The Misadventures of José Faxner

For some reason, whenever I try to embed Youtube clips, things get really messed up. I think the last one came out OK (eventually), but I have no idea what it looks like for people subscribing to my RSS feed. If it looked all fucked up, sorry about that. Seeing as how my memory is really bad, It’ll probably take me 3 tries or so to get it right the next time I want to do it, but hopefully no one’s too inconvenienced.

Edit: aaaand now I had to muck around with timestamps to get the posts in the right order. I hope I’m not sending anyone all these posts like 3 times each because of it or anything.

Hey everyone, and happy new year! I meant to write something sooner, but as usual I got sidetracked and for whatever reason couldn’t be bothered until now. I don’t usually bother with new years’ resolutions, but in a weak moment I considered starting the practice off with a bang, with a promise to write something on this site every day. Needless to say, this isn’t exactly a great start!

I’m still kind of on the fence as to whether I want to give it a try or not. I mean, on one hand I really want to keep this site better updated, and there really is no shortage of stuff to write about - as mundane as my life is things DO happen between updates, and for the times when they don’t, well, I’ve always got a good rant or two up my sleeve. But on the other hand, I’m pretty lazy, and I have the attention span of a 3-year old when it comes to this sort of thing.

I dunno though, I guess it could become a good exercise in discipline. It’s not like I don’t enjoy writing for the site, so I’m not really sure why I keep dreading it the way I do. I guess that’s my attention span for ya. Well, that and my bad habit of tackling pressure and expectations by putting off (if not completely ignoring) my responsibilities. :S

I guess my updates are more frequent and regular now than they ever were before, but that doesn’t really matter to me. I still feel like there’s so much I never write about, and I still spend alot of my time going around forming hypothetical blog posts in my head instead of writing actual ones, and as long as that stuff is going on, I guess I’m not really going to be very satisfied with the way I’m running this site.

I don’t want to make a big deal about it - I’m feeling enough like the boy who cried wolf as it is - but I do want to write more regularly, as well as write about more stuff. I mean, there’s only so much you can write about laying on the couch waiting for your welfare check, but as anyone who regularly chats with me on IRC or MSN can attest to, there’s a lot more I can talk about than that. In some circles I’m even infamous for my soapbox shenanigans, so it does seem a bit silly that now that I do have a grand stage set up for myself, I’m hardly using it. I guess I’ve always had kind of a fear of alienating my readership (all two of you) with incredibly nerdy stuff no one cares about, but it’s hardly as if infrequent updates on my private life is really going to take the internet by storm either. Besides, this whole site is MY thing anyway, so it would just be kind of silly to water things down to some kind of arbitrarily assigned lowest common denominator.

In fact I’m sure that’s one of the reasons updates haven’t been as frequent as they could’ve been; on some level I limit myself to stuff I feel I should write about as opposed to stuff I want to write about. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the stuff I’m doing now, or that I’m not writing about any nerdy stuff that would have a limited audience… but I think that’s the key word right there, audience. Needless to say, I want people to read my blog, or writing it would be somewhat pointless, but I think it’s surpassed by the pointlessness of conforming to an audience that I don’t even know exists. So from here on out, I guess I’ll try to ease up on the self-censorship, and see how that works out. Hey, if I’m lucky I might even GAIN some readers.

PS. My camera died, hence the delay of christmas photos. Once I get batteries for it I’ll upload some pictures.

PPS. You were totally right, Joe, I think way too much.

Jig in Japan has now become The Misadventures of José Faxner, and things look a little different. The look might not be final, but I thought a change of scenery would go with the new name. Hope you like it.

Well I guess I actually even got a REASON to write today - well not much of a reason perhaps, but a quick glance over previous posts tells me that this blog is a year old today! So, um, yay, I guess.

My own birthday is coming up as well, and next Saturday I’ll be a staggering 22 years old. Kinda looking forward to that. Well, not being 22, but my birthday. Hopefully everyone I know will give me some money so I won’t be (as) broke. It’ll be cool though, with any luck there should be a decent party - apart from my birthday the weekend is also ideal for a housewarming party, and I never had a “welcome back” party when I got here either. So I guess there’s no excuse for not having a party (except being lazy I guess, but that isn’t as much a excuse as it is a cop-out).

I could write something about the new awesome apartment we’re moving to, but frankly it’s kinda boring (even though it’s awesome). It’s big, new, and generally swanky. I’ll get some photos once we’re settled in.

So, um… why is it that every one of my posts here seem to start off with me feeling bad about never writing? Well, that’s easy to answer; it’s cause I never write. But I mean, why is that, really? At this point it’s gotten pretty ridiculous - I’m unemployed and essentially I spend my entire day sitting on my ass doing absolutely nothing, yet I can’t find a couple of minutes to spare so I can keep whoever reads this up to date. I mean, I know I’m lazy, anyone know who knows me would say that’s old news… but this is reaching new heights even for me. I enjoy writing, but I still can’t be bothered doing it.

On several occasions in the last, oh, 8 months or so, I’ve seriously considered just saying “fuck it”, and setting aside a few minutes every day to write on my blog. Doesn’t matter if I don’t have anything of value to write about, cause it’d still be better than not writing at all (and furthermore I really can’t picture the day I’ll have nothing to rant about), and hopefully working under some self-imposed pressure I would get something done. Well, obviously that hasn’t happened yet. And I certainly can’t make a promise like that now either. Sure, I’ve got all the time in the world right now, but I know myself. That said though, maybe I’ll try giving it a shot? As it happens, I’m moving this weekend so perhaps I will actually, genuinely, be too busy to write, but I think I owe it to whoever might be reading this to at least try to make the effort.

I want to do something about the site as well. Change the header first of all; for one I’m not even in Japan anymore, and “Jig in Sweden” sounds retarded so I’ll need to come up a new fun name for it. Preferably I’d have some slightly more exciting graphics up there as well.

Not sure if I’ve written a post this long with this little to say (actually I probably have), and while I could come up with a number of things to write about, I think I’ll call it a day. I figure more snack-sized posts would be better than the few-and-far-between essays the blog has generally consisted of so far. Plus, this way, I can come back tomorrow and write a normal post, instead of coming back in two weeks whining about how I never post.

Hey guys. I don’t know if anyone reads this, but I like to think so. If not, I should tell you to. Of course, mentioning that here makes no sense, cause if you’d need telling you wouldn’t be reading this. But now you are, right?

Anyway, enough of that. I just wanted to pop in to say that I know that I’ve neglected the blog horribly for the longest time, but I’m planning to do something about that. Once I get back to Sweden I intend to give the blog a bit of a makeover, AND seriously start blogging again. I have so many friends all over the world now, and I really really hope this blog will enable me to keep all you guys up to date on me, my life and what I’ll be doing. Losing touch with the people I got to know here at AIU is one of my greatest fears, so I really hope that, even if you never write me, or I never write you, at least there’ll be this site for people to read.

To be honest, I’m really excited about the prospect of all my international friends getting some kind of insight into my “real” life back in Sweden. Considering the fact that I was quite excited to write a blog about my escapades in Japan only to have that result in utter failure, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned this new effort might suffer a similar fate… but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I have so many great friends outside of Sweden now; people I may not realistically get in touch with all much with, so unlike before, I actually have a strong incentive to do this.

First things first though, and right now my focus is on getting my shit ready to move back to Sweden. Most people who might be reading this I guess have already gone through it (or are in the process) so I don’t really feel compelled to write anything about it. That of course, being in addition to the fact that it’s taking up too much of my time and energy in the first place.

Anyhoo, as you might know, I’m not happy about going back to Sweden. I love Japan and this past year has no doubt been the best time of my life. However, the idea of going back, and then being able to keep in touch, sending Swedish stuff to people, write about my life back home, and all that stuff - THAT has me genuinely excited.

So within the next couple of weeks, keep checking josefaxner.com. Hopefully there should be some pretty interesting stuff on here before too long. Until then, take care.

I’ve been doing some thinking, and I’ve realised keeping this bilingual thing up is just too much work. I doubt many people read this English page anyway. I don’t really mind writing all that much, but writing a long rant only to have to translate really does take a lot of fun out of it. I’m sure the pressure of having to translate everything has held me back, so not feeling like I have to worry about it could probably help get my creative juices flowing. Or writing juices, or whatever.

I’m not sure what’s in store for the English part of this site. Granted, I haven’t really written much of anything in the past couple of months so I guess these aren’t really big “changes” after all. Maybe I’ll feel like writing in English some times, and do English-only posts, while the brunt will remain Swedish-only. Maybe I’ll take the time to translate some posts. Maybe I’ll only publish posts with very little text on both pages. Time will tell.

If the prospect of me not updating this page makes you feel completely devastated, make sure to let me know - I’m honestly not really aware whether I have many non-Swedish readers to begin with.

Just wanted to say I’m sorry for the recent lack of updates. I’m alive and well, I’ve just been pretty busy, as well as not being in the mood for writing much. I’ve got a bunch of posts lined up in my head though - hopefully I’ll find the time and energy to actually write them down sooner rather than later.

Hey, the bilingual stuff seems to work now. Neato.

Thanks, Johannes!