Wow, can you handle it? Two posts in one week. Sugoi, ne? I just, again, wanted to post a quick update. There is a Mid-year seminar going on, so I must get my beauty rest tonight so that I don't kill anyone tomorrow during my presentation. That always tends to mar any presentation.

Since I, again, don't have time for a massive update, I'll just share a quick anecdote from a friend. My friend was quite impressed with the way I look as if I understand everything being said to me in Japanese, and even mangage to reply correctly to statements which I didn't understand. I guess I'm just good at B.S. I told her that when someone is talking to me, I try to pick up the gist of what they're saying and then guess at what the proper answer would be (can you tell I've been around British people today? Proper... that's not American English. Next thing you know, I'll be calling it a "holiday" instead of a "vacation"). So impressed was she, that she decided to try this bit of language acquisition. So at one of her elementary schools, a Japanese teacher was talking to her in Japanese. She heard the word "Japan" and lots of other words, and she realized that the teacher was probably asking her if she could speak Japanese. Her answer? "I can a little, but not very well. I've been practicing a lot." She got a bit of a strange look from the teacher, but she answered in Japanese, so she figured her Japanese must have been strange.

Only later, when she was talking to a teacher who was fluent in English and Japanese, did she learn that the first teacher had ACTUALLY asked her, "Can you use a Japanese style toilet?" Her answer in Japanese had been flawless, though just a little strange considering the context...

So in keeping with the flow of the last 4 blog entries in which I have stated that I will update soon: once more, I will update soon. At least I changed the template of my blog so now there's new and pretty colors to entertain people with. But it's almost 11 now, and I still have to organize my handouts for a student newspaper meeting tomorrow. It should be interesting. I'm excited about it, but the thought of trying to teach 13 year-olds to write a newspaper in a foreign language is a little bit daunting. Especially since I never took a newspaper class in high school or college. I guess I'll make it up as I go along. The good thing is that if I teach them wrong, no one will know. That probably didn't sound as professional as I wanted it to.

Anyway, this next week is going to be insanely busy. I've got tons of stuff to do for school, tons of stuff to do for our Mid-Year Seminar (does anyone know how to team teach or how to motivate students? I've got 2 and 1/2 hours that my group needs to fill...), and I've got to get ready to go home, too. And winter is coming, so my lack of indoor heat is making me hole up in one room of my apartment and not move. But it's worth it to move. Today, I had a 2 hour conversation with one of my JTE's (usually, Japanese English teachers are really busy, so they don't have a lot of time to chat). And it was a useful conversation because while we were talking, he learned that not all Americans have guns. Or sing really well. Or play instruments. Seriously, these are apparently things that almost all Japanese people assume Americans have/can do. I had fun explaining the concept of "Mennonite" when I told him about my college. "No, NO ONE had a gun. They were pacifists. Well, except those football players, but we holed them up in their own dorm and let them destroy whatever they wanted." He was surprised that I hadn't at least SHOT a gun. But we decided that we could make textbook English more interesting. Instead of saying, "We stayed in a house built in 1904." we changed the sentence to say, "We shot a gun made in 2002." We even went so far as to say, "I drank wine made in 1908." We think students will appreciate the new, updated, and "cooler" version of English. (And come on, what kind of weinie English is "We stayed in a house built in 1904."? How often do you use that sentence pattern in your daily life? But let's not get started. These last 2 weeks have been test weeks at all my schools, and I've led a life of constant complaining about textbook English being silly, stuffy, and stupid.

Okay, so now it's after 11, and I really must go so that I can get my newspaper handouts ready and prepare games for the elementary school students. And I've gotta find some pliers so I can attack the bulletin board. But more on that later.

Okay, so we've had one vote on what I'll write, so that is what I'll write about. Tomorrow. For now, it's very late. I have been cleaning my apartment for 2 days straight. Well, I call it cleaning, but it was much more like excavating. I literally had layers of junk in my bedroom. The drifts came up to my knees in places. It was truly horrible. But now my apartment is almost completely spotless. I had to go out and buy some bins to help keep peace and order, but it all seems to have worked out. It almost didn't, though.

I knew I had to buy something to put in my closet to hold my non-hanging clothes. I got out my tape measure and measured my closet's dimensions, carefully noting the size of the door in my notebook. Then I measured my bedroom door and my front door just to be sure that whatever I bought could fit past both, and I entered these measurements in my notebook as well. Right, ready to go. I went to the store, found the storage bins, and compared the dimensions to my notes. I finally found the perfect plastic container - it was a little plastic storage bin with 3 drawers, and it was just a little smaller than all the measurements I had taken for my doors. It would fit through them all without a problem. Yea for measuring. So with a little bit of struggle, I got my new storage bin on the shopping cart, got it up front, got it out the store, then got it to my car. And here is where I encountered a new problem.

Measure closet: check
Measure closet door: check
Measure bedroom door: check
Measure front door: check
Measure car door:

...


oops

Yeah, that was a slight oversight on my part. So at 9pm in the parking lot of a store in a strange city in Japan, I had to play around with geometry, physics, and other sciences. I'm fairly certain the theory of relativity went in there somewhere. I picked the box up, shoved it in sideways, which didn't work. I turned it on its side. Didn't work. I turned it upside down, shoved it optimistically, and it still didn't work. "Ah ha!" I thought. "The Trunk!" Didn't work. Meanwhile, I had around 5 young guys watching me from the front of the store. They weren't even disguising that they were laughing and talking about me and my struggles. Brilliant.

So hoping against hope, I dragged the thing out of its box, using my keys to cut tape when necessary. Sadly, it wasn't much smaller out of the box, but it had less inconvenient corners. I set it down, lowered my passengers seat all the way back, rearranged my car about 8 or 9 times, then pulled and shoved as hard as I could. It stuck for a few moments on something, but with a creak and groan, it eventually went in my car. After it was in, I got in and realized what it had been stuck on. Yea for flexible rear-view mirrors! Mine almost fell off, but proved to be made of stronger stuff than I thought. Woohoo! The door closed without so much as a hard shove, and I was finally ready to go. Good thing it was clear plastic, too, or I couldn't have seen out of the left side of my car.

Anyway, I just spent the last hour trying to shove the thing in my closet, which required quite a bit of rearrangement. And now I'm tired and going to bed. But I'm half-way finished with a long blog update. But this is all I'll write for now. Stupid cleaning. I was going to relax today and write my blog and catch up on emails; instead, I ended up doing laundry, washing all my floors, rearranging my tv room and bedrooms, and teaching an Adult Conversation Class. So much for my relaxing 4 day weekend. But I found a Laundromat that actually had hot water to wash clothes in (all the washing machines I’ve encountered so far only use cold water). I couldn’t pass up the chance to actually get my laundry really and truly clean-ish. Was it worth it? We’ll see how I feel when I wake up tomorrow.

Right, I hate to fall into that pattern of "Oh, I promise I'll update soon", but it happens. This coming weekend, I have a 4 day weekend, so I have promised myself that my blog will be massively updated and my apartment will be massively cleaned.

Here are some things you can look forward to in my next updates:
On Bladder Infections and the Ankle Injuries that Cause Them
On Horrible Lunches
On Swearing and Why Its Okay for My 12-year-olds to Dance to Sex Songs
On Musical Interpretation

Let me know which one sounds the most promising so I can be sure to actually write that one this coming weekend.

Haha, you thought this was going to be an actual update, didn't you? Psyche! It's late, so I just wanted to post info. about my Christmas plans. I just bought my tickets, and I'll be home December 23-January 11. Some of that time will be spent in Indiana, but I don't know exactly when that will be yet. Probably sometime around Christmas?

Fun story - you know what's worse than find half a bug in your apple? A student finding half a bug in their school lunch! School lunches are made in one big vat, then dished out to smaller vats for each class. Everyone in the school will eat the same thing on a given day. So today, one of my students found half a large bug in her salad as lunch time was finishing up. That gave wonderful pause to everyone in the school as we all had to wonder - who had the other half and didn't notice? Yum. I guess mushrooms and cabbage AREN'T the worst things in school lunch after all...

Okay, another quick update to assure everyone that I'm alive and will soon be posting regularly again. For now, I just got on for a quick moan about school lunches.

As I sit and eat my cabbage, carrot, corn, and hot dog soup (in fish stock), I have to wonder about what makes truly good cafeteria food. American lunches did have many of the major food groups necessary for children - starch, fat, oil, sugar, and burnt crispy bits, to name a few. To be fair, there usually was a healthy option in most lunches, but honestly, I think maybe 1 out of 25 students actually selected to pick up a fruit cup or salad, and of those, about 90% threw it away without eating it. It was almost impossible to get a really healthy lunch that tasted decent. In America, I saw so much junk food that I was convinced that no nation in the world could have a worse school lunch program. I was wrong.

I guess I shouldn't complain because I'm fairly certain that most of the lunches I eat here are healthy. Or, at least, what I can identify in the lunches is probably healthy. Maybe. I know the school lunches are usually planned so that they can utilize fresh ingredients. But it kind of sucks, because it has given me a chance to figure out exactly which vegetables I hate to eat boiled and then cooled (most of them). What makes "fresh ingredients" worse is that they really love seasonal stuff. And, unfortunately for me, it's mushroom season now. It's not that I have anything against fungal lunches, per se, but after a solid 2 weeks of them, my stomach and I are ready for a change. Or a gas-x. Mushroom are gross. I can only liken the fungal culinary experience to eating a rubber chew toy for dogs. In my humble opinion, no food should squeak when you eat it unless it is alive and actively trying to escape. And while quite a few mushrooms have managed to fall off my chopsticks, I wouldn't call that an attempt to escape. Or, at least, I wouldn't call it an active one because that would involve biting and scratching. And if I ever met a biting, scratching mushroom, I think I'd just leave it alone.

I really hate mushroom and cabbage season. I suppose everything has a season, and we must endure through the gross, squeaky, tasteless seasons. I guess I just have to keep hoping and waiting for chocolate cake season.

On Practical Gardening

So way back in the beginning of September, my schools had their annual Sports Days. You really have to see them to believe them, so I took tons of video for everyone to look at when I get home. These Sports Days are pretty big events. People from the Board of Education, the PTA, and other important people who I have no idea who they are, come to watch these events. The schools, then, must be cleaned and look nice and tidy. And since schools don't hire janitors or groundskeepers, this job falls mostly to the teachers and students. And since the students are practicing hard in 100+ degree heat, most of the teachers do the majority of the work. In my first year here, I was at my base school for the first week, so I ended up helping to weed the Sports field while wearing a skirt and sandals and wielding a sharp instrument of death. Fun times, fun times. This year, I was at several different schools, but I was smart enough to wear sports gear and take pictures of my students instead of picking weeds.

Now, when I say pulling weeds, you probably think of someone sitting with a spade or something. No, when we pull weeds in Japan, we don't pull them - we annihilate them. With extreme prejudice. The first time I helped, I was given a stick with a flat, sharp piece of metal on the end. Kind of like a mallet of death. Some of these things are sharp, but the one I had was not. I guess I was supposed to bludgeon the weeds to death with it. Other teachers carry other implements. The vice principal (kyoto sensei), principal (kocho sensei), and head teacher all get the really fun weed pulling jobs. They get to walk around in ginormous long-sleeved jumpsuits with aprons over them because these special teachers get to wield Blades of Weedy Death. They get the weedwackers, the weedsmackers, and the weed destroyers. All symbols of spinning, shart death for weeds and the occasional snake (kocho sensei killed a snake that was on the field with a weedwacker. That was great fun to watch). Apparently, though, there are some weeds that even these instruments cannot get to. Weeds stuck in between the pavement and the curb in the parking lot are impervious to weedwackers. I'm happy to say, though, that my teachers found a solution.

First, I should describe the head teacher at my school. The head teachers is usually a teacher who has taught for around 15-20 years, has a good handle on teaching, and can hand out punishments whenever the vice principal isn't around. The head teacher at this school was actually the head teacher at one of my other schools last year. He never talked to me at that other school, but at this school, I found out that he actually can speak flawless English if he is so moved to do so. He's just incredibly shy around me, as is the entirety of the male population of Japan. I'm intimidating like that. Anyway, I feel as if I have to make this observation about him: he is the most ripped man in Japan. He has biceps as big as my head. Well, maybe not quite that big, but still impressive. Here in Japan, most of the guys I see that are muscular have very thin, sleek physiques, so they don't have the massive muscles that guys who lift weights in America have. These guys usually have the lithe physique of martial artists (surprise, surprise). This is not to say that they are not strong and do not have muscles. But this is why my head teacher sticks out so much - he is absolutely and completely ripped. And he knows it. And he wants others to know it as well. He walks around in sleeveless t-shirts whenever he can get away with it. And whenever he does wear a t-shirt, he rolls up the sleeves so everyone can see his guns. He is not shy at all about it. He really kind of looks like a man's man (and no I'm not in love with him - he's old enough to be my father, and he's married and has kids. So don't worry mom! I'm not marrying any Japanese guys yet! [I bet that "yet" was comforting, wasn't it?]

Anyway, this guy is a man's man, very big, beefy, manly, practices judo, probably spits and scratches himself when appropriate. I had seen him prowling the school grounds with the weedwacker one day, and he seemed to be having problems. For those of you who have never heard a weedwacker scrape against cement, I suggest you go give it a listen. Hearing fingernails on a chalkboard will NEVER be an issues for you after that. So this guy suddenly disappeared for awhile from the school grounds. After an hour, I had to leave to go coach students at another school for speech contest, so I grabbed my stuff and ran out the door. As I turned around the corner, I heard a noise like air going into a balloon. I soon found out why. Turns out that Mr. Buff had a great idea about how to get rid of those weeds. When using a weedwacker doesn't work, why not pull out another helpful gardening tool - a blowtorch. What? You're telling me that you've never used a blowtorch on your flowerbed? Why ever not? It seems a logical conclusion to me! Stubborn weeds? Make life easier! Burn them all! A quick pass or two with a blowtorch, and you'll never be bothered by those weeds again. Or by your eyebrows, flowers, trees, grass, or neighborhood cats!

This is just one of those sweet things that I'd never get to see if I had stayed in America. Sometimes I'm so glad that I'm in Japan. Where else could I see someone using a blowtorch as a garden tool? It's the little things...

On Quick Updates

Let's play the "You know you haven't posted in awhile" game.

You know you haven't posted in awhile...when you realize you can't remember your password and have to search all your email accounts for an hour to find it. Yeah, this has been a productive evening.

I know I haven't posted lately, but, once again, I've been busy. I've been helping new ALT's in the area settle in, helping students prepare for an English Speech Contest, and getting ready for Sports Day. And battling 100+ degree weather. And starting English Conversation classes again after summer break. And getting ready for the soccer tournament this weekend. And I went back to America and all that good stuff in July. So I've been a tad busy. Once this weekend is over, I may have some more free time to do several posts, but for now, I'll have to leave it at this short post just letting people know I'm alive. Oh, and possibly one fun anecdote.

I was shopping the other day and saw some of my male students at the store. I smiled brightly and asked them, "How are you?" The boldest smiled, looked around in case there were other teachers around, and declared, "I am sexy." I so want to use that as my standard answer whenever I get asked that question from now on.

Very quick post just to let you know I'm alive and I won't be posting much lately, as I'm going (coming?) home soon for a few weeks.

ON HEAD TRAUMA
I decided I will post this while it's still fresh in my mind. Japanese people have no concept of germs, I think. Also, I have decided that the purpose of the school nurse is to distribute maxi pads and bandaids. I'm not entirely certain that the school nurse has an sort of medical training at all. I've taken 2 Red Cross courses and High School Health class, and I get the feeling that I know more on the topic than the school nurses at most of my schools. I really wonder how much school nurses get paid, because for all the work they do, the school could just hire a homeless person for much less money with essentially the same qualifications and skills.

The other day, the students were playing outside after lunch, as they often do. One student fell, hit his head on the concrete, and started bleeding fairly heavily from his head. The teachers called in the school nurse, who came running. All she had with her was a towel in a plastic bag. That's it. No emergency medical kit or anything. No gloves. No disinfectant, antiseptic, cleaner/cleanser, nothing. Just a towel. And I know she didn't wash her hands before she came out. She walked up to the student and began mopping the blood off his head. Meanwhile, the wrapper from the towel got caught in the breeze, and after it had rolled through dirt and blood, one teacher picked it up and held onto it. After a few minutes, the teacher with the bloody bag comes in to call the kids mom. He plops the bag right down on the desk, wipes some blood off his hands on a kleenex, puts that on the desk, too, and picks up the phone. Oh, and the desk with the phone is right next to me, fyi.

The school nurse runs in a few seconds later to ask the mother what hospital to take the kid to. She didn't wash her hands, touched the phone, her computer, her desk, etc., opened a pack of clean guaze, grabbed it with her unwashed hands, wiped her hand with it, put it on her desk, then went out to put it on the kids head. ACK! The mere imagining of the transfer of germs going on was enough to give me chills. I had to take a Communicable Diseases information course for my summer job working with children a few years ago, and I have to say that there are some truly horrendous diseases that you can pick up through contact with blood or other bodily fluid. If I know this, you'd think the school nurse would, too. But she didn't appear to care. Instead, she called a taxi to go to the hospital (a TAXI?!? What the crap, this kid is hurt, shouldn't you call an ambulance?), coughed into her hand, removed the bloody towel from her desk (don't worry, she disinfected her desk afterwards by grabbing a tissue from the box and rubbing the blood around the desk a few times), and left to go to the hospital.

Throughout this whole ordeal, teachers were coming in and out of the teachers room, picking up bloody towels, dirty tissues/bags, using their computers and phones to check on info. And none of them washed their hands even once. And none of them were wearing medical gloves. And each time they entered the teachers room, they took off their shoes. How messed up is that? Don't mind spreading whatever diseases through blood and dirt, but God forbid we drag dust onto the teachers room floor. Well, so long as they've got their priorities straight.


ON FINDING MYSELF
They say that to find who you truly are, you must remove yourself from everything you know and examine yourself; to put yourself in a foreign environment and see how you react. I've done this, I've taken this journey into a foreign land, and I've made many discoveries about myself and my true nature. Perhaps one of the biggest and most important discoveries I've made about myself so far is that I could never marry a man with smaller feet than me.


FAME
In Japan, literally every little hick town and horse outpost is famous for something. Every city claims it is famous for something, whether it be its' special brand of noddles, its beer, its sweets, or its people; and they all sell gifts (to tourists too stupid to know not to buy them )indicating what makes them famous. My city actually is famous (the first Japanese prime minister was born here, so people can buy silly postcards with his picture on them), but other cities aren't so lucky. Still, people always act like their town is amazing due to its great fame. And when they tell others what their city is famous for, others feel obligated to be impressed. So some hick will tell a traveler, "Yup, our city is famous. Right over there is where Lord Tajima puked after eating bad sushi." And the person listening must respond, "Eh? Ii, na!" Meaning, "Really? That's great!", as if nothing in the world could be better than some unkown noble tossing his cookies in a rice paddy. And they must look at the Tajima Puke Replica with great interest, even if they won't buy anything.

I just want one city to be honest and say, "Yup, we're famous for nothing. We don't even have special hats, although my son once got the hiccups after eating a live frog. That was special." But even if they said that, the person listening would still have to say, "Eh? Ii, na!" Good thing I can't speak more Japanese, or I'd start bsing people and telling all sorts of weird stories about why my city was famous. "See that mountain over there? Well, that's the very spot where...uh...Bob the uh...god of Alcohol Poisoning umm....dripped some of the uh sacred alchohol of the gods in order to make dogs of putty that he could mold to his will and make his messengers so that the other gods would um...know when he was planning big drinking parties. Would you like to buy a putty dog souvenir?" Consequently, I'll be bringing home plastic models of Lord Tajima's puke if anyone wants one...

ON THE JOYS OF TEAM SPORTS

Parts of this one are going to be PG-13, so I apologize. I will warn you about them before they come.

I posted a short and cryptic update about my soccer weekend and never actually got around to finishing the post. I’ll try not to make this a mammoth post, but something tells me that it will be.

From June 8-June10, there was a large soccer tournament on Awaji Island near Kobe. ALTs from the western side of Japan came to drink beer and play soccer, in that order. We had had a tournament similar to this in December except that in the December tournament, it was sleeting while we were playing.

Our girls team was going to go in 2 cars to Awaji, a great feat, seeing as it is a 6 hour drive. We left Friday night and would return Sunday night. I was placed in the car driven by our goalie, a very nice, possibly insane, lady. She is from Australia, she is a chain smoker, she loves to drink, and she has some serious anger management problems. Great fun. It turns out she has serious road rage, too. If someone was driving slower than her in the fast lane, she would drive up right behind them, flick her lights on and off at them, and honk her horn. Great times making friends in Japan. There were 5 people in the car, so it was a little cramped, but still enjoyable for the first 5 minutes. After the first hour, we (we being the others in the car, not me) decided to play an absolutely wonderful game which has a bad word in the title, so I will not elucidate. Essentially, a person had to give the names of 3 people, either famous men or men in our prefecture, and then everyone else has to decide who they personally would sleep with (one night stand), kill, and marry. Great fun, great fun. This game was sadly interrupted by the apparent typhoon that suddenly came upon us. As we were driving through mountainous, windy roads, a storm suddenly overtook us. I have never driven in a storm like this, and I was quick glad that I was not driving. It was almost impossible to see through the rain; every time thunder struck, we could feel the car shaking, and the car was being hit by debris from the trees near the road. We were driving on a 4 lane highway, and we couldn't even see the cars next to us. We were inland, with a city on one side and a mountain on the other, and I will clarify that there were no bodies of water nearby; all of which made it very surprising when the tidal wave hit. We have no idea where it came from or what it was. We were driving along, and suddenly, a gigantic wave came at our car from the right side, engulfed the car for 3 seconds, then was gone. Totally out of nowhere. Fun times. We got to Awaji 7 hours later, all grateful to be alive.

We got to the hotel and found out that there were only 2 rooms for our team - one with 3 beds, and one with 4. 2 of the other girls in my car were nonsmokers and pretty calm people, so we immediately decided to steal the 3 bed room on the pretense of it being a nonsmoking room. I was fairly happy with the arrangement, as I thought the other 2 were nice girls. One of them, who shares the same name as me, has a similar sense of humor to me, and she likes anime. Happy times. So we went to bed at around 1 in the morning and got up around 7. Nice, relaxing night sleep on a bed as hard as rock. We got dressed, headed out to the field, met 2 of our players (girls play on half-fields and need 6 players for a team; we had 5, so we asked 2 girls from another prefecture to play with us). Played the first game. Won 4-0. Played the second game. One of our girls rolled her ankle, so she was out for the rest of the day. We had to play most of the second game and the third game with no subs. But we still won the second game 6-0. The third game was a long awaited grudge match between our team and the team that had won 1st place at the December tournament (we had been second). They have girls on that team who played soccer in college, so they're a really strong team. Our goalie was doing all sorts of swearing to rev herself up because she really hates this team. The previous year, one of their players accidentally injured her, and she was looking for revenge. So it was rather ironic that 5 minutes into the game, one of their players accidentally kicked her in the head, making her bit through her bottom lip and giving her a concussion, thereby bringing our number of players to 5. Hurray. Luckily, someone was on had to take her to the hospital to get stitches, and the other team waited long enough for us to get another team's goalie so we could have 6 players. Amazingly, we actually managed to hold them to a tie. Until the last minute of the game. We asked the ref "How much time?" and she said "Less than a minute". Great, we only had to hold them for one minute, then we could go into Penalty Kicks! And then they scored, with 30 seconds left in the game. Crap. Heartbreaking loss, 1-0.

Everyone wanted to go into Kobe that night to a Brazilian restaurant, but our goalie was in no position to drive, as she was taking some great pain medication that made her slightly loopy (though that could have been the concussion...). Darn, looks like we couldn't go. But wait. What's that, you said? Was there an AET nearby who had only just recently earned her Japanese driver's license? Why, yes, amazingly enough, there was!! And just GUESS how EXCITED she was to be driving a TOTALLY INSANE strangers CAR through LOTS of traffic in a BIG JAPANESE CITY?!? She was THRILLED!!! So after an incident I won't talk about, as it involves onsens and embarrassment, we went out to Kobe.

The restaurant was indeed nice (I still haven't taken the time to get the pictures on my computer yet, so I can't post them. Sorry), and it features a large array of salad bar type foods buffet style. Also, at each table, there were a few empty plates, and every few minutes, a large man would come by with a ginormous spit of meat (pork, sausages, beef, chicken, you name it, they had it) and he would carve some of it onto the plate using a knife which any samurai could have easily used as a sword. It was about $25 for nomihoudai (all you can drink) and tabehoudai (all you can eat) for 2 hours, so most of the AETs consumed an amount of alcohol that would have made most Vikings stand back in awe. I had fun listening in to conversations around me (I had people from Canada, England, Scotland, Australia, and South Africa sitting around me) and contemplating if our goalie should be mixing her pain medication with 3, no, 4 beers and 1 chuhai (a fruity alcoholic beer thing, I think). Nothing wrong with mixing medication and alcohol, right? I'm sure there could be no bad consequences from that. Everyone kept saying how sorry they felt for me because I couldn't drink since I was driving. Yup, it was a shame, but we all have to make sacrifices in life. It probably helps that I don't drink anyways...

This next paragraph is a little...gross at parts, so if you're squeamish or don't like potty humor, don't read it, please. If you read it anyways, well, I did warn you... So we left the restaurant. I didn't know the way back to Kobe (I had followed another team's bus to get to the restaurant), so the girls in my car all piled back in and we waited for the other team to go back to their bus (it had to park a few blocks away from our cars, so they had quite a walk). After 20 minutes, one of the girls finally said, "I've gotta pee." Now, I know that we had all been thinking that (I had had quite a few ginger ales myself, so I was feeling the pressure, so to speak), but no one wanted to say anything. After 25 minutes, we figured the bus must have forgotten to come back to get us. The girl then said, "Okay, I can't hold it, I'm gonna pop a squat." For those of you who don't know, to "pop a squat" is to crouch down where ever you are and go to the bathroom. So she gets out of the car, goes up to are goalie who is smoking a cigarette (high, intoxicated, and getting some tobacco in - great combo!) and asks the goalie to stand in front of her. She then goes up on the curb so some bushes are blocking her on one side, the car on another, a phone booth and bushes behind, and the goalie in front. She then proceeds to pull her pants down IN FULL VIEW OF EVERYONE DRIVING ON THE ROAD and goes to the bathroom. She then gets back up and gets back in the car. I must say that at that point, everyone in the car was dying with laughter, including the goalie who was standing in front of her. She was very unapologetic about it - "well, I needed to go!". Five minutes later, she announced that she had to go again. Everyone berated her for "breaking the seal" (going to the bathroom the first time after lots of drinking; once you go the first time, apparently, you need to go soon after that), but she got out again and went once more. Another girl in the car then figured that she might as well go, too; plus, she's wearing a dress, so she figured it be easier for her to go. So she goes out to almost the same spot and starts to do her business. She suddenly shrieks with laughter and informs us all that her legs are getting wet because she is going so hard that it's ricocheting off the sidewalk and on her legs. Poor girl. Couldn't get much worse than that. Oh, wait, what's that coming towards us? Why, it's the bus for the other soccer team pulling up right across from Peeing Girl! Wow, talk about phenomenal timing. She leaned over onto the hood of the car, laughing so hard that she couldn't even stand up. "I'm still peeing," she gasped, "I can't stop!" Some of the other team looked out the windows and saw her, which was quite amazing, as she had at least 10 Japanese people walk past her without noticing what was going on. She finally finished her business and got back in the car. Her nickname the next day was, of course, Potty Legs.

So we got back at around 11, and there was another party that almost all the players were going to at a nearby bar. Hmmm...I could go to a bar and watch people get drunk and do dumb things, OR I could relax, stretch my aching muscles, read a book, and get to bed early. Yeah, I am such an old woman at heart. So I went to bed at around12, was woken up at 2 by one of my roommates coming in, was woken up again at 4 by the other roommate coming in and talking, I assumed to my other roommate, woke up again at 6 because someone was snoring really loudly (one of my roommates had a cold and warned us that she might snore), and finally got up with my alarm at 7. I looked over at the one roommate (2am) and she was awake and looking slightly annoyed. I assumed it was because our other roommate (4am) was snoring. I nodded at 2am, indicating that yes, the snoring was annoying. Then I looked over at 4 am and saw that HER EYES WERE OPEN. Weird. Her eyes were open and she was snoring. Talented, that is. I will comment here that even though I don't drink, my mind tends to act drunk when it is tired. Logic and I are not friends in the early morning hours, especially when muscle pain, cramps, and sunburn are involved. Looking more closely at 4 am, I saw something else weird. She apparently had 3 HANDS. AHH!! Freaky! How'd that happen? I put my glasses on and peered at her again. 3 hands. 3 arms. 2 heads. Ummm...yeah. There was a guy in her bed. THERE WAS A GUY IN HER BED WITH HER!!! Well, now I knew who she had been talking to at 4 in the morning. When she realized we were both awake, she said, "I'm sorry, guys, he followed me home!" Apparently, they had met outside our hotel the night before at 3am and had started talking and making out. He was so drunk at that point that he actually couldn't remember the name of his hotel (he had come that day, so he had only seen it for 10 minutes), so 4 am, being a kind soul and not wanting him to have to sleep out in the rain, had offered to let him stay with us. Nice. Very kind. So that was an exciting way to wake up.

So we got up, got ready (which is really hard when every muscle in your body is trying to remind you that the most athletic thing you've don't since December was play tag with the elementary school students, and you had had to stop after 5 minutes because you were so winded and sore), and headed back out to the field. For some reason, the brackets were messed up, and even though there were 8 girls teams, we ended up playing 2 of the same teams we had played the day before. We won our first game 2-1, and then our second game was against the Team of Amazingness. They hadn't gone out to the bar the night before, so they were all fresh as daisies. The entirety of our team, except for me, were playing with hangovers (the first game started at 9:30am). This was not going to go well. Their first attempt at scoring was stopped by our goalie; after seeing our goalie coming towards the ball, their player backed off and stopped charging. Our goalie talked to their team and told them she was okay (which she wasn't - apparently alcohol+medication+tobacco really DON'T mix well. Who would have thunk?) and that they didn't need to play overly-easy for fear of hurting her again. They took her at her word, and we lost 3-0 (should have been 2-0 - the first goal was scored offsides). It would have been worse, but for the last 4 minutes of the game (The games were 40 minutes long), we knew there was no way we were going to come back, and they were saving themselves for the championship game, so it was nice. Everyone jogged instead of running, when someone got the ball they just hauled off and kicked it as far as the could instead of passing to other people, and no one was being entirely aggressive. Heartbreaker for us, since it meant we wouldn't get 2nd place this time around, even though we deserved it (for those who know me, I usually don't brag often, but when I do, it's deserved bragging. We really were the only competition this other team had. Our team had 3 girls who played high school soccer, and the rest of us played some sort of sports in our lives, so we have a generic sports coordination thing going on; the other teams mostly had girls who had never played a sport in their lives. People kept asking how often our team practiced [Team Amazingness practices once a week]; most were stunned to learn that we, at best, practiced once a month, and that we had just met 2 of our players on the first day of the tournament). So we went into the 3rd/4th place match against an equally unenthusiastic team. We each agreed that we were tired, and they knew we were going to win, so we got the ref to allow us to play a 20 minute game. We scored a goal in the first minute, and it was pretty much over after that. It was a much more relaxed and fun game than our last had been, so it was a nice ending. We got third place - a nice trophy, and a large case of beer. Hurrah.

I had to drive home that night, which was all sorts of fun. 6 hours of driving after 2 days of intense physical exercise, sunburn, sleep deprivation, and stress. What more could one ask for? What's that, you say? A trip to an onsen (hot spring) after which the guys describe as a RUDE TERM COMING UP, PLEASE DON'T READ IF YOU'RE EASILY OFFENDED "wang by wang replay" OKAY YOU CAN READ AGAIN. I need to hang out with AETs more often because it makes me feel so good and morally superior. Anyways, 5 hours into the drive, the goalie says she can drive, and I'm so tired that I believe her. We got back to the city we departed from at 12:30, and then I had to drive another teammate home, so I didn't get back to my apartment until around 1 or 1:30. And I had school the next day. Fun stuff. All day Monday, I was doing a sexy "Night of the Living Dead" jolting type of stop-and-go walk. Stairs were equally amusing, as I could barely lift my legs (before I started playing soccer, I had not been aware that I even HAD a groin. Did you know that everyone has groin muscles, and that these muscles can be pulled and strained? See how much I've learned since I've come to Japan?). Now, two weeks later, I finally got over the cold I got from Miss 4am (her midnight make out partner didn't get it, which I think is a little unfair), I'm walking more naturally, and I've stopped crying every time I see a soccer ball. Progress is being made, I think. Maybe by the next tournament that rolls around in December, I'll actually be willing to make another attempt at being sporty. Until then, though, I think the most exercise I want is the bicep curls I do while changing tv channels.

ON MY THREE STALKERS
At my Base School, there are three first year boys who absolutely crack me up. They always say hello to me in incredibly loud voices. The other day after class, they came up to me as I was gathering my stuff and all stared nervously at each other. One of them (the tallest, and therefore, I think, the leader), said “se no” which is the Japanese equivalent of “okay, an three, two, one”, and then they all said in unison, “Jessica is cute.” I laughed and thanked them for their nice lie, and they all giggled a bit (I didn’t know boys could giggle, but I guess they can). Ever since then, whenever they see me, one of them says “se no” and they all say “Jessica is cute.” Talk about a daily ego boost. As an update, they just learned the word “beautiful.” Today, they came up to me and did their “se, no, Jessica is cute AND beautiful.” And people ask why I like Japan…

ON NATURE'S WARNING SIGNS
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a bad poker face. When I’m feeling particularly annoyed, overstressed, and generally ticked off, my eyelids start to twitch. I don’t think most people would notice it, but I do, and it annoys me even more. I can’t help but think that it twitches for a reason. Maybe it’s like one of nature’s warning signs: poisonous frogs are brightly colored, rattlesnakes have their rattle, that guy in the Farside cartoon has an inflatable floaty and a bazooka, and my eyelid twitches. It's natures way of telling people that what they are approaching is dangerous and under pressure, so everyone should stay away. I think I need to make the twitch more obvious so some of my more annoying acquaintances stay away...

ON MORE TRANSLATION FUN
I was in an adult conversation class the other day, and one of the men was talking to me about some topic or other (I’ve forgotten what it was about). We were chatting, and suddenly he said a word that didn’t fit. “He was being very impodent.” I asked him to repeat it, but it didn’t make any more sense the second time around. I had no idea what he was trying to say, but it sure sounded like “impotent” to me. Figuring that was the wrong word, I asked him to repeat it. Three more times of him saying “impotent” at me, and I was no closer to figuring out what he meant, though I was a lot closer to laughing. I tried to help him out by making some guesses. “Important? Impressive? Impersonation?” But he kept saying those words weren’t right, and repeating “impotent” like it would help me figure out what he was saying. Eventually he got out his dictionary and looked up the word he wanted. He turned his dictionary to me, and I read the word. Oh, impudent! Okay. That makes sense. He gave me a “duh, of course it makes sense look, then asked me what I thought he had said. I taught him a new phrase, “I plead the fifth.”

ON HOOKED ON KANJI
My students at one school were learning the phrase “Do you know…?” My English teacher for that class decided that the students should write some different kanji (Chinese characters) and ask me if I knew what they meant. Now, I was less than thrilled with this, as my kanji comprehension is at about the level of a Japanese infant. After being in Japan one year, you’d think I’d be getting some decent skills, but in truth, I’m a slacker. I haven’t been studying nearly as hard as I should have been, and this is becoming all too apparent to me as I’m about to enter my second year here. So the students were asking me about some kanji, most of them holding up just one character and asking me about it. I understood the easier ones they held up (river, mountain, forest, stomach ulcer), but then one student got up and held up what looked to be a diagram of Fort Knox, but what actually turned out to be ５ kanji strung together. He asked me, “Do you know what this kanji is?” I informed him that of course, I had no idea. I did recognize some of the kanji for the city of Tokyo, so I mentioned that to him. He then said, “That’s right!” (He was reading off the script the teacher prepared for him, so he wasn’t sure how to say “That’s half-right.”). “This kanji is Tokyotokkyokyokakyoku.” He explained it meant “Tokyo Patent Permission Office”, which was honestly, obviously going to be my next guess. He was impressed that I had at least managed the "Tokyo" part and declared my kanji skills to be "amazing." Again, another ego boost. I'm not sure I'll be able to make it back to America, as my big head is no doubt going to have trouble fitting on the plane.

Announcements
In case anyone hasn't heard, I'm coming home for 2 weeks in July (the 14-29). So if anyone wants to visit, I'll be home some time during that period. We already have family events scheduled, so for any of my friends, fans, or stalkers, please email me to set up a time to meet if you want. :-)

ON GETTING A JAPANESE DRIVERS LICENSE

So I went to get my drivers license on Friday, June 1st, leaving bright and early in the morning. I left my BOE at 8:15 to the applause and wishes of good luck from my BOE bosses (embarrassing much? And of course, it didn't add any pressure to the situation). I headed out with the same woman who had helped me before (and who should be nominated for sainthood, I think). I reminded my BOE that 9 out of 10 foreigners fail the Japanese driving test their first time, but I don't think it really sunk in. I think they thought I was just exaggerating. I wasn't.


More fun times at the Japanese DMV. We got to enjoy the window hunt again, but luckily we actually got to the right windows. Our first window stop (window 12-14) led us to the guy who had "helped" us last time. He did my paperwork, welcomed me back, and wished me good luck. We got through all the necessary paperwork (hand in paperwork Window 12, pay fee at Red Window3, show stamps obtained from paying fee to person at window 10, get more paperwork from Red Window 4 and have police officer X help fill it out [ever tried to ask someone who doesn't speak your language if they have narcolepsy? That was some fun paperwork, let me tell you. My poor BOE lady...] go to big booth 2 to get eyes tested [by a sweet old man who spoke no English, but told me I could use English for the eye test if it made me more comfortable], then wait upstairs in waiting area 2 for someone who will give me the written test), and went to our assigned waiting area. There were already about 150 Japanese people in the testing room (for native Japanese, they have to answer 100 questions on the written portion of their driving test - I had 10. Sweet.); at 10:20, a police officer came and took me into the back of the testing hall.

I was slightly worried about the written test, as if I failed that, I would have to go home and come back another day, which would have been horrendously embarrassing. Other AET’s have said that the test is very easy, and if you fail you shouldn’t be let within 10 feet of a car. Even more pressure, because if I’m the one idiot that fails this thing, I’m never going to live it down. So I listened attentively as the officer explained (in Japanese) how I was supposed to take the test (circle True of False - he was worried I didn't understand those complicated directions, so he repeated them about 3 different ways, then asked for confirmation that I understood.). He led me to the back of the testing hall where I sat down and opened a notebook with 10 pages (clearly marked with numbers 1-10 on 10 different colored tabs). The examiner told me I had 10 minutes to finish the test - it worried me a little that I had so little time, so I hurriedly opened to the first question, which was a really tough opener. "If the traffic light is green, but there is a police officer signaling for you to stop, you should obey the police officers' directions. True or False." I think I agonized over that one for AT LEAST 10 whole seconds. The other 9 questions were just as difficult. It took me almost THREE WHOLE MINUTES to answer said questions. I went through the test twice, and after 4 agonizing minutes, I turned to the officer to let him know I was done. He smiled and said, "Easy, right?" He directed me back to the waiting area where the BOE lady looked up at me amazed. "That was four minutes. You're done?" Ten minutes later, the guy came back and said that I had, of course, passed (his words, not mine).

The officer then directed us to a room overlooking an enclosed driving course. He gave us a sheet of paper with a course mapped out and said the testing would start at 1:00, and we could walk the course at 12 if we wanted to. So I had roughly 2 and 1/2 hours to memorize the course, which was easier than I thought it would be. After 20 minutes of studying the course and memorizing it, my BOE lady asked if I wanted to go get lunch so we could walk the course at noon. I was feeling really nauseous and didn't want to eat anything for fear of booting in the course car (we didn't get to drive our own cars for the test, we had to drive cars the course provided for us), but I knew that if I didn't eat, this woman wouldn't eat, either. We headed down to the cafeteria and I was delighted to see that all the food served there was deep fried, greasy, or piping hot. Just the thing for a nervous stomach! I got a bowl of noodles, hoping it wouldn't be to horrible on my gut, and finished in about 3 minutes. We headed back to the course and waited another tense 10 minutes (SERIOUSLY the woman with me deserves SAINTHOOD) before we walked down to the course. I didn't know how long it would take, so I started walking fast before I realized my BOE lady is a good foot shorter than I am, so it was taxing her a bit to trot at my pace. I tried to slow down, but my nerves were having none of that. We walked the course in about 15 minutes, talking through when to stop, where to look, when to signal, etc. When we got back to the start point, I told her I wanted to walk again, but didn't want to drag her along, so she took my things and went back upstairs to wait. This time through, I flew. I walked the course in about 10 minutes, paying particular attention to the trouble areas.

The trouble areas in this course were 2 particular spots. There's a part called the "s-curve", which is an sharp s-curve about the width of a parking space. The next tricky part is called "The Crank." The crank is 3 very sharp 90 degree turns with flexible poles lining each corner. Rules of the test are: if you fall off the road, it's an automatic failure (they built a trench alongside the road, so if you accidentally get too close to the edge, it's rather obvious that you're off the road), and if you hit a cone or pole, it's an automatic failure.

I looked at my watch after my second walk through and saw that I had 5 minutes before the course closed, so I went back up to wait. Ms. Saint Theresa and I waited for another 15 tense minutes before a guy came up the stairs and confirmed my identity. There were 2 other Japanese guys waiting, so he talked to them for about 5 minutes (they would be driving a different course than me, so he was explaining their route). Then he got to me, confirmed that I spoke a little Japanese, and we were off. Now, there are a lot of routine things one must do when doing a Japanese driving test. The test itself is not so much a driving test as a test to see how truly serious you take driving. You get TONS of points taken off if you don't do certain things at certain times. The key to passing this test, I had been told, was to drive as slowly and as carefully as if you were going through a field full of puppies frolicking around children playing dodge ball.

Before the test, the instructor got in the car, as did the next driver (the driver that will drive after you sits in the car as you take your test. Really, great fun. I highly suggest for your next driving test, you get someone who's never seen a foreigner in their life before and stick them in your car. It's really quite fun to have someone staring at you from the back seat of your car while you're trying to concentrate. And I mean staring. EVERY stinking time I turned around to check my blind spot or looked in my mirror, he was staring at me.). Instead of getting in right away, I had to walk around the car, check the tires, check the mirrors, and make sure no stray object, cats, or nuclear devices were located near the car. I then opened my door, said "Excuse me" in Japanese, and got in once the instructor gave me permission. I checked my mirrors, checked my seat, checked my mirrors, looked to the left, looked to the right, checked the mirrors, checked that everyone was wearing their seatbelts, checked my mirrors. This test is all about over exaggerating everything you do so they can see that you are serious about driving. Every time I checked a mirror, I made sure to swivel my head so that he KNEW I was checking a mirror. Every time I checked my blind spot, I almost literally turned all the way around in my seat so that he couldn't miss what I was doing.

So, starting the test. Turned on the car, put it in drive, took off the parking brake, signaled to go out, checked my mirrors, checked my blind spot, waited for the bus, and released the brake. I had been told by other AET's to drive insanely slowly on this course, like around 5 kilometers an hour (I think that's -.2 miles per hour or something). I started off at about 10-15 kph, and that seemed incredibly slow, but I kept at it. Around a curve, turn left, approach a blind stop. Stop. Count to 4, roll forward, stop again, count to 4, check, recheck, triple check, okay. Pull out right turn stop light is green, slow down, check crosswalks, speed up, left turn into s-curve, go slow, stop breathing, keep tears inside, finish s-curve, thank God, signal left out of s-curve, stop, count to 4, go left, stop, count to 4, another left, traffic light, stop, green light, go slow, look at crosswalk, go left, go straight, another left (for the love of all that is holy, ENOUGH with the lefts!!, go straight, another left, and left into the crank, passenger seat passes corner, crank the wheel, drivers seat passes corner, crank the wheel, slow down, passengers seat passes corner, crank the wheel, signal left, start breathing again, count to 4, turn left, go straight, look at crosswalk for stray dogs, children, or gorillas, turn right, turn left, turn left, go around a corner, go straight, go back towards the car garage, look both ways, slow down for crosswalk, signal right, turn right, pull into parking space, brake, car in park, parking break on, car off, check mirrors, get out of car, cry yourself into oblivion, pass out. And thus ends the driving portion of the test. I thanked the instructor. The whole time I was driving, he hadn't been taking any notes. In Ohio, I remember that my instructor was grading me during my whole test. Once we got back to the driving center, she added up my score and told me straight away that I had passed. But not so in Japan. They like to make you suffer. Must be part of the code of Bushido or something like that.

The driving instructor then confirmed that I knew a little Japanese, and proceeded to reel off some very fast Japanese. I knew I failed at that point. And I had no clue what he said, though I caught the words "left" and "bicycle." Eventually, he realized that I had no idea what he was saying, so he took me back upstairs to Ms. Theresa. He reeled off his stream of Japanese again, she listened, and he left to go give the other 2 their tests. I thanked him again for his time. Then my BOE lady turned to me and said, "He says that you need to stay more left when you drive in case bicycles or mopeds come beside you. And he says that when you stop, you do stop, but you need to stop longer." Oh yeah, I so failed. She looked at my disappointed face and said, "I think you passed. Probably."

Now came the fun part. I had to sit in a waiting room for half an hour until the guy could come out and tell me that I failed for sure. Fun stuff. Poor Ms. Sainthood had to sit while I was in a depressed little funk for half an hour. And when I'm depressed, it can be an almost palpable thing. The minutes dragged by, and I was cursing myself for not falling off the road or something. At least if I had fallen off the road, it would have been automatic failure instead of this waiting for 30 minutes and THEN failing. And still, a small part of me was hoping that I had passed. I kept playing all sorts of scenarios in my head where I had to go back and tell the BOE that I had failed. Somewhere inside of me, my mind kept trying to think positive and show me scenarios where I came back triumphant. All those scenarios ended with Godzilla attacking my city right after that, so my victory was always short lived.

After a very, very tense half an hour, a different police officer came down the stairs and called for me and my BOE lady. He was not smiling and really looked liked the messenger who was about to tell Vlad the Impaler that his subscription to Horrendous Torture Implement of the Month Digest had been canceled. He then, still unsmiling, said something in fast Japanese. My BOE lady turned to me and said something in English that I didn't understand. But she was smiling. Hope, a thing with feathers that sits unseen in my soul, tried to take flight directly through my intestinal wall. "I passed?" I asked, and she nodded, smiling. My mind then digested what she had originally said, which was, "He says 'you are very rare'", which could be a great pick-up line, but wasn't intended to be in this case. Apparently he had explained to her how rare it was for a foreigner to pass the test on the first time (finally, she believed it - she thought I was over exaggerating until then), and that was his way of saying that I passed. He then broke into a grin when he saw how happy I was (my knees almost gave out), and said we had to do some more paperwork (I was so relieved at this point that I was positively skipping to go do more paperwork. Yea! Paperwork! I love this stuff!!). He escorted us to the appropriate window like a proud father, and every officer he saw along the way, he stopped to tell them that I got my license on the first try. Rather hilarious. Some of these officers I'd never seen before, so they just smiled in a vague sort of way and congratulated me. The officer I had seen a few times before shook my hand and looked very happy for me, though he was probably actually just happy that he would never have to see me again.

Yea for more paperwork. I was floating at this point. We then went upstairs so I could watch a safety video in English that taught me how to drive in Japan. Since I had just passed my test, I figured I knew how to drive in Japan; but I was so high on joy at this point that I swear I have never watched a movie as attentively as I did this one. My BOE lady and I talked a little bit (we were the only 2 in the room, so we didn't have to worry about disturbing others), and I think she wasn't as sure as she had seemed about me getting the license. She kept saying, "I'm so relieved!" She was preaching to the choir on that one. After the video, we asked the police officer what my driving score was. He said that there are 100 points for the test, and you need 70 to pass. Then he said that I "giri-giri pass", which means I barely passed. I got 70 points. But who cares? I passed!!

I then went to get my picture taken. Some really nice ladies were operating the camera. They congratulated me and told me to sit down and look at the camera. I sat and started fixing my hair and adjusting my shirt, then I got ready to look at the camera. "Ii desu" they said (it's good/okay); "Ii desu" I responded (yup, we're set, take the picture). My BOE lady then said, "Oh, no, they meant they had already taken the picture." ..... What?! This is a picture I'm going to have to live with for how many years, and I didn't even know they took it? What the heck? I was probably looking off-screen, drooling, and fixing my lopsided shirt. Great. I'm going to look like the hunchback on Notre Dame. Whatever. I got the license. Now I just have to be careful to not get pulled over so that I don't ever have to show it to anyone.

A few minutes later, and we were out of the DMV. I was so happy (have I expressed that enough?). I offered up so many prayers of thanks it was insane. The drive back to the BOE was much less tense. My BOE lady and I said we should pretend I failed just to see how the BOE reacted, but once we got back, we couldn't hold back our giggles. My section chiefs all stopped work when we came in and asked, very kindly, if I maru (circle/passed)? I think they were worried I didn't, because they were all looking very kind and concerned (man, you break down crying once, JUST ONCE, and everyone thinks you're going to do it all the time). I waited for a few seconds because everyone needs a little dramatic tension in their life, then I held up my hands in maru. The whole BOE cheered and told me congratulations. I told them "giri-giri pass", but one of my sections chiefs said, "We'll take it. A pass is a pass!" I had people crowding around me asking to see my deformed drivers license picture (it looks like a mug shot), and telling me how impressed they were. It was 4:00 at that point, and my boss looked at me and said, "Your work is done for the day. You can go home and relax now."

The rather ironic thing about all this is that I almost got into an accident on the way home. I think I had been so overly vigilant in my driving for the past few weeks that my mind snapped now that I had my license. So I went across a busy road and failed to notice the car speeding towards my side. They breaked just enough and I floored it just enough that we barely missed each other. I thought how wonderful it would have been to have to call the BOE 1 hour and 20 minutes after I got my new license in order to tell them that I had just totaled my car. But luckily, I'm okay. I just didn't drive for the rest of that weekend, and then I went back to driving as normal the next week. The poor Japanese DMV. They have no idea what kind of monster they've just unleashed on the roads of Japan. (*insert generic evil laughter here *)

ON THE JOYS OF SHARING A ROOM

Really, insanely quick update, as I have to be at my conversation class in 30 minutes.

Question: How do you respond when you wake up in your hotel room and find that one of your roommates decided to let a man sleep in her bed with her? I remember hearing her voice at around 4 am, but I didn't hear who she was talking to, so I assumed it was our other roommate. When I woke up at 7 and looked over at her bed, I realized that I was very, very wrong. Apparently, she had made a "friend" last night, but he was so drunk that he forgot where his hotel was. So being a kind person, she invited him to stay in our room with her. How sweet is that? I wasn't as bad off as our other roommate, though. She had gone to bed with a tank top and no pants or shorts, thinking, "It's really hot in here, and we're all girls, so it's okay." Needless to say, she was less than thrilled with the fourth person in our room. Whee! Fun times in Japan.

Okay, quick update here to fulfill my once a week obligation. I hope to have some time to write on Thursday night, but I'm not sure I'll be able to find spare moments. Sorry. The drivers test update is halfway done, but I'm too tired to finish now.

ON BEAUTIFUL QUESTIONS
Middle of class. 30 Japanese students looking on. Teacher turns to you and asks, "Do you know how to reproduce?" How do you answer? Turns out it's a teaching technique they use in Japan, and the term "reproduce" is the best translation they have for it. Nice. Who would have thought? I just figured it was going to be a really, really interesting question.

ON BEING LOST IN CONVERSATION
I "teach" an English adult conversation class in which 5 elderly Japanese people sit around and talk in Japanese for 2 and 1/2 hours. Highlight of my life, really, because I couldn't ever hear Japanese otherwise. Wait. I'm in Japan. I hear it EVERY DAY. I so dislike teaching this class. Imagine 5 people you really don't like. Doesn't have to be a reason you don't like them - they just get on your nerves. Now imagine having to sit in a room around a very small table with them. For 2 and 1/2 hours. Every week.

They talk for the whole time, mostly in Japanese. I will sometimes make a contribution in English (it IS an English conversation class), and they will nod, one of them will translate for the others (only one of the 5 even attempts to speak English), and then they will discuss whatever I said in Japanese. Occasionally one of them will turn to me after a joke and encourage me to laugh at it. They will be talking for maybe 20 minutes straight in Japanese (at which point my eyes have glazed over, when suddenly, someone will turn to me and say, "It was a joke. So funny!" through their laughter. Ahahahaha...yeah, I still don't understand Japanese, especially not jokes that take 5 minutes to explain. Last week, they were once again speaking in fast Japanese, and I was trying to catch some of it. I caught a few references to years (1992-1993), and I think I heard the word "dog", but I'm not sure. They all then burst into peals of laughter. One of them turned to me and said, by way of translation, "It's so funny! 1993!" and then looked at me expectantly. That was no help. That was actually the only part of their conversation I understood. Why did she translate that? And what was so funny about 1993? I was 11. Unless it was a joke about Tiny Toon Adventures, I probably wouldn't have understood it. You know the part of the song "Mary had a Little Lamb" that says, "It made the children laugh and play, laugh and play, laugh and play..."? Well, this conversation class makes me want to scream and cry, scream and cry, scream and cry.

ON IDEAS FOR GAMES THAT I'LL NEVER USE
I was trying to think of new games to play with the elementary school students. I was teaching them the names for various items of clothing, and I thought that we could play a type of go-fish. But as the thought further developed, I could see problems. "Taro, do you have any pants?" "Yes, here." "No, Taro, you're supposed to hand over the card with the picture of the pants..." But I do think it would be supremely fun to hear someone say, "Jun, do you have any pants?" "No, go fish."

On Root Vegetables and Bad Teachers

ON ROOT VEGETABLES
I should have learned from the microwave incident that when I say little things offhandedly, they can have surprising repercussions.

I was at Cromartie Jr High the other day, once again trying to keep from drooling on my paperwork. The principal walked in with a bucketful of some sort of dirty root vegetable type thingies. He came up to me and said in loud, slow, Japanese, "TAKENAKA". Ah. Yes, I see. Still having no idea what the scary, muddy, smelly things were, I grabbed my dictionary and looked it up. "Bamboo shoots". Okay. Good to know. I smiled and told him what they were in English. He then said something, and picked up a really HUGE bamboo shoot and showed it to me. As I understood it, he said something to the effect of "This bamboo shoot is really big, isn't it?" I agreed with him. "Yes, it's big." He laughed, and went and got some newspaper. I realized that some sort of error in understanding had been made as he started to wrap up the bamboo shoot. With a sinking feeling, I realized that by somehow agreeing that the bamboo shoot was big had apparently meant, "please, I'd like to take home an excessively large bamboo shoot so I can watch it slowly rot and decay, as I have no idea how to cook it." The other teachers in the teachers room were laughing at the fact that the foreigner had apparently asked for the biggest bamboo shoot. Just goes to show you that foreigners eat a lot, yea?" A few of the female teachers came up and tried to give me directions for different ways to cook this beast, but I realized that it was impossible, as I didn't have any pots or pans large enough to cook it in. I smiled politely and pretended to write down their directions.

I got home and, of course, never cooked the thing. It slowly started to rot until I finally threw it out with the burnable trash. It looked like a little mummy wrapped up in its newspaper. I was glad to finally be rid of the thing. Which is why when I went to Cromartie the next time and got yet ANOTHER bamboo shoot from the secretary, I wanted to start crying. My only consolation is that the season for bamboo shoots is rather short, so I suppose I'll only have to worry about smiling and accepting these things for a few more weeks. Until then, I guess I'll have to either figure out how to cook them, or figure out the Japanese word for allergy and explain to my office that I've suddenly developed an allergy for bamboo shoots. Is that even a real allergy? I don't know, but I bet that they would believe me if I told them many foreigners were allergic to it. But would I be willing to lie to dozens of people just to make my life more convenient? You betcha!


ON HORRIBLE THINGS TO TEACH CHILDREN
I thought the worst/funniest moment of my teaching career in Japan was going to be the time when a teacher asked to to teach students the translation for "otaku" (nerd). Nothing beats having 25 students chanting the word "nerd" in chorus. Or so I thought.

Perhaps some background would be nice before I get to the point. There is a teacher that I hat-...er...that I am less than fond of. She's not a horrible person; she's just a horrible teacher. A horrible, horrible teacher. A HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE teacher. Of all my English teachers, she has the second worst English skills of the lot. She always makes TONS of grammar and spelling mistakes in classes, and all her worksheets for the students have LOADS of errors all over them. If a normal Japanese person has crap skills at English, I don't care. In fact, I appreciate the fact that they try to use English. But when it comes to English teachers, I expect them to be good at English. And she's not. She's really, really not. I'm so embarrassed whenever we have international gatherings and she's in charge because her English is so crap. After teaching with her for awhile, I decided that maybe I should politely try to correct some of the mistakes she was making on the students worksheets. If her English is crap, that's one thing; but she's teaching my students crap English, and I feel like part of my job is to help teachers improve their English as well as the students. So one day, I pointed out to her that she had made a few mistakes on the worksheet. I did it in a very Japanese way. "I was reading this worksheet, and I noticed you wrote 'I will take bath'. And I think maybe it might be a little more natural to say 'I will take A bath'." She just looked at me blankly. "I mean, I've never actually heard this phrase used in America. Not, of course, that it may be used like that in other English speaking countries, but I think that it's not very natural to say it this way." Blank look. "And I think teaching students this phrase will be hard for me because I don't know how to say this at native speed because it's not a native phrase." Blank look. "Your English on this sheet is wrong." Her reply? "Oh. Well, I already printed out the sheets for all the students, so I don't want to change it now." We had about 5 other conversations like this over the course of a month, and each time, she refused to change the mistakes. No matter how politely (or rudely) I phrased it, she still refused to change the mistakes. So I had to say these wrong sentences and have students repeat after me, thereby teaching and reinforcing incorrect English.

To add to the many joys this teacher heaps upon me, she's a HORRIBLE classroom manager. She has absolutely NO control over the second year students this year. They talk, yell, get up and walk around, throw things, make fun of her and me, etc., and she doesn't try to stop them. Perhaps their most annoying habit is when they get up in the middle of class and start looking through our teaching supplies. In one of my first classes, several boys got up during my introduction and started picking up my dictionary, notebook, and pictures, and took them back to their seats to play with. And they do that in every class. They get up and start looking through my stuff. When I try to stop them and say, "Stop. Don't touch.", they look at me blankly and say "No English [I don't understand English]" and continue to mess with my stuff. And whenever I try to look at the teacher for help, she refuses to look in my direction and correct the students. Sometimes she'll look up when they pick up my stuff and ask her "What's this?" Now that I'm thinking about it, I think I should bring in some horrible things with my teaching supplies. I wonder how you say "tampon" in Japanese?

So to sum up her negative aspects, she's bad at English, she's got bad classroom skills, and she's just an overall bad teacher. But on the positive side. . . . . ummm... having trouble with that one. And for some reason, God has decided to smile upon me by blessing me with her 5 times instead of 3 (most teacher teach 3 classes [one grade]. For some reason, at this school, she teaches 2 grades [5 classes] and the other English teacher only teaches 2). Add this to the fact that the teachers at this school are incredibly nosy (on days when I'm at this school, they wait until I leave to teach a class, then some of them open my desk and look through my bag, purse, and teaching supplies. They've ruined a few pictures by spilling tea or food on them.), and you can probably understand why I DREAD going to this school. Seriously, every time I see it pop up on my calendar for the week, I want to sob uncontrollably (and I almost did last week. I had a class with the really bad class with Miss Incompetent, and the students were so bad that I almost burst into tears from frustration. I was closer to yelling at students than I have ever been, and that includes my American students). At my other schools, even if I'm having a bad day, I can at least fake a smile and depend on the fact that one of my students will do something to make me laugh. Not at this school. The only thing I can depend on is the fact that I will literally be counting the minutes until 4:30, when I can escape. I've been convicted lately that I need to work on my attitude towards this school, because if I start the day convinced that my life will suck, I don't see how it can really get better from there.

And as another tangent connected to what I said last time about being "in love" with a new teacher - I found out in April that this school was going to get a new English teacher. I was excited at first because that would mean that I'd only have up to 3 classes with Miss Incompetent, and thus maybe I could look forward to going to this school like I look forward to going to the other 2. But the more I thought about the school and everything that I don't like there, I realized that in order for me to actually look forward to coming to this school, the new guy would not only have to speak near perfect English; he'd also have to have the physique of a Greek god, the face of an angel, and the ability to find me a beautiful, unique, and interesting person he'd be interested in dating. When I did meet him, I learned that he does have a decent handle on English, even if he sounds like he's Russian. And he's kind of cute, in a little kid sort of way. And maybe he has the physique of one of the lesses Greek gods, perhaps Bobules the god of old cheese. So while I didn't have hope that I'd look forward to going to this school, I at least thought that I might not hate it so much. However, for some unknown reason, my school has decided that the new teacher will team teach with the good teacher at this school, and has thus left Miss Incompetent to continue teaching 2 grades on her own. There goes my brief glimmer of hope. Crushed. Destroyed. Annihilated. Never to be thought of again.

All this leads to one particular lesson with Miss Incompetent. And this lesson is rated PG-13 (maybe leaning towards R). Miss Incompetent usually comes to me at the beginning of the day and shows me the lesson plan. She'll highlight the target sentence and show me some examples she wants me to have the students repeat. This lesson, the target was to teach students plurals. 1 cat, 2 catS, etc. in hte form of "Someone has Something." So she had a sample conversation for us to have. I've stopped looking at her sheets before classes, as even if there is something wrong, she won't change it. I have now learned what a bad thing that is. What is to follow is not fiction. I got to class and after a few minutes, she asked me to read the sample sentences. "Jane has 3 dogs. Taro has many DVDs. Dick has big balls." ...

...

...

Yeah. You read that right. Of course, the sheet had pictures of Jane and her dogs, Taro and his DVD's, and Dick and his soccer balls. Of COURSE it was soccer balls. What ELSE could that sentence have meant? I can't really describe the sound of 28 Japanese students informing me that Dick has big balls. Certainly a unique experience. But wait, it gets better. The teacher decides on a little spontaneity. The students are learning numbers as well, so she wanted to teach them the sentence "how many?". She wanted to model that question, so she asked me questions about the sample sentences. "How many dogs does Jane have?" "She has 3 dogs." "How many DVD's does Taro have?" "He has 20 DVD's." "How many balls does Dick have?" I so wanted to answer that last one with something like "Well, ever since the accident, only one." But I didn't. So help me, I have NEVER tried to keep laughter in as hard as I did during that lesson. Just goes to show that even if you hate your job, you can still find moments of joy in every day, if only you take the time to look.

Another quick update. Hurrah!

ON DRIVING
It's been almost a year since I came to Japan, and you know what that means: time to get stuck in yards and yards of silly Japanese bureaucracy! Woohoo! Before I came to Japan, I got an international drivers license, which allows me the privilege of driving in Japan for 1 year. After that year, though, I've got to get a Japanese drivers license. Now, if I was from any one of 27 different countries, including England, Canada, or Australia, I could just go to the Japanese DMV, so a lot of complicated paperwork, and get a Japanese license. Headache over. Since I am from America, though, I get an extra helping of headache. Hurray for me!! So not only do I have to do some really spiffy paperwork, I also have to take a written and driving test. Extra fun for me!!! I hate bureaucracy!!!!

I have to make 2 visits to the Japanese DMV. The first visit was just to do some boring and tedious paperwork so they could approve me to take the tests on my second visit. Not wanting to do this alone, as I have the Japanese language skills of a ferret, I brought a lady from my BOE who speaks a decent amount of English. She called ahead of time and told me that I had to bring several documents, including proof that I had been driving in my home country for more than 3 months before leaving. Unfortunately, I renewed my drivers license just prior to leaving America, so my license indicated that I had only had it for 1 month. So I had to get in touch with the Ohio BMV and explain to them what I needed. They were actually quite helpful (maybe it had something to do with my mom calling and roughing them up a bit first?) and even tried to fax me a letter in Japan, which consequently didn't work. I eventually got the letter thanks to my parents (who deserve extra rooms in their mansions in heaven for all the work they've done for me since I've been in Japan), who scanned it and sent it on to me through email.

So the day arrived when my BOE lady and I were supposed to go to the BMV to get the paperwork done. We triple-checked that we had everything and went to the BMV. We drove about an hour and a half to get to the capitol city of my prefecture. We walked into a large room with 2 walls of numbered windows. My BOE lady said we should go to window 2, so away we went. We got to window 2 and were then told to go to window 12, which directed us to go to window 13, who sent up up to the second floor room 2, where we were directed to sit in the seating area until 2 o'clock, when we were then told to go sit in the 1st floor waiting room until someone came to take us to a different room on the 1st floor. And that's not exaggerating at all. We certainly got a work-out.

When we were finally led into the interview room, the man asked me tons of questions about driving in America. I didn't INTENTIONALLY lie about any of them, but how many people here honestly remember how many questions were on their driving test? Or how many hours of classroom work they had to do before they could take the practice test to get their temps? I was grilled for about half an hour on things that I've long since forgotten, and he sat waiting patiently for me to answer every question. I didn't have the option to simply NOT answer, so I had to do my best to make plausible sounding answers. The man then looked at my paperwork for about 5 minutes and asked me about 60 times how old I was when I got my first license. Fun stuff. After a few minutes, he had us sit in the waiting room again, then he came back 15 minutes later and gave me all my stuff back and said it was okay for me to take the test on my next visit. Hurray! So now I get to go back in a few weeks and take a written test (10 multiple choice questions, 3 hours to complete it) and a driving test (90% of all Americans fail it at least once). I'm so looking forward to it!

ON PEP
We had a pep rally on Friday. In Japan, pep rallies are solemn occasions. It's a time when the school body says to athletes, "Here is our pep. Guard it well." And the athletes respond, "Thank you for your pep. We will do our best." There is no spontaneity, no cheerfulness, no random fun. It is highly organized, highly boring, and highly annoying. Students file into the gym. Teachers say stuff. The athletes with games come up on stage. The principal addresses them. The student council addresses them. A student with a headband comes up, and 2 students with flags follow them. He chants, then the student body chants in response, then he chants more, the students chant more. Then they sing the school fight song. Isn't that happy? With pep rallies like that, I guess it's not surprising Japan doesn't do as well in international sports competitions.

ON LOVE
So I've fallen in love with one of the new teachers at my school. He's a first year teacher, and as such, he attends a lot of classes with the other more senior English teachers. He happens to be at the school I really don't enjoy. At this school some of the students will come up during class and look through my stuff. I tell them to stop, and they just say, "No English [I don't speak English]". And the classroom teacher lets them. She has got to be my least favorite teacher. The students are always talking, yelling, and throwing things in her classes. But ever since this new teacher came, the students haven't been as bad. He prowls around the classroom and stops students who are talking or being disruptive. I think I fell in love with him on my first day of classes with him. I was in my worst class, and a student came up to try to look at my things. Before I could even move towards him, though, the new teacher walked up, smacked this kids hand, and said 2 words that every woman (or, at least me, in this situation) loves to hear: "Don't touch!" I seriously could have hugged him at that moment. For all I know, he could be a serial killer, but at this point, I don't care. He has made my life at this school slightly more bearable at this horrible school. So until the moment he tries to kill me, I am going to think the very best of him.

Not much to write right now. I've got to do a lesson plan still before bed, and I've been tired of late. So yea for short updates! And sorry, once again, for any huge and glaring typos. We aim to misplease.

ON PERSISTANCE
I was talking to Freddy (a teacher at one of my schools) a few months ago, and he introduced me to the word "dandy". He tried to explain it rather quickly before class, and as far as I undertood it, it meant a man who cared a great deal about his appearance. He asked me how to say that in more natural English, but the only word I could think of was "metrosexual". I found out later that week that he hadn't explained "dandy" very well, so I had actually given him a completely different word than what he was looking for. Oh, well. I really didn't think anything of it.

A month later, we were walking to class and he said, "Remember that word you told me a few weeks ago?" Honestly, I tell him new words all the time. He always asks me the strangest questions, so I teach him a lot of English slang. I asked him what word, and after several mispronunciations, I realized he was saying metrosexual. "I can't find it in any of my dictionaries," he said, slightly distressed. Trying not to laugh at his distraught expression, I explained to him that it wouldn't be in a dictionary, as it's a newer word. He looked disturbed at this, but dropped the subject.

Skip forward 4 months. Freddy came up to me at school the other day with a very happy look on his face. I asked him why he was so happy. He opened a book up and showed me the word metrosexual, with a Japanese explanation for what it meant. "Look!" he said proudly, "I found it! I found a slang dictionary, and I found it!" This was 5 months after the fact. And he had been looking for the word this whole time. Something that I had completely forgotten had been consuming him for 5 months straight. I have to wonder if he's been sleeping these past 5 months or if he's just been scouring bookstores and libraries the whole time. I guess I'm happy for him, now that his 5 month quest has ended. I'm just going to have to be really careful about what new words I teach him. I think things like "obsessive" and "OC-disorder" would be good to teach him.

ON HOLIDAYS
Most teachers ask me to talk to my classes about how I celebrate holidays in America. So when Easter came up, I talked to my students about the religious and secular aspects of Easter as it is celebrated in America. You know, I never truly realized how complex the Easter story really was until I had to boil it down to 50 simple English words. Both the religious and secular aspects include a LOT of vocabulary that my students don't know. I'm pretty sure some of them are now convinced that the Easter Bunny died on a cross for their sins. Am I going to hell for that?

ON SHAKING HANDS
In the school that I hate, there is a class that I hate. In the class that I hate, there is a teacher who I hate. There's a whole lot of hate going around on my part. I won't go into detail on this teacher right now; I'll just say that she's got horrible English and her pronunciation makes me want to cry - as do many of my teachers, but she's the only one who thinks that her pronunciation of English words is better than mine. This is just one of the things that irks me about her - I don't want to go on about her more than that for now. I'll save the full rant for later. For now, I'll just talk about one incident with her. I got a lesson plan the other day in which she said, "The AET will introduce herself in simple English and shake hands with the students."

...

Kids me no touchy. I'm sorry. You want me to what? These are junior high school kids. Do you know where their hands have been? The problem for me isn't that I DON'T know where their hands have been - the problem is that I DO know where their hands have been. I know EXACTLY where their hands have been. I'm already boarderline obsessive-compulsive when it comes to handwashing. Since I've been to Japan, I've gotten worse. I've seen adults and students alike discreetly picking their noses, scratching various body parts, using the restroom and not washing their hands, eating lunch, playing sports outside, etc. And not washing their hands after any of this. And you want me to shake 90 of those hands? Oh, I think not.

The problem is, the teacher's English sucks, so I couldn't explain to her why I didn't want to do it. So I did it. I shook every little sweaty, sticky hand, and then I tried to avoid touching anything of mine until after class when I could run to the restroom and scrub my hands till they bled. I feel like a walking germ factory. I was tempted to go rub my germy hands all over her stuff in hopes that she'd be out sick for a week or two, but that might have earned me odd looks from the other teachers in the teachers room.

On Appliances

Gomen (sorry)! I haven't written in a very long time, but I have a good excuse! I'm lazy!

I never said you'd like my excuse...


Since it's currently late for me, I'm just going to post on my current woe. I'll post more perhaps tomorrow, but this whole laziness habit is a hard thing to kick. I'll have to work on that. But I think that can wait for another day.

ON APPLIANCES
They say bad things come in 3's. I won't go into details, but both of my sisters just had...interesting and unexpected things happen in their lives. Silly me, I thought, "Man, that sucks for them. I guess I'm just lucky. Hahaha hahaha hahaoh crap." See, whenever I think things like, "Gee, I'm glad that didn't happen" or "Oh, aren't I lucky that such and such" I invarialby end up, hours later, crying and saying, "WHY DID I HAVE TO SAY THAT?!?" As an example, I hated it when I first came to Japan. I didn't actually cry at first, but I just wasn't happy the first few days. Then one day, I tried to make myself more positive. "Well, everything may smell funny, I may not be able to understand anything even when it's said in English, I may be forced to talk to more people in 2 days than I've talked to in the past 2 years, and Iu may hate to think that my shower would only work for midgets, BUT at least I've got my healthohcrap." And yes, true to the curse, I woke up with a cold the next morning.

So after what I thought the other day, I really, really shouldn't have been surprised this morning when I found out that my refrigerator is no longer in the land of the living.

To fully appreciate the wonder of God's timing as it relates to my household appliances, let's travel back to last night. I was relaxing in my living room, watching some tv and enjoying my day off (this is Golden Week in Japan, a week where we get 3 days off for no apparent reason. Yea for random holidays!!!). The prevoius day, I had gone out and shopped, figuring that if I were to fully enjoy my days off, I'd need to stockpile food and clean clothes like it was Y2K so that I wouldn't have to leave my apartment for any reason except the Second Coming. My fridge and freezer, for once, were full of fresh, non-decaying, non-leftover food. Oh, the joy! I could open my fridge at anytime and find fresh food and beverages! But sadly, this joy was not destined to last. For in order to make the food, I had to have clean dishes. I have the terrible habit of making food choices based on what pans I have clean. Used the pancake pan yesterday? Good, I'll make eggs today. Used the soup pot last night? Good, I'll make spaghetti. Used all my dishes in the past week? Good, I'll eat toast on a paper towel. Eventually, though, toast gets old (both literally and figuratively), so I did get off my lazy butt (although I was, in my defense, not being lazy - I was killing hoardes of heartless beings bent on destroying the heart of all worlds, though I'm not entirely certain why they're bent on that - maybe it's Golden Week for them, too, so they have nothing else to do?) and washed dishes, a feat which took over 2 hours due to my small sink and even smaller draining board.

So back to me relaxing in the living room watching tv. I was enjoying the quiet of the night and scent of clean dishes, when I suddenly heard a large, terrifying grunking noise coming from my kitchen. I paused my dvd, froze for a second, and listened in horror to the grunking noise, wondering what the heck Pete was doing in my kitchen. I realized the noise was coming from my refrigerator at the same time I realized that no amount of money on this earth was going to make me walk out into the kitchen to see who was doing what to whom and with what. The noise stopped after a few seconds, and my thoughts on the subject were brief, yet decisive. "Fire? Nope, no fire. Explosion? Nope, no explosion. Water spurting all over? Nope, no water. Smoke billowing out of anything mechanical? Nope, no smoke billowing. And we're good. Nothing whatsoever to worry about... Yeah... Yeah, I bet Japanese fridges all make horrible grunking noises every once in a while just to say hello... Yeah, maybe if I understood more Japanese, I would have been able to understand what it just said to me... Yeah, well then, nothing to worry about. I'll continue watching my dvd and pretend nothing has happened... Yeah. NOTHING HAS HAPPENED, DARNIT!" Yeah, it wasn't convincing to me, either, but little lies can sometimes help us keep our sanity.

I found out the next morning that instead of "grunk GRUNK grunk", what my fridge had ACTUALLY been trying to say was, "Help..me...I'm dying...erp...gurgle...gurgle...sclup....." As I was getting ready to talk to one of my sisters this morning, I went to my newly stockpiled fridge to get something to eat. I opened my freezer for ice and noticed that the inside seemed a little drippier than normal. Curious, I looked at a box of popsicles that was decidedly soggier than it had been yesterday. I pulled out a popsicle and noticed that it was no longer a popsicle; rather, it had become a popsuckle (that word sounds odd, but it's late so I can't think of anything else. Humor rating for this post = -1.). It was liquid. Totally. I could have drank it for breakfast. Yum. "Well," I thought, "That's not normal popsicle behavior. For you see, the normal state of a popsicle is a 'solid', and I see that my popsicle has metamorphosed into what is commonly known as a 'liquid'." (Okay, so I actually didn't think that last part, but come on, I had to learn those scientific terms in 5th grade and like WHEN are they EVER going to be used in my real life unless I force them to fit somewhere?) For some vague, stupidly optimistic reason, I thought, "Well, maybe it's because this popsicle was closest to the door and that somehow...made it...no, that doesn't work, does it?" Still, I looked at a few more of the popsicles in the box, and alas, they were all as sadly puddled as the firs tone had been. I also noticed a certain balminess that I know is not a part of my freezer's natural ecosystem. Drat.

When I opened my fridge, I noticed the temperature was slightly warmer than normal, but the light still went on. This gave me hope for a second, but I realzed that the light was on, but nobody was home (humor rating = -2). Though I guess if you give it a few days, I'll have some nice sentient mold growing on some of my foodstuff, so maybe somebody will be home given enough time...

So now my fridge is dead. Does anyone know what to do with a deceased refrigerator in Japan? I'm not certain what I should do. I have absolutely no idea how to call a fridge fixer (I was going to say mechanic, but I'm fairly certain that's not the word I'm looking for). See, one of the fundamental problems here is that when confronted with anything vaguely mechanical, electric, or electronic, my brain gets immediately overheated and I go into what is known as "Damsel-in-Distress (DID) Mode". I can't figure out how these things work, and for all I know, pictures really are taken using magic and planes fly because there are hundreds of indentured fairies flying inside the wings of 747s. That's just how my brain works. Or doesn't work, as the case may be. I have NO IDEA how electronic things function. Still, I optimistically looked at my fridge and tried to figure out what might be the problem and how to fix it.

I hit it once or twice, because they always do that in movies, but it didn't seem to do anything other than hurt my hand, which I'm sure wasn't helping anyone. I then unplugged and replugged all the appliances near the fridge. I then opened and shut the doors to the fridge and freezer, adjusted the temperature control, did a rain dance, sacrificed a piece of toast to the carbon gods, and then hit other appliances in my kitchen out of principle. Surprisingly, none of these sure-fire methods for fixing appliances seemed to work. And as luck would have it, my one Japanese friend and mentor is out of the country for the week. Great timing (Before she left, I said something like, "Man, I hope everything is okay while she's gone. I'd hate for something to break down. But that hasn't happened so far, so what are the chances that in the week she's gone..." ... yeah). Well then.

Still intent on maybe being able to fix this myself ("I've got a college degree, I should be able to do this, right?"), I got out a flashlight and small mirror so I could peer behind my fridge. It indeed confirmed everything I know about refrigerators in one go: "yup, there's pipes and tubes and stuff. Some of them go into the fridge. They probably work together to, as we say in the science world, 'make things cold'." Yup. Sure am glad I looked back there. Otherwise, I might have missed something important. Like maybe there could have been a toaster back there. Yeah. I mean, what if it was as simple as that? I could have looked and said, "Oh, oh! I see the problem now! It appears someone has changed my fridge pipes and made them into a toaster oven! Haha! Your normal human would have overlooked that, but not I!" Though realistically speaking, it could actually be a toaster oven back there, and I still wouldn't know the difference. And I still couldn't have fixed it. All pipes, wires, and cords look the same to me.

So now I sit in my apartment with a fridge and freezer full of quickly decaying food. Normally, I would kick myself over something like last night, when I totally ignored the danger warning signs. But realistically, what could I have done to fix it last night that I haven't thought of this morning? It's not like some insomniac mechanic fairy would have happened to be wandering by and bestowed upon me some kind of magical appliance powers that would have allowed me to fix any appliance simply by laying hands on it. So for now, I must sit here and worry about cleaning my apartment, for I know that once I inform my BOE of this, I will have people descending on my house. I'm slightly worried that we'll find half a dead cockraoch in one of the pipes. Maybe this is some kind of cockroach revenge for me sucking up Pete's girlfriend in my whirling vortex of doom? Ah, well. As they say in Japan, shogunai (it can't be helped). But you know, I can't help but think, "I'm lucky my fridge hasn't done anything weird like start to work suddenly in the middle of the night so I don't have to buy a new one. Oh, and that world peace hasn't been achieved yet. And that I don't have a wonderful, handsome, intelligent man proposing to me. Man, I'm lucky none of those things are real...Hahaha hahaha haha...."

(Just in case - it should work better than before, that means no hate crimes, and he has to be over 5'10" tall.)