so my lucky charms seems to have abandoned me. negativity is a cloud over my head that insists on staying. i woke up in my own bed (which apparently i should put away everyday or it will mold. fun). i could barely get up and missed the first bus that i planned to take. it really wasn't bad. i enjoyed eating my own food and having control over my own well being. i don't know if it was worth 3600 yen, but oh well. it was another day of orientation. i went to the less job related ones: cooking, travel and pop culture (j-pop). in the cooking section there was an opening game of listing off a number of things that would possibly indicate that you are not a food loser. well it seems that i am THE food loser. every qualification matched me, i was the only first year still standing in the end. food loser = me. we went on a walking tour, i got totally disoriented. i took some pictures to help for later, waste of time as i will explain further on. there was an enkai (work party with lots of drinking) but first the girls and i--kate (chicago), natalie (from south africa) and sandi (illinois)--went back to kate's room--at the hotel for non-hiroshima city JETs--to chat about tv shows and movies and stuff. sandi went home for lack of money, the other three of us went to the enkai. as we were 30min late everyone else had quite a head start on us. it was an all you can eat and drink buffet. mix your own hard-a drinks and lots of beer floating around. interesting, but really i wasn't totally feeling it. i still had a decent time and drank too much beer. we then wondered over to the shack, a gaijin bar. i had water and nibbled on popcorn. i tried to take a pic of the 'greasy but good' section of the menu and realized my memory card had popped out and disappeared. fuck monkeys. i am soooo angry. i mean i have most of the photos off of it and there was a hope it would show up the next day at the restaurant (it didn't), but shit. i lost my miyajima photos and some good shots from earlier in the day, including a t-shirt with the text 'eat more rice bitch'. good stuff. so yeah the rest of the night/next day i was blah. i held onto the little hope that it would show up later and we went onto jamaica--a bar and dancing thing. mostly rap on tuesday, lame. but i got my jiggy on a little, chatted with some cool kids and went home with a very drunk kate and natalie around 12:30. kate was a doll and let me crash in her hotel room so i didn't have to worry about the bus. we ended up talking till like 2 and finally then slept. the neeext day was free breakfast at the hotel and the last day of orientation. some info about killing time and about how to spend your time in hiroshima--travel, creativity, finding yourself, ect. and then this cool woman, flo, talked about the importance of sex and masturbation in keeping from insanity (a recommendation for nerve.com, we'll see if its any good). then she showed some of her really cool photos and talked on the basics of photography. 15min after this inspiring talk i find out that no, my memory card has not turned up. shit. so the option now is buy a new card ($100) that won't work in the new camera i want or buy a new camera ($400) that i don't have the money for or hope that i can get the photos off my cell phone and just use that till i get paid. so my new challenge is to read my japanese phone manual...in japanese. yay. oh yeah and we went to indian for lunch, wandered pasco depaato, got coffee (i didn't but others did) went to tower records and finally headed to the bus center after getting lost in soga trying to find a salad. yeah i'm fucking angry. i had some cool photos on there that i was very close to downloading monday night but i didn't. fuck shit. this is not my week.
post shower, more clarity.
so what i most desperately desire is the possibility of calling home. it's 4:30am in portland, (8:30pm here), elena would be the only one who might be awake. but realistically i'm fine. it's only 2 weeks till i will have that ability. during those weeks i will be busy. tomorrow is my first full day at school. next week i go to a week of japanese language courses. the week after i'll be at school everyday, maybe teaching. on the weekends i will most likely be going to osaka and mt. fuji. i will be a busy busy girl and i will be fine. the positive things that have happened? i met more cool JETs and got phone numbers of people i can hang out with later. including a nice lesbian girl who used to be my predecessor's friend. i saw portland in the lonely planet u.s. edition. they mentioned a couple good things, called our park blocks small, and of course mentioned powell's and the crystal. i bonded with kate, natalie, and sandi. there are plans to travel together, to go to concerts and me to visit each of them as sandi is the only other one in the city. plus kate has seasons 1-4 of gilmore girls and natalie loves buffy and st: next gen and sandi and i are going to trade books and she might re-teach me to knit. everything is going to be fine. at least that's what i'm going to keep telling myself, over and over.
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