By no means at all

I briefly flirted with the idea of being a hacker. This was terminated when I was informed that I would have to download and install an entire new operating system in order to steal internet from the staff room. I wanted to take it quietly, but that sounds like a lot of work. I am just not that technically savvy, although I may happen to have friends in those places…

I thought I was pretty clever until last night when someone told me that every ALT has internet except me. This pushed me to the breaking point of lameness and required that I start opening cans of complain-til-someone-fixes-this-shit at work. I am currently recovering from that cold, so that helps me be a little less patient and a little more like, omgwtf can you just do this one thing to make my life better?! kthx.

So even though everyone is holy-crap busy all the time, I decided to ask Mikan-sensei. But when I got to school, he just looked so damn overworked (because he is) that I decided to ask the VP instead. The VP is always engaging me in deceptive conversation which leads me to believe his English is basically my English, but actually, it’s not (go figure).. he sounds very natural most of the time, so it makes me feel all confused and not-listened-to when he doesn’t immediately get what I am saying, which is actually a fairly frequent occurrence. Anyway, I figure if the VP regularly has time to ask me about movie quotes, he can totally take a few minutes to re-bless my laptop with the gift of internet and save me the trouble of downloading linux to haxor it.

My recourse of late has been offline gmail (which I kind of love for some reason) and then knowing that any really important information (should anyone choose to share any of that with me) could be communicated via cell-phone email/textmessage. Which is another lame way to say, I was reduced to cellphone email for my connection to the outside world between the hours of 7:15am and 4:50pm.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

But today? Today I FORGOT MY CELL PHONE on its charger and so even though I did march up to the VP and ask, no really, is there any way I can get internet on my computer? And even though the technically inclined teacher checked it out, and even though they called the BOE to get the password (because apparently the BOE has that, and people here do not, or some crap), the computer guy at the BOE has the day off today (and we all know what a “day off” means… he is either at home sick or he is retaking the driving test for the 45th time, etc. UNLESS he is like Miss Piggy-sensei who just has every Wednesday off…) so I do not have internet either.

I started out thinking I would slowly progress toward having internet by any means necessary, but I ended up (NOT) having it today.. by no means at all.

Fail.

jerksvent

People are jerks.

You might overlook this in your day-to-day life because it makes the living of it easier. It’s much more pleasant an experience to think things are “funny” rather than “annoying as hell,” or that they are “cute” instead of “stupid.” Inquisitive, not invasive, a teaching opportunity, not asinine… the conversion list is endless and it’s an interface on operating system that you wonderful kindhearted souls must use to function without your head exploding all over everyone all the time.

But when you find yourself short on patience, let’s say, you didn’t sleep well that night, or you got a cold, or something, suddenly all the jerk actions of all the bastard people become way too apparent. Suddenly it’s possible to have a beef with everyone. Suddenly you don’t have the internal resources required to rise above shit like you normally do. The irony being that other people will during this time think that YOU have suddenly become a jerk, when actually you are just seeing the jerkiness of all others clearly for the first time in a while.

Soooo I have had a cold recently. And I have about had it up to here with basically everyone. Okay the kids are actually mostly okay, except for those smartasses who make a point of not trying and then make sure you notice it. And there are a few staff members who have stayed out of my way (what, because they just can’t be bothered to even think of having my back? Thanks a lot!) and I can think of two staff members who have been, dare I say it, nice to me today.

Everyone else just wants shit from me and doesn’t have any idea how to be courteous, helpful, or understanding.

Mostly today I am just frustrated at Miss Piggy because I’m sick of her complaining; today she is really energetic, rushing me off to class five minutes early when I clearly have too much crap all over my desk and papers IN MY HANDS that I am trying to sort before my next class.. thinking she is cute or clever or whatever. But like.. not helping students on their worksheets for some reason. Getting me to make her copies for her because… whatever. Arg.

Also, I feel overworked today because I have four classes at the middle school. This is silly because until recently, that was the norm. But lately, two is the norm, giving me the rest of the time to do things like plan elementary, and then catch up on other important life tasks like trying to keep my email inbox under better control, or trying to study Japanese.. (None of which I have done today, nor will I ever be able to EVER AGAIN, JEEZ) Now, I do recall that I was always astonished at how behind I always seemed when I was trying to cram even just staying on top of work (that elementary planning and creating materials will get you every time) into the time I had, so the change was secretly kind of awesome. But I never felt overly put-upon to go to four classes in a day here.

But TODAY good GRIEF you want me to sit through FOUR classes?! Two of them with the awesome awesome crew of first-year (frogs) but with Miss Piggy, the others with the sweet and kind-approaching Newbie-sensei but with those awful second-year kids (the mice) who just stare at you rather than participate in anything ever?!

It's been a few days. A couple days back I sat at the sushi bar with Big Brother contemplating why no one in this town gives a damn anymore.

Having a cold makes me crotchety and entitled. So all you jerks had better start treating me better and at least PRETENDING to give a shit~!

Thanks.

/vent

littler fish

I always used to say that the easiest thing to learn is something you have already learned before.

Academically, I still think that’s pretty true. I almost feel like this is a companion entry to the one immediately previous because it also has to do with taking a long time on something. Only this time, in a progress-oriented way.

I decided that it takes me six years to get comfortable with a language. Six years, no shit. I guess it would be different if I were studying something intensively and focused on nothing else.. maybe the time would shorten up, then; but I’m not sure I could study Only One Thing for, you know, like two or three years, and still retain my sanity.

So when it comes to language, I have to move in stages. There are certain things I look at on the first go round, learn them only insofar as I have to (memorize for the quiz), and then just consign them to the currently-out-of-reach mental box. It’s not that I’ll never have what it takes to master those concepts, it’s just that I don’t have the time/energy/motivation/knowledge background right now to even want to deal with them.

Kanji’s like that. I had much bigger fish to fry than literacy for a long time. Honorifics and humble speech are like that, too. I joke about the ridiculous complexity of the Japanese writing system (which I am beginning to enjoy, go figure). You may also have heard me complain about how there are actually like twelve levels of formality for speech. Well, it’s not so. There are totally more than that.

But twelve is really all I probably need*, seeing as how I most likely won’t be having an audience with an emperor anytime soon. If I do, I’ll just have to hope that he, like everyone else that deals with me in this country, will be understanding that using those freaking levels is hard, and not as high on my priority list as learning how to just ask a train station worker a question with more words and less miming.

Thing is? If I think about it and formulate the question in my mind before approaching a station worker, as long as I’m not in any hurry, I can do that now. So I look down at my little chart of honorific and humble verb forms, and I kind of sigh, because.. shit. I guess it’s time. Twelve, though, really? Jeez. Not that it’s any easier for a nonnative English speaker to navigate the hemming and hawing we do instead to set a tone and show respect or lack thereof. I think in Japanese, you can ask a favor of your superior fairly directly if you use the right words.. you know, can I receive the favor of you allowing the rudeness of my requesting to get a ride to the work drinking party? Whereas in English I feel like you kind of more just.. make statements like I really want to go to the work party, but I don’t really know where it is, or how to get there. Can you tell me how to get there? Can I get there by walking? Oh you’re right, that is kind of far. Is it out of your way? Oh you would? Thank you so much!

I’m not turning Japanese. I always frickin’ have been.

 

* Obviously, you don’t really really need them. But it’s nice to know they exist when you go into a store or restaurant and the servicepeople, who have to be saying things like “How can I help you?” or “What would you like?” are using words that you cannot conceptualize, despite your basic vocab skillz. It’s kind of like the way a waitress will never say “What do you want?” which is simple/straightforward both grammar and vocab-wise, but instead “What can I get for y’all?” or “What would you like?” .. and would is all kinds of trouble as a modal verb and all this BS, when you really think about it.

But seriously, the service in Japan is mostly just insane(ly good), and it will only confuse them if you try to tip them. Go to a cafe in Japan once in your life just to hear someone say what must actually be “We are honored that you have graced us with your presence, I beg that you allow me to serve you,” and then not expect extra cash for it.

Shocking

I’ve been thinking lately about fatigue.

When we were at orientation at the beginning of the whole JET adventure of mine, there was a seminar on “Culture Shock” which is now called “Cultural Fatigue.” The speaker kind of made a joke about how the “fatigue” term is harder for people to understand, and sort of elicits the response just take a nap, whereas “shock” seems a lot more dramatic.

But not to me. Shock is something that is short-lived, intense but momentary. Personally, I’m okay with crisis. My mind is much more geared to dealing with things like intensity-in-the-moment. In my naivety, I believe that there is no great shock I cannot stomach for that one horrible moment in time.

It’s the moments that come after that really scare me. It’s the prospect of the time that will go on and on. This is what makes a thing like loss difficult for me. It’s the way loss means it’s going to be gone for a long time, the way the future stretches out before you suddenly lacking something. I’m not scared of having a bad day – I’m scared of real lingering unhappiness.

So the long-term-ness of the strain implied by fatigue is, to me, much scarier than shock, culture or otherwise. It’s not the moment of holy shit, there is corn and mayo on this pizza but no pepperoni, but rather the months and months you will go before you have decent pizza. But even that is fully bearable because, heck, what’s six months (and this example is just pizza—there are far less unhealthy, trivial things to deal with) of bad or no pizza? Really, what’s the rest of my life with no pizza? I’d say it’s pretty tragic, but in all seriousness, I wouldn’t care that much.

What’s scary about cultural fatigue is having to do things in a way that doesn’t fit with your own desires or ideas. It’s exhausting to want to make a difference and to feel that you don’t. In more general terms, it’s fatiguing to want something and not get it.

The scary side of fatigue is facing the prospect that it doesn’t get easier or better with time, it gets worse. Shock is something that happens, and sucks, and then slowly mends, like any old wound. Fatigue, to me, sounds more like a deteriorative disease.

The problem is not that you had a fight with your sig-O. Fights are good in a lot of ways.. and very often, they are pushes to progress that wouldn’t otherwise be made (in that way, they can keep you from stagnating). The problem is not a fight. The problem is when you have fights all the time. About the same damn thing. And progress never seems to get made. The problem is stagnation.

I never worry about a cough, or a cold, or a sore throat, even when it’s particularly painful or shitty. I only worry when it’s been three or four weeks, even if the cough is minor.

I don’t care that the kids are wild/incapable of attention for English class on the last period of the day on a Friday afternoon. But I do care if they are like that every week and I only ever get that time slot for the rest of forever, or they turn out that way in my class no matter what time of day I go. It will take three weeks for me to figure this out/admit that there is something I need to see about fixing.(Then I sigh and feel tired because of the prospect of the way I now know I have to do something ‘bout it, as opposed to being tired because of all I’ve done.. I get tired in advance.

But actually, the ironic thing is, sometimes you really do just need to take a nap or something. Sometimes you just need a little something to allow you to turn around on the way you look at a thing. Sometimes you just need a figurative breath of fresh air. It can start with something as simple as getting a better handle on your own physical health.. making sure you get enough sleep, eat well (I’m telling you, spinach has serious vitamins happening), get a bit of exercise (swear to goodness it helps with sanity), brush yo teeth, etc… well being on top of one thing leads at least me to feel better about trying to get atop another.

I’m writing this now.. from a point of view of being scared of fatigue, not really being mired in it. I’ve said that I fear or dislike change. But I also greatly fear lack of change (as a component of fatigue)—which is a logically flawed fear to have, since change is impossible to prevent.

I guess it’s like they say, though, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The overarching things don’t change. The atomic things don’t change. Stuff in between never stops changing. Shocking.

good morning

“Good morning!” I blink. It must be a teacher because… Most students don’t stand in the doorway of the copy-workroom to talk to me. But it’s one of my third-year girls, one of the ones I like the best because she, for example, is willing to stand in the doorway of the copy-workroom to talk to me. There are two best friends with almost the same name, but this is the prettier of the two, so I remember her name as the one that sounds weirder in English.

“Good morning!” I smile.

“Your skirt is very.. good!” she says. “Very cute!” there are “o”s lingering on the ends of her words. skaato, guudo, kyuuto. I don’t mind, although maybe I should.. it might be my job to mind.

“Thank you!” I say and smile again. I really like this skirt. Something about it makes everyone think I made it myself. I guess it looks kind of homemade. It’s just prairie enough that it wears easy, washes easy, but it’s long enough to wear to work. It’s not very businesslike, but it’s fine for a Friday. Or any day. Who really cares what I wear. Except for the 3rd year girls, of course, and that one teacher who is nice enough to compliment me on new haircuts and anytime I try something adventurous with an accessory.

As she walks away I glance in the mirror above the workroom sink. “God I look like a crazy person,” I note, trying to smooth down the left side of my hair. Normally the left side will lay flat and it’s the right I have to worry about. But I guess the humidity will play havoc no matter what I try. I give up, slice up my phonics worksheets to their proper size, hole-punch them so I don’t have to collect them (but I probably will), and march my brown tennis-shoe self right out of that workroom.

You Never Know

It’s currently pouring. Just an hour ago, it was sunny and warm.. pleasant in the shade, anyway. It’s one of those delicious summer storms in this, the so-called rainy month. It’s only day three of this rain-month but it’s rained two out of three days.

Today was weird. I didn’t feel like teaching class, but I did feel like chilling at recess. I think working in elementary schools is taking years off my mental age. I think that may be a good thing. But I didn’t want to run or be athletic like I sometimes do. I have a little bit of a sore throat, a little bit of a cough..

And that kid that normally seems to exist solely to make one hour of my day really suck… that kid was for some reason carrying the class activity. He’s actually pretty sharp, that little ADHD punk, and even when he was getting stuff wrong, at least he was still participating.

I guess you just never know.

And even though it’s now June, it still gets chilly enough that one needs sweaters in the morning and evening. And sometimes in the afternoon, too, right after the rain. What is up with that? I’m not complaining; it’s just weird is all.

A Capital Excursion

My first tourist trip to Tokyo. A retrospective post.

First of all, I meant to write this entry back when I first wrote about that horse. The whole REASON I dragged that poor horse into this blog was because I was thinking about it a lot on my Tokyo trip. Things seemed to flip from bad to good and back again fairly rapidly, that weekend.

I’ve noticed that this tends to happen pretty frequently when I don’t bother to plan ahead. That will go on record under ‘my own damn fault.’

We went to Tokyo on the three-day weekend of March 20th. My personal goals included visiting Hakone, possibly visiting Kamakura, and otherwise, just following along with what the group wanted to do.

On our first day, though, it became apparent that what the group wanted to do was go shopping. I like shopping, I promise. Only, I’m not used to going shopping very often, and I’m not used to paying boutique prices, and I’m really not used to the kind of shopping that requires me to either shuffle in a snaking line through a store or deck someone in the face in order to reach the bit of clothing I want to inspect. Tokyo was incredibly crowded because it was a three-day weekend and the weather was amazing. For the first time in months, we wished we were wearing shorts.

SINCE the weather was amazing, Harajuku was okay, because it was kind of an outdoor street area with lots of funky little shops, but once we started hitting the department stores, I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt bad for abandoning the group, but I had to escape. I grabbed a cool drink and made my way up across the bridge (apparently, cosplayers hang out there, but mostly on Sundays, and I was there on Saturday) and into Meiji Shrine, and I instantly could not have been in a more different place. I was glad I’d decided to get out, even by myself, and enjoy this parklike setting for our first 75 degree day a bit.

I got a call, though, not too far into my exploration, from The Other Georgian, who had been called back to Shiso for work the following day (this is lame, because shinkansen tickets to Tokyo cost like 300 bucks round trip, and she had gone on this three-day-weekend under the assumption that she would, you know, get to stay for more than one afternoon). The girls were rallying at a local pub and asked me to join them. I hurried back into the city streets, but not before I spotted at least one (maybe two?) weddings going on in the shrine.

We had a pissed-off-happy-hour bitching about how no one has our backs at work enough to give us a damn heads up about anything, not even “oh hey, yeah.. we’re gonna hafta ask you to work on Sundaay..” sometimes. And then The Other Georgian left and we went to Ginza to check out the new Abercrombie flagship store with CatJET’s friend, who works there.

Okay. I had never actually been in an Abercrombie store in my life (with one possible exception.. I might have taken a few steps into one in my local mall many years ago), much less a flagship, much less their latest pride-and-joy flagship in the middle of the most expensive shopping district in, like, Asia, or something.

When we walked in, I wasn’t convinced that we hadn’t accidentally stepped into a nightclub instead by mistake. There was a half naked male model on the first floor with whom we were encouraged/forced to pose while the door staff took a polaroid for each of us. There was nothing else on the first floor but the beginning of what we would soon learn is an eleven-story mural of mostly-nude muscular-but-preppy-looking white guys engaging in various kinds of sport activities.

We were ushered into an elevator, and assured that we need not reach for anything we wanted to look at, because that’s what the attendants were for. There must have been a model dancing on like every floor. Which was suitable only because the lighting was so low and the music was quite clublike. It was insanity. We browsed this luxury stack a bit, and I even snagged a little video (although, strictly speaking, photos are not allowed.. CatJET’s friend had my back.. check out this page for the photos from this weekend, and the video too).

We thought about going out that night, but actually since most of us had gotten up at like 4 to get the earliest train we could, we were pretty beat and ended up just going back to our guest house to crash after a quick and painful dinner at Yoshinoya (think like Waffle House style, only Japanese beef-bowl foods).

The following day was the day Heke and I were going to Hakone, to seek out the big fancy Yunessun resort onsen, where you can apparently bathe in things like tea, wine, or coffee, as well as your classic hot-spring facilities. Hakone is famous for its hot springs, so we figured we’d head out and do that. We decided to spend the morning at the Hakone open-air museum, which is like a big sculpture garden, before checking out the onsen. The others were headed for Kamakura to see the big Buddha.

The train, other train, and then switchback train to the place took approximately two forevers longer than we anticipated, but sitting on trains is kinda relaxing, plus there was nice scenery and good company, so it was no big deal. Except for the part where the switchback train was so packed we had to stand in separate doorways just to ride it.

The open-air museum was pretty freaking awesome, actually, but when we got to Yunessun, the line was unbelievable, and the place seemed full of kids. We gawked for a second, then decided it was going to be impossible to relax here, not to mention we would never, never be back in time to meet the crew for dinner. We figured, this is Hakone, there have to be hot springs everywhere, let’s find one.

So we set off. And we kind of just wandered, and that didn’t work out as well as we might have hoped. There’s that horse again… but lo, we found an awesome souvenir shop next to a Lawson’s where we asked directions (and received an awesome homemade-looking map of the area). We wandered some more, in the direction of what we hoped was an onsen.. the first place was just a public bath-house, but the at the next place, we hit the jackpot. It was a damn good thing, too, because by then we were getting chilly and sick of wasting time.

Tenoyu was awesome and decently priced, and so Heke and I were able to soak in all kinds of sweet tubs (aside from the large and oft-seen rocky pools, there were tubs made of wood, metal, and stone) in a classy outdoor garden area. The water seemed to be piped right out of the hillside and spilled into the pools super hot. If you’re ever lost in Hakone and need an onsen, I recommend it. Overall, it was much quieter than the other place, and seemed much more the classic style of open-air hot springs bath. We didn’t get to bathe in wine, but this might have been better (there’s that horse again…).

We took a bus back to the switchback train, which was blessedly a lot emptier. When we got to the main Hakone station, we had like five minutes before the “Romancecar” direct train to Shinjuku was going to leave. It was supposed to be a little cheaper (and a lot more direct) than our way in of shinkansen to other train to other train, so we got in line to buy tickets. The people in front of us were slow, and Heke and I were basically breathing down some old lady’s neck silently yelling to each other all the while, oh my lord, it’s not that hard to buy tickets from a machine, we have like two minutes and the next train isn’t for another 45, hurry the eff up…! I still giggle when I remember the look on the face of the poor old lady in front of us.. she glanced back to see if one of her companions could help her out, I guess, and she saw these two manic gaijin about to pounce. With a terrified look in her eyes, she insisted that we go ahead of her in line.

To our chagrin, the machine was really hard to figure out. But it also only charged us like 7 bucks or something, about 20 dollars less than we ‘should’ have paid for the 1.5 hours and distance we were going (if we were taking the shink, etc.).. but it said the name of our station, and we didn’t have time to argue with that, so we fled into the train and sat down just in time. Then we got to nap on our direct express train, once we finished hoping that the bar we’d seen on board was open (it wasn’t) and that the lady would come by offering food (she didn’t).

When we got to the station, there was some kind of problem with our tickets.. the station guy was kind of a douche to us. I guess that’s the other side of that 7-dollar horse..

Our Romancecar still got us back too late to eat dinner with the rest of the group, so we grabbed some fast food and munched it really fast while we got dressed to go out. We ended up going out to a gay club with someone’s friends, and it was really fun. Gay clubs are pretty sweet in that the music is almost always great, and there are far fewer sketchy dudes trying to sleaze their way into your pants.

The next morning, after a quick combini breakfast, we rolled into Shibuya for some shopping, and I went off to meet a college friend who now lives and works in Tokyo. After lunch, we made our way back to the crowded Tokyo station to buy our shink tickets for much later than we’d hoped. We camped out in the station for a while, got on the train, and tried to sleep our way home. When we got there, it was really late, we all had work the next day, and we wanted food. So we searched Himeji for a Yoshinoya, to no avail (although I later found it on the Himeji bike ride). Which is probably better for our health, anyway.

Finally, we trundled home, broke, exhausted, but with plenty of memories and new life lessons.