It has been an utterly long time, and I make no excuses short of the apathy that comes with a wintery chill. However, I have also noticed that the chair I sit in generates some sort of magical energy field that slowly causes any sense of productivity to wither. You see, for some reason, the Japanese love sitting near the ground, perilously close to a full on resting position befitting dreamers. Unfortunately, it means that the extra energy I need to exert to get up usually remains mere potential, rather than any sort of kinetic miracle. This cost of activity, let us call it something simple like activation energy, is high enough to deter me from doing most actions that I had, apparently up til now, taken for granted. Why this applies to things that can actually be done remains a mystery, but I assume it has something to with either blood circulation, chi, or ley lines. Possibly all of the above.

What follows is an array of thoughts desperately trying to flee logical order.

I received a Christmas card from my father today, or at least I had received it sometime during my vacation but only just today discovered that I had, indeed, received a card from my father. And apparently only my father oddly enough, as my mother didn't sign anything. For the record, my parents are not divorced and live under the same roof unless some drastic changes occurred during my absence, followed by a series of coincidental presences as I can hear my mother communicating with my father whenever I call back home. At any rate, I stared at it for a good while, that gooey buildup of sentiment growing inside as the most I could do was just smile warmly at the gesture. My family has never been one to celebrate Christmas (or Thanksgiving, or Halloween, or the Fourth of July, or birthdays, or...), a fact that bewildered most of my students and made them doubt my credibility as an American™. I have never bought a present for them nor have I ever received one I didn't handpick myself and delivered to myself personally, on a date that was by no means the birthday of anyone's Saviour, so it came as a nice surprise to see them make the gesture, and now I sorta feel bad for not returning it (and probably never will). You think you know a person, and they still manage to surprise you twenty some odd years later.

World building is both an enjoyable and frustratingly difficult endeavor (I always want to spell this word endeavour because I either want to become British or I yearn to consume something). There is surprisingly little freedom to be had by playing God, as one must exercise both self-control and creative chutzpah to make a world that is both somewhat plausible and yet different enough to . It is times like these that I wish I actually knew, uh, things about people and being able to extrapolate how things would go if this cultural trigger was switched on or off. Maybe I should look into getting some sort of world-building book, but alas, getting any resource in English is rather economically wasteful.

One day I will take the time to actually fit a goddamn story in this world (these worlds, really). The outline has a total of three quarters of a chapter written, in an order that is not entirely sequential and, if you scratch at its surface hard enough, you can see that the current draft lies atop a graveyard of past visions given way to dust. And while I am dreaming, maybe one day I will actually try and learn the first thing about creative writing. I will blame UCLA for any academic deficiencies I have, even though I don't think I ever took the effort to look for a creative writing class (muses cannot be whipped into labor, despite a certain Gaiman story that did far worse than whipping to a muse).

As the new year dawns, my fears of the future have once again resurfaced. Not so much a fear of the "Oh God robots are gonna overthrow us all" sort of future, but rather a more mundane "How the hell am I going to find a job that will support my posh and somewhat hedonistic lifestyle" sort of future. I realized that I would need to get a job that pays at least 50k/year, which might be possible if I weren't, uh, somewhat unqualified for a lot of the jobs I want. Hopefully, I haven't forgotten how to be myself in interviews, which for one reason or another gives off a sense of confidence even though, in reality, I am a shivering child clinging to childhood safeguards that will do me no good against the sharp, gnashing teeth of nightgaunts.

It amazes me that every single old person that sits next to me on the bus smells like dead farts deeply settled into a rotten onion.

When I was in fourth grade, my mom would always make me a cup of cocoa every morning. I dipped a few Chinese (Taiwanese?) coconut crackers into that liquid concoction that sprung forth from the powders of a Swiss Miss, and that would be breakfast. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I grew up rather pudgy, although it is a surprise that I didn't end up becoming a diabetic. Still, despite the health concerns I was clearly ignorant of, or at least chose to ignore for the sake of routine and scrumptious morning treats, that meal would be the breakfast I would associate my childhood with.

Unfortunately, like all good things, having too much of it made it toxic, and I soon found the taste of instant cocoa to be rather. Maybe my tastes matured, maybe they changed the formula, maybe it was the fact that my parents, for some reason, never cleaned the damn tea kettle and thus allowed the minerals of LA tapwater to settle on the bottom, adding its unique flavor to every fresh brew. I dunno. In any case, that morning cup of cocoa ceased being a sweet treat and became something that had to be forced down before I left, so as to not waste food, of course.

I don't think I've ever had cocoa since those days. Maybe on a few occasions, here and there, just to remind myself that yes, this is rather bland and only superficially tastes like chocolate and that the marshmallows are the same kind as those found in Lucky Charms, but there was no enjoyment from it anymore. I had moved on to coffees and teas and all those other beverages that connote a sense of class or refinement that I could never really have, seeing as how I've been branded as a cocoa kid for the rest of my life. I'm not even sure if I had ever liked the cocoa in the first place, but the idea of it, the idea of that sweet warmth in a cup, would bring relief to even the coldest of LA days.

It's currently hovering around 5-10C here in Japan, a country, I would like to again mention, that doesn't quite seem to understand the idea of insulation. My walls are literally made from cardboard or something close enough to it. Seeing as how I do not possess enough fortitude to just withstand the cold, I must fend for myself against the cruelties of nature. I can throw on a blanket, put on the heat, or add enough layers of clothes so that I feel like a rolled up sock or a hobo , but once I remove those shields, I'm left feeling cold again. There is only so much that these external forces can do for me before I find myself once again in want, and it is in this naked vulnerability that I find myself missing home again.

It's not just the actual heat of the hot water spreading throughout my body and warming it up from the inside, but the comfort of knowing that someone took time out of their day to make you a cup of cocoa, even if it was of the instant variety. It's such a simple act of courtesy, and one that I had so often viewed as a responsibility, as part of a routine schedule, and maybe it was. But just as likely, I had taken the act for granted, and I would rather not further pollute yesteryears with the grime of cynicism. Still, though, thinking back about those cups of cocoa, seeing the package in the grocery cart or as I'm unpacking that grocery bag, they connect my childhood with a certain fundamental kindness, a genuine compassion that I have long felt absent during my time in Japan. With nothing able and nobody willing to demonstrate that basic level of humanity, I fear that nothing can abate the chill I feel this winter.

Mojigakuen Senior High School placed second and tied for third in the 7th Annual Fukuoka Debate Contest.

Now to fight all of Kyushu...

The following are model answers. I'm still unsure what it's trying to say.

1) For me the real attraction of a trip is a subtle mixture of, on one hand, feeling safe and satsified by knowing, from studying the map, where I am and what is around me and, on the other hand, a superb sense of freedom derived from the fact that, with no help from anyone, or without any instructions, I can walk around, just suiting myself.

2) The supreme freedom caused by the fact we can walk around as we like with no directions or help, and the feeling of safety and satisfaction caused by the fact that, thanks to a map, we know where we are and have a good knowledge of our surroundings - the delicated mixture of these feelings is the essence of travel for me.

Here, read these sentences and try to make sense of them. I get the feeling you'll collapse under a nearly Lovecraftian realization that the world just simply doesn't make sense anymore.

"It is the one unexpecetedly remembered when it works wen meeting and speaking though the name of hte person of the first meeting is not remembered easily and other party's name is put out to the mouth."

"As old car is given and getting an importantly doesn't give the environment the load from the living newlied buy to an up to the minute car fast for a long time."

"The person who has the cell phone seems to increase and to have most by a young person recently. However, it hinders more tan the cell phone rings during the lesson and it doesn't hinder teacher's nature."

"I will entirely use the bus when going out to travel. It buses because it is a vehicle suitable to support intuition of the land also in the town, the village, and ground in the frontier."

Aaaand we have a black president.

And here I am in some foreign land :(

...is the time I woke up because I had a dream that McCain had won. It was rather unsettling.

(For those unable to do the math, that's 10:36 AM PST)

I'm not sure how people ask me to come into work on Saturday and Sunday on a four day weekend and not look at least a little humble or desperate at the same time.

I said no.

There's a certain sadness to buying books you can't read until, oh, next year. Especially when two of those books were purchased as a result of a haunting Halloween spirit.

I can't really imagine the mountain of media that's accruing at my parent's house. At least I'll have something to do in that (hopefully) transitory period of unemployment where I'm procrastinating away from finding a job and an apartment. It's a strange sort of ambivalence of not being able to wait to move and dreading the entire process of moving and acclimating.

"Pianist" is now on that list, alongside "sit" and "election."

Everyone always says that they miss their friends and family and weather and not living in a country full of plague lepers, but I miss that lovingly acquired, meager collection of tomes that constitutes my personal library. Maybe it's just this time of year, when some sort of Pavlovian trigger goes off and I feel compelled to do something remotely academic, or the nostalgia that washes over me as I fondly remember reunions with seemingly old friends after an entire summer's worth of lifetimes dilutes my memory of them. Even though the air is thick with change, the earthen tones and the stability that they connote induce a need for permanence, and, well, one hopes that the recorded thoughts and imaginations of persons articulate enough to satisfyingly ascribe one, the other, or both will remain remembered for some period longer than our individual lives.

Granted, I am by no means an academic reader, and I could probably count the number of books I have reread on one hand. But to have the library at hand, at my disposal, brings a certain comfort to me the way a soldier might caress their firearm in times of anxiety. Obviously, there were difficulties bringing my books over to Japan, mostly having to do with weight limitations limiting my desire to be absolutely prepared for any potential whim I may have. Unfortunately, those weight limits only allowed me to take a few Gaiman books, a few Murakami books, and a Lonely Planet travel guide to Japan. Truly a sad state of affairs, to abandon something I had endearingly possessed in fluctuation forms for the past, oh, let's say 20 years of my life, give or take. Most of those books are locked within a closet, the repository of lost lore for those that aren't fortunate enough to be blessed with a mystery-tinted attic. I sometimes wish I could read my Encyclopedia Brwn books, but I don't want to dig through the closet. And I still probably remember the solutions.

I think the works I miss the most are my comic books and, a more specific subset of the former, my Calvin and Hobbes collections. I've resolved to purchase those hardcover mega editions when I return to the States, as, well, I don't think I could qualify as a fan without them. But the originals, the ones purchased from a Scholastic book club at the age of 7, those will have a place in my heart so long as my heart still possesses an ember of humanity. It was a sad realization that this summer would be the first time I didn't do my annual read-through of those surprisingly literate and insightful strips, and it was even sadder for me to realize that I almost missed the first realization. It feels as though a certain fragment of my childhood remains with those stories and punchlines, and the mere act of revisiting them, even after I know how the strip goes by merely glancing at the art, affords me a momentary respite from the troubles that plague "adulthood," and I, of course, use that term in the most nebulous, perhaps technical, manner possible. Sometimes it just feels good to forget that problems exist, or if they do, they can just be simply laughed away.

The sedentary nature of books conjures a certain feeling of foundation, of settlement, of fallen dust infusing a sense of history within a locality. Even after VHS tapes can no longer be viewed by apparently non-existent media players, after CDs and DVDs go past their expiration dates and are no longer readable, after data is lost in various technical malfunctions, the words on those pages will still remain, just waiting to be consumed again, perhaps shifting slightly to provide newfound insight. Without that atmosphere of permanence, there will always be a certain transitory property to wherever I am and, by extension, to what I am. Without my books, it just doesn't feel like home.

I really, really have no idea why Japan forces its students to translate these horribly written sentences. Nobody thinks these sorts of thoughts in these sorts of ways, so it's not only impractical to teach this shit, but since this is the sort of retardation that shows up on entrance exams, they're forced to spend time learning stupid shit instead of practical, or even interesting, shit. I mean, I can only say so many times that these are horrible sentences that nobody will ever, ever say or use in any sort of professional environment, and yet I know that this is the sort of shit they'll be seeing on their entrance exams. Maybe it's a test to see if they can make sense out of garbled messes? I dunno.

These are model answers. These make every instinct I have as a writer burn with rage and aggravate me as the person that has to check student responses to them. I can't begrudge the student responses for being worse because they didn't have much to work with in the first place.

-The sudden decrease in the percentage of young people and the aging of society caused by the increase in life expectancy are the phenomena of these past few years which are causing many problems.

-In the past few years, rapid decrease in the number of children and the aging of society caused by extended life expactancy are phenomena which have brought a lot of problems.

-Recently, while the number of children has kept on decreasing rapidly, prolonged life expectancy has resulted in an aging population. These phenomena have given us numerous problems.

The last one actually approached readable, but the initial Japanese sentence wasn't split up into two and nobody would think of splitting it up into two.

Edit: Here is a student's answer:

"A few year's quickly the decreasing a number of children and the phenomenon that an aging is caused by making average people's life span has been causing many problem."

For some reason beyond my comprehension, our school invited a Singaporean guy and a Pakistani (this feels so naked without an -an) girl to talk about their culture, and the students, as usual, didn't really put much effort into curious inquiries, even in Japanese with translators present. That's not the reason I'm writing this entry, but I just wanted to take a quick jab at that little aspect of Japan.

Anyway, during the course of the Q&A, someone asked the Pakistani chick (or maybe she volunteered the info herself, I dunno. I tend to zone out when Japanese is being spoken, so I sorta sympathize with, but not forgive, my students when they have to listen to me in English) what parts of Japanese culture was popular in Pakistan. Her response was Samurai Jack and tai chi.

Good to know that the US isn't the only country in the world that flaunts its cultural ignorance. The ties that bind, and all that.

While I was on the bus this morning, this old lady, and I would like to take a moment to note my disdain for the elderly, failed to properly cling to a hand rail and started slipping backwards. Me, a being of infinite grace and dexterity, sidestepped like the world's greatest matador, instead of providing some semblance of support for this woman, who, by my estimates, was probably around 60 or 70. She fell to the ground of the bus in what was probably a pain compounded by the lessened fortitude of old age, but I didn't really feel bad.

Seriously, I don't know how people that live in Florida deal with old people. Probably by banging the shit out of some beachside hussy, I reckon.

I am afraid that I am going to wake up to a new dark age forged from the rotten core of this economic disaster. Admittedly, I don't even know how falling stocks and bailouts and murder-suicides as a result of people going insane and despondent are going to affect me, aside from stuff costing more and whatnot. I'm sorta glad that I'm not rich enough to have investments or responsible enough to take loans, have mortgages, or own a small business.

I guess I've always wondered what human flesh tastes like.

Pandering to the ignorant majority is still pandering to the majority. Hollow words wrapped in gold make for better gifts than speeches laden with dense information.

"Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies,and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself,'Does any of this really matter?' " Palin said.

I don't know why I'm so infatuated with how retarded Sarah Palin is. I'm not the sort of person to stop to watch traffic accidents or go to car races of any kind, but something about this colossal train wreck of American democracy, while at the same time somehow epitomizing American values, induces some sort of nihilistic euphoria that makes me want to cackle while the entire thing goes to shit. Sure, I'd be sad (well, I'm in a foreign country at the moment and can technically hide here for like three more years if I'm desperate enough), but goddamn it'd be an entertaining descent into entropic strangleholds.

Like I said, I'm pretty confused over why I seem to be obsessing over her. I mean, I've, uh, "sought" the attentions of women with less fervor and attention than this, but it all feels like some sort of demented school crush that will end in nothing but heartache and pathetic (and creepy) contributions to the spank bank. Who knows, maybe I love Sarah Palin, if not for her "I liked cock" appearance mixed with that "I can show you a thing or two *winky wink*" demeanor, then at least for making me feel like a better human being.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger,who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

*Link lifted, as usual, from Boing Boing.

I'm reminded of a quote from the relatively obscure game Anachronox, which says, and I'm paraphrasing, "Democracy doesn't work because people are stupid." And it's true. By and large, people will not be educated enough, informed enough, integrated well enough within political mechanisms to be able to make intelligent, rational decisions about their country. One can even say that the fact that we elect people to do our thinking for us just reinforces the idea that people are just not qualified to handle the big picture.

While discussing current political events with a friend, I mused that politics nowadays, and maybe it's always been like this, isn't about policies or capabilities or anything that requires peering into depths. No, the surface is much easier and much more palatable than the darkness that underscores everyone's lives. It'd take too much work to actually listen to the words, and too much skill to notice the subtle lines of treachery hidden by a radiant smile. I don't really blame them, to be honest. It does take a lot of work to filter through the bullshit and rhetoric and get some semblance of an idea regarding policies and perspectives, so maybe the blame doesn't rest solely on the American people, but on the politicians that pander to this sort of lowest common denominator, scandal-seeking, drive-thru sound bite consuming American. They do have to realize, though, that some of us are willing to listen and are skeptical enough to need more than throwaway words that invoke fleeting moments of good feeling to convince us that they're going to do the right thing.

That being said, the entire Sarah Palin thing is a farce that seems to have convincingly fooled a good number of Americans. Somehow, all the ethics violations, the incredibly retarded things she says, and generally questionable behavior hasn't stopped people from believing that she is somehow qualified in case John McCain croaks in office. Kudos, Republican party, for pulling off the greatest magic trick the world has ever known.

The following article is an incredibly cathartic read. It reads a bit too angrily to be, uh, let's say unbiased, but it's a fun read. Not sure how you feel if you disagree with it, but I suspect you lack the amount of cognitive ability needed for me to give a rat's shit about what you think.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Sometime during the summer, I talked to the middle school English teacher, and she seemed rather excited that the middle school culture festival skit was going to be West Side Story. I thought, okay, racial tensions seem to be something that seems to be completely alien to the nearly homogeneous population of Japan, but there's singing and dancing. Why not? Then I got this skit in my e-mail, asking me to correct it. I groaned, because I hate correcting middle school shit because it would almost always require me to rewrite copious amounts of it. Then, as I was reading through it, my jaw just drops at...well, everything about it, really. There is now a void within me, an emptiness where once was the ability to correlate between decisions and the reasons behind them. I can no longer cling to the comfort that events wrought by insanity are supposed to make sense on some fundamental level. Maybe not logical sense, maybe not even a sort of sense that mortal minds can comprehend, but there was a faith that even madness had its place. No longer, perhaps never again.

Today, I went back to the middle school, as the ALT there had left for greener pastures (seriously, she was from Hawaii) and left a hole that I had to be guilted into volunteering. The same English teacher asked me to record the lines for the entire play. I accepted, cordial professional that I am. Unfortunately, I didn't realize just how much willpower I needed to not laugh out loud during some of the scenes. Keep in mind I had to read ALL the lines in a dialogue. The script I read was slightly different, but I don't feel like exposing myself to it again just to figure out the differences. A cursory glance at my "corrected" version shows that they didn't even put in most of my corrections, which completely puzzles me. I don't know how they can, in good conscience, ask me to help them with their English and then ignore damn near every single one of my suggestions. But I digress. Besides, the rawest form of this chaos would perhaps serve best for purposes of entertainment.

And thus, I bring you:

( West Side Story...by Japanese Junior High School Students )

This is what the last song SHOULD have been.