A very small outing

 I listed 10 things last night, didn't practice, and went to bed. 

I had what apparently were grandiose plans for today. I was going to go to a thing that I was under the impression was going on until 6, as it had been open until 4 yesterday, Friday. I was hopefully going to get an early enough start to, after checking out this event, take the bus up to Palo Alto and go to Gryphon Strings where I'd have fun looking around this phantasmagoria of stringed instruments including ukuleles, and at the very least buy a strap for my banjolele. 

I woke up later than I wanted, the natural result of having stayed up longer than I should, then checked and the thing had run until 6 yesterday, and until 4 today. I'd missed it. And with Gryphon closing at 5, that was already off. 

In the end I had my coffee and nuts and rode up to Japantown where I went into Ukulele Source and bought the very same Levy's strap I'd have bought at Gryphon, with no long bus ride required. 

Then I took a walk around, getting in interesting conversations with a couple different store owners. So it was a pretty good time. The guy at Nikkei Traditions and I got into talking about Hawaii things, and when the subject became the classic comedians there, I told him how when I was a kid, one kid in the neighborhood might have one of the comedians' record, then they'd memorize the routines and tell it to some other kids, who'd then pass them on. The result was getting the routines 2nd or 3rd hand, and often funnier than the original. 

It turns out there's quite a collection of music from Hawaii on the rack there, and the guy told me how they had some of the comedians' material there until someone complained; they were Portuguese and didn't see the humor in what we called "Portugee" jokes. That's how weird the mainland is. 

The guy'd even been surprised that the classic send-up of racism song, "Mr Sun Cho Lee" was sung in schools there. "Sure, we all sang it," I said. I think the thing with Hawaii is, there isn't the level of racial power/powerlessness that there is on the mainland. There's some, but it's not nearly as extreme. There's no one group that's in power and as surprising as it sounds, things are more "level" than on the mainland the same way the economy is more "level" in Japan. At one point I joked with the guy that "I'd be happy if Japan just bought Hawaii" and we had a good laugh about that. I'm serious though. 

I walked back around to Nijiya and did some shopping, and went back in for a little box of Pocky to enjoy with some of the chicory coffee I'd brought from home. I got in a lovely little conversation with a mom and her daughter; some people at the very top of the new building were waving, and we waved back and talked about fun things to do from up there like toss paper airplanes and fly kites and so on. Also about interesting hot/cold things like taking a scoop of vanilla ice cream and pouring espresso over it, and I described the lemon thing I'd seen in Barcelona which is a lemon with the insides all taken out, with a sort of lemon ice cream/sorbet put in. 

So my day was a bit different day than the usual grind after all.