Expresso Time

Ugh. I'm jet lagging so badly right now. I know I shouldn't go sleep right now... but I'm just so tired...

I went to bed kind of late, like around 1 am. Then I woke up again around 4 am, and promptly started hating my life. ...I pretty much watched My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic (a surprisingly decent show) until I had to go to work cause I couldn't go to sleep.

So tired... =_=

I gave the staff room omiyage today, in the form of Jelly Belly jelly beans. I think it went off well. I hope. I put them into individual cups since they weren't actually originally packaged that way.

Arg, I still need to eat lunch but I don't know what to eat. It's already almost 1 pm. Sigh... Not having classes is throwing my schedule off, because I don't really keep time well on my own. I'm a structure kind of person; I need it otherwise I'll just kind of laze about until it kicks in that, oh yeah, I should be doing XX or whatever. Then I'll do it. I've gotten pretty good at self imposed deadlines, and those for the most part, keep me on track but for some things... and some times (like now) it's just so... hard.

HOORAY FOR EXPRESSO COFFEE CONBINI DRINKS. I have energy again, can't you tell?

I was going through my pictures and videos of California, which has mostly just made me pine with longing for things like Farmer's Markets and ridiculously cheap fruit. I keep having to tell myself that I'm in Japan - Japan! - and that it's kind of awesome. Because it is. I'll be able to go back to cheap fruit some day. Really... it's not that bad...

My personal goal, now that I've returned to Japan, is to eat more fish. Tuna fish from a can doesn't count. I'm talking like the fish that they sell at the supermarkets because it's supposed to be cheaper (I think?). The seafood section of our grocery stores are kind of amazing. They're more like Ranch 99 (the super huge Chinese supermarket chain) in that sense, without the live bits. Which, now that I think about it, is a lot of it. They don't have any live fish at the supermarket here, but they do have a spectacular amount of dead marine life, from whole squid and whole fish to fish steaks and scallops. My goal is to start buying and cooking the things like salmon... so long as they're cheaper than meat. I haven't actually looked at the prices (I keep getting distracted by the omg whole squid or other interesting selection they have there).

This is kind of a random, ramble-y post. Moreso than the others.

The librarian at our school is super awesome. I can have conversations and stuff with her, and she's super super nice. Plus she doesn't mind if I occasionally go up there to study or whatnot, so I don't have to worry about nodding off in the teachers room. I don't do that very often, but sometimes the day is just so. freaking. boring. This is usually during the break periods between actual class. Like now. I don't have classes because it's summer vacation, but, I still have to go in to work. Some of the students (ie, all the academic ones) have summer classes that they're taking, or club activities they continue to do during the summer, so it feels like there are always students here. To fill the time, I'll study Japanese, or look through my lesson plans and brainstorm different ideas. But that only lasts for so long during the day. Eventually, after a couple days/hours of just doing that, I either get sleepy or stir crazy. It's fine when it's in the winter, since you just go outside and walk around a bit and BAM you're awake. But in the summer... it's pretty awful gross. I go outside only when I have to, or when the staff room gets too cold. (I suppose I should be thankful it gets too cold at all, since that's much better, in my opinion, than not being cold enough. Also, I happen to sit in the path of the air conditioner, so it blows straight over our row of desks, providing good weather-esque conversation when everyone around us is freezing cold).

My vice principal continues to amaze me with the topics that come up in conversation. Today was the etymology of Japanese words. Hajimemashite はじめまして, which is translated as "nice to meet you" has a much deeper meaning, I found. The way my VP explained it, you're saying something that literally translates to something like, "for the first time." You say this when you first meet someone. In essence, he explained, it means that this meeting and introduction was not a work of fate, nor of destiny; it was a completely random accident. When you say "hajimemashite" you're conveying something like, "I'm lucky to have met you" since, after all, it was complete happenstance that out of all the billions of people in the world, you meet each other. It conveys, I'm told, this sense of gratitude of this random accident occurring.

It made me like the greeting a lot more, that's for sure. It's so... poetic and kind of almost philisophical, all rolled up into this "nice to meet you" phrase that we have translated so clumsily. Etymology is pretty freaking cool.

He also asked me why we call them "tank tops" because we were talking about how he had a difficult time understanding the phrase, "the market tanked." I had to tell him that honestly, I had no idea. Actually, I'm looking it up now, since I'm curious. But my internet is ridiculously slow (though, at least the signal just *barely* stretches up this far).

UPDATE: Ha! My original guess - that it had come from the soldiers and marines wearing tank tops inside of tanks - was completely off. ね、知ってる？ Tank top comes from "tank suit," which was the word for a one piece bathing suit. The tank part of it was because it was worn in a swimming pool, or, as it was known back then, a swimming tank.

NOW YOU KNOOOOOOOOOW.