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Welcome to Japan.

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on October 1, 2008
in Stories from the Edge
. 0 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write some stuff about the month or so I’ve spent in Japan so far on this website that I created for the express purpose of doing exactly that thing, but there have been… complications.

As with any jaunt outside of one’s zone of comfort, noteworthy events occur much more frequently here than they would under normal circumstances. So, whereas back home I could take stock at the end of a month and find that the only events worth writing home about during that time were that I finished, say, reading Transmetropolitan and continued my long-standing streak of not getting laid, the same amount of time in Japan has yielded so many new experiences that time itself seems to have warped and even wrapping my head around all the stuff I need to tell the folks back home about is overwhelming.

I have some backlogged content that I am working on writing out to chronicle the story so far in greater detail, but here’s a general overview of the situation.

I arrived in Narita, Japan on the scheduled day with no knowledge of where I would eventually end up, prepared to spend up to a month waiting around for any additional information. I’d even allowed myself to think that spending a month in Tokyo with nothing much to do while getting paid a monthly salary would actually be a pretty swee. However, fortunately (or perhaps <em>unfortunately</em>, it’s still a little early to make that call), a placement was found for me while I was in the air over the Pacific Ocean, and upon arriving at the training site I was given the name of the city in Iwate prefecture where I would be living for the next seven months. The name itself meant nothing to me, which is a shame, because if I’d had any conception of Japanese geography or demographics I might have asked them if there was possibly another place they could send me and avoided a lot of irritation. It turns out that Iwate is like the Wisconsin of Japan, cold and desolate and kind of a backwater.

Meanwhile, despite the remote location, my apartment is actually super-nice. The problem is just that it is super-nice in all the wrong ways. I have an intercom with a built-in video camera peephole, a keypad lock on the door, three huge rooms and a bathroom with an enormous bathtub… but was not provided a refrigerator, a stove, or lights, and was not able to obtain Internet access for four weeks because I had to wait for the service provider people to come to my apartment and install something onto my phone jack. Skulking around my apartment all day with my makeshift furniture and lack of practical amenities with all the aforementioned, unused bells and whistles makes me feel like some kind of post-apocalyptic savage curled up among the ruins of a long-dead but highly advanced civilization.

So I spent the first two weeks of my tenure with almost no outside contact save a payphone on the corner that eats ten-yen coins like they are the antidote and whatever Internet cafe action I could find when I took the train into Morioka on weekends; a number of my very good friends from New Orleans and the surrounding areas recently got screwed over by another big hurricane, and I didn’t know about it until almost a week later. Even now that I have a phone and an Internet connection, the logistics of living in a place where almost no one speaks any kind of language I can understand definitely take a toll. The isolation has been a little overwhelming. Seriously, there were puppets.

Some nights when I get home I will say the word “fuck” a few times just so that I can be sure that I still remember how.

As far as work goes, it is something of a mixed bag. I am teaching at two high schools. The first school, let’s call it The School of Suck for anonymity’s sake, is in the town in which I live, and is about a ten minute walk away. The students I teach there are mostly punks who talk in class and make teaching extremely unpleasant. I also teach at the School of Rock three days a week, and the students there are much nicer, although when I teach them I am usually tired because the commute by car is about an hour.

On days when there is snow on the ground it supposedly takes much longer.

I am to understand that it snows there constantly between November and March.

Great.

So far I have missed my family, my friends, pizza, burritos, and seeing movies in theaters.

So far I have not missed the “Your mom” jokes.

Rather than trying to summarize the last month in the “This happened, then this happened, and it was super fun, and then this happened” format, which I am not such a fan of, the next several entries will most likely be focusing on the deconstruction of specific small elements of my observations in Japan, along with short narrative descriptions of incidents that can be thought of as representing some larger aspect of my overall experience. Or, you know, whatever else I feel like writing about.

I uploaded the first batch of pictures that I built up during my exile. They can be viewed on my Flickr account. Hope you enjoy them.

Freedom is Slavery. Or was it “Slavery is Freedom”?

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on August 7, 2008
in Teaching in Japan
. 2 Comments

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.

Green eggs and ham. And bacn.

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on July 20, 2008
in Teaching in Japan
. 0 Comments

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.”

To Begin

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on July 10, 2008
in Stories from the Edge
. 4 Comments

So I guess I had planned to start a blog right after I graduated from college as an online portfolio for my writing, a “man I hope I get into grad school” sort of thing, but then I spent an entire year watching “Veronica Mars” DVDs and working a (pretty cool, admittedly) low-paying tutoring job while I figured my stuff out. The graduate school thing turned out to be a bust because I guess getting into a graduate program for creative writing is really hard, especially if one is as lazy and unmotivated as I am; I figured it would be pretty crappy if my Plan B was something lame, so I applied for and was offered a job teaching English to Japanese children and preteens, and my ideas for my “wacky grad student hijinks!” blog segued nicely into a “wacky teaching English in Japan hijinks!” blog with some occasional very frequently occurring entries where I would focus less on talking about Japan and the teaching therein, and more on complaining about the government and things people do that are irritating to me.

So here we all are. The name of this site is “Worse Than Coleslaw” because coleslaw is just about the worst thing there is. The title is somewhat optimistic by suggesting that, in a world where the most terrible thing conceivable already exists, the condition of the world can only improve; but the title is also pessimistic in that it implicitly acknowledges the possibility of something being even worse than the worst thing. Hope and despair in one convenient package.

I figured the best way to start things off was to reprint the speech I gave at my college graduation as Senior Class Orator, and go from there. It’s been a year, but I’m finally trying to follow my own advice.

Senior Orator Speech, 2007

If you’ve never written a graduation commencement speech, what most people tell you is to always open with a quote.

I’m not an expert in the construction of these kinds of speeches, but I’ve been around enough to have noticed that generally they fall into two structural approaches that pretty much every student graduation speaker I’ve ever heard has adhered to very closely. The first is the traditional approach, where the speaker opens with a quote from George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Voltaire or some other big name in Western philosophical thought. This approach hasn’t actually been entertaining or particularly moving since about 1963. In the second structural approach, the speakers do a kind of post-modern thing where they complain about how they’re supposed to use a quote from one of those aforementioned stuffy, un-cool, old-school establishment type guys, and—since they assure us that they are edgy, rebellious, free-spirited individuals—they give pretty much the same speech, only they quote Bob Dylan or Jerry Garcia instead, and this is supposed to be like their idea of really stickin’ it to the Man.

I’ve decided to try and avoid that trap entirely by not quoting anyone at all. You’re all smart people. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by getting up here at your college graduation and giving you a graduation speech that sounds like someone generated it out of a template in Microsoft Word. You’ve already heard that speech a million times, could hear it at any college or high school in the country. Hey, this is COLLEGE UNIVERSITY. We have more elevated standards here, coming as we do from the legacy of our Jesuit education. Do you think Ignatius of Loyola—he’s the guy who founded the Society of Jesus, for those of you just joining us—do you think he would have gotten up here and been content to spout some trite, platitudinous nonsense? No, of course he wouldn’t do that—and not just because he’s dead. He wouldn’t try to pull that kind of thing because he’s St. Ignatius. He doesn’t quote people, people quote him. I’m just trying to live up to his good example, because I think the world would be a much better place if we all tried to find our own words to describe the things we are actually feeling rather than relying on the words of others to describe how we think we are supposed to feel.

Here’s the thing: Thomas Jefferson is dead, and he has nothing at all to say about our lives or what it means to me to be standing up here and talking to you today. What could he have to say that could possibly hope to begin to describe what all of us are feeling now, the complex, bittersweet ambivalence that characterizes such an occasion? This moment is very precious, and we’ve come too far and worked too hard to waste this truly excellent moment on prepackaged emotions and sentiments assembled in a factory sweatshop.

This college graduation thing is, after all, kind of a big deal, to the point of being almost miraculous. I wouldn’t normally presume to speak for any of you, but, as the Powers That Be were quick to remind me, that is kind of what you all voted me up here for, so I don’t have to feel too bad about that. For me at least, I can say with quite a bit of confidence that the four years I’ve spent at COLLEGE has been the greatest time of my entire life. It meant so much more to me than just a way to increase my future earning potential. In the time I spent at COLLEGE, I went from being that weird kid in the corner to being an actual, viable human being. This school was where I emerged from the shell I’d been in my entire life, where I made some friends who I really love and respect and admire, and had classes with some awesome teachers and expanded my understanding of myself and the world around me. And what could Oscar Wilde possibly have to say about how cool it was to go to a school that was so small that I could actually go to the houses of my professors, to eat dinner at Dr. ENGLISH’s place or drink wine with my fellow English majors at Dr. ENGLISH ALSO’s house, or have Dr. SCIENCE give a bunch of us tarot card readings on the coffee table in her living room?

It hasn’t been all peace, love, and happiness. We’ve seen some pretty heinous stuff these last few years: two major hurricanes, the death of a much-beloved teacher—Dr. CHEMISTRY, who I didn’t know very well, but he liked my newspaper column, which was enough to make him cool in my book. We’ve gotten less sleep than is perhaps recommended by conventional medical wisdom, and have dealt with plenty of personal crises of the small and large varieties. And there are plenty of things that I will not miss: for example, I will not miss driving on the roads in THE CITY, which are terrible—all those intersections that empty into other intersections and stoplights every five feet and those darn service roads that I still can’t quite figure out and all the crazy drivers who seem to become more incompetent as the roads become more convoluted. But do you think Sophocles has anything to say that could possibly console us in our grief and discomfort and annoyance?

Still, in a way all that bad stuff kind of adds to the charm, like. Or maybe it’s better to say that it contrasts with the good stuff and makes the good stuff seem that much better. Even things that used to really bother me seem kind of endearing at this point—all the weird smells in the dorms, or that disconcerting blur effect that affects your vision when you go without sleep for too long. And even all the HUGE. EMOTIONAL. DRAMA. was actually, for me at least, just starting to get interesting, after, kind of, evolving past the “Lifetime Original Movie” type petty underclassman nonsense into some really epic, Shakespearean type tales of love and betrayal and scorn. Heck, I’ll probably even miss that crazy genderless statue.

Now, as the Everyman (and woman!) of our graduating class—and not just of the undergraduates, but the graduate and Lifelong Learning students as well, shout at to all those folks—it’s my job to give you a proper sendoff, a sort of warcry “HOO-ah!” Army kind of thing to encapsulate your experience here while inspiring you to go forth, onward and upward, to do great works with the knowledge you’ve been given. Honestly, I’m not sure I’m up to that task.

All I can say is, you worked hard to get this far. Don’t screw it up by being stupid, and don’t waste it by doing anything with your life that isn’t completely and utterly amazing. Let’s be a generation that constructs our own words, that doesn’t just settle for whatever’s already on the books to get us off and get us by. There’s plenty in this world that needs fixing, and it would be oh so lame if after four years of struggle we all just sat around watching teevee and drinking and becoming jaded, uninteresting, overweight nobodies who use other people’s words to justify all the dumb things they do. Your new lives are just beginning, so be sure to make the most of this amazing achievement.

Anyways, I’d better wrap this up. I’d stay longer, but it’s really hot, and I have to move out of my apartment by five o’clock or I’ll get fined. I love you all. Thank you, and God bless.