Tag Archive for ‘lists’ at Worse Than Coleslaw

Social Aspects

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t like sports? You do now.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.

You aren’t afraid of a little text now, are you? Keep reading for professional tips and things to keep in mind.

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.