Author Archives: DELively

Second Time Around With A Different Plan

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For the record: We are happy to report we survived the typhoon and that school was cancelled.

This month my goal is to hurt my daily opportunity to work on this blog.

I’ve written before about how I took part in a Monthly Challenge where participants were encouraged to adopt a new habit or drop an old one for one month and see what happens and how they feel. At the end of the month they decide if they are going to keep the habit.

In my case, I decided to try a consistent 11-5 sleeping schedule, even on weekends, which was a lot better than my four hour(ish) random sleeping schedule. To help accomplish this I also decided to stop drinking coffee after lunch.

After the month, I’ve found that with the more consistent sleep pattern I’ve had more energy and been more productive in the afternoon–especially at work when I have a free hour–and after work. (The exceptions are if I have a high-carb lunch, then I get sleepy for a while.) It also gives me time in the morning to exercise, do some writing and plan my day and I’ve found myself less grumpy at work (although the company I work for is trying to make up for that. Long story involving a typhoon and bovine scatalogical materials.)

Now that the 30 days are over, I’ve decided I’m going to keep the habit.

The problem is, now when I get home I’m still in my “damn I’m sleepy” after work schedule where I sit down in front of the computer and read news and generally waste time for a couple hours.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself much more restless during this time. Therefore, my goal this month is to eliminate the after work internet and focus on writing projects and more reading.

The problem with that is, after I’ve written a couple hours, I don’t have much energy left for these daily entries. (That happened this weekend when I spent the better part of each day writing.) Also, if I never turn on the internet, it’s kind of hard to write a post for it.

That means I’ll have to experiment with when to write these–which mean’s I’ll probably continue to start them at 10 p.m. or so Tokyo time and hope I don’t have as many typos as I usually have.

By the way, I encourage everyone to try to the Monthly Challenge. Try giving something up for a month. At the end of the month, you can change back or keep going.

 

Writing the Storm Out Randomly

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This is the time of year in Japan when the weather goes insane and I get headaches (guess what I have now). Except for the typhoons, it reminds me a lot of Kansas.

One of the first things you learn about a Kansas autumn and winter is that you never put anything away where you can’t get at it. All your clothes should be reasonably accessible and some of them should be in your day bag. One day will be hot, the next cold, the day after that both.

This time of year in Japan we get Kansas weather. The last four days have been 72 Fahrenheit (22 Celsius) sunny and dry; 90 Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) cloudy, humid, rainy; 82 Fahrenheit (28 Celsius) sunny and humid; and today 63 Fahrenheit (17 Celsius) in the morning, 57 Fahrenheit (14 Celsius) in the afternoon, 61 Fahrenheit (16 Celsius) now. Even indoors we’ve been able to wear shorts and t-shirts today and then needed sweatshirts.

Adding to the fun, Typhoon 18 is on its way to Tokyo. I know that it has a name, Typhoon Phanfone, but Japan gets so many typhoons it just gives them numbers. Also, Phanfone sounds like a smartphone, not a scary typhoon name. (Where as 18 is three sixes; think about it.)

We’ve already been hit with a lot of rain and schools are being cancelled all around us. (Both our youngest and oldest have the day off). By contrast, the typhoon has given me more work by postponing a sports festival and my two cancelled classes have been uncancelled. There’s a chance tomorrow’s classes will be cancelled, but probably after I’ve been stranded on a train.

After the typhoon passes, we will get a day of hot muggy weather (probably 86 Fahrenheit 30 celsius) and then it will get cold again the next day.

Eventually it will get cold and dry, except for the days that are warm and rainy.

At least then the headaches will be gone and my blog posts will become slightly more coherent.

Crazy Little Thing Called War

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Every now and then, when you live in Japan, you get invited to something and aren’t told how serious it is. You usually end up learning something about yourself. One of the things I learned in Japan is that I suck at organized tug of war.

Keep in mind, until I got to Japan I didn’t know there was such a thing as organized tug of war.

Sometime during my first couple years in Japan, I was invited to participate as part of a mostly foreign team in a tug of war competition. My team had a couple disadvantages 1) me 2) our tallest and strongest friend would not be available for the competition and 3) our women were scrappy but petite.

In our ignorance though, we still thought we might make a good showing of it. That ended as soon as we arrived at the gym.

We were in mismatched sweatshirts, jeans and sneakers–although we may have been asked to wear similar colors. The other teams were decked out in professional tug of war uniforms. These included rugby style shirts with reinforced underarms and shoulders, matching shorts and special indoor tug of war shoes. They also, it turned out, had technique and practice. Even their women would look at us and go “I must break you”. There’d then be a short chat as someone corrected them. Then they’d look at us and go “I will break you”.

In our first match, I think I was the anchor and my friend Tom was in front of me. As soon as the judges said go the opposing team started bouncing and chanting. Each bounce pulled us closer and closer to oblivion and we lost.

It turned out we had too much weight at the back. We started experimenting with me at the front and Tom at the back and vice versa. This proved pretty effective as it gave us a tall person as leverage at the front and that made each bounce slightly less effective. We also learned to pull as a team.

There were, however, no scrappy team of misfits overcoming impossible odds moments.

We lost every match, but at least they weren’t Denver Bronco Super Bowl / Brazil versus Germany World Cup 2014 bad.

After that we may have gone to a party with the people who invited us but I don’t remember.

Watching Baseball From A Long Way Away

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Woops: Technical difficulties. Lost first version of this. Second may be short.

Although I like baseball highlights and the baseball playoffs I don’t like baseball that much. (And, no, I’m not a commie.)

Part of the problem is I didn’t play anything resembling organized baseball until Hayden, Colorado got a Little League team when i was 11 or so. I tried playing (to this day I don’t remember why I did that, but the fact I actually played in games meant there must not have been many players) but I never took to the game.

I never learned to judge a pitch as it left the pitcher’s hand and I never learned to judge where a fly ball was going to land. To this day, I remain impressed by people who run to where the ball will be. My strategy involved standing in one place and hoping the ball hit me.

Also, when I was growing up Colorado didn’t have a baseball team. By the time it did, I was living back in Kansas which still has no team. I therefore never had the chance to study the game they way I did the Denver Broncos and American Football.

To me baseball is still just two men with a ball taunting  a guy with a stick while a bunch of their friends watch and wait for something to do. Despite that, I respect the skill baseball players have and I even enjoy baseball documentaries. Heck, I even watched the documentary Knuckleball! when I was on a plane last year.

I also tend to watch baseball when something record breaking is about to happen. Back in 1995 I joined a group of friends to watch Cal Ripken, Jr. break Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak. What I remember most about that was how moved my friend, a Baltimore Orioles fan was, and how ESPN announcer Chris Berman stopped talking so everyone could enjoy the moment. To this day I’m grateful Bob Costas wasn’t the announcer. He’d still be talking.

Now, for the first time since my first semester at university, the Kansas City Royals actually have something to do in October other than find an open golf course. Unfortunately, the games are on when I’m at work and I can only watch them via game trackers on sports websites.

I think I like this way of watching baseball better than actually watching baseball.

The Benefits of Incompetence and Bad Design

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It’s weird for me to say, but I benefit from government incompetence.

If the Japanese government were at all good at making an effective English curriculum and education teachers, I’d probably be out of a job.

When I first came to Japan the thing I noticed right away was the huge difference in English levels between my younger colleagues and my older colleagues. The older colleagues had little interest in English–many of them hadn’t wanted to be English teachers–and generally followed the official government textbook. Fortunately for them, the Japanese English teaching system, even in 2014, allows a teacher to teach English without ever having to speak it. (More on that later.)

Instead, people like me were brought in to provide “real” English and develop speaking activities.

My younger colleagues, though, were more interested in English. They’d made conscious choices to become English teachers but found themselves managed by the teachers who couldn’t care less. They were also hindered by the odd Japanese English system.

The textbooks–with a few exceptions–are designed by committees following strict Ministry of Education rules. The rules dictate how many new vocabulary words can be taught in one book. Any book that fails a rule, is sent back for revision.

The result is several textbooks with different titles but identical teaching plans. Every textbook is a bizarrely disorganized mess that teaches grammar in a scatter-shot way by focusing on grammatical structures rather than verbs and verb tenses. “I am” and “you are” are taught in one unit but “He is” and “She is” are taught later in the book even though they are the same verb tense. The books also teach relatively complex grammar “My grandfather is a man who likes to play darts in the pub as he enjoys a pint brewed by a man who is an expert at making beer.” (Note: that sentence is not actually from the textbook.)

The books also require the teachers to teach at the same pace in the same order. If they don’t, students will have difficulty on the mandatory exams. This kills any real possibilities for new ideas and modern teaching techniques. When I was still in Niigata, I would stop teaching junior high 3rd year classes (9th grade) early in October because 1) my spoken English lessons did not fit the curriculum and 2) my colleagues didn’t have time for my lessons.

The result is students who study English for six years in junior high and high school and a year or two at university but can’t speak English.

It’s all silly and a waste of resources, but I hope the curriculum planners never get their act together.

 

Partying in the Capitol With Drugs

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Warning: Today’s might be kind of gross. You have been warned.

One of the odd things about Washington, D.C. is that everyone walks as if they have some place important to be.

I learned this thanks to a medical evacuation.

When I was in the Peace Corps, one of the things you could count on was that you’d be sick, really sick, at least once with something people usually don’t like to talk about. You could count on the fact that the unnamed condition would be a major topic of conversation among the expats, as there wasn’t that much to do in Albania.

You could also count on the fact that the unnamed condition would be given a name. In our case we called it the “shpejts” (shpayts) which means “quickly” in Albanian. (For the record, I take credit for that name.) A day without the shpejts was a good day indeed.

I managed to avoid the worst of it until near the end of my tour when, all of a sudden, the water people in Tirana decided to swap the water and sewer lines for a day and even Albanians were getting sick.

I personally ended up with two different kinds of shpejts, the contagious bacterial kind and the amoebic kind. I lost enough weight that if I’d stood behind a barbed wire fence I could have been mistaken for a refugee and caused a NATO invasion. (I weighed around 152 pounds/69 kilograms.) Eventually I was medically evacuated to Washington, D.C. They sent me that far so they could out-process me easier if I wasn’t medically cleared again.

I ended up staying at the Virginian Suites Hotel right beside Arlington National Cemetery. I had easy access to the Capitol and even managed to have dinner with a relative. My mother and grandmother came to D.C. for a couple days to check on me/persuade me not to go back.

Unfortunately, about the time I met the doctor, I was put on drugs and told I couldn’t drink.This meant I had to experience Washington D.C. sober, which not even many of our politicians have done.

I toured all the usual places Capitol, Air and Space Museum, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Lincoln Memorial Etc. I also tried to find the place Ronald Reagan bought Crack back in the ’80s.

While I was there I could see how everyone walked quickly with a “get out of my way, I’ve got important meetings to attend” stance and speed. I found myself imitating them as I moved around the Mall between the various Smithsonian museums.

In the end, I was in D.C. three weeks. One week for check ups; one week to wait for the doctor to finish vacation; and a week to get medical clearance and return to Albania.

It wasn’t long after I got back that I realized I probably should have listened to my mother and grandmother.

I Partied With Lawyers and the Booze Won

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When I was in Albania, I would hang out with lawyers. Surprisingly, they were actually a lot of fun.

In order to reengineer itself after communism, Albania, through various sources, imported a bunch of US lawyers to help write the new constitution and advise the development of something resembling a justice system (insert joke about starting at home first).

Because I was in the capital, and English speaking people in misery love the company of other miserable English speaking people, I fell in with some of them even though we had nothing in common other than location.

The interesting thing about lawyers is 1) they like to argue 2) they like to drink and 3) they like to talk. As result I found myself sitting quietly–I was as surprised as everyone else–while they debated various random things triggered by fact number 2.

A few of the interesting things I learned:
–If  you want to get a police officer’s undivided attention, make eye contact with one and then run away. Police are programmed to chase after you. This is more effective than calling for help.
–If you run from a police officer and dump something in the trash as you’re running, they need to jump through legal hurdles to access what you threw away because the cop made you do it. If you see a cop, dump something in the trash and then run, they can use what you threw away because you did it yourself.
–The jury system is the worst system ever.
–Lawyers don’t really give perfectly spoken summations, especially ones that don’t actually refer to the case.
–Shooting a corpse you know is a corpse is not a crime (unless you made the corpse a corpse in which case the situation becomes problematic). If you shoot a corpse because you thought it was a sleeping person, that is a crime.
–It is remarkable that I am not in jail.

(disclaimer: this information is 20 years old. Consult local authorities and laws before staking your future on any information given in this blog.)

My favorite moment in the 1)2)3) talks happened when the topic, for some reason, turned to Turkey and the movie Midnight Express. The prosecutor from Brooklyn immediately went into a small rant about how the protagonist deserved everything that happened to him after he got caught smuggling hashish. Her strong rant horrified the handful of defense attorneys in the group. They didn’t try to defend it. I pointed out that Turkey changing the type of crime and the length of sentence as his sentence came to an end was the problem, because even though I’m not a lawyer, I’d had enough to drink to play one.

Her reaction, well, let’s just say it convinced me to never, ever get in trouble in Brooklyn.

 

 

The Best Lack all Control the Worst are Full of Cacaphonous Energy

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In all the years I’ve been teaching I’ve only been broken by a class once.

That happened last year, but first let me explain some background.

The school where I work is top tier private boys school with a Christian leaning (more on that later). However, as declining birthrates take their toll, the school has begun to lower its standards for admission from “future leader of Japan” to “Japanese and breathing”.

The first taste of this came several years ago when when had a class of junior high first years that were almost to a person bad. They weren’t just rowdy in a large group of teenaged boys kind of way, they were bad in a hostile, don’t give a shit kind of way. They were so bad that when we had a chance to meet their elementary school teachers, we asked them “what the hell happened? What did you do?” They said it was just a bad class but the next class would be better. This was mostly true and I ended up dubbing that group of students the “Demon Seed Class”.

The school also has a relaxed discipline style that allows the students a lot more leeway. The result is the least Christian Christian school imaginable. For example, if I enter a homeroom class two minutes before the bell, no students acknowledge me. They continue playing until the bell rings and then they get settled.The Demon Seed Class wouldn’t even settle in then, until I started giving homework if they took longer than two minutes to get settled.

The Demon Seeds were the worst class I’d taught until last year, when I had the perfect storm of bad in one third year junior high class. They’d been minor Demon Seeds for two years, then I seemed to get all the worst students.

To make matters worse, I was working four nights a week and not getting home until 11 and then going to bed well after midnight only to get up around 5:30. I was exhausted and couldn’t focus and became afraid to go to the bad junior high class, even though I only met them one a week. They smelled the fear and their behavior got worse.

Eventually, the evening classes finished and I got my bearings back but the class was pretty much lost. By the end of the year I divided them into two groups: the “study room” for students who actually wanted to study and the “play room” at the back for students who wanted to play. (I can’t legally throw them out of class.)

A few of those students were barred from entering high school, but I now have several students from that bad class. Luckily, I can now throw them out and fail them. Interestingly enough, now that I can do that, I haven’t had to.

 

Broadswords and Moving Nuns

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A couple times back when I was in graduate school I decided to freak out my students and try to drive my roommate insane.

For reasons I still don’t understand, a friend from my fraternity acquired a large Norman broadsword. It wasn’t sharpened and was probably intended for use with the Society for Creative Anachronism. My friend, of course, was not a member of SCA which made the sword’s presence even more mysterious.

Me being me, I immediately though it would be a good idea to take the sword to class.

I carried the sword unsheathed across campus–note to people under a certain age: there used to be time in the USA when people weren’t whiny chickenshits and you could carry swords across campus without attracting too many funny looks or a SWAT team.

Once in class, I set the sword across the front of my desk. I then taught class normally (well, in so far as anything I do is normal) and at the end of class I picked the sword up and carried it back to my friend.

It took a couple classes before one of my students got the nerve to ask me why I’d brought a sword to class. I responded by saying “That’s a good question. Take out a piece of paper and describe how you felt about that.” Several students groaned in a way that seemed to say “Can’t you just kill us with the sword instead?”

A year later, the friend with the broadsword would be my roommate. During a trip to England, at the Petticoat Lane Market, I found a rubber nun. The nun had a cloth habit and when you squeezed her, a pair of anatomically correct breasts inflated and poked out under the habit. It was childish, blasphemous, and profane. I knew my roommate, who happens to be a staunch Catholic, would love it.

Sure enough, it earned a prominent place on the shelf near our television and every now and then I’d pick it up and give it a squeeze and marvel at how silly it was. I always made sure to set it down slightly turned from where it was before, especially when I noticed my roommate studying it. If he set it facing forward, I would always move it slightly the next day.

I did that a few times until he asked me if I’d been moving it. I played dumb for a while until his Catholic belief in demons and the afterlife came to the fore and became early signs of panic and I felt guilty and suddenly remembered he owned a broadsword. I told him I’d been messing with him and we had a good laugh.

 

The Stranger in The White Van

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Despite having seen a lot of splatter movies growing up, I once accepted a ride from a stranger driving a van.

I wasn’t actually hitchhiking, I was more of a target of opportunity, so to speak.

About a hundred years ago when I was living in Niigata, I got this sudden urge to travel during Golden Week (a period of time when four national holidays arrive at the same time. On a whim, I decided to go to Shikoku. This is roughly the equivalent of deciding to travel to Western Nebraska on a whim.

I arrived in Tokushima early evening and was turned away from several inns and ended up sleeping in a manger. (Sort of.) Actually, the fourth hotel called the fifth and arranged a room at a business hotel which is only one step above a capsule hotel and, quite frankly, not that much bigger than a manger.

The next day, it started raining which meant I couldn’t ride the cable cars and do other things Tokushima is famous for. That said, the food was good and I enjoyed the cultural center. (I think I still have a handkerchief I dyed while I was there.)

From there I went to Takamatsu and then to the Iya Valley where I decided not to pay 500 yen to cross Kazurabashi, a vine bridge 42 feet above rocky, watery death. The journey did not provide enlightenment, just fear, and the sides only came up to my waist, increasing the fear.

I did take some nice pictures, though.

After roaming around for a while. I sat down at an abandoned bus stop across from an abandoned restaurant to wait for the bus, even though I wasn’t actually sure when it would arrive.

That’s when the stranger in the van arrived. The van was full of other people’s clothes. The man offered to take me to the closest station where he assured me the members of his cult would cage me in a wicker man and burn me alive to ensure good harvest. Granted, I might have misunderstood him a bit as the Shikoku dialect doesn’t sound like any Japanese I’ve ever studied.

Eventually, I figured out he worked hauling clothes to clothing stores and that he recommended a certain brand of Shikoku sake. Also, since he earned his living driving, he talked about the fact that the road through the mountain was newly built and saved him a lot of time.

Eventually he deposited me at the station and I went to on to Kochi, which was okay, but nothing special. The van ride was actually the last interesting thing that happened on that trip.