政治

So the other day when I was at the gas station, sitting in my car, a vehicle drove by blaring some sort of loud message in Japanese, and I realized there were several middle-aged men in suits standing around the back of it one a sort of deck and waving at people. The side of the vehicle read (in English as well as Japanese, hence why I could read it even with it traveling away from me), "Democratic Party of Japan". One of the men caught sight of me as they went slowly by, and his eyes sort of widened in an expression quite reminiscent of that on the faces of my students when they notice me around town, and he started waving exuberantly at me (also, just like the students), and when I grinned and waved back he gave me a huge smile and a thumbs up. It was rather nice, really. I know shamefully little about the Japanese political scene, however. So I had no idea what sort of policies might be behind that wave and smile.

But I finally got around to looking it up, just now, and with some feeling of relief I have discovered that the DPJ is the main opposition party to the LDP, the conservative party that's currently mostly in power. According to Wikipedia...

"The Democratic Party claim themselves to be revolutionary in that they are against the current status quo and the governing establishment. The Democratic Party finds that the bureaucracy of the Japanese government size is too large, inefficient, and saturated with cronies and that the Japanese state is too conservative and stiff. The Democratic Party wants to "overthrow the ancient régime locked in old thinking and vested interests, solve the problems at hand, and create a new, flexible, affluent society which values people's individuality and vitality."

The Democratic Party finds that a free market economic system is favorable for Japanese people's welfare. The claim is that they represent "citizens, taxpayers and consumers", not seeking to favor either free market or the welfare state and see the government's role as limited to building the necessary system for self-reliant and independent individuals.

The Democratic Party seeks to introduce transparency of government and a decentralization of government agencies to local organizational structures including to let citizens themselves provide former government services and have a society with more just and fair rules. The Democratic party proclaims to hold the values in the meaning of the constitution to "embody the fundamental principles of the Constitution: popular sovereignty, respect for fundamental human rights, and pacifism.", having an international-policy non-intervention and mutual coexistence and to restore the world's trust in Japan."

So that's today's lesson on Japanese politics. Yay.

The end.

Oh, lyrics? But I'm so lazy. Okay fine, these are lyrics:

They hitch their covered wagons and they roll out west.
Politics in the pockets of their Sunday best.
Shaking hands, kissing babies, for all that they're worth.
They promise you gold, promise heaven on earth.

Still, that old bald eagle circles;
it's not the first time that he's seen
his reflection in the eyes of innocence.
He's become just another
part of the machine...

Starfish

Something else has made me disproportionately happy. But in order to describe said thing I first must describe some things that had been making me sad.

So, at the end of the week before last I put up stuff on one of the bulletin boards in the student genkan at Icchu. There was a little envelope where students could leave messages for me, and another envelope with random, very simple English word puzzles. Let's play, guess how many messages I got and how many of the word game sheets had been taken. Is the total sum of your guesses a positive integer? If so, it is higher than what I believed when I went to check on Monday morning, and found no messages, and a nice thick pile of word puzzles remaining. This made me feel like I was not a worthwile person.

Later that day, however, I decided to take the risk of actually counting the remaining word puzzles, knowing there had been twenty. If I counted twenty, it would of course plunge my spirits even lower, because I would know for sure no one took one. But, I've noticed about myself that I always have to do things like this, make sure, know for certain. So I counted.

Fifteen.

Yay! There's an infinite difference between five and zero, in this case. If five students actually took the puzzles, they'd been worth making. I was happy.

Second thing that had been making me sad: There's a kid in 3-1 (third year students, class 1), Yamamoto-kun (山本君), who always gives me the sweetest smiles, and occasionally asks me questions (in English!) about Japanese luxury cars and how popular they are in America. Sadly this is not a topic I'm much of an expert on. Anyway, this makes him the only student so far who has attempted to have conversation with me about anything other than whether I have a boyfriend, when I'm going to get married, and whether I think Jarryd is hot. And the only student who talks to me in English without immediately bursting into giggles after each word. (No offense to the very friendly and energetic group of girls who follow me around asking about my love life and giggling...I like them too! ^_^) But...when I gave my self introduction to 3-1, all of what, four weeks ago now, and they wrote me messages, I didn't receive one from him. I asked him the next time I was there -- two weeks ago -- and he said he'd given it to the main teacher and not to me, so I asked the teacher, and he just sort of shrugged. So I figured he'd lost it. Which wasn't a huge tragedy, but frustrated me, since Yamamoto-kun was the only student who had particularly asked content-full questions, and I couldn't write him a reply. Well, I could have just written him a note, but I didn't know if that was too singling-out somehow. Anyway. Perhaps for no very good reason, it frustrated me.

But,

When I got to school this week, there was a paper taped on my desk. Actually, it had somehow been flipped over, so that it was upside down and mostly on the desk next to mine. And so I didn't notice it or realize it had anything to do with me for quite a while. Finally at some point when I was bored and tired and scanning the desk for lack of anything better to do, I amused myself by trying to read the lettering at the top of the page -- which I realized was in English -- upside down and backwards. It was harder than it should have been -- I was really, really tired yesterday! -- but I finally made out the words "listen" and "answer". Wait, I finally thought to think, why is this paper in English anyway? And then, wait, that sounds like the heading of those sheets they wrote messages on. So I flipped the paper over. Naturally, it was one of those very sheets. Identified at the top as belonging to 3-1-14, Akinobu Yamamoto. Yay! I guess the teacher randomly found it somewhere. (Yes...the students do all have individual numbers...)

From this paper I learned that he likes cars (which I knew), the movie Bad Boys II, and the rapper T.I. Ha ha. I love the random American culture that reaches the middle schools of rural Japan...There were lots of kids who were fans of eminem and Linkin Park too. And one girl watches Kim Possible.

Meanwhile, I wrote a reply, which included some sales figures for Lexus and a discussion of the cars my own family owns. When I got to school this morning I discovered that I was not to have class with 3-1 or 3-4 as scheduled, only 3-3, which was disappointing because the third year day is always the most fun. 3-3 was first period -- we played bingo -- and after class I was in the process of handing my reply to the teacher to give to Yamamoto-kun, when I noticed him standing idly in the hallway. So I just gave it to him. He looked slightly intimidated by the length of the English paragraph, heh. But smiled at me as always.

Then he pulled out a folded piece of paper, and said "Ah, sono, English Board...kore..." I looked at the paper. My word puzzles! He'd done all of them. He pointed to the translation puzzle and grinned. When you filled in all the words in the little boxes, my name appeared vertically. I laughed and said "wow, very good!" I wasn't sure if he was like, handing it in to me sort of, or what, so I asked if I should take it or if he wanted it, and he said yes he wanted it, and folded it back up.

So really what made me disproportionately happy was knowing there was at least one student who bothered to take the puzzles, complete them, and wanted to show me, and seemed pleased that he'd noticed my name tucked in there sneakily. That makes it worth it for sure, right?

^_^

In other news, I bought airplane tickets yesterday! I'm officially scheduled to be home this winter now, from 12/23 through 1/9. So if anyone who's reading this (who isn't a sketchy stalker...) is going to be around the northeast during that time, we should hang out! :-)

And now I should be making myself some food and finishing vocab before Adam wakes up and yells at me for being so lazy, heh. (But AIM informs me he's only been idle for like three hours lol...so I kind of feel like I have a while...) In any case, have some lyrics (in English! Gasp!):

So as you push off from the shore,
won't you turn your head once more
and make your peace with everyone?
For those who choose to stay,
will live just one more day
to do the things they should have done.
And as you cross the wilderness,
spinning in your emptiness:
you feel you have to pray.
Looking for a sign that the Universal Mind has written you into the Passion Play...

便座カバー!

Something that made me disproportionately upset: At the party at my house on Friday, I discovered, someone took it upon him- or herself to switch the orientation of my toilet paper. I keep it so that it spins toward the wall. I have realized this is not standard, but it is what I prefer. So I understand someone maybe thinking "huh, that's kind of an awkward way to have toilet paper oriented." But how do you go from there to "and it's totally my place to correct this obvious flaw in the way this house is organized"? It's not like it's impossibly difficult to use the damn toilet paper that way. Just shrug your shoulders (yes, shrug, there are times when it is called for!!), use the toilet paper, and walk out. It's not your house! This bothered me. I'm sure it wasn't meant maliciously. But it seems to me like part of what you hear described as the shame culture of Japan: if they think you keep your toilet paper wrong, they won't ask you about it, tease you about it, or just ignore it as not their problem -- no, they'll just fix it for you, and you'll notice, and you'll know that someone disapproved so much of how you keep your toilet paper that they felt compelled to change it.

Why I was in a mood to be disproportionately upset by things: I let them cook meat in my house. I was considering putting this one also under the same heading as the last one, and leaving the underlying reason for my mood as something vague and chemical, like that I'd had two drinks, or prolonged PMS, or something. But no -- I have decided this was the underlying cause. I had said in an email to Jarryd that I didn't want meat cooked in my house, and yet when he showed up, he said "okay, so one of the nabe will be meat, and then we'll make a vegetarian one for you, too." "Oh..." I said. "So, you didn't read my email?" "Huh?" "...Never mind," I said. And I was never quite in a good mood for the rest of the night. Because I was disappointed in and angry with myself. Because all I the protest I could manage was "it's just, I don't want to have to clean up a bunch of meat afterward..." and so when they assured me there would be nothing to clean but a few bowls, and Valerie promised to take care of that, I had nothing left to object to. I try not to be an obnoxious vegetarian. I don't scowl at people in restaurants when they order meat. I don't wrinkle my nose at their food. I don't lecture them. And I am not, really, of the opinion that any individual person choosing to eat meat is an evil thing. It's not that simple. Perhaps mainly I don't feel justified being morally superior about it because my vegetarianism was handed to me. If I'd been raised eating meat, I can't honestly say I have any conviction that I would have made the choice to give it up. I love the food I love very deeply. I could easily see myself not wanting to give them up, rationalizing that humans are carnivores, that animals eat each other all the time, that I am not a large enough percentage of the world to make any real difference in any case. So I have no moral high ground, just the fact that my parents are vegetarian.

But, here is the truth: I don't believe in eating meat. It makes me sad and guilty to see the corpses of animals being eaten, whether that's fair or not, whether I hold it against the individual people doing the eating or not. And this is my house. This is my space. I didn't want people eating meat inside of it, and not just because I'm physically grossed out by the idea of having my sink full of leftover meat scraps. Because it made me feel guilty. Because it was too close, psychologically, to me buying, ordering, cooking meat. It's my house. And I was a complete pushover. This did not make me pleased with myself.

Something that makes me (disproportionately?) happy: When I woke up the next morning, one of the emails on my cell phone informed me that Miss Gratzer had friended me on facebook. Miss Gratzer is one of my high school math teachers. How random. I confirmed her friend request and scanned over her profile. She was friends with a handful of other teachers from my high school. Who knew? I guess it never explicitly occurred to me after facebook shifted to including grownups that this might include some of my high school teachers. So I friended Miss Dunnell, and Mrs. Dutta.

"I wonder..." I wondered. I searched. There were a dozen or so people with the name of my Spanish teacher; one of them had a picture that could have been him, but at the small size I couldn't tell. Oh well, I thought. Mrs. Dutta accepted my friend request. Just for fun I searched within her friends. Up popped that picture. So it was him. "Should I friend him?" I asked Andrew. "Of course," he said, "go for it." A few hours later I did -- with a little message saying "hey, Miss Gratzer randomly friended me and it led me to realize a lot of my old teachers are on here!" Well, I wouldn't want it to seem too personal, right?

And when I got home last night, after staying for three hours at a dinner party I expected to stay at for half an hour tops -- it turned out not to be the normal crowd of loud, drunk young men making loud, drunk jokes, but rather a crowd dominated mostly by sweet, friendly middle-aged Japanese women who asked me about my hobbies and what I like to cook and took pictures with me and made me exchange phone numbers with them...but I'm getting onto a tangent, aren't I? -- I found a message in my inbox. From my Spanish teacher! Saying it was nice to hear from me, and asking what I was up to. Hee! This was exciting. I wrote him back, perhaps a slightly rambly message, and this morning he has replied and his reply includes the sentence "I'd love to hear more about your linguistics thesis..." I'm trying to figure out how to respond to that without going overboard and babbling on and on about things...heh. But I figure I'll give myself a day or two to reply, and not do it right away.

Mr. Gajendragadkar, sadly, remains outside the world of facebook...

My plans for today: hang out at home, listen to baseball (maybe), talk to Andrew, finish 白河 (yes, finish finish!), finish the scene of my story I was in the middle of, and cook myself something nice for dinner.

Whether or not I read the essay my aunt posted on facebook a few days ago and am blatantly stealing from it in the format of this post: Yes.

But that's enough for this post I think. Thank you to anyone who informed me that you do in fact read this; it's very good to know. ^_^ (少ないのに。。。) I have various little anecdotes I've been meaning for a while to post on here, but I think I'll just keep meaning for now. It's time to find myself some food. I think I shall try looking in the grocery store...

さあ　これから何をするんだい　僕はもう行かなきゃ
ほら　またどこかで　涙の落ちる音。。。

P.S. If you don't know what the title of this post means, I recommend a Google image search. If you then don't know why it's the title of this post, rest assured -- there is no deep logic to it. I couldn't think of a title, and so a random reference to an anime no one who reads this will have seen was the best I could do.

一人で見た真っ赤な空

Sometimes, I have this sudden flash of realization that none of it really matters. Not in a cynical, indifferent sort of way -- but that everything I stress about, everything that pokes and prods at my mind and makes my stomach feel tight and keeps me up at night, it's all okay. I remember sitting outside the Science Center one day last summer, a week before I left for Japan. I had just bought about eight pairs of shoes and I wore my favorite one. I sat up against the stone wall next to the path that leads over to the parking lot. I had just been chatting with Lake, outside at the tables by the math wing, and now he had gone off to work and I waited for Mark, who had said he'd come to dinner with us and maybe even come see The Dark Knight as well. After the movie Lake and I were to head to Adam's house for a weekend of playing RACK-O and just chilling. It was one of those gorgeous days where the campus just sparkles and there are just the right number of clouds blowing around in the sky. I was worried, nervous, about all sorts of different things. Nervous about whether Mark and Lake would enjoy dinner or whether the conversation would be awkward; nervous about whether Mark would really rather be hanging out with his new boyfriend; nervous because Lake had said that Adam might take the roof and doors off his Jeep and the prospect of riding in it sort of scared me but I didn't want to seem lame...and of course, above everything, terrified of going to Japan the next week.

But suddenly, sitting there, for that moment, it all melted away. And I felt this deep conviction that nothing could possibly go wrong, not really, because I would always be able to sit and watch the clouds floating by and feel the wind, and that was really all I needed for the world to be good. Oh it sounds like such a cliche. And it is. But it's a beautiful feeling, when I happen to be able to find it.

And it doesn't mean I don't care, and it doesn't mean I won't try to make friends and to help people and to produce something meaningful from my life...It just means that every little step, every little interaction, every detail doesn't matter as much as it does in my head. It means there's something beautiful and joyful about just existing and as long as I get to exist, it will be okay. In these moments I stop needing validation, stop needing some sort of proof that people like me, proof that I'm successful in some concrete way.

But even though I can remember these moments so vividly, I can't recapture the feeling on command. I can only wish for it to come back. This whole week I've been slightly dampened, for no apparent reason. Everything has mattered just a little too much -- whether the students like me, whether people reply promptly enough to my emails, how messy my kitchen is and how daunting the idea of actually cleaning it is, whether the other ALTs invite me to hang out. I went for a walk tonight by the water and I was hoping for that flash to come. It was a nice walk. The sky was beautiful. I saw a few students who ran over and said Hi to me. But that feeling didn't come.

I haven't been updating this blog because no one reads it. If anyone ever tells me they actually read it, I'll go back to posting. Or, if you just email me and ask what's been up in my life, I'd be happy to babble. But it feels pointless to type out anecdotes here just so they'll fall into the great Void of things-online-that-no-one-sees.

Now I guess I'll go tackle my dishes and try to get the kitchen back in working order.

大切な人に唄いたい　聴こえているかも解らない
だからせめて続けたい　続ける意味さえ解らない

一人で見た真っ赤な空　君もどこかで見ただろうか
僕の好きな微笑みを　重ねて浮かべた夕焼け空