On This Most Auspicious Day...

...Alright, so this is a bit late. (A bit.) I forgive you if you thought I fell off the end of the world. Really, I think I myself forgot about this blog for a time, ehhehe. Seriously, though - what should I talk about? Once you get past the initial "OMFGJAPAN" of living in Japan, it's kind of a lot like living anywhere else in the world - you know, you wake up in the mornings, eat breakfast, put on uniform, etc. Bike to school. Get stared at like some rare breed of idiot when you manage to correctly say "I actually rather dislike eggplant." Run the marathon in gym (2.8 km in 16 minutes, baby! Needless to say, I did not come to Japan for the high school gym bit, even though Yoshimi-sensei is the nicest gym teacher in Japan, or possibly the world.). Go to class. Attend kendo practice (since I got the men - head mask - I've started practicing with everybody else, even though I'm still really awful. Still, as I said, everyone's pretty nice about it, so it's not too mortal a blow for my self-esteem.). Bike home. Eat dinner, wash clothes, watch whatever show's on (each night there's a different show I like to watch, so that's important), take a shower, fall asleep. Rinse, repeat. You fall into a routine, just like anywhere else. (Well, except maybe the "rare breed of idiot" part. I still hate that, and it makes me look rather longingly on the days when I could actually talk and make merry like any other teenage girl with other interesting humans. But, as I said. You get used to it.)

My summer vacation - all three weeks of it! - mostly consisted of me going to kendo in the mornings and watching Japanese-subtitled episodes of "Boston Legal" in the afternoons, all while downing liberal amounts of C. C. Lemon (a fizzy lemon drink that is almost as delicious as lemon squash and not even in the same league as Country Time lemonade, or - God forbid - Crystal Lite.) Then again, there was the three-day AFS camping trip in the mountains around Sapporo, which was rather fun. I mean, not only did I get to spend time with teenagers who can actually appreciate sarcasm - I also found a Starbucks at the Sapporo train station and drank my first real coffee (read: not the dark sewage my host mother brews and subsequently attempts to pass of as caffeine, though I think it's more the beans' fault than hers) in over five months! So that was nice. And there was also the Obon festival in the middle of August, right before school started back up again, which involved wearing yukata and dancing in parades - hmmm, good fun, good fun.

And now for a totally random tangent, this time on the utterly incomprehensible, hit-or-miss phenomenenon that is Japanese humor. Japanese humor in a nutshell: if it's funny the first time, it's also going to be funny the third time, and the twentieth. Also the eighty-first. This is not an exaggeration, either. Case in point: some months ago the up-and-coming comedian Edo Harumi (Harumi being her first name) made a punchline of going "GUUUU~" and doing two thumbs up when she encountered words that ended with (or, in some cases, merely contained) the syllable "gu." Six months later, she's still doing it, and people are still laughing at it. (And they're seriously laughing, too, not just going "oh ha ha, I get the cultural reference and appreciate it!" like we do nowadays with things like Monty Python quotes and speaking chatspeak.) Just yesterday I watched an Herbal Essences ad in which Edo Harumi enthuses that HE shampoo will make your hair "shiningggGUUUU," "wavinggGUUUU," and other such adjectives of that ilk. (Yes, in Japan, hair can be "waving." You learn to be lax on your conjugations here.) I myself have almost unconsciously started to avoid "gu" verbs like oyogu and tsunagu for fear that, inevitably, my sentence will be punctuated by some foolish fool going "GUUUUU." (Fortunately sentences rarely arise where I must use the verbs "to swim" and "to connect or link" - respectively - so it's not too much of an impariment. I'm just glad Edo Harumi didn't think the syllable "ru" was very possibly The Funniest Sound Evar, since practically half of all Japanese verbs end with "ru.") However, there also exist some comedic gems like human tetris, the cookie-and-treadmill game, and that segment they sometimes have on Hexagon where a person has to climb up a sheer wall wearing a sticky suit and without falling into an enormous pit of flour beneath them. (...Flour?!?!) So. Who knows?

Anyway, 'm gonna go eat lunch now. Hope you're all having fun going to real school now - I wanna hear all about it! (I don't even know what colleges half you guys are going to, anyway... I skipped out of town moments before everyone got their letters back, so I only know where about a handful of people are going. I expect a full report on where everyone's going in my comments box ASAP, Andy/Katie/other-loyal-readers-who-I-don't-know-seeing-as-they've-never-commented! Now hop to it!)