Japan

So I actually typed this up the week after the Japan trip, but put off posting it till now cause I was hoping to maybe add some pics to this desperately long post first... but that never happened, and I doubt I'll find the time to sort through all of them AND post them in one go. I'm busy enough with other stuff as it is.

Instead, I'm leaving that job to the also somewhat-stuck-in-2013 photoblog and putting this up as is. 

Just arrived home on Sunday (11/9) and I already want to go baaaack.

Highlights and other thoughts. This is gonna be a long one.

1. FOOD. SO MUCH FOOD
2. Places
3. Memories
4. Anime/Manga/Video Game merchandise.
5. General notes on traveling:
6. What I'd hit up next time:

Ladybugs

Lately I've been finding couples of ladybugs hanging around the toilet in my bathroom. I smacked one of them only for it to fly-fall onto my pants-leg AHHH MAKE IT STOP.

I'll have a more substantial update later. Between traveling and work and the new Durarara!! and being obsessed with [looking up] books, I haven't had time to do much else... and now I have to wake up for a 6 AM meeting. -_-

Till next time.

Plane Crashes

Air Asia QZ 8501 vanished early this morning local time, somewhere to the east of the Indonesian island of Belitung while en route to Singapore from Surabaya. The plane is still yet to be found.

This feels uncomfortably close to home right now considering my family and I just flew the opposite route (Singapore to Bali, specifically - but they're pretty close) two days ago, and we're flying Air Asia tomorrow to Jakarta.

I used to have a major phobia of plane crashes over large bodies of water and air turbulence during flights (ironic considering the number of times I've been on a plane in my life: too many), but lately I've been feeling mostly apathetic about it, considering that the likelihood of dying in a plane crash is statistically much lower compared to dying in a car crash. It's just that it's easier to picture escaping from a car crash compared to a plane crash (especially from a plane going into the ocean), and the crashes this year have been more high profile than usual even though the overall frequency was lower, so it seems a lot scarier than usual.

(Then again, I haven't experienced any turbulence on a flight as bad as one particular trans-Pacific flight from 8 or so years ago that apparently caused planes smaller than the one I was on to shift a few thousand feet... I thought I was going to die on that flight.)

It's really more like a "I won't be paranoid about it until it actually happens" kind of feeling though, since if it ever does happen I probably won't be worrying about it for very long anyway. Que sera, sera.

Still, for the families awaiting news on the fate of that plane... Lord have mercy.

interim

Leave it to the end of a good trip to make me feel existentially depressed all over again. (Nothing to worry about; just another one of my usual mood swings.)

1. I don't often talk about a lot of the emotions I really feel throughout the days, or rather aside from whatever ends up reported here, which is more like a tiny sample of what I really experience. For the record, I'm an F by Myers Briggs standards [ignore if you dislike Myers Briggs; I understand lol]. I don't necessarily talk about my feelings that often with people, but I generally go through the same motions mentally as a lot of other F's I know who tend to be more vocal about them. Most of the time I don't think my emotions are worth voicing aloud, as they tend to feel shallow or naive in retrospect; I can get jealous over the stupidest little things and upset over issues that aren't worth getting riled over.

But I still feel, and I can't help but experience feelings that I regret having later on down the line... like becoming over-possessive of my friends. There was once a time when I become so obsessive about how close I was with people that in one circumstance I just had to have a conversation with the same particular person everyday or else I'd start growing paranoid about growing distant from that person (which I uh... tracked using our chat logs during a time when AIM didn't automatically store them) and it progressed to the point where we kinda grew sick of each other and stopped talking for a year (which might've been considered abnormal at the time). This was only with a friend though- I still worry about what would happen in a romantic relationship, like I might turn into one of those jealous and over-possessive boyfriends.

It's partly why I've kinda kept my distance sometimes from friends when I might not emotionally want to otherwise- because I'm afraid of growing sick of someone whose presence I used to enjoy or likewise alienating them. I don't want to repeat the past again.

2. I worry about becoming so preoccupied with the little things I tend to obsess over (for the last few weeks it's been Pokemon again >_>) that I grow more distant from the people I do get a chance to see, because nothing else going on in my life happens to be relevant to them at the moment. This also means that when I do see signs of the closeness of other people's relationships, I randomly feel jealous pangs inside, even though it's no business of mine and really my own fault for letting my own relationships wither anyway.

Not that they're really withering right now... but for lack of a better term, I don't feel as "connected" to most of my friends as I sometimes wish I could be (and other times I just feel apathetic about it). Sometimes I come and go in people's lives for various reasons, and then the next time I see them they tell me that it feels like they haven't seen me in ages, even if it's only been a month. This last month being Japan, two weeks of jetlag and sickness triggered hermiting, Fog City Stomp, Thanksgiving in Socal, and then Tahoe. I've kinda lost what consistency in seeing people that I had even a month ago... although my current life-flow might be considered normal by some people's standards.

3. Sometimes I feel like I'm just going through auto-pilot motions even when I'm around people now. Like I'm going along with whatever plans happen to come up as another means of keeping me distracted from the little things that might otherwise demand my attention... like my future, which I keep putting off to some later date when I'm not occupied with trips (Indonesia and NYC coming up... I know, I travel a lot) or the weekly/bi-weekly movie night-swing dancing-small group-sometimes game night routine I had going earlier before everything got all jumbled up. I don't know what will happen in the coming weeks either.

I need a break from life to figure out my life, but that's probably not that feasible without pulling something drastic like arbitrarily quitting my job or something but I don't intend to go there.

But in the meantime... I'm keeping my calendar minimal for the next couple of weeks. I need room to breathe and think again. I was starting to forget what it was like to pay attention to my own thoughts till now.

-- I also went snowboarding this weekend for the second time (and for the record it was exponentially better than this depressing post because I took a lesson instead of trying to free-form learn and failing), but that's another story. Kinda knew this already, but I find I enjoy activities a lot better when I actually understand how to do them properly. This will sound petty but I still feel a little bitter about that first experience... but that's what I get for not preparing for it ahead of time.

from two weeks ago

"People need to conform the external reality they face daily with this subjective feeling they likewise experience constantly."

-- A Naked Singularity

This book makes me wish my everyday conversations were more abnormal.

It's only natural to want to give your own thoughts and feelings significance while paying less attention to others at the same time. To desire that people would acknowledge your words as meaningful and impactful even when they aren't always.

When someone asks you what the highlight of your year was and you have trouble thinking about it because what seems like a highlight to you may not be so for others. and I don't just mean that in the insecure about the worth of my experiences sense, but in the I might kinda value things differently sense. [Good question though.]

You speak of viewing things only in terms of how they affect you, and not on its own terms. Of course, we shouldn't be fear-mongering over issues that likely wouldn't ever come anywhere near us like the news cycle would suggest, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be paying attention to it. Unless the only reason you pay attention is for that direct applicability.

I have issues conforming to things I don't fully accept even though I haven't really thought out why I don't accept them in the first place. Or why I accept the things I do allow myself to conform to.

Sometimes it'd be nice to just disappear, but it's not worth the cost of ignoring responsibilities that would matter to you in the long run.

Dream Post #51

I went through this phase for a while of not recalling having any dreams, and now after shifting my bedtime a little earlier somewhat unintentionally, I've been having a lot more dreams... and also waking up multiple times in the middle of the night because these dreams tend to wake me up randomly. Sigh.

(I realize the numbering got off-track in previous posts, and this technically is post #52 under the dreams tag, but whatever.)

1. I'm gchatting with Yvonne who's supposed to be in the Dominican Republic right now, and she's asking me lots of deep questions that I'm having trouble answering. Then she suddenly signs off after growing impatient with me typing up a response to her creative writing prompt [ugh why is it always in-class essays] because she has to board a plane in Boston.

2. I'm in a classroom explaining the merits of Ryan L's personality to a bunch of primary schoolers. (Ryan, stop abusing your hive mind privileges.)

3. I'm playing an RPG that ends somewhat haphazardly (trick the enemy into holding the bomb!) and discover at the end of it that the entire plot was masterminded by one of my party members, but this fact was never revealed in the end. Kuai points out to me from one of his film critic's video analyses that you would've only noticed this if you'd paid attention to that guy's change in attire during the last hour of the game. And then I wake up wishing this game were real because I want to see more random subtleties in entertainment like that- the kind with answers that are never spelled out for you outright but not too obscure either.

4. At some point, I'm watching a video on facebook of Jason [roommate Jason, not brother Jason] performing a forehand shot from tennis in slow motion, except for some reason he's purposely mis-hitting the ball so it looks weird. Typical Jason.

5. I'm chasing after Peter and his nephew (who apparently runs ridiculously fast for a baby) up a flight of stairs on a dark and stormy night, with my dad and brother tailing after me. We realize that we bypassed the hotel/apartment room we were staying at several flights ago, so we turn the other way and I suddenly remember that Dad can't see at night but luckily there are handlebars on the stairs... until there suddenly aren't and he falls off the gangway and I wake up.

6. All I remember is being trapped in a car and Rosemary's outside making fun of me for doing something that very easily could happen in real life [but I don't remember what now].

If I have more dreams in the next week I'll just add them into this post.

7. A parasitic alien species reminiscent of the Yeerks from Animorphs has burrowed deep into the earth beneath a desert and begun assimilating people I know a la The Thing. Most of what I can recall involved chasing teenage martial artists through desert pits as they were pilgrimaging towards the source similar to those teenagers who travel to Syria to join ISIS. By the time I woke up, Wes and Johny had already been taken and the world was doomed.

8. I'm walking through a 3rd floor school hallway only to run into a huge number of SWAT team members running in the direction I came from. I take this as a signal that a shootout is about to happen behind me and I run downstairs as fast as possible... only to be stopped at a security checkpoint where I have to prove that I actually read books using the three book purchases I apparently just made and my Kindle.

History

Random memory: 5th grade, having just learned about Tiananmen Square, asking my mom why Communism still exists in China when "everyone knows that it's bad."

Mom's response: "It's not that simple..."
[I don't actually remember the rest of the sentence lol. Probably something about how it's really difficult to just change a government like that, because some people actually saw it as a good thing. Or maybe that's how I'd try to answer my 10-year-old self.]

I don't know how long it took me to grasp what she really meant, but looking back on it now... It's weird to be able to distinctly recall a time when you thought of things completely differently.

---

At the moment I'm currently reading A History of the Modern Middle East by Cleveland. I'll admit that I've read more excitingly narrated nonfiction books in the past, but by history textbook standards it's actually fairly interesting, and doesn't feel as dense as say People's History of the US.

A few thoughts while reading so far, which probably will not be of interest to anyone up-to-date on their history:

- This book glosses over subjects a lot faster than other nonfiction books... which is probably a given for it being a tertiary source, but still. One moment you're reading about the monarchy in Iraq for the first time, and then the next thing you know the royal family gets killed off in a sentence and it's bye-bye monarchy. Not even a word on how they died. But eh, I'm planning to read more books after this one anyway.

- This is a topic that's been addressed by Lies My Teacher Told Me (decent read by the way), but I've been realizing more how inadequate my history classes in the past have been at addressing recent events. The textbooks always tended to taper off somewhere around the Gulf Invasion, but at some point after Watergate I think my mind would just stop retaining anything that we learned... aside from Reagan=trickle-down economics, but I didn't really care by that point lol.

But moreover, I think what I really missed was the ability to make connections between the events we did learn about in class and the current events ongoing at the time. I mean, I was able to see the connections between the events we learned about during class, but take a look at the news on any given day and I'd always experience a disconnect, as if people who really were able to keep up with current events were in on something that I had no idea of... which technically was true in a way.

- Part of the reason why I'm reading about Middle East history now is because I want to get a better understanding of what's been going on in that area today and why, considering how pervasively often it's been in the news for the past decade and then some. I mean, I feel like for as long as I can remember I kinda just assumed things were messed up there... because it's always been that way (see this previous post), but when you actually start to read up on that region's history from a considerably less Western-centric view, it really starts to change how you see things.

- I used to view Islam similar to how I viewed Communism like above, but learning about it now, it's made me realize how much of a stabilizing presence it brought to the Arab peoples of the past (and to some extent presently... well that's another story). That's not to say it isn't without its own issues either, but I can see why people in the Middle East would seek out renewed forms of Islamic governance especially in response to the governments they had to deal with in the 20th century.

- To summarize the last 150 pages read... McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, Balfour Declaration, Sykes-Picot (...Britain and France really screwed things up here), skip a few and World War II, and then you have the era of Nasser and the Arab-Israeli Wars up to the June War and Nasser's fall from grace. I just reached the chapter on the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and I have to say it makes a lot more sense now knowing the general background of the decades leading up to it from Iran's perspective rather than having it turn up in the middle of nowhere during American history class. I guess that's a show of the extent of my ignorance of things up to this point.

- I would really like to play a game that simulates 20th century geopolitics. Like with the addictiveness of Civilization, the historical accuracy of Europa Universalis, and for once actually going past the World War II era that a bunch of other games seem to be preoccupied with. Well okay, I realize the caveat of these games is that the longer you play them, the further away from reality they get with all of the alternative "what-if" decisions you end up making, but still.

Or maybe I just want to watch/interact with a computer simulation that shows all of the major world events in history happen via the graphical interface of a 4X Civ/EU style game. Like a universal world replay or something that lets you zoom in on specific countries and events and directly links you to the relevant wikipedia article or whatever if you want to read more. I mean, I'm practically wikiing every major world leader I come across in my book anyway.

- Ryan will probably groan if he ever sees this haha, but some part of me wonders why I never set aside the time to take an actual history class (Race and American Film only half-counted) in college. I'm pretty sure I would've enjoyed it. Screw all those pre-med courses I took... even though I don't really regret those either.

- All of a sudden, I really want to watch Lawrence of Arabia. After I finish this book, probably.