…James.
So James left today. I always think that goodbyes are going to be bigger affairs than they are, there are very few truly monumental sayonaras. The only time it’s ever happened to me was the night I left the guys at Bradford. I still get a little teary eyed thinking about the buzz at Love Apple, capped off so beautifully with the way it all began, rolling down the amphitheater in an altered state of mind. But enough of that, lest I cry. All I could manage with James was something pedestrian such as “Hope our paths cross again” or something so banal I can’t recall it. We’ve been on the same street for three years so I figured perhaps we’d do something the night before or organise something to say a more final farewell, but what with the kid and all and James trying to get through his last minute preparations it was not to happen. With luck we’ll meet again and then that will be all moot.
Merely hours later new guy Matt strolled into town. Very nice chap, amiable and well adjusted I think we’ll get along famously. We had a welcome party this evening where I learnt a few things:
- The young funny guy at the Board of Education is called “Taguchi”, I had it in my head he was called “Kawaguchi”. I’m glad I never referred to him by name.
- His parents own the liquor store. Which means I have given his family nuff cash over the years.
- One of the more senior members of the board is unmarried, I find this surprising as he is so very amiable and seems like the kind of guy who has been married for years.
- You can deep fry octopus directly, rather than heat it in batter balls.
- My Japanese consists of more local dialect than I previously thought.
More than any of this though, how has it been a week since my last post? That’s completely absurd, it only feels like it was a day or two ago. This is what having children does to you, they suck up time like tiny little chrono vampires with their refusal to sleep to the point that making a blog post seems like the ultimate folly when one’s time is more precious than unicorn farts (which smell like toilet duck).
In other news: Raiki seems to like Ocean Color Scene, it seems to buy me half an hour of none cry t2ime post feeding, which is wonderful.To me this is the biggest achievement any band has made ever. So in your face U2″, “The Rolling Stones” and “The Beatles” so lullability is nothing compared with mid 90’s indy crooning.
…Williams. … I wish I’d called him Cooper now. What was I even thinking?
Wassup wit choo biatch!
So there he is, he’s 41 days old and counting. Doesn’t time fly when you’re spared the crying by living many miles away. It flies noticeably less when one is on the receiving end of said crying around the clock, but I guess this means at least I’m wasting less of my life asleep. So mother and child are back in the house and I’m getting my first real taste of permanent fatherhood. I do love spending more time with the little guy and the wife, living on my own was becoming a slightly somber affair and I was slipping back into a single mans habits.
The disruption to sleep patterns and so on is less of an issue now than it clearly will be in about 6 weeks due to the summer holidays, meaning my work day consists largely of going to work, drinking coffee and leaving at noon. My one hope is that the boy gains full use of his cognitive faculties in the next 5 weeks or so and ceases crying forthwith.
Next week heralds the reappearance of what has become and almost half yearly tradition for me. The slicing and dicing of my big toe. Yes, one again I have a toenail suffering from some poor trajectory and slicing through the legitimately fleshy part of my foot. Having been told last time that it was fixed so that it wouldn’t come back I was less than impressed with the resurgence, so this time I asked them to permanently remove the nail and burn the root so that I can just soldier on without it the rest of my life – it’s almost like real exciting surgery and stuff, I’ll post some (hopefully) horrific pictures when I get the chance.
You know what film is quite good? Red Cliff Part one. I admire a film that is brazen enough to end in the middle of a scene with “to be continued”, rather than copping out with a kind of half ending thing.
Filed under: stupidity
Although it’s the 19th now thanks to the absurd length of Zodiac, not a bad film by any of the stretch of the imagination, just not quite as good as I feel has been advertised, and the ending seemed a little obvious. But then everyone knows how much I hate nouns.
School is finished now, so I have 5 weeks of almost uninterrupted slacking which I am very much looking forward to. I agreed to take the Kanji test with the middle school first graders this summer, which gives me something to aim for, my main aim is to beat all the other kids taking part and then lord it over them for the rest of the year.
Mayumi and Raiki make their long awaited return to home on Monday. The timing is convenient as it no longer really matters if I sleep well at night for the time being as I have very little to achieve and not far to travel in order to achieve it. I met a former student the other day in the supermarket that I hadn’t seen for well over a year, she had her 2 year old sister with her and she assured me that any excessive crying should significantly lessen around the three month mark. With Raiki cruising towards 6 weeks at the moment it means I only have to endure another 6 before I may get a respite. One will endeavour to do ones best.
It’s funny how things change. I was speaking to Dillon not moments ago about stuff in general. He and Marco still live close and regularly buzz. I envy that in many ways, not to the extent that I would want to take back any of the last few years, but enough to make me feel a little melancholy about sitting here in front of a computer screen on a friday night with bugger all else to do. I got to thinking about chapters in life and the exponential speed with which they seem to be passing. Having been here for three years now (or thereabouts) I guess I’ve seen a number of chapters whizz by without even really thinking about it.
Bored now. Bye!
ffs…Andrew WK version was waaay better than this
Filed under: Weird
..and we like what we do.
Say, do you remember Andrew WK? You’d be forgiven for forgetting about him, but I remember him being fun if not so melodically gifted. I remember I actually went to a gig of his in Leicester when he was touring the UK like 8 years ago or so. It was entertaining, if only because he’s an iceberg short of a fjord … it’s very hard to rain down on the parade of a man with the kind of enthusiasm umbrella he has.
So anyway, I was busy relishing the fact that I had finished for this semester at my faraway school and was checking out some stupid J-Pop videos on Youtube. Whilst flicking through the comments (something that’s seldom recommended) to a particularly absurd video I found one guy/gal had written “I prefer the Andrew WK version”. I laughed to myself because I figured it must be a cool new meme or something I hadn’t heard of. For example: Your buddy could make you listen to a new song and you could just say at the end “I prefered the Andrew WK version”, and then it would evolve into a whole new phonomena and people would say it after anything:
Scene: Cinema after Slumdog Millionaire
A: Wow! That was awesome, what’d you think.
B: It was pretty good. But I preferred the Andrew WK version.
Scene: After sex in your sexy room with a sexy lady
A: Wow! that was so hot! Was it good for you? (Lets pretend we live in a world where people actually say that for a moment).
B: Yeah. It was good. But I preferred the Andrew WK version.
..you see how it works, it could be the best meme ever! Much better than that friggin’ piano cat and Chuck Norris facts. Then Andrew WK’s career would get a temporary kick start and he could eat for a few more years and stuff. Everyone’s a winner!
So anyway, I assumed this was the case and was all “Man, I wish I’d thought of that. I’m so fucking stupid! It was obvious!”
BUT! It turns out the Andrew WK is not only still in possession of [1 x career]. Furthermore he actually did cover a bunch of mainstream J-Pop songs from last year! With a surprisingly high degree of translation accuracy (certain parts remained in Japanese).
Here’s a band called ShuChiShin with their self titled song ShuChiShin which was a huge hit in early 08 (note hilarious posing and 80’s stage effects)
And here’s Andrew WK’s thing
GreeeeN struck gold with “Kiseki” (Miracle) in mid 08, interesting side point, people in the vid aren’t the band members because they’re all dentists and thus can’t be featured in any promo material or appear as the band because they’d all lose their jobs. Which is absurd enough to be interesting. The people in the video are acutally just some completely random people who decided to make their own video whilst hanging out together, its so nerdy I love it, look at them all lip synching the song.
Anyway. Andrew WK did it too:
Last Nezumi Senpai was a one hit wonder with a comedic homage to easy listening cabaret style nonsense.
And for reasons best known only to himself, Andrew WK rock parodied it.
There are several things to be learned from this:
- Andrew WK is still alive and kicking (hooray!)
- For some mind boggling reason he made an album entitled 一発勝負 (ippatsushobu) covering random J-Pop.
- I invented the best meme ever!
Peace out~!
…is that the time?
I’ve somehow lost a week between posts and I’m not sure how it happened. That’s time for you eh? A massive cunt. Have that time.
I’m feeling nostalgic as I got a congratulations on spawning a child message from an old friend from many years back, during my high school days in fact. It brought back memories of the halcyon days I’d almost forgotten, a time of little stress, a little money and a lot of pub quizzes. It’s funny how few of the bad memories float back up to the top – there probably were loads, but outside of the time I lost my phone in Leicester city I don’t recall many. Also I had a lot of crappy managers … but that seems par for the course in retail.
So its as hot as monkey ass here in the mountains again, and that has meant the purchase of an air conditioning unit. Now, an ethical man would use this great power wisely. However, I feel like abusing the great power thats been bestowed on me for a couple of days, it’s beautiful living here in the frosty command center that is my room.
I purchased (provisionally) a car the other day to replace the current lease mobile I’ve been charging about in. You’ll notice the absence of any adjectives like “awesome”, “cool” or “new”. It was however cheap and in great condition. It’s a 7 year old Suzuki Wagon R, a car I’ve had an affinity for ever since I got one as a loaner a couple of years back. It’s one of the more spacious and comfortable of the “Kei Jidousha” (Light car) range which have the same amount of power as about 3 hairdryers. But, they are cheap to run and don’t break down easy – and that’s all I need, with a kid to look after, flash cars fall waaaaay down the priority list. Anyway, here’s a pic of the model I got (not the actual one)
The long summer vacation kicks in on Friday this week, I am hella looking forward to it – I guess I can spend a lot more time with Raiki and Mayumi, it feels like I’m slacking on the parental front a lot as I can only visit Wednesday evenings and weekends assuming nothing else is happening.
Not sorry to be getting full nights sleep though. Not regretting that at all.
Well, the JLPT is temporarily over and done with.
I really wouldn’t like to say how it went, it’s a tricky beast to gauge really. Either way I feel it’ll be a close run, I’ll either have scraped or pass or let it slip from my grasp by a few agonizing points.
The test is broken down into four sections:
1) Vocab/Kanji – Responsible for my failure last year actually went rather well this year. I would roughly hazard that I passed it.
2) Listening – My specialist section, I took 80% of the test last year, I doubt I took that much this year, maaaybe a pass but I think more likely just below the pass mark.
3) Reading – This was ass this year. The topics were boring and the wording vague on some of the shorter ones. Probably didn’t quite achieve a pass mark.
4) Grammar – Probably passed, the first 50% of the questions were very easy, the latter 50% were trickier but I probably managed to solve enough of them to pass overall.
So..that’s all she wrote for that. I guess I can take a couple of days study break before getting back to the drawing board and studying for something else (I need motivation more powerful than self improvement sadly).
Nothing else!
またねー
Filed under: Japanese
your language (if you’re Japanese)
It’s the JLPT on Sunday and I’m sitting the 1-Kyuu again. It would be really nice to pass and once and for all end the constant spending of money and dull studying of archaic Japanese grammar patterns and move on to more fruitful uses of time, such as banging my face against a wall of snakes.
I don’t want to curse myself, but I have a vaguely confident mindset, as I’ve passed plenty of tests in practice now, so passing is at the very least a theoretical possibility. Pulling the rabbit out of the hat on the day however is another thing altogether, especially when it involves a 5AM wake up and trek to the station to ensure I get to the test centre in Osaka by 8:30. Additionally, knowing that there is the potential to pass this time (rather than last time where I half expected to end up just drawing boobies on the answer paper in the hope that it might make some female JLPT lickspittle blush when it came to marking) has made the affair a lot more nerve-racking. The nightmare scenario is that after all the studying I’ve done for this, I’ll end up getting a worse score than I did last year and thus be forced to kybosh the very notion of self improvement. Imagine that.
Anyway, I have to get to the sleep cave if I’m to have an entirely productive day on the morrow. Until then, allow me to be a slave to popular trends:
thanksloveyoubye
…that this isn’t funny then you’re a fucking cunt twat
(of course not knowing anything about Tin tin may make affect it in some way)
