BED!

Highlight of the day today was talking with Tsukihara san (Tsuki-chan) after ukulele band practice, he talked my ear off for a while telling me all kinds of things about playing music, especially about which hand is important to focus on when you're learning how to play--he says that although you'd think it's best to concentrate on the left hand, you should focus more on the right one; the left one's the shakaijin, the worker, and the right is the geijutsuhito, the artist, and the worker's going to learn his task because he just has to and that's the way of it, but the right one either has it or it don't, and if it's got it then it's got to work and work and work to really bring it all out...and besides, the right one's the one making the damn music happen. It was great to talk to him though; I think if he weren't there I would cry most nights after practice for feeling so cast adrift, but he really makes me feel like part of the group. It's hard there, like, very hard. I think everyone must not realize how difficult (as in impossible) their conversational Japanese is to follow. They speak REALLY quickly and with thick accents and slang and jargon and dialect...it's like if a Japanese native came to the states and sat in with a group of Italian apple sellers and tried to figure out their conversation using his middle school English textbook. This is what it's like. But I think they maybe think I just don't like talking with them...rather than, "I can't." Well, anyway Tsuki-chan likes me, and he talks to me, and I am a better ukulele player than any of the other Junior Ukulele Scouts, as I call us (with the exception of Nabe-chan, a relative newcomer and instant fanatic). I think it makes a difference that I have like a million other things going on in my life, and none of these people, lovely as they are, has much else. Like, my week's schedule involves practicing Japanese, studying Japanese, teaching at six schools and lesson planning and material making for each of them, doing lots of aikido, doing even more aikido, keeping an aikido journal, doing jodo, praticing jodo solo on my own time, going to ukulele practice, practicing ukulele on my own, staving off feelings of discouragement when practicing ukulele on my own, planning out and broadcasting a live radio show, teaching adult conversation class, and a million other things, not to mention that I bike everywhere except when I take the train into Matsuyama for aikido. Biking takes time! And energy! And all of this is on top of normal life stuff like eating and doing dishes and seeing my girlfriend and reading the paper (the American paper). So it's all well and good for Nabe chan to become an instant ukulele fanatic if he's got all this time for it, but me I've got to bike a half an hour to the store and buy some eggs, for which I first need to spend half an hour making sure I know how to ask for eggs in Japanese. It's a busy life! And if I spent all my time practicing the ukulele for you people, I wouldn't have studied enought Japanese to be able to talk with you at all! Sheesh, give a guy a break!

Okay, bedtime. I have to leave the house at 7:30 tomorrow, so counting backwards that means packing my bag at 7:25, breakfast at 7:20, getting dressed/teeth and contacts at 7:10, shower from 6:50, hunt for a towel at 6:48, out of bed at 6:47.999999999.
Tomorrow's breakfast is A BAGEL!!!! Or yummy cereal, but I may be out of bran flakes, and then I would cry. WORD.

NIGHT!