Where to begin? I moved to Tokyo from NYC about 5 months ago. I came here with nothing more than a few hundred dollars and a couple suitcases. I had shipped my clothes in 3 boxes by airmail only to receive 2 of them...by fedex after the post office screwed them up. The other box is prolly floating off the coast of Guam. I came here without a visa and no real job, I bartended in Roppongi for a while as an Illegal laborer...who'd a htunk I'd end up working like the Mexicans that were the butts of all my jokes in High School??? Since then I have gotten a visa and a job teaching english...making decent money doing it. I have gone through a lot of struggles...the language barrier, being broke, getting lost, watching miho go broke supporting me the past few months, etc. I have overcome all of it. I started work a few days ago. I love it. i have a great job...I get paid to speak english!!! It's a conversational school so all I really do is talk to my students. It's really easy!

I took my Japanese mid-term yesterday. I can't read hiragana yet that well. They had to give me a hiragana chart just so I could even read the directions on the test. I think i failed haha...ah well, I can speak alot of japanese though. I aced the speaking part of the test...I know cuz the teacher told me I got most of the credit I earned on the whole test on the speaking part...too bad it only counts for about 10 percent of the test!!!! Typical.

So now I am watching the Mariners game LIVE @ 11am!!! It is on a Japanese TV Network called BS. Other than the American news (ABC) and British news (BBC) and Al-Jazeera and the Yankees and Dodgers, and Mariners games it is pretty much just that...BS. The media here goes nuts every time Matsui even hits just a single. It's like he hit the game winning home run for the blue jays in the world series instead of Joe Carter. Oh, dont get me started on the Grand Slam he hit at Yankee Stadium on Opening Day...they still show that on tv every time he comes up to bat!!!!!!!!!! AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! I do miss NYC a little, but if I went back I would miss Tokyo alot more.

I just got home from school. I got only 54 out a possible 350 points on my test!!! OUCH!!!!! I got 32 of them on the speaking part. Like I said...I can speak a ton more than I can read or write. not good! My teacher wrote "See me after class" on the test....but hing about it was that she wrote it in Japanese...now obviously if I cant read enough to take the test then I sure as hell can't read enough to know what that said. So anyway I am walking out after class ends and she starts running down the hall after me yelling in japanese. I understood her clearly...haha. She then explained to m what she had written and I cracked a grin and said...look at my score, you should've written it in english. she shook her head and just walked away...she then said, in english mind you..."go home and we'll discuss it during a break on monday."

I read the most shocking thing today in the International Herald Tribune...any of you who have lived abroad know what it is...but...Basically Japanese Society is way more stratified than America is. Females have as many rights here now as females in Saudi Arabia. A Senior Aide to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was quoted as saying on television that most women who get raped deserve it and it is probably their fault. Then a Parliament member agreed with that other idiot saying that men who rape women are "Verile and Fertile Specimens." If that happened in America those guys would be killed. Here the women just agree...

The rainy season is going weeks over it's usual length. It is still raining everyday...except for yesterday...why you ask??? because yesterday was the first day I left my apartment with an umbrella in weeks. At about 2pm or so the sun came out and it got really hot. So here I am walking through Ginza Station to get on the train after work sweating it out, in a suit, holding an umbrella, and all my paperwork...the idea of having an umbrella is to keep you dry, last night it served as a night stick to keep everyone away from me on the subway, even at 930 at night it is so crowded u cannot walk anywhere on it..it might as well have rained...cuz today after I walked from the subway station to my apt I was as soaked from the rain as I was last night while holding an umbrella...oh...and a giant black crow swooped down at me and made me drop my newspaper in a puddle...that made me happy...so not only am I mad cuz i am soaked...but now I have a crow the size of a bald eagle going after me....good times. Tonite is Friday..I am staying home...that's how tired I am...I worked a lot of hours and it wore me out...

I read about the guy breaking into NYC Hall and blowing away the city councilman...I'm glad a cop then turned around and shot him, but it was prolly a bit much to close the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, seal off the subways for all the stations around city hall...of which there are quite a few, and to have police in riot gear running through downtown Manhattan just blocks from the crater that is all that is left of the WTC...I also am glad Saddam's sons got killed,　I wish I coulda dropped napalm on them...I raised a beer in the air to the demise of those two bastards last night haha...