The electronic embodiment of my brain farts.
Stayed on ’till 7:30, lots of lightning, our truck broke down, I have to be at work tomorrow at 8… and I am still awake messing around on my blog.
私は昨日は忙しかったが，今日はひま。 yeah, right. I wish.
It’s not so bad I guess. More money.
On another front, AC/DC pre-Brian Johnson was a great band; perhaps they were the very epitome of 70’s rock (It’s a long way to the top!).
Should be sleeping… need to go to bed… fire tomorrow, I guarantee.
I think blogs are fascinating. Under normal circumstances, I would never put my personal thoughts, goals, ambitions, study habits, whatever on a personal forum accessible to anyone, but myself and millions of others do it on a daily basis.
Enough of this… off to bed. Big lightning storm (and hopefully some forest fires and overtime) tomorrow.
Just thought I’d post some vocab words I’m hoping to have memorized by Saturday:
えきーeki-station
べんり(な）ーbenri-convinient
ふべん（な）ーfuben-inconvinient
たくさんーtakusan-a lot
こうがいーkougai-suburbs
ところーtokoro-place
すくないーsukunai-few; little
Easy enough, right? (sorry for the lazy post!)
Eh, this blog seems to be getting more popular. Kudos to all you randoms who have been reading. I appreciate it, seriously.
It is no secret that I feel my job leaves much to be desired. Sure, I can go around and tell people I’m a fireman, and they get impressed for the better part of five minutes, but the lifestyle firefighters (especially seasonal wildland firefighters like myself) lead during and outside of firefighting is not what I want. One of my crew members and I were discussing this and he had a hard time believing that firefighting was not my everlasting passion. I really didn’t know what to say to him at the time, but I think now I have it figured out.
We were sitting at the guard station watching a movie. I was, as I always do, thinking about school and how bad I can’t wait to get back. One of the forest officers who overheard my conversation with my crewmember asked me what it was I missed so bad about school. In short, my answer is I miss all the little things that come with studying away from home such as:
-Getting up at 5:30 to get the first cup of fresh coffee at Cafe` Roma
-Running from one side of campus to the other to make it to class on time
-The satisfaction that comes with handing in “A” work
-Hanging out with people all over the country AND all over the world who I would otherwise never have the chance to so much as meet
-Engaging in a community that has a vested interest in you learning their language (I owe any knowledge I have of the Japanese language to an amazing group of Japanese exchange students)
-Discussing Mill with a classmate I just met 15 minutes ago
-Preparing food with friends that involve trimmings from all over the world
-Going to the bar and having a pint with friends at the term’s end
-Walking home to my apartment late at night after spending 5 hours in the library
It’s the small things like these that make college life so worthwhile and desirable. I’ve never had this much drive, motivation, desire… whatever it is I’ve never felt anything like it before. When I’m in Eugene, it feels like the rest of the world is open to me and all I have to do is choose which direction I want to go and I can go there. Perhaps this encompasses the “grander scheme of things”, but it is my daily engagement in the smaller aspects of college life that cause it to transcend from bearable to desirable.
I’ve been pretty busy with work, despite the lack of fire. No good ideas for posts, except I’ve been coming home tired lately and ready to go strait to sleep.
Japan and Germany are tied for the places I want to visit the most. Germany has its pull because it is the land of my ancestors, but Japan, I think, is more attractive to me. Here’s why:
I’ve been studying Japanese for about a year now, and I’ll admit, I’m not good at it. However, I’ve had friends with little or no prior foreign language experience become fairly fluent in Japanese. Their secret? They’ve traveled to Japan on foreign exchange programs, some with no prior knowledge of Japanese, and made serious efforts to engage in Japanese culture, which means copying native speakers and speaking as much as possible. I’ve heard some of them describe themselves as toddlers who are just learning how to speak.
Being thrust into a country whose language I have only an elementary understanding of… That’s what I want.. or at least, that’s what I think I want. I guess in this situation the old maxim of being careful about what one wishes for applies here most.
Watch me eat my words in a couple days…
Yesterday I went out and bought a men’s health magazine. I haven’t done that for a long time because no matter how bored I’ve been, I’ve never been able to justify spending $4.50 on what amounts to a bunch of advertisements.
However, boredom reached a new level of extreme causing me to succumb to the allure of magazine purchasing (that, and Widmer’s variety 12 pack… Oregon has the best microbreweries in the country!). As I was flipping through the pages, I noticed an article titled “Animal magnetism made easy.” Being someone who is fascinated by “natural” elements, especially those concerning human nature, I ripped through the article. It turned out to have less to do with “Animal Magnetism” as it did “being cool.”
By Animal Magnetism, the editors at MH weren’t talking so much about natural attraction; instead, they were providing insight into how to act to create that “natural attraction” between men and women. The first paragraph in the article was, by far, the most profound. I’ve never heard Men’s Health claim it is ok to not be good looking as long as you are sure of yourself, indifferent to what others think, generous,and have a general positive attitude. While I was recovering from my shock that MH just printed what I thought they would never print, I realized how true it was.
Every time I’ve gone to a party/social gathering and was indifferent to what anyone else, especially the women present, thought about me, I’ve always found myself engaged in conversation (and if I wasn’t so picky, despite how rare these occurrences are, I’d likely have a girlfriend).
But for every time I’ve played it “cool,” there are at least 10 times I’ve done exactly the opposite. Everytime I’ve payed any sort of attention to what others were saying or thinking about me, everytime I’ve approached a girl I like and have been nervous about what I should say, or if I looked good, or if some superficial part of me wasn’t perfect, I’ve fallen flat on my face.
The article has fascinated me. I wish I could repost it without being afraid the original author or MH will sue the everloving shyte outta me, but I think the concepts of “coolness” speak for themselves. The ones that don’t are crutches for people who don’t exactly get the first ones right.
Thursday/Friday=my day off. You’d think I’d stop being lazy and post blog entries instead of entertaining myself with aimless projects and unproductive activities. What? Blog entries are not productive? I don’t believe it. I refuse to…
A productive activity(?): Keeping in shape. I stepped on the scale today and was surprised to see… 166.8! .4 pounds lighter than the last time I stepped on. Like always, I weighed myself 3 times to make sure the reading was accurate and sure enough, 166.8. .4 lbs closer to my goal of 160. My nightly 5k runs have been paying off!
That is, until I remembered I had hardly been properly hydrating myself today. While I am a little disappointed, I feel it is more important to be healthy while loosing weight as opposed to dehydrating yourself in order to make yourself feel better about the number on the scale. Besides, this isn’t about the number on the scale. I’m more interested in a personal sense of satisfaction, a sense that I’m making a proactive effort to change my body for the better. I’m just using the scale as a way to measure, but if I don’t measure myself according to the conventions I’ve set, the number means nothing. What I’m doing is merely out of boredom, not out of dissatisfaction with my physique.
Aside from procrastinating on 日本語の勉強すること (Japanese language study), I spoke with a couple of Morman missionaries on why they thought I was lost and had no direction or purpose in life. It was entertaining and I promised them I would read their book, but their main argument was that I would know God exists by the feeling I got after reading their book. I’ll read it, but…
Today’s fire forecast-
Lightning Activity Level: 2
Relative Humidity: %12 (near record low)
All that means is that we had a small chance of lightning starting a fire that would have burned the whole district down. We’ve had so many of these ’scares’ that I barely payed attention to this one. I’ll believe it when I see it sort of attitude.
Anyway, one of my original goals of this blog was to convey and write about my various passions. One of my greatest desires is to engage in a vocation that I am convicted is fulfilling. This coming school year, I feel I have the opportunity to experience this by working for a student group (in my area of specialty: public relations) that works to make international students feel at home at the University of Oregon. I’ve volunteered for them two years and this year I have the opportunity to serve as one of their officers. This could very well be the first “job” I’ve had that I actually care about.
It’s time to get off “serious” blogging and start just using this as a personal journal of sorts.
I work as a wildland firefighter which sounds much more interesting than it actually is. We haven’t been getting many fires lately and the ones we do get are not very big. There have been exciting moments, such as the time we stopped a fire moments before it took off uphill, but most of the time on a fire is spent digging a line around the fire to contain it or mopping it up which also involves a lot of digging.
On those days we don’t get fires, we usually spend half the day running around the district looking for abandon campfires and the rest of the day we take off to the Guard Station which is a small house with beds for workers to stay overnight if they are looking for just a couple hours extra pay. The guard station has a television with an XBox. Needless to say, the XBox gets a thorough workout with four or five bored crew members.
Today we subscribed to the formula above. I’m not complaining, mainly because these days go by quick, but I certainly cannot wait for this season to be over so I can be back at school.
