As the World Turns

We've entered yet another period wherein I am guaranteed to accidentally write the wrong date on all of my papers, now haven't we? Goodbye, 2010. You were very confusing with high highs and low lows. But you know what? You finished well enough. I would give you an overall pretty okay grade.


But now that the date has changed, even if only on the calendar, and not yet in my heart, it's time to kick it up.

There's a great English-language used books store in Ebisu called Good Day Books that I first went to over three years ago with a friend. I remembered really enjoying the bookstore and also getting my head smooshed in the doors of the elevator. Since then, I hadn't gone again. I never really took the time to explore Ebisu save a couple times where a friend would suggest meeting there to check out a new cafe, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography or just walk from there to somewhere else. Actually, just a few days ago was much the same as that. The plan was to go to an exhibit at the museum that we had missed the day before, but by the time we arrived at Ebisu, it was too late to actually enter the exhibit. Instead, we killed some time at the bookstore before heading off to meet some folks in Shinjuku.

I guess I had forgotten how nice the bookstore was. The first thing I saw when we safely made it out of the elevator was a book I had bookmarked on Amazon, one of the few books on the Foreign Service Officer Test's reading list that isn't a textbook, and thus well out of my modest price range.

I'm almost halfway through it now. Ideally, I would like to just be studying for all of that right now, but I am a student, and I do have a somewhat silly course load this term. Today I plan to get my XML in order for Thursday. I'll finish reading for my presentation on Thursday in another class. Hell, maybe I'll even check that English that I've been putting off for months.