I made the mistake of telling a band member she couldn't take a bunch of friends/family backstage at the end of the night. Didn't make her too happy. She made sure to come up later and ask me "what's your name?" She meant to say "What the hell is your name prick I need to tell your boss you pissed me off." I had to bite my tongue while she told me how pissed off she was and how that had never happened in her professional career, yadda, yadda, yadda...
I was polite and ended up walking away because she wasn't getting any nicer. If only we'd had the show in the green room, apparently they could pack that. It'd free up the stage too so I could make real money off a real crowd and pay my very, very real rent. Bombing the Friday before rent is due is painful.
The rest of the band was very polite and nice though. They even let my blind friend who is visiting from Japan check out their drum set. Dai is here from Tokyo with his mother. A mutual friend put us in touch so I could work on my Japanese and he could practice his English. I've taken him to a baseball game, hiking, tubing, and even for a bike ride. It's been cool, tubing down the Poudre was fun but a bit dangerous. Trying to steer two tubes tied together while trying to remember the japanese phrase for "very big right straight ahead - put your feet up!" was a bit difficult. But the whole thing was a lot of fun too. The water is cold and hitting the occasional rock hurts but not enough to make me not want to do it again. In fact I did it this afternoon.
The whole thing has been pretty good for me, being able to practice Japanese has been great. It's been difficult not being able to gesture though. You tend to take vision for granted and I when I started explaining what Hooters was after we drove by one I forgot that Dai couldn't see it. So for all he knew I just decided to spend five minutes trying to explain in broken Japanese that there was a famous American restaurant with bad food and girls in tight little outfits. The baseball game was fun though, I got the tickets from a friend before I found out Dai was blind. "Ball", "Strike", "out" are pretty easy to translate though, thankfully.
The players were so close I probably could spit on them. But why spit on the Rockies? Poor guys will never win a World Series. It's like heckling the Chicago Cubs. Haven't they suffered enough?
Couldn't sleep a few days ago so I grabbed my wooden sword and took a bunch of cuts, hit my punching bad, did some push ups and pull ups, and hit my tire with a sledgehammer. I spent the next two days with incredibly sore forearms and biceps. Took a bit of work to raise my whiskey coke to my lips the following night but apparently the repeated motion caused my muscles to loosen up a bit. Today was the first day I didn't have any pain in my arms. Time to do it all over again.
I think I've figured out why sword work is important to Jujutsu. I have a theory but I'm going to have to swing a sword daily for the next 5 - 10 years. Will elaborate and explain after I've confirmed my theories. Give me a decade. Give or take 10 years. Probably give.
Becca officially moved in as of July 27th. Strangely enough all her clothes wouldn't fit in my closet. It is nice that now I don't have to send her a text telling her to make me a sandwich. I can just yell it at her. Of course now she's close enough to throw things at me when I tell her to make me sandwich. Big heavy things that aren't sandwiches.....On the plus side her bed has a much firmer mattress. My back feels great, or would had I not, only a hundred feet from our exit point on the Poudre, hit a large rock with my hip.
