The creation of this blog is the commencement of a new pointin my life. The name Rishana was something I created in 9^th gradeJapanese class when I saw a conversation between a girl named Risa and Shana ona worksheet. Since then the name has stuck. Rish is the guardian of the throneof my soul and all who wish to proceed must pass her stern judgment. She the embodiment of my true, unfilteredthoughts, my honne. She is the whispers in the back of my head thatlead me on the right path when all seems lost, the light in the darkness.

Most importantly however, Rishana is the name of The Beastthat I long ago chained deep within the darkest reaches of my heart to protectmyself. The task in front of me now is to reawaken that slumbering force. Mylife until now has been that of learning to drive a car with one wheel missing.As skilled as a driver as I may become, the vehicle is still flawed. If I am toachive all that I am capable of, I must undo her chains one by one.

Today, I for the very first time, begin my commitment to live andexperience life.

Well it turned out tasting alright (besides the dashi releasing an eye watering stink in our kitchen, perhaps I will talk about the smell issues with dashi at further length in a later entry). The two problems we had with it were it’s difficult to find the highly-marbled thinly sliced beef around here, and we didn’t have any sake. It seems like you really need the sake to make it taste just right. But otherwise I was so happy! I will be trying this again as soon as we can pick up a small bottle of sake.

Banana Castella: this is a (usually) banana shaped fried castella cake filled with a mashed up, sweet banana filling. See the image to the left. I first tried this by recommendation, Shouma thought I would like it and like it I did. After the first time I tried it, I couldn’t find it for awhile and I found it again at a Mini-stop. I also found a bag of mini banana castellas shaped like animals for 100yen at Sunkus. It is perhaps one of my most favorite items.

Chips: Japan as a wonderful and wide variety of chips available, in just about any flavor you can imagine. I did find it difficult to get cheese flavors however. Most were delicious, or at least interesting. The only variety I really disliked was Doritos Pizza-La flavor. See this link for a great over-view of some Japanese chips.

Apple juice: Apple juice in Japan is an entirely different affair than it is in America. It’s think, strong and pulpy. It’s not nearly as sweet, but it’s way more tasty. The closest juice I had to American apple juice was produced by Fanta, but it was carbonated.

Onigiri: Rice balls, usually triangular in shape and covered in portion by a piece of seaweed. They can be filled with a variety of food including pickled plum, fish, or even chicken! I really liked the chicken onigiri I had on the way to Narita airport, even though it was one of the worst days of my life haha.

Green tea ice cream: Just as the title implies, this is green tea flavored ice cream, and it’s just lovely. I usually bought a single serving size, touted as having only 80 calories. I have also heard of sweet potatoe and mochi ice creams, I wish I could’ve tried those ones as well. But squid ink ice cream … I’ll pass.

Strawberry, banana and vanilla milk: I bought one of these almost everyday. They are usually very delicately sweet and just make you happy as you drink them. The strawberry flavor is apparently too girly for Shouma, but banana is ok.

Well that’s all the food I can think of right now, it always makes me hungry when I think about Japanese food. I think America really lacks the innovativeness and openess to create varied food items like Japan. But I think more and more people become interested in unique and international food all the time so perhaps we can look forward to Japanese food being more widely offered here in America someday!

Given my stringent after-work routine it¡Çs close to 9:00 by the time I arrive at Katamachi. I still fancy myself as a starving college student and as such refuse to spend 400 yen on a cup of tea at a place where I can only linger for an hour or so. This leaves me one option:

The grandfather of Dunkin Donuts

Mister Donuts is the largest donut chain in Japan. Their claim to fame (in my mind, anyway) is that they offer free refills on coffee and café ole. For Japan, this is huge. You can¡Çt even get a free refill at McDonald¡Çs (obesity problem solved!) and family restaurants charge a stiff fee for access to their ¡Èdrink bar.¡É In hindsight a family restaurant would be just as good of a place to lounge the night away on the cheap, but I can¡Çt break myself away from Katamachi¡Çs magical social gravity.

Walking around Katamachi reminds me of the arcade in Westland mall back in my senior year of high school. If there weren¡Çt already people you knew when you arrived, you could count on someone dropping in for a game or two of DDR before long. The ultimate passive social network. The best Saturday nights start at Mister Donuts when people you know happen by after your 4^th cup of coffee or on your way to pick up your bike parked in front of the Tatemachi McDonald¡Çs.

Kanazawa is small, in a good way.

A lot of people (mainly natives of the region) tell me how people from Kanazawa are particularly reserved and cautious of strangers, but this train of thought runs parallel to the Japanese Have Longer (Or is it Shorter?) Intestines and Can¡Çt Digest Meat Properly Express. If I had to argue for their case I would say that people are comparatively morose due to the lack of sunshine and unyielding precipitation, but I¡Çve found people to be extremely accommodating!

Being blindsided willy-nilly is not without its disadvantages. Sometimes you just aren¡Çt in the mood to see anyone and just want to study in silence, hence being at a coffee shop alone save for your book. Sometimes you don¡Çt want to run into that person. A more likely scenario for me is that you don¡Çt know who the hell they are. Oh yeah, you¡Çve seen them, chatted a bit, exchanged names and handshakes. But when it comes down to it I can¡Çt put a name on the face, much less remember the face!

If only I had my mask I could get by without such intrusions

Case in point:

There was a well-publicized party at APRE (groan) last weekend where I met someone who I had gone to Karaoke with. Except I couldn¡Çt remember their name. Or that I went to Karaoke with them. And this wasn¡Çt more then a month prior!

This continued for most of the night until I stopped making eye contact with suspiciously familiar characters. I know where all the missile tanks are in Super Metroid but I can¡Çt remember a name? Jesus Christ.

I¡Çve found that if I smile and make a self-depreciating comment people let this casual affront slide. But it happens so much that it¡Çs starting to bother me. But not enough to seriously bother me. Just enough so that my cheeks reflexively flush and I go home to write about it in my blog.

There are too many people in the world!

Tracy mentions that building new habits take 10 to 21 days. That goes for breaking old habits, too. In other words, once you get past that first 10-21 days you won’t need much effort to continue that way.

The most powerful idea in this CD is visualization. Now I’ve discussed this before in Eat Dessert First, and Tracy explains why it works and elaborates on more things you can do.

Brian Tracy does NOT say, “You have a bank account. You’ve chosen not to access it for all these years, for whatever reason. What you didn’t understand was that instead of cash, this bank account has pussy. It pays interest in pussy and yields pussy dividends.” But it would funny if he had.

Resolve that, before you get to sex, you are not especially intelligent, you are not especially funny, you are not cultured, you are not rich… you have the least possible number of noteworthy positive characteristics NOT related to sex.

What you ARE is manly, confident, sexual, tempting, discreet, passionate… all the things that women think of when they think of hot sex and making out.

Basic Rule: If hot, steamy sex/kissing and “X” don’t go together, absolutely do NOT present the “X” side of you until after the first sex, even if that side of you is something good.

For example, can you think of hot, steamy sex in the same thought as a funny joke? If you can, does the joke diminish the power of the sexual image? If so, save it until after you’ve had sex with her for the first time.

As you’re meeting someone, you can only present a few sides of you. Present only the sides that are consistent with hot, passionate kissing and sex.

Now I know there are some hard-headed guys out there who will need this point nailed into them over and over again before they get it. This goes against just about every message society and even “pickup advice” columns send nowadays, but let me assure you it’s one of the simplest and most powerful contrarian bits of tech-wisdom you’ll ever find.

Most guys don’t realize that their wealth, their car, their nice apartment, their high-status job, their intelligence, and so on are actually making things so much harder for them. Or rather, the fact that they emphasize these things holds them back.

This is a tough one to parse, because in fact some of these things actually do help in terms of providing opportunities to meet certain high-class women. Opportunities do matter, but they are not nearly as important as how people perceive you.

This gets even more insidious when you take into account golddiggers and other women taken to shallow endeavors with men. Occasionally some girls will even fuck for money, dinners, status… But this is not the life I hope you’re after. This is a depressing life filled with high-priced prostitutes, IF by some miracle things actually go that smoothly. Most guys fall in love with such women and end up ruining themselves in short order, even if they started out wealthy and sane.

Back to the point: these things HURT you, not help you. Think of truly hot sex and passion - the very thick of the fray of the act itself - where does money, status, culture, or Mercedes fit into that picture? They simply do not.

This is not to say “present yourself as a poor, underclass, lout” - all those things ALSO detract from the image of passionate making out and sex. Are you guys getting the picture yet? Let me spell it out for you once again:

You want to be UNREMARKABLE in every way, EXCEPT as related to PASSIONATE KISSING AND SEX. In aspects directly related to sex, you leave a deep impression on her.

The results of this are that, in her mind,

YOU = SEX

and nothing else special of note. Nothing else to distract from that singular image. Counterintuitive as it may be, “sexual” is always better than “sexual and rich.” She remembers you as the passionate one, the tempting one, the manly one, the hot one, the one who knows what he wants and goes for it, the one who rocks women’s worlds, the one who is in control, the one who is sexually experienced, the one who makes no excuse for his desires when the time comes, the one who is ready and able when her need strikes.

There will be plenty of time to get to know all sides of each other after the animal lust side of things is out of the way. Before that, focus on the passionate aspects only. Simple!

P.S., once you get to the first sex, you can drop this whole thing if you want to. It’s simply a tool for raising the chances to get to sex, after which - as I always talk about - you generally have broad choice to lead the relationship in whatever way you choose.

P.P.S., Note once again that although all this looks like it’s aimed at guys who just want sex, nothing could be further from the truth. The fastest, surest, most secure, and strongest path to love is through fast sex. You’ll never see a girl fall in love as hard or as deep as she does for a man who takes her sooner and better than anyone else ever has. This is just biology. We don’t make the rules, but we ought to learn to work with them. If you have instinctive mental or moral opposition to the this basic fact, take the time to think this through and investigate. If you’re at all skeptical of this fact, this investigation is not optional. Sooner or later you’ll have to face this fact and come to grips with it. Only then can you gain real control over your interactions with women.

Following along with the Psychology of Achievement**, on the second CD (Accepting Reponsibility and Taking Charge), Tracy discusses “releasing your brakes” which I have covered before. I again recommend this series in the strongest possible terms. There is literally no one who would not benefit tremendously from listening to it, even those that have already done so. It’s simply the best overall life success program ever conceived, and has stood the test of time.

The CD and my previous posts cover this “releasing your brakes” stuff pretty well, but I want to emphasize that this is not any kind of “optional” thing that “might” help you. It unequivocally will help you, and in fact it is essential for this stuff to work as a whole.

Specifically, your life will suck if you somehow learn how to get with many fine women but it exposes all kinds of internal sicknesses in you, and success is very unlikely to happen anyway under those conditions.

You want to rid yourself of these encumbrances first to make a clear launching pad.

Here we are talking about the most common UNSEEN issues that guys who are trying to learn pickup walk around with for years without ever knowing what’s really holding them back.

And let’s get one thing straight: YOU CANNOT FORCE YOUR WAY INTO SUCCESS. You cannot simply ignore underlying issues, like holding grudges against women or men, or blaming others for your failures so far. The issues will not go away. They WILL come back to bite you. The “fake it ’til you make it” idea just doesn’t stretch that far.

Even if you manage to meet with some kind of success, it will not cover over these negativity issues for long, and you’ll find yourself either retrogressing or going down an even darker path. Look at Mystery - there is a man who’s underlying issues were never solved, yet he reached success in terms of women, money, and fame. In the sense that I’m talking about now, he “forced” his way to “success.” But would I trade places with him? Not a chance. He’s not HAPPY, which is the point of all of this in the first place. He fucks models, but has severe clininal depression and all sorts of mental issues that I don’t even want to imagine how they impinge on his sexual and romantic relations. That’s not success in my book.

I am all about building success from the ground up.

Real confidence, real sincerity, real understanding of women, real ability to connect at a deep level without encumbrance…THEN can come the really effective techniques.

More and more I realize it’s not the techniques as much as the foundation that have made me successful. Building from the ground up is the fastest and surest way to success with women. That’s something you won’t hear from most, but it’s the truth. It really doesn’t take long for most guys anyway. 3-6 months is all most guys need to make order-of-magnitude improvements. If you have deep-rooted issues it could take longer, but nowhere near the 2-3 years “pickup community” guys seem to typically take. And you’ll be a lot happier when you get there, and able to handle all types of relationship situations and make deep and rewarding connections with great women. Yes, you can have it all. The marketing hucksters are the ones who try to break the lessons into watered-down, packaged units so you’re always left needing more product, always seemingly one step away from success, for years…and years…

**IMPORTANT NOTE: Those interested in the Psychology of Achievement should get or download the 6-CD set, NOT the shorter 2-hour version. And don’t worry about the touchy-feely stuff as it can be safely ignored - separate the wheat from the chaff on your own.

My trip is less than two months away- and I’m in debt. Now that I’m eighteen, and my parents have found out about me joining the military, they don’t pay for jack shit. Health insurance, car insurance, car note, car repairs (and there are a lot of those), cell phone bill, gas- I pay all of my own stuff now. I’m lucky that they don’t make me pay rent. It doesn’t help that I got so pissed at my IHOP boss a few weeks ago that I told her to her face that she could shove her pancakes up her ass, and that I quit. I ripped my apron off, shoved it at her, and walked right out the door. I don’t think SEX has ever felt that good.

*mumble* Not that I would know….. *sigh* Virginity sucks.

Anyway- with one less job, I decided to take the easy way out and just pull double shifts at cane’s. You get paid out the ass for overtime at cane’s, and it’s not like I wasn’t accustomed to the work. HOWEVER, the monotony of being at one workplace, seeing the same damn dumb people every day and doing the same menial tasks over and over…. It really wears on a person. I would close one night, clean everyting in that place and get out of there around three in the morning- then have to be back there less than six hours later to re-open everything and start another day. Nowadays, with work and general insomnia, I’m lucky to get five hours of sleep a week.

What really wears on me are the people I work with. I work with a much tighter group than at the theater; at any given time, there were no less than thirty to thirty five people working at my movie theater. At cane’s, there might only be you, the manager, and three other workers tops. Therefore, you get to know your coworkers a lot better- and a lot quicker than you normally would. There’s a guy there, one that I really like, who’s kind and thoughtful, and helps me lift heavy boxes even if I don’t ask him to. He’s the All-Around Nice Guy, guys that you don’t come across everyday. He likes me, too, and he’s even started ksising me Hello and Goodbye on the cheek when we happen to work together. However, we’ve both decided that it’s not wise to date eachother when we both work for the same place; it could cause all kinds of complications that neither of us need.

Then, there’s this other guy. He’s rude, self-centered, narcissistic, sarcastic, and a total jackass. He’s just nice enough to everyone enough so that they don’t resent him. Instead, he’s viewed as a sort of Top Dog of the place, and everyone listens to him. Except me. I summed him up as a jerk right after we met. I had just started there, and it was the first time I had even seen him. Being naive, my first thought was of how cute he was- then I saw him stealing food. He had a handful of fries in one hand, and his back turned to the security camera. I told him. “You’re going to get into trouble.”
His answer? “No I’m not. You might, though.”
However, when I was about to ask him what he meant, we both heard the manager’s footsteps getting closer. Instantly, he grabbed my chin and gripped it realy hard, so that my teeth cut into the inside of my cheeks and said, “Open your mouth.”
My thoughts instantly shifted from, “He’s kinda cute,” to “This mothafucka’s NUTS!”
I made the mistake of opening my mouth to ask him what the fuck he was thinking- and before I could even take a breath, he popped the rest of those french fries into my mouth and hurried away.
Right then, the manager rounded the corner, and looked right at me. “Having a good shift so far, Pandora?” he asked innocently.
I nodded and smiled, hoping that would be sufficient, but then the manager narrowed his eyes and said, “Do you have anything in your mouth…?”

Have you ever had to swallow four Idaho french fries whole to avoid being fired your third day on the job?
I did.

After that, I decided that that guy was NOT someone I wanted to be friendly to. I’ll call him Brewsky. He likes to boast about how much he drinks and how much pot he does, when he’s really just a spoiled brat who has his mommy pay for everything.

The guy I like, I’ll call him Apollo. He’s so incredibly polite and smart, and he jokes around with me without being crude like other guys. Every time I’ve asked him to do something for me, no matter how big or small, he does it for me without question. He’s a totally All-American Good Guy and I enjoy every minute I spend with him. Unfortunately, Bresky found out about us. I guess in such close quarters, it really wasn’t too hard to guess, but as shift manager, I had taken great pains to make sure that the two of them were never scheduled to work at the same time- or if they were, I was off that day. I kept that up for several weeks, until one of the other managers granted Brewsky permission to take on some extra shifts- shifts that I had painstakingly arranged so that Apollo and I could work alone in the kitchen. Instead, it would wind up being me, Apollo, and the jackass of the year- alone in the kitchen, working within feet of eachother.

Barely a week ago, such a night transpired, and it happened to be the night Brewsky found out about Apollo and I. Now, bear in mind that I’m sure the rest of the crew knew about how he and I felt about each other- they just had the decency not to mention it. However, Brewsky lacks that subtlety. As soon as I walked in the door, Apollo helped me out of my coat, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I had barely smiled when Brewsky popped from around the corner, looked between Apollo and I and gave an INSANELY LOUD wolf-whistle and said, “Stop that you two- we have cameras watching. Unless you two are secret voyers? Tsk tsk…” Everyone else in the kitchen giggled and I was MORTIFIED.

Apollo and I managed to have a semi-normal shift together, aside from Brewsy’s occasional inappropriate comments. But whenever Apollo had to go to the back, Brewsky would either follow him and they would spend WAY too much time back there for my comfort, or he would stay with me- and say stuff like, “It’s pathetic the way you run after him, I thought you were better than that.” “You’re totally not his type- an independent girl who pretends to be helpless is a total turn-off,” “If I were him, I’d be laughing at you.” I told him off every time, but he kept at it, until I finally said that it didn’t matter WHAT he said to me, or how much he tried to get under my skin, because the fact remained that at the end of the day, when Apollo helped me ito my jacket and walked me to my car, and kissed me goodbye on the cheek- when the day was over, it was Apollo I was going to be thinking of and how wonderful he was, not Brewsky and his childish jokes. That seemed to shut him up for a while, then the unthinkable happened.

When all three of us were in the kitchen not too long after that, Apollo had just changed out the bird cart, meaning he had replaced the empty bin with a fresh bin full of raw chicken strips soaking in marinade solution. These bins are each about as large and heavy as a medium-sized television set, and they’re a bitch to move and replace. Unfortunately, as soon as Apollo had replaced the empty one with a fresh one, Brewsky told one of the other crew members to clean the bird cart- meaning that Apollo had to take out the bin he had just struggled to lift and place to begin with. I glared at Brewsky- I knew he was doing that on purpose, but he just grinned. Then- as Apollo was lifting the giant bin of chicken, Brewsky yanked the table out from beneath it, making it tip forward. To try and save the chicken, Apollo kicked his knee up to hit the underside of the bin to tilt it back, but he hit it too hard, knocking himself off-balance, and the bird bin spilled all over him. He was slathered with raw strips of chicken, bits of chicken fat, and gallons of chicken juice and marinade solution.

To say that I was shocked and appalled is a complete understatement, but above all, I was disgusted that Brewsky would do something like that. While Brewsky and the rest of the crew laughed, and I knelt by Apollo to help him and clean him up, I was suprised to see that Apollo was laughing along with them, albeit a bit embarassedly. I was impressed to see that he was such a good sport about it; if I were in his place, to have someone do something like that to me, I admit that i would have either flared in anger or broken down crying. But Apollo- he just stood up, took the towel I offered him to wipe his face and laughed and said, “I guess I should be more careful next time.”

I took command, and got one of the stronger crew members to replace the now empty bin while two others cleaned up the fluid and chicken pieces off the floor. Strangely, Brewsky led Apollo out back to “get him cleaned up.” I was constrained as a manager, and I had to make sure everything in the kitchen was back up to the health code before I could check on Apollo, but as soon as I was sure that everything was sanitized and bleached back to standard, I put someone else in charge and ran out back. Much to my displeasure, the only one I saw out there was Brewsky, and for a moment I was dissappointed, thinking that Apollo had gone home. Then I heard running water, and saw a stream of water running from the backhouse- where the dumpsters were- to the street drain, and then I realised that Apollo was using the hose to rinse himself off. Brewsky made some snide comment about missing him, and I told him that he was needed inside. Once he went through the door, I used the headset I was wearing for drive-thru to tell a girl at the register to keep Brewsky inside. I knew she liked him- and was a huge motormouth- so with her constant chatter she’d be able to keep him preoccupied for at least twenty minutes.

This is where it gets a bit fangirl-ish, and perhaps a bit romanticized, but I SWEAR this is how I remember it happening. Maybe it’s a bit skewed in my memory, since I’m a girl, and the guy in question is the guy I have a huge crush on, but I don’t care.

I walked around the backhouse door- and I see Apollo bent over, back to me, totally shirtless and stripped to his shorts, running the hose over his head and back. I’ve seen other guys shirtless before, and I’ve had crushes before- but my GOD if you had seen him there like I had, you would know why I named him Apollo. He must have heard me, because he turned around and it was almost funny how he tried to cover himself while he apologized for his appearance. I laughed and told him it wasn’t his fault- and that I would have to talk to Brewsky about his behavior. Apollo’s response? “What are you talking about? That was an acident. I have to be more careful.”

Sometimes it’s cute how naive he is.

I showed him the two extra towels I had filched from the supply closet and he called me his “life-saver”. I even got to take the hose and help him rinse off- and then dry him with the towels I had. I hate to be such a girly-girl, but getting the chance to rinse and dry such a toned body after a LIFETIME OF ALL GIRLS SCHOOL, I simply could have died of happiness.

Naturally, if catholic taught me anything, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

I had barely had ten minutes alone with my dream guy and then the jackass had to make his appearance again, saying that he wasn’t needed inside, and that if I wanted to spend time alone with Apollo I would have to at least take him to the back of my car like a normal over-sexed teenage girl. I told him that I wasn’t that kind of girl, and Apollo got between us, saying that he was dry now, and asking Brewsky to escort me back inside, and to return to the backhouse with his clothes for him. So, Brewsky walked me back inside- and actually had the nerve to ask me, “What do you see in that guy, anyway?”

I couldn’t believe that! Anyone with eyes can see what a great guy Apollo is. Right before I went inside, I tossed Apollo’s clothes at Brewsky from where they were on the chair outside and I snapped at him, “Because he’s everything you’re not.” and I went inside.

Since then, his mother made him quit to get his grades up (ha!), but from what I read on the scheduling list, he’s due to start back next week. Normally, I’m not one to show open disgust for a fellow human being, but this guy really wears on my last nerve. The only thing keeping me going- and pulling 70 hour weeks at a fast food chicken place is my upcoming trip to Japan…

…….and my reunion with Fujiomi.

Figuring this out, as well as a good number of other things, obviously seems a task bigger than a short three months.