Wednesday, July 05, 2006

團圓

One of my friend's biggest wish is to one day "unite" all of her books scattered all across the world. A trip to Nagoya yielded 50-60 new books, a set of newly added weight that she now has to consider taking care of when the summer ends. I just want to unite all of my little kids plus ceramic dishes and clothes collected at all locations of the globe. As for books, sigh, I've already given up on the idea.

Would you call this the newly arisen phenomenon of the so-called "global villager" or "international citizen"? Someone should begin a business that caters towards this special group of beings who would rather choose nomadism than steadism. Air travel's weight limit should be lifted for such group of people, is regular postal service that does major yearly damage to their wallet size.

I went to a post-wedding wedding party with a friend. It was supposed to be a male-only, bachelor-party-like wedding celebration, but my foreigner status enabled me to join the party as a special guest. It was a "post-wedding" party b/c the couple got married all of a sudden, for reasons that isn't terribly hard to guess - "奉子成婚・できちゃった結婚・marriage out of wetlock." In fact, できちゃった結婚 has become such a normal social phenomenon that there was even a TV drama about it a few years ago.

The stupid me was asking why the gov't wouldn't want to increase its effort on public education against wetlock babies. These friends said - "The gov't loves it. It may help the country solve its current low marriage/birth rate. Indeed, if it weren't for a wetlock baby, I don't think the couple on Sat would've considered getting married. "Too busy simply," they said.

As the night prolonged, these 4-year-old salariman started to chain-smoke while crack jokes and utter complaints about their salariman lives.

"May-chan, do you know golf well?", one of them asked.
"Umm, not really, why?"
"Well, you know that for golf, the entire game consists of 18 holes right?", he said.
"Um, and?"
"Well, in our company (NTT Docomo), when we treat our clients for a "golf" trip, by the time they finished hitting the 14th hole, we say the following thing to our client: 'So-and-so-san, are you having a good time today? After your finish the 18th hole, would you be interested in proceeding on to the 19th one?'"
"Eh?! The 19th one?" I asked, thinking that I must have missed something after a few rounds of drinking.
"Yes, the '19th-one' ..." this friend said, with a smirk on his face.

What does this 19th one mean? Well, use your imagination, everyone.

梅ちゃん at 1:59:00 PM

1comments

1 Comments

at 7/5/06, 10:41 PM Anonymous Anonymous said...

i don't think my imagination is capable of coming up with a 19th whole. does the number have some sort of significance in japan?

 

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