2:58

it’s juuuuuuune!!

it’s also officially the rainy season… it started this past week. last rainy season ever of my life, hopefully, thank you and GOODBYE. i will not miss the endless rain, or all the moisture that seeps into my apartment and encourages mold.

the advent of june means i go home NEXT MONTH.

listening to waltz #2… forgot all about this song, until alex chopp had to go and get a tattoo of "XO" on his chest/shoulder. nomoretalkingaboutthis

i played pachinko last night. took me long enough to get around to it… was always scared to go in by myself. i can finally check that one off the bucket list. it is just as boring and pointless as you might expect. seriously it takes NO SKILL, you just watch balls fall down through pins and hope they land into the right holes. if it were more like pinball i’d get it, but no… you just launch balls up and watch them fall. it’s almost completely random. and everything in there is so damn loud, you seriously have to yell above it, plus all the flashing lights, it’s totally overstimulating… and then there’s the stench of smoke and just the general sort of people who play pachinko (deadbeats)… ugh not a pleasant experience. i will never understand this aspect of japan.

my sister is being reeeeeeeal hypochondriac lately. i just, i don’t even know. i can’t understand it intuitively and i have to watch how i respond to anything she asks me… going to a chiropractor is not a big deal but she has this irrational fear that if they adjust her neck it will do.. something?… to an artery and she’ll have a stroke. so she asked me if i had any opinions on the ‘legitimacy of chiropractors’ and it was just like aaaah normal people don’t overthink going to a chiropractor. they just go. christ. i don’t know what to tell her. this is only one thing lately in a series of health-related freakouts. it’s been one after another. i don’t share her attitude/fear toward death so i just can’t empathize… i don’t know what to tell her. being sick or dying is nothing to me but a fact of life, but it causes her this extreme anxiety that i just don’t know how to respond to. it’s not logical. 

i wish it felt like summer here. the rainy season plus a full semester of school do not feel like summer to me. plus everyone is paranoid about sun exposure so they cover up from head to toe, and no one bares their shoulders tank top-style, so i can’t either unless i want to be stared at (more than i already am). sometimes i wonder if they have vitamin D deficiencies from never allowing sun to touch even one inch of their skin. or problems with heat stroke from always being so layered up in hot weather.

finished 1Q84. underwhelming. i discovered haruki murakami back freshman year at UT… quite accidentally, while searching for a book at the library by ryu murakami. i checked out and read kafka on the shore and fell in LOVEEEE back before most people even knew who he was. since then i’ve read most everything he’s written, and liked some more than others, but 1Q84 just fell flat… i’d put it at the bottom of the list, somewhere near dance dance dance and a wild sheep chase. 

now i’m reading the casual vacancy, the new JK rowling book, and it almost doesn’t feel like the same author. it’s so much more mature, the vocabulary so much more advanced… the themes so much darker. i don’t know. it doesn’t have the ‘spark’ of harry potter. if i didn’t already know the author i’m not sure i’d think much of it.

gonna read ender’s game after this.

53 days. (38 days of work [34 at schools], 14 middle school days, 16 elementary school days, 4 days at higashiyama)