Hi All,
I have 20 minutes to write so we will see if I can produce anything of literary value...
Last night I got a phone call and I thought it was the wrong number. Just as I was about to hang up, the voice said that I met him in Chofu park, then I remembered HIROKI! He is the teenager that Chris and I met in the park about 3 weeks ago. He has a band and they are playing in October and he invited us to come. Well, he called that night to remind me and I THOUGHT he said that he had a tee-shirt he wanted to give me. You know, like wear it and show your support for the band kinda thing? So he asked if I would meet him in the park the next morning for work to give me this tee-shirt. SURE (although this DOES require that I wake up BEFORE normal, which is not cool, but oh well.) So I get to Chofu park thinking he will be easy to find because there aren't many people in the park in the morning. Well, that was a mistake! The place was PACKED with people. It was kinda like "Take your kid to work" day but it was "Take your shit to the park" day. A MILLION people were there with all their worldly possessions, selling them for a buck. I guess it was a sort of flea market but it was mostly old clothes and toys and crap. So I walked around looking for Hiroki for a while and people-watched. One poor boy lost his mom and stood on the outskirts of the crowd screaming bloody murder... "MAAAAAAAAAAAAMA....MAAAAAAAAAAMA...MAAAAAAAAAMA!!!!!! I felt helpless because I could not help him, I couldn't communicate with him. He was about 3 years old and I am pretty sure he did not speak English. So I stood and watched to see if mother-hen would ever emerge from the crowd, beckoned by the agonizing screams of her little brown chick. Sure enough, she came within 3 minutes, just as he was cranking up the volume. Thank God.
So after that mini-drama drew to an end, I decided it was time to call Hiroki (I would never find him in this crowd.) I was really excited about getting my free tee-shirt that would surely have some cool Japanese print on it. When I called, Hiroki answered and said that he was running late. I told him that he could drop it off at my work if he wanted, just tell them it's for Rachel. So we agreed.
Well, about an hour into work, one of the office ladies comes back to the teachers' area and asks if I know a Hiroki. Yes! I DO! And I raced up to the front for my free concert tee-shirt; hopefully it was a white shirt maybe with black hiragana or kanji. Black tee-shirts just wash me out unless I have a tan. Or maybe it has a picture of his band, that would be cool, too. Instead, Hiroki stood there with 2 orange tickets in his hands. He didn't say TEE-SHIRT, he said TICKETS! And not only that, THEY AREN'T FREE! THEY COST $15.00 BUCKS EACH! And not only THAT, he wanted ME to buy BOTH tickets, one for ME and one for CHRIS! WHAT???? OK, we have a slight misunderstanding here, Hiroki. I won't even ASK about the free tee-shirt, because OBVIOUSLY, your poor pronunciation of the word "tickets" is the whole cause of mine own mental debacle. But now THOSE aren't even free??? (Of course I did not say any of this, I just told him that I had to work until 9pm that day so I did not want to buy tickets to a concert that I might not even be able to see). He ended up giving me the tickets and I told him I would pay him if I could come. And that was the end of that. You never know how much a free tee-shirt means to you until you have it YANKED right from under your nose. That sucked. Maybe life in Japan is getting too mundane for me now. Maybe it's NOT the hormones after all, it's BOREDOM! I suppose I need to go catch an Express train from Shinjuku to Chofu, life is NEVER boring on the good old JR Express (That stands for Japanese Railroad). Well, more than 20 minutes has passed since I started writing so I suppose it is time to go pay the piper. Keep the e-mails coming, it adds excitement to my otherwise boring life on this side of the earth. On the brighter side of things, Michael is coming in 6 days! I'm sure that will breath new life into things, which means BETTER WRITING MATERIAL FOR ME!!!!!
OK, that is all for now.
Love me
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