The Butterfly, The Spider, and Three Lights

There's a little butterfly inside my head. I couldn't tell you what color it is, because when it comes to play it flits by so fast I can't see the color. But it leaves whispers in its wake.

"Holy shit, Lena -- you understand what they're saying!"

Yeah, that's right. A thought that floats through at completely random intervals and occasionally makes me lose track of the whole conversation.

Bloglight Japan: Hanami

The word hanami literally means "flower viewing". Every spring the sakura bloom and their petals fall, and the Japanese go out in droves to have picnics for the occasion. Family picnics, company picnics, club picnics, picnics with their fellows in the same major in college, etc. Special spring-themed candies are made and everyone has a good time.

The official hanami holiday is May 1. However, the sakura seem to be somewhat sensitive to the weather; the earliest-blooming sakura (in the southern part of Japan) bloom in late April, while Hokkaido get their sakura blooming near the end of March. The Japanese keep track of when the sakura bloom where every year, and there has been a trend towards it blooming later and later. (Global warming says what, now?)

The sakura petals only stay on the tree for maybe a week. I didn't expect them to fall that swiftly, and didn't get any pictures taken. :'( The petals are a very pale pink -- paler than I expected. I think the petals darkened a bit when they fell of the trees, though, but I couldn't say for sure.

{End Bloglight}

Thursday was the anniversary of the school's founding, so it was an in-service day. As such, a number of the groups in school were having hanami picnics in the nearby parks. The Gaiken was no exception, though by that time the petals had all fallen off the trees and there were no flowers to see. It was a lot of fun, regardless. At first, it was the third years and me... somehow we all still thought it started at noon when everyone else thought it started at 1 PM.

It clouded up a bit later, but at first it was very sunny and quite warm. One guy ran to the store and got us all ice cream. We had a rock-paper-scissors- fest to see who picked their ice cream first from the pile of random ice creams. I was fifth or something, and got an orange cream thingy. While I was eating it, a spider dropped from the tree above us onto the edge of my ice cream.

Anyone who's known me for a while knows that when I suddenly find a spider right next to me or on my person, I have a SHAKE IT OFF panic attack accompanied by a long string of profanity. Most of the people that were there are studying English, so they knew what I was saying. That was interesting. No one seemed to really mind per se, but I think I surprised them.

When we got everyone together and got started, I found out why summer festivals in Japan always include fans. The Japanese have apparently not considered putting lighter fluid on charcoal to make it catch fire faster, so everyone sits around fanning the tinder madly trying to make the coal catch. That was kind of fun, but what was even more fun was putting griddles over the coals once they were going well enough, then cooking the food. They had bought pre-prepared meat from a meat store (sliced to chopstick-edible size, marinated, and split into a number of packages corresponding to the number of griddles), so once they took out the chucks of lard (yes, lard) and greased the griddles down, we started tossing massive amounts of marinated meat, vegetables, and noodles on the grill. Man, oh, man, was that tasty.

Even though it was midafternoon, there was beer and other minor alcoholic drinks to go around with the juices and tea. I drank a bit (didn't even feel it much), but Asa got drunk. He was like, "How about that rematch?" He was already ruddy-faced when he suggested it, and since that's not really a fair match I used the convenient excuse of having a meeting later that day to put it off.

The meeting in question was regarding the play for drama club. Specifically, the lighting. I didn't get a part, so I am on lighting duty. It's one of the few jobs that my limited command of Japanese is good for. Unfortunately for us, however, most of the lights on the stage here no longer work. Yuuji thinks it could be as simple as a popped breaker, but years of begging the student council to do something about the lights has proven ineffective. The breakers (since they are the breakers) are behind locked doors, and for some reason no one has gone to look. If the lights are actually broken, I don't even want to know how much trouble that might be.

In short, we have three lights. Three plain ol' yellow suspension lights. We can't even control all three separately, as there are only two lighting switches. So. We are gonna see if we can't achieve a spotlight-ish effect by having the central light on one switch and the lights on the sides on the other switch. Here's hoping.

Realizations of the Period

1) I am never gonna get used to cars stopping at crosswalks when I am not even halfway across the street or am not even in the street yet. For crying out loud, people, you have plenty of time to get through without hitting me!
2) If you take music classes, those classes will be about western music for the most part. This is true in most countries, and Japan is no exception. Part of the reason I wanted to take music classes here is because I knew this and wanted to learn the vocabulary as well as continue my music studies. Well, last semester, the music class I took had nothing to do with western music. This semester, I mentioned that I got a crash course in reading music -- being able to look at a note and identifying it as A, B, C, D, E, F, or G -- because I didn't have enough of a grasp on the Do-Re-Mi in a scale to use that in understanding what the teacher said. Well... it turns out the Japanese don't call them A-G like we do. They call the notes Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Ti exclusively, with Do being C. OMG.