Hooray!

Nothing much to talk about. I finished my first week at Higashiura. I was nervous about the change but I like this new place better. I work in a mall now. I don't know if that's funny or not. I feel a tad lame, but working in a mall has its advantages. First of all, the food options have gotten much better. In Handa City I ate at the grocery store or McDonalds almost everyday. Now I have tons of options and nothing is particularly expensive. I've been eating ongiri for the past week. They're rice balls, wrapped up in seaweed, with different kinds of fish as the filling. The tuna and mayonnaise ones are fucking delicious.

I haven't heard back from Teruko since we went to that Salsa club. I hadn't planned on talking to her again after that night and I guess she came to the same conclusion.

My roommate Tom won't leave me the fuck alone. More often than not I don't want to talk to him, or anyone else for that matter. Jah help me when we're home at the same time because I find myself his captive audience. He seems completely oblivious to my body language and one word answers. Even when I retreat to my room he'll follow me and talk to my from the doorway. It wouldn't be so bad but he's boring, can't listen to me without interrupting, and is pretty insulting in an unintentional way. I was cooking yesterday and he came up to me to see if I could help him remember the 10 commandments. Good question. Let me think. I got it! Thou shalt not ask your roommate pointless questions when thou hast a computer and internet access in your room. His room is coincidently where its nice and quiet and I'm not currently located. I told my other roommate David that he was annoying the shit out of me and he said that they're both aware that I don't like to talk sometimes and maybe Tom's just doing all of this to fuck with me. If that's the case, then him and I are going to wind up in a bad place very quickly because I don't have any more patience for him and could smash him into the ground.

I had my first level 2 student the other day. The highest level at Handa is a 4, but we do a couple of level 3's in man-to-man lessons only. They're all pretty weak 3's too. So this 2 lived in San Francisco for 6 years, and went to San Francisco State where she majored in Psychology or something. So our conversation went something like:

Unprepared sensei: Hello!
Cute Level 2: Hey, how're you doin'?
Unprepared sensei: Oh. Pretty good, how about yourself?
Cute level 2: Fine, but this morning I got caught in traffic and it took forever to get here.
Unprepared sensei: I see... ummm... so you lived in the States?
Cute level 2: Yeah, I lived in San Francisco for 6 years before coming back to Japan.
Unprepared Sensei: Oh. What do you do?
Cute level 2: I teach English to little kids.
Unprepared sensei: Ok... Do you like art?
Cute level 2: Yeah, I'm really into Pop Art right now. I just finished a book that I think Andy Warhol wrote or something, and he just seemed so sad to me.
Unprepared sensei: Was the book 'A to Z with Andy Warhol' or something like that?
Cute level 2: Yeah, it might have been.
Unprepared sensei: Yeah, I read that back in Boston.
Cute level 2: Cool.

Her fluency was just a little bit slower than mine but her vocabulary was as good or better than most native speakers'. So we just chatted about art and America and her (god-dammit) boyfriend. Why she needs Nova I have no idea since I was unable to tell her anything she didn't already know. She looked a little Emo to me with her big square frames and second-hand t-shirt. I like it as a look though.

Other than a kid's class in which this little shit likes to scream in my ear, Higashiura is pretty awesome actually.