Christmas Video Greeting

I'm not going to be home for the holidays this year. (The first year since 2002 I've been away for the entire holiday season, although technically in 2004 and 2005 I only made it back for New Year's due to the fact that winter break in Japan centers around New Years and usually starts on or after Christmas).

So I thought I'd forget about my usual gripes about Christmas and post a Christmas video....
It seemed like a good idea until we turned on the video camera and I realized I didn't have anything intelligent to say. But then again because google video is a free hosting service without any limit on the number of videos, I figure why not share this with you anyway (for what ever little amount it may be worth.



Shoko, who is recovering from a cold, asked not to appear on camera, so she just did the taping. There is the usual "Are you finished? Do you want me to stop taping?" confusion at the end, which Shoko wanted me to edit out but I thought it was the best part of the video so we left it in.

I may have come off as flippant in the video, but I really am sorry not to be home for the holidays this year. A result of being semi-Unemployed is I tend to have a lot of time alone in my apartment with my thoughts, which in turn leads to occasional severe bouts of homesickness. At one point I was considering trying to come home for the holidays but I decided against it because:
1) Plane tickets are expensive, and right now I'm without a steady job so I shouldn't be spending a lot of money
2) I was just home this summer for my brother's wedding, and I will be back home next summer for my sister's wedding.
3). Despite the fact I have a lot of free time on a day to day basis, there are a number of things I do need to keep an eye on, such as figuring out what I'm doing next year, getting my visa renewed, etc.
4). And lastly, I didn't want to come back to the US and just have to have the same conversation over and over with everyone where I told them I didn't really have a job at the moment. That would be a little bit too familiar. As F. Scott Fitzgerald might say, "We want to come back to America, but we want to come back to America with something to show for it."

So I'll be staying in Japan for the holidays this year. Don't worry about me too much though, we do manage to stay busy. I've been to a couple get togethers already and I've got a few more Christmas parties lined up the next couple days.
But I hope all of you back home (or where-ever you are), have a happy holiday season.

Link of the Day
Now this is Funny! A friend showed me this youtube video on eating sushi the other day. Apparently it already made the rounds on the internet, and I'm just playing catch-up now. But if you haven't seen it yet, it's worth the five minutes or so it takes to play.

Someone once said to me, "It's a huge myth that Japanese people don't understand sarcasm. Whenever someone tells me that Japanese people don't get humor or sarcasm, I just show them this video". (He was actually talking about something different, the infamous "Yatta" video, but I think it applies equally if not more so to the Sushi video).

This great leap forward in Japanese humor was undercut slightly by Shoko, who refused to get the joke when I insisted she watch the sushi video and spent the entire time saying things like, "That's not right at all. Why are they teaching the foreigners all this wrong information?"