pretty great, you guys

Man.  It really has not helped that in recent weeks, while researching Taiwan, I was forced to wade through an endless bog of excruciatingly bad "Westerners in Asia LOL" blogs that nearly forced me to reexamine this whole bit altogether.  Why does every white person think their opinions are worth hearing?  Spare your comments, I obv. get the irony.

If you read this, we are probably F-book friends or Twitterers (don't follow me on Twitter) or whatever and you are feeling exhausted by my endless stream of meth-head pseudo-drama and unfunny rantings on complete wastes of time.  Thus, you are intimately aware of my life's hems and haws, and you can tell when I am sitting alone on a curb somewhere inhaling a bowl of udon and ranting about the grooming habits of young Korean women.  Has this blog become irrelevant?

Maybe.  My day-to-day experience is different in the subtle ways that a change of zip code anywhere would make one's business different.  It is possible that this has led to an opening of my perspective, in that I feel less encumbered by commutes and geography and thus liberated to explore a little more.  But hasn't there always been stuff to explore, even way out in the suburbs?

I'm certainly not sitting around as much after work, sitting down with a bowl of ramen to binge-watch 'Justified' or something of less-than-incremental value for my brain.  I suppose the biggest problem about last year was my own attitude, OK GUYS I GET IT.  But I also think it is easy to maintain a shitty attitude when you harbor a legitimate disdain for overlong subway/bus rides and you live in an area where said attitude leads you to prefer binge-watching mediocre TV over going outside and walking around a little.  So that's changed too, my attitude.

I've also managed to fit travel-size amounts of pain and guilt and regret and loathing into my new digs, but those are pretty normal to a man I suppose.  Even new stuff is built on old rocks.

And anyway,

* I'm going to Taiwan in 2 days;
* I'm going back to Japan in September;
* I'm going to Thailand in December;
* I'm going to ??? in March before
* Returning home in Spring 2014.  You already knew that.

Tangible accomplishments?  Forever working on those.