AIAJ

stands for the American Institute of Architects in Japan.

Every two months, they host a lecture, and tonight, there was one. I had been in touch with the President-elect, whom I had met once at a lecture before, and we had been talking about getting me a position at an office somewhere.
Anyway, I met him there, and we talked for a bit before, and then the presentation went on. An American architect practicing in Kyoto, working mostly with traditional Japanese structures. He mentioned something that was actually a term I had heard in calligraphy and my heart jumped! So there IS a connection!!!!! Something I knew there was and had been looking into for a long time!

I talked to him after the lecture about that, he knew nothing about calligraphy, and I was really stoked to be able to talk about both calligraphy and architecture with MIT graduates. After that, Jim, the guy I had been in touch with, said that they were going out to dinner, and invited me along!
The visiting architect, Jim, the current president (?), and I went out for a very nice dinner and we talked for probably over 2 hours about all sorts of things. I got to take out a pen and paper and show them some things I had seen between architecture and calligraphy, and they seemed really interested!

Fuck yes.

Wrote some fun stuff today, mostly experimenting with a cool effect with the darkness of the ink. If you write something, and then write something over it, the thing you wrote first will come out, so, if you wait change the darkness of the ink etc, you can get some really cool effects!
I took out a small brush and drew somethings, and then wrote characters over the drawings, which had some cool effects.

Yesterday, I went to the New National Museum, which is a really nice building, and it had some neat exhibits, one called "Skin + Bones" about fashion and architecture. The architecture was pretty cool but the fashion was ugly.

There was also a HUGE calligraphy exhibition, and I spent a REALLY long time trying to run through everything, and that was only a 5th of the collection!!!!!!!! TOO MUCH!!!!!!

I am getting everything together for my visa application.

In other news, I saw a while back that they changed the Seven Wonders? BOOO! I am disappointed with the new choices.

I saw a T-shirt the other day with had the 7-eleven logo on it, but instead of 'eleven' said'inches'.
I thought about it for a while and decided that it is really only funny in Japan.

I am staying the night in a internet pod so that I can get to the station early tomorrow morning because a special ticket goes on sale which has a stamp rally on it, and if you get the stamps you get this awesome Ghibli thing!!! And it gets me 100 yen off admission to the Ghibli show at this museum, which opens tomorrow. It is all about sketches from the studio.

Thats about all I can think of for now.

Peter