(This 3am posting brought to you by depressing dreams waking me out of a sound sleep.)
The biggest downside to Japan: loneliness. I'm terribly slow to make friends even when I speak the same language as them, and when I don't have that? Nngh. In some ways, life in Tokyo is somewhat reminiscent of my days in Boston, Denton, and a good portion of Ann Arbor: an inability to find people I liked, much less hanging out with them. AA took about two years before I finally met people outside of work - and in the Bay Area, I met the majority of people I know during my first year there.
I'm pretty happy with most other aspects of Tokyo, although the weather sucks a lot in the summer, things in general are more expensive, and I get occasional cravings for food that's either mostly unavailable or quite costly (deep-dish pizza, cajun food, and spicy food in general.) It tends to be much more compartmentalized than places in the US, though - I've been walking down the main road in Nakameguro pretty much every day for the past ten months and I still find shops and whatnot that I hadn't noticed before.
There's a lot here that's really nifty, but without the ability to connect to people, it's tough.

I've been paged eight or nine times this week. My sleep schedule is utterly shot. I haven't slept for about 19 hours, and I'm tired but not sleepy. Blarrrrrgh.

One of the worst aspects of my recurrent dysthymia is the anhedonia: it's damn hard to get out of the house and do anything when everything seems equally meh. Fortunately, that seems to be getting better as of late. I think.

I cut off all my hair again; for comparison, here's what I looked like the last time I did it (in 2001) and now (in 2008):


I look older in the second pic (go figure, it being 7.5 years later), but I can't really figure out what the obvious difference is. More creases on my forehead, perhaps?

edit: I'm 20-30 lbs lighter in the 2008 photo.

I wandered around Yoyogi park the other evening, to try and see if the fireflies were out. Saw a lot of people - more than I'd expected for 8:30PM on a Sunday - but no lightning bugs. I realized how much I missed having grass and trees around. All it needed was a little stream to complete the "what moof likes in natural-ish landscaping" set.

Of the people I've seen in Japan with purple hair, all of them have been little old ladies. (I'm told that it's mostly the Kansaijin that are likely to do that.)

It turns out that people speaking in languages I don't understand to be quite draining. If I know the language, I can usually tune it out; if not, however, I strain mighty hard to try and figure out wtf's being said. This might explain why I sleep so damn much (other than dysthymia, ha ha.)

I've been posting far more to my flickr ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/secretagentmoof/ ) than to LJ as of late, mostly because there ain't a whole lot that seems worth posting about on LJ.

So. After I'd whinged up and down at HR for quite a while to get me medical insurance that'd be regularly usable in Japan, last week HR sent me an "assignment letter" that they want me to sign and return. (While I received the doc on the 21st, the doc itself is dated Mar 7.)

Now, some history: I was persuaded to accept an "assignment" rather than a "transfer" because I was told it'd make things easier for when I wanted to go back to the US: I'd be assured of having my present position, have a desk, have the transportation provided, etc. However.... the assignment letter I got says none of those things. In fact, it says the exact opposite.

And just because I don't have enough stress in my life: it's supposed to be Golden Week here in Japan from tomorrow to Tuesday; however, because of broken shit I've inherited from my just-departed erstwhile coworker, amongst other things like network deployments, I may have to forgo that and work in the office anyway.

So, yeah, I'm a wee bit stressed right now. (I hear GOOG is hiring....)

My head is killing me - and not from the booze last night, either. Yesterday, I managed to smack my head into the doorframe, which is conveniently at forehead level for me. Take that, add a zit breakout which seems to be sitting right on some pressure points, season to taste, and you get "ow."

My stomach ain't feeling so hot, and one would think from the gas I'm producing that I have a decomposing gerbil in there or something - those are due to the lovely alcohol, in all probability. (It doesn't help that I've been on-call for the past couple of days and been paged regularly out of a sound sleep...)

Whee. Was out at dinner/drinks with coworkers - emphasis on the "drinks". Turns out my comprehension/speaking of japanese goes way, way up when I'm kinda 'faced. (My typing skills engender many more typos, on the other hand.) Fun was had by all. This contrasts quite a bit with being awoken this morning by the police investigating some gaijin deadbeat (or so we infer) who was in my room about a year ago. It was kind of annoying being awakened from the bizarre and portentous dream I had about some gigantic redwood-like tree that turned into a sleeping human female when fed the right combination of magical ingredients (which was required for some mission I and the elder witch were on). Also realized that one of the probable reasons for my hypersomnia is that warmth + blankets = comfort to my aspie self when all around me are people I can't talk to and stress about job (possible Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo, not having firm health insurance that works in Japan, etc - but mostly not being able to talk to people.) Go figure.

It's started raining pretty heavily; fortunately, when I was walking around earlier it was only drizzling intermittently. After the quite fun hanging out with icis_machine last week, I resolved to be more touristy. Unfortunately, right after she left I came down with a rather nasty cold. Couldn't go to the flower-viewing boozefest, couldn't go to the penis festival, wah. Felt better today, though, so wandered around the shopping street south of Ueno, then proceeded to Akihabara where I proceeded to not find the Yotsuba desk calendar. Oh well.

Now it's time to watch the new Dr Who, I think.

Thanks for the kind words, y'all. I've actually been feeling better for the past couple of days, although still not at full speed. I took the opportunity to chop off about 10" of my hair, although I think it still may require more chopping. Cameraphone photo here.

Also, it appears that March 20 is "Equinox Day" in Japan, and an official holiday.

I appear to be smack in the middle of a full-blown major depressive episode, all right. I don't feel depressed, but sleeping for 12-16 hours on the weekends is a pretty good indication (as is the lack of motivation to do much of anything, the inability to concentrate at work, etc.) It doesn't help that one of the side effects I have is no small dose of self-loathing for being depressed in the first place (or as those kids would call it, "being emo"), nor does the knowledge that some people get mighty freaked and/or depressed when I talk about such (which feeds into my deep-seated worries of "am I babbling about things that nobody wants to hear, anyway").

tl;dr: wah wah poor me.

As part of my duty as being an older brother, I'm obligated to pimp out my sister's etsy store.

She's really pretty talented. Here's one of her baby shirt images:

Sometime between 4pm Sunday and 10pm Tuesday, the magnetic stripes on all the cards in my wallet I've tried have all become nonfunctional. Here's to hoping international mail is quick.

I'm really really glad I have a local bank account now....

I explored the mother of all art supply stores today - Sekaido in Shinjuku. It has six floors, with one about 75% devoted to just watercolor supplies. Yowza. Would have gone to the 8 bit cafe or 16SHOTS - video-game-themed bars (icis_machine, I think you should go there), but they're closed on Sundays, alas. Was gonna go to a goth club in Shibuya, but my back was killing me and I was feeling quite meh, so saved my $25 for some other time.

And speaking of meh, ( lj-cutting myself is so emo! )

At least my Japanese class seems to be going decently well; my verbal comprehension seems to be going way, way up.

What am I up to? Same old stuff, really.
Missed both Japanese classes this week because I felt like crap (part physically, part mentally); the cold weather doesn't do much for my "Go and do stuff" inclinations. Stupid winter S.A.D.
I'm on mixi far more often than I am on LJ.
I've been posting stuff to Flickr fairly regularly.
Forgot to apply for an absentee ballot.
Taxes look like they're going to be somewhat hellish, between figuring out how much US/JP/California all want or owe me.
My feet are cold.

Poll #1123219 emo!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Is moof emo?

Some of my coworkers think I am, it seems.

I had forgotten just how much I hate being cold, how prone I am to cabin fever [the 'staying at home because it's too difficult to get motivated to go out into the cold' aspect], and how much more Aspie-like I get when I'm cold. Ugh.

On the other hand, I start Japanese classes tomorrow. Woo!

Inkscape gets the moof seal of approval for open-source drawing programs. It's pleasantly reminiscent of Aldus Freehand (not Adobe, Aldus), doesn't crash, and seems to be fairly featureful. Some weird interface quirks, but eh, I can deal. What does not get the mSoA: unix input methods - in particular, scimand X in general. The former has a nasty habit of going batshit crazy and doing random things with its preferences, display windows, and what keystrokes it happens to accept today; the latter has alternate input methods as an afterthought, none of which work consistently. (gtk actually does input methods tolerably well, funnily enough.) anthy gets a small "boo" for parsing "nni" (as in "konnichiwa") as んい, not んに. This makes me look like a tard. In other news, boo on Amazon for not shipping some items (in this case, a timbuk2 messenger bag) to Japan; boo on timbuk2 for saying that shipping to japan would be $50 (!!), and yay to the ebay seller for which the total cost - including shipping - came out to be less than the retail price. (Didn't get my first choice of color, but oh well.) And finally, yay to the Japanese notion of 白ロム, 'shirorom': being able to buy a cellphone without having to do the two-year service contract. (Yeah, the phones are still [generally] provider-locked - but the telcos go out of their way to make it difficult to get a phone.)

I got off my lazy tuchus and uploaded some more photos. Also, Santa brought me a shiny new cellphone for Xmas! (Unfortunately, I was at work, so I had to reschedule delivery for today, the 26th.)

The sweet potato vendor was out night before last. They're pretty darn tasty when it's cold out.

edit: LJ's "rich text mode" is too dumb to realize that when you do <href a=....> it might - just might - be a URL you're trying to link. Durrrrrrr.

Wow, I'm terrible at updating. Not a whole lot to write about, though. Finally got my work visa, so I can now go do exciting things like... open a bank account! Buy a cellphone! Get an apartment! Little things like that.

I really need to start doing more tourist stuff. It'd be nice if my knee didn't feel like it were about to dislocate, though. Also need to get off my ass and enroll in Japanese language classes. (Had the experience of hearing Japanese and knowing what it meant without having to think about it - even though it was only "kono densha wa", or "As for this train...")

It's the Emperor's Birthday [observed] today - in addition to Xmas eve - so lotsa stuff is closed. More importantly, the solstice is finally past, so the sun will stop going down at four-fucking-thirty in the afternoon. Thank Jebus. Maybe I'll stop being so goddamned grumpy.