Valentines massacre

It was a strange Valentine’s week for me, as I broke up with my girlfriend this week. Without divulging too much and at the risk of sounding maudlin (as in Sammy Maudlin!), I’ll paraphrase the Doods himself: “It’s easier not being with someone you love than it is being with someone you’re not in love with.” Uh…perhaps I messed that quote up a bit, but I think you get the idea.

Anyway, things are very cool between Tomoko and me, and although we are no longer together, we look forward to moving on with our lives as very good friends. Seriously.

So, in other words, I am currently a free agent. So, in the parlance of our sister: “Muchachas, formar en línea aqui, por favor”

In other news, I started pricing out surf boards and wet suits when Tomoko came for her visit last week. She's a former surfer, so she knew the questions to ask while surf-board shopping for the first time. In about a month from now, I'll be all surfed up and waxing to go. I live about a 12 minute drive from a decent surfing beach, so I'll try to go out every morning if I can. God forbid, I'll soon be calling everyone dude and listening to Jack Johnson (yuck).

Oh yeah, happy belated birfday to my mother, Solita Ramos Zalameda whose birfday was on February 13. I miss you, momma!

All Japan Pro Wrestling

It might come to a real surprise to many readers of this blog that when I was younger, I was a big professional wrestling fan. So when Ranie’s friend Akihiro Tanaka invited me to watch the All Japan Pro-Wrestling show in nearby Yaizu last Sunday, I was pretty excited to go with him.

AJPW is a wrestling major league, with the some of the biggest international names in wrestling making their careers in Japan through out the years, including Ric Flair, Stan Hansen and the Funk Brothers. As well, it was the home for legendary Japanese names like Giant Baba, Great Kabuki and Jumbo Tsuruta.

All Japan Pro Wrestling star Muto Keiji

The auditorium, which had a crowd of about 400, was freezing, as was the atmosphere. The Japanese audiences are very quiet and reserved. They would politely golf-clap for a maneuver which had me awe-struck and yelling.

There were some former WWF wrestlers like D Lo Brown, Chuck Palumbo and Bull Buchanan performing at the show. But the highlight for me was standing about a meter away from Muto Keiji, one of Japan’s most popular wrestlers ever, who wrestled in North America during the 1980s under the name The Great Muta.

quick thanks

Thanks to fabulous lady Lana Gay for sending me a postcard. I hungout with Lana in Australia in 2002 . Since then she's become a radio personality. Currently at a rock station in Vancouver, Lana used to do overnights at Toronto's Edge 102. She's so fine!

Also thanks to my student Misato Okada for giving me her brother's TV. Here in Japan, anything more than three years old is considered old and usually scrapped. So I have a practically new 14" TV for free. Now if anyone had a car they were throwing out...

Results of Postcard contest -- Part one

A genuine Zalameda hug goes to Daniel and Gabriel DeMesa-Borrett (and especially their mom Raquel DeMesa -- my cousin), who sent me a wonderful handmade postcard.

A complete stranger named Lindsay signed a card that said I'm the father of her unborn child. Hmmm....

Please keep sending the postcards...the address is enclosed in a blog entry back in December.

it's February...already?

Well, the month of January whizzed by with crazy weather (for Japanese standards) and not much to report other than I've gotten quite granola on the world.
Three weeks ago I read a spiritually uplifting book called The Monk who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma and as much as I never thought I'd be into it, I've traded in my smoking habit for meditation and my pancakes-sausage-n-egg breakfasts for miso soup and rice. I'm exercising everyday, and there are hints of my abs and pecks which I haven't seen since George Bush Sr. was president.
Without too many distractions here (except for my new acoustic guitar and DVD player and awaiting Tomoko's monthly visit from Tokyo), I've pretty much focused on a self heeling.
But no worries, it's not all good stuff. Ranie and I went into Fujieda -- the town next to mine -- last weekend and tore it up at a cozy little bar called POT. Suffice to say, by the end of the night (and the Tequila), the bartender had some major concerns about me and my condition!
I've decided to attempt taking a level 2 Japanese proficiency test at the end of the year, which means learning not only speaking the language, but learning around 900 kanji (Chinese characters). This, of course will take some intense studying and lots of headaches!
That's all I gots, for now. I hope you are safe and sound wherever you may be! Please let me know how all of you are doing.

Nemaste,
Jess