...so I haven't been writing much recently, mostly because I've been spending a lot of time writing speeches in Japanese, and once you've written a speech in Japanese, you don't really want to do much else. Plus, it's been Hotter Than Entirely Legal, which has kind of been killing all my energy. Seriously, it is currently 90 degrees, and it's 11 p.m. and I strongly object to this state of affairs.
BASICALLY, THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED RECENTLY:
Friday we had a field trip to see kabuki at the National Theatre in Tokyo. It was a special show intended to introduce people to kabuki, so there was a 30 minute introductory lecture followed by about 2 hours of kabuki. Thus, most of the other patrons were middle school children. Unfortunately, the introductory lecture turned out to be cooler than the actual show, 'cause in the introductory lecture they showed us a whole bunch of cool mechanisms they use in kabuki (from puppets to hydraulic lifts in the stage)...which then did not appear in the actual play. The actual play was...not the most exciting piece they could have performed. Basic story: dude discovers that his wife is actual a fox pretending to be his true love when true love shows up at his house with her parents, dude apparently is so distraught by this state of affairs that he goes to sleep (????), fox lady spends 30+ minutes lamenting the fact she has to leave, fox lady finally writes a poem on the sliding doors and leaves, dude feels bad and follows her, fox lady dances around with...dudes in clothes I don't know what they were supposed to represent, THE END. That took 2 hours. Roughly half the audience fell asleep, while one fourth of the conscious audience spent the entire performance poking each other and being super disruptive. So. That was a thing.
Afterwards I went out to dinner with a bunch of my classmates, and then headed home because the rest of them were heading out to a bar.
Saturday I visited the National Diet Library with Danica, who is one of my cohortmates from Harvard. If you ever get a chance to go to the National Diet Library, you should definitely go, because it's awesome. I now have a library card that is good for the next three years, and I think I'll be up there next weekend, 'cause they have a bunch of books I want to look at. The way it works is that you find the book you want in the library system, place a hold on it using the computer, and then you'll get a message when it's delivered to the holds counter. You can take out three books at a time, and you can also get up to 200 pages copied per day (2,000 pages, if you're okay with them delivering the photocopies to your house within 3 days). It's a great system and they have a bunch of interesting books, and I am basically super into it. So, yes, I will be going back there.
Otherwise, I have mostly been doing homework and writing speeches in Japanese. I led a one-hour discussion class about religion today, because I am all about talking about religion in class all the time. I'm giving YET ANOTHER speech about religion tomorrow morning, because my class is all about speeches all the time. Otherwise, my class has not been terribly exciting; we're reading about the unemployment rate for the forty millionth time in my academic career, because apparently when Japanese classes are looking for "societal problems" to talk about in class, rather than talking about, I don't know, any of the forty million other societal problems we could discuss, we talk about the unemployment rate. [insert loud sighing here]
...so, yeah, that's basically it. It's grossly hot, I want to swim in a pool of ice, I would eat ice cream for 600% of my meals if that were a nutritionally viable option, etc.
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