WHUT. MY LIFE....WHUT.

"Why all the people always seem to be just be on vacation

What do I get from it? I don't get anything at all."

Hot, tired, and really confused from the past few hours, I stumbled downstairs to watch Humi eating my donuts and Masa eating some half-priced pastries in front of the t.v.. I got a spoon for my yogurt and on my way back to my room, this random dude, maybe late 20's, blonde, kind of tall with sort of a belly, with what I may have possibly misconstrued as a slight gay lisp, says, in fluent English,

"Oh, hi there!"

 "Oh....hey?"

"You must be Alex." Whutttt how do you know my name.

"Yeah...totally."

"Neil." Neil shook my hand with the intensity of someone who is probably not gay.

"Nice to meet you."

"How long have you been here?"

"Oh you know....about a month or something. What about you?"

"About two years."

"Oh, jesus. Do you like it?"

"Not really. I'm too lazy to move. See you later." He smiled and slammed the door to his room. I blinked and ate my yogurt.

"Same boy you've always known

Well I guess I haven't grown."

Today, I got up at 9 to go meet Adrian Ho and his friends at the JR station in Ueno.

Usually when you are in a foreign country and are lucky enough to meet up with someone you know, you have most likely been close to them for a long time; at least, long enough to know that they have been traveling abroad, and close enough to the point where they would go out of their way to meet you. I met Adrian Ho 5 years ago in a Tae Kwon Do class in Bellevue, Washington. I knew him for one week. We went to dinner once, he introduced me to the Bawls energy drink--a precious fad of the days of old--and we kicked and punched our way through our severely short physical friendship. I found him on Livejournal soon after we met. I have long-since quit Tae Kwon Do, and most of my days now consist of sitting around on my ass eating yogurt and granola streaming old re-runs of Rosanne off of Youtube. But a year or two ago, Ho found me again on Facebook after we had sort of stopped talking, and due to the expansion of digital social networking and constant status updates, we discovered that we would be in the Tokyo area around the same time this Summer and, like every few years, we agreed to meet up.

I love good friendships, and I love nothing more than good friendships that don't really make sense. We got together and walked with the friends he came over with, other architecture majors from the University of Oregon in Eugene, and laughed about the old Tae Kwon Do dojo and the teriyaki chicken we ate and that one, long-lost picture of Ho in a grocery store holding a bunch of bottles of olive oil that is still somewhere, taken by my outdated camera possessed with the spirit of my dead grandmother. Ho explained that the dojo nearly went under--the IRS apparently got on the owner, Lee's ass about paying employees on the table and, unable to deal with the pressure, he left the dojo to one of the senior students and ran off to Portland. Said student really fucked things up for awhile before it was sold to another student, and apparently now things are as orderly as ever. I never really gave a fuck about that dojo, or Tae Kwon Do in general, but it was nice to hear the news.

I wandered around with Ho and these strangers like I had known them all my life. There was another stranger among them who was slightly out of the loop--a Chinese girl named Jen who knew Ho since she was a baby in Hong Kong. After growing up in China and living stateside for a few years, she decided to do exchange in Tokyo, leaving her fluent in 3 languages. Whawawhoawa. The 5 of us roamed the streets of Ueno, eating street vendor food and looking at cheap sneakers. I ordered yam soft serve ice cream....because I couldn't help myself. It was purple, and delicious, but I still wasn't really able to shake that aftertaste of fresh-baked yams. After a while, we found the entrance to a zoo! YAY!! So we spent $6 and gawked at lions, tigers, bears, monkeys, rhinos, and hippopotami to our hearts' content. I got some doughy panda themed snack and it was delicious. My shoulders slightly sunburned, I wandered around the zoo like a true American tourist--tank top, waterbottle, camera out, glossy eyed, overwhelmed look on my face the entire time. My favorite part was the sugar glider exhibit. I LOVE SUGAR GLIDERS!!! There was also a slow loris--a few in fact!! I lol'd as I was reminded of Llama, but couldn't get any pictures seeing as how they were in the nocturnal animal display hut. Zoos are so exciting, yet so melancholy at the same time. I really get a kick out of seeing exotic animals--especially tigers that are inches away from my face separated by a thick sheet of glass--but watching all of them pace monotonously around in circles in their hand-fed, cement paved environment makes me really, really uncomfortable. I try not to think about it. I just focus on how adorable the red pandas are. I DIDN'T KNOW THESE WAS RED PANDAS. A thousand internets for whoever can tap that reference.

Exhausted and overwhelmed from the excitement of staring at caged animals, we had some okonomiyaki-type food and split up, because I needed to go meet an acquaintance for a favor in Takadanobaba.

Though essentially West-Shinjuku, there's something about Takadanobaba that really weirds me out. Maybe it's the way it smells, or the way the people look. Maybe it's the abundance of rats in the street. Whatever the case, it's somewhere I would generally rather not be. But I made an agreement with a friend of a sort-of-friend that I would buy them lunch in exchange for their help. After getting off the train in Takadanobaba, I had to find Waseda University. Following along with my normal philosophy of "eh, I'll find it," I realized that this procedure often doesn't fly, especially in a portion of the city that is kind of creepy and you aren't fluent in the native language. I ended up getting directions from two policemen, an older, grey-haired woman on a bicycle, and two university students to the co-op. Albeit a supposedly repressed society, Japanese people are SO FUCKING NICE. Each one of these people went out of their way to walk me at least a block to point me in the right direction so I didn't get lost. Fortunately, my Japanese is good enough so that I can keep up with small talk and be a charming foreigner before they realize how bizarre I really am. I arrived at the co-op, and called my contact (who shall remain anonymous for now, because when we actually do meet up, their identity will give some of you some SERIOUS lulz) and he agreed to meet me. Unfortunately, as it turns out, there is more than one co-op on the Waseda University campus, and after waiting an hour, I called again to find out that he had waited for me in the other one forever, wondered why he couldn't find me, and had other business to attend to. I lol'd, because I had nothing better to do than wait outside in the warm Waseda darkness anyhow, and Tanashi is really close to Takadanobaba so I really didn't give a shit. I'll meet up with him later. As all of this waiting was happening, I noticed that there was some dude in glasses with a backpack and a nalgene bottle also waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He was also waiting at the top of the stairs when I came outside, and when I set forth on my path to return to the station, he walked in the direction I was going. Figuring he was probably just waiting for somebody too, because fuck, I can't be the only person waiting for somebody else at a damn university, I turned and exited the other way. It was the long way out of campus to the street, but it was a pretty night, and I need the exercise anyway. 

I'm walking briskly for about 15 minutes or so because, that's just kind of how I walk, when the same dude scares the living shit out of me by coming up behind me and asking where I'm going. As weird as it is, I'm kind of used to this, because I guess I'm sort of a novelty as a pasty American, and occasionally Japanese people will come up to me and ask me where I'm from, in return detailing their brief and irrelevant trip to Chicago or wherever. But I soon realized this was a little weird, because it is not just a hop, skip, and a jump from Waseda to the station....this guy must have followed me at least ten blocks. I felt honored as I recognized my first official stalker.

He followed me the remaining six blocks or so to the station, telling me that he spoke broken English and that I was very beautiful and that we should go to karaoke right now. I yawned and told him I had dinner plans with nonexistent friends. He asked if I was single, and I went on to tell him all about my blonde, Swedish boyfriend Jörgen, captain of the water polo team, who I've made up in my head for occasions such as these. After explaining that I don't have a phone, a computer, electricity, or running water and that there's absolutely no way to contact me in my commune on the farmlands of downtown Tokyo, he gave me his e-mail address, which I stuffed into my pocketbook full of all of the phone numbers and e-mail addresses I have acquired from strange men throughout this trip, none of which are Yohei's. 

Dazed and confused, I walked back to Big Wave 21 with the two donuts in a bag I had had with me the entire time, which were intended for the person I was to meet but now had no one to savor them and chomp them down. I regretted not giving the donuts to the policemen, the grey-haired lady, and the two university students. I walked into the door and saw Humi in the kitchen, cooking up his usual lavish, overly-complicated dinner. 

"Humi, do you like donuts?"

"Herro, Alex! How are you! Yes?"

"Here's some donuts. I don't want them." 

"Rearry???" His stunned reaction to the gift of stale donuts was amusing. "Thank you! Thank you for donuts!"

"Yeah, no problem."