Osakatomebaby

There always seem to be earthquakes in the morning. I mean, I know there's no relationship...unless there's some tidal effect for magma I don't know about. More likely it's because that's when I'm still enough (in full contact with the ground) to notice.

This morning there was a little one...have you ever had a lucid dream? There are two kinds of lucid dreams (in my vast experience). The first is the kind where you are aware that you are dreaming, but you have no control over external events. Kind of like living an enlightened life...which makes me think of all kinds of other questions but will save you from them.

The other kind is where you have control over external events. If at any time you realize you are dreaming, the best way to determine what type of lucid dream you're having is to think to yourself, "well then, if this is a dream and I have control, I must be holding a cabbage (or tomato or eggplant or whatever)." Then look at your right hand. If you're holding a cabbage you're good. Otherwise you're just along for the ride, but it doesn't matter because lucid dreams aren't scary. Lucid dreams happen when you feel in control of your life anyway.

So you have the cabbage. Cabbages are good because they're easy. And even if you have one it doesn't mean it will be easy to control circumstances. But if you can't produce the cabbage it's going to be hard to do bigger stuff.

The other thing about the cabbage is that, you know, it's a cabbage. Of all the things you could want, why would you want a cabbage? I guess because it's not something that you want or care about, and probably doesn't have a lot of emotional associations.

This is important because once you start bringing emotional issues in your dream will go all haywire. Not that bad things will happen for the most part (well, not that they absolutely won't), but that once you flip that switch by say, wishing for your ex-girlfriend to be there holding your hand instead you'll start to lose control, because you're brain is smarter than you and it knows your ex-girlfriend. You can call her up, but I'm here to tell you, if she didn't do your bidding before, she's not going to now. She's defined, she's got her parameters, and the more you try to fix things the more your lucid control is just going to slip slip slip away-ay-ay.

Besides that you'll start wanting things that you wouldn't normally want. Actually that will probably happen anyway. I don't think I ever consciously wanted Madonna to teach me how to play the harp or to sing Christmas carols with penguins around a burning tumbleweed or to learn to manage a controlled fall down the side of a mountain while levitating 5 feet over the surface. If I did, I don't recall. Regardless you'll wake up wondering where this stuff is coming from...and you know, you don't want to know. All the more reason not to call on that ex-girlfriend.

The trick to lucid dreaming is...

Nah, I can't tell you.

Okay fine, the trick is simple. Live an easy life. It wouldn't hurt to be a little bored either. Get enough sleep. That means 5 to 7 hour-and-a-half cycles. You sleep in cycles of about an hour and a half. It's not exact obviously, but more or less. Trust me. (So by the way if you want to wake up more easily, try to time your sleep to this--the alarm clock is more bearable if it doesn't come right in the middle of a cycle). It also helps to believe in the power of suggestion, aka hypnotism.

So if you believe what I just told you about the hour-and-a-half cycles just because I said it, that's cool. If you got all cynical and started thinking, what the hey do you know, that's cool too. But, if you thought, well, that's rather dubious information you're putting out there and you aren't particularly an expert nor have you cited a whit of scientific research, but it sounds good...okay I'll give it a try, then I think you have a better chance. If you don't think you can be hypnotized you can't, right? You have to be willing.

(Why am I suddenly having a flashback to being hypnotized to believe I'm a chicken. That wasn't me right? It was a movie...with Woody Allen? Was it a dream? Aw heck).

So another thing about hypnotism is that you can do it to yourself. Like you can say, I'm going to keep a glass of water by the bed, and if I don't wake up at 6:00 I'm going to throw the water on myself. Or to be less literal you could say if I don't wake up at 6:00 the bed will catch fire. You'll be more likely to get up as long as you maintain the belief.

Admit it, you wake up a minute before the alarm because you hate it so much that you just can't stand to hear it. But you don't turn it off because it's your responsibility to obey the alarm you set. But! Once it goes off, it's not you you're disobeying, it's the damned noisy thing disturbing your sleep and why did I set it so early anyway because I can get ready in half an hour even though I was late last week because I set the alarm way way early and that was dumb and...snoozzzzzzzzze.

Okay, so I'm not always in control. That's why getting enough sleep is important because if you do it means you've got stuff under control and your priorities in order and as a bonus, you'll get lucid dreams which rock. Seriously, cabbage may not be that exciting, but instant out-of-nowhere-just-because-I-thought-of-it-cabbage is pretty satisfying.

The other trick is to try and remember your dreams. Well, you'll probably be too busy in a lucid dream to remember anything after the cabbage. But whether it's lucid or not, there is a trick to remembering your dreams (hypnotize hypnotize). As far as I can tell, if you wake yourself up slightly about an hour before you're supposed to wake up, you'll be more likely to remember.

So if, say you want to do this subtly and you wake up late enough you could leave the shades open or something and tell yourself you'll wake up a little at sun-up. Or just set an alarm and plan to turn it off.

Earthquakes? That started this? There was a tiny one this morning. If you can sense a 1 than I guess this was that...if not then 2. You get the idea. So I'm on the inch-and-a-half thick futon on a wood floor and I'm half awake. I'm not dreaming, but there's still this wish, it's like a dream. The first wish was that it be an earthquake. It was. The next was as it started to subside that it be a prelude to a bigger one. It was. That's where lucid dreaming and those unknown wishes and the control factor get all mixed up. I wanted a bigger earthquake. I wanted panic and terror. What does that mean first thing in the morning? Am I naturally morose? Do I have some destructive instinct? Maybe I need to get more sleep. And how can I control this Lucid waking state? Waking life?

I apologize for the animation, but I GOT THE BOX which I was waiting for. This is that very box. And I don't know how to make it stop spinning. C'est le sense de la vie.

So What was in the box?

• Books: Bradbury, most of the stuff written by TAL contributors, and, oh yeah, the Vintage Murakami I cared about a month ago.


• CDs: Leonard Cohen/Songs of Love and Hate, Lou Reed/Berlin


• PANTS!


• Presents! Books from Mum and Dum I can use in my classes

And this:



A star named for me. Awwwwwwwwwwww. However, to be really cool I think the star needs to change it's name to a symbol that looks like a greek letter and it can be pronounced like my name but with an Ancient Greek lilt. I'll be contacting Alfredo to see exactly what that lilt might sound like.

I wonder how many International Star Registries there are out there in the universe (or even just the galaxy) doling out names for my star. I suppose it's big enough to handle lots of names. Heck, the sun has about a million different names on this planet alone. Has it got more names out there? Almost certainly.

Still, I think it is about the coolest present I ever received. I just hope other critters out there in the universe can pronounce it.

On that note, I hope there are no Vogons out there writing poetry about it...more likely the only life forms in the vicinity are a bunch of unfortunate mattresses...or are they futons? Either way, that's where I'm heading now.

This is a good way to start the day.

I came across this when I did I GIS for "Crazy Train -Ozzy" (don't ask). The Internet works in mysterious ways. Click and read it too unless you're related to me...because...no one related to me likes kayaking.



BTW the following is true:

Class
4-Technical
5+-Consequences
6-Intimidation

The title of this article caught my eye. Interesting but quite difficult to interpret. For one thing, I've always been fairly oblivious to "gender differences" myself. For another, I have a hard time seeing my own culture in the kind of definitive terms that come so naturally when dealing with an "other".

I guess I'm mostly reacting to the comment that,

Cultures emphasizing manliness and femininity are in the West. Those kinds of ideas are traditionally weak in Japan.

I wonder if this is really true or if this is looking at it from a Western chivalrous perspective. In terms of gender roles and expectations, Japan is certainly more strict insofar as business is till male-dominated and images of feminine domesticity abound as an ideal. No, nobody's going to hold the door for you here on account of you being a female, but they're going to look at you askance if you use "male" language.

There might be at least two other things going on here. One is that the large-scale women's liberation movement in the Western world brought some of these issues to light in a way that hasn't happened in Japan. The higher attitude of role importance could be interpreted as generational backlash or simply an idealization of a concept that doesn't entirely exist in reality.

This can't be quite right, because certainly Americans do still act on these ideas, but is it just made more conscious by the politics of the last 40 years?

The other thing is that from what I can tell, many of the questions were based on affirming or denying traditional gender role assumptions (defined in large part by the Western idea of chivalry). But I wonder about what other questions were asked. For example, how should childcare be divided among the sexes?

Sidenote: I wonder why the translator twice used awkward expressions/vocabulary rather than the word "masculine"? I don't know the Japanese question, but "Do you think men should act in a manful manner?" is just wacky.

So I wasn't expecting to, but I had sent this restaurant review (including directions) to a friend this morning before heading out, and lo and behold, where did we end up tonight? Seriously fabulous beer, which, I can say without cultural reservation, there is a dearth of around here.

Loreley is exactly what it ought to be, which is to say, I had a smashing time and I wouldn't change a thing. It's a tiny place and it filled up fast. Fortunately we had already snagged our table in the corner.

My my my. The beer was a treat. We tried a pilsner and two different heffeweissens (Maisel's and another which doesn't seem to be on the otherwise fabulous site).

Dinner wasn't like the stuff at the chain German restaurants which usually includes marguerita pizza and very Japanese salads. We had pretzels (okay, kitschy but they were good), a fabulous salad of pickled herring with dill (there was a lot more before I took the picture but we ate so fast I forgot to get a good one), fried potatoes with eggs and pickles and an abundance of sausages.

Then we started to get jealous of all the folks sampling liquers and decided to join the fray. Not knowing we were ordering gin (because we didn't ask), we...did. So that was a bit of surprise. I'm not a gin drinker, much less straight*, but I sipped it for a little while and actually enjoyed it. Halfway through we switched. I had started with one of the flavored brandies--it's the last on the list.

I know, I'm a heck of a lot of help, but all in all I think that means I had a good time. Anyway, the owner and waitress were fabulous. She was very knowledgeable which is probably precisely why I don't remember the details. And the owner was too fabulous and generous. Perhaps they were all high on the great review, but whatever it was, it was worth it. They certainly looked like the pictures on the website.

I've been following Spaulding Gray's disappearance and suspected suicide over a month ago and I found this article in The Scotsman rather interesting because unlike the more sensational reports, it's more of a reflection on the man himself and the process by which he transformed his life experiences into performances. The journalist recalls his meeting with Gray 11 years ago and his feelings of catching him somewhere between actual experience and a final polished performance...of being someone he was perhaps testing material on, or less cynically, a participant in a conversation through which Gray was trying to process his experience.

"The important thing is not what you dreamt, he told me, but what you remembered that you dreamt and the way that you interpreted it."

He talks about his interpretations as well--about feeling sadistic. And he talks of internal conflicts--doubting the veracity of his own feelings precisely because he is interpreting them, not only for an audience but for himself. It's not conclusive, but that's probably why I appreciated it.

Feelings are a bit like sub-nuclear particles. You can't examine them without changing them or their course, and you're left to wonder if the resulting descriptions really bear any relationship to the thing itself.

Still, Gray's incredible monologues would suggest that this is worth doing. They're good because he captures the jarring unreality of life and our limited resources to respond. It's difficult enough to interpret experience, much less express it in a compelling way. Gray is extraordinarily talented. Yet it seems to me this extroverted technique of understanding life via art, monologue, memoir or blog is worth doing. Unfortunately it isn't always enough.

Don't worry, I'm not going to go off the deep end in the blog. I just hope Gray is just out there somewhere...being sadistic.

I'd source it if I remebered where I saved it from.

This is the most random reference to teaching English in Japan I have ever seen.