Klingsor's First Winter

Stories of great change are interesting.

I always think of Central Asia, and the many cities that have risen and fallen due to empires coming and going. What are people doing in these final steps. What sadness in entire cultures and peoples being wiped out to be forgotten by history. What philosophy or art they may have had!

I don’t just think of Central Asia, I think of present day Russia east of Moscow too. I think of Perm. I think of Kazan. I don’t know anything about these places, but I wonder about them in 800 AD or whenever Islam and Christianity were there. How would a young boy full of dreams lead his life. Did romance exist?

There’s recent stories of change as well of course. Things closer are harder to romanticize because the horrifying tragedy is so apparent. Anger and helplessness bubble to the top.

But in all these situations our little old human emotions and vices and whatever else are there. Our love and our passion is there as well. It’s not about defining ourselves or leaving a legacy. It’s corny, but it feels like it’s about the dance on the alpine meadows with truth and love. Alpine signifying high ground.

I hope we will not be insignificant casualties in the winds of change.

I hope my son will have a good long life.

I’m saying not much of anything.

Excuse this middle aged man.

I had this sudden and violent realization yesterday that I hated my job. My previous job felt like a community and made me feel like I was inside society. My current job at a foreign company, speaking mainly English and having no close comradery with colleagues makes me feel more alienated and makes my perceptions of Japanese society come less from intimate experience and more from brief encounters with strangers that are easy to misinterpret negatively.

I thought about friends outside work and with a young son I rarely meet them anyways, and now they are all non-Japanese anyway. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t build a link to society to combat a feeling of alienation.

My wife’s family has a strong Chinese connection with her mom from Taiwan and sister’s husband from Shanghai, and so something more unique than anything. 

So I simmered in these thoughts, not wanting to be unnecessarily negative, but also not wanting to run away from them just because they were negative. The overarching thought was my last job provided a connection into something bigger and my current job does not.

After having this idea in the slow cooker of the mind all day, and going about interactions at my health check yesterday and with colleagues in the office, I came to a different conclusion, and something that I had come to before. 

Passive participation is over. 

There are things I can do at my office to end this feeling. I can speak more Japanese, and not mind how amazing everyone’s English is. I can confront my Japanese probably having gotten worse and allow it to get better again. I can ensure my family does more inside society. I can have fun with friends and family and it doesn’t take away from anything, and only builds things. I shouldn’t blame them for something not related to them. 

I can take action basically. 

And so we’ll put that in the slow cooker today. 

There was this debate on social media about people being 34 years old in various situations. In the suburbs with kids or with a big truck or whatever else, and people were spending time to give their opinion on what was a good use of life and what was a waste of time.

In my head, the only correct answer is engaging in such a debate is a waste of time and not engaging in a debate is not a waste of time.

Today I saw something about the JLPT and N1 grammar and people were in English discussing the merits of the test and their opinions on whether they could look down on someone for their opinion on some of the grammar on the N1 test.

In my head, the answer is the same: engaging is a waste of time and not engaging is not a waste of time.

When I was a young man I believed in the dialectics. Communication was the only way to reach the higher truths is what I saw. I now see a majority of communication, well, specifically communication in text via internetal waves as a waste of time. It all seems disingenuous to me now. Maintaining sanity and reaching alpine meadows is something different. It’s not being alone with your own thoughts, as that surely leads to insanity as well, but action is involved in the solution for maintaining sanity and gaining metaphysical altitude.

Giving an opinion on N1 grammar and what 34 year olds should do to strangers chips away at sanity and is running down the mountain.

At least that’s how it seems on this buzzed train ride home, sitting in front of some western guy with way too good Japanese and his partner who LOVES him.

Note from the morning after: I was more than buzzed.

The land we wanted got sold to someone else. Good lessons in that. It was feeling for a while that everything was going right with minimal effort, so it’s nice to see minimal effort leading to a negative result in something so ultimately inconsequential. There will be other land.

The house builder set us up an appointment with their financial planner. We imagine it was for him to tell us how big of a home loan we can actually have and how other financial planners just want our money to invest. This will likely be the case, but he was just so much more professional than the first financial planner we had. Made it easier for us to be saps.

There are a lot of these grown up matters my wife and I are trying to navigate and the first step is getting information and it’s hard to question what you first hear. We don’t aggressively question or distrust. We first just want to hear it from a few people and then judge afterwards calmly.

Or perhaps also likely is we won’t care enough to properly judge calmly and just do whatever. That would make us suckers though, and that wouldn’t be ideal. Maybe doing something with investing or whatever is better than blowing all our money on shit we don’t need though.

I believe I have lost my train of thought.

I’ve coasted on my Japanese skills for probably a decade or so.

I told my wife I felt an email I received from the home builder we were talking to sounded cold, and she replied with my initial email sounded cold too! I was first upset because I asked her to check the email, but then I realized many things, mainly that it’s not her responsibility and I never asked her to check the tone of the email.

So my Japanese can appear semi-fluent, but that makes such mistakes make it sound like I’m a blunt cold foreigner as opposed to a little buddy just doing his best.

The current easiest solution is to just feed things into ChatGPT or something like that, which I do on occasion, but that also makes it feel like the humanity is leaving my body in some ways.

Really, there are likely 20-30 expressions that I just need to memorize when to use, and so IF I use ChatGPT, I need to do regular boring studying of all the phrases it gives me and understanding why it’s giving me them. I need to compare these phrases to what would be said when speaking to someone, so when meeting someone I can match the tone of emails I send.

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We leave the door open to my son’s play area and he has left it to explore the outside world. I’m going to make sure he doesn’t bump his head so I don’t get in trouble.

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EDIT: There’s more than this, there’s the dance of language that has gotten away from me. I need to get the dance back too. I think I had/have it to some extent.

My son is 11 months next week. Almost a year.

That punishment thing I mentioned in my previous entry did not happen.

I did run every day for 21 days or so, but then life (or laziness) got in the way. I’m going to try and run at night.

Our house, or at least the house’s important rooms are clean. We have guests over now and this is brilliant. Also, being lazy in a clean room feels luxurious.

Work is going well. However I feel like all my smoke and mirrors have been used and I have to give it pure raw competence and action now.

I never read that Murakami book I mentioned 8 months ago or so. I forgot I had it. I bought other books to get me back into reading.

I’m carefully looking into buying land and building a house. I don’t want to do anything rash. However, I think it would be good for the family. Not required though. We could be happy where we are. I think it could be a more fulfilling life if we did it. It would mean a higher mortgage to pay back every month, which is always somewhat a risk.

I have a complicated relationship with video games. The relationship is best when I’m listening to video game music on vinyl, and remembering the good times. However, it is fun to get sucked in sometimes.

I’m reading Narnia to my son again. We’re almost done the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. My son likes books, but not Narnia. He likes picture books. Maybe it’s silly to insist on reading, but I hope it to just be one of those daily habits.

I hope to write more. I hope to remember the theme of Klingsor’s First Winter more. I hope to be mindful more.

If I can’t find my keys, etc when I’m leaving the house, I’ll put 1,000 yen in a jar.

If I use my phone for more than four hours a day (to be adjusted), I’ll put 1,000 yen in a jar.

To be added upon later.

Punishment will set me free.

This year’s word is ACTION.

I purposely didn’t put dates visible on posts. It makes everything timeless, or at least that was the intention.

However, I just reread what I had previously written, which was two months ago, and nothing has changed.

May the next time I write be very soon, and with the words bolded: action has been taken.

My colleague’s son was born a week or so ago. He’s already going to the Spanish embassy to get their Spanish passport. I have yet to do this for my son, who is now four months old.

It’s easy to fall into routines where the bare minimum is getting done. The house is clean-ish. Laundry is done. Son is getting his exercises and sleep and feedings in. I am working, which has been stressful for a few months, and will likely be stressful for a few more.

However, my son doesn’t have his Canadian passport. I haven’t renewed my German passport in over a decade, which I think is a step to having my son get his German passport. My son as mentioned doesn’t even have his Canadian passport, nor a Japanese passport (these two I think will be needed when we go to Canada for Christmas, and the Japanese one for when we take him to Taiwan before that). The house has been disorganized forever, and needs a new concept as there are to many things that just don’t have a place they are supposed to be.

We have rooms of stuff we should actually sort through and throw away. Old curtains that are fine but we don’t need. A table we thought would work but ultimately didn’t.

It is easiest for us to leave clothes on our second floor where the living room is, as this is where it feels natural to get dressed (maybe this is the problem!)

In words, it feels like we’re living in our early 20’s, when in fact we are in our early 40’s and there are certain routines that should’ve been put in place long ago, and now with our son, I feel the urgency there even more to give him a structure and not the semi-chaos.

So I want to spend the free time above the bare minimum mentioned above focusing first on throwing things away. This could be using the car and going to the disposal place or to a recycle shop, but just getting rid of stuff we don’t need, and reclaiming space. Then properly putting in more storage and giving things more places to live.

A filing cabinet of some sorts would also be great.

In this chaos, there is also the need to eventually move my office/games room to the first floor, so our son can have a room beside ours. He may sleep with us for months to come, but I think getting this ready would be a good idea.

So I guess:

1. Throw away shit we don’t need
2. Get the floor coating done (I think I mentioned this before)
3. Move my room to the first floor, and give Ori a room for when he’s ready

If I could do this, I would be happy.