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Northern Japan
What a day. In an effort to totally avoid paying for hotels we have worked out an elaborate system of only taking night trains, where we can sleep as we travel. Today that landed us in Aomori, a small city in Northern Japan. After spending two hours researching things to do there, I had found…
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Losing My Religion
Something strange has been happening to me over the past year or so. I haven’t written much about it because I’m almost in denial that it’s happening. I’m caring far less about money. This is scary to admit. A lot of my identity, at least internally, is based around the desire and eventuality that I…
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How I Became Weird
When I was ten I went to a Christian summer camp called Camp Calumet. We stayed in cabins with our counselors and a dozen other kids. By a stroke of luck my best friend Ryan and I ended up in the cabin with the cool counselors. I don’t remember either of their names, or even…
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Friends and Trains
I had better write an article today. The pressure from the family is mounting and we’re about to take a mammoth train trip that will probably leave us internetless for a few days. We got our train passes and immediately headed out on our pilgrimage to Shikoku. It was awesome. We’d never seen rural Japan…
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My New Site: Daily 15
I was reading a self improvement site a month ago and while reading it I had a thought. “Is this actually going to make ANY difference in my life?” Nope. Then I started thinking about what WOULD make a difference, and for reference I thought about things that had changed my life. What they all…
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The Pilgrimage
We’re going on a pilgrimage. We just realized that our train passes are valid starting today, so we need to take a long trip to start it off. Fourteen hours to the island prefecture of Shikoku sounds about right. In Shikoku there is a traditional 88 temple pilgrimage through the countryside and woods that covers…
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Biking in Tokyo
We finally bit the bullet and bought bikes. Not just any bikes, though, hilarious foldable ones. They fold up pretty small and are light enough to carry around. There’s a term here, “gaijin smash”, which is when a foreigner does something uncustomary or illegal but no one stops them because they’re all too polite here.…
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Dvorak Day Four
I’m on day four of this magical adventure and I’m slowly becoming more capable. I’m averaging around thirty words per minute now in the little typing program, but probably a bit less in real life. At least I don’t want to kill myself when I type anymore. It’s the little things in life, you know?…
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I Feel Impotent
I’m a fast typist. Ninety words per minute. Take it. That last line, however, took three minutes to type. It’s excruciating. Why? I’m switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout. For those who don’t know, typewriters started out with their keys arranged in an “ABCD” configuration this caused the hammers to bind, so the standard “QWERTY”…
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The New Zealand Embassy
We were only able to book our last house for three weeks, figuring that we’d find something else once we got here. As our week at the first place ended we scrambled to find somewhere new. It was going to have to be a compromise. In fact, with only a few days left in the…
