It almost never snows here. The first things I noticed when I stepped outside today were that it smelled very cold and that there was ice on my bicycle seat. I was just reading about how global warming incorporates "colder" in its process. I know extremes can bring people together, and I love snow, but I seriously think we should phaze out fossil fuel use without further ado.

In this town there is a hardware store called Oh Joyful and a "snack girl" bar called Harlem Fucker. Just some of the things that endear me to it.

Last night was Alex's goodbye dinner and festivities. He's become a little brother to me. His three months are up so he's headed back to Wisconsin. We gave him a wooden torch, such as those carried by people running in the upcoming otomatsuri, only smaller (it's made for those who don't want to risk it on the mountain, but who still want to write their wishes/prayers for the new year (lunar timing) on their torch and burn it.) We wrote our sentiments and goodbyes on the gift torch.

This morning from bed I heard bursts of wood flute music and spontaneous drumming, quite close and echoing off the mountain. It seemed I had unwittingly succeeded in traveling back in time. When I biked soon after to the corner store, I saw them--a group of 3 or 4 men in blue and white garb, one wearing a trailing, intricate headdress. There was a tall taiko stand holding its drum. Maybe they were the ones who had traveled the distance of time.

Do you know (maybe you do, but I didn't) that if you join a homestay organization, you can stay with people all over the world for free? I joined two; one of them, I had to pay about fifty-five bucks for the lists of hosts, and I don't have to offer hosting in return. The other was free but I must offer at least to show people around when they come visit San Francisco, as I'll be living there. I am not obliged to offer accommodation. I just started contacting people, and so far I have a homestay in Thailand and one in Egypt. I'm also trying for China, Vietnam, Nepal, Tunisia and places in Europe. I'll also visit friends in France and Amsterdam.

Whenever I pick up my guitar, it seems my fingers have been studying and strengthening in the interim since last time, but when I pick up my juggling balls it's back to day one, four months running now.

Tsuka no ma ni imi nado
Shiriuru sube mo naku
Tada azayakasa dake
Kinou ni kakenuketa

there was no way in that short time
that I would find a meaning
only brightness
running through yesterday

Here's a more literal translation (neither are mine, the following was just offered impromptu by my coworker Ikuya):

Coming next month is the otomatsuri, Shingu's fire festival where participants (only men allowed) go to 

top of the ancient stone steps at one of the shrines near our house, drink enormous amounts of sake,

light huge torches, and then run down the nearly vertical steps. Our manager Yusui accompanies the

teachers who join this festival because the locals might try to attack if they see gaijins. I was thinking 

of going up there earlier in the day and hiding out among the trees on the mountain so I could watch at

close range, but the god of that shrine might get pissed off, or I might be seen and maimed (a woman 

gaijin at the ancient men-only festival?) But it's my favorite shrine and I go there a lot.

On customer service in Japan:

Employees are unfailingly polite, come running when you call, routinely go the extra-mile to help customers, and will give you the deepest, most respectful bows. If however, you define service as being knowledgeable about the products they sell, or as being capable of making sure that a customer goes home with the merchandise that is right for him or her, then you may be disappointed. Electronics store workers in particular are notorious for their lack of knowledge about the products they sell.

When I went to buy a tuning fork at a nearby music shop, the lady at the counter didn't know what I was talking about (I also gesticulated the motions of striking and listening and plucking guitar strings) but then she brightened and led me to the electronic tuners. I said, "Ah, chi gao" (different!) and was about to go through the whole fork routine again when I noticed they were in the same case with the electronic ones. I was just glad they had them.

DOOR TO DOOR MOP HEAD SALESMEN
I was just using the phone in the genkan and some man came and announced himself. He was giving a mop head replacement to her grandmother who had ordered one. Why hasn't the fact that people can buy these mop heads easily at any store made this useless job a thing of the past?

This reminds me of the bamboo rod sales trucks. They blast a recording of what sounds like a ghost song. Sometimes a man singing, sometimes a woman, the voice rising and spreading out over Shingu and becoming the wind. And it's all for some bamboo sticks, household use.

Do you wash your hands in the stream of water that comes out of the toilet tank (No, Japanese people don't wash their hands in the toilet bowl. The water comes out of the cistern at the top)?
Yes: 97
No: 36

But, why does water come out of the tank? You can even turn on the flow when the toilet isn't flushing. Sometimes the top of the tank, which is usually bowled, contains plastic flowers or plastic fruit or some kind of decor.

The karaoke book of foreign songs has enough Radiohead, Coldplay, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Smiths, Hendrix, Chile Peppers, and of course Beatles. It doesn't have any Velvet Underground or Niko. And no Sonic Youth. There are obscurities that are popular here like Scatman John and unobscurities like Slipknot. I find myself singing things I never would have listened to, like Larger Than Life by the Backstreet Boys. One that they should have, but don't, and I want to sing is Lovechild. So, tomorrow we will have a party to celebrate the appearance of friends from the States and Japan. To appease Bucket Lady only because she has lived in the neighborhood far longer than we have and gets up pretty early, we'll move the whole thing around 10 o'clock to a bar and employ (but happily so) the now obligatory microphones and odd karaoke videos.

Onsens: Last weekend's hot spring place that I went to was in the mountains. It had large outdoor pools, one of them kindly shallow enough to lay down in, with a long stone cylindrical neck rest. I've gotten very accustomed to being around girls and women of all ages who have no clothes on. Up to the very old, and I think the body is beautiful then too. In California there is a difference at the hot springs/hot tub places I have been to. Here in Japan, everyone, having grown up bathing publicly, is completely relaxed in the pools. In California, I've noticed upon approaching and getting into communal springs/tubs, a sense of, We Are Here and We Are Doing This Thing, and that tiny difference makes all the difference. No matter how relaxed I am in that setting, it's a degree less comfortable, even with the night sky above and the tea and the good conversation. One other good thing: hot spring places here cost about three to five dollars, no time limit.

I don't want to sound like, Japan is great and California isn't. Definitely not so, but it's refreshing to see children and very old people together at the hot springs.

Aslan, layers and layers, the dragon skin. Airsmell is spicy. Thought I'd never be able to roll my r's or sing, justice looking beyond where I began. Italian women's proud bodies won't make of vanity the curvature of time. The same green as the river in late summer.

In Wakayama I was shown a place with several built-into-the-hillside tombs, with small square openings and dark interiors lined with very old, flat stones piled up to make walls. Most of them were about five-hundred years old, but the oldest and biggest was 1400 years old. I also went to a castle, an art museum, and rode a rollercoaster that had spinning seats. Another one of those great inventions. One of the first roller coasters was in St. Petersburg in the late 1700s.

This coming week I'll have a visitor from Tokyo and one from San Francisco. Chance simultaneity.

Sweet winter has prevented our neighbor from stepping outside at 7:30am every morning and knocking huge buckets together or whatever she was doing with them that would wake me far before I wanted to get up. (All spring, summer and autumn.) The walls of our old house are so thin, and the house behind us so close, that when bucket lady speaks from her front door, it sounds like she's in my bedroom. Last recycling morning, I woke up to the sound of tall boot heels tack-tack-tacking on stone. Pretty loudly, because she was running in heels in the dark of 6:30am with her clankety bags back and forth, back and forth from her house to the lot where the bins get set up in front of our house. The truck doesn't come till 8:00 but recycling is some kind of big event in this neighborhood. Some Thursday mornings I dream of blue bottles lined up on a shelf and old Japanese men laughing in the cold.
Okay, off to Wakayama. Oh, my student Akitsu's grandmother's names were Shika (deer) and Kame (pronounced Kah-may, meaning turtle).

This weekend I'm going to Wakayama city. There are actually museums there and more than one movie theater. Impressive. Carl Sagan's book Billions and Billions will come with me in the car in case my friends fall asleep or we feel like having quietness.

I'm finding that some of the important aspects of my viewpoint coincide with what he thought; mainly that we should learn quickly how to apply appropriate methods to counteract our mistake of treating the biosphere like it could handle any amount of abuse. I usually think of it as a fish tank where, if some crazy chemical spills into one part of the aquarium, the whole habitat is polluted. If you keep spilling strong pollutants into the tank, all the fish die.

In his book he pointed out, besides insisting that he never actually said, "Billions and billions," that the atmosphere of earth is comparable in size to the layer of shellac on a classroom globe. It's that thin.

It's starting to make sense. I learned strumming and some minor chords today. With a human's proclivity to name things, I was thinking about giving or finding a name for my guitar. Our living room has four enormous windows of frosted glass (privacy, privacy) so the plants and fence and sky outside look impressionistic, right now wildly because of the crazy wind that is making our gate crash and crash.
What are joss sticks?

It's very rhyming, but here is a poem:

North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest arch enemy - the wrong haircut.

A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has been aired by state-run Pyongyang television.

The series is entitled Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle.

The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.

It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.

Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.

I guess the officials think that women don't have/need many nutrients and that their brains should be robbed of energy.

In my own news. Yesterday evening my housemate and I had sukiyaki at our neighbors/landlords the Kuribayashi's and we were, I am very appreciative to say, treated as royalty. They were most kind; it was a farewell to me as I'll be leaving here at the end of next month.

The years 2001, '02, on up to '04 seemed like just over the point of 2000. But '05 seems well past the mark that used to be almost tangible, "In the year 2000..." but was actually a turning of a page. Obviosities.

I was wondering why so many web pages and also friends of mine in the states were saying "tsunami" instead of tidal wave, thinking that they were the same, and guessing that everyone suddenly wanted to say it how it is said in the region that the quake happened. The two terms actually are casually interchangable, but a tsunami is caused specifically by an underocean quake...then, posting a comment, I noticed that I used the word "hanabi" (fire flower) instead of fireworks. Even though I am in Japan, I can still (sort of) use the language I learned first, and there was really no need to say hanabi. Sounds rather pretty though.

This is all wordy speculation. There are things on my mind so I am just typing randomly here. Plus, today is the first day of work after our winter break. It doesn't usually feel like so much has changed with the clicking over of a number in January. But this time...yes.