I've just realized that it's St. Patrick's Day today. Japan may be big on a lot of American holidays, but St. Patrick's is not one of them. Most people have never heard of it. I've always been kind of in to St. Patrick's. I like green and Irish stuff. But if I decided to start pinching the green-less people, I'd have to start with myself. I'm devastated to say that I completely forgot this year. It's barely morning in the states anyway, so I can still redeem myself. I'll listen to some Irish music when I go home and be sure to cook potato soup for dinner. It still makes me feel bad that I forgot. I can usually remember, because it's exactly two months before my birthday. I guess having the rest of the people around me not aware of the holiday makes it easy to forget. I wonder, if the people around you didn't celebrate something as big as Christmas, would you eventually start to forget it?

It makes me think about how influenced we are by our surroundings, and how we get used to the things that seem strange or frustrating. I usually discover that I've become used to something when I find myself without it. Something as simple as the heated toilet in my apartment. When I go home to visit my parents and the toilet seat chills my bottom, it makes me wonder. Another good example is the keyboard that I'm typing with at the moment. I used to hate this Japanese keyboard, with it's short space bar and apostrophe in an inconvenient place. But since I started writing my blog on it, I've gotten used to it and started getting frustrated when I try pushing shift and 7 to get my apostrophes at home. I guess it just goes to show how quickly you can adapt to your environment.