not dumb, just lazy

To Hell With Subtlety; Or, The Fine Art of Wooing While Sleep-Deprived

2009-06-23T01:38:05Z

So anyone who's been even peripherally aware of what's going on with me lately knows about the epic war of Gabriel vs. OMG MOTHERFUCKING COCKROACHES IN MY MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE. I won't belabor the point here more than I have to (mostly because I really don't like thinking about it) but in brief:

A) It is sooooo not my fault. It is the Eurotrash slobs next door. I've been living here since September of last year and up till two weeks ago, saw not a single one. I keep the place fairly tidy under normal circumstances and NOW my house is so damned sterile that you could perform surgery on my floor. But then I'd have to vacuum again, so don't. Unfortunately this has made no difference.

B) The count is up to seven, some of them Texas-sized and OH SWEET MERCIFUL GOD, what genocide did I commit in some previous life to deserve this sort of karmic retribution??

C) It's come to the point where I dread going home. I'm on constant red alert for skittering in the corners of my vision and I've started having trouble sleeping. I think I might have mentioned that I'm very, very phobic of the little bastards.

This all becomes highly relevant later.

But first rewind.

I'm talking with autumn_belias online, when she says out of the blue, "Oh hey, a friend of mine is in Tokyo right now o_O" and I said, "Give her my number, I can show her the sights." So she did, and I did, and numinicious and I hit all the slashfan hot spots in Ikebukuro and then I took her with me when I met with Miyamoto Kano again to go see Goemon. (And how wrong is it that the roaches get discussed for four paragraphs, and Ms. Miyamoto gets a passing mention, but the details are (friends locked) in Num's blog)

Saturday night was when it got interesting. Num and I went to ni-choume, aka gaytown, and she got to experience the joy of really weak Japanese drinks. (If you drink enough to get tipsy, you've imbibed enough sheer volume of liquid to make sloshy and nauseous.) We hit Dragon, then Advocates, and swung round to Arty last to round out the set.

Now Num, being mostly heterosexual, had sampled the straight clubs in Shibuya and found them somewhat wanting. Nor was she entirely comfortable with asking straight Japanese men to dance, wondering if perhaps they would be completely turned off by Western female assertiveness. Admittedly, I've had little interaction with heterosexual Japanese guys, but in my personal experience, everyone is happier when the other person makes the first move. It's become socially accepted as the man's responsibility to do the pursuing, but I credit most of my success with guys (back when I wasn't one) to the fact that I believed in equal-opportunity pursuing and my conquests found themselves pleasantly surprised and totally willing to let me take the lead. I mean, who wants to put themselves out there for rejection? Nobody. Ballsy people learn to live with that risk, but it is flattering when someone finds you irresistible enough to make overtures.

We are in Arty, and it is -- as I promised Num -- like dancing on the Yamanote Line at rush hour. It is feet-stationary dancing. There are beautiful faces sliding in and out of the crowd, and I'm enjoying watching them, until one in particular catches my eye and I nudge Num's attention to it. (I think it was the hat he was wearing. I love me some fedoras.)

Num: You should dance with him, then!
Me: *waffle waffle* Okay! I shall show you how it's done round these parts!

An aside: How to Pick Up Boys at Arty:

1) Dance with them. If they dance back, proceed to step two. If
they dance away, acquire a different target and repeat step one.

2) Ask them for their cellphone address.

3) USE said cellphone address. Be bold!

This is deceptively simple.

Communication is difficult, but proceeds as follows (well, translated from Japanese), both of us taking liberties with personal space as we shout into each other's ears:

Me: DANCE?
Him: OKAY.
Me: YOUR NAME?
Him: YUUTO. YOURS?
Me: [Ooh boy, here it goes --] GABRIEL.
Him: WHAT?
Me: *sigh* GABRIEL. [thinking: I really need to make a gay alias like half the dudes here do, except it feels pretentious as hell.]
Him: WHAT?
Me: NEVER MIND, IT'S HARD FOR JAPANESE PEOPLE TO SAY.
Him: NO NO, ONE MORE TIME?
Me: GABRIEL.
Him: GAYBRUL? [draws back to look at me, plainly thinking he couldn't have heard that right]
Me: YES!

We dance for a minute or so, then, inspired by the clothed public orgy going on in the knot of people next to us -- and also conscious of both Num's desire to dance and the fact that sometimes hapless straight boys end up in Arty and are just too polite to say no when asked to dance by gay boys -- I steer him bodily between myself and Num. Figured that even if he's not into me he can at least enjoy dancing with her, because she's blond and cute too.

The two of them made a few stabs at conversation as well, volleys that left Num looking somewhat confused, so I leaned in over Yuuto's shoulder to ask what they'd said.

Num: I ASKED IF HE WAS GAY. I THINK HE SAID 'I DON'T KNOW' ?? o_O
Me: [to Yuuto] ゲイですか？？
Yuuto: わかんねい！
Me: [to Num] YOU HEARD RIGHT!

Then, on a whim:

Me: [to Yuuto] WANNA TRY IT AND SEE?
Yuuto: LOL!

Then I glanced at my watch and realized it was 11:35, and that we had twenty minutes to catch the last Saikyo line from Shinjuku station. (It's not the end of the world if you miss it, because you can take the Yamanote line round to Ikebukuro and catch a few later ones, but getting stranded in downtown Tokyo when you have work the next morning isn't a risk you want to flirt with.) So I caught Num's attention, tapped my watch and hollered that we had to leave to catch last train. Then, despite being the most sober I'd ever been inside Arty -- or perhaps because of it -- I asked Yuuto if I could have his cellphone email, and to my surprise he assented.

("You're lovely," I murmured before I left, taking the liberty of giving him a kiss on the cheek. Because what the hell -- I'd kind of assumed that nothing would come of this, and felt he ought to know that. I think he blushed.)

But even more surprisingly, he turned out to be a really good text mail correspondent, and by really good I mean prompt and seeming quite interested.

Me: By the way, it's totally okay if you don't know whether or not you're gay. I think being bi is way better anyway.
Him: Thanks! So are you gay?
Me: Hrm. Well that's a bit... complicated -- [Omniscient audience, feel free to smirk knowingly here] -- but I generally prefer guys. I have dated both men and women before though.
Him: Me too! I've dated both too.

Gentle readers, this is promising. I like bisexuals. I'm so sick of gay guys who find out about the trannie thing and are like, "Oh. Well you understand, right, why I'm not interested now; because I'm gay." So am I, asshole, screw you.

Him: By the way, you should teach me English next time!
Me: [O_O!! He's taking it for granted that there will BE a next time??] With pleasure! I'm a fabulous teacher.

We continued shooting emails back and forth at a brisk pace on my walk home, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Until I walked into my house and found a cockroach the size of a Hummer in my sink, HOLY SHIT. I killed it, with enough nerve gas to make it probably unsafe ever to use my kitchenette again, then went outside to hyperventilate for a few minutes. This has reached critical mass, I thought. I have laid traps, I have put out repellent, I have vacuumed and sterilized and sprayed raid around my door every goddamned day, what more can I do? What BABIES did I ritually cannibalize in a past life to deserve this sort of karma??

Even worse, I was stone-cold sober for all of this. I'd been coping by getting pleasantly buzzed every evening, so that I could relax enough to not care so much about the potential bugs lurking in every corner. Unfortunately since it takes a BOTTLE OF SAKE to get me tipsy, I'd decided that that was likely to get really unhealthy (and rather expensive) really quickly. So, sober. I took a Valium instead, the expired leftovers from the stash that I keep in reserve for trans-Pacific airplane flights, because I hate flying as much as I hate roaches.

It didn't work.

Four thirty in the morning, I am exhausted, still awake, frustrated to the point of tears. My alarm will go off in four hours, to greet a full eight-hour day, this hard on the heels of the previous day, where I got three hours of sleep and felt wrecked. The answer comes to me like a blessing -- call in sick. I wouldn't have felt justified doing that if I'd been drinking, but I hadn't. It was only my fault inasmuch as I am damnably incapable of making myself get the fuck over this phobia already.

So I try to call in sick.

Long story short, Nova has no spare teachers. Get thee to the classroom. I want to murder someone.

Sitting, numb and unblinking on the train, I think about the manager's passive-aggressive voice saying, "Well could you try to make it to class today?" and fantasize about breaking faces and breaking windows. I have a vague recollection of being told, when a manager was going over the stipulations of my Nova contract with me, that I would be responsible for possible damage to the premises. I was like, Say what? And he said, Oh, that would be only if you went berserk or something and trashed the place, and we both laughed about it then. Now I see that it was cleverly done.

I can handle a half-day, I think to myself. Four classes before lunch is plenty of time for them to find some mid-level, trainer-type to cover a half-day for me. If they can't do that much, then I'm quitting, I resolve. I bloody well mean it this time.

On Sundays there's another teacher who comes in for a half day in the morning, and I was already planning to ask/beg/wheedle/what-have-you him into staying on for my afternoon classes and letting me go home early -- only to find out that he's sick too. He spends the breaks between classes curled up miserably in the corner of the staffroom, clutching his stomach and just as furious as I am about being made to work in his condition.

I'm so tired that it hurts. When I put my head down between classes, I can feel some chest-deep pain that worries me because it puts me in mind of a system strained to its limits and about to break. I catch myself doing that half-second, sleep-blink thing in the middle of lessons, my brain automatically going into standby mode when the students take too long to respond. I try to nap during lunch, but it's more of the same as last night, exhaustion that I can't transcend enough to sleep.

The other teacher finishes his shift and gratefully slinks home. I don't even feel envious, just glad that one of us, at least, gets to go rest. That cunt of a manager calls to tell me that there will be nobody coming to replace me, as if I hadn't figured that out by now. I'm not especially civil as I get off the phone with her, but what's she going to do, fire me? They don't have enough teachers as it is, and when I get off the phone with her I go straight up to the staff girl's desk.

"I'm quitting," I announce. "I'm giving my two weeks notice. Is there a form to fill out?"

She's somewhat used to my dramatic gestures, so I had to repeat myself, dropping into Serious Voice and polite-form Japanese before the message registered.

"You mean it??" o_O !!

"Yes."

"Huh. Well then..." She wanders off to look for the proper form. Given her general competence in other areas, I expect to receive it about the time I get settled with my next job. I think I'm going to sign it "Sorry for short notice, thanks!" the same way they signed my transfer back to the pit of morons known as Oimachi.

I don't know if it's a good idea, but at this point I don't care. I have about $5000 in savings, which was about what I had this time last year when I moved, jobless, from Ibaraki to Tokyo. I can apply at Gaba and Aeon and all the other places that are likely to suck just as much as Nova, but in a different way at least. I can scour those find-a-teacher websites and collect private students. I can go see if the foreigner butler cafe wants a trannie. I can--

Oh hey, I have a text message from Yuuto. "Hi Gabriel!" he says. "What time do you get off work?"

*blink* That question sounds... purposeful. "6:10," I write in reply, and then add, "But I've had a terrible day, because I couldn't sleep at all last night, so doing anything this evening is out of the question."

Then I erase almost all of it again. "6:10. Were you thinking of making plans?" Send.

Now by this point, I've made up my mind that I'm not spending another night at my house until I get the chance to do another round of -- probably futile -- attempts at making myself the only living organism in the room. Meridel is out of town, I've been entrusted with a key and the care and feeding of her pet rabbit and hamster. She never really gave me permission to be a squatter, but whatever. I'm desperate, and if she's pissed off I can make it up to her later.

So as the day draws to a close I'm considering what to pack for a camping trip to Meridel's house, a sleepover of one. Wondering whether I should take Yuuto up on the implicit invitation to hang out after work, or just drag myself off to bed and collapse. I finally finish my last class and stumble out of there like a zombie. Texting back and forth with Yuuto as I ride the train home, neither of us inviting the other directly yet, I still can't decide what I'd rather do. On one hand, I know I can make plans for the next evening when I'll be cleaner, better rested, and better dressed, and he'll know I'm not just blowing him off. On the other hand, the sheer artlessness of his interest and his eagerness to meet tonight is infectious and makes me want to go DAMN THE TORPEDOES!

And here, I think I've learned something: there is absolutely nothing to be gained from playing cool and playing hard to get. It just makes the other person think you're not so interested, and discourages them from continuing to pursue you. Just some food for thought.

Him: So what are you doing for dinner tonight?
Me: I was planning on making macaroni. I'm a pretty good cook.
Him: Pasta? Oh man, I'm hungry!
Me: [oh well, damn the torpedoes] Do you want to go out to eat together? As long as you don't mind it being a little later.

The response on that one was a longer time coming than the others had been, and I confess to being on edge waiting for the phone to buzz again, but also on edge because I was by that point in my house again, surrounded by the possibility of roaches as I shoved stuff in a backpack. The packing took longer than I would have liked, and I was on my bike en route to Meridel's house when the reply came. I'd been pulling the uniquely Japanese text-while-you-bicycle maneuver--

Him: "I want to have dinner at your house!"

--SCREECH, when I did a metaphorical spittake and remembered why that maneuver is illegal. Because oh yes, I'd like to take him home. I would be so down with that. I like cooking for guests, it gives me something to do with my hands while we chat. He could sit on my floor, we could watch movies on my computer, lots of privacy to let things go where they will.

I like this plan. It is perfect in every way, except... except -- roaches. And I cannot believe they have managed to find YET ANOTHER way to incommode me, even more they already have. Invading my house, driving me to insomnia, and now COCKBLOCKING?! What did I do to deserve this??

Because there's no use pretending that they're not there, not when I've been averaging one every two days. I'd be nervous and jumping at every shadow, not to mention probably unable to cook on that stove without poisoning somebody. And when the inevitable roach did show its ugly little face, I would then promptly have a meltdown like the night before. Which is, all in all, totally not first-date material.

So I regretfully had to explain that I was babysitting a house, but said that if he was free tomorrow then he could come over and I would cook for him then. (Hell with this subtlety stuff, it keeps you from getting things done.) We made plans to meet in Ikebukuro instead, which is apparently where he lives and works. (As a hairdresser, I believe I forgot to mention. さすがに, I said when he told me, because he does indeed have fabulous hair.)

It will come as a surprise to exactly no one that I didn't recognize him when I saw him again. I have a terrible memory for faces even under the best of circumstances, and sweaty strobe lights is not the best. Heavy, trendy glasses, I recalled vaguely, being better at remembering wardrobe features than facial features, though I did remember him as having particularly beautiful eyes. However, there were lots of boys with fabulous hair and trendy glasses loitering around. I was kind of worried that this was going to be a variant of the morning-after syndrome, like, "Hrm. You were... a lot hotter before I got a good look at your face," but then he found me (fewer gaijin to choose from) and he's still hot. Woot, go me!

We went to an izakaya and chatted over food. Yuuto is a little younger than me, he turns twenty-three this week, but he seems older. Perhaps this is just because I've sort of regressed to the age that I look since transitioning, which is somewhere between fifteen and eighteen. In his free time he likes singing karaoke and going to the movies by himself, and reading books about psychology. ("Have you been to karaoke before?" "Yeah, I love it." "We should go sometime!" "Definitely!" Me thinking: We should go right now, dark-n-private karaoke booth ahoy!) He asked about my hobbies, I told him net surfing, sci-fi/fantasy, and American football. ("It's fun, I play in Yoyogi Park." "I've never played football before, I'd like to try it." "We totally should!")

He asked if Num was my girlfriend, and I said, no, I'm single and I live alone. (That's actually not to be taken for granted in Japan, because housing is so expensive that a lot of young adults continue to live with their parents. So it's not as much the mark of a scrub here as it is there, but I imagine it could make dating them kind of inconvenient sometimes.)

"And you?" I asked.

"一緒," he said, which gave me a moment's surprise and disappointment, because that means 'together' and I took it to mean he lives together with someone, then he smiled and added in English, "Me too." So apparently that's an idiomatic usage I hadn't come across before, good to know. Also, hooray for no subtlety!

His English is quite good. I asked him where he'd learned it, and he said middle school and high school, which is no answer at all because everyone studies it in school and everyone forgets the hell out of it as soon as they can. He said that his friends have enough foreign friends that he gets regular chances to practice. Which is ni-choume in a nutshell, since I've found that Japanese gays tend to be way better at English than the mainstream population.

Him: Do you go to Arty a lot?
Me: Not really. I only went last night because Num had never been there before. Do you?
Him: Only when I'm drunk.
Me: [surprised, because he'd seemed quite lucid] Were you?
Him: A little. :)
Me: Ah. Quite lucky for me then. So do you go to ni-choume much?
Him: ...Only when I'm drunk.
Me: LOL, I think you are what we would call in America a "two-drink gay."

Then we finished our food and I nearly face-planted on the table from exhaustion. I suggested we migrate to a coffee shop or something because it was getting raucous inside the izakaya -- ("Are you sure you don't want to go home?" he asked, eyeing me dubiously. "I'm sure!") -- and we wound up wandering around the doujin alley area. He was surprised and amused by the unabashed yaoi billboards displayed in full view. We wandered into a park, where we totally could have sat down and made out if only it weren't raining, a nasty humid rain that makes me sweat through my clothes and curls my hair unattractively. (Seriously, this was like the Murphy's Law of dates.)

"Hate this weather," I muttered as we settled into a cafe. "Makes my hair go all frizzy."

"I like your hair, I think it looks nice."

"I like your hair. さすがに, hairdresser, huh." His, of course, is perfect, through a combination of skill and product and being naturally straight.

We had a similar conversation about five minutes later about eyes. He likes mine because they're very blue; I like his because they have a lovely shape, like cat eyes, though I sort of forgot to tell him. He had this tendency to watch me with those lovely eyes, the sort of eye-contact-maintaining body language that screams romantic interest even when there's no touching going on. I've noticed this from people-watching. I found it hard to meet his gaze, as I often find it hard to look at pretty people, just stealing glances now and then, because I always feel that if I start staring then I'm not going to stop.

Eventually we got kicked out of the cafe and went back to Ikebukuro station. All evening I'd been kind of bemused by the novelty of suddenly not being allowed to publicly display affection, because even though I disapprove of PDA in principle, I really would have liked to be able to do more of those small, exploratory touches that you have to do when you're navigating new relationship waters and trying to gauge reciprocal interest. This was driven home hard when we split at the JR gates -- how do you end a date when there are a thousand other people around you? Kissing was out, obviously, but what's the protocol here? A handshake? A hug? o_O Hell, even standing around and being visibly reluctant to part is sort of Brokeback.

When I got back to Meridel's house there was a text waiting from him, that put a sappy smile on my face: "Thank you for coming even though you were so tired. I'm really happy."
Me: "That was a very nice ending to what had been a really lousy day. I'm happy too."

In short, I am totally sweet on this guy. You may have noticed. I'm all happy and all nervous, because I haven't been so lucky in a really long time and it feels too good to be true. We made plans to meet again on Thursday, but ooooh, I didn't want to wait that long. So this morning, after a restful 6 hours of sleep in an unfamiliar but untainted house:

Me: You sure you have no free time today? I'd really like to see you again.
Him: Want to go to a cafe for a bit?

To hell with subtlety -- for serious.

A tale more tragic than mine

2007-10-05T11:47:05Z

So a while back I think I mentioned that I had found one person in Japan more miserable than myself (more miserable than I was at the time; I'm doing pretty well now), and that was a fourth-grader whom we shall call Helen, transfer student from the Philippines who knows fluent English and NO Japanese. Her parents just got divorced and her mother decided that Helen should learn Japanese, or maybe she just wants to be a bar hostess here, so the girl has been uprooted from her home and plopped into a new school where she didn't speak a word of the language.

Good lord, and I thought I had it bad.

I had talked to Asata-sensei, closest acquaintance among my coworkers and my liaison with the school's higher powers, and asked if there was anything I could do to help. Helen's homeroom teacher had been bemoaning the difficulty of teaching her anything, since she didn't understand Japanese, and I offered to give her one-on-one tutoring during sixth period when I didn't have class. They kind of muttered about it, the days went by, and nothing came of it. I felt a little guilty for not pushing harder, but I'd heard from many a source that letting ideas quietly die is the Japanese way of saying no. It pricked my conscience when I did run across Helen though, because her face would simply light up when she saw me, so pathetically grateful was she for someone, anyone, that she could talk to.

It's for her own good that I not take too much of an interest in her, I told myself. She needs to make friends with her peers, needs to socialize, doesn't need to spend her recess with hanging out with the English teacher. Out of curiosity, I asked her homeroom teacher if Helen was learning any Japanese-as-a-second-language at school. "Oh no," the teacher said blithely, "But her parents have switched to speaking it at home."

O... k... So she's adrift all day at school in an ocean of Japanese, and then doesn't even get a break from that at home? Fourth grade is too old to learn language by sheer osmosis. But I let it slide; I'd offered to help, and they weren't interested in letting me.

Skip a couple months. After my last class on Thursday I went up to the computer room to print some stuff and found Helen and some special-needs kids working on the computers with a couple of teachers. She'd learned a few words of Japanese and was getting some one-on-one help, which I found an enormous relief. When they finished she came over to chat for a couple of minutes.

"I heard you using some Japanese," I said. "I'm glad to hear it; I was worried for you."

"Worried?" she asked.

"Yeah. I imagine you're very lonely, not being able to speak the language."

Her eyes went wide as dinner plates. Another student wandered over for the novelty of hearing English spoken in conversation, and she didn't even notice him. "I am very lonely!" she said emphatically. "I have no friends here!"

I gave her a wry smile in sympathy. "Neither do I."

"I mean, I do, but..." she trailed off unhappily. "My friends are... they're... It's -- how do you say -- ijime?"

Ijime. Bullying. Jesus Christ, that the only people this girl can call her friends are the ones bullying her.

"It's mostly Mai-chan," Helen continued. "Do you know her? She does it before class, and then when the teacher arrives she is good to me."

It's times like these that I think I might make an okay parent after all -- I may not have enough generic love to go around for all five hundred of my students, but I have grown quite fond and protective of a select few. I try not to be obvious with my favoritism because that's just asking for bad blood, and generally my favorites are the ones who need a little extra attention anyway -- the clingy kids from single-parent or neglectful-parent households, the mentally disabled ones who can't do English worth a damn but are full of unconditional love like kittens, the too-smart-for-their-own-good kids who remind me of me at that age, or a poor Philippine girl stranded in the Japanese school system.

So when I found out that someone had been picking on one of my favorites, I wanted to throttle the bitch. Seriously, what is wrong with this girl? That she gets her kicks from bullying someone who'd be isolated and lonely even without her help? I was seething inside, and it's probably a good thing that I don't know the kids' names, because I'd find it very hard to keep from tearing into this Mai-chan next time I saw her.

Then the other kid was tugging on her arm, reminding her that it was time to go, and Helen reluctantly allowed herself to be pulled away. She asked me to keep it a secret; I said I would, then went straight down to the staffroom and sat Asata-sensei down for a chat. Because honestly, there was no way I could let the situation go now. I told Asata-sensei that I'd had been talking with Helen, told her frankly about how unhappy the girl was, and reiterated my offer -- a little more forcefully -- to provide some sort of extracurricular help for her. "We can sit in the corner of the staffroom and she can help me make flashcards!" I railed. "But she is desperately lonely for someone she can talk to!"

"She's making friends..." Asata-sensei protested weakly.

"She's being bullied," I countered flatly, directly contrary to Helen's request that I keep it a secret. Does this make me a horrible person or a responsible adult?

In the end, Asata-sensei brought it up with the vice principal again, and the upshot of it all is that they've agreed to let her come into the staffroom during recess -- if she wants to, that is, this only came about on Friday afternoon so I haven't had a chance to ask her yet -- ostensibly for me to teach her Japanese.

"You're very kind, aren't you?" Asata-sensei remarked fondly after I'd finished my vehement tirade on Helen's behalf.

"I know how she feels," I said simply.

More vignettes from public school.

2007-06-18T12:43:38Z

So planting rice was great fun. I got to wear a t-shirt and corduroys to work, the first time I wasn't in a suit, and I got to hang out with my favorite second grader, who apparently can talk and isn't mentally handicapped, just an oddball.

Her name is Suzu-chan, she's extremely cute, and at first I was quite pleased to realize that I was experiencing feelings of warmth and affection for her, because it meant that I wasn't defective. I don't get warm fuzzy feelings for kids, you see, so up until Suzu-chan this was something I had experienced only with kittens. Huzzah! I thought, I find this kid cute, which means I'm not a sociopath after all! Then I realized that I liked her because she acts more like a kitten than a kid -- she doesn't talk, she just follows me around like a duckling with a smile beaming from her adorable upturned face, and attaches herself to me whenever the opportunity presents itself, wrapping around my arm or my leg and trying to keep me from walking. The Japanese teachers, when they notice, chase her off and chide her about personal space, but it's really quite adorable.

So I fell into step with the kids as we trekked out to the rice fields, walking with a girl named Aya who'd taken the initiative to grab my hand. Turned out I was right behind Suzu-chan, who amused her friends with creepy faces and surprisingly sophisticated wit for a second grader.

Planting rice requires you to squelch around knee-deep in mud -- apparently vice principals and English teachers are too cool to get muddy, so we get knee-high boots (Hi there, Sakura-sensei, looking good) while everyone else tromps around barefoot, which inevitably produces a lot of "Eeeeh, it's cold, it's icky!" from the students. I finished planting my section and went to help Aya, who refused to venture into the mud without me there to protect her from frogs. Which put me next to Suzu-chan again, who gave me a brilliant smile and then wiped mud on my shirt WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. I laughed and she did it again, at which point the Japanese teacher noticed and gave her a sharp rebuke.

"Sorry!" Suzu-chan whispered after the teacher had turned her attention elsewhere again.

"It's okay," I whispered back.

I'm probably not doing this girl any favors in terms of teaching proper social interaction. Also, I'm lucky that the other students didn't notice her antics and flatten me as they all tried to follow Suzu-chan's lead.

***

Teaching the "What is this?"/"It's a _____" structure to fourth graders, I ran a game in which everyone has a fruit card and they go around doing the dialogue (theoretically) and trying to steal each other's cards. If they lose their card, they have to come to me for a new one. "What is this?" I asked one boy, holding up a peach. He squinted at it. "Eh... a butt?" he hazarded. (ケツ, which I only know from translating too many naughty books.) "It's a peach, stupid," his friend said, shoving him, but they both snickered over it and apparently shared their observation with everyone else, because after that the boys absolutely refused to get 'peach' right on the first try.

***

So I was scheduled to eat lunch with the fifth graders, but I arrived a bit early while they were still trickling in from gym class. Changing out of their gym shirts, one kid abruptly called my attention to a boy who had forgotten his undershirt and was now running around barechested. "Kyaa, naked!" I said, because I have a younger brother and I can tell when they're fishing for a reaction.

Then, fifth grade boys being the whores for attention that they are, suddenly every boy in the class was stripping for me.

Why, oh why, couldn't I be teaching high school? Because wouldn't that be a sight for sore eyes. As it was, one boy took a marker and drew more nipples on himself, while the others shared with me their joke about having an elephant in their gym shorts. *le sigh* I took my glasses off and told them I was now blind.

***

I think Asata-sensei (English teacher, the coworker that I'm closest to) may be a kindred spirit of sorts in this not-so-keen-on-teaching thing. I was standing with her as she saw the first graders off at the end of the day, waving and repeating "Be careful... hurry home... be careful..." to the students. Which seems to be a set phrase, "Hurry up and go home," except I doubt you're supposed to follow it by muttering "...I'm tired" through gritted teeth. That, and whenever I find something nice to say about the students ("They're cute!") she doesn't quite respond in kind ("They're loud"). ("They're genki!" "...They're unruly.")

***

Aaaaand I finally decided that I could afford a bike, albeit a very cheap one. I haven't ridden a bike in years, not since my last one got stolen while I was at UNT, so it was a little bit unnerving being on one again after so long.

It was a nice feeling -- Friday night, peddling home with two kilos of rice in my bicycle basket and absolutely nothing on the agenda. I felt like a real Japanese person, with my denki pot, rice cooker, and now a bike. Monday morning was a phenomenally low point in my I-hate-my-job upswings and downswings, but by Friday, after a week of lessons that had gone well and lots of progress made on the integrating-with-the-students front, I was feeling more optimistic again. If the ups can stay high and the downs can get shallower, then I'll do okay.

Also, between school lunches getting progressively less edible and my new bicycle, I am going to have an awesome ass by the time my contract is up.

This could have ended like that episode from Cowboy Bebop...

2007-06-14T23:03:45Z

So I came trudging into the staffroom after my last class of the day, passing a teacher whom we will call Hen-na-ojisan-sensei, because that's what he calls himself.

"Yo," I said, a bit too tired to process anything more complicated than that.

"Are you feeling GENKI??" he asked me, the question I get the most since I came back from the week I took off, ostensibly sick.

"No, I'm sleepy." Children are energy-leeching vampires, I swear. And I still had another three hours to entertain myself at my desk before I could leave. "I could go for a coffee."

"Or you could have a power drink!" Hen-na-ojisan-sensei suggested a little bit too enthusiastically.

"Power drink?"

"A mysterious drink!" he informed me, eyes alight. "It has been in the fridge for a year. No one knows what it is."

"Okay..."

"RED BULL!!"

"Red what? You know this?"

Oh yes, Red Bull and I go way back. After ascertaining that it was a year old but not yet expired, I opened it up and took a drink as a few of my coworkers looked on in horrified fascination.

"Does it taste... good?" Hen-na-ojisan-sensei asked dubiously.

"No."

"But you drink it in America?"

"Yes."

"Oh, so it tastes different there?"

"No. But that's not the point." :D

Nugget of Joy: apparently this works for ALL languages...

2007-04-23T08:48:46Z

So I was having the fourth graders play twenty questions today; one kid thinks of a famous person or anime character and the other kids have to guess who by asking "Is he an athlete?" or "Is she an anime character?" or whatnot. They got a little frustrated by their lack of English vocabulary, and predictably circumvented this by asking questions in Japanese. "Nuh-uh," I said, cutting one kid off. "In English." He scowled, then repeated himself verbatim -- louder, slower, and with a crippling American accent. I was laughing too hard to make him do it again.

Vignettes from a week of public school

2007-04-18T10:37:55Z

The problem with learning Japanese from manga is not only that you pick up certain slang words that are inappropriate for using when talking to your superiors (like say, otoko-mae), but that you learn to talk like disaffected youth. Needless to say, I was hard-pressed to remember to end my sentences in polite form. A week later, I've gotten real good and tacking an "...んです" onto the end of my sentences to make them polite; it's like polite form for lazy gaijin who don't want to conjugate.

***

Curb checks notwithstanding, I've settled into driving on the opposite with an ease that has surprised even me. I've identified what I think are speed limit signs, although they never have any bearing on the speed of traffic, and I'm not supposed to go over 50 kmph with the spare tire anyway.

***

On Monday as I was driving to school I found myself first in line to turn left at a red light. I took it, wondering through the whole maneuver whether this was legal in Japan. I passed a cop car a few minutes later with his lights on, but I'd been told before that cops just did that in Japan for no reason, so I didn't give it much thought. Ten minutes later I pulled into the school parking lot, and so did the car who had been behind me for ten minutes.

"Sensei!" my fellow teacher tells me urgently. "You cannot turn left at red lights!! You must wait for it to turn green!"

"Oh," said I. "Yeah, I was wondering about that. Because in America, if you DON'T turn right on red, the people behind you will start honking and yelling."

"When we passed the police car I was so worried!!"

It didn't occur to me until later to wonder how she'd known it was me; that is, why she would care if the policeman pulled over the red-light-running car in front of her.

***

So my first day kind of sucked, because -- as per Interac's suggestion -- I winged it. "It's just self-introductions the first week," they said. Yeah, well, you can't make a self-introduction stretch 45 minutes. I couldn't even make it last five the first day. It helped that I managed to find some pictures on my computer at 6:30 AM the morning before school and bring get them printed off to pass around. Finding pictures was surprisingly difficult. "Okay, hmm... me slouching like a D&G ad, no that's not appropriate... ex-boyfriends, no... Oh hey! A single picture of my mom! Rock! .....and a single picture of my dad! ...And look, me in a godzilla costume! That'll work!" The godzilla costume turned out to be a smash hit, as well as a picture of me holding Akira after his first bath. The kids were tickled that my cats had Japanese names.

But the rest of the classes just sucked, boring for the students and stressful for me, as I ran them through some basic drills. I'd like to say that I was assessing their knowledge so I could plan future lessons accordingly... but really I was just trying to find SOMETHING to do to take up the time. I found myself dreading day 2.

Day 2 went much better. I learned how to stretch the self-introduction and picture-passing about fifteen minutes, then open the floor for questions for another 20 (or 30 if the class was outgoing and caught on that if they asked questions, they wouldn't have to actually do any work).

***

OH MAN, but I am going to get so skinny on school lunches. I am given precisely the same amount of food as the students, except on days when they serve rice, in which case I'm given a special teacher's tin with a red sun on top. Presumably this means it's bigger, if they bother to mark it specially, but I don't see much difference. The food has been extremely edible so far (although sometimes I have to covertly watch the kids to figure out how to eat it) which is good because in Japan you're expected to eat everything they put in front of you. It probably doesn't hurt that I'm invariably STARVING by the time lunch rolls around. Even so, it's weird and new so I take every bite with caution and I'm not exactly clamouring for second helpings.

***

They have low standards for foreigners in Japan. People will make an effort to be a sort of cultural liason for you, and if you know anything at all when coming in they will be astounded. If you can speak two words of Japanese, they'll make as big a deal over that as if you were fluent. If you can get rice to stick to your chopsticks, they will remark on how skillful you are. "You can use chopsticks!? SUGOI!" "You know to take your shoes off when coming inside? WOW!" "You drink green tea?? AWESOME!" "You can write your own name!? THAT'S AMAZING!"

No -- what's amazing is that I can USE YOUR BLOODY TOILETS. The ONLY thing that I could actually have used a cultural liason for, and for obvious reasons they leave you to sink or swim on that one. The first time I used a Japanese toilet was in Tokyo station, I was desperate for a bathroom because I'd just spent the past hour being shuffled through customs, and there was absolutely nothing else available. I don't think I peed on my pants leg, but it was a near miss. I didn't even know which way I was supposed to be facing.

It was three years before I made another attempt at a Japanese toilet -- I was once again in a train station (Shinjuku this time) and there was a beer forcing the issue. As I used the public restroom, I could see quite clearly why the Japanese considered their toilets superior to Western ones, despite the learning curve involved -- doesn't matter how filthy the bathroom is, because you're not touching anything. So for the glory of becoming honorary Japanese (and because one of my schools has no other options >_>) that is now a skill I have mastered, though unfortunately not one I can brag about in polite company.

Misadventures with the Tinyvan

2007-04-14T13:18:39Z

So on Monday, my last day of freedom before school started, I decided that I had better make certain I was capable of finding the schools on my own, because it's UNFORGIVEABLE to be late, even on the first day, and then seppuku would be my only option. Needless to say, I did not make it there without mishap. I got lost. Really, really lost. The story of how I got un-lost is just tedious though, so let's skip it. I did find the first school, eventually, an hour later than I should have, and after making sure that both maps I had agreed on how to get to the second, I set out again.

Semi-rural Japan, from the pilot's seat of the Tinyvan.

The problem with driving on the "wrong" side of the road is not that you can't remember to stay in the left lane (although when you make a turn there is a split second where you have to actively THINK about which lane you're turning into) but rather that you're not used to having the bulk of the car on your left rather than your right. Makes it hard to gauge where the far edge of your car is. So there I was, driving along, when my longtime arch-nemesis struck again.

Or should I say, I struck longtime arch-nemesis again -- the curb. I've yet to be in an actual car accident, but I managed to break my car in America THREE TIMES on curbs. Omens for the Tinyvan are similarly inauspicious.

"HOLY ----!" I shouted as a horrendous jolt rocked the car. A moment later the Tinyvan was on level ground again, but he was making this terrible scraping sound, so I pulled into the first parking lot I came to. I got out and walked around to survey the damage.

Can't say I've managed that one before.

Well if there's nothing else you learn in Interac's training, it's to call them whenever anything happens. Or when it doesn't. Or when it might. When in doubt, call Interac. I made the call, gave my name to a lady who didn't speak very good English, and she said they'd call me back. I wandered up the street to find my hubcap while I waited.

Hubcap! Hooray! I couldn't stop laughing, really, the whole thing was just ridiculous. I hadn't even had my car for
48 hours before I'd managed to render it un-driveable. And the Japanese people sitting in their cars as they waited
at the light, idly watching the foreigner walking on the sidewalk, were going to see me walk out, pick up a hubcap,
and turn around and walk back.

A few minutes later a different person from Interac called back -- apparently by this point word was out that I had been in a traffic accident! I assured her that I was okay, that my car was mostly okay too, it was just the tire. She asked if I was still on the road and I told her I'd pulled into a parking lot.

"Oh!" she said. "Then you can drive it home?"

"Uhhh.... no."

"Okay. I will call you back."

I wandered around to the back of the car and pulled up the floorboard in the trunk to reveal a spare tire and jack. Boss Man had given me the owner's manual when he gave me the car, with a "Please read this," which to his face I said "Of course," and to the Tinyvan I said "Pfft!" It was still in the glovebox though, so I pulled it out and flipped to the instructions for changing a tire.

The parking lot I'd found looked to belong to some sort of government building, and there was a steady trickle of cars coming and going. More than a few people looked at me funny but nobody tried to help, probably because they were afraid of having to speak English. One guy laughed, but I think that's because I was taking pictures of the tire with my phone. I fielded two more calls from Interac, no more helpful than the previous ones.

A work in progress. I put the jack in the wrong place initially, then realized it was crushing
part of the frame of the car. >_> Oops.

I have a motto that often sees me through life: "Stupider people than you have managed this." Changing tires was no exception.

Slick.

THE END

Behold, I call it the Tinyvan

2007-04-08T12:33:01Z

So I finally got my car yesterday, after being stuck in S-town for two weeks with no wheels. And before you all say "Oh, awesome!" -- NO. I DIDN'T WANT A CAR. I didn't want to NEED a car, I wanted to be somewhere with a rail system and maybe peddle around on a bike... but seeing as that didn't happen, a car is somewhat necessary.

Hiroko-san drove me and another ALT -- whom I'll be referring to as The Creep, for that is what he is -- to the car rental place, where a few other ALTs were already hanging out with the Boss Man putting their stamps to Japanese documents they couldn't read. Car insurance -- can't drive without it. I had my stamp out, all ready to do the same thing, when a guy named Shawn happened to glance over and say,

"Hey wow, your insurance is like twice what mine is."

"Eh?" said I.

Shawn whipped out his own paperwork to compare. "Yeah, look at it... yours is like 165,000 yen, mine is only 89,000 yen."

"WHAT?!" I said. I flagged down the Boss Man and asked him, politely as I could manage, why this was.

"Uhh..." he squinted at the paper. "Probably... things to do with age..."

"WHAT THE... erm... I mean...

By this point, my plight had gotten the attention of the other ALTs milling around.

"How old are you?" asked The Creep.

"Twenty-one."

"Yeah, that would be it," The Creep drawled. "You're also probably a girl."

"Isn't that supposed to make it lower?" I protested, aware of the similar disparity in America.

"Not in Japan," he said smugly.

But yeah, what are you going to do? Conscientious objection doesn't hold much sway in Japan, so, muttering and cursing, I stamped the damned thing and was promptly given a set of keys.

As you can see, it's like a minivan except tiny-sized. Yosh, I said, I will call it THE TINYVAN, for that is its name.

Five identical tinyvans, from my vantage point in the driver's seat of mine. After giving us the keys, Boss Man was
like, "Go! Drive them around the parking lot!" So then there were five tinyvans, all piloted by gaijin who had never
driven on the left before, zooming around the parking lot like bumper cars. The urge to ram into other people was
OVERWHELMING. On the right, watching the toy cars zip about, is The Creep in the striped shirt with another ALT
whom I hadn't met before.

The Boss Man. He's a cool guy, really, though sort of confused about why I was taking a picture of him.

Montage of my Tinyvan.

Me, looking cute. My hair's at that annoying fluffy stage. If I can make it through
the next month or so without getting fed up and hacking it all off again, I'll come out looking
like a j-rocker.

Shawn, the aforementioned ALT. He's a cool guy, we went to Shibuya once during training. The fascist Japanese school
system is likely to make him cut his hair, so this picture was taken for posterity. I told him to strike a stoic pose.

And back to the home once more...

I bought azaleas to sit outside my window. The really fabulous part is that when it rains, I can position them to catch this obnoxious drip that the gutter makes on my metal balcony.

Other than that I've just been hanging out at my apartment trying to fight off a low-key head cold. It was fine the first few days, but now the chills, body aches, and godawful congestion have finally caught up with me. More annoying than anything else, but it keeps me up at night and I'm using tissues like they're going out of style.

A post that's almost work-related

2007-04-06T09:26:33Z

So today I visited my schools for the first time. A housewife named Hiroko, contracted by Interac to shuttle their ALTs around until we get our own cars, picked me up at noon and we went out to the school. No sooner had I stepped out of the car in my sharp suit and smoked sunglasses, when I was surrounded on all sides by tiny Japanese children shouting HALLOOO!! WHAT IS YOUR NAME??? The previous English teacher, it would seem, has trained them well. I'm like a rock star. For elementary school students.

We continued on to the principal's office, continuing to be pelted with hellos on all sides. And here I'd been told that they would be terrified of me -- I'm glad to see that's not the case. We were met by the VP, a handsome older man whose name I forgot, so we'll call him "Sakura-sensei." He was glad to learn that I could speak Japanese, because the previous teacher hadn't known any Japanese at all upon arriving, and Sakura-sensei is shy about speaking in English.

They summoned the English teacher, an extremely genki lady whom we'll call Asata-sensei, and proceeded to lay out my schedule. Three days a week at this school, two days at the other school, and four classes per day. We were midway through a discussion about what sort of things I would be teaching the kids when Asata-sensei realized she hadn't introduced herself properly, so she interrupted to do that. Then proceeded to introduce Sakura-sensei again, even though he'd been in the room longer than she had. Then she says,

"Sakura-sensei is very handsome, isn't he? Like that famous actor, Richard...?"

"Richard Gere?" I suggested, because there was a resemblance, though not an overwhelming one. Sakura-sensei, meanwhile, looked like he was trying to hide and that this wasn't the first time Asata-sensei had brought up the subject.

"Yes!" she exclaimed, obviously feeling vindicated that I agreed with her enough to know who she was talking about. "He's very... how do you say in English? 'Good looking'...?"

"Otoko-mae?" I suggested, realizing -- a split second too late -- that I had just called the VP a total babe. (In my defense, the word is specifically for men, so it's not like I was impugning his masculinity at all.)

Asata-sensei and Hiroko-san laughed uproariously. I don't know if Sakura-sensei was still trying to sink into the couch cushions, because this time I was trying to do the same.

"I'm sorry!" I said. "I learned that from manga!"

"Hahaha! Manga!" they said.

As I explained to Hiroko-san in the car later, there's a big difference between knowing the meaning of a word and knowing when it's appropriate to use. Hiroko-san assured me that it was okay, he had taken it as a joke, and that I had lightened the atmosphere. I remarked philosophically that everyone likes compliments. Then I taught her the meaning of "ghetto" as a slang word.

So -- looking forward to working with you, Sakura-sensei. ;)

More pictures

2007-04-01T01:58:15Z

Let's get the obligatory cherry blossom pictures out of the way first. I happened to arrive in Japan just as the cherry trees were coming into bloom, and although I never did get to go on an official hanami outing, there are certainly enough trees around.

ONWARD!

That's actually the logo for a parcel service like UPS. Last time I was here, Shelley and I kept seeing it all over Tokyo and thinking it was adorable but wondering what the heck it was.

So the sakura pictures make S-town look gorgeous, but the fact is that most of it looks like this. That would be a radish field in the foreground, and random suburban sprawl behind it. It's actually nice enough in good weather, but on cloudy days you just want to hop the first train out of here and sleep in a hobo park in Tokyo rather than coming back.

Passed this on my walk, couldn't resist taking a picture. Who says that S-town has no nightlife? Why, you can NIGHT GATHER FUN! What could beat that?

SAFETY IS JOB ONE!

And back to the home...

Observe, my kitchen now contains a pan. For breakfast each morning I've been making those egg-on-toast things from V for Vendetta, because that's like the only western food I can find all the ingredients for. Bread? Check. Butter? Check. Egg? Check!

Observe my computer, connected to the internet and hard at work copyediting a final draft of the terribly trite Love Me Sinfully. *snorf*

And because I am a vain little beast, pictures of myself with the tried and true "picture in the mirror" and "camera at arm's length" maneuvers.

Vignettes from S-town

2007-03-28T12:23:42Z

Went walking around S-town today, but I forgot my map so I opted to stick to the main road. On my walk I encountered no fewer than FIVE hair salons, which is weird, particularly here, because I have yet to see a single person in S-town with fabulous hair. Lots of pubs too, and radish farms. Lots of radishes.

I also came across a flyer that someone had pasted up that read (in Japanese) "There is no God but Christ." I could feel my lip curling involuntarily as I approached it, but when I drew nearer I saw that someone before me had expressed their displeasure with it too, a fine patina of scratches marring the surface. I make no apologies for my hostility toward Christianity, and one of the things that I will forever appreciate about Japan is that they've completely rejected Christianity without replacing it with something worse.

My home for the next indefinitely

2007-03-28T12:17:59Z

Training over, they finally kicked us out of Tokyo on Monday morning and sent us to our various destinations accompanied by cheerful Japanese housewives to keep us from getting lost. For the benefit of any wacko stalkers that may read my LJ we'll call the town I've been assigned S-town and the lady who escorted me Tomoko. (I told her I had a friend named Tomoko; she told me that all Tomokos are cheerful; I begged to differ.) First stop was the city hall to get my alien registration card, which was boring but didn't take too long. After lunch we went to drop my stuff off at my apartment, which was larger than I'd been anticipating and quite nice.

( A photo montage of my apartment, behind the fake lj-cut )

Then we went to the cellphone shop, which took for-fucking-ever. Five other Interac people were in the same town, and we all kept turning up at the same places pretty much simultaneously. I, however, was the most decisive so I tended to get things done first: "Which is the cheapest? I'll take that one, please." With difficulty, Tomoko translated as the clerk ran us through the cellphone plan. 980 yen base monthly fee, plus 21 yen per 30 seconds of call time. Twice that if the cellphone I'm calling isn't a SoftBank one. "What about text messaging?" I asked the clerk. 3 yen per message, or free if it's to a SoftBank phone. "So... basically I need to pick my boyfriend based on his cellphone provider?" I asked Tomoko, and from the clerk's snicker she caught that too.

After another hour of waiting, being talked at in Japanese, and signing things I barely understood, I wandered back over to the other guys who were still waiting. "You done?" they asked. "Yes," I said, "but it's going to be another half hour before my phone is ready, so I was going to go buy my futon." "WTF," they said, "Are they assembling it themselves??"

Next we went to the Japanese equivalent of Cole's, ugly brand name stuff at blowout prices, to get a mattress. Tomoko was amused and impressed when I applied the same M.O. to buying housewares. "I'll take that futon, those two pillows, and that towel," I said. "I like shopping with you," she said. As I was checking out, it occurred to me how familiar this whole scene was. There are certain universal truths -- that getting a cellphone will take forever even if you know exactly what you want; that the pretty girls will get the trendy jobs at cellphone boutiques and whatnot; and that the dumpy girls with bad make-up will be the ones working at Cole's and Solo Serve and the dollar stores. Or in this case, Shimamiya and the hyaku-en shops.

Foreigners traveling in Japan always talk about how incredibly different it is, but the fact is that people are people, no matter where you go.

Nugget of joy: Interac training

2007-03-28T12:13:33Z

Working for JET or Interac, you are an Assistant Language Teacher -- emphasis on assistant. So what do you do if the English teacher you're assisting makes a mistake? (And they will, because they are always native Japanese and sometimes rather bad at English.)

The example that Jody, our trainer, gave was I likes fish, writing it on the board in big, legible letters. We're told not to correct the teacher in front of the class, but what do you do when they're about to teach the kids something that is flat-out wrong?

"Aha!" Jody says, striding to the front and wiping out the S. "You can do it that way," he tells the imaginary Japanese class and teacher. "But in conversational English we usually say..."

"Or," he continues, talking to the crowd of Interac trainees again. "My favorite one: 'That's how they say it in AUSTRALIA, but in America...'"

The trainers were a hoot. Interac > JET, even if they are a little disorganized most of the time.

I staggered out of bed four minutes ago

2006-06-19T11:37:43Z

...waking up from a bizarre set of dreams that was some big weird Smallville/Deathnote/real life crossover. There was slash, and lots of cats, and Lex torturing robots.

And now I am off to a class on "how to teach English as a second language," as taught by my father. I expect to crash for about four hours once it's over, and then I'll be off to a bartending class in the evening. Both will last two weeks. Then I'm going to go blow all my money in California.

HI ALEXIS!!! SEE U SOON, YA??!

That is not food

2006-06-12T05:55:38Z

So I was doing my thing today, as usual, using a combination of Jim Breen's online dictionary, ALC's online example database, and my l33t guessing skillz to bring you only the highest quality translated trash. Oh how I love the example databases--the sentences it produces vary between mundane, bizarre, and outright nonsensical.

> Let's make believe we are ninjas.

> I know that chair is your favorite, but we've talked about this... (Interestingly, in the Japanese sentence that accompanied this, it said nothing about a chair)

> That is not food.

> You should not attach to the standpoint where the person who fluctuates between hopes and fears to superficial things manages the person.

> There are doctors and doctors. (this one pissed me off because it was the exact structure that I was looking for, but the translation was nonsense)

And then today I came across one you might recognize...

> He is not dumb, just lazy. (彼はばかじゃなくて、怠け者なだけだ)

<3

For those who are interested, Jim Breen's WWWJDIC is the dictionary I swear by, and my new best friend Jessica (a translator-at-arms, whom I love more than all of you for SHE KNOWS JAPANESE) pointed me to ALC, which would appear to be Japanese for "space pacman." (Who knows, you can probably find an example sentence that says so. You can find example sentences for anything, it's craaaazy.) Ignore all the text cluttering the page and just put the phrase you want to look up in the input box.

Que sera, sera

2006-05-21T03:46:05Z

Dear Dennis Nance,

I am writing to decline the position that the JET program has awarded to me. I doubt you will consider my reason ‘just,’ but I was assigned to an extremely remote rural location after having specifically limited the scope of my assignment to urban/suburban on my application. I realize that there is a shortage of applicants willing to work in rural areas and that I will not be offered an alternative post by declining this one, but a village of one thousand in the northernmost tip of Hokkaido is unacceptable.

Thank you for the time and effort that you have put into my application process, and my apologies for any inconvenience that my resignation may cause.

Sincerely,
[real name deleted, because apparently strangers read my lj]

So... the JET thing

2006-05-19T04:14:17Z

For those of you who haven't talked to me in, oh, ages, here's a brief summary to get you up to speed: I graduated this semester, with the oh-so-useful degree in Japanese. I work for a publishing company in Houston that licenses and translates Japanese gay porn. It's a great job, but only pays like part-time work. Moreover, I'm competent but still really slow. I need to go to Japan and get fluent, which means spending a few years there.

Enter the JET program--sending freshly minted grads overseas to teach English in Japan. JET is what people with a degree in Japanese do for their first year or so out of college, it's so prevalent it's become nearly a cliche. I applied--won an interview in March, drove out to Houston and apparently answered all the questions wrong but still got my secondary acceptance in May. However, it would seem that I answered THE most important question wrong:

Interviewer: It says here that you would prefer an urban placement, but if none are available than you'll take a suburban one? What about a rural placement?
[for the record, those are the three categories that you're allowed to choose between]
Me: .......I wouldn't be happy there.

Apparently I should have said NO. NO, I will not accept placement in a village or an island. Unequivocally, NO. Because today my paperwork from the placement committee arrived at my parents' house...

"I am pleased to inform you of your placement as an Assistant Language Teacher for the 2006-2007 Japanese Exchange and Teaching program.

You have been assigned to Hokkaido, Otoineppu-mura."

My mother reads this to me over the phone. I blink. "Mom... do you know what 'mura' means? It means VILLAGE."

So I turned to the internet. What is this Otoineppu place? Well if you believe the boast of its own website, it is "Smallest village in Hokkaido~!" Ho-ly crap. They have a population of one thousand. A hot springs. A few noodle restaurants. A ski slope. And a truck stop. There is a bus route that takes it to neighboring, equally minute villages. There is a local train line that will take you to Sapporo in about three hours. Sapporo--it's like the El Paso of Japan, only on the map because they'd hate to leave that huge section blank. If I hopped trains for a day and a half, I could probably make it to Tokyo. Their accents are so far removed from standard Japanese that people from Tokyo can't understand them. Click here for the map.

Did they not listen to me? I'm expected to spend a year of my life there. I stared at my computer screen and cried.

And then I got up and went looking on the internet for a better job. Updates incoming on how that goes. I leave you with a list I compiled, arguments for and against accepting placement in Otoineppu:

Why I should:
-I applied to the JET program, it's tacky to back out now.
-I'm guaranteed a job for a year and a reliable salary.
- ** The JET people will assist me in finding accommodations and getting settled in **

Why I shouldn't:
-I never signed on for a village of 1000 in the ass end of Hokkaido. If they don't respect my requests, then I don't have to adhere to their decision.
-The goal of going to Japan is to learn the language; I'm a city slicker and antisocial under the best of circumstances. I don't see myself being motivated to spend the time necessary for language-learning with these people.
-Furthermore, their accents are whack--I heard about this in detail from Dr. Traphagan. It does me no good whatsoever if the language I learn isn't what I'm trying to read.
-I'm going to be miserable there. Going to a place knowing full well you're not going to like it is dumb, dumb, DUMB. It's like a recipe for mental breakdown.

Murakami Haruki, Translator's Prerogative, and Me

2005-12-16T05:35:53Z

This was the final paper that I turned for my Translating Japanese Fiction class. It makes reference to two [very short] short stories by Murakami Haruki that I translated in their entirety, 32-year-old Day Tripper and Taxicab Vampire.

Murakami Haruki has received some rather vitriolic criticism from writers and critics in Japan for being too Westernized; they claim that his stories reduce Japan to ideas easily digestible by foreign readers, nicely packaged pop culture, and he is, in essence, a fake and a sell-out.

I don’t really mind though, because apparently “Western” in this context means “on the same wavelength as me,” which means I can translate his stories in my own voice and they come out true to the original tone. The best example of this is from “Taxicab Vampire,” when the driver expresses doubt that the protagonist believes his claim of being a vampire. When the protagonist assures the driver that he does believe him, the driver replies with:

「じゃあ、いいんですけどね。」

Which I translated without hesitation as “Then we’re all good” and I thought it did a decent job capturing the friendly, flippant tone. Then I was making my mother read it, and I became self-conscious of that phrase when she said, “This is all you right here!” and pointed out that particular line. She’s right, of course. “We’re all good” is a complete me-ism, the same way that omnipresent やれやれ is a Murakami-ism. (My spoken equivalent for his やれやれ is a muttered “Jesus…” but I invariably have to change that to something else in writing.) So I changed it to the slightly more mundane, “That’s good then,” but after a while I started to wonder if I really had to change it. Is it necessarily a bad thing if a translation reflects the translator’s voice that strongly, right down to an idiosyncratic turn of phrase, if it fits both the original words and the tone of the story?

Examining the original Japanese, the ‘good’ is present although the ‘we’ is implicit—but then again there’s a けど in the strictly literal, and we’re hardly going to stick a ‘but’ into the English translation. In my professional opinion, it’s close enough. As for the tone of the story, “Taxicab Vampire” is told in the literary equivalent of a deadpan, this bizarre conversation unfolding with one person playing along and the other asking odd questions and making outrageous claims with a straight face. I wanted to capture in translation what I imagined the cab driver’s tone to be—factual, polite despite his mild disapproval at how incredulous the narrator is.

But then again, the ‘we’ in “We’re all good” is very casual and implies a degree of solidarity that may well be missing in the original text. Having no experience with Japanese as a spoken language, it is often difficult for me to judge such things. And on those grounds, I caved and left it as the boring “That’s good then.” It’s not as much fun, but if I’m wrong on the issue of formality then, by God, it’s not because I’m inserting my own voice where it shouldn’t be.

***

One of my translating ‘strategies,’ if the corners cut by a devious brain can be considered strategies, is to make a working first draft in which I make sure I understand every line of the story, and then I let it stew for a few days. In the first draft stage, there are often natural-sounding English phrases that correspond well with the literal meaning, but will elude the translator who is too wrapped up in the literal Japanese to think of them. So I read, I go out some, I watch TV (only Law & Order, actually, because it’s the only thing my roommate ever watches), and somewhere in the back of my mind I’m keeping on hand all those phrases that were okay in my first-draft translation but just not catchy enough. Like the opening line of “32-year-old Day Tripper”:

“I’m thirty-two and she’s seventeen… I’m tired of thinking of it that way.”

BORING.

It’s the first line, it has to be snappy! It has to grab the reader right off the bat, the way the Japanese text did when I was flipping through the book, managing to pull me away from 「鏡」 despite my odd fixation with mirrors. It has to express the narrator’s chagrin at the fact that he is a thirty-two-year-old man who hangs out with a seventeen-year-old girl and the wry, defensive humor he uses to counter that chagrin. It has to be something like…

…let’s take that from a different angle.

The moment I heard that phrase it clicked that that was what I needed for the opening of “32-year-old Day Tripper.” Chagrined? Humorous? Catchy? Good on all three counts. Unfortunately, it bears absolutely no resemblance to the original Japanese, which I’m usually a stickler for preserving. After all, it’s a slippery slope—one moment you’re changing a phrase here and there because you feel that you have better words than the person who wrote it, and in the next your translation bears absolutely no resemblance to the original work, they have to call it an English ‘adaptation’ instead of a translation, and you’re working for—

I won’t point fingers. But they make more money than I do.

So where’s the cut-off? Does my translator prerogative extend to completely blowing off the literal in exchange for a turn of phrase that, in my opinion, expresses the same sentiment and captures the humor of the original? In this case, I say yes. It’s the first line of the story, which may well be the deciding factor for whether someone flipping through a collection of short stories will bother reading this one or skip to the next one—the need to catch the reader’s interest overrides the need to be true to the original language. (Especially with a weirdo name like “32-year-old Day Tripper.” Seriously, I wouldn’t have even given it a shot except that I’m lazy and it’s mostly dialogue.) Whether or not I would make the same call if that line had been in the middle of the story rather than the beginning, I can’t say. Probably not, though.

***

Fortunately for those in favor of literal translations, that was the only line in “32-year-old Day Tripper” for which I experienced such a revelation. There are a few that I’m still waiting on, but seeing as this project is due in sixteen hours I’m not likely to get my epiphany in time. The one that I feel is most glaring comes shortly after the narrator’s rant about his colleagues and their complicated game of boredom, when he moves to focus on the girls: “In reality, nine out of ten young women are tedious affairs, although the girls are of course not aware of that fact. The girls are young, beautiful, and full of curiosity. They think that tedium is completely unrelated to them.” (I believe that’s a nearly verbatim translation – I’m sorry I forgot to copy the book before giving it to you.)

That last line—“they think that tedium is completely unrelated to them”—distresses me. It’s not bad, per se; it doesn’t make the reader stop and go “huh?” or require an awkward double take the way bad translations do, but it’s not good. It sounds just unnatural enough to make me, someone who can read Japanese, stop and say, “I can guess exactly what that was in the original” because 関係はない is like 仕方がない, one of those turns of phrase so prevalent in Japanese speech. They can translate literally, but they aren’t idioms in English the way they are in Japanese, so they can make a sentence intended to be casual sound stilted.

I didn’t leave it like that—“completely unrelated to them”… やれやれ—I adjusted the tone to fit the rest of the story, light and whimsical. It now reads “They think that tedium has nothing to do with them,” which is a definite improvement but still not satisfactory, due in no small part to the difficulty involved in translating 退屈 into a noun that makes it clear that the boredom is what the girls invoke in other people, not that the girls are themselves bored. So I had to think hard about what I thought that line should convey, which is a new experience for me because usually I run with instincts that I don’t even realize are instincts and not necessarily explicit in the text. What is this line? It’s an indirect quote, what the girls think of themselves. They think that boredom has nothing to do with them. I realized that I wanted that line, whatever it ended up being, to sound very teenage. Murakami’s narrator in this story is not hostile to the foibles of teenage girls, but there’s a subtle cynicism lacing through the work. An understatedly childish expression for describing that lack of awareness, even though it’s ostensibly in his voice, would be perfect.

Eventually it will hit me. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with the perfect wording for that line, and depending on whether I think I’m prone to forgetting it I might get up right then, pull out my laptop, and fix it. And if we’re still in touch, I guarantee I’ll send you a Eureka! email about it.

A linguistics fetish

2005-08-15T23:53:22Z

The reason I'm a translator is not because I can't find any other work. (Although I am a translator of comic books because no one else will hire me.) This isn't an interim job until I get out of school, when I can go into something boring and respectable like computer science (long past that), something that I'll laugh about with my equally staid husband when we talk about the wacky things we did in college for money, but won't tell my kids about. Nope, translating will be my career because I, my friends, have a fetish for linguistics.

Not the boring stuff they teach you in linguistics 301, about morphemes and allomorphs and phonemes and allophones--even I couldn't keep those straight, and I sort-of cared. What fascinates me is how languages translate, and even more, how they don't. How something can be poetry in one language but sound horribly awkward in another, despite the translator's best efforts. What languages reflect about the culture they express--how in one language, a rather complex concept is such an integral part of their society that they have a single word for it, but in translation it would take paragraphs to explain. Or when the target language doesn't share that concept at all, and all the verbose explanation in the world can only describe the concept in terms of others. "It's like _____, only not quite..."

The notion of "kami" is one of my favorites, "shinigami" in particular. Raised in a culture without the concept of kami even I can't truly understand it, but I understand enough to appreciate the problem of translating it. Kami is usually translated as "god" with a lowercase g, but even with the lack of capitalization it doesn't match our Western ideas of what gods are. Gods, even ones with a lowercase g, are unique. Greek gods, for example--Zeus and Hera and Athena and Ares and all the rest--now those are gods. The notion of kami, however, would include nearly anything from Greek mythology that is inhuman and vaguely powerful--satyrs, nymphs, dryads, zephyrs, you name it. The official answer for the question "How many kami are there?" is "Eight million." It's tied up with Shintoism, though, so most Westerners don't have to deal with it, even anime nuts.

Unless the kami in question is a shinigami, which is the character for death plus the character for kami, and somehow seems to crop up quite a bit. The various ways that shinigami can be translated are apparently infinite. The ones that come to mind are "god of death" (predictable), "angel of death" (slightly more appropriate), and "soul reaper" (wtf?). Because kami aren't all-powerful, you see, some of them aren't very powerful at all. A shinigami is not a god of death, because that would imply that they are Death with a capital D, the one that comes for you when it is your time, etc etc. I have a hard time with this concept, because nobody explains it and yet it seems that all Japanese people intuitively understand what is meant by shinigami. The best I can explain shinigami is only in terms of what they're not--they're not human, they're not all-powerful, and they're certainly not unique. Wherever shinigami turn up, they're never The God of Death. They're more like... bureaucrats. Undead underlings. They aren't evil and they don't bring death per se, although they could probably kill you if they wanted to. Usually they keep death and the afterlife tidy and keep it from tampering with people who aren't dead. So what on earth do you call them in English? Easy, whatever you want to. The gaijin will have to figure it out as they go along anyway, since there's no word to sum it all up.

Whew, that was a lot of talking. An example of the verbose explanation that still can't quite pin down the meaning, only make comparisons. The other thing that tickles my fancy is the technical aspects of the Japanese language itself, and how much fun they have with kanji. Kanji are pictographs hijacked from Chinese that are associated with a one particular concept and at least two pronunciations--the original Chinese one and a Japanese pronunciation grafted on later. Occasionally you will get a kanji compound (a word formed from two or more characters) in which the same characters combined in the same way can be read differently and have different meanings. In other words, on paper it looks identical but it has two pronunciations and those have completely different meanings. Like "kedoru" (to suspect; to sense) and "kidoru" (to affect; to put on airs), for example.

*Sigh* I adore Japanese.

And I like to take these concepts of particular interest and work them into the fiction I write. It makes the world-building more real, somehow. And, since I also like to inflict my writing on others, here's the linguistic depth behind the word I used as a title for one book--

Lokhailen.

That was the Sedekevran word for this place, when scholars found themselves unable to pronounce its name in the Watertree tongue so they simply translated the meaning—sanctuary. It was more subtle in the original language however, and he found himself scratching out the Watertree pictographs on the shale beside him. Two characters, one that meant untouchable or unreachable, and the other that simply meant place. Read one way it meant sanctuary; the same two characters had a second reading however, that was usually translated as “heaven,” but didn’t mean that at all. It was the Watertree word for places that existed, but not for humans—a concept that didn’t even exist in Sedekevra, much less merit a word of its own. Mystical, supernatural places that no human could reach. Not quite heaven, and not quite sanctuary.

An odd, under-handed sort of ego boost...

2005-08-13T00:38:19Z

...is to see porn that you translated for sale on Amazon. The one review is positive, and specifically compliments the translation job, which would be flattering except that they liked the book which isn't much of a recommendation for good taste. But in all seriousness, boss-lady & co really pulled through--they did an amazing job with everything, from cover design to the weight of the paper that my boss-lady was obsessing over when she was in town. The translation quality is just the most noticeable feature of a job done well or poorly.

In other news, we are proceeding nicely through the piles of books we acquired. Book reviews will be incoming as we finish. (I'm currently reading three at once. o.O)

Ponderings

2005-04-09T06:50:42Z

So I've been tossing this notion around for a few days involving dream states. Basically it's this: dreams are not about change. Major events don't occur in dreams. In the dream you may be aware that a major event has happened, but you don't see it happen, you only cope with the consequences, because dreams are static. That is to say, the situation you're in at the beginning of a dream is (generally) the same situation you'll be in at the end of the dream. Discount for the moment dreams in which you die, or where you realize midway through that it's a dream and therefore you can twist it to be whatever you want.

Of course when I try to test the validity of this theory by checking it against dreams I've had, I can only remember dreams that support it. Examples: If you're lost, you're never going to find your way home. If you're running from something, it's never going to catch you and it's never going to stop chasing you. One situation that pops up in my dreams a disproportionate amount of the time is where I'm with someone and we're trying to find a place to smut. I suspect this stems from too many evenings in high school spent driving around doing just that, but even though I haven't had that problem in two years it's still a recurring theme.

As far as dreams in which Big Events do occur, I'm fairly certain you never get to watch them happen. You're just tossed directly into the dream world with the awareness of it, and in the dream you cope with it. (To say "the dream is about coping" implies that dreams are capable of being "about" something--makes them sound like books instead of brain garbage.) For example, I had a dream once where my father had committed suicide. But when I think back on it, I didn't dream the actual death, only the aftermath. It picked up at a point where he was already dead, and I spent the rest of the dream angsting over the fact that he'd displayed all the warning signs of suicide, but I'd never done or said anything about it. (How *do* you approach a parent about that? "Hey dad, you sound suicidal sometimes--I just want you to know that I really do appreciate you, and we'd all be sad if you died.") Anyway, the situation was the same at the beginning (dad is already dead, I am upset) and at the end (dad is still dead, I am still upset).

So! I want to hear about dreams you've had that support or disprove that theory, or dreams that are just wacky.

A Warcraft epic

2005-02-17T15:41:50Z

People who do not play Warcraft are welcome to disregard this entry since I suspect it will lose much of its humor if you haven't had the joy of this game. This was in response to Miriam complaining that she died a few times trying to explore around Moonglade--cry me a large body of water, sweetcheeks, and read my story of suffering!

Enkelien: so Shelley and I are on our Alliance characters
Enkelien: exploring Loch Modan
Enkelien: we're level 17 and 20 at this point, I believe
Enkelien: and we see a signpost that says "Searing Gorge"
Enkelien: which is clearly too high level for us
Enkelien: but being curiouser than cats we're like "gotta check it out!!!"
Enkelien: but there is a giganto-normous gate
Enkelien: and a gatekeeper who refuses adamantly to let you in without a key
Enkelien: so we're about to turn around
Enkelien: when a level 54 dwarf comes riding up and opens the gate to go in
Enkelien: !!!!
Enkelien: we follow him, of course
Enkelien: into Searing Gorge
Enkelien: the gate closes behind us, locking us in
Enkelien: at this point we stripped naked so that our armor wouldn't take durability hits every time we died, because we expected to die a lot
Enkelien: (and we did)
Selestius: rofl
Selestius: nekked!
Enkelien: yes
Enkelien: a naked night elf man and a naked human chick
Enkelien: so we died
Enkelien: and then died again
Enkelien: and then died again
Enkelien: (did I mention it's a long corpse run?)
Enkelien: but we were exploring you see
Enkelien: and getting mad exploring XP
Selestius: rofl
Enkelien: so I decided to take a spirit rez and explore the other side of the zone because clearly I wasn't going to get there on my own
Selestius: mhmm
Enkelien: which gave me rez sickness.... which meant every time I died I had to wait 3 minutes before I could resurrect
Enkelien: that sucked
Enkelien: finally Shelley decided she was sick of it, and wanted to hearthstone out
Enkelien: she managed to get to a path
Enkelien: where there were fewer monsters
Enkelien: keep in mind that our aggro range was like, the entire zone
Selestius: right
Enkelien: I couldn't make it to a path
Enkelien: I kept dying, and dying, and dying
Enkelien: I too was fed up and going to hearthstone though
Enkelien: finally I got in a position where the monsters were far enough away not to aggro
Enkelien: I rezzed
Enkelien: I hit the hearthstone
Enkelien: it spent its 10 seconds casting
Enkelien: server began to lag
Enkelien: a monster wandered back over and saw me
Selestius: aw jeez
Enkelien: and killed me before I had moved
Enkelien: MY CORPSE WAS IN AUBERDINE
Enkelien: MY GHOST WAS IN SEARING GORGE
Selestius: *dies*
Enkelien: so in Auberdine
Enkelien: in the inn
Enkelien: there's a naked night elf corpse
Enkelien: and my ghost in Searing Gorge is utterly baffled
Enkelien: I can't leave the zone, because there's the gate and I don't have a key, and even if I did have a key I couldn't use it cuz I'm dead
Selestius: right
Enkelien: I could wait for someone to come through, follow them out, cross the entire damn continent and take a boat to Auberdine
Enkelien: and then I remembered that the boat to Auberdine is broken
Selestius: *sigh*
Enkelien: even if I ran through Searing Gorge, through Loch Modan, through the Wetlands, to Menethil Harbor
Enkelien: I would have to talk to Capn Placeholder, which I can't do because I'm dead
Enkelien: now if that doesn't trump all, I'd like to hear what does

And how did it end, you now ask with baited breath?! Anticlimactically. I who'd the zone to find priests in Auberdine, and a level 60 was amused enough with my story to resurrect me. That experience, however, was more amusing than the time I fell (*cough* jumped) off Teldrassil and found out that you can kill your ghost if you try hard enough.

Hop in the handbasket; we're headed for a warmer place

2004-11-04T03:50:15Z

Tagline shamelessly stolen from Chapman, but it paraphrases what I've been muttering, aloud and in my head, since Bush took Ohio: hell in a handbasket, my friends, hell in a handbasket. And the worst part? He actually won. He didn't hijack the election, like he did in 2000. He actually won. The majority of Americans actually want that despot in power.

It's a failure of conscience, if you want to use as loaded a word as conscience. It's a lack of empathy in my book, selfishness and complacency taken to an obscene level. "My job hasn't been outsourced. I got my $300 tax rebate the other year. It's not my family dying from Iraqi/Israeli/Palestinian/American bombs. Therefore the incumbent is doing a decent job and should be re-elected." They forget about or just ignore the millions of lives that our president touches outside of this country. People who don't even have the power, minute as it is, to vote against him.

This was corroborated by an email from a friend of mine in Brazil. In my last email to her I'd asked what the rest of the world thought of America's electoral process, "because I'm looking at it from the inside and saying, what the fuck?!" Apparently they're looking at it from the outside and saying "what the fuck?!" too. She wrote, "Here in Brasil our entertainment shows are making jokes like 'they should let us vote too, they're electing the president of the world after all.'" Indeed.

It doesn't help that half the nation still thinks that Iraq was involved with the Sept. 11th bombings, a misconception that Bush administration has made no attempt to clear up. Highest voter turnout in years? Great, but Jesus Christ, if they're not going to go to the polls informed, I'd rather they stayed at home eating their cheetos and watching their Sponge Bob Squarepants! Merely voting does not make you part of the solution; going to polls without a clue is many times more dangerous than not going at all.

I don't know if Kerry would do a better job getting us out of Iraq. The situation there has gone from bad to worse to oh my god we're so fucked it's not even funny. The other day I dropped a glass pot lid in the kitchen, and that split second of carelessness made a dangerous mess that took fully half an hour to clean up. A month later, I'm still finding shards of glass sometimes. It's much easier to fuck something up than it is to fix it, and when it comes around to the delicate procedure of repairing things (especially "things" as volatile and fragile as a fledgling middle-eastern democracy) I'm less than inclined to trust the ham-fisted fools that made the mess in the first place. And it's not very reassuring when you realize that Bush's reelection campaign was better planned than his invasion of Iraq.

But I'm not part of the solution either. As I watched the electoral votes stack up for Bush I tried to work up a sense of righteous indignation--"I love America, but I hate Bush!"--but I couldn't. I don't love America. I don't agree with what America stands for--an unsustainable, expansionist ideology and a place where brash confidence gets more respect than empathy and diplomacy. Where nobody calls the president to task for saying "Bring it on!" to a war that's already killed a thousand of his own soldiers, and a hundred times that many foreign civilians. Excuse me for a moment guys, but what the fuck is wrong with this country? I've lost all faith in a populace that would reelect George W. Bush.

I'm not part of the solution. I'm leaving. I graduate in fall of 2005. I'm going to Japan, and though I may not settle there, I'm not coming back here.

The Psyche, part I

2004-09-07T23:13:03Z

There are a lot of things I don't understand very well, and I'm one of them. What my priorities in life are, what I want from myself, what I want from a partner, what kind of person I want to be--I muddle through life pretty well without knowing the answers, but I do strive to understand more about myself. Usually I just leave well enough alone and let those questions stew on the back burner, but occasionally I get flashes of insight about myself, religion, and society in general. This weekend I watched Hero three times and did lots of mindless driving, meaning I had lots of time to think, and lots to think about. The result? Insight galore. I'll try to organize it as best I can.

I was always afraid that one day I was going to find religion. That one day, religion would land on me and I would become a holy-book-toting, rhetoric-spewing, random-passerby-proselytizing, born-again pain in the ass. Why would I fear that, you may ask, when that one line says volumes about my views on religion? Because despite my contempt for herd-mentality and my distaste for zealots, I can't leave religion alone. Like a television buzzing in the background, I can't ignore it.

Now I've poked at various religions, gone through phases where I experimented with various faiths, but I was never able to do the "faith" part that goes with that. Religion isn't religion, the way I see it, unless there's something that you have to take on faith, something you're required to believe in even without proof. I could handle the rest of religion, but not that part. But religion, the notion of it, had always fascinated me and I was convinced that one day my skepticism would be overrun and I would whole-heartedly embrace religion. (Ugh--and the worst part is, I'd probably be happy about it!)

This weekend I realized that I was wrong. Religion is three things--a way to explain our existence, a guide for living our lives, and an explanation of what happens after death. I cheerfully embrace the Big Bang theory and evolution, as thinking people should, and believe that religion's role in answering the "why are we here?" question should have been tossed in the trash a century ago. As for what happens after death... despite my best efforts, I believe we simply cease to exist. Maybe reincarnate. And although I can't force myself to believe in the pretty notion of an afterlife, I can see where some people would find that comforting. If that makes them better able to cope with death, more power to them. So all I really want from religion is a set of ideals (documentation, to use the term kicking around the office) to live up to. A guide on how to become an honorable, respectable person.

Now all that, up to my tripartite notion of what religion entails, had been kicking around in my head for at least a year. Probably more like two or three. What hit me this weekend was the sudden thought, "Religion and culture aren't that different." Now that may not seem like much, but following close on its heels was the realization that I wasn't looking for religion, and I never had been. I was looking for a culture whose values I could espouse as my own. I'm not so arrogant as to assume that the ideology I'd fashioned for myself didn't have something better. I simply hadn't found any organized ideology that I admired and wanted to adhere to. I hadn't found a culture that I wanted to be a part of.

And I still haven't. To be continued in part II.

Sonna...!

2004-08-27T06:10:27Z

Incoming: Japanese grammar mutterings. If you don't study Japanese I won't be offended if you skip this.

Speakers in any language sometimes trail off without finishing their sentences. A writer who has a character trail off knows what they were going to say, and if it's well-written the reader can usually guess. That reasoning breaks down when you're reading something that's not your native language--namely, because they trail off and leave out a different part of the sentence that what your mind is used to filling in. In Japanese, since sentences are structured with verbs always at the end, the verb gets the chop, and my American brain goes "wtf?"

An example: "I'm more sensible than that middle-aged delinquent." In English if you were going to trail off in disgust you would probably end it after "that." "I'm more sensible than that, that--!" and if people had been following the conversation at all they could probably figure out which middle-aged delinquent you were talking about--there are never that many running around. However in Japanese the same sentence would end before reaching the verb, which leaves an odd hole in the middle of a sentence. "I'm more [ ] than that middle-aged delinquent!" Now how in the hell do you translate that? I know what he means--but the closest English literal ("I... more than that middle-aged delinquent...!") simply sounds unnatural. Do you make up a verb, thus completing the sentence and tampering with the author's intent? No answer yet. Maybe I'll discover the magic balance someday.

Anyway, all this business was my trouble with "sonna" for a long time. Sonna means "that sort of". "Sonna hito", for example, means "that sort of person." However, characters would quite frequently say "sonna...!" and then trail off, leaving me at a loss. There were usually any number of things that could have followed it, but always afraid to stray too far from the literal I usually just translated it as "that's..." It didn't seem right sometimes, but a lot of stuff doesn't sound right when taken literally from Japanese to English. Then I'm watching anime, and I realize that every time someone says "Sonna...!" it would get subtitled as "It can't be...!" or "No way...!" Turns out sonna in that context is part of the larger phrase "sonna koto wa arimasen" which could translate as "such a thing isn't so!" They just leave off the "thing isn't so" part nine times out of ten.

Yes--I learn Japanese in baby steps, one minor revelation at a time.