Category Archives: Random

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.

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.

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.

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.