I'mma comin' home! Well, for two weeks. Monday, I leave the Land of the Rising Sun, and come to the Home of the Brave. And I'm not even packed yet.

Newsweek article on the "Top Public High School's in the country" (magnet schools not included). Ok, ok... so I'll admit that I wasn't surprised that my high school, El Cerrito, didn't make it on the list of 700+... but come on, it's a list of 700+!!! I was a little hopeful. I graduated from there. That's gotta count towards something! Hahaha. What surprised me was that Berkeley High and Encinal both made it. I mean it's Berkeley High and Encinal!

Go search for your high school, unless you went to a school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, because none of us made it (Then again, if Kennedy made it, and El Cerrito didn't... well, I'd got nutzo). Go Gauchos (that's an Argentinian cowboy, folks).

Man, oh man! Got back from teaching English classes just now. Yes, I know it's 11PM... but it's ALL GOOD because when I left to teach my evening class, I left the stove on for the pot roast I prepared. That was 4 1/2 hours ago. A total of 6 1/2 hours, simmering in my pot... that deserves two "Kool-Aid Man 'Oh Yeah's'." Actually, I'll add another Kool Aid Man to that because I got the beef for free! "How?" you ask? Well, the pastor's wife got the hunk of beef as a gift, but didn't know what to do with it because Japanese people don't make pot roasts! So she does the Christmas fruitcake thing and says to me, "I don't know what to do with this, so take it."

1... 2... 3! Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

ESPN directed me to this website because of the upcoming French Open, a pro tennis tournament. A little late, but it still has its moments. My favorites come from the section entitled "Les Jokes."

Some things I thought were absolutely hysterical:

"Going to war without France is like walking through Harlem without your white sheet and burning cross."

"Going to war without France is like going duck hunting without your accordion." ---Donald Rumsfeld

"As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure" ---Jacques Chirac
"As far as France is concerned, you're right." ---Rush Limbaugh

Q: How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris?
A: Nobody knows. They've never tried.

I, like most young American people out there, am connected to Kazaa, a file sharing network.

After reading that the Fox show "24" is pretty good from a few friends' blogs, I decided to check it out for myself (yes, yes, I know it just finished it's second season... but I've been gone man!). Unfortunately, American programming on Japanese tv is limited right now to Boy Meets World, Dharma & Greg, Friends, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. No 24.

Enter Kazaa. Right now, I'm trying to download the entire first season (that's right, all 24 shows), and some of the beginning episodes of the second season. Apparently, because the show is an hour long, the files are honkin' big. And big honkin' files mean long download times. So far, I've been able to watch the pilot show and the second show. I also have the 4th, 5th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 24th episodes of the first season, but I can't watch any of em until I have the 3rd episode downloaded. And that 3rd episode is taking its sweet time. Only 100 hours left! Woo hoo... I think.

As I went outside to throw away my "Nama gomi" or "Organic garbage" I thought about some of the comforts of home that I miss. Japan may one of the most advanced nations in the world, but man, they are seriously lagging in some ways.

The garbage disposal. I love that thing. They've gotta figure a way to introduce it to the general Japanese public. Throw organic garbage like egg shells into the sink, push em down the drain, flip the switch and hear the carnage. Then again, I can't remember anybody in college having a garbage disposal. What I do remember is a friend of mine advocating drain-o as a liquid garbage disposal.

Central heating. Could have used that this past winter. I tell ya, a space heater doesn't cut it when it's 0 degrees fahrenheit outside even if your windows are quadruple paned (like mine). Actually I could have used central heating this past spring and fall too. Summer wasn't included because it seems that Hokkaido doesn't have one of those.

And of course, the George Foreman grill. Seems like American infomercials are always playing on some channel here in Japan. But the George Foreman grill informercial is not included on that list. When I went home last year, I thought about bringing one over, but then I remembered that the electrical output is different. I didn't want to mess up the delicate settings of the George Foreman grill and get one huge black grill mark across the entire chicken breast.

It's been a while since I've posted about Japanese culture stuff...

Back in March, the school year here in Japan was ending. And with the end of the school year comes graduation ceremonies, and the preparation that goes along with it. Having met a lot of teachers in the Japanese school system, I gathered that there was a big debate among teachers, principals, and school board members in the months of February and March. The point of contention was whether to sing the Japanese national anthem as part of the graduation ceremonies.

In recent history, the Japanese national anthem had not been sung during school graduation ceremonies. Apparently, in the past they did, but it stopped after World War II by order of the school officials. And just recently, those school officials decided to reinstate the ritual to the strong opposition of many teachers and the general public. This is not to say that the Japanese national anthem is not sung anywhere. Most people know the words to the song because of baseball games and other sporting events. And this is deemed "OK." But bring it into the schools and somehow, everyone is against it.

It seems that the national anthem is closely tied to Japan's history of war... especially World War II. This is odd to me because most of the people who are against the idea of bringing the national anthem back into the schools never lived during World War II. Nevertheless, the shame that is tied to the loss in the war and the horrible war crimes Japanese people committed against the surrounding Asian countries lives on through the generations. Patriotism, or nationalism in this respect, is close to non-existant. This is strange because the Japanese take great pride in being "unique" (or so they say) to the rest of the world... that is, in being Japanese.

But I think all this adequately describes how the Japanese view sports. Japanese people don't want to teach their children that "war is good," so they oppose having their children sing the national anthem in the classroom. But to sing the national anthem on the baseball field before the game is ok. To have the national anthem playing in the background as their Olympian won the gold medal stirs up a lot of pride. Could this explain why the Japanese are so incredibly serious/fanatic about their sports? If a sporting event were only a game, there would be no need to be so fanatic... but if there's a war going on in front of you, there's a reason to focus all your energy. Maybe that's the reason why the Japanese people see a little samurai in watching Hideki Matsui hit a homerun.

Pretty stoked about going back home for two weeks in the beginning of June. For those who don't know and are interested... June 2nd-16th. For those who did know... there's some reinforcement. For those who didn't know and weren't interested... too bad, now you know.

In preparation for the trip, I've been meaning to call some of you by phone, but it seems that once again NTT (the Japanese phone company) has made things unnecessarily complicated. Because NTT charges so much for international calls, I signed up with a third party international phone call company. To use the third party company I have to use my regular NTT line to call the third party company (an international call) for a brief second to show that I want to use their services. For some stupid reason (and I emphasize the word STUPID), NTT changed the way to dial out internationally, and so now, I can't use my third party company!

So I called NTT's help line to see how I can continue to use the third party company... well, apparently, for me to be able to do that, I have to upgrade my contract with NTT which of course costs more. I hate NTT! I hate their cell phone branch company DoCoMo! I hate monopolies! Come to think about it, I don't like the Milton Bradley board game very much either.

On a lighter note, the cherry blossoms have finished blooming. They started blooming about a week and a half ago. Beautiful. Here's one picture. And here's another. I now understand why there's a Cherry Blossom Festival at SF Japantown. It's beautiful.

I've been meaning to post this for a while... MAD PROPS TO TOMIO. Tomio found a way to send me beef! NY steak at that. A box of four. Amazing.

Weird thing though... steaks weren't the only thing inside that cardboard box. There was some sliced pineapple in there too. I dunno how I'm supposed to eat the pineapple with the steak... maybe I'm supposed to make some homemade tropical A-1 sauce or something.

A continuation on the topic of worship...

I ended the April 29th entry with a question... "What does it mean to have a heart of worship... after the music fades?" I didn't have to think hard before answers to that question popped in my head. But the answers weren't "how-to's." Instead, they were people. People I've met who completely exemplify this concept. I can't really describe em but I don't think I have to because we've all come across them from time to time.

They're people who immediately strike me as being different. But not weird different. Different in a sense that they truly put their minds "on things above" and it shows in their actions. It seems that everything they do, they do it with the complete knowledge that Jesus is with them always. And it's contagious. But not necessarily because of the words they speak, because often they don't say much. It's strange... somehow, I just know that Jesus is alive and kickin' in their hearts.

So far, I can still count the number of these "heart of worship"ers I've met on both of my hands. I can only hope that I too can be a "worship weird-o." I kinda like the sound of that. A "worship weird-o," a "dub dubya." Much thanks to those "dub dubyas" I've met so far, for reminding me what is important and for setting the example for me to follow.

I dunno what it is about the video store here but every time I go up there, my intestines work overtime and it doesn't take long before I absolutely have to go to the bathroom. Maybe it's the smell of Geo (the video store's name), or the lighting, or the humidity, or something, I don't know... whatever it is, it's forcing me to pick the movie I want to see real quick, which is a problem because it takes me extra long to be able to read movie titles in Japanese (so I usually don't watch sci-fi movies because they're the furthest away). Another problem is that the video store doesn't seem to have a bathroom for customers! So, after I pick up the movie and pay for it, I have to do that funny run most people have when they're in a hurry to get to a bathroom (it kinda looks like how the Hanna Barbera cartoon characters ran with their backs perpendicular to the ground), to the convenience store across the street.

I got the movie "I Am Sam" with Sean Penn and Michelle Pfieffer by the way. It was a great movie. And as always, the people working at the convenience store were nice today.

Here's a list of things describing people from my brother's year (or Millennials as they're beginning to be called). It's a list that this college puts out to help profs there understand the incoming freshmen. I thought some of the things listed were quite clever. Specifically #15, #48, and #49.

I love the things that come out of professional athletes' mouths.

Trot Nixon a baseball player for the Boston Red Sox recently hasn't been playing to full capacity because he has an irritated eye. To be specific, he has an "abrasion on his left cornea." On Thursday the 8th, in regards to the condition of his eye, he was quoted as saying, "Things are still a little cloudy but it's better than [Tuesday], when everything seemed 3-D."

Umm, can someone tell Trot that he doesn't live in a 2-D world? I hope everything "seems 3-D" all the time in a 3-D world.

In my April 8th post, I wrote about the timing crosswalks in Sapporo. Here's a picture of one of em from afar. And an extreme close-up. (Note: You have to have a Yahoo! account to see these photos just like all the other photos posted on this blog.)

I love it. I was checking my web counter webpage that shows who the last people were to visit the blog, when they visited, and the last website visited before visiting the blog. Apparently, two different people did a search on Google, wondering if peanut butter goes bad. One guy typed "does peanut butter go bad" in the search box while another typed "peanut butter go bad." And because I wrote about eating really really old peanut butter, Google directed those searchers to me. Thanks google.
As a side note, I've noticed that traffic has picked up on the blog. Thanks to all those so far who have responded to my April 30th entry. To increase the traffic, I've thought about putting a glamour photo of myself on the side bar like a number of the popular girls' blog sites... but well, too bad, I couldn't find one. Besides, even if I had one, I don't know if it'd go over very well. I think I should just stick with writing about old peanut butter.

Just came back from a Gospel music workshop at Sapporo. Went May 1st -5th. All in all a good time... I even sang a solo, go figure. It was all worth it just to see Japanese people just let loose and dance, or try to. Reminded me a lot of that one Virgin TV commercial from a few years back with that Asian dude saying something like "I'm tired of people thinking Asian people can't dance. Feel my groove," and then proceeded to dance like Puff Daddy, which sorta looks like the Chubby Checkers twist.

I guess having rhythm is a prereq for the ability to dance. And yeah, most Japanese people don't have it. Recently, our church here in Date, started contemporary worship music. So, there are times when we're called to clap on the off beat. Well, for the first 3 minutes or so, we've got clapping on the on and off beat... even when the tambourine is beaten on the off beat to help out. Reminds me of one time at AACF large group when Dave Wang was leading worship... some people were clapping on the on beat while some others were clapping on the off beat, and he just stops playing and singing, and goes, "Ok, ok, we're gonna learn how to clap on the off beat tonight."

The relationship between rhythm and Asian people is strange though because it's almost completely non-existent, until you put it in the form of a video game. DDR, that one stupid DJ game with the stupid mini keyboard, and out here in Japan there's a maracas game and a tambourine game... there's even a Taiko drum game that's out on Playstation 2. I beginning to think all these rhythm video games are the result of the Japanese government planning on creating a super-generation of Japanese people with super-rhythmic skills to... take over the world. Sorry, I couldn't really think of a reason that'd make sense, but I dunno taking over the world worked well for Pinky and the Brain, why not the Japanese government led by the Great Sasuke?