A typical Sunday, which means lots of sleeping and doing nothing. I went to church and tried my hardest to stay awake after returning home, but by 2 o'clock I had given in to my napping urges, and didn't wake up until 6. I'm finally only 70 pages from the end of The Bells of Nagasaki, but won't be able to read it too much for the next few days because of the terrifying approach of Real Work in the form of my one final. Of course I say that I'll be working and studying tomorrow and Tuesday, but in reality I'll probably lazily study for a couple of hours and then space out for an equal number of hours, just to maintain my Japanese schoolwork equilibrium.
Since I really didn't do much today, I figured I'd just continue talking about potstickers, because they are twelve kinds of delicious, the last three of which came straight from heaven. We made two types, Korean and Chinese. The former was kim chee (of course), ground chicken, tofu, those transparent rice noodles and various spices. The latter was beef and spices; they are normally made with some pig product, but Ayed can't eat the unclean meat, so we stuck with beef. As far as the name, I looked up the characters just now, and they mean nothing like "potsticker," so that's no help. Incidentally, what they do mean is "wrapped/twisted child," the child part of which might better be considered a diminutive like "little wrapped."
Recently I've been listening to a new artist a friend turned me on to called James McMurtry a very great deal. Those of you with a taste for slow, mellow songs with lyrics that are not only completely unrelated to love a fair amount of the time, but also concise and well conceived will surely find him worth a look. His best album by far, at least in my experience, is Where'd You Hide the Body, but I suspect that anything he's done is worth listening to. That bit about being unrelated to love in particular is extremely rare and pretty much automatically makes a band worth listening to just because they have the originality to think of something different to sing about. For example, Freezepop gets away with love songs because their love songs tend to be about things like a woman-robot love affair torn by fear of Y2K, and probably half their material is unrelated to love, unless you consider Wheel of Fortune, cloning or the like love-related. McMurtry pulls pretty much the same trick, where his songs are divided about half and half, where the love songs are actually surprisingly lyrical and full of honest-to-God poetic imagery, and the non-love songs are about pretty much whatever he wants.
Speaking of Freezepop, Achewood and Freezepop are together again and Freezepop has gone all out crazy-style and made an absolutely incredible song about Philippe, which is pretty much too good to be true. How is it that a largely unknown electronica band from the East Coast and a largely unknown online comic from the West Coast are good friends? Because I have been a very good boy.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN
Oh, actually, if you look closely you can read it. It says "I dash in about 15 minutes from Brooklyn to Manhattan. It seems that an angel's wings have grown completely."