I’ve missed the last few days because I’m honestly feeling a little run down lately. I think it’s a combination of getting older and also having all of my goals be really distant and amorphous. In the short term I really don’t have any desires other than taking photos that I’m satisfied with and staying at a healthy weight. All of my real ambitions are a year or more out and that makes the work towards those goals seem more ineffective. In short I want to go to Japan on a teaching exchange program and I also want to learn the Japanese language to a relatively high degree. The latter of which is the hardest because it requires daily application of a considerable part of my attention but the benefits of that devotion are unmeasurable. It’s like working out for hours every day but you only notice that you’re in shape after four or five years. 

Over the weekend I watched the Japanese action comedy The Fable and it’s sequel The Fable: The Killer Who Does Not Kill. They are based on a manga about a comically hyper-lethal assassin who is tasked with retiring for a year and living a normal life. After watching the films I started reading the manga and the films definitely lean more into the comedy, which is more what I’m looking for lately. The manga has it’s moments of humor but it’s also presented with a bit of stark inhumanity that generally turns me off whenever it is employed. What I mean by that is that the world is presented as rather bleak and terminal. The films balance this out by making  the characters elastic and approachable in contrast to the rather hellish backdrop against which they are set. They are by no means relatable or sympathetic but they do have a squishy human side that makes them much more endearing. In the manga everyone seems to fit perfectly in the world they’re in and I think it is a detriment. I believe it is a byproduct of being in a graphic medium like manga whereas in film you have the depth and expanse of the real world to soften the blow of whatever unrelatable scenario the characters find themselves in. Unless you’re Blame and the world is the main character you have to focus on small details and let the reader’s imagination fill in the rest. 

I went to the river this last Sunday like I always do and this time there were at least twenty young men with RC cars driving around on the rocks. This is a trend I noticed about six months ago but in that time it has really taken off. If the weather is nice then these guys (every one I have seen has been a young man) head out in droves and record themselves driving seemingly slow RC cars for hours at a time. And with only a few exceptions they all seem to show up independently of each other. Sometimes they come in pairs but the vast majority are on their own. It is as if they are drawn there by the will of some great dorky magnet that beckons them on a primal level. At some point I will photograph them and post it for posterity.

Every day I create a list of new Japanese words that I come across in my immersion learning and I save them on my phone. I’m going to post some of the interesting ones here to keep track and maybe create memorial signpost that I can look back on. Today there was:

1. 乗り切るー to weather a storm or get through adversity
2. いい加減にしろー that’s enough!
3. 徹夜ー staying up late