cleared for launch.

About the biggest news this week is the return of my passport--with work visa attached on page twelve--from the Japanese Consulate in Denver. Receiving this was a huge load lifted off, as it was the final bureaucratic hurdle before leaving. I hate depending on bureaucracies for anything (let alone my entire career future), but everything's in my hands now and that's a good feeling. The visa itself has a picture of me, and under that is my classification of "professor," a category which I can't help but find somewhat shocking. I still tend to think of myself as liquor store clerk or windshield delivery man, but if I'm to be recognized as a professor I'll take it without offering any correction.

I also caught a cold this weekend, but I fended it off fairly quickly with some mysterious nasal goop called Zicam. I started feeling sick on Saturday morning, and didn't take Zicam until the evening. When I woke up this morning (Sunday) I felt awful, but by two or three this afternoon all the symptoms were pretty much gone. I was left feeling exhausted (like I had just spent a day fighting off a cold), but I have no doubt that I'll wake up tomorrow feeling refreshed and ready to complete the last week of the IEP's Spring I term. I don't usually like product placement, and I didn't plan on doing any advertising in this blog (never mind the earlier mentions of Wal-Mart and American Airlines), but if a 36-hour cold sounds preferable to one which lasts 3-6 days, then you should take Zicam. I'll try to see how much I can take with me to Japan.

I also told a second friend about this blog. His name is Zach, and he's my old freshman roommate. Here's a piece of trivia: Zach is the person indirectly responsible for the naming of this blog. He supplied the name for a favorite phenomenon of mine, and I thought that would be a good name for a blog (or a shade of hair dye). So there you have it. But anyway, more about Zach--as the morning anchor for the ABC affiliate in Colorado Springs, he has the most interesting job of all of my friends. Seeing as how he wears make-up everyday and isn't allowed to grow a moustache or get a cool facial tattoo, I feel obligated to tease him about his job whenever I see him. But I'm secretly very proud of him, and I like telling people I know a talking head on TV. I suspect he'll someday make it to an anchor position in Denver, which has been a longtime dream of his, or possibly teach broadcast journalism at CSU, which would allow him to live in his favorite town in the world.

Another important and interesting thing about Zach is that he has been keeping his own blog for about 2-3 years now. He puts a lot of time and effort into it, so it looks (and sounds) very sharp. Zach's very open with his blog, and he describes both insider TV news stuff as well as new things happening in his personal life--a very interesting combination!--with quality and engaging prose. What Zach's been able to do with his own blog is definately something I keep in mind as I tinker with this one.

Well, I'm getting tuckered out and am thinking about turning in for the evening. Here's a nifty little CG picture of wind generators on some alien-looking planet. I like this picture because the hermetic side of me (which constitutes about 85%) would love to live or work in such a spire-like wind generator on an alien planet. The artist is Daniel Trbovic and, as usual, I know little to nothing of him other than his website. It seems like Mr. Trbovic has a taste for alien landscapes, wind machines, and motorcycles, so he must be a cool guy. Anyhoo, enjoy, and have a nice week!

a nice tall glass of lucid prose ...

Not much new to blog about.

I bought luggage at Wal-Mart a few days ago. I paid around $60 for a 7-piece set, which is so startingly cheap I often arch my eyebrow when thinking of it, and frown as I consider the price's implications on the set's overall structural integrity. But of the 7-piece set, one "piece" is a tiny doc kit, one is a miniature duffle bag, one is a suit-carrier for all my non-existent suits I can't have getting wrinkled, and the final is a nylon pouch with drawstring, perfect for storing fruits and vegetables or the heads of my enemies. Those four pieces are worthless--if anyone wants one, I'd be happy to send it to you. The real reason I bought the set was for the three larger suitcases, which were stored together like a nesting family of Russian Matryoshka dolls. These suitcases range in size from large to large carry-on, have wheels and extendable pull-handle, and are constructed of seemingly-sturdy chemically-treated plastic/nylon mesh. They should perform quite well in carrying my dwindling stock of personal necessities--basically, what I need to survive before the rest of my stuff arrives via USPS global express.

In other news, I bought plane tickets. I'll be flying American Airlines primarily because they boast an average of four extra inches in leg-room. Four extra inches might mean little to normal-sized readers, but for a grotesque ogre of my physical dimensions, commercial air-travel is akin to a bizarre brand of humiliating torture. I hate it, and I often lay awake at night thinking of how much the 16-hour plane ride from Dallas to Osaka is going to suck. The plan is to heavily dope myself with tylenol PM. Anyway, four extra inches of legroom might allow me to do normal things, like fully lower the tray table or twist and slouch down in the seat for easier napping.

And that's about all that's new with the travel stuff.

In other news, I've been reading a book called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I usually dislike most contemporary literary writing--with the exception of DFW's Infinite Jest, I really can't recommend much written after Nabokov's Pale Fire (which came out, I think, in 1962). But, after reading only the first hundred pages, I get the feeling I'll likely be ranking Kite Runner alongside other personal favorites seared into my memory. I usually approach books on an intellectual level, and Hosseini's crystal-clear writing allows for a smooth transition of ideas without any extraneous interference masked as "new" forms of artistic expression. It doesn't self-consciously beg for the attention of literary blowhards, and it isn't out to make some soon-to-be-dated political point or teach some retarded lesson (which is what I usually hate in contemporary literature). In addition to its unassuming and story-based focus, it succeeds in putting me in a place and time which I am completely unfamiliar with, and it does it in such a way that this place (Kabul) feels like home to me.

If that weren't astonishing enough, it also has a tremendous emotional affect on me, viciously rending me one moment before soothing me with gentle and pleasant descriptions. "Soothing?" Shit! I'm in danger of breaking the "no sentimentality" subsection of Rule Three in the last post, so I'll cease the mushy stuff by saying that this book often provokes in me physiological reactions of both visceral pain and cranial euphoria. Suffice it to say, I'm really getting a lot out of it, and when I'm not reading it, I'm thinking about it.

Anyway, the thanks for this book (as well as thanks for an uncountable number of other things) go to my friend, Elizabeth, who is currently living in a South African port town named after her, demonstrating the noble possibilities of our shared profession. She told me about the book in a recent e-mail, and, out of curiosity of her reaction and admiration of her vast knowledge and opinions on books, I immediately went out and bought it. As is usually the case with Elizabeth, her opinion was correct (in the sense that correct opinions mirror my own) and I feel yet again indebted to her, this time for introducing me to a superb work of art.

I also have to thank Elizabeth for giving me the idea of a travel blog, and then encouraging me to write one. Elizabeth keeps her own blog, and I find myself checking it regularly to see what's new. In spite of slow and unreliable internet connections, she blogs quite well, and I hope I can too. I entered this whole blogging thing with skepticism (see the first post), but it turns out that I enjoy keeping a blog, even though no one reads it as I haven't told anyone the URL yet. But I'll change that shortly. I think I'll tell Elizabeth first, and hopefully she'll like it.

Anyway, I should introduce the computer art for this post. For some reason, I like putting pictures on my blog--I feel like the curator of an online gallery or something. This piece is by Olivier Derouetteau who, I'm guessing, is a French artist with a specialty in two-dimensional computer art. Click here for his French website, Flatworld. I like this picture because it's simultaneously eerie and heartwarming. Heartwarming? God, I'm in a weird mood tonight. I'll try not to emote so much in the next posting. Expect heavily masculine doses of sweat, piss, and blood ... with some excrement thrown in for good measure! (ew, gross.)

Look out world. I'm thinking about unveiling this bad boy ...

This little blog experiment has been semi-interesting so far. This is my third post and I've only told one person about it ... yet I haven't given her the web address. Anyway, I think I'll tell her and a couple other people the specific URL later on this week, and shortly thereafter the course of human history will be forever altered.

I'm just kidding, of course.

But maybe it's not such a joke. Since the supposed "course" of human nature is constantly shifting according to inscrutable cosmic whimsy, the opening of one seemingly-insignificant blog might in all actuality be every bit as significant as, say, what Matt Carlson eats for breakfast on April 23rd 2007, or a regrettable index finger muscle spasm on a vice-presidential hunting excursion, or a minute seismic shudder on Jupiter's Io. Who can say exactly which events inspire and were inspired by other events, and exactly which consequences, among the trillions of thinkable and unthinkable possibilities, can be reasonably tied to any random and seemingly insignificant action?

Anyhoo, that's the kind of writing that four beers can bring out of me, and hopefully we won't see any more amateur philosophy on this page. In fact, I think I'll start establishing governing rules for myself and this blog:

1. No attempts at deep philosophy, particularly when bourne out of insobriety of any sort.

2. Future postings should pertain centrally to my experiences overseas. The entire purpose of this blog is to keep interested friends updated as to my whereabouts and activities.

3. When possible, try to make haha. This means no whining, no outrage, no excessive sentimentality, no overt didacticism, no boring information of any kind unless such writings are vehicles toward greater haha. Whininess, rage, sentimentality, didacticism, and tedium are characteristics to which I'm prone, and I don't do any of them well. So I'll try to just stick to haha.

4. Go Broncos.

That's a good start.

About my upcoming trip, I'd currently place the odds of all my best-laid plans tragically falling apart at less than one percent. This whole thing is almost certainly going to happen, and I'm starting to get a little nervous (hence this evening's ale indulgences). The Japanese Consulate in Denver has received my Visa Application and, assuming my credit card isn't declined (inshallah), FedEx should deliver the package to the Intensive English Program sometime next week.

I've also been in contact with future co-workers at Kobe Kaisei College. Talk about useful correspondence! I learned that I need to pack several years worth of deodorant because they don't have that there. Without that particular piece of advice, I might've started some kind of international incident.

Tomorrow I'm going to Super Wal-Mart to look at luggage, then to a travel agency to check out prices for an open-return round-trip airline ticket from DIA to KIX airport in Osaka. These weekend outings would be fun, but the roads in Fort Collins are caked with snowy sludge and the temperature is unlikely to get much higher than 15 degrees.

So, until next time, please enjoy another CG masterpiece (in this sentence, I'm addressing blog readers that don't yet exist, heh heh). This piece is by Matt Cioffi, a superb artist who works in richly textured photorealism and anthropomorphized simians.

Still busy ... no field trips.

The main reason I'm posting tonight is because I'm a little worried that blogspot might delete this page by virtue of its inactivity. I realize I likely have nothing to worry about, but here's a post anyway.

I'd actually been planning on posting more frequently, but I've been quite busy working at the Intensive English Program this term. I usually arrive at the IEP around 6:45 to 7:00 AM, and I usually get home around 5:30 PM . . . sometimes even later if a student needs to retake an exam or if I'm simply so behind on grading that I need to stay late to get it done. By the time my head's cleared on Friday, I find five days have simply vanished. It's a bit distressing, but it's the best job I've ever had so I shouldn't complain too much.

Plus, the IEP has been very good to me--helping me secure a high-paying career and all--so I feel working six ~50 hour weeks is a good way to start repaying my debt.

Here's some good news: Kobe Kaisei, the school that's hired me, has reported that the Japanese Immigration Bureau has approved my work visa, and the certificate is headed my way via airmail. Once I have the certificate, I need to take it to the Japanese Consulate in Denver so they can perform one last piece of bureaucracy on my passport. Then the last hurdle is cleared. I figured that I'd need to travel to Denver to perform all this, but a good friend of mine in Japan has informed me that I might be able to send a FedEx pre-paid envelope to the consulate, and they can get everything back to me in about a week. If this works out, no day off, no field trip to Denver, no need for a detailed blog entry (see the previous post).

In unrelated news, here's a funny anecdotal story about teaching Saudi students the intracacies of English Grammar: Earlier this week, we'd been discussing modals--should, would, could, might, will, had better, must, etc.--and appropriate situations to use them. On Wednesday, we were going over modals of advice using exercises from Betty Azar's seminal text, "Understanding English Grammar." Students were presented with hypothetical situations and asked to deliver advice using the forms we'd been drilling. For example, "what advice would you give someone who is getting a divorce?" or "what advice would you give someone who is failing their grammar class?"

My students--ten Saudi boys/men, a Korean guy, and a girl from Ghana--were performing admirably according to the tasks Azar presented, but everything fell apart at the prompt "What advice would you give someone who is traveling to Denmark?"

All of a sudden my Saudi students exploded:

"You SHOULD not go to Denmark!"

"You MUST not go to Denmark!"

"You BETTER NOT go to Denmark!"

Of course I was delighted to hear my students using the form correctly, but I was taken aback by the venom in their contibutions. Then I remembered the whole Danish cartoon controversy, and everything suddenly made sense. After briefly marveling at the collective emotion and cracking a few insensitive jokes, I politely asked them not to hurl rocks or firebombs at me and continued with the lesson.

It was kind of weird to see a fury similar to that shown on CNN evident in a classroom. I've seen the cartoons of course, and half of them don't seem too offensive, but I think the one with the Prophet sporting a bomb in his turban might've been a tad too provocative. Worse, it's utterly nonsensical: why would anyone think to link Islam and its adherents to explosive devices? I don't get it.

I suppose that's enough of a post for tonight. I think I'll end it by posting a beautiful picture I discovered on a CGtalk forum (check the link on the sidebar if you're interested). Anyway, I realize I'm likely infringing on some kind of copyright, but this picture is simply too beautiful to keep to myself. I commend the artist, Jason Chan, on this masterpiece and formally direct any intrigued readers to his personal website at www.jasonchanart.com.

Anyway, here's the image: