おにぎり
[8/26]
I started to write an email about the past few days – since last Friday when I last talked to people – but I felt bored writing it, which is a very bad sign for how anyone might feel reading it. So I’m going to give a trimmed down version, with only scattered little anecdotes/reflections. Besides, that way next time I’m talking to people on Skype I won’t just say “uh, I could tell you about stuff, but you might as well just read about it on my blog...”
First of all, Kuroda-sensei, one of the English teachers at Icchu, knows hide songs! He came karaoke-ing with us last Friday in Kasumi (yup, there’s a karaoke place within like a seven minute walk of my house!), and I was singing EVER FREE, and he joined in! It made me disproportionately happy. He seems generally rather quiet and awkward but he was pretty damn good at karaoke. 楽しかったわ。
At the barbeque that the Kasumi International Something-or-other Association put on for us on Sunday, we played a haiku game: going around the circle and counting off in threes, the first person wrote the first line, the second the second, and the third the last, without communicating. Here are two haiku I liked:
おにぎりは
みんなは元気
笑い声
(Rice balls,
Everyone is lively,
Laughing voices.)
レベッカさん
海に飛び込む
月見草
(Rebecca-san
Flies out to sea,
Evening primrose.)
If I were to edit them in retrospect, I’d change it to おにぎりや, to avoid the two は’s. And of course the first line of the second one has six syllables, at least I think the double consonant would count...so I guess you could do my name as レベカ if you really cared. And for the record, the line with the rice balls was my contribution. (The other line I wrote was ねずみのように, “like a mouse”, but the haiku it ended up in wasn’t that memorable...I don’t know what the first line, and Alisa was feeling time pressure and couldn’t think of anything for the last line and ended up with 車だよ, “It’s a car!” Heh. What would it mean to be a car like a mouse, I wonder...?)
I am reminded that I’m not very good with little children. At least, I end up feeling stressed around them, afraid of not being entertaining enough. There were a couple of kids at the barbeque, and the younger one, Jun, who was five, would follow me and Alisa around staring at us. So I kept feeling like I should talk to him, but I didn’t know what to say...especially in Japanese. So I would just grin at him and wave, and he’d blush and run away lol. Then near the end, he was following me around staring at me, so I started staring back and narrowing my eyes, which made him laugh, and then he was following me again so I spun around quickly to face him, and that somehow turned into him chasing me around one of the tables, and eventually I let him catch me. Then he began the following thing again so I walked around for a while pretending to look for him while he trailed right behind me giggling, then finally I turned around quickly and said “found you!”, or something that I hoped meant that in Japanese, and he squealed and laughed and ran away. So I felt somewhat proud of myself for managing to bond with him a bit...but I just always have this feeling that I don’t know the right way to respond, that some people just know how to be around kids that age and make them laugh and make them feel comfortable, and I have to work so hard at it. I feel much more comfortable with kids who are a bit older.
Well, fortunately I only go to an elementary school once or twice a month. But there’s no denying, the little kids are truly adorable... ^_^
Yesterday when I was hanging out at Alisa’s place eating okonomiyaki (mmm...) and watching some random movie, we were checking something on IMDb, and so then just for fun I checked the pages for Rescue Rangers and Gummi Bears and discovered that not only are my comments still first if you sort them by “Best”, but in fact at the moment they are both on the front pages. Yay. I commented happily on this fact, and Alisa started laughing and said “you are just too cute...” And it was actually really nice because I think she meant it; in other words, I think she thinks it’s sort of quirky and endearing that I’m so proud that my IMDb comments about some old Disney kids shows were found helpful by 100% of people who bothered to weigh in...rather than just thinking it’s weird or kind of pathetic. With Alisa and Jarryd I’ve been doing this sort of experiment of not hiding things about myself – so they’ve seen me belt out Japanese rock songs at karaoke, and seen me sigh over the picture of Seto I found on the cover of a Duel Monsters magazine at some second-hand store, and heard stories about how I used to* find the g.c.d. of random large numbers for fun in middle school – and, unless they’re just pretending very well because we’re pretty much the only English-speaking people around here and they can’t politely exclude me from things, they seem to like me anyway. In fact, they seem to like me for that stuff. And that’s a nice feeling.
Congratulations Rebecca, you might be thinking – you’ve discovered something no one ever thought of before, that the best way to make friends is to actually be yourself and let people get to know you. You should write a book. Well, I know it’s clichéd; and I wouldn’t claim to have discovered anything, because it’s not anything I didn’t already believe was true. And, I still can’t do it with most people. But I’m working on it, and with those two so far it just comes naturally. And I feel really lucky for that, and grateful to them.
*Footnote: Perhaps that “used to” is a little premature, considering that earlier today when I was working on math I noticed a problem that was not assigned that involved calculating some g.c.d.’s using the Euclidean Algorithm (which is indeed what I used in middle school as well – because I was just that awesome), and I was sorely tempted. I would not be shocked if those g.c.d.’s end up getting calculated tomorrow evening...
So it is currently 9:23pm on Tuesday, a time at which I was expecting to be driving back from Toyooka. On Saturday, at the Toyooka International Association welcome party thing, they told me to come to the Tuesday night classes, and I said “can I start this week?” and they said “sure.” At least so I thought they said – admittedly, it was in Japanese. In any case, I went, and I went to the third floor, as instructed, and found it completely dark and rather creepy. Heh. The second floor, however, was bright and had several people on it, whom I asked about the class, and they very kindly checked for me and determined that it wasn’t happening this week. -_-;; Next week, they said.
So, there I was in Toyooka, having driven forty minutes, at about 7:10, with nothing to do. Turns out that Toyooka, at least the section of it I was in – which seems to be one of the main shopping districts, right near the station – is about 70% shut down at 7:10 on a Tuesday. Only a few of the stores were open and there were only a handful of people walking around. I headed for the big mall right next to the station, because I hadn’t explored it yet. The first floor was relatively lively, and I ended up buying both a little change purse, which I needed, and some frozen yogurt. When I went up to the second floor, however, I found it almost empty. So I just walked back to my car and came home.
I’ve been having a hard time falling asleep, and a hard time waking up. I am quite aware that my sleep habits are terrible and unhealthy – I do all sorts of things before bed that I’m not supposed to do, like eat and type things on the computer. And I let myself snooze alarms for like, an hour. (Although Japanese alarms, it seems, treacherously turn off after you’ve snoozed them for about twenty minutes...) So I’m not complaining, since it’s clear that I could do things to help myself. Alisa also said I might not be getting enough physical exercise, which I’m sure is true. So it’s my own fault; so let’s say, I’m frustrated with myself. Even when I’m feeling really knocked out, I’ll lie in bed for an hour or two, sometimes more, unable to drift from daydreams into actual sleep. I should find more novels to read, maybe that would help...And then, in the morning, even when I’m pretty much awake enough to get up, and know I should get up and start getting things done, I can’t fight the desire to curl back up slip back into sleep. It’s not because I’m depressed or because I don’t want to be doing the things I’ll do once I get up...but especially because I’ve been having a frustrating time falling asleep, there’s something I just don’t want to let go of; when I know that if I lay back down and closed my eyes I could easily fall back into whatever dreams I was having, and I know that if I wake up any further I’ll be up for good and will have to struggle again before getting to sleep the next night...I just don’t want to let go of being asleep. Like I have to get in as much sleep as I can while I’m in that state.
But I don’t mean to be making it sound like I have some sort of terrible insomnia – it’s really about the same as usual. It always takes me a while to fall asleep. I guess it’s been frustrating because I know I need to be getting on an earlier schedule, and it seems like even when I get up at eight or nine for several days in a row, I can’t fall asleep before like two in the morning.
Well, tomorrow and Thursday I have to get up by like, oh, six, six-thirty. So perhaps that will kick my sleep schedule back a bit...
Which means I should be getting to bed now, but I know I won’t fall asleep for a while. Besides, all I’ve eaten today is three pancakes, two rice balls, and that frozen yogurt. So I’m going to make myself a snack – probably consisting of yet more simple carbs – and watch an episode or two of anime, and then try to sleep.
Oh yeah – I’ve watched four episode of that anime that Wikipedia claims has places based on Kasumi in it. I cannot verify that yet: the station, the school, and the shrine (the places Wikipedia mentions) are not based on the main, active train station, or either of the middle schools, or the one shrine-like place I’ve been to. Jarryd says there is a small, out-of-use station somewhere (or maybe more than one lol); and I haven’t really been to the high school yet, only driven past it; and there are many shrines. However, the town in the show is certainly exactly the same genre of town, sort of uncannily so. There are signs about trash disposal in the background, and all the same sorts of markings on the streets, and the same stone walls at the edge of the sand on the beach, and the same little bridges over rivers that run between rice fields. So it’s pretty cool to watch. ^_^
Okay time for food. Hmm, food, lyrics...okay, this popped into my head, and I mentioned this song earlier in the post, so it works:
夢に夢見た季節忘れちゃって、
あの子に聞いてみる。
すると微笑むあなたは言いました、
「夢って食べれるの?」
I started to write an email about the past few days – since last Friday when I last talked to people – but I felt bored writing it, which is a very bad sign for how anyone might feel reading it. So I’m going to give a trimmed down version, with only scattered little anecdotes/reflections. Besides, that way next time I’m talking to people on Skype I won’t just say “uh, I could tell you about stuff, but you might as well just read about it on my blog...”
First of all, Kuroda-sensei, one of the English teachers at Icchu, knows hide songs! He came karaoke-ing with us last Friday in Kasumi (yup, there’s a karaoke place within like a seven minute walk of my house!), and I was singing EVER FREE, and he joined in! It made me disproportionately happy. He seems generally rather quiet and awkward but he was pretty damn good at karaoke. 楽しかったわ。
At the barbeque that the Kasumi International Something-or-other Association put on for us on Sunday, we played a haiku game: going around the circle and counting off in threes, the first person wrote the first line, the second the second, and the third the last, without communicating. Here are two haiku I liked:
おにぎりは
みんなは元気
笑い声
(Rice balls,
Everyone is lively,
Laughing voices.)
レベッカさん
海に飛び込む
月見草
(Rebecca-san
Flies out to sea,
Evening primrose.)
If I were to edit them in retrospect, I’d change it to おにぎりや, to avoid the two は’s. And of course the first line of the second one has six syllables, at least I think the double consonant would count...so I guess you could do my name as レベカ if you really cared. And for the record, the line with the rice balls was my contribution. (The other line I wrote was ねずみのように, “like a mouse”, but the haiku it ended up in wasn’t that memorable...I don’t know what the first line, and Alisa was feeling time pressure and couldn’t think of anything for the last line and ended up with 車だよ, “It’s a car!” Heh. What would it mean to be a car like a mouse, I wonder...?)
I am reminded that I’m not very good with little children. At least, I end up feeling stressed around them, afraid of not being entertaining enough. There were a couple of kids at the barbeque, and the younger one, Jun, who was five, would follow me and Alisa around staring at us. So I kept feeling like I should talk to him, but I didn’t know what to say...especially in Japanese. So I would just grin at him and wave, and he’d blush and run away lol. Then near the end, he was following me around staring at me, so I started staring back and narrowing my eyes, which made him laugh, and then he was following me again so I spun around quickly to face him, and that somehow turned into him chasing me around one of the tables, and eventually I let him catch me. Then he began the following thing again so I walked around for a while pretending to look for him while he trailed right behind me giggling, then finally I turned around quickly and said “found you!”, or something that I hoped meant that in Japanese, and he squealed and laughed and ran away. So I felt somewhat proud of myself for managing to bond with him a bit...but I just always have this feeling that I don’t know the right way to respond, that some people just know how to be around kids that age and make them laugh and make them feel comfortable, and I have to work so hard at it. I feel much more comfortable with kids who are a bit older.
Well, fortunately I only go to an elementary school once or twice a month. But there’s no denying, the little kids are truly adorable... ^_^
Yesterday when I was hanging out at Alisa’s place eating okonomiyaki (mmm...) and watching some random movie, we were checking something on IMDb, and so then just for fun I checked the pages for Rescue Rangers and Gummi Bears and discovered that not only are my comments still first if you sort them by “Best”, but in fact at the moment they are both on the front pages. Yay. I commented happily on this fact, and Alisa started laughing and said “you are just too cute...” And it was actually really nice because I think she meant it; in other words, I think she thinks it’s sort of quirky and endearing that I’m so proud that my IMDb comments about some old Disney kids shows were found helpful by 100% of people who bothered to weigh in...rather than just thinking it’s weird or kind of pathetic. With Alisa and Jarryd I’ve been doing this sort of experiment of not hiding things about myself – so they’ve seen me belt out Japanese rock songs at karaoke, and seen me sigh over the picture of Seto I found on the cover of a Duel Monsters magazine at some second-hand store, and heard stories about how I used to* find the g.c.d. of random large numbers for fun in middle school – and, unless they’re just pretending very well because we’re pretty much the only English-speaking people around here and they can’t politely exclude me from things, they seem to like me anyway. In fact, they seem to like me for that stuff. And that’s a nice feeling.
Congratulations Rebecca, you might be thinking – you’ve discovered something no one ever thought of before, that the best way to make friends is to actually be yourself and let people get to know you. You should write a book. Well, I know it’s clichéd; and I wouldn’t claim to have discovered anything, because it’s not anything I didn’t already believe was true. And, I still can’t do it with most people. But I’m working on it, and with those two so far it just comes naturally. And I feel really lucky for that, and grateful to them.
*Footnote: Perhaps that “used to” is a little premature, considering that earlier today when I was working on math I noticed a problem that was not assigned that involved calculating some g.c.d.’s using the Euclidean Algorithm (which is indeed what I used in middle school as well – because I was just that awesome), and I was sorely tempted. I would not be shocked if those g.c.d.’s end up getting calculated tomorrow evening...
So it is currently 9:23pm on Tuesday, a time at which I was expecting to be driving back from Toyooka. On Saturday, at the Toyooka International Association welcome party thing, they told me to come to the Tuesday night classes, and I said “can I start this week?” and they said “sure.” At least so I thought they said – admittedly, it was in Japanese. In any case, I went, and I went to the third floor, as instructed, and found it completely dark and rather creepy. Heh. The second floor, however, was bright and had several people on it, whom I asked about the class, and they very kindly checked for me and determined that it wasn’t happening this week. -_-;; Next week, they said.
So, there I was in Toyooka, having driven forty minutes, at about 7:10, with nothing to do. Turns out that Toyooka, at least the section of it I was in – which seems to be one of the main shopping districts, right near the station – is about 70% shut down at 7:10 on a Tuesday. Only a few of the stores were open and there were only a handful of people walking around. I headed for the big mall right next to the station, because I hadn’t explored it yet. The first floor was relatively lively, and I ended up buying both a little change purse, which I needed, and some frozen yogurt. When I went up to the second floor, however, I found it almost empty. So I just walked back to my car and came home.
I’ve been having a hard time falling asleep, and a hard time waking up. I am quite aware that my sleep habits are terrible and unhealthy – I do all sorts of things before bed that I’m not supposed to do, like eat and type things on the computer. And I let myself snooze alarms for like, an hour. (Although Japanese alarms, it seems, treacherously turn off after you’ve snoozed them for about twenty minutes...) So I’m not complaining, since it’s clear that I could do things to help myself. Alisa also said I might not be getting enough physical exercise, which I’m sure is true. So it’s my own fault; so let’s say, I’m frustrated with myself. Even when I’m feeling really knocked out, I’ll lie in bed for an hour or two, sometimes more, unable to drift from daydreams into actual sleep. I should find more novels to read, maybe that would help...And then, in the morning, even when I’m pretty much awake enough to get up, and know I should get up and start getting things done, I can’t fight the desire to curl back up slip back into sleep. It’s not because I’m depressed or because I don’t want to be doing the things I’ll do once I get up...but especially because I’ve been having a frustrating time falling asleep, there’s something I just don’t want to let go of; when I know that if I lay back down and closed my eyes I could easily fall back into whatever dreams I was having, and I know that if I wake up any further I’ll be up for good and will have to struggle again before getting to sleep the next night...I just don’t want to let go of being asleep. Like I have to get in as much sleep as I can while I’m in that state.
But I don’t mean to be making it sound like I have some sort of terrible insomnia – it’s really about the same as usual. It always takes me a while to fall asleep. I guess it’s been frustrating because I know I need to be getting on an earlier schedule, and it seems like even when I get up at eight or nine for several days in a row, I can’t fall asleep before like two in the morning.
Well, tomorrow and Thursday I have to get up by like, oh, six, six-thirty. So perhaps that will kick my sleep schedule back a bit...
Which means I should be getting to bed now, but I know I won’t fall asleep for a while. Besides, all I’ve eaten today is three pancakes, two rice balls, and that frozen yogurt. So I’m going to make myself a snack – probably consisting of yet more simple carbs – and watch an episode or two of anime, and then try to sleep.
Oh yeah – I’ve watched four episode of that anime that Wikipedia claims has places based on Kasumi in it. I cannot verify that yet: the station, the school, and the shrine (the places Wikipedia mentions) are not based on the main, active train station, or either of the middle schools, or the one shrine-like place I’ve been to. Jarryd says there is a small, out-of-use station somewhere (or maybe more than one lol); and I haven’t really been to the high school yet, only driven past it; and there are many shrines. However, the town in the show is certainly exactly the same genre of town, sort of uncannily so. There are signs about trash disposal in the background, and all the same sorts of markings on the streets, and the same stone walls at the edge of the sand on the beach, and the same little bridges over rivers that run between rice fields. So it’s pretty cool to watch. ^_^
Okay time for food. Hmm, food, lyrics...okay, this popped into my head, and I mentioned this song earlier in the post, so it works:
あの子に聞いてみる。
すると微笑むあなたは言いました、
「夢って食べれるの?」
posted by Ashila at 2:42 AM
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