Mumblings of an Old Man

Surprise Holiday

2010-11-10T23:45:00.001-05:00

So the x-rays were a snap. 30 minutes' walk to the lab, pics, and walk back. Time to snag a coffee on the way back in. The arm sure is hurting, though. Not good. Though the painkiller/ice regimen is helping.

Eventually clued in to the fact that I do not work tomorrow. The clue being the huge number of people announcing that they would not be in on Friday. It also suddenly made the concern that somebody was covering (that would be me) sensible. Oh well. I'll enjoy the day, and nobody will be in on Friday, so there's not likely to be much stress. I've got a backlog of timekeeping to do.

So a lot of cute acts come out of Japan, but for my money, this is perhaps the coolest. Give it 60 seconds to let them hit their stride. This is Puffy Ami Yumi with Boogie Woogie #5.

Look at that

2010-11-08T19:22:00.003-05:00

Not even two years later. And they say I don't update. Pfft.

So what's happening?

Right arm may be fractured. X-rays tomorrow.
Trip to Egypt planned for this January.
Did I own a piano last I blogged? I have one now.
And I am once again participating in that excruciating ritual known as NaNoWriMo.

Now, some music.

Ok, that was a pretty confused video. But the tune was good, no?

A little late...

2008-12-28T15:08:00.004-05:00

Meant to post my favourite Christmas video before going away: Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. Kirsty, of course, no longer with us. If you don't know the story, details here. But first, enjoy the video, and Merry Christmas.

(also, higher quality video here, *if* you hit the "watch in high quality" link to the bottom right of the frame -- no way to link directly to that version)

Never shot a Pantera fan

2008-11-24T18:57:00.011-05:00

Been on a bit of a Tim Minchin kick lately. However, it was hard to find a clip that wouldn't require a language warning (there you go Keri, though not sure the content will make sense to a wee person in any case).

Some really good bits here (each very different), though the language warning applies. (Rock 'n' Roll Nerd, in particular, is not to be missed)

Some people have it worse than me.

So F***ing Rock

Rock 'n' Roll Nerd

Ah hell, these are excellent, too. (even more warning)

Inflatable You

If You Really Loved Me

Bike Hero

2008-11-19T00:03:00.003-05:00

Well if you have any idea what this is at all, it will rock your sox.

Addendum: Well, as suspected in some places online, this was a viral advert by a PR company. Details from Activision here. Still very cool.

Hot Fashion Moments

2008-11-03T01:27:00.003-05:00

Well, another birthday come and gone. Had lots of fun, though, and the festivities are not over. Julie got us Spamalot tickets at the NAC, and we are going this Tuesday.

The night of, we went for 10 pin bowling, and then drinks afterward. Some people apparently had better things to do -- and others were unintentionally left out -- sorry, James! For the former group, I only have the following to offer: you look mahvelous!

(ok, that's not entirely fair. I would have invited you, Erin! It was all very last-minute over here)

Ah, who am I kidding. I just had to use that picture. Hehe.

Now I am pretty much consumed with NaNoWriMo. Far more prepared than previous years, though that isn't saying much. I am behind in word count because I've been plotting -- something I should have been doing in October. OTOH, I am extremely happy with the story. So we shall see.

Chemical Party

2008-10-17T00:54:00.002-04:00

'Nuff said.

What can I say?

2008-10-04T00:41:00.002-04:00

I didn't think I'd enjoy watching anything as much as I enjoyed those Yacht Rock videos.

Here is Michael Gregory with VP debate in Song and Dance.

What A Fool Believes

2008-09-06T00:56:00.016-04:00

Well, it's been awhile since the last update, so I'm kicking things off with my latest addiction -- the finest product of Channel 101. What is Channel 101?

Every month, five-minute TV shows are screened for a live audience in New York City. The audience votes to renew some shows and cancel others.

The top five shows become the new "prime time" lineup; losing shows are banished forever.

The next month, prime time shows return with new episodes, pitted against each other and a crop of fresh new pilots.

At Channel 101, your entertainment destiny is in your hands. If you like a show, nurture it with your votes and it will bloom into a series. If you don't like a show, it goes away. Wouldn't it be great if "real" television worked this way?

Back in June of 2005, Channel 101 premiered a new show called Yacht Rock, unlikely stories behind collaborations of the late 1970's and early 1980's. It had ten episodes (each is about 5 minutes long) before the Channel 101 audience cancelled it. They created an eleventh, and then it was gone. Here they are.

1 (original site)
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Oh, I almost forgot -- some mature language and content!! Enjoy.

PS: don't miss episode #'s 5 and 10, whatever you do.

Almost sorry to see this one go

2008-07-04T00:34:00.003-04:00

I've been saving it for so long!

This is Kiiiiiii. "4 little Joeys". It is pretty kick-ass.

HAPPY CANADA DAY!

2008-07-01T01:44:00.003-04:00

Well, had to work on Monday, so not quite the four-day weekend that I would have hoped for. Hazard of the low-man totem pole thing. Finally decorated my office, though. Three multi-picture frames from several years back from the year-long Asia trip. A beautiful canvas transfer painting from Homesense -- brown, very long and stylized downtown buildings. Moved a few pieces of furniture around, and put up a nice brushed steel floor lamp from IKEA with a 150w halogen bulb to scatter light from the ceiling. Green banker's lamp around the corner of the desk and out go those fluorescents! Also some bamboo in (painting-)matching brown river rocks but now I wonder if the lack of fluorescents will do them in. Will see. Anyway, it's beautiful, and so relaxing.

Took a night walk with the pup at midnight tonight. His first. Very excited, a little rangy, and had to calm him down a bit. We've had rain so he got a bit muddy and had a partial bath afterward. The boy loves to be groomed. The garden is coming along, though a few things need replanting. No sunflowers to speak of, and not sure about the wildflowers. The carrots are there but not growing much. Only the peas are going crazy, and we didn't originally have enough trellises, so they were slinging climbers all over each other.

Anyway, someone recently posted a thread online about Canadian song covers, and the America version of the Eddie Schwartz classic. Well, I haven't heard this since I was a kid, and then I heard it all the time. No video to go with, unfortunately, but I'm glad for the person who put it up so we could have the tune. If you're old enough (or young enough) to remember, sit back and enjoy.

And Happy Canada Day!

Has to be done

2008-06-27T20:00:00.003-04:00

Maybe you've seen it, perhaps a previous year's version, or at least heard of it.
Definitely worth a view. Oh, and it requires sound.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Once you're done there, by all means check out the outtakes.

Holy crap

2008-06-17T22:14:00.003-04:00

So this is terribly, incredibly exciting.

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OUR GARDEN SEEDLINGS HAVE APPEARED!

I spent a weekend "weeding" (they were really lovely plants, but I have no idea what they were) when Jules was in Toronto, and another with the whole gang helping out, enlarging the garden and transplanting the removed grass where I removed some of the too-numerous paving stones we have in our yard. I'd "gardened" as a kid with my parents in a large rented lot outside of town. Neat memories but I'm sure I didn't enjoy it a lot at the time, despite my parents' attempts at engaging my enthusiasm. I do recall row signs bearing titles like "Randy's carrots" and the like and I'm glad for the memory.

Well it's been apartments pretty much since I've been on my own, and now with Jules, until the current townhouse, which was mainly for the dog to have a yard. I had hopes for the garden but had no idea if anything would grow. I wasn't sure the soil was any good, for one thing, though that strange existing plant sure seemed to thrive.

Well yesterday there were tiny green sprouts sticking up from the earth, and today... the peas are three times the height they were yesterday. We've had gentle rain and it's done wonders. I was fearful for the carrots but we have little tufts sticking up there, too. And broad, thick leaves where I planted squash. No sign of the sunflowers that should be coming up along the fence, but I do see where the wildflowers are making an attempt. All very cool. But the dog is not heeding our symbolic little fence and I worry for all the plants now. He likes to tromp around and dig things up. Go figure.

The full garden set on Flickr can be found here. I will update the set as things progress!

Missed a couple of video Fridays, but I'll just go back and backdate one. You'll never get me to admit it so don't even try.

Super awesomeness you won't believe

2008-06-13T12:34:00.003-04:00

So here's the deal: I miss a Friday video and I post one that's just stupendously awesome to make up for it.

Hard to believe I'd forgotten about this one for so long. How you can not have this in your thoughts at all times is beyond me. Really. It's beyond me. I need help.

Two apologies

2008-05-25T14:35:00.010-04:00

One: I realize that my last post was a bit creepy. I refer of course to my use of the word "fulsome", which should never be used at any time for any reason.
Two: I completely missed posting my Friday video, which I know is the only reason anyone puts up with my inane mumblings.

This past week was a busy one. Jules and I rented a car (a cute, blue, Kia Rio) and high-tailed it to Quebec City, which for some reason, the inhabitants refer to simply as "Kebec". It was a pretty fabulous week. Aside from our first night's dinner -- it was late and we didn't have time to search out a proper, non-tourist restaurant -- the food was excellent if a bit rich. And our trip timing could scarcely be better. The day we eventually made our way to two museums happened to be the "International Day of Museums", and thus, free. We go to the Fort Museum just in time for their entertaining sound and light show, highlighting the battles of Quebec in a way apparently inspired by the sound and light shows done with dioramas depicting the Civil War down South. We arrive at another museum just in time to don 3-D glasses for a strange fictional cultural film. We put off a tour of the Citadel until arriving on a morning punctuated by cannon blasts. It was the anniversary of the Patriotes' revolt. It was pretty much all like that. And a horse carriage ride. And a ghost tour. And more. The hotel room was a bit small, only one of two rooms on the upper, obviously attic, floor (featuring a slanted bit of low ceiling I dubbed "le bonk"), but it was clean and comfy. The weather was a bit cold, but I had brought appropriate garb.

I suppose I should also add that our initial reason for going was to attend Jules' high school reunion, which provided countless opportunities for riffing on a movie that Jules can actually quote -- Grosse Point Blank. Despite rather lackluster attendance from her year -- it was a cumulative meet -- a good time was had.

As a vacation, it was pretty damn good. The history was tangible and educational -- I've finally learned the strategic function of earthen ramparts -- and the food was fantastic -- we ate caribou and stag, both in fondue and in St. Jean Lac tourtière; lamb, lobster, and sugar pie.

I hadn't been quite sure what to expect of Quebec City. From what I managed to pick up from my high school history classes, I expected it to look pretty much like this. So if you haven't been, even these descriptions may not evoke the proper image. So for your tardy Friday video, here. Quebec City celebrating its 400th is, in every way, exactly like this. But with tourtière.

Elliot-toe and the Plot

2008-05-24T22:05:00.005-04:00

So my parents are in this weekend. Or rather, a four-day extended weekend. Julie and I are taking Monday and Tuesday off, as it's a long drive from Winnipeg and we don't get to see them very often.

In our wanderings today, having taken a quick tour of the National Art Gallery, we found ourselves in the Byward Market and decided to stay for dinner. We settled at the Keg, and before long, we noted our longtime traveling nemesis, Elliot-toe, arriving with an unknown older gentleman. We waved somewhat frantically and he eventually acknowledged us, and came over to meet my parents. He identified his companion as blood relation and we insisted on meeting the Elliott broodle-kin.

Well, says the father of Elliot-toe, I don't know you, but I know Julie from Elliott's blog.

...

Perhaps this is a good time to note that as long as I've known Elliott, Julie and I have been together. And while we're not exactly inseparable, the only times we have visited with Elliott, sometimes from afar, sometimes not, we have both been present. Yet somehow photos of Julie have made their way into Elliott's blog with relative frequency while photos of yours truly have not.

Naturally, I take it upon myself to correct the situation.

Here I am inserting myself into Elliott's life. Notice the lack of photoshop. And awareness of those involved. I'd like to think that future such ~~stalkings~~ photo ops will eventually create a fulsome web record of goings on in our inextricably intertwined lives. I have already employed Simon as spy and possible assassin (as required). Yes, the future is bright, indeed.

Early Friday

2008-05-16T16:20:00.001-04:00

Ok, so we're leaving for Quebec City on Thurs, so I have to post an early Friday video. But I'll just date it as Friday and no one will be the wiser. (You don't actually read these things, do you?) This one is for Jules.

"Strategic" being a euphemism

2008-05-13T21:41:00.007-04:00

I read this yesterday, which more than likely resulted in the following dream. It's been a long time. Feels like the 80's again.

Jules and I were living in Winnipeg. It was winter. Jules was busy with another urgent errand. I made my way over to my sister Keri's house on a kind of flatbed of rollers with a handle and motor. A kind of CAT. Difficult to use. Anyway, time was ticking. About 2 hours to go before Winnipeg would be hit by a nuclear strike (never unreasonable, having a CFB), along with several other Canadian cities.

I eventually arrived. I recall the time remaining being an hour and two minutes. My niece Danielle and a girl friend of hers answered the door. I said something like "Sorry to disappoint you" (I think they were expecting a non-relative). I believe my sister Kathy was there, also. I said to Keri that we have to get out of here. What are her plans? She said she was going to install a keypad lock on the car. I said I thought that was a good idea, thinking of the likely ensuing chaos, but was there time?

I think I may have compromised the dream when I realized that my plan to travel west in the mountains lacked a certain, shall we say, prairie element. I woke and wrote the whole thing down.

Later I slept again and entered a later part of the dream. Julie was at a nearby archipelago with other survivors. I had stopped at one of several piles of possessions that had been dumped along the way. One of my boxes was here. I started going through it, grabbing mostly wooden carvings from Indonesia from my trip several years ago. Then I made my way forward, doing this jump and glide thing that I do sometimes in dreams. Not quite flying. Then I reached the area where Julie was, and my little holocaust dream, part ii, ended.

New on NBC

2008-05-09T19:22:00.001-04:00

DANCE! EVERYBODY DANCE!

2008-05-02T18:43:00.003-04:00

Did I say best video? Oh, that was best music video.

THIS is the best video ever.

Uh... on review, some scenes not suitable for some viewers.

The Strange Incident of April 29

2008-04-29T23:58:00.012-04:00

I've been recording my dreams lately. I hauled out an old book that I used to use to keep them in. Bought it in Malaysia. Funky, mesmerizing pattern on the cover. Anyway, recording your dreams is supposed to make you better at remembering them, and one step closer to the sought-after lucid dream, which I've had but that's a whole other subject. Suffice to say that I've had some pretty weird images and experiences in my waking mind of late. But that's not what this was.

I set out this morning running late. I was on just 4 hours of sleep. I don't do that much anymore, but chilly out, I was feeling awake and clear-headed, regardless. I pulled my rain jacket about me for warmth.

Crossing the street into the park that leads to the park'n'ride and my bus to work, I put my earbuds on and hit play. I'd just loaded some Dread Zeppelin, and their version of Black Dog started up. Strange sounds for a spring park scene in the morning, but DZ always makes me smile.

That's when I looked to my right, past the fenced-in baseball diamond where we take the dog to play fetch off-leash.

I saw someone walking, a spring in their step. But, well... they appeared to have no head.

Instead there was a horizontal line of white, and a diagonal one running down into the body as it strode forward. I slowed a bit but, well, I didn't want to stare.

I looked ahead and bit my lip. The Twilight Zone theme played on guitar as DZ continued their intro.

I looked back. The headless figure jauntily bobbed forward, the brilliant white angle, like a 7, protruding outward. Well, I thought. I can't really explain that.

For a moment I wondered if the person was wearing some kind of costume. Some kind of headless man costume. Through the park. In the morning. It was hard to work out which was the less realistic explanation. At the same time, I felt like I'd passed some kind of test. It's hard to know how a person will react when confronted with something that surreal. I like knowing that my mind isn't about to snap like a twig just because I encounter a few headless people on their way to work. I suspect much of this particular thought process is explained by the lack of sleep.

I was tired, and I wasn't wearing my glasses (when I'm not tired I'm 20/20 without), but there was no doubting that I was wide awake, and my vision was sharp.

I paused at the edge of the park, and that's when I saw the figure cross in front of some different scenery. The parts of head above and below the shimmering white
headband showed for an instant, and then blended in again. The sky was overcast, the scene all dark blues and greens. The headband, and perhaps some kind of draping cloth glowed a brilliant white in contrast.

Heh. I continued on.

Later I saw the person board my bus. A woman. Somehow I was expecting a Japanese man. She met my gaze for a moment and I took in the odd headband and scarf arrangement. Then she settled into her seat, and we both headed downtown.

Here's yer video

2008-04-25T20:21:00.006-04:00

Note the "SILF" t-shirt. Kids, don't explain it to your parents.

It's definitely on

2008-04-18T07:37:00.007-04:00

Last week, there was the smell.
Earlier this week, motorcycles, bicycles.
Yesterday, girls on roller-blades and 20 degrees.

It's definitely on. Spring is here.

So, there's been a night and day difference in swimming, quite abruptly.

Last week, fetching rings from the bottom made class suddenly comfortable.

Then yesterday, I was restless from not being to the gym or pool recently, and too hot in the hot tub waiting for class to begin and thinking about how nice it would be to get in; our instructor is also ticking off skills on her list so there was a lot more underwater work -- swimming a distance underwater, and dolphin kicks in preparation for butterfly work. There's something about underwater work that takes me right back to Asia and all the fin-diving I did. And when you know you're going to be under for a minute or more, it becomes crystal clear that you have no need to be taking a breath every 5 seconds. It's just not necessary. And all the skills work keeps you thinking about other things, the way going under with slates and a camera did.

So the bit of front crawl I did was, well, a piece of cake. Easy, comfortable, confident. Now I can just concentrate on the moves. At least until I think about swimming in a river.

Meanwhile, 5km Law Run coming up next Friday. Looking forward to it!

Ok, videos. Two of em. The first one has its "oh, ah AAAAAAHHHHHH!" moment at about the 1-minute mark. The second is pretty much all like that. The experience of either would suffer terribly from stutter, so load entirely ahead of time before playing. Have fun.

Low volume recommended.

Regular volume recommended.

Ok, I can't stand it

2008-04-11T23:55:00.002-04:00

Also very good, and very catchy. There's still 5 minutes left in this video Friday so I'm posting it. Enjoy.

Best Video Ever

2008-04-11T08:30:00.003-04:00

Ok, yes, you were Rickroll'd.

But it was the week of April Fool's. Had to be done.

This week, I came across so many amazing videos that it was hard to decide which I'd put up. Until, that is, I saw this one. Then it was no contest.

I predict you will watch it twice. Then later, once again. After that there's probably no saving you. I now have all the stuff these guys have done on my mp3 player. Enjoy. (requires sound!)

FRICKIN FRAK.

2008-04-04T21:34:00.014-04:00

(this is a family blog)

Well, where to start.

I hate to swim.

I wanted to be positive about it, you know? I don't care for it. I'm not good at it and I don't care for it. Sometimes it downright gives me the willies. But no, actually, it sucks. I'm addicted to air, and I want it when I want it, not when I'm next supposed to be able to have it, if a wave doesn't go crashing over my head.

So I had a little incident. A little drowny-type thing as a kid in my uncle's swimming pool. Not that serious. My dad was there to pull me out. (thanks dad) The thing that bothered me about it was that you're supposed to be able to just... swim. Everybody says so. That's why you hurl your loved ones into the nearest freestanding pool or river, and can do the same thing with a dog, no? Instinct just kicks in. I remember a lot of flailing. And sinking.

Fast-forward to swimming lessons. Still not too comfortable but making progress. It gets to be evaluation day. I dunno. Not too far along, but not the first course, either. And what happens. The elastic on my trunks snaps. But I'm too embarrassed to tell anyone, so I complete the evaluations -- including a dive -- with one hand at my waist, to hold my shorts up. FAIL.

A little further along. Grade 4. I'm not crazy about pools by this point, and having not developed ability, have not developed confidence. But we take a school trip to the Pan Am pool. Kind of exciting. Cold, large, but exciting. Then my teacher -- notoriously unfriendly woman to put it mildly, stabs me in the eye with one of her gigantic fingernails as I'm swimming along. Gah! I don't know what freaked me out more: that I thought I may have lost an eye, or that my teacher was suddenly being incredibly nice to me. So I develop a paranoia about being underwater in public swimming pools, where in the state of your muffled hearing, you can never tell if someone is about to, say, dive on top of you and snap your spine like a twig, or perhaps stab you in the eye, blinding you for life.

Fast-forward to about 7 years ago. I'm in Asia for a year, just backpacking around and taking stock. Haven't done a lot of swimming so little ability, little confidence. Same old story. But I'm in excellent shape and I make a decent go of it. HUGE frickin hurricane hits. I mean gigantic. I actually snap pictures of a waterspout but turns out the camera I bought in Bangkok was a complete bust. Anyway. Huge frickin storm. Goes on and on. Our beach can only be reached by small boat. Supplies run short. Then one morning, daylight. The waves are brown with debris, but things are looking up. Fantastic! So a bunch of us go trekking to the other side of the island where there are "huge waves, I mean really immense". Only post-storm, they weren't huge. They were gigantic. Oh yeah, and it wasn't post-storm, turns out. We were in the eye, but didn't know it. So it screwed up the waves and currents beyond recognition from the beach. Riptide almost takes two of my friends away, then catches me. Completely done for. No idea how I pulled through. Well some idea, but that's another story. Shaken, not stirred, to say the least.

Still, just two weeks later I'm due to take my first SCUBA course, so I have to get back in the water and get comfortable again. That day. No time to think about it. Don't think about it. Do not think about it.

So here I am today. I like to run. Running is good. You can breathe all you want; the cement never conspires to suck you under to some final, dark place of suffocation. Nope. Happy, tiring fun. But I've always wanted to do triathlons, so...

I'm taking swimming lessons again. And if my elastic breaks, I think I'll tell my instructor. And I'll say it again: swimming fricking sucks. Laps suck. Sticking your head underwater sucks. I can do backstroke forever and ever, but front crawl, erg. And don't even get me started on breast stroke. But slowly it's beginning to come together. Things got chaotic in the pool the other day with another class suddenly crashing into my lane while I was swimming along, and I got that nasty vulnerable feeling again, unable to suss what was going on underwater. But mostly good. We did search and rescue surface dive patterns yesterday, and retrieving things off the bottom of the pool, and that was fun. Of course, this is all in a pool. The swimming portion of triathlons are done in lakes and rivers. Different kind of fun.

So today after work I hit the gym. 5 minutes on treadmill; full weights workout, really hard. Then half an hour on the elliptical till I could feel a tendon start to tick, then onto the bike. What the heck, I figure. The upcoming sprint triathlon has a 20km bike portion. I'll do that. Not expecting much. It's just twiddling your feet in circles, isn't it? Well holy hell. I struggled to get it done in 40 minutes, and it ate me right up. This thing is gonna be harder than I thought.

So it's Friday again and I have a special treat. The best Muppet footage ever. Enjoy.

"Hmm, that's not good,"

2008-04-02T23:26:00.007-04:00

I thought. We were the last two left. Looks bad. Evasive.

The customs officer was standing primly in the aisle of the aircraft, at a table that came up to her waist. Tall, blond, in a uniform vaguely dress military.

She looked in our direction, nodding with a slight but insistent smile.

I looked at Jules and squeezed by, while other passengers, having already returned from the woman, were picking up their things and moving on. All of it seemed somehow slightly futuristic, sterile, and threatening.

"A few questions, sir," she said, with an English accent.

I nodded.

"Your doctor's name?"

"Floyd Grant." I have no idea if I was making it up.

"Mmm. Neurologist? Optometrist? Psychologist?

"Uh, GP."

But she was already counting out pills. Big, flat, white ones. Each had a large black letter or number on it.

"Right then, here you are. Enjoy your stay."

Then it was Jules' turn.

I got the news today, oh boy...

2008-04-01T07:41:00.000-04:00

Dire news from Reuters.

Infiltration

2008-03-28T23:23:00.003-04:00

So you go to the bathroom on your floor and it's blocked by a cleaning cart. You go away and return later if you can. Or you wait if you can do that. Or, you hit the stairwell and try another floor.

A lot of the floors in my building do not have stairwell access. One floor down from me does, though I'd never been down there. I wasn't even sure what was there, but there was going to be no waiting today, so down I went. Quick glances at signs to tell me where I'm going without obviously being lost. Try not to head to a dead-end or access-pass-only door. Find the bathroom. 2 guys inside. Be casual. Then back to the stairwell. Interestingly, there's a sign upon reaching my floor that warns that our hallways are monitored by closed circuit tv. Never noticed that before. I wonder why us and not them.

So another Friday, thankfully. A short week but it felt long enough. So here's a video.

Odd Jobs

2008-03-22T19:44:00.005-04:00

It occurred to me as I toured my new workplace a couple of months ago that I wanted to write this post. Another tour, new coworkers, new procedures. New work.

I wanted to write about it because it's become a tad tiresome. I've done it entirely too many times before. I like change. But I think I'm ready to settle into a little rut for just a bit. Develop some, I don't know, expertise in something. Actually earn a raise. Collect holidays. Stop being the absolute lowest person on the totem pole.

This got me thinking of all the other places I've worked, and I set about making a list of them. Given the semi-anonymous nature of this blog, I'll remove some of the details of the employers involved, but every job here is one I was hired to do and did, for some portion of time. Roughly in order.

- counter server at a doughnut shop
- dishwasher
- waiter
- cook
- municipal government cashier/clerk
- canvasser for an environmental advocacy org
- retail (book store)
- construction/renovation
- cook at a café
- security guard (mobile)
- teaching assistant (undergrad level philosophy)
- bookstore bagger
- alarm company dispatcher
- live-in level 3 group home counselor
- air traffic control trainee
- counselor level 4 crisis stabilization unit
- cruise ship bartender
- office temp (many offices, gov depts, and conferences)
- law office temp (likewise)
- courtroom aide
- summer articling student
- articling student
- legal counsel (various offices, disciplines)
- English teacher in Japan

That doesn't count the jobs I applied for and was hired for, but for one reason or another (usually a good one) didn't show up for. Those, AFAIR, are:

- rail yard security guard
- cook (fancy restaurant; tyrannical chef)
- baker
- soldier (they said take the weekend and think about it. I did.)

And volunteer work, some of which were remunerated but not with money:

- candy floss maker/seller
- data entry clerk
- victim/witness court aide
- honorary probation officer (for 4 years)
- youth justice committee member
- worker at a community legal clinic
- worker on school law review
- volunteer with environmental advocacy org
- fire handler with local arts/festival org
- assistant SCUBA dive researcher for environmental org
- and, one time only, as Santa Claus

I get the impression I'm forgetting a few, but that's most of them. Each one, new names, some degree of upward learning curve, and new stuff to try. But man am I tired of that.

Except casino dealer. Haven't tried that. Would still like to.

Super long weekend!

2008-03-21T09:49:00.010-04:00

And for the occasion, this catchy little number.

Embarrassing how many of these I knew.

Another Friday

2008-03-14T08:47:00.001-04:00

This requires volume -- but not too much.

I was just kind of in the mood for this today.

A really rather serious spread

2008-03-07T09:25:00.006-05:00

I am slightly hooked on this one.

Lyrics here if you want to think about it, but it's also nice just to sit back and let it soak in.

Better copy here (but can't embed; requires Quicktime)

(The only bit I don't care for is the line "You sole proPRIetor of that priceless red-wet" which, frankly, I find annoying)

Well, this sucks.

2008-03-04T22:06:00.006-05:00

Long day at work. Punishing workout after. Then I fell on an ice embankment on the way home. Bashed up my elbow, wrenched my back, and twisted my wrist. I think the endorphins from the workout are helping to kill the pain. Anyway, that's not what I'm mumbling about tonight.

This is about another old man. Slightly older. Grizzled, and by all accounts, ornery.
Gary Gygax, crawler of imaginary dungeons, wielder of Platonic solids, is dead at age 69.

I hadn't even reached my teens when I inherited my brother's 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons set. I think I memorized the Player's Handbook. Until 3rd edition came along, I could still be counted on to tell you what a given material component was. God, treasure type. Remember treasure type? Or what it takes to get to the centre of a prismatic sphere? (hey, no cheating -- I see that rod) Loads of great memories with friends, and I think that's how it was for countless groups of kids out there. And of course a whole industry -- several, actually -- sprang up in response. Yeah, it wasn't always great, and there were always new versions of the idea being put out there, but there was something amazing about being able to meet up with a few friends in a coffee shop and have someone say "Wanna roll up characters?" and 20 minutes later you're off and running. And the moments that were great, well, they were fantastic, in every sense of the word.

Thanks for the memories, old man.

Awesome

2008-02-29T00:58:00.002-05:00

Well, it's Friday, and I've been wanting to link to this forever.

Credit where due, to Pitchfork for this quote:
The skimpy budgets of artists with no chance at MTV airplay have been a windfall for DIY animators, who are granted free reign to whip up a hopefully viral video without having to deal with actual people. Joel Trussel achieved high communicability with this cartoon, which resembles a lost outtake from Yellow Submarine. Just like Forrest with his music, Trussel throws everything indisputably awesome-- Vikings, roadies, robots, guitar battles, marching bands, Polaroids-- into four minutes, and the simple pleasure of image/sound synchrony does the rest. [Rob Mitchum]

Crank this baby up. It's War Photographer.

Sweet!

2008-02-27T21:48:00.008-05:00

In my Elementary School Library, there was a certain book. Great story. Haunting, evocative pictures. If you picked up that book and inspected the library card inside, you'd see my name all the way down one side and then back down the other (until all the lines had been filled and a new card was inserted). That book was H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

I remembered describing the pictures to many people. But only recently did I think to go online and search for it. I've recently been playing around with eBay for the first time, so I thought I might be able to find an old copy. Well, there are plenty of copies with various art, but not mine.

Finally, I tried a few museum sites of War of the Worlds cover art. There have been scores of covers. But there it was -- the 1960 Looking Glass Edition. And it turns out that our school librarian chose wisely, because for some reason it was a well-known edition, and quite difficult to come by. I was saddened by that fact, but so pleased to see it again:

Once I had the details, I decided to search about some more. And what tremendous luck I had.

It turned out to be a classic. The New York Review of Books has put out a special new print of the 1960 Looking Glass Edition. And the NYRB tells why: "In 1960, Edward Gorey prepared a set of his inimitable pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate a new edition of Wells's The War of the Worlds for the legendary Looking Glass Library. Characteristically quirky, elegant, and entrancing, Gorey's visual take on Wells's seminal tour de force has been unavailable for close to fifty years. This special hardcover edition from NYRB Classics brings back for today's readers a richly rewarding collaboration between two modern masters of all that's wonderful and strange."

Wonderful and strange it is. Go check out some of the interior art on the NYRB site. Maybe order yourself a copy. Mine came today!

Fixed!

2007-12-25T13:49:00.000-05:00

A GIANT thank-you to my niece, Nicole, for having me in to her work to have my sloppy dental work fixed up. It seems that the work was ok on the whole, but my random dentist had some wacky ideas about finishing it off. And perhaps lack the know-how to floss. Anyway, in for an x-ray, work by the doc and then scaling by a hygenist, all at no cost! Super-friendly doc, and sitting in the chair listening to work being done nearby, was reminded what professional dentistry is actually supposed to be like. Had to venture back to drop off a bottle of wine for the man. Awesome job.

And a great little visit home for the holidays. I'm always glad to go (if also glad to leave before too long). The fam was surprised and happy to see the pup come along with, and he had a good visit, too.

Now possibly over to Toronto for New Year's. Have to see. Oh, and work is on the horizon. I start Jan. 7 in a new office. Excited by the work (and heck, working in my field has regained novelty status) and will be nice to be paying down debt instead of continuing to accumulate it. A good start to 2008!

Root of the problem

2007-12-14T21:37:00.000-05:00

Here's the top ten signs that your root canal procedure may be in trouble:

10) Your random new dentist's offices are deserted.
9) During your procedure, they keep rifling through drawers looking for stuff
8) The dentist never tells you what's coming next or how long it will take.
7) The dentist mumbles to his assistant: Do we have any? No? That's ok.
6) The dental assistant likes to put things in your mouth and then look elsewhere, choking you with the suction tube.
5) The dentist takes hold of an instrument the assistant is holding and moves it, and her hand, to a different position.
4) The dental assistant drops the suction tube onto the floor.
3) The dentist mumbles to his assistant: We only have these? That'll do.
2) The dentist appears to have an amazingly short memory. He takes two measurements and then asks for them constantly. Dystal? 1-8. Lingual? 1-6. Dystal? He asks his assistant for each about a dozen times.
1) The dentist slips with the drill and both he and his assistant pause to stare.

Ah yes. Healthy tooth. Broken tooth. And my favorite dentist is in another town. What's a boy to do? Why go random dentist shopping, that's what!

More than 3 hours in the chair, but it got done.

Update: my 15 minutes in the chair on Friday turned into 50, as a simple crown installation turned into something else. A layperson doesn't know what's gone wrong but he knows when something has. Crown goes in. Floss. Test bite. (feels tight, but the bite is ok, I say) Crown comes out. Cement goes on. Crown goes back in. Flos- *snap* Ok. Flo- *snap* A dozen attempts later, he's threading it through the gumline gap and sawing upward. No good. Next: painful wedges. Nope. Finally, frustatingly, sitting up and being told that I can leave it as is (?!) or he'll cut this crown out and put a new one in in the new year. Argh.

[late edit: did I mention that during the RC, they put on a Mel Brooks movie? That was torture]

Wrapping up and taking off

2007-07-29T13:50:00.000-04:00

Hitting the road tomorrow. Bit of a chaotic mess getting everything squared away with cancellation of service contracts, the move, inspection, and -- for me -- marking school papers even after my last day was done. I was prepared for it to be bittersweet, but honestly, the past month has seen so much trouble, and so much of it unnecessary, that it can't be. Leaving is simply sweet.

So tomorrow we fly out of Centrair to Bangkok and spend at least four days there. We've been planning on heading to Laos at that point, after we find ourselves some Typhoid vaccine (none here in Japan) but have been playing with the idea of taking a sharp turn and heading for Malaysia instead. Funny, that would mirror my trip years ago, when I found myself studying Laotian, with a slowly expiring visa in my passport, looking north but heading south...

Time for a bit of sleep, then a trip to the post office, and off we go.

So we're climbing this

2007-07-05T08:58:00.000-04:00

Not part-way up. To the top, starting from about halfway up.

Normally this would not be a problem. It is supposed to be challenging, but do-able. However, this year has seen far more snow than usual, and for the first time ever, the summit was going to be closed, until a workcrew managed to dig a passage to the top. Must have been some labour at high altitude.

So, we've gone and bought ourselves walking sticks, cotton gloves with rubber grip, bottled water, electrolyte packs, a headlamp for Jules, chocolate, spare batteries, whistles, LED lights, and rain gear. Tomorrow is supposed to be clear, but the forecast for Saturday is "100% chance of precipitation". As Julie points out, as long as that doesn't mean at 12:01AM, we might be alright. We are hiking through the night, hoping to summit for sunrise. If not, we can still catch it on the Yoshida Guchi trail. It has been raining, though, and that means ice, so we're going to go slowly and cautiously.

At 3776 metres, this is not as high as I have been. Annapurna Base Camp, at 4130 metres, was higher. (Annapurna itself climbs to 8091 metres, making it the world's tenth-tallest) Of course, I got altitude sickness on Annapurna, but I'm not being driven by a half-mad German climber this time. (Julie is French-Canadian)

During our recovery we hope to explore the nearby region, including the infamous forest Aokigahara and some interesting caves. About these, Wikipedia has this to say:

The caverns found in the Aokigahara forest contain ice even during summer. Legends tell of monsters, ghosts, and goblins haunting the forest, adding to its sinister reputation. Furthermore, Aokigahara Jukai (The Sea of Trees) is the top suicide area in Japan; the spirits of those who kill themselves there are said to be cursed to forever haunt the area. Over 78 bodies have been discovered in 2002 alone, prompting officials to put up signs prohibiting suicide in the forest.

Excellent. Julie's been bugging me to go camping! Actually, there's an old rumour that compasses do not work in that forest. While it's apparently been disproven, may as well see for ourselves. Though it's the caves that are the real draw for me.

OK, will update with pictures on the return. Gambarimasu!

Best Video Ever

2007-05-26T23:06:00.000-04:00

This gives you a great feel of a typical kaiten zushi place. Not our footage. (slow loading -- pause for a few minutes first to ensure smooth play)

Enjoy!

Updating Flickr -- please wait...

2007-05-11T06:27:00.000-04:00

Hi all.
Back from numerous trips, and resting up after a bout with the flu.
While I update Flickr, which I expect to take a little while, enjoy a clip of my new favourite Japanese video game, Drummania.

No, I can't play that fast.

The majority of the people who are reading this are my Sworn Enemies!

2007-04-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

Korea, kimchi, ribs, the DMZ.
Hokkaido, Simon, adventures of the marimo.
End of Life on Mars.
End of Vonnegut.

Much catching up to do here but no time and a tad depressed. So I leave you with this Youtube Friday installment.

Oh, wait, the Asahi has more:

Toyama, the Kyushu-based activist who calls himself a fascist, set up "shop"--a cardboard box on which to sit--in front of Tokyo's Koenji Station one recent evening. He also had several cans of beer in a plastic bag.

Addressing 20 or so passersby, Toyama said: "Let's start the drinking session as usual. But under the election law, I'm afraid I can't treat you. Please buy alcoholic drinks yourselves at a kiosk or a convenience store nearby."

Toyama has followed the same routine since the campaign kicked off on March 22.

Apparently he got 15,000 votes.

Ok, off to Takayama. Be back soon.

- Freemount

special lunches

2007-03-15T07:05:00.000-04:00

I mentioned previously that we get "special lunches" on occasion, at least those of us in the school "social club", which appears to be everybody.

Having talked recently with my parents (hi mom and dad), I know that people back home are interested in what there is for food out here. You know sushi, but that's not very typical fare out here. Well, I suppose, neither is this, but it will give you a good idea of the kinds of things found in school lunches. Just more of it, in this case, with a nicer presentation. I grilled my staff room neighbour for details on just what everything was.

Wednesday we had an unagi (eel) set. It was delicious, but just one single piece of eel!

I recommend following this Flickr set to get details on everything you see here, but there is lily bulb, namafu (gelatinous flour-based cube), Japanese cedar buds, cod in roe, boiled eggplant, sweet potato, kamaboko (sea urchin), ebi (shrimp), roasted sake (salmon), Takuam (pickled daikon, named after a Buddhist priest), shibazuke -- common, purple cucumber pickles, shimeji (a kind of mushroom), the one piece of grilled unagi, and rice.

Thursday, we had another special lunch. It's final exam marking week at Motosushoyo. Not much for me to do now that I'm done marking all of my first years' compositions, but the other teachers are all busy.

This one came in a pretty but disposable box.

Again, you can get details on all of the food in a Flickr set for this meal, here. But the meal included: one piece of ebi tempura, pumpkin salad, chicken, pasta, okra in white soy with tuna (avoided -- I hate the slime), a cube of sweet potato in sesame seeds (delicious), herring roe on cedar buds and fish, a kind of compressed fried lotus root patty, ika and seaweed strips, a mushroom top, a chunk of boiled pumpkin, a tied tofu bag with diced veggies inside, a bamboo chute, and a whole little squid!

One compartment also held a piece of "Bavarian cream" cake, a strawberry, a slice of lemon, and what looked like glass noodles. Well, we've seen these before. There are glass noodles, but they're not alone.

Do you see the eyes? A kind of "whitefish" (though they are pink).

The little squid, I have to say, was adorable. Here he is with the tied tofu bag and bamboo chute, and again from a different angle. Very photogenic.

Here he is making friends with the fish-shaped soy sauce bottle. And here he is wearing a jaunty sea-captain's hat.

Yes, he likes his sea captain's hat.

Sadly, he was beginning to show signs of wear at that point, and had to be eaten before any Shakespeare could ensue.

* * * * *

Well, we leave for South Korea tomorrow, and I need my sleep. It's exciting but rather nerve-wracking. I feel wholly unprepared. We do have lots of things planned, though, and have even booked a USO-sponsored tour of the DMZ. See you in five days.

the two saddest words

2007-03-13T05:44:00.000-04:00

So it's the end of the academic year.

Most senior high schools had their grad last week, and ours was no exception. The only graduation I'll ever see here.

It should have been both a happy and a sad event, but they managed to drain all the life from it. After a (solid) hour of speeches, some students stood to receive recognition of honours, but none crossed the stage. Certificates were not even handed out at the ceremony. They were distributed later.

I was also a bit miffed that I was discouraged from taking photos. The bright spot is that, as I was passing a stairwell on the way to the gym building, I found all the 3rd years packed into it, instructed to await the cue for their entrance. They were only too happy to pose for a picture.

Japan manages to be the only country I know of where people are genuinely happy to have anyone take their picture, and thank you warmly for it.

In any case, the morning was a bit long, the speeches sombre in tone, and we all returned to the main building and our kerosene heaters while the students began to show signs of life, gathering outside in the sun and chatting happily. There were few tears that I saw, but that likely came later. I hadn't realized they were having parties upstairs in the classrooms until wandering across a building catwalk and passing several students lugging huge emptied trays that, judging from the scraps, had been covered with some extravagant fare not long before.

That sounds a bit cold. I should add that I was a bit emotional about the graduates and would have been more so, but I've only had ten 3rd year students, so the vast majority of the graduating class I did not know. It would be different to be here next year and see my second-years graduate, or again the following spring and see the students I knew as first-years go.

We also had another "special lunch". I have to admit, the staff "social club" seemed like a bit of a ripoff when I first arrived. Membership costs according to salary; at my level, I was paying 2850 yen (that's $28.50 Cdn) a month, and yet there were no uses to which this money would be put until Christmas. But since then, we've had one or two special lunches a month, and they're fantastic. Given the strong value of community in Japanese culture, I wasn't going to decline membership in the social club regardless, but it's nice that something good comes of it.

I think I was in a bit of a funk that day, to be truthful. While some friends I haven't seen in a few months recently noted that I seem a "bit happier and more settled", it's still fairly easy to fall out of step here. For example, I've recently become persona non grata I think because I failed to attend a retirement party for one of the teachers. How long this will last, I don't know, but I'm tiring of this kind of thing. Which itself is probably alright, since the biggest issue Julie and I have had to deal with over the past month or month and a half is the decision whether or not to recontract with the JET Programme. We went back and forth on this a lot. A major part of the problem is that you are forced to decide six months in advance. It's hard to know how you'll feel then, having gotten past the winter and partway through a new year in which you actually understand at least in part how things around you work, both inside of the classroom and out. When it came down to it, I was slightly leaning toward recontracting and Julie was slightly leaning away. I tried making a weighted pro-con list, and the scores came out: Japan: 0; Canada: -1. Julie remarked wryly that that sounded about right.

In the end, we talked about it every night for a week, for anywhere from 3-5 hours at a time. There were some pretty heavy considerations being lobbed around. We have a dog at home that we need to get back to. But he's in good hands. I have a job at home to go back to. But it bores and depresses me. Julie has no job to go home to. But she could acquire one and is itching to move on in her career. A second year would allow us to move in together again, get a car, and explore more of Japan. But we would be merely extending the experience -- is it worth the cost? Added to that, with having to decide six months in advance, we weren't signing on for merely another year, but another year and a half from the point of decision. That's a long commitment to make, considering how highly variable our feelings were concerning our time here. Hell, a long commitment, regardless, and I'm a bit of an options-freak (but hey, it kept me out of the armed forces -- I couldn't say yes to nine years DEO). In the end, we grew tired of talking about it but lacked any way to make the decision. There would be regret with either option. Which would produce more?

In the end we declined to recontract. We made one small concession to keeping options open, and that was that we agreed to check out a few places for possible relocation if, approaching our actual finish we knew we needed more time for Japan. But that's a hard slog to be sure. Here we have apartments set up, bills being paid for the most part automatically, and steady work with people we mostly like. Elsewhere, we'd have to sort out the work visa, find work, find an apartment, and basically start all over again. Not something to do for a month or two, so again it would entail more time. 6 months we figure or not at all. One of the big downsides of JET is that you cannot choose where you go. Our own choices were marred by misinformation or lack of information, and perhaps the biggest downside of JET is that you cannot move between years. Not between cities, not between schools or levels of school. So you either have to like your experience enough exactly the way it is, or drop the program and strike out on your own. Not impossible, but difficult. We'll see. (Those backup cities, incidentally, are Tokyo, Nagano, Sapporo, and Hiroshima. It would be nice to try out a location of our own choosing, though I would miss quasi-inaka life near the rice fields.)

Immediately after sending in the paperwork with my answer I felt substantial regret. I needed work for the new year. I could go back to my old job (depressing), or to a new job (difficult and not lucrative) or to school (a probably impossible expense). So the question shouldn't be limited to: do I truly want to do this for another year, but also do I have a better option for the coming year? Where staying had originally seemed like pushing a luxury too far, it began to seem like the practical thing to do. To make matters worse, as I think I've described before, it's pretty much impossible to have a very bad time in my job for very long. Something surprising and pleasant is usually just around the corner, and in the meantime, the delight of the students to see you, to start a conversation or just say hello, makes it difficult to walk around feeling down. I knew that there would be days where I would think that refusing the option to recontract might have been a mistake. I didn't anticipate days where I was sure of it.

A little bit of time has passed since then. Cold weather has unexpectedly struck, bringing big, lazy flakes of snow -- more than we've seen all winter. And while it is beautiful, the cold helps remind me of the comforts of a Canadian home. (though the heaters used in yesterday's assembly were something out of science fiction and worth the chill on their own) Since arriving here, Jules and I have remarked that Japan has many virtues (many, many) but it is a difficult country to feel comfortable in. In addition, the recent social imbroglios, as I mentioned, have also left me feeling a bit detached, and now with classes finished until the new school year starts in April, I don't have these happy, smiling students to keep me feeling so connected to the place.

But regret is a highly variable thing. I usually have no problem with making decisions between bad options. It's the situations with multiple good options that are tortuous. If all else fails, I'll decide something daily and see if a pattern emerges over a week or a month and go with that. If pressed for time, I'll flip a coin (as I eventually did when faced with having to choose between a big law firm and Justice -- though that was more to produce an emotional result and take a read off that). So here's the new regret-o-metre, both to keep track of feelings about staying longer in Japan, and as a yardstick for how things are going here and to what extent I'm missing home.

Currently, I'm freezing in my living room (it was 8 degrees in here this morning) and doing a little research on South Korea for our upcoming trip -- this Friday! I'm very excited about it, though the food looks to be daunting (chili peppers in *everything*?!). Between South Korea, Hokkaido, and whatever we get up to for Golden Week, I'm going to need a new hard drive to store all of these pictures.

Friday Night Videos: polar bear clip

2007-03-09T06:30:00.000-05:00

Another classic.

Busy Weekend part ii: Meiho

2007-03-09T05:35:00.000-05:00

I was a little apprehensive about my snowboarding trip with one of the physics professors from my school. He spoke less English than anyone I'd done something outside of school with, and I really didn't know what we would talk about in the car for two hours.

We managed, covering all the expected terrain. Favourite Japanese foods? Japanese foods I don't like? Where have I travelled in Japan? Where do I want to travel? What did I take in school? And so on. In return, I peppered him with questions regarding where he's lived (born in Gifu) and taught (around Gifu prefecture) and for how long (23 years). Every once in awhile he'd crane his neck to look up at the surrounding mountains and mutter "chotto".

"Chotto" is one of those handy Japanese skeleton-key words. Literally, it means "a little", so you get the expected combinations. Chotto muzakashii (a little difficult) Chotto yasui (a little cold) But it can also be used to express doubt, hesitation, or reluctance. I scanned the surrounding hills and agreed with him. chotto... I don't see any snow...

We passed highway signs with digital readouts that informed us that it was twelve degrees Celcius outside. It would be colder on the mountain, but not much colder. I was beginning to wonder if we were going to drive two hours to a closed ski resort. The website the night before had claimed a base of 160cm, but there wasn't a speck of snow on these hills. I felt a little bad for my companion, who would be culture-bound to show no frustration; only slight disappointment at what was, effectively, my plan to go snowboarding this weekend.

It was a nice drive. I'd actually been most of the way before Meiho turned out to be just about 20km past Gujo Hachiman, the destination of one of my first road trips with Julie in Japan, taken by neighbours of mine in my old building last fall. Beautiful town. I've recently been told that it's a "little Takayama". We still haven't made it up there but it's a must. (when we found out we were to be posted in Gifu, I wanted Takayama. Julie, on the other hand, doesn't like the cold, so she was happy ending up on the southern plain)

It was also a long drive. The speed limit was 50kph. The whole way. We passed some beautiful cedar-covered mountains, responsible for much of the terrible hayfever problem in Japan, I am told. And we went through some really neat, lengthy tunnels.

Finally, only moments after we spotted the first specks of snow on some surrounding mountain tops -- and I'm talking specks -- and likewise saw bits of snow in deep troughs beside the road, we caught our first view of Meiho.

It was pretty crowded, too. People getting their last bit of downhill in of the season, I think. We parked a good distance away and made our way up to the rental shop to start. I needed some equipment. Alas, I probably wasn't saving a dime coming up by car, since the lift ticket and round trip bus go for about $80 and include a rental discount. The lift ticket and rental cost me $80 by themselves. I was given some papers to fill out by a Japanese girl with the expected boarder aesthetic. She spoke pretty good English, which was fortunate for me, since the only thing I was able to make out in Japanese was "regular or goofy". About fifteen minutes later, I had my equipment and lift ticket, and up we went.

Man, was it warm. Little streams ran beneath most of the lift runs. It was mostly bare rock under most of them, too. All around was snow, and we passed two monster snow machines which must have been working overtime to produce that 160cm.

Left: my chaperone. Super-nice guy. Not much English, though. We bond over mutual dislike for raw ika. Right: It was too damn warm for a touque. I risked ice cuts the first few runs down until I pulled it on.

A bit rusty, to be sure. I took a few falls while I practiced carving. The snow was pretty slushy, which didn't help, but I think I only had one jarring tailbone fall, while slowly pulling into a lift line, yet.

The day didn't have the kind of atmosphere I loved in BC, and I kept trying to figure out why. A good bit of it, I think, had to do with my companion's decision to not leave me alone. He'd either received instructions to that effect or had decided on his own to keep an eye on me. Of course it's possible that it's simply the Japanese way to be communal in all things. Either way, I couldn't get a single run to myself.

The Japanese mostly ignored me, which was nice. Occasionally I'd get smiles and even waves, but few were brave enough to chat: a couple of girls building a snowman just off the lift at the top peak, and another girl that screamed and wiped out when I vaguely headed in her direction. (there was plenty of room!) And I nodded to one boarder in the lunch area who calmly nodded back to me, then turned to her friend and did an excited little dance. All in all, pretty low-key. Lunch was four pieces of fried chicken, five french fries, and a Coke. One thing I have a bit of trouble with is the indirectness of Japanese communication. I couldn't get my companion to tell me whether he wanted to head out again just yet or not. Eventually he hinted that he'd like another 15 minutes of rest, so we did. People were beat. There were heads on tables all around us.

We did another couple of hours on the hills and called it a day at 3. It was actually getting pretty cool by then, and I'd left my warmer layers in the car. Equipment also had to be returned at 4:30 and I really didn't want to be caught in a traffic jam where the fastest vehicles up front can only go 50, so I was happy to go. I was also pretty beat. Not in the shape I was last time I did this.

The drive home took forever, and we didn't have a lot to talk about. It was a good weekend, and the company was good, but next time I go snowboarding I definitely think I'll take the bus, where everyone involved can sleep the whole way if they like. The highway readouts told us that it had reached 20 degrees Celcius. This might be the last weekend for Meiho -- far, far earlier than usual.

A busy weekend, day one: Kegon-ji, re-birth, and the Hina Matsuri

2007-03-05T06:05:00.000-05:00

Faced the weekend with a few good options. Go off with a dear co-worker of mine, and Jules, to a nearby temple/shrine, or go snowboarding. As it happens I did both.

I was chatting with my co-worker about weekend plans, and mentioned that I was intereted in snowboarding when another teacher overheard and asked about it. I was in the science staff room in a building facing the persimmon orchards on the north side. I sometimes go there to teach. I hadn't really met this physics teacher before, so thankfully we were introduced and I suddenly found myself being rather sheepishly invited skiing/snowboarding. It was kind of strange. He seemed to be amazed to be offering. And equally amazed when I accepted. So I went from looking forward to a relaxing weekend to mostly looking forward to a very busy weekend, with a full day trip with one co-worker and Julie on Saturday, and a snowboarding excursion starting early Sunday morning.

It was beautiful weather Saturday, thankfully, and it was really good to hit the road with my co-worker again. We had taken one trip previously with him and his wife, but it had been awhile since we'd done anything together. He picked us up at the Circle K across the way and off we went.

We were going to Kegon-ji, the last temple/shrine in a pilgrimage route of thirty-three sites called the Saigoku, in the greater series of the Kannon 100, across Japan. Their festival had been held a couple of weeks earlier, and it was still early for sakura, so it promised to be not too busy a time to visit.

Well, the place was thoroughly breathtaking, and I realized for the first time, I think, that Jules and I are almost insatiable temple-goers. We just don't get tired of them.

Seeing a map of the place, we realized for the first time why my co-worker had planned the entire day for this activity. It was huge. The site dates back over 1200 years, and evidence abounded of past pilgrimages, from posts along the way stating how much had been donated to the site (generally hyaku-yen -- $1) at the time, to papers covering the gate with the names of people who had visited, and at some of the shrines about the site framed photos of some of the more recent groups to attend.

I think I enjoyed this site more than many I had seen in Kyoto. Kegon-ji was surrounded by towering cedar trees, and there was no sound but the wind blowing and occasional temple bells. On the walk up I had the distinct impression that my mom would like the place immensely.

There were a few surprises here, too. A large-ish shrine covered in paper cranes that we were told was the shrine for lost infants and fetuses. But upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was also a place of thanks for healthy children, so that brought the mood up a little.

We also ventured beneath the hondo (main hall of the temple in which the main image -- the honzon -- is enshrined) in a symbolic re-birth, moving carefully through a corridor apparently devoid of all light. Well, there was the occasional crack, but indeed these were shockingly brilliant. The whole experience was a bit disorienting. The path curved and did not stay level. At the end I was convinced that we had emerged out the other side, intead of arriving where we in fact were: the front of the main temple. Inanely I wondered how the man permitting admission had made it to the back of the temple, and what are my shoes doing here, and oh I see...

After this we had lunch at a fantastic unagi (eel) place. We arrived a bit late for lunch but they graciously took us in and served us a wonderful meal of unagi-don -- eel on rice -- with japanese pickles, fresh fruit, a kind of consomme (rather than miso) that held something that looked like a mushroom but turned out to be an internal organ of the eel (possibly the heart), and a delicious plum wine.

They also had a beautiful looking sashimi setup that we didn't have the chance to sample this time around.
Just look at that block of tuna. Those are two huge crabs from Hokkaido on the top.

Then we were off to a kawaramachi ya -- a paper and paper doll house. It turns out that Saturday was the Hina Matsuri -- the day of the paper doll festival in Gifu. So the place was quite busy. It's not really my kind of thing, but it was interesting, and some of the displays were quite impressive.

A tiring day but enjoyable. Then resting up for the day of snowboarding ahead.
You can access the entire Flickr run from the link at the top right.

Friday Night Videos

2007-03-02T07:27:00.000-05:00

Does anyone remember that show? Classic. And far superior to Samantha Taylor's Video Hits.

Anyway, most of you have probably seen bits of this but maybe not the longer clip. For the rest of you, enjoy.

Ok class, now repeat after me: "We don't need no... Education"

2007-02-27T06:09:00.000-05:00

I may have mentioned this before, but it's darned hard to have a completely bad day in this job.
Don't get me wrong -- it's possible. It's certainly happened. But in a job so thoroughly infused with people, you can never tell when something fun, or funny, or touching, or just plain lovely will happen. And it does pretty much every day.

I say this because things were looking to be shaping up into a pretty bad day yesterday. The schedule changed and I wasn't told (until someone came to get me partway through class), one of my JTE's (normally a gem) was befuddled and inattentive and basically sabotaged everything I did in the classroom, and physically I wasn't feeling so hot -- tired, hungry, weary, cold.

Then, well... how can you complain about a day when part of your work involved drawing this on the blackboard:

I had been at a loss for what to do with my 2nd year class, and my JTE had suggested that we do a writing exercise. She loves writing exercises. My other JTE's hate them. This is one of the reasons I have to design different lessons for the same grade level in any given week. In any case, her suggestion was to do a "favorite song" exercise, where the students would write the lyrics in Japanese, and then translate them into English. Good idea, I said, and I made up a worksheet for it (as always, with cute clip art grudgingly coughed up by my ailing, ancient work laptop), with a little section at the bottom asking the student to tell me why the song was meaningful to him or her, why he or she likes it.

So that's what we did. The students got right to work.

The thing about this class is that, well, it isn't like other classes. I first locked horns with this JTE frequently. She wouldn't take a plan or suggestion from me without altering it in some way. Nothing ever worked for her. It didn't take long to see that she has an amazing command of her class, though, and they truly are lucky to have her. They have to work harder, but they really learn. Consequently, we can do all kinds of challenging things that would simply be too much for other classes. I've come to like her as a person, too, and I think only some of the other staff have bothered to see through the tough veneer.

Today we chatted about the subject at hand while the students wrote. (She will often snap up interesting or amusing comments from me and deliver them to the class in Japanese -- much to my chagrin when I forget that I'm "on the record") Well this class she fixed me with a serious look and asked: "Do you know 'Men at Work'"?

Uh, pardon me?

"The music group -- Men at Work. Do you know them?"

Not quite what I was expecting.

I had started out this year wanting to join a school club of some kind, and unfortunately found that everything I was interested in my school didn't do, or wasn't available to me. Kyūdō? No club. Shogi? No. Volleyball? Girls only. I got stuck with the English Club, which might not have been so bad, except that it was being run as just another class, with exercises. No fun stuff. No music, movies, group discussions, debates. Nothing interesting or challenging. So what did I find? The Broadcasting Club. Operating at noon, I could fit it into my schedule. The club broadcasts music throughout all of the classrooms where the students eat their lunch. I thought it would be a great opportunity to play some western music and see what they liked and didn't, and what they were already familiar with. Well, they knew the Beatles. They knew Michael Jackson. They knew Billy Joel. They knew U2. That was about it. I had a third-year student who knew Nickelback, but he's a special case. So I set out to provide a general western pop music education.

The first week we had Billy Idol, David Bowie, John Lennon, The Animals, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Nirvana, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan. And they knew none of it.

It was like some kind of strange Footloose universe where the adults had won. Not only were these kids NOT familiar with Stairway to Heaven, they didn't know Led Zeppelin.

Oh, the educating they were going to get.

But two problems arose. One: it truly is amazing the amount of depraved music I listen to. Or put another way, amazing how little western music doesn't contain at least one and probably several of the following: sex, drugs, anti-authority sentiment, anti-education sentiment, criminal behaviour, and any number of other things antithetical to the Japanese ideal, at least in theory. Problem two: I started running out of time, even at lunch. I was missing the occasional day, and there was still so much to play! Van Morrison, Van Halen, AC/DC, the Beach Boys, Chicago, Radiohead, Def Leppard, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Police, The Band, The Pretenders -- and oh the Canadian music! The Tragically Hip, Leonard Cohen, The Tea Party, Barenaked Ladies, Crash Test Dummies, and on and on. But a strange thing happened at about the same time. I'd come wandering into the booth to find... my Japanese club-cohorts playing western music. Just a little, sporadically, but it started happening often enough that I didn't feel that the students were really missing out. They'd have their J-pop and then one of the students would feel like some "Michael", and suddenly the classrooms would be filled with "The Way You Make Me Feel" (ok, we could do better, but that's beside the point). They also played some I'd never dream of playing. Incredibly obnoxious hip-hop. Metal. Avril Lavigne. And so I left.

Anyway, on this particular day, here was my JTE asking me: Did I know Men at Work? Well, that's one of my favourite bands, isn't it? And I'm not talking about the hits, either. Sure, Who Can It Be Now? and It's a Mistake are great, but they hardly compare to I Can See It In Your Eyes, Helpless Automaton, and Catch a Star. I could go on and on... (don't worry, I won't) But naturally what really got me is why does this teacher know Men at Work? Is it because they previously had an Australian ALT? "Oh no. We know Men at Work." (!) Well ok then. And what else does this JTE know and like? (Wait, don't tell me: THE BEATLES.)

"Do you know that song: 'Smoke on the Water'?" ...

... YOU LIKE DEEP PURPLE?!? "Oh yes, very much." And so there we go, singing "Duh duh duh, duh duh duh-duh, duh duh duh, duh duh" in front of the class. What else does she like? David Bowie. The Police. Queen. Kiss. I was staggered. So we chatted about western bands that I thought she might know or like, and thus we came to Pink Floyd, and my drawing on the blackboard. (my drawings are a constant source of amusement to her -- she calls me the lawyer who likes to draw) She also asked me if I had been a good student when I was in high school, and when I said yes, she said: "I don't believe it!" Uh, ok. But she explained she meant "studious and well-behaved" rather than getting good grades (to which the answer again was yes -- I didn't start rebelling till university). But it was some kind of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" observation/compliment, she explained, so that was ok.

Oh, incidentally, those are the lyrics to Clapton's I Shot The Sheriff around that picture. My JTE wanted me to write some song lyrics for the students, and well, I was damned if I could remember any. I mean, I could think of lots of good music, but not all the words to any given song. Some of the clever ones I'd recorded and transcribed for use in class weren't handy, and again I couldn't remember all of the words. So I Shot the Sheriff went on the board. Which, if you strip it of cultural context and humour, is kind of a violent song. At least I resisted the urge to go for Another Brick in the Wall.

An interesting addendum to my recent shogi match story. I was fishing around for more info on the game -- it's fascinating, really -- and came across some information which shed new light on the game I had had. Surprising light. Apparently, novice players are given handicaps. Great, heaping handicaps, starting with the rook and bishop (by far the most powerful pieces; there are only one each of them, and there is no queen) but generally even more:

An experienced player at shogi can give a beginner the handicap of eight pieces easily. This means that the experienced player plays without his rook, his bishop, his two lances, his two knights and his two silver generals. In fact, games are sometimes played at the handicap of ten pieces (without the two golds as well) and still the giver of the handicap wins. I have played games where I have given a beginner a handicap of the entire board, playing only with my bare king, without even pawns, and still won.

I am by no means a great player of shogi. Nevertheless, I can easily give the average person, not a regular club or tournament player, the handicap of six pieces, meaning a rook, a bishop, two lances and two knights. Moreover, I can give any player rated less than 5 kyu the handicap of a rook and a bishop and I will win every game at those odds.

Because of the greater complexity of shogi, the stronger player will win with much greater frequency than in chess. Big upsets are much rarer.

From Basic Rules of Shogi on the web. So again, I'm stunned. I had no handicap. Maybe I have a talent for this thing. Have to follow up.

The other thing that's happening here lately is it's paper marking time again. This time with a rather tight deadline, so I'm spending a lot of time wading through some 240 of them. I first blogged about my discomfort correcting the kind of unguarded, heartfelt sentiments expressed in some of these essays, and that hasn't really improved. I get essays on war, loss, and heartbreak, and my response is the same: stroke out the erroneous words and letters and try to provide some kind of helpful, supportive comment.

Some of the essays, though, are hilarious.

One of the things that's really striking is how words are mispelled according to how they would be mispronounced. So you get plenty of "l" and "r" mixups, which in writing can be a little jarring. Sometimes vowels share that fate, also.

"I have two dogs. They are very very very cute. Their names is slum and dunk..."

Well, I was in correction mode, and almost without thinking I wrote "Slam?" above where the student had written "Slum" and instantly regretted it. The student goes on to describe Slum and Dunk in fairly good detail, and with obvious affection. Is the family now sadly pondering whether to change their beloved pet's name, now that they're aware that his name is synonymous with urban decay? I have no idea.

Plagiarism can also be a bit of a problem, though not nearly so much as at home in the west. For every set of compositions, I usually get a single pair where there was obvious copying happening (complete with identical mispellings) and usually another where a pair of students simply seem to have worked together. I suppose they figure that, with so many students, so many papers, I wouldn't notice. But I go through them rather intensively, in a short amount of time, and I can spot the similarities right away. So I was a bit surprised when a student thought that they could copy me and not have me notice.

First, he ignored the instructions, to choose one of the three possible topics (family, pet, or hobby) and instead wrote one paragraph on each, modeling my examples exactly, replacing a word where necessary (baseball where I had written snowboarding, cat where I put dog, etc.) My example sheet for first years also usually includes some vocab or expressions that they might find useful. So after writing three paragraphs copying my examples nearly exactly, the student concluded his essay with the following sentence:

"Here are some adjectives that you might use."

Yeah. We had a pretty good laugh about that one.

Some compositions are just in a charming, idiosyncratic style that I hate to mess with. It's a fine line between good english and boring english, but where there's an obviously better way to say something, I mention it.

"Allow me to introduce my family to you. How many people are there in your family? There's six in my family and for families. My mother, father and grandmother, grandfather and great grandmother. they are is look great. My great grand mother especially she in good shape. Does she do something special to do? No, she doesn't. She is go to bed early and gets up early. She have a good sleep and get plenty of rest. Does she have any hobbies? She hobby is knitting and sewing. It looks like she is very fun. What does you father does for fun?

My father hobby is walk a dog. And he likes have a good sleep but he don't have free time now. He business is persimmon farmer. We make our living by farming. Oh agriculturalist? Yes. my family is early risers. But I don't like early riser. Because my mother sid. "The early bird catches the worm."

I get up early this morning. I experience in no different from before. I overslept again.

My family is large family. they are in good shape. They are living in the by out of choice. Do you like your family? Yes, oh course."

Eeeeeeeeh... yeah that's weird.

2007-02-26T09:57:00.000-05:00

So here's an interesting little event.

I'm sitting in the staff room at my desk. Our office is an open-air affair. Japanese offices don't have cubicles from what I've seen. About a half-dozen other teachers are in the room -- so it's about half-occupied.

I'm tapping away on my computer when I become aware of a rattling sound. Loud. My first thought is: earthquake. But as the seconds tick by, I realize that none of the windows are shaking. The noise is only coming from one place: the double doors that lead into the hall. Those doors open about a hundred times a day, with students peeking through looking for teachers, with a loud "Irasshaimase!" But this time the doors didn't open. They just kept rattling, loudly, and now all of the teachers were looking up at them, curiously.

As the JTE closest to the doors got up, the shaking stopped. She reached out and opened one of the doors, craning her neck around the corner, and then speaking to a couple of other teachers who were standing in the hall. She turned back to us and said a few words in Japanese, and the teacher next to her put her hand to her chest, taken aback. My mentor, sitting close by, caught my eye. "Poltergeist," he said. Well at least someone got something from my Halloween lesson.

Turns out that the two teachers a few paces from the doors, on the other side in the hall, had heard and seen the shaking, too, but no one had touched the doors from that side. They figured what we did -- that someone on the other side was doing something to the doors for some reason. A tremor is another possibility, but indeed, only those doors to the hall shook. None of the windows or other doors did.

In honour of this event, I have devised a new feature for Mumblings: the ectoplasm scale.

Ok, now I'm creeped out.

As if I weren't missing winter enough

2007-02-22T10:37:00.000-05:00

I understand that Lake Superior froze over! Here's some lovely footage.

The accidental gaijin -- my first game of "shogi"

2007-02-16T10:09:00.000-05:00

I've been a bit of a mess this week.

It's been cold, I've been sleeping almost not at all, and running late pretty much everywhere I go.

On Monday, I found myself chatting with the Japanese teacher who sits behind me in the staff room. A bit of an outsider if you can believe it, only because he's from the nearby prefecture of Nara. (the Japanese are unbelievably insular geographically) Super-nice guy. I've been out with him socially on a couple of occasions, usually with another teacher who just passed his teaching exams, the youngest here. And occasionally with one of our senior teachers, one of our two resident persimmon-barons. Also a nice guy, though I still find the social hierarchy a bit weird, both in the obsequiousness of my colleagues in his presence and how he in return throws his weight around. It's all a bit odd and discomfiting.

Anyway, I was chatting with my office mate from Nara, and asked, probably not for the first time, if he played shogi. Shogi is "Japanese chess", and along with kyūdō(Japanese archery), it represents the main cultural in-roads I've decided to pursue while in Japan. I'd never played before, nor did I know the rules, but I'd picked up a cheap cardboard board and wooden pieces at the hyaku-yen shop (aka: dollar store) and was still looking for someone to show me the ropes. My companion checked his calendar and suggested the next day, Tuesday, after school. That was a little sooner than I expected. I wanted a bit of time to at least learn the rules so I wouldn't completely humiliate myself, but I agreed and got busy trying to find out more about the game. That pretty much amounted to printing off the wikipedia entry and trying to come to grips with how different this game was from western/international chess. Pretty damn different, as it happens.

For those interested, let me describe the key differences.

In both chess and shogi, pawns are the most numerous actors. They are the grunts, the footsoldiers, and while they are readily sacrificed in play, in either game it is foolish to underestimate them. The main difference here, however, is that, while in chess, pawns attack at forward diagonals, in shogi, they attack directly ahead. This means that while they often lock up in the centre in a game of chess, blocking the progress of many more powerful pieces in the back, in shogi the centre is a free-for all. Soldiers either keep at weapons length or they engage and fall, clearing the way. The locking or clearing of the centre represents a fundamental strategic decision in any game in chess. That element is completely absent in shogi. (I always try to have new chess players try to visualize pawns wielding lengthy weapons like pikes but having limited space, requiring that they be pointed obliquely; here, I imagined the shorter weapons of Japanese soldiers, perhaps some kind of stabbing short sword.)

Another fundamental characteristic of chess is the progression through stages of play, usually from an opening, where pieces are "developed" to ideal positions, to begin the middlegame siege. Endgame is usually characterized by very careful play on a board largely cleared of pieces. Well not so in shogi. In chess, pieces are said to be "captured", but they never return to the board. It's really a polite way of saying that they've been killed in action. In shogi, pieces really are captured, and in any subsequent turn, the capturing player can return them to the board to fight for their new master. ANYWHERE on the board. As a kind of story element, it seems both dramatic and ridiculous. I like the idea of reinforcements -- a new lancer joins the fray; the cavalry charges in. But I have no idea how to imagine a foot soldier popping up from nowhere behind enemy lines; a general appearing suddenly in front of the opponent's king. It's bizarre. And to a player of western chess, hugely unpredictable. So nothing recognizable as an endgame ever takes place in shogi. Reinforcements keep arriving at critical moments in any open location, blocking threats, directing attacks, and generally messing with the western player's idea of carefully constructed areas of threat and safety.

As if this weren't enough, each type of piece can be promoted in enemy terrain to take on entirely new characteristics. Picture a knight riding into battle and then hopping off his horse. Suddenly, he moves and attacks in completely different ways. So too, the fuhyō (footsoldiers), the kyōsha (lances), the keima (knights), single hisha (flying chariot -- a rook) and kakugyō ("angle mover" -- a bishop), and ginshō (silver generals). Only the king and the kinshō (gold generals) cannot be promoted and so carry the same pattern of moves throughout the game. It's like "counters" in the Japanese language. You can't simply use numbers for things -- one plate, one book, one cup, one dog, one person -- each category of object requires not only a different word for the object itself but for the number that precedes it.

All this to say that, getting two hours of sleep Monday night, I was wholly unprepared for Tuesday. It's sometimes not bad for teaching, particularly in the afternoon, where sleep-deprived genki-ness helps keep the students entertained and interested. But not particularly good for shogi, I think. In particular, when trying to study the wiki notes that morning, I found myself running up against a surprisingly tough obstacle wholly unexpected: I was having trouble telling the pieces apart. I had learned their moves for the most part, including their differences before and after promotion, but the Japanese script used to identify the pieces looked much the same to me. Here I could spot the kanji for "wheel" -- ah yes, a flying chariot, the eastern rook. But wait, here's "wheel" again -- the "incense chariot", the lancer unknown in the western game. Other pieces likewise looked confusingly alike. That didn't bode well. You can't play a game mistaking pieces for each other -- even a couple such mistakes would be disastrous. So I asked that our game be postponed until I could at least learn which pieces were which. Amused, my colleague agreed. Shortly thereafter I discovered that it was actually Valentine's Day, and I adopted that as my excuse. (Sorry Jules! She hadn't realized either, and actually, in Japan, this is her day to give me a gift. We guys return the favour on White Day -- March 14.) Anyway, I basically put shogi out of my mind at that point, thinking that we would set another date in a week or so.

Advance to Thursday. Still short on sleep, still averaging just two hours a night, and really feeling it. In fact, I'm just about losing it. I'm feeling down after Valentine's Day for some odd reason, brooding about unresolved decisions regarding work and the future, and generally a mess. At that point, my Nara friend asks me what I'm doing Friday. I don't know, I say -- why? Well as it turns out, he and our senior colleague are spending Friday night at the school. Why, you might ask? They are guarding the examination papers. Yes, a safe is not enough. Teachers are taking shifts across the weekend, and these two are first. (for a measley 3000 yen as it turns out, but I'm not certain that they volunteered) So if I want to come in on Friday night, he says, we can play all the shogi we want. Wow. Ok, I say, unsure but thinking that it would probably be nice of me to give him something to do. But come Friday I'm still sleep deprived, and I am ready to beg off again when he tells me that he has club activity practice after school, so we wouldn't even be starting till 8 or 9pm. Besides, I hadn't glanced at the shogi materials since cancelling on Tuesday, and tired, had made a bit of a mess of my afternoon class and was ready for the weekend. But then he caught me a bit later and said that we can play at 7:00 -- he would go home right after work and change, return to oversee his club activity, and then order in. Eh... how could I refuse? So I finished up at work and headed home relatively early -- at 4:30 -- thinking that maybe I'd take a short nap and then study my ass off so the event wouldn't be a complete disaster.

Well, I get home and have a bite to eat and procrastinate, and I'm so messed up that the next thing I know, it's a quarter to seven, I'm freezing cold (9 degrees Celcius in my living room), and my computer is on the floor, having fallen from my lap. All not good. Ugh. So I get myself up, turn the heater on for the few moments it will give me, hurriedly get dressed, and bolt out the door. Well no bloody time to walk to school, so I take one of the ramshackle bikes I have in the nearby shed -- no working headlight, slightly wonky wheels, and worst: no brakes -- and headed off for the pitch-black roads between the rice fields between home and school. Less than ten minutes I'm at the school, remarkably in one piece. Students lingering after club practices greet me as I go by, and finding a door open by the office, I change shoes for indoor slippers and boogie to the staff room, just 7 or 8 minutes late.

My Nara companion is there, along with his senior guard-comrade for the evening. Also there was our youngest teacher, hanging around to socialize and (!) watch the match. A few other teachers were there but on their way out. I was glad I had munched on a piece of chicken when I got home from school. Food had already been ordered so I made do with coffee while I studied the shogi wiki printouts for the first time since Tuesday. I also got out the school shogi board and pieces -- still a cheap set but much nicer than mine -- and decided to familiarize myself with the look of the pieces directly. Well, I was in trouble. They were nothing like the clear, abbreviated script-symbols used on the setup chart in the wiki. Rather, they looked like the slightly less clear photos of the pieces themselves, and were terribly hard to identify. Worse, there were many pieces from different sets mixed together, so that I sometimes had trouble identifying like pieces as even the same kind. Uh oh.

We chatted a bit and my young colleague dropped the news on me that he and his girlfriend had split up. He had wanted to marry her, but it was a cross-prefectural romance, and she didn't want to leave her home. So I commiserated with him a bit before the four of us settled down to begin the game. As always, my senior colleague supplied what I could only guess was wry commentary in Japanese as I found myself unable to identify the pieces well enough to even set up the board. Either embarassed for me or not expecting much of a match to follow, he retired to his desk while I sorted out my pieces.

Then, with my heartbroken workmate as a lone spectator, we began. I was given first move. Um, great I guess.

So I rifled through my papers quickly for an opening. The wiki mentions two: an elaborate "castle" defence (they use many terms from chess, but in completely different ways) and a much simpler one, taking only six moves to put together. At this point I couldn't really understand any strategic benefits behind this opening, but it gave me something definite to do so I began it. Before I'd made my third move, my opponent came crashing into my line, taking the first of my pawns while my king was halfway from safety, halfway to safety, basically hanging out with his neck exposed. I'd failed to recognize a piece. It cost me and it looked like it was going to cost me a lot more.

And that pretty much set the tone. I lost three pieces before I began to even consistently identify what it was I was looking at. Then began a rather steep learning curve in tactics while I faced more pieces than I had -- then more pieces again as my captured soldiers were "dropped" behind my lines in service of my enemy.
My opponent made just one blunder, losing his angle-mover. Or rather, my angle-mover. I resolved to not let him be recaptured again. And gradually a strange thing happened.

The tide began to turn.

It turns out that, while wildly different, certain principles of shogi and chess are the same. In either game, your options when under attack are to defend the piece, counterattack, or if possible, threaten the king. Threats to the king cannot be ignored. So -- if you are very, very careful -- you can hold off a knife to your throat indefinitely so long as you keep one on your opponent. Things were looking grim in one corner of my little kingdom. Enemy pieces were promoted and it was beginning to look like it wasn't part of my domain at all. I focused on attacking the enemy king and keeping him under attack from that point on, first pinning a gold general to him (a chess move!) and then desperately trying to arrange forks to simultaneously threaten afar while taking out threats at home. But, deranged from lack of sleep and pumped up on caffeine, I physically shook with nervousness at every move, as I could never be sure whether I had misidentified an enemy piece which would then come sweeping in and take something vital, returning it to the battlefield a turn later to be used against me.

I was lucky, however, and didn't miss any threats, and move after move I mounted new pressure on my opponent. It turns out that shogi is a kind of power-mad chess player's dream. The ability to reinforce anywhere on the board permits the mounting of threats unheard of in chess. That also meant that I had to keep the pressure on. One turn of release and new pieces would be falling from the sky to attack well inside my camp. Slowly, I took back the pieces I had lost and the cluster of available reinforcement shrank on my opponents' side while growing on mine, and I added them to my attack. We played a very good game then, I think. I made no major blunders and neither did he. Where I could have caught him out he always chose a different way, and never passed up the opportunity to drop whatever captured pieces he had to block my attacks and isolate my pieces. I nearly blundered with disturbing frequency, mind you -- just realizing in time that a contemplated move would fall to a (until then misidentified) piece, or mistaking my own piece for one of different abilities. I often stopped to scan my wiki printouts, reminding myself time and again of the moves available both to my pieces and to his.

Some two hours later it was all over. I had won.

So picture this. I'm in a country where, if you ever needed to let the boss win at golf, it's here. Standing is paramount. Saving face is critical.

Not only do I, a lowly gaijin ("barbarian"), beat my opponent, I do so at shogi, the Japanese answer to western chess, all the while scanning sheets to check how the pieces move and saying things like: "Keima desu, ne?" (that's my knight, right?) "Ryūō desu ka?" (That's a dragon king, isn't it?)

So I figure I may as well have just slapped him across the face. It didn't even occur to me to intentionally lose. I figured he would take care of the winning on his own. I was just struggling to stay afloat.

"You are very strong player" he said when it was all over. "Uh. I was pretty lucky, I think," I said. I thanked him for the game and we promised to play again some time. He headed out for a cigarette and I, still shaking somewhat, gathered my things to head for home. I met the other two teachers on the way out. They, probably out of kindness, didn't ask how the game went, and I certainly didn't tell them. But they'll ask my opponent, as will others who knew we were going to play tonight. I feel bad about it. It was a stunning victory and I'm proud as all hell to have been able to pull it off, but it's an embarassing turn of events for my colleague. I mean, on the way out, I joked that my senior colleague was a kind of fuhyō, guarding those examination papers. Uh, says my young workmate, "the fuhyō is of a very low standing." D'oh. That's my typical level of rudeness around here. Unthinking. (I replied that yes, that's true, but the pawn then becomes the kinshō, a symbolically important and grand evolution. That appeared to placate him.)

Anyway, I don't know if there are any shogi matches in my immediate future, or whether I should seriously entertain losing any of them if I have a choice in the matter. That's not something I would ever consider doing at home but perhaps here it's another question. Then again, a gaijin can't hope for integration anyway; rudeness is expected. I can at least earn a little respect.

So that was my first shogi game. A surprise for everyone. Now I think I'll get some sleep.

Some pictures.

Kanji chaos. What is what?
Notice the captured pieces off-side, ready to be "dropped" back onto the board.
My lower left flank has been infiltrated. I'm in trouble, but starting the counter-attack.

My opponent, looking confident.

And it's all over. Ōtedzume. Check mate.

and now a brief intermission

2007-02-15T10:54:00.000-05:00

Uploading photos to Flickr before I continue posting.

In the meantime, enjoy this.

Mumblings of a long vacation

2007-01-16T09:58:00.000-05:00

What, you don't like dogs?

Well, that's one long blogging hiatus.

I had struggled to upload an audio clip which I considered integral to what would have been my last post, a couple of weeks into December, never got it done, and now here we are.

The plan is to intersperse tales of the now not-quite-distant past with reports of the present.

First, the trip. What can I say about the trip? Weird to just jet to a location I had in the past backpacked a full year to reach. Less anticlimactic, mind you. I already knew that Denpasar was a hole.

But first came Taipei. We didn't end up staying all that long for reasons I will touch on later, so I will treat this first and last stop together.

December 23, 2006 Taipei

This place sucks. I am a tightly wound ball of irritation. WHY ARE WE CUTTING BALI SHORT TO COME BACK HERE?!?

January 6, 2007 Taipei

Hey, this place is kinda cool.

The problem with Taipei was a bad first experience.

We survived the trip from Nagoya on Air China, which by some accounts is a discount airline, but we found fairly pleasant, and whose to say how nice we might have found Taipei were it not for what happened next.

We exited the arrival area with our bags accounted for, to find the "Free Go Airport Bus" that will take us to our hotel. Well, it will take us close to our hotel. Good enough. And it will cost us something like 165 Taiwanese dollars -- about $7 CDN. I don't even know if it's worth taking you blow by blow through what happened next. Maybe I just want to avoid re-living it. An excited little man told us to wait with some others when we tried to find out if we were in the right place. He was busy directing people, throwing bags onto the occasional bus, and yelling at people. It was busy, but there didn't seem to be any need for the aggression. We overheard a bit of Japanese from the two older women in front of us, and Julie said somewhat wryly that they were watching this man with a look that was "very Japanese". We knew enough to know that the bus preparing to leave was not the one we wanted, so we hunkered down for a bit of a wait. Not a long one, though, as our "Free Go Airport Bus" apparently left quite often. So we waited.

As time went by, our tickets were checked, we were rather aggressively moved to make room for a luggage cart collector, and moved again for no clear reason. Another bus arrived and was loaded, and the front of our line, headed by us and the aforementioned Japanese women, suddenly became the back. Boarding the bus, we found NO seats whatsoever. I recalled a Thai bus ride I had taken, sitting at people's feet -- who had paid the same ticket price as I had -- and was starting to get a bit ticked off. The angry man boarded, saw the situation, stomped around a little, and then demanded we get off. We were handed our bags once again. There was some protest but the angry man would hear none of it, making almost violent gestures. I saw the look that Jules had mentioned, on the faces of the two Japanese women who, with us, had also been left out. Patient disdain. We joined them in it.

More waiting, another line. Nothing could happen so fast this time that we couldn't and wouldn't be able to change, we resolved. We were shunted to one side, and another line formed, ostensibly for the other bus route again. A bus pulled up and the other line was shuffled on. Watching all of these people board, I had to hope that this wasn't our bus. We couldn't be sure. Attempts to get information from the little man gained us nothing but more shouts and gestures. The man's assistant seemed a bit more apologetic, and the two of them talked for a moment, and suddenly we were being waved on to this bus. Jules and I shared a look and then handed our bags over once again. Either this was our bus, and we were almost shoved aside once again, or they were prepared to take us where we needed to go. But of course the bus was nearly full once again. The man pointed us to two seats that were not even in the same vicinity, and then stomped off the bus again. We noted two empty seats side by side in the back of the bus, and Jules, furious, sent us hither. The man boarded again with a couple and may have looked a tad displeased to see us in the adjoining seats (it was hard to tell what passed for displeased on that perpetually dour mug) but he ended up putting the couple in the other two, separated seats, and after checking to make sure our bags were indeed in the bus -- as we were clearly back in the ROA (Rest Of Asia) and nothing was to be taken for granted -- suddenly off we went. Perhaps a scant two hours after arrival at the airport.

Oh, the two Japanese women did not make it onto that bus. One of them wished Jules "ganbatte kudasai" (do your best -- a kind of "good luck" in this case) as we boarded. :( I was beginning to feel quite protective of our Japanese co-travellers. Who knows how long they waited in whatever non-resident hell the bus tyrant had in mind. How many lines would we have waited at the front/end of before being permitted to actually set foot on a bus? Chiang Kai Shek knows.

Well, what more can I say about Taipei, the first time around. The event coloured everything that came after. China/Taiwan wasn't an easy place to get used to as it was, mind. The food in particular turned Julie and I off completely, and even in the relatively fun days that followed on the return portion of the trip, we would occasionally catch wind of a viciously strong odour that, to my best estimation, smelled like entrails, shit, and battery acid. We found our hotel's staff to be cold, Taipei to be pedestrian-unfriendly and uninteresting to walk at night, and generally regretted that we would be returning there (even cutting Bali short!) for the last part of our vacation. Fitful sleep gave way to an early morning "free" bus ride -- thankfully efficiently staffed and run from that end -- to the airport, and off we flew to places warmer in all respects.

Cut to our return trip some two weeks later, a day late, having missed our international flight (more on that another day) and we're back in Taipei... only NOT Taipei.

The bus area is well-run and not crowded with would-be passengers. Different people are there running it, in fact. The sign for the bus is different. (Still the Free Go Airport Bus, despite the price) We have a comfortable ride to our hotel, which given the rather large Taiwan earthquake over the holidays added to our inability to make contact by phone, we were repeatedly adding the tag line "if it's still standing/if it's not rubble" to any mention of. The bus people see us off handily and we arrive to smiling staff at the hotel. WTF is going on here? I remarked that, were we to find Taiwanese food delicious, it would confirm that we had truly crossed over into an unsettling parallel universe.

We did fast food that night -- Japanese chain Mosburger no less (mmm, Mosburger) and then settled in, exhausted. Out and about the next day, a little late as Julie was not feeling well, off to the Chiang Kai Shek monument/hall which was stupendous. Beautiful grounds, immense, impressive hall, chess-piece-like polished guards twirling weapons in lockstep. Fabulous. And that night, the biggest of several night markets. I was a little tired and not expecting much. Well, the place was so energizing that we didn't leave until late, pacing along rows of food booths (still mostly unappetizing), games of skill (a couple of which we played), ridiculously-expensive UFO Catchers, mind-numbingly-shocking pet sale display cases (ok, that was a downer), crafts, clothes, and general non-threatening weirdness. (we were still most definitely in the ROA, but now the difference was charming. We saw more pairs of jeans that night than I've seen since coming to Japan. It was... a little more down-to-earth than urban Japan) Still the venemous stench booths, which I never did learn to spot so I could identify their contents and then avoid altogether.

Oh yeah, we also visited a weird museum, the feature pieces of which were a carved jade cabbage, and a stone carved into the likeness of a piece of meat. The gift shop never tired of iterations of either of these items, particularly in tacky hologram form.

The next day, early to the airport, short flight to Nagoya, direct Meitetsu line train to Gifu, cab to Julie's, and the last bus back to my place in little Kitagata Cho. A long, long day. Stack of mail shoved in the slot. Huge mess. Laundry to do. Work the next morning. Ah, home.

--------------------------------------------

And in the present...

Sad, sad news last week.
I understood that our third-years (grade 12) begin a special schedule soon due mostly to university entrance exams. It was unclear how many classes we'd have left together before that took effect. The Scheduling Gods are whimsical round these parts. But we (my 3rd year conversation Japanese Teacher of English and I) figured maybe a month left of classes. Late last week, Sekiya-sensei stopped by to tell me, no, sorry, just ONE WEEK. That's two classes. She stopped by again the next day. Sorry. Just one class.

So my thinking has gone from "now that their evaluations are over, what do I want to make sure these kids leave knowing?" to "uh... ok, let's have a party."

I'm sad. I tell my JTE this pretty much daily. I've never had a little class of my own before, and as a little class -- with pretty high english skill -- we do neat stuff. Games you can't do with bigger classes. Creative exercises. The kind of things I expected to be doing in the English Club if the person in charge wasn't such a giant stick in the mud. Our last class before Halloween, while the rest of the school was in examinations, I held a school-wide Halloween Mystery Treasure Hunt with these guys. Even the extreme paranoia of the Japanese school bureaucracy, putting as much of the school off-limits as possible (the clock tower in the courtyard! A mystery treasure hunt *without* the courtyard clock tower?!?) didn't manage to spoil the fun.

So tonight, low on sleep, I slogged around looking for a cake and supplies. Hit the neighbourhood caki-ya. A hundred -- or is it two? -- years old, which you would realize if not by the ancient sign then by the absence of anything remotely resembling cake. Further afield to supermarket Apita, then the nearby bakery, and finally a tiny pastry shop where I did manage to find what I could recognize as a cake. One of those all-white strawberry-topped numbers. Then off to the dollar-store to secure paper plates and plastic forks. (we'll eat western this time around) Then a long slog home. Then out again for toyu (kerosene). Ran out last night which, despite my tiredness, absolutely had to be remedied before nightfall. Slog home again with 14kg of kerosene dangling from one arm, my free box of kleenex in the other hand. These guys. Amazingly service oriented. I watched the gas station attendant block traffic so his customer could leave via the preferred road, then he wraps my kerosene and sends me off with a gift. Cheap stuff, too. Well, if the fumes don't asphyxiate you. A tad pricier.

So, tired tired tired, and I didn't bring home my 3rd years' journals to mark, so I'd better go in early to do it. Maybe two months without this class after this. I'll love having only 2 classes on Monday, and one less on Wednesday (usually 4 classes, now 3, plus the dreadful English Club), but I sure will miss these guys. I know I'll get another class but I don't WANT another class. :(

So there.

And now some pics.

The "Free Go Airport Bus". It's free, once you've got a ticket!

It's not kyudo, but it's fun. 6 balloons in 10. Not bad with a tenth, bent arrow.

Why, men with candles in their ears. What else?

Me and the Jules at Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall. We're facing the hall, here. Sorry.

Eeemmmmm, yeah.

Now without further ado...

2006-12-15T10:04:00.000-05:00

Pleix: Birds.
(needs sound -- loud is good; headphones are better)

Jumpin Jehosephat!

2006-12-14T08:38:00.000-05:00

My first Japanese earthquake. I've felt em in Ottawa and Vancouver, and in both cases, it was one of those "Is that a truck going by?" moments, but this was distinctly different. The Vancouver one lasted a long time. I was in bed in my basement apartment in Point Grey when everything started swinging, and it just kept doing that for about 30 seconds. In contrast, the one here was all up and down shaking, like being *on* a truck with its shocks gone, but it lasted perhaps a scant 4 or 5 seconds.

The Japan Meteorological Agency had it on their website just minutes later. A 3.5 in neighbouring Aichi Prefecture, with a local, just a 1-pointer but directly here in Kitagata Cho, at 21:55, originating 40 miles below the surface.

Cool.

Well, it's been awhile since I've updated. Took about 2 weeks just to transfer the internet account over to the new address. Japan is not a place for transients of any stripe. The new place is pretty cool. Or cold, rather. I'm not used to this lack-of-central-heat thing they've got going on. Call it culture shock or ethnocentricity or whatever else you like, I can't for the life of me figure out why Japanese houses and apartments have no insulation. There's no reason. They still heat em in the winter and cool em in the summer. There's no need for all that unecessary heat transfer.

My kerosene heater (just beeping at me now to say it needs a fuel refill) keeps track of the current room temperature as well as what I've asked it to hit, and lately it seems to be about 12 degrees celcius in my living room until I crank the thing on. I don't have it on much. It is kerosene, and stories and warnings abound about accidental asphyxiation. You need to air the room out every hour or two, or more frequently in a smaller space. I keep my sliding doors to the kitchen and actual bedroom (currently filled with boxes of stuff) closed so this room heats up faster but fills with fumes faster, too. So I don't use it much. But damn, it gets cold in here.

I've been sick the past few days and it's no wonder. I thought going in and out of air con in the summer was bad. Try living room (warm) to kitchen (cold) to bedroom (super cold with lots of windows) back to the living room again, or the school staff room (very warm) to the halls (very cold) to classrooms (warm again) and then maybe outside (not cold by Canadian standards, but still cold in a business suit and slippers).

The heaters are cool, retro-looking things. Here's a shot of them during a staff meeting I wasn't obliged to attend:

They certainly are nice, though I wonder about the fumes, since there appears to be no venting of any kind. At any given time, there's a fair chance of seeing a teacher or two huddled around one of these things.

The move to the new apartment went alright. Julie and I worked at a pretty steady pace, and in the end it took all day. From about 9:30 in the morning when we picked up our truck, to something like 8:00 that night. Super-close move. Just one tiny one-way, maybe 200 metres worth, and we'd have had a much shorter trip for each load. But no. Instead, we had to wind this crazy path through neighbourhood roads, past a pedestrian-only bridge over the nearby closed train line, past a tiny, tiny bridge that I dared not go over more than once, to a main road, turn left, another main road, turn left, road, left, and there we are. A crazy spiral. Over and over again.

Except for the fridge. I don't know much about moving fridges, but Julie and I got in a discussion about defrosting, and looking up fridge moving on the internet, I discovered that fridges cannot be moved horizontally unless its ok'd by your particular manufacturer or else all kinds of nasty things can happen. Well, a vertical move just wasn't going to happen with our sizeable but short van, so off we went to get a dolly. Except that dollies are apparently nigh-unheard of here. At least the type I wanted: two-wheeled, with angle-irons at the bottom to tilt an appliance back on and wheel away. No, the school had one of those. On loan. And they wouldn't re-loan it. So I was stuck with one of the types common here: 4-wheeled, no tilting, and we opted for an ancient-looking green-painted one because it was lower than the modern, well-oiled looking one beside it. Then we obtained the help of a neighbourhood Australian friend and off we went. And it looked something like this.

You know. Through the neighbourhood and over that pedestrian bridge I told you about. Three gaijin and a fridge. (good name for a comedy troupe) A spectacle and then some in a town with few foreigners of any kind.

And here it now is. A family-sized fridge, other JETs would apparently kill for. (And all I had to do was pay a family-sized rent for a few months and drop a few thousand in extras to get it) The apartment is quite lovely. A nice size. Efficiently-built. Cold as hell as I said, but nice. No tatami room (which Jules in particular misses), but a nice bay window looking out on a rice field and huge yard and gardens of some houses behind it, which helps offset the view from my front door: the parking lot of a church-like coffee/curry house, and across the road, the Circle K, not quite as bright as "Big Max" but plenty lit with fluorescents itself.

The place is still a mess. Having been sick lately, and also in denial, I haven't done much to the place yet, but it will be much comfier (and more affordable) than the last place. Barely more than a week till we leave for our Big Vacation (more on that another time) so I must put in the work to have this place looking nice before we go, the better to have a stress-free return if that's possible.

The only other recent news is that I returned home to find my living room/balcony french door ajar, screen and all -- exactly as I'd left it (D'oh!) -- so now I'm wondering if I'm going to encounter wildlife in here anytime tonight. A bat or rat or maybe one of those horrendous giant Japanese centipedes I've seen pictures of on the internet. Eeaagh. Ok, maybe not a lot of sleep tonight.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JULIE!!!

2006-11-21T10:01:00.000-05:00

And not just any birthday, but the big 3-0!

To steal a bit from a favourite source:

Hoshizora
Kirakira
Konpei
Tou no you

I hope you have a great year, here in Japan and elsewhere, my dear.

Much love.
Happy Birthday!

Niece Set To Elope!

2006-11-21T09:29:00.000-05:00

Well ok, she denies it. But in doing so she used the word "elope" and I just thought that was too quaint not to use. Ok, and this picture might be a touch old. Anyway, I hope she and Jason have fun in Vegas!

Another long day here in Kitagata. Out of school at 7 o'clock. Partly work and partly not. Three people from my real estate agency dropped by to go over clauses in the new contract and get it all done. The slightly weird guy with the shaved eyebrows who showed the apartment -- he talked little; a woman from the office who went over most of the contract with my supervisor; and an older woman who went to work when we started getting ready to sign documents -- a contracts specialist, ensuring that I understand everything I'm agreeing to. Then there was much signing, sealing, and filling out of forms.

I can finally say good-bye to this apartment and move into my new one this weekend. This apartment was given to me by my predecessor and the school board. They told me it was big. They didn't tell me that it'd nearly bankrupt me to live here.

JET recommends that participants bring $3000 to cover ALL costs for the first month here: rent, food, expenses related to settling in, and so on. Initial payment for the apartment alone: $4000. That's three month's rent that I may or may not see again ("key money"), 1 month rent "gift money", 1 month rent in advance, a "transaction fee" more than an entire month's rent by itself, and several smaller expenses, put together. I tried to fight the contract but it was no use. It's taken me this long to get enough money together to end the contract and begin a new one. There are new expenses to starting over, but nothing like the last time, and the rent and reduced utilities (set at a high fixed rate for this place) should make the move worthwhile in just 2 months, while I have 8 minimum left here.

I'm looking forward to the new place, but I suppose I will miss the view.

That's a freakishly big, bright pachinko parlour across the way. There's no noise from it; just a ton of light. All the noise comes from the kendo studio next to it (kids screaming aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh as they attack each other with sticks) and the occasional megaphone-equipped vehicle touring around at night spouting right-wing propaganda.

At night it's quite a nice view, also.

Mount Kinka and Gifu Castle are barely visible when I crane my neck to the left off the back balcony (much closer to Julie). Two major temples are a stone's throw away and I can see them both, also. One of the biggest malls in Japan, Malera, is not too far away and can be seen from the apartment, and the ferris wheel belonging to another mall, as well as a couple of sets of illuminated driving range netting.

I suppose I might also miss the tatami room.

It is kind of neat.

Well, that's it for me today. Another long day ahead tomorrow, and special plans, too.

Business, Busy-ness, and Cross-Procrastination in Japan

2006-11-13T06:50:00.000-05:00

I left work at a quarter to seven tonight. It was dark, and had been since 4:30.

My supervisor left at 6, saying that he felt guilty that he was leaving before me. The teacher next to me left shortly after, saying the same thing. Ordinarily, our staff room is locked up a bit earlier than today, and I get kicked out, often to bring work home. Hayashi-sensei, our youngest teacher who just recently passed his teaching exams, says that he has never seen an ALT so diligent. I normally get out as early as I can and take the stuff home, but I figure what the hell. As long as I'm doing the work, they may as well see me doing it.

Yes, it's your dumb luck that you stumbled into YAAB -- Yet Another ALT blog. Or maybe you know me but don't know much about this, in which case I'd best explain that ALT stands for Assistant Language Teacher, a position with JET -- the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme. The job description seems to vary, mostly depending on school level. Most junior high school ALTs seem to feel useless and are bored stiff. Most high school ALTs don't have enough time in the day to teach, lesson plan, confer with JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English, our counterparts), make up class materials, and mark. Today I was late because of the last item on that list. Serves me right for handing out so many writing assignments last week.

There are, as you might expect, a number of things to get used to here.

Today I think I finally got used to correcting serious writing. Let me give you an example.

My second year students recently came back from their school trip to Okinawa. It's a regular ritual at our high school for our 2nd year (aka grade eleven) students. I should have figured it would not be an entirely cheery trip, but it didn't really click until I sat in the gym with them watching "a movie on Okinawa" before they departed. It followed the exploits of a senior high school not much unlike our own, during the second World War. Much of it was hopeful, with teachers you've come to know and love, donning uniforms and keeping the students safe in bands, inside abandoned buildings, caves, and wherever else they could find shelter. Of course, raising hopes was just so that they could be crushed. Most of the latter half of the movie was a string of automatic gunfire, explosions, and attractive, young Japanese youths screaming "Sensei!!!" Some students and a few teachers are killed outright in the fighting. The rest take their time dying through the rest of the movie. One hopeful band makes it pretty far and then finds themselves cornered. So they huddle around a grenade and pull the pin. And so on. Yeah kids, lets go on a trip to Okinawa. And with that they do.

Anyway, I gather from various assignments I've foisted on them since returning that two major impressions were made during their Okinawa trip. One was that it was stinkin' hot there. The other is that war is terrible and never to be repeated. (Ok, third, that the sea is almost indescribably beautiful -- sure, their english skills are minimal, hence my employment, but they really seem awestruck by it, since they come from one of the few landlocked areas of Japan)

Regarding that second impression, of war, a student has written the following partway through an essay:

I hope world peace.

I hope world peace.

A heartfelt sentiment from a deeply affected student. So of course I must mess with it.

Two ways to go, really.

I have hope for world peace, and
I hope for world peace.

There are other ways to revise it, but those appear to me to do the least damage. And so I print my big, blocky red ink correction over their genuine display of emotion.

for
v
I hope world peace.

Yeah. They pay me to be a bastard.

Well, ok, I've had worse work.

Today was actually ok, and I find myself yet again having to admit an unpleasant truth: being busy is good.

Unfortunately, I realized a few years ago that for whatever reason, I find it better to be even busier. And busier. And so on without end.

Now, this isn't to counter the genuine fact that I am lazy. That I am. But there's something about coming home at the end of a too-long day of work, where you packed every moment full. Maybe it's the feeling of being on a big project. If that's the case, I can stay half the night. Or all night.

These are the kinds of things you want to discover about yourself before going to law school, or going to work for a big firm. I didn't, but you know, it's never too late to quit (until it is, and it wasn't).

The Japanese teacher's day is a long one. A very long one compared to a government lawyer in Canada, or a teacher there, too. Japanese teachers work all day from first thing in the morning often until 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 at night, depending on club activities after school. My school in particular pushes their volleyball team to practice until 9 or 10pm, but I know we're not the only one. You can be just about anywhere at 10 o'clock at night and see Japanese school girls and boys heading home in their uniforms, (so unusually) slumped in posture. It's depressing.

But anyway, today I stayed until a quarter to seven and was told I was diligent. Time to go home.

Fortunately, I had a case of these puppies waiting.

Wait, did I mention that there were some things to get used to around here?

Yeah, don't ask.

Anyway, I'd hoped to start this blog awhile ago, but I've been busy.

I recently celebrated my birthday, in fact, but that was such an irredeemably bad day that I was afraid my first entry would be more grumblings than mumblings, so I've put it off till now. Not because I'm not busy, but because I'm so busy that I can make use of the principle of cross-procrastination.

What's that? Cross-procrastination. I'm sure you know it.

It's where you have so many different things you don't want to do competing for your attention, that you can play one off another.

This month, I have an inordinate amount of extra classes, rescheduled due to a prefectural school board workshop, one and probably two grades worth of curriculum to overhaul in very short order, a novel to write (for NaNoWriMo) which was postponed for a week while friends visited from elsewhere in Japan, leaving me with much less time to complete the thing than the already tight deadline of one month for 50,000 words, and I am moving in two weeks and have not yet packed anything nor disposed of any of the junk left here by my predecessor. Add to that a larger than usual batch of marking, in addition to the teaching load, and today after school I coached a 3rd year for her upcoming interview for junior college.

So how does this thing work? Simple.

I don't want to mark papers so I clean my apartment.
I mark papers because I really don't want to blog.
I blog because I really am not in the mood to put down another 2000 words of novel at the moment.
And I will do that tonight, too, because while I want to do some marking, I certainly don't want to spend much time tonight doing schoolwork after an already long day.

Bingo. Cross-procrastination. Works every time.

So while I hadn't started this blog because I didn't have enough time, I really don't have enough time now, so here it is. Don't ask questions. Just help me polish off this case of tiny Asahi.