becoming a real person, with Graham Nash
Just ran some errands; posted some letters, signed for JASSO, paid some bills. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Well, not really, but there’s a strange sense of satisfaction in getting small things done.
I was talking to my friend Emily about this. She wants to stay in education, do a Masters. Me, I kind of just want to get out there in the real world. Like Rob Fleming or Jesse (Hawke?) I don’t feel like a real person, living in a single room and eating combini food and scripting visual novels no one will ever play. I want a job – something interesting, mind – and a proper apartment or a real house with more than one room and beanbags and big giclée prints (bizarre fact: the development of giclée printing was spearheaded by none other than Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash) on the walls and a cat called Noboru Wataya.
Obviously, when I’m working my 9 to 5 in Sainsburys and living in a quiet backstreet in Leeds I’ll miss the student life, so basically the lesson here is never try to do anything, ever. (I’ve become a nihilist, lately. Does it show?)
Last week was a bit of a fugue, a blur of hanami and hikikomorish tendencies. Yesterday, after a sake-induced hangover I kind of snapped out of it and went for a walk in Yuutenji, which Emily told me was a pretty nice area. And it was. I had a proper coffee in a proper coffee shop, visited the temple (awash with sakura, obviously) and wandered through the city of Meguro, which reminded me awfully of some area of Leeds.
I love cities. It’s interesting, though, that all cities are kind of similar… all built from offcuts of each other. Parts of Higashi-Shinjuku are identical to New York (round about the corner of 47th and 6th, near the NHL store). I stumbled across Chicago in Niigata, found Norwich in Harajuku, and this bit of Meguro really nailed that “concrete Holiday Inns and big roundabouts with hundreds of road signs and a dozen pedestrian crossings” bit that cities like Leeds do. You know what I mean – designed for cars, not people.
Down by a weird riverside bit (it had the feeling of a riverside area with cafes and bars, but it was built on a five story embankment above a feeble drainage ditch) there was loads of sakura and a big matsuri (festival), with food stalls and huge throngs of Meguro residents and a fat lady (who did indeed sing, to a large audience) and a wonderful, rejuvenating sense of life.
Of course, it couldn’t stay sunny for long, and now Tokyo is overcast and rainy again.
Stay inside and drink tea, as the Bryce 2 materials browser would commonly recommend. In conclusion, I have one goal in life now, which is to play “Black Out Fall Out” on electric guitar in front of a billion fans and then spontaneously combust, because nothing can top how awesome this song is.
音がない (No sound)
泣き止まないずっと (Don’t cry your heart out)
もうCRY OUT (Keep crying out!)
I know I know la la la la
もう止まらない！ (Don’t stop!)
(oh cool, previously unheard original 2002 version, though I wager the version on 2005′s Polysics or Die!!!! is better)
I know exactly what you mean – I spent the first two years wanting to do a Masters or PhD when I finish, but now I just want to get out of education and move into the “real world”: Flat, car, job, money etc.
University sort of feels like.. an alleyway: You can only go straight – But you know at the end of it you can anywhere, and you just end up waiting to get out.
Or something.
Metaphors were never my thing <__<.
@Shaun
Haha, no I get you entirely.
The thing that worries me is that I got these same sorts of feelings in 2008 when I was working and I couldn’t wait to get to university where I’d have my own room and my own life and so many opportunities… Ah well. Not much I can do at the moment.