Entries this day: AM_Study Jump_trains Work after_work

AM Study

8:37am JST Saturday 26 June 2004

Listened to Genki Japanese CD 3 on repeat last night. Good stuff.

Jump trains

9:32am JST Saturday 26 June 2004

Just to say I did it (and to get a seat), I switched from the Tokyu Toyoko line to the Tokyu Meguro line. I should be able to switch back at Denenchofu without having to wait for another Toyoko train. Oops. Maybe not; that was a close call at this station. Ah well; I got a seat.

Work

1:37am JST Sunday 27 June 2004

12 lessons at work today. I was a bit tired by the end, not being as forgiving or generous or whatever it is that I normally am during lessons. But, the dude obviously hadn't been studying. Man; I'm so fickle and unforgiving now that I've started studying.

I enjoyed chatting with a few chatty students today; Junko passed her LUT with pretty much no problem. She wanted to review, so I was like, "aight," and as soon as she answered the first question (with a grammar yet beyond that which was requested), I knew she would finish the review and pass the test in the same lesson. Money.

Jesse and I played hackeysack during our 5:30 break after we got non-caffeine genki drinks from the woman giving them away across the street. They worked, or the placebo effect was great; Jesse and I were doing some mad kicks and awesome hackey sackey moves that we hadn't been able to do before.

There was a scooter nearby labeled SCOOPY, which is either a brand name or model name that I've seen on other scooters (or this one scooter is stalking me) and the sack landed over near the scooter and I was like, "hey scooter, that was to you," and Jesse said something else and I was like, "don't be scoopid," but it was funny and not mean sounding like it sounds in this story. Jesse laughed more than I thought was appropriate for the joke; it wasn't *that* funny, but it certainly wasn't mean. Anyway; it was funny.

I wrote 8 postcards to different students today. And I got two 5-5s in the past couple of days. That's awesome for me; I had been lagging way behind; I got zero for the last paycheck, but I think they got cancelled because I had a couple of 2-2s. Oops. But it's set so I won't have those students again.

after work

1:48am JST Sunday 27 June 2004

After work, I found Hitomi waiting outside for me; that was nice. We went to a local takoyaki place (even closer than the one Jesse and I went to a couple weeks ago) and met her friends ゆか、　ひとみ、and とみー。 Hitomi and Hitomi were like perapera penguins talking 100 miles per hour, and Yuka and Tomi were much slower speakers. Tomi spoke almost as little as I did. When they pointed out that Yuka spoke more slowly, I became conscious of the different speeds of their speech. I could begin to measure the syllables per second (not count, but get-a-gist-for) for each of them. That was pretty cool; Japanese suddenly became another level easier to understand.

The flat screen TV featured a wack "drama" that ended with a man shooting either himself or a woman dressed in white on a cliff overlooking a beach (they didn't show the actual shooting, and I wasn't paying attention (possibly I wouldn't have known had I been paying attention) to the show anyway) and then a nature show on rabbits that look like big mice with big ears or big squirrels with big ears or little rabbits with small round ears. Cute.