2009 February Archive at Worse Than Coleslaw

About a month ago I started taking karate lessons held twice a week in a gym near City Hall, about a five minute walk from my apartment. The Japanese style of martial arts that my instructor teaches is at odds with the American Kenpo style that I studied for something like eight years when I was a teenager—the footwork is all convoluted and the only stance we use is too deep and impractical, to begin with—but it’s enjoyable enough and gets me out of my own head for a while, which is important when, on any given eight-and-a-half hour workday, I have approximately eight-and-a-half hours of downtime. Part of the curriculum of this class consists of lots of zen type posturing; my instructor even tried to explain to me the oft-repeated parable of the willow bending in the wind versus the oak tree fighting against the wind and being blown down as a way to tell me to relax my fucking shoulders already holy shit man, which was quite interesting considering he speaks no English and I speak not nearly enough Japanese for something on that level. Most of the other students are elementary or junior high school age, which adds an element of hilarity to the whole endeavor since, for these small town kids, seeing a foreigner is a pretty strange occurrence. They enjoy getting me to play tag with them, and also frequently walk up to me during breaks, hold out there hands, and say “Jan ken pon!” which is the Japanese name for rock, paper, scissors. On one such occasion this one girl, I think she said she was eight years old, eager to showcase her international knowledge, even corrected the other kids:

“Ya ya ya,” she said. “Eigo de ‘scissors paper stone.’” I was impressed.

Also in attendance are a little five-year-old girl and her mother, who started the class a couple of weeks after I did. Since she’s so young, it’s pretty likely that I am the first non-Japanese person this kid has ever seen, so she gets pretty shy around me. She spent two or three classes studiously avoiding my gaze, but one day as we were all gathered around the massive space heater during a break, after a good deal of hesitation and several false starts, she whispered something into her mother’s ear and pointed at me. The mother walked over to me, smiled, and said, “Ninjin wa Eigo de nandesuka?” which means “What is the word ‘ninjin’ in English?” The little girl held back, using her mom as cover.

After six months in Japan I’ve grown used to people asking me basic, GED-level questions in Japanese and having to shrug my shoulders with a meek smile on my face, which doesn’t work as well as it should because the shrug is not a recognized gesture here. Lately I’ve started nod enthusiastically in such situations hoping that the person I’m speaking to will assume I understand even when I don’t; this is a technique I learned from my students, who frequently use it to great effect, cementing in my mind the idea that teaching involves a two-way flow of information between teacher and pupil. So I in this case I actually had to blink a couple of times before I was able to respond, because, strangely enough, I knew the answer to the question I was being asked.

“Carrot,” I said. The little girl poked her head out from behind her mother, and I sounded the word out more slowly so she could see my lips forming each syllable and hear how it was pronounced. “Carrot.” This is one of the very, very few instances in quite a while where I have been able to display something resembling competence in my day to day life. After six months spent as a cheeping baby bird—stranger in a strange land working at a strange job that I don’t have any idea how to do well—it was nice to finally be able to feel like I was capable of, like, occasionally affecting my surroundings in a positive way. It was a revelation.

I consider this an epic win.

Addendum: I uploaded the Winter Sports Festival pictures as a video slideshow. Also, the pics from Tokyo are up a mere two months after the fact, and can be viewed here on Picasa because Flickr is asinine, and stuff.

I once wanted to Change the World. A part of me still does. At the moment, though, I’ll settle for having health insurance.
I wear my glasses all the time despite the fact that I can still see pretty decently without them. I tell myself that this is because, if I didn’t put them on in the morning and keep them on all day, I’d never remember to put them on even when I did need them.
A major reason why I am thinking about leaving Japan is that I hate being in a place where no one laughs at my jokes.
All of the best decisions of my life have been made for the stupidest reasons imaginable.
I’ve spent a good portion of my life idolizing the image of the slacker savant, that figure in movies and books and such who excels in life while minimizing his or her actual work output. I (literally) slept through high school and got a 4.2 GPA, all-nightered it through college and graduated magna cum laude and with honors, and devoted myself to as many pursuits that I was already good at as possible so as to reduce the amount of practice I would have to put in to those pursuits. Now that I am ostensibly an adult, however, this approach is much less successful at allowing me to actually do anything with my life.
I prefer to have a relatively small number of close friends than an extensive network of casual acquaintances because I hate the idea that the words I speak mean less to the person I am speaking them to than they do to me.
I keep waiting for one of the books I am always reading or the CDs I am always listening to or the movies I am always watching to somehow encapsulate my existence and explain to me why I am the way I am and what shape my life should take from here on out. At some point I got sick of waiting for this to happen and tried creating my own catalysts for personal growth in the form of short stories, funny articles for the school newspaper, and blog entries on Facebook, which brought me closer but still haven’t quite done the trick.
I really suck a planning and organizing. This might be one reason why I dislike my current job so much.
The idea of wearing a tie or even a collared shirt is irrationally offensive to me. As far as I can tell a tie serves no practical purpose whatsoever, and I hate being beholden to arbitrary standards that have no basis whatsoever in reality.
I really, really want to get a “Calvin and Hobbes” tattoo.
It takes me forever to answer e-mails and such because I always try to really think about what I’m going to write back, and if I’m not feeling particularly eloquent at that specific time I’ll put the message aside and wait until I am. Sometimes this can go on for days (and weeks), even with something simple like writing on someone’s Facebook wall. For similar reasons, it took me a long time to write this list.
I tend to get really nervous when shopping for clothes, so I do as much shopping as I can online. When I do go to an actual store to buy clothes, I don’t always spend as much time as I should trying things on and finding something that really fits me. As a result, many of the clothes I own are (noticeably) either to big or too small, but I wear them anyway.
You know that one game people play when they’re drunk sometimes where you hold out ten fingers and take turns saying something you’ve never done, and then if any of the other people in the group have done that thing, they put one finger down until there is only one person left who still has one or more of his or her fingers up? And since this game is mostly played by drunk people, the “I have never” statements usually end up being about sex? Yeah, I always win that game.
I hate waking up early. I recently realized that I have never woken up before 10 AM voluntarily. Even in instances where I’d volunteered to do something that took place before 10 AM, when it came down to actually waking up for that thing, I’d have hit the snooze button and gone right on sleeping if I could have. If I ever get married, my wedding will have to be in the evening or else I’d stay up until all hours the night before and then hit the snooze button four times in the morning and almost be late.
Despite my intense dislike of waking up, I have a pathological tendency to go to bed at late hours for no other reason than I hate the thought of spending less time awake and doing my own thing than I spent at work on a given day.
There is no number sixteen.
Something about an ordinary, quiet life is extremely appealing to me and is also terrifying. I realize that my personal happiness has historically been linked more to the proximity of good friends and the amount of time I am able to devote to goofing off rather than traditional indicators of success such as creative output or professional development, but this is hard for me to justify philosophically. It’s still hard to say whether hard work and great deeds will win out in the end over my desire to spend entire days watching music videos on YouTube.
I love food, but I have an extremely unrefined palette. To me, there is very little difference between a Subway sandwich and one from an actual deli, Chipotle is the ultimate Tex-Mex establishment, and KFC’s factory chicken tastes better than almost all of the “authentic, home cooked” fried chicken I’ve eaten at restaurants in my various travels across the Southern United States. The one exception to this rule is with soda; I stick with Coke or Pepsi and don’t touch that offbrand stuff.
Even though I consider myself an environmentalist, I have never, ever had fun on a hiking trip.
My favorite album of all time is Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” Many is the time I have made myself hoarse by belting out “Oh Comely” while driving too fast down I-10 on my way to one destination or another.
I think it would be cool to be a stand-up comedian, but, like many other jobs that seem cool, I have no idea how one actually gets into that line of work.
I don’t make eye contact with people unless I think about it really hard. I try to play this off as an amusing personality quirk rather than the sign of a deranged mind. It is an especially unfortunate tendency at job interviews, but is inconvenient in a wide variety of social situations.
My favorite novel is Picture This by Joseph Heller. Despite repeated gushing recommendations and despite the fact that I have loaned it to at least two different people, I have yet to convince a single one of my friends to actually read it.
My personal theme song is “Aside” by The Weakerthans, unless I’m trying to psych myself up to do something important, in which case it’s “Boy Decide” by Murder By Death.
I have trouble being concise.