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.

I have not written anything for a long time, because - truth be told, I have not done anything altogether interesting (for all that time) (…and then some).

I moved back to the concrete piles that stretch unbroken from Tokyo, and far further off.
It was a good decision, being that: I don’t fall asleep on my feet from boredom at my old job anymore.

Nowadays I listen to housewives tell me what they think of whatever new movies happen to be new while they’re telling me about them.
I sleep a bit later, “work” an hour, take my 2 hour lunch, “work” one more hour, then go home.

I thought I could paint a lot more with all my extra time here, but all the colors  to be seen here are advertisements for things I don’t want.
I tried rebuilding my website several times, but all the software I’ve tried only seems to allow you to make an extremely ugly website. I sit down every once in a while to try it again, but it gets me nowhere when I could be spending time with the kitten that used to sharpen its claws on my bike tires.  It stopped sharpening its claws on my bike tires right around when it /the kitten disappeared,  a few months ago.

(I would rather go off looking for the kitten than sit for hours trying to get all the electric: headings, fonts, and menus to work, or to match).

I took my girlfriend to America for 2 weeks in October to try American vegetarian food, see my backyard, and see my sister’s wedding. We went to the Statue of Liberty. She had pie for breakfast. Our suitcases were much heavier on the way back.

She took me to a park one day in the fall to see some colored leaves. It was very nice, but a crowded park, an hour away, is not the forest in my backyard.
Now there are only a few apartment buildings - blocking my view of hundreds of other apartment buildings - in my backyard.

Mind you I get full pay to read short dialogues and hand out stickers after the kid’s bingo classes.

There was a day when I got up an extra hour early, so I could get to work earlier, and try to organize something a little more fun and effective for that day’s pair of kid’s classes.
But there was another train jumping suicide which left only enough taxis for the first 50 people, + I wound up with the day off.

I was also off on Christmas day this past year. I sorta’ hoped it would cost less than $2,000 to go back home for Christmas, …but George Bush is only trying to make the world a better safer place (for oil and munitions companies)/ Bush wants everything safe-icated for American Economicalisim.
Everyone else I know was working on Christmas; My girlfriend was working, and sick, so she came out to dinner and went straight back home afterwards.

We went to a Chinese restaurant a few cities down with my old Japanese teacher and her husband . We were a bit late to meet them because there was another train jumping suicide a little while earlier, and the trains didn’t really work for the next hour or so. Aside from us being late, and her being sick, it was good. She had called a week or 2 beforehand to make the reservation + have them prepare an entirely vegan course for the 4 of us.

A few days earlier, the lady who organizes the free Japanese lessons took me to a Christmas party in Tokyo. She brings me to swank restaurants/ takes my girlfriend and I on day trips pretty frequently, and it’s usually moderately interesting, so I rarely ask very many questions about whatever she has in mind. There’s nothing better to do around here anyway.
This was me, her, and around 20 old Japanese couples (men wearing ruffled scarves/ women with clip on pearl earrings) - all sitting stiffly crooning poor translations of English Christmas songs (the translations didn’t fit with the beat or melody whatsoever). The dinner they had inbetween was decidedly NOT vegan. I had: garnishes, bread without butter, and wine whenever a bottle was passed into my corner.
The part of that that I did like was that one old fellow volunteered to do a magic show for everyone, in which he stopped to think and to restart most of the tricks more than once.
I came with a package of cookies someone else had given me earlier that week, and left with a package of wrapped dried seaweed and some Mango jam. Mrs. Ito came with a $500 handmade scarf from Indonesia, and she didn’t want the mango jam she wound up with, so she gave it to me.

I’ve been taking Japanese lessons again since I came back to the city, but now my girlfriend is the one who teaches me, and I don’t ever learn anything. She tries to convince me that the obscene amount of junk mail I get is a valuable thing. I in turn try to estimate the annual per capita tree casualties, but this does nothing to advance my Japanese ability.

Once she tried to argue that hiking is more fun in the city, because you can stop and go shopping whenever you want to. There aren’t any stores in the forest she wisely assertained.
(I know that’s spelled wrong, but I think the A-S-S form is more apt.)

When I 1st moved away from this city - I lived in a small town - surrounded by small mountains. It was a very nice change of scenery, …although very lonely. I wouldn’t want to go back ther for more than a week or so unless somebody came to visit me.
I took lots of baths + tried to develop psychic powers, with some small degree of success.

You’re far more likely to fall asleep while meditating than anything else… but other times, when you’re trying to fall asleep you start vibrating or watching an ultra high speed slide show of God knows what. One night, not so long ago I tried staring into the dark and it felt like I was punched in the head.
I can type that, …and you can read it, …but it’s not something you can read and understand.

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.