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10 years. And Thursday.
I started this journal on September 16, 2001.
I guess it's really weird to look at the passing of time so closely. I always think that, despite my best efforts to shake up my life all the time, not enough changes. But clearly, it has.
I feel kinda bad that I've gotten out of my LJing habits. It's mostly due to Facebook and Twitter, I know. I kinda hope that being back in Japan will get them back on track, now that I'll probably have more to write about, although, last night I came home from the Tokyo Dome and just wanted to CRASH HARD. Clearly, I'd rather live my life than blog about my life, but it's great to look back on entries, of course.
I'm finishing up an entry about Puzzle Hunt, anyway.
So yesterday, woke up early, Kozo and I went to Nakano station area proper, ostensibly to get me a cellphone, but we did a bunch of other stuff too. Walked through a shopping arcade, got "breakfast" at a katsu place called Matsuno (I had katsudon and udon, and Kozo had an actual proper breakfast combo of soup and natto and rice and all). Then we went through the 100-yen shop, where I found some but not all of what I was looking for. Did pick up useful things for me here like a mirror, nail clippers, laundry net, shoehorn, etc.
Then basically, onwards to the Softbank store for a phone. Kozo looked up a bunch of the prepaid plans and Softbank is a fairly good deal -- I had to buy the phone for like 5000 yen, which is the phone and the charger and a memory card and registration I guess, and then had to buy a phone card for 3000 yen. The 3000 yen basically gets me the 315 yen registration per month of unlimited email usage on my phone... and I can make calls for 9 yen per 6 seconds, so 90 yen per minute, which kinda sucks, although I like that if you're only on the phone for like, 20 seconds, it doesn't charge you for a whole minute. (A lot of my calls basically ARE "Hey, I'm here, where are you?")
The only catch is, they took my gaijin card and apparently they ACTUALLY CHECK to make sure you are registered at the address it says you are registered at. And the front of my card has my old old old Saitama address on it, so I had them register me as still being in Akabane. So it took like, 30-40 minutes to do the activation, fortunately the nice people in Kita-ku apparently don't have me tagged as "crazy gaijin escapee" for leaving the country. I probably should go visit them at some point because of residency stuff from last year, but I'm a little bit afraid to because it's a lot of vocabulary that I don't know.
Anyway, we came home after that, walking yet another route, and then I played with the phone for a while before getting stuff ready to go to the TOKYO DOME! For the last Fighters game there of the season! (They're in Sapporo but play 8 "home" games here each year still.)
Some nanshiki little leaguers were on the escalator from the subway with me, all like "omg a gaijin! looks like a Fighters fan!" so I chatted with them a little. I had a Tsuboi shirt on and the loudest of the boys was like "wait, I'm Tsuboi!" which was pretty funny.
I got there and basically ran into Mineji on the way out of the subway station, he found me Ogasawara and his friends. Ogasawara's all like "Deanna's my new best Facebook friend! Except I can't understand a damn thing in English!" I went to get tickets, came back, lost those guys, but found Ojisan, who was like "WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN JAPAN OMG!" As were several other people. Sakamoto also eventually found me, and I ended up sneaking into line with him, heh... better than waiting out there for 20 extra minutes!
People went in and saved seats. I went around saying hi to people in various places, a bunch of people demanded taking a photo together since they hadn't seen me in so long, stuff like that. I guess the amusing thing is that like... some people were just like "welcome back! I heard you moved back to the US..." and a few people were like "where the hell have you been!?!? I haven't seen you at a game at all this year!!"
Shrug.
My brain was starting to overload from the Japanese because I don't know how to explain a few things and then I ran into Takuma, my friend from Keio that I met last year on the Akita-Morioka roadtrip. He lived in CA for 5 years and is fairly fluent in English, though he was all like "OMG TOTALLY FORGETTING HOW TO SPEAK". Also in WEIRD COINCIDENCES, he apparently met Matsuda, the crazy dude from Fukuoka, and they're now buddies. I ended up running off with those two and another friend of theirs to go do pinbadges... we ran into several other friends of mine along the way, which was funny too. AND we found BB and got a photo with him! yay.
All I really wanted was an Imanari badge. So I got my raijo badge, then went to get in line to do gatchapon badges... and while we were all there, some guy comes up to Matsuda like "I got these, they're mostly crap, anyone want to trade?" and I said "OMG YOU HAVE IMANARI!!!! I WANT I WANT I WANT!!!" so he basically just gave it to me for my Tadano, which is the one I got for just showing up. WOOHOOO!!!! Then when I actually did the gatchapon I mostly just got random rare badges, which I don't care about that much, though the Fighters-Swallows one is kinda cool.
The next hour is mostly a blur. Got a cheer sheet from the ouendan (who were kind of like "WTF", I really don't know if they've noticed I haven't been there this year. Miyauchi, the guy I know best, wasn't at this game, I wonder if he's still in the ouendan?) Switched seats within our group so that I'd sit next to Takuma, but still in front of Shinozawa J and Taicho, so that as everyone else showed up (pretty much everyone but Tsuyoshi), I got to say hi to them.
The game itself was of course a fantastic experience... just getting up and singing and cheering and all, I was so happy to be there again! The Fighters scored runs in the 1st and 2nd inning so we got to cheer a lot then, though it slowed down and for the rest of the game it was just a lot of close calls. The Marines cheers this year are pretty good, particularly Ishimine and Matoba.
I kinda learned our new songs for Scales and Hoffpauir and Ugumori... and recorded videos so I could study later anyway.
On the subject of those guys, bizarrely, this one person had some cheering props for Scales and Hoffpauir, both of which were bad puns in Japanese. For Scales he had a 助さん (suke-san) sign -- you could see this as maybe being a little racist because of the word people use for non-Japanese players, "suketto", which just means "helper", but I think in this case is a play on Scales in Japanese being "sukeruzu". For Hoffpauir, whose first name is Micah, this guy had a squid hat. Get it? Micah sounds like "maika" in Japanese, which is a kind of squid.
Yeah.
I dunno, anyway. Fighters won the game 2-1. The entire team came out to bow to the stands and throw baseballs at us afterwards... one of them landed 3 feet from me but a guy got it :( There was a big deal about Nashida since this was his last Tokyo Dome game, he's retiring as manager after this year.
Then the traditional post-game singing and stuff, although I noticed it's shorter than in past years, I'm guessing that's due to conserving power still.
Filtered out of the stadium with friends, saw various other friends, even Akki who had shown up late and was like "WTF, aren't you going to move back here? When'll I see you again?" which was kinda odd. I decided to walk to Yamashita via the front of the Tokyo Dome (and the ToDo store, where I got a Swallows towel handkerchief -- I need one in this sweaty-weather), and ran into some more people at the front of the Tokyo Dome as well. On my way to Yamashita I ended up talking to two random guys I've never seen before who were punching Giants posters and said they were lifelong Fighters fans.
Then the bookstore, where I overloaded on Koshien and college magazines. So much Yoshinaga, so little time ;) It's still killing me to hear he wants to go to Waseda...
Took the train back here, feeling sweaty and exhausted but pretty damn good.
I guess it's really weird to look at the passing of time so closely. I always think that, despite my best efforts to shake up my life all the time, not enough changes. But clearly, it has.
I feel kinda bad that I've gotten out of my LJing habits. It's mostly due to Facebook and Twitter, I know. I kinda hope that being back in Japan will get them back on track, now that I'll probably have more to write about, although, last night I came home from the Tokyo Dome and just wanted to CRASH HARD. Clearly, I'd rather live my life than blog about my life, but it's great to look back on entries, of course.
I'm finishing up an entry about Puzzle Hunt, anyway.
So yesterday, woke up early, Kozo and I went to Nakano station area proper, ostensibly to get me a cellphone, but we did a bunch of other stuff too. Walked through a shopping arcade, got "breakfast" at a katsu place called Matsuno (I had katsudon and udon, and Kozo had an actual proper breakfast combo of soup and natto and rice and all). Then we went through the 100-yen shop, where I found some but not all of what I was looking for. Did pick up useful things for me here like a mirror, nail clippers, laundry net, shoehorn, etc.
Then basically, onwards to the Softbank store for a phone. Kozo looked up a bunch of the prepaid plans and Softbank is a fairly good deal -- I had to buy the phone for like 5000 yen, which is the phone and the charger and a memory card and registration I guess, and then had to buy a phone card for 3000 yen. The 3000 yen basically gets me the 315 yen registration per month of unlimited email usage on my phone... and I can make calls for 9 yen per 6 seconds, so 90 yen per minute, which kinda sucks, although I like that if you're only on the phone for like, 20 seconds, it doesn't charge you for a whole minute. (A lot of my calls basically ARE "Hey, I'm here, where are you?")
The only catch is, they took my gaijin card and apparently they ACTUALLY CHECK to make sure you are registered at the address it says you are registered at. And the front of my card has my old old old Saitama address on it, so I had them register me as still being in Akabane. So it took like, 30-40 minutes to do the activation, fortunately the nice people in Kita-ku apparently don't have me tagged as "crazy gaijin escapee" for leaving the country. I probably should go visit them at some point because of residency stuff from last year, but I'm a little bit afraid to because it's a lot of vocabulary that I don't know.
Anyway, we came home after that, walking yet another route, and then I played with the phone for a while before getting stuff ready to go to the TOKYO DOME! For the last Fighters game there of the season! (They're in Sapporo but play 8 "home" games here each year still.)
Some nanshiki little leaguers were on the escalator from the subway with me, all like "omg a gaijin! looks like a Fighters fan!" so I chatted with them a little. I had a Tsuboi shirt on and the loudest of the boys was like "wait, I'm Tsuboi!" which was pretty funny.
I got there and basically ran into Mineji on the way out of the subway station, he found me Ogasawara and his friends. Ogasawara's all like "Deanna's my new best Facebook friend! Except I can't understand a damn thing in English!" I went to get tickets, came back, lost those guys, but found Ojisan, who was like "WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN JAPAN OMG!" As were several other people. Sakamoto also eventually found me, and I ended up sneaking into line with him, heh... better than waiting out there for 20 extra minutes!
People went in and saved seats. I went around saying hi to people in various places, a bunch of people demanded taking a photo together since they hadn't seen me in so long, stuff like that. I guess the amusing thing is that like... some people were just like "welcome back! I heard you moved back to the US..." and a few people were like "where the hell have you been!?!? I haven't seen you at a game at all this year!!"
Shrug.
My brain was starting to overload from the Japanese because I don't know how to explain a few things and then I ran into Takuma, my friend from Keio that I met last year on the Akita-Morioka roadtrip. He lived in CA for 5 years and is fairly fluent in English, though he was all like "OMG TOTALLY FORGETTING HOW TO SPEAK". Also in WEIRD COINCIDENCES, he apparently met Matsuda, the crazy dude from Fukuoka, and they're now buddies. I ended up running off with those two and another friend of theirs to go do pinbadges... we ran into several other friends of mine along the way, which was funny too. AND we found BB and got a photo with him! yay.
All I really wanted was an Imanari badge. So I got my raijo badge, then went to get in line to do gatchapon badges... and while we were all there, some guy comes up to Matsuda like "I got these, they're mostly crap, anyone want to trade?" and I said "OMG YOU HAVE IMANARI!!!! I WANT I WANT I WANT!!!" so he basically just gave it to me for my Tadano, which is the one I got for just showing up. WOOHOOO!!!! Then when I actually did the gatchapon I mostly just got random rare badges, which I don't care about that much, though the Fighters-Swallows one is kinda cool.
The next hour is mostly a blur. Got a cheer sheet from the ouendan (who were kind of like "WTF", I really don't know if they've noticed I haven't been there this year. Miyauchi, the guy I know best, wasn't at this game, I wonder if he's still in the ouendan?) Switched seats within our group so that I'd sit next to Takuma, but still in front of Shinozawa J and Taicho, so that as everyone else showed up (pretty much everyone but Tsuyoshi), I got to say hi to them.
The game itself was of course a fantastic experience... just getting up and singing and cheering and all, I was so happy to be there again! The Fighters scored runs in the 1st and 2nd inning so we got to cheer a lot then, though it slowed down and for the rest of the game it was just a lot of close calls. The Marines cheers this year are pretty good, particularly Ishimine and Matoba.
I kinda learned our new songs for Scales and Hoffpauir and Ugumori... and recorded videos so I could study later anyway.
On the subject of those guys, bizarrely, this one person had some cheering props for Scales and Hoffpauir, both of which were bad puns in Japanese. For Scales he had a 助さん (suke-san) sign -- you could see this as maybe being a little racist because of the word people use for non-Japanese players, "suketto", which just means "helper", but I think in this case is a play on Scales in Japanese being "sukeruzu". For Hoffpauir, whose first name is Micah, this guy had a squid hat. Get it? Micah sounds like "maika" in Japanese, which is a kind of squid.
Yeah.
I dunno, anyway. Fighters won the game 2-1. The entire team came out to bow to the stands and throw baseballs at us afterwards... one of them landed 3 feet from me but a guy got it :( There was a big deal about Nashida since this was his last Tokyo Dome game, he's retiring as manager after this year.
Then the traditional post-game singing and stuff, although I noticed it's shorter than in past years, I'm guessing that's due to conserving power still.
Filtered out of the stadium with friends, saw various other friends, even Akki who had shown up late and was like "WTF, aren't you going to move back here? When'll I see you again?" which was kinda odd. I decided to walk to Yamashita via the front of the Tokyo Dome (and the ToDo store, where I got a Swallows towel handkerchief -- I need one in this sweaty-weather), and ran into some more people at the front of the Tokyo Dome as well. On my way to Yamashita I ended up talking to two random guys I've never seen before who were punching Giants posters and said they were lifelong Fighters fans.
Then the bookstore, where I overloaded on Koshien and college magazines. So much Yoshinaga, so little time ;) It's still killing me to hear he wants to go to Waseda...
Took the train back here, feeling sweaty and exhausted but pretty damn good.
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