Entries this day: Day Mandarin Yamamba

Day

4:ish pm JST Wednesday 26 May 2004

I'm on my way to Shinjuku to take my first Mandarin lesson. I don't have my computer (because my back still hurts a bit) so I'm writing this on a scrap of paper to transcribe later. This is when I think, wouldn't it be cool to have a recorder that could record my spoken thoughts and then have them transcribed? I want to get a recorder with removable memory so I can record tons (and possibly not even *have* my computer for weeks (the horror!) and still end up with a well-filled journal at the end) without running out of memory.

I spent a lot of time with Hitomi recently, which was not exactly on my schedule originally, but we had fun and talked a lot. I told her a thing that my dad told me, using trees as explanation. My dad drew a picture of two trees; I used kanji. It described relationships: if I'm in a relationship like a tree leaning on another tree, if the first tree leaves (as trees are want to do) (no pun intended) then the other tree will fall.

That leaning tree is how I used to be in relationship with Christine, back in my college days. Now I'm in Japan, leaning away from all other trees, sorta kinda.

Today, though a bit late after all that talkin', I was like fuckit, I still got time to do shit and I wrote to Carla and Colleen, bought a notepad for my Mandarin studies (the notepad says "when you put the pen nib on this pad,you find out an advantage of it." (including no space after the comma) which I thought was perfect to prove that bad Mandarin is better than no Mandarin. And researched getting iListen software so I can record and transcribe instead of type.

Mandarin

10:38pm JST Wednesday 26 May 2004

Met Shufen. Went to a cafe on 7th floor of Lumine1 in Shinjuku. Yammered mostly in English and then she showed me the 4 tones of Mandarin (plus 1 shortened "tone") and about 5 sentences including 8 kanji.

I recognize some of the kanji from Japanese.

I don't yet know 1) how to type the Chinese kanji on here, and 2) how to tell my website how to tell web browsers in what language the characters are encoded.

Yamamba

11:27pm JST Wednesday 26 May 2004

Sigh. I was too nervous/shy to ask the yamamba girl *anything* - for her picture or HI or anything. I didn't want to hang out with her; I just wanted her pic.

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I had walked from Mandarin lesson to Yoyogi station by way of the bookstore where we will meet next week to find a Mandarin book (and I looked for the げんき 1 workbook (they had げんき 2, but not 1), and looked at some of the computer books; chose not to buy anything, including not any of the how-to-be-successful books that I happened across at the end) and then got off the train at Harajuku cause I haven't walked from Harajuku to Shibuya in a while.

Due to 'perfect' timing, I saw the most yamamabastic yamamba girl I've ever seen up close. I kinda stalked her while she was walking the same direction as I on the way home; I would keep walking ahead and then stopping so I could watch her go by. It's the face that's so made up; dark skin, white lips, whitely dusted nose, dark mascara with white around it. The white around her dark mascara was little dots, about 50 under each eye. Turns out she went to my same train line, so I stood by her in the carriage.

She was picking at a wound on her hand; I chided myself later that I could have asked her what happened to her hand, and maybe just maybe that would have made her day brighter so she could talk about the pain she was enduring. Or maybe not.

I have her image in my mind; that will have to do. Oh, the white dots under her eyes were hearts. So かわいい。