Hidemi's Rambling No.285

Japanese people spend New Year's Eve cleaning. Basically, they spend the closing days of the year on cleaning frantically because somehow they need to clean up the house thoroughly and wash the car before the new year comes. The cleaning reaches the climax on New Year's Eve. Mothers also need to prepare the special meal for New Year's. The pressure that everything has to be done by New Year makes them prickly all day. They often take it out to someone in their families. So, New Year's Eve is a day of cleaning and fighting in Japan. I recall few New Year's Eves in my childhood that I managed to escape my mother's scolding. I sincerely wanted to get rid of that custom, and have firmly decided not to clean up on New Year's Eve. Even so, every year I find myself cleaning up somewhere in my apartment in spite of myself. I did it today, too. Does DNA work in this act...?

Hidemi's Rambling No.284

The finals of the Japanese ‘manzai’ tournament was held yesterday. ‘Manzai’ is one of Japanese comedy styles, which is a stand-up comedy by two or more comedians as a team. The tournament for both professionals and amateurs is held annually and decides the best comedy team in Japan. The finals is broadcast live nationwide and the winner takes one hundred thousand dollars. It’s a big annual event for me, as I adore Japanese comedians. I wait for this event for the whole year like Christmas, wondering who will win each year. Prior to this year’s finals though, I heard the shocking news. The tournament would be discontinued and it was going to be the last one this year. To me, it’s like Super Bowl isn’t held anymore. They cooked up various reasons for the termination but it’s obviously due to lack of sponsorship and the ratings. I can’t believe that more people watched a figure skating this year that was aired on a different channel. While watching the last ‘manzai’ competition on TV, clenching my hands for excitement as usual, I knew how much I would miss this event. Now, my favorite comedy tournament is over, so is ‘LOST’, so is Christmas. Our new song is completed and come new year, the move to my new place will be in full swing. When change happens, many things come to an end simultaneously. It’s a little sad, but that’s what moving forward is all about…

Hidemi's Rambling No.283

I saw God for the first time in my dream the other day. I was preparing for work in my room. I looked out the window and noticed three small dots in the cloudy sky. While I was figuring out whether they were aircraft or UFOs, the three black dots were getting bigger and bigger as they were coming closer. They were flying with tremendous speed toward my window and I recognized each dot was in the shape of a human. The two of them were leading the way for the third one that was flying a little behind them. I was extremely frightened and covered my eyes. Even so, I felt an urge to see them and opened my eyes. They were hovering right in front of the window. As soon as I saw them, I clearly understood, or was told somehow, that the two human-shaped things at the front were angels and the also human-shaped one in the middle behind was God. In this dream, God was Jesus at the same time. Their looks were so different from my imagination. None of them had wings nor was wearing white. All of them were quite young with black hair, wearing black hooded coats. They were flying just by themselves, with their arms lightly forward and their knees slightly bent. I was completely awed and fearful. God/Jesus was looking straight into my eyes with a serious gaze while hovering. Then, He turned and flew away with His angels high up in the sky. When they disappeared, my mother came into my room. I told her what had just happened but she showed no interest. Instead, she asked me to let her hear our new song. The moment I pushed a play button, I woke up. Later on the same day, totally unexpectedly, our new song had been finished at long last.

Hidemi's Rambling No.282

When I decided to go back to the mix down from the mastering of our new song in order to boost its overall volume, I prepared to take a few more months to complete it. Once I accepted the delay and released myself from constraint called time, things presented a new twist. I had compared the volume of our song to other CDs with the stereo components. Our song came from the computer through the line-in of the stereo, which meant I compared the line-in sound to CDs. Before going back to the mix down, I burned the song to a CD as a small-volume version because except for the volume, the mastering went perfectly. It happened when I checked the sound of the CD. The volume was as large as other CDs! It had been indeed boosted already during the mastering. I just compared it in a wrong way through the line-in. I had been struggling with the volume for a couple of months based on my false judgement. When I heard our song at the right volume, I found out how silly I was and laughed out loud. At the same time, I burst into tears for indescribable joy. The only remaining problem to complete this song was the volume. Now that the volume was boosted, the song’s completion was within my grasp. Looking up at the ceiling of my room, I was loudly laughing, crying, then laughing, and again crying, with tears falling down. It was so funny, ironic, stupid and joyful…

Hidemi's Rambling No.281

On my way to do the holiday shopping, I dropped by McDonald’s for breakfast. Although the place was huge, it was crammed with people and I gave up eating there. I usually eat in a thrifty way at home with food at the sale price or half price. But since it was the holiday season, I decided to eat out luxuriously for once. There was a hotel near McDonald’s and I had all-you-can-eat breakfast at a restaurant there. I hadn’t been there for a couple of years and noticed things had changed. Most of the customers having breakfast there are the ones who stay at the hotel. Last time I had breakfast there, all the customers were Japanese. But now, most of them were Chinese and South Korean. They traveled by package tours and left almost all at once. After their big buses departed the hotel, only a few tables were occupied by Japanese. And I found out that Chinese and South Korean travelers’ manners have become better than Japanese ones. Japanese customers’ kids were shouting and running around the restaurant. Young couples were eating with the room slippers of the hotel on. Japan has been in a long economic downturn for years. In these years, Japanese people have lost money and also manners. Thinking about the transition of times, I spent two hours for the breakfast while having as mush as I could to the verge of a burst of my stomach, in order to make the most of money I paid…

Hidemi's Rambling No.280

I usually get prepared foods at half price at a supermarket after they give up on selling them at the list prices as the store’s closing time draws near. I know very well the exact times when they put half-off stickers on the leftover items for several supermarkets near my apartment. As I’ve been shopping this way for years, some of the shoppers have become familiar to me. At several different supermarkets, the people jostling for half-off items are usually the same line-up, including me. They sometimes get acquainted with each other and exchange information. Although I am, without doubt, one of them, I don’t feel like joining the half-off circle. When I find familiar faces, I always pretend not to notice and try to look away from them. It seems my last pride while enjoying shopping at half price more than anybody else. I saw one of familiar half-off shoppers at a supermarket the other day. She’s the one I see almost every time I shop during the half-off time. That evening, she was returning some half-off items to the shelf, looking into her wallet carefully. I thought I saw what I should not see because it was one of the saddest sights to me that someone was calculating the rest of money for what they wanted to buy. As soon as she left the shelf though, I picked the items she had unwillingly returned into my basket, as they were goodies. While buying them were completely legal and nothing unethical, I couldn’t help feeling guilty somehow…

Hidemi's Rambling No.279

My younger sister joined with me in taking piano lessons at the pianist’s house years later. While I didn’t practice, my sister was a diligent student who practiced earnestly. Still, I was the one whom the pianist raved about in the lessons. He was an elderly man and often danced to the piece I was playing falteringly. My sister played fluently on the other hand, but he once slapped her hands while she was playing. He shouted ‘It’s not like that at all!’ as if he couldn’t take her playing anymore. To me, it seemed she played much better than I did, but to him, she didn’t. He held a students’ performance once a year at a concert hall. He picked a piece for a student to play there according to their skill. Because I didn’t practice, my skill had progressed extremely slowly over the years. Even though he had admired my hidden ability, he couldn’t pick a piece for me that required high skill. I played an easy piece that a grade school student could play when I was already a teenager. I couldn’t live up to his high expectations toward me and quit. Eventually, I started writing songs and chose music for my career. Since the pianist also composed music and made sound with a synthesizer, I thought I could learn it form him and visited his house for the first time in years. In the rich residential area, only his gorgeous mansion had disappeared and nothing remained of the house but the empty lot there. I wondered if the place had really existed in the past…

Hidemi's Rambling No.278

The pianist’s house where I took piano lessons was about a 10-minute drive from my home. My parents took me there and sometimes I took the bus alone when they were busy working. I wasn’t allowed to come home by bus though, because I was still too little to get on the bus alone in the evening. So, my parents would pick me up on their way home from work when my lesson finished. The problem was they were usually late. I had to wait for them at the pianist’s house long after my lesson was over. He let me wait in the lesson room while watching other students’ lessons. But, my parents often didn’t show even after the last student’s lesson finished. In that case, the pianist felt pity and let me wait in the living room. That put me in the utmost awkward situation. As it was evening, his family was gathering for dinner. A good smell was wafting from the kitchen. They couldn’t start eating because I was still there. Everyone in the house had to wait for my parents. And I had experienced this torment not once, but several times. Once, I felt uncomfortable up to my limit and it became impossible to wait like that any longer. I called my grandparents at home and my grandfather came to pick me up with his motorbike. That night, my mother bawled me out for asking my grandfather to get me. She always acted like a perfect parent before my grandparents, but she said my phone call damaged her effort. While she was furious at me, I couldn’t understand why I was to blame not she, who left me waiting for hours in the choking discomfort…

Hidemi's Rambling No.277

My parents bought me a piano and I started learning to play at the age of four. It was my mother who wanted it, not me. Although she disliked music so much, a piano was a must-have item for her to satisfy her vanity. At first, a neighbor came to teach me at home, then I began to go to a pianist’s house to take lessons when I got a little older. The pianist had about 100 students and I was probably the laziest student of all. I really hated practicing. I took a lesson once a week, and sometimes didn’t play at all for the whole week between the lessons. A wonder was, I was his favorite student for some reason. He was quite strict with his students but to me, he regularly said that I had a feeling for music somehow. No matter how poorly I played, he kept admiring me for what he called my natural ability. He seemed to believe that I was talented and had the makings of a pianist, but unfortunately, that never motivated me. I didn’t practice anyway and remained an unwilling student all along…

Hidemi's Rambling No.276

When I was eight, my uncle got married and left our house. He had collected small change in big jars and gave all of them to me when he left. I had always wanted him to leave soon, but I found a lot of toys that he had given me in all those years besides the small change. About five years later, he also gave me my first guitar. It was a white classic guitar that he won as a prize for a golf game with his friends. Although it was a cheap model, I had played it for years until it got completely tattered and I bought a new one for my first gig. While my uncle was a giver, his wife was very careful about money. She came to sell her homemade bread to my parents, or reaped away with her neighbors most of persimmons that my parents grew in my family’s field. Long after I left home for music, she visited my parents’ house and asked about my first white guitar. According to my mother, she wanted it back now that I had left home and hadn’t used it anymore. I was purely surprised that she remembered the guitar. It must have been her longtime grudge that my uncle gave it to me. After 10 years, she retrieved the worn-out, battered guitar at long last…

Hidemi's Rambling No.275

On one evening during the time I was little and lived with my uncle, he talked with my grandparents in the living room and I felt unusual tension drifting from the room. I peeked in, and saw my grandparents cry. I was shocked, as I had never seen them cry before. I asked my mother what happened and she reluctantly told me that my uncle wanted to marry someone whom my grandparents couldn’t approve of. In my hometown, a marriage used to be ties between the families, not between the individuals. My family was once a big landowner of the area and they had clung to the pride long after the downfall. That was why they still did strict screening for the family’s marriage. My uncle wanted a love marriage, which disappointed my grandparents bitterly enough to tears. My grandfather ruled the family powerfully and no one could disobey him. He didn’t allow my uncle’s wish. Not long after, my uncle got married with my mother’s cousin by an arranged marriage. At the wedding, I happened to see the bride, who was supposed to be having her happiest day wearing a beautiful bridal kimono, crying in the dark corner of the hallway. She didn’t want to marry my uncle. Her relatives were persuading her to go through the wedding. That sight decided my image of a marriage. She became my aunt, and I’m still single…

Hidemi's Rambling No.274

It’s common in Japan that a child remains at a parents’ house after going on to college or starting to work at an office, or even after marrying. That had been my family’s tradition for a very long time and as a result, we lived in the exact spot where our ancestors had lived, without moving for hundreds of years, because a firstborn should have stayed in the parents’ house. That had lasted until one particular firstborn broke the tradition by leaving the house; that was me. So, my grandparents, my parents, my uncle, my younger sister and I had all lived together when I was little. This uncle of mine is my father’s younger brother and he was such a trouble some existence when we lived together. He constantly teased me and stole from me. My biggest pleasure back then was to get a snack at a nearby small candy shop after school with my scarce allowance. But the snack was often gone the moment I put the bag in the house and looked away from it. My uncle would eat it. I never understood why a grown-up like him sneaked a kid’s snack. He brought me a toy whenever he went on a trip or out for an errand. Even so, his daily plunder harmed goodwill, and I earnestly wished he would leave the house as soon as possible…

Hidemi's Rambling No.273

Along with many rather unpleasant memories of my childhood, I also have a few good ones about my family. New Year is the biggest holiday in Japan and two days prior to New Year’s Day, all my family would make ‘mochi’ every year, that is rice cake made from glutinous rice. That’s my family’s tradition passed for who-knew-how-many generations. As we used to make ‘mochi’ not only for our stock of food but also for offerings to shrines and temples and for gifts to our relatives, it took the whole day to finish making hundreds of them. My grandmother boiled glutinous rice over a kiln and my father put it in a wooden mortar and made it into rice cake by pounding with a heavy wooden mallet. My grandfather was sort of a ‘show runner’. The rest of my family- my mother, my sister and I- shaped the rice cake into small balls. Because New Year was so close, everybody was in a good mood and the usual tension between us went away for once. It used to be the happiest day spending with the whole family together for me. But even our long-survived tradition couldn’t stand a recent rapid change of time. The wooden mallet and mortar were replaced by a rice cake-cooking machine. The kiln by the gas stove. We needed a less amount of ‘mochi’, as our relatives got fewer, and the whole day work became unnecessary. I left home. My grandparents passed away. This is the way my happiest family event has disappeared…

Hidemi's Rambling No.272

A vast maneuver site of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces is situated near the apartment I currently live in. Although there are houses and apartments densely around it, they often exercise in firing artillery and parachuting, and disturb us with thunderous noise. Since I usually sleep in the daytime, coping with their noise is particularly difficult. That’s surely one of the reasons I’ve decided to move out. Yesterday, I woke up with the loud noise of a helicopter. I thought it was a usual parachute exercise, but it sounded slightly different. It came and went around busily. Then, I remembered the news that North Korea bombarded South Korea the day before. I imagined the Japanese Self-Defense Forces might be prepared for the contingency. If war broke out there, Japan would be too close geographically. As North Korea’s weapons are out of date, their missile might mistakenly hit here instead of South Korea. But when I took the thought calmly, I realized that there seemed to be more chance of a Japanese helicopter crashing onto the residential area than that of a North Korea’s missile. In either case, I had better speed up packing…

Hidemi's Rambling No.271

In Japan, the series finale of ‘LOST’ has been just aired; thus my several-years-long fun is finally over. I had made countless predictions for the ending, all of which were outwitted. I wasn’t prepared for that surprising conclusion. After six years of adventure with ‘LOST’, it’s certainly the best TV show I’ve ever seen. It beat my other favorite shows like ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, ‘Seinfeld’, and ‘South Park’. I was deeply moved by some of the episodes and made ‘LOST’ the TV show that I cried most. In total, I may have cried more than I did when I saw the movie, ‘Field of Dreams’. The character I shared emotion with most was Ben. His personality was so similar to me that I sometimes felt like someone who knew me was writing his lines. One of the ‘LOST’s best aspects was that most of the character’s parents were evil. Too many good parents appear on the movies and TV shows and that makes me scoff at them. Whoever wrote ‘LOST’ must feel the same way as I do about parents. ‘LOST’ was real and touched me. I already miss the show. I wonder if I can find a superb TV show like it ever again…

Hidemi's Rambling No.270

I found that the problem I’ve been tackling, which is to boost the volume of our new song, could be solved by redoing the mixdown. But it’ll take a few more months to complete. Although we have more than 20,000 visitors for our website and MySpace profile, and they kindly keep coming, not a single song has been up there yet. That’s shameful to me. Also, I feel reluctant to tell my partner that I need more time to complete the song. I thought about an extreme. What if I were the only human on this planet? If there were no one else besides me, I would redo by taking as much time as I want until I reach my satisfaction. Time is relative like happiness and bears meaning simply in relation to others. Come to think of it, our new song is written just about it. While I’ve been working on it, I ignored what I had written myself. So, I decided to go back to the mixdown. Considering the song’s theme, it was destined to take time…

Hidemi's Rambling No.269

It’s Mickey Mouse’s birthday today! I throw a birthday party for him every year, as he’s my best friend. He has helped me a lot every time I went through a difficult time. I always wonder about rather cold treatment of him from American people. When I lived in California, I went to Disneyland on Mickey’s birthday to celebrate it. While there are some kinds of special event on his birthday at Tokyo Disneyland, I was surprised that there was none at Disneyland. They just had regular shows and parades without mentioning his birthday. A cast member didn’t even know it was Mickey’s birthday when I asked about the special celebration event. She gave me a vacant look, seeming to have no clue what I expected and made a big deal of. Furthermore, people say ‘Mickey Mouse’ when they refer to something too trivial and easy. One year ago today, I also wrote here about how important he was to me, and saw a sudden and sharp drop in the number of my blog readers on the next day. I call it Mickey shock. Now that I wrote about him again this year, I’ll lose my precious readers that I’ve gained with effort for the whole year…

Hidemi's Rambling No.268

The exciting 2010 season of Formula One is over with the champion being Vettel. He’s deserved and while I congratulate on his first title, I can’t help feeling disappointed about my favorite driver Alonso’s result. Currently, he’s the fastest, the most skillful, focused and intelligent driver in the field. Up to the last race, he had led the point standings and been closest to the title. I had predicted that he would be the world champion this year before the season started. One setback was that he transferred to Ferrari for this season. Ferrari is notorious for cheating and I had to cheer the least favorite team for Alonso. He started from the third position on the last race and I was convinced that he would grab this year’s title because finishing fourth was enough for him to do just that. I watched the race on TV so intensely that I could hardly breathe at one point of the race. By the time the race ended, I was short of breath, extremely exhausted, and had a headache. Alonso finished seventh, much less forth, and lost the championship. During the course of the season, Ferrari technically infringed the testing ban and the team-order ban. To me, it seemed that those infringements weren’t forgiven and he lost for that. Since cheating is Ferrari’s specialty, he might not win the championship as long as he stays in Ferrari…

Hidemi's Rambling No.267

Formula One’s 2010 season is going to end this weekend. This year, the championship title will be decided on any of the three drivers. All three are my favorite drivers and deserve the title. In that respect, it was a very good season, because there’s sometimes a season in which an unworthy driver wins the championship. The worst case was the years when Schumacher had dominated the sport. He cheated, banged off other driver’s car, and grabbed the title year after year. On the other hand, there’s a splendid season such as the one when Villenueve won the title fair and square. Justice is served on one season, and isn’t on the other. Precisely speaking, two of the three contenders weren’t so fair this year. One driver hit and pushed off one of the three, and the other driver used a loophole to do a test run in spite of the testing ban and had one win handed over by his team mate in spite of the team-order ban. That tells who will clinch the title this weekend is the remaining one, if this year is the case for justice to be served. But looking through the past record, justice is treacherous and unreliable for this sport. Maybe that’s evidence that the championship title is meaningless and has nothing to do with justice…

Hidemi's Rambling No.266

I had a dream about my grandparents last night and couldn’t go back to sleep because I missed them so badly. Both of them have passed away, but they raised me when I was a child in place of my parents who were too busy working out in the field as farmers. When I lived with my grandparents, I didn’t appreciate being with them, as they were strict, quiet and boring, and I constantly missed my parents. But after I grew up and left my hometown, I realized how my grandparents regarded me and felt about me. Until they passed away, I had returned home once or twice a year. My grandfather would wait for me with an envelope that had some money for me inside, and my grandmother with my favorite food that she would have prepared and cooked from morning. She would wear particularly for the day something I had given to her before, to show me her gratitude. Those things were what I could never expect from my parents. My parents would be seldom at home when I returned although my homecoming was only yearly and informed well beforehand. That was not because they were working. They would be out for shopping or, at one time, they were even gone on a trip to Hawaii. They seemed to lack the sense of pining for and anticipating someone. Or, they may have simply avoided me. Parental affection doesn’t necessarily come from parents. In my case, it was my grandparents who gave it to me…

Hidemi's Rambling No.265

The apartment I currently live in is furnished, and the place I’m moving to isn’t. That means I need to get appliances. First, I bought a microwave oven. And now, I’ve been looking for a washer. To get a large appliance like it is quite tricky because it needs to be set up inside the room. Almost all retail stores have restrictions on delivery. They don’t deliver large appliances to isolated islands or mountainous regions in Japan, or if they do, they charge extra cost. My new place is located in the mountains and right among the restricted areas. There’s a way to shop at a local store to avoid those delivery restrictions, but the town I’m moving to is so small to have only one electrical appliance store. And since it’s not a chain store, I would pay the list price. I usually have a strict policy to get something, which is to get at the lowest price on the market. But I can’t apply my policy to getting large appliances this time. I have to give priority to a store that delivers to my place over a price. Combined with the extra charge, the price gets higher and higher. It’s not my style of shopping, but I have no choice. Following a bear’s attack, obstacles to live in the mountains have emerged one by one…

Hidemi's Rambling No.264

I have two different personalities inside myself. They’re in stark contrast with each other and that often confuses me. I know fame and money would do no good and I try to live only in order to make good music, nothing else. But my other self always wants to live in Monaco and own a Formula One team. It sneers at my way of living and makes me feel miserable. I vividly remember the moment this other self was born inside me. It was when I was in the second grade. Until then, I hadn’t talked to anyone but my family members, all through the years of kindergarten and the first grade at elementary school. To me, people outside my family were all evil and stupid. I despised them for some reason, and ignored them, as I didn’t want to be one of them. As a result, my social life as a child was atrocious. Because of my attitude, other kids constantly picked on me, slandered and bad-mouthed. I was always alone and loathed school so much that I couldn’t sleep every night of schooldays. I sensed that I couldn’t live like this any longer. I was about to be broken like a machine with no lubricant, and couldn’t stand it anymore. I knew the way to make my life easier was to become one of them. After long deliberation, I came to a decision, and my other self was born. I started talking to people, laughing with them, playing with them, by enduring the foolishness. I became popular and my school life turned into a less nightmare although my true self was very unhappy. Now I’ve grown up and chosen to live as my true self. Still, my other half disturbs me once in a while by craving fame and money. Am I really sure that other self isn’t my true self? What if the other self is true me…?

Hidemi's Rambling No.263

I’m very fond of stuffed animals. They have been my best friends since early childhood. For me, seeing a mascot moving around means my friend stuffed animal tribe comes to life and that always gives me great pleasure. I record and burn on a DVD when I see a mascot on TV, and go to him or her to say hello when I see one at a theme park, a supermarket or a drug store, by plowing through other kids. In Japan, the number of mascots has been increasing lately, with all sorts of a kind. Most of them are mascots of unknown, minor characters, opposite to famous characters such as Mickey Mouse, Snoopy or Hello Kitty. Whether famous or not, more mascots are greatly welcomed to me, as my dream is to live on a mascot planet. But Japanese people especially seem to like minor characters among others. A lot of companies, municipalities, campaigns and movements have introduced their original mascots and it’s a trend. Unlike famous mascots from professional sports teams and theme parks, their characteristics are somehow loosely defined, their looks aren’t so refined, and they’re only known to a limited number of people. Even so, they’re booming enough to have established their own category as ‘unrefined characters’. And that seems the key to appeal to Japanese people most. This trend may reflect their subconscious about living in an undefined, unrefined country…

Hidemi's Rambling No.262

Recently, there has been more and more news about bears and monkeys that appear in town and attack people all around Japan. It’s said that they come down from the mountains for food, as there has been less food up on the mountains due to the climate change and deforestation. The area I live in now is animal-free so far, because there aren’t mountains nor woods around, just too many crazy people. But at last, I heard the news that a bear appeared in the area I’m moving to. My new place is in the country with numerous woods and fields, surrounded by mountains. A bear was spotted in a field and a man got injured. Terrifyingly, the field was quite close to my new apartment and I think I walked beside it last time I went to my place and was on my way to shopping. That reminded me of a couple I saw on the street then. They were walking with tinkling bells. I knew that a bell worked to keep from a bear encounter and I thought they came back from hiking in the mountains. But now I know they were tinkling bells for the exact spot. By moving, I intended to be rid of people, but never thought I would live among bears instead…

Hidemi's Rambling No.261

I’ve been working for mastering of our new song for some time now. I still can’t get it up to my satisfaction though, after using everything I’ve got. I successfully made the sound itself exactly what I’d wanted. The only problem is the volume. I tried countless compressors and limiters, read a book on the subject and looked it up around on the Internet with no luck. Our song stays in low volume compared to other CDs. The other day, I found mastering software that many engineers regard as an ultimate volume booster. It looked attractive, but it was quite pricey. It was my decision whether I bought it or took our song to a studio engineer. I just wanted to try the software and go through with the mastering so badly. I decided to try to the best of my ability and then, after it became certain that I couldn’t, turn to a professional. I bought the software. Now, the road to a goal is one, only the ending will be either the software or the studio. I’ve known that completing a song takes time, but music also can be a money pit…

Hidemi's Rambling No.260

I had a dream last night that my mother left me in a shopping mall to enjoy shopping just with my younger sister. The sensation I felt in the dream was so familiar that I recalled the similar experiences in my real life. Since I started junior high school, my parents and my sister had often gone out without me because my school was far from home and I came home late every day. As I got furious each time when they came back, they usually lied that they went out just for an errand. But I always knew they went shopping together or in a worse case, visited my favorite grandparents’ house without me. The main reason I could see through their deceit was because they bought something for my sister when going out, and I often found it later in her room, as the evidence. In my theory, parents should get something for a child they leave at home, but my parents do the opposite and get something for a child they are taking with them. And the luckier one who got into the car with my parents for fun was always my sister who came home much earlier from elementary school. I can’t count how many times I shouted a word ‘unfair’ to my parents. Sometimes, they even ate out just three of them and still pretended that they hadn’t had dinner yet. At dinnertime of those occasions, they had strangely little appetite while I was starving. My mother repeated, ‘It’s weird. I’m not hungry tonight’, and my sister followed suit. Only my father tried to eat his second dinner for the night, contorting with fullness. Their acts were so poor that anyone could tell they had already eaten. But no matter how hard I demanded, my mother kept lying. I can still feel some sort of desperate loneliness with these old memories…

Hidemi's Rambling No.259

I can’t throw things away. Because I’m easily attached to my belongings and also I’m thrifty, I keep things for a possible future use, just in case. As a result, my tiny apartment has become even smaller with junk such as worn-out clothes, cracked shoes and sundries that I don’t know what they are for anymore. As I’ve started moving to my new place, I realized how time-consuming packing all the junk was. Packing one cardboard box a day is a maximum addition to my daily life. So, my moving process is horribly slow. With this speed, I can’t even imagine the day I finish packing everything into boxes will ever come. I feel like it lasts forever. But the longer it takes, the more money I end up spending, because I’ll have to keep paying the rent for my old apartment. My junk, which I’ve kept to save money in the first place, took advantage of my weakness and began to take money away from me…

Hidemi's Rambling No.258

Last weekend, I went in my new apartment for the first time since I looked at the room with a real estate agent in September. Although the building was 20 years old and I had expected some fixtures would have been broken, everything worked fine including a heater and a boiler. Only, the room was dirty from the former resident’s poor maintenance, meaning an extensive cleanup awaited me. The room was carpeted, and that carpet was extremely dirty with countless stains. I was talking with my partner how careless the former resident must have been, and at dinnertime, it was my partner who inadvertently spilled soy sauce on it. Already a new stain has been registered. My biggest concern about living in that room had been whether claustrophobia would fall on me or not. One of my ways to lessen the phobia is turn on the TV. My cell phone is capable of receiving TV and I carried it around as the most important emergency item for the phobia in the room. Thankfully, I didn’t feel the phobia but tried to turn on the TV for fun before going to sleep. Then, my cell phone told me that it couldn’t receive it. As the building stood surrounded by high mountains, the wave was too weak to be received. Once I realized the TV wouldn’t be on, I felt a touch of claustrophobia all of a sudden. I shouldn’t have tried TV…

Hidemi's Rambling No.257

Japan has a census every five years and now it’s the time. Back in my hometown, the chair or a leader of the area used to be entrusted with distribution and collection of the forms for the whole block as voluntary work. Then, the forms would be handed to the area’s public office by him or her. When my father took charge of it, he looked through all the forms after collecting them for possible errors in filling them out, that was also one of the responsibilities. But, as he was checking errors in the forms, he inevitably acquired neighbors’ personal information, such as the income, the family members, the work place, and the academic background. I felt extremely unpleasant about it. After I left my hometown and was on my own, I had never submitted a census, as I knew what a person who came to collect the form did with my form. Probably because of the similar complaints, the government has changed rules for this year’s census. They hired people to distribute and collect the forms and the form should be sealed by a person who filled it out. With this way, the personal information should be protected from some neighbor. Instead, the form collection person is persistent ever, now that it’s a job. They keep coming up to my apartment and even call after me on the streets in the neighborhood. I go out sneakily, looking around for a collection person. I feel like a fugitive every day…

Hidemi's Rambling No.256

Here is the finale of my apartment hunting. I had complained about delay of the contract to a real estate agent and she had advanced the date for it. Two days before signing, she called me and gave me yet another surprise. She went in the room to make sure everything was okay and found out that the owner had taken away all of the furniture and appliances although the room was supposed to be furnished. According to her, everything was gone except for a kitchen table. She sounded more shocked than I actually was. Because each piece of furniture and appliances had looked pretty old and worn-out when I saw the room, and even if unfurnished, the price was still a lot lower than the area’s average, I asked her not to retrieve them as she offered. I accepted the present condition, and signed a contract at last. My six-month long apartment hunting is officially over. Starting now is my moving saga. It’s decided for me to move 160 miles far from where I live now to the countryside surrounded by mountains. Is it really possible for me to live in the mountains secluded from people? More than anything else, please no more bad surprises for me…

Hidemi's Rambling No.255

During the construction of my family’s new house, many contractors and carpenters came and worked every day. As we lived in barns as a makeshift home at the edge of the construction site, I saw them regularly and had a crush on one of the carpenters. He would come to work by car and pass under a pedestrian bridge at the almost exact time every morning. I used the bridge to the elementary school, and every morning when I was walking on the bridge, his car passed beneath it. I waved at him and he waved back at me every time. One day, while I was hanging around near the construction site, he came up to me and handed me a key chain in which miniature playing cards were contained. He said it was a small gift for me. I was over the moon. But, that was the last time I saw him. Because the construction company executive ran away with all the money my family had paid, the pay for the workers stopped. The construction was abandoned and no one came to work anymore. Only a carpenter with craftsmanship who carved beautiful patterns on the wooden thresholds came to continue his work without pay after his new job. But the carpenter I had a crush on never showed, and his car never passed under the pedestrian bridge. I cherished the miniature playing cards for a long time…

Hidemi's Rambling No.254

When the construction company executive disappeared with my family’s money, his wife came to our place with his daughter. She wanted us to know that she wouldn’t shelter him, that she didn’t have any idea of his whereabouts either, and how sorry she felt. She begged not to report to the police. While the grave meeting was held, I was sent to play outside with his daughter. I was nine, and she was a year or two younger. I used to be shy and wasn’t good at being friendly with someone so quickly. But with her, I got along so well at once for some reason. Along the narrow way at the back of my house, clovers grew rampantly. I taught her how to play ‘clover wrestling’ and it became uncontrollable fun. I had never laughed so hard so much in one day. That was the most fun I had ever had in my life. We promised to play together again and she left with her mother. I’ve never seen her since. As her father’s body was found in a gutter a couple of years after the day we became friends, I wonder how her life turned out and how she is now. I hope she’s happy somewhere now…

Hidemi's Rambling No.253

My preparing for moving recalls the time my family built a new house when I was nine years old. By then, our house got too old to live in, as it had stood for about 100 years. After the old house was destroyed, we had lived in our old barns that stood beside the old house until the new house was completed. That was when I became ill and got nephritis. In the middle of the construction, an executive of the construction company that was building our new house disappeared with the whole money our family paid. The construction stopped and our new house was left only as the wooden frame. Since my mother was extremely vain, reporting it to the police was out of the question. She turned to her relative who ran a construction company in a distant town from us. He kindly came all the way from there, fixed the plan and rearranged everything for us. Although we lost money, our new house was up at last thanks to him. A couple of years later, we read a news article on a local newspaper that the construction company executive had been found dead in a gutter. He must have had much bigger troubles other than his embezzlement of my family’s money while he was on the run…

Hidemi's Rambling No.252

A new supermarket opened one block away from my apartment. It’s the closest supermarket and I can see it from my window. Since the construction started in spring, I’d been looking forward to its opening while seeing the progress of the construction site. I jumped in it on the long-waited opening day and the store exceeded my expectation. Their prices were a lot lower than I’d thought. They have carried the opening sale and I’ve been there almost every day. Before the opening, a flier of the store came in, which said, ‘Please use us as your fridge.’ With this proximity to my place, I thought it would be a good idea, depending on the prices. Now that the prices are low, using the store as my fridge is becoming real. Because I found something at the lowest price ever each time there and couldn’t resist getting them, I’ve brought home more food than I could eat. As a result, my home fridge is packed, too. Once I decided to move out my apartment, this nice supermarket appeared. Leaving the store behind makes me feel hesitant to move…

Hidemi's Rambling No.251

About my apartment hunting, I’ve written up to the point that the owner of the room wanted to consider his or her price, which was offered as 20 percent off by himself or herself in the first place. Two more weeks have passed and the owner offered 10 percent off. Since I was going to pay the full price to begin with, 10 percent off was still a good deal to me. I answered to take it. Then, the situation took an unbelievable twist, again. The real estate agent asked me to pick my convenient days for a contract among several days in the end of October. That means it would take two months to close the deal since I decided on the room. At first, I thought it would be done in a week because the process was simple – look at the room, make a decision, sign a contract and pay. How could it be possible to spend two months for this easy process? At this stage, it should be done only by signing a contract, and yet, they need three more weeks just to do that. Meanwhile, I noticed the owner had placed an ad for the very room I applied on a different real estate company’s website. The room remains available there. Now, a suspicion crept into my mind. Is the owner waiting for someone who wants the room at the full price and prolonging the deal on purpose? But that someone was me because it was the owner who offered the discount while I didn’t ask for anything. Whatever the plot is, it’s beyond my comprehension. I wonder when and how the whole thing is settled…

Hidemi's Rambling No.250

It’s one year since I started my blog. I’ve written my mishaps and embarrassing experiences both in the past and the present. I usually feel gloomy when thinking about those events and often feel like shouting madly to shake them off from my mind. At first, it seemed impossible for me to write them down and make them public because like most people, I wanted to look cool although I was completely the opposite. But once I started writing, I realized something unexpected. It soothed the pain. It’s like writing brought closure to my agony that had until then seemed eternal. In other words, blog is a therapy for me. I know how pathetic that sounds, but it’s been very helpful to make me feel easier. Curiously enough, whether music or writing, things that make me happy don’t make money…

Hidemi's Rambling No.249

The classic card game is usually played during New Year’s in Japan. There used to be a family gathering in New Year’s in my house every year. On one New Year gathering after I won the tournament of the game at school, I suggested to play it because I had become extremely good at it. I played with my relatives and my grandfather. I won dominantly by getting most of the cards. Then, my grandfather began to be angry with me, saying I was unfair. In 100 poems the cards hold, a player often has his or her favorite poem. It’s considered that person’s specialty, called ‘my eighteenth’ in Japan. No player other than that person can take the card on which his or her favorite poem is written, even if the card is right in front of you. Other players concede it by letting the person pick the card on purpose. They say it’s an unspoken rule of the game. I ignored it and just kept taking as many cards as I could whether it was somebody’s eighteenth or not, because to me, the game was a matter of memory and speed. With my grandfather, my relatives also began to complain. Although the game was one of very few things I was good at, nobody had played it with me ever since…

Hidemi's Rambling No.248

When I was in junior high school, there was a tournament of the Japanese classic card game that I wrote about. One hundred cards were laid out before competitors and each card had an ancient Japanese poem written on it. A teacher read a hundred poems one by one and competitors picked the corresponding card. The one who got the most cards would be a winner. The game isn’t as simple as it sounds. While a poem reader reads the whole poem, only the latter half of the poem is written on a card. To pick a card fast before it’s taken by your rivals, you memorize the whole poem. The instant the top of a poem is read, you recall the poem’s latter half, find the card it’s written among the laid 100 cards, and pick it. Because my family had the game at home and played it occasionally, the poems were quite familiar to me. I was able to memorize all 100 poems easily before the tournament, that let me beat a competitor one after another, as by the time the teacher read a first verse, the card of the poem’s yet-unread latter half was already in my hand. At the finals, I even beat the smartest girl at school and won the tournament. I came home with great joy and told my mother I had won. Her response was, ‘Where’s a certificate?’ According to her, without a certificate or a diploma, there’s no way to show people the result, thus winning is pointless. She urged me to have a teacher issue the certificate and I asked the teacher. A few days later, I received a makeshift paper for the certificate. The pitiful paper was decorated proudly in a frame by my mother…

Hidemi's Rambling No.247

It was my birthday yesterday and my parents sent me presents. The gifts from my mother were exactly the same necklace as the one she had sent me a couple of years ago, a vinyl bag which she apparently had got as a freebie, and some towels she didn’t use anymore. She also enclosed a bag of rice crackers. My hometown is in Kyoto that is a Japanese historic city with a lot of old temples and shrines. Many stores there take advantage of the location and use the historic sites and events as their signature design for wrapping. The store my mother bought rice crackers used a Japanese classic card game. It’s played with 100 cards on each of which an ancient poem is written. For some reason, I was very good at the game when I was a teenager. I haven’t played it for a long time. Some of the 100 poems were printed on the wrapping of the rice crackers and I remembered how good I was. The best present from my mother this year was a wrapper of a snack…

Hidemi's Rambling No.246

Whereas Japanese recent movies and dramas are intolerable, Japanese comedy performances are brilliant. There is an annual event for a short situation comedy performance on TV, which is a contest for both professional and amateur comedians. The winner takes one hundred thousand dollars. I look forward to the event every year. It’s broadcast live on TV but this year, I set the timer to record the program on my computer, as I was busy. My plan was to watch it later by laying food and snacks as an annual party. About one hour into the three-hour event, I glanced at the computer casually during chores, and was horrified at the sight. The computer had shut down for no apparent reason. That meant it had stopped recording the show that I’d been waiting for a whole year. I panicked completely, turned on TV and rebooted the computer right away. I wasn’t sure how long I had missed the event, but watched it live from that point on anyway, because I took it as a sign not to put off something you really want. By missing the former part of the event, my excitement was half ruined with my planned party all ruined. After it was over, I watched the recorded part on my computer. Miraculously, the time that the computer was off was during a commercial break. It shut down right at the moment when one of the performances got to its punch line and the stage was blacked out. When I turned on TV and resumed recording, it was at the start of the next performance. I didn’t miss a thing. When I panicked, I shouted a lot of whys to my computer almost crying. It must have heard a cry of a soul and adjusted the timing by itself…

Hidemi's Rambling No.245

Here’s an update on my ongoing apartment hunting. After I saw the room and deliberated, I decided on the place which price was 20 percent off. A week after I submitted the application form to the real estate company, its agent told me that she hadn’t been able to reach the owner. A few days later, she called me again and said that she finally contacted the owner. But she asked me to wait a little more as the owner wanted to consider the price. From then on, both the agent and I have been just waiting. Now I noticed absurdity. The 20 percent off price was offered by the owner in the first place, not by me. Is he or she considering his or her own price? And is he or she going to decline the price by himself or herself? What kind of game are we playing? Two weeks have already passed since I applied for the room. I have no idea how it unfolds hereafter…

Hidemi's Rambling No.244

Despite the ceaseless agitation that Japan’s population has been decreasing and its birthrate has critically dropped, a population explosion has been happening in my neighborhood in particular. People keep moving in, kids keep being born, and houses and stores keep being built. Only the space around me is the exception of Japanese trend. The more the people, the higher the odds of crazy ones. I introduced here my neighbors who used the street as their own yard and let their kids shoot hoops from the busy street to their house. The noise of a bouncing ball was so annoying and I dropped a note to stop in their mailbox one day. It worked and I had retrieved peaceful sleep for a couple of weeks as I usually sleep in the daytime. A sad fact is that crazy people don’t learn. They resumed playing basketball on the street last Sunday and I had to drop the note again. This neighborhood was once quiet and sparse, but now, it’s close to the limit of my patience…

Hidemi's Rambling No.243

An artist who has a contract with a major record company generally has a deadline for work. Due to the cost of studio use and the promotion schedule, they often need to finish recording in a couple of weeks. Sometimes, it requires compromise and the work results in what they didn’t want. I, on the other hand, have no contract, no obligation, no bind. I’ve been working on the current song for seven years now, including two years of recording. These years have been the happiest time in my life, with contentment from work. I’m in an ideal position to pursue my music as much as I want, so to speak. I always wonder why people don’t live like this. Of course, if they do, fame and money is almost certainly hopeless as is my case. I have no contract, no fame, no money, and call it ideal. Maybe I’m beginning to become a nutcase…

Hidemi's Rambling No.242

I’ve been mastering our new song on my new computer, which has an updated version of Cubase. I’m more than satisfied with its effect line-up but sound itself was better on my old computer. In a timely manner, the sound card on my new computer got disconnected from the software suddenly and I installed the old physical one to replace it. Sound became much better but I found out that the overall volume of the new song wasn’t as big as it was supposed to be. I had set some effects to boost the volume and it sounded on a par with audio CDs. As it turned out, the former sound card didn’t support the direct monitoring and I had listened to amplified sound by the computer. It’s the matter of a little more volume now that I’ve gained most of it with a variety of effects. From this point on, it has come down to my idea. The question is, do I still have any ideas left…?

Hidemi's Rambling No.241

When ‘LOST Final Season’ started in July in Japan, the cable company also began to air ‘Flash Forward’. Its characters’ experiences of a glimpse of their future were weirdly familiar to me. Come to think of it, I’ve had a similar experience myself, in a way. As long as I could remember, my family members had told me that I was a successor of the family and I was to live with my family all my life as my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather and on and on and on did, by taking a husband into our family to bear our family name. They kept saying that as a usual chant so repeatedly that I was sort of under the spell that I would be stuck to the house as a successor until the day I died. So, I was an outsider when other girls chatted giggly about what last name they would bear after their marriage or where they would live in the future. I knew what my last name and what my future address would be because they wouldn’t be changed. My whole life was so predictable for that matter. Since I knew my future, I had no interest in my life, and days were so boring. That experience lets me perfectly understand the despair that the characters in ‘Flash Forward’ feel after they saw their future. In my case, I changed my future completely by abandoning my family, my friends, my hometown and the old tradition. Now, I’m free from my once-arranged future. Instead, I dread my uncertain future everyday…

Hidemi's Rambling No.240

After I saw the outside of the buildings, I met a real estate agent who showed me the available room in each apartment. For a room in the apartment which was under refurbishment, she offered a 20 percent discount because the carpet and the wallpaper in the room was damaged. As the room had been my first choice anyway before I came here and I have a weakness for a discount, my mind was almost set on that place. The thing was, as I wrote here once, the available rooms of that building were concentrated on the fourth floor in the east side and this room was among them. Even after I saw the building and the room with my own eyes, I couldn’t find out what was wrong with the fourth floor. I checked in a hotel and went to have dinner at a restaurant in the hotel as the stay included dinner. Since it was a budget travel package, I didn’t expect the food at all. But the dinner was probably the most gorgeous feast I had ever had. It included all-you-can-eat crabs, tempura, steak and shrimps. Ironically, fatigue and tension for decision making spoiled my appetite and I could eat only little. At night, I couldn’t sleep either from a sense of claustrophobia because the mountains and the woods closed down the area. I asked myself if I could really move in this area, let alone on the enigmatic fourth floor…

Hidemi's Rambling No.239

I transferred the bullet train to the local train to the area where all three apartments of my choice were located. There were no passengers but me on the train although it was a weekday morning. The station was an unmanned small shack. I walked along shabby houses, used-to-be shops and rice fields and found one of the apartments among them. My first impression was that a photograph showed things much better than they actually were. The building had looked a lot more gorgeous in the photos on a website. I walked on and soon found the other two apartments. One was under refurbishment and I couldn’t see it from the outside. The other stood nearby and I saw a half-naked old man sitting idly on a balcony, who was a kind of person I didn’t like to have as one of my neighbors. I took a rest on a bench, wondering if this trip had already become a fool’s errand…

Hidemi's Rambling No.238

My apartment hunting has come to a climax. Last weekend, I went to see the places of my choice in the countryside where I had never visited before. I had found a budget travel package online that paying only for train tickets made a hotel stay, dinner and breakfast all free. It was a 90-minute bullet train ride and to take the bullet train, I got to the downtown train terminal. I hadn’t been downtown for years and was shocked by its filthiness. Years ago, my English friend once said that she was amazed at how clean it was when she first came to Japan. Now, time has changed that and litter was everywhere on the streets. But once the train left the terminal, I was supposed to enjoy a beautiful countryside view from the train window after a while. Since it was a super discount travel package, the trains and the seats were specified beforehand. The bullet train was a double-decker. My seat was on the first floor from which I could only see people’s feet on the platform from the train window. Although I expected the countryside would come into view after departure, low soundproof walls standing along the railroad track blocked scenery all the way…

Hidemi's Rambling No.237

Since I decided to move out, I’ve realized the power of the Internet again. Without going anywhere physically, I’ve been able to look for a place to live at home, gathering a lot of information on prices, floor plans and the neighborhood. People’s blogs are useful, too. For the past eight months, I’ve been looking around the Internet, collecting and comparing the details, and have narrowed down the choice to three apartments. They are all located in the same area, which is surrounded by mountains, cold and snowy in winter. The area has a small population with a constant decline. That has led to a remarkably low price for an apartment there. I chose the area because the prices were low enough to fit my tight budget. But its small population was the main appeal to me, who feel uncomfortable to be with people. All three places I’ve picked for my new home are more than 20 years old and one of them is on the fourth floor. So far, that one is my first choice. There seem no particular flaws in the room, but the building’s available rooms are mostly on the fourth floor. Is it just a coincidence, or is there anything wrong? Even the mighty Internet doesn’t tell about it. I wonder what’s the secret of the fourth floor…

Hidemi's Rambling No.236

Way back in an episode of ‘LOST’, Charlie made a list of the best things that happened in his life. One of his best things happened to me, too. When I lived in California, I would often visit Disneyland Hotel, as it was only a few blocks away from the place I lived. One day I had a meal there and went into the rest room. There was a cleaning lady working at the washbowl. I have the habit of thanking and nodding to them and I did so to her at the time as usual. Our eyes met and she gazed at me. I was about to wash my hands but her gaze stopped me. I was puzzled and watched her. She said, ‘You’re number one.’ It was one of the most perplexing experiences of my life. That has mystified me ever since. In Charlie’s case, it was obvious. But in mine, it was ambiguous through and through. I’m number one of what? When? I haven’t seen any sign of number one concerning me…

Hidemi's Rambling No.235

In the TV series ‘LOST’, ‘candidates’ had met Jacob at one point of their lives, mostly at a young age and possibly at the miserable time. Thinking of a mysterious encounter, I may have met Jacob myself. When I was six or seven years old, my grandfather took me to my aunt’s house. They weren’t so well-off then, living in a small house with a lot of cats and dogs and eating from the aluminum plates. Across their house was a pachinko parlor. It was a really shabby place. My grandfather took me there and made me wait while he was playing. The place was small, filled with pachinko machines, cigarette smoke and down-and-outers. Since there was no waiting place for a kid, I was just strolling through the narrow aisles between the noisy machines and worn-out people. Suddenly, someone called me and I turned around. A man with sunglasses was standing behind me. He held two buckets of silver balls, which meant he had won a rare amount. The buckets were too full to hold the all balls and some of them were spilling. He pushed the buckets to me and said, ‘ Take these. Go exchange for your chocolates.’ Because he pressed them forcibly, I had no choice but to receive. And he disappeared. My grandfather was astounded when he saw me with the buckets and told me to return them to the man, but we couldn’t find him. I had never hold that much chocolate in my arms. The brand of the chocolate still remains my favorite but am I still a candidate? Or have I been blotted out long before…?

Hidemi's Rambling No.234

There is no formal casino in Japan. Instead, there are innumerable pachinko parlors all over Japan. A pachinko is a very popular Japanese gambling game that is partly like pinball and partly like slot. They buy small silver balls to play with, and the machine brings out the balls if they win. They exchange the balls for money or items like cigarettes and chocolates. For some reason, it’s not allowed to exchange directly for money. They get a certain strange item with their balls once, and exchange it for money at a small dark hut behind the building. A pachinko parlor is sort of a mix of a casino and a game arcade. It has a large number of pachinko machines side by side in aisles and exists around almost everywhere people live. Sadly, it doesn’t make people a millionaire. By playing all day, they win a few hundred dollars at most. As for me, I’ve never played a pachinko in my life. My life itself is awfully like gambling and I’m bogged down with it completely…

Hidemi's Rambling No.233

I often see people living in the States shoot hoops in their yard. In Japan, it’s almost impossible as the houses are crammed densely back-to-back with a very small yard or mostly none at all. Despite these circumstances, there appeared a daunting family who launched an outrage. They put up a net on the side of their house, which was facing the street directly, so that their kids could bounce a basketball on the street and shoot to the house’s outer wall. The street that is busy with people, bicycles and cars has now turned into their yard. Unfortunately, that crazy family lives so close to my apartment. The noise of a basketball hitting asphalt is very loud, resonating through walls of crammed houses. Since they started this assault, I’ve thought about complaining, but haven’t because I don’t want to get involved with this insane family, who willingly let their kids play on the public street and are fine with it. Yesterday, my sleep was disturbed by their noise two days in a row, as I slept in the daytime and worked at night. To the thin walls of my apartment, their dribble sounded like a continuous snare drum. The kids have expanded their street yard, closing in on me. That does it. It’s time for an action…

Hidemi's Rambling No.232

Many municipalities in Japan hold a fireworks display during summer. The one for where I live took place yesterday. It’s an annual event of 90-minute fireworks. When I first moved here, the fireworks were visible from the window of my apartment. But soon a house was built right in front of it and blocked the view. I had been out to see them since then and had found a perfect spot near my apartment. But then, Seven Eleven was built right in front of my spot and blocked the view. So, this year, the event started with spot hunting. Soon after the fireworks began, my partner found the spot. It was beside a fence that surrounded a construction site for a condominium that had been abandoned due to the recession. The fence stood on a five-foot-high mound. I needed to stand on the 15-inch-wide edge after climbing the steep mound. While my partner easily reached the spot, I was fighting with my fear of slopes. As I was about to give up, my partner declared that the spot had the most splendid view for the fireworks around here. With his help, I managed to get to the top of the mound in every conceivably clumsy way. There, I made a discovery. In addition to almost all kinds of phobia, I also had a fear of heights. For 90 minutes, I clung to the fence with all my strength that would be unnecessary for people except for me. But, the view was indeed magnificent, the best spot ever for this fireworks display. On top of that, thanks to the height, I got to see the fireworks of Tokyo Disneyland, which I had heard the sound every night but never been able to see from my neighborhood. And today, every muscle in my body is screaming from the climbing and clinging. Nothing ventured, nothing gained…

Hidemi's Rambling No.231

I’m poor at recognizing people’s faces. Sometimes they’re all the same – sometimes I can’t remember my acquaintance’s face. To me, Richard in ‘LOST’ and Mark in ‘Flash Forward’ is the same person. Even after I was told they were different actors, I still can’t see the difference between the two of them. When I lived in California, I had rented a room in a hotel where a long-term lease was available. The rent included breakfast and supper and I had eaten with other tenants or guests. One day, I went into the lounge where the supper was served as usual, after coming back from a vacation in Florida for a couple of weeks. A woman came up to me and asked, ‘How was Florida?’ I was frozen with terror. How could a total stranger like her ever possibly know I was in Florida? Is she a CIA or FBI or whatsoever agent? Why is the US intelligence after me who am the least important human being in the world? What did I do? What kind of threat is she posing to me? What does she want? With all those thoughts, the tongs in my hand were trembling while holding my favorite Chaw Main. I managed to squeeze my voice out of fear and asked her how she knew I was in Florida. She stared at me with a look of surprise and said, ‘You told me so yourself.’ She was my acquaintance. Although we had had a meal together for several times, I didn’t remember her face…

Hidemi's Rambling No.230

The rent of my apartment includes utilities, which means I can use them as much as I want. Since it’s murderously hot everyday, I’ve spent most of time inside my air-conditioned apartment, working for music and watching America’s TV shows. A few days ago, there was a note in my mailbox from the management company of this apartment. It said that even though it’s utility-included, my usage has been so excessive that they may charge me unless the usage drops to an ordinary amount. Well, I do have my say on this. First of all, I need air-conditioning more because my room is a duplex apartment and the roof is merely nailed iron plates that conduct heat extremely well. It’s their fault, not mine. Secondly, who decides the ordinary amount? Japanese people are obsessed to categorize everything and they don’t allow someone or something sticks out. I hate to be categorized and fight against it all the time here. They should accept there is someone who works at home during the night and sleeps in the daytime. Thirdly, the note asked me to care about the environment. They must think using the word ‘environment’ makes them a saint. It was them who had chosen iron plates for the roof! Before they start charging me, I really need to get out of this apartment…

Hidemi's Rambling No.229

It’s been one of the hottest summers in history of Japan. Surely it’s the hottest summer in my life. The daytime high often reaches over 95 degrees and that has locked me up in my apartment. To make the most of a day like this, I placed an order of groceries at an online supermarket and had them delivered today. They carried a special promotion to give a customer a box of laundry detergent for free any $50 or above purchase. I had calculated carefully and made the total $50.48. After the delivery person left, I noticed the detergent was missing. There was a piece of paper instead, that said one of the items I’d ordered was sold out and its price was subtracted from the total. As a result, the new total got less than $50. I felt furious and was on the verge of calling for complaint when I recalled the delivery person. In the midst of the unbearable heat, he came up to my door, carrying heavy grocery bags and boxes, yet smiling and courteous. All I had to do was to receive them, and still, I was complaining about a dollar or so. I wonder why the smaller money is, the more persistently I pursue…

Hidemi's Rambling No.228

As my condition got better in the hospital, I went through a thorough examination to be determined whether I could be released from the hospital. For the examination, I was required not to eat anything but water for 24 hours. As a child, I had hardly skipped a meal before and I felt dizzy from hunger less than six hours into a fast. A girl whose bed was next to mine had put up a drawing above her bed. There was a shining sun in it, and it looked a sunny-side up egg to me. Because it was a full examination, it was going to take long in several different rooms. Although I asked my mother to accompany me during the whole process, she didn’t make it, again, as usual. I gave up after waiting for her as long as a nurse let me, and went for the examination with the nurse. The building where it took place was far from my hospital room and I needed to be in a wheelchair because my illness had required me to be inactive and quiet. All those things made me very nervous, so lonely and extremely hungry. The result was good and finally, my hospital life in the summer at the age of nine ended after one month. I survived nephritis but almost died from hunger on the day of the examination…

Hidemi's Rambling No.227

Since I was in the hospital for nephritis, I needed a special diet. I wasn’t allowed to take in salt. Each meal for me was salt-free and it tasted horrible. My mother felt pity for me and brought salty snacks every time she visited me. She encouraged me to eat them under my bed lest anyone see that. One day, I was caught by the other kid’s mother. She asked me where I got the toxic foods. She was astounded to hear that my own mother had brought them to me. After three weeks in the hospital, my condition got better and I was allowed to take a bath. My mother unusually came to see me early on that day to accompany me in the bathroom. Back in my hospital room, she bound my hair with ribbons without drying it. A nurse saw it and sharply scolded us because I might catch a cold. My mother was smiling, embarrassed, but wouldn’t redo, as it was too tiresome for her to dry and bind my hair all over again. I admit I was a bad patient, but my mother was the worst mother of a patient…

Hidemi's Rambling No.226

Back in my hospital life of my childhood, the next room to mine was a room for six boys. One of them was a five-year-old boy with leukemia. He often hung around my room and we got along well. I taught him how to fold origami. Because he was little, his mother stayed at the hospital with him. She frequently yelled at him, hit him and even kicked him. I was terrified of her. One day, my mother came to see me and went to take some tea for me from the free tea stand near my room. There, I saw her talking with the boy’s mother and learned that he had only a few months to live. His mother sounded so gentle and so sad. I understood why she treated him like that. For the first time in my life, I realized that sorrow and desperation led to unreasonable anger. Although I was only nine years old, I had never felt mortality so closely and strongly while playing with him…

Hidemi's Rambling No.225

My partner is very attentive and observant. And often, he is too much so. He does good things to me that I don’t ask for. Mostly I’m happy about it but sometimes it gets on my nerves. As what he does or says is always for me, I feel like shouting ‘Leave me alone!’ He anticipates what I want and does that before me. Although I want to have things done to my own liking, he does them for me before I go about it and requires my gratitude. Yesterday, he cleaned the stairs of my apartment in his way that was different from the way I was going to clean them. And he pushed his kindness to me as usual. I didn’t thank him because I had sensed that what he always claimed to do for me was actually for himself. In my view, he should thank me for letting him do in his way. That threw us into a fight. Too much kindness is a burden…

Hidemi's Rambling No.224

Apartment hunting that I’ve been doing for a few months now leads me to think a lot about my future. Since the choice has to do with how much I can afford and how long I intend to live there, it’s inevitable to make a long-term plan. For a person like me who doesn’t have a steady income, that’s extremely difficult. As the basics, I started with the worst-case scenario. It reasonably excluded some fancy apartment from my picks, and boosted fear for my future. I realized once again how uncertain my future was. Of course, there is still a possibility the best-case scenario will come into play, but if not? I might end up being a lonely old woman with no place to live. That depressed me so bitterly. After a few days of depression, I decided not to think about the future for a change, and began to live a day at a time. It worked for me. I’ve felt easy and full since then…

Hidemi's Rambling No.223

A couple of days ago, I found a small swelling under my tongue. I was horrified if it was cancer. The next day, my lip slightly swelled. I suspected some kind of allergy. I’d never had an allergy before and I recalled what I’d eaten for the first time lately. I’d had sukiyaki sauce that had been thrown in as a freebie when I bought groceries at an online supermarket. Also, I’d started taking blueberry supplements for my eyesight, as it had become blurry for some time and I’d felt fatigue in my eyes. I stopped having either of them and the swellings subsided. I convicted sukiyaki sauce of allergy. I resumed taking blueberry supplements and today, I woke up with a big fat lip. I look like a cartoon. My funny face is even funnier. I misjudged sukiyaki sauce and the criminal was the supplements, which I dared to invest for my eyesight although it was costly. I can’t go out today like this as I planned…

Hidemi's Rambling No.222

I installed Cubase 5 to my new computer for mastering of our new song. I’ve decided to do the mastering by myself instead of taking it to a professional. Basically, I don’t trust those who are so-called professionals or authorities. I believe I can do better. After working on the song for seven years, I don’t feel like leaving it to someone in this very last process. It might hit a dead end, and then, I’ll turn to an expert. But until then, at least I want to try and I think it’s worth trying. On the other hand, by doing so, It’s become uncertain whether the song should be completed by the end of this year…

Hidemi's Rambling No.221

The next bed to me in the hospital was a girl with asthma, who was two years younger than I was. Her mother visited her only on Sundays and she was practically all alone. That drove her to snuggle up to me all the time. And, she became the biggest disturbance in my hospital life. She was babbling rubbish all day long beside my bed and during the night, she would wake me up to tell me that she was going to the bathroom on her each trip there. Soon my patience ran out and we had a fight. She got on my nerves so badly that I started to hit her with a notebook in madness, as if I had been battering annoying flies. Other girls’ mothers stopped me and treated me like the cruelest girl they had known. Thankfully, she got out of the hospital much sooner than I did. Nobody was happier than I was for her release…

Hidemi's Rambling No.220

When I was in the hospital with nephritis, I shared the room with five other girl patients. Except for a very small or very sick child, parents weren’t permitted to stay overnight with the patients. They came during the visiting hours. I was nine years old and had never stayed outside home such a long time before. I suffered from homesickness rather than from nephritis. My parents were too busy working seven days a week as farmers and only my mother visited me everyday. But she only made it less than one hour before the visiting hour ended although I was waiting for her all day long. No matter how desperately I begged her to come earlier, she prioritized her work and I got to see her merely forty minutes or so a day. Sometimes my father also came to see me, taking my younger sister with him. In that case, when the visiting hour was over, I would see my parents and my sister off. They went into the elevator together and the door shut before me, excluding me alone. That was the thickest door I’d ever felt it was. I went back to my bed and lay down hiding tears from other girls and nurses. Maybe it hinted my future relationship with my family. The three of them still live together in our old house that I left after I struggled and couldn’t quite fit in…

Hidemi's Rambling No.219

This time in my fourth grade, I was in the hospital. It started as cold-like symptoms with a high fever. But I was left unattended because summer was the peak season for farming and my parents were extremely busy as farmers. To make things worse, my family had been rebuilding our house at the time and extra attention of my parents was paid to that. A week or so later, I vomited blood and fainted. That at last captured my parents’ attention and they realized the seriousness. When I became conscious, they had called a nurse who lived in the neighborhood and she was attending me. She suggested taking me to a hospital. After examination, I was diagnosed with nephritis. As the summer break for school was just around the corner, I was admitted to the hospital on the day the break began. Although I had been longing for the summer break as the precious time of my freedom, I was locked up in the hospital instead…

Hidemi's Rambling No.218

Fernando Alonso won GP of Germany last Sunday. He is my most favorite driver in the current Formula One competition. He transferred to Ferrari at the beginning of this season, which caused me to cheer for my least favorite team. Ferrari was infamous for foul play and preferential treatment when Michael Schumacher was in the team. Because a couple of years have passed since Schumacher left Ferrari and the team crew changed, I had hoped that the team had gotten out of wickedness. But it hasn’t, judging from the way they won the last race. They made Alonso’s teammate slow down so that Alonso overtook him by team orders that were banned. I wonder if Alonso can stay fair and right as he has been, in a dirty team like Ferrari. The question is awfully similar to the one I always ask myself. Can I stay fair and right in the dirty world like this…?

Hidemi's Rambling No.217

My sister won the first prize of a local poem contest for elementary school students. Her poem appeared in the local paper and many people read it. The title was ‘My Mean Big Sister’. Back then, every time she saw my face, her habit was to say ‘Play with me!’ As I liked to spend time alone, it had been an endless torment. Her continuous play-with-me chant would often drive me crazy and I tried to escape from her as much as I could. Her poem described how coldly I snubbed her whenever she felt happy to see me at home, and that was highly praised. To congratulate her, I told her that she owed me for this prize because if I had been nice to her, her poem wouldn’t have existed, and added that my meanness proved right and so I would try harder. Needless to say, she got on the verge of crying and ran straight to my mother as usual to tell on me…

Hidemi's Rambling No.216

One day in my early teens, I heard a scream from my younger sister’s room. My mother and I went in and my sister was crying over the open drawer of her desk. She said her money was gone. She had stashed all her money in an envelope there by saving her allowances and money as New Year’s gifts from relatives. She had thought the total amounted to well over $1000 and had decided to count for the first time in a long time. But there was less than $500 and she was devastated. My mother lulled her by explaining that was how money was gone. While spending a small amount of money on candies and snacks at a time, it accumulated a big amount in total. ‘That’s why we say money has wings,’ my mother said to her. But my sister insisted she had never bought candies that much and never wasted her money like that because she loved to save. My mother’s theory wouldn’t change though, and she kept telling her that money disappeared slyly while we were unaware. She said, ‘You learned an important lesson today. Now you know what is money.’ Quietly seeing my sister cry hard saying repeatedly that was impossible, I had a clear idea what had happened really. It was I who had regularly stolen her stashed money. I was in junior high school and my allowance was always short for what I wanted. I was constantly in a battle with my mother for a raise and denied. While there were countless things in the world that I wanted to buy, my sister wasn’t interested in buying at all. So, her money was useless and I did a favor by spending it instead of her. My sister’s money had wings all right, and brought me a lot of records, posters, concert tickets and accessories. Neither my mother nor my sister had the slightest idea what I had been doing. And they still don’t know about this…

Hidemi's Rambling No.215

I had a dream about my sister last night. In each and every dream about her, she takes my parents away from me. She’s four years younger than I am and I still remember the time when she was born. Although everybody told me that I must have been very happy to become a big sister, I felt gloomy more and more as my mother’s due date was drawing near. I strongly wished my sister would never be born because I knew grown-ups’ attention would leave me. And I was right. She was born to be my parents’ favorite. My mother especially stood by her all the time, both physically and mentally. I was sent away to my grandparents’ room to sleep with them. My mother’s arms and lap were always occupied by my sister and I was constantly driven away to my father. Only consolation for me was my grandfather’s attitude. Because Japan was excessively male-dominated –it still is, in my opinion-, he was bitterly disappointed that his newly born grandchild was a girl again. He kept complaining about it to his neighbor friends, saying ‘It’s no good! A girl again! No good!’ For that matter, he had six grandchildren in all and none of them was a boy. I regard it as a curse. My sister still gets along well with my parents as their favorite, lives with them in my hometown, and they brag about whatever she does while they criticize for whatever I do. To this day, they remain taken away from me by my sister. It can be a good thing for me, though…

Hidemi's Rambling No.214

The most troublesome homework for the summer break in elementary school was a picture diary. It was a big blank book in which you would draw and write about what happened each day, along with the day’s weather. Because I held off on my entire homework as a lazy student, the last day of the break would become a shambles involving my parents every year. While I was doing other pieces of homework sobbing from regret and their rebuke, they were tackling the picture diary by forging happenings and making sentences. But the thing was the required daily weather. There wasn’t the Internet yet at the time and the weather record of the past 40 days depended on my father’s memory. My mother drew pictures and I wrote down the stories my parents told me. My picture diary was evidently written by a grown-up with peculiarly well-drawn pictures and mature sentences. Of course, the total amount of homework was too huge to be done in one day even by three people, and I would submit only part of it on the first day of the second term. When asked by the teacher for the rest of it, my excuse was always ‘I’ve done it, but somehow, I forgot to bring it.’ The first couple of days of the second term would be spent likewise. Although my parents made me promise that it would never happen again, I repeated it every summer break…

Hidemi's Rambling No.213

The summer break has started in Japanese schools. It’s about 40 days long and followed by the second term. When I was a student, schools imposed tons of homework as a common practice. It was an enormous amount with which you would deal everyday to finish. Because I was a negligent student, I used to spend the whole summer break without doing my homework until the last day of the break every year. As a result, I had to stay up all night on the last day, weeping and regretting. My homework would become a family matter because my confession of unfinished homework was made to my parents on the last night of the break. For its considerable amount, my parents had to get down to my homework right away without finishing to scold me as much as they liked. My mother's strong vanity couldn't afford embarrassment that I would be scolded by the teacher in front of the class for not having done my homework. Continuously reprimanding me, my parents would help my homework all night…

Hidemi's Rambling No.212

I shopped at the discount supermarket that I’d recently noticed its existence again. Their usual prices are at the level of special sale prices at other supermarket. They also have their private brand at even lower prices for beer, noodles and wine. Meat is cheaper than the half-price one at other stores. I get the meat there with further discounts because of the imminent expiration date, so that the price is unbelievable for meat. It’s open 24 hours and I can go there any time I want without worrying about its closing time. It’s a perfect place to shop for me if not one particular thing –the music played in the store. They play Japanese hit songs annoyingly loudly. Their problems are they sound like a patchwork of fragments from hit songs of U.S. that were popular ten years ago. Their lyrics are particularly horrible with childishness. I try not to listen to them but it’s loud enough to beat any defense like earplugs or portable music devices. I don’t want to be contaminated, so I have to leave the store quickly each time. Being unable to enjoy shopping leisurely is the catch of this otherwise great store. The low price always has its reasons…

Hidemi's Rambling No.211

I spent the whole day giving much thought to the apartment that I’d found. There are numerous cons about the place, but moving in a better place with my low price range seems impossible. I looked for solutions for the cons – the soon-out-of-order water pipes and the broken boiler, except for the neighbor who is wanted for murder, as there’s nothing I can do about it. Thanks to the Internet and my partner’s unconventional ideas, I reached the solutions at the end of the day. I was so excited and happy that moving in that gorgeous apartment was getting feasible. I got up this morning only to find out that the place had been just taken. I hope you can imagine how disappointed I am…

Hidemi's Rambling No.210

As I’ve been constantly looking for an apartment online, I found a pretty good one again. It’s located by a lake near Mt. Fuji and it’s spacious, furnished and Western-style. Usually, this kind of property is far above my price range, but this one is discounted considerably so that it dove into my range. The catch is that the building is very old by Japanese standards. It’s 36 years old. Still, it’s the most gorgeous place I could possibly afford. I gathered information about the area, such as the climate, restaurants, shops and most importantly, the train and bus schedules because I don’t have a car. I decided to go to look at the room and sent an e-mail to the real estate company for an appointment. Meanwhile, I bought a train schedule book and made a precise plane to go there as a weekend trip. A reply from the real estate company included the more detailed information about the apartment. Because it’s old, the water pipes may give out at any moment. The boiler is broken, too. To finish up, one of the residents is wanted for murder. It’s not the one again…or, is it…?

Hidemi's Rambling No.209

Tomorrow is a polling day for a national election in Japan. For the past two weeks, it had been noisy from candidates’ campaign cars, which are the most common way for campaigning in Japan. The car is decorated with banners of a candidate’s name and runs through streets shouting the name over and over at the top of their speakers. Here, it’s still the era that Marty went back in ‘Back to the Future’. When it comes to an election, I always remember Mr. Goyude. He was a local politician in my hometown. I often saw him outside the elementary school I went to, waving and talking to kids. He would hand out his cards to kids, saying ‘Say hello to your parents for me!’ Some foolish kids boasted about getting his autograph or shaking his hand. Every time I saw Mr. Goyude, I felt pitiful for him. Japanese people say ‘A doctor or a minister, which will you become?’ when they admire a promising child. Our family’s next-door neighbor used to say it to me and each time, I hoped not to be a minister because to become one, the process seemed so sad and miserable. Now I’ve grown up and I became neither a doctor nor a minister…

Hidemi's Rambling No.208

I decided to upgrade my Cubase SX3 to Cubase 5 and placed an order online last night. I’ll save $400 by the upgrade, not getting the whole thing. To qualify the upgrade, I needed the serial number of the current software. I rummaged in my room for the number. Finally I found it and entered it on the order form. For the last blank of the form, they required a user ID. That’s a big enigma. I wasn’t given any user ID for Cubase. On the other hand, I’ve got quite a few user IDs for the website. What user ID? Which one? I looked through the papers and couldn’t find anything likely. On their FAQ page, there was an answer to a completely different question from mine, which told to enter the name in the user ID space. Now that I’ve run out of guesses, I filled in the blank with my name. A submit button had never been far like this. This morning, the e-mail told me that my order was processed. The user ID was simply my name. Just getting an upgrade is this troublesome…

Hidemi's Rambling No.207

Today is the Star Festival in Japan. It’s based on a forbidden love story between Altair and Vega, who are allowed to meet each other by crossing the Milky Way once a year on the seventh of July. We celebrate it by decorating a bamboo tree with paper ornaments. Among the ornaments are slips of colored paper on which we write our wishes. After the festival, they are taken into a river that is believed to be connected to the Milky Way for this particular occasion, where the written wishes come true. The last time I wrote my wish and floated the slip into a river was when I was nineteen. Since I had already started my career as a singer-songwriter, I wished to be successful someday. It seems that my wish slip hasn’t reached the Milky Way yet in spite of this many years’ traveling…

Hidemi's Rambling No.206

When I left for Costco yesterday, it started raining slightly. I thought how unlucky I was. I could have returned home but I didn’t want to waste my time to have prepared for going out and went on. By the time I got off the bus to walk to Costco for the rest of the way, it had stopped raining. There seemed a big downpour during my bus ride. I may have been lucky after all. On my way home, I missed the bus. I thought how unlucky I was, again. But by taking the next bus, my subsequent connections for the train and the buss went incredibly smoothly. I may have been lucky again. When I went to bed that night, I felt numb in my left arm and I feared that I would die from a stroke during my sleep. Thinking how unlucky I was, I fell asleep…

Hidemi's Rambling No.205

My apartment hunting is still going on and I found the best pick so far online last night. That could be it. It looked so attractive and I got excited enough to prepare for going there to close a deal first thing in the morning. There was some time before dawn and I looked up on the Internet about the property. Plenty of information was there, most of which were complaints about the superintendent of the building. All complaints seemed to refer to the same person and I became doubtful whether I could live in a place that such a bad person managed. While I read on the complaints, a different one caught my eye. A low flow of a shower. It was the last blow. By the time the morning dawned, my excitement was gone…

Hidemi's Rambling No.204

I got up 1 p.m. and when I arrived at Costco after walking to the station and taking a train and a bus, it was already 7 p.m. By the time I finished shopping and started back home, I felt exhausted because of heat, humidity and the long trip. Platforms of the train station were packed with commuters although it was 9 p.m. They were waiting for the train, standing squeezing each other and almost spilling over from the platform. I was sitting on a bench at the platform to take a rest and watching them get on the train, crammed and holding a strap. I was impressed by their physical strength. They get up early in the morning, commute all the way, work all day long and still have this energy left, while I get up in the afternoon, go shopping and rest on a bench waiting for the less crowded train. To me, this is a once- or twice-a-month thing, but they are doing this every day! Are they human beings with mighty power? Or, I’m a super weak person. Can I withstand all summer like this…?

Hidemi's Rambling No.203

It’s the middle of the rainy season in Japan. Even without sunshine, daytime highs are around 86 degrees every day. The worst thing is unbearable humidity. It easily exceeds 90%. We are virtually walking around inside a sauna. Maybe because of the horrible conditions, I haven’t been well lately. I’ve felt tired and had a mild headache all the time. Of course I use air conditioning, but the huge difference between inside and outside somehow makes me sick. That has deprived me of a party although we’ve just published on Kindle our second book, ‘Hidemi’s Rambling Volume Two’. I really had to do something for my poor condition and bought an ‘unagi’ bowl at a supermarket. An ‘unagi’ bowl is a Japanese dish that has a slice of a grilled eel over rice and is poured with sweet sauce made by soy sauce. It’s usually expensive, but I got one using a cheaper Chinese eel, also at half price. Eating an eel is supposed to be effective to get physical strength in Japan and people are having it in summer. I counted on an eel this time too. But while I’m explaining an ‘unagi’ bowl, it sounds more and more grotesque. I eat a strange thing…

Hidemi's Rambling No.202

After the mix down of our new song, I couldn’t manage to get it to the suitable volume. Instead of taking it to a recording studio to adjust it at the mastering, I decided to do the mastering by installing Cubase AI on my different computer, recording the song to it and increasing the volume. The other night, I had a dream in which I took the song to a studio engineer for the mastering. I listened to the finished sound by the engineer and screamed in despair, ‘No! This isn’t what I wanted at all! This is too muffled!’ And I woke up. It seems that I think the sound of our new song isn’t crisp enough. Now that my dream told me so, I will use the equalizer again on the mastering. Thus, our new song is in a final burst. Well, I’ve been saying this for over six months now…

Hidemi's Rambling No.201

Where I grew up wasn’t a good neighborhood. To my mother, seeing her child go to a public junior high school was out of the question. To get in a privileged private junior high, she made me go to a supplementary private school after the classes of elementary school. But even to get in the supplementary school, there was an entrance examination because it was for selective kids. As the public elementary school I attended was low at the educational level, my score of the exam was bad although I was the smartest at school. But the exam included an IQ test, which I had never taken before. In a three-way interview between the examiner, my mother and me after the exam, the examiner told us that he had never seen this high IQ before. I was supposed to fail the exam due to the low marks, but they let me pass as an exception considering my high IQ. Since then, I’ve leaning on my IQ for my life. My IQ is the only source of my confidence in my pathetic life but it’s the reason of my suffering as well. I’ve been unable to accept each and every failure of mine because I don’t understand why my high IQ couldn’t avoid it. Why do I fail in so many things? Why am I unsuccessful? Will I end my life without making use of my IQ? My partner compares me to a Formula One car. Although it runs faster than any other cars on a circuit, it’s completely useless on a regular street. I’m looking for a circuit for me but unfortunately, roads in the real world are all rugged with various obstacles…

Hidemi's Rambling No.200

When I was little, my mother constantly said bad things about others. She believed that, even when someone was kind to her, there must have been some plot behind the nice gesture. To sum up what she talked about every day, there are only evil people in this world. In kindergarten, mothers would fix a lunchbox for their kids and the kids would have it with their classmates and their teacher. At one lunchtime, when I was opening a lid of my lunchbox, I inadvertently dropped it to the floor without having a single bite and it overturned there. I lost my lunch. While other kids laughed at me, my teacher, who had been trying so hard to make me play with other kids, cleaned up the mess for me and took me to a small candy store outside the kindergarten. She told me to pick any bread I liked. I picked one timidly, feeling afraid what kind of trap this would be, as I didn’t have any money. She suggested one more. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and shook my head. She picked one more piece of bread by herself, took out money from her own wallet, and gave all the bread to me. I was stunned. She bought me lunch. It was the first time that someone unrelated to me was so kind to me. Since then, I had started talking to her. Even after I finished kindergarten, I had kept exchanging letters with her and I still send her a Christmas card every year. She was the first person who destroyed my mother’s theory of the evil world and taught me that there were some good people in this world…

Hidemi's Rambling No.199

I spent two years in kindergarten playing alone. The first year was quite peaceful because no one, including my teacher, cared that I didn’t play nor talk with anybody. But in the second year, the peace was broken by the teacher who took charge of my class. She did care and worried about my withdrawn attitude. One day, she suggested me to play with her outside at recess. She held my hand and took me outside. The biggest attraction was a trampoline at the playground. Kids would wait in line for their turn at recess. My teacher joined the line with me, saying to other kids ‘Let’s play with Hidemi! Make friends with her!’ They looked at me dubiously but reluctantly agreed because it was their teacher who told them to do. While I was waiting in line, I got more and more unbearable to be among others, standing so close to them. I observed the trampoline too, and it seemed impossible for me to reach the center of it by avoiding fall through gaps between the round frame and the mat. I began to search the way to escape from this deadlock but my hand was tightly held by my teacher’s. As my turn became imminent, I felt desperate. Then, the teacher said to me ‘Your turn is next. Now that you have this many friends, you can play without me, can’t you?’ and saying to other kids ‘Be nice to Hidemi!’ she returned inside. All at once, I ran away from the kids and the trampoline. I ran to the far edge of the playground and stood there. Kids were playing as if nothing had happened. I secured the enough distance from others and felt safe. Ironically, nothing has changed since then, as I’m still distant from the society…