Halloween, the new school, and brewing animosity

Boo. yes, halloween has come and gone and no, my roommates and i didn't get to dress up like the taliban. turns out i wazs way too busy with the party prepping to do any of that shit. i don't even know if i changed out of my work clothes. how scary! i was a nova teqacher for halloween! ha ha.

the dinner went well. 23 people crammed into my tiny ass apartment and we had lots of gumbo, garlic bread, stick salad, punpkin fritters, and various other goodies. cory's friend Alfonzo (the fonz) who is here shooting a movie also came over which was nice. all in all, a nice halloween party. i look forward to doing it again next year.

The new school is BIZEEE! damn, i am busting my ass like no other and yet i can't catch up yet. i had a sit down with the head teacher today and we went over a bunch of stuff. it's hard because no one really has the time to show me all the happenings; so basiocally i gotta get it in bursts when peeps have the time. it is exhausting. but i remade a necessary spreadsheet for work last week so i felt pretty good about that. i guess i need to look at my small accomplishments. i'm teaching a lot more now and with more variety which is good but i'm just wrecked at the end of the day.

so i realized that i forgot to write about the mormon wedding (which wasn't a mormon wedding by the way). turns out it was just dinner which would have been cool but it turns out i was sitting just 2 seats opposite of someone who is brewing seething hatred my way which sucked ass. i didn't get to sit with my friends so there was no commisseration going on. kind of a yucky night.

well, that's all that's fit to print at the moment since (yes, you guessed it) i'm exhausted from work. need to cure the insomnia.

new chapter

yes, it's true! i am finally leaving the small school comforts of my branch (ikebukuro seibu guchi) and traveling about 100meters to the east to Ikebukuro Honko; one of the biggest and busiest schools in the tokyo area. i am also getting moved one notch higher on the food chain; i'll be going there as an assistant trainer. i'm not sure that this really means anythig at all. basically, i help make the schedule and give people papers to sign. but hey, it'll look decent on the resume and it'll give me a change of scenery which is also good.

so i've been making a big photo album to take to work (my own year book if you will) of all my students and of shots of me and my friends at work. it's a pretty funny album and i find that i have tons more stuff to put in it than my last album from the last school. i'm really going to miss some of them, they are fabulous students.

i am currently on day 8 of a 15 day stretch of working. yeah, it sucks. but i'm home early every nighth which makes it fairly decent. i hate working nights. if a student asks me a grammar question after about 4 in the afternoon, i tend to stare at them with my "duuuuuhhhhh . . . . i dunno" look on my face and have to ask them to ask me again in the morning.

this weekend is halloween and i'm having my annual (well, it's really only the second time i'm doing this) gumbo and smore-a-thon complete with scary movies and garlic bread. i'm thinking of doing pumpkin fritters as well (no oven so no pumkin pie, cake or cookies -- damn you no-oven Japan!) but we will have to see how ambitious i am.

mom and grandpa are in town and are supposed to come as well but we will have to see hoqw grandpa's mood is; he hasn't been very happy since he got back to tokyo and now he is vowing not to go back to the states which could be problematic. but we'll have to see what happens.

on another halloween note, my roommates and i will be wrapping towels around our heads and getting water guns to be the taliban. we realized that hollywood just recycles the same 3 middle eastern names: muhammed, sayid, and habieb. we don't care who's who. photos to follow . . .

Kyoto, Weddings, Etc

On my way back from a five day stretch in Kyoto visiting with my dad and seeing my uncle and the rest of the family. It’s been a while since the last update so let me fill you in. The big H (Helen) has left Japan and did a mini world trip before heading to honk kong where she transferred for her job. As happy as I am for her, I still miss her like crazy and am thinking of visiting over there perhaps for the holidays. So farewell to the big h and in her place we get the train! Leilani (as most of you probably know as the train) is here for a very short stint with nova before heading back to the US where they are keeping her job for her. We have completely different schedules so I actually don’t see her very much despite the fact that we live together. Oh well, I guess it’s not that important. Anyways, the welcome leilani/farewell big H party was held in tsukishima (the land of monja) and we got to go see the big H’s massive hotel room at the park hyatt in roppongi hills. Sidebar: roppongi hills is the infamous place where that kid died cuz he got his head stuck in the revolving door. It’s also where they are showing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Smell-O-Vision, which is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever heard of.

This past Saturday, I went to Kyoto cuz it was the anniversary of my uncle’s death, so the whole family gathered for a big party. My “normal wear” was acceptable so said on the phone so I showed up in shorts and a t-shirt. Of course it’s not ok (another family faux pax under my belt) and I have to change. The only problem is, Kyoto is still stinking hot as balls, which means I have to wear my warm weather clothes. Arrrrgh! So for the next five days I basically boil because I only packed warmish clothing. Yes, I checked the weather before I packed. Yes, it called for cooler temperatures. No, it didn’t say anything about it going to rain. Fuck. I actually had to get my dad to drive me to the uniqlo just to pick up a t-shirt. My one other t-shirt I wore got shitted on my bird during a morning walk. Asshole pigeons. Besides the clothes fuck up, it was all pretty good. Got to spend some time with the cousins and the crazy aunt and see the rest of the peeps that I basically only see once a year. My sort of uncle Aotani made ox tail stew one nite and we had hammo (a special Kyoto fish) for dinner the next nite. All in all, I ate pretty damn well in Kyoto. I sit on the shinkansen now eating a granola bar and drinking vending machine tea so I think I made out pretty well in the end.

What’s to come:

I can’t go home this year for Christmas which sucks but I am hoping to go elsewhere like to see the big h in honk kong or maybe see other peeps. I haven’t seen my self-proclaimed goddaughter mew mew (Duang’s kid) yet (duang was still preggers when I went to Thailand last year) so I am thinking of doing that too. We will see. The holidays are also a good time to pick up overtime which pays fairly well so that’s something to consider too. I gots to save up the dinero so I can have a kicking time in Jamaica in January. I am going to Montego Bay to see sabs get hitched so I am pretty damn excited about that. I am also considering a pit stop in California on the way back for a week or so to surprise my folks (so if any of you who read this speak to my parents, don’t mention anything about this – they have no clue). It’ll be nice to get some decent Mexican food in my belly as well as find some clothes that don’t cost me a kidney and actually fit my fat ass. That’ll be fun. It’ll be my late holiday. In June, I will be back in America, this time to the east coast (yes, back to north Carolina) to see my dear friend Katherine get married (jeez why is everyone getting married?!) so I am excited about that too. I guess this means I have to start dieting now!!!!! (I know I keep saying this) so I can look crash hot at the wedding (they’re great opportunities to pick up). I like how I’m all set to go to these weddings though I have yet to get an invitation.

Sidebar: I’m sorry but this fucking kid is SCREAMING his head off on the train and I am ready to lose it!!!!!!!!! God, get it under control for fuck sake! My folks would have kicked my ass if I behaved like that!

Ok, sorry about that. Anyways, on the wedding front, my friend Marino is also getting married later this month so that’s another wedding I gotta go to. That one I actually got invited to. Japanese weddings (well, the one I went to) tend to be really boring so I’m not exactly looking forward to it yet. Combine that with it being a Mormon wedding, which means no booze, no chocolate. Bummer. But rumor has it that it won’t live up to my expectations so that might be good. I’m gonna try to have fun.

a season, a reason, or a lifetime

so my friend the big H forwarded a friendship email around that said that there are 3 types of friendships out there: friends who come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. lifetime friends are easy to decipher. seasonal friends are people who come into your life for a particular span of time, usually brought together by geography or something like that. a reason friend is a person who is in your life to fulfill a particular purpose and then is gone. i read this email and then promptly erased it due to the forwarded nature of it and my thinking forwards are pretty much bullshit most of the time anyways. but my friend Julie brought the email up in conversation a couple of weeks ago and i thought about it again. the words ring true, but i feel like it's missing something. the forward makes it sound like these friends are all over the place and perhaps they are, but certainly not in proportion. and friendship changes a lot and there are often time when i think i have one of those lifetime friends and it turns out that it's nothing more than an ephemeral fart in the wind.

this year has been particularly tough and there's a part of me that knows i couldn't have gotten this far without some of my so called "friends". however, i've lost quite a few friends this year (lost in that we are no longer friends, or they have passed away, or the dynamic has completely changed to where the friendship is no longer recognizable) and the one lesson i keep coming back to is that i need to be more guarded. i like to wear my heart on my sleeve; i'm bad at hiding my emotions, but i find that whenever i'm honest, i find myself getting kicked in the proverbial nuts. and i feel like all of this is culminating to a huge god-like sign or intervention where a greater power than myself will kick the shit out of me to teach me a lesson about letting people in. now, i know a lot of this has to do with the fact that i'm feeling hurt, disappointed, lonely, and for the fact that i have a bottle of very cheap tokyo wine in me but i still felt this way before the wine earlier today and will probably feel this way in the morning. why are the lifetime friends so hard to find? why do so many friendships seem like more than they are? is it because i want them to be? could it be that i'm a lot needier than i imagine myself to be?

my other rant has to do with friends who compartmentalize their lives. i had a bit of a fight/argument with my japanese friend the other night because he is a huge fan of compartmentalizing his lie. i'd asked him why none of us hadn't met his girlfriend before despite the fact that they had been seeing each other for at least four years and known each other since they were children. he said it was because he didn't want to blend different aspects of his life together. so i said that it seems to me that people who feel the need to compartmentalize their lives that way tend to be limited friends, or that i see them as limited friends. he got very upset with this and demanded to know why he had to share his entire life with me. now, this is certainly blowing the whole issue out of proportion. i don't think that people need to share all aspects of their lives with their friends but i do think that friends who feel the need to create strict bifurcations in their lives tend to be limited friends. if a person compartmentalizes me into one aspect of their lives not to bleed into the other aspects, then i'm not sure that i want that person in the other aspects of my life. this friend has already bled into other part of my life. he used to be my student, now he's my friend, and he knows things about me that i other people don't know. but upon inspection of his contribution to this friendship (after my realization that i am simply just one part of his compartmentalized lifestyle), i've come to see that he shares very little of himself compared to me and that makes me wholly uncomfortable. i am a firm believer in the grade school tit-for-tat dynamic which is why i do not confide in friends who don't confide in me. a balance needs to be kept. and i don't believe in the double standard. given this new information, does that mean my friend really isn't my friend? was he a season that is now over?

all of this over-analyzing gives me a headache. so much of how i deal with people comes from my gut instinct but i find my gut failing me in the long run these days. but perhaps i shouldn't blame it on my GI system. maybe it's just that i ignore the signs even when they're there. i know i ignored quite a bit with the recent loss of a person i considered to be a good friend. i know there are times when denial really is my best friend. it just sucks that it has to hurt so badly. i wish it was easier. but i know that is an overly-simplistic view of life. that's life my compartmentalizing friends outlook. life isn't a neat, easily divisible pie that you can store into different ziplock containers. life is messy and painful and disproportionate and dramatic and sad and wonderful and frightening. it's not supposed to be simple and manageable. that's not life. and i know that's not what i want. and perhaps i just need to grow a thicker skin to realize that a season or reason friend is just as important as a lifetime one, their impact is just for a much shorter amount of time. and by taking these relationships and integrating them into my life (even if it's just for the past or some memories), i value and cherish them in the only way that's important, my way. it's time to cue the sinatra.

Jews, Jackasses, and Tacos

having grown up in southern California, i have had the priviledge of coming in contact with people of all races, creeds, and backgrounds. and where i'm from, there are plenty of Jews so i never thought anything about it. afterall, the media is saturated with them. Seinfeld, Spielberg, Adam Sandler: all Jews. To hear about passover and Chanukah and study them was part of our curriculum. so you can imagine my surprise on Sunday when i found out that two people i know (both of them Australian, mind you) said that they had never seen or known one jew in their entire lives! as the japanese would say, "Eeeeehhhh?!" i found it astaunding that in this day and age (not to mention how small the world keeps getting) that there are people out there who still haven't met any jews. but at the same time, i suppose i've never met a native antarctican so that makes me a bit of a weirdo in some circles as well. i guess i wasn't prepared for such a shock.

now if it just ended there, that would be one thing but now that this asshole has met the only jew he's ever known, he's making all kinds of jew jokes which is making this poor girl very uncomfortable. it reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where that dentist converted to judaism just for the jokes. what an asshole.

this same asshole came to Taco nite (one of the most expensive dinners to host) despite the fact that he invited himself and no one wanted him there. i don't mind putting forth the time and money for my FRIENDS but for other assholes? no thanks.

and even more on the asshole front and Taco Nite, so it wasn't just the one guy but there were some others who weren't invited who came as well. and they invited other undesirables! where does it say that a party at yoko's is a free for all? that's balls not to mention very rude. i thought we coveredx this in the lesson about party invitations . . . .