A Day in the Life

I was thinking, one thing I haven't posted about yet among all these theme parks and vacations and gimmicks is what a normal day is like here. There are so many random details, small things that happen but aren't enough to write or even talk about usually... but put together they make up my daily life. I'm not sure if it amounts to anything colossally interesting, but here for your edification is a chronicle of my day yesterday, Monday, June 18, 2007.

6:50am: The phone alarm goes off. I have a regular alarm clock which I got as a gift along with my cell phone contract, but the cell phone is easier to set so I've always used it. I wake up enough to make it stop, then stay in bed anyway.

7:05am: I decide it's time to get up. I open my curtains to let in the sun, which rose about 2 hours earlier. For no readily explained reason, Japan does not use Daylight Savings Time. With my towel, clothes, and toiletry bag in tow, I go down 3 flights of stairs to wait in line for one of the 2 showers.

7:40am: After showering, changing clothes, checking email, etc., I go down to breakfast. Today I have the "Western food" option, which I get about 90% of the time (as the Japanese option usually involves fish, which I prefer not to eat that early in the day.) It is an assortment of vegetables in a tomato sauce, and also a small bowl of macaroni-type noodles and alfredo-type sauce.

Side note: I apologize that my culinary vocabulary in English is about as poor as my Japanese. I only know the names for about half the dishes served at the dormitory, and I can't describe them properly in any language really. My most sophisticated cooking word is probably ratatouille, and that's only because Pixar is so good they can get away with such a weird name for a film. Too bad it doesn't come out here until a month after the U.S.

8:00am: Having flipped my nametag and switched from slippers to shoes, I head out of the dormitory. Along the way to the subway platform I am cawed at by 3 giant crows. Solitary giant crows are pretty normal here, but three at once were enough to make me move to the other side of the street from their balcony perch. Evil-looking birds.

8:09am: I board the Chuo Line Rapid service in the direction of Tokyo, second car. The first car is women-only, so the second becomes men-only by default. Signs all over Musashi Koganei station remind me that over the weekend of June 30/July 1, service will be curtailed in order to get the outbound elevated track running. I am pretty excited about this, and I look forward to riding the new elevated track soon.

8:50am: My Chuo Line train arrives at Yotsuya station. During the ride, I have studied the vocabulary and grammar points for the chapter test I will have in Japanese class at 9:15. The local homeless man (who, my Japanese friends tell me, is called 四ツ谷さん/ Yotsuya-san/ Mr. Yotsuya) appears to still be asleep-- usually at this hour he is sitting with his rosary beads at the curb.

9:00am: I arrive at my Japanese classroom, which is in Building 11's 6th floor. Thankfully at the beginning of the month they turned on the air conditioners; it used to be my default 'job' to open the windows to get some fresh air. Now my 'job' is just to turn on the lights. Why nobody else does these things I don't know. There are still announcements over the intercom stating that students with measles are not allowed on campus. You'd think by this point they would have gotten the idea, but maybe it makes the administration feel better, like they're actually doing something.

9:15am: Our professor, 小林先生 (Prof. Kobayashi), arrives and we begin our test. I am glad we have at least one male Japanese teacher. Japanese language teachers in general seem to be overwhelmingly female, and that only gives you one side of Japanese gender-specific language. Why Japanese has different speaking patterns for males and females is another topic, but I'd personally prefer to speak like a man and not a woman if that's possible. Though for you guys out there who'd like it the other way around, you're okay by me too.

10:45am: First-period Japanese ends. I feel pretty good about how I did on the chapter test. We get a break between our two morning periods of Japanese, which are taught by separate professors and operate practically independently of one another. I usually go up to the 7th floor during break: since there is no one there but the cleaning lady (we always exchange "good mornings"), I can stretch my legs a bit, enjoy the quiet, and be refreshed for the second class.

11:00am: 大森先生 (Prof. Omori) begins our second class, which focuses more on listening/speaking and casual speech patterns. Even though we had a chapter test in the first class, we have a vocabulary test at the beginning of this one. After that, we listen to a conversation example of how to complain in Japanese. Japanese complaints are entertaining, to me at least. For example, one common formulation is to conjugate a verb with ～てもよさそうなものだけどね (-te mo yosasō na mono dakedo ne), which translates roughly as "it would just seem to be a nice thing [to do], right?"-- this means "I really wish you had done this instead of what you did."

12:30pm: Second period lets out, and I head down 6 flights of stairs to Building 11's basement cafeteria. For the first time in a couple weeks, I get the ¥450 ($3.70) A Lunch, which is usually some crazy mutation of Western-style cafeteria food. But today it is a chicken pita, which I figure can't be too far wrong. After I find a seat with Cameron, Camille, Colin, Joe, and Ryan, I am rewarded for my curiosity by biting into pita bread that is approximately the consistency of stone. We discuss, among other things, that Little Kuriboh is due to post his parody Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged Movie sometime during the day. Yes, we are a little nerdy, but it's a pretty funny series even if you don't like anime.

1:30pm: The party splits up, and I head for the university library to read the Washington Post. Specifically, the comics section. It's just a little piece of American culture that's become something of a ritual for me. I can read the news just fine online, but reading Zippy the Pinhead's discombobulated, postmodern adventures (for example) on an actual piece of paper seems like the only way to do it right.

1:50pm: I head over to one of Building 2's many computer labs to do a number of things: check the news, print out the notes guide for my later history class, and scan the receipts from my visit to the doctor a couple weeks back. I'm hoping I can get my study abroad insurance to pay for my medical bills, but they're not so expensive, so if they don't then it's not the end of the world. Speaking of which, I am now 100% well; in fact, I started feeling much better when my medications ran out. Just goes to show something, I'm sure.

2:45pm: It's early, but I go down to the Building 10 basement classroom for my Japanese History class. It's over-enrolled, and there are never enough chairs and desks for everyone in the class-- thus, it's best to get there ahead of time and grab a seat than have to drag a chair from a neighboring room as I had to do once. I read over the notes guide and reading briefly, then have a short rest.

3:15pm: Prof. Fuess (pronounced Foose, like 'loose') enters the classroom, wearing a collared shirt for once. In the words of a classmate who may wish to remain anonymous, "he usually looks like he just got out of bed and came to class in whatever he found lying on the floor." The lecture is about Japan's foreign relations in the lead-up to World War II, but he somehow manages to make it seem boring. How I managed to get a 100% on the midterm is completely beyond me, as I generally don't do the readings in any detail. It seems Fuess prefers my BS to actual substance, which there is plenty of from other students much more involved than me. In sum: I don't like the class very much, and I think it's not fairly graded besides.

4:45pm: History lets out, and since it's the last class of the day for most people, a group of us form to walk to the train station. Jennie, Cameron, and Seamus peel off at Shinjuku station, leaving me and Joe on the train. I watch as Joe plays Meteos, a strange little game for the Nintendo DS. I was kind of surprised he was playing that, since everyone seems to be working on Phoenix Wright lately-- but maybe Joe beat it, just like he did the crazy male-cheerleaders Ouendan game. Did you, Joe?

5:45pm: We arrive back at the dormitory, and since I'm feeling tired, I decide to have a short nap. I set my phone to wake me up at 7:00 for dinner.

6:50pm: Colin and Ryan attack my door to get me to wake up-- they want to have dinner quickly so that we can all watch the Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged Movie together as we discussed at lunch. Along the way down to the dormitory cafeteria, we pick up Joe and Charles. Dinner is a bowl of rice with various vegetables and some fish on top (once again my food descriptions fail). As always with this type of thing, I load a bunch of ginger on top because ginger tastes like sharp pink freshness mixed with awesome. It kind of drowns everything else out, but that's not so bad sometimes.

7:20pm: It is decided that if we are going to watch a movie-- even a parody of one-- we must have popcorn, so we head down to the Seiyu department store to pick up some movie munchies. Most all department stores here have supermarkets in the basement (or else on the top floor), so you can literally get everything you need to live just by going to one building. The others get their popcorn; I'm not so much of a fan so I just get an ice cream cone for ¥89 ($0.75). Being thus prepared, we go to Ryan's room to view the movie, and after a few system crashes we switch to Firefox and watch the movie literally just as it is being uploaded to YouTube. Funny stuff as always.

9:00pm: Around this time I emerge from Ryan's room and realize I still haven't put my laundry in as I planned, so I grab a load of dark clothes from my room and load them into one of the 5 washers on the 3rd floor. I must mention that these washing machines operate using methods so far advanced from anything I'm familiar with that they are literally indistinguishable from magic. The clothes churn themselves inside the washer, mixing and moving around without any readily explained motive force. Craziness. But they get clean, and that's what matters!

9:15pm: I return to my room, and alternate between surfing the Internet and doing my homework, with admittedly much more of the former than the latter. Among other things, I discover the Japanese Ratatouille trailer, catch up on the latest Homestar Runner short cartoons, re-watch parts of the Abridged Movie, and belatedly come across the London 2012 Olympic logo controversy. (In my opinion they could have done a lot better.) Also I do my Japanese homework and read a little about Aum Shinrikyo for my Religion, Conflict, and Violence class. Along the way I get my clothes out of the washer and hang them up in my room to dry, since there's a 30% chance of rain overnight (though that did not come to pass.)

11:45pm: Colin returns to let me know there are more Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged episodes up (#21 and #22) so we have to gather again to watch them. This being rather later at night, it is naturally even funnier than before (and less annoying since we know to use Firefox from the start.) As we're wrapping up, Ryōma joins us, though he can't talk much since he's losing his voice. Such random ailments are cropping up here. Even when I was getting ready for bed and going to brush my teeth in the bathroom, I ran into Mike, whose allergies have more or less incapacitated him for the past several days now. Even my American-bought drugs aren't enough to help, though I gave him some to try.

Eventually around 12:30pm I made it into bed and fell asleep shortly thereafter. A full day, I think, but of course only one of many.