BGMs on Xanga

: Not Living Up to Expectation :
The first half of installment six from JA Journal is attached below.

: BGMs on Xanga : Afternoon Update (3:50 pm) 
Calling legal chicks: Meaning baby eagles, not girls... Okay, you guys convinced me... Grom was jus playing with my head! The problem was that I had just read an article in Time Magazine ("Downloader Dragnet", 4/4/03) that suggested that they ARE after the... what did tigger call me, small tempura? Hrmph! But as I reread the article it has to do more with "active" file sharing, and I suppose BGM is a passive practice... Hehehe... So thanks to all you "legal chicks" for showing me the light...

: BGMs on Xanga : Morning Edition
Calling legal eagles: Are BGMs on Xanga legal? I grasp the concept of illegal downloads. Copyright issues, intellectual property, yeah, these are legitimate claims, I think... But if I purchase a CD and play a song from it, how and where I want to play it is my business, no? Are there royalty issues involved if I play it as background music on my Xanga site? While Xanga is a public site, I don't play the BGM for profit a la radio stations. I don't promote downloading/swapping by providing links a la Napster. Geez... if anyone knows the legal issues involved, please leave me a comment...

Those who don't like Jimi Hendricks might call in the music nazis...

Originally posted on JA Journal, Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Not Living Up to Expectation
This is the first half of installment six.

Hindsight is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it allows you to see past mistakes in the context of subsequent--sometimes painful, hopefully, better--experience. The curse is that your selfishness, narrowmindedness, and stupidity stands out in relief, and has the potential to haunt you for an extended period of time. Looking back now, I think the main reason I broke up with BA was because she just wasn't "Japanese" enough. I had been going through an identity crisis of sorts, and I could not give up the notion that I was tied, in some shape or form, to "being Japanese."

After breaking up with BA, I sought--I suppose subconsciously--the other extreme, and found MM, a girl who was from Japan, whose English had not yet fully developed. She was a senior in high school and relatively cute, and in many ways, very Japanese. But--as I was to learn--perhaps too Japanese. I don't want to generalize and offend anyone, but at the time, MM seemed like the typical Japanese girl: spoiled and dependent. One Sunday afternoon in 1976, we spent strolling along the Redondo Beach pier.

     "Oh look, cotton candy! How nostalgic! How nice..."
     "Want some?" I asked.
     "Sure!"

I got her the cotton candy and she started eating small bites of it when all of a sudden, she noticed apples dipped in red dye 39, lined up in short rows upside down...

     "What's that?"
     "That's candied apple. I used to crave these when I was a kid."
     "Really? I want to try some too."
     "Uh, what about the cotton candy?"
     "This? It's too sweet anyway."

She handed me the cotton candy and told the guy at the counter she wanted one. The stick of the apple securely in hand, she headed down the pier agan. The guy eyed me with a "She's with you , right?" look, and held his palm out.

I jog to catch up with her only to find her grimacing. Now what?

     "This is too sweet. How could you have craved something like this?"
     "........."
     "I don't want this anymore."
     "You want the cotton candy then?" I asked hopefully.
     "No, I need something to get all this sweet taste out of my mouth."

She promptly dumped the candied apple into a trash can already overflowing with the wasted food other children had thrown away...

     "........."

I had this image of a Biafra poster in my mind, but it was too difficult equate confections with food staples...

As I have learned, subsequently, her actions are not necessarily of a spoiled child, but they reflect what Takeo Doi revealed in his book, An Anatomy of Dependence (Amae no K・. Perhaps, had I read Doi's book first, I would have understood her behavior and accepted it... or maybe never have dated her in the first place. It's hard to say...

More later... about early Onigiriman