So Abe-san had his shoot today…I was in it (and I didn’t find out until yesterday)…no lines but I got to smile and be pretty. The only problem is I don’t smile so well when I’m nervous…man, I tell you I feel much more secure behind a camera then in front of it. We sat out on the couches in front of the club room for a while and hung out. I like this crowd…I’ll tell more about them and the others tomorrow. And Hooray for our mini film festival! (Got to get those subtitles done for Dog Prince) Medaisai is in 3 days! Our school festival is nice because it doesn’t fall in the autumn like a lot of schools’ bunkasai. It will be yakisoba and haunted houses and concerts all the way! Woo-hoo! Jumping Beans, I’m happy!
I can’t stop watching this. If you haven’t seen it, hasten to it THIS MINUTE! Deathnote Live Action
So, the ending to the tale of the centipede…after I left it at a cliff hanger, I’m sure you are wondering what became of the beast. Well, after searching high and low and not being able to locate it, I began to calm down, and eventually assume that it had found its way out of the room by the way it came. Forget about it, right? I lay on the bed and watched dramas on the free TV, and then brought my laptop over and lay there all comfy and curled up watching host-bu. It was the 8th episode, a pretty good one, where the host-bu goes to the ocean. There’s one scene where a character (Tamaki) holds up a large crab for the heroine to see and a centipede crawls out, making the surrounding girls freak out. (MU-KA-DE~!) I laugh…got rid of that problem. It is not three minutes later when I start to feel a really weird sensation on the TOP OF MY HEAD. No. Oh no no no. I put my hand up there. NOOOOOOOOO! The enormous centipede freaks out as I try to get it out of my hair. I shout. It zips under my pillow and then disappears down the crack between bed and wall. I tear off all the covers. Time to bring out the big guns. “Sang Hi! uchi no heya ni kite kurenai? Ima, ima…nanka dame nan da.” I call my pal on the cellphone, and the long and short of it is me and my far more level headed Korean neighbor (kind soul that she is…you should have seen her face when I greeted her at the door with a flip-flop, a folder and an umbrella.) chased the thing all around the room and then finally got it. Didn’t die easily…you have to keep whacking it again and again…my God, its Hell. Finally it gave up the fight and we emerged victorious. First boss battle of this adventuring party over. The end
Searching for a counter to keep track of the time I have left here I found a widget called “In Japan.” Just a simple counter, over a Japanese sun flag. It makes me wonder if it is common for foreigners here to count the days till they go home (I wonder if that is the origin of the widget)…I always have very mixed feelings about it….all the time I am here miss home, but it is not that I really want to return. I feel the pull of New York like the moon pulls on the earth and changes the tides…the thing that I feel the most is the place that surrounds me, my feet solidly on the Japanese ground, content and living in the present. It is just that slight pull, barely there melancholy that signals my link to NY. It was the same for Japan when I was back in America. I always feel a little lonely for where I am not, but always very happy where I am.
I am an animal person. I love most of the life forms on this particular planet, and although my tastes tend to sway a bit more toward the fuzzy mammalian variety, I am not biased against snakes, eels, spiders, earth worms, or any of the other myriad of species of a more creepy-crawly nature. Toward the various lower life forms I feel a sort of magnanimous, if slightly condescending, sympathy(considering I, as a higher primate, am far more biologically advanced than they are a certain degree of smugness is understandable), and attempt not to interfere in their doings as long as they do not meddle in mine. Little bugs, go about your doodle-y way in peace. Except the goddamn centipedes. I want you all to die. There are three things I hate in this world. I always write the same two when, say, filling out those boring Facebook style personality questionnaires. After a completing sickeningly long list of “Likes” the self-satisfied optimist in me deigns to make a few tiny little concessions. “Oh, I hate racism and bigots.” I say. “And people who torture.” Why even bother to state the obvious? You really aren’t putting too much thought into this, Emi. And then I always follow this short cliched list with “centipedes” It serves as kind of a humorous chaser to a very broad category of hellish bastards, being a small and insignificant phobia. Who would know that these catty centipede comments would come back to haunt me. There were always centipedes at my house. One time I was startled in the bathroom as one crawled up the shower curtain. It disappeared, and when I called my dad in, it fell on the top of his head, much to the chagrin of all parties involved. The centipedes that live in New York, though, are nothing compared to the variety that live here. It isn’t the size of them that’s the problem…having lived with a foot long millipede for over a year, one would think I was used to it. (Mitch the Millipede was a good pet, although he wasn’t a xylophone playing rabbit.) No, Japanese Mukade are tenacious, bad tempered brutes with a poisonous bite and quick reaction times. On top of that, I have had bad centipede luck lately…During a Picnic with the Korean Presbyterians, A four incher with red legs plopped down from a branch beside me, and I nearly stepped on a ridiculously large one idling on the path on my way home from club. So forgive me the phobic rant… Kids check under their bed for monsters, I, humiliating as it is, check every night for centipedes. And then today, as I put my foot in a sock I had hung up to dry, I find my fear is justified. A suspicious wiggly lump at the toe. At first I am not sure, but then it moves again and I tear the sock off, this long dark THING sprouting legs everywhere emerges. I screech like a girl and fling it away, sock and all, and in a moment of panic dash from the apartment. I knock on Sang hi’s door, but she seems to be out, and then I realize who a baby I am being and go back inside armed with an umbrella to slay the thing. And its gone. I hope that it is still inside the sock so I pick the sock up on the umbrella and fling it out on the veranda, whereupon I begin to smack it mightily. And…I realize…I don’t know where it has gone. It’s still…INSIDE THE ROOM! Cue scary music. So I guess I’m going to be shaking my bed clothes more thoroughly than usual, and hoping that the fool bug is not on the warpath tonight. I’ll keep looking, mark my words. Curse you centipedes.
Oh, and on the bright side, there was a working TV in the free corner today! Yesterday a bike, today a terebi! The two things that I was considering luxury items and wavering back and forth as to whether I should Invest …problem solved. Now I can watch Bleach and Variety Bangumi! Yay!
I woke up this morning and remembered something that sent me straight out of the covers and busy: today I was to collect my 1000 yen bicycle. During the Meidai foreign student’s bazaar a month ago, I was placed on the waiting list in the second-hand bicycle lottery, getting sixth place in a drawing for four lots. Of course, I assumed my chances of getting a bike were slim to none (who is going to turn down a $9 bicycle, even a one gear, rust covered mama-chari?), but to my great surprise I found a mail in my inbox a few weeks ago titled “bick” and detailing the procedure, time and place I should remember in order to collect the goods. Yatta ne, Emi. You got yourself a bicycle.
I remember the last time I lived in Japan, my bike and I were inseparable during summer vacation. Bright red, one gear, shopping basket between the handlebars…I named it “the wind,” I got a hilarious farmers tan riding it up and down the hills and and winding roads of the Machida Suburbs. During school, riding to the train station everyday was one of my favorite parts of the morning, because it was all downhill for the most part and on the way to the bike parking garage near Tamagawa Gakuen Mae I would pick up so much speed that everything would go blurry and curves would be a wide and dangerous arc of movement. There was a hill right in front of the station, the last hill on the way there named korokoro zaka, presumably onomatopoeia for the sound you would make rolling down it - the thing was practically a 45 degree incline. Miho and I would blast down it, with our seifuku skirts flying out behind us. It was great.
So I have a bike. It’s a bit rusty, not a pretty shiny red thing like Kaze, but the chain and the breaks seem pretty solid, and you can shift going up the hills. The name on the fender is 西村竜次. I think I’ll call it “Ryuu.”
Later: I rode to many kilometers. I found a book off. I ate lunch at Bamiyan Ramen, which had free Icee refills. My life is complete.
In closing, A Random Thing: At the North Co-op Cafeteria, I have had all these flavors of soft serve ice cream: - Green Tea - Annin (or Chinese Gelatin Dessert) - Black Sesame - Yuzu Peel (Japanese Citrus) - Sakura (Cherry Blossom) - Rose - Miso Flavor -Genmai (brown rice) -Ume (Japanese Sour Plum) and - Wasabi I have not tried Japanese purple Yam flavor or Tofu because it is sold out.
I am awake now. The lights aboard the 747 are dim, the windows closed and the in-flight film has just finished. There is no sense of time up here, of night or day, just the absolute of the minutes ticking by on a digital watch, and I am still emerging from a nap. My senses blurred by sleep, I am full of the profound disorientation that overseas flights tend to invoke, as we jump the time zones one by one. As I write this, I am somewhere above the arctic circle, on a Jet bound for Narita Airport, and the whole thing is beginning all over again.
Hours Later: I woke up right before the airplane touched down at Narita, the bulk of the 747 coming down much harder than the lighter jet I had ridden to Detroit. I shook myself, got my bags, and then out the door and down the steps to the tarmac where the buses waited to take us to the terminal. It was funny going down those steps, because it was exactly the same feeling as last time but with one small difference: I was seeing it all over again, and instead of novelty, it was nostalgia that colored my thoughts. This time I was alone, tracing the same steps as I had four years ago, thinking how I had changed, all the NYU memories in my head, a legal adult…so much between “then” and “now.” Entering the Terminal, I saw I sign and everything went blurry. I had to stop for a minute before continuing to customs. Above my head, in bright red…on the sign above the entrance to the corridor it said: Okaeri Nasai. Welcome Home.
And it’s been more than two months since I wrote that. I tell you, my blog can’t keep up with my life. I have been in Nagoya for a while now and everyday there is something that is more than blog-worthy going on, but writing an entry would mean taking time away from other blog worthy things. Midterms are over, and I have a little bit more spare time than before, so perhaps I shall start recording the goings-on a little bit more faithfully. After all, I am provided a rant space, why not use it? I think I will also write down memories, Inter-splice them with days to day things. So begins the Thief Rabbit Blog.
