cooling off

This morning I stepped out of my door and it was...cool. And breezy. And...and not humid! And apparently the temperature, at least, is going to keep up its good behavior. This is not a drill! Misery season is officially over :D

That being said, of course the ONE day I actually wouldn't mind some hot summer weather, it's going to drop below 20 C and rain heavily. On Saturday a bunch of JETs are heading up to our prefecture's tanfastic water park / amusement park / outlet shopping center, and I was looking forward to gettin' my swim on in those pools. But I guess if I stay in I can take care of some much needed fall cleaning, and maybe...bake? Cookies sound awesome right now.

Just had the second lesson-planning meeting of fall term, and it definitely went better than the first. Experience, both during the past year and the past week, have taught me what pitfalls to look for in the first-year students' textbook lessons (confusing vocabulary, grammar or verb forms that are just tossed in at random and never explained, etc.), and I think I am getting a lot better at generally jazzing them up with engaging activities and visual aids.

Also! Soma FM has a new station, and I love it. "Suburbs of Goa" keeps me sane during the days when Creeper-sensei doesn't have nearly enough classes to keep him out of the office and out of earshot. I have a feeling it will also be very useful when proper flu season starts and everyone steadfastly refuses to blow their damn noses, opting instead to become perpetual snorting machines because somehow that's more polite and less disgusting. Right.

Yahoo had up a list of "Office Do's and Don'ts" that they snagged from CNN the other day, and it really made me pine, if not for America per se, then at least for a professional culture where everyone understands that it's NOT okay to kick off your shoes and prop your rank-nasty feet on the desk edge right next to your neighbor's face, or constantly belch and grunt and hum tunelessly (actually the more accurate term would be "tonedeafly," but I'm pretty sure that's not a word. Well it is now), or leave your phone at your desk all day without setting it to vibrate so that everyone gets to hear the nauseating pop song you set as your text message notification over and over and over again.

Yeah, it's the little things that get to you. But all in all this term actually doesn't look too bad - second-year culture kids are well taken care of with Grammar-sensei so no worries there; I have a fairly solid plan for third-year culture & they're good students to boot; and first-year classes are at least working out better than last year, if nothing else. They're really benefitting from Grammar-sensei's English class, so we don't have to hold their hands quite as much. I don't teach the class from which some students will move up to 2A Culture next year, but I would hazard to guess they'll be pretty alright. The total number of students enrolled for each year has been going down, as well. While that doesn't bode well in terms of Japan's aging population, at least it means smaller invididual class size, and that's better for everybody.

the fall frenzy begins

Wow. Meant to type this up last night, but I zonked at 8:30 and only woke up around midnight to turn off the kitchen light. Such is JET-lag (hurrhurr see whut I did there).

After getting back from a tanfastic vacation in America-land (getting TO 'Merika was a different story entirely, but it worked out in the end, obvs.) I found myself waking up at 5 in the morning to typhoon warnings, earthquake dispersions (although apparently I'm the only doof who didn't feel a thing even though it was a 3.0 in my area), and Orientation for my prefecture's newbies. Suddenly I am a sempai lolwhut?

It's kind of amusing how the process of giving advice makes you feel like you actually know things. And at the same time it seems like this year's group is so much more on top of stuff than I remember being. Still and all, going into Orientation as a second-year was actually a good experience. Listening to the general talks a second time provided a way better setting for reflecting on my performance over the past year than that done-in-10-minutes evaluation sheet the supervisors hand out in February at the office. And when I got bored I could outline this term's classes on the back sides of handouts :b And then I took the bunch from my area out to lunch and it was good tiems, they're all very relaxed & groovy.

So, first day back at work today. We're still on "break," but from now 'til December it's the busiest part of the year, and I'ma have to stay on top of lessons, fun things like sumo tournaments, paperwork, etc. I will probably be a little crazy manic/short-fused for a while, especially during the next abominable two months of heat & humidity. I don't have the glamour of Japan-novelty to protect my spirits this time, so my plan is basically to stay indoors as much as possible until October and then get a ginormous infusion of genki from the cooling-down of everything.

At least now sunburn isn't such a big concern - the weather pattern from here on out looks something like Typhoon --> rain, Post-Rainy Season Rain --> rain, Humid As Hell --> clouds & mist, Another Typhoon --> torrential rain, repeat repeat repeat, Autumn (read: last week of October / first week of November) --> rain

rhythm

It's a rainy grey day in Shima, the kind that makes you want to be inside. Except jim-jams and hot chocolate inside, not desk-computer-workplace inside :p Still, I just have my second-year culture kids today, and their teacher is overseeing a group translation of their latest reading. They do well with structured tasks, these guys (otherwise they can be a handful; all that unfocused energy and whathaveyou) and I'm glad their new sensei is an instructor who can handle that.

I'm starting to get the rhythm of this year's classes, I think. Not all my first-year communication lessons work, but the rate-of-epic-failure is dropping and the students are starting to voluntarily participate without so much teeth-pulling. As I recall, the previous co-teacher and I were still having to call out student numbers pretty much every day throughout fall term.

With the second-year class I can not-stress for a change, because they've a Japanese teacher who is actually willing and able to take charge of their education, take at least this portion of it in some direction. The third-years are pretty chill and the girls just want to know everything, and the boys are pretty well-behaved for teens but then again there are only three and my girls will actually out-volume them c: Two of them, I can tell, are really interested sometimes. They just can't let it show, or the one who took this class purely to get out of math distracts them. But it's by far the smoothest-running class, is third-year culture.

In August I get a new beat - the Ise-Shima/Minamiise JETs, particularly the newbies. A while back our current regional advisor dood called for a show of hands as to who'd like to replace him, and I guess it was just me and another guy. I was perfectly content to let other-guy take it, as I'd only really volunteered in the exceptional case that NOBODY else would, but apparently the people up in the Tsu office thought differently. And final decision's theirs, so, tag, I'm it.

Checkin' in

Eikaiwa started back up yesterday, and boy did we sure cram a loooootta people into a stuffy little room. I think at the last class AJ and I taught back in February, maybe five people showed up. There were 20 last night, most of them new faces, several of those completely new to English conversation, so this is gonna be interesting. We decided it would serve our general sanity better if we took turns teaching separately; not that our adult students aren't all kinds of wonderful, but sometimes you just really don't feel like standing up for two hours in a lecture room every other Tuesday night. Two people for that small a group is a little redundant anyway.

I got thrown a little off-kilter last night, with the long day and the sink full of dishes and the arts-and-crafts-included lesson I wasn't quite done preparing for when I got into the office this morning, but my head is clear again and I feel as on top of things as I generally get. Tomorrow is my first visit of the new year to moon-school (like a new moon, it only comes around once a month, and its workings are still mostly inscrutable to me).

Oh yeah, and over the weekend I scooched some things around in my apartment and managed to make it both broader and deeper. Suck on that, physics, my space works for me now, and does that ever feel good. Even better than soft-tennis-Mondays, because it doesn't make me all stinky and tired. THAT MONIKER IS A LIE, it is way harder than normal-tennis. Okay the balls are soft and squidgy and I cannot help thinking they look almost exactly like those fake boobs you'd find at Spencer Gifts & giggling to myself every now and again... but YOU try hitting one of those things across a full court while maintaining control of its height and direction and see how "soft" a workout it is.

Also, the backhand form? Weird as hell. If someone from my school's club attempted to so much as volley a normal tennis ball with their wrist in that position, their hand would snap clean off.

intensity

For having "slept" about 3 hours during the past 48, I feel pretty okay. I really needed this kind of weekend, in fact. Friday I went home in a Mood and took a long and very satisfying nap. Yesterday at approximately 11:30 a.m. I was up at the northern end of Mie with eight other people, spread out between two apartments, beginning the 24-Hour-Comic challenge. 24 pages, one day to plot them out, draw them up, and put them all together. It's the kind of thing I would find myself doing in Riley Hall the weekend before a critique, the kind of thing I have been doing entirely not-enough of after getting my fake art degree that represents more of an afterthought to my English thesis than a double-major. Some ruminations along those lines were contributing to Friday's mood.

Yesterday, though, all the external constraints of my undergraduate studio work were gone - this project was almost entirely self-directed and wouldn't be held up for critique against standards that are only right for passing a specific class. The varied and loose-knit group of misfits was there, gathered by our common interest and encouraging each other by our mere presence, at times - didn't matter that the person sitting next to me was playing old-school Sonic on her DSLite at two in the morning, the important thing is she was staying awake with the rest of us, though all the sensible circuitry in everyone's brain was telling them to have a goddamn nap already.

I made the mistake of laying down on a folded-up futon in the corner for oh-but-10-minutes. It was horrendously difficult to drag myself back over to the table where my story lay barely coherent up through page 14. I felt every junky munchie-snack I had eaten since waking up, actually every pseudo-food I had fed myself in the past week, and all the effects thereof. My head was fried. Then the endorphins kicked in and I was wired until six, just like this time last year. Crash for a couple hours, force down a banana and some cereal, head off to work morning shift at the library and then try not to nod off during a 90-minute lecture. Okay this morning was a little different, but still, same admixture of relief and relentless energy-drain alternately spurring you into the day with ambition or exhaustion, toward another accomplishment or just the achievement of making it home to your bed before you do a faceplant & pass out.

Probably thanks to four years of kinesthetic learning, I did not go kerplunk but instead carried on with normal waking hours and waking-hour activities up until now, bedtime. Along with the inevitable muscle complaints from stiff and scrunched drawring positions, I hope at least some of the intensity inspired by yesterday's arting marathon will remain with me when I wake up tomorrow.

The correct answer is, "No."

Just so you know, if any Japanese people ever catch you eating something native to the country / easily obtainable locally and ask you "Do you like that?"

Sometime last week I brought a kiwi to work with my lunch. The teacher who sits on my right asked me if I liked kiwis, and I said "Yeah they're tasty!" and happily munched away on it. I thought the exchange had ended there, but this morning he comes in to work and pulls out a big plastic bag full of kiwis he'd bought . . . I dunno, somewheres. Wholesale, apparently. I keep forgetting how close to New Zealand we are.

Anyway, it's not uncommon for the teachers in my office to bring in a sack full of fruit and pass it around, but usually it's native stuff like mikan (teeny-weeny sweet little seedless oranges that grow all the hell over Western Japan. In Isobe, any home-owner lucky enough to have a yard has either a mikan or a persimmon tree in it, possibly both). So I took out a kiwi and gave the bag back so he could pass it to the next desk over. But he shook his head and gave it back, and said "No no, that's all for you!" There are like 20 kiwis in this bag! I don't know how I will find time to eat them all before they start going squidgy.

Then around lunchtime I went downstairs to the school's lunchfood stand, which is a little office near the student entrance that sells sandwiches and [any pastry you can think of here]-with-[any food you can think of here]-filling concoctions and onigiri, which are what the Japanese invented by way of sandwiches using rice balls instead of bread slices. They come wrapped in little seaweed ribbons so they won't stick to your other onigiri / foodstuffs and hey, bonus nutrition from the seaweed!

I bought a curry-filled-bun and was going to be on my way, when the lunch-lady, whom I have literally seen only twice thus far, today being the second time, called me back and handed me a big paper bag full of mikan. I don't know how she heard that I like mikan, because all she asked me before handing me the bag was if I HAD any mikan. Of course I said no, because all I had at that time were apples and bananas in the apartment and a huge-frickin'-sack full of kiwi in the office. And now I have mikan for days! I just ate one in my dinner tonight, with some spinach and lemon-baked chicken. Kind of a rudimentary "Asian" chicken salad, I guess :p

In conclusion, Japanese people love feeding me.

Japanese Work Ethic

There is a Category 1 typhoon heading for Shima.

I am still at work. That is all.