4 Days to Go.

In four days, the Fulbright Grant period officially begins with the orientation here in Tokyo. I'm very much looking forward to meeting the other Fulbright kids and going out on the town and getting trashed together (assuming they are the getting trashed together types, which there is a good chance they are not. Shit.)

Tonight, I had dinner with one of my sempai from Lehman, Shinji. He took me out to eat yakitori and drink some beers in Roppongi. He paid, using the same excuse Daisuke used the other night ("you're a good contact to have"); hopefully he actually wants to be my friend too. Anyway, it was really nice catching up with someone from the floor; sounds like a lot has changed since I left last year. We also had a pretty funny/sad (if that makes sense) conversation about how screwy young Japanese society is and how there is very little hope for the future unless highly improbable major changes are made. Kanpai!

In other news, it looks like the grocery workers in the OTHER half of my home state have decided to lose their minds after the workers in Southern California did about a year ago. Yes ladies and gentlemen the grocery workers in Nor. Cal. are going to strike too. I'm predicting that like their counterparts in Southern California, they will fail terribly. And I do not, I repeat do not, feel sorry for them in the slightest. Now, let me apologize here. I admit, I do not know the most about the grocery industry, nor do I know the history of grocery labor contracts or even really the current state of things compared to other industries. So I basically know nothing. I'm a tabula rasa when it comes to knowledge of grocery labor. But purely going off of intuition, it seems like getting paid almost $20 an hour to bag Wonder Bread and Fig Newtons and having almost all of your health benefits paid for is a pretty good situation. I would take that (keep in mind this would be what they would get with no strike; and currently they make $20/hour with full health benefits). I would have thought people working at grocery stores were getting paid $10 an hour tops with health benefits reaching the dizzying heights of First Aid kit. But apparently at least one website (a socialist one - go figure) finds making $20 every hour for asking "paper or plastic" to amount to "low wages and brutal exploitation." I don't know, maybe I'm crazy, but that sounds ridiculous.

Song of the day: Little House of Savages (Bows and Arrows / The Walkmen)