On Friday, after returning from Tokyo and sleeping most of the previous day, I was to visit Hokuto High School, where Amanda teaches. On the way in I took off my shoes and got a pair of school-issue slippers, which were approximately 6 sizes too small for me. Walking around in these was difficult enough, with my heels almost entirely unsupported, but ascending and descending the stairs was a positively acrobatic maneuver. Most of my attempts at this were punctuated by either the painful stubbing of a toe or one of the slippers flying off into a hallway.

After checking out the classrooms a bit it was down to the staff room for the morning meeting. Everyone stood and a bunch of stuff was said in Japanese, with plenty of honorifics and such. I could instantly sympathize with Amanda's complaint that she rarely knows what's upcoming and going on around the school, that was apparently the content being spoken here. My presence was announced and explained, and the 80 staff members applauded me and my omiyage, a surreal moment. Then there were some smaller group meeetings, and Amanda kindly arranged with some other teachers for me to observe some classes.

For the first two periods I was to watch Amanda's English classes. So far I hadn't seen any students, but this was it. As they started to come in, reactions ranged from head-down obliviousness to mild bemusement to near mental breakdown. Amanda left the room for a long minute and I was left to explain myself to the obvious alpha girl, who skidded into the room and stopped short, shouting "WHOOO AH YOU?!?!" I uttered my catchphrase of the day, "Amanda-Sensei no tomodachi desu" (teacher Amanda's friend). At this she skipped around the room, saying "tomodachi tomodachi" several times. The classes consisted mostly of games involving vocabulary, along with the usual, boring, kids running back and forth between this room and the next one as fast as possible to memorize sentences written on cards and write them down.

After that I watched a music class. It was mostly independent study going on, so I spent a lot of time standing around trying to look interested. One student had been introduced to me by Amanda as a particularly cool kid. He was on the guitar, but after a few minutes had his head on a desk, taking a nap. When the teacher noticed this she said something to him, but the brief exchange that followed seemed entirely too relaxed. In general, the atmosphere was surprisingly relaxed--I didn't sense any of the fear or competition that I remember at times of high school. But I had been told that the students were separated by the 'track' they were on, academic, business, or, well...service sector? so this may have been one of the less 'serious' sections. Eventually Junpei, done with his nap at the guitar, started strumming Green Day's "Basketcase," and I considered that enough of an in to start up a conversation. His English skills were extremely impressive, and we had no trouble communicating.

Next was science class. At first Amanda accidentally brought me to the wrong room, which was full of even more surprised students. Just before we realized the mistake a husky student with very short hair turned to me and said, after some thought, "YOU AH GOOD-ROOKING GUY."

When we got to the right room for science class, I was surprised to find only 4 students. I was also surprised when the teacher walked up with a big smile to show us a bag full of pig's eyes. At that point Amanda decided to leave me to it. It was dissection time, and I was given my very own eye. Normally I would have no real problem with this, but it was rather unexpected, and there's something about seeing eyelashes out of their usual context that's all the more disturbing. But I had almost been waiting for a time when I'd have to suck it up and do something very much out of the ordinary for me, so I dove in. Or to be more accurate, I began tentatively poking at it with the little spear and forceps, trying to separate the surrounding tissues from the eyeball. This prompted a fatherly talk from the teacher about how "hand is the best tool." Point well taken. Next we had to cut off the resilient layer from the front of the eyeball. I responded by cutting out the entire front, cornea, lens and all. The other students were trying to help me, but it was not of much use. The teacher took it in stride and used it as a good example of what not to do. He was an extremely nice guy and really tried to teach me someting, even writing out the vocabulary in romaji. So if I ever need to discuss the cornea with a Japanese fellow, I'll know to say "kakumaku." We played around with the lenses for a while, observing the magnifying effect, and the teacher offered one to me to bring home as omiyage.

After a tasty lunch, Amanda had some work to do and I was advised to make myself visible, apparently to create the impression that my visit had some sort of a purpose. But I must admit I came to dread the hysterical reactions of the students, and found myself running away, or trying to in my tiny slippers and failing miserably, when I heard their giggles echoing throug the halls and stairwells. I'd also found it rather unsettling when I noticed the Playboy Bunny icons decorating many of the girls' otherwise staid uniform socks. When I passed a classroom with a view to the hallway it was near chaos. Then I saw sitting on a locker a wooden practise sword, and performed a couple of Kill Bill thrusts and swings before pausing to think about the potential for embarrassment.

In the afternoon Junpei came to the English lab for some conversational practise. He played some songs on his guitar, showing himself to be far more skilled than I. At the end of the school day the kids all cleaned the premises for 10 or 15 minutes, and I should mention the school was utterly spotless and extremely nice and modern. We said goodbye to the teachers who had been my guides, and I tried to express my appreciation, saying "totemo omoshirokatta" 'it was very interesting' and hoping that didn't have the same connotations of strangeness that it has acquired in English. And then my brief look into the life I could have had was over.

Smartass programmer: if you do a product search at Staples.com, one of the fields shown in the resulting URL is called "cromulent." This word means "fine, acceptable"--having lost habitual OED access I can't tell you any more. The Chambers Dictionary is silent on the subject. Unfortunately the field never seems to have any value.

DJ Pasty Pete reports that a neighborhood grocery store is advertising a sale on Philadelphia Cream Juice.

Lately I have thrown myself at FINDing things with renewed enthusiasm. For a while I picked up just about every piece of paper I saw. Dave of FOUND magazine says that on average 1 out of 5 objects you pick up will be interesting. When I encountered a far lower ratio I got a bit frustrated. I seemed to be finding a large number of extremely mundane pieces with directions or phone numbers written on them. There were also totally blank pieces of looseleaf paper, that material being by far the most promising, and things thoroughly ripped up for no apparent reason, like a printed out email advertising a sale at a clothing store. I grew to hate napkins that from a standing position didn't look like napkins. Finally I did start to find some interesting things, although still many of them were only barely interesting, only if you stretched your curiosity about the mundanity of strangers' lives, or reached for interpretations of small details. Nothing at all heartbreaking or hilarious, like the things I've gotten so used to seeing in FOUND. I've started thinking that the magazine spoiled me by showing me only the best of the best from everywhere. But I was inspired by a co-worker's find, after relatively little effort, of pieces of several versions of a hysterically hostile note written to someone's sister. It was easily of the level of something in the magazine. Since then I've tried to take it easier, and have been much more pleased when I find something good, having a lot more of the feelings I have when reading the magazine. I will try to find a good way to share some of these; if nothing else they're probably more interesting than anything I have to say. Check out this thing I've been talking about here and hop on the bandwagon: FOUND

Lately I've been keeping a notebook by my bedside and trying to write down my interesting dreams right when I wake up. Everyone knows this is a fun thing to do. When you do it right after waking, you still partly believe in the dream's logic, so what you write sounds much more dreamlike than accounts written later on. And of course my subconscious is far more imaginative than my conscious mind, so many good ideas are surely lurking there. But whether it's trying to wake up early, study, or write down dreams, my mind always has a way to defeat itself--in this case, several ways. Sometimes I start to wake up and think about writing down a dream, then I fall back asleep and dream that I'm writing down my dream. Should I then wake up and include that dream in my writeup? Other times I think about whether or not the dream was interesting enough to record, or whether I can remember it well enough, and I keep going back and forth on it until I can't even remember what the dream was really about. Or I start thinking too much about the best way to write it, and then I know that the writeup isn't going to be good in the dreamy way it should be, because I've already overthought it. I have won out a few times though and gotten some prize writeups, and some ideas that could make good lyrics or Michel Gondry videos. One time I woke up not with a whole dream but just with several 'ideas:'

want to map the make chain
(it's no secret that I)
spiderman sequels in term of
a nationwide directive
K-Maths

The second line applied to the first one, the 'make chain' being a term I had in mind for the creative process. K-Maths is like K-Mart, only with maths! No idea what the other lines meant, I don't think they were supposed to be connected.

Took the terrible 8pm-midnight nap tonight. Dreamt that I was part of what I would call a vigilante HVAC squad; you see we go in and secretly fix up the systems when the building management doesn't want it done the easy way. We were planning to go into the Pentagon, which was controlled or at least guarded by John Edwards, and implement some badly needed enhancements to the ventilation system. I think it ended with me running into a startled Edwards' office with some kind of crossbow in hand, and shooting it in a perfect path through the entire building.

5am or so, gave up on my initial attempts at more sleep and finished off the box wine--excuse me, "cask" wine. According to the blurb from the maker, rectangular prisms made of corrugated cardboard are now called casks.

A day and a half or so later, continued writing this entry. Yesterday H. and I caught "Donnie Darko: Director's Cut." Before the feature they showed a trailer for "Open Water" which was somewhat different and improved from the one we saw before "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" (the most frustrating movie ever), which was the worst trailer ever [was that confusing enough?]. It was like the worst of both worlds, with lo-fi footage of people treading water and saying "OH MY GOD!" and then the hi-fi deep voiceover saying "THE MOST TERRIFYING MOVIE OF THE YEAR", coming off completely like a parody. Just picture how bad this could be and that's exactly how it was. That pattern was repeated about 6 times, along with some footage of fish and sharks swimming. Evidently the filmmakers realized how bad it was and got a new, shorter one made. Back to "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead": this movie was extreme subtlety, and in some ways that was very satisfying, although part of me is sad that I've become enough of a grownup to be able to appreciate that. But good god Mr. Hodges, you can only take it so far, before you're spending an hour and a half building up to something and then only half finishing it. Back to Donnie Darko. This was certainly an education in director's cuts; you go in with high hopes because it's like a movie you already know is good has been made and released anew by the person most likely to understand what made it good in the first place, and therefore able to improve on it. But knowing that it's the director's cut, one can't help but notice when a scene could easily have been left out without affecting the plot. Some of the additions were pretty nice for explanation and making the foreshadowing clearer, another common DC effect, but some of them were just not necessary. These DC's are sometimes accompanied by stories of battles with the studio over what would originally get released, but if there was such a fight with this one, I can't see why. Enjoyable nonetheless.

After reading The New Yorker for a while, Tape Op is like a children's book. The former takes several protracted sessions, usually over slightly more than a week, if I'm going to read all the big nonfiction articles, which I try hard to do; the latter I'm now stretching to make it take more than a couple days' worth of dull moments. In the current issue they recommend four old little keyboards that supposedly have really cool sounds or abilities and are available really cheap. Of course it being in Tape Op means the prices of these keyboards will now rise significantly. It always gets depressing when I'm forced to realize that my interests, while they might seem obscure to some, are still shared by a large number of people, way more than enough to crowd an auction.

When I first obtained Belle and Sebastian's "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" I listened to it once and then put it aside. A lot of the songs didn't sound at all the way I had expected them to from their titles, and titles are important to me. I also find their unbelievable technical precision in playing their instruments, along with the highly produced sound they now employ in recordings, to be almost off-putting. But I gave it another chance recently, perhaps needing some happy music to balance my Daniel Johnston listening, and I've found plenty to like. My most joyous moment came when after falling for the song "I'm a Cuckoo," I suddenly understood the last line of the refrain, "I'd rather be in Tokyo/I'd rather listen to Thin Lizzie-oh/and watch the Sunday gang in Harajuku." This caused me to laugh like a madman, surely in part because I had just woken up and was a bit delirious. Okay, so the gathering of goth teenagers in crazy costumes every Sunday at some locus in that Tokyo neighborhood is not exactly a secret; I'm pretty sure it was in the Lonely Planet that I skimmed before deciding it was useless. But he did a fine job of constructing the lyric to make it sound like a pastime rather than a curiosity. Plus, as I've said, Harajuku is among my favorite place-names in the world, and hearing Stuart Murdoch pronounce anything makes it even better.

If you google for "++ =" (yes, in quotes), you'll find that not only does it not return any results, it doesn't return anything at all, not even the "Web" bar that tells you you're looking at that type of results. I was looking for this because of some weirdo statements in some C code that I was working with, that it turned out were somehow incrementing a double pointer and then assigning the single pointer part of it a value within the same statement. I figured the cause was something to do with the Google calculator that lets you type in basic equations, trying to solve an equation that would be mysterious indeed. Plenty of other stuff works too, like + = not in quotes, or ^ %, #, $, ~, (), everything else above the numbers but not *, or &. Hard to understand why this would be. It felt a little odd then doing google searches for strange google results, and that came up empty anyway.