A Life that Shines Glory

This is a song written by a friend of a friend of a friend in Sapporo (I think. Origin kinda gets lost amongst all the friends...) Anyway, it is absolutely beautiful and I wanted all of you to be able to enjoy even just the way it looks, so I made it into a picture instead of just typing it. I was smart enough to think of the fact that many comnputers in the world do not recognize Japanese. This is also very special to me because I was able to translate it. What do you think? Any suggestions of alterations on the English version -- I can't really touch the Japanese-- ? P.S. The first word is the one used in the Japanese version. It means wonderful.

A Life that Shines Glory

Subarashii Your name is marvelous

Just hearing it brings me relief

Perfect and complete, the Holy word of God

Water to drink and air to breathe

Your pardon forgave all the sin of my past

Bridges were burned; there's no turning back

Everywhere I go, you've already passed

Though the road is so steep, your glory lights my path

.

I lift up my voice, I lift my hands

In worship of God on high, sing Halleluia

Rejoicing with life, living to praise

In the bad times and all the good

God, your glory, I want to shine

New Glasses, New Job???

So I am pretty excited about my new glasses. I think they rock! It is all a part of my new "style". Hehe.

Last week, my friend cut my hair. She did exactly what I had asked her to do, but my hair came out a lot shorter than I had anticipated. But rather than crying over cut hair, I decided to roll with it. I started parting my hair on the side (where as before it was in the center) and for today, I straightened it. Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, in addition to the changing of my hair, this weekend I added a new element: the glasses. I went to Sapporo this weekend to go to church and see some of my friends there. I ended up staying a day later than I had planned on. On the first day, I went with my friend Christy to the supermarket. At this store, there is also a clothes store, bakery, and eye glasses store all inside the same building as the grocery stuff. She and I want to chat with the eye doctor there, but he was busy so we started looking around. They were having a crazy good sale. All of the frames in the store were on sale: some 30%, some 50%, and one table was 3900 yen (which is about $35 US). That included frames, lenses, and an eye test. I decided that it was about time for me to get my eyes checked anyway, so why not do it cheaply? I was pretty happy that Christy was there. I could understand some things that the lady helping me said, but there were some questions that she asked me that might as well been Greek for all I knew. Of course, it was Japanese, and honestly, I was excited that I could understand and respond to as much as I did. So with Christy's help, I took the eye exam in Japanese. It could have been a reading test! The E chart, as I like to call it, didn't have an E on it. It was all in Japanese hiragana. Praise God I can read hiragana. After the test, they gave us hot tea to drink and asked me to come back the next day to pick up my glasses.

The next day, I went back alone. Christy had to work. But, it was a good day. God gave me the courage to go and I didn't even feel a little panicky. I showed my paper to a saleswoman and attempted to say something like, "I came here yesterday and they asked me to pick them up today," but it came out more like, "Um... Yesterday... um..." Fortunately, she understood and I was asked to sit at the table where someone, again, brought tea for me to drink while she sized the frames to fit my ears. When she was finished, she sat and chatted for a while. It was pretty exciting for me to get to practice Japanese, although most of what I said was stuff like, "Is that so?" and "Oh, really?" These kinds of phrases interspersed throughout conversation to give both participants an active roll are actually an important element of politeness in Japanese, so it wasn't a waste of time for me to practice them.

Anyway, yesterday was the first time I wore my new glasses out in public. I wore them to school last night. A fellow teacher said that I look like a school teacher. One of my elementary school students said that I looked like an eye glasses model. I laughed at that! But, after class, the other teacher said that seeing my new glasses made her want to get new ones too. Maybe this new style will create a new career for me as an eye glasses model. Do you need a college degree for that?

Counting the Uncountable

You may already know this about me, but in case you don't, my thinking process is a bit strange to most people. I remembered this during lunch the other day.

My friend and I often eat lunch together. That day, she and I decided to go to the Italian restaurant in he building where our office is. For lunch, they had a pasta special with your choice of one of three sauces. Two of them didn't sound so good to me, so I ordered the one that was a tomato base with bacon and something. I didn't know the other word, so when the server walked away, I asked my friend what it is in English. Side note: usually, it is kind of dangerous to order things that you don't actually know what it is that you are ordering, especially if you are a picky eater or if you live in a country where things like octopus tentacles and raw eggs are pretty standard restaurant items. Since I am not a picky eater, I ventured.

"Mushrooms," she said. Whew! Luckily, I love mushrooms, so I was pretty excited about that. I told her so. I also shared with her that one of the many things that makes Japan a great country to live in is the selection of mushrooms in any grocery store. There is like a special wall-o-mushrooms set up in every store. There are big ones and flat ones, thin but long ones, short and fat ones, fan-shaped, white, gray, brown, ... I don't know the names of them, so don't ask. There are several varieties that are one big mass at the bottom, with millions of little pegs growing out of it. This is the variety that sparked our conversation. She and I are both English teachers, just so you know.

She told me that as she was teaching class one day, the textbook was explaining countable nouns and uncountable nouns and giving examples of each. ( For you non-grammar-savvy people, a countable noun is a person, place or thing that you can count: flowers, pants, cameras,... An uncountable noun is one that you cannot count: water, time, toothpaste,... You can measure uncountable nouns, but you can't say, "I have 2 toothpastes." You CAN say, "I have 2 tubes of toothpaste.") The textbook listed mushrooms as countable. Some mushrooms are. We don't dispute that button mushrooms are countable, but the block of mushroomage that I described before are not.

So, being the thinker that I am, I tried to picture myself in a grocery store in the States discussing mushrooms with a friend. How would we count them? But that situation didn't seem very natural because I usually don't count the mushrooms that I am discussing. So in my mind, I switched settings. How would I count mushrooms in the middle of a field? That's nature, right? But mushrooms don't grow in fields. So I pictured myself in a forest. But I forgot to picture my friend there, so I had no one to discuss the mushrooms with.

At this point, I laughed out loud. I tried to explain why I laughed to my friend. Can you believe that I really did think all of that in my mind? In that order and everything! I tell ya, with my imagination, life is never dull.