All kaiten sushi all the time

I am so bad at updating.  SO BAD.  Part of the problem is that I've been going out/actually talking to people in the evenings, so instead of writing my blog posts after dinner, I come home exhausted, talk to Nick for a little bit, and then fall asleep.  The dangers of having friends!

Anyway, here are the answers from the super short words challenge!

1. pasokon = personal computer (paasonaru konpyuuta)
2. rimokon = remote control (rimooto kontorooraa)
3. meruado = mail address (meeru adoresu)
4. kaanabi = car navigation system, aka GPS (kaa nabigeeshon)
5. santora = sound track (saundo torakku)
6. furima = free market (furii maaketto)
7. kopipe = copy and paste (kopii ando peesuto)
8. ama = amateur (amachua), which is the opposite of puro (pro, short for professional)
9. infure = inflation (infureeshon)
10. shinse = synthesizer (shinsesaizaa)

...the highest anyone scored (that they told me; I dunno, maybe someone got all of them but was super secret about it) was a 2.
Say it with me:
:'D
Perhaps I have been in Japan too long, but a lot of these seemed pretty intuitively obvious to me!  (Well, not kopipe* and santora and shinse.  I got shinse after I thought about it, though.)  I have probably just been in Japan too long, you guys.  Probably.

Let's see.  What has happened since the last time I updated?

Monday was Louki's birthday, and I made her a cake, because it was either that or read stuff for class.  Anyway, it turns out that some people think being able to bake a cake is impressive?  I dunno.
Also, somewhere in the middle there I discovered that Grace is a brony which means that OUR BRONY LEAGUE IS NOW AT THREE.  We are UNSTOPPABLE.
Anyway, a bunch of people went out to a kaiten sushi** place, which was really good AND really cheap!  And I ate a bunch of saba (mackerel), because I am into saba.
Then, when we came back, it turned out that basically the entire dorm was waiting to sing "Happy Birthday" to Louki.  It was exciting!

Almost immediately after that we all trooped up to Ashley's room to wish HER happy birthday at midnight.  And I wanted to play her the ponies happy birthday song, but then I realized it was from an episode she hadn't seen yet and I was sad.

The next day I had penmanship, and one of the women who I haven't seen in almost five months was there.  It turns out that she injured her knee and was bedridden for a while, which is (obviously) why she wasn't coming to class, but it's great that she's able to get up and walk around again!  Also, she was shocked to see me, because apparently Nakano-san had told her that I had gone back to America...and failed to tell her that I was coming back.  OOPS.
But anyway!  It was a pretty good class!  I actually did some pretty okay penmanship and was super proud of myself until Nakano-san, 15 minutes before the end of class, handed me a string of about 20 incredibly difficult kanji and told me to try it "as a challenge."  ...it was pretty bad.  I shall take pictures and put them up here at some point.  Prepare your eyeballs.
Also, people in penmanship class have realized that actually maybe I kind of know something about Japanese religion, because:
A. I can understand the weird, obscure Shinto terms Nakano-san uses
B. I got into HARVARD, so clearly I must be kind of okay
C. Nakano-san was describing an amacha*** ritual, and I correctly identified it as being created by Gedatsu-kai,****
D. I knew what Gedatsu-kai was (I just read a book on it...)
E. I know the difference between Amaterasu-oomikami and Amaterasu-no-mikoto (one is from the Nihon Shoki and the other is from the Kojiki).
It's amusing, because a couple of new women have started coming, and Nakano-san keeps introducing me as knowing "all this random stuff even I don't know about Shinto."  Ahahahaha, what.

That evening I had Japanese class, where we finished reading a mystery novella we started a couple of weeks ago.  In the end, it turned out that the person I suspected from the beginning did it, and when we were just reaching the climax, our teacher asked if anyone knew who had done it, and I said I did, and she was SHOCKED OH MY GOODNESS.  It was kind of obvious, though.  If you're going to include a character and not have him/her DO anything, OBVIOUSLY HE/SHE DID IT.  Especially if it's a novella.

Wednesday I went out to Toyota City to interview Aoyama-san, the priest who the Yamaguchis (my host family in Tochigi) introduced me to.  He answered negative to almost all of my questions, which is interesting, but not entirely unexpected.  Anyway, I got some good information out of it, so now I just have to write it up into my paper.  I've been trying to work on my paper a little bit each day, but that's not actually how I work on papers, so it's more like on Wednesday I worked on my paper for a couple of hours and doubled the word count and I haven't touched it since then.  Oh well.  It'll get done.

Thursday I had Japanese class, where we were learning kanji compounds with two or more readings/meanings.  For example, 心中 can mean "in [someone's] heart" (しんちゅう) or it can mean "a love suicide" (しんじゅう).  They are pretty different words!
After class I went out with a bunch of other foreign students to kaiten sushi AGAIN, because we are all about kaiten sushi.

And now it is Friday and I am writing this in the afternoon so that I don't forget in the evening.  GENIUS.

Next week is Golden Week, which is a week with a million holidays in it, so everybody goes traveling.  Everybody except me, that is.  I don't really have any plans.  Maybe I'll figure something out or maybe I'll just bum around or maybe I'll go on a day trip somewhere.  WE SHALL SEE.  On the other hand, we have to finish a draft of the handbook by Monday, so maybe I'll just work on that...

*Which may be my new favorite word.  It just sounds so perky!

**Rotating sushi.  It's where the sushi is on a conveyor belt or in sushi boats.  People are always shocked when I say that we have kaiten sushi in the US.

***Sweet tea.

****As it turns out, Nakano-san belongs to a more Shinto-centric spin-off of Gedatsu-kai called Kamunagara-no-michi (which is the old reading for the word "Shinto," by the way!).  I need to find infos on it, basically.

Tsukinamisai again, calendars, and 失敗

First off, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes.  My inbox kind of overflowed with them.

Sorry about the really long silence, but I've been absurdly busy with
- preparations for visiting Mary
- filing a whole bunch of paperwork for next year
- working on my final grad school app
- fieldwork
- writing my essay for class uggggggh
...also, A Game of Thrones has stolen my soul.  So, yeah.

Friday night, right after I had gone to sleep...
Dorm people: DANA!  DANA, GET OUT HERE.
Me: ...I'm sleeping.
Dorm people: HAPPY BIRTHDAY WHOOOO 8D
Me: =_=
So my dorm throws parties for everyone who has a birthday, but, uh, I was expecting them to do it on my birthday, not the night before.  I was pretty incoherent and exhausted, but everyone put up with my inability to form complete sentences.

Also, I got cake.

And they gave me a card, which included...

...this incredibly accurate portrait of me.  BEST PORTRAIT EVER, AM I RIGHT?

Saturday morning I woke up early to go to Susanoo Shrine to help out with the tsukinamisai (monthly festival, if you've forgotten) preparations.  They were very grateful that I came because, as it turned out, Shigehara-san, who normally helps out, was unable to come, which meant that there were three of us plus Nakano-san trying to set everything up.  So I got a glimpse into the insane number of preparations that go into a festival.  Keep in mind that this is a small festival (tsukinamisai is not terribly important) at the second smallest level of shrine (smallest level with parishioners)!  But in the hour leading up to the festival, I
- took all the offerings out of their bags (since vegetables in Japan come in bags) and arranged them by type (fruits, vegetables, not vegetables, things we can pretend are vegetables)
- filled all the water containers
- found lids for all the water containers
- filled the sake containers
- transferred sake around because I divided it up wrong the first time
- realized that there was a funnel there that I could have used, oh well
- found lids for all the sake containers
- arranged the sake, water, rice, and salt offerings on trays
- arranged chairs on the ceremony stage
- rearranged the chairs because I did it wrong the first time
- arranged slippers for people to use on the ceremony stage
- carried the offerings out to the stage
And after the ceremony, I
- removed the offerings from the altar and carried them back into the shrine office
- washed and dried the sake, water, salt, and rice offering containers
- wiped down the offering trays
- counted a whole bunch of omamori and ofuda*
- put a whole bunch of omamori and ofuda into boxes
- carried the chairs back inside
- wiped down the small tables used for the ceremony
- helped pass out the divided up offerings
- helped arrange the tea sweets for the naorai
Of course, Nakano-san also had to purify all the omamori and ofuda for the New Year during the ceremony, so it was a bit more complicated than usual, but you can probably tell that a fair amount of work goes into it.  Plus, it was freezing cold, and you can't wear shoes on the ceremony stage, so I spent about three hours running around in socks and no gloves.  I discovered that my hands swell up when it's cold. It was exciting?
In any case, because I proved my competence, I've been cleared to help out at New Year's, which is SO EXCITING.  Also, Nick and Miranda are invited, which is also SO EXCITING.  WHOO.

On a somewhat random note, I found out something interesting about miko (shrine maidens).  Traditionally they were virginal, prepubescent girls.  Then they changed the restrictions so that they had to be young girls who were unmarried ('cause how are you actually going to check the virginal thing without that getting really awkward?  Plus, child labor laws).  Then, on Saturday, I discovered that apparently someone realized that, hey, sometimes people have sex outside of wedlock (I KNOW, RIGHT?), and so the restrictions have been changed AGAIN so only women under 20 (the age you're considered an adult in Japan) who have never had a boyfriend are eligible.  Of course, this assumes that
A. nobody has sex while they're not dating
and
B. everybody who's dating is having sex
neither of which are true.  But I suppose it's less awkward than putting "Are you a virgin? Y/N" on your job applications.**
Yay, random asides!

So Saturday afternoon I went to see The Adventures of Tintin, which cost 2,000 yen ($26), and that was WITH a student discount.  It was fun (and gorgeous to look at, for the most part), but not really worth the price of admission.  Oh well.  I did discover that 3D glasses in Japan are HUGE (imagine like those snow goggle/sunglasses things), which meant that they very comfortably fit over my regular glasses.  Sweet.  Even better, the 3D didn't give me a headache, although I'm not sure whether that's because of a different projection technique or because of my new glasses ('cause I haven't seen a 3D movie since getting them).
And then after that I went to get Taiwan ramen.  YUM.

So that was my 21th*** birthday.  I thought about trying to get drunk on chocolate (Miranda's suggestion), but then I realized that if I ate that much chocolate, I would probably die.  Plus it would be expensive (I'm not going to eat that much cheap chocolate, geez, next you're going to tell me to eat Hershey's).  So, that didn't happen.  Oh well.  Maybe next year.

Anyway!

Yesterday (Monday) I had penmanship class, where we were working on calendars.  This meant that we got to write the kanji for all the different years in the Chinese zodiac.

So I think this looks extraordinarily derpy, but apparently it's really good, so...what do I know?

And then we practiced writing the kanji for this coming year, which is the year of the dragon.

So then Nakano-san told me to practice writing the kanji for dragon by itself.

Nakano-san: Your letters are too skinny.  Make them fatter.

Nakano-san: Still too skinny.

So then she gave me THE FAT BRUSH (its actual name), a brush so extraordinarily large that one of the other students was afraid to use it.

Nakano-san: There, that's better.

Here's the finished product!  The left side got a bit squished, but whatever.

...also, you can totally see my toes in that picture.  That's a little weird.

Then, because I had to wait for my calendar to dry, I practiced writing the years of the zodiac in hiragana.  YAY.

So today, Tuesday sensei came into class and gave us a choice between a regular class or a conversation class that definitely was not a party.  We picked the latter and ate snacks and had a party, I mean, a totally serious lesson.
Also, everyone is incredibly upset that Tuesday sensei will not be teaching the second year class.  One of the girls threatened to fail the class so that she could take the first year class again.

Also, it's time for...language fails!  Failing at Japanese is an art, and a lot of foreign students will keep track of their particularly spectacular ones.  Here are a collection of language fails from Japanese class this semester...
Sensei: Please describe how to make rice in a rice cooker [suihanki].
Student: Well, first you take the rice, and you...you measure it?  You measure it with a cup.  Okay.  Then you wash the rice.  And then you put the rice into the vending machine [jihanki].
Sensei: HOW DO YOU MAKE RICE????
---
Japanese student: I want to get a boyfriend, so I'm thinking that next year I'll do konkatsu [sort of like match-making activities].
Foreign student: Wait, how will that help you get married?
Japanese student: ?????
Foreign student: Oh...OH, you said konkatsu.  I thought you said tonkatsu.
---
Sensei: Why do you like Japanese boys?
Student 1: Because of their kizukai [consideration].
Student 2: Their kisukai [kissing parties]?????

Anyway, that's the short version of what I've been up to.  Tomorrow I have some administrative stuff to do and some last minute Christmas-shopping-like-stuff, and then Thursday night I head out to Saga prefecture where I'll be staying until the 27th.  Nick comes in on the 28th and Miranda comes in on the 29th, so, uh, I'll be fairly preoccupied.  This blog may not update a whole lot, but I'll try to at least post something every week so everyone knows I'm still alive.

Now it's off to finish this dangblasted essay...

P.S. Happy Hanukkah to everyone celebrating it!  I keep seeing the emails about latkes in Tech House, and...and now I really want to eat latkes.  Darn it.

*Slips of paper which are placed in household altars and believed to carry a bit of the essence of the kami.

**Is it legal to discriminate on the basis of sexual experience????

***Edit: Oh geez, I've been reading way too much Cake Wrecks.  That should be 21ST.  21ST.  This is why you don't write blog posts late at night.