nagasaki blues

“I don’t get it. What do you mean, you’re afraid of animals?”

“I’m afraid of all animals. Definitely all of them.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re scary.”

Ayumi and Nana are walking to school beside me, and as is fairly normal, they’ve taken a break from attempting to speak English and have thus mostly forgotten I’m there. In the process they’ve also forgotten that I understand their Japanese.  I didn’t know that Ayumi was afraid of all animals. Because I am bored, I keep listening:

“What about harmless animals, like birds?” Nana is incredulous.

“Unacceptable. If I see a bird on TV, it’s okay, but if the bird looks at the camera, I have to change the channel.”

“What about mice?”

“All girls hate mice.”

“Not me. I love mice. They’re cute.”

“Only Mickey is okay.”

“And Pokemon? They’re not really animals.”

“Pikachu is cute.”

“Is Pikachu supposed to be a boy or a girl?”

“Boy.”

“And what about Anpanman?”

“His name is Anpanman, not Anpanwoman.”

“His head is made of bread. What’s his body made of?”

“Plastic. Just a guess.”

High school students are high school students wherever you go. Not much changes as you cross oceans, and students still have the same wandering, pointless conversations they always do regardless of place. They speak for the sake of filling silence as much as anything else. There is no need for personal breakthroughs or deep meaning. The day before:

Risa: “Do foreigners get acne?”

Mika: “No.”

Shiho: “Of course they do. That’s why that weird Jessica Simpson lady is on those Proactive commercials.”

See? Mostly indistinguishable from American conversations, only with different cultural cues. That’s what makes today interesting. Today was the presidential election. Ayumi and Nana humored me about this and pretended (I think) to be interested, asking once an hour, “Obama win yet?”

When it was all said and done, they asked a more intriguing question: “Now, do you want to go back to America?” I told them I was here for now, then asked them if they wanted to visit sometime. Both shook their heads ‘no’, and when I asked them why, they made gun shapes with their hands and little gunshot sounds. “Don’t want to get shot,” said Ayumi, and the entire time that I was explaining that TV is sensationalist and that it’s perfectly safe to travel to the U.S., I was embarassed.

You can’t blame them, really. They have always known a country with a remarkably low violent crime rate. America’s murder rate is nearly 9 times higher than Japan’s, and it doesn’t help that some of the more popular American TV shows are things like 24, Prison Break, CSI, etc. It seems that the average person I talk to thinks we’re pretty bloodthirsty. They might be right.

A few times a week, strangers ask me where I’m from. I tell them I’m American, and every time I do I’m aware that I’m donning the fabric of these preconceptions. I say, “I’m from Tennessee, in the United States,” and I know that I’m simultaneously admitting to whatever preconceived notions they may have about us. This bothered me more a year ago than it does today, but I can’t say I like it.

The entire point of this is that an hour ago, a man waiting at the car shop beside me asked where I was from. I told him. He replied with: “I have hope for America. I think good days are ahead.”

I agree.

I don’t really like you. You have made a select list of groups of people that I generally dislike by default, which is admirable in a way, but as I get older I find that people irritate me more often, so perhaps it’s me that needs to do a little soul searching. Either way, I find hypochondriacs to be a drain on society for two primary reasons: 1) The whole self-pity thing is a bit played. 2) It’s manipulative. It’s the domain of those who want to be fretted over, who want to be worried about. It’s a way for people to blame every little miscomfort on a dramatic health crisis, and it’s a waste of about 20 million dollars in unnecessary medical expenses each year.The advent of WebMD.com, Yahoo! Health, and other sites has given these people more misinformation to arm themselves with than I originally would ever have thought possible. Back in the day, the whining of hypochondriacs was mostly limited to the realm of ill-defined but terribly exaggerated phrases like “horrible, awful migraines”, which is not very specific, meaning they couldn’t take it much further than that. Now, those same headaches can chalked up to an arteriovascular malformation, one of the harsh realities of the technology age that fills me with sadness.Exhibit 1: A woman I worked with in an office who would complain of things like “lumbar-vertebrae displacement” brought on by her substandard office chair.

For research’s sake, I went to WebMD and decided to see what (if anything) is wrong with me. You’re given a picture of a human body to click “where it hurts” and a list of symptoms to choose from. It’s hot as hell this afternoon, so I immediately checked off “Excessive sweating”. No problem. I then moved on to “Hunger” and “Food cravings,” as I have almost an hour left until lunch. Because I’m doing this instead of working, I went ahead and added “Easily distracted” and “Poor concentration” as well, then rounded it out with “Difficulty staying awake during the day”. Finally, I realized how depressing and profoundly cynical it is that I’m doing this at all, so I finished with: “Inability to care for self”, “Low self-esteem”, and “Sense of impending doom”.

I would diagnose myself this afternoon as a workplace slacker with a poor attitude towards humanity, but imagine my surprise when WebMD broke the news to me: I have supraventricular tachycardia. Son of a bitch, a potentially fatal heart condition. I saw this on Dr. House.

This is going to be problematic.

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…)

The last time I took some time out to write about how things were going, it was in the margins of a notebook on a northbound train for Tokyo to meet my family in Narita, a bit of a wasteland only worth knowing the name of because it’s home to Japan’s largest international airport.

My father and sister stayed for about five days, and between traveling with them and going to pick them up I spent something like 35 hours on trains. In this time, I accomplished the following feats:

1) Destroying “New Mario Brothers” for the Nintendo DS in a scant three hours.
2) Beginning and finishing Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which I suggest you do as well.
3) Sampling some of Kyoto’s finest boxed lunches.
4) Sleeping.

Regardless, my notes look something like this:

I must confess to a mystic fascination with public transportation and trains in particular. There’s something vaguely magical about falling asleep near home and waking up somewhere you’ve never been before. It’s like drinking to excess, only without the hangover and far more expensive. I am a-okay with that.

I had plenty of time to think on the train, and I thought a great deal about work. Plenty of people I talk to regularly seem to forget that I actually have a job that requires most of my time, seeing as all the interesting stories are about doing exciting things in exciting places. Fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, I’m just another sub-par teacher trying to keep a day ahead of everything. It’s not all glorious Japanese hilarity. I wake up every morning and put on a coat and tie and get down to gettin’ busy. With this job comes the inevitable frustrations and complications that virtually all jobs have, but with this one there’s a fundamental difference: if I slack off, if I blow off responsibilities and try to wing everything, it’s not me that gets hurt. Not at all, actually, since I’m under contract. But it’s no good for the kids, and I’ve grown rather attached to them. This startling development has caused me some stress.

I have yet to receive a noise complaint from any of my neighbors, for instance. This happened something like once a week back home. Have I lost the ability to rock? It’s a distinct possibility, one that should shake you all to the bone. I was planning on shredding my way to the forefront as rock’s new savior, but if I’m too busy grading English tests then someone else may have to step up, and I’ll be damned if the world needs another U2 album right now. God help us all. (Or Satan. Whichever is in charge of rocking.)

It’s hardly just that, though. My hair is turning grey. My patience is eroding. I have watched the frustrations of this environment eat at it slowly, then more quickly, until all it takes is one miscommunication too many to put me in a murderous mood. It took me a long time to build up the kind of tolerance for unpleasantries that I came here with.

It cost me more than you think to cultivate the kind of emotional distance from everyday life that allowed me to look cosmic misfortune (or personal screw-ups) in the eye and say: “Oh well. Might as well move on.”

But, somewhere around Yokohama, a realization hit me. In a moment of zen-like clarity I realized whose life I have wanted all along: the good-natured and aging Japanese alcoholic.

You heard me. Think about it.

This is a man whose entire drive from the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep is to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, at all times. He is functional, mind you; he typically holds a respectable job and shows up. However, he sleeps at his desk when he’s tired, vomits in the streets, and blatantly ignores things that irritate him. He’s long since learned that sweating the small stuff is a waste of time and energy, and the only things that aren’t small stuff are baseball, fishing, and the people he loves.

I’m not saying that sleeping on the job and collapsing in gutters on weeknights are appropriate behaviors to copy, but I am suggesting that a certain kind of apathy is a pivotal tool in preserving mental health.

So here’s to thinking less. Since I wrote those lines, I’ve taken three weeks off of school to travel southeast Asia (more to come on that later),  joined a new band, bought a new television (and a new couch from which to enjoy it), and resolved to take more naps.

So far, so good.

And here’s my New Years Resolution: to write more. Much more. Expect frequent updates from here out.