50 mi more

LONG LONG LONG time no see and happy holidays! I'm OK and just hope you are, my fellow Americans. Last post was in June and today is the end of November, to my surprise. There are only three months and half to stay in the US and my home university has sent a bunch of emails about the lectures I'll teach in next academic year (In Japan, academic year starts in April, the season of cherry blossoms). Yeah, time flies, especially the time for sabbatical. The presidential campaign had started at that time when I arrived here in last August and lasted till this November. During this period, two Japanese prime ministers resigned, to my surprise again. I bet you don't know them. As I wrote last year, the first resignation wasn't reported by the US media because of Britney Spears' awesome/awful performance at the MTV Music Award, and the second one wasn't either due to the unexpected appearance of Sarah Palin (by the way, most talented person I found in this campaign is not Barack Obama, but Tina Fay). I just hope the incumbent guy, Taro "Rosen" Aso, will not resign until next March. Anyway, I should be more productive than I was.

Another concern is a weight control. The problem is American food. At first, I thought how big the portion of meal here and how salty they are, and how sweet sweets here are. But now, my taste became Americanized. My stomach accept any kind of food and I really like American sweets. So, it's quite natural that I gained my weight and couldn't wear clothes I brought from Japan. And the bad thing is my wife, now living in Berkeley, California, lost weight surprisingly because she uses a bicycle to go to and from her office. And the worst thing is she often boasts how much she lost like "I wanna have a new belt because it's too long." Hey, we didn't talk about your stupidly long belt at that time and it was totally out of the context. And to my surprise again and again, she said she started jogging. That lighted me fire. To beat the woman, who now pretends to be a health conscious Californian, I also started jogging from August with the aid of Nike+.

Here is the result. Year, I ran one hundred miles so far and lost ten pounds from August. Now I recover the weight I had when I entered this county. But, as people here did in Thanksgiving, I had too much meal, so I'm afraid that I gained weight again. So, I promise you to run fifty miles in December. It's a challenging goal, but by this declaration, I want to show my commitment.

However, I want to emphasize at the same time that I won't sacrifice the joy of eating for the sake of diet. The well known belief that American food are not delicious and bad for health aren't necessarily true. If you carefully choose what you intake, you can enjoy the diversity of wonderful foods here and will not gain weight. You cannot enjoy so many kinds of sandwiches in Japan. You cannot enjoy such interesting sauce like mango dressing for sea bass in Japan. You cannot enjoy authentic Hong Kong style dim sum, Mexican fresh salsa, cram chowder both in Boston and New York, crab cake in Baltimore, and Californian fusion cuisine, in Japan.

Anyway, give me your loud cheer to accomplish fifty miles run!