well, i did it. i imported my blogger blog into my movabletype! and i brought a couple of friends along the way.

now, until the unveiling of the new howdy, i'll be super secret blogging. and all those other suckers will have to catch up.

at the time of import, my blog was 6069 lines of code. a total of 387 individual posts. all of which i had to meticulously go through twice. first, i added titles to posts from long ago, as a result i ended up reading much of my blog over the last year and a half or so... it was sort of nice to relive it. the second was when i messed up the import and had to change each individual old post from "Draft" to "Publish". !que meticulouso!

well, i'm going to try to have fun with this and getting it looking customized... hopefully, that will come sooner than later... if only i had internet at school...

oh speaking of no internet at school. yesterday i brought my computer to school. i was so bored that i restructured all my messy directories. i totally revamped my documents folder and my wimpkiller folder. now i know what i have to upload and its all in an orderly fashion on my computer. there's nothing better than finding a filing system that you like and can live comfortably with. mine also uses the old color labeling feature on panther. seriously, there's nothing better than an organized filing system.

my friend ryan phillips and I used to play video games in his basement. intermittently, we'd have to beat up and practice fake karate on his emotionally distraught younger brother, seth, who was in love with michael jackson and purple heavy metal guitars. ryan had over 30 something nintendo games and we set out to conquer them all. we'd critique each game and talk forever on the video games we'd create if we, at 8 or 9 years old, worked at nintendo. we'd also practice our WWF moves (on his little brother and his friends). we grew our hair out like Andre Agassi (mullet) and ended up getting lice. we wore nothing but sweatpants and biker shorts everywhere. my favorite color was hot pink. ryan rode around on a woman's bike so it wouldn't rack him. it was in that basement where the older neighbor kids showed us pornography for the first time. we snorted pixie sticks and diet coke. our favorite movies were the Friday the 13th series, the Nightmare on Elm Street series and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. we were good at nintendo. i wrote and illustrated Legend of Zelda fan fiction. our sport of choice was kickball. ryan, the athlete of our duo, went on to play football. i went on to play heavy metal guitars. [/nostalgia]

this weekend was rock and roll. i went to Kyoto to visit my friend Akintunde whom i met at Hope in the City, my church back in Austin. it was a nice weekend filled with good African food, subways (these impress me), temples visits, parties with programmers, nintendo, and expensive parking.

i met nintendo!
one cool - and i mean really cool - thing about Akintunde is that he works for Nintendo. THIS MAN IS LIKE A KING AMONG MEN! just to brag, projects he's worked on: Final Fantasy VII, Metroid Prime, a nice looking giants game that came out in Japan. . . needless to say that makes him radical. he has my dream job. in fact, just last week Akin met Shigeru Miyamoto, godfather of Nintendo, the man who invented Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda, etc. Akin showed me and i got to touch his business card.

being a Nintendo-jin, he also has Nintendo friends. saturday night i found myself being carted around to a corner of Kyoto for a birthday party.. the party was about 15 people or so crammed into a smaller japanese house. there were western guys there who had themselves japanese wives. one co-celebrated person party was for a guy named Dylan... Dylan was one of the the guys who coded Star Fox for the SNES. talk about meeting living legends.

we talked a bit of video games, how they're coded and how they're "made fun". for the 9 year old me, this was a dream come true. i had to confess i had failed computer science due to limited brain capacity and procrastination... chances at a coding job are out of the window. all in all, it was a nice even. and it was interesting for me to watch men relating to japanese wives.. . because, who knows what the future has for me.

in all it was great to hang out with Akin. mainly it was great to hang out with someone from my home church. we just had a common ground, a common thread of DNA apart from just being in japan. in a lot of ways, it was how church is supposed to function by creating brothers and sisters in Christ.

_ ___ _ _ the temple i went to Kiyomizu-dera. This is one of the more famous temples in Kyoto. I've read about it a lot in textbooks, etc... its on every postcard, so i thought i'd take a look. After missing a few bus stops, Akin and i follow the masses up a hill and to the monument. we tend to stand out... me with my beard and Akin with his 7 foot tall Nigerian-ness. sort of funny to walk in a crowd and be at least a head taller than the rest of the people. but we're not the only foreigners. Of course, the market outside of the temple is bustling with hopes of wrangling native and foreign tourists into purchasing overpriced nicknacks. this mercantilism continues on into the temple as well.

as you walk up the stairs you watch people toss their money at a offering box with a grate (presumably, to prevent thieves or to make the worshiper feel their offering is safe) and then shuffle over to a buddhist priest who is writing on and dispensing little pieces of paper, prayers that are to be tied to fences, trees or any place appropriate.. your prayers dwell in the temple grounds until they are taken down. then the people shake a hallow octagonal box and pull out, what looks like a chopstick, a fortune.

rant.07/fortune telling
when will people understand? what fortune teller is going to give you a bad fortune... one that could actually happen? because, let's be honest, you're their source of income! if they keep telling people that they're going to have a shit week and find out their girlfriends are pregnant and going to have an abortion behind their back, then the fortune telling business wouldn't be very popular. check the horoscope one day, not impressed? then just go on the internet and find one you like. not impressed with those? then just wait until tomorrow for it will surely change. [/rant]

around the temple we witness more prayers. the burning of incense, which to me at one point could have been misconstrued as witches working over their cauldron of boiling sorcery. i gawked open jawed as i watched the patrons pray. we finished our walk around the temple grounds and took pictures of pagodas. we then walked back down the hill a different way and took the long way to a shrine... there was a shortcut, but we didn't know about it. this shrine was pretty big.

the shrine
upon entering this shrine we saw a big banner that, translated, read "BAD LUCK YEARS!" and then it proceeded to graph out which years were years of bad luck according to the Shinto tradition. then it gave the years prior to bad luck.. how do you escape this cursed year of birth? that's right! you pay money for prayers and protection via an omamori, a talisman for protection.

rant.02/which religion not to follow
just a public service announcement... if any religion tells you that this year is a bad year for you, so you have to give money for some talisman to protect you from the bad... expect a scam! [/rant]

this temple was of the same feel of the last one... i watched countless people. some were jovially approaching the banister with a child-like quality, while others vacuumed their emotion into emotionless reverence and gravity. this changed me a bit i think. i realized i take my religion for granted. i realized how different the sound of prayer is in this religion and mine. i'll tangent more on this later.

_ ___ _ _ afternoon in a small bar with small time music i made haste back from Kyoto in the early morning after forking over a total of about $50 in parking fees for the weekend. the drive back was nice. japanese roads are stupid, sign-less, and one lane when there should be two // but they sure are pretty. driving through rice paddies and in valleys of mountains along rivers may never get old to me. i hope.

just hours later, i met a friend of mine, the owner of our local anglophile bar, picked me up and took me to another bar for an open-mic session he was playing at. the bar was as big as a small living room packed with a full bar with chairs, sound equipment, and a grand piano. a chair was up out in an empty corner for the open-mic. i wanted to sort of hide myself and not meet people, because it was awkward, but i ended up meeting some nice people - one guy who wanted me to take him home with me next time i go home... how to get out of that? home is vacation, not translation time... i think. the musicians mostly played a bluesy sort of style with appropriate well-practiced licks. words in japanese. my friend, the bar owner, played some english songs: "wonderwall" by Oasis and "i can't get my eyes off you" by what's his name, the old guy... i like this song a lot.

i can make any long story short i suppose, but they told me i had to play at the next open mic night in a month. great. i have no songs. pressure's on.

this is the end...
my only friend. this is the end (of this post). i have a lot more stuff but i'm in the middle of changing my blog... so i'll hopefully post it from my new blog. its exciting to me... but a challenge. so! you'll have to update your links if you this blog doesn't come up next time you show up. ok. peace out.

maybe i've already said this, but these things really impress me. i think God must dwell in them because they are so massive, so secretive. i think i could walk through them all day and never understand anything about where i am... they connect all throughout the city like underground hallways that shift millions of people each day. the massiveness of a subway terminal and all its cascading layers approaches infinity of complexities in my brain, so it becomes something i know i could never understand. its capacity blows me away. blows me away. makes me think of God.. . because i know He's bigger than a subway system. uh-oh, my brain has approached infinity. [/tangent]

i'm awake right now... much to my future self's regret in the morning.

so this week has been pretty good (compared to the last, swing low!).. but i'm back in action. and i owe it all to a book (its a good one, you should read it!).

today i got the sitar out and glued it up... now its in perfect resonating order. thank god it wasn't a waste of money. and there's an English teacher in my town who spent 6 months in India studying Raga... that's fortunate.

reoccuring dreams
so why have i summoned you hear? this week, for three nights in a row, i had a three different dreams in which i pooped my pants. it baffles even me.

earrings for susan's debut
so.... here's the mp3! my solo project has been both tenatively and decidedly called earrings for susan, after my mom. that and i like the name susan. i love you, mom. this song however doesn't quite reflect my mom's beauty... i don't know if its possible. but its a song i made... and my band (my computer and i) have to start somewhere... this version still isn't final. that will come in the year 2007 or so. maybe in the near future there will be more EFS mp3s featuring: more lonely guitars, more emo than you can shake your glasses at, "a very merry sitar christmas", ambient music, and election election covers as well. rock on, sparticus!