geez. leave this thing for a month and it gets all gross and starts collecting cobwebs. and it's not like i have anything super special to share with the world out there, other than to let my few, faithful, and increasingly disillusioned followers know that i have not stepped through an inter-dimentional manhole into a world where frogs sing like birds and life is easy and the wind smells like freshly laundered clothes. i am, in fact, just a lazy bum.

in my defense, i have only recently overcome my problems with my compy. i finally did what i should have originally done when it started acting up- something anyone who ever had any sort of nintendo system learned as a child- blow on it. it's a little more complicated with a computer, but not really. it was taking about 4 times longer than it should have to do everything, so i finally took it apart, blew on all the main components, reassembled, and it now feels like it runs at CRAY super-computing speeds. it had a few hiccups, but it's pretty much been faithful since then. which is good, cuz i was about 3 crashes away from lighting the thing on fire.

and now that my compy is fixed, my motorcycle is broken, although, as of yesterday, it is somewhat less broken, although it still won't start. baby steps.... i won't bore you with the details of what all went wrong, but i will tell you that i'm messing around with the insides of the engine, which is scary for me.

mom and dad potter were here for a while last week, and man was it great! i cleaned the crap outta my house, which i needed to do anyways, but it was good to have that deadline. i drove out to get them, which takes almost 3 hours, even though you pretty much are in the city of tokyo the whole time. and i only got lost once!! my bike broke the exact day they arrived, which was a pain, since i was planning on giving them the key to my car and just driving my bike everywhere. it was kinda rainy anyways, so it wasn't that big of a deal. it was, however, super great to have other people in my house! those of you who live with other people, parents or otherwise, may not understand this, but the amount of time i spend in my house has been consistently going down over the months. i don't even have a computer there, which means i can't even electronically hang out with anyone, let alone actually hang out with anyone in person. i rarely eat any meal at home other than breakfast, and i usually don't get in until like 10 or 11. it's just a lonely place. at least at the office i have a window that people i know walk by, and a computer that connects me to all my friends. even if i am horribly horrible at keeping in touch with most of you, it's somehow important to me to know that i can email or, better yet, IM with you all. i actually have been shopping for webcam/headset thing so it'll be like we're almost having a normal conversation. except i won't see you. jerks. but, i digress. having my parents home was awesome, cuz we actually used my house like it was a house- with the hanging out, and the eating meals, and the turning on heat and all that. it was a little weird- before we would go anywhere, i'd be getting my shoes on and yell out "now did you guys leave any lights on? mom, did you turn the heater off? is the hot water heater still on?" cuz they would have left the whole world on if i'da let 'em. some people. geez. they were (and continue to be) very encouraging to me, and a great source of joy and laughter to me in my life. except they freakin' grilled me about girls.

in some things, i find that intentional ignorance is the best answer. like with girls. if i let myself, i can and have fully obsessed over girls, to the point that no matter what i am doing, i'm thinking about the chances that they will see me, or the chances that we'll run into eachother, or whatever. and it's a pain, cuz it really is distracting. i can't focus on what i'm doing, as i usually do the most important and time-consuming parts of my job in fairly plain view. which means, if you are clever enough to read between the lines, that there is someone, or rather, there are someones that my parents think i should pursue here. and i have, in my view, fairly good reasons for not doing so. these reasons were, in the end however, unsuccessful to convince my parents. the overall result of this little problem, is that i'm now thinking about girls again, which is annoying. i prefer to think that nothing can or will ever happen, let it go at that, and spend as much of my time as i can thinking and obsessing over the youth ministry, instead of dissecting every interaction with people to discern every possible nuance or hidden meaning in our brief and random encounters. and now i'm even wasting time blogging about this. grrrr...parents (shakes fist).

well, my lunch meeting with ryan (not me) is coming soon, so i must go and prepare for this by buying plastic boxes filled with noodles for our consuming pleasure. and perhaps also triangles of rice.