I did dream about her. Fancy that. Sometimes you get what you want after all. Better yet, I woke up because Minami peeled the duvet off my face and when I rolled over to swat at this enemy hostile towards my sleep, I hit instead, a firm female thigh, which wasn’t hers. It was Soon-Mi’s and it was wrapped up in these bright blue leggings and all the sleep in me just vanished. I sprung up, careful not to expose the other morning-sprung member of me and applauded her choice of garment. She told me I had to get moving, we [View Full Entry]

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Something one must take because they have done something they should not have; to make up for a deficiency of judgment or oversight in the pursuit of the Bacchinal arts. For me this means Advil. I woke on Thursday, February 28th sometime in the early afternoon or late morning. The sun was stabbing its judgmental rays through the thin gaps between the curtains and the window frame, and all I could make out aside from that was Gen’s head looking down on me, shaking back in forth with that wry New Yorker grin of his. “You f*cked up last night.” The [View Full Entry]

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‘Woke up the next morning just after midday to the same clatter as always and had a cold breakfast of leftovers from the two meals I had missed. I’m a little teased as to why none of these kids feel it necessary to wake me when they’re up and having fun. They must think us white kids need our sleep I guess. I’m wasting time not skiing and not hitting on my internet idol, so after I fill up I have to go badger everyone to get their sh*t sorted so we can get this road on the show. Minami is [View Full Entry]

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Soon-Mi threw two innings of vodka screwdrivers and retired. The rest of her defense followed shorty after. Wee decided to call the game early which just kills me because the gin was just then starting to fire in me, and after 11 hours of driving without a break, all the kids who had been sleeping were now quitting on me. F**k jet-lag. You can make excuses or you can make memories. Gen was equally energized and thus equally disappointed, so we stayed up an extra hour and talked about how sweet this was all going to be. Then he went and [View Full Entry]

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On Sunday the 24th we all woke up about three hours later than planned, some of us hungover, half of us still suffering from the effects of jetlag (exacerbated by excess of alcohol) a few of us had breakfast and all of us piled into the cars. We split ranks, by playing “gu to pa”- -basically the Japanese version of drawing straws. The luck was me and Soon-Mi…and Minami and Shin. That put Gen, Yumiko, Yuuki and chatterbox Yuu with mommy in the other car for 9 hours. I felt a little bad for Gendawg, having to sit all day without [View Full Entry]

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It was Saturday February 23rd. I woke up at 10:30 a pleasant amount of noise radiating from upstairs. Living alone in a heavily insulated apartment will cause you to forget how noisy a real house is supposed to be. Even with my brother temporarily vacated to a friend’s there were 11 people staying in mine at the moment. It’s a good thing 6 of them are Japanese otherwise this place would have gone Philadelphia in a flash. As big as my house is I knew with that many people around I wouldn’t get the time alone with her to get inside [View Full Entry]

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Very few vacations start for us by going home. My brain was full of mixed signals of nostalgia and adventuredrive. Normally when I take this flight I'm alone and in the mood for calm and reflection. I slept the duration of the flight and awoke for the descent and immediately returned to work on my game plan. Over the week prior to take-off I pulled Yuu and Yumiko aside on sepparate ocassions, educated them on what you now all know about the intertwining personal histories of my internet-idol and I and officially enlisted their assistance. I had to be frank. Now [View Full Entry]

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I sat through another hellish day in a snowglobe-Montreal, nursing another hangover, recounting my adventures and scratching away glozen days from calender, plotting my final weeks at school and my escape into summer. I put on a play last night--Something I had written in my freshmen year for a girl I had a crush on (naturally, "she couldn't make it")- -A plucky romantic comedy in one act from the early days of my male-female dialogical abstractions phase (still ongoing if you haven't noticed). And I have been too preoccupied with it's preparations to spare some thought to phrasing [View Full Entry]

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Probably, the most bizarre thing about the last conclusory episode of Volume II of "Memoirs of a Gaijin" is that it lacked a conlusion. Unlike the year before there was no grand sweeping statements to be found to summarize the learning of the adventure, point towards the future and justify my ways to man. Commentary was almost absent entirely. My actions were stated, as barely as I found myself able, and then I left. That was all. Part of the reason for this was, I myself was never able to come to a conclusion as to what exactly it was I [View Full Entry]

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It literally means “The Battle of Legend” a name used to signify the classic clash of perennial central league archrivals, the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo and our loveable Hanshin Tigers of Osaka. Ah baseball…It started with baseball. And so it shall end. I picked up my bike from the train station after being struck out for the last time by Miss Takahashi and promptly headed over to the Retro. I wasn’t planning on crying, but I was still in a mood that could’ve been helped by some electrolovemusic. When I walked in, it was packed full of randos and some DJ [View Full Entry]

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