October 2011
3 posts
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The Nehru Memorial Library and Museum in Delhi,...
So I was in India for a while doing an internship with a human rights advocacy group. A big project I was given at my internship had me researching the history of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 1985. As part of this research, I was required to look at the debates held in Lok Sabha upon the bill’s passage and subsequent renewal every...
April 2010
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The Christian Hypothesis
It was never quite clear what people should call me when I was on the job.
To begin with, my first name, Matthew, carries with it some inherent difficulties when transliterated into Japanese, namely that there is no “TH” sound. My students pronounced my name “Mah-shew,” which was pretty adorable, but did not really address issues of protocol and respect. Depending on the school and the class,...
March 2010
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Boy, Interrupted
For a long time after returning back to the United States, months and months, I found myself uttering some permutation of the phrase, “Hey, I just got back from Japan,” to justify all sorts of lapses and indulgences on my part. If I felt tired and didn’t feel like doing any job hunting on a particular day, I’d tell myself that that was okay, that I had a window of ennui in which it was...
July 2009
2 posts
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Pictures from Kyoto
I have pictures up on Picasa from my trip to Kyoto in April, 2009. Kyoto is a fun place that every human would benefit from seeing at least once in her or his life. Here are some choice moments in all of their embedded Flash-y goodness:
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May 2009
2 posts
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Photos: Sapporo Snow Festival
I’m in the process of working through all the remaining material from my time in Japan: pictures, videos, amusing anecdotes, and all the rest. Towards that end, photos from my trip to Sapporo for the Snow Festival there can be found on my Picasa page. Or you can just look at the bottom of this entry and use the super high-tech embedded slide show action instead, if that’s more your...
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Tips for Future (And Current, I Guess) Assistant...
Social Aspects
Determine how comfortable you are with lying to your students. Your relationship with your students will be built on them asking and being asked simple questions such as “What is your favorite musical group?” Now, maybe your favorite band is Neutral Milk Hotel—and why shouldn’t it be? However, the person who asked you the question has no idea what the fuck a Neutral Milk Hotel...
April 2009
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Tourist Spotlight: Iwatayama Monkey Park
The job’s over and done with, and my time in Japan is running out. A lot’s happened, and I have many interesting things to say but not so much opportunity to say them just now. I’ve been “on the road” (in a purely metaphysical sense, since all of my traveling thus far has been done by train) for about a week and a half now. Crashed for a few days in a fellow ALT’s new apartment amid the...
March 2009
3 posts
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Not dead, only dreaming...
My last day of teaching was one week ago. There’s lots to talk about still, but my Internet connection is a little spotty now that I’ve moved out of my apartment. I will provide new entries and status updates with as much regularity as I can manage.
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My Trip to a Japanese Dentist
One thing I was told upon arriving in Japan was that Japanese toothpaste was no good and that I should have some good old fashioned American toothpaste shipped to my apartment as soon as possible if I hadn’t thought to bring any with me. Incidentally, I was told the same thing about deodorant, and condoms. Japanese dentistry as a whole did not garner rave reviews among the veteran teachers who...
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February 2009
2 posts
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Addictive Behavior
About a month ago I started taking karate lessons held twice a week in a gym near City Hall, about a five minute walk from my apartment. The Japanese style of martial arts that my instructor teaches is at odds with the American Kenpo style that I studied for something like eight years when I was a teenager—the footwork is all convoluted and the only stance we use is too deep and impractical, to...
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25 Random Things About Me (I Succumb To An...
I once wanted to Change the World. A part of me still does. At the moment, though, I’ll settle for having health insurance.
I wear my glasses all the time despite the fact that I can still see pretty decently without them. I tell myself that this is because, if I didn’t put them on in the morning and keep them on all day, I’d never remember to put them on even when I did need them.
A major...
January 2009
3 posts
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Winter Sports Festival
I attended my Hell School’s Winter Sports Festival on Saturday of last week. This consisted of various snow-related games and activities. The first event was a relay race where three people worked together to drag a tire with a small child riding on it around a cone and back to the starting line before passing the tire on to the next team. The soccer field was completely frozen over with ice...
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Life Imitates Art
I was flipping through my journal earlier today while I was at work and came across an entry I’d made over Winter Break while I was staying with a couple of friends in Marumori and unwinding after our successful five-day excursion to Tokyo. Said entry detailed a small but extremely poignant (to me, at any rate) “Japan” type moment. I have reprinted it here with relevant hyperlinks for your...
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Gaijin Solidarity
In homogeneous Japan, the specific details of your heritage or ethnicity or whatever are less significant than the fact that you are not Japanese. Thus, all people not from Japan, whether they be American, Philipino, Chinese, Korean, whatever, are all usually referred to using the word “gaijin” (or “gaikokujin” if the speaker is trying to be more polite), which simply means “foreigner.”
I live...
December 2008
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The Eastern Capital
So I spent five days in Tokyo at the beginning of my Winter Vacation and have made a short detour to Miyagi prefecture with some friends before I head back to the frozen northlands from whence I came. Miyagi prefecture, with its milder climate and larger and more interesting capital city, is still a major improvement over the town in Iwate where I currently lay my head, but it seems like a major...
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With the Kids Sing Out the Future
The pillows are a Japanese rock band whose sound is usually compared to that of the Pixies but without all the Spanglish and jokes about fucking. I was first exposed to their music, like most Americans, by watching Fooly Cooly (FLCL), which is an absurdist Bildungsroman Japanese cartoon about weapons-grade Gibson guitars being pulled out of transdimensional portals in people’s skulls and on...
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Internal Rhythm
I don’t know exactly why I stay up so late every night. It’s almost like this rebellion against the working day, like I give myself over to the bosses when the sun is out but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let the considerations of the job alter my behavior outside of normal working hours anymore than it absolutely has to. Except that’s a really dumb way to act on such subversive feelings,...
November 2008
5 posts
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Pizza Time
There are lots of ways to measure how “civilized” a particular country is. None of these methods are definitive, but when grouped together they give us a general idea of where are the nice places to live, and where are the places to be emigrated from with all possible haste. How a society treat its prisoners. How they treat their dead. How they treat the marginalized and less fortunate.
Gross...
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Tripping the Light Ascetic (Ganbatte-Fest ’08,... →
New Flickr album is up.
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Cultural %$#ing exchange
I have this idea in my head that people who are driven to come to Japan (or anywhere else, I guess) to teach English tend to be cut from a different cloth than the rest of humanity, and that I myself am not of the normal overseas teacher stock. I say this because my own interpretation of shared events differs wildly from that of the other ALTs I have spent time around.
I am testing this theory...
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Apartment Tour, Supplemental
I posted a short update regarding my apartment and my preparations for the long Iwate winter.
Apartment Tour, Supplemental
October 2008
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Tales From the Classroom, Part 1
So after school I teach conversational English to a group of five second year students whose English is already quite good. They are practicing for a short homestay trip in, I dunno, January or February or some such, so we study things like giving directions and vocabulary for shopping and stuff. I have no idea how to teach this class, but the students are good-natured enough that we usually...
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Man Has No Nature!
If I had to be all pithy about it, I would say that I don’t particularly like the job I am currently committed to performing for the next six months or so despite the fine opportunity for cultural exchange and personal growth that it presents. Luckily, I am under no obligation to be pithy, or even to be concise, and so have the luxury of going into greater detail about the melange of emotions—bad...
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The Full-On Multimedia Experience
So I took some video of my apartment in Iwate prefecture back when I first moved in, and have recently uploaded it onto Youtube. Hope they are enjoyable, or at least interesting.
A Tour of my Japanese Apartment, Part 1 A Tour of my Japanese Apartment, Part 2
Overall it is a very nice place, and I appreciate it even more so now that I have seen some of the holes the other teachers with my...
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Welcome to Japan
I’ve been meaning to write some stuff about the month or so I’ve spent in Japan so far on this website that I created for the express purpose of doing exactly that thing, but there have been… complications.
As with any jaunt outside of one’s zone of comfort, noteworthy events occur much more frequently here than they would under normal circumstances. So, whereas back home I could take stock at...
August 2008
1 post
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"Freedom is Slavery." Or was it "Slavery is...
The company I work for finally got a hold of me over the phone a little while ago with details regarding my teaching placement, which was especially lame after I spent three weeks refreshing my Gmail inbox like seventy times per day waiting for that information. A very Scottish gentleman called me on a Monday night and told me that they had placed me, and by “placed me” here I mean “had no...
July 2008
2 posts
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Green Eggs and Ham. And Bacn.
What I’ve been doing a lot for the last couple of weeks is sitting around waiting for important e-mails to show up in my Gmail inbox. This is very similar to what I do every day already, except the things I am waiting for now are genuinely important job-related deals and not just some people on Facebook telling me that my expression in a picture from like two years ago is “hilarious.” See, the...
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To Begin
So I guess I had planned to start a blog right after I graduated from college as an online portfolio for my writing, a “man I hope I get into grad school” sort of thing, but then I spent an entire year watching “Veronica Mars” DVDs and working a (pretty cool, admittedly) low-paying tutoring job while I figured my stuff out. The graduate school thing turned out to be a bust because I guess...