It's beginning to look a lot like Halloween

Of all the luck, I’m at Hidaka sho an extra day this week but the teacher here that I’m conducting my secret scandalous affair with is off on a business trip.  Even without her though, I’ve had a GREAT day.  It was supposed to be really stressful and hard, too, an it’s been great.  Woke up with enough time to shower and eat breakfast, and I got to use my newly procured shower stool for the first time –honestly, the best thing ever and no, I don’t care how much it betrays about the progression of my cultural indoctrination here; I got to sit on my little stool while I showered and it was wonderful– got to school EARLY for the first time since maybe when used to take the B-5 bus to elementary school, found the dice and blocks I needed for the hairbrained game I hatched last night and finished my prep work for class in the NICK of time before class started.  6th grade in Hidaka, maybe my favorite group to teach.  The sensei are fantastic and fun, the classes are genki and enthusiastic and, on the whole, pretty darn good, and I get to teach them whatever the hell I want to.  Today we did: “How many X’s do you have?” “I have this many Xs.”  Pluralizations are really hard for them to learn, especially to learn the circumstances when we use the plural and when we use the singular.  So we started out with the old “throw things at the students” game, which my GOD I love doing: I launch something or some several things at a kid, the whole class asks him or her, “how many balls do you have?” and the kid says “I have two balls” or “I have no balls” or “I have sixteen balls.”  By the way, yeah, using balls makes this otherwise exciting activity hands-down hilarious.  Then we reviewed parts of the body, with a kid as the demonstration dummy and me poking and prodding him as the class answers what the parts of his body are called in English and Japanese, and then we played our game.  The Homeroom sensei and I would demonstrate: she rolls a big cube that I’ve taped the words, “head,” “foot,” “arm,” “hand,” “leg” and “body” to the six sides of, like a D6.  Head, it says.  “How many heads do you have,” she asks me.  I roll my normal 6.  “I have 5 heads!”  And she draws my five heads on her side of the board.  “How many legs do you have,” I ask her, rolling the big die.  “Three,” she answers.  It’s Halloween, I tell the kids, so we’re drawing each other as monsters.  They not only catch on right away, but really get into the activity, even using the English questions and answers and making great pictures of each other, which we all put up on the board afterwards with magnets.  Three classes of this; genki kids and good teachers to boot.  And afterwards, the teachers came up to me in the office room and told me that it was a GREAT class and they were really impressed and amazed that I’d thought of it on my own (especially as recently as last night) and that I was, they said, the best ALT they’d ever seen.  So that’s a pretty good day.

And AFTERWARDS, we carved pumpkins!  I had tried to include pumpkin carving as an activity for tomorrow’s Halloween Party here, but it got mega vetoed.  But the sixth grade teachers said that they wanted to do it anyway, and since I was here an extra day this week, we should make a special period out of it.  They got three HUUUUUUGE pumpkins from god knows where and we went outside with their classes and carved pumpkins together for like two hours and played and threw pumpkin gook at each other and got messy and had a wonderful time.  And I got to use the knives.  And the kids were totally into it and really great (although they were downright obsessive about cleaning out the insides of the things … one of the tops doesn’t fit back on anymore because they carved too much of the inside meat out around the opening …I tried to tell them it wasn’t a big deal, just scoop out the goop and start makin a face, but you know these folks: they do a job right to the end), and the pumpkins are awesome.  And the first ones anyone has ever seen like this (what the hell did the last ALT do during Halloween?  Isn’t this a no-brainer necessity activity?  Come on.).  And to think, I was stressed out about today.  

I still have to make my costume for tomorrow’s party (and I’ve seen some of the kids’ ones in the art room in the school – things involving paper mache and sewing and props and shit – I’m gonna have to not half-ass this one) and get some props for tomorrow night’s conversation class (we’re having a Halloween party and I need to get some snacks and stuff, and I want to get things so we can play the time-honored “stick your hand in the creepy jar” game, which will be hysterical with a group of old Japanese obaa-chans (grandmothers)), and set up my radio set for tomorrow afternoon’s recording session; but ya know, I think it should be a pretty good day.

workin late

want to go hooooooome.  still at work.  it's late.  will be here much later.  i want to go home.  blaaaaaaaaaah.  i want to be done with the work i have for tomorrow.  and this week.  it's a stressful week.  i want it to be next week and for it all to have gone well and for me to be done with it.  that would be awesome.  instead it's monday.  i have a halloween class to prepare materials for for tomorrow - monster drawing i think, with like twister spinners for parts of the body and dice for numbers of arms and legs, and practicing "i have ## _____s" with pictures of your partner.  I have three heads, I have ten eyes, etc. I have four chins, which will be hysterical because "chin" means "penis" in japanese if you say it with a cartoon mexican accent.  "Cheen."  If this were the states in a foreign language class and i had just told them that the name of part of their face is an interlinguistic homonym for male genetalia, you'd be sure that one of my kids would be bound to end up with four giant penises drawn sprouting at every angle from his head, but as it is i think they'll just giggle a lot and the teacher will look vaguely scandalized and i'll feign utter ignorance, the one impenetrable redoubt against the idiosyncrasies of teaching here. 

So while my computer was booting up (so slowly) I began to compose this post in my head, and it was supposed to start like this: “I’m sitting in my newly rearranged and freshly cleaned apartment debating a second McChicken sandwhich and wondering if I can remember all the cool things that happened today,” but, unfortunately, tragedy has struck and I have to start out my post like this:

I’m sitting in my newly rearranged and freshly cleaned apartment already regretting a second McChicken sandwhich, and mildly regretting the first as well, and trying to remember all the cool stuff that happened today. “MacDonald’s,” I can hear you ask, incredulous, “you’re eating at MacDonald’s?”

Well let me tell you a thing or two: there is, firstly, a tremendous amount of value in things tasting exactly like you expect them to, especially in a place where even when you brace and condition yourself to expect it to just taste like that fish-smell in chinatown, you’re just never really prepared for it anyway and at the odd times when you realize you’re eating it anyway and not really minding, you think maybe you’re losing your soul. That’s thing one. Thing two is that it’s late and I don’t feel like cooking, because I wouldn’t do my dishes before going to bed and then when I woke up tomorrow it wouldn’t feel as neat and tidy in here as it now will; thing three is of course that going through the MacDonald’s drive-through on my bike FREAKS these people out and there’s no easy way for them to tell me that I can’t because I can’t understand what they’re saying to me and it becomes easier, at a point, just to let me do it. It reeeeally screws with their tacit rule system, and I love it. Also, the drive-through’s open till 11. And did you know that they don’t make you wait at a little window for your food, but let you drive to the front or park and then they BRING IT OUT TO YOUR CAR. Nuts, these people are: nuts. It’s a land o service here, you don’t know the half.

So today is the middle of a glorious three-day weekend, Monday being the national holiday in commemeration of Japan’s first hosting of the Olympics (they take this stuff seriously over here); and this particular acation made all the more sweet and tasty by the fact that I didn’t make aaaaaaaaany kind of big plans; I got to do all my dishes, vaccum, clean, rearrange, put my bed away for the first time in weeks, do some house shopping (I now happily sport a bevy of colored tea-candles in little stone holders all over my pad, which freaked out the japanese guests I had over last week – they discreetly blew them all out at opportune moments when I wasn’t looking; a display of what I interpret as a deeply set architecturocultural fear of fire), I’ve got laundry going through a conveyor belt cycle so I can get through it all, and I’m even airing out my futon. Friday I went out with my friend Hiroko from the Bari Bari (that’s the radio call sign) station, first a nice Italian kind of resterant in a town called Toyo about an hour away and then walking on the beach between here and Matsuyama, black inky sky and black inky water and brown sand under foot, both of us exhausted and resolutely denying it; it was a fun time and a nice change from our normal coffee dates. I can’t tell if it was supposed to be a ‘date’ date or what; I really don’t think so and it didn’t feel like one during, but afterwards we sent short “I had a nice time” emails and then suddenly I got to wondering, but I think it was only the exhaustion that played tricks on my mind.

Speaking of, I’m BEAT. And I think I’m getting up for morning keiko (that’s shorthand for ‘Aikido class’) tomorrow; since there’s no work afterwards I can just go back to sleep once it’s done, and going won’t make me late or overtired for anything important later on. I got an unspecified date-ish kind of thing¾playdate is a word that should re-enter my vocabulary¾I got a playdate tomorrow with the supercute teacher at one of my schools, and that’s exciting but not something that interferes with morning keiko, so it looks like it’s on. Lots of keiko is going to be more and more important because I just got told that I’M TESTING in DECEMBER! December 3^rd our shihan (ie: Super Jedi Teacher, our official pedagogical link to the AikiSource) will come down to run testing and I’ll be going for Ikkyu, the rank before black belt (which, should I pass, I can test for next December, they all tell me excitedly). Which is awesome, because I get to humiliate my new friends and teachers in front of their official sponsor jedi. My only hope is that if we’re forced to commit seppukku afterwards, I get to watch at least one of the other guys go first, those sons of bitches. Don’t scoff the seppukku idea; it’s not as if at least one person won’t bring a three hundred year old live-blade knife to the test just in case; shit like that really goes down here, like today in my friend Murakami san’s parent’s house, where he called his father into the room for a conversation that went something like:

“Hey pop, where’s the sword?”

“Which sword? Your sword? It’s over in that closet I think.”

“In these drawers at the bottom?”

“No, above, behind those doors that are held shut with a pencil.”
And Murakami san takes out a $15,000 wakizashi and its accompanying $1,000 bag, beautiful and light and precious, and we play with it for a while before they put it back in the closet and clost the doors with the pencil through the handles.

Going to bed for now, I’ll explain all about how I got to Murakami san’s parents’ house tomorrow.

Subarashi yume,

(By the way, my test is supposed to include, amongs many other things, a four minute free-technique bout; four minutes of being attacked and narrowly escaping certain death ... i mean, uh, tossin out some cans o whupassssssssss. Bring it, baby. BRING IT!!!!! WHOOO!!!!!!!!)

nothin special

I'm having a nice day today at Miska-sho, the fifth of my four schools and the one in downtown Imabari (if it can be said to have a downtown).  I taught four fun if nearly identical classes on counting and numbers, got to throw balls and magnets and markers at kids (rapidly, and in quantity), and in one class the other sensei even played gunner’s mate with an armful of books, standing next to me so I could here whip them across the room at the pack of frenziedly counting children.  1 book.  2 books.  3 books and a magnet.  4 books, 3 balls, 4 magnets and a marker, fi …you get the idea.  I also had one kid spontaneously "SUP!" me in the hallway, and, although not hardly as loud as it really needed to be, it was a great start.  I will break this country, I swear it.  

Aikido last night was really great too, even though I got the holy hell kicked out of me by a man old enough to be my great-grandfather and tough enough to clear the guerillas out of the Colombian rainforest, who also told me I should start doing pushups with the backs of my hands on the floor to toughen up my wrists (and he demonstrated).  Yeah, whatever.  Thanks, old-timer.  Here, I'll go do that while you go tow this schoolbus through the city with your teeth.  I have to go cry now.At the end of class he started talking to me in his almost completely indecipherable old-japanese-man voice, a long speech the only (terrifying) parts of which I could catch were: "test," "you," "next," and "ganbaru," which is the japanese equivalent of Good Luck, and is dispensed with the intended connotation of "fightfightfight!"  Me? Test? Next? Fightfightfight?  Oooohhhhhhhhhhmygodohmygodohmygod.But there's no sayin' No to a man like that.  He could kill you. 

After class they asked me to come to Namikata, another nearby town, for more training but I had to go record my show at the FM BARI BARI station.  Always fun but a bit different this week, on account of the new radio season starting with the new month.  They’ve moved my time slot and I can’t do the show live anymore, which is poopy, and now it’s at a crappy time, which is even poopier: Friday at 11-11:30 and again at 4, which means that it’s during the workday and no one I know can listen to it.  I’m part of the gaijin block of daily airtime, and I guess it doesn’t get a lot of listeners.  But there’s new schedule come April, so I’ve got a while to change their minds …

Next week I can record the radio show at a different time and be able to go to the after-class class, which means both more training, more high-level partner training, and more flirting time with this girl named Mari, 20 years old and a really good 5kyu, only been in aikido for a while but LOVES it, and is super cute to top things all off.  She has a boyfriend, but I don’t know that, so the flirting’s all all right.  

Otay, gonna go read or something, maybe find somewhere to take a nap.
More soon,

School Daze

So hi!  I’m writing from work today, at Tamagawa junior high school, where I’ve just secretly installed the Blogger for Word toolbar on the office computer to make it look vastly more innocuous when I’m sitting here for huge chunks of time when everyone else is working.  Thanks, Blogger!

And I should probably be working too; today’s pretty much a no-brainer (the JH classes are much less inclusive so far than the Elementary school ones, where it’s pretty much my show to run) except for the 3rd-year elective class where I might need to plan a bit more; but the rest of the week is real work.  Tomorrow should be a breeze but Wednesday needs some thinkin’ for: Wednesday is my day at Hidaka Sho, the largest and closest-by of my five schools, not to mention the one with the best collection of really attractive young teachers.  One of them, Yoshimatsu Michi sensei, whooooooo-ooo! is she cute!  We flirt some but the only place to do it is in the staff room, so it’s only in these short bursts.  She cute though.  Anyway, last Wednesday we sat down at the end of the day to plan out the coming week’s lesson, me and the 6th grade teachers; the school is big enough that I get one grade on any given day I go there, and it works its way down from 6th to 1st before starting over.  So next week I get the 6th graders, who have AWESOME teachers named Matsumoto and Higashino, and they said that I could pick between two topics to plan a lesson around: countries of the world, or Halloween.  Well.  Since I’m not sure if I could do an entire lesson around Yakko Warner’s “Nations of the World” song (although it could be kind of completely amazing), it becomes an even easier question than it ought to have been: Halloween.  The problem is, this week’s class is still almost a good month before Halloween, so it would be kind of silly to get all dressed up and Halloweeny when it’s just too early for it.  So I proposed a plan, and the vice principal (‘kyoto sensei,’ everywhere) thought it was great and OK’d it: we’ll do a Halloween lesson each week for the next 3 with the 6th, 5th, and 4th graders, and then in the last week of the month we’ll have a giant Halloween party in the gym!!  It’s GENIUS!!!!!  So we get three weeks to prepare and stuff, and then I get to throw a Halloween party.  So I need to figure out before Wednesday what exactly that entails.  Obviously, costumes: I want to see cowboys, pirates, the walking dead, robots, anime characters, gundams, demons, you name it walking through the taikukan (gym) at the end of the month.  So maybe some costume vocabulary, and maybe a costume-making session?  Obviously, Halloween vocabulary: scary, candy, boo!, witch, ghost, trick-or-treat, costume, etc.  Also, tactile vocabulary: squishy, gross, sharp, gooey, cold, warm, etc., for playing the “pass around the creepy items” game.  Jack-o-lanterns: I’m not sure if we can get real pumpkins in quantity on the school budget, but maybe each class can make 1 jack-o-lantern (voting on designs, selecting carvers) and then there can be a contest at the party.  And we can make them on paper too I guess, to decorate the gym with.  Trick-or-treating; tell me, someone, what’s the trick part of that?  What can I make kids do to earn treats?  Language games or physical challenges I guess.  Suggestions?  I can have different sensei around the gym with different challenges, too.  That would be fun.  Maybe we can bake pumpkin seeds too.  Any more suggestions, please send ‘em my way; I got to plan this out and plan out the party too, and SOON!

And Tuesday’s no good for planning because I’ve got a DATE! with Ayako!  It’s date #3, we’re meeting in Matsuyama at 7 or 8ish and then catching dinner; she’s curfewed at midnight (no, it’s not what you’re thinking, she’s not like 15 or something, it’s just the living-with-parents and parents-being-unreasonable business, the former being a Japanese youth-culture characteristic and the latter being more globally prevalent) and I’ve got to make the last train home at 11:15, so it’s just a quick dinner date, but still exciting.  

Okay, can’t wait to tell you all about my weekend full of adventure, but for now I gotta go look busier.