a clown, a friend, a princess

An inconvenience to the plans I had had for the last hour of school today—these being to search for and copy down ukulele tablature on the internet while abstractly contemplating tomorrow’s lessons at elementary school—I have been asked if I would like to go to a meeting being held by the principle of another school. Which means, "There’s a meeting at 3:00. It’s in Japanese. You are expected to attend. It ends half an hour after you are supposed to go home." Boo! But then they told me there will be tea and sweet cakes. Hooray!

***

It's tonight, I've eaten and am going soon to sweet sweet bed. I left work an hour and fifteen minutes after I was supposed to today, not fifteen. The meeting was long, and in Japanese, and at the end of a long day. Did I mention it was in Japanese? In the afternoon when I was asked "if I would like to go" and was feeling somewhat testy about it I tried to counter, saying that if they wanted me to go then I would be happy to, so is that really the question? I made a bigger deal out of it than I should have I suppose; I knew what they meant. I think I was already a bit keyed-up at the teacher who was trying to ask me to go, my handler Matsumoto sensei. He's an infuriatingly poor communicator and very much a buffoon, and talking with him usually puts me into something of a sour mood. He is in fact the first person I have ever known who immediately calls the word, that word, buffoon, into the forefront of your brain from the cobwebbed collection of one-liners from plays and comic books that stays stuffed under the bed where your good ideas sleep at night. The kids play with him, but he is not really a player in their games; a sometime prop, a sometime intrusion, Matsumoto sensei. He's young, it's his first year at the school. Music and art. And because he also has the role of being my special handler (I have one at each of my schools and at the office) he "team-teaches" the third and sixth grades with me. I have been trying to be more communicative more in advance about lesson ideas, reasoning that at this point I should probably just accept that a general intuition will not surface to help him or myself out during class; so yes, I try to up the communication on my end, but it remains difficult. Interestingly enough, it is when comunication becomes really frustrating with people like Matsumoto sensei that I find myself speaking only in English instead of what would be obviously more helpful, which is speaking in Japanese. It will often be things I know how to say, or at least how to get across with the Japanese I know. But I won't use it. It'll run through my head in Japanese in a little reel, and I will calmly, testily sign-speak in English, ignoring it. "Then we'll play rocks-paper-scissors and the winner gets one of the other guy's play business cards." The minutes go by. I used to not understand the phenominon of why I refuse to speak Japanese in moments like these, but having given it some thought I believe it could be called, "passive-aggressiveness." See? I get it now.

The buffoon Matsumoto sensei is counterpointed by Ide (that's, "ee-day," folks) sensei. Who is wonderful. He's a great friend at that school, and we would see each other outside of school too except that he's a new father and his spare moments are spent lovingly and exhaustingly at home. He speaks English with a great deal of natural expressiveness and feeling. When he talks he's real. Ide sensei came through as my morale hero this afternoon before the meeting, when upon seeing me walk into the room he greets me, double-takes, and says, "wait, are you going to understand any of this?" I give him the enormous, sarcastic, sure-faced nod where YES means HELL NO, and he says, "well, then you shouldn't have to be here!" Someone whispers to him that the vice principal told me to come, and he starts to walk out of the room to find the principle so she can excuse me, but I had figured out by then that the real reason I was there was so that our principal could show me off to the other principal who was visiting for the meeting, so I told him not to worry about it. Honestly though, the fact that he not only noticed that something was amiss about my being there but then went to access the Heirarchy and try to FIX it make it all feel OK. He's a real one, that Ide sensei. No robot there; he notices things, he's real.

And then of course there's Yuriko. Whoops! I mean "Kimura sensei." She's the PE teacher, although you could also correctly identify her as THE FUN, AWESOME TEACHER I'M HAVING A SECRET AFFAIR WITH!!!!! Not affair as in married woman affair, don't worry. Affair as in kind of a relationship but not really a relationship relationship. A romantic project let's say, to steal (not coin) a good term. Yuriko is pretty great, and we like each other; it's cuddly and kind of sweet and pretty darn nice. Like, genuine likeage going on for us. And the school we're at together isn't the one that's right in my neighborhood, so we don't have to hide hide hide in the mornings from the schoolkids that live in my building. One interesting factor in our current happy involvement is that Yuriko is moving to Kyoto as of April 1st (unless she's fooling, har har har), so it's not such a big invested kind of thing. Sure it's sad, but maybe also kind of perfect. We like each other, but there's no real need to think very far outside the boundaries of, "when's our next date?" Also, it leaves me mostly guilt-free about pursuing other concurrent romantic projects; not that I'm going to end up dating more than one girl at the same time (I should be so lucky, nu?), but I can keep myself feeling—and more importantly and truthfully, seeming—like I'm available; after all, the impending truth of actual availability is only about six weeks away. Hmm. Bittersweet, this one ... well, more happy than that. Semisweet? And speaking of, Happy Valentines Day.