some people can take a joke, and some people need to remove a large object from their colon
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Most of my life kind of blurs together and I can’t remember exactly what I did on any one day, but certain ones stand out, either because they were really good or really bad. If I look back and pick out the best days of my life—ranking is kind of silly, but I’ll go ahead with it—I can remember almost everything I did that day. I can remember the day I found out through the grapevine that a girl I was hopelessly, desperately in love with, and who had a boyfriend of several years, had the hots for me. I remember every thing I did up until that point and after it for about an hour each way, like a video tape. I can remember jumping into a large sand pit with my little sister from the construction of a highway in our yard. I can remember lighting fireworks off by the Minnesota river and talking about girl problems with friend when I was 12. Little peaks like that that keep my memory from becoming one helpless blur.

Big days like graduation and holidays stand out, but also there’re just some days at work or school that were just plain good, and for no particular reason. People were in a good mood and I had a good time, just as simple as that.

Lately I’ve been stressing about getting things done—trying to keep a daily exercise routine, studying for my Japanese proficiency test and keeping the ever-growing pile of stuff in my apartment at bay, but yesterday I kind of pulled out the stops and let in the momentum carry me.

It was my school’s festival last weekend, the likes of which we don’t have in the ol’ USA. Kids put on plays, music and dance clubs perform, and all kinds of crazy events. It’s something you have to experience to understand, but the atmosphere is happy as hell, to put it colloquially.

Some of the homeroom classes open up shops, so I had lunch at one of those. Then I had my fortune told at an Auspice, and I bought a bunch of key chains and bracelets from another place. At one point I saw an almost albino-white girl walking around with some older Japanese people, and I assumed she was an exchange student at another school, which is pretty rare. I stopped by their table and asked her, in Japanese, if she could speak English. No, in fact she was from some country south-west of Russia, whatchakalit-issa. And that was the second time I talked to a foreign person in Japanese out of necessity. She said she had gotten some scholarship to tour Japan for a couple weeks. So I left it at that and wished her happy travels.

I tried to catch all the plays, and my favorite had to be Alice in Wonderland, where the queen was played by the Judo club captain, a stocky boy. He really milked that role.

Anyway, while the excitement was dying down, one of my American friends and I were standing around. He’d come to catch the tail end of things. We chatted up some random people, and ran into a guy who had been student teaching at the school the previous term. We hung out for a while, and then he invited us over to his house, unexpectedly, which was only like a five-minute walk.

We sat around talking around a coffee table, and met his mother, who happened to be the host mother of the Russian-esc girl, Ana, who I’d met the day before—talk about coincidences. Then their daughter came home, followed his father, grandparents and Ana. My friend, Mr. G., the American, found out that Anna was a dancer, and they taught each other different steps, which was pretty smooth. And then Mr. A, our Japanese friend, showed me his high school yearbook. He was a graduate of the school I teach at, so I got to see younger versions of a lot of teachers. One teacher, who still works there, he told me had married and divorced to two of his former students, and was currently single, all based on rumor, of course.

Later the grandfather wandered in, and he started talking about the war, for some reason, but not resentfully. And that’s the first time I’ve talked about the war in depth with Japanese people. He apparently had been training as a soldier, but as soon as he finished his training, the war ended.

Then we were invited to stay for dinner, and had temakizushi, make-your-own sushi roll. The family was really friendly and social, so much so that they didn’t seem at all Japanese. But when you meet witty people anywhere in the world, I’m sure they transcend their own cultures and do things the same way. As I say, some people can take a joke, and some people need to remove a large object from their colon.

After dinner, Mr. G and I said our good-byes, rode our bikes halfway home, and then stood around talking for a couple hours. Then a guy shouted to Mr. G from his bike, and it turned out to be a 20-some-year-old dude he met at a bar one time. He makes designer jeans out of his apartment.

It was just a good day. I don’t want to go all mystical, but once in a while you can feel fate pushing you in one direction—you meet one good person, and everything else kind of falls into place.