I Am Completely Serious

The variety of the contents of my fridge has a direct effect on my mood. Today I opened it and saw that I had fish, ramen, broccoli, eggs, fava beans, tomato sauce, cheese, cake, strawberries, soy milk, guava nectar, whiskey, chocolate syrup, margarine, and orange juice, and was so rendered immediately happy. And then I ate the strawberries and half the cheese, thus decreasing the variety of the fridge, and so my happiness upon the next occasion I open it.

I did go to the tea stall in the grocery and buy Presumably Quality Tea. I got a small package of 500-yen loose-leaf stuff, which smells very smoky and serious, but doesn’t actually have a lot of taste. To use Terminology, it lacks body. So I’ll probably buy some other kind of expensive tea next time. The tea lady was not snotty, as I had predicted – she got very enthusiastic explaining the tea stamp card to me. Evidently it gets you some free tea when you fill it up. In general, when Japanese commerce inflicts stamp cards on me, the cashiers look at me uncomfortably, say “stamp card desu,” and hope I don’t ask any questions. Maybe she hadn’t had many customers that day.

Someone stop me, I’m going out to buy feta cheese.

In the not-a-train category, this inscrutably Italian Mexican pimped-out car was in my office building’s parking lot the other day.

But anyway – the JR system is exciting stuff!

Continue reading “JAPAN RAIL ADVENTURES!!!”

but I can’t right now because I’m craving feta cheese, and in addition to making me sick, feta cheese is 1200 yen.

I also need to buy tea. Going home and drinking my Celestial Seasonings green tea has brought me to the unwelcome realization that the Japanese brand I usually drink is awful. So I’ll probably have to go to the special-special tea booth at the front of the grocery and let the Tea Lady look down at me superciliously from the block she stands on, as I squint my jet-lagged eyes at my DS stylus, fumblingly typing in tea terms. She’ll probably gesture with her apron.

It’s been a month, and I was doing fine. But the World of Warcraft withdrawal’s hitting me again. Every once in a while my fingers twitch out the keyboard shortcut sequence for Hunter’s Mark, then Serpent Sting, then Arcane Shot. At odd moments I find myself anxiously recalculating whether the blue neck attachment I’m wearing is really optimal for my DPS, trying to remember whether I still have my old green one in the bank.

My PayPal chargeback against Yahoo went through – I got my $35 back.

I went into the store for bread and I accidentally came out with chocolate cake, wagashi, and a cream cheese danish.

Test edit.

The short version of this post: If you’ve ever had and then canceled web hosting/domain registration/etc. with Yahoo, you probably want to go in and remove all your billing information, just in case.

The long version: Continue reading “Yahoo is not a good company.”

Pinto beans! And this teeny little bag cost 400 yen. I am soaking them and will make them into chili tomorrow.

“Pinto bean” in Japanese is “uzura mame,” which means “quail bean.” I assume this is because they look like quail eggs. So it seems like Uzura from Princess Tutu’s name must be “quail.” I wonder if there is some deep reason for this.

(Japan really likes quail eggs. They are boiled, and then breaded, fried, and put on a stick to eat as a snack at bars. I don’t really know how I feel about Japan getting a jump on the South in the frying-stuff game here. Anyway, quail eggs are cheaper than pinto beans here and that feels like a violation of the natural order.)

Also, here is a booth down the road which contains a sort of vending machine, which you can apparently use to have the rice you grew on your farm sterilized so your family can eat it. I found it very difficult to translate the kanji because it’s all brushy.

Things that smell nice together: Nippon Kodo Mainichi blend incense, Earl Grey, and rain.

I woke up at two PM wanting bacon, so I went to the store, bought bacon, fried it, and ate it with fava beans and sushi rice. Fava beans seem to have more flavor frozen than fresh. They are not a very classy food in Japan – apparently, like edamame, you have them with beer at bars. My manager thinks it’s funny that I eat them so often.

It’s strange to walk outside on a warm day, sweating and feeling dumb for having worn my coat, and spot, through an abrupt gap in the houses, the mountains still covered with snow. It feels like someone might have cast a spell on them, to hold them back; or cast a spell on my coat.

A nice thing about living in a non-Christian nation is that the mail runs on Sundays. I have a tiny adorable Kodansha English Library edition of Comet in Moominland now, as well as a new Japanese textbook (for me) and a new English textbook (for Mee, Goody Proctor, and the Devil).

For the first time since I got to Shibata, I spent the weekend sleeping late, fooling around on the internet, not getting stuff done, and not eating.

This is how I know I’ve settled in.

Having discovered that the cell phone works fine as an MP3 player, I started up my perennial Get The iTunes DRM Off My New Pornographers Albums Project again. I tried three pieces of DRM-cracking software, none of which worked. It is a triumph for Apple’s software engineers!

Except that I just torrented everything instead.

I have made the Mr. Saturn theme from Earthbound my ringtone. But I am deeply disappointed to discover that the new phone has no place to hook my little dangly-charm of Killua from Hunter x Hunter that I got from a vending machine.

I am so much cooler than you.

(Why would Nokia split my cell phone’s manual into 25 separate PDFs and make me download them each individually?)

It feels like some sort of minuscule adulthood rite of passage, buying a kitchen appliance for myself.

Also, standing in the grocery store’s massive liquor section* and doing math in my head, I chose to buy one of the big things of Baileys instead of a little one, calculating that it would be about 70 yen cheaper per ounce. I think this is also some sort of rite of passage, but it might not be an “adulthood” one per se. A dissolute, girly adulthood rite of passage. I then came home and drank spiked hot chocolate and leveled my orcish hunter to 45.

(Apparently the Ice Stone has melted, you guys.)

* It’s a spirits aisle, a beer aisle, a wine aisle, and a bunch of wine displays spilling out into the housewares section. It sprawls.

My new cell phone has two cameras. One on the back for normal pictures, one on the front for video-phone.

I live in the future. (It’s wasteful.)

I like how I get paid and come home to find the yen’s actually lost on the dollar, for what I’m pretty sure is the first time in months.

I was paid in cash for some reason. (Apparently it’ll be direct-deposit next month.) It’s very weird having over a thousand dollars in cash sitting here next to me. I just have this urge to, like, gesture with it. Gesture at fools.

Cut for long/boring/whiny.

Continue reading “Further Adventures with the Japanese Cell Phone Industry”

Accomplishments this weekend:

* I purchased, laboriously hauled home, and assembled a small wooden shelving unit for the kitchen. This all makes me feel very macho. I even managed to avoid putting any the sections in with the unfinished side wrong-way-around.

* I rearranged the kitchen to accommodate said shelving unit. I have put a power strip in there and plugged both the microwave and rice cooker into it; I will hope that this doesn’t overstrain it.

* Got a case and inkpad for my hanko, so I can actually use it if necessary. (It hasn’t been necessary so far.)

* Until today I’d only been able to find one ATM that would take my American debit card, and it was twenty-five minutes walk away and in the middle of nowhere. But now I’ve I located another – it’s also twenty-five minutes away, but it’s in a big shopping center, so I can combine errands. And I’m 99% sure I’ve found a third, five minutes away FTW! I have enough cash that I haven’t tested that one yet, but it’s a Japan Post Yucho machine, and those all seem happy with American cards.

* Deposited some money in my Japanese account so I can get a cell phone.

* Failed to actually get a cell phone, because the place I went to didn’t have any English-language pamphlets. Japanese cell phone plans are intentionally complicated – they’re mostly incomprehensible even in translation. I’m not giving these people any money without English documentation. Will try at another store before work tomorrow. (I know the damn pamphlets exist because I saw them in Tokyo and Okazaki.)

* Discovered a good reason, aside from fashion, to have a matching hat-scarf set: The scarf’s presence around your neck makes it very easy to prove to the Lost and Found people that you are also the owner of the hat.

I own four hats, and have now lost and recovered three of them once apiece. I wonder if, when I finally go through this process with the fourth, I will at last be safe, or if the cycle will simply begin anew.

* Finally remembered to buy headphones.

* Examined prices for curtains and toaster ovens, items I intend to purchase when I finally get my friggin’ paycheck.

* Totally failed to pick up my resident alien card. I have to do that sometime between today and a week from today or a Bureaucratic Nightmare Possibly Ending In Deportation will ensue, and I had made an entry on Google Calenders to remind me to do it today, and Google Calenders didn’t send me the damn reminder email argh. It would have been a lot cheaper to do it today because I would’ve had time to take the damn bus, but if I have to get it done before work I’ll probably have to take a cab.

* Totally failed to do any lesson planning yet. But I have Ideas. I think I’m going to do a holiday thing and teach the older kids about Lupercalia.

* Levelled my Tauren Druid up to 125 in Enchanting. (Why can the horrible Native American stereotypes become moronic Celtic stereotypes…?) This isn’t actually an accomplishment.

Today I successfully 1) set up a Japanese savings account and 2) withdrew money from my American account. Take that, hostile universe.

I don’t really eat it in the US. But somehow, on this side of the Atlantic, its frequent presence on a stick mysteriously makes it desirable.

Dad: So are we going to Lexington this week?

Mom: Why do we need to go to Lexington?

Dad: I got this Starbucks gift card! There’s no Starbucks around here.

Mom: Why do you need to go out and use the gift card the minute you get it?

Dad: I can’t drink the card, dear.