A little holdover until the real posting...

Hola Amigos,

Thank you for waiting patiently for an informative and substantial posting. Unfortunately, this isn't it. I'm going to write a long and thorough posting about my posting here at Kobe Kaisei College. But I haven't found the time yet, and I'm still waiting for "the catch" (this job is so great, I know there must be a catch somewhere...). So expect a decent post sometime next week.

In the meantime, please follow this link if you want to see a video of my last night in Ft. Collins. The video was secretly shot and produced by a student of mine, Mr. Ahmed Ghanem. It's quite a nice little clip, and I'm both impressed and honored by his gesture. To see it, you got to click through some stuff and wait 30 seconds or something like that.

Enjoy.

Despite the delicious dumplings, I do not recommend dining at "Ringer Hut"

Eating in Japan is often a perilous undertaking. Although I wish it weren’t the case, I’ve been wandering quite far and on a regular basis to find Western-style food such as burgers and fried chicken. The Wendy’s in Sannomiya, for instance, is remarkably like a Wendy’s in the US with just a few differences: the first is the foot-thick layer of smoke that obscures the ceiling, the second is the loud American gangsta rap that is pumped through the restaurant’s sound system, and the third is that the burgers somehow manage to be even greasier than Wendy’s burgers in the states.

The reason why I prefer to eat American-style food is that eating Japanese food is basically a crapshoot in which the odds of edibility are heavily stacked against you. For every mysteriously-labeled menu item that yields something chewy and delicious there are dozens of dishes which are, to be polite, quite challenging to the Western palette. (A less polite way of putting this would be to say that most Japanese food tastes like deep-fried rotting fish byproduct.)

For instance, this evening I ate at “Ringer Hut”, a fast-food style restaurant in Kobe’s swanky Habalando (Harbor Land) district. This outcome of this meal was particularly disheartening because I ordered it with the help of a picture menu. In the picture, the dish I ordered seemed like a delectable noodle victual, complete with fresh vegetables on top and fried dumplings to the side. What I got was moist worm-like boiled vegetables (?) lain atop a bed of crispy hay. Swimming amid the straw and worms were chunks of octopus and guppy. Like all strange-looking meals here I Japan, I approached this one with an open mind. It’s impossible, I naively thought, that this food can be remotely as vile as it appears.

And then I took a bite. After crunching through the straw, the taste was substantially worse that I was expecting, even worse than black licorice. It was a flavor so toxic it immediately struck me as possibly fatal. I think one of the tentacles was still moving, struggling against my molars and poisoning my taste buds. But, like a good soldier, I dutifully chewed and swallowed a bite, and swore to myself that the memory of this meal would be deeply repressed, like many of the gay uncle molestation events I’m probably repressing so deeply I am not even cognizant of such events even happening.

After swallowing and the few deep breaths that followed, my gaze turned to the fried dumplings. They were, at least, a familiar standby. Plus, on the side of the tray, there were little packets of yellow paste—probably mustard (but in Japan you can never be too sure) and perhaps just the thing to erase the tainted flavor left in my mouth. So I generously dipped a dumpling into a pile of yellow and took a bite. The following are the thoughts that entered my mind:

Hmmm . . . this dumpling is actually quite good! And the yellow paste was indeed mustard. Delightful! And such a tangy mustard too. And quite spicy. Really spicy, just the way I like—SWEET BLESSED VIRGIN! IT TRULY HURTS . . . AND THE PAIN. IT’S EXQUISITE! SWEET, SWEET AGONY, CLEANSE MY PALLETE OF ALL PREVIOUSLY INGESTED UNHOLINESSES, SCOUR MY NASAL CAVITY OF ALL UNSOUND SCENTS. THE MUSTARD, THE FLAME—I FEEL THE FLAME. NO . . . I AM THE PAIN.

After a 10-15 seconds, my head started to clear and I took another dumpling between my chopsticks, dipped it in the cleansing mustard, and slid it into my mouth. Overall, comparatively speaking, that was actually a pretty good meal.

Anyhoo, I’ll end this post with a picture that I feel perfectly symbolizes ingesting disease and agony. I don't remember the artist or the title, but I'm calling it "DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME: A Pious Baboon Eats from The Melon of The Damned."

Arrival in Kobe and comments on local fashion scene.

All-righty then. My last post covered the airplane journey to Japan. This post will try to cover the hazy events which transpired immediately after my arrival. Hold tight—this is going to be a real page-turner. Or, perhaps I should say mouse-wheel-spinner. Or scroll-bar-puller. Or page-down-presser. Regardless, prepare for pure excitement made manifest through the mysterious vagaries of HTML code.

Upon arrival at Kansai International Airport—an airport which sits, coincidentally, on a man-made island consisting of compacted garbage that experts alarmingly conclude is slowly sinking into the ocean—I went through customs, picked up my baggage, and met up with Lori, a kind lady who is also my co-worker at Kobe Kaisei school. Lori volunteered to guide me from the airport, which is in Osaka, to my apartment in Kobe. This was a task Lori performed quite well, and I am appreciative of her efforts.

The next few following days are a bit of a blur, as I was suffering both jet-lag and a nasty flu I contracted on the airplane (thanks again, air travel!). In the haze I managed to fill out an application for my gaijin-card (all foreigners who reside in Japan for an extended period of time must have a gaijin-card, which tells authorities that even though they’re foreigners, it’s sort of OK for them to be there), open an account at the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and sleep off the flu for a day or two at my new apartment.

Speaking of my new apartment, it was quite a pleasant surprise to move into a home which had been fully furnished. Denise Wright, the friend who lived in this apartment before me, kindly left all sorts of nice things for me, including a toy robotic turtle which can scoot itself across the dining room table while making burbling electronic noises. This toy, and Japanese television, provided much-needed distraction as I sat shivering for a couple days in a snot-soaked fever.

After about four or five days, the symptoms of my flu had waned enough that I could venture out regularly into Sannomiya, the lively heart of Kobe, for extended periods of time. It’s there that I rediscovered the Manboo internet and comic café. Manboo is quite an extraordinary operation, with walls of comic books of dubious-content, free slurpee and coffee machines, bathrooms, and even showers. I haven’t used the showers, yet—I just noticed them on a map of the place. The big draws for me are the little booths which contain the primary means of my international correspondence—e-mail. In each booth is a nice leather recliner, leather foot rest, TV+DVD, flat-screen monitor, internet-ready computer, little safe (I have no idea why this is here), and a pair of slippers (ditto). I usually rent the booths out in three-hour blocks for a mere 819 yen—about $8.

The other noticeable things in Sannomiya are all the fashionable young people. Readers of this blog who have laid eyes on me will attest to my complete ignorance and disinterest in matters of fashion, but here I have started feeling quite perceptive to it. Most people I see are my age (mid-20s), the kind of age group which typically cares little for correct sentence structure (this is my way of apologizing in advance for the next sentence). The men usually dress according to one of two themes: the first is some sort of crazy punk-look, which includes wild, dyed hair, camouflaged pants, vivid pink or purple shirt, and brightly-colored Converse shoes; the second theme is that of business suit, of which there are two different kinds of suit-wearers: the first kind are legitimate “salary-men,” the name given to young professionals for whom freshly-pressed suits are necessary for their jobs; the second kind of suit-wearers belong to a group I call “Crazy 88s” or “Goons.” These guys are indeed wearing business suits, but their suits are oversized and worn loose so they can flap in the wind, with loosely-tied ties around their necks and unkempt hairdos. The second-kind of suit-wearers usually roam in packs, and, although they do indeed look cool, they’re also kind of scary-looking for some reason—like they’re hellish businessmen from an alternate reality of Japan. Or Crazy 88s from Kill Bill Vol 1.

As for the women . . . well, let me just say that Kobe seems to be inordinately comprised of young women. They’re everywhere, and they’re usually wearing two types of outfits. The first outfit I would describe as business-formal, with dark knee-length skirts, white blouses, and dark blazers. (Do business women wear blazers? What do they call that blazer-looking garment worn over blouses? I’m calling them blazers.) The second group of women are quite eye-catching: they usually wear tight sweaters, very short miniskirts, and knee-high leather boots with 4-5 inch spike heels. I’m told this is Japan’s cold-weather fashion. On warm-weather days, leather boots are discarded in favor of thigh-high stockings and high-heeled strapped sandals. These women (both booted and stockinged varieties) usually teeter around in their high heels in a pigeon-toed fashion, a walking-style affected to maintain to culturally-determined standards of cuteness, from what I’ve read. When I see women like this in a train station, part of me thinks it is kind of sexy and cute, but the other part of me fears that some young woman will, with one carelessly-placed and trembling footstep, simply topple off the station platform and onto the tracks of an oncoming train. Fashion around here is quite fascinating, but also a bit unsettling for a variety of reasons.

And, on that note, I’ll end this post. Next time I’ll discuss my school, Kobe Kaisei College, and perhaps my journey into Osaka’s Den-Den Town to purchase a computer monitor.

Until then, assuming I can correctly post it, please enjoy this picture of fashion motif I would like to see someday.

One of the better flights I've had.

When last we left our hero, he was receiving a two-day send-off befitting the grandeur of his bearing and the grace with which he functions in today’s mire. Unfortunately, his heartless “friends” deserted him, alone, to the vicious caprices of fate and the hazardous environs of Day’s Inn near Denver International Airport.

After taking his sleeping pills, our hero was disrobing in preparation for sleep when his right arm accidentally struck a sharpened corner of the wall, causing a significant portion of flesh to become violently sheared off the back of his hand.

Oh no! thought our hero. That crucial part of my hand will be grasped firmly during repeated handshake encounters! Whatever shall I do? Will the mysterious Japan-man think less of me should I cringe during his crushing handshake? Will my weakness be interpreted as an individual affliction, or will my wincing disgrace not only myself by also the culture which produced me?

Luckily, artificially-induced sleep was setting in, and our hero was spared too much worry. He was soon asleep on his square King-sized bed, clutching a Kleenex to his hand in a valiant effort to staunch the flow of blood and prevent his lifeforce from leaving his body.

Dreamless slumber cradled our hero for approximately five hours at which point it was interrupted by a thoughtless Days Inn desk clerk telephoning him to wake up. After cursing the man, our hero slammed the phone down and stalked into the bathroom, where he enjoyed a significant bowel movement and hot shower.

Hours later, after having already suffered one cramped flight to Texas and a two-hour delay at Dallas Fort-Worth Airport, our hero found himself confined to a torturous iron seat located in the rear of the dimmed economy-class cabin on a Boeing 777 traveling approximately 500 miles per hour high above the Bering Straight.

To his right slept the second largest man on the plane, an Asian fellow unable to speak English but gifted instead with convenient narcolepsy. To his left lay the aisle of the plane, the lane in which our hero’s sandal-clad foot was repeatedly overran by a one-ton drink cart, and where his shoulder was repeatedly jostled by the flaring hips of menopausal flight attendants who enjoyed sashaying wildly up and down the path at the very instant in which merciful sleep was poised to overtake him.

Just inches in front of our hero and practically in his lap was the seat in front of him, armored by a stowed plastic tray table, the lower edge of which was becoming progressively buried underneath our hero’s kneecaps in a most excruciating fashion.

Embedded in the top portion of the seat in front of him was a miniature television monitor upon which Charlize Theron was struggling valiantly to breath life into the dull and insipid action/sci-fi vehicle Aeon Flux. This miserable excuse of a film, which played every two hours, was the only respite from which our hero could distract himself from the agony of his condition.

The monotony of the journey was punctuated by our hero’s casual and occasional observation of his foot. Aside from the angrily-red tread imprints from the drink-cart, our poor hero’s foot was ballooning outward from the straps of his sandals. This mysterious and hideous effect often affects our hero during the horrors of air travel, the ungodly and unnatural forces of which cause his noble blood to sink to his lower extremities, puffing out his skin until his feet become brick-like in both general shape and color.

Anyhoo, imagine 13-14 hours of this, and you get the general idea. Next entry, you’ll learn if our hero survived the journey due to his resilience, determination, and superhuman endurance, or if the forces of airline evil finally succeeded in ending his brave and vibrant life through new and creative ways of inflicting unspeakable agony.

Until then, try to enjoy this picture, which symbolizes our hero’s plight.

The very first in a series of boring but rapid entries!

To the few readers of this blog:

My sincerest apologies for the abysmal lack of updates over the past week. It hasn’t been until just recently that I’ve been able to restore some semblance of stability to my life, and computer usage has been, when available, quite confusing.

Japanese keyboards aren’t really made for use by Westerners, which is my polite way of saying Japanese keyboards suck. The all-important and near indispensable space bar is reduced to a mere inch in length, and the mysteriously-labeled keys adjacent to the space bar automatically render the text being typed into Japanese characters. Add to that the near impossibility of locating the apostrophe key (I think it’s shift-7), and you have a miserable typing experience. I’ve basically been waiting until I could obtain a computer monitor at home (mission accomplished as of a couple days ago) so I could write at home on my good ole western keyboard, and later take what I’ve written to an internet café where I could copy the document to an e-mail, or, in this case, my blog. And that’s basically why it’s taken me so long to update.

That, and because I’ve been sick with the flu, jetlagged, occasionally broke, and crazy-busy.

But all that’s finished now and I have so much to tell ... but here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to publish, right here on this very blog, a serialized chronicle of the events of the last 10 days. I’m thinking one post a day, just to keep the two or three people who read this blog eagerly anticipating tomorrow’s entry!

Here goes:

Our tale begins back in wintry Fort Collins a couple Fridays ago. Friends and colleagues from the Intensive English Program had kindly invited me to their beginning-of-the-term-potluck-dinner even though my brief by satisfying tenure at the IEP had ended a couple weeks prior. But I felt it would be a good occasion to say goodbye to some people whom I might not see again for several years (or ever, as might sadly be the reality). Once I arrived at the IEP, I was stunned to discover that a so-long banner had been hung in my benefit! That’s right—a banner just to say adios to little ole me!

After I had seen the banner, potluck attendees were ushered into the room and a mysterious gift bag was thrust into my hands. That’s right—a gift just for little ole me! Inside the gift bag was heaven-sent item so wondrous it defies description! Actually, I can describe it: it was a state-of-the-art digital camera, complete with big LCD screen, movie-capture capability, and big memory card. I was shocked because a state-of-the-art digital camera was something I’d been wanting for years now, and the item had unexpectedly made its way into my possession. Wonderful!

Looking back on the evening, I feel a tinge of foolishness because, in my shock, I was unable to convey effectively how meaningful the gift was to the throng of well-wishers and camera-chipper-inners who watched me open the bag. But if anyone reading this entry chipped in for the camera, please accept my humble and sincere sentiments of gratitude. It was a wonderful and thoughtful gift, and I really do feel unworthy. But I’ll still take it, haha!

The rest of the potluck was a delightful affair. I said goodbye to numerous teachers and students before we went to The Vault, my preferred tavern in Old Town Fort Collins. Once at the vault, good friends and colleagues proceeded to intoxicate me. In my inebrium, I was surprised to see John Calderazzo, my non-fiction writing instructor and friend, also show up to send me off—a kind and welcome gesture. All in all, the evening was something I’ll remember fondly, even the difficult moments bidding farewell to people who had functioned as family for me since the beginning of summer 2005.

In particular, I want to give a massive shout-out to my homie, Jordan, yo. She’s been a great friend and goof-off buddy since I arrived in graduate school, and if she weren’t at the IEP, I doubt I’d have had a tenth as much fun. I'm not too worried about saying goodbye to her because I'm certain we’ll hang out again in the not-too-distant future.

Also, I’ll never forget dear Karen, who I fear exceeds me in wit, cynicism, and intelligience. (And I consider those three things my strong suits! At least I'm more ruggedly handsome than she is, and likely better at video games.) I’ll always remember saying goodbye to her for a long time, all the while mentally begging the great unknown to magically turn the goodbye to a see-you-soon. My fingers ache from continuously remaining in the crossed position.

Upon waking up the next morning, I rushed around the basement I’d been living in, cramming everything that hadn’t been shipped into my luggage. It took some serious pressure and zipper massage (that sounds indecent, huh?), but everything ended up fitting snugly in my suitcases. After having lunch with and saying goodbye to the Birdsall family—who had been exceedingly kind to me for a number of years, agreeing even, in one more act of generosity, to sell my car for me—I traveled to Denver with my friend, Makiko. Once there, I checked in at a motel close to the airport, and, after Zach and Errol showed up, my close circle and I went to Casa Bonita in Denver.

This was a very fun evening (we even made the rounds in Black Bart’s Cave), but my impending departure set my nerves on edge. Errol, Zach, and Makiko have been my friends and handlers for years (Errol since kindergarten), and while saying goodbye to them was difficult, it wasn’t too hard because I know for a fact that I’ll see each plenty in the near future. Even Zach, who’s worried about that. Don’t worry, dear peckerhead!

After all that, I took two kinds of sleeping pills and, by 10:30, was fast asleep.

And that was my extravagant sendoff from the comfortable den of Fort Collins! Hopefully I didn’t break the “no-sentimentality” rule too egregiously in this posting, but it’s nigh-impossible to detail difficult goodbyes without expressing some mushy sentiment. But worry not: those feelings of closeness have since been replaced by sensations of alienation and isolation, and that usually gets my cynicism drive chugging overtime. The scales of this blog will balance soon. Expect snarkiness, and soon.

I am here! (I think...)

Hello blogosphere! I am in Japan, but I am still waiting for my computer to arrive and to be hooked up to the internet at home. Right now I am in an internet cafe, but Japanese keyboards suck (can someone tell me where the damned apostrophe key is?) and I do not want to write a long e-mail. Plus I am tired and sick and the thought of going home to my bed sounds good.

I will write a substantive post when I am ready. I have a lot to talk about, including two great send-offs and my friend, Matt. Plus, all the crazy life-in-Japan shit (oh yeah, that.).

Hold tight for more details! In the meantime, enjoy this picture of an octopus shaving.

I'm out, bitches!