Friendly folks

People are really friendly around here. Here are sample conversations:

(when ordering my phoneline)
She: Is there anything else I can help you with?
Me: Um, well, does the DSL have an upload or download limit?
She: Hell, no! Trust me, you are going to love this, it is the bomb.
Me: Cool.

She sounded genuinely excited. I sold a lot of contracts in Japan, and I never got to describe anything as "the bomb".

(while a friend is donating a cigarette to some guy on the street)
Guy: Hey, did you see that girl?
Us: Huh?
Guy: That girl in the white shorts! She had a nice ass. Shit, you guys didn't even look! That girl had a nice ass.

There was one more great little exchange about our choice to pursue PhDs in philosophy--I forget the details, but it was also instigated via the exchange of cigarettes. I'm thinking of carrying around a pack of smokes just so that I can participate in this aspect of social interaction more often.

I have no idea what's going on in the world

I just noticed that the clocks on all the computers in the library tell me that it's an hour earlier than I thought it was. So, daylight savings has ended. This came as a big surprise.

I have no TV, no radio, and no internet access at home. I've never been so distraction-deprived. I think I'm actually adapting to this situation pretty well, and I know that there are many positives to being so free of distractions, but I still really want to return to my former life as a media junky.

I'm getting a phoneline on November 2, and ADSL is meant to kick in on the 7th. Once I get that set up, it'll be much easier for me to start filling the apartment up with junk; the university has this great website where students sell second-hand stuff to each other, generally for really good prices. So far I've tended to miss the best deals, since I can only access the internet on campus.

I'm getting really obsessed with Kierkegaard. I've never encountered a single sentence written by him before this semester started. How did this happen?

A Few Updates

Well, Dad is coming in 10 days. Yay! This is going to be the high-point in the fall for me.

Speaking of which. So the ball is in motion for my interview - for another promotion. I don't know what my chances are since there is competition from (probably) more experienced people. But hey, I have nothing to lose in trying so I'm gonna try. We'll see what happens. Looks like even if I don't get it I will be coming back to Japan for January. Plans for after that are up in the air.

Really excited about coming home for xmas. Going to Alberta from the 21st until just after xmas, but not sure what's going on in terms of flights. Should be in Vancouver from the 26th or the 29th, or sometime in between then. And I have to be back at work bright and early on Sat. the 7th of Jan. :( The only problem is that the travel agent said all flights back were completely booked before the 5th. I hope something works itself out because I've gotta be back in time. Eek!

Life is extremely dull. No Battlestar til January. :( Nothing much else is on, but I'm downloading the 3rd season of Farscape, for fun. No good movies out here. May download Sin City if I get around to it, heard really mixed reviews (people seem to either love it or hate it).

Hope to get out with the camera this weekend, we'll see if the weather cooperates. That's about it.

BattlestarGalactica.com: Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion Book

More Xmas wishlist goodness. :D

Battlestar Galactica (2004): Season One:: Universal Home Video and DVD

Wishlist for Xmas: THIS!!! it's so awesome. gotta have it. :)

Coming Home

Went to the travel agent's today to book my flight home. Only problem is there are no flights before the 5th that aren't completely booked up. I may have to move one of my vacation days from the 20th of Dec to the 6th of Jan (was leaving on the 21st and wanted a day to get ready, guess I'll have to forego that). I really hope I can find a flight back because I'll have to work on the 7th, it'll be really hard getting out of that...

National Novel Writing Month - National Novel Writing Month

Think I might try this - see how far I get.

CBC British Columbia - Class sizes still an issue

'Education Minister Shirley Bond says the Campbell government has only agreed to talk about class-size limits, and has not agreed to pass new legislation.

"After that discussion we said, 'If it's necessary, we will certainly look at amending the School Act.' So, there's no time line attached to that."'

Is the government totally retarded (oh wait, we know the answer already)? They already look really bad, don't they realize how much worse they look when they say stuff like this?

Almost fully functioning

I now have my fellowship stipend cheque and an SSN. And, actually, I got the cheque before the SSN. I had been assured that this was absolutely impossible. The people who told me this were the people responsible for writing the cheques, but apparently they changed their minds. At the moment I'm under the distinct impression that the bureucracy here is worse than it is in either Japan or Canada.

Anyway, I've applied for a phone line (I've been told that the phone company is decidedly evil), and I'm shopping for a computer tower to go with the 19 inch monitor that I bought that was supposed to go with the other tower I bought second hand that turned out not to work (I got my money back, though).

Excursion

Today I went to Yoyogi Park and the Meiji Shrine - the quintessential tourist traps that I've never been to! ;) Of course I took the camera and took a lot of photos, a lot of which didn't turn out. Still getting the hang of it.

Toby sent me Benadryll - there's a reason it's not labelled 'non-drowsy' and I found that out yesterday. I took one for allergies, and then headed out to get my hair cut. Inside the hair salon, they had the heat cranked up, so it was very cozy. They also didn't speak to me AT all, if that's possible. I mean, I can manage a few words and brief conversation in Japanese, but they were very focused on the hair-cutting. Conversation was not a priority. I started feeling very sleepy - could barely keep my eyes open. It was all I could do to get home without falling asleep!

At the Post Office...

This guy was having trouble at the post-office. I was waiting in line and he noticed me. Turns out he's from Sri Lanka - and he must be very lonely because he kept saying "I'm so glad I've met you!" over and over... I'm sure he had only the best of intentions in mind but I was a little freaked out. He followed me all the way to the Family Mart on his bike (from the post-office, this is a good 5-8 minutes), talking all the time about how lonely he is in Japan. Finally, he wanted me to give him my phone number, but I told him my phone didn't work. I shopped around in the area for a good 10 minutes before going home and I wasn't followed, so that's good. Very strange.

CBC British Columbia - 'Ray of hope' in teachers' strike

"Ready's move comes on the heels of a new poll showing a majority of British Columbians side with the teachers."

Hard to believe, but a good sign.

Awesome Day

Apart from being by myself, today was great.

For starters, it's the last working day for me before a 3-day weekend, which is great in itself.

Signed my new contract and got a raise previously thought unattainable. Then, had good lessons all day. Had to stay a bit late, but when I got home, a birthday card and a package from Toby were waiting for me! :D :D :D

Got a really nice sweater (how ironic, sweaters in Tokyo) but it is actually getting a 'little nippy' as the Brits would say. Well, at night anyways. :D It's great :D.

Now I have to decide what to do with my 3 days. Gotta go to the visa office tomorrow and get my visa renewed so I can come home at xmas. :D :D :D. Magic on Wednesday, gotta get lots of games in before Dad comes so I can keep up in the standings, ha ha. Gotta go to the post office and mail off some goodies. Looked into getting out of Tokyo for a day-trip or something but everything seems really far. I'll see what I can do with the camera in Tokyo I guess, maybe I'll try Yokohama for a change. Also, sigh, gotta do some more cleaning before Dad comes next month. Sigh. :(

All in all though, a really really great day. :D

Ha ha!

Post-Nagoya Pictures

A few weekends ago, I visited Chris and Apis in Nagoya and some of their friends. Now, I've finally got around to doing the pictures up! Well, I've only posted one here, there are others but I took them with the crappy camera and they didn't turn out so good :(.

Weekend is Over...

Got to take pictures in the skyscraper district in Shinjuku - I figured, hey, it's a fairly photogenic place. On that note, I made it out of the closest exit correctly for the first time in two years - previously, I was only able to navigate to and out of the south exit without getting lost in the station, but this time I managed the west exit. woohoo!

On a geekier note, got to try Ravnica, the new Magic set, and started up in the new league. It's a pretty fun set, but my cards suck. :( Toby and I both won prizes for coming 4th and 8th respectively in the last league (I got that high due to points acquired for losses ;)).

Update & Weekend

It's sunny! I've been waiting all week for a chance to take out my camera. We'll see what happens - the weather is so nice, it's like one of those early September days back home where you get that crisp feeling but it's still warm enough that you don't have to wear a jacket (well of course it will get up to about 20 today at least, I'm sure). First I'm gonna go to the camera store and pick up a few little goodies,and later tonight is my first day of Ravnica - the league started last week but I had to miss it due to work (on my day off - ergh). Of course, at some point I should find time to continue the cleaning project I started shortly after Toby left, but there's always tomorrow for that...ha ha...;)

This week was so busy and sucky. I had to do 2 lessons of overtime and I had to have an evaluation and meeting with my boss. I may get the chance to interview for a promotion, but I'm waiting for details. It would have to be really sweet to get me to stay but I'll keep my options open.

That's all for now I guess.

Odds and ends

SSN

I said I wasn't eligible for a SSN, and had to get an ITIN instead. This is what I was told, but it was a lie all along. Because I'm in the country as a J-1 instead of F-1 status (I have no idea what that means), it turns out I can get a SSN after all.

So, after going through the first few steps of getting an ITIN, I started over, and went off to the Social Security office. It turns out that I'd decided to go to the office right when they were especially short-staffed. When I arrived, the board said "now serving 33", and it stayed that way for a full half hour. My number said 65. Thankfully, they started moving people through a bit more efficiently, and it was just another hour and a half before my number came up. Little did I know that there were actually 2 entirely separate queues--there was one for SSN applications generally, and an entirely different one for SSN applications for foreigners. There is no indication of this, however, until you go all the way through the first queue, at which point in time your name is stuck onto the second queue, and you have to sit back down and wait some more.

After all that, I got a letter telling me that my SSN card would arrive in about 2 weeks. I asked if I could find out my number before that, and was told that it's actually quite impossible for me to find out my number before I receive my card. This is despite the fact that it should take about a nanosecond for the relevant computer to assign me a number; also despite the additional fact that the really important thing is the number itself, with its physical manifestation in the card being relatively useless.

Money

The university has a generous sum of money saved away for me, and is ready, willing, and able to sign this money over to me--as soon as I get a SSN. Until I give them that SSN, they can't even start to write out the cheque.

That's OK, because I have plenty of money in my Canadian and Japanese bank accounts that I can use if I absolutely have to. But I'd like to avoid doing that if at all possible, because of charges and poor exchange rates.

Phone

There are two options for acquiring a phone line.

Option 1: Provide a SSN and 6 months worth of credit history.
Option 2: Provide a copy of a passport (or any other alternative form of identification), and a large deposit up-front.

If I had my SSN, I could provide them with a credit history (which I have in abundance), and get my phone line. Alternatively, if I had my SSN, I could get a lot of money from the university, which I could use with my perfectly good passport to get my phone line.

Basically: I'm screwed.

Courses

These are fine. I'm taking too many courses right now, but it's not too much pressure because there's no expectation that I'll complete them all for credit.

The star of the semester is a course on "Kierkegaard's Socrates". I originally shied away from this course, because I know next to nothing about Socrates and precisely nothing about Kierkegaard, but upon reflection I decided that those were perfectly good reasons for taking the course. We're going through Keirkegaard's The Concept of Irony in quite a bit of detail, and the combination of hard (but not impossible) interpretation with (to me) completely new ideas has me in philosophical nerd heaven.

I'm also taking a course on Darwin and how he developed the idea of evolution, as well as a course on evil, which is going to involve a lot of reading about the Holocaust, torture, and other cheery topics.

A touch of hero-worship

On Sunday there was a hoity toity seminar about Kant and Hegel, with one of the listed speakers being John McDowell. I'm a fan, so I almost went, but it involved a lot of reading before hand (there were going to discuss the papers, not present them), so I gave it a pass. Also, it was at 10am on a Sunday.

Early Monday morning I luckily got word that Jürgen Habermas was giving a talk later that afternoon. Habermas, being a superstar not only in philosophy but also in just about every corner of the social sciences, drew a large crowd, and the seminar room was so packed that I had to sit on the floor. I managed to get a clear line of sight to him, from maybe 7 feet away. He looked at me a few times! It was so exciting.

Later it was brought to my attention that Habermas had probably attended Sunday's seminar. I got to thinking who else I might have missed, and started to get a little mad at myself for not going. On the other hand, if this place can draw big names like that once, it can do it again.

Dubya

Everyone I've met so far really hates him. One of my fellow first-years applied to U. of Toronto just to open up the option of getting out of the US. It makes me feel at home.

Shopping!

Went shopping today for a new camera. I've been wanting to move into a digital SLR for awhile now, and finally decided on the Nikon D50. :D Just in time for Dad's visit - lotsa photo opportunities when sightseeing. :D :D :D