nenkyuu

"Nenkyuu" is the regular paid time off that we can take throughout the year. I took it today three hours into the morning because apparently all the other teachers decided that this was the day to take off, so the office is empty and dull and my work computer's maddeningly slow.

Also, the windows are all closed and the air conditioners are set at 27 on low speed. It is a dry & breezy 26 C outside. Sorry, office, you fail at life.

There's a nice breeze coming in through my balcony door, and outside a couple of the rice fields are already being harvested. I don't quite trust this mild spell - I KNOW I remember being sweaty and gross well into Septemer last year - but it's pretty nice to not have to run the lung-fungus-inducing aircon all day. Gotta get back to working on essays, but first some observations:

Every old man driving a kei-truck looks like the guy from Waking Ned Divine (sigh...okay Grandpa Joe from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but seriously, you should see David Kelly in other things)

Parasols are useful for defense not only against the sun, but also against oosuzumebachi ("big sparrow bee," the most giantest of Asian giant hornets, which happen to live in the mountains around my town). I know this because on Monday one flew INTO my parasol, got angry with me for being in its way, and was summarily smacked down with said instrument. Then I RAN LIKE HELL.

Dirty dishes are like goombas to my Mario - I just walk away from the sink for a second and when I go back again they've respawned. Unfortunately they don't make little bloopy noises; I would probably clear them more often if they did.

Thyme looks kinda sad when it's in a bit pot all by itself.

Score two more for O-town

Okay maybe two-and-a-half. The Starbucks in Shinsaibashi's subterranean shopping town pulled one from the tranportation industry's book and, much like all Japanese cities do to their subways, heated my sammich to an even five-zillion degrees. But I am prepared to forgive it and give it half-credit because my chai latte was so very exceptional.

That was the end of my day in Osaka - the middle portion involved a little reconnaissance and just the right amount of wandering around like a tourist except I am getting to know this city quite well now so my inner compass will actually kick in and prevent me from having to wander too much.

The first evidence of this came about during the start of my day. After escaping the limited express train that just went to show Kintetsu does not, in fact, lag behind JR in torturing me through the clever and precise mismanagement of small details, I hopped the local subway to the aquarium. Now it being Children's Day, and fishies and otters and penguins generally being attractive to small children, there were thick hordes of people swarming about Osaka Port. This was actually surprising to me for all of 10 seconds, whereupon I mentally smacked myself upside the head for believing I could go to a landmark attraction on a long-weekend holiday and AVOID crowds. Sometimes I have a problem with my brain not working.

So back down the main road I go, thinking alright, at least I can get a good lunch down here by the port, and I'll use the 70 minutes I would have spent just standing in line outside to wander about a bit. Surprise me, Osaka. Two blocks later, there's a cute little curry shop on the corner with the most magical name: 星の森 ~ Forest of Stars. I love that image. I loved the interior even more than I loved the name. I loved the seasonal-vegetable curry, too, and the soy-milk hot chocolate, and the photo albums brimming with pictures of the shop teddybear Loreley all the hell over the world, and the way the proprietress unabashedly took a lunch-break on the corner bar stool next to me and let me chat her up about the bear, the music, stuff.

Her husband, who takes the orders and refills the water glasses, has a kind face. He reminds me of Steve Tomasula somehow. I think it's the beard-glasses-smile combination, but mostly the smile. If I lived in Osaka, this place would be one of my haunts. A little pocket of calm and warmth in the midst of all the bustle and hurry and dodging that goes on right outside the door.

It occurs to me that I never found a place like that in Nagoya, despite having lived there for a semster. It also occurs to me that I was 20, which is one up from 19, which was a stupid age, and that my life as an exchange student was quite insular and extremely repetitive from week to week, and only some of that was Japan's doing. It was still a good semester away from Notre Dame. It's just what worked for me then would make me crazy now, and does sometimes, when I catch myself falling into routines. Ironically, it was a Japanese Zen master who once said, "To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing."

Eff eff eff.

Okay, Korea pics are finally available to the general public: clicky clicky
None from Tuesday for obvious reasons (generally not advisable to bring a camera around a place that's full o' nekkid people, as spa's tend to be).

It's been a long and wonderful weekend (the Friday-Saturday bit) and I am entirely too sore (out of shape) and not nearly as on top of cleaning and organizing as I should be (no excuse really, so there's me feelin' pretty shitty), and next week I am a teacher again and still not quite sure how to feel about that.

My fellow JET and I have better plans, clearer goals, but it's the same system we're working in, and that system has been grating on me for a while. More specifically my function within it, I suppose. ALTs are supposed to shape their students' education but are also endemically excluded from shaping the process. I almost wish I didn't see it, except I'd be a complete fool to wish for lack of perspective. Anyway it's not my or any other foreign worker's personal battle with the education ministry, and it never can be; that's not the way things will get changed. I can hope to close out the term with a few small successes, a couple students with the genuine spark of interest, and I can be glad of those, and so on for the next term. And then I'll move on to challenges that will actually allow me to make the effort of meeting them. In a new place, somewhere with bookstores and cafes I can haunt. I do like spooking about without spooking the locals, every now and again. Until then, of course, I'm making the most of my place and time here, crushing bureaucracies be damned. I can start champing at the bit and being a wet blanket next April :p

Mini-update, bigass music rant

Unexpectedly had a four-day-weekend thanks to Mother Nature blessing me with an overabundance of springtime germs. I felt near death on Wednesday night, but I felt mostly human again by Saturday so I spent the weekend-weekend shopping & nerding out with a friend. I gave Japan my money, and it not only gave me fantabulous finds at its hippie shops, but my new favorite designer name in the whole wide world (this includes tokidoki, because yeah my new favorite's prices are still ridiculous, but not quite that ridiculous): drug store's. "It is a symbol of happiness beloved by girls," according to a lot of their overpriced t-shirts. Their mascots are little pigs, and they appear in every iteration imaginable, including but not limited to: samurai pig, noodle-shop pig, viking pig, Rastafarian-inexplicably-riding-a-Hindu-elephant pig, Harlem Globetrotters pigs, The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover pigs, and these little doods on the left here. HELLS YES that is Indiana Jones pig and Sean Connery pig. I got a surprisingly-not-overpriced backpack that is most definitely a direct play on LeSportsac's tokidoki handbag aesthetic but with viking pigs and "Helmetons" written on the button-logo instead of "LeSportsac." It is made of awesome and win ♥

In the next 3 days I wanna get some of the dust out of my apartment and take a crack at revamping my first-year students' classes so that they can actually get something out of them this year besides "I'mu fine sank you." Then I'm going to Korea.

What follows are some thoughts on "Nightmare Revisited," which I bought at Tower Records in Suzuka this weekend. All those in favor of NOT sitting through my musings about The Nightmare Before Christmas, contemporary bands, and two successive generations of movie-goers, stop reading nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn...
...ow.

Okay, I wrote the bulk of this while it was still very fresh in my mind, so forgive me if the transitions aren't obvious because my brain does that lateral-thinking thing an awful lot and I don't notice it because, well, it's my brain. To get right to the point (that's a lie), I don't at all care for any of the songs that have anything to do with Jack (that's the truth). Yes, that very much includes The Polyphonic Spree's version of "Town Meeting Song." They, like the rest of the bands that were inexplicably chosen for Jack-related songs, just end up sounding like parodies of themselves, and not in the good kinda way. About the only performer of which I am unqualified to make that assertion is Sparklehorse (haven't heard any of his [their?] other songs), but judging by the rest of the indie-pop outfits on this album I feel I can make an educated reach and include him (them?) too.

Something I should make clear: I am not simply singling out bands like All-American Rejects and Plain White T's because they happen to fall within more or less the same flavor of music. DeVotchKa did an amazing job on the overture, and sonically he is worlds away from Marilyn Manson, who did wonderful things with "This Is Halloween." The reason bands like Manson and DeVotchKa and Stars work for this collection is because they can stay true to their own sound - and, of course, knowingly spoof themselves; I mean, Marilyn Manson, THEE Marilyn Manson, singing in wee-tiny-witchy voices and going "whee!"??? I laughed pretty hard. The man is completely self-aware, acting as his own caricature here, and has a ton of fun with it - while also remaining true to the stories and emotions embedded in these songs.

By contrast, Plain White T's doing "Poor Jack" just sounds like Plain White T's doing their best Danny Elfman impression. And admittedly it's pretty spot-on. But if you're merely going to copy the original song exactly, how is it "revisiting" that song? What elements of your band, besides the name, are you adding in?

Flyleaf goes to the opposite extreme and does Flyleaf-sings-a-song-called-What's-This. Not Flyleaf reinterprets "What's This" from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I simply cannot integrate those two songs, because they are separate animals. When I listen to those vocals, to that instrumentation, I don't hear wonder and delight at making new discoveries in life, at breaking out of your own little world and taking joy in the diversity of experience.

I hear all the teenagers and twenty-somethings who did not see this movie as eight-year-olds. They saw it in their teens and twenties, because it has Halloweeny stuff in it, and because they mistakenly felt it validated their self-absorbed morbidity. They saw this film when they were too old to naively accept the fantastical aspects of death and monsters as commonplace within this particular fictional world - they had already been taught that those things are in fact taboo no matter what the context. So they did not understand that Jack's return to Halloween Town as the Pumpkin King was not, in fact, a triumph of their subculture - for Jack, being spooky is the norm, a regular 9-5 job, and thus for him it is a return to traditional values, albeit with an enriched worldview and renewed inspiration thanks to his having briefly experienced a different way of life. Let's not forget with near-disastrous results. If anything The Nightmare Before Christmas is a pretty straight-up cautionary tale about throwing yourself into alternative lifestyles or attempting to emulate different cultural practices without first gaining some actual knowledge and understanding of them, god forbid.

Granted, I acknowledge that the songs, in a way, simply embody a different generation's experience of the story, one that is not wrong in any meaningful sense. It is what it is. Jack can be a lonely guy with a stagnated career having a quarter-life crisis, and he can also be a whiny emo kid. I guess I just can't help but bemoan the connections that later and broodier audiences were missing out on due to their inability to see past their mascara and pink hair extensions. And also Flyleaf-chick's voice gets REALLY irritating after just a minute and a half. (Apologies to Jenni, and nothing against mascara or pink hair extensions - they are really quite awesome when given into the right hands, i.e. not-most-15-year-olds).

I'm on the fence with Amy Lee. I have mad respect for her vocal talents, and she captures Sally's voice perfectly, but...yeah, but. Fiona Apple. Her voice, and her music, gives Sally the little spark of moxie that we always knew was there, but gets drowned in the fatalism of "Sally's Song." I can listen to Fiona Apple's rendition and not feel at all guilty over it. In fact I'm going to go dig that up right now.

P.S. -- Dear Notre Dame Class of 2009: I hope your more conservative elements are at least mature enough to quitchyer bitchin' about having PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA as your commencement speaker. To those wet blankets who keep fueling what I imagine is by now a raging Viewpoint wank-fest: freaking loosen up and enjoy the most awesomest commencement in the history of ever. Oh, and have fun with your subsequent Bush-begotten lack of employment. Neener neener. Love, Nikki.

Spider-brain, go!

The sky SPAT on me today as I walked up the hill to school after buying lunch. And the wind was one big raspberry in my face. All that was missing was that PBTHBSBTHPBP!!! noise.

...I find it no small tragedy to the English language that we have no way of codifying that wet-sloppy noise within our writing system such that our brains can actually interpret it as onomotapoeitic. There has to be some language out there that can. And I bet the people who speak it find it easier to laugh when the strung-out monkey of life flings some poo in their direction.

Do you ever have days when your head is just bursting with thoughts and you can barely track one partway as they fly out and spin away in all directions? Today's one of those days.

It started this morning. Well, it started long ago, but this particular day started this morning around 8, walking up the hillside road behind my apartment building. Some trees are flowering already, and though I could swear they were orange trees back in the fall, they bear a striking resemblance to sakura (cherry blossoms). I've been advised by many people in Isobe and elsewhere to go see the sakura blossoming in the spring. In fact I can remember being sorely disappointed about not staying in Nagoya for spring semester two years ago, partially because I would miss out on cherry-blossom-viewing. I didn't follow the thought any farther then, because that was then and I was a different person.

One thing I DID get to do in the fall, though, was go autumn-leaf-viewing in Kyoto and Nara. The leaves turn brilliant reds and golds and firery oranges and make the gloomiest, sunless day look like high noon in midsummer, such is the warmth of their colors. And in spring the cherry blossoms (among other trees which apparently feel compelled to imitation) appear and even after they've fallen, they're still magic because they blanket everything like pink snow or pixie dust.

This happens every year. And that was not only me talking just now; it was the collective wonder of the crowds. Every year, autumn and spring, they go to the same sites to witness the same transformations. Autumn and spring and leaves and flowers happen in many countries, but it's an institution here at a level that in some ways surpasses the religious significance of the shrines where most of the viewings take place.

I won't go into Shinto or cultural genealogies - I'd be sitting here all day - but all this made my brain jump to change and fluctuation and our fearful fascination with it. The nightly news mentions that some trees are blossoming earlier this year, and I sometimes get the distinct impression that this is an affront to decorum on the trees' part, or at least pointedly inconsiderate. If they change their flowering pattern, people may have to change their travel plans, change their traditional calendars, change their expectactions, and we won't have any of it.

I think it largely true that anticipated changes bring more satisfaction than unexpected ones. At the very least, for the large part we seem to have equipped ourselves to deal better with a totally predictable world. It says a lot about us as a species, that we have this need to be able to anticipate, to constrain, if only in our minds, the fluctuations that patterns of change are allowed to display to us.

Oftentimes it means we deliberately blind ourselves to larger-scale developments or refuse to place ourselves within a wider frame, a less centralized system. This occurs at all levels, from macro-economics to interpersonal relationships. I catch myself doing it a lot.

Of course the other side of the coin is that we still strive to understand, to know how all this great mess of STUFF works, even and especially when we realize just how futile a venture that really is. It means that all the silly nihilists can go terrorizing bowling enthusiasts with their ferrets, screaming that life has no meaning and you can't believe in anything, and the rest of us can still sit back and say "Yeah, alright, cheers. We'll figure something out then, shall we?"

...I like to imagine The Human Spirit as having a posh accent...given how pathologically dreary the upper-middle-class English population can be, I really have no idea why.

Um, anyway. Time for lunch. And then one more class and then I've gotta get some detail work done on the painting I started a couple weeks ago.