Category Archives: Personal

Watching Baseball From A Long Way Away

Leave a reply

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.

Partying in the Capitol With Drugs

2 Replies

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

Leave a reply

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 Stranger in The White Van

Leave a reply

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.

A Small Burden of Duty with Pajamas

Leave a reply

Today I ended up being seen but ended up not doing very much except change clothes.

Today was the Capital Region Junior Karate Contest for my karate style. The competitors are as young as fourth grade elementary school and as old as high school seniors. Earlier this year I committed to attending and serving as a judge. In fact, I marked it on my calendar way back in April or May and have been reminded of it several times, including last week at practice.

I didn’t really feel like going, and almost called to cancel four different times this past week. With the girls away, I thought a couple days to just relax and be alone would be more interesting. However, given all the reminders I’d been given, I thought I’d better go. I packed up my dogi and caught a 7:15 train and went down to Tokyo. I decided, though, I would use the girls’ absence as my excuse to abscond as early as possible. To offset this, I arrived early and helped set up–which mostly involved moving and setting up chairs and tables.

Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered I wasn’t scheduled to judge any events.

I don’t fully understand why this happened. No one in our dojo was scheduled to be judge, including sensei. Despite this, I put on my dogi and sat down to watch.

Because this is the largest junior contest, there seems to be a certain amount of politics involved, especially for those of us with black dogis. Sensei once explained that once you’re an official sixth level black belt, karate becomes more like a job. (I’m still not official.) Also, unlike lower levels, it’s also possible to lose a degree and have to retest. This is mostly a big deal if you want to have an official dojo and train adults.

Being seen at the contest is therefore a big deal. Those who haven’t played the politics well can find their dojos unable to officially train adults. (This happened for a brief time to my old dojo in Itoigawa a few years ago when they didn’t play the game well enough.)

I played spectator for a while. The high school kids were especially good, even impressing my sensei.

At lunch time I changed clothes and ran away. I don’t know how politically savvy that was, but it was more fun than playing spectator whilst dressed in black pajamas.

The Year of Living Bewilderdly

1 Reply

It’s no exaggeration to say that I’d rather relive my high school years than be age 20 again.

The host of a podcast I like to listen to often asks his guests: “If you could go back in time and visit your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself?” (He clearly doesn’t watch enough Doctor Who to know why that is a bad freaking idea.) In my case, I wouldn’t tell 20 year old me anything. I’d just watch him and make sure I’m not still doing any of the things he was doing.

During age 20 I went to England and, well, let’s just say, fell into obsession with the wrong kind of woman (She Who Must Not Be Named). That would have been bad enough except that she didn’t say “piss off” but rather seemed to enjoy the attention (in the same way a fisherman enjoys the attention the fish pays to the hook). The results were worthy of a novel, but first there was alcohol involved.

Age 20 was when my forehead “visited” a rock and the year when I did my heaviest drinking. (Please note, I was not yet technically of legal drinking age although, under a quirk of Kansas law, I had been when I was in high school.) It was also, fortunately, the year I learned to moderate my drinking.

What I remember most about age 20 was a strange malaise. I was neither a teenager nor was I fully an adult. It was all a very strange time. My grades dropped and I went on pretty impressive money wasting binges involving billiards and arcade games. (For the record, I’m the only person in existence who could ever waste a lot of money playing too much pool and never actually improve my skills. And you all thought I didn’t have any talent.)

As I’ve written about before, age 20 ended on a Tuesday with a police frisking. In an odd way, that frisking snapped me out of the malaise. I was still on the hook at strange times for increasingly strange encounters with She Who Must Not Be Named –she once tried to convince me to help her with “a small murder” but I knew it was the alcohol talking and, luckily, I’d already learned to moderate my own consumption–but I never had that sense of malaise and bewilderment again (well at least not until I fell into obsession again, and then that third time but those are a much longer post).

I do wonder, though, what 20 year old me would have done about the “small murder”.

Past My Bed Time For 30 Days

Leave a reply

One of my guilty pleasures, and a topic I’ve been slowly acquiring notes on, is reading and following the advice in self-help guides and different self-help guru books and websites–especially those that are free. Every time I do this, though, I always think of the late, great George Carlin’s line “if you’re looking for self help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?! That’s not self help, that’s help!”

Some of the advice I try and it’s quickly clear it’s not going anywhere. I’ve tried meditation and I just don’t get it: Sit around, focus on your breath, think about your thoughts as you think them without thinking about them, sigh, take a sip of coffee, turn on TV. (Those last three are my additions and not, technically, part of the normal meditation process.)

Similarly, I don’t really get “Morning Pages” either. It’s supposed to be like taking a mental dump in three pages every morning and that’s supposed to clear your system. You’re not even supposed to read what you’ve written (and with my handwriting, it’s unlikely I’d be able to anyway). I’m trying them again at the recommendation of a friend, but I’m always aware that I’m wasting 15 minutes that could be spent on other writing and/or drinking coffee.

I also tried, back when I could barely do two pushups, the One Hundred Pushups Plan, which promised to take me from 2 pushups straight to 100 straight in six weeks. Although my total number of pushups improved immensely, I found I hit a plateau and never got near 100 in six weeks. I think part of it was the every-other-day nature of the plan. It was hard to establish a regular habit.

That said, as I’ve written before, following some self-help advice, I did manage to stop chewing my nails, with only a few minor relapses.

Right now I’m part of a monthly challenge where participants decide on a new habit and then try to implement it for 30 days. After the 30 days, participants will decide to keep the habit or modify it. Some are writing daily blog posts (fools); some are cutting out pasta (wise); some are giving up coffee (fools without souls). I’m personally giving myself an 11:00 p.m. bedtime and getting up every day, even weekends, at 5:00 a.m. Believe it or not, this is a healthier sleep pattern than I’ve had in years and it’s making my afternoons more productive. To help accomplish this, I’ve stopped drinking coffee after 1:00 p.m. (or so).

In the morning, I’m exercising (pushups and karate leg practice) and doing my morning pages. I’m also using the time to work on some other small projects before going to work.

I suspect I’ll keep the 11-5 schedule, although I’m still not happy with my morning routine. The next monthly challenge might be no morning TV.

 

 

Practicing By Myself is Futile Resistance

Leave a reply

I haven’t done a sports related post in a while as I had a month long hiatus from karate whilst I babysat a teenage daughter who has few skills other than eye-rolling, tweeting and thinking she’s being sneaky and getting away with something when she’s not.

I’ve been back in the groove for two weeks and things are ugly. Although I try to practice on my own, I’ve found cases where I practiced a kata for two weeks then had to relearn it when I found out I was doing something wrong. The katas are especially nasty during belt test time because I typically have to do five of them. This involves a lot of low stance that starts to make your thighs beg for mercy after the second kata. (Hold a half squat for two minutes. Keep your back straight; don’t bend over. Rest 15 seconds. Then hold it for two more minutes. Rest one minute. Hold it for three minutes. Every now and then punch and kick.) What makes it hurt is that the different moves are slow. It’s like doing 10 slow pushups with the down move and the push up each taking 30 seconds to perform.

After I get the katas down–or sensei just gives up on me for the day–we switch to the fighting routines which start out one on one but eventually evolve three to five attackers. What makes these hard is situational awareness (the people behind you are authorized to grab you and/or slash you a good one with a wooden sword) and that several of the moves have to be done with technique only and no strength. This is especially hard to do when you’re trying stay ahead of three to five attackers. Also, you’re not supposed to repeat a technique which means you eventually have to do something you suck at.

I’ve also found it difficult to practice the fighting routines by myself. It’s one thing to image train and pantomime a move, it’s another to actually grab the dogi of a person who’s resisting and pull him down without clinching his lapel in your fist. Instead, we’re supposed to use slow moves and leverage so that even a 70 year old woman could defend herself with the moves against a strong attacker. Great theory; hard to accomplish when adrenaline is flowing.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only one stinking things up tonight. All three students stunk the place up at least once.

Dealing With Lots of Rules and Naughty Neighbors

Leave a reply

Although Japan is, for the most part, full of polite people who obey rules, both written and unwritten, there are a few exceptions. Most of them seem to live in my neighborhood.

I’ve written before about the train types, but there’s one type, the squatter, that’s a result of Japanese driving and property laws.

First, in order to get a license and registration for your car, you have to prove that you have a legal parking place for it. This involves literally drawing maps of the parking area and a “zoom” map of the parking place onto an application. However, getting a legal parking place isn’t always that easy.

Because Japanese property is expensive, most condos and apartments don’t come with free parking places. We, for example, have pay $60 a month on top of our rent to park our car.  Some condo owners in Tokyo pay hundreds of dollars a month for parking. That fee, though, gives some privileges. The space is ours and no one else can use it. If they do, it counts as a form of theft and we can get the police involved.

However, not everyone who lives in our complex wants to pay the fee. One person has created a space by moving some planters and leaving her car there. This is illegal, but this is where Japanese politeness comes into play. No one seems to want to confront the person and no one seems to want to report it to management. If they have, management doesn’t seem to have time to deal with.

I personally would immediately hand the squatter a flier that says the place is now a rental space and, because it’ s a premium location, it costs $300 a month. If you park your care there, you agree to pay the fee. If you don’t pay it, your car will be taken away. (I know who the squatter is and I know I can kick her ass; however, I don’t know how big her boyfriend is so I should probably do a little research first.)

The other rule breaker is the Foreign Asshole. (Oddly, in this case, not me.Sort of.) The FA breaks rules in two ways: inadvertently (usually accompanied with the phrase “are you joking? There’s a rule for that? Really?) and deliberately (because they think the rule they broke inadvertently is stupid).

One example of a rules is that junior high and high school kids aren’t supposed to be in certain shopping areas after 5:30 p.m. or so. It’s not actually a legal curfew, but parents are encouraged/expected to watch out for other people’s kids and encourage them to go home. Because of this, She Who Must Be Obeyed told a girl from our complex that she needed to get home. Also, because they were traveling the same direction, she also ended up following her home (along with our girls).

This set off the girl’s mother, who hails from Some Other Country in Asia (not it’s real name). She confronted SWMBO in a very rare English shouting match. After a few minutes I stood on our balcony to watch the events and keep them, well, calm. However, after several minutes, even I had to point out that the woman needed to pay more attention to where she was living. This caused her to shout at me and for me to go to 8 on the mega voice power scale (I can out shout a room full of junior high kids, a woman from Some Other Country in Asia is no match). I assured her we would never again make an effort to make sure her daughter was safe. We’d just leave her to her fate. She tried shouting and I went to 9–for the record, this voice goes to 11, and, yes, I am a Foreign Asshole.

This prompted her to threaten to sue me and come after me with her lawyer. I started laughing and double dog dared her to sue me. I told her “Oh, bring it on.  I’m from the USA. We’re practically born with lawyers on retainer.”

I haven’t spoken to her since and told SWMBO to stop speaking to her in English which made it more difficult for the woman to communicate and to argue.

I don’t know if she still lives in the complex. Don’t really care.

Falling in Love Twice for the First Time

Leave a reply

Mothers seem to have an instant connection with their children that fathers, in my experience, don’t have. For the mother birth is physical and painful and personal. For the father it’s pretty much wine, flowers and a certain amount of patience followed by a couple hours of pacing and saying “breathe breath” whilst being cursed. (Well, in at least one case.) The children are part of the mother. They are not part of the father.

(Although it should be mentioned that when they were in their misshapen, badly formed lizard looking newborn phase was when my girls most looked like me. Which says a lot about how I look.)

As such, I think fathers eventually have a moment where they fall in love with their kids. A moment when protecting them, killing for them and living for them becomes part of you and not just part of a legally mandated series of responsibilities.

In my case, I fell for my oldest when she was two or so. We’d enrolled her to receive a series of videos and books featuring Shimajiro, a little boy tiger (this makes sense when you realize Hello Kitty is a girl not a cat) who learns a lot of lessons in preschool about manners and study skills, usually accompanied by music. (It is not as annoying as Barney.) The package contains a Shimajiro puppet that remains a must have toy for preschoolers.

When the kit arrived our oldest was excited to the point of hopping up and down. She immediately went for the Shimajiro doll and started playing with it. She started going around and having Shimajiro say hello to all of us. When her friend came over she said an adorable (in Japanese) “Shimajiro came to our house!” It was annoyingly cute and I was smitten, and still am, even though all our internet capable electronics now have to have passwords on them to keep her off the internet.

With our youngest, there was a bit of set up. Our oldest had, over time, acquired change from various places (grandparents) and that meant she had to have a coin purse. Following the code of “Monkey see. Monkey wants her own.” This meant our youngest had to have a coin purse of her own, even though hers only contained slips of paper we called “her money” because we didn’t want her choking on coins (she was still under two). During a trip to a 100 yen shop our oldest bought some sort of trinket from a capsule toy machine and then went to find something else.

I watched our youngest study the machine and then squat down in front of it. She got a serious look on her face as she took out one of the slips of “her money” and tried to put it in the machine. I was smitten. I ended up buying her one of the “less likely to choke on it” toys. I’m still smitten, even though she’s developed an impressive back-talking skill for a nine year old.