The Days Blend

it took me a year here to figure it out, but i'm most worn out at the end of the month because of the distances i have to travel to get to the schools that i teach at. the first week is a long week in yamasaki which requires over an hour of commuting each day to get up to a quiet town in the mountains north of himeji. i haven't found anything incredibly interesting to do up there, but i'm told that there are some fantastic onsens. tomorrow i'll be in himeji tsuji, the only monday i work in the month, thus robbing me of two consecutive days off and any concrete weekend-like plans.

the southeast asian excursion is always in the back of my mind, as i plan and gather the resources in what little time i do have as well as make a point of saving money here. i believe that i will receive my perfect-attendance bonus at the end of this month after managing to arrive to every class on time for the duration of my previous contract, and that money is being stashed away so that i'll be comfortable when i depart from japan in october.

the olympics are upon us again and old rivalries between vancouver and toronto are temporarily set aside in the name of cheering the canadian hockey teams on. i have been seen sporting my oversized home-ice jersey for the team, though now that i've had a look at the black team canada jerseys that they wore against germany i want to get my hands on one of them.

i've all but quit drinking over the last three weeks; having drank too much in early february i decided to have only a light drink last night in the spirit of sending a friend off at a sayonara party and it was the first in a while. david and i have been attending a local gym which is keeping me focused on the need for positive goals and will hopefully make me the strong young man i'll need to be when i set out to trek through the world between japan and australia. and the act of not drinking has been proved quite revealing in how my attitude affects the choices i make in the time i have. why waste any of it away? i think it's good to relax but health and moderation share a strong affinity.

anyone have any cost-effective ideas for what i can do with my wednesday this week? it's the day off i'll be getting in lieu of my monday circumstance.

what's onomatopoeia, you ask? it's what happens when you name something based on the sound it makes, such as "buzz" or "whoosh". there are many such words in japanese. your japanese onomatopoeia for the day is beron-beron, meaning stumbling-drunk. it only takes being beron-beron once or twice before you understand why it's called that.

i received a great postcard from a friend in france who is now in scotland. thanks christine. all of you over there on other continents are making it difficult for me to quench my travel appetite. europe's next, but only after a stint in canada.

more later this week when there's time. i'm trying to take my camera out with me more often but it seems like i'm rarely doing too much that's new these days. forgive me. i'll get something up here soon enough. stay warm, everyone.

Riding Cockroaches Through Morality Plays

“religion is an insult to human dignity. with or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
- steven weinberg, 1979 nobel prize winner for physics



i find it fascinating to think that altruism is a development that happened naturally; by process of elimination, it remained alive as a concept programmed into our genes that proved beneficial and remains as a result. science, in this way, and as richard dawkins adamantly explains, is the secret ingredient of atheism that makes it life-affirming. religion dwells in rigidly-asserted assumption while science seeks to constantly understand the truth by adjusting its outlook. religion, a restrictive life banking on eternal vindication in tired rehearsal and science, acutely devoted to the questions of the immediate and the now.

but in secularism and atheism we have also steadily advanced culturally, a process much like the very genetic on goings that brought us to where we are now. things have improved socially where we have abandoned the exhausted hollows of faith and allowed for liberal interpretation and interaction. progressive notions regarding the need for equality among all people regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation have been attained through education and the questioning of a system conveniently focused around a patriarchal deity.

in learning to selectively follow conveniently applicable areas of text written thousands of years ago, one thus negates the integrity of the whole as an infallible source. and to follow the whole of any major theological text is simply a means to recalibrate a phallic assertion within the programming of our social structures and ongoing cultural story. religion seeks to extend the chapter of human history that has been drawing gradually - progressively - to a close.

religions and faith encourage us - sedate us - beyond the grasp of the experience we have at this moment. can you recall the names of your familial predecessors more than four generations ago? do you know the lives of each of your great-great-great-great grandmothers? their lasting legacy is you, the ongoing experience of your life in the perpetuation of the genes each of those women passed to you. indeed, you may have very little remaining connection to each of the contributing women in your history, aside from the genetic legacy you are proof of. this same process happens all around us on the earth - not in an unproven postmortem haven of bliss and reward for the rehearsal we had as organic matter. you feel that? life is happening to you right now.

the beauty all around us - in the earth, the stars, all life and its origins - cry out to us to explore and interpret the mystery of simply being something, anything. try to take in the vastness of the universe or consider the age of our incredible home planet. take it all in and see where we, each of us the product of countless genetic permutations that have occurred along the way, have come in making the world a better place through peace and altruism and recognizing the value of order and welfare and empathy. it is a behavior patterned that we are programmed to accept and pass on, not for fear of an consequential afterlife but instead for the benefit of the guarantee we have in the cognition of now. it is by no coincidence that we love - for it is by love that we are we.

"we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. the number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of sahara. if you think of all of the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and i are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. we are privilged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world." - richard dawkins, from the root of all evil

It's So Cold In This House

tomorrow marks the first part of a new day.

it also happens to be a day off that i'm committed to having off. whatever that means. work has been busy and various other commitments seem to crop up everywhere. but not tomorrow. nope. no one is going to interfere with my thursday. mokuyobi is mine, baby.

so tomorrow i have to finish cleaning the apartment and do the laundry and i promised i'd meet dave at the gym and maybe attempt to record a song without actually knowing anything about music. yasumi. sweet. wait -- where did my day off go?

the apartment itself is freezing. while not canada-cold in japan, it certainly is vicious in its own right. is it a moist cold? some cruel joke of winter humidity? i don't know, but it rarely snows in himeji and yet i feel colder moment to moment than i ever really did in canada. i have decided in a non-committal way that this has a lot to do with the form of transport i use here. maybe more to do with the fact that i take the train or bus everywhere than it does with the climate itself. and to get to their respective platforms i use a bicycle. the population density here in japan gives the country an infrastructure to support an incredible public transport system and so i am rarely in a car. i am often outside, waiting my life away until the next train arrives. that being said, i rarely have to wait very long.

but the apartment is cold. this remains an issue, no matter how fast i can get to where i'm going when not in the apartment. large windows. thin (though incredibly soundproof) walls. cold faux-wood vinyl floors. no central heating. one large room. it's not all that winter-friendly.



ahh, so yes. the southeast-asian adventure planning is underway. jacob and i had our longest-to-date conversation on the telephone a week ago at a staggering (and approximate) 215 minutes in length. i decided i never wanted to speak with him again, and certainly not spend five months rocking the shores of southeast. he talked some sense into me, which took and additional 35 minutes and now i am ready for the adventure with a renewed vigor. above i have posted the maps to the countries we will be traveling through as well as our proposed route.

we start in thailand, move around a lot. check it out. it all begins in bangkok and we travel back and forth around northwestern thailand before moving to laos, for a landlocked stint, and then a long journey through the length of vietnam. from there we will be entering cambodia before moving back into thailand from the east border. you'll then see the long blue (bus) or green (train) line as we head south to malaysia and eventually indonesia. these are the plans tentatively, and jacob has been breaking his back checking out all the destinations and researching the places we are looking at going to. sometime i'll post a more finalized itinerary, but for now you just need to know how our colour-coding system works:

*dotted/checkered route lines indicate a return journey along the same path
red - air route
blue - bus
green - train
yellow - taxi (obviously)
pink - ferry (not intended as a joke but rather something i just realized was an inherent pun.)

the dots on the maps along each route are places where we're definitely stopping for more than just a night. so try to figure out what we're doing as best you can. if you've been to any or all of these places, jacob and i would love to hear your input, so leave a comment or send me an email. australia is still very much a part of this trip for me if the funding is right. i've heard of people living and working in australia on organic farms, which would be a good way for me to earn a bit more cash while i attempt to become a professional surfer/rock star/movie star/diplomat/philanthropist, or whatever it is i plan on doing down there before heading back to canada.

i've also posted a few pictures from a staff meeting i was at earlier this month and i think i managed to get a picture of just about everyone i work with at my company, at least while they were all in the same room. enjoy.