To begin with, my first name, Matthew, carries with it some inherent difficulties when transliterated into Japanese, namely that there is no “TH” sound.  My students pronounced my name “Mah-shew,” which was pretty adorable, but did not really address issues of protocol and respect.  Depending on the school and the class, I was referred to as just “Matthew,” “Matthew-sensei,” “Matt-sensei,” “Mr. Matt,” or by the simple title of “Teacher.”  I didn’t even try to teach them my last name, which contains not only another “TH” sound, but also an “L.”

One day while we were walking to class, the Japanese English teacher I worked with at the School of Suck in Shizukuishi asked me about the origins of my name.

“The name ‘Matthew’ is from the Bible, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.  ”In the Bible, Matthew was one of the disciples of Jesus.”

“Disciples?” he said.

“Followers,” I said.  The teacher nodded and grunted in affirmation.  I said, “Matthew also wrote one of the books of the Bible.”

“In the New Testament,” the teacher said, eager to show off his knowledge of Western religion.

A few days after this conversation I was in a class being bombarded with queries; occasionally we would just give up on the lesson and let the students ask me questions about myself or American culture or whatever, usually translated from Japanese by this same teacher, who supervised me while I was teaching at the School of Suck.  The boys in that class were very interested to hear about guns and the American military, coming as they did from a place where guns are not present anywhere.  One of them asked me if I’d ever fired a gun before, to which I replied, “Yes.”

“What was it like?” they asked, via the Japanese instructor.

I thought about this for a moment.  ”It hurt,” I said.  There were disbelieving exclamations of “Ehhhhhhh?” and “Uso!” that were pretty common occurrences in these sorts of conversations.  To clarify my point, I mimed shooting a rifle and rubbed my shoulder with a pained look on my face, and most of the students seemed to understand that I was talking about the recoil, although it looked as though this was not something they’d ever thought of.

Another student asked, “In America, did you fire a gun often?”

“No,” I said.  ”I do not like guns.”  This was an oversimplification of my general attitude towards firearms, but oversimplification out of necessity was always the way of things in Japan.  My students apparently had a hard time grasping how I could have lived my whole life in the United States and not have spent all my time blowing the crap out of milk bottles and bowling pins.  What a wasted youth.  Then their Japanese teacher pointed at me and said “Christian desu,” by way of explanation.  The conversation that ensued lasted about 15 seconds, during which time I assume he was explaining the Christian idealization of nonviolence—not actually seen all that often in the Western world anymore, but it is technically in the books.  The conversation ended with a lot of nods and knowing smiles.  I did not have the patience or the inclination to clarify that many Christians in my country were actually super hardcore gun enthusiasts, or that calling me a Christian at all was kind of a stretch, thus perpetuating an idealized and largely incorrect  stereotype.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t really have the proper disposition to be a teacher.

A few weeks later I was experiencing a similar barrage of questions, this time from the girl’s side of one of the first year classes at the School of Suck.  It began with them wanting to know if I had a girlfriend in the United States, and also if I had a girlfriend in Japan.

For some reason, many of the girls at both of the schools where I taught were obsessed with getting me laid.  It was endearing, if a tad creepy.

I’d already opened Pandora’s Box by telling them that my regular tutor at the weekly Japanese class I attended was a woman about my age, and they wanted to know why we hadn’t hooked up.  None of my explanations for this lack of action were acceptable to them, and in fact even a year later I actually am still not quite sure about the answer to that question myself, except to say that I am very stupid.

Before the situation became too embarrassing—when my blush reflex is triggered my entire head turns the color of a tomato, which tended to cause a lot of chaotic situations when standing in front of 40 high school age kids who had limited experience with white people—and without any prompting from me, the Japanese instructor mentioned the Christian Hypothesis once more, and all was once again right with the world.  In fact, the Christian Hypothesis became a convenient explanation for all sorts of weird things that I did or failed to do during my tenure as ALT at the School of Suck.

This did not, however, save me from being berated for my failure to take a Japanese lover by that same asshole teacher one night when we split a pizza and a bottle of red wine at this little “Italian” place in Morioka.  I think he thought I was retarded—like, literally, retarded:

“Your Japanese instructor is a woman?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And she is how old?”

“24,” I said.

“And you are how old?”

“24,” I said.

To him it was as simple as that, and he shook his head while his face wore an exasperated frown.  I could have hated him for that, if I hadn’t already hated him for all of the bullshit he put me through during school hours.  Really, the only good thing to come of that evening would be later on when this guy commented how surprised he was at my alcohol tolerance.  “I did not expect you to be able to drink this much,” he said.

Only in Japan would that ever happen.

1. Determine how comfortable you are with lying to your students. Your relationship with your students will be built on them asking and being asked simple questions such as “What is your favorite musical group?”  Now, maybe your favorite band is Neutral Milk Hotel—and why shouldn’t it be?  However, the person who asked you the question has no idea what the fuck a Neutral Milk Hotel is, and you aren’t going to be able to explain it to them.  Your answer will be met with blank stares and disappointment.  Conversely, if you answer “Green Day,” or “Avril Lavigne,” or even “Nirvana,” suddenly the person who asked you this will get excited and say, “Oh, me too me too me too!”  You have just established a rapport.  You can definitely make the case that this is a disingenuous, Machiavellian way to live—and you are well within your rights to decide that you don’t want to lie to your students under any circumstances.  But given the limitations on your ability to communicate, it is also a very effective way to ingratiate yourself to the people whose continued goodwill you rely on.
2. This is prison rules. Since your job description is quite poorly defined and subject to the whims of the Japanese teachers you work with, it’s important to establish expectations early on.  If you want to go to clubs after school and hang out, do it as early as possible.  Don’t arrive super early or stay late on your first day.  With such a poorly defined position, the expectations of those monitoring you will be formed in large part by your own actions.  You want to ease into certain things, but do everything you can to establish your identity and “character” quickly before you get stuck doing things you don’t want to do.
3. If you do not have the ability already, learn to snap your fingers, moon walk, and do that thing where you put your fingers in your mouth and whistle really loudly. Many of your students, especially the younger ones, will have never seen someone do these things and will thus be very impressed.
4. Buy some weird ties from someplace like CyberOptix or similar. It is not easy to establish your identity as the cool teacher through words since very few of the kids you are teaching can understand what you are saying, you need to establish a persona through nonverbal methods.  Oddball ties are a great way to do further this goal, assuming you are a dude… or a lady who is inclined to incorporate ties into her daily ensembles.
5. Set your hipster street cred on fire. Japanese high schoolers love American music.  More specifically, they love the kind of American music that no self-respecting, tight-pants-wearing “Pitchfork Media” enthusiast would ever listen to even under penalty of death, but you’d have to be stoned or stupid to think that you are somehow earning any points with your students by giving them a bunch of obscure German synth-pop bands no one’s ever heard of when they ask you what kind of music you like.  Additionally, none of the bands whose CDs made your “Top Ten” list this year will have any songs you can sing at karaoke, so stop being a pretentious dick, have another beer, and sing “Wonderwall” already.
6. Don’t like sports?  You do now.
7. Incidentally, your new favorite baseball team is either the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. Those are the only two American baseball teams your students have heard of because those two teams have popular Japanese players on them.
8. Learn to sing “Linda Linda” by the Blue Hearts. It is a great sing-along sort of tune that is well known by almost everyone in Japan, perfect for breaking out at karaoke while in the company of Japanese people—be they your coworkers or just some people you met on the street—who will be thoroughly impressed by your performance.  Luckily, the chorus is pretty easy to remember.  It goes “Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda, Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda.”  Think you can manage that?
9. No one in Japan has ever heard of the pillows or “Cowboy Bebop.” If you have made it to Japan, you have probably watched and enjoyed Cowboy Bebop and downloaded the entire pillows discography after hearing their music in FLCL, and are excited to be in the land that created both of these things.  That’s fine; they are both quality works, and anyone who gives you shit about being a fanboy or whatever is a bad person who doesn’t believe in intellectual curiosity.  If a Japanese person asks you your favorite Japanese band, you will want to say “the pillows.”  This is only natural.  But that person will almost never know what the hell you are talking about.
10. No one will understand any of your jokes. You’re probably a very hilarious person back home, but the rules of humor changed while you were in the air over the Pacific Ocean.  In the context of your daily life, humor consists entirely of sight gags and references to Japanese pop culture.
11. Eat lots of Japanese food. Besides the fact that Japanese food is often delicious, “What are your favorite Japanese foods?” will almost always be the first question anyone in Japan asks you.
12. Figure out your blood type. Offhand you probably have no idea what your blood type is, but blood types are a Thing in Japan.  Your blood type is believed to say something about your personality, like your astrological sign or the results of a Rorschach test.  Your students will want to know what your blood type is, and you run the risk of sounding like a dweeb if you can’t answer them when they ask you.  Not knowing yours is an excellent excuse to give blood, which is a thing that you should be doing anyway.

Professional Aspects

1. Your training will be worthless. Despite the fact that the people doing the training at these things are likely veteran teachers, every suggestion they give you for how to conduct yourself in and outside of class will instill you with a deep sense of terror while still remaining utterly irrelevant to the ways that people actually live and work as ALTs in Japan.  Additionally, the sample activities your trainers teach you will, for one reason or another, not apply to any of the classes you teach.  For example, someone at some point during training will mention that “Battleship” variants are a great way to have students practice combining different phrases to form sentences.  This is 100% bullshit; your students will have never heard of “Battleship,” and trying to explain the rules of such a game to your them using crude hand gestures and bone tools will take up more class time than actually playing it.
2. Even if your training isn’t worthless, it will still be worthless. The job description of an ALT is so poorly defined that every teacher you work with will have different expectations from you: some will want you to teach the entire class all by yourself with no help at all, and some will want to stand you up at the front of the class while they teach and periodically have you repeat words and phrases like a trained monkey so your students can hear the correct pronunciation.  Depending on what company you work for, elementary, junior high, and high school teachers will often be trained together, despite occupying radically different positions.  So even if you receive good advice at training, it will likely be advice for someone who will be doing a totally different job.
3. Learn to speak Japanese. People will tell you that you do not need to know any Japanese to teach English in Japan.  This is true, in that you will not necessarily catch fire if you set foot in a Japanese classroom without being able to compose a haiku in kanji, and you are usually discouraged from using any Japanese in the classroom anyway.  But living in a foreign land—especially in the small town off the beaten path that you are most likely to be sent to your first time out—is not very much fun when you can’t speak the language, and neither is trying to communicate the concept of words like “pudding” or “dugong” to Japanese teenagers entirely in English.  Additionally, since learning a language is an exponential process—that is, the more of a language you know, the easier it is for you to learn said language—you will most benefit from the immersion if you already have a firm grasp of the basics.  Your experience will be so much richer if you are able to at least get by in day-to-day conversational Japanese: you’ll be able to form stronger bonds with your coworkers, you’ll be better able to understand the dynamics of your classes and connect with your students more as a human being and less as a walking test of their knowledge, and you’ll have an easier time getting around during your off hours.  You will be able to have confusing cultural oddities explained to you, which will in turn help you to get a much clearer picture of your host country’s ins and outs.  This is not to say that you should let a low level of Japanese proficiency keep you from seeking a teaching position, but do be aware that there are real and significant downsides to coming in blind.
4. Word Searches are your master. You probably hated doing word searches when you were in elementary school (unless you were clinically insane), but you’ll find that in many cases there are students who never pay attention in class under any circumstances except for when you put a word search in front of them.  You should come to every single class with two sets of word searches with relevant vocabulary for extreme emergencies—one short word search for when your lesson goes south, and another longer word search for when your lesson goes to hell.
5. Over-preparedness is sometimes worse than under-preparedness. Just because you are given five hours each day to do lesson planning doesn’t mean you should actually use all that time to plan lessons.
6. Activities will always end five to ten minutes before you want them to. This is, of course, unless they take twenty minutes longer than you want them to.

Things to keep in mind.

1. The city, town, or small fishing village you are sent to will suck.
2. If the place you are sent to does not suck, fuck you. Lucky bastard.
3. Japanese teenagers do not speak English. Despite the fact that you are teaching them English—which would suggest that it is not something they already know—it is easy to forget just how little of what you say is really understood by your students.
4. Japanese English teachers often do not speak English. There are plenty of Japanese teachers whose English is excellent, but many (if not most) will be deficient enough that communicating with them will be difficult.
5. You are the least important person at your school. Japanese high schools are swirling nexuses of psychotic activity.  Many of the students commute up to an hour to get to school and stay until 6 or 7 at night and come in for several hours on weekends doing club activities.  The teachers routinely work 10- or 11-hour days on weekdays and often come in on weekends to help with the clubs they sponsor or catch up with grading.  Everyone is busy with matters that they take very seriously.  Most of the teachers took English in school but remember about as much as you remember of calculus or art history, so unless you can manage conversational Japanese you will not have a very easy time making small talk with them.  The chair you sit in all day will be the shittiest back-pain-inducin’ torture device they can find, and if you even have a computer it will be an old ThinkPad from like 2001 with unidentified sticky goo all over the keyboard and an ancient Japanese Windows ME install.  And since the students clean the school themselves, there isn’t even a custodial staff for you to feel superior to, just one janitor who takes care of the real heavy lifting.  Your coworkers may or may not even tell you when there is a fire drill scheduled.
6. Most schools will not care if you fall asleep at work. Since the teachers at Japanese schools work such long days, it is viewed as perfectly acceptable for them to catch a few quick Z’s at their desk.  This is usually interpreted not as slacking off, but as some sort of demented dedication.
7. If your schools do care that you are falling asleep at work, they will not tell you. Since it’s not worth worrying about and won’t affect you either way, you might as well just go for the snooze if you are tired.
8. Your kids may be Japanese, but they are still high school students. Your students will probably be much more polite and attentive than American students at a similar sort of school (that is to say, a poor, rural school may still have some punkass kids in it, but they will be less punkass than punkasses in America).  However, a typical Japanese high school curriculum consists of 10 – 12 classes per year, each class meeting two or three times per week.  Statistically speaking, those are not good odds that the class you are teaching (which was not optional and is held right after lunch) is any one random student’s favorite class.
9. Learn what your hometown is famous for. Every town in Japan is famous for something, be it a style of traditional dance specific to that region or a particular kind of food or whatever.  People assume that this is the case for American cities as well and will want to know about it.  If your hometown isn’t really famous for anything in particular, or the thing it is famous for is too complicated to easily explain (“My hometown is famous for being the home of the biggest magnet laboratory in the Southeastern United States”), you once again have to decide whether or not to just make some stuff up.
10. You are probably going to get screwed by your landlord. In Japan there is a practice known as “key money” where your pay your landlord a cash tribute (usually equivalent to one-and-a-half to two months’ rent, although it can be higher) as a way of thanking him or her for renting to you even though you are a dirty foreigner before he or she gives you the key to your new place.  And I know that you are probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, that’s called a deposit, asshole.  They do that in America too.”  But no, key money is not a deposit, but a bribe.  The money goes directly into your landlord’s pocket and will never be seen by you again.  The deposit (also equivalent to two months’ rent) is a separate expense, and If your apartment has tatami mats, a good chunk of your deposit will go towards replacing them when you move out regardless of whether they actually needed replacing.  If you manage to bypass one or more of these issues, you are the lucky exception rather than the rule.
11. Regardless of the age of your students, one or more of them is almost certainly going to try to stick his or her finger up your asshole. This prank is known as a “kancho.”  If none of the kids you teach tries this during your entire tenure as an ALT, you should consider it not the normal state of affairs but a very pleasant surprise.

Even though I speak almost no Japanese and the kids have a hard time forming English sentences, we are still able to get stuff done without the presence of a Japanese teacher. Part of the reason for this is that my students in this class have a couple of electronic dictionaries to share between the five of them that they use to translate any words that I can’t make them understand with pantomime and synonyms. These dictionary things are totally slick. There’s not been a word yet whose meaning the students have been unable to suss out with the aid of their trusty electronic dictionaries, and with the help of these devices combined with the students’ quick wits and considerable knowledge base, I’ve mostly been able to avoid the communication problems I experience in my other, larger, less motivated classes,

Sometimes when class kind of tapers off like it so often does due to my legendary lack of ability to plan things, the kids’ natural intellectual curiosity will drive them to look up random idioms on the dictionaries’ idiom finder and say said idioms to me just to see what I’ll do. Yesterday, I saw two students, the only boy in the class and the girl who sits next to him, passing an e-dictionary between them, whispering in Japanese and glancing up at me. Finally, they did a little surreptitious jan-ken-pon (which is identical to the American “rock-paper-scissors” in everything but the name), and the loser turned to me and readied herself to speak, glancing down at the LCD screen a couple of times to make sure she had it right in her mind. For my part, I tried to look as non-threatening and good-natured as possible so that she wouldn’t feel too nervous about speaking English. In an American high school you’d expect them to come up with stuff like “I have a raging hard-on” or “Fuck you, GI,” but I don’t have to worry about that so much in Japan. Still, I’m never quite sure what to expect when this kind of thing happens.

The first go round I couldn’t make out what she was saying because there was a lot of noise coming from outside the classroom as the baseball club ran drills out in the hallway. From time to time I could see them looking through the door’s window and trying to sound out the stuff I’d written on the board. “What was that?” I said, and leaned in to hear her better.

More confident this time, she said, “I feel like a million dollars!”

Ironically enough, the four years I spent as a high school student are both the reason I am here and the reason I have had so much trouble adjusting to the job.

Back when I was in school, my favorite teachers were the ones who made class interesting by sheer force of personality: Fr. Jesuit for his scatterbrained historical tangents and well-developed sense of irony, Dr. English-teacher for his puns and eminently dash-able one-liners, Dr. History-teacher for his frequent references to the use of LSD. Sure, there were discussions in all of these classes; however, the emphasis was still on lecturing, and I was content to just go to class and listen to my teachers talk about interesting things for fifty minutes. Under normal circumstances my teaching style would be shaped by this preference, and I would focus on attempting to fill my class time with dry humor and tangential ramblings. But since my audience consists entirely of non-native speakers, trying to adapt this method to my current responsibilities does not work, not even a little. It’s just the nature of teaching and learning a foreign language, and doubly so when you are teaching students whose language you do not speak.

My least favorite teachers traditionally were the ones who made me get out of my seat and actually do stuff in class. I always used to resent it when my Spanish teachers made us practice dialogues in pairs or do group activities, more so since I didn’t know anyone in any of the four Spanish classes I took throughout high school and college and at the time was hampered by somewhat crippling social anxiety that made every such class an ordeal. But now I get paid to try to get my kids to do exactly that which irritated me not that long ago.

“It’s a weird position to be in,” I told one of the other assistant teachers working in my prefecture. “Back then I would totally have hated having a language class with me as the teacher.”

“What would have gotten you to pay attention in Spanish class, then?” she asked me. “If you knew that you could do it in your classes now.”

“I’m not sure anything could have,” I said, after giving it some thought. The only thing I have been able to come up with even after a lot of pondering is if the practice dialog was on video and took place between two naked women and a man who was fully clothed but also on fire. I might have lifted my head out of the puddle of drool on my desk for that. My lack of interest in Pictionary and Word Finds as viable class activities wasn’t one of those “Jesus this is so boring, I could totally do a better job of this,” sort of thing. Like Socrates, my criticism of the system did not go so far as to suggest anything better. I simply was more interested in sleeping than I was the subject matter just then, and Pictionary and its various ilk prevented me from being able to sleep by forcing me to get out of my chair and engage the material. The main difference I can see between me and the kids I am teaching (many of whom, at least at my ghetto school, seem about as interested in English as I was in Spanish way back when) is that I was able to snooze my way through high school while still taking AP classes and maintaining a 4-point-something GPA, which is great if you can swing it, but not recommended for the general population.

I’m not trying to say that I think games and activities are a bad thing or that they shouldn’t be a part of the learning process. My point here is that my experiences as a student have colored the way I approach the business of teaching English, and this is a problem because I am still coming from the perspective of a fashionably jaded, 19-year-old slacker prince. Back then I would have considered anyone who told me “Hey, here’s a board game you can play to practice the passive tense!” to be a total cheeseball who was not to be trusted. Even once I got to college this mindset did not disappear completely; when I took Conceptual Physics (Physics for Non-majors) junior year, I skipped all the lab days where we ran experiments and stuff because I was unwilling to expend the effort for such a minimal return. Labs counted as extra credit and I already had an “A” in the class and was confident in my ability to maintain that good grade without any help. My job right now is basically to be the embodiment of the very persona I would have scoffed at not too long ago. This makes lesson planning extremely difficult because I am incapable of coming up with my own ideas. I am so quick to write off the kind of vocabulary-building games that are encouraged by my superiors that my brain no longer possesses the mechanism to come up with those kinds of ideas by itself. I thus get all of my lesson ideas from books and websites—no big deal, there are plenty of resources for ALTs out there that I can cherry pick ideas from—but this too presents a problem because my immediate reaction to every potential exercise is “That sounds totally retarded” no matter how well it would probably work in class, necessitating multiple readthroughs of such material to extract as much quality material as possible. More than that, though, it is hard for me to sell the idea of Bingo (a time-honored ESL tool) to a classroom full of Japanese teenagers. The whole thing comes off as half-hearted. I also am further limited by the necessity that, since most of my students do not speak enough English to understand the instructions I give in class, any such activities I use be simple enough to explain via demonstration using gestures and crude bone tools.

Of course, I knew that my job would involve all of these elements. I simply underestimated how much I am a product of my experiences, and how little those experiences have prepared me for the situation I in which I find myself.

So I would say that so far I enjoy teaching, and that it’s the “teaching English as a second language” thing that is really my problem. Being able to talk to my students, even if it’s just asking them what their favorite sport is or what kind of music they like, and having them come up to me in the hallway to start conversations, is one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life, and teaching is probably the best way there is to really learn about a new culture. However, the problem with ESL is that it puts me solidly outside my niche and prevents me from playing to my strengths while exaggerating my weaknesses. Language has always kind of been my thing. Whatever problems I had interacting with people in my life, I have always usually managed to compensate for these problems by being funny or verbose or both at the same time. You take away my ability to communicate and what do you have left? Mostly you have a skinny-ish guy with glasses that don’t stay on his nose who doesn’t look people in the eye for more than two seconds at a time and who only has enough control over his body language to express three emotions: “nervously cheerful,” “neutral,” and “good-naturedly confused.”

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.

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.”