Sunday, October 01, 2006

Boats... grrr!

Yeah, one thing I've noticed is that I use an inordinant amount of exclamation points (one could even say I... "spackle" my writing with them), or as I like to refer to them, "bangs." I guess if you know me that is sort of indicitave of my character though, so I'll just leave it out there as a simple observation. Things that make me go hmm... Oh hey, and before I forget, Engrish of the day goes to the guy on the train wearing a trucker hat that read "I lost my virginity in Madagascar." Priceless.

So today's theme is me being totally pooped. I cannot for the life of me sleep in, whether it's a weekday or my day off, whether I go to bed at 11 or 3, whether I went out the night before or whatever. The fricking sun gets me up at like 6am or so just about every day and I'm hating it. One thing that luckily isn't going to be a factor anymore is that there's no DST in Japan. American occupational forces did enstate it in Japan during the post-WWII occupational period for about 6 years, but as soon as we left it was one of the first things to go. That means that while you enjoy daylight until 9pm on some days during the summer, I enjoy the sun rising at like 4am. Yeah.

Sooo... that means I need some thicker blinds. I went and checked, and it looks like I'll wind up dropping like $50-60 on curtains big enough to cover the window in my bedroom, and the same goes for if I want darkness in any of my other rooms as well. Strangely enough this didn't bother me in Chiba for whatever reason, but it sure does now so I gotta do something about it. As soon as payday comes around that is- I already spent 420,000+ yen this month. Oh, and that's only like $3,500 btw.

And just to top it all off, today I was not awoken by our benevolent source of sustenance and life... oh no, he didn't even get the chance. You see, today I arose to the onerous sound of fog horns, most likely from boats all the way on the other side of my area of town. The bastages!! They got me up at like 5am! I think I might have gotten back to sleep for a grand total of 30 whopping minutes before I had to get up to go to work since there was an opera today I had to help out with.

So dragging along I make it to work, with said opera on the horizon. I must admit it was rather impressive to see this Japanese woman no bigger than yours truly belting stuff out with force without need or wont for a microphone. This girl wasn't your stereotypical shy and demure Japanese girl by any stretch of the imagination. She was an honest to goodness soprano and had range that would give Mariah Carey back in the early 90's a good run. She wrote her own material, which was lackluster, but it was more about getting the town's kids involved apparently so whatever.

The theme? The Shichigahama awabi legend. It's about these fishermen who went out to sea a long time ago and got stuck in a storm. The storm tore a huge hole in the bottom of the boat and they started to sink, so they start calling out to some local god that was supposed to protect them. They start paddling back and notice the water's stopped. When they get back to shore, they look on the bottom of the boat and what do they see? A big 'ol awabi, blocking up the hole. And there you have it.

Alright, well now that that's said and done I'm off to catch up on some z's. Snore.

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