Hidemi’s Rambling No.261

I’ve been working for mastering of our new song for some time now. I still can’t get it up to my satisfaction though, after using everything I’ve got. I successfully made the sound itself exactly what I’d wanted. The only problem is the volume. I tried countless compressors and limiters, read a book on the subject and looked it up around on the Internet with no luck. Our song stays in low volume compared to other CDs. The other day, I found mastering software that many engineers regard as an ultimate volume booster. It looked attractive, but it was quite pricey. It was my decision whether I bought it or took our song to a studio engineer. I just wanted to try the software and go through with the mastering so badly. I decided to try to the best of my ability and then, after it became certain that I couldn’t, turn to a professional. I bought the software. Now, the road to a goal is one, only the ending will be either the software or the studio. I’ve known that completing a song takes time, but music also can be a money pit…

Advertisement

Hidemi’s Rambling No.260

I had a dream last night that my mother left me in a shopping mall to enjoy shopping just with my younger sister. The sensation I felt in the dream was so familiar that I recalled the similar experiences in my real life. Since I started junior high school, my parents and my sister had often gone out without me because my school was far from home and I came home late every day. As I got furious each time when they came back, they usually lied that they went out just for an errand. But I always knew they went shopping together or in a worse case, visited my favorite grandparents’ house without me. The main reason I could see through their deceit was because they bought something for my sister when going out, and I often found it later in her room, as the evidence. In my theory, parents should get something for a child they leave at home, but my parents do the opposite and get something for a child they are taking with them. And the luckier one who got into the car with my parents for fun was always my sister who came home much earlier from elementary school. I can’t count how many times I shouted a word ‘unfair’ to my parents. Sometimes, they even ate out just three of them and still pretended that they hadn’t had dinner yet. At dinnertime of those occasions, they had strangely little appetite while I was starving. My mother repeated, ‘It’s weird. I’m not hungry tonight’, and my sister followed suit. Only my father tried to eat his second dinner for the night, contorting with fullness. Their acts were so poor that anyone could tell they had already eaten. But no matter how hard I demanded, my mother kept lying. I can still feel some sort of desperate loneliness with these old memories…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.259

I can’t throw things away. Because I’m easily attached to my belongings and also I’m thrifty, I keep things for a possible future use, just in case. As a result, my tiny apartment has become even smaller with junk such as worn-out clothes, cracked shoes and sundries that I don’t know what they are for anymore. As I’ve started moving to my new place, I realized how time-consuming packing all the junk was. Packing one cardboard box a day is a maximum addition to my daily life. So, my moving process is horribly slow. With this speed, I can’t even imagine the day I finish packing everything into boxes will ever come. I feel like it lasts forever. But the longer it takes, the more money I end up spending, because I’ll have to keep paying the rent for my old apartment. My junk, which I’ve kept to save money in the first place, took advantage of my weakness and began to take money away from me…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.258

Last weekend, I went in my new apartment for the first time since I looked at the room with a real estate agent in September. Although the building was 20 years old and I had expected some fixtures would have been broken, everything worked fine including a heater and a boiler. Only, the room was dirty from the former resident’s poor maintenance, meaning an extensive cleanup awaited me. The room was carpeted, and that carpet was extremely dirty with countless stains. I was talking with my partner how careless the former resident must have been, and at dinnertime, it was my partner who inadvertently spilled soy sauce on it. Already a new stain has been registered. My biggest concern about living in that room had been whether claustrophobia would fall on me or not. One of my ways to lessen the phobia is turn on the TV. My cell phone is capable of receiving TV and I carried it around as the most important emergency item for the phobia in the room. Thankfully, I didn’t feel the phobia but tried to turn on the TV for fun before going to sleep. Then, my cell phone told me that it couldn’t receive it. As the building stood surrounded by high mountains, the wave was too weak to be received. Once I realized the TV wouldn’t be on, I felt a touch of claustrophobia all of a sudden. I shouldn’t have tried TV…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.257

Japan has a census every five years and now it’s the time. Back in my hometown, the chair or a leader of the area used to be entrusted with distribution and collection of the forms for the whole block as voluntary work. Then, the forms would be handed to the area’s public office by him or her. When my father took charge of it, he looked through all the forms after collecting them for possible errors in filling them out, that was also one of the responsibilities. But, as he was checking errors in the forms, he inevitably acquired neighbors’ personal information, such as the income, the family members, the work place, and the academic background. I felt extremely unpleasant about it. After I left my hometown and was on my own, I had never submitted a census, as I knew what a person who came to collect the form did with my form. Probably because of the similar complaints, the government has changed rules for this year’s census. They hired people to distribute and collect the forms and the form should be sealed by a person who filled it out. With this way, the personal information should be protected from some neighbor. Instead, the form collection person is persistent ever, now that it’s a job. They keep coming up to my apartment and even call after me on the streets in the neighborhood. I go out sneakily, looking around for a collection person. I feel like a fugitive every day…