pass, I wrote a bunch of emails, that kind of thing. Honda-san from my lab was kind enough to translate some course titles for me so I can at least make a slightly more informed decision about what to do come April.

I’ve talked to a bunch of people online, which has been both good and bad – in some ways they can be very comforting, or distracting, or whatever I need them to be. In other ways they’re just a reminder that they’re far away, and that can be very hard to deal with sometimes. You’d think after five years in a long distance relationship, moving to several cities around the world and constantly having to leave people behind, I’d be used to it somehow, or that I’d have some good method for dealing with it. I don’t, really. It’s just shit sometimes. Along this vein I actually got some good news – my good friend Jenny from Seattle is going to be in Japan in early April! So after a very, very long time, I get to see her again (and her hubby!) which is going to be great.

I had to wait for almost an hour at Softbank (my phone provider here in Japan) this week to do a less than two minute activity – changing my address. Man that pissed me off. And it’s not like there was anyone else in the store when I arrived other than a couple of people occupying the only shop people there. They just took forever. In fact, it wasn’t until a third shop person arrived that I got served. Mental.

This week my scholarship money finally came through, so I’m no longer in financial dire straits. This is one less thing for me to worry about, which I like. My money is budgeted out and fairly carefully kept tabs on, so I have enough flexibility to account for things cropping up… still, I need to make sure to get as much stuff for my new place as I can for as little as I can. I think craigslist is going to be my friend for a while.

In my continuing effort to learn more about game development, I ordered a book from Amazon Japan this week as well. I had a voucher for them from a survey I took a while back, so it was good to use that as well. When I get my hands on the other textbooks I ordered from the US the other day, I should have a good dose of interesting reading ahead of me.

Friday this week was the Vernal Equinox, which in Japan is still actually a national holiday. So, a bit of a short week, workday-wise. I spent the day meeting Kyoko’s brother Tadataka for lunch (then briefly his wife later), then out with Kyoko for the rest of the day. We wandered around Shinjuku Park for a while, which was huge and awesome. There were a lot of people looking at the early blooming cherry blossoms, as well as a bunch of other people just lying all over the grass and enjoying the sunny weather, despite the somewhat strong wind. From there we went to a cafe for a little bit before going to see the new Dragonball movie. It’s not a good movie. It’s predictable, has some terrible acting and overall left me feeling like they had some killer material that they could have done something really awesome with, and just didn’t. Weird. Still, it did have Chow Yun-Fat and James Marsters. Emmy Rossum is in it too, but I thought didn’t suit the part as well as she could have… that could have just been bad writing, though.

This weekend has mostly been talking to people and doing… well, not a lot. I did meet up with Wocky, an old friend and workmate of mine from way back, that was a lot of fun having dinner and drinks. I haven’t seen him since… late last year, I think. Hopefully I won’t leave it so long between going out this time around. I went and got some groceries (and discovered my local supermarket sells all kinds of handy stuff quite cheaply), did some work (and data-entry) on my personal budgeting system and looked at some flights online – trying to work out the plan for the end of the year. In general terms, I’ll be heading to the US to see Anastasia and her family, then we’ll both go to NZ for a bit, then Anastasia’s going to be moving to Japan to be with me after that. It’s going to be a bit pricey, but hopefully manageable. I’m still working on the specific dates, but hopefully when Anastasia is in NZ I’ll be able to arrange for her to see a bunch of my family, and introduce her to a lot of my friends she hasn’t met yet. Thinking about doing that makes me happy, I’m looking forward to it a lot, even though it’s still quite far out.

Oh yeah, I also wrote a poem this week, which isn’t something I do often. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to bother putting up a section for my writing on my site… in some ways it’s almost counter-productive. I write for myself, not for others, so putting it up here would be a little odd. What do you think, empty void?

This week started off with my being on Vampire Standard Time. I didn’t manage to get to sleep all night, then slept all day and I missed the lab seminar that day. Thankfully that got corrected to a more normal pattern during the week.

I think I lost my bankbook. It’s bound to be around here somewhere, but since most of my stuff is still in bags or piles, I’m not sure when I’ll actually get around to finding it. I’m sure it’ll be soon… that or I’ll have to go to the bank and fess up that I lost it. Speaking of banking, I did a little bit of work on my own banking system, and put in some more back-entries from my spreadsheet. Boy is that going to take forever to get those back-entries in.

Things at uni have been mainly working on the survey system for my research, which is somewhat slow going. Certainly slower than I expected it to be. Other than that, it’s just been talking to a few of my labmates and the usual weekly meeting.

This week a few interesting things happened. I started to have a play around with Blitz, a programming language (and interface) designed specifically for making games. I’m not sure how much time I’m going to be spending on learning it as I go forward, but since my friend Ian has used it before, I figure it’s easier for me to learn that and work with him on a project using that than it is for both of us to learn something new. Anastasia is in LA at the moment, which has been a bit weird on the time difference for getting to talk, but we’ve managed to connect pretty regularly this week, which is good.

I went to see Defiance with Kyoko this week, which I enjoyed despite it being a war movie which isn’t usually my cup of tea. Apparently I also didn’t turn into a foreigner this time when the movie ended! We had a bit of a chat about it afterwards and she thinks that since we went to see Iron Man (months after the rest of the world), I’ve gradually been turning into a foreigner less and less! ^^ I do find it rather hilarious that she tends to think of me as Japanese in a lot of contexts. We also had a look around the area around my house a bit as well – the local ramen shop is pretty good, actually. We played pool at a place near the station that was ridiculously cheap… although I am still in utter disbelief over how many times I managed to sink the white ball in one session. I ended up losing 3-5, but learned that Japanese people do tally counting by gradually writing the kanji for “correct” – interesting, huh?