HA!

This picture is inappropriate. Whatever.

I'm tellin' ya, October's gonna be than September.

perfect 10

Hello October. Even though it rained all day today, and even though I found myself drinking wine by myself in my apartment last night, You will be significantly better than September because September sucked a lot and any other month would be hard pressed to surpass its suckiness. September was the worst September I could remember in ages, and that's pretty bad because September is usually when the new school year starts after summer, you know, back when I had to go to school and all. I have high hopes for You, October. Don't fuck me over like how that little bitch September did.

I hope you all have good Octobers too.

KIDS SUCK

WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH JAPANESE CHILDREN??? 

There's this OBSESSION with infiltrating other people's private body parts. Have you ever been kancho'd?? That's "child induced enema" to those who don't speak Japanese. Clasp your hands together, fold down your last three fingers, you now have a lethal anal weapon to pugnaciously thrust into any ass hole you please, as many times you can get away with.  They think it's funny. It's not. One kid slapped my breasts and called "oppai sensei" or "breast teacher" for the duration of the entire hour-long lesson and has called me oppai sensei every subsequent lesson thereafter. Kids shout "chin-chin" (penis) through the whole lesson. And this is not just little shits, a TEENAGE student GRABBED my boob once after lessons. I was probably that burgeoning pervert's first post-pubescent boob, and he probably wanks off to it as I type. You know what you're doing when you're 14 years old. 

I think I hate the parents more than the kids for raising such stupid, disrespectful children. They're dangerous too. My students wear name tags that are attached to their clothing with bobby pins, and some will wave the pointy end around recklessly, trying to poke each others' eyes out because kids are such vengeful brats. I've had a kid throw magnets into every corner of the room, including the small space behind the television set, and in his effort to retrieve the magnets he almost tips over the set, and had I not seen it in time, it would have landed directly onto another child's head. Shitty Japanese kids are bad, but nothing's worse than a dead, shitty Japanese kid. And their silent killers! Their diseases! DIRTY, GERMY, SNOT KIDS. I think they're all out to get me. I think my tonsillitis is coming back.   

It's funny when you're in school and sometimes you might think your teachers are out to get you, well, now I know they are. I'm out to get you, it's my defense mechanism so you can't get to me first. 

 

sea change

The date on this post is actually September 10th. I'm continuing on an earlier draft from August 25th that I never "published", but it's funny how you know in your gut that life will just pull the chair from right under ya, and you're on the floor, pissing and moaning about your ass hurting even though you saw it all coming:

I'm stooping on someone else's apartment right now and feelin' zen. The weather has been less-Oprah's armpit lately. There's really no point to this post, more free write than anything. 

August has been a strange month, and now that it's about to end I feel an approaching sea change.  I'm applying for an internship in Hong Kong. I mean, it's gonna be tough to get but I'm optimistic. Actually, I want it fucking badly. And just the act of thinking about leaving has me all contemplative. Getting it means I'll have to leave Japan. Leaving everything I've known and grown accustomed to for the last nine months and starting over again, again. As much as I try to act spontaneous and free-spirited, I'm naturally a creature of habit, and change is plain unnerving. 

So yeah, as predicted, a lot has changed and I'm going to summon the reserves to pick myself back up again. I haven't heard from Hong Kong yet and as much as I want it, it doesn't matter if I don't, there will be other jobs. What has my wheels spinnin' is the whole idea of leaving. I'm not happy here anymore. Japan is starting to wear on me. 

tranquil

At the very end of my tonsillitis post I mentioned my chest hurt. Turns out that the month-long pain around my left boob was just imaginary, said Bubbe, requoting the diagnosis from the doctor's visit last Monday. 

IMAGINARY? Explain! 

This is what I understood from her translation: Taking deep breaths are not good for you. 

What?? 

Yes, she said. You're stressed out and taking really big breaths unconsciously. Big breaths cause superfluous intake of CO2 and that causes the pain in my chest. Just relax and the pain will go away. 

I said, well that's a relief. 

And then the doctor prescribed me some pills, pills that were described in Bubbe's Japanese-to-English dictionary as "tranquilizers." Fantastic. I'm on them right now and feel better already. 

it's alive

This last week has been punctuated by moot stress. I have convincing evidence my hair thinned a bit during this time. For nothing! 

The following is a long keitai-mail I sent my dear friend Joe this morning.  It sums up what I've been up to lately. 

"I had a minor nervous breakdown a moment ago when my ipod wouldn't turn on. my laptop's dead already, i woulda jumped on the next plane home if i lost the tunes too. it came back to the light after frantic power-button cpr. i curse japan and my appliance dependency. oh home! ive had sooo many lost in translation moments lately, especially transportation. i usually call the office so they'll get a taxi for my taxi school but THEY WERE CLOSED BECAUSE IT WAS SUNDAY. hmm funny...i guess SUNDAYS ARENT WORK DAYS UNLESS YOU ARE AN NT. so i called my own taxi somehow just repeating hachiji over and over to the receiving end and luckily a taxi came at 8. then [the company] fucked up my train tickets and i had to cancel them and buy new ones, literally scraped the bottom of my purse for the yens to pay for it with a minute left b4 the last train leaves. fri night after work i had to pretend to fall asleep once i got on the train bc i only had enough to pay for the stop before. the ticket guy pushed me awake once he realized i 'slept' past my stop and i faked 'HONTO?!?' he bought it and i ran off once the train stopped and jumped the wicket. i want my car = (" 

Chronologically, "week of unnecessary stress" starts with coming home to a comatose laptop. Macky-B had been purchased only a year and a half ago and I never download anything, so until then it was running like any other shiny new toy. So when the damn thing wouldn't turn on after numerous attempts I was devastated. In a place where nothing's familiar, a pitch black screen can be one of the most daunting. Slipped into transience was not only my DVD, music player, but also all those photos, videos, term papers, etc that had been stored in non-backed up fashion (who actually does that anyway?).  If this sounds anything like my lost-Internet post all the ways back in Beppu Beat time, it was actually way worse. It's like waking up, finding your arm (which was all good and army every day since fetal development) on the floor, not knowing how your arm detached and made itself useless, and being fucked over with the whole attachment bit. Okay, it might not be THAT bad, but my MacBook became laptopy carcass. I was busy every day from work so I had no time take it somewhere to get it fixed. On the upside, it being gone meant I had more time to study for the GREs, play lotsa guitar, get lotsa reading done, and I had an excuse to not reply to mounting emails (or compose blog entries). Freedom from material attachment...yadayada. 

(All's well though! I was thisclose to sending it to Apple, but I'm typing on the little shit-tease right now! After floating in purgatory for a week, it decided to come back to life! I still probably wont get to all those emails in due time. Oh, I love my pretty little Mac.) 

At the same time the company's dreaded Summer School kicked off. I'll gloss over that; I hate talking about work. Basically for eight straight days my life consisted of scuttling for about 12 hours a day. It was awful, I'm beyond glad it's over and now I can go back to my job sucking as usual. 

So after a bad week everything is right in the world now, woohoo, I've learned nothing from this and I'm still stuck in Kyushu. 

mommy dearest

So about a month ago what started off as a routine sore throat soon developed into an actual pain in the neck, one the size and consistency of an average walnut lodged right below my left jaw. It felt like I was shot in the face. The medley of accompanied symptoms included vicious headaches, a high fever, the chills, and my defeated, pathetic sick puppy of a self, bemoaning illness. I might have exaggerated the pain to anyone within earshot to gain unsolicited pity, but you're allowed to when you're sick. I cursed and casted blame on my filthy students for thinking it's funny to lick and sneeze all over an otherwise healthy sensei.  

Had I been at home I would have just weakly exasperated to Mom who would have cured me before I could even say lickity. But you can imagine how it's way more difficult here, especially if you only have enough language skills to order food off a menu with pictures. It would have saved me a lot of pain if going to the doctor consisted of pointing to an illustrated menu of symptoms and saying please.   

Friends suggested I should "probably go get that checked out." I'm aware I should have. But I had several reservations. The most minor being I didn't want to use up my sick days while I was actually sick. The most pressing was not knowing where to "go" to "go get that checked out" and having no idea how to communicate the "that" of "probably go get that checked out" even if I found the place to go. And incredible pain and discomfort aside, even if I did jump those locational and verbal hurdles (I could have just asked for directions to a hospital, found a nurse and pointed at the protrusion on my neck) there was then the price of good health. I aint insured, hun! Crossing my fingers that I would heal on own my was appealingly free of charge! It's so much more fun spending yens on things other than doctor's fees and prescription mediation. 

  

So my stubbornly stupid or stupidly stubborn self settled on self-medication. I tested Mom-approved home remedies, but I soon learned that eating healthy, gargling salt water, and sipping hot lemonade and honey only works if it's administered by your doting mother during a mild cold. And I guess taking six Advils every few hours numbed the pain but it didn't actually improve the situation. Seeking some sort of answer, I tried diagnosing myself on the Internet (which I now believe causes acute hypochondria) but Googling ambiguous search terms like "sore throat" and "pain in the neck" led me to believe my ailment could be any number of peculiar diseases. Goitres, cancerous lymph nodes, thyroid malfunction (never mind that mostly pre-menopausal women suffer from that)! Oh my! 

I think the hardest part to being sick is admitting you need help. It took me awhile but I finally accepted I was sick and not getting any better. I reached a feeble hand to my cell phone and called the one person who could help me, a mother. My sympathetic Japanese Okaasan eagerly whisked me to a throat doctor, patiently helped me translate my pain, instructed me to open my jaw as requested by the doctor, explained to me that I caught tonsillitis after the doctor's inspection (TONSILLITIS!! I SHAKE MY FIST AT THOSE THOSE BASTARD CHILDREN!), dealt with all the administrative stuff, and showed me how to swallow the meds. She stopped short of wiping my ass. My swollen, bacteria-laden salivary glands went back to being unobtrusive in about a week. I was back to my genki self.     

There's probably a lesson in this. My chest hurts. 

"what's wrong with me?"

I realized the other day I'm only as neurotic as the book I'm reading. Not good because, one, I thought all this time I had something of my own intrinsic personality, and secondly, since I'm reading "The Corrections", I'm currently depressingly, obsessively analytical. This entry has taken me an hour to write.  

all those bugs busy buzzing 'round

I HATE JAPANESE VERMIN. I feel like I'm in a Brobdingnag voyage---they're huge! I saw a spider the size of my hand one night, hanging out on the bathroom tiles welcoming me to be petrified by it. The fuckers are surfacing everywhere in this humidity. I counted at least eight large spiders and one Big Daddy sunning themselves and being all spider-like on Nakatsu school's front door. I entered and exited through the back door the whole week to avoid contact. ANDANDAND!!! MOSQUITOS ARE EVERYWHERE AND THEY LOVE CHINESE FOOD. I lose sleep over them because I hear them. They wake me up from slumber, mockingly buzzing near my ear, tummies full of my blood. One morning I woke up with seven bites all over my body. My largest accumulated mosquito-bite-total stands at 11. It looked like I had leprosy. 

A few months back I saw the first harbinger of the upcoming months' insect infestation---ROADKILL CENTIPEDE, guts and all festering about. If you can see an insect's insides, you know it's big. I wondered aloud if was some deranged kid's house pet that escaped, because nothing that mortifying could naturally surface from the ground. There are plenty of (less) creepy-crawlies like ants or ladybugs roaming around already. I insisted to my sanity that the centipede was a renegade pet an unpleasant person kept as testament to their strangeness, like people who raise iguanas or keep bats in cages or whatever. But NO, I WAS WRONG. CENTIPEDES ARE EVERYWHERE. I saw another one recently sauntering across the road as if it's were allowed to be exposed to human sight, that asshole! I ran away and screamed bloody murder. What what was it doing walking on my sidewalk?? What was it doing breathing my air??  

If I wasn't so scared of them I would smash every insect to pieces or obliterate them all nuclearly--but I have a feeling radiation exposure would just cause them to mutate, grow larger, and spiteful of humans. I think the first atomic bomb caused them to grow this large in the first place. 

Can insects read? I now have a slight irrational fear they will kill me in my sleep for posting this.  

potty mouth

This entry was inspired by last week's bathroom banter with a coworker at an izakaya. Without going into too much detail--I peed, I wiped, I postured, then I hollered to the next stall over:

"WHY DO ALL JAPANESE WOMEN FOLD THE FUCKING TOILET PAPER INTO A TRIANGLE?!"

After said holler, a fit of giggles surfaces from a bystander. Twas an English-speaking Japanese woman! So I doth implore: "WHYWHYWHHYY must you make me feel bad for not folding the toilet paper into a triangle after I use it?" 

She replieth: "Because I get bored when I go pee!" 

"Oh...does it matter if I can't fold it back as neatly as I found it?"  

She continued giggling. I think she was too polite to tell me that I probably shouldn't bother. 

Thus begins The Beat's Japanese bathroom enigma analysis (for women at least). Only in Japan would urination merit a proper blog entry.

Enigma-1: Toilet paper triangles. 

Toilet paper triangle in an upscale hotel, sure. Toilet paper triangle at the communal in Starbucks, whyy? It's a nice gesture, but I don't need your help to find the end of the roll. I don't want to think about your grimy hands delicately folding a perfectly symmetrical toilet paper triangle while I'm peeing. I don't want to feel guilty for not folding the toilet paper back into a triangle so the next person can conveniently wipe too. If you're doing it just because you're bored, as in the aforementioned anecdote, why don't you bring a book instead? 

Enigma-2: Bathroom slippers are always worn in the bathroom. 

Fair enough for the Eastern-style toilets, which is basically just a hole in the floor you squat over (where bodily excrement could splash about if you can't aim well) but why are the ubiquitous slippers found in Western-style bathrooms as well? I wont launch a scientific study comparing the amount of floor bacteria in the respective rooms, but I'm betting the Japanese style floors have way more icks and ews. There really is no reason to protect your feet while using a Western toilet, actual Westerners sure don't. I venture to guess that Japanese people are so used to wearing footwear in bathrooms that they carried it over to the Western counterpart. This segues to to...

Enigma-3: If the Japanese are so afraid of possible unsanitary exposures, then where are the damn toilet seat covers? 

I'm a squatter. I will never EVER sit on a public toilet seat, who knows what combination of fuck's on the seat, and if there is only one other squatter like me it merits my hover. After living here for 6 months, I now prefer the floor toilet over the seat for public peeing. I'm gonna say it's actually more sanitary to squat over the floor because there's a bigger surface area to aim pee versus the smaller circumference of a seat. Plus, less porcelain-to-skin contact is desirable. So if the Japanese wear slippers to protect their feet, why don't they have seat covers to protect their exposed ass? They don't hover; them women actually sit on the seat, even on public toilets! I don't get it! It seems to be a cultural attitude that naked skin is always clean. This brings me back to a doctor's visitation a few months ago when I was asked to change into a robe and sit bare assed on the wax-paper-less examination table. Perhaps hundreds of actual diseased patients are screened on that table!! But there it was, a pleathered, germy, cushioned table. I shuddered, held my tongue for sake of cultural sensitivity and carried on. What was I talking about again?

Enigma-4: The automated flush sound. 

I love those nifty washlets with aim-accurate bidets, sprays, and charming musical tones as much as the next foreigner. Some of those toilets even have automated deodorizers that make your ones and twos smell like spring flowers! BUT, I'll never understand why there's an option to play the built-in flush sound when it makes the actual flush sound when you, well, actually flush. 

That's about all I have to say about that.