Unpacked alllll the books. Two massive bookcases full :) Going through all of the books has me like "Cancel my next three years. I'm going to start at one end of this shelf and read my way to the other side" but give me a few weeks and I'll be back to ordering more books, like I have none waiting on me ^_^

On the "books that meant a lot to me at one time or another" shelf, I found Prozac Nation, and I can't believe I haven't snatched all the snippets for e-foreverness yet.  I discovered this book during a time that I now realize should have been a medicated time, had my parents "believed" in mental illness. Very grateful to be past it, now, but it's a miracle none of my attempts to hurt myself were permanently successful...endocrinological side-effects excluded. Either way, it was nice at the time to find literature that understood me, when very few people around me could manage to do so, so I dogeared a lot of pages...

"And their discontent, their stuck-ness was played out on their children. Sharing kids with a person you have come to despise must be a bit like getting caught in a messy car wreck and then being forced to spend the rest of your life paying visits to the paraplegic in the other vehicle. You are never allowed to forget your mistake."

"...you most certainly would have described me as, well, as full of promise. That term is loaded with irony to me now because I know how false that appearance of promise is. I know how much latent discontent and sorrow that visible determination can mask..."

"In retrospect, maybe my mother did the right thing...After all, by forcing me to participate in real life, she might have prevented me from indulging and wallowing in a depression that might have been even more bottomless and intractable than the one I was experiencing."

"The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions--showing up at work, paying the bills--you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us--better known these days as denial, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out a window, you don't have a problem."

"Even in my lowest moments of lolling about my bedroom, I knew that in the end I'd return to school, take finals, get good grades, and get through second semester. At heart, I have always been a coper. I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown."

"I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut. I remembered learning about the Doppler effect in high school science, about the paradoxical reaction between sound and space which causes a source of noise to get louder the farther away it moves from  you."

"Sometimes I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me."

"What do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. The pain is so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be."

"We are such irritating people, can see the dark side of everything, and our perpetual malcontendedness kind of ruins it for everybody. It's like watching a movie that you think is great, spiritually uplifting, a lot of fun in spite of its faults, and you're with someone who is in film school or is a professional movie critic, who tends to analyze every moment of the picture until the pure joy that you feel just because you do--no need to explain it--is expunged by all his nitpicking and hairsplitting. And this curmudgeon ends up ruining your night, choking your buzz, killing your joy. Well, that's what it's like to be with someone who's depressed. Only it's not just one movie or just one night. It's all the time."

• Room 1, escaped in :55, wasn't sure we were gonna make it :) It was samurai themed, based at the end of the Edo period. As a gate that would open one of two final puzzles, we had to make a choice -- power or strength.  We chose power, which then revealed that we helped the assassin kill the shogun.  We were like "Oh no, we chose the evil route!" but apparently that was an OK thing because it ended the Edo period and ushered in a new era, etc...I think this was our favorite room, overall.

• We escaped Room 2 in about :35.  It was zen themed and the first room was gorgeous. Sadly, they had a lot of do-not-touch symbol stickers, so maybe the room was TOO pretty with too many fragile things :) There was a riddle puzzle about the number of times a bamboo bucket filled up in a day, and there was a real bamboo fountain in the first room that we thought would be part of that, but the puzzle turned out to be clued by audio, while we were in another room away from view of the fountain.  Not sure if that means the fountain was broken by asshole customers or if it was just there to stir your imagination if you were like "wtf is this audio?" later in the game. When we went into the second room we opened up, the game masters popped their heads in the room and said "You can't come back in here through this door" and we were like "bwa? what does that even mean?" so...maybe that could have been cued better? How would one enforce a one-way gate in a room escape without majorly freaking people out? The second room was a tea room and we had to dissolve some tea in a cup to read something at the bottom, which was fun. We made our way into a third room that was solid white...we had to solve the "water clock" bamboo riddle to get BACK to the first room (at which point the one-way gate made sense) and solve a final puzzle with some things we'd collected from the other rooms.  There were these really nice locks with 4 digits that you had to push a button on the bottom of the lock to release, which were really sturdy and super satisfying to solve :) Cuts down on guessing and doesn't explode in your hand if you accidentally get the right numbers in it -- I'm a fan :D


• Room 3 took us almost the whole hour, again.  It was a bride room about a 100 year old wedding mystery... the premise was a bit shaky. Maybe the story makes more sense in Japanese culture, where it might be a mystery why a bride would disappear on her wedding day, where in the USA we'd be like "that bitch didn't wanna get married.  the end." ...turns out (spoiler!) she wanted to have a career instead.  Clutch dem pearls. It didn't really make sense for their to be modern shoeboxes, blacklight, and weird painted handprints all over a mirror in this story, but whatever.  We went with it.  There was a cool puzzle where lamps came on behind cutout shapes that were super tiny against the bulb, but were magnified when they hit the floor.

After room escapes, we went through the restaurant supply district and saw lots of cute things.  How did we know when we found the restaurant supply district?  I'm glad you asked...



I may have purchased a good number of kitchen implements... and some fake food.  Fake food is a huge thing in Tokyo!  All upstanding restaurants have visual representations of their menu items laying around.



I love the girls posing with shrimp and pizza slices...




We also found a milk vending machine and, like you do when you find a new vending machine in Tokyo, we had some :) It was delicious!



One of the unexpected perks of being in Tokyo when it was super rainy was that we got to see a number of cool "umbrella etiquette" posters...



Don't be that guy!!



You wouldn't punch a businessman. You wouldn't assault a head-wound victim. SO WHY DO YOU BEAT PEOPLE'S SHINS WITH YOUR UMBRELLA?!

We also saw a fun "do not feed the pigeons" sign...



If you let pigeons eat in the wild, like they are meant to do, they will poop on flowers, not on people's faces.  Simple enough.

From there, we stopped at a Freshness burger to sit for a bit with a cheeseburger and an avocado burger...most of the burgers we had were like "cheese food" or "milk beverage" level...didn't seem like it was roughly-ground beef shaped into a patty and grilled, but it was still tasty.  Just had a kind of mild taste and smooth texture...like a big swedish meatball, squished.  Then we went walking to find crafty markets and while we didn't find the market we had read about, we did find touristy goods.



A sea of grumpy looking animatronic dancing bipedal cats. Like you do.



Pickle-on-a-stick bait, gets the tourists every time!

We bought a fish-shaped cake cream-filled hot gooey donut thing and Drew accidentally the entire thing.  Cue feeling sick and gross for a bit...




We also bought an umbrella that turned out to be a parasol. Oops. We didn't realize this fact until later, when water was coming through it onto my face. It was fine in drizzle, not so good in downpour. It's very unnerving to be walking under an umbrella and to still have water streaming down your face. I was walking behind Drew swearing up a storm, and at first he thought I must just be really bad at holding an umbrella, but then, nope...

We wandered back to the station, passing an amazing Karl Lagerfeld display. Of course Japan's version of Karl is super young and cheerful looking.  Plus Choupette.  Love.



We headed to Shibuya to try Tokyu Hands again (it was closed the night before), but it started raining super hard, so we dashed into the arcade (again) to dodge the worst of it, but I was already soaked through.  Thanks for nothing, parasol.  We did catch Tokyu Hands open and we were determined to look at every item in the whole place. SO MANY THINGS. My feet were totally soaked so I ditched my socks and hobbled about in my wet sneakers.  Didn't even matter.  There were so many cute things.  There are no words.  We were there for hours.  We bought a jazillion things...more on that coming later :)



So many cool crafty supplies!



Sexy root veggie poses!



Adorable, or creepy? Adorable!



I like the skeleton eating kebabs and sake...and the one with the IV and crutch.




Even the cutting boards are cute!

We had some tasty chicken heart, chicken skin, pork, and salmon and avocado kebab snacks and hot sake, like our skeleton action figure friend, then we called it a night.



On our way back through our home station, we found a more modern vending machine...whoa...



Before bed, Drew went for a run to burn some fish-cake glucose and I took a bath in the tiny tub to sooth my sore feets.  Most adorable tub ever...wasn't even mad about having to hug my knees to fit in it.