My time left in Japan is growing shorter and shorter. One month and change from today, I'll be on a way-too-expensive flight back to San Francisco, touching down for a week before I head back up to Portland. Life in bullets:
Final exams are more an annoyance than a source of fear. I'll probably barely pass Econometrics, due to a teacher good for nothing but hilarious quotations, but the rest of my classes aren't going to require test performance so much as buckling down and cranking some work out.
My too-short internship at Naked is half over, and my challenge of the moment is to prove I'm an invaluable guy within the next thirty days, the sort of guy you'd like to bring back in six months or a year. Being able to do English-language creative work in Tokyo is a rare opportunity, and the awesome caliber and personality of the people there is just frosting on top. Six Apart is another option for the future, but my Japanese isn't good enough to work as a full-time employee in an all-nihongo environment.
I am twenty-one years old. WTF? I think I've grown more in this year than the several preceding it, but I haven't had the time to sort through this second mental pubescence yet. I celebrated with a birthday picnic in Yoyogi park, but I think a proper coming-of-age bar crawl is in order when I get back to the states.
Somebody brought an Olympus EP-1 to my picnic. Slow autofocus (but no shutter lag when you shoot manually) and no glass viewfinder means it's not quite the hobbyist's holy camera grail, but it's the closest digital has come to the folding Minox my dad holds up as the greatest pocketable camera of all time. Develop it one more generation, toss in a viewfinder, and we'll have arrived. Its beautiful retro body and ability to mount any lens ever made by anybody are just bonuses.
My last Tokyo 2.0 for the forseeable future is coming up, and it's coincidentally the one I volunteered to take the reins of. Next Monday, SuperDeluxe, 6:30pm. See you there! Saying goodbye to all my geek buddies is going to suck, but I heard something called the 'internet' can be used to stay in touch over distances of several miles. I'll have to check that out.
I sold my bike for about what I bought it for, within one day of posting it. Thanks, craigslist!
I'm going to be homeless next year unless I find a place quick. Know anyone with a three-bedroom house in Southwest Portland?
The next few weeks are going to be filled with work, parties, packing up, last-minute shopping, and all the other errands that come with moving your life from one country to another. Transition is lame, but I haven't seen my American friends (or little sisters in a while, and I'm looking forward to getting the whole 'college graduation' thing out of the way, too.
