A few more things you never needed to know about Japan

16. Anything can come in a can.

Along with your general canned foodstuffs like tuna, corned beef and sardines, you can also buy some other funky things:

Bread and muffins

(Bread in cans has been traditionally marketed as ‘emergency supplies’ to keep in your ‘in case of earthquake’ kit.)

Whale

(It’s a pricey product costing around $50 for this 120g can.)

Insects

(Includes such protein-packed favourites as bee larvae, locusts and silkworm larvae.)

Ramen noodles

(Comes in soy sauce and miso soup flavours and there is a cold version for summer too.)

Curry and rice

Oden (vegetables, egg, deep-fried fish paste sticks etc. simmered in soup)

I’m guessing the love of putting things in cans comes from the popularity of vending machines and considering there are over 5.2 million vending machines in Japan, that’s a lot of canned-goods love.

(Not everything coming out of a vending machine is a can though – sometimes it’s sushi.)

17. The language is easy, but excruciatingly difficult at the same time.

Compared to English, Japanese is a very structured language and the pronunciation is much easier. Japanese only has five vowel sounds compared to the 11-20 that English has (depending on your accent) . If you see the letter ‘a’ in Japanese, you know it’s pronounced as ‘ah’ as in ‘cup’ not the variety of sounds it can have in English like ‘apple’, ‘about’ and ‘cup’.

There are also lots of handy phrases and words in Japanese that convey a whole range of ideas in a compact package:

doumo – means hi, nice to see you again, good to talk to you again, thanks.

natsukashii - describes a feeling of missing something, something  that gives you fond memories and sometimes makes you homesick

yoroshiku onegai shimasu – means it’s a pleasure to meet you and I hope you will be nice to me in our future business dealings and I look forward to building a relationship with you

Having said that, Japanese also has one of the most complex writing systems on the planet which requires you to master three separate writing systems and the honourific/humble levels of language mean that you must know whether the person you are speaking to is higher or lower than you in the ‘food chain’ so you don’t embarrass yourself so badly you need a sword to fall on.

Japanese is also a very contextual language and often there is no subject in a sentence, so if you say, ‘atsui ne’ theoretically it can mean ‘It’s hot today’, ‘This room is hot’ or ‘I’m hot’. It’s up to the listener to decide what the speaker is referring to. There are also a huge range of regional dialects within Japan and in some areas, the dialect spoken is almost totally incomprehensible to someone speaking the standard Tokyo dialect.

Learning Japanese takes some serious blood, sweat and tears, but once you get a grip on it, it’s so much fun.

18. Fashion fads are scary.

Here are a few of the fashion fads over the past few years:

Yamanba/Ganguro – Wild mountain hags/Solarium-sizzled faces

(Characterised by really dark skin, white lips and eye-liner and funky hair.)

Gothic Lolita

(Characterised by lots of frills and a black and white colour scheme.)

Kogyaru – High-school girls

(Half the time you don’t know if they actually are school students or if they’re just wearing the uniform for fun…)

Shibuya Gyaru – Shibuya girls

(Characterized by big hair, loud voices and five-inch acrylic nails.)

19. It’s okay to seriously decorate things.

Mobile phones

Trucks

(Even more impressive when you see this coming towards you in your rear-vision mirror at night on a dark, lonely highway.)

Newly opening shops/restaurants

Fingernails

Funerals

(Is it just me, or do these decorations seem to say, ‘You’re dead, let’s disco!!)

Even more things you never needed to know about Japan

12. Etiquette is a minefield.

As mentioned in no. 4 “There are rules about everything”, there are endless ways to make faux pas in Japan from forgetting to change out of ‘toilet slippers’ to using your chopsticks in a way that is only done at a funeral. There are whole sections of bookstores related to 作法 sahou (manners, the right way to do things) in Japan because things are so complex even for the Japanese (and especially the younger generations) and there are lots of classes offered – mostly aimed at women – by schools that specialise in teaching you how to perfect your sahou.

A few basics about eating:

• Soup is always placed on the right-hand side and rice on the left

(This picture also shows an important point of never grouping things in fours. Four is an unlucky number so everything always comes in groups of five or six. The same also goes for the number nine.)

• Break your chopsticks by holding them horizontally and pulling in a semi-circle like you’re opening a fan.

• Hold the rice and soup bowls as you eat – don’t leave them sitting on the table. But don’t pick up a large bowl of noodles – leave it on the table.
• Rest the arm you are not using on the table – not on your lap or under the table.
• If you want to put your chopsticks down while eating, don’t leave them sticking out of your bowl and don’t put them on a plate or bowl (although many people do this, it’s not technically polite). Rest them on the chopstick rest (if there is one) or you can make a little one from the paper sleeve your chopsticks were in:

• Don’t spear things with your chopsticks or pass food with your chopsticks – put what your passing on a plate and give it to the other person or put it on their plate directly.
• Don’t gesture while holding chopsticks and don’t point with them.
• When you’re finished eating, return things to as close as possible to how things looked at the beginning of the meal. Put lids back on bowls and return plates to where they were. Don’t stack plates and if you’ve still got your paper sleeve for the chopsticks, put them back in it and lay them where they were originally.

That’s not an exhaustive list and that’s just mostly dealing with chopsticks. As I said, etiquette is a minefield.

13. There are four seasons.

People in Japan always used to ask me, ‘Does Australia have four seasons?’ and I never really understood the question. I mean we have spring, summer, autumn and winter, so that means we ‘have’ four seasons, right? Wrong.

In Japan seasons are marked with foods, festivals, flowers etc.and everyone *feels* the changes and actively does something that celebrates the change in the season.

Very rarely will you ever eat a food that is not in season, people will travel vast distances just to see seasonal flowers bloom and seasons are marked by specific clothing changes. June 1st is the official day that school students and company employees with uniforms change into short-sleeves. They then change into long sleeves from October 1st and generally you’ll see the official changing of the sleeve length as a story on the night’s news bulletin.

The seasons are also the basis of the vast Japanese domestic tour industry and you’ll see busloads of people going to see the ‘new green leaves’ at the start of spring and the autumn leaves in autumn and to eat specific foods that are only available at that time. People will also often change the furnishings inside their house to match the colours of the season.

There are also seasonal events above and beyond the four major seasons including:

Monsoon season – in June during which everyone admires the hydrangea blossoms and complains about everything going moldy from the humidity

Fireworks & festivals season – usually in the height of summer during July and August

Moon-viewing season – in September and it’s also the time that McDonald’s in Japan releases their “moon-viewing burger” because the egg in it looks like a moon.

14. Everyone has a uniform.

When I first went to Japan and started working in a hotel, I had a uniform. It was a hot pink jacket and skirt with a bow-tie. It was oh-so-sexy and one of many uniforms I had in Japan. Every single person has a uniform from the sales people at the department stores:

to the guys directly traffic:

Train drivers and conductors and the lovely ladies pushing the buttons in elevators wear hats and gloves. Many people (generally the women) in offices wear uniforms and the sailor uniforms of school girls are famous.

Even if you don’t have a specific uniform, there are generally rules about what it’s ok to wear to work. Guys wear grey or navy suits with ties, while women wear skirts, pantyhose and high heels shoes. Make-up for women is also part of uniform – you’ll never see a woman in public without it (mostly because a lot of Japanese women shave their eyebrows and without makeup they look like something out The Ring)

15. Sex is everywhere but no-where.

On the surface of Japan, it looks totally over-sexed. Everyone has heard about the love hotels, the maid cafes, the used-panty industry, the vending machines selling porn, soft-porn tv programmes and anime & manga porn featuring tentacles:

It seems like sex is everywhere, all the time, but apparently while it’s in your face all the time, no-one is actually getting any.

It’s a fact that Japan is one of the developed nations with the lowest birth rate (1.28) and the highest number of sex-less marriages according to the Ministry of Health in Japan:

It’s also standard practice to have two single beds in the master bedroom in your house and double futons are almost unheard of. Housing companies are also reporting that many Japanese people building new houses are requesting separate bedrooms so they don’t have to sleep in the same room as their significant other.

Maybe this is why they’re being forced into dealing with tentacles.

Still more things about Japan you never needed to know

8. The convenience store is your friend.

Japan has over 42,000 convenience stores in an area equal to the size of my backyard (I’m kidding…sort of…) so the competition to attract customers is fierce and they do it by offering all sorts of amazing services. The top three convenience stores chains are:

7-eleven

Lawson

Family Mart

Each of the chains has their own range of obento, bread, rice balls, sandwiches, salads etc. and the normal selection of other foods, drinks, alcohol, cigarettes, books & magazines, game software and everyday items. Each 7-eleven store stocks 2,500 items and receives fresh supplies of perishable food three times a day.

(Staff will heat up your obento for you with microwaves behind the register and there is self-serve hot water for your instant ramen.)

(There are sweet breads and pastries as well as savoury goodies like tuna & mayo rolls and pizza bread.)

At convenience stores in Japan you can’t buy petrol or lottery tickets, but they’ve taken the term ‘diversification’ to a whole new level by allowing you to:

Print photos; send faxes; photocopy; pay your bills; buy domestic airline tickets; buy tickets to concerts, theme parks & museums; buy phone cards, phone recharge vouchers and any other sort of prepaid thing that exists; buy stamps and postcards; buy insurance; recharge your mobile phone; get your dry-cleaning done; send & receive packages; bank with the in-store atm including doing telegraphic transfers; order cakes, special meals and a whole range of other stuff through catalogues;  buy carbon off-sets; book a tour; order anything from amazon and other on-line sites and have it delivered to your local 7-eleven for you to pick up and just recently some 7-eleven have started to issue you with proof of residency which previously you had to go to your local government office during office hours to get.

In each store you’ll find an atm, a copier or two and and an electronic terminal for booking tickets etc.

(You’ll also find copious amounts of pornographic material in the magazine section…)

Like I said, the convenience store is your friend.

9. It’s perfectly okay to sleep whenever and wherever you can.

(Drooling on your neighbour is considered bad form but it’s perfectly acceptable to lean all over them.)

Trains and buses are great places to catch up on zzzz’s, but so is your desk during a lull in your fifteen-hour work day:

And at school is fine too because your teacher won’t care even if you’re in the front row:

10. Bookstores double as libraries.

Spending hours in a bookstore reading books from cover to cover without making a purchase is perfectly acceptable.

There is a word for this called tachiyomi 立ち読み which literally means ’standing reading’. Some people will often list tachiyomi as one of their ‘hobbies’ along with sleeping and eating (their idea of what a ‘hobby’ is is slightly different to ours). Trying to actually get to the books when people are two or three deep in front of the shelves though can be a bit of an issue sometimes.

11. If you ain’t got an umbrella, you ain’t got nuffin.

In Australia rain is so infrequent that many people live their entire lives without purchasing an umbrella, and on the rare occasion that it does rain, people simply get wet and they don’t really care. So I was totally unprepared for how important an umbrella was until I went to Japan….

Every single store in Japan has an umbrella stand that magically appears outside the door once the first couple of drops of rain fall.

(Hopefully the stand you want to use doesn’t have a sleeping cat in the bottom of it…)

Many establishments also offer ‘umbrella sleeves’ so you can take your umbrella inside with you without dripping water everywhere. Sometimes you have to take a sleeve and put it on yourself:

(The sleeve stand includes a bin to throw the sleeve away as you leave the shop.)

But often there are machines that do the sheathing for you:

(You insert the umbrella in the hole at the top and pull it out through the gap in the front.)

Being Japan there are also sometimes machines to remove the sleeve for you:

(You put the umbrella in the hole in the top and pull it back out again.)

Umbrellas come in all shapes and sizes from utilitarian 100 yen plastic umbrellas:

To ultra-light, ultra-small umbrellas that rely on cutting-edge materials to still be strong enough to use and that can be bought for around $10:

(Pink is of course for girls and boys can get suitably ‘manly’ colours.)

Being Japan, you might even find yourself an umbrella vending machine:

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what sort of umbrella you have, just ensure you use it. Walking outside in the rain without an umbrella is right up there with blowing your nose in public – it just ain’t done.

More things about Japan you never needed to know

4. There are rules about EVERYTHING.

Obviously with a lot of people in a small space, everything flows much better when there are rules and people follow them. On escalators, people not moving stand to the left and people walking walk on the right.

(Except when you travel to west Japan where people stand to the right and people walk on the left.)

Lining up for a train is also serious business. On the ground there are indicators for where the carriage doors will be and at some stations there are places to wait for the ‘next train’, ‘the train after that’ & ‘the train after the next, next train’ (in the below pic the white, orange and red lines):

Once a train has come and gone the whole group moves orderly to the adjoining area as per the diagram:

This particular station has a wall along the platform and doors that open once the train has arrived. Some stations have this so they don’t have to have a conductor on the train, to avoid people falling onto the rails and to help avoid ‘accidents’ where people jump in front of trains:

They also have some fairly serious rules about where you can and cannot smoke. Smokers are often herded into glass boxes in the middle of train platforms to do their business:

5. Everyone has a bicycle.

This is one of the bicycle parking lots near a station I once lived near while I was going to uni:

(It was still early morning when this picture was taken so there are a few places left.)

To use one of the eight parking places in this area, you pay a few dollars a day or enter a lottery to get a parking place you can use for a year for a set fee. To park your bike at your own apartment may also cost money, but at least you don’t have to worry about helmet hair as helmets are not compulsory.

Bicycles are the life and blood of Japan and if you don’t have one, shopping is tough and taking your kids to daycare is even tougher:

(They recently introduced a law saying that you had to have a special bicycle if you want to carry two kids. The new bicycles are more stable and are supposed to stop kids being killed when a strong breeze knocks the bike over into the path of an on-coming truck.)

6. Non-Japanese people are from another planet.

If you stay in Japan for more than ninety days, you have to register yourself at your local government office as an alien. Alien registration requires you to give them fingerprints and every possible scrap of information about you including where you were born and the names, date of birth, nationality and relationship status of anyone you live with.

Once you get registered as an alien, you have to carry your alien card with you at all times and theoretically you can be arrested if you don’t have it on you. I still have mine with my very alien-looking mug-shot and if you look carefully at the top you’ll see it says “Certificate of Alien Registration”:

(I always felt so proud of officially being an alien, but looking suspiciously human.)

7. Toilet paper is really cheap but you have to carry your own.

Toilet paper generally comes in packs of 12 rolls that sell for anywhere from 198yen to around 400yen ($2-$4).

(I’m guessing the reason for the 12-roll pack is because it’s the biggest size that you can hang from the handlebars of your bicycle and still steer.)

Tissues come in packs of 5 boxes for around the same price:

(Once again wrapped in plastic with a little handle for hanging from your bicycle…)

There are also some companies that come around collecting old newspapers and in return for a stack of newspapers they will give you a roll or two of toilet paper. In Australia we normally pay $5 -$7 for 12 rolls of toilet paper and each box of tissues can cost what five boxes does in Japan.

But even though it’s so cheap, generally speaking, public toilets do not contain toilet paper or anything to dry your hands with. So what do you do?

You collect little packets of free advertising tissues to wipe your bum and carry a handkerchief to wipe your hands.

(There are normally about 10 tissues in each pack and they advertise absolutely anything from haircuts to porn shops.)

Especially around big stations and and shopping areas, you’ll generally see people giving out tissues:

Oh and don’t ever blow your nose in public in Japan or you won’t just be an alien, but a dirty one.

Things about Japan you never needed to know

1. Postal workers are amazing.

Here’s a pretty map of Perth CBD with streets, terraces, avenues and whatnot all clearly marked.

Here’s a map of the area around Tokyo station with….nothing.

So how do you find anything? Well everything is broken down into areas like suburbs and then the suburbs are broken down into smaller numbered areas on separate blocks of land and then each building is numbered. Sounds easy, right? Except most of the numbering occurred according to when the building was built, not according to its location so number 77 can be next to number 43.

Here’s a close-up of a place I used to live (yes, I lived in the middle of nowhere a few times) and you can see the numbers are all over the place:

It’s standard practice to give people a map for directions because having the address tells you fuck-all. Postal workers simply have to memorise where places are and that’s why they’re amazing.

2. Everything is ‘busy – even the books and tv.

I remember watching my first Japanese tv programme with Master and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Why do they write all over the screen?’

I was used to it so it never even dawned on me that it might be a bit strange for someone watching the first time.

The magazine my friend sent me is pretty much the same – it’s ‘busy’.

I don’t actually know why they write all over the screen on tv, but my guess is that it’s because so many words in Japanese have exactly the same pronunciation, but are written with different kanji.

3. Public garbage bins are virtually non-existant.

If you visit Japan, one thing you’ll notice is that there is almost no-where to throw away anything. The ubiquitous convenience stores generally have one outside, but anywhere else, you could be searching for days.

Why?

Throwing stuff away is serious business in Japan. Most of the waste is burned in smoke stacks that dot the landscape and for large things like furniture you’ll often pay a hefty fee to dispose of it. Although the rules for separating waste vary between prefectures, wards and even suburbs, normally you separate into burnable, non-burnable & recyclables and put them out on separate days. Separating your waste can require a phd:

There is nowhere to put garbage bins so you generally just leave out your garbage in a designated spot between designated hours on your designated day (yes, people will watch you like a hawk to make sure you don’t break the rules). There is generally a net at the designated spot supposedly to keep the crows away.

The garbage trucks often have cutesy pictures on them and they play music at ridiculous volumes that will wake you up at ungodly hours ( I think anything before 8am is ungodly…) There are always two or three guys in uniforms that run around picking up the bags and who take their job very seriously.

Stay tuned for part two in which I continue to prove that with Master away I have waaaay too much time on my hands.

When the Master’s away, the kitten will play…

…by roping up her boobies!

(My apologies to the OCD people out there who hate it when I use two different colours of rope…)

Here are a few facts about me and self-bondage:

• I nearly always get into the mood in the afternoon somewhere between three and six o’clock
• Self-bondage is purely functional for me and I don’t care about the aesthetics
• I never used to be into boobie bondage until I started watching porn and then it became a bit of a fetish of mine
• I used hemp and nylon rope because hemp is great to anchor to and leaves you with purdy marks and nylon has a nice bite

(I don’t really have the necessary amount of boobage for decent boobie bondage, but it still kind of works.)

Generally speaking, I do it so tight that it’s hard to breathe. After a while things really start to hurt so I don’t leave it on for that long – just long enough to have a release and then I’m done. Bondage is my foreplay, a means to an end and I tend not to do it just for the sake of bondage i.e. I always have dessert

Sometimes I get marks, sometimes I don’t. On this occasion I was blessed with some purdy marks:

(Is it just me or does it look like I tie-dyed my boobs?)

Questions from the deep

Have you ever typed a question into google? I’m betting that if you’re one of the 118,000,000 or so hits that google gets a day, you’re probably asking it questions like I do. My favourite thing to do when I’m bored out of my brain is to start typing a question into google and see what questions it auto-fills for me. Just type “why…” and have a look at the fucked up questions people ask the great google god in the sky.

It’s also highly amusing (in a slightly politically incorrect way) to ask the question ‘why do…’ and then insert the names of various racial/social groups.

If you haven’t tried it yet, please do so now. You have my permission to not even finish reading this…just go and do it. Seriously, it will change your life.

Along with the flurry of amusing search terms I get from people ending up on my blog, I also get a lot of questions so I thought I’d try and answer a few of the questions people have asked over the past week:

1. different name you can call a potato?

Well,  if you are a bit high-brow you could always call it a po-tah-to and then we’d have to call the whole thing off. Then again, if someone puts one up your anal passage, you may also call it a ‘fucker’ as in, “Get that fucker out of my ass!”

2. difference between a cream and a slave?

Well, one is white and made from milk and the other one can be any colour and made from human. I wonder if they meant “a cream pie”? But then again, asking for the difference between a cream pie and a slave is just as fucked up.

3.  how to get off a masochist?

My gut answer to this is, “Just roll off them”, but I’m guessing they meant, ‘How to get a masochist off?’

If we’re talking masochist and masochist=likes pain, pain is a good start. Just bear in mind that’s it’s not always quite that easy and most people have preferences and different things that press their buttons, so I’d always advocate *talking* to them before you start using them as a pin cushion.

4. pronounce strine?

Just say it like it’s spelled and if you can say it through your nose to get the Australian twang, you get bonus points.

5. difference between sago and tapioca?

I think I covered that in my recipe for coconut tapioca but in case you can’t be bothered to do the clicky: sago comes from the pith of the sago palm and tapioca comes from the tuber called cassava. Yes, you should invite me to your next trivia night and yes, you should make sure I’m on your team.

So that’s about it for the Q & A portion of the programme. I’ll leave you with some of the more interesting non-question search terms for this week:

brain surgery for slavegirls

free hamster mature milking slavegirl

self bondage your car

literotica comming gallons of sperm

Homebody

I wonder whether being ‘anti-social’ is part and parcel of being a slave?   I’ve noticed on a lot of other blogs that people class themselves as anti-social and I am one of the biggest confirmed recluses ever, so I’ve had a question in my mind for a while now:

Does it go with the territory or is it just a fact that socially-challenged people gravitate towards being submissive?

I would call myself a homebody. I like being at home where I can be myself without worrying about anyone looking at me or having to make conversation. I’ve always been like this though, ever since I was young. I’d generally amuse myself with very little effort and I’ve rarely felt the need to seek out friends or maintain friendships – which, of course, makes me a really crap friend. I’m the type of person who won’t call you just to chat and who generally won’t reply to your emails. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my friends, I just enjoy my space and silence a little too much and for most people my ‘barely there’ approach to friendship is too non-committal and too non-reciprocal to be worth the effort.

I don’t think I’m rare in the slave world. I think my self-sufficiency is fairly typical of most slaves and I’m swaying more towards the possibility that socially-challenged people gravitate towards being submissive. I don’t think I’ve ever read or heard about a truly extroverted slave in the years I’ve been hanging around the internet and the greater majority of us seem to be inept socially in someway, but then again, it may be that everyone is inept socially but that some people just cover up their ineptness better.

Surprisingly, one of the things I was hoping to get as a…how shall we put it? side bonus (?) of becoming a slave, was that I was hoping to inherit some of Master’s friends. I was hoping to be introduced to a different social circle and to become a part of it, by default, by being his property. The idea was good in theory, but my first owner introduced me to a sum total of zero real people and Master, being originally from the east side of Australia, was pretty much in the same boat as me as far as not knowing anyone here and having a very limited social circle.

Over the years we’ve formed quite a few friendships with kink-minded folk  especially in part to the luncheons and things we have at our house. For some reason I always find it easier to talk with people over yummy food than when I’m tied to something and getting my ass beaten…funny that…. Unfortunately, we still have zero friendships outside of kink due mostly, I think, to my anti-social nature. And, of course, the down-side of kink friends is you’re always restricted by what’s okay to talk about and you never actually know whether the name you call them by is their real name. All that hiding and dancing around the truth annoys me, but I understand the necessity of it for some people. Sometimes I’m just itching to ask, ‘So what do you do?’ – the most basic of questions - but I stop myself because it’s very likely that it’s an ‘off-limits’ topic for many people.

I think generally Master wants to be more social than I am and he is held back by my lack of enthusiasm for anything outside the house involving people I don’t know really, really well. I find also that when I’m working – even part-time – having to be out of the house for extended periods of time makes me want to stay home even more when I have the chance. If I’m home all day, every day the cabin fever will kick in and I’ll actually want to go out somewhere if I can, but when I’m out of the house from 7:30am to 6pm several days a week, I feel like my quota of ‘house-time’ hasn’t been met and when the weekend comes, I ain’t goin’ nowhere until I get my house time fix.

This might also sound a bit blasphemous, but I have a little bit of a niggling feeling that people who excel socially don’t make good slaves. I don’t know whether it’s the image I have of slaves being, in some way, incomplete or lacking, but the image of a socially confident slave just doesn’t gel with me. I don’t see them being the life of the party, chatting with all and sundry, with never a ripple to mar their perfect surface. I see them hugging the dark corners and responding when spoken to, breaking into a sweat at the thought of speaking in front of a group and wondering who are they to have anything even slightly worthy of listening to.

Oh wait, that’s not slaves in general, that’s just me.

The Banal

So it was back to work with a bus full of kiddies for me today. I enjoyed my stress-free commute to work during the six weeks of the school holidays so much. It was great to have peace and quiet inside the bus and even better knowing that I would arrive in time to catch my train. When my bus turns into a kiddie-filled bus it takes an extra twenty minutes to get to the station and I generally miss the train I need to catch to arrive at work comfortably on time. It must be the goodie-two-shoes in me or something, but when I know that I’m going to be late for work I panic. Even though my boss generally isn’t there when I arrive and no-one knows whether I actually get there on time or not and no-one would care anyway, I know and I care and I feel guilty being late.

I think that’s one of the reasons why Master calls me ‘anal’.

One of the good things about being in the southern hemisphere is that the school year actually finishes in the same year. Our schools start in February and end in December – usually the week before Christmas. When I went to school in Japan is was so strange to have the year finishing and for school not to be. I could never quite get my head around it and I really didn’t like having a short xmas vacation filled with homework and assignments. Then I went to university and the semester started in September and that messed up my mind even more.

I think that’s another one of the reasons why Master calls me ‘anal’.

And speaking of Master, he is abandoning me at 4:30am tomorrow to head off to Melbourne for a job interview. The lengthy flight is bad and then there’s the three hour time difference; added to that is he is flying Virgin which has crappy small planes that make you feel like you’re livestock being carted off to the salesyard. But it’s a free flight and he’ll get to see his mum and dad (which may be good or bad depending on how much yelling takes place in the house…)

This means that yours truly will be home alone for several days….which may be good or bad depending on how many releases I have to make the long, lonely nights bearable.

I think the last time I looked I had two releases on the fridge chart. One for ‘being fabulously obedient’ i.e. stripping off naked and kneeling on the seagrass mat and answering interrogation questions appropriately when asked in front of friends, and one for ‘being a bossy bitch at the movies’ i.e. for stomping up the back of the cinema in my biker boots when we went to see Sherlock Holmes and telling the kids to STFU.

Oh, did I mention we went to see Sherlock Holmes? I have to say I didn’t like it. I just couldn’t establish any sort of connection with the characters and it seemed to me that everyone talked too fast (maybe that’s just another sign that I’m becoming a fogey though). I don’t know what else I want to see but I can get $7.50 movie tickets through my club membership until March 24th so anyone got any suggestions?

Master being away until Sunday night also means we’ll miss the play party on Saturday night. I’m not overly concerned. Apparently I was to go as pony girl again with head harness and arm binder. Apparently the outfit I’d modelled for him with the mango was all well and good, but he had his heart set on pony girl. Apparently he was going to beat my ass or some such thing. Of course, all of that could just be him messing with my mind.

The real reason I’m not overly concerned about missing the party is that if the employment situation doesn’t start looking up, right about the time we come back from Japan we’ll run out of money to pay the mortgage, meaning the house will need to be sold and we’ll have nowhere to live and life will generally suck. I’ll all for missing a play party if it might mean a chance for employment and the resulting income.

In other news, the weather is starting to get cooler and unfortunately our air-con has chosen this particular time to go bung. When we turn it off, water keeps gushing from the unit on the roof down to ground and as my bedroom window is right where the water outlet is, turning it off is a no-go situation. As a result we’ve had to leave it on 24/7 while we wait for a repair guy to deign us with his presence. The air-con has been on continuously since Friday and it will be this Friday afternoon before the guy can come. I’m wondering if they will have to come and dig me out of the ice floes by then. Seriously, it’s freezing inside the house. I’ve put both of my winter doonas back on my bed and I feel sad and grumpy – because that’s what feeling cold does to me. Master is blaming me for the air-con situation because apparently I jinxed it or something by saying casually the other day that it was  great we’d had nil problems with it even though we use it heaps… and it was about that time it decided to go bung.

Do you think I have some weird funky jinx-like power? *makes mysterious hand gestures and ‘woooooo’ sounds*

So that’s about it for the banalities of my life. Stay tuned for the next episode in which I’m still cold and I’ve run out of releases.

Is that a mango in your cunt or are you just happy to see me?

Just for all the Sitophiliacs among us:

I don’t think I’ll ever look at a mango quite the same again…

I’m guessing the question on everyone’s lips is, “Why the mango???”

When I have the answer myself you’ll be the first to know. I seriously don’t know how the mango thing started. One minute I was posing for pics on the dining table in the outfit I was planning on wearing to the next play party and the next minute I had a cunt-shaped mango shoved in my twat and was told to masturbate with it!!! WTF??

All I can say is that we have some funky friends. They pop over for coffee, conversation turns to play party outfits and then we get a mango-in-cunt-situation. Yep, it’s always friends who fuck you over.

Oh, and in the interests of public awareness I really think everyone should click on this wiki link about food play. Thanks to wiki I feel much better about my ‘tame fetishes’ and I’ve also added several new words to my vocabulary including :

yeastiality – umm…yeah, I think we can work out that one

nyotaimori – eating sushi off a naked body

wakamezake – drinking sake from a naked body

vorarephilia – the fetish of eating (I think I may add this to my fetlife profile…)

No mangoes were harmed in the photo shoot…until Master happily munched on the prop mango for breakfast today.