Time for a change of pace. While I’ve been away from home nearly 4 months now, I haven’t posted or written much outside of my journal. I woke up one night to a good idea that would help kick start my creativity. Inspired by Wired’s article on 6 word stories, I set out to write 25 stories on Twitter.

 

My rules were pretty simple, 25 stories (the amount taken from Facebook’s recent viral outbreak) written on my twitter account. Each would be numbered, which cut my space to 137 characters. They would all be posted within a single day too, which gave me a deadline. I completed my task with time to spare, much to the confusion of several people on Facebook, which receives my Twitter feed.

 

Here is the collection of stories, with links to the original Twitter posts:

 

#1) Empty desert for miles in all directions. The car rolled to a stop, it’s driver murdered. Who done it?

#2) Success! The world’s heroes & governments fell easily to Baron Plague’s weapons. Now where had those clone templates gone?

#3) From mountain to rubble to sand to sediment. Then mined then sculpted. The nose of the Sphinx. Destroyed and forgotten, back to sand.

#4) Lifetime limits be damned. Technology cannot be contained. I’ll save my mother by giving birth to her.

#5) “Rid us of the goblins!” said the king. Zor the Magician now wished he’d picked bow tie & top hat over beard & staff for his act.
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As the end of my Japan visit kept nearing, I continually pushed back my departure date. I originally meant to stay two months. I extended that to 10 weeks near the end of December and then 12 weeks as I closed in on the 15th of January. The Israel/Gaza situation was getting a lot of press and even more pressure so I ultimately decided that there would be better times to visit Egypt. I was down to Korea, France, and New York for the rest of my trip.

 

My last month in Japan had stopped being tourism and became more about spending time with the special people I’d met there, specifically Lorna. Halfway through January, I learned that Silvia’s living situation in Korea had become unstable. I decided that since staying in Japan was so appealing already, I would opt to not further complicate her life with my visit. Then, with the US Economy still nosediving, I began to worry about money. I decided that a $1500 ticket to France for a week of spending Euros and another $1200 ticket to New York wasn’t the best idea. My globe trotting trip had stopped at Japan. I pushed my departure date back to the 4th of February. Of course some of these cuts were simply to accommodate my desire to stay in Japan.

 

There were some notable highlights to my last month in Japan. On the 8th of February, Lorna’s mother Kris and I headed to Osaka’s World’s Fair Park and it’s Museum of Ethnology. The museum contained works of art from countries of the world (excluding North America) and information on how they coordinated to the cultures that created them. I particularly enjoyed demon masks from Southeast Asia and the examples of many of the written languages of the world. There was a machine in Japan’s section which gave an example of all the local dialects of Japanese. Even with my rudimentary Japanese I heard how different the language could be throughout even this small country. The World’s Fair has created a lot of interesting attractions around the world. Most famous is the Eiffel Tower, which is one of the main tourist destinations in Paris. In Osaka, they created the Tower of the Sun. Nowhere near as famous as Eiffel’s tower, but distinctly Japanese in its oddity, it is deceptively tall.

 

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To start off 2009, I headed back to Yodo from Lorna’s apartment. It was a cold and quiet morning in Japan. I could tell it was the new year because the ads on the train had changed. The first advertisement of 2009 was for a shopping center who had chosen to display their wares with a Japanese model wearing a cow hat.

 

 

I got back to the Hisa clan’s house in Yodo around 11 AM. The house was still except for Kenta, who was past his gate at the door. Everyone was still asleep from the previous night. Rickie was the first one to wake up, which told me I had definitely missed a strange night. As it turned out, everyone had gone to the temple before midnight and come home around 2 AM. Will and Rickie then went back into Kyoto for some parties. Rickie had gotten home at 7 AM. As the rest of the country began to wake up in it’s post-celebratory haze, I heard a few stories during everyone’s recovery. Hisa and Isamu were up sometime around noon, instantly snapping back into their normal roles.

 

I passed the day with little excitement. Unfortunately the next day was quite similar. Lorna and her mother set off for Tokyo on the 2nd, and Will arrived in Yodo to prepare for their trip to Hokkaido. 2009 was shaping up to be a very quiet year.

 

On the 3rd, I woke up alone in the house. Everyone had left for Hokkaido and it was just Kenta and I. My task for the day was to find something to do for my four days of solitude. I spent time on the internet and then headed to the Kaikan dorm to hang out with Bob, Kyle, and Daniel (Will’s neighbor). Kyle jailbroke my iphone and showed me a lot of the new applications I could download while we all watched movies and played Mario on the Wii virtual console. The evening ended a little before midnight with me taking the long walk back to Yodo.

 

The next morning I found myself in a similar position as the day before. It was cold, I was alone, and I needed something to do to keep me from having long conversations with Kenta. I headed back out to the Kaikan again, but this time with the plan of dinner and drink.

 

We all went to a small noodle restaurant near the dorm. Bob and I had a beer with dinner then we all grabbed a few more at a convenience store on the way back. There’s something about being in college that takes the edge off of drinking like a hobo. Or it could just be that drinking at a bar is prohibitively expensive in Japan. Around 11:50 PM I had a small buzz but wasn’t really interested in returning to Yodo. I convinced Bob to let me stay on his floor and made another trip to the quickie mart on the corner for some Kirin Strong 7.

 

 

After midnight, I ended up discussing American politics in the Middle East with Hasan. Hasan is a Moroccan student who’s been in Japan for several years. Between some slurring and the language barriers in both English and Japanese, I’m not sure he understood my point. We both settled that we didn’t think what Israel was doing was right. Hasan said he didn’t care that it was a Jewish-Muslim conflict, he just didn’t want to see anyone dying. I couldn’t agree more. An hour or two later, Kyle had disappeared and Bob and I realized we were the last ones awake. I slept on the blankets from Bob’s kotatsu (heated table) in unexpected comfort.

 

In the morning I got up and made the trip to Yodo. It was cold and I was not feeling great. Kirin Strong 7 is not really a beer. It’s a beer flavored 7% alcohol drink. This feature had given it a particularly disgusting hangover effect. Kenta was beside himself with loneliness when I got back, practically backflipping with joy to see me.

 

Recovering from my hangover, I spent the day on the internet and sitting at the kotatsu. Feeling the inertia to remain lazy, I did the same thing the next day. I watched Jurassic Park on youtube, cleaned up some photos I’d taken, and whiled away the hours. In the late evening, Hisa, Isamu, Rickie, and Will returned from their ski trip in Hokkaido. Hisa made sure to make fun of the instant ramen containers I’d thrown away. I don’t care, they were delicious and cheap.

 

After two and a half days of nothing, I finally had something to do on Wednesday. Lorna and her mother had returned late the night before. She had a half day in the morning and I was headed out to meet up with her for lunch. We ate and caught up on her trip while her mother was out seeing some of her Kyoto friends. Though I’d seen her when she got back to Japan, the weekend had felt very long. When her mother returned we went for dinner at Cafe Independents near Shijo. Lorna and I had tried to go there before, finding it closed for a private party. It was worth the return trip in both food and atmosphere. It was getting late and very cold so I decided to stay with Lorna and her mother, rather than risk the weather on the long walk in Yodo.