I can't remember the last time I wrote something that actually dealt with the day to day realities of my life, and so I think it's about high time to get into the nitty-gritty. I'm a teacher now. Ha. Let's define "teacher" for a second here. Someone who is old. Check. Someone who knows things. Uh.. check I guess. Someone who stands in front of an assemblage of students on a daily basis. Sure, yeah, I'm still following you, check. Someone with the ability to convey something of worth to said students he or she stands in front of. Ah fuck, nope, I can't do that.
I "teach" four classes a week by myself, but I think on the kid's schedules instead of "Eikaiwa" (English Conversation) some cheeky little bastard at the Shokuinshitu (teacher's room) substituted recess. Or maybe nap-time? The kids certainly converse, but rarely in English, and rarely when I want them to. To be fair, this is due mostly to a combination of my poor abilities as a teacher and Japanese society's hesitance to prescribe Ritalin, but yikes I've had some worthless classes so far, that's for sure. The other day I was trying to teach them about Mt. Rushmore (my first mistake) and a host of other noteworthy American landmarks (including the Alamo, I was really trying to pick the most impossible shit I could, I guess. I don't write out what I'm going to say in class before I go, I just kinda wing it, and so imagine my surprise when I came to the Alamo. I have a difficult enough time trying to convey the names of fruits and vegetables, let alone facts about the Mexican-American war and the conception of rugged individualism as it relates to the old west. Fuck, I was like, "uhh, and then I went to the Alamo (the whole presentation was framed as a massive vacation i went on), which is... an old building? Ok moving on... Disney Land!"). That lesson went well, except for when I looked at my students. I try not to do that anymore. Just pretend they're not there and everything will be fine.
Some good things do come out of my lessons, however. During the first week I got a lot of attention from my female students. I remember back in middle school all the girls had huge crushes on Mr. Bruns, the social studies teacher, (two bits if you remember that dude), and boy was I jealous of him. He was like 26 (?) and all the hot chicks were totally into him, while here I was, appropriately aged (13), and floundering in a sea of never having talked to a girl ever. To be fair, part of me was OK with that, but another part of me wanted to kick Mr. Bruns in the nuts. Oh how times change, because now I have become Mr. Bruns. And you know what, it's not that tight. I feel for the poor guy. But I guess I feel more for myself, because when you get down to it I'm sure the girls who were into Mr. Bruns were a little less forward in their appreciation. I wonder if they ever walked up to him and said "you have beautiful eyes." Or, slightly more unlikely, hollered from the back of the class, "cute boy!" No, I'm quite sure that never happened to him. But it does happen to me, and I guess there's nothing to do about but luxuriously sweep my hair away from my eyes and act sheepish. There's no other appropriate response. There is one girl who asks me her name every time I see her, and after a fifteen second struggle with my recalcitrant memory and I finally find myself able to bring it up, she collapses into a paroxysm of delight that I can only respond to by turning my back and running away at full speed. I'm going to have to do something to let those poor 13 year old boys know that I'm not trying to steal their potential girlfriends. I think I'm going to stop showering and or shaving and or wiping my butt and see how long it takes for a) the infatuation to fade away or b) for me to get fired. Only time will really tell.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
A Long Time Gone
It's been a while since I've posted anything, I realize, and while there are a couple things bouncing around in my head from the past few weeks, I just can't seem to get to get it up right now (gross) so for the time being, how about some more of the epic??? Sorry this part sucks too, I think the editorial comment at the end of the selection speaks for itself, but I swear it's the last lame one of the bunch. Then it gets rocking for real.
The truest thing about divinity is that it
cannot hardly separate itself from pride,
and for Triton it was no different. Though
his wound was already closing, he felt the
pain of it steadily growing. Like a lunatic
blood poison it traveled through his veins,
bypassing his vena cava and heading up, thirsting
not for his heart but his mind. Slowly upward
did it flow, and even as Joanna was heartened
by the apparent regeneration of his Divine health
his mind grew closer and closer to insanity.
And so they swam on, she unaware of her dire
peril, he unable to do anything about it.
Some time along, the poison now very near
to Triton’s brain, he stopped, seemingly needing
to catch his breath. The nymph, still unaware
of his degeneration, happily obliged and the
two of them sat on a rock. Triton looked
up into the sea and the sky above that, and
spoke to the naiad, lost somewhere deep
inside his slowly twisting mind. “Dost thou
see the stars far up? Dost thou see them?
Mine eyes can pierce those heights, and
to me they seem to waver. Fleeting and
inconstant, whose were they before
they gave themselves to the Olympians?
Zeus made them not, and neither did that
glorified smith, Hephaistos. They were there
flickering before Ancient Kronos and likely they
will long survive me and thou. Why do they
waver so? Do they mock me in my
frailty?”
“Lord, do not speak so, it makes no sense.
Thou art strong as thou hath ever been. The
stars do not waver, ‘tis merely the watery
filter through which thou see’ests them.”
“Nay, they waver, and they would
do so for me even were I to see them from
the solid earth. Has thou ever known a
god to die? I think it must be possible. Does
our power come from ourselves? Clearly not
entirely, for what power had Zeus before
he took it from Kronos?”
“ Enough to fight back the Titans. But wait,
why do you even ask? What a morbid subject
for one so mighty...”
“My might bled out of me when that boy
smote me with his weapon. So much
strength, and so inconspicuous! From
whence has he descended that he
should have grown so strong so soon, and
without anyone knowing?
Yet Zeus hadn’t lightning bolts before they
were gifted to him, and even Gaia
came out of Chaos. We are nothing in
ourselves.”
“But thou are so much to us! Didst thou
not feel the sea’s wound as it reflected
thine? If you died would the sea die
too?”
“My fair nymph, I may be the sea while I
yet live, but was there not a sea before
there was me? Were there no waters
before I was born to Lord them?
Nay! The ocean breathes not through
my lungs, rather I breath through the
ocean.”
“ All the same, what is a city without
a king, and how could we survive your
death. Our love for thee would dissolve
our bodies! (But how could thou die?
Thou are Triton, king of the sea...)
“ Am I so great as to deserve such devotion
from thee? What do I do, save take offense
and subsequently revenge for the actions
of mortals? Does the water love me for
my abuse of it? Does any mortal love me,
or do they merely show respect for fear
of me? Death would be a gift. Would thou
die with me?”
“ So thee is intent upon dying? It seems that
thy wound penetrates far beneath thy mendable
skin. Could no words persuade thee?”
“ My eyes are growing dark and I fear that
the shade is death.”
“ Then I would go with thee. Whatever you
say, I love thee, and a sea devoid of thy
presence would be for me too salty by
far. How could I discern the water
from my tears?”
“ All is well. On this trident let me
take what the Arbiter left behind. Hades,
thou shall not have my spirit, for it belongs
to the sea. Here, Joanna, let me soothe
thy pains with a gentle edge... The cut is
true... Now for me... It’s not as cold
as I had thought it would be.... With my
blood, I make peace. Now let it run forever
in the waters of my ocean... peace...”
And so, almost in sight of Poseidon’s great
palace, for it was beyond only the next rise,
Triton took his life along with that of his loyal
nymph and surrendered his immense soul back
to the sea. Before his eyes closed for the last
time, the haggard gleam therein went out, and
for a moment there were flowing lines of peace
graven upon each iris.
Seconds later his body and that of the nymph’s were
consumed in a startling blaze of ultramarine, and
a blinding light sped out of the ocean and up into
the air, racing for a little grove of trees nearby. The
moaning of the waters ceased, and where two godly
bodies had lain only a brief flash earlier, no trace remained.
(BLEAGHHH, SUCKS)
Friday, September 5, 2008
A Dip into my Brain
It's strange to stop and notice you're somewhere new, and then to look behind you and see how you've got there. Does the past stretch out behind us like a road, like a wide, straight path, clearly visible all the way back along gently inwardly sloping time-lines that create the impression of distance before they vanish into the dim West, the setting sun that sits static on the edge of our worlds and marks , somewhat paradoxically, where we started? Is it clean, manicured, littered here and there with signposts that we can see that we can read that tell us where we were and when we were there? Can they tell us what it was like to be where we were? Or, is the past the proverbial winding road, short-sighted, obscured by the bends we've just come around, the anticipation of those to come? Does it move up and down, into and out of valleys, onto promontories where everything is visible for years and years around, sometimes coming down and turning strange corners where all around there's nothing but cliffs, big old rock walls on all sides and just a little trickle of a path to crawl through in the dark. Is the past a road at all, is the impression of distance, of a discrete progression through space and time just a metaphor we make up to understand and order the massive glotted mess of memories that are our lives?
I guess it's all semantics because when you get down to the stones at your feet and the old dusty trails in your mind, where we are is where are, and where we were is where we were. It's fun to plot lines between then and now, now and again, however, because that's the only way we can see the extraordinary lines our lives make. What am I doing right now? Sitting on my balcony in Japan listening to Creed, firing neurons into cyberspace and trying to paint a picture of what my life has become, is becoming. What was I doing two years ago? Sitting in my room in Japan, probably listening to Creed, scribbling in a journal, trying to figure out how I was going to survive a semester in an unknown place. Well, I've got about three times as much time to while away this time, and a much wider portal to spit myself out of once it's all done. What was I doing last year? Mostly drinking hella beer, staying up late because, never sleep you silly bitch, playing Settlers three times a day, occassionally reading something, occassionally fretting about something. But with the briefest progression of three months, oh how things have changed. And in so many ways. I'm back in Middle School, wandering the halls of a place that most certainly is not Kellogg, dressed in a shirt and slacks, armed with posters, pictures, and a suddenly most spectacular ability to speak English, waking up at six-thirty and unable to stay awake past ten thirty most nights. Talk about a dramatic revision. But I guess that's what makes this life fun; it's potential for rapid, incandescent, fundamentally revisionist Change. Every morning I wake up and am amazed by how the jigsaw pieces that make up my life have been rearranged and put back together, how elements I expected and pieces I never could have imagined are combining to form an entirely new me that is only a few steps down the road from where I was, but feels, at times, like a man who's stepped into a parallel universe. Are there other worlds than these? Why worry about that, when Earth contains more than you could explore in a lifetime?
I guess it's all semantics because when you get down to the stones at your feet and the old dusty trails in your mind, where we are is where are, and where we were is where we were. It's fun to plot lines between then and now, now and again, however, because that's the only way we can see the extraordinary lines our lives make. What am I doing right now? Sitting on my balcony in Japan listening to Creed, firing neurons into cyberspace and trying to paint a picture of what my life has become, is becoming. What was I doing two years ago? Sitting in my room in Japan, probably listening to Creed, scribbling in a journal, trying to figure out how I was going to survive a semester in an unknown place. Well, I've got about three times as much time to while away this time, and a much wider portal to spit myself out of once it's all done. What was I doing last year? Mostly drinking hella beer, staying up late because, never sleep you silly bitch, playing Settlers three times a day, occassionally reading something, occassionally fretting about something. But with the briefest progression of three months, oh how things have changed. And in so many ways. I'm back in Middle School, wandering the halls of a place that most certainly is not Kellogg, dressed in a shirt and slacks, armed with posters, pictures, and a suddenly most spectacular ability to speak English, waking up at six-thirty and unable to stay awake past ten thirty most nights. Talk about a dramatic revision. But I guess that's what makes this life fun; it's potential for rapid, incandescent, fundamentally revisionist Change. Every morning I wake up and am amazed by how the jigsaw pieces that make up my life have been rearranged and put back together, how elements I expected and pieces I never could have imagined are combining to form an entirely new me that is only a few steps down the road from where I was, but feels, at times, like a man who's stepped into a parallel universe. Are there other worlds than these? Why worry about that, when Earth contains more than you could explore in a lifetime?
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Something to Wash away the Faith
I really can't leave that last post up standing alone any longer. Have you ever cried while watching a person make a speech? Have you ever cried while watching somebody make a fourty-five minute speech about governmental policy? Is you name Kramer Phillips? If not, kill yourself. Whoops, I guess I have. Then I wrote a really long, passionate post about it. What is the world coming to? Not sure, but I need a little irreverence to bring things back to normal.
Uh, let's see here, there's gotta be something.... ..... ..... fuck, come on, something.... I haven't felt this stretched for material since I stood up in front of a class and sang this song: "January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December." To the theme from Splash Mountain. See if you can do that, and then see how you feel about yourself afterwards. I at least got to do it in front of roomful of giddy seventh graders who clapped for me when it was done and were awed at my ability to say "February" without sounding like my mouth was full of marshmallows. It's not their fault, listening to people who don't speak Japanese trying to speak Japanese is similarly painful, and they don't often have the redeeming qualities of being 11 and adorable. It's like being in a classroom of little puppies. Or maybe kitties. You know the website kittenwar.com? Well, it used to be my favorite way to pass 10 seconds, but now it's my life. You do always get that one really ugly kitty every once in a while, which, well, yeah my life works like that too. You can't scorn the ugly child, however. You just have to smile the biggest at them.
Yep, I think that'll suffice.
Uh, let's see here, there's gotta be something.... ..... ..... fuck, come on, something.... I haven't felt this stretched for material since I stood up in front of a class and sang this song: "January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December." To the theme from Splash Mountain. See if you can do that, and then see how you feel about yourself afterwards. I at least got to do it in front of roomful of giddy seventh graders who clapped for me when it was done and were awed at my ability to say "February" without sounding like my mouth was full of marshmallows. It's not their fault, listening to people who don't speak Japanese trying to speak Japanese is similarly painful, and they don't often have the redeeming qualities of being 11 and adorable. It's like being in a classroom of little puppies. Or maybe kitties. You know the website kittenwar.com? Well, it used to be my favorite way to pass 10 seconds, but now it's my life. You do always get that one really ugly kitty every once in a while, which, well, yeah my life works like that too. You can't scorn the ugly child, however. You just have to smile the biggest at them.
Yep, I think that'll suffice.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
I Think I... Believe in Something?
Change. It's a word I've been hearing a lot of lately. At least when I listen to the things coming from the Barack Obama campaign. It sounds nice. Hey, yeah, change, Ok, I could go for some of that. George Bush is stupid! Whooo, I went to a liberal college and now believe firmly in blue things and things on the left. Yeah, poverty and big business sucks! And screw war. That's totally wack, dude. Ah what? Health Care? Sure, I'm 20 and covered by my parents, who gives a fuck, but yeah Change!
I admit I haven't been much of a politically minded person, well, ever. I didn't even vote in the 2004 election. I spouted the same old stuff I remember a lot of other people saying: the candidates are the same, my vote doesn't even matter anyway, who cares, what can the president really do, no matter who wins my life won't change much, blah blah, apathy is cool, blah blah. I didn't vote, and it turns out that, technically it didn't really matter after all. John Kerry won Washington, lost the election. Had I voted, nothing else would have changed. And it certainly wouldn't have Changed. Still, I've gotta think that my heart was in the wrong place. And yet, to continue qualifying myself here, I'm not too ashamed. I was 18, which is young, and having just recently come from a place where my biggest social concern was where in the South Lot I was going to park my car in the morning, all of a sudden affecting a massive political interest would have been just that; an affectation. I wasn't ready to vote because I didn't believe anything because I didn't really know anything. So I didn't vote.
However, you go to a school like Whitman and you can't help but suck up a lot of ideology. And that's good. That's what college is for. You're supposed to learn about the injustices in the world, about the way things should be in a perfect world, and about how far in actuality we are from such a perfect world. It's good to feel, to sense what's wrong out there in the great wide open and put on a drive to fix it. If you don't leave school with a little bit of a bloody heart then, well I won't say you're doing something wrong, but I will say that it's good to soak up some sense of social justice like a giddy human sponge and hold onto it like the sort of sparkling water you one day hope to see the world reflected in.
I wouldn't say I ever really became a massively politically minded sorta dude, but yeah, by the time I graduated I had a better sense of what's right and what's wrong in the world. What we're doing well and what we need to rearrange. Of course everybody thinks George Bush is a dummy (speaking here not for the whole country, just the vast majority of Whitman's admittedly small, admittedly liberal population), and so of course I'm going to vote democrat, because we need a Change, and Obama's gonna give it to us. However, as my first paragraph-paraphrase of my first take on the Obama campaign suggests, maybe my appreciation for the actual meaning behind that capitalized word wasn't really that great. Maybe I was more of a body surfer bowled over and helplessly swept away by the wave of Obama-mania surging through that little liberal community than, to persist in a tacky metaphor, someone who had ever stopped to think about what sort of kinetic energy that kind of a wave actually possessed. What it could actually do.
Now? I guess I'm not that much better than I was. I didn't even know Joe Biden was the democratic VP nominee until a week or so after it was announced. I'm in Japan, a little separated from the epicenter of US political activity, and I'll admit, that old political apathy was starting to seep out from deep within my bones again. Yeah, I'll register for an absentee ballot eventually. Whatever. But, today I watched the speech Obama gave at the DNC, and I had to reevaluate a lot of stuff. I always figured I'd vote for Obama, but unfortunately my sentiments listed heavily in the "just because" direction (dereliction). Well, he's a democrat. Doi. But I watched that speech today, and I now know I'm going to vote for Obama because look at what he could possibly do.
Look at where America is now. The rest of the world hates us, but much worse it's almost become expected that we hate ourselves. I'm speaking largely from a liberal viewpoint, but the past few decades, and particularly the past eight years, have introduced an infusion of national shame into our collective bloodstream, and we can't hold our heads up in public unless we do it with a sheepish look on our faces. Whoops, yeah, I'm American, yeah we suck, sorry. This is especially true for those of us in foreign countries, but I'll get to that. The National Anthem has picked up more than a minors and discordant resonances, and it gets harder to look at people waving the American flag without wanting to cringe, to look at it without feeling that the red parts are died in blood, the blue part mostly melancholy, and the stars either ironic or just more rows of soldiers waiting to fall into and get lost in the blood. I see that flag and the last thing I want to do is smile, the last thing I want to do is salute it. Because how can I, when America is rapidly becoming synonymous with a host of words far less savory than liberty and independence for all. Even "freedom" has been hijacked as a word we can believe in, has been slowly beaten and broken down, reprogrammed so that now it's just a shade of what it used to be, just a shade we hide behind when we go out into the world and do something for our own sake. The national lexicon is changing, has changed, and, though I hardly need to say it, America is far from the global angel it once was (a title which is itself intrinsically flawed, but gets to the point that people used to like us more than they do now). At this point, it feels like we've fallen out of the international sky and crashed straight into hell, only it's happened so slowly that only now are we noticing the horns poking out of our collective forehead.
That's where America is now. Living in a foreign country makes it worse. Sure, I'm in Japan, and if there is one country that would stand next to the US if it managed to shit toxic waste from the Florida coastline it's this one, but I spend a lot of time around people from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (our... allies?) and hating on America is something of a pastime around here. We played this silly game called Typhoon the other day, where you get points for various things and if you pick a particular card you can wipe out a certain team's points. We played it where different teams were countries. At one point the US had zero points, Canada had 1,500,000, the UK got the obliterator card, and I'll give you one guess whose points they whiped out. "Uh, we'll whipe out the US's points." "Don't you dare, we'll bomb your asses." "Sorry, we're taking your zero points anyway" "Oh it's on now. Japan was the last country to bomb us and you see where that got them" And so on. It was all banter, all done with irony in mind, but it proves the point anyway that the rest of the world bashes on America, and America has no choice but to bash on itself in the face of it.
But is that how America has to be? Do we have to be a country of fat, rich, trigger-happy assholes that nobody likes? Do we have to do all the shitty things to ourselves that we do? I think for the past few years I've resigned myself to the fact that America sucks, and all I can do about it is be aware of and apologetic for that fact. But. Can we actually change what we've become? Is that what this whole Change thing is really about? Taking America in our hands like potters clay and remaking it in the beautiful image of what it could be, of what we want it to be? It's hard to think of an America I can actually be proud to belong to, because for as long as I've had a consciousness of national identity we've been shitty. We've been a bully. We've been sloppy and sordid and untrustworthy and that was that, all there ever was, all there ever will be. But just maybe we have a chance to take on decades of dishonesty and slough them off like old skin, and maybe underneath there is still a place that sparkles. Maybe we can never get our wings back, but, well, then again maybe we can. When I think about it, aiming any lower than that is to underestimate the message of Change.
Hope some of that was readable.
I admit I haven't been much of a politically minded person, well, ever. I didn't even vote in the 2004 election. I spouted the same old stuff I remember a lot of other people saying: the candidates are the same, my vote doesn't even matter anyway, who cares, what can the president really do, no matter who wins my life won't change much, blah blah, apathy is cool, blah blah. I didn't vote, and it turns out that, technically it didn't really matter after all. John Kerry won Washington, lost the election. Had I voted, nothing else would have changed. And it certainly wouldn't have Changed. Still, I've gotta think that my heart was in the wrong place. And yet, to continue qualifying myself here, I'm not too ashamed. I was 18, which is young, and having just recently come from a place where my biggest social concern was where in the South Lot I was going to park my car in the morning, all of a sudden affecting a massive political interest would have been just that; an affectation. I wasn't ready to vote because I didn't believe anything because I didn't really know anything. So I didn't vote.
However, you go to a school like Whitman and you can't help but suck up a lot of ideology. And that's good. That's what college is for. You're supposed to learn about the injustices in the world, about the way things should be in a perfect world, and about how far in actuality we are from such a perfect world. It's good to feel, to sense what's wrong out there in the great wide open and put on a drive to fix it. If you don't leave school with a little bit of a bloody heart then, well I won't say you're doing something wrong, but I will say that it's good to soak up some sense of social justice like a giddy human sponge and hold onto it like the sort of sparkling water you one day hope to see the world reflected in.
I wouldn't say I ever really became a massively politically minded sorta dude, but yeah, by the time I graduated I had a better sense of what's right and what's wrong in the world. What we're doing well and what we need to rearrange. Of course everybody thinks George Bush is a dummy (speaking here not for the whole country, just the vast majority of Whitman's admittedly small, admittedly liberal population), and so of course I'm going to vote democrat, because we need a Change, and Obama's gonna give it to us. However, as my first paragraph-paraphrase of my first take on the Obama campaign suggests, maybe my appreciation for the actual meaning behind that capitalized word wasn't really that great. Maybe I was more of a body surfer bowled over and helplessly swept away by the wave of Obama-mania surging through that little liberal community than, to persist in a tacky metaphor, someone who had ever stopped to think about what sort of kinetic energy that kind of a wave actually possessed. What it could actually do.
Now? I guess I'm not that much better than I was. I didn't even know Joe Biden was the democratic VP nominee until a week or so after it was announced. I'm in Japan, a little separated from the epicenter of US political activity, and I'll admit, that old political apathy was starting to seep out from deep within my bones again. Yeah, I'll register for an absentee ballot eventually. Whatever. But, today I watched the speech Obama gave at the DNC, and I had to reevaluate a lot of stuff. I always figured I'd vote for Obama, but unfortunately my sentiments listed heavily in the "just because" direction (dereliction). Well, he's a democrat. Doi. But I watched that speech today, and I now know I'm going to vote for Obama because look at what he could possibly do.
Look at where America is now. The rest of the world hates us, but much worse it's almost become expected that we hate ourselves. I'm speaking largely from a liberal viewpoint, but the past few decades, and particularly the past eight years, have introduced an infusion of national shame into our collective bloodstream, and we can't hold our heads up in public unless we do it with a sheepish look on our faces. Whoops, yeah, I'm American, yeah we suck, sorry. This is especially true for those of us in foreign countries, but I'll get to that. The National Anthem has picked up more than a minors and discordant resonances, and it gets harder to look at people waving the American flag without wanting to cringe, to look at it without feeling that the red parts are died in blood, the blue part mostly melancholy, and the stars either ironic or just more rows of soldiers waiting to fall into and get lost in the blood. I see that flag and the last thing I want to do is smile, the last thing I want to do is salute it. Because how can I, when America is rapidly becoming synonymous with a host of words far less savory than liberty and independence for all. Even "freedom" has been hijacked as a word we can believe in, has been slowly beaten and broken down, reprogrammed so that now it's just a shade of what it used to be, just a shade we hide behind when we go out into the world and do something for our own sake. The national lexicon is changing, has changed, and, though I hardly need to say it, America is far from the global angel it once was (a title which is itself intrinsically flawed, but gets to the point that people used to like us more than they do now). At this point, it feels like we've fallen out of the international sky and crashed straight into hell, only it's happened so slowly that only now are we noticing the horns poking out of our collective forehead.
That's where America is now. Living in a foreign country makes it worse. Sure, I'm in Japan, and if there is one country that would stand next to the US if it managed to shit toxic waste from the Florida coastline it's this one, but I spend a lot of time around people from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (our... allies?) and hating on America is something of a pastime around here. We played this silly game called Typhoon the other day, where you get points for various things and if you pick a particular card you can wipe out a certain team's points. We played it where different teams were countries. At one point the US had zero points, Canada had 1,500,000, the UK got the obliterator card, and I'll give you one guess whose points they whiped out. "Uh, we'll whipe out the US's points." "Don't you dare, we'll bomb your asses." "Sorry, we're taking your zero points anyway" "Oh it's on now. Japan was the last country to bomb us and you see where that got them" And so on. It was all banter, all done with irony in mind, but it proves the point anyway that the rest of the world bashes on America, and America has no choice but to bash on itself in the face of it.
But is that how America has to be? Do we have to be a country of fat, rich, trigger-happy assholes that nobody likes? Do we have to do all the shitty things to ourselves that we do? I think for the past few years I've resigned myself to the fact that America sucks, and all I can do about it is be aware of and apologetic for that fact. But. Can we actually change what we've become? Is that what this whole Change thing is really about? Taking America in our hands like potters clay and remaking it in the beautiful image of what it could be, of what we want it to be? It's hard to think of an America I can actually be proud to belong to, because for as long as I've had a consciousness of national identity we've been shitty. We've been a bully. We've been sloppy and sordid and untrustworthy and that was that, all there ever was, all there ever will be. But just maybe we have a chance to take on decades of dishonesty and slough them off like old skin, and maybe underneath there is still a place that sparkles. Maybe we can never get our wings back, but, well, then again maybe we can. When I think about it, aiming any lower than that is to underestimate the message of Change.
Hope some of that was readable.
Friday, August 29, 2008
My First Day at Work
So you want to make a good impression on your first day of work, huh? I did. Wanted to, I mean. Sure I've been coming to this school for about two weeks, cheerfully popping in @ around 7:55 ( a full 15 minutes before work starts (which is expected)), sitting down at my desk for a couple hours and working diligently on, eh, well I guess I've been studying, but considering my title is "English teacher" I feel like Japanese student doesn't necessarily fit the job description. But with nothing else to occupy my time, that's what I've been up to since I've been here; lounging around an empty teachers' lounge, reading books, occasionally drinking the other teachers' things from the community fridge, and generally using up oxygen and freon (it's like 100 degrees in this city and the teacher's lounge has AC).
Yeah, I've been making a good impression. Every once in a while if somebody is here we'll exchange a word or two, they'll praise my Japanese, I'll smile demurely into the carpet and that'll pretty much be that. However, today was supposed to be the dawning of a new era, and I was supposed to be able to make my first impression for real.
Yep, today was the opening ceremony for a new term, a requisite part of the Japanese School year. You guys remember fighting back tears as Jean Carwile Mastellar showered us with some over-quoted Emily Dickinson some four odd years ago @ convocation? Yeah, well, here that happens three or four times every year. And it starts in middle school. But, hey, different country, different customs. And if it means I get to make a speech (which it did), then I'm all for it.
For such a momentous occasion I figured I had to put on my Sunday best, so I woke up early, brushed my teeth, pulled my Dad's old suit from the wardrobe, fastened my tie nice and tight, and stepped into the late August sunlight with the words of my upcoming speech fluttering meldiously against the walls of my skull like little puffs of silver wind through church bells. Hmm, I just realized I'm using a lot of Christian iconography here, which is totally inadvertant. But anyways.
However, true to form, this is where everything stopped going according to plan. Immediately upon stepping out of my apartment. And I had even eaten breakfast, too. The late August sun is pretty hot, it turns out, but being the mach man that I am I decided to ride my bike to work. Which was my biggest (and in fact my only) mistake. But it was enough. Have you ever tried biking twenty five minutes to work in a full suit in 95 + degree temperatures. Aesthetic perversions aside, it's a great way to turn yourself into a human stream of sweat. So here I am, lost (did I mention I didn't really know how to get there?), pitting out in ways even BK could never imagine, and starting to freak out. At this point, the fact that my blue suit was so dark it was sucking in matter and crushing it to nothingness within the cavernous maw of the sweat-stain opening up in my lower back was probably the least of my worries. I had to find where the shit I was. Ok, landmarks, that's what I need. Street signs, anything. I just gotta find that one, building, with the, kanji.... on it... o fuck i'm fucked.
My heart sinking to the squishy soles of my shoes, I took a left and started mentally preparing myself for the impeding loss of my pink (seppuku isn't quite an appropriate punishment for a first time offense), when, Holy Amida on a sunbeam I recognized something! Yes! A landmark! I knew where I was, and now I just had to concentrate on getting my butt to school as rapidly as possible.
I surged past the trundling groups of my soon-to-be-students like a speedboat past clutches of ducks, splashing them with twin streams of sweat that must have spread out behind me like a wake, and with about a minute to spare I made it to the teachers' lounge, my shirt transparent, my smile triumphant. Sure I had to introduce myself to all the teachers looking like I'd just gotten out of a swimming pool, and sure I gave my speech with my nipples clearly visible through my clinging white shirt, but, I rocked it all. And maybe now they will never forget Frisk-Sensei, the speedy, sweaty foreign wonder.
Yeah, I've been making a good impression. Every once in a while if somebody is here we'll exchange a word or two, they'll praise my Japanese, I'll smile demurely into the carpet and that'll pretty much be that. However, today was supposed to be the dawning of a new era, and I was supposed to be able to make my first impression for real.
Yep, today was the opening ceremony for a new term, a requisite part of the Japanese School year. You guys remember fighting back tears as Jean Carwile Mastellar showered us with some over-quoted Emily Dickinson some four odd years ago @ convocation? Yeah, well, here that happens three or four times every year. And it starts in middle school. But, hey, different country, different customs. And if it means I get to make a speech (which it did), then I'm all for it.
For such a momentous occasion I figured I had to put on my Sunday best, so I woke up early, brushed my teeth, pulled my Dad's old suit from the wardrobe, fastened my tie nice and tight, and stepped into the late August sunlight with the words of my upcoming speech fluttering meldiously against the walls of my skull like little puffs of silver wind through church bells. Hmm, I just realized I'm using a lot of Christian iconography here, which is totally inadvertant. But anyways.
However, true to form, this is where everything stopped going according to plan. Immediately upon stepping out of my apartment. And I had even eaten breakfast, too. The late August sun is pretty hot, it turns out, but being the mach man that I am I decided to ride my bike to work. Which was my biggest (and in fact my only) mistake. But it was enough. Have you ever tried biking twenty five minutes to work in a full suit in 95 + degree temperatures. Aesthetic perversions aside, it's a great way to turn yourself into a human stream of sweat. So here I am, lost (did I mention I didn't really know how to get there?), pitting out in ways even BK could never imagine, and starting to freak out. At this point, the fact that my blue suit was so dark it was sucking in matter and crushing it to nothingness within the cavernous maw of the sweat-stain opening up in my lower back was probably the least of my worries. I had to find where the shit I was. Ok, landmarks, that's what I need. Street signs, anything. I just gotta find that one, building, with the, kanji.... on it... o fuck i'm fucked.
My heart sinking to the squishy soles of my shoes, I took a left and started mentally preparing myself for the impeding loss of my pink (seppuku isn't quite an appropriate punishment for a first time offense), when, Holy Amida on a sunbeam I recognized something! Yes! A landmark! I knew where I was, and now I just had to concentrate on getting my butt to school as rapidly as possible.
I surged past the trundling groups of my soon-to-be-students like a speedboat past clutches of ducks, splashing them with twin streams of sweat that must have spread out behind me like a wake, and with about a minute to spare I made it to the teachers' lounge, my shirt transparent, my smile triumphant. Sure I had to introduce myself to all the teachers looking like I'd just gotten out of a swimming pool, and sure I gave my speech with my nipples clearly visible through my clinging white shirt, but, I rocked it all. And maybe now they will never forget Frisk-Sensei, the speedy, sweaty foreign wonder.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)