Author Archives: DELively

Bad Things Come in Phones for Knives

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Today was Friday the Thirteenth and it produced a horror story. The horror story, as many horror stories do, involved the post office.

First, you have to understand, the day started well. It’s “marathon” day at the school which means there wasn’t much for me to do other than finish preparing a final exam. That part went well. Once that was over, I set out to pursue a number of simple tasks.

My first task was to get money (today was payday) and deposit part of it in the rent account. That went surprisingly smoothly, which should have been a warning for what happened next.

My second task was to mail a knife to its manufacturer in the USA for a warranty repair. I didn’t have to wait long, which was good, and then presented my parcel to the lady behind the counter. She asked what was in it, I said a knife going to the USA for repair.

There was the sound of teeth sucking. She then asked what kind of knife it was. I said it was a small folding knife and repeated that it was going to the USA for repair. More teeth were sucked and she consulted another clerk. Bringing someone else into the situation meant the situation had escalated to Wakarimasen Dekimasen and I was probably in trouble. The other clerk, who had helped me send parcels a few times, eventually told me that I’d have to wait for a while.

I frowned but remained calm (since I was carrying a knife this was a good idea, which is why I’m surprised I did it). A few minutes later, I saw the first clerk was talking to someone on the phone. I swore to myself and put the box back in my bag and waited. As rule, nothing good ever comes from a Japanese consulting someone on the phone.

Sure enough, ten minutes later, I was informed that the post office couldn’t ship small folding knives to the USA because DEAD PEOPLE! but if it was a 10 inch butcher knife that would have been okay. I asked if her if she knew what the word “Bullshit” meant. She didn’t.

Once again, I didn’t argue very long. I was already packed so I just left and went about the rest of my tasks for the day. I was, of course, carrying a knife the entire time.

When I got home, I consulted a YouTube friend of mine who is the only Japanese gun owner and knife enthusiast I know. In fact, the knife I was sending in for repair I got from him. (The problems were not his fault.)

He explained that he’d had this trouble and that it seemed to stem from a misreading of a bulletin sent by the post office about the dangers of knives and hijackings and a general Japanese paranoia of knives. He said he’d had to prove that several Japanese knife companies use the post office to ship their products to the USA and that since then he hadn’t had much trouble.

The funny part is, when I got home, there was a knife waiting for me. It had been shipped from the USA and delivered via the Japanese Post office. I guess that’s safer than shipping things the other way.

Side Note: If you’re interested in my friend’s videos and Japanese hunting, you can check out his English language videos here. Be warned, though, that some are pretty bloody and you will be appalled at how much meat he leaves behind. In his defense, he gets dozens of deer a year.

Training with Red Flags and Scheming and Shouting

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I once had a trainee talk about cheating on his wife and then yell at his fellow trainees. I had another trainee decide to skip part of the training.

This all happened because about ten years ago I started helping out with training in my company. Basically, my company recruits, or at least it used to (more on that later) from two locations. Inside Japan and outside of Japan. (This outside the box thinking tells you a lot about my company.)

After the new hires arrive, they are put through four or five days of training. They get basic TEFL teaching instruction, company policy explanations and tips on not snapping mentally and then beating your colleagues with a textbook; and they also get medical checks and, on occasion, go visit their employer.

Along the way, trainers and training assistants are watching them for any and all warning signs that they may cause trouble. We would listen for obvious red flags such as racist and sexist comments; people who didn’t seem to work well as part of a team; and any comments that indicated a too eager interest in being near junior high and high school girls.

In one training session, after I’d had a lot of experience, I was assigned a group of Bulgarian women (long story) and a couple random Englishmen. Near the end of the training, each trainee was assigned a 20 minute demo lessons. Each demo lesson had to have a warm up; introduce a grammar point; and then show a variety of lesson and the trainees ability to transition from one activity to another. They had a couple hours to plan and make materials and be ready to teach. I would also assign at least one trainee to play the part of “obnoxious little shit” (a technical term) to see how the trainees handled bad students.

One of the Englishmen got up and announced that he couldn’t think of a warm up and skipped to the first activity. He passed out a work sheet and then spent five minutes quietly walking around and “observing”. He then repeated that with the next part of the lesson. He finished after 10 minutes and the students had barely spoken. I told him he had to do it again and that he should probably figure out a way to do it right.

My favorite incident, though, happened in one of my first solo training sessions, I had a group of about 20 and most of them seemed to play nice with each other. One guy was dressed a bit casually (suits and ties were expected, at least at the time, even in summer) but he seemed to be working well with the others, although he did tend to go out of his way to partner with women.

During a smoke break, I was talking with him and a group of the ladies and somehow and for some reason he started talking about his wife throwing a remote control at him. He said she did it because he’d told her “if you don’t give me what I want I’ll just go out and find it myself”.

Red flags started popping up all over the place.

Later, I put everyone in pairs for the 20 minute demo lessons (at the time they were a pair activity). I made the mistake of pairing him with one of the quietest women in the group which let him dominate the planning.

When it was their turn, he took charge of the warm up. He then started shouting:

(points at random students) LISTEN! THINK! LISTEN! THINK! (points at own mouth) YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND THE WORDS COMING OF MY MOUTH BECAUSE YOU CAN’T SPEAK ENGLISH! LISTEN! THINK! LISTEN! THINK!

That went on for three minutes. Once the rest of the class were suitably scared to death–even the designated “bad student” was too freaked out to know what to do–he stopped shouting and turned the lesson over to his partner.

I made several notes as red flags clouded my vision. Luckily the other trainees made most of the comments I was going to make, leaving me to only interject that I was glad he gave the response he did because I wasn’t sure if he was serious or just trying to piss me off.

I never saw him again, although he did become a big part of my training as I imitated the shouting to demonstrate a key “thou shalt not”.

I don’t know what happened to him, but I heard things didn’t go very well.

A Story of the Flouting Flautist

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Today we bought our oldest a flute and I started having flashbacks.

About 800 years ago (plus or minus a few years), when I was starting junior high school in Hayden, Colorado (or maybe it was before that when my helicopter was taking rocket fire from the knights in the Third Crusade; it all runs together) I remember being taken to a large room where some guy tried to sell us musical instruments. Although I expressed a brief interest in the saxophone, I ended up with a trumpet.

All I remember about that was the trumpet was made by F. E. Olds, who pretty much closed up shop right after my parents brought the trumpet. I also have the number $250 stuck in my head ($815 now) and that may have been the price of the thing. I played all through junior high and high school and then finally gave up the trumpet.

After delaying almost two years, and with the promise that she’ll keep using it in high school (long story involving getting recommendations is involved there) we finally decided it was time to retire the old school flute and buy her a flute of her own.

First, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I had a consult on our acceptable price range and SWMBO surprised me with number much higher than I expected her to say. After treating me with an AED we went to a local shop and began choosing flutes. This involved our oldest practicing with different flutes (and actually impressing the sales lady).

Although our oldest knew what the approximate price range was–for the record, it was not my idea to tell her–or perhaps because she knew it, she managed to play the more expensive flutes better than the cheaper flutes. I was ready to do a blind test to see if she was just messing with us, but I know from experience a better made instrument sounds better than a cheap instrument.

In the end, she’d narrowed her choice down to the Damned Expensive One and the Freaking Expensive One (not actual brand names), and seemed to be favoring the Damned Expensive One. However, She Who Must Be Obeyed kept saying to get the Freaking Expensive One and I kept looking for an AED to use on her in lieu of professional shock therapy.

In the end, our oldest chose the Freaking Expensive One and has agreed, although she doesn’t know it yet, to wash dishes for 20 years (or until she’s 20, something like that). All we, the parents, got was a bottle of cheap Bordeaux.

Yes, that’s right, the store gave us a bottle of wine after the purchase to help us ease the pain.

Home and Go Away Again

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I spent a surprising amount of my first year in Albania trying to find a permanent place to live.

I’ve written before about how I used to be a lousy house guest and how I eventually had to move out of my host family’s apartment. Granted, this was something I’d hoped to do in the long run but it happened all of a sudden. Unfortunately, it also happened when the dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages was out of the country–he had a list of places I could stay–and the only people available to help me were Peace Corps staff who had a lot of other volunteers to worry about.

I was originally told I’d be staying in an apartment owned by a widow. As I understood it, she’d move in with family and I’d get the apartment. It was an okay place, but kind of hidden in a maze of streets. When I arrived with my stuff, she was there and I was told I couldn’t move in then. I was basically homeless with all my stuff in boxes around me.

Luckily, a pair of fellow expatriates took me in “for a short time”. Unfortunately for them, both the Peace Corps and I dragged our feet to get me out. This was surprising because we weren’t, technically, supposed to live with fellow expats.

Eventually, right around the start of winter, at the suggestion of yet another fellow expat, I moved into a house with an older woman who never seemed to smile much, her daughter, who didn’t seem to talk much, and their other boarder, a cute young Albanian woman who was the only friendly one in the house. I lived there over the winter, which was a mixed blessing.

My room was one part cave, one part cold storage. I bought a little electric fan eater that took some of the edge off, but we lost power  a lot. The woman started cooking for me, which I hadn’t asked her to do, which would eventually lead to a money argument.

When my dean returned from overseas, he quickly found me a permanent place to stay. I found another boarder for the woman, which helped solve some of the money argument, especially as the person I found was paying more money than I could.

For a while I was fine, but about the time I got settled in and comfortable, my country director forced me to move cities. Luckily, I found a nice apartment quickly, but it was never quite home.

A Boss is Not a Booster But Rhymes With Rich

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I once had a boss so bad that the women I worked with were encouraging me to hit her.Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, they weren’t discouraging me from doing so.

I’ve mentioned yesterday that I once spent a summer working in Kansas City, Kansas as part of a Peace Corps inspired project to help community development in Kansas. I also mentioned that our team was five brilliant women and me.

I never understood why such a large group was assigned to the project, but luckily we all got along well so we never spent our time pondering “How the hell did we get here?” (something like that). I think part of the reason we got along was we didn’t like our boss. Let’s call her Bad Betty (not her real name).

The trouble with Bad Betty started before we even technically worked for her. Part of the project involved spending the semester beforehand doing research on the community. This included visiting the community and conducting interviews and trying to figure out who the movers and shakers were. Somewhere along the way, we met Bad Betty, who was a social climbing government worker with a “vision”. All of us were put off by her–working with someone who is always right can be very tiring, as I’m sure my colleagues know.

Sometime during our eight weeks in Kansas City–or maybe, because our faculty adviser joined us, before as part of our preparation; the timeline has grown fuzzy–we joined a group of neighborhood kids on a trip to Worlds of Fun. We had a great time, met some great people, and emerged looking like, as one of the team put it “drowned rats”.

At the end of the day, we returned to the community center that would serve as our headquarters and stumbled into a meeting of VIPs from the community center and the community. We were exhausted, but one of the ladies explained what we were doing and the rest of us just grunted and nodded and went “grrto rmto gootagoo” (something like that). At least that’s how were were treated. About the time we were ready to suck down gallons of coffee and head back to Kansas State U and shower, we were instead asked to stay for a short meeting with Bad Betty.

Bad Betty then proceeded to lecture us about the importance of leadership and praised the person who spoke up and then berated all of us for not being ready for a meeting of VIPS we didn’t know was going on before we found out it was going on. We were all stunned speechless as we thought we’d done a pretty good job. Somehow, we all managed to stay quiet although I did have to whisper “Wait until we’re in the car. Wait until we’re in the car.” to a couple team members.

Yes, believe it or not, for a few moments, I was actually the one calling for reason and restraint while others were suggesting I slap my boss. Then we got in the car and I had to be restrained. Bob, our faculty adviser–and all around great guy–eventually intervened on our behalf which earned him the full wrath of Bad Betty and us little bits of snark.

I still wonder if we’d have been such an effective team as we turned out to be if Bad Betty hadn’t gone full bitchtard (a technical term) on us that day.

 

Making Silly Newsletters and Not Working

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There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words. –Dorothy Parker

One of the oddest things about my writing history is that it’s full of silly newsletters. One of my strange skills as a writer is taking work events and turning them into occasionally witty silliness. I’ve done this at least three times, four if you count this blog. Well, maybe five.

The first newsletter I remember working on was during the summer I spent working in the Chelsea District of Kansas City, Kansas as part of a Kansas State University development project. I was part of team that consisted of five brilliant women and me (technically the mascot). Oddly, we all got along well, worked together well, and, well, didn’t like our boss. (Long story.)

Unfortunately, although we were often busy, occasionally we weren’t. During those times, I took it upon myself to “report back to headquarters”, which we were encouraged to do, via a strange newsletter I think I called the Gremlin. Its catchphrase was “Because We Know You’ll Pay”. In it I reported the odd news events involving us. Usually I reported our successes, but I also remember reporting on the issues two of our number had with cockroaches. It was silly, but well received, but full of the kinds of stuff you “had to be there” to find funny. (For example, the story of the girl, the cockroach and the towel that had been used for days.)

The next summer, I did the same thing when I was assigned to work in Jetmore. I don’t remember the name of the newsletter or its catchphrase, although I do remember reusing “Because We Know You’ll Pay” and then changing it.

My next newsletter appeared when I was in Albania. This one I also called the Gremlin and it also had a catchy catchphrase that has slipped my mind. The Peace Corps Gremlin was more angry than the others and was written and printed during my frequent trips to the Peace Corps office. (I may still have a copy one of these tucked away somewhere but the odds are slim.)

The next newsletter came about as my friends were leaving the JET Programme. As I’ve mentioned before, I kept friends up to date on sumo news and Japanese pop culture news. I dubbed it the “Crazy Japan Times” after the slightly more prestigious Japan Times newspaper.

When I put it online, my only real gimmick was a series of ever-changing “Pithy Epigraphs” under the masthead of the page. They were random, often famous, often insane and, to my mind were  often funnier than the newsletter:

Jolly Obfuscatory
A Tale Told By An Idiot
Prohibited Where Voided By Law
Crusty But Benign
Life With the Boring Parts
The Only Sane Man In The Room
Never Better Late
Eas In Crucem  (Note: To hell with You.)
Bobby Thumbed a Diesel Down Just to Watch Him Die

These newsletters have been a lot of fun, but they are ultimately empty and, if I were to go back an look at them, dated. (In my defense, in the last news letter I wrote back in 2006, Shinzo Abe was Prime Minister so maybe it’s not THAT dated.) They also didn’t have any momentum.

As for this blog, well, it’s my latest newsletter.

 

 

 

Putting Off Until This Year What Should Have Been Done

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About thirteen years ago I started a website. Several years ago I pretty much abandoned it. Last year I almost lost it. Something about it, though, haunts me. Today, though it’s a good chance to talk about procrastination.

The website I started was called the Crazy Japan Times. It grew out of a series of newsletters I wrote to former JET Programme members and friends. The newsletters were based around Sumo tournaments, which happen every two months, and I started adding in quirky bits of pop culture and Japanese news along with the tournament updates. Eventually, someone suggested I actually start posting it online.

That part was pretty easy. However, because I only wrote a newletter every couple of months, the site never built a regular audience and I didn’t try to monetize it. I added a section on moving to Japan and getting an apartment that’s been reasonably popular, but once it was done, there wasn’t a lot much more to do with that.

Then, around 2006 or so, I got tired of doing the newsletters and then posting them, old school style (more on that later), on the site. Even though they only came out every couple of months, the newsletters were a lot of work. I’ve added a few book reviews and a couple videos about Japanese knife laws since I stopped the newsletters, but for the most part, the site’s remained untouched. The handful of “posts” I’ve done–Sochi Olympics news and a recent Super Bowl report–have all been done on Facebook.

Last year, I accidentally almost let the name lapse, but managed to get it back. That was more habit and hope than plan, though.

The problem is, the site needs a major overhaul and update. It’s so old-school it won’t show up on mobile devices. It’s also a pain to update without doing a lot of old school html coding (yes, it’s that old and yes I still code by hand. Sort of). Because of this, I’ve been putting off the update for almost two years. (You think you can procrastinate? You are an amateur. I’ll prove that to you later.)

This is mostly because there will be a lot of work in a short amount of time with a lot that can go wrong. (This leads to swearing, some stress, and a lot more swearing.) It’s also because I’m going to have to jettison the old design and start over, which feels kind of strange.

That said, my goal is to start that site again, maybe with some guest contributors, as the daily posts here come to an end or change in 12 days. (My year of posts ends February 19th.)

Tomorrow, when it comes, I’ll start the prelims of updating the CJT. If it goes well, I’ll be really happy this time tomorrow. If it doesn’t, well, at least I’ll have something to write about for post 354.

Fear and Loathing in Prague

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I mentioned before how I traveled with a pair of beautiful women and then got driven insane by show tunes. I also learned, on that trip, why you should never travel with friends.

Our Prague trip started out well. We ran into a guy in the train station who rented us an apartment one block from Wenceslas Square, which is the heart of pretty much anything anyone would want to do in Prague. The apartment was nice, we could come and go as we pleased, we could cook for ourselves and it was a reasonable price.

Everything went downhill after that. Although there was a Mozart Festival going on, we’d apparently landed during a short hiatus. This meant there was nothing to see except a puppet version of Don Giovanni which is not something that interested us as 1) it’s a dark, depressing opera; and 2) puppets. (To see what we missed, see here.)

Instead, we ended up roaming around Prague, which is not a bad place to end up roaming. It’s almost annoyingly beautiful and well preserved. I managed to check out a couple exhibits about Franz Kafka and visit the castle that inspired his novel.

The problem was, we were three, which meant we didn’t always want to do things that interested all of we (something like that). Tension began building, especially as we had no real distractions other than each other, and we ended up going to a cinema to watch Schindler’s List (because that’s totally not more dark and depressing than an opera about sin and punishment).

After we watched Schindler’s List, we decided to go party. Yes, to understand how messed up we were at that point, and remember, alcohol was not yet involved, we watched a movie about the holocaust and then went out to find a disco.

Something punished us for that choice, though, because we saw a disco on top of a tall building and decided to go there. When we got there, we paid a hefty cover charge and then bought an expensive drink each. The club was well decorated and modern and mostly empty. It was playing some of the worst music ever. It was like someone was playing the music backward. Even if I’d wanted to dance, the music was impossible to dance to. (To this day I’m shocked such music exists.)

We left and found another club which turned out to be a lot of fun. It was full of locals and was great for people watching. (Unfortunately, I was still in my “stand off to the side and watch people” phase which, I’m assured, is normal and which, I’m also assured, I’ll move past some day.)

That one ended badly as well. One of my travel companions had decided she’d had enough, got the coat check ticket from me, and retreived her coat. Unfortunately, she neglected to all the coats. I then spent the next 20 minutes arguing with the coat check guy and describing everything in my coat and my other travel companion’s coat.

Eventually, all coats were retrieved. It’s the friendship that never quite got retrieved.

I should have gone to see the puppet show.

The Last Temptation of Campus

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Back when I was in graduate school, I decided to see how many Christians I could possibly anger at once.

In my defense, I wasn’t the only one who thought this would be a good idea.

For reasons I don’t remember, I was part of a group called Kaleidoscope Films. Kaleidoscope operated out of the Student Union and specialized in bringing “little” and/or “artsy-fartsy” films (a technical term) to the union. Each member was assigned to recommend a film and then the group discussed and voted on them.

Once a film was chosen, a couple members were assigned to handle publicity.  This meant we had to make a large poster to put outside the Union Forum Hall and a smaller poster that fit on an A-Frame somewhere else on campus. This was all pretty painless and involved projectors and minimal art skills and couple hours every couple of weeks.

At least that’s what it involved before we decided to bring Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ to campus. We did this even though it had never been shown in Manhattan, Ks during its original release and even though we knew some people would have “issues” with it.

Like all things involving blasphemy and religion and evil, several meetings with “important authority figures” (IAF; another technical term) ensued. We were basically told to justify bringing such a controversial movie to campus and were are also assured, in so many words, that “free speech” was not an acceptable reason. So there.

In one meeting, I think with the man in charge of the Student Union, a group of us fielded several questions about our choice. The meeting was tense and we were all intimidated by the IAF and were stumbling around trying to avoid using the phrase “free speech.” At some point, the man asked why the movie was even worth seeing since someone in our group had just admitted it wasn’t textually accurate.

For some reason, although I knew better, the devils over my shoulders took over and I started talking.

Keep in mind, as you read what comes next, I don’t think I’d actually seen the movie or read the book at that point.

Also keep in mind that if you’re relying on ME to say the right thing, you are in desperate, desperate trouble.

I told the IAF that the movie allowed the director to focus on one element of the Christ story: his part human side. By trimming down the actual text, the director could explore that issue more than had been in other movies about Christ. It explored what was good about being human and what Christ was giving up to be the messiah. (I actually said more than that, but that was the gist of it.)

Whatever I said, it worked and we were allowed the show the movie. I don’t take credit for it, because a lot of people worked hard, but our chairwoman told me my answer was perfect. We did have to host a discussion about the movie, which is a policy exception we didn’t have to make for other movies. (If you search “The Last Temptation” in this link you can read Kansas State Collegian articles about the controversy.)

Although it did have some great moments, I was underwhelmed by the movie. The ending was kind of predictable.

Going Back Home to Not There

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My only explanation for how I ended up at Ole Miss after the Peace Corps is one I stole from a movie: At the time, it seemed like a good idea.

Dating a poet, though, was not a good idea.

I’ve mentioned before that my plan was to get a “regular” Ph.D. in literature at a school with a strong creative writing program. This is because my Master’s degree had a creative final thesis and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have a more rigorous thesis for my Ph.D.

After I got there, everything started out reasonably well when I managed to land half a teaching position–which was all that was still available at the time. I found myself once again teaching non-native speakers of English and once again in the familiar territory of school.

Unfortunately, the culture shock that hit was brutal. After two years in Albania, I suddenly found myself surrounded by people aspiring to be Marxists rather than those attempting to recover from the mess left by Marxists. (I won’t get into this, but suffice it to say that all university Marxists hear when you talk about the perils of Marxism and communism is “blah blah blah free stuff blah blah blah free stuff blah blah blah for me”.)

But even that wasn’t as bad as my sudden lack of interest in studying literature. I still liked reading it, I just didn’t enjoy the “oh so serious” discussions of it and the “oh so serious” and “freaking long” papers we were supposed to produce. The comfortable lifestyle was no longer comfortable. It also wasn’t interesting.

In the midst of this culture shock I started dating a poet. Let’s call her Abbey. Now this relationship broke a couple of my hard learned rules

1) never date someone in the same department;
2) never date a woman who has “it” when exposure to “it” makes you stupid and incoherent;
3) never date someone when you’re in culture shock and, thus, stupid and incoherent;
4) never date a recovering alcoholic;
5) if you do date a recovering alcoholic, don’t date her in her first year of sobriety;
6) Don’t start a magazine with someone you’re dating.

The relationship was intense and passionate right up until the day it ended. Unfortunately, at that point rule six had been violated and we had to work together for a few more months until the magazine’s first issue was published. We were both happy to see it finished and both happy to be finished with each other once and for all.

I spent most of my second year at Ole MIss applying to get out. My plan was to go to Japan for a couple years, do the reading for my comprehensive exams and then go back and finish.

I did all the reading, I just decided not to go back.