Japan & batteries: the two genders
PSA: We don’t really have text if I’m not living. And while winter in Chicago is a great time to hunker down & do bigger projects, it’s not so great for the real substance of text, the brain reset that reminds us all that there are worlds beyond this one and we can do, really, anything with what we have in front of us.
As a result, text will go dark for a brief period while we embark on reconnaissance.
There was a moment the other day when I was making matcha, and I realized I was running out. I buy the good stuff when it comes to matcha, which always means it has to be shipped from Japan, which takes a long time. Then I remembered: wait, I’m going to Japan in eight days.
Firming everything up on the way out. Making sure my clients have tests running. Questions are answered. People ask why are you leaving so soon after the holidays? and really the holidays are the vacation everybody takes, which makes it not-vacation, right?
Vacation is an act of resistance against the daily thing you are doing, and it can happen anytime, for any reason, without apology. I told one of my newer clients that I was going on vacation and it turned out that they, primarily based in Europe, were all going on vacation at the same time. Oh right, Europe.
I always keep my pack load in my closet, and then when we get closer to the date I start to stage it next to my dresser, prod at it, fill it with random things that need to be in there. The earlier the pack load comes out, the more desperately I want to go on this trip. Usually it comes out the day before a domestic trip, a few days before an international trip. It came out four days before I moved to Marseille for the whole winter.
The pack load came out nine days before this trip. It’s just sitting there, hanging out, reminding.
Due to the ongoing apocalypse, I built a go bag and got one of those chungus batteries that has a bunch of outlets and can be used to power a sizable amount of your life. I think they were initially designed for glamping, but power is a bit of an 80/20 thing: most of the stuff takes up very little power, and the essentials don’t really hurt much.
Battery technology has gotten pretty astounding. It used to be that you’d have to use a gas generator, which 1) loud and 2) have you met me. And so therefore battery. Why not? Throw it in the closet, pull it out when you need.
Chicago’s electricity is usually good, so why get a battery? I think back to the one time when I was once chopping food in the kitchen, and heard a ground-shaking explosion at the exact moment that my power cut out. I reflexively looked out my back window to see a black plume of smoke rising near the liquor store across the street. The transformer powering my little hunk of Avondale got bored and had decided to explode, which was a bold decision that I respect.
I stopped chopping, threw my shoes on, and walked outside to watch a small crowd gawping at the ensuing fire. We beat the fire department there, of course. Took some pics. Talked to some other residents. Two weeks prior, a furniture store a half-block away spontaneously burned to the ground; now this.
We were out of power for about 45 minutes. The power company is good at responding to situations like these. And then I didn’t think about getting any backup power for another 7 years, and now here we are, in apocalypse, batteries freakishly cheap and about to get tariffed to hell, and so.
The battery comes with a solar panel. After decades of hearing about solar panels, it feels cool as hell to own one. The sun! Giving us power! Have you heard of this?
I already own pretty much everything and don’t need stuff, so why am I visiting Japan? What superfluous nonsense am I going to get there? Oh right, I need to go on one single matcha errand.