Score two more for O-town

Okay maybe two-and-a-half. The Starbucks in Shinsaibashi's subterranean shopping town pulled one from the tranportation industry's book and, much like all Japanese cities do to their subways, heated my sammich to an even five-zillion degrees. But I am prepared to forgive it and give it half-credit because my chai latte was so very exceptional.

That was the end of my day in Osaka - the middle portion involved a little reconnaissance and just the right amount of wandering around like a tourist except I am getting to know this city quite well now so my inner compass will actually kick in and prevent me from having to wander too much.

The first evidence of this came about during the start of my day. After escaping the limited express train that just went to show Kintetsu does not, in fact, lag behind JR in torturing me through the clever and precise mismanagement of small details, I hopped the local subway to the aquarium. Now it being Children's Day, and fishies and otters and penguins generally being attractive to small children, there were thick hordes of people swarming about Osaka Port. This was actually surprising to me for all of 10 seconds, whereupon I mentally smacked myself upside the head for believing I could go to a landmark attraction on a long-weekend holiday and AVOID crowds. Sometimes I have a problem with my brain not working.

So back down the main road I go, thinking alright, at least I can get a good lunch down here by the port, and I'll use the 70 minutes I would have spent just standing in line outside to wander about a bit. Surprise me, Osaka. Two blocks later, there's a cute little curry shop on the corner with the most magical name: 星の森 ~ Forest of Stars. I love that image. I loved the interior even more than I loved the name. I loved the seasonal-vegetable curry, too, and the soy-milk hot chocolate, and the photo albums brimming with pictures of the shop teddybear Loreley all the hell over the world, and the way the proprietress unabashedly took a lunch-break on the corner bar stool next to me and let me chat her up about the bear, the music, stuff.

Her husband, who takes the orders and refills the water glasses, has a kind face. He reminds me of Steve Tomasula somehow. I think it's the beard-glasses-smile combination, but mostly the smile. If I lived in Osaka, this place would be one of my haunts. A little pocket of calm and warmth in the midst of all the bustle and hurry and dodging that goes on right outside the door.

It occurs to me that I never found a place like that in Nagoya, despite having lived there for a semster. It also occurs to me that I was 20, which is one up from 19, which was a stupid age, and that my life as an exchange student was quite insular and extremely repetitive from week to week, and only some of that was Japan's doing. It was still a good semester away from Notre Dame. It's just what worked for me then would make me crazy now, and does sometimes, when I catch myself falling into routines. Ironically, it was a Japanese Zen master who once said, "To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing."

blips

I haven't made a real picture-laden post in a while now, I think not since I put up those terrible and pity-evoking shots of my empty apartment when I first moved in and had no clutter stored up around the edges like cushy, subcutaneous fat deposits.

So here be some things:

1) wee-tiny kwabs be back in town. This one don't take no sass!
B) a gecko I found chillin' on the stairway handrail one afternoon. He'd just recently lost his tail, as you can see, little bud's just starting to come back in. He let me poke him and pet him a bit, probably thinking the whole time ohgodohgodohgod what is this horrible thing touching me please don't eat meeeeeee;

iii) a birdbatterfly. They seem to be all over Mie - I just saw one in Kumano over the weekend (I will look up their real name some day, wait no of course I won't, it can't be as good as this one I made up) They are generally not very obliging photo subjects, but this one had some flowermunchies to snack upon and keep it (relatively) still. It was the size of my hand, fingers splayed, and it was so drunk on nectar it nearly bumped smack into my head quite a few times;

and Δ) something NOT alive but flora-related, sorta, a painting I started a humiliatingly long time ago. It's going to get done and then it's going in a closet somewhere, and meanwhile I am starting a new project or two and not letting this old thing haunt me with its staleness and my failure to make it better.

Tomorrow I'm making a day-trip into Osaka that can't get too expensive, because I forgot that when Japan has public holidays, Japan's ATMs take public holidays as well; they dun' work and you can't get to 'em anyway 'cause the banks and bank-corners are all closed. Konbinis still operate, obviously, but Nicole and I have had some issues with finding Hyaku-Go-friendly stores in O-town. Helps when the ATM actually services your bank.

Anyway I am stocking up on chili-beans and diverse&sundry food-goods, for in a recent attempt to make myself some delicious chili, I inadvertently created the best Sloppy Joe recipe ever. EV-ER. No, internet, you can't have it, I'munna make a million dollars. ...Also I have to remember exactly what I did first (.__.)a

Chaahan (fried rice) tonight was in general a success (it was DELICIOUS, thanks for finally getting me the recipe, AJ!), only gum in the gears being that I tried to add some chopped bok choy to it and it weren't havin' none of that, taste-wise. Silly rabbit, bok choy is for stews.

intensity

For having "slept" about 3 hours during the past 48, I feel pretty okay. I really needed this kind of weekend, in fact. Friday I went home in a Mood and took a long and very satisfying nap. Yesterday at approximately 11:30 a.m. I was up at the northern end of Mie with eight other people, spread out between two apartments, beginning the 24-Hour-Comic challenge. 24 pages, one day to plot them out, draw them up, and put them all together. It's the kind of thing I would find myself doing in Riley Hall the weekend before a critique, the kind of thing I have been doing entirely not-enough of after getting my fake art degree that represents more of an afterthought to my English thesis than a double-major. Some ruminations along those lines were contributing to Friday's mood.

Yesterday, though, all the external constraints of my undergraduate studio work were gone - this project was almost entirely self-directed and wouldn't be held up for critique against standards that are only right for passing a specific class. The varied and loose-knit group of misfits was there, gathered by our common interest and encouraging each other by our mere presence, at times - didn't matter that the person sitting next to me was playing old-school Sonic on her DSLite at two in the morning, the important thing is she was staying awake with the rest of us, though all the sensible circuitry in everyone's brain was telling them to have a goddamn nap already.

I made the mistake of laying down on a folded-up futon in the corner for oh-but-10-minutes. It was horrendously difficult to drag myself back over to the table where my story lay barely coherent up through page 14. I felt every junky munchie-snack I had eaten since waking up, actually every pseudo-food I had fed myself in the past week, and all the effects thereof. My head was fried. Then the endorphins kicked in and I was wired until six, just like this time last year. Crash for a couple hours, force down a banana and some cereal, head off to work morning shift at the library and then try not to nod off during a 90-minute lecture. Okay this morning was a little different, but still, same admixture of relief and relentless energy-drain alternately spurring you into the day with ambition or exhaustion, toward another accomplishment or just the achievement of making it home to your bed before you do a faceplant & pass out.

Probably thanks to four years of kinesthetic learning, I did not go kerplunk but instead carried on with normal waking hours and waking-hour activities up until now, bedtime. Along with the inevitable muscle complaints from stiff and scrunched drawring positions, I hope at least some of the intensity inspired by yesterday's arting marathon will remain with me when I wake up tomorrow.

Dude. Duuuuuuuuude.

Okay, add this to the list of reasons why I desperately want a grad school in the UK to accept me for fall 2010: Scotland, you now trump Warwick on my list

So about half of the bajillion rice fields across the road have been flooded in anticipation of the plantinating, and the frogs are going absolutely bananas. From around dusk 'til the early morning they sound like an army of kodama. Of course there are the usual froggy-noises, too, but apparently we have an abundance of clickity amphibians here in Isobe-"it's over nine thousaaaaaaaaand"-cho.

and on the 3rd day he became ZOMBIE JESUS

Today the Easter Bunny left a basket - okay a big brown box - at my door...okay the delivery-man knocked 4 or 5 times and probably rang the doorbell once or twice but I was in the shower and I completely horrified/mortified ("horrtified"?) him by answering in my towel because gjfshkdlt I need a bathrobe. Inside the box were several types of candies, a piece of sheet music for piano, Maruchan ramen (which you can't get in Japan, but I have found that Nissin ramen is almost exactly the same stuff except it obvs does not have "Oriental" flavor packets), and Vol. 45 Issue 14 of The Onion. Apparently President Obama has been depressed and distant since the Battlestar Galactica series finale. I probably would have been, too, had I been following the show at all. I will have to pick it up sometime when Hulu is actually available in my region.

Anyway, thanks, Easter Bunny :B

Also today, I started cooking again. Like real cooking, not boil-some-noodles or fry-up-an-egg kinda "gorramit I dun' feel like eating :c" cooking. I am attempting to grow some hhhhhherbs in little earthenware pots so that I may have fresher things with which to cook in the fall, but the seeds I bought were kinda old (packaged last year), so I 'unno if they'll sprout or not. According to the internets, I may have to wait 1 - 8 weeks to find out.

Also also today, before I started cooking again, I was a spectacular dork and got to snark at comics-universe Nightwing as comics-universe Talia al-Ghul while animated-universe Nightwing got sassy with Booster Gold over shacking up with said al-Ghul crazy/awesome manipulative ho-bag and letting her convince him that the ninth Doctor of Doctor Who fame has, in fact, kidnapped and spatio-temporally dislocated the anthropomorphized embodiment of madness and mania, Delirium of The Sandman fame, the consequences of which include but are not limited to the unbalancing of the entire multiverse and Batman becoming "normal" again, i.e. not-Batman-anymore. Yeah.

As a prelude to this nerdomancy, Nicole and I drove to the Meiwa Aeon center to see "The Watchmen" yesterday, and I am pretty sure we were the only two people in the entire theater, besides the American dood sitting next to us, who could A: appreciate the historical contexts referenced by an alternate-history-1985, and 2: track and discuss the film's deviations from the comics. Then we spent a good 10 minutes trying to decide who would have better-suited the role of Laurie.

s'alright

This week has been strange, not unsettling, just, all-over and different.

I haven't felt like cooking for various reasons, but a long conversation today helped bring back my appetite. Thanks, Ana ♥

There are two more people living on my floor now, soon to be three. My immediate neighbor, the new art teacher, I have not actually seen at school yet, and I don't hear much of her in the building despite thin walls and noisy plumbing. The next resident of the big apartment in the corner is my school's new English grammar instructor. She is a formidable lady - I respect her style. It's odd to actually hear other people coming and going at night, but I don't mind feeling the place is actually inhabited once in a while.

Also on the list of things helping me be okay with life: this happened

Eff eff eff.

Okay, Korea pics are finally available to the general public: clicky clicky
None from Tuesday for obvious reasons (generally not advisable to bring a camera around a place that's full o' nekkid people, as spa's tend to be).

It's been a long and wonderful weekend (the Friday-Saturday bit) and I am entirely too sore (out of shape) and not nearly as on top of cleaning and organizing as I should be (no excuse really, so there's me feelin' pretty shitty), and next week I am a teacher again and still not quite sure how to feel about that.

My fellow JET and I have better plans, clearer goals, but it's the same system we're working in, and that system has been grating on me for a while. More specifically my function within it, I suppose. ALTs are supposed to shape their students' education but are also endemically excluded from shaping the process. I almost wish I didn't see it, except I'd be a complete fool to wish for lack of perspective. Anyway it's not my or any other foreign worker's personal battle with the education ministry, and it never can be; that's not the way things will get changed. I can hope to close out the term with a few small successes, a couple students with the genuine spark of interest, and I can be glad of those, and so on for the next term. And then I'll move on to challenges that will actually allow me to make the effort of meeting them. In a new place, somewhere with bookstores and cafes I can haunt. I do like spooking about without spooking the locals, every now and again. Until then, of course, I'm making the most of my place and time here, crushing bureaucracies be damned. I can start champing at the bit and being a wet blanket next April :p