I was 5 and he was 6 / We rode horses made of sticks

This song is playing in the Shinjuku Virgin Cafe as I type on this funky Japanese keyboard. (It's very relevant, as will become clear.)

We have yet to acquire internet (we're going with ADSL, which apparently takes some time to arrive, and we need a phoneline first, which is a bit of a chore), and Kate's memory stick ain't working, so the Canuckistani backlog will have to wait a while.

In the meantime, here's my favorite highlight:

I'm in my first Voice class (where you basically get paid to have a conversation) with M., a friendly Japanese woman who said she'd been to France, learned a bunch of French, and had ended up working as the personal assitant for this French actress who'd been working in Japan. This French woman had done a bunch of CMs and such, but had wanted to move into movies or something. Eventually a year or two ago, she'd succeeded, and got a gig over in LA.

Now, I'd done my research on the cast of a certain movie, and now I'm thinking, "could it be? nah..."

Then M says: Do you know Quentin Tarantino?

And I have to keep myself from screaming: Sophie Fatale!!!!!

Yep, she had been the personal assistant for Julie Dreyfus, aka Sophie Fatale. Man, that just made my day. I was bouncing off of the walls. I told her how I loved that movie, how I'd dressed up as one of the Crazy 88, how my fiancee* had dressed up as the woman herself.

That was so rad. I'm 2 degrees of separation from Sophie Fatale!

*M. remarked on how I was too young to get married. Apparently the average age for Japanese people to get married is like 30 or something, for the reason that marriage for women basically means the end of their careers, apart from that of housewife.