Upcoming: Dinner Date

As I've mentioned before, teachers in Japan work extremely long hours. As a new teacher, Tatsuya seems to have an especially grueling schedule. Although I was very discouraged to discover exactly how little free time he has, since our okonomiyaki date I've been working on ideas for how to fit myself into his schedule. One of those ideas was to go watch his softball team play. That turned out pretty well; although we didn't get to talk much, I enjoyed watching the game, and he seemed happy to have me there. My next target was figuring out how to spend time with him during the week. The idea I came up with? Cook dinner for him. If I were to make dinner, he could just drop by after work, eat and talk with me, and head home afterward. He wouldn't need a huge chunk of free time in order to do it, and I wouldn't have to wait for a rare free weekend in order to see him.

Of course, the problem with this plan is that I don't know how to cook much of anything. Left to my own devices, I will typically live off of microwaveable foods and take-out. So offering to cook anything for another person is an unusually bold move on my part. Still, I'm not so ambitious as to attempt to make a meal from scratch, so my somewhat lazy plan is to prepare some pasta using a pre-made sauce. All I'll be doing is boiling the pasta and emptying the sauce packet onto it. To make it look more like a meal, I'm planning to buy some garlic bread as well. I feel a little insecure about offering to make dinner and then serving something so mediocre, but I'm not doing this because I like to cook, I'm doing this because I want to see Tatsuya again. I'm hoping he'll understand that.

Despite my misgivings, I'm excited to have Tatsuya over for dinner tomorrow night. I'm really looking forward to spending a little bit of time with him again. I think he's even leaving work a bit early; he said he'd be done around seven. I've been cleaning my apartment since last week, and while there's still stuff laying around here and there, the place looks much nicer than usual. It'll be the first time he's seen the inside of my apartment. In a way, I feel like he might have a better understanding of my life here after seeing my home.