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.