メリークリスマス！

Merry Christmas to all! See you when I see you

Microproblems

I look at people around me, and I see them focusing on microproblems. Microproblems depend on the context. In daily life, a microproblem might be which socks you will wear today, or if you will have meat or fish for dinner tonight. In the context of your whole life, a microproblem might be something like a failed relationship or a lost friendship. It might affect a tiny part of you, but the overall outcome will still be the same. Right?

I don’t like microproblems at all. Macroproblems are my thing. You can guess examples of macroproblems based on my description of microproblems: macroproblems are decisions that affect your entire context, be it your daily life or your whole life. A decision to pursue a PhD is a macroproblem, and for daily life a macroproblem is something like devoting your entire day to studying or to fooling around with your friends. My decision to move to Japan was initially a microdecision, based on my reasoning that it would only affect one year of my life. After I arrived, I changed my entire outlook on life, and I decided to stay longer. Thus, the microdecision became a macrodecision.

Which is more important? Who knows. I am back in Holland, and since then I see everybody I know here worried about microproblems. No one thinks about the macroproblems in life. In life, I would define macroproblems as things that concern the devotion of people’s lives to some cause. People don’t think about that here. Their goal is to get married and have children, so that their kids can get married and have children. Boo hoo, well done. Of course it would be cool if you could get rich on the way, and a happy and healthy life would be nice too, but in the end, that’s it. That’s the final goal. And there is nothing wrong with that. But people don’t think about WHY they have this goal. Why it’s so important for them to have this. So many people living so many insignificant lives. I just can’t be bothered to care.

And nobody blames me for not caring. People are only looking out for their own happiness. If you put on your own simple society facade, and blend in with the rest of the mindless cows, nobody will ever notice that you do not really care if they have a bigger car than their neighbor, or if they are 0.01% happier than the rest of their family.

So what is it that we should look for? Fuck if I know. I have no clue. I’ve been looking for something better than ‘married with children’ for years and I sure as hell haven’t found it.  But the least you can do is look! Open your eyes for one second and take them away from your petty little microproblems, and then maybe you will see that there are more important things in life. Everybody has to deal with microproblems, but it takes a better mind to actively deal with macroproblems. Most people just take life as it comes. This world needs more thinking people and less mindless sheep.

‘If you think you are a mindless sheep, then please kill yourself’. Keep in mind that mindless sheep don’t think, so the world will not get better from this post. People who are already thinking for themselves will not be affected by this post, and the mindless sheep will not read it or they will not get it. ‘There are two kinds of people that need help. Those that don’t need it, and those that don’t want it. The people that don’t need help would accept it, but the people who don’t want help, need it.’

Was signed, mindless sheep Randy.

Home winter

I have just started to use wordpress and I’m already starting to dislike it. Why is it so difficult to create reasonably sized thumbnails for pictures? It’s quite annoying and I have to say blogspot is much better at handling this. Oh well.

This time I managed not to oversleep, and I actually caught my flight in time. With a lot of time to spare actually, so I was kind of bored while waiting for the plane. I was also bored while waiting during the flight. I was even more bored at Zürich, while waiting for my transfer flight. During the flight to Amsterdam sleep caught up with boredom, and during the two and a half hour train ride back home I was mostly sleeping. And so ended my 26 hour journey back home.

It’s cold here! Way colder than Japan. I can’t believe I’m crazy enough to go backpacking with Kamil next week. I’d better prepare accordingly and bring a lot of warm clothes. And a lot of lenses for my camera. And I need a book for my flight back. I will be traveling all day for January 2nd, 3rd and 4th, so that should be ‘fun’…

Anyway, the weather cleared up today and I managed to take some wintery pictures. There will be a couple more appearing on my photoblog the next days, so stay tuned.

Oldskool

Of all the things I could be doing… Of all the things I _should_ be doing. I’m leaving for home in three days. Two and a half days now. My kitchen is a mess after the commonroom party last Saturday. My suitcase is not packed. My things are not prepared. So what am I doing? I am writing on my blog.

When people are busy they think less. When people think less they have more time to enjoy the moment. This weekend was excellent. I didn’t have time to think. Friday night was spent at an excellent restaurant, after which some of us enjoyed a bit of talking in the commonroom. The ‘bit’ turned into several hours and I went to bed at 6AM.. The next day I was supposed to go to Tokyo for shopping, but I canceled it, since the evening brought us the commonroom party, and we celebrated Bert’s birthday. He’s leaving soon, so these are the last couple of days that I’ll see him (in a long time, anyway). Bert, I wish you the best of luck! Sunday was spent shopping in Tokyo, which led to a good, long chat again. All in all a very talkative weekend.

I’m looking forward to going home. It’s been a while since I was so busy day after day for such a long time. I don’t have time to think at work or at home, and life just flows along. I am delaying important decisions for later, and it seems fine. I understand that I have to wait a while. There’s no point in trying to force things to happen. When the time is right, good things will come my way by themselves. And I will be ready for them. But not yet.

Acceptance

My friend is intolerant. There is no other way to put it. Any information that you give her will be immediately used to form a (negative) opinion about people. After she makes up her mind, it is impossible to change. She will never change her mind about a person, be it good or bad. And when her mind is made up she will use any little thing to confirm that her views are correct. This pisses me off to no end on occasion and I finally feel the need to write about it.

Is it so difficult to just accept other people? One of the reasons that I am still here is because people are more tolerant. People here don’t care if you fit in with other people. You are expected not to, because you are a foreigner. Other foreigners don’t expect you to be the same as them because we are all from different countries. The atmosphere is free and tolerant, and everybody can relax and be themselves. Except one person.

This person still keeps worrying about her public appearance. If she thinks people don’t like her she can be upset for weeks, and if she thinks she said something wrong she will apologize for it the next 4 hours. It’s always about how other people see her, and she always tries to make a positive image for herself (and her country). Why is it so difficult to relax and not worry about what other people think of you? If you keep this up you will die of stress when you are 30.

So much for a fresh start…

This weekend I went to OoYama for the fourth time -___-. It was fun, although it does get old after a while, so for me the focus this time was on talking and playing with my camera, more than climbing. I put the pictures online at picasa, and I’ve placed some on my photoblog as well. All in all it wasn’t a bad trip, and a lot more difficult than Takao-san last week, which was kind of easy.

Today is Sunday, and it’s been quiet. I remember when I used to enjoy my no-interaction-at-all days, but I haven’t had a single day in the past 6 months where I haven’t spoken to anyone at all. Which is a good thing, I guess. Still, a balance is required. I need to talk to people to keep me motivated and energetic, and I need to be alone to by myself and stay focused.

Alex showed me a cool link about a new way of resizing pictures called seam carving. This way doesn’t actually resize pixels the old-fashioned way, but it finds the least important seams in the picture, along which it removes pixels. This way the most important details are resized the least and the unimportant details are removed. Sounds great in theory, but in practice it could still use some work. It deforms faces horribly, for one thing. I gave it a try on a landscape picture, and the resizing worked so great that I don’t even wanna bother to show it here. I will show you the strange result of resizing a picture of some leaves on a tree:

Original:

Resized using seam-carving:

Interesting, but useless. The idea itself is brilliant though, and I’m sure many better implementations of this technique will present themselves in the near future.