Our plans to leap over the Pacific are become more real with each passing day, and my progress in dabbling in acquiring at least some Japanese language prior to that trip is progressing with promise.
Sorta.
Fluency? Heck no.
But I am hopeful that I won’t be completely overwhelmed by even simple basics in a radically foreign country (for us, anyhow) by the time we step off that plane.
For an English-speaking middle-aged guy who was never very good at spoken languages, Japanese has been something of a new yet familiar challenge. I have been using a multi-pronged approach that includes flash cards, Duolingo, online resources and eating large amounts of sushi. The last one probably isn’t helping much, if I’m honest… but I only half contest that because our local sushi place does use hiragana on their menu and it really does lightly boost my confidence as I start to recognize the characters better with each passing visit.
I also forced myself into a tougher difficulty setting on Duolingo when I just recently realized I could shut off the Romanised hints in the lessons and force myself to start thinking in the hiragana characters and not just the English-like phenomes.
None of this is an endorsement for Duolingo. I just happened to have an account and I just happened to get it for a student discount because I was registered in University.
My take on the whole do-it-yourself, language-in-a-can approach is of course, and has always really been, one of cautious skepticism. I’ve generally been poor at languages because ranked in order I would often put my personal verbal communications skills near the bottom of my list, even in English. I won’t say I’m bad at it, but I am much better at writing and visual communication methods. I’m also a bit of an introvert, and as much as I would hesitate to ever use that as an excuse for any kind of failure to participate, I do admit that I am less inclined to strike up conversations in general… and significantly less inclined to strike up conversations in a second language. It’s just a personal quirk that I should probably get over and work on, to be honest. But to that whole point, sitting on the couch and talking to my phone, and getting frustrated because my pronunciation is either wildly off or the speech recognition is weak or maybe I’m just not learning how to talk with Japanese words is something that I do put squarely on my methodology and thus on the effectiveness of these little language lesson services. They are better than nothing, I admit, but by how much I’m yet to be sure.
That is to say, I could probably learn much better passable Japanese by signing up for a course and being forced to talk to strangers in a classroom a few nights per week than I can ever hope to learn by unlocking little digital badges and gaming the game that I downloaded on my phone.
And ALL of that is to tell you that what I am actually really feeling good about learning through this app is the written portion of the exam: the hiragana. I probably can’t speak well enough to be understood, and my brain locks up when I try to listen to a spoken phrase and damned if I can remember more than a few dozen words of vocabulary BUT I have started to get my mind around the character set.
The Wife is in the narrowing of date options phase of trip planning. It may sound slightly insane but our trip window now hinges on the ride maintenance schedule at Tokyo Disneyland. Really. But it seems like we’ll be seeking a pair of seats to Tokyo before the year is out, and that is super-exciting.
And if nothing else, at least I’ll be able to order us some tea when we arrive.
Barely twenty four hours after I finished reading Dust (which I reviewed in a post now barely a day old) I finished yet another thick tome of a novel which I had been reading concurrently: the second book of the Hyperion Cantos.
I don’t know exactly how thick. Digital books be bits.
There are no rules about all this reading books and writing reviews, are there? If there are, I’m willfully ignoring them, going to read and post whatever I want. I mean, hell, I’m usually reading five or six books at any given time, random opportunity, and always depending on my mood. Sometimes I’m vibing for some soft nature comedy while other days I’m grooving on a juicy apocalyptic allegory.
Similarly, there’s no rules that can’t say since I’m now apparently starting with a relatively clean slate with whatever novel I pick up later today, I can’t also clean off the ole review slate to go along with it. Thus, to round out the usual trio of reviews, I dug out a bonus pair of books that I had polished off and reviewed earlier in the year, pre this-blog-revival to add to the my list.
The Taking by Dean Koontz
If I asked an AI to write a paranormal thriller wrapped around a religious allegory and puffed up with so much flowery language that a poet would hold their hands up for a reprieve, there is a good chance the AI would spit out something very close to this book. I was feeling like I should do a survey. I have been writing a lot of paranormal science fiction lately, and like anyone who dabbles in anything it only makes sense to dip one’s toe into the pool of publicly available material that already exists in a category. In researching the category of paranormal science fiction, I came up with Dean Koontz, so went to the used bookstore to hunt down a book or two. The story was something of a chaotic fever dream. The short chapters jumped from idea to idea, barely lingering on anything long enough to track the impact. Chekhov left a dozen guns at the scene and nary a one was fired. And the self-importance of humanity in the vastness of the universe that came gurgling out of these pages could only have been written by someone who was—wait for it—writing a science fiction take on the biblical flood. Zoinks! I should have seen that coming. Gah! I’m sure some people like this schlock but it wasn’t my jam.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
It had been a long time since I read 1Q84. And strictly speaking, I listened to it as a very excellent audiobook shortly after it came out fifteen years ago. I was a different person then, half my adulthood ago. I didn’t remember it. I mean, I thought I did. I thought I had an impression of the story, but I had convoluted bits of it in my mind and confused it with other things I must have read since or before or whenever. Murakami drops hints to his methodology in the story, and the surreality of the plot seems to sweep by and if you aren’t paying attention maybe you miss these things. I wrote a one pointthat this book seems like a descriptive stew pot with morsels of plot mixed in. It is, after all, as much a sensory experience reading this tome of an 1155 page novel as anything else. The author has one of his characters spend months reading slowly through Proust and reflecting on that experience, and I think that this book might be a kind of modern, surrealist response to Proust in some ways. (In fact, I reserved a copy of Proust from the library to poke my nose into that to see if I get the same vibe from weird translated French literature as I do from weird translated Japanese literature.) I don’t want to spoil the book by degorging the plot here though. It is a meditative slog through a closely parallel world from which the protagonists are seeking parallel escapes, each other, and understanding. And in all that, all those 1155 pages almost nothing happens and yet it is filled with life and action and heavy beats of human footsteps through time and reality. It’s worth your time to read this.
Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The sequel-slash-second book of the Hyperion Cantos takes off mere minutes after the first book ends, but is marked by a stylistic shift that would almost make them feel like completely different series if not for the rich characters we have been following. Where the opening novel is a book of “tales” and backstory as the key players make their way like set pieces to the larger game, this one is a more traditionally linear story jumping from and around the various perspectives of the original characters and a small cast of others as a complex galactic-scale mystery unfolds. Hyperion is a kind of cautionary tale about the yoke of technology around the neck of humanity, and the slow realization that the conveniences and advancements that have been offered by technological tools can often be mistaken for progress. Simmons, as much as he is an author of hard technological science fiction, might just have been waving a warning flag to a society on the cusp of an information age that was just arriving as these books were published. The highly advanced data networks and frightening artificial intelligences that are key players in the story have very clear and obvious analogs to our modern age, and in the context of a world shifting and changing under the influence of unrestrained social media and the exponential growth of systems that increasingly do our thinking and creative work for us is a message that Simmons was probably decades ahead of his time in offering. I assume countless other science fiction authors have trod a similar path to shout an identical message into the void, and sadly it seems as though very few of us are listening.
Hey. This isn’t my first mythic quest for enlightment. I’ve jumped on the whole mediation bandwagon time and again over the course of my life. Sitting still. Breathing. Realizing my eyes are dancing around behind my eyelids and wondering if that’s normal while little gong noises play from the speaker on my phone.
Okay, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. Probably. Definitely.
Cuz see, meditation is supposed to be good for you, and not just in a wibbly wobbly new agey kind of way, either. Mentally focusing. Resetting your own thoughts. Mindfulness. Personal awareness. Turning down the volume of life. Turning out the stress. Turning off the screen for a few minutes, if nothing else.
But sticking to a meditation schedule is not as simple as it sounds at first. I mean, unless I ship off to an ashram and live some kind of autere life, finding inner peace in the Canadian suburbs just as the summer fun season is kicking off is decidedly more challenging than that. I needed a plan. And to suit that plan, I dcided I should get started with a clear goal. An experiment. How many days in a row could I set aside at least ten minutes to meditate?
Here’s how it went…
Day 1
Okay. I’m all set. Kinda.
I propped myself up in a quiet corner of the bedroom, sat facing away from the door and dimmed the light. I tried to quiet my mind and… my wife walked in and asked me for the amazon password. *sigh*
Ok. Bad start.
Instead I decided to focus my focus. I recall I used to have some app on my phone that was semi-free and was solid enough for my needs. Quickly I redownloaded that and set up a new account while I was at it. Hey, we’re starting fresh here, right? Two minutes later my headphones are plugged in my ears and I’m sitting back there on the floor facing away from the door, a quiet voice in my headphones telling me to get comfortable and relax my posture while focusing on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out. And it goes on like this for a few minutes, all good, but I can hear the teevee in the other room and my foot is starting to tingle because it’s falling asleep and…
Focus needs work. And maybe I should shut the door next time. Oh, and a pillow or something.
I’ll make some tweaks to the plan tomorrow. Fifteen minutes later and it seems that my zen is still on order.
Day 2
I have other “important” stuff going on this evening and rather than feel rushed I decided to try out an afternoon meditation session, descending down in the quieter basement while everyone else was out for an hour or so.
So there I went. Another fifteen minutes of sitting still and within five minutes while I’m supposed to be focusing on my breathing all I can focus on is my itchy toe, and my itchy nose, and my itchy earlobe and geezers it always this cold in the basement? I mean, I’m not expecting enlightenment on day 2 but I figured I’d at the very least be able to sit still for more than sixty seconds in a row. Boy, was I wrong.
Day 3
The house is quieter. Normal non-weekend life has resumed and the family is off at their dance classes, so I have a couple quiet hours with the house to myself.
I’m not going to log every day of this, by the way. At some point this log is going to start skipping days, maybe even a week, but unless I fall off my meditation cushion and miss a day I won’t necessarily report on this quest for mindfulness. Partly that’s because it’s going to get repetitive, but the other reason is that guess what I sat there thinking about for fifteen minutes today: this. I had a little narrative running through my mind planning out what I was going to write as my entry for today. Congrats, dude, you just discovered another way to think about working. Multitasking is probably not the point.
I set the timer for a simple fifteen minutes session and sat there, thoughts of my breath and my blog running through my head. The only one less settled than I was the dog, who seemed a little preturbed that I was sitting on the floor but had no interest in playing with her ball. Enlightenment eludes for yet another day, he writes sarcastically and knowing that nothing is ever that simple.
Day 4
My mind is awash with grey noise.
I sat still for fifteen minutes in the late morning today having set my timer and settled onto the floor once again. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breath and ignore the itch on the tip of my nose.
The biologist in me explains it as some kind of neural cooldown. Optic nerves dealing with the lack of input and turning boredom into randomness. I sat there with my eyes closed and there was not darkness: there was static, a subtle static of dark hues, browns and oranges and blues so deep that they would be mistaken for black save but the twitching of my brain to the contrary. And I afraid to open my eyes to ruin the emergent light show watched as the static rippled like the tides upon a pond and then blossomed into shimmering rings of fire dropping away into infinity which then dissolved into flickers of hallucinated electric shocks from the edge of my vision, my eyelids hung relaxed and fighting the urge to open as the minutes passed before the chime rung once more from my phone.
Day 6
I have been reading one of the Sam Harris books on meditation and one of the first things that stuck out for me was the notion (tho I’m paraphrasing here) that meditating doesn’t need to mean cosplaying as a Buddhist monk. The concept of western-style meditation can just mean finding a quiet place to sit and practice refocusing and re-centering the mind, honing in on the breath. To me, this means losing that attention about ten times per minute and then trying to reel it back in each time. He explained it like, I dunno, pushups. You just do lots of pushups until eventually you are good at doing pushups, but you don’t expect your first, hundredth, or even your thousandth pushup to be some gloriously perfect pushup. It’s just the work of doing all those pushups that brings you closer to doing better pushups… and the strength follows.
To that end, I found myself leaving the cross-legged position of my bedroom floor and for the last two days I have been out and about in nature, finding quiet places off the beaten path to sit and practice for fifteen minutes at a go.
Day 8
I have been unprepared these last couple of days, by which I mean that I sat down in a quiet place to do the mindfulness thing and within two minutes of the timer starting my throat got all chalky and clammy and, you know what, I am really thirsty. Why didn’t I drink a glass of water before I started this, huh? Note to self: drink a big glass of water before I start next time.
Day 11
The habit is falling into place. I mean, it is not yet simple nor easy, but I have found a kind of rhythm to the little blocks of time that I allocate to myself for this practice. And yet, here is the rub: I think I am just finding a new way of doing something I’ve already been doing for years.
I have occasionally used the word “meditative” to describe running. This evening I went out to run club. I had already logged my fifteen minute mindfulness session earlier in the day, and as the evening pressed on I met up with the group for an hour of trail running. For about ten minutes I found myself running for a stretch alone, a few of the people a minute or so behind me and a pair of runners about a minute ahead. I haven’t been doing much solo running lately, and then there I was, with ten minutes of just me and the trail… and I was darting along, eyes wide open, focusing on my breathing, thinking about nothing much at all, and it struck me just how meditative those solo moments on the trail can be.
So maybe it isn’t entirely strange that I find myself sinking into a familiar sort of feeling sitting with my eyes closed, focusing on my breathing and clearing my mind. The only thing really missing from these recent sessions is the trail, after all.
Day 14
Just through a busy weekend and squeezing in time for mindfulness is when there are places to be and schedules to keep is not very meditative. I found myself pinching in two sessions at inconvenient moments and then fighting the focus fight, trying to bring that newly practiced attention muscle to bear on the moment but fighting the agenda-scraping mental blur that was whirling in my head of thinking this is just another task I need to accomplish today. Counter-productive? I dunno. I need to reflect on if it helped or if it was merely performative for the app streak. Yikes.
Day 20
I feel a bit performative. It’s been a busy busy busy week with all the goings on around the end of school for The Kid and and I’ve been squeezing in these meditative activities in the cracks of life.
Part of me is okay with this. That’s the point. I tried going back to listening to the guided meditations in my app (the free ones, because I’m not quite ready to pay for this experiment yet!) and they all try to assure me in a calm soothing voice that the whole point is to find five or ten minutes of calm in a hectic day, but my racing mind is nagging me about the dangers of seeking quick fixes for complex problems. My unsettled mind seems like a complex problem and a soothing voice in an app does really seem like a quick fix.
Day 23
I haven’t mentioned this, I don’t think so at least, but every single one of the last twenty two days of meditation have been, no matter where… sitting.
Small detail. Sure.
But today I thought I would mix things up and try one laying down on my back. Does it make a difference. I mean, I decided again to lean into one of the guided meditations in my app—there is either just a timer with chimes or there are podcast-like tracks of people telling you affirmations and breathing exercises and on and on—and the voice in my ears told me to find a comfortable position either sitting or laying down on my back, so I opted for the latter.
There really are not any rules.
I mean, I’ve been lurking in the shadows of latent skepticism about this whole thing, if I’m being honest. I have been side-eyeing the rational part of my brain telling me that there is purpose in method and method in a larger picture of what this is and that isn’t wrong it’s just not clear what the details are doing to the foundations of the larger picture of this thing. Do this. Or that. Whatever. It’s groovy. Just breath or don’t or both. You pick. My skeptic senses are tingling today, and I can’t help but tell you that no matter how clear my mind might feel—or usually just gently vibed—I’m not entirely conviced this road leads to enlightnment so much as a subscription to an expensive app.
Day 26
I wrote a longer article today about that earlier revelation I had connecting my meditative running experience with this whole sitting and meditating thing. To be honest, as the month nears its end I think I do prefer the feets version of this seeking zen.
Day 28
I’ve decided that twenty-eight days equals a month.
This mythic quest, a personal experiment in search of pop cultural enlightenment has reached a kind of natural end I think.
And what then are my conclusions?
Look, I set out to find a kind of mindfulness in the cracks of my day. I knew going in that I had tried this before. I had played with the mental exercises that were meant to build focus and balance the mind and relax the soul. These, I still believe, are all good for us. We live in this frenzied world of social media doom-scrolling and never-ending attention seeking AI algorithms that are endlessly patient to prey upon our limited attention. Any ability we foster, any effort we make, any strength we seek to build our resistance against this is good.
And maybe, just maybe, my two-bit attempt at finding all that in an app or method that was itself was always bumping at me to subscribe or rate it or rate a guided session to which I just partook, maybe, just maybe, and maybe more than maybe, that was not the right approach.
I spent the majority of the month using nothing other than the timer inside the app to find what I had set as default: fifteen minutes of mindfulness… to which the same app would collect my meditation stats and add to my streak and ask me to set goals. I assume all those yogis and far off folks seeking enlightenment through these similar methods are totally posting their meditation bonafides on their tiktoks, right? No. I don’t want to blame an app trying to do the right thing, but it is easy to get cynical when the end game was always giving me vibes of monetizing my mindfulness. So… there’s that.
But in the end what I think of the whole thing, from quiet moments in nature to surreal mental light shows from an under-stimulated brain to distractions by the dog or the family or the wasps flying around my bare kneecaps in the park or anything… it was an effort and it was… ok.
I also realize that I find mindfulness in other ways in my life: walking through nature, running along rainy trails, reading in the park, and making art as I focus on light and colour and lines. Parking myself on a cushion and closing my eyes is alright, but it didn’t bring me peace or enlightenment.
It brought me a great big shrug.
The modern meditation movement, after participating with faith for one month is like the protein shake of the healthy eating movement: a quick fix in a bottle with glitzy branding. What we all just need to do, and I already have been, is eat a balanced diet and live our lives.
Will I go sit in the park with my eyes closed again? Of course. But I’m bringing along a sketchbook and some music, too.
A couple months ago I was proudly telling people how much progress I was making on Pleck’s Mart. Heck I was logging at least—at least—a couple hours every day adding to the code base and debugging the game and making art and then sitting at the cafe writing story for the damn thing.
I also wrote a couple months back about how I made some silly choices around leaning into a dead-end part time job that was supposed to round the rough edges off my days but instead wrapped me up into grocery store drama and derailed a bunch of personal motivation in my off-hours, plentiful tho they were.
In short tho, I haven’t been coding for about two months now.
Sadly. Realistically. Frustratingly.
There is a mental wall in the way, if I’m being honest, because (a) I was just coming up on a challenging bit of code, (b) a new version of the engine came out in the intervening months, and (c) it’s kinda sorta summer and (d) I should be spit-polishing my resume and not making video games.
But then I went to Game Con this weekend.
A couple things happened, very passively to be honest, but they happened at Game Con nonetheless.
First, I got to wander around and talk—actually chat with and talk to—other indie game developers. That’s big. There’s a hundred reasons to go to a convention linked to your hobby, but seriously on or close to the top of that list of reasons should be the simple fact that hanging out with likeminded individuals is inspiring for another long list of reasons. There is a community. There are organizations boosting these efforts… locally. People have trod this path before us and are coming up the path behind us, and that means something.
Second, I got to finally have a chat with Chris. We’ve been friends for over twenty years now, hung out countless times, vacationed together, stood atop a mountain peak in the sun, and rung in the new years nearly every year of that twenty. He is a legit developer. I mean, he professionally codes for a living, has a business, does community building, and that list goes on. And I sheepishly gave him access to my github repo. We finally got to chat, hanging out in the halls of Game Con, playing some board games and poking at the demo booths, and he wants to help with Pleck’s Mart. What’s our next step, he asked.
So, it’s monday morning after the gamer inspiration weekend and I’m looking down the day at a question of not if I go down into the basement today to write some code… but when.
What is the next step?
As ever, it’s one problem, one line, one version at a time. And if nothing else, looking for that lost momentum.
The last three days have been punctuated by epic thundershowers meaning not only does the lawn now desperately need to be mowed thanks to the rain, but also that it was a good weekend for a time-consuming indoor actitivity.
This weekend was filled with:
Games. Anita scored a pair of tickets to the annual Game Con convention over at the expo center, three-day VIP passes, and she apparently had no interest in attending. One ticket to her husband, obviously, but I took the second and spent a huge chunk of the weekend, including Friday, there.
Friday I got to the con just before lunch, did some of miniatures painting, wandered around, watched a couple demos, and then met up with Chris on his break, who was volunteering there all weekend, and we played some board games in the middle hall.
I skedattled out of there around five, and chilled with the dog through another thunderstorm as the evening pressed on.
Saturday I got up and got back to the con to meet Aaron. We did some wandering and product sampling, checked out a lot of the vendor booths and then watched some of the mainstage shows while we ate mediocre poutine. He took off around 2 and I stuck around a little longer to paint another free Warhammer miniature.
Back home later that afternoon we made dinner and I retreated to the basement to read.
Sunday morning was a beautiful sunny day and so we logged a nice ten klick run in the river valley.
Sunday was also a dual event in our house, Karin’s birthday and also Father’s day, so the poor kid was juggling gifts and cards and being in a good mood.
I had bought Karin a 2 player “duel” variatiaion of another board game we like. Finding good two player games is our new challenge as the parents of a kid just about to launch into university, and we played a couple rounds trying to figure out the rules… then the strategy.
We walked the dog over to the cafe for something else to do later that afternoon, and then as the evening pressed on we went for a slow but tasty dinner at the nearby sushi place to celebrate the double celebration day.
And then, just because it had been a busy couple of days, I hunkered down for the rest of the drizzly night to finish off another book in my queue so that I could move onto other things… not that it’s a race or anything.
blog.8r4d.com
Ah. Some blog, huh?
I’ve been writing meandering drivel for decades, but here you’ll find all my posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, parenting, and overthinking just about anything and everything since early 2021.
In fact, I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me.
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