Bah! Two of my favorite coworkers are leaving Kichijoji-Ko. No worries since one is just transferring across town . . . . the other, though, is traipsing back to England for law school. The two of them had a fun leaving party at a swanky Kichi bar Sunday night. We'd put together a pool for gifts that somehow got directly transferred to paying our bar tab. Delicious. In retrospect drinks on the honorees seems a little backwards, but they're the generous types so it daijobu desu.

The days before that were really busy and fantastic. Colson and her buddy Elizabeth came to town on the 26th as a post tax season vacation. They both have real-person responsible-type jobs but somehow managed the 10day holiday with style and ease. Suffice it to say they and I (after seven months) are both seasoned Tokyo tourists. It was so good to see the ladies and great to have four days away from NOVA.

My housemate Megan went to Malaysia and brought back the gout. Fortunately she also brought back a copy of Eternal Sunshine, so I'm thinking that one balances out the other.

To perpetuate the idea that I'm completely embroiled in a life of Rugby, which is mostly false, really, I'll reference the Toshiba Cup semifinals, which we went to yesterday. Game 1: Canada v. USA, Game 2: Japan v. Romania. Both matches were alright though the latter was much better since the crowd probably quintupled (?) in both size and enthusiasm, the game was both a bit tighter and a bit quicker, and Japan won whereas the USA sadly lost. Never having watched a rugby game in anywhere near its entirety, I was really suprised how much I enjoyed it. Sitting through a 2-ish hour game without the imposition of TV time outs is certainly a luxury. Plus the concessions stands sell hot noodle cups.

Over the past months my housemate Olivia has befriended some of the guys from the Suntory Rugby team. Rugby is pretty popular in Japan; not quite as much as soccer, but it's certainly more watched than it is in the U.S. Apparently a lot of top players from New Zealand's and Australia's teams come to Japan for the tail end of their careers (I think because rugby in Japan, contrary to elsewhere, is somewhat friendlier to much-abused joints and limbs). Soooo, Olivia is Fijian and many of them are Islanders, creating a natural bond . . . one that has facilitated my befriending of former greats from teams such as the New Zealand All Blacks*. That such a claim meant nothing to me until about a week ago (they don't talk about it -- we had to rely on Olivia's sister, an avid fan, to alert us to the caliber of our company . . . and even then I didn't know who the All Blacks were until Olivia enlightened me) only slightly diminishes the glamour of the situation, right? Wellll, they're a lovely bunch of lads, anyway, and as far as I can tell they have all have their teeth and ears.

*If you watch the Haka History video, not only will you want to watch Whale Rider again; you'll also see some of Japan's finest at their most grainy.

After a few days of crap weather (Shagan recently reminded me of how it snowed on her birthday/farewell freshman in, ehhh, 1996?!, to which I'll add that it also snowed for our roof-poppin' party in my basement just one week earlier), it has finally returned to enjoyable* enough, just in time for the weekend. This one-day weekend is dedicated to package retrieval and lazitude only, however, as the past "week" was more weekend than usual given birthday celebrations including real live dancing until dawn, amongst other things.

It was recommended recently that I read an article by David Foster Wallace. So I read it and it's well-written, funny, kind of bizarre, all that; what I really want to address, though, are the footnotes. Brilliant! They're much like the "Stickies" that come with Mac's OS: pastel and all over the page -- i.e. on the sides and bottom, plus some of the footnotes even have inset footnotes of their own, akin to little miniature alien heads peeking out of the mouths of larger aliens . . . kind of. The tedious task of footnote perusal has always been a secret struggle of mine; they're often so dry and exhaustively full of abbreviations and obscure references. But now, thanks to David Foster Wallace, footnotes are fun again! Thanks DFW.

*I find I use the word "maybe" at least four times more here in Japan than I ever did in the U.S. Same with "enjoy" -- mostly as a verb. Students commonly use these words much more than the average native speaker, and I cringe upon recognizing that it's been rubbing off on me. Ah! I do try to self-correct, especially in writing, so maybe** nobody's noticed.

**see, like that.

To the right we have a common sight on Tokyo JR Escalators: the "no phoning up your fellow subways passengers' skirts" sign. It's funny in a disturbing way . . . maybe only funny because, frankly, the sign makes it seem so. Really, though, it's disgusting that there have been and are enough incidences of up-the-skirt camera action to validate such signs.

Springtime Fasting is DIFFICULT in Tokyo. Busy. Difficult. Crowded. Difficult. Busy. You might think it would be easy, but N-O, it is not easy to feel meditative when one's pores are unceasingly bombarded by smoky, greezy, pollutionated air.

Today I took a sentimental visit to Takao to go running with a buddy who lives there. The run was great, and the nature in Takao was really lovely. It's easy to forget that greenery exists in such abundance when one is surrounded solely by concrete and asphalt for weeks at a time. My increased perception may also have something to do with the new contacts I bought; until my recent trip to the eye doctor I'd been squinting at greenery and concrete alike -- now I can differentiate!

I have a secret job on the side at a cram school, run by an old couple who used to live in San Fran. Anyway, today they had me tutoring maths with a sassy ninth-grader. The other teachers (all Japanese) were amazed that he "listened" to me, claiming that he's usually something of a laze-pot. My only possible explanation is that there may be some sort of bizarre allure to learning the one discipline, math, via the other discipline, English. You think?

Ok, so Happy Mothers' Day, to likely the only mom who reads this blog (though if there are more, the same to you). I got rid of the picture . . . not so interesting.

I was recently trying to think of aspects that really struck me when I first crossed all those time zones and landed in Tokyo, and I've decided that one of them is the smells. Maybe I've mentioned it before, but let me just detail my thinking a bit more.

So, because many of the sounds in Tokyo mean essentially nothing to my American ears (though I'd like to think some of them are starting to make some sense, maybe), I think my nose perks up a bit more than usual; you know, they say folks with sensory impairments (mine being self-inflicted, I guess) are often able to increase keenness in the remaining 4 senses. Well, regardless of the reason, I notice smells . . lots of 'em. Some smells in Japan that don't exist anywhere I've been in the U.S. include: decaying vegetable smell (it's always in maybe a 20 meter radius of a veggie stand, which is essentially everywhere, and in my first months it made me queasy every time I smelled it -- now it's just another city aroma), over-populated train car smell (ew), different seafood smell, matcha (powdered green tea) smell, and sweet bean smell. If I can think of any more I'll update. There are plenty.

Recently, though, I've experienced some familiar smells -- the smells of *NATURE* in the form of the Tama River. Oh, the poor Tama -- cemented on every side and dried to a tepid trickle, it's reminiscent of the Patoka in both its lack of briskness and the quantity of gnats and populate its banks. It has a humid, borderline fermentation+industry aroma, the kind where one wonders just how many three-eyed fish are swimming beneath the surface.

In non-olfactory news, I taught myself to both read and write hiragana and katakana in six hours over the past two days, and I'm now as literate as a Japanese five-year-old. Hurrah! It's a whole new world. Literacy is awesome. I feel born again. You, too, can increase your Japanese literacy by clicking here. Bonanza!

Takao must lack a large enough population to merit city loudspeakers. Fuchu, however, is peppered with them. In the mornings and evenings and maybe the middays, too, I don't know, the city pipes muzak like Billy Joel's Honesty (on strings) through these loudspeakers. The experience is almost surreal, and not a little unnerving.

In the past 10 days or so I've discovered a new train line that leads to Fuchu. There are now four relatively distinct ways for me to get to work, which is good since I'm always running just early (late?) enough to catch one or the other. This fourth way, however, is a bit tricky; it includes an eight minute long, u-shaped pedestrian trek. This little trip is pleasant during the daytime, but sometimes confusing in the dark, meaning the ratio of times-I've-gotten-lost-thereby-missing-my-last-train-home-and-having-to-flag-a-taxi to number-of-attempts is 2:2.

Long-awaited Golden Week is here, so students who aren't affluent or determined enough to travel during this peak season take the holidays as opportunities to show up for a little extra English action. This deviation from pattern is nice in the sense that the regulars mix up their (and consequently our) schedules a bit, but frustrating in the sense that I wish we could all just go to the beach instead of bathing, hour after hour, under the unforgivable flourescence of NOVA's teaching cubicles.

I learned Japan's version of Rock Paper Scissors and proceeded to win a free drink at Koki's, a 380 yen bar in Kichijoji, after a match with the waitress. Hurrah. That same day, unrelatedly, I learned that The New Yorker has been using umlauts to differentiate betwixt . . . well, you can read about it if you want. Weird, though.