Jason C. Romero's Website

The Airport

I got to the airport at 4 a.m. My bag was overweight at 63 pounds and they were going to charge me $80 dollars, but international flights are allowed two bags, so I just took out a canvas duffle bag I had inside my luggage and made another 13 pound bag (which was mostly books).

The Flight

The flight was fine. I had a middle seat and watched movies to pass the time when I wasn’t sleeping.

Atonement

I thought this movie was crap and felt like they could have left the entire middle out.

It gave off a pretentious self-important vibe, seemingly written by someone narcissistically obsessed with writing, especially with the annoying typewriter music they kept playing.

Cloverfield

I thought this movie was brilliant. I really appreciated the nod to Godzilla, Blair Witch Project, and Aliens.

I also really liked the way it spoke to the experience of memory and its relationship to mass media, both with the video glitches that would show events that had been previously recorded, as well as one character’s argument that “people will want to see this” because just telling them won’t be enough.

27 Dresses

Why not? The movie wasn’t great and was terribly predictable, but I still loved it.

The funniest thing was that she married just the kind of person that I would like to be with — a witty cynical writer with a soft heart. (And he was hot.)

Getting Settled

I walked around Asakusa after going to my new place and was more pleased with the area than I thought I would be. I found a small market nearby, and it seems nicer than the one I went to in Sendagaya the last time I was here. The Oedo subway line is also closer than the nearest train was in Sendagaya, and it goes to Shinjuku, which is all I really care about. My room is quite small, however, and I wish I didn’t have to climb a ladder to get in bed.

I had dinner at Yoshinoya, in part for embarrassing sentimental reasons, and, surprisingly, found that one of the workers came from Russia to study tourism. When I left he wished me luck with my research.

Minutiae

• The (Asian) money exchange lady at the airport in Atlanta was shocked that I was not Asian.