Thoughts

The End is Near

Posted on 2020-12-26 18:36 by randy

Mortgage, marriage, pandemic. Boom, now you're old. I'll be brief, because we're not quite there yet.

In my entire life there has never been a year like this. I am no longer young, but I don't feel old yet either. Many bad things have happened to the people around me this year. Nothing is quite the same as it was before. Nevertheless, the pandemic brings perspective.

Gradually, my priorities shift. Goals get closer to fulfilment. Some things were not possible this year, but other things came along to replace them. Less travel, more at-home activities. Less human interaction, more peace of mind. Less commuting, more cycling.

There is "pre-pandemic" and "post-pandemic". Let's hope 2021 will be "post-pandemic". Getting older. Getting better.

Long ways to go yet. _{(Smeagol will show the way)}

Posted in Thoughts | Tagged coronavirus , introvert

The cycle of change

Posted on 2020-01-03 07:20 by randy

I've done quite a few cycling trips, but three clearly stand out as the major ones: Tokyo to the southernmost point of Kyushu, Tokyo to the northernmost point of Hokkaido, and Kyushu back to Tokyo. As far as the Japanese coast line goes, the last bit that I haven't done yet is from the northernmost point of Hokkaido back to Tokyo via the east coast.

Next year is the ten year anniversary of that first trip, the one from Tokyo to Kyushu all by myself. Inevitably, I find myself thinking about my life in terms of "before the trip" and "after the trip", about what kind of person I was before, and what kind of person I was about to become. That first trip is the marker for the biggest change in my life. I moved back from Japan to Europe. One life ended, and another one began. I was young and naive and full of a hope and a freedom that I will never ever regain. The term 'cycling trip', to me, is about that feeling of youth and freedom. But it's a feeling I've gradually lost over time.

Europe taught me some harsh lessons about what it's like to actually be an adult. I really had just been playing around in Japan, and I was not quick to change my ways after moving to the UK. I landed a job with a lot of freedoms, and I used it to become the most physically fit that I ever was. By the time I took three months off for the second cycling trip, I was in my prime. I challenged myself by cycling routes that I'd never even have consided before. The second trip to the North of Hokkaido was definitely my best physical achievement. I was never 'not fat', but I was definitely fit.

Between the second and the third trip something changed. I started becoming a different person again. It became hard to think of cycling in the same way as before. After the first trip I had never experienced life in that way before, and there was nothing better to me. The second trip continued on that feeling, but at the same time my life back in the UK was starting to come together.

My moment of 'cracking' came during a smaller trip, a few years after the big trip north. I had taken a two-week holiday from my job to do a shorter cycle from Hiroshima to Kyushu, to repeat a few of my favorite bits from past cycling trips, and to fill in a bit of coastline I hadn't cycled yet. I was cycling along the coastline with a perfect blue sky, not too warm, not too cold. It was a nice, wide, road, with a cycling area to the side and not too much traffic. Mountains on one side, and some small islands visible along the Japanese inland sea. It should have been perfect. I should have been enjoying myself beyond belief. But all I could think of was: "Why am I not enjoying this?"

I didn't understand the feeling, or where it came from. I stopped by a convenience store, bought some food and sat on a seawall for quite some time, feeling unhappy and trying to make sense of my emotions. Whenever I think about my trips nowadays, it is that moment that stands out for me as the turning point, the point where I realized I was becoming someone else. I didn't understand or accept it at the time, and it vexed me for years. It kind of still does. I still want to be the person I was back when I undertook that first cycling trip, but I can't. I can never go back to that. My life experience won't let me.

That trip was in Autumn. The next spring, I quit my job and went cycling again, to do it properly this time. I figured that the previous trip left a bad feeling because I had a job to get back to. It's hard to reproduce the feeling of freedom if you're only on a two-week break, so so I thought at the time. The third 'I quit my job and I'm going cycling' trip went from Kyushu back to Tokyo. It started at the point where I left with a bad feeling the previous autumn, and I felt vindicated when I made it back to Tokyo along the northern coast. I still had it.

But my exit from my job was a soft exit, with the opportunity to come back, which I did. Soon I was living the same life as before the cycling trip, which is why in the long term I think about this third trip differently than the previous two. Every cycling trip I see my options in life decreasing. Every trip I get older, more settled down. And that's not a bad thing at all. I'm quite happy with the direction my life is going. I'm creating options in one area, but as a consequence, options in another area are disappearing. Cycling trips remind me of a freedom I can't ever have back, and that's why I started feeling bad when I think about cycling trips. More and more it feels like escaping from life rather than creating opportunities in life.

There's one more trip left before I can finally say that I've cycled all of the coast of Japan, and I'm dreading it more and more every year. I've chosen my life in the UK, so I won't get the sense of freedom I got from the first trip. I'm getting older every year, and I'm definitely past my physical prime, though I reckon I'll have no real trouble as long as I don't injure myself. I'm pretty good at not injuring myself. Lastly, the bit of the coast I didn't do yet is the coldest, longest, most desolate, un-Japanese part of all of Japan: the east and north coasts of Hokkaido. Long stretches of nothingness with cold temperatures and strong winds. None of it is what I like about Japan, and it feels like a chore to do it at this point.

2020 seemed like the perfect 'I quit my job and I'm going cycling' year. Exactly ten years after the first trip. A perfect opportunity to evaluate what I was then and what I am now. But the truth is: I do that all the time. It's not like I turn my brain off for ten years and then wake up and wonder where I am. I chose to come here and I was conscious for all of it, no excuses. I'm no longer the same person I was ten years ago, and the person I am now has different priorities. I wouldn't have grown as a person if that statement turned out not to be true.

The legendary fourth trip will have to wait a little longer. I've not given up, but I need to create the right opportunity for it. Life goals allowing, I intend to make this happen in the next five years.

Let's see what will happen in the next decade. 2020, bring it on.

Posted in Cycling , Thoughts

Grown-up life and blogs don't mix

Posted on 2019-04-08 13:02 by randy

In the recent years I've begun to think very differently about the 'free' time I have available to me. Back in my mid-twenties my free time was truly free. My commute was short, my responsibilities were little, my social life was not very active, so I ended up having more than enough time to spend on all the things that interested me at the time. Now, ten years later, my social life is still not very active, but everything else has gotten a lot more busy. I lose two to three hours every day in my commute. I am fortunate enough to be able to worry about what the most efficient way is to mortgage our apartment, how to invest our savings, and so on. Once those things enter your life you have to prioritize them accordingly. Just keeping up with this took some adjusting for me. And I don't even have kids! I can only imagine how busy people are when they have kids to take care of. The free time in my life has gone from 'mostly unplanned' to 'fully planned', with almost no exception. I probably first had this thought years ago. I just didn't have time to blog about it.

What does "I don't have time" even mean? In this context it doesn't mean that I am so busy 24/7 with things that utterly vital to my life that I don't have time for anything else. I still spend lots of time playing games, watching movies, cycling, editing photos, and so on. What it means is that, after I'm done with the things that are vital to my life (social obligations, researching decisions that will affect me for the next decades, daily-life churn like laundry, dishes, commutes) I end up with very little time and 'active brain time' left, that I choose to spend it on other (less creative) activities.

Today is an exception, though. Today is the first day in months in which my to-do list has finally shrunk enough for me to feel like devoting some time to blogging. In retrospect I think it was probably a mistake to switch away from Wordpress those few years ago. Yes, my blog is now statically hosted, way faster, and fully managed by me, but the scope creep in getting the little features that I need in means it ends up taking literally years before I have something that even does the bare-minimum that Wordpress does. If I had to make this decision again, I probably would've stayed with Wordpress and moved to more expensive hosting. It's a wonderfully hands-off ecosystem. The reason I wrote my own static blog system and did not use an off-the-shelf solution is because I believe I would be locked in to someone else's solution if I used an off-the-shelf library or framework. My own system minimizes dependencies and lines of code. The actual meat of the system (template rendering, page generation, publishing) is less than 600 lines of code. Sadly, the Django app that I'm writing this in is proof that I still have dependencies and need to write hundreds more lines of code before I actually have something I can use from any random device or location. I think this solution is the right solution for someone who has the time to work on it. What I should have done is just buy more expensive Wordpress hosting, which would've gotten me a lot more happiness, time-savings and features.

One thought keeps popping back into my head over the past few months: "Efficiency/Productivity is the enemy of Creativity". That's one way to phrase it. Another way would be "Efficiency and Creativity are two sides of the same coin". The more efficient I work, the less creative I am. The most efficient people I know are people I would not rank very highly on creativity, and the opposite seems to hold true as well. I find the consequences of this interesting for someone (like me) whose professional role is "web developer". The 'developer' part is something you can improve by being more efficient/productive, but the 'web' part has a very strong element of creativity in it that is sometimes overlooked. Trying to satisfy both elements is an interesting challenge. Building my own blog is something I thought would be helpful for creativity, but in my attempts to keep the amount of work to a minimum I think it ended up being an exercise in productivity rather than creativity. Building things is not fun if you don't enjoy doing it. And (at least in the case of hobbies) if you don't have joy in what you do, why are you doing it?

Use it or lose it.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged blog

A modern-day Dokkōdō

Posted on 2019-03-07 18:30 by rv

Prioritize mental, physical and financial health.

Use all of the day. Don't spend all your time in virtual worlds.

Accept inconvenience. Don't complain.

Think about what, ten years from now, you will wish you had gotten out of life now.

Spend some time in the sun every day.

Eat in moderation. Don't eat bad things.

Throw away things you don't need.

Meditate every day.

(Inspired by the original Dokkōdō).

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged dokkodo

Moving the goalposts

Posted on 2019-01-06 14:43 by rv

This blog is finally on https! It's been a while in the making. I first tried this over a year ago but couldn't get AWS from generating an infinite redirect loop. In the end I think it was a combination of the Cloudfront distribution doing redirects and the S3 bucket that this blog is now served from also doing redirects. I think I may have actually solved it at the time, because I did the same thing again this week and it worked, but it turns out the changes take quite a while (over a day from what I've seen) to propagate, so I never knew that my fix worked the last time I tried it.

So, 2019 now. Middle age has definitely struck. I've found myself very busy last year. Busy enough to not have enough mental energy for side projects or hobbies. My major peave of the year is definitely my commute. My commute to work is, by my own standards, way too long. It's one of the things I'd like to improve on this year, if at all possible. Currently I've got perhaps 3-4 hours of free time after work, which, after dealing with all the adulting (house chores, mortgages, that sort of thing) leaves me with no time during the week where my brain is actually functioning. While I'm unhappy about that, it's also a path I've chosen for myself, and the benefits (which I won't go into here) outweigh the costs. And there's things I can do to optimize that.

One thing I definitely should reflect on when thinking about last year is the concept of moving the goalposts. I keep perceiving my life in a way that makes it seem that I haven't accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, but I forget that I had very different goals a few years ago. While I was kind-of-sort-of aware that I had been doing this over the past year, lack of free time and preoccupation with other things left me until the December holidays to really realize how much my life has changed in the past few years. Whilst all of the world around me was going to shit in 2018, for me things have improved massively in terms of knowledge, financials, living quality, and all kinds of other things. When I'm busy living the daily life it's easy to overlook that and just focus on optimizing the next thing that's not quite perfect yet, without realizing that I've already dealt with 99.9% of the biggest worries I could be having. I think it's ridiculous to value the remaining .1% of quality of life as high as the 99.9%, but that's naturally what my brain does, and it needs conscious effort for me to stop thinking that way. My goal is to try and be more aware of that in 2019.

Here's to a good 2019. May your goalposts be moved ever further.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , Thoughts

Hello blog!

Posted on 2018-10-05 16:43 by rv

Hello, blog. It's been a while.

Last year, after the previous blogpost, I felt a good sense of closure for the blog, so I decided to take the plunge and turn the entire site into a static site. No more wordpress, no more new comments, no more new posts. This turned out to be pretty easy to do: all I had to do was scrape all the pages on the domain and upload them to S3. I had been meaning to get an https certificate set up, but ran into some snags that I couldn't be bothered to work out. It's still on my to-do list, but at the time it was just yet another thing that prevented me from continuing the blog.

Continuing? But why? Didn't I say that I was done blogging? Well, yeess.. but..

Everything I said in the Goodbye post holds true, and I stand by what I said. The internet is not the same place it was when I first started blogging. Compared to 10 years ago I still feel quite strongly that it's way less appealing now to to put content online. The second argument, about my own life, also still holds true. I really do have way less things I want to blog about, and way less time to write blogposts. It compounds, of course: because the internet feels less inviting to me now, I feel the need to structure new blogposts better, more coherently. That costs more time. It all compounds.

But despite all that, during the past year I did find myself occasionally having the desire, the inspiration and the time to blog. Even if the amount of things I write is cut down ten-fold, there will still be the occasional blogpost. So, while the desire to blog was occasionally there, I was blocked by having made the site static: with no wordpress interface it's just a major pain to manually write something: I'd have to manually edit HTML files, update the index page, update the category pages, tag, pages, archive pages.. It's simply a non-starter. I had to make this easier.

There's a bunch of static blog generators out there. Some of them look nice. I'm willing to bet that there's a very large change that whichever one I pick won't be maintained any more ten years from now, and if there's one thing I hate it's dealing with someone else's codebase in my free time. Big nope. Since I'm a web developer anyway, I decided to build something myself. That was in January..

I got pretty stuck on doing something simple. If there's ever a second thing I hate, it's dealing with my own codebase in my free time, so I wanted to make things as simple as possible. This often meant that, as soon as I wrote something, I immediately discarded it for being too complicated. Perfect is the enemy of good, and nothing got done for months. I had decided that I wanted a flat file format consisting of a yaml section for each post's metadata, and markdown(+HTML) for the post content. But I really didn't get further than that, because I desperately tried to pretend that it was just a small project and could be contained in one simple file. I finally found myself with a lot of free time this week and decided to tackle the problems head on.

The result-for-now is that I ended up with more code than I wanted, but nothing too crazy. Since I'm the most familiar with Python, I ended up writing a template renderer using jinja2, a generator which gathers all the pages that need to be updated for each article, and a publisher that uploads to Amazon S3 using boto3. No other dependencies, although I did write a little preview site in Django just so I could get instant gratification as I was doing all the template and CSS tweaks.

I ran into major issues with transforming my original blogposts from Wordpress to the new yaml+markdown format. At first I was working on a scraper-like tool that would read my old blog's static HTML files and do some parsing. Then I found out that for some reason my old static blog was missing all posts before 2007. So I had to deal with the Wordpress SQL backup. I wasted an hour trying to import the bloody thing into SQLite, but ran into countless SQL dialect errors. Eventually I gave up and installed MySQL and ended up wasting another hour getting all the settings right and connecting to it from Python. In the end I did manage to extract all the posts from the database and into happy little human-readable flat files.

Then I hit another snag: turns out a lot of posts on this blog use special [block] tags for extra functionality, and that of course wouldn't work as-is. So I had to convert those to HTML. Since I was doing some search-replaces anyway I decided to do some anonymization as well: my goal for this blog is for it to be a one-way street: if you already know me it should be easy for you to discover this blog, but if you don't know me already, searching my name should not bring up this blog as the topmost hit. I realize I am completely failing at this at the moment by having a Github link in the header. That'll probably go away at some point.

Another snag was the post count: since each page shows the number of posts in each category, I'd have to update very single page every time I add a post for a category, just so the counts are updated. What a pain. I decided to remove the counts from the HTML entirely, and I added a separate stats.json file that adds the counts in through javascript. No javascript required for this blog, but it does do enhancements.

It was at this point that I realized that I was getting very carried away with everything and that I had to put a stop to this: I ended up spending the better part of five days rather than the two or three mornings I had estimated. But finally I am in a state where I can relatively easily write a new post and publish it. I need to have the python code and the raw blog contents on the machine that I'm writing from, and it currently only works via a command line one-liner, but it works. I intend to make a very basic front-end for it at some later point in time so I can publish from any machine using a Django app. Another thing I'd like to add back is the comments section. Who knows, perhaps I'll get around to that before 2020..

There's a lot of things I want to do, both in terms of adding features as well as things to write about. I still want to write down in detail what the Lego Raspberry Pi project ended up becoming, and I also want to publish the static blog generator on github after I'm done cleaning up the code. Who knows, I might even be tempted to write about my personal life again at some point. In any case, stay tuned for more exciting content.

More to come!

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , Thoughts

Goodbye blog

Posted on 2017-05-22 10:15 by rv

It's time for me to acknowledge that this blog is becoming less and less of a priority in my life. I've tried to re-motivate myself for blogging by attempting to open a Patreon account last year, but that hasn't been very successful. For good reasons, I should add, because if you're going to spend money on Patreon there's a lot better places to spend money on than this silly place. I'm not intending to wipe this blog off the internet or completely stop posting, but the content of this blog has definitely changed from "I am posting at least weekly about important experiences in my life that have affected me deeply" to "I am posting once every few months about stuff that I have trouble motivating myself for". So I guess some closing words are in order.

There have been some major changes in my life lately. I got married. Bought an apartment. Bought and sold a car. Changed jobs. But I think the one major change that is a constant throughout everything is: I got older. I continue to get older. And as I get older, the amount of importance I place on my own life only decreases with time. I believe this is strongly correlated with intensity of experience. Ten years ago I experienced everything for the first time and was amazed at what life could be like. It was something that I felt I had to record, not even necessarily for others, but at least for myself. Formative experiences. The internet was a more innocent thing at the time, and a blog seemed like the right place. The internet was full of friends, not of crackers.

On all these fronts the zeitgeist has moved on. I am at a point in my life where I don't have many truly 'new' experiences any more. There's still loads of stuff I've never done, but I've done enough similar things often enough to be able to relate and use my experience in new areas. For example, my experience in touring cycling gives me a broader knowledge that can be applied to backpacking. It also gives me a starting point if I ever wanted to venture into speed cycling. My experiences in traveling to various countries means I've learned how to get started on exploring other new countries. My experiences in learning several programming languages and countless frameworks-du-jour means that it's pretty easy for me to pick up other new software technologies. It's a kind of meta-experience: it's the experience you need to be good at experiencing new things.

Having meta-experience is nice, but also not nice. It definitely seems easier for me to start any random new thing at this point in my life compared to ten years ago, but also, I could not possibly derive the same kind of enjoyment, the same kind of 'new-ness', from it. Less intense experience means less desire to blog about it.

Another thing that's changed since I started this blog is 1) social media, and 2) my relationship with my friends. When I started this blog Facebook was only just becoming popular. Video calls existed but kind of sucked, especially if you had to explain to non-tech-savvy people (my parents) how to do them. This blog was a great means of staying close to the friends that I made in Japan after we all went our separate ways. That was ten years ago though, and the amount that I communicate with my friends today seems to be a better fit for Facebook than for blogging. Even my un-tech-savvy parents figured out how to use Facetime, so there's no shortage of communication methods.

It's definitely worth mentioning here that the internet has changed. If you're applying for a job, companies you apply for will without fail find out everything about you that's publicly available. That's only rational. I've had a negative experience once where a potential contact called me out on something I wrote on my blog. That's fair game, but if, like me, sometimes you write things that could be taken negatively out of context, then you need to consider that your online presence can only have negative consequences for you in real life.

There's also the hacker angle. The more you put up online about yourself for anyone to find, the easier it is for someone to impersonate you, or to find out starting points that they can use to find out more about you. This was something that you only vaguely had to be aware of ten years ago, but is becoming way more important lately. There's probably already web crawlers out there whose sole purpose is to crawl information on the internet and group it by person.

I'm sad to write this, but I'm even worried about what governments can find out about me. Imagine you're on a plane to some country, go to passport control and get taken aside for a 'random' check. Then you're confronted with some silly blogpost that you wrote ten years ago that casually mentions "but country X is a shit country anyway and president Y is an asshole". This is not a far-fetched scenario. I have read reports of this happening to other people online. All it takes is for one person to jump on one silly thing that you wrote years ago and you're in for a terrible experience. You could argue "but then you should think a bit more about what you write on the internet", which is a totally valid argument, but also that's kind of what makes blogging fun for me and (hopefully) for the few people in the world who are actually reading my blog, so if given that choice I'd rather just quit blogging.

I am coming to terms with all of these things. The meta-experience/getting older thing in particular has caused me to review parts of my life that I always took for granted, that I am now starting to feel that I could live without. Cycling is one of those areas. It fitted my bohemian persona from ten years ago, but nowadays I find that I've got some direction in life. With that direction, my cycling hobby has been reduced to 'staying fit', which is something I can actually do indoors. It doesn't help that the UK is a lot less cyclograph-friendly that Japan either. Blogging is on the list of things that used to matter a lot to me but are just not having any effect on my life lately. So it's time to cut them out. Spring cleanup. I have gained (meta-)experience from all of these activites, but now it's time to let it go.

See you later, perhaps.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Closing thoughts

Posted on 2017-03-16 11:04 by rv

(Written on the 13th, scheduled with time delay.)

Right after I gave my bike to Kuroneko for airport delivery I was in shock. After one busy event after another, I had some free time to think. I sat down at a random 'park' (that is, a free bit of concrete) and after a while finally calmed down. I had anticipated this moment, because I thought that moment would clearly show how I felt about the impulsive decisions I had been making recently. Instead, what came was only a mild rationalization with no clear sway towards thinking it was a good or bad decision to go back early. My mind was still full of worry about the day's hotel and if I would be able to cancel all the next hotels without financial damage. The rest moment wasn't quite there yet.

I know very well that what I'm doing is a pretty weird thing, even for my doing. Impulsive booking a cycling trip, and then impulsively cancelling it and returning early for no tangible/external reason, not many people would do that. Of the small group of people that does touring cycling, an even smaller group does touring cycling alone, and even smaller group would plan (and unplan) a trip the same way I do. This does not bother me in one bit, but I can see that other people may have trouble understanding my motivations. Hell, I have trouble understanding my motivations. That's why I write blogposts like these.

Yesterday I awoke from the love hotel quite early. I never managed to turn the lights off and I left the outside door ajar just to cool the damn place down. It's an utterly terrible place to sleep. I'd even prefer a capsule hotel over a love hotel, but that's only because capsule hotels tend to be way cheaper. Anyway, I went for a short stroll through early morning Kochi (yes, I can say where I am now!) and walked towards the station. Not many people were awake yet on this Sunday morning. I considered taking a train back to Tokushima, which is where I came from when I took the ferry with my bike. But the connection between train stations and ferry ports seemed tedious so I got a train ticket instead. The Limited Express from Kochi to Okayama went along much of the same route that I had cycled the day before. It felt like rewinding the trip. Somehow, in retrospect, I still hadn't quite found my rest moment yet at this time.

Then I hopped on the Shinkansen to Osaka and did some shopping. Yodobashi is fantastic as always. I wanted new noise cancelling earphones since I lost some bits of my old ones on the flight in. Yodobashi provides. When it came to lunch I was deeply appalled though. Osaka station area is shockingly, disgustingly busy on a Sunday. Every restaurant had a queue of people waiting in front of it. I absolutely hate this. Queueing for food is just not my thing. I'm definitely not a city person. I also thought about finding a quiet cafe after lunch but that was clearly impossible as well. Yet somehow on my way back towards the station I found one place inside the station building that wasn't very busy, and I managed to have quite a decent curry there.

My final hotel is near the airport, and only a short train ride away from Osaka. And a bit of a walk, it turns out. Unfortunately my Google Pixel GPS chose exactly this moment to stop working, so I had to navigate the old-fashioned way. It wasn't much of an issue though. But at the end of the day (again, in retrospect), still no 'closure' moment about the trip.

The closure moment finally came today. I have a day free to do whatever I want since my flight is not until tomorrow, so I took a local train to Wakayama. I went on the train, put my new earphones in, put some music on and just sat back and enjoyed the scenery. That's when I realized: this moment is all I really wanted from this trip. One quiet, peaceful moment, to experience Japan the way I remember it, without any stress, or worries, or hurries. All I needed was one day.

That's when I knew I was comfortable with my decision. I knew what the way forward was. The way forward for me is not Japan, because I have been there before. You can never go back. There is only forward. You can never derive the same enjoyment from the same thing twice. It diminishes every time. That is why you must do new things. It may seem like common sense, or a thing you can make yourself realize just by thinking about it, but you can't. You really can't. You need to confront yourself with this reality somehow, otherwise it just doesn't hit home. For me, making an impulsive decision was the way to make me truly realize this. A lesson I learn in this way is a lesson I will never forget.

As an interlude and totally secondary reason, one very practical reason for feeling great about my decision is this: it's raining. It's a gray and miserable day today, and the area I'd be cycling in is even worse according to the weather report. Wind and rain are pointless hardships. At least when you're climbing a mountain you're suffering for a payoff, but there is no payoff for cycling in the wind and the rain for the whole day. All it does is make you feel more miserable.

That's the lesson of this for me: you can never go back, and repeating past experiences diminishes the value over time. You can compare it a bit to playing games: after you've leveled up sufficiently, you don't go back to the first level to hang around and repeat the same quests over and over again, right? There's always a next level, but the levels you've completed, they're done. They're fun to revisit after you've done them, but you'll never again feel the same challenge that you felt the first time you did it.

I imagine people will read the previous paragraph and think of it as something negative. I don't see it that way though. I'm quite stoically inclined, with a (healthy?) pince of nihilism added to the mix. It's just an unchangeable part of reality for me. I have tested my words on myself and by experimentation have confirmed that they are true, in so far as a statement about a state of mind can be true. So, not 'True' truth, but 'true for me'. I'm very happy about this, because I know it is something I can rely on. It helps me define meaning, so I no longer have to seek for it, or at least not as much as I used to when I first started doing cycling trips.

Tomorrow morning I fly back to the UK. I hope my bike will be at the airport, but now that I've rationalized my trip and my feelings about cycling I know I won't consider this trip a failure even if the bike doesn't make it or is damaged. It would be a minor setback compared to the mental clarity I found. That said, fingers crossed though. The trip's not over yet. But I'm on my way home.

Posted in Cycling , Thoughts

Impulsiveness

Posted on 2017-03-15 11:52 by rv

(Written on the morning of the 12th, set to autopublish on the 15th)

The truth is, after the cold but refreshing downhill from the last post, either before or after I went to the temple, I forget, I got a strange idea in my head and I couldn't let it go. It just kept sitting there and wouldn't move, and forced me to think about it. In my mind I imagined the steps I would need to take and the consequences it would have if it went either right or wrong. In the end, I figured it was worth doing a little investigating in real life to see if it was possible. After all, I still had plenty of time left in the day.

I decided to see if I could change my flight and go home early.

Why? Mainly because I wasn't really enjoying myself any more. I've got the "cycling in Japan" theme nailed. I can look at a map now and know exactly what kind of road I'll encounter. When I enter a new town I'll know exactly where the station is, where the hotels are, where the conbinis are, without even looking at a map. Everything is just hugely predictable, and, finally, unchallenging. I just am no longer getting out of these cycling trips what I was getting all those years ago when I first started.

Besides that main reason, two additional reasons that caused me to feel this way are that 1. this trip was pre-planned, and 2. it is genuinely cold and unpleasant outside if you're sweating like mad, which makes the random wandering-around kind of a non-thing for me. If your clothes are wet with sweat and there's a cold wind chilling you down then you don't feel like casually cycling around to see what's out there, you just want to get to a warm place as soon as possible. The pre-planned bit meant that I already knew exactly where I was going, and I knew that yesterday was both the most difficult and the most beautiful route of the trip, so the challenge kind of disappeared after that.

So, at Sukiya I put the first part of my plan into action: check if I can actually change the date on my return flight. I managed to check on my mobile phone on the wifi from the conbini next door. I could indeed change my flight! I didn't change it just yet, though.

I am 200 kilometers away from the airport. I needed to check how I would get back there if I'm not cycling back. The train would take me back there in a day, but as I expected and confirmed after checking, it would take quite a few transfers, and either a very long time or a little trip on the Shinkansen. I've learned from experience that the last thing I want to do is haul an ultra-heavy bike bag around from train to train, walking from platform to platform, going up and down stairs, passing through heavily populated stations.. That is something that would make for a very miserable day for me, so I preferred to avoid that option.

My preferred option, which I've used once before on a previous trip, is to bag the bike and send it via the Yamato Kuroneko delivery service straight to the airport. Kuroneko, for me at least, is not a sure bet. I do not have absolute confidence that they'll accept my bike as bagged, that they'll deliver it to the airport on time, and that they'll deliver it at a reasonable price. Everything changes when it comes to bikes. No one knows how to deal with it. To be fair, I've never had negative experiences with Kuroneko, but if I mess this up I'll lose my bicycle, so I needed to be absolutely sure that it was possible.

So I held off on changing my flight and first cycled onwards to Kochi, where I found a Kuroneko facility. A clueless guy tried to help me but gave up almost immediately and passed me on to a very helpful lady, who provided me with all the details I needed. It was indeed possible, could be delivered within 3 days if I gave the bike bag to them today, and although she didn't say directly I inferred that she wouldn't charge me an insane amount of money.

This was around 16:00/16:30, and I still hadn't changed my flight. So I excused myself from the Kuroneko and immediately went to the nearby conbini to get wifi so I could change my flight. I had to present my bike them before closing time at 18:30 so I was suddenly very rushed. But of all the luck in the world, in a giant city, this conbini did not have wifi! So I cycled onwards towards the station and the center in the hopes of finding a conbini, warcycling to find wifi. Not too far away I managed to find a Joyfull family restaurant which had an open wifi, so I hopped onto my phone to change the reservation. I could still make it.

But then the website broke! The Cathay Pacific site was very mobile-friendly, very easy to use and walked me right to the final step of changing the dates on my return flight, but then it errored saying I didn't put dates for my departure flight. Well, no shit, I already took that flight, can't change it now. I hoped it was perhaps a mobile site issue, so I grabbed my laptop and, in the parking lot of a family restaurant, tried to change my booking on my laptop. Again, no luck.

This was a good point to give up. I could simply cycle back to my hotel, never see Kuroneko again and continue on with the rest of the trip. But I felt annoyed that the Cathay site wouldn't let me change my booking even though it clearly allowed it, so I called them up. Still from the family restaurant parking lot. With my laptop resting on my bike. I connected immediately and the guy I spoke to helped me in record time to change my booking with no issues whatsoever. Excellent customer service. I'm flying back on the 14th.

Then I cycled, quite hurriedly, back to the Kuroneko building, where I started to take my bicycle apart. I'm getting better at this every time, but the rushed-ness of the situation caused me to dirty myself quite a lot. I sprayed a lot of chainspray on that chain in the morning, and it was making marks everywhere. I didn't do nearly as good of a job bagging it as on the way in, but hey, whatever. I'm going home. The friendly lady was still there and accepted my bike without issue, and only charged me 4400 yen. I'm pretty sure that the last time I used them the price was at least double. She also didn't check the weight. Perhaps they changed their policy, or I was overcharged last time, or it's just that the distance is less this time. In any case, I'm not complaining.

The sense of relief I got when my bike was finally accepted was amazing. I had a very good walk along various canals on the way back to my hotel, finally realizing what I had done. This trip started out as an impulsive thought made reality in only a day, and now I had undone the entire trip, also on an impulsive thought, also in only a day. That's probably not a good thing. Then again, the best way to learn is by making mistakes. At least, that's how I rationalized it as I was walking the many kilometers to the incredibly sleazy love hotel I wrote about last time.

I wasn't done yet though. I still had to cancel all my reservations and book a hotel for the next two nights. I managed to change my existing booking for the airport hotel and even ended up a little bit cheaper. All other hotels had free cancellation except one, and that one was kind enough to waive the fee. I've mentioned before how booking.com is fantastic, but it really is worth saying again. Everything can be done through the website and I was done with the whole process in only a few minutes. Way better than calling up hotel after hotel to get it done.

As of the moment of writing I am still in the love hotel. The door made a noise at midnight which scared the crap out of me because I thought it was going to unlock the room and let some random couple come in, but everything was quiet throughout the night. I never did manage to find out how to turn the lights off, though. What an inconvenient place.

I'm about to check out and head over to the station, where I'll take all those trains back to the airport. My plan is to stop over at Osaka on the way and buy some new noise-cancelling earphones, because I lost the rubbery bit on one of the earphones on my old ones, and I think it's time for something better anyway. No plans for tomorrow yet, but I think I'll go on walkabout somewhere and take some random photos.

I think I'm done with cycling trips for a while. At least until I find adequate motivation to do another one.

Posted in Cycling , Thoughts

Year-end-cap

Posted on 2016-12-26 08:15 by rv

Observations:

I got married!
I question whether this blog adds value to my real life any more.
Compared to 2015 I am cycling more and am fitter.
Being fitter has helped me keep my peace of mind during stressful situations at work.
Schelling points and fences are fascinating.
Next year I wish to speak my mind more freely among my friends.
I increasingly want to be part of a community again.
I actually typed a really long post for the end-of-year event but decided not to post it.

Prep work is done. Time to make a move.

Posted in Thoughts

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