Friday, October 28, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.371

Right before I moved in this small town, a cool Western style restaurant had opened near my new apartment. It has become my favorite place right away, as there are only few Western style restaurants around the town. Until this summer, it offered an all-you-can-eat buffet. But now it has been ordered a la carte and closed between lunchtime and dinnertime. Because I have a jinx that my favorite place is almost always destined to close down, I’ve been feeling anxious about the future of that restaurant. I went there for lunch yesterday and found they had replaced the menu book with a printed sheet of paper. A list of the menu had decreased to a quarter of the previous one. The number of the employees had been also drastically reduced and a chef was bringing the food to the tables and clearing them. The showcase that used to have lots of pieces of a variety of cakes was empty. Since I really like this restaurant, I do hope it will survive. But an ominous sign is that it’s already my favorite place. As long as I like that restaurant, there is a high probability that it will also close down like many other favorite places of mine…

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.370

The other day, I happened to have an unpleasant need to call my parents. Since we don’t get along well, the last time we spoke was when my mother called me to see if I was all right after the Japan’s earthquake in March. Whenever she speaks with me, she brags about my younger sister at great length. My sister has drifted from one job to another all her life while I’m a musician all my life. Even so, my mother is extremely proud of my sister who she considers a member of society, whereas she considers me an outsider and has kept denying my way of life. In our latest telephone conversation, she mentioned that my sister had moved out my parents’ house for her new job and lived near my place when the earthquake occurred. According to her, my sister got injured and stayed at a shelter. I had thought I was the only one in the family who suffered from the earthquake because my parents’ house was far from the seismic center and I didn’t know my sister had moved to the region where I lived. My astonishment was, that my mother hadn’t told me all about this until now although we spoke right after the earthquake. For some reason, she had kept it in secret for her benefit. Whatever the benefit might be, she kept me from helping my sister on purpose by concealing that my sister lived close to me. I’ve known her useless secrets and schemes, but this time I was amazed what a monster she had become…

Friday, October 21, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.369

Until I moved in this small highland town in the mountains, I'd forgotten about enjoying beautiful colors of autumn leaves. The leaves of trees around my apartment have been turning yellow and orange. As its peak seemed near, I decided to go up to a mountain park nearby. It took me too long to prepare to go out and I consequently missed the bus. The next available transportation was a train. When I went outside of the building, it was chillier than I'd expected, and I went back in to change my jacket to a heavier one. By the time I went out again, there was little time to catch the train, and I had to scurry to the station. It made me sweat and changing a jacket futile. I was already hungry when I got off the train and walked to one of my favorite restaurants for lunch. From the outside, I saw a kid in the restaurant, which meant I couldn't go in as I have kid-phobia. I changed my plan to have lunch at the restaurant inside the mountain park. Because I was starving, I wanted to get there as soon as possible and scurried again to the cable car station to catch the earliest available cable car. It had just departed when I arrived at the station sweating all over. To the next departure, I was eating free samples of food and sweets at the shop in the station. I finally had lunch at the park and the view from the restaurant was absolutely breathtaking. Autumn leaves were woven through the mountains, from the front of the window into the distance. Beneath the window was a blanket of cosmos flowers. My hectic chases of a bus, a train and a cable car seemed to pay off. When I was leaving, the cashier couldn't handle the cash register well and started to grapple with it. During her repeated unsuccessful attempts, the departure time of a cable car to go down the mountain was getting closer. I handed the exact amount of money not to receive the change and asked her to let me leave. I barely made it. Even on a day off, I was pushed for time all day...

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.368

For the first time in six months since I moved in a new town surrounded by the mountains, I’m going to get out of the town by going down the mountains to the city. I’m going on a trip to Tokyo Disney Resort and my hometown next month. After precise planning, I made a reservation for a hotel and trains online yesterday. I found myself lucky when I saw some online special discount packages just released on the same day. The package included a hotel stay and a round-trip train ticket, which was cheaper than the list price of the train ticket. That meant a high-class hotel stay would be completely free. I jumped to the offer, filled out the application form and clicked a submit button. The web site showed an error message saying it was already sold out. When I got back to the package list page, the one I had chosen turned into an unavailable sign. It seemed sold out while I was filling out the form. I chose the second-cheapest package among the available ones, filled out the form and submitted. The result was again that it had been sold out. I repeated this for five or six times and still couldn’t make it. Each time, by the time I clicked a submit button, the item had been snatched. Was everyone online all at once making a reservation at this particular web site, for the same destination and date? Could it be possible? Or, was the application system simply gone down? While suspicion took hold of me, my online reservation had become a fierce battle of speed. Finally, I successfully made it with a less discounted package. Although it was still a great discount, I felt like I made a loss after seeing the bigger discount items…

Friday, October 14, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.367

The high school I attended held a team event competition on a field day. Ten students from each class formed a team and put together an event. The team that won the competition would get a trophy. When I was a sophomore, I was a team leader of a costume dance parade on a field day. I planned and directed the show of 50 students, which featured music and characters from foreign movies. For two months, I’d prepared the costumes, choreographed the dance, and practiced with other members. In hindsight, it was a puerile silly show, but our team won the competition that year. As a team leader, I couldn’t help anticipating great gratitude from the team members. A trophy was to be handed after all events of a field day were over. I did some small after-event work in a tent beside the field when a teacher handed a trophy to our team. Although it had been always handed to a team leader in school history, one of our team members received it in place of me and the commemorative photo of the whole team was taken without me. Everything happened in mere five minutes while I was inside a tent. When I was back in the field, the team had been dismissed and the trophy had been moved to a school building. I got furious. I shouted at the team members ‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ over and over. They seemed to realize my absence right then and made lame excuses such as they looked for me but couldn’t find me, and so on. I received great contempt instead of gratitude. None of them had an ounce of respect for me. I didn’t even touch or see the trophy. In the yearbook, I wasn’t in the picture of the glorious team as if I weren’t in the team let alone the team leader. I still can’t breathe for fury remembering that field day…

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.366

Throughout my schooldays, a field day was a nightmare for me. I was poor at gymnastic and a slow runner. I always swaggered as the smartest kid at school, but a field day was the annual event that I was humiliated as a laughingstock in front of all students and their parents. The team events like tug-of-war did less damage because my poor performance was covered up among other students. But individual competitions like a hundred-meter dash were such dreadful events. It was raced in groups of six and I was always last. I don't know how it's felt to breast the tape. My parents came to cheer and bring lunch on a field day every year and always felt embarrassed in the stands. When I was little, I had been extremely introverted and hardly spoken to anyone except for my family members. But with a lot of effort, I had become sociable by the time I was in the fourth grade. And on a field day of that year, a strange thing happened. I came in third in the hundred-meter dash. I never thought sociability affected ability to run. I assumed my long spell of a humiliating field day was over. Unfortunately though, it wasn't. I had been skinny but as I got sociable, I gained an appetite and got fat. I soon returned to be a back marker in the race on a field day. I became more unsightly as a slow fat runner and drew more laughter than before. Humiliation added up to a field day...

Friday, October 7, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.365

It’s a season for a field day at school in Japan. Students have rehearsed the various events for a month or more. Parents are invited to a field day to cheer and bring lunch for their kids. Popular events are the 100-meter dash, an obstacle race, a tug-of-war, and a relay race. Among them, there is one weird competition. Students play on opposite sides of a red team and a white team, to throw small balls into a basket. Parents are required to sew the ball out of cloth beforehand and the school collects them for the event. In the competition, the handmade balls get scattered around a pole at the top of which has a wooden basket. With a signal, students dash to the balls all at once, pick them up and shoot them at the basket. Then teachers count the balls inside the baskets of both teams out loud, and the team with more balls in the basket wins. Besides this, there are other strange team events. A mock cavalry battle that a student wearing a cap is carried by two students who run around to get opponents’ caps, a composition exercise that students form certain shapes with their bodies as a group, and a dance by the whole classes. They need a lot of rehearsals because of those team events. All students must participate in a field day that comes every year until they graduate from high school…

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Hidemi's Rambling No.364

One of what I hate most in this world is a kid. I rarely see a quiet child and most of them are ill-behaved, noise making, violently romping monsters. I can’t stand their high-pitched voice and way of laughing. All my life I’ve tried to avoid them, even when I myself was a child. Ironically, almost all my favorite places are also kids’ favorites. Kids encroach on theme parks, restaurants and stores that I happen to like and I eventually can’t go in. The mystery is, the same thing happens to an area where I decide to live. When I lived in downtown Tokyo, I had chosen an apartment in a quiet area, but families with kids had moved in the neighborhood constantly. Soon, I was besieged by kids and had to move out. After I moved in a suburb, the quiet neighborhood had rapidly gathered families with kids and I again had to escape. Now I’ve moved in a sparsely populated town surrounded by the mountains. I’d seen few people around me and been confident to have finally found a kids-free environment. Five months have passed since I moved in and I noticed an ominous change around me. There used to be only few elderly residents in my apartment building, but I’ve seen more and more kids lately. They are jumping into a Jacuzzi in the communal spa and running around the locker room. A baby is crawling the dirty floor there. Kids have been moving in since I did. Am I a magnet for kids or something? Do they inevitably gather around me? I’m afraid that the town also might have many kids soon…