First and starting line

There is a delicately structured chaos to the waves, and being able to see them from shore to horizon makes you uniquely aware of the patterns you simply cannot perceive when you're up close and swimming.

There are some other photos on the flickr in a folder labeled "island life" from my trip around the island and my dinner party with the guys at the hospital. I think you should be able to find them fairly easily by following the link embedded in the photo, but this is all very experimental so, who knows.

I was invited to another such dinner party this Friday, in which Masa and Higuchi went way out of their way to make a bunch of croquettes and invite me and one of the girls from the hospital named Tomomi over. Actually, wait a second:
That's Masa and Higuchi from the right. The girl is named Ai, but she was just in town visiting from Tokyo. Also, that's more or less what I look like these days. Slightly more tan, significantly less burnt.

At any rate, I am for some strange reason surrounded by friends. I left the Kagoshima orientation slightly cheesed that I was missing out on a chance to get to know some of the other Kagoshima JETs. They were all going to a sort of language learning retreat, which I wasn't signed up for, and due to the flight being booked couldn't shift things around to go on. But then I got back here, and had a lovely weekend with some of my friends, and realized that I'll be just fine without a crowd of English speaking compatriots. I've got Eli for those rare "what the hell is up with JET?" moments, and this blog and all the fine people back home for the rare times when I'm pining for my native tongue.

Japanese has been hitting that overdrive point lately, which is ironically characterized by everything seeming to slow down. It's the superhero drama, the sport star watching the pitch coming in and thinking for minutes in slow motion "curve ball, eh?" Learning all sorts of new goofy words, and using points of grammar I didn't even remember learning, or at the very least remembering having forgotten. It's super fun.

I hesitate to talk too much about "things that are going to happen" but here's my week in brief:

Wednesday: First day of school. So relieved. Been working on a way to make my self-intro more fun by taking every point I want to talk about and making a bunch of really simple true-false type questions about them, with a bunch of obvious and not-so-obvious lies. My name is Sean Connery, etc. I think it'll keep the kids from glazing over, and I'm trying to design it so it can kill a really short period, or a really long one depending on whether I walk into the class and am met with "Talk about yourself for 50 minutes!" or "Say your name, then lets get on to real teaching". I have also recently started producing my own vocab picture cards, with alarmingly high production values. When I finish them, I'm going to get some hosting, and throw them up for all the JETs to download. There is a real dearth of free, high-quality picture flashcards suitable for Japanese elementary school kids.

Thursday: My weekly dinner with the Yodas. It's getting a lot easier to just sit around and talk, as evidenced by the relative amount of time between they finishing eating, and me finishing. When I'm struggling to speak, I stop eating. Today we were nearly equal! Also, I find it incredibly odd that Japanese people peel grapes. But they found my insistence on eating them equally strange so, eh. I think it's because the big Japanese grapes tend to have a lot of that dry quality that wine has. Shibui, in the Japanese.

Friday: First Shamisen lesson! Like a Japanese three-string banjo. The island ones are particularly high in bad-assery, because they are made from snake skin. We'll see how this goes. I think Mr. Yoda is going to be taking lessons with me, which will be cool.

Saturday: First dive! and I could not be more excited. I got Yoda to loan me a dive manual he had lying around (in English, handy enough. I have no desire to translate 40 pages of technical Japanese dive-speak), and am starting my basic dive theory education.

The busier I get, the more free time I seem to have, paradoxically. It's that starting momentum problem. When I'm running closer to the wire, I don't have time to procrastinate. So I get things done, instead of rotting to death.

My walk down by the Kagoshima harbor failed to accomplish its original goal, but I didn't mind. The air was full of dragonflies, hundreds and hundreds of them, dancing all over the boats and walls. The sea ripe with the August jellyfish bloom--fat little masses of tentacle twitching in the water. And always the volcano in the background, occasionally spitting out a puff of smoke and ash, to remind you that it still has fangs.

I always have loved graffiti, graffiti in Japan doubly so. In a society which stresses conformity and heralds the hammering down of nails with the audacity to stand, the graffiti is a reminder that dogma and reality are, mercifully, rarely coincident.

Photos

I now consider the matter of photos closed for the time. I'll keep a steady trickle going, one or two a post. Mostly seem to be selecting them based on whether I like the photo, vs. whether they are the most iconic of my life. But still, it's a taste, and I get to show off. I also now know a nearly infinite amount more HTML than I did before spending that hour of my life.

left to right, top to bottom:
a) view from the plane. I live somewhere to the left of the harbor.
b) boat parade, in which I got to wave to the whole town as we sailed by them on the dock at the summer festival. I stood radiant and godlike on the prow of the first boat. Cheering and gasps ensued at appropriate intervals.
c) photo of the kids sitting next to me at the summer festival because nothing could ever be cuter than little Japanese kids in kimono.
d) sunset at Sugira beach during the summer festival. I have long held that taking photos of sunsets is almost cheating, because no matter what you put in front of it, it looks like magic.
e) island school kids Island drum troupe. I don't know the name. It isn't Taiko though. I see this girl around the island sometimes, she must live nearby. She's really shy, and I always remember how intense she looked when she was playing. I have a photo of her literally 5 seconds before this smiling and laughing with her friends.
f) This kid was awesome. The previous act was a father and his two kids, and this little kid runs up from the crowd and starts batting at their costumes. Then he's just standing inches from the stage staring up at whatever is happening in awe until, he sort of whirls around with the most devilish grin on his face and BREAKS for the crowd as his dad comes flying out of the crowd to go stop him from messing with the performers.
g) My geckos. My guardian spirits. This one lives in my air-conditioner and is a noisy little asshole. But he killed a praying mantis in single combat, so I think we're cool.
f) Francis, my pet spider. He lives outside my living room window. He is about the size of my open hand, with his body being maybe the size of my thumb. He's pretty cool. He just hangs out, attacks 1-yen coins when I throw them at him, and occasionally disappears from his web for hours at a time, making me just a little bit on edge every time I lift the toilet seat, or open a cabinet.

That was my first week or so. Interim photos less interesting, but I might throw one or two of the island exploration day photos up...once I find them. I think they're on the card, but I'm getting ready to go to Kagoshima city for orientation, whatever that means, so I'll check when I get back.

Other news in a nutshell: Met all the teachers on the island, one after another, and did my amazing talking gaijin bit, which was met with varying degrees of applause. Was informed by one school principle that I apparently have a noticeable Kansai accent. Kansai is the region where Osaka, Kyoto and Nara are. My host family in Tokyo was from there. I knew I had a tendency to conjugate things in Kansai-accent sometimes, but apparently my pronunciation is tinged with Kansai. I suspect that that this only adds to the confusion when I open my mouth to speak, and not only Japanese, but regionally inflected Japanese, comes pouring out. I'm actually rather proud of it however. Always did like Kansai. Instead of the customary greetings, there is a Kansai regionally version of "hello" or "what's up" which translates to something like "made any money lately?"

Also went golfing for the first time with one of the teachers at one of the elementary schools who was just the most outgoing, friendly guy I've met since coming to Japan. I was laughably bad, but every now and then would have a moment of golfing zen, my body becoming an elaborate clockwork automation, my eyes suddenly capable of seeing the wind and my brain perfectly aware of where every muscle in my body was and was going, and hit an amazing drive, right into a lake. I think I might be going back next weekend.

Stepping out, getting busy

The theory for success in Japan appears to be basically the same.


Working out a language exchange with a local Philippine woman, who speaks really rather good English, free of any qualifiers even. She could go live in America, and have very few problems. But she wants to practice, and I think wants to set a good example for her kids, which I'm totally cool with. So I'm going to learn some Tagalog. I'm actually quite excited.

In other news, the guy from the gas company who came by today, told me to stop being such a damn shut in. It was awesome. I also become increasingly aware of exactly how well tracked almost all of my movements are.

I'm also highly tempted to go see if I can talk my way into helping harvest some sugar. There are these two just oh-my-gosh-dorable Japanese old ladies who have been slowly harvesting a patch of sugar occupying an area about the size of, maybe the inside of a NYC intersection? I could not say why but the thought of hacking away at sugar for a few hours after work seems not only fun, but somehow therapeutic.

We're fools whether we dance or not. So we might as well dance. As they say in the islands.

I am learning 20-40 new words a day, which is just a riot. I can now accuse you of being vague, and also insinuate that you are being "unfortunately, vague as ever" ainiku, aikawarazu aimai. JLPT 2 is in December. I intend to pass with flying colors.

I think I just made about 50 some odd balls, patties, and stuffed things of meat. Turns out the great secret to preparing a bento lunch every morning is to not prepare a bento lunch every morning. Rather, the secret is to cook and preportion everything, then freeze it. You can even prepackage homemade soup. I have no desire to do so, but by golly you can! P.S. for other JETs out there, get all up on that blog. It's perhaps the greatest Japanese cooking resource I have ever found which is full of both English and pictures. Often even pictures of instructions, which are just f-brilliant.

OK! Bedward. I have photos to assemble in the morning. My work computer and my home computer do not get along, so I have gone to great lengths to counterfeit a fake ID to allow my home computer to usurp control of my work printers, so I can finally get these self-introduction pictures printed out. How will Kikai's finest computer technicians fare against my gaijin computer acumen? Tune in tomorrow.

My shining future

Friday, I finally get to meet some of the English teachers, and thus I am officially declaring it the first flower after what has proven to be an unusually long and boring 100 degree winter. Week after that is Kagoshima orientation, and a free trip to civilization. And then the real fun starts.

My time at the office, in between being bored and studying Japanese (today's words: to make up for, to get drunk, grandparents, cousin, some island vulgarity which is about the sharpest sounding thing I have ever heard come out of a Japanese persons mouth. It's damn near guttural. I think we'll be hearing a lot of it) is spent trying to find information on what the hell I'm supposed to be doing with my time, particularly since I am a one-shot, and see these kids perhaps once a month.

What these searches keep turning up instead are just about every single disgruntled JET horror story that exists on the planet. Hell, one guy appears to have even compiled all these into one place for easy access. It is both demoralizing and encouraging. Demoralizing because the JET programme as a whole does seem to have some endemic flaws, largely stemming in the fact that JET, as an organization, recruits through a fair deal of propaganda. It's not even necessarily overt, but it is self-selecting. The guys who want to go from college to college in America talking about how great their experiences were had great experiences. And "JET: 85% of you will fail to make a difference, and you will be haunted by it." makes a poor recruiting slogan.

But the silver lining in all of it, is that so far my situation, generally difficult as one-shot visits are, is pretty decent so far. My house, while old, is the charming kind of old, not that "sometimes the water goes out, so we have to do laundry in the river" old. My coworkers, while not culture-bridging super mutants, are all very nice, and generally pretty damn accommodating and laid back. My alarm didn't go off this morning, so I got in about 45 minutes late...and smelly. No one said anything, but I stayed late of my own volition to make up for it (principles!) and the office girls and my boss's boss were sitting around with me for the last bit, killing time, laughing about my obvious inadequacies as a human.

In fact my whole chain-of-command is pretty cool dudes. My boss, Koizumi, is like the smoothest Japanese man I have ever come across. He like...is incapable of panic or something. His boss (I think, it gets confusing) is this just incredibly laid back dude named Masu, who just kind of hangs out at his desk most of the day and laughs at everything. His boss I've mentioned before, the elegant but deadly Harunaga, who has really settled into a good routine as far as the guerrilla English attacks go. The office is not what I would call "fun" but it is certainly getting less awkward.


Edit: Last section removed for personal reasons. Henceforth this blog shall contain no more waxing poetic about my misery. I'm just gonna go do my job, enjoy my life, and tell you about the funny and profound parts. Huzzah! Also maybe photos...but don't hold your breath.

Special replacement paragraph!!!!: While browsing through my predecessors notes earlier today, I found the following printed on one of the lesson plans she received from an Elementary School "ALT greets the students with vigor and excrement!". Underlined in red by Ilsa with the note "I think I'll let Adam decide whether or not to bring this up."

My Never Ending Summer

Apparently, it is this hot on Kikai almost all the way up to November. And it's just so consistent! High of 33 every...single...day. It's going to be high of 32 on Monday.

Tears of joy, tears of joy.

I quite literally slipped on a puddle of my own sweat while making dinner tonight, as I turned my little living room into the set of a bad romantic comedy, or perhaps a tastefully done porno, the line between the two is thin. From work clothes, to shirtless, to crumpled pants on the floor while my sad little towel just got wetter and wetter. Follow the line of clothes, past the pot of hayashi raisu in the kitchen, rice cooker set to "warm", to the room in the back of the house and throw open the door. Find a panting, still slightly sunburned gaijin passed out on the floor, flooding his tatami. Anti-climax? Logical progression of surrealist events.

I biked up the hill to my place of employment three times today. It's not a long hill, but whilst attired in khakis and seated astride a bike with the temprament and design of an ancient Japanese grandmother, clunking and sputtering but for good goddamn still working as it claws its way up that hill, well, it got increasingly less fun. It also gets hotter later in the day so...quick tip: if you have body hair of any kind, and I do mean any kind, stay as far away from anywhere hotter than say, Iowa. Pretty much forever. Or get very used to being soggy. On the plus side though, it fixes my hair in the morning, and irons my clothes! F'Gross, right?

I did produce ONE viable Japanese bank account however, for my efforts. I wonder how much it must suck to not look Japanese, and grow up in Japan. Every time you walk into a bank, city office...ice cream stand, probably? Every single person goes into "OH SHIT GAIJIN GAIJIN!!!!" mode. "Do you need me to hold your hand, or perhaps just do it for you?" She says with her posture. "Please, just don't make me speak English." scream her eyes. "No. It's quite alright. I can speak Japanese. And read it as well my good bank wench! For you see I was born here, in the Japans. Now please, stop having an elaborate series of fear-induced heart episodes."

Bank wench is appropriate. Ask anyone in Japan.

Just don't ask too hard.

In which Japan and I find common ground

The lights go on, A leads to B with an inevitable C to follow. All thanks to a handful of shredded fish, a sheet of konbu and 20 minutes of my day, once a week.

You can make everything, everything you need to fill out the background of a Japanese meal, in an hour on your Sunday. Dashi stock, the birth of Japanese food like chicken and beef stocks to the long dead Europeans, is so easy to make I might even go so far as to say that one almost could not screw up the process of making dashi. Hot, it takes 20 minutes and some minimal caretaking. But if you fear that even the act of flicking the burner to "on" is just too much danger for your haggard frame to handle, well friends and family there's a fascinating solution involving a pitcher, your fridge, and an overnight stay. The mother of Japanese cuisine, that tantalizing umami-filled fish broth is, when it all comes down to it, fish...fucking...tea. Where have you been, all my life.

An hour of planning saves a day of work;
Organization will set you free;
Cleanliness is next to godliness

My life has become the posterchild for the obvious revelations movement.

Expect their posters soon in a town near you—Soviet-style young towheaded sunburn grinning, marching out of his valley, planner in hand thrust triumphantly towards the heavens, while the crowd golf-claps and cheers in a patronizing tone.

My summer of marriage proposals and ice-cold mugi-cha

I sit, envelope in hand, with my first paycheck. Although "check" would be a misnomer, seeing as how I get paid in cash. I am now 68000 yen richer, for what amounts to a week of reading about children's games, and trying to figure out how to kill the hours between 8:30 and 4:15. Killing time. What a wonderful expression. I taught it my new friend on the island, EMT by the name of Masahara, Masa for short. Spent most of the weekend hanging out with him and his friends (he and his friends? I teach the language damnit, I can't be expected to speak it.), which was a riot and a half. And a much needed confirmation that I will not have to continue anthropomorphizing the furniture and discoursing with the ants.

Masa was friends with my predecessor, who left a note on my fridge informing me that I should call him ASAP because he's hyper-friendly. He's a pretty funny guy. While we were driving around the other day he says to me in English "So you are kind of famous on this island, but it is good that you are friends with me, because I am famous too on this island. Because EMT, there is only one, and also I am young and attractive." Had my first night out bar-hopping in Kikai, which was surprisingly ok. There's a little live house down by the beach, where I drank an obscene amount of jasmine flavored sho-chu (because hell if I'm going to let a scrawny Japanese guy out drink my might gaijin stamina/I am stupid).

I also met a pretty cool Filipino gal by the name of Evan, who has an awesome voice, speaks pretty decent English, and three kids who hate the ever-loving-hell out of English despite this. I told her to come by and I'd see if I could think of something to try and get them motivated, but I don't really know what I can do. The basic concern is that their grades are bad, and just because their mother can speak it, they still basically view English as an exercise in abuse inflicted upon them by the Japanese government. I don't know how their finances are, but I was going to ask if she's looked into sending her kid on a homestay in an English speaking country, perhaps Canada because it seemed much cheaper when I was flipping around researching it instead of not working. One of the basic problems of motivation here in Japan is that English is a classroom language, not a practical one. It's EFL (English as a Foreign Language) not ESL (English as a Second Language). Most of the people I know who are really good in English, went on some kind of homestay thing, or had close contact with a lot of English speakers. Though I can't say which way causality runs, so, I suppose we'll talk about it. Either way, it is refreshing to have someone around I can more or less speak with in my native tongue. There are...very few people on this island who can do that.

It also turns out there are 24-hour karaoke-kan here, which blew my mind. English songs and everything! Kikai has a nightlife...who knew?

The next day, after the "WHAT DID YOU DO, WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME!!!!!" hangover died down a bit I went swimmin' down at the really pretty beach in the South of the island, which has a coral breaker making this calm little lagoon with little coral cliffs you can dive off, very cool. The resulting sunburn, not so cool, but hey, I mentioned that I'm stupid right? Lesson learned: I am a marshmallow, and should fear the sun accordingly. Met up with some of Masa's friends from the hospital and an absolutely gorgeous (but married, curse my luck) friend of theirs who was visiting from Tokyo. Spent the day driving around the island.

Highlights include: stopping at a mango farm, and having the owner shower us with literally 5000 yen (50 bucks-ish) of free mangoes, and mango juice, while he and his son sat around and chain smoked and talked about their farm. They gave Masa's friend Higuchi a pet beetle as well. They had a bunch of little terrariums. I couldn't tell you why. It was a very odd little farm.

Going up to the highest point on the island, and looking out over the Pacific side of it. The ocean just going forever. You could see for miles, and miles, clouds and their shadows, and the ocean rippling out to nowhere. Then we went down to Somachi port, and made like little kids, climbing all over the big stone breakers, up 8-foot walls on half-foot wide ladders, and watching the waves come flying in and just explode on the coral. Kikai is a fairly calm little island, but the waves over by that one harbor were...beautiful, powerful, chaos.

Met up with another one of their friends Keiko, and had a little dinner party over at Keiko's place. I don't know if I ever mentioned the giant prawns? The fabled half-meter prawns? Yeah, they exist. This one was maybe a foot, but my god, once you got past the fact that you were eating prawn meat in a stew made mostly of its own brains and innards, it was amazing.

At some point the fact that I am single came up, and Masa proceeded to (to translate directly from the Japanese) recommend Keiko, much in the manner one would recommend a bowl of ramen, or a type of snack. Same word. My brain found this very odd, but everyone kind of proceeded as if this were normal, and not in a sarcastic way. Keiko agreed. I, filled with confusion, kind of awkwarded myself out of that conversation. Masa then suggested that maybe I should marry his sister instead, because she was 23 and cute. The sunburn probably hid the blushing. I...I really think somehow that entire exchange happened in real-world, not sarcasm-land. Japan is a strange place. And I live here.

Then we all went down to the beach and set things on fire, and waved them around in the sky, and opened the camera shutters and let all the light in. We watched the stars, and the ferry lights coming in to the harbor, and Amami glowing just faintly off on the horizon. More of Masa's friends and coworkers showed up, and I was by-this-point-customarily recommend to marry two of them. I wonder if this trend will continue.

It was a fantastic night. I also picked up a Japanese name. I told Masa that some of my friends back at school used to call me AG because they're my initials, but aside from that I don't really have any nicknames. But AG with a Japanese pronunciation sounds like Eiichi, a Japanese man's name. So they all started calling me Eiichi. I kind of like it. I can pretend, just a little, that I am not the whitest (currently reddest) thing within 25 kilometers. And it's weird, because I've only been here for a few weeks now, but I really feel like I've got this charming little group of friends, when just last week all I had was a charming horde of ants and geckoes.

My fridge is full of eel, and noodles, and ice-cold mugi-cha (barley-tea) in a great big pitcher. It tastes like summer ought to, and I live on an island, surrounded by increasingly familiar seas of people, and water.

P.S. wanna know what looks really really funny? A really tan blonde guy, especially since my hair is starting to sun bleach. Just picture it. Yeah, it looks more or less like what you're picturing. We'll see if ridiculousness continues once the red-tones fade.

One down, 51 to go

I think the mayor got the whole town together before I got here and gave a little speech which went something like "whenever you see the new gaijin, I want you to kind of squint at him, and then stifle any emotional response that comes to mind." It's like no matter what their reaction to seeing me is, they're in the middle of trying to stop doing it. It's hilarious, and oh-my-gosh-so-cute.

Found out some time this week that Kikai was part of America for about 2-3 years, in that shaky post-war "we're going to borrow these, ok?" period of American-Japanese relations. This is also, coincidentally, why Kikai is part of Kagoshima (the prefecture (like a state, but the size of Rhode Island) way down in the south), and not some separate island prefecture. In order to prevent Kikai and Amami (island next door) from declaring independence with US help, Japan made them part of Kagoshima, so that America would be more inclined to return them. Hey, it worked. Returned Amami and Kikai in the 50s, took till the 70s for Okinawa.

Survived my first week of work with varying levels of success. Good point: kind of making friends and fitting in to the office environment! Bad point: So bored. Like I would rather be building dikes in a hurricane, which I suppose I could be doing given that one is kind of going on right now. The common thread throughout my life seems to be "can deal with just about anything, except mindless drudgery. Also natto (look it up)" Because of the way Kikai uses their ALTs, we really can't prepare for any specific topic during our pre-student month. My stated goal is therefore to mass produce warm up activities and games which can be applied to a broad spectrum of topics. This seems like it would be hard, but there are literally billions of such games readily available on the internet, and 90% of them are basically old playground games, or seemingly unrelated activities with English questions or vocab review tacked on somewhere. Kind of like the corn on pizza here. I get it, corn is delicious. But what is it doing in my pizza? So too, with the English games. Lets play backgammon, but whenever someone knocks someone else off they need to ask them what the weather is like. Yep. Internet consensus is that this is pretty much all you need to do to make an ESL game.

So now I'm faced with a bit of an awkward position. I really, honestly, would rather be doing something productive. Almost uniformly would rather be doing something, no matter how potentially unpleasant, than doing nothing. But you can only accumulate so many games before you start to hit that diminishing returns flat zone, where you couldn't play all these games in a year even if you could see the kids every single day. Unless that's literally all they were doing, to the exclusion of, like, learning.

For the time, I've settled on preparing my self-introduction which I'll be teaching for, by my estimate, about 2 months. My last "first day" is about a month in, but it's at the huge Jr. high, so I bet the 2nd day I have there about 2 weeks later will also still have self-intro stuff. After I get done with prepping that, I'm honestly thinking of sitting down with all the boardgames I know and love, and seeing if I can derive ESL games based on them. The basic theory I'm currently operating on, is that the closer the ESL game is to the "game" side of the spectrum as opposed to the "shallow pretext" side of the spectrum, the more kids will want to play it, and thus accidentally learn things which they will never be able to forget no matter how hard they will inevitably try. English Settlers of Catan, anyone? I swear it could be awesome, with the right planning. And I'm going to be the one to do it!

Lord, send me students, before the boredom drives me to insanity, or brilliance. Or both.

Tropical storms become hurricanes, and we wish we'd never asked "what are you waiting for?"

The storm is still 2 days out, more or less, and the bulk of it won't be hitting Kikai. Wind is howling like crazy though, and the doors on my house are rattling in their frames. The big spider outside is fluttering in the breeze, and suddenly I understand why they make their webs so strong. For some reason, just like my first earthquake, I'm excited. Like little kids when the power goes out. It's never scary, just an adventure. But we'll see, when the storm really hits.

Today was a turning point. My boss's boss, lovely fellow named Harunaga, told me I should be making games for the kids. Prior to this point, I had been operating under the assumption that given how little I actually interact with the kids, seeing any specific group of them maybe twice a month, the games which my predecessors had prepared which fill 2 file cabinets would be sufficient. And they probably would have been. But something about that moment, him smiling and showing me how to work the laminator, clapping me on the back and going back into his office. What the hell am I doing here, if I'm not making a difference? Not trying to make things better. I know how my predecessors' tenures went, and they did fine, and I could certainly give the kids another year of what they've been getting. But why the hell not try and make it something different, and novel? Why not use the piles of materials they left me as a resource to make my own way of teaching, my own games, and see if I can't get a few kids to learn something new.

Struck up random conversations with two people over at the 100 yen shop (like a dollar store, but more useful) while I was buying little gift bags to hand out some of Mom's cards in to the people at the office. Something that was holding me up, it just ain't there any more. It's not all roses and fuzzy teddybears just yet. Hell, I may not even be out of that first big decline you hit after the high of "OMG IT'S JAPAN!!!!" wears off. But we're leveling out. Instead of getting steeper. Things are hard. But they're getting easier. They're getting better.

Cool stuff. I'll snap some shots of the storm if I can.

Deer in the headlights of life

At our predeparture in Chicago, one of the alumni who was running the proceedings turned to us at the end, and reminded us "at the end of every day, just remember: you're one day closer to the end. And that goes for the good ones, as well as the bad."

I did not plan this week well, basic problem. The world is full of labor and time saving conveniences, Japan perhaps more so than many other parts. I, in my infinite wisdom, ESCHEW THEM ALL for my first week in this country. Whatever compelled me to decide to start cooking all my meals from scratch right out the gate...

The experience has been good, although I am currently about 30 seconds away from curling up in a ball on my for-fucks-sake-finally clean floor with my army of ant roommates, and letting them eat me. I really do think I can cook 3 meals a day, relatively functionally. The issue is entirely one of planning. You see, Bento-lunches require mostly everything that goes into it to be tasty at room temperature, since you don't refrigerate them, and thus I have been largely flying by the seat of my pants on what the hell to do every morning. Also, preparing two meals at once is...surprisingly difficult. So lessons for next week! Sit down on the weekend, figure out what you're eating for the week, and when you're going shopping for what ingredients, or you will probably snap and throw yourself on the nearest daigumo web. (dai = big, gumo = spider, my isn't Japanese logical?).

P.S. they are enormous. I threw a 1-yen coin at the web out behind my house and it stuck. Now 1-yen coins are about as substantial as jello is nutritious but still man, what the hell!

I am starting to understand the whole shopping thing though. Another JET alumni I talked to at my interview had done a similar route up to the program, the whole home stay in college, veteran of seedy Tokyo underbelly, can sleep through dense traffic on a public park bench, "I get Japan, of course I do" mindset. But right before I actually went in to the "interview" portion of the show he started telling me about how he still went through culture shock, not because Japan was so foreign and different, but because he thought he understood Japan, and it turns out there were whole facets of the culture that his host family was always taking care of for him. He went through culture shock, because he didn't realize that living in Japan, and just being in Japan, require two entirely different levels of effort. There is an entire aisle at my local supermarket for various types of seaweed. This being a tropical island, there is a fish section containing a bright blue fish literally the size of my torso (I'll get a photo if the big blue bastard is still around tomorrow when I go shopping).

I also did my first round of laundry yesterday and today, which is a whole new set of time management challenges. Japan doesn't believe in dryers. Just doesn't. Why use a dryer when there's a whole bright shining world of free air and sun to do the drying for you? They do have a point. But what this means for the intrepid newly minted citizen of Kikai island, is that suddenly the weather becomes fascinating, because you have to time your laundry for days with a) no rain and ideally b) no cloud cover, so that you can get the sun involved. Yesterday I did pretty well. Stuff was dry by the time I came home from work. Today...not so much. My predecessor seems to have just used one of her spare bedrooms for drying clothes. I'm using it as a fallback for now, but there is just something so seductive about line drying in the great out doors.

Life has become, in very short order, one great big time management puzzle.

I'm exhausted, despite it only being 8:30ish and having skipped my daily swim because I am suddenly TERRIFIED OF THE OCEAN after reading about stonefish and black-headed sea snakes. Basically, the former is a little poisonous landmine, and the other is perhaps the single most poisonous things floating around out there. Now neither is overtly aggressive, and they really don't pose much of a threat unless you actively, well, poke them. But accounts of people who have accidentally stepped on stonefish, while rarely fatal, usually go something like "subject requested that his leg be amputated, rather than have to deal with the pain for a moment longer". It is apparently just about the most painful thing ever. The sea snakes aren't really an issue. Apparently they're 2-10 times more venomous than cobras, but god or evolution has a sense of humor, and put their fangs way in the back of their mouthes, so that 9 times out of 10, even when they do bite you (which is rare to begin with) the poison doesn't even get near your skin.

Oh but the ocean is so fun. Literally teeming with things that want me dead (didn't even get started on the sharks), but just so so pretty, and warm. I still don't think I'll be back in the water for a few days.

Work is. Complete thought. Would kill everyone in the office if it would bring me any closer to not having to be in the office. Because the kids are all on break right now, my time is spent stuttering around in Japanese trying to make small talk in a culture that somehow manages to keep it even more superficial. What did you do this weekend? Blink. Blink. Also there is still an alarming amount of panic everytime I open my mouth, and it's making me panic in turn. I don't function well in Japanese when my brain is screaming instead of thinking. And the worst part is everyone is so damn nice that I know they're probably not talking to me because they're afraid of disturbing me. But in the words of my sainted mother: "this too, shall pass."

Also, if anyone has any productive suggestions for what to do with myself now that I've read enough ESL games to fill 5 years of class, all of my predecessor's notes, and god help me even the huge pile of materials JET publishes (which are about 50% legitimately helpful, and 50% lowest common denominator), I'm all ears. I've started translating the constitional mandates defining the Japanese education system. I'm arguing that this classifies as "Japanese practice", but my brain and I aren't really fooled.

I might bring my laptop in, and start putting together my self-introduction materials for the kiddie-poos. I'm sifting through my photos and picking out the ones most likely to elicit giggling, and make me look foolish. As another wise JET alum once told me "Elementary school kids: you have absolutely no leverage. They don't get graded, and they don't really care about English. All you can do is make things as fun as possible, and try and trick them into learning." Which I've been told is suprisingly easy, as long as you're willing to make a fool of yourself, and break down the "I AM YOU TEACHER" dynamic. For now though, it's alllll academic. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Ok! I've successfully killed a fair chunk of the time I seriously don't have. I may skip making lunch tomorrow and just bike down to the supermarket, and buy something. I could use the break. Getting up tomorrow and hopefully hopefully going running, or at the very least doing some situps and jumping some rope (found one in the closet. win!) I am beginning to putrify, from the lack of excercise.

But to end on a good note: I am so tan right now. So so tan.