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Hanami Parties Update

or “Welcome to My weekend, my life.com”

If reading the semi-coherent recollection of a drunken stranger’s week-end is not part of your Monday schedule, feel free to just gawk at photographic evidences, conveniently gathered here and there, including the perfunctory tits shot, courtesy of our dear Tracey…

In a scene telling of the spirit of this week-end, yours truly and three of his drunken groupies were seen yesterday night, fiercely decided to rock out the last train out of Harajuku, the same way they’d been rocking out Yoyogi park all afternoon: with lots of drunken debauchery and deep house beats blaring on a portable sound system.

If that’s not yet doing it for you, picture, if you will: the whitest, skinniest guy this side of Brooklyn, manning the most improbable Japanese ghetto blaster ever seen on the Tokyo metro, while the ladies managed to send the poor few salarymen present into abyss of despair: if even the ever-reliable subservient Japanese female could be spotted pole-dancing in a subway car, who was to tell what would be next. But the most awesome part was definitely the widespread toe-tapping around the car: people seemed to, in fact, kinda like it.

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Party announcement at the bottom »

How do you do when you completely and unabashedly forgot an ex’s birthday? With no valid excuse whatsoever, if only a very busy day and a genetic inability to remember dates correctly (I swear I thought it was tomorrow). And don’t tell me suck it up, apologize and get a nice gift: she’s quite the vindicative type too. After all, she made sure to wait until the following morning at 8am to inform me that I was officially an arsehole… you know, just making sure I had no wiggle room for white lies…

Which brings me to the problem of my day so far: what to do…

Which you probably do not give a rat’s ass about. And truthfully, who am I to blame you.

But let’s not ruin the mood. I guess we’ll just have to double the usual morning tequila sunrise and consider our quota for public humiliations and shameful exposures fulfilled for the whole month. And that’s always a good thing: you don’t really want to stock up on past dues for these kind of quota.

Cue mandatory sakura blossom speech.

Everybody will have, by now, noticed that the sakura blossom is upon us. At least I know I have. But I would have little excuse, seeing how every other street in my neighbourhood instantly turned a rosy white color and I no longer see my breath upon waking up (which means either one of two things: my new toothpaste is working much better than the previous one. Or it’s getting warmer). That, and also half the trains on the Yamanote have been busy giving day-by-day updates about the state of the sakura front (unlike, say, some people who could have at least hinted that there was an important upcoming date, last time we talked).

There are basically two schools of hanamist:

Some will defend the inscrutable beauty and zen symbolism of the spectacle, and take comfort in their ephemeral regularity, seemingly changeless, yet each time unique. Those people, particularly the gaijin among them, will tend to grow copious amount of facial hair and put on traditional samurai armors to charge at locomotives on their horse, thus ensuring an edifying finale where they can get a last dying glimpse at the sakuras down below, before heading out for the land of their ancestors.

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It is usually pointless to pay any attention to whatever offensive comment Shintaro Ishihara manage to spew with regularity, seeing how he makes little secret of his goal to alienate about every single non-Japanese human being on the planet. The fact that he is the Governor of the greater Tokyo area makes it all the more pathetic.

His last display of xenophobic moronism, though, did manage to make me laugh in disbelief quite a bit.

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Started playing around with a new layout for this blog.

Not the final version by any mean…

I had to separate the redesign in two phases. This is only the first phase: structural changes.

Second phase (actual theme change) will come later, when I’ll be done with the coding and can concentrate on finding inspiration (I cannot code on mushrooms: just doesn’t work).

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Like most people here, I have an ambivalent love relationship with Japanese ATMs.

I mean, who doesn’t love their ubiquitous salaryman-foodstamp dispensers: after all, they are lovable, sexy and incredibly serviceable.

Until night falls, that is. At which point they suddenly emerge clad in leather, whip you into submission, make you bend over and ram your every orifice, strictly foregoing the use of any lubricant.

Which, come to think of it, does remind me of a few ex’…

Ahem. Anyway.

Japanese ATMs are sometimes very convenient. For example, despite living in an über-residential neighbourhoods where most of the locals are either dead or not too far, and banks an unheard-of commodity, I only have to walk a hundred feet from my door to the closest ATM-equipped combini.

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I cannot possibly be the only one to have noticed that the girl basically has one. single. pose.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she has potential to make it into every college fratboy top ten shaggable. when she gets the coke-induced twitching under control.

But the fact this ridiculously cheap 20 degrees left, 30 degrees down, naughty-girl-with-malicious-eye-and-mischievous-smile is what nowadays passes for a paragon of charm, or even plain basic sex-appeal, is a sad testament to that pathetic MTV culture we live in.

And the fact I just took the time to write this, an even sadder testament to the very low level of productivity of my afternoon.

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Where do people get this intense urge to share meteorological insights with everybody they meet?

Have you noticed how some blogs go to incredible lengths to keep you informed of the exact humidity rate in whatever random corner of the world they happened to be written in, by covering half their homepage with some prominent weather-indicating gizmo. See, the trick is to make this otherwise thoroughly uninteresting data more palatable, by presenting it as an amusing novelty. Whether as a seasonally dressed character in stereotypical outfits, or the perennial Smily Sun and Pissy Cloud icons, there is always an effort to coat the dull core in a layer of pointless cuteness. The point remains: Nobody gives a fuck!

Believe me, there are very few excuses to bore strangers with detailed recounts of your personal adventure in mercury hop-skipping. And most of these only apply to stiff upper-lip middle-aged british men, whose emotional gamut couldn’t possibly cover any other topic, and hapless gaijin trying to maintain a casual level of neighbourly smalltalk, without veering too deep into the murky waters of a language that was specifically designed to let locals single out and decapitate potential invaders.

I mean, why can’t we find deeper subject on which to waste these precious seconds of our all-too-ephemeral lives. Why. Why? WHY? Are we so quick to forget that we are but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more. Have we descended to such abyss of superficiality that we can no longer reach out to our brother Man and talk to his heart. Do we need to hide behind shallow meaningless phrases and disembodied conversations?

Sad indeed…

…

Anyway, that being said:

Where is my fucking Spring weather!?!

Especially now that my futon sits outside like a giant soaking wet sponge after I failed to remove it before yesterday’s pouring.

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1. Unnecessary longwinded and irrelevant Foreword

What does one do, on a depressingly bleary rainy Easter Monday?

  1. Stay in and abuse pharmaceutical substances while watching the entire second season of Scrubs, freshly downloaded off the net.
  2. Stay in and abuse pharmaceutical substances while working on a thoroughly useless piece of software instead of, say, earn a living.
  3. Go to church and bath in Holy Water.

Answer: 1) and 2) (all about multitasking).

Oh wait, sorry… that’s just me.

I believe the correct answer for regular God-fearing sinners is 3).

I know… One usually partakes in such activities on the preceding Sunday. But yesterday was way too busy attending a sun-tanning contest in the garden with my neighbours.

Seeing how I nearly lost an arm to self-combustion last time Holy Water hit my bare skin, we will have to make do with the next closest topic at hand today, and discuss religions in general.

Note: Because this blog wouldn’t be what it is without its overly affected pseudo-wordly brand of cynicism, you can expect a certain amount of negative thoughts and disparaging comments on the matter at heart. We would therefore cordially invite the strongly religious and easily offended among you, to go browse somewhere else for the duration of this entry. Hare Krishnas and Jehova’s Witnesses: you can stay; you are probably accustomed to people overtly mocking your faith by now.

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It’s always the same thing: whenever I stop posting for a few days, the more I wait, the more I set expectations high for a triumphant return, laden with brilliant insights on life, love and death, all written in the elegiac, yet wry and witty, prose that has made my reputation all the way to the English-speaking suburbs of north-Tokyo, and beyond.

Just too much pressure to take.

That and also it’s been kinda sunny outside lately, and every hour not spent coding, has been spent basking in my sunny garden, catching up on readings and bonding with the neighbourhood cats over raw bacon and milk (ever tried raw bacon? It’s awesome).

I am only too painfully aware of how pitiful it would be to post, solely to apologize for not having posted in a while. Hence, I have taken the time to write a few lines about the only topic that I could muster any blogging enthusiasm for, right now: Me. Seeing how talking about myself, as this old queen used to put, is what I do best.

So without further ado: 99 things about Me, me, me…

Frankly doubt you’ll know me any better for that, but it will satisfy this website’s need for an “about me” section, without lifting too much of that shroud of mystery I like to keep tightly wrapped around my persona.

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I did promise you we would resume our Recipe Monday series, didn’t I?

I know. I am one week late. Some people have written to complain that my instruction to stash in advance on the main ingredient had caused a few problems with their spouse and neighbours. some petty matter of smell or something.

In order to make up for that, it is not one, but TWO recipes, that I shall bestow on my eagerly awaiting cooking public this time.

Tonight, we will be making a complete luxury meal, starting simply with a Pork Chops in Mango Chutney & Ginger Sauce, merely there to lay the groundwork for a scrumptious Squirrel Melba in Champagne Sauce.

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