I just read that last post I wrote, and it's really good, I'm the shit. So, I find myself motivated to do it again. The question, however, is what does one write about when one's life is largely devoted to scrounging the internet for Mariners' news, thinking up new and creative ways of butchering Chone Figgins' name (just now I thought of CHUUUUUNE FLUGGINS!!!! and I wish I were a season ticket holder (who lived in Seattle) because I have at least 81 others that I would love to put on signs and try to get an interview with Mike Blowers or something. The impending absence of Beltre means that there will be a void opening up in the crazy fan section at Safeco once filled by The-Beltre-Guy, and I would love to be that replacement. The-Chone-Figgins-Guy. That could be me. Or should I say The-SHWAAAAAAYNE-SHWAGGINS-Guy?), watching infuriatingly melodramatic Japanese sitcoms on the internet, and occasionally scouting out Marshall's facebook page for pics of his girlfriend? Not much, that's for sure. Which is why I have just decided to write whatever it is I'm going to write in a language most of you probably can't read anyway. Because why not. It will also spare you the pain of reading it.
さあ、どうしようかなぁ。日本語ででも、書きたいことはあまりないじゃん。ええと、たぶん、なんだろう、あっそうだ！ あれか？あれにするか？はい、ということで、あれについて語らせていただきます。すごいな、あれ。まあ、やっぱり、やめた。実はこんな内容のまったくない話は続けられないな、実力足りないし。というか、エネレギたりないだろう。いや、つまらなすぎるから。 いずれにしても、さっさと本題に入るか？でも、本題って、まだ決まってない。わかった、わかった、スピッツについて話そう。スピッツは、どういうことというと、私の大好きなバンドです。そうそう、こんなにつまらないことをみんなに聞かせちゃいます。どうかお許しをいただけますよう、お願いいたします。本当に日本人がこれを読んだら、やばいかも、自分でも何を言っているかはさっぱりわからないから。まあ、そんなはずがないので、安心しましょうか。ごめん、話がちょっと飛んじゃったね。だけど、スピッツだ！すごい気に入ってる、最近。この前BEST HITSみたいなアルバムを買って、まじで絶え間なく聞き続けている、ずっと。夢にも出っている。もう、ちょっと、やめたいなと思っているところだけど、絶対無理。現を抜かしている。やめようにも、すぐ体が震えだして、髪が抜け始めるとかかなぁと、心配しているから、まあ、しばらくでもこのペースで持続。どうせ結局、飽きちゃうからね。たぶん。 何でそんな気に入っているかいというと、 ぴったり九十年代の音楽の雰囲気にはまるから。たぶん初めてでも、日本語まったくわからなくても、聞いたら、すぐ”こいつ、九十年代のものだ！”とわかっちゃうと思うよ、間違いなく。なんでだろうな。何で聞いたらすぐTHIRD EYE BLINDのことが思い浮かぶのかな？不思議だな。だけど、幻でもない。確かな現象だ。音というか、雰囲気というか、どこかが、”これは九十年代に作られたものだ”と宣言しているように聞こえる、この馬鹿私に。えっ、やばいな、自分の言葉本が当にわからなくなちゃった。日本語的に文章があっているかどうかこいつを見てもらえる人はどっかにいるかな。ま、いいや。 ここらへんで、締めるか？もう、ずいぶん長くなってきたし、思わずに。はい、ありがとう、バイバイ。
Wow, that was ridiculous. Don't be impressed, though, it's very likely that none of that makes any sense. I mean, maybe it sort of does, but maybe I was just mashing keys together. I think it makes sense. Doesn't actually matter. It was fun. Ok, well, it's nine forty and I haven't eaten yet. I've got some old lettuce in my fridge, maybe I'll go make a salad.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
When the Past Bubbles Up
Because sometimes out of the dross of the present it does. Mysteriously. Who knows what it is that dislodges a long forgotten face, landscape, or abstract but verifiably temporal emotion out from the massive, sedimentary shelves of our memories, but sometimes a word, a glance, a shaft of light summons memory from the deepest mausoleums of our minds and reanimates them before us, alive, full of blood, and none the worse for time and distance. Sometimes it's hard to remember who you used to be, sometimes you feel like you've changed so much that you shouldn't even recognize your memories as your own, but then a breeze will strike your face from a particularly resonant direction and you'll find yourself standing on the sidewalk of a twenty-three year old life as a momentary eleven year old, not bothering to wonder how you can reconcile the briefcase in your hand (sike, I don't use a briefcase) with the long forgotten porch of a treehouse you feel yourself standing on. It's a bizarre experience, but it's also enough to remind you that who you always were is who you always will be, even if only in sporadic and unpredictable spurts and splashes.
When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.
That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.
When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.
That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
A Career in Review: Roger Federer
Strangely I find myself very by intrigued by my new-found appreciation for Andy Roddick, a thought that I by all rights never should have had, but the world is a crazy place and so, doffing my cap to said craziness, I will leave Andy for the time being and look instead at what yesterdays Wimbledon match did for my opinion of Roger Federer.
My opinion of Roger Federer... Have I ever had a higher opinion of any other public figure? Of all the human shaped stars in the sky, none shine brighter for me than Roger's. For years now he has stood Herculean and indomitable amongst the planets and nebulae and seven foot power forwards of our devotional sports galaxy, a figure too large for the relative obscurity of his sphere and too bright to be missed by even those who wouldn't normally see the world of tennis through a telescope. Where the majority of tennis players wink out before stargazers have a chance to wonder if they're even a trick of the light, Roger Federer blazes in the empyrean field of professional sports like a distant sun, and his presence commands the same sort of attention as a Lebron James or Tiger Woods.
Or so I like to tell myself. I'm not so delusional as to think that Roger draws as much attention, renown, or worship from all corners as somebody like Lebron or Tiger or Tom Brady, but I do know that of all the athletes I've watched I've only had one idol, and he comes from Switzerland. No other athlete inspires the sort of undying, unconditional, boundless love from me that Roger does, to no other athlete do I assign the same sort of unshakable loyalty, and given the choice of watching any single athlete in the world play up close, I would hands down in the blink of an eye without hesitation say Roger Federer, Centre Court, Wimbledon and wipe my hands of this world. Roger is a god to me.
But why, you ask? The answer is simple but gets more complicated: he plays a game I love, a game I hate, a game I didn't quite grow up with but grew into, a game that defined me and defines my starkest sports memories, with an unearthly beauty that is shoddy misdirection for sheer ruthless destruction. I admit that I love dominance, I love power, I crave the strength contained in competitive annihilation, and for years Roger stood on one side of tennis courts and banished opponents from his presence with a game that was simply undeniable and entirely beyond reproach. He was an archetype more than a human, an avatar, an earthly manifestation of a Platonic ideal rather than a fellow creature of blood and bones and dirt. He was so much better than EVERYONE that I looked forward to his matches not to cheer him in overcoming challenges but to bear witness to him incinerating his opponents (who were themselves unimaginably good tennis players) like dry bundles of straw before a wind of flame. He was a magician, a sage, a hero, and tennis was his Art. Maybe I've made my point already, but allow me the indulgence of saying that Roger played tennis in a way that seemed to stretch it out to the furthest limits of possibility, as if the game were designed with the prophecy of him in mind, and I couldn't get enough of the fulfillment that was pretty much every summer.
But then, into the golden light of his glory came a fleet-footed youth with a massive left arm and an inhuman will, flying into the sky of Roger's supremacy on black wings that churned sun-streaked blue into thick masses of lightning-shot black and gray, hanging in the air like the guillotine of the future that I never thought would call for Roger's neck. Fucking Rafa. If I love Roger with all of my heart than I hate Rafael Nadal with all of my soul. In my head Roger is white and gold and Rafa is the color of blood. Rafa came into Roger's perfect world and, somehow, tore it all down. All of a sudden, Roger was beatable, Roger wasn't going to live forever. Roger was our supreme champion, and... he couldn't beat Rafa. It started slow, with the French. Roger had never won the French even before Rafa, so even after he first lost to Nadal there it wasn't the end of the world. Nadal could quarter the market on clay because grass, hardcourt, and whatever shit they play on in Australia were part of Roger's kingdom and no army could storm that keep. They all said that Rafa didn't have the game to win on any of the faster surfaces. Yet. Yet is an insidious word, however, and faster than it seemed possible Rafa got better. As if some infernal engine fueled his ceaseless motor, Rafa got better and better and better up to the the point where patrick mcenroe and dick enberg were lowering the hard court odds to 50:50. Rafa never felt pressure, Rafa never stumbled, Rafa never gave up, and in situations where other men would crack, crumble, choke, and lose, Rafa never showed even a shred of fear, never once revealed to anyone his humanity, hit forehands and backhands and serves in a way that nobody else could, or arguably ever has, and won.
Even during Rafa's rapid ascension I still had confidence that Roger would overcome him in the end, but as trophies and plates continued to be doled out it became more and more clear that Rafa was Roger's kryptonite. I'd never imagined that Roger had weaknesses, but Rafa emitted deadly gamma rays that blasted through all of Roger's defenses at the speed of a falling giant, and turned him into a shivering, shaking, crystal thin shell of his former dominance. When Roger lost in the Finals of the French to Rafa in like ten minutes, losing all but four games in three sets, I was shaken. When he lost, a mere four weeks later, in five of the best sets many argue tennis has ever seen at Wimbledon, on GRASS, I was shattered. Number one was long gone, and the impetus produced by Nadal's already horrible victory at the inner sanctum of Roger's power seemed to me too extreme for Roger to ever reverse. He was number two in the world, and still incredible, but Nadal had thrust him from his pedestal of immortality, and when the new year brought the Australian Open Final I thought I could feel my idol of old hit the ground and break into a million pieces on the blue neo-styrofoam surface as Roger lost to him again, never, I thought, to be put back together again.
For all that, however, deep deep deep way deep down, I know that Rafa is no demon. He's not a bad guy, he's not a villain, he's not driven by the souls of a thousand demons. He's just.. really fucking good. Really amazingly good, and Roger couldn't beat him. Up until Rafa, Roger never really had a rival. He pretty much mopped the floor with everybody else out there. Rafa gave Roger his foil, his enemy to vanquish, but, unfortunately for Roger, he never really seemed to rise to that challenge. Roger could beat anybody else, but Rafa warped Roger's mind and stole his confidence like it seemed nobody ever would, and in the end was just too tough.
But the end for whom? I'm really running out of steam here and don't want to continue this post, sadly, but Rafa seems to have pounded his body to a pulp, only the uncertain future will tell whether or not he will ever recover, and in his absence, at the French, at Wimbledon, Roger has reclaimed the seat of preeminence that I thought he had abdicated forever. The future will tell how the narrative of Roger's career is ultimately received, how we will read the destructive meteor that was (is) Rafael Nadal. Will Nadal recover and resume the process (seemingly already well in hand a few months ago) of changing the guard? Will he fade away like a star shooting through the blackness of night, though leaving behind a much more tangible memory of his passing than a contrail in the sky? Will he come back and never be the same? Who knows, but just as his arrival altered the path of Roger's career and legacy, so to has this momentary passing; it is clear, however, that though Rafa has been out of sight for the past two majors, he won't be out of mind for the rest of tennis history.
My opinion of Roger Federer... Have I ever had a higher opinion of any other public figure? Of all the human shaped stars in the sky, none shine brighter for me than Roger's. For years now he has stood Herculean and indomitable amongst the planets and nebulae and seven foot power forwards of our devotional sports galaxy, a figure too large for the relative obscurity of his sphere and too bright to be missed by even those who wouldn't normally see the world of tennis through a telescope. Where the majority of tennis players wink out before stargazers have a chance to wonder if they're even a trick of the light, Roger Federer blazes in the empyrean field of professional sports like a distant sun, and his presence commands the same sort of attention as a Lebron James or Tiger Woods.
Or so I like to tell myself. I'm not so delusional as to think that Roger draws as much attention, renown, or worship from all corners as somebody like Lebron or Tiger or Tom Brady, but I do know that of all the athletes I've watched I've only had one idol, and he comes from Switzerland. No other athlete inspires the sort of undying, unconditional, boundless love from me that Roger does, to no other athlete do I assign the same sort of unshakable loyalty, and given the choice of watching any single athlete in the world play up close, I would hands down in the blink of an eye without hesitation say Roger Federer, Centre Court, Wimbledon and wipe my hands of this world. Roger is a god to me.
But why, you ask? The answer is simple but gets more complicated: he plays a game I love, a game I hate, a game I didn't quite grow up with but grew into, a game that defined me and defines my starkest sports memories, with an unearthly beauty that is shoddy misdirection for sheer ruthless destruction. I admit that I love dominance, I love power, I crave the strength contained in competitive annihilation, and for years Roger stood on one side of tennis courts and banished opponents from his presence with a game that was simply undeniable and entirely beyond reproach. He was an archetype more than a human, an avatar, an earthly manifestation of a Platonic ideal rather than a fellow creature of blood and bones and dirt. He was so much better than EVERYONE that I looked forward to his matches not to cheer him in overcoming challenges but to bear witness to him incinerating his opponents (who were themselves unimaginably good tennis players) like dry bundles of straw before a wind of flame. He was a magician, a sage, a hero, and tennis was his Art. Maybe I've made my point already, but allow me the indulgence of saying that Roger played tennis in a way that seemed to stretch it out to the furthest limits of possibility, as if the game were designed with the prophecy of him in mind, and I couldn't get enough of the fulfillment that was pretty much every summer.
But then, into the golden light of his glory came a fleet-footed youth with a massive left arm and an inhuman will, flying into the sky of Roger's supremacy on black wings that churned sun-streaked blue into thick masses of lightning-shot black and gray, hanging in the air like the guillotine of the future that I never thought would call for Roger's neck. Fucking Rafa. If I love Roger with all of my heart than I hate Rafael Nadal with all of my soul. In my head Roger is white and gold and Rafa is the color of blood. Rafa came into Roger's perfect world and, somehow, tore it all down. All of a sudden, Roger was beatable, Roger wasn't going to live forever. Roger was our supreme champion, and... he couldn't beat Rafa. It started slow, with the French. Roger had never won the French even before Rafa, so even after he first lost to Nadal there it wasn't the end of the world. Nadal could quarter the market on clay because grass, hardcourt, and whatever shit they play on in Australia were part of Roger's kingdom and no army could storm that keep. They all said that Rafa didn't have the game to win on any of the faster surfaces. Yet. Yet is an insidious word, however, and faster than it seemed possible Rafa got better. As if some infernal engine fueled his ceaseless motor, Rafa got better and better and better up to the the point where patrick mcenroe and dick enberg were lowering the hard court odds to 50:50. Rafa never felt pressure, Rafa never stumbled, Rafa never gave up, and in situations where other men would crack, crumble, choke, and lose, Rafa never showed even a shred of fear, never once revealed to anyone his humanity, hit forehands and backhands and serves in a way that nobody else could, or arguably ever has, and won.
Even during Rafa's rapid ascension I still had confidence that Roger would overcome him in the end, but as trophies and plates continued to be doled out it became more and more clear that Rafa was Roger's kryptonite. I'd never imagined that Roger had weaknesses, but Rafa emitted deadly gamma rays that blasted through all of Roger's defenses at the speed of a falling giant, and turned him into a shivering, shaking, crystal thin shell of his former dominance. When Roger lost in the Finals of the French to Rafa in like ten minutes, losing all but four games in three sets, I was shaken. When he lost, a mere four weeks later, in five of the best sets many argue tennis has ever seen at Wimbledon, on GRASS, I was shattered. Number one was long gone, and the impetus produced by Nadal's already horrible victory at the inner sanctum of Roger's power seemed to me too extreme for Roger to ever reverse. He was number two in the world, and still incredible, but Nadal had thrust him from his pedestal of immortality, and when the new year brought the Australian Open Final I thought I could feel my idol of old hit the ground and break into a million pieces on the blue neo-styrofoam surface as Roger lost to him again, never, I thought, to be put back together again.
For all that, however, deep deep deep way deep down, I know that Rafa is no demon. He's not a bad guy, he's not a villain, he's not driven by the souls of a thousand demons. He's just.. really fucking good. Really amazingly good, and Roger couldn't beat him. Up until Rafa, Roger never really had a rival. He pretty much mopped the floor with everybody else out there. Rafa gave Roger his foil, his enemy to vanquish, but, unfortunately for Roger, he never really seemed to rise to that challenge. Roger could beat anybody else, but Rafa warped Roger's mind and stole his confidence like it seemed nobody ever would, and in the end was just too tough.
But the end for whom? I'm really running out of steam here and don't want to continue this post, sadly, but Rafa seems to have pounded his body to a pulp, only the uncertain future will tell whether or not he will ever recover, and in his absence, at the French, at Wimbledon, Roger has reclaimed the seat of preeminence that I thought he had abdicated forever. The future will tell how the narrative of Roger's career is ultimately received, how we will read the destructive meteor that was (is) Rafael Nadal. Will Nadal recover and resume the process (seemingly already well in hand a few months ago) of changing the guard? Will he fade away like a star shooting through the blackness of night, though leaving behind a much more tangible memory of his passing than a contrail in the sky? Will he come back and never be the same? Who knows, but just as his arrival altered the path of Roger's career and legacy, so to has this momentary passing; it is clear, however, that though Rafa has been out of sight for the past two majors, he won't be out of mind for the rest of tennis history.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Pausing for Greatness
In a world where professional sports have taken repeated hits from scandal after scandal and appear before us as the bruised, battered, dented recepticles of competitive spirit that they once were, it becomes more and more difficult to appreciate the products various leagues put on various fields and courts without first having to forgive the product in question some sort of ethical or competitive shortcomings. In almost all of the major professional sports leagues there are serious flaws we as fans have to endeavor to ignore in order to affirm the legitimacy of the objects of our support; in baseball you have to overcome the anxiety that your favorite team might be powered by a guy (or guys) that is a mutant product of test-tubes and needles; in basketball you have to ignore the specter of a corrupt front office looming over the court like a vast, shadowy puppet-master, using a legion of referees to block and construct games not quite as if they were Broadway productions but certainly as if somebody not on the court has designs on what the scoreboard says when the buzzer sounds; in football similar concerns about the humanity of it's superhuman participants arise if we forget to suspend our disbelief at the 300 pound man chasing like a sprinter after a quarterback and stopping just short of ripping his arms off and bludgeoning him over the head with them in taking him down. In cycling, it's hard for anyone to win a race without the guy he lost to (and everybody watching) crying for his pee in a cup. In all of these sports (except, perhaps, for cycling) the demon of commercialization time and again steps out from behind the curtain and further disrupts the illusion that the pageant of professional athletics is motivated solely, or occasionally even largely, by the sheer will for success and pride in team and place that it is in amateur sports. Athletes frequently invoke the old axiom that "it's a business, too," and unfortunately we can't help but suffer the intrusion of the business side of the game(s) upon the other side we care about; sports unite and inspire us, but you have to be willing to sift through the taint of bloated salaries, greedy, soulless owners (and sometimes players), and the invasive barrage of commercial sponsorships in order to get to that inspiration.
All of this isn't to say that I don't follow sports, that I don't root for my teams, that I'm not uplifted by their successes and downcast at their failures; the Mariners lost their way through 100 games last year and I vomited through September; The Mariners won 116 games in 2001 and I distinctly remember being violently depressed when they lost a game to the Cleveland Indians in which they were up by like 9 runs with three innings to play. I think I snapped and punched my baby sister in a fit of rage, that's how much that team meant to me. I love sports, I think sports are an intrinsic part not only of our culture but also our humanity, which is why it strikes me as so unfortunate that they seem to be debased a little more each day by scandal and mishandling to the point where a fair percentage of people seem to see professional sports as little more than grimy idols to greed and dishonesty.
Which brings me to the shining beam of light that lanced into that semi-dark sky this morning from a stadium at the center of a complex of chalk lined strips of grass in the middle of London and stayed there, pulsing, for something like four hours and 19 minutes. Today's Wimbledon final was a transcendent moment nearly ten years in the making that struck a decades worth of waving, wandering, and unraveling narratives of wild success, simultaneously unfulfilled and thwarted potential, glory, the loss thereof, and its redemption like a godly hammer out of the realm of the possible and into the realm of substance, giving it form as surely as a blacksmith turning raw iron into metal with meaning. Today a red-hot history in limbo was thrust into a four plus hour pool of cool, refining water, and what emerged was a redefined narrative of struggle and triumph that, in my eyes, redeems sport, and reminds us all of why, exactly, we are fans.
Where to begin. Perhaps with a brief admission that tennis isn't immune to some of the negative pitfalls that beset other major sports. There's a lot of money involved. If you win you will get very rich. There's the sort of scandal that Tim Donaghey would be proud of. Nikolay Davydenko has been accused of pulling punches (or should we say shanking forehands) in order to influence betting. Drugs aren't entirely out of the picture; recently Richard Gasquet was suspended a year for testing positive in a drug test. For cocaine. Yes, tennis isn't without it's flaws here and there, but the thing that sets tennis apart from its counterparts is its intrinsic individual nature. The problems that arise in other sports are largely institutionalized (greedy owners, greedy unions, greedy commissioner's offices), whereas tennis tournaments are composed of individuals coming to a single place to go one on one until there's only one. There are no contracts so there are no agents to hate, there is no free agency so there's nobody to betray, and no one's expectations to fall short of except your own, ultimately. There also seem to be no drugs to speak of, discounting the recreational ones Marat Safin snorts off the ass-cracks of Russian prostitutes. In the end, tennis is an every man for himself sort of game that is more reverent of its winners and merciless to its losers than any other game, and in this removal of all the extraneous shit that bogs down other major sports tennis shines.
Furthermore, the intrinsically individual nature of the sport allows for more compelling personal narratives than pretty much any team sport can offer. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they are compelling in a different way. Certainly we love to follow teams, and a franchise like the Yankees or the Patriots or the Lakers accumulates stories over time until it's history becomes vast and complex in a way that no single man or woman's life ever could. When Jeter puts on a Yankess uniform he stands beside the Babe and Dimaggio and Gehrig, whereas when Andre Agassi picked up a racket and stepped onto the court he was pretty much just Andre Agassi. Of course, that is a bit of reductionist statement, as I will get to, but it is undeniable that a franchise with a hundred year history can come to mean more than any single person ever could.
And yet, the history of a franchise is composite, whereas a tennis player stands alone, not only as a competitor, but also as a figure that receives history. Sort of. He takes his meaning, of course, from the people he beats and the people who beat him, but compared to being member of the San Fransisco 49ers, Carlos Moya definitely stands alone.
That said, there are a lot of individual narratives that flame out without ever meaning anything. Ashley Harkleroad, Daniela Hantuchova, Janko Tipsarevic, Guillermo Coria. Ever heard of them? Not if you don't follow tennis rabidly you haven't. But then there are others. James Blake; his story starts in promise, nearly ends in tragedy, but comes back like Lance before fading into the obscurity that awaits most every professional tennis player eventually. Top ten in the world, Blake bashed his head on a net-post challenging a ball, broke his neck, got shingles, and lost his father to cancer in the same year. That's a real shit storm of bad luck (particularly the shingles) that you might not expect your neighbor the pencil-pusher to ever fully recover from, but miraculously Blake was back roughly a year later and reached as high as number 4 in the world. Gustavo Kuerten, or if you prefer(which I do), Guga, owner of the sort of curly fro Matteo Legget could only dream of and potentially the most retarded grunt in the history of sports. Patrick Rafter, last of the serve-and-volleyers (I loved this guy so much I chose my racket just because he used it, even though serve and volley was the furthest thing from the game I played), the Aussie you could identify by the streaks of white sunblock type stuff he spread across his face like warpaint, if not by his endangered species of a style of play. Others. Tennis has an incredibly colorful cast of characters.
Which brings me to the two names I've been keeping back for all of this time, the two names who this morning, at least in my eyes, played the sort of career, maybe even life, -defining match that happens only very very rarely in sports, and should be recognized when it does. First, and most obviously, there's Roger Federer, the sort of mythological figure who comes once in a lifetime at most, and for my money challenges, and in fact overtops, even Michael Jordan as an awe-inspiring superhero of the sports world. And then, perhaps even more interestingly, there's Andy Roddick, a figure who was supposed to be the savior of American tennis, the next Pete Sampras, who had the bad luck to be born into a world where the next Pete Sampras already lived and breathed and dominated. I've been pretty violently anti-Andy Roddick my whole life, calling him nothing but a big serve and an ugly, brutal forehand, a three year-old child at the net and a ninety-year old grandmother on the backhand side. Today, though, he proved something to me; he played the most spectacular match of his career in the biggest moment of his career, and agreeing entirely with an article I read that described his effort in defeat today as heroic, looking back at his whole career with today as the lens... I think I love Andy Roddick. I'll be back later with why.
All of this isn't to say that I don't follow sports, that I don't root for my teams, that I'm not uplifted by their successes and downcast at their failures; the Mariners lost their way through 100 games last year and I vomited through September; The Mariners won 116 games in 2001 and I distinctly remember being violently depressed when they lost a game to the Cleveland Indians in which they were up by like 9 runs with three innings to play. I think I snapped and punched my baby sister in a fit of rage, that's how much that team meant to me. I love sports, I think sports are an intrinsic part not only of our culture but also our humanity, which is why it strikes me as so unfortunate that they seem to be debased a little more each day by scandal and mishandling to the point where a fair percentage of people seem to see professional sports as little more than grimy idols to greed and dishonesty.
Which brings me to the shining beam of light that lanced into that semi-dark sky this morning from a stadium at the center of a complex of chalk lined strips of grass in the middle of London and stayed there, pulsing, for something like four hours and 19 minutes. Today's Wimbledon final was a transcendent moment nearly ten years in the making that struck a decades worth of waving, wandering, and unraveling narratives of wild success, simultaneously unfulfilled and thwarted potential, glory, the loss thereof, and its redemption like a godly hammer out of the realm of the possible and into the realm of substance, giving it form as surely as a blacksmith turning raw iron into metal with meaning. Today a red-hot history in limbo was thrust into a four plus hour pool of cool, refining water, and what emerged was a redefined narrative of struggle and triumph that, in my eyes, redeems sport, and reminds us all of why, exactly, we are fans.
Where to begin. Perhaps with a brief admission that tennis isn't immune to some of the negative pitfalls that beset other major sports. There's a lot of money involved. If you win you will get very rich. There's the sort of scandal that Tim Donaghey would be proud of. Nikolay Davydenko has been accused of pulling punches (or should we say shanking forehands) in order to influence betting. Drugs aren't entirely out of the picture; recently Richard Gasquet was suspended a year for testing positive in a drug test. For cocaine. Yes, tennis isn't without it's flaws here and there, but the thing that sets tennis apart from its counterparts is its intrinsic individual nature. The problems that arise in other sports are largely institutionalized (greedy owners, greedy unions, greedy commissioner's offices), whereas tennis tournaments are composed of individuals coming to a single place to go one on one until there's only one. There are no contracts so there are no agents to hate, there is no free agency so there's nobody to betray, and no one's expectations to fall short of except your own, ultimately. There also seem to be no drugs to speak of, discounting the recreational ones Marat Safin snorts off the ass-cracks of Russian prostitutes. In the end, tennis is an every man for himself sort of game that is more reverent of its winners and merciless to its losers than any other game, and in this removal of all the extraneous shit that bogs down other major sports tennis shines.
Furthermore, the intrinsically individual nature of the sport allows for more compelling personal narratives than pretty much any team sport can offer. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they are compelling in a different way. Certainly we love to follow teams, and a franchise like the Yankees or the Patriots or the Lakers accumulates stories over time until it's history becomes vast and complex in a way that no single man or woman's life ever could. When Jeter puts on a Yankess uniform he stands beside the Babe and Dimaggio and Gehrig, whereas when Andre Agassi picked up a racket and stepped onto the court he was pretty much just Andre Agassi. Of course, that is a bit of reductionist statement, as I will get to, but it is undeniable that a franchise with a hundred year history can come to mean more than any single person ever could.
And yet, the history of a franchise is composite, whereas a tennis player stands alone, not only as a competitor, but also as a figure that receives history. Sort of. He takes his meaning, of course, from the people he beats and the people who beat him, but compared to being member of the San Fransisco 49ers, Carlos Moya definitely stands alone.
That said, there are a lot of individual narratives that flame out without ever meaning anything. Ashley Harkleroad, Daniela Hantuchova, Janko Tipsarevic, Guillermo Coria. Ever heard of them? Not if you don't follow tennis rabidly you haven't. But then there are others. James Blake; his story starts in promise, nearly ends in tragedy, but comes back like Lance before fading into the obscurity that awaits most every professional tennis player eventually. Top ten in the world, Blake bashed his head on a net-post challenging a ball, broke his neck, got shingles, and lost his father to cancer in the same year. That's a real shit storm of bad luck (particularly the shingles) that you might not expect your neighbor the pencil-pusher to ever fully recover from, but miraculously Blake was back roughly a year later and reached as high as number 4 in the world. Gustavo Kuerten, or if you prefer(which I do), Guga, owner of the sort of curly fro Matteo Legget could only dream of and potentially the most retarded grunt in the history of sports. Patrick Rafter, last of the serve-and-volleyers (I loved this guy so much I chose my racket just because he used it, even though serve and volley was the furthest thing from the game I played), the Aussie you could identify by the streaks of white sunblock type stuff he spread across his face like warpaint, if not by his endangered species of a style of play. Others. Tennis has an incredibly colorful cast of characters.
Which brings me to the two names I've been keeping back for all of this time, the two names who this morning, at least in my eyes, played the sort of career, maybe even life, -defining match that happens only very very rarely in sports, and should be recognized when it does. First, and most obviously, there's Roger Federer, the sort of mythological figure who comes once in a lifetime at most, and for my money challenges, and in fact overtops, even Michael Jordan as an awe-inspiring superhero of the sports world. And then, perhaps even more interestingly, there's Andy Roddick, a figure who was supposed to be the savior of American tennis, the next Pete Sampras, who had the bad luck to be born into a world where the next Pete Sampras already lived and breathed and dominated. I've been pretty violently anti-Andy Roddick my whole life, calling him nothing but a big serve and an ugly, brutal forehand, a three year-old child at the net and a ninety-year old grandmother on the backhand side. Today, though, he proved something to me; he played the most spectacular match of his career in the biggest moment of his career, and agreeing entirely with an article I read that described his effort in defeat today as heroic, looking back at his whole career with today as the lens... I think I love Andy Roddick. I'll be back later with why.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Completing the Nod to Bukatsu
So I've returned to answer the question, "Why do I think Bukatsu is such a cool thing?" Well, before I answer that question, I've got to revise some of the misleading impressions I may have given with my previous post. The Way of the Middle Schooler, I translated Bukatsudo, likening it to the complicated, seemingly unbreakable set of rules governing the lives and honor of samurai. No doubt Bushido, the path followed by the samurai, was stringent, demanding physically and mentally, and utterly uncompromising in its delineations of what a samurai must do and how hard he must do it. What about Bukatsudou, however? Initially, I approached Bukatsudo as the modern manifestation of Bushido, only as applied to Hello-Kitty-loving, cell-phone-toting, pokemon-watching 13 year-old children as opposed to man-slaughtering, self-sacrificing, ultra-dedicated vassals of old-world warlords. I figured the Way of the Middle Schooler and the Way of the Samurai, while obviously divergent in many critical modes of application, were at least resonant ideologically. If, in the event of defeat, a samurai must take his own life to ease the sublime shame of failing his master, I figured that the Middle Schooler, while strongly discouraged from killing him or herself after a poor showing on the hurdles, for example, is at least obligated to go 精一杯, full-spiritedly, at practice so that a poor showing at the 大会 becomes less likely.
That's certainly how it goes at baseball practice. Maybe it was because my first brush with The Way of the Middle Schooler was with the most overly serious of them that I assumed it would be that way across the board, in fact it most certainly was, but at any rate after a few weeks of baseball practice I figured Japanese Middle Schoolers had the sort of work ethic to shame a navy seal. The first time I wandered up to a baseball practice, anxiously stepping through the gate in the chain-link fence after about three minutes trying to figure out how to open it up, I heard a hoarse voice call out from across the field and all sound ceased (that was Shuhei, he's the baseball captain and recently he was told by a doctor to stay quiet at practice for a few days because he had yelled his throat raw). Startled I looked up to find the entire team looking at me. Moments later, Shuhei yelled out again, Rei, Rei, Rei, and as one they bowed to me three times in quick succession. I was pretty confused by this. Awkwardly giggling I stumbled over to the bench, trying to ignore the way the kids doffed their hats and bowed to me whenever I passed them.
Then I got a real shock. The kids went back to practice, and what they did was run bunting drills for about an hour and then do an around the horn drill where they had to, well, throw the ball around the horn like fifty times without messing up. If a kid made a bad throw, or another dropped a good throw, both guilty parties would bow and apologize to the rest of the team before everyone started all over again. The most impressive thing? There was no coach to be seen. Nowhere. I could imagine American Middle Schoolers running bunt drills on their own, for an hour, without the barest whisper of a coach for miles, but it would take a few generous hits of payote. This Bukatsudo shit is fucking serious.
But that was just the baseball team. Those guys actually are little modern samurai. My mistake was thinking every group was like them. My misconceptions were corrected when I met the track team. And the ping-pong team. And the computer team. Don't get me wrong, there are serious teams out there that don't whack around balls with sticks; the volleyball team, at least the girls, take their shit pretty seriously, and I imagine it's probably not a good idea to fuck around with the kendo club, considering your coach wears armor and carries around a heavy stick, but EVERY kid isn't like that. The track team, which I have been a consistent 'member' of for the past few weeks, proved to me that in Japan the Way of the Middle Schooler isn't necessarily paved with stones of dedication and back-breaking commitment. No, goofing around and dicking off are prevalent here as well. The other day my buddy Shunsuke had to run in normal shoes because he had somehow managed to throw his spikes on top of a storage shed. I was asked in between sets of sprints by a group of girls if I would rather eat poop-flavored curry or curry-flavored poop. I thought about it for a minute and eventually came to the only conclusion possible: curry-flavored poop. I then observed that Japanese girls seem to really like poop (which they do), and things went downhill from there. I brought sunglasses to practice the other day, and suffered the subsequent penalty of twenty or so minutes of "cool" looks from half the boys team as they all tried them on. I've eavesdropped on multiple conversations about hopelessly unrequited love that I had to do my best to take seriously. Unable to resist the temptation to have a point, I guess, I have to conclude that this venture into Bukatsudou has given the humanity, and more importantly, the adorable frivolity, to the students at my school, and that sir, rules. Put simply and without an eloquent flourish to round it out.
That's certainly how it goes at baseball practice. Maybe it was because my first brush with The Way of the Middle Schooler was with the most overly serious of them that I assumed it would be that way across the board, in fact it most certainly was, but at any rate after a few weeks of baseball practice I figured Japanese Middle Schoolers had the sort of work ethic to shame a navy seal. The first time I wandered up to a baseball practice, anxiously stepping through the gate in the chain-link fence after about three minutes trying to figure out how to open it up, I heard a hoarse voice call out from across the field and all sound ceased (that was Shuhei, he's the baseball captain and recently he was told by a doctor to stay quiet at practice for a few days because he had yelled his throat raw). Startled I looked up to find the entire team looking at me. Moments later, Shuhei yelled out again, Rei, Rei, Rei, and as one they bowed to me three times in quick succession. I was pretty confused by this. Awkwardly giggling I stumbled over to the bench, trying to ignore the way the kids doffed their hats and bowed to me whenever I passed them.
Then I got a real shock. The kids went back to practice, and what they did was run bunting drills for about an hour and then do an around the horn drill where they had to, well, throw the ball around the horn like fifty times without messing up. If a kid made a bad throw, or another dropped a good throw, both guilty parties would bow and apologize to the rest of the team before everyone started all over again. The most impressive thing? There was no coach to be seen. Nowhere. I could imagine American Middle Schoolers running bunt drills on their own, for an hour, without the barest whisper of a coach for miles, but it would take a few generous hits of payote. This Bukatsudo shit is fucking serious.
But that was just the baseball team. Those guys actually are little modern samurai. My mistake was thinking every group was like them. My misconceptions were corrected when I met the track team. And the ping-pong team. And the computer team. Don't get me wrong, there are serious teams out there that don't whack around balls with sticks; the volleyball team, at least the girls, take their shit pretty seriously, and I imagine it's probably not a good idea to fuck around with the kendo club, considering your coach wears armor and carries around a heavy stick, but EVERY kid isn't like that. The track team, which I have been a consistent 'member' of for the past few weeks, proved to me that in Japan the Way of the Middle Schooler isn't necessarily paved with stones of dedication and back-breaking commitment. No, goofing around and dicking off are prevalent here as well. The other day my buddy Shunsuke had to run in normal shoes because he had somehow managed to throw his spikes on top of a storage shed. I was asked in between sets of sprints by a group of girls if I would rather eat poop-flavored curry or curry-flavored poop. I thought about it for a minute and eventually came to the only conclusion possible: curry-flavored poop. I then observed that Japanese girls seem to really like poop (which they do), and things went downhill from there. I brought sunglasses to practice the other day, and suffered the subsequent penalty of twenty or so minutes of "cool" looks from half the boys team as they all tried them on. I've eavesdropped on multiple conversations about hopelessly unrequited love that I had to do my best to take seriously. Unable to resist the temptation to have a point, I guess, I have to conclude that this venture into Bukatsudou has given the humanity, and more importantly, the adorable frivolity, to the students at my school, and that sir, rules. Put simply and without an eloquent flourish to round it out.
Friday, May 15, 2009
A Nod to Bukatsudo
The phrase "Bukatsudou" literally translates to "club activities," but were you to take a more holistic, emotive approach to the translation, you might come up with a much longer term that sounds more like a way of life than a good way to waste a lunch period. There is a character in Japanese, 道, "Dou," that essentially means "path, road, way," and it can express either the most plebian patch of concrete you've ever set foot upon (歩道 (hodou) for example, means sidewalk), or the other kind of life-governing "path," the kind that often, perhaps even necessarily, tend towards the transcendental (武士道 (bushidou) means, roughly and ineptly translated, "the way of the sword," or perhaps "the way of the samurai.") The "dou" in Bukatsudou (部活動) is not that "dou," but I want to suggest that it probably should be. If I were to spell "Bukatsudo" in Japanese, I would spell it 部活道, and I would translate it as "The Way of the Middle School Student."
Clubs in Japanese schools are nothing like clubs in American schools. When you think of clubs in America, you think of eminently marginal, fringey little unions that meet once a week at lunch somewhere and maybe occasionally plan a weekend outing. When you think of clubs in America you think of Debate Club, Environmental Club, Key Club, Anime Club. You think of them generally as a way to boost that extra-curricular section of your college applications, or, alternatively, as a way to goof off with a theme. Critically, you think of them as being fully separate from the much more visible, generally more serious team sports category of after-school-activities. Sure you've got your Swing Club and your Dinosaur Club (I just looked up a list of club activities at my high school because I couldn't come up with any more and they actually have a fucking dinosaur club), but compared to say, the Football Team, or the Basketball Team, who cares? Not only are clubs second tier socially, but they also just lag as a commitment of time and energy.
Enter the Way of the Middle Schooler. Clubs in Japanese Middle Schools take sports teams in American Middle Schools and bludgeon them over the head with a kendo sword; I'm not even going to mention what they do to clubs. Part of it is just a semantic difference, however. Club activities in Japan encompass all after-school activities, as everything from the Brass Band to the Soccer team fall under the umbrella of Bukatsu, whereas in American schools there is a stricter delineation made between the kids who spend their afternoons painting pictures and those who spend theirs kicking balls. Semantics aside, however, clubs in Japan are pretty much across the board a bigger commitment than anything American middle schoolers participate in, be it a club or a team.
I could go on like this forever, cutting cultural differences out of the fabric of my afternoons, but by this point I'm fairly sick of turning my life into an unending comparative anthropology classroom, so as much as is possible, I want to look at the Way of the Middle Schooler without overtly filtering it through an American consciousness. Whoops, I'm writing this so I guess that's an impossible task, but, Bukatsudo is fucking sweet and I don't want to taint it by punctuating it with an incessant, and ultimately misdirecting, chorus of "In America, we do it THIS way, but!"'s. Who cares about American Middle Schools anyway, they suck. However, this post is already horrifically polluted with them. I guess there's no escaping cross-cultural analysis in this post, so I've decided to finish here. Let the next post deal with the natives as they are, not as reflected off of the colonizers. Stupidest line ever.
In summation, clubs in America suck and aren't really a big deal, but clubs in Japan are EVERYTHING and are pretty awesome because of it. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn why.
Clubs in Japanese schools are nothing like clubs in American schools. When you think of clubs in America, you think of eminently marginal, fringey little unions that meet once a week at lunch somewhere and maybe occasionally plan a weekend outing. When you think of clubs in America you think of Debate Club, Environmental Club, Key Club, Anime Club. You think of them generally as a way to boost that extra-curricular section of your college applications, or, alternatively, as a way to goof off with a theme. Critically, you think of them as being fully separate from the much more visible, generally more serious team sports category of after-school-activities. Sure you've got your Swing Club and your Dinosaur Club (I just looked up a list of club activities at my high school because I couldn't come up with any more and they actually have a fucking dinosaur club), but compared to say, the Football Team, or the Basketball Team, who cares? Not only are clubs second tier socially, but they also just lag as a commitment of time and energy.
Enter the Way of the Middle Schooler. Clubs in Japanese Middle Schools take sports teams in American Middle Schools and bludgeon them over the head with a kendo sword; I'm not even going to mention what they do to clubs. Part of it is just a semantic difference, however. Club activities in Japan encompass all after-school activities, as everything from the Brass Band to the Soccer team fall under the umbrella of Bukatsu, whereas in American schools there is a stricter delineation made between the kids who spend their afternoons painting pictures and those who spend theirs kicking balls. Semantics aside, however, clubs in Japan are pretty much across the board a bigger commitment than anything American middle schoolers participate in, be it a club or a team.
I could go on like this forever, cutting cultural differences out of the fabric of my afternoons, but by this point I'm fairly sick of turning my life into an unending comparative anthropology classroom, so as much as is possible, I want to look at the Way of the Middle Schooler without overtly filtering it through an American consciousness. Whoops, I'm writing this so I guess that's an impossible task, but, Bukatsudo is fucking sweet and I don't want to taint it by punctuating it with an incessant, and ultimately misdirecting, chorus of "In America, we do it THIS way, but!"'s. Who cares about American Middle Schools anyway, they suck. However, this post is already horrifically polluted with them. I guess there's no escaping cross-cultural analysis in this post, so I've decided to finish here. Let the next post deal with the natives as they are, not as reflected off of the colonizers. Stupidest line ever.
In summation, clubs in America suck and aren't really a big deal, but clubs in Japan are EVERYTHING and are pretty awesome because of it. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn why.
Monday, May 11, 2009
An Event that Defies Explanation
I mean, it probably doesn't, but I'm not really feeling like words at the moment, so I will insert (moving) pictures instead. This is what I did last weekend. You only really have to watch the first twenty seconds or so unless you want to see an oldish man bite it and get laughed at. I get bumped out of the picture by a drunk dude posing as one of those wind-up cymbal-clashing monkeys and never make it to the fore again. I'm not really sure what happens in the second video.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Strangest Dream Ever
I've been home for about five days now, which has been great, but the jet lag has meant that I've been sleeping at very strange hours, and while this may or may not be a result of the jet lag, the dream I've been having have been as weird as the times in which I have been having them. Last night I woke up at 4 AM, wide awake and unable to do much besides lie in bed and count sheep, while around 2 PM in the afternoon I am usually hit with an unassailable wave of exhaustion that requires a bed and a couple hours of necessary, if torturous, mid-afternoon naps. Never been a fan of naps, really, they always leave me feeling as if my world is breaking up like some prehistoric supercontinent, separating out into a vast, uncharted ocean of bizarre dreams.
But that's beside the point. Sometimes those bizarre dreams are like nothing you could ever experience in an unfractured waking reality. Like one I had some time between 4 AM and 12 PM this most recent sleeping period. I stumbled out of bed this morning/afternoon to make lunch for keelie and her friend who is over for the day with the mild sensation that something remarkable had happened last night, something epic spanning continents, epochs, mythologies, and ultimately human existence, but I couldn't summon up any concrete details. As I was cutting the girls' peanut butter and honey sandwiches into little squares, however, a few ragged images surfaced in my mind, and now that the sandwiches are being consumed in the lair of keelie's room amidst the frenetic, tinkly sounds of two dueling Nintendo DS's running some Kart, I will try to put those pieces together into something that suggests a coherent whole.
Of course that's impossible because dreams of their very nature are wildly incoherent, and this one beats many I've ever had, but at any rate let's get down to business. As far as I can remember, it all begins in a tower. The sort of tower where they usually keep Princesses with extraordinarily long hair, or socially dangerous physicists, or some other type of Old World fairy-tale character. However, despite those associations it was clear that though this was a long time ago, it was also in a galaxy far, far away. I was a prisoner of Darth Vader, trapped in the tower of an enchanted castle that looked a lot like it could have been an extension of the Japanese fortress I visited about a week ago. It was also clear that I was Harry Potter, and that if I could just somehow escape this castle and make my way to some unknown destination, I would be able to rid the world of some unspeakable scourge that was probably Darth Vader but later metamorphosed into something larger. I was scheduled to be executed in a very short amount of time, however. I had to escape. The fate of the world, of the galaxy, of Hoguscant, the Death Snitch, Princess Leimione, Ronbacca, counted upon it, but here I was, trapped in a white walled wooden tower with no discernible way out.
Flicker. There's a guard lying unconscious behind me and I'm climbing a really long ladder (turns out I was in a basement instead of a tower?) out of my prison and into... downtown tokyo! That was also New York. After a few close calls, I managed to make it out of my prison, and into the city where I immediately made my way for the closed shinkansen (bullet train) station I could. I knew that by boarding a bullet train I could make my way to my destiny and the liberation of the world from the Voldemortian Empire. Eventually, I made it there, and with some key assists from various Hagridian/Dumbledorian figures, I made it onto the right train, dressed in a purloined Darth Vader suit, for cover, apparently. You'd think this would be the worst possible disguise for someone trying to hide from Darth Vader, I mean, you'd really stick out, and you'd have storm troopers (who in this situation looked a lot like Japanese ticket takers) asking you for directions, and you'd have to make your voice all gravelly and choke people with the force and stuff (which I couldn't use) and you'd probably be found out almost immediately. HOWEVER, turns out the dream dumbledore is just as clever as the one living in JK Rowlings imagination, because this very train happened to be carrying a massive group of people in full costume headed for a DARTH VADER CONVENTION!!! I feel like the real Darth Vader would never allow such a congregation, but thankfully in this bizarre world I was able to slip into the crowd and avoid detection for some time.
Of course, the authorities knew I had gotten on the train, so even if they had to check every Vader look-alike they were determined to find me... I had to think of something, fast. The scene spasms and I find myself in the bathroom, facing my reflection in the mirror and praying for something. I look at the scar on my left hand, the blazing sunshine that was left there when Vader tried to kill me with force ligthing as I young child. I had shielded my head with my little baby hand way back when, and somehow, it had repelled the attack, sending it straight back at an astonshied Vader, effectively shaving his head and etching little bird-feet into this stunned, parchment white scalp. With a fervent prayer directed nowhere in particular, I threw my hands about and accidentally turned on the water faucet splashing water all over myself. Cursing absently, I went to whipe the water off my hands, and lo! the scar that had been so clearly engraved into my skin for 11-16 years or so came off as if it had been inked in wet jello. My eyes going wide, I realized the implications of this, and drawing back my forelock to expose the lightning bolt scar I received in some parallel universe, I went to erase that mark, too. Now, they would never be able to recognize me. I would be home free.
I guess it worked, because the next thing I knew, I on Mount Olympus, crossing some bridge of the gods on my way to meet Zeus in order to activate some ancient prophecy. Perspective had changed a little bit though, because while scarless Harry Potter was still a part of the party, I was no longer occupying his body. Instead, I was some impotent incarnation of Hermes. As I, together with a party of gods, led Harry through the screen of deadly snakes overhanging the bridge like willow branches, I remember pointing my staff at things and trying to say magic words to make something cool happen, I recall being able to summon up nothing more than the sensation of a spark-plug misfiring. Then Keelie woke me up. Which is good, because that dream wasn't going anywhere. I don't think dreams ever finish, I think we just mercifully wake up from their endless metamorphizing.
But that's beside the point. Sometimes those bizarre dreams are like nothing you could ever experience in an unfractured waking reality. Like one I had some time between 4 AM and 12 PM this most recent sleeping period. I stumbled out of bed this morning/afternoon to make lunch for keelie and her friend who is over for the day with the mild sensation that something remarkable had happened last night, something epic spanning continents, epochs, mythologies, and ultimately human existence, but I couldn't summon up any concrete details. As I was cutting the girls' peanut butter and honey sandwiches into little squares, however, a few ragged images surfaced in my mind, and now that the sandwiches are being consumed in the lair of keelie's room amidst the frenetic, tinkly sounds of two dueling Nintendo DS's running some Kart, I will try to put those pieces together into something that suggests a coherent whole.
Of course that's impossible because dreams of their very nature are wildly incoherent, and this one beats many I've ever had, but at any rate let's get down to business. As far as I can remember, it all begins in a tower. The sort of tower where they usually keep Princesses with extraordinarily long hair, or socially dangerous physicists, or some other type of Old World fairy-tale character. However, despite those associations it was clear that though this was a long time ago, it was also in a galaxy far, far away. I was a prisoner of Darth Vader, trapped in the tower of an enchanted castle that looked a lot like it could have been an extension of the Japanese fortress I visited about a week ago. It was also clear that I was Harry Potter, and that if I could just somehow escape this castle and make my way to some unknown destination, I would be able to rid the world of some unspeakable scourge that was probably Darth Vader but later metamorphosed into something larger. I was scheduled to be executed in a very short amount of time, however. I had to escape. The fate of the world, of the galaxy, of Hoguscant, the Death Snitch, Princess Leimione, Ronbacca, counted upon it, but here I was, trapped in a white walled wooden tower with no discernible way out.
Flicker. There's a guard lying unconscious behind me and I'm climbing a really long ladder (turns out I was in a basement instead of a tower?) out of my prison and into... downtown tokyo! That was also New York. After a few close calls, I managed to make it out of my prison, and into the city where I immediately made my way for the closed shinkansen (bullet train) station I could. I knew that by boarding a bullet train I could make my way to my destiny and the liberation of the world from the Voldemortian Empire. Eventually, I made it there, and with some key assists from various Hagridian/Dumbledorian figures, I made it onto the right train, dressed in a purloined Darth Vader suit, for cover, apparently. You'd think this would be the worst possible disguise for someone trying to hide from Darth Vader, I mean, you'd really stick out, and you'd have storm troopers (who in this situation looked a lot like Japanese ticket takers) asking you for directions, and you'd have to make your voice all gravelly and choke people with the force and stuff (which I couldn't use) and you'd probably be found out almost immediately. HOWEVER, turns out the dream dumbledore is just as clever as the one living in JK Rowlings imagination, because this very train happened to be carrying a massive group of people in full costume headed for a DARTH VADER CONVENTION!!! I feel like the real Darth Vader would never allow such a congregation, but thankfully in this bizarre world I was able to slip into the crowd and avoid detection for some time.
Of course, the authorities knew I had gotten on the train, so even if they had to check every Vader look-alike they were determined to find me... I had to think of something, fast. The scene spasms and I find myself in the bathroom, facing my reflection in the mirror and praying for something. I look at the scar on my left hand, the blazing sunshine that was left there when Vader tried to kill me with force ligthing as I young child. I had shielded my head with my little baby hand way back when, and somehow, it had repelled the attack, sending it straight back at an astonshied Vader, effectively shaving his head and etching little bird-feet into this stunned, parchment white scalp. With a fervent prayer directed nowhere in particular, I threw my hands about and accidentally turned on the water faucet splashing water all over myself. Cursing absently, I went to whipe the water off my hands, and lo! the scar that had been so clearly engraved into my skin for 11-16 years or so came off as if it had been inked in wet jello. My eyes going wide, I realized the implications of this, and drawing back my forelock to expose the lightning bolt scar I received in some parallel universe, I went to erase that mark, too. Now, they would never be able to recognize me. I would be home free.
I guess it worked, because the next thing I knew, I on Mount Olympus, crossing some bridge of the gods on my way to meet Zeus in order to activate some ancient prophecy. Perspective had changed a little bit though, because while scarless Harry Potter was still a part of the party, I was no longer occupying his body. Instead, I was some impotent incarnation of Hermes. As I, together with a party of gods, led Harry through the screen of deadly snakes overhanging the bridge like willow branches, I remember pointing my staff at things and trying to say magic words to make something cool happen, I recall being able to summon up nothing more than the sensation of a spark-plug misfiring. Then Keelie woke me up. Which is good, because that dream wasn't going anywhere. I don't think dreams ever finish, I think we just mercifully wake up from their endless metamorphizing.
Friday, February 27, 2009
What a difference a day makes
As a white dude living and working in a Japanese school, you can never really be sure when something you do is going to cause a stir. Maybe one day word will get out that you've successfully managed to use the Japanese style toilet in the teacher's bathroom and you'll hear nothing for the rest of the afternoon except praise for your squatting abilities. Maybe another day you'll go to the gym during recess, make a lucky shot from the free throw line, and then be held up as the second-coming of Michael Jordan. I think one time I put my hood on during lunch with a class of Elementary schoolers (Japanese schools are butt-fuck cold in the winter and dress codes are lax, so I wear a hoodie a lot of the time), and the entirety of the class collapsed into hysterics and walked around hooded and cloaked, or, if they had neither, just with their shirts pulled up over their heads, for the rest of the meal. Sometimes, it's fully absurd the sort of things that impress Japanese kids, to leave the teachers out of the mix entirely. That being said, I was pretty sure that the hair cut I got yesterday was going to cause a real fuss today. Typed out, that sounds like potentially the most egotistical thing ever spoken, but consider the situation for a moment: 1) Japanese people pull absolutely zero punches when it comes to talking about physical appearances (cases in point: I've repeatedly been told by kids and adults alike that they want my eyelashes, the other day at the gym one of the trainers said I wasn't as fat as I used to be (asinine statement for multiple reasons), when my brother came to my school countless kids (boys and girls alike) came up to him and told him how attractive they thought he was, etc etc etc) 2) I stand out like a sore thumb 3) They make a fuss over me when I do nothing, and yesterday I did something that changed my look in dramatic fashion. When you put those things together, it means that you're in for some strange moments at school.
I got 'em. To be fair, though, I did look a lot different. For the last seven months or so these kids have been gotten used to looking at this sloppy, ugly-ass mug:
But then, out of the blue, I showed up to school looking like this entirely different and mildly threatening human being:
They didn't know how to respond. I mean, things are always awkward the day after you get a big haircut. It really stands out, you know, and people have to comment on it. "Wow, nice haircut." "You look really different." "It looks good." The English language is rife with such stock phrases to deal with just this situation. In Japan, apparently, the same rules don't apply. I guess in Japan you just scream, or stare at someone like they've just recently been shipped over from a different zoo, or maybe you run up to the recently shorn, vigorously shake their hand, and express your desire to be better friends in the future. All of those things happened to me today. A couple people tripped and fell in the hallway; one girl stood slackjawed staring at me in the teacher's room until she was ushered out; another girl asked why Chad's brother was back in Japan; a boy who has never shown me anything but mild hostility and disdain came over to tell me I looked great; another group of boys asked me where I got my hair cut and how much it cost; yet another boy stood in front of me and pretended to masturbate. To be fair, I'm pretty sure that boy has some serious mental disabilities and should probably be at a different school. But still, it was a pretty eventful day at Maruzuka Junior High. And even though I don't really want to admit it, I guess I have to say that I kinda liked it. Even though I said earlier that they make a fuss over a lot of little things I do, I guess I should say they used to. Recently I've been little more than a blip on anybody's radar, so it's nice to come roaring out of obscurity again, even if it means suffering a lot of awkward compliments. I'm pretty sure everything will be back to normal on Monday. Unless, of course, I decide to shave my head on Sunday.
I got 'em. To be fair, though, I did look a lot different. For the last seven months or so these kids have been gotten used to looking at this sloppy, ugly-ass mug:
But then, out of the blue, I showed up to school looking like this entirely different and mildly threatening human being:
They didn't know how to respond. I mean, things are always awkward the day after you get a big haircut. It really stands out, you know, and people have to comment on it. "Wow, nice haircut." "You look really different." "It looks good." The English language is rife with such stock phrases to deal with just this situation. In Japan, apparently, the same rules don't apply. I guess in Japan you just scream, or stare at someone like they've just recently been shipped over from a different zoo, or maybe you run up to the recently shorn, vigorously shake their hand, and express your desire to be better friends in the future. All of those things happened to me today. A couple people tripped and fell in the hallway; one girl stood slackjawed staring at me in the teacher's room until she was ushered out; another girl asked why Chad's brother was back in Japan; a boy who has never shown me anything but mild hostility and disdain came over to tell me I looked great; another group of boys asked me where I got my hair cut and how much it cost; yet another boy stood in front of me and pretended to masturbate. To be fair, I'm pretty sure that boy has some serious mental disabilities and should probably be at a different school. But still, it was a pretty eventful day at Maruzuka Junior High. And even though I don't really want to admit it, I guess I have to say that I kinda liked it. Even though I said earlier that they make a fuss over a lot of little things I do, I guess I should say they used to. Recently I've been little more than a blip on anybody's radar, so it's nice to come roaring out of obscurity again, even if it means suffering a lot of awkward compliments. I'm pretty sure everything will be back to normal on Monday. Unless, of course, I decide to shave my head on Sunday.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
That was Also Awkward
I'm really on fire these past few days, let me tell you. I went like six months without anything too outrageous happening to me (if you're willing to turn a blind eye to the occasional noisy boy-fire escape copulations I have to sit through), but in the past three days or so I've been awash in awkwardness. To be fair this one has been bubbling up for at least a few months, but what is usually a timid, momentarily flash of banshee-like uncomfortableness today grew confidant and smacked me right in the face with fully unanswerable questions and, potentially, a lawsuit. If we were in America, that is. If we were in America, however, this probably never would've happened. Nevertheless.
Let me give you some background here on this whole thang: amongst the generally rowdy, silly group of first-year boys I occasionally pall around with during passing periods, there is one King, or rather, one Court Jester with at least mild behavioral disorders, who is constantly doing really stupid, but hilarious, things. I don't really care about protecting his identity, but I ought to, so I'll compromise and call him Atsy. Almost his name. So, in his natural habitat, Atsy can often be seen walking around the little lounge area on the top floor of Maruzuka Middle School with his blue athletic shorts around his ankles, his brilliant yellow Tweety Bird boxers on full display, smiling like Dopey on a heavy dose of morphine and screeching like some demented osprey at people who happen to come close to him. He likes to alternately lie down or jump around on the benches in the lounge area with his shoes on, which, let me tell you, drives Japanese teachers fucking bananas. They hate that shit so much, and every day, pretty much without fail, you can find Atsy flopped face-down on the benches, his face reposing in a pool of sunlight, beaming like a spastic cherub as three or four teachers try their best to get him to sit in seiza and contemplate koan, or whatever it is Japanese kids are supposed to do during break time.
This kid pretty much hates studying in all forms, but he does like one almost-English sentence: "Do you like manko?" He asks me this on a very regular basis. He prances over to me all googly-eyed, his boxers flashing in the sun, and, "Do you like manko?" Then his brain explodes and he dissolves into paroxysms of insane laughter that, blessedly, mean I don't have to respond. He usually satisfies himself with the question and the utterance of the sacred word, manko. Turns out "manko" means "pussy." Not girls, not vagina, pussy. Real down and dirty. For a long time I didn't know that, and so I figured he was asking me if I liked manga. To which I would always reply, no, thank you, I'm not a nerd. He was understandably never satisfied with that answer. At least he wouldn't have been if he would have stopped laughing at his word choice and listened to my response.
That's how it usually goes, however. He pops over, asks me if I like manko, and then disappears into a tattered shroud of Wicked Witch of the West-esque giggles. It's fine. Today, however, things got very real. I guess he's gotten really comfortable with me or something, because today was crazy. I sat on the bench, per usual, and he bopped over, all evil-eyed and barely sane, and cawed at me, "do you like manko?!" As he giggle, I said, no, actually I prefer papayas (always trying to dodge the real question.) It didn't stop there. Then he said, "do you play sex?" This has happened before, and my usual defence is just to correct his horrid grammar. Have. Not play. He's not interested in learning. After I try to play the consummate English teacher for a second, he skips over to another teacher (who takes his antics with much more aplomb than most) and says, "sensei, do you play sex?" I can't believe this is acceptable, but the teacher in question just sort of shrugs and raises his hands in the air as if he doesn't understand. Not bad. Then Atsy asks in Japanese, "have you ever had sex?" The teacher's response doesn't change. The kid next to me says, "no way that guy's ever had sex." insightful little 12 year old.
This would be enough to register as strange, but it gets worse. Atsy comes back over, sits next to me, and points at his junk while asking me something in Japanese. I've never heard the phrase before, but I know what he's saying. I just really don't want to believe he just said it. It sounds like he's asking me if I play tennis, so I say, yeah, I love tennis. He's not saying tennis. He's not going to let it go either. So he puts on his lecturing cap and starts to teach me some things about the human body. "Down here, (pointing to his crotch), you have a cock, right? (He actually says, "Kokku" Japanglish for cock). Right? A cock, a chinkou, a penis!" I can do nothing but grudgingly admit that he's telling the truth. He continues, "Well, has it ever gotten BIG (pantomiming getting a massive erection)? Has your chinko ever stood up (terrible literal translation)" He's asking me if I've ever had a boner. What, exactly, is the proper way to respond to this? I can't say no. No, I've defied all physiological probabilities and made it to the age of 22 without ever achieving an erection. No, I'm a eunuch! I could resort to the story I used on 13 year olds on World of Warcraft message-boards once, tell him I'm the Death Emperor, asexual, standing outside of this world genital-less in the void and stealing the souls of sinners in the night, but my Japanese isn't quite that good. Also that's not the image sensei are supposed to convey. So, after a few moments hesitation, I go with the seemingly reasonable, well, it's natural that all boys get boners. To which the insightful boy next to me responds, quite natural, yes.
Then a teacher appears, I quiver in fear, he yells out "one minute to class!" the kids disperse, telling their teacher what Atsy was asking me, and I dash down the corridor to my next class trying to look innocent. Am I? Yes? I hope Atsy is satisfied. I hope I don't go to jail.
Let me give you some background here on this whole thang: amongst the generally rowdy, silly group of first-year boys I occasionally pall around with during passing periods, there is one King, or rather, one Court Jester with at least mild behavioral disorders, who is constantly doing really stupid, but hilarious, things. I don't really care about protecting his identity, but I ought to, so I'll compromise and call him Atsy. Almost his name. So, in his natural habitat, Atsy can often be seen walking around the little lounge area on the top floor of Maruzuka Middle School with his blue athletic shorts around his ankles, his brilliant yellow Tweety Bird boxers on full display, smiling like Dopey on a heavy dose of morphine and screeching like some demented osprey at people who happen to come close to him. He likes to alternately lie down or jump around on the benches in the lounge area with his shoes on, which, let me tell you, drives Japanese teachers fucking bananas. They hate that shit so much, and every day, pretty much without fail, you can find Atsy flopped face-down on the benches, his face reposing in a pool of sunlight, beaming like a spastic cherub as three or four teachers try their best to get him to sit in seiza and contemplate koan, or whatever it is Japanese kids are supposed to do during break time.
This kid pretty much hates studying in all forms, but he does like one almost-English sentence: "Do you like manko?" He asks me this on a very regular basis. He prances over to me all googly-eyed, his boxers flashing in the sun, and, "Do you like manko?" Then his brain explodes and he dissolves into paroxysms of insane laughter that, blessedly, mean I don't have to respond. He usually satisfies himself with the question and the utterance of the sacred word, manko. Turns out "manko" means "pussy." Not girls, not vagina, pussy. Real down and dirty. For a long time I didn't know that, and so I figured he was asking me if I liked manga. To which I would always reply, no, thank you, I'm not a nerd. He was understandably never satisfied with that answer. At least he wouldn't have been if he would have stopped laughing at his word choice and listened to my response.
That's how it usually goes, however. He pops over, asks me if I like manko, and then disappears into a tattered shroud of Wicked Witch of the West-esque giggles. It's fine. Today, however, things got very real. I guess he's gotten really comfortable with me or something, because today was crazy. I sat on the bench, per usual, and he bopped over, all evil-eyed and barely sane, and cawed at me, "do you like manko?!" As he giggle, I said, no, actually I prefer papayas (always trying to dodge the real question.) It didn't stop there. Then he said, "do you play sex?" This has happened before, and my usual defence is just to correct his horrid grammar. Have. Not play. He's not interested in learning. After I try to play the consummate English teacher for a second, he skips over to another teacher (who takes his antics with much more aplomb than most) and says, "sensei, do you play sex?" I can't believe this is acceptable, but the teacher in question just sort of shrugs and raises his hands in the air as if he doesn't understand. Not bad. Then Atsy asks in Japanese, "have you ever had sex?" The teacher's response doesn't change. The kid next to me says, "no way that guy's ever had sex." insightful little 12 year old.
This would be enough to register as strange, but it gets worse. Atsy comes back over, sits next to me, and points at his junk while asking me something in Japanese. I've never heard the phrase before, but I know what he's saying. I just really don't want to believe he just said it. It sounds like he's asking me if I play tennis, so I say, yeah, I love tennis. He's not saying tennis. He's not going to let it go either. So he puts on his lecturing cap and starts to teach me some things about the human body. "Down here, (pointing to his crotch), you have a cock, right? (He actually says, "Kokku" Japanglish for cock). Right? A cock, a chinkou, a penis!" I can do nothing but grudgingly admit that he's telling the truth. He continues, "Well, has it ever gotten BIG (pantomiming getting a massive erection)? Has your chinko ever stood up (terrible literal translation)" He's asking me if I've ever had a boner. What, exactly, is the proper way to respond to this? I can't say no. No, I've defied all physiological probabilities and made it to the age of 22 without ever achieving an erection. No, I'm a eunuch! I could resort to the story I used on 13 year olds on World of Warcraft message-boards once, tell him I'm the Death Emperor, asexual, standing outside of this world genital-less in the void and stealing the souls of sinners in the night, but my Japanese isn't quite that good. Also that's not the image sensei are supposed to convey. So, after a few moments hesitation, I go with the seemingly reasonable, well, it's natural that all boys get boners. To which the insightful boy next to me responds, quite natural, yes.
Then a teacher appears, I quiver in fear, he yells out "one minute to class!" the kids disperse, telling their teacher what Atsy was asking me, and I dash down the corridor to my next class trying to look innocent. Am I? Yes? I hope Atsy is satisfied. I hope I don't go to jail.
Monday, February 9, 2009
That was Awkward
Boy did I ever just have an awkward experience. The most awkward experience of my life? No, I can think of at least three thousand things I did in middle school/ high school that were more awkward than this, but nevertheless, yikes. As most of my stories of late seem to center around my various misadventures in commuting, let us return once again to the bus. This time I didn't bring anything incriminating onboard with me. Well, nothing except for my self. Which, for various reasons, is sort of a constant recipient of unwanted attention and otherwise undeserved embarrassment. To the point: I hopped on the bus today, expecting nothing more than the usual fifteen minute chug from the Maruzuka Chugakko stop to the Sougouchosha one, though I may say that I was wishing to make that trip in Seiengakuen-less comfort. Seiengakuen is the private all girls school that sits in the direct middle of my commute like some sort of madhouse of giggles, Hello Kitty key chains, boy gossip, and more than anything, a sheer flood of girlmanity. Girlmanity? That sounds kinda fundamentally incorrect, but nevertheless, every day the first half of my ride home is made in the leisurely, silent company of maybe three or four old ladies headed to the nearby hospital, or maybe just to the station and home from a day of whatever it is old ladies dressed in kimonos do on weekdays in Japan, but as the bus rounds a bend and the Seiengakuen stop comes into view, the line of white cardigan, blue-pleated skirt wearing girls snaking at least thirty segments deep down the block, I sigh, stuff my backpack between my legs to vacate the seat next to me that I swear to god I will fucking vomit on my principal in the middle of an assembly if anybody ever sits in, and settle in. This morning, by some strange stroke of luck, the bus I took to school was luxuriously vacant of all Seien students, so I was able to enjoy a full bus-ride of repose as opposed to half of one, and I had the naivety to hope that I might enjoy another comfy ride on the way home.
Fat chance. I made up for that relaxing ride this morning with the most awkward one ever this afternoon. So I'm sitting there, crossing my fingers as we cross that fated corner, but sure enough, waiting at the Seien stop there's a big indecipherable blur of blue cotton and cream cashmere (private school, quality duds), and I'm a little bit stunned, because it's actually a bigger blur than I've ever seen before. The bus stops and sooo many girls get on the bus. I couldn't see because there were too many fourteen year-olds in my face, but I'm pretty sure the bus driver closed the door and pulled away before all the kids could get on. But, there's currently a shit-load of fucking kids on this bus, but strangely, not only has the seat next to me remained vacant (当たり前でしょ？）, today the two seats in front of me are empty too! Weird, these girls must be extra shy today or something.
Or were they? One of the girls keeps shooting me furtive little glances, which I sort of ignore, sort of return in the manner that is distinctly peculiar to the blond-haired foreigner on a bus full of little Japanese girls, but eventually more fools try to board this bus that is rapidly becoming a death-trap, and Shiori-Mc-Peekers and her bespectacled companion find themselves forced into the open seat in front of me. I figure that's the end of that. Nope. Shiori continues to look back at me occasionally, though she at least has the decorum to mask these looks behind the facade of talking to two of her friends that are standing in the aisle next to me and the seat apparently occupied by my imaginary friend. I guess it's not a facade though, because the four of them, Spectacles, Shiori, and the two other tag-alongs enter into a fairly intense conversation about how you would correctly ask the question, "where do you live?" In English. Fuck, they want to talk to me. I don't really have any idea what I want, so I just sort of sit there and give up trying to keep a shit-eating grin off my face as these four little girls alternately sneak peaks at me and try their hardest to formulate a very simple English sentence to ask me. The English teacher in me is fairly appalled at the attempts they bat around ("Where, なんだっけ？, live?, なになになに、You where? あっそうか。 Where living do you."), the human being in me really confused about how they can be blatantly having a conversation about me that I am physically in the middle of and somehow manage to not acknowledge my presence, and whatever part of me it is that wants to engage these kids unsure about whether I should try to play the role of English speaker or just tell them in Japanese that I know they're talking about me, and that I'm from America.
I chose to just sit there. As the bus pulls into the station, one of the tag-alongs says to Peaks-A-Lot san, "you better hurry up and ask!" but she only replies with something that I didn't really catch, something about being stupid and not understanding English, and then one of them says "Well, how about just bye-bye?" To which there is no response except for the familiar flurry of giggles. This is where the story flops, because the bus pulled into the station, they said nothing, I said nothing, and then everybody got off the bus.
That's not quite the end of the story, however, because after I wait for the bus to clear out and then approach the front, I notice that my flock of would-be-interrogators are waiting not far from the door of the bus, scrunched tightly together, giggling, pointing towards the bus and apparently getting up the necessary courage to say something to me. I shake my head, smiling, pay me fare, hop off the bus, and give them the old wave and "bye-bye!" as I walk past them. They explode into giggles and a chorus of bye-bye's, and I walk out of their lives but perhaps not their memories. Two of them didn't get enough the first time so they followed me said bye-bye one more time, which I graciously indulged. I guess they don't have an ALT at their school to say hello to and then run away from every day. Maybe this is the beginning of some new friendships? Who can tell? God regular not middle school aged Japanese people must think I'm a perv though.
Fat chance. I made up for that relaxing ride this morning with the most awkward one ever this afternoon. So I'm sitting there, crossing my fingers as we cross that fated corner, but sure enough, waiting at the Seien stop there's a big indecipherable blur of blue cotton and cream cashmere (private school, quality duds), and I'm a little bit stunned, because it's actually a bigger blur than I've ever seen before. The bus stops and sooo many girls get on the bus. I couldn't see because there were too many fourteen year-olds in my face, but I'm pretty sure the bus driver closed the door and pulled away before all the kids could get on. But, there's currently a shit-load of fucking kids on this bus, but strangely, not only has the seat next to me remained vacant (当たり前でしょ？）, today the two seats in front of me are empty too! Weird, these girls must be extra shy today or something.
Or were they? One of the girls keeps shooting me furtive little glances, which I sort of ignore, sort of return in the manner that is distinctly peculiar to the blond-haired foreigner on a bus full of little Japanese girls, but eventually more fools try to board this bus that is rapidly becoming a death-trap, and Shiori-Mc-Peekers and her bespectacled companion find themselves forced into the open seat in front of me. I figure that's the end of that. Nope. Shiori continues to look back at me occasionally, though she at least has the decorum to mask these looks behind the facade of talking to two of her friends that are standing in the aisle next to me and the seat apparently occupied by my imaginary friend. I guess it's not a facade though, because the four of them, Spectacles, Shiori, and the two other tag-alongs enter into a fairly intense conversation about how you would correctly ask the question, "where do you live?" In English. Fuck, they want to talk to me. I don't really have any idea what I want, so I just sort of sit there and give up trying to keep a shit-eating grin off my face as these four little girls alternately sneak peaks at me and try their hardest to formulate a very simple English sentence to ask me. The English teacher in me is fairly appalled at the attempts they bat around ("Where, なんだっけ？, live?, なになになに、You where? あっそうか。 Where living do you."), the human being in me really confused about how they can be blatantly having a conversation about me that I am physically in the middle of and somehow manage to not acknowledge my presence, and whatever part of me it is that wants to engage these kids unsure about whether I should try to play the role of English speaker or just tell them in Japanese that I know they're talking about me, and that I'm from America.
I chose to just sit there. As the bus pulls into the station, one of the tag-alongs says to Peaks-A-Lot san, "you better hurry up and ask!" but she only replies with something that I didn't really catch, something about being stupid and not understanding English, and then one of them says "Well, how about just bye-bye?" To which there is no response except for the familiar flurry of giggles. This is where the story flops, because the bus pulled into the station, they said nothing, I said nothing, and then everybody got off the bus.
That's not quite the end of the story, however, because after I wait for the bus to clear out and then approach the front, I notice that my flock of would-be-interrogators are waiting not far from the door of the bus, scrunched tightly together, giggling, pointing towards the bus and apparently getting up the necessary courage to say something to me. I shake my head, smiling, pay me fare, hop off the bus, and give them the old wave and "bye-bye!" as I walk past them. They explode into giggles and a chorus of bye-bye's, and I walk out of their lives but perhaps not their memories. Two of them didn't get enough the first time so they followed me said bye-bye one more time, which I graciously indulged. I guess they don't have an ALT at their school to say hello to and then run away from every day. Maybe this is the beginning of some new friendships? Who can tell? God regular not middle school aged Japanese people must think I'm a perv though.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
The Pitfalls of Good Citizenry
Has a good deed ever blown up in your face? Well, I guess one didn't blow up in mine today, but nonetheless I did have one kind of go off like a stink bomb in my hand. In my backpack, to be more precise. Every day I stare at this sign posted to the two bus stops I sit at waiting to be ferried from home to school and back again, and it says, essentially, "please help keep our bus stops clean! cleanliness comes from individual effort!" or, that last part in japanese, "mana ha hitori hitori no kimochi kara." Alright, yeah, that sounds good, I'm down with being a part of a cooperative community, let's do it. So this afternoon, I rushed out to my bus stop a few minutes later than usual, looking down the street to see if I can see the bus yet. Not quite, so I'm about to sit down on the bench and relax for a minute when I spot a smashed beer can shoved up against the little cement wall behind the bench. Yes, "mana ha hitori hitori no kimachi kara," now it's my opportunity to participate in this great community beatification project I read about every day. So, wondering which one of my passed out students' hands this semi-crushed up can fell out of this weekend, I bent over to pick it up and pop it in my backpack for momentary safekeeping. Oh fuck, this either belonged to Mi-chan or wounded soldiers aren't really a big problem amongst Japanese middle schoolers (or, more likely, bums) because there was a fair amount of beer in the can and as soon as I picked it up it fucking spilled all over me. Oh crap. Now what. Stealing a glance down the road, I see that the bus is almost upon me and there's little to do except try to pour the excess beer out of the can, shove it hastily in my backpack, and get on the bus, hoping desperately that I haven't been wetted to the point that I smell like the resident wino as opposed to the resident speaker of English. So I did, and nonchalantly pulling the ticket that keeps track of your fair from the dispenser, began my effort to look like I was innocent of any contact with alcohol. I mean, of course I was innocent in the sense that I was just trying to keep the bus stop clean, but I certainly had alcohol on my hands, and I could think of no easy way to briefly and satisfactorily explain that to affronted Japanese folks aboard a bus. I sat down, and everything seemed fine. Then the lady in front of me looked back with disdain on her face, and about five minutes later vacated her spacious window seat for an aisle seat next to another woman a row up. And it's not like they were just friends because they didn't talk. I smelled my hands. Yes, alcohol. My bag. Not too bad really. Then we passed the private all girls school, and like 50 12 year old-girls got on. Like usual. I huddled closer in my seat, hoping that by becoming as small as possible I could hide my hoppy scent, and in so doing keep my job. Sadly this is where the story ends because I quickly got off without further incident, but I'll actually be pretty surprised if I don't have to answer some awkward questions tomorrow at work. Old ladies are fucking nosy in this country, especially when it comes to dastardly, foreign alcoholics who are supposedly teaching their kids English. "Mana wa hitorihitori no kimochikara." Ne!
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sato Sho is Peace
Not quiet, necessarily, but I actually really authentically enjoy going to one of my elementary schools. sadly, I don't go there very often, but every once in a while I do and it's a beautiful place. The classrooms are new, furnished in mostly blond wood that smells of cedar (potentially. nice-smelling wood at the very least), and while from the outside it exhibits the same brand of rectangular, crumbling century old concrete inspired architectural squalor that all Japanese schools are famous for, on the inside the lines are smooth, attention to aesthetic detail apparent, and everything is generally both clean and cozy. Which is rare. My other elementary school exhibits all the attention to aesthetic detail of a fall-out shelter that didn't get its door shut in time; maybe at one time it looked nice, but that was before the bomb turned it into a heap of, well, crumbling century old concrete. I realize now that this is an entirely inappropriate description of any Japanese building, let alone an elementary school, but I will keep it posted with a nod to it's impropriety because it's gets at a truth. Japanese schools are generally sorta ugly and look blown out.
But this one isn't, and it's not just the inside that shines. The kids are great too. I don't I played some silly game called fruit basket in class that isn't really very intellectually stimulating but because the kids are running around bumping into each other all the time they don't really notice. The best part of the day is just bumping around with the kids outside of class, because they're cute. Simply put. In the morning they do this thing where the whole school runs around outside on the track for like ten minutes, and the asked me to join. I said yes, and while it was exhausting I didn't regret it one bit. I was running around in a shirt (not a tie today however) and slacks amongst a fucking sea of white T-shirt, green shorted little kids, the late winter sun shining cheerfully on the prow-like triangular faces of the school buildings, struggling to keep up with the frantic sythesized version of some Aladdin song they were piping in over the loud speakers, and for a moment, things were good. Things were real good. And that's where I'll leave it.
But this one isn't, and it's not just the inside that shines. The kids are great too. I don't I played some silly game called fruit basket in class that isn't really very intellectually stimulating but because the kids are running around bumping into each other all the time they don't really notice. The best part of the day is just bumping around with the kids outside of class, because they're cute. Simply put. In the morning they do this thing where the whole school runs around outside on the track for like ten minutes, and the asked me to join. I said yes, and while it was exhausting I didn't regret it one bit. I was running around in a shirt (not a tie today however) and slacks amongst a fucking sea of white T-shirt, green shorted little kids, the late winter sun shining cheerfully on the prow-like triangular faces of the school buildings, struggling to keep up with the frantic sythesized version of some Aladdin song they were piping in over the loud speakers, and for a moment, things were good. Things were real good. And that's where I'll leave it.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
A Couple Words on the Loss of a Lot More
I haven't been posting much lately.
I guess mostly that's because I don't have a lot to say. My everyday life is ushered along quietly humming conveyor belts from bed to school to class (occasionally) and back to home to bed again, with little to punctuate the droning intervals except for vocabulary words from textbooks and characters from the books I read that I can't quite get all the way absorbed in. You'd think with nothing really to fill up my days except books I would find myself fully immersed in them, but instead of rough, sure hand-holds to grab onto and use to climb into worlds of mystery and magic, the caste-system and fluxy, shifting reality-paradigms (i just read the god of small things and am well on my way to finishing up this little mind-fuck of a book called the lathe of heaven), I find myself mostly grabbing at air. Alas, the crags and crannies of these story-shaped mountain-faces are still mostly sheets of teflon that don't really allow for much purchse. Such is life, for the moment.
However, that's not what I explicitly meant to write about here. I wanted to write a cautious obituary for the death of my epic. In fact, all the poetry I've ever written and never printed out. I lost the flash-drive that had all of my stuff on it the other day. Fell out of my backpack when I was cycling, only barely consciously, to work one morning. Forgot to zip up the pocket it was in and, whoops! Now years and years of work are lying in a gutter or a sewer drain somewhere. Maybe some Japanese person will find it and use it to learn English with. There's some hope for all of it, there might yet be files waiting to be salvaged on my old, beat-to-shit Dell that I think Keelie is currently playing with. Maybe. Just maybe all that stuff isn't dead yet.
But maybe it is, and I guess there's nothing for it but to pick up and write a bunch of new stuff. I've got some ideas. I made mention to "the kid who humps fire escapes" the other day in the GBN blog, and that gave me an idea. He's a real kid. He humps fire escapes while yelling out "OH BABY, OH YES!" really loudly during passing periods. He sits on benches and pretends to penetrate a mysterious someone sitting on his lap. He laughs uproariously wheneve I say the word "six" in class. To him, there's really no difference between the short "i" sound and the short "e" one. So, I think maybe I'd like to write some profiles of my sillier students. For posterity and such. They sure as hell can't read english, there's no worry about them stumbling across my blog and understanding it. Maybe someday, but not while I'm around that's for sure. So look out for that on the horizon, and know that it's not because I'm embarrassed or something that I'm not posting any more of my poetry on this bitch. It's cuz I don't have it anymore.
I guess mostly that's because I don't have a lot to say. My everyday life is ushered along quietly humming conveyor belts from bed to school to class (occasionally) and back to home to bed again, with little to punctuate the droning intervals except for vocabulary words from textbooks and characters from the books I read that I can't quite get all the way absorbed in. You'd think with nothing really to fill up my days except books I would find myself fully immersed in them, but instead of rough, sure hand-holds to grab onto and use to climb into worlds of mystery and magic, the caste-system and fluxy, shifting reality-paradigms (i just read the god of small things and am well on my way to finishing up this little mind-fuck of a book called the lathe of heaven), I find myself mostly grabbing at air. Alas, the crags and crannies of these story-shaped mountain-faces are still mostly sheets of teflon that don't really allow for much purchse. Such is life, for the moment.
However, that's not what I explicitly meant to write about here. I wanted to write a cautious obituary for the death of my epic. In fact, all the poetry I've ever written and never printed out. I lost the flash-drive that had all of my stuff on it the other day. Fell out of my backpack when I was cycling, only barely consciously, to work one morning. Forgot to zip up the pocket it was in and, whoops! Now years and years of work are lying in a gutter or a sewer drain somewhere. Maybe some Japanese person will find it and use it to learn English with. There's some hope for all of it, there might yet be files waiting to be salvaged on my old, beat-to-shit Dell that I think Keelie is currently playing with. Maybe. Just maybe all that stuff isn't dead yet.
But maybe it is, and I guess there's nothing for it but to pick up and write a bunch of new stuff. I've got some ideas. I made mention to "the kid who humps fire escapes" the other day in the GBN blog, and that gave me an idea. He's a real kid. He humps fire escapes while yelling out "OH BABY, OH YES!" really loudly during passing periods. He sits on benches and pretends to penetrate a mysterious someone sitting on his lap. He laughs uproariously wheneve I say the word "six" in class. To him, there's really no difference between the short "i" sound and the short "e" one. So, I think maybe I'd like to write some profiles of my sillier students. For posterity and such. They sure as hell can't read english, there's no worry about them stumbling across my blog and understanding it. Maybe someday, but not while I'm around that's for sure. So look out for that on the horizon, and know that it's not because I'm embarrassed or something that I'm not posting any more of my poetry on this bitch. It's cuz I don't have it anymore.
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