blakerson.com

I have arrived in Shimane! I'm borrowing Internet access since I won't have my own for a couple weeks. I can't open any accounts anywhere until I get my resident alien card, which just started today and will take a week.

Life here is pretty sweet. My rant-liable predecessor turned out to be mildly psycho, nobody liked her, and it's a relief that she's leaving. As such, my living conditions are pretty great - my house is nice, big and comfy, my car is small and AWD, the other teachers in my town are insanely helpful, and my working conditions are great - I don't even have to report to the Board of Education office for the entire summer holiday, so one of the other teachers took me shopping in a nearby town for futons, towels, groceries, etc. My supervisor is *not* a Nazi by any means - he's actually rather easygoing, and my predecessor just thinks the sky's falling. Turns out she's 40 years old and still can't take care of herself. Oh well. Adjusting is turning out to be relatively easy.

Also: typhoon today. No reason to panic, as they always hit the southern islands and just kind of dump some rain here once they've died down. It's now 5pm as I write this, and the rain predicted for 3:30 has yet to show itself.

Dearest amigos,

My departure to Japan is now very close at hand - 10 days, in fact. I'll be doing my writing as usual from Japan - trust me, once I'm settled in I'll have a fair amount of free time - but how you'll go about reading it will come with a twist.

Basically, this site will serve the purposes of very personal stories (things involving specific identities), life-changing revelations, love stories, and information on how to come visit me in Japan, when the time comes. Along with all the usual stuff like rants on games and music.

For the rest, like general information on my life in Japan, the wackiness of being one of very few white people in rural Japan, the silliness that comes with being an English teacher, and advice for aspiring teachers, I've created a new site which I hope will get something of a larger readership and perhaps even become a business venture. (You'll notice those ads on the right, which are intentional.)

www.konnichiwhoa.com is that site.

This site will link to that one, but that one won't link back to here. And just to make sure we're all perfectly clear, this site isn't going anywhere.

Everyone cool? Great. Now go hit up Konnichiwhoa and read some stuff about Japan.

Such was Aroon's title for the photo album of my trip to visit him in the grand old Silicon Valley, and the name just kind of stuck.

This weekend I struck another of my lifelong to-dos from my list: see California. In my desire to see as many of my close friends as possible before Japan, I was off to the Bay Area for the weekend to visit Aroon in his new digs at loopt. I was excited to find out what my Californian friends were on about, since they all insisted that it's a completely unique place. Truth be told, it is. It wasn't all palm trees and suntans though, since I was in northern Cali, or more specifically, Silicon Valley. Aroon works and resides in Mountain View, CA, home to (among many others) Google.

There's plenty about California I could write about - the organic farmers' markets almost every day, the grocery stores that sell more organic than not, Aroon's organic car - OK, not the last one. He drives an RSX-S and it's just what you'd expect - a freshened up Integra that goes decently fast. But I digress. What really interests me is the Silicon Valley culture in which Aroon has completely immersed himself. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions in this town, but the little taste of life I got here includes virtually everyone being tech-fluent, all the kids going to top universities (MIT and Ivies are the most common by far), the cars are all nice, money is plentiful and worries are few. (And yet, unlike Texas, the fat cats here all vote blue.)

And there's one thing pervading and perpetuating this living American Dream: the start-up.

Silly me, the cautious one who believed the hype that the dot-com boom was done for. This place begs to differ. It's alive and kicking as if it became a permanent fixture in local culture instead of the volatile economic rollercoaster that Newsweek or Time makes it out to be.

Enough of the scenery, on to the action. For Aroon and I, it was a whirlwind 4 days that involved a ton of places that were new to both of us. A night of barhopping ended in crashing at Aroon's coworker's place in the middle of San Francisco, but not until after I gained the unofficial title of Loopt Office Linebacker after a female Looptie play-fought with me and I tackled her, providing a source of comedy and shit-talk for the next 24 hours.

The next day was Tourist Day in SF, when Aroon and I decided to do things like drive the Golden Gate Bridge and see Pier 39. It kind of sucked, but the weak moments were broken up by our party piece, the loopt office iPhone which was on loan to Aroon for the weekend. It turned ordinary moments into more-playful-than-usual cameraphone moments, and it even turned a snooty waitress into a sweetheart.

The rest of our time was spent back in Palo Alto hanging with many of Aroon's friends in the area, which is basically the network attached to the cousins he lives with. A movie at an actual drive-in was a first for me, and a day spent at the farmers' market turned into cooking lunch which then turned into a gigantic dinner party for people of all ages.

Also, Bay Area sushi isn't as good as I had hoped. :( Oh well, I'm going to the home of sushi in very short order.

The work-safe-only iPhone-camera pictures can be found here:

Blake Does The Valley

About 2 months ago it was early May and I felt that I'd have a really, really hard time leaving Austin. The whole tearing-up-on-the-way-out-of-town thing was a pretty sure thing in my future. There'd be thousands of words to write on my recollections and where they'll take me and all the ways they'd stay with me.

Now it's the week where I leave Austin for a very long time, if not forever, and I don't feel quite so bad about it. In fact, it's almost a relief.

When Mos Def referred to it as 'the thrilling beginning, the quiet finale' he was singing (yes, singing) about 'lifetime' - not the rape-survivor-movie channel, but the idea of a lifetime. Yet, the last 4 years of mine form a sort of self-contained lifetime of their own.

I was definitely thrilled to be starting it. UT Orientation meant new friends, infinite possibilities, and a chance to reshape myself. The thrill left me sleeping 2-3 hours a night and running all day on pure adrenaline, no problem. You could feel the excitement in my writing from June 2003.

Now the mere thought of anything less than 8 hours of sleep is horrifying. My heartrate picks up a couple beats with the memory of the stress that came along with the sleep deprivation I suffered my senior year. It's quickly becoming apparent to me that I have a pretty serious problem with caffeine, too - I have pretty hardcore withdrawals and if I'm given a glass of iced tea at a restaurant I'll just chug it, unsweetened, racking up 7 or 8 free refills. Please, my heart begs the rest of my body, give me some peace and quiet without all these caffeinated fuckers coming along and spicing up my day.

And dear lord, save me the thought of drinking with Adam and Mikey and Patrick anytime soon. Not that I don't love my former roomies - but drinking another 12 gin & juices in a night just doesn't sound as exciting when I could be in the New York Bar drinking one glass of awesome Scotch for the same price. I'll miss the hilarity of those guys, but I won't miss the cheap liquor that cheapens the times I've had with those guys.

That's not to say it's easy to walk away from other people, either, but the process is helped by how gradual it all is. This time around I'll be saying a few final goodbyes to people I hold very near and dear, but I've already bade farewell to most of my 'extended family' at things like P2 graduation and JA's numerous goodbye parties. People have already started scattering, and I'm just one of a million scatterers that everyone knows going through this graduation thing. My Facebook friends list shows 482 friends at UT. I probably knew half of them by the time the first month of school was over. On the way out, I have plans to see roughly 5 people.

Thrilling beginning and quiet finale, indeed.

Sorry for not posting. I just haven't had much to say.

But this week that all changes - moving out of Austin, weekend in SF with aroon, and then just a couple weeks prep time for Japan.