Author: Justin

Tupelo Honey

Was listening to Van Morrison late last night and got caught up in memories when the said track played.
When he first started his practice, my father often accepted barter when his patients couldn’t afford treatment. One man brought in a couple jars of Tupelo honey from his own beehives. Naturally, when I heard this story a couple years ago, I asked my dad how it tasted. “Sweet,” he said.
When my pal T’s father opened a cram school thirty years ago, many of his students came from poor families, so he also accepted fresh produce or other various goods as payment. That’s so cool.
When I think of how impersonal and insignificant office jobs are in the modern world, it makes me fucking sick.

My Superhero Name is “Itchy Pest”

The mosquito-free period in Japan seems to be shrinking every year: I clearly remember having stray skeeters bumbling about the house as late as the last week of January, and I was assaulted by a particularly thirsty one again just last night. For many years, November through April were completely mosquito-free, but I guess it was just inevitable that my nemesis would eventually evolve to torture me in all but the coldest periods of the year.
And this is important to me, see, because last night, I slapped myself across the cheek in my sleep, hard. I was dreaming that a giant mosquito, like in that old-ass movie Caveman had landed on my face, so I panicked and, in my state of nocturnal distress, tried to smash it. I must have hit myself really hard, because my girlfriend woke up and said, “what’s wrong?” I glanced at the clock – 4 o’ clock? On a Monday morning? Fuck! – and grumbled, “GODDAMN….mosquito…FUCKING BIT ME.” She rolled her eyes and coyly asked if I had slapped myself again (which didn’t make me real happy at the time, but seems mildly amusing now), then promptly fell back to sleep since SHE had nothing to fear. You see, ever since I was little, anybody in proximity of me has nothing to fear from mosquitoes – my blood is like VSOP in a sea of lite beers or something.
Anyway, to make a long story short, this fucking insect tortured me until 6AM, biting me on the cheek three times and once on the ear before I decided I’d had enough and decided to kill it, no matter how long it took. Sleep deprivation coupled with a madly itching ear drove me to eat its broken corpse after I finally got it.
So, no fucking with me please today, sirs and madams, I have absorbed the power to suck my own weight in blood and cause mad itching, and I ain’t afraid to use it.

Weaning Japanese from the Brush

Mechanical input of Japanese is a subject that has always fascinated me, so I was happy to find this history of wapro (word processors) in English:
http://www.honco.net/japanese/05/
When I first came to this country, one of the first indicators of how hard the Japanese language would be to learn was an old lady at city hall operating an old school Japanese typewriter. The device itself was closer to a printing press than any typewriter I had ever seen… I remember my second cousin pointing her out and saying, “before your very eyes, old technology fades away.”
(He’s a minister. Ministers say some really deep stuff sometimes, it makes me wonder if they know something I don’t.)

Back in body, if not in mind

This is my state of mind after 3 days of hitting the slopes in Hakuba (quite literally, I’m afraid). It was an awesome trip, overall. Nobody got hurt too badly (although general aches and soreness are shared by all), even the little girl in the pink helmet who Taro ran into at high speed and made cry. I’m burnt a nice shade of brownish-red, and the “racoon eyes” are a source of great joy for my colleagues. (I can’t believe I brought back cookies as a gift for these bastards – they don’t deserve cookies.)