A – Z + Wedding Stuff

When he came up to our wedding party, Joe kept saying that I should write something.

I kept telling people to try the vegan cupcakes,

+ that our house was on any number of National News Broadcasts because it marks the very edge of where all the landslides stopped.

“Congratulations on your Wedding!!  Any plans for the future?”
“We’ll probably go live on the floor of some school gymnasium with the rest of the town until I can get a job somewhere civilized.  And …maybe …maybe we’ll get a TV someday.”

He said I should write something + Yeah, …I’ve been thinking that for about a year myself.

I did write quite a lot (again), but it got erased (again) when I tried to save it (first time that’s happened that way).
Last year I had written a lot just before my computer died, so it seemed safer to me to type everything in online from now on.  You know, so a hard drive failure doesn’t destroy countless hours of work (+ my classic Star Trek collection) all over again.

So I had mostly finished the long story of how I got married, relying on the site’s auto-save function until I hit the save button myself, …when it said something about a cookie being missing + it went to a different page, + all the stuff I’d typed into the previous page over the previous 2 days disappeared – as did nearly all my resolve to start over.

+ Wouldn’t you know it, …but it happened AGAIN just right now.  I typed it into another program + saved it there first thankfully.

(I hate this site SO Much!)   This is what’s left of what I gave up on before:
——————————————–

I  told my wife, …’cause I’m married now, how my bike pump broke while I was fixing a flat tire, + she said I have the worst  luck of anyone she knows.  It’s comforting to me that somebody else finally understands this.

I’m not sure it’s the worst luck though really, just not very good luck.  For instance:  It’s good I got the tire inflated right before the pump sprang a leak.  It’s good I hadn’t eaten anything solid before I threw it up 20 times + couldn’t eat anything else the next 3 days.  It’s good my blood sugar never got too low in all that time, because I couldn’t have eaten anything to remedy it.

I missed a day of work because of my illness, so my boss, who knows I have to live off of less than$400 a month offered to give me a pair of his classes to make up a little time/ get a little more money;  But he called me to make the offer when I was at the phone shop, with the battery out, trying to get a replacement, ’cause the battery in my phone only lasts a half a day, …+ I missed the call/ no work for me.

I stepped on the cutest lizard in my house that day, but I bet it was a lot cuter before I stepped on it.  Occasionally I’ll find a slug on my toothbrush, a rat in the shower, a giant spider in my socks, a poisonous centipede in my tea-cup, a cockroach in the bottle of mouthwash (somehow),….. but I didn’t know we had lizards.  I hope we have more of them;  I like lizards, and I think they could help with some of our other problems, but I don’t know if they eat slugs + we have a lot of slugs!
I put the little fellow out on top of the compost pile, because there are lots of small bugs there he could eat there, instead of the giant bugs in our house eating him.

I should probably jump ahead to all the wedding crap I had to do/ go through…

It wasn’t my idea, I don’t see what the big deal is, but I showed up + am married now by all accounts.

It’s very nice that my girlfriend finally stopped bugging me regarding: “when are we getting married?”.  Now I bother her from time to time about: “when are we going to get a cat?”, but she says I’m too poor to afford one.

Which reminds me:

The website I 1st used to sell paintings on the internet announced that they are going to shut down.  I was kind of upset until then, …about being poor + stepping on that cute little lizard, but hearing how the site that F@#ked me five times is biting the dust, that perked me up.         Of course, the downside to that, …all the information I had about those however many years of paintings sold + unsold died with my old computer;  That S#%tty site had been my only back up.

I’ve got something nice here now:    http://ryancanvas.com

I bought this great Vegan Cheese stuff when I went home for Christmas last year.  I kept it in our tiny freezer + used it only very sparingly.  It’s so nice to have, ’cause you can just put a slice on a piece of bread, toast it, + you’ve got yourself an easy lunch/ dinner when there’s nothing else at hand – which there frequently isn’t, because we live in the ass end of nowhere, + I am poor.

I went home for Christmas this year too;  To visit aging relatives, make half assed preparations for a wedding party in the U.S., and to buy more vegan cheese.

There are no stores around here where you can get vegan cheese/ other things of interest.  That’s true for most of Japan, but here is just a whole lot smaller than most every other place.  We get: booze, bread, rice, sweet potatoes, soy milk, and a small selection of toilet paper, shaving razors, vegetables – not much else.

I got a lot of vegan cheese this time, because last year when I got it and brought it back here it was great.

This time I got a lot more of it, sliced and in blocks, and carried it all back, + only discovered it was expired when I was transferring it to our tiny fridge.

I did at least manage to see a few relatives and make some half assed wedding party preparations:

It’ll be held: somewhere, failing that: somewhere else.  I haven’t decided on the date.  I don’t care what you wear – just cover your shame.  Khalique said he would be the DJ.

It’ll all be vegan – as were the 2 dinners we had here.

Both of those were very nice! 

The dinner after the ceremony/ what you see in the video was at a very old restaurant/temple where the emperor used to keep something important – 300 years ago.  I forget what though, I got married 3 months ago + don’t remember – It was purportedly something impressive!

We had the ceremony at a temple in Kyoto so the few/2 relatives I could force to come to visit me for the 1st time in 8 years, could see the nicer side of Japan.  They said they liked it – as well they ought!  They were not, however, accustomed to walking.  We passed up so many culturally significant sites, so many hundreds of years old – because they were more then 50 yards away.

The ceremony its self was held at Nan Zen Ji.  It’s a good place for photographs, and it’s a Zen temple – so there’s far less dogmatic bullshit, I had the duel fortune to not understand anyway.  The priests and I share the same diet, and were it not for my now wife’s fussiness over how I would look in our wedding photographs, the same haircut.

An assistant priest explained what we would have to do during the ceremony, but left out the part about the oath, which I could not catch when the head priest came out with it.  My then, now wife, girlfriend tried to slip me the right answer, but I had never heard of that word.

Chikaimasu – as it turns out, means something to the effect of swear or promise, but I thought she was saying

Chigaimasu/ error, so:

When the priest asked me some thing to the effect: “if I do so swear”, …I said something to the effect of: “no way”.

We were also supposed to read an oath of some kind
(“What kind?” I do not know.),
and do some ceremonial Sake drinking thing.

We were each of us supposed to drink from each of 3 bowls 9 times each – to total 27/ or 52 sips altogether, but she’s not good with details, so she skipped ahead to the 2nd bowl after just 3 sips, which seemed to alarm the priests – who had to make some fast adjustments to the ceremony.
She also insisted on reading the oath like she was auctioning something off, paying no heed to my second grade reading level.  There were many pauses while she waited for me to catch up, but luckily, we both read quietly enough to not make it too too too obvious.

—————
All the interesting things that happen in a year, it seems, are not so interesting that I recall very many.  Here are some odd bits in a format that might jog my memory:

A

Apples – I got this all vegan baking book for Christmas 2 years ago, + it took me about a year to come to the understanding that my girlfriend/ wife would never just open it up and decide to cook something in it.  When I took it upon myself to do just that, she seemed to be offended that I was making so many chocolate things.
So many, to her is – I guess: 4, because I made 2 chocolate peanut butter cakes, one chocolate cake, and a batch of cookies over a 3 month period.  She wanted apple something for her birthday, so I made an apple cobbler.  Then she made 2 or 3 more of them, then had me make 3 apple cakes, then she made a German apple cake, but the chocolate was so much better, and less frequent while the weather was cold + neither of us could get out to get any exercise to work off the calories.

Arithmatic – She keeps track of all the money we make and where it gets spent and constantly reminds me that I am poor.

B

Bombay – It’s a city in India.  It’s got nothing to do with anything.

Broke Ass – That’s got a lot more to do with me

C

Car – Mine’s got no brakes, and the tires are worn down to nothing, hopefully someday I will get a hold of some money.

Cash – hopefully

Cat – I was painting a picture in a park, where all these drunk old men were drinking.  I don’t usually have a lot I want to speak about, with strangers, in a park, while I’m busy (for instance), but my wife talked to them + got us invited to their after party at someone’s home.  They kept asking us when, if, why we didn’t have any kids.  The answers involved various forms of “hopefully never”, but I did mention that I wouldn’t mind having a little cat.  The guy who lived there happened to be feeding some stray cats, so when one came over and rubbed up against me, he told me to take it home with us.

His name’s Ken + he has a F%$ed up eye.  He follows me around whenever I take him for a walk on the beach

Children – Who needs them?  Kids are work, and why would I want to come home from my job (where I get abused by children), only to have to take care of more children?

That question was rhetorical.

Cr*p – My wife’s sister has a kid who’s 3.  When they came to the US for our party there, this kid took all her clothes off  and jumped in the pool.  She did it several times.  Several people had to jump in the pool in their semi-formal party clothes to pull her out, …because she can’t swim at all.  I wore a T-shirt and floral swim trunks to my own wedding party, but she only tried to drown herself when my back was turned.

I was paying attention the time she jumped out of the pool, squat down, + cra*ped on the patio, but I made a point to turn away then.

D

Dragon Age: Origins -  Ask me what I did all winter.  I love that Sh$#!  (Another reason why I did not write anything for such a long time.)

Dragon Age: Awakenings – Not nearly as good, not by a wide margin, but it was still better than sitting and writing all the same stuff all over again.

E

Egg Salad – The party we had in the US, for all the people who couldn’t come to Japan was supposed to be all Vegan – like the dinner we had after the ceremony and the reception afterwards in Tokyo, but we took my mom with us to the store when we were ordering up some catering + She + my wife conspired to order Egg Salad and Tuna sandwich wraps and buy a bunch of cheese while I was getting mixers for the drinks.
I was up until 3:30am one night baking, and decorating, 60 plus  all vegan cupcakes, in lieu of a more traditional cake.  After my wife went to bed I attached a pair of  “Green Lantern” (with his ‘magic’ green ring) and some girl superhero toys as wedding cake toppers to the display, but it was so hot that day, not a lot of food got eaten.  And we made way too much

F

For some Reason – there was a

French Guy – in our town.  Jack called + asked if I could keep him busy during the day,  which makes sense – ’cause I don’t have a whole lot to do, except I don’t know what the hell to do with some French Guy.  A couple days later he brought the 3 of us to a beach on the opposite side of the peninsula where the waves were 3 times as tall as I.  It’s fun to get tossed around like a drowned snake – except I lent my favorite bathing suit to the French Guy, and the one I was wearing was too large – even with the string pulled tight, so the waist band filled up with sand which hurt some.
Taking it off hurt a lot less, but the water was kind of cold – as George Costanza once explained

Fukuoka – I was going to drive, but then we found a bus that could take me there for less money and far less trouble.  I had an interview with a giant company, who offered me a job somewhere boring not far from here.  It’s a giant company, so I asked them if I couldn’t get one of the more interesting jobs – outside of Kyushu, that I’d seen advertised.  I’m waiting to hear where I will be moving to, with little notice, in a big rush, very soon.

Addendum: Apparently not overly soon, hardly soon at all really, hopefully before my wife starts nagging me again.

G

Gallery – My friend who operates the rest stop up the road from my house decided that I could sell my paintings there, so he cleared out a room (mostly cleared it out) for that purpose.  We put a bunch of my paintings up, with price tags on about 10 of them (that’s when we ran out of paper).  He and his mom were all excited about having a mini art gallery open up adjacent to their mini restaurant.

For my part, I don’t know that I’ve ever been excited about anything.  Anyhow,  nothing sold the 1st day, and they’ve looked disappointed ever since.  It’s to be expected;  Nobody here has any money.  I should take some pictures of that gallery actually, …before I go, …wherever I do go, suddenly, in a big rush – hopefully.

Goat – He also asked me to paint a giant “portrait” (?) of his goat.  He bought a board larger than most any door I’ve ever seen, a bunch of smaller boards (for supports), and the worst paint imaginable.
I spent a few days studying goat physiology, and another week on my knees on the floor of the cement room so the worst paint in the world wouldn’t drip when painting a giant cartoon goat.  I had shown him sketches, but he wanted it to look more cartoonish, which is good, because it’s all anyone could manage with that horrible horrible paint.

Green Lantern – Is not my favorite superhero, but I like green, and when my once girlfriend/ now wife kept asking why I didn’t want to wear a ring, + what kind of ring I would wear if I could have any kind at all, …of course any intelligent nerd would want a Green Lantern ring.

Yes?

Of Course!

I found a place on e-bay that had non-functional ones (of course), made of silver for $50.  I ordered one 2 sizes larger than the one we got for free with her rings, but it’s still too tight.  I got a deal actually on that and a Batman ring, which I ordered in the same size, but is somehow much too large.  Despite her previous admonishments against me not wearing  a ring, she’s generally not much happier seeing me with a batman ring.  I generally like not wearing a finger shackle.

H

Haircut – I don’t like yours either.

Hats – Hat’s are a decent way to disguise baldness, unlike wigs, which are typically frowned upon.  I’ve never liked hats, but then I’ve never been, or realized I was as bald as I appear to be now.  The one friend who came to our wedding from the US had a hat on for a whole week’s worth of photos.  I’m okay with that.

I

It rains SO much here! – Like 29 days a month.  The sun has been out intermittently lately: periods long enough to lull you into a sense of security, then it suddenly starts pouring once you get halfway up a mountain.  I take very good care of my bike, but just in the past 3 months it’s gone from about a 1% surface area covered with rust to a 25% rust afflicted area.

J

Jack – was supposed to watch our cat while we were away, but I think he went to live with his girlfriend way way off in the city when the town was cut off by the landslides. Nobody we could get a hold of knew anything about our cat’s welfare.

Jail – is a good excuse for not coming, but another of my favored friends just forgot to come to our wedding party.

Having a giant wedding party is really the reason people get married after all.

K

Kenny –

L

Landslides – The mountain I can see right out my window came down – all mud an boulders: swallowed several homes, destroyed part of the road, and washed away a big part of the beach.  Nobody in our area was allowed back in their homes for several weeks.  We heard about this over Facebook while we were in the US getting ready for our wedding party.
By the time we got back to Japan, you were allowed back in your house, but only during the day – though this was not strictly enforced.  They said if it rained at all anytime before August, everyone would have to go back to sleeping on the floor of a community center.  (Incidentally, a previous community center was gutted by a landslide 3-5 years ago + has been left abandoned ever since.)

M

Matsumoto – is a really pretty city in Nagano.  I went there for a job interview at this weird place. (It was that or go back to our town early + not be able to sleep in our own house.)  They’d been interviewing people for 20 odd days for one job.  You had to do a grammar test, a speaking test, a demonstration lesson, and an interview.  I got to see my old town in the far off distance from the train on the way there and back, but I didn’t know what the “present perfect continuous” tense was.  No job for me.

Mouse – My wife found a dead one in our bathroom when she first came back to our house and I was in Nagano.  She’s here to fore refused to learn anything about the garbage code in our town (Which I had to do, despite it being entirely in Japanese), but in her defense there is no listing regarding the proper disposal of dead rodents (burnable – Yes?).  What she did, was just throw it in the yard, in the heat of summer – for me to retrieve several hot days later.

Movie – Here’s another bad one :

N

Naohiro – My old roommate when I lived in a different awful old house came to visit.  He thought this was the best place of all the places I’ve lived so far.  (There have been quite a few!)  I actually had “work” the day after he arrived.  While I was out, Naohiro opened all the windows and doors inside our house.  The wind blew several paintings down – no serious harm done to any of them, thankfully, but then the cat got into our bed room and peed on our futon.  While I had the mattress in the bathtub under running water (’cause cat pee can’t be washed away once dried), he went out and pumped up my boss’ inflatable boat.  When I had hung the futon out to drip dry, I went down to the beach to meet him.  He was swimming around/ looking for fish, oblivious to the fact that my boss’ inflatable boat was way off in far distant waters – having been carried off, out, and away by the wind.

He said he’d pay for it, but I just swam out about 10 minutes + caught up to it.

Neutered – We had the cat neutered after that.  My wife, because her English isn’t the best, or because she likes to frustrate me, now refers to him as “Gay”.  i.e.  “Poor Kenny, you made him gay.”.

Nigata – is apparently one of the snowiest places on Earth.  We might move there next.

Addendum: but probably not

O

Ocean – The Ocean broke my back!  I mean, …it didn’t break it, but damn.  There’s nothing for a mostly unemployed guy to do in a tiny town far away from anywhere, so I took my wife’s bodyboard to the beach that had the big waves, and it had big waves again today.  One of them bounced me off of the board and threw my legs up behind my waist, +  that’s where they were sling shot forward from when my chest landed back on the board.  I took a shower, but I’m still finding sand in my ears and nose and eyebrows.

Omnibus – is a word I’ve never used before, …except I’ve used it here, – as a placeholder.

Okayama – We might move there too.  Who knows?   I don’t

P

Paint – I put the paint on the canvas.  I don’t know how it get’s all over the cat, but sometimes he strolls in with green, red, blue splotches in his fur.  I say “What did you do?!”, but he doesn’t listen.  Maybe it’s because he’s Japanese.

Pancakes – It was like 20 seconds after I signed the wedding paper that I realized I should have worked in a provision that she has to make me pancakes on weekends when I ask.  If I’d only thought of it a little earlier.

We decided to hand it in on Halloween – my thought being that I could ever after refer to it as the scariest day of my life + not have to worry about her being in earshot.

Naohiro told me that his girlfriend went and got the papers, brought them home, he signed them, then she turned them in to city hall while he was at work.  Even knowing that, I was surprised at how anti climactic the city hall part of the process was:

We woke up some security guard, who tried his best to not look at me at all, while he checked at the details with my wife.  we didn’t have to swear an oath;  Neither of us even had to show any ID.

Afterwards we took a ferry over to the opposite side of the bay, ate some noodles in a weird spinning fountain table, then climbed a mountain.

I fell down the mountain + got several deep gashes on my leg, which I referred to as my wedding scars.  We were planning to stay the night in a hotel after sitting in the hot sand bath they have there, but it started raining really hard, so we just drove back home that same night – stopping at an Indian restaurant along the way.  Pancakes the next day.  I had to mix the batter up though.

Plan – The plan was: we do all the wedding crap, than I quit this job I have,+( only kept because it’s the only way to get time off to do all that wedding crap), then I get a real job somewhere.

Q

Quota – If you want people to apply for the job you have advertised, clean out your e-mail inbox periodically please. I wrote a nice letter of introduction to go along with my resume for each of 2 companies last night, but both e-mails came back saying: Undeliverable – User’s inbox has exceeded quota.  I could only find a postal address for one of the 2.  Wasted time.

R

Rationing – The cat used to eat all the food I’d give him all at once, but after we went off on vacation + Jack disappeared, he seems to have gotten the idea that he should only eat little bits at a time.

I too have been trying to make the little bit of vegan cheese I have left here last until I move somewhere, abruptly, hopefully soon.

I try not to eat too much of anything else either, …because I have no money.

Rick -  I wanted to have that Rick Astley video in place of our wedding video for the party we had in Tokyo afterwards.  My wife forbade me.

But I spliced it in for the party in America.  Pretty good song for a wedding actually.

RyokamiMura – If we’re lucky, …which we typically aren’t, we’ll get to move there, instead of some other boring beat to hell smells like cow crap city in Kagoshima.  It’s a small small town – part of the very same place I lived alone once before.

S

Saitama – I’ve had legal residence in Saitama 3 times already, …+ I’ve almost always hated it.

Spiders – There was a spider, …seriously, as large as a tarantula living in our shower for about a month.  It would slink off into a far corner whenever I went in and turned the water on.  I always washed myself in an opposite corner while keeping an eye on the beast.  Oe day while I was cooking, I thought I dropped a mushroom on my bare foot, but it turn out, …to my horror, that the cat had chased this giant hairy monster across my feet.  I trapped it in a cup with a piece of cardboard + threw it outside, hopefully it will not eat a bird.

Stroll – The day after we got the cat, when my wife was no longer drunk or surrounded by other people, she locked herself in the bedroom and refused to come out again until the cat was gone.  This was one of the many times she’s threatened to move back to Saitama.  Other instances include: me being too poor, me being too poor another time, and another time, and me not doing anything to help with the wedding in Japan (despite the fact that all the preparations we could do from where we live involve writing or speaking Japanese better than I can).

The cat had been a stray cat before, but being a long fluffy haired cat, prone to knots and matting, he couldn’t maintain himself very well as a stray.  I took him for a walk around the neighborhood while she was being ridiculous, and was surprised how he would follow me around mostly – especially considering it was only the 1st full day I’d had him.  Of course mostly meant, not entirely, and after he got lost, I went back home, and she found him outside our house the next day + let him back in.

I did maintain the habit of taking him for leisurely walks on the beach – until the beach was half washed out by landslides.

And she maintained a passive + not so passive aggressive attitude towards the cat for about a month.  Nowadays she’s usually upset that  the cat won’t sit with her while I’m around.  She still threatens to move back with her mom whenever she’s upset about something, or nothing though.

T

Tea – where is mine?

Teapots -  I brought 50 pounds of antique Japanese Shochu pots back to the US to give out as wedding party favors.  I was so busy during the party, …mostly translating for my wife’s mother, that I forgot to give away 85% of them.  Most people there’d have a hard time finding Shochu anyhow I suppose.  They look like tiny tea pots.

They – have baseball bats in the store, but that doesn’t mean you can play baseball in the store.

Three – My wife, her mom, and her sister, plus a little girl (I guess that makes 4).  Anyway, it was just me and a bunch of Japanese ladies in a car, shopping for 8 days!  I wasn’t looking forward to that, but they fell asleep in the car an awful lot.  I took them all to a little department store on the way to the mall one day, and they were in there for 6 hours!  Her sister wandered off without her daughter, which meant that my wife and I had to chase her around the store for 5 of those hours.  <See “They” above>

This little girl is as wild as most of the ones I usually have to teach, except her mom didn’t come back for her after an hour was up.  She ran around the store yelling exuberantly, tryed to play with all the toys still in their packages, she threw on armloads of bracelets, necklaces/any jewelry she could get her hands on – pieces falling off behind her as she went.

Tokyo Wedding Party –

U

Urchin – I either stepped on a spiny sea urchin + got the tip of one of its spines stuck in my foot, …or I got a giant splinter from the wooden floors in our old house.  I would examine it if I could get it out of my foot.

V

Van Gogh – I took them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showed them the Egyptian wing, with actual artifacts, you know: an entire temple transported to New York City from Egypt stone by stone, mummies, whatnot.  Her sister walks right past it all and says she wants to see the paintings.   I showed them the sculpture garden along the way, but her sister mutters repeatedly that she wants to see the paintings right right away.  I took them to see the paintings and they all sit on a bench facing the hallway with their backs to the Van Goghs.  I tell my wife that everything behind her was painted by Van Gogh + she said “Eeeeeeeeehh” (tonelessly)- without turning around.  I told them all there is a painting of waterlilies by Monet a room away, “it fills up a whole wall”.  My wife says “Eeeehh”.  Her sister said that her daughter dropped her handkerchief along the way there + that we would have to go back the way we came.

No Carvaggios, or ancient Greek statues for me.

W

Walking – People in and around New York City are normal as I see it.  Those 3 (4) were all reasonably fit, why could they not reach or maintain a reasonable pace?  Even when it was raining they walked at wedding procession speed, and her sister was always at the other side of the street when the lights turned.  Whenever we crossed a 4 lane avenue, she would wait for the 1st light, walk to the middle of the road, stop at the island in the center of the street, and wait for the next green light.   My parents wouldn’t walk uphill, or walk very far, but they are old, + can at least move faster than a snow sled in the summertime.

Watermelon – They only cost 300 yen ($3.25) up the road, but when I went the 1st time, I didn’t have that much.

Whiskey – The guy with the hat met Naohiro for the 1st time as we were setting up for my wedding party in Tokyo.  They opened up a beer at noon.  I was busy sitting still like a statue, having my picture taken over and over and over, while they seem to have been having fun.  At one point, he said, he found himself in a piano lounge writing haiku.  He also said: “Damn, my vomit tastes like whiskey.”

Y

You can run but – it’ll probably make you tired.  Maybe you should try hiding?

There is no X or Z, go home!