If you are a gamer or internet geek you might be aware of the phrase “The Cake is a Lie”. If not, then never mind. Today I bring to you a new truth, “The reflection is a lie!”

I would like to quickly share a weird/dumb thing that I think about sometimes. I remembered it after I got home from the gym yesterday.

So I was at the gym, and if you have spent any time in a gym you know that there are big mirrors everywhere. I walked up to the mirror and started doing some muscle man poses. It felt pretty good. I looked at my reflection and thought to myself, “Yup, I am a few steps away from reaching incredible hulk status”.

I went home later that day and did the same pose in front of the mirror in my house.

Hmm, not quite the same effect. I looked skinnier than a 9 year old school girl…

I bought a few pair of jeans last week. If you are in Japan then no doubt you would have heard of a 24 hour shop called JeansMate. I am pretty sure the mirrors there made me look a bit slimmer and taller. But that’s what clothes shops do right? They have those mirrors to try to make you look better in the clothes and trick you into buying them.

I then went to a bathroom, looked at the mirror and felt sad because my eyes were not parallel. It looked like the left one was 2 or 3cm below the right @_@

It kinda makes me wonder what % of mirrors in the world can actually give you a 100% true representation of what you look like. Or are all the mirrors the same and it’s just the angles and lights? Any mirror experts in the house?

Anyway moving on swiftly!!

So over the next few months I might be doing a bit of travelling. I am planning a super last minute trip to Thailand for a few days around the 18^th of next month. I probably will end up going. But it won’t be decided till literally the last minute. I am also planning a trip to Okinawa to a friend’s wedding in September and a trip back home in December.

I have never actually been to a wedding before. Apparently in Japan you have to pay about 30,000 yen (300usd) as a wedding gift if you attend.

At first I was pretty excited about going. People always say that Okinawa is like Hawaii. But after doing some math and adding up money for the plane ticket, wedding money, hotel money, food money, spending money and money for a pimp suit and pimp hat for the ceremony I am starting to worry about how much of a dent this 4-5 day trip is going put on my wallet. The dude is a cool guy and everything, but I might I just have to plead ignorance and not pay any wedding money LOL.

Or I can just be responsible, not go and save myself a ton of money…. But I really wanna go …:(

Sigh, decisions, decisions @_@

Anybody been to Thailand or Okinawa before? Summer is coming yo. Where is everybody going? Or are people calling off their holidays because of the credit crunchers?

Scrimmaging through some old stuff I came across an old picture. It was a picture of me when I was younger. I picked the picture up and walked over to a mirror. I lined it up next to my face and looked at the similarities. I wanted to look at what I had started off as and what I had now become.

 Unfortunately it was a pretty pointless exercise. Looking at a before and after picture of your childhood does not tell you much about anything. 

I decided to take it one step further. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I was like in my early teens. I tried to simulate in my mind what me in my early teens would think or say if he met the current me now.  

Would he say, “Well done sir you have done well”? Or would he be like “What happened to you old man, how did you let it come to this??!!” 

What would kiddy you say to current you if you met? 

I tried to think back at what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be when I was younger. I think at one point or the other I wanted to play football or basketball. But in terms of 9-5 real life work I don’t think that I ever had a clue.

I ended up studying IT because I was competent with computers and heard that the pay was good. I didn’t know what part of IT I wanted to get into, I just decided to jump on it and see where it takes me too. It was not until I was like 21 or so deep into university life that I thought to myself that it would be cool to become a programmer. 

But during my 11-20 year old period I don’t think I ever said to myself I want a career as a [Insert career title here] or my dream job is doing [Insert dream job title here] (A pimp doesn’t count as a real job right?). Is that weird or normal? At the age of 13 did you guy have your hearts set on becoming doctors, lawyers and interior decorators? If you were, was it something what you actually want to do or your parents’ wishes? 

I think that your circle of friends can have quite a big affect on how you end up (especially when you are young). Would you say that your friends helped you in a positive or negative way growing up?  

I guess I learnt street stuff from some of the nuts I used to run with. chance to do it all again I think I would have chosen a bit more carefully…

Hi there, welcome to the corridors of my mind.

I sit here at my work desk very tired. Is it because I have been getting home from work at 8PM every day? Is it because I went to the gym last night and overdid it? Is it because of stress?

No!

No!!

No!!!

It is because of a dream that I had last night. But we will come back to that in a minute.

“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?” Morpheus

I remember when I was younger I wet the bed a few times. It was weird. I would be in the middle of a dream then all of a sudden I would experience a scene change.

What is a scene change you may ask? I am not sure what the average person dreams of. I personally don’t dream about fairies, unicorns, princesses and rainbows. I normally just dream about everyday life stuff. Chilling with my chick. Going clubbing with Tokyo Grindhouse CEO and Cincere etc

A scene change is when your dream changes from clubbing in Tokyo with your friends, to being in secondary school again…

Ok, so when I was a kid I would scene change and end up in a bathroom or a bush and I would start taking a pee. I would actually experience the relief that you feel when you finally take a pee after holding it for so long.  I would then open my eyes and realize that I had actually taken a pee not only in my dream but in real life lol.

There are probably numerous other examples. Like suddenly feeling cold in your dream then waking up to find out that your window is open and your room is freezing. Or when you first start puberty and have a X rated dream and wake up only to find out that you…. lol

So lets return to the dream I had last night. I was dreaming then I had a scene change. I was trapped in a burning room somewhere. It was getting hotter and hotter until it got to the point that I was actually burning up in real life. Then bang I opened my eyes, threw my bed cover off and started sprinting towards the front door of my house.

After leaving my room I realized that my house wasn’t on fire and stopped dead in my tracks.. I was in a semi-subconscious state. I wasn’t sleep walking or anything, with the dream and the temperature rise I actually thought that the house was on fire. I guess it was a hardwired reaction. Like when you go to a club and hear gunshots and just run for the exit without even thinking.

It seems like when dreaming the body sends signals to the mind. If your body is feeling some sort of extreme sensation it might make your mind portray it in your dream. The opposite is also true in that the mind might send signals to your body based on something extreme you experience in a dream.

Luckily last night was the mind playing tricks on the body and sending signals based on a dream… 

Anybody have any weird experiences where they experience some sort of link between their body and mind while they dream?

Another cool topic is death in dreams. People say when you die in your dream you die in real life.

I don’t think I have died in a dream yet. There is one time where I wasn’t sure if I did die or not. I find that a split second before dying I either wake up or scene change.

Based on my recent dreams I have nearly died by getting shot, stabbed, falling off a cliff, falling of a building, and falling out of the sky. Anybody ever died in their dream and lived to tell the tale?

How many people remember what they dream about? It sucks when you have an awesome dream and forget about it. Anybody write them down?

Anybody have a dream that came true? I think I’ve had a few dreams that I lived out. But I think it’s based on the numbers game seeing that I dreams about things that I do on a daily basis… 

What do you dream about? 

There are many mysteries in this great world that we live in. Like take the Egyptians for example. How in the world did a civilization that possessed little to no technology build those pyramids in the middle of the dessert? Some sort of magic?

But seeing that I am not in Egypt, and I don’t watch TV much it is not something I think about too much.

A mystery of the world that is always itching at the back of my head though is beer. I remember the first time I took a sip of beer. I can remember my facial expression like it was just yesterday. It is because of times like that, that I sometimes wish I had a camera following me 24/7. To catch those so called, “Kodak Moments”.

If I remember correctly the first beer I drank was a can of Fosters. I had a look of utter disgust and outrage on my face. How the hell could somebody who is suppose to be my friend give me this shit to drink (Gordon).

I once heard from someone that beer is an acquired taste. If you drink a lot of it you get used to it or somehow even come to like the taste.

Well yes that is all well and good. But based on my theory that, “There exists no human in this world that drank beer for the first time and liked it” Why would you keep on drinking it even though it tasted completely vile the first time?

Out of boredom I did some brainstorming and came up with these possibilities:

Peer Pressure: Everybody else was drinking it so you felt you had to…

You are retarded: Self Explanatory

Financial Reasons: After hours in a room with an abacus, graph paper and formulas on alcohol tolerance levels you came to the conclusion that beer is the cheapest way for you to get drunk.

Convenience: Mixing Vodka and Coke on a moving train is too hard.

You are an Anomaly: You are an exception to my theory and experienced love at first gulp. The first time you drank beer you were like, “Holy Smokes, what is this tingling sensation on my taste buds. This drink tastes awesome!!!”

Those are the only plausible answers I could come up with. So, what I would like to know is who loves beer? Who likes beer? Who agrees with me and thinks beer tastes disgusting?

I remember once telling someone that beer tasted disgusting and he was like, “I will give you a sweet tasting beer to try” He pulled out a 1664 Kronenberg. I drank it, but it tasted just as bad as the Fosters I had drank….

Can anybody actually taste sweetness, sourness and other so-called flavors in beer lol?

I have received some feedback from a few people about my blog. Pretty happy so far with people have said. So would I like to say thanks to the people who read it. Feel free to drop a comment if you find anything interesting, want to spark a discussion about something or have any suggestions about anything related to the blog. And if you have a Google account feel free to click the followers link on the right hand side and pledge your allegiance to A Misspent Life

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Also I am in need of a banner for the blog. If anybody is bored and wants to cook me up one it will be much appreciated

So without further ado lets get down to business.

Who am I? What am I? Where am I? Am I really in Tokyo? Am I even awake? Have the past few years been a dream and I am really in the UK sleeping in my house in London? Am I even alive? Am I dead and this is hell? Is this my first time on earth? Or was I here 300 years ago as an Indian guy with a turban and a red dot on my forehead?

Once in a while I just turn it all off. The music, TV, PC, phone, the lot. I sit there and I think. What the hell is going on around me? What is the meaning of it all?

This weekend I will turn 25. That is a quarter century. I have been on this planet for a decent amount of time now. Looking back at my parents, their generation and the generation before they probably all had kids and full families at my age.

I sometimes look in the mirror and ask myself what the hell could I do for a kid? What could I teach a kid that is looking up at me saying “Daddy. Daddy!”?

I think in terms of maturity our generation is doing pretty badly. We have all the things they never had. An abundant of resources and opportunities but too many people just take it for granted.

I sometimes just sit at my desk at work thinking what is the meaning of all this. The monotony of it all. Go to work, come home sleep, have a little fun on the weekend, rinse repeat, THIS IS YOUR LIFE. Maybe I am doing it wrong. Maybe I am not putting enough effort into life and that’s why I feel like I am wasting away at times. But one thing is for sure, there is no way I can bear this monotony until I hit retirement and end up spending the rest of my days in a bingo hall.

But maybe that is our purpose. When I was young my Pops said this to me “In this world ain’t nothing going on but the rent.” At the time I didn’t take much notice since I was living at home for free and going to school so it did not apply to me. But now I have gained 100% independence I feel the meaning of those words every day. So maybe that is the purpose. To live a life that revolves around paying the rent with a few hobbies thrown in here and there. At this moment I just don’t know.

A friend of mine once told me that it is our purpose to procreate. Procreate? A family, a family name, a family tree, a bloodline, a heritage, a lineage. These seemed to be quite important to the older generation. Especially to males. Keep the family name alive. Keep my blood line alive so even when I am gone I have left my mark on this earth and I will be remembered.

To tell the truth I couldn’t really care too much about leaving my mark or anything like that. Obviously I care about my actual family but the name and stuff like that is not something I am really bothered about. Who the hell cares what retards and strangers think of me when I am dead? As long as my reputation does not cause trouble for the people I left behind, I couldn’t really care.

Maybe our purpose was decided before we were even born.

I was a doctor, your granddad was a doctor, your great, great granddad’s pet fish was a doctor, so now you must also become a doctor. That kind of thinking is still around. You see it a lot. Sometimes you are bound to a certain type of occupation or life based on the sort of work thegenerations before you have done.

Or sometimes even worse you are entrusted with the broken dream of a parent or family member. The father who wants you to become a tennis player because he failed to make it as a pro. Now he needs you to become one so you can live the dream that he failed to live for him…

Oops didn’t realize how long this was getting lol. Guess I’ll come back to this topic again someday.

Peace