I met Aya's mother and sister for dinner tonight, it was the first time for us to meet each other, but everything went swimmingly, with no power outages like when my mother and Aya met. They were surprised at my "proficiency" in Japanese, in that I could generally follow what they were saying and reply in a somewhat simplistic fashion, and I think ( Read more... )

Another story connected with my private teaching, this time about my regular student. He's about 35, I'd say, and possibly not the most socially well-adjusted guy, for example when I did a trial lesson with him he asked for advice on meeting Western girls, and then another time when talking about break-ups he told me that he was devastated every ( Read more... )

I went to do a private lesson for a woman who runs an English school. I arrived there and rang her doorbell, to no effect, then I heard her calling my name from behind me. I turned around to see her getting out of her car, but as soon as she got out she realized that she'd locked her keys in her car. She called her son to come and help her, and ( Read more... )

http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Metal%20Wolf%20Chaos/

Today was supposed to be test week for my conversation class, but the students didn't want to do the test and neither did I, so we did a sort of bonus lesson that I prepared for them, basically involving a list of funny new slang words and some riddles, and everyone seemed to have a good time. One of the students asked me about the word 'gaydar', ( Read more... )

I finished my last day of Kid's Interviews today, and everything went fairly smoothly, except for one little girl bursting into tears upon seeing me, but that's happened a few times, so I'm used to it. Afterwards a guy I worked with showed me where the local RPG store was, which I'd been meaning to find for a while now. It was pretty standard, a ( Read more... )

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=15646&IBLOCK_ID=35

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/14/chinese.women.ap/index.html

Having made a silent promise to myself to write more often, I'm going to try to post every day now, to the possible annoyance and/or dread of those who have lj-friended me, but I guess we'll just see how that all shakes out ( Read more... )

I wonder if the massive general disdain for 'stupid people' that some have is a socially acceptable expression of ideas previously derived from eugenics...