Happy New Year

To my parents dismay, I spent my first(albeit relatively uneventful) "Holiday Season" in Japan. Lots of youtube live music, a day-trip ski vacation(with video!), a beard, no haircut, drinking in an expensive hotel lobby, going to a shrine on new year's eve at 2am, and lots of led zeppelin - namely physical graffiti.

To further complicate the progress of my band(hopefully it will prove to better serve it in the grand scheme of things....) we kicked out dave. Dave and I basically totally disagreed about what made good drumming for our songs, but he is otherwise one of the nicest people i Know. it made kicking him out especially difficult, and i think he was pretty hurt, but he did admit it wasn't something he hadn't thought about himself. Hopefully when this blows over a bit we can all still go out etc. Now the new search begins - as i have been preoccupied with recording/sequencing drums for all of the new riffs i'm writing, i have delegated the drummer ad-writing to the other two and their japanese better halves. I'd really like to play with a Japanese drummer, but drum skill is going to take top priority, so we'll see what happens.

I was reading Bertrand Russel's "History of Western Philosopy", and made it to Athens, and have again put it down. I hope to knock out another chunk soon. Pythagoras was nuts.

i bought yet another japanese guitar - a yamaha this time - fucking rips. i'm stoked.

i also bought a record player in order to force myself to reestablish my relationship with full albums. been good - i'm going to buy some more when i recoup some of my losses from the guitar purchase.

Skiing was pretty awesome. It snowed all day, which kept the crowds down. I was pretty eager to hit the moguls. Fate would have it that a mogul team of about 15 people formed a line all day on the slope so that they could ski the entire thing one at a time and critique each other. my politeness prevented me from going ahead at first. Was annoying, not to mention embarrassing, as my first(well basically all) runs in 5 years were less than pretty. fortunately the video yurika tried to take of that didn't turn out.

i went to my 2nd japanese class since the breat this evening, and I'm in a little over my level, which is great. However, there's this one middle-aged dude from California, that although pretty fluent, makes a shitload of mistakes and repeats them after the teacher corrects him - i think that only gets on my nerves because of being on the other side of the table with students like that. he's not afraid to talk though, which keeps things interesting, even though he likes making sweeping generalizations about japan such as "all japanese salarymen are robots". He went to duke, and tried to start some shit about basketball ("I AM THE ENEMY- mwaHAHAHAHAHA") - i guess assuming i went to unc. i informed him that i had worked at duke for a while and didn't really care about b-ball.

The other people are a woman(about 40) from montana, who is really sweet, and a girl from myanmar who is also cool. A far better dynamic than last winter, with rob "It's a man's world, guys" australian dude, and a woman from Algeria who got angry every time she didn't understand something.

I have been reviewing in my NOdai(tokyo's agricultural university) classes for the upcoming final exam. I asked them to write some questions to ask each other about their vacations - my favorite was "Did you do?"

I am going to see spoon on the 6th and the Police on the 14th. They are both cool, but a little too close to adult contemporary to be back to back. i need to see some heavy music soon,.