Category Archives: Personal

That Didn’t Go So Well In the Closet or Outside

Leave a reply

It occurred to me this morning that I left out part of the story in yesterday’s post. Because it was karate practice night, the theme was, by default, supposed to be sports related. Then, as I got writing, I got hung up on the kissing and forgot to mention the sports–or more specifically the sports injury. (This, perhaps, reveals a lot more about me than I care to know.)

Therefore, since today I’ve hit a major lull in the ideas for daily posts, I’ll revisit yesterday’s post a bit, and add a couple odd details.

As I said yesterday, when I was in As Is, I was performing several parts. Because it was a low-budget graduate student production, we were expected to provide our own costumes. I seem to remember telling the costume designer something to the effect that I didn’t have anything that was really gay looking. (Shut up, all of you, right now. Just shut up. Stop snorting.) The costume designer said “No, just bring some of your cool clothes from your closet”. I said something to the effect that she’d probably better come look at my closet herself.

She managed to find a few usable things, but I suspect she’s still recovering from the horrors she found there.

Now, as for the sports, playing several parts also meant I often had quick costume changes. If you’ve only ever been in the audience for a play, one of the truly remarkable things you never see is the highly coordinated, very carefully timed machine involved in a costume change. In one case I had a monologue where I was a scientist who’d been rejected by his peers after they discovered he had AIDS and then I had two minutes to get back stage, get into a new costume and be back on stage as a new character who was, as one critic described him, a “minty” AIDS hotline worker who actually got to deliver the line “You go, girlfriend” with every cliche stereotype the director told me to muster.

The problem is, the Purple Masque Theater is a thrust style stage built in part of an old football stadium. Because of where I was standing, to do the change, I had to run outside, run across the grass, run in through the front of the theater, run down the hall whilst undoing my belt and get backstage where a team of costumers would be waiting to simultaneously strip and dress me, redo my hair and then shove me back on stage.

The early stages of all that went well. I got outside and got across the grass, but as I made the turn into the entrance to start the run down the hall way, my left foot slipped and I landed on my left knee cap with an impressive smack that tore my trousers and bloodied up my knee. I then hobbled down the hallway to the impatient and angry costume team who told me I was late as they stripped me and dressed me and shoved me on stage. I then got to hobble around through a couple more costume changes.

Now, if I were smart, and if you’ve been reading this blog regularly you know how doubtful that notion is, I would have gone to the campus clinic to have my knee checked out. I, of course, did not. I don’t know if it’s psychological or If I gave my kneecap a good chip or hairline fracture, but it still hurts on occasion to this day (especially now that I’m writing about it).

The funny part is, because of the way we got our costumes, it was my trousers I ruined doing all that not the costume department’s.

 

In The Moment It Was Merely Acting, Pretty Much

1 Reply

For reasons I don’t remember, although I suspect a woman or some kind of art credit was involved, I signed up to take acting classes when I was at university. One of my teachers was Charlotte MacFarland and what I remember most about her class was that she was great at bringing out what few talents some of us had and that the final exam consisted of going to a party where we could eat and drink at our pleasure.

When you’re a student, this seems like the greatest idea for a final exam ever and it would have been, except that we had to go in character, as the character we’d performed in our final monologue, and we had to stay in character for at least an hour (maybe two, I don’t remember). Again that could be great, except in my case I chose to do the “To be or not to be speech” from Hamlet which meant I had to go to the party as Hamlet.

Let me assure you, Hamlet is not the guy you want to be at a party–you have to wear black, be depressed, run from ghosts, talk to skulls, call women whores and try to kill people named Claudius (actually, now that I think about it, that’s pretty much what I’m like at parties anyway).

Other acting classes were also invited and, at the party, I apparently impressed a graduate student instructor/director who was casting a play and he invited me to audition. Auditioning for a play is a strange process involving cold reading characters and interacting with strangers and every now and then some of you are sent home and others stay, hoping not to be sent home at the last minute. To cut to the chase, I was cast in multiple roles.

The play was As Is which is one of the first plays to deal with the AIDS crisis and it’s effect on the LGBT community. I therefore had the unusual experience of impressing my mom by telling her I’d been cast in a play and then freaking her out by coming out to her, so to speak, that I was playing a number of homosexual men and that a kiss was involved. (See, I told you there were kissed cowboys.) Actually, I might not have mentioned the kiss. I may have left that as a surprise.

To her credit, my mom attended the play and stayed for the entire performance, although I’ve heard from friends in the audience, the kissing scene didn’t go over very well. It wasn’t easy, at first, on my part either, but once you get in character, and don’t have a choice, it gets easier. The director was also keen on acting exercises designed to build trust among the cast. Oddly, we all trusted each other enough to smooch on stage, but a lot of us didn’t like each other outside of the theater.

After that, I acted in several small plays at the Purple Masque Theater and played Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which means I was the only un-funny character in the entire play. I also did some back stage stuff, including being Light Board Operator for one play. (Note to any future Lighting Designers in the audience: Don’t Change the LIghting Cues At Dress Rehearsal One Night Before The Play Opens!)

Acting was always fun, but it was never a passion. I walked away from it as easily as I walked toward it. I did save a few techniques and voice excercises here and there that I use in my higher level English classes. I also learned to project my voice pretty well, which helps a lot with junior high school classes.

I didn’t kiss any more cowboys though–although there was that drunk Japanese guy at a beach party once, but that’s another story that also involved a little red-haired girl.

If I Only Had a Brain and Something Resembling Discipline

3 Replies

A couple weeks ago forces from two different countries and two different walks of life combined to steal away what little productivity I have left. A YouTuber/soulless ginger from the Southern USA and a soulless Canadian bureaucrat, by colossal coincidence (Coincidence? I think not!) nearly simultaneously introduced me to the online game World of Tanks. It’s basically a slow-moving first-person shooter involving tanks. The best part is I can speak with the soulless Canadian bureaucrat over the internet while we play. (I realized after we first played that it was the first time I’d spoken to him directly in 15 years. Welcome to the modern world of modern friendship. This makes sense when you keep in mind I’m also friends with New Zealand knife maker I’ve never spoken to at all.)

All this has me thinking about computer games because the first computer game I remember playing too much was Combat on our Atari Video Computer System we got a couple hundred years ago (plus or minus a few years) when we lived in Hayden, Colorado. The most amazing thing about the Atari 2600 was that my mom also liked playing, although her favorite game was backgammon, and that we still managed to play outside a lot, even in winter.

The first thing I remember learning from that game system was that computer games cheat. My mom still has a picture of the tv screen after the backgammon game gave itself double nines on six sided dice. We also learned, when mom got the famously buggy ET: The Extra-Terrestrial game. (By the way, if, by any chance, she still has it, I encourage her to sell it.)

I also remember a little cafe or shop across from the park in Hayden having, at one time or another, Space Race, Asteroids and Pac Man and burning a few quarters on those (about the equivalent of a dollar now).

My chance at fame and glory came in or around junior high when our school got Apple computers and they attempted to teach us programming. Some of my friends were programming surprisingly fun computer games yet, try as I might, I just couldn’t get interested in that. I liked playing games, not playing with code. To this day, I’m more interested in playing computer games than getting under the hood and trying to make them better or figuring out how to make my own. It’s one of the few activities I can truly surrender to. I could sit for hours with my Coleco Electronic Quarterback (hey, you had blockers and could pass. Awesome.) Decades later, I could play Civilization II for days on end without eating or sleeping and consider it time well spent.

Give me a book, though, and I’ll be analyzing it from the opening line and collecting ideas and tricks. Or I’ll be criticizing it and figuring out how to make it better or giving up halfway through because it’s not going anywhere. I’m basically the writer/narrator from John Barth’s story “Lost in the Funhouse” who can’t help but comment on the story as it goes along because he knows so much about the tricks the story is trying to pull. Sit next to me when we’re watching TV and you’ll soon consider moving to a new room where you can watch without the running color commentary and attempts to guess the next line.

I can surrender to movies–I’ve never walked out of a movie; I’ve been close, though, very close–but that critical eye is always watching.

Now it’s time to go fight with some tanks or stop the creepers from reaching my base. I haven’t decided yet.

 

Baseball, Basketball, Nuggets and Broncos

1 Reply

Because baseball season has started here in Japan, and because that means there’s nothing on the news other than lengthy baseball reports and features, I’m in the mood to talk about sports. More specifically, I’m in the mood to talk about why I’m not a big fan of baseball.

I’ve said before that baseball is simply a group of people standing in a field watching two other people play catch while some jerk with a stick tries to interrupt them. I’ve then had baseball fans say that I don’t appreciate the subtlety and nuance of baseball. Fair enough, but this strikes me as damning with faint praise. It’s basically the same as having this conversation:

A–Dude, your sister’s ugly.
B–No, dude, her looks have subtlety and nuance.
A–Whatever, dude.

My disinterest in baseball can be directly blamed on Colorado. When I was growing up, Colorado had no professional baseball team. They did have the Triple-A minor league Denver Bears and the first sporting event I remember attending at a major stadium was one of their games. I remember having been there, and I remember my cousin three or four times removed catching either a home run or a foul ball and joke-complaining that he’d dropped his napkin whilst doing so, but I don’t remember anything else about the game.

Also, until I was 10 or 11, Hayden, Colorado didn’t have any form of little league baseball, preferring to produce rather impressive football teams (to my Europeans readers, that’s the form of football where people attempt to knock each other down, not the one where people flop around pretending they’ve been shot) As a result, baseball wasn’t imprinted in my bones from a young age. (I still can’t judge where a fly ball is going to land.) In fact, if I remember correctly, I played “organized” soccer in p.e. class, and remember some European pro from the old North American Soccer League visiting our school and giving us tips long before I remember playing organized baseball.

What Colorado did have was basketball and the Denver Nuggets–I remember getting to see them play after some Boy Scout event and watching the great Dan Issel do a backwards dunk. Oddly, although I played basketball in junior high and for a year in high school (“play” being a very strong word for what I did) I never became a fan of professional basketball and couldn’t care less about who wins the championship. (College basketball, though, that’s a different story.)

More importantly, Colorado had the Denver Broncos. Although I sucked at football even worse than I sucked at basketball and didn’t play it at all, Hayden had, at the time, at least as I recall, a football culture that dominated all other sports and I’ve always been a football fan. Having grown up with the Orange Crush, I became a Bronco’s fan, gladly accepting the embarrassment and sense of tragicomedy that often accompanies that choice. Even after we moved back to Kansas right before my junior year of high school, I remained a Bronco’s fan. This, of course, meant constantly defending that choice:

A–Dude, you’re in Kansas now. You have to cheer for the Kansas City Chiefs.
B–Why does living in Kansas mean I have to cheer for a team from Misery, er, Missouri?
A–Because, well, because they have KANSAS in their name and that’s all that’s on TV, dude.
B–Whatever, dude.

I admit to having a soft spot for the Chiefs (Chieves?) and like to see them do well, but when I finally got to see them play Denver live at Arrowhead Stadium, I was decked out in my Bronco Brother Crap in the midst of many rabid Chief’s fans, costing me the friendship of my travel companion, at least during the game and until we were a safe distance away from the stadium.

Unfortunately, football season is a long way off. Until then, I’ll find myself wishing the Boys of Summer, actually only played in the summer.

Sloth, Lethargy, Laziness, Bachelor Mode

1 Reply

Perhaps as part of my recovery from yesterday’s journey to watch Frozen. I and the oldest were about as lazy as it was possible to be today. We did somehow manage to wake up, change out of our pajamas (although the oldest had to be told several times) and feed ourselves, but neither of us could be bothered to actually venture out of the house.

This is a normal condition for me when She Who Must Be Obeyed is away. When the Cat’s away, this mouse gets lazy and sloppy and plays computer games. In other words, I revert to bachelor mode. The kitchen table becomes excess storage and the kitchen sink becomes a receptacle for dirty dishes which are cleaned as necessary but not before. The living room becomes a secondary Temple of Half-Finished Projects (i.e. an office), with appropriate stacks of half-finished projects set on the coffee table and balanced carefully on the sofa.

To rephrase a part of the Bible: By much slothfulness the bachelor decayeth;
and through idleness of the hands the house filleth up with crap through.

I have warned She Who Must Be Obeyed to never, ever, try to surprise me by coming home early without telling me. Were she to do so, I have no doubt she would immediately flee back to her parents’ house or go find a psychiatrist (for her) and a zoo keeper (for me).

The most amazing thing about bachelor mode is, after days of acting as if the washing of a single dish will somehow destroy me and doom my soul to hell for eternity (as if altering Bible verses won’t…), in those last few hours I can transform the house into a model room suitable for showing potential renters.

I always leave something undone though. I wash the dishes but don’t dry them and put them away. I leave the laundry hanging. I have to show She Who Must Be Obeyed some physical proof that, yes, I really do need her, if nothing else for some adult supervision and so the neighbors don’t think a bear moved into our apartment.

Now, however, this is all complicated by the presence of my oldest. Now I have to maintain certain fatherly standards. Today I did that, albeit in a very lazy way.

You Are Number Two And Will Be Treated Accordingly

Leave a reply

Since today is the day I practice Karate, or was supposed to be (long story), it seems that Sunday’s are slowly becoming the day I tell my sports adventure stories, pathetic as they are.

Many years ago, when my friend Charles and I had our brown belts securely fastened and were being considered for our black belts, we were told that Norihito Kawamoto, the founder and head of our style, was going to visit our dojo–which, given the no nonsense nature of our style, meant he’d be visiting the community gym where we practiced. Our sensei’s suddenly turned very serious and we had several minutes of etiquette practice, which we’d never done before.

I don’t remember us talking about what we were expecting, but neither of us was expecting a tall, pot-bellied balding man who spent most of his time sitting on a chair with his eyes closed, apparently asleep, whilst two of our senseis tested for their sixth level black black belts.

Joining Kawamoto sensei was another high level sensei from a dojo in Myoko. I don’t remember his name, even though I’ve met him once since then, but I remember he’s the first Japanese martial artist I’d seen who had swagger. He knew he was good–and we weren’t about to argue. When we practiced with him, he was doing things in ways we hadn’t practiced, including getting in closer at the start of a technique than we’d practiced. I’ve learned since then that this is pretty common. Although we all stick to the same basic techniques, there’s a lot of variation in performance and teaching styles.

Eventually Kawamoto sensei left the chair and it was clear that despite his size, and a noticeable limp, he was light on his feet. He pulled the Myoko sensei over–as he was officially the second highest rank in the room–and used him to demonstrate the various techniques.

Now, it’s important for you to understand that, in this context “used him to demonstrate” means “smacked the living crap out of him for the better part of ninety minutes”. Several of our techniques involve pushing on the opponent’s face. Kawamoto demonstrated that by smacking the Myoko sensei loud enough in the face that the rest of us cringed. And then he kept doing it. By the end of the night, The Myoko sensei had a little less swagger and a bright red face.

Lesson learned: Never be the second highest ranked guy in the room.

Now, although this has never been officially stated, this seems to be a rule across the style. In my sensei’s case, you don’t want to be the second highest ranked student in the room. When Fukuda, a sixth level black belt, is at practice, I get the extra special treatment. With Fukuda he’ll demonstrate “Now, after blocking the knife with both hands, you deliver a backhand across the stomach and then push the person’s face with your right and then you do the throwing technique. Got that?” With me, he back hands me across the stomach, smacks me in the face and throws me. If I get things wrong, I get yelled at.

When Fukuda’s not there, unless I’m doing something completely boneheaded, the tone is much more gentle, while the lower level student gets the special treatment.

To this day, I don’t know if this is official policy, or just some kind of the hazed becomes the hazer psychological thing. In general, the teacher’s aren’t abusive in other ways. My sensei went through a faze where he was slapping us on the shoulder or on the head when we made repeated mistakes. I told him if he didn’t stop, I was leaving for good, and he’s never done it sense.  But the sensei’s bring the pain when demonstrating techniques.  I’m on my guard no matter what, especially when we’re using bo staffs and swords, even if I’m number one.

 

 

 

Inspiration So Pure So Smooth So Precious

8 Replies

One of the things ordinary, normal people don’t get about writers is our affinity for notebooks. Not the digital carry it with you and send email kind, but the kind made from wood pulp.

To a normal person, a notebook is a thing used to record things, like notes. For a writer, a notebook is inspiration. It is precious and has magic powers. Like the new running shoes in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Summer Running”–which the narrator is convinced will make him run faster–a notebook contains the purest form of all writing: the things we hope to write before we actually sit down to write them. There are no awkward sentences, no under-developed characters, no plot holes. Everything is perfect–well, at least until the first marks are made on the page.

To understand the effects of this, you have to understand how normal people and writers buy notebooks and then what happens after. A normal person buying a notebook will pay the money, say something like “Thanks, I really needed one of these” and immediately start scribbling notes. A writer buying a notebook will suddenly grow twenty feet tall like Galadriel in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring and announce “Within these mighty pages are a great novel/epic poem and all that is necessary for me to reveal it is for me to leave white the things that are not a great novel/epic poem and lay marks upon the things that are. All shall love me and despair!”

The normal person behind me then says “Hurry up, moron, some of us have places to be. Oh, and you know Galadriel was a chick, don’t you?”

Basking in the glow, we get our brand new notebooks back to our writing space. There’s then a few moments whilst we arrange the space properly and then break out our pen. That’s when the problems hit. The shinier, more perfect the notebook, the less likely we are to begin writing in it. The ultra-smooth, fountain pen friendly paper of our Apica Premium CD Notebook is too smooth and pure to be ruined by the horrible scrawls we are about to inflict on it. It is the paper for something that people will be studying 300 years from now. It is not for the notes of a crap action novel or the notes for some pathetic blog. It deserves better. Hell, I don’t even have a proper pen for it.

It is precious.

In my case, at this point my internal editor/heckler–her name is Kimberly–starts snickering. (I’ll tell you more about Kimberly in a future post; all you need to know now is that she’s a snarky, ruthless bitch.) She hears the opening line that’s been rolling around in my head and says “Didn’t that meth lord guy say that on Breaking Bad in like season one or was that like Macbeth? It doesn’t matter, it still stinks. You’re not the one who knocks, you’re the one who stinks. And you can’t even smell. (See, I told you what she was like.)

I therefore put the nice, shiny notebook away and drag out some handmade ones that I assembled several years back out of unused handouts and old student evaluations. Kimberly messes with her hair–her hair is always perfect but she always complains she can’t do anything with it–and says “Changing to crappy paper won’t help. It’s just crap on crap. Stinky, stinky, stinky.” She sighs. “And how much time did you waste  making those nasty things when you could have been writing? How many blank notebooks do you have anyway?” My answer to that question is “shut up”. All she needs to know is I now have a moldering stack of old paper held together with rusting staples.

As I’ve been working on this blog I’ve discovered that one of the advantages of computer screens is that there’s nothing particularly tactile about writing on them. You never have that “my words are crap and will despoil these precious pages” moment. (Well, unless you own a Mac, in which case, yes you will.)

Kimberly just laughs at that. “I’ll be here whatever you choose, you loser. I’m precious that way.”

 

Slogging and Blathering and Assessing

1 Reply

Today’s post, unless I’ve miscounted, is post number 37 which means I’m 10% finished with this daily project. Since I’m coming down off a minor migraine, I’ve decided to assess what’s happened thus far and where I hope things will go from here.

I went in to this project with very little plan and I was worried about having enough interesting ideas. (Ha Ha Ha. Too late, DL, looks to me like you’ve already run out. That’s funny. Ha ha. I get it. Now shut up.) My friend Steve was much wiser in that respect, and his new daily poetry project looks interesting, too. On the other hand, having no plan gives me a much broader range of topics. But when you can go anywhere, where do you go first?

I keep a notebook of possible topics, but prefer to blather on about whatever strikes my interest on the day–hence haircuts and lots of stuff about marking exams. I want to keep a good portion of the possibles list as “I Got Nothin'” back-up topics.

I also decided by the end of the first week to limit myself to one hour of writing for each post. One of the reasons I haven’t done anything like this before–and also why I’m dubious about daily diaries–is the time spent on things that don’t necessarily pay. The consequences of the time limit have been mixed. Although it forces me to write quickly–I don’t count any prior notes or scribbled lines toward the time limit– I feel a number of the entries just kind of stopped without a satisfying concluding punch–The Corpse of Peace, for example.

I’ve also been worried about balancing the mix of serious, funny, seriously funny, falsely profound and downright tragic, but that might be a result of deciding how honest to get with all of this. I also don’t want this to be another version of the barely breathing The Crazy Japan Times, although I may start cross-posting some stuff over there.

I do have an eye toward readership–the blog’s been doing reasonably well thanks to Brad Dowdy of The Pen Addict including one of my posts in his regular Ink Links. (Note: that’s NOT the Ink Links my post is in.) I’ll probably add a tip jar one of these days, although that possibility changes depending on what day it is.

I also want to work on a couple connected series of posts, one about Albania and the Peace Corps, one about university and why I am a grad-school dropout and one tentatively involving “Daddyhood”. (Once again, though, I’m saving those for the “No, really, I got nothin’. Really, I don’t.” days

Thanks to everyone who’s commented, either on a post or on Facebook. I hope you’ll share these with others. I also hope I manage to keep your interest the rest of the way, despite cheating posts such as this.

 

 

Ask Me No Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies

1 Reply

A dirty little secret of being a teacher overseas is that you are one part educator, one part bald-faced liar. Well, you don’t start out that way; it’s just that you quickly learn that lying is part of the job.

More specifically, it’s a defense mechanism. When I was in Albania, a fairly common conversation would proceed something like this:

Albanian–Tell me how much is kilogram of meat in America?
Me–What’s a kilogram?

Well, that was an EARLY conversation. A few months later the conversation was more like:

Albanian–Tell me how much is kilogram of meat in America?
Me–What kind of meat?
Albanian–Beef steak.
Me–What kind of beef steak? There are different cuts.
Albanian–Just average kind.
Me–Well, in Kansas the cheapest kind was–
Albanian–No, New York City.

Substitute “kilogram of meat” with “liter of milk”, or “pack of cigarettes” or “car” or “house” and you start to get the idea of what we were going through. Eventually, we just gave up and started lying.

Therefore, by the end of the first year, the conversation went more like.

Albanian–Tell me how much is kilogram of meat in America?
Me–Twenty dollars.
Albanian–It is expensive, I think. How much is kilogram of chicken?
Me–Sixteen dollars.
Albanian–I see. How much is pack of cigarettes?
Me–Seventeen dollars and twenty-seven cents.
Albanian–(Lighting cheap Partizani Cigarette). America is bad place.

I justified it by telling myself that somewhere, somehow those things were actually those prices.

I wish I could say things had improved in the age of the internet and the smartphone, but even here in Japan teachers field questions such as “How much it cost to have wedding in America?” I always say “ten thousand dollars” and then watch while they start to do the math in their heads “102.23 times 10,000 equals” pulls out smartphone, uses calculator “Ahh, that is cheap I think.” I don’t tell them they can just head over to the Little White Chapel in Vegas and be married and out for a lot less. I also don’t say look it up.

Part of what gets to you is it isn’t always a way to lead into a broader conversation; you really are expected to be a kind of living breathing Wikipedia, and it gets old fairly quickly.

Luckily, no one’s ever looked up and called me on it. If they do, though, I’m ready for it.

“Well, I haven’t been home in a while. Things may have changed a bit.”

I try to be a good person. Really I do, but only as necessary.

Cut, Shaved and Therapized

2 Replies

I’d planned to go get a haircut today, but various events intervened: neighbors, the threat of rain, kids coming home from school with report cards and a dazed and confused teenager (but I repeat myself) who can’t read a map.

This, however, has me thinking about haircuts and my favorite places to get a haircut. In the USA, your choices are barber shops and stylists. Barber shops are primarily about sports, wisdom and life lessons–as one barber told me when he heard I was in Air Force ROTC: stupid, brain dead and moronic is no way to go through life, son. (Something like that. I can’t remember if he’d been a Marine or a soldier). Stylists shampoo your hair and then teach you about the transience of life and physical possessions by sculpting your hair into a shape you will never, ever, no matter how hard you try, be able to replicate on your own.

Albania, though, was an experience. For about 50 cents (if you were really splurging) you got a disturbingly fast dry haircut followed by a shave with a straight razor. That was followed by the application of a burning aftershave that was apparently the acidic by product of some sort of chemical weapons test and then the barber rubbed some sort of lotion on your face as part of a face and scalp massage. After days of extreme culture shock, it was better than drinking (well, it was cheaper than drinking) and better than visiting the Peace Corps nurse for counseling. Even the women in the Peace Corps were interested in getting a haircut at a men-only local place.

In Japan, as of late, you have a choice: therapy or a haircut.

Therapy: When I was in Nou-machi, my barber was Barber Ishii, an older woman of no determinable age whose hobby was taiko drumming. A haircut and shave from her involved first a pile of hot towels on your face for several minutes, followed by hot shaving cream and then a shave and a short face massage. Then came the haircut itself and then a shoulder and scalp massage. That’s when the taiko drumming skills and strong arms took over. By the time you’re done, the world is a great place and all your problems are just insignificant little things you don’t even need to ponder. All this for about 35 dollars, complimentary cup of coffee included. (And, usually, because I was a regular, free food of some sort to take home.)

Haircut: The last several years, the more expensive stylists have been competing with “Ten Dollar/Ten Minute” barber shops that promise a haircut cheap and fast. (In some stations, you can even get a haircut while you’re waiting for the train.) You get to give a few basic directions and the barbers go to town. If you time it right, you can sneak in a few extra minutes, and if you don’t like the results–they usually leave your hair too long, I suspect to keep you coming back regularly–they will take extra time and fix it. All that for 1,000 yen. I switched to them, partly because younger stylists have dropped the massage portion of the haircut but kept the price the same.

Still, whenever I get back to Nou-machi, if it’s not a national holiday, I head down to Barber Ishii for a haircut and some therapy.