Catching Flies with Chopsticks:
Galvin's Japan Journal
Some people get writer's block. I get writer's blue balls. For the past week I've been enjoying a nice, relaxing vacation, but what do I do? Keep looking at the little things. I didn't even really do anything, but that didn't stop me from constantly noting funny little quirks throughout the day that practically demanded variable exaggeration in anecdotal form on the internet. Maintaining a web journal about one's really pretty tedious existence practically demands a keen eye for minutiae in the author, a "talent" that is not very easily turned off. For instance, I'd go to a restaurant, and at some point during the meal the elderly owner would come down the stairs. No big deal, right? But here's what immediately begins running through my mind:
the impossibly ancient proprietor descended the staircase of the eatery in such overly prim and elegant fashion that his manner was only betrayed by his wearing a fanny pack and a shirt so plaid it could only have been conceived as a joint effort of the world's best and craziest scientists and artists; P.S. try to work in the phrase 'like a debutante at a ball' at some point, plus maybe some cock jokes
Y'see? This is what I have to live with in my head every day. I actually didn't mean to start doing journal entries for another week at least, but what can I say? I'm addicted. This is a fix for me. I cannot truly relax until I get my literary rocks off all over a couple hundred strangers on the internet. And now to hastily direct your mental imagery to more pleasant territory; kittens and puppies.
Anyway, I'm back baby, and in a condition that according to market surveys are statistically superior to before by at least a 0.3% margin. C'mon, lame turns of speech or no you know you missed me. You must have felt so lost without someone to remind you every other day in amateurish rambling that Japan is wacky; your brains suffering, dangerously malnourished without someone as brilliant as myself to offer you such original, groundbreaking commentary on varied topics like how many things Suck or that my job sucks. Where else can you read of the exploits of someone who will likely be directly responsible for at least 2 or 3 of Japan's future serial killers? How can you live without me? I contend that you cannot. Truly, I am an infinitely expanding universe of Awesome that big banged, BANGED baby, right smack in the middle of the former void of nothingness of your lives.
So anyway, I can probably safely assume that absolutely nothing of any note has happened in YOUR dreadful lives recently, but what about mine? What terribly enthralling things have occured in my life during the long week I was gone? Well, like I've been saying, not much. DO YOU NOT PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING I SAY YOU MISERABLE LITTLE PUKE. But let's just see if we can't knit a sweater out of a single square of Charmin and try to come up with something at least marginally interesting from the past week or so of nothing:
...
....
.....
......
COCK!! Hahahahahaha LOL2003!!!!!111111
Yessir, it's good to be back. Truly, I am like a type of debutante at some sort of ball.
I'm sitting here in the office scrutinizing the faces of the people around me. I'm not doing this merely because I am bored and have nothing else to do, although naturally that's part of it, but because 9 of these people are unfamiliar. Newbies. Or, if you frequent internet message boards, in which case I hate you, "n00bs". Y'see, every workplace in Japan's education sector undergoes a staff changeover April 1st of every year. These transfers can take place either through request or decree, so whether you're a teacher, a principal, a groundskeeper, or hold any of the desk-related tedious-looking jobs here in the board of education, chances are you won't be at the same workplace for more than a few years in a row. They announced these transfers at a couple of my schools a couple weeks ago. It took place right after graduation when the kids were already emotionally vulnerable, so I suppose not surprisingly many of them burst into tears, like they do when I punch them in the kidneys for insolence. Personally, I can't imagine shedding tears for any of MY elementary school teachers unless some shrapnel from the fatal grenade ended up lodging itself in my groin, but it was touching I suppose.
Somewhat less heartwarming was the farewell party for the 9 departing Saku City board of education members, where in lieu of shedding tears of heartfelt emotion we instead got rip-roaring drunk. The whole thing culminated in my supervisor making me sing some old Japanese song with him called "You Are the Wife of My Heart" on karaoke and then telling me that his one regret was that he never slept with me. Come to think of it, not too long ago another one of my co-workers got trashed at one of these things and kept making grabs for my balls. I wonder if everyone is closeted around here. Perhaps every night after I leave they press a button that converts the BOE into some steelworks-themed nightclub or something.
Unoriginal borderline offensive riffing on harmless drunken jocularity aside, I'm gonna miss my supervisor. Yeah, he was a bit strict with the rules (making me come in every day whether I have anything to do or not), but he was also a nice, funny, uncle-ish guy (i.e., he didn't care about my being nearly an hour late every day). I at least wish someone would have told me he was one of the ones leaving, because then I wouldn't have wasted the last six months trying to convince him I was constantly on the brink of insanity so he wouldn't lay too heavy a schedule on me. Actually, I'm gonna miss a lot of my transferred colleagues; they were all a pretty quality bunch. Even Nakamura-san, who once dragged me out to karaoke until 2 AM so he could sporadically sing Beatles songs ("Ret it be, ret it beeeee...!") whenever he wasn't too busy emitting a nigh-continuous stream of noisy flatulence. Hell, if nothing else, all of them were at least a visually interesting bunch. There was the guy that looked like a turtle, the guy that looked like a pervert, another guy who looked like a turtle, someone else who looked like a sort of aquatic mole...I'm not sure what the deal is with the aquatic/erotic theme but the fact is I could at least pick them out of a lineup because of this. This new bunch, though...boring, boring, boring. In fact, I can't picture a single one of them frolicking peacefully underwater or groping a schoolgirl; or both. I can't see how I'm expected to tell them apart let alone learn their individual names.
That's another thing. I wish someone would have considered how taxing this staff changeover is on my memory, since I only just weeks ago finally learned the names of everyone in my office. You have no idea how difficult remembering Japanese names is for me. I'm not sure why, but whenever a Japanese person tells me his name my brain interprets as some sort of hostile verbal virus and smacks it right out. The only names I learned in the first two months I was here were of Hashizume my supervisor, Soyano the guy who lives in my neighborhood and has me over sometimes, and Mr. Kobayashi, who was so flattered by this that I didn't have the heart to tell him I only remembered because of that guy in The Usual Suspects. And now I'm back to square one, faced with 9 strangers who look like they were all cast from the exact same mold and then had toasters hurled at slightly different parts of their faces so they'd at least look a little different. I swear each of them could reasonably pass himself off as a twin for at LEAST one of the others.
So, this is why I'm sitting here trying to convertly study the new guys' faces, looking for some kind of discerning flaw that I could use to distinguish them in some way. And until I learn their names, I could at least assign them Dick Tracy-esque petnames. You know, like Prunemouth, Hairnose, Clitbrow, etc., etc. Or, for the guy who just noticed that I've been staring at him all day, I think I'll call him "Glareface". Aw, fuck.
Francis Lockamy has been busy lately. Who is Francis Lockamy? Fuck if I know, but he sent me two links yesterday. Compare that to all the NOTHING the rest of you have done for me lately. I don't know who this Francis Lockamy is, but I sure like him better than I do you. Also, I like saying his name. Go on, try it, it's fun! Lockamy Lockamy Lockamy. Hey Francis, is it pronounced "Lock Amy" or does it sound more like an Italian person frantically demanding attention, "Lok-ah-me"? Either way, throw a "General" in front of it and it sounds like someone who should be chasing the Incredible Hulk or something.
Where was I? Oh, right, the uh, links. This first one is from some other guy's Japan page dealing with the frantic stupidity of the "dance game" subgenre of Japanese arcade dorkitude. I personally do not see the point of playing a videogame that intentionally deprives the player the opportunity to make various rad shit blow the fuck up. Also, while I do agree the whole dance game thing is pretty odd, General Lockamy, I still contend that The Typing of the Dead is still weirder.
Link number two is brilliant in its simplicity, forwarded to me as retribution "for all those color schemes you make us put up with." Touche, Mr. Lockamy. By the way, for those who actually ARE prone to fits of epileptic seizure, perhaps you should think twice about clicking on that link. Oh, and Terry, I actually find it superior to yourethemannowdog.com.
Speaking of things with which Terry McMahon actually has absolutely nothing to do with, I'm going to start marking the Engrish section on the frontpage with the date it was last updated so you all don't have to click to that section to see if it was updated since you last saw it only to see that no no it's still an old one and consequently feel a deep overwhelming sense of disappointment rivaled only by that seen in your parents' eyes on the day of your wretched birth. (Note to self: Run-on sentences > Actual humor) Anyway, thanks for this great idea, Harrison! It was made all the better by the fact that Terry had nothing to do with it.
And while I'm phoning it in, I made the most half-assed update to the photos section EVER, simply sticking the old frontpage photos in it since I just changed that, too. But I mean, come on, that one where I'm mostly naked flipping off the camera, that's comic GOLD.
Lastly, here's a couple web page of other fellers in Japan: this first one has lots of photos of Japan, so think of it as picking up the slack for my own half-assed photo section. The other one is another web journal in Japan. I'm putting it up because I'm a big fan of the guy's writing style. I find it better, or at least certainly tighter, than my own random flow-of-consciousness flailings, anyway. But uh, just so you don't leave me for him, I should point out that I heard he's a Nazi and has nose herpes.
Wow, I'm quite the link-whore. You send me anything and I put it right up. But man, doing these updates consisting entirely of links and gratuitous name-dropping sure beats actually coming up with my own material! Well, I'll probably actually write something original tomorrow or the next day. Unless Francis Lockamy gets frisky again, that is.
Wow, 30,000 hits. And to think that I only repeatedly visit my own page as fast as possible for no more than 3 hours each day. My ever-expanding internet fame makes me so happy I may only express it via bad heartfelt poetry as is fitting a blog. Now, I'm not much of a poet, so I hope you'll all bear with me. All you English majors can just leave your harsh criticisms at the door. My ego is far too fragile; your so-called "constructive" criticism is very DECONSTRUCTIVE to my self-image. Anyway, pop psychobabble aside, I present to you now, my touching poetry. But just remember, it's okay to cry:
*sniff* Don't you just love free verse? Okay, crappy joke, I apologize. But hey, a link will make up for it! This one comes courtesy of a Clayton Harris, or Harris Clayton, I forget (You're fallin' behind, Lockamy). Apparently everybody's favorite fat insane North Korean uncle, Kim Jong Il, has gotten into the web journal game as well. Read it, it's too funny.
It's nice to see other people recognize how humorously/frighteningly insane Kim is. I mean, Saddam for all his bluster is your basic, run-of-the-mill dictator. He's your blase power-hungry villanous type who just happens to like to fill his country with ridiculously flattering self-portraits and bronze statues of himself. There's never any real question about his motives; with him, it's all about power. Plus he's just so visually blah with that dreadfully boring moustache and beret look. Were he not actually physically real, sooner or later some hack screenwriter would've dreamed him up as the villain for the next Schwarzeneggar flick.
Kim Jong Il, on the other hand, looks like an overinflated beach ball with a bad haircut and glasses and could very well choose to don an armored suit and cape and challenge the Fantastic Four any day now. When Saddam gets aggressive you at least know there's some semi-coherent reasoning behind the whole thing. Kim, meanwhile, looks like he might invade another country because the yogurt told him the moon should be orange. If Saddam and Kim were children you were babysitting, Saddam would be the predictable fat kid always going for the cookie jar, whereas Kim would spontaneously begin urinating wildly all over the kitchen because he was dissatisfied with the vowel distribution in his bowl of Alpha-bits.
No, I'm not a poli-sci major. Why do you ask?
Something that occured to me recently is that everyone here is a pervert. Normally I would include myself in that statement, but really, in this country I simply can't compete. I am a top-level pervert to be sure, but really only at the amateur level. I'm still not confident enough in my perverting skills to practice outside of the home. Japanese men, on the other hand, have perverting down to a fine, sweaty-palmed art. Even the people you wouldn't figure to be perverts are in reality a sort of pervert hustler. There you are, cocky and confident in the knowledge that this guy couldn't look at NEARLY as much porno as you, until you visit his home and discover that his entire garage is actually constructed of tens of thousands of porno magazines, stuck together with a certain kind of biological mortar which I won't even deign to specify.
I'm sure many of you have heard of at least some of this. People openly reading porno comics on the train and whatnot. Well, that's certainly true. Back when I lived in Tokyo I'd often see businessmen in sharp suits seriously studying the stuff like their promotions depended on it. It's not just on trains though, and not just people toting around their own privately-owned porno in public. It's everywhere. At the place where I used to get my hair cut (you know, back when I used to actually get haircuts), there was a wide selection of print erotica, of both the photographic and cartoon variety. I flipped through them, of course -- purely academic interest, naturally -- but for some reason never once while turning the crinkled, worn pages did it ever occur to me to switch barbers. I think I've been in this country too long.
Oh, and it's not just barbershops where one can find public domain stroke-books, either. For instance, one time, instead of heading to the same ol' BOE cafeteria, my co-worker and I decided to go eat some always-delicious ramen. I'm just about the biggest noodle fan you ever will find, but my appetite was dulled somewhat by my co-worker's inability to stop reading pornography even while eating. Call me a wet blanket, but I find it difficult to sit there heartily slurping up a tasty bowl of noodles while my 40-ish gray-haired co-worker sits across from me calmly studying a pictorial of, I swear, former Olympic gymnasts performing balance beam routines in a g-string. Now, I'm as big a proponent of the ever-hilarious female degradation industry as you ever will find, but I mean, a place for everything, and everything in its place. It's not like people go to strip clubs and say things like, "Hey dollface, when you're done doing the whole naked pole thing over there, I'll have the lobster bisque." So is it really too much to ask to eat a meal in peace without being cajoled to look at pictures of topless Russian women humping balance beams? Or perhaps I'm just a prude.
TV, naturally, is another plentiful porno source. I honestly haven't watched Japanese TV for any significant amount of time since about New Year's, but the last program I watched turned out to be...memorable, to say the least. A perky female correspondent was sent to Las Vegas to find...the women with the largest, most grotesquely inflated breasts in the country. You always hear about Japanese television being wacky and unrestrained, but honestly this is the first real instance of it I've seen here (or perhaps my sensibilities have merely become dulled). At first I thought it was going to be an interview program filled with such thought-provoking questions as "So, how big are your breasts?" and "Are your breasts REALLY that big?". But no. They had to go one, check that, several thousand steps farther. Right before my increasingly disbelieving eyes, the half-dozen women swiftly removed their literally bursting tops and then began doing tricks with their breasts. These cartoonishly huge sweater gorillas, so large they were practically independent entitties (Ha! Pun!), violated just about every physiological, religious, and architectural law known to man merely by existing, and now they were being used to perform such lovely tricks like crushing soda cans and picking up several full beer bottles at once. The whole time the perky Japanese female correspondent stood there gleefully clapping and tittering (G'haw haw!) away, saying "Sugoi! Sugoi!" over and over, which I believe translates to, "Gosh, mathematics are hard! Let's all cook meals for our husbands instead!". Which, y'know, more or less sums up the feminist movement in Japan.
Well, anyway, I could go on talking about perversion all day, I assure you, but I'm tired and I'm still feeling a bit o' that link fever. This one is probably getting popular enough where it's only a few levels beneath linking The Onion on the "Yeah, never heard of THAT" scale, but what the hell. Courtesy of Rob Dickens (hee hee hee), Strong Bad's E-mail over at homestarrunner.net. If you've never seen it before, especially check out the "japanese cartoon" one. You'll like it, I promise. TROGDOR!!
Happy Birthday, Greg!
I've seen a surprising increase in both hit counts and reader mail lately. The former has doubled and I'm getting five times the amount of responses I usually do. I don't know why that is (perhaps Kim's Jong Il's people are watching me), but I like this trend. Keep it up! Only this time, less overtly lame people write me!
Anyhoo...I started teaching again today, meaning my awesome work schedule of eating crackers at my desk in the Board o' Ed has come to a tragic yet inevitable end. Whenever I have these long stretches of office days I sometimes forget that my job is actually supposed to be teaching English, and not just seeing how many times I can click the "refresh" button on my Yahoo mail internet explorer window within a 7-hour stretch. Therefore today was kind of a rude awakening, seeing as both my cracker intake and e-mail checkage sunk like twin stones to the bottom of some wretched, miserable, symbolically melodramatic lake.
I'm exaggerating, of course. Teaching Hell doesn't really start till May-ish; until then, I've got mostly junior high visits, which really is a pretty nice way to break back into things. However, it was kinda strange being back there today with the just-graduated seniors gone. I loved those damn 9th graders. For one thing, most of my fan club members were in that grade. And now they've been surreptitiously replaced by little midget folk who know even less English, and who are STILL wearing hilariously pink jumpsuits. Speaking of which -- man, those jumpsuits were funny enough before, but now even more so since these new kids are wearing freshly pink ones that haven't suffered 3 years' worth of washings. The 7th graders are now a VIBRANT hue of fluorescent pink; like someone's idea of a cruel, blinding joke. When I first encountered one in the hallway today, I couldn't help it, I burst right out laughing and didn't stop until he was forced to duck into the nearby nurse's office just to get away from me. Which, of course, is the ideal way to welcome students to a new school.
Still, I can't be having any worse effect on their self esteem than actually having to wear those pink abominations every day for the next three years will. If I were them, I'd feel pretty shafted. If they had been born a year earlier or later, they'd at least get comparatively normal blue or green jumpsuits. But no, since they came into the school the year they did, they're stuck looking like the Highlighter People from planet Bic. I heard a few teachers actually moved to change the color of uniforms this year to more relatively normal colors like orange or purple, which, while a nice gesture, only serves to raise more questions about the why things get done around here (specifically: a) you know you have painted yourself into a fashion corner when switchin to orange or purple is considered an IMPROVEMENT; b) WHY are their first two choices the still-freakish colors of orange and purple?). Moot point though, since the motion was quickly put down, in short order too I hear. I have no idea why -- I guess it's possible that I'm not the only sadist at my school. Either that, or they were eager to move on to more urgent issues, like whether or not they could cut down on school lunch costs by paying a homeless man to shit in a pot and having the students pass around a single wooden spoon. Lord knows it would be one of the saner decisions they've made.
Speaking of segues, your favorite awesomely named contributor and mine, Francis Lockamy, is back with another great link: The Toilets of Tokyo. This is a great link if you're like me and need to meticulously plan out your public shitting schedule whenever you go out. There's some awesome Engrishy-descriptions for the dirty toilets, but above all else MAKE SURE you click on the "How to use Japanese style toilet bowl" link. I can't tell you how enormously instructive it is for a confused foreigner such as myself to watch a little Shockwave man excrete a little Shockwave turd into an otherwise daunting Shockwave squat toilet. I can't wait to go to school tomorrow and try this, pun intended, shit out.
Best sentences written in my junior high students' daily English practice notebooks today:
#1) "Do you know about Ramadan? It's the ninth month of the Muslim year. It's a month of farting."
#2) "Did they stay homo because it was raining?"
I love my job. Where else could I stay so well-informed about the strict religious flatulence rituals of mideast cultures, or learn that human sexuality is apparently entirely weather-dependent? Penitence and religious observance through wonderful monthlong conciertos of ass-music! Chaos-Sexuality Theory! I love it!
Anyway, I can't even compete with my students for comedy, so instead, here's a link to keep you busy. Get this, a webcomic about being a JET, ain't that crazy? I'm not sure if a lot of the gags will make sense for non-JETs, but for those that get them, I'm sure you'll agree most of them are spot-on. The situation depicted in the comic I linked specifically, as long as you don't interpret the third panel literally, happens to me on practically a daily basis. Never in my life did I imagine that being publically accused of having a large penis would be a shameful thing. Then I came HERE.
And the other link is another blog about a woman's misadventures as a porn-store clerk. I realize it has nothing to do with Japan, but it's damn hilarious regardless, so read it. I uh...actually, since I'm at school I don't have the link on me right now. Oopsie. Oh well. I'll fix this paragraph when I get home then. Check back later.
*******Six Hours Later*********
I got bored at work today so I just left an hour early. I hope no one noticed. Anyway, the link I mentioned. Porn Ahoy!
Aw, the high school girl I tutor, Yuka, just got back from apparently Japan's only school trip abroad not to be cancelled due to the war, and brought me back a box of chocolates! Delicious truffles, no less. I tend to lean more towards the salts than the sweets in my snacking, but for chocolate truffles, I will make an exception. Let it be known that I fully approve of students bearing me gifts in addition to the exorbitant fees I charge for private lessons. No, but really, it's quite a sweet gesture, and even as I type this I am enjoying these delicious chocolate truffles brought back for me from my student while she was visiting Canada...hey, wait! That means these chocolates are CANADIAN!! Made by vile, filthy, maple-scented hands! (spits out half-chewed truffle, sets rest on fire) Pardon me whilst I vomit. All right, so it's still a nice gesture, but I can't say I approve of her inadvertant attempts to poison me.
So apparently, I, and all you link-happy readers out there helped murder the poor webcomic linked in yesterday's entry dead. I wasn't aware there were enough of you out there to kill even a tiny free-webhosted page; either I miscalculated my audience size or his. Then again, it's awful hard to miscalculate something you never bothered to calculate in the first place. Well, uh, lay off the clicking if you're still trying to see that webcomic. And if by any chance the proprietor of that fine webcomic site happens to be reading this, uh...it's all my readers' fault, even the parts that they had nothing to do with.
Anyway, let's try to be a bit more cautious with today's links, eh, you click-happy bastards? Not that it should be a problem. First one is just so goddamn deliciously Japanese I can't get over it:
I love how Japan can always be counted on to deliver news stories that sound like they were made up by The Onion but are actually, fortunately for humor and unfortunately for the very fabric of reality, indeed real. I guess professional wrestlers winning seats in government is becoming less and less an uncommon thing these days, but I believe this is the first time any of them has insisted on continuing to wear his ring attire, let alone his MASK, while in office. God. That's just so hilariously surreal that I feel by merely typing that sentence I have attained some higher sense of being. That's it. I need to start watching Japanese C-SPAN starting exactly NOW:
Councilman Watanabe: "Therefore, it is my contention that a punctual delivery of six comely white-girl prostitutes to my private gold-plated office every night at six is paramount to jump-starting our continually slackening economic status. Furthermore, it is without the slighest regard to my own financial condition that I moreover propose that it is for the good of the people that I be paid more."
The Great Sasuke: "By way of rebuttal to my esteemed colleage, I would like to say that SHININGUUUUU WIZAAAAAARD *Runs across floor, vaults off Watanabe's knee, striking him in the head with his own knee while in mid-air*
Announcer:
"Uooooooouuu! SHININGU WIZAADO! SHAAAIININGU WIZAAAADO!!!!!"
All right, so maybe the above scenario is a bit unrealistic, but I CAN at least look forward to all the awful wrestling-pun headlines that will no doubt be appearing in my newspaper shortly. I swear, somewhere near the bottom of the secret Journalist Constitution is a paragraph stating that when writing something that is even remotely related to professional wrestling, at some point of the article wrestling terminology MUST be utilized metaphorically, whether or not it makes any sense. At some point in the near future, I WILL see an article with a headline like "Masked Politican Body-Slams Tort Reform" or "Grappling Assemblyman Pile-drives Unemployment Rate to All-Time Low" in my paper. It's just a cosmic law.
Having said that...
GOLDUST FOR PRESIDENT!!
Follow-up to yesterday's article: "Governor looks to unmask wrestler".
Once again, no, I am not just making this up. I love that Citizen Sasuke has already made his first blowhard nemesis. It's classic wrestling good guy/bad guy psychology: you always cheer for the exciting guy with the mask, and boo the stodgy guy who wants to rob him of it. It doesn't MATTER if the latter is actually making quite a few valid points (I mean, if the guy at the desk to me suddenly started showing up in a mask, I might be kinda put off by it myself). It only matters that he wants to put the free spirit down. BOOOOOOOO! Incidentally, if this whole fiasco culminates in other Japanese politicians donning their own garish, attention-getting ensembles simply to keep up in terms of publicity, I will spontaneously have a heart-bursting orgasm right then and there.
By the way, first person to send me an article about this that uses wrestling terminology as a pun (as described in yesterday's entry) gets a cookie.
'course, Japan, weird as it is, hardly has an exclusive claim to insanity in politics, especially in THIS world. Going along with the whole "people who act like over-the-top parodies of themselves" theme as of late, I present to you now, a page devoted to the always-hilarious Iraqi Information Minister. I've been a fan of this guy for a while too, and he fits in quite nicely with Kim Jong Il. Somehow, I get the feeling that if either of these guys were killed and secretly replaced with a Saturday Night Live cast member, no one ever would notice the difference. Except if it were Chris Kattan. I hate that guy.
In other news, I watched Japanese television for an extended period for the first time since January last night, and immediately found myself watching a program that had a girl's skirt hooked up to a loom in an attempt to determine exactly how many rotations of the wheel it would take to completely unravel it. This caused me to put a cooking pot on my head and strike it repeatedly with a wooden hammer while idly wondering exactly when God died.
Lastly, in personal news, I'm excited beyond words at the news of a new supermarket filling the void in the building next to me (and my heart) by the end of May! For those coming in late, I've been whining since late January about the closing of my beloved Seiyuu supermarket next door, depriving me of the convenience of having a grocery store within a 20-foot radius of my apartment. But now I'm getting a new one, meaning I can once again suck at the fatty teat of luxury, and well, not have to remember to pick up a carton of milk on the way back from work. Yessir, no more of this "I bet these moldy crackers I found under my sink are rich in riacin" for me! Of course, since I no longer have to adjust to a new lifestyle, but instead just have to wait for my old one to return, I now have a perfect excuse to just eat pure garbage until that new grocery store gets built. Peanut butter and Chee-tos, here I come!
Believe it or not, not every second of every day of living in a foreign country yields some sort of life-affirming cultural adventure. I think many JETs, myself included of course, have some difficulty filling the inconsequential chunks of time when we are not working or attempting to prove that if only we drink enough alcohol perhaps our contracts shall be magically negated. I am speaking of course to weekend nights, or what I refer to as 'the dead zone' of the JET lifestyle. I admit I've never been very good about making productive use of my time (*coughwebjournalcoughcough*), but it's just as well. Personally, when I get home from work each day usually I'm so completely emotionally, mentally, and physically drained that it's all I can do to maybe make dinner and subsequently attempt to digest it by manually manipulating my intenstines with a very big and very precise set of tongs. I'm usually so beat that while I can summon the strength to change out of my working clothes, I almost always run out of fuel somewhere between being buck-ass naked and wearing boxer shorts. Hence, many of my weekend evenings are spent sprawled out mostly naked on the floor, robotically scraping food off a plate in the general direction of my minimally-angled mouth. The salty texture of my own tears goes quite well with the canned beans I've been surviving on for the last eight months; it's too bad most of them end up dribbling down my quivering lip, rolling off my wrinkled chin and finally plopping pathetically onto my bare, hairless chest. In the morning the round, greasy stains shall be washed away, but until then I converse warmly with them as my only companions, chatting about their imaginary lives; which, to my repeated amazement, always somehow appear to be better than mine.
As for after-dinner entertainment, well, that's a bit more active. I thrive on variety, yet live on routine; hence, my late-evening entertainment follows a strict yet varied weekly schedule. For instance, on Monday, I'll sit in front of the northernmost wall of my apartment and stare blankly into it. Tuesday I'll switch over to the eastern one and give it some much-needed half-conscious attention. Wednesday and Thursday are devoted to the south and west respectively, and by Friday I'm feelin' a little wild so for the sake of variety I'll pick one of the corners and stare vacantly at it instead. Then to wind down the week, on Saturday I'll periodically catch glimpses of the floor, or ceiling, depending on what direction my wild sobbing spasms take me during the course of my twice-weekly ritual of weeping loudly into my pillow. Sundays are devoted to a little home improvement project I'm working on; each week I'll alternate between going out looking for some very strong rope and finishing grafting crude but sturdy rafters into my apartment ceiling. In the process I've learned a lot about both carpentry and knots; yet somehow I get this strange feeling that somehow I'll just never have the time to ever put these newfound skills to use!
Some of you nosy busybodies are probably suggesting I take up a hobby of some sort right about now. Well, thank you, but you should be satisfied to know that I already have my fingers dipped in MANY different interests; as well is one that is constantly held in a boiling, scalding pot of water that is one of the very few things that still enables me to feel. Of course you already know that I have an interest in writing, but I ALSO have a vested interest in obsessively sharpening and sterilizing a steadily growing collection of razor blades. Much of my collection can easily be found at my local neighborhood Razor Locker (Japanese name: Laser Rocker), AKA the rusty tool sheds in my neighbor's backyards. Also recently I've taken to flipping through old copies of various bridal dress catalogues, but rest assured this is a completely non-related interest despite the fact that many of the patterns therein would look quite fetching if instead of being woven into a dress they were carved directly into my own numb, worthless, skin.
Anyway, even though it's plainly obvious that I'm living a very full, varied life despite the sometimes dull nature of my current environment, lately I can't help but feel that perhaps some minute changes might be in order. However, when one lives such a jam-packed, carefully structured life such as mine, even tiny changes aren't very easy to make. It's like trying to switch out a single Jack of Hearts from an intricate, grandly constructed house of cards: if you're not careful, if you do not attain a perfect fusion of skill and finesse, then the whole thing could come crashing down. That's why, at first, I've started by just trying to make tiny, minute, miniscule little changes. I'll work my way up to the big ones once I master the tiny details. For instance, the other night instead of having my usual can of beans, I instead gnawed wildly on one of the many saran-wrapped human torsos stacked neatly in my freezer. The unsightly chunks of human gristle that get caught in my new scraggly beard are not the cordial conversationalists that the old beans that used to drip onto my chest were, but that's okay. I was getting a little sick of their lording all their smug little success stories over me all the time anyway.
Sometimes, it still amazes me that I speak Japanese. Okay, no, I'm certainly not fluent or anything. But I've been here for eight months now, and my language skills have come along fairly well, even though there are still the odd days when I wake up and feel like I've forgotten the language entirely (other people learning foreign languages probably know what I mean). I still have trouble watching and understanding the news, and would have difficultly calling the electric company, due to too much specialized vocabulary, but for the most party normal, everyday conversation isn't usually a problem. Provided I'm the one that's leading the conversation, that is. Y'see, if I'm the dominant one in the conversation I can keep it revolving around topics involving vocabulary I know, and ask questions to which the answers can probably be easily inferred anyway. However, if I give the other person the reins, there's always the danger that he/she will take me into the intimidating territory of multisyllabic words and grammar patterns beyond a first-grade level. Or, God forbid, ask me questions. I hate being asked questions in Japanese, because it so easily leads to any number of embarassing conversational mishaps.
See, it's fine if I'm asking the questions. If I don't understand the response, conversational damage control is easy enough -- I simply gloss over whatever nonsensical yellow rat-man gibberish they spouted out and quickly change the subject before they can fully realize I had no idea what they just said. If they're asking me the questions, however, and I don't understand it well enough to answer, or worse, mishear and answer a question like "What do you eat for breakfast?" with "Why yes, I would like to explore your sister's anal cavity", the conversation will drop like a stone and I'm stuck standing there feeling like the world's biggest idiot. It's like Rain Man: It's not my native language, so I'm always gonna be Dustin Hoffman. I know this. However, if I get to control the conversation I can spout of all sorts of shit about how water burn baby and the other person is forced to patronizingly go along with it so long as I don't give them a chance to speak. But, if I lose dominance and forced on the conversational defensive, sooner or later I'm gonna be asked how much money a new car of a pair of underwear costs, and my ignorance will be exposed by harsh reality (Today's Awful Metaphor brought to you by: a Francis Lockamy Link).
The problem is that Japanese people perceive foreigners as on one of two and only two levels in terms of language proficiency: Totally Fluent or Drooling Ignoramus. Stammer out even the most broken uttering of arrigato gozaimasu ever, and you will invariably be met with praise like "Nihongo zyouzu desu ne" ("your Japanese does not make me wish to take my eardrums to a rape crisis center") as you are hailed as history's greatest language authority. Prove unable to sufficiently answer even a simple question about advanced thermonucleardynamanamics, however, and suddenly your perceived language skills are downgraded to sub-chimpanzee as your conversational partner slinks away in embarassment, shamed at both his initial misconception of you and his own lack of proficiency in a language that you would perhaps be more comfortable with, i.e., throwing feces. Okay, I'm exagerrating slightly but it's completely true that in most cases your Japanese partner will only barely stop short of flat-out sprinting away in embarassment of exposing your linguistic weaknesses. Ask anyone else who knows. Actually, I guess for most of you _I_ am your only authority on the subject, so let me just vouch for myself and say it's true, you incredulous fuckbots.
Actually, what probably most amazes me about speaking Japanese is that people actually speak Japanese. When I was learning it in school I guess I subconsciously categorized it as yet another block of useless knowledge that I would never use in real life; much like trigonometry, chemistry, or sex ed. To me, Japanese is something mechanically repeated by apathetic kids in some overpriced liberal arts school, or spoken only in embarassingly low-budget conversational videos show in said schools. It's not someting spoken by actual people, much less an entire nation of them. Whenever I say something in Japanese to someone, and it actually gets through, I am utterly amazed, because to me it's just this obscure shit that no one else would even care to know. It's like referencing a line in some obscure movie you like only to have the other person surprisingly know what the hell you're talking about. Every time I say something in Japanese to someone, I feel like I'm sidling up to a streetlight rendevous with a fellow agent. "The red crow flies at midnight," I'll say, half-expecting to get shot due to using the wrong code words. Therefore, it never fails to amaze me when the fellow agent returns, "In Paris the cafes are many". He understood. I did it. I actually made sense.
Well. Most of the time.
Yes, this is what I do with my time (move mouse over picture):
You can tell I just learned a new HTML trick because it's the second time I've used it in as many days. It's like learning new vocabulary, I need only use it enough repeatedly in a small time frame and it shall be mine forever. I hate HTML.
More than that though, you've probably already guessed that I'm suffering somewhat of a superficial dilemma all of a sudden. Which is, to say: I'm damn HOT without glasses. I mean, look at that shit. In the picture where I'm just wearing glasses like normal I look all like, "Golly, this Dungeons and Dragons fansite certainly is intriguing in a substitute-for-a-normal-healthy-sex-life kind of way!"; whereas merely by placing the cursor over it suddenly I transform into this smoldering, brooding GOD who's all like "Damn...is it adequately sexy in here, or is that just me?" Clearly I should look closely into laser-eye surgery. Who cares if I might go completely blind in the future! It's a fair trade off for 100% increased smoldering ability! I mean, if you can't smolder, you're hardly a man. And lord knows I am already not much of a man.
As a side note, I would like to mention that I spent $100 on a used desk/filing cabinet/chair combo for my apartment today, yet somehow failed to notice until about an hour ago that the chair and the trim of the filing cabinet are both freakin' bright pink. That, along with my silver and lavender stereo (visible in the background of the above pic), combines to form just about the most sexually suspect furniture scheme EVER.
Continuing on, I think I look pretty amazingly different just by mussing my hair and taking off my glasses. Maybe the whole Clark Kent/Superman thing isn't as unfeasible as people think. I've always wanted an alter-ego. Therefore I hereby christen my non-bespectacled self as Donny Chong, 70s Asian porn star. Better yet, my nerdy alter-ego also works in the industry, but as a 70s Asian porno AV director. See, I'll set up the mics and stretch saran-wrap over the close-up camera lenses, then as my half a dozen young, hot, 70% artificial starlets begin achingly and impatiently whining about where the hell the warm wad of masculinity that is their co-star is, I'll slip into a broom closet, take off my glasses, muss up my hair, and emerge, pantsless, ready to do my other job with no one the wiser. Then six hours later when we finish up, I'll change back into my geeky alter-ego and nervously ask one of my co-stars out to a cocaine party, only to get turned down as she snidely laments that she wishes I was more like that Donny Chong. I, of course, will respond only with a sly wink and smile.
And yes, I realize that having written an entire paragraph about my porn-star alter ego basically proves that no amount of hair-mussing or contact-wearing could ever result in my complete de-nerdification. Only a time machine and the far future's most skilled geneticists could hope to accomplish that. Maybe instead I should fantasize about being someone without quite this much time on his hands. Then again, with this job, the whole Donny Chong thing is, relatively speaking, far more likely to happen.
I'm forgetting the English language. It was inevitable, I guess.
It started off slow. Almost unnoticeable. I'd find myself fumbling for words a bit more than usual. I'd instinctively pronounce Rs and Ls as a sort of amalgam of each other rather than as two distinct sounds. I'd sometimes catch myself throwing Japanese-style grammar patterns into my English speech, resulting in sentences like "That is what?" and "As for library books, I shall more soon return them." Conversations overall just seemed to take a lot more effort than usual; my tongue would feel drowsy and slack, like it was moving through jell-o. Then again, I've never been much for spoken words. Writing is where I feel I can best express myself. But that's where I noticed I'm REALLY losing it.
These journal entries used to be something I could dash out in about half an hour, no matter the length. Now, partly because I'm making a conscious effort to slim them down, but mostly because I shall soon be a babbling simpleton, they take me about twice that. I write and type just about as fast as I ever have, but I get...stuck a lot easier. Usually when I write, I feel there is only one specific way to word each and every sentence, and both the the structure and word choice would come to me pretty naturally. Now, I find myself sitting there for upwards of half an hour when trying to figure out the words I KNOW I want to use but cannot for the life of me think of. Take the sentence about my tongue feeling "drowsy and slack" in the above paragraph: I knew there were two adjectives I wanted to use to describe my tongue but simply cannot find them. Finally, after about ten minutes later I just settled on drowsy and slack, but I'm still not happy with them. It leaves me feeling very...frustur...frus...frusto...fustomoga...fuck.
Actually, what's really going now is prefixes. Lately I've been having extreme difficulty trying to remember whether an "in" or an "un" goes in front of a given word to make it negative. Is it UNfeasible or INfeasible? UNlikely or INlikely? UNpire or INpire? UNderstand or Immerstammerstand? It's just so confusing these days. Adverbing words is, too. The other day I couldn't remember if it was fantastically or fantasticly. Suberbly or superbally. Nostalgically or nostalgicly. Actually, are any of those actually words? I honesty am having derficculty determineing. Similarmaly I couldn't renember if it was likeable or likable. I still don't. The latter looks like it could be mistook as "lick-able" tho, so I just went with the former and hoped 4 the bestest. Dernt worry howevah, more soon me probolem fisx. ME ENGLUSH TALK YOU GOOD!
Lame jokes aside, I really am noticing a decreasing knowledge of my native language as days go by. Like Homer said, every time I learn something new, something else gets pushed out. Anyway, given the frazzled state of my brain, let's instead defer to some of my readers for entertainment!
[discreet segue]
A reader named "rhunkins" (runkins?) has come bearing a link. Pet owners! Strip your cat of its dignity AND show the world that you are a complete flake all at once!
Five-Star General Francis Lockamy of course is not to be left out of the linking game. Do some clickin' to see a flash English primer that really isn't too different from my own teaching style. Back when, you know, I actually could SPEAK the goddamn language.
Not too long ago, my beloved town of Nakagomi suffered the loss of its major supermarket. As soon as I found out it was happening, I wrote -- and some would say, whined -- to no end of how crushing a blow that was to both the economy and general morale of my neighborhood. My town, for many years, has been one on a steady, unstoppable downslide, even as surrounding cities pop up to take its place. With the loss of the supermarket came the loss of the city's backbone. Its pride. Its dignity. For even as the once-great drinking town of Nakagomi was clearly deteriorating from many years before, at least there was the Seiyuu supermarket. That one national brand name that still cared about this run-down little town; that by its very presence, recognized Nakagomi as a city that still mattered, despite the unkindness of recent years. But when the Wal-Mart corporation stomped in with its big, faceless feet, all of that changed. Our Seiyuu supermarket -- that corporate symbol that proved that modern times had NOT left our little Nakagomi behind -- was taken from us. And with it, all hope. For at least with the supermarket, we could take pride in remaining self-sufficient. Even as the town become void of places to buy decent radios, cookware, and furniture -- we could still buy groceries -- food, our very essence of life~! -- right in our very own neighborhood! At least we had that. Our own food, our town's own food, home-sold, and home-purchased, right near our very own, well, homes. And when we lost that, well, we lost everything. Forced to leave the town boundaries to forage for *hmph* foreign sustenance, we cast away the last shreds of our dignity. At the very least, however, we could take some small comfort in the fact that things could get no worse. How could it, after all, when we had already been robbed of our very backbone? Short of the ironic comfort that comes from already being at the very bottom, there was nothing left to take.
We were mistaken. Just today, I found out exactly how wrong we were.
Since the Seiyuu closed, a few other businesses have followed it. The antique shop by the 7-11. The 100-yen store. The Pallas department store, already a wheezing, gutted corpse of an urban mall, was dealt its final death blow and quietly passed away, almost unnoticed. And the "Hot Dog Pocket" coffee shop was forced to move to another location. And all this was to be expected, of course. I had anticipated it. After all, when the backbone is removed, how can the rest of the body stand? We had already lost the most important part, so these new losses barely mattered. Insignificant, useless ribs hanging off an already shattered skeleton. Like I said, they had already taken everything that mattered. We could be hurt no more. But today, while walking through the commercial district, I found we had been robbed of something perhaps even more important, more crucial to our miserable, shallow little lives, than even our beloved Seiyuu supermarket. Yes, even more than the Seiyuu! For even after robbing us of our backbone -- our pride, our very DIGNITY -- the fickle hand of fate and urban development has AGAIN returned to take something that, in our short-sighted arrogance, is even more dear than that! For they have now taken our heart! The very SOUL of our now condemned town!
...they closed the goddamn strip club.
"I will/ remember yooooouu...."
Yes, that there is the strip club. The once-great "High Touch Club." Can you believe it? It looks like a goddamn wedding or a funeral -- in fact, that's what I thought when I first saw it. I figured maybe one of the strippers had either gotten married, had a baby, or died, perhaps all three, in that order. But no. Those banners are there to celebrate a new, boring old, not-populated-with-naked-women snack bar there, as if this town doesn't still already have 4 million of those. How many strip clubs do we have? Well, okay, at least two. And beyond that some odd-dozen assorted sexual service-type centers. But c'mon, it's the friggin' TOUCH TOUCH club~! Like I said, if Seiyuu was the backbone, then the Touch Touch club was the heart. Or at least the penis. Either one. And without it we shall die. Or be castrated. Whatever. It's much the same thing. Perhaps it is appropriate that the new bar has put up those funereal-like banners. Even though, secretly, I think they put up that garish shit just to let everyone know there ain't a strip club there anymore.
But yeah, it didn't always look like that. It had dignity, dammit. It used to have opaque black glass doors and a giant sign next to it with crude cartoon breasts being fondled by crude cartoon hands advertising 45 minutes of "Touch Touch" for the mere pittance of 6000 yen. Longtime readers may faintly remember me writing about this place in one of my very first entries; how happening upon it while exploring my quaint little village square quickly introduced me to the odd dichotomy that runs through this place: equal parts old-fashioned sleepy, innocent suburbia, and equally old-fashioned dirty, urban sleaze. The Touch-Touch club marked the gateway from the sweet ol' Mom and Pop district to the Korean and Thailand Whore Orgy Wonderland, separating the two opposites quite effectly with its hard-to-miss giant cartoons breasts. Without it, I must admit, I'm afraid the lines might blur a bit.
The saddest part is, I had so little time to appreciate the Touch Touch Club. And no, I've never gone IN it, thank you very much, but it's jarring because I just kind of assumed it would always be there. I mean, I can see how the demand for y'know, food might dry up, but man's need for sleaze is something I figured I can always count on to remain constant. Surely the Wal-Mart corporation didn't buy the goddamn Touch-Touch too and shut IT down too for, pardon the play on words, underperforming. That would make me hate them even more than I already do.
Still, even though I swear on the Bible I never actually went in the place, that doesn't mean I don't still have fond memories of the Touch-Touch. Sometime way back in September I had a friend from the States, girl named Yuki, visit me. And one night, out of lack of anything else to do, we went down to the ol' commercial district, positioned ourselves on a bench in the little square between the Touch-Touch and a rival strip joint, the Doki-Doki Real Memory, and just watched the activity. It was actually quite a fascinating little anthropological study, actually. Watching the strippers dressed in their big fur overcoats come to work. Observing the awkward, sharklike salesmanship of the bleached-blonde sketchy suit-wearin' guys practically assaulting passersby with discount strip-club coupons. Watching the varied clientele, determining which ones were drop-dead drunk and which ones were merely just kinda pathetic. Don't sound like much, but it managed to maintain our avid attention for almost two hours. It was just pretty captivating because all this sleaze takes place in my really pretty sleepy little country town. Not a juxtaposition I'm used to, I guess. I mean, a few times in Tokyo I've practically been chased down the street by some sketchy guy yelling "YOU WANT SEX??!! REAL YOUNG GIRL!!!" at me, and that's just disturbing. Here, though, in this fairly harmless little town, being handed the world's most lurid "20% off" coupons from some guy who looks like he just wandered off the rice paddy and realized he now had pubes, it's pretty frickin' goddamn amusing. Like watching an an Amish guy repair a stereo underwater, there is a certain morbid amusement that comes from watching people do things they were just never meant to do.
Good-bye, sweet Touch-Touch. Alas, we hardly knew ye.
...no, really. WE HARDLY KNEW YE.
Reportedly, the person who approved my JET application has seen this webpage, and has since apparently decided to go through applications a little more carefully from now on. Personally, I don't see why he would react that way. Yes, I bitch. Yes, I moan. Yes, I occasionally microwave students and secretly sneak little bite-size chunks of them into the school lunches. But I actually think this li'l website of mine carries a rather positive tone about the whole experience in general. You can decide for yourself whether or not I'm kidding when I say that. But I think it's pretty obvious.
Let's make something totally clear: I'm not in any real trouble for running this website. I'm not even really sure that whoever gave my application the nod has indeed seen it. It's not like I got some scary-lookin' "cease and desist" letter in the mail stamped ominously with the official JET logo, whatever that might be. Rather, a former JET who likes this site e-mailed me some nice comments, only offhand mentioning that she had inadvertantly showed it to other former JET friends, one of whom is "pretty sure" he's the one that approved my application. I thought that was pretty funny so I asked her what his reaction was, out of pure curiosity. In response, I was told the reviewer "mentioned something about rereading his applications in the future." I'm not even sure if he was totally serious, or for that matter whether any of this is actually true; although I have no real reason to doubt it. When I posted my previous entry I meant it as just a funny little detail I heard through the grapevine, and nothing more. I certainly didn't think it was anything to worry about, although people are now pointing out to me that maybe I should. And that implication, that I SHOULD have to worry, is what kinda bothers me.
First of all, it's not like I'm trying to paint myself as some free-speech paragon or something, but the notion that I should not be allowed to say whatever the hell I want on my own damn webpage which I am paying for with my own damn money is absolutely preposterous. It's my own damn money, so I'll write about whatever the hell I want, however the hell I want, and yes, that includes my job. I really don't see a problem with that so long as I'm not bashing particular people just to be plain mean, or revealing that I am perpetrating some kind of blatant contractual violation every day on the job. And again, don't think this is about me being on any sort of moral high horse. Quite frankly, if JET paid me to, I would gladly write pro-JET pro-Japan propaganda until my morally bankrupt little fingers bled and gladly turn in any dissenters up to and including my own mother to the Thought Police without so much as a twitch. However, no one's payin' me nothin', so I'll just write what I want, thanks.
Secondly, I honestly don't think I'm saying anything that bad. You want to know a little secret? This site is somewhat exaggerated. I know, *Ooooooooooh*, you are all saying in hushed, disbelieving voices. And here I bet you've all been thinking that I really do routinely chuck children through windows and spend all day thinking of ways to make fun of my coworkers. You wanna know the real truth? I am NOT that sucky of a teacher. Gosh, I hope I didn't just totally shatter your image of me by saying this. But yes, almost all of my students like me and are even excited to see me. I get along with nearly all my teachers despite working with almost 100 different ones who I will individually see anywhere from once a week to once in my entire time spent in this country. But no matter the schedule, many teacher still go out of their way to make me feel welcome or like a real part of the teaching staff even if I'm only there once a month. The problem is rarely so much that I am treated poorly or absolutely despise my job, it's more that I am at heart an antisocial prick who gets exhausted very easily. No, the children don't hate me. Most of them in fact clamor to play with me after classes, but I usually just brush them off; not because I really dislike them but because I'm just so goddamn exhausted all I wanna do is get some coffee in my system so I can perform properly for the next class. I am honestly the most bipolar little SOB in the entire world when at work. During classes I am almost always energetic as goddamn hell, practically bouncing off the walls, working my ass off to keep the children interested and having fun. It's true, I see each class so sporadically I really don't think I can teach them much English. However, I CAN implant a lasting, positive impression of foreigners in their young minds that may stay with them for their whole lives, so THAT is what I work for, and mind you, I work my ASS off at it, thank you very much. However, as soon as I'm in the teacher's room after a class, I probably look like I just attended the funerals of 17 of my most cherished childhood idols in a row. I'm exhausted. I'm spent. I'm no longer on stage; so all I want is some goddamn peace and quiet before I go on next. I don't mean to shun other teachers, and I think they understand that. It's just quite simply what I HAVE to do if I want to do my best for the next class.
But if that's true, why, then, does it site come off so negative to some people? Well, first of all, cheery and enthusiastic as I am in my classes, it's not like I ever update during them. No, I of course only do that when I'm basically a human puddle and trying to remember why I ever came over here. More than that, as a writer -- and I'm not presuming that ranting on the internet qualifies me as a "writer" of any sort, but stay with me -- I just believe negative things are not only far easier to write about than positive ones, but more entertaining, to boot. If I came on here and every update was about how wonderful and lovely I thought everything was I would quite frankly want to swallow a loaded shotgun and bash my head into the wall until my entrails were blasted out my ass. Call me cynical, but yeah, I think negativity is easier to relate to, particularly if it's told in a humorous manner and kept reasonably good-natured. I've gotten e-mails from people telling me they appreciate my brightening their day a bit, or from people saying they sympathize with my situation. And I almost hate to admit it, but yeah, the idea of helping to cheer up someone who actually needs it makes me feel good. And I'm not going to do that by saying how awesome my life is. I do it by taking the negatives and presenting them as something for you to laugh at, even if I'm not at the time.
Another thing: this journal is very cathartic. Make no mistake: this job -- and as I've said before, I believe my position in particular -- is extremely exhausting, and very stressful. I honestly do not think I am built to be a teacher. I'm solitary and I hate large crowds, particularly being in FRONT of them. I hate being expected to be knowledgable, or any sort of authority on any given subject. I don't like being the center of attention unless I am specifically aiming to do so, like on this website. Now, picture someone like that being in front of 20-some kids 4 or 5 hours a day teaching a class, having received absolutely zero prior training, and in a goddamn FOREIGN LANGUAGE to boot. You're goddamn right it's stressful. You're goddamn right it's exhausting. And indeed it has more than its fair share of negatives, not the least of which is my becoming even more antisocial than normal because usually by the time I get home the very LAST thing I want is to be looked at or listened to for even one goddamn minute longer. But don't get me wrong: I'm not pitying myself. I'm not regretting it. I made my own choice to be here, for a second year no less, and I'm happy I did. Despite it not being quite suited for me, I do firmly believe it will ultimately end up being good for me, so I'm trying my best to get through it. And that's where this journal comes in for me. I don't need to vent about the various good parts of my day, no offense. I do, however, need to let off some steam about the bad ones.
Despite this, do I think I'm overly negative? Not in the slightest. You want negative? THIS is fucking negative, and apparently that means something coming from me. The author of this link prefaces it with very much the same "I'm only talking about the negative, but in actuality I'm quite happy" stuff that I do, but to me, it just doesn't ring true. You can't toss off one sentence of cheer followed by several pages worth of pure negativity and expect your little disclaimer to have any sort of credibility afterwards. It doesn't work that way. But isn't that kind of hypocritical considering I just admitted that's essentially what I do? Well, no. That guy, he's just rattling off a veritable grocery list of negative experiences with very little context or dressing. But when I write about, say, my coworkers reading porn, the vapid nature of Japanese TV, my students being little idiots or how disgusting I think it is that people eat baby bees here, and you can't perceive the underlying joy of my being fortunate enough to experience these things -- if my over-the-top negativity seems to stem from pure, bitter cynicism rather than honest, well-meaning bemusement -- then well, I am just about the biggest failure of a writer the world ever has seen. I'm not thinking I'm makin' ART here. I'm not expecting you people reading this at work to always read between the lines. But though I am very much a negative person with day-to-day concerns, in terms of the big picture, I am just about the most sickeningly positive person you will ever meet. And I like to think that comes through in the general tone of this site, even if you're not actively trying to fill in the blanks. In my view I have NEVER written an entry in this journal that ends up as entirely negative. Not once. And yes, that includes the one written at the end of March. Or this one, for that matter. Again, if you want negative, try reading the messageboards at the Big Daikon. The regulars on the discussion list there not only routinely make me look like I actually have a life, but by contrast make me seem as if spend all my spare time harvesting rainbows and moonbeams to power the fantastical contraptions of Happy Town.
Lastly -- throughout the course of the last eight months I have gotten several e-mails from fellow JETs praising me for telling it like it is. I have lurked several messageboards that linked my site, reading total strangers talk about how spot-on many of my observations are. I also get letters from people telling me they appreciate my trying to paint an honest picture of my experiences in a foreign country, and not trying to force it to sound like it's either one way or the other. By contrast, I can count the times people were actually motivated enough by my harmless little scrawlings to write a negative letter on one hand (even though I'm probably soliciting more by that very statement). Similarly, I have gotten letters from people telling me I had gotten them interesting in JET, and even convinced some people who were on the fence. I have NEVER had someone telling me I had totally turned them off to the idea. You hear that, oh great and all-powerful JET superiors? Clearly, I'm not misrepresenting anything TOO terribly over here. If I am, then well, a lot of other people are as well.
...of course, this is all assuming I am actually trying to SAY something with this site. Which, I assure you, 99% of the time I am not. Jesus Christ, this site started as a B-level Engrish repository. As for the journal, well, yeah, I'm here to rant. To vent. To, yes, bitch, as well as to moan. But I'm also here to entertain -- primarily myself, yes, but if some of you can cop some joy off it too, well, all the better. I don't mind. But if you're taking anything I say here to heart, if you're taking any of your emotional or opinion cues from ME, of all people -- hell, if these entries don't immediately leave your brain basically as soon as you're done reading them -- well, clearly we have a problem in our little communication here, and I don't believe it's on THIS end. I'm not one to duck moral responsibility, but at the end of the day -- Jesus Christ on a bagel -- my webpage is fucking named KindofCrap.com. And if that isn't one big fucking mother of a tipoff that I'm not to be taken too seriously, well then, my robotic friend here has but one thing to say to you:
Galvin Chow -- Nagano Prefecture Assistant English Teacher -- out. Fuckbot.