The Weekend in Review

Hope everyone had a good Valentine's weekend. Mine was swell. I went into Tokyo to meet Mr. Kobayashi and some of his colleagues in translation who had read some of my work and they held a nice dinner for me at a beautiful izakaya pub in Jimbocho. Jimbocho is a really cool part of Tokyo that has a whole street devoted to bookstores. If only I could read Japanese better, it would be heaven. Even not reading Japanese well, I still liked being on a street full of bookshops. I do read Japanese, but only the first two alphabets. I can only recognize about twenty kanji (from the third alphabet). And there are hundreds of kanji. I am just now starting to study them, and they sort of make sense once you begin to figure them out, but it's a very different system of organizing meaning for me than Romance languages use.

We left Tokyo around ten in the evening to take the train back to Ami. Once we got back to the train station in Ushiku, though, we still had lots of energy and decided to go to a karaoke bar. Tadashi suggested it, and I said sure. At first I thought it wouldn't be that fun, just two people karaokeing, but once we were there, I had the best time ever, actually. Tadashi is the funnest person to hang around with. I love that cat.

We spent most of the weekend hanging out, relaxing. There's not much to do in Ami, so we watched movies on my laptop and went shopping and out to dinner and to a game center, where I won a watch with one of those grabby arm things. We ate lots of chocolate too. Tadashi brought the best chocolate cake with him from Nagoya, and we ate it for breakfast on Sunday before I took him to the train station and sent him on his way home.

Going back to school today was sort of depressing. Whenever I have a long weekend, I don't ever want to go back to work. I probably will feel out of it at work for a few days before I get back into my routine and just accept the monotony of a work schedule. I really want a job where I can just work at my own pace and not have to be stuck in the actual work place for eight or more hours a day. I do better work when I make my own schedule anyway.

I am working on the fourth story/chapter of a new book I'm writing. It's set in Japan. At first I thought they were individual stories, but recently I've come to see that they are all part of a whole, and so now I'm working on a much bigger project than I at first realized. I'm excited about it, and can't wait to see where it takes me.