On nice days I go to the beach, and those jelly fish!!!! You never even see them, but they Sting!

There have been 3, …maybe 4 nice days in the last month. The whole rest of the time it rained. We’ve had lots of promising looking blue patches in the sky but the grey keeps on beating them out.

Half the time I drive around with my backpack full of paint and brushes - hoping there’ll be a good sunny hour or two.

Maybe 30 minutes at 大鳥峡 and the blue patch I was pulling for gave up. It drizzled as I packed up my paints, and poured as I hiked back to my car.

30 minutes at Sakurajima - and the top of the mountain got swallowed by a cloud, which waited a few more minutes before raining, stopping, and raining and stopping again. I’ll assume that some of the people who stopped there in the rain to watch me were art enthusiasts, but some of them probably just wondered what the mountain they’d traveled to see - looked like.

One day it poured and it shined 6 times in rapid succession.

It was only rainy then sunny 3 times so far today; Raining now.

Rain and paint just don’t mix well.

Paint outside on cloudy days and you wind up with dismal dark paintings…, so I haven’t been as productive as when I 1st arrived here.

Mind you, 2 paintings a day, 4 days a week is difficult to maintain - even if the weather is nice.

I make it a point to go down to the beach any day that I have off. The water there is so warm, it has to be at least partly heated by the volcano (Mt. Sakurajima) up the road. It is of course cooler in the rainier times. And you’ll probably get stung once an hour. (Jellyfish)

When I lived in Saitama, my girlfriend would visit me most every day.

My new best friend, is a giant driftwood log. Every time I go to the beach I go find my log, roll it down into the water, then swim around it/ hang off it like an otter. Ask it how it’s been, tell it about the 1 yen coin I found, …It’s a good log.

2 sunny days this weekend, so I painted 4 pictures on the beach - and got stung 2 times.

Jelly fish!!

I used to bring my goggles to the beach, but there’re no fish and no plants to see. Long ago I was throwing the jelly fish I found washed up on the beach - back into the sea. No I don’t see them on the shore anymore. Maybe they’ve learned?

I don’t know if I would repeat my kindness to them if I saw any more washed up on the shore. I hate those damn jelly fish.

Anyway, I like the beach.

Despite the Damn Jellyfish!

Something/ not painting - that I have accomplished lately:

I cleaned my house.

Also, I moved into a newer nicer, much much much cleaner house. (That is the one I cleaned.)

New house video:

[youtube=http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=K3W__aF-_8A]

For some reason there was no mailbox at this house. All the other houses have little metal boxes nailed to the sides of them - mine just has a number of nail sized holes. I thought it odd that somebody would take a mailbox with them when they move, but then I went to a hardware store + saw how much they were charging for those little metal boxes.

When I went to the beach later that day I found a large plastic jug + thought I might be able to make it into something like a mailbox.

I did that “successfully”, though it nearly cost me the tip of my pointer finger. I only have a folding/ swiss army knife - which folded itself about a fifth of the way through my finger and nail when I was trying to cut through the plastic.

I’d like to say I learned from that mistake. I couldn’t use that one finger for a few days./ I gave it up for 2 weeks, then got 2 more bloody gashes, before I finished the job.

I’m happy with it/ and mostly healed now, …although I never get any mail.

My job here, I’m not wildly pleased with.

The 2 and 3 year olds just sit there with their hands in their mouths/ their friends mouth/ their drool spilling out of their mouths. The older kids have learned how to punch, and they often seem to want to practice on me. This one little bastard took a running swing between my legs (which is just the right height for a little kid’s arms). That hurt for hours, but I can only twist their little arms for a few seconds.

“It’s not English class unless somebody cries”.

Some of them think I’m gym equipment, some of them think I’m a petting zoo, some of them think I’m an Un-dress up doll, some of them just sit there and drool.

We played a game today where I had to chase some kids. I lunged at a little fat kid, and my pants ripped, and they all laughed at me. I missed him too. He was slow, but slippery.

The place where I once had to spend 20 minutes trying to get 2 mentally handicapped children off of me, so I could try to quiet down their 50 otherwise unsupervised classmates,…

It had improved significantly.

Hardly anyone ever tried to take my shirt off of me anymore, and they hadn’t given each other any serious injuries in a month. One time (within that 2 month period), the school’s principle looked in, and everyone behaved until she had gone (almost a whole minute). She canceled my company’s contract a few weeks later saying: “the kids aren’t having fun”. I was astounded! Those damn kids had soooooo much fun. I was only ever able to keep them from breaking bones/ shedding blood. I could understand if she’d said they weren’t learning anything. I could hardly hear myself over the din a lot of the time I was there (…they

This ticked my boss off.

I like money, you like money, he’s really really concerned with getting and keeping as much money as possible. He’s also pretty stressed out. I was hired to replace 2 people, and I think he had employed even more before I came.

Everything is, of course, my fault though.

The day before those people canceled that contract I had been talking with the only other foreign teacher he has. One of the reasons I switched to this company was so I could go back home for Christmas. This other guy too, seems to want to not be stuck having little kids try to stick their fingers up his ass on the most celebrated day of the year.

My Boss said only one of us could go home for Christmas. The other guy here really wants to go, and I value going -more than I value my job certainly, so it’s an easy decision for me - as to what I should do. Fa-La-La-La-LA!

Unfortunate about the timing though really. I don’t know what the deal was with them canceling, but I know why I’m not going to work through Christmas.

This other guy had to go and do my last 2 afternoon classes at the place that canceled. Because he and I are the only teachers, I got sent to do his 2 afternoon classes, plus his 2 night classes. I still had to do my own night class on top of that. Canceled classes means a short term increase in classes.

His anniversary was a week ago, so he asked me to switch one of his later night classes for one of my earlier night classes. It’s a pain for me to have to sit around for an extra hour, but it was his anniversary. The part that irks me, is the student I was supposed to teach called a few minutes before his class to say he forgot he had to come that night. So, the other guy got to leave 2 hours early, I had to stay 2 hours late, AND make up for the extra class the other guy didn’t have to teach the next day.

That was the day my girlfriend flew down from Saitama to see me. I hadn’t seen her in over 2 months, so my boss, who likes money, looked upset that I didn’t want to leave her outside for an extra hour and 10 minutes ,in the perpetually raining weather, in an unfamiliar area, with a heavy suitcase to drag behind her, so he could let somebody else come in and bore me a little later on a Saturday night. I’ll take care of your girlfriend he said. “She doesn’t like creepy old men” I thought, but decided to just stick to: “No Way”, and “You don’t know what she looks like.”

He was starting to get mad at me refusing it, when I suggested, as calmly as always, that he could just have to guy come earlier in the afternoon. Which was no problem for him.

As for the Christmas thing, he has wisely resolved to allow me to take off. As I had said, I would have taken off anyhow. He’s decided that he will let me use my vacation time to go, but all of my classes from now until then will have to be 15 minutes longer each, …so he doesn’t have to refund anybody any money.

That I’m going, is of course, the most important thing, that I’m using up all of my paid vacation time, when I’m being forced to do most of that work beforehand - is less than ideal.

I complain, but then I took a peak at the other guy’s schedule + it’s a lot busier/ he has more to complain about than me.

I took a look at my new monthly schedule too, and found I had one extra class. My boss never wrote where that class is… I asked him that morning, and he said it was there in the office. He moved the time of my next class back 20 minutes - I thought - so I would have just the time I needed to make it there.

I finished my new class + hurried the 30 minutes distance to my usual class - to find my boss there. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

He hadn’t written a location for that class for me, nor had he given any indication that I wouldn’t be going there the same as always, + I assumed it was the same place as always. But it wasn’t.

He was/ is mad because I didn’t read the empty spaces the way he didn’t write them.

The funny part was that I left the stuff I need to teach at the school I wasn’t supposed to go to, while I was cleaning it.

This morning I went in the office, …because I have to go in the office every morning - in case he needs anything. He never actually does need anything, but he gets mad when I don’t go and tell him that I’m going now. He wasn’t there today, but his wife was. His wife asked me where I was supposed to work today + I told her + she got mad.

“Oh no, That’s 20 minutes away” she said.

“It’s 15″ I said.

“Can you really make it there on time?” she said.

“Absolutely” I said.

“Can You really?” she said.

“Yes.” I said.

“You can make it there on time?” she said - again!

“It’s 20 minutes away.” she repeated.

“It’s 15 minutes away, and the clock you’re looking at is 5 minutes fast.” I said …slowly.

“I don’t think you can get there on time.” was what she said next.

+ these are the times that I wish my Japanese was better.

If someone you knew was running late - do you think it would help them, …or, perhaps, make them later - to ask them the same dumbass question over and over and over.

I got there 4 minutes early, and I wanted to call her in the office to ask her where I was and what time it is.

It was nice to have my girlfriend over for a few days anyway.

She thought it smelled awful here too, but she has no idea how bad it can be.

She doesn’t often stay up ’til 12am!

We went to where the 1st Emperor’s grandparents are interred. It started pouring as soon as I parked the car. We went to the waterfall + saw lots of those weird orange cave crabs. We went to the beach and swam out to the shrine on the rocks. We went to the Indian place in town, and both felt sick the next day.

We went to Kagoshima city, bought a few art supplies, souvenirs for her mom and coworkers, then hurried back to the volcano side, to get in my mini car and drive like mad to the airport.

I was pretty mad too. We had to stop and ask directions twice, because there were/ are no airport signs at 2 of the intersections you have to turn at.

I drove for just under 2 hours - which should have been about an hour and 10 minutes. We got to the airport about 10 minutes before her flight. The people at the check in counter told her that she needed to be there 15 minutes before the flight, but they gave her a ticket for the 1st plane the next day, and I bought a map at a gift shop. We found another Indian restaurant and a hotel a few minutes away. I was glad to get to see her a little more, + dropped her off the next morning before my 2 and a half hour drive back to my city before I had to start work.

It rained again while I was getting ready to go out painting.

The next day looked nicer, but I decided I would just go for a swim instead. The Jellyfish stung me 2 times!

By some (seemingly) extraordinary coincidence: I only had 2 slices of bread, just enough peanut butter, and precisely enough jelly to enable me to finish all 3 up - together, with but a single “peanut butter + jelly sandwich”.
I decided it would be fun to take this as a divine omen of something or other, but never bothered to ponder it further. Deliciousness!

By some far more meaningful coincidence: I happened to wake up (to the cheery early sounds of propane tanks being dragged across the pavement beneath my window). I remembered what season it was, and got to the city I worked in that day, an hour early. From that train station - two thirds of the way to where I work, is a shallow river filled with: ducks, cormorants, egrets, turtles, fish, and , sadly…, bicycles, foam cups, and fire extinguishers. The part that is especially nice in that season though, is all the gnarley old cherry trees (which bloom only briefly).
An hour early was not enough time to paint anything, but just enough time for my little leaky bottle of ink and pen tips. I stopped under an old stone bridge and did a picture of a red wood bridge. You can’t see the red though, …being that I only had black ink.
With winter gone, it was still light enough outside after work to allow me to do another picture: Trees on both banks - in black + white.

A few days before, when I 1st happened to take my little leaky bottle of ink and pen tips to a little park to draw some cherry trees and wait out my 2 hour lunch break: I got a call from the president of my company who had stopped by where I work (unannounced/ unexpectedly) with some papers I would need for some new classes. I think my being in the park then is lucky, because as nice as he is, I didn’t have to talk to my boss, and didn’t have to explain why I was wearing the jeans and T-shirt it is my custom to wear to my “business casual job.

He surprised me there a few weeks later + said nothing about my “Business - very casual” attire, but laughed a good deal at all the vegetables poking out of my backpack, so it may not matter what I wear for my 2 hour work days after all.

I like my job, but dislike city, and would like vacation.

The last day that week was one where I only had to work in the morning, which permitted me to take some paint to a spot I painted in when I first lived in the suburban blight I occupy again now. Only one drunk guy and his kids tried to talk to me then, which allowed me enough time to finish my painting and make it home on my bicycle before total darkness set in. Did really well with that one I think.

Being that this is a ceaseless concrete sore - there are really really very few other/ + no better places to go to paint, so my girlfriend went back there with me the next day.
While I was busy painting, she sat on the ground and played Sudoku. One of the times that she looked up, she asked me if we didn’t know a guy by one of the trees.

There were lot’s of guys there by the trees, and a fair chance that we knew any of them, but being that there were about a hundred guys in the area immediately near the trees (because there are lots and lots and lots and lots of people in this area, and a terrible lack of trees for anyone to be near), I couldn‘t pick out a dark haired guy that looked more familiar than anyone else.
Later on, some girl wandered over and asked me if I didn’t know some guy, who was then waving to us with both arms. That helped a lot!
He and his family are all from Turkey, and he brought something Turkish over for us to try. It was sort of a thin pancake with maybe spinach, and potatoes or pumpkin pressed inside. I liked its uniqueness,
…if not its taste or texture. His girlfriend stayed and talked with my girlfriend for a while. That seemed to liven her up a lot; Girls like talking.
This other girl said she said she had gone to art school and offered to introduce us to people who know how to get paintings into places where they could be seen or sold.
I’ve heard that sort of thing before, and it does sound nice, and it was nice of her to suggest it, but I don‘t expect anything to actually come of it
An older woman also came by, watched, and took lord know how many photos of me there. She was really truely earnestly interested in how many cherry petals had gotten mixed into my paint / had adhered to my painting.
Tweasers at home revealed it to be 48.

There was also an old man …who said he remembered me from long long ago - painting plumb trees under the Shinkansen tracks. That was my favorite part, I remembered him too after he mentioned that
…makes me wonder if I won’t bump into him again a few more years down the line.

It was a really really nice day and nice night, accentuated by the fact that it rained the entire week after.
It cleared up the day just before the weekend,
but switched right back to rain when I’d gotten home from work.

While trapped indoors I looked into what possibilities lay for me to escape my suburban confinement.
Actually I took the easier approach: revised an old resume I had disabled on a Japanese job site, to let companies look at it - just to see if anyone wanted to offer me a sweet job like mine, in a place unlike this one.
Not long after, this one company offered me one for one, and another for the other, but no combination of: nice job + good place.

I’m down on Saitama, so my girlfriend thought she would prove to me that Saitama is not such a bad place. She drove me to a big park 2 cities down, which was packed full of only children and young parents. We had a good walk all around the park, but didn’t see anything interesting besides the one tree that looked older than me.
She took me a lot farther out on another day to see a lake where the mountains reach the plain, but she didn’t want to wake up before 10 am, and actually didn’t wake up until 12pm, …so we got there not long before dark.
I liked it there, somewhat far from here… Driving there for a mini-hike, a snap-shot, and a drive straight back is a shame though.

I’ve taken to collecting houseplants - to try and liven up my most immediate surroundings., but it bothers me that all the pots they sell are either: expensive, or plastic. Expensive ones are expensive. Plastic ones are a cornucopia of toxins, which crowd the seas and landfills - and will do for the next million years at least.
But they are cheaper…
It’s weird to have to buy a container and dirt to keep a plant nearby, when they should rightly be all over the place anyway.
I was going to reluctantly buy a few extra dishes: ceramic mugs, soup bowls, and whatnot - to keep some extra plants in but then I discovered these new pots - otherwise indistinguishable from plastic ones, except they’re made of bamboo fibers and flour. They crack the week after you put a plant in them, + claim to disappear without a trace within a year if kept outside. This has to be one of the most exciting types of pot that has come out in a very long time. Hooray for pot (s)!

Anyway, on that one day that I headed to work an hour early, I got to the station with lots of time to spare, and I saw some cool close up photos of these rock archways on a mountain I used to drive past. Nagano is full of mountains, but that one would easily be the coolest (if it were in Nagano, not right next to Nagano - in Gunma).

My girlfriend drove us there one weekend soon thereafter, so I could try to paint a picture there. It always was my favorite mountain of all those I’ve seen this far, and it would have been the perfect time to go paint: the cherry trees up on the mountain were still blooming, as were so many other flowers. I was pleased we had timed it so well,
but 20 minutes after we got out of the car, it started raining.

I think, by all rights, Japan should be called the land of “Dude, where’s the sun?”.

The rain was not so hard this time, and it let up before too long, but the sky stayed ominous looking, so we hiked all that day instead. The trail there goes through several stone archways. We climbed on some rocks + took some pictures. I took about 30 minutes to draw a picture of an arch.

I could have done a lot better with it.

(I also usually cut my hair reasonably well, but my hand twitched while I was using the scissors this last time, so I had to get my shaver out of storage early + go all bald.)

We got back to the car at dusk + drove around looking for a place to stay for about 2 hours. We could have driven back home in less time…

The next day was a lot safer/ sunnier + we were going to go back to the same spot so I could try to paint everything there while it was still so so so nice, but we stopped at a little lake along the way which was also nice, so I started painting there + we didn’t leave until dusk again.

Whenever we head in that direction we stop at an Indian buffet where the waitress presses one of the chefs into make me a vegan curry.
I don’t know why I like Indian food so much.
I’m told that my brother has to go and work in India for weeks at a time, and he brings jars of peanut butter and jelly with him, so he doesn’t have to eat curry all the time.
Peanut curry seems like an idea!
The pumpkin curry I tried a few days ago was terrific.

I stopped at an Indian curry place nearest the station where I have recently been forced to start teaching on alternate Wednesday nights. That was alright, but more expensive and much much more limited in quantity. It also burned my insides for 2 whole days.
It might not have been soo bad for so long, but I decided to have spicy vegan Singapore noodles for lunch the day after; Kinda’ like how Arnold Schwartzenegger was doing push-ups in his hospital room right after he had surgery done - too much too soon.

Speaking of surgery reminds me that I had been talking about curry, and by talking about curry I mean to point out that my girlfriend has decided that we are engaged now.
She made me go ring shopping with her in some swank area of Tokyo where they have an all vegetarian Indian restaurant. That was excellent, but again, pretty expensive considering: it was in an expensive area and involved buying 2 rings (+ mine was free).
Rings and weddings are remarkably unimportant to me. I’d be much happier just having fewer cockroaches, or a few days to travel.

The night before all that, a recently married friend of mine who is going to make a nice art website for me came to discuss ideas, lose at Mario cart, and look around my apartment for things he can get when I go. He likes curry too, so we had a bit of what was left over from the night before.

The night before was when she made nann, + I made curry, + she got upset that I had all but decided to move to one of the furthest parts of the country. She wound up crying more than briefly, which I don’t like to see, but I don’t remember exactly how that came to her decide-ding that we would get married soon.

The soon part surprised me. I thought I’d have a few years grace period, but she was saying soon while talking to the staff at the jeweler’s who wanted to know when we’d be getting hitched.
“I want to get married”, I’ve been hearing more or less persistently for a year ; It doesn’t surprise me much anymore. What is the need/ What is the benefit of Marriage? And why would it ever have to be soon.

Soon is when I seem to be leaving for one of the furthest parts of the country. Maybe with that approaching, she was able to wake up before 10 to go ring shopping.
If for whatever reason you feel as though you want to get married, I would advise you to have the foresight to surprise her with the ring. You will save sooooooo much time (+ probably money).

We started ring shopping at 12. One shop, one train ride, and one more shop later, it was 4pm + we got to that nice, though expensive vegetarian Indian restaurant - with the good pumpkin curry. Nice place, terrible waiter, I prefer the buffet we always stop at whenever we head in the opposite direction. I’ll miss that place if/ when I move to one of the furthest parts of the country.

We were at that last ring shop for the 4 hours which ensued.
She, having picked out a platinum, and pink gold matching engagement + wedding ring set (with 7 small diamonds and one large one I insisted not come from an unknown part of Africa (The ensuing investigation took at least an hour, but people recommended I watch that movie about diamond smuggling in Africa, + I‘d hate to think of anybody losing an arm or their family over a shiny rock).
After we got everything worked out, she was happy + said it was fine by her if I wanted to go back to the expensive all vegetarian restaurant with the good pumpkin curry, but 3 days of curry and the price set me off of it this one time.
She was good enough to get us a package of French fries on our way back to the station.

I have to admit that I found it intellectually stimulating to ponder with what frequency French fry purchasing would have to occur to equal the price of the aforementioned jewelry in: one, five, ten, and thirty year periods of time.
I’m just a pretend genius though, so I didn’t actually do the calculations, I just helped eat the fries.

Kagoshima is a city in the southernmost part of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s largest islands. Kagoshima has sounded really really interesting to me for a long time because:
They have cone shaped sake’ cups which cannot be set down on the table without spilling, and those same cups have a hole at the bottom, which sake’ would leak out of - if you didn’t plug the hole up with your finger. These are 2 very creative ways to ensure everyone gets drunk very quickly; You just have to shoot it.
What they put in those cups, my old roomate brought with him on a ski-trip and we drank it as his girlfriend drove us all back home. (Apparently it’s okay to play drinking games in a car in Japan, if the driver isn’t drinking). She didn’t miss out on much, what he had in that bottle/ what they put in those cups is not good! We had to stop at a convenience store to pick up some better tasting liquor + I think Tyler had to drink, ‘cause that’s how the game went: When we drive past a Pachinko parlor - Nao drinks. When we go past a convenience store - Tyler drinks. I had love hotels and those circular sushi restaurants.

The other thing about Kagoshima is that it has one of the Earth’s most active volcanoes in the bay opposite the city. They say it spews a cloud of grey ash up in the sky almost every day. The people there always carry umbrellas to keep the dust off of themselves, and they have a hard time choosing a day to hang their laundry out to dry.

The company that tried to get me to take the job with great hours in the city as bad as the one I’m in now, and later tried to get me to take a really busy job in a city which is arguably better than the one I’m in now… - They got me to wonder if I shouldn’t look and see what other jobs, in what other places might be available.

I saw an ad for a job in Kagoshima, where I’ve most wanted to go for years, …so I told the guy I’d like to know more, + he called me a few times, + this + that + offered me the job without bothering about an interview.

The vacation’s pretty bad, but I don’t actually get any vacation at the job I do now.
It’s nice I can work without working + see my girlfriend/ “fiance? - I guess”, but it also feels as though I am just waiting here to Die (again) (+ play on face book).
This other job involves a car - which beats the hell out of riding your bike to work in the midst of a typhoon. I already have a grey umbrella for the sunny - ashy days.

Rain:
My feet were wet from 10am to 10pm one day last week. A typhoon came during the night + I didn’t plan to have time to get the train to work. My bike is a lot more direct/ quicker than the train, but it made me a whole lot wetter - despite my rain coat and ski pants. My shoes, of course, are just normal shoes, so they got filled with water + my feet sloshed until I got home.

I got home at 10pm, because I had an interview with the company that kept offering me jobs I didn’t want. I came direct from my job in one city, and rode 2 cities down, past my house, + 2 cities further to get to the interview just in time. I met a guy in a very nice suit + had to apologize for wearing my “business very casual” clothes direct from work. The guy asked me lots of questions he didn’t seem to need to hear the answers to. He said he used to work with one of my oldest old co-workers/ one of the ones who tried to convince me to leave Nagano + come back to Saitama. He said that they had put teachers into the teeny town I used to live in, and that one of the people he’d talked to there had had nice things to say about me. His boss came in at one point + waved to me + shook my hand, because he had worked at the company who had put me in that teeny town - when they had put me in that town, and he quit that company to start his own company. It was a long validating trip down memory lane. The job they had in mind for me sounded kind of sucky though.
Despite my jeans, wet shoes, and T-shirt, they wanted to offer me work I didn’t want, and they wanted me to start tomorrow. I wanted a bit of time for vacation between jobs, but told the guy in Kagoshima that I was interested in his offer anyway. - I figure living at the southern tip of an island with the sea on 3 sides might make time to travel less important.
We’ll see if I’m right or not. Sometimes: I am not right - sometimes.

“Golden Week” is a time when a lot of people, like me, get a small portion of the week off. This makes traveling anywhere further than your local grocery store both: crowded and expensive.

My girlfriend and I had the same few days off as everyone else, + didn’t want to waste them sitting around in my apartment/ this city. Trains, busses, planes, ships, trolleys (assuming there are any trolleys in Japan), would be too full to fit everyone and both of us inside them, so we waited until late afternoon the 1st day of the mini-vacation, to drive up to Fukushima. I had been to the 5 colored ponds there years ago + liked them. At that time, the city I lived in/ live in now had a special deal with an inn up there to give Ageo city residents a big discount on nightly stays. Sometimes when we ponder the good/ bad points about this city, I am reminded of that.
Early on, when we had determined that staying in our city would be a huge waste of a good opportunity to go somewhere I was led to think that going back there would be good. That inn’s out of business now though.
We bought a Fukushima travel magazine at a roadstop on the way.
Going there really wasn’t too bad by the way. I expect most people got in their cars the night after work the day before. My girlfriend saw a picture of a village where all the buildings had grass roofs + decided we would go there the next day.
Again, we drove around for nearly 2 hours looking for a place to stay before we found a spot.
We got up the next morning + went to a castle (which was packed full of other people too). We figured we’d find someplace to have lunch on the way to that village with all the grass roofs, but we didn’t, and we got caught between 2 cars in a long long long long long line of cars on a 2 lane road. We must have gone one car’s length every 10 minutes. We both got really really sleepy after being stuck in a tunnel for 30 minutes. I thought we might die from carbon monoxide poisoning. The opposite lane was full of cars speeding back the way we came, making it nigh impossible to turn around, so …after at least 2 hours + perhaps 2 kilometers of waiting, we got to a blinking traffic light where we could turn + take another road back.

We went a few kilometers back when the road got all crowded up again, so she told her car’s navigator to navigate us to a temple that is somewhat famous out that way. I liked it there because it wasn’t trapped in the car, and there were lots of chickens wandering around the grounds.

We went to the 5 colored ponds the next day. I like it there best: Nature, colors…

That’s it, …but they’re good things!
We rented a rowboat for 30 minutes + saw giant goldfish in the eerie blue water.

I stopped to paint a picture, but had to quit when it started to rain.
The rain stopped before we were back to the car, + all the other people had fled, so I stopped + tried to paint another picture. My girlfriend decided she would visit the gift-shop where we parked/ and wait in the car until I was done.
Just after I started painting, it started raining again. I started putting my stuff away again - as Acrylic paint and rain make a bad combination (water soluble), but figured it might clear up again if I waited a little bit.
I did wait a little bit + the rain did slow, then stop, but it made marks in the paint I had to let dry then re-paint, + by the time I was “finished” it was almost too dark to see any colors in the eerie colored pond.

As soon as I touched the car, my phone started vibrating like crazy because my girlfriend had apparently been e-mailing and calling me, hoping I would hurry up. Mostly everyone went home around the 1st rain, so the gift shop closed + she had nothing to do.

She said that she had had to pee for the last 2 hours, but the bathrooms were locked up. There was a public restroom in a parking lot across the street which I remembered from years before when I had come by myself, + she was even more “pissed off” that she’d been sitting + waiting so long when there was a bathroom 3 minute’s walk from the car. What can you do though?

There was a big traffic jam on the way back - when I was the one who had to go. Luckily for me, she was driving, so she drove to a rest stop and I ran in + went, while she was still waiting in the line of cars trying to get a parking spot.

We got home late + woke up late + I had a feeling like I should clear some of the things out of my apartment that I wouldn’t be needing. About a week and a half later I was offered that job in Kagoshima, a city so far away, I would/ will have to be very very selective about what I take with me when I go, + what I ask my girlfriend/ “fiance?” to take in her suitcases with her when she comes to visit me there.

The Bureau of Immigrations is a place for Immigrants …and in between folk like me, to go and sit for hours. There are of course’s lots of other places to go and sit, but only the Bureau of Immigrations has soooo many screaming foreign babies. It’s not just the grey carpets, grey curtains, grey walls, grey carpet, grey benches, and the multi-colored/ multi-cultured babies that draw the crowds though. You see: We’re forced to go.

If we were not forced to go, I think a lot of us foreign types would get upset that we have to sit for hours to wait to pay 2,000 yen for a stamp of permission to stay and pay 8,000 yen for another stamp of permission to leave occasionally.

I had a friend who forgot to go back to Immigrations to get his set of stamps: allowing him to stay and leave. I used to wonder which of those 2 stamps take precedence, but then he tried to go home for Christmas, and he wasn’t allowed on the plane, so there you go,
(…or don’t go).

I’ve been here legally for 6 years, but I never intended to stay long enough to have to go sit at the Bureau of Immigrations this many times. I wasn’t sure if they would force me to leave if my visa expired, but I didn’t want to have to go to court to find out - like my friend did. He got fed up and went home, …when they allowed him to. I took his job.
I went to immigrations to get the papers I needed to fill out. I filled them out, then waited in line to get a number, so I could wait to be called to give my papers to somebody else. Somebody checks your papers to be sure they’re all filled out before you can begin to wait to hand your papers to somebody different.
It took me maybe 10 minutes to fill out my papers.
15 minutes waiting to show my papers to the lady who hands out the numbers
I got a number and waited for 2 hours until:
They closed for lunch for an hour
Then I went for a walk, came back after an hour, and waited for at least another hour for them to call my number.
They called my number.
A guy looked over my papers for about 5 minutes, had me write my address on an postcard, He said they would send it to me when they decided when I should go back.

They’re reasonably comfortable grey benches, but still a huge pain in the ass if you know what I mean.

Why did I have to wait more than 4 hours for some one to look at my papers for 5 minutes? Why did I have to get a number for someone to look at my papers - when that someone looked as intently at them, as the person who looked at them when I got the number 4 hours before?
Why couldn’t I just leave my papers on the counter and go do something worthwhile with my day off?

Why did they have to demand that I go back to get my stamps during the only 3 day weekend I’ve had in a year?
Why did it take only 40 minutes to get it all done with when I did go back?

I wouldn’t say that I’m especially eager to stay here now, but I have to build up my insulin supply before I try going back to America again. $435.00 for me to talk to a doctor for 15 minutes in my own country, …and I can’t live without insulin (which, of course, requires a prescription/ Doctor‘s visit). Nice how that works out…
A non-sarcastic nice thing about here is that: people get the medicine and care they need without having to rely on corporate financers.

Between now and again, I watched all the clips of Ralph Nader I could find on YouTube and learned a lot about corporations. Are Nader’s ideas from 2000 still relevant today? Yu-Huh.
I volunteered to fly back home to help get Mr. Nader all the signatures he needs to get on the state ballots; I even said I’d ride my bike from house to house across the country so we wouldn’t have to spend $4 a gallon + pollute that much more in doing so. He hasn’t written back about it, but I did get an invitation to his birthday party as a result.
I really would have loved to have gone to that.
Damn shame I had to work that day, …on the other side of the planet. I did, however, take my girlfriend out for dinner on his birthday, …and hers.
We had a just a little party for her on her birthday. She picked out a place with half price drinks. Of course the food was roughly 3 times the price you’d pay anywhere else, …and only 2 vegan options. Didn’t get much of anything to eat, and had a lot to drink, and had a hang over alllll the next day.
I use my cell-phone as an alarm clock, so when I got a cell-phone mail an hour before my alarm should have gone off, I hang avertedly turned my back up alarms off and went to work. My head hurt, but I was especially disappointed to be told that I was an hour early.

I want that hour back, but as I say every time I write, I don’t work very hard. Which works out to be pretty un-exciting.

I’d go live in the woods if I didn’t need a job to buy insulin.
I told my girlfriend that + she got all miffy because she thought she wouldn’t be welcome to come and be a hermit in the woods with me. I tried to explain how you can’t be a real mountain hermit with your girlfriend asleep on your couch all the time, and how it’s impossible for a diabetic hermit to manufacture insulin with just spit and berries, but it didn’t cheer her up any + I had to say it was okay if she wanted to come and visit. She’s a pharmacist, but I’m still not retired.

Relatively warm days recently. These last 2 days I was off I went outside and painted plum blossoms near the railroad tracks - one of the few patches of land hereabout that hasn’t been turned into an apartment building.

There’s a park with actual green grass and some trees in one of the other cities I get sent to work in. It was warm enough the other day that I could go eat a peanut butter sandwich there over my 2 hour lunch break. It took 30 minutes each way to walk there, but I saw some trees and heard some birds.
That’s about all the contact with nature I’ve had for 5 months, unless you count all the cockroaches that run wild through my kitchen when the light is turned off.

I don’t like to kill them, so what I usually do is: keep my apartment clean, plug up the cracks and holes that lead in and out and out of the apartment, and trap the ones I see in an old cup - which I empty outside.
Really late one night I caught a big cockroach in an old mug my friend had left in the apartment. I took it outside on my balcony + tried to hurl it out into the night, …but I shook too vigorously - the handle of the mug snapped free - which sent the mug (+ cockroach inside) flying - loudly- into another apartment building, then something else, then it clattered on the ground a bit. It was loud as hell! I don’t know that it actually shattered though. I only live on the 2nd floor.

I threw bits of bread crumbs and unpopped popcorn kernels out the door of my apartment from time to time over the course of the winter - for the birds, but it’s all still there. There only seems to be big black crows in my city, + as far as I can tell, they only eat from garbage bags. “Picky”.

There’s a mini library next to the train station in my city. I went there a few times recently to try and find a children’s book that I would be able to read. I could read the ones I got, but I just couldn’t follow the story very well. My girlfriend has been a Japanese language volunteer for a few years, and she’s the one who teaches me Japanese now, but she was surprised at how many weird words they put in children’s books.
Anyway, I guess seeing books reminded her that there is a library in our city, so she went there on one of her days off + got out some cook books.

Consequentially, she’s been baking a lot recently. It also happens that she’s much better at teaching me to make curry than at speaking Japanese. She even taught me how to make tofu, which is good, ‘cause I‘ve also learned a lot more about the problems with plastic packaging.

She came over and made Nan one night. Having watched her do it, I thought I would try to make it myself. It took up about 3 hours of my time - at least an hour trying to get the “dough” off of my hands and another hour trying to get the “dough” off of the counter, off of my clothes, out of the bowl, out of the sink, etc…

An interesting side note:
Before I tried making Nan, I had to stop at a store for the right kind of flower.
The Japanese word for “What?” just happens to be pronounced as: “Nan”,
so when I went to the store + asked which flower would be best for making Nan…. I was also asking:
Which flower would be best for making What.
So the lady said: “What What?”
I said: “What, ‘from India‘”.
She said: “What? India? What Indian food do you want to make?”.
I said: “the What, the bread that they eat in India” .
She said: “You want to make curry?”
I said: “Yes, but I want to make the what that they eat with the curry”.
+ she said: “Oh, you mean what!”,
but she still didn’t know what kind of flower I ought to use,
…maybe where I went wrong.

The lady who lives under my apartment is from the Philippines. The guy that lives a couple doors down from me is from Ghana. I bumped into him one winter afternoon, and he suggested we have dinner sometime. I doubted he was a vegan - some people apparently aren’t, so I invited him to come out drinking with me + a couple of my friends one night instead.

He called me that same evening and said he’d like to come, but we had a bad connection, + it was hard for us to hear each other. I was 2 cities down from where we live, so he said he’d call when he got there + we could sort out the directions then.

I heard nothing back from him until a couple hours later, when my friends were too drunk to continue, + we were all splitting up. It was actually right when I got to the train station that I got about 7 messages all at once from the guy from Ghana + from another friend I’d invited. My phone’s battery just then dropped from halfway full to nearly zero as I was reading, + he only seemed to say that he couldn’t get through to me and he was going to go home, so I just went home then too.

He called me at home a few weeks later (+ I hate telephones), so I walked over to his apartment. He gave me a beer before I could mention that I hate beer + asked me to come out drinking with him and the Philippino lady from downstairs, who was then doing his laundry.
I went home to shut my soup off. (I tossed most of the can of beer in, which helped the flavor somewhat.) I changed into clothes I wouldn’t mind stinking of smoke, + went back to meet them. His ex-girlfriend also happened to stop by for a chat then, so it took considerably longer for us to head out. When we did get to where we were going, the Philippino lady from downstairs, whose idea it was to go out drinking, suddenly remembered that she had to be at work in a few minutes. She asked to borrow money from the guy from Ghana and she ran off; He seemed frustrated - it being her idea that we all go out drinking, + his money. She said she could meet back up with us around 2am, which was only 7 hours away/ totally not going to happen, but we said okay. He took me to a little “Soul Bar” in our city. I had been in there for about 30 minutes and $30 about 5 years ago with some other friends. At that time there were 2 guys dancing in front of a mirror - intently watching themselves dancing in the mirror + a middle aged woman sitting on a couch eating potato chips/ Altogether not worth the $30 cover charge.

This time it was me, the guy from Ghana, a middle aged woman sitting on a couch, and her daughter. I hadn’t eaten any of the soup that I was just about finished cooking (when he 1st invited me out), so I had some potato chips and screw drivers to keep from fainting. He tried talking to her daughter, but she wasn’t having any of that. Her mom got up to dance a lot, and I like “soul” music, so I did the same. I didn’t try to dance with her, because she was too old, she was not a good dancer, and that’s reason enough really…
Hearing things in a noisy bar/ conversation in general is not my forte, but it seems it was not just coincidence that this same lady was at this same place 5 years later. She shouted to me later that she is there every night. I think someone who goes out dancing every night really ought to be a better dancer. Her daughter was also not much of a dancer, but she was thin + she had drank a lot, so she gave it her best effort. The guy from Ghana is a guy, so it makes no kind of difference how he dances. The only really important things he + I had to discuss all evening were: how weird it is to ask somebody to go out drinking then remember that you have to go to work at the last second, and that skinny girls aren’t all that appealing. She/ the daughter was the only young girl though, so he kept trying to talk to her, and she kept having none of it.

He was slightly peeved to begin with, + perhaps disappointed in the girls that were there/ not talking much to him, so he went home. A business man in his very late 60’s ( perhaps even in his late 70‘s)-with a good quality suit came in and got his “booty on the dance floor”. He was a better dancer than the girl or her mother. A couple guys came in with a young girl. The old guy in the suit, next: “busted some moves” with her,
Then he went to sleep on a table. That same girl tried to get one of the guys she came in with to dance with her, but he clung to his chair. I hate to see a young lady strain herself, so I held the chair as she pulled. This, somehow, resulted in that guy insisting on buying me lots of drinks I didn’t really want. I was just going to stick around until I finished off my last drink, but, hey, several more drinks… and I’m sorry to say, a drunk Japanese guy yelling drunk Japanese at me over loud funk music.
Some sexy looking girls turned up around then, but I have a girlfriend,
and more importantly, in this instance: I had to meet my girlfriend at 5am at the train station so we could go snowboarding with some of her old coworkers.

I went to sleep at 2:30ish. Had a bit of my soup before turning in, then, yeah. 5am wake up.
We got to some other station about 30 minutes later + met a guy who drove us up to meet the rest of the group. Unfortunately there had been a bit of snow while I was asleep, and the road was too frosty to drive as fast as we otherwise would have. We met the others at a rest stop about an hour late. They decided that we would go to a ski park near where my last house was. Also unfortunately their car couldn’t get up the road to the ski park, so we had to go to the little expensive one that is 5 minutes walk from Karuizawa station.

N’er have I been to a ski park as sucky as that one was. A lot of money for the lift ticket, and a 40 minute wait in line ( I timed it the 1st time we went through) to get on any of the lifts up the very little mountain. I saw people walking up the hill, sliding down the hill, then walking up the hill again, while we were still waiting in line. We went on a Sunday, so some people left a little before closing, to get back home + get ready for their jobs. The last 2 or 3 hours we were there weren’t so bad. Dancing, not sleeping, and waiting in long lines for ski lifts all morning made me unusually tired that evening though.
The people I was with had a “free lunch” included with their lift tickets. I knew they wouldn’t have anything for a vegan, the line for the only restaurant looked about an hour long, and Nagano is the only place you can get one of my favorite Japanese foods: Oyaki.
There was a huge shopping center right next to the ski-park (owned by the same company), and the 1st shop there had oyaki. It wasn’t very good, but it gave me an extra hour and a half of waiting to get on the lifts and I went down the hill 3 times before the rest of my group came out of the restaurant too.

I am not able to count all the very good reasons to be a vegetarian, let alone name them; There are more than several. When people ask me I can only mention 5 or 6, or 10 or 15…, without getting into the proper details. When PETA said they had pamphlets/ brochures for interested parties to hand out - I did volunteer.
If you didn’t know: Environmentalists and Animal Rights Activists are now considered “terrorists” by the Bush 2 “administration“, so it’s safe to assume that the NSA now knows not to go snowboarding in Karuizawa.
I never even did get those brochures, but I’ve been on the PETA Asia mailing list for a long time since. I got a message not too long ago asking for people who could speak Japanese to help them with their new Japanese anti-fur campaign, and again, I volunteered.

I didn’t know I would have to telephone Media-outlets (in Japanese) to be sure they got those pictures of that sexy naked girl who “preferred it to fur”. I hate telephones and I especially hate using them, but I do like animals, …and fair trade chocolate, and I like sexy naked girls, …and I like moss covered stones, and patchouli….

Anyway,
They gave me 3 numbers to call. I had my girlfriend tell me how to say things in Japanese like: “rights” (alla‘: “animal rights“), “organization“, “connect” (as in: “hook a brother up”). It took her a lot of thinking to come up with the right words.
I managed …not at all gracefully.
Somebody told me that their whole photo department was “off” that day. They added that there were only 2 people in the department, …so it might not have been just a polite way to hang up.
Perhaps getting a call from an Animal Rights organization would make a lot of people uneasy. Getting a call from someone obviously reading a script to you too! …Uneasy. Then when you factor in my funny American accent - assuming I have one, well I wouldn’t want to talk to me either - But I hate telephones + wouldn’t want to talk to anyone if I could help it.
A lady who answered one of the phones asked me who the e-mails were addressed to, so I told her how I was one of the few PETA volunteers who could manage to speak a little bit of Japanese, + somebody in another country had done the mailing. It turns out that she spoke very good English, + she went and asked the people in the photo department if they had gotten the photos of some sexy blonde lady naked in Tokyo. They had.
I saved Playboy Japan for last. The receptionist explained that the whole company was a photo department. That sounds like a good company - but they had the worst “on hold” music of the lot. The guy I got on the line after waiting seemed interested in seeing pictures of the world’s sexiest lady naked (because she doesn’t like fur) in Tokyo.

Naturally.

A year or 2 after I got here my mom sent me an e-mail about something or other and she mentioned that the girl who liked me all through elementary school had died. I wrote back to ask why, but never got the answer.
I asked a few people I grew up with, whenever I was back in the old country and able to ask, …but nobody ever knew.
I thought I let it drop, but:

I had a dream a few weeks ago that I was somewhere with people from my high-school that I was friendly with, sitting at a table, and talking. The girl that used to like me (who died somehow), came and sat down in the empty seat beside me. She looked at me quietly, but didn’t say anything. I said: “Hey, didn’t you die a while ago?” Her eyes got wider + she seemed to be thinking about it/ She still didn‘t make any sound. So I said: “You did die though, didn’t you?” She lowered her head a little and looked concerned. I’ve been curious about this for a few years, + I was excited; If anybody would know why it was said that she was dead, she would. I said: “Somebody told me you were dead.” . And all the color suddenly left her, she slid down in her chair, and her head went limp/ rolled. She laid corpselike for just a moment before I woke up.

I stay up late a lot. Like right now…
My girlfriend wondered if I had trouble sleeping.
I said I have to wake up and eat sometimes to keep my insulin from killing me (again). + I told her about that dream, how it woke me up, + she had trouble sleeping afterwards.

That was a dream though.

I would have had an extra day - to ease the transition between jobs/ place of residence, but we had that day switched to get an extra day off after the following weekend. My old roomate, the lesser of the remarkable filthy pair/ a good reason why I went off to live in the wilderness years ago…, he had made plans for a group of us to stay at an island near Tokyo. The group started off as a grand concept, but wound up being him and the girl he lives with, me and my girlfriend. That worked out well, because we all fit into one rental car when we got there.It wasn’t rainy then, but it was very cloudy and looked like rain all through ’til afternoon. We walked to the nearest beach after checking into our Inn. I swam around and looked at the fish, and painted 2 pictures while the other 3 slept on a blanket. I got very sunburnt, as did my old roomate. Those paintings came out pretty well. It was a bit overcast though, so the colors came out a bit darker than I would have liked. My back/ shoulders and such were also darker/ far more painful than I would ever want them to be.

I thought we’d all stay up late drinking, being that that’s what my old roomate does every night, and indeed we’d each bought a lot of drinks beforehand for that very same purpose, but after sleeping on the beach all day, the only thing the 3 of them wanted to do was go to sleep early.

The day after that we went to a pretty bay that had a boardwalk over some of the rocks. It had a bridge high between 2 groups of rocks, where many people go to swim and jump off the bridge. My old roomate found a baby sea-urchin and threw it to me so that I could see.

I ought to have known better than to try to catch anything he threw at me; It is now a month later and I still have red spots on my hand where the spines broke off under my skin.

While swimming I dove down a bit, and was pleased that I found some adult sea-urchins deep in the water there. They look all in all spinier than the babies.

They wanted to have a barbeque near another beach, which was more vegetable based than all the other barbeques we’d had up until then; I would call it progress,

…but it might’ve had more to do with the high cost of groceries on the island.

We got the fire going quickly. A teenage girl who was part of something that looked like a church group fainted nearby. They were standing out on the beach under the noon sun setting up tents. An ambulance came, though there couldn’t have been anything larger than a clinic on that island.

We stayed in the shade and started drinking the drinks then.

When we’d finished, I went down to he other side of the beach to paint a picture of a rock archway. Rock archways have always fascinated me. This one was cool/ the 1st I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. It was just at the edge of the road though, so I had to stand pretty close to it to be able to see it without obstruction. It was the 1st time I ever painted a picture drunk, but I don’t think you can tell.

They had planned to stop in a hotspring before dinner at the Inn, but they slept on the beach too long again to manage to spend any time there. It looked like a really cool - outdoor oceanview hotspring, …but I was too sunburnt to be able to enjoy hot water - and didn’t mind not being able to go then.

After dinner we went on a boatride to see glow in the dark plankton and flying fish.

I saw 1 flying fish, and I was the lucky one.

The plankton was super cool! They call them ocean fireflies; That’s what they looked like. We also got a rare view of the stars - away from the city and suburban lights. It would have been an ideal - romantic after dinner activity, except that the boat made me slightly sea-sick, and it made my girlfriend - very.

On the last day, we went back to the beach that they had slept on for the whole 1st day. My old roomate bought a spear to try spear fishing. He impaled a baby pufferfish, and one pretty yellow fish before a lifguard came by to tell him that spearfishing wasn’t allowed on that beach; Odd that they sell the spears right next to the beach then… Anyway, he spent about a half hour trying to get the yellow fish in the cooler without it bleeding on his last few cans of beer, but changed his mind, and let it back into the sea to bleed to death in dignity. Fugu/ pufferfish is of course poisionous, so he put that guy back into the water just after shoing everyone that he was able to spear a fish.

We took a taxi to the port on the other side of the island to get the boat back to Tokyo. We got there an hour early, so my old roomate slept more, the girl that he lives with sat on the beach next to the pier, my girlfriend watched me paint some/ answered a lifguard’s questions about me + my painting.

I was able to “finish” that painting in that time, because I was working fast, and because my girlfriend was talking to the lifguard on my behalf, but I had to leave the sky cloudless to get the rest in on time.

Everyone slept on the 3 hour boat ride back to the city, and I was amazed at how much all 3 of them slept all through that weekend.

I didn’t want to go straight from a nice pretty island to the endless concrete monoliths, so I proposed we all stop for dinner in Odaiba. The other 2 just went right home, but my girlfriend and I went, watched the drinking party boats, saw the fake statue of liberty, and went to an Italian buffet that had a view of the same.

The next weekend/ the last weekend I took everything else from my old apartment to my friend’s old apartment, …where I live now. I went to his farewell party and came back to Nagano to drop my old company’s car off.

The place they had me living when I 1st went to Nagano has a famous double waterfall which is impossibly difficult to get to. I’d always wanted to go there and paint a picture of it/ just go there somehow, but every atttempt I’d ever made was foiled.

The only thing I had with me on my last day in Nagano was my bag of paint/ easel/ etc..

It was raining and foggy then too though, so not only could I not paint a picture of the double waterfalls, I couldn’t even see them when I did finally make it there.

They sounded nice.

I got the car back to my old company in the evening, and by some coincidence, theye happened to be in the process of moving their office across the road (for half the rent). I gave them a hand for a little while, and then it was night, and they gave me a ride to a train station where I got a ticket all the way back to my new apartment.

While I was on the train, my new company called me a few times to give me information on where + how I should get to work on my 1st day (early the next morning).

My phone battery was weak, and getting weaker, and using a cell phone on a train is generally discouraged, so I said I’d call them back when I got off the Shinkansen.

But somewhere between Shinkansen ticket gates - my shinkansen tickets disappeared, so I had to explain this and that and the color of the hair of the man who sold me the ticket to the group of JR staff nearer to my destination. They said that they were allowed to charge me triple the total fare for not having a ticket, but they only re-charged me the cost of traveling down the last few stations.

My new company called again at 10pm, when I was finally on a local train towards my new city. They didn’t have anything especially interesting to say. I told them to go home, as it was 10pm.

I had to dig around for something to wear to work the next morning, I got to sleep really late, and I had to wake up early to make it there in time. I wasn’t looking forward to doing it, but it wasn’t so bad when it was all through.

I haven’t had much chance to write anything much lately.
You see, I used to be a person, and I used to accomplish things (…that never mattered),
but now I watch t.v.

On a couple of the days when my girldfriend and I went out hiking, we saw a man sitting in a car across from my apartment. When we came back he was still sitting there.
One day we were fixing up the paint on my girlfriend’s car, and we saw him drive away then come back after 20 minutes, and go back to sitting/ waiting in his car.
I suppose one thing I have done lately is solve that mystery.

, …he was looking at dirty magazines and smoking.

Another thing I have done recently is paint some of the prettier parts of my new area.
I used to paint more frequently, but my girlfriend has been visiting me on my days off, so I haven’t spent nearly as much time outdoors on my own as I used to.
It’s good for the most part.

One day that I did have off and alone, I went to a little pond at the top of a mountain. There was nobody at all around my house (except for this one guy smoking and reading porn in his car), but it was really pretty busy at the top of that mountain.
It was partly cloudy at my house, but almost exclusively cloudy at the top of the mountain.
It was warm when I left my house, but chilly that much higher up the mountain (more so, due to the clouds).
It was windy when I left my house, but it was windier at the top of the mountain; The pond was in a basin, which I thought safe from the biggest gusts of wind, …but no. (Of course the wind made it colder still.)

I hiked my way past a group of slower hikers. I put my easel at the back edge of the walkway that ran past the pond. My easel blew over twice while I was getting my paint out, so I used my jacket to tie it to a railing.
It was warm at my house, …I don’t know why I even brought a jacket, but man, …it would have been really nice to have been able to wear that jacket. It was so cold and windy that I had to give up on my painting (after more than 3 hours of sticking it out).

I painted a pair of better pictures on a far nicer day, by the river at the base of my town.
And I sat inside playing video games on a few of the rainy afternoons.

The nice lady who’s in charge of the Nagano branch of my company took me to the department of immigrations (in Nagano) to get my old visa transferred into my new passport.
The mirthless beaurocreat who did that wanted us to leave his counter as immediately as we could, so I stuffed my Foreign ID card into my passport. Later I came to wonder where my foreign ID card was. The last time I remember seeing my old passport, is when I went to get my new foreign ID card, …so I thought it would be funny if I lost that card in the act of getting my replacement passport re-validated.

I found it before too much worry came to me though.

When that was finished we tried taking the snow tires off of the car that they lend me.

That was when we discovered that there was/ and is no jack in my car.
We borrowed a jack from my supervisor’s car, and with a bit of kicking, we got one of the wheels off my car (and some dirt on me in the process). When we tried to change to the far more gas efficient “summer” tires that they saved for me to use, we discovered that they were actually “summer” tires for a large truck/ we couldn’t put them on my little car.

That wasted some time, but left a few hours to spare before I had to meet one of the teachers from my old school.

I went to some recycle shops - because I like recycling, …and everyone knows that I’m cheap.
I found a Nintendo 64 there for $8!

I went to a store which purportedly had used videos and video games for sale, but what the sign outside said, was not what was inside the store.
It was half comic books and action figures - and half porn movies. What a weird combination!
Great for unpopular teenage boys!

I met a teacher who isn`t at the all vegan restaraunt in Nagano, which was again - closed (for the 8th time?), so we went back to the nice little Indonesian place that can make vegetarian food if you ask them to.

I like that place too because: it is cheap, they can make vegetarian food, the food that they do make you is interesting, and they have statues of brightly colored frogs having wild, fun-looking sex. I like those statues, because sex is something that frogs, however brightly colored, can not do.
I tried explaining that to my friend, later to my girlfriend, but they are apparently not as widely versed in the mating practices of amphibians as I am.

I’m not sure if she or her fiance’ like frogs, but I bought my little sister a wedding gift there.

Also, having bought the Nintendo (to compete with my girlfriend), I found myself in need of a t.v.
When I got those two things squared away I tried a couple of games that I also got cheap.

An old man who hides in a small room with a cross in his hand and a cross on his back told me that there was a large dangerous man in the garden. I already knew about the large dangerous man in the garden, because he had already killed me 6 or 7 times. I wanted to know if there was any way I could avoid being killed by him, but the old man speaks in Chinese + Japanese script, + that was all I can understand.

At any rate, I was able to beat my girlfriend squarely any number of times. Then she got bored and decided that she wanted to watch t.v., so we went out to get a wire to plug the t.v. into the cable box.
And that’s when I started watching t.v.

T.V. has some very interesting “pseudo-educational” things to show to the people of Japan.

There was a show which tested whether a team of 4 celebrities could beat one very able elementary school student in a number of sporting events.
They lost every time.

There was a show which let celebrities bet whether the world’s top Women’s 110 meter hurdler could beat a specially trained border collie - in a hurdle race. {It seems to depend on the height of the hurdles and the number of times that they ran it.}

There was a show where average looking Japanese ladies (and a couple uglies) told a panel of celebrities how hard it is for them to be ugly all the time. Then a panel of “expert beauticians” looked over them one by one, and wrote out their ugly points on posterboard.

One lady had a nose which was a bit too wide, so they put her on a diet, changed her hair, bought her new clothes, and gave her a nosejob, and a boob job. They repeated this procedure for basically everyone (minus the nosejob), and they all came out looking like Michael Jackson.

He’s such a scary bastard!

Here’s a thing which has been “unsettling” to me recently:
Twice in the past week and a half, after I had been tossing and turning in my bed late at night, I seem to have fallen asleep very suddenly.
That part wouldn’t bother me, …indeed I would’t be able to take any notice of that - if it were not for me again returning to full consciousness - very quickly, hearing a sound, and seeing a middle large size black dog walk across my room to the outer wall - and disappear.

I don’t have any pets or irregularly shaped pillows which can move, so I don’t know what to make of this. It’s more of a curiosity than anything else though.
Here’s a thing which bothered me more:

There was another show where Japanese people wore silly clothes/ hats/ blonde wigs and big rubber noses to pretend to be from other countries. One of the Japanese people not pretending to be from another country put some different foods on a sushi conveyor belt to see if “the foreigners” could pick them up with chopsticks or not.

Everyone laughed when the man “from India” couldn’t pick up a peanut with his chopsticks. “Ha, Ha! Indians can’t use chopsticks!” They clapped and laughed

but it was really just a Japanese guy with a turbin and a big brown rubber nose pretending not to be Japanese.

Is there something here that I am misunderstanding?

Honestly! It irked me somewhat that none of the celebrities on the other show would cheer for the American woman.
3 of them sat polite and quiet, while the rest cheered for the border collie.

I don’t know if things would be different in a country like Sweeden.

The Sweedish are amazing! City busses that run on atmospherically friendlier ethanol and bio gas.
(Although I think the bio gas is made with chicken fat, …so I can’t say I’m really pleased with that… but) They have toilets with compartments (compartment number one and compartment number two - to correspond with, ahem: “number one” and “number two“.
- It saves water),
recycling bins that issue store credits, super heavy engine idling fines, etc.
Hooray Sweeden!!!!

The teachers at my school have a refrigerator that they keep a single jar of very old marmalade in. I’ve never seen anyone open the fridge to look for the much too old marmalade, but all the same: When I first switched it off, I had to explain my reasons for turning off an old, and very nearly empty fridge at least 4 times. 2 months later somebody switched it back on.
That’s funny, because there is a freezer fridge combo that is larger and just as empty downstairs.

Refrigerators use a lot of energy, and when the only thing that’s at stake is a single jar of marmalade that would be just as expired warm as it is cold, …I switch it back off.

I switched it off on Tuesday, after the ruckus on Monday that was caused upon discovering the fridge (then the floor) was a mess of cold water. I am left to think that somebody filled the fridge full of ice - over the weekend.

I try to be almost as energy efficient as I possibly can, …but the part of Japan that I live in is much too mountainy to get very far on a bicycle.
Most of the time I do use my bike to get to and from school, but it wears me out, and tends to rain on me at inconvenient times: yesterday, and twice today for example.

I got permission to leave school early to go and get more medical supplies.
I can’t just go out and buy insulin for some reason… There’s no cure, and it doesn’t fix its self,
but I still have to go see a doctor every month so that he can make absolutely certain that I’m still diabetic.

It started pouring just as I was getting ready to go, and it stopped pouring just after I got there.

I was only a little wet; I used an umbrella despite the lightening. I am happy that I haven’t learnt that lesson the hard way yet.

I was a little worried when going to the doctor’s, because the doctor that I went to after the hospital turned me away - called my old doctor in my old town to find out about me, and my old doctor sent him some information about the kind of drugs I was taking. That doctor then decided that it would be too much trouble for him to see me, and passed that file on to the nurse at my school, who sent it to my current doctor, before I could tell her not to, because it would be inconvenient for me to have to explain that the insulin the old doctor used to give me didn’t include the type I assured this most recent doctor he did.

Ordinarily I would say that lying is bad, but the insulin I duped this new doctor into prescribing for me is really good - quick acting! No more waiting 4 or 5 hours for breakfast!

I saw a specialist about 12 years ago and she said that I ought to get on that new kind of insulin right away. She was gonna’ prescribe it for me the next time I went - when she had my test results back, but in that short stretch of time our insurance company/ policy changed, she became far too expensive, and all the other doctors I’ve seen have been very unimaginative./ afraid to maybe have to take some responsibility/ or any more risk.

This guy seemed not to want to bring up the point of me having him refill a prescription that I’d never had in the 1st place. I like that. His nurses are afraid of me. That’s typical; There’s no telling what a clearly non-Japanese guy like me might do next.

What I did next:
I went home. What kind of dumb ass would go back to work with just an hour left til closing and the sun shining.
I might’ve mentioned that it’s a long + somewhat difficult climb up to my apartment from the center of town…

I completed that climb - and my building was in sight when I got a call from my school. They said that someone had a question about a class for tomorrow. I’m sure I didn’t have to go alllllll the way back down the hill again, …but that’s what happened.
It also started raining again then. I didn’t mind it so much that time, because I had climbed all the way up, and I was pretty hot.

What I did mind was that the teacher that had the question wasn’t around, and when I did find him - he asked me to wait in the room they keep me in. And after I waited, the question that he had for me was: “What are we going to do tomorrow?”

That I had written + illustrated + put on his desk long before I went to the doctors. He went away and got it, looked at it, and said okay and I left again, and rode my bike all the way back up that bastard of a hill again.
We wound up not having time to do anymore than 5 mintues of the 30 minute thing he had me prepare anyhow.

He was the one who was good enough to give me half a day’s leave to go to Nagano city, to visit the immigration office, to get my replacement passport - replacement stamped.
If he was able to speak English better he might’ve said “but be here all the earlier the next day” - much like Ebaneezer Scrooge (and Scrooge MacDuck) had said.
The lady at my company who asked him if I could be excused was suprised that I got half of that day off, because there was absolutely no work for me to do on that day, and no good could be accomplished by keeping me there for the other half of the day.
For some reason I did make some papers that the kids could maybe work on in an upcoming class, and of course we’ve never used them either.

I think maybe everyone has to deal with little pesky inconveniences like that, but I have a friend who gets paid almost as much money as me, and he only works a few hours a day. Mind you I only work a few hours a day, but I have to remain on school grounds for 9 hours a day. He leaves his house around 10am and gets home at 4:30. He also says that he can wear whatever he feels like wearing, doesn’t have to sit at his desk for 9 hours for no reason on Christmas day, etc.
He’s leaving and he wants me to take over his job when he does.

I mentioned this to the people at my company who were responsible for only paying me $500 some odd dollars for all of March, … and they thought about it for a long time and said that they’d give me another $400 some odd dollars to not defect.

I’m kind of sick of moving so often, and I don’t really like where I would be moving to, …although it is in the same city that my girlfriend is in.
But I’m not terribly fond of having a stern old man who speaks very little English keep a close disapproving watch over me; Although one day he was checking up on me, very sternly, with chocolate around his mouth, and I couldn’t help but feel a little giggly.
He’s really not such a bad guy, he just tries to assert his “in charge of me status”, and I expect having to stay at school for 12/13 hours a day wears him out somewhat.

The kids here are known far and away for their “non-studiousness”. Not one minute ago, one of them was laying on the couch by the window, beating himself about the head with a squeaky rubber hammer which my predecessor left behind. I was happy that he seems to have wandered off with it, but some other kid has since been wandering in and out of here – singing like a drunken salaryman.

The 1st wanders back in and asks me where the other guy is.
“The guy who is singing down the hall?”, I ask.
That guy wanders back in and gets beat on the head with the squeaky hammer.
They wander off (for a longer period of time – I hope).
I hear a squeak of a rubber hammer, and a familiar teacher`s voice saying: “Owch! …Hurts!”

About an hour ago 3 of them were sleeping on the couch and on chairs they borrowed from various desks, while another was rifling through everyone`s stuff.
2 more came in and disrupted everyone – as there were no more prime spots for sleeping.

The fashion here is to wear a certain style of belt, with your pants around the middle of your thighs. It`s a hoot to see them all trying to chase each other down the hall.

I’ve always had a pretty poor impression of coorporations, and I know that’s not singular to me.  Loads of people probably resent the idea (and the practice) of having to wear clunky shoes - and a suit that makes moving your arms constraining.  Why do we all have to waste the better parts of the day indoors - hustling forms?  Working for a coorporation on the other side of the Earth can push the issue of desk work out of the forefront of the mind, …but I do work for a corpooration.   What I used to like about this corpooration, was that they mostly forgot about me.  I did my job, and they never had reason to show any concern but, … This corpooration has recently tripled the number of its middle managers. A metaphor that  approximates the situation:      ” Fat kids (crowding) around a pizza’.” I skipped a part of my company training and I’m glad that I did.I console myself with the thought that there is a reason for everything that I do, and finding that there was no reason for me to go to training - I didn’t. Now these (metaphorically) chubby chocolateers are waddling their way around me. A metaphor that better approximates the situation: “Fat kids crowd around a pinata’.” 

The nice lady from the Nagano branch of my company said that the head office was trying to call me on Friday and Saturday nights. Why would you call a guy on a Friday or a Saturday night? I’m glad that they never got through. Some guy called looking for: 佐藤　愛/ Ai Sato.  I might’ve assumed too much from that call; It could have been a wrong number, but Japanese girls are known to give people alternate phone numbers rather than simply rejecting a fellow.  He sounded really disappointed that I didn’t know Ai Sato. My company might have my number from 2 years ago, but I’m not sure… There were all kinds of rumors going around that my company would soon be bankrupt.  Those rumors might’ve just been a tactic to get people to defect to other companies.  I never actually heard any of the rumors form anyone other than a friend of mine who did switch companies said it was so. Perhaps they really can’t afford to call me… 

 They told the head of the Nagano branch to ask me to call the main office between 6 and 7pm.  I have the kind of cell phone service plan that costs me a whole lot of money if I make any call over a couple of minutes.  I’m also a cheap-ass.  If I have to talk to idiots I would like it to be on their dime/ and during working hours, but I did call them. In the interests of berevity I called them several minutes before 7, but I got a message saying that that isn’t a real phone number.  It was 2 years ago that I last used that number…  Maybe they change them periodically so that their employees will unwittingly answer - not knowing who it is.   That happened a number of times a number of years ago - Oh Man! I hate when you’re relaxing at home and you answer the phone, and it’s some clueless supervisor! The 1st company that I worked for in Japan didn’t get my number for the first 3 months.  I thought I did well with that.  The cool guy that worked there asked if he could have it, and I forgot to specify that he ought not give it out, ..but once he had it, people from all over Saitama were calling me asking me to forsake my few days off for extra work. If insulin grew on trees I would not need to work for a corpooration/ participate in Society like I do now; I doubt I would.   I have come to like my new city better anyway -  Better than the unending concrete of Saitama. - Not quite as well as my last city, …but it is catching up.    When my girlfriend came over the holidays we drove to the  park near the top of the volcano and went hiking 3 times.  The last day we thought we heard a bear, …but it didn’t really sound so much like a bear…  She got the idea that the volcano was stirring, which felt right to me, but how would I know.There are no volcanos in New Jersey. We played frisbee with little kids another time. We went to the orange water hotspring halfway up the volcano another time.  That was neat.  You get in the nice hot orange water, and your skin turns orange. There was a cheerleader with orange skin in New Jersey, we called her; “the orange cheerleader”, but  she used funny tanning lotions - not Iron enriched volcanically heated water. 

 I dug my old glow in the dark Spiderman underpants out of  the closet to wear to the movies (under my pants though/ underpants) (It was Spiderman 3 of course). She liked it too  …the movie more than my underpants. Before she came I went to a hospital and another doctor’s office.People don’t go to doctor’s offices like they do in America;  When they have a snuffly nose they go to the hospital.     I went to the hospital, and I went to the counter that said 1st time patients, and I said “Hello this is my first time.” and “Could I please see a doctor to get my prescription refilled”.  I said that 1st bit, and that other bit both - in Japanese.  The Japanese woman behind the counter laughed and said - in Japanese: “You don’t speak any Japanese at all do you?!!!”  I replied along the lines of: “What language do you suppose I’ve been speaking?!” - only I said it slightly more politely (and in Japanese).  She looked “unhappy” to hear me say this.  I said again, in Japanese, again,; “This       is   my   1st    time   at   this   hospital.”      “I   need    to   get   a   prescription   refilled.  What do I need to do to see a doctor”.    Then she said, in a tentative beaurocratic way:  “Well, …this hospital doesn’t have any doctors.” I left and went to the clinic that the nurse at my school recomended.  It was farther away, a lot smaller, kinda’ hard to find, and probably really only for children.  There were toys on the shelves and puppets hanging from the ceiling.  There were 2 toddlers in a crib, and 5 or 6 mothers reading story books to 7 or 8 children (with snuffly noses).  I got through about 2 pages of “My Neighbor Totoro” before they called me in.  The doctor said that the nurse of my school had mentioned that I might be coming, but he wasn’t sure what I needed.  “Insulin” I said.             (All of this conversation took place in Japanese as well, but he wasn’t a d*^@$ead.)  He was reluctant to prescribe a lot of insulin/ syringes without seeing some of my medical history.  I gave him the number to the clinic I used to go to in my old city, but they had already closed for the holidays.  A nurse that worked for him called a couple other hospitals/ clinics looking to see if there wasn’t someplace which could do the necessary (unnecessary from my perspective) blood tests before prescribing me any insulin.  One hospital said that they would see me, This was of course the hospital where that daft *&^% said there were no doctors.  I told the nurse that I had already gone there, so she called back and looked a little confused when she told me that she spoke to a lady who said that some man had come in over an hour ago talking crazy. When I do take it upon myself to speak, very few people ever have trouble understanding me, but some imbiciles see that a person is not Japanese and can’t be swayed of the opinion that only Japanese people can speak Japanese.  (This is will repeat - It alarms me.) Sometimes you can speak with someone in Japanese for ten or twenty minutes …and then they ask you if you can speak Japanese. Sometimes you have dinner with someone, and they ask you at the end if you can use chopsticks. I’ve been here a long time, and I believe I’ve put up with a LOT of crap,  

I love my girlfriend, the scenery (away from the cities) is good, and I like the low cost tofu, but a person can only be asked whether he knows how to bow so many times a day before he becomes reluctant to communicate with anyone new.(Bend at the waist - Yes?) I was at that clinic from about 3:45 to 6:30, because that nurse had borrowed my blood monitor kit to call other clinics and ask them if they knew about it/ used the same kind.  I would think a lot of them were closing at that time, …and indeed - some of them were likely afraid to agree to admit anyone who wasn’t Japanese.  I would have just gone home, but she had the last of my test strips and she just kept telephoning. I told my girlfriend all of that when she arrived the next day.  I told her about the lady at the 1st hospital and she said: “F*&% that B*%*!”  (She studied English in Australia, so she knows how to communicate. I’m proud of her.) The next Monday I went to another clinic.  Some nurse interviewed me - in Japanese - again with no problem.    Then I talked to a doctor.  Then they took blood and made me pee in a cup.  Then I had to talk to the doctor again and he said that my pee was good, but my blood was a little high.  I told him that I ran out of my other kind of insulin - the kind I’ve been asking doctors to prescribe to me for 8 years, but they never have;  They always say my blood isn’t very good, but they’re generally content that I haven’t died or gone blind yet.  But I have died, and on some occassions I do go blind. After talking to another nurse for another 20 minutes about how much of everything I would need month by month, I waited a long time to be called up for my turn to pay and finally got to leave!  I’ve been asking for that fast acting insulin for sooooo long!! No one ever wanted to risk putting me on it.   I just told all those new nurses and the new Doctor at my new clinic that I used to use it, but ran out, so they prescribed me “more”.   Then I went to the pharmacy where they didn’t have my usual insulin - just the fast acting stuff (which I did get for the first time finally!). 

The people at the pharmacy explained in Japanese that they would have to have my usual insulin delivered - within 2 days at the very latest.  (They said the number 2 in English - many many times for some reason (probably because I am not Japanese, and although I understood the greater part of everything else that they said in Japanese, they were happy that they knew how to say “2″ in English.  Maybe they wanted to show off)). I was not impressed for 2 reasons: There’s nothing impressive about that +It took 4 days. My girlfriend went to a pair of weddings over the weekend.  I guess you don’t bring a date to weddings in Japan;  I wouldn’t have wanted to fly to Kyushu for one night anyhow.  She wrote to say that she caught the bouquet, which made me nervous.  I went painting near the orange water onsen we went to the week before.  There had been buds on a tree right near the orange river.  I thought they would be in full bloom ( a little over a week later), but they were only just starting to open.  At any rate that painting turned out pretty well.   I wasn’t able to finish the other picture that I started.  I might have - there seemed to be just enough daylight left, but 2 people came down the hiking path well over an hour after anyone else.  They asked me where they were - It was not where they wanted to be.  I found myself driving them (about 30 minutes) to the station in my city.  (It was about 15 minutes to the nearest bus stop, but if this city is like any other place I’ve lived before, there would only be around 3 or 4 busses a day.)   They asked me if I spoke Japanese, and I said that I was able to, but rarely ever bothered to say very much.  The girl seemed really suprised to hear me say that; It turns out that she’s only been here for a few months.     You could talk to a group of Japanese people for hours/ days/ or longer and never shake some of them of the presumption that Americans can never speak Japanese.  (This I have repeated. - It alarms me.) What I told her is that there just isn’t much that I want to say. What I didn’t tell her was that: I only ever ask a question - if I can not get the answer on my own.   There was a yellow tubelike thing near my seat in the teacher’s room.  At the next week’s teachers’ meeting I picked it up and saw that it had my name on it.  What could it be? There was a cylinder inside of it, which had an opening at one end with a hole cut into the side - giving it the appearance of a whistle.  I forgot that I was in a teachers’ meeting and tried to get the whistle looking thing to produce a sound …to no avail (for the best I suppose).  I put it in my pocket to ask Ms. M.  Ms. M would know what it was.  I asked Ms. M, and Ms. M knew what it was.  She told me that it is a thing which is used to collect pee …so the doctors can check it.  I told her I had thought it was a whistle.  She said it was funny watching me blow into it during the teachers’ meeting, but that is was okay, because they probably don’t recycle them. I am an advocate of recycling - whenever possible, with, possibly, this exception. 

http://www.youtube.com/v/1b8ng1-Oa4c

I had this long long  meandering story about me being moved to a little Ho-dink town in the mountains.  It was pages and pages long + for the most part very amusing, …if unfortunate. 

  It’s still too soon to tell if this will be an adequate sequel. 

If I had known that that one dumb-ass would get me transferred, I wouldn’t have wasted so much of my time doing my work as well as I did,

and I did do it well.

Indeed,  If some of the many disappointed people here knew who she was, she would likely come to prefer being transferred herself.

At any rate, as much as I did like Suzaka, I never intended to stay forever;

A little longer might’ve been nice, but “someplace else” has its appeals as well.

   The principle at the one school I worked for always seemed really stern, and I was most often too reluctant to try to say anything to him, but he made the nicest going away speech for me in front of the whole school.  

A girl I helped with the speech contest there got on the stage after him and also made a speech for me in front of the whole school;

 I didn’t help her with that speech,

but she did a very good job of it and gave me a big bouquet of flowers that I would love to have more time to try and paint a picture of, but I find myself having to tie up loose ends/ pack up all my stuff instead.

 The principle at the other school always seemed to be a little afraid of me, and that didn’t change very much to be honest, but he also gave me a quick going away speech and managed to “plug” my website several times. 

   They let me out of that school for about 3 hours that afternoon.   I went to file a report with the police for the passport that I’m still missing.  

  I don’t know why the American Embassy requires an official “missing article” police report to apply for a new passport.

 I don’t know why they would need to know an exact time of day that a missing article went missing (in the report)  - If you knew exactly when something disappeared you would likely know how/ perhaps where it disappeared to.

  I also don’t know why you would have to go to a different police station to get a copy of the same “missing article report”  that they write right in front of you at the first police station.

I don’t know why the one policeman that drew/ gave me a map to the other police station pointed in the wrong direction when explaining the map.

I didn’t / don’t know a lot of Japanese words: “Embassy“,  “official report“, and “primary police station”,  but I do know how to say “erotic fantasy” …

   Mine is Nurses!

  I got back to that other school just in time for all the teachers there to applaud and give me a nice little clock for all the work I did there. 

  They told me exactly what time I had to come back and said that they were planning something…

 I think it would have been funny if I showed up late and said it due to my not having any idea what time it was.

Despite what I consider a staggering cost, I had agreed to go to the other school’s end of the year finale’ because my favorite teacher told me he would be leaving it.

  As it turns out, I had to leave too, so I got one of the special seats at the front of the room with all the other transferees, and there were loads more speeches about the lot of us.

   I didn’t understand most of them, but I wasn‘t trying too hard to listen to most of them,

 most of mine included.

   We stayed up only slightly late, but woke up more than just a little too early (in my opinion).  We got a bus back to town.  I walked home from school and tried my best to stay awake until it was time to go and get my girlfriend from the station. 

She had been in Australia for a month.

We had planned to use my spring vacation/ the time before she got a new job at a new pharmacy  - to take a little trip somewhere in Japan.

I would have liked to have gone to the Grand Canyon, but I can’t go home without my passport, and my passport is still not anywhere it should be/ lost!

As I would, by all reckoning,  have to leave Nagano in the near future, we decided that it would be better to try and do all the cool things a person in Nagano can do, in Nagano, while we were …still in Nagano.

The first night that she came we finally made it to the all vegetarian restaurant in Nagano.

The 1^st time I tried to go there - I got lost.

The 2^nd time I tried to go there - they were closed.

The 3^rd time I tried to go there - I arrived 2 minutes before closing (which they thought inadequate).

The 4^th time I tried to go there - the girl I was with didn’t want to (she said it was because the ice cream there was really bad, which seemed an odd reason not to go - She didn’t order any Ice-cream where we did end up after all).

The 5^th time was Fantastic!!!! 

Well, absolutely adequate, but entirely vegetarian anything is exceptionally nice as far as I am concerned.

 People who aren’t vegetarian often wonder what it is that we vegetarians eat, and the definitive answer that I have come to is:

 Food.

Most vegetarian places use wheat or soy based proteins, as well as mixtures of different vegetables.  This place used millet seed in a lot of their dishes.  I liked it, she liked it - we were both surprised to see that  they even had ice cream that was made without any milk or eggs! (Scream)  Actually, everything except for that was really good; That was, in truth (like the other girl had warned me long long ago) decidedly: Un-good.  I would like to be able to go again.

The next day my girlfriend and I were going to go snowboarding at the super cool place I went the last time, …but she and I have this waking up early disability, and consequentially we didn’t make it out of my house until 3pm.

I had always wanted to take a bath with wild monkeys, but it turns out that you can’t do that.

I’ve also always wanted to do anything with several sexy - scantly clad Nurses,

 …perhaps if I took an ad out?

Anyway,  there’s a place not too far off where you can go watch wild monkeys forage in the snow and warm up in the open hot springs, but it closes at 5pm.

  We got there well before 5, but it turns out that that place closes at 3pm on Sundays.

There were still plenty of monkeys running around and digging in the snow, but the park staff had cut off the hot water flow to their pool, so they were no longer interested in splashing around in it.   As cool as it would have been to see them all wearing shower caps and touting “soap on a rope”, I still got to see a whole mess of monkeys without having to pay the entrance fee, so I wasn’t at all upset.

The next day we drove to a castle a little over an hour away.  Castles, I’m told, are always cold.  This castle was very nice, but it was winter, and it was cold.   This castle had no heat.  It had lots and lots of open gun and arrow holes as well as large panoramic openings in the upper floors, and no glass to cover any of these openings.  You also had to take your shoes off when you went in, so it was really chilly.

We thought we’d save ourselves the toll money by not taking the expressway back, which would have been fine if I hadn’t also decided to save myself the $20 cost of  a book of maps that had more than half the roads printed in it.  I bought a map for 100 yen - less than a dollar, that did get us home - eventually.

The next day we went to an indoor hot spring with a pool/ hot tub and a waterslide.  I raced a couple of kids up the steps to the slide 3 or 4 times, but then they got tired of it.

   Later, the English teachers from one of my old schools had a little end of the year English party.   2 of them picked us up in a car and took us there.  5 minutes before they arrived I got an e-mail from my company telling me to be ready to go for an interview in a placed called Maebashi, …which I had heard of, but knew nothing  about.  I was just about to ask the 3 of them (the English teachers and my girlfriend) what Maebashi was like, when I got a phone call from my company telling me to be ready for an interview on Thursday in a place called Komoro.  I had never “heard“ of Komoro, but I remember seeing the name on many of the signs we passed in the road while we were lost the night before.

  The party was good, except that I could hardly hear anything out of one ear the whole time ( + the next day. ( I think I got water in there one of the many times I went down the waterslide).)

 I made due with my usual “dining out in Japan” fare of:

 French Fries,

 “salad with no bacon bits please”,

 and “Tofu with no fish flakes on top please”. 

Oh, and lots of Booze.

Can’t forget the booze…

They gave me a funny paperclip dispenser, and a little egg shaped refrigerator basket magnet.  I understand the paperclip dispenser - because it’s a funny paperclip dispenser.   The basket magnet seemed too small to put anything in at first, so I had to think about it, and I informed them not too too long after that it would be perfect for me to store syringes in.

  The English teacher I once tried to take to the all vegetarian restaurant in Nagano showed up and gave me a little bouquet of flowers.  She’s engaged now it seems, which is nice to know.  A woman I had never met before also turned up with a little bouquet of flowers for me.  I think she was transferred into my old school to replace one of the English teachers transferred out.  My replacement was decided when it was decided to replace me and his vacancy will in turn be replaced with someone as yet unknown.   ….maybe Greg?

(He’s a guy I met later.)

  My most immediate replacement was also good enough to drive my girlfriend and I home …’cause he didn’t have any of the booze.

 The booze…

 The booze!

The next day we woke up Early!

Then we went back to sleep a few times, but did at least manage to make it to the ski park before 2pm.  We got to go down the old “Olympic Course”.

I did it in “non-Olympic time”!

 There was also this one super steep hill that I went down head first on my back, and when I was finally able to stand up again at the bottom of the hill, my jacket was full of snow.

We went to an onsen (/volcanic water bath) after that.

Sometimes little kids go in those with their parents,

sometimes really young girls go in the men’s bath with their fathers,

….for some reason a girl that I had taught, that had just graduated the 6^th grade was in the men’s locker room with her father, and was clearly - if not intently, watching me undress. 

  She wanted to be sure that I would be one of her English teachers the next year, so she came over to ask, and I had to explain nakedly/ ackwardly that I was supposed to have been, but that someone had decided to replace me.  Every bit of that was uncomfortable.

My girlfriend and I were supposed to go to some shopping outlet the next day/ Thursday, but I’d been scheduled to attend an interview in a town we had gotten lost in the vicinity of  3 days before.  As the town was fairly close to the shopping outlet, and as interviews of this kind never take more than a few minutes, we decided to drive down there together so that I could take her shopping as soon as it was over.

  The interview was scheduled for 3pm, so my company asked me to meet some of their representatives there at 12 to pick out an apartment nearby in case I did get the job. 

That killed a little time….

 We went into the Board of Education at 3pm, and some nervous looking guy stepped out to say that they were having a meeting/ couldn’t meet with us then.

 I was told not to go too far away, as they’d call us back within an hour (or 2), so my girlfriend and I wandered around the center of that city for an hour - We got extravagantly bored, and waited in the car for another hour - Then we got a call from the other people at the company, who were also  deathly bored of waiting around in that city, so we all got together to wait around some more (in a supermarket lounge.  Nearly 2 and a half hours later/ Late Greg and I were called in for a him or me - both together - choose one - 15 minute interview.

   Neither of us had any interest in that city at that point I dare say, so it’s fair to say that he was the lucky one. 

The more and more I think about it actually, the luckier he seems.  Lord knows I put no effort into making myself seem any more charming.  They asked me how I felt at school when I was young, and I really had to think hard to come up with anything other than “sleepy”.  I was prompted for an answer, so I said that my brother went to the same school as me, and he used to beat me up a lot.  They asked me if I had any friends that did drugs and I said that I didn’t.  They seemed to like that answer, so I thought I better strike down my bonus points and point out that it was more because they usually seemed inclined to beat me up too.

They asked me what kinds of things - other than English I could teach the kids in their city. 

In the past I have taught kids different ways to rudely arouse sleeping classmates, how to give/ get out of strangle holds, …  I wanted to say that I could teach everyone how to make a really fantastic salad - because one rude old bastard told everyone there that vegetarians like me have a “weird religion”, and he “didn’t want me teaching it to the kids”, but after a wee bit of thought I just said “art”.

I wore sneakers with my wrinkled $30 suit, but nobody noticed either.  I spoke Japanese better than Greg, I’m afraid and they did notice that, and I got stuck with the job. 

3 cheers for Komoro(!!!!),  later, …when I leave it.

My girlfriend was kind enough to wait in the car for those 20 minutes (the whole interview + walking time).   She would have waited in a café or anywhere, but we had already walked around the city and found no cafés or anything of any value to do, so she just fell asleep in the car.  I had to wake her up and give her the bad news.

We finally got to the shopping center that she likes just as they were closing up the last few shops.  I don’t mind not going shopping at all, but she waited around politely all day just to do that and in the end we couldn‘t even find an open restaurant, so she just took a train back home and I drove a little over 2 hours back to mine.

 I brought the car I borrowed back to my company the next day.  It’s cheaper than parking it in my town/ my old town.  While I was there we discussed: my new contract, some training thing I’m supposed to go to over the weekend, how we ought to go about moving me, … We got it all settled nice and neat, but they never received my new contract by fax from the head office, the dates of the training changed, and the  truck they thought they had free wasn’t…

I made a mental list of places I’d like to paint pictures of while I am here/ able to.  I went out on Saturday morning and it looked like a real bad rain was coming, so I stayed in for a few hours: straightening things up/ waiting for it to rain.  After about 3 hours I decided to just go outside and give painting a try.  About a quarter of a mile from my building it started to rain. 

As I was walking back, I remembered making a mental list of places to paint pictures of on rainy days.   It was never a very long list; It was 1 place.  I wound up painting the eves of an old fashioned house from the inside of my building’s parking garage.  I would be moving within a week, so I used acrylic paint, which dries quickly, instead of oil paint, which can take a month or more to dry - depending on how it’s used.  I’m not nearly as fond of acrylic paint, but that picture came out pretty well.  I came in quite cold.

On Sunday it rained all afternoon, so I continued cleaning up my apartment/ getting ready to move.  In the evening I met the Hawaiian guy who worked at all the schools in my town that I didn’t (who is replacing me at some), and an elementary school teacher that I liked, who I threw many snowballs at a few weeks earlier. 

They asked me where I’d like to have dinner, and I,

of course,

Said: the all vegetarian restaurant in Nagano.

The 6^th time I tried to go there, it was - again - closed.

But the Hawaiian guy knew of a cool cheap little Tai/Indonesian place not far off, where they can make things without meat.  That was Great!  + Cheap! + in my case Vegetarian!

On the way back we stopped at a bar where the owner would play songs on his guitar for you to sing along  to.  Me and the vodka I made friends with decided to try and sing a song my parents used to have a record/ LP of in our house when I was 10.  I’m not sure if the owner had ever even heard the song , but it did, in the end, …finally end.

  That was fun anyway., and luckily we were the only people in there.

On Monday the nice manager lady of the Nagano branch of my company and I drove another hour down and one back to look at one more apartment in the city I have to move to.   I would have liked to have looked at more, but that’s the one I’ll be living in now. 

 We saw 3 on the day of the interview:

one was expensive,  and right next to the train tracks

one was expensive, old, yellow from tobacco , the shower had something that looked like a diesel engine attached to it, and it was sticky in places

one was more expensive, nice, but a long long way from where I would have to work.

The one I’ve wound up in isn’t as nice in the inside as that last one, but it’s closer , cheaper, and has the best view.

I spent the next 2 days painting as much of Suzaka as I could, …while it was still nearby.

This one older fellow saw me painting some old buildings, and he told me something like his brother owns them.  He walked by and invited me in for tea every 45 minutes or so, but he drove away on an errand just as I was finally finishing up.

I also met the friendly guy who runs the popular grilled meat shop near my old town.  He took pictures of me and put them up on his website. 

2 days later, I had to go say hello to the principle of my new school, so the “nice manager lady of the Nagano branch of my company”  came by in her car, which we packed  up with some of the small things that would fit inside, and drove all the way down to Komoro again.

When we got to that school the principle confessed that the first day of school would be:

 his last day (making a trip down there to meet him - Unnecessary).

 He also informed us that the first day was several days earlier than the board of Education had told us.

I was supposed to have until Thursday/ 1 week  to move into my new apartment and visit the American Embassy in far off Tokyo (to swear before an officer that I am an American, and try to get all the paperwork for my replacement passport submitted), now I have until Sunday but….

The Training thing the head of my company had planned for Friday/ Saturday also got switched to Saturday/ Sunday, so I’ll have no days off before starting work in a new city, and my plans to rendezvous with my girlfriend for a day or 2 while in her area are similarly canceled.

Just to give you the feeling - I will say:

In Japan there are soooo many vending machines!  They say it’s very convenient because you never have to walk more than a hundred yards to buy a drink. 

As sinks are also commonplace, I don’t see any great benefit to them, but people like to walk up to vending machines, and look through the plastic window at all the cans they can buy.

I’ve been telling people that this new city I have to move to is really dumpy, but I don’t think they understand.

 On the way to my new apartment I saw a vending machine and looked through the plastic window, and saw  that is filled with old cans.  How old?

 All of them are at least half orange with rust.  - Komoro.

When we got to my apartment we swept up all the emaciated dried up fly carcasses from the more than 1 year since anyone had lived there.

    I wondered whether the last fly “went crazy”: before eating the remains of his fallen comrades/ or after that last ditch survival trick had finally run out.

I didn’t yet have any city sanctified garbage bags to dispose of the remains, so I just swept them into a paper bag at hand.

I found out later that there are 8  kinds of garbage here with special times/ places and strict rules regarding the disposal of each.

If/ when I do ever find time enough to do so I will have to look up “dried up bug exoskeletons” in my city garbage dictionary to check their “proper disposal procedure”, or I’ll just have to fill my pockets with dead flies and make sure no one is looking when I take a walk.

 I tried out the toilet in my apartment and noticed for the 1^st time that it wasn’t a regular toilet.  It has a flap at the bottom where the water should be.  When you “flush”, the flap goes down, and it makes a noise that makes me think that water would drip down to rinse it off - if I had any water service connected there yet.

I would have stayed the night there, but  my nice supervisor friend from the Nagano branch of my company said we could load his much bigger car up with some more of my stuff and drop it off there on our way to our company training thing over the weekend, + I would need to be at the older apartment to facilitate that.

Then he called me the next afternoon to say that the training was canceled, …which is great, except that I still had to do a mock training with him that night, and no longer had any way to move anything larger than a large suitcase to my new apartment.

I always find it fascinating how quickly and entirely the information I am given changes.

I wasn’t sure how the manager lady would arrive that Thursday morning, so I packed everything securely away in boxes before she arrived.  Then I waited around all the next day, and the next day (with everything all ready to go/ inaccessible.  Waiting and waiting for days is nicer when you have something to play with.

I couldn’t cook without any pots/ pans, so I went to the little bar where they were always nice (in a weird way) to me - for the last night.  I had one of the 2 things on their menu that they could alter for me to be able to eat and I told them I wouldn’t be coming back.

I should have been gone before the next night, but instead I found myself buying a package of friend beans, and opening up the box I had packed my kettle in - so I could heat up a cup of vegetarian spinach soup.

The next day was the last day I had off before starting work.  I called my manager to ask if they’d come up with a way for me to move yet, but he didn’t answer his phone.

 He didn’t answer an hour later.

+  He said he would check with the other lady and call me back the next time I called, but he didn’t call back, so I called another time and at around 2pm I roused him from his hangover to get the company’s little dirty spare car.

I put my mini-fridge, work clothes, microwave, and heater inside and finally got on my way.

About 5 minutes from my old apartment I noticed that the kerosene from my ever problematic kerosene heater was toxifying the car, so I rolled down the window.

I got to my new apartment and unpacked the car.  Kerosene and soy sauce were all over the back of the car.  I managed to get to the home center before dark - a good thing because:

I was busy,

There were no light bulbs in my new apartment,

 I got dizzy from sitting in the car for more than 1 minute.

 I asked them if they had anything  which could clean a car full of spilt kerosene.

I speak Japanese well enough to explain most of my problems, but I always have trouble getting people to believe that these things really happen. 

 Apparently no one else has ever spilt a lot of kerosene inside of their subcompact car.

Hooray Me!

Work - the 1^st day was just me not listening to a lot of explanations that I also would not have listened to - were they in English.

I had 1 hour to go home and change before the school staff party: “to celebrate the beginning of the new school year”.  The “nice manager of the branch of my company lady” and a nice guy from another venture business of hers came by in the last few minutes of that hour in the truck that was free that afternoon with the rest of my stuff.

I got a ride to the party where the guy in charge said that they didn’t know what I would be able to eat, so I would just have to order something.  I tried to order something off of a waitress, but she said that she could only take orders from the guy in charge of the party.  I told this to the guy in charge of the party.  He asked me what I wanted.  I told him.  He said alright, just order that.  I told him that I was told that I wasn’t allowed to order anything.  A committee was formed to explore the problem of:

 the waitresses not being able to wait on anyone but the one guy that they could wait on, who couldn’t understand that anyone other than him couldn’t ask for anything.

  All it all it was pretty good.  The usual blend of: people who are afraid of me for not being Japanese, people who are interested in me for not being Japanese, people who don’t realize that I can speak/ understand Japanese, people who seem to think that I can speak/ understand really complicated Japanese, and the well toasted alcoholics. 

  They don’t seem nearly as dangerous as the last bunch of teachers that I worked with.  At the 2^nd party I was able to remember all the drinks that I ordered, and most of them got to me mostly full.

(sampling) …the booze

The booze.

Why did they schedule a big party for a Monday night?  I made it to work on time - Early the next day.  They sent me home early  because I had to meet someone from the gas company who came to do a safety inspection before turning my gas on.

The safety inspection was Unremarkable!!!!

Ha!  I love that.

Before getting my gas turned on I could only eat micro-waved potatoes with baked beans. 

That gets everyone’s gas going!

Ha!  (It’s a pun.)

I managed to slip in a few remarks about a missing passport now and again, so they let me out of work the next day as well, so that I might take the 4 hour trip to central Tokyo to get to the American Embassy - which closes early that day of the week, …but I made it in time.

  I actually woke up earlier than I ever had to when I was just going to work.  I rode my bike to Komoro station.  I waited for a local train and rode it to where I could get on a Shinkansen/ Super express train.  I waited for a Shinkansen and rode a long way to a part of Tokyo where I knew there was a subway station.  I was cut in line twice while waiting to consult with the guy at the subway gate as to which way down the line the station where the embassy was was.

The police patroling the outside of the embassy asked to see my passport, which being lost was the reason I was there, but I had my alien registration card.

 (I’m told it is illegal for anyone who isn’t a Japanese citizen to step foot outside their residence in Japan with out it/ or a valid foreign passport with a valid up to date visa.  You‘re probably not too likely to get caught by a random patrolman and arrested just for not having one, but I‘ve heard stories about people riding bikes - thought to be bicycle thieves being caught without them and having to pay huge fines.)

  A guy at the embassy said that they would mail me a new passport in 2-3 weeks.  He told me that I ought to keep my whereabouts  in the Department of State’s online database current - in case there was some kind of natural disaster.

  I told him that I just moved to an apartment that lies just below an active volcano.  I didn’t tell him that it’s in the area designated “very likely” to be subject to poisonous gasses.

Ha!  Beans! - That was the pun from before. 

 Mt. Asama does spew  molten rock + noxious gasses too though.

I also didn’t tell him that I get dizzy when I drive;  He seemed busy.

 I managed to get out right before they closed for the day/ early that day.

On my way back to the subway station I found an entirely vegan restaurant.

 I once would have likened finding an all vegan restaurant in Japan  - to stumbling across a living breathing magical unicorn on your way to work, but I am happy to stand corrected.  - all the wiser now.

It was a good place and I would go back, …if it wasn’t an 8 hour round trip.

I put 2 falafels in my pocket to share with my girlfriend - who is merely politely curious at my eating habits.

(People who are unaware of the effects meat farming has on:

their own health,

the well being of millions of starving people,

the earth’s environment as a whole…

… to name a …few reasons,    would do well to try something like:  http://peta.org)

My girlfriend was supposed to come over the weekend to see my new apartment, and finally go to that shopping center that she wanted to  2 weeks before, but her mother reminded her that she was going to be in Korea over that weekend, and that someone needed to stay at home and watch over their dog.

I repeated that same process of riding my bike to the station, waiting, taking a $4. train ride, waiting to take the $50. Shinkansen ride - not quite so far as Tokyo this time - to see her.

We met my old roommate at an Okinawan bar in his city the next day, + we went for a long drive to have a barbeque with some of her friends the day after that.

  Her friends didn’t have much that was meatless, but they were friendly, and brought lots of booze.

The booze

The booze.

 That barbeque ended at about 3pm, so she tried to drive us to that shopping center that she really seems to want to go to.  Again, we got there just as everything was closing, so she just took a look around my apartment and headed back.

I got to see her again the next weekend, because my company decided to reschedule the training that they had canceled 3 weeks ago - for that weekend - not too far from her.

I didn’t hear anything from anybody, so I sent my supervisor an e-mail inquiring as to whether the training had again, been canceled, but I didn’t check for replies because:

I couldn’t get to a computer,

The computer repair men were repairing all the computers,

And if it were a case of the training NOT being canceled - I didn’t want to know anything about it.

He called me at 9pm the night before training to be sure that I did know about it, which really was a let down.  He said it was in 2, 8 hour sessions, on Saturday and Sunday

- that was shocking!

  He said I had to wear a shirt and tie to it which was more of a let down.

I wanted to tell him that I had recently contracted: Avian Bird Flu, but instead, I merely mentioned that the puddle on the floor of my bathroom got bigger every time I flushed the toilet.

I woke up at 6am the next morning so that I could be in time for training: a bunch of jerk asses swaggering/ strutting,  and telling me what I already know - when I could be doing anything better.

I sat in bed for about a half hour, thinking about how much I really didn’t want to go to a totally unnecessary training session.

I took a shower then sat on the edge of the tub thinking about what kinds of things would be better than going to training.  (- In the meantime I dripped entirely dry.)

I made a pot of tea and drank it very slowly and thought of funny excuses to not go to training - other than Bird Flu.

(In this meantime, I missed my chance to catch the good train, …and I missed the back-up train.)

Then I wrote my girlfriend a message - summarizing my opinions on my company’s mandatory-unpaid-unnecessary- unhelpful- 9am-6pm, Saturday and Sunday - formal attire necessary, you work 12 days straight training that I would have to pay a lot of money to get myself to/ not be compensated for in any way.

Then I just didn’t go.

How mandatory is mandatory?

Not terribly mandatory.

The cherry trees in my new new city had just started to open up.  I didn’t know where the best spot to paint them would be, so I just drove down the hill to my new school, where there are lots of cherry trees.

  It was warm, but very windy, but all in all - far better than sitting in a little dark room with 50/ 60 other unfortunate people who’s weekends had been theived - being told what types of pants/shoes/ such are and aren’t suitable for work.  I was at first a little concerned about angry phone calls, but they were, perhaps, too busy to notice me missing.

Waking up as early as I did (to ultimately NOT go to training), did give me the benefit of a good long Saturday’s worth of day light. 

 The wind, however, was a real hinderence to progress.  I had to choose a less optimal angle to paint both of those pictures from, because standing behind a thick tree gave me a little bit of protection from the really really strong gusts of wind.  Still, one picture got blown off of the easel just after I had finished it, and my palate got blown into an as yet - unused canvas (still in its wrapping - Luckily).

After  those 2 pictures I thought I’d go off and look for another - perhaps less windy place to paint.

I didn’t find it.

 I found places that were less windy, but I couldn’t find anyplace else worth painting.

  I tried a few more times on a few other days, and this really is not a nice looking city.

I went back to my 1^st city that evening to visit my girlfriend.  Her city is a wasteland.  Mine is an ugly  boring wasteland.

    The plan, was that I go to the training - near where she lives, meet up with her that night, then go to the other day of training in Tokyo (yes, on a Sunday).  Despite not going to the 1^st day of training, I went all that way to see her.  

  I was also expecting someone to call me - angrily about missing the 1^st day  + to insist I go to the next.

 That call came the next day, …but it wasn’t  really an angry call.  It was a: “The training just started a few minutes ago, are you lost? Oh, you’ll be about 2 hours late? Oh, ….you weren’t here yesterday?“ kind of a call.   They told me that they were meeting in a yellow building in a park by a station.

 I found the park after getting to the station, but could find no yellow buildings in it.

When they called again to ask if I’d found the place I explained the situation, and it turns out that there were several parks near that station. 

It took me until after the lunch break to make it all the way to where they were.

Then I had to sit there for 4 hours and learn such things as:

How to say  “Good Morning” in Japanese   (- I learned that on the plane ride over here 5 years ago).

How to play Hangman, and Pictionary…

Ummmmm,        ….Huuuuhhhh,     tck

Actually I didn’t learn any of that, because I already knew all of that. 

‘Glad I missed the 1^st day.’

I said that to the guy sitting next to me - who turned out to be Greg.

He said: “Yeah, but you have a good excuse to not come all the way down here.”

I said: “Yeah,  - I didn’t feel like it.”

He said: “Because you live in Nagano.”

I said: “Yeah, …. That too.”

An hour or 2 later, a girl sitting on the other side of me pulled out a book.

  I was waiting for one of the 2 managers stationed at the door to wander away - so I could sneak out, but they stood there in shifts.

    The closer and closer it got to 5 o’clock - the less they stood by the door, and the more they stood blocking the door.

I was the 1^st to escape - at 5:15.  That’s 15 minutes after “mandatory - no weekend for you - you learn nothing - waste your youth watching us poise - training “ was scheduled to end.

How can you turn 20/30 minutes worth of information into a 2 day fiasco?

Talent and shamelessness.

Talent and Shamelessness.

When I was walking from the station in my old city to where I parked my car it began pouring down rain.

 I was not 10 minutes from the car when this happened - I had an umbrella, but never the less - all of me - below the knees got soaked. 

    If only they had let us out of our mandatory unpaid Saturday/ Sunday formal wear necessary - but totally unnecessary training on time.

I got home  at 10:55.

My feet were wet for those 4 hours in between.

When I got home my toilet was fixed, …but broken.

Fixed in that: you could flush it without getting your feet wet (Although it didn‘t matter just then (Well, …depending on the consistency of the flush water)).

Broken in that: the flap at the bottom - that separates the body of the toilet from the “stink pipe” went down, with that first flush, and never came back up again.

It’s the later part of April, but my new new apartment is still really cold.  It turns out that the clock they gave me at one of my the schools in my old city also has a thermometer component.  This I find fascinating. I’ve been watching it, and although it seems to be getting warmer, it snowed an inch last night.

 The plastic pump I bought to refill the kerosene tank of my heater broke at my old apartment;  It sprayed kerosene here and there, …and on me.

 I didn’t want to buy another one of those wretched things, so I got a funnel to replace it.

 When I tried to refill the kerosene tank with the funnel on Monday, it went all over the floor.

     Luckily my toilet water towel had had some time to dry, so I used that to soak up the kerosene.

I’ve told my girlfriend that if we ever wind up living together, she will be the Queen of kerosene.  I would up and quit dealing with it right now, …if it wasn’t so cold.

The funniest part of my old long rambling story about being forced to move someplace, was when they took me to meet the mayor.

 An English teacher came in here yesterday + looking very determined - he shouted to me that I should wear a suit to school on Friday, because they’re taking me to meet the mayor here.

He told me the same thing - at the same volume today.

Let’s hope they mayor doesn’t ask me what I think of his town.

When I was visiting my girlfriend in my old city over the weekend I saw a travel poster with the name of my city on it, …and I laughed.

I was wrong about the garbage anyway….

 I thought that there were 8 very specific kinds of garbage, with different collection dates/ procedures, but there are in fact 12!

The toilets in this country have little sinks on top of them- to wash your hands or whatever. When you flush, water comes out of the little spout at the top.

I’ve always felt that pants – are towels that we wear on our legs; Some people even go so far as to wear those intriguingly textured terry cloth pants…,

but I thought I should perhaps splurge on a hand towel to hang over some of the exposed pipes that run across the wall to my toilet.

I wasn’t doing it to impress the guests I had coming, but to help keep anyone in a nylon track suit feel comfortable – if and when they decided to wash their hands from the top of my toilet.

There is a towel/ blanket shop under my apartment. I had gone there once before, but in the meantime, forgot why I never went back. I assumed it was because of my here to fore – limited towel/ blanket demand.

The hand towels were pretty cheap there. The face towels were larger, prettier, and cheaper than the hand towels. I grabbed a hand and a face towel, which – together – would have been 100 yen and took them to the register and I waited for anyone in the shop to notice I was there. When the guy did come and notice me he said I couldn’t buy those towels. “Why?” I asked. (It was a towel shop after all.)

He said that you can’t buy 1 face towel and 1 hand towel, you have to buy 5 of each, or none.
He folded them both up and walked away.

That was 2 weeks ago, and it still stirs me up to think about it,

Not least of all because I only have 1 face!

How do they stay in business? What does he expect me to do with the other 4 towels?

It’s a good place to shop if you like clerks who go out of their way to be unhelpful, …and you’re married and have 3 kids/5 people in your family, and you need precisely that many towels/ blankets, but who else would go there otherwise? What if you were going to the beach with 6 sexy girls?
Would you have to buy 10 beach towels/ or 35?

Japanese towels suck anyway – you can get more water off of you with a thick napkin,
but that could add up to several trees worth after a year or so.

I explained all of that to my guests when they came, and perhaps – not coincidentally, some of them forgot their bath towels when they left.

(You might be interested to know that bath towels here are nearly twice the size of a standard handkerchief.)

I didn’t, however, say anything about needing any toothbrushes, and now I have 5 of them, so it may’ve just been by accident that they left all that stuff.

When they were here we went snowboarding. They picked out a cool place to go, and we all got up early and waited for the girls to put their makeup on. I’ve been asking girls for years if they really need to pay such attention to the fine details of their eye-makeup, when they always wear ski goggles on top of it; They always say yes.

When they did, eventually - finish, we got into my old roommate’s friend’s brand new car. It was very impressive! It still had plastic on the seats, and a computer that counted down the distance to your destination. It must’ve had the wrong kind of tires though, because we couldn’t get up the hill.

I don’t suppose anyone would have wanted to leave it parked in the road 6 kilometers from the ski-park and walk that distance. At any rate, we didn’t. We found an adequately non-steep place to go not too far off; + the steeper slopes there were closed off due to lack of snow.

The next week some other guests came and we tried to go to the ski-park right next to the one we had to go to the previous week. There was no longer enough snow there though, so we wound up going to the one we couldn’t make it up the hill to, the week before.

That place was much much better. The snow wasn’t really ideal for skiing/ snowboarding, but you couldn’t ask for better snowball snow. No one asked me to stop throwing snowballs at them, but nobody threw them back at me as exuberantly either. (They wouldn’t have had to, my aim is pretty bad.) I had a great time, and would definitely make an effort to go there often, …if I still lived here.

You see, the manager of my company called me this morning. He was driving, someone else in the car with him was talking, and it was a long (often interrupted) story, but it seems that: all of the teachers at all of the schools here like me a lot, they think I’m doing a wonderful job, they think I have a good character / nice personality, and they prefer me to certain predecessors, but someone somewhere (who is completely mental and has a father - who works for the board of education) disagreed with the general assessment loudly enough that the head of the Board of Education decided they may as well try to see how someone else would do in my place, and I have to be put somewhere else.

That just goes to show that one person can make a difference, …though not necessarily to anyone else’s benefit.

I often felt it my responsibility, as a reasonably intelligent human being, to help this one sorry individual pull their head out of their own ### / “see the light of reason”, but thought it better to do it gradually

– and indeed, most people will resist change/ resist anything uncomfortable/ and pass blame wherever else they can.

I know I used to, but now I really try hard to get to the honest truth of things. It’s hard to see through “how you want things to be”, to appreciate “how they actually are”.

Anyway, I’m glad I won’t have to teach those ackward adult classes with the one cranky/ drooly old man here anymore. It’s nice to know that the articles which I had to write for the town paper will no longer be creatively: ”edited” to a degree that they come to mean something entirely different.

Otherwise I really liked this town/ this area a whole lot. My girlfriend was thinking/ and seemed to have decided to come to live up here – closer to me, so it’s good that I have to leave before she accepted any job in this area. The head of my company said that they can get me a job somewhere in the dead concrete city suburbs very easily, but I would hate to have to live someplace without lots of trees.

Really, what I’d like to do is stay in Nagano and not teach an adult class, but changes do keep things interesting.

So, as it was 2 years ago, when I had 2 weeks to pack up everything I own and move to someplace far off and away that I didn’t want to go to: I again have 2 weeks to pack up everything I own, and move someplace -?- ….

I had a girlfriend in High-School,
…just 1.

+ She once went to a fortune teller.

She didn’t say very much about it until she broke up with me.

It was something along the lines of: we had different things in store for us, and that she was planning to go on a trip with some guy named Steve.
She said, that the fortune teller told her: ‘That I would one day live in China, and have a weird religion, and eventually meet a girl “just like her”’.
It did strike me as bizarre and off the topic (of whoever that “Steve- d%&$(%!!” was) at the time, but:
Several times since I came to Japan, I remembered hearing that prediction and laughing…
Most recently when I took a picture of my new girlfriend and noticed something more than just a slight resemblance to that first one,
…but I don’t hold it against her.

I like it when all the little bits and pieces come together.

There were a few here and there, and in between;
Then I lived in Chichibu for a little while…
…
…
… Wow! (…stay the hell out!!)
…
…+ I finally moved someplace civilized, + got a girlfriend (from back where I began).

She’s a good girl! …
“…Loves her ma’ma…”

I don`t know how she feels about Elvis, Jesus, America, or Tom Petty

I am ambivalent.

… about Tom Petty that is.

(But whenever I think - to myself /or out loud, that she`s a good girl, …the rest of that song follows through.)

It cost’s a lot to go and fall down a mountain.

The girls that I went with had some kind of discount coupon which allowed us to go and fall down the mountain at nearly half price, but there is no “Free Falling”.

What a horrible pun! I don’t particularly like or dislike Tom Petty, so I wonder why I’m trying to work that song into everything.

I didn’t even fall all that much that day, unless you want to think of it as “I fell for a girl”,

which I did:
There was a girl lying in the snow, and I didn’t want to run over her head, so I fell down to avoid hitting her.
- Ha! You would like think I meant that by its idiomatic usage, not that I literally fell to help a girl. Oh! Humor!

Indeed, idiomatically as well, I did come to like a girl, but in ordinary circumstances I would prefer to express that without using the word “fall”. Fond perhaps…

At this one point I was going to go over a jump, + I got settled into a nice neat line of approach, + fell down.
I went over the jump on my back; It was a peculiar feeling to go through the air that way.

The weather was great, the snow was also great, the girls that came by really really early on that Saturday morning to get me, were positively adequate. The one that I never liked so much, who for some strange reason also doesn’t like me so much, and a friend of hers drove us there and back. The one had plans for that evening in town, and the other lived several hours away, so we had to leave a little after 5pm. The pharmacist, of whom I am fond, whose house I stayed at over new years, was supposed to come that night to go snowboarding with me the next day as well, so it worked out for all of us. A good time was had by me, and probably by them too, but I was the only one who went over a jump on my back!!

I was obliged to go again the next day, but apprehensive as to how much fun it would be, stiff as I was, going 2 days in a row. I woke up that morning– sleepy and concerned. Sleepy: because it was still morning, and concerned: because I knew that that pharmacist, of whom I am fond, would be coming that evening, to stay over, and to somehow go to a ski-park with me the next day. I didn’t have a car, and had neglected to ensure that we would be able to get seats on the bus that goes to the ski-parks. The one girl that I went with that day, was kind enough to go with me to the park’s hotel’s information desk to ask about a bus that goes between the ski resort, and the station in the city.
The girl at the counter said in the most politely unintelligible Japanese, that there was a bus, but that it was only for people who were staying at the hotel. Luckily the other girl that took me that day found a brochure with information on another bus that goes to the ski-parks, that you didn’t need reservations for.

I had about an hour between getting home and having to go down to the train station to meet the pharmacist, of whom I am fond. I spent all of that time hanging my stuff up to be reasonably dry/ kempt for the same thing the next day.

I caught up with her alright.
We made spaghetti and stayed up late.

+ It turns out that she’s not really a morning person either, so despite her coming such a long way to go snowboarding, we never did go snowboarding.

We had breakfast at around 2pm, and finally left my apartment just after 7pm.

What a girl!

She’d been in Australia for the last year. Australia is considerably warmer than Nagano, and it’s currently summer there, and girls don’t really like the cold any which way, so I thought it best to buy a heater before she arrived.

I went to the only electronics shop in town once to look at heaters that might actually do some good – as opposed to the one that I bought some months earlier, which does not (heat/ do any good). The people in the electronics shop however, were not to be bothered with such trifling matters as “selling electronics”, so after looking around for someone to help me for 15/ 20 minutes I left.

I went to a recycle shop in the city near my town, and they had heaters, but the heaters were heavy, and would take 2 hands to carry, and it was a 35 minute long bike ride to get there, so I didn’t buy a heater there either. (The old man there did offer to have one delivered to me for free if I could wait until Sunday evening, but I knew that the Pharmacist, of whom I am fond, would be coming the day before, and leaving that night.)

I went back to the only electronics shop in town, midweek, and they were every bit as unhelpful as they were the last time, so I left again, after 15 minutes, again.

Come Friday I went back to the only store in town and waited them out.
I asked some guy if he was busy and he said he was.

He was still standing there on his own, “busy”, a half hour later.

I really really didn`t want to give those bastards any of my money, but I was again concerned that my apartment was far too cold for a nice looking girl to be comfortable. It wouldn’t be right to have her sleeping in her jacket and, indeed, It would be far preferable to have her not sleeping, and wearing very little…

For which it would be better to have a heater.

I found some jittery old guy to sell me the cheapest heater they had – an old looking battery powered kerosene one. I asked him where I`d be able to find a tank to keep/ carry kerosene in. He seemed to think that I was asking where to buy kerosene, then he seemed to think that I was suggesting that they give me a kerosene tank. He jumped to some peculiar conclusions, and totally disregarded my multiple inquiries into getting internet service. Man I hate that place! So much of my time was wasted there that night, that the home center (where it turns out they sell kerosene tanks) was closed.
A month or 2 before, I had seen several empty tanks at the expensive supermarket that I rarely go to, but they had been sold out the last time I went (a few weeks before).
After pushing my bike back home - across town, while carrying a heater, I went back to that supermarket. And wouldn’t you know: they did have the tanks, and not only that, but this time they had the same heater I just spent soooooo much time trying to get, …and it was about $20 cheaper, and I wouldn’t have had to deal with the dips%&s. from the electronics store nearly as much, or carry it across town.

It was worth the time and money - regardless. She sat on the floor next to the heater for a time, and it makes my apartment bearable when I am alone there as well.

She had to go back home, a city I lived in, not 10 minute’s walk from her, for the 1st 3 years I was in Japan. It might have been nice to have met her, when I did live there.

We decided to have dinner at the all vegetarian café in the city on her way to the Shinkansen/ express train, but it would be a little while before we got there, + all the snowboarding ( etc.) from the day before had affected my metabolism. We only had 6 minutes to spare, but we went to the Mr. Doughnuts under the station to get something to keep me from passing out.

There was a trainee there who was just learning to fold the paper bags properly, so we had to run up the stairs, through the station, and down another flight of stairs to catch the next train.

We got to the café later. Many many people had recommended it to me, and I always wanted to try it. The first time I tried to go I couldn’t find it. One time later, I tried to take a date there, but she wanted to go someplace else. Another time I went there alone, but it was just closing up for the night. And this time: it was a shop holiday/ closed for the day.
We went someplace else,
…which was nice enough.

She came back this last weekend, and brought her snowboard again, and we didn’t go snowboarding again, (or indeed leave my apartment until after dark the next day again), but this time neither of us had any intention of going. She brought the snowboard so that she could: tell her mom that she was going snowboarding (and make it appear so), and …so that she’d have a good excuse to come back again in another 2 weeks:
to get her snowboard.

We made soup one night, and went to a handmade noodle shop the next.

She makes my heart race, so I have to eat more to keep my blood sugar up.

I showed her a still life that I was working on, and she didn’t ask about the Auras surrounding the flowers.

She asked if I was religious, and I said that I didn’t have a religion (as such), but that I had a reason to think that certain things are…

She used some program on her cell-phone to check the train schedules, and find out what time the latest possible train she could take, to get the last Shinkansen back, to another train, + then her house would be. We didn’t have a whole 6 minutes to spare, so I said, jokingly, as we were jogging to the station, that: I didn’t think we had time to stop at Mr. Doughnuts this time. She said that she would love a doughnut. I said that we only had 3 minutes. She said that we would have to be fast. I said I would run in and get her something while she got her ticket. (That way she could still make it to her train if I didn’t make it with the doughnuts, …which of course I couldn’t have.

I ran in and ran past - a young couple deliberating on what kind of doughnuts they should get. I got a tray and a pair of doughnut tongs, and found myself, too, set back by the daunting task of choosing.

Given my usual pace, I think I chose very quickly on this occasion. – There was still no way I would have made it back to her in time mind you…
The guy at the counter asked me if I wanted them for there or to go. I hadn’t been alone in a fast food type of place for years and years, so I didn’t remember the exact concise Japanese phrase for: “Hurry up and put it in a bag, you Bastard!”,
…so in lieu of that, I just pointed to the door.

It turns out that the door is just beyond where all the seats are,

so that bastard went and got a new tray and a dish for me so I could sit down.

I explained that my girlfriend was waiting outside, and asked him if he didn’t have a paper bag.
He went and got a box.
I began to explain that I didn’t need a whole box for 3 doughnuts, but I stopped myself and left.

I figured she would have just got on the train, and I would be walking back home with 3 doughnuts in a large box that I would eventually eat by myself, but she had waited for me.
(The train hadn’t waited for her.)

Given that she had no way to get back (and I don’t think either of us was too upset by this), I asked her if she didn’t want to go back in Mr. Doughnut’s and pick out something maybe better suited to herself, but after all that, she really seem to even want a doughnut at all.

It was nice having her over for that extra night, even if I did have to wake up at 5:30 that next morning to see her off again – so that she could make it to work on time, …in another part of Japan.

The kerosene in the tank I bought ran out after she left that second (third) time, so I walked it to a gas station after work. I had a bit of trouble choosing what button to push on the all complicated – all Japanese menu screen on the pump. So it was good that another teacher from one of my schools came by after filling up his car to check on me.

He also observed – to my benefit – that I had dropped all my money on the ground.

But my ill luck was not entirely averted.
No.

The gas tank was heavy –
whatever 18 liters of kerosene weighs.

I thought I’d carry it back on my shoulder, and… after a time I became aware of a distinct kerosene scent, which was indeed: kerosene, dripping down the tank on my shoulder.
I resealed the tank, and carried it the rest of the way to my apartment before going to the store.
I tried not to stand still for very long at any time while in the store, because I got dizzy whenever the kerosene fumes from my jacket caught up to me.

Of course moving around all the time does tend to make you breathe heavier / inhale more fumes when you do stop. I got slightly nauseous and developed a bit of a lingering headache. When I got home again, I hung my jacket up outside + changed clothes.

When I wore the jacket, which I’d assumed would have aired out that next morning, the: shirt, pullover, and undershirt I was wearing all came to smell like kerosene within 5 minutes. That faded before too long, but I had to chain my jacket to my bike outside to keep everyone else from getting sick.

I thought I should take it to the cleaners after that, but the care tag inside said it was the kind of jacket that you wash in a washing machine.

Into the washing machine it went – Along with: some towels, socks and such…

I washed everything multiple times since then,
..with different blends of different soaps,
with splashes of perfume and rose oil mixed in,

…but I still find myself wearing a kerosene scented scarf,
And drying off with a kerosene scented towel whenever I get out of the shower.

This weekend I am going back to my 1st city, where my New girlfriend lives, where my old Japanese teachers are having a farewell party for some Korean people I’ve never met, and where my old roommate is having a 30th birthday party.

I’ll wear my kerosene soaked jacket in the hopes that all the cigarette smoke will dull / mask the odor.
I’ll do something akin to worrying about how I’ll be 30 in a few months myself, though I know it doesn’ make any difference really. Except perhaps that, I think it will feel entirely different to have to tell people that.