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After having been unable to sleep, I decided to give up trying and head to the gym at 5am. I’ve never seen the streets and trains so deserted in this busy city. I didn’t expect to find the gym in Harajuku to be more crowded than I’ve seen full of frighteningly hulk-like creatures. With that situation, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that, for the first time the locker room smelled like … a locker room. Ugh. They seemed to be frantically cleaning at 7 so perhaps it’s not so common. It also stuck me that I’ve never seen a woman in the men’s locker room. This may sound an odd comment, but there’s generally a (invisible after you’ve been here for some time) little old lady scurrying about in the toilet/changing room type areas everywhere. (Really if you’re a man you should expect a woman to be cleaning up during your “restroom activities” – and I do mean mean right next to you watching). Perhaps Gold’s is not the type of place that toilet ladies think to apply. Guess little old anythings don’t generally enter in any capacity.

The next word in the title phrase is known to all. This weekend it was triggered by coffee. Kaldi coffee, specifically, for which a great love has developed within me. You see, my supply of mildly roasted ‘Precious Beans of 100 Years Old Coffee Tree’ was exhausted, so I was relegated to the under-the-counter jar of Nescafé Excella (it’s soluble!). All in all, the Excella is a passable cuppa insofar as freeze-dried instant varieties go. The problem, the jarring shock, is that Kaldi had thoroughly ruined me. It had informed me of heights sublime.

Perhaps the temporal proximity of the two quaffing experiences accentuated the disappointing effect of cup number two, but the damage was done and led to a questioning regret for ever having tried Kaldi in the first place. In all likelihood, I would be at least generally appeased by the Excella, had not the apple of knowledge been within my purview. I knew, and more damningly had tasted, the superior.

How could I have allowed my bliss to be so devastated? Does even the banality of the whole ‘ignorance is bliss’ phrase cry out for suspension of belief regarding its nature? A tired axiom, demonstrating by example the level of its fatigue? Its truth is certainly not in question. Living in Japan, I fear that the concept of sushi elsewhere has been ruined for all time. A special holiday sunday brunch (and the view) at Top of the Mark on the rooftop of the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins in San Francisco causes others to fall, crashing down to pedestrian level. The electric excitement of Hong Kong at night leaves lesser realms in an eco-friendly brown-out. Spain. Tapas. Ad nauseam, this could be.

Would it not be better for all parties concerned if happiness, once obtained, could be constricted to simply encompass that which is within immediate view, without pondering what may lie beyond distant horizons? While I don’t regret the mind-expanding experiences that have passed me by, a part of me feels a tinge of melancholy to be always in a state of qualitative comparison.

As I write this, sipping of the replenished supply of roasted foreign fruit (‘Café Andes’ this time around), I implore you not to let me know of anything better.

Finding that my social security card has gone missing, likely thrown out due to hanging out amongst some trash-worthy papers against its better judgement, I looked up the US government here in Japan. Their site is quite helpful and offers a number to call to arrange an appointment for this. I make the call and explain the situation. I’m promptly transferred to the typical machine listing announcements, which eventually tells me to ‘press 2′ for ‘federal benefits and social security’ issues. I press ’2.’ Within seconds a friendly recorded voice comes on. I expect to hear how much my call is valued and such, so I don’t particularly listen to what is said. There is a dial tone. I must have done something wrong. I call back. I press ’2,’ listening carefully this time around. All along, the friendly voice had been trying to wish me ‘goodbye!’ click.

I continue trying through the day with the same result. I find this fiendishly clever on behalf of the American government. They can surely reduce the deficit if they can just ensure that any inquiry with the secret phrase ‘federal benefits’ triggers an immediate hang-up of the phone line. Perhaps they have not gone far enough? Google could likely be persuaded to present a 404 error if the same phrase were to be used on the net.

Okay, this was probably just a bad day for them at the embassy. I’ll keep calling during their working hours. It will just take some careful planning to catch them. You see, they work a few hours in the morning, and a couple hours in the afternoon. Those are the normal hours. The exceptions to those hours are the usual: all Japanese holidays (this is Japan), all American holidays (this, umm), and, of course, … Wednesdays.

UPDATE: Got through. Appointment set.

I had not really appreciated the significance of appreciation until recently when someone learning English as a second language wrote “I would appreciate you if you correct my English.” Yes, everyone knows that this is perfectly understandable, but the person really wanted strict advice and commented that there is almost no method to verify the correctness of a sentence. For me, learning Japanese is extremely difficult, but I cannot imagine how much harder English must be with all of it’s exceptions – not to mention all of the conversational usage which breaks what rules there are. This got me to thinking about “to appreciate.” Let the rambling begin …

It seems the issue with ‘appreciate’ is that it might seem crass if you say “I would appreciate you if you do XYZ” as it sounds a bit rudely like a bargain. Imagine if you say “I would love you if you buy me this” or “I would be your friend if you do my homework.” This sort of thing is only said jokingly (or extremely seriously to an intimate partner (eg. “I would love you if you stopped dating my brother and sister when we get engaged”)).

If you do want to ask someone to do something for you, rather than saying you would appreciate them if they do it, you would say ‘I would appreciate it if you (would/could) correct my English.’ This way it sounds like you would like the person to do something, but you will value the person regardless of whether they do it or not. Similarly, people frequently say something like ‘I’d love it if we went to Disneyland’ – but never “I’d love you if we went to Disneyland.”

If you do not make appreciation (or love, friendship, etc.) of a person dependent on some action then you could say “I appreciate you.” So, if the other person has already done something for you or has already agreed to do it for you, then you could say “I (really) appreciate you doing this for me,” “I really appreciate you correcting my English,” “I appreciate you being there for me,” etc.

As a side note, I heard my father simply say “I ‘preciate ya.” Yes, he’s Southern (U.S.). I asked him about this, saying that in California we always say “I appreciate it.” He responded that “That’s the whole difference between California and The South. – Here we care about the person, not the thing.”

Anyway, I hope this is helpfully correct and makes some sort of sense. If not … I’d appreciate hearing from you.

PS: This is marginally related to the differences between North/South alluded to above and seems as good a place as any to input a nifty quote I heard about D.C.. “Washington D.C is a city of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency.” I’ll put an attribution here if I remember who summed up things so pithily.

I’ve been fiddling with Stephen Fry again. He has a page on AudioBoo where he elicits answers to questions possibly quite interesting. Between that and his tweets it might be satiating until the next season comes around.

Unrelatedly, The other day I mentioned scrapes on my shoulders after gyming and how I have been trying to figure it out for years. Apparently all I had to do was to post that and go to sleep and the answer was obvious. That machine possibly called a calf abductor or something where you have your heel off the back of the metal bar where your shoulder is the only other contact with the machine. Well, repeatedly raising 100lbs on your shoulder at the top of the shirt seam is quite enough to gouge my tender flesh. Duh.