I normally do all my Japan blogging on the other, but this has fuck-all to do with comics so here goes:

Tonight I paid $16 to have fish nibble dead skin off of my feet.

I think those might actually be Jim’s feet. But yes, at the onsen we visited they had a very unique pedicure service, where one could shed the dry skin from one’s feet via ravenous, tiny fish. It tickled to high hell, though the idea of it was far worse, for me, than the actually feeling.

More pics to come, but yes, the fish eat your feet.

- Chris

My apartment, and me, December 2008

So just after Christmas, our Landlord finally got serious about renting out the long-time-empty main floor of our apartment building. He also added a new wrinkle to the mix, putting the entire building up for sale… I guess he was tired of not really being a very good landlord. He wasn’t bad at it or anything, at least so far as we were concerned, he just wasn’t particularly interested in it… I kinda think he got saddled with the responsibility by his parents, who’ve since moved out of Canada.

What selling the building means, in concrete terms, is that we will have a new landlord (eventually) and that’s that. We have no real interest in moving. What it means in general though, is that for the better part of 4 months potential buyers have been traipsing through my apartment as they “inspect the building” before buying. It means that we get about 24 hours notice before a tour group is coming through, and if that happens to co-incide with wanting to stay in bed, well, tough shit. There’s also the added enjoyment (note: sarcasm) of not knowing whether or not a potential buyer for the building has any interest in keeping us as tenants. Which means that every single person moving through my apartment is also judging me as a possible tenant. Their right, of course, but no less… awkward… for me… or us I suppose.

Up until today, I had been vacating the apt before a viewing, but today a combination of being under-the-weather and f’ing exhausted meant that I couldn’t come up with anywhere to go for an hour that didn’t make me nauseous. So I sat here pleasantly on the couch, Andrew on the computer in the bedroom, and we ‘entertained’ a slightly befuddled real estate agent and a tour group of 3 older Korean people, who asked us if our roof leaked (no). Then we sort of looked at each other. Then I went back and started twittering, and they twittered amongst themselves in Korean. And then they left, to go do the same thing to our neighbours (who–ha ha–were also home today).

The thing that has helped me completely not lose my shit (I deleted the phrase “put my mind at ease,” because my mind if far from at ease…) is that Andrew went and looked up the Ontario Housing such-and-such rules for evicting a tenant, and since we’re on a month-to-month lease, about the only way our current–or potential–landlord could get us out against our will would be if they wanted to move into the space themselves, or move in a member of their family. Which is nice, though there’s clearly a thousand ways around that. Like, saying they’re going to move in, and then… not. Because what’re we gonna do?

So the idea of pre-emptively moving has come up… leaving on our own terms rather than getting a piece of registered mail telling us that we’ve got 60 days to find a new place. The horror of it is, for me, that I’m both incredibly comfortable in this place, and incredibly lazy too.  I don’t want to move. Even the promise of a bigger, better place to live doesn’t outweigh the sheer amount of work that it’s going to take to pack up the massive amount of shit that we’ve accumulated, and move it all to somewhere new.

For example: On Friday, friends of our announced on Facebook that they were giving up their apartment (they bought a place), and it was first-come, first served. $1500 a month for a loft style 1 bedroom + den, 2000 square feet, about twice as much space as we have now! The utility bills were lower, the space was amazing, and it had lots of big bare walls for our bookshelves. And… I couldn’t pull the trigger. Realistically it’s about a hundred bucks a month more than we could comfortably afford for rent, but it’s also… the work! THE WORK! I have like 15 double Diamond boxes of graphic novels alone! Not counting art books, or novels, or the boxes of single-issue comics in the closet that I try not to think about! And that’s just the books. The idea of moving anything at all even for an awesome, awesome apartment (it was awesome!) is just not attractive at all, by which I mean I refuse.

I am aware this is unrealistic. Eventually, I will need to move.

I’d been telling myself for the past few years that I wasn’t going to move until I was moving into a place that we bought. I want to move… once. For the next 10 years. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that that’s a pipe-dream at best, that anywhere we could currently afford to buy is nowhere we’d want to live. You’ve caught me, at the time of writing, in the middle of a major realization. I might actually end up in another apartment in Toronto before I buy a home. It’s… depressing.

That said, I am trying to get ready for the eventuality that 60 days from now I’ll be apartment-hunting. I’ve begun to bring in bags of books to The Beguiling to sell, knowing that every bag is a full box that I’m not gonna have to eventually box and lift up and down three flights of stairs. I am throwing stuff out at a frightening pace (anything recyclable is going into the recycle bin, don’t worry). But perhaps most important, I’m beginning to change my mindset from simply dreading the possibility of a move to actually thinking about what that might entail, what I might want out of a new place, and what I can do to make a potential move as easy as possible.

So, in the end, I don’t think I’m going to be moving. I know I will, but at least it’s a ways away.

Sigh.

- Christopher

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/22/bbc-winter-olympics-inuit-cartoon

Loved this, really striking. No embedding, sadly, but go check it out.

- Chris

I almost forgot I had this blog.

So 2010 is here! It’s pretty good so far. I’ve been blogging up a storm over at Comics212, my reflections on manga from the decade that just passed. I’m not normally one for a “looking back” type post, but what the hell, I was inspired, and so far it’s been a hit. The second-last one is gonna be tough though… still wrapping my head around what I want to say.

What else… It’s been ridiculously busy, even above and beyond the blogging (which has been so consistant so far! I really wanna keep it up). It occurs to me that I intended to start writing more this year, possibly for money, and about things other than comics. I’ve got a few ideas in me so far, but I was just doing a search on gay life in Japan, and the stuff that’s out there is awful. I mean, I found it helpful when I was first looking into what gay life (and nightlife) was like in Japan before I headed there in 2007… but so far as I can tell, almost none of the material has been updated SINCE then.

Japan has a sort of strange relationship with the internet, where a lot of Japanese gay stuff is very specifically Japanese-only, as they’re not interested in having to deal with foreigners. I kind of get that, but there’s still a gap of information for people like me, who are heading there, or people who are going to the country for teaching or exchange or whatever. You can (and will) be welcomed in Japan, if you know what you’re doing. How do you know what you’re doing? Ideally, you just do as much research as you can and then throw yourself into the scene… if you’re me, and are generally unafraid of the consequences. But, and I know this will strike you as difficult to believe, there are people out there who are shyer than I am, and they don’t necessarily want to deal with the gay and the language barrier and the being thousands of km from home all at the same time. There’s no real writing, certainly nothing up to date, to help a newb navigate the customs and rabbit-warrens of Japanese gay bars.

Admittedly, I feel like on some level that is exactly the way Japanese gay bar owners want it, for the most part. You still see signs like:

Stolen from http://www.wordpress.tokyotimes.org/?p=2486

… more often than you might think. In fact, and here’s a good example of what I’m talking about, some gay establishments, particularly the more risque ones, will have signs like this posted out in front on purpose. Why? Because any foreigner who really knows what goes on in a place like that will disregard the sign and go in. But any foreigner that stumbles into what they think is your run-of-the-mill sento and sees a sign like that will walk out (or make a fuss), indignant, rather than getting themselves into a situation they weren’t expecting inside said establishment, where things would go much worse for all involved if a foreigner got angry or indignant.

But is that sort of information readily available? Well organized? Is anyone like  ”your gay buddy in Japan” walking you through it? Not that I can find.

And that’s just one thing. So I’d very much love someone to pay me to write about that, for an appropriate audience, in 2010. I’d like people to pay me to write about all sorts of stuff. We’ll see. I’m going to start knocking on doors soon.

- Chris

All I Want For Christmas Is The Octopus Pie Christmas Special from Meredith Gran on Vimeo.

Get it, wrapping/rapping? Oh the 80s, you were inventing it as you went along. Anyway, I first heard this one on CFNY before it turned into ‘the edge’, years after it was released and an alt-music hit. But I grew to love it nonetheless, alongside other alt-classics.

Edit: Updated for a more fun video.

- Chris