well, i should be working on today's lesson in my japanese correspondence course, but i'm feeling lazy, and a promise is a promise i know. now we've established how i spent monday ("previously on glenn's diary..."), so i'll proceed to tuesday. tuesday, i had two classes, so i mostly screwed around on the internet. i finally got a clue and went to the napster forum, where i learned how to get on napster from work. woohoo! the proxy at work seems ambivalent, and i can't really hog bandwidth with a max of 18Kbps, but it beats the hell out of my wimpy 33.6kbps connection here at my apartment. plus, it's free. i am now no longer pissed about having to stay at the chuugakkoo till 4. now, if there could just be a really hot (and available) female english teacher fresh out of college there, i'd really be in business. :-)
wednesday, after staying at work till 5, i arrived late to my eikaiwa's birthday party for me and another member of the club. i know i'm a jerk, but i honestly forgot what they had scheduled. they gave me some random stuff, including five thousand yen worth of music gift certificates, which was really cool. i won't feel as guilty next time i go to hmv. the chocolate cake they served was pretty good. bonus. orders of magnitude better than the turkey day dinner, but that might be damning with faint praise. my best b-day party ever was my 18th, when i had a bunch of high school friends over to my house. my friend harry told me then "congratulations. you are now old enough to have the honor of serving jail time as an adult." :-) and my dad was there.
the next day was, of course, at the elementary school, and it didn't suck, thank goodness. i woke up and had a rare online conversation with melanie, which would have made my day in and of itself. at the shoogakkoo, the two classes of second graders i had were very enthuastic and bouncy. it's such a contrast between the junior high and elementary school...the classes themselves at the elementary are loads of fun, while the lessons are boring tripe (if i have to do "aisatsu" again (which i do, tomorrow. yes, i have to work on saturday. that's the reason i got monday afternoon off.), i'm gonna do something that indicates my general displeasure.) ("aisatsu" is the japanese word for "ritual greetings".) at the junior high, however, teaching most of the classes is about as fun as walking through mud, while the lessons at least show *some* variation. the older english teacher, though not as skilled at spoken english as the younger, is really creative in her lesson planning, almost to a fault. but i enjoy team-teaching with her, as she tries to stretch her students. and i enjoy getting paid to surf the net while i'm at the chuugakkoo. anyway, back to the elementary school. the lunch (lunches there are free) was really good, as it usually is. and i got my japanese lesson for the day done while sitting at my desk there. i got home that night and ate random bits before heading to the gym for basketball practice. doing wind sprints on sunday (see previous entry) helped, as i wasn't nearly as tired when i got home. during "halftime", i went out of the gym area to get some water, and, as i'm filling up my cup for second glasses of cold water, i look up and see all the guys standing there. they say "happy birthday", which surprised the hell out of me. again, i had forgot completely about it. and they gave me the video comp. of u2's _best of 1980-1990_. a very good present, and i think they were pleased by my reaction to opening the gift. ("cool!") while i despise music videos in general, the comp isn't all that bad. the highlights are the vids taken from _rattle and hum_, the live version of "sunday bloody sunday" at red rocks, and the vid for "where the streets have no name". the interaction with b.b. king on "when love comes to town" is great stuff, even if it was taken directly from the movie for _rattle and hum_. a really nice day. i'm gonna have to get me the _rattle and hum_ dvd sometime.
today was cool, but laid-back. only one class. the winter days here are great when there's no rain and the wind isn't acting up.
by the way, in case you hadn't gathered from the above, tomorrow i will be 24. whoop-de-shit.
been listening to: joy electric, the prayer chain, mike knott, at the gates, clinic, sigur ros, U2