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| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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No Sex, No Drugs, No Wine, No Women (But A Lot Of Pretty Cool Stuff Otherwise...)
Love Notes From A Universe Hell Bent On Proving Its Own Lack Of Indifference Last night I dragged Max over to see Fu, to give Fu the mask that has been in my car for the last hundred years. Fu is working as a teppan chef at this place that I don�t particularly like�and I don�t particularly enjoy yaki�d food anyway, so the whole point of the little exercise was to see Fu. Who apparently had little to no idea what was in the box I was bringing for him, despite having spent a leisurely half-hour under an algenate mask with straws up his nose. But that was long ago, and who knows who either of us is now. (I�m making little sense here, I know, but I spent a long afternoon, under the influence of a non-non-drowsy antihistamine, studying kanji that I should already know and which I decidedly knew not. And Japanese? Is foreign under the best of circumstances, but under those particular circumstances? Is incomprehensible.) Fu? Oh, right. After a yaki�d dinner (most of which I didn�t eat, opting instead to bring it home in a box to molder sadly in Max�s refrigerator), I came home, went to bed, and woke up about three hours later thinking: I�ll bet that mask was broken. Somewhere in transit, I�ll bet it got broken. And I never checked it before giving it to Fu, and it�s being broken? God, what kind of message is that? After a few hours of these thoughts running around my head, I was able to get back to sleep. And I woke up a few hours later, thinking: Oh, right, today�s the day I�m going to see Dave. And I went about my business. The car�s �Check Engine� light came on yesterday, but the mechanics could not possibly fit the car in to check the engine until next Monday, leading me to wonder about the supposed necessity of having a �Check Engine� light�or even having an engine for that matter. (�It�s okay to drive�just so long as the light�s not flashing or anything.�) But already having cancelled the morning Judi walk, I went to the gym, did a half-hour of cardio and the requisite �I�m only here to oogle the girls� five lifting exercises minimum, and then went over to the bookstore for a coffee. (Yes, I used to go for books, but now? Not so much. Caffeine over intellectualism any day.) Scored my coffee, wandered a bit, picking up a book on how to fail miserably at learning kanji (they leave out the miserable failure part in the title and call it instead something like 250 Useful Everyday Kanji, but we all know the truth), and returned home. I was restless, but read the introduction to the book. Tried to nap. Called a few schools to set up some observation hours, managed to do so at a single school in the Valley, took a shower, thought, God, just get out of the house. Go down to ErinII�s for some coffee. So I loaded up the bookbag (and, yes, I did just realize that this is the most boring story ever posted on the internet, so I�ll just shorthand it by saying that upon leaving my house, I headed in the opposite direction from ErinII�s and ran into Dave on Central.) We stood outside the new sushi joint (where he�s soon to be head something or another) and chatted for a while. I told him I was moving to his old stomping grounds, Tokyo, and he was duly impressed�or at least was polite enough not to piss on my parade. I asked him about Fu and the last sushi joint, and he broke into this terribly complicated story, complete with major and minor players, and I tried to hang on, but it was even more detailed than the story I attempted to foist off in the last paragraph, and crossed several cultural borderlines to boot, so I ended up just kind of looking at Dave and thinking about the whole freckled thing, which I find kind of funny in a cross-cultural kind of way. (Spanish people are not usually freckled and�well, so we often find it funny when people are.) Maybe I should put in there that it was Dave�s freckles that put that thought in my head. Oh. Kay. And while we were chatting, this cute Japanese boy (I say that he was a boy, but given that ageless Asian gene, he was probably in his mid-40�s or something) rode up on his bicycle and tried to run Dave over, albeit in a very friendly manner. And here I�ll just say that though I�m always shocked at how pretty Japanese women often are, I�m always even more taken aback by how pretty Japanese boys are. Japanese boys (from the ages of about 18-30 anyway) tend to be ridiculously pretty. Much prettier than Japanese women by far. And this kid was no exception. We had an English conversation in which much of my contribution was a resolute �?� and Dave did his version of translation in which the loud English is punctuated by Japanese phrases, often very rude, and by this, The Boy (Nihon Div.) was made to understand that I was going to Tokyo to work as a eigo no sensei. The meeting ended with my talking with the big boss, only half-jokingly about taking a job in the kitchen. (God, don�t let me ask again to work like the Japanese do, because the first time I did, I ended up getting a O.L. job in Tokyo, complete with commuter pass and 45 minute commute bracketing each day of a 42-hour work week.) But that was my day. A teppan dinner of lead still in my belly, a Dave sighting, and an afternoon of hours of practicing what resembles useless barnyard chicken scratching that I am supposed to believe is understood by the most highly literate society in the world. But I am still grateful. When you let go, it leaves room for what comes. Let go. And be grateful for having done so.
More lies:
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