Quote:*duck* Ack! Right, right! I know, believe me, but among other headaches this medication thing seems to have me sleeping about twice as much as I usually do, so please, beg pardon for being a little behind.
*throw*
Anyway...
The eventual plan for the evening started with the word 'kareoke'. Frankly I had no opinion one way or the other on that score, perhaps because in a lot of ways I still thought like an American - I didn't and don't get the kareoke thing that seems to be such an obsession for the Japanese. Certainly I have no idea how a town the size of Fuuka, what I'd guess at less than twenty thousand people, managed to support more kareoke parlors than it had restaruants.
Speaking of which, that was the part of the evening's plans that I took issue with. In retrospect, all the girls were clearly having a great deal of fun watching Shiho punch all the food-related buttons she'd gone and learned in the months since I'd woken up, but seriously, it was not just my being picky.
Example: Fuuka has three real pizza joints. One of them is vile by any standard - unsanitary, disgusting, foul-tasting, and just about every other epithet you can honestly apply to food. Another is the sort of place that turns you away at the door if you've got your tie tied wrong, if you know what I mean (although, having been taken there for 'Yuuichi's' birthday some time later, I can tell you that their food is actually worth what they charge for it), and thus entirely unsuitable for what was really one step up from a frat party, and the third, well, they were good enough and cheap enough, but their cook was apparently ineradicably convinced that a pizza was not a pizza without mayonnaise.
Mayo.
On pizza.
Um, no?
And all of the other options were either shot down by... well, pretty much everyone but me as not being 'interesting enough' or were just as absurd in their own right. McDonalds produced the best hamburgers in town, for example, and theirs were a great deal worse than the ones I remembered eating under the same imprint back in America - the rest weren't even recognizable as being meat-based.
On the other hand, it wasn't as though the entire ordeal didn't have its compensating factors. Besides the comedy factor inherent in my ranting, Mai told me later that it was the first step for most of the HiME-sentai towards regarding me as a person and a friend, rather than some wise, all-knowing oracle - although I'll ask that y'all kind audience-members keep in mind that, at the time, I had no fucking clue any of them were even considering looking at me that way.
We did end up with good food that was both 'interesting' and within our price range, we got to see a wide variety of register slaves react to Fumi and Midori in particular's ideas of 'good party clothes', and more personally, I got a chance to pick up a couple of disposable cameras and document both outfits and events for posterity.
Given how little I remember of that evening after we got to the actual parlor (and the content of the pictures taken after that point), I have since reached two conclusions. First, where my original (ie, fat white American) body had inherited a tendancy towards alcoholism and attendant tolerance for the drug, my new one was archtypically Japanese - ie, lit by the start of the second beer.
Second, if Midori ever spikes my drinks again, I'm going to monitor her alcohol intake then sneak in in the night to rewire her alarm clock to play fucking DISASTER AREA at eight in the fucking AM.
For once, I actually know exactly where I plan to go with this - but since I have a test in... exactly eleven and a half hours... that'll count for about half of my grade in that class, it should likely wait.
So. Stay tuned for next time, kids, where you get to hear about Those Damned Photos.
Ja, -n
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"Puri puri puri puri... Bang!"