I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.  My building rocks, and I’m learning the Canal Street area as far as food goes.  Lots of food for super cheap! Today I ate a fried Pork-chop and Rice with tea egg and cabbage, from a little place my co-worker showed us, for 5 dollars.  It was delicious, but I had this horrible image of turning into a fat round ball and rolling down the street at the end of the year as a result of these lunch specials, so I think I’ll be taking food quite often to save cash and my tummy.  I feel like doing tennis again today.  Yesterday, when I played against Rym I was surprised I could still hit the gosh-darned ball, it’s been so long since I played.  Tonight is a Geeknights night, so I should run on my own or something.  Or animate maybe.  Hey, don’t laugh, I actually worked on a new shot yesterday.  When it’s cleaned up, I’ll post a vid here.  I’m thinking that maybe this would be a good place to post miscellaneous drawings that I don’t put on my main page.  Art dump!  Whoo!

Hey, what a weekend!  Hey, what a start to the week!  The sun is shining brightly on my arms and face as I walk to get lunch in Chinatown, and as the dog days of August come into full force, many changes have occurred around here.  Saturday was quite the event.  The Johnny Wander Crew was moving to Brooklyn, and the FRC turned out in force to schlep heavy items up the many flights of stairs to their enormous walk-up apartment.  Five of them are splitting the rent, so it works out to be fairly cheap, but man, was I ever so envious of an apartment as I am of theirs!  They have roof access and a clear view of the Manhattan skyline, and I see it as a perfect place to be young and full of art.  Jaa, but we made quick work of the moving.  I feel sometimes like our group of friends is like some kind of magic force that you can call upon in times of need, and when summoned descends in a big, overwhelming wave to perform the task of hand.  Nat-chan and J. even came, even though it was J’s birthday party that night (they brought an unfortunate fanboy acquaintance from Otakon, who I doubt was expecting hard labor.) We got sweaty and sore, but in a little over an hour, we had the truck empty and the furniture installed in more or less the right places.  I brought a change of clothes, but the sweaty boys were forced to buy 2 dollar t-shirts at the bodega on the corner.  By the end of the experience, it looked like a uniform of white shirts and jeans had taken over.  I finally got to meet Aido’s mom and pop (both awesome) and hope to be visiting the Wander Crew from time to time.  Damn, Rym and I missed you guys!

Following the move, the white shirt brigade (minus Aido, Ananth, and Conrad, who needed a little time to recuperate) headed back to Manhattan to go see Ponyo.  We barely made the movie because the E train was totally full of fail, but we got there, hungry and tired but happy and settled in for big screen Ghibli time.  I had been very skeptical about Disney’s dubbing ability, but every character was spot on.  Tina Fey as the main character’s mother pulled off a particularly good performance, and Liam Neeson was really well cast as the sea wizard.  It was so great!  This is the first time in a long while I have been this pleased with an anime dub.  Later, we headed up to a Japanese bar called Riki on 45th, where I had reserved a party room for J’s party.  We sat on cushions, ordered Japanese comfort food, and sang Karaoke for hours.  It was not the best karaoke outing, but it had been a while, and we used the Japanese machine.  We did about half ani-song karaoke, which is tough but always a plus despite my warbling.  Out of town Fanboy was a karaoke n00b and a microphone whore, though.  I had this mental image of Jumba from Lilo and Stich shouting “Share!” and apparently that was the general mood of the group.  Next time, we will not go to an izakaya, but to a regular karaoke box.  I hear the one above the sushi train on 3rd has free lunch specials…

We packed up the office for our move today.  The necessities are boxed, the random cords sorted, and the software FINALLY inventoried (all this time we had a copy of COMBUSTION?  What?!) and with that, Our team is heading down to Soho for the forseeable future.  Everybody is all excited about the prospect of all the food down there, because the pickings over by Penn Station are kinda slim, but it may be that we’re just spoiled New Yorkers who find a street with less than three Asian Fusion joints on it some-what bland.  I will miss team meals in K-town, my Cafe Zaiya melon-pan in the morning, and the inevitable detours to the Bryant Park Kinokuniya on my way home, but I’ve got a good feeling about this business.  I feel like I’m starting fresh, like it’s a new semester and I’ve got all new pencils in my pencil case.  I’ve learned a lot in the two years I’ve been sitting at my desk in the one room office of this little game studio, and now I feel like when I sit down at my desk in Soho, it will be as a professional 3D artist, not a green-horn student with diploma in hand, trying to fool people into paying me for my art. (Although, first I may have study up bit.  I realized that the people who are my awesome art interns are more experienced than I am, and have the mad 3D skillz.)

It’s weird,when we were cleaning, we found a piece of paper with stick figures on it.  It basically was advertising a thousand bucks to the winner of a character design contest, and I remembered seeing this paper stuck up on the bulletin board on the eighth floor hallway at Tisch.  I looked at the stick figures, thought “what kind of scam is this, here?” and proceeded to stay up late on my birthday drawing my entry. I didn’t get the thousand dollars. I did, however, end up somehow landing a job at this little start-up web company with a big dream.  Now I make awesome air pirates for a awesome living with awesome people.  Who would have thought a scrap of paper with stick figures on it would change my life?  Thanks, guys.  Now I need to stop being full of piss and vinegar when it comes to controvesial subjects, like Office 2008 and Harry Potter. Boss, just think of me as spunky!

Now that was fast.  I’m on the LIRR [Long Island Railroad], going out to visit a friend and I realized that the last entry I made I was in Nagoya, nattering on about food and movies and bicycles and not much else.  In some respects I was hoping to leave some more substantial account of the expatriate experience but in the end it was as it always is…a series of fragments, pictures and blog entries, some old papers et cetera that I can hold out and say “here, look…Japan.  My life.”  The rest is fated to remain inside my head, invisible to everyone around me, gradually fading to be rewritten with new memories as life goes on.  I was happy to have moved to Japan again, to once more have suffered in the muggy heat of the summer there.  The cicadas were so loud…One time in a park where I rested one morning every branch must have been home to at least five dozen of the fat bugs because the sound was so loud to have been almost a physical sensation.  The last week I was there, just before relinquishing my bicycle to my next door neighbor, I took a bike ride around my neighborhood by the drainage ditch in the evening.  Bats were flying all around, looping overhead and the lights were going on in the little mom and pop okonomiyaki joints down the street.  I rode a lot that summer, to Sakae, to Yagoto.  Dispite the pest problem I liked the apartment building, with its metal doors and cement balconies and the most fantastic veiw I have ever had over my railing.  Life was simple and interesting and free.

My sister came out to visit.  That was the most amazing thing, seeing her in the airport, her hair grown long.  I have gotten so used to Japan it no longer seems  foreign place to me, but it is a place, as it were, apart.  Old connections, old problems are, for the most part, traded in for a new set.  However, sometimes the two world brush against each other, and you are reminded about how small the world really has become. It is a strange and wonderful thing to see a your sister, a personage so familiar to you that their sudden appearance in a setting that you though of as being severed from your “other” life makes the whole thing seem like a dream you are having.  We had a fun two weeks.  My friends at the movie club liked her…the two of us dressed in Yukata and went out for kaitenzushi (sushi train, according to the Australians.)  We went to Kyoto and met up with her friend from school.  She helped me clean the apartment and put up with me freaking out thinking I had sealed our night bus tickets inside the cardboard box.  We ate eel-bowls and went to the Noda’s and did many, many adventures.  I love my sister.
Not only that but dad had a business trip in Yokohama and we got to see him too!  It was crazy!  The three of us all met at Hachiko statue in Shibuya and had dinner with my Japanese family, and then we went back to the hotel the next day.  It was one of the big ones in the Yokohama Skyline, right across the street from the big ferris wheel that the show in Hachikuro and other movies.  We rode it and I sat with my sister and dad, looking out over miles and miles and thinking…I am happy.