the Galactic Truth

The Bureau of Immigrations is a place for Immigrants …and in between folk like me, to go and sit for hours. There are of course’s lots of other places to go and sit, but only the Bureau of Immigrations has soooo many screaming foreign babies. It’s not just the grey carpets, grey curtains, grey walls, grey carpet, grey benches, and the multi-colored/ multi-cultured babies that draw the crowds though. You see: We’re forced to go.

If we were not forced to go, I think a lot of us foreign types would get upset that we have to sit for hours to wait to pay 2,000 yen for a stamp of permission to stay and pay 8,000 yen for another stamp of permission to leave occasionally.

I had a friend who forgot to go back to Immigrations to get his set of stamps: allowing him to stay and leave. I used to wonder which of those 2 stamps take precedence, but then he tried to go home for Christmas, and he wasn’t allowed on the plane, so there you go,
(…or don’t go).

I’ve been here legally for 6 years, but I never intended to stay long enough to have to go sit at the Bureau of Immigrations this many times. I wasn’t sure if they would force me to leave if my visa expired, but I didn’t want to have to go to court to find out – like my friend did. He got fed up and went home, …when they allowed him to. I took his job.
I went to immigrations to get the papers I needed to fill out. I filled them out, then waited in line to get a number, so I could wait to be called to give my papers to somebody else. Somebody checks your papers to be sure they’re all filled out before you can begin to wait to hand your papers to somebody different.
It took me maybe 10 minutes to fill out my papers.
15 minutes waiting to show my papers to the lady who hands out the numbers
I got a number and waited for 2 hours until:
They closed for lunch for an hour
Then I went for a walk, came back after an hour, and waited for at least another hour for them to call my number.
They called my number.
A guy looked over my papers for about 5 minutes, had me write my address on an postcard, He said they would send it to me when they decided when I should go back.

They’re reasonably comfortable grey benches, but still a huge pain in the ass if you know what I mean.

Why did I have to wait more than 4 hours for some one to look at my papers for 5 minutes? Why did I have to get a number for someone to look at my papers – when that someone looked as intently at them, as the person who looked at them when I got the number 4 hours before?
Why couldn’t I just leave my papers on the counter and go do something worthwhile with my day off?

Why did they have to demand that I go back to get my stamps during the only 3 day weekend I’ve had in a year?
Why did it take only 40 minutes to get it all done with when I did go back?

I wouldn’t say that I’m especially eager to stay here now, but I have to build up my insulin supply before I try going back to America again. $435.00 for me to talk to a doctor for 15 minutes in my own country, …and I can’t live without insulin (which, of course, requires a prescription/ Doctor‘s visit). Nice how that works out…
A non-sarcastic nice thing about here is that: people get the medicine and care they need without having to rely on corporate financers.

Between now and again, I watched all the clips of Ralph Nader I could find on YouTube and learned a lot about corporations. Are Nader’s ideas from 2000 still relevant today? Yu-Huh.
I volunteered to fly back home to help get Mr. Nader all the signatures he needs to get on the state ballots; I even said I’d ride my bike from house to house across the country so we wouldn’t have to spend $4 a gallon + pollute that much more in doing so. He hasn’t written back about it, but I did get an invitation to his birthday party as a result.
I really would have loved to have gone to that.
Damn shame I had to work that day, …on the other side of the planet. I did, however, take my girlfriend out for dinner on his birthday, …and hers.
We had a just a little party for her on her birthday. She picked out a place with half price drinks. Of course the food was roughly 3 times the price you’d pay anywhere else, …and only 2 vegan options. Didn’t get much of anything to eat, and had a lot to drink, and had a hang over alllll the next day.
I use my cell-phone as an alarm clock, so when I got a cell-phone mail an hour before my alarm should have gone off, I hang avertedly turned my back up alarms off and went to work. My head hurt, but I was especially disappointed to be told that I was an hour early.

I want that hour back, but as I say every time I write, I don’t work very hard. Which works out to be pretty un-exciting.

I’d go live in the woods if I didn’t need a job to buy insulin.
I told my girlfriend that + she got all miffy because she thought she wouldn’t be welcome to come and be a hermit in the woods with me. I tried to explain how you can’t be a real mountain hermit with your girlfriend asleep on your couch all the time, and how it’s impossible for a diabetic hermit to manufacture insulin with just spit and berries, but it didn’t cheer her up any + I had to say it was okay if she wanted to come and visit. She’s a pharmacist, but I’m still not retired.

Relatively warm days recently. These last 2 days I was off I went outside and painted plum blossoms near the railroad tracks – one of the few patches of land hereabout that hasn’t been turned into an apartment building.

There’s a park with actual green grass and some trees in one of the other cities I get sent to work in. It was warm enough the other day that I could go eat a peanut butter sandwich there over my 2 hour lunch break. It took 30 minutes each way to walk there, but I saw some trees and heard some birds.
That’s about all the contact with nature I’ve had for 5 months, unless you count all the cockroaches that run wild through my kitchen when the light is turned off.

I don’t like to kill them, so what I usually do is: keep my apartment clean, plug up the cracks and holes that lead in and out and out of the apartment, and trap the ones I see in an old cup – which I empty outside.
Really late one night I caught a big cockroach in an old mug my friend had left in the apartment. I took it outside on my balcony + tried to hurl it out into the night, …but I shook too vigorously – the handle of the mug snapped free – which sent the mug (+ cockroach inside) flying – loudly- into another apartment building, then something else, then it clattered on the ground a bit. It was loud as hell! I don’t know that it actually shattered though. I only live on the 2nd floor.

I threw bits of bread crumbs and unpopped popcorn kernels out the door of my apartment from time to time over the course of the winter – for the birds, but it’s all still there. There only seems to be big black crows in my city, + as far as I can tell, they only eat from garbage bags. “Picky”.

There’s a mini library next to the train station in my city. I went there a few times recently to try and find a children’s book that I would be able to read. I could read the ones I got, but I just couldn’t follow the story very well. My girlfriend has been a Japanese language volunteer for a few years, and she’s the one who teaches me Japanese now, but she was surprised at how many weird words they put in children’s books.
Anyway, I guess seeing books reminded her that there is a library in our city, so she went there on one of her days off + got out some cook books.

Consequentially, she’s been baking a lot recently. It also happens that she’s much better at teaching me to make curry than at speaking Japanese. She even taught me how to make tofu, which is good, ‘cause I‘ve also learned a lot more about the problems with plastic packaging.

She came over and made Nan one night. Having watched her do it, I thought I would try to make it myself. It took up about 3 hours of my time – at least an hour trying to get the “dough” off of my hands and another hour trying to get the “dough” off of the counter, off of my clothes, out of the bowl, out of the sink, etc…

An interesting side note:
Before I tried making Nan, I had to stop at a store for the right kind of flower.
The Japanese word for “What?” just happens to be pronounced as: “Nan”,
so when I went to the store + asked which flower would be best for making Nan…. I was also asking:
Which flower would be best for making What.
So the lady said: “What What?”
I said: “What, ‘from India‘”.
She said: “What? India? What Indian food do you want to make?”.
I said: “the What, the bread that they eat in India” .
She said: “You want to make curry?”
I said: “Yes, but I want to make the what that they eat with the curry”.
+ she said: “Oh, you mean what!”,
but she still didn’t know what kind of flower I ought to use,
…maybe where I went wrong.

The lady who lives under my apartment is from the Philippines. The guy that lives a couple doors down from me is from Ghana. I bumped into him one winter afternoon, and he suggested we have dinner sometime. I doubted he was a vegan – some people apparently aren’t, so I invited him to come out drinking with me + a couple of my friends one night instead.

He called me that same evening and said he’d like to come, but we had a bad connection, + it was hard for us to hear each other. I was 2 cities down from where we live, so he said he’d call when he got there + we could sort out the directions then.

I heard nothing back from him until a couple hours later, when my friends were too drunk to continue, + we were all splitting up. It was actually right when I got to the train station that I got about 7 messages all at once from the guy from Ghana + from another friend I’d invited. My phone’s battery just then dropped from halfway full to nearly zero as I was reading, + he only seemed to say that he couldn’t get through to me and he was going to go home, so I just went home then too.

He called me at home a few weeks later (+ I hate telephones), so I walked over to his apartment. He gave me a beer before I could mention that I hate beer + asked me to come out drinking with him and the Philippino lady from downstairs, who was then doing his laundry.
I went home to shut my soup off. (I tossed most of the can of beer in, which helped the flavor somewhat.) I changed into clothes I wouldn’t mind stinking of smoke, + went back to meet them. His ex-girlfriend also happened to stop by for a chat then, so it took considerably longer for us to head out. When we did get to where we were going, the Philippino lady from downstairs, whose idea it was to go out drinking, suddenly remembered that she had to be at work in a few minutes. She asked to borrow money from the guy from Ghana and she ran off; He seemed frustrated – it being her idea that we all go out drinking, + his money. She said she could meet back up with us around 2am, which was only 7 hours away/ totally not going to happen, but we said okay. He took me to a little “Soul Bar” in our city. I had been in there for about 30 minutes and $30 about 5 years ago with some other friends. At that time there were 2 guys dancing in front of a mirror – intently watching themselves dancing in the mirror + a middle aged woman sitting on a couch eating potato chips/ Altogether not worth the $30 cover charge.

This time it was me, the guy from Ghana, a middle aged woman sitting on a couch, and her daughter. I hadn’t eaten any of the soup that I was just about finished cooking (when he 1st invited me out), so I had some potato chips and screw drivers to keep from fainting. He tried talking to her daughter, but she wasn’t having any of that. Her mom got up to dance a lot, and I like “soul” music, so I did the same. I didn’t try to dance with her, because she was too old, she was not a good dancer, and that’s reason enough really…
Hearing things in a noisy bar/ conversation in general is not my forte, but it seems it was not just coincidence that this same lady was at this same place 5 years later. She shouted to me later that she is there every night. I think someone who goes out dancing every night really ought to be a better dancer. Her daughter was also not much of a dancer, but she was thin + she had drank a lot, so she gave it her best effort. The guy from Ghana is a guy, so it makes no kind of difference how he dances. The only really important things he + I had to discuss all evening were: how weird it is to ask somebody to go out drinking then remember that you have to go to work at the last second, and that skinny girls aren’t all that appealing. She/ the daughter was the only young girl though, so he kept trying to talk to her, and she kept having none of it.

He was slightly peeved to begin with, + perhaps disappointed in the girls that were there/ not talking much to him, so he went home. A business man in his very late 60’s ( perhaps even in his late 70‘s)-with a good quality suit came in and got his “booty on the dance floor”. He was a better dancer than the girl or her mother. A couple guys came in with a young girl. The old guy in the suit, next: “busted some moves” with her,
Then he went to sleep on a table. That same girl tried to get one of the guys she came in with to dance with her, but he clung to his chair. I hate to see a young lady strain herself, so I held the chair as she pulled. This, somehow, resulted in that guy insisting on buying me lots of drinks I didn’t really want. I was just going to stick around until I finished off my last drink, but, hey, several more drinks… and I’m sorry to say, a drunk Japanese guy yelling drunk Japanese at me over loud funk music.
Some sexy looking girls turned up around then, but I have a girlfriend,
and more importantly, in this instance: I had to meet my girlfriend at 5am at the train station so we could go snowboarding with some of her old coworkers.

I went to sleep at 2:30ish. Had a bit of my soup before turning in, then, yeah. 5am wake up.
We got to some other station about 30 minutes later + met a guy who drove us up to meet the rest of the group. Unfortunately there had been a bit of snow while I was asleep, and the road was too frosty to drive as fast as we otherwise would have. We met the others at a rest stop about an hour late. They decided that we would go to a ski park near where my last house was. Also unfortunately their car couldn’t get up the road to the ski park, so we had to go to the little expensive one that is 5 minutes walk from Karuizawa station.

N’er have I been to a ski park as sucky as that one was. A lot of money for the lift ticket, and a 40 minute wait in line ( I timed it the 1st time we went through) to get on any of the lifts up the very little mountain. I saw people walking up the hill, sliding down the hill, then walking up the hill again, while we were still waiting in line. We went on a Sunday, so some people left a little before closing, to get back home + get ready for their jobs. The last 2 or 3 hours we were there weren’t so bad. Dancing, not sleeping, and waiting in long lines for ski lifts all morning made me unusually tired that evening though.
The people I was with had a “free lunch” included with their lift tickets. I knew they wouldn’t have anything for a vegan, the line for the only restaurant looked about an hour long, and Nagano is the only place you can get one of my favorite Japanese foods: Oyaki.
There was a huge shopping center right next to the ski-park (owned by the same company), and the 1st shop there had oyaki. It wasn’t very good, but it gave me an extra hour and a half of waiting to get on the lifts and I went down the hill 3 times before the rest of my group came out of the restaurant too.

I am not able to count all the very good reasons to be a vegetarian, let alone name them; There are more than several. When people ask me I can only mention 5 or 6, or 10 or 15…, without getting into the proper details. When PETA said they had pamphlets/ brochures for interested parties to hand out – I did volunteer.
If you didn’t know: Environmentalists and Animal Rights Activists are now considered “terrorists” by the Bush 2 “administration“, so it’s safe to assume that the NSA now knows not to go snowboarding in Karuizawa.
I never even did get those brochures, but I’ve been on the PETA Asia mailing list for a long time since. I got a message not too long ago asking for people who could speak Japanese to help them with their new Japanese anti-fur campaign, and again, I volunteered.

I didn’t know I would have to telephone Media-outlets (in Japanese) to be sure they got those pictures of that sexy naked girl who “preferred it to fur”. I hate telephones and I especially hate using them, but I do like animals, …and fair trade chocolate, and I like sexy naked girls, …and I like moss covered stones, and patchouli….

Anyway,
They gave me 3 numbers to call. I had my girlfriend tell me how to say things in Japanese like: “rights” (alla‘: “animal rights“), “organization“, “connect” (as in: “hook a brother up”). It took her a lot of thinking to come up with the right words.
I managed …not at all gracefully.
Somebody told me that their whole photo department was “off” that day. They added that there were only 2 people in the department, …so it might not have been just a polite way to hang up.
Perhaps getting a call from an Animal Rights organization would make a lot of people uneasy. Getting a call from someone obviously reading a script to you too! …Uneasy. Then when you factor in my funny American accent – assuming I have one, well I wouldn’t want to talk to me either – But I hate telephones + wouldn’t want to talk to anyone if I could help it.
A lady who answered one of the phones asked me who the e-mails were addressed to, so I told her how I was one of the few PETA volunteers who could manage to speak a little bit of Japanese, + somebody in another country had done the mailing. It turns out that she spoke very good English, + she went and asked the people in the photo department if they had gotten the photos of some sexy blonde lady naked in Tokyo. They had.
I saved Playboy Japan for last. The receptionist explained that the whole company was a photo department. That sounds like a good company – but they had the worst “on hold” music of the lot. The guy I got on the line after waiting seemed interested in seeing pictures of the world’s sexiest lady naked (because she doesn’t like fur) in Tokyo.

Naturally.

A year or 2 after I got here my mom sent me an e-mail about something or other and she mentioned that the girl who liked me all through elementary school had died. I wrote back to ask why, but never got the answer.
I asked a few people I grew up with, whenever I was back in the old country and able to ask, …but nobody ever knew.
I thought I let it drop, but:

I had a dream a few weeks ago that I was somewhere with people from my high-school that I was friendly with, sitting at a table, and talking. The girl that used to like me (who died somehow), came and sat down in the empty seat beside me. She looked at me quietly, but didn’t say anything. I said: “Hey, didn’t you die a while ago?” Her eyes got wider + she seemed to be thinking about it/ She still didn‘t make any sound. So I said: “You did die though, didn’t you?” She lowered her head a little and looked concerned. I’ve been curious about this for a few years, + I was excited; If anybody would know why it was said that she was dead, she would. I said: “Somebody told me you were dead.” . And all the color suddenly left her, she slid down in her chair, and her head went limp/ rolled. She laid corpselike for just a moment before I woke up.

I stay up late a lot. Like right now…
My girlfriend wondered if I had trouble sleeping.
I said I have to wake up and eat sometimes to keep my insulin from killing me (again). + I told her about that dream, how it woke me up, + she had trouble sleeping afterwards.

That was a dream though.