Tonight I am without the normal entertainment that keeps me busy throughout most workday evenings. Thus, I write.

"Why no entertainment?" you ask? Well, Amy and I are having a little belated Thanksgiving gathering at her place this Saturday and in attempt to give that real holiday feeling to the whole affair I am recording a football game, which of course means I can't watch it. So the recorder is going and the tv is off. I will do this again tomorrow night so that we can have at least two games for the day.
Yeah, we're (or maybe it's just me) a little crazy, but one of the guys that is coming has already expressed his excitement about being able to watch football, so it's worth it. He lives way up in a small town and I don't think he gets the satellite service that I do which affords me the opportunity to watch my favorite team sport in the history of man. Between technology and sport a guy can waste a lot of time. But waste is such a strong word. I choose to call it research. Research on which kind of defense I should use against the run when playing my football video game.
Shutup.

Today was fun. Yuda is always fun.
On the way to my first class my teacher told me, "Ah, tomorrow is Thanksgiving in America."
"Yes," I answered, "It is," thinking about the fun I would be missing.
Then she came back with, "Today, please tell the students about Thanksgiving."
A year ago I would have sent that being in my head back to the file room where he would have scrambled in a sweat to find the files on Thanksgiving. "Thanksgiving files...Thanksgiving files...I know they're here somewhere...!" But now I am used to the whole idea of winging it and I allowed that little being to continue drinking his morning coffee with his feet up.
Actually the three minutes notice I got was about two minutes and fifty seconds more than I normally get with this teacher and class. A few weeks ago I was suddenly bombarded with questions on Halloween and more recently the students hit me up for info on Xmas.
It's all rather interesting, this perception of American holidays they have. They tend to just scratch the surface with their knowledge of them but I guess knowing about them is better than not knowing anything at all. Imagine what you know about Japanese holidays and I bet it's much less.
It seems that their two favorite American holidays are Halloween and Xmas. They like to be told about children dressing up and trick or treating and about the idea of Santa Claus. Not two subjects about which I know more than the average American so I just wing it and tell them what I know. They seem happy and soon we are on to other things.
Getting back to today, though, for about five minutes I gave them the lowdown on Thanksgiving and then opened it up for questions. At this point you could have heard a feather fall off of a dead turkey. They had no questions. Not one. Why? Well, it might have something to do with friends, family, food, and football. Four of my favorite things but not four things that these girls seemed interested to learn more about. No candy, no costumes, no Santa, no presents, no questions. So we moved on to a little textbook work.

In my last class I was asked about my girlfriend, "Do you have girlfriend?"
Well, they know damn well I do as this has been mentioned before. They just like to ask. They are all girls afterall. But I decided to screw with them.
"Yes," I said, "I have many girlfriends."
"Ohhh," they jumped, "How many?" (all of this is in slow, searching-for-the-words English)
"I don't know," I said, "But many."
"Who?"
"One American girl and many Japanese girls," I answered, indicating with my hand that by "Japanese girls" I meant all the girls in this class.
They liked that and cheered to which I rolled my eyes. But then one of the girls asked the teacher, Miki, something and then came back at me with, "Tell truth, when marry your girlfriend?"
At that I cut the conversation and moved on to other things. I don't know why certain girls keep asking me about my marriage plans. A couple weeks ago at another school, I was asked the same thing and when I answered that I had no marriage plans at the moment all the girls pointed at another girl in the class and screamed, "Oh, please, with her, with her." She just sat there blushing and I just smiled at her. It's all very flattering but as these girls are 16 or so it's a little too late for me to take advantage of my popularity. Much to my chagrin, nothing like this ever happened to me in high school.
Ah, well, I just hope Amy realized how lucky she is. Heh heh.

Ok, that's it for tonight. Happy Thankgiving to all of you. And go Cowboys!