This post is not funny. Sorry.

A while ago, I went to the park around Hirosaki Castle, and I took some pictures. Enjoy!

 I want to live in this garden. 

Santa wears a lot of mascara...

I work at a special needs school every once and a while, and the last time I was there, they had me dress up as Santa Clause and sing songs with the kids. One of the other teachers made a sleigh on wheels himself, and dressed up like Rudolph to pull me around. It was awesome.

So basically this is what I would look like if I inexplicably became an old man, but retained my love of eye makeup.

This story has a terrible twist ending, just so you know.

Here in good old Japan, it's customary for everything from schools to sports teams to have an end-of-the-year party called a "bonenkai". Basically, everyone drinks a lot and eats a lot and nobody talks about what happened there the next day.

My school had an awesome bonenkai. The food was amazing, we played a drawing game (which my team inexplicably won, even though my rendition of Pikachu kind of looked like a fish), and had a jolly good time.

Until a member of the school board had a heart attack just as we were getting ready to do some synchronized cheering (which is a thing in Japan) and eat cake.

So instead of cake, we got paramedics. And then the party was super tragic, so everyone just kind of wandered sadly away into the snowy night.

The end.

P.S. I don't know what happened to that old gentleman. I assume he is alright, since I probably would have heard someone mention it if he wasn't. I am going to pretend he retired and moved to the Bahamas to pursue a life of fishing and not having heart attacks at parties.

I can't think of a good theme. Have some random pictures with commentary.

I would like to know what we were reacting to in this picture, because I am clearly on the attack while Tori...well, scratch that, I don't know what she's doing. At all.

To truly grasp the size of this bowl of ramen, imagine Lake Erie with noodles and bits of fatty pork. I think in the course of eating it, I accidentally poked the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald with 

my chopsticks.

I crashed my bicycle. Several nearby construction workers rushed over to help, but that may have been because in the process of falling over into the gravel, my skirt ripped rather far up my thigh. Merry Christmas, random construction workers. 

I like the gentleman in the front gazing wistfully into the distance. Everyone else is bracing to meet their mighty foe in battle, and he's not even looking, he's just like, "I think I'll rearrange the living room when I get home. Maybe put up some new wall scrolls. I love me some wall scrolls."

Adulthood.

To be clear, I am an adult. I am twenty-one. I have a college degree. I have an apartment, a job, and I pay the bills (except for that one time when I didn't pay my gas bill for three months and all my appliances got turned off, but we don't talk about that).

I had plans for my life after work today. I had things to do, grownup things, that were important... or something. I don't really remember. Because when I got home, this is what happened:

This was terrible for two reasons. One, I was listening to really obnoxious pop music really loudly, and my neighbors were probably clawing at their ears, asking the universe to put an end to their torment.

Two, once the euphoria that only jumping on a bed can produce had faded, I was left feeling like all my adult-y efforts had been undone. I sometimes think adulthood is like the life bar in a video game. You can deplete it by having an awesome time doing ridiculous things, and refill it by completing very boring tasks that are mostly mundane and unreasonable. I had done a huge amount of damage to my adult life points. I had to solve this problem before I had to go to work again, or I might show up in a kitten sweater and pigtails with a wild look in my eyes.

So I did all my dishes. ALL OF THEM, shedding tears all the while.

The end.

I think this was nice?

I received this cookie from a coworker a couple of days ago.

I am pretty sure that is a skewered eyeball in a bowl. Maybe this is a piece of Japanese culture I don't understand. Or maybe my coworker wants me dead. I just can't tell. 

Sometimes, I am allowed to leave work for a little while to run errands. I often have to go to the bank during school hours because for some reason, banks here close at 3:00, and the ATMs have business hours, which defeats the purpose of an ATM, but whatever.

I DIGRESS. So I was walking along, enjoying the first sunny day we had had in a while, when my eye caught something moving on the sidewalk. I looked down and promptly shrieked in terror, because there were hairy, nasty caterpillars everywhere. I do not know what kind of caterpillars these were, suffice to say that if you made one really big, it would look like the villain in a Godzilla movie.

To help you imagine this, I have drawn a picture of the caterpillar using the highest quality artistic software. Also, Godzilla is there because I felt like drawing Godzilla.

 They were EVERYWHERE. It was a mass exodus of horror, crawling right around my feet. By this point, I couldn't really go anywhere else, since there were cars on the road (Side note: there were a lot of people in cars who were probably really amused by the foreign girl frozen in complete fear on the side of the road, because I was there for a while, and a lot of cars passed by. That's all.). 

Left with no other option, I ran out of the field of the caterpillars, and managed to squash approximately 95 of them. And then I felt equal parts sad that I had squashed 95 caterpillars (who, despite being horribly gross, are just baby butterflies, and no matter how you look at it, you suck if you kill 95 baby butterflies), and annoyed that my shoes were now really dirty.

And then I went to the bank.

The end.