Project Nexus

I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the layout of my other blogs and their lack of flexibility. My blog on Ameblo, for instance, looked pretty crap and you couldn’t change much about the style to make it look more elegant or clean. The fonts looked horrible and the layouts to choose from look like they were all designed by a 3-year-old. There is also the issue of having to log into 3 places to post updates, which seems a little counter-productive (unfortunately).

So I’m going to try out WordPress. I was going to go to Tumblr, but Tumblr has no ability to have users add comments, which means no spam (yay!) and no feedback, discussion or any form of communication with the two people that end up reading it (nay!!!). So, here I am. We’ll see how long this lasts.

中国語でも日本語でもポストをよく書いてみるよ！可是，我的汉语说得不好。我需要练习汉语。

Anyways, welcome to the new blog.

I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to the pursuit of perfection. It’s natural to want to be correct, but I take things a step further sometimes and try to make everything right from the start. Yeah, it’s perfectionism, and it’s a completely counter-productive way to learn a language.

It’s also the case with my blogging. That isn’t the reason why it hasn’t been updated for so many months, but it’s certainly something that does drive down my motivation to post things up. I don’t like making mistakes as much as I should. A bit of a personal flaw of mine, I guess, but I think it’s something I can work on and overcome.

Anyway, I just wanted to post some thoughts of mine up. I think, now that I’ve started a new job and have a bit of a routine set up, that I can start to look at getting back into a blogging routine. I have some ideas on how I can make things easier for myself in that regard; let’s see whether those ideas translate into real-world success.

I have had a great week.

It all started on Saturday. At TAFE, where I study Japanese, we had a visitor’s session, where native Japanese speakers came to our class and helped us practice our speaking skills. The practice was great, but actually being able to meet so many wonderful native Japanese speakers in Sydney was the best part of it all. I have a lot of wonderful friends in Japan (who I miss dearly) but I’m so happy about knowing cool Japanese people here. I hope that we can become really good friends.

So that was Saturday. My good friend Manny and I decided to invite our new friends to join us in our study group. I felt it was a good opportunity to practice teaching people English and they could help us study Japanese as well. It’s a win-win situation in my book! Together, we can become closer friends and also improve our language skills at the same time. I’m really looking forward to every study session now.

Well, in celebration of what should be the start of some wonderful friendships, I want to look at the word for “friend” in Japanese for my character review. Here it is:

Alright, so the first character means “friendly”. The character originally was a pictograph of two right arms covering objects. This gave the meaning of working together and protecting, which is what you do with friends, according to the Japanese. I feel like I want to work together with my new friends to help everyone improve and be the best people they can. I think this is what makes me a good friend.

The second character means “attain” or “reach”. How does it get this meaning? Well, I found this character a little hard to dissect, but the character refers to a number of sheep moving towards their destination in a smooth manner. This metaphor gives the meaning of a steady progression towards your goal, which then means “attain”. So how does this fit into the meaning of friends, then? Well, actually, the kanji has another meaning – it’s also a suffix meaning plural number of humans. Having said that, for me, having made these new friends, I feel like I have reached a goal that I set for myself many years ago. Now I can enjoy the wonders of life with my new-found company.

Here’s to friendship!

It has been a long and tiring week for me. I moved into my new apartment on the weekend, so I am finally close to work and able to stay out longer with friends! Yay! Haha, gone are the days where I have to be socially disabled because of the 2 hour trip back home. I’m really enjoying the fact that I can get up at 7:45am and still make it to work on time.
The road to this point has been long and hard. I feel like throwing my hands up in the air and screaming with glee, but I know that this is just the beginning of a wonderful adventure for me. It’s a lifestyle change that will come with a cost, but I really feel that this is the right way forward for me and I think it will, over the long term, show its worth.

Tonight, I met up with a Japanese friend of mine who will be staying in Sydney for a year. I’m so happy to have met a Japanese friend here and it seems that I will be able to meet some Japanese people through her. I should be able to meet some Japanese people through one of my housemates as well, so I will soon have a good network of Japanese friends. This makes me really happy. It feels like another step in the right direction. I have always felt that, as soon as I made one good change in my life, other good things would follow. This is certainly the case at the moment. 

With all of the recent big changes to my life, I feel it is time to celebrate the beginning of my wonderful adventure by going through the word for “adventure” in Japanese. BOOM!

The first character is a basic character. It has the sun element on the top and the eye element at the bottom. Actually, however, the old version of the character looks a little different. It has a helmet over the top of the eye, which was meant to represent a warrior in battle. This character came to be associated with attacking and has a secondary meaning of risk, which is what it means in this word.

For the second character, the right side represents a hill, something any adventure cannot be without, and the left side is a phonetic element meant to represent combining things. This leaves us with the meaning of combined hills, which would be awfully steep and perilous. So steep and perilous, it turns out, that this is what the character means!

So an adventure is a steep and perilous risk to the Japanese. While I am taking a few risks along the way, I think I have got myself set up to have one hell of an enjoyable ride. May everyone’s adventures be blessed with fortune and ecstasy.

Well, I am finally blogging again.

It’s almost as if there is some pattern forming. I blog for a while, it gets to be too much, I give it a rest, I see why I should do it, I start again. It must be annoying following something that is so inconsistently updated. Anyways, I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts.

I’m currently looking for some clarity in my life. I have a lot of things that I wish to achieve, but I don’t know the best way to go about achieving those things. I have faith that a true path will show itself over time. How? Well, I was having a great conversation yesterday about the best way to learn kanji. Today I was reading a book about the best way to evolve from a guy who likes programming to a guy who can program. Both of these sources suggest that sharing your love and passion with others, as well as publicising your ignorance and desire to learn new things, is the key to learning. I think this is why I’ve come back to my humble blog.

So, to bring back something that people have mentioned as a nice feature, I bring to you … a kanji dissection!

KA-POW!

Alright, let’s get down to business. The first character means bright. Bright like the lantern that guides you down the tunnel of cluelessness and into the vast, open, clear world. Bright like the sun and the moon, like this kanji shows. The one on the right is a little more tricky. The left side means eye and the right side … doesn’t have a meaning. The old meaning of this side was “fuel used in sacrifices”, but that has nothing to do with its current day meaning, which is “to see something that is far from you”. In time, I hope I will gain clarity to see that the things I want that are far from me are not so far away.

Well, the holiday came to an end last week …

Sad times.

Of course, the main thing that needs a refresh, as far as I am concerned, is my wardrobe. Damn, I have a lot of really crap looking clothes. I have come to realise over the last week or so that dressing well (or feeling well-dressed, at least) is really important for feeling good throughout the day. I got all of the clothes in my wardrobe that I would never wear again and threw them out. It’s time for a fresh start, I think.

I am also thinking about other parts of my life that need a bit of a refresh. I certainly need a holiday. That will have to happen soon, or else I will go off my nut. I also want to buy a few expensive items, such as a tablet for my computer, a Macbook Pro and a PS3. I won’t be surprised if I am very poor in the near future.

I had a really nice weekend.

On Saturday, I went out on a trip with my parents to a rainforest. We all took our cameras and went to take photos of some waterfalls and the Australian countryside. Unfortunately, it was a bit rainy that day, so many of the pictures were taken when it was dark and overcast. There was a really nice area where the grass was really green and the sky was a very lovely blue. We couldn’t stop there, though, so I only ended up getting one picture of it from inside our car. What a shame! >.<

On Sunday, I met up with a friend from China, who I met on the internet a while ago, and we decided to go for a bush-walk. I really enjoyed it. I took heaps of pictures and got to see a part of Sydney that I had never seen before. My Chinese friend is also really nice. We did a 10 or 11km walk in just under 4 hours, which is very good considering sections of the walk were graded as “hard” on our map. I was tired after the walk. After saying goodbye, I met up with a good friend. We had a few beers and some dinner. I had a really nice day.

If only all weekends were as good as that one!

Hey everyone,

Well, Christmas is over for another year. Quite frankly, I don’t really see the point of half of these holidays. Don’t get me wrong – the days off are awesome. I’m just saying that it seems like we are all meant get this Christmas spirit but it just feels like it fizzles out now. I mean, we spent a quiet day at home for Christmas this year. Perhaps I am contrasting it to being in Japan last year or to an actual Christmas party we went to 2 years ago.

Nevertheless, this year doesn’t feel very Christmassy. Not many houses putting up lights, no carols, no real buzz out in the public. I think the Christmas tree in the QVB was as good as things got, which is really saying something. Has this city just lost its spirit? I wouldn’t be surprised because this place isn’t exactly the most buzzing place on Earth. If only it were as full of life as it looked, eh?

It’s a bit of a shame when the most hopeful place in your sight is the horizon.