Jaundice from your Bento

Discovering that your finances are crumbling, even though you've gone halfway around the world to earn better money, is the sort of thing that fucks up your day. In fact, several days have been dampened by this revelation. I'm still going to Thailand, and I'm still paying the bills, but some of the bills back home will be relegated to "Later". Namely, my credit cards. Had I known the state of my financial disequilibrium I wouldn't have bought that "Introduction to Philosophy" on the internet a week ago, spending $80 in credit card magic money in the process.

Crumbling is perhaps too strong a word. I can get by, so don't worry all you worrisome folks. It looks like I won't be buying lunches at the combini anymore (except on special occasions, like when I'm too lazy or don't have the time to go home and prepare lunch). Today all my classes were cancelled because the students had exams, so I went home on the pretext of going to the post office and prepared myself a nice lunch. There's a neat trick that can be done with the rice cooker. I set it to turn on at 12:00, put in rice, water and chopped carrot, and then when I arrive for lunch it's all ready. The carrot was a tad soft though because it sat in the rice cooker after it had finished cooking, and the remaining heat mushed it. Must get green vegetables. I can see in the dark just fine (which is what carrots do for ya - but that may just be a myth propogated by the allies to trick the German pilots into eating too many carrots and pumpkins). Come to think of it, I've been eating carrots and pumpkins myself. Pumpkin is a very popular vegetable in Japan and is often served as a small side dish to a bento. Please note the absence of "box" after bento, as bento means box. So maybe I'm a German pilot or just in danger of getting jaundice.

With the rest of my day I read a few entries on BigDaikon.com, a JET website. One true story described a foreign teacher's experience with the police after a racist Japanese man jumped him. The cops were just as bad and wanted him to bow down to the man, who claimed that he was the victim. The teacher didn't submit though, and after hours of interrogation he was released from the police station when the punk-ass dropped the charges. Forgive my use of punk-ass, I just couldn't think of anything better. Maybe that's because the other rest of my day was spent trying to follow the extremely long strings of logic/illogic constructed by Foucault. That man makes a lot of references to French authors. It makes me think that my exposure is severely limited by reading in English. And I used to think that all the ideas were available in English through translation and synthesis.