10 VII 07, Being the Former of Two Parts
it has been a while.
i've settled into The Routine: drudgery at the lab (same stuff as in FL but without helpful undergrad Oompa Loompas), read myself to sleep, rinse, repeat. occasionally punctuated by raucous evenings on the town, almost always rounded out with nomihodai (AYCD) karaoke. all-you-can-drink programs here are very manifestly not engineered with your typical Western capacity in mind... let alone that of intemperate biologists. i watch the clerk's eyes as he details this program, seeing despair and confusion germinate deep in his soul.
prepare ye for a whirlwind encompassing those vital bits where i was not slaving over reaction tubes and machinery. i have two weeks to cover - you will forgive me if i abandon strict chronological succession and skip here and there between toadstool caps of memory. hey, i just finished Cryptonomicon: 1130 pages of shuttling across five decades. you can handle a couple blog posts. this one will cover events preceding this past weekend.
being a red blooded American in a strange land, i got pumped to celebrate the 4th in grand fashion. i took a cue from Miles' (Bangkok) playbook and called our embassy to see what events might be going down there or elsewhere around town. a polite Japanese woman on the phone:
"Ah... I am sorry. Our party was on June 23rd."
"... say again? June 23rd??"
"Yes sir. I am sorry."
".............that's very strange."
at which point she hung up. hmm.
my crew is dauntless, so we organized our own evening of revelry and contempt for other nations. we had pity on several affable Canucks and brought them along to celebrate a belated Canada Day. patriotic gear was donned. i sported my oversized Texas belt buckle, drawing curious glances on the subway. Lane later tied an awesome and equally garish flag bandanna across his brow. the girls wove elaborate tales explaining how a tiny speck of red on their shoe constituted A Complete Red-White-and-Blue Ensemble. i kid, i kid.
nine of us crashed an upscale chain restaurant called Gyu Kaku - Jun gave me a nice cloth banner from there once, which i have in my apartment back in Florida. it's a yakiniku joint, which means that there's a small charcoal grill recessed into every table where you cook artful trays of bizarre meats. there was a meal set that saw numerous, increasingly odd courses brought 'round. while all delicious, the standouts were some odd manner of tongue in cross section and... Japanese hot dogs. on the Fourth. immaculately fitting.
the group shed a couple members and proceeded on cue to nomihodai karaoke. when we could wrestle the mike from heedless and howling Tyler (haha), we had some large-scale singalongs - drumming with chopsticks, bringing in fresh pitchers, and just generally being a Major Patriotic Nuisance. a fine and refined evening.
the weekend immediately following the last blog post, i went on the first of many geek pilgrimages: Akihabara and outskirts. i'd been fiending to go to Akiba since i was fifteen or so... all tech-savvy young men hold it aloft in their hearts as some cyclopean temple to Nerddom. for those uninitiated in our rites, it is also called "Electric Town", and is a dense anthill of electronics shops. it was a nice diversion from what i've increasingly recognized as the fractal geometry of Tokyo - towering subunits of near-identical entertainment / "entertainment", restaurant, and retail development iterated on spiraling and ever-decreasing scales.
i bought original Famicom carts of Dragon Quest and DQ2 for less than five bucks each. yes.
as is my duty and privilege, i sought out one of the five Pokemon Centers in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. i have never, and beyond hyperbole i truly mean this, never seen such a busy store. the queue looped back on itself four or five times with at least a dozen cash registers grabbing frantically at yen notes. the place prints money. that said, this money may combust upon erupting into the retail space, as the mean temperature of the store approximates the surface of a particularly nasty star. i almost passed out twice.
okay. on to more recent developments (next post, writing now).
