I’m sitting in my newly rearranged and freshly cleaned apartment already regretting a second McChicken sandwhich, and mildly regretting the first as well, and trying to remember all the cool stuff that happened today. “MacDonald’s,” I can hear you ask, incredulous, “you’re eating at MacDonald’s?”
Well let me tell you a thing or two: there is, firstly, a tremendous amount of value in things tasting exactly like you expect them to, especially in a place where even when you brace and condition yourself to expect it to just taste like that fish-smell in chinatown, you’re just never really prepared for it anyway and at the odd times when you realize you’re eating it anyway and not really minding, you think maybe you’re losing your soul. That’s thing one. Thing two is that it’s late and I don’t feel like cooking, because I wouldn’t do my dishes before going to bed and then when I woke up tomorrow it wouldn’t feel as neat and tidy in here as it now will; thing three is of course that going through the MacDonald’s drive-through on my bike FREAKS these people out and there’s no easy way for them to tell me that I can’t because I can’t understand what they’re saying to me and it becomes easier, at a point, just to let me do it. It reeeeally screws with their tacit rule system, and I love it. Also, the drive-through’s open till 11. And did you know that they don’t make you wait at a little window for your food, but let you drive to the front or park and then they BRING IT OUT TO YOUR CAR. Nuts, these people are: nuts. It’s a land o service here, you don’t know the half.
So today is the middle of a glorious three-day weekend, Monday being the national holiday in commemeration of Japan’s first hosting of the Olympics (they take this stuff seriously over here); and this particular acation made all the more sweet and tasty by the fact that I didn’t make aaaaaaaaany kind of big plans; I got to do all my dishes, vaccum, clean, rearrange, put my bed away for the first time in weeks, do some house shopping (I now happily sport a bevy of colored tea-candles in little stone holders all over my pad, which freaked out the japanese guests I had over last week – they discreetly blew them all out at opportune moments when I wasn’t looking; a display of what I interpret as a deeply set architecturocultural fear of fire), I’ve got laundry going through a conveyor belt cycle so I can get through it all, and I’m even airing out my futon. Friday I went out with my friend Hiroko from the Bari Bari (that’s the radio call sign) station, first a nice Italian kind of resterant in a town called Toyo about an hour away and then walking on the beach between here and Matsuyama, black inky sky and black inky water and brown sand under foot, both of us exhausted and resolutely denying it; it was a fun time and a nice change from our normal coffee dates. I can’t tell if it was supposed to be a ‘date’ date or what; I really don’t think so and it didn’t feel like one during, but afterwards we sent short “I had a nice time” emails and then suddenly I got to wondering, but I think it was only the exhaustion that played tricks on my mind.
Speaking of, I’m BEAT. And I think I’m getting up for morning keiko (that’s shorthand for ‘Aikido class’) tomorrow; since there’s no work afterwards I can just go back to sleep once it’s done, and going won’t make me late or overtired for anything important later on. I got an unspecified date-ish kind of thing¾playdate is a word that should re-enter my vocabulary¾I got a playdate tomorrow with the supercute teacher at one of my schools, and that’s exciting but not something that interferes with morning keiko, so it looks like it’s on. Lots of keiko is going to be more and more important because I just got told that I’M TESTING in DECEMBER! December 3rd our shihan (ie: Super Jedi Teacher, our official pedagogical link to the AikiSource) will come down to run testing and I’ll be going for Ikkyu, the rank before black belt (which, should I pass, I can test for next December, they all tell me excitedly). Which is awesome, because I get to humiliate my new friends and teachers in front of their official sponsor jedi. My only hope is that if we’re forced to commit seppukku afterwards, I get to watch at least one of the other guys go first, those sons of bitches. Don’t scoff the seppukku idea; it’s not as if at least one person won’t bring a three hundred year old live-blade knife to the test just in case; shit like that really goes down here, like today in my friend Murakami san’s parent’s house, where he called his father into the room for a conversation that went something like:
“Hey pop, where’s the sword?”
“Which sword? Your sword? It’s over in that closet I think.”
“In these drawers at the bottom?”
“No, above, behind those doors that are held shut with a pencil.”
And Murakami san takes out a $15,000 wakizashi and its accompanying $1,000 bag, beautiful and light and precious, and we play with it for a while before they put it back in the closet and clost the doors with the pencil through the handles.
Going to bed for now, I’ll explain all about how I got to Murakami san’s parents’ house tomorrow.
Subarashi yume,
(By the way, my test is supposed to include, amongs many other things, a four minute free-technique bout; four minutes of being attacked and narrowly escaping certain death ... i mean, uh, tossin out some cans o whupassssssssss. Bring it, baby. BRING IT!!!!! WHOOO!!!!!!!!)
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