Worse Than Coleslaw

The company I work for finally got a hold of me over the phone a little while ago with details regarding my teaching placement, which was especially lame after I spent three weeks refreshing my Gmail inbox like seventy times per day waiting for that information. A very Scottish gentleman called me on a Monday night and told me that they had placed me, and by “placed me” here I mean “had no placement for me, why don’t you come to Tokyo and hang out while we wait for one of our other teachers to go crazy or get cancer and you can take their spot?” I was somewhat nonplussed by this arrangement, envisioning some sort of white slavery ring scenario like you’d see in a particularly bad episode of Law and Order: SVU, but at the same time I’d spent like two months preparing for this trip and had no alternative plans for the next year. I told Scotland-san that I’d be willing to go for this but would e-mail him with a few questions later on to make sure I understood everything. I spent the first half hour after the phone call trying to come up with a way to describe the situation to my friends and relations without sounding like someone who was about to get conned like that Irish dude in The Sting, and couldn’t really come up with anything that didn’t paint me as a naïve child about to get taken for his last penny. However, I have been repeatedly assured that I will be signing a teaching contract with the company I work for at the same time as everyone else, and will be paid normally even during the time I spend waiting around for them to actually find a reason to pay me. I guess I can respect them for not just blowing me off and sending me on my merry way (which most American companies would probably have done), but it’s hardly an ideal situation.

Meanwhile, I only just got my Certificate of Eligibility (the first step of the visa process, the visa being a kind of important thing to have) until a couple of days ago, less than two weeks before I’m scheduled to set out. Exasperated at my failed attempt to get things done in a timely fashion for once in my life, I decided to just embrace the chaos of this journey, bend it to my will; with that in mind, I ordered a negotiated-fare airline ticket of dubious merit and signed up for a World of Warcraft account so that I could spend my time focused on something other than all of the things I still have left to accomplish before I leave the country. Despite my playing against type by actually trying to get everything about this trip taken care of well in advance, the universe has seen fit to force me into a chaotic jaunt into the void. That’s cool, I guess. I don’t really believe in predestination, but I will admit that this experience will be an extremely valuable precedent when I wait till the last minute in the future on purpose; some people would even say that this is God Himself telling me that I should just be content with my procrastinatin’, slacker self and not try to be all diligent and stuff. If it means I don’t have to deal with making To-Do lists and keep an appointment book, I’m all for it. There is a whole discussion here about whether it is better to attempt to correct perceived shortcomings in one’s personality (in this case, my inability to plan things ahead of time) or simply find ways to work around those shortcomings in the true spirit of guerrilla warfare. But I’ll leave that for another time.

Some coworkers of mine were sitting around earlier today during a lull in business, talking about instances of personal hypocrisy. I was listening out of one ear while doing serious business playing World of Warcraft on my MacBook when one of them asked me, “How have you compromised your beliefs lately?”

“Well, I got to work like ten minutes early today,” I said after a moment of thought. They agreed that that was definitely not in keeping with my core system of thought.

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