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a day out with friends

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2010.06.05

Last night, Kenny and I went to the festival at the shrine behind our house. There, we ran into several friends.

They're all parents of small children from the neighbourhood of about Kenny's age. Happily, I was sufficiently able to speak with our friends in my (still very broken) Japanese that I felt comfortable joining them and talking about various things. My vocabulary and grammar are crap, but it's good to be able to get involved.

Couldn't say the same for Kenny, though. He didn't seem to know what to make of the other boys, though he'd seen them all before. It crossed my mind that we've been spending too much time alone on the weekend and not seeing enough of other children. I mean: for months, now.

Sure enough, when we followed through on the plans we made last night, Kenny was reluctant to start palling around with the other kids. In fact, he spent the whole day hanging around his Oka-san and me. We vowed to reverse the trend and get him in front of kids again.

Happily, Yu-kun's dad is essentially a kid as well (like me) and we've agreed that he's going to bring over his boy and his electric plastic rail kit and we'll make a giant combined wooden/plastic model train. For the two two year olds, of course. (e_e)

Here are some pics of the day.


t-rex, daddy, t-rex

yes it's a playground; never mind the axle

slightly apart

do I have something on my face?

god I love trains!

who's the interloper?

someone ask for a macho man?

yu-kun describes the one that got away

kenny as a cool dude

what you looking at mister?

toddler pow-wow on a train

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)