March 1st, 2002. First day of spring.

Spring starts earlier here than in Toronto. We never really had a winter here though - no snow.

Wrote this at work today, during a free period:

The lesson load has mysteriously dropped back to the way it used to be when I first started. Thank goodness. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that we no longer have a head teacher at my school. Frances was just telling me today that there are no such things as coincidences. Hmmm....

These quiet times are surely one of the best memories that I will take away from Japan. Sitting here, blissfully ignorant to the hustle and bustle going on outside in the reception area. I feel so badly for the Japanese staff. They are worked to the bone. I'd help out, but I can't speak Japanese, so I'm pretty much useless - save for menial tasks like stamping envelopes or shredding papers. There were no papers to shred today and nothing needed stamping, so I spent the remainder of the 45 minutes contemplating what I should cook for dinner that night. Chicken or pork? It's always a tough call. Maybe I'll have both.


I've been having some bandwith problems with Tripod lately. Seems that they shut down all access to this site if I go over 1Gb a day. That's actually quite a lot for a crappy little site like this, so I was really surprised to find that they had taken me down last night.

This either means that there are lots of daily readers, but more likely, it's just one or two people who were bored and went through my past entries (that's what the bandwidth consumption breakdown suggests to me, anyways).

Whatever the case, it makes me happy to see that people are actually reading what I have to write. Making this site is kind of like pissing into a deep, dark pit. You give and give and get nothing back. You don't know if you are even making a dent in the damn thing. But then I get an email or encounter something like this bandwidth issue and that's like hearing the pit fill up. I feel like I'm accomplishing something...even if it's just pissing into holes.

Here's me with my new hair. Nothing special, but I look and feel like my old self again.

I feel at home. *sigh*

I asked Watanabe-san for the Japanese name for this style of cut, but promptly forgot it immediately after he told me. My memory isn't what it used to be.

During one of my classes, as I was waiting for my student to show (he didn't), I heard a very low-level student at another table say, "The fish swims in the sky."

She was trying to explain the Japanese tradition of flying fish-shaped flags on May 5th. It's not exactly Pulitzer material, but it sounded strangely poetic. Like there was some ancient wisdom hidden in the twisted metaphor. Mistakes can be good, I'm convinced that's how some literary greats came up with some of their stuff.

How does the saying go? "Put a thousand monkeys in front of a thousand typewriters and eventually, they will replicate the works of Shakespeare."

I picked up my photos today, and here are some shots of Eddie, Wes and I sparring near Eddie's place on the 26th. This is me intercepting Wes' hook.

Wes and Eddie going at it.

Eddie spent most of the night punching the snot out of us. He's better by far, and about twice our size. I have lost all my conditioning, I was dead tired after the 3rd round. Look at my hands in the photos, they are hanging at my waist.

Eddie took full advantage of this by laying them in whenever I paused to catch my breath. In this shot, he is teaching me that his legs can reach farther than my jab can. I landed a few solid oblique kicks on him, and one good hook, but that was it. Spent the rest of the night trying to keep my teeth in my mouth.

Yeah baby! I've got Wes on the run!

Damn. Spoke too quickly.