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.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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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