2013 so far in 5 minutes

Ready...go:

The first maybe 20 minutes or so of New Year's this year were spent in some rowdy gross pub in Shinjuku. The guy I had just met that night for the first time (we ate soba) and I ducked in there because we were in danger of ringing in the New Year on the street and that seemed somehow inadequate, I guess. Really it would have been fine. Anything would have been fine at that point. I had abandoned fineness.

On the 1st I did some laundry, like my sheets. There are some mold spots on my futon but they did not come off when I brushed them with a dish soap-laced toothbrush, so I gave up and just put the clean sheets over it. I also did some homework, like sending a New Year's card to my classic lit prof. Oh, and I cooked for the first time in a really long time. I made spicy nabe with pork and tofu, lots of veggies.

On the 2nd I studied in the morning ("studied?") I am reading Botchan but I have gotten to a point where it's sort of tricky and it's hard to feel like I want to keep reading. I know that if I read more I will have to look up more words in the dictionary, which is a soulless exercise. And then I don't remember the words anyhow. I have learned some words, though, like 親譲り and 無鉄砲 and 無闇.

In the afternoon of the 2nd I went to a New Year's party at a friend's house. Actually, they are more like my Japanese family. We ate a huge spread of traditional Japanese New Year's food and then they made nabe with fish and stuff in it that we dipped in ponzu. Everything was super delicious. We drank a lot. I met some new people and some of them were single. That fact was is always pointed out kind of dramatically because they know I'm single too.

Oops, 6 minutes.