journal features

new type of home

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2020.09.06

Mari and I have been remarking to each other what a difference this place is already making. The kids can run off to their rooms upstairs to hop on live games and simultaneous chats with their friends. We can barely hear that they're online, as opposed to having to hear every syllable of "Cha-chan, I said go left! Go left! Go left now... Why didn't you go left. Now I'm dead again." The first floor has a "six tatami" room plus a good sized eating/living room that's adjacent to the kitchen. In short, we have enough room to live without constantly bumping elbows. And the rent, even with all the up-front charges, is less than we could have found in Toronto anywhere.

There are trade-offs, of course. It's a 25km+ trek to work by bike, or a three-train journey plus a ten minute walk if I want to take transit. Also, the only shop within a reasonable walk is the grocery store, so it's not like it's an exactly walkable place. But of course we knew this coming into it. And again, it's doable becaus ethe first train trip is maybe three minutes in duration, and the long one is handled nicely by an express that makes all of two stops between us and the hub station at Shinjuku. The third trip is four stops on the major ring line.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton