I could use a few friends over here.

I just surveyed the 3100+ songs on my iTunes, and found that 14 songs have the word "friend" in the title: indie oddities by arists like "Casiotone for the Painfully Alone" and "Devendra Banhart"; two songs by the White Stripes; classics by the likes of "The Beatles", "James Taylor", and naturally "The Zack Attack". Fourteen is a good number of songs. And it also happens to be more than the number of actual friends I have in Sendai.

Not that it's my fault, or anyone's fault here. It's hard moving to a place where you have no associations with anyone (I mean, even when you start working somewhere, you have your co-workers) and attempting to meet people. I have no social roots. Sure, I meet some kids in my Japanese classes, and I have a few Japanese acquaintances here and there from random circumstances, but I have very few people I can count as friends. Last Friday, I tried going to the rockband club to check it out, hoping I'd meet some cool Indie rock kids. But they all kind of looked at me funny, I guess wondering what they were supposed to do with this asian kid from the States. Not that I can blame them; I had no idea what to do with them either. A couple of the guys let me borrow a shitty old Steve Vai Signature Series Ibanez guitar (for guitarists, yes, one of those lame guitars with a handle cut into the body) and I jammed a little with them, but no one had any idea what to do and it was just kind of awkward.

When I can't scare up a few of the people I know to actually do something with me on the weekends, I actually prefer the weekdays when I actually have class to go to and responsibilities. For those of you wondering how I can still have a lack of friends, remember that everything here has to be done in Japanese and Japanese style. People just don't start talking to each other randomly like people do in the U.S. At Penn, I could make friends in class pretty easily. That doesn't really happen here. You just come and go.

Tomorrow, I'm being assigned a conversation partner, which might open some doors. My theory right now is, if I just expose myself in as many directions as possible, SOMEONE will HAVE to be my friend eventually. And then it should be easy from there. In the meantime, I'll just be like, listening to iTunes and stuff.

Oh, and if you miss admiring my immense talents, take a look at www.furuburaito.com, a website put together by another fulbrighter named David and myself. It doesn't have much content yet, but every graphic was made by me and good ole photoshop (other Dave built the structure and I filled it in). I just finished overhauling a huge section, so take a look.