108 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} 108) wrote,@ 2004-06-12 01:20:00 |
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「あの過ごした時代のこと一つも残っていません。あの時代はこの世界に本当にあったかどうかと誰も分かりません。」
According to a commercial I saw while dining, more than 600,000 people play the Skylark Gusto Touch With E game. It's a little television attached to each of the tables in the non-smoking (and therefore family-friendly) section of the restaurant. You play these gimpy little games by touching the screen. Stuff like tennis and whack-a-mole. The games cost anywhere from 25 to 210 yen, which is electronically added to your bill. Perform skillfully, and there's a chance of winning some great prizes. Perform not so skillfully, and, well -- you at least get to have some fun with someone else while rain falls heavily outside the windows of Urayasu, Chiba.
It's a great place to be late on a wet night. There's a game store called "Tokujiro" across the high-way, and I bought a copy of Husking Bee's 1998 album "The Steady-State Theory" for 480 yen in there while I waited for my friend. When my friend, a woman-friend, if you must know, came, we ate at Gusto. I was, as always, upset that the spring menu's changing into the summer menu includes axing the pepperoncini pasta, which was probably the best damned pepperonicini pasta in Japan that didn't also come with an egg fried over-crispy by yours me-ly. I ordered the Yamamori (oomori means "big size," komori means "small size," yama means "mountain") Fried Potato and the Cheese-Plate, and thought I'd be happy with it. I ended up not being too happy -- since the Cheese-Plate's stunning debut on March 21st, 2004, it's grown a layer of mayonnaise beneath the cheese. I have some runny stomach pains now. I just relieved some of them while reading volume three of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball on a home-like toilet too small for my foreign ass, which, mind you, isn't really that big.
So we were watching this little television, begging to be played with, while we waited for our food to come. They determine the contestants for the Japanese "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" from a trivia game on here, I gather. Not only that -- the jackpot in that show is ten million yen. Which, while seeming like ten times more, is really only one-tenth the American jackpot. Go figure.
We longed for quizzes. The simplest quiz was free -- a horoscope. I said I was a gemini, and it told me that, tomorrow, I will meet a great opponent and defeat him swiftly; it is to be a day of the greatest luck. I wonder . . . ?
The only other quiz I wanted to take was sponsored by Disney, overlords of this part of Chiba, where the Japanese reincarnation of the Magic Kingdom looms on the horizon. This quiz, so it said, would, with simple questions regarding my astrological sign (both Chinese and Western), blood type, and personality, tell me which Disney Princess I am. The quiz informed us, just after its lengthy intro, during which all the princesses flew by, smiling, that it would cost 210 yen. We said fuck that shit, and by the time we got to the "H" in "shit," the food was there. One of my fred potatoes was the length of . . . well, something. I held it up to my middle finger. I then held my middle fingers together. It was about as long as both middle fingers laid end-to-end, with room for a thumb to stand thick-wise.
"That's long."
"Tell me about it."
"What do you call your middle finger in English?"
"'Middle finger.'" It might have been a trick question. It probably wasn't. The name for the middle finger in Japanese is nakayubi, meaning "middle finger." Simple. The others are oyayubi ("parent finger" -- thumb), hitosashiyubi ("people-finding finger" -- index finger), kusuriyubi ("medicine-finger" -- ring finger), and koyubi ("little finger" -- pinky (not to be confused with Koyuki, "Little Snow" -- Star of "The Last Samurai," "Waraemon," and lots of bouncy tampon commercials)). I amazed my friend that I knew all of these fingers. So this initiated a body-part quiz. Eyelids, elbows, toes, tongues. Eventually internal organs, the kind you can read about on medicine bottles, were referenced. In the end, when I was naming all of the bones in Chinese, I had to lie that I'd never once actually taken a course on anatomy in Japanese. She didn't believe this. For all she knows, I've been in Japan for nine months, and have been speaking Japanese for eight of those months. So I ask these two important questions:
1. How well can any friendship turn out when it's based on a small lie?
2. Which Disney Princess do you think I am? I'm shooting for Jasmine.
The lie is no big deal. It's just something that never comes up in conversation, and it might not ever. I figure we'll be . . . done with each other before anything could harm either of us permanently. Which is to say, yes, it's not something that lasts forever.
There's a prostitute at Urayasu Station. She has a sister. She's Chinese. She waits by the Mister Donut behind the Gusto, stopping men. I had been appointed to meet my friend at 7-Eleven; the prostitute wandered over there, and was stopping men, asking them how they planned to spend this kuso-rainy evening. I kept looking at her. She was twirling a transparent umbrella with red polka dots on it. I was standing with my hands in the pockets of an aqua-green blazer, in mismatched socks and punk-rock shoes, without an umbrella, getting soaked. The prostitute kept looking at me. Some old man came up and stood beside her. He wasn't going to pay her. He just wanted some conversation. The girl looked at me the whole time the guy was talking to her. While he was talking to her, my friend showed up, ten minutes late, as always. She walked right past me as I stood there in the rain. She entered the 7-Eleven and started looking at a magazine, thinking she was either on-time or early. I went in after her soon enough, thinking that people look at people mostly when they don't know them.
I had locked eyes with this prostitute only once before. She is Chinese, with these beautiful freckles. I knew a Chinese girl with freckles in college, and her name was, believe it or don't, Lulu Wang. She was chubby, and probably hated her own chubbiness, though I was captivated with her perfection. She had the least irritating laugh I think a person has ever possessed. I once told her that in an email sent near the end of the year. She'd brought in a reel of her uncle's newest film, a really good one about Hong Kong in the 1960s, and I for some reason emailed her that night after seeing the movie for the first time. In the email, I managed to tell her she had a beautiful laugh. There was this other guy -- this Indian-American fellow from Chicago -- who laughed like a horse's ass at every tiny thing that was funnier than something else. I said it was nice on days when she was there and he wasn't. She replied with two sentences, one of which was "Thank you for your kind words." I never emailed her back. I only lamented that she probably hated her laugh as well as her freckles and that plumpness that filled out a fuzzy sweater. I feel kind of sorry, even now, that we humans scarcely notice the things other humans love about their bodies, and that we frequently love or lust after the parts they hate.
I knew a girl who hated her large breasts, for example. If you're reading this: they're nice. That is all.
NOTHING THAT BELONGED TO THAT AGE IS LEFT. NOTHING THAT EXISTS IN THIS AGE IS RIGHT.
I find this prostitute in Urayasu to be very beautiful, and wonder, as a man, why she doesn't do something else with her beauty. I guess it isn't possible. It's hardly even possible two ways in hell for me to ask myself that question about someone else. She is what she is because that's what she is. She also costs 20,000 yen, if my ears serve me too well. She is Chinese, and she is beautiful, and she's a prostitute in a town owned by Disney. Lord love her until the end of her days.
You know, #22: I really like Chinese girls a lot better than Japanese girls, any day. They're more . . . realistic. They're like actual human beings, with layers. There was this Chinese girl on the Yamanote Line yesterday, at about hour three of my journey, and she was studying Japanese. She was mouthing the vocabulary words, closing the book on her finger, and then closing her eyes, and mouthing the words again, and then opening the book. At one point, she sneezed, and wiped her nose on the cuff of her shirt. At one point, she wiped tears from her eyes. They were either from the sneeze or from her passion. Why don't I have more Chinese people in my life? Because I'm in Japan.
Or . . . am I?
Japan's population is just over half of that of the United States of America. In the USA, children are raised to learn the value of a dollar by aspiring to one day have a million of those dollars. The first four years of American primary school, I dare say, exist to teach a child exactly how big a million is. In Japan, where the Chinese characters themselves group numbers into tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands, and then ten-millions rather than the Western hundred-thousands and millions, a half a million is a big deal. To say a videogame sold half a million copies in a week, or that 600,000 people play with some gimpy touch-panel screen at a diner in Chiba is a big deal. It's a big deal because it's an advertisement for a product, contained entirely within the world of the product, contained only in locations of that restaurant chain. It's a curious thing to see during a rainy night with wet hair after staring at a prostitute who was staring at you in the first place. It makes you realize how big humans are. If this has any connection to the food on the plate or the conversation in the air, or the just-bought CD in the bag, it's a tenuous one, one that is already losing its own connection to this world.
I'm going to take a shower . . . after I get some yogurt.
In closing:
How many of you regularly
A: Sneeze upon exiting a building on a sunny day and beholding the light of the sun?
or
B: Crave a piece of candy, a cookie, or some other sweet thing before taking a shower?
One of those means something about your health. The other is just some genetic gimpiness you inherit and can't get rid of. It doesn't hurt you. Then again, on a geologic timeline, nothing does, really.
According to a commercial I saw while dining, more than 600,000 people play the Skylark Gusto Touch With E game. It's a little television attached to each of the tables in the non-smoking (and therefore family-friendly) section of the restaurant. You play these gimpy little games by touching the screen. Stuff like tennis and whack-a-mole. The games cost anywhere from 25 to 210 yen, which is electronically added to your bill. Perform skillfully, and there's a chance of winning some great prizes. Perform not so skillfully, and, well -- you at least get to have some fun with someone else while rain falls heavily outside the windows of Urayasu, Chiba.
It's a great place to be late on a wet night. There's a game store called "Tokujiro" across the high-way, and I bought a copy of Husking Bee's 1998 album "The Steady-State Theory" for 480 yen in there while I waited for my friend. When my friend, a woman-friend, if you must know, came, we ate at Gusto. I was, as always, upset that the spring menu's changing into the summer menu includes axing the pepperoncini pasta, which was probably the best damned pepperonicini pasta in Japan that didn't also come with an egg fried over-crispy by yours me-ly. I ordered the Yamamori (oomori means "big size," komori means "small size," yama means "mountain") Fried Potato and the Cheese-Plate, and thought I'd be happy with it. I ended up not being too happy -- since the Cheese-Plate's stunning debut on March 21st, 2004, it's grown a layer of mayonnaise beneath the cheese. I have some runny stomach pains now. I just relieved some of them while reading volume three of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball on a home-like toilet too small for my foreign ass, which, mind you, isn't really that big.
So we were watching this little television, begging to be played with, while we waited for our food to come. They determine the contestants for the Japanese "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" from a trivia game on here, I gather. Not only that -- the jackpot in that show is ten million yen. Which, while seeming like ten times more, is really only one-tenth the American jackpot. Go figure.
We longed for quizzes. The simplest quiz was free -- a horoscope. I said I was a gemini, and it told me that, tomorrow, I will meet a great opponent and defeat him swiftly; it is to be a day of the greatest luck. I wonder . . . ?
The only other quiz I wanted to take was sponsored by Disney, overlords of this part of Chiba, where the Japanese reincarnation of the Magic Kingdom looms on the horizon. This quiz, so it said, would, with simple questions regarding my astrological sign (both Chinese and Western), blood type, and personality, tell me which Disney Princess I am. The quiz informed us, just after its lengthy intro, during which all the princesses flew by, smiling, that it would cost 210 yen. We said fuck that shit, and by the time we got to the "H" in "shit," the food was there. One of my fred potatoes was the length of . . . well, something. I held it up to my middle finger. I then held my middle fingers together. It was about as long as both middle fingers laid end-to-end, with room for a thumb to stand thick-wise.
"That's long."
"Tell me about it."
"What do you call your middle finger in English?"
"'Middle finger.'" It might have been a trick question. It probably wasn't. The name for the middle finger in Japanese is nakayubi, meaning "middle finger." Simple. The others are oyayubi ("parent finger" -- thumb), hitosashiyubi ("people-finding finger" -- index finger), kusuriyubi ("medicine-finger" -- ring finger), and koyubi ("little finger" -- pinky (not to be confused with Koyuki, "Little Snow" -- Star of "The Last Samurai," "Waraemon," and lots of bouncy tampon commercials)). I amazed my friend that I knew all of these fingers. So this initiated a body-part quiz. Eyelids, elbows, toes, tongues. Eventually internal organs, the kind you can read about on medicine bottles, were referenced. In the end, when I was naming all of the bones in Chinese, I had to lie that I'd never once actually taken a course on anatomy in Japanese. She didn't believe this. For all she knows, I've been in Japan for nine months, and have been speaking Japanese for eight of those months. So I ask these two important questions:
1. How well can any friendship turn out when it's based on a small lie?
2. Which Disney Princess do you think I am? I'm shooting for Jasmine.
The lie is no big deal. It's just something that never comes up in conversation, and it might not ever. I figure we'll be . . . done with each other before anything could harm either of us permanently. Which is to say, yes, it's not something that lasts forever.
There's a prostitute at Urayasu Station. She has a sister. She's Chinese. She waits by the Mister Donut behind the Gusto, stopping men. I had been appointed to meet my friend at 7-Eleven; the prostitute wandered over there, and was stopping men, asking them how they planned to spend this kuso-rainy evening. I kept looking at her. She was twirling a transparent umbrella with red polka dots on it. I was standing with my hands in the pockets of an aqua-green blazer, in mismatched socks and punk-rock shoes, without an umbrella, getting soaked. The prostitute kept looking at me. Some old man came up and stood beside her. He wasn't going to pay her. He just wanted some conversation. The girl looked at me the whole time the guy was talking to her. While he was talking to her, my friend showed up, ten minutes late, as always. She walked right past me as I stood there in the rain. She entered the 7-Eleven and started looking at a magazine, thinking she was either on-time or early. I went in after her soon enough, thinking that people look at people mostly when they don't know them.
I had locked eyes with this prostitute only once before. She is Chinese, with these beautiful freckles. I knew a Chinese girl with freckles in college, and her name was, believe it or don't, Lulu Wang. She was chubby, and probably hated her own chubbiness, though I was captivated with her perfection. She had the least irritating laugh I think a person has ever possessed. I once told her that in an email sent near the end of the year. She'd brought in a reel of her uncle's newest film, a really good one about Hong Kong in the 1960s, and I for some reason emailed her that night after seeing the movie for the first time. In the email, I managed to tell her she had a beautiful laugh. There was this other guy -- this Indian-American fellow from Chicago -- who laughed like a horse's ass at every tiny thing that was funnier than something else. I said it was nice on days when she was there and he wasn't. She replied with two sentences, one of which was "Thank you for your kind words." I never emailed her back. I only lamented that she probably hated her laugh as well as her freckles and that plumpness that filled out a fuzzy sweater. I feel kind of sorry, even now, that we humans scarcely notice the things other humans love about their bodies, and that we frequently love or lust after the parts they hate.
I knew a girl who hated her large breasts, for example. If you're reading this: they're nice. That is all.
I find this prostitute in Urayasu to be very beautiful, and wonder, as a man, why she doesn't do something else with her beauty. I guess it isn't possible. It's hardly even possible two ways in hell for me to ask myself that question about someone else. She is what she is because that's what she is. She also costs 20,000 yen, if my ears serve me too well. She is Chinese, and she is beautiful, and she's a prostitute in a town owned by Disney. Lord love her until the end of her days.
You know, #22: I really like Chinese girls a lot better than Japanese girls, any day. They're more . . . realistic. They're like actual human beings, with layers. There was this Chinese girl on the Yamanote Line yesterday, at about hour three of my journey, and she was studying Japanese. She was mouthing the vocabulary words, closing the book on her finger, and then closing her eyes, and mouthing the words again, and then opening the book. At one point, she sneezed, and wiped her nose on the cuff of her shirt. At one point, she wiped tears from her eyes. They were either from the sneeze or from her passion. Why don't I have more Chinese people in my life? Because I'm in Japan.
Or . . . am I?
Japan's population is just over half of that of the United States of America. In the USA, children are raised to learn the value of a dollar by aspiring to one day have a million of those dollars. The first four years of American primary school, I dare say, exist to teach a child exactly how big a million is. In Japan, where the Chinese characters themselves group numbers into tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands, and then ten-millions rather than the Western hundred-thousands and millions, a half a million is a big deal. To say a videogame sold half a million copies in a week, or that 600,000 people play with some gimpy touch-panel screen at a diner in Chiba is a big deal. It's a big deal because it's an advertisement for a product, contained entirely within the world of the product, contained only in locations of that restaurant chain. It's a curious thing to see during a rainy night with wet hair after staring at a prostitute who was staring at you in the first place. It makes you realize how big humans are. If this has any connection to the food on the plate or the conversation in the air, or the just-bought CD in the bag, it's a tenuous one, one that is already losing its own connection to this world.
I'm going to take a shower . . . after I get some yogurt.
In closing:
How many of you regularly
A: Sneeze upon exiting a building on a sunny day and beholding the light of the sun?
or
B: Crave a piece of candy, a cookie, or some other sweet thing before taking a shower?
One of those means something about your health. The other is just some genetic gimpiness you inherit and can't get rid of. It doesn't hurt you. Then again, on a geologic timeline, nothing does, really.
