August 6th

Let’s just pretend today is still the sixth. With that in mind:

• Today I ate my favorite dish at my favorite seafood place in town (anago-don at Uomasa)
• I walked to the beach with friends, both old and new
• I washed nary a dish, because we ate out all day
• We watched 5,000 fireworks at the annual show in town, barely 200 meters from the launch area
• We watched Breakin’ and the Last Dragon (Sho ‘nuf!) in a sudden fit of 80’s nostalgia (anybody remember Vanity? Also, we discovered perhaps Jean Claude Van Damme’s earliest movie appearance – as a silent [thank god] extra in Breakin’)
• I received calls and messages from all over the world, all day long
• I congratulated myself for having the foresight to take tomorrow off work – this, if nothing else, shows some promising personal growth

Today was a good day to turn 32 – I feel special things are gonna happen this year. It’s gonna be a great one.
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Cultural Point of Interest – Japan’s Economy Fueled Entirely by Cellphone Packet Fees
We watched the fireworks show from Ohama Beach, a ten minute walk from my house. Like I said, we were right by the mortars and the sound was felt more than heard. The fireworks with low trajectories lit up the surface of the sea to reveal a fleet of pleasure craft anchored just outside the danger zone; I saw twenty times more boats off the coast of Sumoto on this single night than I’ve ever seen before. But that wasn’t the most interesting thing:

The fireworks were great, but in the end they are just fireworks…
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Much more impressive was the sheer number of LCD screens lighting up the night as people recorded photos/video on their keitai cameras:

Hey, if a massive tsunami had hit us right then, at least our demise would have been very well documented…
Guess my cynicism isn’t really improving with age…
Or, maybe it is.