Bellydancing Fun

Yesterday, Mari had a New Year's party for all of her loyal students and assistants. Luka and I went and had a great time. All the girls fawned over Luka and he just ate it up. I got to play the dumbek(a middle-eastern drum) and perform my pelican dance. That's all for now. check back for updates...

Karaoke commercial

Yesterday, one of my students asked me if I was in a karaoke commercial. I couldn't believe that he even recognized me- I appear in the first scene for less than 2 seconds. I've included the link for your viewing pleasure.
click here

The original website is here: http://www.joyjoy.co.jp/top.html

Luka in the sky with rice...

As everyone knows, people in Japan eat a lot of rice, even my son. The thing is, I never really realized how much rice we ate until Luka came along. Now I find dried pieces of rice all over of the apartment, or stuck in hidden creases of my son's clothes. Don't get me wrong, we clean the apartment and his clothes regularly, but somehow these renegade pieces of rice always seem to get away...

Past Life

I know it sounds funny but I talked to a telephone psychic about my past life. She's a pretty popular psychic here in Nagoya who used to be an English teacher. She conducts all of her sessions over the phone for security reasons. Anyway, it turns out that I was a buddhist nun in northern Japan during the Edo period in my past life. I had had a very hard life and before I passed away I resolved to be reborn again as far away as possible from Japan. I made it to America- that's probably far enough. The funny part is that I came back.
It's impossible to prove whether the psychic was right or wrong, but either way she can tell a great story and she definitely doesn't sugarcoat her readings at all. Of course, the reading was kind of depressing. I wanted to be a royal prince living in France or a great misunderstood composer. Oh well, maybe I can be a misunderstood composer in this life...

Woops!

When I first came to Japan, my wife's family would often take us out to the local chinese restuarant. The place was and still is amazing, although it's not much to look at. It's more like a little hole in the wall with grease stained walls and windows, a sign of an authentic chinese restuarant in Japan. Anyway, my Japanese at the time was limited to simple one to two word phrases like "delicious" or "I want to go, eat,etc."
So, one day we were all in a cab trying to decide where to eat for the night and someone mentioned the restuarant. I thought this would be a great chance to show off my Japanese skills to the in-laws, so I said(or thought I said) "That's sounds great! That place has delicious food!" Unfortunately the name of the restuarant like a lot of Chinsese restuarants has the character for "unique" or "珍" as its first character which is pronounced as Chin and the second character is the repitition character "々" and the third character is "店" or ten which means shop or restuarant. So the name of the restaurant is Chin-chin tei but if you drop the 'tei' part like I did that fateful night, it means penis. So, in a cab with my(at that time)future in-laws, wife, and a cab driver I said "I like c--k, it's delicious, I wanna eat it!" and if you think that's bad I thought they couldn't hear me the first time so I said　it at least three or four times. Mari kept elbowing me harder and harder until finally she stepped on my foot and explained what I said in English. Everyone just turned bright red and stared at their shoes. I thought it was the funniest thing that ever happened and of course I was all alone in that opinion.

High Fever

Luka has had a pretty high fever since New Year's Day. Mari and I have been stuck inside for the past few days, but it's actually kind of liberating. He should be fine. He's been getting lots of rest and he still has his famous appetite and strange love of natto and seaweed. I've just been writing a bit and updating my website. Oh yeah! Mari and I were cleaning the other day and I found this CD of a piece for six guitars called Thoughts on Landing. When I wrote it I didn't really think it was such a great piece but on second listening it's not too shabby. The following is a performance from Washington State. The idea I wanted to convey was of landing in a strange new place.
ThoughtsonLanding.mp3
SummerFestival.mp3