Author Archives: DELively

History in Bytes of Bites

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I think, when the issue is carefully considered, that selfies and lunch portraits make more sense than paper diaries.

A picture of the squid you ate for lunch with the caption “GIANT SQUID!” doesn’t seem all that different to me than recording what you ate in a diary. “Ate squid for lunch. Delicious. Texture of slimy leather.”  The main difference is time. Tweeting a picture of your drink next to your face is much faster than writing “I had a Pina Colada at Trader Vics. My hair was perfect.” (The photo is also less cliche and easier to understand than my handwriting.)

Similarly, a picture of your bloated, red-eyed, tear stained face with the phrase “Life after bitch” is much more effective than endless whinging about your break up and about how she didn’t appreciate you and “What does she see in that p&#@k anyway! I mean, besides a good job and lots of money and perfect hair and great fashion sense and his own private jet what’s he got that I haven’t got? I mean, like what’s a private apartment in Paris when you’ve got my wit and, well, my wit?” (Oh, like you’ve never been dumped for someone like that before.)

Granted, part of the problem with electronic files and storage is that the formats are always changing. I’ve spent many hours moving files from one format to another and making and storing various back ups. (I also now have no way to read old floppy discs.) If we can’t find a way to extract the old data, we lose large pieces of history, but I’m sure some enterprising soul is already working on that problem.

Selfies and photos of your lunch and photos of the jerk on the train and of the great sunset, when taken together, are a terrific record of a life. Even better, they’ve got color and expression.

Now if I just had a better filing system for it all.

 

Rites of Passage at a Self Service Station

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A few years ago, I watched She Who Must Be Obeyed and father in-law pump gas for the first time in their lives.

It was fascinating, and vaguely familiar, to watch as they figured out how to choose the flavor of gas they wanted and pre-pay and then get stuck on what to do next.

Eventually I had to get out and help them.

Until recently, all Japanese gas stations have been full service in a 1950s sense. As you pulled into the station, an attendant would direct you to an open pump and then an entire team of attendants would descend on your car. They would wash the windows, check the air in the tires and, give you a towel so you could wipe the inside of the windows. If you didn’t smoke, they would give you air freshener beads to put in your ash tray. When they were finished and you’d paid, one of the attendants would block traffic so you could get going again.

However, a number of oil shocks eventually caused some gas stations to experiment with self-service so they could eliminate overhead. This was such a big deal it made national news. Now that people have figured out how easy it is to pump your own gas, the call of the lower prices has slowly driven out the full-service stations. There are still a few, but they have a lot of competition.

By contrast, when I was in the USA, I only went to a full-service pump once, and I only did that because I was in a hurry and it was the only pump open. I was met by an attendant who was one part bored and one part shocked that anyone had actually come to use the pump. He washed my windows and he may have checked the oil but that was pretty much it.

Lately, Japan has also discovered self-checkout lanes at large grocery stores, although it’s still at the phase where a nearby attendant is needed to deal with any issues.

So Cute You Want to Slap It

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No one does cute as well as the Japanese.

This is mainly because no one else thinks the idea of “cuteness” is as important as the Japanese do. European clothing comes in two basic colors “dark” and “not as dark” as Europeans try to appear sophisticated and/or imagine they are invisible in dark alleys. In the USA we’re running through our collections of university sweatshirts and beer brand t-shirts because we got suckered into going to college for degrees in Antarctic Poetry and Elvis Studies. (Oh, like you didn’t consider those.)

In Japan, though, cuteness is a martial art. Only Japan could make a perfect family movie like Totoro, which has a cute monster and no villain and yet still manages to have tension. Even the dust balls are cute in Totoro.

Also, only someone from Japan would have this conversation:
A-san: I’m sick of all the doom and gloom in heavy metal.
B-san: Me too. It makes me so depressed I got another skull tattoo. But what should we do?
A-san: Let’s take a heavy metal band and front it with cute teenaged Gothic lolitas
B-san: What would they sing about?
A-san: Chocolate.

The result is the annoyingly cute Babymetal. (And they actually do have a song about chocolate.)

What strikes me about Babymetal is that it’s a concept that couldn’t work if the girls were from the West. We would be more prone to turn them into Cherie Currie or dress them in European black to show how they are serious musicians. They’d only dress like Gothic lolitas to be ironic.

Even when the Japanese try to dress gothic and dark, they’re still pretty cute:

She will eat heart, adorably.

She will eat your heart, adorably. Then she’ll go to math class.

This propensity for cuteness for cuteness’ sake effects even the all-boys school where I work. Last year one of my biggest troublemakers went for the shirt untucked, loose tie, loose trousers look. He even attempted a greaser pompadour. The effect, though, was ruined (from a Western perspective) by the chain full of cute stuffed animals he carried around with him.

I’ve seen another boy with a similar look but with Dragon Ball hair. He had a Hello Kitty doll hanging off his belt.

 

 

 

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here But Be Ready For Work

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Today’s post is brought to you by the letters T and D and by the number 19.

T is for Typhoon:
If you’re keeping score, this is the second typhoon in a week and the 19th of the season and, just for fun, it’s more powerful than last week’s typhoon. Also, for the record, Number 19 sounds scarier than the official name: “Vongfong“. (It’s the difference between a ski run called “Death’s Door” and one called Number 2. Think about it.)

The frequency and lethality of the storms has prompted the Japanese press to dub them “Suzumebachi Typhoons” or “Japanese Giant Hornet Typhoons.” The Japanese Giant Hornet is a particularly nasty beast that seems to be an unholy hybrid of hornet, bird, and demon that feeds on human corpses. (Something like that.) They also tend to attack in swarms.

D is for Dilemma:
It currently appears as if the worst part of Typhoon 19 will pass North of us, but we’ll get a lot of wind and rain. This brings about a dilemma.

One of the problems with mandatory schooling is that the people who force others to be there don’t go there; the people forced to be there don’t want to be there; and the people paid to be there like neither the people forced to be there nor the people forcing them to be there and want to somehow to get paid for not being there. Anyone paid to be there who actually wants to be there when they don’t have to be there is either weird or an a$$hole.

On the other hand, every now and then a perfect storm (sigh, yes, I know, but you’ll see) of factors combine to show the people paid to be there that it might be better if they actually go there.

In my case, last week I assigned a big project to my high school third years and they are supposed to present it tomorrow. If they don’t, it messes up the final project in a term in which they’ve already got few classes and I’ve had to cut some of my regular material. It’s actually in the best interest of my sanity that I actually go to work tomorrow. (Weird or A$$hole? You be the judge.)

Also, if school is cancelled, the terms of my contract require me to produce some kind of “material” or “evidence of work” or I lose a day of paid holiday. This is easier than actually going to work but it also means that our oldest and our youngest will also be home which means sister fights and oldest vs She Who Must Be Obeyed But Teenage Daughters Think They Are Exempted fights.

That said, I’m always happy to work from home. I just hope everyone stays safe.

Idle Hands Are the Devil’s Remote Control

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Back when I was single, in the middle of winter, I used to watch crap television simply because it was in English.

Not only would I watch the crap television but with a little help from Japanese TV scheduling, I invented binge watching.

First you have to understand the pull English language television has, especially if you’ve just come from Albania where all TV shows were in either Albanian or Italian and included such gems as Disco Club Albania, where every week couples danced to “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” as part of a contest that never seemed to be resolved, and Detective Extralarge, which is, well, a show with Philip Michael Thomas  that exists that was made. (And you have to keep reminding yourself, as you watch it, that you are awake and not in a nightmare.)

The effect of this is so powerful that on a trip to London after several months in Albania, my friend and I almost missed new years because were mesmerized by CNN news and the pilot of Melrose Place, which remains one of the worst hours of television I’ve ever survived.

But it was in English.

Then, when I got to Japan, in the middle of winter I found myself bored and one of the devils over my shoulders made me reach for the remote. I stumbled across a Beverly Hills 90210 marathon on one of the cable channels. I watched it pretty much straight through, with a couple hours sleep mixed in. This is when I invented binge watching. I would continue that tradition through pretty much the bulk of the series. It was a terrible train wreck of a show, but not quite the point where it was classic and campy.

But it was in English.

Since then I’ve gone through fits of binge watching. I tried watching The Walking Dead (summary: boring, soap opera, boring personal issues, boring, HOLY CRAP ZOMBIES. Insides are now outsides. SHE”S EATING HIS STOMACH! Boring, soap opera. Repeat.) I gave up on that.

Recently, I watched all the episodes of Inspector Morse (which inspired me to my latest big writing project) and most of the episodes of Waking the Dead, a British CSI that had a few great episodes but was generally loud and annoying and I ended up skipping to the end after a while.

But it was in English.

A World of Choices With Five Bubbles

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When I was in Albania I decided I wasn’t in enough debt so I decided to study for a Ph.D. when I finished my Peace Corps service.

To do this I had the interesting joy of applying to graduate school from a developing country with a dodgy mail system. My mad plan, and some day I’ll go into full detail about how mad it was, involved getting a “regular” Ph.D. in a school with a strong creative writing program.

Somehow I managed to acquire applications and the money to pay for applying (see first paragraph about debt) and ended up applying to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) which had a good creative writing program that included the late, great Barry Hannah, a connection to William Faulkner and John Grisham’s plantation. To do this, though, I had to take both the ordinary GRE and the subject specific Literature in English GRE.

Luckily, one of the books I received from Norton Publishing was a college algebra book. I was therefore able to what I’d been unable to do at university: learn math above the basic level. This helped me do well on the ordinary GRE.

The Literature in English test was more difficult because it tested both breadth and depth of knowledge. Also, incorrect answers actually counted against my correct answers. At times it was better to not answer a question than to risk getting it wrong.  Luckily, I had an entire library from Norton to help me review.

Unfortunately, because I was in Albania, I had to take both tests on the same day. Since, at the time, both tests were about three hours long, I spent a long time in a chair filling in bubbles.

I ended up doing surprisingly well on the GRE, even in the math section, and did pretty well on the Literature in English. Luckily, I happened to be familiar with a couple of the works in the analysis section. I did worse in the part that had poetry conventions. “Is the following an example of iambic pentameter, sprung rhythm or boogie woogie do wop?” (Something like that. My choice, for the record, was F for “Who f@#king cares?” which means I didn’t answer it.)

At the end of the day, the entire world had five bubbles next to it and I found it difficult to answer a question without being tempted to choose D All of the Above or E None of the Above.

In the end I managed to pass both tests and was accepted to Ole Miss which was an interesting time of the kind you curse your enemies with.

The Things Best Left Unremembered

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One of the things you should never do is Google your childhood.

One thing people my age (who grew up in the USA) like to do is lament the loss of the great Saturday morning shows in the 1970s. We are convinced that modern Saturday morning fare is crap and we were the few, the happy few.

This is mostly because we remember how the shows made us feel not how they actually were. We also tend to remember the theme songs. We also don’t realize how demented we’ve become because of them.

The king of all shows was The Krofft Supershow. We mostly remember it for hosting a bunch of other shows. What we didn’t remember was Kaptain Kool and the Kongs. When you watch this, you will understand why we blocked it out.

Having watched this once, I then forced myself back into very dark places, I first dared explore one of the shows that first gave me an inkling of, well, puberty, Electra Woman and DynaGirl.

The song is still catchy and the main actress still, um, electra inspiring. (I should also add that Judy Strangis aged well and/or had a good plastic surgeon.) If you want to explore true madness, however, search for an actual episode. (Electra demented.)

The other shows, and probably the ones with the best theme songs were Doctor Shrinker (warning the acting is terrible and lead woman is named BJ).

and Wonderbug

Unfortunately, this greatness was ruined in Season 2 when Bigfoot and Wildboy and Magic Mongo were added to the line up. And then it was completely ruined in Season 3 with the addition of the Bay City Rollers.

Now, those still wallowing in denial will point out that all the networks had their own line up. One channel gave us superheroes with Shazam! and The Secrets of Isis (come on, how many of you, for a brief second, think “Oh Mighty Isis” when you hear news out of Syria and Iraq? My hand’s raised) but these were just badly acted, not demented. They also didn’t have catchy theme songs.

In the end, I suppose, what current Saturday mornings miss is the variety of twistedness and dementedness. Well, maybe that’s because we’ve become so demented we don’t remember. Whatever the truth, the theme songs aren’t as catchy as they used to be.

Scary is Only Skin Deep

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As we’ve entered October, Japan has entered a battle between advertising Halloween and advertising Christmas.

Some stores have Christmas decorations up. Some have Halloween. Some have both.

I’ll save discussion of Christmas for a later date, but Halloween is a very strange thing in Japan. One of Japan’s favorite past times is very elaborate, dark and scary haunted houses. What’s odd about them is that a lot of them run all year round and are especially popular in the summer. I’ve even heard it argued on TV and from former students at a pharmaceutical company that going to a haunted house actually cools you down on a hot day. I don’t understand how this works but I think sweat and urine soaked trousers are involved.

Halloween itself is recognized but not really celebrated. I traditionally have to dress up in something scary and hand out candy to some of the neighborhood kids and our youngest’s friends. One year I dressed up with fangs, funny glasses and a white raincoat. I carried a flashlight. In other words, I was a dentist.

For this month there will be Halloween themed candy and decorations and they will all disappear on November 1 and the Christmas (spending) season will start.

There will also be Halloween parties.

Right after I moved to Tokyo I participated in what would turn out to be the last of the “great” Yamanote Line Halloween Parties. (Note to those who’ve never been to Japan: the Yamanote Line is a busy train line that circles Tokyo.) The tradition was to dress up in costume, take control of a train car, and ride a complete circle of the line whilst 1) drinking and 2) trying to find free oxygen in the crowded train car.

I went in 1999. Apparently the year before there had been some damage to one of the trains and/or too much fun was had because I was greeted on the platform by a number of people in government issued costumes (police) who were handing out fliers in English explaining that impromptu parties by costumed individuals counted as illegal riots/invasions of Japan and were therefore discouraged. Police even asked us where we were going because riding the train all the way around the line was apparently illegal for invading forces.

Once we seized the train car for the glory of greater Drunkovia and its God Bacchus, police followed us on and took positions at opposite ends of the car. They began slowly moving forward and squeezing us into a tight clump. The funny part is, we were better at letting people get off the train than most Japanese are during rush hour. We would have been even better at it if the police hadn’t been forcing us into a clump.

Now our apartment has Halloween decorations up. But our hearts aren’t really in it. (We’re just waiting for the cheap candy…)

The Man in the Moon and the Skunk in the Trailer Park

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One thing I have to say about lunar eclipses is that I like them better in the early evening than late at night.

Three years ago an eclipse came way past bed time. I got our oldest up to see it but her reaction sounded something like “ghermst hawpsdt kkelwost jeislwowks, daddy (yawn)”.  I still don’t know if she was impressed or not and I know she doesn’t remember it.

This time we had the entire family taking shifts running outside and checking the status of the moon. Eventually I dragged out my big camera and zoom lens and spent a lot of time hugging a light pole (shut up) to get something resembling clear photos.

Back in the mid-70s, when I lived in Colorado, one of the coolest things we did was stay up late to see a lunar eclipse. I had a smallish telescope that was reasonably useful but mostly I remember it being a clear Colorado night. Being at 6,336 feet helps a lot with astronomy because the air is thinner. Living in a rural area helps, too, because there are few lights.

The best part was, once the moon started to go dark and bloody, I got my first good look at the Milky Way. I still remember being impressed by it. In fact, I wouldn’t see anything like it until I was in Albania. (Third world city, few lights.)

I remember staying up to see another eclipse, but what I don’t remember was which viewing had the skunk. Everyone was keeping a safe distance and although I saw it move behind someone’s trailer, I wasn’t having the “man that stinks” reaction everyone else was having. That was the first time I realized that I wasn’t smelling things quite the same way as everyone else. A few years later, I’d realize I couldn’t smell at all.

The next total lunar eclipse in Tokyo is in January/February 2018 with another coming at the end of July. If we’re still here, it’s a date.

Literature as a Second Excuse to Travel

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When I was in Albania I got a chance to spend some of George Soros’ money.

First, though, I nearly wasted some of it.

I’ve written before about how expatriates go through a cycle of culture shock, almost normal, culture shock, almost normal. The worst usually happens about three months in. Until then, you live in a kind of “this ain’t too bad” euphoria.

In my case, the euphoria led me to get involved with too many extra projects. I agreed to help out with the Open Society Fund for Albania (Soros)’s  new University Guidance office, the sole purpose of which was to help Albanians go to US or UK universities. I would sit there several hours a week and help Albanians apply to universities.

I also agreed, through a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, to proctor a selection test for teachers at an educational university in another town.

Then two things happened. First, I saw the office I would be working in and it would basically be, a chair, a desk, a couple books, a computer that didn’t work and me helping students. I knew they weren’t going to be ready for the grand opening but they planned to proceed anyway.

Second, it turned out that the selection test would be the weekend of the grand opening. I would have to say no to something.

At this point, culture shock and panic took over, and I opted to go to the selection test without telling the OSFA (Soros) I wouldn’t be around. The result was that I was pretty much fired from working with them, although my outstanding culture shock nourished denial skills made me think it was mutual.

The funny part is the selection test was cancelled. Instead something bizarre happened, but that’s another story (and one I’ve actually told too many times).

A couple years later, the OSFA (Soros) was looking for projects to fund and I submitted a proposal for a series of lectures I called “Teaching Literature as a Second Language” that I hoped would convince Albanian teachers to start using more literary works in English as a Foreign Language classes.

I got, roughly, 200 dollars for the project and that covered materials and travel related expenses. In the end, I traveled to three cities and did one lecture (which amounted to a brief history of books they’d never been able to read and a plan for how to use them). In two there were complications that stopped the lectures.

I then proceeded to shock the entire OSFA (Soros) by actually filling out an after action report. Apparently these were so rare that the person who received it didn’t appear to know what to do with it.

I tried to get more of George Soros’ money, but the OSFA (Soros) never got interested in giving me any more.