Asahi Super Normal

An endless thrill ride!

Saturday May 10th, 2025

The first full week of May has been pretty excellent as things go. I spent much of April putting all the puzzle pieces together to create the impossibly precise conditions under which I am able to do 10 hours of work per week. Now granted, that isn't much, but it's more than I'd gotten done on this project in the previous 48 days!

Alone in The Stacks

For context, I live at a housing co-op. Thanks to a miraculous set of circumstances my only job is as a community archivist and historian here. Back in early Winter of 2024 I wrote a proposal for a position which went through, and then got elected to that position on January 5th, 2025. What I've promised is to have an archive ready to be maintained by the end of the year, but this is a completely self directed task with zero oversight. This is actually the second co-op to trust me with this, which is a story for another time.

Anyway. This was my first week back at it, and I've decided to start back up by fully implementing the Records Retention & Destruction Policy that I got passed in February. It's a 90 year old cooperative and no one has ever thought to do this, so it's a pretty serious undertaking. I have the equivalent of about 100 bankers boxes of files to sort through, and I'm estimating around half of that will have to be disposed of.

The first of many..

This first week went off without a hitch! I managed to get 14 boxes sorted, quickly speeding up as I developed a workflow for the task. Just over 50% of the files went to either the recycling bin or in bags to be burned. Pulped? Shredded? Not sure yet. We did burn the first bag though, which was a great moment, and a bit of deja vu from the last co-op archive project.

Digital Anachronism

I got up to plenty of other stuff this week as well. I have a new schedule of Mon/Tues/Thurs/Fri for archival work, Wed for personal projects, and the weekends "off". This Wednesday was fully focused on creating this here website, from choosing a web host to making the Main Page! I got into a flow state and it was surprisingly painless. The choice to use MediaWiki came pretty late in the game. My brain struggles to learn a new skill and be creative at the same time, so making a wiki was an unorthodox no-brainer for me.

A Nice Weekend

It's currently Saturday evening, or is it Sunday morning? Today was a great day off. I went to an orientation meeting for a fascinating new organization with a friend of mine, and of course offered to take minutes at the next one. I simply cannot resist documentation. We ended up hitting the local Asian market on our way home, getting a lot of good staples and fun items. Living on $966 a month in disability money, but getting ~$270 in SNAP benefits, food is one of the few places I can afford to splurge every now and then.

The Grass is Always 緑-er

These garlic flavored crunchy coated peanuts are what I really should've been writing about.

Something I did just... fully indulge in was a 4 pack of Asahi Super Dry beer, which is a very goofy choice for me. For one, I almost never drink, so this is almost purely for weeb reasons. When I was a kid I had a weirdly realistic Japan phase that was focused not on anime or other Japanese media, but on the daily mundane experience of living in the country. I was specifically obsessed with TheJapanChannelDCom, a super old-school Youtube channel that I found through all the typical vending machine/pachinko/food type content, but that also lends a very different perspective than a lot of others.

I began learning about Japanese bureaucracy, cultural norms, housing markets, sexuality, etc. with the full belief that I would be moving there one day. I recall actually crying as a teenager that it wouldn't be feasible to live there until I was in at least my early 20s, which was forever away. Ultimately the obsession got so deep that it actually solved itself entirely. I got a nuanced enough understanding of the culture and government to realize that living there as a foreigner would be no easier or more fulfilling than my life in the states. Much like my own country, consuming Japan's media and taking a vacation one day is probably the best way to experience the place for the average person.

God, that sure is a massive tangent to tell you that I bought this beer for $10.99 when I don't even like beer, just because I know it's the most common one in Japan, and I'm a sucker for cool packaging. The verdict? It tastes almost exactly like Rolling Rock.