Klingsor's First Winter

It’s been a while, but I did a run last night.

My health check showed potential kidney stones and fatty cysts and other things and while they’re not 100% related (I don’t think), it is time I take my health seriously, which includes running.

On the way home, I stopped by the supermarket and got a cinnamon doughnut and and orange chuhai. I ate an drank them as I walked back to my house. Both were fantastic. No regrets. Good life call.

Today I hope to replicate the run, and leave the doughnut and chuhai to perhaps next Sunday.

I do need to stress it was a good doughnut. The kind that reminds you of youth.

Need to call the clinic too for those lovely follow up checkups.

Asked questions. Got answers. Gave clear opinions. Much better.

I’ve been listening to lots of financial planners and housing people telling me what we should do with our money. As I don’t have much knowledge, I always think it’s first best to listen to everything. However, it’s almost time to make an informed opinion on a few things, and I’m really not in the mood to do so.

I just talked to my dad, and he gave a completely different opinion on finances (pay debt before investing) and there’s a matter of respecting his opinion while also going my own way.

I perhaps avoid telling people I think they’re wrong or we want to do another way because I don’t want to deal with whatever they have to say in reply. That is perhaps something that is ultimately not good. (I would not want my son to feel he would need to do that, or even have him want to do that.)

But then I feel like I have to put in the work and actually research things well to have an informed opinion, and in my usually sleep deprived state, I sometimes honestly would rather not.

But anyways, it’s getting time for me to do that.

I’ve been stressed recently.

I’m not now. I’m watching a Ghibli blu ray and soaking up the atmosphere. I should be running, but an accordion is playing and it’s 1964 before the Olympics, and there’s this sense of hope for the future in Japan. (I lament the loss of hope in Japan.)

My wife has concerns about our son’s development. There’s likely no issue (you never know for sure), but she needs to release that anxiety somewhere.

Then at work, as HR, people are kind enough to share with me their anxieties, and sometimes people need to show their hidden ugly selves to HR. So I take that all in.

Sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes I want to share my mess of anxieties with someone. However, it’s not the time to tell my wife, she has enough on her plate, and that’s not what HR does (if sober). So today I had a little “woe is me” moment. “Woe is me” moments are silly, but you forget that.

Tonight I played some Fire Emblem. I watched some Ghibli. (I have showered since starting this composition, hence the tense change.)

Now I am beside my son who sleeps peacefully. I remember what it’s all for.

I would love more situations where I don’t have to be the stoic adult and can just fuck shit up, but not just now.

Eliciting a response through provocative language encourages one to not respond at all.

When I was younger, on an Internet forum I proudly said “if no one replies disagreeing to what I said, then I can assume I’m right and everyone agrees.”

Someone graciously replied with “no one replying just means they can’t be bothered and don’t want to engage with you. It’s not their obligation to discuss anything on your terms.”

And that stuck with me. Also, he didn’t have to tell me that.

And for better or worse, I for the most part feel no obligation to tell people when I disagree with them, unless we’re on a mountain, or in a Hub, and something sweet is in the air.

So stumble down the stairs again
Pretend you’re not too proud
To understand and still know when
Your voice cuts through the crowd
Lonely people talk too loud

I think there was some ambiguity in the past. Saying that technological progression and human progression are not one and the same was food for thought.

Social media was neat. Sharing photos and your life with others, meeting people of similar interests, it seemed like a great new thing.

And now everything is about engagement it feels on social media. Be sure to have a small detail in what you say incorrect so people will engage and correct you. Be sure not to write the full thought so people click to read more. Be sure to follow what is literally all the rage and help stoke the flames. Be sure to use AI to do the above for you to save time. Be sure to have it all automated in bots. Get that engagement.

It seems very clearly to not be progression in anyway, and yet it feels like the biggest addiction of my life. I read so much by racist sexist shitheads and I don’t want to. I see fights on social media. I see women give a single frame of themselves in revealing clothing. I see people stare weirdly into the camera while I’m supposed to read banal text.

And yet I haven’t been able to look away. I know it’s destroying my very fiber, and yet I’ll just look at one more 20 second video.

The deadline was my son being born, but that didn’t work. It has to be soon though. He can’t see his dad always on his phone getting angry at what people from Sioux Falls are saying.

And so I’ll continue to try and fail, which is not a good look. Those happily addicted to their phones are much better. They’re succeeding at their vision.

Oh well, more and more clarity daily.

—-

My son and I will finish the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in two days. Please be excited.

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.