Ponderances on a Thursday
According to my teachers, the news last night announced that we’re officially in the rainy season here. That’s right, folks, it’s Plum Rain, take 2. This time I’ve invested in a new rain suit and some towels to keep on board the scooter, so I should be ok.
After cleaning out the spam folder on my email account today, I had a thought. What sorts of spam plagues Japanese email accounts? What’s it like? In English, at least, you get the requisite offers for products to enlarge various reproductive organs, or slim your build. Then there are the drugs and get rich quick schemes. What sorts of things dominate Japanese email spam?
I am hearing rumblings of the new people coming to join the ranks of ALTs here. In preparation, I’m starting a Google Map to help explain my area. Right now it only delineates the bigger islands in Kamijima-cho and the area in which I teach. But I plan to add to it as I go. If any other Imabari dwellers want to add to it and expand upon it, let me know.
I’m having vocabulary fun thanks to Alex. He wrote a little entry using the words he studied, so I thought I’d try my hand at it too. Here’s a passage using 23 words that I didn’t fully comprehend, have habitually misused my entire life, or completely had never encountered before from the first 2 pages of vocabulary. Yay! I’m going to use as many as I can in each sentence to make it short. It will not be pretty…here goes.
Chester was a rather perspicacious young lad. Gifted with foresight, he was often viewed as a bellwether among his student peers. His reputation was one of an angelic, nearly sacerdotal, abstemious bookworm. Privately, however, Chester was a deeply supercilious soul. His own recognition of his intellectual gifts allowed him to look down on the others as mere lolling imbeciles, playing about in the muck and dross running in the culverts of academia. In his nearly preternatural state of enlightenment, they were but a ceaseless background clangor. Though his thoughts were filled with vituperative derision for his classmates, they never seemed to catch on. Indeed, Chester was neurotically craven about maintaining his image. It was not that he was complaisant, though. He simply radiated a naturally mawkish image - that of a studious misfit awkwardly attempting the insuperable; to earn the respect of those surrounding him. In reality, he had a surfeit of confidence. He knew he was destined for bigger and better things. His ego had sufficient puissance to suborn Chester’s entire being into coldly regarding his present situation in the manner of an explorer who enters his bivouac smugly at dusk, having seen an augury outline of his goal on the horizon, knowing that the following morning will bring a prefatory taste of his eventual emolument. Chester was hit by a bus, but it’s ok, because he was a total jerk. The end. Ha ha.