Two hours

Less than two hours remain for me to:

- Gaze out upon Tokyo's low-lying brownosphere, which is invisible below the tenth floor due to the utter lack of horizon here

- Endure the snorting on my left, compliments of a chronically congested coworker

- Pretend to be busy with tasks that don't exist

- Sit at the middle of a row of desks which extends, in apparent descending order of importance, from department manager to... women

- Wonder why half of my Japanese coworkers refuse to speak Japanese to me

To be fair, I'm also gonna miss:

- Dressing up in a suit and playing "salaryman" every day

- Being occasionally treated to dinner

- My business card, which seems to have an inflated estimation of its own importance

That said, I'd better start cleaning out my desk drawers...

Light at the end of this tunnel

Tomorrow's my last day pumpin' for the man. From here on out I'm freelance, baby. Or semi-indentured. Do I have to be consistent here?

At any rate, 24 hours from now I'll be saying my more-or-less permanent sayonaras to the Japanese chemical industry. Hooray for me!

What will Eric be doing for an income, you ask? Well, there's this funny little book thing. We're in the middle of the first volume, the second has been "committed," and presumably we'll also get the third and final book in the series. So that should keep me busy for the next few months.

After that, who knows? I may do some manual day labor to fill in the gaps between translation jobs. That'll keep the bankbook oiled, and maybe I'll learn some "street Japanese" in the process. What I really need to do, though, is contact a publisher about translating a book that has broader appeal than the current job. Don't wanna get typecast, you know.

Anyway, I want to start off on the right foot, so before I go here's a link for your amusement. We are swimming in Engrish here, folks.

New soy

Okay. I had a post up yesterday, but that was a test and its gone now.

This is my new interim post, and it is doomed to the same fate once I get this puppy up and running for real.

til then.