Monthly Archives: October 2015

Not as Lazy as it Seems

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Given that I didn’t move far from my office chair, and played a game, and watched other people play games, I actually had a reasonably productive day. More or less.

After six days in a row of work, I decided to go full lazy today–and you should never go full lazy–but then I ended up tinkering in a notebook.

As I prepare to start National Novel Writing Month again, I’ve found myself, against my better judgement, scribbling out ideas for a science fiction novel. My goal this time is to start from scratch which, in all fairness, is the intent of the event. The two times I’ve done NaNoWriMo before I tried finishing works in progress: the first one I didn’t finish; the second I did finish, but it nearly broke what’s left of my sanity.

There are a few problems. As I’m world building, I’m also scribbling random bits of dialogue and scenes which may cause me to write sections I can’t, technically use as part of my 50,000 words. (I vow here and now not to use them unless I’m really desperate to finish.)

I also find myself becoming more interested in world-building related research than the actual characters. This is a form of procrastination that gives the appearance of working without actually requiring work; kind of like cleaning your desk and checking your email before you write.

The last problem is that this blog has remained a daily project despite my intent to make it a few times a week project. Unfortunately the daily habit has set in strongly enough that I find myself trying to think of topics after supper and, for some reason, avoiding the list of topics I made a long time ago. Also unfortunately, it hasn’t set in enough for me to do any prep before supper to make the writing easier.

My goal is to start the NaNoWriMo process on Monday. I will, but first I have some research to do.

 

The Early October Blahs

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Maybe it’s just that we have to work or maybe it’s just the speeches. Either way, all the foreign staff at the school where I work felt like yesterday was Friday and that today was a mistake.

I’ve written before about how I need to beware the ides of October, but this year things seem to have started early.

One of the things that happens at the school where I work is that we spend the first month of our autumn term junior high school classes chasing down speeches and speakers and reading speeches and then listening to speeches. This burns a lot of energy, especially if we sacrifice a lunch break to hear a speech. We also spend a lot of time talking about missing speeches with  homeroom teachers who do a good job of blending “Oh, that’s terrible” with “Why is this my problem?”

There are sports days and sports tournaments and the approach of the two day school festival when the all boys school gussies itself up and tries, in general, to impress visiting young women and their parents.

Little things like “school” and “schoolwork” and “grades” aren’t that important in October.

For us, because of quirks of scheduling and a couple train delays, we hadn’t had a full week of work until last week. Then, for most of us, this week was a full week and everyone was dragging and trying to remember what day it was. Everyone agreed that getting up to go to work today was surprisingly depressing.

In my case I worked last Sunday, which means I’ve worked six days in a row. It also means I stopped caring about day four. I only lost my temper once and had to get loud twice. I also threatened a memorized conversation to get  class’s attention. This could be that start of the October doldrums.

I do have a couple projects in mind for the rest of October to keep me distracted and am even considering starting National Novel Writing Month early (sort of) to take advantage of some days off so that I can stop before exam time in November and still accomplish 30 days of writing. (More on that in another post.)

Until then, it’s a three day weekend followed by an exam shortened week.

I’m working on Sunday again, though, which kind of messes things up.

Not Very Heroic Heroes

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I have a high school second year class (11th graders) that’s ahead of my other classes. This is not because they are smart, but because they have more days off than anyone else and I’m having to move faster through the curriculum.

Today the students were supposed to present the superheroes they’ve spent three days creating. The presentation involves memorizing a short speech about and making a poster (usually traced from a template and then hand colored) of their superhero. To save time and give them more time to finish, I opted to have them deliver the speech only to me rather than  in front of the entire class. In classes where I have more time, it will be speech in front of everyone.

However, the superheroes assignment has its problems.

First, I had a student develop a superhero baby who was completely dependent on his mysterious mother who was not actually going to make an appearance in the speech. I pointed out that the baby had to do something because he’d be one of the stars of the final project. I sent the student back to rethink things but he didn’t do much. I also suspect that, because there are no templates for babies and he has to free hand draw the picture, he’ll soon be aging the super baby.

Second, another student keeps explaining that he doesn’t want to memorize the speech and I keep explaining that I want him to memorize the speech which means he doesn’t have a choice. That said, because this student has a lot of “issues”, I’ll probably let him get by with memorizing the first part and reading the rest.

Third, one student appears to have directly ripped off a character from Psycho-Pass, which means he’s got some ‘splainin’ to do next class. I don’t keep up with what’s popular in manga and anime, but I could tell by the reaction of his friends that something suspicious was afoot. I therefore consulted our local manga/anime experts (three other foreign teachers) about who the character might be.

Fourth, one student will probably not finish the project and that’s probably my fault. When he first brought his speech to show me, his superhero’s name was “Chin-Man”. in Japanese, this translates roughly to “Penis Man”. I saw the name and sent him back to make a few changes without reading anything else. He put his head down and went to sleep.

Today he presented the same speech with “Penis-Man” now dubbed “Turtle Man”. However, the backstory is still the same which makes the original name seem rather creepy: Turtle Man is an elementary school teacher who only helps little girls because he likes little girls. (Use the original name and you’ll understand.)

I said he sounded like a villain, as did Turtle Man, and noted that the speech was 60 words too short. The student came back later with 60 words of padding about Turtle Man’s house and neighborhood. I told him that wasn’t what he was supposed to write and asked him to explain how Turtle Man uses his powers to help, sigh, little girls. My student said he didn’t know and I switched to “loud mode” (a technical term) and told him he had to know because that’s what the speech was supposed to be about. I sent him back to make edits but he just sulked more and kept the guy behind him from working.

If it’s only going to be presented to me I actually don’t care if the students have questionable characters (several hundred years ago I was a teenage boy, too) but stuff like that disrupts the class too much so I don’t allow it to go in front of the entire class.

I do, however, expect them to do the work, especially when I told them on day one they couldn’t use “I don’t know” as an answer. Why do they insist on using it? I don’t know.

 

Wearing Different Colors

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I ought to do a commercial, in the spirit of this one, to sell televisions right now.  I can imagine me saying “my hair is brown, my eyes are blue and my skin is well tanned.”

The problem is my hair is turning white, my eyes change between green, blue and gray depending on what I’m wearing and right now my hands are blue and my fingertips are orange and black. (If that doesn’t send people running for higher definition televisions, then nothing will. I could also wear a green shirt and say it’s blue, although that wouldn’t work in Japan. (More on that in another post.)

This technicolor finger painting happened today when I was refilling a couple fountain pens and, well, things got weird.

I had no problems with the black ink at first, but then managed to grab a piece of blotter paper in the wrong way and blackened my finger tips.

The same thing happened with the dark blue ink I used for the second pen.

Then, I refilled a third pen with a more turquoise shade of blue. In this case, I tested the wetness and dryness of a spot on my cleaning towel and discovered it was, in fact wet, and my fingers were suddenly blue.

At that point I decided to wash the towel and, by default, my hands. This involves running it under warm water and squeezing out the ink.

Unfortunately, the ink, despite being water-logged, was still persistent enough to make my hands an interesting shade of blue.

This is one of the risks of using, not only fountain pens, but fountain pens with bottled ink. If you’re not careful, you end up wearing your hobby. You can also end up wearing colors that you weren’t using. The orange comes from an ink I wiped on the towel yesterday.

Now I’m faced with a dilemma: do I wash dishes to help clean off my hands, or do I just go to bed and the let tomorrow morning’s shower take care of the ink.

Culling the Herd One Denial at a Time

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Because I have a couple new pens on the way, and despite the fact I won’t see them for a couple months, I find myself beginning the slow process of culling my herd of pens to make way for (and pay for) the new ones. This sounds like an easy process but it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

First, i have to look over each pen and decide that it needs to go and why it needs to go: it’s too old, I never use it, there are others I like better, the nib isn’t as good as I thought it would be. I’ve got three others just like it, this one is broken. This results in a list of “this pen must go” candidates.

That part of the process is followed by the hours of justification for why I should keep each pen on the list. These justifications usually start with:

The Sentimental Reasons
It was my first internet pen; it was my first Kickstarter pen; it was my first fountain pen; it was my first Massdrop pen; it looks like a pen that was a gift from my father; my ex-girlfriend gave me a pen by the same manufacturer.

After the sentimental reasons fail, the economic arguments kick in:

The Economic Reasons
Sunk Cost Fallacies: It’s still new; I haven’t had it long enough for me to truly know it; I spent a lot for it and need to get my money’s worth out of it; it still has a lot of life; if I just clean it up a bit it will work perfectly and I will like it better.

You Haven’t Sunk Enough Costs Into It Fallacies: If I just spend some money to get it cleaned and tuned it will be better; if I get this fixed up, I could sell it for more. I haven’t reviewed it on my blog yet.

After those fail, the next step is the denial arguments:

The Bitter Denial Reasons
It’s too much work to take pictures of it and post it and that’s totally the sunk cost fallacy. Look at all these flaws; no one will buy this anyway because it’s crap so I should keep it. Cleaning all these will be real pain in the butt, do I really want to do that when they might not sell? What if something goes wrong in the shipping and I have to waste a lot time dealing with it? What if I’m not charging enough and I’m ripping myself off? There are already thousands of these out there so I won’t get much money for it. I should do more research about how much to charge.

After that is all resolved, the next step involves taking and posting the pictures and figuring out how to collect the payments.

But should I post the pictures on a forum or make a page on my blog to sell them? I’ll have to think about that a while. Until I figure it out, I’ll just play with some pens.

Practice Makes the Day Perfect

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One of my weaknesses as a teacher is that I’m always happy to have days off and I’m always happy to have my students do well in sports if it means I don’t have to see them for an hour or two.

A couple times of year at the school where I work junior high school classes are interrupted by various sports tournaments. Non-athlete students still have class, but because the majority of students are absent, special classes are held in place of regular classes. I suspect this is because Japanese law makes class attendance both compulsory and a right. Students have a legal right to attend the class they must legally attend (something like that). If the majority of students are gone, that means regular classes can’t be held because 1) that would be depriving the athletes of the their legal right to an education and 2) most of the teachers are off serving as team faculty advisers and coaches anyway.

Whatever the reason, all I know is I don’t have to see my worst class tomorrow. Because there is a special schedule, our junior high first and second year classes (7th and 8th grade) are cancelled completely. This is true even if it rains as enough sports take place in-doors, or can be played in the rain, to preclude classes taking place.

The only thing that can hurt this is the teams sucking. This happened several years ago. Many of us had already planned our free time (if you have mostly junior high classes it is possible to get an entire day off) but then found out that not enough teams had qualified for the next round to justify a special schedule and we were informed that although we’d have a few absences, we would have regular classes.

I therefore found myself standing in front of a class and saying “Why am I here” to the soccer and baseball players.

Since then, I’m pretty sure a couple of my colleagues have spent time after school coaching the various team to make sure they play at peak performance. I’ve considered making my athletes run laps around the room to help keep them in shape.

But that’s a problem for next year. Until then, I have a long lunch break tomorrow, which causes other problems.

Rest in Peace, Roomie

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About a hundred years ago when I was at Ole Miss, my African-American roommate’s friends accused me of corrupting him because we were watching hockey when they came over. One of them pointed at me, whilst speaking to him, and said “you’ve been hanging around him too long”. My only defense was to point out that he was corrupting me.

In 1994, for one year, I was roommates with Michael Robinson, who was a law student at the time. He turned out to be a terrific roommate (I am traditionally, not a good roommate at all) and was full of Southern graciousness and patience. He also taught me a lot about hockey, mostly as a defense mechanism to shut up my stupid questions. For example: “Why does that guy have a C on his sleeve and that guy has an A?”. or “Why do they keep changing players all the time?”

(For the record, given the reaction of his friends, I’m pretty sure he was the only African-American hockey fan in the entire Southern United States.)

He was also, and this I never understood given that he was from Mississippi or at least spent most of his life there, a Dallas Cowboys fan. At the time we were roommates, the Cowboys were attempting a three-peat of Super Bowl wins.

When I doubted this, the future lawyer in Mike took over and he demonstrated, with surprising energy, the three-peat speech that Emmitt Smith was going to give when they won. I was one part horrified and one part embarrassed for him so I didn’t listen as closely as the speech deserved, but I remember it went on quite a while.

When I questioned his love for the Hated Cowboys (the team’s official name outside of Dallas) he pointed out the Denver Broncos, my favorite team, had already lost four Super Bowls, often in spectacular fashion and that I should shut up. (Something like that.)

After a year, he moved in with another roommate and a year later I moved to Japan and lost touch with him.

Then, a couple months ago, in fit of nostalgia, I looked him up and friended him on Facebook. As a rule, although I will make a few comments on posts, I typically don’t start interrogating people about their pasts, especially if I haven’t seen them since the George H. W. Bush administration. All I know is he’d been sick and looked a lot thinner than when I knew him. I also knew he’d started his own law firm.

Then right after I published yesterday’s post, I learned he’d suddenly died. I don’t know why but his family members are in our prayers tonight.

Right now I’m raising a glass of whisky in his honor and wishing him the best and wishing I’d contacted him sooner and been more nosy about his life.

I also hope the Dallas Cowboys lose every game. (That will never change.)

Goodbye, Mike. Thanks for all the interesting times.

 

Hatred Skips a Generation

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Today proved that our oldest hates insects maybe more than my mother does.

As I’ve written before,  my mother has only two classifications for insects: bad bugs (those still living) and good bugs (those smashed on a hard surface). My mother even has a soft cackle in her voice after she kills a bug and declares it a “good bug”. You only hear the cackle if you listen closely–and let’s face it, who listens to their mother?– but it’s there.

Every now and then we get a small infestation of gnats in our apartment. This is especially true now as the weather is changing and the gnats are attempting to get “refugee” status in our house.

Our oldest seems to get especially annoyed by the gnats as they seem to hang out near her desk. This has led to a couple angry outbursts and noisy desk slaps. I sympathize with this as I’ve snapped and felt a rush of blood lust whilst killing insects but I’ve never felt the visceral hatred my mother had.

Our oldest seems to have inherited that hatred, but my mother doesn’t have the look in her eyes that I saw our youngest give today.

As we sat down to eat, our oldest suddenly tracked some movement and the look of hatred in her eyes was one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. The look was what a hunting dog would give if it had not only spotted a duck, but also hated the duck with a passion. This wasn’t just “there it is” this was “I want to watch you bleed.”

Once I drew attention to the look, by crossing myself and saying several Our Fathers and Hail Marys, the look went away and I almost threw more bugs at her just to see the look happen again.

I also hope she learns to deploy that look at annoying boys.

 

Dropping Kilograms Pounds and Stones

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I’ve mentioned before how, when I was in Albania, I ended up getting sick and losing a lot of weight. Recently, I’ve volunteered to lose weight have been doing my best not to get sick.

The impetus for this was a discount on a guided weight loss course run by former US Army soldier Vic Magary. I don’t remember how I heard about him, but I remember seeing some of his videos a few years ago and getting some of his diet books and thinking, well, yeah, some day. I like his common sense attitude and the fact he doesn’t try to sell a bunch of equipment or play up his service in the “I was totally Special Forces and please don’t look up my DD 214 and prove I wasn’t” kind of way. (Note: he was in infantry, not Special Forces.)

Then, when the 30 day course went on sale (it was the last time he was offering the course as he is starting a new project.) I decided to try it. I knew there would be resistance from She Who Must Be Obeyed and I also had a trip to the in-laws that would complicate things (hint: beer, beer and more beer and lots of food), but for the most part I’ve stuck to the plan.

Vic required participants to keep a food and exercise journal (daily exercise is part of the plan) and promised to send us angry emails if we didn’t keep our journal updated. He gave us daily feedback on our food journals and also gave us access to different sources of advice.

I found, and still find, the food journal to be the most useful part of the plan. Twenty four days after the official program ended I’m still keeping it. The idea is you enter what you ate, when you ate it and about how much you ate and that can be kind of terrifying in a “do I really drink that much bourbon?” kind of way. You also weigh yourself once a week. If you have a bad week you can review what you ate and never do that again. If you have a good week, you have a plan you can use again.

I went with much lower carbohydrates, meaning I eat a lot less pizza than I usually eat (luckily we don’t order it that often) and I have to go easy on pasta, rice and potatoes. I have to find a way to include vegetables with every meal, including breakfast. I also eliminated a lot of in-between meal snacks and changed the snacks I do eat.

My goal was for this to be a lifestyle change and not just a “I need to get into this suit for one night” plan. I also didn’t want to starve myself. She Who Must Be Obeyed is slowly coming around, although she refuses to join the plan. (She doesn’t need to.)

The results have been pretty good. I started out at 98 kilograms (216 pounds) and as of today’s unofficial weigh-in I’m at 89.5 kilograms (197.3 pounds). I’ve been inconsistent with the daily exercise, but mostly on work days when I do a lot walking (3.1 miles/5 kilometers each work day).

My goal is 84 or 85 kilograms (185 or 187.4 pounds) Then I can moderate things a bit.

Me at 152 pounds. This is what I'm trying to avoid.

Me at 152 pounds a couple days before I was medevaced. This is what I’m trying to avoid.

Standing at the Edge of the Rabbit Hole

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A colleague of mine is standing at the edge of the rabbit hole and I find myself with a moral dilemma. Do I do what’s right and hope for the best which is good for my colleague, or do I do what’s wrong and hope for the worst because that’s the best for me?

This colleague, seeing my extensive collection of pens and fountain pens, has decided to stick a toe in the ink, so to speak, of fountain pens. She also implied that I was going to be her adviser in all this.

This is where my moral dilemma enters the situation: do I use Jedi mind tricks (which I totally have) to persuade her to buy a more expensive starter pen in the hope that if she doesn’t like fountain pens, I can pick up the pen on the cheap for myself?

Unfortunately, once she made the decision to try fountain pens and before I could advise her, she did a shocking amount of research in a short amount of time and settled on a Platinum Preppy which was actually a very good choice (for her). It writes well and has a smooth nib. It also comes in fun colors, which is often important to people just starting out with fountain pens. It lets her try fountain pens without spending a small fortune.

She said she’d considered a Pilot Cocoon for a while but had opted against it as it was a bit pricey for a starter pen. I started waving my hand saying “this is totally the pen you’re looking for, this is totally the pen you’re looking for” but she went with the cheaper pen. (My Jedi mind tricks must be a bit rusty.)

The problem with the Preppy is that of the three I’ve owned (in two different nib sizes) I’ve had two caps split lengthwise rendering the caps and the pens useless. (I did convert one in to an ink cartridge holder but more on that in another post.)

I’m now kind of hoping she likes pens as I don’t want another Preppy. Also, if she likes them, it will be nice to have fellow pen addict, especially one who likes to do research.