Drive a striped tomato

Back during summer I went to some kid’s house, well it was actually his mom’s house, and I work with the mom, but she wanted me to go to her house during a summer day off and we would have a grand old time, and I could speak to the kid in English, and his name is Shuhei, and that is what I did. They fed me this massive, unfinishable lunch as a way to say thank you, I said thank you for the lunch and then I internally exploded, half my body make-up is sushi rice now, I’m kinda like an onigiri but in reverse. They gave me like 20 packs of soumen noodles as a gift cause I mentioned I liked them, all of this is not important. In the car on the way back to school I showed the kid my 3DS and he lost his fuckin’ mind, and that was the last I heard of all that. Then last week his mom came up to me and tried to put words together to represent the abstract concepts of a 3DS data exchange (called “a StreetPass” in the localized English), and explained she Wanted To Do A StreetPass, cause Shuhei got a 3DS from Santa Claus, holy shit. We made a StreetPass date, I felt like I was cheating on Jessica with a young boy via an Older Woman and we were gonna do filthy green-light district unprotected data transfer. Is the build up for this gonna be worth the payoff? Last week I brought my 3DS, after agonizing over how to set up my Mii, knowing that he would be received by an eight-year-old kid. I tried to figure out what hat I was gonna wear and what I was gonna set my message to and what game I’d play before so that I’d control WHAT HE WOULD GET. But then I totally fuckin forgot and I accidentally left the womanly beehive wig on lookin so beautiful, and my StreetPass message, though I thankfully recently changed it from “Rectal impact,” was “I’m not negi,” an inside joke that is only inside to Jessy and I, and only funny to one of us, and that one of us is me. So this kid probably got the StreetPass when his mom brought his 3DS home, after bringing it specifically to tag me, and then he got to be all like “Brandon is wearing a girly beehive wig and looks like a hostess, what does I’m not negi mean, oh, oh god oh, what” So that was pretty cool. I have like 776 StreetPass tags, which is like 600 more than he does, amateur, get your shit together eight-year-old I am crushing you, jeez. His most recently played title was Nintendo Video.

Speaking of “Rectal impact” I have made it a goal lately to come up with the most depraved online mottos that I possibly can. A semi-chronological list follows, based only on memory, for posterity:

– Corpulent grogan
– Faetus impact
– Hefty rectal egg

Today I thought it was time for a change, so I first wanted to put it as “Magical fuckjuice” but the filter would not allow fuckjuice, and then I thought the word “soiree” sounded pretty funny so I tried changing it to “Violation soiree” but the filter wouldn’t allow that either!!! It also would not allow “Violator soiree” but humorously enough allowed “Rapelay soiree,” which even has cadence. I encourage all of you with Nintendo 3DS systems to get in on the action with a nice phrase like “Quivering donk” as long as it is sixteen characters or less.

MAGICAL FUCKWASTE OF JAPAN LATELY
– My students are doing their final presentations, they are hilarious
– My brain is a goddamned sieve lately, I cannot remember even a thing, holy shit
– Uh
UH

The most pressing issue on my mind when it comes to work lately is I wonder which of my co-workers the Hyogo aliens are going to suck away and send to other schools this April, and I find myself moving through the mental checklists as though I am personally selecting them for what accounts to a kind of “my circle” murder, as I’ll likely never see or correspond with any of the people that are spirited away for fresh blood. Which ones are expendable? I’ve come to the conclusion that mostly whatever happens is okay with me as long as I get a young, cool, attractive replacement just barely fluent enough in English to still make cute mistakes that are funny to me and also who likes hanging out so I am not the only person under sixty when the English staffs goes out to get shit drunk and yell anime songs at karaoke. It would also be nice if they are good at the Internet, then they can Google my name, find this blog somehow, and then see that I, in this post, expressly wished for their arrival, and also realize that I am a sociopath who has no idea what feelings are so maybe we can get along if they are down with a guy like me.

Break me off a piece of that

Now I chew on a Kit Kat “BIG LITTLE,” the name of a snack which happens to be a bite-sized chocolate ball version of “Big Kat,” itself a large version of Kit Kat. I just finished a stick of spicy string cheese, and I have a chestnut-flavored cola in front of me. Life should be good, shouldn’t it? As it happens, for many of you one of these days around now is Thanksgiving Day. Unlike last year I don’t even know which one it is, and will likely not concern myself with finding out. If it’s today, that means my Thanksgiving dinner is BIG LITTLE, and if it’s tomorrow, much like in 2009, my meal will be government-subsidized rice gloop with a plate of what is probably squid rings in semi-flavorless water (I am, as always, totally serious, only no, really). I have a theory that it is indeed tomorrow, because several people will be having a delicious feast at a scrumptious multi-course Brazilian meat restaurant. I of course will not be attending because it is “at night,” and every night I have is totally destroyed by Japanese class, work, or immediately falling asleep due to exhaustion (to be fair though, at least one night a week is spent drinking myself stupid).

The advantages of celebrating Thanksgiving in the U.S. are many. Football games on television, big steaming pots of noodles, tender roasted turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy, pumpkin pies, some beer, the weekend and change off, time for video games. But there are some advantages of not being in the States for the second Thanksgiving in a row. Oh wait no there aren’t.

We have been getting to know our new refrigerator like any sensible people would: by spending hundreds of dollars on bulky items that wouldn’t have any chance of finding space in our old one. Just the other day I baked some gratin potatoes in a casserole dish and then, with but a couple of spoonfuls left in the bowl, put plastic wrap on it and plugged it into the fridge for later consumption. Our bottom drawer, a crisper/cooler of most gracious space, currently harbors no less than two bottles of wine and a (to us) “jumbo” sized PET bottle of Coke, clocking in at two massive liters. We have shelves of vegetables, a door packed with dairy products, and a discrete freezer devoted entirely to fruit and ice cream. Even our cat could comfortably reside in the refrigerator, for a little while at most.

The precipitous changes that have occured around the place are due in no small part to the arrival of this behemoth: to ensure the continued functionality of our microwave/oven/toaster unit, which previously resided on the fridge (now much too tall to allow the ‘wave’s cords to reach the outlet) we have needed to shuffle various shelves around from the entryway to kitchen. In our lust for continued change, Jessy even got us a small Christmas tree, which is most totally a real tree, despite the fact that both of us will be out of the country from mid-December to early January, and will have no occasion to do anything exciting with the tree except smell it (it smells good). It is also the cat’s new favorite thing to crash into, sending needles all over the floor. Despite having his own bowl of water, Kiki now drinks exclusively from the tree’s stand. The Damned Thing is decorated extravagantly, with two, yard-long strings of LED lights, each powered by its own battery pack, because we live in Japan and things like this make sense. For example, the other day we started watching a Japanese animated series called “Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt,” which is about two dysfunctional girls who have to kill ghosts so they can get back into heaven. Panty’s panties transform into a gun, and Stocking’s stockings transform into a sword. In the first episode, they destroyed a monster literally composed of feces, who was eating people through their toilets. This is why Christmas lights are expensive.

LIVIN’ IN JA-PAN-I-CA
eye to eye, station to station

– Made tacos last night, they felt exotic
– North Korea’s gettin’ crazy, hope they leave me alone
– Teachin’ late tonight, comin’ in an hour later next week
– Playin’ Black Ops on PS3, knifin’ dudes thousands of miles away
– Used to bowing in public, gonna look dumb in the U.S.
– Went grillin’ on Sunday, next to “no barbecue” sign
– Read this book called The Housekeeper and the Professor, it’s about math
– Things get more normal every day

LIVIN’ IN JA-PAN-I-CA
i feel Good

There are some days, when I’m busy or tired or happen to feel a particular way, that all I want to do is sit at a table with a beer and some music and a Scrabble board and play against myself for hours, seven letters at a time.

I saw Evangelion 2.0, and it was really sweet

I feel as though I have accomplished something great!  But really all I did was go see an anime.  And bought a toy from a capsule machine.  And a little art book/movie pamphlet.  And downloaded a screensaver.  Oh, life!