Wasting my time in the waiting line

After 25 blissful years together, sleep and I have parted ways. It was not a cordial parting; we are no longer on speaking terms, sleep and I. Until recently, I required and easily got 8-9 hours of sleep every night. Now I average around 4 hours and am pleased to get 6. This has resulted in my being in a constant zombie state, not tired but never fully awake.

Before, I would go to sleep somewhere between 10 and 11 o'clock and wake up at 7. To give you a feel for how much this has changed, let's take a look at last Sunday night's sleep schedule:
9:45 - Fell asleep watching CSI.
10:30 - Woke up. Watched more CSI.
11:30-1:00 - Slept.
1:00-2:30 - Laid awake in bed.
2:30-4:00 - Decided to make the most of the situation and called a friend back home.
4:00-5:00 - Still not tired, called my brother.
5:00-6:00 - Watched it slowly grow lighter.
6:00-7:00 - Slept fitfully.
7:00 - Got up and got ready for school.

I had never noticed it before, but without sleep, the passage of time stops. Sleep divides yesterday from today from tomorrow; without it, the week is one endless day. Nothing moves forward.

I'm waiting for things in my life to fall into place, but until they do, I'm stuck. No sleep, no passage of time, no moving forward. Unfortunately I have no control over the situation; I'm waiting for other people to hand down the decisions that affect my future. Let me tell you what it's like to wait for a French person to decide where your future lies. I believe Sartre put it best when he said, "L'enfer, c'est les autres."

And now it's 3am on Friday and I'm awake, not because I've been out, but because I can't sleep. Once my episode of the Office finishes downloading I'll watch that and then maybe read some more. With any luck I'll be asleep by 5 or 6, but at least I don't have to get up at 7. I can sleep for a few hours in the morning and then get up an continue with my endless day.

Japanese friends

I have never professed to having very good social skills, but I am still surprised that I have managed to live in this country for 2.5 years without making a single Japanese friend my age. This is not completely my fault. For one thing, they are hard to find. Everyone I see walking around my city is either in a school uniform (meaning they're under the age of 18) or quite obviously over the age of 35. Where everyone goes between the ages of 18 and about 30, I have yet to find out. I assume I'll come across a colony of them producing Hello Kitty goods in a forest someday.

My foreign friends and I have often bemoaned the lack of Japanese people our age. Then, when one is spotted, we concoct schemes to ensnare them to obtain a Japanese friend of our very own. Once, an Australian friend of mine informed me that he had spotted a young, nice Japanese man working at a cafe near his house. "I have a plan," my Australian friend informed me. "I'm going to make him my friend. First, I'm going to become a regular at this cafe, where I will converse on a regular basis with this guy. Then, I will invite him to one of my barbecues. Then we will start hanging out, and eventually I will invite him to my house." Still no word on how that's working out for him.

In Japan, the school year starts in April. Teachers change schools every few years, so at the beginning of the year there are usually a few new faces in the teachers' room. When I came back to my desk after spring break, there was a new, young, female teacher sitting at the desk next to mine. I acted casual, but I couldn't believe my luck. Here was an actual 25-year-old Japanese woman. I had seen them in pictures and on the news before, but it was my first real encounter with one.

Lucky for me, it was she who seemed interested in me. It took her 3 days to work up the courage to speak to me. It was fun to watch her do it as well; she would peek over at my desk, start to open her mouth, and then stop. Sure, I could have spoken to her, but I was doing an informal experiment to see how long it would take her to work up the courage to speak to me. Finally, on the third day, she introduced herself. As it turned out, she already knew my name, age, and where I was from, so there was no need for me to do much talking.

We've spoken a few times since then, and now I'm trying to figure out how to take out relationship to the next level. That's right, I want to make her my friend. I feel like a nervous teenage boy who wants to ask a girl out on a date for the first time. I want to show her that I'm interested without scaring her away. If I wait too long to act, she might think I don't like her, but if I act too quickly I'll seem desperate and weird. Trying to walk that delicate line, our interactions go something like this:

Hosokawa-sensei: (Glancing at papers spread across my desk, looks over at me and offers a timid smile.)

Me: (Returning timid smile) So... ummm... do you live around here?

Hosokawa-sensei: Yeah, right next to school. I walk here. And you?

Me: Oh, I live in the next town over.

Hosokawa-sensei: Oh, really? How do you come to school?

Me: Usually I drive, but if the weather's nice I can bike it.

Hosokawa-sensei: Oh that's great! How long does it take?

Me: Oh, about 20 minutes.

Hosokawa-sensei: (Awkward smile.)

Me: (Awkward smile.) So um, I should probably get back to making these name tags now. I'll talk to you later.

Just riveting. She'll be mine in no time.

How do you say it in English?

Yesterday's English phrase in a couple of my classes was "How do you say _____ in English?" A simple, straight-forward and useful expression. The problem is, since language is shaped by environment, there are some things in Japan for which there is not an English equivalent.

In my first class, the Japanese teacher pointed out various things in the room and asked me how to say them in English.

Japanese teacher: (holds up a student's ruler) "How do you say monosashi in English?"

Me: (smiling and the kids, wishing I was anywhere but there) "It's a ruler."

Japanese teacher: (holding up a dictionary) "How do you say jisho in English?

Me: (continuing fake enthusiasm, wondering why I spent 4 years studying French litterature to do this all day) "It's a dictionary."

Japanese teacher: (removes a plastic sheet from a student's book) "How do you say shitajiki in English?"

Me: (suddenly looking uncomfortable) "Ummm, ummm, it's a plastic sheet thing-y that you put under a sheet of paper to make it easier to write? I don't know, we don't have those in America."

And I felt incredibly stupid, although it's not my fault the Japanese are so anal they need to carry around plastic sheets to make their writing neater. I may or may not own one of these myself, and it may or may not have cute monkeys on it.

Later on in the day, I was talking to an older Japanese woman about the yellow dust that was filling the air. I had assumed it was pollen, but it turned out to be yellow sand from the Gobi desert. Who knew?

"So anyway," she said, "what is the English word for yellow sand that comes from China?"

"Ummm, I think you just have to say 'yellow sand that comes from China.' Why? Is there a Japanese word for that specifically?"

"Yes," she answered. "It's kosa."

So I learned of the shortcomings of the English language yesterday. But outside of Japan (well, East Asia maybe) why would one need to talk about shitajiki and kosa? By the way, if there is in fact an English word for shitajiki, could someone please tell me what it is?

Apology

I would like to issue an official apology to the people of Japan, specifically the male population. I have much maligned you in recent weeks, although not without reason. Fortunately, you redeemed yourselves this morning. I want to stress, however, that while the people have redeemed themselves, the country has a ways to go before it will ever get out of the red and into the black in my book.

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This morning I got out of bed after a fitfull night of sleep, dressed, and made myself lunch. I was pretty happy with myself because even though I was operating on about 4 hours of sleep, I managed to get out of bed and actually prepare my own lunch, and still be on track for being on time to school.

Before we go any further, there's something I should explain about Japanese roads. Besides the fact that they are usually narrow, packing two lanes into what Americans would consider barely enough space for one, they are often lined on both sides by a 3-foot-deep gutter. Sometimes these gutters are covered, and sometimes they are not. It is not unheard of for a drunk foreigner to stumble into one of these gutters and end up with massive leg trauma. The road in front of my apartment fits this description: two-way, though barely big enough for one car, and lined by gutters reaching into the abbyss. There are metal plates covering the portion of the gutter between my parking space and the road. The problem is, there aren't enough of them. Sometimes they get shifted around, leaving a small gap.

Back to this morning. I was in a pretty good mood as I backed out of my space. I knew a small gap had developed in the plates, so I gritted my teeth as I backed out, hoping to miss it. I did. Then I started to go forward, turning to the left, and bam the car fell in the ditch. I tried going forwards and backwards, but nothing worked, so I got out to asess the damage. Yep, looked pretty stuck to me. Japanese cars tend to be light and small; a friend of mine had once lifted car out of one of these gutters all by himself. I thought I could do the same; I was wrong.

At about this time, an old man and a young man were walking past. The old man began to laugh at me, so I shot him a look of death. Then I went up to him, and said "What do you think I should do?" The young man was immediately on the case. He gave it a once over, then dissapeared somewhere. When he returned he had reinforcements. The old man had gone, and there were now three people at the scene. All of us tried to lift the car out, but to no avail.

"Hmm, it's too hard with 3 people," a middle-aged man who seemed to have taken charge said. "I think it will take 5."

With that, the young man dissapeared again, and returned with 2 more young guys. There were now 5 of us, but we still couldn't get the car out. One of the men called JAF, the Japanese equivalent of AAA, to come help us. They said it would be 40 minutes before they got there.

It was starting to rain, so one of the young men went and got me an umbrella from his work place. We stood shivering in the rain, waiting for JAF to show up. Some of the guys left because they had to be at work, but the man in charge stayed with me. We shivered in the rain a little more, and spoke of important topics: where I was from, my age, the narrowness of Japanese roads, the difficulty of the Japanese language, etc. At last the JAF guy showed up and by sticking planks of wood into the ditch, we were able to drive my car out.

So, thank you Japanese men, and I'm sorry for judging you so harshly.

The Excrements of the Monkey

If I were making a list of all the tings I disliked about Japan, well, we'd be here a while. But near the top of that list would be the Japanese belief that they are the only country in the world to be blessed with four seasons. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it really does. But more important are the following questions: (1) Why on earth do they believe that no other country has more than 3 seasons?; and (2) Why do they cling to it with such pride? I mean, if the belief that you alone get to experience spring, summer, fall and winter is what gets you out of bed in the morning, who am I to judge? Still, it angers me. I treasure the suprised looks on their faces when I make the rash claim that my state also enjoys four distinct seasons.

Perhaps because they believe that they alone have four seasons, they honor them with a zest not found elsewhere. Starbucks, for example, sells collector cups for each season.
I have the autumn edition. It's quite cute, but I would be pretty embarassed to take it school with me now that it's spring. It would be tantamount to wearing white after labor day.

The seasons are manifested in everything. Including, apparently, monkah poo.
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Being a connoisseur of all things monkah, I've decided to take a trip to a nearby prefecture where there is a monkah park. In this park, there is an onsen (hot spring) for the monkahs
to bathe in. Today I was doing research about the park, when I found the following information on the English version of the website...

" The excrements of the monkey on the snow are figured a spit dumpling, which like adulterate sawdust and fiber, because of the monkey eats some kinds of rind and bud mainly.

When the sunlight is getting much, the river become muddy of melting snow, and the ground gets extent from the foot of a mountain, the excrements of the monkey soon become like people.
Needless to say, it is smaller though. The smell become like the excrement of the horse, and the color is getting green. Because the wild monkey start eating young sprouts, young leaves,
young weeds as the trees are beginning to bud.

Spring has come for the excrements of the monkey."

Hopefully I'll get to experience spring in all its forms, from cherry blossoms to the excrements of the monkey, in the upcoming week.