Japan blues

You can't do something big everyday, even if you're in Japan. That's why I did nothing big today, except perhaps you might call it big that I played Shanghai III 2-player with one of the guys here that I met through frisbee. On an arcade machine! That was awesome. I still prefer the old really quick joysticks from that machine we used to play on in Vancouver, Titus.

I did my work today, but very slowly, and I spent too much of the day on the computer. I spent some of it biking, under a slight rain. I also bought a 93¢ umbrella (converted to American, but not including tax) that really did not do its job and made me bump into things while I was on my bike. Probably not using that again.

I biked around out of frustration that my room was too dusty, or that the house was too dusty, or that I was inhaling dust from SOMEWHERE. I think closing the window solved the problem. Maybe it's because of the neighbors' cats, which I'm certainly allergic to. It might also be the fact that I failed to vacuum my blanket, which I certainly should have.

Part two in the saga of the missing gym shorts: when my host mother gave me back my gray gym shorts from the same brand, I reached inside and found something I'd never seen before: a price tag from Barnes and Noble that said Champion athletic. Wait, what? I didn't get these shorts from there... Oops, I just solved this mystery by thinking about it right now while I was typing. Yeah, first of all, the brand's different, and second of all, my mom must've bought one of the presents I gave to my host family from Barnes and Noble. (So the tag from one of the shirts I gave them got sent through the laundry into my pocket.) They've been using the t-shirts and apparently abstaining from eating the chocolate. I can't blame them. Tonight, I finished off this red bean mushy thing from like three days ago (Galen, if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be doing things like this) because I was really craving sugar food (e.g. brain food) and because it didn't look like mold had any effect on it. Well, I feel kind of weird now, and it's from the beans, not the mold if there was any. I think that if I were following traditional Japanese dining rules, I shouldn't have eaten that. To think about how healthy this society is! (At least when it comes to dining. To daily life, that's debatable.)

I'm using my chopsticks that I no longer use for eating as a support for my left wrist, because the laptop is wayyy too hot where my left wrist is supposed to sit.

I have a wicked hard "review test" for my reading and writing class on Wednesday, and the same day I have a vocabulary test, and I don't know how much I have to study just yet. Probably all of the list. Instead of getting ahead for that I was reading my sociology stuff for Wednesday (I'm skipping the econs reading for today) and it wasn't very exciting. Some of the stuff the person was explaining was extremely obvious and just needed some extreme clipping. Didn't manage to finish it, and I need to go to bed now so I can wake up in eight and a half hours.

I'm awaiting your comments, and an email (or two? the nonexistent suspense!!!). I know that everyone else's blog has pictures, but that's not how I roll. If you want pure, unblogadulterated pictures, you can go to my Flickr or the other obvious source. I suppose I should link the Flickr, but I need to sleep waah.

Yeah, I'll put it on the sidebar.

Also, the TV was showing a pretty powerful... argh, mot juste (translation: what's the right word... Flaubert was always looking for the mot juste btw so you know I'm literary)... insight (forget the last words. I've studied surrealism too and at least in France they had fun forgetting what they just wrote down) into the lives of wives who had gone to Iraq and come back completely traumatized. Makes the editorial in the Tufts Daily today (yesterday?) about McCain and winning the war in Iraq (winning? haven't we learned that there's no concrete way to say you've won, especially when you messed up in the first place by going there?) look completely barbaric. I'm filing for my absentee ballot.

I'm sorry that this blog is more personal than Japanese today, but I'm also going to add a little note that Georgia dropped out of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest which is going to be held in Russia. Haha, there was no way they were going to be able to outdo themselves on "Peace Will Come" anyway... maybe they'll send the US in their place?

I was hoping Tufts would have a segment on what the IR and poli-sci professors were saying on the South Ossetian conflict and the US's reenactment of Commodore Perry's 100%-purely-peaceful-nope-yep-nothing-going-on-here-WARSHIP-nothing's-wrong entry into Japan, anyway... really more of my tax dollars are going to stirring up tensions in foreign countries? Enough.