Happy birthday !

Well, I just dropped off my GF at her exam. I can’t believe I’m having nervous willies like she is — butterflies in my stomach and intestinal pain. I remember my first standardized test that counted (I think it was the PSAT), so now I can imagine how she feels.

I am so proud of her having come so far, and even if she doesn’t pass, I am positive she’ll be a better person for having gotten this far. It’s incredible to see someone go from being completely frightened of an exam (nay, terrified) to being confident enough to stride into the testing center and take the damn thing!

One thing’s for sure, we’re gonna party like it’s the end of the world when this whole thing is over. :P

You know, I go out and buy the hardware you guys recommend. I even saw a big “Intersil Prism2” sticker on the side of the NIC’s box.

I install linux. about 400 times. no dice. not with wvlan_cs, not with orinoco_cs, not even with prism2_cs. It’s just foobar.

So I completely destroyed my last desktop PC (PPro 200, 64MB) because I am just sick of this nonsense. If you guys can figure out how the hell linux PCMCIA supports a card that identifies itself as “HyperLink Wireless PC Card 11Mbps” then go for it. My websearches turned up a guy from a while ago who got it working with a now outdated kernel. Now support (and a string for it in /etc/pcmcia.conf or hermes.conf) don’t exist.

So there. Screw linux. As a matter of fact, screw any OS that takes two days out of your life to eventually STILL not work.

I’m off to Yodobashi to buy myself another standalone unit with a bridge mode built in. SIGH.

Just paid for my account on LiveJournal.

What a difference $25 makes. :)

I overslept by an hour this morning, which means . . . my GF was an hour late to work. To taking care of screaming kiddies.

OOPS. BIG OOPS.

(Even though she’s quitting in two weeks, and they know it. It’s not fair to the parents or the other teacher.)

I’m now taking suggestions on how to make it up to her.

And, overnight, an email arrives from S. letting me know that things are OK, and, as far as I can tell, there are no hard feelings.

Looks like there’s some spirited discussion over on the comments to the last thing I posted! I’ll chime in a bit here:

I contacted my other friends who I had been ignoring for a while because my GF got on my case while I was in Arizona a couple of weeks ago . . . based on your letter lily! so yes, you absolutely had something to do with it. :) Was my life that overwhelming? To a degree, yes. As I mentioned, I had at least a partial breakdown while at my last job, and while I was in-between that one and my current job, I was pretty depressed. You’d think I would lean on my old friends for help, but rather, I have this habit of simply trying to deal with it myself, and often not too successfully. I’m not quite “too proud to ask for help,” but more likely “too frightened of burdening others” and “too used to dealing on my own.” My GF will attest to the fact that I certainly leaned on her a bit, perhaps too much . So yeah, I’ve learned my lesson there.

But I also wasn’t careful about the separation I made when I left the US; I fully intended to keep up with my friends, and weed out the people I didn’t feel like communicating with (common enough, I’ve moved almost every year since 1991). Instead, I got immediately overwhelmed by the amount of email I had to deal with, and kept putting it off because it was way too intimidating (and my email interface sucked ass.) With a day of serious determination, I managed to clean it all up, so in the end it wasn’t all that hard to do. I guess, in the end, it was more of a realization that I was afraid my former friends would be just that — former. I was afraid that the decisions I had made in life would let people down, and rather than diminish myself in their views, I’d let them go on remembering me the way I was. That’s the fatal mistake, because good friends wouldn’t act that way.

I’ve managed over the years to stay in touch with a few people for much longer than a year or two, my oldest friend being from 1982. That shows that, in the end, I stay in touch with people I care about – it’s just that I’ve taken a hiatus here for a while. Looking back over my own personal history, I have a habit of doing this, not because I don’t need friends, but because I get caught up in a particular situation: graduate school, a job, a particular mate, etc. Achieving balance has been one of my key issues for years, and the older I get, the easier it seems to achieve. My GF had a great idea on my birthday a couple weeks ago; rather than having new year’s resolutions, have birthday resolutions. One was to keep in touch with the people (and institutions) that I care about. I’d say I’m doing a far better job now than I was at the start of this year.

Onto U.S. politics: I’m glad to hear that not everyone in the US is a right militant bastard. The general reaction to the US here in Japan, as far as I can tell from my immediate friends, is that the US is reacting out of proportion to the threat it received, and that the expansion of the effort into other regions (the famous “axis of evil” quote) is going way too far. Countries like Japan feel a bit bullied into helping out, and while no one here actually supports terrorism, they certainly don’t go out of their way to support the military action. I also don’t think that the locals here expect the US to help them survive or defend their borders; that sort of protectorate concept went out the door with the British leaving Hong Kong in 1999. There’s a growing movement in Japan to kick the US out of Okinawa (fueled by the absolute atrocities committed by horny US service men, search the Japan Times or Yahoo for references) and establish a military again, and these actions might actually increase those sentiments.

I’m a bit closer to canongrrl’s ideas here, mostly because it rings true. For all the social and political tolerance the US professes, things are certainly different when it comes to foreign policy, protecting industry interests (Enron anyone? No one here trusts the Bush government now because of Enron). It’s that duplicity that bothers me in any culture, even here, what with the environmental disaster, Nanking, the yakuza influence, control of the press by private interests, etc. It’s all clear to me, and no location is a panacea. Nor am I about to suggest some Utopian, Objectivist anarchic society that only exists in the mind of some twisted, sexually deprived author. My GF is right; I’m not going to give up my citizenship so soon over this. Now, the Defense Of Marriage Act, or the Marriage Amendment – those are an entirely different matter, and in fact the reason I started thinking about other countries. The whole Afghani nonsense just contributed to my sentiments.

Phew, time for a drink…bbiab.

I think my allergies are getting worse. After every meal for a few months now, I’ve been having coughing fits. And now, for the last week or so, after every meal I feel this lump in my throat, as if I can’t breathe . . . and it’s not getting better. I’m worried, but I also don’t trust the Japanese medical system’s doctors to correctly diagnose my allergy problems. Does anyone have any ideas?

It’s finally happened.

I took my inbox of 2500 emails and reduced it to just 11. Lots of emails were notices about long-abandoned programming projects, mailing lists that might have been important one day, and other useless notifications I acted on a while ago. Others were the notes of acquaintances, wondering how I was – things I could have answered in a 10 minute email. Finally, there were the 50 or so emails from people who really matter to me — ones I should have dealt with ages ago. They’re all taken care of now, and what remains in those 11 notes are the final scraps I need to deal with, none older than December 28th, 2001.

In the due course of cleaning everything up, I typed this response to a neat person I met at my goodbye party in NYC, generously thrown for me by S. Names have been truncated to protect those who don’t know I’m posting this…

I’m sorry to hear about S. (as I did from many of her other friends.) Apparently because I didn’t email her after the terrorist attack, she was very upset, and I may have lost her as a friend. It’s unfortunate, because I enjoyed hanging out with her, and I don’t think anything I could have said could make her feel better. I took the terrorist attack hard too (I was watching live, by odd coincidence, on Japanese TV, when the second plane struck), especially since I used to work down in the same area and in the same building with Merrill Lynch, SSB, etc. But for some reason S. slipped my mind, and, while I didn’t intend any ill will, I didn’t contact her because by the time I remembered her predicament (via Y., actually, sending me an email with S’s recounting of what happened) since it seemed she was holding up well. By the time I actually thought to send her something, my feelings on the topic started to shift — and I didn’t think she’d be receptive to my viewpoint.

Yes, I was a New Yorker for long enough to feel a kin with the city, but frankly, the American reaction to the terrorist attack is entirely out of proportion with all sanity and due respect to human life. I wonder if any other New Yorkers feel the way I do, or if everyone is just so caught up in “an eye for an eye” that any action is justified. Frankly, it disgusts me, and it’s enough for me to *seriously* consider revoking my US citizenship and becoming French, Canadian, or hell even Japanese (though the last is unlikely.)

Thoughts?

Overall, the last post is about being honest with my friends and myself. I can’t answer everyone’s emails in detail. I can’t solve everyone’s problems. I don’t always get along with everyone I know. That’s life, and I gotta learn to deal with that.

I couldn’t easily edit that thread into my last article, and I have to run off to the conference now, but I thought you all might like to know that I’m being more honest with myself — and with you.

My GF got me a wonderful bottle of Perry Ellis Portfolio perfume! I haven’t worn perfume in a while, but I really like this scent, so I’ll probably start again. Yay!

Originally this was going to be a ‘friends only’ entry, but I think everyone’s entitled to it.

But perhaps what I’ll remember most from this birthday isn’t the great perfume, the fantastic meal atop the rotating restaurant, the wine or the boring conference. It’s the frank and honest words my GF spoke to me over dinner. I cried, I gnashed my teeth, but in the end, I think I may have finally learned my lesson.

I mentioned to her that I’m starting to get a guilty conscience about the fact that, since I moved to Japan, my email has been piling up (currently 2400 messages in my inbox) and I’ve barely been answering anyone’s emails. We had a long and drawn out discussion, in which she forced me to realize, amongst other things, that I like to cry about things without actually resolving the issue for myself. The real issue here is that — if I’m ignoring those emails, I’m saying I don’t care about people, plain and simple. And if I’m hesitating to answer emails because I can’t solve people’s problems they email me about, big deal. “Tell them you can’t solve their problems for them, that you feel for them, and you wish them better times.” I guess that’s really what it’s about, isn’t it?

I guess this was all precipitated by a realization that I didn’t contact someone I hung out with for a couple of weeks in NYC (before I moved to Japan in 2001) after the terrorist attacks. I received a forwarded copy of an email from her through my former GF — apparently she worked near the WTC (as I had) and was really shaken by the events. However, it seemed like her local friends were taking care of her, and that all was in hand. The thought crossed my mind that I should send her a note and express my symapthies, but I also knew we weren’t that close, and didn’t think twice about not sending something. I had contacted the three people who were left in NYC who I was close friends with — a former coworker, my ex-GF, and a friend from Boston who had moved there shortly after I did — and they were all OK.

Now I get the feeling that she’s slighted by my lack of attention to her, just like many of my friends must be, judging from their emails. Usually it starts with a “Hi Joan, here’s where things are in my life…” note, then is followed by a “Are things OK?” note, then a “Where are you???” email, and finally . . . silence. In my attempts to be the perfect friend to everyone, I end up being a friend to no one. I can’t possibly respond to everyone with the detail level I want — showing empathy on the areas I can, expressing sympathy where I can’t — and have any sort of sanity. There’s just too many people to stay in contact with.

Which is why I started up LiveJournal. It’s sort of a self-service way of keeping in touch with me for those of you I can’t send the heart-felt notes to. But it’s beyond that. I owe all of you I care about notes. Some of you I’ve fallen out of friendships with . . . perhaps it’s time, perhaps our lives have taken us in different paths, perhaps we disagreed on too major an issue. But it doesn’t mean you aren’t known to me, doesn’t mean we can’t still be friendly towards each other. There’s a big difference between the two, because, frankly, I don’t have enough room in my life for 100 friends I share my whole life with. I have room in my life for a few people I share everything with (simply because of TIME, not egotism or elitism) and now have a mechanism to share the highlights with the rest of you. I’m sorry I can’t offer a “premium subscription service” where you can know every detail, where I’m always available to talk to, where I can help bail you out of any problem you run into. I can promise to most of you that, should an emergency arise, I’ll be there to help (like my friend who I talked out of suicide last week). I can promise to lend an ear and read your emails. And, now, I’ll promise to at least send an email saying “I read your note – I’m here to listen,” and, if I have a strong opinion, perhaps “Here’s what I think…” But I can’t be best friends with everyone.

At least now I know that I can’t keep complaining that I don’t have any friends. It’s my fault that I don’t maintain the friendships I care about.

So those of you who are important to me: when I return to Japan, I’m cleaning out the 2400+ emails, sending notes to you, and trying to make amends. Those of you who don’t receive emails (not including the person I mentioned above, by the way) — it’s not that I don’t care. But it’s that I don’t have anything to say, nothing to apologize for, and hope that we are still friendly towards each other. It’s not a “promotion” or “demotion” — it’s a clarification of what’s been true all along. We’ve been acquaintances, we’ve shared experiences. Let’s keep doing that when we want to. But let’s not have unreasonable expectations, either one of us. You can’t expect me to be able to drop everything for you and help you with your problems (I don’t have the energy). I can’t expect you to do the same. But we can keep each other up to date, and perhaps meet up for drinks if I’m in town. Can’t we just leave it at that instead of pushing the envelope unnecessarily?