the Galactic Truth

I haven’t had much chance to write anything much lately.
You see, I used to be a person, and I used to accomplish things (…that never mattered),
but now I watch t.v.

On a couple of the days when my girldfriend and I went out hiking, we saw a man sitting in a car across from my apartment. When we came back he was still sitting there.
One day we were fixing up the paint on my girlfriend’s car, and we saw him drive away then come back after 20 minutes, and go back to sitting/ waiting in his car.
I suppose one thing I have done lately is solve that mystery.

, …he was looking at dirty magazines and smoking.

Another thing I have done recently is paint some of the prettier parts of my new area.
I used to paint more frequently, but my girlfriend has been visiting me on my days off, so I haven’t spent nearly as much time outdoors on my own as I used to.
It’s good for the most part.

One day that I did have off and alone, I went to a little pond at the top of a mountain. There was nobody at all around my house (except for this one guy smoking and reading porn in his car), but it was really pretty busy at the top of that mountain.
It was partly cloudy at my house, but almost exclusively cloudy at the top of the mountain.
It was warm when I left my house, but chilly that much higher up the mountain (more so, due to the clouds).
It was windy when I left my house, but it was windier at the top of the mountain; The pond was in a basin, which I thought safe from the biggest gusts of wind, …but no. (Of course the wind made it colder still.)

I hiked my way past a group of slower hikers. I put my easel at the back edge of the walkway that ran past the pond. My easel blew over twice while I was getting my paint out, so I used my jacket to tie it to a railing.
It was warm at my house, …I don’t know why I even brought a jacket, but man, …it would have been really nice to have been able to wear that jacket. It was so cold and windy that I had to give up on my painting (after more than 3 hours of sticking it out).

I painted a pair of better pictures on a far nicer day, by the river at the base of my town.
And I sat inside playing video games on a few of the rainy afternoons.

The nice lady who’s in charge of the Nagano branch of my company took me to the department of immigrations (in Nagano) to get my old visa transferred into my new passport.
The mirthless beaurocreat who did that wanted us to leave his counter as immediately as we could, so I stuffed my Foreign ID card into my passport. Later I came to wonder where my foreign ID card was. The last time I remember seeing my old passport, is when I went to get my new foreign ID card, …so I thought it would be funny if I lost that card in the act of getting my replacement passport re-validated.

I found it before too much worry came to me though.

When that was finished we tried taking the snow tires off of the car that they lend me.

That was when we discovered that there was/ and is no jack in my car.
We borrowed a jack from my supervisor’s car, and with a bit of kicking, we got one of the wheels off my car (and some dirt on me in the process). When we tried to change to the far more gas efficient “summer” tires that they saved for me to use, we discovered that they were actually “summer” tires for a large truck/ we couldn’t put them on my little car.

That wasted some time, but left a few hours to spare before I had to meet one of the teachers from my old school.

I went to some recycle shops – because I like recycling, …and everyone knows that I’m cheap.
I found a Nintendo 64 there for $8!

I went to a store which purportedly had used videos and video games for sale, but what the sign outside said, was not what was inside the store.
It was half comic books and action figures – and half porn movies. What a weird combination!
Great for unpopular teenage boys!

I met a teacher who isn`t at the all vegan restaraunt in Nagano, which was again – closed (for the 8th time?), so we went back to the nice little Indonesian place that can make vegetarian food if you ask them to.

I like that place too because: it is cheap, they can make vegetarian food, the food that they do make you is interesting, and they have statues of brightly colored frogs having wild, fun-looking sex. I like those statues, because sex is something that frogs, however brightly colored, can not do.
I tried explaining that to my friend, later to my girlfriend, but they are apparently not as widely versed in the mating practices of amphibians as I am.

I’m not sure if she or her fiance’ like frogs, but I bought my little sister a wedding gift there.

Also, having bought the Nintendo (to compete with my girlfriend), I found myself in need of a t.v.
When I got those two things squared away I tried a couple of games that I also got cheap.

An old man who hides in a small room with a cross in his hand and a cross on his back told me that there was a large dangerous man in the garden. I already knew about the large dangerous man in the garden, because he had already killed me 6 or 7 times. I wanted to know if there was any way I could avoid being killed by him, but the old man speaks in Chinese + Japanese script, + that was all I can understand.

At any rate, I was able to beat my girlfriend squarely any number of times. Then she got bored and decided that she wanted to watch t.v., so we went out to get a wire to plug the t.v. into the cable box.
And that’s when I started watching t.v.

T.V. has some very interesting “pseudo-educational” things to show to the people of Japan.

There was a show which tested whether a team of 4 celebrities could beat one very able elementary school student in a number of sporting events.
They lost every time.

There was a show which let celebrities bet whether the world’s top Women’s 110 meter hurdler could beat a specially trained border collie – in a hurdle race. {It seems to depend on the height of the hurdles and the number of times that they ran it.}

There was a show where average looking Japanese ladies (and a couple uglies) told a panel of celebrities how hard it is for them to be ugly all the time. Then a panel of “expert beauticians” looked over them one by one, and wrote out their ugly points on posterboard.

One lady had a nose which was a bit too wide, so they put her on a diet, changed her hair, bought her new clothes, and gave her a nosejob, and a boob job. They repeated this procedure for basically everyone (minus the nosejob), and they all came out looking like Michael Jackson.

He’s such a scary bastard!

Here’s a thing which has been “unsettling” to me recently:
Twice in the past week and a half, after I had been tossing and turning in my bed late at night, I seem to have fallen asleep very suddenly.
That part wouldn’t bother me, …indeed I would’t be able to take any notice of that – if it were not for me again returning to full consciousness – very quickly, hearing a sound, and seeing a middle large size black dog walk across my room to the outer wall – and disappear.

I don’t have any pets or irregularly shaped pillows which can move, so I don’t know what to make of this. It’s more of a curiosity than anything else though.
Here’s a thing which bothered me more:

There was another show where Japanese people wore silly clothes/ hats/ blonde wigs and big rubber noses to pretend to be from other countries. One of the Japanese people not pretending to be from another country put some different foods on a sushi conveyor belt to see if “the foreigners” could pick them up with chopsticks or not.

Everyone laughed when the man “from India” couldn’t pick up a peanut with his chopsticks. “Ha, Ha! Indians can’t use chopsticks!” They clapped and laughed

but it was really just a Japanese guy with a turbin and a big brown rubber nose pretending not to be Japanese.

Is there something here that I am misunderstanding?

Honestly! It irked me somewhat that none of the celebrities on the other show would cheer for the American woman.
3 of them sat polite and quiet, while the rest cheered for the border collie.

I don’t know if things would be different in a country like Sweeden.

The Sweedish are amazing! City busses that run on atmospherically friendlier ethanol and bio gas.
(Although I think the bio gas is made with chicken fat, …so I can’t say I’m really pleased with that… but) They have toilets with compartments (compartment number one and compartment number two – to correspond with, ahem: “number one” and “number two“.
– It saves water),
recycling bins that issue store credits, super heavy engine idling fines, etc.
Hooray Sweeden!!!!

The teachers at my school have a refrigerator that they keep a single jar of very old marmalade in. I’ve never seen anyone open the fridge to look for the much too old marmalade, but all the same: When I first switched it off, I had to explain my reasons for turning off an old, and very nearly empty fridge at least 4 times. 2 months later somebody switched it back on.
That’s funny, because there is a freezer fridge combo that is larger and just as empty downstairs.

Refrigerators use a lot of energy, and when the only thing that’s at stake is a single jar of marmalade that would be just as expired warm as it is cold, …I switch it back off.

I switched it off on Tuesday, after the ruckus on Monday that was caused upon discovering the fridge (then the floor) was a mess of cold water. I am left to think that somebody filled the fridge full of ice – over the weekend.

I try to be almost as energy efficient as I possibly can, …but the part of Japan that I live in is much too mountainy to get very far on a bicycle.
Most of the time I do use my bike to get to and from school, but it wears me out, and tends to rain on me at inconvenient times: yesterday, and twice today for example.

I got permission to leave school early to go and get more medical supplies.
I can’t just go out and buy insulin for some reason… There’s no cure, and it doesn’t fix its self,
but I still have to go see a doctor every month so that he can make absolutely certain that I’m still diabetic.

It started pouring just as I was getting ready to go, and it stopped pouring just after I got there.

I was only a little wet; I used an umbrella despite the lightening. I am happy that I haven’t learnt that lesson the hard way yet.

I was a little worried when going to the doctor’s, because the doctor that I went to after the hospital turned me away – called my old doctor in my old town to find out about me, and my old doctor sent him some information about the kind of drugs I was taking. That doctor then decided that it would be too much trouble for him to see me, and passed that file on to the nurse at my school, who sent it to my current doctor, before I could tell her not to, because it would be inconvenient for me to have to explain that the insulin the old doctor used to give me didn’t include the type I assured this most recent doctor he did.

Ordinarily I would say that lying is bad, but the insulin I duped this new doctor into prescribing for me is really good – quick acting! No more waiting 4 or 5 hours for breakfast!

I saw a specialist about 12 years ago and she said that I ought to get on that new kind of insulin right away. She was gonna’ prescribe it for me the next time I went – when she had my test results back, but in that short stretch of time our insurance company/ policy changed, she became far too expensive, and all the other doctors I’ve seen have been very unimaginative./ afraid to maybe have to take some responsibility/ or any more risk.

This guy seemed not to want to bring up the point of me having him refill a prescription that I’d never had in the 1st place. I like that. His nurses are afraid of me. That’s typical; There’s no telling what a clearly non-Japanese guy like me might do next.

What I did next:
I went home. What kind of dumb ass would go back to work with just an hour left til closing and the sun shining.
I might’ve mentioned that it’s a long + somewhat difficult climb up to my apartment from the center of town…

I completed that climb – and my building was in sight when I got a call from my school. They said that someone had a question about a class for tomorrow. I’m sure I didn’t have to go alllllll the way back down the hill again, …but that’s what happened.
It also started raining again then. I didn’t mind it so much that time, because I had climbed all the way up, and I was pretty hot.

What I did mind was that the teacher that had the question wasn’t around, and when I did find him – he asked me to wait in the room they keep me in. And after I waited, the question that he had for me was: “What are we going to do tomorrow?”

That I had written + illustrated + put on his desk long before I went to the doctors. He went away and got it, looked at it, and said okay and I left again, and rode my bike all the way back up that bastard of a hill again.
We wound up not having time to do anymore than 5 mintues of the 30 minute thing he had me prepare anyhow.

He was the one who was good enough to give me half a day’s leave to go to Nagano city, to visit the immigration office, to get my replacement passport – replacement stamped.
If he was able to speak English better he might’ve said “but be here all the earlier the next day” – much like Ebaneezer Scrooge (and Scrooge MacDuck) had said.
The lady at my company who asked him if I could be excused was suprised that I got half of that day off, because there was absolutely no work for me to do on that day, and no good could be accomplished by keeping me there for the other half of the day.
For some reason I did make some papers that the kids could maybe work on in an upcoming class, and of course we’ve never used them either.

I think maybe everyone has to deal with little pesky inconveniences like that, but I have a friend who gets paid almost as much money as me, and he only works a few hours a day. Mind you I only work a few hours a day, but I have to remain on school grounds for 9 hours a day. He leaves his house around 10am and gets home at 4:30. He also says that he can wear whatever he feels like wearing, doesn’t have to sit at his desk for 9 hours for no reason on Christmas day, etc.
He’s leaving and he wants me to take over his job when he does.

I mentioned this to the people at my company who were responsible for only paying me $500 some odd dollars for all of March, … and they thought about it for a long time and said that they’d give me another $400 some odd dollars to not defect.

I’m kind of sick of moving so often, and I don’t really like where I would be moving to, …although it is in the same city that my girlfriend is in.
But I’m not terribly fond of having a stern old man who speaks very little English keep a close disapproving watch over me; Although one day he was checking up on me, very sternly, with chocolate around his mouth, and I couldn’t help but feel a little giggly.
He’s really not such a bad guy, he just tries to assert his “in charge of me status”, and I expect having to stay at school for 12/13 hours a day wears him out somewhat.

The kids here are known far and away for their “non-studiousness”. Not one minute ago, one of them was laying on the couch by the window, beating himself about the head with a squeaky rubber hammer which my predecessor left behind. I was happy that he seems to have wandered off with it, but some other kid has since been wandering in and out of here – singing like a drunken salaryman.

The 1st wanders back in and asks me where the other guy is.
“The guy who is singing down the hall?”, I ask.
That guy wanders back in and gets beat on the head with the squeaky hammer.
They wander off (for a longer period of time – I hope).
I hear a squeak of a rubber hammer, and a familiar teacher`s voice saying: “Owch! …Hurts!”

About an hour ago 3 of them were sleeping on the couch and on chairs they borrowed from various desks, while another was rifling through everyone`s stuff.
2 more came in and disrupted everyone – as there were no more prime spots for sleeping.

The fashion here is to wear a certain style of belt, with your pants around the middle of your thighs. It`s a hoot to see them all trying to chase each other down the hall.