Lay in a supply of red wine. Resolve not to ever think about school outside of school until having had wine. If start thinking about school, think to oneself, have I had my wine yet? If the answer is no get the bottle. If no bottle, no thinking about school. Brilliant!
Two times in two months that I’ve heard the same comment about childbirth is making me think about my stance on a particular liberated-woman-sensitive-man theory I’d accepted without much thought.
This theory is that both parents should be able to share equally in the birth of their child, from the beginning, and also that a strong man will be there through all of it, from the beginning, because wincing at the sight of blood and pain is wimpy and a poor excuse for missing out on the miracle of childbirth. With that thought in mind, there is a law in the United States called the
Family and Medical Leave Act that is supposed to provide men and women with equal rights to take time off and attend their newborn.
In Japan, I’m pretty sure there is no law of this kind, and not much call for it. According to a Japanese man interviewed by Absolutely Tokyo, it wasn’t the office keeping him from attending his baby’s birth, it was just common knowledge that a man has no business being there. Here women traditionally move back home in the end of pregnancy to be with their mothers during delivery and first months of infancy.
Anyway, I was with AbsTok in her shock at the man’s reasoning (”to see a woman screaming ‘gaaaaaaaaaahhhh’ and giving birth, with all that blood and nakedness, destroys a marriage”) and dismissed it as typical Japanese living in a bygone era-ness.
But then I read the same thought expressed by a woman over at Opinionistas. To quote a quote, O’s med student friend in residency told her “I’ll give you some advice…if you do end up giving birth the regular way, don’t let your husband stand at your feet. No way should he ever see something come out of you like that. He’ll never look at you the same way again afterwards. I’m sorry but it’s true.â€?
Anyway, I still believe firmly that men, women and the baby can all benefit from equal sharing in baby’s first months, but I have to admit it makes me wonder about a man’s place in the delivery itself. All-inclusive, nobody left out, men in the room with the doctors, versus keeping a few mysteries behind veils…what do men think of this anyway? That’s an opinion I’d like to hear.
Having kids sounds scary, any way you spin it. My friend is on her second baby, due any day now and I don’t envy her. Maybe in a couple years I will. For now I’ll stick with kissing, my sex ed teacher told me you can’t get pregnant that way (and it helps your allergies).
As of today you can’t describe ambient noise or recount the ambience of your recent dinner date in my comments, because my blacklist will nail you as one of the annoying-as-fuck spammers that keeps trying to sell the prescription drug Amb*en 1000 times a day on my blog. Take that goddamn spammers! I need a different plan of attack, this blacklist thing isn’t working well.
Ambient mood lighting aside, it’s Tuesday and I’m back at work. Last week was the famous Golden Week, an entire week off which I spent rafting and canyoning in Shikoku, followed by hibernating (vernating?) in front of the second downloaded season of Lost. Good show, by the way, despite its obviously republican Bible-consulting writers.
Anyway, Monday classes made me want to jump out the third floor window for something to do (let’s recite verbs from the textbook together! “He….went-o….shoppingu….”"ximena sensei is the ing-verb correct?” “yep”"I….am-u….lookingu”"ximena sensei is the ing-verb right?”"you betcha”) so we’re trying for a better Tuesday.
In other news, I haven’t complained of the cold in over two weeks, and today it’s actually a bit hot. Summer is around the corner, time to get out the old ats’! As in atsui, nee, as in “damn it sure is hot in here.”
In sports, the Lakers were tossed out of the NBA playoffs, after losing depressingly to the Phoenix Suns in a tie-breaking game 7. Too bad for the Lakers, but Steve Nash is a much cooler guy anyway.
Lest anyone who knows me panic at the sight of sports news featured on my blog and justifiably fear that I’ve gone daft, well, what can I say? The laptop that houses season two of Lost was taken over by the NBA. I had no choice but to become interested in basketball and learn the names of the players and choose a team based on character analysis of both sides and schedule the rest of my week around finding out what happens to them. Nothing else to be done about it.
Let’s verb!
Blogging is writing an entry in your weblog. What term describes reading your daily blogs?
Thus far I’ve got:
Dunno about that second one.
I didn’t use to have cable, and then I moved to Japan and now I don’t get any English TV or radio stations at all, so watching/hearing the news is pretty much a hassle and I feel I’m not keeping up.
And now I don’t have to! It’s like a three minute version of the Daily Show.
On the enjoyment of being a contrarian.
And by contrarian I mean the type of person who brings up every ornery thing they can think of to prove other people wrong just for the satisfaction of it.
If we’re expressing our contrary opinions, I’d just like to get off my chest the following: I tend to regard the reflexive finding of ways to call bullshit, sometimes even in one’s own supposed friends, as a very minor intellectual step above those who obsessively play to win at that best of party games, “top that.*
This other game, we’ll call it “who’s smarter”–it doesn’t do you any good. It doesn’t make you sound smart. It doesn’t make you friends. And let me tell you, two of these people in a room together is as fun as wad of burning hair. As soon as it leaves the realm of intellectual discussion and both parties still won’t drop it, it becomes about as entertaining as a fighting couple.
Via Yami, who is of course not the subject of my rant. I love you Yami.
* Top That: “I went bungee jumping” “oh, yeah, isn’t it great? I did bungee jumping from a helicopter five times” “oh well anyway when I did it they almost used a rope that was too long” “oh. heh, anyway, actually they did use a rope that was too long in my case but I only got a concussion and the pending lawsuit could win me millions, can you believe it?” *sour silence from the defeated party*
The heat has officially been turned off at school and my kerosene heater ran out of fuel last night. While my lungs are grateful for the respite, I sure wish it would warm up already.
Had my first class of the year today and I think it got off to a good start. In my opinion, we’re at an immediate advantage with the best teacher for the job teaching seven promising students. We started off speaking in English today, leaving no room for the usual “eigo-wakaranai” (but I don’t speak English!) nonsense, and we intend to carry on that way.
And to make my Friday a bit happier yet, the new JTE told me that she had been mistaken; actually the class of five girls who always give me some kind of effort (the third-years I’ve had in various classes since they were freshmen) will be my class this year. So I’m looking forward to that, though I wouldn’t have been quite as hateful towards my co-ALT if she’d had them, as I made it sound like when I was in mid-froth the other day.
This is partly because I realized just now, with a shock, that I’m beginning to sound like a certain ALT in a certain corner of the prefecture, a self-proclaimed genius destined for world domination according to her blog (which I will definitely not link to), and who is reputed to have single-handedly driven off a new ALT at her school by coveting all of the best classes and jealously guarding “her” students. Note to self, try not to become a total raging bitch.
So, today I found out why, when last year, my various team teachers had a meeting with each other (ten feet from where I was sitting) to discuss the plans for the class I taught with them, I was never asked to attend.
According to this year’s head of the English department, who often handily lets cats out of bags, it was because of certained unnamed teachers who were “not comfortable” with having the meeting about English language conversation class held in English. And thus Ximena, obviously knowing not a lick of Japanese, could not be included in the proceedings, because we wouldn’t want that teacher to suffer or anything.
I know exactly who it was, of course. The one who did her best to undermine me in all of our classes, laughing and talking aside to the students about how she couldn’t speak English, tralala oh well!–It turns out she not only helped drive a wedge in class, but she passive-aggressively requested that I not be included in staff lesson plan meetings for her comfort, so I was always clueless as to the master plan, and had three different conversations with three different teachers each week to plan the same lesson.
The consequences of that disorganization affected students as well. I didn’t attend the meetings, but of course I wrote 50% of every exam. Because classes were all slightly different, the test sometimes covered material that some classes hadn’t touched on, but I wasn’t aware of it until grading the test. And all this could have been solved by my attending an occasional meeting. One might ask, what’s the point of my job here anyway? What are the taxpayers of Japan forking over for?
Fucking ho-bag bitch!! And fuck the rest of them too, for indulging her little personal issue at my expense. Yeah, it’s time to say bye-bye to Japan.
This on top of an exhausting day of fully grokking the school supply situation here at school. Japan is a rich country, you’d think there’s some money floating around in there for, say, enough teacher’s copies of the textbook? Apparently not, so this year I will be sharing one book with two other teachers, including a promising new JTE with a wry sense of humor, and less happily, the whiney once-a-week ALT who as of this year splits most of my classes with me, taking turns each week. (Which, incidentally, means we have to work together. Which was like pulling teeth last year, trying to pin something down while she says she’s busy, will find something later at home on the internet. This on top of the two-hour once-a-week class schedule, which is the worst possible way to learn a language, but I shouldn’t even get into it or I’ll never stop, though I’m on a roll here so why not?)
The kicker was a visit to the school library, to proudly show off my donation of over 60 English books ranging from elementary to high school reading levels. Whereupon I was told via my JTE, by the librarian who does not believe I can understand Japanese (who did however thank me profusely when he first received the box) that by the way they can’t actually be added to the library, because there is not enough shelf space for any more books. So I was like, this library is an empty room, can’t we like, get rid of that dusty wall of unopened encyclopedias to make room for something students might actually read…? But no, at most I can pick out the best 10 to be displayed on a rotating basis. A display of books? WTF. Anyway, it’s a poor school indeed that can’t afford an extra shelf.
I’d had my fill, but there was one more kick coming–the five best girls in last year’s shipwreck of a class, who like me personally and always give me at least some kind of effort? They made a tiny class of them, representing the best English students in the whole school, and gave the class to Whiney ALT. What the fuck ever, I say again. I tried, I really did. I’m so outta here.
Unfortunately, in some ways, I’m leaving just as I feel I might finally be hitting my stride teaching- and classroom management-wise. But there’s no way I could take another year. The way I see it, my school with help from the taxpayers of Japan is funding my immenent psych-ward hospitalization and therapy.
My bike mechanic friend down the street suggested, when I stopped by to rant about incompetence, that I ask her how much she paid for uraguchi-nyuin (bribing one’s way into college, literally “back door freshman”), or maybe what the kaedama (substitute) who took her teaching license exam cost back in the day, hahaha. Great guy, Hiroshi. Even if he did remind me to keep an open heart lest it become small and hard from hatred. Yeah whatever, my heart is a pebble of black tar.
Like I told my friend the Korean ALT, as I finished telling him my story, I could just cry at the way things are run at this supposedly well-funded school. And what’s worse is that I’m certain American schools are in even far more depressing shape.
“Uh-huh,” he said, deep in thought. “Do you think I’ve lost weight?”
I’m back, I’m rested, and I’m slightly tanned. I spent spring break in Thailand. It was messy, sandy, beachy, lovely, delicious, and above all stinking HOT. It was a nice break, and mostly blurs into a haze of beach and Bangkok traffic.
The first day to Bangkok, arrived at midnight and waited in the airport until the first morning flight down to the open-air boutique airport on Ko Samui. From that island I and my travel companion, we’ll call him OC, were efficiently funneled toward the ferry which took us to a smaller island called Ko Phangan (”pan-yang”). At the little ferry port we spent an obscene amount of money (I think the term is “got had”) for a very bumpy ride in the back of a pickup truck “taxi” over the worst road I have ever seen, to the other side of the island. This was so we could stay at a little beach called Ao Thong Nai Pan Noi. It was worth it; the beach was gorgeous and we had a really cool little hut, literally 15 feet from the edge of the sand. To celebrate I got a Thai massage, which was everything that massage long ago in India should have been.
So of course, we only stayed one night, figuring everywhere would be equally cool, and continued our journey back over the island the next day and on to another, smaller island called Ko Tao, which was our intended destination. I wanted to give scuba diving a try since OC is a big fan of it, and Ko Tao is famous for awesome dive sites.
Which I, unfortunately, never saw any of. The next day we joined a boat trip, my friend for a refresher course and I to try an intro dive. I was thinking that if I liked it I might do the 4-day certification course, but as it turned out I was counting chickens before I bought any eggs. I couldn’t learn the most basic of skills required to try even an intro dive, which is clearing your mask underwater. Couldn’t do it, just kept inhaling seawater and almost puking, all the while getting more and more panicked about the thought of having multiple meters of water over my head. So, after like 50 tries, I gave up and swam defeatedly back to the boat. I guess I’m a landlubber, not cut out for life underwater. In other firsts, it was probably also the most I’ve ever paid to fail utterly.
So, no dive course for me, went back to Ko Phangan with the idea of staying put for awhile. This time we stayed on Ao Thong Nai Pan Yai, the second beach in the same bay as before. The beach was even prettier and the sand even finer, and the water even more swimmable. It was amazing. This time the front porch of the bungalow was a mere five feet from the sand, and the people who owned the hut and restaurant were very friendly. We stayed three nights, and OC got another dive in while I just swam, snorkeled (no problems there), napped, got another massage, ate too much and got a little browner. Though I really slathered on the sunscreen, not wanting either a) to look like the lobstery people who obviously forgot or b) the bronzed German girls who all looked great in their bikinis, despite being the color of grilled hot dogs.
Which brings me to another point; as it turns out, Thailand is a secret German colony! I swear 9 out of 10 tourists were German, and also smokers and covered in tattoos, both men and women. They did, however, look great in their bikinis/speedos. I was totally jealous. I gained weight, if such a thing is possible on a vacation where you sweat a lot and swim and haul your pack everywhere. Even considering the pint of blood I lost to mosquitoes at dusk.
On April Fool’s Day we left regretfully and headed to Bangkok for 2.5 days, just enough to see the Grand Palace and Royal Wat, Wat Pho (the reclining Buddha), get massages at the Wat Pho massage school, and hit up some markets where I got to practice my rusty bargaining skills. While I definitely enjoyed the beach, I have to say I felt much more alive in Bangkok, chatting and haggling with the vendors. If I were alone I might have spent the whole two days at the markets and really perfected my art.
I expected my impression of Bangkok to be similar to that of Delhi, but actually Bangkok seemed more modern and affluent by far. The traffic jams were epic, but all in all the driving was much more organized, with less trash, fewer dogs and no cows. If Bangkok is still the third world, then Delhi is more like the 4th. Anyway, Thailand was good, long live the King.
Interestingly, I think it also sort of got the desire for post-Japan traveling in India out of my system. Somehow it became clear that with no job prospect there and no desire to study yoga full time (the default for India travel bums) I don’t think I’d be happy just wandering. I really want to go to India again sometime, but with a purpose. For now I want to keep moving my life in a direction.
My new non-India plan is vague, but I think it will involve going home and bumming for a bit until I get encouraged to leave/get a job/get out of bed and shower by the mum. I intend to sleep a lot and enjoy not having a job for awhile. Need to detox, de-Japanify, stop bowing reflexively.
Other than that, I’m thinking of (dum-da-da-dum) applying for grad school (I know I swore I wouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself aaak!) possibly in Education, with a teaching certificate in mind. Seems like something that could be useful.
But before any of that, I have 3.5 months to go, as of yesterday. I’m already stressing the apartment cleaning, sorting, packing, shipping, weeding of my stuff, which got busy with itself and multiplied while I wasn’t looking. Also I have to think of what still to try and see while in Japan. It seems awkward to be starting a new school year just as I am about to go, and in some ways I’m ready to just finish up now and get out. But more than anything, I am dreading the goodbyes. As much as I complain and plot my escapes, there are a dozen people here whom I will really miss.
Maybe I should stop moving around so much.
It’s a beautiful day, too beautiful to bitch. Besides, some guy giving a lecture apparently said that as a short-term visitor to Japan, I spend way too much time objectifying, exoticizing and otherwise demonizing as a would-be expert on Japan. Well maybe, but it’s mostly self-preservation okay?
Anyway, I come to you today with the following thought; how about we talk about what Japan does right, with minimal snarking for a change?
First off, spring. You can’t not love the gorgeous delicate ume and sakura trees, they tend to make me sneeze a little but I wish they wouldn’t, because they are the romantic centerpiece of truly beautiful spring days.
Seasons are kind of cheating, though…so how about the beautiful houses that invite in the spring? The whole prefecture is full of little villages by the sea, and from the train along the coast you can see shiny ceramic tile roofs by the sea, mostly black but occasionally blue or sea-green, like fish scales.
A traditional Japanese house (and even my apartment) has a tatami (woven-straw-mat) floor in at least one room. It is soft to walk on, comfortable to sit on, warm in the winter and cool in the summer. To complement the floor, rice paper screen doors and windows which glow coolly in the day but keep out the direct sunlight.
More important, if you ask me, is the bathroom. I’m not a big fan of squat toilets, luckily they were out of style by the time they built my place. The deep ofuro hip-bath, coveted by some, is not something I’m particularly attached to but I long for the ultimate luxury item: a heated toilet seat. Someone messed up and forgot to invent them back home.
How long can a house last without the guidelines for living in it? To protect wood floors, delicate tatami, clean rugs and the sanity of the floor-washer, Japanese people take their shoes off in the house. I myself am a self-proclaimed shoe nazi, agreeably and without regret, from even before Japan. I don’t want to walk barefoot on what you tracked in from outside. I don’t want to sweep the floor every day. Take them off.
Something else I’ve noticed here is that people are careful with their stuff. At home I always thought clumsy or graceful was a personality trait, but I’ve come to believe this is actually the result of cultural training. People are taught to be good with their hands.
I observed a cooking class here at school and was astonished–there aren’t messy cooks, things don’t get everywhere, it’s almost weirdly clean. The specifications of procedures taught in cooking class are exacting, with quizzes in areas such as timed daikon chopping, graded for quantity and precision. They are teaching not only the ingredients and procedure, but the techniques for minimal waste and mess.
This somehow translates into an ingrained lack of trouble with being neat and clean in other areas of life, the opposite of most people I know back home. I think our messy Western houses must seem sprawling and dirty by comparison.
As far as travel is concerned, long-distance buses are the way to go. You get your own island seat and you don’t have to share an armrest. They recline and have footrests, and are half the price of trains and faster. Need I say more?
Well, time runs short. All this talk of spring and travel reminds me that tomorrow is the beginning of spring break, and my long-awaited vacation. And on that note, I’m off and away for the next two weeks or so, so have a good one and I’ll catch you on the flip side!