Small Things

Things to rejoice about today include:

According to Sitemeter, someone reached my page by MSN searching for

Japanese Toilet Ettiquete

This is awesome.

A Letter Home, of Sorts

This comes somewhat out of nowhere, especially after my vague but terrible last week which I haven't really shared anything concrete about, but I thought this was funny so I'd share it. I'll still share about what's completely stupid and awful with me in good time, but, you know, here's some yuks first.

A letter home.

Dear Pabst Brewing Co.,

My name is Josh Bisker. I'm a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, a smalltown campus community which prides itself on (amongst other things) the apocryphal and self-spread rumor that we are the biggest per-capita consumer of PBR in the nation. (Please, don't spoil our illusion.) In fact our girls rugby team, legitimately one of the fiercest in the 50 states, has their name and logo modeled after PBR's, for love of the brew: Pretty Bad-Ass Rugby (and I know they were in some negotiations with you to get official sponsorship, but I don't know where it ever went). Across my four years at Oberlin, particularly my post-21 year and a half at Oberlin, ahem, I got to be quite the lover of a cold, nickel-cheap can of Pabst (or a bottle! I saw them in bottles once!).

Well, now I've graduated. Moved on to a new life--and this one's in Japan. I like it in Japan. Lots of good living to be done around here. I teach English to small and unbelievably adorable little children; I train martial arts with old Jedi-like men; I eat a geat deal (a GREAT DEAL) of very excellent seafood; I've even got a nice Japanese girlfriend these days. And, sometimes, I go out drinking. The Japanese, they like drinking. They do their drinking very differently than we do ours however, and while in some ways it's much more more formalized, it also much more regularly reaches sloppy excesses; rarely does one drink here in a relaxed, "I feel like a beer" kind of way. Which takes, as you may imagine, a good deal of the niceness out of it: when the drinking becomes another obligatory part of ritualized socialization, not a choice or a fun option, then, well, it sucks. Not that millions of Americans don't drink in exactly this same way, but rather that here in Japan everyone's on the same approving page about obligatory social binge drinking, and back home it seemed like the mindless binge drinking folks remain largely in the dark about mindless binge drinking being what they're doing. Why's it different here?

Well, it's no secret to any of us that alcohol can help smooth the flow of conversation where it is otherwise coming slowly, and this trait finds particular focus where drinking in concerned in Japan: a place where by anyone's standards, people have no idea how to talk to other people about anything. Folks here are by and large terrified by spontaneous socialization and expression. Stymied, silent. The formalized drink-til-we-drop setting can really be one of the only ways for people to open their mouths in front of each other, except to utter the occaisional, forceful, "Hai!" Unfortunately, when they do finally start to come around to talking to each other, or to you, they're drunk. And what's something people talk about when they're drunk? Yes: they talk about drinking.

A friend will corner you, and say, "Ah, Joshuu ... which do you like better, beer, or Japanese sake, or wine?" And you, drinking a beer, will say, "Well, I like them all I guess. But usually I drink beer." And your friend will say...

"Ahhhhhh, so you do not like wine."
"Well, no. I like wine."
"Ahhhhhh, but you like beer!"
"Well, yes. Yes, I like wine and beer."
"Ahhhhhh, so! You do not like, ahhhhhh, JAPANESE SAKE!"
"No, no. I like Japanese sake just fine."
"Ahhhhhhhaha! You would like to drink Japanese sake with me right now!"
"No, no no. I am drinking a beer."
"So! So desu ne. You do not like wine."
"Right, I do not like wine. You got me."
"Joshuu, we should go....we should go out for to go have drinking sometime together."
"We're drinking right now. That's what we're doing right now."
"Ahhhhh, hahaha. So: do you like ... Japanese sake? Or, beer?"
"Well. Well you asked me this."
"Ahhhhh, sososososo. So, doooooo, do you like better wine, or japanese sake? Or beer!"
"I'm drinking beer right now?"
"Ahh, because you do not like japanese sake. So. Ne. But we should have a time to go out drinking. Together!"
"That's ... we're doing that right now. That is the thing that we're doing, right now."
"So, Joshuuu: If you wanted beer or japanese sake, which would you like better?"
"..."

It goes on. This conversation series, if it can be called that, is punctuated by another question related to imbibing: you friends will ask you, do you like Japanese beer? The honest answer to this is no. "No. No, I do not like the stuff, the made-from-rice-and-vegetables, sour, watery, foamey-like-the-sea beer-substitute that passes, expensively, for beer in this place. If you brought this to Germany, five-hundred-year-old men would claw their way out of the soil to find you and kill you for what you have done with the joyful, delicious thing that their legacy has bestowed upon you." And after you've been asked this kind of thing enough times in a sitting, you throw your polite societable face to the wind, and you use as much Japanese vocabulary as you can muster to say something like that to the folks who continue to pester you about it. Scandal. Big scandal. But curiosity follows feau-paux, and, if anything, it is to provoke curiosity which is a fundamental rationale behind this isolated island nation's invitation for me to live and work here. From this new curiosity, this uncertain outcome, someone will ask me, "well, what is your favorite beer?"

And then, friends, come the stories of Pabst, the Blue Ribbon Beer. I can regail them like kids 'round a campfire: "no joke - thirty cans to a box! Thirty! And at the supermarket, it was only ... 12 dollars!" Numbers roll behind rolled up eyes, currencies are converted, division is done, and then gasps and screams shudder between my comrades. And no one can quite understand when I explain why I love it so much, why that's the taste that'll bring homesick tears to my eyes when I try, and fail, to bring its memory back to my senses. I remember overbuying beer for a party that no one came to, I'll tell them, and we had maybe two hundred mixed cans left in the bottom three feet of our fridge but you'd dig, DIG for a PBR, and when there were none to be found in the sea of High-Lifes and Beasts, then by God, we went out and bought some Pabst so we could go on living life like we wanted (though oh lord, did it take forever to get rid of those million other beer cans). Oh Pabst, good PBR, it's like the mark of home to me in this strange and far away place.

Which is why, good friends at the Pabst Brewing Co., why I am writing: where can find a pack of PBR in Nihon? We've got four big islands. A bustling crop of world-class big cities. Small country pubs by the bajillion. Is there any Pabst? Please let me know if you can help me, you've got a loyal costomer reaching out to you. When I get back home I'll have a Blue Ribbon Beer in hand before I put my bags down, but that may not be for years yet to come. In the meantime, PBR me ASAP, please.

Lovingly yours,
-Josh

Incidentally, the makers of Molson's Canadian will be recieving a nearly identical letter in the very immediate future. Both letters cleverly include my address. Who knows? They've got tons of beer around, they could totally send me some.

More to come soon. Bikes, cars, hospitals, X-rays, whiskey, white-water-rafting, science museums, fights with people who are possibly your girlfriend, non-English speaking English teachers ... you name it, it's here. Yeesh.

Summary, in Haiku

was that yohgurt bad?
stomach's all woogley oogley...
whiskey's a no-no.

can't i be upset?
i wanted to talk, but now
i'm comforting you.

cleaned out my roommates
but now i'm living alone.
before, i had bugs!

hope it's okay that
the one thing i understood
was to practice more

ETA's T-PLUS.
anytime now would be fine.
"T-PLUS ONE HOUR."

a bit wobbly, but
pinkish isn't black and blue.
guess it's not broken?

if it were raining
wasting my day being sad
wouldn't be so dumb

even-steven crash:
graceless head-on collision /
landed on my feet

not that it's not sweet,
but instead of being bummed,
ask if i'm ok.

no, day-glo orchids,
one thing's louder than your shirt:
my four plunky strings.

"T-PLUS TWO HOURS."
this is not a vacation
I'm still in my house

i hope your yelling
helps one of us learn to play
the ukulele


more to come. for now, sleeping. and worried, yohgurt-induced fever dreams.

Send me messages,

I am having a rough week.