Eureka!!

I had a bit of an epiphany on the way home after watching King Kong tonight. Actually King Kong has absolutely nothing to do with this but I thought I would throw it out there. I actually thought it was quite good, but it was a three hour movie about a gorilla. A three hour movie about a gorilla! Hopefully the director's cut edition, if there is one, will be exactly that. Cut out about an hour of footage instead off adding more like they usually do. Why do they call it a director's cut anyways if they add more content?

Anyways, I'm off on a tangent again. So I had a bit of an epiphany tonight regarding this blog. That is, that this blog really could be twenty times more brilliant than it is (I'm not actually saying that it is brilliant-you know what I'm trying to say!) The biggest crime a writer can commit is to bore his audience. Fortunately I'm not a writer so I'm under no such constrictions! Mwhahaha! God knows I'm probably a serial-borer what with my fascination of restroom hand-drying technology and what passes for highschool uniform fashions (not to mention highschool drama shows!)

Getting back on track again. As I was saying, it seems to me that this blog isn't quite living up to it's potential. It isn't firing on all cylinders, for you mechanics out there. When I said I had an epiphany tonight, I made it sound like it was something out of the ordinary. In fact, on a good day (a day that I actually make it off the couch and outside of the house,) I'll have anywhere from five and up to ten or eleven epiphanies a day. It's one of those things that comes with being a foreigner in Japan.

I never have serious epiphanies. Nothing life changing. They're always ridiculous. I'll have one and then think to myself, 'Oh God, that's hilarious! I've got to remember to write it in my blog.' But of course, I never do remember. Epiphanies are like dreams-they come and go and by the time I sit down at the computer at night, they're nothing but fleeting memories and I'm stuck writing about restroom hand dryers.

Perhaps it's for the best. Most of my observations probably wouldn't translate to text well anyways. They're almost always about japanese inanities or or absurdities and you really have to be there to experience it for yourself to appreciate the humour. Tonight's, for instance, happened as I was walking by one of the pachinko places. Gambling is illegal in Japan so you take your prizes and turn them in for cash at a 'store' around the corner. Only for this particular pachinko place, the 'store' is directly across the street. The only way it could possibly be any closer would be if it was inside the pachinko building itself, which would then of course be illegal. I don't know why, but as I approached those two doors standing directly opposit each other, I felt a moment of clarity, as if I had suddenly solved a piece of the puzzle that is Japan. That, combined with the recollection of a conversation I had with a student in voice class, (according to him, many pachinko parlours are owned by North Koreans who send their earnings back to North Korea to fund nuclear weapon research,) invoked a moment of mirth that made me wish I was at a computer to get it all down. But like I said, these things don't really translate well to text.