Hungover 02/13/2012
 
There was a party at my school today. We ate special tomato and soy milk stew and then myself and a couple of students came. As usual I woke up with some regrets about the night. I realise now that I only asked the younger single lady students to come to karaoke with me. It was unintentional but it makes me wonder what people at the time thought. Probably nothing. Hopefully nothing. There hasn`t been any real backlash from a night out since I called my sister-in-laws parents house at 2 o`clock in the morning and told them my brother had just hugged a lady with big breasts. They weren`t too happy about that.
I`ve been asked to write articles for 2 local magazines. I hate writing. I don`t know why we write since we invented speaking, but since it was my teacher who I pay far too little for lessons for and who even makes me little packed lunches when I go to my Japanese tests in the morning, I couldn`t really refuse her. Thats for the Niihama magazine. The other magazine is one thats distributed around Imabari. I feel like refusing that one but she has my phone email address. She has asked me to write something of around 600 words. No specifics, just something. She wants that by the end of February. I have 2 weeks. It`s a little ridiculous. What`s also ridiculous is that she goes on in her email to ask if I would like to be papa monkey in a party for kids. I have ignored her.
In the week I attended a local festival. It was bitterly cold that day but Yoko and I went down to the seafront and got in line with the other attendees. It was the 19th Memorial of puffer fish ancestors day in Niihama. We had all gathered to remember the pufferfish that we had eaten in the past, and thank them for giving up their lives so that we could eat their livers and other fleshy bits. It started off with this guy speaking in tongues and handing out branches of trees for local dignitaries. We then all moved out to the dockside where crates of live pufferfish were waiting. A nice city official gave up his chance so that I could have a go. I put on some gloves and a man handed me my fish. I was stood next to the mayor at that time and he knew what was expected so he explained to me that on the count of three we would hurl them into the sea as a mark of respect. I think Yoko managed to get a photo of me. I felt awkward lobbing it one so i really only dropped mine, but the mayor really gave it his all and actually his came pretty close to ricocheting off a nearby boat. He seemed proud with his throw and he shook me by the hand.
One other thing I`ve had half an eye on this week has been the language of youth. I happen to notice the word bitch, or me bitches used a lot by young British ladies. They seem to think they are American hip hop artists. I personally have only ever used that word ironically, and I`m not suggesting they start using language like "Hello Roger, pass me one of those delicious turnips" or something, but if a young lady of today said that it`d be more like "Oi me sweet ass bitch, give us some of that f$&#$ing turnip, would" NO. GET YOUR OWN!!
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relaxation 02/06/2012
 
its kind of pointless me writing anything here as ive done bugger all, all weekend. It has been a weekend of rest and yet while that is the case I am exhausted as a result of it. Yesterday I went down to tokushima. Its the anniversary of yokos mother passing so she goes there each year to light a jostic. While we were there we took her dog for a walk in the local area. Yokos dog is a female dog so it doesnt try to hump my leg like any male dog does. We also visited yokos grandmother who filled us up with some delicious sweet bean paste soup before meeting up with yokos brother and sister-in-law, who were far too excited with the fact that i was gonna have dinner with yokos dad later. They were suggesting raising beers with him and stuff. I couldnt see what the occassion was really so instead i had a nice chat with him about sean connery and cell biology.
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In order to stem the tide of nose bleeds I have recently taken to applying copious amounts of vacaline up my nose. It seems to work. I haven`t had my regular nose geezer in a while, but at events such as todays street market I am reminded of the unfortunate side-effect of the treatment. That side-effect being that as I walk around the streets seeing exciting and exotic foods from around ehime, all I can smell is petrol. There was local fried chicken from the guy who says "I love chicken" constantly, there was a stall that sold boar meat burgers, hundreds of peculiar shaped vegetables and massive bags of crackers that could take months to get through. I ended up chatting with the president of Japanese juggling society. He was a nice man. From what I could figure out. According to some historical documents and some pictures he had, up until only about 400 years ago most of Europe had been juggling with pig bones and it was only until the Japanese got a hold of the traditional hobby that it was changed to cloth balls. I ran that one past my main dadio and he seems to think thats a whole load of cobblers, but then he wasn`t there being presented with the cold hard facts.
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allergies 01/16/2012
 
I remember I was laughed at when I said that I thought I might be allergic to my own hair. I searched it online and I found a whole load of people who say they have the same problem. They all say their doctors also laughed at them. Who`s laughing now? I`ll tell you who isnt laughing, my skin specialist!! I went to him and he sorted me out with some anti-allergy drugs. He did laugh but not because of my theory. For some reason he laughed when he saw the strange infection i have at the side of my mouth. It didnt seem an appropriate time to laugh to be honest but I think hes going a little doodlally with his age.
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Luck 01/09/2012
 
Well that was 3 weeks ago and this is now. I`ve prayed to three separate gods to make this year less shite than the last. I`ve bought omikuji (fortune telling lucky papers) in a shrine with a two meter dong and I`ve bought a wooden thing that has paper around it. Nothing can go wrong. I figure the gods have gotta cut me some slack this year anyway. I have a beard right now that is frankly pitiful! but thats probably not something they take into consideration when dividing out the years worth of luck. From what I can tell you have to work your ass to the bone if you wanna make it in this world and I worked so hard last year I had local ivory hunter poaching my ass to make pianos!! I didnt really but here`s a picture of a cock...
Its from uwajima shrine in Ehime. I went there having seen it online. I had also read that there was a porn museum built right next to it so I went there too in the same holiday. I was a little disappointed really. It was a bit of a cop out. On the first floor there were photos some guy took of african ladies from tribes who were topless and then there was a lady breast feeding a child, which the guy was on hand with a camera for to add to his collection. I mean I admire the opportunism but I recon I could probably watch that kind of stuff before the water shed between the price is right and university challenge. It got a bit more racey upstairs but for me the freakiest thing wasnt the exhibition it was the fact that on the top floor with the naughtiest, kinkiest stuff (I`m t there was a mother with what I assume was her 16 year old son. It was the wierdest thing. The son was terrified as you would be at 16 while the mother was pointing out the best bits to him. Sex de should never be provided by any member of the family. It should be done as it was done for me, by that video in biology class with the naked tennis players.
Oh I also went to Ozu and Uchiko in my break. They`re beautiful places so I feel I should save them for my more normal blogs.
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What is woman? 01/09/2012
 
Our first Christmas party is over. We`ve got 4 more to get through. Our game at the start was a marginal success. If i was a kid i would have loved it but the difference presumably is that I`m not a girl. The idea was that Santa had been working so hard making presents that he made himself extra tired and went to bed early. The problem was that he was so tired that he started sleepwalking and walked all the way to the barbers where he awoke to find that half of his beard had been shaved off. The game then required the kids to stick vaseline on their noses and then race to retrieve cotton balls from a basket by sticking them to their noses and bringing them to santas photo to complete the beard. The problem was that as soon as I mentioned that we would be putting sticky oily stuff on our noses there was a loud cry of "YADDA", which mean "No way you lunatic", and then they all hid in the corner. If I were a kid I would have loved getting slimy stuff on my nose but as I say this may just be one of those differences between men and women that I am unaware of.
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This weekend has been mental. Towards the end of the year people in Japan get together for bounenkai`s or end of year parties with coworkers, friends or whoever really. I had three this weekend. The first was karaoke with my footsal team who are a pretty wild group. Todays was with our landlord, a thoroughly nice guy who genuinely loves to help. Our second was a "owners of businesses" party. It was weird the variety of guests. There was a guy would owned a dog shampoo shop and the host intorduced Yoko to the doctor of a womens clinic (we dont know what he was implying there). there was a guy who owned two hotels and a chain of restaurants and towel shops. He was thinking of making a Niihama towel so because Niihama is next to the tallest mountain in west Japan I gave him the idea of rolling a towel up and twisting it around and around in a spiral so it looked like a mountain. I think he was impressed. For a big business man he was a nice chap too actually.
Yoko and I were sat at a table with a bartender who was already wasted before the party had even began. He kissed my face later in the night. We also met a friendly young lady who was actually good friends with one of my students, and as I have stated before in my blog, there is always something I regret from a night out. It wasn`t really my fault. She was taking photos of the bar and for a joke I thought I`d pose for her to take a photo of me. We had chatted for a while so I then thought it might be nice for her to join us mingling around the room. Its often awkward thinking of things to say at first so its better to go as a crowd. I prepared the Japanese in my head to ask her. Yoko saw me thinking about how to word something in Japanese and she preempted me, translating my thoughts as "You can stick that in your blog if you like", refering to the photo she had just taken. I didn`t care at the time that I was misquoted but looking back it must`ve seemed slightly big-headed to jokingly request someone take a photo of me and then pretty much say "Stick it in your diary. It`s a day to remember. You just met Owain Smith!!"
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Im pretty much contributing to 3 blogs right now. Ive discussed in detail which part of my brother I`d eat first if I really had to. Ive talked about diffusing stink bugs every morning and the beautiful autumn leaves, and Christmas. I dont really know whats left to write on this one but I guess one thing that has been on my mind recently has been dreams. This morning I dreamt that my arms were like a real mans. They were muscly and kind of hairy like popeye and I was so happy that I finally had arms to be proud of, and I was just wondering if these are the kinds of dreams I should still be having at the age of 29. Surely my subconscious should be more focused on getting a good equity plan or something.
Oh and I watched the new Tin Tin movie on the weekend. It was brilliant fun. I was cracking up throughout.
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One of the weekly occurances with GEOS in most schools was managers of the schools receiving phone calls from weirdoes. Generally they would call to ask what kind of underwear the managers were wearing that kind of thing, but one of my favourite stories about life working for GEOS is my friends. She worked as a manager for 4 or 5 schools  and one guy always seemed to track her down and ask her weird stuff wherever she went. In one phone call she didnt recognise him and he pretended to be interested in joining the school so she was required to be nice and try to get him to come to the school for a level check with a teacher and . He had other plans though. He said he wanted to help her with her interview technique for when he did visit. They were to roleplay various situations. In the first situation he was a man who was interested in group lessons. She went through the procedure with him and he gave her feedback. In the next he was a little girl and she was doing the interview. Apparently he then went on to fake a girls voice and he pretended that he was being naughty and she had to discipline him. For the final roleplay he was to be a glamous women who he described in detail. She had a big bust and a slim body. She did the interview, though Im guessing she was a little suspiscious at this point. He wasn`t impressed with her interview technique and he told her straight. If you are going to do an interview with a glamorous lady you must first compliment her on her great hips and big breasts!! Sage words indeed.
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As you may have noticed, I havent been able to include any photos in any of my posts of late. I have another blog which Im contributing to more regularly and if anything exciting happens to me in the week I would stick a photo of it on there. Now I like to think people who do read my blog, if I were to draw a pie chart, would comprise of 50 percent people who I have made good friends with over the year, 20 percent people who are interested in Japanese culture, another 10 percent are people who genuinely are lost in Japan and searching for emergency services online and the final part I`d probably draw like an actual pie because I would probably have gotten a bored by that point .
For the 20 percent who want to hear about Japan a little more, I thought in this post Id write a little about my experience working with GEOS, an English conversation school that I worked for for about 6 years. Im pretty sure most teachers have funny stories about it because compared to working in the UK, it was a little bizarre. In my last posting I talked about going to the doctors so I thought a tie in with that would be timely.
When I worked for GEOS we had to have yearly check ups. I used to go to this doctor whose grandchildren I taught. He was nice enough, but his English was a little off at times. I remember when I went into the X-ray room I was told to "inflame my lungs", which was baffling to say the least. The other thing that always annoyed me was the kind of grading system they used to explain your healthiness to you. There were 3 levels in all. The first was "healthy and able to work", the second was "unhealthy but able to work" and the third was "unhealth and unable to work" and there was nothing in between. Those were the only results we received.
One year my results were "unhealthy and unable to work" and I was a little shocked. I hadnt a clue if that meant unhealthy and getting worse or unhealthy but will get better soon so I requested more information from GEOS head office, where my full results used to be sent. I talked with the head office member in charge and she said she would find out for me and within a week she got back to me to say that there was protein in my pee, which meant I was tired or exhausted. I didnt enquire further as she told me it wasnt a problem.
Now one of my good friends was working in head office at that time. He worked for an entirely different department but he gave me a call for some reason and the first thing he said to me was "Hi Owain. How`s your yellow pee?" It must have been discussed all around the office. Now surely thats private information!! I don`t know if thats just GEOS or if it`s all Japanese companies, but it felt like an only in Japan moment for me.
One thing I did want to mention to the mumster. We`ve managed to get the picture up on the wall now. Its in a safe spot from children and people can see it easily.
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