TB.Pensar 10

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I thought MONOCLE had killed my keyboard.

Huh? Thursday night, an unfortunate accident — and the fact that the space around my work area has gotten a bit out of control — saw a pile of stacked magazine fall over, with the latest issue of MONOCLE crashing on my keyboard. The “f” key was broken, or mostly flipped up and wouldn’t stick down properly, but it worked. But then I quickly realized that the “c” key was screwed up, only working if you hit it with extra force, which you just can’t do when you’re typing normally. I didn’t take long before I realized how often the letter “c” appears in the English language. So I made an appointment at the Apple Store Ginza’s Genius Bar for the next morning, fearing that I would need to pay for the replacement of a new keyboard. Verdict? A quick clean up fixed the problem with the “c,” and they just replaced the “f” key, no charge. Relief. I swear, the only thing that really gets me on edge is whenever anything happens to my laptop — it’s as if my whole world is crashing down on me. One bright spot is that for the first time I had no fear of losing any data, since I have everything backed up using Leopard’s Time Machine (I’ve always been really bad about backing up my stuff).

And now, time for some big life change news. Earlier this year (in June) I wrote about how I had embarked on a freelancing career (or rather devoting more time to it), but that I was in a transition mode, since I still devoted two days to teaching English. Well, last week I handed in my resignation, and in about a month I will no longer be teaching at all. I’ve been able to do this because of a new project I’m going to be involved with, which I’m pretty excited about. I won’t go into details yet, until I find out what I can talk about and what should be kept under the belt (I’ve gotten in trouble in the past for being a bit too public about certain involvements, but those who attend PauseTalk regularly will have heard of it). So right now I’m heading into 2008 with my career definitely going in the direction I want, and I couldn’t be happier. This new project, the book for Kodansha International, my regular web/newspaper/magazine work, the occasional event… Good times indeed!

Speaking of events, I’d like to thank everyone who checked out the “Creative GBG in Tokyo” event at Cafe Pause during design week, as well as the special PauseTalk edition. As a follow-up, we will be giving away some of the items that were on display in a contest, of which I’ll talk about in the coming days. Also, a while back I had mentioned wanting to produce some sort of magazine-related event, and although it’s never come up again, I would like to say that it’s still on my mind, and I’m thinking it might be good to do it sometime in the spring.