March 2008
4 posts
five facts about me
I was three time the British Tae-Kwon-Do association silver medalist for my age groups.
Almost all things, and all people are less important to me than football.
I once cooked a meal for Louis Theroux during my time working a a motorway service station.
I have an odd appreciation for the smell of diesel, vinyl and other oil based products.
I would replace ketchup and mayonnaise with tartar...
福岡の天気はよかよ！
昨日から今日も福岡の天気は暑いになりました！昨日天神へ行ったし一蘭の博多ラメンを食べるし会社へ行きました。仕事はもっともっと面白いになっています。今アイフォンとイポッド・タッチーで使う方のウエブサイトの作ります。それは始めのアイフォン・サイトですが進むは早いだ。来月の一日まで終わるはずである予定です。短いですが俺はコンフェデントですよ！
今日授業の後に友人とテニスをする予定です！楽しみにするね！明日の晩は僕の友達、ウィリアムさんの誕生日パーティーすごい嬉しいになると思って。遊ばんね！
日本語書いてをすみませんですがよく練習で上手になるのために。
Tonight
Tonight I had my heart broken by a girl dressed as a thundercat.
February 2008
2 posts
音楽
So I played last night in a support slot for some of friends at a little bar out of the city and into the Fukuoka prefectural wilderness. Well, wilderness is probably unfair, but it’s really fucking far away.
The main act was a few people I know playing a mix of jazz and old pop classics. I dumbed down considerably to offer some Radiohead, Beatles and Belle & Sebastian - no gig is...
a week in Fukuoka
So I have a couple of my family members coming out to see me over the next couple of weeks whilst I”m on spring break, and I’ve trying to come up with cool, interesting things to do with them during there visit, preferably without leaving the city limits. This list might be of some use to anyone else spending a short time in our wonderful city.
Eat some 博多ラメン (Hakata Ramen)
The...
January 2008
11 posts
Ethnic novelty as a weapon
My Englishness has been fleshed out here in longform on several occasions, and I’ve explained how it has both positive and negative effects on the life of a foreigner in Japan. One plus point of my being an Englishman here, I’ve yet to mention as yet.
It’s the same wherever you go, and for however long. People seek comfort in the familiar. For my American cohort, that means...
The matter of manners in various manors
日本に「ありがとう」と言うはどこによって違うばいね。！難しか！
PS: 今日博多弁を少し勉強しちゃった分かるの人と？
Translation:
Saying Thankyou in Japan differs greatly according to where you are. Complicated, no?
PS: Tonight, I’ve been studying Hakata-Ben a little. Can you understand it?
LIST
I’m currently enjoying, rather a lot - the following:
If the brakeman turns my way- Bright Eyes
Piazza, New York catcher - Belle and Sebastian
Insistor - Tapes ‘n Tapes
METAのTAME
Quommunication - Because it looks lovely.
THAT IS ALL.
二十三歳になって。
I turned 23 years old today. That doesn’t really matter so much as my increasing agitation at the slow progress I’ve made in the last five years at getting where I want to go. Still, a birthday is a birthday, and whilst I did the real - hardcore - celebrating over the weekend, I’ll be going out tonight with a few of my friends here in Japan for a couple of drinks and some food.
...
Detached
I don’t mean to keep coming here and writing the same thing over and over again with new words. But for every brief - simulated across wires and airwaves - piece of contact I have with the girl I left at home I find myself desperately trying to find the right way to express the sadness I feel for not being able to hold her hand and tell her everything could be okay if she wanted it to be.
...
touching
I’ve spent a week with my new - and hastily jailbroken - iPod Touch, and so far, I’m in love with it. I’m using it far more than any previous iPod, even though it has only half of the capacity of my 5th gen, and thus, only has half as much music on it.
It’s really outside of music and video playing though, where the liberated iPod Touch becomes an altogether more...
Going lo-fi for GTD
I’ve tried countless ways of ‘getting things done’ better in the past. Starting off with online applications to manage to-do lists and appointments, before moving to application based solutions on the mac. But I always have the same two week burst of enthusiasm for using a new system before leaving it to gather dust.
So, I’ve gone lo-fi. And it’s working. I’m...
Kawabatas Japan
An early perspective on a subject in vogue.
On receiving the nobel prize for literature in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata appeared before his audience dressed in Kimono, to present (in Japanese) his lecture ‘Myself of Beautiful Japan’. In it he made reference to the classical Japanese poetry of the 12th Century, and the female-penned Heian texts which are to this day regarded as the finest...
3 tags
Fifty years from an uprising
I’m a big believer in the theory of cyclic social attitude. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot since coming to Japan. In particular, it is the paradoxical viewpoints of the ageing and young generations of Japanese towards the west which leaves me thinking that this country is falling slowly towards what I suppose is most easily - though not entirely accurately - labelled as...
Is scared. Needs guidance
The last few days I have been involved in conversations with a few different people about age, and life after student-life, and I have to tell you - I’m fucking terrified by the whole idea of turning 23 in three weeks time, and of graduating in 18 months, and of being a 25 year old recent graduate with no job, no wife, no children and no prospects.
What the fuck am I going to do? By the...
December 2007
7 posts
Good good-byes
Time is precious, I know that, but take for granted the brevity of my time here in Japan. This week marks the end of the first half of my academic year here, and that means around 25% of my cohort are leaving and returning back to their various corners of the world.
Four months is a flash of a film lens, but when you are spending your days and nights with a person, you quickly become invested in...
3 tags
I like your songs, I can sing along, but where's...
I met an English girl in a bar. We talked about England and Japan, and how we thought that the shared language between us and the Americans masked a greater cultural divide than we have with our French, German and Italian neighbours. We listened to old Placebo songs and laughed at how drunk (and young!) all the people around us seemed to be!
We caught a train to a friends bar out in the...
Rut
The last couple of weeks have been possibly the hardest of my time in Japan. I’ve been having increased contact with my family back home, and that combined with the time of year, and my well documented longing for a certain someone back home have had me stressed out and uninterested in partaking in all the usual fun we have here.
That was until Wednesday, I was out for the birthday party...
On being a western man in Japan
Being a foreigner in Japan (especially a white, European, male foreigner) usually means at least one of the following things:
You are a massive anime/videogame nerd.
You are an English teacher.
You are desperate for a(ny) Japanese girlfriend you can find.
Fortunately, I’m none of those, and that being the case, I have to constantly justify my decision to come here to a surprising number...
Open and honest
It’s a new tactic for me. I’ve grown up around, and become, the sort of person who keeps everything very much to himself. In my family, you don’t talk about how you feel - it’s a sign of weakness. I have been aware of that for some time, but was happy to accept that that is just the sort of person I am. Like my father is, like my uncles, my mother, my grandparents all...
WatchIn the same vein.
1 tag
What the fuck are you doing with your life?
Go home, ask her to marry you, move into a flat into the city centre together. Holiday in Asia, visit friends in northern cities on occasional weekends. Go to your mum and dads once in a while for Sunday lunch, and go to the pub with my lot. Get a cat, a car and all the sports TV channels we can afford. Discuss at great length Titus Brambles failings and the merits of Jay De Merit, celebrate the...
November 2007
6 posts
3 tags
Santa-san
I’m not the jolly type
Yet my university here in Japan, presumably noting my generous proportions and oh-so-desirable white skin, decided I was the perfect candidate to be Mr Claus at one of their associated kindergartens. Yep, they’re going to dress me up in a red outfit and have me hand out presents to little children.
Now, I’ve seen me, I’d be terrified if I was a...
未来
I still have a way to go before I graduate in May 2009, but judging by how quickly my life has flashed by for the last five years, it is with no real surprise that I find myself contemplating what I want to spend my life after university doing, and where I want to do it.
My three months living in Japan thus far has given me a thirst for travel, and for the world outside of the island borders of...
Grinding Teeth
The last few days I’ve noticed myself grinding my teeth on a number of occasions. This isn’t normal. I seem to start doing it without noticing, and invariably notice it and stop, only to be back to the grinding again soon after. I’m a little worried that it might become a serious problem unless I can stop my brain from telling my jaws to grind.
I read a little about it on...
2 tags
musery
Music is my guilty pleasure. I fell in love with it upon hearing a friends’ brothers copy of ‘Without You I’m Nothing’ by Placebo, I guess around 1998. That would have made me about 14, and I suppose that is the time when music becomes most peoples pre-occupations.
It set me on a trend of spending all of my time and money consuming music. I developed quickly a style of...
Grande, Tall
So yeah, the name of this blog ‘venti’ - is indeed at least partly a coffee reference, I am one of those irritating people who thinks chain-store coffee is delicious, and who likes to think he knows ‘good coffee’. When I was 15 I hated people like that - people who think having a cultured weekend is going to Starbucks and reading the entertainment pull-out from the Guardian...
All things go.
So, I want to try and remain anonymous. Not because I have anything to hide, or because I have a reputation of any kind to uphold, but because I hope it will offer me a freedom to abuse. I blog elsewhere, but that has been going for so long that the things I can’t say are more often than not the things I’d like to say.
I will say this. I am an Englishman abroad, living in Japan and...