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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