Across the Pacific

2010-05-26T08:31:00.001-07:00

http://powellnykoxu.chat.ru

The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail. Get busy.

New Things

2006-05-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

There is stuff going on...

First, in what is a change for me, I'm actually willing to say that I'm working on a novel.

I've tried novels before. And, invariably, I'd get between 75-100 pages into them and run flat out of gas. My characters would be two-dimensional. My plot would shrivel up like a sun-ravaged flower. Everytime, I'd realize this, get fed up, and quit.

As part of my current writing class, we have to turn in the first draft of a novel in, jeez, three weeks! I'm not sure if I'll be done by then, but at least this time I know I'll finish. The most important lesson I've picked up from this class is an idea as to the actual mechanics of writing a novel. Before, I'd always attacked the challenge like it was a short story, which was one of the main causes of my frustration. With the realization that novels are their own artistic form came a new approach, and in the relatively near future, the fruit of that approach may be edible.

No guarantees as to the taste.

I'm still working at the law firm, and there is now some possibility that the job could become permanent. There is nothing set yet, but the option has been mooted.

I'd be for that happening. In addition to getting paid more, I'd actually have benefits, which I've been told is a situation that people want to be in. The only real downside of working with lawyers is that...I'd have to work with lawyers. In my current position, I'm effectively shielded from having to deal with the attorneys. If the job became permanent, that shielding disappears. A worthwhile sacrifice.

Next, I'm running a race.

One of main goals when I came back from Japan was to keep off the weight I'd lost through running with my kids and...well, living in Japan. It's a miracle the contribution that human sized servings can make to one's health. Early days in America weren't so successful, but since January I've been running four times a week.

And now I'm running a race. I mention this here because the race is a fund-raiser for the Junvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, which is the largest private diabetes research foundation in the world. The race, Beat the Bridge, is one of their main fund raisers. I realize that if you read this, you're probably, like me, broke. But if anyone's willing to give, it's easy to do. You can donate with a credit card here.

And last, the family dog passed away.

Thirteen years ago, my dad and step-mom arrived at our home in Ballard. They had a puppy, a little ball of butter-yellow fur. I fell in love there, at that moment. I'm the one who suggested her name: Visor. I have always loved dogs greatly. I loved this dog more than all.

Visor gave us more tales than I would choose to recount here, but a few are worthwhile. All of them involved eating, because it was her favorite activity and one that often seemed to short any sense that ran through her beautiful head. Before a long car trip, she got into a neighbor's basement and ate an entire jar of Vaseline. A rather big jar. Vaseline doesn't do any damage, but it does lube up the insides, resulting in more road-side stops than we'd originally intended. She got into masses of chocolate twice, resulting at least once in a late night trip to a veterinary hospital and a pair of my pants covered in crumbly acidic dog vomit. She'd eat things even when they were still wrapped in plastic. My uncle said she was the only dog he knew who bagged her own poop.

In the end, age and cancer took over. On Monday, we put her down. We buried her on a small hill on our property and while we dug, the family's other dog and our three cats joined us. I don't know why they came. They were probably curious. But I choose to believe that they came to pay homage. Visor deserved that.

I am grateful to be in a family that understand the connection we can form with pets. Not just immediate family, but extended as well. The night we buried her, I went to visit my aunt and uncle, who live only a few hundred feet away. They've buried many animals, and we talked about that and the pain and the love that makes the pain worthwhile. Everyone knew that we'd made the right decision. They also knew how hard that decision was to make.

And still, I miss her.

The triple slap and other things

2006-05-04T22:26:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, a group of us got together for drinks. At the end of an evening, one of the girls had to go. She said goodbye and then she gave the host of the get-together a hug. She gave him the old triple slap.

Somewhere in the realm of human existence, there was a good reason for this to develop. Whatever that reason, the current meaning is utterly clear. If a girl slaps you on the back when giving you a hug, you are totally and completely friends. Guys dothe triple slap as well, but it has a different meaning. Think of the triple slap as a kind of Morris code, with each slap tapping out the words "I'm not gay." (the apostrophe is artfully worked into the first slap). Why is this important? Because men are idiots. But a guy could be married to your sister, be the father of three children, and if he doesn't do the triple slap, you've got worries. Why? Again, because we're idiots. I'm not going to defend these ideas or behaviors because, really, what would be the point.

There is other behavior similar to this. Go to any bar. Find two guys talking. I guarantee that if they're under the age of thirty, the two of them will not be facing each other but will be at an angle, like two sides of a triangle. More than likely, each of them will have a beer in one hand. The other hand will be in a pocket. I'd love to know how this evolved. All I know is that I do it automatically.

A behavior in women that I've become curious about is arm crossing. One of my co-workers and I will occasionally go and grab coffee in the doldrums of the morning and whenever we leave the building, she immediately crosses her arms. This isn't individual behavior either, as you see it regularly. A man and a woman walking, in which they clearly aren't together, and more likely than not, if they're of a certain age, her arms will be crossed. Maybe the reason for the action is in that last sentence: it sends a clear signal to all present. But if there are other reasons, I'd be curious to know them. Or maybe it's like the triangle or the triple slap. The reasons are lost in the mists of time, but the herd still demands compliance.

Team names

2006-05-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

A trivia team name from last night, because this still makes me laugh:

"I found Jesus. He was behind the sofa the entire time."

Litmus tests

2006-05-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, a coworker lent me a book. She had it on her desk, having just finished reading it. It was her second time through the novel (A Confederacy of Dunces, but John Kennedy Toole), and she was reading it again because it had an effect on her personal life. Her boyfriend loves the book, so much so in fact that he uses it as a litmus test. In her words, he won't date anyone who hasn't read it, or perhaps is willing to read it. Familiarity with the book is one of his criteria.

That struck me as odd, and I said so. I said I didn't like the idea of a litmus test. But, as I've read the book, I've harkened back to that previous conversation and it has occured to me that while very specific, this guy's test is, at a basic level, no different from any other. We don't tend to put such things into terms like litmus test or qualifications. We talk about what we like. What we're attracted to. But down deep, they're basically the same thing.

But wanting a partner that's read a specific book? I started wondering, what are my specifics? I don't think I have specific red-lines, such as having to read a book. Maybe things I don't want people to do, such as running a meth-lab out of one's basement.

And as I thought about it, I came upon one. This has been true for a while, and probably always will be: I'd love to date a woman who know the proper timing and usage of the phrase "look three, go one." That's damn hot.

Also, someone who regularly proves to me that I'm wrong. Very attractive.

How about the rest of you folks? Any specifics? Married people can play too.

At one with your inner character

2006-04-27T21:55:00.000-07:00

Today, for lack of anything better to do, I went to a reading/signing by Elizabeth Moon. Elizabeth Moon is a fantasy/science fiction author of some note. I've only read one thing by her, which was part of a novel excerpted for an anthology. In the field of speculative fiction, she's pretty well known. At least the fifteen people at the signing seemed to know who she was.

I'd never been to a reading/signing before, and I quickly learned that it helps to go to those involving authors with whom you're familiar. Moon read a piece of her newest book and opened the floor for questions, and most of those revolved around, not surprisingly, her previous books. I spent a good portion of the time listening to exchanges about plots and characters I didn't know.

However, in the middle of all this, she talked about writing perhaps her best known recent book, The Speed of Dark. The novel is notable for, among other things, having an autistic protagonist. (The one excerpt I've read of monk's was from The Speed of Dark and it featured a scene involving people fencing without masks. But I'll let that go for now. For now...) Moon said that the novel was difficult for her to write because it required her to get into the voice of an autistic, and that she continued to speak and act in certain ways that could be considered autistic for the six months following the completion of the work. This level of involvement with her characters apparently wasn't a new thing for her. She also said that during the writing of a fantasy novel set in a poor village, she put on 35 pounds because the village was full of hungry people and she "was eating for everyone who lived there".

I found myself (oh, there you are, self) fascinated, and honestly, a little jealous. I've had those moments that I think most authors love, when a character spontaneously does something in a story and the action is both interesting and honest. But nothing at that level. And, honestly, I'm not sure if it's something I want to shoot for. I like my characters. I want them to live. But I'd rather them live on the page than in me. One of the best parts about writing is the ability to play God, and that seems hard to do when you're no longer the Almighty, but one of her subjects.

Things you should know...

2006-04-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

...well, you probably know.

If you click this link, you will find the President's latest poll results. Not surprisingly, they're not good. The meager 32% of Americans who approve of Bush's performance is a personal low for this President, though I'm willing to bet he can push them lower if he tries. Of those remaining, 60% disapproved of Bush's performance while 8% had no opinion.

I have a bone to pick with this poll. Not with the 38% who still approve, because really, if you still approve at this point, is there any reason to spend time arguing? No, my concern is with the 8% of those interview who had no opinion.

How can you have no opinion about how the President is doing?

I mean, come on. Really. No opinion about the President's job performance? Are there really 24 million people in this country who don't care one way or the other about how the President is doing? Even if you go as far as you can within the estimated 3% margin of error, you still get 15 million people, which is 15 million too many.

In college, my debate partner and I ran a case calling for mandatory voting in the U.S.

Yes, I was and am a geek.

Anyway, our argument was as follows: voting should be seen as a responsibility, much like paying taxes. If you don't pay taxes, people suffer through cuts in services and poorer infrastructure. Similarly, if you don't vote, people suffer by having a democracy that loses some of its legitimacy. There are many arguments in opposition, but the one I wish to mention here stated that there are a lot of dumb people out there who really shouldn't vote. Not forcing the stupid or the ignorant to vote keeps at least some of them away from the ballot box.

During debate, we would counter this by claiming that the opposition were a bunch of elitists. Really though, they had a point. I'll tell you right now, if someone can't come up with an opinion on President Bush, I'd rather they not vote. They might do a good job. They also might try to bring the Bull Moose Party into power.

Actually, that might not be such a bad thing.

-------------------------------------------------

For the guys out there, here's a great word to try with the ladies: pulchritude. Honestly, I have no idea how you're supposed to use it, but I'm sure you'll come up with something.

General Nincompopery

2006-04-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

Through a college friend of mine who now lives in Seattle, I've gotten into the trivia night at a local pizza joint. Every Monday, for a couple of hours over a couple of beers, a group of us get together and compete against the massive number of nerds that live in this city. As most of you know, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to trivia. Wait, let me rephrase that. I am a geek, and trivia is but one way in which my geekdom is manifest.

I love Mondays.

Generally, one of the rounds is Current Events. In order to prepare, I regularly spend part of Monday reading CNN, the New York Times, and just about any other news source I get my hands on. It's either that or work, which doesn't make for a difficult choice. Things I learned today included:

-Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are possibly considering giving birth to their child in Namibia.
-1916 was a major year in the Irish independence movement
-Today was Patriot's Day, a holiday celebrated in only a few states, in rememberance of the Battle of Lexington and Concord
-The largest Easter celebration in the U.S. was at the Georgia Dome.
-Other stuff.

That Pitt/Jolie fact is A) not really a fact and B) useless, which means I will remember it for the rest of my life, long after I've forgotten my own name or how not to wet myself.

Anyway, number of current event questions today? Zero. Questions I did get? What Greenpeace ship did French intelligence agents blow up in the 1980s?

The Rainbow Warrior. I know that only because of the comic Bloom County. Believe it or not, this is the second nautically based question I've been able to answer thanks to Bloom County, the second being on which boat were compromising pictures taken that scuttled Gary Hart's presidential bid. (The Monkey Business).

CNN. Useless. Bloom County. Funnier, and coming up roses.

New Look

2006-04-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

Went for a change, mostly because I've really gotten to hate how the comments are set up, and this was the best (read easiest) way I could figure out to get them to reset. Any problems, let me know.

Easter

2006-04-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I really celebrated Easter. The holiday never appeared in Japan, as it isn't commercial enough (yet) to have made it over the lake. Frankly, it was always easy to forget. Holidays don't exist in vacuums. Well, I guess technically, nothing exists in a true vacuum, and holidays are no exception to that rule, so there you go.

If a rule doesn't have an exception, is it proved? Does that make any sense?

Anyway, without others around, the holiday didn't mean much. Even without others, it didn't mean much on a personal level. I am Christian now, was Christian in Japan, but still, it was just a day. No different than any other.

And, maybe it shouldn't be a day different from any other. The act it celebrates is a continuing event, one that happens every moment of every hour of every breath of every life. Still, it is good to have one day to renew our focus. Like Christmas and giving, or the Fourth of July and the importance of gun powder.

I've been going to church more recently. For the first time in my adult life, I've found a church that really suits me, that really fits. It is large, and offers a degree of anonymity. I'm not entirely sure yet why that's important to me, but I prefer that facelessness. Perhaps something to do with the ability to be within oneself and not feel the focus or pressure of those around. It feels good to go. There is peace there, a peace that is always on offer but again, it's good to have that one moment each week during which theavailability of that peace is brought back to one's attention. Easter reminded me of the sacrifice that made that peace possible, for me. It brought tears. I've never cried in church, but I did today.

Everywhere I've lived, I've learned something. I learned about the importance of writing here in Seattle, and the importance of faith. I needed those. I might have found them elsewhere. I found them here.

I told someone yesterday I was Christian. They asked if I was hard-core. I'm not sure what that means. I won't throw bibles at you. They're expensive and if I haven't warmed up properly, I could hurt myself and really damage my pitching career. But I wouldn't be me if I wasn't Christian. In the same way that I write. Something would exist if those things weren't true, but it wouldn't be me.

I start acting old...

2006-04-09T19:22:00.000-07:00

When did it happen that the phrase "was like" replaced the word "said" in the American vernacular?

Really, when did that happen, because it's annoying, and I would like it to stop. I'll admit here, because I've already admitted it everywhere else, that I like to eavesdrop. Put me next to a group of people and I'll probably spend more time listening to their conversation than whatever else I should be doing. If what I should be doing is listening to the person sitting with me, then this can get me in trouble. But I can't help myself.

In all of this, I keep hearing "was like". She was like. He was like. They were like. At this point, I appreciate "they were like" because at least the conjugation is correct. Don't use "was like". Use "says". Use "said". When in Japan, I soon learned that the Japanese word for kiss is kissu. The original Japanese word had been replaced by its English equivalent. One day, out of curiousity, I asked one of my fellow teachers what the original Japanese word was. She had to think about it, then didn't seem entirely sure of her answer. I don't want this same thing to happen to the word said in twenty years time.

I will stop acting old...now.

Okay...now.

Here's another question. Why do we say "a friend of mine" when talking about something a buddy said or did? Do we need "of mine"? Isn't that assumed? I remember once in Japan...

The way it aught to be...

2006-04-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share this moment from class yesterday, as an example of what writing should be.

One of my fellow students read a scene in which her heroine sees a surley neighbor abusing an animal. The heroine waits until later that evening, then goes to rescue the animal. The instructor listened to this and felt it wasn't quite right. The heroine wouldn't wait, the instructor said. She'd run out there as soon as she could to save that animal.

Now, the easy way out of this would have been for the writer to say, "No, she'd wait." But the heroine wouldn't wait. It was obvious from the character and the character's state of mind that waiting was the last thing she'd do. So, instead of changing the character, the writer changed the scene. The neighbor didn't abuse the dog at first. He did that later, at which point the heroine intervened.

This may not seem like much, but to me it illustrates what good writing should be. Changing a fully developed character because they do something you don't like is dishonest. That character is, for all intents and purposes, a real person. I can't simply change the personalities of my friends and family if they do things I don't like. But you can change how people behave if you change their environment and stimuli. Then the actions and reactions are true to form and much more real.

Money for nothing

2006-03-30T20:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, in my writing class, we started to discuss the financials of publishing. Our instructor told us that one of previous students had come into the class eager to finish his novel so that he could get it published and have the sales start rolling in. "I need the money," she quoted him as saying.

Writing for the money.

I don't know how much money writing has cost me, but it's a lot. I spent nearly a thousand dollars attempting to get into grad school last year. Maybe more than a thousand. I just sent another $55 into the blue today, as part of applications for some writing workshops I'd like to attend this summer. Will I get in? Probably not, but that didn't stop me from sending the applications. Or the money.

Printer. Toner. Paper. Envelopes. Postage. Coffee (I write at Starbucks) Time. All of it, and even when and if I finally sell a story, it won't come close to recouping the costs. Neither will the story after that, or the one after that. And, at whatever point I actually finish a book and sell it, that money won't help either. Yesterday's class featured the news that many publishers expect you to take some or all of your advance and use it to pay for the promotional work new authors should perform. More money, out of pocket. Writing is like the lottery, in that the odds are not great, and the lottery has the decency to only charge you a dollar per throw.

This probably sounds like I'm bitching, which is good, because I am. And now I'm going to stop because I have to go to bed to get up tomorrow to go to Starbucks and write some more. Money be damned.

The Horse

2006-03-26T20:46:00.000-08:00

I got bucked last week, and, upon landing, found yet another reason why I write. At this point, it's become a Horse activity. When I do it and when I run, those two are activities that add concreteness to the rest of life. They're good for me. They require discipline for me to do. And they help me get back on the Horse.

Too often, success is portrayed as something complicated. It isn't. Success is just getting up one more time than you fall down. Nothing else.

Seahawks

2006-02-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

F***!

Ah, to hell with it.

FUCK!!!!!!!!!

I'll tell you two things that kill me about that game, other than the fact we lost. One was how we lost. It wouldn't have been so bad if Pittsburgh had just blown us out of the water. Losing sucks, but losing to a clearly better team happens. But we didn't lose to a clearly better team. Pittsburgh played a good game and we didn't play the kind of game we could have, the kind of game we'd played so far through the playoffs. Pittsburgh won because they were the better team yesterday, and yesterday is all that counts. But that's a game we could have won.

Still, we didn't win. Congrats to Pittsburgh, because they got it done when they had to. A well earned, well deserved win.

The other thing that gets me, and this is more irritating, is the reaction of Seattle fans. "Aw shucks" we say. "Well, we had a good season," we tell each other, and from now on we'll spend the next twenty years talking about the great run we made in 2005-06, much like we continually talk about the Mariners in '95, a season in which we DIDN'T MAKE IT TO THE WORLD SERIES, much less win it. To hell with that. Anyone who knows me knows I'm no fan of the Yankees, but I'll give them and their fans this: they don't talk about seasons in which they "played well" or "did their best". They talk about seasons in which they won championships, and all the rest don't matter. Remembering seasons in which you played hard and made the playoffs but didn't win the championship is like remembering a romantic night you spent with your cousin: nothing good should come out of the memory other than a promise never to do the same thing again.

Now I'm going to go be grumpy.

2006-02-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I spent the day at a temp assignment making copies and praying to the Almighty for a swift and painless death. Or a slow and painful death. Either would have been fine. God, in his strange and incomprehensible wisdom, didn't see fit to grant my simple request, but he did reward me for my hubris ("You'll die when I'm damn well good and ready to kill you") by guiding my hand and helping me spill toner all over the copier.

Which broke the machine for most of the rest of the day. So I guess there was some justice.

At the time though, an idea hit me. I'm not really sure what the source of urban legends are, but I think I've got a good idea for a new one. If you've never seen copier toner, it is a dark, fine powder that, and trust me when I say this, gets into and onto everything. It looks very much like coal dust and that's from where this particular inspiration came. I think a good urban legend would be that people who are employed in jobs that require heavy copier use suffer higher incidences of black lung and other breathing conditions than miners. It can join the others job stories out there, such as flight attendants and pilots have higher cancer rates due to exposure to cosmic radiation (possibly true) and science fiction writers frequently keeling over, exhausted from the sexual demands of their attractive female readers (unfortunately, tragically, untrue).

That's the rumor. Spread it whenever you get a chance and if anyone asks you about your sources, start coughing uncontrollably until they get embarrassed and stop asking stupid questions. If you could cause some black dust to come out during the fit, so much the better.

New word of the day: estoppel. An estoppel prevents someone from denying the truth of a particular fact. You can find examples if you click on the link. My favorite part of the word is contained at the bottom of the linked definition. There, it says that not only is estoppel, is it just means "stop", but that "does not appear to originate in any known language. Our research indicates it started either as a legal fraternity's drunken prank or was the result of an unknown Judge's severe speech impediment. "

Wedded bliss

2006-01-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year.

I spent New Years up in Calgary, at the wedding of my friends Ryan and Kathy. It was a pleasure to see those two crazy kids getting married. I haven't seen many other couples I would consider more right for each other.

Of course, time in Calgary meant learning more about those to the North. I was the only American there, a fact that came up at the reception and led to a fairly verbal response (a roar? murmuring? muttering? I'm not sure what to call it, but it was loud). Roar aside, the families and the guests were exceptionally friendly and by the end I hated to leave.

The wedding also had something I'd never seen before. Apparently, it is tradition that at the reception, when one guest starting ringing their glass (with silverware, I suppose), the rest join in, and when the sound becomes loud enough the bride and groom kiss. I'd never seen this before and from looking it up on the Internet, I think it's something that is mostly true north of the border. At this reception, instead of the ringing of glasses, Ryan and Kathy wrote questions about themselves. Guests could come up to the MC's lectern, read out a question, and if the guest or anyone at their table could answer it, R&K kissed. It quickly dissolved into if anyone in the room could answer it, and then went further into no one answering and them just kissing (at their own wedding, disgusting, I know).

Still, my question is, has anyone seen this in America? On the websites that mentioned this, there were some Americans who gave their views on the tradition, but they were all from very close to the border. The rest of the respondents were Canadian. So, anyone? I'm curious.

Brainstorm

2005-12-21T14:27:00.000-08:00

I just figured out how to describe what I do:

If you took a thousand of me, and put me at a thousand typewriters, in a thousand years, I'd randomly bang out Shakespeare. Or Horton Hears a Ho.

A thousand of me. Who could imagine that much fun!

I am going to bed.

2005-12-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

I am actually. It isn't nine yet, but I'm wiped.

I'm in the middle of getting back up to speed on what it means to work. Yes, dear readers, I'm working again, though it pains me to say so. I take great umbrage at that fact (it's left me in a dudgeon, you might say), but what can I do? For some reason, the landlord still wants the rent and the utilities want me to pay for my heat and water.

And food. Foods good too.

At present, I'm working at a local law firm, doing data entry for Accounts Payable. I'd heard of Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, but I never really knew what they did, as opposed to now, when I don't really know what they do. Whatever it is though, it involves sheets of paper and small numbers that make my eyes water. I'll be honest that this job is good for two reasons. One, it provides a paycheck. Two, it reminds, very powerfully, of why I'd rather have future paychecks come from writing.

Now, finally, off to bed.

Catharsis

2005-12-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

We've got one more session in my writing class before it breaks for the term. Since we're getting down to the end, last Wednesday, we filled out evaluations forms (Question: Does this class apply to your major? Uhm...sure, why not.) Our instructor left the room while we completed the evaluations. When she returned, she said that while waiting to read the evaluations were fine, she was open to hearing anything we had to say about the class.

Open to what we had to say? Floodgates, people. Floodgates. The mouths opened wide. The complaints started coming. It's been clear for a while that there are some dissatisfied customers.

The complaints ran the gamut, but in general, they focused around one area. As I've mentioned before, this class is the second in a series. A little over half the people in this class took the first one. Their complaint was that the current class had been billed as an advanced course, yet a lot of what we've learned is a repeat of previous material. If we were going to cover this stuff, they said, at least we could have done it in more depth. Not a complaint for me, as I've picked up some new things, but I understand the frustration.

Our instructor had two responses. The first was that we're covering different things next term, items which are probably new. However, it was her second response which, to my mind, was much more interesting. She said that for many of these things, there isn't a lot of depth. Take characters for example. Characters can and should be deep, but for the purposes of most writers, the theory behind the creation of characters simply isn't that deep. Admittedly, I'm still a neophyte to the whole academic writing thing, but that made a lot of sense to me. When you learn about plot and character and theme and all the other things that should go into a good novel, there are important things there. But, at least for most of us, these topics don't go that deep.

What happens when you delve into them is that you reach the boundary between craft and art. Craft is the construction. Craft is the tools. Craft is important. It's vital. But what separates a workman-like book from a great book isn't craft. They can both be well crafted. The differentiation is art. Good authors and great authors both should know craft. Dan Brown knows craft (and if you're looking for a way to drive authors insane, mentioning his name is a good one).
The problem is, it's highly questionable whether you can teach art. You can learn art. The very fact that writers improve, I would argue, demonstrates not only an improvement in craft but an improvement in their artistic abilities. But for those people who are hoping for more depth in the topics we discuss in class, the instructor I think would say that they're going to rapidly come up against a barrier that no teacher can take them across.

This class has been good for writing. It's also been great for learning about the teaching of writing.

Why I haven't gone far in life.

2005-12-02T06:58:00.000-08:00

There is a commercial on TV at the moment, for a Playstation2 game, I think. It features a young guy looking up into a tree at his stuck cat. A pair of robots stand next to him. They cut down the tree with their lasers, catch the cat, and give it to the guy. The tree falls on his car.

And, in the background, is a rendition of the "Golden Girls" theme song. I watched that ad this morning. My reaction: "They cut the lyrics. Those aren't the full lyrics to the 'Gold Girls' theme song!"

Then I sang the entire song. To myself.

I'm feeling a lot of shame right now. All of it deserved.

I'm actually going to do this thing?

2005-11-30T23:52:00.000-08:00

It had to end sometime, but still, it wasn't with a great sense of relief or excitement that I walked into temp agencies and said yes, please help me get a job. The people I met were great and very professional. One woman even said that I have expert levels in Microsoft products. In retrospect, I should have asked for a plaque.

Job. I've got to get a job. And then keep writing. Up until this point, the writing thing had always seemed like a fun hobby. Now I'm becoming one of those people who work in the day and write at night. One of those people.

Excuse me a moment.

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Okay. I think I'm better...no, wait a minute.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!

That was a short one. I must be feeling better.

I'll admit something: I'm an idiot. I've read the biography of writer after writer who do what I'm about to start doing. I'm not different or distinct. But still, what the f***! (that's for you, mom) I'm a great writer. I'm supposed to have an agent and three books out and I'm not supposed to be getting a job. Sure, I haven't actually written a book, and I'm not actually that good, but still. I want to know who ordered this dose of reality, because it sure as hell wasn't me.

I miss Japan for many reasons. Right now, I miss it because it felt like summer camp.

-----------------

No word of the day, but we do have a video clip of the day: Jon Stewart and The Daily Show and a little something about our friends north of the border. Check out the Hosed clip. It would be funnier but for the fact that probably, for many Americans, the information contained within is actually new.

We loves ya, Canada, wherever you are.

Question of the day

2005-11-27T23:34:00.000-08:00

Is "you're interesting to talk to" just as bad as "you're a nice guy"? My guess: yes. Yes it is.

In other news...

I have always been a big fan of debate. Enjoyed the activity in high school. Loved the more structured form in college. Whether debate or discussion, the activity is almost always worthwhile.

The exception, of course, is the ersatz debate that appears on cable news channels. Jon Stewart, in a now legendary appearance on the defunct CNN "debate" show Crossfire (click here to watch the video, and believe me, it's worth it), has already pointed out how poor and harmful these so-called informed discussions can be. Here's what gets me though. As of late, I've been watching a fair amount of Law & Order and The West Wing and these shows do a far, far better job of actually examining these issues than any cable news debate show ever has. For obvious reasons, they can't usually go into depth, though The West Wing does from time to time. But in general, they tend to show both views of a contentious topic in a relatively fair-minded way that if nothing else should encourage viewers, if they're interested, to learn more.

Of course, those same viewers may then tune into a debate show, which will ruin the whole effect. But still, come on people. We're getting better examinations of the critical issues of the day on dramas? I would hope that viewers would demand better of the news. The sad thing is, I'm not sure how many people know the difference anymore between honest debate and what appears on TV. Perhaps they never did.

Good signs for the American empire

2005-11-27T11:52:00.000-08:00

It seems to be a given at this point that American schools can't teach math and science. Every year, poor children suffer severe and permanent injuries trying to do calculus on their fingers. Most American teenagers couldn't multiply or divide fractions with a flashlight, two hands, and a map. A calculator wouldn't help much either.

Still, you give a group of those same teens a bill at Dennys, and they'll divide it up in nothing flat. They won't figure in tax or add a tip, but they'll know damn well that their cup of coffee and plate of french fries doesn't add up to your deluxe burger and coke.

America. Slicing up checks since...whenever the revolutiathingy happened.

You can't go home again

2005-11-27T02:17:00.000-08:00

...or so wrote Tom Wolfe. You can, however, go to Dennys again. Why'd you want to, on the other hand, is a much more difficult question to answer.

On a whim and the memories of fried cheese and marinara (uhm, fricheara...), I and two high school friends returned to the Dennys of our youth, the site of many bouts of late night angst and poetry sessions. (My love for you is like the deep, deep sea, in that it's deep, and there are ships on it.) No angst this time, and thankfully, no poetry. No smoke either.

Maybe you can't go to Dennys again. The Dennys I remember was filled with smoke. It was choked with smoke. The story went that sometimes they'd sponge the walls and the water would run yellow with old nicotine and tar. After an hour or two, you'd wish the stories were true and that once they were done with the walls, they'd start on your lungs. But alas, no longer. Now, the young folks of Ballard have to go elsewhere for their coffee-and-cigarette-late-night-my-parents-don't-understand-me-and-everything-is-just-a-popularity-contest-add-some-more-hyphens evenings. Soon, they won't be able to get it anywhere. A ballot measure recently passed that bans smoking in, among other places, restaurants.

Smoking is bad. Smoke-free is good. Still, I feel bad for those kids. Bad philosophy deserves bad air. That's the way I grew up, which means it must be good.

----------------------------------------------

Today's words are good ones, though I can't say I've heard them used in conversation. We've got reconnoiter, which is listed on dictionary.com as obsolete French. (insert joke here, with no points given for "Isn't that redundant?" or "Don't you mean 'obsolete freedom'?") and connote, which is related to denote. To denote something is to say it directly. To connote something is to imply the meaning.

And of course

2005-11-22T00:37:00.000-08:00

Today's word, from the David Letterman show: verisimilitude

Learn it. Love it. Live it. Mispronounce it.

Welcome back to America. Go screw yourself.

2005-11-22T00:26:00.000-08:00

Issues of reverse culture shock...

Japanese escalators are wondrous beasts. Most of them are motion activated, meaning you step on and they start up. Outside of my supermarket this evening, I stepped on an unmoving escalator. It didn't start, so I got off. You can't walk up an elevator if it's not moving. That'd be like walking up...stairs.

I walked up the escalator.

Another Japanese escalator surprise: they almost always work. That was a big change from Washington, DC, where the escalators for the region's Metro are regularly out. Yes, there was nothing more exhilarating than getting off at Dupont Circle, the deepest station in the system, and finding out the escalator wasn't working. Exhilarating and, dare I say it, fun. So much fun I couldn't wipe off the f***ing smile.

Why the ***? My mom reads this blog. That's why.

-----------------------------

In other news, Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Okay, I'm 17 days late (Nov. 5 is the day in question). But it's never to late to celebrate Catholic attempts to blow up Parliament. Good times!

learned activities

2005-11-20T21:52:00.000-08:00

I loved being in Japan. Loved it. Except for the times that I really hated being there, I had an absolute blast. Many reasons of course. For today though, the reason of importance was self-learning.

I've written about this before: how, for me at least, being in Japan helped me learn a great deal about being an American. When it was illustrated to me the ways in which culture affected my understanding and my values, I not only gained greater knowledge of myself, I gained control over those facets of my personality.

I am discovering that writing, and learning about writing, does much the same thing.

In the past couple of class for my writing course, we've talked about characters. There are millions of things one can say on the topic, but the one I've found most interesting is the idea of the telling detail (the other thing I've picked up as that I really had no business applying to grad school, as I am just now learning these things, but that's for a later post). The telling detail, as best as I can understand it, is basically a description of a character or place that tells you more than just what it literally says. The example we were given was of a man who wears nice suits and drives a fancy car but whose home has dirty dishes in the sink and leaves collecting at the corners of the pool. Those details show not only how the man dresses and how he keeps his home. It also tells you about his character, and it's a lot more interesting to read than "he cared more about appearance than substance."

What's interesting about these details though, is how much they play on cultural perceptions. A man or a woman wears a suit to work everyday. If you know nothing else about them, there are cultural assumptions you will take from that description. And when you know those assumptions, you can play with them. As a writer (again, more lessons I should have known already, but I'm slow), you can mess with your audience by giving them some details that generally support one assumption, then throwing them something completely out of left field. Makes for more interesting reading, because we react when people break away from our assumptions. In a story taken from real life (with details left out), someone I know just found out that a co-worker was running a meth lab. The co-worker was in general a nice person: quiet, respectful, helpful, polite. That this person, this person of all individuals, would be running a meth lab was really upsetting. The person had set up certain assumptions through the details of their behavior and attitude, and then had completely gone against those assumptions.

It isn't always a bad thing to make an ass out of u and mption. Assumptions, at times, play valuable roles. We probably would not have made it this far as a species if we couldn't make assumptions such as, "Ogg was eaten by that saber-toothed tiger thing-a-ma-jig. Therefore, I should throw rocks at anything with large teeth." Still, it's important to be aware of them. This writing class is helping me become more aware of mine. If the class could also teach me how to write, it would be perfect.

Another good word

2005-11-16T22:32:00.000-08:00

Sophistry, from the same guy who used patois.

Patois, in regular conversation! I love it.

Read this blog...

2005-11-16T13:51:00.000-08:00

No, not this blog. You've got far better things to do then wasting time on this blog.

Instead, read this blog.

Taken from today's entries, with all due credit given to Miss Snark and the snarkling who wrote the original question...

[Miss Snark]

I was wondering if gin is the drink of choice for agents? I browsed a few other agent blogs and they too mention this beverage. I associate gin with floozies and pink thingies. Most of my writing buddies do vodka or whiskey. Some of the more determined writers will do needles but I don't crochet so that doesn't work for me. What do publishers and editors prefer? I wonder if our profession is the only one where getting tipsy make our work read better?

1. You can put gin in an Evian bottle and even the worst writing conference perks up dramatically.

2. Miss Snark IS a floozy. However, she lives in NYC so she doesn't own anything other than black or white. Killer Yapp however has been known to sport a pink tam.

3. Publishers and editors drink the blood of writers and agents and hang upside down in their closets overnight. I can't believe you didn't know this.

4. Vodka and whiskey are for pansies. Real men drink Everclear

Words you should use

2005-11-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

'Druthers'

That's a word you should use. As in, "If I had my druthers,..." There are many sayings and words in English that I think should be used more often. 'Yonder' is a good one. I heard 'patois' the other day, which I really like. I actually worked ingenue into a conversation last week, of which I was quite proud (in retrospect, I didn't use it correctly). But for all the possible choices, I'd definitely have to go with druthers.

And I think it's making a comeback. Originally a late 1800s slang derived from shortening "would rather", druthers has made an appearance in such notable places as NBC's Law and Order, which if nothing else shows you that the writers of that program know good old-fashioned words when they hear them. So, all of you, whenever you can, use druthers. If I had my druthers, 'druthers' would be the new hip slang of the decade.

And, yes, I do have too much time on my hands. Next time, something interesting! Maybe!

how can you beat this

2005-11-13T17:32:00.000-08:00

New favorite organization: Northwest Anarchist Federation.

--------------------------------------

On Friday, my brother, mother, and I attended a taping of Says You, a radio program on NPR (National Public Radio). The show is a mix of puns, puzzles, and other forms of word play. It is quite amusing, and apparently fairly popular in Seattle. According to announcements made at the time of taping, we were part of the biggest live audience they'd ever had.

The shows (two were taped that evening) were hilarious, and the audience thoroughly enjoyed itself. However, in one segment where the answers were based upon Washington state city names (eg. "Yo Yo's talkative twin? Yakima), the audience got feisty. There were some boos, and dare I say it, even a hiss or two.

Seattleites (or Seattlite. I've seen arguments for both) are a pretty worldly bunch. The city is increasingly made up of individuals from all over the country and the world, to the point where people who were actually born in Seattle are a bit of a novelty (I'm not kidding. Some people are surprised.) However, we can still be pretty provincial about certain things, and one of those is the pronunciation of the names of our neighbors. Seattle is generally spared such mangling, because the city is well known. But others aren't so lucky. Yakima will some sometimes be pronounced with a long i instead of a short one. Spokane is 'Spo-can', not 'Spo-cane'.

Puyallup is...well, Puyallup. Duh.

I'm proud of my city and its modernity (now with electricity). But we've also got a chip on our collective shoulder about certain things, and I like that too. Mispronounce names, we'll boo you. Compare us to Spokane (as one member of the show's cast did), we'll take you behind the barn and beat you with broom handles.

just a little more time is all I need.

2005-11-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

I had a great idea for a blog a couple nights ago. I had just had a really interesting session of my writing class. I got home, sat down, put my fingers to the keyboard, then ended up playing UT with Jason and Craig.

Which, as I understand it, is not what real writers do.

But, be that as it may... Writers of all stripes go about their craft in different ways, but there is absolutely a common set of problems that most writers have to struggle through at one point or another. Sometimes that one point is the beginning of their writing careers, followed by an end point, which is death. One of those problems is the perfection conundrum. You'll write the first 50 pages of whatever you're working on, then go back because it's not perfect, or while it's good, you've thought of something else you wanted to add. I find that my characters will change on me, which means I probably didn't do enough prep. Regardless, I want to go back and put the new character into the old work, which means more rewriting.

On Wednesday, we had a guest lecturer, and one of my fellow neophytes brought up this problem. The lecturer had two points. The first was an LBJ quote, "Perfection is the enemy of the good." Fine, point taken. We have to accept that good is as close as we're going to get. But following that, the lecturer mentioned something else. It was his opinion that many writers have this problem because our writing is the one thing in our lives that seems like it should be perfectable.

I don't know about you, but I've heard many times that, "you shouldn't worry about being perfect." Regardless of the subject or the task, perfection was not something worth striving for. For most of life, this is fine, because we don't have time for perfection, either because we have to get work finished, or because we can't go back a day and change the mistakes we made at the work place or at home or in raising our kids (which, if this would actually possible, would mean that no child would ever grow older than six months, if that). But writing, no, writing is different. Writing doesn't prohibit us from going back and fixing mistakes. Writing doesn't have to be out the door next week. Your writing can stay with you for as long as you want to keep it. It, unlike anything else anywhere, can be perfect.

But that's the trap. An alluring one, but a trap all the same.

---------------------------------

For those interested, there is a blog written by a literary agent that is very informative and amusing. Miss snark, the literary agent. Check it out.

Go Brown

2005-10-31T19:06:00.000-08:00

There are a number of things for which my alma mater is known. American football is not one of them. I feel bad for anyone with professional hopes who gets recruited by my school. If Brown University shows up at your door, asking you to play for us, any chances of you ever making it to the NFL are pretty much kaput.

There is, however, at least one exception. Sean Morey is a Brown grad and plays for the Pittsburgh Steelers on special teams. Sean even got a mention on Monday Night Football tonight...

...when he jumped off-sides. "You'd figure a guy who went to Brown would know where the neautral zone is," said John Madden.

You'd think so, John. Apparently, you'd be wrong.

Your baby's ugly and you're an idiot

2005-10-15T17:48:00.001-07:00

Moving into my new apartment continues apace. At present, it's a mess (not surprising) and there is a large wooden bookshelf in my entry way (also not surprising, but not usual). Most of the last week has been taken up with entertaining a friend from school and putting the apartment together. There is also, of course, the writing class.

Last Wednesday was week three. The class continues to be a good one, and while the lessons we've covered so far haven't unveiled any new or revolutionary information, they have been very useful in putting certain ideas to the fore of my consciousness and in providing the vocabulary with which to discuss those ideas.

The class has also given me a chance to watch the teaching of writing, and this has proven most interesting of all. Writing, and probably any class about the creation of art, is fundamentally different from your average class. This is true for two reasons. First, in most other courses, the students come in with at most basic ideas about the discipline they plan to study. Not so with the arts, in which everyone has an opinion. Second, and more importantly, for most other classes, your students don't have a dog in the fight. If they learn something that disagrees with what they previously thought to be true, they'll probably accept it with a minimum of struggle. (not always true, but usually so)

Not so with art. Not so with writing.

A author's novel is often called his baby, and while the analogy is cliche at this point, I don't think there is another alternative. My novel is mine. Not just in that I created it, but that it contains me. I'm in there, either in the characters or the plot or the themes or some combination of those. This isn't some idea about history or English or math that I can surrender if someone tells me I'm wrong. Getting rid of my novel, dropping it on the reject pile, would be like chopping off my arm. Or giving away my baby.

Consequently, as we get farther and farther into the class and we learn more and more about the does and don'ts of novel writing, people in our class are coming up against situations in which the teacher is saying, or it feels like she's saying, "I'm sorry, but your baby looks like a mutant ape with a bad skin rash. And it's stupid." Our teacher isn't rude. She's direct, but not offensively so. And, she has not, and I believe would not, tell anyone that their idea or story was a bad one. But it doesn't take much to upset a nervous parent.

As a result, the class is now being taken up by "what-ifs." Your story should begin with an introduction of the central dramatic question? "Well, what if my story takes a while to get to that?" Your story should grab the reader in the first paragraph? "Well, what if my story takes some time to get started?"

And the answer to all of these questions is: well, you can do it if you write well enough. Your baby may have brown hair when what people want are blond babies, but if your baby also plays flawless classical piano, the matter of hair color will be forgotten.

These questions are nearly impossible to answer. You really have to read each person's story to know if breaking the rules happens to work in their case, and the limits of time make that difficult to do. Are there ways around this? Perhaps. But no author worth their salt is going to let someone call their baby ugly.

Grammar lessons for the profane

2005-10-13T00:50:00.000-07:00

from my apartment, and because I've had a few beers...

At what point did "shit", and in particular "the shit", become a catch-all pronoun? Sentences such as:

I'm going to hit that shit.
I've got shit to do.
You can't buy that shit.
etc.

all have meaning, even though they say absolutely nothing.

Really, what's up with that shit?

And, don't forget, you English teachers out there...

Make sure to explain to your students that the use of "shit" to describe something contains derogatory meaning, while "the shit" is meant as a compliment.

The definite article. Rocking that shit since the beginning of the English language.

Pencil stabbing morons

2005-10-01T01:18:00.000-07:00

Trust me, the contents are not nearly as bad as the title might make it sound. I just liked the ring of "Pencil Stabbing Morons."

So, there was this moron in my class who I wanted to stab with a pencil.

Let me back up. This last Wednesday was the first meeting of my new writing class. I've never taken a writing class before, and so was quite nervous. I really didn't know what to expect, but I had hopes. I was hoping for a class with at least some people my age, people I could get to know on a social level. Attractive single women with a fetish for pudgy glasses-wearing sci-fi writers would have been nice as well, but, at least on that score, I wasn't particularly confident.

The class turns out to be something other than what I'd hoped for; there is one girl who might be my age or younger, but everyone else looks to be in their 30s, 40s or older. It is a relatively large class, maybe 25 people, and many of the members seemed to already know each other; this is the 'advanced' course and several of my fellow students took the 'intro' course the year before. So, not likely to have much social mixing.

But, all and all, I think the class will be a good one. It is made up entirely of people who have novels they wish to write, and as such should provide a good structured environment for me to nurse my own novel to term, after which I can inflict it upon the world. The teacher, while I had some minor professional differences with how she handled the initial class, seemed quite competent. It's clear she's done this before and knows how she wants to the class to go. And, perhaps most importantly, there was only one person in the class who I disliked instantly. He just happened to be sitting next to me, well within pencil stabbing range (I had a pen.) Why did I dislike him? Because, like many people who are talkative in class, he had absolutely nothing of interest to say. And his voice irritated me. And I think he's a seal-clubbing Nazi.

The class meets once a week, and by next week we are supposed to have a basic outline for our novel. In my application letter, I think I said I had already written an outline. Uhm. Interesting, that.

Stupid qualified people

2005-09-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

Well, at least one thing in my near future resolved itself, and that is that I am not getting the internship. Stupid irony: when I went in for the interview, the man I interviewed with said if they got someone who was a qualified journalist and a biking nut who would work for free, they were going to go with that person. We had a good laugh at that. And then, and then, someone who actually bicycles walks in and takes the internship. Go...bicycle somewhere else, buddy. This was mine. Mine!

(Shake fist at heaven, and scene.)

So, no internship. I'm not as disappointed as the above description seems to imply, as now I can look for a job sooner then January (the internship would have run through December) and not put as much of a drain on my savings. Still, would have been fun. Win some, lose some, or fill in your preferred cliche here.

In the mean time...one of the few things I've been busy with is a science fiction/fantasy/horror critique website called Critters. Members send in stories, which are then distributed to everyone else, who write critiques. I have a story in the queue, and, as I have an exorbitant amount of free time, am working to write ten critiques this week: doing so allows one to bump their story up in the queue. Like all sites of this kind, they've got some good stuff and some bad stuff. It's a learning experience no matter what, and I think a productive use of my time.

Hoping to move this weekend, so perhaps in the near future, I'll be blogging from my new place. Pictures to follow.

2005-09-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

If you had asked me a month ago if I thought being without work for a month would make me a little stir crazy, I would have said, "No way!"

And I would have been right.

I love being unemployed. The no money thing isn't the greatest, but as I saved up a fair amount from being in Japan, I'm not actually out of money. I can't spend in the same way I once did, but as America is cheaper, that hasn't been causing major problems.

I wish I had some major update to post here, but I don't. Life continues apace without dramatic change or drift. I should be moving in the next week or so, and am consequently, for the first time in my life, in the market for furniture. I'm actually engaging in a lot of firsts right now. First apartment. First furniture. First insurance. All sorts of things that, up until this point in my apparently relatively sheltered life, I'd never had to provide before. It's kind of exciting...kind of. Renting an apartment just isn't that much of a thrill, particularly when you have as little to spend on rent as I do.

I start my class this week, and am excited about that. As I've received absolutely no further contact from the UW (University of Washington) since they informed me as to the class's location, I have no idea what to expect. Not even sure how big the class is. More to write about, I suppose.

That's it. Boring, but I don't have much else to offer right now. And I kind of like it that way.

"I want to live in America...!"

2005-09-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

I think.

I don't know how to start this post, so I'm not going to worry about snappy introductions or the like. Hopefully, those will return in time. So, here's the bullet point version of Across the Pacific.

1) Travel

For a while, at least, I'm done traveling. I've had two trips since I got back. One was to Calgary to see friends from Japan. The other was to Maine for the wedding of college folks. Both were, each in their own way, excellent.

2) Job

My official response to the question "So what are you doing now?" is, "That's an excellent question." I don't know what I'm doing now. I do have options though. The two are not doing anything for a month and then start looking for a job or I may get an internship.

The internship is a bit of a surprise. It is with a small publishing company in downtown Seattle, and I actually applied for it in July, before I left Japan. I had called up the company and spoken to someone there who had told me that the person who made the internship decisions liked to decide on interns early, say around August. So, I sent of an application...and proceeded to hear nothing. Nada. Not even a rejection letter. That, to me, meant I hadn't gotten it, so I stopped worrying.

Flash forward to two weeks ago, when I get a call. Apparently, the man in charge hadn't made the decision yet, and I was still in the running. I went down for an interview last week, which I think went fairly well. It sounded as if he had four or five other candidates for the job. The internship involves a lot of work on a local publication, Bicycle Paper, and for the job they're looking for someone who has experience with journalistic styles of writing and who are members of the bicycling community. I have read newspapers and can usually identify a bicycle two out of three times (given good lighting), but I told all that to the man I interviewed with and he still seemed optimistic. It seems like a good internship and I hope it works out.

We shall see.

3) Living.

As of now, I am mooching of my mom, which while low cost is somewhat high in guilt. My brother moved out of my mom's apartment a little over a year ago, and up until that point she'd always had folks around, it seems. Now I'm butting into her space. She doesn't mind, as its short term, but I'd like to give her her space back.

At the beginning of October, I'll be able to do that. I found a studio downtown, near the interstate. Decent size. I'd never had to find my own place before, so the experience was a new one. But, as my location options (what with no car) and the price I could afford limited things, it turned out to be not that difficult to decide. Over the span of a few days, I looked at a number of different places and found that I was basically looking at the same building over and over and over again. I eventually just went with the room that looked best, a room, ironically enough, that is being vacated by a Japanese lady.

Here's my new location.

4) Writing

Still doing it. Starting to collect the rejection letters. I feel like a real writer.

And, along with that, there is a new education component. Starting next week, I'll be taking a course with the University of Washington Educational Outreach program. The course is on Genre Fiction writing and should be very good for me. I have yet to find myself in a situation where groups of strangers sit around and tell me my stories suck. Up until this point, only family and friends have had that honor. I could use the input and the critiques. More on that, of course, as it goes.

And that wraps it up. For the most part. It is good to be back in the US, and yet at the same time I find myself yearning to return to Japan. For a variety of reasons. I know that I am supposed to be here right now. I'm pretty sure at least. It's important also to remember that when I left Japan, there was joy at the prospect of returning home. The change back has not been a particularly difficult one, but I do find myself waxing nostalgic from time to time.

懐かしい。

Only natural.

back

2005-09-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'm back in the US and doing well. A hectic well. I've been on trips to Eugene, OR and Calgary, AB so far, and am leaving tonight to attend a wedding in Maine.

I wanted to type "a friend's wedding" but both bride and groom are friends. Equal friends, I'd say. I got to know them at exactly the same time. Can I say "friends' wedding"? What particle do I use? Why is this important? Why am I still typing?

More later. Hopefully the later will make more sense.

But I wouldn't count on it.

2005-08-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

This blog began in Japan. It's not going to end there, but that's where it began, and so a final message from this...place, seems appropriate.

But I don't have the words.

To Sara and Toshimitsu, to Caleb, to Jason and Yukiko, to Cliff, to Daiki, to Don and Susan, to Abby, to Derrick and Eun-hee, to Bon, to Kelsye and to Matt and to Kio, to Andy and Dija, to Kathy and Ryan, to Steve and Fumi, to John, to Katherine.

To Sasaki, Thrasher, Okamoto, Fujita, Watanabe, Fujiwara, Taniguchi, Terada, Kobayashi.

To karaoke, bowling, curry, wine, cheese, Johnny Cash, scrabble, hookha, Outback Steakhouse, the Master, Yoshi, Diablo II, UT, Japanese class, uhm...he he, Larry, rally, Capricosa, cousin, writing, readerisms, nelsonisms, Dr. Dan, Starbucks, baseball, bluegrass, gadaberdine, sumo, and the things I've forgotten but won't forget.

To Japan.

Thanks

and best wishs.

I hope to see you all again. Soon.

Sapporo, Yamagata, and earthquakes

2005-08-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

The trip continues, a bit more eventfully then originally planned, but eventful isn't always bad.

On August 13th, I quit Sendai and headed up to Sapporo. My primary goal for seeing Sapporo was to witness the Nippon Ham Fighters in action. The company who owns the team is Nippon Ham, but I always like imagining the team as the Nippon (Japan) Ham Fighters, with a pig or other pork product striking a fearsome pose. Perhaps a pork chop fighting off some apple sauce. You know, something classy.

I had two full days in Hokkaido, and the first one was primarily taken up with my baseball adventures. The Fighters play in the Sapporo Dome, in the northern part of the city. Now, if you've followed this blog for a while, you'll be familiar with my general impression of Japanese baseball stadiums: they're uglier than...a thing...that's really, really...ugly. Really ugly.

I'm going to be a writer!

The Sapporo Dome however, well, it's not particularly beautiful but it did have a strange sense of grace to it, and an almost understated cool.

From the outside, the stadiums looks mostly like a chrome tear drop running horizontally down a window pane. It buldges slightly at one end, then tapers back towards a flat set of windows.

What most stood out in my mind though was how desolate the place seemed. For some unknown reason, Dome management had placed fences across several paths leading around the Dome, so one could really only see it close up from two sides. With so much of the outside of the dome secured from people, it made the place seem desolate. This was particularly strange when set against one of the far sides of the Dome, which was a large park. Walking along a path in-between tall grass and wildflowers in the shadow of a gigantic metal teardrop is not something I'll soon forget.

Now, where was I again?

Ah, the Sapporo Dome. So, the outside has this funky but desolate techno-look to it. The inside was not to be outdone. The Fighters' colors are gold and black, and so much of the inside of the stadium was, yes, black with gold high lights. The seats were black. The outfield walls were black. The ceiling was black. The players were...Japanese.
In the hallways as well, the ceilings were black while the walls were concrete. Now, there is one thing you must remember about black and that is, no matter how well it is lit, no matter how much light you pour on it, it is still black. It will always be black and dark and rather weird looking, if in a strangely cool way.
With all this black, fans entering the stadium through the access hallway find themselves in something that feels very much like a cave. To compound the weirdness, to actually get to the seats, fans have to walk up stairs to another level, also in black but with much higher roofs and nothing else. No concessions. No bathrooms. Just a high roof, support girders, and black. The cave had more life than the upstairs spaces.

The game itself, however, was fun. Before the game started, around 40 kids, ranging in ages from maybe 5-12, came out on the field to run the bases. The big kids handled it fine, but when the little kids started running, they invented some rather strange ways to head home. One little girl started for first, then about halfway down the line cut strait towards second. She touched second, headed towards third, and again, about halfway there, went strait home. Another little girl went to second, and then kept going, into the outfield. The mascot (which looks something like a bear, but I'm not sure) ran after her and when she saw him coming, she really took off. He finally caught up with her in center field and coaxed her back.

In comparison to this, the game was almost an after thought. Still though, it was quite enjoyable and came in at around three hours, which may be the fastest game I've ever seen in Japan. In between innings, I wandered around the stadium and even found the Shinjo Memorial Display which was interesting for two reasons. 1) it had some very nice gold colored shoes and 2) Shinjo isn't dead. He was actually playing center field while people were standing outside in the hallway, taking pictures of his memorial display. Japanese English.

After game, I hit up my second major goal in Sapporo, which was ramen. Everywhere in Japan is known for some special food, and Hokkaido's is ramen noodles. There is even a rather famous ramen noodle lane, for a lack of a better term. It is basically a hallway with many small ramen shops attached to it. In other countries, famous restaurants may be grand affairs, but in Japan it seems that every restaurant is a hole in the wall, famous or not. Probably a necessity, considering the lack of space, but its still strange to see the signatures of numerous famous people on a wall where you find yourself also expecting to see a family of touring roaches taking in the sights.

The front and back of Sapporo's Famous Ramen Yokocho District. You can see the place I ate in the back picture. I had butter corn ramen, which basically consists of noodles and corn in a broth with extra butter. Uhm. Butter.

The following day I headed to Lake Toya, which is the middle of a national park. I took a two hour train from Sapporo, then hiked four an hour to the lake itself. At the point I discovered that A) there is a bus that takes 15 minutes and 2)the lake itself is surrounded by resort hotels. But, I got in a good walk and saw some beautiful scenery on the way.

Additionally, I stumbled onto Mt. Utsu. Mt. Utsu is a volcano that has erupted several times in the last hundred years. The most recent, in 2000, was heralded by heavy earthquakes that did major damage to at least one of the towns surrounded Utsu.

A small path has been created that runs over some of the volcanic fields and part of that path includes a cement road that, in the earthquake, was warped to look like a sheet of overheated rubber. Steam vents release a steady supply of sulfurous gas, which causes the whole place to smell like overripe cheese.

Still, a fairly impressive site, especially in another part of the town where the road collapsed and water filled the sinkhole, leaving a lake with traffic light towers sticking out of it.

When will people learn that speeding always leads to the horrible apocalyptic destruction of your town?

After Utsu, I made it to Lake Toya, only to see signs everywhere for Toya Onsen. An onsen is a hot springs bath and considering that Toya sits next to or on volcanic territory, I figured Toya Onsen would be great. I looked all over for Toya Onsen and finally hit the tourist information booth, where they informed me that Toya Onsen was the name of the town. The actual onsens were in the hotel. I got a list of hotels and picked one based on the superb criteria that it was closest and I didn't want to walk anymore. I had an enjoyable bath, then negated the whole thing by putting back on my sweat drenched clothes. Still, I felt like I had done something cultural.

After my bath and some supper, I headed back to Toya (the town itself, not the lake), making sure to take the bus this time. I even arrived to see a beautiful sun set from the beach, a nice finish to my day.

I left Sapporo the next day intending to make it to Yamagata, a rural city to the west of Sendai. However, just before noon, a major earthquake hit Miyagi-ken, the area I was heading to. Thankfully, there were some injuries but no deaths. Up in Hokkaido we felt nothing, but the earthquake caused massive delays in trains. I was only able to make it as far as Hachinohe before having to give up for the night. I spent the night at a local business hotel, then headed down this morning. I've got one less day in Yamagata than I would have liked, but under the circumstance, I'm not going to complain. Much.

Tomorrow, to Yamadera.

Sendai pictures, plus some juice extras

2005-08-13T06:56:00.000-07:00

Fullcast Stadium, in Sendai. The corporate naming thing is only now starting to pick up steam in Japan, but you know how a good idea just flies. Unforunately, corporate naming is a crappy idea, but still seems to be making its way around the world. What follows are pictures of the fans and stands.

________________________________

And some folks around Cannan House, on one of my last nights there. Kathy and Abby, looking lovely as always.

Hadija and Andy. Two of, flat out, the coolest people I've ever met. We drank a lot of wine together, and I will miss them a great deal.

John, fellow baseball lover.

Katherine and Matt, holding it down for Seattle.

"Juicy extras"
or
"Ryan, don't move! Your crotch is on fire!"
or
"NOOOOOO!!!!!!"
or
"Oh! Jelly beans!"

The children listed with rapt attention while I pointed out the booger hanging from Ryan's nose.

Sendai

2005-08-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

the beautify of 2:00 in the morning is that I should be in bed but I'm not. However, as the hotel room I currently occupy is as about as wide as a postage stamp, the only thing I have do to get into bed is fall backwards out of my chair. Literally.

I am in Sendai. Tomorrow, I leave for Sapporo, but I leave having accomplished what I set out do here. Those things are 1) see Sendai and 2) see a baseball game at Fullcast Stadium Miyagi, the local pro hangout.

Saw Sendai last night and this afternoon. Not much to Sendai. Like most Japanese cities, it has either had its soul stripped out of it or never had one in the first place. Sendai does have trees. In fact, it calls itself the city of trees. But trees alone do not a personality make. Beyond the trees, Sendai is just one big collection of faceless concrete. But, that's par for the course here, so I'll forgive them.

To say something positive about Sendai, it does have Starbucks. Using the senses given at birth to all Seattle natives, I have been able to track down five Starbucks and two Tullys (another Seattle chain) within a one mile radius of the central train station. Yes, I too was appalled at the disturbing lack of franchises here. You are not alone in your grief.

The baseball game took place tonight, the Sendai Rakuten Eagles vs. the Seibu Lions. Seibu won 8-2. The game was fairly interesting and, at 3 hours and 10 minutes, a sprint in Japanese baseball terms. Fullcast Stadium is a nice little affair, with red seats and intimate sizings. I took pictures, but as I can't seem to find the cable that connects my camera to my computer, the pictures will have to wait.

Off to bend now, with Lifehouse's "You and Me" strumming away. Damn Ipod and Itunes and the ease with which I can now buy songs. I haven't had a moment's peace.

check out the song if you can. It's a good one.

grabbing the bull by the horns

2005-08-06T06:17:00.000-07:00

Cows. Cows are what stand out in my mind when I think about Delhi. I thought that last year. I find myself thinking the same thing this year. Cows. Everywhere. Cows.

I found out today why cows are everywhere in Delhi. And I do mean everywhere. They are on every street and sidewalk. Cars swing around them or stop for them as they trundle across the street wearing cow faces, which of course are either contemplative or utterly thick. Apparently, the perfusion of cows is a relatively new development, having only really become a major nuisance in the last five or six years. The reasons is Delhi's spread and the drive of local land developers to secure more property. They buy the land of farmers on the outskirts of the city and when the farmers leave, they often abandon their cows. The cows, having nothing better to do, wander around, and many of them end up in Delhi panhandling for change and trying to sell you penny trinkets for $1.50.

The city has decided to take action. It has offered a bounty of 2000 rupees for all cows captured and brought to it (I don't know what they do with them once they have them). We found that out today and now, as we drive around, I no longer think hamburger on the hoof but a couple hundred dollars of mooing goodness. Except when we drive outside the city limits. Those cows have no bounty, and as such are worthless.

Cows.

We are on our third day in Delhi. The students are off at homestay, and as such we few teachers are relatively free to run amok. Yesterday, I, my boss, and his wife (who has come along this year), went to Jaypur, a famous tourist spot about 250km away from Delhi. We got to see the Sky Castle, visit the largest sun dial in the world (so big that it tells time in two second intervals) and purchase nick-nacks at a craft store in which they insist that you can look as you like then thrust all sorts of crap into your gob. The craft store also had a large replica of the Taj Mahal. ("Only for show, not for sale" many salespeople told me). They assured me that they did not cut of the craftsmen's hands once the project was finished.

Salesman: It took our craftsmen four years to complete this.
Me: Did you cut off their hands afterwards, he he?
Salesman: No.

To be honest, the craftstore did have some nice things, and I did make some purchases. Not many though. I find most Indian crafts, which are exceptionally colorful, to be a bit gaudy for my taste. I would have liked to have told the men hawking wall portraits that I was afraid one of their multi-colored creations would cause to me go berserk and stampede through a small village. I don't think they would have laughed.

Two more days in Delhi, then on to Agra for the real Taj ("Onlyfor show, not for sale.") then back to Japan. Snarkiness level high. Enjoyment level high. Don't have the runs anymore. It's a good trip.

India

2005-08-02T23:44:00.000-07:00

Still alive, I'm not puking anymore, and I hate the sight and smell of Indian food.

On to Delhi. Yeah!

blogging in Narita

2005-07-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

I should be in India. However, it only takes one trip to India to realize that 'should' and Indian travel plans are only semantically related. One thing all of us newbies discovered last year was that Indian schedules, in particular for trains, were useful only in that they would give you an idea as to what day the train would leave, and what time it would not leave before. When it would actually leave was anyone's guess.

It seems that trains are not alone.

Over the past few days, Bombay has apparently been drenched, so drenched in fact that Bombay's airport was closed. Because the airport was closed, no plane could land or, and this is most important, leave. Consequently, the plane we were supposed to catch yesterday was never able to leave Bombay and come to Japan. Because of that, we spent last night in a hotel in Itami, near Osaka Airport. This morning, we flew to Narita in Tokyo, and will soon board a direct flight to Delhi.

This has been interesting for two reasons. One, it gives the kids an experience with Indian travel without even having to leave Japan, which I'm sure they all consider a rare treat. Second, it illustrates that planes actually do exist outside of the time that we use them. I've always thought of planes as being temporary entities. They come into existence when I board them,　and immediately dissipate back into the ether when I've left. To realize that they actually have an existence outside of me is a bit disturbing. Once again, I've been pushed a little farther away from that spot in the center of the universe that I should rightfully occupy. Why did no one think of Dan when they developed these things?

Jerks.

India

2005-07-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Off to India. Will be back August 10th. Later, all.

from Kyoto

2005-07-25T03:37:00.000-07:00

Are you telling me you don't have a G Field? Loser.

old but still beautiful

2005-07-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

About two months ago, I went to the wedding of my friend Joan. I haven't had the chance to put up photos from that. Better late than never.

Fellow Brunonians looking good. And feeling good! And drinking good! And eating...somewhat. But drinking good!

Joan and Anthony Licata. (and as much as I tried, I couldn't come up with a caption anywhere near as meaningful as the picture. They fit. It's clear: they fit.)

Me-looking good. Joan-looking much, much better.

Mighty Mike Kreidman. Some people remain friends no matter where you live. I could live on the moon and Mike would still be a great friend. Get him now, ladies. He's single AND he's sponsored by Dreamcast. How many guys can say that.

Leaving

2005-07-25T03:02:00.000-07:00

Having paid them all off and promised never to contact any of them again, some "friends" of mine and I headed out on Friday for what could be termed a goodbye party. It could be termed that, but I, not being a big fan of goodbyes, preferred to think of it as just a regular night out.

While the size and composition of the party changed, everyone who joined seemed like they had a good time. We started at the Hard Rock Cafe in Osaka, home to expensive food and even more expensive food. We followed that with some bowling, and the true highlight of the evening, karaoke. We found a karaoke place near the bowling alley that featured 歌い放題　and 飲み放題, or all you can sing and drink until 5:00 in the morning. We got to the place a little after midnight, and two hardy souls, myself and Abby, made it through to five. We walked home in what could have been either early morning on a regular day or mid-afternoon on one more overcast. (Japan has no daylights savings time, which means in the summer the sun comes up far earlier than God ever could have intended.) A good time was had by all. The day that followed on the other hand...ugh.

Pictures below. Enjoy.

Caleb, Kiyo, and John. Kiyo is at present contemplating precisely what trajectory to use to throw water into John's lap, a feat he would perform shortly after this picture was taken.

Jason, moi, and Cliff

Yukiko and Craig on the left, Jason and Abby on the right.

Ryan...
... and Kathy. They're getting married. Eeeekkk!

Steve. Preparing for take-off? That's the best I could do. Fill in your own funny caption.

There were more people present, and for those who I don't have pictures of, I apologize. Send me something and I'll put it up. Maybe even a caption. Keep your fingers crossed.

life imitating cell phones

2005-07-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

A while back, I wrote a story of the standard sci-fi variety in which everyone is connected to the Net via implants. The characters of the story were constantly connected to oceans of information. In the city in which the story took place, there was a park which provided an oasis away from this all-encompassing connectedness, a geographical position surrounded by scramblers and other devices designed to keep the Net out. In the story, the main character goes to the park and finds almost no one there. Why? No one can stand to be disconnected. It feels unnatural, so they avoid the park.

When I showed this story to Kelsye, she found that section a bit creepy.

Today, I cancelled my cell phone. I was a bit nervous going in, as I always am when I have to handle anything relatively significant in Japan. But, it went surprisingly easy and when I walked out of the shop, my cell phone service had ended. That's when I became really nervous. It felt like I had lost a hand or an ear or an eye or some other body part and even though I am still accessible by many other means, to lose this particular method is taking some time to get used to.

My character may like the park, the citadel against the intrusions of the world. I, on the other hand, wouldn't go. To be separated from the world like that? I've only lost one way in which I can communicate and even that feels...unnatural.

honky tonkin', down in... part 2!!!!!

2005-07-09T20:03:00.000-07:00

So, last night, we went to a honky tonk bar...

Country music. Country music in Japan. Does there seem to be some disconnect between those two? While Japan has its own version of country music, enka (more bridges, fewer pick-up trucks), the North American version has not made a popular entry to this side of the ocean.

Still, country music exists here, and a group of us found a prime venue for it in Kobe: the Kobe Honky Tonk. Last night was our second time there, and we had come to see the same band we saw the first time we went, a five man blue grass troupe calling themselves The Parrish.

The Honky Tonk itself is small. Between three to four meters wide and perhaps ten meters in length, the band and the audience are almost literally on top of one another. In such a narrow locale, it doesn't take much to fill the place up. Yesterday, with eleven Cannan House people, we did the trick. Two other couples and a group of drunken salariman later, the place was hopping.

And really, it was hopping. This is the amazing thing about live music: you don't even have to enjoy the music to get into it. I love blue grass, so the mood was mine from the start. But several of the Cannan House folks and, I'm willing to bet, a few of the Japanese weren't interested in the music. Still, with a crowded space and a band that knew how to pick and play, it was a wonderful atmosphere.

A lot of credit for that atmosphere has to go to the band. The Parrish are a talented group, but even that doesn't seem to encompass what they've done. When I, at least, think of blue grass, Japan does not come to mind. Whether it is fair or not, I would not expect as much out of a Japanese blue grass band. But The Parrish, well, these guys are good no matter how you look at them. Excellent instrumentalists, excellent singers, excellent performers.

A good evening with good music and while I'm sure I can experience these things in the states, there is something special about experiencing it here. Perhaps if I find a rocking enka bar in the states, I can replicate the experience, with the snow falling deep on the bridges and the sake following until the train home.

honky tonkin', down in...

2005-07-09T19:44:00.000-07:00

One of the experiences that living in Japan has afforded me is the chance to hear the baseball television announce teams for a variety of different clubs. And really, what is amazing to see is that most of these teams, no matter where they live, past experience, or the quality of their team, are crap. Just really, really bad. The Mariners, I'm sorry to say, are no exception. Veteran announcer Dave Niehaus is good. The other three...not so much.

A particular gem came about a week ago during a White Sox game. The White Sox were playing the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Washington Generals of Major League Baseball, and the White Sox announcers started discussing Travis Lee, the Devil Rays' first baseman. The play-by-play man began talking about the first time he saw Lee. Lee, a rookie at the time, had just used a loophole in the general contract to sign a big contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks. The play-by-play guy admitted that he had been skeptical of Lee, but when he saw the young player, his first thought was "The Diamondbacks got him cheap."

This story bugs me for more ideological reasons, namely the tendency for traditional scouting to ignore a player's performance and judge him primarily on appearance. But more generally, the play-by-play guy is telling this story about a player who, since he entered the league in 1998, has been a massive disappointment, and at no time does the play-by-play guy mentions this. He says multiple times that he thought the Diamondbacks had made a great signing, while on the field before him, Lee was stinking it up.

Maybe this disconnect is common in people, but if you're going to be a broadcaster, you've got to be particularly careful. There is nothing worse than having your very point disproved in front of you, except maybe continuing to jabber on inanely while its happening.

This post was originally supposed to be about a honky tonk bar. Let me start over and try again.

2005-07-06T08:04:00.000-07:00

I've been having trouble sleeping lately, trouble getting enough sleep. I lay in bed, the air conditioner humming to itself. I stare at my clock.

"12:04," it says.

"I know," I reply.

"12:05."

After a while, my responses become more vulgar. The clock doesn't seem to notice.

I can't sleep because of stress. I've got this seed that sits in my stomach all day until it is time to go to bed. As soon as I start my bedtime rituals, the seed germinates. It grows amazing quickly, awesomely fast in fact, and in no time at all I am lying in bed, in the darkness, feeling the tiny thorns of nervousness and wondering where they were but a half hour ago.

I'm nervous because I'm leaving. I'm nervous because my home, much as it has been for the last three years, is spread all across my apartment with no sense of order and with no packing materials in sight. I am nervous because soon I will I have no job. I will have no apartment. I have no educational prospects on the horizon. Every time I think of money, I realize I don't have enough of it.

I am nervous because I am going home, to a place where I spent 18 years and now know very few. I'm nervous because I've grabbed my life by the pant legs, am holding it upside down and shaking it and finding depressingly little change bouncing and clinking on the sidewalk. Or maybe there is too much change, just not the kind that pays for rent, food, a car, gas, insurance and all the other little sundries that life demands from those who traverse it.

I'm nervous because I've never had to supply the vast majority of these things before. I'm 27 and I'm an idiot.

And as I lay in bed, thinking about packing and moving and how the time I have to do these things seemed two weeks ago to be in plentiful supply but now seems disturbingly short, I think about four prints. I love Norman Rockwell. I have bought, over the years, four copies of some his work. They are the main adornment in my living room and, as such, my entire apartment. I can't remember the last time I looked at them. They are simply there.

In two months, the paintings won't be there anymore. They will be in a new there, on another largely bare apartment wall, staring out into a room covering with things that I meant to clean up but haven't yet. I will not see them because, I will be asleep. Maybe I'll dream about the career I don't have or the woman I haven't met or the money that slips through my fingers faster then water. But I'll be asleep and not cursing my clock as it blinks through the night, waiting for night to move on so that it can move on and I can move along with it.

I've been in Japan this long...

2005-07-05T06:12:00.000-07:00

August is coming and with it my last trip through Japan. Sendai, Hokkaido, Yamagata: baseball, ramen and some time in the mountains. It's going to be great.

If I can get train tickets. As I'm going to go in August, I'm basically competing with 130 million people for tickets. If that seems like a number akin to the population of Japan, well, there's a reason for that.

So, today, while in Kobe, I decided to finally go see what the damage would be. I took a train up to Shin-Kobe. My major concern: money. I didn't have much cash on me. Still, I was going to a major train station to buy tickets. There had to be a convenient cash machine there.

After much looking at a major train station, I finally found the bleeping cash machine. I stuck in my card and tried to withdraw about $600 (train tickets aren't cheap). No luck. $500 was the limit. So, I went with $500. Buzzing, whirring, and out popped a piece of paper that definitely wasn't money. Turned out my ATM card didn't work there. The machine only accepted the ATM cards of a single bank.

After looking around the major train station for the other ATMs that might possibly allow me to withdraw my money, I finally found one...in the convenience store five minutes away. Through the rain. I withdrew my money, went back to the station, and went to the ticket agent.

"I'd like to buy a ticket for the 11th of August," I said.

"Great," he said. "Come back on the 11th of July. We don't sell tickets more than a month ahead of time."

But none of this surprised me, because I've lived in Japan thissssss long...

Happy America Day!

2005-07-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

Happy America Day, everyone. I hope you all enjoyed your holiday basking in the liberty and freedom our great country provides. For anyone who is not American, I have added a link to an on-line dictionary so that you can look up the meanings of liberty and freedom for yourself.

I celebrated liberty and freedom by going to work. Not so much liberty there. Or freedom, for that matter. It's almost as if the Japanese don't know July 4th is a holiday. Ridiculous.

We are in finals week at school. I had one exam today (not America day) and one tomorrow. So, all and all, not too bad. School is winding down, which means that the stresses of school are being conveniently replaced by other stresses. Like moving. I'm finding that my final week before I leave for India is rather quickly filling up with activities with friends, which of course is great but means I need to start packing now.

And, amidst all this, I did get to celebrate the fourth. Not with fireworks, though fireworks are widely available here in Japan: you can buy them in local convenience stores. No, I and some other teachers took part in that other important aspect of July 4th: drinking! A local izakaya was even nice enough to be celebrating its one year anniversary with cheap drinks. The drinking was kept to a minimum, as the specter of work still lurked behind us. But all and all, we had a good time.

Of no relevance to the previous topic, but still interesting: any native English speaker who spends any time in Japan can tell stories about the tortured use of English here. English is everywhere, splashed on everything and every once and a while, it is even correct. Foreign words, and particularly English, are used a lot because they are considered cool. Foreign words and phrases are particularly big in advertising.

I always thought this was a feature that was peculiar to Japan, and of course, when making such a broad cultural declaration, I turned out to be completely wrong. An interesting article in today's Washington Post (you may need to register to read it) discusses the use of foreign words in American advertising, and in particular the use of French in beauty product packaging. Not surprisingly, a lot of the packaging is incorrect, and apparently often features words that are supposed to sound French but really have no meaning at all. You've got to give the Japanese credit on this point at least: the grammar may be off but 95% of the time, the words they use are real words. And this article does not address at all the uses of Chinese and Japanese kanji in tattoos and other products, kanji often chosen because they look cool and not for any thought of what they might actually mean (either that or the person tried to find the meaning but got bad info). Here's a fun site about nonsensical (or worse) tattoos.

So basically, this is one more thing that, when I've laughed at the Japanese, I've been hypocritical about. But as it would be unpatriotic to limit my freedom to laugh at others on America Day, I'm going to keep doing it.

The meaning of here

2005-07-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

-A Hat Full Of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

Bringing it back around

2005-07-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

Standard practice at our school is that every class begins and ends with a greeting or goodbye. Friday was no different. At the end of fourth period, my last class ever, I asked the students to stand. I wished them luck on their final exams.

"Goodbye, everybody," I finished.

"Goodbye, Mr. Reade," they intoned, and then, in unison, they added "Thank you for your teaching." No prompting. No warning. They did it on their own.

I'll admit it. I got a little phaklempht.

It is odd to realize that I am, for all intents and purposes done. That is to distinguish myself from actually being done. We have finals next week, followed by our standard week of random business, then our closing ceremony. I guess this job doesn't really end until I get back from India, though I don't really consider an all-expenses-paid trip to India work. For all those additional things though, classes are over, and that to mean signals that this job has come to a close.

And my first thought is, how do I remember this, and I say that because I think we do have a certain degree of control. Particularly when it comes to our decision to focus or not to focus on the minutiae of experience. When my students are surprising me with thanks, when I realize that I don't have to spend any more time lesson planning, this job becomes great. Fantastic. But I also want to remember those days when I dragged myself out of bed and the last thing, the very last thing I wanted to do that day was haul my carcass up to school and teach those snotty little bastards.

I ran this past Kelsye and she made a comment which I think is apt: remember it positively, while not forgetting anything that would help you decide whether or not you wanted to do the same job again. And doing this doesn't necessarily involve remembering the minutiae. The specifics help if you're required to make an argument as to whether or not to take a certain job again, but beyond that relatively rare occasion, general sentiment should be enough.

My general sentiment is this: I don't want to do this job again. I'm not particularly a big fan of teaching English, and particularly not at this level where it is at the foundational level. The foundational level is important. Vital, in fact. But if I'm teaching English, I would prefer to work in the polishing part of the process, not the development.

But, I do want to come back to Japan, and I want to do that because I've loved my time here. This is a great country. A fantastic country. I would very much enjoy spending more time here. Not permanently. I'm still very much an American at heart. But time abroad is always an invaluable experience, and more time in Japan would be both invaluable and fun.

The places you'll go

2005-06-28T00:29:00.000-07:00

Or come back from, as the case may be. My trip down south is over and I have returned to school, in heat so thick and oppresive you have to push through it, like dank heavy curtains. Still, the fact that this is the last week of classes makes me feel a lot better. Plus, I don't actually have to do any work. That really makes me feel better.

As to the rest of the trip...I left Fukuoka early Sunday morning and took a shinkansen to Hiroshima. While I accomplished what I'd set out to do in Fukuoka, I do wish I had spent more time there. Hiroshima, however, I've seen a couple of times before, so just dropping by for a quick baseball game didn't bother me. I arrived around 11:30 and decided to walk to the stadium. Hiroshima is a beautiful city and a joy to encounter.

The walk was an easy one, only twenty minutes, and complicated only slighty by the fact that the Pacific Ocean started falling out of the sky. It rained, and rained hard, and I could see the game being cancelled and me having to make another trip down just to see a baseball game or, worse, going home without finishing my quest. When I arrived at the stadium, people were mulling around outside and it seemed quite possible that there was going to be no game. But, complain as I might about Japanese baseball, its fans are a hardy breed. As soon as I went inside the stadium, I saw a sizeable crowd waiting and ready to go, including a fair number of fans sitting in the outfield bleachers, shielding themselves with only umbrellas.

As the stadium wasn't that crowded (which I assume is a normal state of affairs, as the Carp aren't that good), I took up cover in a seat protected from the rain by the second deck. Thankfully, the rain slackened and then ceased and the game, while a half-hour late, started. The Hiroshima Carp vs. the Chunichi Dragons. The Carp are one of the few teams in Japan that incorporate the name of the city in which they play, which I heartily endorse. And Hiroshima Municipal Stadium isn't a bad place to catch a game. It is designed along lines similar to those of Koshien Stadium, which I believe is the old stadium in Japan. The infield is all dirt and the dimensions are small. How small, I don't know, as this is the only stadium I recall being to that didn't have distance markers down the fall lines and out in centerfield. Still, quite intimate and as the game was sparsely attended, I could pretty much sit anywhere I wanted.

And I did move around a lot, because the game was just no holding my attention.

I realized a couple of things while watching this game. Firstly, my visit to Japanese stadiums and my attempts to appreicate them as baseball venues is not something I could do in the same way in the US. The reason for this is that at any US stadium, I will actually be interested in the teams involved and my feelings towards those teams will strongly affect my view. In Japan, on the other hand, I really don't care about the teams. In none of the games that I saw this weekend did it make one ounce of difference who won or lost. The only thing that was important was whether or not I enjoyed the ball park and after I had taken as much appreciation from the location as I could, everything else seemed rather pointless.

It seemed pointless because Japanese baseball is, well, just plain boring. It is amazingly slow, as I've said before. I just saw an article in Sports Illustrated for Kids (I read it for the stories) about a US game that went 19 innings and took six hours to play, with two of those hours being taken up by rain delay. The game I saw on Saturday when 4:45 to get 11 innings. Sunday's game took 3:30 to go nine. The reasons for the length are multiple. Pitchers take forever on the mound. The number of full counts is relatively high. And the game lacks most of the big plays that make baseball interesting. Not many power hitters in Japan. Lots of bunters though, which would be great if bunts were interesting. But they're not, so no help there.

Basically, this weekend brought me to the conclusion that baseball, as a stand alone sport, can not hold my interest. I'm not willing just to watch a baseball game in which I have no interest. It takes too long. What makes me a fan, then, is that it doesn't take much to hold my interest. I'll watch little league games (the kids are fun to watch). I'll watch softball game (the 40 year-old weekend warriors are fun to watch, mostly because they throw more tantrums). Minor league ball (the young up-and-comers), international ball (USA! USA!) and any American pro game you care to mention. All of these things have something that grab me. Japanese baseball has none of that, and baseball alone isn't enough.

Scary and enlightening and mostly goes more to my point that Japan needs to do something. Becuase if these teams don't act soon, they're going to lose all of their 27 year-old, glasses wearing, blog writing, Seattle-born, curry loving American fans, and then where the hell are they going to be?

Travelin' man

2005-06-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

I firmly believe it should be the goal of everyone who lives in Japan to see all of the major four islands at least one team each. And, provided that I make it up to Hokkaido this August, I will do that, though I'm a little bit embarrassed as to the amount of time I'll have spent in Kyushu. Assuming that I don't come back here before hitting the states, I'll have spent less than 24 hours. That's better than hanging around an airport during a lay over and calling that a visit, but not by much.

Still, did do what I set out to accomplish, namely, going to a baseball game. Saw the Softbank Hawks and the Nippon Ham Fighters (that's Nippon Ham...Fighters, though I prefer putting the emphasis on the other side of ham) in a 6-5 extra inning romp that went nearly five hours. Yes, you read that correctly: almost five hours. How many extra innings? Two, to be precise. Some bench player named Ide with a .216 average came up in the bottom of the 11th with the bases loaded and pushed the first pitch he saw through the right side. Sayonara finishes (as they are called in Japan) are exciting, but by then I was so bored I was happy to leave.

4 hours and 45 minutes. The only reason a game should last that long is that it goes at least 15 or it is a major slug fest. But Japanese games always seem to draw themselves out. Games in America always seem to run between 2:30 and 3:30, but I don't remember a game I've seen here that finished in under 3:00. It may explain why all the night games start at six o'clock. Sure, it may be a pain if you're coming from work, but at least you've got a shot of getting out before midnight and catching the last train home.

As to the stadium, the Hawks' Yahoo Dome wasn't that bad. I'd put it in the upper third of the stadiums I've visited, and that's primarily for the food. Wendys, KFC, and the local concessionaire was pretty good as well. The stadium itself was boring: I walked the outside hallway which was miles of monotonous brown. The only way you could tell you had arrived somewhere was through the aisle markers on the ceiling. Aside from those, the lack of landmarks was almost otherworldly. The field itself was also drab, and astroturf, but in spite of the seeming effort to take all the possible character of a building and bury it deep within its iron and concrete bowels, Yahoo Dome wasn't a bad place to see a game.

Off to Hiroshima today. I've been told that the Hiroshima Stadium is tiny. I'm looking forward to seeing it for myself.

Two steps closer

2005-06-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

I'm heading to Kyushu and Hiroshima this weekend to see two baseball games, and to knock two more stadiums off the list. I'll be in Fukuoka tonight, and Hiroshima tomorrow. I've been to Hiroshima twice before, but this will be my first time to Fukuoka, or indeed any part of Kyushu. In all liklihood, this will be my only trip to Kyushu, and it will last less than 24 hours. Not sure of that really counts as a visit to the island, but I'm going to mark it up.

Mariners Sweep Mets

2005-06-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

Hang your head in shame (you know who you are). Not only did you get swept, but you were swept by us!

Oh, wait...

I promise you good times

2005-05-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

Getting ready to head to the states this weekend for a wedding. I'm leaving on Friday, the wedding is on Saturday, then I turn around and come right on back on Sunday, touching down in Japan Monday evening. A very short trip but one that is infinitely worth it.

And not only for the wedding. I'm also getting a new computer. I've wanted a new machine for a long time. I need one so that I can save valuable seconds in word processing, and perhaps even to play a game or two, though that certainly isn't foremost on my mind (games, games, games, games). I certainly could have bought one in Japan, but it would have cost more, it would have had Japanese software, and most annoyingly, a Japanese keyboard. Japanese keyboards are basically the same as western keyboards, with the standard qwerty layout. Some of the buttons though, are different. For example, the @ button, instead of being Shift-2, is located just to the right of the P. The apostrophe is Shift-7 instead of being next to the semi-colon. These seem like small things, but when you have to go back and forth between the two systems, it can get annoying.

Anyway, I bought this laptop from a small Californian company that focuses in computers that are really good at word processing...and can play a game or two. You know, something sensible, because if Harold wasn't my middle name, sensible would be. That or super star sex machine. One of the two.

As I mentioned previously, the folks at the apartment complex held a BBQ this last weekend. I went to Costco in advance and picked up some hotdogs. Disturbingly though, I could only eat two before I got sick and tired of all the meat. I must be out of practice. To make up for lost sausage opportunities, the next day I went with Andy and Hadija to a local kaiten sushi restaurant and found hotdog sushi.

The sauces covering it are, yes, ketchup and mustard.

I know it will go strait to my extra juicy thighs, but I just can't say no!

Just for the edification of those out there not familiar with some of the particulars of sushi: one, sushi is not actually raw fish. In fact, sushi really doesn't have anything to do with raw fish, though it is a very popular feature. Sushi actually is rice and sushi vinegar, with other things then included, be those other things fish, vegetables, or a nice sausage. Kaiten sushi is a particular style of sushi restaurant in which small plates of sushi run around on a conveyor belt (you can kind of see it in the background of the second picture). Patrons sit next to the belt and when they see something they like, they reach out and take it. At the end of your meal, the waiter counts the number of plates you have in front of you and rings you up. An absolutely great way to eat sushi.

Moral Dilema

2005-05-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

After stepping off an airplane, it takes the average person about five minutes to realize that Japan is an incredibly crowded country. People live jammed together in box-like apartment complexes, sidewalks disappear under the demand for useable roads, and wide open green spaces are worth their weight in gold. Still, in our neighborhood, there is one place, relatively close, that offers a reasonable (for Japan) amount of open space, and that is the main lawn of the university. And on Saturday, a couple of us local foreigners tramped up there with a frisbee and a football in an effort to pretend to be athletic.

We arrived at the university, went to the lawn, and immediately found several signs telling us that athletics, and frisbee in particular, are banned on the lawn. This posed the moral dilema of the day.

Japan is not only a cramped land. It is also a complicated land. Japanese culture is guided by rules and standards that are intricate at best and down right enraging at worst. I'd be willing to bet that I make at least one mistake a day, and that's probably being conservative. However, most Japanese don't get angry if foreigners make mistakes, because they don't expect foreigners to understand Japan. A common belief is that Japan is so complicated and unique that only native-born Japanese can understand its ways.

Now, if you live in Japan, the assumption that you'll never understand Japan can become a little grating. Japan maybe complicated, but it's not that difficult, with a little effort, to understand a good chunk of the rules. Proving to Japanese people that their culture and country isn't as hard to understand as they believe is, at least for me, something I like to do. That includes proving that foreigners can understand the Japanese language, including the Japanese used to write the signs informed us that we were not to play frisbee.

Now, the no-frisbee rule is not a bad rule, but it's not an important rule either. Its main purpose, obviously, is to keep people from getting hit in the head with a frisbee. However, if no one is around, as no one was on Saturday, there's no real reason to follow the rule. We weren't putting anyone at risk of getting hit or hurt. Moreover, we saw other Japanese people playing sports and even throwing around one of those flying disks that are basically really thin donuts.

However, those people were, as I said, Japanese. Anyone watching them would assume they'd read the signs and chosen to ignore them. I doubt we'd get the same treatment. The assumption for us would be that we couldn't read the signs and so didn't know we were breaking the rules, just like the standard foreigner.

What to do? We couldn't very well run around telling people that we could read the sign but decided to ignore it. Additionally, showing up but not playing wouldn't provide clear proof that we read the signs and understood them. Playing, on the other hand, demonstrated to all who saw us that either A) we knew the rules but ignored them or B)we didn't know the rules because we couldn't read Japanese. I'd be happy to bet a very large sum of money that the number of people who assumed A could be counted on one hand.

So, we tossed the frisbee and no one seemed to care. But next time, I want to bring a sign reading "I'm breaking the rules and I love it". It would also help further spread the bad boy image I've been trying to propogate. Bady, baby, bad.

Fun side note: finding a frisbee wasn't too difficult, but finding a football was anything but. Kathy, one of the teachers at the university, met a woman whose husband is a coach for the university football team. The woman told Kathy that, since football isn't very popular in Japan, buying a football can be expensive. Kathy asked how much. The woman told her 20,000 yen, which is about US$200. Yes, $200 for a freaking football. However, there was an upside, the woman said. Since her husband worked for the university, and the university bought the footballs in bulk, her husband could get Kathy a deal. What kind of deal, Kathy asked. A great deal, the woman said. Only $120.

Hurray?

Thankfully, Kathy told this story to another teacher, who said that he had a football. So, we borrowed his, after leaving Kathy's new bicycle as a deposit.

street ball

2005-05-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

Walking to Japanese class, I came upon three Japanese high school kids, two girls and a guy. One of the girls and the guy had tennis rackets and were hitting a ball back and forth. As I approached, the girl saw me and the two of them stepped aside.

At which point, I wanted to yell "Foreigner", pass, then "Game on" and go about my business.

It would have been funny if you were there. Uhh..maybe. Right.

Japanese class is coming to an end. I'm done in May, and mighty happy about that. Japanese class has proved to me that it is possible for a class to go on too long. Yesterday's class featured reading the back of a chocolate bar wrapper. Last week, on Thursday, we read the instruction manual to a new massage chair the school got, which wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't read the same manual a few weeks earlier in the Tuesday class. At this point, I think the teacher has run out of things for us to do. I bare some of the responsibility as well, I suppose. I have no particular fondness for studying outside of class, which means I've probably gone as far as I'm going to get on my current regimine.

Besides, there are other things I want to do with the time. Mostly, write. During the grad school application process, I got so used to writing regularly that it turned into a habit, which is an awful thing to happen to a writer. I'll seek treatment soon. I promise.

Enough delay

2005-05-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

I hope everyone knew that when I said I'd post again a day after my last post, I meant several days after. I hope that was clear.

So, where have I been? I guess I should jump right to the crux of what lead to this prolonged period of silence, and that was my failure to get into grad school. That was the inital reason anyway, and afterwards my failure to blog picked up a momentum of its own. But, not blogging isn't going to change anything and has caused at least one person to worry about me (and to Sara, thanks for the concern. I appreciated it.) So, enough absence.

Yes, I didn't get into grad school. Worse things have happened and worse things undoubtably will. It was difficult to handle when the first rejection letters came in: I joked about not having much chance, but deep down I believed I'd make it. By the time the last letters arrived, I was resigned. The grad schools decided that I wasn't ready, and as they are the best judge available for this type of thing, they were probably right. In the end, I'm somewhat glad that I got rejected everywhere, as opposed to getting into just one or two. I certainly would have taken the offered admission if it had come, but I might have found myself at the very deep end of a very large pool.

What's next. For the immediate future, I finish out my contract here then head back to the states. As to where, I don't know. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the one place I don't really want to be is Seattle. Seattle is for settling down. Seattle is for establishing long-term roots. Seattle is not for returning to after failure. As such, where I end up will be decided almost entirely by employment opportunities. I'm going to start looking for jobs in teaching or which involve a lot of writing and editing. Why? Because in the end, I plan to reapply to grad school. I love writing and teaching and its worth it to me to take another crack at this. Along with employment designed to improve my chances, I'm also going to look for classes in literature and writing, as well as submitting some of my "work" for publication.

Will it work? No idea. But I'm going to try anyway. I've got to try.

Been long enough

2005-05-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

Back tomorrow.

Guerilla English

2005-04-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

A guy I knew here once told me about an idea he had for teaching English. He called it Monkey English. The idea was quite simple, consisting in its entirety of buying a monkey, bringing it to the classroom, and asking the students "Ok. What's the monkey doing now?" Not only would the class be more active, but there would be numerous opportunities to learn new vocabulary, such as biting, rabies, feces, hurling, lawsuit, and other such.

My own idea is pirate English, which makes the language easier by requiring no conjugation of the verb "to be". An example:

I be buying a monkey
You be buying a monkey
He/She/It be buying a monkey
They be buying a monkey.

All sentences end in "har, har, har". And eyepatches. Lots of eyepatches.

All this brings me to the beginning of the school year and guerilla English. Even as I try to avoid them, there is a new crop of first years learning English for the very first time. To them, consonants are a journey, vowels an adventure, and whole sentences such a massive concept that they defy imagination.

Isn't that great? The moment I fear is when they learn hello.

Hello is, not surprisingly, one of the first words they learn, and when they do, that moment is akin to the arrival of a new toy. And what a marvelous toy it is too. Suddenly, the first years can talk with those two hulking foreigners meandering the hallways (OK, maybe I'm the hulking one, but Kelsye too is taller than most of the first years). Its time to say something to those foreigners, but you don't want to get too close, because you just don't know what the foreigners might do. After all, foreigners might be people, but then again, they might not.

It is now to use guerilla English.

Guerilla, or hit-and-run, English, is pretty basic. You run up to a foreigner, yell "herro" (the pronunciation not having been perfected yet) then flee, laughing. Foreigners love this, I tell you. There is nothing we enjoy more than having a random hello flung at us, only to turn around to see the rapidly retreating back of some first year returning to a huddle of friends. You're not sure whether to reply or duck. Actually, ducking is the only real option, because trying to reply only leads to more laughing and a befuddled look. I'll leave it to you to figure out which party has the befuddled look.

"Students. If they didn't exist, school would be great."
-every teacher, everywhere

Korea

2005-04-11T04:24:00.000-07:00

So its finally time for me to write about Korea. I have had no reason for putting this off other than I've been putting off pretty much all personal correspondence as of late. I keep waiting for my grad school situation to resolve itself before I say much of anything, but as that is dragging out...

Korea. I was in Korea from March 20th to March 26th and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I spent the first three nights in Daejeon, a city two hours south of Seoul where Eun-hee (who along with Derrick were my initial guides in Korea) is from. I arrived in Seoul and took a bus down. They put me up in a nice hotel and we went out for dinner and drinks that first night.

I had a pair of initial impressions of Korea. The first was the lack of English. It seems like Japan has English up everywhere, making it much easier to understand what's going on. Korea seemed to be lacking that. In retrospect, I don't think this is so clearly the case. I simply don't notice the lack of English in Japan because I can read the Japanese. Still, Korea seemed more intimidating at first. Second were the massive number of apartment complexes. This impression though, unlike the first one, has a basis in fact. I was told, and visual impressions bore this out, that most Koreans prefer to live in large apartment complexes.

These are seen as safer and with the concentration of humanity, businesses, schools and government have reason to build nearby. Additionally, the concentration of residential areas seemed to open up more space for commercial use. Korea, compared to Japan, seemed to have more open space, from wider roads to actual sidewalks.

While in Daejeon, I really got a chance to see Korean life. Derrick had lived there for a number of years as a teacher and wise kind enough to show me around. We went to some local markets, ate plenty of Korean food, and sampled some of the night-life. My first impression of Korean food was quite positive. Korean cuisine hasn't catapulted itself into my list of favorite things to eat, but the BBQ in particular was fantastic and all of it was tasty. The stuff we had was much better than anything I've ever tried in Japan or America.

While in Daejeon, we also went on a day trip to Koje Island. Koje is four hours away from Daejeon at the southeastern corner of the country. The trip there allowed me to see a lot of country-side. My first reaction: MASH did a good job in setting the TV show in southern California. At least at that edge season between winter and spring, Korea looks a great deal like the TV show. The drive included coastal areas, which were quite beautiful.

Eun-hee's sister, mother, herself, and moi

Derrick and I

When we reached Koje, we first took a boat to Oedo,

an island that is famous in Japan for its appearance in a Korean soap opera, a soap opera which in turn was one of the lead reasons for a huge surge in the popularity of all things Korean. The island was purchased by a farm couple and over the years was turned into a garden attraction.

We walked about the island for an hour before heading back. Upon returning to Koje, we went to a museum located on the sight of a massive prisoner-of-war camp used during the Korean War. The museum had a fair amount of information in English and featured an interesting recreation of the camp grounds that had been used as a movie set.

A memorial to those who fought in the war.

My time in Daejeon over, I headed up to Seoul. I stayed in the area of Itaewon, which is near a major military base. Itaewon is swarming with foreigners: it seemed like every fifth person I passed was clearly not Korean. I am used to being a bit of a minority in Asian countries and found this invasion of specialness annoying. Who the hell did these people think they were, being foreign when I was around.

But to Seoul itself. It is a massive city: easy to get around thanks to a far-reaching subway system but still hard to fully comprehend. My first day there, I went to one of the former royal palaces and the museum on its grounds. There actually isn't a lot of historical stuff still standing in Seoul. A lot of things were destroyed during Japan's occupation of the country, and anything that survived that didn't survive the Korean War. Still, there are a number of historical sights worth seeing, and the palace was one of them.

The following are palace photos, including a picture of the changing of the guard.

The following day was, for me, the highlight of my Korea trip. I went to the DMZ. The tour itself was a bit odd as it was in Japanese: that was the only tour I could find that went to Panmunjom, the real heart of the DMZ. The bus ride from Seoul was about an hour. Shortly after reaching the city we got into country side, a place that normally wouldn't stand out except for the massive amounts of barb wire and the general lack of people.

Getting into the DMZ is no picnic, and involved several stops and passport checks. We had a short lecture on the history of Panmunjom at a UN base, then headed to the village itself. Our time in Panmunjom was quite short. The village has been divided in half and we quickly made our way through the structures on the south's side.

The best part of this was our quick tour of one of the blue shacks that straddle the boarder and are used even today for military talks between the two sides. For a moment, all of us were technically inside North Korea, and we even got to have our pictures taken with a South Korea guards, fierce looking men in sun glasses who stand in a modified tae kwon do stance and do not smile. Try getting your picture taken next to someone who could kill you.

It's different.

While in Panmunjom, we also got to take pictures of North Korea's propaganda village, located in sight of the boarder. The village was created to show the South Korean guards how good life in the North actually was. No one actually lives in the village, which kind of ruins the rouse. The main feature of the village is a massive flag, attached to a flag pole that is over 100 meters high. South Korea actually put up a massive flag first, leaving the North no choice but to outdo them. The North Korean flag is actually so large that it is too heavy to fly. Or so we thought. But on the day we were there, it was aloft.

The day was incredibly windy. Still, even our guide was impressed. She said in the ten years she'd done the tour, she'd never seen it blowing in the wind. Lucky us.

In response to the North's propaganda village, the South has its own freedom village. We were not allowed to go to the freedom village.

When I got back I did the bulk of my shopping. Korean money was hard to get used to. One hundred yen (US$1) was equal to about one thousand won. Most things were cheap. Still... I'm used to deal with denominations of a thousand. A thousand yen isn't too much, while 5000 is. So, when I was walking around, I'd see something and think "10,000?!? There is no way I'm going to pay that." Then I'd have to think about it and realize they were only asking ten dollars or a thousand yen, which I'd have no problems parting with in Japan. Took some getting used to.

My final day in Korea, I saw some of the sights in Seoul, including a prison erected by the Japanese to hold political prisoners and Korea's War Museum. Korean museums can be a little hard to handle after a while. Korea has been ruled or controlled by one major power or another for good chunks of its history. It really hasn't been free to decide its own course until after the Korean war. I think as a consequence, the rhetoric at most of the museums was quite nationalistic, and after a time exceedingly so. All Korean solders are patriotic and brave and the Japanese and North Koreans were cowardly aggressors. When one thinks about Korea's history, the bravado makes sense. But it still becomes a little much at time. Instead of an attempt at historical neutrality, most of the museums I went to seemed to be oriented towards illustrating the nobleness of Korean sacrifice and how put upon the country has been.

For my last night, Eun-hee had arranged for to meet a friend of hers, an art grad student who was good enough to show me around another part of Seoul and allow me to sample some of the night life there. She turned out to be a very cool lady and we had a great time.

I even got to try Korean rice wine, which is much like Japanese sake. Good stuff. I took my last taxi back to my hotel and even saved some money as the driver didn't bother to wait around at red lights. Yeah!

All and all, I had a blast. Go see Korea. Go.

Tokyo in the spotlight

2005-04-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

Saturday night in Tokyo. I'm at the tail end of a pair of ball games. Tonight was Yomiuri (the Yankees of Japan) at Tokyo Dome, also known as the Big Egg and the nickname is app. Yesterday featured the Yakult Swallows at Jingu Stadium. The stadium takes its name from the nearby Meiji Shrine (Meiji Jingu). Its nickname seems to be Beat Stadium, the substance of that name taken from the various hip-hop references the team threw on its jumbo-tron in an attempt to distract from the product on the field. Most batters were greeted with a hip-hop montage and the rap "Do the smurf, do the wild baseball bat. Do the smurf, do the wild baseball bat."

How does one do the smurf? Do they have videos of that?

Pro baseball stadium is slowly dying in Japan and Jingu Stadium is a perfect example of why. The stadium squats in the middle of metropolitan sports park, one indistinguishable hunk of concrete among other hunks. I have never had difficulty finding a baseball park before. Especially in Japan, they are always near train stations, and there is always a line of people leading to the park. I believe those people are called fans. While not far from the nearest station (a ten minute walk), when I arrived there were no easy-to-spot fans heading towards a ballpark. There were no signs pointing the way. I found one kid wearing a Chunichi Dragon uniform (the Yakult's opposition) and followed him for a while. He turned out not to know where he was going either. I next chose a middle-aged couple, choosing them because where else would a middle-aged couple go but a Yakult Swallows baseball game. This unconquerable piece of logic led me to Jingu Stadium.

If the Tokyo Dome is the Big Egg, then Jingu Stadium is the Big Festering Concrete Death Swamp (or BFCDS for short). It is not a good looking stadium. Not surprisingly, it also does not put the game in the best light. Unfortunately, Jingu Stadium is not alone in this. There are many ugly pro-stadiums in Japan (I've been to eight of the twelve) and when you see them, it is no surprise that most of the attention of the average Japanese baseball fan is overseas. Japanese teams seem to make very little effort to sell their teams. The evidence is there in the stadiums. They do themselves no service by limiting the number of foreigners per team (two position players, two pitchers) which keeps the level of competition lower than necessary (imagine the quality of major league ball if it didn't allow Dominicans). In general they put out an inferior product, that seem at a loss when no one buys.

I love going to American baseball parks. Even if I don't care about the teams, the parks themselves are worth it; metal and brick and concrete art. In the day you can bask in the sun, at night you can sit in the middle of a sparkling jewel and at either time you know that, for three hours, the world will be warm and serene and perfect.
At a Japanese stadium, you can stare at aging cookie cutter standardness and feel your appreciation for what is a wonderful game torn away on the dull edge of urban apathy. Japanese stadiums make the game less fun, plain and simple. Why then should Japanese fans pay to see these places, pay to watch teams whose quality is moving west, pay to be part of a league that cripples itself because it takes the these paying customers for granted? Obviously, Japanese fans shouldn't, and more and more, they don't. I hope the lesson is learned sooner. The game can't afford for it to be learned later.

The Tokyo Dome is an example of what could be. It is not a beautiful stadium. In spite of my feelings about the Kingdome, it is clear that baseball should never be played under concrete. But it is still better than most, and the presence of the Dome is enhanced by its setting-a multi-themed amusement and shopping area. It may not have much to do with baseball, but it is interesting and it brings people to the stadium area, some of whom might just stay around and see a ball game.

Inside the Tokyo Dome

The Giants cheering section. Various chants include "Go Evil!" and "Let's sell our soul to a team owned by a faceless television conglomerate...of Evil!"

As for the rest of the trip, I've been trying to see Tokyo. I have no particular love for this city, but any entity this size has its own natural gravity, one that draws people whether they are interested or not. Yesterday I went to see Meiji Jingu and Harajuku, Harajuku is known as a center of avant-guarde teen fashion. Indeed, while walking around I passed groups of photographers waiting to snap the latest trends. I slowed down enough that any interested parties could grab me. If nothing else, I figured pictures of my kahki and t-shirt ensemble would make everything else look that much more interesting. Clearly though, all the photographers lacked vision. Upon leaving Harajuku station, I started walking down the main street, passing people and looking for signs that would lead me to Meiji Jingu. I finally found a map near a police box and following it, headed in a direction that to me seemed like up. After a good half-hour of walking, I found myself in the midst of the athletic park that I would return to later that evening for baseball. The athletic park is nowhere near the shrine. A bit disgusted, I took the subway to what seemed a likely station. After a bit more random rambling, I finally asked for directions and found Meiji Jingu.

After living in Japan for a year, one has seen about every shrine one needs to see. After two years, visitors are treated with a sneer when they propose visiting any shrine or temple. You would figure at this point then, I would have absolutely no interest in seeing another shrine. But I just can't help myself. There is a little voice deep in my psyche that, when ever I'm out and about, keeps keening "you're in Japan. Go to a shrine and/or temple" (I can hear the /, believe it or not.) I can't control myself. I just have to go.

Meiji Jingu itself isn't that exciting, but the big park that surrounds it is. The walk through the greenery, dollaps of sun light drifting in through the shadow weave. Wonderful. I spent about an hour walking around before finally leaving. As I walked out, I saw a train station. "Why," I wondered, "didn't I get off here?" Then I looked again. I had gotten off that station, literally 50 feet away from the shrine's entrance. If I had just looked to the right, I wouldn't have spent two hours walking around lost. Stupid right. Stupid looking.

Today I went to Ueno, to the massive park located there. The cherry blossoms are out, and with them the crowds. Still, the park was beautiful, with genteel white flowers perfuming the air and the short white-haired elderly getting in my way.

Ueno Park

Yet more Ueno Park

I leave tomorrow, but plan first to go to Kamakura, the capital of the first shogunate. The history major in me can't resist. I'm guessing I'll probably go to a shrine.

Back again

2005-04-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

Baseball is back. I thought I should follow its lead. Congrats to the Mariners on a 5-1 victory today to open their season. 162-0, people! I can feel it.

Of course, we'd be bounced in the League Championship series...

Have had a good break so far, high-lighted by Korea, about which I will write more. School, though, is starting to rear its ugly head. We had our first meeting of the new year last Saturday (3.5 hours!) and yesterday was opening ceremony for the new first-years. I can tell already its going to be a long year for our principal. He is already a bit of a wind bag, but as this is his final year before retirement, he's got one last chance to share every piece of wisdom he believes he's accumulated. Its going to make for a lot of long speeches. Thankfully, I won't be here at the end of the school year, when he starts giving his retirement addresses. Those could last hours.

As to where I'll be next year, this break has provided no answers. I've gotten a steady stream of rejections from the grad schools I've applied to. Three more are still in the mail, but at this point I'm not holding my breath.

But, back to baseball. And did this weekend feature a lot of it. On Thursday, Jason and I went to watch his school's team compete in the spring national baseball tournament. High school baseball is huge in Japan; it is probably more popular than pro ball. The highlights of high school ball are the two national tournaments: an invitational tournament in spring and the national championship in the summer/fall. Both of these tournaments are played, conveniently, at Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya, very close to where I live. Taking advantage of outfield seats that are free to all, we watched Jason's school crush some poor saps from northern Japan.

Not the most exciting baseball. Japanese high school ball is ruled by small ball, which dictates the extremely excessive use of bunts and other runner-advancing techniques. Small ball wasted no time in appearing: the first batter of the game hit a single, the second batter proceeded to sac bunt him over.

Sunday though, featured almost no small ball, as one of the university teachers and I went to see the Hanshin Tigers, the normal residents of Koshien and the second most popular team in Japan. With the high school tournament still ongoing, the Tigers were hosting the Yakult Swallows at the Osaka Dome. The fans alone were a sight to see. Tiger fans are known throughout Japan for the volume of their support, and they didn't disappoint. When I looked around the stands, I saw nothing but yellow and black, the Tigers colors-except for a small corner in the upper deck of left field where the Yakult fans had been consigned. When the Tigers were up to bat, the Dome shock with a riot of singing and chanting (Japanese fans don't cheer, they only sing or chant team prescribed songs and slogans)...except for that one corner. I had to admire the Yakult fans.

The Tigers won, but that wasn't the best part of the game. Actually, I was rooting for the Swallows, so the Tigers victory was a bit of a disappointment. No, the best part of the game was that I won free beer. John (the university teacher) introduced me to a game involving, and this is a rarity, drinking. For this game, each person picks two or three ballplayers. When those ballplayers hit a homerun, the person who chose him gets a free beer. I, however, scored a bit of an upset. At the bottom of the third inning, with the Tigers up to bat, I proposed an additional waiver. John would take the Tigers, I'd take the Swallows, and if a pitcher from either team hit team hit a homerun, that would be worth two beers. As the Tigers pitcher was up at that moment, John took the bet. The Tigers pitcher struck out. At the beginning of the next inning, the Swallows pitcher came up to bat and promptly popped the ball over the right center field fence.

I love it when a plan comes together.

P.S. Bloggers spell check suggestions for Mariners: mourners. How tragically apt.

Trips

2005-03-19T07:47:00.000-08:00

Going to Korea until Saturday. Have a great week, everyone.

So close...

2005-03-16T05:27:00.000-08:00

With the end of the school year so near and with it a precious three weeks of vacation, the punishment meeting machine is now in high gear. We have weekly meetings. We have daily meetings. We have meetings in the middle of meetings. Only through this ordeal of fire will we be duely chastened the time vacation rolls around. Today we spent 45 minutes talking about whether three kids going to a tennis tournament should have an absence attached to their records. Great!

After three years in Japan, it is my firm belief that everyone, everywhere, should be required to spend at least one year abroad. The reason is simple: so that everyone will suffer as I have suffered. No, no, wait. That's why I teach. I keep getting those mixed up.

There are, of course, many reasons why people should spend time abroad, but to me there are two that resonate most strongly. The first is the opportunity living abroad provides to learn about a foreign culture. The second, and related, reason is that spending time in a foreign country teaches one a great deal about one's own culture. I'm sure of I mentioned this before, but it is still one of the coolest parts of being abroad. I have learned more about what it means to be an American during three years in Japan then I think I ever did during 24 years in the States.

This week's big insight: Americans don't like meetings. OK, obviously not a big news flash, but to me it was interesting in another way. I've gotten accustomed to a lot of different ways of doing things in Japan. The only way anyone could live in a foreign country for longer than a year is to adapt in this manner. But in all that time, I've never gotten used to the meetings. I still hate them as much now as I did three years ago. More so in fact, because when I first got here they seemed different and interesting. I have a feeling that no matter how long I live in Japan, I will always detest the Japanese propensity towards meetings. I may learn an actual preference for Japanese rice. I may be shocked at how loud foreigners can be. I may get uncomfortable wearing my shoes in a house. But I will never learn to live with meetings. Will not happen.

And this realization brought me to the natural question: what do the Japanese think about meetings? In many ways, this is an impossible question to answer, as there is never one single response to any question concerning a culture. But if someone had to take a stab at it, what would they say is the Japanese stance on meetings? Clearly, they don't enjoy them. Every week, during our regular meetings, I look around at my fellow teachers. The vast majority have pained expressions on their faces. Or they're asleep. Or they're doing both, as one teacher is capable of doing. In these meetings, at most 1/4 of the teachers ever speak. So why do we have them? I asked one of my co-teachers what he thought. His response was that most Japanese don't know any better. They've gotten so used to meetings that not having them, or having significantly shorter ones, wouldn't occur to them. He has some authority in this opinion as he recently spent two years in the U.S. Before he went, he felt meetings were just part of the deal, but since his return he has really learned to loathe them and questions their necessity, much like his former American hosts.

Which brings me back to my second point: everyone should be required to live abroad for at least a year. Not all experiences would be the same. An American who spent a year in English-speaking Canada wouldn't come back with a whole new conception of how a culture can operate, though they might understand why so many people dislike our country. But every country is different in some ways, and a year spent abroad would do wonders. It might even shorten Japanese meetings, if such a thing were possible.

More travel

2005-03-10T05:42:00.000-08:00

...so now, on top of Korea, I'm also headed to Tokyo for a few days. In my quest to see a game at every pro baseball stadium, I'm going up to see the Yakult Swallows and the Yomiuri Giants. Yakult is a ho-hum team that no one really cares about, but Yomiuri is big. Like the Yankees, they are the richest team in Japanese baseball. Unlike the Yankees, most people like them (and Yomiuri fans aren't condemned to hell, but that's another story). With these two games, I will have finished off the Tokyo region and have only four teams left. Four teams in three months should be doable.

Only one more week of school to go. Graduation is next Tuesday, while our closing ceremony is the following Saturday. Of course, this doesn't actually mean people go home, take breaks, etc. I was talking with one of my co-teachers today, who is also in charge of the basketball club. Over the three weeks of spring break, his team will get seven days off, which includes holidays. His is a normal schedule. The soccer team, on the other hand, gets one day. One freaking day.

I asked if a team coach could have no practices during spring break. Apparently, it is possible, but it would bring trouble down on the teacher involved. Not only would other teachers complain, but so would the parents. They expect their kids to be kept busy year-around.

It doesn't end there though. My co-teacher told me a story from a few years ago, at which time two of our students, one of whom was on the basketball team, decided to take a trip to Okinawa. On their own. Yes, two 14 year old kids off to Okinawa, without a parent in sight. My co-teacher asked the parents about this. Apparently, they didn't see a problem. So, the two kids went, and when they returned they brought back rumors of smoking, drinking, clubbing, and as my co-teacher put it, "social activities" (as in "Hey baby, wanna go engage in some 'social activities'?")

Now, whose fault is this (the question of no fault being involved not even worth asking)? The kids would seem an obvious choice, followed by the parents. But here, the school gets a lot of the blame along with the teachers. One teacher actually said to my co-teacher that he (my co-teacher) was responsible because he hadn't filled all of the basketball team member's free time with practice.

This is a major problem at my school: we place almost no responsibility on the students. If a kid fails, it's his home room teacher's fault, or the school's fault, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be his fault. We rarely expect our students to be responsible for themselves. Of course, they are punished if they do something wrong, but all too often teachers then turn around and blame the student's home room teacher for not controlling the offending student well enough. I appreciate the responsibility that teachers feel for the students, but until we start demanding that our students take more responsibility for themselves and actually levy punishments for failure to do so (such as, say, actually failing kids who don't get passing grades), we aren't helping them and we certainly aren't helping ourselves.

Korea, here I come

2005-03-08T06:01:00.000-08:00

It is now official: I'm going to Korea this spring. The tickets are bought. The reservations are being made. I'm so excited I could plotz.

To-do-list: look up plotz...IN KOREAN!

I'm going from March 20th to March 26. I'll be spending a couple days with Derrick and Eun-Hee, two friends from around here, then some days on my own in Seoul, including a possible trip to the DMZ (where a dress code exists to prevent the North Koreans from video-taping crazy looking Westerners, then using their images in propaganda). I plan to eat so much Korean food that I'll gain 10 pounds. Oh, what the heck. 20 pounds.

Had my last test today, and the saddest one. Not sad in the sense that I cried, though a few tears did leak out as I looked at the finished tests, waiting to be graded. Today's test was for my returnees. They are moving into their third year, which means that while I will still have them next year as part of my vocabulary class, I will no longer be able to teach them in a separate returnee class setting. Instead, they'll have to get used to my slow, no humor teaching style...which really means they'll have to get used to me being slow. (ha, ha)

I have had these kids for two years, ever since they first came to the junior high school. I have been able to study things with them that I simply can't with my regular kids, such as Shakespeare, debate, story writing and the like. There has never been a great deal of closeness. I have a somewhat reserved teaching style and even if I didn't there's only so much connecting one can do with 12 and 13 year olds. But I can joke with them. I can talk with them. I can actually get to know them somewhat, and those things make a world of difference.

And for these reasons, I was sad today. I will most likely not be able to interact with these kids in the same way next year: the change in classroom setting and their reluctance to stand out from their peers being the most prominent reasons. These relationships largely ended today.

Good kids. They'll do well. And this brings the most difficult part of teaching. If you are a good teacher, if you do connect with your kids, you have to watch each year as they move on, while you stay in place, year after year.

Weekendings

2005-03-06T03:48:00.000-08:00

Hosted my first party of the year this weekend. A small affair, no more than 20 people, and I wonder if I'll do this again when I leave Japan, if perhaps in September I'll try and host something for fellow grad students, if that happens and wherever that maybe. If I get the chance, I'd like to. Great parties involve a lot of planning, but good parties don't. Mix people with a certain degree of affinity for each other and alcohol. The alcohol is of course optional, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Obviously, I didn't have anything to drink. Honest, mom, honest.

Something else every great party has is Japanese people. If and when I get to grad school, I'm absolutely inviting Japanese exchange students to any party I have. Not only are they fun, they also are conscientious, to the point of helping to clean up before they leave. After every party I've had in Japan, I've woken up to find most of the cleaning already done. I think Americans should develop this attitude. You hear me America? Remember, after all of Dan's parties, you should help clean up.

As so many evenings at Cannan House seem to, the night ended with Trivial Pursuit. Kathy and I on a team against two other groups: Steve, originally with Humi but quickly abandoned; and Abby and Watanabe. I like playing Trivial Pursuit with this group, the primary reason for that being that I haven't lost. Kathy and I didn't lose last night either. We stomped them.

So what does my current Trivial Pursuit streak in Japan mean? A fat lot of nothing, obviously. I'm not playing against dumb people. I'm not even playing with average people. I'm playing with very smart people. I'm smart enough to compete. I've also been lucky (no false modesty. That's the truth.) I'm happy that I win, but I try not to take it as meaning too much.

I try anyway...

I've always been identified as smart. In the grand scheme of things, I'm clearly not. I'm smarter than average, but not by much, and I have no hopes of ever climbing the greater heights of intellectual achievement, places where the rare air is only breathable by the elites. Still, I've stood out and have come to use my intelligence as a form of self-identification. I'm Dan. I'm smart. Those two things go together.

Which leads to arrogance. It's a weakness. I'm sure that I'm smart, which in turn leads to a sureness in the strength of my ideas and beliefs--a ridiculous position as intelligence and the rightness of one's ideas, while having some correlation, are nowhere near as steadfastly related as I would like to assume. I get caught up and I have trouble listening to other people's ideas or sometimes come to believe too strongly in my own.

I can think of two important realizations in my life. I'm pretty sure these realizations are very close to universal. The first was that everything I had figured out in life had already been figured out by billions of people before me. The second was that the things I've figured out are based on a highly limited set of experiences and as soon as I live one more year, I'll probably change my mind about a lot of things.

And this is the next big thing: that accumulation of experience never stops, does it? I think many of us have been brought up in the idea that change happens suddenly. We hit points in life and suddenly things fall into place. But it doesn't work like that, right? You pick up new pieces and you pick up new pieces and one day they look one way and the next day they look another and for the entirety of every life there is nothing but change and flux and, one hopes, growth.

Which means I'm probably never going to be able to stop battling my bouts of inflated self-importance. The bouts, I hope, may become less frequent, but they will probably always be there. This includes realizing that my current streak in Trivial Pursuit doesn't mean anything, and that when someone here kicks my ass (probably the very next game), that won't mean much either.

No more pseudo-philosophy for the foreseeable future. I promise.

As you may know by my blog...

2005-03-02T05:28:00.000-08:00

I am hoping to go Korea in a couple of weeks. I should have the details worked out soon.

This last weekend though, I did do some traveling, to Tokushima, a small city on the eastern coast of Shikoku. Jason and I went down Saturday by bus. He had weddings for much of the day, so I decided to do a little traveling.

Now, Tokushima itself doesn't have much to see, and on top of that I figured Jason and I would tool around on Sunday, so Saturday was my chance to go see something outside of the city. I settled on a famous vine bridge in the town of Iya. As I discovered when I arrived, there are only three vine bridges remaining in Japan, and the one in Iya is the longest. So, I set out to discover this fine vine bridge in the middle of Shikoku.

The middle of no-where Shikoku.

At this point, let me make a note about going places in Japan. Japan has a public transportation system that puts anything in the U.S. to shame. Not only is it easy to get to the places everyone wants to go, but its also possible to get to the places that almost no one wants to go. Not always easy, but at least possible. Pick a small town in the American Midwest, and chances are that if you don't have your own transportation, you're not going to be able to get there. Japan, on the other hand, has trains and buses that run to even the smallest, middle-of-nowhere towns. The system is very impressive.

Of course, you always have to debate whether or not you want to go these middle-of-nowhere towns. Sometimes you decide no. Sometimes you decide no after you've gotten there, which is a little late.

The trip to Iya took about four and a half hours. First was a two hour train, than an hour and a half wait, and finally a one hour bus into the mountains of central Shikoku. We drove through towns that if you blinked, you missed them. We drove through towns smaller than that. And near the end of the line, perhaps ten of us got off in Iya, all to go see the bridge.

The bridge itself spans a small river, one that, if it ever rages, hadn't yet received an infusion of summer run-off.

Its setting is magnificent, and the bridge blends well with its surroundings, which makes sense as it is made of its surroundings. When I went, there was snow on the ground, and a large storm hit before I left, covering everything in a feathery white coat.

For a mere 500 yen, the locals let you cross the bridge. While the vines are still present, you can see the only slightly camouflaged steel cables that run through the entire structure. The bridge looks quite safe. It is quite safe. But when you're walking on it, it doesn't feel quite safe. The vines supporting it hang slack, for one. But even more thrilling are the bridge's slats. These are narrow, between two to three inches thick, and are spaced about five to six inches apart,

allowing you to see the river below.

There is no danger of an adult falling through, but still, you step lively, especially when wind adds to the bridge's natural tendency to rock.

After crossing, I walked another 50 meters to a local waterfall, which was quite pleasant. I then walked back to the bus stop. I had spent a half hour walking across the bridge, to the waterfall, and along the local river. That pretty much covered all of Iya.

The bus wasn't going to come for another two hours.

I decided to go see more of Iya. Unfortunately, there wasn't much more of Iya to see. The town sits on the sides of a river-cut gorge and by all rights probably shouldn't be there. Nearly every house I saw existed and created land, usually either a cement embankment or a steel-beamed structure. The main road, more like the only road, took five minutes to walk and after that you were heading into areas outside of town. I walked to one end, turned around and walked back. I walked along the other side of the canyon. I still had more time. So, I found an open coffee shop (most of the shops were closed) and sat for an hour, talking with the operator, a nice older woman from Osaka.

Snow had started to fall heavily by the time I left, making the bus ride back more invigorating. I arrived in back at the train station to find I had another hour and a half wait. I grabbed some dinner, walked about, then hopped the train. I made it back into Tokushima around nine. Jason and I then went to a local gaijin hangout, a sandwich shop run by American who makes, believe it or not, real sandwiches. The Japanese have sandwiches of course, but they are poor imitation. This guy had the real bread, the real toppings, he toasted it, everything. Just fantastic food.

The next day, after Jason had finished his weddings, we rented some bikes and saw Tokushima. There isn't much to see in Tokushima, but what there is is quite lovely. Ask anyone who has been to Japan, and they'll tell you that Japanese cities are, on the whole, very ugly. Buildings are almost always blocky and monotone, with the color scheme seemingly limited to dirty earth-tones. Tokushima hasn't been completely able to shake this architectural heritage, but it had clear made efforts at urban beautification, and had done so quite successfully. One of the rivers near the down town area had beautiful paths along each side, include a board walk. We also traveled to a local park that surrounds the sight of the former castle (long since demolished). Its spaciousness, combined with its bucolic nature made for a lovely city, and one that I would highly recommend for people looking, not for tourism, but for a place to get away from it all.

None of this is to say that Tokushima is a complete unknown. In fact, once a year it holds a major festival, and that festival is famous throughout Japan. The Awaodori festival is best known for its signature dance, and at a local museum we got to see a demonstration. Women's dances and men's dances are different but strikingly similar, with an identical rhythm and seemingly, an identical basic dance. The dance itself is quite simply, having only three steps and two hand gestures. The men's dance is even more free form. Some of the men demonstrated the dance using a fan, and while their legs all did the same thing, their hands and fans were all over the place. The basic feature of the dance seems to be this: you can do it when you are out of your gourd. As being out of your gourd is a critical part of any festival, the dance is a perfect feature.

We stopped at the sandwich shop once more, than headed home. A good weekend. A good trip to Shikoku. Good sandwiches. What more can a guy ask for.

Searching

2005-02-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

On Yahoo, the query mr. chins asian beaver will get you to my blog. It will also get you some other sights, many of them not actually related to Oregon's state animal.

Ann Coulter

2005-02-28T08:31:00.000-08:00

Late this evening, for lack of anything better to do, I started randomly flipping through blogs. Inevitably, I came across one with a political bent, this one in particular being liberal in orientation. More clicks, more links, and I stumbled onto a recent article by Ann Coulter concerning a conservative blogger who obtained access to White House press briefings. I won't get into the content of Ms. Coulter's column. At this point, she's reached a place where supporters would believe her claims that the Earth revolves around the sun while opponents would happily disavow gravity if she came out for it. Regardless of her column, what is at issue here is the stridency of her comments. She could certainly not be accused of doing anything halfway. She hurls the term "liberal" like fighters hurl fists.

In anyone, this kind of stridency should engender curiosity. The world is never this black and white, regardless of what side of the fence one stands. So what kind of person would try to represent the world in a way that does not seem realistic? I found a brief biography and this is the interesting thing: she's a very smart woman. At least her resume presents her as such. She's a law school graduate from the University of Michigan, was an editor of The Michigan Law Review, clerked for an Appellate Court judge, and in general has held a number of positions that are not easy to obtain. Reading her biography, something seemed wrong. Someone with her qualifications and experience should be well aware that America, even American politics, isn't as clear cut as her articles make it seem. Titles and experience are not guarantee of lucid thought, but in general the two go together. So what's happening here?

And I started to wonder, why if she doesn't really believe all this? What if she found a position and a style that gets her attention, that gets her noticed, that gets her opinion out there and her voice into public debate? That's a powerful set of motivators and many people, perhaps even most, might be willing to take on extreme positions if it meant being heard. And it might not just be her. Surely Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh don't believe everything they say. Certainly liberal columnists don't buy into every piece of propaganda. If they do, that's sad in one way. But if they don't, that's even more tragic.

For, for anyone in a position like that, there is no out without destroying one's career. It's similar to being an actor, but while fans may confuse an actor's role and his or her real self, the actor at least as no incentive not to set strait such mistakes. However, if indeed Ann Coulter is wearing a persona, it is one she can't put aside. If she came out one day and said "All right, all right, I am very conservative, but even I didn't believe some of what I wrote," her career is likely over. Her persona, if it is one, isn't a role. It's a lifestyle, and one she can't give up without paying a very heavy price.

Then again, maybe she believes everything she writes. But I would like to think otherwise. It is patronizing to say I think she deserves better, but that's all that comes to mind. No one should be stuck in a role in which they have to say regularly things, and more importantly, support things that aren't true. Nothing can be worth that.

Going to the middle of nowhere

2005-02-24T19:30:00.000-08:00

Off on a trip this weekend, a short one to Shikoku. On the weekends, my friend Jason works at a wedding chapel, presiding over western-style weddings as a fake chaplain. His gig is not that unusual in Japan. Western style weddings have become quite popular, and many couples want to augment the image with a westerner serving as minister. Jason isn't Christian, but then again, very, very few of the couples who choose this service are Christian either. Anyway, this weekend I'm heading down to where he does the weddings, to hang out and see some of the area. A good chance to get out of Kansai.

In other news...

Every Tuesday, one of the national English-language newspapers, the Japan Times, has a feature on foreigners in Japan or the Japanese relationship with foreign guests and residents. This week's article featured a broad overview of the entire subject. It discussed Japan's changing views on its foreign population and the role of foreigners in Japan. Its main point was that, at present, Japanese identity is very much in flux, and that Japan's views of foreigners is not excepted from the tide of change.

Naturally, one of the main points of the article was the conception of Japanese-ness that has been developed by governments and other leaders. Central to that conception is the idea of Japan and the Japanese as "a monocultural, ethnically pure society". Stating that one is Japanese is not merely a statement of nationality or ethnicity. It also links one to a much vaster and monolithic collection of social norms and behaviors.

While this may seem no different than any other country, it is different. For example, say that I told you, with no other description, that person A was American. Now, what do you know about person A? You know that he is most likely an American citizen. You can probably assume that she has certain beliefs about the importance of freedom and personal liberty. You have a one in three chance of being apt if you yell "Thar he blows" and throw your harpoon. After that though, you don't know. You don't know ethnicity. You don't know religion. You don't know views on marriage or life-style. You don't know diet. You don't even know if English is their first language, or if in fact that person speaks English. There is a whole laundry list of things that you simply don't know or can't reasonably assume about a person who is labeled an American.

If, on the other hand, I tell you that Person B is Japanese, I can give you a whole list of items that you can assume with a certain degree of safety. And what is most important is this: ask a Japanese person what it means to be Japanese, and you'll probably get a similar list. Ask two Americans what it means to be American, and all you'll get is an argument.

Here's the major reason why this is interesting though, and you can see evidence of it in what I've been writing: not only have the Japanese bought into this, but foreigners have too. It's true: the Japanese are more alike than most other countries, and certainly more so than multi-cultural countries like the U.S. But they aren't that monolithic. Every Japanese person is different in a multitude of ways. Maybe not as different as any two randomly chosen Americas, or Canadians, or British, but still, different. In spite of those differences though, most Japanese have bought into the idea of the Japanese people being a highly homogeneous race, and what is truly fascinating is that most foreigners that live here buy into it as well.

An example. From time to time I'm asked what I think about Japanese women. I have a pretty pat answer. They are, of course, very beautiful, but I'm uncomfortable with the Japanese focus on cuteness and the kinds of behavior that such a focus brings about in women. I say that for me to date a Japanese woman, she would have to be confident, assertive, strong in her views, and independent; in sum, she would have to be (wait for it) less Japanese!

There are a million other things like that here, things that slip into foreigners' vocabulary. When you say something is Japanese, or not Japanese as the case may be, people often know what you mean. We too have come to view this society as one big block whose members act and think the same way. This is not to say that there aren't certain elements of truth to these ideas. All stereotypes have elements of truth; that's what makes them so powerful. Once you've heard the twentieth person tell you that Japan is unique because it has four distinct seasons (I'm not making that up), people start to become less distinct. But this article really brought home to me how comfortable I have come with this idea of the Block Japan idea. Which is unfortunate, because its not accurate and it limits my view of the Japanese people I met each and every day.

Japanese class

2005-02-22T05:24:00.000-08:00

For the last year and a half, every Tuesday and Thursday has been Japanese class. (excepting holidays, days on which I have too much work, and days on which I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a hot pin than study) Without a doubt, if I had not taken the class, my Japanese would be nowhere near its current level, which is that I am able to follow the conversations of young children and highly intelligent chimps. Still, I'm getting bored. I find myself each week less and less motivated to go to class.

Recently though, things have changed. My teacher pulled from a Japanese study journal a series of quizzes on Japanese culture, history, and society. So far, we have tackled the easy and medium questions, with the difficult questions coming next week. The quizzes have been a lot of fun, but not only because they involve trivia, which I enjoy very much. The main reason they have been interesting is that they stimulate discussion. For the first time in a long time, we are really talking about things in class, instead of just reading a textbook.

A note on Japanese textbooks. I have not read many Japanese textbooks. I have read some focusing on English and more focusing on Japanese. Within my limited experience however, I can say unequivocally that Japanese textbooks are the worst I have ever seen. Again, I don't have a great deal of knowledge here, but the ones I have seen are awful. If you really want to learn a subject in Japan, you show your dedication by charging into a text book, an experience not unlike being repeated whacked in the head with a manhole cover.

All that aside, it got me wondering whether or not, over the last two years, I should have taken more cracks at allowing discussion in my own regular classes. In my returnee classes, we have discussion, but their English is strong enough to support such activities. In my regular classes, I've always assumed that my kids weren't capable. Certainly, they wouldn't be very prepared. The Japanese school system is still very much based around rote learning. Class discussion is a rarity, and trying to do it in English might be impossible. But perhaps I should have tried. Maybe the kids would have had more fun. Maybe they would have done their best deer-in-the-headlights impressions. But still, it would have been worth a shot. Next semester, I don't have enough teaching time to try, but if I ever teach English as a second language again (God, we've talked about this. I've requested no.), it will be something to definitely remember.

A week and...

2005-02-21T05:59:00.000-08:00

Nothing, really. This last week has been good. My third years had their last classes. Sad to see them go. They were my favorite group so far during my time at my school. But, on the other hand, no more classes means more free time for me. The weekend that followed was much like any other weekend, with drinking, karaoke, and trivia.

And this is what it really boils down to. Life is filled with these small things, things that happen everyday, things that take up the vast majority of our time. A conversation with a co-worker. A drink at a bar. A run in the rain. A song on the stereo. And these things, they take up the seconds, they fill our lives, but when you try to describe them to someone else, in particular someone who doesn't live where you live, who doesn't work where you work, it's impossible to do. These moments can't be recreated.

That's what my last week was. It was moments. It was like every week I've ever had and like most weeks I'll probably have. They are a blast, and they make for lousy blogging. So, I'm leaving it there as explanation for my absence. It was a good week. I expect to have more like it.

Strange things to miss

2005-02-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

Went bowling last night with a couple of folks from the apartment complex. Good times were had by all, which means that I won at least one game. During the festivities (i.e. the game I won), someone asked me what foods I missed from America, at which point I was disturbed to realize that what I really miss about the states is fast food.

Sad but true. I miss pancakes, but I can make pancakes. What I really miss is Dennys. I miss Mexican and Chinese food, but I can get both of those. What I miss is $5 and a Styrofoam container that is so full that picking it up leads to back strain. And as I answered that question, it also occurred to me that when I leave Japan, I'm going to miss the exact same thing. Ramen? I could make ramen, but in the states I'm not going to be able to track down a 600 yen bowl of noodles that makes my mouth water. I'll miss curry. Japanese curry comes from Indian curry, but has changed enough at this point to be considered Japanese cuisine. It is less spicy and in consistency and color resembles thick brown gravy. You pour it all over rice and eat it with a spoon, one of the few Japanese dishes for which spoon consumption is the norm. (I heard a story from a fellow teacher whose father, when he first had curry, thought that he had been given a spoon because he was a foreigner. He asked for chopsticks and tried to eat curry that way, almost assuredly to the amusement of the restaurant staff.) Most importantly, it's damn good eatin'.

Now, I could make all of these things, just as I could make the American foods that I miss. But it isn't the food in particular that I really crave. It's the convenience. I want to be able to get cheap food easily. That's all. I'm lazy. Work with me on this, or rather you do all the work, and I'll keep up the eating.

Race day

2005-02-10T05:50:00.000-08:00

Along the bank of a neighborhood river, students and teachers gathered today for our annual run. The day was overcast and cool, perfect for running. Rain the night before had left the ground soggy in spaces but still quite manageable. And my only goal for the day was to, well, beat Kelsye. And I did. At the end of nine kilometers, I was firmly in the lead.

Stupid ten kilometer races.

She won. She pulled ahead and beat me. But, I'm not bitter and so, I congratulate her and wish only that for the next month Kiomye will sleep nowhere but with Matt and Kelsye, all the while doing her best impression of a tai kwan do master blitzed out on uppers. Because I'm not bitter.

The race was a good one. Even though I couldn't beat Kelsye, I was faster than last year and felt much better physically after it was done. All that running seems to have paid off. Today's race also gave Kelsye a chance to witness Japanese stretching in action, which seems to be designed around an attempt to take everything that modern medical science tells us not to do, and doing it. Unnecessary flexing of the knees? Check. Bouncing as you stretch? But of course. Stretching for only a few seconds? Got it. Stretching before even a slight physical warm-up? No doubt. Add the pelvic thrusts for good measure (because warm pelvises make for good runners) and it was a sight to behold.

In almost every area, Japan is one of, if not the most, technologically advanced countries on Earth. But when it comes to physiognomy, either everyone missed the boat or the boat never set sail. I'm sure I've mentioned the abuse of pitchers on this blog, but really there is so much more. Stretching is another example.

Here's my biggest thing though: in Japan, kids play only one sport. When you enter junior high school, or perhaps before, if you are going to do sports, you choose your team and then you never do anything else. It is very difficult to change teams once you've decided. Additionally, there really aren't seasons in Japan. If you are on the baseball team, you do baseball year around. No breaks. No down time. Just baseball. The idea, as I understand it, is that by dedicating yourself so thoroughly to one thing, you can overcome any physical limitation and reach perfection.

For a country with as many people and as much money as Japan has, I think it should produce more world-class athletes than it does. The Japanese also seem aware of this, and talk about their relative lack of size when compared to foreigners. Perhaps. But I think a fair share of blame also has to fall on the sports system itself.

If kids never get to switch sports, if they never get to try different things, there are all sorts of negatives. First and foremost, they have no chance to find out if they are better at any other sport, or if there is another sport they might enjoy more. This, above all else, strikes me as the biggest problem. It is, effectively, a misuse of sporting resources. Many of the kids at my school might be better at football or soccer or tennis or swimming, but once they've signed up for the baseball team, they'll never find out. Right now, I'm willing to bet that Japan has far more people who are not playing their ideal sport than most other Western countries. Natural talent, talent that would make Japan even more competitive on the world stage, is going to waste because people aren't allowed to try different things, especially in their formative years.

Throw on top of all this the lack of cross training opportunities and other problems, and you have a system that instead of helping kids reach perfection is actually denying them opportunities to develop their natural abilities to the utmost. I'm not sure if this system will ever change. New thinking on stretching, for example, still hasn't made it yet, and stretching is much less fundamental in its relationship to basic Japanese thinking. But until the current system is replaced by a better one, Japan is going to remained handicapped in its ability produce top quality athletes.

Big time

2005-02-09T05:18:00.000-08:00

Again, if I was competitive...

Today, the school had its annual English speech contest. For the weeks before the contest, every English teacher was given one or two contestants to coach. I don't mean to brag, but this year the kids I coached came in first and second...which makes up for last year when the kids I coached came in last and next to last. But last year was clearly the children's fault. This year was all me.

No, honestly, that's not even the case. The kid who came in first, well, our practice went like this. We met for the first time last Thursday. We were going to then meet on Friday but he was sick and missed school. We met again on Monday and I discover that over the weekend he'd memorized his speech and sprinkled the whole things with gestures. Very robotic gestures, mind you. Whenever he made one, his voice would shoot up in time to the movement. But considering that the rest of the kids looked as if their arms had been stapled to their sides, he stood out. Frankly, I shouldn't even be that critical. This is a 14 or 15 year-old kid who has already got a good jump on public speaking. He'll polish over time and turn into a real winner.

As for the second kid, I have to admit I'm proud of his result. He did a lot of work, but I'd like to think I contributed a little. Just a little. What that kid has is a real writing talent; he is one of my returnees and last semester, when we did short stories, his was easily the best. But he also worked really hard on the speech. We kept it simple, and he handled simple exceptionally well. I hope he speaks again next year, as he also is quite gifted.

Our school's run is tomorrow, so I headed over to Kelsye and Matt's for a nice carbo load meal of pasta with pasta sauce and pasta on the side for desert. Kelsye claimed that she had done some reading.

...and found a source that stated that eating a bunch of pasta the night before a race isn't actually that good for you. How shovling pasta into your pie hole hand-over-fist isn't good for you, I don't know, but scientists claim all sorts of wacky things. One just recently claimed that junior high school students can be made to learn English.

In other health news, apparently green tea is good for endurance. Most research labs here seem to get oodles of yen to produce studies touting the health benefits of various parts of the Japanese diet. Other foods are known to clean the blood, improve eyesight, and give your coat a healthy sheen.

Being ridiculous

2005-02-06T02:45:00.000-08:00

It is a good thing that I'm not a competitive person, or I might care about the number of people that visit this blog. I might even have multiple visit trackers, and check those trackers on a regular basis to see who had visited and how they had gotten here.

If though, for the sake of argument, I was such a person, I would have discovered the following thing: apparently you can find this blog through some rather strange searches. In no particular order, the following search engine requests have brought up my blog:

"sexs saudi arabian"
"real samurai armor for kids"
"naked public bath me january"
"kenny sonoda"

Who the hell is kenny sonoda, and what is he doing in my blog?

The Cuba Party on Friday was a lot of fun. I have to admit, with each passing get-together, I love this new group of teachers more and more. They are nerds, people. Nerds, just like me. Or, if not nerds, then they have nerdish tendencies which they make no effort to suppress. Apart from general discussion and drinking, the party also included Mafia (a fantastic party game that, if you've never played, you should try), Trivial Pursuit Charades (when you know how to act out "Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Clerk", please let me know), and, if that wasn't enough, at around 2:30 am the hosts of the party pulled out another trivia game and of the several people remaining, none of them left! Yeah!

This Thursday, our school has its annual 10K run. I ran this for the first time last year, carrying with me a certain degree of trepidation as I hadn't run anywhere near that distance in several years (well, maybe over several years I'd run 10K. Maybe.) No worries this year. Normally, we run on a Saturday, but the race was moved to Thursday this year because the river beside which we run is usually quite busy on the weekend. I'm all for the move to Thursday, as the lower number of people will make for a better race. The only downside is that with a less crowded race track, I won't have as good an excuse for pushing kids into the river.

Even a blind squirrel...

2005-02-03T05:26:00.000-08:00

Wednesday contained one of the highlights of my teaching career to date. No, my students didn't learn anything. I have yet to reach that milestone, and honestly am in no real hurry. In fact, what I accomplished is, to me, more momentous than my kids actually learning. Believe it or not, some students actually laughed at one of my jokes.

The inability to use humor has always been one of the negative points of my job. Putting aside for a moment the language barrier, what I'm really up against is a cultural humor barrier. As I've undoubtedly mentioned here before, sarcasm is not a common theme in Japanese humor. Most Japanese, regardless of their language ability, tend to take seriously what to a Westerner would clearly be sarcasm. It often necessitates explaning why a joke is funny, which ruins the joke. I am quite fond of sarcasm and in classes before this one have tried to liven up the teaching environment with off-the-cuff jokes, but that option isn't available to me here in Japan. This means that either I plan my jokes a week in advance or just junk the whole humor thing. Planning a joke is almost as bad as explaining one, so humor has pretty much disappeared from my classes (though I can still get the kids to laugh if I say something, then explain "American joke" as they look up at me blankly. That American joke line always gets a chuckle.)

You're probably wondering what the actual joke is...or you've just stopped reading all together, which probably is good evidence why my career as a stand up comic isn't going to pan out. (ok everyone, just fifteen more minutes of explanation and I'll get to the humor. Now, is everyone on page 27? Good!) In class on Wednesday, we started a unit on reserving a hotel room and as part of the unit I had the kids read a dialogue. In the dialogue, the customer as Yusuke Yamashita, and one of my kids read the name is Yamada. At which point I said "Now, Mr. So-and-so, Yamashita is a Japanese name, so you don't know it."

And then, the kids laughed. OK, four of them laughed, but they laughed at the joke. It was a momentous occasion for all. I spent the rest of the class crying with joy, much as you are probably crying right now, so moved were you by that story. Or you're crying for some other reason. Its really all the same to me.

I doubt that before I leave I'll get my kids to laugh again, but you never now. Once was enough though. I'll take that.

In other news, I recently finished a book called The Riemann Hypothesis. The Reimann Hypothesis, according to the author, is the most important unsolved mathematical problem around today. Perhaps that is hyperbole, perhaps not. I don't know enough about mathematics to tell. Either way, the book is quite enjoyable. In its detailing of the Riemann Hypothesis and those mathematicians who are trying to prove or disprove it, the book sets out to accomplish two things. The first is to in some way explain this important hypothesis to laymen, a task that even the author admits is nigh impossible. Basically, the Riemann Hypothesis details the relationships between prime numbers and the rest of the numbers, but that explanation is A) probably wrong and B) something akin to trying to encapsulate China in the statement "It has got a lot of people".

The Riemann Hypothesis aside though, what the book really tries to do is describe what mathematicians are about and how they view the mathematical world in which they live. The main reason I picked up this book is due to conversations with a friend of mine who is currently getting her Ph.d. in mathematics at Yale. She has, on many occasions, lamented the fact that for so many of us, the field of mathematics has been colored by our experiences in high school. We think of math as a domain of brute force calculations, in which you either know the rules or you don't, and most of us don't. Her point and the book's point is that this view of math as simply calculations removes from the field its beauty and artistry.

And the book does a decent job of showing that beauty. Well, it does as good a job as it can. I can tell you over and over that a certain picture is beautiful, but unless you actually view that picture for yourself, you'll never have anything more than an intellectual belief, completely devoid of actual understanding. The book is faced with the same problem. I can be told that a certain mathematical problem, theorem, proof, or hypothesis is beautiful, but since I don't understand what's going on, I have no more understanding than the person who has been told about the picture.

What the book is successful in doing is illustrating the creativity and artistry that goes into math, a creativity that is the equal of, if not necessarily related to, the more common creative outlets with which non-mathematicians are familiar. Again, the common belief of mathematics as nothing but right answers and your answers blunts this beauty. But even mathematicians wouldn't argue that basic calculations are often boring. (the book gives several anecdotes on how many mathematicians regularly have the same trouble as you or I doing basic addition, subtraction, etc. off the top of their heads) The beauty comes when one moves into the higher realms of math, and it is in these areas that the host of rules that we associate with math to a certain degree disappears. Why do they disappear? Because at the higher levels, no one has gotten there to make the rules. Think of higher level math as climbing a mountain. There are the well traveled trails below, but as one gets into the higher reaches, one finds areas in which no trails exist. The trails still have to be built. There are of course basic rules dictating how to build a trail, but the actual details of the trail itself, where it goes, how steep it is, etc. are left up to the trail blazer. In a very real sense, at higher levels, mathematicians are making things up as they go along.

I don't understand mathematics any better after reading this book, but I think I have a greater appreciation of it and that was worth the read in itself. If you are at all interested in understand what mathematicians are like, I recommend the book. If you're not, well, I'll sum it up. Mostly, they are geeks (sorry Joan) but they are cool geeks, doing truly interesting and amazing things.

it gets cold

2005-02-02T05:59:00.000-08:00

Japan, in all of its meanness and spitefulness, has decided to get cold. Over the last couple of days, we’ve dropped from teeth-rattling cold to spirited-cursing cold, with a couple of dips into praying-for-a-quick-death cold. It's an official scale. You would think it wouldn't be so bad, as I spend most of my days inside a school, but of course, you would be wrong.

Why are you wrong so often? Why is that?

Much like its wars against grass and river banks (find a river bank in Japan that hasn't been cemented and I'll give you a nifty prize), Japan seems to have something against heating entire buildings. At my school, the classrooms and teacher rooms are heated...and that about raps up the heating section of this blog. Halls are unheated, which wouldn't matter as the windows and doors are constantly open. What really gets to me is the bathrooms. Bathrooms should never be cold. This is against God's law.

Went back to Japanese class yesterday for the first time in a month. I had taken January off, nominally because of entrance exams but really because I wanted a month off. It was nice to see that when I got back, nothing had changed: I still didn't know most of the kanji and was regularly perplexed by what was going on. I have already decided that when I return to the U.S. I will continue to study Japanese. In fact, I don't see it as much of a choice. I have to study Japanese, because otherwise all the pain and irritation I've gone through to this point would be wasted and that's just not worth it.

Weekend looks good. One of the college teachers just got back from a conference in Cuba, so is planning on throwing a Cuban party. As an American, I'm sneaking in with Andy and Hadija, a British and Canadian couple who have free entry. Kathy and Ryan, the hosts of the party, have asked people to bring things to be shared with the rest of the party goers, in proper Communist style. My guess is that, in proper Communist style, they're going to hog all the chips and salsa for themselves and their supporters while the rest of us eke out an existence on the vegetable platter. Vegetables are also against God's law.

Postal disorders

2005-01-30T03:56:00.000-08:00

Why should I worry about grad school application review meetings when at least one of the schools I've applied to seems to be somewhat baffled by the mail? I received a nice letter from Texas State University informing me that they had received my application but that other materials were still missing. The letter was dated December 19th. As the materials were due January 15th, this should have provided plenty of time, except that the letter wasn't mailed until January 19th. Why would you mail a letter asking me to send more materials before the application deadline four days after that deadline has passed? I'll assume that the rest of the materials, which I mailed after December 19th, arrived as they should have, but that letter was still a rather brutal shock to the nervous system.

I went to Costco today and on the way back ran into a fellow English teacher. As some have done, he asked me why I was leaving Japan.

I'm leaving Japan for one reason: I want to study creative writing and I can't do that in Japan. My future plans require leaving Japan. But once I finish graduate studies, I can easily see myself returning. I like this country. It is frustrating at times, but no more than any other. And while I have not changed in my decision not to live here permanently, after grad school Japan would make an excellent jumping off point for a career in collegiate teaching. Not only would it provide valuable experience, any job I got here would almost certainly pay better than any similar job in the US. As a permanent place to live, Japan is not for me. But as a place to return to for a few more years, Japan is very much still a possibility.

Vacation Days

2005-01-28T01:46:00.000-08:00

In my incredibly soft and namby-pamby life, going almost two weeks without a vacation day seems like a trial. But, it is my incredibly soft and namby-pamby life, so let me tell you about the trial I just endured.

With the end of entrance exams, today was an official vacation day. In fact, it might have even been a required vacation day. For most vacation days, there are a number of teachers who come to school anyway, for club practices, homework grading, wife and children avoidance, and the like. But today might have actually involved forcing those teachers to go somewhere else, as they were not allowed at school. I'm guessing that if I had walked around my area, I might have encountered teachers wandering aimlessly, unsure of what to do or where to go.

Thankfully, I didn't walk around my area. I went to Kyoto. I hadn't been to Kyoto in a couple of months and I missed it. I had no real plans or things to see. I've already been to most of the important sites in Kyoto, so this time I just wanted to go out and experience some of the city. I arrived around ten and walked for about three hours, including an unplanned sojourn through the grounds of the former Imperial Palace. The Palace itself is closed off, but the grounds around it are open to the public. The grounds feature things that are exceptionally rare in Japan, in particular large patches of grass. The Japanese seem to have something against grass, so it is not often that one finds a place where this national hatred has not yet destroyed all available lawns. The walk through the grounds was quite enjoyable, and I think constituted visiting a site. I have to admit that while site-seeing was not part of my stated goal, there was still a little voice in the back of my head saying "You're going to Kyoto and you're not going to see something historical or cultural? What's wrong with you?" I have a problem. I admit it.

I was also stopped by a wandering Jehovah's Witness who wanted to talk. There is a Jehovah's Witness' hall not that far away from the apartment complex and they drop around from time to time. At this point I recognize them (not the individual people, but the general demeanor) and politely but quickly see them off. This time though, I didn't feel like ending the conversation early. The conversation was cordial and respectful, and illuminating for me. I told the man that I wasn't interested in becoming a Jehovah's Witness, but when he asked why I couldn't give him a good specific answer. I settled on stating that I wasn't interested in changing my Christian affiliation (I told him I was Episcopalian, which is at least historically true) to any other variety. That seemed to satisfy him somewhat. Honestly though, I'm not interested in joining any particular denomination. Perhaps if I search long and hard enough I might find a denomination with which I agree in every major respect, but until that happens, I'm just as happy picking and choosing. I don't believe any denomination can have any credible ability to claim the one true and correct voice of God. That being the case, I'll just go with what I like. I do have what I believe is a sounder philosophical grounding for that choice, but I'll talk about that another time.

Really though, the day was about relaxing and walking and thinking and a little writing, which I accomplished at a local Starbucks. What was most pleasant however was walking around and not being surprised or fascinated by everything looking so foreign, or even thinking that things looked foreign. I believe the goal of anyone living abroad should be to reach a point where the country in which you live seems no longer like a strange and foreign place but seems simply to be a place, different in certain respects but still in the end a country where people live their lives. To fail to reach this point seems to me to be a failure to appreciate what a country really is. Japan certainly has elements that are different from my home. It has bunches of them in fact. But in the end, all those differences combine with all the similarities to create a place that, while unique, is still centered around people and those people's existences. Refusing to see Japan or any other country as a normal place (with certain exceptions of course, such as countries torn by war and conflict) involves failing to see the people as normal people, who live their lives...as all people do. I'm glad that I've reached something akin to that point in Japan. There are still moments of frustration and cultural misunderstanding, of course, but those features are probably permanent. What I am happy about is that when I walk through a neighborhood, it no longer goes through my mind to think "Wow, what a crazy, crazy place." Instead, I think nothing (not hard for me to do, yes, yes, very funny) because the place doesn't seem remarkable to me anymore. It simply is, and that mindset should be the goal.

"I'll never have to do that again!" and other tales of wonder

2005-01-27T04:29:00.000-08:00

Celebrate! Cheer! Dance and clasp hands! Rejoice! Entrance exams are over! Yea!!!!

And I'll never have to do these again! Double yea!

Today was indeed the last day of entrance exams. We had our final meeting, posted the results, put everything back in order, then I went home. The other teachers may still very well be at school, avoiding their wives. Of course, entrance exams wouldn't give up without a fight. Today's meeting lasted 3 1/2 hours. I once calculated how much time teachers at my school would spend in meetings over the course of their careers. It worked out to a couple of years.

Why 3 1/2 hours? Excellent question. Especially as...well, let me explain a little. Our school actually has two tests. The first and more comprehensive exam took place on Saturday and Sunday, with results posted Monday. Of the approximately 180 kids we admit each year, around 140 come out of this first test. The second test is only one day in length. It is usually taken by kids who failed the first test or who couldn't take our first test because they were taking another school's test that was inconveniently scheduled at the same time. Whatever the reason, we only take...(180-40, worked out on my fingers...I'm a writer) around 40 students from the second test.

The meeting for the first test (at which we decide who passes and who doesn't) took 2 1/2 hours. Since that was to choose 140 kids and today's meeting was to choose 40 kids, that means today's meeting should have been...I don't know, some number. My brain hurts. But, as is true for so much in Japan, since today was the last day and we get tomorrow off, the meeting had to be extra long, to provide additional suffering to make up for any enjoyment we might secure tomorrow.

Admittedly, the meeting did cover some important points. For example, when we got down to choosing the last couple of kids, some teachers wanted to use questionnaires that every test taker filled out. On the questionnaire, we asked students what schools they wanted to go to, and the teachers involved today wanted to reject those kids who hadn't put our school at the top of the list. Which might have been all fine and dandy except for one small problem, which was that we had told all the kids and parents that their answers on the questionnaires would have no bearing on admittance. A quandry indeed. In the end, we kind of dropped the questionnaire angle. Still, the process was alarming for two reasons. Number one, this isn't the first time our school has had this meeting. In fact, this is something like the 90th time. Maybe more. But that issues keep turning up would seem to indicate that someone should really sit down and think this whole thing out, as opposed to the somewhat ad-hoc decision making that seems to take place. Perhaps I'm being somewhat unfair, but so what. It's my blog.

Second, watching all this got me wondering if I should be worried about what my own applications are going through at the schools I've applied to. Am I not going to get in because in my personal statement I said I wanted to attend the school in question, while applicant X said they "really" wanted to attend? Should I have tried a preemptive trump with "really, really" wanting to go, or perhaps even "really, really, really", followed by a whole slewof exclamation marks? Doubts abound.

At the end of day, I headed from school to a local Starbucks to do some writing. Had a very productive day, and that in itself made me feel good. The biggest hurdle to becoming a writer is, appropriately enough, writing. You can find plenty of websites and books filled with tips on how to get oneself to write. Interesting fun historical fact: Victor Hugo (Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) so disliked writing that he would strip naked and then have his maid take his clothes away, leaving him alone with nothing but pen and paper. He would not get his clothes back until he had finished his quota for the day. No word exists of what his maid got for having to see a pudgy naked Frenchman on a regular basis. Hopefully, it was something very nice.

I haven't had to resort to the nakedness yet, mostly as I can't seem to convince anyone to come take my clothes. (takers?) But lately, I haven't needed to. I wrote a lot during the grad school applications process because I needed stories to submit. I was somewhat worried that once that pressure disappeared, I wouldn't keep writing. But I've found that I've continued to write regularly, certainly much more so than compared to even a year ago, and that feels good. Part of it is the story I'm working on, something that's been percolating inside for a couple of months. But a lot of it is that I'm really getting into the joy of writing. It's fun now in a way that it wasn't before. I enjoyed it enough earlier to decide this was what I wanted to peruse, but it's gratifying to find myself catching up in reality to what before had been something of an ideal.

The Infinite Nature of Meetings

2005-01-24T05:52:00.000-08:00

The announcement of who has passed our entrance exams and who has failed is tradition bound in its styling and execution. The registration numbers of the successful applicants are printed (instead of being written by hand, perhaps the sole nod towards modernity) and posted in the hallway outside of the school library. At 3:50, the doors are opened and in a rush of humanity, the students and parents who have cooked under the pressure of tangled nerves sweep into the school. The first child in today would not look up until he reached the announcement. Head bowed, he marched down the hallway, trying to follow the instructions of the school staff and refrain from running. He made it to posting area, looked up, and then was swept under by the crowd that followed. I do not know if he passed.

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The time for the opening of the doors to waiting parents and students is set well in advance. Still, in the early afternoon, the area outside of the main doorway turns into a campground, as folks show up early to get a better position. Parking is a problem during this period. A former student of our school lives right next-door, and in the past his family has had problems with people parking on their property.

Someone joked that a solution to that would be to have me stand in front of their house and simply say “NO!” to anyone who tried to park. After all, I’m big and white and that, along with the use of English, would probably successfully frighten off just about anyone. Which is strange, because I’ve never thought of myself as scary. Not that I haven’t tried. During those occasional phases when I thought being a bad boy would help me get women, I tried to be scary. But no one seemed to buy it. Obviously, no one read the carefully typed memo I handed out informing people of my new “Scary Dan” policy, with helpful advice on how to react to my new, more menacing nature.

Memos or otherwise, being scary has never really been part of my make-up. Tall, goofy looking white guys with glasses do not make for obvious monsters. But in Japan, I fit the bill. Who knows, I might have even been able to keep the former student and his family off of their own property.

“We want to park here.”

“NO!”

“But, we live here.”

“Yeah, I know who you are…NO!”

Maybe I should reintroduce my bad boy agenda here in Japan. If only I could remember which font I used for that memo…

God

2005-01-22T05:37:00.000-08:00

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good". -Romans 12:21

This is what God should be about. Not who will go to Heaven or who God favors or what countries. God is about doing what is right, and about the power of good. The rest, well, it maybe important. But it's nothing compared to this.

Now, what does "good" mean...

Big Flesh Fantasies

2005-01-22T05:20:00.000-08:00

You've heard of fantasy baseball, and football, and basketball, and hockey and soccer and everything else. So of course, it should come as no surprise that there is fantasy sumo.

For the last two tournaments, a couple of the guys around the apartment complex have been doing fantasy sumo. It's far easier than any other fantasy I've done because sumo is easier to break down than any other sport. You win, or you lose. There are no subsets. You get no passing yards for your wrestler throwing his opponent off of the ring. No extra points for interesting takedown techniques or anything like that. Fantasy sumo is simply this: you pick some wrestlers, the other guys pick some wrestlers, and whoever has the group that has collected the most wins at the end of the tournament is the champion.

As of day 13, I'm tied for the lead with 41 wins. Will I win? Well, I don't have the sole yokozuna (yokozuna is the highest rank in sumo) so that's going to hurt, but I've got a shot. We'll see. If I win, I get a bunch of free beer. If I lose, I give other guys beer. Someone's getting beer, so there are no real winners or losers here.

I lie of course. Saying there are no real winners or losers is loser talk. I want to win.

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Oh, and if you expected something else to come out of a title heading like that...you clearly haven't been reading this blog enough.

Entrance Exams and Notes

2005-01-22T04:49:00.000-08:00

We began entrance exams, my school's annual renewing of its lifeblood and a one week festival of pointlessness during which I am given one meaningless job after another. While our entrance exams are in full swing, four other top schools in our area are also holding their exams. The date is determined by a committee of the five schools in a blatant effort to cut down on competition. Its collusion, pure and simple. It also protects the weakest schools. As students can only attend the entrance exam for a single one of these five institutions, they have to choose which school they have the best shot of getting into, as opposed to taking multiple exams then going to the best school that accepts them. If the schools had different entrance exam dates, quite naturally students would go to the best school they could, ensuring that the lowest schools would be stuck with the lowest students and slowly fail, making them either revamp or go out of business, as they should. The current system only ensures continued mediocrity.

As for jobs, there were two today. The first was proctoring our exam for returnees, or students who have spent a significant time abroad. As a result, these students are probably behind their peers in language arts, math, and sciences. However, their English ability is significantly better, while the kids taking the regular test don't have an English part (probably for the best, as most have them have never taken a single minute of English instruction...making them only slightly less capable then my students. The children are to blame.)

This year, we have four returnees taking the exam. We also have four proctors. I suggested sitting one proctor next to each student. We could watch them and make vague comments such as "Uhm...", "I see", or "In what world would that be correct?" whenever they fill in an answer. I bet they'd love the attention. Instead though, we split into two groups of two, with one group proctoring the first part of the exam and the second group proctoring... (Wait For It!) the second part.

For the regular exam, they also use teams of two, and those teams also split into half: i.e. one person handles the first half of the exam, then they switch. Additionally, each proctor in the regular exam is responsible for 50 students, while we're responsible for four. So why does the returnee exam have two proctors in the room at a time? Because they have to have a place to put the foreigners, and this is where we go.

The rest of the exam period, which goes on for a week, is the same. Kelsye and I will be put into groups where we aren't needed, simply so we can be put someplace. I like Japan. I accept many things about Japan. But this part of Japan is, well, stupid. They don't need me. Send me home. Don't pay me. I don't care. Just don't make me spend a week doing jobs where I'm clearly not needed. Whether its extra proctoring, extra faces for interviews (normal interview teams are only two teachers, but two teams have three teachers. Guess who the extra teacher is on those three person teams?) to other pieces of crap. We're not needed. Above and beyond not needed, we have no jobs to do. Send us home.

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Last Wednesday was 大寒, which is the official coldest day of the year in Japan. That doesn't mean it actually is the coldest day of the year. There can be and probably are be days that are colder, but this is official the coldest day.

That aside, on Thursday, the Japan Times ran a picture for a 大寒 "event". The picture featured a bunch of elementary school kids from a region outside of Tokyo. The boys in the picture were wearing nothing but bathing shorts and a hat, while the girls got that plus a t-shirt. All of them were, according to the caption, rubbing themselves with dry towels and chanting.

I ran into a former student of Sara's yesterday, and asked him about that picture.

"Yeah," he said. "That's happens in most places in Japan."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because that's what happens."

"But why?"

"Because it's tradition."

At which point, I gave up.

Perfect Music

2005-01-18T22:38:00.000-08:00

The last week and a half has been fairly uneventful, but that is about to change. We're heading into entrance exam week, during which our school gets turned upside down. Instead of hormonal teens, our school is flooded with pre-hormonal pre-teens (I think the hormones are injected sometime between passing the entrance exam and actually coming to school). Entrance exams, for the foreign teachers, represents Japan's "being present is contributing" ideology in all of its glory. Next week, I will be assigned to spending ungodly amounts of time carrying around tape dispensers and other assinine assignments simply so that I will have something to do. But, at least I'm getting paid.

And, I'll have good music to listen to when I get home. Found out, almost by accident, that Alison Krause has a new album out. I simply can't get enough of her. She has one of the most incredible voices I've ever heard and even more importantly, while she and her band, Union Station, always introduce new and innovative things, they never lose that basic sound that draws me to them. I would marry Alison Krause...if I knew her...and she knew me...and we were both so inclined. Oh, and if she isn't married already, as that could be messy.

Also got two new Chieftains albums. The Chieftains are a famous traditional Irish folk music band. The two albums I got feature them with various Nashville stars, and in particular blue grass artists. One doesn't have to listen to blue grass for long to realize that it has roots in traditional Irish and English folk music, and that those roots are still strong. I've been listening to these two albums and the Alison Krause + Union Station album at school today. Great stuff.

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I'm not sure how many of you will have the opportunity, but if it comes your way, I highly recommend checking out Corner Gas, a relatively new Canadian sit-com. That means if you're not Canadian, you're probably out of luck, which is disappointing, for while the show is clearly proud of its Canadian roots, you don't have to be Canadian to get it. One of the university teachers received Season One on DVD and I was lucky enough to borrow it. In a total of 13 episodes, the only things I found that would require a little research were:

1) Who is Tommy Douglas?
2) Who is Pierre Trudeau?
3) How flat is Saskatchewan? (bottom right picture) (Also, how do you spell Saskatchewan?)
4) What is a Grey Cup? and last...
5) Hockey, or What's up with that anyway?

The writing is fantastic. Kind of like Seinfeld, only less venal.

My not so busy life

2005-01-09T20:17:00.000-08:00

Today is a national holiday in Japan, so in combination with my regular day off tomorrow (for "research"), I have a three day weekend (lost Saturday to Kangaku's opening ceremony). I spent Sunday doing the most important thing I could think of, which was finishing off season II of 24. Yes, a good nine hours sitting on my ass in front of the TV. I think I've found the reason behind America's obesity problem.

And, because I'm a dork, something occured to me during my self-enforced 24 marathon: 24 and shows like it could not be done without the cell phone. The cell phone might be the most significant piece of technology for television and movie plot lines that has come around in the last twenty years. Satellite techonlogy, computers, and related items add new story twists, but you could still do a modern crime show without them. You'd have to rely and more old-fashioned dectective work, but it would still function. But without cell phones, you simply can't do a show like 24. In nearly every scene, someone is on a phone. Without it, the show doesn't work.

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This week's adictive internet game for the intellectually inclined: Geosense. For this game, you are given a map (US, Europe, or the world) and the name of a city (in combination with either the country or the state which that city is in). You have ten seconds to click on where you think that city is, and earn points based on how close you are and how much time it took you to guess. Look for mandaniel in the top scores...you won't see me anywhere.

Samurai

2005-01-07T06:58:00.000-08:00

From Matsue-jo:

I've seen plenty of samurai stuff in Japan. These kinds of exhibits are popular with foreigners and Japanese like-a proud symbol of Japan's heritage for some, a kick-ass kid's fantasy for others. But while I was looking at armor in Matsue-jo, something finally struck me.

The samurai were short.

I don't mean kind-of short. I mean short, as in probably around five foot. Once I thought about it, it made sense. One only has to look at the older generations in Japan. Those in their seventies and eighties probably grew up on a diet fairly similar to the samurai. In fact, their diet may have been better. The older generations in Japan are largely comprised of people who do not crack the 5'6" barrier, or even come close.

The samurai were the same. We imagine them differently. They are symbols of power and strength, two characteristics that, when we consider them in a physical manner, are tied to size. But when one looks at samurai armor and sees real samurai blades (most of which are only between two to two and a half feet in length), you realize they just weren't big people.