Seoul Incheon: not actually very remarkable. It’s a big modern airport very much like many other big modern airports. It’s not ideally designed: it requires walking maybe 1500 meters from one end to the other, for military arrivals at least. Still, its linear design means it is at least simple. Also, free internet and occasional power ports make things nice.

Beijing: ridiculously, monumentally enormous. The extra open architecture is very pretty and enhances the impression of spaciousness. It’s got a modest selection of duty free shops and restaurants. For all its size, it’s strangely empty: the restroom has queueing lines and handy symbols built in to speed traffic through its 20 stalls and 40 urinals, but I had it to myself. Perhaps the decision not to heat it had something to do with that. There are occasional power ports, but they are of the wrong shape and voltage. Internet is available if you pay cash yuan at the business center. There is no easy way to get cash yuan. Important: do not attempt to connect there using military id and orders in lieu of passport; you’ll be turned back by Customs.

Newark Liberty: relentlessly commercial. Like many US airports, there is pretty obviously more security in place than the architecture was designed for. My overriding impression of the airport comes from one flight where I connected there from Japan: my bag took 90 minutes to emerge from the baggage claim, and then the line to re-check it ate another 150. Needless to say, I missed my connection from all of this. It wasn’t nearly so bad this time, at least. Internet and power are available at business kiosks.

Manchester Boston: a small feeder airport with aspirations to eventually grow into a hub. Its current compact size and low traffic makes it feel very comfortable. Power and wireless internet are both easy to find and free.

Tokyo Narita: efficient, artistic, elegant. Probably the most comfortable airport for its size I’ve ever been in. It’s also one of the more complex, but there is plenty of clear signage to help find the way around. Power and wireless internet are ubiquitous, but the “you’ve successfully joined our wireless page” is actually a multilingual set of links to various ways to pay for the connection to get it to stop redirecting all traffic to the links page.

Military:

RKSM (Seoul Airbase): as my home airbase, it’s the place I’m most familiar with. It’s unique in my experience of military airfields in not having a greasy spoon type diner attached to the flight ops building somewhere. The airbase is actually run by the Koreans, with K-16 being a plot leased to the US military.

RKSO (Osan Airbase): this place is run by the Air Force, so I don’t often go there. Still, if you want to see an F-16, an A-10, or a U-2 on the ramp, this is the place to (occasionally) find them.

RKSG (Camp Humphreys): this is where we actually do most training, as it’s the nearest airbase actually run by the US Army. Here’s where the rest of 2CAB, meaning the Apaches, Chinooks, and another battalion of Black Hawks, are based.

RKSY (Yongsan Garrison): a tiny heliport barely large enough to fit two Black Hawks simultaneously, it’s still a common destination because Yongsan is where a lot of the command structure for Korea is located.

RKJK (Kunsan Airbase): another Air Force base, this one only gets mentioned because it has the nicest Flight Ops building and pilot lounge I’ve ever been in. I believe it homes F-16s.

RKTG (Camp Walker): this place apparently used to have a fairly large air contingent; you can still see the remains of a runway suitable for fixed wings, and there’s plenty of parking and refuel space. However, at some point buildings were constructed over both ends of the runway, leaving only a single helicopter pad. It does have an exceptionally nice USO building.

I got lucky, though. In my Japanese class in college, there was a woman named Sarah. By lucky coincidence, she grew up maybe half an hour from my hometown, she attended the same Japanese class that I did, and most importantly, she was part of a student exchange program that put her in Tokyo the same year that I was in the next prefecture over. She was pretty. She was friendly. She was engaged. Actually seeing her took some effort, as we were about 100 minutes from each other by train, but the prospect of conversation unencumbered by inhibition made the journey worth my while.

Every few months, then, I would arrange to go do something with her. We went to an amusement park; we went to explore Yokohama; we celebrated an American-style Thanksgiving with her homestay parents; we did many things. Most of those events remain only as snapshot memories from which I derive the rest of the occasion, but one really stands out in my mind: the road trip.

It was early spring, and we both wanted to try something beyond typical tourist attractions, something that would get both of us to a part of Japan that neither had seen before. We decided to rent a car in Tokyo and drive north to a natural hot spring resort in the mountains of Nagano. The area gets few non-Japanese tourists, and it seemed a good way to get a bit more immersion than usual. Renting a car in Tokyo was easy to accomplish, and reserving a room in a ryokan, a Japanese-style small inn, was only slightly more difficult. Everything seemed like it was going to be easy.

Driving in Tokyo is crazy, but not really all that much more crazy than driving in Boston or New York. It turns out to be really easy to adapt to driving on the left side of the road; the only hard part to adapt to was the fact that the windshield wiper and blinker switches were on opposite sides from what I expect. The road signs were rare and usually incomprehensible, but it was for that reason that we had reserved a car with a built-in GPS unit. We hit a small snag when we realized that neither of us could understand the GPS interface well enough to actually program in our destination, but we did what anyone would: we pulled into a gas station, showed the address of our destination and the GPS unit, said “onegai” (please) and “wakarimasen” (we don’t understand) a lot, and gave our best puppy-dog eyes. The station attendant was friendly, as every service-industry employee in Japan is, and pushed a lot of buttons on the screen and then it was showing arrows and a colored line projecting from our current location. We thanked him, and drove.

I am skeptical of the notion that any two people together in a confined space will of necessity become friends. That trip, though, tested my skepticism. Sarah and I didn’t have a whole lot in common beyond a shared interest in Japan and Japanese, but we found that in that car, we could just talk. Somehow, hours of what would have been tedious cross-country driving alone became vibrant and enjoyable. We noted the scenery when it was remarkable–surprisingly often, it was–but other than that, time just seemed to vanish.

In retrospect, there were plenty of hints that the GPS wasn’t taking us where we expected to go. The gas-station man had said quite a bit, actually; we just couldn’t understand much of it. As we ascended the mountains of central Japan, there was quite a bit of snow, but we passed a point in the early afternoon when the snow started going away. There was the fact that, hours after we had expected to have arrived, we were still on the highway with quite a long strip of hilighted road showing on the GPS. Despite all that, both of us were surprised when we saw a rare English-translated road sign: “Welcome to Niigata City.” Shortly after that, we discovered a beach. We had driven clear across Japan en route to its center.

There really wasn’t a whole lot we could do about that except laugh. We played on the beach of the Sea of Japan; we ate dinner, and then we went off to find a more competent gas-station man. Accomplishing that, we set out and drove again.

By the time we arrived and checked into the ryokan, it was well after dark and there was no hope of catching any of the attractions we had planned originally to see that day. There was no time to waste on a weekend trip though, so we asked the owner if there was anything interesting still open. He shrugged, and pointed us to an izakaya, which is more or less a Traditional Japanese Pub.

Imagine a Pub in the romantic sense: it is the relaxation area of the common man, where the locals of a town will gather each night to unwind. It is a place of joviality and games, and the friendly atmosphere of the working folk of a small town who have all known each other forever. Now, make it Japanese: beer is beer the world around, but instead of darts, there is karaoke. Instead of wood paneling and hunting trophies on the wall, there are tatami mats on the floor and calligraphy on the walls. Best of all, instead of hostile locals suspicious of any outsider, the people there were delighted to talk to foreigners, to buy us drinks, to compete with us in karaoke. It was a fascinating night.

The next day, we visited a natural hot spring in the area, known for having been discovered and first used by monkeys. The thing about monkeys is that no matter how often they bathe in a hot spring, they still make the whole area smell like monkey residue. We visited and touristed around for a while, and then we headed back for the long drive back to Tokyo.

The overwhelming majority of the time that weekend was spent in the car. We spent more driving time to vacation time on that trip than on perhaps any other trip of my life. Despite all that, despite the unanticipated addition of hours of driving, I can’t say that that time was wasted. Quite the contrary: it is rare to spend so much time in one go in a state of perfect companionship. Those hours of driving are a treasure in my memory.

I have two part time jobs I acquired while filing the Army application. Both of them strike unexpectedly and require my full time, then leave off for a period giving me nothing to do. I am a small-bid freelance coder and substitute high-school teacher. These jobs aren’t the best, but I find that I’m not bad at keeping a schedule of frantic deadline rushes interspersed with complete R&R time. It meshes well with my sleep schedule, at least.

If for some reason you are tempted to send me Christmas presents, know that I love to read novels. Particularly really good ones. Everything else is pretty well taken care of for the moment.

I am thinking of convening a group of people for a holiday party of some sort. This is complicated by the fact that, with a very few exceptions, no two of the people I would invite live within an hour’s drive of each other, and the geographic center of our locations is out of driving range for everyone. I may have to just assume that everyone can get to Boston. Most likely, nothing will come of this unless I see interest. Consider this advance notice, at least.

Then, the TSA imposes a ban on “all beverages, shampoo, suntan lotion, creams, tooth paste, hair gel, and other items of similar consistency” in carry-on baggage. In other words, if you’re travelling with toothpaste (and that’s the only way to travel when your mother is a dentist), your option is to check your bag. Hassle-free flight is a dream from the past, apparantly.

This is asinine. This is the sort of rampant paranoia which I find hard to believe. This is cutting off your nose because it had a zit on it.

I arrived back in this country a week ago and already I wish I lived somewhere else.

2 August: Tokyo -> Boston -> Rochester, NH
12 August: Boston -> Seattle
18 August: Seattle -> Newark
(NJ stuff goes here–details to be figured out later)
20? August: NJ -> vertumnus1′s family’s place
27? August: Drive back to NH

I actually have very little detail on the movements after the 18th, but those are being coordinated by people who aren’t me.

Earlier this week, I found out that they were actually angling for possibility number three.

I’ve agreed to stay one month past the end of my contract, and teach classes through 31 July. This technically isn’t required, but I’d feel like an asshole to refuse them. Given the special circumstances, they gave me extra time to finish things up before leaving the country; I don’t have to fly out until 2 August.

I’m still planning on taking about a month’s vacation before proceeding to my next job, whatever that ends up being. This just delays it a bit. Given that I’ve got the time and money saved up to travel all over the US visiting people during that time, let me know if you’re interested in seeing me we’ll see what we can work out in terms of travel plans. As things stand, it looks like I’ll be arriving in Boston late on the 2nd, and proceeding from there.

The last weekend of this month has come and gone, and I can say with certainty that this is not a trip I will forget soon.

It started with a rental car. One of the strongest guidelines when planning this trip was that it was to be cheap; neither my friend nor I wanted to spend more than was absolutely necessary, because near the end of the month both our budgets were stretching. There was a cheap ryokan with an onsen* (~$40 per person per night) a reasonable distance out, but it would cost $80 per person for a five hour train ride on the local trains, or $120 for a shorter ride on the shinkansen. Luckily, I discovered that it’s possible to rent a car for the weekend for only $80, so in theory we could actually pull off the entire trip for under $100 per person, which seemed reasonable.

Driving in Japan, in general, is not actually as big a transition as I had expected. It’s not very difficult to stay on the proper side of the road, and road signs are generally easy to understand, at least on such issues as the speed limit, one way roads, and general traffic control. The biggest issue is that the blinker lever and the windshield wiper lever are on opposite sides of the steering wheel; all too often, I would attempt to signal a turn and set the wipers in motion instead.

The car rental place with the good deal, however, was located in the middle of Tokyo. Driving in Tokyo is not pleasant. It’s got the congestion of New York, the street layout of Boston, and it occupies a larger area than either of those. Furthermore, the signage with respect to major roads is ambiguous and confusing, even though major words are listed in roman characters. After about 90 minutes of general confusion trying to find the proper highway out of the city, we pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant to program the car’s GPS route-planner for us**. Luckily enough, the attendant there was very helpful and friendly, and after about five minutes of fiddling with the controls he had the GPS displaying a dotted line of arrows along the intended route. He conveyed that he hadn’t put in our exact destination, but an approximation which should serve until we were closer to the destination and could get someone else to reprogram the GPS for us.

With the help of the GPS and its associated software, we soon made it out of the city and on our way. By 2pm, we arrived at the end point of the GPS’ programmed route, and sought out another person to reprogram the GPS. To our great dismay, we discovered that we were in Niigata–on the coast of the Japan sea, about twice as far as the ryokan. We had assumed that the gas station man had programmed an intermediate destination; he had instead sent us to the endpoint of the correct highway.

There wasn’t much to do at that point except curse the gas station man soundly, play in the ocean a bit, and turn around. After another four hours of scenic Japanese highway***, we finally made it to the ryokan, where we were delighted to be greeted in person by the proprietor, who spoke quite good English. After we were checked in and settled, we headed to a nearby izakaya**** for dinner, and maybe drinks. As it turned out, gaijin were a rarity in that place, and the locals were happy to buy us sake while we sang american songs at the karaoke machine and chatted with them in whatever combination of English and Japanese we could muster between the lot of us.

The next day, we headed out to the nearby wildlife park to see the snow monkeys cavorting in the natural hot springs. While there was a large colony of monkeys in the park, they seemed reluctant to enter the water until the park attendant threw some food in, at which point there was a mob.

The monkey park was at the end of a path of decent length up the side of a mountain. Across a small valley, there was an onsen for people based on the same hot springs. I must say it was much more enjoyable than the artificial onsen at the ski place, in large part because there was almost nobody else there. The indoor bath was comfortable, but what really made this onsen memorable was the outdoor bath. Apparently, though the practice becomes rarer as time passes and as population densities increase, it was common at one point for onsen to be mixed-gender installations. This practice has not entirely died out. Though the indoor baths were segregated at the baths near the monkey park, both indoor baths had doors leading to the same outdoor bath. That would have been easy for me to deal with, particularly as the mixing of genders was entirely theoretical while I was there; there were no women in attendance. What made the experience hair-raising was the fact that the outdoor bath was situated such that one had a magnificent view of the mountain across the valley, and the path up it–and all the people on the path had an equally unobstructed view of the bathers.

I did try the outdoor bath, reasoning that this was not a chance that would present itself to many people, and I would rather preserve my adventurousness than my modesty. That said, I watched carefully and made sure that there was nobody on the path before venturing between the indoor bath and the outdoor. There was one guy, however, who had no such qualms. He was standing outside the outdoor bath, stretching, relaxing, and enjoying the view. When I first ventured out, he said in decent English that the water there was too hot for him; apparently, he was not going to let this spoil his enjoyment of the outdoor scenery. At one point, he waved to someone on the path, standing tall so as not to be missed.

I didn’t stay in the outdoor bath for very long.

After walking back from the onsen, it was time for us to head back to Tokyo. We would have had a pretty smooth time of it, as it was simplistic to tell the GPS “lead us home.” However, traffic on the way into the city was inexplicably dense for a Sunday evening, and we lost an hour and a half in the jams.

Last weekend was an adventure of the sort that I’ve grown up reading about and wishing to have. Yes, we were lost most of the time, spent four times as much as we meant to*****, and had an itinerary meager enough that just reading about it is undoubtedly making the more planning-oriented members of my family cringe. At the same time, it was time spent in enjoyable company, doing interesting things (at least while we weren’t driving). It felt full, and satisfying. In particular, the whole thing felt like a more authentic experience than I expect most people have. I’ve stayed in high-class hotels in both the western and the japanese style, and I’ve done most of the touristy things to do in Japan. I’m not going to complain about comfort, luxury, or style, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a sanitized vision of Japan presented to tourists. Going on this trip, I feel like I’ve peeked behind the curtain, and seen the sort of thing that I would as a native. Being able to say that is immensely satisfying.

Of course, it was raining with varying intensity all day, which meant that as I was walking around Worcester and Boston I ended up soaked. I’m thinking that it might be a good idea to buy a waterproof jacket, or maybe an umbrella…

The talk went pretty well. He’s an entertaining speaker, and I was interested to note that he draws exactly the way I do. He’s much, much better at it… but he outlines the face, then adds hair, then features, always going back and forth from one section of the drawing to another adding detail and refinement. Not at all the way art schools teach you… MIT has some neat gadgets in its lecture halls, such as a bed with a video camera mounted on a stick above it which lets you see, for example, books, or a guy drawing a picture in realtime.

At times he seemed almost scared of the audience. There were a few fairly rabid fans, who were thrilled enough to see the person behind the pixels that they forgot he was not there to have a one-on-one conversation with them about how great he is. Also, one person cosplayed as Ping…

All of this is either mildly interesting, if you’re a fan of the comic, or not interesting at all, if you’re not. So I’ll talk about the other thoughts this trip inspired.

I had several hours to just wander around MIT, stop at the museum, explore. It made me think that going to grad school might not be so bad an idea; it could be fun to go there, or Caltech, or someplace big and interesting and work on some really fun projects. I haven’t really thought this out in depth yet, and I may not end up doing it… but it could be fun. And even MIT doesn’t have as bad a gender ratio as we do, apparantly…

Everyone, enjoy your summer. I know that I’m going to have a blast, and I expect the rest of you to as well.

I read incessantly. Sometimes I stop for a time because I am busy, or because there are other things on my mind, but those times never last long at all. Sometimes a day or two. More often, an hour or two.

Why do I do this? Because sometimes I find someone who has written something good. It may be a piece of prose that sings within me, causes me to see the scene as if I were watching it in a movie with a souped-up emotion track. It may be an idea so interesting that I have to sit back and just think about its ramifications for a few minutes. It may be an argument that boils my blood to the point where, after reading it twice, and then again, I have to stand up and run about the house angrily denouncing the point of view and all its fallacies to anyone who will listen. But for each of these experiences, I have to wade through mountains of lesser material. I do it gladly.

I was not one of the early adopters of the internet. I was born too late for that. But I have been playing with computers since I was tiny. Still, they were always a diversion, a platform for games, a testing ground for programs of one sort or another. It was not until late in high school, when my family got broadband, when I had the freedom to sit at the computer for hours and browse, that I really adopted the internet.

But once I found it, it was perfect. And endless repository of information, about anything I can think of. I can happily sit at the computer for hours, and hours, just following links to new and interesting parts of the internet I haven’t been to before. Sometimes I go to google and type in random words as a search, just to see what shows up. Sometimes it is interesting. Often enough, it is good.

In the past, I have called myself an information junkie. But that is not entirely accurate. For the most part, information for its own sake is not good enough. I have a book about battleships in my room at home. It is a large book, designed for the reference section in libraries, full of blueprints and tables of information. But those are not why I value the information. I value the stories. The battles fought, who won, why.

I have read a dictionary of the english language. It was terribly dry. I forced myself through it. And you know what? It wasn’t a waste. The etymologies of the words were little stories, frequent enough to entice me to keep reading, little tidbits of interesting ideas, like chocolate ships in a vast field of corn bread. Except they seemed much more in context.

I started reading through an encyclopedia soon afterwards, and I couldn’t do it. Because for every little article about something interesting, there were five huge ones filled with tables and figures that weren’t in the least bit interesting. Frankly, I could not care less if Nigeria’s coal imports steadily increased between the years 1965-1980. But I found that the articles about politicians, the articles about history, the articles about war, kept my attention quite well.

History class was still a challenge, though. There was all this attention paid to names, and dates, and places, and none at all to the history itself. I don’t have any interest or memory for the details. So I don’t know the name of the man who led an expedition to a fort which I can’t name within the Canadian border to retrieve cannon held there for General Washington to use during the siege of Boston during the Revolutionary war… but I know the story all the same. I can even tell you the name of the book I got it from. Guns for General Washington. I don’t know the author. But if you want to teach me history, I decided, don’t give me a textbook that talks about the Boston Massacre with a contemporary illustration, reprinted with permission; give me Johnny Tremain.

I think that’s the only real reason why I prefer fiction to nonfiction: the authors feel compelled to write stories, and make them interesting. Nonfiction authors seem to have a compulsion to relate the facts, as briefly and dryly as possible. For a similar reason, I prefer to stay away from most mainstream fiction, and stick toward the edge: science fiction. fantasy. anime. manga. It irks me that the most popular, the best selling fiction always seems to be either steamy romance, cheesy horror, or murder mystery. Because those genres are defined. There is nothing new to say about romance; it’s just rearranging the adjectives and pushing the envelope of popular morality a little bit farther. Horror is hard to convey because the only source of fear are the unknown and your own mortality, and it’s exceedingly difficult to find and author who conveys that fear well. And murder mysteries have the same appeal to me that solving jigsaw puzzles and mounting them does: it may give a small sense of satisfaction, but it’s time better spent elsewhere.

No, when you look for writing that makes you think, writing that has influenced the world, you have to look to the edge. 1984, Brave New World, Alas, Babylon… everyone knows of these works, yet they were all written for a niche market of science fiction writers.

That’s enough of my literary tastes. People will disagree, and neither of us is going to change your opinion for the other. I don’t hate all popular writers. I just think it’s harder to find the interesting ones. Ill give you Vonnegut as the exception who proves the rule.

I write. I despair of ever becoming as prolific a writer as Piers Anthony, as interesting as Robert Heinlein, as clever as Neal Stephenson, or as smart as Larry Niven. But I write all the same, because it’s one way in which I can contribute. I feast upon the Internet every day for interesting ideas, and I leave behind tidbits like this occasionally. Logically, there’s no way I’m putting back enough interesting writing, enough insightful art to make up for what I read. But that’s the beauty of the scheme: if thousands of people each put forward just a little bit of something they thought up and think is clever, there’s a bounty rich enough that it’s unthinkable to try to know it all. I write, I draw, I create, not because I hope that what I am producing is interesting or good now, but in the hopes that eventually I will make something that someone else will look at and say to themselves, “that is good“. I’ll never know when or if that happens, but with luck, the day will come eventually. Until then, I write. And for every word I write, I read a thousand. Otherwise, where would I get my ideas?