I find myself thinking “so how many cool new things am I missing out on today, simply due to ignorance?” quite often these days. I don’t nearly spend as much time with the computer as I used to, and the time I spend I sit on “DND” on Pidgin studying kanjis about 99% of the time, but even when I was using the computer for more or less most of the day, I still had that feeling that I am missing out on cool things.

And thus, a meme. Make a post on your blog listing up to 5 sites or services that amuse you/intrigue you/help you the most at the moment. This list (at least for me) always changes, as I tend to discover new things, or grow bored with old ones.

Or as in the case with dictionary.com … I had enough of the god damn ads. It’s as if they added a new banner or “text-ad” once a month for the last year. I used their dictionary service very very satisfied for I can’t count how many years (from before my Skotos days), but now my faithful “di” keyword in Firefox went from dictionary.com over to dict.org, which is quite ad-free, thank-you-for-asking.

So my list of 5, backwards because I’m hip that way:

5. dict.org — a free dictionary, and by free I mean very free, as in free of ads and stuff

4. smart.fm — I have been lagging behind recently, because I’m nearing closure on my kanji studies and that’s taking up most of my spare time, but this is a cute site for hammering Japanese (or whatever language it is you wish to study) vocab into one’s brain.

3. gmail — boring, I know, but gmail is actually sort of new to me. I went with POP3 for the longest time, but when my move to Japan started drawing near, I realized that it was just stupidity not to stop with the POP.

2. VISA exchange rates page — call it a blessing, call it a curse, but at least it tells the truth. Most of the time*. Oh and yes, this is above gmail. That says something about my economic situation, I’d say.

1. Zero Punctuation — this guy makes my day. Totally. He reviews games (PC, console, etc) and as the title suggests, he speaks very very fast and very angrily, most of the time. You’ve gotta see it to understand. Even if you don’t know any of the games on the list, just check one out anyway.

Now your turn. I’m not asking you to do this to make me feel all gooey about having started a meme, I’m asking you to do this because I’m honestly curious about what the people I know are entertaining themselves with that I have yet to discover. Call me a greedy bastard.

*) Once about a month ago I went there and saw that the yen had dropped like a rock in the ocean. It had happened overnight, and it was a matter of something like a 30% difference in “price” for me right there. So I scampered off and withdrew money, and when I got home, the amount withdrawn was not at all matching up with this new, glorious number. Turns out the Visa site screwed up somehow, because the day after it was all back to “normal”.

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to study Japanese. I’m to this day not sure why, but together with my good friend Kenneth (who shortly thereafter jumped ship, whereas I continued forward) began to delve into the mysterious land of the weirdly-shaped squigglies.

During this time, I also got in contact for the first time with my girlfriend. I had decided at some point that the best way to learn is to simply start talking to Japanese people, so I looked around and signed up for this “find friends” web site, saying I was looking for people all over Japan who could tell me about their city. You see, I was planning on going to Japan to study, but I had no idea about where in Japan I wanted to go — I knew I did not want to go to Tokyo, but that was about it.

So shortly thereafter, I got dozens of emails from Japanese people. Or should I say, Japanese girls. The guys seem to have reservations about talking to other guys, for some reason. Even today, 3 years later, I still don’t know what’s up with that, though I have my (qualified) guesses.

Regardless, one of those dozens of people happened to be my girlfriend. We got off on a pretty rough start, to be honest. We more or less got into an argument right after the “hello”, and it kind of continued like that the nextcoming months, with us having our little bouts here and there. Despite these little bouts, the one person I continued talking to for any lengthier period of time was my girlfriend. The others peetered out into nothingness, whereas the relationship between me and her kept growing stronger. I had no feelings beyond friendship toward her at all, at that point.

She came to Sweden for the first time in April 2007, a little over a year after we first started talking (in February 2006), and spent a week touring Stockholm with me. It was during this time that we got together, and the time we could spend to dwell on our newfounded relationship in person, was fleeting. She returned to Japan and neither of us shed a tear. It was when I got back to my apartment that I really felt that something was missing, but it was fleeting. She’d only been there for a week after all.

The months that came, I made a lot of important decisions. In the end, I hadn’t really been inspired by any of the prefectures in Japan, so I decided to send out emails to a buttload of schools that seemed promising. I sent out about 40 emails and got replies ranging from:

“helo

thank u for emial !!!!!!!^.^”

(and nothing else written beyond that, no application forms, etc) to emails that looked like anything a professional native would whip up. One of the latter was from a school here in Kyoto, which I ended up choosing due to the friendliness and helpfulness of the principal.

My girlfriend and I decided that she should come spend a month in Sweden in August (2007), and so we were together for a second time. To be objective about the time is impossible, because it just wasn’t normal. We were living a sort of dream, with no problems, no responsibilities, and all the time in the world to do whatever we wanted — I was having a summer vacation at my school, and had enough money to survive without taking on a job.

At least that was how it was before her return-date came closer. In the end, we found ourselves once more doing the farewell thing, and this time as well, no shedding of tears on her sake, and none on mine. Not that we weren’t sad, mind you. It’s just that, at least in my case, if I started I know it’d just make things worse, and I think she had the same idea. Watching her back as she walked through security, I realized I wouldn’t see her for another 8 months. Presuming my plans to go to Japan actually worked out right.

I will soon have been in Japan for a whole year (April 5th, to be precise), and during this time we have both gone through a lot of things together, some good, some bad, some disastrous, but we’ve somehow managed to get through to the other side, if a bit roughed up. Each time a hardship has come our way, we’ve overcome it and grown stronger, both individually — especially I — but also as a couple. It’s a normal thing, I guess, but I marvel at it sometimes.

Last Sunday (the 1st of March), my girlfriend and I walked around Kyoto and looked at temples, ate lunch at an Italian restaurant, dinner at an exclusive restaurant in Hotel Granvia near Kyoto Station, overlooking the city lights. Afterwards before we went to her parents’ place that night, I asked her if she would marry me, and she said ‘yes.’ And no tears were shed. And the smile on her face was exactly right, somehow.