Where I Intended to Be

In a parallel universe, I update my blog every day. Part I. November 15, 2009

Unfortunately, that universe is so close to me, and yet so far away. Following  Brian Greene / Elegant Universe - esque jargon, that universe and my universe are slices of cosmic bread on the cutting board of reality. Unfortunately, those slices are completely oblivious to each other, except in a vague way that occasionally inspires the bittersweet and humbling taste of guilt.

It’s sort of what I feel whenever I forget to answer e-mail (also one of my well-known vices…)

Ahem.

So, welcome back! How are you today?

Things have been quite busy, as usual. Let’s skip the chitchat and get down to business. I have 26 memories that need to be announced and elaborated on. To break it up a bit, and keep things from getting too long winded (too late…), I’ve got ten listed here, another ten listed in Part II, and the last six (AS WELL AS AN ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING ANNOUNCEMENT) in Part III.

Apologies as usual for the “Lists and Lists Galore” method of blogging that I seem to be embracing. ^_^;;

Here we go!

#1: October 21st: Dance Practice Hilarity
This was a dance practice that we held before a pretty substantial festival that we went to the following weekend. We all already knew the dance that we were going to do (D.J. Ozma’s Macchibo), and so we spent two hours sitting around, talking, and occasionally practicing the dance. At one point, we decided to work on our timing, and so we did the dance while standing in a circle. This was hard for me, though, because seeing everyone else dancing mirror-image fashion really confused me. I pointed this out, and one of the troupe members turned around and did the dance with his back to me, thus prompting a flurry of comments about his backside and me complaining just so that he’d turn around and give me a chance to look at it.

-__-;;;

There are times when I wish I didn’t understand Japanese. Although the whole thing was, admittedly, pretty hilarious.

#2: Fievel VS My Little Monkey Saga: Part I
As I pointed out in an earlier post, Fievel is becoming bolder, and I began to wonder at one point he and My Little Monkey would run into conflict with each other. I was right to expect some overlap, but surprised that Fievel is turning out to be the winner in the Epic Battle for Julie’s Love and Attention. The thing about My Little Monkey is that, while he is a persistent little monkey, he is also easily distracted, and if I don’t respond to his demands/requests/questions/comments/concerns RIGHT WHEN HE HAS THEM, then there is a chance (however slim) that he will lose interest in me and go off somewhere else.

Fievel, however, is constant, and never, EVER loses interest.  Every possible break that exists in the school’s schedule, he darts to my side, English sticker card in hand. And he doesn’t leave. Come rain or hail or sleet or snow, the child simply refuses to go.

(Sorry about that.)

Seriously, though, he is, at present, the victor in the Fievel VS Monkey battle, if only because he just never gets up and eagerly seizes on any spare moments of attention that My Little Monkey’s absence allows. Also, he gets bonus points for being infinitely lighter than the Monkey, so I’m more willing to entertain his requests to be carried around.

You know, there are some days where I wonder if I mightn’t be a jungle gym.

#3: Disturbing Yet Heartfelt Movies are Disturbing Yet Heartfelt
I’ve been hanging out a lot with Rocko lately, and so he took the opportunity a few weeks ago to show me some of his favorite movies. One of them, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, was one of those movies that I started out kind of disliking, but then fell in love with. It’s, more or less, about a drugged out D.J. that loses his hearing and eventually finds a path to a redemption of sorts. It was extremely interesting, but one of those films that stayed with me for a while. Rocko felt the need to show me Children of Men the day after we watched It’s All Gone Pete Tong, and so by the time I went home that weekend, I was kind of in a state where I questioned my existence and the value of reality.

Because, you know, that’s what you do sometimes.
 

#4: A Significant Way That The Universe Wins: Baskin Robins Is In Japan
And not only that, but I was able to get Halloween flavors. Although, to be honest, I like their regular chocolate flavors better.

That’s pretty much it. I just like ice cream.

#5: Serious Bonding With the Dance Troupe
October 25th, the troupe all piled into a couple of cars and we drove down to Owase to celebrate the seventh annual Kumano Kodo festival. It wasn’t all that large, but there were a really large number of dance troupes there, so I was able to see a lot of different dancing styles throughout the day. There were some that were obviously influenced by Chinese dance styles, and then one group did a pretty respectable version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (I was particularly fond of that one).

The day was really, really cold and rainy, though, and so when we weren’t dancing (we had a three-hour break at one point), we all huddled inside one of the buildings, ate festival food, talked, and occasionally napped. It was really relaxed and reminded me a lot of the trips that I went on when I was in band in high school. I also spent some time with D.J. Ozma Jr. – we played cards and, at one point, played catch with a ball that was in the shape of Doraemon’s head.

#6: Culture Festival Preparations Are Fun
The culture festival for my middle school was on Halloween, and so the week up to it we were all busy trying to clean and decorate the school, finish art projects, put the final touches on musical performances, and occasionally sleep. Every year that I’ve been in Japan, I’ve done a performance with the music club, but since the club doesn’t really exist anymore, I haven’t been doing anything this year. This left me with a little (a very little) free time, and so I was able to spend my afternoons wandering around and helping various student committees.

My favorite afternoon was the one that I spent with the student government. Every year, the school puts together a huge mural of 105 individual sheets of paper that, together, make a large and elaborate design (the art teacher likes me, and so I always get to do a piece of the mural, too). Anyway, the student government is responsible for assembling this to some extent, and I decided to help them out. It took us a couple of hours to tape everything together and get it ready to transport to the gym, but we had a really great time together. They’re all intelligent, somewhat quiet second year boys, but they were super lively when we worked together. We spent a lot of time joking around in English and Japanese. (They really surprised me with how much English they wanted to use around me).

It was an unexpected and lovely afternoon.

#7: No, Really, I Enjoy This
I must, because the week before the middle school culture festival, I averaged about 3.5 hours of sleep per night. This was due to trying to get my part of the mural finished, to practicing a dance that I performed for the students, to staying on top of my work, and also to doing some extra special Halloween-related preparations for my elementary schools.

God, I love coffee. And my students.

#8: Darkness falls across the land…
So, every year, I show my first year JHS students Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It’s short, sweet, and relatively easy to understand even if the students don’t have a Japanese translation in front of them (which I did provide them with this year, but still).

This year, though, my first year students have a very special, very intense love for the King of Pop. I think that knowing about him before his death made that unfortunate event more meaningful. It seems to me that they hold him as some kind of symbol of the English world and the link that they have to it. He’s their favorite artist to watch, and every time they see the projector set up for class, they hope that they’re going to see another one of his songs.

Anyway, given this interest, I decided that this year, I wanted to make the Thriller lesson a little more extensive and interesting. So, after we watched the music video, I gave them a copy of the spoken section (the part where Vincent Price scares everybody … ever). You know the part:

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’alls neighborhood…

I told the students that they had to memorize four lines of it and recite it to me for a speaking check. The bonus for them was that for every extra line that they memorized, they would receive two extra credit points.  At first, the students were skeptical – although I made the worksheet in such a way that they could read the English words, they didn’t understand a lot of them, and I think that the idea of a recital really made them nervous.

But, they pulled through, and quite well! The activity turned out to be surprisingly popular – especially because they got to chant about blood, death, and zombies (which are all subjects that teenagers enjoy to some degree). (One student did manage to memorize the whole thing…)

I was vastly entertained whenever I heard them practicing in the hallways during cleaning time. It was particularly funny because as soon as one student would start, others would join in. I’m only half-joking when I say that at one point I began to have serious concerns about my students inadvertently raising the dead.

Luckily, though, that does not seem to have happened.

#9: I Turned My Kids into Animals
Halloween really is a great time of year for English lessons. As you saw earlier, it gives me an opportunity to be slightly wackier and more creative than usual.

This year, I switched my curriculum around so that my first and second year elementary students would be studying animals during the month of October. This was the perfect backdrop to, well, dressing up like a witch, turning on some Disney Parade music (which all of my students identified before the first measure had finished), and “casting a spell” that turned them into a variety of animals. It was something that my music teacher did when I was in first and second grade, and I thought that my students would like it, too.

I turned out to be right, although I’m still fending off questions as to why I drive to school when I claim to be able to fly on a broom. Children are such curious little beings, aren’t they? They also don’t forget anything.

#10: I Also Wore a Gypsy Costume
This was part of my strategy for the activity described in #9. With a few modifications, it easily doubled as a witch’s costume. I was really nervous about wearing it to school, though, because it looked pretty ridiculous to me and I thought that my schools might object to it on the grounds of it looking unprofessional.

Imagine my shock, however, upon discovering that all of my co-workers loved this dress. I guess they thought it was really cute, and they told me that it was the kind of outfit I should feel free to wear every day. I walked around for two days feeling like a small, vulnerable puppy dog that everybody wanted to take home with them. It was surreal, and just goes to show how this country can still surprise me – even after almost three and a half years.