This week has been an odd mixture of things I have enjoyed and continuing to be in a weird funk. The funk has been kind of pervasive, a refusal of my brain to cooperate with the work I should be doing for my research… I only really made the barest progress, which is frustrating since I want to be further ahead. At the very least I made a rough timeline and put some more questions in my survey system, although part of that I know is that I’m not confident that the question set I’m putting together will be in any way valid for research purposes – I’m not quite sure which papers or whatnot I should be reading to get some guidelines on this.

In any case, my being in a funk has been a bit of a challenge to deal with. This coming week I’m going to try and motivate myself to do… well, anything, really. I don’t know that I can directly motivate myself on my research as well as I might like to be able to, but I can at least motivate myself to work on some of my personal projects. Hopefully some of the buoyancy from working on my personal projects will spill over into my research and I will be in less of a funk. Better to be motivated and working on the things I want to work on than not really working on anything in particular, right? This week also sees the start of classes, so I’m sure that’s going to be its own fun challenge to deal with as well.

That being said, some good things happened this week as well. Firstly I had another basketball practice, which always makes me feel better… I also didn’t lose once in the games we played, which was awesome. After that, I had my first hanami, or flower-watching party! It was during the week with my basketball circle, we went to Inokashira Park for a while and sat around drinking under the cherry blossoms, playing some silly games and just chatting away. I got to see a bunch of people from the circle that I hadn’t seen for a while as well, which was good fun. After we were done in the park, everyone then went off to a restaurant for more drinking and some food, which was a whole bunch of fun as well. Unfortunately after that I had to head home to make sure I didn’t miss the last train or anything, and a bunch of others went home then as well, but a good number from the circle went off to do some karaoke, which I’m sad to have missed out on, particularly since I’d had plenty to drink and would have been beyond my threshold of self-consciousness about singing ridiculously in front of people I don’ t know very well. Maybe next time, I guess!

Another good thing to happen this week was my game development textbook arrived from Amazon Japan, which is very neat. Only problem is I haven’t opened it yet… I know it’ll probably suck away a lot of my time, so I have to figure a way to ration the book into manageable parcels so I still get other things done. Still, I’m looking forward to getting stuck into reading that and hopefully putting some of the principles to work in managing/developing my own pet game projects! ^^

An awesome thing to happen this week – Jenny came to Japan! Hurrah! I got a call from her mid-week saying she was in Japan and arriving in Tokyo the next day. We managed to catch up a couple of times, which was great. First time just grabbed some lunch and did some wandering around Shinjuku, then second time out for dinner at a pizza place in Ikebukuro with their friend Tom. Incidentally, apparently having Tom and I meet made the whole trip worth it in and of itself… we’re just that entertaining, huh? ^^; It was lovely to see her again, and to finally meet her husband, whom I’ve been hearing about for a while and have seen a bunch of photos of but never actually met until this week. Hello, Chris! Also, thanks again for the nut spread from Seattle, it was awesome for you two to think of me like that.

I watched some anime, read some manga and went along to the introduction to the courses for academic writing and presenting in English. I’ll be taking the academic writing one, so I can learn a bit more about the whole paper-writing thing… although I suspect it might be an exercise in learning more Japanese so I can understand their textbook. The courses are compulsory for my degree as far as I can tell, so better to get them out of the way sooner rather than later, I think.

Today I had the distinct pleasure of going around on a semi-hanami with Kyoko. We didn’t manage to join up with everyone for a proper hanami like we thought we would last weekend, but it was still good fun. We had lunch, then walked around Ueno park and saw a whole lot of stuff (including eating some water-candy), then went to the Ueno children’s library for a while (I read Where’s Wally in Japanese! The Japanese version is called “Search for Wally”… I think), then back through the park and off to Asakusa. When we got there we wandered along the river looking at the sakura as the sun slowly set. Watching the sky turn pink from a bridge with the white sakura lining the banks was very cool. It’s a pity I couldn’t really get any decent pictures with that kind of lighting actually… once more proving to myself that eyeballs are more awesome than cameras. ^^ Anyway, after that we sat along a wall on the bank on one side and had a couple of drinks and some food from the food stands. We got treated to listening to some random foreigners playing music a bit further down from us, which was very amusing.

In addition to all this fun stuff, I also had a few sleep problems, did some cleaning, postponed with Eri until next week again, had to deal with paying more bills and calling up people about getting applications for automatic payments and so on as well… I have to say, automatic phone systems in Japanese when you don’t know Japanese? Tricky.