experiences, life, learning and relationships.

Other than waiting to apply, or finding something to occupy myself for a year or two before I can accomplish my goal, the most difficult side of the JET program goal is my current relationship. Ashley loves Japan, she has been obsessed with it sense she was a little girl. Her minor in college is Japanese, her art often focuses on Asian cultures, she loves eating Japanese food, etc. She is the one that told me the name of the JET program. I think she regrets this last one. even though she loves Japan and is facinated about it, she dosent know if she wants to apply to it. She wants me to wait another year for her to get out of school so we can apply together, assuming she decides to apply at all. this dosent make any sense to me, even if we applied together we don't want to go to the same place, even if we did want to go to the same place I don't think they would place us there. Also I don't want to do this with some one that I know. If I did then I don't think I would get the same out of the experience. She has become fairly spiteful about any aspect of it. Me learning Japanese makes her upset especially if I learn a word that she dosent know or make a mistake when studying. To her saving my money for the cause seems pointless because I haven't been accepted yet. She thinks I am a fool to leave my Job that I really do love for some thing that I don't know if I will enjoy or not. Heck she doesn't even read this blog even though I talk about it and the other blogs that I read all the time. When I apply in late August or September I assume we will have a huge knock down drag out fight about it and the same if I get an interview or accepted.

Her concerns and emotional qualms have a base to them. She knows that if I am accepted it is probably the end of our relationship. I guess that is a horrible thing to say but it is within all likely hood true. I guess this project is fairly selfish on my part but I think it is to great an opportunity to pass up.

life and experiences

as some of you know, I am an atheist. I believe that when we die all consciousness ceases and that is that. This is one of the main driving forces in my life. People have posed the question "what is the meaning of life?" of course their is no solid anser to that but to me it turns more into a goal than a meaning. so here it is... I was born to procreate eventualy, to learn as much as I can, and to experiance as much as possible.

I have always learned new things in an obsessive manner, my family can atest to that. I will focus in on one or two things untill I think I have learned enough of it and then I drop it. This was more prominate in my life untill around the time that I moved off to college. at that point my goals shifted to atempt to experiance as much as I can. I still love to learn but I look at what I can gain from experiances as a powerful teacher.

I have been contemplating exactly what is drawing me to attempt to move to Japan and I have concluded that the two main reasons are to learn and experiance. It is such a good chance to do those two things that I would be a fool not to try.

Unfortunately Experiances, learning and Japan have become a sore subject in my releationship. Ill explain in the next post...

ok so music is another thing to look in to

OK so I'm am still looking in to all kinds of things now that I am out of college and have decided that I must learn more and more about random things that I don't feel that I have explored enough. So the other day I decided that music was one of those things that I should add to the list. So here is the starter list that I have made over the last two days compiled from several Friends that I think have unique out looks on music.

• The Arcade fire
• At the drive in
• Cattle decapitation
• glass jaw
• Hank snow
• cursive
• holy molar
• negative land
• guapo
• sleepy time gorilla museum
• download
• Mr Bungle
• Tom Waits
• John Coltrane
  
• Nick Cave
• Golelin
• Morphine
• T Bone Burrnett
• Guapo
• Iron and Wine
• Ghost Hand Observatory
• LCD Sound System
• Dandy Warhols
• Silver sun pickups
• Chromeo
• Richard Wagner
• Mike Oldfield
• Muddy Rivers

That is the start of the list if anyone wants to add to that list please feel free to comment and help my musical boarders be broadened.

Police are stupid

Ok so I am at UAB's ceramic studio with my girlfriend making sure she is not carried off. For those of you that don't know her personally she is 4'11" tall and could literally be carried off. any how there is a person in her class that has a personality/mental disorder and he decides to get drunk. So as the hours go by and he becomes more demented and talks to various invisible people, slams things on the tables, breaks beer bottles on the kilns, breaks old sculptures, writes messages that are illegible all over the boards, and cusses out the other students. I finally had enough. I called the professor and got no answers.... I called him again 20 min later, no answers. 30 more min go by and he starts cussing out Ashley, my girlfriend, because she asked him a simple question. So I called campus police to deal with him. in about 1 min 3 cops were their asking me questions and pulling this guy out of the studio. in 3 minutes their were 12 cops there I guess for back up or because they were bored. some how the man in question, who is in his late 30s, starts telling the cops that me and another person were not students in the class, which was true. I tell the cop that I am there to make sure my girlfriend is safe he told me that it didn't matter and me and the other guy would have to leave.... so I left, the other guy left, and the drunk guy left. All this happened at 11:00 at night in Birmingham AL. Our wonderful city fluctuates from the number 9 to the number 11 most homicides in the United States every year. In the campus news paper they tell how many people are mugged, how many cars are broken in to etc every week, it usually takes up a few pages. I digress I called the cops and I wound up getting thrown out that's kind of messed up. Oh well I will go have breakfast over at the professor over that studios house in the morning and tell him what all happened. Did I mention that I have taken 13 classes with that professor and house sit for him on a regular basis? We will see tomorrow.

As of late

So the semester is over and now I am worrying about how to retain all of the information that I have learned over the last 4 months untill I get to my next class in the fall. I think that I will use lists that I am making from Iknow.jp.co along with videos from a web sight that my sensei told me about that her husband was the host of http://www.gpb.org/irasshai. These videos are really funny in that I cant believe how bad this is funny and they were filmed in the late 80s to early 90s so that just adds to the atmosphere. but there are a nice number of these videos so I will give them a shot in the interest of not loosing what I have learned. more over I will communicate with Ashley as much as I can that does seem to help us both in our studies.

I would like to send out a huge congratulations to Sean from the blog flyingsound. He was accepted into the JET program and is awaiting assignment. The more people I see achieve their goal in getting into JET and the more people I meet that have been in it. The more I feel that it is an achievable goal. All I have to do now is wait for application time and get to it. It is kind of scary, this single goal has become the main focal point of my life as of late. Most things that I have done as of the last 6 or so months has been with the thought "This can or could help me get into the JET program or could help me if I get into the JET program." I hope that it is not all for naught.

new ideas

So I have been swamped with the combination of working at my job, getting ready for Magic city art connection, and getting ready for my Japanese finals(there are two of them). All of this happens in the next 9 days and has limited what I can do or have time to do.

Despite all that, I have been thinking a lot about reading. I am not a very avid reader and that is precisely the problem. I was thinking about ulterior motives that North Korea could have for all of its posturing in the past and how small of a country it is and I kept thinking about the book the mouse that roared. I know what it is about but I have never read it, so I decided to buy it off of amazon. purchasing this old book reminded me that I am lost when it comes to books that well read people consider standard. Though I don't know what this will accomplish but I think I am going to start reading a lot of the "classics" if you can call them that on top of that I have been asking several people the question "If you could recommend 3 or 4 books that you think every one should read what would they be?" some of the stuff that has come up has been fairly expected and then some of it has been surprising. So I think that I am going to add these books into the ones that I read to make the reading list a little more well rounded and modernize it a little.

I wonder how this experiment of becoming well read will turn out and what I will take away from it? I guess Ill have a better idea after the first 50 or so books. I will post a list of books that I have compiled both new and old, suggested and off reading lists, when I have compiled it a little better in about a week until that happens. I think I am going to post a blurb about each book I read and what I take from it also so I hope I don't bore you all to death with that. Finally I want to know what you all think about this and hear your ideas. If you could recommend 3 or 4 books that you think every one should read what would they be?

Bad day

So today was a pretty bad day. I was in a car accident. My truck is possibly totaled. It is amazing how much damage can occur at 25 mph. No one was hurt. More over I just had the clutch replaced on it and that cost me $775.00 so lets hope that it is not completely gone. Other things that made this a fun day were. . . I went to the doctor and was poked, prodded, given a shot, had my blood stolen for god knows what dastardly uses. The vending machine at school took my money. sigh... Oh well! on the plus side my sister let me borrow her scion TC until my truck is fixed or until I find another vehicle assuming it is totaled. ooh and I went back to the house that I was house sitting and had a nice long nap! man I needed that.
Oh yeah and my sensei told the class about her travel agent that she booked a flight through from here to Tokyo and it was only $700.00 round trip．I was so excited about this that I blurted out in class 本とですか！！どこ!？!?At which point every one turned and looked at me.　It seemed that most of them had no idea how much these tickets are through travel sites but Cook sensei helped out by playing a game that had the normal price through continental airlines and then the price of first class just for fun. prices $2100.00 and $11,000.00 these shell shocking prices made me look like I wasn't crazy and the best part was that my excitement was rewarded when she hooked me up with the travel agents name :)
So I guess that the day wasn't a total bust after all.

Adventures in Mississippi

I went to Mississippi a few weeks ago and I just remembered that I have not written about it. So, after work I drove five hours to my mothers house in Mosspoint Mississippi on the coast. Upon arriving I crashed out until morning. Upon waking up I had to make my way out to the largest store (Walmart) in that tiny ass town to purchase jeans because all of my cloths were dirty before I left and Ashley had kindly taken all of our dirty clothes to her parents house. It was like walking in to the Twilight zone. All of the men and some of the women seemed to look like Limmy from the band Motorhead.

So I start looking for paints in my size and I start to notice another trend. All of the pants sizes seem bigger around than they are long. I wear a 33X34 pants size and all the pants were marked things like 38X28. After looking for about 15 minutes I find a pair that will work and start up to the counter. On my way I see some neat fedoras and decide that I didn't know which I wanted so I bought them both.

The last time I was in Mississippi I went to this great PoBoy restaurant that use to be a Chinese restaurant, that was run by Koreans. At this restaurant you can order PoBoys of various sizes from 6" - 36" and they have all the good Asian condiments such as my favorite, Saracha sauce. I tell my mother and step father that I would really like to go find that place again and my mother declines going but my step father says that he would go with me. It took about an hour but we eventually found it again (it had been about 2 years since I had been there last). I walk in and start talking to the lady at the counter, who seems to have some difficulty understanding my questions, when a man walks out at starts(in broken English) impatiently asking what I want. I tell him that I want a 12" shrimp PoBoy only lettuce at which point the lady starts to write down my order and the man turns to her and screams what I said into her ear. "12 INCH SHRIMP POBOY! ONLY LETTUCE!!! she finishes writing it down, ignoring the man and takes it to the back. I get my sandwich a few minutes later, put some saracha sauce on it and head out.

Unfortunately, I only was able to stay for 2 days, but on the second day fulfilled the last objective that I had come to do, other than seeing my mother, walking on the beach, and shrimp PoBoys. I went out to find an alligator. Mississippi has 3 major natural resources: Mosquito's, Spanish moss, and alligators. None of these things are very hard to find but I had forgotten that I was still technicaly winter time and Alligators were fairly dormant at that time. The first place we went to find them was a place called Sou Bayu. We went here for several reasons: It is the home of one of my step fathers best friends, it has a bar on the property (so we can drink while looking for the alligators), and this is the last place that I saw alligators in the wild... about 10 of them last time. oh and did i mention that this place is a mobile home park too? oh yah classy! So we get there and grab some beer (bud or miller are the only choices... sigh) and walk out of the bar to talk to the locals and find some gators! to no avail unfortunately, all of them were sleeping where ever alligators sleep in the winter. So we left. On the way home my stepfather had the idea to go to an alligator ranch to at least get some pictures so we did. Not quite as much fun as finding wild ones but at least I was able to get my pictures.


After that I headed back to Birmingham so I could get back to the grind of studying and working. It is always lots of fun to go to odd little towns and see the local color, take in the local cuisine, and find the local wild life. I hope to be able to do it again soon.

Away from computer

Sorry about not posting lately My truck is having a new clutch put in so I am stuck at my girlfriends house, so I cant use my desk top. I left my power supply for my laptop in Mississippi so I cant use it (more on my adventure in Mississippi to come). My girlfriends laptop has a nasty key logger that I haven't had time to remove, so I wont use that computer. and I have not had time to go to the library to use their internet. ah well Ill make sure to get some of my posts up today because I am off.

sub-piphonie 2

here is the next sub-piphonie in the series: Never let anything as common and easily obtained as money get in the way of something as important as a good friendship.

A Friend of mine owes me a nice amount of money and unfortunately he is so embarrassed about it that he has stopped talking to me. it has been a few months now and I have finally caught up with him and told him that he owes me nothing. Unfortunately he still feels that he does and I think it is going to take a lot more persuasion to get him to hang out with me again and that is a shame because we have been Friends for over six years... so to all you out there: Money is everywhere, all you have to do is go get it, but good friends are hard to come by. So unless it is a huge amount of money that they owe you like $5000 (why would you lend a friend that much money?). Don't let it tarnish your friendship. that goes for the other way around too if you owe some one money don't just disappear, it makes people think you don't care about them.

Sub-piphonies

This year I have had several small Epiphanies that have happened to a million people a million times but I feel they need to be said in case some have not experienced (or realized that they experienced) them. I will start a new label called "Sub-piphonies" and hopefully they will help some people out as I deliver them or at least make people think or reflect. The first thought in this series is: Human emotion is the most urological thing that I have ever encountered. One might think that this is common sense but I never knew how true it was until I had some experiences recently and after thinking back this statement proves its self many many times in what I have seen and experienced over the years. And it can be any emotion: anger, greed, happiness, sorrow, elation. Absolutely any of them. More over any combination of emotion seems to be compatible with any other at some time or another. Emotions are very odd things :)

Snow?

If you ever come to Birmingham and talk to people, about snow, who are above the age of twenty, that have lived here their entire life, about eighty percent of them will begin recounting the "Winter Storm of 1993" where 13 inches accumulated for about five days and brought this city to a stand still. Needless to say we do not get much snow here, but when we do every one freaks out. For the last few days I have heard of this cold front that is bringing snow to Birmingham. I am usually skeptical of winter weather advisory but apparently they were right this time. I woke up this morning to my boss calling me ... unfortunately I can only assume that he had the phone in his pocket and accidentally called me an hour before my alarm went off. Any how, in my groggy daze I looked out of the window and was blinded by the reflection off of snow that had covered every where. It really is a beautiful sight if you are not use to it. Still sleepy I went back to bed until my alarm went off. After explaining why I could not stay home just because it was snowing to my girlfriend, I got ready for work and walked on out side to my truck. By that time the snow was melted off of the roads so I had no difficulty going in to work. It continued snowing for hours until about noon when it stopped. The sun came out, the temperature increased, and by 1:30 you could not even tell that it had snowed. Yesterday we had probably 1700 visitors to our mu seam, and that has been standard for the last few weekends, but today due to the snow, I bet we only had 150 visitors all day. People here are so afraid of the snow that they postponed all plans for some thing that was gone by 1:30 and we don't close until 6:00. It really is amusing to watch people react to life. I really do hope that I get to go to Sapporo and experience snow enough to get tired of it.

This is the snow at around 10:30

And this is a picture at 1:30... man I wish it had stayed longer.

25 things

I have had many Friends do this 25 things about them page and I found it so fun to read about them and their randomness that I did it as well. So I thought I would share it with you all.
1. I was raised Mormon.
2. I have the lowest IQ in my family except for my mother.
3. I started my first real job when I was 13 years old.
4. I was the only male in my graduating class.
5. I was a Veterinary Technician when I was 17.
6. I started teaching high school when I was 19 and stopped when I was 23.
7. The FBI has my finger prints.
8. I have been to Australia and New Zealand.
9. I am learning Japanese To teach English in Japan.
10. I make sculptural furniture.
11. I have 2 tattoos and 1 brand on my back.
12. I have very crooked pinky's that I inherited from my mother.
13. I have part of a pencil lodged in my right knee.
14. I spent my last day "off" buying beer and lotto tickets.
15. I have had 16 different room mates over 7 years in one house. 2 of which lived in the kitchen.
16. I was an intern at sloss furnace.
17. It took me 7 years to graduate from college.
18. I am dyslexic.
19. I become obsessed and consumed by what ever I want to learn at the time.
20. My girl Friend is 15 inches shorter than I am.
21. John Watters once stared at me for 45 minutes.
22. My favorite color is red.
23. I have been bestowed the priest hood from two different religions but I am an atheist.
24. my eyes are the same color scheme as my brothers only backwards.
25. when I was a kid I was some times called the Kissing Bandit.

places to live

When applying for the JET program, every one gets to name a place that they would like to be sent to. Not that it is a guarantee that you would be put there but it is still nice to be able to have a say in it. I have done a little research into interesting cities and have found a ton of them. In the next few posts I would like to introduce them starting with my first choice Sapporo. I like living in a city with the population density of Birmingham, it seems to be a nice balance. Birmingham and its metro area contain about 1,100,000 people and the city is about 150 sq miles. Sapporo on the other hand has about 1,800,000 people and is about 3X’s the size of Birmingham. Though it is larger than Birmingham its population density is still probably higher in reality because the cities size includes mountains that are not often inhabited by large numbers of people. Also, I like the cold and the average annual temperature in Sapporo is about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. More over Sapporo gets 190 inches of snow a year. I have only experienced “real” snow (more than a 2 or 3 inches) 3 times in my life that I can remember. I have been told that it doesn’t take long to get tired of snow but I am willing to give it a shot. Speaking of snow Sapporo has an annual snow festival every year which includes ice sculptures! Sounds like a blast to me.
Good food is a huge necessity for me and Sapporo is known for Curry soup and miso ramen both sound super tasty to me. It also doesn’t hurt that they have a famous brewery there that makes Sapporo beer and that they have an annual festival that includes beer gardens and food during the summer. All and all this place sounds ideal for me. Next post Ill get off the north island and talk about a place that is a little warmer.

I know I know I should post more often but I have an excuse!

So I have not added a post in a very long time. Life has been very hectic and I have been with out a sure form of internet for more than a day at a time as of late. Things are starting to get back to normal now... Thankfully! I just moved from my home of seven years and relocated back to my fathers house in order to save money in the event that I am accepted into the JET program. I would really like to save enough to pay for my plane ticket and have enough left over to auto pay my Student loans for at least two years. There are other benefits that come with this move the fist is that I don't have to worry about covering others rent which I have had to do numerous times with the 17 room mates that I have had at various times in that house over the years. It gives me a great quiet place to go to study Japanese a few days a week. More over my direct family members are my most trusted friends so it is nice to live with one of them again, they are always good company! I only stay at my fathers about 2 days out of the week because he lives 15 miles away from my job so the rest of the time I spend at my girlfriend's new apartment that is about 2 miles away from my work and 3 blocks from the school that I am taking Japanese from. hopefully everything will continue smoothing out and life will get back to or become less busy than it was before :)

The Person. Part two.

So I have lived a fairly interesting life. I think my parents are to thank for that because they were so liberal with my two siblings and myself when raising us. People say that you can do anything if you put your mind to it but that was a way of life in my upbringing. My parents encouraged and supported pretty much anything that we became interested in. They let us do what we wanted, even if it was a little frowned upon, with out interfering unless we managed to get ourselves in to deep. Mom and dad called it benevolent neglect. What ever it was, I allowed to grow up how I wanted with out being smothered by overbearing parents.

Being raised with this out look allowed me to pursue what ever was interesting. This has blessed me with an odd resume that started when I was around thirteen. I have worked in several plant nurseries, I have been a kennel worker and eventually became a veterinary technician, I installed school networks in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina destroyed my apartment and all the work we had done, I wired and installed security and home automation equipment, I have worked at an advertising agency where i started out doing data entry and eventually was required to become a web design intern, I taught high school computer classes for four years, I was an art gallery assistant and today I am an exhibits fabricator at McWane Science Center where I get to build, assemble, maintain, improve, and deconstruct kick ass science exhibits. I have been at this most recent job for about eight months. It is a great job; I wake up not dreading to go into work like most of my friends do. It has good benefits and I get to work with intelligent and interesting people.

Unfortunately for me, I have such a wide veritey of jobs because I become bored over time and I think life is to short to be bored. So, I stay at a job for a few years, some times up to six, and then I move on to learn the next trade that seems cool or useful. That is one of the reasons that I have already set my sights on the goal of getting into the JET program over the next year or two.

I realize that the background that I have given is some what sporadic and I'm sorry for that. from now I will only reveal little bits about myself in sections of the blog instead of paragraph after paragraph. I just wanted to establish a base line. till next time!