forward facing

i recently learned that one of my colleagues, XK, was a farmer in F__ province in China, quit after elementary school was a favorite with his boss and hates to read. he has one of the most assertive and clear speech of anyone i've met, and he has also helped to clear the air of a lot of bad energy with his presence. i'm going to try being more like him, more 前向き and more daring in the coming months...

new growth

it’s been a really long time… i might have to change to a different blog, especially since i haven’t updated this one in such a long time that it really has no following. good reason… but SF says that you don’t have to cut everything out to move forward. of course, I think that that has got some truth to it, but the way I’ve been living is to try to clear some space for new growth. i’m scared to death of being trapped in rooms that lock from the outside. i forgot to tell you this morning but i do like that 3rd spirit, FB – after the Russian Revolutionary Sweep and the American Efficiency: the New York Enterprise & Creativity.

nothing to say

i read what you write and i have nothing to say. the problem is also, i have nothing to ask. i have become a stone.

the only thing i can do is cut and paste. cut and paste. cut and paste.

lunar new year

it's been a month of celebration and hopefully some transformation.
i just updated a blog that hasn't been touched since may of 2008, which reminded me of other blogs...
many things to think about, many questions to ask, many problems to solve.
my fortune for the year is a shining sword.

i just got off the phone with my father, who tells me that my life will be difficult. also that one needs not just success but the will to do things. do i have the will to change?

Lupe Fiasco

I'm really into Lupe at the moment. So much in fact, that I even designed one of my main manga characters off of him. Avery takes a page from many of my former students (mostly black male high school students) but he is supposed to look like Lupe. OK, so given the dearth of realistic black characters in the manga of my youth, i have to disclaim the unnatural look of my black characters... Hopefully I'll be able to throw up some samples so you can judge for yourselves. But yeah, with practice, hopefully...

things i've learned from drafting my manga 2

i was talking to DW the other night about random things, and the topic of how to reconnect with our past selves came up. i mentioned that the manga project has done a lot to reconnect me with my past in a way that soothes the pain, even as it brings back painful memories psychologically, spiritually, and somatically. what that means is that as i sat at my old desk in my grandmother's house at the end of august, i felt myself being dragged into old patterns of thinking, behavior, even sitting - in short, i felt the cells in my body as i used to feel them when i would sit at that desk as a 5th grader, hating the summer homework that i was doing at the time, feeling estranged from any community, swatting mosquitoes...

it feels good to be drawing again. it's something i've done almost since i could hold a pencil, and it allows me to write and escape and even confront old mistakes and tragedies. i'm not good enough to tackle anything huge yet, but i want to get there.

singing Bob Marley "One Love" to a room full of middle aged semi-professional enka singers in Shikoku

i have many beautiful memories with bob marley's voice as my soundtrack:
- 12 years old, sitting by a fake fireplace while my bro plays nintendo
- 20 years old, singing with a truck full of american and malagasy students through the arid south to Faux-Cap
- 23 years old, singing with KY in a deserted parking lot in Cleveland, OH

and now, this:

one night in Kochi, my dad and i went out to eat on my aunt's tab. we went to a fancy izakaya where i had the best seared bonito (katsuo no tataki) of my life. afterwards, just as i was getting sleepy, my aunt dragged us in a cab to the suburbs for a night of karaoke and whiskey.

it was a one-room bar with 5-6 tables full of middle-aged men and women singing enka ballads as if they were on national television. i was probably the only person under 40. of course, everyone has to sing, so i pored through the tomes of songs for something i could possibly do justice to, which is when i found good old Bob. The problem is i can only really sing Three Little Birds without breaking glass, and all there was was One Love and maybe No Woman No Cry.

So i picked One Love, forgetting that you have to have that wonderful roots reggae wail to be able to sing the hook. I also forgot that the hook is repeated about a hundred bajillion times. Other things I did not know: the version of Bob Marley on this particular system was not the same as the Legend CD that i own and that everyone i know in the US owns and listens to; the tempo is breakneck; japanese-supertechnology allows for the adjustment of pitch to match each singer's range and so if you start higher than your range because you are nervous (which is what i always do) then you have to stay there for the rest of the song; etc.

it's easy to overlook these things when everyone around you is semi-pro and sings karaoke more than once a week or at least more than once or twice a year, which is how often i get around to it. and no, singing along to the Bob Marley Legends CD while stoned does not count as practice.