This is the last of my posts about my 2010 goals. I’m hoping my friends will help encourage me and hold me accountable.

Area Three: Music
I what now seems like another life, I was a professional musician. It was without question the hardest, most time-consuming, and lowest-paying job I ever had, and I had a love-hate relationship with it. I loved the music, and hated the profession. I don’t care it I never working in that business again, but over the past few years, I have not been spending much time on my music, and thats not good.

In fact, that gap between my abilities then and now is so large it can get really frustrating when I start up again. So some simple, modest goals that I’ll enjoy.

By the End of 2010 I will:

• Learn at least 60 popular songs
• Sing on stage at least twice
• Agree to go to karaoke when my friends ask
• Practice until I can recognize all chords and intervals again

This probably won’t be that big of an issue in the news because the networks won’t be able to put a red-blue spin on it. It’s bad for American democracy as a whole.

The legal fiction of corporate personhood keeps getting stretched farther and farther. Yesterday the Supreme Court overturned several precedents and ruled part of the 2002 campaign finance reform law to be unconstitutional saying that corporations have the same free speech rights as actual people, and as such the government can not place any restrictions on corporations and labor unions spending money from of their general funds to support of specific candidates.

Companies are not people. They can’t be found guilty of a crime, have no emotions or social connections and don’t fear punishment or ostracism. That’s not criticism of companies. It’s just a fact. They are not people and should not be treated as such.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like.
— Edward Thurlow

I’m continuing to post about my 2010 goals hoping my friends will help encourage and hold me accountable.

Area Two: Japanese
I’ve been living in Japan for over 20 years. Twenty long, stinking, painful years. No, seriously only about three of those years were long stinking and painful. The rest ranged from “same as the old year” to unbelievably challenging and fun. I’ve married into a Japanese family, served on the board of a public Japanese firm, negotiated the sale of a company, given countless of business presentations, three hiroen speeches and not a few public presentations; all in Japanese. But you know what? As far as I’m concerned my Japanese stinks. I must be getting my point across using some combination of facial expressions, hand gestures and telepathy, because I lot of the time even I don’t know what I just said. That changes starting now.

There are three areas of my life that I plan on improving in 2010. My goals are modest when I look at them individually, but achieving all of them would make life at the end of 2010 a bit better than it is at the start of it. I’m putting my goals up here on my blog in the hope that my friends will hold me accountable vie encouragement, gentle prodding, shame, mental abuse or swift and blinding violence as they deem appropriate.

Area One: Health
I don’t think I ever fully recovered from the trauma of my seventh grade gym class. You see, I was a fat kid (not chubby mind you, but 30-inch-inseam and a very tight 36-inch-waist rotund) and had a crew-cut sporting gym teacher with a who liked to call us fat kids “jellybeans” and make snarky remarks when it was our turn at the chin-up bar. Even though I eventually dropped the weight and got pretty good at baseball and the martial arts, I (shamefully) never managed to do more than three chin-ups.

Truth be told, last year was supposed to be my get in shape year, but things didn’t work out. A nasty back injury led to a knee injury, which shut down all exercise for much of the year. Thankfully, yoga and stretching averted the surgery my doctor suggested, but 2009 was a step backwards in health. This year is going to be different.

By the end of 2010 I will:

• be able to do 10 perfect pull-ups
• run 5k in under 30 minutes
• have a 90 cm waist as measured across the belly-button
• do a downward dog with my heels on the floor

It’s wonderful to watch a nation try to create an ideal government. Bhutan is in the process of creating one in which the government is held accountable based on the happiness of its people.

To make this work the Bhutanese came up with a way to mathematically quantify happiness both on the individual and national level, and to have an objective measure of to what degree specific government policies increase or decrease the happiness of the people.

Part of this involves a 300 question questionnaire, which most people were quite happy to fill out. Questions about the degree to which people feel safe from spirit and ghost attacks struck me as silly at first, but the fact is that people do feel less happy when they are worried about being attacked by a ghost.

Amazing and inspiring stuff.

The following email was sent from one of our financial clients. They truly know how to get in the holiday spirit. I’m sure the sender meant well and never got to see the irony.

Subject: Season’s Greeting

May the miracle of Christmas fills your heart with warmth and love.
Merry Christmas!

Sincerely,
xxx

–
This message may contain confidential, proprietary, or legally privileged information. No confidentiality or privilege is waived by any transmission to an unintended recipient. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender and delete this message immediately. Any views expressed in this message are those of the sender, not those of xxxx.

This message does not create any obligation, contractual or otherwise, on the part of xxxx. It is not an offer (or solicitation of an offer) of, or a recommendation to buy or sell, any financial product. Any prices or other values included in this message are indicative only, and do not necessarily represent current market prices, prices at which xxxx would enter into a transaction, or prices at which similar transactions may be carried on xxxx own books. The information contained in this message is provided “as is”, without representations or warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Past performance is not indicative of future returns.

CyberMarriage!

Last week a Japanese man married a Nintendo DS video game character from a game called Love Plus. The ceremony was well attended, officiated by a priest and the couple spent their honeymoon in Guam.

Hummm. I’m pretty sure that she was under the age of consent.

Our minds as well as our bodies have an immune system.

Our mental immune system is activated any time an alien and potentially harmful concept is introduced. In the same way white blood cells surround and isolate a virus, our minds quickly surround the new concept with excuses and semi-logical reasons why the new concept cannot be valid until the concept is comply isolated and cannot connect to any of our healthy, strong beliefs. It ensures that no thoughts can pass though this barrier an interact with the new concept. In this way the new concept is rendered inert and harmless and eventually passes out of our minds as waste.

One of the things I find most amusing about hippies is that they tend to be hopelessly unaware of the degree to which their anti-establishment views are instilled and fostered by corporate America, and how much these companies profit from them.

However, the tea-baggers have taken this delusion to a whole new level. It seems that Glenn Beck has A Plan which he will be explaining in a new book which will go on sale next year. In order to publicize the book, he will be staging a march on Washington, and I’m sure a lot of his fans will “do their civic duty” by showing up.

Putting Red/Blue politics aside for a moment, this is an astounding example of the near perfect annexation of political dissent. It almost seems like satire. Going to a protest has become no more significant than going to a Miley Cyrus concert.

When you look back in history at the various causes that have resulted in large protests, you can’t help but be struck by the sacrifices, the sufferings and the vision of the people behind them. I think this has been true whether the issue found its support on the right or the left.

So it seems that political dissent has been reduced to a PR event. It’s like equating Miley and Mozart because we call them both “musicians”.

Oh yes, and if this little stunt was not offensive enough in the abstract, Beck has scheduled his book release march for August 28, 2010 at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial — the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

I was cruelly denied my lunchtime workout today. Gold’s Gym closed for the day because the elevator was out of order. The fact that it was closed did not piss me off half as much as the fact that none of the dejected looking gym members milling about saw the utter stupidity in this.

It’s a gym for christsake! The customers are (or at least should be) perfectly willing to walk up a few flights of stairs. If that’s too much for you, fine! Walk up as far as you can and then go back down. Congratulations, you just finished your workout.

When I go back tomorrow, I’m sure they will be apologizing and handing out little sugary snacks for every one to chew on as they wait in line to use one of the StairMasters.

My friend Jim sent me an interesting article on “What Startups are Really Like”

It’s a worthwhile read, but I had to chuckle at the author commiserates with one of the entrepreneurs he was interviewing about how hard it is to get a date.

Unfortunately this extends even to dating:
It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women.

I did know about that, but I’d forgotten.

Rubbish! The whole “I quit my job because that’s no way to spend a life, and now my friends and I are going to change the world.” thing goes over phenomenally well with women.

Ebisu Baccarat Chandelier

Last week Ebisu Garden Place (our local shopping mall) put up their version of the Christmas tree; the “Baccarat 250 Chandelier” which is made from 250 different crystal lights. It’s impressive, I suppose, but it never struck me as very “Christmasy”. It seems kind of sterile behind all that plate glass.

The Japanese, however, adore the thing and come out in droves each year to ohh, ahh and take photographs. This year Ebisu was plastered with big red signs imploring passers by to “Feel the Experience” or the “Eternal Lights” visible only until January 11th.

If you can’t make it out, here’s an awesome interactive view, check out this site. You might even see me on my way home.

Is a lot harder than it seems. Last December I decided to bring my 104 cm waistline down to 90. The first 8 cm came of pretty quick, but the last four a proving to be annoyingly stubborn.

OK. I’m getting up from the computer and going out for a run.

I’ve been listening to comedy albums on my iPod during my daily commute recently. I arrive at the office in a much better mood, and I end up getting more space on the train than I normally would.

Since its considered rude to laugh out loud so I try to suppress it, and everyone stays away from the scary gaijin giggling to himself in the corner.

Bill Hicks is a riot!!

I cook once a year, on Ami’s birthday. Last night was Italian.

Actually, I enjoy cooking. It’s artistic and practical at the same time and has a complexity and variability to it that is very much like music. Everyone has their own unique style and whether the starting point is a recipe or sheet music, no two people will produce exactly the same result.

I barely have time for my music these days. If I started cooking, I would not have time for the rest of my life. Ah, another 364 days and I’ll be in the kitchen again.

Hong Kong is going nuts with this swine flu scare.

I went to dinner last night and the buttons in the elevator were covered with a plastic sheet and a sign saying “Disinfected every two hours”. But if you walked around the corner and took a look down the alley you could see they had raw meat sitting out in the open for hours.

Someone really needs to get their priorities straight.

There was a huge demonstration in DC today. It made getting on the freeway hell, and the hotel and shops are packed with tea-baggers. It reminded me of why I find hippies so annoying.

I’m all for protest; regardless of your point of view. It’s a good thing. A duty really. Public involvement is needed for a heathy democracy to exist. I even enjoy the loony fringe that turns out at these events. Many people calling Obama a fascist and communist or a Nazi and a Marxist on the same sign without a hint of irony. People wearing an American flag tee-shit carrying a placard saying “Not MY President.” The overwhelming number of Hitler references is troubling, but in general, it’s all good.

The only thing I find annoying about the hippies and tea-baggers is the false sense of self-importance and paranoid sense of persecution. Walking around, I hear a lot of older white folks speaking in thick southern accents saying things like “They tried everything they could, but they could not stop us.” “I think we really have them scared now.”

No one ever seems to know who “them” is, but they are sure that “them” is working very hard in secret ways to prevent “us” from telling “them” what “us” really feel.

At least the hippies had good music.

I was in LA yesterday and took Ami to Pink’s — the best hot dogs on the West coast! A month back, she begged me to take her, but when we actually picked up our order, Ami sat there staring down at her 12″ Jalapeno Dog with a mixture of shock and disgust. After some not so gentle prodding I got her to try it.

For the next several minutes Ami expressed her amazement that Americans could eat such things, at which point she realized that she had finished her dog and reluctantly admitted that it was pretty good.

Another Pink’s fan is born!

I tried yoga for the first time the other day. I walked into the studio and saw three guys warming up by doing the splits. My way-too-perky instructor confirmed that this was, in fact, Introduction to Yoga, I grabbed a mat from the pile, stretched what muscles I could, and prepared myself for the inevitable upcoming groin-pull.

Fortunately, the next 45 minutes did not involve any strianed muscles or dislocated joints, but turned out to be physically exhausting. I never imagined that not moving could be so tiring. I’m going back again next week.

I definitely have to invite three or four of these girls over for a game of Twister.

After conclusively proving that water is wet and grass is green, researchers at Oklahoma State University demonstrated that single women are more attracted to married men then to single men. Scientists told 200 students they were participating in a study on online dating, but their “match” was fictitious. He was perfectly crafted to match their interests. All girls were shown the same picture and told the same name, job description, etc. The only difference was that half the group was told their perfect match was single and half were told he was married.

Of the girls who thought Mr. Right was singe, 59% wanted to meet him, but when the girls were told he was married 90% wanted to pursue a relationship.