Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful not for all the sleep I get, but for the many times I have found myself wake up.

I am thankful not for the quantity, but for the quality of meaningful friendships I've had over the years.

I am thankful not for my religion, but for the relationship with You it has helped me grow on.

I am thankful not for the happy moments, but for the family I can share them with.

I am thankful not for what I have, but for the dreams I've built out of what I don't.

Fan Mail

Dear Chris, Jonny, Guy and Will,

You are my most favorite musicians on planet earth. And I bet you hear that everyday, it may sound almost insincere. But trust me, I'm one of the many souls that mean it!

I have no idea how this letter got to you. I had intentions of mailing it since I am discouraged by the chances of it eventually ending up at your desks. When I watch Youtube, I see millions of hits on your videos. It makes me think that even if I didn't watch your videos or buy all your albums, or if I never became a fan, you'd still be as famous, as great and as awesome. And I don't really mind! I'm just glad to be your fan whether it matters or not!

Have you ever wondered which song of yours people like best? Some days, Violet Hill can be my favorite. Other days, I wake up singing Don't Panic or I put myself to sleep with Yellow on repeat. I used to say Fix You was my first love, but I might have to rethink that since any of your songs can, whether it may be Speed of Sound or Talk, bring back feelings of those eager days when I sped up to my room, locked the door and pretended to live inside a Coldplay world.

I'm a fan, not only because you are excellent with the whole music thing but because you possess such spunk. You are rock stars that are very comfortable under your skin. The total package was too original to be shoved off. The songs are simple and complex all at once.

It is my great fear that you stop creating music. Please don't ever get tired. You may not know it but many people, in the silence of their rooms during midnight, play your songs and remember feelings. Your songs are theraputic like aromatherapy candles, and that's your relevant contribution to the stressed out, baggage-laden world.

It has been my birthday wish to see you perform live for 3 years in a row now. I don't mind wishing for it until I'm old. I just sure hope it comes true, or else those birthday candles would be such a waste.

Kidding aside, keep on rocking my socks until they fall off.

Danne

A Yellow Box

This is the most beautiful yellow box I've ever seen in my life.

It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. I didn't really care if the doorbell of the mailman woke me up. When I spoke to him in the video doorbell thing and I heard the word にもつ, I knew it would be the beginning of a beautiful day.

YAY YAY YAY! I love the smell of home.

Sweet November

Hey! I wanted to share some pictures with you.

Here are some of my favorites. They were taken from different places, train rides away from each other, at different times, in different moods, so forgive the incoherence!

Let's start off with something classic-- Shibuya crossing. It's one of those busy sanctuaries in this city. You'll never get tired of repeatedly watching people rushing across the huge intersection.

This was a photo of people doing different kinds of banzai during our school festival. It was extremely entertaining.

Harajuku crepes! "Mmm." will be enough caption for this.

Here's a temple in our neighborhood standing high and mighty!

Roppongi Hills--classy! There's so much life in this place.

This is what you see when you look up while walking Roppongi Hills.

This is how freshly steamed side street Chinese food in Japan Chinatown looks like.

Autumn

This is my 150th blog post in this website (some which went unpublished due to reasons unknown). In this sesquicentennial entry I decided to write a post about Autumn.

Autumn is such a nice word, and I say that maybe because I like how the two consonants m & n go together at the end. I would have named my first kid that. But my fancy for Autumn goes beyond nominal, as such would hardly give it justice.

The crisp, cool air, layered clothing, late sunrises and early sunsets all contribute to a mood of slowing down. Nature exhibits entropy by the way falling leaves arrange themselves on the ground. People sit outside coffee shops drinking tea or cocoa in an attempt to keep them warm from the moderately cold air.

The sad thing however, is that autumn is hardly taken on its own. It's always seen as transitional, the season between summer and winter. It is like a middle child. It is then that leaves decide to commit harakiri so they don't die during the extreme cold. It's when people do fur coat shopping and stock up on food. It's when squirrels pack their belongings and begin to burrow on the ground. Nobody enjoys Autumn as Autumn. Everyone's anticipating Winter.

I'm not sure how Autumn herself feels about this.

Human Brain

Excerpt from my journal

It reads: the human brain-- probably one of the most important inventions of God.

It's just one very fascinating machine, no neuroscientist could probably get to the exit of the labyrinth that's in there. God must have really designed it that way so we can't boast.

Typing this blog post while drinking water and chatting and breathing, and my heart's beating and I'm shivering because it's cold; all of those controlled by a mere mound of human flesh that we call the brain. How did thoughts like E=mc² spring out of organic, decay-able human flesh?

Executive functions like planning, initiating appropriate actions and abstract thinking happen just so naturally, burning probably only a few calories, in a split second.

God must have been so proud when he invented it. Awesome!

Tonight

I'm not going to give any details but I want to sum it up to:

"It's been so long since my favorite shirt had been my favorite shirt."

Read between the lines.

Hihi

Today, for unexplainable reasons, I am happy. It's been quite a while since I got into the homesick rut. Going out of the dormitory to explore the city was just very liberating.

I want to build a home at the center of Roppongi Hills. Who knows?

Quoting my friend Jeanne, it's "I am so happy I can just hug anyone right about now," to think it was just days ago when I said I can't feel anything.

I write longer when I'm sad. Haha. Did you notice?

Because there are days when we just feel nothing.

Nothing. No happiness, no sadness, no fear, no pain, nothing really sensible to blog about. I'm giving you a chance to back out from reading this post!

My emotion palette is of untainted white. So today I tried to watch a movie which was supposedly good and critically-acclaimed. It had the best visuals, it was about dreams (my supposedly favorite subject), people in circus costumes were flying, there was a mystical waterfall, the background seemed like it came from A Midsummer Night's Dream--it had all I wanted in a film, but I felt nothing. What's wrong with me?

And then I realized there should be days of untainted whiteness for there to be days of vivid blue and yellow. Days are like pages of a sketch pad. You can be confronted with a blank white sheet staring at you, and then tomorrow when you wake up, you just find it flipped over to a page filled with a blots of colour.

There are days when we feel, there are days when our hypothalamus is wrapped in tissue.

Low Light

Today I paid a visit to a vault of around 1.5 million books and it was a wonderland for the soul! I was a wanderer thrilled by the thought of being surrounded by books from the 19th and early 20th centuries. In my one year stay in our school I sure should take advantage of one of the biggest libraries in Japan. It's a must to sit still and read, read, read!

I borrowed these books. I'm kind of excited to learn about C.S. Lewis' take on pain and suffering and all of life's dramas. The thicker book below is entitled The Psychology of Dreams from the 1920's.

Sitting in one corner, being totally isolated from the world and getting transported into an alternate universe created by some person you barely know-- that's the best thing about reading.

There you are, sitting at the back of my brain.

I Want You Now

I do not remember when of you I last held sight

I think I lost chances of seeing you since I boarded that flight

You're bad for me, that's what they all say

But I can't help to want you anyway

I do not care of the consequences of the future

Not seeing you is just pure, uhh, torture

You always let out the inner child in me

With such trivial things I feel so giddy

It's a no-brainer, you make me happy every time

And I don't even mind making you this rhyme

For the next time I see you I'm sure never to pass up the chance

To tell you how I've fallen into such a potato romance

Oh, McDonald's french fries

Getting All Geeky

Waking up is such a phenomenon, no wonder empowered (?) women like Katy Perry, Hilary Duff and Ke$ha sang about it.

Every morning we spend some time struggling between the lure of sleep and the promising waking life. Even when we're too tired to even think, a debate plays in our heads and it often goes: Do I want to stay in the sheets and put my brain to rest from the madness of last night, or do I want to get up and go out there?

Just as the phase between dreams and reality is a blur, there is a threshold of sleepiness or waking. I couldn't better articulate myself than by showing you a graph of what I'm trying to say.

Being geeky and taking this topic too seriously aside, I believe that sleep research is a very promising future for me, thanks to my Biopsych course this sem. The blur between dreaming and waking was always a fascination, and so are the things that happen before, after and in between them!

Sorry if I'm taking this topic too enthusiastically. And since we're at it, let me try to convince you why this whole thing is totally cool. Sleep is a reversible state of unconsciousness-- it is not anywhere like drugs or paralysis. And yes, it's better than alcohol. The morning-after feeling just feels so good. If you want to take a break from the daunting task of dealing with reality, it's easy to get in such a state of unconsciousness (well except if you have insomnia).

I ♥ sleep. Don't we all? :-)

Hot Fuss

Now an official Brandon Flowers/The Killers fan! I love 'Somebody Told Me', 'All These Things That I've Done' and 'Human'. They're the only 3 songs I've been listening to all day.

Thus the conclusion to make a Brandon Flowers wallpaper.

He is what you call hot.