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?