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More thoughts on staying and going.

Hits (as in, coolness)
Fireworks!

Fireworks

umm…and fireworks.

Misses (as in, stuff I miss)
Having real speakers instead of laptop ones
Having a non-itchy nose (Is it the detergent? The AC? The office? Who knows…)

But back to the fireworks!  Sumida river’s fireworks festival/hanabi taikai (literally, fire flower big event) is one of the biggest in Tokyo.  What’s awesome is Japanese people love fireworks, and lots of cities have these festivals. There are 12 within the 23 Tokyo city wards alone, plus a bunch more in the Kanto area.  Annd they publish the # of fireworks getting launched at each one, so you can identify the biggies!

They sell sparklers and stuff at the supermarket too. Fireworks, friends, and fooood. Kind of impossible to not be super happy with that triple threat combo.  I contributed Tabish’s banana bread.  Was well received, of course.

Gonna have to have me another little party sometime soon, methinks.  Heh, after I check out the one at Meiji Jingu this Thursday.  Clocks in at a pretty sizable 10,000 fizzies.  Really…you can’t have too enough of sparkly lights and good company.  No pics to take at this one though.  SLR is out on loan for the week.

I’ve found that I’m really good at convincing other people, when I’ve actually fooled myself first.

And in the same way that you can magically ignore text messages when you know who they’re from and don’t care, you can amazingly ignore (and hence convince yourself) of surprisingly interesting things.

Say, hypothetically, one is leaving a comfortable (mosquito free!) apartment with an awesome view in a delicious (in many ways) city.

Say, in as soon as…hm…let’s just pick…eleven…weeks.

In such a case, it makes sense to, for the sake of sanity and general happiness, change the brain’s course from the pattern of “but I haven’t..” and “there’s still….!”or “but the __ is SO GOOD” and .. right.

It becomes useful to observe that…

• The current English reading collection pathetic
• $5 for a mealy apple is unacceptable
• Having more fingers than good friends is somewhat sad
• Watching So You Think You Can Dance over low def flash video is even sadder

And on the flip(state)side um…

• The Camry needs some love
• A batch of unfinished smackdown is begging to be delivered.  Two batches, actually.
• Whole Foods Sandwiches
• People. Dogs.  Dogs that aren’t like little children with bug eyes and rhinestone accessories and…
• Really Spicy Food
• Non goopy “Chinese” food

Righto.  Tally ho, and all that.  Looks like I’ll be seeing most of ya’ll sooner rather than later.

Hypothetically, that is.  Haven’t quite bought my ticket yet. ;) 11 weeks is a long time!

I’ll need it.  Lots of stuff to do.

Stuff like…trying miso ice cream.

(FYI: It tastes like rich, buttery caramel.  Totally gonna try to make it myself someday.)

…is always a little disturbed. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the fan that you left on because of the heat. Maybe it’s weird karma floating around from last week’s solar eclipse.

Whatever it was, I had a really weird, really distinct dream last night.  It all had the feel of a happy Ray Bradbury short story. Based in the real world, with eerie fantastical elements, but completely safe at the same time.

The parts I remember went something like this…

I was headed back to my high school, to try out, for all things, the track team. It was the same sort of dark, pre-dawn warm almost-summer morning the kind I remember from the relaxed end of swim season.   I was carpooling with my non-swimmer carpool buddy (real person who failed to recognize me at another’s friend’s wedding a few years ago), and somehow we ended up on the highway, and then in Thailand, drinking frosty fruit things, on a very large boat. More like a moving building, really.

We were there, apparently, to get our fortunes told. While waiting for Fortune Teller #1, who was an elderly white mother of my nonexistent friend Michelle (my brain is very detailed when making stuff up), we stopped by what I assume was a more junior fortune teller.  This fellow was a bit like the goofy neighborhood boy in Coraline. (That one’s name, by the way, is Wybie. And there are a surprising number of Wybie <3 Coraline videos online, but no real clips. Odd.)  This one decided that out of my (now numerous) friends, I should get my fortune told last, because, you know,  mine was special, so there might be a lot to talk about.  Best not to rush the imaginary soothsaying.

The track team tryouts?  Oh, well, we’d figure something out later.  Maybe we’d be back in time. You know how it goes.

After waiting what seemed a moment (magic of dreams), there was only one person left between me and the guy who, um… was now wearing thick circle goggles.  Anyhow, the one person in front of me was a bookwormish Real Person, also from high school.  I remember hearing that she went to Berkeley, and haven’t heard from/about her since.  Odd that she’d appear here.  Anyhow,  as she moved her  away from the table, it was finally my turn!

Taking a good look at this floppy fellow, with a smile and head cocked to one side…I was kinda curious to see what my fortune was gonna be.  Really curious.

…But then the bread machine that I’d carefully set the night before beeped, and the real world smell of fresh bread reminded me I had a 7:30 am meeting to be getting to.

Maybe the moral of the story is, don’t wait in line?  Ditch the old high school non-friends if I see ’em, because they’ll just get in my way?  Alas.  Maybe I’ll try eating super spicy food and sleeping with AC off today.

This kinda weirdness happens to me when seasons change too. I feel like I usually forget those, though.