Last month, I went to Seattle to attend this year's The International, a video-game tournament. It had been the second time this year I've been to America. I went to San Francisco for about four months to attend school, then I went to LA for my holiday. As much as I wanted to go to the East Coast, Seattle was actually one of the cities I really wanted to visit. And the fact that the place pretty much gave birth to a video game that I was really into, was the nail on the coffin for my decision to attend TI4. As usual, I took plenty of photos. My two weeks in Seattle, now that I think about it, really brought back a lot of memories -- for better or worse.

Centre court, Honolulu airport. I chose Hawaii Airlines because it was the cheapest option and because I originally wanted to go to Pearl Harbour. Well, I didn't get to go. Honolulu airport was unlike any other airport I've ever been to. For a place that's absolutely filled with the Japanese, this place felt nothing like Narita. It was very relaxing, very laid back, and the tempo of life here seemed to be very slow. Even the security guards were Hawaiian shirts and spent most of their time making jokes and socializing with the passengers. Occasionally you could hear the sound of ukulele. It was quite a pretty sight.

And here are the runways. That was the plane I boarded. The place was incredibly humid and hot. This was the closest I've ever gotten to the Equator. It was winter in New Zealand. I wore a woollen jumper to Hawaii. It was a big mistake.

A friend of mine came to pick me up. I was going to live at this apartment for the next two weeks. How I came to know him is actually bit of an incredible story. But that's a story for another day, I suppose. He also held up a hilarious sign which made this exhausting journey a bit more bearable.

He was living with a room-mate who was studying CompSci at the University of Washington two blocks away. He also read Dostoevsky and Ayn Rand, and my impression is that the latter had a profound affect on him since he was mostly indifferent to me and just about everyone. He spent most of the next week or so in his little corner, watching video game streams. He also ate a copious amount of bacon, and the smell of frying lard 7 in the morning made me feel very, very sick.

It was very, very hot in Seattle. It was actually cooler to stand outside in the sun then to be baked inside in his apartment. It was quite a nice place to live in, except for the fact that the rent was really high since it's so close to the university. His apartment definitely felt more sophisticated and probably more comfortable than the apartment I stayed in at Berkeley. But I couldn't bear the heat. So I went out.

Foliage outside the apartment. Very pretty. Already it seems that I must've been thinking about home, since I was looking at the blue skies and thinking about how closely this place resembled New Zealand.

University of Washington, Tacoma campus. It was a very, very beautiful school. There were lots of trees, unlike the University of Auckland which felt more like a jungle of concrete and glass. Down the lane you can see the Museum of Glass and the local history museum. My first impressions of Tacoma had been really good. But it felt different from Berkeley. Tacoma was an industrial hub, intersected with rail roads. It was not very cultural, it was very rustic, rugged and coarse. Berkeley had a lot more culture.

Union Station. 

Museum of Glass. It's literally what the name of the place suggested. There was a walkway over the rail hub that connected this side to the actual museum. The architecture had a Frank Gehry feel to it. The place, like the adjacent history museum, was almost devoid of people. The other side was connected to the ocean, and you could smell the tangy scent of saltwater. I spent a few minutes looking at the forest of sails and the dinghies and boats gently rocking in the water.

Downtown Tacoma.

As you can see, there really aren't a lot of people here 8 in the morning. By the time I got back to the museum, though, people were already lining up in droves at the local Starbucks. There were so many coffee shops here. Seattle gave birth to Starbucks, after all.

I also went to the local history museum. The place wasn't actually very impressive, and as expected I was the only person in there. The only thing that caught my sight was a gigantic model rail road. Like a child I spent about twenty minutes just staring at it.

I really don't see how this is supposed to make history cool. They were trying to brand people like Rosa Parks as some sort of cool role models for kids, with stuff like "Well, did you know that Rosa Parks didn't give nobody her bus seat? That's so cool!" The fact that I'm here at the museum is the living evidence that history is for wimps.

I didn't do too much else at Tacoma. In fact, there wasn't really that much to do to begin with. The weather was incredibly hot, and even with fans running 24/7 the apartment wasn't getting any cooler. The qualifiers for TI4 was also on, and my friend spent most of his time watching that. Thanks to the heat, I couldn't remember too much about the next three to four days. We didn't eat much, either. My friend was an awful cook, so I made curry which he really liked. His roommate also liked it and in a rare display of sympathy, he came to me asking how I made the curry so delicious. He also said that I would make a really good girlfriend, and I said that I wouldn't mind being a girl in my next life. We also went down to a Pho place, and in the end we went there so many times, I got nauseous just by smelling coriander. He promised me that we'd go to Seattle together but that never happened, and we just sat in front of the computer watching Twitch streams. I guess he really wasn't the outdoors type. It would've been a lot fun going out with him. Well, it would've been.

My friend and I were so incredibly different. He was a misogynist, while I'm a pretty big supporter of woman's rights. He was an atheist, while I'm Catholic. I believed in racial equality while he really, really doesn't like spics. I'm a vegetarian, and as a response he held up a giant chunk of frozen beef and proceeded to point to his stomach. I believe in environmentalism while he really couldn't care less about the melting of ice caps. I read a lot of books, while the only thing he reads are Twitch chat and Skype convos about who the best girl is. He was pretty big and tough while I'm a bundle of sticks. I make my bed every morning, while his bedroom resembled a war zone. And most importantly of all, he liked Chitoge while I liked Onodera. We must've been both thinking that the other guy is nuts.

A few days later, his friends (who were also TI4 attendees) also arrived. That made for a total of 7 people (8 if you include his old room-mate) and things were becoming unbearable. The heat and the fact that so many people were crammed in such a tiny space was making me very, very uneasy. I was also the only person there who showered on a daily basis, so not much could be said about hygiene, either. I wanted to clean up his room but my friend wasn't very happy about it (later on, my father commented that this was exactly how his college dorm was like, so it seemed like I was the outlier here). In any case, it wasn't very comfortable for me, but there was no point complaining about free lodging. Especially when my friend is actually such a nice guy in real life.

So yea, this is part one of my story. Next, I'll be going to Seattle.

It's only been three days (four days, actually, although it's only Thursday morning here), but my week had already been a bit of a roller-coaster, of both disappointments and, strangely enough, some satisfaction here and there. Yesterday I received an email telling me that I'm not going to get that position that I wanted, which I suppose is expected since I was competing with the rest of the country for only a dozen positions. It was actually a lot of fun writing the cover letter, believe it or not. With that being said, I really think I should work harder. I thought I worked hard enough but that's a really bad mentality to get into. You can't get to a plateau and stay there, you have to strive to be as good as you can. And the hard thing about it is that you can't get salty afterwards. Well, just a little saltiness can't hurt.

I got a translation gig the other day, which admittedly was really, really fun. It was from a marketing consultant from a public relations firm called Dentsu (apparently it's the biggest PR firm in Japan), and she wanted me to translate her presentation slides into English. It was a lot of work, not only because I wasn't familiar with marketing jargon but also because she's going to showing this to some really big clients, and I really didn't want to mess it up. Her clients wanted to invest in a new shopping centre and her job was to come up with a plan to get people to buy things they don't actually need. It was really hard work, but I learned a lot, especially about how presenting marketing ideas is, in itself, a matter of marketing and how much rhetoric there is to the so-called 'hard data' they always present. And I received good pay for it as well, although I retrospect I really should've charged more.

If I had more of those gigs and worked from 9-5, 5 days a week for a year, I could be earning a six figure salary. Well, I could be, if exchange rates were better, and if I got more gigs. She paid me quite a bit for the standards of her country, but it really isn't very much here in New Zealand. It's probably enough to buy a figure or something, but for six hours work I really expected something more. Then again, (to quote what HR people have always told us), it's the 'experience' that really counts. Translation is such an easy thing for me to do, and the only hard part is learning new jargon and adopting the right voice. It's hard because different clients and different types of people talk in really different ways. Business and marketing talk in one way, academia talks in another, and instruction manuals are really different from all of these. I think the task for me, right now, is to read as widely as I can and try learn a new language. By the time I'm 25, I hope that I can speak four languages, with Japanese and probably German next in line.

The reason why I picked Japanese was because I think I can master this language a lot quicker than, let's say, Russian. It's also more versatile, I guess, and if I get really good at it I might even be more employable! Well, scratch the last part. I'm going to try memorize the fifty kana first before I move onto conversation, and I'll try get my mother to talk as much Japanese as I can. She was actually a Japanese teacher, although she's a businesswoman now and she probably won't bother with me any more. Someone once joked to me that I have the perfect learning environment for Japanese because my room is completely filled with junk from Japan. It felt almost like a compliment, except for the fact that they were all made in China.

I don't really have time for entertainment any more. The only video game I play with any real frequency is Hearthstone, and I'm thinking of quitting that soon so I could focus solely on my work. I don't really watch anime, either, although there's still a few more figures I want to get (and a really, really cute pair of Yuru Yuri headphones I'm thinking of getting, just because I will look super cool in them). Cardcaptor Sakura is the only show I've watched for the past year or so, and the one I've genuinely enjoyed. The show is completely innocent, completely naive, and yet at the same time it's packed full of emotions, especially when the backstory of Sakura's mother pops up (over and over again, in fact). The show is really beautiful, although I have to make sure I don't watch too much of it. Otherwise I'd get into the fantasy that people are really that sweet, beautiful, charming and innocent in real life, when the people of the real world are far less 'nice', so to speak. It takes months and years to build a relationship, but one argument is enough to break it apart. In fiction, you find love at first sight and love that is unbreakable. There's a pretty big difference between the two.

(A bit of info about the picture on the right: it's by an artist called 'moonknives' and I really like his work. I actually have a few of his art hanging in my room, actually. And it turns out he watches most of the stuff I do, too).

I have a lot do in the next few years. Idleness is no longer really an option for me any more, and I can no longer really bear the feel of idleness. It does not feel good at all. This year had been such an incredible journey, and after thousands of miles of travelling I just don't think I can stop walking. Two years ago I promised that I would get the grades I want at university. I climbed that plateau and there's a thousand more plateaus to ascend. There are so many climbs in front of me, and I think I might get really badly hurt, bruised and I might even fall into despair. But those are just emotions. The best cure to nostalgia, to sorrow and the departure of those you love, to those emotions, is to devote yourself so completely in your work, that you lose yourself in your own passions.

I spent most of this week thinking about an assignment that I had to do. There were quite a few assignments, actually, and the thing about going to school is that you end up with a lot of obligations. Cover letters, class surveys, and of course essays. Obligations that I'm happy to fill, to be honest. I'm now the class rep for one of my courses and things had become quite busy. I talked a lot with my professor and with every single conversation, I felt that I had become more and more of an adult and less and less of a child. To converse with another adult on equal terms was a very strange feeling.

On Wednesday I went with two of my acquaintances to a nearby university where they were holding fortnightly talks on finance and how to succeed in a business career. It's no surprise that every business school seems to have the prettiest buildings. In fact, this one was a lot more attractive than any single other lecture theatre I've ever seen. I was quite tired so I sat down and chewed some gum, and one of my acquaintances showed me a Tumblr page on his Samsung Galaxy. It was a post about how ridiculous it was that magical girls like the Precures take such a long time transforming and the villains won't actually hit them. They were making up theories about how the Precures slowed down time and all that. I just think that it's fiction and people are allowed to do whatever they want.

The talk was pretty interesting. Quite embarrassing actually - well, at least I got embarrassed! The speaker was a Swedish banker who has worked on hedge funds and all that, and is now working as a motivational speaker. Then before his presentation started, he began singing and honestly, his singing wasn't very good. Then he started showing us photos of his recent travels, as well as his private island in Sweden. Then he taught us the key to being happy, namely that 1. you have to be rich and 2. you have to own an island. Okay, maybe he didn't say that. But he reminds me of someone who has worked in finance for such a long time, that he's getting bored. So bored that he lives off talking nonsense, and that (unfortunately) there is an audience like me who's actually listening attentively to them. He ended the presentation, as expected, with a song. This time, I noted down his email and I decided I was going to shoot him an email after.

I bought a can of peach nectar at a local Japanese shop. It's basically a translucent peach juice with bits of peach flesh floating in it, and it actually reminded me of Misuzu, which is hardly surprising since my room is filled with pictures of her. I only found the canned version whereas the one she drank is actually in a juice box form, and probably should be a lot thicker. They also charged me three dollars. Three dollars! I guess I better keep the can.

My week didn't end too pleasantly, I suppose. An online friend invited me to spend some time with him. Then it turned out that he had to scrim for someone and that he couldn't hang out with me anymore. I saw his friend's list and I saw so many people whom I used to talk to. But I don't talk with them any more. And it felt strange. It was a very empty and desolate feeling to know that the Internet isn't really quite the same as real life, that your relationships are as complex and as fragile as a spider-web. I think that when people first meet, you become excited at what they might be. Then as things dissipate, you realize that you pretty much have nothing in common with just about anyone. I don't think anyone really managed to live through that phase, and at least I could feel for those who, in the end, just get sick of other humans. I think as long as those feelings persist, I won't be a true solitary. The day I become truly solitary is when I immerse myself so deeply in my fantasies that to feel the warm embrace of another human is no longer necessary any more. But that's impossible, really, because humans can't live without other humans, whether I like it or not. It sickens me to the bottom of my heart.

I just want to sleep. I feel so exhausted and next week is going to be very busy.

Writing has become my only consolation out of my pastimes, and the more I write the more I think that there could be so much more I could do in and with my life. But it's not at all a comfortable feeling. Writing is very nostalgic, and the more nostalgic you are the more you  think in the past. My history had been a mess. The more I write, the more I regret. But when writing is your only consolation, there's not much you can do.

Recently I've started on a new diet. I figured that I had not been eating enough protein, and since I'd been a vegetarian for the past five years or so there was no way I could eat meat again. I'm actually trying out a few brands right now since the original tomato sauce flavour is getting a bit boring. My new favourite is the Mexican flavour with the jalapeños, and I've been eating it for the past few days. My diet has become increasingly simple as of late, and I've been seriously considering buying some Soylent in the near future so that I'd never have to cook again, at least for a short while (in case you haven't heard, Soylent is this tasteless food powder that's suppose to be blended into a slurry - it's pretty gross).

I found a new restaurant near my university which I've become quite fond of. It's a small, Japanese place tucked away in the middle of an old-fashioned shopping mall, and there are only a few stools inside. But for some reason the place makes me warm and fuzzy inside, maybe because of the pot of curry at the back of kitchen that seems to be permanently boiling. The place is basically a downsized family restaurant, and they sold only curry and croquettes. The curry was six dollars while the croquettes were a dollar each. The curry there tasted very different from the curry I make at home. I heard that Japanese curry is supposed to have honey and apples in it, which gives it a very sweet flavour that I'm very fond it. Well, at least that's what I guessed. I wonder if they keep the mixture of their curry a trade secret or something.

The little shop is owned by a young Japanese couple. The guy is quite lanky but the young woman was actually quite attractive - she'd dyed her hair blond and a big, pretty smile, and I rather enjoyed it when she asked me (with a strange yet charming Japanese accent) whether I wanted pickles on my rice. The first time I came here, she was tending to a few babies the customers brought with them, and she kept on saying 'kawaii desu ne' or something like that, which made me slightly uncomfortable because listening to that real life felt quite surreal. I also bought one of those soda bottles (the ones with marbles inside) for three dollars -- there were only 200ml inside, which I thought was an absolute rip. But I loved the sound of the 'pop' the bottle made when the seal is broken, and that gentle sizzle of the bubbly fizz coming out. It's winter here in New Zealand, but those fizzy drinks made me think about summer.

On the way home, I met an old friend of mine whom I hadn't met in a few weeks. He looked surprisingly chill and relaxed and I felt that he was the sort of person who would let nothing get him down, even if it means doing assignments on the day before it's due or dealing with a really bad GPA. He's still exactly the same as before, really, and all he really does in his spare time was playing video games. I invited him to rob some banks with me on Payday 2 but his response was very lukewarm, and I'm okay with it since I am absolutely terrible at robbing banks. But our conversation soon ran out of steam. I felt that our common language had ran out somewhat, and I was getting quite bored of video games to begin with.

Tomorrow I have a cover letter to write. I've already thought of the structure but I still feel a bit icky about the writing itself since I'm not confident whether I'll get this position. It's going to be a long day.