I died thirty seven times.

I did beat the level. But it took my hearty 187 lives down to a mere 150. And it felt fantastic finally beating that level.

Along the way a little box popped up. Nintendo was telling me that my handling of Mario was not up to par. “Here is a white leaf. It will help you,” they said. I acknowledged it. But I refused to take it.

A few deaths later another box appeared.

This time the box was garnished with a wing emblazoned with the letter P. “I know that wing,” I thought, remembering how many times I used the fabled P-wing in Super Mario Bros. 3 to get past that dastardly sun in the desert level of World 3.

It was the perfect motivation.

They never told me how to beat the level. They never told me what I needed to do to stop failing. But they said, “Hey, you look like you are having a hard time. We’ve got this stuff to help you.” And that made me want to do better.

There have been so many games I have given up on because they were too hard. Or, and this is shameful, that I eventually used a guide to beat. But not this time.

Because every single time I failed, I knew that if I really wanted to give up, the answer was right there. All I had to do was take the P-Wing. Take it and win. It would be a cheap win. It would be like using the guide. It would be like using a cheat. But it would be a win. And I could do it.

But it also was telling me that I didn’t have to take it.

It’s scary. Losing all that data. Just having it be completely gone would be like losing a part of myself. My data! My game saves! Oh god, the game saves! If I lost my visual novel progress that would be absolutely crushing!

What has happened?

It’s just data. Sure, it’d be nice to not lose it every day, that is why I have it there to begin with. But according to iTunes, my contacts, calendars and settings will be saved if I upgrade on this new computer. My purchased apps and the like will not be. I transferred them over and then spent 20 minutes trying to find if my data will be safe or not.

But I’m just going to throw caution to the wind this time. Maybe the data is there. Maybe not. I’m not going to be losing that much stuff. Game data, may have to relogin to a few accounts. Whatever. And if I do lose something, maybe I wasn’t in that dire need of it anyway.

I can’t think of anything I can absolutely permanently do without. Most things can be gotten back.

It’s kind of like ripping off a bandage. And my goodness, how silly it feels.

Until I look at my iPhone right now and see only a black screen and see iTunes is not currently doing anything.

That’s scary.

But in the end, it’s just a phone. It’s just data representing people I can get in contact with again. Games I can play again, if I want. And if I don’t, losing the data shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

Of course, I’m optimistic I’ll lose very little here. Let’s see how I feel if I’m wrong.

My parents are going to look for a Halloween costume in the States and send it to us. The asked what kind we would like. My wife replied “A cute one” but when typing it on Facebook, no punctuation seemed to match the way it had been said.

A period felt a little too command like. An exclamation mark, however, felt like it was conveying more excitement than intended. I needed punctuation that hit about halfway between the power that a period and exclamation mark give.

Now, it could be said that from context, it would be understood that my wife was neither issuing a command nor way too excited about this. But what if one of those was the reality? In that case, more words would have to be used. This of course is not an issue at face value, but it changes the words used which could then imply other meanings, right?

As text has been used in difgferent ways over the years, we as people have been finding different ways to use it to represent the variety of tones in languages. Caps lock, short hand, smilie faces, all of these things have an impact on how our written word is understood. However, we have not really started using different punctuation on the keyboard as sentence delimiters.

Even if we did, it would take time for things to catch on and then not everyone would use it the same way.

When I first came to Japan, I emailed someone several times to ask how to get to a location for a party. Their last email ended with “…” which, to me, signified a bit of annoyance for all my emailing. But when I talked to the directly about it, they said that was not the case at all.

That very “…” often shows up in video games (Japanese RPGs) and was a joke amongst my friends and I in college. “Dot, dot, dot” is how we would read it, but we just assumed it was meant to indicate silence. Which didn’t particularly make sense, but we just kind of went with it.

Flash forward to me playing some Japanese sound novels and every time “…” showed up there would be a sigh, or a grunt or some sort of exhalation. The key was that it was not silence, and I had never realized this. That punctuation had more meaning than I was giving it.

Which is why the voice acting that is now more prevalent in video games helps to get the text across to the player. But we still will lack this in our own text messages, doing our best not to cause confusion or be misunderstood.

I was scheduled for a full week, but due to the typhoon, Monday’s classes were cancelled. Due to the damage done to one of my schools, Thursday’s classes were cancelled.

It seems unlikely that that school will ever open again.

I’m lucky, and I know that. With the natural disasters happening all around the world, I have yet to be hit directly. It was very close to home this time, but still, I got nothing. It really has made me more thankful.

And given me a bit more of a rambunctious feeling.

We all hit points in our lives where we feel the need to mellow down a bit. Ryunosuke being born definitely did that to me. But these events this past year have made me think again about that. I need to live more, on my own terms.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to be traveling the world searching for myself.

It’s time to do things I want to do, not things because they pass the time or things because they are there. I don’t care for traveling, so I won’t. I do want to play video games and read books, so I will. I spent too long in my life listening to other people telling me that what I enjoy is wasting my life and it took me too long to realize that I was wasting my own not doing the things I really enjoy.

読めへん。

直せへん。

でも、新しいは？

I was the third person there.

Well, tied for second. When my friend brought me there, there was only one other person there. His girlfriend.

I was confused at first.

Being greeted with “This is a surprise party for you, but everyone else is late!” was much more hilarious than sad. People did show up eventually. And when they did, I was the one who got to yell “Surprise!”. That seemed fitting somehow.

One time when I came back from the bathroom, everyone shouted surprise. That was also unexpected. The party had already been going on for a good hour or two. I liked that. These friends of mine have a good sense of humor.

It was a wonderful time.

I try to read more Japanese, I really do. But there is just something about the almost lack of pictures and “clump” that the Japanese text tends to do on the site that just drives me insane. It’s like how 2ch is just a bunch of text with maybe a bar here and there to separate things.

I know it has often been said that the simplistic web design of Japanese sites is to favor browsing on cellphones, but with the advent of smart phones I can only hope we get more and more into decent looking sites.

It’s not just Wikipedia that is bothering me recently, though.

Try to find a good GameFaqs-like resource in Japanese. It doesn’t exist. That’s fine, except then you are browsing wiki-like sites that have the guides for the games broken up into sections which are then further broken up into parts. Trying to find anything ends up taking more time than it is worth.

Am I just not used to these sites? Am I complaining too much? Am I browsing the wrong part of the web? It always seems that if I look up something in English, I get current results. Japanese results can be from a decade ago.

I don’t know if it is the frequent naps, the hectic lifestyle or a slow onset of crazy, but it really feels like a year has passed by in these two weeks.

At this point it has become even more apparent how useful organization is. The problem of course is keeping up with it. I found a pretty good to-do app in Quickie but the issue as always is to remember to actually look at the to-do list.

The issues of the modern man here, I swear.

Or so they tell me.

That said, I will never forget being there for my son’s birth. It was completely mind blowing. Mind blowing is an understatement. It was completely unreal. I still can’t believe that there was a child there once he was born. It didn’t make sense.

That has probably exhausted me the most.

But it is a great exhaustion. It feels really good to be alive. I still have all the same problems I did before¹ but I feel really, really good. Overwhelmed, but good.

So I can only keep on going forward now, building on these good feelings.

Work has been no different, which I am glad for. I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to focus. But I can. I almost feel like my teaching is better now. I got a burst of “don’t give a fuck” energy and I just feel like I am finding more and more ways to get around issues that I have.

I am solving problems on a tiny scale.

But the scale, this frame of mind can only grow. Well, it can grow inversely, which we call shrinking. But I am not going to let it shrink. I am going to build and expand and make myself more awesome so that I can influence my son to be extremely awesome. Because we can always expand past our limits, but the greater the limits, the greater we can expand.

Aw, hell yeah.

1. Some may even say I have more problems now.

My wife didn’t start getting pains until yesterday afternoon. They got pretty consistant around 11 pm, so we called the clinic and they told us to come in. They checked her up and said she was still a good ways off from giving birth. Better safe than sorry, I guess. Today has been a bit painful for us though.

More for her, I’m sure.

I heard that giving birth was tough. I never doubted it. But for the past day it’s been like watching my wife being punched every ten minutes by the Invisible Man. It’s grueling to watch, and while the hand holding and massages seem to help her a little bit, I can’t even imagine what it must feel like.

Everyone has been telling me to rest. Well intended advice, I am sure. I can’t, though. Well, I have been laying down next to my wife and reading when I’m not massaging or helping time the contractions. But I’m definitely not ‘at rest’. Tense would be the word. While I slept last night, and for a good number of hours, I definitely do not feel like I did. Not sure how I’m going to go to work tomorrow.

Completely drained and this is only the beginning!