It’s my thirtieth month as a high-school English teacher in Kobe, and there is nothing of any profound and shaking significance to report. This morning an old vagrant sat across from me on the train, then moved next to me and said hello, and immediately asked what country I was from, before volleying into some kind of conversation about my 3DS, which he could not see because he was sitting beside me, and it’s in 3D. He was like “can’t see it, can’t see it” and I was like “you sure can’t” and he was like “aha aha” then he got off the train before me. The two businessmen across from me to my right made some comments about how the weird vagrant man was a weird vagrant. One of the businessmen was wearing a facemask, which is totally normal.
We started watching this series called “Game of Thrones,” it uses a high-fantasy setting and started as books, which means I will never read them. The series was produced by HBO and, as I understand it, cost $60 million over the course of its ten episodes. One of the more charming points of the show is that the Exceptional Content is never wishy-washy–the series opens with two lingering decapitations, is followed by a minute-long scene of full nudity by not one but several women, contains conversations in which people bypass the social pleasantries of gateway curses and skip straight to Fuck, also some relatives bang each other and later in the series some throats are ripped/bitten out and or stabbed, also more banging. The characters have names, but I’ll be Fucked if I remember any of them, they’re all like Hodor Dargantio or L’Orealdrious Salafoop. The few that I remember are: Agent 006, Dwarf, Hot Naked Savage Wife, Tinymouth Bitch-boy, Bastard, Climby, and The Fat King. This show is pretty sweet let me tell you.
JAPANESE MINOR ENCOUNTERS
– That soda called Citra is back, it’s called Citra, I haven’t had it in like fifteen years and here it is in Japan
– Ate a “chicken nugget sandwich” today, it was literally a chicken nugget on a bun, wrapped up and sold in the cooler section of the convenience store
– A man is balancing on one foot in front of the small gas heater, he has taken the shoe off of the foot and is trying to get the foot warm, I think he is finished now
– I thought I’d make some pilaf the other day with supper, thought I’d just see if I could find a pre-packaged rice mix of some sort to boil up all quick, but that is not a thing in Japan, I made homemade dumplings instead aw yeah
EAHRG
Jessy was gone for like three weeks during Christmas and I was all alone, so I had a forgotten taste of the bachelor life. I engaged in such scandalous activities as roleplaying as a female and marrying another female in a video game. Also I drank alone and with friends, watched Masters of the Universe back-to-back with Dragonslayer, ate at the sushi-go-round, stayed up until six in the morning twice, bought grass for my cat, and I guess some other stuff. Sometimes it was awesome to be alone again, and other times I remembered that the thing I notice the absence of most when Jessy’s gone is my random source of entertainment and companionship. On the other hand I did get like 70 hours of video games played.
I made mochi last week with the night school kids, and I remember to wear my jacket when the beatings happen because the splatter. I wielded Big Hammer, our third encounter, and it was like hoisting an old friend high above my head then slamming him down against a pile of squished grains to make stretchy goop. We ate the mochi with anko and the other orange powder that I forget what it’s called all the time, oh, kinako. It tastes like crushed up Cap’n Crunch cereal. Also we had ozoni, which is “soup.” You put the mochi in the soup. Another weird old vagrant next to me asked some questions about American Baseball, then when I mentioned the Orioles he said “Buruku Surobinson Buruku Surobinson.” I was like “yep he was good” but I dunno man Brooks Robinson stopped playing like six years before I was born.
NM DY 