A pressing engagement.

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.