Tonight's post will be a play in three acts: “How to Achieve Perfect Happiness” “Registered Aliens” and “Baby's First Typhoon” …and now on with the show.
How to Achieve Perfect Happiness
First you must skip breakfast. This is because you would rather lay in bed than wait eight minutes for the toaster to make you a piece of toast.
Then go to a Japanese Middle School, ideally somewhere in the Kyoto prefecture. Do battle with a complicated guillotine-like Japanese paper cutter. Feel hungry.
Have lunch with the 7th graders. Gulp down a serving of pasta. Puff out your chest when your female students marvel that you can cook (“Yes, ladies, I can boil water.”) Feel hungry.
Run around after school doing errands. Remember after two weeks of forgetting to finally get the smaller sized trash bags. By now you should be all sweaty in your work clothes and really hungry.
Now here's the key bit: Go get some convenience store Tempura. When you're back at home turn on the air-conditioner, change into your pajamas and heat-up your Tempura dinner. Eat your dinner with that half bottle of coca-cola you forgot you had. As you lie back, propping up your sore feet and entering a tempura-coma you will experience perfect happiness.
In addition to being a very happy person, I am also a really awful person (albeit accidentally). Today I both stole a little girl's desk and had a student get teary in one of my classes. My attempts to encourage the latter after class were met by a look of utter bafflement, as though I had pulled a fish from my pants and begun to dance around with it. I guess the student had already forgotten about their academic trauma.
Registered Aliens
Libby and I went off to the Sakyo-Ward office today to pick up our Resident Alien Registration Cards today. This means, among other things, that I no longer have to carry my passport with me every time I leave the house. Additionally, if I ever get lost and some nice Japanese family finds me cold and whimpering in a gutter, they can notify the authorities who will reunite me with my caretakers. Unregistered foreigners are taken to the pound, where only the very lucky will ever find a forever home. So as my mother would say, I'm a “legal beagle” so long as I keep my rabies vaccinations up to date!
Baby's First Typhoon
Typhoon #12, or Typhoon Talas, came through Japan on Saturday. However, while it did sizable damage to the coastal prefectures, Kyoto prefecture and Kyoto city were pretty much unscathed if the news is any indication. Still, they have been at least 25 deaths attributed to this typhoon. If you're interested in the news from the most affected areas check out the following links:
As for me, my windows rattled a bit all day Saturday and I took everything inside off my porch, but that was about it. Because of Kyoto's sheltered position between mountains it was safe enough for the little old Japanese ladies (and Andrew) to do their Saturday shopping with only a few gusts of wind to bother them. The worst of the weather happened on Saturday after the sun set, with harder wind and more sudden downpours. Still, the power never went out and people seemed to be going on with their lives outside. I guess the Japanese are just used to extreme weather conditions by now.
Fin.
-Andrew
I miss storms, send some of the rain to Portland, okay?
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