JavaJunkee.com

My new favorite song and video. This is just magical.

I’ve been a little busy lately moving from North Hollywood to Studio City. My friend Colinski and I found a really awesome apartment; it’s a great building and a great neighborhood. And I’ll be saving money. As I joked with Colin last night, if I keep raving about how awesome this place is, it’s bound to end up being haunted or something.

Anyway, aside from the move, I’ve just been getting the full summer in LA thing on by going out for various events like Design Week in Little Tokyo and the Kalbi Burger Challenge in Koreatown. Oh, right—I won that!

Bite Me

I’m really excited about the new place. And I’m also quite excited for the Donut Summit this weekend.

Stay tuned!

The trip to Okinawa was really quite wonderful. I did happen to break my glasses while waiting for my connecting flight at Narita, and in the middle of trying to fix the one side that lost a screw, I knocked the screw loose from the other side and lost it. I’m still walking around with a (barely noticeable) staple holding my glasses together until I make it to the eye doctor tomorrow.

Aside from the broken glasses, and forgetting to pack deodorant when traveling to a nearly tropical island, things were simply amazing. Being immersed in Japanese once again forced me into trying to think in Japanese as much as possible, so that even when I was landing in LA after the trip was over I still caught myself trying to figure out how I would say this or that in Japanese.

The convention was a real blast, and I got to see lots of the people I met when I traveled to Nagoya back in 2009. All around, a worthwhile investment. And it has certainly inspired me to redouble my efforts to work on improving my Japanese.

Now that I’m back in LA, I’m working on an apartment search, and hoping for some time to get to work on my novel. I’ve got thirteen days to the next meeting of our writing group, so I better get cracking.

This morning I woke up at 6:30, did yoga on the beach, and then swam in the ocean.

Don’t hate.

Have some coffee! (h/t: Colinski)

Once again, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I know I told you I’d keep you updated about my latest efforts to adopt healthier eating/fitness habits, but then I guess I got busy with other stuff. Or something.

In the time since I last posted, a lot has actually happened:

• Mom came out to see me participate in a commencement ceremony at CSUN.
• I went to Nor Cal with mom for a weekend with the Ferrara clan.
• I went to Six Flags with some friends and had a lot of fun but was left with a lingering feeling of having been traumatized by X2.
• Sion Sono came to LA for a retrospective of his movies at Cinefamily. (I reviewed a couple here and here.)
• My friend got married in Vegas and I went out to help him celebrate.
• I made an impulse decision to fly to Okinawa for a convention over Fourth of July weekend.

Sounds like a lot of fun, right? It has been.

As far as the diet/fitness stuff goes, I’ve decided not to be as much of a stickler about it as I was thinking I should be. A couple of friends observed that maybe if the habit I’m trying to eliminate is being in the position of getting a drive-thru meal at 10pm because I haven’t eaten yet, maybe I could simply try avoiding drive-thrus rather than proclaiming “I shall not eat after 9pm EVER”. That said, my innate drive for self-sabotage has led me to interpret the decision not to abide by those goals as license to resort back to eating large pizzas for dinner and getting ice cream at 11 at night.

Just the other evening I was talking with a friend about it and he has agreed to be a fitness mentor to me for the time being. My first instructions are to not worry about diet etc, but instead just get into a habit of going to the gym. Four times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and either Saturday or Sunday; 15 minutes of cardio each time I go, no more, no less. I went yesterday morning and it felt nice to be back in there. And while I won’t be stressing on the diet, I will avoid the drive-thru.

I’ve been brushing up on my Japanese for next week’s trip. My baby bro is in Okinawa at the moment, so unless he gets deployed somewhere between now and then, we should be able to get together for a meal. I’m looking forward to it.

Finally, the reason this post has been so long delayed is that I’ve spent all of my free time over the last week or two going through old posts and cleaning them up, trying to correct broken photo links etc. that have come with the multiple migrations of this blog (going from blogger to wordpress, and various new installations of wordpress with different hosts, and so on). That project seems to be finished for the time being, and doing it was a fascinating trip down memory lane.

I’ll leave you with a gallery of pictures from recent fun:

This is pretty rad. (Found via LAist.) Might just be a good excuse to get up early again tomorrow.Today I got up early to go to a 7am meeting and present my friend with a (sugar-free) cake. It was my second time baking a cake, and both times I wasn’t patient enough to wait for the cake to cool adequately before applying the icing, and so it ended up looking pretty bad. But it’s the thought that counts, right?Monday I got up early to go do my tutoring at the middle school down the street from work. It’s really more like being a teacher’s aide/assistant, as I basically just observe the lessons and then help the kids who have questions. It’s fun, and definitely rewarding to see the look on the kids’ faces when they grasp a concept, or realize that they’re smarter than they might think they are. The kids will be doing tests the next couple of weeks, so I guess I’ll have a couple weeks off. I still need to email the teacher and see if/when I should come back next. I think when this school year is out, I might switch it up and sign up for a full-fledged volunteer tutoring program; someone recently told me about one that is geared toward kids staying in homeless shelters, which sounds like it would be pretty rewarding.As for an update on the goals I posted about last week, I’ve been doing pretty well. I haven’t gone for yogurt or ice cream all week. Thursday night I heated up some leftover spaghetti when I got home at 10pm, as I hadn’t had any dinner yet that night. I feel like this was an improvement over what I might would have done the week before, going through a drive-thru at the same hour, but still it’s best to shoot for not eating so late. This week I’m working on planning ahead so as to not end up in that kind of situation.

If I knew you were coming...

As far as desserts go, I ate baklava on Friday night and sampled on some sweets here and there at Unique LA. Aside from that, I’ve been kicking butt! You know, aside from some mangled sugar-free cake today :-p

Ambitious me...

Those of you who know me—i.e. all three of my readers—know that I’ve tried to be more health-conscious in fits and spurts over the last few years. I have gone through brief periods of using the livestrong.com diet/exercise tracking tool (as I mentioned here and here), and I have also tried using the one over at sparkpeople.com. While the “Spark People” website sounds a little more like some sort of new-age religious movement than I’d like, I was really impressed to see that they offer a customizable meal plan generator tool that will even spit out a grocery shopping list for you. But in spite of the availability of these and many other self-improvement tools, I have not yet found lasting success with following through on one of these plans. I mentioned something to this effect when talking with Siel from Green LA Girl a couple months ago, and she suggested that blogging about it might be a way to boost my accountability to myself and get ongoing encouragement and support from friends. I was initially a little resistant to that idea, simply because I’m not crazy about the idea of opening myself to all variety of suggestions and opinions about how I should proceed. But then, that could also have simply been a handy excuse for not holding myself accountable to my goals.

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided that maybe I can approach it differently than I have in the past by taking a couple very small, manageable steps at a time instead of trying to overhaul multiple areas of my life all at once. So, without further ado, and just in time to coincide with the stress of my student loans going back into repayment, I’m offering up the first few goals I will tackle. And because I know you’re all just dying to keep tabs on my progress, I will report back here weekly to let you know how it’s going.Here are a few of the goals I’m pursuing:

• No french fries.
• No meals after 9pm on weeknights.
• Sugar/dessert no more than 2 times a week.

I was going to post this before the 1st of May, by the way, but punctuality is not one of the goals I’m currently pursuing!

consumer electronics ftw!

So, I finally gave in and jumped aboard the e-reader bandwagon. Not that it was a huge leap for me or anything, being the gadget-whore that I am, but I was just biding my time until I felt I could justify the expense. They made it easy for me by offering this refurbished Nook just within the double-digit price range. I’ve been enjoying it so far. I’d been using a Kindle app on my Android phone for quite some time—and even read all of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore on my phone—but the price of the Kindle was a little more than the refurb Nook. Now that I have the Nook, while I certainly favor the more open epub format than the closed proprietary formats used by Kindle, I do miss the “Whispersync” feature of reading on Kindle. I’m hopeful that Barnes and Noble will pick up on that somewhere along the way.

Having an e-reader has also prompted me to start geeking out on how to create epub and kindle-formatted documents, which has been enjoyable. It turns out it may even have some useful applications in my workplace, which is also quite exciting. I am mindful of folks who seem to be against the idea of e-readers, although I suspect that’s actually more about Amazon and their arguably evil big business model. (They are Wal-Martish in many respects…?) I think it’s probably a good idea for more small publishers to look for ways to market ebooks as a way to combat the big business stranglehold on the market.

Oh you fancy huh?

Anyway, all of that aside, one other thing I’ve managed to accomplish recently is getting my diplomas into some nice matching frames. Actually, they’ve been framed already for like two weeks now, the next line of business was getting them up on the wall. And that I have done. Enjoy.

This video footage of Kesennuma getting leveled is both awe-inspiring and deeply saddening.

Aside from trying not to let coverage of the earthquake/tsunami aftermath get me down too much, I haven’t been up to much lately other than embarking on a couple new adventures: watching old movies (and even an occasional new one) to write up for PopBunker.net, and tutoring at a nearby middle school once a week. The tutoring gig, which is almost more like a classroom aide sort of thing, is quite an experience. It’s definitely given me a newfound respect for schoolteachers. So far I’ve been going in to tutor for an hour before work every Monday, but in April I’ll also be going on Thursday afternoons for an after-school writing workshop thing. I’m looking forward to it – teaching sure seems to be a great way to learn.

I’m still amazed at the thought of an earthquake that strong striking just about anywhere. I saw something on twitter about it shortly after it happened, and so I was up very late Thursday night watching the coverage. I sent Yuka a message right away to let her know that my thoughts are with her family, even if there’s not much I can do to help.

Early the following morning, Mom called from Northern California, where she was finishing her visit with Tim, Yasu, and the boys. She said that Yasu’s family is all fine, as Okinawa is pretty far removed from the epicenter. It turns out my little brother Bob was in Japan when the quake happened, though he says he didn’t feel anything. He’s in Iwakuni, which is still on the main island, but is very far south of Sendai. It’s important to note, by the way, that Maru is okay.

I’m saddened by the tragic loss of life and horrific damage in Sendai and surrounding areas. As many others have already said, the building codes in Japan surely saved countless lives and prevented the damage from being far more extensive. Let’s just hope their nuclear power plants don’t negate that.

Of course, there are also those who would say that the Japanese deserved it, but those people are idiots.

You can find out how to support relief efforts here.

My spirit guide.

At long last, with the help of Colinski and Archie McPhee, I have discovered my spirit animal.

I look forward to his guidance.