Brian the caveman

Back when I was in basic training, I had a drill sergeant, Hernandez [hereafter DS Hernandez] who was, to me, a diamond in the rough. Now generally, I was pretty damn intimidated by all the drill sergeants – because when you’re in that state of mind, that’s the image they are trying to portray. Let us just say, training is very effective.

While I was still very much intimidated by DS Hernandez, there was also a high level of respect I had for him, and I think it was mutual on my part as well. He was the one who appointed me to squad leader, which would lead to my promotion later, kept me on the inside with all the training and drill information, and even had me into his tent to give me the rundown on the final days of basic, something which I thought was unheard of.

He was the positive reinforcement I needed to make it through basic training not just in the sense of survival, but excelling beyond peoples expectations. Of course I wanted to do good for my friends and family, the thought of sticking my tail between my legs and crawling home humiliated because I couldn’t make it was unacceptable, but deep down I also wanted to do well because I wanted to show DS Hernandez that I am a damn good soldier and I wanted to have both me and my squad exceed his expectations. I think we generally did.

Needless to say, I was quite surprised to learn that he is now rotting away in Ft. Leavenworth, the Department of Defense’s maximum-security prison. Apparently, when he was stationed in Alaska, he got into a bar fight and killed two people. This may sound crazy to you, but as an army soldier trained like him, I am sure it was part just immediate reactions that have been burned into his head. In days like this, in the Army, deployment is always a single letter in the mail away. Soldiers in today’s day and age need to be ready to take orders, kill, and survive at a moments notice. The fact that he killed two people was no shock to me, almost kind of delighted that he was a man who practiced what he preached.

What shocked me was that afterwards he fled, went home, and somehow managed to get back to Ft. Benning, Georga – where there’s the Infantry training school. I am not sure the timing of the story, but I imagine that there was not enough evidence left to tie the murders to DS Hernandez.

When he was back in Ft. Benning, he got drunk one night, raped his 13 year old step-daughter, and when the cops were called was so belligerent that he thought they were after him for the murders in Alaska. High-speed pursuit with Ft. Benning police later, he was arrested and charged with so many violations I doubt he will see outside the walls in Leavenworth till I have kids in college.

I honestly feel bad for him. Sure, you probably think he’s a horrible person, but I always think I’m a good judge of character, and his downfall to me seems like nothing than one large fail. No matter what is going on in your life, soldiers have the most stress than anyone of us. Imagine being a tightly wound spring, ready to explode, but if you do the possibility of someone getting killed is astronomically high. You are a spring designed to kill – how could anyone expect different?

What lesson can we learn from this? Stress is a serious problem that can make ordinarily good people do drastic things. Stress causes us to drown our sorrows and problems in alcohol which does nothing but causes that spring to let loose. We as humans are designed to deal with stress but we need our outlets. For most of us, that is eating, but for the few of us that follow our genetic programming, we have learned the awesome power that comes with focused, hardcore exercise. On top of that, following the rules of intermittent fasting, we give our sympathetic nervous systems a chance to recuperate and rebuild and thus we are better at dealing with stress than the normal over-fed fat-ass.

Don’t be like DS Hernandez – eat right, exercise, and train your body and mind to deal with stress correctly so you don’t end up killing two dudes in a bar fight.

Sometimes when something I used to eat comes across my face I remember that delicious taste and consider cashing in my morals and just eating the damn thing. It happened when after not a week back in the US my grandfather bought the family a half dozen of those awesome muffins from Perkins – yeah THOSE ones…

Almost always, as quick as the thought enters my head it leaves the same way it came in, usually getting bumped in the ass on the way out. I have realized I’ve become quite Buddhist in my food choices lately.

You eat, and its over. That fleeting moment of anti-nutrition is always full of flavor bliss, but it is always over too soon, and all you are left with is a stomach full of high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, and a defeated mentality. No thanks. If I am going to cave into my sweet tooth, I like to do it with at least some milk or dark chocolate, sometimes even encasing yummy nuts like almonds.

Your body and brain are nothing but the building blocks you give them. The old adage, “you are what you eat,” still holds true. I’ll pass fleeting fragments of tantalizing taste bud memories for a properly functioning brain any day.

Then I began to think about why I kick myself in the ass trying to make sure I eat as perfect as I’m willing to eat. It is no myth that eating has positive mental benefits, serotonin etc, but at the end of the day, I would rather take an entire day bursting with vigor and positive energy than eating like a pig loafing around all day. I’d rather look into the mirror and like what I see and strive for the next level than be mad at myself and go back to playing xbox360.

There are many scientific benefits to eating properly and healthy including improved insulin sensitivity, increased brain function including but not limited to learning and focus, reduced stress do to the settlement of the human sympathetic nervous system, and best of all – a properly detoxed system devoid of poisons and most importantly – body fat.

The question of health to me reflects highly on the Buddhist quest for enlightenment in macro form. Do you want to be satisfied right now, while you eat that ice cream, and go back to being a fat-ass, or do you want to be satisfied for life, every moment you are awake or asleep – alive and out in the world strong and confident rather than fat and lazy?

Skyscrapers gave way to normal office buildings, gave way to houses, which gave way to rice fields, roads with cars, and spotted countryside with occasional houses. I did not like to think that this would be the last time I would see such sights, but more along the lines of the last time on my virgin journey into wonderland. I would be back. I knew it the moment I stepped into the train. After investing so much time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears into developing good social skills and fluency in the language, I would be stupid not too. I realized long before I set off how much of a kick in the pants it is to spend so much time learning a language, only to get really good the moment before you have to leave.

But alas, arriving in the mass of human transport in the middle of the countryside, I saddled up to my seat and prepared to depart wonderland. My last moments of my exchange student adventures will always be her smiling face, watching me descend the steps towards immigration from an overlooking window, my face chocked with tears of not only leaving, but leaving her behind as well. That face representing all I have come to know and love about Japan being slowly left behind as the stairs gave way to queues with restless people holding passports.

The flight home was absolutely without incident. It was probably the shortest time I ever felt I spent on a plane, not wanting the final touchdown in America because of what it represents – the end of my journey and my arrival home.

People repeatedly ask me how does it feel to be home; for which I have no good answer. America is my bread and butter, and where I have lived most of my life. I didn’t live in another country for many years, so I do not think I have quite developed a complete second personality like some have told me. To me, returning to America was like putting on an old pair of shoes, a little bit older but mostly the same exact feel.

The biggest shock to me was that the way I interact with people is still exactly the same. I thought I would be friendlier in English because it’s a language I’m more comfortable with, but I actually think I’m more friendly in Japanese. At first it took me a long time to even get the courage to talk to people, but by the end it got to the point where if someone used a word I didn’t know, I would not hesitate to ask them what the word meant. At first I thought it was embarrassing because I didn’t know the word and would just shut up, but then I realized that I am not a fluent speaker so what’s the point of trying to hide the fact that I’m not.

I guess I have just become a hybrid of sorts. I still think in Japanese, and dream in Japanese but English at the same time. I do not feel that my personality is all that different, if anything just more confident and happy to be alive in this awesome world.

Where do I go from here? Back to an American style university that’s for sure. I loved umass before I left, and now I appreciate it even more than ever. I plan on spending the next year making my Japanese better than ever, working on Brian 3.0, fighting, kicking, grappling, learning to be an even better caveman. There is a lot I need to focus on, then it is off to law school. And all the while spending time in the great playground that is Japan.

Do not misunderstand. I still find the lifestyle of Japanese people atrocious, and I would never want to seriously participate in their lifestyle. But it is hard to argue the fact that in a short time, I rubbed shoulders with some of the biggest names in my world. Japan is like a playground to make money. I tasted the good life while I was there, one filled with money, women, fame and fortune. Who would not be drawn to that? I’ll be back. A Japanese terrorist watch list couldn’t keep me out now.

One of the reasons i do not think I could get by in this country is, at this point, simply a matter of comfort factor. Im cool on the idea that i have a lot of words to learn and a lot of study to master characters, but on the whole i just do not know the system as well as i do back in the states.

The other day i spilled some coffee on my keyboard to my macbook pro. Luckily the computer still works fine, with the exception of the keyboard. now, i know where to go to pick up a new replacement keyboard. i know what torx nuts are called, i know how to explain in explicit detail exactly what happened, whats going wrong, and why. I know how to get a good estimate on what it will cost me to fix it, if i let Apple do it.

I guess at the end of the day I’m just a big dummy with no confidence in his Japanese.

I want to write, but it is slowly beginning to take me too long to think in English sometimes the Japaneses word comes first, but it takes me a minute or two to realize what the correct English word is. I find this extremely hilarious. Conversations with between friends and I are almost impossible to understand unless you have a strong grasp of both English and Japanese. I promise I will sit down sometime soon and try to remember English again. \

I never thought I would be one of those students who, “forgets English.” I never believed it.

I know I have not written in a while. For that I apologize. Rather than sitting in my room and writing essays on my self-reflections I have been out, enjoying the newly warmed temperature, and taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Today I went to the famous Fish Market in Tsukiji and shot, in a matter of two hours, over 200 photos – almost 1.5gigs! The little bar on the right with the pictures is all my favorite photos uploaded on Flickr so that I at least have the option to protect and reserve all rights to my images, as well as providing me a huge gallery to view in and of itself. Flickr is the largest and in my opinion, the best, online photo community on the net. Please take a look if you feel so inclined.

I think I have come to the conclusion that photography is the second most important thing in my life right now. The first is, of course, health, fitness, diet, exercise, and fighting. I have gotten into quite a nice routine of going to school or the gym in Sendagaya, then just spending the rest of the day wondering around Tokyo seeing what sights I can find and take pictures of. My photo folder on my harddrive is almost up to 16gigs and contains thousands of images I have taken.

Soon, with the dawn of a new spring in Japan, I will be out even more and hope to attend at least a few Spring Cherry Blossom festivals that are had in and around Japan.

I want to work on a artistic/photo journalist portfolio. For now, I am not trying to make this anything more than just a career, but I will never put it either above my abilities or below my interest level. I have vivid dreams of taking pictures, and it has come to be that the click of the shutter is my new Zen.

[Warning: snowboard intense slang ahead!]

Snowboarding in Japan is definitely an amusing experience; to me at least, with 17 years of experience.

The first thing I noticed when going to Ikebukuro to hop on the bus was that there’s like a million kids all going at the same time. In the US, when you go to the mountain, there are a lot of people from all ages, but the place where we went to only had young kids from teenage to maybe late 20s at the oldest. The bus makes two stops on the way, American rest stop style, and each time it was just packed with kids coming from the mountains. Its like everyone takes a vacation at the same time, and does the exact same thing each time.

The second thing I noticed was the lack of fences — anywhere. There were so many runs that could easily kill someone if you fell off the side. It was quite exciting actually. I got to take advantage of that fact and had some nice cliff bombs.

The place we stayed at, for the price, was actually quite nice. Hard to complain when you get breakfast and dinner, of course Japanese style, and a nice bathhouse room pumping fresh mountain spring water from the aquifers that seem to exist all over Japan. We slept four to a room, Japanese style with tatami mats all over and crashing out on futons with bean pillows. It was quite nice to get out of Tokyo and get back to nature.

The rental snowboards were actually of pretty piss poor quality when compared to the US, which I found both startling and completely expected. I mean — the kids here suck [which comes later], so why would they know the first thing about what a nice board should and will feel like? The boards were mostly covered in scratches head to toe, piece of crap bindings, boots that were from the Regan administration era, and edges that couldn’t cut your skin if you hammered your fist into it.

The most surprising, as hinted at earlier, was the complete and absolute level of suck that exists. For the price, about 50 dollars for two all-day passes, the facilities and snow quality was extremely surprising. If you went off course at any point you were greeted with at least five feet of fresh puffy powder snow. With more skilled friends and my board in tow, I would have been doing glade runs all day.

But these kids suck. Seriously. They spent at least 50% of the time sitting on their ass in the snow. I know in Japan if it is not your “thing” then you are not dedicated. It is a shame really, because snowboarding really isn’t my “thing” either but yet I could board circles around 99.9% of these kids. I saw one REAL rider the entire time, and only for a fleeting second, and all he did was switch 180 on like a three foot table to a clean front side 360 on the six foot table in the only nice rhythm section in the park. I did not see anyone attempting the 10-foot table once, which was a shame because the landing was nice fresh untouched powder. Again, had I brought my own equipment I would have never stopped shredding that hit.

I was prepared for that but what depressed me the most was, as I have complained about previously, was the “sameness” to everything that we did. From the bus, to the hotel we stayed at, to the bathhouses, the mountains, rental equipment, everything had this strange sameness to it that resonated a deep chord in my soul that I really do not like.

The town the resort exists in is quite interesting too. See, Japan has a huge problem with the aging population and declining birth rate, much like other countries, and this town was a perfect example of that. All of the young kids have since gone off to college in Tokyo, and left the old people to die [seriously]. There are hoards of abandoned rotting houses. Well, the might not even be abandoned but due to the lack of footprints in the snow, that was the only conclusion I could come up with. This is like one of those towns that are always on the news in Japan, because whenever it snows really hard in places like that, huge numbers of old people die because they either freeze to death or starve.

Once again I am reminded why I am glad I am not Japanese.

The Warrior Diet
Basically this diet can be summarized into a single sentence.

Eat like a Paleolithic man.

So far I am on day 2. I started a blog on Google’s Blogger but I think I should update here when I am bored as well. I will back post day 1 and 2 for your reading pleasure.

Day 1—
Yet another one of many blogs I have spread out across the internet, this one in particular deals with the new diet I have recently found called the “Warrior Diet.” The concept is quite simple; bring humans back to the Paleolithic period, and eat like they did. For the Google Book click here.

So far, I am still eating my normal breakfast, reduced fat milk and bran cereal, followed up by some coffee. For lunch, I have a banana in my pocket. Right now, I am really hungry. Let us see how this goes!

Stats:
167cm
66kg
Military Press: 40kg
Push Press: 50kg

Day 2—
Last night I kind of splurged a little and ate Japanese okonomiyake for dinner. Basically a mix of water, flour, egg, cabbage, tuna, and little pieces of bacon all tossed together into a frying pan, lightly cooked with a dab of oil so it does not stick, and topped with some special okonomiyake sauce and mayonnaise. It was quite delicious.

Now it is about 12 o’clock and I am really hungry. So far all I have ingested was coffee. I have a banana in my bag that is looking more and more delicious as the day goes on. I do notice a much higher level of alertness than I usually exhibit at this time of day, but I must admit it might possibly be due to the coffee and nothing else.

I feel like I should be getting some better fruits that do not have a very high glycemic level. Most likely I will end up switching to grapefruit and oranges for the high fiber levels.

The story continues! 伝説をつづく

So I had this really long essay on snowboarding in Japan, but I forgot it at home. So stay tuned. Check out my flickr on the right side for the pictures.

So I had my first reverse culture shock experience today. I was watching videos online of the latest debate between Obama and Clinton and their excessive use of each others first name came as a blow. I mean, regardless of who is talking about what, I doubt that they are the best of friends. I guess it is weird because after being here for so long, you can learn a lot about people relations by the way they refer to them in Japanese — that whole “san” thing that like to make fun of. [Me included].

I guess I really am turning Japanese, no matter how much I fight it! NOO!