Hello, World

Partly sunny, 31C (33C)

I'm back online from home.

NTT came, with a truck and a whole team of people. They stopped a lane of traffic on the road the goes by my apartment to string a wire from across the way. They snipped it's innards down to a thin, clear thread, and so I'm back online.

I'm happy about that. :-)

Tomorrow, I want to go to Kobe--the foreign foods store and Tokyu Hands, and Nankinmachi, and maybe the museum while I'm there...

I think I'm getting sick. I woke, today, with the telltale sore throat and a slight fever at 8 in the morning. I'm working against it. Kids' classes don't follow the 20/80-rule (teacher does 20% of the talking and, ideally, at least, students do 80%), so I really can't lose my voice. I have 27 lessons a week (at least 5 every workday), so I really can't even have it be too uncomfortable/taxing to use. Bah to paying money for health insurance... I'll be sure to use it.

But tonight I plan to ride my new-used bike to the mall, maybe shop for an instrument stand to keep my shamisen in and catch another movie.

Mall trip

Partly cloudy, 25C (25C)

Going to Kobe tomorrow is postponed. Just a few minutes walking around and I could tell that I'd need tomorrow to be a whiny baby before rock star-champing it at work all week. I got most of what I was going to get at Tokyu Hands, got a guitar-stand for my shamisen (780Y, and I was prepared to shell out 3000Y for it!), got some vitamins (including one to "make you clear"--Gaba supplement), and a few other things (tsumego books** for seme-ai (attacking) and yose (endgame), as well as some short stories by Murakami, as he's all the rage but I didn't want to invest in reading Norwegian Wood and being horribly disappointed as I often am by much-lauded [Japanese] novelists), I also got a tube of 36--36!--colored pencils on 50%-clearance for coloring my mandalas.

I meant to see The Expendables, but I got the month wrong for it's release and it'll be out next month, not now. So I saw Eat, Pray, Love, instead. I thought it was really excellent in both content and virtually all aspects of execution.

That moment towards the beginning... I know that moment inside and out. I am that moment. I recognized several other moments throughout the rest of the movie as well, which made it all the more dramatic and [unexpectedly] emotional for me.

Except at the end.

But it gave me an idea, nonetheless.

And it gave me some questions to ponder in between reading my books about child neuro-psychological development, teaching theory/technique, language instruction/learning, and disciplinary systems.

I also like that the protagonist was closer to my age than female protagonists usually are.

It's a little bit of a letdown that coming down with whatever cold I'm getting is going to mean I won't have the stamina for "catching up" on Internet things. Probably for the best, but still somewhat of a letdown.

Recently, I've been trying to imagine what would the Important People from various phases of my life have to say to one another if they were in a room together.... It's a kindof... strange exercise.

It also occurred to me some weeks ago that many, many people have been disappointed that I wasn't a boy, a few have been disappointed that I wasn't a more typically-girly girl, and that almost none of any of those people have anything to do with my life, now--but they were, once, each and every one, very influential.

**I'm glad and relieved to know, now, that I'm at about a level where such books can actually serve a purpose, but now that I know I'm not crazy or stupid I'm noticing some rather pointed discord between the national trends of Japan (the source of these tsumego and, more notably, their solutions) and Korea (the background and basis for the series I've used to learn the rules and basic theory/technique of the game--therefor my foundation). So where, for example, the "Korean school" (as I'll call the teachings based on the book series I've used) calls for priority going to balancing corners before taking a side, the "Japanese school" (as I'll call the underlying theory for the solutions to the tsumego I have easy access to) seems to reverse the order. It makes things like fuseki (game opening) more complicated for a novice such as myself to evaluate clearly....