Entries this day: Ultimate! hitomi

Ultimate!

12:02pm JST Sunday 18 September 2005

Holy shaiza!

For the first time in a long time, it looks like I will be able to play ultimate today! I have worked every weekend that I've lived in Japan, with notably few exceptions. Therefore I have never joined the only ultmate group listed in Metropolis, which meets on Sundays at 2:30pm.

It's funny that I'm wondering if I should introduce myself as Wonderboy or as Rob...... I don't have either of my discs (which were labeled WONDERBOY) because one was lost in Vietnam, and the other I donated to the 51st voyage (in a "magnanimous" gesture of reducing the amount of crap I'm lugging around).

Not that discs are crap, but.

1:01am JST Monday 19 September 2005

Huge fun at ultimate. Met a lot of cool peeps and then went to a bit of a party afterward. I enjoyed chatting with Koki and Ii and a woman named Wakako, but she was drunk. Koki is working hard at school and work. Ii is Chinese with really good English and Japanese to boot.

11:39am JST Monday 19 September 2005

Yesterday I headed out to ultimate around 12:45, having read on the Outdoor Japan website some people saying "let's start at 1pm." Walking from the station along the river, I saw a model being photographed by about 15 guys with cameras. I watched, curious to know how *she* was chosen, and if I thought she was particularly cute and BAM I stubbed my toe on a rock and kinda tripped, immediately embarassed to have become the stereotypical chickless movie character guy not watching where he was going while watching a girl and BAM.

I caught myself with little effort and wondered what the heck I had hit. Looked back and didn't see anything. My toe hurt a bit more than just a bump; I looked down to see a flap on my big toe layed open. About a centimeter in diameter.

Man.

I absolutely refused the idea of letting it stop me from playing ultimate, but I didn't refuse the idea of borrowing some white tape to cover it. While walking beside baseball teams practicing, I humbly interrupted one of the manager-looking guys and asked for "sports tape," using Japanese pronunciation: "supotzu tapu," and showed my toe. True to Japanese helpfulness, he immediately sprang into action and located their medical bag and produced two bandaids.

I thanked him and put them on, knowing they wouldn't last long. Walked a while in search of the ultimate group as the bandaids quickly started flapping off. Saw two people playing disc and made one last effort to get sports tape before I went out to play. Talked to the nearby manager and he produced one bandaid, which I used to sorta cover the flappage.

Walked over to the couple playing disc, but they said they were just playing alone and didn't know of any ultimate pickup game. Hmmm. Okay; fair enough; and I continued walking past that field in search of ultimate.

Shortly, I heard someone shouting "hey!" more and more vigorously so I turned around, quite sure no one could be shouting for me, and quite surprised to find they were shouting for me. It was the couple I had seen playing frisbee. They had come and tracked me down to say that the ultimate frisbee guys had arrived at the same area they had been playing before.

Wow. I totally thanked these two guys for having gone out of their way to find me; I definitely appreciate it.

Walked back to the ultimate field, where five people were playing. Looked down to see how my bandaids were holding out. Still going strong. Walked across the field and looked down to find the bandaids had completely escaped. But the blood had stopped, and the cut was filled with a fine blood stopping layer of dust, so it should be no problem.

We tossed discs around for about an hour until we had enough people to play four on four. I showed Izumi how to more properly throw a forehand and saw that Adam had quite a lot of ultimate experience, and Hisa could do some cool disc spinning tricks on his fingers, and Ii could catch quite well.

hitomi

1:09am JST Monday 19 September 2005

Argh.

Why am I so frickin' nice?