Mosquito

I've often said that having five cockroaches in your house is preferable to one mosquito. Cockroaches, be they bigger, shinier, faster, creepier and prone to suddenly fly at you, can be humorous in a Keystone Kops kind of way. There's nothing funny about mosquitos though.

Their refined purposeness is but one of their hideous traits, including the way they fly with their legs splayed like a grappling hook, the way those limbs fold beneath them once they've landed, a squatting machine extracting resources, the way ones gradual sink into sleep is yanked upwards by the whirring of tiny wings, the fact that they're too small to dispose of easily.

The morning saw me engaged in combat with a particularly vile specimen - blue, with white band around its legs, the bite of which leaves an ugly red welt which is insanely itchy for about a day, then lingers looking foul. I lost this bout and saw the thing, weighed down after its meal, hopping across my desk, sunlight revealing its formerly slender abdomen, now bloated and red with my blood. The little shit.

Repeating oneself.

Maybe I haven't written anything for a while because Japan and the lifestyle I've been leading recently have ceased to inspire me. I can't remember the last thing that surprised me about Japan, but there's one thing I will never get over...

...at my current school, there is a teacher now working on a part time basis. This is due to a sickness which has bound him to a wheelchair - it isn't the result of an accident, rather a peculiar wasting disease. A woman comes in to help him negotiate the trickier parts of the school. Yesterday, as the afternoon slump took hold, I saw him, clearly finished for the day, reading a newspaper, whilst his lady-friend buried her nose in a novel. Such blatant procrastination is all in a days work in any job in the world...but an hour later, I saw he had finished his paper and was staring into space, whilst the lady put her head on the desk and had a nap.

Why didn't they just go home?

Oh, and Abe Shinzo just resigned.