Nothing spectacular to report today, at least nothing spectacular that happened. I sat at my desk for about six hours, picked my nose, stared off into space, slept, picked my butt, slept while picking my butt, woke up to teach a class, then went back to sleep until it was time to go home (a disorienting day, but not surprisingly I feel pretty rested right about now), so outside of the number of stairs in my school (176), tiles in my classroom (12), or urinals in the third floor boys bathroom (4), i can't really say much about my day at school, except for that I now know that whistling in class is most definitely against the rules, even for teachers.
However, I can briefly say something about something cool that is going to happen sometime soon. Cryptic, yes, but it's kind of a secret. I hate secrets though. On Wednesday November 5th, from 5:37 PM until 5:42 PM at a McDonald's nowhere near you, myself and a few brave souls are going to participate in the greatest social experiment to take place in Japan since somebody showed them a white person. What sort of experiment, you say? Well it's largely to see if we can draw out the deeply seeded Japanese belief that foreigners aren't actually human beings but are instead some sort of animatronic nonlifeform with no feelings and no known ability to use chopsticks that might either explode into random violence or shut down entirely at any moment. Well, there's really no way to get them with the random violence thing without having to face some sort of jail time, so we're taking the other route. Have you ever heard of flash-mobbing? I hadn't, but I'm finding out everyday that being from suburban Washington makes you more of a country bumpkin than I had suspected so I wouldn't be surprised if you already knew all about this (except for those of you who also grew up in suburban Washington and then went to college in rural Washington). But, while it comes in many shapes and sizes, it ultimately boils down to a large group of people seemingly randomly engaging in a bizarre coordinated something in what would otherwise be an incredibly ordinary place and situation. A large group of people suddenly freezing in a crowded bus station and staying that way for five minutes before walking away like nothing happened; a mass of people pulling out pillows from shopping bags in the middle of a shopping center and having a huge pillow fight for a few seconds before calmly putting the pillows back in their bags and going back to their business; a huge group of people sprinting down the length of a train platform as if they're late and desperately need to catch one, but then stopping and breaking off into small independent groups to chat once they get to the platform and there's no train there. It's crucial that you catch as many innocent bystanders in the middle of the spectacle as possible, because part of the fun of a flash mob (I'm guessing) is messing with people and getting them to think there's something big going on that they're just not in on. Their everday reality, catching the train, buying christmas presents, eating in a restaurant, gets turned on its head for a moment, and something crazy happens that you would never ever expect to. If it works, if you've done it right, then people leave wherever they were thinking, "what the fuck just happened? Did that just happen?" Not just, "damn kids."
We're going to go with the easy one first, freeze-framing it for a pre-determined amount of time, and then coming back to life and moving on like it was no big deal. Just robots that ran out of juice for a minute, you know? And we're going with McDonald's not to make a political statement about how McDonald's isn't the sort of fuel you'd like to put in your body if you'd like to live a healthy life and not have full body breakdowns every now and again, but more because that's where all the kids hang out, and they might react the most strangely. At any given time you can find elaborately dressed girls standing in front of wall mirrors, doing their make-up or refashioning their hairdos or maybe even doing a little improptu plastic surgery. Boys hang out after school in their uniforms, looking tough in their mullets and mohawks and military themed duds as they sip on a blueberry oreo mcflurry (drink of the month and it's great). If well executed, it could be great. We'll see how it goes, and if we manage to get a video of it, well, you can see it in action. I'm hoping there's a computer hacker amongst us who can hack into the McDonald's security camera system and like divert the feed onto the internet or something, but I'm guessing that's impossible. This sort of thing looks better from all angles, though, you know?
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