The start of the month might’ve caught me out of the house, but the Start of Month Reading remains.
On a surface level I’m fighting for things to get better. On a deeper level I’m worried things are beset against me, and on the deepest level I’m indecisive between taking initiative or keeping myself in check.
The start of the month is marked by trying to keep it together while I fight against the esdtablishment, the middle of the month will mark hopes with regards to feeling like I have to deal with everything on my own, and the end of the month will see me rush ahead for inner calm.
On the whole I should fight tooth and nail against that feeling of being on my own.
Considering I’m working on my visa renewal and there’s a non zero chance that it’ll expire while being renewed locking me out of my money accounts and how I tend to feel lonely when stressed… yeah this sounds about right.
My mom always talks about stress “popping out” with some body symptoms. For me it’s things like my ears getting itchy and I think I’m speedrunning the symptoms in question.
Yesterday I slept like a motherfucking bear, and today I woke up with a nerve violently twitching ON MY BUTTCHEEK.
I know stress had me assblasted, but this is silly.
Girls in hand I decided to go check the castle I keep seeing in the distance.
Ueno German Culture Village. When I heard about it I thought it’d be like La Colonia Tovar back in Venezuela (basically a German community selling food and such), but it’s just… a community with a replica of castle… Marksburg I think it was?
It says Theme Park and maybe there’s events that happen at specific times but on the whole it’s less than the word “Theme Park” might suggest.
I took instead a detour to the Heart Rock with all the Heart Locks. The heart Rock is basically a hole erosion made look like a heart but it only shows up when it’s low tide, so it was very half-hearted when I saw it.
…
Oh come on that was a good one and you know it.
Taking to heart what I thought about yesterday Aurora felt more natural today compared to yesterday.
Next was Asagi, and you can see the photos started to look foggier, so I assumed that since I was using a mist filter (at that point I hadn’t checked if it was black or white mist) I went to xhange the filters and since I was done I figured I should change the pose.
Then…
Uh…
Is it the flash?
Maybe some setting got moved?
It looks fine on the preview but taking photos makes them look like this… oh God, don’t tell me the sensor got something in it.
As I hit the sensor cleaning button and check the inside I realize the problem.
Condensation in the lens. But not like the kind I had yesterday where the filter got foggy, no, THE INSIDE GLASSES GOT FOGGY.
This has never ever happened to me and I’ve put that camera and that specific lens through way worse in the past.
I took this photo with my phone just in case I needed the reference to come back later.
Then on my way to sitting down I hit my shin near my ankle SUPER hard with the corner of one of those benches.
I am being tested and I will not be found wanting.
In the time it took me to do a Peter Griffin impression while holding my leg the lens started to defog.
One sigh of relief later and one groan of pain also we were back in action.
Worth even the leg pain.
After packing up the stuff I decided to look for a more beach-y sort of spot and turns out there was a small detour with a neat tiny bit of beach.
This pose required a bit of tuning and also her legs came off (routine stuff, just annoying) but I really like the result.
Then came Asagi’s turn.
Aside from adjusting the hand position she too got it right quickly. I really like how she looks, like there’s a glimpse of a carnivore laying inside the herbivore girl.
Afterwards I came back to my room not just to leave the girls and walk lighter but also to shower because, as I’ve alluded to in the past I sweat like a motherfucker and I was basically bathed in sweat with my shirt smelling like when you don’t hang your laundry it’s that bad.
How else would I survive tropical countries though?
There was this thing with a couple of restaurants near the German Village and I got me a yakiniku set. All the while there was some live performers doing audio testing and man the younger one of them kept dropping the mic and I could just feel my uncle (a sound technician) cringing for no reason half a planet away as it kept happening.
Food was good though.
I did a bit of exploration on the way back and… ok so this place fucks me up because there’s a LOT of streets that are like this:
So I walk one direction in 1 and because in my mind it reads like a straigh line I return in a straight line like in 2 and suddenly I’m elsewhere.
But in that process I learned that there’s all these small tunnels and roads everywhere because you can rent basically golf carts to move around the resort.
When I returned I decided I had to make a conbini tripone way or another, as much to restock on things as to get snacks in case I got hungry.
one hour walking or 13 minutes in car, literally on the other edge of the island.
I called up a cab via app and I got the number of a local cab agency just in case the taxi service got funny as it tends to out in the sticks.
Miyakojima, like Okinawa doesn’t feel like Japan, even without thinking about the lack of trains there’s just so much empty space in general.
I’d say it’s American but the scale of the buildings is still Japanese so it’s almost like an american theme park.
…oh I guess from that perspective Ueno German Village IS a theme park…
At the Family Mart I tell the driver that hey, if he waits like 10 minutes he’ll get my ride back too. He says he’ll make another trip and then return but gives me his phone number.
I’m done in like five minutes, call him, wait 20 minutes, assume he fucked off and try the app again.
I pay another cab to return and when I get back to the hotel I have like 7 missed calls from the other driver.
Oops…
Because my sleep schedule has been so chaotic, I ended up spending most of the night afterwards going through the backlog of videos, there’s like 20 on drafts right now.
Only two days of travel left! Let’s hope I don’t hurt myself in a different way each day until then…