nagasaki blues

This a compilation of my notes from the last week:

Monday, 10:42 PM

The Japan-to-Tennessee jet lag has decimated my biological clock. It is Monday evening, but I have been asleep for the past six hours, waking to a house empty aside from my father, sitting alone in a darkened living room, hands folded in his lap.

He’s waited to tell me that there’s been an accident, that my uncle was riding his motorcycle home when drag racers overtook him on a quiet stretch of highway, sending him flipping across the well-manicured lawn of a local church. He’s dead at 46. He is dead, and my mother has already gone ahead to be with her family. My mother has been mourning the loss of her brother for four hours while I have been asleep in the guest bedroom, dreaming of girls, beaches, and other things that suddenly seem less important.

“Can you believe it?” he asks me. “That it happened on a motorcycle?”

I can’t.

(more…)

To those who have recently left Nagasaki or are leaving in the upcoming days:

Thank you.

When the cold is awful or the heat is unbearable, the mosquitoes are out in full force, and all the vice principals of the world have teamed up to make things a problem, you’ve kept it worth it. Homesickness ain’t a damn thing when people make you feel at home, you know?

I don’t go out of my way to spend time with people I don’t like. I just don’t waste the effort on it. I spent time with you all because you have made life here better in innumerable ways.

Please keep doing what you’re doing. Good luck.

To those of you who have just arrived in Nagasaki:

You’ve got big shoes to fill.

Don’t blow it.

Fish are dying.

This, in and of itself, is not entirely special, but the specific circumstances are. In one Japanese river in particular, 2 tons of dead fish (including 2,000 eels, if I read it correctly) have washed up in the past few days, and nobody seems to have a great explanation for this. News channels are running footage of men with nets in rowboats shoveling fish carcasses into styrofoam containers and scratching their heads.

In other news, the Iwate-Miyagi Earthquake tore mountains apart and caused massive landslides, blocking the flow of rivers and causing lakes to rapidly form, resulting in extensive flooding.

In Akihabara, a man drove a truck into a crowd of people. Armed with a knife, he then set upon the crowd, killing 10 and injuring more, including one police officer. Another cop attempted to stop him with his baton before apparently remembering that police are armed. He eventually drew his gun, at which point the attacker surrendered. Too little, too late, isn’t it?

I’m hearing an awful lot of talk about why things like this keep happening. Kids spend too much time on their cell phones. Video games are violent. We’re too reliant on technology.

As if disasters ever needed a reason to occur.

Occasionally, some switch in my head goes off and I can’t stop watching television. I could ride a bike. I could get some work done. I could, theoretically, do my laundry or pull the weeds from the garden. There are any number of things I could be doing instead of watching five hours of House a day, but none of them are quite as satisfying as allowing my brain to degenerate into a state pliable enough that I diagnose myself with encephalitis caused by toxoplasmosis, then Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, before finally accepting that all that is actually wrong with me is that I’m housing a parasitic Ascaris worm.

At the very least, my excuses for taking sick days will probably become more interesting in the upcoming months.

Plenty of people are quick to villainize TV as a soul-sucking black hole that makes you stupid, but this is a dramatic oversimplification. These are the same people that believe that aspartame causes cancer despite the fact that no legitimate medical evidence exists to support this theory. The fact of the matter is that television is an intricate window into society. More than that, it’s a great way to take a mental vacation for as long as you might need to.

Still, it’s not really normal behavior for me. I watch TV, but not usually in huge blocks. One might diagnose this as a self-preservative need for a temporary form of escapism. That would certainly be a fair conclusion, something that Dr. Foreman or even Cuddy might agree with. But not House. No, not a chance. Because House knows there’s something bigger going on. House will call you on your bullshit between mouthfulls of Vicodin. This is because House knows (somehow) that you have nothing worthwhile to escape from. Everything is going well. The weather is outstanding. Work is fine. The students are fine. Why not enjoy the beach for a few hours?

Because I’m only on Season 2, that’s why.

I’ve broken my unspoken promise to keep updating at least once a week, and I can’t say it’s because I’ve been busy. Quite the opposite, for the most part. The last few weeks have been very eventful, but at least during the afternoons I’m plenty available at work. I suppose I’m just slacking.

The good news is that I have ambition.

All great men become great through conquest. This may be an unfortunate fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. Whether it’s conquering people, nations, ignorance, or societal norms, there’s always a usurper and the overthrown, and if you think I’m wrong about this, consider this point: I’m not.

The point of this is that I’m going to conquer the ocean, or at least a small part of it. The pirate in me is rearing its eye-patched head, and I feel the call of the sea. So we’re building a raft. We’re sailing this raft across the Ariake Sea to a small area of Kumamoto Prefecture. Actually, you can see the exact path we’re taking if you happen to use Google Earth; just search for “Kuchinotsu, Japan” and look across the bay to Futae. It’s not so far, but I’m pretending it’s a huge victory in the hearts of men because it makes it more enjoyable all around.

As far as names go, I’m leaning towards the S.S. Sussudio. I’m considering this name for the following reasons:

1) Instances of the letter ’s’ make up more than half of the name.
2) It sounds kind of poetic.
3) People might ask about it, which will afford me the opportunity to explain that I think Phil Collins sucks.

I didn’t say Genesis sucks. I said Phil Collins sucks. There is a huge difference here. “Sussudio” is not a word despite the fact that he uses it as one in the song by the same name, and Phil himself explains it thusly: Apparently, he was sound checking and just using a made up word as a place holder, but no actual word sounded right after the fact. So “Sussudio” became the name of the girl in the song, and later became the name of his daughter’s horse. In an interview, he apologized to all the people of the world who are now named Sussudio. I thought that was rather arrogant, assuming that adoring fans had named their children after your song title all over the world, but a quick search on Facebook and Myspace reveals that, unfortunately, there are people named Sussudio out there. If nothing else, Phil has dicked them out of the opportunity to have a respectable first name.

This is mostly about not liking Phil’s music, because for all I know he’s a nice guy. I do know he left his wife for someone half his age and completed most of the divorce proceedings by fax.

My point is, it’s my raft, and if I want to call it Sussudio then who’s going to stop me? You? I don’t think so.

The crew is assembled, and it is a sturdy crew indeed. We’ve begun preparing materials. I hope to set sail in the early summer, though as of late new dangers have come to light. For one, the waters in question are reportedly shark infested. To me, this is a non-issue. Essentially all ocean water has the potential to house sharks from time to time. This seems like a silly reason to be afraid.

Not a silly reason: deadly whirlpool. I just heard about this, though all the fisherman know to avoid it. Nobody felt the need to point out the existence of the whirlpool to me until last week, which seems a bit late in the planning stage. Apparently it’s about halfway between our start point and end point, and I’m imagining something huge and frothing and vicious and inherently angry despite being unable to feel human emotion. I can already tell I’m going to personify the hell out of what amounts to moving water, but I can’t help it.

Updates to come. Any suggestions for alternate names or any tips for sail construction?

Today I have lost my finest students to graduation.

Out the window, they’re holding big boquets and failing in attempts not to cry and generally making a big mess out of their parents’ attempts to take pictures, and I’m not going to see that again. Acknowledging the fact that there will be more students (even equally special ones) in the future doesn’t actually help.

They’re still in the parking lot, but they’re already gone. I’m only writing about this in the first place to keep them here a bit longer, to pretend that they’re still happening to me.

Out the window, the ocean’s doing this stellar trick where it catches the sunlight just so and scatters it like glitter on the half-hearted waves of the Ariake Sea. It is a beautiful day, and I’d almost forgotten them.

When it’s cold here, this place feels desolate. On the other hand, when it’s pretty, it’s gorgeous. If it would only get warm enough to swim and fish again, maybe we’d have something going. For now, I’ll settle for longer afternoons.

I’m doing this in place of grading papers and tests, hundreds of which I have in stacks covering my desk. You may remember similar behavior from the times I exhibited it in high school, college, and every job I’ve ever held. The students just finished their speaking tests, which are simple enough: they write a relatively brief skit using the grammar and vocabulary they’ve learned during the current term, then perform it in class. The results are varied. These must take place in an airport or on an airplane.

Exhibit One of One:

Flight Attendant: Do you want chicken or fish?
Takuya: Fish, please.
Yuya: Me too.
FA: We don’t have fish.
T&Y: OH MY GOD. CHICKEN PLEASE.
T: How much does it cost?
FA: It 1 dollar.
Y: How much for your smile?
FA: Priceless.
T: I want you.
Y: Me too.
FA: I don’t make the decision. Tell me your good things.
T: I have dog.
Y: I have father.
T: I have my plane.
Y: I love father.
T: Do you love dog?
FA: We are landing in New York. Please sit down.

~ fin ~

Well, at least they’re making an attempt at creativity.

Valentine’s Day update!

As of 1:16, packages of candy received: 4.

Dissapointment Level: moderate (yellow).

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and all I’ve heard all week is about how I’m going to get so much chocolate, like this much, and how I shouldn’t eat it all at once, and how I should be careful because I’ll be expected to give candy in return on White Day. Well, let me be the first to say that I couldn’t care less. I’m ready for handouts. I feel pretty confident it’s coming, too, since as I write this three girls (not in my class) are standing in front of my desk and giggling like the schoolgirls they are every time I glance upwards. In my book, this spells candy.

For me, Valentine’s Day is generally a pretty apathetic affair punctuated perhaps by the occasional Lifetime special on wife-beating or an anti-romantic meal with other frequently-single people. The last one I remember sticks out vividly in my mind:

There we are, listening to Foreigner on a Waffle House jukebox, when I notice that the guy at the counter next to me is staring at the waitress ringing up checks. Not checking her out, not vacantly gazing. Staring. Needless to say, this captures my imagination, and I’m on the edge of my seat 20 minutes later, when he finally speaks to her. The conversation happens like this:

“You got any kids?”

She didn’t even bother to make eye contact, clicking away at her register, but answered, “Two of ‘em,” in a low Southern drawl.

Silence followed for another few minutes, and he asked, “You gotta man around?” Getting to the point, I would go on to learn, is sometimes appreciated.

“Yeah.”

“You wanna come over sometime?”

Surely, I thought, this man was not serious. He did, after all, ask the prerequisite question about whether or not she was in a relationship, implying that the answer mattered to him in some way. Learning she was attached, he continued right along with his proposition as if this was no concern to either of them, which it apparently, mind-blowingly, was not.

“Sure. I don’t want no wife catching us and trying to come after me, though.”

At the time, I thought: Flawless. This is better than television. This is better than any bar conversation I’ve ever heard or any quiet exchange over coffee. This is better than most books. How many people get to see this kind of exchange up close? It’s like watching humpback whales mate, a sight a handful of people on the Earth have been lucky enough to witness. In six sentences, they had managed to decide that, yes, they would be sleeping together. That’s the magic of Valentine’s day.

Well, I don’t need all of that, but empty calories would be nice. I want to snack on rice balls tomorrow about as much as I want to see the world’s paraplegics challenge the world’s morbidly obese to a naked make-out contest, which just isn’t very much at all.

Hitomi, one of the freshmen, came back to school today. It took an hour to get a smile out of her, a feat I usually accomplish accidentally within seconds of talking to her by saying something she doesn’t understand, tucking a pencil behind my ear (apparently hilarious), or something equally unfunny. My point is, it’s not supposed to take much to make this kid laugh. She’s not wired for the stoic role. But here she is, head in her hands, staring at the floor, her brightly colored eyeglasses switched for a more conservative pair.

I can’t tell you where she’s been, since apparently I’m not supposed to know. I asked, of course. ”It’s complicated” was the answer.

I was talking with Mayumi when she stepped through the door, who looked at me and said, profoundly: “I am shock.”

A few months ago, a student’s house burned to the ground along the shoreline, just up and ignited like a pack of matches, so donation cans were placed in the classrooms and probably a bit of money was raised. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably less than what it costs to build a new house. It’s probably Hitomi, but I don’t know. I’m not trying to be cynical about it; it’s not as if the school can be expected to magically fix something that tragic. It’s the heart of the act that counts, and I’m sure every little bit helped. I’m just saying, we’re charged with the responsibility of helping young people grow into well-developed individuals, but when something of critical importance goes down all I can really do is slip the kid in question some leftover Cambodian money or perhaps some Lilo and Stitch stickers and tell them to “try their best.”

 Seriously, what do you do?