Depressingly down

*sigh* well, if any of you are still reading, sorry, and I guess it's time to explain all the woe that has recently befallen the house of panda. The pictures, by the way, are from my recent trip to Tokyo (more on that later - both in this entry and in the next) and are quite happy, in contrast to the depressing angsty drivel I'm about to whine, spit and sputter all over you. Let's start with some geeky ranting, which those of you not so inclined may want to skip. If you want, you can actually just skip all of the moaning and just enjoy some randomly cheerful pictures.

Pandas welcome you to the Ueno national zoo!

---
BEGIN GEEKY PART OF ENTRY
---

First of, as you no doubt may have noticed, the site is all blown to hell and michaelpanda.com no longer seems to be working. That would be due to the fact that my shite webhost, whom I should of dumped f-ing ages ago when they first started jerking me around, and then again when they decided to take their servers offline without any warning for like a week straight, then again when when they crashed not 2 weeks later, or then again when their "upgrades" happened to result in a large chunk of data loss... well, you get the point, ANYWAY, my shite-ass webhost has decided to crash/go offline again for no discernable reason and with nary an e-mail for explanation.

What makes this particularly wonderful is that the fuckers a) don't seem to be responding to any of my e-mails and b) have absconded with all my data, which I had been trying to back up ever since I noticed the outages were getting more frequent about three weeks back but which had been unsuccessful at since I got booted every 5 mintues through an ftp session.

The Yamanote-sen whirrs to a stop in Tokyo station

The long and short of it being that large chunks of data are most likely lost forever, especially all of the blog pictures from the last few months (*screams at top of his lungs*) and who knows how much, if any, I'll ever manage to recover. I've sent off a few last grovelling pleas to my webhost, but *sigh* am just about ready to give up on ever seeing them again.

I'll give em' a couple more days, and if I still hear nothing, I will slag them off like they so royally deserve to be slagged, thoroughly, vehemently and across the entire damn internet. So stay tuned! As for now, I've got some stuff on a temporary server and will attempt to get a new permanent webhost ASAP.

Tennis looking quite chuffed over the prospect of onion soup...

Of course, as the saying goes, when it rains, it pours and so of course, I find myself simultaneously running into massive computer problems, when my DVD-RAM CD/RW drive (its the same drive, you see, a fact which will become abundantly crucial in a moment) has decided to become quite pantsed in a way I have never quite encountered before. Essentially, what has happened is, my computer has decided to stop recognizing the fact that the drive has anything to do with DVDs whatsoever - it will happily burn, read and access CDs to my heart's content, but stick in a DVD and ... nothing... nothing at all.

Not so much as a single damn peep out of it, unless you count the painful sounds of a laser scanning up and down repeatedly trying to lock onto a track and then finally giving up.

Naturally thinking this must be a driver problem (windows continues to show the DVD-RAM drive as a "cd-drive") I foolishly attempt to roll-back the (untouched since I first took my baby out of the box) driver to no avail. Then stupidly, I think I can simply uninstall the driver and upgrade to a new one only - gasp!!! guess what?

The entire Namacha Panda mascot collection SHALL BE MINE!!!

My DVD-RAM CD/RW drive is a "Matsushita (panasonic) DVD-RAM model UJ-812". Scouring literally every single crook and cranny in the vastness of the intarweb yields drivers for a UJ-810, UJ-811, UJ-813, even a UJ-814 and UJ-815 .... but as far as god and google are concerned, the UJ-812 (let alone the drivers) only exists as a figment of my imagination and a very brief blurb in an industry newsletter.

At this point I feel that I should mention one very important detail - my operating system is entirely in Japanese, which hardly qualifies as my native tongue.

After spending the better part of two days futzing with the damn thing, I give up and do what I swore I would not do - call tech support, which also happens to be entirely in Japanese, of course.

I'll spare you the gorey details, save only that a) I actually didn't do as badly as I had feared trying to figure out such technical stuff over the phone in japanese, b) I learned a whole lot of very interesting and of dubious-usefulness-in-the-future terminology and of course c) that the tech support boy has concluded (much as I did about 24 hours ago) that my drive/computer is fucked and that I will have no recourse but to send it in to get repaired, and hopefully sent back god only knows when. This naturally I am loathe to do because I know that no matter what I say, I'm going to get back my same computer worse for the wear, sporting a new (refurbished, of course) DVD-RAM CD/RW, and doubly of course, a totally wiped, reformatted and ghosted-to-factory-specs hard drive, which means I'll lose all my data. And naturally I am way too broke to be able to afford an external drive to back up my shit before I send it in.

Roppongi hills. Haters say what they will - I want to live here in the future!

(to head off the questions that any of you that are still reading are probably wondering:
a) yes, of course I thought about moving my data off to another partion then restoring the original partion with the recovery disc, only OMIGOD, since providence hates me, of course the recovery disc is actually a DVD, and since my DVD drive won't, umm... read DVDs.... that's a no go
b) yes I thought about trying to do some fancy hidden/locked partion nonsense, only partion magic absolutely refuses to work with my japanese-formatted drives (keeps hitting some goddamn error no matter what tests/checks/fdisk, etc. I run on the stupid shit).
c) and naturally, yes, I thought I'd ask the tech guy to just send me the stupid UJ-812 driver (although to be honest, it's pretty likely the actual drive itself is busted judging from noise it's making) but when the question was broached, what resulted was a tidal wave of nihongo at a million miles an hour, the gist of which was "no, we can't send you the driver because (insert lame official japanese excuse here) .".
d) of course they're making me send in the whole goddamn computer rather than just the drive because that's just the way things are done here in this country and anything else would make just too much sense (pardon my (only slighly unjustified) xenophobic bitterness...) )

Ummm yeah, so that's that. So who knows if panda may be permanently offline for a month or so in the very near future? *sigh*

----
END GEEKY RANT PART OF ENTRY
----

What else is amiss? Oh yes, swamped at work by lazy, full-of-attitude (the bad kind) students who actually angered me so much with their insolence and apathy (despite my best attempts at taking a deep breath and espousing the more peaceful of buddhist mantras) the other day that I actually inadvertantly called one a "retard" the other day, something which I am most definitely not proud of (and of course neither the JTE nor the student heard (it was under my breath) nor could have understood anyway, but the point still stands) but I was so fed up with their lazy-as-all-fuck apathetic attitudes, criminal (literally) misbehavior, self-absorbed insolence and the sack of shit that they (the bad ones only) must have for brains that I almost walked up to the kyoto sensei after my class and told him I quit and fuck it all, I'm going home tommorrow. It was only through a near-heroic panda effort that I managed to walk past his desk, and straight out the back door, skipping the rest of the day to lay in bed and look at my less-than-sympathetic ceiling while questioning why the hell someone saw fit to waste a) my time b) the students time and c) tens of thousands of japanese tax payer's money to pointlessly employ me at such a dump.

I know that someone has to get the short end of the stick, but even I am amazed at how quickly 10 months in the lowest of the low part time high schools has not only completely decimated any sort of enthusiasm or hope I may have ever had held for teaching japanese kids, but also completely eviscerated whatever positive feelings I had towards japan and replaced in their stead a rapidly deepening sense of loathing, disdain and physical revulsion towards so many things in this gloomy hell hole I find myself in. I still can't believe how thorough the transformation has been, and how amazingly deep and profound my sense of apathy has become... it saddens me to think that so much of me has been perverted by my surroundings... until I have lost that which I treasured so dearly and which brought me here in the first place. It angers me that the students have managed to have such a deleterious effect on my psyche, despite my best efforts to the contrary, and it is without hesitation that I say that I am counting the days (27) until my transfer to a new and much better school. As horrid as it is to hear a teacher say it - to hell with these kids. Someone else will have to teach them, because I. Give. Up.

I was asked to write a letter to my successor in order to welcome him to my current job. I find myself wondering if all of my successors hated this job as much as I have come to hate it? I suspect not, because I'm sure that a large part of my current vehemence is due to amplification by the horribly muggy and humid japanese summer (my temperment is extremely sensitive to the weather)... yet, I find myself at a loss as how to put it to him. My predecessor said very little to me (in fact, he was rather shite as those things go - I got more info from his friend than from him) which is one way to go about it, I suppose, letting each person find their own way, but I find it hard to shake the feeling that I should at least attempt to prepare him in some way for what is to come.

*sigh* I find myself staring out the window at the depressing concrete and rusting tin facades that never seem to change here on the dark side of japan, the ura nihon, the forgotten countryside where the very worst of Japan doesn't even bother to hide and I sort of repeat that St. Francis bit, where he's going on about having the strength to change what he can, the patience to endure, and the wisdom to know the difference and I ask myself if I have made the right decision staying here another year.

The tokyo renewers conference - that magical vacation paid for by our employers to sort of encourage those of us who were stupid/drunk enough to sign on for another round and bolster our flagging spirits by showing us all the fun we could have hadif only we weren't stuck way out in the middle of a bunc h of rice fields - was hella fun. Big post on that coming up as soon as I get a chance...!

Happier days in Tokyo, with some delicious panda food before me...

Sometimes I think I would enjoy this JET gig more if I hadn't come to Japan so many times before on my own/as a student - and seen and lived in the big cities and that other deeply seductive and attractive part of the whole affair - if I hadn't gone on beyond the superficial "dazzle" and realized (what for me, at least) is truly the higher standard of living and self fullfillment one can have in such environs - the part of japan that captured my heart, imagination and drew me back here to try and hack it for a while (to use a slightly mangled cliche). Let the so-called "japan purists", "japanophiles" and all other sort of holier-than-though pretencious gaijin rifraf go on about and have their much vaunted "rural japan" and "hidden japan" where they have caliph-like visions of a "lost japan" and "the true japanese spirit" - I'll take my beautiful, sprawling, crowded cities any day.

Hey, if I have to look at concrete, it might as well be pretty and filled with interesting people, right?

Coming back from tokyo - to the depressingly pointless work, the malfunctioning computers, broken webhosts, eternally-needing-to-be-fixed-prefectural website, un-updated xanga, ugly and boring inaka "urban" sprawl, bursting-at-the-seams inboxes, waiting-to-be-sorted piled up month's worth of trash and sweltering heat.... I think back on all the good times I had back when I was a students living it up in Japan.... I remember I ran into this one guy from New York once in a dodgy gaijin bar in Osaka somewhere, drunk off his ass and still pounding back more as I stirred around my 2500 yen Thanksgiving Day special oily instant mashed potatoes waiting for my girlfriend's friends to finish living up their dreams of "internationalizing" by talking to to a bunch of intoxicated eikaiwa-whore gaijin with slighly different "internationalization" ideas of their own.

"Mike" he said - "the thing about Japan is this....". I remember staring at him having just finished my little "wow this place is so awesome and I can't wait to move here after I graduate and live forever" that all us Japan-n00bs go through at one point or another - *you have to remember that working here - is... is a whole hell of a lot different than being a student here."

On days like today, I'm sort of coming to understand just what he was on about.