Suits and Weddings

Wedding Trackers already know that there are only 97 days until the nuptials, but for the rest of you, a reminder. This weekend we looked up and down for an appropriate suit, but given my shitty attitude and my lost "wa," I don't need to tell you, things did not go smoothly. I think my attitude has been doing poorly for a number of factors, but the main one seems to be the growing formality and complexity of the wedding. And also the fact that you have to move forward with planning when you don't feel like it, or when there are more pressing relational problems that need to be dealt with at any given moment. It's hard, really. Add a different country, different culture, poor Japanese ability...

That's not entirely true. I went out by myself today and found the suit that I want, pictured here. The one thing Japanese suits have over US suits is the fact that they are much, much slimmer. Instead of looking like a fat, lumbering goose in a cheap rented tux, I look a little bit more like Edgar Allen Poe's poems look, at least in my imagination. Plus, this suit is one of the cheaper ones I found and not having to shell out over 100,000 yen has put me in much, much better spirits.

For the reception in the States, I want to get Jason Molina. Do you think he'd play? I e-mailed his booking agency. Tell me if you think this is creepy — a while ago, me and Bob Kurtz went to Kentucky to see the Magnolia Electric Co. play and this guy opened, Joe Manning. He was awesome. Awesome. So if Molina can't play, I wanted to ask this guy, but I can't find any information about him online, except a phone number on whitepages.com. Do you think it would be creepy to call that number and be like, Hey, this one time I saw you play a show two years ago and I was wondering if you'd play my wedding reception? I think it's kind of creepy.

I made up a new game where I take a dialog from my Japanese textbook, pick one of the characters and read the lines to a partner without telling them that I'm reading from the book. I then proceed with my person's dialog regardless of my partner's answer. Observe:

Stephen: Excuse me, Section Chief? Do you know about the relationship between the head and the foot?
Yoko: What?
Stephen: No, that's not right at all.
Yoko: I didn't hear you: the foot and the what?
Stephen: Exactly.
Yoko: Exactly what?
Stephen: Section Chief, are you serious?
Yoko: Section Chief?
Stephen: I have to get back to work.
Yoko: What are you talking about?

I then tried to explain what I meant by "shitty study buddy," but that's a really hard phrase to translate. Have I mentioned that Yoko is an incredibly patient woman? She's an incredibly patient woman.