TOFURKEY FTW

Yeah, yeah, okay, I haven't updated in a while. I know. Sorry. But things are really busy now, and the only time I have on the computer is when I have a free period during school, and then it's a choice between updating this thing and reading Meitantei Conan online. (...You can easily guess which one I pick most of the time.)

So. School. It's cool. Kinda. The administration has purposely kept my courses involving lecturing and intelligent thinking to a bare minimum, assuming (correctly) that I would be totally unable to follow, and, as a result, I am now taking calligraphy, art, and music. My schedule is different every day, but I usually have at least one (sometimes two) free periods in the library, where I am surrounded by books I cannot read (yes, my soul does die a little inside every time, thank you). I have math and geography about once a week each and English at least five times a week, either with my homeroom class or with third-years. Unfortunately, this time is rarely spent learning more about my native language: instead, my perfect accent is exploited for the greater good, and I end up going up the front of the class to read aloud some elementary-level story about the Machigenga people of Peru or the popularity of tofurkey in the US market. (My first week, I must have had about eight of my classmates ask me if I had ever eaten tofurkey. I remained mystified about their strangely coincidental curiosity up until yesterday, where I myself read about tofurkey in the English textbook. Good heavens.) I am also in an English reading class, though I consider it half about English and half about environmentalism. I still don't know why all our lessons are centered around global warming and CO2 emission rates, actually, but apparently next class we will be watching An Inconvenient Truth in English, which is something to look forward to. (Not the Al Gore bit - the English! Hallelujah!) (Ah, that reminds me - if I were you, I'd watch what I post on the Internet from now on. It might end up being used in the English class of a random Japanese high school. Last class, we had the distinct pleasure of translating the muddled remarks of some twenty British twelve-year-olds into Japanese and then analyzing them to see if they were 'for or against' global warming - whatever that means. All I know is that anyone who uses the phrase "top clever people" is not to be listened to, and that no one has used the word "reckon" outside of Louisiana. I greatly pitied, however, the group that had to interpret some young British do-gooder's caps-locked 'INSTEAD OF PUTTING ALL OUR MONEY INTO THE WARS WHY DON'T WE USE IT FOR RESEARCH INTO GLOBAL WARMING??')

Then there is kendo, which is my club. Needless to say, I'm terrible at it, but it is quite involving, and the other kids are very nice about the whole INCOMPETENT FOREIGNER IN UR DOJO, SWINGIN' UR SHINAI thing. A big problem is that most of the force behind the shinai lies in the left arm, and my own left arm is rather weak in comparison to my right. Mostly I just work on the basics by myself, though sometimes a boy will end up sacrificing his practice time to help me out. There's practice every day, by the way, even on Saturdays and Sundays, though Monday was a rare yasumi (break). As a result, my left arm is constantly sore. I also recently got into a bicycle accident on Pisa, so my right hand is covered in scrapes and I can't sit seiza style (something of a blessing, actually) during practice. (Pisa, by the way, is the name of my bike. It's short for 'Piece of Crap', because that is what it is. Pisa is held together solely on spit and a prayer, and the only reason I do not loathe it outright is because it is painted a rather charming cherry color. Instead, I reserve for it the passive-aggressive affection with which I usually treat my more temperamental electronics and my departed rabbit. While the good news is that, because Pisa is old, it will never be stolen, the bad news is that because Pisa is old, it will never be stolen. I understand that something called 'bicycle trading' - where, should you return to find your bike mysteriously absent, you merely take some other nearby bike in trade - is actually quite common in these parts, and it shows that same odd sense of totally Japanese practicality in its idea that if someone's got to walk, it may as well not be you.)

...Ah, and there's the bell. Next time: talking more about classes, English language books, shopping, and how earthquakes used to be things that happened to other people. Until then - ja ne!