Alive

Alive in America. 6 hours in Honolulu at gate 15 staring at Diamondhead as a guy on a cell phone,they are all on cellphones, argues with his girlfriend. The unironic clincher, "That's how I roll!"

Pefect flight to Atlanta on Sominex. N0 movies. No headphones. No turbulence. Asleep on my tray table. Jennifer took me to Waffle House and Super Walmart so I could experience life as a white person. Handed me off to Chad and we were off to Knoxville. Dave Kyser is in the hospital with swollen hands as his dog tried to eat his cat and he tried to stop it. No sign of the cat. No camp for Dave. Strange nexus of dead state-troopers in North Carolina. Possible run on panda brains for the ecodorm. Warren Wilson College has my initials.

Miyazaki

DSCF8031, originally uploaded by wwc photos.

MIyazaki was good. Tomo got drunk and asked for permission to use his own toilet. No one told me that all of the belongings that I had carefully placed in plastic containers, wrapped in a blue tarp weighed down with concrete and stored under a cover on Chad's roof had been moved and uncovered by someone thereby leaving 95% of them utterly destroyed. It is my fault for leaving them there. It was asking too much but it was hard. It was easier because Natsuki came along and said "Throw it away!" She also added, "Unless you can't." Which makes her rad. I got to go surfing about 3 times. The waves weren't great. James managed to break my board so I tried Tomo's fish, which was impossible. Aoshima waves were tiny, but I rocked James' fun-board. A little bigger at Dobutsuen-ura and we ran into Shiho's sister, who informed me she has a boyfriend these days.

Chad and Caroline are off for Wales, and then to parts unknown. Won't quite be MIyazaki without Chad.

I slept hard on the boat back. A kid on the train today was wearing a basketball shirt that read "Slum Dank." I feel you kid.

This morning I had to work at the education training center with other English teachers on making short videos for elementary schools. THe irony wasn't lost on me that two years ago I was on the waiting list for FSU Film School and now I am having an old lady tell me how to work their beat up video camera.

Now I am getting ready to get on a plane to Hawaii and on to Atlanta. Every moment I am on a plane I am convinced I am going to die. I am pretty sure I won't, but if I do, it was a good run. You can get this post Buzzfeeded as "Dude predicts demise in blog-post." Play The Pogues at my funeral, put my ashes in a cherry bomb and blow up a mailbox or something. I have some good books for the trip.

I am a good shade of brown. On to camp!!!

My Students

DSCF8011, originally uploaded by wwc photos.

This what my students look like. The one on the right is the toughest kid in school. He doesn't cause problems for me. The one on the left is bad in calls but is somewhat nice to me. He is almost taller than me.

Return to Miyazaki

DSCF8039, originally uploaded by wwc photos.

I caught the ferry back to Miyazaki on Friday night. Saturday we went swimming in Aya River and then to the Aoshima Matsuri. I had noticed a U.S. Navy minesweeper in the harbor. At the matsuri there were all these chubby foreigners looking out of place. After a few minutes I put 2 and 2 together. Most of the Navy guys were pretty friendly. This guy, Barney I think, was running around barefoot in a pair of trunks. As he explained that his tattoos were by Sailor Jerry he held a beer in one hand and some kind of wine in another. As he explained the tattoo he was dumping each cup on his chest. Miyazaki.

Happy Birthday Natsuki!!!

It's Natsuki's birthday.

In celebration:

Human Rights?

An interesting article on the recent Japanese Supreme Court ruling on children born to non-Japanese mothers.

I agree with a lot of his points here. Lots of large issues, whether it is human rights or the environment, get cutesied up and littleified as to be digestable by Japanese society. An overall, ecological criticism of rampant consumer culture would be changed to "Why don't you take an eco bag to the grocery store." Or, as Pro. Jones observes here, the right to a fair trial is usurped by, "Don't be mean to people."

I think eco bags and not being mean to people are important, but I worry that simplifying things so much makes the larger issues irrelevent to the larger population. I believe that is the general viewpoint in Japan anyway. Human rights are something big that is dealt with by the government, which is boring and no one is interested in. It's really none of our business.

Phoney

Interesting point. I would be included in that demographic.

FLorida Voter Swing

This is good. I don't imagine that it affects the Panhandle so much, but something will have to give. My prediction is that the Panhandle will gradually more isolated in its political leanings and be an aberration in Florida, more strongly linked with Alabama. Of course, a lot of this depends on immigration patterns which could root out the old white-folks and retired military. The main issue is that there are no large universities or new-fangled jobs to keep younger people around so there is little push for internal change.

Just in Case You Forgot

Here is info on the Gion Matsuri. You will notice that my photos are linked to at the bottom.

Do You Believe in Miracles?!?!?

My phone works again. I dried it all out. It wouldn't work. As a last ditch attempt, I put the battery back in and turned it on. The outside display is a little messed up, but it is completely functional. I think I should buy a new one soon anyway as it is probably corroding internaly. Aren't we all.

Like I Said, It's Hot.

I was worried yesterday that people would get heatstroke. Especially sinc eit is matsuri season. I would wager that some tourists in town for Gion Matsuri are going to pass out at some point today.

Speaking of passing out, we are having a Gion Matsuri party at my house tonight. Now that I live on Muromachi, I actually have Yamaboko on my street. I went and took pictures of them being erected yesterday. Will try to post soon.

A few months ago I was coming home from work and I heard a group practicing the Gion Matsuri "kon kon chiki chin kon chinki chin" music and I got excited. The next morning I was riding my bike to work and I got all excited thinking I was hearing it again. It turns out it was just the metal shutters on a parking garage being opened. I am all for dischordant Japanese music but... It happened again this weekend. I hear some metal banging and thought "It's started!!" But it was just another shutter, being lowered this time.

Sorry it is on a weekday Ed, or I would have invited you.

AKA Barbie

I just saw this. Congratulations Jennifer!!

Hot

Indeed it is really, really hot. All of the tourists are in town for Gion Matsuri, but I would advise them to not got outside during the day. I went running about 10am and it was death hot. Later in the afternoon I went to buy some new board shorts. It was super death hot. Also, the store was full of fake surfers buying fake surf clothes for the purpose of fake surfing.

School Expert Says: School Works!!!

A British education expert gives Japanese elementary schools a thumbs up. There is a lot I like about Japanese schools and stuff that I don't. In the end though, it is the same equation as anywhere else; good schools work and bad schools don't. Surprise. On the whole, I think that Japan probably has more good schools, but that is hard to say sitting here.

Somehow, the thing I can't get over is that this article again wrongly uses the phrase "magic bullet." I hate that. Wait. Now I am thinking. You could make a strange case that it uses it correctly but I think they mean to say "silver bullet." People often confuse the two. This makes me more nuts that it should. It is like when people say, "She got the Noble Peace Prize in science." No. No she didn't. Nobody ever has. Still better than calling someone a "porous defender."

Guinea Pig or Tug Boat?

More from Debito Arudou, who is worth reading even when he is wrong. He is not in this case. I'm just sayin'.

Wet Phone

Here is some good information on fixing a wet phone. I got a lot of it right and some big parts wrong. I took the battery out and dried everything I could as soon as I got it out, but I also put the battery back in a few times. The whole thing is dissassembled and sitting in front of a running fan right now.

Disaster Strikes

I fell asleep after work today and woke up around 12:45. I groggily began searching for my keitai (cell phone) knowing that I went to sleep with it somewhere in the vicinity. I couldn't find it anywhere so I gave up and went downstairs. When I came back up I saw it, suspended in a glass of water that was next to my futon. How does this happen? How? If you don't live in Japan maybe the magnitude of this disaster seems a bit muted. Essentially everyone I know or have known for the last seven years lives inside of that phone. If I wanted to mail someone who I hadn't spoken to in half a decade, I conceivably could. I have now deconstructed the phone and laid it out in front of a fan. I have known this situation to go either way. I am not sure how I began to piss of God, but I must have done it well and good. I was going to compare losing one's phone with being mired in bankruptcy but then I thought, "No. That feels a little bit different." Pray for me children. Pray for me.

Don't Believe the Hype

Do you really think that drilling off of Florida will help you oil consumer? A few things keep being pretended in the current oil conversation. First, it seems to be glossed over that the oil won't go directly to the American people. The oil will go to the oil companies. The same oil companies who make record profits during a time of crisis and are given subsidies to do more drilling. Subsidies!!! We subsidize companies so that they can the take more of our money. What the F?

Second, large drilling operations are not economically feasible. Companies might pretend that they are because they might be able to squeeze a little out for now, but mainly because they desire to preserve this system for as long as they can run it.

Lastly, this is all the equivalent of a 12 year-old boy thinking, "If I just lay here and masturbate for 5 minutes then that is time that I won't have to get up and go to school." It doesn't change anything. We are going to have to deal with oil shortages. No one wants to cut back on consumption. No one wants to think about the population. No one wants to think about the fundamental nature of our societies so they reason something easy; just drill more then shoot all of the pollution into space. It don't make no kind of sense.

As Jane's Addiction Would Say...

Here we go!

Wet Pants

This morning I woke up to a giant rainstorm in Kyoto. It stopped before I went to work and I was able to ride my bike downtown without getting wet. To big foreign guys had jumped in Kamo-gawa by Sanjo-Ohashi and were splashing around in their underwear. I must say that my entering Kamo-Gawa around Ebisu-Dori, North of Nijo was playful and summerish, these two rubes committed and unforgivable transgression. If you can't understand that it is hard to understand the directional bias of Kyoto.

As the train neared Hirakata we caught back up with the rainstorm, which, as a former resident of both Florida and Miyazaki, I must say was the most violent non-storm related rain I have witnessed. It fell straight, but hard.

Everyone was buying umbrellas at the station, but I didn't feel like waiting in line so I ran through the bike parking lot, exited in front of the pachinko place and dashed up the street to the Family Mart, where no one was buying anything. At school, 90% of the teachers were soaking wet. My pants still are.

Back in the dungeon the last two days and things are getting worse. I have assumed a Zen attitude about the matter and have decided to merely bear witness. Yesterday Okada set off party-poppers in my class yelling, "Happy Birthday." My natural reaction would be to beat the living shit out of him. Not being able to do that I paid attention to the 70% of the class that was trying to participate. Hyodo came in holding a popper and I said to him in English, "Hyodo, if you set that off, I will rip off your fucking head and shove every stream of paper into the bleeding hole." He said, "I don't understand." "But you catch my drift." "I got it. You said 'Why don't you sit down and do the worksheet.'" "No, but that will do."

Yesterday, Ueshina, the 2nd tiniest boy in the 1st grade, tried to beat up the math teacher. Apparently the 1st years are trying their big-boy pants on for size. Apparently they don't know that my big-boy pants are Zubaz and their is no moratorium on me regulating their asses.