Well, it's that time of year again, when if I were at home and 8 years old I'd be dressing up as some fleetingly popular children's character and parade my gruesome self around the neighborhood in exchange for delicious candy. However, since I am, again, stuck in this savage land too heathen to observe and celebrate a dark pagan holiday devoted to the occult, the only way I can truly cope is to put on a mask constructed via an eight dollar pillow and a pair of shears and run around pretending I'm a confoundingly popular children's character that has horribly somehow sprung to life. I am speaking of course, of my Hello Kitty costume, which is just so enduringly wacky that I had no choice but to wear it again this year. That, and I was too lazy to actually come up with something else. Cough. Still, I bet you can all rest a little easier knowing that, probably while most of you are soundly sleeping what with your Western hemisphere, there was a semi-grown man running around Nagano city dressed as a fucking scary anthropomorphic cat. Like so:
Now, parading around dressed up as Hello Fucking Kitty doesn't exactly make one a hit with the ladies; but then again, neither does pointing at them and making lewd gestures (that unfortunately didn't come out very clearly in the picture). That's Paolo's friend Yuko by the way, from "outside Tokyo," who is somehow crazy enough to have now left her metropolitan paradise two times in the last month to come spend time with us in this countrified bumblefuck wasteland we lovingly call our adopted fucking home. Personally I think she's nuts; but she gets points for drawing up enough courage to come up to me and ask for the one thing all girls secretly, achingly, longingly, yearn for from me: of course, if the ironic buildup didn't tell you, I mean she wanted to try on the Hello Kitty mask:
I do believe that marks the first and only time this particular version of the Sanrio icon has ever actually been played by a girl. And while a female Hello Kitty seems like it would actually make plenty of sense, unless you're one of those sickos that has always theorized that it's had a penis, I don't mind telling you I'm a bit disturbed actually seeing it materialize. It'd be like if female actors started to actually want to play the female roles in the traditionally all-male art of Kabuki theater; it would just totally destroy all its history. Also, let's face it, Yuko's hair poking out the bottom of that thing makes it look like Kitty has some kind of grotesque ZZ Top-ish beard that makes her come across as some sort of Hello Hermaphroditic Kitty, and really, that's a couple too many levels of disturbing even for me. | message board
You know, I was going to actually go to the gym today, as I've been doing sporadically for the past couple weeks, but instead I decided to sit here and write this. So in a way, it's your fault that I struggle to lift a can of Altoids and weigh 72 pounds.
Moving on to our real topic, I should note that I am hesitant to write this entry since given this and my entry on the 7th some of you may get the wrong impression that I have an unhealthy obsession with a certain brown mushy substance that poops out of your butt. However, for the sake of my art, that is a risk I am willing to take.
Anyhoo, so last week I walk into the special school on a day seeming like any other. You know, being attacked with a pair of xylophone mallets by a hyperactive 15 year-old with the mind of a 7 year-old, and later going to wipe off the spit he projected onto my mouth with my sleeve, realizing all too late that said sleeve was already soaked in more spit from when he was gnawing on it not ten minutes earlier. You know, just your usual, everyday stuff.
On a side note, lately my special school has been assigning me specific children to partner up with each day, and I can't help but notice that it's almost always one of the least manageable children that's pawned off on me. Never do I get paired with the cute mute girl who uses a pad of paper to ask me questions, all of which are "Who is your favorite music idol?", or the guy I suspect is not actually retarded, given his habit of elbowing me in the ribs whenever a female teacher walks by and telling me to look at her butt. No no, I always get put in charge of the kid who spends all day picking the skin on his hands until they're covered with open sores, seemingly just so he can touch me a lot, or the aforementioned xylophone-mallet-wielder, Kazuki, who ALSO wanged me with a fucking cowbell (side-side note: "I have a fever...and the only prescription is...more cowbell". Come on, reference, anyone?).
What was I talking about? Oh yes. Around third period they herded all the middle-school-age students into the nurse's room for a presentation, and they had me along as well, just in case, you know, Kazuki felt like seeing if he could jam a bassoon up my ass or something. At first I was mortifed that we were about to see a sex-ed presentation, as being one of the only adults in a room full of special children who just became enlightened to the penis is not a prospect I cherish. However, I guess they don't teach special kids about that stuff, so we ended up with something arguably worse. My first sign that something was up was when the assistant nurse walked to the front of the room wearing an apron covered by a very crudely-sewn cloth representation of the human excretory system taped to it. You can tell she was only the younger assistant because she looked fairly mortified over what was about to happen; whereas the older, more confident head nurse was all smiles as she gleefully slid a paper carrot along the usual route of her assistant's cloth-replica stomach, small intestines, and large intestines. Then the cutout ended up at the younger assistant's pelvis, where it then, quite ceremoniously actually, proceeded to plop into a large metal bowl waiting between her legs. Then the head nurse picked up the bowl and tilted it over so we could all see alarmingly realistic representation of a GIANT COFFEE-COLORED STEAMING TURD placed within it, merrily proclaiming, "Wow, Shirakura-Sensei, what nice poop!" Then, she actually PICKED THE DAMN THING UP, causing all the retarded children to scream, scream, scream, and me to laugh uproariously to the point that other older male teachers more conscious of maintaining their dignity couldn't help but join in with some hearty chuckles as well. And then of course, there was the poor assistant nurse, still standing there with cloth intestines strapped to her waist and wearing an expression on her face that would not look at all out of place in some particularly degrading German humiliation porn.
Anyway, as you have probably guessed, it was not a sex-ed presentation we were to see that day, but rather, poop-ed. The parade of hilariously well-rendered turds continued as the Head Nurse produced a second giant metal bowl with a huge piece of rock solid-looking shit tumbling around in it. Then she picked it up (the student's protestations and the sound of several years' worth of harrowing hygenic training coming undone finally forcing her to explain it was just clay) and said, "This is HARD shit. Has anyone here ever had a HARD shit?" A female student raised her hand, and the Head Nurse called on her saying, "Now, when you shit that HARD shit, how did your butt feel afterwards?" "It really hurt!" she responded gleefully, as if at perhaps the world's filthiest motivational seminar. Then we reviewed ways to prevent painful super-dense shits, like drinking more water or not eating rocks, and moved onto the third bowl, which had this giant pasty mess of really the most nauseatingly accurate imitation of awful pulpy diarrhea that I have ever seen. I swear, if this woman didn't already have a presumably fulfilling career as a school nurse, she could revolutionize the novelty toy industry. "Has anyone ever made poopie like this?" asked the nurse again. Feeling I owed it to my kids to be honest, I sheepishly raised my hand, seeing as well, I had been eating all my meals at 7-11 that week.
The fourth and final giant metal bowl of alarmingly meticulously prepared fake poop disgusted and confounded even a moderate master of intestinal distress such as myself. Whereas the previous three bowls had been molded out of some kind of clay, this last bowl looked to be, at least to my best guess, made out of a couple of egg yolks and some partially-stirred pancake mix. I mean, I'm not even sure what that was supposed to BE, other than DISGUSTING, and all I know is that if you start leaving shit in the toilet that that looks like THAT you can probably expect your entire intestinal tract to soon follow. The only way it could have possibly been more disgusting is if she would have then jammed a giant hidden spoonful of corn into her mouth and then spit the half-chewed kernels into the bowl saying, "Okay, now who's had shit like THAT?"
Of course, the whole point of this psychologically scarring demonstration was summed up by a drawing the nurse then posted on the whiteboard depicting a boy with no pants on bending over the toilet and looking at, really inspecting, his poo. Now, I'm sure this is a valuable thing to teach, since one's turds can be a rather helpful indication of one's health (I should know), and it's not like many of these kids' parents are following them into the bathroom to make sure last night's curry is coming out all right. But I mean, I may not have "training," or "applied knowledge," or "an even remotely relevant degree", but it seems to me that it's not the greatest idea in the world to stand there smiling and holding a deceptively realistic piece of fake shit in a room full of special kids and then telling them that they definitely must inspect their poopie each time they go to the bathroom. I imagine that it must be much easier just to hand a kid an extra pear or cucumber to eat each day, and then just blissfully assume all is coming down roses. Anyway, all I know is, after that little lesson, fucking Kazuki can strike me with as many musical instruments as he likes, so long as he doesn't touch me with his probably unspeakably filthy hands. | message board
All of the rest of you doin' the web journal thing out there, rest assured that if you link me, I will almost certainly find you. I'm sure some of you occasionally, when you are very bored, enter your own names into Google just to see what comes up. Well, I have some sort of crippling narcissistic disease that causes me to not only search my own name, but every possible keyword combination that might lead to this site, about fifteen times a day. So anyway, Japaneze and BitterLittleMan, I appreciate the shout-out. As for the rest of you, check 'em out, good-lookin' blogs with some good-feelin' links.
Another thing the internet is responsible for is revealing to me that I in fact am NOT the only person in the world named 'Galvin Chow,' thus freeing me from a grave sense of lonliness I felt up until age 18 when Google was invented. Looooongtime readers of this journal may remember this guy, who I refer to as my older, lamer, real-estate-agent alternate-self (incidentally, he is why this site has its current name instead of simply being plain ol' galvinchow.com). But the first other Galvin Chow I found out there happened to be an 11-year old boy in Malaysia. Fascinated by this discovery, and more than likely not entirely sober, I sent him an excited email informing him of how ecstatic I was to find not only someone else of the same name, but someone who, from a physical standpoint, could very well be my past self. Needless to say I got absolutely no response other than his webpage shutting down within the week. Boy, one minute you're sending your younger 11 year-old Malaysian self an excited probably slurred missive and the next his parents are likely inferring that you are a pedophile. No trust in this world.
Anyway, my latest discovery in this little club is Singapore Galvin, who is the uh, devoutly Christian version of me, I guess. You know, maybe it's just me, but it seems like all of my people look the same. Now, I can smell some of you getting deeply offended right about now, due to my apparently blatant generalization, so let me clarify -- no no, by "my people" I don't mean the dirty Chinamen, who by the way as far as I'm concerned can STAY in space, and that includes that mutant freakshow Yao Ming (discussion question: does Chinese astronaut ice cream leave you feeling hungry after an hour?) -- I mean the Galvins. Why is it that being named Galvin seemingly condemns you to an existence as an undeniably dorky, skinny Asian man with glasses? What is in a name, after all? If you ask me, it's everything. Naturally there are plenty of successful people with dreadfully common names, or even strange ones. But if you want to really make it in this world, it's really a step up to have a name that is not weird, but still uniquely cool. Think about it; when was the last time we had a president that had some fucked-up space name or just some common everyday Joe Bag'odonuts handle? Never. Nope, it's the Nixons, the Tafts, and the Carters that are truly successful in this world. You think a guy named oh, off the top of my head, "John Edwards" could ever be president? No, because your name pigeonholes you for life. Which is why I plan on siring a series of three sons given the beautiful names of Head, Shaft, and Balls, in that order, to ensure that nothing as arbitrary as a name will ever bar them from plying whatever trade they wish.
But at any rate, of course, the real reason all people named Galvin happen to look pretty much the same is because my name definitely falls into the category of English names only Asian parents would even consider giving their children. Our very own Sakura Shogun has a theory that each and every prospective Asian parent is given a handbook full of names popular up to but never beyond the 1960s that would be appropriate for an Asian-American child. This would explain why Asian kids always have names like Howard, Seymour, Henry, Frank, Garrick, or Dongface; instead of nice normal modern names all the white kids get like Derek or Piotr or Frankie Muniz. If you ask me, it's all just yet another tool used by the White Man to hold the Chinaman down; but don't you worry. One of these days after I find a few dozen more Galvins, I swear I will round us all up, get us all the exact same pair of glasses, jeans, and T-shirt, and we will get shit DONE, confusing our friends and roaming the streets like a band of very, very geeky looking zombies.
Finally, it should be noted that ever since I bared my hysterically-awful-poetry-writing soul in my last entry, my daily hit count for this journal jumped from the low 200s to over 400. The lesson to be learned here? I should embarass myself more often. Also, you are all heartless, cruel bastards who take pleasure in the ineptly-described pain of others; soulless creatures that shall never know the simple joy that comes with rhyming "bloodied" with "understudy". Nay, do not pity me, sir; it is I that pity you. | message board
Yesterday, I went plumbing the depths of my six-year old hard drive as prompted by a faithful reader needing some information on my thesis. I found the requested info soon enough, but while looking for it I came across something else: helps of old text documents on my computer that I had completely forgotten about. Reading through them was at first a only mildly cringe-inducing pleasant trip down memory lane, but soon it became so embarassingly painful that I believe I would have been more comfortable had I instead found a hidden trove of secret Polaroid self-portraits taken by one of my uncles posed next to my naked sleeping body. Among this veritable graveyard of bodies better left buried were some remnants from my ill-fated "short story" phase, a half-dozen screenplays aborted 4 pages in; even found a "dream journal" I once kept when I was once convinced that my dreams were telling the very mundane future -- see, sometimes I'd say, use a set of paper plates, then go into this trance-like state and think, "I know I've seen these plates before -- in my dreams!" and I believe it was a whole three months later before I gave up on keeping a record of my nighttime clairvoyance. Yeah, you think I have too much time on my hands now, well, you haven't seen my history as told by my hard drive.
However the undisputed grand bull-moose WINNAR of this hotly competitive exhibition of embarassment can only go to one particularly better-left-repressed skeleton: the lost, as I now call it, "Japan Journal Version 1.0," my record of my experiences the FIRST time in Japan when I spent my junior year at the International Christian University in Tokyo. And having now spent waaaaaaay too big a portion of last night reading through the excessively wordy (yes, even more than now), melodramatic, horribly...oh, let's be honest here, bloggish thing...well, I must now make a request of all of you and that is that if I, God forbid, die some sort of unnatural, premature death, SOMEONE must seize my laptop and cast in into the ocean just to ensure no one ever gets even a glimpse at the pure awful that lies encoded within. No wait, first burn the laptop, THEN cast it into the ocean. And before that, hit it with hammers then have a fat man skydrive directly onto it. Wouldn't want to take any chances here.
Reading through the Cro-Magnon Galvin's Japan Journal has made me newly appreciative of the self-imposed Golden Rule of this current effort: no talking about my personal life (I mean my personal personal life) if I can at all help it. Trust me, if any of you could see the thing -- which you will not if there is indeed a God -- you would understand why. For digging up this thing produced a horrible self-revelation of my past lameness comparable to finding an old photograph of yourself wearing parachute pants and one holy mother of a mullet along with a smile that can say only God, I am so cool and never stop being so. Only several dozen times worse, because at least that photograph would not have been written nearly entirely about relationships, pursuits of, and assorted other humiliating anecdotes about girls, as well as -- this makes me really want to take my own life -- HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, ANGSTY POETRY. Auuuugh. I wrote poetry. ME. Do you know what this means? Everything I've ever written is a lie. Nearly everything I cannot stand about other people who do the whole web journal thing is ME no less than 3 years ago. Hell, I believe I even speak favorably of SPECIFIC anime somewhere in there. Like a devoted, wizened rabbi finding memory-jolting trinkets from his college days spent in a hateful Nazi fraternity, this jarring peek into the mirror of times past has forced me to sit down and consider whether I indeed have any right to proclaim myself the Champion of Anti-Web-Lame that I will now retroactively claim I have always proclaimed myself to be. Alas. *restrains self from writing poetry about depths of own sorrow*
Here's the part where I'd now go back on my word and post some experts from this terrible Necronomicon of melodramatic teen angst, but honestly, I cannot do so without horribly embarassing myself as well as several people I know...okay fine. Can't very well leave you with one long-winded cocktease, so what follows are some very selective excerpts, bite sized chunks of lame, if you will, that still won't reveal too much personal info:
"...Of special mention is Kiku, the ICU student who volunteered to show how to get home, and the first jaw-droppingly
gorgeous Japanese chick I’ve seen here. To be frank, my heart practically stopped when she first said something to me, and I’ve given her the official title of
Cutest Girl in the Whole World. Not a very creative label, but an extremely accurate one nonetheless. Yeah, I’ve got a pointless crush. ‘tis been a while.
Speaking of crushes, Kashiwai-san. Talk about an attatakottie. Whoo!" (For those not in the know, "Attakai (Japanese for hot) " + "hottie"
= "attatakottie." Apparently.)
"Nothing annoys me more than people trying to undermine each other’s social high ground. The kids who dress in thrift-store jeans and campy T-shirts
are no better, they’re just following what their perception of what “cool” should be anyway. It’s still a group mentality, it’s no more individual than the J. Crew set.
It’s still judging people by what they wear, which is supposed to be why people are wearing worn jeans in the first place.
It all just seems terribly hypocritical. I hate it, all the different social groups being so sure that their own group must be the one that’s in the right. I hate it."
"When is a rose not a rose? When it’s morose. Indeed, is happiness implicitly fundamental to the essence of a rose? Would a rose, symbolizing beauty,
lose its archetypal meaning were it sad? Mehaps nay, for in this world there exists such as thing as cheerless beauty, that which elicits a positive aesthetic response
through or despite its poignant connotations. To a sado-masochist, a morose rose may be quite a beautiful..." "This is futile, but I gotta remember…there’s much more than a good chance that she merely finds me a semi-interesting, semi-unique person, and is merely
curious, with no romantic/sexual interest involved. This really IS the most likely scenario…but I won’t believe it. Hopeless I am, simply hopeless. It’s too late for me.
I even read a Mishima play tonight, “The Damask Drum,” about an old man who kills himself out of painful unrequited, unrealistic love…and failed to immediately make the connection.
Love, or should I say, crushes, or lust, or whatever you want to call it, is a drug, the most dangerous drug in the world." "...it’s worth mentioning that while I write this, I am listening to the Final Fantasy VI: Grand Finale CD, which contains 14 selections of music from the
game performed by a full symphonic orchestra. While I disagree with some of the pieces included on this CD
(of all the characters’ themes, why Relm’s and Gau’s, my two least favorite characters in the game?), it’s turned out to be quite a worthwhile purchase"
And now...saving the most psychologically scarring for last...ANGSTY POETRY!!!
Think pleasant thoughts
Have a lovely dream
Hope they’re glimpses of the future
On which your hopes can lean
But remember, that your thoughts
Are just thoughts
And you lean on shattered dreams.
...someone please stop this...okay, last one, but it's a doozy.
It’s a tale without an end
A song that’s never done
A race you started weeks ago
But even now you run
Your pen’s gone dry
Your voice is shot
Your legs gone long ago
But still the end, that precious end
If only you could know
The rules you drew up by yourself
Now don’t seem so fair
You told her that you loved her
But not when she was there
You made the date
Told all your friends
And even cut your hair
The scene was set, but you forgot
To ever tell her where
So the show goes on
Without your lead
Your self-esteem’s been bloodied
The role, it seems, was just miscast
Break out the understudy
It’s a tale without an end
A song that’s never done
A race you started weeks ago
But even now you run
Delude yourself all you like
This game is long since done
You lost, you know, but that’s okay
Would life be better had you won?
Well, that was scarring. If you need me, I'll be crawling into a pit. And trying to die. | message board
Normally I wouldn't just cut and paste something from the messageboard and call it an entry, but Lockamy has posted some damn fine links that should not be missed:
1. This is absolutely hilarious... EGM set down several kids to document their reaction to the games of yesteryear...
2. I hate to mention it, but Wing is singing again... Go and listen...
3. Quite a different "take" on Japan... Some guys sexual escapades through The Land Of The Rising Sun...
4. What would Jesus drive? Christians against SUVs? HUH!?!
5. Phone Losers is such a great, great site... Albeit most of it is highly illegal and I ain't recommending it, but its damned funny... These guys do it all, red boxing, prank calls, Anarchy at Wal-Mart and they've even high-jacked a fast food joint's wireless frequencies! You'll never look at Radio Shack in the same way again...
Six. Hey remember that Optimus Prime cosplayer? Wanna see his homepage? Here ya go! Look for CHRONOBOT... A transforming Tardis!?!
Okay, now just so regular visitors of the messageboard aren't gypped, here's some other links I have floating around (thanks to Paolo Sensei for the last couple):
7. Accidental Videogame Porn. Becomes unfortunately stupid a lot sooner than expected, but worth a glance or two.
8. Paul really IS dead, goddamit. Actually, even though I'm sure you're skeptical as any sane person would be, this is surprisingly convincing. Reading this page takes you on a perfect bell curve from believing this man is a nutjob (seeing what it's about) to thinking he really may be on to something (looking at the photo comparisons) and then all the way back down to nutjob (dragging up all that backwards lyrics crap). Still, read it and tell me honestly it didn't instill you with at least a little doubt. Conspiracy theories have become a fairly popular topic of conversation with my friend Australian Mark; after this perhaps you too may graduate to more advanced theories like the moonlanding being faked or the Jews secretly controlling the Bank of Japan. Well, in addition to everything else.
9. For everyone who's ever wanted to dress their own schoolgirl. Maybe it'll kill your computer every time it's loaded,like it does mine. Er, not that I've loaded it much.
10. Some idiot "phat" Asian girl blogs her impossible quest to quit being so fat. I hate people who feel the need to advertise their race as part of their identity. Also, I hate the fatties. At school I fart with impunity as long as there's a fat kid around I can blame it on. Hey, it's his fault for eating so much. Ain't that right, Fatty?
Well kids, wasn't that great? Hey, two entries in as many days, so a link entry is good enough, y'ask me. Now get off my damn porch before I shoot you, damn noisy kids. | message board
So, this weekend me and some of my fellow dumb American friends were forced at gunpoint kindly invited to watch a
rugby game on TV between the New Zealand All Blacks and the Canada...actually, I don't know the Canadian team name, so I'm just
going to assume it's "Maple Leafs" and probably be right. Now I, being a nerd of course, know absolutely nothing of sports. I don't
even really know how most American, and by American I mean normal, sports are played; let alone some crazy third-world game
like rugby. Hell, even now when I turn on the TV and there's a basketball game on or something I scream and think I'm watching
some kind of race riot. And now my friends were expecting me
to come watch a rugby game between the people that begat Jango Fett, and Canadians, which are just
like us Americans except slower and without the mastery of fire? On the other hand, there would be pizza and beer there.
Also I figure that any time there's a chance to discover one more thing Canadians are bad at, well that's one more victory for us proud
Americans that we can neatly line up right next to our infallible voting technology, untarnished war record, and
incorruptible toy doll industry.
Anyhoo, my approach to taking in the cultural experience that is rugby was the same approach I take to gory scenes in horror movies: take off my glasses and allow my resulting blindless to let me believe I'm watching something else. This actually worked pretty well with rugby. Even if I just squinted, I could at least pretend I was just watching soccer, except all the players were really bad about upholding that no-hands rule. To be fair, some of my friends did try to explain the game to me, but with me being an incorrigible moron and all it was a nigh-impossible task comparable to teaching John Mayer not to suck. As far as I could tell the object of the game seemed to involve carrying some sort of oblongish "ball" to a predesignated end of the "field" in an effort to score "points"; let me know if I am going too fast for you. Some of the finer points of the sport seem to include wearing really tight black spandex shirts and touching the other players as much as possible, which of course sounds very appealing to the likes of me and Terry McMahon.
My favorite part of the game, however, took place before the game actually started. The New Zealand team lined up and performed an impressive, honestly somewhat intimidating Maori dance that got the crowd hugely riled up. Then the camera cut over to the Canadian team, most of whom were just kinda standing there in a line seemingly trying very hard to remember how not to fall over while less medicated members ran around in the background preoccupied with thoughts like trying to catch rainbows and butterflies and gaining passage to the secret underground gnome world. Eventually the Canadian team was rounded up by their handlers and the game began, but not before my friends informed me that this particular matchup was acknowledged by pretty much everyone, including the Canadian team, as a mere formality to a New Zealand victory. My Canadian friend Mark remarked that if it were New Zealand vs. Canada in ice hockey, then well, it'd be a different story altogether. Which is totally correct, of course; but really, freezing over fields and putting everyone on skates is pretty much the Canadian solution to EVERYTHING.
Anyway, by the end of the night, like the twin prongs of the Spear of Predictability, I was drunk off like one beer and the Canadian team was murdered something like 70 to 6. Don't feel bad for them however, for I'm sure their spirits were lifted afterwards by such pick-me-ups as balloon animals, ice cream, and errant pieces of shiny foil. Plus, they probably got to ride an airplane home afterwards, which was fun even for the kind of scared players because it was explained to them that an aeroplane is basically just like a big choo-choo train with wings. And maybe if they behaved really well, maybe some of them were allowed in the cockpit to sit on the pilot's lap and scream "Coming in for a landiiiing!! CHOO CHOO!!!!". Keep on trucking, you special little guys! | message board
Goddamn it. Things have just been working against my updating this journal lately. Never mind my computer troubles, never mind my crippling preoccupation with getting drunk and beating Korean whores; I'm simply having one of those seemingly bimonthly bouts of writer's block. Several times this week I've sat down to write an entry, sometimes even finishing one, only to say to myself, "Oh wait, this is horrible and uninteresting" and just deleting it in frustration. Which, okay, is not to say that most of my entries are not horrible and uninteresting, but there's some levels of separation here. Or maybe what I'm interpreting as writer's block is actually just sporadic fits of actually having standards. Either way, god damn it, I have an office day today, meaning eight hours of nothing to do but sit in front of this computer, so Jesus fuck I am writing SOMETHING today whether or not it is crap.
Hmm, given the lack of anything significant happening in my life for the last few weeks, maybe a short, unorganized spattering of random thoughts seems the way to go. Hell, I know YOU have nothing else to read anyway, so let's give it a go, hmm?
Oh, and in a blatant attempt to inflate my hit count, I will now announce that today's entry shall be updated continuously throughout my entire eight-hour workday here today. Smell the ratings! Take that, Yongfook!
Did anyone else notice that the day I wrote my really bitter, frustrated generalizing rant about racism in Japan (the 8th) was the exact same day Schwarzenegger was elected to office? I fully believe that is God intervening once again with His/Her wonderful sense of humor and reminding me just which country I prefer being in these days anyway. On that topic, man, even though I knew it was going to happen, Arnold being governor was sure a whole lot funnier before Arnold actually became governor. A couple more cast members in office and we're only a few steps away from the script for Predator becoming the basis for a new Constitution. Me, I was rooting for Webster.
Yes, I know he wasn't Webster, and no, I do not care.
This week, pressed for lessons to teach students I began just teaching them idiotic street-hustling style games and was again taken aback by just how awesomely inspired I can be when my back is against the wall and I am feeling bored and sadistic. Suddenly I took it upon myself to teach these Japanese preteens who live next to rice paddies and have never even seen a pube the ways of the "streetz" which of course are nowhere NEAR where I myself grew up. "Pick a card, kid, pick a card. Three cards, pick the one that's not the joker". Of course, he'd pick a joker and I'd then show the class that, indeed, ALL the cards were jokers, and then silencing their cries of "Unfair! Unfair!" with the fact that I was teaching them the most valuable lesson of all; which is, of course, to never take your eye off the Man.
To follow up this point I introduced the next incredibly moronic yet surprisingly capitivating game, the "Eraser Catch Game", which consists of me tossing two mutilated halves of a pencil eraser a second grader gave me earlier as some sort of demented gift and saying if the player manages to catch both of them they earn their team 11 points. What do these points get them you ask? Nothing, but you'd be surprised what kids will do just to have more points than the other kids. Anyway, the first time I did this the kid actually caught them, so from then on I was forced to do obnoxious things like tossing both pieces in completely opposite directions or lightly lobbing one piece towards the student and then just winging the other completely across the room. Again came the cries of "Unfair! Unfair!", but now, valuable lesson #2 was learned; which is that the White Man, he the Devil (Current time: 10:04 AM).
A link courtesy of Lockamy over at the Message Board: Anime Sucks. I haven't read much of this yet, but it looks to be right up my alley. And therefore, yours.
As I type this literally half my coworkers are at the window staring at the apparently super-speedy rice-harvesting machine doin' its thing on the paddy 5 stories down and one block away. This machine is, reportedly, amazing, because in half an hour it is doing all the work that used to take my coworkers an entire week by hand in their childhoods. See, this is definitely one of those cultural experiences that I look at for 2 minutes, give a patronizing "sugoi!" as if I have any frame of reference whatsoever, and then go back to sitting in front of the computer for another hour (11:26 AM).
I just had lunch at a restaurant that serves "Bukkake Udon". M'heh. Heh. A HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAOOOOH MERCY. Man, I'm eating there every chance I get. (1:10 PM)
Well, it's 30 minutes before quittin' time, and when I go I will be leaving with five mushroom rice balls, a giant apple, some cheese/bacon/egg bread, and a great big decorative souvenier box of "Sweet Shrimp Pies", which is proclaimed by its packaging in English to be "common currency in the world." Having visited only a relatively small portion of the world in my lifetime, I'm just going to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one, and assume that in Finland or someplace similarly backwards one can pay for one's legal fees with a couple dozen boxes of shrimp pies.
Speaking of said pies, I'm eating one right now, and they are proving quite the enigma as they are neither pies nor taste anything of shrimp (though they are quite sweet). Rather they are flaky biscuit/cracker hybrids that taste not unlike a common brand of cookies easily purchased here. Now, my coworkers picked me up these 'pies' as a gift on a recent trip, and I am very grateful for the gesture, but this just furthers my suspicion that every "regional treat" in Japan tastes the exact same. Purchasing gifts for coworkers when travelling is quite the institution in Japan; generally the protocol is that if you travel any farther from your door than the distance an epileptic seizure would carry you then you MUST pick up boxes of the speciality treat of that region to share with your coworkers. One time, I had to go to Tokyo for a meeting, which is an HOUR from here, and my supervisor took me aside to explain that it was imperative that I pick up boxes of gift-foods for the office. Anyway, this whole forced gift-giving thing puts a bad taste in my mouth. Hilarious pun intended (3:41 PM).
Well okay, it's now ten minutes before quittin' time, which seems like a good and sane time to end this little experiment. I actually didn't update this as much as I wanted to, not that, if my web statistics are accurate, any of you noticed. Regardless, I'd say this buys me out of the next few days' worth of updates, wouldn't you say? | message board
So I've taken up napping at work. And I don't just mean sissy nodding off at my desk while still looking like I'm trying to do work. I mean trucking off to an entirely different room, curling up in a ball, and nodding off for an hour or so, waking up just in time for my next class (or, in some cases, being woken up by sympathetic coworkers). It started off a couple weeks ago as a practice suggested by a teacher to help stymie my ever-nagging cold, but since then, it's proven quite addictive, seeing as I have pretty much nothing productive to be doing during free periods anyway. Of course, it helps that most Japanese elementary schools come equipped with tatami rooms for no reason I've been able to discern as yet. For the moment, however, I'm going to assume they are in fact made for the purpose of employees sneaking in quick naps, just so I can claim that my sleeping on the job is in fact part of my cultural study. Hell, some of them even come equipped with blankets and pillows, so I'm not just totally making this shit up. Even still, I believe this now brings me to an entirely new level of Disgrace to my Country and Profession. | message board
Some of my actual mail is ending up in my junk mail folder a fair amount lately for some reason, causing me to delete a lot of it without ever seeing it. So if you've written me and didn't get a response that's probably why. Well, that, or I just hate you.
On Friday I invoked the Hall Threat again, but thankfully was not forced to follow through on it since the girl immediately started behaving. See, I'm fair guy.
And there is no real reason for this update other than for the sake of making one so I don't have to make one for another week. Oh, also to show you this. Wrong country, but still some pretty damn funny misuse of English as well as that general vibe of the bizarre that I like to go for. The banana peel and fire ones are my personal favorites. | message board
I sent a first grader out in the hall today. We were playing 'Color Basket,' a game I've mentioned before, for which I needed to assign everyone a color. First kid I go to, I point and him and say, "You're 'red,' okay? Say 'red'!" and he just puts on this obnoxious grin and goes "Why?" in a very clearly disrespectful voice. I tried several more times and got the same response, so eventually I was just like, "You know kid, if you just don't want to play the game, that's cool, you can just go sit in the hall like your homeroom teacher threatened earlier" (which she did). I even half-playfully picked him up and started carrying him towards the door, and he starts flipping out and going, "I want to play! I want to play!" So, still being very nice and using my 'patient' voice, again I go, "Okay, then, if you want to play, you're 'red,' all right? Now just say 'red'." In response he just aped my words doing a very obnoxious impression, so I was like, Fuck This. I picked him up again, carried him to the hall, sat him down facing the wall, and said in a stern voice, "Say NOTHING" and shut the door. Then I joined in the game in his place, just to ensure that the game would be even MORE fun; or at least sound like it as heard through the door. Periodically we would hear a feeble thumping sound coming from the other side of the door, but that was all we heard of him until the homeroom teacher eventually let him back in, bawling his eyes out. She tried to make him apologize, but he wouldn't say a word. In the end, since he seemed to have learned his lesson regardless, I just let him play. For the remaining ten seconds before the bell rang, that is. Heh.
Now, some of you out there probably think I was too mean; whereas some of you, mostly longtime readers I'm guessing, are probably pumping your fists and mentally yelling like trained parrots, "Don't fuck with Chow-Sensei!" Well, you are BOTH wrong in your assessments. Personally, I feel I handled this situation exactly as I should have. It was the end of the day, for which I'd been teaching only first and second graders, and honestly doing my very best to keep them entertained despite my nagging strain of Mongolian flu. I was in no mood to put up with shit like that kid was giving me, nor should I have to. Because, and this is something that's been bugging me for quite a while, a lot of kids in Japan think they can just walk all over foreigners simply because they are foreigners. And I for one am through with perpetuating that mindset.
Now, people who really know me know that I am perhaps one of the least PC people in the world. I think almost all forms of political correctness are for namby-pamby whiney twats who are all too eager to believe that the rug has been unfairly yanked out from under their feet by the deep-rooted evil in society rather than simply accept the possibly that they maybe they are just great big fucking morons. That being said, there are things I see in this country that absolutely blow my fucking mind. I watch TV here and sooner or later I am guaranteed to point at the screen and scream insanely to no one in particular, "That black man is dancing around like a monkey and having bananas thrown at him in this commercial; WHAT THE FUCK". I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put this: Japan is perhaps one of the most casually racist countries in the world. It's not really a particularly vindictive prejudice, it's more like a subconscious cultural inclination to believe that foreigners just plain do not have to be treated the same as Japanese, simply because they are not Japanese. Now, a friend told me, you're treading on thin ice when you generalize an entire society, so for the benefit of anyone without a fully functioning mind, I now feel obliged to mention that I do NOT feel EVERY SINGLE Japanese person I know is some horrible racist. In fact, most of the ones I know personally are really quite nice. However, after my cumulative two years+ in this country, I cannot see how anyone could not think Japan has got some serious problems in its general attitude towards foreigners.
Related anecdote: One day, a group of fourth-grade girls spent the better part of 40 minutes, begging, PLEADING me to spend my lunch break playing with them. Eventually I conceded and we went to play cards. In addition to the usual laughing at everything I say and do, because I'm a foreigner and thus me thinking I'm people is forever humorous, they also took to slapping my bare forearms as hard as they could for no reason or just randomly plucking cards from my hands. As usual I took this in stride, so I just said, "Should you be treating your teacher that way?" And almost immediately the laughing response I got was, "Haha, don't be silly! You can't really be a teacher, Chow-Sensei! You're a foreigner!" And this is pretty much what I deal with every day of my life on this job.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure if you put a Japanese guy teaching Japanese in an American elementary school, there would be plenty of kids who would come up to him and be like, "Ching chong ching chong" and think it was the funniest things in the world. Hell, I probably even would've been one of them, despite the irony. The difference here though is, if their parents or in fact any adult were there as well, they'd probably slap them in the back of the head and for crissake tell them to shut the hell up. In this country, or at least from what I've seen every day of my life here, the adults are the ones probably laughing the hardest. No one reigns in their kids here, they think "oh, they're just being children" and takes no measures to correct behavior. Little kids will approach a JET and ask why his/her nose is so big or something, and the adult will often do nothing. Other than laugh as well, and continuing to think no discipline is necessary.
See, at least when I went to junior high, and kids would giggle whenever saying 'good morning' to me or something, I could understand why. When people are at that age, there's any number of things that could be causing behavior like that. Feelings of rebellion, shyness because they are studying the language themselves, learning to express themselves for the first time. Little kids though, being that young, are nothing but near-fucking-EXACT reflections of their parents. So my question is, what the fuck are these irresponsible zeroes teaching their children? Nearly any other JET will tell you that many of their kids often seem programmed to perceive foreigners as something less than complete human beings. And what really makes me furious is knowing where that mindset must come from.
Anyway, it's a fine line to walk, but I've taken it upon myself to try and get through to these kids that foreigners are not just toys to be mistreated hilariously simply because they are different. At a recent JET conference, the subject of disciplining children came up, and the advice of an older JET was never to yell at a child no matter how angry you get, because "all that kid is going to remember at the end of the day is that a foreigner yelled at him." And that's totally true. I consider my prime responsibility in this job to be giving all these young impressionable minds I work with an overall positive image of foreigners; since for almost all of them I am the representative for the entire rest of the world. At the same time however, if you don't yell at that kid, you run the risk of giving him the impression that he can just walk all over foreigners as much as he wants because they'll just smile and take it. Thus, every time I make a decision like I made today, I think to myself, "Okay, I could yell at him a lot, thus causing the kid to grow up and grow an Organized Nazi Hate Group," or I could just sit here and take it, thus encouraging him to treat foreigners like shit for the rest of his life anyway." And well, since both worst-case scenarios end up with the hypothetical student becoming horribly socially maladjusted anyway, I figure I may as well go with the way that lets me yell at someone. | message board
I was standing outside the faculty bathroom today when suddenly a young boy darted out of it. Almost immediately I went in to investigate, since usually a student in the faculty bathroom must mean some kind of vandalism, which meant that I would get to dispense a beat-down if I found evidence of any. As I pushed open the stall door, I thought to myself, "Ha, wouldn't it be gross if there was runny shit smeared all over the toilet bowl and walls or something?", only to find something that, in some ways, was the exact opposite of what I was expecting.
No, what I found in that stall, you see, was anything but messy and disorderly. In fact, what I found floating before me in the toilet bowl this afternoon was one huge piece of shit so long and immaculately cylindrical that I had to take a couple of deep whiffs just to ascertain that it was not in fact an unconventionally discarded link of Polish Sausage. One end of the monstrous log reached the very bottommost part of the toilet, and from there it was almost a straight 90 degrees up to the other end, which barely breached the surface of the toilet water to form a filthy little island. Now, such a long, continuous piece of shit like that, breaking the water, that's like, one of every grown man's secret little ambitions (no, honestly. Ask one. Under torture.), but if it came out of that kid? He deserves a fucking medal, followed by an entry in the Guiness Book of World Records for being presumably the only boy in the world whose insides are filled entirely with large intestine.
Now, I know you all must be wondering at my psychological condition to be standing there in the teacher's bathroom staring at a piece of someone else's shit; but trust me, if you could have only SEEN this thing...well, mere words do absolutely no justice to the massivity of it.
Furthermore, it wasn't so much the size of it that piqued my curiosity, but also its conspicuously, shall we say, single status. That's right, there was nothing else in the bowl BUT the giant turd; no wads of toilet paper to go along with it, no impact crater in the porcelain; NOTHING. This meant that whoever had deposited this...this thing, whoever had dropped a penny quite THIS big into the ol' wishing well...well, it was safe to say, whoever the culprit was, he was now running around with either a) a criminally unwiped ass, or b) the filthiest pockets in the entire world. I mean, yes, I know, sometimes you get those super-clean 'ghost' shits that necessitate no wiping whatsoever, but come on, usually one at least checks for one of those with a test wipe or something. With this though, there was just that one huge loaf, and nothing to keep it company. And if you had the same keen deductive mind weaned on countless viewings of Batman cartoons that I do, you'd realize that something is very wrong with that picture.
Anyway, needless to say, I soon realized that I had been peering into the toilet bowl staring at someone else's giant turd for nearly thirty seconds and decided to flush the damn thing before anyone came in and saw me. I mean, as much as I'd like to take credit for that sort of thing, I don't need anyone thinking that I go around all day with an unwiped ass. I mean, I'm not some kind of weirdo. | message board
Just so you all can see what an old man I've become, I've taken the liberty of assembling my various medicines for a group photo:
Quite the little gathering, isn't it? Needless to say I felt like quite the twink today reaching into my cargo pants pocket at lunch and pulling out an entire pharmacy for all my coworkers to stare and marvel at. It's not as if they all didn't already think I'm weird enough what with being American and all but now they need to think I'm some poor hopeless invalid born without an immune system. Anyway, I thought it would be extremely captivating for me now to detail what each and every one of those medicines does. Wouldn't you agree?
Let's start with the oval-ish pills on the bottom left. According to the printout I received from the hospital, these are supposed to 'work against the runny nose, stuffed nose, and sore throat of a cold.' There's also a part of the description I can't read so I'm just going to assume I am now sterile. The vial up and to the right from that is a gargling solution for my throat, and is covered with all sorts of hilarious warnings like WARNING: DO NOT SPRAY IN EYE as if I'm ever going to be like, "Hey, this stuff works so well on my throat, maybe it will erase my myopia as well!" Also effective for a sore throat, according to the printout, are the roundish pills below that, which are also for the 'suppression of hives and other allergic effects' as well. Gosh, that's funny, I remember having a flu, not injecting myself with a cornucopia of allergies I've never had and then going mosh-pitting at a zoo. Thanks Doc!
That brings us to that white powdery substance spread in packets among all the other medicine that I now am just going to claim is heroin, because quite simply I cannot read a single word of the description for it in Japanese so for all I know it could be. Whatever it is, it is certainly one of the foulest things I have ever tasted in my life; and remember, I've had sex with all your mothers.
The bottle on the right is an over-the-counter Japanese cold medicine called 'Ruru,' that appears to do everything all of the pills the doctor gave me with the added benefit of costing twelve dollars more. I've been taking it for the past couple weeks and for a while it worked really well but I think I took so many I actually became immune to it. Thing about Japanese cold medicine, it's really strong, and when you buy a bottle of sixty-five pills you think it'll last you while but that's before you look closer and see that if you above the age of 5 seconds you need to take at least three of them every time or you may as well be eating M&Ms.
That brown bottle with the yellow label actually is not mine, but I found it in my apartment and chose to include it in the photo because upon closer inspection it is diarrhea medicine. And you know, diarrhea, LOL!! Since it is not mine yet was in my apartment this allows me to make the reasonable assumption that my JET predecessor had some pretty crazy shits going on.
Now then, that leaves us only with the big fellow on the left many of you probably know already, our good buddy Ibuprofen. That I am taking because I am hysterically xenophobic and refuse to believe any of the crazy Jap medicines listed above (with the possible exception of the anti-shits medicine; like I said it's not mine) are actually doing anything. I'm actually not terribly certain if I'm supposed to be popping these in addition to everything else but really, when you're already dosing yourself with this much shit one more hardly seems like it will make a difference.
Anyway, that brings us to the end of our little medicinal tour. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to rest up so I can be in top form to be battered around in a doped-up haze by overly energetic schoolchildren again tomorrow. | message board
Before we begin, a couple of announcements:
This webpage is currently hosted at Yahoo, but given that I have oh, 3mb of storage left I'm thinking of switching to something else. Right now I'm favoring doteasy.com, as I know several people who have their pages hosted there and seem to have no complaints. Plus, they offer 1000mb of storage as opposed to the 25 I'm currently getting for the same price, which of course translates to a lot more photos and videos on this site; which would be handy when I'm in one of those Don't-Feel-Like-Posting moods, such as right now. So, any of you savvy nerds out there have any input on it, or have any better suggestions?
Secondly, I've decided to stop putting my email address at the end of every entry because since I started doing so the amount of junk mail I get with subjects like Knock walls down with your new bigger cock has increased immeasurably. And as much as I'm tempted by such services, I really only need one of those emails for reference. Anyway, if anyone has anything to say, I'm sure you can handle clickin the "back" button and scrolling down to the bottom of the frontpage.
Along those lines, there's also the messageboard, whose posting population seems to be almost entirely composed of near-virgins who were in marching band (yours truly included). So hey, are you not a freak? Well, then you should post at my messageboard!. Because lord knows the war against lame, she does not go well.
Anyway, if I seem to have too much of an edge in this entry or seem to have lost it entirely, it is because my Mongolian flu has taken a turn for the worse, as this Saturday I woke up with entirely new symptoms placed neatly on top of the old ones. Now, coughing and runny nose, fine, but I have to draw the line at fever and not being able to stand up properly. At any rate, so great is my desperation to be cured that I actually bit the bullet and marched myself in the hospital down the street. Now, I hate doctors enough as it is, as not only are they part of a profession that is becoming more and more a field only entered because it's one of those jobs that successful kids are said to grow up to have, but because most of them are complete hacks who charge me 80 bucks for vile-tasting, ultimately ineffective 'medicine' only to say, "Whoops! That didn't work? Come pay me more money and this time I might give you something that works." How convenient.
This is getting further off the topic, but personally, I think medical science was all just made up one day because someone didn't want to just be a garbageman. Yeah, sure, my body is powered by a delicate system of "organs" that can fall prey to all sorts of microscopic "bacteria" that, rather conveniently, I can't even see. Right. And somehow, stabbing me with a long pointy needle is somehow supposed to make me all "better". Uh-huh. Tell me another one, Hippocrates.
At any rate, given me...skepticism for modern medical science, you can imagine how greatly my fears are assuaged by not only going to a doctor, but going to one and having to conduct affairs involving vocabulary I'm not likely to completely understand. It was the same sheepishness I felt when I took to get my computer fixed here before I realized I could just haphazardly add vowels to the relevant English vocabulary and communicate just fine ("Konpyuutaa need more RAMU!!"). Hospital vocabulary, as it turns out, is entirely different, as instead of easy-to-remember mangled Engrish it consists of strings of Chinese kanji characters longer than your arm. For instance, if I want to go in and complain of my burning yeast infection, I need to go up to the counter and tell them I'm seeking help for my shinkinseichittsuen. How am I supposed to remember that? To me it sounds no different from something a character in a videogame might yell when performing a 'special move'. Is this form I'm filling out detailing the the benefits of my insurance plan or am I inadvertantly signing away all of my blood? How the hell should I know? Other than y'know, actually learning the language.
Despite all my worries, however, the trip went predictably uneventful enough, with my only faux pas coming when the nurse barely stopped me from sticking a therometer in my mouth that was meant to go under my armpit. I can't say much of my skepticism was invalidated however, considering I was there for over two hours only to finally see the doctor for a grand total of literally 3 minutes before I was scooted off with such a massive assortment of pills that I look like I went trick-or-treating at an old folk's home. Over the course of the next week or so I need to take one pill for my throat pain, one pill for my fever and bodyache, a powder for my runny nose, and some weird gargling tube for my throat again. Oh, and each one needs to be taken three times a day; except the gargly thing, which needs to be taken five. AND they make me drowsy, which leaves me in arguably worse position to do my job than I already was. And, after I was sufficiently loaded down with placebos, I was shooed away, billed, and told to come back if none of the antibiotic Sampler Pack seemed to work. See what I mean?
On the bright side, my health insurance seems pretty kickass as I only paid a bit more than ten bucks for this whole ordeal which means all these great pills are practically free. Lord knows how much I've paid for state-altering drugs in the past, so perhaps I shouldn't complain. Not that that's gonna stop me, you understand. | message board
Thanks to 'WhiteMonkey' via my message board for this month's banner. See, people DID actually make some for me. See mom, I AM a success!
Well, it's about time I tell you about this year's Tokyo Game Show, isn't it? I was going to write a whole separate article about it, but a) I didn't want to break my streak of not writing any non-journal material, and b) it would be just as effective to use the exact same text from the 2002 Show and just change the pictures. Also I plain didn't damn feel like it. I do hope you'll forgive me. Anyway, without further ado, I present to you
Two seconds away form being clotheslined by glaring security guards
You know, I'd like to go into a long, overwritten prelude here, but that was basically my entire last entry, so let's cut right to the meat here. I assume most of you have read the aforementioned 2002 article and thus know that the Tokyo Game Show is a giant showcase for all the videogames that shall soon be available to purchase and discuss snippily on internet message boards by loser teenagers. As was the case with last year, my purpose in attending this exhibition was not to play all the newest, coolest games, but rather, to gawk at all the weirdoes dressed up as say, a bat lady or a fucking scary little girl. But to be honest, this year just wasn't as memorable. Maybe it was just my imagination, but even the freaks in costumes seemed to be more, shall we say, aesthetically substandard as compared to last year's. Oh sure, the the models were as fap-tastic as ever, but they're paid to be so, so it doesn't count. So, overall, I guess you could almost call this year's show a comparative disappointment. This is to be expected of course; since I've now had the experience of seeing such weirdness first-hand twice now, naturally the second time is not going to be as sweet. And hey, nothing ever beats your first time, am I right, fellas? You know what I'm talking about!
...wait, I'm sorry. I just remembered the types of people who read my webpage. I guess you don't!
At any rate, there was one fairly significant...difference, one saving grave for this year's show that set it apart from the last. Y'see, I've often wondered, all too often, in fact, what exactly posesses an otherwise normal, psychologically healthy human being to wake up one day and think to his or herself, Gosh, y'know, I really think I should dress up like a Final Fantasy character." It is truly a question for the ages. Well, this year, I got a small glimpse into that world. This year, I got one small step closer to understanding what makes a "cosplayer's" head tick. For you see, last year, I only walked among the costumed freaks. The difference this year, then, was that I actually had one of them along with me. This year, we had our friend Michelle come along DRESSED UP AS TOMB RAIDER.
Perverts in back: "Look! A cosplayer! And she's white! These pictures shall be extra masturbatable!"
Now, I should explain here that Michelle is a very normal, very sane, very nice girl. That being said, I was quite surprised at how little goading it took for her to show up at this giant public event in a tank top and short-shorts with a pair of plastic BB guns taped to her legs (and yes, that would be why we had the guns as described in my last entry, and incidentally, they almost got us kicked out of Costco). Granted, she already had the hair for it, and the relative simplicity and normalcy of the getup is probably enough to make the really hardcore costume freaks flip up their fluorescent hair in disgust. Still, you wouldn't know it by just how popular a girl Michelle became at this show. Probably the most hilarious part was that it started off so slowly. For a while I didn't even think Michelle would be noticed among all the people toting giant cardboard swords or clad completely in butchered red vinyl. But then, as even the greatest flood can start with the tiniest trickle, one shy Japanese guy shuffled up to ask for a picture, and with that, the flood gates were opened. I guess once it became apparent that she was willing to pose for photos it no longer became as scary to approach this Western woman bearing guns that could very well be real if the stereotypes are true. Eventually it got the point where we actually had to leave her behind to deal with her 'patrons' while the rest of us explored the rest of the show. When we saw her again about an hour later, she had in her pockets no less than a half-dozen business cards that were practically dripping with slime and an amused yet exhausted look on her face. A little later, her fiance Mark told me that by the end, she even had her own series of poses worked out -- Guns up! Guns front! Guns right! Guns left! Blue Steel! -- just like all the other semi-professional costumed oddballs, all of whom seem to pose like cats even if they are dressed nothing like one. The funniest part was that at the beginning of the show, she refused to let any of us take pictures of her and seemed ready to use those BB guns if we even tried. By the end, though, it was all routine as the four of us lined up in front of her and let four final flash bulbs fly. She had become one of them, if only for a few hours. And hey, if nothing else, now I can say I have a friend dressed up like Tomb Raider on some on some greasy freakshow's pervert cosplay picture site (bottom right) and for once not be lying about it.
So, through Michelle, I believe, I have come just that much closer to what makes someone decide one day to say, dress up like a giant pink bunny. But here's the really disturbing part: if by some horrible curse I end up going to the show again next year, I think I would only do so if I actually dressed up as something myself. And what's really scary is, I couldn't even explain to you why. Maybe it's the attention, the sheer spectacle, that draws me in. The thought of having so much attention focused on me for a couple hours but then being able to reclaim complete anonimity again the instant I slip off my cardboard costume and walk out the arena doors. That's part of it for most people, I guess, but I can't help but feeling that the motivation is something much less tangible than that. I guess that it just feels like the most, and oh god this is the least appropriate use of a word ever in the entire history of the English language, natural thing to do. You go to a video game convention, you dress up as a video game character. Simple as that. And the fact that I am now, to some degree, able to understand the answer to a riddle that in hindsight I never really wanted answered, well, it scares me. You see, next year...well, let's just put it this way: this year, I was just the dork humping the guy wearing the giant Japanese imp suit:
...next year, I could be IN that suit. And to know that, my friends, is to know true fear. | message board .
