On the Road

I've recently been contemplating the power of stories. In fact, I had a discussion about stories with my friend John just about an hour ago. I've been enjoying thinking about stories so much for the past hour or so that I'm tempted to start rattling off some of my thoughts. But instead, I think I'll tell you a story of my own. It may be one that means little to you when it's all said and done, but it's one that marked a rather pleasant chapter in the life of the ones who lived it.

Last Saturday, two boys met at one of the boy's house. Their names were Peter and Travis. Both of those boys had scooters. And they set off on those scooters in search of a mysterious lake. One of the boys had discovered the lake on a map, but neither boy had seen it in real-life and neither boy had ever heard anyone else talk about it. But they were in a mood for exploring, so off they went.

They had to fight through a lot of cars and trucks, but finally the boys found themselves riding past the borders of the city. And things slowed down a lot after that. The roads grew smaller and tighter, but they were more peaceful and interesting, and more suitable to a Saturday scooter adventure anyway. The boys brought the map, just in case, but they secretly hoped they wouldn't have to use it. If someone had stopped the boys at many points during their journey, saying, "Hey, you, just where do you think you are?!" they wouldn't have been able to answer with anything better than, "Somewhere south of the city," or even better, "Maybe you should mind your own business, thank you very much."

Did they ever find the mysterious lake? Of course they did! (It's a rather large lake, after all.)And they found it without a single bit of backtracking, too, though backtracking is hardly a bad thing usually. And what an unexpectedly plain and normal lake it was! Said Travis: "I thought it'd be more of a lake than this. It's basically just a big rice field." Peter thought so too.

But the boys weren't disappointed. They just decided that instead of spending too much time looking at the lake or trying to get something out of it that it just didn't have to give, they would see whether they couldn't make some kind of adventure out of the journey back home.

So they zigzagged their noisy scooters down narrow roads, overgrown with trees. They nearly ran over a big spider in the road once. Then later, they nearly ran over a strange stick. They turned around when they realized the stick had moved, and watched it slither off into the brush. They went down wooded roads and winding roads and gravelly roads and going-nowhere roads and rice field roads. One time they scared an oba-san (old woman), but not too bad, they thought, so they didn't feel bad about it. And many birds and animals and even a few bugs (some swallowed) noticed that as they rode, the boys would often laugh out loud, almost as if someone were tickling them.

They even stopped at a gas station once that happened to live on the side of an old road. The man there asked them, "Mbababa--Pe! Mhahahaudud--Pe!" and things like that. They told him, "Ibaraki-ben de hanasereba, zenzen wakarimasen. Demo futsu na Nihongo ga sukoshi wakarimasu," which of course means, "If you talk to us in the Ibaraki dialect, we can't understand a single thing you say. But we can speak a little bit of normal Japanese." And he told them, "Gajaumusuni--Pe!" which seemed to mean, "Then please talk to my wife, you crazy foreigners!" So they did, and a rather pleasant woman she turned out to be. After some poor guesses about their ages, occupations, and ability to speak Japanese, she let the boys pay for their gas. She told them one last time to please find Japanese girlfriends and then let them leave.

No one knows how long they road those scooters down those small streets on the outside parts of the city. Sometimes you could hear their scooters' happy, roaring, 50-cc engines south of the city, and sometimes you could hear them east of it. Out east, some people say they heard those engines several times in a nice little neighborhood where they boys' friends lived--the Woods and the Chans. One nosy neighbor even noticed the boys' scooters sitting outside those houses--with the boys nowhere to be seen! Well, those boys didn't disappear, as you might've guessed. Even boys on a crazy scooter-riding adventure in search of mysterious places like to stop and talk to their friends sometimes, you see. And they did a bit more than talk. The Woods gave them water and pineapple, and the Chans gave them enough peanut butter for a month! All brave adventurers should be so lucky as to have friends that nice and caring.

And that was nearly the end of their journey. They headed back to the city but stopped at a park to explore just a little more. What a way for an adventure to end. Wouldn't you know it, that park turned out to be a park that didn't allow for much exploring. But it did have some very nice playground equipment, and as the boys obviously thought, that's nothing to sneeze at.

They got home an hour later and just before dark.

The End.

Books

Some of you will be filled with immense joy, some of you will ridicule, and some of you will probably just snicker and click the little "x" in the top right corner of the screen, but: We foreigners here in Mito, Japan, have got ourselves a little book club.

Yep, that's right. We meet every other week, typically at the home of Mark and Kelly Barneche. We've only been meeting a few months, but we've already gone from philosophy to culture to this week's book on psychology/sociology/life-in-general. I think everyone who has gone has enjoyed it quite a lot, and the discussion is about as good as any college class I've ever attended (and that's pretty good). In fact, I need to hurry up and write this post so I can get over there--tonight's the night!

That being said, I have gone ahead and decided to play along with Gabe's crazy game of blogosphere spam. It's all about books.

1. How many books have I owned?
I probably own about 300 right now, plus however many I bought and returned in college--so low-300s or so.

2. What was the last book you bought?
Tough question. First of all, I already feel inferior to Gabe for not even having my books catalogued, much less insured. And now here I've gotta go and, because I'm short on time, start typing out titles on my blog without providing hyperlinks--how can I bear this shame!!!!
Now, to answer the question: I have advance-purchased Harry Potter 6 and C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed. If those don't count, then you'd better put me down for Pilgrim's Progress, which I bought last year!!! (December 31st)

3. What was the last book you read?
The last book I finished was Shogun by James Clavell. Before that, it was some crazy book written by this crazy Japanese author. Currently, I am reading Bonhoeffer's Ethics, Augustine's Confessions, Les Miserables, and our book club's latest venture, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and I'm not even joking about that last name).

4. What are FIVE books that have meant a lot to you?
It's okay if these are books I've written, right? jk

1) The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis
2) The Brother's Karamazov by Dostoyevsky (it's second on Gabe's blog too--just call me Mr. Solidarity)
3) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey (the worst thing about this book is the title)
4) The Scarlet Letter
5) (I won't write this book on my blog. Ask me in person if you want to know.)

5. Tag five people who haven't played yet:
Sorry, I just don't play that way...

Later!

I Was Honored to Have Given Doraemon My Head

I should warn you up-front: I'm in a dangerous mood tonight--I feel like blogging and have nothing to say. What you do with this knowledge from here on out is your own business. I won't be held responsible (at least I hope not).

I have my own English conversation classroom at school, called the ECR (as you know if you've read any of my reason posts). There are 18 classes at my school, so theoretically each desk, except for a few in the back, have about 18 different occupants weekly. That makes these desks uniquely suited for recording the history of my classroom. I like to think these desks tell a unique version of history--like a Rosetta stone or cave drawings, almost indecipherable to anyone except that arcane group for and by whom they were produced. Ever so often, I go around with an eraser and blot out the recent annals of my classroom. This gives me a good excuse to intrude upon these esoteric writings, which tell a history of my classroom from a perspective very different from my own.

I don't even know who the historians of the desk annals are. During class I often furtively scan the terrain, trying to notice, undetected, those select, peerless few who have been chosen to recount the history of the ECR. But to me they remain phantoms--unreal, unknowable, beyond grasp, yet their existence made undeniable by the signs they leave.

Today, I saw, written on a desk in the Japanese syllabary used for foreign words: "Wai Emu Shi Ei." I was momentarily puzzled before decoding the enscription's secret meaning: Y-M-C-A. It brought a tear to my eye to think that all over this country, maybe, probably, somewhere, the most sacred treasures of American pop culture are being transcribed on many a hard surface.

Somtimes the messages are less than subtle, however. I've mentioned it before on this blog, but it's worth repeating. Once I found this sentence written in clear English on a desk in the front row: "Don't overfriendly with me."

Today I saw a picture, drawn on a student's worksheet, of a famous comic book character, Doraemon (a rather feisty cat--I think). At this particular moment in time, Doraemon had a spear in his hand, and on that spear was the severed head of a man wearing glasses and smiling most sincerely. I may have misinterpreted this sign, but I couldn't help but notice that the impaled head bore a striking resemblance to that of my own. In spite of myself, I laughed out loud. I suppose I would've been concerned had it been a gory picture, but it was actually a rather pleasant one. Instead of the disconnected neck having dangling bones and dripping blood, as one might expect, it had a perfectly rounded ring at the bottom, like you see when you accidentally remove the head of a toy figurine. In fact, the whole head had the look of well-shapen plastic. I was honored to realize this student thought so highly of me: Even after horrible mutiliation, here was I, my "genki" smile fully intact, coupled with my comic-book-sized larger-than-life personna. And believe me, in Japan you just don't get any bigger than being a comic book hero. Or a villain. Maybe someday you can become one too. Don't give up just yet.