Un-smush, wireless, and beer breath

For round 2 of fun yet painful dance class, I actually talked to some people.  One gal could actually say my name like Audrey vs. o-doe-ree (the asian-ified way) … because she’d watched episodes of 24. Apparently there’s an Audrey on 24?  Anyhow, she’s been taking jazz hip hop for the past 10 years.  Another person had been taking this specific teacher’s classes for two years.  

Learning this kinda helped my flattened ego start to peel itself off of the floor.  That, and the fact that this week was easier because the classes built on last week’s choreography.  I just take care NOT to look at myself in the mirror.  A bunch of the kiddies (16-30 y/o kids) brought video cameras – I guess so they can tape the teacher and practice at home.  The funny thing was, a lot of them were video-ing on their phones.  One gal didn’t have her phone handy when everyone ELSE was taping, so she actually took a video of someone’s camera as it played back the original clip.  

In other news, I am once again typing from my bed.  There seem to be lots of hot water bottles for sale in the stores these days, for warming people and their beds, but it’s tough to beat a nice warm macbook on these chilly nights.   That is to say – I broke down and finally got wireless, via a $50 teensy router.  Seriously, this thing is palm-sized.  I briefly wandered into a large electronics store, saw lots of bigger, ooglier, unnecessarily pricier options, and decided that while hated-on by bloggers, really this little guy wasn’t so bad.  Soo…if you’re in the neighborhood and see an audrey-sub network, that’s me!

There’s a distinctly gross, damp beer breath smell that’s invading my ride home EVERY SINGLE DAY this past week, and there’s only one thing to blame – bonenkai season.   Bonenkai is literally the “forget year party” where people get drunk, forgive and forget the year’s mistakes and transgressions…and then stink up my subway ride home.  Yeeah.  I’ve been sleeping and getting home later since arriving here, so my subway ride home gets me to Shibuya at around 11 or 11:30 pretty often.  The later it gets, the more drunk people you find dragging their slobbery selves to make it for the last train.  Since drunk people have been…drinking, and tend to have poor muscular control, their fume-filled mouths hang wide open, sending a grossness that slides right past my protective bubble of noise-cancelled mp3s into annoyance zone.  I saw one gal sitting in a corner with her head in a plastic bag, quite quietly and (relatively) politely, heaving away. 

The train ride from Shibuya to Ebisu’s just two minutes.  I think I used to be able to hold my breath for that long underwater…