Entries this day: Class Ebisu_recycling Gaba_Day Jimmy dan

Class

11:57am JST Friday 14 May 2004

Class was good. I stayed after and wrote some sentences.

Ebisu recycling

1:58pm JST Friday 14 May 2004

I decided to walk to Ebisu from Shibuya. Had never done that before, but it's only one station on the Yamanote Line so I figured I wouldn't get lost.

I spent 45 minutes watching guys at a paper recycling place recycle paper. I was just enraptured by the imprecise sorting. Seriously, for my brain, that's just unheard of. Incomplete sorting? Pretty good sorting?

Coolest thing was watching the forklift driver. He was good. He could adjust the span of the forks, drive the forklift through any space, and he could *rotate* the forks to dump stuff into their recycling thing.

Strangest thing is they would dump a load of paper into the hole with a conveyor belt at the bottom, pull out the inappropriate paper and put it in appropriate bins. Okay, that's not strange, but *then*, as soon all the paper was past the magic slot, they dumped onto the conveyor the paper they had just pulled off the conveyor! They must have had some different bins behind the scenes that were being used to collect the different types of paper. It was amazing.

I'm tired. As I type this it's actually 1am on Saturday morning.

Gaba Day

5:45pm JST Friday 14 May 2004

Gaba Day was big fun. We went to a bar called Zest in Ebisu, where there's a mechanical bull and several Texas license plates and old signs and shit, just like janette uses to decorate restaurants.

"Tex Mex" buffet for 3 hours including all our Japanese-Mex favorites. Baked whole fish on rice, tiny buffalo wings, little drumsticks and smokeys, then pineapple and chocolate cake for dessert.

One thing that I realllly like was a layer cake that was like really thin layers of like crepe it seemed and then whipped cream or so holding them all togheter. REally nummy; I grabbed as much of that as I could find after my initial foray to the dessert tray.

Keddins was there; he and I had the same orientation and training for Gaba , and we chatted a lot. He's working on a presentation thing for an author or some such; I don't know all the details, but there will be a party on June 5th 8pm to 5am. I may got to half or more of that.

I told him about my rollercoaster book idea and got some positive vibes in return; I can do this thing.

Marvin DAngerfield (awesome name) the Gaba guy / radio DJ on InterFM "MCed" the event tonight, getting peoples attention and shit fto say we would have mechanical bull rides at 4pm. Those never happened; the bull was reported as broken around 3:55. Interesting that this detail wasn't known previiously. I wandered a bit and was surprised that I didn't immediately go whoah an Astros shirt when I saw a guy wearing an Astros shirt. I was like, "Mm. Astros." then "Hey man, *Astros!!!"

He said he was wearing it because he liked the colors. Fair enough.

Jimmy

12:55am JST Saturday 15 May 2004

After Gaba Day, met up with Jimmy to talk about my roller coaster book and I told him about Thunder Rabbit and read some of Thunder Rabbit's adventures and he was like, "we could write a book on that!"

So we will.

dan

11:45pm JST Friday 14 May 2004

Fun with Dan tonight. He invited me to play Hackey Sack Jack with him; I hadn't in a while (and I had inadvertantly neglected to mention him in my Rob Update,) so I was glad to have a chance to play. Dan is hilarious! We were doing all sorts of funny stuff, various types of hits and silliness. I don't even remember what all.

We tied our world record of 18 hits tonight, and when we played carefully, being sure to pass back and forth instead of hogging, plus playing literally closer together, we did a lot better than our average of 2 or 3 hits.

Around 10:15 we went to the conveni to grab a meal and sat in the park for a bit enjoying the warm air of Spring. A kid and her dad walked through the park, and she climbed on the James Bond rolling slider thing a bit and Dan was like, "I'd like to have a go at that."

"Yah, me too; tell that girl to get off of there; we want to play."