I'm not the only one sick of Japanese men!

From the today's BBC:

Japan marks 'Beloved Wives Day'

Husbands are urged to improve the "marital mood"
A group of Japanese husbands keen to improve their marriages have declared Tuesday to be Beloved Wives Day.
The Japan Doting Husbands Association is urging men to be home early - by eight o'clock - this evening and express their gratitude to their wives.

The group has also come up with five golden rules, like calling one's wife by her name rather than grunting, and looking into her eyes when talking.

The move comes as the divorce rate in work-obsessed Japan continues to rise.

"Many men can't put their feelings of gratitude towards their wives into words. Work is number one for them," the group says on its web site.

The organisation was set up by Kiyotaka Yamana, a 45-year-old businessman in Kawasaki.

He and his first wife divorced because she was fed up with his workaholic ways.

When Mr Yamana remarried three years ago, he vowed to do things differently.

Since the group's web site was set up in December, about 100 people have signed up, according to The Asahi Shimbun.

Men can try out phrases on the web site, before springing them on their wives.

One member has written: "Though we fight from time to time, I feel very happy when I am with you."


Yowzaaaaaaa!

Weekend wrap-up

It's Sunday. I'm tired and a bit hungover. My throat hurts. Here's a rundown of all the weirdness I got up to this weekend:

-On Saturday afternoon, I hurt my back doing laundry, uh, I mean snowboarding... Who does that? How old am I? Ugh! So I rested all day and wore heels at night cause I found they forced me to stand up straight where flats allowed me to stand like Quasi Moto. Not cool. Boozing help alleviate the pain and surprisingly today I am relatively pain free.
-I saw the Niigata Charity Musical which was defnitely cute. Major props to the people who give up so much free time for it.
-Went out on Saturday night for the play afterparty
-Talked to loads of people I haven't seen in ages, including Kat and Kate

And Grace

And Nuria

-Got drunk for charitable purposes
-Saw the biggest collection of weirdos EVER at the second bar we went to. Including 5 people over 7 feet tall wearing t-shirts the size of my bed sheets, Japanese gangsters, Jgirls dressed like early 90's hookers (no lie, I saw clear heels and lace up capri pants -- I almost cried about 5 separate times), a random rap group, a "shake what your mama gave you" competition where jgirls with no rhythm or asses tried to shake things. I still shudder at the memory.
-Saw Hiroshi. Things did not go as planned. I'll spare you the details. It was pretty lame but I'm chalking it up to cultural misunderstanding and moving on with my life...
And counting down the days till I move to Portland and find a cute West Coast Liberal boy.
And the No More Dating Bartenders Rule is officially in effect (again).
And because "I mean business", this is me deleting Hiroshi from my phone:

-Because of the failed plan, I had a slightly hilarious (or not so much) bitch session where Kristi acted as my therapist （ちょーごめん！) and an innocent shrub might or might not have been abused.

It was, um, interesting...

Another sweet dropkick shot

It's official. I just handed in my (non) re-contracting form to my BOE.

Mama's comin' home...

More snow, etc

Here, in bullet form, are my random thoughts of late:

GOOD THINGS:
-I just spent the entire weekend in Shiozawa with Aaron and his homestay family. We ate and ate and ate and drank and watched TV and went snowboarding all day Saturday and played with little kids. Beautiful.


-Kate just booked our flights to China for March. I am super excited about this trip!
-No school for Monday and Tuesday this week because of some random ALT seminar. I get to wear nice shoes.
-I think I found (rather, SJ pointed out to me) a grad program in Portland to enter next year, January 07 perhaps. Ah, contemplating the future...
-The Bloc Party CD. I'm totally diggin it.
-Law & Order episodes on sale on iTunes.

NOT SO GOOD THINGS:
-How sore I am from boarding.
-How damn cold it is inside.
-My little bartender boyfriend who is currently frustrated with me. Not to worry, I have a plan.

That's about all for now. Off to bed. おやすみなさい！

Snowboarding sweeeetness!

On Saturday, Aaron and I hopped in the car bright and early to head down to Myoko for a day of much-anticipated snowboarding. It was raining like crazy up here so we were happy when we arrived at the ski-jo and it was not only totally clear but also freakishly warm. The snow wasn't so great due to the recent rain, but we made do and had an excellent day.
We were above the clouds which made for some awesome views

Aaron's senior yearbook picture

Oooh, look at me

Oops


Aaron was surprisingly good for only his second time out. He's totally gonna be better than me by the end of the season.

Haaaay

It started raining shortly after lunch, so we cut the day short after we were both totally soaked. But before we hit the road again, we had banana, ice cream and chocolate creps. Yum!


Ooh, can't wait to go again!

私のふるさと！

So, I've told all of you about the abundance of Rochester, NY shirts that my Elementary School students have, right? Well, tonight while browsing through a local sports store, I found a couple good ones


This cracks me up cause I don't even think you can buy Rochester shirts IN Rochester. Love it!

And on a non-related note, for the second time in my stay in Japan, Niigata has made the international news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4613902.stm
Goodness!

More on my weekend/snowboarding later...

A Canandaigua Christmas

Well, I was in the 'daigua for so long that I can't be arsed to detail all of it. And those of you who know anything about the 'daigua (75% of my 4 readers) know what it entailed. So I'll post highlights and lowlights and some pictures to whet your appetites.

HIGHLIGHTS:
-Seeing my beautiful mom and sister
-Seeing my fabulous friends
-Sleeping my bed which I liken to sleeping on marshmallows
-Baking cupcakes with Heather (we totally wussed out on the flavor bombs this year)
-Watching hours upon hours of celebrity gossip, Law & Order, and Ellen on TV
-Buying magazines, books, and ok... Speaking English!
-Shopping - Eastview Mall is the bane of my credit card's existence
-Shoe-shopping
-Exchanging presents
-Central heat
-$1 pints
-Jagerbombs at Jose & Willy's
-Chicken wings and pitchers of Labatt's at Wally's
-Food, food and more food

LOWLIGHTS:
-How long it took me to kick my jet lag -- it was ROUGH!
-No snow in the 'daigua - that's crap for this time of year
-The tiny plane I had to take between Toronto and Rochester

-Mini blips of drama here and there
-That mining accident in W.Va
-Driving on the right-side of the road again

And now for a few pictures, in no particular order (I'm putting the rest on my fotopage for those of you who want to steal them), Enjoy:
Kevin at the Pickering

Oh, god I love those shoes

The gals after the Xmas gift exchange. It was a good one, thanks girls!

This is the radio Katie uses in her car. So hot.

Our Christmas Tree. My sis did a fabulous job on it.

The Assholes at Wallys. Allison and I totally match. Sweeet.

My lil sis and I

People watching at the mall

Jessi, Dave, Michelle after CA Reunion '05 at O'Brien's

A Journey rock-out session in the car

At Jose & Willy's. Oh, yes.


All in all, it was a good vacation. I feel pretty good about the next 7 months in Japan. I have lots to look forward to in '06 (two-thousand-scandalous, if you will) including a winter of snowboarding, a trip to China (Beijing, Xian and Shanghai) in March, Golden Week in Thailand (gonna check out the tsunami side this time), summer - and all the parties it brings, and moving to Portland in August with SJ. It's gonna be a good one!

Holy Snow!

Ok, so where I live, there's no more than a foot on the ground, but just an hour south of me, in Tokamachi, they have had record snowfall. Apparently there's more than 300 cm -- for those of you who are weak with conversions, that's about 10 feet. Good lord! I stole this picture from a Niigata JET who lives down there, hope that's not bad blogging etiquette or something...


Can't wait to go boarding tomorrow!

A Brooklyn New Year's

Ok, let me just start by saying that in order to update my winter vacation in America in some kind of coherent fashion, I'm going to split up New Year's weekend from all the rest of it. And I'll do New Year's first. Oh, and I'll be posting all of my pictures from the trip on my fotopage some time this week (mcurran.fotopages.com).

So, Friday morning Sarah and I hopped on the road down to the Big Apple. Katie and Michelle were coming separately in Michelle's car. Destination: Emily Burton's fantastic Brooklyn apartment. By some miracle, Michelle and Katie were pulling onto Emily's block right as Sarah and I were hauling our stuff to the apartment. We immediately headed to a Thai restaurant for dinner where Alan (horray!) met up with us and Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife were seated next to us (and SJ swooned over the heart shaped rice).

After a brief power nap and a power-dolling up session, we headed into Manhattan for a birthday party for some chick Emily and Sarah went to college with and to bar hop arount the Lower East Side. The highlight of my night was not the beers or even the Mango Martini (which was beautiful) but the amazing drunk eating we partoook in after the bars.
Exhibit A: CUPCAKES! Where else but in NY can you find cupcakes at 3am in a coffee shop next to a bar??

Exhibit B: Next door to the coffee shop was a BURGER PLACE. Anyone who knows me knows that I can eat a burger pretty much any time of the day including immediately after a cupcake at 3am. Here's Sarah and I street-eating, love it!


I hate to think of what amazing food might have been available had we continued stumbling down that street...




The next day was New Year's Eve. During the day, Katie, Michelle and I had pizza at a nearby pizza place then headed into Rockefeller Center so I could take pictures for my students and to just be tourists.

Michelle, Katie and I (and snow!)

Saks 5th Avenue

St. Patrick's


When we headed back to the apartment we began the juggling act of 6 girls and one shower which surprisingly went off without a hitch.

We had two parties to attend and lots of boy-shopping to do, so at 10-ish we headed out to our first party at my dear old friend Dave's apartment in Brooklyn. What we found was a verifiable Canandaigua Academy Reunion including Darrell and the Molisani brothers. The only non-daiguans were Emily, Sarah Ford and Tom Conroy. Kinda creepy actually. To get things going, we started playing The Year 2005 In Review By Numbers Game where someone would say a category and everyone would say their resepective numbers.
For Example:
Number of times I puked: 0
Number of countries I visited: 7 (counting Japan. America and Guam separately)
Number of boys I smooched with: 12 (I won that one)
Number of weeks SJ was unemployed: 32 (or was it 34?)

Here are some photo highlights from Dave's
This is my favorite picture of the night

Look at those shoes!

S. Mo and A. Mo

Dave & I

2006 glasses, hell yeah


We headed out to party #2 with enough time to scope out the boy scene before the ball dropped. This party was held at an apartment belonging to Emily and Sarah's friend's boyfriend's friend or something. Whatever, the apartment was sweet and there was free booze - all I ask, really. The party was hopping but alas, the boy to girl ratio was not in my favor so my big midnight excitement was when the whole countdown thing ended and I noticed there was no line for the bathroom, snatch. Good thing I smooched A.Mo before we left Dave's place...

And here's the blackmail from Party #2
hot hot hot

Me & Kit looking scandalized

My boyfriend for 2 hours, Justin

no caption needed

The girls and some baditude


Around 1am, I was chatted up by that lovely boy, Justin, who I learned was raised in Tokyo until high school. He was cute and interesting (finally!) so we ditched the party for a cigarette and when the girls came down we decided to head out to a bar. Things are a bit blurry at this point but I recall yelling to some girl in a window, giving away my 2006 glasses, having a Brooklyn Lager and a conversation in Japanese. Soon enough it was bedtime for us all and the gals and I stumbled back to Emily's place.

New Year's Day felt like 5 days rolled into one, but not in a bad way. First Sarah, Michelle, Katie and I went to brunch (hangover burger, check); then Michelle left; then Katie, Sarah and I spent the day in Joey's bed; I showered (they didn't!); Alan came over with beer; Emily came home from work (she's a trooper); Dave came over with more beer; we went to a Mexican restaurant and drank margaritas (we are champs) and we went into Manhattan to check out a bar Dave told us about. It was totally intense.

Monday we drove back upstate. On the way we stopped at Memories for a little photo shoot. 10 points to anyone who can figure out what's wrong with this picture


Overall, the trip was totally kick ass. Thank you all for making my New Year's so much fun!

Happy two-thousand-scandalous!