We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog for this special message

Don't really have much to talk about today, so instead I shall say, "Go watch Tiger and Bunny!"

Go watch Tiger and Bunny!

There, I said it.

(Hint: If you're in the U.S., it's on Hulu.)

It's kind of like if you took Gurren Lagann and X-Men, threw them in a blender, made one of the characters Batman, and then covered the whole thing in dork sauce and commentary on product placement in reality television shows.

'course, I haven't actually finished the show yet, so for all I know, it pulls a Fractale, but I can recommend the first 21 episodes.

In other news, according to Blogspot, the people viewing my blog are located predominantly in the U.S., Japan, and Russia.
...also, the majority of my traffic comes through Facebook.
This is somewhat strange, since I don't have a Facebook account...
I narrow my eyes suspiciously at ALL OF YOU.
Also, 56% of the time, my blog is viewed in Chrome?
I don't know.

Japanese academic writing, sexual minorities, and curry

The reading for my advisor's seminar has really driven home two points for me:

1. If I lived in ancient Japan (or ancient China, for that matter), I would be a really lousy literatus.*  Most of the reading has to do with looking at references to shrines in ancient Japanese poetry, and there will be a fifteen character poem followed by a five sentence explanation of the "general meaning" of the poem.  Given my overwhelming failure at producing poetry (ha ha ha ha, let's not even talk about it), if I had to write a super meaningful poem while following the incredibly strict poetry format, I would probably fail so badly I would spontaneously combust.**  And don't even get me started on ancient Chinese poetry.***

2. Japanese academic writing and I don't really get along.  I enjoy a certain amount of straight-forwardness in my non-fiction, it is true.  When I have a point to make, I make it.  I don't meander down a gravel path, stopping to smell flowers occasionally while chatting about the weather and subtly dropping hints that maybe at some point I will talk about what I am actually getting at here.  I also don't feel the need to spend every sixth sentence recapping what I said in the last five sentences.  YES, I GET THAT YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO WALK INTO THE OFF-LIMITS AREAS OF SHRINES.  YOU TELL ME THIS AT LEAST ONCE A PARAGRAPH.

So, yes.  That is what I have learned.

In other news, in Japanese class today we read an article about a program to help sexual minorities who were victims of the 3/11 earthquake.  (You can read the article here, but unfortunately it's in Japanese only.)

Sensei: Can anyone name any sexual minorities?

Class: *silence*

Sensei: Any at all?

Girl: [slangy word for male transvestites]

Class: *laughs*

(This was the point at which I gave up and raised my hand.)

Sensei: Dana-san?

Me: Homosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals--

Sensei: Sorry?

Me: Asexuals.

Sensei: I don't know what that means.****

Me: People who don't have sexual desire.

Sensei: Oh, yes, them too!  All of them are sexual minorities!
My Brown education has served me well.

I still can't believe no one else could come up with any other sexual minorities, especially since the article we were reading had at least two or three in the first paragraph.

And on a final note, it's time for...

More Misadventures in Cooking!

So despite this being my third visit to Japan, and despite making Japanese food while at home/school, I have never tackled the ubiquitous Golden Curry.

Yes, it needed to be bolded, because that's how ubiquitous it is.

Don't try to follow my logic there.

Anyway.

I decided to make a bunch of curry so I could eat it for lunch and dinner today and lunch tomorrow as well.  And curry's not that hard, right?  I mean, I've seen people who can't even boil a pot of water properly make Golden Curry...so it can't be that hard, right?

ALL THESE MEASUREMENTS.  WHAT DO THEY MEAN?????  What does "makes 11 plates" mean?  How big is a plate?  Isn't that a weirdly specific measurement?  WHY 11???  Who looks at an onion and says, "Hmm, I bet this is 150 grams of onion"?

Oh well, I guess it's time to fall back on the classic technique...

Make stuff up!

Yay, ingredients!
1 onion
1 carrot
more ginger than you deem strictly necessary
3 cloves of garlic
3 (tiny) potatoes
half a steak (at least, the cut of meat is called a steak but, uh, I don't think it's actually a steak 'cause it was 300 yen...)*****

Now to find a pot!

Meet Sketchy-chan!  He's a sketchy pot.  Some of those blotches might be bloodstains.  I don't know.  But he's what I've got, so better use him (after scrubbing him vigorously)!

So the package said to cook all the vegetables and meat in a little bit of oil, so I did that.  So far so good!  Nothing on fire yet!

Okay, so I'm supposed to add water next...do we have a measuring cup?

Well, no, we don't, but we do have this Hello Kitty mug!  Um, I guess I can use that?

So then I added about 1 1/2 Hello Kitty mugs worth of water.  And still nothing had caught on fire!

...but the box said that it would take about 20 minutes to cook, and I was hungry, so I used Secret Cooking Technique #2: Everything Cooks Faster If You Turn the Stove Up All the Way.

There, much better.

After the vegetables were done cooking, I had to deal with THIS.  This is the curry...stuff you're supposed to put in right at the end.

It said that one package (each box comes with two packages) makes 5-6 plates of curry, but I had no idea how much a plate was, so I just dumped the whole package in.

And then I stirred.

...actually, this looks kinda gross now.  Um...

Add more water!

That seems to have done the trick.

At this point, Hi-chan was leaving for class, saw that I was making lunch, and said, "Oh, hey, you're making curry!  I love curry!" which I took as a good sign.  If she could recognize it as curry, it had to be at least marginally edible, right?

So this is the finished product.  It's a little bit more gelatinous than regular curry (I probably screwed up the water-to-curry-stuff ratio), and, despite being marketed as spicy, is probably a 3 out of 10 on the spiciness scale.  But it's still pretty tasty!

And thus concludes today's misadventure in cooking.

*Literatus: yet another word that spell check says doesn't exist!  Whoo, spell check.

**So spell check tells me that "combust" isn't a world either.  Are we having problems with English today, spell check?

***For an account of not-so-ancient poetesses in China, I suggest The Talented Women of the Zhang Family by Susan Mann.  It reads like a novel, so even if you are totally turned off by non-fiction writing (or if you don't have the vocabulary to get through super academic works), I would recommend trying it.

****That's understandable, because the Japanese word for asexual is Aセクシュアル (A-sekushuaru) whereas the words for "homosexual" and "bisexual" are 同性愛者 (literally "person who loves same sex of people") and 両性愛者 (literally "person who loves both sexes of people") respectively.  You'd think that 無性愛 (literally "love of no sex") would be a reasonable word to use for asexuality, but I guess people might think it means love of amoebas...?

*****Before everyone starts sending me articles about how Japanese beef is (maybe) contaminated with radiation, I bought American beef for exactly this reason.

In which I continue to bowl badly

A few of us from the dorm went bowling today. It was fun, although I am probably the worst bowler in the world.  After a while, I was happy every time I managed to hit more than one pin.  Fortunately, I didn't wind up in last or second to last, because for some reason, everyone decided that the two worst bowlers would have to buy the two best bowlers ice cream.
...of course, I can't be that proud of myself, 'cause one of the girls who placed below me wound up hurting her finger and bowling the entire last round (set? I dunno bowling terms) left-handed, and the other girl was literally dropping her bowling ball onto the lane.
The guy who came in first managed to bowl three strikes in a row on the last round, so that was dang impressive to see.

Don't have much else to talk about, except that I wound up talking to an Australian guy about the Australian legal system...?  Apparently there are two different kinds of lawyers--lawyers who do stuff in courts and lawyers who don't do stuff in courts.

Nothing else terribly exciting going on over here, so, uh, have a song about dinosaurs on Westminster Bridge.

Too much reading

I have to read 61 pages for my seminar before next week.

Did I mention that a page can take me up to 30 minutes to read?

GAH.

In happier news, Japanese class continues to be awesome.  We practiced reading kanji today, and I could read most of them, so yay for that.  Also, chocolate-covered potato chips are weirdly delicious?  I mean, I don't particularly care for potato chips, but cover them in chocolate and they are suddenly brilliant.

...in other news, our colander has gone missing and I managed to scald most of my fingers while trying to drain my soumen without a colander.  Thus, typing is kind of painful.

So tired.

Should sleep.

Bread ears

...so it turns out that Japanese envelopes don't come with built-in adhesive.
This is my face right now:
>:I
Next time someone starts telling you about how technologically advanced Japan is, just tell them, "NO BUILT-IN ADHESIVE ON ENVELOPES."

What Japan does have, however, is hyakuen.  A hyakuen (literally "one hundred yen") is like the Japanese equivalent of a dollar store, but way cooler.  Whereas dollar stores are generally full of stuff that A. doesn't cost a dollar (what does "99 cents and up" even MEAN?) and/or B. you don't want to buy, hyakuen are full of EVERYTHING.  I went to one today (to get the aforementioned envelopes) and they sold food and dishes and towels and umbrellas and envelopes and notebooks and bags and pet bowls and tupperware and spatulas and scrunchies and pretty much everything else under the sun, all for 100 yen (105 yen with sales tax).

In other news, in Japanese class today the foreign students had to explain some Japanese idioms.  The idiom I got was 「手がたりない」(literally: not enough hands), which has a direct English equivalent ("don't have enough hands"), so it wasn't too bad.  (Our sensei said I explained it very well, so YAY!  Even though I had to speak really slowly so that I wouldn't stutter...)  Meanwhile, one poor soul got 「パンの耳」 (bread ears), which, weirdly enough, means the crust of the bread.

In other other news, no one ever spells my name correctly in Japanese.  It's not THAT hard.  デイナ (deina).  Not ダナ (dana) or ディナ (dina)  or デーナ (de-na).  And especially not だんな (danna, which means "husband").  Of course, spelling my last name is a nightmare, so it's understandable if people screw it up, but, seriously, first name, not that hard.

Also, in response to question from last time, I have never had aloe juice, although I have heard of it.  I think it might be more popular in Korea and Taiwan than Japan, though.  At least, when I've heard about it, it's always been from Korean and Taiwanese students.

Food!

...so I am kind of dumb sometimes, by which I mean that I bruised my feet by walking in dress shoes yesterday.  So I really, really need a solution to my dress shoe problem.  Or I need to stop walking 13-ish miles in a single day.  (Given my average walking speed...that seems about right.  The maximum distance I could have walked is about 18 miles, but I wasn't walking the whole time, so that's unlikely.)

...also, I need to remember that if I wear V-necks, they expose more skin than is normally exposed, and the exposed skin is very pale, which means that it will burn much easier than normal skin.  So right now I have a magnificent V-neck shaped sunburn.

Did I say sometimes I am kind of dumb?  I meant very dumb.

So instead of telling you about how I hobbled around all day (DON'T WORRY; I'M FINE.  I bruised my feet all the time when I took karate, and they'll be fine by tomorrow.) and scrubbed a tub, I instead I will do something different and write about FOOD.

Dang, food in Japan is so good.  Unfortunately, produce (while pretty much the most delicious produce you could ever ask for in your life) is kind of expensive (at least compared to California), so if you're like me and want to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, prepare to be paying slightly more for food.

So here is some delicious stuff I have eaten since getting here:

Chinsukou!  Remember how I said that one of the girls in my Japanese class passed out omiyage from Okinawa?  Well, this is it.  I got a go-ya-flavored one.  Go-ya (I don't know what the English equivalent word is, or if there even is one) is this kind of funky-looking vegetable from Okinawa.  People tell me that it's bitter, but since I can't really taste bitter things (or it doesn't bother me as much as other people), it just tastes delicious~

Anyway, chinsukou is this kind of flaky-cookie...and in this case it actually tasted like go-ya!  Although sweeter than the actual vegetable.  But SO DELICIOUS.

Other Green Things You Can Eat in Japan include melon soda!  I have a kind of weird love of melon soda, especially given that I strongly dislike most soda, but melon soda is just so good.

If it isn't bright green, you've probably got the wrong thing.  Weirdly enough, it does actually contain melon juice.  Lousy melon soda tastes a little bit like drain cleaner smells, so...uh...don't drink that.  It'll probably destroy your internal organs.

In terms of delicious non-green things you can eat, there is nashi!  In English they're called "Asian pears" or "apple pears."  But Japanese ones are a lot bigger than most of the ones you'll find in the States.

...a lot bigger.

They have the consistency of pears with the shape of apples and the taste of, well, nashi.  I highly recommend them.

Back to green things!  This is komatsuna, which you can actually find at Japanese grocery stores in the U.S.  It's kind of like spinach, but not as dark and way easier to overcook.  Sort of like a spinach-lettuce hybrid?

And what can you do will komatsuna?

Well, if you're a college student with only one pan, you can make...

...Rice Egg Vegetable Stuff.

(I need a better name for this, but it is delicious, despite its lame name.)

Basically, I took a bunch of Japanese dishes, mixed them up, and came up with some horribly mutated dish that tastes really good.

To make enough for one person, you will need:

1 egg
more ginger than you deem strictly necessary, diced very fine
about two cloves of garlic, cut into very thin medallions
one bunch of komatsuna, with the ends cut off, sliced into two-inch-ish long strips
some mushrooms, sliced into strips
some onion, sliced into small-ish pieces
some carrot, sliced into very thin medallions
some rice
some soy sauce

Step one!  Start your rice in the rice cooker.  Note: Don't make dry rice.  You need your rice to pretty goopy for this to work.

Step two!  Go do something for about thirty minutes.

Step three!  Take our your vegetables, wash them, and chop them into pieces!

Step four!  In a little bit of oil (I used canola oil, 'cause that's what I have), fry your garlic and onions and ginger.

Step five!  Just as the onions start turning translucent, add the mushrooms and carrots.

Step six!  About sixty seconds later, add some soy sauce and crack the egg into the pan.  Then mix up the egg REALLY FAST so that it coats everything.  It should sort of resemble a pan of slime.  If it looks kind of weird and gross, you're doing it right.

Note: If you scramble the egg beforehand, you are cheating.  Also, it won't taste as good for some reason.

After a while, it should start looking like this.

Step seven!  Add the rice to the pan.  Make sure to stir it well so that the rice gets broken up.

Step eight!  Add the komatsuna.  You shouldn't need to cook it for more than about two minutes, tops.  Also, you might need to add water at this point, if you made your rice too dry.

Step nine!  Enjoy!  (It's also really good cold, for some reason.)

Step ten!  Wash up your dishes.  Seriously.  When you have one pan to share among four people, you have to do dishes really quickly.

And thus concludes this episode of How to Cook Like a College Student with Only One Pan.

On a final random note, remember how I was saying that I had forgotten all my useful Japanese, and could only remember words like "sexual generative organ"?

Well, guess what word came up in my reading for class.

Yeahhhhhhhhhhh.

Fieldwork, or Ow My Toes

So this morning I decided that I would spend the day finding shrines in the area.  Google turned out to be very helpful in this respect, because it shows shrines on the map whereas most paper city maps don't.  Unfortunately, using Google to get directions wasn't particularly helpful, because the Google map directions look like this:

南山大学名古屋キャンパス 名古屋交流会館 〒466-0824 愛知県名古屋市昭和区山里町５０

〒466-0805 愛知県名古屋市昭和区伊勝町２丁目９９ まで歩く

約 14分 (1.2 km)

伊勝八幡宮 〒466-0805 愛知県名古屋市昭和区伊勝町２丁目９９

If you can't read Japanese, let me translate:

Start at Nanzan University
Walk to Ikatsu Shrine (about 14 minutes)
Destination Ikatsu Shrine

AMAZING, GOOGLE.  I AM BLOWN AWAY.

Of course, it's not entirely Google's fault, because in most of Japan, streets don't have names.*  In fact, the only streets in Nagoya that have names are the major roads, and they are named things like "153" and "220."  This would be why most directions in Japanese go something along the lines of, "Go straight and then turn right at the blue house and then turn left at the high school and it should be just past the weird-looking tree."  Also, addresses are given in the form of the city then the district then the neighborhood then block in the neighborhood and THEN the house number, because buildings are numbered in the order they were built, so #1 and #2 could be ten miles apart on the same road.

Oh, and if you think you can use street signs to navigate?

Awesome!  I'm on Child Welfare Center East!  Sure, that's a weird name, but whatever.  What's my cross street?

Oh.  Uh...wait, what?

I really haven't a clue what the street signs are supposed to accomplish, honestly.  Sometimes they tell you what neighborhood you're in, but that would be like if you were in San Francisco and the street signs said, "Sunset District."

Anyway, I wrote down directions as best as I could from the map I pulled up on Google, changed into business casual clothing (I figured it was better to be safe than sorry), and then packed my bag with all my handy-dandy research tools.

My camera bag (I couldn't take a picture of my camera, obviously), my passport (I have to carry it around with me until I get my ARC), my inhaler (you never know when you might need a punch a bear), a handkerchief, a notebook, and some writing utensils.

And then I went off.

The first shrine I stopped at was Ikatsu Hachimangu.  (It is also the only shrine that's name I'm sure I'm pronouncing correctly.)  It was about a fifteen minute walk from my dorm, and despite it supposedly opening at 9 a.m. and my getting there at 10:30 a.m., they were still setting up for the day.

Here's a dragon spigot that was at the hand-washing station.**

The shrine seems nice overall, but very small.  As far as I could tell, it has a staff of two (one man and one woman).  I would have gone up and talked to them, but they seemed very busy cleaning up something (perhaps because yesterday was the autumnal equinox?).

It turns out that the shrine will be having a festival on the sixteenth of October, so I'm going to try to visit again for that if not sooner.

 As I was leaving, the gentleman was dragging a tarp full of thousand-crane chains from the main shrine building into the shrine office (presumably for ritual burning).  As you can probably tell, some of the cranes escaped.

So then I started walking toward shrine #2.

On the way I passed this really nice lake/park.

And then I found the shrine.

As I was standing outside of the main gate trying to make sense of the kanji,*** an elderly Japanese woman called to me and asked me if the shrine had caught my eye.  I said yes, and then she asked where I was from. I said America and she reacted like I had said I was a superhero or something equally amazing.  And then I said I was studying shrines, and she was so thrilled.  She immediately began telling me all about the man who runs the shrine (apparently she knows him and she said I should talk to him because he would love to help me and knows lots about Old Things) and how young people these days don't appreciate shrines like they used to and how she and her neighbors gather at the shrine on major holidays and make delicious food and eat it together.  I could only catch about 60% of what she was saying, unfortunately, because she was talking really fast and had a really thick accent.  (I really need to learn older Japanese.  I have so much trouble talking to anyone over sixty, because the Japanese they use is so different than what I'm used to.)  But she was really friendly and I thanked her for the information and then she rode off on her bicycle.

And then I went into the shrine, which seemed to be set up in someone's backyard.  All the shrine gates were obviously hand-painted and probably built by hand as well, given that a few of them were a little bit crooked. Also, one of the shrines was:

...the entrance to a house.  (There's a normal room inside.  You can see the boxes through the window.)

Also, there was a motorcycle parked right in front of the shrine office.

Unfortuntely, the owner/priest/caretaker of the shrine didn't seem to be around, so I couldn't talk to him, but I will be going back, because that has to be one of the most unusual shrines I have ever seen.  Plus, I would generally like to talk to anyone who would want to set up a shrine in his/her backyard, and who also comes at the recommendation of friendly old ladies.

So then I walked around the block and found this shrine:

The shrine's name is 須佐之男神社, which I think might be "Susanoo Shrine" (yes, that Susanoo).

No one was at this one either, although it's also very small so it probably doesn't employ full-time staff.  There's a festival on the seventeenth of every month, though, according to a sign, so I can go back for that.

Random Japanese culture lesson of the day!  These two lion-dog-bear (nobody's really sure what to call them) statues appear at the entrances of shrines and temples.  The one on the right has its mouth open (and is making the sound "ah") and is male and the one on the left has its mouth closed (and is making the sound "n") and is female.  The male one represents beginnings, and the female one represents endings.  (The "ah" sound is the first letter in the Japanese alphabet, and the "n" sound is the last!)

Also, the female one is stepping on a small lion-dog-bear.  I'm not really sure why.

Aaaaaaaaaaand then I walked and walked and walked a bunch more, and stumbled upon a shrine that somehow wasn't on my map!  What luck!  The name of the shrine is 五社宮, which, I'm going to hazard a guess, is Gosha Shrine?

More dragon-spigots!  (You can actually see the ladle this time.)

Once again, nobody was there, although just as I was leaving, a little girl (probably about two-ish) and her dad went strolling through the shrine.  (Or, really, the dad was strolling, and the girl was chasing pigeons.)

Here's a place to hang up ema.  Normally they're hung on racks, but here they're hung on a string.

And then I proceeded to get massively lost and wind up at a grocery store instead of the shrine I was trying to reach.  I kept seeing signs for shrines, but they would point toward parking or wouldn't have any directional arrows.  So I gave up and walked toward the last cluster of shrines...and wound up getting lost there too, somehow, despite the fact that I knew EXACTLY where the shrine was supposed to be and I kept seeing posters for the shrine.

...so eventually I gave up, because my feet were really hurting.  (Walking around for five hours in dress shoes isn't the greatest idea.  I don't think my toes will forgive me any time soon.  I'm really going to need a better solution if I'm going to keep walking around as much.)  So I stopped off at a grocery store and bought soap.

Because nothing says "beautiful" like the majestic cow.

*Kyoto is one of the few exceptions to this rule.  Kyoto was also built on a grid, which means that it's supremely easy to navigate.

**Before going into a shrine, you have to wash your hands to purify them.  This is a fairly simple process.  Pick up the ladle with your right hand and pour water over your left hand.  Then switch the ladle to your left hand and pour water over your right hand.  Then swish some of the water around your mouth and spit it out.  (Most people opt out of this part, 'cause shrine water can be pretty grungy.  Acceptable alternatives are wiping your still-wet right hand over your mouth or pantomiming taking a sip from the ladle.)  Tip the ladle so that the remaining water runs down the handle (note: this is really hard and most people don't do it because it's REALLY HARD and requires hand-eye coordination) and then put the ladle back where you found it.  Yay, you're done!

***The name of the shrine is 白髭稲荷大明社.  Shirohige Inari Taimeisha?  Basically, it's the White-Facial Hair (the word can mean beard or mustache or both) Inari Shrine.

Futons, plastic surgery, tacos, weather, and boyfriends

Time for a random thought dump!

First off, futons are the best.  Seriously.  I am planning on sleeping on a futon for the rest of forever if I can.  They're soft and warm and comfy and snuggly and just generally epic.  Yes.  Futons.

Second of all, the weather has really cooled off.  It was actually kind of chilly today, which was a nice change from the oppressively hot and humid weather we were having earlier in the week.  I can wear long pants without feeling like my legs are shriveling up and dying!

Third of all, I went to a "tacos party" in the dorm common room this evening (it was in celebration of one girl's birthday).  It was 300 yen for one...taco...like object.  It was supposed to be 300 yen for ALL THE TACOS, but apparently they did not expect 37 people to show up, so they made enough food for about 10.  But they were good, despite not really being taco-like.  They hand-made the tortillas, so they were more like flatbread than tortillas, and there was tuna (???) and some sort of...onion...like...substance...and the taco meat was a lot saucier than normal.  If someone had handed me one of their tacos and asked me to guess what it was, I would have said some kind of Mediterranean food.  But it was food, and I got to meet some more people, so I guess it was worth 300 yen?

Fourth of all, we had a discussion in Japanese class today about plastic surgery, and four of the six girls said they would like to do it.  My response was "NO NO NO NO NO NO" and the other girl's response was, "I like my face."  ...also, apparently our teacher didn't know what sabi meant.*  I need to stop using obscure tea ceremony terms in class.

Fifth of all, it seems that I am once again in danger of being paired off with someone.  I did not realize how completely obsessed pretty much everyone I have met is with dating.  When introducing themselves, girls will say whether they have a boyfriend or not and whether they're living with their boyfriend.  People have, multiple times, asked me if I am living alone (i.e. whether I'm living with a boyfriend/husband).  The girl whose birthday it was today said her goal for this year is to get a boyfriend.  Also, Hi-chan, the Japanese girl in my suite, shortly after we met asked me if I had met other people from the dorm yet.
Me: Um, not that many.
Hi-chan: Have you met any boys?
Me: Um...not that many.
Hi-chan: There are lots of boys in the dorm.  You should meet them.
...of course, it took me about half an hour to realize what she'd been implying there.
And then this evening, I was taking out the trash and, on my way back up to my room, I passed Hi-chan talking to a bunch of Japanese guys.  She thanked me for taking out the trash as I passed, and I said it wasn't a problem.  But then, about half a flight up, I heard her tell the boys I was from California.  There was, as usual, an immediate reaction of awe.  (I don't know.  Apparently being from California is really cool or something?)  And then some random guy asked, "Does she have a boyfriend?"
...I must admit that I nearly sprinted back down the stairs, but I decided to ignore it, because A. probably not cool to eavesdrop on conversations and B. if I had misheard him, that would have been really bad.  But I'm pretty sure I didn't mishear him and FRIGGIN' GEEZ.  I am a PERSON, not some random Californian object you can buy off a shelf.  You don't even KNOW me, so what the heck do you care if I have a boyfriend or not?
...of course, now I'm going to be paranoid that every guy who tries to talk to me is just trying to win the Californian prize.  I'm kind of horrifically dense when it comes to flirting, to be honest, and I probably wouldn't even notice if the guy was hitting on me unless he was being REALLY OBVIOUS.  On the other hand, I could be loudly obnoxious about having a boyfriend, but that's not really going to stop anyone (as I have heard from sitting in corners as other people are talking about their long-distance relationship-like entities).  It would also be obnoxious, and, honestly, it's none of their business.
But on the other other hand, I don't want a bunch of guys sizing me up like I'm a piece of meat.
AUGH, FRIGGIN' AUGH.
Maybe I should just tape a sign to my forehead: "SO NOT INTERESTED. LET'S BE FRIENDS INSTEAD."

*Sabi is a concept most common in medieval Japanese art, especially in tea ceremony.  It's the idea that asymmetry and imperfection is more beautiful than symmetry and perfection.  It's why a lot of very expensive tea ceremony bowls are warped or unevenly glazed.

The typhoon blew my post away

Short post today, because I was stuck inside all day, thanks to the typhoon.  It seems to have blown over now, but they're showing pictures of the damage on TV and it's pretty frightening.  In Kyoto, which is about as far inland as you can get in Japan, there was a house that sank an entire story into the mud.  In Nagoya, all the schools were closed and the public transit was shut down and the U.S. consulate was evacuated.  Fun times.

I've spent the day making a spreadsheet for my finances, reading the assigned article for my seminar, trying to calculate whether I can live a full year on my first payment from Fulbright (answer: yes, actually, as long as I'm thrifty and don't ever go anywhere, which won't happen, because I want to travel), reading more of the article (it's not terribly long; I'm just a very slow reader in Japanese), watching a Mario Kart tournament in the dorm common room, and other such things.

Also, my Japanese suitemate said she'd take me to Toyokawa Inari*, because her family lives nearby.  You know, if people keep offering to take me on random field trips, my research may just do itself.

*Inari is normally worshiped** as a Shinto kami, but Toyokawa Inari is a Buddhist temple.  It's a very interesting case of a kami being worshiped as Buddha.  I also read an entire book on Inari (and Toyokawa Inari, specifically), which was The Fox and the Jewel by Karen Smyer.  So that would be massively cool.

**The way "worshiped" is spelled really bothers me.  It's like "kidnaped."  Ugh.  I shudder when I look at those words.  CURSE YOU, ENGLISH.

台風が来た！D:

To say the weather has been miserable would be an insult to miserable weather.  A typhoon hit us last night, and we've had torrential rain* since then.  It's supposed to clear up by Thursday, but right now walking outside is sort of like having someone dump buckets of water over your head while wading through a river.

(These pictures are from about noon, before it started getting bad.)

That might explain why there was no one else there when I went to apply for my Alien Registration Card (ARC) this morning...either that, or I was up so early that no one else in their right mind would want to go at that hour.  (9:30 isn't that early...is it?  I've been waking up at 6:30 or 7 every morning, so it seems pretty late to me...)  So instead of taking Hours and Hours (as some people said it would), it only took about twenty minutes.  And most of that time was waiting for them to issue me my temporary card certificate.  Plus it wasn't anywhere near as difficult as people were making it out to be; a lot of people told me I should go with an interpreter, and Makino-san (the woman in international student services who has been helping me out) said I should only go alone if I wanted "a challenge."  I also tried to enroll in the National Healthcare Program, but apparently a post card was sent to my dorm with information, and I need to wait until it arrives?  I'll be heading back to the ward office to pick up my real ARC in a couple of weeks anyway, so it's not a big deal.

After that, I went over to international student services to turn in my form to get an inkan (name seal) and to pay my rent.  They have a really strange rent-paying system where you buy tickets from a machine and then turn those in to the student services office.

On a slightly related note, I have so many problems with money in Japanese.  Not in the normal "problems with money" sense (I'm incredibly reluctant to ever spend money, and probably will be until the day I die), but rather in the "YOU ARE SAYING NUMBERS TO ME AUUUGH WHAT DO I DO?" sense.  Of course, Japanese doesn't have the easiest numbering system to begin with.  In English we count things in groups of three zeros: you have thousands, and then when you have a thousand thousands you have a million, and then when you have a thousand millions you have a billion and so on.  Well, SOMEBODY decided that in Japanese they would count things in groups of four zeros: you have ten thousands (man), and when you have ten thousand ten thousands you have a different number (oku...which is...100,000,000...one hundred million, I guess?) and so on and so forth.  So 1,000,000 is "one million" in English but "one hundred ten thousands" in Japanese.  To further confuse matters, the best way to mentally change yen into dollars is to lop two zeros off the end.**  So if someone asks you for "one ten thousand seven thousand eight hundred fifty yen" in Japanese, you have to first mentally convert the number into something you can actually picture (17850) and then stick a decimal point before the last two numbers (178.50).  Moral of the story: JAPANESE NUMBERS LARGER THAN 9,999 CONFUSE ME TO NO END.  And that's very unfortunate, since my rent is all in ten thousands.  I almost accidentally paid 1400円 instead of 14000円.  YIKES.  Good thing I stopped to double-check the zeroes.

So after my adventures with paperwork, I waded (literally waded; the water was over my ankles) to my professor's seminar, which turned out to be a graduate-level course.  There are four other people in the class, two in their second year of graduate school and one in her third.  (The last guy is in seminary, I believe, and is going to Rome in March?)  We had gotten about fifteen minutes into the class (and I was just about to introduce myself) when an announcement came over the P.A. saying that class was cancelled because of the typhoon.  Yikes!  So we had to leave the school, and we won't be meeting again until next week.  From what little I have seen of the class, everyone has significantly better Japanese than I do (there are two Filipino students and two Japanese students) and knows more about Christianity than I do, but I knew how to read 仏 (the kanji for "Buddha"; it's read "hotoke") and the Filipino students didn't.  Small victories, I guess.  I'm sure I'll learn a lot from all of them, and hopefully they won't think I'm too overwhelmingly pathetic.

So because classes were cancelled, I went down to the common room for the dorm and started reading the assigned article for my advisor's seminar.  It's called "What Is Shinto?" (「神道は何か？」) and although I have to look up 1 word in 20 (my academic Japanese is somewhat lacking, especially since I don't use terms like "sublime" and "ten thousand volumes of doctrine" all that often), I am understanding it perfectly, which, I think, is pretty much amazing.  Of course, I spent the last year reading about Shinto obsessively, so maybe it's not that amazing.  But the fact that I can read an academic article for a graduate-level course in Japanese?  That's something worth celebrating, I think.

...and then my friend in Niigata emailed me, because apparently the U.S. Embassy sent out a warning about the typhoon???  (But I didn't get it for some reason, even though I'm signed up for their emergency alerts...  Hrrrm.)  Apparently sections of Nagoya are being evacuated.  And the international students who live outside of the Nanzan area are being allowed to stay at our dorm tonight, because it's too dangerous for them to try to go home.  And classes might be cancelled tomorrow too.  Basically, it's crazy, but DON'T FREAK OUT, MOM AND DAD.  I'm fine.  And I will continue to be fine, as long as I don't do something stupid, like try to climb a mountain or go hang-gliding.

Last thing!  I stand corrected in regards to the comment I made earlier regarding tying up wishes.  You do do it in Japan (I've even done it)!  You tie wishes to bamboo for Tanabata, but since it's not normally done at shrines (a lot of stores set up bamboo outside, so you most commonly see Tanabata wishes in shopping districts) it totally slipped my mind.  So thanks to my mum for having a way better memory than I do.

*Unfortunately I cannot use my favorite Japanese word here (ゲリラ豪雨; guerrilla downpour) because the typhoon was expected, but I AM USING IT IN A FOOTNOTE, OH HO.

**This is no longer true, since the exchange rate SUCKS (74 yen to the dollar, last I checked), but I still do it just to get a ballpark figure.