Author: F C

NY Times: Coping: In a West Side Apartment, a World. Japanese film editor has 40 years of Asian American historical stuff, slowly being given to NYU so he can put in a double bed. Sounds like my bedroom.

On Saturday, P and I went to the wedding of one of my work-study students who had recently graduated. Centerport, Long Island was the venue for the ceremony and the reception, which would have been perfect if it wasn’t raining cats and dogs. We reserved a Zip car and made the trek along the Belt Parkway, the Cross Island Expressway, and then the LIE. After this point, the directions in the invite were really fuzzy and it was hard to see signs in the bad weather; thankfully I had Mapquest directions, which saved the day.

The ceremony was homey in a Methodist church/school; the main sanctuary serves double duty as an auditorium when the pews are removed and replaced by chairs facing the opposite direction. The reception was really remarkable — it was held at the Thatched Cottage, which had excellent food. The cocktail two-hours had a dozen action cooking stations cooking Asian and American dishes. The actual luncheon was really Linner because it was not served until 3, but it was so good. There was a menu of 5 entrees, which were all cooked to order. We had the Long Island Roasted Duck in orange sauce with string beans, carrots, and mushroom shaped potatoes — it must have been some of the best duck I’ve ever had.

Sunday started out as a slow day until I had a call that our office floor had flooded out — apparently they were doing some work with the pipes, and some bizarre change in water pressure caused all of the toilets in the building to flush. Thankfully the worst that happened was that some of my boxes are waterlogged; there were no computer damage. Went to Lowe’s to pick up stuff for the apartment — P’s moving in at the end of the month and the apartment has to get out of bachelor pad mode by then. We also did mondo laundry – 4 whole bags worth, by which P got fed up at the end of the wash cycle and went home to take care of the dogs.

Exams are this week, and I’ve got to try to actually sleep to make it in to proctor a 9 am exam.

Today was the 90th birthday of one of the professors. What did he wish for? To be 30 years younger. He was really concerned about students attending class. They weren’t, he thought, because they were trying to make enough money to make ends meet. He’s using his birthday party to raise scholarship money next week.

Another prof mentioned that he was concerned about me but felt that I needed some distance. He said that one day, I’d look in the mirror and see my father smiling. One day that will be true.

I’m going to be upgrading the blog to WordPress 1.5 this weekend, which will include new features and a bit of a redesign. This shouldn’t change how the blog itself works, but will help reduce the spam load.

Things move quickly in the last week. The beginning of the week, it was a sunny 80 degrees F, now its 50 and raining. My personal mood jumps quickly from vibrant to sad to indifferent. From wanting to stay put last weekend, tomorrow morning I’m jumping onto a Chinatown bus to get to Boston for the day — it’s for a bar association conference. Today I went to a conference about teleconferencing — why we didn’t teleconference, I don’t know. But we did find out about a teleconference about teleconferencing. Anyway, 5 hours before taking off.

I got home Wednesday night, so this is a recap of the Wednesday that went on for 48 hours…. my jetlag is pretty much over already.

Wednesday morning part 1: Before checking out of the hotel, I bought a Japanese yukata, a night robe that was quite comfortable. We went to several 105 Yen stores (the equivilent to our 99 cent stores) in the Shinjuku area, including Don Quiote and US Mart. Then we went to the flagship store of Mitsukoshi at Nihonbashi. Nihonbashi is a bridge that is the Columbus Circle of Tokyo: all distances from Tokyo are measured from here.

Mitsukoshi is literally the Cathedral of Commerce. There is a circa 1930 Wurlitzer organ that they play daily at the opening and at other times including noon, when we attended. A 4 storey statute of the Goddess of Sincerity stands directly in front of the organ in the main atrium. Three floors of fabulous food sits below ground, while floors above include an operating 500 seat theatre where they give cultural performances, an art gallery that rivals any major modern art museum, and an outdoor rooftop square which contains three Shinto shrines.

We indecisively chose two items of the millions of Japanese foods in the food hall, and then made the mad dash back to the hotel and to the airport. We made a bad choice of connection between subways (just say that it was the equivilent of getting off at Grand Central and deciding to walk to Port Authority) and then had a hard time finding the right exit out of Shinjuku station (which is Grand Central, Penn Station and Port Authority all rolled into one). We had missed two trains to the airport in the lost time, and came close to a third waiting in the ticket office, but instead I managed to get the ticket dispensing machine to work and we got on board in time for the hour long train ride back to the airport. Going through security and customs was very efficient, and we made it with 20 minutes to spare.

I spent most of the time on the plane asleep, twisting and turning. The attendant was actually on our flight inbound, and she was like one of those theater matrons that are attentive in a zany manner. We made it back technically one hour before we left.

I’m missing blogging for two days, the last day in Kyoto, which I will be calling “the path to enlightenment”, and the day in Taiwan, which I haven’t figured out what to call yet. Mucho work these next few days….