Every time I pass this sign, I can’t help wondering what exactly a “fetish bar” is and what people do there. Can you order a Tom Collins with a stiletto-heeled kick in the nuts chaser? If you ask for a bottle of beer does the waitress ram it up your ass? Alas, I will never find out. My only fetish is for brainy geek chicks who wear wire rim glasses and can code in languages I’ve barely heard of.
Thanks to a bout of nolo virus or salmonella or food poisoning I got from a plate of fried chicken about a week ago, I spent most of my winter vacation sleeping (and pooping), which provided the perfect opportunity to quit smoking for the 129th time.
So right after I post this message, I, for the first time in almost a year, will make the two-hour journey home without smoking the three ritual cigarettes I normally do. Nonsmokers won’t understand why this is such a big deal, but current and ex-smokers will. The cigarettes you associate with certain places and activities are the the most difficult ones to quit.
If I didn’t announce this publicly, I could easily picture myself buying a pack on the way home.
I’m turning into a workaholic hermit, it’s been 47 days since I last did anything social, and I finally got paid today. Anyone in Tokyo up for drinks tomorrow night (Friday)?
I wish I had something interesting or witty to say, but all I do these days is work, go home, tag base, then go to work again.
Last night I spent way too much time putting together a wee video clip from my archive of old and unlabeled tapes. I threw it in the chumbucket because it’s more of a home video than something insightful about Japan. I don’t want to put too much stuff like that in the main feed because I think it might bore some people who for some incomprehensible reason aren’t as enamored with my kids as I am.
Every time I work on a video, I wonder how the pros do it for the evening news so quickly. Or how TV and movie editors manage to watch, edit and archive hours and hours of footage. Maybe they don’t watch over and over what they’re working on like I do.
Chumbucket access rules are to do one of the following:
Do one of the above, then e-mail me and I’ll give you the URL.
Last Friday at the BlogNation Japan shindig, I recorded some interviews with a few of the attendees. As I held the microphone in front of them and listened through my headphones, I kept thinking, “Wow, how am I ever going to be able to chop this up and rearrange it into a coherent story?” But the truth is, every time I start a new project, the same kind of fear and doubt run through my mind. It’s called “anxiety.” I feel it almost all the time, unless I’m doing something that I have 100% confidence in. (Those things include teaching, training, and troubleshooting PCs.)
The way I’m learning to come to terms with anxiety is to ask myself, “Well, if it all goes to hell, what’s the absolute worst thing that can happen, and how will I deal with it?”
If my attempt at creating a professional-sounding audio program to the best of my ability ends up sounding like a junior high school social studies project, I won’t lose any money, friends, or respect from others. I won’t fall over dead of humiliation. The time I spend on it won’t be wasted, because I’ll learn from it. And I’ll do it again on another topic; I’ll keep at it until I improve.
I realize I’m expecting myself to hit it out of the ballpark my first time at bat. I have a life-long tendency to expect too much out of myself, and it prevents me from starting or finishing challenges unless I force myself, kicking and screaming all the way. That’s the main reason why I’m here, blogging, podcasting and videoblogging. Because it scares the bejesus out of me if I let it.
I admire people (like my boss) who can jump into something new without any experience or a detailed plan and risk failure, so all this online stuff is my attempt at becoming more like them. It has never been easy, even after two years of constant practice. Core beliefs don’t change easily, even if on an intellectual level you know they’re false.
Right after I write a post, create a video or release a podcast, that voice tells me, “You’re not good enough.” But lately, something different is happening. I’ve been sampling bits of my old blog posts and podcasts that I have no recollection of creating and they seem like they’re from someone else. And you know what? They’re interesting, and often funny. When enough time passes that I can separate the critical, perfectionist “me” from the creative me, I can actually enjoy my own work. Maybe if I keep reading and listening to my past, I’ll finally catch up to the present and finally be at peace with myself.
In a nutshell, I think I’m OK. But just to be on the safe side, I’m going to get completely drunk tonight at the BlogNation Japan shindig tonight and repeatedly vomit in my backpack on the train ride home. (I’ll be sure to wear my binaural mics.)
P.S. Rockstar Mommy is a funny, funny blog written by a woman who, if there are more like her out there, I just might grind my family into hamburger and try starting life over. She cheered me up.
Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m missing my true calling in life: sharing other peoples’ stories with the rest of the world. (Either that or running a business that does house calls for peoples’ home PC problems. I love helping friends tame their computers.)
I like the formula This American Life has for putting shows together. The mix of voiceovers, mood music and honest, spontaneous-sounding interviews is top notch. Everything except the cadence of Ira Glass’s way of speaking. I can’t put my finger on it, but that’s the only aspect of the best public radio show in existence today that I don’t want to emulate. It’s not as if I have to resist the urge to claw at my ears when I hear him talk, but he has such an idiosyncratic, kind of uppity (but not snarky) tone of voice that I know I have to avoid sounding like I’m imitating him. At the same time, I can’t sound like the barbiturate-addled hosts of NPR programs either.
The topic I want to cover is “Living and Working in Japan as a foreigner.” I want to conduct interviews with people on why they decided to come to Japan, how they found work, their work history, whether or not they feel as if they’re succeeding, and what the experts think are the best ways for people to find the job that’s right for them. And I want to keep my own story out if it, because if I don’t it’ll probably end up sounding like I’m using the microphone as my psychoanalyst.
For those of you who have thought about taking a stab at living in Japan for a while or moving here permanently, what do you want to know from those who are already here? What would you like to hear headhunters and recruiters talk about? I’ve got my list of questions, but I’d like to know if ya’ll can think of a few that might not have crossed my mind.
This is going to be my attempt at getting better at audio production. There’s an entire team of producers, assistant producers, writers, sound engineers, editors and researchers who work together to put out every episode of This American Life, and for a long time I’ve been wondering what I can accomplish on my own, even if it ends up being nowhere near as high quality. As long as the final product is interesting and listenable, I’ll try to be happy with it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about “faith.” We’re surrounded by what we have faith in. I get out of bed every morning because I have faith that doing so is better than staying in bed. I use my toothbrush because I have faith that it’ll clean my teeth. If I didn’t have faith in it, I’d throw it away. If I didn’t have faith in the bicycle I ride to the train station, I’d either fix it or throw it away and buy a new one. I have faith that the train I ride to work will get me there. And so on. We’re so surrounded by people and things we have faith in that we don’t normally think about it.
We throw away or avoid the things we don’t have faith in. So I started thinking, what if someone doesn’t have faith in himself or herself? And I realized, wow, that’s my problem. That’s a big problem. It makes me think of all the things I would have done by now if I had more faith in myself.
Here’s the reality. The company I work for isn’t doing well. I need to take some of the blame for that. And my only choice is to have faith in myself, my coworkers and my boss that we can turn things around. At the least, I need to have faith in myself. And having gotten so used to not having faith in myself, it’s going to be difficult to change my way of thinking. But for my family’s sake, I have to do it. I want to do it for my boss, too. I like the guy.
A glasses retail chain in Japan made a splash on various blogs and news sites lately with a new mobile site that lets you try on specs using your camphone. In reality, all you do is download an overlay and put it over a photo. Hardly very innovative or convenient. Here I’m using a random mugshot from The Smoking Gun. Framesdirect.com is a much more quick and convenient way to see how you look wearing different glasses.
