電話ボックス

Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute
Just sit right there
I'll tell you how I became allergic to bleeding wheat


I was a bit concerned about my hideous hayfever, so I coincided a trip home with an allergy test to find out exactly what was setting me off. The results were a surprise, to say the least.

I am allergic to wheat and oats and prawns, but we don't care about that.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my undying love for bread and cereal is apparently my downfall. And has been for 22 years, without my knowledge.

Which does bring up an interesting question - Since I've gone for 22 years heartily consuming food that my body hates, why hasn't it told me by now? Or has it already, and I just wasn't listening?
In any case, I've been promised by various sources that even a month off the stuff and I'll be feeling great, full of energy, life of Riley, etc. etc. So, rather than let the Evil Wheat keep killing me from the inside (somehow), I'm going gluten-free. Don't have much of a choice.

Now, not eating wheat sounds fairly simple:
- Avoid bread
Sigh. Check.
- Avoid wheat-based (read: most) cereal
Check. Corn Flakes are still cool.
- Avoid pasta
bugger bugger I mean check.
- Avoid anything with wheatflour in it I mean anything
Check. As in, check ingredients.

It's only now that I appreciate how much wheat and oats have pervaded our lives. Some meat? Sorry, gravy has wheat flour. Let's go Japanese! Except not, because noodles and soy sauce are also wheatflour-based. KFC? They batter everything. Kebab? All about the flour-based baps and rollers.

Basically, I'm living off carrots, fruit and some ungravied meat, along with an unexpected saviour - Uncle Ben's. Rice, rice, rice all the way, with buggerall wheatflour involved. Loving it. And I'll have to be loving it for some time.

Oh well. At least I have an excuse to eat sugar - carb substitute. Honest.


So I'm dealing with it.
Didn't stop me crying like a baby when I threw out all my bread and cereal, though. It was like kicking puppies off a cliff.

So I was turned on to Kayleigh, by Marillion, about a week ago, and I have to say I'm rather addicted. If you haven't heard it, I recommend watching it before you read this. No really, it's an excellent song. Everyone should appreciate it. I would talk more about it, but I don't actually know anything about music and I'm afraid I'd get about 5 words in before I started making things up and telling you some ridiculous fact, such as that Kayleigh was actually a metaphor for the songwriter's pen and he was struggling with writer's block. So it was actually an ode to his pen to apologise for past misdeeds and request forgiveness, so that he could continue to communicate his beautiful mental images to music.

...actually, that does sort of make sense. But anyway.

Link to the song: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cwNVfNc1IQM


It was only upon actually listening to the lyrics that it occurred to me that some of them might be marginally less than sane. In fact, one of them very much so. But I'll get to that.

And now, as a glorious waste of your time (I'm good at that), I hereby give you the lyrics for the song, with a running commentary to put together the pieces of this outrageous story.

( Er, behind the cut, that is. )

This entry is dedicated to a Londoner friend who's about to bravely take the hard path and head off on the biggest journey of her life.

20:04 <@Mystie> paz: i won't join more, i swear!
20:04 <@Mystie> new group: oooh, anime with western/rare dialect, come see, come see
20:04 <@Mystie> paz: i won't joi--- oooh hougen~~~ *follows*

I just wanted to post this as an example of someone who knows me so much better than I do.

So I'm sitting here with eyes wide open, proactively ready to take on the world and raise productivity to superhuman levels. The downside? It's past 3 in the morning and I have work in a few hours. Insomnia is a terrible thing on a Sunday night, I don't know why it keeps happening to me. Maybe I'm cursed with Sunday night sleeplessness, sort of a reverse-Sabbath.

OK, I'll admit it, last week it was entirely my fault. I'd realised that I had little to no drinks in the house on Sunday night, and the nearest (open) place to stock drinkables was the garage, which would have required me to entertain the preposterous notion of going out and walking down the road. So I went hunting for anything that looked vaguely drinkable. The milk was there, still in date but not enough to fill a refreshing glass full of. Damn. But then my eyes fell on the teabags. And the milk. And the kettle. A plan had been formed. Which did seem like an excellent idea at the time.

Cut to 3am, and me lying in bed with eyes wide open like saucers, cursing anyone and everyone who had a hand in discovering caffeine. I did eventually drop off an hour or two later, then proceeded to unwittingly ignore my alarm until my body's emergency defence measures woke me up at 8am and I threw myself out the window to get to work on time.

And now, a week later, I'm revisiting my old friend Insomnia. This is ridiculous, I didn't even drink any caffeine today. Unless the potassium in banana juice has a 14-hour turnover, I'm fairly sure I shouldn't be doing this. To be fair, I did drop off for a couple of hours earlier, but even so I'm usually out cold by at least 1. And yet, after trying relaxing music, boring books/games and other assorted old strategies for forcing sleep, I'm still wide awake.

...I don't think I was bitten by a vampire. No hideous fang marks on my neck and my only current craving is for pints of delicious milk. So not that, unless a vampire cow found its way into my apartment.

I even turned to iTunes to find sleep-inspiring music, but all it's produced is music that gives me the feeling I'm about to be abducted by aliens. And as relaxing as that sentiment is, it's not quite my cup of decaf.



One productive thing has come of this, though. I found out that LJ really does support RSS feeds. I know that there are some casual readers of this who don't use LJ cough cough parents cough who always give out to me for never updating, then don't read anything when I do. Well! Now you can use this:

http://fuushu.livejournal.com/data/rss

and have no excuse for missing my infrequent nuggets of wisdom, because your browser will kick you whenever I post something.

So it's been a couple of weeks now, and the apartment's actually mostly sorted.

A couple of things I didn't mention last time were that the shower had no shower curtain, and thus basically flooded the apartment after every shower. Also, the washing machine is psychotic and tries to murder the rest of the kitchen in a furious rage whenever it hits spin cycle.

After angry emails from basically everyone across all of the translation teams, the Company was kicked into action and gave us a shower curtain, a dining table and shelves. Now, me being me, I still had the boxes sitting in the middle of the living room, so getting through to the kitchen wasn't as much a short walk as an obstacle course.

Enter my mother, who swept in with her guardian angel powers and poked me into getting to work. So together, we rearranged the kitchen to make it more workable, unpacked everything, bought stuff to make the place look somewhat nice, and ordered in a dryer to replace the tiny pathetic clotheshorse.

So now the place is livable! The washing machine still goes on vicious rampages, but I can set it to the less violent spin cycle now that I have a dryer to balance it out. The shower curtain plus makeshift lip stops it flooding, and the desk is still as beautiful as it was.

Gonna need a new TV at some point, though. Hrm.

Not updated this much lately, I've really beem meaning to.

Well, the big news at the moment is that I'm moving. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning. Yep, the glorious apartment and brilliant location really was too good to be true and Nintendo have decided to move us all to one general area on the other side of the city. We were significantly loud in our resistance, but nothing we could do, since it's one free apartment to another.

So we went to take a look today, having waited almost 3 hours to get our keys from the landlord at the office.

And yeah, step-down is a gross understatement. It might just be me overreacting, but my god is it awful. It's kind of like living in a mental institution or a high-brow prison. Z was thrilled, since he's been living in a one-room flat since he got here, but the rest of us were very suitably unimpressed.

But it's done now, no going back. I'm moving in there tomorrow morning and won't have internet till Monday. So wish me luck not going insane!

There comes a point in every man's life when he has to move out of the next and brave it in the cold, hard world. The Real World of Work and Responsibility.

Which is fine, I'm having no issues with The Real World so far. We seem to get on pretty well. My main enemy, however, has reared its ugly head. Yes, boys and girls, cooking.

Cooking is a delicate art, one created by cavewomen in an attempt to stop the recent invention of fire being used for mass indiscriminate arson sprees. It is an almost sentient creature, one that passes through history in a display of torment and torture of poor humans that could ironically be likened to a mass indiscriminate arson spree.

Of course, none of this is known to the public. The people who discover the truth and attempt to draw the world's attention to it have met rather sticky ends at the hands of kitchen implements. A famous example is Sylvia Plath, who was victimised by her entire kitchen for years on end until her own oven finally offed her, the poor woman.

Naturally, every youngling who leaves the nest, whether by a carefully-calculated leap of faith, or a carefully-calculated flying kick delivered by its loving parents, has to come up against this horror. And of course, they are all silent about it; who wants to be asassinated in the night by an army of teacloths?
Eventually, they see the light and declare that cooking is Very Safe, and Actually Quite Convenient, Really. For these people there is no return. They have been caught up in the endless cycle of life, death and reheating. And they live out their lives, never knowing true freedom.

The Japanese, recognising this terrible fact of life, attempted a brave countermeasure in the form of sashimi. A novel idea indeed, for a time casting out the foul demon.
However, it did not quite go according to plan. One fateful day, a man had a remarkably convenient idea planted into his head: combining this raw fish with rice. Naturally, the rice would have to be cooked, as raw rice is inedible.
By this time, the meaning of the raw fish had been lost in the annals of time, concealed in cryptic messages left by the peoples of Nara in their poetry. However, by the time anyone could decipher their unique poetry, the damage was done and Japan was lost.

But what their efforts did grant us was hope. Centuries later, the efforts of both the Nara poets and great literary geniuses such as the late Plath have been deciphered. Their lives have not been in vain.

Only we, in this era of automation, can halt this terrible demon. Food dispensers. Automatic cookers. Cooking robots. The list goes on.
Only we can stand up to this plague controlling humanity. Only by removing the terrible pain that cooking causes us can we truly be free. We must step forward, all of us. United.

And if not, there's always arson.


---


So I've been branching out lately from my 3-week dinner diet of oven pizza and microwaveable pasta into actual proper cooking. It was an effort to broaden my horizons and get in touch with my true inner self. It had absolutely nothing to do with me running out of pizza.

The first thing I did was about a week or two ago, when I did chicken, spuds and carrots. You know, the usual farmers' dinner.
It went well enough. The chicken tasted heavily of More, although the potatoes and carrots were slightly on the overdone side. I was told afterwards (isn't that always the case?) that you should toss them in halfway during the oven time.
Cooking #1: Moderate success.

Yesterday was decreed to be a Pasta Day, which was the most recent thing I had made back at home ("Oh crap, I'm moving out, quick, teachme2food") and was relatively easy to make.
The garlic oil was divine (although a bit strong, using less next time) and the bacon bits really added to it except when they decided to collect in a big snobby group at the bottom of the bowl grr.
So, cooking #2: success.


Today was undecided. I had chicken, potatoes and carrots, but I also had eggs, bacon and pasta. So I flicked through my Student Bum Recipe Book, and it suggested scrambled eggs with bacon. Which I duly followed.

Doing something I hadn't done before, however, comes with its risks. The fact that it's me doing it only serves to double the risks. So I popped chicken et al into the oven as a backup, just in case my dinner tried to eat me back or something.

The result was interesting. I'd used 2 eggs and possibly a bit too much milk in the blend. And halfway through the process, the eggs decided that they would rather actually be an omelette. Which, given my omelette track record, I wasn't about to argue with. So it ended up being an omelette with 2 extra eggs which was milky on the bottom and very, very eggy on the top. Interesting.

Chicken still tastes like More. Potatoes and carrots are still overdone. Sign. You can't win 'em all.

So it's been a relatively packed week. Outside work that is, which is, um, exciting. And groundbreaking duties that mark me as a productive member of society. Clearly.


---


My dad was over the weekend before last, and we spent the time being brave adventurers, exploring the area surrounding Bornheim to discover the potential mystery locked behind the walls of the city called Frankfurt.

Yeah.

A lot of it was spent following the pointer of a mysterious yellow sign marked "LIDL". Now, I had no idea there was a Lidl anywhere closer to me than the Zeil, so this intrigued me. Because while I have an Aldi around the corner, I quickly discovered that over here, Aldi is vastly, vastly inferior to Lidl with regard to the special offers.

I will interject here for the sake of the ignorant, clueless or otherwise American readers to explain that Lidl and Aldi are examples of discount supermarkets, that mostly specialise in own-brand stuff and have weekly themed special offers, starting on Mondays and Thursdays. And they often are really good offers, hence the people queueing up outside them at 9am and kicking and screaming to get to the parts of the supermarket with the offer they want.
Hell, half of my fleeces are Lidl jumpers.

Anyway, the hunt for the Lidl continued. We found ourselves out on a big open road thing, and approaching a big blue skyscraper that was totally out of place (buildings are not large in Bornheim), and using it as a landmark to not get lost with. I mean, obviously we are manly Irish men and do not get lost ever. But, you know, the crafty wiles of Frankfurt, streets moving, shops sneakily changing their window wares as we pass so they can no longer be used as signposts, etc.

We never did find the Lidl. After winding up back on the Bergerstraße, we just gave up and had ice-cream. From an Italian place that is so nice omg I have to go back every day or I will die you know how it is.
Then we went exploring the southern half of Bornheim, but our perilous journey was cut short when we were both not as much called as screamed at by Nature to return to my apartment. Thus, the adventure ended...for now. To be continued at a later date.


---


And last weekend was spent up in Düsseldorf with the great Lisa and an army of weeaboos (read: cosplayers). It was Japan Day up there, so I was recruited to attend. Of course, as soon as I found out there was takoyaki sold there, my train tickets were magically sold.

So I confidently hopped on the U77, after the map assured me that it would take me to the station I wanted. And I sat, waiting for the station to appear on the list. And I hit the last stop, and it was not there. It was then that I realised I was indeed on the right train, it was just going in the wrong direction. Yup. Go team.
So I went back on the line to the real stop, and humbly followed the weeaboos to the Rhine promenade, where Japan Day was being held. And it was like a huge city-sponsored anime convention, cosplayers everywhere.

Most of the day was spent in the cinema, watching Nabbie no koi, a wonderful Japanese film about an old woman named Nabbie on a small Okinawan island, and her family and the island community. It was nice and slowly paced, one of the very rare times I didn't get frustrated with slow Japanese film. And her husband was hilarious. Must find this movie again.

I emerged to be told that apparently it had rained pretty badly while I was inside, which had wiped out most of the weeaboos. Naturally, I was inconsolable after hearing this.
I then brought Lisa to partake in wonderful takoyaki. Unfortunately, she was marginally less excited about the prospect of eating octopus than I was, and it didn't go down quite as well.

Next stop, Straelen. Pronounce that. Go on.

No, really.

Say it.

Well, you got it wrong, sorry. It's pronounced "Strahlen", because apparently in oldish German script, the "ae" is a long "a" sound, and it still lives on in place names to torture the Germans. Much like the neighbouring city, Duisburg, which is pronounced like it reads, but is a nightmare to pronounce for most Germans, because they don't have the "ui" combination.

Nordrhein-Westfalen is apparently famous for its asparagus this time of year. And after eating it, I can see why. it is so nice i need more now I am now questing in Frankfurt for asparagus.
Her mother also likes rhubarb, and apparently the rest of the family loathe it. And we all know how I feel about rhubarb. I think her mother was thrilled that someone finally shares the same taste buds as her.


---


So my adventures in and around Bornheim and Düsseldorf have inspired me to get a satnav, so I don't get ridiculously lost. so I ordered one on Amazon, which I'm sure will be delivered sometime this month.


But what did get delivered today was my package from Amazon Japan! Whoo-hoo!

- .hack//G.U. novels 1-4 (Whee novels! More walls of text for me to agonise over!)
- .hack//G.U. + volumes 3+4 (For work. Clearly.)
- .hack//XXXX volume 2 (Whee work.)
- .hack//Alcor volume 1 (Totally work.)
- .hack//4koma volume 1 (I'm not obsessed!)
- .hack//CELL novel 1 (Not sure why I got this. Potential work?)
- .hack//Epitaph of the Twilight (I won't even pretend here. Holding this makes my fanboy insides melt and swirl.)
- 方言の地図帳 (Dialect maps of Japan EEE EEE EEE)
- 声に出して読みたい方言 (Japanese classics rewritten in dialect and recorded on CD)
- 方言すらすらブック (General dialect book. I saw this in Japan and overlooked buying it. Now it is mine.)
- 日本語教科書の落として穴 (The Pitfalls of Japanese Textbooks. A book outlining all of the things Japanese textbooks and classes etc. teach students that don't quite mesh with real Japanese. I've heard people rave on about this wonderful book, so now I must read it.)

The German language irritates me in many ways. Let's take an example, question words!

Wo = Who
Wer = Where
Wenn = When

...

...is what you'd expect, right? I mean, German is ridiculously close to English anyway, and they share a common root, so they'd obviously have similar words for things.

Wrong.

The correct order is this:

Wo = Where
Wer = Who
Wenn = If
Wann = When


This naturally leads to frequent headaches for learners of German such as I was in school, and awkward situations for unfortunate English speakers like me who make the Wann/Wenn mistake a few times a week.

Colin: If you open until?
Innocent Stallholder: ???


There's also the fact that German, like every language, is subject to Sod's Law of Foreign Languages, which generally goes along the lines of "The language you learned in school doesn't actually exist and is in fact a big fat lie." This is something that everyone who's ever been abroad discovers, and a lot of people I know personally experienced upon arriving in Japan ("What's an ore?").

This applies equally to German. One of the most basic words that you learn is "nein", meaning "no". And even people who don't know/care about German know that no is "nein", right?
Guess what! The Germans don't! I have not heard the word once since I arrived. It's all about the "nee".
The same happens with two, where "zwei" becomes "zwo" for some reason, although I'm told it's mostly a South Germany thing.


All of these pitfalls unite to make German an insidious language to learn. Japanese is one thing, because it's so different that there's very few instances of "oops, sorry, that word honestly doesn't mean 'stupid spoiled whore' in English..." But German is actually treacherous, because it has so many false friends who take you out to the best dinner you've ever had, then leave you to foot the bill.

So, Germany. Yep. Very German.

Finally got all my packing done by 1am this morning. By which I mean, I put stuff haphazardly on the bed and my dad worked his ridiculous magic to make them all magically fit in the suitcase. Without any of the vaccuum bags we were planning to use, I might add.
This was followed by bed, which consisted of 2 hours of fretful insomnia and 1 hour of sound sleep followed by aggravated bouts of narcolepsy which I like to believe I fought off valiantly. Followed by forcing my parents out of bed and flying to the airport (see what I did there? Haw haw). Thus followed madcap adventures of Colin going to the wrong gate twice, before fleeing back to the proper one. Really, I might as well not have bothered, because it was delayed by half an hour anyway. I was drifting in and out of sleep before we took off, but there was something about a missing passenger, followed by what I swear was the plane running back and forth along the runway (practice run?) before the actual taxi.

Landing in Germany, I immediately found myelf surrounded by German. As you do. I, having not even looked at German since first year, was suitably out of my depth. Still am. Haven't spoken a word of German since I got here except my address. Which isn't as bad as it sounds, given that I've talked to a sum total of three people.

So my apartment. Wow. When they said it was fully furnished, they weren't joking. Kitchen! With cutlery! And iron! And ironing board! Bed, with linen! And towels! TV! With satellite! Internet connection that got set up on the same day that I arrived! And my only bill is the internet bill. Amazing.
Also, every building in the vicinity is at least five stories. This is both awe-inspiring and somewhat claustrophobic.

Having finally forced myself to actually leave the place, I went for a look around. There's a farmers' market every weekend right around the corner, but the German intimidated me, and I didn't have a bag with me. So I just went straight for the familiar, an Aldi down the road. Without a bag, of course, and unable to find the bags, I ended up carrying an armful of shopping (bread, jam, fruit juice, milk...the essentials) home, while people looked at me in an alarmed way. First day in Germany, and I'm already being judged.

As odd as it is, I'm homesick for Japanese. At least with Japanese I know where I am. It's been years of painful toil and constant kicks in the teeth to learn it, but now that I'm in Germany, I'm getting heavy withdrawal symptoms. Mainly because my German brain (very small) needs to take my Japanese brain aside and explain kindly but firmly that German would not be better off with "ka" or "korekara" or other such ridiculously useful Japanese quirks. Because every time I try to focus on German, Japanese comes in with its trademark flying kick.

In any case, I'm here, I'm settled and I have internet. Next step, food supplies!