Oh yeah - songs.

Oh here was something I was meaning to do recently just because it's helped me make it through the last month - a list of songs that are about what I have on my mind or at least pick at my wounds and make me pity myself (yay! and yes, it includes two songs from the new Weezer album which I have salvaged from the wreck to enjoy). They are in no particular order and if you listen to them I think you'll know immediately which songs correspond to which part of my life; hell, by reading the titles you should be able to guess. Feel free to somehow find and enjoy these songs yourself:

Bright Eyes - Gold Mine Gutted
Bright Eyes - Devil in the Details
Franz Ferdinand - Come on Home
Ratatat - Breaking Away
Blonde Redhead - Elephant Woman
Ben Folds - Gone
Cursive - The Recluse
The Postal Service - Nothing Better
50 Cent f/ G. Unit - Hate it or Love it (remix)
Fabolous - Breathe (okay these last two don't match the rest of the list well, but they make it, okay?)
YUKI - センチメンタル　ジャーニー
Anna Nalick - Citadel
Tujiko Noriko - rocket花火
Sufjan Stevens - Chicago
Bump of Chicken (stop laughing at the name please): 車輪の唄
Weezer - Perfect Situation
Weezer - Hold me

Timing is everything

These last few weeks I'm in Japan are some of the busiest I've had in a long, long time. And things just got worse. Thursday, I went down to Tokyo to see Hyunjoo, and it was a nice reunion. We walked around Tokyo a bit and just talked and hung out. There are a lot of things I feel about it, but this isn't really the place to write about it, so I won't. I'll just suffice it to say it simultaneously went much better and worse than I expected it too.

While leaving the taco place Hyunjoo and I have now gone to twice in Harajuku (it was actually kind of a bittersweet request that she asked that we could eat there since probably the single thing we've eaten together the most is tacos - i mean, it was our dinner for our one year anniversary last year even), Yuji-ojisan called me to tell me that Aiko-obaachan, who is his mother and my Grandpa's sister, was close to dying. I told them to call me later to tell me what to do, and they later asked that I come over the next day. Well, last night, Shinji let me use his apartment since he usually stays at his girlfriend's place in yet another one of his acts of selflessness that I am really piling up here in Japan - he's just a great guy. This morning, I woke up to a phone call that Aiko had died, which marks the fourth relative to have died since the day I arrived (if you recall, my mom's cousin here died the day I arrived in Japan, who was also Aiko's oldest daughter). It's not emotionally hard because she was 84, but it's just hard to fathom how much the shape of my family has changed since I arrived in Japan - with deaths, births, marriages, and breakups and so much more drama than just those categories can communicate. It's been easily the most turbulent year in my family in the time I've been alive.

So after running by Kinkos to take care of some errands, I went to my uncle's place to take part in the first of the rituals for Aiko's death. Sadly, I'm getting good at Buddhist death rituals now that I've been through so many relatives passing on here. I saw all the extended family that lives in Tokyo, including Sachiyo, who in the one moment of happiness this past few days got me two tickets to go watch "Waratte ii tomo", this really famous daytime variety show, be taped in June. It's really hard to get tickets (she seems to work for the show or the station) and I'm pretty excited about it because some huge celebrities appear on it regularly. It was so incredibly nice of her to do that since we're not really close or anything.

Anyway, I had to come back to Sendai tonight because my Japanese mom here (Teruko) has been planning to take me to an onsen in Tohoku for over a month now, so I couldn't cancel on her. So I have to come back for this and then leave immediately afterward for Tokyo again for the funeral (as a sidenote, I had my family take home all my formal clothes because I didn't figure I'd need it anymore, so my mom had to overnight fedex it all back again. dOh) and then come back to Sendai again immediately afterward for another event with the dance group that I promised I'd attend. Then Tuesday I'm hosting a taco party here in my apartment for my friends. When am I going to finish all my work??

In another bout of bad timing, I had asked Eriko to go out tonight and she told me she was feeling sick. But then around 3 PM she sent me an email saying she felt better so let's hang out; but for some reason I didn't get the mail til a little after 9 PM and by then it was too late!! DAAMMNNN.

I better get some work done at this onsen. I have to.

Today or never again

This past weekend was a pretty spectacular one. I was supposed to go to Tokyo, but with that pushed off to later (later today actually), I was free to take care of some other business at hand. Which was actually the reason I was able to cause trouble at the club event last Friday night. Anyway, first, my Sendai mom Teruko took me out for Saturday night dinner at a nice new shabu-shabu joint that was built in the underground restaurant garden underneath S-Pal (a department store in front of Sendai Station). It was pretty fancy and delicious shabu-shabu with incredible side dishes. Thanks Teru-chan.

Sunday night was my first owakare-party (going-away party), this time thrown by the closest members of WHO, my recently oft-mentioned dance circle: Lupan (whose real name is Hidetoshi), Lin, Ma-cchan, Hide, Yakou, Ono-kun, and Korosuke (whose real name is Aiko). It was a shouchuu party (which is distilled rice liquor) and man did we drink a lot of shouchuu. The best part was that they had gifts for me - which I somehow didn't expect because I've only been in the club a little over 2 months. Koro and Ono (who, again, are dating) bought me flowers and a card (which they had everyone sign), Hide made me a copy of the "You've Got Served" DVD, and Lupan, who is probably my best friend in the club, got me a traditional Japanese pipe just because it's cool. Not sure what I'm going to use it for, but it's really sophisticated looking. And apparently people don't really own them in Japan anymore, so it's kind of a cool thing to own (but then, really, how many people in the U.S. actually carry pipes anymore? Except for potheads).

So yeah, that night I came back home and watched "You've Got Served" immediately. Remember how I made fun of it only one entry ago? Well, I now eat my words: it is an awesome movie. The story is cliched and badly acted, with moments of unintentional comedy. But it's actually slightly better than would be expected. Unfortunately, it expectedly involves the typical black ghetto youth movie stereotypes: if there is any free time, it is spent playing basketball, a kid gets beat up while delivering something (that is never specified as drugs of course; let's keep this clean), a kid gets shot-up and killed, there are no fathers, but there is a wise grandmother figure. And the wise grandmother is SO stereotypical "wise black grandma" that it is grating. There are moments when these elements feel like "reality" but most of the time it just feels like a way to move the plot around so people can dance more. Thankfully, the movie also includes pompous, rich white kids from Orange Country who come to LA to push around the poor black kids. As if Orange County doesn't have a bad enough rep already, we need a movie that creates a patently ridiculous fantasy in which white kids can cause trouble in rough black neighborhoods in LA and not get killed? What is that?

Wow, did I just really spend a paragraph writing about the plot of this movie? Does anyone give a shit about that part? No, of course not. I am tempted to erase that paragraph because this movie is about the unbelievable, inhuman dancing. And there is a lot of it. It even has that one guy featured in that video floating around the net where at that battle in LA that had mostly Asian kids, this dorky white guy walks on stage and proceeds to do a style of robot dancing where he looks like he's made of rubber. But most of the unbelievable shit comes from the break-dancers: they fly around like they have wires attached to them, and this one guy even does a backhand spring. "But that's easy!" you say? Well, instead of springing off his hands, he uses his head. HIS HEAD. Explain to me how this doesn't kill him. For anyone disappointed in me for gushing about this obviously awful movie, I apologize. It's just that my 102 temperature seems to indicate a bad case of dance fever (jazz hands!).

Ahem*. A small observation: the one song I called decent on the new Weezer album, Perfect Situation, sounds exactly like the best song on the Green album, Simple Pages, for about the first 10 seconds or so. I mean EXACTLY. The powerchords are exactly the same, the beginning of the lead riff is the same, the drum part is the same, and the tempo is even almost exactly the same. Luckily, the songs depart from each other thereafter. And you thought Beverly Hills sounded a lot like a bad version of The Sweater Song.

Today, I helped Take and Macchan from WHO translate a chapter of a finance textbook from English to Japanese, which is some kind of ridiculous Finance assignment. Apparently, English exercises of this kind are made compulsory by the Ministry of Education. Anyway, it took forever because (1) who knows how to say stuff like "strike price" and "cost of Equity" in Japanese? I sure didn't! Who knows how to explain European Call Options in understandable Japanese? I sure can't! and (2) I often say Japanese and English grammar are the exact opposite, but that's misleading. If they were the exact opposite, you could just pick up at the end of the sentence and work backward. But they are just opposite enough and just similar enough in the right ways to make translating a pain in the ass. You have to pick up the subject from the beginning, then the object modifiers from the end and then work backward to the object and then put in the verb... it takes a long time. I have even more respect for live translators (is that what doujitsuuyaku is called in english?) now than I did before.

Oh yeah, and for nostalgia's sake, I looked back on some of the entries from the first half of the nine months this blog has been running, and let me apologize - it used to be more interesting and written in much better English.

I'm finally going to Tokyo today for the big reunion. More news upon my return.

a mini logo for the sleeve or the back shoulder

a mini logo for the sleeve or the back shoulder
Originally uploaded by kenji618.

I made this design to be placed somewhere else on the shirt, logically after they said they wished they had a smaller logo to put somewhere else on the shirt too... That breakdancer is actually a capture from that hokey dance-fest movie You Got Served, one of the more ridiculous names for a movie in recent memory.

the front of the shirt

the front of the shirt
Originally uploaded by kenji618.

Here is the main design I made for the dance club t-shirt. I did it using Photoshop. Most of it is hand-drawn, by which I mean I drew pieces of things and rearranged them and edited them to make the design. Since I don't have a scanner, the drawings got into my computer by taking a picture with my digital camera and then using photoshop filters to turn the picture back into drawing, which worked surprisingly well. It isn't very colorful because I wasn't sure how many colors the tshirt print could handle. I hope they like it.

Whoops.

Tonight there was a dance event at Shaft, a bar that's usually a gaijin hangout (foreigner) but today was chock full of Japanese dancers. The night was going quite well - there was some ridiculous battling going on among the breakdancers and more than half of the showtime performers were from my club and they all did a great job. And then ... things turned a bit sour. After showtime ended, some big time battling was going on involving everyone - the breakers, the poppers, the lockers, and even some of the hip-hop girls. Everyone from my club was getting involved, including a cute moment when Ono and Aiko, who I just found out are dating, did a short improv lock routine together. And then suddenly this old white guy (really dorky old white guy with his equally dorky but slightly younger friend) jumped in the middle of the circle and started dancing in a .. well.. old white guy kind of way. Whatever you're imagining is probably very accurate. I saw the two of them earlier get tricked by these two girls into buying drinks for them, which was funny to watch. Well anyway, they seemed pretty drunk, and the guy kept grabbing people and forcing them to dance with him - girls and guys. And it was fine and kind of embarrassingly funny the first couple times (like, these are the type of adult men the U.S. produces?), but the act was wearing a little thin by the 10th person. And then he started grabbing girls and dancing kind of gross with them when they clearly didn't want to. That particularly pissed me off. The dance floor started clearing out. Basically, if you had been touched by him, you left. I sat there though, hoping he'd just stop, annoyed at the arrogant way he jumped in and made everyone feel uncomfortable while probably claiming to try to make everyone have fun (just such a typically dorky-white-guy-in-japan thing to do), and telling myself "don't do anything.. don't do anything .. don't do anything". And then he decided he wanted to dance with me. I decided I wasn't going to pretend I was a Japanese guy and play along and instead decided to let my temper run a little. It wasn't such a bad conversation. I wasn't very mean. I didn't even swear. And none of the Japanese kids could understand what we were saying anyway. After we finished up, he went over to his friend and loudly told him what I said so I went over and gave them a bit more of my mind and then walked off. Don't worry Mom, there was no fear of a fight or anything, and if a fight did break out, I'm more than confident I would have mauled both of them. After all, one of my friends thought he was a fat woman. But MAN did the atmosphere in that place collapse after that. I didn't expect that to happen at all. Whoops. If they cleared out the dance floor, I helped keep it clear. I think one of the guys in my club (one of the breakers) was kind of pissed at me for doing it. Okay, so yeah I kicked myself afterward for doing it, but I felt like someone needed to say what none of the nonconfrontational Japanese kids could say and put the guy in his place. And he's lucky - if this had been the States, I'm pretty sure he'd have a lot of more problems than just me yelling at him.

Oh, and afterward I was pissed at myself for another reason - Hidetoshi, my closest friend and teacher in the club, who is ridiculously good at dancing but very shy with girls, had a cute girl come up to him with her friend and compliment him on his dancing and he let the chance slip with her; I should have helped him out since she was clearly attracted to him. He could have her number now but I didn't do anything! AHHH.

Instead we went to McDonalds to eat some late night disgusting food. Oh man has my life not changed a bit in some ways since graduating from Penn.

Make Believe?

Okay, first thing's first. Five days ago, Pitchforkmedia reviewed the new Weezer album and gave it a 0.4 on a scale of 10.0. That's not good. I responded to this in two ways. First, I thought, "uh oh. Less than 1!!! This album that I've been waiting for because it seemed like Weezer had finally gotten its act together is going to blow!" My other thought was that this Pitchfork running away with itself again and just giving it an extra bad review out of spite. Historically they've given Weezer low scores (yeah, I checked); at least lower than I would have given; in my mind the Green Album should get a little bit higher than a 4.0 and Maladroit a bit higher than a 5.4 (though not much). Hell, they even gave Pinkerton, which is definitely one of my top 10 albums of all time (as it is for about 10 million other kids my age) a 7.5. But then came an ominous sign: I discovered my iTunes music store was working. And I checked what the songs sounded like on the little clips they have, and they sounded really, really .. boring. But unfazed (yes, that's spelled correctly) I went to HMV the day the album was released to pick it up. I came home and listened to it. I skipped the first track Beverly Hills because I've heard it a million times and it's just not that good. And suprisingly (or not surprisingly) neither was the rest of the album. I had heard Beverly Hills was really different sounding than the rest of the disc, which is true; but the common theme throughout seems to be "boring". And Rivers churned out the worst lyrics imagineable. I held off a few days writing this because I thought maybe I'd come to like the album more, but ... I was wrong. There are two notable things about the album: (1) it ranks as the worst album I've bought in the last year (and I've bought a lot of records) and (2) if you take beverly hills off it actually manages to get worse and more boring with each successive song. It's as if it was sequenced to create mounting disappointment. And even decent songs are ruined by something: a horrid guitar solo, jr. high english class lyrics, over-production. My main thought it that Rivers Cuomo is just old now; the blue album and pinkterton were written in his teens and early 20s; then he went crazy and wasted most of his 20s (the music-writing sweet spot) hiding in his apartment. Now he's in his 30s, back at Harvard, and writing crappy songs. Oh well; that's why you keep looking for new bands everyday right? And besides, Perfect Situation (track 2) isn't terrible.

Sorry. Had to get that out of my system. Ahem*. Tonight I went to an event at neoBrotherZ (yet again) because this girl Yumi I met at a club last weekend was DJing tonight as part of an all-girl-DJ event (Yumi actually studied abroad at UCR too so she speaks some English; imagine that. Your first taste of living in the U.S. is Riverside. Ah yes, Riverside: land of cows, dirt, and trash - and any or all of those words might be referring to the people who live there!). So I talked a bit with Yumi (she's also a decent dancer, a great dresses and is memorably hot) while she wasn't running in circles doing her work, had a few drinks, and watched the performances (DJs, MCs, and a couple dance crews). It occurred to me how remarkably far U.S. culture and hip-hop culture has sunk into countries. Here was a bunch of Japanese kids who live and breath hip-hop: they wear it (and yeah they more than just pull it off, especially the girls), they dance it (and dance it well), they write their own original beats and songs, and they spin it as DJs - and these are kids from Sendai, which by all accounts is categorized as inaka (countryside) around here. The only thing they don't know is what the fuck anyone on the track is saying when they drop the needle on the wax. But hey, who cares about the words, right?

I've been spending all my time with the dance club, or working on things for the dance club, or reading books while wishing I was hanging out with the dance club. So much so that my normal friends haven't been seeing much of me anymore. I dance with the team at night til around 10:30 PM on weekdays. I dance with them on Saturdays. Tomorrow night I'm going to an event at a club with them. Sunday night they are throwing a party for me. And it's all great - they are all really good people. And so I wanted to give something to them for teaching me and being so good to me, so I designed their new t-shirt for them, which I will upload next so people can see what it looks like.

The big reunion has been moved to Monday or Tuesday, and with the people who have been filling my days recently, both near and far, it really doesn't feel as necessary anymore.

Crazy May

It's been 10 days since I've updated. Apologies. But this is a crazy month! Not that that's the reason for no updates - no, that's because I'm lazy. But May is a wild month. Let me count the ways. First, it's my last full month in Japan and basically my last bit of time in Sendai. Second, in correlation with what I just said, I have all sorts of soubetsukai and owakere parties (going away parties) with friends and clubs and stuff, which will soon be keeping my nights busy. Third, again along with things ending, I obviously have to finish my research (for which I have been spending my days in the library for) and the Fulbright Handbook (for which I've been spending my nights inside for). Fourth, it's exgirlfriend month! Last week I saw Joanne in Tokyo with one of her Fulbright Korea teacher friends Carolyn which was a good time. I showed them around Tokyo the best I could, though I think it might have been kind of boring - I'm not sure. I hope they had fun. And this week I'm going back to Tokyo because Hyunjoo is coming to town. We'll see how that goes. That exclamation point a couple sentences ago makes me seem a bit more excited about all this than I actually am. Finally, this is a crazy month because a few new things are coming out that I have my eye on, the biggest of which are the new Star Wars (which is surprisingly getting really good reviews according to Rottentomatoes.com), the new Weezer album (which got slammed on pitchfork yesterday). I think the suckiest thing about it is that I won't be home to see the new Star Wars with my Dad. For those of you who think it's ridiculous to be excited about the movie coming out, consider the fact that as a small child, I ate, breathed, slept, and even wore Star Wars. It's an event in my head.

I'm going to have to come back to Sendai Sunday night (one day earlier than I expected) because the kids in dance are throwing me my first going away party. Yay.

Golden Weak?

So we've entered the legendary Japanese Golden Week. Only we should call it boring week. Everyone either went back to their hometowns, or is extremely busy. And somehow, even though it's a week straight of holidays, people still have class! I don't understand - if people went home because it's a break, how can there still be class?? It makes NO SENSE!!

Ahem. Anyway. I woke up late today and went to dance practice where there were both a bunch of freshmen newbies, including a few really cute girls, and a couple fat white people including this guy apparently nicknamed Fat Chris. He was also at the club event last weekend and he's one of these perpetually sweating fat people who smells like livestock. Have you ever seen someone make an entire club smell by himself? I have. It was seriously like having a buffalo in the room.

I took Yuko out for dinner tonight and a few things occurred to me: (1) remember that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry's girlfriend wears the same dress everytime they see each other? The black one? And he wonders whether he just hit the same spot in the laundry cycle, if she's like batman with a closet full several of the same dress, or she really only has that dress? Well that kind of thing happens a lot in Japan. Some families seem to do their laundry all together almost daily (including my relatives), so there are a few people who seem to wear the same thing almost everyday. Yuko pulled that on me today. She was wearing the same exact outfit as the first time I met her. I wouldn't have noticed probably but I consciously tried to make sure not to wear any article of clothing I was wearing the last time I saw her. But sure enough .. she was wearing the same turqoise long sleeve shirt, cream t-shirt, coat, and black jeans. Disconcerting. (2) She's a much more shy and awkward girl than I thought. She's one of these people that doesn't look at you in the eye when she talks, only when she listens. She'll be saying something and kind of looking down. (3) She's also 18! She said her 23 year old sister wants to meet me and I was like "Yes, next time please bring her out with us! Please!"

Okay gotta sleep. But what's on bill for this most golden of weeks? Tomorrow? More fun with Takako, Mayumi, and Hina-ppin. Monday? Apparently going out with with Hyonjin and Minyoung, if they actually don't cancel on me for once. And after that? Tokyo for a few days and then back to Sendai to party up with the guys from dance. Then hanging out with the likes of Miki and her friends and then Eriko and some other kids. Full schedule. Better get some freaking work done for once.