Margarita Pizza has got to be one of the greatest things ever invented

I mean, mozzarella cheese, big pieces of tomatoes and basil? How much more right can you get?! Or gluttonous, for that matter. And to anyone who talks smack about pizza in Japan, sure the portions leave a little to be desired and the sizes are smaller, but everything is smaller here! You really don't get eggs, mayo and squid pizza unless you ask for it, so don't believe the hype.

So what's new with me? A whole lot of nothing, that's what! 日本語ばかり勉強している = I feel like I'm doing almost nothing but studying Japanese. Not that that's a bad thing, but I've honestly kicked it into high gear, sacrificing most of my leisure time toward studying. I may be generally lazy or mild-mannered, but when I stubbornly set my mind on something, I see it through 110%, just so long as I don't lose interest. Which hasn't happened yet, as languages are a lot like endless puzzles, where exploring one nook leads you to a whole 'nother vista of inquiry you knew nothing about beforehand.

Case in point: rude Japanese. I love speaking rude Japanese, it's fun and people are even more shocked than when you speak in an overly polite manner (us foreigners always seem to achieve one or the other, it's an endless struggle). Naturally I only talk in such rude language among good friends... Although I've already once made the regrettable mistake of trying to be jovial with one of my bosses, only to be reminded by the look of sheer, audacious shock on his face that the respect hierarchy is not to be to be tampered with, in language or in action. In or outside the office, a subordinate speaks to his boss in keigo ("humble form"), bows him off of trains, etc. etc.. Of course I am not as subject to these standards as most Japanese, since I'm not expected by any of my fellow staff to speak Japanese, and am conversely expected to carry the aura of "native speaker" around with me, like a floating cultural orb. (It's one of the selling points of the company) If I do however decide to try and speak it, it's a "tread lightly" kind of situation. And just like in any country or culture, some people are way more lax than others, it really depends.

As should be obvious by my lack of formatting, I'm completely winging it this week. The theme was finding unexpected surprises in languages... ah yes. naname means diagonal. Whenever I record a word in my notebook, and subsequently place it into my flashcard program, I always double-check a second source to make sure I have not only recorded the meaning correctly, but also that I am not ignoring other potential meanings. I thought that diagonal surely couldn't mean anything but just that, but checked it on principal anyway. Glad I did, because I now know that gokigennaname means "in a bad temper." I'll be sure to use that one as soon as possible!

I had band practice today and it was rather by the numbers, except that now I've learned the majority of the songs and I'm beginning to get a chance to write my own stuff. It's always the most fun part of the being in a band for me: everything is still fresh and new, anything one wants to alter is still subject to change, and one can get useful feedback from fellow band members. The writing phase can be truly magical, as you are only limited by your own imagination, and you never know what shape things may take. It's as if the music sometimes becomes it's own living, breathing entity! And I don't feel that any of that was over-dramatic in the slightest. At practice, myself and the ladies of F.I.D. were surprisingly enough both in the same boat, as neither of us have had a "real band practice" (one with a drummer) since last summer! Josh, I know you won't read this but I miss jamming with you.

As well as practicing the songs, I also greatly enjoyed the chance to hang out with my band mates - they are not only a few of the best friends I have over here, but they're also Japanese, meaning I can practice my language skills, we can bounce our cultural nuances off of each other, and most always have a good time. Maybe their being Japanese wouldn't seem like such a big deal, but being an expatriate with mostly fellow expat-friends, it is. That point about language practice goes two-fold, since our bass player doesn't speak English much but definitely wants to improve. I even agreed to help her study for the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication), a bar of measurement almost all Japanese use to weigh their language skills, the single most important exam for careers and all that too. Hopefully if I can coach my friend a bit and get her thinking about it the right way, she can study hard, do well on the test and get an awesome promotion or something.

Oh, and by the way, on the subject of bands, instead of saying "check, 1, 2" or "testing, testing," Japanese people go: "ah ah ah ah" into a microphone. I still find it very amusing every time, without fail.

I have had the weirdest dreams lately. From nightmares of terrifying kids' classes (as I'm nervous about the new ones I will receive in the new contract year coming in April) to surreal dreams of Gabe shooting some arch rival and chopping up the body and hiding it in a closet....no, I can't make this stuff up. I'll level that back home, I used to indulge in a certain, er, plant which has the effect on me of not remembering my dreams. Here, I remember something vivid and strange almost everyday, for better or for worse.

So this was a random post, was it not? I have toyed on and off with doing VLOG's (Video-blogs), and they are just so popular nowadays, but I think I express myself much better through the writing process. Besides, what do I really have to say that's so important you need to watch a streamed video of my face for ten minutes? The real thing is hard enough to take for ten minutes, and the virtual equivalent would most likely transmute me into some kind of demented Lawnmower man, choppin' up yer brains with my virtual-lawnmower.

Later!

"What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men — in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy." - Albert Einstein, "The World as I See it."

Panda Sumo Shooting Spree!

More wacky dreams lately. One particularly startling image of furless pandas I don't think I will soon forget... I haven't even watched Hellraiser recently!! Another involved me having triplet boys around 4 and meandering through a Walmart.

Sometimes, I'm glad dreams don't come true.

I went to a Sumo match the other day. It's incredibly ritualistic and deep-seated in Shinto, the native Japanese religion. For example, the circle which the basho (bout) takes place is considered a holy place, and no women are ever allowed within. The legs are spread traditionalyl to show that one is carrying no weaponry. Also, salt is thrown to purify the ring of evil spirits. And so on and so forth, once again wikipedia is your friend if you want details.

A match only lasts several seconds on average, with these arduously long, ritualistic actions in between. The buildup is intense, but often comparable to blue balls when the guy slips, falls over and loses 1.7 seconds in. The coolest thing I saw was this one high-ranked Sumo wrestler, Baruto, toss another 350 lb. dude sideways out of the ring. Also, the fans were so adamant, it was like Japan's WWF as Kevin so accurately put it. People would scream the names of their favorite wrestlers, cheering them on even from the nosebleed section that we occupied. Some dude nearby was wasted on beer and glass jars of sake, and was flipping out for this one wrestler, yelling stuff like "Yea! You can do it, kick his ass!" or some fascimile thereof in Japanese. Whenever the wrestlers would make their exaggerated movements, and finally get to the center to face each other, they would (a minimum of 3 times) walk away to wash up, make herculean and apish gestures and incite wild roars from the audience, before returning to the center of the ring to face off and possibly walk away another time or two before actually initiating the match. (Should I add "run-on sentences" into my tags?)

I wanted to try chankonabe, the fish stew that is the traditional meal of the sumo, but missed out. Kevin did and said it was decent. I'll find out someday. Instead I ate some snack-food with various pretzels, wasabi peas and little dried fishies in it. Quite good, actually.

Half-way around the globe, other events have transpired. About 6 days ago, there was a case of a shooting on I-90, the highway that is in my hometown of East Greenbush, New York. Some dude was firing at cops, people were fleeing the scene, complete chaos. I even recognize the ambulence that takes the guy after he gets shot by a cop - it's a volunteer EMS vehicle from W.F. Bruen station. My next-door neighbor works there. Very surreal. Even weirder is that this all made me think of one thing: what a bitch it would be delivering pizzas with part of the highway shut down!

We never seem to shed the past, every experience somehow culminates into who we are.

I've been up and down lately myself. Nowhere near the verge of shootin at anybody though, which is good. However my life is not free of "pain time" as one student so elegantly put it: I had to sub a class of whiny, hyper 3-year old boys last Saturday first thing in the morning and - O Joy! I have it again this Saturday. I botched a few things last weekend so I sought help from a friend who gave me some good kid-distracting/time-eating advice....and informed me that rewind and fast-forward on tape players are reversed in this country. With any luck, I'll make it outta this one alive.

Dreams within dreams within dreams

It is without question the result of me reading too much Lovecraft lately, and possibly eating some unusually sweet foods, but I had the most bizarre dreams last night. Naturally it's hard to piece together even though I've been thinking about it since I woke up, but a mere 10 minutes certainly seems to do a lot to extinguish the the memories of dreams. I'll piece it together as best I can.

Something about a bronze ball that said "Love is Cthulhu and Cthulhu is Love." Innocent enough? I had a new apartment in what I knew to be the second layer of my dream world, where I was continually trying to break through to the mysterious fifth. I had a safe underneath my bunk bed (bunk bed?!) which held some precious item underneath the protection of plastic clothespins. At 3am the sun was out fully and I was sitting under a highway bridge with my friend Gabe, explaining to him that about my mission and that this could be the third step. Then a giant mardi gras parade broke out on the streets above and I slipped from what must have been the third back to the second layer, back into my room with the bunk bed. I kept getting these physically written tickets for noise complaints at strangely inopportune times. The rest of the dream was a struggle to try and maintain the ground I had already broken, but the urge to urinate is the last thing I remember upon waking up. So yea, I'm completely nutso!

In other news I'm getting sent to what could be my favorite school for pseudo-sub duty today: Shiki. It's a little place and is awfully quiet but the staff are so pleasant and I always have fun hanging out there. I'm hoping to get put there next year on my new contract, keeping my fingers crossed! Oh and it's only 15 minutes and one train ride away, which is pretty convenient compared to my average commute.

Winter's coming! But I can't feel a thing, and it isn't because my toes are numb this time! Nope, the weather here is much milder than New York has ever been even in its most subdued of winter seasons; It was in the mid-60s for the better part of this week, now moving down to mid-50s. We've had a few nights hit around 40 last week, but even when winter does come in full effect here I doubt it will be a big deal for me, a well-seasoned polar bear.

This brings me to things I don't miss about home, and how about a shot from the latest Noreaster (North Eastern Storm) that tore up New England but apparently missed NY, even though I've heard reports of some less-than-desirable weather there too:

Ice storms.

To finish off this segment I need to recount a story about when I visited my friend Rich in February of this year, which sure seems like a long time ago now. I was on my way through the windy mountain roads to the Castle de Hartshorn, doing my usual 40mph or so since I knew all the roads by this time. The sun had just set, and it had been raining quite a bit. I likewise hadn't noticed that as the roads gradually wound their way up into the mountains, so too did the temperature just decrease enough to create some incredibly dangerous sheets of black ice (ice so thin it can scantly be seen on pavement). I noticed the hard way, by almost losing control and skidding off the road around a fairly sharp corner! Lucky for me I slid my backwheel into an easy area to pull out of, but with at least 5 miles left to go it was not looking particularly good for me. I figured that continuing to go up was however safter than trying to turn around and go down in this kind of situation, so I continued with extreme caution. As I trucked along slowly the ice got thicker - the thickest in fact that I have probably ever seen on pavement in my entire life, looked like nearly an inch solid. Cars sat idling at the ends of their driveways, waiting for some kind of plow truck to salt the way. I pulled to the side for a minute to try and call Rich, but he didn't answer. Or maybe I didn't have a signal, I don't remember. After a minute I saw a pickup truck heading in the same direction as me, and decided it best to follow at a distance. If I went off the road at least someone would see it!

As our path wove on we continued to cruise at about 5-10mph, the ice not heeding in the slightest, and it seemed strange that this truck was heading in exactly the same direction as me, since Castle de Hartshorn is located in kind of an obscure area even for these mountain roads. Feeling safe enough I tried calling Rich quickly again, and upon his answering I started explaining my situation when he said: "You mean that hasn't been you behind us for the last 20 minutes?"


"Swallow all the planets, the profits of doom! Quarterly projections, the prophets of doom! A colleague, rabbi and a bishop walk into a bar, one says to the other: 'hey now brother we haven't gotten very far'" - Clutch