blabbo

had my first day of senka today. the students were all genki. one of them, who has adopted the nickname "hingis" made the video course a lot easier b/c everyone else was a bit shy. level 5 (super hight) was really friendly. i brought in a bunch of my crap and made them tell me about myself. if was a pretty narcissistic exercise, but they had fun. they were especially into the converge dvd and biology paper. henry(coordinator and fellow hong kong companion last golden week) decided to have a few of them out post-class and so we went to(as usual with senka) shitty faux irish pub serving $10 pints and attracting loud horny dudes. i talked with ichi(student from one of my classes last year) about slang. he thought it would be a good idea to learn new english from "8 mile". i'm trying to discourage that endeavor, although he's been making so much progress recently, i don't want to put a damper on his momentum. i had a little bit of difficulty explaining the nuances of "dawg" however.
all in all, the students are all friendly dorks, which made me pretty excited about the class.

i did training at waseda yesterday for a part time job and met some cool people. The contrast between that and ECC training was like night and day. Waseda recruited a lot of the gaijin i thought didn't exist(at least in such great numbers) in tokyo - smart, funny, and interested in teaching. met a dude who runs a distro for fun and likes a bunch of progressive hardcore/doom - he's also really into going to shows. dropped a bunch of japanese bands i've never heard of. said he'd make me a cd. i hope.

mike(another cool coworker from ECC who tipped me off to and will also be working at waseda) burned me a ymo cd which I'm getting ready to listen to. i'm stoked. there was a dude who went out of his way to drop a bunch of names at the training and proceded to lament "technology" while extolling the virtues of "old school boom boxes" who kind of got on my nerves. He came up to mike and I and said "what's up nerds", explaining he and his friends in high school thought it'd be a good idea to refer to each other as such. Mike replied he and his friends had referred to each other as "bird" at his colorado high school. He has since been referring to me as that. although cool dude was a little much, he did tip me off to some cool record stores.

i watched "Takeshis'" the other night. it got pretty mediocre reviews in the press here when it came out a year ago, and I can understand why. It made absolutely no sense. Kitano Takeshi warned audiences at Cannes "not to try and make sense of the film", which, although might sound viable from a purely theoretical artistic perspective, it usually doesn't work in practice. However, Takeshi invested a lot in the characters from the film, and i was so endeared to( is that proper grammar) them i gave up giving a shit about the total lack of coherence. recommended. i think it might be available in the states now.

dave(coworker and drummer in the "band" i'm putting together) keeps coming up with some bad ideas for songs and band names(i think something like "bloody bunker boys" or something equally embarrassing), but I kind of appreciate that he's a totally honest dude. however, kevin(other guitarist and songwriter) are a little worried about how to navigate a situation in which we have to say "no" whilst still keeping him interested/not coming acrosss as assholes. He also had the idea of walking around tokyo speaking to each other in japanese. so i agreed. it was really embarrassing and kind of awkward, and i had to quit after about 5 minutes. however, i think i'd probably get a lot better if i indulged him a bit more.

speaking of japanese, i've started hitting the books again recently after about a month hiatus. less than 8 months until level 2 and about 800 kanji to go.

peter skirko is half goat and half larynx