Entries this day: Cutting_lunch_losses Lunch_with_Hitomi More_free_internet Work

Cutting lunch losses

10:35am JST Tuesday 15 June 2004

Fuck.

"Get over it," is, of course, the correct answer.

I was super happy when one of my students said, "get over it," to me when I was talking about the agony of finding nothing but horses in the Calpis boxes.

Today's agony is having neglected to start the rice cooker before I went to buy eggs and spinach. The rice could have been cooking while I was walking.. Arg. I guess I'm not an expert chef yet.

11:08am

I meditated on the situation; tried to grok it.

I wrote a note and put it on the rice cooker, "I cooked this rice, but I have to leave before it finishes. はいどぞう Enjoy free rice."

I decided it was more important to stick to my committment of meeting Hitomi for lunch (on time) than to cook rice; I can just pay for lunch there.

On the way walking to the train station { and unless the train-route-finder miscalculated how quickly I can find the train in Oyama station, I'll be on time to meet Hitomi } I decided that my brain enjoys optimizing things, but is not always the expert optimizer because some things are more important to optimze than others. I realize this discussion is an attempt to quantify or actually describe imprecisely through words the workings of an organic blob in my head, trying to explain illogical processes with logic, but but, brain overload; brain cannot logic brains own self into logicality.

Reboot; try again:

My brain wants to optimize things. But it uses a set of rules that is incomplete.. or maybe a set of rules that don't seem to result in what is optimal.. oh! I know what it might be; my right brain using math and rigorous logic comes up with a different solution than my left brain.

But that is just a rule I've heard and stored away (somewhere) and can use it to reconcile my own frustration at things not having turned out the way I originally planned. That's what this is all about. (hahaha; the brain has once again come up with a solution that it thinks is even simpler; explains the theory of the universe with one simple solution.)

Damn; instead of writing all this crap; I should have been studying Chinese.

1:09pm

haha! This time in Tokyo Teleport, the station with free internet access, I remained seated (and connected) long enough to get my journal entries uploaded while the train waited for its moment to leave. I got on the train just a few seconds before the doors closed.

Lunch with Hitomi

1:16pm JST Tuesday 15 June 2004

Lunch with Hitomi was nice by the bay. Bright sun; families with kids and couples and businessmen enjoyed the weater. Kids swam in the bay, boats boated around. We ate bentos from SunKus and chatted brokenly in English and Japanese. Fun stuff.

We'll hang out tonight after our respective jobs finish. I was willing to loan my key to my room, but basically took back the offer because I want to be there when she sees the Winnie the Pooh sandals I bought for her to walk around the house (in the past she's been slomping around in my huge sandals). I don't know if the sandals are too big, but if they are, I wanna be able to tell her to not feel obligated to wear them; we can exchange them. But I couldn't give her my key, tell her to not notice the sandals, (and if she did notice, to not assume she had to accept them if they're too big,) and not tell her I got her sandals.

More free internet

1:22pm JST Tuesday 15 June 2004

Wow. It seems that internet access is available at more than one (many?) points along the Rinkai line. I'm at a set of three computers (that require 100 yen per ten minutes of use, but) next to which I can get an internet signal at no charge.

This makes me think it will soon (as these free access points become more common) be necessary to implement the secure pop3 access that I was reading about before. I wonder how to verify that it's working.

1:26pm

But right now I need to get off the fucking computer and study!

Work

11:45am JST Wednesday 16 June 2004

Second to last lesson was with a woman who commented on the herd of horses on my bookshelf.

"What their name?"

I wrote her sentence as, "What ___ their name ?" and she couldn't correct it.

I asked and wrote a new sentence, "How many horses are there?"

She counted in Japanese and then gave me the answer.

"Can you make a sentence?"

"Thirteen horse ... there." '...' indicates her pause, not what I wrote.

"Good Japanese grammar." I rearranged the sentence on paper.

"There ___ 13 horse__"

"Are."

"Excellent."

"There are 13 horse..es."

"Faster."

"There are 13 horses."

"Okay good;" I pointed to her first question.

"Are?"

"Yes!"

"What are their name..z."

"Okay, please ask me."

"What are their names?"

"Their names are Joe, Julie, Juniper, Julius, Jasper, Jericho, George, Jeff, James, Jorge, Janette, Janet and Jane." Fuckin' hell how did I not think of janette sooner?

"Really?"

"No." rising tone to indicate the preposterousness of the possibility.

I changed the last one to Junko because that was her name, and gave her a yellow horse (one of five yellow horses).

Last lesson was with a cat (not a horse, mind you) named Takuyuki, who is super laid back; almost beyond my preference, but definitely cool.