On Saturday I woke up, checked my email and learned that I owe about $1,500 in taxes. Not exactly the best way to start the day. But I figure it would have been withheld from my pay anyway had I been withholding enough, so in the grand scheme of things it’s not really a loss. That’s how I’m consoling myself, anyway. In the end it’s just money, nothing to really lose sleep over.
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Yesterday I ate 50 strawberries. Exactly. I counted. I hadn’t really known what to expect when we pulled into the strawberry farm, with rain pouring down by the liter (there are no gallon in Japan). But when I saw the two parking attendants, dressed in bright red ponchos with galoshes and pink umbrellas, gleefully twirling big inflatable strawberries, I knew the place was serious about their fruit.
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My cell phone alarm went off yesterday morning at 8 am. I groped it into snooze mode and sighed into my pillow. I’d been out the night before at my American coworker’s boyfriend’s farewell party. We went to a small izakaya, the one run by the baseballer, actually, and did yet another nomihodai. It was great, though. We ate some of the best food I’ve had yet in Japan. I didn’t drink nearly as much as I did last week, but just enough to plant a little extra fog in my head in the morning. 8 am, Sunday, my day off. For only a select breed of things will I voluntarily get up that early. The object of my affections yesterday, however, was definitely on the list.
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I know everyone will be disappointed to hear it, but I didn’t make it to the baseball game Sunday morning. My friend Take (pronounced Takae) called at 7:30, at which point I was wandering the line between life and death. I wasn’t really all that hung-over, but I was certainly in no state to play baseball. And more than that, at 7:30 I was in no frame of mind to parry my way through a phone conversation in Japanese. He called twice, which jarred me into consciousness enough to pound out a text message in what was probably the most incomprehensible Japanese in recorded history. What I hoped to say was, “So sorry, I can’t make it. Please invite me again next time.” I have no idea what I actually wrote, though.
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Haircuts have always been a fertile patch of trouble in my life. Not only am I unversed in the customs of the barber shop, but I also have an unruly mess on my scalp. My hair grows at all sorts of different angles and densities depending on the region of my head. So after leaving the delicate clippers of my mother, I’ve had more difficulty finding a good barber than anybody rightly should. On top of that, just when I’d found a good salon in Cincinnati I picked up and moved to Japan.
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