The Clock Is Ticking, and I'm Still Worried about Syntax...

At least that's probably what I'll be thinking in about 15 minutes. I have decided I want to experiment with typing up posts while on a tight time frame (like tonight). I guess I have two reasons really. One is that I need to take the GRE soon and could stand to fine-tune my writing-intelligibly-while-under-pressure ability (it's amazing how quickly that particular skill gets rusty), and two, I just don't want to waste too much of my life writing on this crazy blog. But we'll see if this new idea lasts beyond the experimental try you are currently perusing.

I've had a request to include more posts about school life, and I'd certainly like to accomodate. It's a little difficult to do that, however, because A) I have to be careful what I say about my place of employment online (this is, after all, a public forum), and B) I just don't have any new stories. Or do I...? Let me think...

Well, I guess I have developed a slight identity crisis as far as being a teacher. Actually, I didn't "develop" it: I've had it since I started teaching here and just haven't managed to resolve it so far. The crisis is basically the old friend/mentor/authoritarian dilemma. Here I am trying to teach English in Japan. They call me "sensei," and they expect me to know answers to important questions, like, "Can I go to the bathroom?" and "Kento's head is gushing blood. Can I help him walk to the nurse's room?" All of this respect, and really, honestly, on occasion--usually--I just really don't know what in the world I'm doing. I'm here in a foreign environment, with all kinds of social norms and mores that are still completely enigmatic to me, and these kids think I'm capable of answering their urgent, life-or-death questions. I get some immunity from the challenging things because I don't speak the language and because the students know that, even though I'm a "sensei," there's still something a little odd about me... something a little different. (There are 700 people at my school. Guess which one of them isn't Japanese?)

So anyway, occasionally issues arise. For example, today a bunch of girls came into my room at cleaning time to help me clean. I knew they weren't girls who generally cleaned my room, but we had a sports tournament today, so everything was a little out of whack and I didn't bother interrogating them in broken Japanese. I just figured they knew where they should be. Then toward the end of souji time (cleaning), another teacher came into my classroom and proceeded to interrogate them in Japanese. Basically, she asked them in pretty brusque Japanese where they were supposed to be cleaning. After they said, "In the hall," she said something like, "Then why are you in here talking to Peter-Sensei?" So they got in trouble, and I kind of did too. I was practically their accomplice in souji-time crime!

Another time, a girl was being dragged through the teacher's room. She's a sweet student who likes to tell me how cute and cool I am (and she's right, of course). Anyway, she had made the horrible mistake of dyeing her hair, so a teacher was dragging her to the sink to dye it back to its natural black state. As she goes past my desk, she says, "Oh, Peter-Sensei!" and tries to stop and talk. The teacher isn't having it, though. He keeps marching her along and says something to the effect of, "Not even Peter-Sensei can help you now!" That was hard to take. It's one of the rare, striking examples of the failure of my "gaijin powers."

These are uncommon occurences, let me assure you. But almost everyday, just during my normal interactions with the students, small things happen that seem to test the line between authority figure and cool guy with gaijin powers. If I had more time and a password-protected blog, I would probably tell you about some of them. But I think I'll lay this post to rest.

One final word: I love my kids, and I know I'll miss them when they're gone. They have brightened my days so many times, I've already fired ten different guys who were supposed to be keeping count. God bless!

Joy Unexpected

Joy often arises in unexpected places. In fact, one of the most consistent characteristics of joy is that it hardly ever comes from being sought, as a end, as a goal--but it often arises quite readily as a byproduct when you pursue other things.

One of the steady sources of joy during my time in Japan has come from my primary means of getting about--my scooter. I blogged a couple of months ago about a memorable roadtrip Travis and I took on our scooters, and that was certainly an occasion that brought great joy. But trips are almost always a source of joy to me. One of the remarkable things about the scooter (that beautiful, styroam-seated, 50-cc engined piece of machinery) is that it injects joy into the utterly day-by-day, the most routine of tasks. There's one road, for instance, down which I travel quite frequently, and everytime I ride my scooter down that twisting, treacherous path I hear the tune to Star Wars in my head and begin to swerve around in my lane, dodging potholes like a Force-wielding Jedi. And I'm not joking about hearing the tune in my head: It reverberates around in my helmet like a symphony, because it's being hummed--by me. And I don't even realize I'm doing it. It's practically involuntary, and I don't remember its ever having started.

Well, while I was returning home from our cell group, tonight's theme turned out to be a song from Les Miserables, "One Day More" (or whatever it's called). The song goes pretty high, as some of you know, and if I'm gonna take it upon myself to be Jean Valjean, I certainly don't want to wimp out, so I basically wound up screaming at the top of my lungs at certain key moments. At a particularly climactic point in the song (with me screaming "One--Day--More!!!"), I passed a guy on the sidewalk, and that old Japanese man spun around to look at me so fast, he nearly lost his footing and fell right on his face. The look on his face the brief moment I saw it was just priceless: Utter bewilderment, horror, and affrontedness all meshed into one contorted, mouth-gaping shape. I laughed my head off! And he nearly made me bite it on the pavement! The laughter was still going at full force when I stopped at the next light, so that the car beside me could see nothing but the arms of a white person convulsing and a shaking, twisting helmet with a face mask fogged over in the cool autumn night's air. And the thought of what I must've looked like made me laugh all the more.
I hope these people are enjoying me half as much as I'm enjoying them.

What Mark Twain has to do with Me

(Warning: The following post is lengthy, and in a long-winded sort of way. In addition, it springs from several consecutive days of sleep deprivation, and has numerous obscure literary allusions, several awkwardly worded sentences, and sundry failed attempts at wit. That is all.)

Humanity is an interesting thing. In a sense, we're all connected, related, interdependent, but in a sense, most people just have nothing to do with the life of, say, Random Person A. I think that's why it's so notable when various lives do line up or intersect or in some unique way play off of one another. In fact, it's just such a person--and his unique connection to my own life--about which I'd like to say a thing or two.

The man was Samuel Clemens, best known by the pen name of Mark Twain. Born into a middle class family in a small, dank room in provincial-ville, central Mi... and I'm just kidding.

No, where our story really starts, is D----, Oklahoma, in the year 1986. That year a certain ruddy and handsome young lad began a prestigious academic career at none other than Mark Twain Kindergarten. Though beginning kindergarten several months behind the other students (because he didn't want to be separated from his momma), he overcame seemingly insurmountable odds and succeeded in continuing on to the First Grade. As a 1st grader, now at Mark Twain Elementary School, Peter (for this was the boy's name) won great recognition for himself, including First Place in the school Halloween costume contest, as a skeleton. When called into the principal's office to have his picture taken, Peter craftily used his skeleton mask to hide an overflow of tears. More Huck Finn than Tom Sawyer, Peter was crying because he mistakenly thought he was in trouble. Next, passing swiftly into second grade with all the alacrity and elan of a young man who's mastered block letters and addition with numbers from 1 to 10, Peter further distinguished himself as a son of Twain by running away from school after his gym teacher unfairly made him sit in Time Out when another kid tripped him. He also had the starring role in the 2nd grade play and was several times allowed to read his ingenious stories about Russian spies over the PA system to the entire school, including, yes, even the 6th graders.

So Twain and I were intertwined from the beginning. His namesake was my school; his pseudonym, the figurative anvil of my youth; his non de plume, the branding on my chest (on Tuesday nights, when I played soccer). How different my life had I had the misfortune of attending Will Rogers Elementary School! I shudder to think of it.

Then I moved to a new school for 3rd grade.

My next encounter with Twain came in college, when I finally got around to reading the more famous of his works. It's too soon to tell what precise lasting effects they are to have on me, but I can say that I'll certainly never think of the Mississippi the same again, nor will I ever forget the moment Tom, after winning through sheer chicanery the Sunday school prize for Bible knowledge, answered the eager clergyman's request to name two of the apostles with the cataclysmic "David and Goliath." That may have been one of the greatest moments in my life.

Most recently, I've come across several essays Twain wrote about the German language. In one he comments on the unreasonable length of German words--perfectly expressing sentiments I had while living in Austria a few years ago. In another work, he notes a key difference between German and English: That whereas in English we are always trying to think of new ways to refer to the same thing, in German it's perfectly all right to reuse the same word endlessly. So for example, if I, an English-speaker, want to write a story about a man with a knife, I have to do something like this, "The knife's shadow crept slowly down the alleyway. As Mickey peered down into the passage below, he noticed a small light moving and flickering there below--the dagger's tip. Losing sight of the faint luminescence, Mickey leaned out of the window, calling out, 'Hello, down there! Hello!' As though suspended in air, the thick, serrated edge trudged slowly, silently up the firewell beside the window. As Mickey craned farther out of the window, shouting again, the cold blade rose slowly into the air."
So you see what's happened? In addition to forcing me to write a silly story in a genre that's not exactly my forte, this language-wide aversion to repetition also made me use "dagger" (hardly accurate), "thick, serrated edge" (rather melodramatic), and "cold blade" instead of just saying "knife" each time. An odd story here and there may indeed find itself bolstered to have half a million synonyms flying around inside it, but more often than not, it's just simply a pain. I can't tell you how many times in my own experience a short story has come to a jolting stop in mid-composition for no other reason than a simple scarcity of synonyms.

But my favorite quote of Twain's, the quip that really takes the cake, the sayonara hit in any debate over the intertwinedness of Twain and me, was this comment following his travels to France: "I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."

I'll just let you try to imagine how that comment might apply to me.