Well 2am is Monday so I might as well get this going…
Our story begins a few years ago. I was a sickly lad, oft busy in pursuits of…oh wait no, wrong beginning. Actually I was a programmer, working in Tokyo and planning to go to animation school. What followed ended up being a rather horrid descent into burning out. The company that I worked for did not want to allow me to work part time, so I had to find work with another company while I went to school. In truth, I didn’t need money, but I couldn’t legally stay in the country and study animation without a job.
The job I found started off with a bang, porting Linux to a pocket-dictionary type device. The schedule for this project was six months. I joined three months into the project. The work force was four programmers, including myself. Only one of these (my boss) had any relevant experience. The other two programmers ended up being unusable for the project, neither understanding the language nor the concepts. I knew enough about low level programming that I was able to start doing stuff pretty immediately even though I had zero practical experience.
So we had two programmers, and three months for what was meant to be a four programmer X six month project. Nothing had been accomplished in the three months before I arrived.
I started this job the same day as I started animation school. For the next three months, I got up every day at 8:30am, packed into a 98 degree train to ride for an hour to school, studied, got out, had a brief lunch, went to work, and then went home on the last train (equally packed and still 98 degrees.) At 1am I would arrive home. Weekends, I didn’t have school, so I got to sleep until noon, then go into work and work until midnight and take the last train.
I also had homework, which I had to try and do over the weekend, since that was the only time I had some time to sleep. A full animation project would usually take a full night, so I would generally do it on Sunday night and not sleep that night.
It’s probably worth pointing that I also have a sleep disorder, such that I don’t get very well rested if I try to sleep at night. This meant that even though I was dead tired every day, I would still generally end up on the internet or playing a game until 3 to 4 am since I couldn’t sleep. In total, I was getting about 4 hours of sleep for three nights a week, Friday and Saturday I would stay up until 6 or 7 am and get 6 or 7 hours of sleep before work, and then no sleep on Sunday.
The three months of work hell ended just a few weeks after my school went on break for the summer. I slept as much as I could over the summer but when it started, I still felt like I still wasn’t rested all the time (spending a week moving to a new apartment didn’t help.) Two weeks or so in, my parents called to tell me that my grandfather had lung cancer and had a 90% chance of being dead within a year. The two weeks after that, I would set my alarm for 8:30 every day and in the morning, get woken up and just not care enough to get up and go to school. Due to my sleep disorder, by the afternoon, I would wake up enough that even though I still felt pretty sucky, I went to work every day.
Slowly the number of days that I couldn’t make myself get up in the morning became greater, but because I intended to go every day I set my alarm, would wake up, not be able to get out of bed, and still tell everyone at work that I was going to school.
Now I’m not a quitter. I’m not the type of person you see in movies who flits about from passion in life to new passion in life. But the three months of solid work and no sleep followed by the news of my grandfathers illness had fairly well destroyed my ability to care enough. My detestation of looking like a quitter made it take months to realise and admit to myself that:
- Tracing cells for two years wasn’t something I would be able to do, because
- There’s no chance a Japanese company would let an American rise beyond being a grunt animator.
- So essentially, the thing I wanted to do in Japan wasn’t going to work.
- Even I can’t live with zero social life. And Japan is not a place where a white guy can develop a serious social life unless he’s in to clubbing and girls who only like him for his skin color.
- The above four things are (basicly) true, and not just you trying to weasel out of having to carry on.
So yep, I failed. I learned to animate, but never had the free time to perfect my craft. I have almost no drawings to show anyone since I didn’t have time nor the will to draw for most of the last two years. And only just now that I’ve finally left Japan and am getting proper food,* am I getting the energy to do anything.
I was supposed to go to Yakushima a week or two ago, and ended up not going because I couldn’t care enough to get up and go to the airport. Instead I sat in my apartment and watched Lost, when I should have been packing to come back to the US.
I am now back in the States though. I have decided on a condominium to purchase. I will be calling about a puppy tomorrow. I’ve got a couple of versions of a query letter to get my book published, hopefully. And I finally made my first recipes from the cookbook I bought a year ago, for my mom last night.**
My future plan is to become self-employed through programming, writing, and drawing–and to find me a woman! I’ll be happy if I succeed at at least one of those two. 
And things are looking decent on that end. I’m doing stuff again.
My Sage words of wisdom from all of this is: If you don’t have time to sleep just to have enough time to get a minimal amount of joy out of your day, don’t wait. Get out of that situation. Or something like that.
Ah well.
- I ended up moving closer to town so I didn’t have the hour long, 98 degree train ride twice a day, just to end up someplace that had nowhere to eat and a supermarket with nothing but soy sauce and fish. I don’t eat fish! :smack:
** Hummus and Tandoori Chicken. The hummus was perfect; it could have been served in a restaurant. The chicken was juicy, but the marinade didn’t flavor it very much. I need to ask my brother (the chef) what went wrong.
you have had a hard time and I hope a brighter future is ahead. You didn’t say how your grandfather is doing. Have you seen him?
He didn’t poop in the house last night! Yay!
