Surely Someday (but not today)

Trying to decide if I feel like waking up super-early tomorrow to go to Jingu and see Masumi Kuwata's kid play baseball for Oberlin. We'll see, maybe I'll go but show up late.

As for today, I didn't account for it being summer vacation and lots of foreigners deciding to leave the country and needing re-entry permits, so what usually would take me about 20 minutes total at Shinagawa took over 2 hours and as a result I didn't make it to the kuyakusho to update my gaijin card. On the other hand, I did get the re-entry permit, which was actually the more important thing to do -- I can't re-enter the country with my visa without the permit, but I can continue carrying my passport until I update my gaijin card...

Still, I left home around 1pm, got to the immigration office a little after 2, had my paperwork all filled out and my revenue stamp ready... and then my waiting number was #786, and they were serving #610 at the time. Yikes. So yeah, it was around 2 hours waiting. I updated my brackets for West and East Tokyo's tournaments, but hadn't brought any other prefectures to work on, so I spent about 30 minutes just zoning out, really.

Normally I would have been able to make it to Oji in time for the ward office, but alas, not this time. So instead I grabbed kaitensushi in Shinagawa station since it was already 4:30pm and I was starving, and then I took a train up to Saitama Shintoshin to watch a movie. I was going to see either Surely Someday or that new Miyazaki one, and opted for Surely Someday because I'm sure Miyazaki will be in the theaters longer and may even still be here when I get back from the US. (I also kinda want to see Odoru Daisousassen 3 but am not in any huge hurry either.) They had signs up about how this weekend, Oguri Shun will actually be at Movix for some kind of event about the movie, but I really don't want to deal with that kinda crowd. 5 years ago I would have DIED to meet him, but now I've kind of moved on from my Shun fixation, especially since he hasn't been in anything I've wanted to see in YEARS, I'm just not into action/thrillers/samurai stuff. Besides, my favorite actor in recent years is Koide Keisuke. Who is the entire reason I went to see this movie in the first place, it just happened to coincidentally be Oguri Shun's directional debut.

As for the movie itself... it's kind of a big tangled plot. On the surface it's about these four (really five) guys who basically screwed up their entire futures during their last year of high school when they form a band, get ready to perform at their school's culture festival, only the festival gets cancelled... so they build a bomb and threaten to blow up the school unless the principal changes his mind. The principal changes his mind and the bomb goes off anyway and so naturally the five boys get expelled (well, you're led to believe that four get expelled and one dies in the explosion, but as it turns out he survived and simply never left his parents' house ever again). And now it's three years later and their lives are still screwed up as an aftermath of that event.

( brain dump about the movie, huge spoilers, not that anyone's really going to see it, but if you do, this might help )

The upshot is to go see the movie if you like these kind of hairbrained plots where a bunch of guys are being young, dumb, and stupid, almost in the Gokusen vein but without any real moral at the end. I think they're trying to express that "surely, someday" these guys will get their lives back together after screwing them up by blowing up the school, but it's not really clear how that will ever work out. I had to admit that the most interesting part was watching Koide in a role that wasn't as a nice boy for once, though I'm not sure it suits him as well. I'd like to hope that unlike Oguri Shun, Koide will go back to playing dopey romantic comedy leads and I will continue to actually watch him in movies. In some ways I think he's kinda like a Japanese version of John Cusack, if that makes any sense.

more high school baseball adventures

So today was kinda crazy.
I didn't get up early enough to actually see Kuwata Junior swing a bat, but I did see him in the last 5-10 minutes of the Nichidai Tsurugaoka vs. Oberlin game. He doesn't much look like his dad actually. And his team lost, so it was the last chance, I suppose (unless he goes to Waseda for college, ha ha ha).

The second game was Waseda Jitsugyo vs. Soka, and I was sitting on the Waseda side only because it was the third base side, and I'd plunked down there during the first game since I found a seat in the very front row to take photos from. To be fair I have nothing against Waseda on a HS level anyway, although it's the same hype issue I have with Waseda on a college level. Soka I support on general principle because every 3-4 years they are going to send a nice boy from Soka HS to Soka Univ to the Nippon Ham Fighters. No, really (Yagi, Koyano, Takaguchi, now Otsuka...)

As I was getting ready to run up to get a drink and put on sunscreen for the second game I heard a "DEANNA?!?" from 3-4 rows behind me. I am somewhat accustomed to running into random people at Jingu. I am NOT, however, accustomed to having a random 12-year-old kid yelling my name... yes, I ran into one of my JHS students, who was there with his parents to watch Waseda's team since they know Yasuda, #8, the centerfielder. Whoops. His parents seemed amused more than anything, like "Wow, we heard you really like baseball but...!"

Waseda won as Soka imploded (their starter was a freshman, even) and it was a called 15-3 game in 8 innings.

The third game of the day was Waseda Gakuin vs. Toa Gakuen. I stayed for about one inning of that before leaving. Quite frankly there's only so much Waseda I can take in one day.

No, seriously, I was having some heatstroke issues. I arrived around 10:45am and stayed until 3pm, and in that time I drank two bottles of water and had a cup of shaved ice and had a Coke as well, and I started getting a headache around 1:30-2ish and it never went away, so I finally left, figuring that cooling down somewhere and eating some food would help. I went to Subway and got a sandwich and a big diet coke with lots of ice too, and sat for a bit, though the headache didn't subside until I took some Tylenol.

I rode the subways to Oji after that. I felt a little better in the airconditioned cars but still a little crappy, then when I had to walk to the Kita-ku ward office in the heat, I felt crappy again... I got my gaijin card updated, so now I don't have to carry my passport with me, hooray.

Then back to Akabane. I stopped by the bank to pay rent, and then I did an hour of solo karaoke because I won't have another chance before my trip to the US and I had a few things I wanted to try. Though I still had a little bit of a headache there...

To be perfectly honest, the headache didn't go away until around 8pm, after I was at home for a while and the AC was running long enough for me to have spent significant time in a cooled room. I drank some Aquarius, put in a load of laundry and zoned out to play PP because that was all I was really capable of, and as the time in my room went on, I felt better and better.

I'm supposed to go back to Jingu tomorrow too, which is okay, but this time I'm freezing TWO bottles of water to bring along. I only have the one bottle cooler, but maybe they'll last longer this way. I'm also going to bring bread to eat too, and wear slightly cooler clothes. Hopefully that'll all help. I wanna go to Yokohama on Saturday to see the legendary Yokohama HS play, which will be difficult if I'm unable to manage heat issues. It's supposed to go up to 35 pretty much every day. Bleh.