Ways to entertain oneself when you are sitting at a 3 hour long Formal Japanese Business Dinner (a.k.a how to make HELL fun).

During the 1 hour of unintelligible speeches (when everyone, including your principal is sleeping) look alert by doing the following:

-Sit up super straight, and do ab flexes.
-Pretend to be a robot in the off position. Plaster a fake smile on your face, sit straight, stare ahead, pretend you do not have a brain, but look alive.
-Count how many people in the room are actually sleeping…do simple math to figure out the ratio of people in the room who are sleeping vs. people who are awake.
-Write a mental list of everything you have to do that night, so that when you leave you can get EVERYTHING accomplished.
-Write mental text messages to your friends, so that when the speeches end you can duck into the loo and message them.
-Alphabetize countries/states in your head.

During the 2 hour Dinner portion (a.k.a. how to make it look like you have eaten, when you really are not hungry, but are required to eat.)

-Eat all of the garnishes (they don’t take up much room in your stomach, yet they make huge dents on a plate full of food.)
-Eat all of the vegetables and fruits (see garnishes for reasons why).
-Chew everything 25-30 times, very slowly (this kills time…and when you have 2 hours of food ahead of you…you need to kill A LOT of time.)
-Go to the bathroom every 30 minutes and text message in the stall. (make sure your keypad is on mute.) This will kill up to 10 minutes, where you won’t have to eat.
-Explain to your host that you are a vegetarian. If they dispute this (because they saw you eating meat for lunch). Tell them it is a new diet that you very recently started after reading a rather graphic article on Meat, Poultry, and Fish markets. Tell them it makes you very sad to discuss it.
-Constantly smile…it makes you look innocent