meghan9436

MOVING STREAM!! Come pack and plan with me! Chit chat and life updates!

This may be the last or one of the last streams from my current location. Come hang out with me, plan, pack, and maybe do some art if there's time.

https://www.twitch.tv/meghan9436

(I know this update is long overdue, and I need to make a comprehensive proper update about what has been happening in my life.)

I've probably mentioned it several times on this blog by now, but life just keeps flying by faster than I can write it down. There is so much to talk about!

I feel more inspired than ever to channel my inner Harriet the Spy, and take everything down in the environment around me. In the digital age where virtually everyone has a camera in their pocket, this seems simultaneously unnecessary and a lost art. You can buy go-pro cameras that you can strap to your chest or your hat. Or you can get one of those fancy 360° cameras that literally records every angle. There's just something so weird and futuristic about finding a 360° video on YouTube, and you will always find something you haven't seen before in that video. On the other hand, it seems excessive, and an information overload. I hope that between managing this blog, and my YouTube channel that I will find a balance between the best of both worlds.

Sunday is well under way, and the weekend is almost over as I write this. Last week as I was preparing Happy Birthday and Last Christmas, Music Travel Love and Dave Moffatt dropped two new Christmas videos: It's Christmas Time (Music Travel Love original ft. Francis Greg, Dave Moffatt, & Anthony Uy) and Last Christmas (Dave Moffatt cover). I mentioned it in the comments already, but the timing was super weird when these dropped. I think I will write a separate post dedicated to talking about these videos specifically, in the interest of keeping this entry on topic.

So I had spent the week around my work schedules to rehearse Happy Birthday and Last Christmas, as I mentioned. In years past I used to groan at Christmas music because of all the years that I spent working in retail. The Christmas music comes on on November 1, as soon as Halloween is over. Years ago, James Rolfe did a rant about Christmas creep (NSFW language), which I think is still relevant today. I recall even seeing some Christmas decorations out before Halloween, but I didn't document the specifics at the time.

But, when I started getting my head around how to play Last Christmas, there was something in my brain that clicked. There was something about playing that song relatively competently that sparked so much joy in my heart. And this experience gave me a new appreciation for Taylor Swift. *Gasp!* I was never a Swiftie. I actually used to get really irritated by her music during her 2008 debut because it was so overplayed in retail!

Realistically, I was unable to learn the full version of Taylor Swift's Last Christmas, but I did learn enough to do a TV size version of just the chorus. Particularly for ESL kids who are learning this song for the first time, I think it worked out anyway. I also didn't have enough time to learn We Wish You a Merry Christmas, but I am confident that I will have enough time to master these in time for all the upcoming Christmas lessons and parties.

During yesterday's demo lesson, I managed to mess up Happy Birthday quite spectacularly, but it was forgiven. I'm not sure how I managed that! I can play If Life is so Short by the Moffatts pretty competently by now, probably after playing it several hundred times over the course of this year. Aha.. ^^;

What the experience of playing Happy Birthday and Last Christmas has taught me was an important reminder about going back to the basics. Music theory is objectively boring, and I will have to start practising scales, triads, and whatnot. But the basics of of music theory are adjacent to colour theory. When I brought this up with a friend the other night, I was immediately asked what they had to do with each other. So, hear me out.

( The parallels of colour theory & music theory and how they go together )

Beyond that, what I took away from yesterday's demo lesson is that I want to get competent enough at music that I can play anything when asked. I think it would be amazing to have a child make a song request, and just be able to play it on the fly with no questions asked or preparation needed. In order to do that, I will have to study a lot of different styles of music, even genres of music or bands that I don't particularly like.

It is after 2:00 am as I write this. I'm exhausted and I should have been in bed hours ago. But I wanted to get these ideas down while they were still fresh in my mind. I still have more to say, and I will update this entry when I'm feeling fresh. In the meantime, I have posted this YouTube short of some pretty sweet Nagoya limited guitar gear.

Update:
It seems that usually no matter how late I go to bed, I still wake up bright and early because of my work schedule.
My body: Doesn't matter if you haven't had enough sleep. You're waking up now!

Anyway, during the week I had my head in the clouds again ruminating about the past again in one of my Discord chats. There was some discussion about new policy to allow refunds for video games that have been opened. Honestly, this should have been implemented decades ago so that if you buy an objectively bad video game that you can return it. In my post chat commentary here, I think that it wasn't needed in the 90s because most people in my social circles rented video games, so it wasn't a problem. If the game was that bad, we just didn't rent it again. However, video rental stores have gone away in the west, and I think video game rentals have always been prohibited in Japan.

( Recollection: Lord of the Rings in theatres (December 2001) & Unlocked memory: customer service experience in wireless sales (2008) )

To flash forward to the present, DreamWidth temporarily went offline when I was updating this. I initially saved my progress
and I continued this train of thought in a TextEdit file, which by the way, feels like such an old school way of keeping records! But I was surprised how quickly they were able to get the site back up and running, and it does serve as a reminder about how it is good practise to keep backups of everything.

Yesterday went relatively smoothly, all things considered. I managed to catch a wrong train, and I ended up having to take a taxi to the demo lesson. Everything else went okay as I mentioned earlier. When I was finished at the school, I spent some time collecting the stamps for the Higashiyama Line/Sakura-Dori Line Group for the Nagoya Subway stamp rally. I took the time to film some of these adventures, so that will be coming up in a future video.

Selfie in front of the gold clock at Nagoya Station.


I got a quick bite to eat and I managed to snag curry and rice for under 600 yen at Yoshi Nova.

I have now had my acoustic guitar for a year, and following that demo lesson I finally decided to get the strings changed. Seasoned guitarists will probably be shaking their heads. You haven't changed your strings in a year?

Yeaaah. I confirmed later when I returned last night that strings are supposed to be changed every 1000 ish hours or every three months, whichever comes first. I also learned that older strings can also leave marks on your fret board. Yikes. Cue to the excuses. I've never changed the strings on my guitar before, and I honestly didn't trust myself to do it without messing it up. At the moment I currently don't have anyone physically with me here to lean, practise, and jam with. It makes it hard.

Because of this, I decided to just suck it up and I went to my local music store to have someone do the maintenance for me. Yeah, I know. The seasoned guitarists are cringing as they read this. I know. I saw YouTube and on r/guitar that you can put electric strings on an acoustic guitar as a way of making it easier on your fingers and extending the practise time. But the staff at the store told me, absolutely not. I think this was a liability issue more than anything else, so I still agreed to their recommended service.

While I was out and about, I browsed an American vintage store on the floor immediately below. There, I found a Canadian patch that I couldn't pass up because Canadian made items or Canadian market items are so hard to come by around here.

( Another memory elicited from what's in front of me in the present day )

After that, I drooled over some vintage jackets from Canada, particularly the ones with a purple and teal combination. They were spendy, and I'm pretty confident that I can find something similar for a lot less at Book-Off. I returned upstairs and paid for the guitar service, and I scrolled through Reddit while I was waiting in the lobby. I'm not sure how long I was waiting, but the turnaround time seemed very quick.

Before I left, I had a good look around the store again. You might have seen from the YouTube Short video that I posted earlier that there was a pop up event called GUITAR LOVERS SHOW 2023. They had some Nagoya limited pedals and accessories decorated with the iconic golden dolphin that this city is known for. It led to a pleasant conversation with one of the staff members. I mentioned that it would be so cool to have those when I eventually return to Canada.

( Reassessing my dream electric guitar and future guitar purchases )

The day's pickups. I got a business card and a free pick from the pop up event.
Next to it is the British Columbia patch that I found in the wild.

I learned a lot from that interaction! I quickly learned that pedal boards are quite a rabbit hole that runs deep. They look like they're a lot of fun. At least for now, I'll want to focus on learning the guitar fundamentals before I spend any money on these toys. But they are definitely something I can keep researching periodically along the way.

Just to express my final thoughts before I close out here is that I am experiencing some buyer's remorse from the new guitar strings. The old ones were cakey and gross. My guitar was also falling out of tune ridiculously quickly. They needed to be replaced. But I absolutely should not have cheaped out on these new strings. I noticed the difference immediately with these strings because they squeak so much, and I can hear every chord change. But it is a lesson learned that you get what you pay for in the guitar world.

This should bring us up to date to the present. I still need to update my blog about my experiences in Mishima and Tokyo, and those will be coming soon. I need a break from writing now as I feel like I did back in my uni days after writing an essay for class.

Notes to self:
* Update the tags on this entry.
* Make a list of recent song recommendations so that I can have them all in one place.

I realise that I turned into a ghost these last few weeks, and I want to apologise for that. I just wanted to quickly post an update that I am alive and okay, but just very, very busy.

I just got finished with my visa renewal process this week, and I was approved for a three year extension of stay.YAY!

Last week, I started studying the Spice Girls on guitar. Truth be told, I used to be a hater back in the day! I crtiticised the Spice Girls and all the manufactured boy bands for not writing songs or playing their own instruments. But even if it was manufactured pop music, it was undeniably catchy!

My role as an English teacher in Japan also gave me a new appreciation for dance. Because even if the bands don't play instruments, it still takes a lot of talent to actually get up on stage to sing and dance well.

Stop was the one song from the Spice Girls that I liked, but I was surprised to learn that this song from the girls didn't chart to number 1. But I still wonder how the Spice Girls would have done if they had played their own instruments, and how they would have been perceived.

With the usage of a backing track, and without their band performing on stage with them a lot of the time, it does make their music more difficult to study. I'm still up for the challenge though!

The timing of this couldn't have been more perfect because within hours of me first learning how to play Stop, the girls posted on their community page that they just celebrated their 27th anniversary of the release of their debut album with a photo from Tokyo.

I hope to make a more substantial update about how things are going very soon. Take care.

I don't even know where to begin with this post. A lot has happened during this last week.

My aircon finally gave out completely as of yesterday, and it won't even turn on. I have a bathtub fulled with cool water that I periodically go and soak whenever I start feeling overheated. I want to say that it's been 35℃ or higher every day this week, and it hasn't been fun at all. A few days ago, the heat got so bad that it woke me up at 2:00 am. I desperately wanted to take a shower, but I thought it would be disrespectful to my neighbours to take one at that time. I made do with a frozen water bottle instead.

I finally broke down, and contacted my landlord by email to see if I can't get someone in this week to look at my unit. There's my motivation to get this apartment cleaned up from top to bottom, oops! lol...

On the way to work today, I got harassed by an ojii-chan on the train. You know how wearing headphones is the universal "don't talk to me" social cue? Yeah, that was completely out the window with this guy as he kept making wild hand gestures throughout the train ride. I tried my best to blend in with the social norms here to not make eye contact or engage with him in any way. I stayed focused on my phone even though I didn't have an internet connection, and I could see in my peripheral vision that his antics continued to the end of the train ride.

When my stop came and I saw that he also got up, my heart sank. I turned away, and then he tapped my shoulder to gesture me the "correct" exit doors. As soon as the announcement was made, I made a bee-line around a crowd of people and out a different door. I didn't check behind me to see if he was still following me, but I zig-zagged my way through the major commuter hub to make sure that I lost him. Due to the longer route I took, I missed my transfer, and the next train was late. I ended up getting a certificate from my final stop to inform my work that I was legitimately late.

Punctuality is a big deal in Japan. Many companies have a zero tolerance policy for tardiness. Being late even by one minute is unacceptable, and it is not unusual for companies to charge a penalty fee that is deducted from your salary. My work seems to be pretty laid back, but I thought it was better to have that certificate from JR than not.

The last time I had issues with someone on the train was back at the end of March. At that time, there was a guy sitting next to me who kept repeatedly banging his head on the window. Tf, dude? So anyway, I looked at a younger girl who was sitting across from me with her boyfriend. We kept exchanging glances. I smiled at her through my mask, and I kept giving her a look with my eyes to say, "OH MY GERD, can you believe this guy??" I kept pointing at him with my eyes. She returned the look to me, and it was a huge relief when he finally got off the train. There is so much non verbal communication here, and it is such a powerful tool to use once you get it. It took me longer to figure it out than I want to admit to. 😅

With how busy my work has been, and being focused on getting into the swing of things has left me with not a lot of time leftover. Because of this, I have been spending less time on art, and more time developing my guitar skill. With the practise every day, I am finally getting my head around Miss You Like Crazy. This song is coming along beautifully. Misery is coming along really well too. I want to reiterate here that I am grateful to my neighbours for not complaining about my practise.

I'm thinking for tomorrow, I will stream for my birthday and catch up on some Traveler's Notebook items that I have fallen behind on. My birthday will officially mark a year since I went to Kyoto for the first time, and it would be good to finish logging that trip, along with the follow up ones I took last year. I will also want to resume editing the 4K version of the Loft closure video that I recently posted.

Yikes on bikes! I received another noise complaint tonight, Not for guitar playing though! Seriously, are leaky headphones enough the bleed through the walls? I was watching this live performance when my neighbour banged on the wall. I can't remember which part I was watching when it happened, but I decided to link something special. When The Moffatts cover this gem, it's just magical. ❤️

I think it's the screaming in the audience that sets this apart from the podcasts that I listen to, which are pretty monotone in terms of volume by comparison. You really gotta be careful when living in Japan, and the most innocuous things might bleed through the walls and make your neighbours complain. Fingers crossed that I don't get a formal complaint.

Be careful out there!

It came to my attention when I went downtown today to get some of my personal affairs sorted, that Loft Sakae will be closing. This is Nagoya's biggest Loft location, spanning five floors. I made an unexpected, and unplanned video, and I made a post about it on Twitter here.

For those of you local to Nagoya, or if you will be passing through the area, you have between now and June 30th to get the closing sale deals, and your final memories in. It sucks that this is happening, but it's not unexpected. The store had been scaling down their selections for quite some time. They even gutted their art section, much to my dismay.

All is not lost though! Another Loft location opened in the NOVA building in downtown Sakae. It has a modest three floors, and it is within walking distance of the original Loft location. At the time of its opening, it struck me as weird to have another location so close to the main one. It's a lot like the trope about how there always seems to be a Starbucks across the street from one another. But, now we know why.

Even as the world changes around us, we can still hang on to those memories forever. I can't stress enough to document everything! Just like the world around us, our memories are fleeting too. By maintaining records, we can always refresh our memories, and pass them on to the next generation.

The upload that I am posting to YouTube still has another 40 minutes to go, so I thought now is a good of a time as any to post an update. Like my last update, this last week has become a blur with all my days blending together.

Yesterday evening came and went on a high note. I was listening to Until You Loved Me by The Moffatts. I had forgotten how much I love that song. I came up with an idea as I was listening to it, and it brought a smile to my face. It even made me have more of a spring in my step to the point that other people noticed, and reacted with positivity.

I didn't mention in my previous update, but I had my first challenging student that I've had in a while. Truthfully, I've never seen a child so angry to see me! This student had a scowl on their face, and was actively giving me a thumbs down. I had never seen this in a child in all the years that I've been teaching here, so this as shocking to me.

Truthfully, I didn't realise that a thumbs down had such a negative connotation here until a training session that I attended last year where I learned that in the Japanese context, it means "Go to hell." Prior to this session, I used the gesture regularly to communicate "I'm not so good," when teaching children. Much to my surprise and dismay, nobody corrected me! Since then, I found that a better gesture to communicate that is to put both of your hands on your cheeks, one after the other, and cock your head to one side.

Back to the situation at hand, this gives you some perspective as to why I found it so shocking. No matter what I did, this student refused to respond to me, and put in no effort when I tried to play games with them. In exasperation, I finally asked them in Japanese what his deal was. Their first response was, "ゆいずらい, (hard to say)." Upon further discussion, the student told me that they hated English and they wanted to see their previous teacher. Sure enough, I saw the student again this past weekend as I was leaving when my shift was over. I'm not sure what else I could have done here, so I welcome any feedback from other teachers for advice on how to connect with students who have shut down and refuse to connect with you.

When I was teaching during this last week or so, I had two other students unlock some memories that I haven't thought about in years. I can't remember the first interaction from last week, but earlier this week another student showed up with a face full of marker. I asked them, "Did you get into a marker fight?"

Back when I was in elementary school during the 1990s, Mister Sketch markers were popular school supplies right behind Crayola markers. I remember a common trick that my classmates played was opening a scented marker, and telling another student to smell the marker. When the other student complied, they were met with ink on the nose. The embarrassment was palpable, and you only ever fell for this once if you didn't witness it happen to someone else.

Skip ahead to my early twenties at one of my previous jobs. I wasn't there for when the story took place. But allegedly, some of the people who came before me had a silent marker fight when there was a live customer on the phone during a training session. These predecessors were all covered in marker by the time that my supervisor disconnected that call.

I couldn't help but laugh when I recounted this story to my student. It was like, How old are you? 20 something? Are you in 幼稚園 (ようちえん, kindergarten)? My student seemed to enjoy it too, after some clarification in Japanese.

This last week, I also started another book that started at me from my shelf for several years now - Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. It's a story about time travel that comes a host of rules. But one rule that that we would expect, that if you return to the past, you cannot change the present.

I often live with my head in the clouds. I've always been kind of a dreamer with my head in the past, but I think that the pandemic encouraged it tenfold. Part of me dreams of going back to the 1990s when times were simpler, and less chaotic. Opinions on this issue seem to be divided on the 90s subreddit. There, it is often it is said that we look back on the past with rose coloured glasses, and that the 90s weren't objectively better than the present day. I maybe only agree with half of that statement. When 9/11 happened, that was when our innocence in our collective conscious was truly lost. While Columbine and the school lock down drills that followed served as a preview of what was to come, I was still sheltered to the point that I never heard of the terminology terrorist attack that has become so prevalent in the 24 hour news cycle that we have today. I think that the difference is that since the Y2K era ended, we've become more desensitized to the chaos around us.

While I would love to go back to the past, the danger in that is that we miss out on the present, and the people that we share our lives with today. In the interest of not diving too deep into current politics on my blog, I think that sharing our favourite memories and doing our best to relive them in the present can provide some relief. It brings me so much joy to share my nostalgia with a whole new generation of kids. Even just simple things like breaking out my Laurentien coloured pencils or a Pentel Pianissimo mechanical pencil to complete a project, sharing my favourite songs, and my favourite moments from past cable network broadcasts.

On Saturday afternoon, I went to one of my local music shops where I tested out and electric guitar for the first time in my life. I can't remember the demo model that they had on hand, but it most definitely would take some getting used to due to its weight. My aNueNue guitar is so lightweight in comparison! But playing the guitar lead of If Life is So Short on electric sounded so smooth and satisfying. As a kid I dreamed of having an electric guitar, but my parents had this stupid and arbitrary rule that I wasn't allowed to have one until I got good at it. Looking back, I think their reasoning was the same unspoken reasoning that I wasn't allowed to take up the drums as my first instrument choice. I'm still miffed about that!

I appreciate that as an adult, my destiny is in my own hands now. But revisiting an instrument to learn how to play it here is likely infinitely more challenging than back home. The spaces here are smaller. The walls are so thin that I can hear when my neighbours cough. I practise my acoustic guitar without a pick to keep the noise down, and I'm appreciative that my neighbours haven't complained about me at all. The transition to electric down the road will undoubtedly require headphones because that external amp ain't happening. What about learning drums in Japan? It seems like an impossibility. 

While I was at the music shop, I discovered the kalimba, and spent some time there working out the Mother 3 Love Theme given that the 17 year anniversary of the game just passed on April 20th. This instrument sounds so romantic! But, I can't quite place where I've heard it before. I was surprised to find that the startup costs aren't that much, and it may compliment my guitar beautifully. When I researched the instrument online when I got home that day, I was surprised to find that there is a whole online community around the instrument. Someone even did a cover of Miss You Like Crazy.

*None of this content is sponsored.