A Tale of Ordinary Madness:

I don't know

There are better photos I could have chosen I guess, to kick off this post, but this is what you get to pique your interest. Yes, that is the beach!
I missed swimming, I missed it bad.
As a lifeguard, 4 years of it, (or more?) my most fundamental everyday goal was to stay the hell out of the water, but in this dry urban last 7 months my body remembered what made me start that line of work (besides the girls in swim suits) and it was that i freakin' LOVE SWIMMIN
G! It was soooo good to get out in the water, and out of the classroom, out of the suit, and be at i didn't even know where at i didn't even know what hour swimming in the ocean with i don't know whatever monsters lurking in the blackness under me trying to play footsie with me.
No, the monster thing wasn't cool, but luckily it was just my imagination.

Sorry I haven't blogged in awhile. You get some photos every once in awhile and a summary of where they came from, but that's not a blog-- that's , i don't know, camera maintenance? I don't know.

Really It's just been like I'm in this wierd flux of nothing happening at all, but way too much happening to blog about. How to explain that...
Work is either all I think about, or think about avoiding i should say, or else i've succeeded in escaping it, and therefore my daily life, in such an extreme that i'm totally out of touch. I'll go weeks at a time where i like pop into work, my brain goes to robot mode, get out and do stuff, end up in my apartment just to sleep, drink like crazy or travel on the weekends, and rinse and repeat. Or else I'm stressing it and then if i'm stuck in the apartment the last thing i want to be doing is posting and writing.

But today i was feeling lonely for maybe the first time since i've been to japan-- kat left last night, but also my weekend was SOOO great!
I mentioned the beach thing. That was just when i arrived sat. night after work. We then lit fireworks like crazy, caught, just barely caught, the last train into kobe, and sang karaoke until the sun came up, i slept at shuko's apartment, for like 2 hours.
Karaoke is magic, here it is. Some people hate it, i can't figure out why.

I figured out why i have come to hate blogging, because i do so much, then i'm stuck having to follow this dialogue to blow through it
"i did this, then this, then this, then this" it's either that or leaving stuff out. Time for a quick jot of run on sentences to get you through my weekend, and try to get it out of my head so i can go back to normal life.
International food stands at the festival in kobe, sitting around in the RV's they had on display boiling in the heat, daydreaming about how were were going to quit ____, pitch in all of our money, get an RV and live in it and drive every inch of japan, napping in shuko's apartment watching disturbing flash cartoons and chuckling at them while the girls put on yukatta's, walking down to the train station and catching the 5 dollar 1 hour train into kyoto starting off being the only people, and the only gai-jin, in yukatta and jinbe, untill we were squished arm to arm and everyone is blinging in their traditional wear, the festival, the one beer i had that was so delicious it got rid of my stomach ache instantaneously, the canopy of umbrella that appeared over us when it started to rain we were so tightly packed in crowd. That was sunday, and sunday was great.
We turned jill's apartment floor into one giant futon, crashed, woke up, hit starbucks, went through the fish market in the rain while live octopus crawled out of the baskets and grabbed at our feet, bought some badass geta, made an offering at the tako ferry shrine, rode that tasty boat to this island under the world's longest suspension bridge, walked around the island till we found the swimming beach, it was raining but who cares? Ninja'd into the beach area, stripped down, jumped into the ocean and swam in the afternoon in the rain while being cold for the first time in 2 months. Decided on finding an onsen, walked half naked, wet, muddy and as gain-jin as possible into the police office to find out where the nearest onsen was, all in bad japanese while shuko sat behind us pretending not to be/speak japanese. I guess they fell for it, and we made it to a dodgy onsen. Dodged it. Went to a nice onsen, shed our old damp tired skins and sat around naked for an hour or 2 in hot water, hotter water, hotter water outside, freezing water, comfortable showers, and sweltering saunas. Had enough of that, went back to town, where we ate amazing curry in a closed indian restaurant listening to the doors untill we realized, shit, it's 9:40 monday, we're in akashi, and dan has to catch the last shinkansen to hiroshima from nishi-akashi at 10:03. Ran. Farewelled. Got home midnightish, hung out with kat, sat in ceasar's apartment in a massage chair watching jimmy fallon and queen latifah in "Taxi", the worst movie ever, woke up, had the most depressing day of work ina long time, and came home and wrote the longest blog in the world.
Did you catch any of that?

posted by Dan @ 6:43 AM