Tuesday, May 11

Toy shopping
Hot day on the pavement. Humid, post-rain smell. I wore a dress which only, sadly, made it more obvious that I've put on weight since coming here.

My "Discovering Tokyo" class with Harvard professor went to Meiji Jingu today because the weather was nice... and it certainly was cooler there. I had the chance to talk to the professor, who seems genuinely nice and may not be as egotistical as I thought but instead more "closed."

Got home early and took a one-hour nap before going out for sushi in West Shinjuku with Apple Guy and his wife, Green. The place we went was a "standing sushi bar," the kind which is commonly frequented by salarymen... except that this one is quite popular with women, both for its quality and for its ladies' discount. One piece nigiri is 70yen with discount (US 60cents) but all must be purchased in pairs and two pairs must be purchased at once. The grand total, then, for four onigiri withOUT discount is 300yen. Damn cheap and damn good. I had sixteen pieces (salmon, tuna, yellowtail, mackrel, shrimp, octopus, several unidentified fish, etc) and the total came out to a mere 1120yen. YUM.

Green is a recent graduate of a nail salon beauty school in Tokyo and wants me to come over to their house so she can work on my nails. I've never had a manicure before... and while I'm looking forward to the attention, I'm afraid to come out of there looking, erm, a bit more like a blonde bimbo. If I end up doing it, I think I may insist on a French Manicure, as the less paint there is on me, the better. I do weightlift, after all.

I went with Host Mom when she walked the dog late tonight. Even at 10PM, it was warm enough for a tank top and flip flops. We passed a store in my neighborhood that I've wondered about on and off. The storefront is painted black, has no windows and on the siding is painted a large, white question mark. When I asked her what it was, she told me it was an "adult toy store." I should have figured. Then we had a brief but rather amusing conversation about the merits and demerits of frequenting a sex shop is one's neighborhood. She said to me,

"If I want to visit an "adult shop," I'd go to one in Shinjuku."

And I honestly wasn't sure whether to interpret the statement as meaning "WHEN I go, I do it in Shinjuku" or "If I ever had the urge to, I'd go to Shinjuku." The Japanese was quite unclear but I certainly didn't want to follow-up with the question, "Oh, have you ever been to a sex shop?" Or start explaining how the Toys in Babeland in Seattle really has "quite a nice, liberal neighborhood atmosphere."

Host mom is a real hoot. She's extremely nice, very patient and never fails to make me laugh.

Walking through the closed-up neighborhood marketplace after dark tonight, I realized that I've already started to miss Japan. This means that I'm preparing myself for the move home but also that it will be more difficult than I anticipate. Day by day, it gets harder to go to school and subject myself to the same, obnoxious, American outcasts. This is not everyone, of course, but there are some real characters in the program who, while once amusing, now just deserve to be put down. And the classes? Ugh, the classes... if I never have another prof who treats my class like middle schoolers again, I will consider myself a blessed individual. I *seriously* dislike my Japanese profs in this respect.

The hag who teaches my Japanese workshop tried to chew me out in front of the class when I explained that I had to leave half an hour early (of a 1 1/2 hour class) to go to my part-time job. Firstly, I'm auditing the class.. I chose to take it no credit and therefore I have NO OBLIGATION to go. Secondly, the REASON I'm auditing the class is *because* I knew beforehand that my job would occasionally overlap with Thursday class... and I explained this all to the teacher who gave me permission to enter the class. Thirdly, I decided to take the class in-spite of the part-time job conflict and no-credit because I WANTED TO. I thought it would be a good class. Now this menopausal witch had the NERVE to try and make some kind of *example* of me by launching into some schpiel about how "exchange students should KNOW that they're here to learn and not to work."

Excuse me? EXCUSE ME?!? Bitch, please. I'm an adult paying grand sums of money to be in a class I'm not even getting credit for, because I WANT TO. If you want to take a look at my bank account and then offer me your own hard-earned cash, I'll gladly accept and stop working... but until then, shut your idealistic trap. God damn.



So, yeah, there are a lot of things that I'm quite tired of. I need a vacation from Japan, or maybe just from Tokyo... but above all, I don't want to go back to the states and be trapped in a depressing lifestyle that fades into oblivion. I guess, as Chris said, it's not goodbye forever, just "see ya later."

Tomorrow: Sumo at Ryogoku.

Tschuss.