RABU, UKE, X Y Z

Tomorrow morning is my big ukulelelele debut! Our Hawaiian Band in performing tomorrow inside of the mall in Imabari, and there are to be many many hula dancing children there to draw a crowd. Actually it’s more like the other way around, that the dancers are some kind of local community group thing and we’re there giving them music. But we’re performing! It’s totally exciting. I have been practicing up a storm, I’m sure much to the delight of my neighbors and schoolchildren (yes, I even practice at school). Last night I went and practiced with the band leader Ya-Chin at his bar, and he said I was in good shape. Whew! There’s some strange business about who’s actually performing though – I think it was supposed to just be the four real band guys minus the junior ukulele chorus, but Ya-Chin had told me about it a few weeks ago so I asked him for the details again at practice on Tuesday. Everybody seemed a little put on the spot, but I couldn’t entirely follow the conversation that went on afterwards. I guess the ukulele girls weren’t expecting to play? Or they were, but weren’t expecting me to play too? I’m not really sure about it all. One of them, Miho chan (she's on the left in the picture), seemed to say that it was great that I was going to play because the girls weren’t allowed to perform with the group yet. But again, I’m not really sure about any of it. Alls I know is that tomorrow morning I’m putting on my best Hawaiian shirt and playing my little fingers off for a crowded mall of strangers, and I’m thrilled about it.

Not entirely strangers. Yuu-chan is coming, and she’s bringing her older sister (whose name, I kid you not, is Mai) and the sister’s boyfriend, and afterwards we’ll go double date somewhere in Imabari. This will be my first double date since high school when it was the lamest thing I may have ever done ever in the entire world. Then girlfriend Katie and I went out with our friends Will and Jess for a feaux fancy dinner at an Italian place that was only one in a long line of unremarkable and identical restaurants that each folded and reopened with different personnel on the same site across from the Starbucks in New Rochelle, each doomed from conception for lack of parking or even a body of potentially interested clientele. It was pretty super lame. An empty place with thick air and bored waiters, the inside decorated entirely in terracotta—“the color of sicily,” to use a line from Snow Crash—and the food hearty enough to weight down any kind of light hearted conersation. I guess we went there to try to feel adulty? That seems to have been a priority around then. Now I’m just hoping that tomorrow we can go out for pizza and milkshakes or make out in a movie theater, but alas, neither of these are necessarily viable options where I’m living right now. Does anybody else double date? Is this a thing that happens outside of movies about the fifties?

The date is not on my worry list though; things are going great with Yuu-chan. The only difficulty recently has been from an email the other day; it was entirely in Japanese except for her salutation at the bottom: “LOVEU.” I have no idea what to reply to that, or even in fact what it means. As for the first point, me I’m comfortably staying at “I like you” for the time being, because while I do like her quite a lot, that’s about as far as my verbal commitment level is going right now three weeks into a relationship. Moreover, I have no idea what LOVEU really means to Yuu chan. As far as relationship-speak goes in Japanese, lots of words from English have come across into common usage, but their meanings, weights, values and nuances have mutated during the transition. When people use English words in Japanese, there’s often no clear connection between the meaning they’re trying to get across and the sign you think they’re employing. There’s no easy way, for example, to connect the sign and signifier for something like “RABURABU,” which is everyday Japanspeak for “love love.” When people say, “you and your girlfriend, is it RABURABU?” what answer could possibly be correct? Best steer clear. Sorry, Yuu-chan. But I’m excited she’s coming to see me play tomorrow. I hope she RABUs the show. I know I will.