I finally got around to picking up my India holga prints from the new sparkly Yodabashi in Kichijoji. Sadly over half of them have some weird triangular obstruction over the bottom right corner, strange that it appears in all rolls, but not all prints. The joys of toy cameras. Anyway, this is one of them - I took it inside one of the side Mosque halls at the Taj Mahal. It's my fave so far, but there are a few other shots I quite like too. I'm slowly uploading them to Flickr...

Productivity and life-hack blogs have become quite prolific in the past year or 2 and I enjoy skim-reading them to see if anything catches my eye. There is usually something interesting dealing with some issue that's been on my mind...

One such recent issue that's been bugging me lately is trying to find ways to just make everything in my life simpler, more streamlined and effective, and less cluttered. I really feel like I try to do too much and end up being so daunted by my lists of goals and stuff to do that I do it all in a rush - poorly and thoughtlessly - ending up in a half-assed result which then just fucks with my confidence. I wanna spend more time focusing on stuff that's important to me and do the job/s properly for once. That extends to people too.

Zen Habits is an interesting site and recently it featured an article called Simple Living Manifesto: 72 ideas to simplify your life and... well, yeah, it's a pretty cool list of suggestions, ranging from simple material purges to limiting media consumption and internet time and a whole lot more.

After reading it this morning, and mulling over its basic suggestions, I decided it's a good time (room mate changeover time) to embark on a major "stuff" purge - clothes, shoes, books, kitchen crap, computer files & old programs I never use, old burned DVDs, cables and gadgets, wall-clutter... etc etc etc. So I've overhauled a lot of stuff on my computer (and culled many RSS feeds), and also thrown a ruthlessly massive pile of clothes into a suitcase for the next Tokyo clothes swap. Tomorrow, it will continue (yes, another public holiday) into the store room and bookshelves, and will extend into a kind of brainstorming day on ways to get my life nice, minimalist, focused and effective. An all-out purge of things and habits.

Ah, nice segue....

Speaking of purging, I made the momentous decision to not renew my school contract next April.
Whether that means I will immediately leave Japan at that time, I don't know.
Whether that means I will change careers (again), I don't know.
Whether that means I will return to Australia to live, I don't know.
But I'm really excited that I'm making that jump, and I trust that a net will appear. I have 6 months to think about it. All I know for sure is: It's time for a change.

Another thing I'm really excited about it my forthcoming photo exhibition at Araku in Golden Gai, Shinjuku. Details as they come hand.....