the Galactic Truth

I started typing about something else at first, but my girlfriend said she could only beat the dough for the pitas on this table between our computers. I gave up on typing pretty quickly. She beats it with such gusto I couldn’t help but think she’s angry about something.

I’m angry about that one third of my salary.
It’s kind of boring here too.

There’s really very little for anyone to do in this area. There are no restaurants, no movie theaters, no bars with disco nights. There’re just a lot of small farms, a beach we can’t swim on – ‘cause it’s too cold, and hundreds of mountains we can’t climb because there are no trails, and it never stops raining.
Yesterday it finally did stop raining. I went out and painted a picture of a shrine with the first few cherry blossoms of the season. I don’t know why my girlfriend wanted to come with me. Looking out the window, it seemed like a good idea – until we realized how cold it can be when the sun goes behind newly forming rain clouds. She sat in the car for a few hours – reading a magazine and looking angry, while I painted outside – shivered and shook.
She took my car down to the supermarket + didn’t come back for an hour at least. It was really cold.

We tried walking our $200 (equivalent) down to the old lady’s house to pay our rent, but that old lady can never hear us knocking.

She always wants to know who I am + why I’m there with money too.

My girlfriend bought a new computer when I first moved down here, so she could keep in touch with me easier. New computers all have Windows Vista on them these days though, + she’s not too good at using it. It’s all in Japanese + Windows (esp. Vista)  is rarely as straightforward as you’d like it to be, so I’m not a lot of help. We did get the internet finally though, so she at least has something to play with while she isn’t playing video games with me.

One day I was looking for a place to recharge my cell-phone.  There are just enough spaces in the power strip to accommodate both our computers and the modem, so I tried to plug the cord into the outlet in the bedroom. Instead of the 2 prongs at the end of the cord going into the 2 holes in outlet, the inside of the outlet got pushed back inside of the wall – where we can never get power from it again.

I’ve never even heard of that happening before.

….She found a cockroach at the bottom of a sealed container of Listerine we keep in the bathroom.  That’s even more bizarre.  It’s a watertight/ airtight childproof container,so how did a cockroach get inside?

Another odd thing is the old people who just appear.  We heard these voices one day, so I went and peeled back the curtain in the other room, + there were 3 octogenarians sitting on my porch talking calmly amongst themselves.  Perhaps they were talking about the good old days…

I thought my girlfriend would be interested to know there were random old people relaxing on our porch, but before I could even tell her, the old man loudly, gruffly, agitatedly exclaimed:  “Who the hell was that guy?”

I figure that ought to be my line…

I was on the floor of my studio another day when I happened to look up and see an angry old man looking in the window, down at me.   I would have taken a photo, but he shuffled away before I could get my camera out.

When I 1st moved in to this house, there was a fist sized hole in the wall with a wire running out, up, onto the roof connected to an old aerial antenna- that I can’t connect our TV to.  I plugged up the hole with clay, but the wire is still there, and we still can’t get any TV signal from it unless we plug 2 boxes attached to it, into outlets that we don’t have.  It might work out if I were to knock another hole in the outer wall and run an extension cord through, but there’s already a hole in the outer wall of another room which has an extension cord running from a wall outlet out to where the washing machine is…

People keep their washing machines outside here sometimes. It’s a pain in the ass wiping all the ash from the volcano off the washing machine + laundry pole when you want to wash some clothes.

Our washing machine used to squeal so loudly, you could hear it inside any building in the area.

I tried washing some clothes the other day + instead of the usual sound (that makes me want to walk down  to the elementary school down the road – to apologize for the disturbance), there was an awful burning smell.

Our washing machine doesn’t seem to work anymore.

It wouldn’t cost too much to replace it with another really old washing machine,  but that’s a lot more money than I’m happy spending with what I make now…

Now that we have the internet set up – I waste a lot of time doing this and that, but I don’t really remember exactly what.  I also try to get my girlfriend to play something on the Wii I got with her in mind, but she doesn’t like losing, …or playing video games – I’m not sure which takes precedence.
I got some recipes off of vegcooking.com . They usually work very well – if we can get the ingredients in this country… She likes cooking now too.

When we went back to the U.S. for Christmas, we didn’t get a chance to have any falafels.  (There are no restaurants or Mid-Eastern people here.)
Falafel is fun to say. They taste good. They’re so very difficult to get around here!!
They sound easy to cook, …and still taste good, even when you mess them up as badly as we, …or I, did.

She read a book she got from the library while waiting for the pita dough under the table to rise. (We only have one table – a Kotatsu – it has a heater attached to the bottom + a blanket that goes around the sides (to keep your legs warm.)
I’d already finished making the stuff that tasted a lot like hummus – even if the consistency was not right, so I played the cheap Incredible Hulk game I got while we were home for Christmas. Smashing up video game buildings and cars with an angry Hulk seems so therapeutic, but it just seems to make my girlfriend madder.

She was all the more madder with all the extra time my poor failure of falafel making took.

Whenever I ask her if she’d like something to eat, so looks to the clock for guidance, …like it’ll turn her into a gremlin.  Eating dinner late makes her pretty angry anyway.

I got a used Wii off of e-bay before Christmas because she really wanted one the Christmas before. I figured it would give her something slightly active to do when she moved in with me here (where there’s nothing to do this time of year), but she doesn’t share my enthusiasm for Spiderman games, and hasn’t gotten around to trying the ones I got with her in mind.
Spiderman is Awesome though – I have to say.

It’s been nice for me to have it. You can’t paint outside in winter/ in the ever present rain, + there’s no place to go anywhere around here (as I believe I’ve mentioned).

I might have written this sooner – if the city, the princess, the world didn’t need saving, zombie build up, all of that.  There also didn’t seem to be a lot to write about – it being so dull and rainy here.
I waste a lot of time on the internet too, now that we have it, as I have surely already mentioned.

Yesterday was nice because it didn’t rain (the 1st time in forever). Today was nicer because it was both: not raining, and sunny.
I painted a picture of a gnarley old tree growing on a big rock – covered with flowers, in front of a cliff.  It’s quite scenic,

but I knew it was a bad spot to pick on a Monday – being that it was next to the elementary school.
When school let out I had a sudden crowd of eager curious youth pushing each other, pushing my elbows and my easel (while I was working) to get a better look, asking hundreds of questions I could only sometimes understand, and YES: they touched the paint on my canvas to see what making fingerprints in a new painting felt like.

I also went to the old lady’s house again to pay her our $200 (equivalent) rent. I had to explain who I was, what the money was for, how much the rent is, what month it is, and all that all over again. If she wasn’t so old you’d maybe think she had a lot of foreign people stopping by with envelopes full of money for her.

There are only 3 foreign people in this town; One of them is : Jack, so that is what we all get called. I get Jack’s mail from time to time too, …close enough I guess.

I like to bring my girlfriend with me when I pay the rent. It gives her a little exercise and gives me a witness that I did pay – in case that lady forgets.
My bosses’ wife called me a month or two ago to say that the old lady’s son talked to her and he didn’t think we’d paid her for January. She couldn‘t be sure either way. I was sure that I had paid until I thought about it more + more, but even I couldn‘t be so sure about it after so much time had past.
My boss had initially made an envelope with the house‘s address + the names of all the months on it for me to put the money in, so she could stamp the name of the month and I would have something like a receipt to show I had paid – avoid any problems or oversights.
The 1st time I went over there she was peeling persimmons by her front door. I gave her the envelope, but her hands were covered with sticky goo and I never saw or asked for the envelope again. I tried bringing another envelope, but it turns out that she can’t remember where she left her hanko/ stamp anyway. My girlfriend is more concerned with proving that we paid than I am. Mostly I don’t think she would ever remember that she should expect any money from whomever I am every month anyhow.

The people at city hall called me at home on another day because I had renewed my visa a year before, and they hadn’t made a record of it on my “green card” yet.  I move around a lot, + there wasn’t any extra space to pencil in the un-new information on the back of my card with all the other changes, so they assured me it was very urgent that I apply for a new “foreign registration” card as soon as possible.  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.

Last week I was a little shaky + needed to eat to stay alive, but I couldn’t remember what I was looking for in the kitchen.  I think I was expecting to find some food that’d already been eaten.  I used to keep more food around, but then my salary got cut to one third + my girlfriend’s on her never ending diet anyway…  She’s the one who gave me some sugar pills + made sure I ate them.  Having a low blood sugar can also make you sleepy or sweaty.  It was cold, but I had to take off my shirts and find a towel to dry and warm myself up again.

On one of the many many rainy days, I found myself taking a cool shower, …+ not knowing why.
Taking a cool shower is something I‘m always – altogether disinclined to do – I think you’ll understand.  It seemed to take forever to get it to warm up (but not scald me).
When I stopped shivering, I started to wonder how long I had been in the shower. My fingers weren‘t wrinkly yet (though that probably happens quicker when the water is warm). I was immediately impressed with my deductive skills – to have reasoned that out so quickly, …but alarmed at the same time that I didn’t know several more simple things like: what time/ even time of day it was, whether my girlfriend was still home, whether I had shampooed or not, etc.
It was when it came to my attention that I honestly had no recollection of having gotten into the shower, that I got out.

I stepped out to find a clock – to reassure myself I wasn’t late for anything, but having consulted several clocks and my new cheap green watch, it turned out I was already 15 minutes late for a class in a town far away (I was also wet, and naked, and not in my car getting any closer …45 minutes away). That was more alarming, but then when I looked around and found my phone to call my bosses’ wife to say that I wouldn’t be there on time – I found a whole bunch of messages from her asking things like: where I was, what I was doing, why I hadn’t left yet. I wrote her a message to say that I just “found myself” in the shower and couldn’t remember getting in there/ anything before that.

She wrote back to say I had been acting really weird, so she just canceled my class for me. I wondered how she knew I had been acting any way at all until she explained that she had been in my house and gave me a pill …before I took my clothes off.

That is very peculiar is it not.

The day before was my girlfriend’s birthday. I rode my bike up and down a small mountain to get to a small shop that sells very small slices of very small cakes. I was dizzy + shaking off and on most of the rest of that day, so I probably should have eaten more than just most of a very small slice of a very small cake before going to bed. – I’ve woken up dead before after all…

I don’t have to wake up at the crack of noon/ even earlier like I used to anymore. That is very nice!
My boss said there aren’t enough kids at the school for him to pay me to work “full time” this month. “Full time” was roughly 4 to 8:30pm. I never got paid as much as one might like, but those are hours that I was happy with, so I didn’t complain about the money, the kid that wets himself, etc.
This month and last month I’m working the occasional morning Kindergarten class and anything after 6pm. That gives me almost every Friday off (with nowhere to go + it’s always raining) and $700 (equivalent) for the entire month.
I’m glad my girlfriend moved in + is splitting the $200 a month rent with me, but I’m also not entirely comfortable living with someone who can somehow be soooo pissed off all the time.
She made nearly 3 times what I made, when I was still being paid merely “not well“ (as opposed to now, when I‘m hoping to make as much as I did at my part time job in my high-school days).
We don’t share money anyway, so I don’t see how it should affect her. She’s also seems to be angry that I have more free time.
She used to be very angry that there weren’t quite as many convenience stores as there were around her mom’s old house. She’s angry that the floor is dirty after I vacuumed after she vacuumed. She’s angry that I’m playing video games while she’s trying to decide all the details for our wedding…
Women are a pain!

We went back up to Saitama for the weekend to visit her mom and my old friends. As much as I hate being surrounded on all sides but up – at all times by concrete, It was nice to be able to do a little shopping and visit a few restaurants.
We went to this Italian place where you can eat as much pizza as you want. When they finally realize that I will only eat as much of my girlfriend’s pizza crusts as she will concede me, they usually make me something vegan.
We took her mom to a vegetarian restaurant in Tokyo the next day. I was disappointed that all but one soy-sage (It’s not a sausage.) was honey flavored (with honey no less). My girlfriend was a little angry that her mom didn’t like all of her wedding ideas.

I still think the best idea was having lots of chickens walking around during the ceremony – even though I was just joking at first. The Green Lantern costume is also a good idea. My idea of having the party adjacent to that restaurant – in the hall with the giant Buddah statue is the one they liked enough to go with.  Now I’ve got her thinking about getting married on Halloween, …so I can freely confess to anyone that it {was} the scariest day of my life.

As upset as my girlfriend initially was when she moved in with me, despite what she claimed, her house is way way colder than mine. Her mom lets me sleep in a spare room on the 1st floor with no heat (none of the rooms have heat except the one with the heater). I thought I could cut back on shivering time by leaving all my outer clothes and sweatshirts on when I went to bed, but I forgot about the chocolate I had been keeping in my pocket.
It was melted onto the back of my shirt/ into the sheets when I woke up.
I wasn’t sure how to explain that in Japanese, so I got my girlfriend to help.

She doesn’t translate things as I say them though – she says whatever she wants to say and says that I said it.

I never said that I don’t like her mother’s Onigiri, for instance, I just said I didn’t really feel like having it for dinner (having already had it for breakfast and lunch).

While she was practicing for her nail technician exam with her mom (whom I never said did a lousy job – despite how my girlfriend chose to translate it), …I walked around my old city for a few hours and bought 8 cheap curry mixes and three: 1 killo bags of dried beans to take home.  She was mad that I spent a little over $50 (equivelent) on food that would last us more than a year.

I was pleased that I finally got an art frog from the machine.  I’d been dropping a little money in that machine every now and again over the last year I lived there – trying to get the keychain with an artist frog.  I got 4 typhoon frogs, 2 aerobics instructor frogs, 2 mushroom picking frogs,… but I could never get the artist frog until this last time, when I put my money in + nothing came out!

I went to the counter to complain + the guy opened the machine up and let me pick out any frog I wanted.  They stopped making those frogs in 2006 and the machine is still half full – he probably would have given me all the rest for another $1. …

On our way home we stopped at the best Indian restaurant I have found so far – in Kyushu. They were having a sale on Indian clothes (without curry stains), + I got an interesting pajama shirt; Pajamas are the national dress in India.
It seems very well suited to block out the sun and keep you cool at the same time – both useless features with the weather being what it is here.

The cherry trees were just starting to bloom up in Saitama + Tokyo. The blossoms have almost all fallen off down here.

It was good that the sun shone for a few days at least. Three of them I spent in a valley with 2 big waterfalls: painting, and trying to warm myself up somewhat. I painted a lot more cherry blossoms by a river on one cloudy day. I drove around looking for the place people had recommended to me – wondering why the hell they’d think I should look there for nice cherry trees, on another cloudy day.

Cloudy/ rainy days make for poor paintings, so I’ve taken to drawing outside with an old ink pen recently. (Everything has to be black or white, so you don’t have any of the colors diminished by the bad lighting.)

One day when it was gray and windy, but not raining,  I tried cycling up to the lookout on top of the only mountain I’ve found with a road here.  It took an hour and a half of constant pedaling, but I made it all the way to the top: soaking wet and that much colder in the wind at the top of a mountain.

It took me an hour and a half to cycle up, but only 15 minutes to make it all the way down – and dry again!

Now that our washing machine has stopped spinning clothes dry – I might try wearing something wet up the mountain sometime.

I like having more of my afternoons free – even if it does mean a lot less money + an angrier girlfriend.