Oooooooooooooh

The perks of living on your own:

You get to eat wondrous meals (such as delicious, moist oboro dofu mmm) whenever you make them.

You - oh, excuse that - You get to eat mediocre and/or not very delicious meals (such as the miso stir-fry thing I just made ohhh) whenever you make those.

You get to listen to "In the House - In a Heartbeat" at a loud volume and have to stop writing your blog post for a while because you are overcome with having to throw your head back and forth to the music as it gets more and more intense.

Well, the last one you can do anywhere, really. But I just thought I'd throw it in.

And yes, (k we're out of the "perks of living on your own" section now) I was inspired by a tofu cafe I went to in Kyoto, and yes, I did buy various, assorted tofu goods from its nearby shop including oboro dofu and soy milk and tofu tare (sauce? marinade?) and tofu dumpling type things, and yes, I did seek recipes from the cafe's website, and YES, I did use one to create a delicious oboro dofu, which I have now made twice and for which I am thinking of new ways to make it better and even more numsaflex (yummy).

Tonight's meal's taste reminded me of when I first got to Japan and started cooking with Japanese ingredients (or really cooking period). I'm getting the impression miso isn't really ideal for frying and maybe I just stick to using it in soups and the like. Anyway, it's not like tonight's dinner is that bad. I mean, it tastes alright, and it's dinner, right?

RIGHT!?

Yeeahhh.

Wow, the soundtrack to 28 Days Later is depressing. Who would've thought? Oh, but it has a motif, as I just noticed! This little thing that comes at the end of "In the House - In a Heartbeat" that always sounded okay but a little out of place is actually its own song earlier in the album! Cool. K, but really, this is too weird listening to this without watching the movie, and it's making me feel like I'm in a life-and-death, fight-or-flight, end-of-the-world situation. I like hyphenating words sometimes. And things like that.

Oh yeah, the thing I wanted to talk about today: karate. Yes! I am taking karate lessons now, and it kind of wound up as a private lesson that the sensei teaches right after his class with the little kids ends. It's sweet. I was really surprised when I remembered, and all the feelings came flooding back (in)to me from some wellspring somewhere within, how much I love martial arts and practicing them. The workout is just so awesome to me - getting good excercise from doing bodily motions over and over again always trying to execute them better. I love the feeling of exerting myself physically and mentally at the same time like that. Plus, you can tell when you're doing it right and getting better. Actually, I think I can tell that more now, being much older than when I did martial arts in middle school or around then. In any case, I love practicing martial arts.

And karate is way different from kali and kickboxing, which I did before. The kicks are crazy! and the stances and punching styles! Oh man, it's really fun and exciting to learn (even if I got a rude awakening/surprise about how much less flexible I've become (I always prided myself on being flexible before!), though it could also just be that I never much used the muscles these kicks utilize when I took martial arts lessons before). Anyways, I always feel really energized and alive when I finish karate lessons, so that is awesome. I can't wait to...just keep going to class and doing karate pretty much, haha. However, I can't go to next Monday's lesson, because...

I'm going to Taiwan! Hurrah! Thank you for your suggestions on places to go and things to see, everyone who gave me those. I don't really have any idea of what to expect, but I'm excited to see where one of my good friends has chosen to be his home for this year and experience what he likes about it.

I finally started doing this idea I've had for studying Japanese for a while now. I found a website with something like 3,500 kanji (still not very much) that categorizes them by grade levels and has really extensive information on them, including what seems like all their different readings. SO...I'm starting at grade one, from the very beginning, and going over all the kanji for which I know the main ways to read and use, but now I'm focusing on all their obscure readings or on certain basic kanji for which I just don't know certain readings because you don't use them that much. That was confusing, sorry, but going with the spirit of leaving things just as they come out of my head, I'm going to leave that the way it is. The long and short of it issss (I never use that phrase) I've studied super high level kanji for the challenge and because I'm curious, but something that's always been in my mind is, "Hey, it may be good to keep learning harder kanji and all, but wouldn't it be cool to learn all the ones used in everyday situations, like on trucks and signs and buildings and stuff, and just be completely comfortable with kanji in my daily life?" Yes, it would be. So now, I'm going over all the everyday kanji! And it's interesting and rewarding! So there's that.

Um, anyways...no pictures again this time, sorry. I do have some I'd like to post, but never seem to have time when I get around to writing in this old thang. You can have this one for now?













(Hint: I searched, "little tiger.")

Also, Mono is awesome. I just listened to "Memorie Dal Futoro." Good, good, good.

That's about all for now. I might not update again until after I get back. Oh yeah, I also felt pretty good today when I was able to reserve a seat on a bus to the airport and a hotel room for the night before without missing anything the people were saying or having to ask them to repeat anything, and that's with all that crazy polite language (敬語ぉぉぉぉ！) (except for this one thing the hotel clerk said which I still can't figure out). But, uhhh, yeah. Good day. I spent a lot of time looking out from my balcony. Goodnight.