burningbright

Last night, in the absence of having Voyager episodes to watch or email to check, I cleaned my apartment (more like shuffled things into different piles) and made ready for winter (dug my kerosene heater out of the media equivalent of a snowdrift).

I also cooked dinner, for the first time in awhile. I’ve been skipping or eating out or bumming food since being sick, and it felt a little alien being back in the kitchen. It felt empty, too, like a missing presence over on the desk. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think my computer was a person…so maybe it’s just that I felt the ever-present emptiness more keenly without Voyager to fill the silence.

Last year at this time I felt peaceful in my home, but this year I feel uneasy, bored, lonely. The boredom probably means there is something I should be doing but am avoiding (studying Japanese, for example).

Anyway, that’s just ramble. Something occured to me today as I took a survey for the benefit of AJET, a volunteer association of JETs who interface with the Japanese government division that oversees our job.

It asked me questions about team-teaching, my co-teachers, their English level and how much I am included in the process of teaching English at my school and to my surprise, I could not answer negatively to any of the questions. I am useful at this school in that I actually get to teach my classes. I have a lot of control over what is attempted in class, if not how it turns out. My JTEs speak English well and are not afraid to use it, for the most part.

I’m not always happy with how things go, but it’s not the fault of the program–more like me getting frustrated with my students for not having a high enough English level to do very interesting activities.

(More accurately, I get frustrated with myself for not being a better teacher, when I do an activity and the kids seem bored. Other subjects may be boring but mine is not supposed to be!

(I feel guilty when I look back on a class and realize I should have fleshed out the lesson more, like yesterday when I based an exercise on material I assumed they had learned in their grammar class but apparently have not.

(In fact, recent delves into the English 1 textbook as well as a new policy of pausing to ask the kids whether or not they understand what I’m saying both lead me to believe that a) I am not understood a lot of the time and b) they are masters of pretense and will never ever tell me if they don’t get it. Maybe it’s a Japanese thing, or maybe all students do it, but it looks like it’s up to me to interpret feedback because my co-teachers will never tell me when I’m off track.)

Other of my grumblings have to do with sometimes not feeling loved and needed, but all in all, job satisfaction or dissatisfaction comes from success in the classroom, and feeling perhaps not properly qualified to do this job* without the language skills. Other than that…based on the human tape recorder stories of many of my friends, I’m pretty grateful to be where I am. My teachers are good, my kids aren’t bad, I can’t complain though I like to.

*It begs the question, what is this job? That’s a bit of a mystery, actually. The ALT job description is a vague list of happy end goals for the future of Japan. Teaching English is not specifically on that list. Among other things, I am supposed to experience Japan and take the experience home with me to share with the rest of the world. Which is pretty much the sweetest job ever. But I do sometimes wonder guiltily** how to best spend my time/earn my salary while I’m here.

**There’s that word again. Hmm.

November 16th, 2005
Categories: school . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

My computer was crap. It never worked quite right and always made funny sounds. One day the hard drive started making an interesting clicking noise.

I thought it might be trying to tell me something so instead of backing up important information I restarted it one too many times and now it is fried.

Fuck.

And then there’s my digital camera, whose batteries last half an hour these days. As a final straw, my 256 mb card corrupted beyond repair when I was in Okinawa.

Is it a sign that I am supposed to turn Amish? Thank god I don’t have a pacemaker. Everything breaking at once, it makes me despair of spending two grand replacing all of it…only to do it again in another two years.

Maybe I’ll get out the old film camera, and read some books or something.

November 15th, 2005
Categories: happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

I woke up last Thursday and started puking, and puked my guts out for half a day. At noon the shit fairy came to visit and stayed until Sunday. It was a wasted weekend, and now I’m back to basically normal digestion but I am coughing up the nasty snotty phlegm of last winter and the winter before. I thought it was sickness but maybe it’s just cooler, drier air that makes my throat and lungs clog up.

India did it to me, that month in Delhi, breathing fumes and dust and grinder shavings. Now my lungs fill defensively at the merest change in the weather. How could I survive the winter at home? More importantly, how do I combat this lung juiciness for the next four months? I don’t wanna go through it again this year. The hot wasn’t so hot this year, and the humidity not so humid…how easily my body has adapted to warmth and wetness. It does not relish winter, and it trembles in fear at the prospect of the frigidly dry Midwest.

November 9th, 2005
Categories: happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: 2 Comments

If there is one thing that makes otherwise liberal and free-thought advocating folks bond with just about anybody else, that would be hating vegetarians. I kinda get it and I kinda don’t, but mostly I just wonder what gets people so annoyed about my stating a preference that doesn’t infringe on their liberties.

I have been vegetarian, loosely interpreted, for several years. Technically I think I’m an ovo-lacto-pesca vegetarian, which is arguably barely vegetarian at all, but what it cuts out of my diet are the key ingredients in hamburgers, hot dogs, steak, ramen, meatballs, yakiniku, tenderloin, pot roast, chicken salad, corndogs, ham sandwiches, BLTs, tacos, beef curry, and the damn bacon bits that are in everything. And reptiles and bugs I guess. Anyway.

I have reasons for deciding not to eat meat. But I’m not sure they are important, because not one of my reasons has even once been enough to convince a non-vegetarian of, well, anything. Not that I was trying to convince anyone–absolutely 100% of the times I failed to convince were during the process of responding to a question as to why I am vegetarian. People are always with the questions, no conversation is too polite to save from firing off a round, like ammo.

You know what the most common response is to my answer? “But I like meat.” As if I were saying, for example, that I was personally forbidding them from ever eating meat again. Or even implying that they should change any of their habits. As if they were in any way addressing my statement. In fact, I’m pretty sure the average non-veg is usually seeking a target, rather than a conversation. They want a finished argument from me, which [being flawed and weak, naturally] can easily be attacked and trumped. If possible, they would single-handedly like to send a former salad eater running to the nearest steakhouse, freed from their burden.

If it mattered I could give you a litany of speculation on the motivations beyond simple curiosity, for the unexpected intensity of an average interrogation; secret guilt because they eat meat and feel they ought not to, satisfied disillusionment as to the reality of a painful world, association of vegetarians with suspiciously hippie activities like living in co-ops, conviction of cold-eyed realism wherein one accepts humanity’s blessed status at the top of the food chain, their father is a pork farmer. Whatever. In truth I don’t care about their deeper motivations.

Even the more thoughtful questioners don’t bring much of a counter-argument, and that is because this is not a debate. In the end, of course, I am vegetarian because it is my opinion that to be so is a good thing. I have a system of thought based on philosophical study and empirical evidence, but nothing irrefutable at the bottom of it. Which makes it kind of like believing in God, come to think of it. Though I am loathe beyond loathing to draw parallels between religion and being a vegetarian, one thing is certain; believing in pretty much anything is a declaration of war against today’s enlightened ethical agnostic.

The Japanese take. At an enkai last week, a drinking/karaoke party with my former adult class students for a member who got married on Saturday, I was asked. Among the but-I-like-meat responses I caught a comment (which I can’t be sure of because it was in Japanese). I think the guy said he was surprised, not by any of my reasons specifically, but because my reasons were a personal choice.

I took this to mean personal choice in the sense that it is my decision to inconvenience myself (and sometimes others), not a mandate by a doctor or a religion. Which is true, though I try to minimize the hassle for others. But anyway, it was possibly an example of what gets the collective Japanese dander up.

One more thing. People who style themselves vegetarian purely for reasons of health. They grate, and it’s not just the smugness. Something about the damn granola they are always chewing on, it really pisses me off.

November 2nd, 2005
Categories: deep thoughts, japan . Author: ximena . Comments: 2 Comments

And Happy Halloween. As my students now know, ãƒ?ロｳｪーンã?¯ã‚·ãƒ¢ãƒŠå…ˆç”Ÿã?®å¤§å¥½ã??ã?ªholidayã? ã€‚I celebrated with friends at a local bar, with about the best music I’ve heard at a DJ’d event in Japan.

I was a pirate. Unfortunately there were enough pirates for a respectably sized crew. For the record, I am in Japan, besides for web surfing I am pop-culturally isolated. How could I have known that pirate was going to be the single most popular costume in the entire world? I just think Johnny Depp is hot, and, uh, I want to be him I guess. Walk the plank the rest of ye scurvy copycat scallawags! Costume-wise it was a bit depressing for me.

But everyone put a lot of thought into their costumes, and the Japanese partiers who came also got into it, so that was cool. Definitely one of the better parties I’ve been to around here.

An enjoyable Halloween night, the beautiful wedding of an aquaintance-almost-friend and other events in the last few weeks have conspired to give me pause about my blithe decision to leave next year. Up to now it has seemed so obvious, that two years is the perfect amount of time. Three years would be too long, but two is just enough.

Or is it? Do I really know this place? I’m more settled in for sure. It isn’t as exciting as last year, but as a trade off it is more comfortable. People I meet even seem to express a little bit of respect; sticking it out for a second year, huh? I still get complimented on my use of chopsticks at every enkai, and I am still barely literate, but I am in this for another year, not giving up just yet, and that’s worth something.

Also finally, this past summer and this fall, I am getting to know some people I could really be friends with. Actual Japanese people, shocking I know. I think I’m starting to become a part of other people’s lives, and that’s a distinction I never would have made even half a year ago.

Another plus; school is going more smoothly this year. I have figured out ways to work with nearly all of my teachers, I don’t bitch more than once a week about them anymore. Somehow, coming full-circle to the material I taught last year and facing it again, I now recognize steps I can take to improve my teaching, and the thought of class doesn’t sent me into a panic anymore. No more not-a-real-teacher non-Japanese-speaking blind leading the non-English-comprehending blind; now I run my classes the way I want…mostly. I’m over my stage fright…almost completely. It’s taken a full year to get this far.

There are certainly the things that didn’t go well–this year’s school festival, for example. This summer, which would have been better spent several thousand miles from Japan. The fact that I’m not teaching an adult class this year, apparently. But it kind of makes me want to do it over, just once more, and get it right this time. See Mami-chan, who told me she’d make sure we did something in next year’s school festival, and her friends graduate.

I know the routine now; life gets busier and busier until Christmas, and then after break it escalates a little more until the end of February, when the seniors stop coming to school, and then the freshmen and sophomores eventually take their finals, and then there’s graduation in March and life steadily slows down again despite the beginning of the new school year until summer when everything is dead. Arrive September, repeat.

The way this year is passing another year might just fly by if I signed on for it…what to do?

By the way, for some stuff about rocks and feminism and an occasional piratey Yarrrr! check out this blog.

November 1st, 2005
Categories: happenings, japan . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

October 31st, 2005
Categories: quiz . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

Or alternatively, “empty chairs at empty tables.” Where did the entire staffroom disappear to? Do I hear an assembly in the gym? Well, it’s a good thing I no longer give a shit about whether they include me in stuff here at school…

Briefly considered going home there, upon being ditched yet again at my desk without notice, but I think they tend to notice if you disappear and I’m not trying to make enemies.

The turning point was the school festival. I’m sure I could have tried harder to insert myself into preparations, but the truth is I never had much idea what was going on, when I asked to help they said things were fine thanks, and I felt too uncomfortable to just walk into a room and tell them to let me join. Plus, another little bit of honesty: I was afraid to offer my services too freely and get roped into a ton of thankless gruntwork, taking up all my free time with potentially little reward. Commitment fears blah blah.

Anyway, they didn’t ask and I didn’t volunteer loudly enough, and to top it off they didn’t ask me to be in the teacher’s play because my Japanese is not good enough, and I was hurt. And since the school is an organization and not a person, there is nobody to address this feeling to, so over the last couple weeks I’ve decided without deciding that I’m just not going to try very hard to be part of things anymore. Being buddy-buddy with the teachers is not why I came here anyway.

Which isn’t to say I don’t care about my classes. On the contrary, I think caring less about what teachers think is allowing me to concentrate more fully on trying to improve my classes, both in content and in how I relate to students. My goal is to have my classes be more interesting, and to be as responsive and interactive a teacher as possible, surpassing the language barrier to the best of my ability. If I can do that I will consider this year well spent.

As far as goals go, I don’t really care about learning Japanese anymore either. I will take the correspondence course like last year, and I still look things up and ask questions, but unless (ever hopeful) things take a wild turn I probably won’t spend much time learning to write kanji.

Because in a year, I’ll be gone. I’m pretty sure. Believe it or not I actually have some reservations about leaving. What if I don’t find another good job? This job is pretty sweet to be giving up. And it would definitely be nice to see some of my favorites graduate; Mami-chan, Fuyuko and Chisato, Chihomi and Akiko, Chiyo.

But I can’t stay for them, and the thought of a third year of Sailing: Lesson 4, Who’s Calling, Please? about makes my decision for me. Please god no. Only so many more winters I can stand to freeze and breathe kerosene. To be semi-conversational and barely literate. The facial expressions of blank confusion and an extra 40 minute wait at the bank upon submitting two pieces of paper in the wrong order. The giant cockroaches.

And yet, still I wonder, is it worse than what I will go back to? After all, I’ve only met one person in Japan so far who professes not to believe in evolution. On the whole, people are more polite and more thoughtful, that’s a welcome change from the boorish average back home.

Yes, there are things about Japan I would definitely like to take home, and I guess in an alternate reality another year isn’t even completely out of the question…but the prospect of staying indefinitely makes me quake in my shoes; thus the waning interest in Japanese language studies.

So, where to next?

12. Grad school for geology.

Because geology is sexy.

September 29th, 2005
Categories: school, career, japan . Author: ximena . Comments: 1 Comment

“…54% of Americans do not believe in evolution.”

Are you fucking kidding me? What is going on here? Explanations welcome.

NYT article.

September 21st, 2005
Categories: politics . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

It is almost September. Next month was the deadline I set for myself, for having some viable options thought up for next year. The need for this becomes especially apparent as I sit here warming my desk chair due to cancelled classes, and face the reality of my questionable usefulness as an assistant ESL teacher.

But it is undeniably a job, which is what I will be needing this time next year, so I am making a list. Carefully considered, in no particular order and with some disregard for viability:

1. Travel tour guide.
2. Grad school.
3. Website owner and maintainer.
4. Teacher.
5. Dolphin trainer.
6. Green building enabler.
7. Astronaut.
8. Something in a third-world country.
9. Starfleet.
10. Psychohistorian.

There might be more, but I think that covers a lot of ground.

Number 10 would be particularly cool, although probably a thankless task since humanity doesn’t yet have the million year history necessary for proper analysis, and even if it did and I could extrapolate the future, nobody would appreciate my predictions until I was dead. But I could still make the most amazing timeline ever, which has its own appeal. Grokking the depth of time really fascinates me, and my feeling is described well by this NYT editorial:

I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old…

It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity.

…3.5 billion years of biological history is different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time.

Asimov had an inkling, and his stories always took place over millenia. It was both awesome and alienating, because you knew you could not be the hero in one of his stories. None of his heros ever saw more than a fraction of the story. The Time Machine captured a sense of it, even the 2002 movie version had moments, but accidental spine tingles seem to be the best we can do to try and describe eons.

The author of the article said, “One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time.” I agree. It makes me want to stand in the Total Perspective Vortex (Doug Adam’s machine that shows you in one instant the whole infinity of creation and yourself in relation to it, reportedly with the one nasty side effect of destroying your soul), or at the very least to create the timeline to end all timelines.

Yes, the Ultimate Timeline. Now that would be a sweet, sweet project.

August 25th, 2005
Categories: career . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

It has been awhile since I checked in on the American music scene so I thought I’d update you.

*WARNING: THIS POST SPIRALS QUICKLY. STOP IF COLORFUL LANGUAGE OR REFERENCES TO RACE OFFEND YOU*

*…PANSY*

Review

“Touch,” by Amerie. Shakes her ass. Skipped to next song after 15 generous seconds. “Sugar We’re Goin’ Down,” Fall Out Boy. Only white guy on the list, or at least I think he’s white, can’t tell under the rime of dirt. Rants about how he hasn’t washed for days. Or that’s what he should be ranting about because he needs a fucking bath, twenty seconds. “How to Deal,” Frankie Jay. Heavily made up girl writhes and glares while he croons and licks his lips a lot. Ten seconds.

“These Boots Were Made for Walkin’.” Jessica “Mouth” Simpson has no talent. Jesus. For what it’s worth, Ashlee Simpson (not listed) is way better than anyone on the list, reference “La La” (”You can throw me like a boomerang/I’ll come back and beat you up”).

“Bonanza (Belly Dancer),” Akon. He licks his lips a lot and some girls shake their asses. Them girls are nasty! And he’s even nastier, fucking gross grabby perv!

[This video reminds me of that club in Okinawa City near the military base. There were five distinct groups of people, who only interacted at the groin when at all. They were, in order of height, Japanese girls dressed like hookers, black girls dressed like hookers, white girls dressed badly, white guys dressed badly, and black guys dressed like thugs. The white girls stood in four-square style groups facing each other, pointedly ignoring everyone else except to glare and/or roll their eyes. The white guys shuffled pathetically and tried to grind on girls, failing consistently. The black guys shuffled and tried to grind on girls, which worked more often because the black girls were down for ass grinding.

The Japanese girls were hilarious. I personally watched one girl who had gotten separated from her Friend Gaggle, as she helplessly backed in a sort of limp-wristed dance across the floor trying to escape from a pursuing grinder, looking around desperately for someone to rescue her. She couldn’t think of a reason to say no to him, since attracting him was precisely what she had accessorized for in the first place, but upon having attracted him her life’s purpose was thrown into turmoil as she realized she really didn’t want him to grind on her ass or get anywhere near her…this existential conflict could be read on her face. I laughed out loud and then turned around to tell some guy to get the fuck away from my butt.

In fact people often seem to consider my butt an open topic for free discussion. My butt has led people to believe {and express said belief out loud} that I am of mixed origins, either black or Latina, which I consider quite a compliment except they were pretty much just talking about my butt. The woman who cuts my hair made cupping motions. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it. That club was totally lame. I am officially done with hip-hop for good and anybody who touches my butt is getting a beating.]

“Players Only.” “Stoopid” R “Us” Kelly has no skills, licks his lips a lot (is lip-licking the new crotch grab?), some girls writhe and shake their asses. “I wanna see ya move like da ocean” piece of lameass bullshit trying to appeal to da fellas, whuuut? Stupid shimmy-girls deserve him and their lot in life, wish I could sink the whole yacht party. Pisses me off. Deserves a beating.

“Cool,” Gwen Stefani. Not that great but the video is okay and it is in fact the only piece of not complete shit on this list. She has a nice smile. She does writhe a lot for a story about heartache. Tolerable.

“Twist It,” Olivia. Some guy talks about hittin’ girls and either that guy is named Olivia or the oiled-up writhing girl in the background mistakenly gave him all the lines so she could sing the stupidass refrain while shaking her ass. Really fucking stupid, a beating is too good.

“We Belong Together,” Mariah Carey. Nice pipes, why does she sing the same three fucking chords all the time? while writhing. Insipid, but kinda throws me back to junior high by the fact that she’s still alive and squirming.

“Someday (I Will Understand).” Britney. This girl is looking healthily round and fat, and will soon be on the cover of baby magazines world-wide with interviews with themes like “Britney shares invaluable never-before-heard insights on what it’s like to have a baby.” Anyways, in her new role as barefoot, pregnant and too old for the biz, she writhes but doesn’t shake her ass so much which is probably a good thing because we wouldn’t want her to go into early labor on camera. Ick. And awful, how in hell did that ever even join the race for number one? Of course, in comparison to what did win…

“Wake Up.” Hilary Duff dresses, sings and mixes exactly like Avril Lavigne, only with less punk and subsequently less character to make her at all interesting. Costume changes, ballad about clubbing, sings in a monotone, shakes her “white girl butt,â€? writhes a lot, blah blah whatever. She and Senior Simpson have that in common. And the complete lack of skills. I wanna see them punch each other in the face.

Conclusion

As punishment for being the worst offenders among a list of talentless fucks I propose that Mouth Simpson and S.R.U. Kelly be locked in a room together for at least the rest of eternity with a karaoke machine that only plays opera. During meals of sweet green tea-flavored Cup Noodle they will watch stand-up comedy by Mariah and Britney alternating with a poetry slam between Hilary and Mr. Olivia. Amerie is assigned a 10-page paper on the history of anything. Fall Out Boy has to take a bath. Frankie Jay and Akon have to get naked together. Stefani gets off with a warning.

As for me, I sacrifice my music reviewing career in disgust, except I might start busting rhymes about being an ESL teacher and start a feud with ESL educators in other countries for a small but burgeoning subculture audience.*

*See article Rap Marketing Comes to Nerdcore.

July 28th, 2005
Categories: ornery . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments