Time really flies...or rolls

According to the Metropolis, a weekly english language magazine for foreigners, there's a new alarm clock on the market. It's called, appropriately enough, "Clocky" and is an alarm clock on wheels that rolls away during the night and hides so that you have to get out of bed and find it to turn it off. Whether or not they become a fad here in Japan I'm not sure but I suspect that they probably won't catch on in North America where most people sleep on beds rather than on a futon on the floor. I can just imagine herds of lemming-like alarm clocks commiting suicide each night by throwing themselves off nightstands and falling to their untimely deaths.

I on the other hand have no need for an alarm clock because a) the earliest I have to be at work is 10:50 am and b) I wake up at 6:00am every day anyways because of the sun shining in my window. The sun wakes up at an ungodly time here. We're talking like 4:00 am in the morning! The flip side to this is that the sun disappears at a ridiculously early time at night. It's gets dark not too long after 6:00 pm. I know its still early in the year but I mean come on! Isn't the longest day of the year only a couple months away? I mentioned this to a fellow coworker who has done a couple of tours in Japan. His answer? Social Engineering. They want you to get up early in the morning and go to work and then they want you to go home at night and go to bed. If you've spent any time in Japanese society then that might make sense to you.

In other news, I came >this< close yesterday to buying a fairly expensive electronic item. I won't tell you what it was, only that its initials are P.S.P. I was so close that I had gone to the bank and withdrawn the money and was standing there in front of it like a little kid. But then I had a change of heart and took the money back to the bank and redeposited it. Must be a sign of maturity-either that or the pink eye has finally worked its way into my brain.

In pink eye news, I finally decided to go to the eye doctors and got a prescription for it. I was tempted to not bother today because my eyes were looking pretty good but I wore contact lenses yesterday and the red flared up again. My symptoms are so mild that it really borders on the ridiculous. But I have kareoke on payday with lots of gorgeous Japanese staff so I don't want to have to wear glasses! The worst part is that I have to toss out a brand new pair of contacts that I just started before I contacted the condition. I find it bothersome because it seems so wasteful but I'm sure Chad you have a more blunt term for it!