Hello again, this time I’ll be talking about VIOLENCE… yeah, exciting stuff.
As i was saying last time, living here in Colombia makes you a little bit desensitized to hearing about danger and violence while also making you extremely attentive to your surroundings in search of signals of danger, I’ve mentioned someone i knew having been killed for opposing a robbery but also through my childhood one could hear pretty often about kidnappings for extortion money, constant publicity for newspapers featuring all kinds of violent altercations that had occurred in town in their covers and headlines, constant monitoring of one’s surroundings/neighborhood to the point of many people people i know of that are able to distinguish the pop sound from a motorcycle engine from a gunshot, and never mind the constant and i mean CONSTANT idolization of P*blo *scobar in most media that features anything about my country.
You may think that i must live in a pretty hellish side of the country… and you are not wrong about it but i want to make the distinction that even when we (the people that live here) are surrounded by so much violence everyday the boundary that has to be crossed for it to be unlivable has not been crossed, we still live happy lives over here, neighboring children can still play around outside without it being that big of a deal, people can still go outside at midnight for cycling activities and bars and stuff without it being completely lethal and even recently a lot of 24 hour service Bakehouses have been popping through town (When my partner was here we would frequently the one closes to my home because we’d suddenly get a horrble itch for sweet stuff deep into the night while watching a movie), and even though i’ve become used to hearing about all of this stuff… well i think i’ve had enough? Don’t get me wrong i’m not gonna turn a blind eye to the societal and cultural issues we have over here but i don’t wanna live so desensitized of other people’s misfortune, i can’t remember the last time i’ve truly felt sorry for some other’s bad day over the live news and i could say that i want to be able to cry for each and every soul among those but the reality of it is that it’s hard to shed tears over an nonexistent bond. So i’ve decided to first: stop consuming so much live news media (even though i don’t consider myself as someone who consumes it much, even just a tiny bit of it can poison your brain). And two: To stop fighting over things i cannot control… this may read pretty weirdly but allow me to explain.
My partner tends to have REALLY bad period cramp and other side effects related to them, nausea, extreme hip pain, fever and more stuff that inevitably ends up occurring during each time she visits, this last time happened around the weekend of the begging stages of the Football World cup, she came down with a really intense pain in her lower back alongside the dysmenorrhea related stuff and it happened right while we where almost done with the tabletop game night, me and my friends and family tried to help her as much as we could but could barely do much to keep her at peace that day so when we arrive home i tried accommodating my room the best i could so that she felt comfortable in it, next day tho something really annoying would happen, as it was Sunday with the next day being a holiday well most of our neighbors where having parties in their houses mainly to watch the world cup, my room is situated just by the side of the neighbors garage so by 1PM the sound of “GOL!”, the smell of alcohol and a barbecue coupled with the sounds of the football match topped with the 32C heat rays of the day where intruding my room and my partner basically couldn’t rest at all so i tried moving her to another room in the house but even then constant noise from everything was so loud that it was becoming insufferable so we ended up calling the local community manager for them to send someone next door to at least get them to lower the volume a bit, i watched from the window for the person who would come to their garage, talk to them for an extremely short while just for then to walk away having done nothing, i expected something like this due (Colombians are pretty stubborn when it comes to their loud noises) but i at least expected for them to feel at least a little bit bad for making their neighbors uncomfortable enough for them to call on for community action but…instead of it they stared to talk trash about us, they stared calling us names and many other things that i don’t really want to write about but they where not saying them to us directly but instead between each other in a loud voice as if to get us to hear from the other side of the wall, and of course i heard them and to be honest with you i got a little bit mad at them, so i went outside and walked to them to explain the situation and how uncomfortable was for us to hear them talk shit about us through the window, what happened i kid you not was the wildest thing i never imagined would happen; an extremely drunken man that smelled like if he was the sole worker of a whole beer factory came to me saying things like “Dude stop being so over the top (i was not, even though i was mad i went talking to them in a calm way), we’ve barely doing any noise at all” to which i responded “I could hear y’all talk trash about us through the window, you think that’s barely any noise at all?” at that time 3 other drunken men in the group would get up from their chairs and start throwing hurting words at me so my Mother got worried and came out of the house worried for my safety and as an old grandpa with a beer in hand saw her he shouted “YOU BITCH!” with as much force as he could, he then got up his chair and broke his glass beer bottle on the table while still shouting, i was stunned, what was happening to him? It got to the point that 2 people from their group had to hold the guy with force and after shouting to him to get him to calm down and him refusing to they forcibly removed him by carrying him inside the house. I was still stunned so i didn’t noticed the moment my Father had came out the house too worried due to the shouting and glass breaking and then they all started shouting at each other to the point that the police had to be called, at one point i asked about the old man losing his mind and i got hit with “Well he’s sick of the heart and if he dies it’s your fault” to which i said “He shouldn’t be drinking then” and at that moment who would self proclaim himself as his son would take another beer glass and start threatening me with it… crazy stuff, anyway the police was called and the whole thing would end up scattering after they arrived and we all talked to them with no end to the discussion in sight.
What i want you to think about this anecdote is what the whole culture of violence has done to us here in my cultural sphere, people that deem themselves bearers of reason will justify themselves with whatever means they can obtain even if they resolve them in unnecessary violent ways, and that’s because we’ve been so desensitized from violence that even altercations like that are deem as “nothing out of this world” or “Typical drunken rage”, people in my culture don’t measure the reach of their actions as intrusions of others if they deem their end goal to be crossed with them, it seems obvious when you stop to think about it just a little bit but we’ve had our eyes covered by the reporting of violent events for so long that we sometimes forget that most of their authors are just making click-bait material out of the suffering of others.
Though of the Day
In my curriculum i should also add that nothing comes from trailing the drunkenness of a fool.
Hello! I’m back once again to talk about stuff no body cares! Nah, i’m being mean to myself heh…
So as you may have known due to my last entry, since the beginning of the month until the 17th-18th ish my partner was visiting me here in my country in our twice a year meet up (yes we barely see each other like 24 or 28 days out of the 365 all of the year even though we voice chat on discord almost everyday) so i wasn’t really writing at all mainly because i couldn’t either concentrate in my deep thoughts nor be enough of an asshole to ignore her completely in my usually 1 hour writing schedule i take for these diary entries, so i apologize if whoever reads these was expecting something from me these past few weeks.
There’s lots of things to talk about that i’ve been processing in my head through all this time but I’m not feeling confident enough to talk about all of them in one entry so i’ll try to sprinkle them from here on in different entries. This time i want to do a kind of blog like entry detailing some of the things we did while she was on visit here, as i mentioned on my last entry a few hours after i was i finished writing i had to go pick her up from the airport at something like 1 AM which it’s pretty nice if we take into account her worst medical condition: Being Chilean. Turns out that when you live most of your life in a region of the world where the maximum temperature during summer doesn’t exceed 27°C mid-day and you travel to a country right on the top of the equatorial line where days are 32°C on average, well, you kinda die on the spot. In the past whenever she’s come here she has always arrived at 12PM when the sun its a it’s brightest and she almost always has a heat stroke as soon as she gets out of the plane and into the lobby, one time when i went to pick her up i couldn’t find her at all and she wasn’t answering to my messages nor my phone calls so i got really worried just to find her a bit later almost melting in a chair right in front of a Dunkin Donuts while oogling at their products, so when i met her the very first thing i said was “You want one?” just for her to say “What? Want what?… Hello!”.
So this time it was kind of a blessing that she had arrived late at night when there’s no sun at all although i was a little bit worried due to the past day being election day and due to my country being one of the most violent ones in all of south America so there was a slight chance of some sort of protest blocking my way or some sort of terrorist attack going on, whenever i think about this i find it kind of funny how most of the world and even most of South America doesn’t really have to worry about these types of events happening at all but ever since i stopped being a glue eating baby i’ve been conscious of the amount of violence here, you hear about gang and theft violence almost everyday and terrorist attacks and kidnappings every once in a while as well so the constant hearing of threats may tip your balance of the bias against the security of the country, i remember the first time i went to Chile my partner’s Mother warned me about thiefs and pick pocketing on the streets by saying something like “Be careful of your phone and belongings around here, this is not like your country, you can actually get robbed” and i couldn’t help but chuckle at what she said since i’ve been robbed at gun point twice here in my own town. Anyway what i want to say is that hearing about that and having some experiences of the like may negatively influence the way that you look a the whole picture, and in my case, as someone that walks almost everywhere and regularly uses public transport… well i can say i feel pretty safe? But i can contrast this safeness to the one i feel while walking arround in Chile, while here in my country i feel safe while also having to constantly monitoring my surroundings in Chile i can just feel safe. Heh i went on a weird tangent there, sorry, i picked my partner up safely and as she was traveling all day and she was extremely tired she went to sleep immediately after arriving home.
Most of the time she comes here we don’t do much tourism or things like that, we just spend time with each other by going to cute cafés or pastry shops, watch series and movies together and sometimes go out with my friends to do whatever there is to do, so that’s what we mostly did, and since we both are not the type of person to take pics of whatever we do, well… i mainly just have food pics hahahaha, so today i’ll limit myself to recall of the things we did using the photos i took, here we go:
Second Day Dinner
Half Eaten Sushi Plate (As always)
Cakes and Milkshake from one of my favorite Coffe shops.
A few years ago i was streaming a playthrough of Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 2 while translating it from japanese on my Twitch channel and she was present through most of it and we ended up taking the route of her favorite character so i figured while she was here we could read through the fourth game (I chose it specifically because recently i saw there was an english translation of its re-release on the switch) so we played through a the first school semester and half of the second one while aiming for the dumb ass, sexy ass, country ass teacher Kojiro Mikage, i wanted to get to know the whole cast before choosing a route but that stupid Mikage was just too damn funny to miss out on but i originally wanted to go for Minoru Nanatsumori as i don’t really like characters of his type on Otome games but somehow i felt that his attitude was a bit different from your usual Fashionista-rock star archetype so i wanted to look into his story a bit more, i sadly didn’t take many pics of our playthrough but i did take a pic the Valentine’s chocolate we decorated for the Valentines event:
It’s supossed to say “Love Sonic” but somehow it looks like “Que Sonic” which makes it even funnier. The first time i tried decorating it i actually put a crudely drawn Sanic on the corner but got hit with the “Dissaster” tag by the Hanatsubaki twins (Your firends on the right side). Fun fact: My favorite animal is the Cow, mainly the fluffy ones.
Later we made a trip along side my friend and their partner to a mountain near town where the temperature is much cooler with the objective not just to cool ourselfs off but also to watch the pretty sunset and to enjoy some hot drinks while engulfed in the atmosphere, you actually get to the place by means of a cable car so i thought about taking lost of photos of the ascend there but the damn thing moved so much i couldn’t really take good photos, they all came out blurry ;( Anyways here’s some photos we took there:
Blurry Cable Car photo from her phone (I know you are reading this, its time to buy a new one)
Entrance to the place.
Sunset View (The Sun had already set)
Photo of my partner and friend taking photos (She loves Piano-chan btw)
Hot Drinks.
Then the same friend that invited us to see the sunset later invited us to a tabletop game afternoon that they where organizing at their apartment complex, i thought that it was a little thing between friends that would mostly consist of mostly 6 different people but turns out they invited a whole lot of people and we ended up playing games of 12 players each, it was really fun although as we both are not really that sociable of a couple we ended up the night extremely exhausted, being with people is fun but man is it taxing. (Sadly i didn’t took any decent photos that day, sorry)
The last day we went omiyage buying as we always do so we went to the local Miniso in order to buy some presents for a Chilean friend that has their birthday soon, i ended up buying her a cute doggy keychain and Sanrio blind box, my partner also bought some blind boxes and gave one to me, it turned out to be a little Kitty-chan that i used to bully through most of the night.
Ominous Kitty.
Here’s one of the only photos we took together… yep.
Aaannd… that’s it. We planned a lot of things this trip that we inevitably didn’t end up doing due to some stuff i’ll talk about in later diary entries but of the things we had planned the one that i regret no doing was going to the local cat caffe, i think it would have been a really perfect place to take photos at but alas we got hit with the worst of the trip trials and the worst of the Colombian society tribulations.
And i’ll leave it at that for today, just a report style of post, i’ll talk about my feelings tomorrow. See ya then.
Thought of the Day
Immediate reactions makes harsh judges of even harsher sentences.
Can i really call this a diary when i’m not doing it daily? That’s the great question that more than a half a million GoodbyeNamaikiGirl viewers are asking (hahahahaha). No but for real, sorry about the silence lately, my mind has been occupied by the mundane these past few days as i have been mainly preoccupied with some arrangements in the family store plus some in home due to my partner visiting me from today until the 17th (She is actually on the plane as i’m writing this), i probably wont be posting much during those days as whenever i write these entries i take a lot of time to come up with something half-coherent, my brain is kinda slow so making analysis, deciding how to express them and then actually choosing the words for them it’s a process that i need a lot of concentration and time to do in a half-decent way and obviously i don’t think i’ll be capable of doing that while my loved one is physically here with me. Of course i still want to write stuff about whatever i’m deeply thinking about during those days but i’m not sure about the way that i want to do it, when i mentioned to her that my friends where doing some light journaling so we came up with the idea of doing some while she’s here but to be honest with you I’ve never been good at expressing myself through the visual medium, don’t get me wrong i still think the visual arts are my favorite of all the arts and there’s nothing that i love more than coming up with designs for characters and their clothing or just illustrating the cacophony of ideas that Onpu represents in my head but somehow the ideas (other that esthetically ones) that i want to express i’m not really capable of expressing them by strokes on a canvas.
So i’ve thought about recording little snippets of our lives while she’s here in a quasi-vlog styled stuff (Basically Pensamiento en Lemniscata), i’ve actually had the idea of getting an old camcorder with really bad quality akin to the quality on video recordings of the 2000s era that one used to see on early youtube so that i continue experimenting with weird radiotalk style stuff on that youtube channel while also recording the many different cafes and pastry shops that i normally visit in my daily life while also recording the times i’ll go to those with my partner while she’s here, buuuuuut i haven’t really got to buying one, my problem is that the only realistic way of buying those types of cameras these days is to get them from some Facebook marketplace listing and I REALLY DON’T WANT TO TALK TO A RANDOM DUDE ON THE INTERNET AND I REALLY DON’T WANT TO MEET ANY OF THEM OFFLINE, believe it or not i’m a little puffy ball of social anxiety and even thought i’ve gotten used to talking with random people my mind still preffers to avoid those situations completely. So i’m thinking about just recording them on my phone but idk man i just don’t think it’s really all that interesinting to do it that way.
Wow i went on a really divergent tangent to what i was thinking about writing today… welp guess i’ll just transition to that now:
Most people may think that because i’m such a music nerd i must be listening to music every single minute of my life, while on my walks from home to work, while on the pc, while gaming and while arting but, as i’ve mentioned before, i don’t really like to listen to music in such a passive way as i think that music, just like any art, desservers the proper mindset in oder to be apreciated. Also, contrary to what most people of today like, i really love being in silence. Most of my fondness for it comes from my necessity of alotting the proper time, space and ambience in order to think about my stuff but other than that it’s just that i cannot stand loudness at all, whenever loud voices enter through my window, whenever i hear the congested rumble of bikes at the distance, whenever people at a waiting lobby keep scrolling through tiktoks with their phone volume at 70%, i just lose it, i cannot concentrate or even think about anything in those conditions, it feels as if my brain is being stabbed with needles on a wavelenght, it’s so abrassive and annoying that i can’t help to isolate myself. If you are not from Colombia you might be aquainted with the idea that the people over here are so happy and expressive that it is as if they are dancing all the time, i want you to dissosiate from that idea, it is almost always like that because THERE’S MUSIC EVERYWHERE AT ALL TIMES, I HATE IT SO MUCH. You might listen to the ramble of a radio host while on the bus while at the same time listening to the personal salsa selection the old guy in front of you has commited to that day while by your side 4 different kinds of kids are scrolling through 10 different kinds of tiktoks on their mother’s phone, it is physically exhausting. I have this thing where when i’m driving (And i end up driving a lot due to my Mother and Sister not really wanting to do it that much) i always turn the radio off, no matter what is coming through the waves i just cannot concentrate on my own thinking and my driving while the attention grabbing stereo host is trying their hardest to get me to call on their phone, i don’t usually put anything on the aux too since i’m very selective with my music and don’t really like playlists and it would be really dangerous for me to be driving while searching for songs on my phone, so most people that i tend to drive either don’t care that much about it or say it out loud, “This silence it’s kinda awkward, turn on the radio” they say. Man, i know this is a petty hill to die on but i’m convinced that this constant search for sonoric stimuli it’s the reason why people cannot stand their own minds for more than 2 seconds at a time, what is wrong about wanting to just be at peace? What is wrong with only having a conversation with no BGM? What is wrong with using earphones? Those are the questions that i’ll never get convincing answers for while living under this culture.
Thought of the Day
Getting tired of the universe balancing good and bad things equally.
Here’s a short analysis of a dumb thing i was thinking while listening to music searching for the perfect song for the title of last entry; i ended up choosing Balzac’s – The Pain is all Around because is a song that equates pain to love in its lyrics while also talking about the indecipherable feeling of both being strange entities that accompany one self and that surprisingly matches what i think that “Mother Mary” movie was trying to say. So while talking with my partner about the entry and about music in general we would (as we usually do while talking about music) end up telling each other about whatever piece of music or lyric that stood up to us while exploring artists, and as we were talking about the feeling of “sincerity” and of “simplicity in expression” in art as well she would end up mentioning an artist that she has been following for a while called “Melanie Martinez” who’s, and i quote “Way of expressing hate i really dig” or so she has told me.
She was telling me about the artists second album: “K-12” and about how she really doesn’t like it because it sounds like something a angsty teenager would write. The concept album revolves around past experiences and fictional experiences detailing the life of a teenage girl going to a high-school where everything is bad and awful and horrible and… yeah, you get the point. The thing is that as she told me “everything about it sounds vapid and surface level, even when the topic is a profound one” and i kinda get that, i’ve listened to many artists trying to depict different emotions and reactions to several different situations and whenever i listen to their sound and/or read their prose i would end up feeling something to the shape of “Is this it?” it is as if the artist is either not looking into themselves in trying to understand the chemical reactions fueling their emotions and instead they are just content with the thought of them just existing, either our (mine and my partner) and their way of feeling things and thinking about them are so diametrically different that we cannot comprehend them, or most likely they are purposely portraying their feelings in a really simple way in order to make them universally inclusive, which i hate.
My partner would also tell me about a song that her sister showed to her once “Querida Rosa” by artist Cami, song that on listen her sister would instantly tear due to the experience of having lost their Grandmother and the song being about losing a loved one, my partner told me that even thought she doesn’t really love that song she can kinda sympathize with it in the same way as her sister does but not on a such potent level. So in my curiosity i would search for the song and would give it a listen and… man, i don’t wanna be mean but it is such a nothing burger of a song, musically more stale than reheated bread and lyrically as barren as the surface of the moon, and its full, AND I MEAN FULL of that dumb dumb dumb way of “Properly” singing that i hate. In contrast there’s this really amazing album by artist Stomach Book called Sophomore Slump Callithump that was mostly all written the night Vivi’s (Stoomach Book) mother’s died and their feelings and way of expressing themselves are way more involved, where she explores the mixture of hate and love and regret in their loved ones death, i can sum it up in a kind of lyrical leitmotiv in the album that goes “I don’t want to be alone when i look at you”.
So the next day while listening to that Balzac live that i shared on twitter i thought about how extremely stupid Balzacs songs sound like, they mostly just shout and shout while these aggressive guitars and drums cover the whole soundscape, their easthetic can also be seen as really dumb and vapid too, skeleton shirts, early 2000s visual-kei hairstyles and EXTREME OBSESSION with murderers, destruction, darkness and the number 13? so one would think they are a dumb band for dumb egdy teens… but then after a while you open your ears and start hearing things, you hear desperation and pain and the overwhelming feeling of wanting to break away, and then your read their lyrics and find out that most of it its just about self hatred, of not finding yourself in an overwhelming sea of crowds, of feeling that your voice cannot break through the walls of the zeitgeist and so you start rising your voice louder and louder disregarding whatever those crowds could say until you inevitably tire yourself out. And in the process, you’ve transformed the vapid into energy.
I don’t know why but these past few weeks every single time it turns to Sunday i get a REALLY sharp craving for some ice cream at around the sunset, so i’ve been going to the local mall to get it from my favorite ice cream shop (They have the greatest choco mint i’ve tried over here, not too sweet and not too minty), as you may recall one of my besties and their partner live in an apartment complex right besides the mall so that’s how i’ve been getting more involved in the lives, well as i happened to go for ice cream yesterday and as i happened to ask if i could go visit them i ended up in their home most of the night.
Aside from casual conversation about life stuff and about a friend that’s trying to escape their home by renting them a room in their apartment (Their mother became crazy paranoic about everything and they are tired of dealing with it) they told me that before me calling they where just about to start watching a movie by the name “Mother Mary”. Now given how pedantic i talk about most art related media you would think that of course i am a movie freak and all of that but to tell you the truth i’ve never been really that deep into movies, of course i’ve watched all of the classics like your Tarantinos, Hitchcocks and Kubriks, i’ve dabbled into really indie european films mostly depicting a ton of violence (it was during my teenage years when i was a deeply edgy puber) and of course there was a time in my life where i was binge watching each respective year’s Cannes participants, but most of them i found profoundly… boring? I am able to recognize the talents that compose any given movie at their intrinsic parts like shot composition, coloring, scoring and editing but somehow i always find whatever they have to say boring or lacking in thought or just simply not enough. I’ve always thought about my feeling for movies are due to the short nature of them, yeah some people find the 2 or 3 hour runtime of a typical movie more on the “long” spectrum and i can’t imagine what you think of movies if your attention span is no longer than the average length of a tiktok video but to me that is an extremely short time to properly expose a topic or a thought and so artsy films tend to leave me hanging on the interesting ideas and developments. The opposite, and i mean really short movies with simple plots made for the sole purpose of being entertaining, also bore me as well with their simple thinking and focus mostly unimpressive spectacle, your typical superhero movie or investor contracted animated film’s light rays impact my retinas and completely bounce of off them by the time the movie is over, i end up only remembering scenes that i thought where nicely composed or that had exceptionally good animation.
And so that’s why all of my favorite movies revolve around depicting a simple topic in the most personal way there is, i love Speed Racer’s love of action where it’s direction always points to the most fun way to translate the joy of performing, i also love Fantastic Mr. Fox’s plea to return to your naturalistic self and embrace responsibility as much as you do your hopes, and of course i love Pulp Fiction’s will they won’t they (kill or kiss), that’s the type of movie that i like.
So in watching this “Mother Mary” movie i would recognize it’s themes as they where led bare on screen but as always there where things that i could just not manage to connect with, the movie revolves around a Pop star named “Mother Mary” who’s career she feels has recently plateau, while trying on dresses for her next show an extremely intense pain begins haunting her and she assumes this is due to her dresses not properly portraying who she really is and so while in the middle of her concert preparations she escapes into her old dressmaker friends house to beg her for her to make a proper dress, her friend reluctantly agrees to help her out but in order to really portray what she Is now Mother Mary first needs to open up their hidden true feelings to try and make her friend understand, on the way there you discover a romantic undertone that deals with, what i think is the main theme of the movie, Pain.
Pain in the stigma of an unrequited gay love, pain in the stigma of a pop star harboring all of the emotions of her audience while dealing with the desires of others to project themselves onto her and pain in the stigma of not having been able to identify what was truly important to oneself at the right time. I call it stigma because that’s what it is, the movie depicts the idea of psychological pain transforming into physical pain by means of cuts and open wounds, the idea that wounds are windows through which the phantoms of regret and anguish not only escape from within us, but also of that they are open doors through which they are welcomed in.
And i like that… in theory, the reality of it is that no matter how i try i just cannot sympathize with extremely famous pop stars and designers, of course i know they are people just like you or me and that they are able to feel and think just they way i can but somehow whenever i think about popular music and popular fashion and the showbiz world i just cannot wash away the taste of the non-genuine, the taste of plastic. Just for me to fathom the idea of someone trying to sell me on my humanity, on the pain that i’ve suffered and on the love i’ve grown inside myself just with the idea that everyone’s pain (love) can be pristinely bottled up in a pretty jar for it to be sold on stores on a rotating line of months and to be shown on stages and parades of performing dolls… it makes me gag a little bit.
Thought of the Day
Of the curses i’ve casted upon myself and of the phantoms that haunt even my brightest of days, what i love is that i can say that they are only mine.
A few days ago a video from Youtube essayist Lily Alexandre came out covering the topic of “Wonder” or what humanity describes as the drive of awe, mainly in the natural phenomena that occurs around the world. In the essay she describes the main idea that biology researcher Richard Dawkins has about the feeling of wonder in that wonder is just the catalyst human brains have for knowledge and that the main goal of that feeling is for it to be extinguished by the pursuit of the truth in the world. The feeling of magnificence one feels when looking out to the stars in the darkness of the sky (宇宙 ＞うちゅう・そら＜) is nothing more but the natural occurring developing process of our brain telling us to get to know more about it.
The main example the youtuber makes is that of the historical wonder humanity has for the “murmuration”, a natural congruent flying formation a flock of birds makes which at first glance it’s extreme degree of synchronization and “liquid like movement” seems almost impossible for a group of individuals to make, its almost as if their general decision making transform into the one of a single being. One of the theories trying to explain this phenomena was of literally that, a collective consciousness in the birds (yeah…) but turns out this pattern of movement that seemingly defies the limits of what bird can actually do it’s actually a really simple one, birds only need to follow at least 3 rules in order for a murmuration to take place, one is is for them to avoid obstacles, the other its to match each other’s flying and the last one its to stay as a group. In this case what defies what Dawkins says about wonder is evident in the simple fact that even after all the time that has passed in between humanity experiencing murmurations and finding about what they really are and how they work we haven’t taken out the overwhelming feeling of actually experiencing one out of the equation, even if the answer is quite simple, the sensory experience doesn’t care about that, just like what happens in art.
I think that humans have something similar to murmurations actually and it’s not the overwhelming feelings of crowds running rampant during an event or choreographed performative art exhibitions but rather it’s the way in which societies distribute their living spaces and live (Dance) in them, it’s architecture. As a huge fan of walking around in neighborhoods i don’t know or visiting cities or manmade places i can always feel said wonder in the little things of how we line up ourselves, the way that most basic of designs change from climate to climate or the way that conventional “rules” about what homes can be are bent to the desire of the people living in them. Homes can have one floor or more, be long and narrow or wide and broad, be painted certain colors or just let be as it was built, they can have gardens or just garages, and we can apply the same logic to parks, boulevards, riverbanks, roads many other things, the important thing is that they all have (move) order, they all fit in a certain designated space. Rarely do you see a neighborhood that doesn’t make sense at all, you don’t see a set of stairs going nowhere, traffic lights where there’s no crossings to be had or roads stopping by the bed of a tree, we humans have decided on an admittedly not so simple set of rules about how we distribute ourselves and have followed them ever since even when our desires of self expression shape the little movements of our play.
Whenever i cross a place I’ve never seen before I’m always overwhelmed by the sensory experience looking at it’s colors and it’s shapes, i think about why is it built like it is and about how is life living there, there’s this funny little thing i like to do where i go through one place first by car or public transit to see what it looks like first and then i go there by walking in order to get the full experience of the details i’ve missed thing like looking at the stores in the area I’m passing and try to guess what is their story there, try and guess who are the people going there and what they like about the place. In fact i do this so much that whenever i go visit my partner, since she lives in a different country than mine i inevitably end up making her walk A LOT because I’m just so curious about what life is like over there to the point that she has discovered many different places in her neighborhood that she didn’t even know existed.
I find this comparison between our human habitat to that of bird’s murmurations quite telling of our relationship with architecture, it causes wonder, both of the desire of knowledge of it’s origins and in the immeasurably amount of seemingly impossible “movement” in it, even though we’ve ourselves have decided the rules for them.
Thought of the Day
When you open your eyes, even the pavement looks back.
Today while listening to my usual playlist of music (one of many as i don’t really use streaming services so my music library is separated between different devices, webpages and even hard drives and music players) i would hear The Beatles song “Hello goodbye” which is one of my favorites and while remembering other songs and looking for others on YouTube i would end up listening to “Hey Jude”. Generally whenever i look for a song to listen to instead of it appearing in my playlist i don’t really tab it out or put it in the background, i listen to it with my full attention while singing it’s lyrics if it has any, so this time while doing that a video suggestion of a couple of video reactors (heh) listening to “Hey Jude” for the first time appeared in the suggestions column, i don’t usually watch these type of videos ’cause i find most of them to not add anything to the overall experience of listening to music but sometimes a video of a song i really like appears and i can’t shake the curiosity of knowing what other people find in the art i enjoy. Things like if they notice certain sounds, instruments, playing techniques or quirks in the performance, or if they know about the technical and lyrical prowess of these artist, and of course, if they notice what the lyrics are saying AND trying to say.
So i queue up the video and while listening to the song again with these peoples thoughts added into the mix while I’m also singing (a cacophony of sound), at the part McCartney sings:
And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude refrain. Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders. For well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool By making his world a little colder.
I almost always tear up, like always, it makes me really emotional. The part that says:
So let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin, You’re waiting for someone to perform with. And don’t you know that it’s just you, hey Jude, you’ll do, The movement you need is on your shoulder.
Also gets me everytime. And while thinking about the reason why i felt like this simple and direct emotional lyrics get so much to me and make me feel a certain way i would look up into the screen and i noticed the girl in the video was crying as well, and i got even more emotional hahahaha.
So i’m thinking about what is it even in these simple lyrics that makes them so emotional and i would take a really long while to arrive at the obvious part, feelings. I believe that feelings can be heard in music more that they can be in things like speech or imagery or writing and this is provably due to the wordless and imageless nature of emotions, of course we humans tend to assign meanings to things and then to make those symbols the meaning in itself really easily. In the language of humans we have assigned feelings to objects and concepts that have no real relation to each other, for example the color Red means passion or a simple Red rose has become the physical manifestation of love, but of course these are just the vehicles we’ve selected to transport the idea of feelings between each other and nothing else.
Music is completely different, music is feeling. I believe music is not the symbol of emotion or the vehicle for concepts but it is the literal expression of sentiment, and lyrics are the first translation layer that these emotions pass through, if you hear someone say that they are “happy” in high or temperate tone you assume that that person is expressing their happiness, but what if you hear someone say the same exact thing but in a sad or somber voice? The feeling changes, it can no longer be the expression of happiness but rather maybe the admission of pain, but it all comes down to the tone and cadence. That’s why i think that miracles like the one i talked about in my previous entry take place mostly in the world of musical expression, and that means music must then be the oldest form of art.
What I’m saying is not that the best method for emotional exchange between humans is music, i remember once i was talking about one of my favourite songs “エメラルドの流氷” (Emerald no Ryuuhyou) by GreyNightly Chelsea Terrace with a friend and i told them about the lyrics and that i felt that the part where the singer calls a child their “Baby baby monster” was one of the best expressions of love i’ve ever heard in music, that i felt like calling someone their baby monster was something i’ve never heard before, my friend of course told me that “Dude, i’ve heard that thounsands of times from my dad” and thinking about it… they are right, i’ve even heard one of my uncles call their children like that, it its actually a really common thing to say, so i wondered why i felt that way about it. I concluded that it was because of what i talked about before, it was the tone and the cadence, the way Mayumi sings those really simple and common lyrics that everyone would come up with is what makes me feel different about it, i can feel her love, i can feel her endearment, i feel that if i listen closely i can feel the warm hug of a lamp enveloping me when i sleep.
Thought of The Day
Whenever i listen to that song and its lyrics, love becomes more than feeling.
As i was finishing up saturday’s post i was recalling my mental book of ol’ Famitales and i remembered the time when i was still a student at Hikarien and i participated in one of their Speech Contests and then in the Nationwide Speech contest as well, mainly the topic that i talked about in that speech kept circling my head until today while scrolling through my instagram feed i would encounter a post talking about the same “topic” and so i decided to talk about it today.
What i wrote for the speech was an analysis of the ramification of the consequences of manifestations of culture into other distant and anachronistic cultural paradigms, sorry for the pedantic jargon, it was about a song called Yuube no Himitsu by artist Tomoko Oogawa that would surprisingly become popular in my state during the 80s, 90s until even today and how it’s weird popularity in my country proves that music is deeply stateless regardless of negligible things such as language, how it challenges the convention that culture resides within the boundaries of time and space and how it mirrors what happened in the Japanese musical scene during the 60s.
When i was still studying for patissier one day while kneading bread my teacher would try to make up conversation with me by asking me about my hobbies, i told him about my interests in art and about my studies of Japanese language due to my interest in their music, he told me that he didn’t really knew much about japan or the japanese language but that he distinctly remembered hearing about one of his favorite songs that he would hear on the radio when he was coming home from school when he was a kid, and that that song was a japanese song, he told me that it’s name was “Amor Japonés” by artist “Akaina Akamoto” and that he still sometimes hears it playing on the radio even today. Later when i arrived home i would search for that song and i found out that the song name and artist name where completely made up, the real name was “Yuube no himitsu” by artitst “Oogawa Tomoko”, investigating i would find out that back in the 60s and 70s as specifically my state was widening its cultural exchanges and receiving the last wave of japanese migrants consequence of World War II most of them would arrive by ship to the Buenaventura bay so it was not uncommon to have many of those migrant boats have cultural exchanges with cargo ships that traveled to asia in order to export and import goods, in one of those exchanges a colombian radio host would make great friends with one japanese sailor and as none of them spoke each other’s language their only way of having deeper communication was through musical exchanges, so when they where together in the long trip on top of the boat they would listen to some vinyl LPs that the japanese man had brought, later when it was time to say goodbye as a symbol of their friendship the japanese man would give away Oogawa Tomoko’s vynil to him but as he couldn’t read kanji at all later when he played the song on the radio he would have to make up a name for it, and somehow the song became quite popular so the name stuck for a long time.
What i find interesting about this story is the fact that the language barrier was unable to keep the emotional aspect of music to spread from one culture to another, even though the radio host nor the people listening the song at the time would understand jack nothing about the song most of them would correctly intuit that it was a sad song about love. In an essay about Shibuya-kei by Neojaponisme’s David Marx he would describe some of, if not most japanese pop during the early 70s and 80s as Mukokuseki, meaning without nationality, as most of them would use specific musical patterns outside of what one would think intrinsically as “Japanese music”, Kayoukyoku (Yuube no Himitsu’s genre) specially was subject to the forced cultural opening of japan during and after World war II and you can hear it in its composition, it started including guitars, violins and even latino styled percussion and those could not have been farther to the general characteristics of Japanese music before it. One of the reasons it think my part of the country would become fond of this song is due to its composition, music at the time was full of acoustic guitar trappings and melodies, slow tempo and a kind of melancholic feeling singing. You can hear it in songs artist at the time such as what “Los Tres Caballeros” where singing, its dramatic tempo would also prove really good for singing so i figured most of the drunkards would hear this while on the bar and would struggle to sing it due to the language plus the drunkenness so it would reaffirm it as a “Song you can sing badly and no one would care”.
It’s really beautiful to see cultural exchange like this, its quite rare also, so whenever i think about it i think about the miracle of music, i think about the unspoken langue of feeling and about the overall general experience of humanity that connects us all. Music is important to me for many reasons but one of them is that music allows me to physically feel emotions in a greater scale that simply experiences do, i can’t remember how many times I’ve cried in the last 10 years of my life due to something happening to me but i can tell you that every single time i listen to Coltemonikha i inevitably cry.
In the end won first place in the local speech contest and 2nd in the Nation wide one, my performance actually was the reason why Yoshi and the other Hikarien director at the time would think of me as a possible teacher so i guess it landed me a job? Regarding my placement at the contest, my bet is that that the difficult nature of my speech with the addition of my certified world jambo writing didn’t land me the first place at the national contest tho, the winner talked about the beauty of kanjis and stuff like that, i don’t really remember much about their speech but at the time felt that whatever i had to say was not as valuable as maintaining the pristine idea of “Cultural exchange as idealization” rather than “Cultural exchange as a collective happening”. So after that i stopped writing in Japanese altogether.
Though of The Day
I once read in a manga that:
“In order for Love to become true, a lot of miracles need to happen”
So due to my lack of topics to talk about lately i’m recurring to old anecdotes i have in my dusty ol’ book of Famitales. I’ve got quite a few interesting anecdotes and life happenings so i’ve always thought about writing a biomanga (僕なにさまなんだ？）about the time between my graduation until just after i left Hikarien, it’s mostly depressing stuff but also many of those anecdotes are quite uplifting in a weird kind of sense so i think it would be really entertaining both for me trying to depict those moments in my life and also for a reader to see how much of a disaster i’ve been through all of my life. Thinking about it when i felt i was wasting my time by being alone in between the four walls of my bedroom i never thought that my life would be so full of stuff just about 6 years later, neither i thought i would get to know so many interesting people, travel to places i never imagined, do jobs I NEVER thought i would be doing like teaching japanese or being a supervisor for the N3 JLPT. Turns out that life is really like the game SUPERHOT, it only moves when you do.
Quite a few entries ago i talked about having met Sebastian Masuda, lead designer for Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s early career and herald of the modern Kawaii art movement and strong proponent for the Decora Fashion style, welp i think is time for that now.
A month and a half after resigning from my job at Hikarien the city where i’m from (if you know, you know) would be organizing their annual city wide Book fair, it mostly consists of MANY book shop stands through the city’s local boulevard and it’s surroundings with all variety of books plus quite a few events relating to the year’s, turns out that year’s theme was “Japan” and so the parent assosiation to Hikarien, the Coronbia Nekkeijin Kyoukai (I write it like this so it doesn’t show up online, sorry) would be designated to be in charge of most of the events and decoration and SOMEHOW they managed to get a hold of Sebastian Masuda and hired him to do many different forums about the kawaii aesthetic while also hosting a DIY Kawaii Totebag workshop where he would teach a few people about the intricacies of how he designs things while also giving away for free the necessary materials in order to make a totebag. During the time i would get a hold of these news i was sulking deeply into depression due to me resigning away, feeling like i had let down my japanese and life mentor (i will talk about them later), my coworkers, some of my students and coleagues and of course Hikaries main director AND the previous director as well . I was so ashamed that i had decided that i would never show my face in Hikarien ever again (someone once said that my actions where very “japanese” and i find that really funny) but when i saw that someone i thought was really cool and had made his career out of something i find really cool i thought that just this once would i brake self inflicted restrictions, so i decided to go to the event anyways and as i was still friends with some of the teachers at Hikarien i figured i would show up there before heading to the event as the School is really near the event area and as the new school term was already in motion and that days classes would end an hour before the event was to take place i thought it really synchronized really well. So the day of the event i dressed up in my black haori, my melo shirt, black cargo pants, and thousand plushie decorated handbag and went out prepared for a day full of emotions.
When i arrived at Hikarien classes where still in session, the receptionist greeted me we had a short chat about life and then i would go to the teacher’s room to see if anyone was there taking a break or something and of course the director was there, their name is… let’s call him Yoshi, i was actually afraid of meeting Yoshi due to all of the trouble i had caused him when i decided to decline the scholarship, the reason being that this was a special scholarship sponsored by the Japan Foundation aimed only at one Japanese teacher per country from one of the main schools in LATAM and in the past there had been someone that decided to decline it at the very last second due to family stuff and it resulted in Hikarien receiving a penalty for it, the punishment was that the school and it’s teachers where unable to participate in the scholarship for about 6 years, AND OF COURSE IT THEY DECIDED TO REVERT THAT PUNISHMENT JUST WHEN I APPLIED FOR IT, AND OF COURSE MY ADMISSION FORM WAS SELECTED, so when i decided to decline it (the reason is a story for a later entry) they got a little mad at me so i had to come up with something in order for them to not get penalized again, that’s the reason why i started to look into my autism really deeply and i managed to contact my previous psychoanalyst and together we figured that autism and anxiety disorder was as good reason as any to decline so he ended up writing a medical excuse that Yoshi later translated aaaaaaaand it actually passed and they where not penalized, Yay!?
So when i met Yoshi again i apologized like 10 times over again thinking that they should hate my guts for putting them up for such a thing but they where surprisingly really kind to me, they asked about my mental health and i would ask about the current state of Hikarien, we chatted for a while and he ended up asking me to come back to teach as the current teacher in charge of my previous group was having a bit of trouble connecting to those children, funny thing really, since that same teacher was the main person i was hoping to see that day AND they have a daughter so one would think that they are used to be around children. The class break bell sang and i got out of the teacher’s room into the library hoping i would see some of the children i was teaching, wondering if they’ll even remember me at all, to my surprise all of them did and they where all happy to see me. We talked about what they where learning in class and most of them tried to talk in japanese with me as they where learning about locations in japanese and since my last name is Soto they all made fun of me by saying things like “Soto-sensei! Afuera-sensei!”
But not only that but also the little shogi club i had made during my time there was also happy to see me, they asked about my play and about how they where “now getting into executing the real pro tactics!”, some of my colleagues from classes bellow me from when i was still a student also came to say hi and to practice their Japanese with me, most of them love my pronunciation (Yoshi and the previous director had also complimented my pronunciation before, it seems like i sound like a native speaker) so whenever we talk i mainly help them with their pitch accent, most of them told me that they missed me and that they wanted me to come back to teach them again… man… Later some of the teachers also came by to say hi and that’s where i met with the person i was going there to specifically see, their name is… let’s call them Moon. Moon and i had made acquaintances that same year when they joined the teacher workforce another japanese native representative since we only had 2 of them previously in the group. The day they started working with us during lunch break they seemed a little lost so they approached me and asked where could they go to have lunch at a decent price and i pointed them a restaurant nearby, i was actually waiting for someone to go have lunch with but since classes ended i hadn’t seen them in quite a while so i assumed they had just gone home without telling me and so i decided to accompany Moon to lunch. There we had a chat about our lives and we ended up opening up quite a lot, and since they are a really upbeat and expressive person we became friends pretty quickly, funny thing being that since they speak perfect Spanish and i had never seen them before i thought they where a student up until we where re entering hikarien and we met Yoshi in the stairs and they said “Oh i see you already got to know our newest teacher”, damn, i should stop judging people so quickly.
My real reason to go to Hikarien was to ask Moon if they were going to the Sebastian Masuda event and if they wanted to go there with me since i didn’t want to go alone, what happened was that immediately after seeing each other they would scan my outfit head to toe with their eyes and they would ask “Dude, are you going to the Sebastian event? Let’s go together!” hahahahaha, they didn’t even say hi to me, hahahaha, and of course i told them that i was going. The previous day Sebastian have had a forum about his design principles in the event saloon inside hikarien and Moon was there acting as their interpreter so while we talked about the event they would tell me all about the previous day and while talking some of the other teachers would hear us gush about the design asthetics Sebastian did for Kyary’s earlies hit PONPONPON and so they all ended up joining me and Moon in going to the event, even Yoshi ended up joining us.
When we finally arrived at the event venue THE WHOLE THING WAS PACKED so we ended up rushing to the main tent the event was occurring in fearing that, since the venue had limited seats, we would be out if it due to high attendance and when we arrive a line was already formed so we ran as quickly as we could to take our spots. While we waited in line i would scan the area to see what kind of people where lining up to the event and most of them where scene kids, some in cosplay, some in Subcul clothing, most of them female although they where some guys mainly accompanying their girlfriends, also like two grandmas with their nieces where lining up which i found quite funny, just as we lined up a girl i have made acquaintances earlier that year lined up behind the person behind us. I had met her when we had our annual Hikarien Matsuri styled event where i was acting as a pseudo-floor manager for the thing, i was just the person in charge of the Kingyou Sukui stand but since we had WAY BETTER attendance that we anticipated the real floor manager would end up overworked and overstressed so i offered to help them out. At our lunch shift while i was heading up to the kitchen by the corner of my eye i managed to catch a glimpse of a really pretty dress with quite an specific pattern, “OH that’s DEFINITELY a Liz Lisa” i said and i immediately went to check it out, i approached the girl wearing it and i asked “Hey sorry, that’s a Liz Lisa, right?” and we immediately became “friends” hahahaha, we talked about fashion and things like that for a while and i completely forgot about my lunch time so i had to eat later when the event was wrapping up, anyways, i would say hi to her and then we while chatting about fashion and about Sebastian’s work we would show each other’s the plushie accesories in our handbags but at that moment i noticed that one of them, my Onpu plushie one of my besties had sent me from japan was completely gone! I panicked and asked Moon to guard my spot while i searched for it in the crowd but it was to no avail, i lost my onpu plushie that day, i hope she is doing fine wherever she is. When i came back Moon was lining up alongside their daughter and their mother, turns out they where attending the event too so i said hi and we chatted for a while until Moon’s daughter stared to get hasty due to the high heat of the crowd, immediately after that the event was about to start so the main organizer started counting up the people lining up, assigning a number to starting from the first ones until just the right amount of people where counted since the event had limited attendance and they where quite a few people lined up already, somehow attendance was completed LITERALLY BY THE PEOPLE RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME AND MOON, THAT’S SO UNLUCKY!!!!!!!… then, moments later, somehow… SOMEHOW EXACTLY 2 PEOPLE WHERE GETTING OUT OF THE LINE BECAUSE THEY HAD OTHER STUFF TO DO AND THEY GAVE THEIR SPOT TO ME AND MOON, THAT’S SO LUCKY!!!
But still, Moon decided to give their spot away too because they where worried about their daughter so they planed to quickly get home, get them changed into lighter clothing and then come back to the event, so Moon ended up giving away their spot to one of the girls behind us then gave me the hat their were wearing and said “I’ll leave this with you as an “ill be back” type of thingy, see ya later” and went away alongside their daughter and mother. That would leave me as the literally last person to get into the event with my friend being cut from attending it… aaaaaaaaaaaand being as i am i decided to give my spot to her, i saw the look in her face while they where announcing the cutoff point and since she was really pumped up about meeting Sebastian i felt really bad for her so i just gave her the spot, i also felt a kind of… idk teacher’s duty to do so? She was a Hikarien student after all. She insisted i have it but i managed to convince her with the promise that she would later allow me to take a photo of her tote bag.
She even managed to get Sebastian to sign it, heh.
Now with Moon being gone and with me giving away my spot in the event i would just get together with the rest of the Teacher workforce and we would go around the event looking at the stands while waiting for the event to be over. While looking at an exhibition stand filled with Ghibli lifesized carboard cutouts, a mess of a dude that somehow managed to become a teacher and again somehow got a liking to me, let’s call him A-chan, was telling me about how the previous day during the forum he did at hikarien, Sebastian was wearing the exact same outfit he was wearing today, we laughed at it for a while and then he came up with the idea to gather the Hikarien adjacent people in the event and inviting them to go to a bar when the event was over, we all agreed and since i had told them about what happened back at the line for the event he proposed we invited Sebastian, his assistant and his interpreter along with us (Man A-chan, you are such a dissaster but i love you for things like this, that was actually the second time he had done something like that for me, thanks man) we waited for the event to be over and we told Yoshi about the bar and then Yoshi told Sebastian and his group and they agreed to go, the bar that A-chan had proposed was really close to Hikarien and therefore to the event so we could get there by walking but JUST AT THE LAST SECOND A-CHAN SAID “Oh man wait i gotta get home to get some stuff done, crap, i’m sorry Soto, i’ll leave you with the location of the bar and catch yall later there” and he went away, how can that happen to me twice in a day!? By the time Sebastian and their group had already packed up their stuff and where ready to go, Yoshi came to me and the other teachers and they would introduce us to Sebastian and their team and then to the group of hikarien students and adjacent people, then Yoshi looked at me and said “Well, where’s A-chan?” “He’s gone, but don’t worry i have the location so i can guide yall to the bar” and so we departed to the bar, as i was chatting with some other people one of them being my friend with the tote bag and with Sebastian and their group where walking in kind of horizontal line with only me knowing were we where heading so Yoshi once again looked at me and said “Soto, can you please go in front so you can properly guide us?”… damn…
So picture me, like 3 meters in front of this literal bunch of weirdos, like 4 scene kids in full harajuku clothing, a lolita, 4 people wearing Hikarien shirts, Sebastian and his assistant. I swear to god as we walked through the city’s night life neighborhood we looked like the Rio de Janeiro parade, with me at the helm of course, depressed as sin because i was the only one unable to talk to anyone due to me being on front, i think that was Yoshi’s way of getting back to me for the troubles i’ve caused them, i’m so sorry for having done that but you didn’t have to be so mean…(╥﹏╥). While crossing a traffic signal the group would split up for a moment in two, Sebastian’s assistant, Yoshi and me having already crossed while the rest where waiting for the signal as they where busy chatting between each other and couldn’t cross in time, there i would see and image that would be forever burned into my retinas, there he was, icon of japanese fashion Sebastian Masuda surrounded by scene kids, and behind them a heap of half tore up pile of trash bags about to spill out, it was magical, Sebastian was no longer an icon, those scene kids where no longer special, the whole situation was no longer a fancy getaway with a famous person, it was just another weekend in Colombia.
When we finally arrived at the bar we would settle down on the second floor where there was a balcony looking out to the main street, there Sebastian would stretch his arms up, would signal his assistant for their suitcase and then would remove his shirt (yes, out there in the balcony) and would change his 2 days of use attire for a new fresh one, i imagined that his suitcase was full of the same outfit repeated over and over and over and thank god i was able to contain my laughter, i told my partner about this and since then we have been calling him “El Sebas”, man i laugh everytime i say it hahahaha. Then we would sit down to have some drinks and dinner, somehow Sebastian, his assistant, me and Yoshi would end up right at the edge of the table so i had full access to chatting with both of them and so we chatted about their experiences in Colombia, about the typical food of the region (He really liked the empanadas) and about what he thought of the general culture and they even complimented my japanese too. Some time passed and i would just listen to the conversation Yoshi was having with them and Yoshi noticed that so he told me “Hey Soto, wanna say something? You should talk up now you know?” and i panicked and went aaaaaa and took out my celphone as if to search for something interesting to talk about in my twitter and there i would find a post i made with come clothing i had designed and i figured… why not show it to Sebastian? So i did, MAN I WAS SO NERVOUS LIKE I’M COMPLETE THRASH AND MY DESIGNS ARE ASS AAAAA but he looked at them for a while, pointed to one and said “I like this one” and his assistant look at them and said “Ooooh these are pretty cool, you are really good at drawing!” then in the heat of the moment i looked up some of my mascots as well and showed them and they also thought they where pretty cool! Sebastian wouldn’t really say much about the mascots but his assistant really liked Kumita and Asami, she thought they where really cute. Then she would look at me and say something i never expected… “Your Japanese is really good and you are really good at drawing too, wow, you are so talented!” NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I AM NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA now i’m thinking about that and i’m cringing so hard at myself, why would i show them my designs? i figured they don’t really care about them at all and i was just bothering them with my stuff aaaaaaaa but… what she said made me feel really happy even if for only a moment.
Just as in cinderella’s story, my curfew had arrive (I don’t actually live in that city, i live in the city nearby and in order to get there i need to get on a specific bus that has service until 10 pm) so i said goodbye to everyone and went to the bar exit and just then an there i would meet with Moon again, just in time to give them back their hat, they would deeply apologize for leaving me alone i just hugged them and said that it was alright, i could blame A-chan for leaving me to be the parade’s mast but i just couldn’t blame Moon for tending to their child, we hugged and i waved goodbye again for the last time.
It was a really crazy day full of ups and downs and everything in between so while in the bus ride back home i would look back at what had happened and… i cried a little bit, i felt… appreciated that day? I had let down so many people since the very begging of that year, it got so bad that i even tried to tried to kill myself back when i declined the scholarship and got into all that trouble with Hikarien and my family… through the whole year i had heard things like “You are so stupid for declining”, “I’m so disappointed in you” and “I don’t want people to know that i’m related to you” with the only person on my side being my partner, so having people look at me and what i had done and say things like “We missed you” “We need you”, “You are so talented” or simply “Thank you”… idk man, it made me cry, i still think i don’t deserve any praise at all but i’m glad people think i’m if only a little tiny little itti bitty bit special.
Photo of the Day
A coworker would later upload this to their Instagram stories. El Sebas had mentioned he wanted to go to a salsa dance club so i guess they went there later that night, i wonder if the scene kids where there dancing as well…?
Differing to the rest of my recently peaceful uneventful days, today was quite a weird day, i got woken up at 5:30 am by a catholic ceremony parade being professed today in my neighborhood, the place i currently live in is a semi styled condo with an array of several houses and somehow all of them are BOUND BY RULE (YES I AM SERIOUS) to submit (more like accept that they are going to happen at the vicinity) to several catholic events occurring through the year, one of my least favorites being when during Christmas time they start blasting Christmas carols at full volume at the local community patio as they sun rises (5 to 6 am Colombian time) and i can’t begin to tell you how annoying that is! I don’t consider myself someone with light sleep habits, when i don’t have to wake up at a specific time i usually sleep whatever my body feels the need to and most of the time i wake up feeling refreshed even if barely 3 hours have passed, also whenever i need to wake up at a certain hour I’ve never felt the need to use an alarm clock, somehow my body just knows how to wake up 20 to 10 minutes before that so the concept of waking up to really loud sounds is something so foreign to me that whenever stuff like this happens I’m left in a bad mood all day.
I don’t really have a problem with religious beliefs, in fact i believe that religion in whatever shape or form it appears its needed in order to have a functional society plus i think the cultural phenomena that occurs due to belief is part of what makes different cultures so diverse and beautiful. It’s just that when cultic behavior like this starts actively annoying people outside of their demographic then i start wishing there where more spiritual introspection instead of expression.
Speaking about spiritual introspection, today i attended the ceremony for the deceased relative of my coworker and although it was kind of short and the priest professing it seemed kinda out of it and didn’t properly made it feel like a proper farewell ceremony when i look over to my coworker they looked like it was something they really needed through all of this time. They have been taking it really hard to be real with you, although they don’t really show it i know in the way that their eyes look and in the way you can tell when someone is holding back their tears that they are putting on a brave face most of the time and i could confirm that today, neither them or their sibling could hold back no matter how hard they tried, so in seeing that today as well i couldn’t really properly tell them anything, seeing them in that fragile state i couldn’t even gave them a hug when i was waving goodbye.
Lately whenever i pay attention to the music playing in the showroom i’ve started to notice that most of the song playing in our certified spotify showroom playlist are covers of many different famous songs, i first noticed it because one day 3 different covers of K-Pop Demon Hunters Golden played back to back and i thought it was hilarious but after that many different interpretations of Coldplay’s Yellow, Oasis Wonderwall, Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life and even Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up have been going round the store couple that with the fact that one day my sister payed attention to the playlist too and said something like “You sure that’s a random playlist playlist? It sounds just like mine” and maaaaan I’m starting to think this world is going stray in the worst possible way ever, why is the world so obsessed with making and remaking and remastering the same old songs over and over again? Why is everyone praising the death of creativity like this? I really don’t understand how the overall populous works at all, one can argue that its just the preferences of the people doing the covers, maybe they really like that song and I’m over here over criticizing their stuff but whenever i hear the same old song but now in a tired modern pop style it’s like maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. When i think about the music i like i can name so many different artist in so many different genres all with their distinctive style and characteristics that even when they cover themselves they do it in so many different creative ways that one can only think about the love they have for the source material.
Our Hour‘s cover of Sex Pistols‘s Anarchy in the UK comes to mind as one of my favorite covers i’ve listened to this year (I’ve already named a diary entry after this song hehehe), theirs style is so diametrically different that its exactly the contrast in between them what marks the chaos and punk attitude that ties them, you can actually feel the love Our Hour has for the punk scene in the maniac way their songs are composed, i love them, and whenever i listen to the covers in the showroom playlist i can only think about the love of money these artist have.
Goodbye Namaiki Girl 