We can still be friends though.

"This is it Japan. We're finished. I'm leaving you. I thought I could learn to deal with all of it, with you. But we're just too different. The odd hours, the incessant demands on my time, the limits on what I could and couldn't do with you, all the rituals you insisted on introducing in everything we did just to protect your "wa." Why didn't you just come out and admit you stole that from Cuba Gooding Jr.'s bit about the 'Kwan' in Jerry McGuire, anyway?"
"Look, Japan, we're just moving in two different directions. Let's just try and end this civilly, all right? We're paid up through the end of the month, so let's just go out separate ways at the end of July."
"Besides, you'll meet someone else. You're a great country, and there's loads of people who are looking for someone like you. Well, just not this person. Not anymore. Japan, But after July 26th, well, let's just say we'll both have some looking around to do."
"I'm sorry, Japan. It's not me. It's you."

Talk to a Cubs fan sometime...

Last night the Japanese soccer team took the field for the last time in the 2006 World Cup. Although they successfully advanced in 2002, they drew a much harder group this time. And, somewhat predictably, took a 1-4 spanking from Brazil to finish with two losses and a draw.

Japan is not known for being a sports powerhouse. Oh, sure, the competitive eating circuit is a bunch of fat guys from America's eastern seaboard praying that a tiny woman will finally be able to challenge the unstoppable Japanese five year champ and bring the gluttony title back to the USA. And their women's' wrestling team slammed the crap out of the US on the way to winning their second consecutive world championship. Oh yeah. And there was that baseball thing, wasn't there?

Let's be frank. With the exceptions of Judo, which I'm told they invented, and Women's' Wrestling, which I understand was created on the magical island of Themyscira, Japan has shown its international prowess in primarily American pastimes. Really, was anyone thinking that the Netherlands was holding all its best second basemen out of the majors as an issue of national pride? And is there any other nation on earth that can boast so many people who have enough to eat that they can compete in eating too much?

All of which is to say that it wasn't terribly surprising that Japan's heart-breakingly sincere supporters had their honest hopes of a three-goal victory over Brazil dashed. But what did surprise me was that the recurrent theme on all of this morning's news programs went something like this:

"Just wait 'til 2010."

Japan's coach, Zico, is not sticking around for four years. I'm pretty sure he's going back to Japan just to pick up his already packed luggage. There's no telling how many of the players are going to be in any shape to play again. Really, between now and then, almost anything can happen. But I guess that's what fandom is. "Just wait 'til next time."

Recently

Okay, so a little over a week ago, one of my old friends from New Mexico came to visit. It took a while to get my place, well, not exactly tidy, but cleared out enough to allow a second human-sized form to enter. And after that I sort of had to get back into my routine of working. Which is why I haven't posted anything in a while. But I'll try and get some of the highlights of the trip listed here.

Incidentally, the next two or three days are going to be set aside for the city junior high schools to have tournaments in just about everything. The kids will be competing in soccer, baseball, judo, table tennis, kendo, something called "soft-ball tennis", basketball and track and field. Naturally, after three months of practice they're all quite excited to finally compete.

I, however, have been spared the difficulty of choosing which teams to watch and cheer for. I'll be giving speaking tests to all 271 of the first year students.

One. By. One.


I don't know if you can believe it, but somehow the kids aren't nearly as excited at the prospect of a foreign language test.

I should have paid more attention at the racetrack...

For most of the last week I have been dog tired. Largely due to the annual sports festival held by most schools in Japan. Yeah. I'm so far out of shape that a 100 meter sprint and two hours of hauling field equipment in the rain tired me out. I know, some exercise is in order.

But I also have not been sleeping so much each night. For the last couple weeks I've been averaging about 4.5~5 hours of sleep most weeknights, with a 20 minute nap around mid-afternoon. Is it good for me? Depends on what you mean. Since I have to eat the school lunches every day, I'm probably getting a better diet in terms of nutrition than I've had since I left home. So I'm not so concerned about getting sick. And apart from the odd sports festival, my job is not so physically demanding. The problem is that it's not always so mentally demanding either.

Sometimes it's a struggle to stay focused on the job when it's just a matter of waiting to see what example sentence you'll be asked to repeat next. And since a huge part of my job is providing vocal models and then waiting for the head teacher to shout "repeat" at the kids, I have rather a lot of waiting to do. In an average 45 minute class I might spend 6 or 7 minutes enunciating and the rest of the time trying to keep the kids on the same page. Like, actually clarifying the teacher's Japanese instructions to turn to page 18.

Seriously, the teacher will say, in these kids' native language: "open your textbooks to page 18." It's not in English or German or pig latin, and he doesn't use some ceremonial, anachronistic sentence structures.

"Pray, openne thy volumes of the tongues of the islande kingdom of Albion, and allow thy gaze to rest uponne the leaf numbered with the eighteenth ordinal indicating the place in sequence."

But for some reason, there will always be five or six students blinking dimly around at their peers, trying in vain to understand the meaning of "textbook." It didn't seem to me that a visual aid for something like that would be needed, but sure enough, not only do I have to demonstrate opening the book, there's actually a diagram of how to do it in their textbook.

But the relative dimness of some kids isn't the tangent I wanted to lead you on. My point is that after three years, I've become pretty familiar with my job, and it doesn't always keep me interested. But being really tired makes it a lot easier. If my mind is only running at, say, 60% capacity, it becomes much harder to get lost in a really interesting thought. Mainly because it's a lot harder to think of anything really interesting when I'm that tired.

But last night I got a full 6 hours of sleep. It's like someone turned up the power on all the inputs: colors are sharper and have more contrast, I can hear and discern more sounds, my mosquito bites are itchier and I can feel the difference between the cotton of my t-shirt and the cotton of the shirt I've got on over it where it changes on my upper arm. Smells, tastes, the whole shebang. And it has been a trial keeping on task in class. When one student starts drifting off, it's obvious from his body language. When another stops taking notes and starts writing letters to her friends, I can hear the difference in the speed and rhythm of the scratching sounds her pen makes. And even while all this is going on, underneath it my train of thought has turned into a freaking subway system. It's easy to get lost in all of that, and miss the cue to repeat the dialogue for the sixth time that day. Or was it the seventh?

Which is why I guess I've sort of been handicapping myself. In order to make sure I'm applying myself to the mundane stuff, I've been preventing my mind from being able to wander so effectively or so far out of the bounds of work...

Wait. Did I just admit to sabotaging myself in order to be able to work more efficiently?