There I was just minding my own business on my laptop in my room when some clown decides to shake the whole damn building…
Nevermind, that was definitely an earthquake!
The yellow ring on the last map is my approximate location, I can actually see the epicenter from my dorm window. We got a nice 3 or 4 second shake, not enough to worry anybody but more than enough to get your attention.
Kazu and I are competing in a bass fishing tournament on our favorite lake on June 18th. As such, we now of course must practice as much as possible, heh heh. So under the guise of disciplined and diligent tournament preparations we blew off work and headed back to the lake on Wednesday.
Saturday rolled around and it was time to blow off some steam, so the usual suspects were rounded up and plans were drawn. It was going to be a typical sushi & karaoke outing, but with a twist – we were going to visit a brand-new SCBR that had opened a few kilometers west on the same road as the one we usually patronize… bit of foreshadowing here for you: we were not going to be disappointed.
So I ran into Kazu in the halls of AP House Thursday night around 11pm or so… and to make a long story short he breathlessly invited me to go fishing the following morning at an absurd 4am.
What sort of advantages Kazu seeks to earn by departing at such unearthly hours are unbeknownst to me. Perhaps he thinks, in that twisted mind of his, that if we arrive early enough we’d actually be able to simply pick the bass up out of the water, such would be the depth of their slumber.
Who knows… In any case, never one to pass up an opportunity to abandon work and embrace the nirvana of watery pursuits, I accepted.
Saturday I returned to the Oita “Big Eye” Stadium to join the blue maniacs and wildly cheer on the Oita Trinita for another two hours. This time Satoshi, Jane, and Jessica had other things to attend to – or simply just didn’t want to sit next to a screaming idiot for that long again so they were scratched. However, I did manage to talk Michelle (my RA / buddy) into going and the adventure was on!
Saturday, the 29th of April 2006, can unequivocally be called my best day in Japan ever. It started unremarkably enough around 8:30am with the four of us staggering one by one out of our rooms and towards the kitchen as we bravely fought hangovers of various severity from an impromptu margarita bash the night before.
Finding a human in our floor’s kitchen before 10am on a Saturday is generally nigh impossible, finding *four* humans battling various stages of inebriatory-consequentiality rather than zonked out in bed is downright absurd. These kids must be up to something…
Yah damn right.
Saturday was a big, big day, one we had been looking forward to for an entire week – Saturday, you see, was bowling and soccer day.
Well that bit about having lots of time to post hasn’t quite proved true this past week, but I’ve finally gotten most of the errands I had to do upon return out of the way and am settling into a somewhat regular schedule.
Today is a briefing, if you will, on what is in store for me this coming semester. Class is a good place to start – this semester I’m enrolled in:
Sunday afternoon, the day after my return, the remnants of the 4th Floor Team gathered together and went down to Beppu City Park to see the sakura, or cherry blossoms. We’ve lost 3 previous members: Ting is back in Hong Kong joining the legions of working stiffs and Arami and Yunji are now living somewhere downtown. However, we’ve already recruited two new ladies to the team though, so our numbers weren’t too depleted.
My date of departure approaches. I leave Japan on the morning of December 28th for a three month absence that will have me circumnavigate the planet by airplane – seriously. APU, bless its frosty heart, is doing all it can to make me desperate to leave. Winter so far has been unseasonably cold – we’ve had snow 5 out of the last 7 days, including the current tempest I woke up to this morning. I enjoy snow, very much in fact – but the snow I enjoy falls gently down to earth, accumulating into a beautiful silent white panorama as far as the eye can see. APU snow, on the other hand, on account of our ever-present hellacious winds, *never* accumulates. Instead, it prefers to stubbornly drive itself into your eyes, up your nose, and occasionally even into your ears. I don’t particularly enjoy this…
They tell me time is relative, which is the only explanation I can conceive of to explain how I managed to go 5 days without writing a journal, and yet it felt like no more than 2… Things have been busy here, but it is the kind of busy that is, for lack of a better phrase, not busy. To elaborate, there are days when you wake up in the morning with nothing planned, anticipating time to do things you would otherwise put off, like vacuuming the floor, or bathing. Yet as the day wears on, one thing after another appears that needs attending to, and before you know it the sun has set and while you’ve been busy all day, you don’t feel as if you’ve accomplished anything.
I have decided that this is what it must feel like to work in an office.
I digress. Today, with 5 associates, I journeyed to the far off city of Oita (10min train ride) to visit what you folks would call a “movie theater.” The talkie that we had chosen to see was none other than Sayuri, which was released nationwide yesterday.
