Cautious pessimism. (original) (raw)

21 December 2016 @ 04:09 pm

Shower musings: starting out asking-a-favor or customer service interactions by asking "Are you the right person to help me with X?" is smart...

If they aren't, they at least get the sense right away that you aren't going to be miffed or defensive when they point you to someone else. It saves them from feeling like they're delivering bad news. Which makes them more likely to want to help you find the right person.

If they are the right person, they start their interaction with you by being positive and affirmative that they can help you. Like saying "I can do this!" to yourself in the mirror. And then confirmation bias hits, where because they already said they could help you, they are more likely to do the extra bits to really make sure you get what you need, because no one wants to have lied about themselves.

Current Mood: pensive

Current Music: heart: all i wanna do (is make love to you)

24 November 2016 @ 09:27 pm

Unpacked alllll the books. Two massive bookcases full :) Going through all of the books has me like "Cancel my next three years. I'm going to start at one end of this shelf and read my way to the other side" but give me a few weeks and I'll be back to ordering more books, like I have none waiting on me ^_^

On the "books that meant a lot to me at one time or another" shelf, I found Prozac Nation, and I can't believe I haven't snatched all the snippets for e-foreverness yet. I discovered this book during a time that I now realize should have been a medicated time, had my parents "believed" in mental illness. Very grateful to be past it, now, but it's a miracle none of my attempts to hurt myself were permanently successful...endocrinological side-effects excluded. Either way, it was nice at the time to find literature that understood me, when very few people around me could manage to do so, so I dogeared a lot of pages...

"And their discontent, their stuck-ness was played out on their children. Sharing kids with a person you have come to despise must be a bit like getting caught in a messy car wreck and then being forced to spend the rest of your life paying visits to the paraplegic in the other vehicle. You are never allowed to forget your mistake."

"...you most certainly would have described me as, well, as full of promise. That term is loaded with irony to me now because I know how false that appearance of promise is. I know how much latent discontent and sorrow that visible determination can mask..."

"In retrospect, maybe my mother did the right thing...After all, by forcing me to participate in real life, she might have prevented me from indulging and wallowing in a depression that might have been even more bottomless and intractable than the one I was experiencing."

"The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions--showing up at work, paying the bills--you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us--better known these days as denial, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out a window, you don't have a problem."

"Even in my lowest moments of lolling about my bedroom, I knew that in the end I'd return to school, take finals, get good grades, and get through second semester. At heart, I have always been a coper. I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown."

"I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut. I remembered learning about the Doppler effect in high school science, about the paradoxical reaction between sound and space which causes a source of noise to get louder the farther away it moves from you."

"Sometimes I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me."

"What do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. The pain is so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be."

"We are such irritating people, can see the dark side of everything, and our perpetual malcontendedness kind of ruins it for everybody. It's like watching a movie that you think is great, spiritually uplifting, a lot of fun in spite of its faults, and you're with someone who is in film school or is a professional movie critic, who tends to analyze every moment of the picture until the pure joy that you feel just because you do--no need to explain it--is expunged by all his nitpicking and hairsplitting. And this curmudgeon ends up ruining your night, choking your buzz, killing your joy. Well, that's what it's like to be with someone who's depressed. Only it's not just one movie or just one night. It's all the time."

Current Mood: listless

Current Music: Magnetic Fields -- All My Little Words

21 January 2016 @ 09:23 pm

Combining the last two days :D

Day 5

After stopping in the same park for another egg and coffee breakfast, we went back to Harajuku and got yukatas (summer kimonos). Souvenir must-buy!

Then we went to Sugamo (the old people district...it is literally known as "Harajuku of the old ladies"), and this was totally my speed :) In the train station we found a ton of delicious foods -- salad with chunks of roast, egg, and mushroom and huge tempura shrimp. We stopped for a really fancy coffee, a piece of salt cheese bread and the most gorgeous musk melon cream bun (whaaaat!).

As we wandered through old people land, we stopped for more tasties...we got a super yummy tiny peanut shaped wafer thing with red bean paste inside. I guess those are like butterscotch hard candies, there ;) Then we got deeper and we figured out the "Harajuku" reference...there were entire storefronts dedicated to red grannie panties. Sadly, we saw a guy who had olded as long as he could old, collapsed in the street. This was tragic, but then, absurdly, there was a very virile, very hirsute, very tall young man in a scandalously short silk kimono with no pants speaking to the police and gesturing wildly. We just stayed out of the way. There was also the saddest grandchildren toy store ever. No real displays, just stacks of nondescript boxes...just "whatever, this is fine. it doesn't matter".

Either the Sugamo reminders of our mortality or the sugary decadence of the melon puff knocked us out pretty hard, so we came back to the hotel room to escape the heat and nap and bath.

After a recharge, we went to Tokyo Station and explored this underground mall thing. Even inside the station gates, there are so many stores, and then, boom, even more beyond them!

Cute? Creepy?

Awesome design!

A blurry upskirt photo warning -- look, ladies, if he's got a flip-phone, you should be avoiding him anyway.

I'd only ever seen the chicken one -- the piglet is so sad and so adorable!

I fell prey to some fruit jelly-coated marshmallows from Marshmallow Elegance.

Drew had to resist the most adorable tiny character cupcakes. He was tempted to body check some small children and steal them. This is what sugar does to you, people! We had a tiny donut sample from this amazing place -- they named their flavors things like "snob lemon" and "sophisticate berry". We looked for flavored kitkats, but had no luck. To keep the vicious carb cycle alive, I ate a breaded pork cutlet sandwich on soft pillowy white bread. A lady also offered us some vinegar sangria, which was surprisingly tasty. We were lifting the cups to our faces as she was describing it, in halting english, and as the vinegar scent hit my nose, she was just then saying the word "vinegar" and part of my brain freaked out but the other part was like "shh, it's Tokyo, it's going to be tasty." and it was!

Thankfully for my pancreas, we found a keto friendly restaurant for dinner... that served only beef tongue. Like they stopped us at the door to say "oh, sorry tourists, this restaurant serves only beef tongue. ONLY beef tongue." but we persisted. They were super wary that we had no idea what we were doing :) It was delicious!!

Then we went to Akihabara (Electric Town).

Tamagotchi lives!!

First we stopped in the Pop Life M's sex store...It was a ton of tiny floors crammed with people pointing and giggling and every (I mean every) variety of Japanese sex toy you could ever want. So many sleeves. SO MANY. Including the tiny human torso sleeves. Drew was a bit unnerved by the cutaway cross sections of each sleeve, but hey -- comparison shopping is important :)

Then we went to Yodobashi Camera, another massive many-floored warehouse of electronics and housewares like pianos and washing machines and the coolest fridges ever.

On the top floor we had dinner #2 -- Pepper Lunch! We had tried to go to a different Pepper Lunch location that the Internet said was worthwhile, because you got to order from robots, but that one had been recently closed. Probably some tourist died from a rogue robot attack, or something. They likely reopened right after we left :P This Pepper Lunch diner was not as cool -- we had to talk to a PERSON to order, but Drew declared his hamburger steak (with an egg) the best hamburger steak he'd ever had. I got sirloin. You sit at the table in your plastic bib and they bring out your meal with noodles and veggies. The meat cooks on a sizzler slab...not like a warmer, like a spattering oiled block of cast iron. They brought garlic and buttery spread on the steak. Mmm. No pics of the food, it got de-vour-erd.

We headed back early, to leave time to pre-pack...Good thing we did a trial run, because turns out, we needed another bag :D

Day 6

We took the train to Asakusa and had some Mr. Donut for breakfast... the golden chocolate something-something cake donut was amazing. Then we walked over to a gorgeous buddhist shrine...

On our way out, we got ambushed by Japanese firemen. They were like "You there, come here, take this", and like dumb tourists, we complied... so they sent us through a free fire safety course. With the other 6 year old Japanese children. We went through a smoke tent and we "operated" a fire extinguisher full of water (we sprayed water at a flame until some bored-looking guy turned off the flame source and all the parents cheered). At the end, we got a bag of goodies. They were so proud of us.

Also along this street, we encountered a man walking a full-size pig through the crowd, on his leash. I was too stunned to take a picture.

*squint* what?

We made our way to the Rabbit Cafe...er, Rabbit Museum?

It was super expensive. You picked a room and picked a rabbit, and they have an option to exchange the rabbit halfway through for a different rabbit. Drew had gone to a different cafe earlier where you couldn't pick up the rabbits, but he says that there, the rabbits LOVED being petted and eating veggies from your hand. We were allowed to pick up our rabbits but they were constantly on the move. They didn't seem super freaked out, they just didn't want to sit still long enough to be picked up or touched at all. So mainly we just sat and let them run around us. Then the lady helped us get other rabbits. The new rabbits were also circling and ignoring us...we even bought an extra bowl of leaves for them and they didn't care at all. Not really worth the money, in the end.

My rabbit was slightly less spastic than Drew's...but it wanted nothing to do with either of our parsley leaves...

I guess we're gonna have to eat all this...

One finally took pity and had a nibble!!!

The Cat Cafe was also just fine -- it smelled very slightly of ammonia but it was a super tiny place with lots of cats and books, what do you expect? The cats weren't super curious about new people, they just chilled. It wasn't anything like the ones we saw on cute overload, but it was a cafe first, then they just added the cats...it was not a cafe ABOUT cats. We got a cheap and tasty egg, cheese, and tomato crepe and some iced tea. We petted some sleepy kitties, then we called it done. I think we made a mistake by starting with the owl cafe -- it was so good that the other cafe encounters were just meh :)

Toes are delicious!

Then we went to the base of the Tokyo Tower and wandered around the stores. There were not many other Americans there which was kinda neat.

We got some Tokyo Tower banana giraffe print caramel cake things...like a banana caramel soft Twinkie :) We also ate some matcha fro yo, bought a duffel bag for packing, then went back to Shibuya to eat more noms at the food show. We had tasty buns and dumplings, bought some cheese and ham chips, then we played at the arcade (more Taiko Drum Master, more purikura pictures).

Drew was playing some DJ hero-like game with tons of knobs and buttons. He got to L2 and I was like "man, that's pretty impressive" and then a guy walks up to the next console, loads his profile off his cell phone (like you do), and is at L15.

We also saw someone mastering Taiko Drum Master and it was crazy...tons of people were videoing him. We tried to get barbacoa but they were closed :( Instead we got shabu at Little Lamb...hard to tell if that's like Little Sheep or different?? :)

Tasty scallops and shrimps -- I can't get shrimps like that here! How do they get them straight? :P

Heading out...
We got up super early but it turns out we needed that much time :) Getting to the airport was hard for us -- we dragged our suitcases all over the place, then failed to buy the extra ticket we needed for the second leg, so we had to wait on the next one...in the end, we were cutting it a bit close. We were checking our bags 62 minutes from departure and the cutoff was one hour from departure. Drew's middle initial was an issue, me having a diabetic meal on one leg and a gluten free on another leg was an issue...yeargh! We went through immigration, which was strange to do on your way OUT of a country, then through security. We did manage to get to the gate just before boarding.

We had a 3 hour layover in Beijing but we had customs, security, and immigration to get through. They were not happy with our external batteries...They stopped us and were like "You have 3 batteries in there, you have to show us what it is. What is it?" and we were like "Probably 3 batteries..." The beijing airport was awful. Nowhere to buy drinks or any convenience items. There was a sit-down Pizza Hut and that was about it. Tons of duty free liquor stores, tons of empty storefronts...a guy snoring loudly draped across 3 seats. We couldn't sit together on the plane, and there was no wi-fi...I watched a jillion movies on the way home, but Drew's screen was broken. In California we did the immigration and security dance, then we ...somehow bypassed customs. The guy was like "Ohhh this says you're going to NC, just carry on this way" but I think he thought we were directly flying to NC. Oops :)

Stopping in SFO for a biological clock reset was a really good idea! Not standing even once on the flight from Beijing to SFO was NOT a good idea...I'ma need to invest in some old lady compression socks for this upcoming Australia trip, at least if I plan on eating carbs while I'm there, so that my ankles don't swell to the size of basketballs. Urgh.

The end! Merch post TBD :D

Current Mood: accomplished

Current Music: Ratatat - Loud Pipes

10 January 2016 @ 07:35 pm

Day 4

We started out with some breakfast -- more boiled eggs and canned coffee!

This was my favorite brand of canned coffee! Only availabe at 7-11 :D

We found a little park to sit in to record our thoughts on the previous day. There were cute children playing and it was adorable. Tiny preschool children were doing synchronized jumping jacks in the front window of a daycare across the street. Tiny dogs were getting walked. A sea of tiny children wearing yellow hats walked by. SO MANY TINY THINGS.

We stopped at Shiyodome for a bit of shopping...

The Rabbit wth the Pearl Earring is my favorite...

More cute coin purses than in the entirety of the USA.

Creepy benches are creepy...

Then we headed to Odaiba for the Miraikan science museum. The train ride there was full of pretties!

The museum was so good! Every thing there was better than any thing that has ever existed in any American musuem.

There were signs practically apologizing for "This info is only current as of march 2015, oops" and everything was crazy interactive! Standing in certain places or touching things made the exhibits play or change...it was full of fantastic UI with adorable characters.

This looks kind of bland right now...but note the happy hot plume and the adorable fish :)

And the happy little trees...and the happy mesa, and the happy cloud...and the startled sun!

You are here...

But really the whole thing lit up and animated and had layers of interactivity...super neat!

A brain map!

There was a hut that showed stem cell research and it was like "Yes, children, you could get hit by a car and then you will need spinal repair. It could happen today. Or tomorrow." The doctor was so creepy, animated to slide up and down in slow-mo. "BRB while you think about that *cardboard cutout doctor sinks underneath bed*"

Apparently school children wear matching hats to keep in their groups, here. It was adorable!

There was a huge geosphere thing as part of the ceiling, made of LED screens, and it was based on the last 90 days of actual weather pattern data. The docents were apologizing like "Sorry, it doesn't display night mode...there would obviously be dark half of the time realistically, but we wanted the weather patterns to stay visible" and we were like "I guess that's ok...". They were so worried that we were disappointed. Obviously they have never been to a musuem in the US.

They had the original Paro (the robotic seal companion) on display. I got to touch it!

There was also a corner with 4 areas: "Inside yourself", "You and others", "Family units" and "Society"...The exhibit covered so much. The pictures don't do the videos justice.

The exhibit talked about how memory was plastic and emotions are culturally defined, and about empathy and mirroring that babies use to learn -- this was written for early elementary school kids to understand! The health corner was about epigenetics and mutations (expressed in a cool discordant musical note interactive exhibit) and you could pretend to do lacroscopic surgery and on a robotic model.

I didn't learn these things until college, and here they were in the kids musuem in Tokyo. Elementary kids in Japan are like "Well, of course, DNA expression is a complex process that is naturally going to result in some plastic phenotypes...why wouldn't it?".

They had all sorts of AI exhibits...

Telenoid -- stuff of nightmares!

Asimo!

And there was also a "future town" interactive exhibit where you could sign up and be assigned a role and build a part of the city and choose technology for it to use and things...

We accidentally ended up on a floor of conference rooms and, out of nowhere, we see two guys ride by on unicubs. I was pretty convinced that we were just lost, but then later we found the unicub tour station! Of course we had to do that... The tour attendants were either impressed that we could steer them or they were flabbergasted that we could follow directions as Americans, at all, or they were pretending to be impressed with us like Japanese sometimes do, because it's polite.

In true form, the gift shop was amazing.

Then we headed off to find the giant sky wheel. We found Elvis along the way...

The sky wheel was amazing! Such pretty views!

We got excited about a Segway Lite kiosk, but the weight limit was like 100 lb per adult, so...instead, we ended up in an arcade.

It was way more spacious than the other ones we'd seen, with even MORE variety. It had some sad carnival games, gambling, mechanical animals to ride, terrible maze interaction quest things, video games galore, vending machine collections, bowling, billiards. more purikura picture booths, and a snack cafe. Each time we did the purikura pictures, we got a little bit better at the UI (like we learned how to undo!) but we got worse at posing -- classic overthinking!

When I say sad carnival games, I mean sad carnival games...

At the snack cafe, we got a teryaki chicken and egg crepe...Teryaki in Japan is not the super sticky, sweet, overpowering flavor it is, here. It's subtle, and delicious!

We also got popcorn out of an arcade game -- the game mechanic was to turn a crank and it showed popcorn popping on a simulator. Then we had to pick a flavor packet and couldn't read the labels...we ended up with some vaguely cheesy orange powder. The popcorn was even better because we helped make it. If we hadn't turned the crank, I'm sure we would have gotten a bucket with just kernels and no popcorn, because this is Japan. No pity prizes here.

Then we got an apple ice cream crepe for dessert. We may have gone kind of overboard with the crepes...but they were so good!

The other food options in the arcade -- like Doritos & Mountain Dew in the US :D

The fattest plush hamster ever!

Toebeans!

Llamas :D

We got excited that we may have found some room escape type quest things, but it was more like a mirror maze...

This way to more sparkles!!

No idea what we were supposed to do here, but we just pushed a couple random buttons and stood around a bit...then some triumphant music played and we "got out"...

Vending machines for days!

Drew auditioning for the Robot Cabaret...

Until he ran out of juice...

A fishing game where the controllers were reel handles...

One of the video games was a collection of some ridiculous number of mini games. As we walked by, I saw a feather-waving game with adorable pawing kittens, but we stood there watching that interface cycle through 15 second promos of mini-games for like 20 minutes and it didn't ever come back around. We never saw the same mini-game twice, the whole time.

We tried to get in on what we thought was some racecar or gocart action but it turned out to be more like a driving class thing for elementary school kids. It was advertised like "Hey kids, it's fun to follow rules!" like a driving simulation. Plus they were closing down for the night...

Then we made our way to the owl cafe!!! This sign in the transit station made me happy -- it's so clear, what the reaction to someone falling on the tracks should be!!

Owl menu...

We got the final hour of the day all to ourselves. At first, we felt like they were like "Jeeez, we were gonna get to go home early but now these American bitches showed up..." but we can't be sure that's what they were thinking. They were relentlessly polite and reserved, so who knows? But we warmed them up to us.

TINY!

TINY AND ANGRY!

We got a lot of good pictures, but we also got a lot of pictures like this...hah!

It was feeding time for the little owls, and the big owls (and I) were pretty fascinated...

My, what big eyes you have...

I love Drew's "I'M ABOUT TO ASPLODE FROM CUTE" face :D

And I love his "THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING" face :D

My turn!

OMG four owls...

And the kicker --- literally. Owl #5!!

It's hard to get all the owls to look at the camera at once...

This may be my favorite picture!

Takeaway: Making eye contact with an owl inches from your face is intense. Especially the big ones, but the little ones too...our bodies definitely identify them as predators, on a visceral level!

.

dat wingspan tho...

Testing my forearm strength with the biggest owl...

He couldn't quite get situated, which meant that there was a lot of this going on...

I'm a bit rumpled after that...

This is Lucky -- the softest owl there, and he loved Drew so much!

"You don't mind if I inch a little closer, do you?"

I wish I'd gotten a picture of him nibbling on Drew's ear...

Then he made himself at home at a higher perch...

Totally comfy up there!

Then we went to dinner at Moss Burger. I got a chili and onion burger and it was surprisingly good! We wandered around a little bit more but my feet were all sorts of worn out. We stopped for roll cake and a coffee at a cafe outside the Akibara station. The cake was so soft...not crumbly soft, just pillowy. Damn you, Japan, and your physics-defying baked goods.

After another bath and putting my feet up for a while, I fell out, hard. We slept so hard that we didn't even notice the 5 am 5.5 magnitude earthquake :) Just Tokyo things!

Current Mood: silly

Current Music: Missy Higgins -- If I'm Honest

05 January 2016 @ 12:51 am

Day 3

We had walked so much that Drew's shoes exploded, so we went back to Tokyu Hands and got Drew some fancy shoes. It was a different Tokyu Hands so of course we had to revisit every floor. Drew appreciated the full service shoe shopping! And there were even more cute things! And a weird face-mask simulator...

I wanted the tiny one but figured it'd be hard to get into my luggage :)

Looking for lunch,,we were tempted by this place with adorable pig banners, but we ended up getting Mexican, instead. They made their own tortillas, so that was impressive, but the rice was so strange for a mexican dish! :) It was fluffy and tacky...the right color, but not the right texture for Mexican! Still tasty, though.

Then we went to Harajuku -- we walked the famous crazy street full of ridiculous teenagers and we debated buying things but Drew was cautioning me that more cutes were coming, at the end of the line. Turns out he was not kidding...but I did find a Sanrio store and go a little crazy with the Gudetama merch.

Tokyo Cold Stone is so much fancier than anything we've got...

It took a lot not to buy the flying cat/t-rex shirt...

Harajuku panda pants.

This was not even the Sanrio store or Kiddy Land, just...random Gudetama :)

Then we went to a character cafe to get a rice omelet character bear thing. The face was a transfer which seems like cheating, but it had a cream-sauce blanket and it was adorable. And tasty.

We kept seeing stores with adorable orbular characters on the wall, and we would get excited but they were just hipster clothing stores.

Then we got a Santa Monica crepe! Drew picked creme brulee banana with chocolate sauce and ice cream. There were only a few jillion combinations to pick from :)

About 1/6 of the selection wall...

So much smaller than a typical American dessert!

It was interesting to see tourists from other parts of Japan, there. There was a gaggle of teen bros with their rollerbags, taking selfies with their selfie sticks, planning their poses and pulling selfie faces like American girls. Drew photobombed them and blew their minds. They snapped the picture, pulled the selfie stick back in close, peered at the picture, and then whipped around to be like WHAAAT. Then they cracked up and and made him take more pics with them. They're gonna have amazing stories for their friends about the old mustachioed American dude they found in Harajuku.

Then we got coffee at a Starbucks. There was an American there who made us sad to be Americans. He had to get a friend to help him order...inexplicably. You just point at a picture and say the size, but somehow he was still struggling and being a whiny douche about it. We found an amazing store with sequined platform boots in the window and bought a tiny bear faced macaroon to split. We also found the Line Friends store! Kids these days...

We tried to go to Oriental Bazaar but it was closed on Thursdays, turns out, so we carried on. We finally arrived at the cute mecca Drew had promised me: Kiddy Land. Drew practically bought me the entire store. I have Gudetama themed EVERYTHING now. We checked out on three separate floors. We were seriously like "Screw clothes, we can buy clothes in SFO. Need more luggage space for souveniers!" I also learned that Sumikko Gurashi characters are freakin' adorable...the green penguin is my favorite. (From Wikipedia: Sumikkogurashi - a group of animals with personality issues that like corners). I was so overwhelmed I didn't even take any pictures. They wouldn't have done it justice, anyway. I did snap some pics of the bathroom :D The toilet options were even fancier than the one at the hotel, but mainly it was just the paint job...

After Kiddy Land we had a lot of STUFF, so Drew ran stuff back to the room. We went to back to Shinjuku again for the Robot Cabaret but...it was not really like burlesque. It was like "Variety Show" cabaret.

We did not understand how to get food or drink, so we just didn't. The bathrooms and hallways were amazing levels of tacky, like...floor to ceiling, including the floor and the ceiling. The lounge had nautilus chairs made of gold, and the whole wall was a screen, and there were LEDs and mirrors and gemstones everywhere, and there were sexy ladies belting out some song, with a robot-dressed guy wailing on a guitar.

Tackiest room ever...Vegas has nothing on this!

Now that's a ceiling fan...

Then they announced the show was starting, so we all filed down 3 flights of glowing disco-floor stairs. There were rhinestone encrusted sea creatures and skulls and lots of cleavage...it was even trippier than the lounge.

We get into this narrow hall that's kind of stark, with a warehouse feel. The walls were screens full of trippy kaleidoscope videos...

The show got underway with some musical acts and some dancing Chinese dragon action...nothing too crazy, right?...

Then there was a musical interlude with some weird things happening on the LED walls...

Then it got tribal...

Something something something, jungle creatures...

Pandas ride cows in the jungle all the time. Duh.

Then the ladies came back, riding crazy creatures... They were like "Watch your heads" and people literally had to duck to avoid being hit with a big mechanical snake or a robot arm. Animals vs robots... It was like live-action Power Rangers. There were lots of pyrotechnics and fireworks and the club dance beat never let up.

At some point, a gorilla ziplined across.

The rare forest shark.

Then there were clowns. Naturally!

From there, we had no idea when the show was going to actually end. Singing and dancing happened. They gave us light sticks to wave around and more craziness went down...another huge snake came out, there was a robot dance party, then some guys in EI wire danced. We sang and yelled and even bigger robots came out to dance.

We eventually were dismissed and stumbled back out into the street. We stopped in for what we thought was shabu and teppanyaki...and it was tasty beef, don't get me wrong, but there's no way to specify no rice or no noodles. They kept filling up my shabu pot with things I didn't want, so they just boiled to death.

Cool placemats...

Then we made our way back to the hotel!

Current Mood: creative

Current Music: Fluorescent Adolescent -- Arctic Monkeys

04 January 2016 @ 08:17 pm

Day 2 was Room Escapes! We escaped all 3...Spoilers ahead!

• Room 1, escaped in :55, wasn't sure we were gonna make it :) It was samurai themed, based at the end of the Edo period. As a gate that would open one of two final puzzles, we had to make a choice -- power or strength. We chose power, which then revealed that we helped the assassin kill the shogun. We were like "Oh no, we chose the evil route!" but apparently that was an OK thing because it ended the Edo period and ushered in a new era, etc...I think this was our favorite room, overall.

We had tea after each room with these umaibo puffed snack tube things. Nice touch :D

• We escaped Room 2 in about :35. It was zen themed and the first room was gorgeous. Sadly, they had a lot of do-not-touch symbol stickers, so maybe the room was TOO pretty with too many fragile things :) There was a riddle puzzle about the number of times a bamboo bucket filled up in a day, and there was a real bamboo fountain in the first room that we thought would be part of that, but the puzzle turned out to be clued by audio, while we were in another room away from view of the fountain. Not sure if that means the fountain was broken by asshole customers or if it was just there to stir your imagination if you were like "wtf is this audio?" later in the game. When we went into the second room we opened up, the game masters popped their heads in the room and said "You can't come back in here through this door" and we were like "bwa? what does that even mean?" so...maybe that could have been cued better? How would one enforce a one-way gate in a room escape without majorly freaking people out? The second room was a tea room and we had to dissolve some tea in a cup to read something at the bottom, which was fun. We made our way into a third room that was solid white...we had to solve the "water clock" bamboo riddle to get BACK to the first room (at which point the one-way gate made sense) and solve a final puzzle with some things we'd collected from the other rooms. There were these really nice locks with 4 digits that you had to push a button on the bottom of the lock to release, which were really sturdy and super satisfying to solve :) Cuts down on guessing and doesn't explode in your hand if you accidentally get the right numbers in it -- I'm a fan :D

• Room 3 took us almost the whole hour, again. It was a bride room about a 100 year old wedding mystery... the premise was a bit shaky. Maybe the story makes more sense in Japanese culture, where it might be a mystery why a bride would disappear on her wedding day, where in the USA we'd be like "that bitch didn't wanna get married. the end." ...turns out (spoiler!) she wanted to have a career instead. Clutch dem pearls. It didn't really make sense for their to be modern shoeboxes, blacklight, and weird painted handprints all over a mirror in this story, but whatever. We went with it. There was a cool puzzle where lamps came on behind cutout shapes that were super tiny against the bulb, but were magnified when they hit the floor.

After room escapes, we went through the restaurant supply district and saw lots of cute things. How did we know when we found the restaurant supply district? I'm glad you asked...

I may have purchased a good number of kitchen implements... and some fake food. Fake food is a huge thing in Tokyo! All upstanding restaurants have visual representations of their menu items laying around.

I love the girls posing with shrimp and pizza slices...

We also found a milk vending machine and, like you do when you find a new vending machine in Tokyo, we had some :) It was delicious!

One of the unexpected perks of being in Tokyo when it was super rainy was that we got to see a number of cool "umbrella etiquette" posters...

Don't be that guy!!

You wouldn't punch a businessman. You wouldn't assault a head-wound victim. SO WHY DO YOU BEAT PEOPLE'S SHINS WITH YOUR UMBRELLA?!

We also saw a fun "do not feed the pigeons" sign...

If you let pigeons eat in the wild, like they are meant to do, they will poop on flowers, not on people's faces. Simple enough.

From there, we stopped at a Freshness burger to sit for a bit with a cheeseburger and an avocado burger...most of the burgers we had were like "cheese food" or "milk beverage" level...didn't seem like it was roughly-ground beef shaped into a patty and grilled, but it was still tasty. Just had a kind of mild taste and smooth texture...like a big swedish meatball, squished. Then we went walking to find crafty markets and while we didn't find the market we had read about, we did find touristy goods.

A sea of grumpy looking animatronic dancing bipedal cats. Like you do.

Pickle-on-a-stick bait, gets the tourists every time!

We bought a fish-shaped cake cream-filled hot gooey donut thing and Drew accidentally the entire thing. Cue feeling sick and gross for a bit...

We also bought an umbrella that turned out to be a parasol. Oops. We didn't realize this fact until later, when water was coming through it onto my face. It was fine in drizzle, not so good in downpour. It's very unnerving to be walking under an umbrella and to still have water streaming down your face. I was walking behind Drew swearing up a storm, and at first he thought I must just be really bad at holding an umbrella, but then, nope...

We wandered back to the station, passing an amazing Karl Lagerfeld display. Of course Japan's version of Karl is super young and cheerful looking. Plus Choupette. Love.

We headed to Shibuya to try Tokyu Hands again (it was closed the night before), but it started raining super hard, so we dashed into the arcade (again) to dodge the worst of it, but I was already soaked through. Thanks for nothing, parasol. We did catch Tokyu Hands open and we were determined to look at every item in the whole place. SO MANY THINGS. My feet were totally soaked so I ditched my socks and hobbled about in my wet sneakers. Didn't even matter. There were so many cute things. There are no words. We were there for hours. We bought a jazillion things...more on that coming later :)

So many cool crafty supplies!

Sexy root veggie poses!

Adorable, or creepy? Adorable!

I like the skeleton eating kebabs and sake...and the one with the IV and crutch.

Even the cutting boards are cute!

We had some tasty chicken heart, chicken skin, pork, and salmon and avocado kebab snacks and hot sake, like our skeleton action figure friend, then we called it a night.

On our way back through our home station, we found a more modern vending machine...whoa...

Before bed, Drew went for a run to burn some fish-cake glucose and I took a bath in the tiny tub to sooth my sore feets. Most adorable tub ever...wasn't even mad about having to hug my knees to fit in it.

Current Mood: giggly

Current Music: It's Not You, It's Me -- Coconut Records

29 December 2015 @ 09:19 pm

I got to Tokyo and was immediately assaulted by massive amounts of cute. INSIDE the airport.

There were also amazing arrays of vending machines...as promised.

Drew met me at the airport and helped me navigate to the hotel. The hotel room was amazingly tiny -- especially the bathtub -- and had the requisite crazy toilet options. We got some boiled eggs (a staple for us on this trip!) from the drugstore across the street -- Japanese boiled eggs are not the dry crumbly yellow yolk we're used to. It's this delicious medium boil...

I basically crashed immediately, but we started early the next day!

Day 1:

First up was the Roppongi Hills Don Quijote store -- it was a 6 floor department store crammed with every item you could ever imagine! We bought some cute things and got a clear umbrella because...well, Japan.

Tiny whipped cream tube! In the background: an array of cheeses

Individually wrapped cheeses, to be enjoyed like candy :)

Banana snuggles

Sexy Mr Potato Head

So many tubular squeesh pillows!!

These sponges are serious about cutting through grime!!

Hooded towel type costumes -- Tokyo is all about some Halloween, but only pretty recently, apparently.

Even the cheap masks are way higher quality than ones available here :P

Also pictured: Japan train stations have amazing coffee vending machines, and the signs in the train stations and on the streets made me giggle...cute characters go along with even the most serious warnings...

We went to Eggscellent Cafe for breakfast. Yelp had warned us that the egg theming was a bit over the top, which I suppose was a fair assessment, because there was very little there that was NOT egg themed. Not even like cute Japan character egg. Just plain egg.

My macadamia omelet was amazing, with tasty tomatoes and avocado. The creamy latte was delicious and they served us a grapefruit juice, squeezed inside itself :) nom nom nom.

Drew got a Cobb skillet...

The latte had adorable art on the bottom of the cup! It's so simple, you just need to love Egg. Story of my life.

Then we wandered Roppongi Hills Mall -- saw more department stores, a cute stationery store, and more drugstores.

Mall art: giant spider thing...sure!

You could get cold beef tongue, just as a regular drugstore snack :)

Odd flavor...

Not enough time to eat cereal AND coffee? throw some caramel corn in that latte! It's the best of both worlds!

Party ice -- is it a cup, bag, or pail kind of night??

After a mid-day siesta, we headed to Shibuya.

Our first stop was Food Show, which is one half grocery store and one half food vendor stalls. We ate all sorts of beautiful tasties, like dumplings and tempura cheesey potato cakes and wafery-creamy candies.

Dat wagyu though...just hanging out in the grocery store like any other meat!

Secret cheese is the best cheese of the whole assorted cheese bag!

One corner of the dozens of blocks of food vendors

Adorable cakes!

In Shibuya, we wandered about some in the rain...

Wow, 1000% wedding is a lot of percentage of wedding...

The rumors are true :)

Giant adorable sign...

We found an arcade!

Drew bought me a peanut chicken figurine, because he loves me.

Gudetama!!

Everything is cuter in Japan, including Disney characters

Taiko Drum Master was an immediate favorite!

I really liked the Dance Evolution game where we J-popped along to some fabulous ladies dancing in the street with a squid.

There were more weird pod video games, simulated horse racing gambling games as part of the full-out casino area, and purikura photo booths (no males allowed without females)!

For dinner we headed to Uobei (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB05CKPHfBU) for delicious conveyor-belt delivered sushi. You punch your order into a tablet, three items at a time. A little tray zooms over to you on the belt, and then you push a button to send your tray back once you take your items off. We ate a ton of noms and made a pile out of the leftover rice. We sat right near the kitchen so we saw everything coming out! Drew had some weird items like flounder fin and cuttlefish. I had steamed oysters with a cheesy mayo sauce and hamburger nigiri -- the tiniest, cutest hamburger ever. We tried natto and sea anemone...I'm not a huge fan of either, turns out :) The tempura was AMAZING and it was so crispy and light. Lots of tuna, salmon, shrimp later, we got frozen grapes to go with our hot sake. Then we got a donut with ice cream and whipped cream and fruit.

Somebody stole my damn $4 umbrella. I'm sure it was a mistake, but I did find it funny that I had something taken from me in a country where people leave their cell phones behind to save their seats while they go to the bathroom.

Also pictured: every time we went to the station near our hotel, we had a good laugh at this yogurt ad.

Days 2-6 coming soon!

Current Mood: nostalgic

Current Music: Martin Solveig ft Dragonette & Idoling - Big in Japan

"She said I was easy to love. People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving. It's like scoring the clay to make another piece of clay stick to it."

"She never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling. Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into a friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees."

"I don't believe in psychology, which says everything you do is because of yourself. That is so untrue. We are social animals and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don't."

"She's over the top. That's all I can say about her. If the top is here, where I am, she's over it, hovering above me, naked."

"We come from long lines of people never destined to meet."

"
Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."

Current Mood: touched

Current Music: Tori Kelly - Should've Been Us

Holy crap, this book is awesome!

I forced Drew to let me read like, half the book aloud to him. But here are my favorites :D

"Vesalius and others had accepted the Galenic belief that blood must pass directly through pores in the muscle wall that separates these chambers, although nobody had observed these pores. ...Aristotle had held that the blood in the left chamber is cold and that in the right is warm. Colombo was able to correct this. Blood entering the left chamber of the heart is warmer because, as we now know, it has been replenished with oxygen whose reaction with haemoglobin releases heat." ...I was like "Yea, yea, old understandings of circulation like pores in the heart walls or thinking of the heart as an engine that combusts blood like fuel...wait, what? OXYGENATED BLOOD IS WARMER!? that is so cool!" heh

"Although women do not have that extra rib -- thereby making Spare Rib a suitably ironic title for the well-known feminist magazine -- one in 200 of us does in fact have an extra rib, an evolutionary reminder that we are descended from creatures with many more sets of ribs (such as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which would have had hundreds of them)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cervical_rib whaaat.

"...bone is somewhat stronger in compression than it is in tension. A bone can typically resist a load of a tonne and a half per square centimetre before it breaks. The bones of a child's arm are easily strong enough to support the weight of a family car, for example. Its tensile strength is comparable with that of metals such as copper and cast iron. Only in torsion is bone relatively weak, which explains why most fractures are the consequence of severe twisting forces."

"We conceitedly believe we are taller than our ancestors because we eat so well. In fact, evidence from skeletons of Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens shows that they were taller than we are, owing to the strensuous work necessary to survive. From the size of the rough areas on the bones where muscle attaches, it is known that they were proportionately fitter and heavier, too."

"Normal bone growth during development is well understood; it involves the divison of cartilage cells on fronts located at the ends of the long bones and their subsequent hardening into bone. But the way that bones repsond to use or disuse during life has been something of a puzzle, despite the obvious importance of knowing more about it. Bone can lose up to a third of its mass during the short time a broken leg is in plaster, for example; fortunately, this mass is as quickly replenished when exercise is resumed. Bone exhibits a curious effect known as piezoelectricity. This means that it generates a small electric field when a force is applied to it. This is what happens around the tiny cracks that form when a bone is stressed. Although the details remain unclear, it seems that this effect must be the key to the ability of bones to remodel themselves. New bone cells are created by precursors known as osteoblasts, which carry a postiive electric charge owing to the bone-building calcium ions they bring with them. Stress placed on existing bone during exercise generates a negative charge by means of the piezoelectric effect, which then automatically draws these osteoblasts to the site where they are most needed."

[after a neat section on manual dexterity and the significant presuppositions of "pointing"] "The pointing hand soon acquired a life of its own, known as an index, fist, or 'manicule'. Henry VIII drew his own finely inked pointing hand symbols in the margins of his books when he wished to be able to find certain passages again. Manicules were often beautifully drawn in highly individual styles, reinforcing the sense that they were not merely markers but heartfelt personal gestures. The pointing hand became one of the first cliches -- cliches originally being the special symbols printers needed so often that it was worth casting a special piece of type for them." Then they talk about the "V' sign, Greco-Roman gesture interpretation, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_%28typography%29

"The most important way in which our hands have informed our intelligence is by giving us a readymade numbering system. So-called 'denary' counting is based on the ten fingers and thumbs, and most other popular number bases, such as binary and bases four, twelve, and twenty, are based on various combinations of limbs and digits. Even an octal system used by some Native American cultures begins with the hands: it counts not the peaks that our fingers make, but the valleys inbetween them." Then they talk about how no species has evolved with more than 5 digits, and they go through each finger and it's dexterous advantages. They talk about left-handed discrimination.

"The hands are not our only handed body parts. Inside the human body trunk, asymmetry is the norm. The heart is on the left and the liver is on the right. The stomach lies to the left. The left lung has two lobes, the right has three. There are little-noticed external differences, too. Our hair falls to one side or another. The left breast is usually a little larger than the right. The left testicle usually hangs lower than the right, even though the right one is generally heavier. In a way, it is the presence of symmetry in the body at all that is more remarkable than when it breaks down."

19 December 2014 @ 05:42 pm

I don't know what a younger me found so appealing about Alain de Botton's work. I find him smarmy and pathetic now, like the way I've always found David Sedaris banal and tedious. I should re-revisit. It's a shame if I just really don't like anything of his any more!

AND

"The world can ask you to participate, but it's a day-by-day decision if you want to agree to that proposal."

"He leaned in and kissed me. Just like that, he traversed the space and halved it, then quartered it, then eighthed it, then shut it down completely until there was no space between us at all." Damnit, Aimee Bender, how you gonna make a math obsession sound so sexy?

I wasn't a huge fan of most of An Invisible Sign of My Own (except for one-liners like these) but I am very much looking forward to The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

Also found in my collection of book-related notes-to-self: A picture surreptitiously snapped of the back of a book on display at this year's Christmas House: "The Breakfast Club meets The Walking Dead as a deadly virus hits a locked-down high school..." YA fiction has gotten...varied. Makes me feel old. And grateful for the Kindle app, so no one can see the title of what you're reading :D