Baseball.

Yesterday, courtesy of Jeff, I was able to go to the Giants game at SBC. The first thing I noticed when I saw the ticket was the section number... 208. I thought about it. 200s? Where are those? I've sat in the upper deck before... those were 300s. I've sat at field level... those were 100s. Where are 200 seats?

Kyle, Steve, and I walk into the stadium... buy food and start wandering, trying to figure out where our seats are. Kyle's the first to figure it out. I just follow him. We go up an escalator. Sure enough. 200s are club level seats. Just to clarify, Club Level seats are freakin' awesome. Amazing amazing. Nice view. No lines on concessions. Great service. I don't think I had to open a single door while I was there. They had ushers to open them for me especially when I had garlic fries in one hand, a bratwurst in another, and a Coke between my elbows.

As a side note, as of today, I'm borrowing the book Moneyball from Steve. I'm already 2/3 through it. I'm thoroughly enjoying the humor in it. For those who have read it, I'm kinda curious now as to how those draftees are turning out.

Today, I found a pair of old jeans.

I don't know where they came from. But I found them... today. So, I decided to wear them. I don't think I've worn em since high school. A few observations:

1. I've gotten bigger, most noticibly in the waist and leg areas.
2. I really was 130 lbs when I was a high school senior.
3. Old jeans have this grubby but soft feel that's kinda therapeutic... but not when they're huggin' on your skin.

My lack of posting.

Sorry, I haven't been posting. It isn't so much that I haven't had anything post worthy as it has been that I've been too tired at the end of the day to post stuff.

So, I return to Blogger, and I find the format all changed for the post-er... post-man... post-guy. The display looks all emaily. Strange. This will take a while.

The biggest thing since I posted last? Went to Virginia to see my friend Ben Tao graduate from law school at the College of William and Mary. I'll post pictures soon.

Highlights from the trip to Williamsburg?
-Congrats to Ben
-Southern cooking complete with gravy on everything. Honestly, I think I had a side dish that was gravy on gravy.
-Virginia Beach... the Atlantic isn't a hot tub, but it's plenty warmer than the Pacific, especially at Stinson.
-Seeing Ben give dancing lessons to practically everyone there. Never would've thought.

The speed of time.

Time seems to be moving real slow here in the States. Have I only been in America for 4 weeks? Seems like it's been way longer than that. This isn't to say it's been a drag.

It's been great spending most of my time hanging out with people I haven't seen in a while. Yesterday, I got to be in the presence of Christine and Jason... good times. I also got to rediscover used book stores yesterday. I forgot how much I love those places.

But yeah, I dunno. Time just seemed to slow down as soon as I touched down at LAX. In Japan, it was just that the pace of things in my world was just frantic. I was busy doing something almost all the time. I was always "on." Or at least it felt that way. True, I taught a lot of English classes during my time there, but that's not the whole picture. Even normal conversations with people in Japan required a heightened awareness. Just being forced to speak a foreign language, it takes a lot outta ya. Some mornings, if I knew that I had to go to city hall or the bank or something later that day, I'd study up on the vocabulary I'd have to use to accomplish my goals. Now, in the States, I just "wing" a lot of conversations. I'm not constantly thinking about how I want to say what I want or need to say.

What I mean to say is that my time to wind down in Japan rarely felt like I was winding down. Here, in America, if I want to wind down I'll watch TV with friends or family... or something of the sort. And time would just, for a moment slow down to a crawl. In Japan, I had no such luxury. I had time to watch TV... but it'd be Japanese TV. And watching Japanese TV, although entertaining at times (most of the crazy Japanese variety shows you see in the States were from the 80s... so they don't exist anymore), always seemed to morph into a Japanese language learning experience for me (I learned a lot of my conversational Japanese from playing with kids and watching TV).

Time may slow down if you're moving faster than the speed of light... but I've found that it may also slow down if you're watching Sportscenter... duh nah nah, duh nah nah.

Happy Children's Day

Since when does Cinco de Mayo take precedence over Children's Day? So, Mexico is like a million miles closer to the States than Japan... so what? No love for the Asian nations. There's Chinese New Year. That's it. And Japanese people don't even observe that. That's right. No red envelopes on some arbitrary February day for the people of Nippon. No crazy scary Lion dances with firecrackers going off all over the place. No love.

I have a lot of junk.

I've spent the better part of the day so far just cleaning out my former room and its closet. Amazing. I never realized how much of a pack rat I am. The great thing about the cleaning out of junk thing is that I've found a number of "lost" items (i.e. my old driver's license, old J-league basketball team photos, etc.) and a few things I never knew I had (i.e. Kevin Garnett and Will Clark rookie card). The not so great thing? Aside from throwing nearly everything away... sneezing all the time from all the dust that's just flying around.

Ahhh, the last of the boxes I shipped home from Japan came in yesterday! This is cause for celebration. What was in the last box? Oh, all the necessary things for survival in Japan. English Bible, Japanese Bible, photos, dress shirt, running shoes, Xbox, Xbox games.

In other news, we, at East Bay Free Meth thought of yet another game last night. There is a new East Bay game. The basic version of the game requires only one person and a hula hoop. The guy rolls the hula hoop on the ground in such a way so that the hula hoop rolls back (requires spin). As the hula hoop rolls back toward the starting point, the guy tries to dive through the hula hoop without disturbing the rolling hula hoop.

Over the course of the night, a number of variations were created. Multiple hoops were used. Multiple people were used. A no jumping rule was put into effect (also known as the T-Rex method). And of course different styles of diving were used to see the most effective methodology. I have some video of the activity, but unfortunately, I do not have a place for it on the internet. I'm hoping Charlie will post it on his website sometime soon. We'll see.