Winding Down the Show

My date of departure approaches. I leave Japan on the morning of December 28th for a three month absence that will have me circumnavigate the planet by airplane – seriously. APU, bless its frosty heart, is doing all it can to make me desperate to leave. Winter so far has been unseasonably cold – we’ve had snow 5 out of the last 7 days, including the current tempest I woke up to this morning. I enjoy snow, very much in fact – but the snow I enjoy falls gently down to earth, accumulating into a beautiful silent white panorama as far as the eye can see. APU snow, on the other hand, on account of our ever-present hellacious winds, *never* accumulates. Instead, it prefers to stubbornly drive itself into your eyes, up your nose, and occasionally even into your ears. I don’t particularly enjoy this…

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Memoirs of a Gaikokujin

They tell me time is relative, which is the only explanation I can conceive of to explain how I managed to go 5 days without writing a journal, and yet it felt like no more than 2… Things have been busy here, but it is the kind of busy that is, for lack of a better phrase, not busy. To elaborate, there are days when you wake up in the morning with nothing planned, anticipating time to do things you would otherwise put off, like vacuuming the floor, or bathing. Yet as the day wears on, one thing after another appears that needs attending to, and before you know it the sun has set and while you’ve been busy all day, you don’t feel as if you’ve accomplished anything.

I have decided that this is what it must feel like to work in an office.

I digress. Today, with 5 associates, I journeyed to the far off city of Oita (10min train ride) to visit what you folks would call a “movie theater.” The talkie that we had chosen to see was none other than Sayuri, which was released nationwide yesterday.

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It’s Windy Here

Underneath every aspect of APU life there has been one thing, one theme, one reality that is so constant that it simply cannot be denied. In fact, the existence of the thing of which I speak is so certain that it might as well be considered the genesis of Truth itself. That thing… is wind. Laugh not at this seemingly simple observation. I have heard of places on this fair planet that are what you might call “windy.” Chicago seems to be one place in particular that carries with it a sort of mythos of moving air…

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