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To be sick or not to be sick, that is the question
So, I was sick over the weekend, which sucked. It was some kind of stomach virus.
Now, I am not sure if I am sick or not. My stomach doesn't hurt anymore, but today I started getting a ridiculous headache that doesn't seem to be going away, even with 2 extra-strength tylenol pills. Bleh.
My school cancelled all their classes this week due to flu, from Tuesday to Friday. (I had one class on Monday.) In some of our homerooms, as many as 50% or more of the kids came down with the "Type A Flu", so we can't really get much of anything done anyway without half the kids there. What sucks is that their singing concert competition this Saturday got cancelled and I still have to go to school for Saturday class instead.
What is cool is, since there are no classes, my company said I don't actually have to work every day this week, since there just isn't 4 days worth of stuff for me to do, so I was there all day Monday and I will also go in on Friday to prepare for Saturday. But Tue-Thur I'm just kind of... off. Ostensibly I am resting to recover from being sick, and actually, I AM resting -- I've been sleeping more than usual and mostly spending my time at home taking it easy.
Yesterday, though, I spent the afternoon down at Jingu for the Meiji-Hosei final game, which was close and exciting and Meiji won 3-2, which means that if somehow Keio wins Soukeisen, Meiji gets the title instead of Waseda. I don't see why Keio would bother winning in order for another school to get a title, so it seems unlikely. This time I sat on the Meiji side, but really on the 3rd base side, and I took photos. I ran off afterwards rather than player-stalking -- it just felt kind of weird because I'm kind of partial to Hosei but the people I sat with were all Meiji fans.
Went to Kua'Aina for dinner because it was early enough to still get a sandwich-salad combo. Woo.
Yesterday I also bought a new lightbulb for the stairs. Buying lightbulbs here seems more complicated than it did in the US, but maybe that's just because I was generally more sure of what kind of bulb I needed in the US (and it was almost always the same kind, anyway).
Today I went down to Shinjuku to see the movie "Kuhio Taisa", or "the Wonderful World of Captain Kuhio", which is a movie based on a true story about a marriage swindler in the 80's in Japan who posed as a fighter pilot and married women and ran off with their life savings. In this movie, there were no weddings, but there were 3 separate women he was involved with, was trying to get money from, and he eventually gets caught. I think they tried to make this more of a comedy, but it sort of fell flat as a comedy, and as a suspense-intrigue movie it completely didn't work either. Also, Kuhio was pretending to be a Hawaiian-born American, wearing a prosthetic nose and speaking Japanese in a weird "gaijin" accent the entire time, which was funny at times but mostly grating. I mostly wanted to see it because I like Sakai Masato, the lead actor, but I didn't like him so much in this.
The movie certainly had its moments though -- actually, the best part of the movie was the female lead's younger brother, Tatsuya, played by Hirofumi Arai. Tatsuya shows up at their family's business, a shop that makes bento boxes, and is like "Hey sis, why the hell is all the money disappearing from the shop? You got a boyfriend or something?" and he figures out what's going on. So the next time Kuhio calls up the sister to ask her out so he can steal more of her money, Tatsuya answers the phone in good English like "Hey, I heard my sister has an American boyfriend, is that you? You speak pretty good Japanese!" and Kuhio's like, in Japanese, "I have no idea what you're saying, please speak Japanese", and Tatsuya's like, still in English, "You've got to be kidding! You aren't American, you liar! I'm going to kill you!" Kuhio says, "Don't kill you!" And even the Japanese audience all knows enough English to laugh at his mistake. So while Kuhio is trying to swindle more money out of women, Tatsuya basically hunts him down and makes him pay for his crimes. In other words, he's the only character in the entire movie that seems grounded in reality at all.
Anyway, I came out of this movie with a headache, which at first I thought might have been brought on by the movie itself, but now I'm not so sure. I played one game of Pop'n at an arcade on the way back to Shinjuku station, then stood on a crowded train for 15 minutes to get home. Bought a bento (demiglace "burger") from Otoya for dinner and came home.
The bento really hit home for me why I feel there's no reason for me to cook for myself at all -- first, I hate cooking for one person, and second, for crying out loud, if I can get this huge filling dinner for 700 yen, why should I bother cooking? I generally can manage to find dinner for 500-700 yen, which seems pretty reasonable to me compared to the effort it would take me to make equally tasty dinners.
Also, in the last 2-3 days I went and took care of all the money things for the next month -- rent, bills, chunk #3 (of 4) of my taxes, etc. I find that if I deal with all of that stuff shortly after I get paid, then I have a good idea how to budget for the rest of the month.
I also did a lot of laundry while at home like this. Hooray for sunny days.
NPB draft is tomorrow. I'm excited but scared.
Japan Series starts Saturday. I'm more excited about that. I wish Pau still lived here so I could drag him to Erika over the weekend though.
(I am, by the way, okay for Japan Series tickets now, it seems. If anything I actually may need to find someone to go with me for one of the games...)
Oh yeah, I'm finally actually concretely looking at some flight prices for going back to the US over the winter after my contract at the JHS runs out in December. Thinking about 5 weeks in the January-February timeframe should be enough to see friends and family and to settle all the paperwork I need to do from my dad's death, also I want to go see his gravestone (they're unveiling it earlier than expected) of course.
Though in reality I really do need to figure out what my plan is for 2010 after that, don't I. Sigh. I thought I'd be moving back to the US, but at the same time, I don't feel like my story here has ended yet. The new visa restrictions might kick me out of the country in July anyway, though :)
Now, I am not sure if I am sick or not. My stomach doesn't hurt anymore, but today I started getting a ridiculous headache that doesn't seem to be going away, even with 2 extra-strength tylenol pills. Bleh.
My school cancelled all their classes this week due to flu, from Tuesday to Friday. (I had one class on Monday.) In some of our homerooms, as many as 50% or more of the kids came down with the "Type A Flu", so we can't really get much of anything done anyway without half the kids there. What sucks is that their singing concert competition this Saturday got cancelled and I still have to go to school for Saturday class instead.
What is cool is, since there are no classes, my company said I don't actually have to work every day this week, since there just isn't 4 days worth of stuff for me to do, so I was there all day Monday and I will also go in on Friday to prepare for Saturday. But Tue-Thur I'm just kind of... off. Ostensibly I am resting to recover from being sick, and actually, I AM resting -- I've been sleeping more than usual and mostly spending my time at home taking it easy.
Yesterday, though, I spent the afternoon down at Jingu for the Meiji-Hosei final game, which was close and exciting and Meiji won 3-2, which means that if somehow Keio wins Soukeisen, Meiji gets the title instead of Waseda. I don't see why Keio would bother winning in order for another school to get a title, so it seems unlikely. This time I sat on the Meiji side, but really on the 3rd base side, and I took photos. I ran off afterwards rather than player-stalking -- it just felt kind of weird because I'm kind of partial to Hosei but the people I sat with were all Meiji fans.
Went to Kua'Aina for dinner because it was early enough to still get a sandwich-salad combo. Woo.
Yesterday I also bought a new lightbulb for the stairs. Buying lightbulbs here seems more complicated than it did in the US, but maybe that's just because I was generally more sure of what kind of bulb I needed in the US (and it was almost always the same kind, anyway).
Today I went down to Shinjuku to see the movie "Kuhio Taisa", or "the Wonderful World of Captain Kuhio", which is a movie based on a true story about a marriage swindler in the 80's in Japan who posed as a fighter pilot and married women and ran off with their life savings. In this movie, there were no weddings, but there were 3 separate women he was involved with, was trying to get money from, and he eventually gets caught. I think they tried to make this more of a comedy, but it sort of fell flat as a comedy, and as a suspense-intrigue movie it completely didn't work either. Also, Kuhio was pretending to be a Hawaiian-born American, wearing a prosthetic nose and speaking Japanese in a weird "gaijin" accent the entire time, which was funny at times but mostly grating. I mostly wanted to see it because I like Sakai Masato, the lead actor, but I didn't like him so much in this.
The movie certainly had its moments though -- actually, the best part of the movie was the female lead's younger brother, Tatsuya, played by Hirofumi Arai. Tatsuya shows up at their family's business, a shop that makes bento boxes, and is like "Hey sis, why the hell is all the money disappearing from the shop? You got a boyfriend or something?" and he figures out what's going on. So the next time Kuhio calls up the sister to ask her out so he can steal more of her money, Tatsuya answers the phone in good English like "Hey, I heard my sister has an American boyfriend, is that you? You speak pretty good Japanese!" and Kuhio's like, in Japanese, "I have no idea what you're saying, please speak Japanese", and Tatsuya's like, still in English, "You've got to be kidding! You aren't American, you liar! I'm going to kill you!" Kuhio says, "Don't kill you!" And even the Japanese audience all knows enough English to laugh at his mistake. So while Kuhio is trying to swindle more money out of women, Tatsuya basically hunts him down and makes him pay for his crimes. In other words, he's the only character in the entire movie that seems grounded in reality at all.
Anyway, I came out of this movie with a headache, which at first I thought might have been brought on by the movie itself, but now I'm not so sure. I played one game of Pop'n at an arcade on the way back to Shinjuku station, then stood on a crowded train for 15 minutes to get home. Bought a bento (demiglace "burger") from Otoya for dinner and came home.
The bento really hit home for me why I feel there's no reason for me to cook for myself at all -- first, I hate cooking for one person, and second, for crying out loud, if I can get this huge filling dinner for 700 yen, why should I bother cooking? I generally can manage to find dinner for 500-700 yen, which seems pretty reasonable to me compared to the effort it would take me to make equally tasty dinners.
Also, in the last 2-3 days I went and took care of all the money things for the next month -- rent, bills, chunk #3 (of 4) of my taxes, etc. I find that if I deal with all of that stuff shortly after I get paid, then I have a good idea how to budget for the rest of the month.
I also did a lot of laundry while at home like this. Hooray for sunny days.
NPB draft is tomorrow. I'm excited but scared.
Japan Series starts Saturday. I'm more excited about that. I wish Pau still lived here so I could drag him to Erika over the weekend though.
(I am, by the way, okay for Japan Series tickets now, it seems. If anything I actually may need to find someone to go with me for one of the games...)
Oh yeah, I'm finally actually concretely looking at some flight prices for going back to the US over the winter after my contract at the JHS runs out in December. Thinking about 5 weeks in the January-February timeframe should be enough to see friends and family and to settle all the paperwork I need to do from my dad's death, also I want to go see his gravestone (they're unveiling it earlier than expected) of course.
Though in reality I really do need to figure out what my plan is for 2010 after that, don't I. Sigh. I thought I'd be moving back to the US, but at the same time, I don't feel like my story here has ended yet. The new visa restrictions might kick me out of the country in July anyway, though :)