Monday, February 28, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.302

As a cheap person, I’ve vigorously applied for online giveaways and free samples on the Internet for three years now. I suspended it as of today because I’m moving to my new place and my address will soon be changed. I take this opportunity to go over the result of my three-year applications. The best freebie I won for a giveaway was two dozen cans of limited-edition beer with an antique label. It was worth over $60. I got two dozen cans of cheaper beer or soda for a couple of times and a box of eye cosmetics, too. But mostly what I got were small packets of shampoo or cosmetics. Although it took time to fill out my personal information and answer a survey for the application, I was often disappointed at what the company sent as a reward. While they extravagantly announced that I had won the giveaway on a letter, what they enclosed was a teeny tiny packet. I sometimes saw the similar packet handed out for free at a store or on the street. I may have wasted so much time to apply for freebies online after all. But there’s still the even worse result. In these three years, my eyesight has deteriorated significantly. If it has to do with spending a long time on the Internet to apply for freebies, that certainly did more harm than good…

Friday, February 25, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.301

It has gotten warmer little by little and spring is near. Shortly, cherry blossoms are blooming here and there around Japan, making a usually somber country beautiful. Cherry blossoms mean the season to begin a new year at a school and an office in Japan. It was spring when I entered elementary school and this time of year reminds me of how I felt at that time. At Japanese schools, the whole school assembly is held once a week. I remember the first assembly at the elementary school held in the schoolyard. The school had a large number of students, well over 2,000. They gathered in the schoolyard to listen to a principal’s weekly address, lined up in neat rows by the class and the grade. As I was in the first grade, my row was near the edge of the yard. I glanced at the far side of it, where the sixth-graders stood in line. They were tall and looked like grown-ups to me. And all of a sudden, a strong sense of claustrophobia seized me. I realized that I would keep coming to this school until I grew that big. Considering the excruciating two years I spent at kindergarten, coming here for six years seemed forever and torture. On top of that, it wouldn’t end there. Three years at junior high school and another three years at high school would follow. My mother had already talked about a college then, too. The day I would be freed from school I loathed so much would be so far away. I felt as if I had been put in prison with a life sentence, while the principal was congratulating the first-graders in his speech and cherry blossoms were warmly looking down…

Monday, February 21, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.300

These days, I’ve had nightmares about living in a deserted, out-of-the-way place repeatedly. In them, I was forced to join a dreary folk festival in deep snow with a handful of local people, or I was surrounded by uncivilized people whose language I didn’t understand, or I lived in an ancient, old-fashioned building. Those dreams seem to represent my vague unease for moving to my new place that is located in a remote, mountainous, snowy region. I’ve completed a song I’d been working on for seven years, and I’m about to move out the apartment I’ve lived for nine years. I’m moving to a whole new town where I have no acquaintances, and I’ll start promoting our latest song and recording a new song. Form then onward, I don’t know how my life goes. I believe it will be wonderful as long as I stay alive without giving up. I will enjoy and cherish every process to a new step, which hopefully would be the better one…

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.299

As I’ve been packing my stuff to move out this apartment, various things of sentimental value to me have come out from the back of the shelves. I’ve lived here for nine years and forgotten about most of them since I stored them away. Some are no longer useful, but when I clear them out, I feel as if I threw away my past. That makes me melancholy. Occasionally, I find some money. It’s like I get a bonus for packing, but it’s simply what I stashed by myself in the first place and not what I newly gained. Mostly, what I find are numerous room slippers and old broken appliances. I don’t understand why I kept so many slippers without using. Packing and moving requires a great deal of labor and time. Worst of all, the broken appliances appear one after another and discarding them is costly. I have to pay for each one of them just to dump…

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.298

In Japan, St. Valentine’s Day is the day that women give chocolate to men. When I was a freshman at high school, I had a big crush on my math teacher and gave him a handmade chocolate cake on Valentine’s Day. I wasn’t interested in cooking at all and never helped my grandmother and my mother in the kitchen. Although cooking was an unknown territory for me, I decided to make a chocolate cake on a whim. It turned out to be way harder and more time-consuming than I thought. I made two cakes and chose the better-looking one for the teacher and the other to be stored in the fridge for my family and myself. I handed the cake to the teacher at school and was so happy because he seemed pleased. I came home in a good mood and tried the other cake in the fridge myself. My good mood was extinguished on the spot. It tasted horrible. I’d never had such a terrible cake before, and haven’t since. Of course I tasted it to make sure while cooking, but I did so for chocolate icing, not for sponge cake. As you know, chocolate can’t go wrong, but sponge cake possibly can. I felt awful imagining the teacher was having the vicious cake with his colleagues or his family on Valentine’s Day…

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.297

Hiring specifically new graduates is a Japanese companies’ custom. If you fail to enter a university after finishing high school and spend another year to take an entrance examination again a year later, you would be one year older than other new graduates, and that is a big disadvantage to be hired at a Japanese company. When I failed all universities I applied for, my hope to work at a big company as a super career woman was crushed. The college I passed belonged to the same school as the high school I went to, and wasn’t effective to open a gate for a big company upon graduation. Come to think of it, the dream of my youth was purely based on my vanity because I don’t think I’m cut out for a nine-to-five job nor I don’t want to be a business person. I can’t even wake up in the morning to begin with. But I was young and stupid enough then, and totally at a loss for what to do for life, as I lost my hope and purpose entirely…

Monday, February 7, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.296

February is the time that most universities and colleges hold an entrance examination in Japan. When I was a senior at high school, I applied for five universities and one college. I failed all five universities. They send the result by mail and put it up on the campus too. An applicant is allotted a number and the numbers of passed applicants are put up on a big bulletin board there. For one of the universities I applied, I was fairly confident about passing after the examination, and I went to see the result at the campus alone before receiving it by mail. There were lots of numbers on the big board and I was quite sure mine was among them. But it wasn’t. I failed the exam. And there, I discovered a human reaction to totally huge despair: laugh. To my surprise, completely unaware, I laughed. Besides the applicants, around the board were students who were recruiting those who passed to their clubs and circles, and people at local businesses who were looking for part-timers. Because I laughed, they thought I passed and they flooded around me at once. They handed numerous fliers to me, saying ‘Congratulations!’ I came home by subway. At the station, I dropped to a trash bin a big bundle of fliers that were meant for only those who passed. Tears also fell. During the subway ride, I felt like my life was going in a long endless tunnel instead of a train. I remember how dark my future seemed that day…

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.295

I’ve written for several times that I’m such an avid fan of Formula One. With 36 days to go for the new season, a few teams launched their new cars and the test session has been under way. I check the result on the Internet, fascinated by the beautiful new cars. Japan experienced the Formula One boom from late 1980s to early 1990s. Now, there is not a vestige of it. While soccer and martial arts are very popular in Japan, I seldom hear people talking about Formula One these days. Since the boom was gone, a TV broadcast for the qualifying session has been confined to a short digest. The race is recorded and aired past midnight on Sundays, the slot most people don’t watch TV. It’s getting unpopular year after year and the qualifying isn’t even aired at all in the area I’m moving to. I’m afraid that commercial broadcasting stops airing Formula One altogether. It seems that soon I will end up watching it on expensive cable TV. Formula One is really costly, through and through…