Sir Paul

I had a glimmer of an insight into why I like Paul McCartney. I think I see in him someone with a deep and powerful desire to find some way, any way, to express everything he feels, about people, about relationships, about love, about happiness and sadness and beauty and all those things that feel so all-important and overwhelming, but when you go to capture them you often find you've ended up with a bunch of empty cliches. But Paul keeps trying. He keeps writing songs, poems, symphonies, sound collages, making paintings, playing concerts...and I'm happy to admit that a lot of what he produces isn't that great, and some of it is downright bad. But he keeps trying, un-self-consciously, uncynically, confidently. I think I recognize that in him. I lie awake at night sometimes frustrated deeply by the knowledge that I don't know how to express the things that are most important to me. Or the things I feel are most important about the world. I admire Paul for spending his whole life trying. I find that powerful.

So let's have some Paul lyrics:

You'd think that people would have had enough of Silly Love Songs,
But I look around me and I see it isn't so;
Some people wanna fill the world with Silly Love Songs...
And what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know,
'Cause here I go, again...

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

So sad, so sad,
Sometimes she feels so sad.
Alone in her apartment she'd dwell,
'Til the man of her dreams comes to break the spell.
Oh, stay, don't stand her up --
And he comes, and he stays,
But he leaves the next day...So sad.
Sometimes she feels so sad...

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

Did I ever touch you on the cheek,
Say that you were mine,
Thank you for the smile?
Did I ever open up my door,
Let you look inside?

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

Bend, little willow,
Wind's gonna blow you
Hard and cold tonight.
Life as it happens,
Nobody warns you.
Willow hold on tight.

Nothing's gonna shake your love,
Take your love away.
No one's out to break your heart,
It only seems that way...

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

I stood inside Egyptian temples;
I looked into eternal gardens;
Lay on the shores of distant islands, listening
To the seabirds' song of joy...

Oh, I owe it all
To you, you make me happy.
Oh, I owe it all to you.

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

Somedays I cry,
I cry for those who live in fear.
Somedays I don't,
I don't remember why I'm here.

No use reminding me, it's just the way it is,
Who ran the race or came in first.
Somedays I cry,
I cry for those who fear the worst.

We don't need anybody else
To tell us what is real;
Inside each one of us is love,
And we know how it feels...

Somedays I look,
I look at you with eyes that shine.
Somedays I don't,
I don't believe that you are mine.
It's no good asking me what time of day it is,
Who won the match or scored the goal.
Somedays I look,
Somedays I look into your soul.

勉強しましょう!

I have a couple of posts on Microsoft Word but I don't think they're worth posting here. If anyone wants to hear about the 写生会, you can ask me.

Right now I don't have anything in particular to do, and I don't feel like painting which is the one thing that has any sort of deadline (Friday, sort of). So I'm going to be unoriginal -- I bet most people who go to a country that speaks a different language and post about it do this at some point -- and give a little crash course in Japanese phrases. This is for your own good, o hypothetical reader who doesn't already know Japanese: the crash course is based on things I might have occasion to type on here in Japanese and not bother to translate. So this is your reference if you ever want to know what something means. I'll also include some random words I happen to like.

At Tokyo orientation, one of the speakers said that after being in Japan for a few years, he sort of lost touch with most of his friends who didn't know Japanese. He said it just became too hard to relate. Well, I don't intend on dropping people from my life just because they don't know Japanese. However, I can understand where he's coming from. When you start to think and react in another language, it can feel hard talking to someone who doesn't understand you when you say "sou ka" or "dou shiyou kana..." or "komatta na". Things that have no idiomatic equivalent in English.

So what I'm sayin' is, if you want to stay friends with me, learn to recognize the following words! ;-P

Places

香住 : Kasumi, where I live
村岡 : Muraoka, half an hour away, where some other JETs live
豊岡 : Toyooka, half an hour away, a bit more built-up
一中 : Icchuu, the bigger school right near me
二中 : Nichuu, the smaller school fifteen minutes away

Greetings

挨拶, aisatsu : greetings (includes things you say when you leave)
おはよう（ございます）, ohayou (gozaimasu) : Good morning
こんにちは, konnichiwa : Hello
こんばんは, konbanwa : Good evening (note: nichi = day, ban = evening.)
（どうぞ）よろしく（おねがいします）, (douzo) yoroshiku ((onegaishimasu)) : lit. something like "please be good to me," it's said all the time, whenever you first meet someone, or whenever you embark on a project with someone, or just pretty much when you feel like being polite.
じゃあ、またね, jaa mata ne : see ya later. Note: you can drop "jaa", "mata", or "ne", depending on exactly what mood you happen to be in. So "mata ne," "jaa ne," and "jaa mata" all work fine. Also, "mata", which just means "again", can be followed by something specific, like "tomorrow" or "next week" or "later".
おやすみ（なさい）, oyasumi (nasai) : Goodnight
失礼します/失礼しました, shitsureishimasu/shitsureishimashita : literally "I'm about to be rude" and "I have been rude," you say the first when you enter, say, an office, and the latter when you leave. It's really cute when the students pop into the teachers' room just for a few seconds to fetch a key or something, and announce "shitsureishimasu!" as they step into the room and seconds later "shitsureishimashita!" as they leave. Also note: you don't walk out of rooms forward, when they're someone else's room. You turn to face the interior of the room and say the proper 挨拶. And bow, of course.

Phrases/Reaction

そう（です）か, sou (desu) ka? : "Is that so?", but used about fifty times more than that English phrase. This is the all-purpose reaction. With proper tone of voice, it can be a response to absolutely anything anyone ever says to you. Well okay...that's a lie. It does sort of imply that you've received information you didn't already know. If somebody says to you "2 + 2 is 4" and you say "sou ka", you either sound sarcastic or like you missed a few days of kindergarten. So what if someone tells you something you already know?
そう（です）ね, sou (desu) ne : "Yeah, that's true isn't it..." Except that translation sucks. But this is for those times when someone tells you a simple arithmetic fact (you know it happens sometimes). Or generally when you want to confirm that you share in the sentiments or beliefs just expressed. In addition, it's a staller when someone asks you a question you don't know the answer to. So it works equally well for "2 + 2 is 4" and "how many Sylow-p subgroups are there in GLn(Zp)?" And speaking of stallers, here are the two most prominent ones:
えーと, eh-to : I probably completely made this distinction up for no reason, but I think of えーと as a sort of intellectual hesitation: when you're trying to remember a word, or think about Sylow-p subgroups, or figure out the most clever way to phrase something. But honestly, you can pretty much say it whenever. Preferable to "uhh" and "umm" when speaking Japanese.
あのう, anou : This one I think of as a more sort of personal, emotional hesitation, like you're trying to figure out what you want to say, or you're feeling sort of shy and hesitant about talking to someone, or you're nervous or awkward. But again, you can really say it whenever you want.
すみません, sumimasen : "sorry/excuse me", a good all-purpose polite word. Say this whenever you accidentally bump into someone, inconvenience someone, insult someone, whatever. Also when getting someone's attention or asking a favor.
ごめん（なさい）/ごめんね, gomen (nasai)/gomen ne : "I'm sorry", a bit more intense apology flavor to this one. So, uh, use it when you want to apologize.
残念ね, zannen ne : "that's a shame." But again, you don't actually say that in English. So this is really more like "aww, darn" or "that sucks". But more fun to say.
どうしようかな, dou shiyou kana : lit. "I wonder what I'll do now..." It just sort of means "now what?" or "what should/can I do?" I find it a useful phrase. As a question, it's rhetorical: the "kana" at the end is usually translated as "I wonder..." and basically indicates the sentence as an internal monologue, addressed back at the speaker more than anyone else.
困ったなぁ, komatta naa : lit. "I/we are in trouble," colloquially more like "aww shit" or "that sucks", but with a different flavor from "zannen ne".
楽しみ（にしている）, tanoshimi ni shite iru : "I'm looking forward to it." Often shortened to just "tanoshimi", which means like "enjoyment/pleasure".

Okay I'm getting slightly bored with this so you must be too. (Isn't that how it works?) Also, learn hiragana. Because why not? There are only 46 of them. And they're pretty.

Did I mention (probably not) that one of the second-year classes at 一中, when told to come up with questions for me, asked me what my favorite Japanese word was? I couldn't think of an answer. Words I happen to like, such as "uketsuke" (reception desk), or "kekkyoku" (after all), popped into my head...but they're so random! I just like them because they're fun to say. Well, this evening I remembered what I should have said. So here's the Japanese word(s) of the day:

風, kaze : wind. Can also be pronounced fuu, as it usually is in compounds; on its own as fuu it means, like, "way/manner". You actually know a word with this kanji already -- can you guess? A word involving strong winds with the sound "fuu" in it? Give up? 台風, taihuu = typhoon. Also note: the word for "cold", as in the sickness, is also pronounced kaze. However, it is written 風邪. That second kanji, usually pronounced "ja", means evil/wicked. Heh. And a fun tangent about that kanji: when you enter someone else's house you say お邪魔します, ojama-shimasu. Idiomatically it means "I'm intruding." Etymologically, the kanji are evil/wicked and magic/demon. So, based on the kanji, you're saying "I'm being an evil demon!" Just what we all want to hear when someone enters our house...

船, fune : ship/boat. I don't know any fun stories about this kanji really, except that it's in the idiom 黒船, kuro-hune, black ship, which means something about meeting a foreigner for the first time. (If you're confused about why sometimes I type something as an h that I'd previously typed as an f, don't be: there is no f in Japanese, but when h's begin words it's often written f. Just consider them the same.)

The punchline:

風船, fuusen : balloon. Wind ship. Isn't that cute? This is what I should have answered. ^_^ And in case you're thinking "well that's pretty literal if it's talking about hot-air balloons," it's not. This is the word for like, balloons like you have at birthday parties. Hot-air balloon is a different word: 熱気球, netsukikyuu, hot-air-sphere. Not nearly as cool.

For anyone still bothered by the h/f thing: in English, /f/ is a labiodental fricative, where air is pressed out between the bottom lip and upper teeth. In the Japanese syllable /hu/, the consonant is pronounced as a bilabial fricative, which we don't have in English: air is squeezed out between the upper and lower lip. Subtly different from /f/, but close enough that we talk about Mount Fuji and not Mount Huji. (Note that if you spell it with an "h", you'd want to pronounce it as some sort of fricative back in the throat, which isn't like the Japanese at all.) When /h/ in Japanese is followed by other vowels, however, it is closer to the English /h/; hence Hiroshima, Hokkaido, but Mount Fuji, Fukushima. So there's your Japanese phonetics lesson for the day.

Also, did you know that originally, back in the day, the technique of having books with little moving parts and flaps and things that popped up was reserved for serious scholarly works, on like, astronomy and physics and such? It wasn't until the eighteenth century that people thought such things might be a nice harmless diversion for little children. And now, when I was little I got to play hide-and-seek with Spot and friends, and yet *none* of my science textbooks have had interactive tabs or pop-up features. I see this as a problem. I am (now) of the opinion that at the very least multivariable calculus textbooks and topology textbooks need to be pop-up books. It might be slightly harder to incorporate the technology into such things as number theory and abstract algebra -- although having a pop-up tower of fields has been suggested. In any case, listen up future textbook writers! I'm serious. Textbooks need to be more playful. And you have historical precedent on your side! Go for it.

Okay I tire of this post. Speaking of tiring, here are some lyrics that amuse me (I haven't translated the whole song; this is the very end):

あと　2回　寝返りしたら　試しに起きてみよう
あと　3回　寝返りしたら　今度こそ起きてやろう

After falling back asleep twice, I'll try to get up...
After falling back asleep three times, this time for sure I'll get up...

Ahh, we've all been there... ^_^

色は匂へど

Some things that have made me happy in the past few days:

1) Last night I took a walk instead of going to Japanese class. I walked on the wooden sidewalk by the beach and watched the sky turn from dusty blueish-orange to deep navy, and then watched the moon rise over the mountains. And I passed middle-aged Japanese people speedwalking very solemnly, and a young couple walking a tiny dog, and the dog came over to me and jumped up and I held out my hand to it and said “konbanwa!”, and the woman couldn’t stop giggling at this. There are lights that line the path by the water, low, evently-spaced lights. They’re beautiful, and until it gets cold I want to go for a walk every evening that I can.

2) There’s a piece of paper on one of the bulletin boards in the teachers’ room here – I don’t know what it’s about – that’s written in outline format. Except instead of successive points being numbered, or labeled A, B, C, they are labeled イ、ロ、ハ、ニ、ホ、ヘ、ト...an ordering for Japanese characters based on an ancient poem that contains each character exactly once. I love that this ordering has meaning – metaphor, imagery, philosophy. As if our alphabet spelled some beautiful phrase.

3) I love the first-year class here at 二中. Despite having two fewer years of experience, they all raised their hands to answer the teacher’s questions about me, about what I’d said in my self-introduction, while hardly any of the third-year students did. I’m not criticizing the third-year students for being shy – I probably wouldn’t have raised my hand either, at that age. But I had a blast in the first-year class. They crowded around excitedly to see my pictures. My computer froze – the only time it’s done that so far during my introductions – and I impatiently tapped on the mouse pad and stalled awkwardly, and then finally, when it unfroze, it heard all of my impatient clicks, and about ten copies of a picture of the Gummi Bears popped up. The whole class collapsed in giggles.

4) I love communication. I love when my phone suddenly vibrates and it means that someone, maybe half an hour away in Muraoka or maybe halfway across the world somewhere in the northeast of America, has just taken a few minutes out of their life to communicate something to me. Don’t take this as sounding quite as sappy as it does – I don’t mean to be saying anything deep – but I remember sophomore year of college once putting up an away message that said “What is the opposite of lonely?” (at the time, I admit, I probably was trying to be deep...), and perhaps one answer would be the feeling that bubbles through me that instant the phone lights up. I called my grandma the other night – morning for her – and we chatted for half an hour. She said I made her week; I should have pointed out that it was Monday and she shouldn’t make assumptions about what the rest of the week would hold. But in any case, it was lovely. It’s lovely that I can take a few minutes when I’m settling down to bed and call my dad when he’s puttering around before work, and we can chat about everyday things as though I’m not in Japan. And I love that the girl I met at a capella practice last Sunday took a moment to send me a message that evening just to say it was nice meeting me and she’d see me next week.

5) I read an entire novel today. At school. I started it after my first-period class, and I just finished it. It wasn’t a very good novel. There are all these comments splashed over the cover about how witty and intelligent and insightful and hilarious it is, and...well, it just isn’t. Not to me. I never got into the characters, any of them. I was never tempted to laugh. It was trying to be witty in a certain self-absorbed, slightly cynical, urban sort of way. It’s not the book’s fault that I don’t much like that style. But I enjoyed reading it, and I was grateful for the diversion, and as terrible as this may sound, grateful for the reminder that just because a novel has lots of praise written in big letters on the cover doesn’t mean my life will have a huge hole if I never read it, or that I couldn’t write something better if I really put my mind to it. It’s oddly comforting.

6) I’m meeting Alisa for a walk around Kasumi and then okonomiyaki! (If the damn place is open...it was closed Friday night when I tried to go. Friday night!) That makes me happy, and also means that since it’s 4:45 and I am allowed to leave, I should do so.

No lyrics so I have to write more later. ^_^

Okay it’s later. Back to my list.

7) There’s a western-style toilet at 二中. My preference for western-style toilets should not be taken (entirely) as cultural prejudice. My left knee isn’t very strong and getting myself down and back up again to use the damn Japanese ones without making my knee cramp up is very awkward. And I feel like they’re designed for people a few notches smaller than me in any case. So when I saw that one of the stalls in the staff bathroom at 二中 has a western toilet – a western toilet with a soft light blue seat cover, no less – it made me inordinately happy.

8) 福島先生, the 国語 (“national language,” aka Japanese) teacher at 二中. I like her. I like all the teachers at 二中 (and 一中 for that matter), but I’ve had several conversations with her that have made me feel really good. Yesterday I was showing her my work on the short stories Adam and I are reading and she was really really impressed – she must have said 「すごい」(awesome/amazing) about twelve times as she looked through my vocab, heh. But better than that – today as I was leaving school I ran into her, and she asked me about class, and then she was saying that I should eat lunch with the students from time to time; I had asked the vice principal what I should do for lunch and he said eat in the staff room, so I didn’t question it. But she said it would be fine if I came and ate with the students. Then she asked if I had any interest in trying shodo. Finally! I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me that. I keep mentioning wanting to try shodo to people, apparently the wrong people: they tend to act vaguely interested, and say “oh, hmm, shodo, yeah, I don’t know how you’d go about doing that...” and then drop the subject. She said she does tea ceremony and she’d love to show me that too. Admittedly, I’ve never felt a strong pull toward tea ceremony, but I’d certainly give it a shot. And she’s the first person I’ve talked to who sounded inviting and enthusiastic about helping me get involved in more arts and extracurriculars and cultural things. (Not that other people have been un-inviting, it just hasn’t really come up.) She said everyone was really happy that I was so interested in Japanese culture and everyone is eager to help me participate in things. Yay! 本当に楽しみにしてるわね。

Okay it is (past) bedtime now. Goodnight!

おやすみ　続きは　夢の中で。。。

夜の窓辺

Okay, so I'm slightly infatuated with the internal rhyme in this line right now and I feel compelled to share: So picture the following syllables said sort of fast and staccato-y, with silent beats indicated by x's:

yo ru no ma x do be de ka no jo wa x hi to ri

So the internal rhyme I'm referring to is that between "no ma" and "jo wa" (the two things right before the pauses). But I love it because here's how the word breaks in the line go (with gloss):

Yoru no madobe de kanojo wa hitori...
night 's window-near at she TOP alone

So the rhyming elements are the possessive particle plus the first syllable of "window", and the last syllable of "she" plus the topic particle. I love that! Why is it so satisfying? Something about the mismatch between the phonetic connections and the syntactic/morphological connections is deeply compelling. That's so often true. Why?

I think our minds enjoy being forced to deal with things that are in some ways dissonant or contradictory. Like enjambment, or synethesia (umm, meaning describing something with the wrong sense -- not the actual neurological condition), or unexpected metaphors, or stuff I've talked about before where songs play with your expectations and desire to hear a certain rhythm, or transition, or chord, or internal rhyme like this that creates parallels between syllables that are not otherwise semantically or syntactically parallel in any way.

Sigh. So good.

夜の窓辺で　彼女は一人
星に向けて　歌を唄ってる
「私は一体　何がしたいんだろう？」
不安と共に　煙草をくわえた

肩竦禁止

Conclusion: There is a lot of excellent music in the world. This isn't a deep conclusion, but it happened to come into my mind earlier listening to this new record I bought and am really liking. Sometimes when I think of all the music that I would really like that I'll never listen to, it depresses me. But on the flip side, it's pleasing to be able to pick two random-ish CDs off the shelf in Tsutaya and have one of them be really good. And I like that there are so many people out there who have the real ability to create music that's intelligent and subtle and thoughtful and beautiful. I like being reminded that it's not an ability restricted to the people who happen to go down in international history as the best musicians ever.

I hate having things I want to say and no context in which I can say them. I'm sick of writing Word documents no one will ever read. I suppose this is what diaries are supposed to be for, but I've been finding trying to articulate my thoughts only for my own benefit more frustrating than satisfying. But what do I want out of an audience? Validation? Advice? Sympathy? I think validation more than anything. I think the importance of validation isn't always explicitly recognized.

That's why I hate being shrugged at. Whatever the actual attitude behind it, I always experience this moment of deflation, of feeling that whoever I'm talking to is brushing aside whatever I'd felt was worth saying or wondering or worrying about as trivial. Well a lot of what I say and wonder and worry about is trivial, I don't deny that, but if someone wants to communicate that I shouldn't be stressing so much about something, then I'd like that person first to make me feel like I'm not a complete idiot for worrying in the first place. And in person a shrug can come with a sympathetic smile, and that can be all the validation that's needed, but online a shrug is just a shrug, and I hate that moment of feeling shot down, before the rational part of my brain kicks in and reminds me that my reaction to shrugs is dumb and illogical and people don't mean to be communicating that what I said was trivial.

I'm senile so I can't remember if I've already written about this on here. But I like all the little rituals of validation built into everyday interaction in Japan. It's phatic communication, I guess. And you can't just understand it by picturing driving into a gas station in New Jersey and having the attendant start smiling brightly at you and saying "please" and "thank you" like five times, and bowing at you as they made sure the street was clear for you when you left. Because that would be creepy. (Sort of like when Gruffi starts acting like that...) Because it's not expected. But when there's a deep, underlying expectation that in random interactions with strangers you'll be not only non-rude, but actively polite, it doesn't feel forced or artificial -- it just feels like what people do because it's what they've always done. I wouldn't have predicted I'd like it so much. When our Japanese professors made us say "shitsureishimasu" whenever we entered or left the classroom or office, it just felt sort of annoying. But when the students here do it, it just feels natural and proper.

But that isn't even the sort of validation I was originally talking about. I was talking about validation for the contradictions that I'm continually carrying around inside my head. Because it doesn't seem like there's anything I can do about them other than wait. And it's frustrating when there's no one to talk to.

In other news, I wasn't as productive today as I should have been, I have a headache, my computer is now freezing approximately every two minutes, and I have to get up in six and a half hours, so I'm going to go to bed -- except I napped this afternoon so I probably won't fall asleep for a while.

Sorry for the slightly depressed-sounding post. I'm not depressed; I'm happy. I just have a headache right now...

I had lyrics I was going to post but I'll save them for a different mood. I suppose since I was just saying how I like the politeness rituals of Japanese culture, it's as good a time as any for hide's take on it:

君を見つめているよ
ずっと眺めているよ
微笑んで見ててあげるから
好きにしないよ
愛想よくしているよ
わがままひとつ言わないから
話合わせてやるから
ツノ出せ、ヤリ出せ、しっぽ出せ

They're watching you,
They're always watching you,
They're looking at you smiling,
So you can't do what you want.
You're always perfectly polite,
Never say a selfish word,
Always match their talk [note: I've no actual idea what that line means lol],
So get out your horn, get out your spear, get out your tail!

声にならない言葉

You know in the Phantom Tollbooth, when Milo needs to steal a word out of that word vault, and he does it by holding a word that he'd begun to say on the tip of his tongue, closing his mouth around it, carrying it carefully back to the waiting cannon?

I feel like I'm carrying words around in my mouth, stuttering over them every time I try to talk. Except they don't even go together to form logically consistent thoughts, and I can never let them out because they'd mess everything up and I know it. And someday they'll dissolve, someday I'll be able to swallow. But I can't speed up that process.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling unmotivated to post things here because I don't know of anyone who actually reads it. It seems I talk to the people I'm actually in touch with often enough that we can catch up that way, and everyone else I'm either drifting out of touch with, or they don't have access to a computer. Plus, what I post isn't that interesting. So if anyone is reading this, please write a comment and tell me that you exist.

Instead of lyrics, here's an excerpt from a not-very-good poem:

I promised myself I’d go back first chance.
Pull over, tucked along the curve between mountain and river,
Pick my way up the jagged, overgrown stone steps
That rise and rise, disappearing into green.
I imagine a secret clearing,
Sunlight slanting against the steep ground,
Shadows playing across an ancient, decaying shrine.
Stone worn with the footsteps of families
Come to pray, come to remember, come to comfort themselves
With the ritual,
With the sunlight and shadows.

[....]

The stairs wind tantalizingly, beautifully, invitingly
Up and up, into the shadows.
I promised myself I’d go back, but my secret shrine
Can’t exist.
I promised myself, but
I haven’t gone back.

椅子に座って

First, I need to work out a dilemma. Should I apply for the JLPT Level 2 test? Let’s consider pros and cons:

Pros:

1) It would give me a solid goal to aim for, and be something I could feel proud of if I accomplished it.

2) It would motivate me to actually go ahead and learn kanji and vocab, which would be very useful.

3) If I passed, it would be something concrete to put on my resume that might possibly open up job opportunities working in Japanese communities or even in Japan.

Cons:

1) I would feel obligated to go to class most Sundays, which makes things like weekend trips logistically and morally harder. Plus, that class probably wouldn’t be that much fun in any case.

2) In order to mail the application on time, I’d have to drive to Toyooka after school today, try to find a way to get a 2cm x 3cm picture of myself taken, and then ask for time off tomorrow to go to the post office. All of that is quite a hassle and I don’t feel like doing it.

3) The test costs 5500 yen to take, and might involve taking nenkyuu (paid vacation) to go to the test site, which might not be very close. Plus the money it would take to travel to the test site, too.

4) I do not *need* to take this test for any practical purpose. If in the future I find I suddenly want my Japanese proficiency measured and validated, I can probably find a way to do that from America.

5) While it would force me to study, I ought to be able to force myself to study in any case. With all the lists of kanji and vocab currently in my notebook just from the stories I’ve been reading, even if I just studied those well I would learn several hundred kanji this fall. In fact studying for the test might take up time that I could be spending just as productively and more enjoyably studying Japanese from stories and novels and songs.

6) I don’t want to overbook myself. It’s only been a month and already I’m doing the volunteer group thing, singing a capella, taking once-a-week Japanese lessons, and hopefully soon will be doing at least one English conversation class in the evenings. Plus I want to keep up with math and with reading Japanese fiction, and with socializing with people around here, and travelling, and I still want to find a way to do art or shodo, and I need to get some exercise somehow, and knowing myself I know I’ll need some time to crash and write blog posts and emails and catch up with people on Skype. Given all of that, should this test be a priority?

Okay, if we’re measuring on word count the cons clearly win. The real question is, am I just making up excuses to talk myself out of it because I don’t feel like driving to Toyooka today? Will I regret it tomorrow?

Eh, I’ll deal.

So today was the first day of classes. I gave my self-introduction three times, all first-year classes. I definitely got better at it each time, which isn’t shocking – that happens when you don’t practice something at all, heh. The students were by and large very quiet and unresponsive, which I’d been warned at some of the orientations to expect: apparently the students are sort of trained not to be very boisterous and chatty during class. Still, of course it’s disconcerting to be talking about myself and random music and TV shows I like and such and have thirty seventh-graders staring blankly at me. But I think most of them had heard of Chip and Dale, and the Beatles, and Yugioh, so that was good. The girls in the third class (1組) were the most outgoing, and when at the end of class they had to come up to me and give a self-introduction and have me sign their notebook as proof that they did it, a bunch of them wanted me to sign big across the whole back of their notebook, and/or in little autograph books that they were carrying. One girl had a little picture of Chip in her wallet which she showed me, another girl said she had a little Dale doll, and a third told me she had Yugioh cards too. So that made me happy. And also made me think that probably in the other classes some of the students had such things as well, but had been too shy to talk to me about it. One girl in 1組 bursts out laughing whenever I say or do anything, and says “aaah kawaiiii!!” (So cuuuuute!) Uh, thanks? I think?

Tomorrow I have two second-year classes, and then the remaining first-year class. And then a three-day weekend! Woot. And next week, 二中.

Here are some lyrics, not because they’re relevant to anything, but because I like the song and these are the only lyrics I know off the top of my head, heh:

本当はスターになりたい君が
何も出来ず、椅子に座ってる。。。

P.S. It’s probably pretty bad that, while I’d seen today’s date written up on the board and on various papers on my desk, and have known it was the beginning of September for a while, it didn’t consciously occur to me that today is September 11th until I was typing in the name of this word document (blog post 9-11-08). I’m twenty-two and a half today...I guess that means it’s been just under a third of my total life since 9/11/01. It would be interesting to ask some people here how they experienced that day, what the news coverage was like here. Meanwhile, here are some more relevant lyrics, courtesy of Tom Paxton:

And when we met them on the stairs,
They said we were too slow.
Get out, get out, they yelled at us,
The whole thing’s gonna blow.
They didn’t have to tell us twice,
We’d seen the world on fire.
We kept on running down the stairs,
While they kept climbing higher.

Now every time I try to sleep,
I’m haunted by the sound
Of firemen climbing up the stairs
While we were running down...

P.P.S. Do you think it's a bad sign when, of everything I could do for the next couple hours before bed -- write a story, study Japanese, do dishes/clean, make stuff for my bulletin board -- I seem to have chosen to spend ten dollars to download Care Bears The Movie II from iTunes and watch it? I don't even like Care Bears. I give up on analyzing my own psyche. Okay, I am going to do the damn dishes now. Right now. Then I'll, uh, reward myself (?) with the movie. Sheesh.

いるかいるか

I've written a couple of blog posts on Microsoft Word in the past few days, but I don't think I'll post them; they were really things I needed to write more than anyone needed to read. Here are the cliff notes:

Post 1: Friday kinda sucked. I felt sick of watching from the outside preparations for an event so clearly designed to reinforce the feeling of inclusion and community. When everyone around me seems to have a defined role and a specific set of tasks to carry out and a designated slot in all the processions and cheers, and all I can do is wander around aimlessly, observing. So I spent most of Friday defiantly sitting at my desk reading the random copy of The Da Vinci Code that was sitting on it, apparently left by my predecessor or some predecessor before him. I mean if they're not going to give me anything to do, then why shouldn't I sit in the air conditioned staff room and entertain myself? Then on my way to Toyooka I a) made the mistake of stopping to try to buy sweatpants and thinking to myself "hey, I fit into 'large' shirts in America, so maybe at this store that people say carries Westerner-friendly sizes, I have a chance of fitting into the extra large shirts"...turns out, it never occurred to whoever made that clothing that anyone might ever require so much fabric in the shoulder/chest area. I literally couldn't get the shirts on right; I was afraid of ripping them. Extra large! It shouldn't affect my mood, really, but it's a very invalidating feeling. And b) I think I ate an expired egg (the expiration date was that day! I thought it would be okay...), or something, because I got sudden stomach cramps and nausea and I had to wait like twenty minutes before I felt good enough to drive to the Three Little Pigs meeting. When I got there I was so shaken and spacey that I couldn't help with anything, could barely form sentences (in English, that is), and I left early. So that day, as I said, kind of sucked.

Post 2: Saturday didn't suck. Maybe if this were the cliff notes of the cliff notes I would just leave it at that...but in fact I'll say that Saturday didn't suck because in the afternoon, when everyone was setting up tents and chairs and stuff for the sports festival (体育祭, just so you know, in case I ever use those kanji without explanation), I was sort of adopted by a group of a girls who told me to help them with whatever they were doing, and in between chatted with me and peppered me with questions and laughed at my Japanese pronunciation and word usage and said they wanted to come over to my house and have a party, and they wanted me to take them to America...for free. Anyway, even though I felt constantly ridiculed, it was in a sweet way, and I really liked them. It cheered me up greatly. And -- I know it's dumb that I care -- but another couple of girls shyly said hi to me and then told me I was pretty. I guess it's sounding in this post like my mood is entirely dependent on my analysis of my physical appearance; this is not generally true. But of course, as predicted, I feel self-conscious here because of how differently I'm built from almost everyone around me, and naturally I'm a bit paranoid that the students mainly see me as huge and awkward, so it's just comforting that any of them would say I was pretty.

Okay, that's all I'll say about the past two days. Here's what I'll say about today: in the morning we started the 体育祭, with a big opening ceremony where the students marched around the field in their blocks, with the flags they'd painted leading the way, and then there were lots of formal greetings and introductions. The whole marching around the field thing was eerily military-like, of course, and I'd been prepared to feel my normal prejudice for military-like things rising up. No. Instead, I almost cried. The whole time they were marching, I wanted to cry. I can't explain yet exactly why, but I suddenly found it so moving. I'd spent all watching these kids practice the pattern they were supposed to march, heard the thirty or so girls in the band practicing, seen groups of students in the gym crouched around the flags painting them together, and I don't know how to put this in a non-cliched way, but somehow seeing the real thing, the ceremony they'd spent every morning practicing for, these 391 students all marching along so solemnly and proudly...well, I can't explain why it was so moving, because I don't know, I just know I almost cried.

After the opening ceremony there was a relay race with first year students. And after that...the skies opened. 雨が降り注いできちゃった。 The students huddled under the tents and we all watched the rain in wonder, and tried to get the pools off the tops of the tents without drenching anyone, and giggled, and watched the dirt field become mud. Finally the rain let up enough for everyone to go inside. We'll wait 'til noon, they said, and then make a decision. In the meanwhile, more cheer practice.

So I watched practice for a while, and took pictures and videos (see flickr for some of those pictures, and ask me if you want the videos), and then at 11:30 sat in the staff room listening to people talk in Japanese about what we were going to do. I had spent a little while outside helping in the Quixotic effort to dry out the field using about twenty small foam squares. As soon as we came inside, it started pouring again. Whoops. No more 体育祭 for today. We'll try again tomorrow, they said. If it rains tomorrow, we'll have class, and try again Tuesday. If it rains Tuesday as well...well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

So there I was, exhausted and sweaty and with nothing to do. So I got up the nerve to ask the vice principal for the afternoon off in exchange for my normal Monday half-day, and he said that was fine. Yay. So I went home and relaxed for a little while, and gathered pictures from the internet for use in my 自己紹介 (self-introduction), which I suddenly might have to give tomorrow.

But the staff party was not postponed. So at 4:40 I headed back to school to catch the bus to the restaurant. I had a special designated seat, not because I was any sort of honored guest, but because I'm vegetarian -- they had very kindly informed the restaurant of this fact and I was to get a special meal different from everyone else's. My seat was at the very end of the row. And I was seated next to a really sweet woman who's some sort of secretary or assistant, and she kept saying how glad she was that I knew Japanese -- she was scared when she saw she was the only person sitting next to me that she wouldn't be able to chat with me. She was really lovely and we had a great time talking. Various other teachers stopped by to chat with me. And I let myself be pressured into drinking...I had driven to school, I said; the bus will take you back to your house, they said, and you can walk to school tomorrow. Sigh. But I'm sort of glad I did drink, because it made me very giggly and happy and made it easier to joke around with people in Japanese. The two guy English teachers each came and chatted with me for a while, which was nice. And various other teachers would stop by and make sure I had plenty of alcohol...heh. One of the older guy teachers dragged Kuroda-sensei (the one I'd gone to karaoke with) over to me and told me he was young and single. Sorry, unfortunately I have a boyfriend, I said. Where? the teacher asked. In America. Oh, that's so far, it doesn't count, he told me. Lol.

(Interlude: a few days ago, a group of girls came over and asked me how old I was, whether I was married, and whether I have a boyfriend. Now, the verb meaning "to have" and the verb meaning "to need" are the same in plain form (iru), but different in polite form ("to have" is group II, "imasu" and "to need" is group I, "irimasu"). Mixing them up isn't something anyone who's had more than a few weeks of Japanese class should ever do. However, I was kind of flustered, and instead of saying "Hai, imasu," I said "Hai, irimasu." Yes, I need one. Heh, oops. Fortunately, despite the alcohol, I avoided that same blunder tonight.)

The evening ended with one of the teachers, who was perhaps a bit too drunk, stripping off his shirt and dancing around in the middle of the room while everyone clapped, and then everyone putting their arms around each others' shoulders and singing the school song. Uh, yeah.

Meanwhile, I bought a record by a group called Bump of Chicken, on Jarryd's recommendation, and I really like it. ^_^

Here are some lyrics from it, with very rough translation, because I'm just feeling that generous. (Learn Japanese, peoples! It's fun!)

僕の場所は　どこなんだ
遠くに行ったって　見つかるとは限んない
ろくに笑顔も　作れないから
うつみいて　こっそり何度も　呟いてみる

ひとりぼっちは怖くない
ひとりぼっちは怖くない
ひとりぼっちは怖くない。。。

Where is my place?
Even if I travel far, I might not find it.
I can't make myself smile,
So, looking down, I secretly whisper:

I'm not afraid to be on my own,
I'm not afraid to be on my own,
I'm not afraid to be on my own...

P.S. I would like to point out that the title of this post is utterly brilliant, despite having very little to do with the content. (It was the subject line of an email I sent and I felt it needed to be shared with the wider public, lol.) Among its myriad possible meanings:

'Iru' or 'iru'? (This one is relevant to the interlude!)
Are there any dolphins?
Are you there, O dolphin?
Do you need a dolphin?
Do you need this, O dolphin?
Dolphin, dolphin! (This one is pretty much relevant to anything, because dolphins are awesome.)

^_^

P.P.S. Whoa, you know that thing where when you stare at a word too much it starts to look utterly wrong and strange? I just got that with "dolphin"...that shouldn't happen, since I used to be one and all! Of course, we had a different word for ourselves...

Feel the Fizz

It doesn't make sense that the question is can I resist; the question should be why I'm tempted in the first place.

There, that was nice and cryptic. ^_^

But because I'm me and I'm bad at being cryptic, I'll elaborate slightly: it puzzles me sometimes that I have to fight so hard against the urge to do things that I know, perfectly clearly, will make me feel bad. Eating too much, for example. Not doing laundry when I have nothing to wear the next day. Reading comments and profiles on facebook that can have no effect but to confront me with things my mind doesn't know what to do with. Spending all day inside on the couch. Because the answers aren't the obvious ones. The other night when I decided to have a double-sized serving of spaghetti with butter and salt for dinner, it wasn't because I felt that hungry or because the food was that enticing. When I don't do laundry or clean or go for a walk when I know I should, it's not pure laziness. It feels like some sort of defiance. Completely illogical defiance. Who do I think I'm defying? To what end?

It frustrates me.

That said, today was a good day. Long, hot, sometimes boring, but good. Filled mostly with standing in the sun wearing a borrowed black cap and my sunglasses, watching middle schoolers in gym uniforms (blue shorts for the boys, red for the girls) march in lines around a dirt field, or stand in groups and yell Japanese cheers at the top of their lungs. Such shall be my week. Four more days of preparation and practice for the 体育祭, Sports Festival. So I felt mostly useless, and sweaty, and self-conscious about my sunglasses because I've yet to see a single Japanese person around here wearing them, and I became paranoid that they're considered somehow...impolite? I know that people with dark eyes don't tend to need them as much. But I kept taking them off whenever anyone was talking to me, just to be safe. I had a few nice conversations with other teachers, and the braver students would wave at me and say hi as I walked by; the bravest of the brave would even introduce themselves in English, while their friends giggled in awe and self-consciousness. As I walked by one group of girls they were whispering to each other and I heard one girl nudge another and say "Kiitara ii," (you should ask), and the girl who'd been nudged blurted out "What is your name?", and immediately all the other girls gasped and giggled and sort of shoved her like "wow you actually did it!" I had to repeat my name a few times before they caught on to the pronunciation -- most grown-ups seem to know the name Rebecca but I suppose they might just never have come across it. I tried to ask their names in return but they were too busy giggling by then.

I'm skipping Japanese class in Toyooka tonight because I am absolutely exhausted. It's 6:09 right now and I'm hoping to be asleep by 7:00. Luckily, it's a time in America when everyone I might want to talk to is actually asleep, so even though the mystical wireless connection is here today, I've nothing to tempt me to stay online other than facebook posts I shouldn't be reading.

Oh yeah, yesterday I bought two somewhat random Japanese CDs (the "somewhat" indicates that they came recommended by Jarryd). They were way too expensive to justify my having bought them. So let's hope they're good.

I wonder what I'd believe in if I'd been raised in a different environment. I was sent to progressive, hippy-ish schools my whole childhood and that is where my loyalty lies; I used to defend PFS fiercely and passionately against any criticism ("used to" only because it hasn't come up much recently...). I defended it because I belonged to it and it belonged to me; it was entwined with my own soul. If I'd been born here, gone to this school, would I feel a fierce loyalty to it? Would I want to cry if anyone suggested that there's something a little spooky about how everyone lines up so straight and dresses identically and everything's segregated by gender and everyone chants these ritualized phrases over and over like it's the most important thing in the world? I think I might. I find some of the almost military-like drilling and lining up and shouting a little odd because it's so different from what I was told was the best model of education when I was little. But in the same way I believe I would be deeply religious if that's how I'd been raised, I have a hunch I could have gotten really into the whole ritual of it, the orderliness, the comfort of having an exact spot in line where you're supposed to be, of wearing the same uniform as everyone else, of automatically being part of this organized whole. Of singing the school song at the top of your lungs, bowing in unison with everyone else. There's something validating about it. I understand I'm not the first person in history to muse about the tension between individualism and sense of belonging. But I do believe it's a fundamental tension and it's fascinating to think about in whatever manifestation it comes up in.

I suppose I could even connect it to something else I was musing about recently, about friends who accept your quirks versus friends who share them. There are a lot of things about how I experience the world that most of my friends don't share; and for most of them, there are a few people in my life who do share them. For example, Rescue Rangers and Gummi Bears: I mentioned somewhere that Alisa thought it was cute that I like Rescue Rangers and Gummi Bears, and that I felt grateful for that. I do. It makes me feel accepted as an individual. But when I'm home, with, say, my dad, the fact that Rescue Rangers and Gummi Bears are awesome is just accepted as truth; it's not a quirk about me. It's nothing to do with me; it's part of the shared experience. Or, most of my friends throughout college weren't math people, so the beauty and satisfaction and humor that I find in math they had to just take on faith. And they did, and that was fine. But sitting around the math lounge last spring I never had to try to explain why on earth I'd make factor trees for numbers when I couldn't think of anything else to do, or why Galois theory is one of the most elegant things known to man, or why there's something inherently awesome about big complicated integrals or series or repeated fractions that evaluate to some random multiple of pi and/or e. I suppose that's the ideal, in a way: to be able to "be yourself" in some way, and simultaneously be around other people who can share and understand your experience. I suppose the problem comes when in order to feel like part of the group you need to suppress or deny something about yourself. Like perhaps when the other ALTs -- my best hope for a community around here, at least so far -- want to organize social outings over going to a steak house and drinking lots of beer...

Speaking of steak houses, yesterday in Toyooka we went to one -- I was promised an excellent soup and salad bar -- and while looking over the menu, we decided that we'd rather go to that new restaurant where the party a few weeks ago was, that has international food. But we'd already sat down and received a pitcher of tea, so we felt bad for leaving, and Jarryd asked if he could use me as an excuse. So as we left he explained to the waitress that I was vegetarian and we didn't think I could find a good meal there. (Which was probably true...but wasn't the reason we left.) Well, turned out that other restaurant was closed. Whoops. So we thought uhh...it'd be kind of awkward to go back to the steak house now..."Never mind, she changed her mind, she eats meat now!" Heh. We went to a Japanese restaurant instead.

So my babbling has become rather aimless I believe, and I'm going to fry up a bit more rice and tofu, eat it, and then go to sleep.

I was going to post a few lines from Rocks on the Road, but I'd guess there will be some time this year when I will have that feeling more powerfully than I do now. So I'll go with something else for this post. If I could think of anything...oh, fine, why not?

Come along, you belong,
Feel the fizz of KooKoo Cola.
It's the soda for making you proud,
So take another sip and be part of the crowd!
You belong with KooKoo Cola...

Younger than the mountains

Today I walked to the highschool and back. As I set out it was drizzling with puffy white clouds against a blue sky, and when I got to the path by the beach I could see mist hovering against the mountains illuminated by a sun that was hidden behind the patchy mysterious-gray clouds from which, presumably, the rain fell. The combination of light and blue and rain and shadow and mist was really breathtaking. I brought an umbrella because I enjoy carrying umbrellas but I realized that I don't have one with a curved handle, which is of course a necessity. I shall have to buy one. After a while it stopped drizzling and I gave up on the umbrella, and when the rain started again on my way back I just walked in the rain. It's a beautiful walk, and I discovered a route on which I almost never have to walk by the side of busy roads with no sidewalks. With that route I'm by the water within two minutes, and from there walking paths and streets with hardly any cars take me to the beach in front of the high school.

It's not much of a beach. I'm now convinced the school in AIR really is based on Kasumi High School, but they changed a few things: in the anime, there are stairs leading up to the top of the cement wall that separates the street from the beach, for one thing. Really, if you want to get up on top, you have to walk along the top of the wall from the very beginning, where the ground is level with the top. Also, in the anime they cleaned up the beach and the view out to the water so that it's a pure stretch of sand and ocean. In fact, that section of beach is full of grass and stones, and in the water are a few rows of those odd jack-shaped cement things. However, the view is still gorgeous. As a beach, though, the part on my side of the bridge is more user- and swimmer-friendly.

On my way back I found a small, clear marble on the ground. I decided it would be included in my shrine in the tatami room when I make one. (I use the term shrine loosely here.)

This song is oddly famous in Japan -- apparently, it's in the English textbooks they use, which may partly account for why. (But why is it in the textbooks?) I seem to have been asked to sing it with the TIA acapella group at some event on September 23rd. Heh. Random. But these lines, I think, aren't so irrelevant as all that to this area...

Life is old here,
Older than the trees,
Younger than the moutains,
Growing like a breeze.

Sunrise, Sunset

[8/31]

There’s some saying like “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” or something, isn’t there? Well, God has decided to take away the wireless signal he gave me yesterday. Maybe he just somehow knew that last night I needed to chat with my parents to keep myself sane.

The point of this post is this: I’d had the thought a few weeks ago that this might happen at some point, and finally got around to looking it up yesterday. So here are the times:

November 17, 2008, 4:40pm EST / November 18, 2008, 6:40am JT (Japan Time...I don’t know what it’s officially called)

May 6, 2009, 5:42am EDT / May 6, 2009, 6:42pm JT

At those times, the sun will be rising in one of New Jersey and Kasumi, and setting in the other.

I also had the thought that while there’s something conceptually satisfying about the idea of finding the day when it’s the exact same time – so that the sun disappears from one place at the moment it appears in the other – there would also be something poignant about the days just before or after (respectively), when there are just a few moments when the sun is visible in both places, but in one it’s visible as a rising sun and in the other as a setting sun. So I suppose that would be, say, November 16/17 and May 7.

But meanwhile, May 6th is the quite the mystical date, isn’t it?

And because my cell phone is just this awesome, it is now set to trill an alarm at me half an hour before both of these moments, in case I forget. In fact, it’s now displaying a little icon on the main screen that indicates that it’s got alarms set and waiting to go off, so every time I see that icon, I’ll be reminded. ^_^

Oh, and sadly, cursory investigation (I was getting tired...) suggests that, not surprisingly, Seattle is too close to Japan for this to ever happen with it.

And now, I am off to Toyooka to meet a woman from TIA who will show me how to get to the classes in Hidaka for the JLPT level 2 test. And then, this morning I got a call from Yumi, the woman who showed me around Kasumi a couple weekends ago, asking if (I think I heard right...) I wanted to go to karaoke with her this afternoon at 4:30. Well how am I going to say no to that?

And then tomorrow, school starts.....

Okay, I couldn’t resist for the title of the post but I am not going to put lyrics from Sunrise, Sunset. I must be able to think of another song that mentions one or the other...

So hurry sundown, be on your way,
And hurry me a sunup from this beat up sundown day.
Hurry down sundown, be on your way,
Weave me tomorrow out of today.

Hurry down sundown, get thee begone,
Get lost in the sunrise of a new dawn.
Hurry down sundown, take the old day,
Wrap it in new dreams, send it my way,
Send it my way, send it my way...