I Am Completely Serious

Bonze’s egg! (That’s my box, not the one he used. It had 100-yen-shop marbles in it.)

Continue reading “Stuff”

Today was full of loud, obnoxious middle schoolers. But they were all loud and obnoxious in ways that managed to be cute, so I forgive them.

The windows were all open because it was hot. Naturally, Mee threatened to throw my stuff out them when she lost games. (She never actually did because she is sometimes kinda responsible.) We played a game that used the paper faces - I’ve never made one of Conan, but today I decided to use the Devil’s to represent her. Mee saw immediately that the face was not really her sister: “Conan’s cuter than that!” This is from a young lady who frequently repurposes her homework writing assignments to the important work of maligning her sibling.

Jerkface was finally back today. I was worried that I might have traumatized him, but apparently he was worried he might have ticked me off irreversibly - he was extra-good the whole class, all whispering Ken’ichi and Bonze words they couldn’t get and helping me clean up.

He was still loud and quickly-distracted, because he can’t help that, but he didn’t try any wrestling or shoving the whole class. Maybe I’ve finally gotten through to him on that?

He was asking me a bunch of questions - all in Japanese, of course. He wanted me to explain Alaska to him. This is difficult given his limited English vocabulary. (His problem with Alaska is that it is really big and is not attached to the rest of the United States on the classroom map.) He also asked what my “English name” is. It’s Sarah? You know my name, dude. “No, no, your long name.” It is, indeed, long. I repeated it for him, and added a “the third” to the end. “Whoa! That’s too long!”

After their class (which is my last for the day), the manager came in and asked me to come keep an eye on Leo, whose parents were late picking him up again, requiring that he bug the juku teachers and make a lot of noise.

I can now add Leo to my list of kids who cheat at cards. He lied pretty much constantly when we were playing Go Fish. When the stack was down to six cards and he hadn’t admitted to anything I needed for like seven turns, I said, “You know, if there’s only two players, you shouldn’t bluff at Go Fish.”

“I do not lie,” he informed me indignantly in English. He was, of course, lying. (He doesn’t have what I would identify as a Russian accent in English - he sounds pretty Japanese to me.)

Me having been defeated by his treachery, we switched to Old Maid. When we were down to two and three cards each, he had the Old Maid, and refused to let me draw any other card from his hand. He wouldn’t let go of them. You are subtle, my friend.

In non-middle-schooler-related news:

1) Conan taught Mr. Yodeler the Proper Way To Draw A Melon. There’s only one right way! You’re a bossy child, Miss Conan.

2) Zuzu accused me of being in my thirties, which, obviously, made it necessary that I stop class and write my actual age on the board. (I said, “No, no, no! Twenty-three! Now be quiet!” Cookie observed accurately, “You’re the one who’s being loud.”) Apparently I don’t care what she suggests about my gender, but I do care about the age thing? You’d think it’d be the other way around.

Anyway, youngest sibling - next time you see History Teacher, tell him I apologize for the thing where we thought he was like in his late thirties to early forties.

3) Mr. Sleepyhead is just as bad an ambulance driver as he is a doctor. He stopped to say hi to some dudes. I think he bought some juice, too.

When I was a kid, I remember reading this very didactic Jetsons comic book* where computer animation was evil because it was incapable of producing true art, and also put true artists out of work. Luckily, the computers the big evil animation company is using break down, so they realize the error of their ways, and Elroy saves the day by making a bunch of robots to hand-draw the animation.

The divide there seemed kind of arbitrary to me even as a ten-year-old.**

I wonder if I can find scans?

* I think it was a comic book, and not an episode of the cartoon; I have this image of a big speech bubble over Elroy’s head.

** I have no idea when I would have read this, but I’m assuming this whole thing was about Toy Story. Though I guess they could’ve been reacting to ReBoot, or maybe Donkey Kong Country? But those were still just a year earlier.

(spoilers for general premise of the angel series)

Continue reading “sharon shinn your books age SO POORLY”

Miss Extreme, one of my adult students, is into rock climbing, skiing, and other dangerous leisure activities. This weekend it was too wet for her to go rock climbing like she’d planned, so she did this instead.

Apparently it tickles. She showed me a picture of her feet being swarmed by flesh-eating fish. “I don’t recommend it,” she said. “I’d wanted to try it for a while, but…”

Because you are cheap, and an apparently nonexistent brand.

Did I just spend several hours looking at kimono on Ichiroya and carefully archiving the ones I liked on Flickr? Yes, I did. I made a “want” tag.

I think Japanese grocery stores artificially scent their produce sections with whatever fruit they’re currently pushing. The Uoroku’s present strawberry scent is intense and pervasive. I keep accidentally buying strawberries.

So, uh, I understand the psychology of this - but I don’t know why this drugstore I went into yesterday smelled like myrrh. It was just a normal drugstore, not some kind of drugstore/head shop cross-breed. Is the scent of myrrh supposed to encourage spending on luxury items live expensive conditioner? Maybe someone just spilled something myrrh-scented.

lacrimawanders invited me to a kitsuke class with her last night, and loaned me a kimono to practice with - she is awesome! I wore a kimono properly for the first time! Almost all by myself the third try! (Except for the obi, which I STILL MAINTAIN is impossible to put on on one’s own.) lacrimawanders actually did do it all by herself, which awes me. This is an incredibly complex process.

(I also sat seiza-style for long periods of time, which is very painful.)

And due to lacrimawanders’s vast knowledge of stores in Niigata, I now know where to buy Dr. Bronner’s. This is incredibly exciting to me.

The variety of the contents of my fridge has a direct effect on my mood. Today I opened it and saw that I had fish, ramen, broccoli, eggs, fava beans, tomato sauce, cheese, cake, strawberries, soy milk, guava nectar, whiskey, chocolate syrup, margarine, and orange juice, and was so rendered immediately happy. And then I ate the strawberries and half the cheese, thus decreasing the variety of the fridge, and so my happiness upon the next occasion I open it.

I did go to the tea stall in the grocery and buy Presumably Quality Tea. I got a small package of 500-yen loose-leaf stuff, which smells very smoky and serious, but doesn’t actually have a lot of taste. To use Terminology, it lacks body. So I’ll probably buy some other kind of expensive tea next time. The tea lady was not snotty, as I had predicted - she got very enthusiastic explaining the tea stamp card to me. Evidently it gets you some free tea when you fill it up. In general, when Japanese commerce inflicts stamp cards on me, the cashiers look at me uncomfortably, say “stamp card desu,” and hope I don’t ask any questions. Maybe she hadn’t had many customers that day.

The universe decided to make up for a hideous Tuesday-through-Thursday with an extremely excellent Friday and Saturday.

Jerkface did not show up (which does worry me a little - the manager said his parents had called and said he had stuff to do, but I’m still going to fret about it), but Bonze and Ken’ichi did. And Bonze gave me a present that made my whole week.

As he was coming in the door for class, he said in Japanese, “Oh! I forgot. I have an egg.” He stopped and dug around in his bag, and pulled out a tiny tupperware box, which he opened. Inside was a tiny egg - a little bigger than a quail egg - carefully tucked into in some tissues. He said, “It’s for you,” and took the egg out of the box and handed it to me, then put the box away.

I said in English, “An egg! Thank you so much! …is it a chicken egg?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Yay! Thank you!” (”Yay” is my generic happy word.) Having no suitable container for a tiny egg, I went over and made a little tissue-nest for it on the shelf. We sat down to play a game which required splitting the ABC cards between us.

The “e” card has a picture of an egg on it. Ken’ichi ended up with that one. Picking the card up to admire it, Bonze said, “You have the egg! Can I trade you for it?” Eggs are clearly very important to Bonze.

As he was putting his shoes on at the end of class I asked him, “Is it from Bonze’s chicken?” There were little stains on the egg, which along with its size suggested to me it hadn’t come from a store.

“No, no.”

“Mama’s chicken? Papa’s chicken? Grandmother’s chicken?” He shook his head, very shy about the egg, and left.

I asked the manager why he thought Bonze had given me a tiny egg. He said, “Ohhh. Bonze’s family keeps chickens. It must be one of their eggs. Oh, no! He probably thought it would hatch and you’d have a baby chicken!”

I said, “It’s an intimidating present! It has Bonze’s heart in it!”

“Taihen da na!”

Though I’m sure he was underestimating Bonze’s intelligence, here. (It’s unfortunately easy to do, because he’s so quiet and tiny. Jerkface knows better!) A kid whose family raises chickens is probbbably going to know that an undersized egg he’s carried around in his bag is not going to hatch. I also assume he has the sense not to give an egg he thinks might hatch to someone who may not be prepared for parenthood.

Nonetheless, I’m not sure what to do with Bonze’s egg. Should I eat it? I googled around, and it looks like it’s safe to eat these kinds of eggs. But then, Bonze did have it in his bag for at least two hours, and it was another hour and a half before I could get it home. Is the egg safe to eat? I’d feel really bad about just tossing it…

I feel very flattered that Bonze gave me an egg from his beloved chickens, but it really does feel like an intimidating gift.

The rest of the last couple days:

Continue reading “The Bonze and the Wind Egg”

While you read this, please imagine an eleven-year-old girl with huge teased hair in gigantic purple clip, lying on the floor with her eyes closed, me standing grumpily over her holding up a textbook from which I have been attempting to induce her to read.

ME: Goody Proctor.

GOODY PROCTOR: …pineapple.

ME: Pineapple?

GOODY PROCTOR: <Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Do you know?>

ME: …that would be Spongebob, Goody Proctor.

GOODY PROCTOR: <Ding ding ding.>

ME: Why Spongebob, Goody Proctor?

GOODY PROCTOR: <Because I love him.> I love Spongebob!

ME: Will you get married?

GOODY PROCTOR: <He’s cute!>

ME: I’m very happy for both of you.

Miss Foo had a very bad day yesterday, and I had to pick her up a lot. I just took a shower to de-Foo-ify myself. (I only shower every other day, normally.)

Mr. Weepy really is a malevolent little kid. Miss Foo’s mom came into the classroom to calm her down yesterday, and at one point I’d just gotten her involved enough in a game that she didn’t notice when her mom slipped out - and Mr. Weepy taps her on the shoulder and says, smirking, “Hey, Miss Foo! Your mom’s gone!” So she started crying again.

Continue reading “English English English”

Continue reading “English!”

Someone stop me, I’m going out to buy feta cheese.

There used to be an empty lot I had to go through on my way to the mall. One morning at the end of March or beginning of April, still sleepy, I was walking to the mall, and found that there was suddenly construction in that lot. Cement had been poured, and the ground was higher than it had been. This seemed unlikely to me; for a moment I wasn’t sure if I was in the real world or in a video game. I tried to check my inventory.

Continue reading “Persistence of location”

I made another kid cry today. Cut for length.

My dreams don’t stay in bed all day; they follow me around.

I accidentally got mad at Mr. K today. I’m really sorry, Mr. K. I’ll bring in a special coloring sheet or something for you next week.

Curry made with shabu-shabu beef.

WELL YOU CAN’T STOP ALL OF US

I’m being serious. My reaction to that was to get even more inspired about MY BRILLIANT THING. I looked at the screenshots and thought, “you know, I should probably look around and see if people have posted example game files using Ruby, to get an idea how flexible that is,” and also had an idea about the sprite problem. I might be able to use Magus’s glide animation! I suffer from persistent self-destructive behavioral patterns!

See, the thing I don’t get is why they don’t care about normal fanfic. Okay, so there are two things I do not get, because I also don’t understand why they care at all - but given that they clearly do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t extend to all forms of derivative creative works.

Or, rather: maybe I do see why they care, in the abstract. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I’ve read that Square Enix rewrote the ending of the DS port of Chrono Trigger to make it more consistent with the sequel, Chrono Cross. This was not popular with a lot of the more old-school fans, who frequently prefer to think of the events of Chrono Cross as being non-Chrono Trigger-canonical. (Spoilers: Chrono Cross puts Lucca in a refrigerator.)

The impression this gives me is that someone on the Square Enix creative team is one of those people who identifies so strongly with the story they want to tell that they feel a literal sense of trespass when other people play around in it.* (See: Jo Walton**.) They feel that they have suffered an injury; and the present state of copyright law appears to validate them in this. So, they use it to attack the people whom they perceive as having hurt them.

Cut for length.