Green eggs and ham. And bacn. at Worse Than Coleslaw

What I’ve been doing a lot for the last couple of weeks is sitting around waiting for important e-mails to show up in my Gmail inbox. This is very similar to what I do every day already, except the things I am waiting for now are genuinely important job-related deals and not just some people on Facebook telling me that my expression in a picture from like two years ago is “hilarious.” See, the way my job in Japan works is, I applied to a recruitment company, who agreed to place me in a Japanese public school (or schools, as the case may be) should I be judged worthy of such services. So I accepted the job before I knew precisely where and when I would be going. We can discuss the wisdom of this arrangement at another time, but let me just say that regardless of where in Japan I end up going, I will still be going to Japan. It is, however, frustrating to sit around and wait to hear more details about my assignment, limited in my ability to prepare (I can’t even buy a plane ticket yet, or finish applying for my visa) even as the time before my estimated date of arrival has started to be measured in weeks rather than months. I am (justifiably, I feel) impatient to hear the name of the city, town, or small fishing village where I will be spending the next seven months (or longer, depending on the breaks) of my life. It seems like kind of an important piece of information.

An unanticipated side-effect of this everlasting inbox vigil is that I have developed a Pavlovian response to the “ding” sound that plays each time I receive a new e-mail. Seriously, every time I hear that sound, I do a backflip. And then I have a small heart attack. It’s kind of weird. In the split second between when I realize I have a new message and when I am able to focus my eyes on the subject line, I think to myself, “Oh man, please let it be Sendai. Or Hokkaido, that seems like a nice and friendly place.” But then there is a big emotional crash when it turns out to be a Facebook message from some guy or girl who I haven’t talked to since middle school (and who I didn’t even like back then!) doing a mass-invite to an event in another state that I never needed to know about, ever.

Each e-mail not directly related to my trip is probably as harmful as a whole pack of cigarettes, and this is especially unfortunate considering how much automated messages (I believe the term used is Bacn) I get in a given week in this Brave New World of rampant social networking. Even things that I would normally find enjoyable have been perverted by this insipid waiting game.

Let’s use Netflix as an example. Netflix sends me an e-mail each time they receive a DVD that I have mailed back and each time that they send out a new DVD for me to watch. This is normally helpful because, due to the nature of modern serialized drama, if I mail a disc of Deadwood back, I am hot to know when the next disc is coming. But in this strange Dark World that I find myself in, I can’t help but resent even these messages for not being about the Japan gig:

Light World response: “Sweet! I need more moral ambiguity in my life. It’s like Shakespeare, but with cowboys.”
Dark World response: “Well, hoo-fucking-rah for the motherfucking postal service being so on top of their shit all the goddamn time. Pricks.”