My Thoughts Are Scattered And They’re Cloudy …
Tomorrow’s payday. Can’t wait. Several students quit at the English school so this paycheck will be lower than it was last month. I decided not to calculate how much lower it will be and just wait to see it tomorrow. I might get a job as a webmaster at the other English school I’m working at. That should be fun.

Just got two new students today. Am very thankful.

My Tuesday night class at one of the English schools has three men, two businessmen and one grad student. It’s actually pretty interesting and I enjoy it because they are such serious students. I’m teaching them test-taking strategies for the TOEIC test. A year ago, I would have been “freaked out” at the thought of being alone in a room with three young men, teaching them English, but somehow I’m not scared of it anymore.

Started working on the berith.com site yesterday. Completely changing every single page in the entire site. It’s going to be a lot of work. Come to think of it, it’s too bad most of you won’t be able to read any of it. The site is all in Japanese.

Last night, I finally bought a domain for my own personal site. EmethHesed.com should be up and running in a month or so. Then this blog will move to EmethHesed.com/Blog.

Fratres Mei
They’re working at their Whitefield studies pretty hard, it seems. Ben has several hundred pages of math to do in the next couple weeks. Berek also studies hard, but I can’t understand how, for all his high-falutin’ philosophy, he doesn’t seem to be able to give up those internet networked computer games. I have no idea how the games work except that there is a lot of killing and then after death there is immediate automatic resurrection. Boring.

LOTR
Ooooh, almost forgot. I watched this with Ben on Saturday night. It was much better than I thought it would be. Like everyone else, I guess one of my first responses is, “I want to see the sequel.” As much as I enjoyed the movie, I think I can do without watching it for quite a long while. It was exhausting to watch. The length of the movie didn’t bother me, but all the running and fighting and killing got me pretty tired.

Nearly Attacked
While I was on my way to the movie theatre, I was able to get a seat on the train. However, it seems some lunatic on the train wanted the seat I had so he could better read the pornography he had with him, and a minute or so after I sat down, he suddenly stepped on both my feet at the same time and started jumping on them. After he did that a few times, he raised his fist and his leg and was about to hit and/or kick me but I told him I’d call the police if he did. I didn’t want to give him the seat, but I figured it would be better to do that than get stabbed (who knows if he was carrying a knife?), so I gave him the seat and walked away. All the people around me on the train were busy pretending that nothing was happening. (That is typical of Japan. Is it of other countries, too?) He followed me after I got off the train a few minutes later and I was terrified. I went straight to the police box (there is one outside every train station) and told the policeman there what had happened. I was at a big station and it was crowded so I wasn’t able to point the man out, but the policeman let me stay there for a few minutes. I was, ah, really scared and once I knew I was safe, couldn’t stop crying for a couple minutes. Tokyo is such a safe city. In my twenty years here, this sort of thing has never happened to me or anyone I know, nor have I ever seen it happen to anyone else.

The bright side of the whole affair was that I was wearing my sneakers, not my sandals, so I didn’t get hurt. I haven’t seen the man since. He doesn’t deserve the death penalty or anything, but it would have been so lovely if Li Lian Jie had come flying in to twist a few limbs and maybe even break a few bones.