Enter the Young Professional

A few blessed days ago I didn't even own a tie (excluding the neon green number which I wore paired with a wife-beater and a ratty pair of Chuck Taylors on the rare occassions when I felt the avatar of Avril Lavigne and faux-punk descending upon my shoulders) but after a few days here in Tokyo I feel like the full business suit look has become a part of me. As if it were a spirit quest, I entered the electric wilderness of Japan a young boy in surf-inspired T-shirts and ripped jeans, clinging to the freewheeling, no-parents sensibilities inspired by four years of college, but after two days in the woods (otherwise known as the conference room) I have emerged transformed, now a man with a gleaming silver timepiece strapped to his wrist, collars and cuffs worn proudly like the stiff and starched jewlery of a new warrior, with one arm raised triumphantly towards the sky, thrusting the various folders and pamphlets of my new manhood towards the gods at the ministry of education as the dim lights of the boredroom fall around my lightly heaving shoulders. Yes, I made it. Somehow. I climbed through basalt and brimstone on my way up, dodging the words countless CLAIR officials slung down upon me like fiery meteors, slogging my way through marshes of culture shock seminars and demonstrations of how to teach 7 year-old children to count to ten, feeling my way along the lightless passageways of formal dinners and welcome receptions, uttering the same words "where are you from, where are you going, blah, blah, Japan, blah, blah" like an incantation meant to hold the social world together or because sometimes we're all just robots programmed for pleasantries, but somehow or another I've emerged, a smile on my face and a business card in my pocket, ready to do battle with hordes of innocent Japanese children on the pedagogical battlefields of Maruzuka Middle School.



Well, the whole thing wasn't that dramatic, but I sort of wish it was, because if life were more like a commercial for the Marines I think I might like it better. But alas, the Tokyo orientation session wasn't quite a three day treck up a fiery mountain side, and there was no flaming Godzilla demon to fight at the summit. It was, in fact, much what you might expect from an orientation for a teaching job in a foreign country; panels about managing cultural differences, teaching tips, exhortations to persevere through difficult times, testimonials from former JETs, and various other generally helpful talks about assorted aspects of living in Japan. Thankfully I didn't have to sit through any lectures about the shocking custom of taking off your shoes before entering a house or anything, but I don't feel terribly enlightened by anything they had to tell me. I'm glad we had it, because as something of a decompression period it was nice, but I think I'm ready to experience my new life for myself. I'm kinda done being prepared for it, and need to see and touch and speak to Hamamatsu with my own two eyes and mouth. I'll get my wish soon enough, because tomorrow morning we ship out. Normally the 10:15 departure time would have me crying sleep deprivation, but since I can't sleep in past 5:20 AM anymore I think I'll be fine. That is if we don't get too torn up by downtown Tokyo this evening. More to follow.

I think I'll post my first poem here tonight, as well. There's not much of a reason for me to start with this one, it's not my favorite poem, it's not incredibly applicable to any of the stuff I'm writing about, but it's ok. It's called 130 AM, a title which makes sense because it is about writing and thinking at 130 AM. Self-reflexivity's a bitch but there's no escape.

It’s about the late-night-early-morning
Darkness of a sleepless bedroom,
The intangibly thin quality of the air,
And the ineffable settling of the atmosphere
That sets the surrounding black to shivering,
To swallowing me up and placing me upon
An invisible road, a spirit-conduit between
The moons inside of my head. Their lights
Shine upon lifetimes past, present, future;
Upon the overwhelming thinness
Of those lifetimes, this lifetime, which
That light reveals: or, creates confluence
Between, revealing stages of being that are instead
A Silver Running River of strung-together
Time that is all points at once, knowing, touching
The mouth of whatever wide open sea
Awaits from the meager headwaters
Of its germination, just like the Buddha said.

It is in this contemplative, displacing,
Out-of-bodyish darkness that
One, I, feels less foolish in throwing
His intellect out like a symbolic lasso
Over the high points of his life, to catch
The trend and inexpertly extrapolate,
To predict the consequence of blurry dots
And stray, negligent erasure marks
Upon the character or direction of the line;
The all-important, all-encompassing
Two dimensional line that plots
The course of a three-dimensional person’s
Multi-dimensional life. 1:30 AM is the hour
Of resolutions, of defiant promises
To keep the shards of myself and my life
Together; 1:30 AM is the hour of healthy
Fear, of precognition, of decisive plans of action
Deferred to the weaker, complacent hours
Between sunrise, sunset.

It’s the time that exists outside of time,
That doesn’t run out and we can spend
Just to spend; don’t think twice, think
Instead like an itunes visualizer, in streams
Of just barely linked orange, green, violent,
Blue vibrations of the soul.

Curiously,
It’s the only time when who I am really
Matters, when I most want to manifest whatever
Is essential about myself just to see what
It looks like. It’s when a vaguely familiar voice
Or an old chord progression can work like a time machine
To force me into an oddly painful trespass
Upon a better-barred memory-lane;
The magic is in the dark;
The magic is in us;
The magic is all made-up.
It doesn’t really matter, because
At 1:42 AM everything is true, everything
Is false, everything is a beautiful thought
That seems beautiful only until we think
Again in the morning; then, everything
Seems a jumbled, incoherent mess of syntax errors
And melodrama.