| I don't know anything. I am rubbish at everything. |
[Jan. 30th, 2006|10:47 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Strokes - Is This It? | ] |
I realise that I haven't update my journal for, what, a year now?
For that, I apologise.
I am not as introspective as I was. Sometimes this distresses me.
I am beginning to accept the areas of ignorance in my life. This is not acceptable. It is pathetic, at 22 years of age, to have already decided that there are things I can't do. That there are things I am rubbish at. That there are things at which I shall never progress. My resolution for 2006, my only resolution, is to try my hand at everything.
This year (or at least the part of this year that I am going to spend in Japan) I will achieve the following:
Gain a degree of competence at snowboarding.
Stop being shit/lazy/lazy-and-shit at bass.
Learn how to compose a nice photo.
Write about or towards something that interests me EVERY SINGLE DAY.
I could go on. I could go on and on. We all could. There isn't a person alive who, given the right mood and motivation, isn't full to the brim with dreams, ambitions, goals, fantasies, crazy-wild fantasies and distorted visions of their future selves that are even vaguer than that. The problem with all that, though, is that it's very easy to amass a mountain of missed opportunities and wishes to the point where it become incredibly daunting to go for even the smaller aims, for fear of the great pile that is Your Wasted Life crashing down on you. I hope that keeping it to four achievable goals, I can achieve them. Yes.
Actually, Goal 5: I will keep my apartment reasonably tidy. It's pathetic, the current state of the place. I am unfit to live with other people.
To be honest, half of those goals I don't really care about. I snowboard because my buddies (and my wonderful lady-friend) do it. I know, deep in my bones, that it isn't my sort of thing. I am not graceful, nor am I comfortable traveling at high speeds. I don't look cool the way my mates look cool. I can't get over my disgust at the artificially-expensive shitty clothing everyone on the slopes wears, and my desire to own the artificially-expensive shitty clothing myself. The main reason that I get such satisfaction from it is that it is one of those things in which I can keep testing myself. I go twice a month during the winter, and every day I spend on the mountain I see some kind of improvement. Call it The Joy of being a Beginner. In comparison to my job (during the course of which I don't even know what grades my students are getting, let alone whether I'm improving as a team-teacher, a lesson-planner or, God forbid, a communicator of my native language) snowboarding is a hobby that provides me with instant feedback (did I fall on my arse? Yes? I sucked at that bit.) and allows me to set my own goals over the course of a ten-minute run, a morning, a weekend. It's something at which I can feel I'm progressing, and as such is something I feel a very simple enthusiasm towards. The enthusiasm of a person in temporary control over their progress.
(* I don't know if any of you Sheffield bods remember the crazy ginger guy with the Spanish guitar who used to play at the Pirate Writer's open mic night? His big hit was the song about the simple joy of experiencing things for the first time. I agree with him, now.)
Similarly with the photography goal. I have no interest in being a photographer. Neither amateur nor professional. I have enough silly hobbies without adding another. The reason I want to learn how to make a nice shot is pretty simple. I only have 5/6months left in this country. I don't know if I'll ever be back here. I want to have half-a-dozen killer shots that I can look back on and think, I had a pretty incredible time. I fully expect to have an incredible time for the rest of my life (let's face it, the whole process of living is actually pretty incredible, when you stare at a wall and think about it) but I'd like to have some kind of evidence, some memory-joggers, of this particular mind-fuck. A name from school popped up in my mind the other day. I couldn't remember what the person who had just resurfaced looked like. Or anything else about him. He has begun to fade. In five years, I probably won't even know his name. I was similarly slack a university. I don't have photo's of even my closest friends. I never bothered to get the camera out (when I had a working camera) and I'm beginning to regret it. I realise that you should be living life, and not just recording it for future nostalgia (and that was what I told myself whilst everybody posed for snaps a few years ago) but at the same time, you have to try and strike a balance. I am alive IN time. I am as much my past as I am my right-now self (and by extrapolation my who-I-will-be-person) and I shouldn't shy away from noting down things down to look back upon. So, I will learn how to get some lovely photo's. Most obviously, I've been seeing an amazing lass for the last year. Both our jobs are ending this year, so we'll be heading back into the English-speaking world at the same time. Whether we'll be together or not, I don't know. She's American, which complicates visas. I don't have anything on my cv except this job, so getting international jobs will be next to impossible. However it all works out, things are going to be difficult. I've been very lucky to even spend the time I have with her, and I'd like some shots to say; this is where I was, and this is what I did, and this is how I looked; and this is who I was with. Which is all you can really ask for, isn't it?
The bass is a whole other issue. I still suck. I shouldn't by now. I need to knuckle down. Woodshed, as they say.
The writing is a whole other issue. I hate my sentences. I don't know what to do about that. What do you do if everything you write, you find obnoxious? Except the stuff in which you consciously try not to be obnoxious, which comes across as both fake AND obnoxious?
That is all, for now. I'll try and stick up all my mobile-phone photos for 2005, creating a nice segue between the last entry and this one.
Um, write again in a year. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 26th, 2004|10:35 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sad | ] |
John Peel is dead. |
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| In which Mike becomes scarred |
[Sep. 15th, 2004|08:34 pm] |
I began teaching on the Monday of last week. The first week of work at my first ever growed-up graduate-man job. Not somewhere I thought I'd ever reach. But then at the age of twelve I never thought I could be eighteen. Or that I'd finish the History GCSE paper. So yes, I'm employed.
I teach at two school, both Junior Highs. On Mondays and Wednesdays I am at Funakoshi Chugakko, which has sixty-seven students. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I teach at Nakiri Chugakko, which has about a hundred-and-twenty pupils, and classrooms that overlook the Pacific Ocean.
The first week was almost entirely taken up with self-introductions. I would stand in front of twenty bored Japanese kids and hand out photos of my family, loose change, pictures of cambridge and other 'realia'. They didn't care, and by the last lesson it was difficult for me to maintain any interest in my hobbies and pet cat either.
Tuesday was the killer.
The Board of Education, which is where I spend my Fridays, got in touch with the local cable TV company and told them that there's nothing I like more than being in front of a lens. They said they would come to Nakiri Junior High and film my first lesson. My first lesson. I feel that they could at least wait until my third. Or chosen some other JET from some other town. Someone with a TEFL, perhaps. Or some kind of teaching experience. Something like that.
The JTE of that school decided to raise the game. Apparently my predecessor, a Miss Leeanne Kay, had told the school that I was 'jozu' at the guitar. It was decided that I was to play for the students as part of my introduction. Joy.
So I decide that I'll get to school a half hour early, just to make sure that everything's ready, my guitar's in tune, and all of that sort of thing. I leave my house at ten-to-eight, but the Sun seems strangely low in the sky. I can barely look ahead straight as it's right in my field of view as I walk to school. I trouble myself during the walk with the possibility that all the clocks in my house are out of sync, and it's five in the morning or something.
I am on the final road leading up to the school when I bash my forehead on the eaves of a low-slung Japanese dwelling. It hurts a bit - a good solid bump. I curse a bit - all I need is a bruise to be flowering on my face during the filming to add to my woes - and give the bump a good rub. My hand comes down covered in blood.
The blood soaks an eyebrow and begins to drip onto my shorts and guitar case. I complete the rest of the walk in a bent-over jog, trying to keep any more of the blood from dripping onto my shorts.
It is testament to my naturalisation here in Japan that my first action on entering the school is to put on my indoor shoes before going to the staff-room to as for help. I am greeted with 50/50 sympathy/derision. Japan's not so different from England, really.
The guys from my Board of Education are called. They swoop into school like Colonel Kilgore, save for the people carrier, all of them pumped full of mild A-team images.
I am taken to hospital, where I have 14 butterfly stitches. A weaker man than I would have begged the day off school. Not I. The Japanese spirit of Ganbare is strong within me, and I get back to school in time for the first lesson. At the same time as the camera-woman.
The lesson was a bit of a disaster. The san-nensais (third years, so about 15 years old) usually a quiet bunch, are terrified into total paralysis by the presence of the camera. I am mildly concussed. I did not have time to tune the guitar and my hearing was all funny anway. I was sweating like a hog. I kept talking about Spiderman for reasons that I couldn't fathom - it just seemed that every conversational path I took led back to him. I ran out of ideas with twenty minutes to go and tried to play hangman with them and they had no idea what was going on and I was in serious need of a good sit down and the camera lady was going to show this to everyone in the whole wide world.
Eventually the lesson ends and the camera-woman turns her machine off. I pack my bag up and am just about to slink back to the staff room to lick my wounds when one of the students timidly approaches me. He says 'Sank you' and gives me a sheet of Spiderman stickers.
Genki as Fuck |
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| In which Mike tries to bring things up to date |
[Sep. 15th, 2004|08:10 pm] |
I am lazy. I've managed to avoid updating this in ages, and so have forgotten half the things that I have done, and lost interest in the other half.
Which is, frankly, a bit rubbish of me.
I went to a talk by Jorgen Leth ( http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0504654/ ) last year where he mentioned, amongst many other things, a documentary he never made about a hippy commune. It seems that he arrived at the commune a week before the camera crew's equipment was due to arrive. He ended up spending the week just sitting around getting stoned with the hippies, sao that by the time the cameras arrived, the place had lost all of its freshness for him. He didn't feel he could make a useful documentary, so gave up on the whole business.
This is how I feel about this journal. The last month-and-a-half (have I been here so long?) has been an amazing experience, but I've left it too long and to try and trawl the swamp of my memory for some kind of distinct chronology would be a wasted pursuit. Even if I did manage to remember which events ocurred on which days, I will have forgotten all of the sparkling moments that made them important. We must give the first month up, for the time being.
Perhaps if I find a way to take the photos from my phone I will post them here as a mini-history. |
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| On parenting |
[Aug. 18th, 2004|09:10 am] |
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When buying shoes for your child, make sure the new pair fits well enough that he can keep up with his friends when they play running games. |
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| In which Mike sees his new home |
[Aug. 13th, 2004|03:03 pm] |
It was only paranoia. My welcome party was there, they were just hiding at the end of the platform, around the corner.
My welcome party (anglicised for the monoglots amongst you):
Castle Mountain (my supervisor. In his late forties/fifties maybe. Has a lump on his forehead)
Stone Bear (Office Dogsbody. Man with the English knowledge.)
Leeanne Kay (My predecessor. Blonde, from Cleethorpes, really lovely.)
Small Wood (In charge of sports for the Daiou area. In his forties, looks early thirties.)
Small Wood was taking photos.
Stone Bear was waving a British flag.
Castle Mountain was looking anxious.
Leeanne Kay was looking embarrassed.
I had that horrible thing where I could see them as I approached from about fifty metres away. *WARNING! Massive Moment of Britishness Approaching!* It's that thing where you make eye contact with somebody when you are still a good twenty-five seconds walk away from them. You can't say hello yet without shouting, but you must register their presence somehow. A small wave completed, you are still a good distance away. Do you maintain eye-contact? Do impressions of pirates, or attempt a game of charades? Or do you suddenly have to faff with your minidisc player for the distance it takes to approach them, arriving within a comfortable zone of conversation just as the device is zipped into your rucksack?
Why do I find this so uncomfortable? It seemed to happen to me every time I walked down Division street back in Sheffield, where a reasonably good buddy (someone from a seminar or something) would emerge from fopp and catch my eye from fifty metres. If anyone has any theories on why this protracted approach hurts me so much, please elucidate me. I have a feeling that it's the reason that most streets in England are so bent and twisty, so that if you come across a friend the chances are that you'll bump into them on a corner rather than being forced to run this peculiarly agonising gauntlet. *Massive Moment of Britishness OVER*
They fumbled shaking my hand, I fumbled bowing at them. They fumbled over English greetings, I fumbled over Japanese introductions. This was a massive comfort to me. The first thing that my supervisor blurted out to me was "I'm fine thanks, and you?", before I had any chance to ask him how he was feeling. Apparently in Japan the phrases 'How are you?' 'I'm fine, thanks. And you?' are drummed into the children at a very early age, and further pummelled into them at every English lesson. It's their equivalent of the 'Comment ca va?' 'Oui, ca va bien, merci. Et vous?' which anybody who did GCSE french still has in their system as a reactionary tic.
Anyway, the comfort I took in this greeting was that my supervisor was as nervous as I was about this meeting. I managed to spew some platitudes about the weather in Japanese, and by the time we got into the car, everybody seemed to be well pleased with their part in the operation.
1st stop: The board of education. My headquarters.
A building like every municipal building in England and Japan. A town hall, basically. Big, grey. Air-conditioned. There are eight people who work here (including Castle Mountain, Stone Bear and Small Wood). Bowed, hajimemashite'd and yoroshiku'ed them all. As you'd expect, everyone here tries to initiate hand shaking, and I'm always trying to bow. (Carrie Bradshaw journalism moment: Why do we always insist on trying to communicate in the language in which we are least adept, or practice the custom at which we are least competent? The answer to this is obvious). Left after half an hour
[writer's note: At some point I really do intend to slap some photos up here. When I get internet at my apartment it shall be done. At the moment I'm writing everything on a japanese PC, so all of the functions on the livejournal site are in kanji]
2nd Stop: My apartment. My home
Small but cleverly designed. An entrance hall, bathroom in front of you as you enter and the kitchen on the right. Standing in this doorway to the kitchen the bedroom is on the left. I will describe with photos later. Leeanne, my predecessor, was living next door to me for one week before going travelling around Japan. I unpacked my rucksack. My suitcase was still floating in the ether between Narita airport and the board of education.
Kitchen. A mighty oven for the creation of udon. You see the door on the right? That's the front one. The one you'll come through when you visit.
Bathroom. Yes, the toilet is electronic and does all those things you expect a good electric toilet to do (how can I be so clean yet feel so dirty?). Grow up.
Bedroom. Minimalist, but in accordance with all the principles of Feng-Shui.
All my entries are far too long. Sorry. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 12th, 2004|02:01 pm] |
I was offered a plate of beautiful profiteroles today.
Which, upon biting through, turned out to be full of octopus.
Welcome to Japan. |
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| In which Mike is in Tokyo for the orientation, then travels by train to Daiou. |
[Aug. 9th, 2004|02:20 pm] |
Tokyo is an airlock for Japan. Cooped up for three days in a hotel that could be anywhere with everybody speaking English/American/Canadian.
Tokyo. No batteries for camera = no good photos.
I respond nobly, getting drunk every night and missing virtually all of the orienting lectures in a haze of jet-lag and hangovers.
People are already congealing into cliques for breakfasting/lunching/going out in the evening. I'm too vague to latch onto anybody, so roam the streets of Tokyo looking for money. Find some lovely parks. Fall asleep in one of them. Wake up in time for karaoke.
[A note on money: The CLAIR handbook advises all new JETs to bring with them approximately 200 000 Yen (~ 1000 pound sterling) in traveller's cheques to cover expenses over the coming month; including rent, phone, and living costs. Mike chooses to bring a hundred quid in cash Yen and his Lloyds Student Account debit card.]
Karaoke:
*Section Deleted*
Some other time, chaps.
Met some beautiful and pleasingly sarcastic Irish girls. Was a bit of a sleaze, perhaps.
Caught a bullet train with around　other JETs from Tokyo to the outskirts of the Mie prefecture (that's Mie-ken to you). Caught a slower train with the same people across the county. At every stop a few of the others clambered off the train to a round of applause. Every ten minutes or so you could look through the window and see the welcome parties for the others. Some had a score of schoolchildren with banners and flags. Others had to make do with a supervisor and their predecessor fanning themselves in the heat.
Mine was the last stop. The penultimate ALT got off the train at Ise-Shima, leaving me to travel the final three-quarters-of-an-hour on my own. I suddenly got a sense of just how isolated I was going to be. The amusement the 2nd and 3rd year JETs in Tokyo shared at my placement didn't really register at the orientation, diluted as it was with the amusement they shared at my disability with chopststicks, or my ignorance of the kanji for 'male toilet' against 'female toilet'. On that train, though, worrying premonitions started slipping into the back of my consciousness.
Listened to some dub and felt happy again (thanks for that Dorfmeister CD, Si).
Changed into a shirt and tie in the toilet twenty minutes before hitting the final destination (first impressions). Busied myself with bags for the last ten minutes. Lurked by the door for the last five. Scanning the platform for my welcome party, I realised that there was nobody there to greet me.
I got off the train. |
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| In which Mike leaves England and arrives in Tokyo |
[Aug. 5th, 2004|01:43 pm] |
Itinery for Saturday, 24th July:
8:30 Wake, Breakfast, Shower
9:00-13:00 Pack
13:00 Lunch
15:00 Leave for Heathrow
Saturday, 24th July:
10:00 Wake Nap BreakfastShower
10:00-15:00 Pack, Flap and Stress
15:30 Leave
Everything I own in the world
Sat in the airport cafe with parents for a few hours. Caught a plane.
I was sitting two rows from the back of the plane, with an aisle seat. Leg room! View of the toilet! Early feeding! Mike was happy.
The entire block around me was full of other JETs. I think that I find quite a lot of them quite irritating. I'm not sure why.
I spent half an hour trying to figure out which films would be screened. I couldn't. Eventually I found out how to turn the TV on.
Plane films:
50 First Dates
Torque
Quill
Rocky
Some french thing about prostitute murder.
Torque has the honour of being one of the worst films I have yet seem. Competently edited and with reasonable effects, they effectively managed to iron the three blips in The Fast and The Furious that made it enjoyabele (Vin Diesel and an awareness that it was a bit shit being two of them). It was much better in Japanese. I still love Rocky.
We spent over half the journey over Russia. Everyone forgets just how big Russia is (except the Russians, I suppose). It's huge. And has the best clouds.
Slept. Ate. Slept. Ate. Got off the plane.
Narita airport, Tokyo. Different to all the other airports in the world, obviously.
Had all my bits and pieces for customs. Queued. Chatted with the other JETs (I've realised what it is about them that irritates me so much - they all planned ahead. They stand around in smug gaggles talking about International Driving Permits [whoops] traveller's cheques [shit!] cakes baked into the shapes of home towns [dear me] and photos of family and stuff. Once the irritation was correctly diagnosed as a case of jealous resentment, it was easier to enjoy without so much guilt). Caught a bus. Sat next to a South African lass in a bad mood, but she perked up after some coke (my first purchase in Japan, sadly. Still, it turned out to be a tool for joy. Remembered my Charlemagne). Turns out she was an artist who made sculptures out of chocolate, and we spent the rest of the journey happily chatting away until she remembered she was in a bad mood and went for a bit of a sulk.
Arrived at the Keio Plazo Hotel at eight o' clock, Japanese time. |
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