Holy Crap!!! ただいま!!!

Holy crap! I'm in JAPAN!!!!!!!!!!
Against all predictions to the contrary I'm back in IMABARI and I'm enjoying the crap out of myself! I have survived my first week of work! I have begun acquiring furniture for my apartment! I will have bookshelves--BOOKSHELVES!!! BOOKSHELVESSSSS! Why am I so excited about bookshelves? Well, last time I went home to America I came back with two suitcases full of food. Peanut butter, nice jellies, wheat bread, tortillas, pinto beans, indian spices, canned gefitle fish, the whole megillah. THIS time, I came back with books. Got me some Dickens, some Graham Greene, some high lit, some low trash, and so many comic books that I had to stuff about four graphic novels into my laptop case like contraband just to make it in under the weight limit for flying. And now i have nowhere to put any of them! But now: BOOKCASES!

And now I'm in the radio station in Imabari recording a marathon of Kessel Run shows to fill out the September schedule, and I'm thrilled to be here. Right now we're listening to Gang of Four with Damaged Goods...and oooo! yes! we just NAILED the crossfade into Gold Lion by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And here I am in a window box recording studio overlooking the dustbowled shopping arcade in Imabari at ten in the morning dancing my little back-in-Japan booty off for the old ladies and tumbleweeds rolling along neck in neck across the concrete tiles like snails and turtles racing and it feels SO GOOD to be here right now! Yes! YESYESYES!!!!

Moving Update!

Moving SUCKS. In one week I'll be home in America, and then a month later I'm coming back to Japan to a new job and new house and new life in Matsuyama. So I'm packing up now in preparation to be homeless for a month with a million things to stash somewhere or other. And there's so much stuff!!! I've thrown out about thirty FULL trash bags in each of our three trash categories, from Burn Me to Don't Burn Me to Really Don't Even Think About Trying To Burn Me. And now I'm in the final throws of the Things Go Into Boxes stage, in which things go into boxes and then more things go into more boxes, and then even more things go into even more boxes, and THEN I have to go GET more boxes from the supermarket and I end up seeing and playing with my lovely students who are really as of now my former students and then I get all sad and locate consolation chocolate for myself since I'm still in the supermarket anyway and might as well leave with some chocolate, and then when I get home it's become late in the day and I'm sad and fat and I STILL have to put more things in more boxes!!! Braaaaaaa! This is moving.

A piece of truly great one-in-a-million luck has come my way today however...although it is just the kind of Hooray for Friends in Imabari thing that brings it back home how sad I really am to be moving away (which I am; very sad about it). So here's the short, short, super short-version: recently I've become friends with the scion of the towel corporation that owns the apartment building that I live in, Tamai-kun, through boxing. Two weeks ago at a boxing after party in his cool rec-shack he said that he'd let me store all my things-in-boxes at the towel factory in some unused corner. Great! But yesterday a new and even better plan came up: Tamai-kun said that instead of at the factory I can stash all my stuff in an unoccupied apartment right down the hall from me in the building I'm in now!!! Hooraaaaaay!!!! It's going to be so simple and so doable!!! I can even keep my bed and my carpet and my kotatsu table now, all of which I was going to have to sell to my predecessor for lack of storage space! Hooray!!! So just now Tamai-kun dropped by and opened up the place for me (it's seriously only three doors down) and showed me in, and it's HUGE!!! It's this HUGE and beautiful place on the street-side corner with these big windows (I have no windows in my place) and white walls and a huge entranceway and a big big kitchen with counter space and cabinets and a working bathtub and a tokonoma in the bedroom and just this crazy amount of space....what in the hell!?! If I had been living in this place from the beginning maybe I wouldn't even be moving! It's so big and lovely! I know that this is just crazy talk and that the last thing I needed would have been more space to be messy in, but hachi machi those windows! Sigh.

So now to hopefully go put the final putsh into the Things Into Boxes stage. And then I'll be done with moving prep and can move on to other finishing touches to my life here. Crazy. Wish me luck, and a special thanks to Robin and Ellie and Jim sensei for their congrats on my shodan test! It went really well--I saw some video from it and I look pretty good! And how about that picture in the paper, huh? So I'm a black belt in Aikido now! Hooray!!! OK, back to business. BYEEEEEE!

Aikido 達人！！！

Yesterday I got my blackbelt in Aikido!!!!! FUCKIN ALRIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!
It took six years and lots of being thrown around a lot, but YUSSSSS!!
The test went pretty well and I can post some photos and stuff from it soon, but for the time being here's a link to the dojo's blog, which has a picture of me from last week throwing one of my teachers, Murakami san. What's with this picture, you ask? Why's it so grainy? Because it was scanned from the newspaper!!!! I WAS IN THE NEWSPAPER AGAIN!!!! It had a whole interview about why I aikido and stuff, and this awesome picture: and now I'm a blackbelt! Whoopee!!!!!

Braaaaaaaaaa

Life proceeds at quite a clip these days. I haven't had much time to blog about anything, but here's a little slideshow about some of my recent adventures:

Picasa Pics

school and teaching, a house party at my place, planting rice with my kids, boxing and after-boxing, and a cool jodo demonstration! Enjoy!

I got hit by a car! Again!

Here we go again: I got hit by a car! Last night on my way to boxing, side-swiped off of my bike. It's not as bad as the last time this all happened, because my bike's OK and I'm okay, but now I have problems from insurance and actively negligent police to deal with(you'd think that "actively negligent" would be an oxymoron, but where cops are concerned I guess any kind of moron is fair game. We're actually lodging a complaint about how they treated us last night, which is a terribly un-Japanese way to do things but it all was so completely atrocious that we're going to go through with it anyway).

There was damage to the car though, and it's all complicated because the driver turns out to be a mom at one of my schools; after the crash, one my little kids jumps out of the car hollering "Josh sensei! Josh sensei!" Actually the kids were totally awesome about it all and were a big help in telling the cops how they had got it all backwards. I was coming down a hill/exit-ramp kind of place below Tamagawa's community center after eikaiwa class and a car came turning up into the same ramp. The ramp's narrow and windy and cars can't really stay in lane, and even though I moved over to the shoulder and slowed down, the driver didn't see me and cut the turn much too sharp and swiped me. I had been on the left side of the road coming down the hill and the car cut in too close to its right coming up (remember wedriveon the left here too). Its right side fender smashed into me as I tried to break and swerve out of the way; it didn't help any that this had been a rainy, cloudy day with slick roads and low light. I managed to jink just left enough to avoid getting plowed right into, but my bike's handle scraped the fender and door of the car, the body hit my right leg and pedal, and the car's side mirror collided with my arm and shattered. Hang on a second though and read that again: a collision with my bicep broke the mirror off of a car. It didn't break my arm, didn't even really leave much of a bruise, but I broke the mirror off of a car with my bicep. I am Thor.

Of course, Thor's foot and knee got a little roughed up and they hurt somewhat worrysomely today, and last night was certainly no Valhalla. I had to go to the hospital instead of to boxing, which really sucked, and the whole ordeal was pretty awful thanks to the cops. But there was a pretty great side to all of it. My awesome girlfriend Sachiko really came through and turned out to be a realy star. She totally rescued me and bailed me out of all the trouble I was in without my saying anything more than "I don't think I can meet you later, because I just had a car accident." She came to where I was in like two minutes (and later had to call a friend to have them turn the rice cooker in her house off, since she'd left mid dinner-prep) and her older brother and sister arrived about two minutes later, and then each of them telephoned about a hundred people for advice or assistance from anyone with a connection to the cops or the insurance companies. Sachiko's kin totally rallied up the whole town to help me, and her brother was my hero in standing up to the awful, awful cops. He understood exactly the things I wanted to say but didn't know how to and he did a great job of saying them for me, and it was the first time we'd ever even met! And he's the one that's lodging the complaint for me too. I'll have to tell about the cops in a whole different post; it's really insane. But Sachiko and her family were all just really wonderful. They stood by me and they translated everything from incomprehensible Japanese to comprehensible Japanese for me and answered questions for me and kept me in a really good spirit throughout the whole thing. After cops and kids and mom drove away, the brother gave me a much needed cigarette (and Sachiko was way relieved that I'd asked him for one instead of her; it's a secret from her family that she smokes), and we all talked about how awful the cops were. Sachiko had talked to my boss for me on the phone and she had called Yasu, my boxing friend, to tell him to tell me that I needed to go get checked out at the hospital. I acquiesced and she drove me out there and she fielded the desk clerks and the paperwork and hung out with me in the waiting rooms until midnight when we were finally released, and then after we left the hospital she brought me back to Yasu's house because he wanted to see if I was OK and give me a feel-better beer and yaki-soba snack. And all this in her nurse's uniform, not even changed from work. I tell you, things with her really beat the hell out things with Yuu chan during the last accident I had. In the last accident I wrecked my bike, needed fifteen x-rays instead of two, and ended up getting totally fucking abandoned by my girl in my hour of need, instead of totally taken care of. Life is funny in its cycles; last time I really needed someone and they let me down, hard, and this time I didn't even ask for help and I got huge huge support. As my sister said when I told her about all of this, Yay for people coming through. But even despite Sachiko, it's not all roses; I've got an achey leg and foot and arm and I need to get my bike looked over and I need to deal with the police and the insurance companies and my boss and I need to somehow add this all in to my already frantically overloaded schedule, and I probably need to not go to aikido for a day or two (starting after tonight's class). It could be a whole lot better, but I guess it could be worse too, and thank god for good girlfriends.

Total Recall Death!!!

This is a picture of Josh and Allison dying excruciating, tongue-popping deaths a-la Total Recall. As you can see, we had suddenly found ourselves on the surface of the moon. AAAULAAUALAAHAGAAAAAAA!!!!, as Schwarzenegger would have shouted. Click on it to view it in a bigger size or download; it's a much funnier picture at a slightly higher resolution. This was in Bako national park in Malasyia, an incredible jungle preserve that we stayed in overnight. The mountains in part of the park are heavy with iron particles, but the iron is distributed unevenly throughout the other minerals in the rock. High concentrations of iron on the surface will resist erosion by the rains and sea, and over thousands of years it's the sections of rock that are less heavily laced with iron that get washed away, leaving the raised skin you can see in the picture above. Scarred flat beds of iron hovering above purple rocky sand; it really felt like we were on another planet. One with no oxygen. AAAULAAUALAAHAGAAAAAAA!!!!

Belly of the Beast

This photo was taken from inside the colored cloths making up the lion's body in the Japanese shishi-odori, or Lion Dance (roughly). A bunch of men hold up the cloths from underneath and billow them out into the air following the lead of an ornate lion's head mask at the front. The billowing is grunt work, but doing the dance with the lion's head takes the stamina of an olympian and the training of a Balanchine star. The lion's head leads he body around every which way, usually following a pattern someone's great great great great grandfather devised to scare off demons. The mask is usually a big wood and lacquer job bedecked with a flopping jaw, lolling tongue, bulging eyes and a neat mane of jangly brass bells. It's heavy, and the dance is extraordinarily demanding. But inside the lion's body I learned one secret of the lion dance, and that is this: throughout the dance, as the lion moves and snaps and its body writhes and humps, the men under the cloths are constanty rotating who controls the head. Everyone takes several turns at controlling the head so that no one gets too burned out during the course of the dance, which can continue for hours and hours through the long, dogged afternoons of a Japanese summer festival. And the way they do it never breaks the pattern of the lion's movement. If you're watching the dance as a spectator from outside, you'd never know that the change was taking place. Only by descending into the belly of the beast did this secret become revealed to me! BWAHAHAHA!!!

A Day in the Life

In the middle of a wonderful day, with only a moment to post about it before running off to make a train. My friends Yasu and Kawamura took me hiking up a mountain in the morning with a crazy old karate man who had us do some several thousand crunches at a rest point in the middle of the trail, and I learned new words for the different parts of a tree in Japanese. I totally heart Yasu and Kawamura--I think I can say pretty definitively that they're among the best things I've had in my life since coming here. After mountain climbing, Yasu and his girlfriend and I went to this event by the sea side, where a huge part of the ocean had been netted in and a bunch of fish dumped into it, and they gave you a net and a mesh bag and set you loose to go catch as many fish as you could find and scoop up. It was great! Yasu got the first catch, then Toshimi got one, and right when I started to think oh no, is this going to be one of those days where everyone but me tags something?, I caught two big ones right in a row. I got two more later for a total of four, and Yasu and Toshimi ended up with two each. When you caught a few of them, you brought them to a man in a boat and he STABBED THEM THROUGH THE BRAIN WITH A NAIL for you, and then you could put them in your bag without them flopping out and could go trolling around for more. It was great being out in the sun and fishing and stuff, and it was neat being at this big normal summertime community event--lots of parents and kids, lots of teenagers and old folks too, everyone just having fun. It was like Coney Island in rural Japan. Yasu and I also dug for clams, but all we found were these disgusting mud worms and one skippy mudfish that got away before I could net him (can you eat those guys anyway?). We went out for a great lunch too at a fisherman's sushi place with the biggest sushi slices I've ever seen, and ate more than our fill of deliciosity, and I'm sure I was the only foreigner that will ever enter that place between now and kingdom come. It was a really great afternoon, with people whom I really love, and now I'm going into Matsuyama for aikido and staying over at another friend's place to play all day tomorrow too, since I'm skipping work (don't worry, it's cool...I think), and to top it all off, I think I've got a new girlfriend! What a good day! Wooooo!

Image Respond

My pal John Tozzi tells me that he's also teaching himself image play using a pirated copy of Photoshop and a handy dandy book, and apparently he's making miles more progress than I am! Here's a dinosaur project he did. Good job John! Does anybody else have cool photoplayed images they've been working on? Send them in! It'll be a thing!

It should also get noted down for posterity when my awesome stencils are the next Friday night, that the whole thing started up thanks to times with Robin and her DIY, modge-podge sense of fun. Specifically, this came about from a procratinatey introduction to stencilrevolution.com in the King computer room when we were both immersed in crazy paper writing during a finals week in spring, too many years ago (boy, if I coulda majored in procrastinating I would have been at the top of the class). The stenciling never really went further than the computer room for me, but a while later Robin surprised me with this amazing stencil she made and gave to me, a very sweet photo of the two of us having times in London that she printed on brown cardboard in crisp black ink. It looks great, and it was just a really lovely gift--way high up there on the best presents ever list. It's even hanging up in my house right now, in a nice green frame right by the door (and was always a source of consternation for my last girlfriend, Sayo). So yeah, should my stencilized glory score me any big points in the future, the first few should get chalked up on the Times with Robin tally, for anyone who's keeping track. Yo it's cool, I'm happy to share!

GIMP Creation #2

Here's the second finished image I've made using the GIMP, an open-source image editing program I'm trying to learn my way around. My goal with He-Man here was to render a cool image that would be suitable for silkscreening onto a T-shirt or spraypainting onto something.
I still have to print it out at school, cut it out (over probably a few trial and error runs) and then make something with it, but I'm pretty proud of myself for just getting to here so far. I had to take the original image, a color photo of a He-Man toy, and monkey around with its color values and edges and contrasts and things, learning how to use image tools like "colorify" and "threshold," and I ended up getting a result that looks clean and cut-out-able, and it still preserves a lot of the cool details from the original. Hooray! And then I added text. Double hooray! Next is printing and silkscreening. Feel free to do the same with it yourselves (download the file from its location and it should print big onto a B5 sheet of paper), and send me a picture of the result to post up on Japandamonium. For anyone who wants help doing this kind of thing themselves, there's a fantastic website called Instructables that's full of How To guides for doing just about anything cool you can think of. I found a few different guides to help me GIMP my way through He-Man over here. And look at where it got me. I HAVE THE POWER!!! Try it out!

Subtext, Subtitles

Couldn't even stand to finish watching this Monty Clift & Liz Taylor movie I got called A Place in the Sun, which looked promising enough went mostly like this and this with a little bit of this thrown in to make things move even more slowly. The one good moment of it is a scene where cops interrupt Monty and his homely non Liz Taylor girlfriend while they're making out in a car on (ah, yesteryear Americana), and there's this great one-off line where the cop's asked what they're doing and Monty says, after one of his poignant, unreadable Monty Clift pauses, "talking." So the cop fires back this one really funny line with a total no-nonsense face: "Look here boy," he says, "they've invented the house. It's a very good place to talk in. You'd better get back to yours." It's the best line in a movie filled with darling, i loved you since the moment i met you...maybe even before i met you. BUT IT'S NOT THE SAME LINE IN JAPANESE!!! Gosh darn Japanese subtitles seem to work hard at killing all the characterizations in our good movies and flattening out everyone's lines to the shortest approximate statement instead of remaining at all true to the intent of anyone's expressions. In the case of A Place in the Sun, this gem of a line becomes simply, "if you are talking, other places are better for doing it--go home." What happened to "they invented the house?!" It's no wonder most locals don't like any of the good movies from foreign countries; the subtitles kill all the substance!

Japan tends to do a much better job with overdubbing than subtitling in terms of remaining true to the original scripts. Of course, dubbing films is akin in the artistic sense to throwing a bag of puppies off a cliff. Besides, it's not like anyone here in Japan would ever dream of suggesting that foreigners watch The Seven Samurai in English or Italian or French, for goodness sakes. It's a Japanese movie, in Japanese, and it's a superb piece of art. Overdubbing it into another language would be like going to a museum and deciding you like blue more than red so they should go ahead and photoshop Guernica for you. Art doesn't really work like this.

Now this all said, there does seem to be an exception where animation is concerned. Japan's famous for its cartoon industry, but foreigners often see them overdubbed into other languages, and this might actually be the best thing for everyone concerned. If you watch enough anime without letting it destroy your soul and social life, you notice that there seem to be about four or five actors doing all the voices in the industry. This isn't true of course, but most anime relies heavily on a very narrow set of voicing archetypes that can make most shows deftly personality-free. Dragonball Z is an incredibly boring show in Japanese because all of the mains sport identical Macho Fighter voices, while the women use Woman Voice #2, and the bad guys all have Baddy Voice, unless they're robots, in which case it's Baddy Robot Voice. Actioney anime can be much more fun to watch in English because our industry tends to have a much more diverse voice acting pool (there are exceptions, to be sure). Conversely (and rather unexpectedly), the voicing archetypes and rote emotional expressions in Japanese are perfect for lots of American animated films. I just watched The Incredibles in Japanese (bus ride, not my choice) and boy, it was great! Who'd a thought? That's a movie whose original voice acting wowed the boots off everyone, myself included. Now, take something less, er, incredible, like Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride--a movie that did almost nothing but make me yawn in English--and it becomes a freaking masterpiece in Japanese! Seriously, it's an unbelievable transformation. Even the songs are miles better--it becomes a real adventure in Japanese. Maybe the language works better for fake people, or maybe the Japanese dubbing industry just needs to get its act together; either way, don't rent A Place in the Sun, but get your hands on a Japanese Corpse Bride ASAP!

Having cake, eating cake...You know how it goes.

I cleaned! Finally, I cleaned my apartment! It's been so long! But now I seriously have a pretty tidy place once again. I even, get this, I even cleaned my porch! It's AMAZING! Do you want to know how derelict my porch was? My porch was so derelict the landlord complained I had had squatters living there! And get this: I DID! Sometime in the last month or so, the pigeons who hang out above the pachinko parlor next door decided that they'd wing over to my side of the big divide, and then they moved in! I had pigeons NESTING on my porch! Nesting! On two eggs! How the hell long could the thing have been there for? The nest was enormous! I guess it must not have hurt that I had a bunch of dead houseplant skeletons and broken flower pots and closet hangers and other detritus to use as nest-making materials. But still, this is my house! No matter how decrepit it gets!

It's not my house for much longer though. I've got just over two months left of my life here in Imabari, and I suspect that it is going to whizzzz past. No luck so far on the job search in Matsuyama, but then again, I haven't really kicked into too much activity about it yet. Which is worrisome. Partly, I'm wondering how long I want to spend in Japan before coming home...I keep getting all these facebook messages from friends who miss me, and god, I miss them too. I miss being loved by a million people. Not that they don't still love me, but that's the whole idea--they do still love me and I love them all too! And I miss them all! And I want to be able to be loved not from a bazillion miles away. Weird. Life is weird. Things can be so nice here and so melancholic at the same time.

I haven't been to much aikido since getting back from Malaysia either, and that has had its ups and downs...aikido's the thing I'm trying to really focus on now, now that I've decided to stay here and move and do all the stuff, but it's the times I put it on the back burner that I enjoy my Life In Japan life a lot more. Like today; today I cleaned my house and made it really nice to be in again, but when's the next time I'm going to spend more than an hour or two here before going to sleep? I've got aikido keiko (class) every day from tomorrow until the end of time. It ends up feeling like a big one-or-the-other trade off: either I do aikido, or I can have a life. Having cake, eating cake; you know how it goes. I guess that's the idea of me moving to Matsuyama really, is that if I didn't have to spend an extra four hours per class getting to and from the dojo (that's not an exaggeration) then maybe I will be able to have a life style that incorporates my devotion to aikido, instead of a lifestyle which gets put on hold in favor of my devotion of aikido. ("your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, nor has it given you prescience enough to discern the location of the rebels' hidden base...nor does it let you magically teleport yourself home from keiko anytime before midnight three nights a week, nor does it let you find much peace of mind with the retarded Middle School Empire's archaic nonsense, nor have you been able to Force-talk your way into keeping a girlfriend..." man, choke that muthafucka!) For the time being though, even if it's a good sounding plan, since none of it has yet materialized in any form, it's only the not-real-yet-ness that I'm feeling, and it's hard to get excited about a plan that doesn't exist yet. Braaaa. These better be the droids I'm looking for yo.

Me and My Monkey

Back in JAPAAAAAAAAAAN from Malaysia...whoops, I guess I mean MALAAAYYYSIAAAAAA. It was a very different sort of trip from the Thailand experience, which if you haven't seen some evidence of, you should go check out the photo set over on flickr. That was a great god damn time. Why didn't we just go back to Thailand?

The trip had a lot of good things in it. We did have times. Once we were involved in a three way nature battle in the jungle: Josh & Al vs Pit Viper vs. Screaming Alpha-male Monkey. Another time, a ten-year-old Malaysian boy sang James Brown at the top of his lungs inside an ancient spirit cave as we danced to the summit in green light from a rent in the mountainside. This was after the bats attacked us, but before we found the pile of dust-dry butterfly wings, inches deep, the bats' compost heap. We spent three days in the jungles of Borneo, in the care of a tribe called the Iban who may have given up headhunting as far back as a hundred years or so. We stayed in their longhouse and went on treks through pepper plantations, rubber fields and wild, untamable rainforest, minded by a man called "Antelopes" (this was not his given name). My highlight of the trip was when swimming time in the river became bathing time in the river; there was this outrageously spunky, smart, wild and terrific nine-year-old girl named Melissa (mell-EEE-sah) who came down to bathe when I was swimming down with her little brother Monkey Boy. Well, I called him Monkey Boy because he wouldn't tell me his name and because he was a super rambunxious little dude. I'd made friends with him by chasing him around the longhouse on my knuckles like a gorilla, endearing myself to everyone in the tribe. To my surprise, he loved the name Monkey Boy and would go around shouting it to himself to try to make it stick. Wonderful kids. So I'm swimming with Monkey Boy when Melissa comes down to the river with some other girls to bathe. No need to skedaddle; river bathing here isn't nude but done saronged, and isn't a super private thing. Monkey Boy and I were playing on the thick branches of an old tree that had lodged in the river bottom, and I swam over to the shore when Melissa and co came down, and started to splash them. And then Melissa grabbed her bar of soap and handed it to me and held out her hair in both fists, and I got to shampoo her and soap her up; and then she started to do the same for me! It was unbelievably cute and special, that this little girl was sharing this simple intimacy with me after being so aloof for the few days prior to it. It was really endearing and wonderful.

So yes, times. It wasn't all terrific, though a lot of it was great. But thinking back to the little girl in the river makes me feel really happy about it all now, so we'll leave it at that for the evening.

Ittekimasu!!!!

When you shout, "ittekimasu!" it means, "I'm OUT, muthafuckaaaaas!" But also implies you'll be back again soon. So don't fret muthafuckas, in other words.

In a few hours I hop a ferry for OOOOOsaka, and from there to Malaysia, and parts unknown. In the meantime, here are a bunch of pics from Al's and my adventure to THAILAND, though still hightly non-annotated. Sorry. In time, perhaps, we hope. But I got new adventures to be getting on to, so for now ittekimasu, muthafu.............!

Also, a big PS: Thank You! to the good folks at Blogger, who have finally ungraded me to the new version of their software. Blogger Beta has gone the way of the slide rule, and we're high tekkin' it from here on home. Woo!

Proxima Estacion

Next stop....Malaysia!
Malaysia here we come!
Allison and I are leaving on the 26th of April, which is, looking at my calendar, one week and one day from now.
A full-stop, Keanu-like Whoa would not be inappropriate at this juncture.

Whoa.

I better hurry up and get these Thailand pictures off my camera!

And unpack my backpack! The middle compartment is still stuffed full with assorted chazzurai from the trip, including, if memory serves: one recipe book from our cooking class in Chiang Ma; one jar of Tiger Balm; one street-bought copy of this Argentinian guy's journal of his hitch-hiking odyssey through, of all places, Iraq and Iran; several cheap yet totally freaking awesome T-shirts bought at the best street vendor stall on Khao San Road, all the way at the top and tucked around the corner off the main strip; one whole crapload of these lovely little colored straw christmas-light kind of things that I bought far too many of (what, they were like next to free, and all pretty) but haven't figured out where to hang up yet. And my place is, typically, a wreck, and I have all kinds of job stuff to worry about (believe me, I've got the worrying down; it's the doing something about it to STOP worrying that is difficult), and I need to do some laundry and clean up and bring the trash out, and go to aikido!!! Aaaaah! Train to aikido leaves in an hour and 45 minutes, and which of these things can I do by then?!? Braaaaaaah!

The Power of Green

Has everybody read this article yet?

THAILAND!

Take a look at Allison's blog for some pictures of us in THAILAND! We had an amazing time.
A snachet of memory for you from the Muay Thai gym in Chiang Mai where we were getting taught some basics of Thai kickboxing (ie, getting pummelled). Our guy Lek (yes, I know a man named Lek) had taught me how to knee Muay Thai style, and was giving me commands and commentary as he stood there with a pad on his body and I tried to knee him in the solar plexus for about twenty minutes. And the commentary went like this: "Right knee...THUMP...good! OK, right knee--THUMP...good! OK, right knee--THUMP...good! OK, right knee--THUMP...good! OK, left knee--WHACK...bad! Man, come on! Balaance! Riilack! Powaa!" Oh Lek. He seriously was a big sweetheart, and really warm towards us from the very start when he came to pick us up at our guest house on his motorcycle.

On the way to the gym he craned his head around to half face me and asked, "How long you come to Chaing Mai," and I told him it was our first day, which was true enough. We'd arrived from Bangkok two days earlier, but had spent our time in the jungle, and not in the city at all yet. The morning we arrived and found our guest house, which we'd sort of made a reservation for from Bangkok, we waited till the office opened and first thing set ourselves up for a trek out to the jungle, departing about twenty minutes later. The office guy, a wiry-tall skinny guy named Coco with SUZUKI NAOKO tattooed across one shoulder in Sans Serif and cigarette burns across the other, spoke fluid English with the winy and not entirely trustworthy accent of Chinese dry cleaner's female shopkeeper, and tried to warn us off. Coco said, "yeah, you guys both really sure you want to go now? Sometimes people they come overnight and they think they don't need more sleep, but they been partying in Bankok and then they're out in the jungle in the hot and on the elephants and they're so too tired, so you need sleep, we give you room now, you tired, you sleep now today you go tomorrow is also ok, ok?" But bah! Time enough for sleep in the grave! So with only the time to stash our bags and grab a cup of coffee, off we went to the jungle.

But back to Lek and I on the bike. I told him it was our first day, and then I asked him how long he'd been boxing. He said, what? I said, "How long you been boxing? Long time?" And he looks back over his right shoulder at me with a little grin and puts out his left hand, holds it above the road with his palm down as we whiz along through the traffic, showing me the size of the little boy he must have been when he first started. Actually, I later found out that Lek means little, and that it's his Thai nickname; when Thai children are born they get given a nickname in about the same moment they get slapped on the tuchus, so as to beguile the evil spirits who would seek to take their fresh, vulnerable souls. And their nicknames seem to be fairly household words, which comes off as really sweet when you translate it. You get people named Apple, or Shrimp, or Peanut (thanks to Robin for all this culture stuff), or in our friend Lek's case, Small. Which, looking at the man, comes off as one of the better jokes anyone's ever pulled off. Cuz little, he ain't. He's a big dude. Not dopey big, not like Ohio born, corn-fed Grade A American football playing beef big; Lek's big like big pumas and tigers are big. It helps me feel safe while we're riding the motorcyle...which is good, because not only do we have no mirrors, but we're by far the fastest thing on the road (a theme for Al and my week there) in an unregulated melee of cars, trucks, pickups, buses, bikes, charis, tuk-tuks and pedestrians; and Lek keeps trying to talk to me while we're riding, which thanks to the noise of the bike and the difficulty of language and accents, involves him using a lot of hand signals. So here we are, our first day fresh out of the jungle, and at 9:00 in the morning I find myself on the back of a motorcycle--my first time ever on a motorcycle--bursting Kessel Run style through Chiang Mai's rush-hour traffic and holding down a conversation with a massively built and terrifically friendly lifetime Thai kickboxer, who is driving me with no hands on the wheel or handles or whatever it is we've got to steer with, on a bike with no apparent means of braking and no mirrors, which shouldn't really matter anyway since the dude's looking over his shoulder at me the whole time. This, let me tell you, this was a great way to start the day.

Hooray for amazing THAILAND. What an adventure.

Recipe Review

New Recipes:

-Thai-inspired Soup, a la Japanese Ingredios
-Banana-Cornflake Sammy Supreme
-Soy Cream Soup #1: Sweet Potatoes, Chili pepper, Onions, Garlic, Toasted Sesame Seeds
-Soy Cream Soup #2: S. Potatoes and Pumpkin, Onions, Ginger, Toasted Sesame Seeds

Soy Cream Soup Serving Suggestions: #1 is best as a sandwhich on toast. I don't know why this is, but it's absolutely true. #1 is more savory and #2 is sweeter, though still very meal-feeling and substancy. One of the most enjoyable ways to eat #2 is hot in a bowl with plain yogurt, cold like it should be. Freaking divine, I'm telling you.

Yay! Life!

I'm having my first sleepover in Japan!

I'm at my friend Yasu's house in Onishi cho and he's just gone to bed and told me to stay up as long as I like playing on the HDTV-Internet hookup because he'll wake me up in the morning before he sets off to the towel factory. He's set me up with a futon and a cozy room in his place for the night after inviting me along to a drinking party with the organizers of his town's sacred annual spring festival, which I will apparently be a key member of this year as we "transform into gods" and try to break each other's shrines and stand in five-man-high pillars on each other's heads wearing lion masks. Don't ask, man, I couldn't answer. Anyway though, I've got a really good friend and a "transform into a god" date, so tonight tunred out pretty well. This is even though I got stood up for a date and shit (to be fair, it got rescheduled to coffee in the afternoon tomorrow). Yasu is super cool; I think he's the most real person I've met since comig here, and I7m thrilled that he likes me too.