I can’t say for sure if the 16-hour fast has helped or not, because every trip into a different time zone is different, due to the time and duration of the flight and other factors, but I’m doing reasonably well.\u00c2\u00a0 I still have impredictable moments of incipient narcolepsy, but overall I’m staying awake when I should and feeling dirt tired right about now.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the train to church I began Barack Obama’s book “Dreams from My Father,” which resulted in a retiree opposite me asking where I was from and what was my purpose for visiting Japan.\u00c2\u00a0 I let him have his English practice; he used to work in advertising for mass media.\u00c2\u00a0 He said he thought I looked like an American or a German, so he was surprised that I was from Switzerland, especially since he figured I’d be an American from the book I was reading.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t explain the details – sometimes I can’t be bothered.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
At church Uchida-san preached on 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, with the title “It is the Lord who judges me.”\u00c2\u00a0 It seems that he’s also working through this book, if a previous post<\/a> is any hint (the difficulty in understanding his Japanese corroborates that it was also Uchida-san preaching back then).\u00c2\u00a0 I can tell his sermons are systematic and his sentences a little tortuous, and that’s about it, although\u00c2\u00a0I do get the gist of his sermons.\u00c2\u00a0 Today’s sermon as I understood it: The judgment that matters is the Lord’s, because in comparison to him men know little and wield little permanent power.\u00c2\u00a0 Even I myself don’t know myself well enough to judge myself correctly.\u00c2\u00a0 Or so.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Because today was the first Sunday that a group from Park Cities Presbyterian Church in Dallas joined the church, they made taco salad and lemonade for the young adults group.\u00c2\u00a0 What with my zeppin burger<\/a> yesterday for dinner I’ve had quite the Japanese culinary experience so far…\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n I had the odd experience of nearly all new American acquaintances expressing the impression that we’d met before.\u00c2\u00a0 In some cases we got close – Isaac had come here in 2002, shortly after I’d returned to Switzerland.\u00c2\u00a0 In others, we merely figured out that Patrick got his degree at DTS, where Catharine is now, and Amy works at SMU, which is where Mom went to college.\u00c2\u00a0 At any rate, after lunch they proceeded to explain what they were doing (which is where I found out that they’re a sister church of Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City) and talk about Texas (y’all, it’s the biggest state in the contiguous US).\u00c2\u00a0 They concluded with a game called “Howdy Partner!” where the person able to say Howdy Partner with the most marshmallows in his mouth wins.\u00c2\u00a0 It will pain some of my friends in Basel to learn that all the contestants spit out the marshmallows in their mouth at the end.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n On the train home I had my sleep attacks, despite otherwise enjoying Obama’s book.\u00c2\u00a0 I spent my evening buying a train ticket to Nagoya for tomorrow and eating sashimi, tofu and radish salad, and chicken wings at a neat Japanese restaurant which unfortunately decided strident R&B made for the best atmosphere.\u00c2\u00a0 I walked briefly into a bookstore and again pondered the purchase of the DVD with the robot called Stephan, \u00e3\u201a\u00b9\u00e3\u0192\u2020\u00e3\u0192\u2022\u00e3\u201a\u00a1\u00e3\u0192\u00b3 \u00e5\u00ae\u2021\u00e5\u00ae\u2122\u00e3\u0081\u00b8\u00e8\u00a1\u0152\u00e3\u0081\u008f<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, the idea of laying down 4000 yen for what was essentially a novelty product – a DVD in Japanese and “Stephanese with Japanese subtitles” – prevented me from following through.\u00c2\u00a0 On the way back to the hotel I came across a Dodge Ram 1500, possibly the most ridiculous car a Tokyoite could decide to purchase.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n A final observation on observations and I’ll close.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m a rather visual person and I observe people.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve noticed that although I still notice female beauty, I see it with somewhat changed eyes: admiration has been mostly supplanted by analysis of what works and what doesn’t and what might work on the woman I care about.\u00c2\u00a0 I hadn’t particularly noticed that in Switzerland,\u00c2\u00a0so I suppose it’s the distance and the sheer amount of fodder for people-watching in Japan that brought that to my attention.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not unhappy with this development.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Actually, I’ll add one more thing: if someone could help me turn off the stupid little joystick cum button in the middle of my keyboard, I’d be most grateful.\u00c2\u00a0 I keep hitting it as I type.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can’t say for sure if the 16-hour fast has helped or not, because every trip into a different time zone is different, due to the time and duration of the flight and other factors, but I’m doing reasonably well.\u00c2\u00a0 I still have impredictable moments of incipient narcolepsy, but overall I’m staying awake when I should and feeling dirt tired right about now.\u00c2\u00a0 On the train to church I began Barack Obama’s book “Dreams from My Father,” which resulted in a retiree opposite me asking where I was from and what was my purpose for visiting Japan.\u00c2\u00a0 I let him have his English practice; he used to work in advertising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}