Hotel Kaizan Tsuruoka

... all work out - I read somewhere that few people scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience. Albeit, here I am, standing on my two hind legs, scratching the door of expression. I kinda feel like a dog trying to bite the fleeting tail of time.

I spent an exorbitant stack of cash on moving home. Despite ridding of personal items, my bringings totaled to unhappy sums. A highlight of returning home was going through ...

... the same job as me, who I never got tired of criticizing. So robust and damning has my badmouthing been that a friend of mine wants to study my interminable capacity to scorn others of my calling for her university research project. But to be fair to science, I haven’t been as careful with them as I have with my Japanese peers, so there’s a double standard after all. I think the majority are okay, and some are my close friends, but it’s ...

... then again, my stomach hasn't been normal since I met Marilyn.

I wrote this blog a while ago and then discarded it as something smaller than big, but when I signed back on tonight, I found that it had been somehow saved. Suffice it to say, this must be a sign from Zeus himself saying, "Buretto, the deed of bravery is its own praise." So, I have to post this.

Efter en extremt lång resa (Arlanda-Frankfurt med flyg, typ två timmar, Frankfurt-Narita, nästan elva timmars flyg, Narita-Haneda, en och en halv timmes bussfärd, Haneda-Akita, en timmes flyg, sen en timme med buss till Akita-Eki och till sist en och en halv timme med tåg ut till Kisakata, vid Akitas kust) kom vi äntligen fram till Kisakata, en liten och inte så spännande, men mysig och väldigt inaka fiskestad där alla hus har fina tak. Trötta efter resan och ganska ...

... 8220;I’ll never dance again!”). The teacher’s effort has been to draw elaborate illustrations of mouths in profile that convey -- rather abstractly -- where to put your tongue and teeth in order to make an unvoiced TH-sound, as in “thanks” and a voiced TH-sound, as in “though.” As might be expected, our battle against fifteen years of undeviating Japanese pronunciation has so far been a losing one.

... Let me try to describe it, though I doubt I can do it justice. A student yells my name, I look at the student and say, "Yes, my child. What is it that you must confess?" and then he or she yells out some previously learned noun, like "strawberries!" or "blue!" I give them a thumbs up, say very nice, or tell them to keep working on their l's and r's. But, it's not all fun and games. I get tested in there. "Buretto sensei, ichigo wa eigo de nan to ...

... not sure how I did that because I heard somewhere that "[r]ather than focus on the target, the [...] archer concenrates on the quality if his thoughts and actions, knowing that if they can be made pure and calm, his body will naturally correct itself and the shooting will be true." All I remember thinking was, "The whiskey last night netted me no profit. Someone gimme some bread."

... to six. Yesterday in the hallway of my Junior High, shortly after Obama's inauguration, a group of wily ninensei (2nd grade, which is 8th grade in America) boys saw me approaching, said "Amerikajin da!" (he's an American!). They similarly assaulted me with multiple yes-we-cans. During the "Question and Answer" warm-up that the head English teacher begins every class, he asked, "Who is the president of the United States?" Every hand shot up and the ...

My birthday was yesterday. Megumi sent me a calendar of dubiously-dressed Australian babes from the titular country. (She works there on a farm.) Also, my adult class threw a surprise party for me and gave me a Japanese watercolor-themed calendar that I can safely display outside my apartment. Hitomi-san and Hoshi-san baked a cake depicting me in a rocket ship, including a splotch of pink icing on the face to represent my Dickensian Wintry cheeks. Of course ...

... again and again and again. In Internet etiquette, I think this has come to be a form of applause. So respected is the comedian that the audience will parrot a joke as if it were a religious chant containing the words of a prophet. Of course, it lacks the timing and emotional poise of the actual comedian, but the audience itself isn't performing the joke so it doesn't matter. In a documentary about orangutans in the Philippines I once watched, a man was washing his ...