“Youthful Days” by Mr Children… “Yuganda keshiki ni torikakomaretemo, kimi wo daitara fuan wa sugata wo kesun da?” [Japanese] “Even if I’m surrounded by distorted scenery, when I hold you, it erases all the worry…”

So here I am now writing from the coast, having made the move from rainy London to just-as-rainy Brighton. The feeling of living out here hasn’t totally sunken in properly yet because the majority of my time so far has been spent inside an office. Even still, I can point out loads of immediate differences between here and London. The first few things I noticed were the cleaner air and lack of tall buildings, meaning that when one is out in the open, the skyline is not so obscured; not by concrete nor pollution. Weatherwise, London is seriously fighting a battle to keep its crown as the rainy capital of the UK/world because it’s rained every day that I’ve been here. The Eskimos have many compound words to describe the different types of snow they encounter. We don’t have such a vocabulary when it comes to snowy descriptions, but most of us in the UK surely have several different words and ways to describe rainy weather. Today I am going to go with: “This morning, we were aghast with a merciless squall that followed the cats and dogs.” It was a good thing I brought my umbrella because although I don’t mind getting wet, it gets embarrassing when I start resembling someone who stepped on a cunning poolside banana peel.

With the move and all I barely had time to step foot inside a clothes store, let alone go sales shopping, which is pretty good because last year I was exchanging cash for clothes like it was the next new craze. I was really tempted seeing bargain signs hoisted up in the stores and discounted attire pinned to store dummies. I think if I find myself requiring therapy, I will beat up my credit card in the stores of Brighton this weekend. I definitely know how tough it is to resist a bargain, so don’t tell me I ain’t got no feminine side!

During working hours my brain turns into a sponge, mopping up any puddles of data I may come across. It’s going well, indicated by the tiredness felt at the end of office hours, but this could be attributed to my not being used to this new routine. There are advantages to working though. For one, it makes those times when you vegetate in your room feel extremely productive. For another, it’s nice to have a routine again.

As for my room, it has one startling similarity to my old one: they both have fireplaces. The difference is that this one here looks like it’s been used recently. I might give it a go one day when I’m in a suicidal BBQ kinda mood. And have you noticed that everything tastes better flame grilled? Fact. That’s why one day when I unleash my KGC (Kentucky Grilled Chicken) to the world, I too shall be grinning like the Colonel.

The kitchen here is well furnished. It’s wonderful being able to cook my own food (without utilising microwaves), because I really enjoy the process. I seldom used to get the chance to exercise my culinary flourishes because I was never given nearly enough freedom in my parents’ kitchen. If you’re Asian too, the chances are that one of your parents is like my mum in the kitchen, constantly peering over the shoulders of anyone else who so much as applies oil to a heated pan. She’ll be there watching, making sure I don’t tarnish the good karma that her kitchenware had accumulated from being in capable chef’s hands for so long.

This sounds a little unreal reading it in hindsight, but after a long day, there is some relaxation to be found in peeling and dicing vegetables, but only when you’re doing it for yourself. It only becomes a chore when more guests are added to the cooking list and becomes a total pain in the neck when you’re peeling veggies as a punishment for breaking a cardinal rule in your battalion. And serving a battalion wouldn’t be much of a problem in this house either, because we are in no way short of plates, bowls and forks (I didn’t manage to find any sporks though). There is enough cutlery and crockery in the kitchen to hold three dinner parties simultaneously, without the need to do any washing up in between. I really must emphasise how unbelievable the amount of silverware we have is. We have everything from carving forks to dessert spoons and a worryingly large number of knives. The most curious member of the cutlery drawer is what appears to be a large Scotch hunting knife, about a foot in length, with a wooden handle and an etching of a deer on its blade. I have no idea why it was provided, because we aren’t planning on gutting any elks or other antlered creature purchases from the supermarket anytime soon. The house insurance came through the post yesterday, but I feel that simply hanging up this oversized knife prominently in the window would be enough to deter any burglars. The insurance would only really come in handy if the BBQ in my room went wrong.

Everything else about the house is as complete as I’d need it to be. We don’t have a gas supply coming into the house because everything is solved with electricity. The best feature is the power shower, which will spray a strong jet of hot water onto you without needing to fire up any heaters beforehand. I was concerned at this marvelous technological melding of electronics with water (usually not a good combination), but impromptu hot showers are enough to wash away any such concerns of electrocution. We now even have blue toilet water and you know how life feels complete when you have blue toilet water. And speaking of toilets, my workplace’s toilets have possibly the tallest doors I’ve seen outside of a church. These doors go all the way up to the ceiling and thus make the doorway big enough to accommodate the bladder rituals from your typical sweetcorn gathering green giant. I’d take a photograph of it so you can see, but I don’t have a profound desire to be labeled the office pervert anytime soon. Why the hell would anyone linger around the toilets with a camera anyway? The door is big. Use your imagination.

The only thing that seems to be largely missing is the internet, namely broadband internet. We have a thick pipe going into the workplace and I’m getting speeds as fast as the other computer can handle (usually over 100K/sec), which means that data appears on the hard drive just as fast as the little laser inside wants to write it. It’s great, but sucks because I can’t bring anything home with me bigger than a few megabytes. I may have to invest in a portable hard drive and after that I shall show you my best impression of the Cheshire Cat. I also have no TV, but I can’t say I’m missing it. My evenings consist of sketching to music (an art form in itself, which I shall call Pencil Dancing) or reading to gently improve my understanding of Java or Japanese; two vastly disparate languages. Either way, the artistic lawn remains watered and healthy, which makes the me-time more heavenly.

System.out.println(”Hai, dai-suki desu”)

Onto the housemates: One of my housemates is a big guy. If he had an online journal, it should at bigwhiteguy.com. In fact, he does somewhat resemble Randall of bigwhiteguy.com fame, so thus from now on shall be referred to as the BWG. It’s a shame he isn’t really really tall and with big lobes so that I could daub him the BFG or even the BFWG (Big Friendly White Giant). Either way, Roald Dahl would still have made a great story out of it, bless him. I haven’t met the other housemate yet, because he’s returning at the weekend. All I know so far is his name, that he’s Greek, is very much into fitness and health, and a really big Knight Rider fan. I’m half expecting a guy in a leather jacket, with a quiffy bouffant resembling David Hasselhoff, just so my heart won’t convulse into shock if my deliberate exaggeration meets reality.

Two qualities that I warm to in a person are open mindedness and candour. BWG and I had a discussion about such things like being fair and open to accept new ideas and try new things. He’s also quite a believer of seizing moments, especially those involving courting, so that explains why I really like his attitude overall, especially towards dating and the initial asking out process. As he would say, to someone who caught his fancy, “After work, I was wondering if you’d fancy going for a drink?” It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that now, does it? We both came to an agreement that mind games are the devil’s work and that often putting in too much effort is an indication of them not being worth your time. This might appear strange coming from the mouth of a single person in his thirties, but he’s dated a German underwear model, so I’ll just take his word for it.

I’ve been listening to a mother-load of new J-Pop recently and have discovered some nice new tracks. Well, a few of the newly discovered ones I’ve taken a liking to from the band Mr Children are actually around ten years old, but it all sounds new to me. I was browsing around, trying to find out what some of the people on my playlist were currently up to and stumbled across an article that struck me fairly hard. I read that one of my favourite artists, Cocco (whom I discovered just under a year and half ago) did not have a forthcoming new album or any new material in the works because she had indefinitely quit the music scene, reportedly as a consequence of the emotional fatigue she suffered from continually having to reach deeply inside her soul to find the meaning for her songs. Whilst most people see songwriting as a release, she admittedly finds the process agonising because she settles for no less than uncovering the raw layers of her being to find the right words to annotate a song. This state is brought on no doubt due to her being supposedly quite eccentric and overly emotional, often crying in the face of interviews and attention. She was said to be troubled by the fact that she had so many fans and people hearing her music and people in the industry who knew her could see it would only be a matter of time till she could no longer cope and go on hiatus.

In 2001 she did just that, announcing that she was going to stop making music and returned to her hometown. The latest news I’ve read comes from the latter part of last year, when she made an appearance, performed a new song and spoke about her work cleaning up the beaches of Honshuu. This belated news met me with some sadness because she is truly exceptional and up there with the best of them, but this holds consistent my theory that the great ones in the arts are always those who have/had afflictions. I really wish the great ones who introduce so much joy and understanding to our lives wouldn’t have to suffer in the process, but without that sorrowful fuel, things wouldn’t really be the same. Cocco’s kind of story is so rare in the entertainment industry, because a lot of people are in show-business voluntarily, actively choosing to pursue fame with what talents they may or may not have. It’s nice for a change to read about someone who couldn’t genuinely see that their own talent would make them a star and was therefore unprepared for the unwanted limelight. Cocco didn’t want all the garnishes of being a famous singer/songwriter. She was too vulnerable for all that. All she wanted was her music to be heard, and if this doesn’t make her different, then I don’t know what does. After all, great music is only great because it offers what other music doesn’t: something different.

The more Japanese pop that I listen to, the more I feel my heart of rock slowly being hollowed out. There’s a lot of teenybopper stuff out there, which I try to avoid like the bubonic plague, but I can’t run away from the gazillions of power ballads and soft love songs that Japan is churning out. It’s just as well that I don’t understand a lot of what they’re singing about because in cases, the music and the haunting vocals alone are in danger of infiltrating my emotional centre. It’s like with some sung classical and opera music where they’re singing in a language I’m unversed in. I don’t know what they’re singing about but it sounds so beautiful that I can’t help but invent my own words to it in my head. I would wonder if the lyrics were as beautiful as the song and upon checking the translations, I found that in some cases they were. For example, going back to J-music, in Cocco’s “Hane ~Lay Your Arms on Me~” the translation is:

“Ah, we’re connected only by our memories; a connection which is going to break. I am out of breath. My wings soar away and I go back to the earth. Ah, even if you hold me, I’ll soon fall apart. Unable to pat this season carefully, my ashes burn out. Where do I go?”

I found a nice translation and interpretation at Centigrade, which explains why Cocco’s music is like musical poetry. As the translators said, the lyrics don’t seem to fit the mood of music. Listening to the song, I imagined it to be some sort of song about loss, but I had no idea it would be a much deeper kind of loss. The above translation is to be interpreted as Cocco feeling she has nothing else to live for now that her fleeting youth is nearly all gone and that not even the touch from a loved one can make a difference. I particularly like the last line, because if she returns to the earth (i.e. being buried after death) and she loses her wings, how will her soul get to Heaven? Where will she go then? I listened to the song again with the translations in mind, thinking about what she was going through when she was pouring her heart out and if I was weaker I’d have found myself eventually sobbing as though my knees were permanently skinned. But alas, testosterone prevented that embarassing scene.

Until my Japanese skills get better I’ll remain largely in the dark about the music I listen to, but there’s some fun in being able to pick out a few of the little phrases here and there that don’t stretch beyond my childlike vocabulary. It does suck though when I only understand half of a line in a tantalising verse. If I am only understanding the first part, which goes, “I love you, but there is something I must first do and that is…” then the unintelligible bits that follow are going to strike my brain like an unwelcome lobotomy. So what on Earth must she do first before she can love him? Gah!

["Be still my heart." The lovely Mika]

After reading up some of the current news in the J-Pop and J-Rock world, I became suddenly hot for Mika Nakashima. This is positively due to having seen her up close for the first time the other day. As a singer, she’s probably not amongst the most versatile in the mainstream. She’s good, that’s for sure, but her greatest asset has to be the pair of gems she so prominently displays. Make no mistake, I am talking about her eyes! I’m not sure how often she’s had photoshoots when she’s wearing coloured contacts, but I haven’t seen a picture yet where she’s fluttering your typical brown Asian eyes. Hers aren’t brown, but a really inviting shade of grey that glimmers like polished silver in the light (Well, maybe not, but that’s my romanticized opinion). This feature coupled with her smouldering looks, makes her one heck of an alluring lady. I know Tomiko is not going to like reading this, but then I guess she’ll have to fight Mika to prove her affections for me. She shouldn’t really have to fight for me, but in my world I am the King and hence have to be prudent, so she would have to somehow prove her love in a series of challenges. One way this could be achieved is by wrestling Mika, preferably in an enclosed humid setting with good lighting, in costumes designed by Victoria’s Secret and all this in a ring constructed entirely from Swiss chocolate. Okay, I’m now going to bed before I succeed 110% at embarrassing myself. If you are reading this, Happy Birthday. ^_^

[The one thing that Tomiko thinks about but never talks about (because it's such a sensitive topic)]