Conversations with people in Japan (and the walls)

Many occur, few are documented.

-At the gym one of the older gym rats informs me about a salt-related penalty in NYC (he knows I'm from NY, hence I am obviously responsible in part for this horrendous act). Something along the lines of "without salt, what the hell can you even cook?" I agreed it was crazy and told him I would research it myself. When I did, and discovered that Assemblyman Felix Ortiz had actually proposed the idea of fining restaurants for using salt in the state of NY, I agreed that next time I saw gym rat that it was indeed absurd and a travesty that Mr. Ortiz suggested such a silly notion, but hey, he was the guy who advised banning cell phone usage while driving too, so what can you expect (in my much less verbose or articulate Japanese of course). The conversation ended with:

"This Ortiz guy, is he your Dad or something?"

"No."

-When people stare at me on the train, in the street, etc. (as happens daily), I often respond with a smile. Or a funny face. Or a wtf-eyebrow raise. Or just a return stare. But sometimes I want to grab them, shake them and scream "I'm the same as you underneath, my skin is just a different color and my build is slightly larger and I much more vaguely resemble Bruce Willis, that's all!!!!"

-This isn't so much a conversation as a list of questions and comments I've received countless times. My reaction varies between cute and annoying, in that special love/hate manner that only Japan can bring out in me:

"Those are HUUUUUUUUGE" (in response to my shoe size, 13 or 14 in America, 30 centimeters in Japan). I often respond by telling them I have trouble finding shoes back in the States too.

"How about Japanese food?" Often entangled with or followed up by: "Do you like Natto?" (Natto is a disgusting slop of fermented soybeans that smells like dirty socks and tastes like cat food gone bad, so of course I should be into it but just can't bring myself to like it)

"Why are you skinhead?" (In Japan, people think shaved head is skinhead in English due to their bastardized Japanese English. I've explained the difference countless times but I'm starting to give up on this one....it's because I'm prematurely bald, by the way)

-This one is slightly more serious. I met an older fellow at the gym, past 60, who is always quite nice to me. He smiles and bows and doesn't look afraid of me like I'm going to pillage his family and leave them for dead, so that's always a brownie-point earner in my book. I almost always keep to myself there (same as back in the States) but have a few people I say "hi" to, the aforementioned Ejiro-san being one of them. (Another retired fellow I call Mr. Baseball is among the lot, we've never had a conversation over 2 sentences or that didn't involve baseball or his drinking too much the night before) He would for whatever reason give me candy at random times in the locker room... wow does that sentence sounds terrible, but really it was a gesture of good will. So I allowed him to treat me to lunch one day (the who-pays wasn't my choice; in Japan there is no getting out of a treated meal, and that's a fact). The old guy doesn't speak a lick of English and I like that - Old men are hard to understand and it's something I need more practice with in general. Plus, he seemed like a nice guy who probably had a lot of time on his hands since retiring, so I figured he'd be tickled pink at the opportunity. Turns out he was a gym teacher who also taught the mentally disabled. He coached marathon running for some time, and even worked at camps in Mexico and L.A. training potential Olympics contestants. Apparently the locations were chosen for their air quality, dry air somehow being better for training. At any rate, sadly none of them made the final cut, but I still considered that to be an excellent achievement, having trained athletes in a foreign country. He couldn't understand my passion for music, and I likewise couldn't appreciate his passion for running, but we understood each other well enough.... I'll be honest, at times I couldn't catch a whit of what he was talking about. But for the most part it was good, and I didn't once whip out my phone dictionary for fear of losing face (and looking extremely rude). The dumplings and fried rice were also excellent.

There are more. There must be more. But I'm exhausted, so you'll get no more. This is what happens when real life is really busy. Vacation plans, overtime work, figuring out the new fiscal year, I could list enough excuses to color every stone in the sea with virtual ink, but I'll spare you all and myself of the unnecessary. The blog must suffer a bit. Good night readers.

"I want to take you far from the tethers of this scene, we'll cut our bodies free, start a brand new colony, where everything will change, we'll give ourselves new names" - Postal Service

"It's a battle on my own/machinery you can't control/people always complain about their worst/troubles you wish were your own/as the seasons roll on by you realize you're getting older/it's a battle on my own what have I learned?" - Ignite

If only every day could be just like today.

Today was awesome. I got up and went to the gym at 9:45, right when it opened. I pushed myself to do as much as I could and got out at 11:00. I made some a green pepper and garlic omelette with bacon for breakfast, and then went to Shinjuku for F.I.D. practice. To those who don't remember (or never read my older posts), here is a recap:

-F.I.D. is a band I'm in. It used to be all girls, but through several strokes of luck I was able to take the place of the previous guitarist.

-For family reasons, the drummer has been out for almost a year

-Today was my first practice with the drummer - before it had always been me, the bass player and singer practicing to a tape, which was lame but we had no choice.

Roughly 9 months ago, I met the drummer Tomoko and bassist Kanako for the first time. Since then my Japanese has of course gotten significantly better, so communication during practice wasn't much of a problem. The real struggle was in certain music terms like "measure" and "3/4 timing." But regardless, Tomoko played amazing. It was everything I hoped it would be, us 3 jamming out tunes almost perfect on the first try, which is really something considering I've barely practiced them in 3 or 4 months (although I learned them by heart then) and Tomo hadn't hit anything but a practice pad in almost a year! We also wrote 2 songs. I'm so freakin' excited about writing more and playing shows. We all get along and have that chemistry that is necessary for a band - I've seen it flow before, and this is definitely going to be something good.

After that, we all got caught unawares by Japan's sneaky rainy season. It had been sunny and beautiful this morning, and turned sloshy and wet by the time we left the practice studio around 4. We all got pretty soaked, and me and Kana were off to do our language exchange, as we've done every week for almost 6 months now. She's taking the TOEIC next month - that's the big English exam which, if you nail a good score on it, can get you an awesome, good-paying job. It also haunts Japanese people's nightmares, I'm sure. Much like the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) does for me.

Anyway, the wind and rain picked up severely, and we shared one cheap umbrella, both of us with guitars on our backs. Kana's bass unfortunately got a bit damp, turns out my case is soft but water-proof though. We had a good lesson and I've almost half finished with my current Japanese grammar book, which is good progress. I also read some Eyeshield 21 (Japanese American Football manga) on the train. And I'm now totally exhausted.

I really wish everyday could be spent working out, jamming, and studying. As cool as my job usually is, I'm really here to learn, not to teach English. So I feel obligated to make the most of my free time.

Speaking of studying, I started a new blog that will make absolutely no sense to 99% of you out there (only if you're an avid student of Japanese). It's about using spatial memory tricks to group Japanese characters with the same reading together and learn them all at once. Many of these groups range from 10-characters to 50 or 60, all with the exact same pronunciation - Japanese is full of homonyms. Have I lost you yet? It's kind of cool though, because I'm using something some dude on the internet invented called the movie method, where you take one movie to mean one pronunciation, and associate each character with a scene or aspect of the movie. It sounds totally convoluted, but actually works! And is a great excuse to watch a movie. I'm working on doing this with Gran Torino now - that was probably the best movie I saw all last year compared to the Wrestler.

While I was writing this my Mother called, and I got to talk with her, my Aunt and my cousin for a bit. I miss you all! My mother also wrote a beautiful piece about her some recent struggles in her life, maybe I will link in the future. Most moving thing I've heard in a while. As far as heroes go, I think Moms are far under-rated.

Mr T. thinks so too:

@#$% the police.... subheader: The World at Large

Seriously guys, @#$% 'em. One of my dearest relatives has been caught in a clear case of entrapment by the coppers back home (who have nothing productive to do in Hudson, apparently) for selling a 6 pack of beer to a minor. Even though said-minor looked much older, and was obviously sent in by the cops to catch somebody unawares. It is really lame and I can only hope this turns out to be for the best in the end... But I have a good feeling things will be OK.

So what's new with me, you ask with those bloodshot eyes staring down the screen? Well, not too much. I've been thinking about my visit back home in Christmas (despite it being 6 months away) and how cool it will be to hang out with my friends again. But then again, how I really only have a few people outside of my family I even miss, as pretentious as that may sound. There are loads of acquaintances and people whose company I do enjoy, but as far as people I really know, or who really know me, there aren't so many I'm afraid. It's the same out here, except with a slight twist... I know loads of cool people, but really my closest friends are my band-mates, I think. They understand me and see part of me most others don't.

Before I go any further, I'd like to express a small concern. I'm afraid this is all coming off as self-centered or pretentious. I had some guy spamming my comments a few months back saying something like "this is the most self-obsessed shit I've ever read." Well, in his defense, he was probably right. I do care a lot about myself, however, if you don't care about yourself, you're either lying or have serious emotional issues. Or drug problems. I write a lot in this blog to try and make sense out of what's going on and to put things in perspective. It's my second reason for writing, next to letting the folks and friends (and fiends) back home know what I'm up to. And the mysterious internet lurkers who account for more than half the traffic to this site...

But I digress. That was a kind of disclaimer, in other words I'm fully aware I'm writing self-centered stuff. It is my blog after all, so if you don't care about me, you're more than welcome to read something else. No offense taken here! I honestly rarely read other people's personal blogs (more news and opinion-column stuff) with the few exceptions on the right of the page here.

So about my friends. I have some good ones here, mostly lots of cool acquaintances and people who are genuinely worth knowing, but I'm not that close with them. Then there is the aforementioned, twist. That is the beauty of the teacher-student relationship: I feel very close to lots of my students in a kind of distant way I've never experienced before. It's cause methinks is that I meet them through my job, and our common ground is usually just the English language. Of course there's more to life than words, and I've had some amazing discussions, and have had the pleasure of meeting some cool punk rock kids, very awesome Japanese versions of Soccer-Moms, politically-charged types (a rare event out here) and just plain weird yet awesome people. Meeting cool people is in fact one of the biggest rewards of this kind of job, as I've come to see it thus far. But even my most regular students, or the ones I've hung out with outside of class - one who is a skater and lived in california for a few years, really cool dude, comes to mind - don't really know me outside of my shell. Outside of my work persona and my happy mask. I do let pieces of myself through, and definitely express my opinions when the time is right, but more often than not it's a lot of glossy, empty smiling. Wait, maybe not empty. That's not the right word. I take pleasure in what I do, and I enjoy encouraging my students and trying to make something so hard as English fun for them, but so much of my energy, my expressions, my personality is somewhat forced or greatly different from my personality when I'm in normal-mode, instead of teacher-mode. I feel like anyone who calls him or herself a teacher has experienced this kind of self-transformation and these sorts of ubiquitous yet ambiguous relationships. What does it all mean, and will I ever know any of these people after the job is in the past?

That's my rant and thoughts for today. In other news, the buff 60-yet-40-looking ponytail brodude from the gym (remember him? When I first met the guy he was arguing with his other gymrat buddy about whether or not I was Eastern European, way back in fall I think) corrected the way I was doing curls and some other exercises, and after modestly receiving his gracious advice, I can't lift as much but my form has greatly improved. My wrists are getting much stronger, and something so simple as that can help me with the everyday, like computing, writing and such.

Thanks brodude.

"You're not in this all alone
Just look around and you'll see
The answer's right before your eyes
I'm here for you and you for me
It's hard to open up
Just try and you'll see
That true friends will always be there." - Sick of it All