Catching up with people a bit more...

Dude. Darvish and Ma-kun on News Zero in an interview (with Sakurai Sho of all people!). I guess it IS Spring Training season after all. On the other hand I just finished watching today's Ainori (poor Yamaji... technically she retired, but... also only 5 episodes left omg) and SMAPxSMAP and so on and aside from the TV having such crappy reception, it's kind of nice to be back into the routine. Now if I just had a job...

(Well, I have another interview tomorrow.)

Let me backtrack a second. I spent Sunday hanging out with alibash. We went to Ikebukuro and saw 誰も守ってくれない, a movie about... I guess it's a movie about how oppressive the Japanese media can be. Krispy picked it after I said I'd prefer to see a Japanese movie, and since I like Sato Koichi and Shida Mirai and basically everyone else in this movie (it took me this long to realize I recognized Kimura Yoshino from her role in Zenzen Daijoubu!) I was up for it, knowing it was going to be a kind of serious movie. And it was... basically Mirai-chan plays this 15-year-old girl Saori whose brother commits murder and so the Japanese press is trying desperately to make the family pay for it all, while Sato plays a cop named Katsuura whose job is essentially to keep Saori away from the Japanese press. Enter Sasaki Kuranosuke as a jerkbucket reporter who is determined to get to her -- and isn't he ALWAYS a jerkbucket? -- and the internet as his ally, and you have a weird chase movie without being an action movie. I dunno. It was ok. I don't know why there are no comedies out right now though, given that last winter at this time I watched at least 3 or 4 of them.

After wandering through a few arcades on Sunshine-dori, Krispy and I ended up getting Mexican food for dinner at El Torito and hanging out chatting for a while. It was good to see him again! Shame we had to meet under sad circumstances for both of us.

Today I meant to go down to Shinagawa in the afternoon but woke up and felt crappy so I ended up not going anywhere, and spent the afternoon throwing resumes at a dartboard, essentially, while doing half my laundry. I guess I'm getting a little freaked out by the job hunt, most likely exacerbated by my trip back to Seattle because I'm worried about being able to interview and all. We'll see.

In the evening I went to Shibuya and met up with Pau, who I hadn't seen in several months, obviously. He got tickets to Games 1 and 6 of the WBC, so we'll be at the boring Japan-slaughters-China game and we'll also be at the finals for the Tokyo rounds! Wooooo! Anyway, Pau and I went to Momo Paradise and I gorged on shabu-shabu which was maybe not the best idea, but it had been a while and I was starving. Yum.

It seems he'll be around a few more months, so hopefully we can manage to play board games and baseball and whatever else, but who knows. It is kind of sad how the nature of being friends with other foreigners in Japan means that by definition, you are all going to go home someday, so one way or the other, you have to go find new friends.. but it's such a pain to find new friends in some ways. I wish Lisa was still here too. Blargh.

Krispy and I had also been talking about how people don't seem to do things spontaneously here. I think that might be true... and I guess I wonder if I can get better and/or more efficient at planning stuff.

Anyway, fun times. Went around Shibuya a bit more after Pau went home. Turns out Popolare, my favorite arcade there, has closed, which makes me super-sad, although it seems that another arcade I forgot the name of has turned their second floor into "Bemani Only", which was nice of them. Eh. Whatever.

I wonder how the next few days are going to shake down. I still need to get to Shinagawa and it turns out Wednesday is a holiday. Oops.

The Tale of Deanna's Dad and the iPod in the Chemo Room

I told this story at the shiva the day after my dad's funeral.

A bit of backstory would be to mention that my dad was kind of... well, rough around the edges would be a nice way to put it. I often felt embarrassed by things he said in public, or the way he acted... he could sometimes really totally go ballistic on complete strangers for no reason, or say really inappropriate things trying to be funny. I used to worry about whether he actually had all that many friends because I knew he could be kind of odd (and very steadfast and vocal in some of his views, including being Republican and hating certain companies like Dell and Comcast). Several of my friends have "Deanna's Dad" stories, most of which are kind of along the lines of "He's crazy."

Another part of the backstory is that my father had an INSANE mp3 collection. I don't know how many years he'd been basically downloading songs off various European servers almost daily. Occasionally he'd buy CDs if he really liked a musician -- his recent favorites were French rocker Johnny Halladay, and supermodel string quartet Bond -- but mostly his stuff was entirely illegal and generally didn't even have lyrics in English. He had iTunes in his apartment rigged up so his "party collection" of music would play on random both in the living room and his bedroom, nonstop, 24 hours a day.

Anyway.

Basically, when my father would go to the chemo room at Thomas Jefferson hospital, he would spend a few days beforehand ripping DVDs or converting whatever movies he had to a format to put on his 80GB iPod, which he would then bring with him to the hospital.

And whenever he went there, he insisted on sitting in certain chairs, because those were the ones where he could actually plug the iPod into the RCA jacks and get it to play HIS movies instead of whatever was showing on cable. My dad HATED Comcast with a passion, so there was no way he'd sit there for four hours watching it if he could help it.

Naturally, all of the nurses thought he was batshit crazy. Which, I suppose, he was.

The thing is, when I came to Philly in November, I went with my dad to the chemo room for an hour or so. It was maybe his third or fourth session or so, I forget, and I just kind of followed him along, and my dad was friendly and happy to see all of the staff at the hospital, and very proud to be like "This is my daughter!" as he dragged me along through all of the parts of the oncology ward.

We went into the chemo room, and sure enough, he picked one of his favorite seats, and sat down, and one of the nurses came in and took his blood pressure and put an IV in him with some fluid and all, and everything was pretty normal, until that nurse left, and my dad had me bring the TV screen over to him, and then he started hooking up his iPod to it, and fiddling with the channels, and trying to get it to connect properly, and so on and so forth.

I said, "Why can't you just watch your movies on your iPod screen? Or just listen to music?"

Dad replied, "Because I KNOW I can get it to work on here. Just watch, I can do it," and he fiddled some more.

See, the point wasn't entirely to bypass cable, the point was that Dad just HAD TO GET HIS IPOD TO WORK WITH THAT TV SCREEN or he was going to die trying, quite possibly literally.

Eventually he gets it working, and puts on the tracks from the Ventures in Japan DVD that I had brought back for him. He'd been asking me for, oh, 6 years or so, every time I went to Japan, to get him a Japan-only Ventures disc, dammit, and so I finally brought him one on this trip, which he was totally overjoyed about.

Another nurse comes in with another bag of medicine, and she's like "Hey Mike, you still playing with your toys?" She looks down at me, like "Oh, and who's this young lady?"

Before my dad could even say "She's my daughter," the nurse continued, "OH! IS THIS YOUR DAUGHTER? THE ONE WHO'S A SPORTSWRITER IN JAPAN?" She got this huge smile on her face. "It's so nice of you to come in and visit your dad! He won't shut up about you! You and your brother! Was his baby born yet?"

"Yeah," I said, still a little surprised. "I'm not really a sportswriter you know..."

"Yeah," she told me, "you're an English teacher but you meet lots of famous baseball people. You know," she said, hooking up the new bag to my dad's IV drip, "I can't remember who most of the people are in this place. So many people come and go, and obviously a lot of them never come back after a certain point, but... you know, EVERYONE knows your dad, because he's that crazy guy with the iPod who insists on sitting here, there, or there," she pointed to a few stations, "because he can hook it up to the TV and watch HIS stuff. Nobody else here does that. Most people just sit in their chemo chair for four hours and either sleep or zone out watching whatever's on TV."

"Yeah, my dad is kinda crazy," I said.

"Crazy, yeah, but he's a good guy. He makes us CDs sometimes when he knows what music we like. And let me tell you something else, he won't shut up about his kids. WHOA BOY does he like to talk about you guys."

At this point, my dad cuts in, as if on cue, "I got a picture of my granddaughter on the iPod too, you wanna see??"

"Sure, Mike!" she says cheerfully and looks over as my dad flips through a few of the photos, going on about how my niece Lily "has cornered the market on cute".

The nurse tells him she's hooked up the chemo bag and they'll be back to check on it in an hour or two. She says goodbye to me, thanks me for coming with him, and runs off to give other people their monthly dose of chemo poison.

My dad was like "We don't have to watch the Ventures, you know. I also have some Japanese movies on here. You wanna see Hidden Fortress? Or did you already watch the remake in Japan last year?"

"No, Dad, that's okay," I say, "Ventures is fine, I'm going to leave in a bit anyway."

So I listened to my dad tell me about the Ventures for about 15 minutes, as he pointed out which guys are in the band in which eras, and how the original drummer was replaced by his son, and so on. And eventually I got bored and wandered off to go home and take care of some other things.

The funny thing is, it wasn't until weeks later that I realized the significance of what happened there. I mean, my dad was crazy, sure. But I guess something about his craziness stuck out to people around him, and despite him being a little rough, they did grow to like him a lot. At the funeral, my uncle pointed out that the one thing about my father that was always the case is that he never bullshitted anyone, that he was always really direct about things, and really trustworthy and honest. You could say he was awkward and a little crazy, but never that he was two-faced or anything like that. Which is what made him a good guy.

About 3 weeks after the chemo thing, I was hanging out with a friend from high school, and she said the same exact thing about me.

I guess I've always said I got certain qualities from my dad -- notably my interest in computers and my horrible sense of humor. But I guess there are other things I never would have thought of, like my straightforwardness and the way I like giving people random gifts, and how I like telling stories. My dad was never much of a writer, but BOY did he like telling stories about random obscure stuff. And another thing: my dad was certainly unique, and unafraid of being himself... and I think most of the people who know me would say the same thing about me.



Here's to the crazy dude with the iPod. Doesn't he look positively smug that he's got his Ventures on that TV?