I have no voice but I must post

[dr4b]

Karaoke day with Kozo and Akinori. We met at Shinjuku around 12:45, went to lunch at the awesome yakiniku place that I still dunno the name of but is where I had the Meiji bounenkai and then also dragged Konstantin and Ian to later on. Turns out they have some BADASS lunch specials where you get a ridiculous amount of food for under 1000 yen -- we gotta remember that stuff. I remembered that the best meat I ate at the Meiji party involved scissors to cut the meat, so I ended up getting a lunch special that was like 3-4 slabs of that thick meat and oh man was it good! It also came with soup (yum) salad (yum) hiyayakko (yum!) and kimchee (yuck) and namuru (also yuck). Still, for like 980 yen or whatever it was a feast.

Then we moved onto the "new" Utahiroba, where we basically sang our lungs and throats out for 6 hours. Yes, 6 hours. We did the "free time" special until 8pm, starting at 2pm. I did some of my usual stuff but also deviated pretty far into stuff I wouldn't normally sing, some of which worked, and some of which didn't, and some of which failed spectacularly! I'm kind of out of practice on all the Japanese reading, really. Also, I feel like if I was smart I would coordinate with Kozo beforehand, kinda like how I used to make Craig learn songs so I could harmonize with him.

But, yeah. My throat really hurt after that!

We ended up getting dinner at Osaka House after that, the okonomiyaki hole-in-the-wall place that's been one of my semi-regular haunts in Shinjuku for several years. Kozo had monjayaki for a change, which is very weird-looking, but apparently pretty good. And I used one of the pay-to-charge-yer-cellphone thingies for the first time ever since my phone was running out of battery, the downside to this utahiroba is lousy cell signal. Shrug.

All in all a pretty good day. Kind of funny how it worked out for us to have karaoke plans on a day the skies decided to downpour anyway.

Tomorrow is probably going to be... interesting. And then maybe on Wednesday I'll head down southwards towards Senbatsu? I'm not sure. I was thinking to spend a day in Nagoya on my way down and catch a ni-gun game at Nagoya Kyujo. And I want to be at Senbatsu on Friday for sure for Nichidai San's game, so it's a matter of which other days I pad that with. Saturday would be nice so I could catch Chiben Wakayama, Riseisha, and Kokugakuin Kugayama. Thursday has Yokohama, Tenri, and Kanazawa. Sunday has Urawa Gakuin, Kansai, Tokaidai Sagami, etc. What to do! On the other hand I'll be going alone, so maybe I'll get bored after a day or two of it, who knows.

And then uh I should probably do things like settle plane tickets to CMU Carnival, and figure out when I'm coming back from Japan, too. Sigh. The problem is that I kind of don't want to leave, yet in my heart I know that this year I really need to get out of the country, especially now with the current stuff going on -- and not for the reasons most other people are leaving, ie the earthquake/nuclear panic, but for me it's more that baseball is going to be a mess here, travel is going to be annoying, etc. Plus I have stuff to do in the US. But I have to admit there's a pull in my heart to stay here and get a teaching job again just because I know so many places are going to have a tough time finding a new teacher.

Comments

[februaryfour]

I guess Mike may not be enough to conquer the draw of Japanese baseball and teaching English. ^_^

[dr4b]

I try very hard not to make it sound like "The main reason I'm leaving Japan is for my boyfriend" because that doesn't make it any less guilty for him to feel like he dragged me away from a place that I love. In all honesty I don't think I could just move to another place for a man with no other reasons at all for the move.

[februaryfour]

Honestly, though, from my POV (which is rather incomplete, granted) it looks like you're REALLY attached to Japan and the Japanese baseball scene. Which is, you know--why did you leave Japan? What was the impetus? (Hopefully you don't see this as "Ai's trying to chase me back to Japan" and more like "Ai's trying to figure out why you wanted to leave"? Because you like Japan a heck of a lot more than I did.)

[pergamond.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna throw in the opposite opinion here (because my code isn't working and I feel like an argument ^.~) and say that it's hard to compare Japan and the USA currently? Everyone wants a place for themselves where they have a job and interests etc and it's probably too early to have that back in the USA...?

[februaryfour]

Oh, hey, that's a great point. Carry on.

[pergamond.livejournal.com]

God damn it. That doesn't make me feel satisfied!

/goes off muttering

(♥)

[februaryfour]

♥

[dr4b]

The impetus was that English teaching isn't a career, first, and that Japanese baseball is a lot of fun but I wasn't going to be going anywhere in that scene anyway (at least in terms of maybe getting a job or something like I had hoped for back in the day), and third, towards the end of my time here, I was really annoyed at how I have no life OUTSIDE of baseball, all my friends are baseball-related, so 4 months of the year are very lonely, relatively. (Though to be fair, it's less lonely to walk around a city of 23940329403940932 million people than to sit alone in the suburbs, I have discovered.)

Though the other main thing was the fact that I was getting a serious love/hate relationship with the country -- I'd be so happy about something like food or trains or whatever, and ten seconds later it'd always turn into being so angry about something like buttheaded racist Japanese people.

So I definitely felt like I needed to get out to get some perspective.

[februaryfour]

Oh, right--I remember you posting about the love-hate relationship, now that you've reminded me. >_< I apologize for my memory (well, my lack of it).