11/12/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

I'm sitting in the office, and Ono says something about influenza.

"What?" I reply.

He says something about camp, with hundreds of kids on a mountain in the middle of winter.

"Uhh..."

He says something about medicine. Prevention.

"Ooooh no..."

He says we need to get shots.

"We? Like, me as well?"

He says we leave at 3:30.

"You aren't kidding, are you." I look down at my watch. It's 2:30. I spend the next hour trying, and failing, not to think about needles. Needles with holes on the ends... needles with huge cylinders full of gimpy viruses... needles injecting said viruses... under... my... skin. I find my hand unconsciously grasping my shoulder. The clock's needles--I mean, hands--move slower than usual. Eventually I am summoned away from my desk, nothing more grasp onto then a feeble "halp" IMed to people cities away.

I morbidly follow Ono and Ponde as they make their way through Sakae, farther away from the station than I've yet wandered. One building is surrounded by the scent of an immolating Cuban cabana. Another building plays a cheerful synthesized melody at me. Outside yet another building are hot dogs made of catfish hanging out to dry. My captors--sorry, coworkers--slow down and look around as if they'd lost their way. Just as I start to hope we can turn around and go back, "oh, there's the clinic." Darn.

There's no one inside. Despite my astute observations that no one was present and that, hey, we tried our best, we waited. After a while, a nurse emerged and gave us some forms to fill out. Forms in Japanese. Medical terms, it turns out, are not the first things people learn in a new language, English or Japanese. After an entertaining game of charades, we determined that I am not athsmatic, that I do not have seizures, and that I have never developed skin pocks from something I ate, among other things.

We return the forms, and proceed to the level 2 waiting room. We wait, but too soon our names are called out. We're summoned into a room that (if I remember right) is labelled "Disposal," with a menacing diagram of a syringe. They sit us down and... have us wait some more. Then they bring one last form, some sort of disclosure paragraph, they ask Ono to translate it for me. He says it's fine, that it just says I might get really sick because of the shot. Apparently mistaking my double take as a gesture of acknowledgement, he circles the OK and hands it back.

They do him first. The doctor offers to let me watch the procedure closely. I politely decline and turn around. I'm next, and before I know it I've been pierced. Like a wasp stinger or a snake fang, it injects the neutralizing agent into my bloodstream. No sooner then the band-aid is applied, we're whisked back into the waiting room. Ponde follows shortly, and once more we're waiting. Waiting, because that's what you do in a waiting room.

I ask what we're waiting for, and it's explained that we need to pay. Curious, usually that the first thing hospitals back in the US take care of. We wait a good ten or fifteen minutes to pay for the privilege of being so brutally violated. At least Labo'll reimburse me.

Today, after I got home, I did a grocery run and made dinner for my host family. Lemon Pepper Pasta, they loved it. My host mom liked it so much, as soon as she tasted it, she put a little into a tupperware and ran next door to enlighten the neighbors. She said she'd never tasted anything like it before in her life. I made a light caesar salad to go with it, too.

11/11/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

After I left the office today I went over to the Apple store to see if I could get my mitts on a working iPod. A bunch of people have helped me out in this ordeal, big appreciation due there. Thanks!

I walked into the store and took a look at all the options. I was pretty underwhelmed with the classic. The new firmware is terrible. Half the screen is taken up by random album art, which is not only visually distracting, it keeping holding up the rest of the system while it spins up to load more random images. It took twice as long to even select anything, and from what I understand the only way to disable it is to not have any album art whatsoever. Also, it's not compatible with more than half my games.

The Nano looked a bit nicer, but it had its own problems in lieu of the hard drive. For starters, the accelerometer is kind of annoying, particularly it and cover flow. The nano has the option to switch off the menu art, but no option to turn off the accelerometer. I would have to put my music library on a diet to work with 16gb, not to mention podcasts or videos. It's also not compatible with some of my games.

I figured I might as well give the genius bar a shot, so I gave the guy the iPod, showed him what was going on, and he gave me some options. They had a new iPod of the same model that they would replace it with for the ¥15800, or they could give me ten percent off a new model in exchange for it. Now I had three options.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not too good with decisions, especially expensive ones that I know I'll regret. I spent over an hour in that store, looking between the three models and making comparisons online. All three had things about them I really liked: The classic was humungous, I'd never have to worry about storage. The nano was light, and more robust. The 5g had plain vanilla firmware that didn't suck, and it worked with everything my old ipod worked with. In the end, however, I realized that only the old model didn't have anything about it I intensely disliked.

I'll hang on to this for another couple iPod generations, at least until the nanos surpass 32gb and Apple fixes its firmware. I'm happy with it.

11/10/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

Today was another study day.

My ipod has officially snuffed it. I called the apple support line, they said it would cost ¥15800 (about $150) to replace the hard drive and battery.

11/9/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

We went on a road trip to Seto city today. My host mom and siblings had some sort of performance to attend, a children's musician from what I understand. There weren't enough tickets for me and my host dad, so we wandered around the area finding ways to kill two hours. First we went to a ramen shop for lunch, although we made some family circus style dotted lines around the area trying to find one. Really, the GPS thingy had a dotted line trace our path, it looked like a bunch of drunken ants.

After eating, we spent twenty minutes trying to find a golf shop my host dad had seen earlier, but all we found were more ants. We gave up and headed back to a bookstore we saw, but it turned out to be a comic and game store. Interesting enough for me, but not something my host dad was into. There was a big supermarket he'd seen on the map (Apita) and he knew they'd have a book section. We spiraled in on that, then out away from it, then back in, and finally found an entrance to the parking area.

By the time we actually got there, we didn't have that much time left to kill. I did find a puyo puyo gashapon, which turned out to be a puyo superball. It is awesome, and I consider myself lucky that I haven't broken anything with it yet.

On the way home we stopped at a McDonalds (the rest of the family wasn't with us for ramen), and crashed their little play structure. Seia swiped my puyo ball, took it in the structure, and promptly dropped it through some canvas netting or something. The area underneath the structure was locked off, so they had to bring a dude with a keychain to climb in there and retrieve it.

There happened to be a golf shop next door, so we visited that too. My host dad had the grips replaced on some of his clubs, and while I was waiting I got a chance to look at some of the things on display. Two points about those big drivers: they're expensive, and they're light. I'm surprised I've gotten along this far without ever picking one up, but for some reason I had assumed the big heads on the things were there for weight. They're not.

After we got home, I gave them some of the gifts that my mom sent out. They are appreciated!

Oh yeah, and we watched the final game of the Nippon Series baseball championship. The Giants lost, but only barely.

11/8/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

I walked down to the local grocery store to see if they had the remaining ingredients for the lemon pepper pasta I've been wanting to make. They pretty much did, but the pasta came in teeny little 100g packets, pretty expensive. There's an import store that sells real pasta for a reasonable price back in Sakae, so I guess I'll hold out until next week.

11/7/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

I went to a Labo Party today. It was the biggest one I've been to yet (as an intern), there were about fifty kids, plus some parents. Had a great time, but man do those kids wear you out. It went pretty late, so I didn't get back home until about ten.

Imoto tutor dropped me off at the station. The next direct train wasn't coming for half an hour, so I got to wait out on that platform. My iPod is still busted, so it was just a quiet evening... nice and relaxing. The silence was punctured at one point by some random happy music coming from some loudspeaker off in the distance. I'm no poet, I can't properly convey what it was like out there. I'll just say that waiting alone on a rural train platform on a tranquil night is one of those underrated experiences that I wouldn't give back for a million bucks.

Well, maybe a million... heck, maybe for the price of the train ticket, just so I could do it again.

Yeah, definitely not a poet.

11/6/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

...is all I need, apparently. While everyone else is wearing long sleeves, all I've got is a T-shirt and shorts and I still feel warm. Today was... not so interesting. A full day at the office.

When I got home my host mom's Labo Party was wrapping up, so I played Legos with them for a while. One of the folks from the Labo office was visiting too... Yama... Yamaz... still working on the names. One kid requested I build a bunny, so I did, but by the time I'd finished she had left. I built a tablet bearing the word ラボ (Labo), and a set of balloons (referencing a balloon themed Labo songbird). They were duly impressed, so polite.

Election wrap-up... I watched the most recent South Park. Kudos to those guys for getting it out so fast, that was what, 24 hours? Not even. Of all the movies to parody, it was nice of them to choose one I'd seen so recently.

11/5/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

I spent the whole morning in the office following the election today. I never had any doubt that Obama would win, but I did doubt whether the machines would let it through. The numbers (for the popular vote) were a lot closer than I thought they would be, Americans never fail to amaze me. Missouri is really close, it's been called for McCain, but there are some reports of shady business (voter intimidation) in St. Louis.

Prop 8... ugh. I hope that last 5% of precincts pulls things together. I blame it on the spectacularly poor No on 8 campaign, but I really would have thought of Californians more highly than this. For the next amendment, let's make the state constitutionally recognize that it's pronounced "toMAto." If you still feel like your blood pressure is too low, check out what Alabama did.

Had another party today, had a great time. It was made up primarily of elementary schoolers, they picked up on the games I had pretty fast. They defeated the matching game, for example, in less than one rotation, the first time any party has managed that.

Funabashi tutor was pretty nice. One of her daughters stayed in Kansas and visited St. Louis this last summer, so she helped me elaborate on the pictures of the Arch and Zoo in my album. It seems she remembers the Zoo for the cockroaches, I didn't gather whether she meant cockroaches on display or in the zoo cafe.

11/4/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

Today was just another day at the Labo Center office, until about lunchtime when all of a sudden I got summoned into another room. It was a bilingual performance of Stone Soup, by some Labo tutors that I gather were graduating from some sorta tutor training program. After the ceremony we all got fed, but it was only a plain old stone-less bento box.

I went to a Labo Party, not so far away today. It was at a kindergarten, but the kids in the party were as old as 7. There was one kid who ran around like a maniac for the first half of the party, attacking me and running off with my juggling balls. In a quieter part of the party, I looked down and found that he had fallen asleep on my lap. He must have been one of the oldest kids there, but he was out for the rest of the party.

Sakakura was a good tutor, she picked up my juggling balls and pulled off a 3 ball shower (!) for at least five catches or so. The nearest traditional Japanese equivalent of juggling is Otedama, a kids game involving three small bean bags thrown in a shower pattern. According to the mother I was talking to, a lot of people Sakakura's age are good at it, so that would mean it was popular back in the 50s or 60s.

Sakakura emailed me some photos after I got home, the first tutor to do so so far. Sweet.

Oh yeah, it's Election day, polls are open now. Hope there's some good news waiting for me when I wake up.

11/3/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

Today was another holiday. We went to this big playground/park area the next town over, and had a picnic. The place was really cool, there were tons of interesting play structures, most of which probably wouldn't survive litigation in the US. Wavy ones, bendy ones, wooden ones... many of them were not like any I'd seen before. There was a "bridge" of suspended logs across a river, but the logs weren't connected to each other so they'd swing all over the place when you stepped on them. You could very easily slip between them and take a bath if you weren't careful. There were ziplines, mazes, huge roller-slides, and crazy jungle gyms. There was a pool and some kind of pedal-powered go-kart track, but the pool was closed and the track cost money. The place was big, too; we spent all day there and I didn't get a chance to see everything. I think there were some old fire engines there too.

There were tons of people there, we were lucky to get a table. Aside from playing on all the cool structures, we played with a soccer ball for a bit. Out of the crowd the kids managed to befriend an older girl who hung out with us for the rest of the day (I think her name was Kita? Keita?). Anyway, we had a great time.

11/2/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

I spent most of the day messing around with my website. There's now a map you can use to see some of the different places I've been to, and I put my album online after figuring out how to get it down to a realistic filesize.

We watched Spiderman 2 in Japanese, but the kids all fell asleep halfway through.

11/1/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

Today my host mom had a big Halloween Labo Party. We went down to a nursing home and performed some songbirds for some grandpas and grandmas. They seemed to enjoy it, especially the part where they got to hand out candy to trick-or-treating little kids.

It never comes up other than in my own head, but one of the interesting things about this country is the fact that circumstances were very different about 65 years ago. WWII is nothing to me but a few grainy photographs and some important lessons of things not to repeat, but a significant amount of people still remember it first-hand. All the time it happens, I'll see a more venerable gentleman or lady on the subway, and imagine: what would I think of me if I were them?

You see it all the time in America, people saying Asians all look the same. It's not something to be surprised at; our perceptiveness is tuned to the kinds of people we grow up and live with. This goes the other way, too. I've had people tell me that westerners all look the same, without any hint of prejudice. I do my best to stand out, but there aren't a whole lot of other foreigners for me to stand out against.

I wonder, then, what kind of stereotypes am I falling into? This is entirely moot, because people here are very good at not expressing their thoughts (out of politeness, the whole "wa" culture etc.). Still, that makes me all the more curious.