絶望した！靴下は絶望した！

More Christmas pictures will be forthcoming, but just a funny little post for the interim. I have mysteriously been losing socks over the course of the last couple months, and I have now discovered that they have been accumulating under the washing machine in the house. The prodigal sock returneth.

絶望した！クリスマスの写真は絶望した！

Here are Christmas pics - more to follow.

My lovely housemates, Clio and Elena.

Elena with a present.

Clio eating pancakes - she made both the pancakes and the strawberry syrup.

Christmas luncheon at our Pastor's house - turkey, potatoes, all the goodies and a great time for all. There must have been at least 100 people there.

Omotesando Boulevard, where my church is - all lit up and pretty.

Our Christmas spread and tree at the house, with our funky little crooked calendar in the background.

絶望した！寒い天気は絶望した！

In the spirit of my having completed my Japanese Literature course, I will write this blog post in the style of the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) - nothing more than a collection of free-floating thoughts.

Now then...

1.) Even without snow, Tokyo can get REALLY cold - especially in the morning. Tomorrow's high is supposedly going to be 45 degrees, and we got down to 36 or 37 this morning. I'm still working out how to make my room retain heat - it's not a hermetically sealed facility like some of the ones I'm used to.

2.) My courseload has lightened a bit due to the fact that some of my profs had to get to their home schools for the Spring semester. Now I've only got four subjects to manage, and yet it is still very busy for me.

3.) I really want it to be Winter Break - just two more days...

4.) I have a new friend - a cute little NEC netbook I've nicknamed Sanosuke. I needed to get something with a Japanese version of the Windows OS on it, and buying this netbook was actually cheaper than putting a Japanese version of Windows onto my MacBook to replace my current copy of Vista. Software over here is insanely expensive. The most basic version of Windows 7 (the only software you can get over here anymore) costs approximately $300 dollars - 26,000 yen to be precise. On the other hand, I got a great deal on this little devil with Windows XP (the last Windows system I trust). It also provided a good long-term solution for my issues with CD/DVD region blocking - I bought a plug-and-play CD drive at the same place - it works great. This is especially important considering the fact that the drive in my MacBook has been behaving badly and not burning CDs.

5.) I wish I had known that Downy was just a fabric softener three months ago. Now I need to start buying actual detergent...

6.) I went back to Costco with my dear friend Dana, and I have now rediscovered my love of Stagg chili, Riesen caramels, and big, inflatable lounge furniture priced at $20 for a chair and ottoman set. I also bought a 5 kg box of mikan (clementine oranges). I carried everything home to save 1000 yen on shipping fees. Painful, but worth it - yay for lessons of frugality.

7.) We had three earthquakes two days ago. Nothing to panic about - they were actually kind of fun. I was sitting in my aforementioned inflatable lounger when the first one hit, and I thought my lounger had some secret massage-chair technology in it.

8.) My nengajou (new year's cards) are all set for posting. Be watching your mailboxes!

9.) My application for transfer from the JLP to the KIP for next semester is ready to go. Goodbye to having to wake up at 7 AM 3 days a week to commute for an hour, goodbye to classes on Saturday, hello manageable working schedule!

10) Don't worry about me being alone and/or lonely for Christmas or New Year's. I'm singing two services with the choir at church on Christmas Eve (including a duet solo on our jazzed-up Silent Night), I'm having lunch at our pastor's house on Christmas Day, and I'm celebrating with our choir president's family (both her and her husband also happen to be Keio professors - small world) on New Year's Day - doing a very traditional New Year's Celebration with them. I'll kick off the year of the tiger with my housemates by going over to Gokokuji temple (just across the street - yay convenience) and participating in the festivities there - including the 108 chimes. Good times!

11.) I've been receiving some lovely care packages from home - all of the classic Christmas delicacies have found their way to our happy home and have helped us spice up the season. You have our thanks!

12.) I have my first class this next Saturday, subbing for another Kick instructor. I've got a couple of special event classes over the Winter break, and I start teaching regularly in January.

13.) I nearly made it through the entire Christmas season without hearing 'The Little Drummer Boy' once. I consider it a lost opportunity - we were working on a nearly perfect season.

14.) I think my room is starting to have a vendetta against me - it refuses to be cleaned.

15.) Did I mention how cold it gets here?

16.) Improvisation is the best way to live.

17.) Rest in peace, dear GGL - I'll still head up to Akita and think of you there.

18.) The debut of a Final Fantasy game over here is practically a national holiday - if only they had shut down the schools...

19.) St. Germain's bakery makes very good Croquette burgers. I heartily recommend them and will treat anyone who visits me to one.

20.) BTS instructors over here pay through the nose for program releases. Fortunately I, lacking the need of translation into Japanese, was able to get them for less. Far and away, the best release I've seen of the five programs I teach (they don't have Ride over here - no one's using it...yet...) is Step. Each of the other programs has some issue (not necessarily a problem) that I'm not to crazy about, but Step this time is amazing - I hope I can get a regular gig by the time we launch this one (since that means April, I've got some time).

21.) I'm gaining more and more confidence in my Japanese conversation skills every day - despite the way my homework assignments are returned to me ^_^.

22.) I received some great advice on post-graduate work from one of my professors here over coffee after our last day of class. I think that after my graduation from Rice, I'm not going to be in a major hurry to jump into the next academic adventure straight away - I may take a couple years to do something (not nothing) and just build myself and continue exploring. I was counting on this year providing me some answers, and I think this is a big one.

Well, 22 free-floating thoughts should do it for now, I think. Hope to hear from y'all soon, and if I don't talk to you before then, have a very merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, and a spectacular start to the year of the tiger!

絶望した！

絶望した！電車の事故は絶望した！

For any of you who haven't read my recent Facebook post, here is the story of my latest adventure.

This wonderful day started, ironically enough, with a train accident.

No, not the train I was on. The train several trains in front of ours on the circular Yamanote line, amazingly enough. Since it's a circular line, one accident stops the entire circle from moving. We were stopped at a station called Ebisu, about halfway between my house and Tamachi, where I go to school. We got in to the station, and we didn't leave. After we'd been there a couple minutes, an announcement came on saying that there had been an accident between Gotanda and Osaki stations, a few stations ahead of us on the line. Although they didn't give us any details as to the nature of the accident, I found out later that the accident had caused a chain reaction of trains hitting their emergency brakes, sending people (including a couple of my friends who were riding the Yamanote and Keihin-Tohoku lines at the time) flying. We were far enough back that it was a simple slow-down-and-stop.

At this point, I knew that the delay would be enough to make me late for school, particularly so that I would miss the kanji test, my only real motivation for going in the first place - I've grown weary of sitting in the same room for 3 hours doing the core Japanese course. So...

I decided to just say 'shove it' to school for the day and I hopped off the train to go explore Ebisu, an area I'd had a passing interest in for some time, and the place where our train had decided to stop due to the accident. When the opportunity arose, I decided to take advantage. I walked around and found it to be a very charming area, with a fantastic little entertainment area (restaurants, shops, cinema, etc.) called Ebisu Garden Place. It reminds me a lot of Bridgeport Village, for those of you readers in Oregon who know what I'm talking about. As it was still relatively early - around 9 am - there weren't too many people there yet, so it was very serene and beautiful - nothing but the sounds of the various fountains and the dull hum of a city waking up in the morning. After walking around for a while, I popped in to a little bakery cafe called St. Germain for a strawberry crumble muffin, an old-fashioned doughnut, a ham and cheese sandwich on french toast, and a cup of coffee. I stayed in there for almost an hour, casually noshing and reading my book The Mirador. Oh, how I've missed reading for pleasure!

So, after a lovely morning, I hopped on another train that was able to get me directly back to Ikebukuro, and I decided to do some work on two papers that are coming due in the next couple of weeks. I was expecting one or two good pages on each one. I finished them both - each over 10 pages. Now my workload is significantly lighter and I shall have a relatively clear head from here on out, I daresay. Good times!

The other big development is that I now, thanks to my contract at Oasis, have access to their fantastic club facilities. I'm finally going to be able to get going on a regular workout regimen - and not a moment too soon. I'm going to start teaching event classes just before New Years, and I have a regular class starting in January on Saturday afternoons. Woo!

絶望した！

絶望した！肉は絶望した！

Today was Choir Sunday at church, where we did John Rutter's "Gloria" for both services - a 20 minute piece that was a big challenge for us, but very rewarding. I think I've increased my singing range since I've arrived here - some of the last notes are SO high!

Afterwards, a bunch of us went out together to a restaurant called Barbacoa, which is a Brazilian Tabehodai (all you can eat in two hours) place. There is only one word that can truly describe the grandeur and majesty that was this meal:

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAT!

I don't think I'll need to eat for the next three days. Every time the waiters came around with some type of meat on a long skewer, offering it to the table, I took them up on single, double, sometimes triple-sized portions. There was every conceivable type of preparation for beef, along with some lamb and other fine meats. Every morsel was delicious, but I have to say the pepper steak might just be the best thing I ever eat in this country. The amazing thing is that I don't feel overstuffed or ashamed for how much I ate (approximately two whole animals and an entire baked pineapple, as well as one trip to the salad bar - eat your veggies!). I just feel so immensely satisfied and full that I think eating will be a much lower priority in the days to come.

Not long after I got home, I got a call from my housemate Clio, who was going over to Gokokuji Temple, which is literally fifty feet from our front door (although you have to go a bit further to get to the gate) in order to do some reading during the last hour or so of this lovely sunny day. She invited me to tag along, so I did. I cannot believe we've had such a spectacular place so close by and I've never been there once in the three months that I've been here. Mark my words, though, I plan to go there a lot more now that I know how beautiful it is.

I'm in the midst of, well, not a rush - per se, more like a push to the finish of the semester. I've got two papers coming due in the next couple weeks, each of which I'm working on piecemeal, a little bit every day. It keeps me committed to them without feeling overwhelmed. After the insanity of NaNoWriMo, things just feel very open and workable now. We've got a good end to the semester, so it seems.

Friday night was particularly enjoyable. Because some of my professors have to return to their home institutions in time for the Spring semester to start, they are concluding their classes several weeks early, before winter break (hence the push to the finish described above). In some cases, this means that we have extra classes during the week in order to qualify the course as a full semester-long class. On Friday, I had my pop music class, then Japanese law, then pop music again. It was a long go, but the prof took the faithful students, whom he termed 'the elite' out to a little pub round the side streets and we had an after-hours little shindig of sorts. I'm afraid I don't have any pictures, but suffice to say it was a great time and it was very fun to connect with our professor outside of class time. There are some days when I am really glad to be here - this was one of those days, and today was another.

Looking ahead, I'm thinking about switching programs in this next semester. I'll still be at Keio and still studying Japanese, but there are a few things about the operation of the JLP that I'm not particularly happy with. The biggest two are scheduling - I just don't think that having three solid hours of intensive work three days a week is the best way for language study to work. By the third hour, I am usually mentally and sometimes physically exhausted - partially from having to wake up so early in order to be there on time, partially from the (I believe) ridiculous pace that the class takes - there's hardly any time for the things we are taught to really sink in before we are off on some other subject. I am thinking that the alternative, the KIP (Keio International Program) will be a better fit for me in this second semester because it still allows me to work on Japanese language skills, but in specialized and focused classes rather than the trying core classes of the JLP. I've done it for a semester, and I don't really think it's the best fit, at least not for me. With KIP, I'll be able to dial back a bit on my courseload and focus more priority on the areas I truly need to work on. I'll start putting my application together tomorrow and we'll see what we can make work. Whatever happens, we're going to be all right.

絶望した！