Maitta! Always - Daily Amazing Confusions -

It was a hot day today, but when I went to the first floor at lunchtime, it was raining outside. It was not until after I was back home that I knew that the rain in the area the office building was so heavy. I didn't know the rain was so heavy, but at least I knew it was rain because I had a chance to look outside. My colleague, who wasn't left office floor at all perhaps had no chance to look outside, so chances are she didn't know it was rain outside at all around this noon. I'd like to ask if she knew if I remember tomorrow.

When I go to work today, suddenly a woman next to me was surprised and left her seat. Another woman in front of me, although not standing up, looked panicked. Soon afterward, there was a buzzing sound and I saw a small beetle. Fortunately it wasn't one which gave off bad smell, so I picked it up and released it outside from one door when the train arrived at the next station. I was surprised because it was unlike ones really dangerous or harmful, I knew it doesn't do any harm except for its buzzing noise, but for many people, the buzzing sound and the movements of six legs especially when it was on its back.

To bathe enough time to make my body heat high, I counted up and counted down. First, I counted in Japanese 1 to 100 twice, and then counted down once from 100 to one. Considering the pace of counting, it took a little bit more than 5 minutes. After I washed my body I bathed again and counted down in English from 100 to 1. I guess it took twice I had done in Japanese. When I counted down to 80 (eighty), the next number I came up with instantly was ninety-nine (99) and after thinking a little while, the next number should be 79 (seventy-nine). Besides that, I found it difficult to count down from 8, 7, 6. That's what never happens when I speak in Japanese. Counting down is quite simple, but tells a lot about how I'm fluent with a foreign language.

The other day I told that I have a piece of cacao-rich chocolate to control appetite. Since the stock has become scarce, I bought a new box of chocolate right after I left work for today. It was not 86% cacao I bought the other day, but it was 95% cacao. On the way to the station, I ate a piece of it. It was milder than 99% cacao chocolate I ate years before. It tasted chocolate just as a piece of 86% cacao, which was almost as bitter and slightly sweeter, did, but it wasn't sweet at all. While I couldn't enjoy it as sweets, it gave me the energy to stand the train from work.

Yesterday I bought computer glasses (JINS PC) because the nose holder of my old ones are broken. There were some choices, but I chose the same one with same color, because I had been satisfied with its fitting and there was no better color I thought match better. I bought the old ones last August, so they lasted a little bit less than a year. Not bad for its price, around 4,000 yen, considering proper glasses cost at least 20,000 yen.

I haven't ridden a bike for 3 years since right after the great earthquake of March 2011. The last time I rode a bike, all public transportation was down, and there were no way to make contact with anyone in my workplace. Bike was the only feasible way to reach the office in time on the Monday. When I got to the office, one of the staff member was there and told me that employees didn't have to go to work until the company made contact with them. It was the last time I rode a bike. It was because tires, wheels and brakes of my bike were worn out. After public transport was recovered, I didn't feel like riding a bike taking the trouble to fixing the problems since then. I had already ridden the bike more than 10 years, and I was thinking that if I ride a bike again, it would probably be a road racer, thinking of participating in a triathlon. Today, I went to the city to look for a bike, because I felt like riding one again, and my bike doesn't work well any more. ...

I looked up how to use an air conditioner when sleeping. I learned that lowering body heat is a good way to have a good sleep, and to lower body heat, raise it before you want to sleep, by bathing or taking a mild exercise like walking. Now it's time to bathe. It'll be 8 P.M. after I'm back from the bathe. 10 P.M. will be the target time to go to sleep.

An air conditioner came to my room. I hope to have better sleep and keeping mentally and physically in shape. Last year, I was in a bad shape at this time of the year after struck by the hot weather, and experienced terrible decline in my stamina. I hope I will regain it by taking good rest.

After work, it's difficult to control my appetite. It doesn't mean that I'm not full after supper, but I feel full much later than I finish to eat. This make me want to eat more even if I've had enough. One day when I was on a scale, I felt the need of weight control, and appetite control. Exercises may be good for weight control, but still, I need to prevent myself from eating excessively after I've had my daily portion. One day, I saw an article which says his only daily snack is a piece of cacao-rich chocolate. This made me think that a piece of cacao-rich chocolate may help me control my excessive appetite from stress. I had had cacao-rich chocolate for snack when I worked at a post office 7 years ago, to keep myself awake. Later, I've become more dependent on caffeine and benzodiazepine to manage my sleepiness, anxiety, and temper. I went to a super market in the lunch time one day.  10 minutes later I found a few packages of cacao-rich chocol...

I've continued my blog for about 5 years. I wrote some posts about developmental disabilities and my past. I wrote a few posts about computers. But the most thing I wrote was about what I felt in my daily life, on a job training and at work. I could write more about issues often told on mass media, and I have some feeling when I hear something on news, but I'm not good at put into words what I felt, and if I can, I'm afraid that somebody may laugh at my view. This is a reason why I haven't written much about issues picked up news media. I could write more about difficulties and benefits I go through because I'm with high-functioning autism. I haven't written much about benefits because I feel that the benefits I can receive in Japan are quite different from those of English-spoken countries, and haven't have enough vocabulary to explain the difference. It was only recently that I noticed my style of blogging, writing personal diary especially wha...

Today was a holiday, called the Day of Sea. I didn't go to a sea but an indoor pool I went the day before yesterday. Because regular work awaits for tomorrow, pace control was the key. If I pace up as usual because the swimmer in the next lane has overtaken me, I'll be much tired later, and may have bad effect on the work the few days later. I set rather strictly the pace and the distance with which I swam today. I decided to swim exactly 1 kilometer in 26 minutes 40 seconds if there were no interruption. If there was a slower swimmer, that would be OK, I control the pace to the slower swimmer, but if there was a faster swimmer, I made up my mind not to pace up even if I thought I could, and instead give way to them. Actually I swam 1 kilometer in 26 minutes. It wasn't exactly the pace set in advance, but difference was within a minutes. I thought I did well to control my pace. This gave me positive feeling and I will go to work with better mood tomorrow.

Deciding the priority for a day off is difficult for me. There are a lot to do for my future dreams. There are a lot I want to write for future for advocacy, and to do this, I have to organize my thoughts and put them in order. There are also chores around me to do. Cleaning my room, which is a thing I'm really poor at, is among this agenda. There are piles of sheets of documents and sketchbooks I have to dispose of, but hesitate to give up without leaving some digital form like pdf or bitmap. But keeping myself in shape is the most important for me to go to work in the beginning of the week.

I visited the mental health clinic for the first time in a month, and for the first time I applied for the renewal of the subsidy for mental health care. The certificate hasn't come yet, so I brought the copy of the application form to the clinic and the drugstore. Although the amount of payment was a little bit more than in-house pharmacy, all went very well. I met with the doctor, got the prescription and had the payment at the clinic's register, then I went to the drugstore one block away from the clinic, also there I showed the copy of the application form and answered a few piece of questions, got the prescribed drug and had payment also there. I need to have the doctor write a diagnosis again for the renewal of the certificate of disability expiring this November. I hope all will go well that time again.

I realized again that I can't be conscious of business communications so long a time. By the end of today's work I had become so tired and so nervous that I wasn't sure that I behave on a train with so many passengers going home. I decided to take the next train to sit and have a rest. Now that I've been released from work, it's not good worrying about some communication mistakes I made this week.

I've just come home from Bible study. It was surprising that I managed to go, because yesterday I felt very tired. I'm restless usually, but surprisingly this time not. The topic was the turning point of Paul from Acts Chapter 19 when he went to Rome. Jesus' turning point was also mentioned from Luke 9 when he set his face to Jerusalem. It was interesting to see the last third or half of these book are spent to describe these short but important period. I was also impressed to be told that Gospel is not definition, but power.

This morning I relaxed with playing a Touhou shooting game, because I was too tired to do anything else. Although in some section, I was frustrated, in some section I played amazingly successfully. I'm also glad that I ended the game wasting no bomb. I also looked for information about triathlons to see if I can begin with a road bike with a reasonable price of around 100,000yen. It may take a few years, but to participate in a race, I also need to be able to swim longer, and strengthen the skill of self control to complete procedures from the application into a race to return home after ending the race.

I felt strange involuntary movements around my left eyelid and unbalanced tension in my body. This is, a little bit milder than then, similar to the strange feeling I felt in the beginning of this June. I have been relieved of stress these days, but today obviously I overdrove myself at work. Fortunately, it's cool enough to have a sleep this night.

To understand the concept of JavaScript objects, I sometimes draw hints from what I see when I go to work. Today, an ad on the commuter train drew my eyes. It was an invitation to the membership for elderly people to get discount from train tickets. The diagram which describe examples of discounts especially drew my eyes. Each row contained a pair of the origin and the destination, its regular price, its discounted price, and the amount you can save with the membership. This diagram stimulated my curiosity to define a structure of a data object "discount". As well as the ad, a vending machine also invoked my curiosity. Drinks, their categories and contents, and their prices. This also can be seen as objects. I was also interested in the event in front of a vending machine. Put it in a coin, push a button corresponded to the drink you want, and you actually get a drink. You may not get a real drink by a data object simulating a vending machine, but to make be...

Just now I had a shower to cool down. It was about 30 degrees Celsius in recent 2 days, and to calm down, I needed to take a shower with lukewarm water. I also microwaved a wet handkerchief for 10 seconds and applied to my eyes to care my sore eyes.

This week I need to care the tiredness physically and mentally from the tension last week. I especially need to care my sore eyes. Probably, I have to limit the time to view my laptop and playing video games.

Now I'm relieved to be here home, with not much problem in today's skill competition, a prefectural preliminary for the nation-wide and international competition named "Abilimpics", a combination term of Ability and Olympics. I won the gold medal in the web page category this year. Last year, I got bronze in the database category, and the year before last I won silver in the web page category. Although I manage to be superior to the other participants, my performance today was far from satisfaction. For example, I missed rules of vertical margins and forcefully set negative margin to fill the spaces that disconnect the boxes laid out vertically. Due to the heat today, I chose to absent from the first half of awards ceremony. I thought I couldn't stand the pressure and maintain the energy to go to work on Monday. Besides, I was so nervous, I was likely to even forget sweating. My mind gave an alert of body heat in addition to anxiety and hyperventilation...

The typhoon has gone, the sunset is beautiful after I'm home. It looks especially beautiful probably because it's Friday. (although I have to participate in a PC skills competition tomorrow.) We started to work from afternoon today, anticipating the typhoon could affect public transport, but here the rain and the rain wasn't so big. Some areas in Tohoku area had so much rain that the railroads there were struck.

I often read several blogs as well as I write ones. Some of them give me information I'm interested in - computer network and web technologies. Some of them are written by just ordinary people. They attract my eyes especially when writers are on their ways of trying to tests especially I've experienced. These blogs reminds me of my achievements and the battle before them. Blogs dealing with diaries studying for popular tests tend to attract larger audience than learning diaries without tests in the near future. This reinforced that studying for exams is so common an experience that many people like to look back on.

This evening I bathed right away after I had supper. Since I came home, I had been so tired that I thought that if I had gone upstairs into my room after I had supper, I wouldn't have been able to go downstairs to bathe. I usually bathe after I take a rest for hale an hour in my room after supper, browsing the Internet and sometimes writing blog posts.

I sometimes think that I could have learned about information technologies, esp. web technologies much earlier. I have learned a lot about information technologies, especially in these few years, its communication aspect I had little been interested in before. I sometimes think that it's too late to notice to begin something. To fight with this negative thought, I'm setting a vision of myself as a vehicle for people who feel it's too late to begin. This motivate me to continue learning passionately. Looking back on the past, especially when I was in university, I had the opportunity to take lectures on information science and information processing. In the second year of university, I lived in dormitory supported Iwate prefecture I was from. Some member was enthusiastic about spreading the use of the inter net taking advantage of the test supply of cable-TV Internet. In this opportunity, I bought my first PC, and tried to create a website. Commercial use of the Int...

I jogged 4 kilometers this morning. Perhaps, it's the longest I continuously jogged this year. Last year, especially in the spring, I regularly jogged longer than this, preparing for a half marathon. I hadn't been able to jogging that long since I came down with the heat of last summer. I had expected it would take 36 minutes, because I set the pace 9 minutes per kilometer. Actually it took 30 minutes. Keeping the pace to 9 minutes per kilometer may take a little bit of concentration and self-control fighting against the desire to run faster. I'd like to find the pace which keep me in shape.

What does curiosity, my primary motivation to learn and know things have to do with a long span goal like yearly one? My curiosity is often haphazard and moving one thing to another, instead of just focusing on one thing. I encountered this challenge after I watched a message from the president of my company. One way may be change my way of thinking, feeling and acting, to try hard to think of a long term goal, giving up my old way of behavior, which is really stressful. For better mental hygiene, I come to know I need to find some relations between my way of find things interesting and the way, as the president has just put, to set a long-term goal. Take web coding and programing as an example. I'm really enjoying to learn the basics and fundamentals of specifications of the languages which are related to web sites. Giving up this curiosity totally isn't a very good idea because by giving up what I enjoy to learn or acquire skills, I won't have any power in the fu...

A huge typhoon or tropical storm approaching Japan and the Okinawa area is on the alert. In Tohoku, or Northeast area in Japan, it's expected to approach by the end of this week. I'm concerned about the storm in the middle of Abilympic, a technical competition of vocational skill for coming Saturday, although the expected impact on our area will be much less than southern area like Okinawa and Kyushu, in which the strength of wind may reach 50 meters per second, and also worried about the heat at night after it passes, which may cause very uncomfortable night.

I'm scanning many sheets of documents. Probably this afternoon I did more than 200 sheet. Some of them are what I took a note or I drew for distraction when I was in university more than ten years ago. Even these notebooks, there were sketch of automobiles. Drawing automobiles has been the best way for distraction to bear the pain to sit still. I hope this intensive scan help to make space in my room to clean things up to install air conditioner to my room.

It's likely that I've been overloaded with my mindfulness and self-study of web programming. My posture sometimes becomes rigid, and the left side of my lips has become sore. Through working experiences, I've learned to be mindful, but I've also noticed that it takes a lot of energy for me to be mindful. Sometimes I think that it would be nice if I had some vent. It may not exactly a vent, but today I noticed that swimming on Saturday can be one. In the water, I can take relaxed posture, with the feeling being released from gravity, and can take deep breath when I breathe, because no one wonder what happened even if I breathe with a relatively big voice if I did in public it might cause some trouble. Now that I noticed the sign of accumulated stress, I should be careful to take a rest longer than usual on Sunday.

I "heard" the echo of the pressure inside my years and my head, as if I were squeezed from both sides of my head, in addition to what I heard and I felt from outside as I regularly do. It was 15 minutes after I left a Starbucks shop near the station. I knew that I was going to be in difficulty at least for an hour after this happening, so I decided to ride the train next to one I usually ride, in spite I could ride considering time. I knew I would have been going to get involved in further trouble incapable of stand the crowd in that train. What happened Starbucks was, when I went to the counter to make an order of iced coffee, short, "One More Coffee", I was told to wait in line. I hadn't seen such line! But there were a pair of people that advanced to the counter. Probably they were from the line I missed. I was really embarrassed, so embarrassed that my body began to become rigid, unable to move for a while.  I hadn't been able to see the line, and...

This morning I scanned a notebook of 30 sheets. It took 15 minutes, 6 minutes for tearing sheets apart, 6minutes for scanning, and 3minutes for managing the app. On this notebook, I wrote notes when I noticed something while and after skiing in 2003 and a few years later. I was surprised by how fast a notebook can scanned with a document scanner.

This year I've made up my mind to post this blog in English every day. This make me actually continue to update this blog on daily basis. When it comes to my Japanese blog, however, the pace of posts has been on the decline. This is because my desire to tell something interesting has also been on the decline, probably because I haven't able to cope very well with stresses from work, and don't enough time to turn my eyes to something interesting in my daily life and if I manage to do, it's become also hard to put these things into words. The activity of both my brain and my body have been such a low pace. Things has been changed after I told in my Japanese blog that what happened when I listened to American news podcasts. This year I come to understand these news enough to be interested in people and books on the news, which I tell in the blog once in a while. I also told funny mistakes I made while listening to the news. I'm not sure readers really enjoy my...

I'm not good at folding clothes. To improve this, I watched a video showing the shortest and easiest way to fold a T-shirt. I picked two points with my hands as told, but I couldn't understand what happened. A few seconds after, the T-shirt in the video was folded, but not mine. I haven't understood the point of the video, although many viewers gave a review of praises.

After supper, I enjoyed jogging. It was the first time in 2 month that I enjoyed jogging. I jogged 2 kilometers. On weekends, I walked and jogged once in a while in this 2 months. These times, I didn't really enjoy jogging. I jogged because I wanted to lose weight and felt the need to take some exercise. Actually I never jogged more than 700 meters continuously. The mild pain all over my body prevented me from enjoying jogging. Many years ago, I really enjoyed jogging. In the mornings on weekends I jogged around the hill nearby. I often jogged more than 7 kilometers. I also participated in road races once in a while, and ran 10 kilometers in 45 minutes and a half marathon in 100 minutes. I was able to enjoy jogging so much in the past, because firstly I was young, and secondly, I was free from stresses from work and pain caused by such stresses. I had thought that jogging was a good way to relieve such stress, but in recent months, I often felt tiredness even after ...