I Am Completely Serious

I am presently downloading the opening credits of the Conan the Barbarian cartoon series, “Conan the Adventurer,” so I can teach a little girl named Konon to sing the song. (“Conan! Adventurer! Conan! Warrior without fear!”) This obviously makes me the best teacher ever, so please give me like awards and stuff.

My new rice-cooker has a digital timer, settings for three different types of rice, power-saving features, and much more pleasant colors than the old one. It lacks only one feature: the ability to tell me when the rice is done.

I resolve to drink more heavily and more often.

(Why did I let them put me in northern Japan?! People only eat white miso up here! The miso aisle at the store only had two kinds of red!)

The other day it occurred to me that I was the only person in the office who spoke English.

So I started writing steampunk-themed gay erotica.

It was just kind of instinctive.

After a few minutes I realized someone was standing next to me. I looked up and oh shit white eight-year-old, why the hell is the only anglophone kid in Niigata prefecture standing right here.

I covered my notebook with my hand: “No! Secret!”

He shrugged and walked over to tug on Manager’s coat. Manager said, “Oh! You’re here! Hey, Sarah, let’s hear you guys talk English!”

I said, “Hi. What’s your name?”

He looked at me warily, then hid behind Manager. Manager poked his shoulder. “Leo, come on, answer.”

Leo said disgustedly, in Japanese, “I don’t speak English.”

Manager said, “Yeah, he speaks Russian.”

I said, “Oh. Good.”

So today I read Anita Blake on the laptop.

I’ve been having the kids play a game where they race origami fish across the floor by blowing on them. Yesterday one girl was having trouble getting hers to move, mostly because she was blowing from the wrong angle. She complained to me (in Japanese), “I can’t do it!” I said (in English), “Oh, yes you can!”

The two other girls immediately jumped up and began to chant, “Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”

“Oh!” I said. “Obama fans?”

“Obama-fan!” they said, and laughed as if this was the second-funniest phrase in the world. (The funniest is “chicken points” – the kids earn chicken points and get to hold the stuffed chicken (and be the “chicken mama”) if they win a game, see. It’s been an extremely successful initiative.)

The girl whose fish would not move crossed her arms defiantly and began chanting, “No, we can’t! No, we can’t! No, we can’t!” The other two girls joined in.

I said, “You know, you guys are way too young to be this cynical about the political process,” which words they did not understand, but which tone they did, for they all rolled their eyes at me. (This class is all ages 10 to 12, incidentally.) And then I had to go grab the class’s lone boy, who was mopily trying to deform the foam ABCs again, and bully him into blowing on his fish.

Where did they learn this? I mean, I assume they’ve heard “Yes, we can!” on the news, but where did they get the “No, we can’t”? Their pronunciation was perfect, too. Is there stuff going on on Japanese TV of which I’m unaware?

I don’t really eat it in the US. But somehow, on this side of the Atlantic, its frequent presence on a stick mysteriously makes it desirable.

I have successfully purchased pots, pans, dishes, towels, toiletries, and much of the other general moving-type stuff. I’m going to wait until I get my first paycheck before getting anything more heavy-weight, ie, shelving stuff.

My apartment is very poorly designed. Very. Continue reading “Turns out it is kinda cold out.”

I walked home in heavy snow tonight. The sun went down hours ago, but the bright blue-white streetlights on the snow made it feel like just dusk – the streets looked bizarre and desaturated, like a black-and-white photo. It’s very quiet. I saw only a few sets of footprints aside from my own.

Someone had come along just after someone else and, realizing that she and her predecessor wore the same boots, matched her stride perfectly to the other’s, making it look as if a single person had gone down the street, hopping, two feet planted firmly beside each other. Near the apartment I saw hard little prints that looked like a deer’s, meandering alongside a set of bootprints. The feet were too close together to be a deer; I think someone who lives near here puts shoes on their dog.

For most of the sidewalk home, though, I was the first person who had walked there in at least half an hour. Everyone else here drives.

Mr. K, age 7, had to color his coloring sheet just like the pictures in the textbook. When I closed it, he frowned at me and opened it again. And he only wanted one crayon at a time, so he would color something, solemnly hand the crayon back to me, say, “Brown please” and then “Thank you,” caaaarefully color in two dots of brown for the pepperoni on the pizza, and then hand it back. “White please.” The paper was already white! It didn’t need to be colored! But Mr. K nonetheless felt it necessary to go over the bits of the picture that were white in the book with the white crayons.

Those of you who are not presently reading the brilliantly-named webcomic “Vampirates” might do well to examine the most recent page and consider the gaping hole that would be left in your life had you not seen it.

Though the page is spoilery. If you want to know why you should read the comic without resorting to spoilers:

1) The vampirates are Canadian and are taking a boat to Saskatchewan (landlocked).

2) Apparently what Canadian vampire pirates do is, they lobby for health care reform. I know! I didn’t think it would top their list, but apparently yes.

3) It is very pretty with a good sense of flow in panel design. (Well, the people are very pretty – it’s not much for backgrounds, unfortunately.)

4) It is sort of BL, but has excellent female characters, one of whom is the Obligatory Person Who Keeps Saying, “Don’t Worry, I’ll Protect You.”

5) If none of that did it for you, go ahead and click on the link up there.

6) It’s called Vampirates.

(Though I warn you now that if you get into it, its iffy update schedule will break your heart over and over.)

It’s forty minutes long, contains only one student, and covers material I’ve already prepped for three other classes.

Yet I have still have to be in the office the full eight hours.

I think the laptop will be accompanying me on Thursdays.

Yup. We were drawing pictures, and he abruptly decided his wasn’t good enough, so he jumped up, ran outside, sat in his Mommy’s lap, and cried for the last five minutes of class. I’d been warned that he was pretty timid, but he seemed fine until right up until the end of the number flashcards, which was why I switched to drawing. Apparently this was not soothing enough.

I’d actually been told that an entirely different kid today was a perennial crier, but the girl in question showed zero sign of that in front of me. She did, however, encourage her friend to run out of the room with her at one point. I’ve only been doing this three days, but I’m already noticing a pattern: The female students that the previous (male) teacher says are shy and weepy are exactly the ones who see me, narrow their eyes, and start trying to pick a fight. For certain little girls, tears are power.

Yes!

Also (stolen from Kottke), look what’s already happened to whitehouse.gov! CC-licensing! Sane robots.txt! This stuff is only exciting if you are a huge nerd! Exclamation points!

Its image management. The metadata for JPEGs includes tags. I can tag my photos offline! And Windows Photo Gallery Live allows you to upload to Flickr, and actually works right! (Flickr Uploadr doesn’t seem to work with Vista – I’ve been using jUploadr instead. The problem is probably Microsoft’s fault, but it’s nice that they’ve set up a work-around.)

Also, there’s a feature that allows you to offset the timestamps of a batch of images to correct for inaccurate timestamps. This is A Good Thing – I get this problem a lot due to my habit of switching time zones. (Japan is thirteen hours ahead of Kentucky. I live in the future. Thirteen hours in the future.)

However, as with all things Vista, there are caveats. Cut for caveats. (They’re long.)

Continue reading “I’ve discovered the One Good Thing about Vista.”

A conversation overheard on Friday:

English Teacher: What color? What color crayon? You already have the red. Purple? Peach?

Japanese Four-Year-Old: Hada! (Translation: skin.)

English Teacher: What? …No. This is peach. “Peach!”

Japanese Four-Year-Old (encouraged by Sensei’s wince): Hada hada hada hada!

English Teacher, patiently: No. Peach.

Japanese Four-Year-Old continues to chant “hada” for about thirty seconds before covering his dog picture with red, to indicate that it is bleeding, or possible that it has eaten somebody.

So it turns out Japanese crayon boxes have/had the same racial issues as American ones. Good to know.

It had been drizzling all day, but a few minutes from my apartment it turned into a downpour, and then suddenly hail, coming horizontally from behind, like being hit in the back with birdshot. I immediately forgot where I was. I got my map out, and now the ink from the notes I made on it is running.

Though I spent most of my time in Tokyo being bludgeoned to death with textbooks with amusing names (Strategies in Speaking?), I did have a couple days to wander around and be touristy. I took a bunch of photos, but need to sort through them before I upload them. Never trust a cheap cameraphone to give photos logical filenames! My King Metal Slime pictures are all mixed up with my Imperial Palace pictures. I will try to post them here in the next couple days.

Oh, and I taught small children English all by myself. Assigned homework, even! The first three classes were fine. The last had a dreadful parent who made me quiz his son for a test way above his present level, thus rendering me complicit in the destruction of the child’s self-esteem. I did not assign this student homework. And I will kill his dad.

Just like the book! Except with fewer prostitutes. And I lost my train ticket. (“Act like you don’t speak Japanese,” advised Tanizaki-sensei*, escorting me to the school. “Nihongo wo tabemasen.” “Right, exactly.” They didn’t bother to stop me, though.)

(I wonder if Snow Country would exist in the form it does if the shinkansen had been around in Kawabata’s day. Probably the pace would be different.)

Until the present teacher moves out of the apartment on Sunday, they have me in a hotel room by the train station, a hotel room which I believe to be extremely inexpensive. The rooms have actual keys, not cards, and the stairwell is being used to store a lot of boxes of things. I hope the building doesn’t catch fire while I’m here. The lights in the room do not turn on unless you put a little red stick attached to the keys into a slot by the door, ensuring that the lights are not left on in an empty room. (This is actually a pretty good idea…) And you have to turn your keys in when you leave; you get them back when you come back. I know that they recognize me because I’m the white girl, but do they really get so few patrons that this works all the time?

But there is a restaurant attached that has inexpensive and basically acceptable kimchi ramen. And the internet works, which is a step up.

Training was very tiring and I will get all fretful if I talk about it. It’s technically not over yet, I still have to do two more days with the present teacher supervising me.

And I’m very sleepy now and need to go to bed.

* This is not his real name; I’m sticking to my policy of giving everyone made-up names. Tanizaki-sensei is named after Yukari-sensei from Azumanga Daioh, based on his habit of saying deeply inappropriate things, and on Junichiro Tanizaki, based on his being kinda weird.

I’m sorry, I just don’t need any erotic figurines right now.

I’m in a company apartment for training; I’ll be sharing it with two other girls, who aren’t here yet. People who have previously stayed here abandoned many books, including several on aromatherapy.

I have to open the door to the balcony to get the wireless to connect, which is too bad as it is cold out. So I’m going to go make cocoa and read instead. Not the aromatherapy books, something else.