Trudging onward as dystopia looms

I've not had a good go of things lately. I mean, nobody has, really, what with President Convicted Felon and his coterie of criminal henchmen wreaking havoc on the country and destabilizing the world and kidnapping people off the street and declaring only voters approved by the White House will count and breaching security in blatantly stupid ways and intimidating universities and law firms and and and and...

That's bad enough, but mix that in with my frakked up brain chemistry and rained out umpire shifts and I have idle time for my mind to go round and round on the hamster wheel of contemplating the state of the world and giving up on fighting the gravity of the Black Hole and just submitting to depression.

It's been intermittent; most of last week was bad and then the last few days were better with some activity (no rain, so I umped a couple of games Monday and was treated to some Molly Moons ice cream by one of my favorite softball players). Yesterday and today, back to the struggle. It's very tiring.

Anyway, to distract and focus on things that don't relate to the fall of America, I've been watching a lot of Japanese TV. I like to watch the Japanese shows to give my language skills a little test/exercise, try to work on my vocabulary and comprehension. Usually the characters speak too quickly for me to follow whole sentences, I just get words here and there, but now and then I'll turn the subtitles off and try and follow along. The subtitles come back on in short order, though, it'd be better if I could slow down the line deliveries.

The latest in my show choices is one that translates as Shinjuku Field Hospital. It's on Netflix. Among it's principal characters is a Japanese-American former army doctor named Yoko that ends up working at a run-down private emergency room in the Kabukicho neighborhood in Shinjuku (greater Tokyo); the woman playing the role of Yoko has a thick regional accent—think of an American speaking English with a thick Mississippi accent or severe Boston-Irish accent—and will often shift to speaking English, and when she speaks English, the subtitles go away since theoretically no translations are needed. But her accent is so thick that sometimes I have a harder time understanding her English than her Japanese and have to back up the video two or three times to understand what she says. Curious how we interpret the spoken word, you know?

Other shows I've enjoyed of late are (English translations) Hot Spot, Extremely Inappropriate, The Rookies, and Unnatural. All fun in their own ways. Hot Spot is a small-town story surrounding the staff at a hotel near Kawaguchi-ko, a lake near Mt. Fuji, where one of the staff is half-extraterrestrial and over the course of the season a couple of other residents/guests are revealed to be other odd sorts. Extremely Inappropriate is a time-travel tale wherein a schoolteacher from the 1980s finds himself in the 2020s and has to adjust his anachronistic intolerant attitudes to the overly-PC modern standard while another character from modern times goes to the ’80s and has the opposite experience. Oh, it's also a musical sometimes just to make it weird. Rookies is an overly-dramatic series about a high school baseball team that gets suspended for being hooligans and their redemption under an inspiring new teacher; a lot of Japanese TV is a bit over the top in terms of melodrama, but Rookies kicks it up a notch with near-constant music and Shatner-level emoting from everyone. Unnatural is a CSI-like drama with a medical examiner sussing out mysteries of unexplained deaths in Tokyo.

It's fun, engages my brain in multiple ways, and lets me forget about how we're living in a failing state and the people who have the power to right the ship are choosing not to do it.

Gonna spin up some more Japanese TV now. Ikimashou.