Listen to the Rain

Lots of religion in this accounting of my life, and for once, it's not just Judaism!

( Omurice and Chanukah Stories and Singing )

One more week of work and then I have two weeks off for the New Year! I'm really looking forward to having a long vacation. Maybe I'll even play a video game--it is time for me to finally get to Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness.

Every weekend should be a three-day weekend.

( Do all of the things )

So, uh, am I an extrovert now? Even beyond everything I've done, I was all set up to do something tonight, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I wrote about this and some of my friends said they got tired just reading it. I've living that city boy life, as I told fiendishfanfares.

What a lovely weekend.

A month or so ago, I learned that Hanabusa Cafe of Toronto, famous for its super-fluffy soufflé pancakes, was going to open a branch in Chicago and told my friends about it and that we should go. A couple weeks ago, worldbshiny texted me and said that we should go. Last week, I suggested that we go on Tuesday for lunch, so we did. We got there around 11:30, got in line, and then went to Benj Yehuda instead when we learned that there was an hour-and-a-half wait for food after ordering.

After my Japanese tutoring, I immediately tried again and they weren't even serving pancakes anymore due to the wait time, but I got a matcha latte that was delicious.

Yesterday I left work a little early and tried again, and it turned out that third time was the charm (三度目の正直).


It was even fluffier than I was expecting. They piled pancake mix on top of pancake mix and had a double-sided fryer so there wasn't any extra gravity from flipping the pancakes, which were delicious. My only complaint was that I would have liked a little bit more matcha syrup because matcha makes almost anything better and also I misallocated my syrup and ran out right at the end.

I'm definitely going back. They have taro pancakes and early grey and caramel pancakes and jasmine pancakes and I want to try them all. worldbshiny is also really interested in the cheese tea--currently popular in East Asia, but which she hadn't heard about before--and we'll be back once they open all the way. I was worried about their ability to make the food in a reasonable time, but the third time I went I only had to wait ten minutes.

Also, they have chabudai-style seating by the window, so I sat there and I felt right at home. 🇯🇵

(Translator's note: "Fuwafuwa" means "fluffy.")

I'm currently sitting in my mostly-packed-up apartment listening to podcasts on an extremely-rainy Sunday. If this is the last week I live in my old apartment, it's been a good one.

( Many meetings )

This is the first time I've gone to a con on Thursday in over a decade, since the last time I went to Ohayocon. But Anime Chicago was having one of their monthly mixers at the hotel where the con was taking place, and I really didn't want to head out all the way to Rosemont on a Thursday night, hang out, go back home, then turn around and go back to the hotel the next morning. I had kind of resigned myself to it when RogueNire reached out and said I was welcome to stay Thursday night with her and zbrund in their friends' room, so I prepped for a long con weekend.

I also took Monday off. Going to need extra recovery time.

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

There was a lot of great cosplay I saw that I didn't have the chance to take a picture of. The NCR Ranger I mentioned up top. A group of Asian women dressed as platelets from Hataraku Saibō. A picture-perfect Violet Evergarden. A Dokukurage (Eng: Tentacruel) with a decorated parasol and ball gown to form the head and body. Solaire and a Dark Souls III Firekeeper. Banana from Revue Starlight. The Final Fantasy white mage and black mage. The various "loving father looking for missing daughter and dog" Shō Tucker cosplays. The squad of Princess Crown cosplayers with Bowsette, Booette, Tanooki Mario-ette, and Goombette who all went in separate directions just as I reached them.

ACEN is still a ton of fun, but there are definitely changes. I was talking with stephen_poon about how fewer people we know are going and it gets less and less likely that we'll run into people we know as the years progress. I didn't see ping816 or mabown or smtemp or shane.suydam at all, since mabown didn't get a room this year. I've run into theome the last few ACENs, but not this one. I hung out with all the Anime Chicago people and that was a great time, but of course it's not like it was. We are not like we were. I still see the excitement and energy I had back when I was going to Otakon in 2006 in a lot of the attendees at ACEN, but I was thirteen years younger then and I hadn't yet lived in Japan. Of course I was excited to be among my people. Now, my people are tea ceremony enthusiasts, kagura lovers, Japanese learners, and the friends I've been coming to ACEN to see for over a decade, and going to a panel that's all about how great a particular series is just doesn't appeal.

I kind of want to do a kagura panel now, but I can't imagine anyone would attend it.

Every year I gauge how I feel. At ACEN 2012 and ACEN 2014, I wasn't certain I wanted to keep coming back and only tradition kept me going. Now I’m back in the camp (ACEN) of having a great time! I’m looking forward to another great time next year, too.

Delicious tea. 🍵

A few weeks ago, a Tock email landed in my mailbox and I actually read it rather than immediately deleting it. It advertised a tea tasting even at Easthill Tea Co over on Milwaukee. I'd been there once before, on the way to see an exhibit at the Video Games Art Gallery, and I was impressed that they actually had matcha even if I was offended at the price they were charging for it. But the tea tickets were $30 for two hours of tasting, so I put out an invite and meowtima and worldbshiny were both free, so we planned to meet for brunch beforehand, put it on our calendars, and waited.

( A weekend of food and friends )

Last night, worldbshiny and I went to a sake tasting event at Slurping Turtle. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, since the event just read:

Sip on a variety of rare and hard to find Sakes at this unique event! Join us on Tuesday, April 16th, 2019 from 6pm-9pm for a Sake Social, including 10+ Sakes, Japanese whisky & passed appetizers. Industry experts will guide your tasting experience and provide details about all things sake!

Guide our tasting experience? "Passed" appetizers? Well, sake is the best alcohol on the planet, so I asked some people and of them worldbshiny was free, so we went.

It turned out to be much more informal than I was expecting. Slurping Turtle had put out takoyaki, kara-age, cucumber rolls, edamame, and gyōza and then the sakes were mostly in plastic tubs filled with ice. There were people on both sides of the central table, and the host told us to go join the line, so we did.

( Pictures and comments within )

We were there until just after nine when the event ended, much to our surprise. worldbshiny said she had expected to be there until maybe 7:30, but the atmosphere turned into more of a party as the night went on. The experts brought out a drinking game with three kabuki masks of various sizes and a dreidel (their words) which had mask pictures on the sides, and players would drink from the mask whose picture came up. I said I was Jewish and had lived in Japan, and then they said that because of that I had to play, so I did. I spun the dreidel off the table and they told me that was a multiplier, so when the largest mask came up on the second spin, I drank twice from it.

Waking up this morning was a bit rough, though I'm fine now as I write this.

As worldbshiny were standing near the game, a couple (Edit: cillic and heather.eisele) came up to talk to us. cillic took in my all-black clothing and my long hair and asked me what I did, as he opined that I did not seem like someone from the corporate world. I told him I worked for the AMA, and he said he also worked for a nonprofit, and we chatted for a while. I do not remember about what, but I do remember having a nice time, and we exchanged Twitter usernames and Facebook invites all around. And then worldbshiny and I walked to the red line, both made it home safe, and collapsed into bed.

Best $30 I've spent in a long time! One of the experts said that given the value of the sake they were serving, it should have cost $150 a ticket, but even at that low price there didn't seem to be that many people there. worldbshiny suggested that maybe they were expecting a bigger turnout, and maybe they were. But it meant the event was pretty cozy and there wasn't any rushing, so I'm satisfied even if Slurping Turtle wasn't!

I had an impromptu weekend this week thanks to the extremely low temperatures. On Monday, we got an email saying that the building was going to be closed on Wednesday. Just before end-of-day on Tuesday, we got another email saying that the building would also be closed on Thursday. Guidelines were that if we had a meeting, we should call in to attend; if we had a laptop and work we could do, bring it home to work; but otherwise, do nothing. Since my job involves a lot of physicians' personal information, I can only do it if I'm physically present, which meant I got two days off. No complaints from me.

I woke up at 7 a.m. yesterday despite not having an alarm set and then spent much of the day playing Darkest Dungeon. I was originally going to go over to lisekatevans's place to make lunch, but we pushed it back to dinner so I had my salad for lunch (the one I made to eat at work), took a Lyft over around 3:30 and worked on transcribing more Wild Man Blues, and downloaded OmegaT and started the process of translation. I would have just used LibreOffice with two parallel columns, but according to everything I found on the internet that's basically impossible. There's no way to have a left column that runs on the left from the beginning to the end of the document, but OmegaT was recommended in response to someone who had exactly the same question I did, so I tried it out.

So far it's pretty great! It takes in a source document(s), splits it up into a series of smaller segments, each of which is isolated and individually translatable, and then outputs a translated document in the same format. You can leave notes, put in a glossary of neologisms or other terms that need referencing, add alternate translations for certain terms, all kinds of quality of life functions I wouldn't get in LibreOffice even if parallel columns were possible. I'm only a few paragraphs in, but I can already see that this'll make keeping track of what I did and what changes I made really easy.

For dinner, lisekatevans helped with ingredient prep and I made miso nikomi soba. The traditional recipe uses udon, but part of the point was for lisekatevans to use up her extra noodles and soba was what she had. Picture below:

( Brothy deliciousness )

The first time I made miso nikomi udon, it was when I first moved to Japan. It was about 35°C outside, with 95% humidity, and I was in an uninsulated house in the middle of a bunch of rice fields (visible on Google Streetview here!), and by the time I was halfway through the bowl I was sweating buckets. lisekatevans's place was warm, but with the icy cold of death outside, it was a lot better environment to each hot soup. She broke out the bottle of sake I gave her last month, called her roommate over, and we sat and ate. It was delicious.

Going home was awful, though. I figured I could risk taking the L, since it wasn't a long distance, but even with a five-minute walk I felt like I could never take a full breath. Breathing deeply set me coughing, so I took shallow breaths and hunched over against the wind until I got on the L where the air was warmer. I didn't freeze, though, and here I am.

I also vacuumed and mopped the apartment yesterday, so while I was mostly trapped inside, it was a clean inside.

Today I have nothing planned until the evening, when Anime Chicago is still planning to have a meetup at a place called Beermiscuous. I was talking with my Japanese tutor about it and she said it didn't even sound like an English word, but I don't know. I think it sounds exactly like some weird neologism that people would come up with. Like a more proactive version of beer goggles. I don't like beer at all--it's the carbonation--but they do have a small amount of whiskey and wine, so maybe I'll get something.

Alright, time for more translating while watching Continue? play through Final Fantasy VII.

As is tradition, I took the whole week of Thanksgiving off. It's not actually as dramatic as it sounds, since the AMA gives us both Thursday and Friday off, so I took Monday through Wednesday off and settled in for a relaxing week. I sent in my JET essay, so I had no deadlines hanging over my head. I mostly just sat back and played Breath of the Wild. I'm 85 hours in and I finally uncovered every region of the map, so I guess I should get to doing story things now.

I put on the Ocarina of Time outfit I got from the Amiibo when I went to draw out the Master Sword. It made for a pretty good image, I think.

On Wednesday I went out to my parents' house for Thanksgiving and mostly just relaxed out there. There aren't any relatives that come to visit for Thanksgiving, and my sister was busy with work and studying, so it was just the three of us. We had turkey and roasted cauliflower and Brussels sprouts with rolls and strawberry jello, and my parents had stuffing. A small meal, but it's satisfying for me. That's the sort of thing I've had every Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember, and our Thanksgivings were never a huge affair.

I spent part of the time I was there reading the manga version of Ocarina of Time, which I bought in Japanese as an excuse to read it and call it studying, and part of it watching a TV show called "Trails of Tsukiji" on NHK World that my parents got in the habit of watching after they came to visit us in Japan. They record it when it's on and watch it every time I come to visit, and every time it makes me miss Japanese food.

Well, this time when my parents sent me home with a load of fish (which I go through pounds and pounds of since I eat it every day for breakfast), and a load of Thanksgiving turkey, I decided that the turkey wouldn't go to waste. One of the Trails to Tsukiji episodes we had watched was about sudachi, a Japanese citrus fruit, and so there were a lot of noodle dishes flavored with sudachi sauce or rind featured in the episode. Well, I didn't have sudachi, but I did have a lot of noodles and a lot of turkey, so I combined them and, well.

( Turkey yakisoba )

I tagged it 和米料理 on Instagram, "Japan-American food."

Friday I got back from my parents' house and other than going shopping, I did nothing all day. Saturday was the same, except that lisekatevans invited me out after her show to what used to be called That Little Mexican Cafe for post-show margaritas with the cast, and then the margaritas were stronger than any of us expected. And today, I likewise haven't done much of anything other than some cleaning and some prep for the week. The laundry is in, the eggs for my week lunches are boiling, the chicken is thawing, and I'm writing this while all that is going. I'll be ready.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't love more time off, but I have two weeks coming up at the end of the year. Three more weeks until then.

Last night it got down to 8°C at night, and when I woke up this morning it was 15°C in my apartment. But that's fine because I own a bunch of blankets. Burrowing under blankets is the superior way to sleep anyway.

Yesterday I finally went to an exhibition at the VGA Gallery, yet another of those things in Chicago I’ve known about for years but have never been to before now. For a while it’s because they didn’t have a permanent exhibit space, but last year they finally settled in a location in Wicker Park and this year they’re holding an exhibit called “Backlog: Five Years Building the VGA Print Collection,” which seemed like the perfect chance to go see what it was like. Last night was the opening reception, so I went.

Here are some examples of the art:

( ”Vidya” )

I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, and “are video games art?” has a lot of baggage attached to it, but I was happy with the mix of traditional art and interactive art. There were even a couple exhibits that I wish I could have played. There was a large one about Sword and Sworcery that looked interesting, but I elected to play a bit of The Shape of the World instead since I thought it looked like Proteus. There was another interactive display of a game whose name I don’t remember that seemed to mostly involve looking out the window of a bus as it drove through night streets, but there was a button to request a stop, so maybe it was possible to change the route.

I was only there for an hour and ran out of time. There’s always more art than you have time to see.

Before I went to the VGA Gallery I ate Thai food and passed by a tea shop, and being me, I looked in to see if they had any matcha. They had a lot of matcha-derived products the same as most places nowadays, lattes and so on, but they had a “Matcha Experience” for $12. When I asked what this was, I got an explanation back of matcha, so even though it was almost three times the price of the “tea and sweet” available so many places in Japan, I ordered it. Here’s the result:


The matcha wasn’t as bitter as I like, though it was smoother because the barista took the time to sift the powder (something you’re supposed to do but I usually don’t). The sweets that came with it were Japanese candy but they were both matcha-flavored, which seemed a bit like overkill to me. I woud have greatly preferred more traditional wagashi, like manjū or monaka, but I’m willing to be lenient because real wagashi goes bad extremely quickly. But maybe chocolate? Vanilla? Something that’s not something I’m already drinking.

It was good, but definitely not $12 worth of good. I’ve gotten a bowl of matcha for ¥200 (~$1.80) before. $12? Hah.

On the way home, I walked along the 606 for a while, which was extremely peaceful. Just me alone except for the occasional runner going the other way. I wish there were something like that further north.

And now, off to the Japanese Matsuri. It was supposed to be during the summer originally and now it’s on a cold and rainy day , but it’ll still have yatai with karaage and really, that’s the important part.

I've had an eventful week. I wrote about Friday's dinner here and Saturday's wedding here, and now it's time for the rest of it.

On Sunday my parents came into town and we went out to dinner at Francesca's, a local chain with one branch near my apartment and another one out in the far western suburbs. I'd eaten at the suburban one and it was fine, but this time it was pretty bland. Both my father's and my meals were unimpressive and tasteless, and it was only the free dessert we got because my father mentioned my birthday that really made the dinner worth eating. Fortunately, the cherry pie that they brought from home was delicious. We got some frozen custard from Lickity Split and ate it together.

Among the presents they gave me was a Japanese pickle press. I eat an enormous amount of pickles (every morning at breakfast), and I wanted a way to make refrigerator pickles that didn't need vinegar or twenty-four hours of drying. It worked! The pickles have a different flavor than the ones I make with apple-cider vinegar do, but that's not surprising. They're more clear, and they go better with rice and salted fish. I'm not sure even a three liter press is big enough to keep me in pickles without making apple cider vinegar pickles still, but now I have a choice.

After my parents left, I texted lisekatevans on Sunday night to see if she was free, and I ended up going over to her condo after she was finished with a voice recording session and we drank wine for a while and chatted. She gave me ice cream to help my stomach, which was twisting itself in knots, and then showed me several of Taylor Swift's latest videos because she knew I loved cyberpunk literature and fashion and wanted to know what I thought of them. Especially ...Ready For It?, where the love song lyrics contrast with a robot trying everything to break out from the cage it's been placed in. I mentioned the scene in Ghost in the Shell where the major looks up and sees someone else with her same model of cyberbody drinking in a cafe across the river, and also probably my favorite quote about using cyberpunk just as an aesthetic without actually having anything to say:

Cyberpunk is just Asian cities.

I've seen a lot of cyberpunk aesthetic tumblrs that just post photos of Shinjuku at night in the rain.

Monday, my actually birthday, I mostly did chores to prep for the week. I had taken it off but didn't have any plans and had to do laundry, vacuum, go shopping, make my lunches, and a bunch of other adulting. Tuesday was a normal day with Japanese tutoring where we talked about my weekend and about Japanese cooking.

Wednesday I left work and went to Ramen Wasabi in Logan Square for dinner, alone since no one else was free, where I learned that they could swap out the pork for chicken in the ramen so I could have meat, but cooked their eggs in pork fat so I couldn't get an egg. Then I went on to the movie theatre where Anime Chicago was getting together to watch 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 / The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. With stephen_poon, who wasn't signed up through the Meetup site but new several of the people coming and independently decided to go!

I was warned beforehand that Masaaki Yuasa's work was polarizing, but I loved the movie. I loved the dreamlike quality, the way the scenes flowed into each other and it often wasn't clear what was metaphor and what wasn't, the way things seem to get kind of unreal on a late night out on the town where one event blurs into the next and after leaving every place, the response is "where do we go next?!" Plus, I've been out at night in Pontochō, where the film opens, and I've walked along the Kamogawa. It turned out that stephen_poon even went to a wedding reception in Pontochō and the film's first scene is a wedding reception!

I recommend it if you can find it anywhere.

Thursday was mostly ordinary. Therapy went well--we talked a bit about my anxiety about spending money and when my therapist asked what it was that I was worried about, I said that I'm American and it would be trivially easy for me to develop a health condition or have an accident that requires extensive and expensive health care. I have good insurance, but what happens if I can't work? What happens if the American fascists* reinstitute pre-existing condition death panels? I've lived in countries that have real health care systems, so I know exactly what we're missing. She accepted that and then asked me how much money I would need to feel safe, and I had to admit that I didn't think any realistic amount would be enough. So I guess that's an area I can work on.

I went home, took a shower, sat down to work on coding practice, and then I get a text from lisekatevans inviting me out to a birthday party one of her friends was holding at Pearl's, so I threw on some clothes and went out on a work night to listen to actors swap stories about meeting famous people, plays they were in, Midwestern manners, Scotch distilling, and so on. I mostly listened, though lisekatevans valiantly tried to throw me a couple conversational ropes, but my areas of interest were pretty distant from most of the other people in attendance. The stories and the drinks were good, though, and the birthday girl was wearing a black dress and boots--from what lisekatevans said, her usual aesthetic--so I approve of her sartorial choices. I bought one of her drinks because there was a $10 minimum on card charges.

Early in August I invited worldbshiny out to Izakaya Mita to drink sake and eat Japanese food, and while her schedule has been pretty hectic, she finally had a free moment on Friday. She messaged both meowtima and me, but meowtima couldn't come due to making a million caramels for an event on Sunday. So after work, I went to Bucktown and walked up to Moth, bought a book called 日本茶 / Japanese Green Tea, a travel guide to tea shops in Tōkyō in both Japanese and English. I overpaid by quite a bit--the price on the back was ¥1500 and Moth charged me $33, which is almost 2.5 times the cover price--but I like supporting Moth because my Japanese tutor works there. Then I spent some time in a Starbucks reading Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver until 7 p.m., where I walked over to Izakaya Mita and met worldbshiny

It was nice! I didn't have a very good opinion of Izakaya Mita's food from previous visits, though the drinks are excellent, so I expecting to love the sake and tolerate the food. But we stuck to mostly kushiyaki and appetizers like pickles and gobō kinpira instead of going for the okonomiyaki--Kansai style, plus both varieties were treif--or ramen. The duck heart and duck liver kushiyaki were delicious! And the sake was good too, though the first one I tried was a bit sour for me and the second one was unmemorable, the other two, especially the nigori, were delicious. worldbshiny even got the Tedorigawa sake made at the Yoshida brewery featured in The Birth of Sake (which I wrote about here)! I had a much better culinary experience this time, and worldbshiny and I chatted about our lives because we haven't really had a chance to talk before now. After a few hours, worldbshiny was fading thanks to the effects of the sake, so we went out and caught the bus back to our respective apartments.

As I left, I snapped out ご馳走様でした as I left and after a startled pause, got back a hearty お疲れ様でした。

This weekend I don't have much to do, which is good. I could use the break.

Time now to rest, but I was busy the last two days. Account below.

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