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.

RABU, UKE, X Y Z

Tomorrow morning is my big ukulelelele debut! Our Hawaiian Band in performing tomorrow inside of the mall in Imabari, and there are to be many many hula dancing children there to draw a crowd. Actually it’s more like the other way around, that the dancers are some kind of local community group thing and we’re there giving them music. But we’re performing! It’s totally exciting. I have been practicing up a storm, I’m sure much to the delight of my neighbors and schoolchildren (yes, I even practice at school). Last night I went and practiced with the band leader Ya-Chin at his bar, and he said I was in good shape. Whew! There’s some strange business about who’s actually performing though – I think it was supposed to just be the four real band guys minus the junior ukulele chorus, but Ya-Chin had told me about it a few weeks ago so I asked him for the details again at practice on Tuesday. Everybody seemed a little put on the spot, but I couldn’t entirely follow the conversation that went on afterwards. I guess the ukulele girls weren’t expecting to play? Or they were, but weren’t expecting me to play too? I’m not really sure about it all. One of them, Miho chan (she's on the left in the picture), seemed to say that it was great that I was going to play because the girls weren’t allowed to perform with the group yet. But again, I’m not really sure about any of it. Alls I know is that tomorrow morning I’m putting on my best Hawaiian shirt and playing my little fingers off for a crowded mall of strangers, and I’m thrilled about it.

Not entirely strangers. Yuu-chan is coming, and she’s bringing her older sister (whose name, I kid you not, is Mai) and the sister’s boyfriend, and afterwards we’ll go double date somewhere in Imabari. This will be my first double date since high school when it was the lamest thing I may have ever done ever in the entire world. Then girlfriend Katie and I went out with our friends Will and Jess for a feaux fancy dinner at an Italian place that was only one in a long line of unremarkable and identical restaurants that each folded and reopened with different personnel on the same site across from the Starbucks in New Rochelle, each doomed from conception for lack of parking or even a body of potentially interested clientele. It was pretty super lame. An empty place with thick air and bored waiters, the inside decorated entirely in terracotta—“the color of sicily,” to use a line from Snow Crash—and the food hearty enough to weight down any kind of light hearted conersation. I guess we went there to try to feel adulty? That seems to have been a priority around then. Now I’m just hoping that tomorrow we can go out for pizza and milkshakes or make out in a movie theater, but alas, neither of these are necessarily viable options where I’m living right now. Does anybody else double date? Is this a thing that happens outside of movies about the fifties?

The date is not on my worry list though; things are going great with Yuu-chan. The only difficulty recently has been from an email the other day; it was entirely in Japanese except for her salutation at the bottom: “LOVEU.” I have no idea what to reply to that, or even in fact what it means. As for the first point, me I’m comfortably staying at “I like you” for the time being, because while I do like her quite a lot, that’s about as far as my verbal commitment level is going right now three weeks into a relationship. Moreover, I have no idea what LOVEU really means to Yuu chan. As far as relationship-speak goes in Japanese, lots of words from English have come across into common usage, but their meanings, weights, values and nuances have mutated during the transition. When people use English words in Japanese, there’s often no clear connection between the meaning they’re trying to get across and the sign you think they’re employing. There’s no easy way, for example, to connect the sign and signifier for something like “RABURABU,” which is everyday Japanspeak for “love love.” When people say, “you and your girlfriend, is it RABURABU?” what answer could possibly be correct? Best steer clear. Sorry, Yuu-chan. But I’m excited she’s coming to see me play tomorrow. I hope she RABUs the show. I know I will.

Soup for One

There was no school lunch to eat while I was working at the town office a couple weeks ago, and mostly I’d go to the Circle K on the corner and get some sushi or onigiri and maybe a sandwich, and either I’d take them back to the office or, if I could find any kids around I’d eat outside and hang out with them until break was over. But because it was rainy one day and I felt like sitting somewhere and actually having a meal, I went out to the Udon shop across the street. As far as I can tell, it is one of a slim three locations where you can get food of any kind in the town of Tamagawa, and this includes the Circle K, but still, I’ve never been there before. For one thing, I live closer to the city Imabari than to the town-let Tamagawa, so I end up doing most of my hunting and gathering down there. And anyway, whenever I’m in Tamagawa it’s because I’m working, ergo I’ve got a lukewarm and protein-rich lunch full of fish heads and kelp waiting for me at school. Neither of these are the real reason I’ve never gone into the place; really, it’s just because it’s scary to go into new places.

Maybe not scary. Well, sometimes scary. More like difficult though. It’s difficult to go into a new place. There are certain obvious reasons why: sometimes it’s that you know you just can’t read whatever they’re going to show you, and this can be rather dissuasive by itself. Sometimes the menu is indecipherable and sometimes there aren’t menus, just rows of identical looking vertical signs tacked ceiling height onto the walls around the counter. In these cases, even when you can read some of the signs, you feel like a bit of an idiot standing on your tiptoes and squinting real hard for ten minutes straight at a sign that says something like, EGGS, TWO DOLLARS. And then you don’t even want the eggs! But maybe it says something like, LIVE SQUID FEET, TWO DOLLARS. In that case you should go with the eggs.

Soup for Two

It is getting more frequent however that I can read at least a portion of these menus, although I have discovered that I’m not only slow to decode but also rather slow to decide, or at least, slower than my server expects me to be. They will always want to know what I want before I am ready to tell them, and I do not yet know how to say, “still looking!”

This can be, in a word, exhausting. Reading/not reading/semi-reading is something involved in going out, well, anywhere, and is one of the things that makes it exhausting to go out, well, just about anywhere. The only thing more challenging than semi-reading while your stomach's on the growl is of course, semi-having a conversation. And everything here involves conversation. Everything. Nothing is simply a cash-for-services transaction; always the conversation. And really, it’s lovely: I know I’m totally lucky for the genuine warmth and small-town attention that people shower you with here. But sometimes, just sometimes, you just want to go somewhere and eat. Eat and nothing else. Not tell someone where you’re from, or how long you’ve been in Japan, or how old you are, or how old they are. And sometimes you wish that no one would tell you how wonderfully adept you are at using your chopsticks or ask if you want to marry a Japanese girl like maybe their neice, or ask if you can teach them English sometime whenever you’re free. It’s exhausting having these kinds of mechanical interactions, without input or interval. Sometimes you just want to eat your eggs. Or you know, your squid feet or whatever.

I went in to the Udon shop and looked up at the panels above the cash register and saw one that read Udon Te-Shoku, which means “set,” and it was exactly as much money as I could spend and still ride the bus home. I rattled it out without a stutter and sat me down on a stool between two guys eating. Just a normal Joe. Cool as a cucumber. Then one of the guys finishes and gets up, and today's old guy comes in.

We specialize in old folks here. We should export them. They are like our number one national product. It's amazing how many of the folks there are rattling around in these parts. They're like lovable, crazed, ornery tumbleweed, just rolling on through. Today’s old guy sits down next to me and we make eye contact, and he says in Japanese, “where do you come from?” I have discovered that there is no way to answer this funny, no matter what you say. You can say Tokyo, you can say Just down the road there, you can say Pluto, you can say the Congo, you can say anything you want and it’ll never come of funny. So I say, America, from New York. We chat, he asks me questions. Big city? Big city. Do you like it here, too? Sure, everyone’s friendly here. New York’s different? I guess. Everyone’s mean there? No, you get mean folks everywhere…nice folks too.

He asks me, How old are you? Well, how old am I? 28, he guesses. Lower, I say. 24? Lower – 22. 22? 22. You’re…maybe you’re 38? (I always guess down as a policy, but I was not giving him more than 12 years room). Who’s 38, he asks. Maybe 42? 60, he says. I can’t believe it. He shows me his drivers license, we try to do the math. Year 20 of the Showa, he was born in. My foreigner’s residency card says I was born in 58. He’s 60. Then we are quiet, we eat our soups.

A sushi chef, he says. Yoshi-something san, I didn’t really catch it. You should come to the kaitensushi place in the mall sometime. Sure, I’ll come by. You like sushi? Everything. Maguro? Everything. Maguro’s good you know.

And then we’re quiet again, and we eat. The soup’s good, the rice is good, it’s warm inside and raining on the roof and shutters. And then he’s done, he leaves half his noodles and the wakame in the bowl. I guess he just got done. He picks up both our checks when he stands up and he says, It would make me happy to buy you this lunch. And gives me his business card, and doesn’t mind that I don’t offer him one. I don’t even have one, but I don’t say that. And then he smiles at me once, and he pays, and he leaves.

And when I walk back to work in the rain, I’m spinning my umbrella above my head and I can see all the raindrops spatter in their big hemisphere in front of me on the wet street, and I feel happy, and full, and not at all exhausted.

Reliving Glory Days

I've been at my junior high all week and it's the first time in months that I've even been here at all (let alone for a week straight), so I'm really enjoying it. I LOVE the students here. Like, I absolutely love them. They make my heart glow. And besides being completely fantastic in their own right, they become additionally endearing for how completely and unabashedly they adore and idolize me. In ways, this school is a microcosm of a nigh-ideal world: all the girls are completely in love with me and all the boys worship me, I am slightly revered for my magic language powers, I am given a good and important job to do (and often allowed to do it), I'm gaining some camaraderie amongst the other teachers, and there's free coffee every day (of course, it sucks). But I know, it's not a complete world here - and that's why I've got a date with Yuu chan when I get off work! Woo hoo! It is a good day.

Somehow I had forgotten about the actual teaching part of teaching in the several weeks of interim we've had since real classes. In addition to being gladly reminded of the fun rewarding side of it, I'm remembering that it's also drop-down exhausting. I taught periods 1-2-3-4 today and I'm BEAT. One of the classes was totally great - I got the handicapped class today (just two students this time) and went in to teach it with our new vice principal who was SUPER SUPER NERVOUS, and it was the most relaxed easy time in the world. We got to just hang out acting silly in English. It turns out I'm pretty good with being relaxed with kids and teaching them stuff. In the past I remember having a lot of self-confidence squalls when it came to interacting with kids I don't know, or kids I think I don't undersnatd what to do with (like kids with mental handicaps, for instance), but I'm getting more relaxed about all of it now. It probably helps that I'm totally like a little kid half the time anyway. But kids are awesome, they got like the best ideas ever about things. Like, kids haven't forgotten you don't ever need a reason to be enjoying yourself, you can just be having fun and that's ok. Today after lunch I spent like twenty minutes hitting a volleyball up in the air with kids. We didn't even have a net. Just a ball, and we'd keep it up in the air. Guess what? That's still totally fun. Like, it didn't stop being fun after we stopped being teenagers. Simple fun stuff is still simple fun stuff. In fact, I think I'm going to go remind myself of this by interfering with table tennis practice. I like to make them play with me (they're all insancely good) and do things like bank it off the wall or tennis serve it from across the gym. Rule breaking - it's the most important thing I can teach these children about American culture, for goodness sakes. Is that not my job? IS THAT NOT MY JOB?!?

Put Me in, Coach

I crashed the first half of a gym class today with the third graders, who are my favorites. It's the first class of the new year so the kids had to introduce themselves to the new PE teacher. He tells them that they have to say their names and their hobby or club, and then say something else about themselves too; and I, from behind where the kids are sitting on the gym floor, say: "in English! Introduce yourselves in English!" After all, didn't we all JUST do this yesterday and the day before for the new English teachers? "In English," I say and everyone laughs; these kids are all smiles. The shy ones mumble, "really?" to their neighbors and the louder ones say, "no way!" to the teacher, but after a moment's pause the first kid, Taiki, stands up and goes "Hello! My name is Taiki Watanabe. I'm in tennis club ..... THE tennis club! I'm in the tennis club. Thank you!" And when he sits down, all the rest of the kids give him this big round of applause, and then the next one stands up and does it too. They applaud for every kid (and we didn't even practice it this time!). The super unconfident ones started in Japanese but I managed to make even them do it in English. One really shy girl, Yuuka (who I like a lot, she's on the volleyball team and all those girls are really friendly) even added her own sentence at the end, "and my favorite volleyball player is Kasturaya Hirabashi," or someone. This week I've been spending more time with the baseball club, so when one boy stands up and says he's on the team, I ask what position he plays. "What?" He's already in the middle of sitting down, and is so startled by this new question, suddenly outside of the safe self-intro speech, that he ends up caught in the bent hunch between standing and sitting on the floor, looking up at me. "What position do you play?" All the other kids echo, "what position!" "Oh," he smiles after a minute. "Bench."

Boston?

I have been thinking about Boston recently, wondering if that's the place I should end up living, but I haven't really been sure why until I got an email from Ellie saying just that: she'd been thinking about Boston and if that's a place I could end up living. Thank you, psychic twin link.

Yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of built up biases against Boston, but I can't really tell which ones are real and which ones only have to do with being from New York. Like the sports thing: my years spent as a New York kid in a Boston-heavy boys camp has helped me be acutely aware of how unbelievably stupid the stupid obsessive Bostonite sports thing is; the nigh-religious blinding forfeit of self-awareness and rational decision-making, the wilful acquiescence to deep-structure predjudice and bigotry that comes with the donning of a BoSox cap. Yes, I probably feel more strongly on this for having been the ostracized--and me barely a follower of the sport of baseball aside from Field of Dreams and Ballpark Franks--but that doesn't make it any less truly ugly, and its viral proliferation inside the Boston beltway turns me off.

The plus side is of course that almost every positive thing that has happened in America since 2002 has happened in Massachusetts. It seems to be the state to be a liberal in.

But I don't really have much of a real feel for the city itself, Boston. All the people that I know from there are actually from the suburbs of there, and let's face it, it should be some YEARS before I end up even potentially wanting to live in the suburbs. Urbs I can see me doing, and demi-urbs and small towns and country locales, but suburbs feel like they shouldn't happen. Suburbs is like the end of life.

But Boston. What is Boston even like? I get the feeling that it's not all that great, that the things to do there are geared towards frat boys or yuppies, I kind of hate being surrounded by each of those kinds of lives. Most of the images I have in my head about Boston involve the meat head beer helmet sports bar crowd or the crew cut sweater vest snowboard on the weekends kind of crowd and not the underground reggae hula band hookah bar kind of crowd or the literary art making kind of crowd. Is there art and music? Is there nightlife? John lived in Boston for 4 years and he never spoke too highly of those aspects of the place. But there must be, there are like sixty five colleges and universities around there. What's the deal with Boston? Someone fill a brother in.

We all have our reasons

This week the kids are still on spring vacation, which means that all the teachers and office people still have to go to school and spend hours staring at their desks or running the club and team practices that the kids are required to go to throughout vacation, which the teachers are required to hold. Ever see the movie Brazil? Anyway, it means for me that I’m working at the office I spent last summer vacation in, with all the same old faces – my boss Kacho san, my surrogate mother Taeko san, and my handler, friend and life planner Mami chan. The difference is that the office itself has changed locations; from up in the lush Greenpier building—majestic on its hill above the town and fit with all the modern conviniences, like heating and insulation and hot-and-cold running water in the sinks—now we’ve been demoted to down in the town office building with the rest of the city personel. The shi-sho, or Town Office, evokes a building from a still-in-use mental hospital from like a hundred and fifty years ago, the kind you still see when you go driving around the sticks in the Berkshires in New York or Massachusettes. The entire place is built out of what seems to be a single, massive pour of concrete with a couple large meatpacking rooms where most of the town clerks work, and some smaller offices where the rest of us work. The plus side of this, and the only one that I can see, is that on Monday when Kacho san said to me, “well, this place sure is a heck of a lot smaller,” I got to tell him in perfect Japanese, “yep, that’s why I shaved my beard.”

Out with the Old, in with the Yuu

So last month I was seeing a woman, Yuriko, who was the PE teacher at one of my elementary schools. This was not unawesome. She was real sweet and, being the PE teacher, she was in great shape. And we had some nice times together, although we didn’t go out very much. But it was kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I was really happy to just be dating someone. Winter got to be pretty lonely, yo. And it was cool to be dating a hot teacher. We had this whole super-secret-affair, making out in the office break room behind the file cabinets thing going. As the other boy JETs told me, this was a manifestation of “living the dream” on JET. So this was cool. But on the downsides, she was 30, and she was a PE teacher, and she was leaving. Something to do with prefectural teaching licensing stuff, she was moving to Kyoto at the end of March, and this would be the terminus of our romantic project. Which, let’s be serious, probably was what allowed for us to have a big secret affair in the first place – we knew it wouldn’t really go anywhere. So, she’s left. A little sad, sure, but as they say in the Japanese, shoganai. Or as we say in English, “c’est la vie.”

That was March, right before the end of the school year (wacky, huh?), and also right before my parents came to visit (also pretty wacky, huh?). And now, this Monday morning April 10^th, a gray raining beautiful spring day, this Monday, April morning finds me with a girlfriend. Yes friends, I am girlfriended. Yuu-chan. The co-ed. Yesterday we got together for the first time since the middle of March, and it was magic. I don’t know what it is, but I think I really like her. She just drives me crazy. Yuu-chan’s just started her last year of college at Matsuyama Daigaku, and in fact as I write this she’s racing to her professor’s office to try and change some of her classes around after the deadline. Ah, school. How well I recall the days of your never never met deadlines. In addition being apparently perennially just a little bit late to everything, Yuu chan and I have some other things in common, the big one being aikido. We met at the Matsuyama dojo’s new years party, but we’ve never gotten to train together yet. Which is good, because she is much, much better than I am. She’s been training with the amazing teacher in Matsuyama for three years, and is one of his favorite students. He likes me a lot too, but mostly because I make a lot of mistakes. I’m slightly-to-moderately nervous about when Yuu and I finally train together and I embarrass myself terribly by totally sucking. But, as the French say, “whatever.” For now, life is great.

Fish 102

Last night I went to the kaiten-sushi place next door for dinner; it's only 100 yen a plate on Wednesdays (as opposed to the 120 yen on normal days) so I make it in there for a meal most Wednesday evenings before I go to conversation class (English conversation, not Japanese conversation) (teaching conversation class, not attending it...despite what some say I'm already able to converse fairly capably in English). Kaiten sushi means "sushi on a conveyor belt." As far as I can tell, kaiten is a word which means revolving, and is the same as in kaiten-nage, the aikido move, where it means "this is the one where you spin the other guy around ass over tailbone when you throw him."

There are a million different kinds of sushi that come by on the conveyor belt and a million more that they don't put out until you ask for them. There used to be a guy there named Ito san who would make me two ebi-zushi plates the second he saw me locking up my bike outside. I'm a regular! Ebi means shrimp, by the way. And sushi here, to review, means nigiri sushi, the hunk-o-fish-on-rice kind, usually two to a plate unless you get something like "enormous shrimp zushi" or "entire side of an eel zushi." You can also get maki-sushi, meaning rolls (I particularly like the ebi-fry makizushi, which has deep fried shrimp and some Japanese mayo in the middle, though these days I'm trying to cut down on the "fry" portion of my diet to conserve my girlish figure).

Ito san changed sushi shops just after Christmas but there's still my friend Daisuke at the one by my house. Daisuke and I talk every time I go in, but always in whispers over the counter while he cuts and packs the sushi. We have to whisper because, he'll whisper to me, the other guy behind the counter is the boss, and he doesn't like the chefs talking to the customers. This cannot possibly be true. The space that the two men share is a little smaller than the last Manhattan elevator you rode in if you crumpled it at the bottom of the shaft and turned it on its side, and there's no way that the boss doesn't notice us talking to each other when we whisper over the counter: we might as well be shouting at the top of our lungs. Plus, why would he mind? Customer relations are like a quarter of the strength of any business: you've got location, location, location, and customer relations.

And seriously, I am like the #1 one customer to have good relations with. I'm like a celebrity around here! This sushi place is in the district that has my biggest school–the families of some 500 kids all live around here, and their kids all love seeing me outside of class; if this is my regular place, then this is where the kids want to go, not to the other kaiten-suchi place in plain sight down the road. And everyone else loves to come share a few words too. The old ladies all want to know which kinds of sushi I can eat and which ones gross me out (the ones filled with natto gross me out, thanks), the old men want to know why I don't drink sake while I'm eating (because it's too expensive at the sushi bar and because it's a bit déclassé and because it's Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 and I have to teach English class in an hour). And lots of them want to try out their English; can it be a bad thing to have one of your chefs be demonstrably conversant with the celebrity foreign teacher?

Fish 101

So you’ve eaten kappa maki before, right? That’s what we call the sushi rolls that have cucumber slivers in the middle; maki means roll, and for years I believed that “kappa” was Japanese for cucumber. But I never hear anybody call them that. Japanese cucumbers are called “kyurie,” and the rolls are kyurie maki.

There are gajillions of kinds of sushi, but mostly they fall into two bigger groups: makizushi and nigirizushi, or in layman’s (read: English) terms, rolls and bricks. Sometimes sushi comes rolled up inside seaweed, an sometimes it comes like a brick of rice with a piece of fish/shellfish/mollusk/veggie on the top, these ranging in bulk from slice to full out slab. In America, “sushi” means makizushi. I feel like half the time I remember seeing nigiri sushi around we called it “sashimi;” sashimi’s actually just fish. Just fish. Raw fish. We all know it academically, like trivia game-show knowledge kind of knowing—“sashimi is raw fish”—but I don’t think I ever really thought about it until I ate it here: it’s just fish. They take a piece of cold fishmeat, slice it up, arrange it delicately on a plate, and then you FEAST!

It’s surprisingly good. Not that you would expect it to be bad per se, but there’s no way you expect to love eating it like you’ve grown to do. It’s comfort food, in a weird way. Very simple, filling, basic, real food. And unbelievably delicious. I rarely order sashimi when I’m out—largely because I’m still trying to figure out which places serve what, and I don’t want to ask for sashimi at the wrong place and either, A) have everybody laugh at me, or B) have the restauranteur scramble to find fresh fish from a neighboring restaurant so he can fill my request—but I buy it precut from the supermarket a lot, or I’ll get a slab of fish and cut it up myself. This you can do. With ease. There’s only two steps, and one of them is “buy the fish.” Still, somehow at the end of the process as you sit down to eat, you think, “I just made sashimi!

“I can cook Japanese food!”

And next, a fresh young talent just in from NY...

Word.
Things I have done in preperation for next Sunday include:

Record and broadcast announcements over the radio, in English and Japanese.
Written an extensive biography of myself to put in the newsletter of the group hosting the event.

Things I have not yet done in preperation for next Sunday include:

Pick out what I'm going to wear
Plan out, write, or in fact even decide upon a topic for my 30 minute speech and presentation.

Anybody got any suggestions?
It's got to be interactive, crowd inclusive and things. Areas of my expertise include the X-Men, the History of Rock and Roll, and trying to pick up girls. Skills include rudimentary ukulele playing, an area of funny voices, and classroom leadership capabilities. Little help?

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.

The History of Love

I have just finished one of the best books I've read in a long time, the best in a way which most other best books I've ever read aren't able to be. The History of Love is a complex, touching, and wonderful read. Go buy it. Go read it. I chewed through it over the last three days, at first totally unable to put it down, but quick to discover that whenever I DID manage to rest on it for a while my minutes and my hours became occupied richly and warmly by pictures, conversations and stories from the people whom I had met in the few moments that seemed ages ago when I'd lived a lifetime between the covers of this wonderful book. Go, buy it, read it!

What time is it Mr. Wolf?

It is far, far too late at night for me to be up. Napped this afternoon instead of doing my prepwork for tomorrow, which means I needed to do it tonight. Of course, I procrasinated tonight instead of doing it promptly after conversation class ended, so that's that. Procrastination tonight came by way of making mushroomy miso nabe and reading about Bengla, Freeze Drying and Japanese Language in the Wikipedia. It is some supreme awesomeness indeed, that Wikipedia. If you have no idea what the heck I'm talking about, follow the link to global enlightenment. I modified an entry yesterday on one of its sister project sites, the Wiktionary. In the Simple English subset of the Wiktionary, the entry for "Honey" had previously read:

A sweet liquid made from bees. It is usually golden or brown.

By bees. Honey is made by bees. The sweet liquid that's made from bees is known I belive as Trader Joe's Sticky Awful Mexicano Death Juice. Honey is made by bees.

Reconfronting my pile of prep work for tomorrow was not so bad, except for having left it till about midnight to dig into. But it's been mostly a fun night since then (although so, so tired). First I had to make a game board for my 3rd and 4th graders to use for a time-telling game I'd come up with: the board is a long, half-height sheet of paper with 24 clock faces on it, and by rolling a D6 with its sides marked either +3 or -2, you and the other kids you're playing with move one game piece from midnight of one day to midnight of the next. The difference is that you start on midnight the day before the full moon, and you FINISH on midnight of the full moon itself, whereupon you turn instantly into a werewolf, howl into the night sky, and chase the other kids to the blackboard. Also, you have to ask each other "what time is it?" and answer "it's blahblahblah" when you roll the die. I had a lot of fun drawing my game board; it's all spooky and grim on the midnights and all sunny and cheerful in the middle, with transitions from black clouds to grey clouds to puffy friendly white ones and then back down to black again; pine trees become flowers become headstones; bats become birds become bats; rocks become dirt becomes grass become dirt becomes skeletons. I think it should go over great. Also your gamepiece starts out as a smiling handsome dude until you flip it over on Midnight and he changes into what is, if I may say so, a crazy flipped out awesome scary werewolf man. I'm pretty excited for this one. I'll try to scan some pictures of the stuff I make to post up soon. Of course speaking of time I remember that I'm completely short on it. to bed~

Teach Your Children Well

So a class's teacher makes a big difference in how genki or how crappily difficult the kids are. Surprising, huh? I guess we all remember having crappy teachers: the burn-outs, the block-heads, the dead-zones, the tyrants, the basketcases, the buffoons, the pushovers. It takes all kinds I guess. But classes are pretty closed systems in general, and you really only think about 'you the students' and--or versus--him or her the teacher. In my job now I'm a visitor and come-again assistant teacher to about forty-five different classes across five schools, and I see classes with very different kinds of character and a lot of different kinds of teachers at their helms. I can't complain; I make out pretty well in general, and most of the school-related folks here are pretty great to teach with. They seem for the most part a real fondness for their jobs, and despite being worked for rediculous hours and forced into the schizophrenic heirarchicies and compromises of any Japanese bureacracy, they seem to have a lot of job satisfaction and they're all really dedicated to their kids.

Teaching works very differently here; a teacher is often seen as one of a child's primary caregivers, on par with and sometimes above a child's parents. I met a teacher at a conference recently (this is it must be said a whole nother story ... "there's nothing more romantic than a doomed romance," my sister tells me) who was called back to her hometown across the prefecture because a boy in her school--not even in her class, but in a differet homeroom in her grade--had been caught trying to shoplift manga (had been caught, to be specific, trying to shoplift an enormous sachel of 142 seperate paperbacks, of all the idiot reasons for the universe to find to deny me a chance at new love), and she as well as all the other teachers in the grade had to be in school to receive him when the police turned him over to his own homeroom teacher, who was the first one they notified after his detainment; it was up to the teacher to then inform the parents. There's a lot of shit like this here; I'm told that hospital patients might not be told about severe or even terminal conditions, but that their families or teachers will be told instead. Scary to think.

Today I'm at Hidaka Sho, with the ichinensei--meaning first graders--whom I think I completely and unconditionally love. They are so cute and wonderful. Their teachers, on the other hand, can make things difficult. There are three different teachers for the ichinensei at this school, one for each class. The first is young, the next middle aged, the third a bit on the older side (this is like witches in Shakespeare, neh?), and each is very different from the other two.

The young one, Michi, I had a crush on for a while and we kind of dated for a bit, wayyyyyy back when I'd more or less just started out here. She speaks a decent amount of English and although not a great kisser, she was kind of fun. But she's just so scatterbrained and not-with-it in the classroom that my crush totally evaporated after only a few times of teaching with her. As of this writing I've just gotten done her class, and while I really like the kids I can never help feeling like their lack of general intuition and charisma is actually her general lack of intuition and charisma; it's like she's infected them with some mild form of idiocy. I know it's not at all so cut and dry: it's hard being a teacher, and the little little ones can run you pretty ragged. Also, groups of kids do acquire a kind of natural character to them like any other ghestalt. At Becket there were always the harder or smoother, younger or older, fightier or more creative cabins; sometimes my kids were the same age as another cabin but so much less far along emotionally and rationally that they might have been years younger. It just means that within your group stuff you have to work things out to their best interest, at and just beyond their level so you can all get the most out of everything and so your activities and games can help them grow a bit.

Now, this natural character business all understood, it becomes slightly dissapointing with first graders. These kids are like 6. Maybe 5. They really reeeeally want to have fun with you. They want to have pretty much whatever kind of fun you look like you want to have with them. Like, you know what can constitute ten minutes of seriously exhiliating playtime with first graders? Jumping. That's right: Jumping! You hold their hand and you jump! And they jump. And you jump! And they jump. And you pretendtojump! And they jump. And then everybody screams with delight and surprise. It's like, they're perfect. Today when things didn't go terribly well with activities it just felt like the other teacher in the class, Michi, was the only one not on board with the "let's all have fun" program that I felt I had tacitly outlined at the beginning of the lesson by bringing a ukulele and colored magnets into the room with me and tickling the kids as I went around to say hello to them. And it's just like, Try. Please try. Just stay with us. The activities aren't difficult. It's essentially, "repeat after me and we'll sing a song and look at pictures!" All it would take to work is for you--you're the ACTUAL teacher remember, I'm the ASSISTANT teacher--for you to put in a normal application of normal teachery stuff to make the class run smoothly around the "repeat after Josh, jump up and down" game plan. It's not after all like I speak Japanese. My ability to do the behavior management stuff is incredibly slim, limited mainly to some stern eyebrow raising and several ways of standing with my arms folded that are supposed to convey slightly different degrees of teacherly, stoic exasperation. Help me out some, lady, huh?

Really the most crucial thing to any of my classes is that there's some energy--mine and the kids' both--that makes things work. I mean I can't speak Japanese and they can't speak English, so the only option is pretty much to try to have some fun together and orient it around using English words and phrases and to avoid translating them so that the kids don't just think in Japanese the whole time. At first grade especially, anything ESL revolves around energy, intuition, some charity and a lot of kindness, and honestly very little else. In today's class with Michi the only thing I really needed was some linguistic teamwork and energy, and instead she managed to manifest the ability to disperse every watt of energy we could try to build up and work with. It was nearly impossible to retain the kids' attention and interest. And it just shouldn't be that hard. Intuit a bit for goodness sakes. Look:

We warm up every class--and I mean every class, every school, but also every class I've taught with you--with the same series of big cartooney faces that represent tiered answers to the all important English language opener, "How are you today?" The answers we've practiced are, in order, "I'm great / I'm good / I'm OK / I'm not so good / I'm sick / I'm grumpy (alternately, 'I'm in a bad mood,' depending on the grade level)." Every class. Often we'll do activities with this. Often as in, every class. The littler kids can't get enough of it, and it's great because they practice saying a lot of English sounds in what gets to be a very natural and conversational voice, and it makes them feel really special to communicate with me and with each other (they also really like roaring "I'M GRUMPYYYAAAAA!!!!!" and running after each other, and I always feign fear and cower until they pounce on me and I tickle them and pull on their pigtails). So today we start with the faces on the board and everybody warms up together call-response style, answering me with whatever face's signified I'm holding up in front of the class. Michi has gone to the back of the class. And clicked her brain off. I can see it. Nothing spinning behind the eyes. So we finish the faces, and I try to beckon Michi up to the front.

To be fair, lots of teachers go to the back of the room when it's my turn at the plate. But most of them, or, well many of them anyway stay involved in the class and blanket-monitor the kids and help the ones who get lost or stray out, and they'll help me in Japanese when I flounder. It's usually pretty obvious when I need one of them to come help me. But this time Michi has spaced out and I have to super super beckon her up. "Eh, atashi?" "Huh, me," she asks from the back of the room. Well, yes, yes you. First of all I'm beckoning someone exactly where you're standing who's got to be about five and a half feet taller than the tiny munchkin children over whose heads I'm trying to get your attention, and second of all YES YOU, you're the teacher who I'm supposed to be Team-Teaching with. This, is the beginning of the end. Once the kids sense a lack of harmony amongst you the teachers, they snap right out of your spell. It's how it goes with any audience. You break that fourth wall, you lose the magic.

What I want the kids to do is stand up, have the "How are you today" conversation with three other kids and then sit back down for another game. I try to pantomime this and draw it on the board, but they space out a little. Which is fine. They're 5, and I don't speak their language. So I super beckon Michi and drag her to the front and give the pantomime to her, and gesture/say "can you explain that to them?"

"Eh?"

Okay. Let's give it another go. I can feel the spell slipping away from the kids, their eyes clouding over, pencils entering mouths, drool pooling, snot forming. Okay. Let's give it a slightly different go, and with some Japanese: "kids ... talk with ... three people ... this conversation ... three people ... "how are you today" / "I'm blahblahblahblah" ... with three people ... finish and sit back down." Gesture speak: can you tell them to do that? And Michi looks at me and says loudly and clearly the Japanese colloquial, abrupt equivalent of, "I have no idea what you mean."

The spell snaps audibly. Crayons go in noses. One child stand up in his chair and shouts, "it's blue!" Sigh.

Still, it was fun overall. And I really like the "it's blue" kid. He knows his colors, that one! And shortly after the talk-to-three-people game finally got itself underway I gave my ukulele its first classroom debut, which was super exciting for, believe it or not, pretty much everybody. The admittedly lame "How's the Weather" song I'd fabricated (GGGGGGGGGGDCGGGGGGGGGDC...) was not by any means a blue ribbon winning lesson plan, and it too was frustrated by Michi sensei not catching on with the "see, you hold up these cards that have huge pictures of the weather that we've just been practicing with for the last ten minutes and the kids will sing along with 'it's sunny' when they're supposed to. Beleeeeeeive me. just hold them up. three times and then change to 'it's a beautiful day.' PLEASE." Exasperating, but my kids all were singing "it's a beautiful day" pretty accurately by the end of it (that's the GDC ... ooh yeah). Overall very happy-making but I'm not going to strike it back up with Michi. Also, she smelled distinctly of what I believe to be coriander.

Later on today I have the third ichinensei class, with the older of the teachers. She is a peach, and her class might be my favoritest of all favorite things in the entire world. They are just so so so so so so so so cute, and they're fun and lovey and enthusiastic and warm, and I love being in class with them: it always ends up a hundred times more successful and fun than I ever could plan it. Wonderful wonderful wonderful. One little girl has the cutest cheeks that any little girl has ever had ever in the history of human civilization, and it makes her giggle and blush when I pinch her cheeks or nose or tickle her and when she wants to escape she runs towards me and gives me an enormous hug, and is thereby wonderfully and completely safe. Playing with her and the others is almost always the best part of any day I can have. I go play with them honestly every time I come to this school, no matter what. They never get tired of "How are you today?" Never ever ever. They just LOVE us having that little conversation; it almost baffles me. I can say with complete conviction that with one or two exceptions this class of 5 year olds speaks better sounding English than any of my Junior High School students (the exceptions being among the five year olds, not the junior high kids). Their teacher is an incredibly sweet woman, very tender and fun. She's just a peach ... I hadn't ever even wanted to say that about anybody till I got to know her. A peach. Every single time I see her, even multiple times within a given day at this school, she tells me something nice about myself. From how well chosen my tie was to how she thinks my cowboy shirt makes me look very handsome and I'm always such a snappy dresser, to she's so impressed by my Japanese, to how fun my lesson was, or how good my drawing is, and on and on and on. And she's always so genuinely happy when I come to play with her class. It's like, Why am I not always around you and your love-inspiringly cute children? She's just a peach. I'm sure that part of her class's general wonderfulness is her fine example; she's just so kind to them and everyone else, and she's really supportive and patient and strong. It's nothing saccharine, it's totally a gentle strength this woman has. Of course hers is the class that's going to be patient and happy and kind and loving towards me (also, if you were in a class full of kids that cute, how could you not be wonderful towards everything in the world?). What a great class. For them I can't WAIT to pull out the ukulele for the weather song. So much love to ensue.

Questions and Answers

This comes to me in an email from my JTE (the Japanese English Teacher) at my Junior High. She writes, "I send you some questions from 2nd graders( today we thought "why Japanese do ～?" and " Because ～." Then I asked the students if they have any questions about America or you. Would you answer to these?" I think you, dear readers, should help me think up some good answers. Any assisstance would be--potentially--appreciated.

What sport is popular in America?
Why American is taller than Japanese?
Why does American shooping mall has their national flags?
Why did you come to Japan?
Why did you become an ENglish teacher?
What made you to become a teacher?
Why children in America can go home earlier than Japanese children?
Why many schools in America don't have their school uniforms?
Why American people like to communicate with other poeple?
Why is American's nose high?
Why do you blow your nose with a handkerchief?
Why are you ever-cheerful?
Are there any poeple who is not good at talking in America???
WHY do you call South America continent America?(There isn't America in it)

Some of these are pretty awesome, but I'm having a hard time breaking free of the mental and emotional stress of being here in order to give them good answers. For instance, my immediate response to #s 7, 8 and 9 is something like "because we're not fucking robots like you people, and we value individuality and happiness and interpersonal connection, you unbelievable, unfeeling robot people." Which is not necessarily a helpful reply. Suggestions?