“Love 2000″ by hitomi… “Kanashii news to dou demo ii hanashi, asa kara mou sonna no unzari de. Kyo wa itsumo yori mo kaze ga kimochii ii kara ne, tanoshisa ni kigaete ne…” [Japanese] “I’m sick of the depressing news and stories that have nothing to do with me. Today the wind feels nice so I change into a happy mood…”

Do you believe in fate? I used to, but now believe that no matter how unlikely it was for something to have happened, it would have happened sometime anyway. Those with a grasp of mathematics know that to calculate the probability of a series of events happening sequentially, you have to multiply their probabilities together. This invariably leaves a small probability value when you are trying to calculate the odds for say, winning the lottery and in the same year dating [insert person with high datability/droolability factor here]. For means of illustration in this case, I will use Ryoko Hirosue as an example, although simply dating Ryoko Hirosue in itself would be like scooping the jackpot for me. What was my point? Ah yes, I spotted someone who looked remarkably like her on the bus the other day. I know she’s known to travel to Europe more frequently than your average eastern celeb, so if anyone can confirm she is in town, I will show my gratitude by posting a picture of me completely freaking out.

I’ve never been a real believer of things like astrology and star gazing. However, I do feel that the alignment of stars and planets do have some effect on the denizens of Earth. My logic for this comes from the fact that {Geek Mode On!} anything that has mass has a gravitational field. You may already have heard about this, possibly specifically the phenomenon of tides explained by the changes in pulling power due to the moon’s proximity to the Earth. My neuroscientific know-how is rusty, but my theory is that the ideas and decisions that originate from nothingness and come about in your brain are also affected by gravitational fields. Some quacks say that supposed lycanthropes go nuts and howl when there’s a full moon, but there may be some truth in fluctuating behavioral patterns under a full mooned sky. Anyway, if something as significant as the sea level is affected, who’s to say that gravity isn’t affecting each of us in our thinking processes? How are decisions made anyway? If you’re ravenous and have the option to have rice or noodles, what is it that ultimately makes you decide one over the other? In cases, some logic could be applied, e.g. if you had noodles the previous day you may want rice today for a change. But logic only takes you so far. Sometimes you decide just for the sake of deciding, especially in those cases where you can have either rice or noodles but don’t really have a preference and just want to line your stomach pronto. After all, standing around for half a day with a packet of rice in one hand and noodles in the other will open yourself up to ridicule from anyone fortunate enough to be watching. You could argue the logical basis of decision as much as you want, but at the end of the day it’s all down to a gut feeling (in this case, literally).

When you picture something in your mind, where does it exist? If you can see it in your mind’s eye, it must exist somewhere, in some abstract dimension somewhere, right? When you get an idea, what exactly is happening? Where is it plucked from and what is it made of? I’d love to know the answers to these because amongst other things, there’s a great deal of moolah to be made from a venture that sells bottled ideas. What’s that sir, you don’t know what to buy your wife for your 25th anniversary? No problem, your distress will evaporate instantly upon drinking a bottle of this miracle elixir. We’re doing a special deal today; only £50,000 per bottle. Okay, back on track. It is now my thinking that decisions are conceived from black holes in our heads and then born at the molecular level thanks to neurons and axons. They turn into real ideas following a cascade of chemical events in the grey cells and in this form, you can let your logic loose on it to check its validity. Authors like Noam Chomsky have already spoken volumes on how media and governments influence us. Now you can add “gravitational fields” to the outstanding list of conspirators.

Luke Rhinehart touched on the subject of decisions in the book The Dice Man, where its protagonist had created a list of things to do, ranging from mundane everyday tasks to committing murder. The only thing he had control over were the available pool of choices and where they sat in the probability ranking. It was up to the dice to make the decision as to which one he should do. And he lived according the dice; doing exactly what it chose for him to do. This book had caused a stir in recent years especially due to its psychological elements and for good reason, because what happens when we eliminate the decision-making processes from our lives? What if we all lived according to a universal algorithm that takes a group of ideas as input and after some processing, outputs one to bring to fruition? We could all live like robots. Robots are cool.

I had a bit of a fright last week. I was at the table in front of my computer, drawing away with music from Winamp filling the room, when suddenly the sound from my left speaker began crackling shortly before the sound completely cut out. I thought that the speaker had finally packed in after its five years or so of loyal service, so to test it I unplugged it from the other (master) speaker and jacked it directly into my soundcard. This test concluded that the left speaker was working. I tried reconnecting the speakers and in desperation even tried tapping the speakers as a last resort miracle method that wouldn’t require a trip to the tool box. None of these so-called miracle methods worked. Rebooting and cleaning was not going to make a difference. I figured the problem was due to the jack input on my other speaker (which the left speaker plugs into) so had a bad lull in mood whilst I contemplated how long I could live in mono. I came to the conclusion that I would wither after two days, so immediately hatched plans of ordering a new set of speakers. It wasn’t till a bit later that afternoon that I played a CD and found that the left speaker was working again, but alas, Winamp was stubbornly releasing monaural music into my airspace. It was then I realised that it wasn’t a hardware problem, but a software problem. After reinstalling Winamp, everything began working just as it once did. The thing is: I still don’t understand what happened! Why did the speaker start crackling and then suddenly cut out? I wasn’t fiddling with any wires. Nothing else asides from Winamp was running, so how did it manage to corrupt itself? It’s as if the software driver suddenly grew a conscience and figured that simply playing other people’s music for the rest of its life was no way to live (no offence to any DJs out there), so it just topped itself by drowning in a sea of bad programming code. I don’t think it was a virus, but a virus that affects the ability to enjoy music is possibly the worst thing that I could be struck with. I’d rather be struck with mono (mononucleosis, not monaural).

Okay, now a moment to tell you what I learned about my other housemate, Sav. I know I said in the previous entry that I knew the other housemate was Greek. Well it seems that this would only have been possible if he wasn’t from India. If I remember correctly, it was the landlady that confirmed he was Greek (I asked if he was Greek after finding out his name and she agreed, so now I wonder if my persuasion skills are strong enough to get a few months’ rent wavered). Somebody should tell her Indian people don’t originate from Greece and certainly don’t look alike. Plus, he wasn’t like Michael Knight at all. Being Indian, he doesn’t look anything like him, nor does he have a kickass black billion dollar freely thinking Trans Am. He doesn’t even hold up the watch on his wrist to talk into it. He is as much Michael Knight as he is Airwolf. Yes, I’m disappointed. However, he’s a really nice guy and seemingly pretty proficient at a few martial arts. Watch out for the appearance of new bruises on me after I agree to spar with him.

Last week came to a close with a pub session. I hadn’t been to a pub for a very long time and last Friday’s five hour’s of nattering amongst beers was a welcome release to cap off a week of working/studying. I had been waiting all week for the weekend to arrive, aprticularly so I could go out and explore (Since I’ll be here for a while, I’ll be taking photographs and posting them up in the gallery at intervals, so keep your eyes out for additional visual accompaniments). In short, Brighton is an awesome place to live. Lots of second hand book, film and music stores. There’s a big cluster of these in the trendy and hippy part of town, all up to a stretch of road before capitalism descends onto the seafront and chews a big hole into a large area of it. Everything one would possibly need is here. It’s like all the cool parts of London pushed together into a small area. We’ve got the trendy streets that resemble compressed stretches of Carnaby Street, Notting Hill and Camden and the corporation dominated high streets that fill up like Oxford Street.

I, of course, also had to make my way to the sea at the weekend so that I could peer into the horizon and squint my eyes to try to make out the next country. Upon approaching the seafront, there was a pronounced drop in temperature. I held my shoulders high and imagined I was wearing a fleece-lined wrap like the ones Vikings wore. I had decided to leave my jacket back in my room, thinking my thick skin and an umbrella would be enough. The thick skin turned out to be not nearly as thick as required and the umbrella didn’t do too well. Umbrellas come in handy in all wet conditions except one: light misty rain. With any other type of rain, you’ll feel and see raindrops, so the umbrella goes up to shelter you from a soaking. With light misty rain, you don’t really notice it’s there. To the skin it’s fairly inconspicuous and to the eyes it creates the illusion of descending fog. The light raindrops drop and adhere softly to your jacket, that is, if you’re wearing one. I wasn’t, so I had all these droplets accumulating and soaking through my jumper slowly, with me none the wiser. This is all fine and goes on unnoticed till suddenly a threshold level of wetness is reached, after which I suddenly feel the volume of water clinging to my clothes. I felt dry one second, completely wet the next. I am soaked to the bone. Light rain sucks.

They say Brighton is London on sea and I’d have to wholeheartedly agree (partially on account of the amount of raining). I’d also say it’s like the San Francisco of England (partially on account of the thriving gay community), with the difference being less sun and less Chinese people. But of course this isn’t surprising when you learn that San Francisco is the city with the largest population of Chinese outside of Asia. There are way less Asians here in general, along with other non-Caucasians and this deficit must implicitly evoke some sort of roots-camaraderie reaction because every single Asian person I come face to face with will always give some sort of smile, wink or other form of acknowledgement. This is a more welcome response than that I previously experienced in the east end of London, where some triad boys eyed me up and down, possibly to calculate how much they could sell my shoes and jacket for after they’ve dumped my carcass in the gutter. I guess they’d see this as a reasonable way to resolve my friendly smiling at one of “their” girls.

It’s a common conception that any town beside the sea moves at a different pace to its surrounding neighbours and so far it still seems true because the life here is at a slower pace compared with the constant blurring effect of London. There’s more care and more down-to-earth-ness all around here and it all doesn’t take place in some tall building’s shadow. In London, I am always surrounded by man-made structures that obscure everything around us. Here and now I can see the skylines with greater ease than the head-tilting I once had to do in a secluded area of Hyde Park just to see the trail of a cloud. The other thing that instills calm in me here is being able to feel the nearness of the sea in my bones wherever I go. It could just be an effect brought on by the cold air blowing in from the sea, but it does feel more peaceful knowing the sea is so near. I’m really just a water baby that’s dried up over the years spent living in the city.

The last big difference is that people seem friendlier here. I could walk into a store and most of the time I would be greeted by the shopkeeper or assistant and the same again when I left. In London, you’d be hard pushed to find someone even acknowledge your presence in the store by means of a glance let alone make eye contact with you. The most common way to grab London attention by flipping several coins of large denomination or using your hand to flick the dust off your designer banknote jacket. Everything seems less pretentious and more real here which is the way to go. Although I am so used to the fast paced life, I find immense joy in the occasional situation where material things like money don’t become an issue. Everything is boiled down to the basics for life. This reminds me of what Stella told me about the time she did volunteer work in a Japanese village and was paid in watermelons! Okay, man and woman cannot live on watermelons alone, but I am seriously considering a short program which will find me in rural Japan doing similar volunteer work. I want to know the raw feeling of helping less fortunate people improve their lives and to be able to see it first hand. I want to know the feeling of sitting and dining with people whose hands respectively grew and caught the rice and fish I am consuming. In a place like this, my only payment would have to be the tatami mat I sleep on, the unobscured star gazing and the panoramic view of Mount Fuji. I think we all need an experience like this to change our perspectives forevermore. We all need a collection in our memories; a group of references to always know that things aren’t as unfortunate as they sometimes seem. I close my eyes and I know what paradise is. I’ve seen and experienced things so beautiful that they will warm my heart every time I think of them. They will warp my dreary surroundings and give them a new glow, and with everything shimmering under the light, life becomes less of a desperate struggle. I hope all of us will be lucky enough to discover our own Heaven on Earth; to be able to hold it in our hearts and minds forever, because it’s one of the only few things that matter. It’s one of the only few things that no one can take away from us.