1 comments on my sanity Listening to: The hamster in her wheel
Mood: A little on the ARRRGH side
Nina has gorn, back to Thailand for a sun-filled holiday before going back to sun-filled Abu Dhabi. It's a bit damp here.
And someone nicked my bike, the bastards.
Still, it's not *all* bad. I have discovered Buck Rogers properly (as opposed to in parody through Daffy Duck o.O) thanks to the machinations of Ivan. My thoughts are currently classified so that Helen won't read them and be influenced until after I have made her watch some.
Anyway, while Nina was here we managed to do a bit of travelling thanks to various weird days off here and there.
On Thursday we went to Nagasaki, and it pissed it down. I have never before been afraid of aquaplaning but I was really quite terrified at certain points on the drive home, especially when there were crosswinds gusting strongly enough to make the car swerve o.O
I also managed to continue my incredible run of bad luck with Nagasaki car parks... This time having carefully chosen one which did *not* close at 6pm, I managed to swing the front wing of the rental car around into a concrete pillar that i simply hadn't seen as I reversed out of the space. How I failed to miss a concrete pillar which was holding up the roof of the car park and which was about 3 feet in diameter I will never actually know. Anyway, because I didn't call the police and get an accident report (even though no one was hurt and nothing was damaged but the car) I had to pay a fine to the rental company... :(
So then on Saturday, I flew out after work to meet Nina in Shinjuku, where to complete the pattern it was also pissing it down with rain. Armed with a map and my best "I know where I'm going and I am determined to get there" expression to ward off muggers, I set off walking to the hotel.
I gave up after 20 minutes and got in a taxi. :D
We wandered around Shinjuku a bit that night, and took photos, though strangely our most "Tokyo" moment actually took place in MacDonald's. There were two guys sound asleep at the table next to us, a gothic lolita at a table just behind Nina, and more than half the restaurant was filled with girls (and a couple of guys) that looked like this.
Sunday was the big day though- L'arc~en~ciel's 15th Anniversary concert in the Tokyo Dome. They did two shows- and both were sold out. We managed to get tickets through not a little manoeuvring and so we were two out of the 55,000 converging on the Dome on Sunday afternoon.
I don't really know all that many of their songs, but the concert was awesome nonetheless. The theme was time travel, and they had some cool CG movies of the Tokyo Dome flying through a time vortex. Tetsu threw his bananas about, we sang Happy Birthday to Ken and we saw Hyde breakdance.
We also witnessed sheep-crowd mentality in its purest form (unless it's just a thing that is *done* at Japanese concerts) where we all started waving our hands the same way to the beat in the chorus. Everyone (except the two well-hard individuals just in front of us who seemed to think it was uncool to, you know, *move*) was doing it, to the point that in one of the songs we could see that the people right on the front row were almost a beat in front of us :D Physics in action.
And then I had to get up at 5 to fly home on Monday morning and go straight to work o.O Funfunfun.
Despite that, it was an awesome weekend, and in fact an awesome ten days or so.
School is being sucky at the moment, but since when is that anything new? Though I did manage to get Mr. T to ask someone nicely to "hurry up please" rather than him shouting "SLOOOOOOOOW!" which was an improvement on yesterday. (Obviously Mr. T is a pseudonym. If I actually had Mr. T sitting in my classroom I think I would count myself lucky if yellow and red cards and smiley faces were enough to keep him in line...)
And finally, like the human interest stories about fluffy kittens that they like to have on the news, I will tell you of a happy happening.
I had a lyric epiphany.
For years I have thought that the words to "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" went thus:
"I'm taking my time, but I'm going nowhere."
which didn't actually make a lot of sense to me. Yesterday as I was walking to work because of deficit on the bike front, I realised that the lyrics are in fact
"I'm taking my time, but I don't know where"
which suddenly sounds like the kind of clever and snappy lyrics Paul Simon likes.
Aaah, the satisfaction.
November 29, 2006 at 12:10 p.m.