Stupid Stuff

Here's two little dumb stories that have happened to me in the last couple of days.

Hard cross in front of Grandma

I've been reading SLAM DUNK, and really getting into it. In the book, there is a part where 赤木 (Akagi) and his couterpart 魚住 (Uozumi) are going over how they really stressed fundamentals before they became really good players. Footwork, passing, dribbling, they drilled everything into the ground. This struck me particularly because I'm the type that normally either skips fundamentals entirely, or skims it briefly. This usually leads to me looking like I am good at something until someone who actually is good at it puts me in my place. I've been wanting to have my fundamentals down in everything, that's been my goal for a while, so have that in mind as I continue the story.

I had just gotten home from Germany and was coming home for lunch on my first day at school. My house is pretty close, but there are a lot of small little streets you have to take to get there. There's usually no one out, so with that in mind, I decided I wanted to channel my inner 赤木 and rock some dribble drills and look at my footwork. I start dribbling a ball that's not there, and

went ahead with it. Hesitations, cross-stop-crosses, fastbreak moves...I was doing it all, and doing it real deliberately too, to see where I could find the faults in my footwork and correct them. I was real sure to notice everything I was doing, but, one thing I didn't notice was the old Grandma at the end of the street watching the retarded dancing white boy advance up the street towards her. Our eyes met. I stopped mid-double cross, looked straight ahead, and walked right past her. I'll stop juking in public from now on after the look I received from her.

Wig as Weapon

After coming back to Japan, I had a lot of money to exchange, dollars and euros. So, I went to the bank to change it. They sat me at a booth and took a while to get all the papers together, and during that time another person was seated across from me and was told to wait as well. I looked up and was a little surprised by what I saw: a middle aged Japanese man with what looked like Alopecia wearing an amazingly ill-fitted wig. I reasoned it was Alopecia because the man had no eyebrows, no sideburns, and no hair flow going into the wig. It was just propped atop his head. It was something that your eyes were just magnetized to, whether you wanted them to be or not. That wasn't the weird part though. His customer service guy came back earlier than mine, and I wanted to watch to see how he would react to the wig. As he was sitting down, he didn't really look in the man's direction, and the man began to talk about his situation. The bank guy blinked, and was naturally going to look at what it was that had landed on his customers head, for maybe a milisecond, but in that milisecond, the wig man had caught him on the way up. Almost like getting caught looking at a girl's tits, it was like that, that kind of feeling. He had caught the guy red-handed, and was now going to punish him for it. He had the customer service guy right where he wanted him; he then proceeded to speak in an authoritative tone. It looked almost planned. Was this a way of establshing control? How long had he been doing this? The whole thing had me intrigued. From then on, I decided to be careful around men with ill-fitted wigs - they might be that way on purpose.