Atsushi is coming for the weekend and will be greeted by an apartment with no food in the refrigerator and piles of unopened mail on the breakfast counter and half its usual pieces of clothes missing because I took them to the dry cleaner a while back and haven’t picked them up. The place isn’t dirty–we do not allow the accumulation of organic matter–but it looks paradoxically more lived-in than when I’m actually spending time there.

Don’t mind me while I mainline my coffee-break orange juice, mango doughnut, and triple-shot latte as I write. I don’t think there’s an injunction against typing with your mouth full, is there?

Speaking of oranges, a good buddy of mine–bartender who’s worked at various Family places I go to over the years–had a birthday the other day. I figured he’d be getting enough objects decorated with pictures of half-naked men, so I went to Dean & Deluca–I swear, I provide half that place’s revenue (cf. the above reference to all the non-cooking happening at my apartment)–and bought him a little orange-liqueur-y cake in a cute passes-gay-muster box. Anyway, when I gave it to him, he was on-duty at the bar, so he just took it discreetly and said thanks. But I had to laugh a little bit later when he sidled up to me and said, kind of sheepishly, “Uh, Sean-chan, your present? Very nice. Uh, do you think it’s okay if I take it home and eat it there?” See, what he was supposed to do in order to be polite was to open it there at the bar and offer everyone a slice.

I think the way Asia often requires you to be good to your guests when celebrating a milestone (your wedding or birthday or what have you) rather than expecting the princess treatment from them is a good thing. Generally. But if there’s anywhere that it’d be nice to see people take one day out of the year and forget about harmonizing and people-pleasing, it’s Japan. So my reaction was on the order of “Honey, you spend every working hour smiling and giving people drinks, or cleaning up after the people you just gave drinks, or asking them whether they need another drink. It’s your birthday. Take the cake home. Get into bed with the boyfriend, feed it to each other in handfuls, and then eat the crumbs out of each other’s chest hair. THAT is what you’re supposed to do with a birthday present. You are NOT supposed to divide it up among this crew of wasted fags–orange cake doesn’t go with beer, anyway.”

The new Pet Shop Boys is better than a sharp stick in the eye and, more importantly, better than the last new Pet Shop Boys. I’m still not smitten, though. The version with the bonus disc has absolutely gorgeous packaging–one magenta and one orange disc–orange seems to be an emerging theme here–in a lacquer-black jewel box. I just sort of wish I didn’t prefer looking at it to listening to it. (It also has that copy protection that makes it a royal pain in the ass to get onto your iPod.)

What I have been listening to is Shalamar–I’m not nearly the devotee that this character is, but it’s been good to have something in the way of a steady, human pulse to move to through the last few weeks of hecticness. Olivia, too…you know, to complete the sort of black-and-white milkshake effect. (Once, Q Magazine referred to her “Sex-Livvy” period, which I thought was an absolutely adorable back formation from “Sex-Kylie.” Though maybe that’s actually what they called it in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I doubt it, though. I think I’d remember that from my Auntie June in England.)

There was no orange in that paragraph, for those keeping track.

The rainy season has arrived in Tokyo, and (luckily!) it hasn’t been too torturously hot yet. I hope the last week of spring is being kind to everyone else’s part of the world. I promise to be back more regularly when I can…uh…concentrate.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 03:26 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.