Solving the Energy Crisis

I’m so tired today! I’ve had a busy week/weekend with a lot of martial arts, a lot of Christmas shopping and a lot of friend and girlfriend time, and today I’m reeling from it all. If I don’t get a full night’s sleep tonight I’ll die on my feet in class tomorrow. The funny thing is I don’t even want to go rest, I just want to go do more aikido. If I were in keiko (practice) right now I would be the awake-est, genki-est kid on the planet...it’s only the times outside of aikido that I feel tired. Recently I discovered the expression “genki wo morau,” meaning that you got energized by something, or literally that you receive genkiness (“feelin’ peppy”-ness) from something. At the end of an aikido class last week when we were all exhausted and sweaty and had trained really hard, I was glowing from being so happy and one of my sempai said, “jeez, how are you so genki right now?” I said, “I was tired all day but as soon as we started training I got all this energy from you guys.” The response was “thief! Give it back!” I love aikido. Tonight I want to go to keiko in the nearby town of Namikata, but I feel like I have to be prudent and take care of my leaving-the-country preparations (which are significant). I don’t want my last day here to be too frantic and awful...but knowing my track record, there exists a good chance that Thursday afternoon will find me crying into a half-empty suitcase as I contemplate going out to buy one last missing present for a friend back home with an hour left before my bus leaves for Tokyo. If only I had done all this last week, then I could be doing more aikido!

I'm a-Comin' Home!

I'm coming home! ON FRIDAY! FOR THREE WEEKS!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!


I have been super busy gift shopping and figuring out what to bring back and cleaning my house. It's exciting but also stressful, and the truth is I have no idea what I'm going to do when I get back. I want to see friends and family, I want to just relax and be with people, watch American television and go to the movies, get a cup of free-refill coffee, hear some new jokes. I'm coming home!!! YAY!

May the Schwartz Be With You!

Hot Pockets

In Japan people buy boxes of these little chemical-filled heat packs that go in your pockets and in your shoes and on your backs underneath your shirt (they come in adhesive appliqué or as little baggies). Today the school’s special needs teacher, Maki sensei, asked me if we use these heat-packs in other countries. A better question is, Why do they use them in Japan? The answer to that one is that it is freezing cold inside schools and homes in Japan for about five or six months of the year. This is most pronounced in schools, which are horribly cold all winter long. But Maki sensei and I start to talk about this, and it ends up being a really nice conversation. We talk about building styles and school uniforms, and also the way that effecting new changes works in Japan vs other countries, and about how, from an outsider’s perspective, the strictness of the system here seems only cruel and unreasonable even if it seems like “just the way you do things" from the inside. (If you need an example of “cruel and unreasonable strictness,” girls here are required to wear skirts all year round, even if it’s a 15 below 0-degrees with a 20-degree windchill and hail. I am not exaggerating.) But I said that if Maki sensei were teaching in America, she would surely spy out a million crazinesses that escape the average American.

It was really neat having this as a “good conversation” instead of a “rant about Japan.” It was also neat being listened to and talking to someone on the inside, and getting to use all these new words I’ve learned. I’ve been studying with the JET language correspondence course, and I really have learned a lot, even in only the first month. I got to use all kinds of new words, like “progress” and “mail” and “call for” and “compliment” and a bunch more, and I got to use new tenses for giving and receiving actions and things; it was so cool! I even had to think back to the dialogues in the textbook and be like, “what was that expression that Pochi the Puppy’s father kept using? That's what I want to say right now.” It was really awesome—studying totally rocks. Every day I study, my skills get a little tighter and their base a little broader, and everything gets a little easier to use. Go, studying! ROCK ON STUDYING! WOO!

Surprise!

On today's awesome list: although aikido class was only mediocre, jodo class was freaking awesome. I get there and start to put down my stuff and take out my jo (fighty-stick) and the head honcho teacher--the only guy who gets to wear all white like a crazy old stick-wielding jedi man--he comes up to me and says, "let's do it." HELL YES. Let's GO, old man. And he gave me a really great class, like a one hour private lesson really, and I got way, way better during it. I figured out a lot of the things I'd been having trouble with, and I made him laugh a lot (with me...with me) and I just felt like a million bucks. He is not only a really good jodo guy, but also a really good teacher. Like, he gave me lots of encouragement and advice: he even said--get this--he said that I was great at handling a sword, that he was very surprised I hadn't had formal sword-art training, and that if I was this good at the stuff, this good at responding to the things he was telling me to do, and this into it all, that I was probably a samurai. THAT IS FUCKING AWESOME. THE ANCIENT SAMURAI MAN SAID I WAS LIKE A SAMURAI. I AM AMAAAAAZING!

He ALSO said that if I keep going at the rate I'm going at now, I'll be a shoe-in for a blackbelt in August. Now I know that that's not the end-all be-all of doing martial arts...but WOOHOO! I could leave Japan with a black belt in aikido and a black belt in jodo! I would be so cool! I wonder how many other black belts I can pick up while I'm here. I better take up something else in a hurry. Can you get a black belt in like, tea ceremony? Or BABES?

BABES???

Today's Highlights

I woke up today with the same cold that I'd gone to sleep with last night, and I woke up as late into this morning as I had retired into the sneezy, coughy evening before it. This meant that I was late to work, but I was at my lovely middle school in Tamagawa and no one really minded, even though I had class first period.

The kids mostly floundered when they had to do on-the-spot presentations today, but one kid. Hiroshi, whom I adore despite his inability to heretofore display any real progress in English, he just stole the show. He had to talk about “a place I want to visit” and started out saying in Japanese over and over to himself, “oh crap! umm, a place I want to visit...place I want to visit...a place...” right up until I was going to give him a leading question, but just before I spoke he started going. All in one breath, he said, “I want to travel all over the world. I very much want to go to China and the United States, because China is the most beautiful country and the United States is the most popular country to visit. I want to go there and eat the country’s popular foods, for example American pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers.” I was totally bowled over: he was so good! That’s more than I can say in Japanese! I was so, so super proud of him. He had it in him the whole time! What a great kid. It was a great breakthrough for him.

Naked Swimming Pool Aikido

Can I explain it any better than just saying, "naked swimming pool aikido?" I probably can, but it's late now and I'm very tired from doing aikido randori naked in a swimming pool with four friends for over an hour. Can I also say that it was the most fun thing in the world? This is the strangest country ever.

Presto!

Hey Obies, did you know you can still log into Presto? How funny is that! I just looked over all my stuff and saw my transcript and things, and tried to Add/Drop a Winter Term project for 2007 (apparently I need to go pick up my time card from the registrar's office). Yeah, just enter your T# (it still rolls off the memory like your own first name once you see that prompt) and hit "Forgot Your Pin?" and you can get in no problem. Dude, I was awesome! I graduated with Honors in English and a 3.43! Fuckin' hell yes! Sure, I could have done better and that sucks, but holy crap! I'm awesome!

AND, when I was biking home today, two hot Japanese girls holla'd me down from their car at a stoplight! I got holla'd on my BIKE from TWO GIRLS IN A CAR. They were all, "Wayne! Wayne!" I'm like, "I'm not Wayne, bitches!" They're all, "daaaamn, you're not Wayne!" in Japanese, and then we held up traffic for a while and I put the mack down. I ain't making this shit up! I AM A GOLDEN GOD! A GOD!