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What time am I talking about? Well, PERSIMMON SEASON, of course! What else could excite me so much? Two days ago when I was in Mitsuwa, I saw persimmons in the produce section for the first time since last winter. I jumped out of my skin. Figuratively. $1 for a persimmon is fine with me. Yesterday I went to Han Ah Reum where they had loads more of persimmons for 3/$1. AHH. I got two cases (48 persimmons) which are now neatly stacked on plates in the dining room. I ate four persimmons today, but I'll probably eating more tomorrow. They're so delicious!

Since I've been home (this week is my October break...what the hell is October break?) I've been eating up a storm. Yeah, SCREW IT, I'm home and can finally eat more than apples, carrots, and nuts. Actually, those are all yummy foods, but I wanted a little more variety than what food I hoarded in my dorm room could offer. So far I've eaten a bunch of sashimi I got from Mitsuwa and last night I got two wedges of raw cheese from Whole Foods. I wouldn't have gotten cheese if they didn't have a little platter of free sheep's milk cheese to sample from...so it's definitely a good idea for grocery stores to give out free samples. Anyway, I guess it's weird for me to eat cheese after saying "DAIRY SUCKS" so much, but at least it's not the barely-digestible rubbery junk on top of pizza. Let's just say it's a far cry from what I'd see in my dorm; processed, bright orange cheese in a jar or "Easy Mac" which I'm not completely sure is food. I wouldn't object to eating most foods in their raw states; I object to grains and some legumes because they're just not very digestible in the raw state. You can soak/sprout legumes to make them more digestible. As for grains, I don't think those are very good raw.

I don't have anything against eating raw meat, although the only raw meat I've even eaten is fish and I'm not jumping to try something like beef since it isn't usually raised with the intent of eating it raw. Some people feed their dogs and cats raw beef/chicken though, and that seems to work well for them. Of course, it makes sense to feed your pets raw meat and when I think about all the dogs and cats eating canned food I wonder how healthy they are. I've never had a pet so I can't really say anything from my experience, but two of my friends have pets and they aren't/didn't do so well, sadly. One of my friends has two cats and while one of them looks somewhat normal, the other one is really, really fat. Incredibly fat. She knows this, but I don't think she sees this as a health problem. All I can say is if a human were proportionately the same weight, it would be an obvious health problem. My other friend used to have a dog, but they put him to sleep because he was having seizures and loads of problems in general. He was also incredibly overweight and it was kind of sad because I used to play with him when he was a puppy and incredibly energetic. By the end of his life he was pretty docile, just walking around and sniffing people. :|

Erm...back to what I was saying! What was I saying? Oh yeah, food is yummy. Kimchi is delicious. But this doesn't come to mind when I eat it.) I used to eat kimchi somewhat on a regular basis, and then I stopped for a long time. When I went to Han Ah Reum I decided to only get a small container's worth of it and at dinner my mum and I ate it all. So the lesson is, do not get the smallest container. I plan on going back and filling a tub (if they have a tub...hell, I'll bring my own) with kimchi and lugging it back into my dorm room. Mm. I ate it by wrapping it in nori.

I haven't been up to much last week, so I'm not sure what else to talk about...damn, this is sad. All I could talk about was what I ate? Oh, I bought some CDs! Woo! Make CDs cheap and people will buy em; I got Take Them On, On Your Own and 12 Memories for $9.99 each from Tower Records. I haven't been to Tower Records in a long, long time, but it was on the way to Barnes & Noble so my mum suggested we go. So far I am liking both albums, but they're not striking me as "WHOAAA" albums yet (you know, the ones that make you go...whoaaa! ...that was stupid, yes).

Anyway, I wanted to go to Barnes & Noble to look at their sales annex. That place rules. Cheap books galore, even some in Japanese! I didn't buy any Japanese ones since I couldn't read them, but I were taking French or Russian I would have had lots of stuff to buy. I ended up buying My First Xylofun because it was 50% ($5!). However, THE THIRD NOTE IS FLAT! Okay, that's probably why it was so cheap, but I can't imagine that every book has the same flat note. Maybe I'll go back with some kind of mallet so I can test em all out. It might look a little weird, me banging on all the books, but come on...I want my $5 worth! It bothers me. At the very least though it's perfectly flat so that I have a minor scale (click here to listen). It's just that you can't play the songs in the book because of that. I guess I can make up my own, minor dinkly songs though.

Speaking of fun, kiddie instruments, I bought this $1 10-note electronic keyboard at a flea market near my house on Saturday. I took one look at the strawberry and penguin motif and thought, "This is something I must have." I mean, it costed a freakin' dollar. I also had the choice of getting one with a banana and a bird, or one with an eggplant and some other kind of animal. Who thinks of this stuff? Cokeheads? Honestly! It sounds like what you'd expect a $1 keyboard to sound like, but it has 7 built in songs, which is pretty impressive considering it's a $1 keyboard. (Click here to listen to "Happy Birthday"...some of the songs have notes that are too low to be played on the keyboard.) Today at BJs I saw a $15 kid's keyboard that was actually pretty cool (the $1 keyboard is 1-note polyphony...not surprising, and after finding that out I thought I should have bought a few more so I could play chords) but I resisted buying that. I would have gotten it if I was sure it had a "line out" but it had this port that said "AUX/CD" which makes me think it was a "line in", but who the heck would use it for that purpose? Eh. Well. I'll go to BJs again sometime and it'll probably still be there. I also bought Christmas lights at BJs to decorate my dorm room with. It'll be a-glowin' this winter, hooyeah!

So it's very nice to not be in school and to not have to wake up at 8 AM to drag myself to anthropology. It's not a bad class, but it's a 9 AM class, which is never fun. I want to take a dance class next semester early in the morning just to wake myself up. Of course, I might end up falling asleep and fall on my face, but I think the chances of that happening are slim. In Japanese class we learned a bunch of new grammatical things and how to say the numbers and use them to tell time or say the cost of sometime. It was all terrible confusing, and I don't think I'll ever get a hang of the numbers, but I can try. The grammatical stuff confuses me because I don't always know when to use ga, wo, he, or ni, but I have some kind of idea. It would just take me a while to figure it out. Meh.

In English class our assignment is to read My Life as a Fake (My teacher is friends with the author so he got the whole class reviewers copies...woo, free books! I haven't found many errors in mine though, just a few spelling mistakes) over the break. I've read about a third of it so far and it's so, so strange. I would never read it if I didn't absolutely have to, and it's not like its written badly, but it's just such a weird, random story that, in my opinion, doesn't have much purpose. Maybe something groundbreaking will happen in the other 2/3rds? Hm.

Last Thursday I went to the dollar store near my school and got this hilarious ring (4/$1) that one of my friends had also bought. We both think it's one of the greatest things ever, but we're kind of alone on this though. IT HAS GOOGLY EYES FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! What else can you get for 25 cents? I also bought a pack of four double-ended highlighters, of which only two worked, and the green ink in one of them is so gross looking that I would consider that unusable as well. Alright, it was only $1 so what could I expect? I also bought some funny signs for my roommate because I thought they were fitting for her (one was about stress, the other one said "Get Happy!").

Last Friday I watched Radiohead on David Letterman and I hadn't watched TV in a while, so what I noticed most prominently is that late night commercials are 99.9% about drugs and cars. Is that what people want most? I mean...it seemed so sick. Ever other commercial was for a new prescription drug or a new car. I find that extremely troubling. And late night TV is targetting the 20-40 age group I'd guess...so I can understand them wanting cars, but all those drugs? AHHH! Well. Anyway, I generally like David Letterman (more than Jay Leno at least) but the show wasn't that funny. First off, there was only one guest (Darrel Hammond, who was pretty funny) but they gave maybe 3 minutes to Radiohead after having two "Will It Float" segments and...argh! Radiohead doesn't even like David Letterman (at least Thom doesn't, I think) so it must have really sucked. It was a good performance though. I was planning to watch it by myself, but one of my friends (who's in my astronomy class and lives on the first floor; I live on the third) came into my room and noticed my Radiohead poster. So we talked about them for a bit and I brought up that I was going to watch them, so we watched it together and it was more enjoyable than watching it alone. :)

I will end this entry with my new hair cut. WOOEE! Nice n short. I spoke in Japanese to the hairdresser (because it was a Japanese hair salon...otherwise, that would have been pretty stupid) by saying 「ありがとう　ございうます」 and she understood me! Thank god! THen she taught me that in reply to that, you say, 「どいたしまして」 (I probably spelled that wrong...could be 「どういたしまして」？) but anyhoo...yeah. So that was nice. :)