I'm back from the darkside.

Hello, all. I'm sorry I've been out of touch. I went through a low period recently and felt so down that I had nothing good to say. The happy news is that I've come out the other end and things are shiny and hopeful once again. Needless to say, considering I was in such a funk, you haven't missed much.

We had an Obon party after work last night. This is a late-summer festival based around the idea that your ancestors come back to earth to visit a while. But really it's a chance for Japanese people to dress up in yukata (summer kimonos)



and take over public places in order to dance,


drink


and eat greasy food from stalls.

It's a lot of fun (even when it's part of enforced corporate socializing!!!). I took a video of some of the bon-odori (Obon festival dancing) to give y'all an idea of what you're missing out on. A very key point is featured at the end of the vid when you see the drunken salary-man with the sweat rag on his head come into the shot - it's not just about the well-rehearsed dancers in pretty costumes busting a move. It's about young and old, sober and not-so-sober, coordinated and klutzy giving it a go. (BTW, sorry about the poor picture quality - my camera takes video in some HD format that doesn't convert well to youtube. It looks beautiful on telly, though.)



Aside from that, the lull in my spirits coincided with a serious dip in my restaurant karma: I've had some bad meals. On a trip to Daikanyama, I was so excited to see this...


A wholly vegan raw food restaurant. I had only ever seen one raw restaurant (where nothing is heated over 48 degrees and where everything on the menu is supposed to be bursting with healthy enzymes that keep you fit as a fiddle) in Tokyo and the food there was absolutely delicious. Of course, it closed down! Admittedly, it was in a crap location. But this new one here could not have found a better spot. So I was really looking forward to making this my new haunt of choice. And then look at what they served me:


A plate full of rabbit food. I was so angry that they had lettuce feature so strongly. This feeds into all the negative stereotypes of vegan cuisine (plus the waiter was unhealthily skinny, and that's coming from me). I just felt it portrayed all the wrong images to convince a reluctant public of the benefits of this new concept. As if it wasn't bad enough that this UNCOOKED meal took almost thirty minutes to arrive and that they had the gaul to charge more than double what a usual lunch would cost in that area, the much-advertized 'organic' coffee ended up being powder from a jar. I doubt I'll be going back.

Veganism and vegetarianism basically don't exist in Japan, and it's super difficult to follow any sort of restricted eating plan. I don't know how often I turn a blind eye to the stock something is cooked in, or the dish where the meat has clearly just been picked out before being served to me. But worse is the false advertising. The amount of dishes over here that are called 'veggie' that are anything but. I went to a place the other day that was named the Vegetable Laboratory (it sounds slightly less stupid in Japanese). I sat down to order and found out that 80% of their menu was made up of meat, poultry or fish, that there was nothing vegan, and that the only actual vegetarian dish was a wholewheat sandwich with a few leaves of lettuce, some tomato, onion, half an olive and balsamic vinegar. I think I actually had a rage stroke when it was put down in front of me. But hey, at least I had some food on my plate, I guess. Count my blessings and all that. End of rant!

The only other random thing I wanted to mention was that fact that in Japan 'Minority Report' is now a reality. Remember that business with the kind of ether screen that the police dudes manipulated with their hands? Well lookie here at the front page of yesterday's paper:

This article also caught my eye because it was developed in a research centre in Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture. This is where we have one of our centres, too, and I used to have to go there all the time before I got the video-conferencing system introduced. Sometimes I do miss those easy, short business trips - especially the quiet time on the train with no phone or e-mail to bother you. Plus, running that teleconferencing project is repsonsible for at least fifty percent of the grey hairs now covering my head (see photo above) and we are still ironing out the kinks these many months later. But it's Saturday and I do now want to think about work, so I'll sign off. Thanks to any of you who made it this far down the bumper post.

So why the heck am I not fat?

Apparently, it's because I fidget!

I have just finished watching this documentary about why thin people don't get fat. Moral of the story? It's all genetic: just like your body programs you to be a certain height, so too it thinks you should be a certain 'natural' weight. This fascinates me because I have been the same height (183cm) and the same weight (65kg) since the age of 16, and nothing I have done in the last 18 years has really changed things much.

Admittedly, I usually tend towards the healthier diet and incorporate things like lots of walking into my lifestyle. Nonetheless, I go through periods (like the one I'm going through now) where I feel a bit down, and exercising falls by the wayside and all I do is eat high-calorie comfort foods.

And I can eat! Ask any of my friends and they will be able to tell you of the shocking amounts of food that I can put away. A memorable story is from a company summer party in Luxembourg where I put away several plates of rice and pasta salad as big as my head (my friends were horrified) and mere hours later came away saying I was really hungry, nay starving!

The interesting question the documentary posed is where the heck do all these calories go if you don't stock them up as fat cells. Apparently, there are three choices: some people give the energy off as heat (not me, I am constantly freezing); some people convert it to muscle mass (I wish! I am but skin and bone); and some people's body's protect their owners from weight gain by increasing the amount of 'involuntary body movement while at rest' a.k.a. fidgeting.

This has to be the explanation for me. Even asleep my body is constantly on the move. My family and I used to be fascinated by how as a teenager my (wheel-less) bed would end up a good foot away from the wall every morning when I woke up . Hello night terrors! Or night spasms! Or sleep jogging.! Or I don't know what... Moreover I have definitely suffered from the Saint Vitus's dance in the past, and as a child could be seen stepping out little Irish dancing routines even when seated. And then there was that one time in Thailand where certain strange substances may have been consumed that had me convinced that the only way I'd make it through the night was by doing bicycle crunches without pause until said substances had worked their way through my system. But the less said about that the better.

The point of all this being that you can throw away your Jane Fonda workout tapes and the like - the best way to battle the bulge is to have yourself at a constant state of high doe and the pounds will just drop away.

Actually, that's not what the documentary said at all. They were pretty fatalistic. After force-feeding all these thin people 10.000 calories a day for four weeks, even though they all ended up putting on on weight, they all returned to the original body shape and fat percentage about two weeks after the experiment ended without doing anything that different except returning to their normal lifestyle,

So basically love the body you're in because it's most likely the one you're stuck with!

Dribbling into my incontinence pants

I slipped into middle age around 2pm this afternoon when I unintentionally nodded off on a park bench.

It has been scorchingly hot and sunny here for the last few days, and I was enjoying a stroll in the park after a light lunch. I sat down under a tree, and it just felt so nice in the shade, with my full belly and a light breeze and the cicadas giving their vuvuzelas a workout. And then before I knew it, I was doing a very convincing impression of my mother watching tv *zzzzzzz*

I think I'd still feel young and chipper if it had been my plan to take a nap. But it is his random narcolepsy that I so associate with the onset of years.

So I am now officially old and it is all downhill from here: creaking knees, varicose veins and dribbling into my incontinence pants. But to quote something I read in the paper the other day, "Aging sucks! But it is still infinitely better than the alternative."

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D is for Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen

Okay, for y'all i y'all who are learning german along with me, the words for today are:

Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen (DBA) - double taxation agreement

and

unzertrennlich - inseparable

And don't say you'll never need such random words. I used them both today! The first, to help my colleague figure out the payslip of someone we transferred to our german offices last year. And the second to look up a song from one of my stories.

Ain't learning grand. Seriously, just roll these two words around your tongue a few times and you'll feel like the most fluent german speaker that ever was. They're great!

This post is rated PG-13

Hmm... I'm not sure this learning German through soap operas thing is Goethe Institute approved: I now know more swear words than is probably appropriate for someone only on their eighth lesson.

The key to swearing in German seems to be to say the word as you would in English while throwing some extra syllables around the place. Thus "piss off" becomes the expressive "Verpiss dich!"; ya "daft cow" becomes the assonant "bloede Kuh"; and my personal favorite "arsehole" becomes the glorious "Arschloch".

I think I'm so fascinated with this at the moment because you just can't get a good swear on in Japanese. It's a bit of an alien concept. It's hilarious watching Japanese subtitles to English movies. A scene will contain all these myriad bad words in the original and then just have the fairly pathetic クソ! (kuso) repeated endlessly in the translation.

But it's not just the swearing. German soaps are equipping me with the tools to lead a very dramatic life if I ever get to move there. I mean I've lost count of the ways I've heard to say "I love you" and "I'm sorry". And my hostage-related vocabulary is now more extensive than in my native tongue.
(I'm up to my third kidnapping in one soap alone!)

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My career has gone mouldy.

It is Saturday and I am a cleaning machine: I was away doing a training course for the week and came back to find I had squatters - tiny mould spores making their home in my sink, bath and toilet bowl. You see, it's rainy season in Japan - a time of hot, humid stickiness, broken by frequent thunderous downpours. All that fetid moisture can turn the unattended apartment into a Petri dish in a matter of days.

I actually have a pretty high tolerance for the mugginess of rainy season and don't hate it as much as many others living here. I mean, I haven't yet used my air-conditioner, even though we're now at the beginning of July. Nonetheless, the rain and endless grey skies tend to get me down. Yesterday was a prime example of why I hate the rain.

So, as I've mentioned before, our plants and research centres are all located in the back arse of nowhere. The place where we were running the course is accessible by a dinky little mountain train. Even in the best of weather, you have to wait over an hour and a half between trains on this godforsaken line. But yesterday we got caught in a torrential downpour that flooded the tracks and left us stuck in a shed (you could not call it a station) for over three hours. We waited and waited and waited, with little else to do but watch the fork lightning and try to get some sleep. In the end, the promised train never even came and we were forced to get a ridiculously expensive taxi to the nearest major town.

In other work news, transfer intrigues continue apace and I still have no idea what's going to happen to me. I get told I'm being moved to a different job practically weekly at this stage, with the yucky international sales division still being the front runner. In the meantime, though, I have finally been getting some interesting work to do again. My colleagues will be recruiting in Ireland this month and I had to help out by translating a Japanese language personality test that we use regularly in domestic recruitment.

For any translation nerds out there, this topic could form the basis of a really interesting research project. I came upon lots of great questions: bearing in mind that a translation usually ends up longer than the original, should you change the format or grouping of the questions or is there a psychological reasoning behind the original layout?; what should you do about questions that make culturally specific references (e.g. asking an Irish person if their image of summer is someone watching fireworks in a yukata certainly won't be worth much)?; and how much can you depend on the results of any character evaluation if you don't have some way of localizing the statistical data on which it bases its evaluations? It really fascinated me and made me pine a bit for a time when I thought I might have a career as an academic.

Another great thing about the translation was that it allowed me to take some passive aggressive digs at my employers. After translating the questionnaire, I did a trial run with myself as the subject. The output was hilarious. The test told me that I was an extremely conscientious, detail-oriented, rule-bound worker, with solitary tendencies and a dislike for social interactions. All sounds about right to me. But get this, they then rank the jobs in the company you would be best suited to and the jobs you should not be placed in. Top of my list were things like quality assurance, legal affairs, management accounting and the like. And then the careers I should avoid??? Sales, sales promotion, marketing and advertising!!!!

But the best part of all was when I showed the results to my boss and I explained what the evaluation said of me. His response? "I think we need to find a new test!" That's right, rather than recognize that moving someone to an area to which they are completely unsuited is a disaster waiting to happen, he would like to find a personality test that validates making a circular peg fit into a square hole. If nothing else, this experience is really giving me lessons in the way large Japanese institutions think.　出るくいは打たれる ( deru kui wa utareru). Literally this cliched proverb means 'the nail that sticks up gets hammered down', but in other words you could say 'Don't make waves!'

Note to self: do not make flippant remarks about the Emperor's properties!

Walking home tonight the sky was ablaze with color - real red-sky-at-night stuff. So I thought to myself, "Either we're going to have a beautiful day tomorrow, or the Imperial Palace is going up in flames." *snarkily giggling to self*


Not one hour later this is the view outside my apartment:



That's right. My apartment building was on fire!!! Now I'm not saying that the Japanese thought police caught wind of my lese majeste and decided to dish out a bit of 'rehabilitation'... but let's just say I won't be thinking bad thoughts about the Emperor or anything Emperor-related for a while.

Really please don't worry; apart from a bit of smoke, some very loud sirens, and a little confusion as to whether to stay in the building or not, all is well here.

And just in case my family is reading this and freaking out, here have some nice flowers to calm you down. So since fresh green, I've been very slack in keeping you up to date with blossom watch. I didn't even bother with azalea season, so let's just skip straight to 'Here come the Hydrangeas!'




Once again, all flowers kindly provided by the Japanese roadside.