Monday 21 February 2011

Mwwwggghhhhhh.....maybe finished.




Do we look sick? Are we going to go......mmmwwwwgggghhhhh.....again?
Maybe no. Maybe.
We have both started eating again and keeping it down. We have both started purring again.

Apologies if you are eating while reading this: but the vet said it was roundworm. I found one culprit - measuring about 4 cm - on one of the many, many vomitty carpet tiles. 
The vet impressed us with his Open Sesame Technique for popping pills in a cat's jaw, and then we came home to watch away the weekend and detect signs of recovery in our babies.
Popo was so sick he even curled up on Yujiro's knee, so obviously delusional.

Sunday morning early we escaped for a while and went skiing on the city ski area just 20 minutes from home. Beautiful blue sky and great views. Just did the easy course and came back through the forest area. It was enough for my knee. Came home to do family lunch with Okaasan.

Spent the rest of Sunday cat watching and trying to get them to eat something. We shopped for better-than-usual cat food and came home with an array of cans and pouches with which to tempt Popo into eating again. Seafood flavored "Crispy Kiss" finally broke him.

Okaasan is fine, chatting on about losing gloves or something. After my success the other day at getting magazines onto the bookshelf she has managed to cover up the freed-up carpet spaces with more stuff. And Yujiro found a few semi-important letters from the bank and investment companies under supermarket flyers.

In the evening we left her sushi on the table and went to a jazz show! VERY good amateurs (are there any BAD amateurs in Japan?). One of my students is a jazz pianist and she was performing in a show by local music teachers and their students at the Yamaha complex.
She was great. The Japanese cooking teacher from my gym who was also there was great. They were all wonderful...even the few who made mistakes, and the poor guy who forgot the end of his number...he tried to get up from the piano stool and leave the stage but the bass player nodded him sternly back into action - it's jazz...so work it out....

After each performance they had a few words of interview by one of the teachers holding a microphone. Out of 23 people....maybe only 5 actually spoke like adults...the rest were alarmingly incoherent.
Not just bashful about public speaking, modest-cos-I'm-Japanese - but really unable to string two words together or make eye contact! AMAZING! Yet they poured all the passion and soul into great jazz piano performances.
How? Why? How can people get to be 30, 40, 50 years old and be still so socially inept? It isn't just jazz, which has its fair share of eccentrics, it's Japan...so many adult Japanese are just barely operate in relation to others.
I loved the jazz. Made me determined to get along to the jazz festivals this summer in Sapporo. But so sad to see these people unable to communicate verbally.


Anyway. Cats are eating again. There are still two boxes of chocolate to be eaten. The sun is shining and it's time to start a new week.

3 comments:

  1. Hello Oyomesan
    Lurker delurking.
    It's funny, because Japanese children seem to have social eptitude (is that a word?) in spades. My children had a couple of weeks at a Japanese primary school last year and I was so impressed by how well spoken the children at the school were, how well they responded to us adults when we spoke to them, and how confident they were when speaking in front of the class (I really wish some of it had rubbed off on my own, painfully shy and self-conscious two). I wonder when they start to lose it. Maybe when they have to start spending every waking hour studying for school and university entrance exams? Mmmm.

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  2. congrats on the cats being back to good health! i don't know, don't you find that ppl who are really into one thing, whether it be computers, or music or whatever, really do not possess any social skills? we have one worker like that. she was a computer programmer before coming to the nursing home. it's taken about half a year for her to finally get up the courage to start interacting with the residents...

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  3. hope the cats are all better. Did okaasan make it to Hula again this week? Hope so. I agree, a lot of inept at public speaking Japanese people. Probably comes form being forced to do a lot during primary school - even though that all lacks any emotion. Hai, totemo tanoshikatta desu.

    Have good weed.

    xxx

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