Sidestepping the issue of whether it's too early to award it to him or not, one of my students gave me an interesting example of the Japanese perspective on it. According to her, a lot of Japanese people feel offended that anyone could be awarded the prize without having first gone to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, in their eyes the ultimate symbol of the ( Read more... )

Man, doing real push-ups is way harder than doing sloppy half-assed ones. Why'd I have to go and check to make sure I was doing it correctly?

So last night I celebrated my not-quite-30th birthday with a group of good friends, highlights of which included receiving a genuine horseshoe, which will come in handy in my ongoing war against the brownies who try to straighten up my apartment against my will, and, for reasons that I still don't quite understand, two of my male friends who had ( Read more... )

Not too much to post right now, other than the fact that I'm on day 2 of my 2 week summer vacation, and so far things are going pretty well, tomorrow I'm going to my friend's fireworks viewing party, and then the day after it's beach time. That is all, as you were.

The most horrific story of drunken stupidity, which just came back to me as I walked into my kitchen, was not about my student but about his friend, who decided one night to light his cigarette using his gas stove, as presumably you do when your lighter is empty and you just need a fix so bad. Unfortunately, the results weren't "Ha-ha, my eyebrows ( Read more... )

Teaching English feels sometimes like therapy, which might be a sign of sorts, especially last night's private lesson, where for the first half of the 90 minute lesson my student bitched about his boss, his company, and his co-workers, albeit in therapy I imagine there's less of an emphasis on correcting the patient's grammatical mistakes (unless ( Read more... )

Well, my impromptu two week vacation is winding slowly to an end, and while it's extremely unfortunate that for retarded reasons I was unable to spend it in Canada, but I still managed to have myself a good time, albeit a fairly low-key one. That's just fine for me, actually, I'm not big on traveling by myself, to be honest, instead, I did what ( Read more... )

I judged a speech contest a few weeks ago, which was surprisingly fun, partially because there actually weren't that many speeches, it mostly consisted of skits put on by the various classes of a Japanese teacher of English. The whole event was surprisingly well-run and organized, with the children's parents acting as stage crew and holders of ( Read more... )

While killing time before karaoke Saturday night I decided to give Dance Dance Revolution a go, for basically the first time ever. I say basically because I vaguely recall having played it before, but the memory is faint enough that I was either drunk or really tired at the time. Anyways, I dropped a few coins on it and managed not to totally ( Read more... )

Yesterday one of my co-workers, a guy charitably describable as not the sharpest knife in the drawer, gave chocolates to everyone at the office for a belated Valentine's, including myself. Unfortunately for him, that's an extremely weird thing to do here, as for one thing, only women are supposed to give chocolates on Valentine's, and for another, ( Read more... )