Apologies to my fans (mostly Josh) for the blogging hiatus. I had something drafted a few weeks ago (mid-crashout) and then decided it was too out of pocket. If you would like my completely unfiltered thoughts, you can call me at my finally reinstated US phone number.

I just reread my last blog post. I think time passes faster in Tokyo; I can’t make heads or tails of it. Towards the end, the only indicators of how long I was there here were my almost empty bottle of detergent, many pictures, and my irrevocable craving for American food. I am a little sick of Japanese food. You heard it here first.

I talked a bit in my last post about how all my annoyance and hesitance about going to Japan for the summer basically evaporated the second I got there. I can now, with the power of retrospect, reaffirm that sentiment. The most valuable part of the experience was knowing that I could still make it in a different country (granted, one that I have lived in before and speak the language well enough to make life easier). I had to buy a new phone, go to the ER for the first time in my life, and fill out a LOT of residency paperwork all in Japanese, and I survived all of this with ease. It was a great exercise in self-sufficiency and confidence building.

Looking back, my time in Japan felt like one very long day, in which I woke up, drank my iced coffee, headed into lab, ate lunch with my labmates, did a bunch of work, maybe grab dinner or drinks with a friend, and take the train home while furiously scrolling reels on my phone. It was nice to be able to dedicate so much of my time to research, as the rest of my needs were taken care of by good infrastructure. It felt like the most hedonism-maxing that I’ve done in a while. I have eaten, shopped, and done Japan things to my heart’s content. I was also notably in a bubble where I mostly did not receive US news or have to interface with the consequences of it, which goes against my better instincts but was admittedly pleasant.

In short, the theme of the summer was overindulgence, both in spending as much time as I liked on research and consuming as much as I wanted (read: I am fat and out of shape). For a while I found myself feeling so happy and regulated that (for the first time ever) I asymptotically approached, but did not quite hit, a biological clock tick. This period lasted for about two weeks, making it the most out of character two weeks of probably my entire life. 

After a while, I got insanely bored of being happy and regulated and crashed out. Even by my standards, this was a pretty atrocious crashout; I couldn’t sleep before 4am for a few weeks in a row. I texted a bunch of people that I wanted the soft animal of my body crushed under my boot. Many of you told me that this is not a productive thing to believe, and you’re probably right, although it is difficult to express how strongly I experienced that sentiment. 

Now that I’m moderately decompressed from that particular crash out, I can express that sentiment’s actual meaning a bit better: on a meta level, I find life a lot more meaningful (but not more pleasant) when I’m depressed and constantly fighting to make meaning out of it. I’m lucky to be able to fill the vast majority of my day to day with activities that I find meaningful (namely work and fencing) and found that I strongly preferred this to this summer’s version of work-life balance (Disclaimer: personal opinion!). I like to call this way of living eudaimonia—maxxing, in which I may not be having a pleasant time but am existing in alignment with my personal values on life. The concept of eudaimonia grounds a lot of my research in meaningful player experience, and perhaps will get its own bespoke blog post sometime soon.

It is currently my favorite time of year, where I get to brainstorm all the projects I would like to work on for the next few academic quarters. I have a good community program in the works at foundry10, and I feel like my personal research agenda has finally hit its stride, where I have too many project ideas in the hopper to realistically work on all at once, even for me. It is a little bittersweet that this might be the last fall quarter in which I get to do this as a full-time PhD student (you can ask me about this offline as it is not set in stone, but exciting job updates are in the works).

While I had fulfilling work in Japan, being at home with my lovely roommates, singing in my car, drinking post-practice parking lot beers with my fencing teammates, and seeing trees and mountains on my runs - these are the things I dearly missed about my current life, and I am glad to have returned to them. It’s good to be home.