Hot dog writing 2...

(more odds and ends)

I always iron my dress shirts for work. For me it's the last but wholly necessary step to becoming the quintessential teaching-professonial. It's not so much that an ironed shirt makes your appearance more acceptable, but the fact that a coarse, wrinkly shirt makes you look like a giant slob; kind of like how an elephant with a really long trunk probably won't score any more elephant-babes, but an elephant with no trunk at all would just look really weird standing there in the sun. Do creases at the corner of my sleeve help me teach the subtle differences between must and have to better? No, probably not. But when you are paid to do a job there are tiny little things you can do to show your dedication to the work: like ironing your goddamn shirt.  So I'm always surprised by the number of men (usually young) and JETs who don't bother to take the extra five minutes to get the wrinkles out of their business attire. It's like they went through all the trouble of putting together an outfit and then at the last minute decided, "Ah, eff it! Today I'm not zipping up my fly. It just takes too much time. I'm wearing a tie, I've got on dress socks, everything's a-go, but you can't honestly expect me to zip up my fly, too. I am just going to let my dong teeter dangerously close to peeking out the window today."

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When people ask me what the biggest difference is between the American and Japanese schools systems I always struggle to come up with the right answer.  I don't want to offend the person I'm talking to - or the country which has graciously hosted me for the last six years - but nor do I want to bash the US, home of the proud, the brave, and the appallingly low test scores.

But if I were to be honest for a second I think I'd tell them I miss the creativity of American students. It's been five years in front of the Japanese classroom but I'm still amazed every time how my students here will almost always come up with the same answers to an open-ended question with limitless answers, like they belong to some post-apocalyptic educational borg. If I ask them what their hobby is ninety-percent of them will tell me it's listening to music while the remaining ten-percent tell me it's the club activity of which they do year-round. But I mean, really? Like, really, really? All of you like music? You all like playing baseball until nine o'clock on a weeknight? No one's interested in dancing or deejaying? Nobody in this room stalks celebrities online like my old roommate in college? Doesn't anyone care about making that souffle rise? Or constructing houses out of playing cards? You all like music? Can you even say it's a hobby when most of you listen to the same three artists on your bike ride home from school or walk up the hill? Is that actually a hobby or is it more of an involuntary action like breathing and blinking? I can say I'm guilty of it; I listen to music all the time, but I wouldn't say it's a hobby; I just do it because it's better than listening to the high school girls talking next to me or the old guy hacking up his lung from one too many smokes. It's certainly not a passion for me like ball, or books, or pictures, or cooking.

When I was in high school in Cali I remember studying the chapter on hobbies in my Japanese class. The hobbies my classmates and I came up with, they were almost as diverse and ridiculous as ourselves. One kid said he liked taking long walks on the beach with girls with round bottoms. Another claimed he liked catching fish for his hungry sisters. For poops and giggles I think I said I liked stamp collecting and Japanese flower arrangement (a lie I still tell today - eff you! growing up and growing mature) and I think the girl next to me said she likes baking "special" brownies. Now were we all lying? Probably. But was it fun and interesting and did we all learn new ways to describe ourselves? You bet.

That's probably the biggest difference: the lack of unmitigated creativity.

Can't say I blame my kids though. Wear the same uniform, make the same breakfast of rice and miso soup, have the same no-time to do anything other than attend school, and I think I'd say my hobby was listening to music and that my favorite season is spring because I like the sakura trees, too.

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Typhoon Melor is currently swirling it's house-ravaging-way towards the Shiz like a 35-year-old OL with no marriage prospects, but despite the torrential rainfall and high-wind advisory, a few of the young male teachers and I are off to meet some nurses in a city not too far away for drinks and a meal. Seven on seven: two short on each side for a baseball game. The young men seem quite excited about it, but I'm finding it to be more of a nuisance than a pleasure. I'm not too pushed to meet any ladies at the moment and even if I were, I don't think a group blind date is the way I'd go about it anyway.

I'm of the type that thinks true love is found while sorting your socks from your boxers in a laundromat you frequent on Mondays. Or when you go to pick up the wallet you've just dropped and a stunningly gorgeous woman in sensible shoes and no make-up bumps into you in her rush to catch the train that's just left the station, giving you and she a solid five minutes before the next train arrives to apologize and act like you don't want the other's email.

Yeah, what am I, a writer for a cheesy chick-flick?

You've Got Mail!

Captain Correlli's Mandolin!

Pin-sensei, the Lamest of the Lame!

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There's an undeniable truth to stereotypes: they are all true. I don't want to admit this, but it's finally proven itself to be the case definitively.

My buddy, Mel, of African decent, dude loves his chicken and his ass. Can you even call it a sterotype when the guy wants to make a cream that tastes like chicken and meant to be rubbed on asses? Thereby combining his two loves into one twisted edible orgy of black-man pleasures?

And Aussie Sarah, girl gave me a boomerang before she left Japan. It's like she always had it hidden in her back pocket, ready to strike a jumping wildebeast with a deadly arc of precision and lethal force should one of them furry animals present itself in the wild urban streets of Shimizu. Had she stopped me while I was spreading jam on a piece of toast with my regular ol` buttering knife and proffered a longer, more steely knife, I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised.

So when Japanese people tell me that all foreigners are big and strong I can't help but agree these days. Sure, I have my innate lingering doubts, like that English guy I met in Fuji who more acutely resembles a hobbit than giant, but hey, maybe he's bigger and stronger in other areas.

I bring this up because the other day Brian and I were struggling to bring my washing machine down from the fifth floor without the help of an elevator. The washing machine wasn't especially heavy, nor was the fifth floor especially high, but because of the narrow parameters of the stairwell and the lack of a place for a firm grip on the washer, we were making a slow and painful decent. Around the third floor Brian got sick of the plodding two-man operation, said, "Eff it!" pulled the washing machine up towards his chest like King Kong with that boob-tastic blonde and brought the hunk of plastic and metal down the rest of the way solo-shot. After that, he then G-ed the refridgerator as well. One dude. Two awkwardly-shaped appliciances. Me just watching. I couldn't help but stifle the laughter brewing in my chest. 

Them gaijin really are ogres.

Hot dog writing...

(odds and ends)

One of the teachers has been wearing an eye patch all week over his left eye. I would've asked the guy sooner what was up with the new pirate look, but eye patches are actually quite common in Japan; it's like their universal cure to all ailments. Pink eye? Eye patch. Blurry vision? Eye patch. Erectile dysfunction? Eye patch.

Today we happened to be at the sink together at the same time so I asked him how his eye was doing. He told me it doesn't hurt, but his vision is blurry and white, owing to a fissure on the lens. About fissures: some are good (Grand Canyon, Nile River, space between you and a smelly guy on the train, a woman's "flower"), but some are bad (fat dudes' asses, eye). He's going to have surgery on it next week. Pretty scary stuff if you ask me. But the guy was all smiles and ganbare when he told me about it. I love that. Some dudes cry when the cafeteria runs out of chocolate milk (me), and some guys smile in the face of eye surgery (teacher).

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One of the female teachers at the school has really thin hair. When I first met her I remembered thinking how unfortunate it was that a woman in her early-twenties would have such thin hair. And worse, her last name happens to be a synonymn in Japanese for thin hair. You really can't make this stuff up; just the worst luck. However she's a really cute woman and super friendly on top of that; her voice also inexplicably makes me happier upon hearing it. So today as I was walking past her I was glad to see that her hair appears to be getting longer and fuller. And if I may, with the gentle autumn afternoon sun reflecting off her face, she was a damn good two-steps past attractiveness.

I found out about two months ago that she went through chemo-therapy a few years back.

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My fantasy football site has been blocked at school. I think this is ridicuous especially since I'm typing this right now at my desk at work. But you know, I really shouldn't be updating my roster at school anyway. Or at least that's what the guy on my left shoulder says. He's the good one. The one who'd never smoke a cigarette or picture the leggy woman across from me on the train naked or in suggestive poses while dancing on a bar table. But the guy on the right? That guy's got one hand under the table while the other's gripping a wad of singles, all the while a mischivieous smile playing on his face. Though if you look closer you'll notice that deep beneath the upturned arches at the corners of his lips lies just the faintest trembling, a result of the regret he feels from not being able to insert Matt Forte into the starting lineup in favor of Ron Grant who'll have trouble averaging more than 3.5 yards a carry against that physically-challenged but willfully-strong Niner defense. And let's face it, Grant might as well have been you in high school because he's definitely not scoring this week (or much more this year, for that matter). And all because there's an abritrary blockage of fantasy-football and porn sites at his place of work. As if the two are even close to being equal in the department of wasting work-time when one is obviously the world-leader.

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I notice a lot of my co-workers wear their ties really long. I'm of the school of thought that says the tip of a tie should be just at the belt buckle or even a centimeter or two over. Kind of like how shorts have to at least touch the knee cap if you're 30-years-old and under. But surprisingly, a bunch of the men here wear their ties at dong-level. Seriously. It's like there's a horizontally-striped navy blue arrow hanging from their necks pointing directly to their wang. I think this is an interesting fashion statement.

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Last week was the prefectural speech contest in Numazu City. The school I work at entered two students this year and I had been working with them for the last 3 weeks, though not really more than once a week. One girl had the skills to easily take second place and the other girl had a puncher's chance at landing one of the congratulatory prizes. However, because of some poor planning, their prodigious hours in class (they get out of school at six), a random five-day holiday, and an ill-timed day-before-the-contest fever, we couldn't practice as much as we wanted. They both ended up forgetting their lines (one in an amazing, self-combusting-avalanche-of-fire kind of way) and both walked away empty handed despite their superior talents. They were like the Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter of the Shizuoka Prefectural Tobu Speech Contest. All skill but nothing to show for it. So it just goes to show, those damned ants that worked so hard while the grasshopper was just chillin', checkin' out all the fly female hoppers always win. Always. Damn over-achievers. Practicing since summer. Like there isn't a Tokyo Disney Land to visit.