...Having Dinner at Yukiko's House When in Walk Three Shinto Priests, A Woman With a Ukelele, and A Cat With a Red Scarf...

I apologize in advance for the randomness of this post. Its nearly one in the morning, I've been in matsuri (festival) and enkai (office party) mode for over a week, I'm incredibly sleepy and quite confident that my liver hates me after all the abuse I've given it this weekend.

By the way, the bit about the three Shinto guys, the ukelele and the cat with the red scarf really happened. Just ask Aaron, Krissa, and Andrea - they were there. It was sometime after we were asked by public officials to move out from under the enormous ushi oni on suspended scaffolding about to crash down around us in Misaki (yeah, but the photos were great!) and sometime before I found myself an unsuspecting participant in slightly kinky three-way hug with two drunken strangers in Ikata's festival (really not my best publicity moment in town). Wow...I almost forgot how surreal life can be around here; that is, until I tried to explain the circumstances to Claudia during our last conversation. Really C, I'm surprised you still take my calls.

Speaking of bad publicity, the ongoing "puppy joke" continues to amuse. I will preface this by fervently emphasizing that I am a passionate animal lover which is why this story is so funny. I was pulling my car out of the treacherous narrow road that leads from Andrea's house to Melody Line (highway? expressway? only big road on the peninsula???) when I spotted three puppies sleeping on the side of the road. Worried that I might startle them, I ever-so-slowly crept past them (going no faster than 2 miles per hour). Everything was fine until one became skitish and darted right in front of my car but I was driving so cautiously that I didn't even have to hit the breaks. The puppy was entirely safe; however, it continued for several minutes to trot in front of my vehicle howling in fear, giving everybody in town the impression that I was trying to mow it down with my car. It was so embarassing - I was mortified! Will I now be known as the awful ALT who tries to kill puppies?!

Also I would also like to mention that recently, when I was having a really bad day and couldn't reach anyone to talk, I did an internet search about dealing with failure and uncovered the following noteworthy tidbits:

World Rapid Chess Champion and and NIIT Mindchampion Vishy Anand would like to remind us all that "Failure is just your success in disguise."

Ugh, now thats just bloody annoying!

And the fine folks at humanity quest would like us to conceptualize this: "If failure were our pet and we were writing a manual about the care and feeding of failure, what advise would we give?" They even went so far as to provide an example: "Failure is very easy to care for. Be sure to give it daily attention and it will grow big and strong."

Hmmmm...I'm kinda speechless with that one. Managed to feel more bewildered than frightened so I'm giving it 10 points for originality.

Uh, I don't know whats worse, the fact that I did an internet search about failure or the fact that I haven't enough shame to refrain from blogging about it. I'll let you be the judge.

And in conclusion, I would just like to put this on the record lest there is any question about the issue at all. At a recent festival K, A, A and I were watching Japanese "Karashishi" dance. As you know, I'm an enormous fan of traditional Japanese dance (see nearly every one of my previous posts!). This dance is pretty interesting, involving two young men (usually the unmarried 20 or 30 somethings from the community) dressed in a dragon costume and two elementary school aged boys playing taiko. One of the men will manuever the dragon mask ominously over the little boy while the other man dances behind him. Well, it turns out that the guy I have a small crush on was one of the Karashishi dancers. Not realizing this until much later K sought clarification about who exactly he was by asking, completely innocently, "Well, was he the top or the bottom?"

Yikes! Definately the top, K!