Worse Than Coleslaw

I posted a short update regarding my apartment and my preparations for the long Iwate winter.

Apartment Tour, Supplemental

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 have fun despite my occasionally fumbling about for things to occupy the time.

Even though I speak almost no Japanese and the kids have a hard time forming English sentences, we are still able to get stuff done without the presence of a Japanese teacher. Part of the reason for this is that my students in this class have a couple of electronic dictionaries to share between the five of them that they use to translate any words that I can’t make them understand with pantomime and synonyms. These dictionary things are totally slick. There’s not been a word yet whose meaning the students have been unable to suss out with the aid of their trusty electronic dictionaries, and with the help of these devices combined with the students’ quick wits and considerable knowledge base, I’ve mostly been able to avoid the communication problems I experience in my other, larger, less motivated classes,

Sometimes when class kind of tapers off like it so often does due to my legendary lack of ability to plan things, the kids’ natural intellectual curiosity will drive them to look up random idioms on the dictionaries’ idiom finder and say said idioms to me just to see what I’ll do. Yesterday, I saw two students, the only boy in the class and the girl who sits next to him, passing an e-dictionary between them, whispering in Japanese and glancing up at me. Finally, they did a little surreptitious jan-ken-pon (which is identical to the American “rock-paper-scissors” in everything but the name), and the loser turned to me and readied herself to speak, glancing down at the LCD screen a couple of times to make sure she had it right in her mind. For my part, I tried to look as non-threatening and good-natured as possible so that she wouldn’t feel too nervous about speaking English. In an American high school you’d expect them to come up with stuff like “I have a raging hard-on” or “Fuck you, GI,” but I don’t have to worry about that so much in Japan. Still, I’m never quite sure what to expect when this kind of thing happens.

The first go round I couldn’t make out what she was saying because there was a lot of noise coming from outside the classroom as the baseball club ran drills out in the hallway. From time to time I could see them looking through the door’s window and trying to sound out the stuff I’d written on the board. “What was that?” I said, and leaned in to hear her better.

More confident this time, she said, “I feel like a million dollars!”

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 and good—that are evoked each morning as I walk into the teacher’s lounge of whatever school I am scheduled for that day and shout “Ohaiyo gozaimasu” in the high-pitched rumble that characterizes my oft-unused “outside” voice.

Ironically enough, the four years I spent as a high school student are both the reason I am here and the reason I have had so much trouble adjusting to the job.

Back when I was in school, my favorite teachers were the ones who made class interesting by sheer force of personality: Fr. Jesuit for his scatterbrained historical tangents and well-developed sense of irony, Dr. English-teacher for his puns and eminently dash-able one-liners, Dr. History-teacher for his frequent references to the use of LSD. Sure, there were discussions in all of these classes; however, the emphasis was still on lecturing, and I was content to just go to class and listen to my teachers talk about interesting things for fifty minutes. Under normal circumstances my teaching style would be shaped by this preference, and I would focus on attempting to fill my class time with dry humor and tangential ramblings. But since my audience consists entirely of non-native speakers, trying to adapt this method to my current responsibilities does not work, not even a little. It’s just the nature of teaching and learning a foreign language, and doubly so when you are teaching students whose language you do not speak.

My least favorite teachers traditionally were the ones who made me get out of my seat and actually do stuff in class. I always used to resent it when my Spanish teachers made us practice dialogues in pairs or do group activities, more so since I didn’t know anyone in any of the four Spanish classes I took throughout high school and college and at the time was hampered by somewhat crippling social anxiety that made every such class an ordeal. But now I get paid to try to get my kids to do exactly that which irritated me not that long ago.

“It’s a weird position to be in,” I told one of the other assistant teachers working in my prefecture. “Back then I would totally have hated having a language class with me as the teacher.”

“What would have gotten you to pay attention in Spanish class, then?” she asked me. “If you knew that you could do it in your classes now.”

“I’m not sure anything could have,” I said, after giving it some thought. The only thing I have been able to come up with even after a lot of pondering is if the practice dialog was on video and took place between two naked women and a man who was fully clothed but also on fire. I might have lifted my head out of the puddle of drool on my desk for that. My lack of interest in Pictionary and Word Finds as viable class activities wasn’t one of those “Jesus this is so boring, I could totally do a better job of this,” sort of thing. Like Socrates, my criticism of the system did not go so far as to suggest anything better. I simply was more interested in sleeping than I was the subject matter just then, and Pictionary and its various ilk prevented me from being able to sleep by forcing me to get out of my chair and engage the material. The main difference I can see between me and the kids I am teaching (many of whom, at least at my ghetto school, seem about as interested in English as I was in Spanish way back when) is that I was able to snooze my way through high school while still taking AP classes and maintaining a 4-point-something GPA, which is great if you can swing it, but not recommended for the general population.

I’m not trying to say that I think games and activities are a bad thing or that they shouldn’t be a part of the learning process. My point here is that my experiences as a student have colored the way I approach the business of teaching English, and this is a problem because I am still coming from the perspective of a fashionably jaded, 19-year-old slacker prince. Back then I would have considered anyone who told me “Hey, here’s a board game you can play to practice the passive tense!” to be a total cheeseball who was not to be trusted. Even once I got to college this mindset did not disappear completely; when I took Conceptual Physics (Physics for Non-majors) junior year, I skipped all the lab days where we ran experiments and stuff because I was unwilling to expend the effort for such a minimal return. Labs counted as extra credit and I already had an “A” in the class and was confident in my ability to maintain that good grade without any help. My job right now is basically to be the embodiment of the very persona I would have scoffed at not too long ago. This makes lesson planning extremely difficult because I am incapable of coming up with my own ideas. I am so quick to write off the kind of vocabulary-building games that are encouraged by my superiors that my brain no longer possesses the mechanism to come up with those kinds of ideas by itself. I thus get all of my lesson ideas from books and websites—no big deal, there are plenty of resources for ALTs out there that I can cherry pick ideas from—but this too presents a problem because my immediate reaction to every potential exercise is “That sounds totally retarded” no matter how well it would probably work in class, necessitating multiple readthroughs of such material to extract as much quality material as possible. More than that, though, it is hard for me to sell the idea of Bingo (a time-honored ESL tool) to a classroom full of Japanese teenagers. The whole thing comes off as half-hearted. I also am further limited by the necessity that, since most of my students do not speak enough English to understand the instructions I give in class, any such activities I use be simple enough to explain via demonstration using gestures and crude bone tools.

Of course, I knew that my job would involve all of these elements. I simply underestimated how much I am a product of my experiences, and how little those experiences have prepared me for the situation I in which I find myself.

So I would say that so far I enjoy teaching, and that it’s the “teaching English as a second language” thing that is really my problem. Being able to talk to my students, even if it’s just asking them what their favorite sport is or what kind of music they like, and having them come up to me in the hallway to start conversations, is one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life, and teaching is probably the best way there is to really learn about a new culture. However, the problem with ESL is that it puts me solidly outside my niche and prevents me from playing to my strengths while exaggerating my weaknesses. Language has always kind of been my thing. Whatever problems I had interacting with people in my life, I have always usually managed to compensate for these problems by being funny or verbose or both at the same time. You take away my ability to communicate and what do you have left? Mostly you have a skinny-ish guy with glasses that don’t stay on his nose who doesn’t look people in the eye for more than two seconds at a time and who only has enough control over his body language to express three emotions: “nervously cheerful,” “neutral,” and “good-naturedly confused.”

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 company have been given. Still no refrigerator, though; I guess in about a month if I need something refrigerated I will be able to just stick it outside in the snow.

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 the end of a month and find that the only events worth writing home about during that time were that I finished, say, readingTransmetropolitan and continued my long-standing streak of not getting laid, the same amount of time in Japan has yielded so many new experiences that time itself seems to have warped and even wrapping my head around all the stuff I need to tell the folks back home about is overwhelming.

I have some backlogged content that I am working on writing out to chronicle the story so far in greater detail, but here’s a general overview of the situation.

I arrived in Narita, Japan on the scheduled day with no knowledge of where I would eventually end up, prepared to spend up to a month waiting around for any additional information. I’d even allowed myself to think that spending a month in Tokyo with nothing much to do while getting paid a monthly salary would actually be a pretty swee. However, fortunately (or perhaps <em>unfortunately</em>, it’s still a little early to make that call), a placement was found for me while I was in the air over the Pacific Ocean, and upon arriving at the training site I was given the name of the city in Iwate prefecture where I would be living for the next seven months. The name itself meant nothing to me, which is a shame, because if I’d had any conception of Japanese geography or demographics I might have asked them if there was possibly another place they could send me and avoided a lot of irritation. It turns out that Iwate is like the Wisconsin of Japan, cold and desolate and kind of a backwater.

Meanwhile, despite the remote location, my apartment is actually super-nice. The problem is just that it is super-nice in all the wrong ways. I have an intercom with a built-in video camera peephole, a keypad lock on the door, three huge rooms and a bathroom with an enormous bathtub… but was not provided a refrigerator, a stove, or lights, and was not able to obtain Internet access for four weeks because I had to wait for the service provider people to come to my apartment and install something onto my phone jack. Skulking around my apartment all day with my makeshift furniture and lack of practical amenities with all the aforementioned, unused bells and whistles makes me feel like some kind of post-apocalyptic savage curled up among the ruins of a long-dead but highly advanced civilization.

So I spent the first two weeks of my tenure with almost no outside contact save a payphone on the corner that eats ten-yen coins like they are the antidote and whatever Internet cafe action I could find when I took the train into Morioka on weekends; a number of my very good friends from New Orleans and the surrounding areas recently got screwed over by another big hurricane, and I didn’t know about it until almost a week later. Even now that I have a phone and an Internet connection, the logistics of living in a place where almost no one speaks any kind of language I can understand definitely take a toll. The isolation has been a little overwhelming. Seriously, there were puppets.

Some nights when I get home I will say the word “fuck” a few times just so that I can be sure that I still remember how.

As far as work goes, it is something of a mixed bag. I am teaching at two high schools. The first school, let’s call it The School of Suck for anonymity’s sake, is in the town in which I live, and is about a ten minute walk away. The students I teach there are mostly punks who talk in class and make teaching extremely unpleasant. I also teach at the School of Rock three days a week, and the students there are much nicer, although when I teach them I am usually tired because the commute by car is about an hour.

On days when there is snow on the ground it supposedly takes much longer.

I am to understand that it snows there constantly between November and March.

Great.

So far I have missed my family, my friends, pizza, burritos, and seeing movies in theaters.

So far I have not missed the “Your mom” jokes.

Rather than trying to summarize the last month in the “This happened, then this happened, and it was super fun, and then this happened” format, which I am not such a fan of, the next several entries will most likely be focusing on the deconstruction of specific small elements of my observations in Japan, along with short narrative descriptions of incidents that can be thought of as representing some larger aspect of my overall experience. Or, you know, whatever else I feel like writing about.

I uploaded the first batch of pictures that I built up during my exile. They can be viewed on my Flickr account. Hope you enjoy them.

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 placement for me, why don’t you come to Tokyo and hang out while we wait for one of our other teachers to go crazy or get cancer and you can take their spot?” I was somewhat nonplussed by this arrangement, envisioning some sort of white slavery ring scenario like you’d see in a particularly bad episode of Law and Order: SVU, but at the same time I’d spent like two months preparing for this trip and had no alternative plans for the next year. I told Scotland-san that I’d be willing to go for this but would e-mail him with a few questions later on to make sure I understood everything. I spent the first half hour after the phone call trying to come up with a way to describe the situation to my friends and relations without sounding like someone who was about to get conned like that Irish dude in The Sting, and couldn’t really come up with anything that didn’t paint me as a naïve child about to get taken for his last penny. However, I have been repeatedly assured that I will be signing a teaching contract with the company I work for at the same time as everyone else, and will be paid normally even during the time I spend waiting around for them to actually find a reason to pay me. I guess I can respect them for not just blowing me off and sending me on my merry way (which most American companies would probably have done), but it’s hardly an ideal situation.

Meanwhile, I only just got my Certificate of Eligibility (the first step of the visa process, the visa being a kind of important thing to have) until a couple of days ago, less than two weeks before I’m scheduled to set out. Exasperated at my failed attempt to get things done in a timely fashion for once in my life, I decided to just embrace the chaos of this journey, bend it to my will; with that in mind, I ordered a negotiated-fare airline ticket of dubious merit and signed up for a World of Warcraft account so that I could spend my time focused on something other than all of the things I still have left to accomplish before I leave the country. Despite my playing against type by actually trying to get everything about this trip taken care of well in advance, the universe has seen fit to force me into a chaotic jaunt into the void. That’s cool, I guess. I don’t really believe in predestination, but I will admit that this experience will be an extremely valuable precedent when I wait till the last minute in the future on purpose; some people would even say that this is God Himself telling me that I should just be content with my procrastinatin’, slacker self and not try to be all diligent and stuff. If it means I don’t have to deal with making To-Do lists and keep an appointment book, I’m all for it. There is a whole discussion here about whether it is better to attempt to correct perceived shortcomings in one’s personality (in this case, my inability to plan things ahead of time) or simply find ways to work around those shortcomings in the true spirit of guerrilla warfare. But I’ll leave that for another time.

Some coworkers of mine were sitting around earlier today during a lull in business, talking about instances of personal hypocrisy. I was listening out of one ear whiledoing serious business playing World of Warcraft on my MacBook when one of them asked me, “How have you compromised your beliefs lately?”

“Well, I got to work like ten minutes early today,” I said after a moment of thought. They agreed that that was definitely not in keeping with my core system of thought.

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 way my job in Japan works is, I applied to a recruitment company, who agreed to place me in a Japanese public school (or schools, as the case may be) should I be judged worthy of such services. So I accepted the job before I knew precisely where and when I would be going. We can discuss the wisdom of this arrangement at another time, but let me just say that regardless of where in Japan I end up going, I will still be going to Japan. It is, however, frustrating to sit around and wait to hear more details about my assignment, limited in my ability to prepare (I can’t even buy a plane ticket yet, or finish applying for my visa) even as the time before my estimated date of arrival has started to be measured in weeks rather than months. I am (justifiably, I feel) impatient to hear the name of the city, town, or small fishing village where I will be spending the next seven months (or longer, depending on the breaks) of my life. It seems like kind of an important piece of information.

An unanticipated side-effect of this everlasting inbox vigil is that I have developed a Pavlovian response to the “ding” sound that plays each time I receive a new e-mail. Seriously, every time I hear that sound, I do a backflip. And then I have a small heart attack. It’s kind of weird. In the split second between when I realize I have a new message and when I am able to focus my eyes on the subject line, I think to myself, “Oh man, please let it be Sendai. Or Hokkaido, that seems like a nice and friendly place.” But then there is a big emotional crash when it turns out to be a Facebook message from some guy or girl who I haven’t talked to since middle school (and who I didn’t even like back then!) doing a mass-invite to an event in another state that I never needed to know about, ever.

Each e-mail not directly related to my trip is probably as harmful as a whole pack of cigarettes, and this is especially unfortunate considering how much automated messages (I believe the term used is Bacn) I get in a given week in this Brave New World of rampant social networking. Even things that I would normally find enjoyable have been perverted by this insipid waiting game.

Let’s use Netflix as an example. Netflix sends me an e-mail each time they receive a DVD that I have mailed back and each time that they send out a new DVD for me to watch. This is normally helpful because, due to the nature of modern serialized drama, if I mail a disc of Deadwood back, I am hot to know when the next disc is coming. But in this strange Dark World that I find myself in, I can’t help but resent even these messages for not being about the Japan gig:

Light World response: “Sweet! I need more moral ambiguity in my life. It’s like Shakespeare, but with cowboys.”
Dark World response: “Well, hoo-fucking-rah for the motherfucking postal service being so on top of their shit all the goddamn time. Pricks.”

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 getting into a graduate program for creative writing is really hard, especially if one is as lazy and unmotivated as I am; I figured it would be pretty crappy if my Plan B was something lame, so I applied for and was offered a job teaching English to Japanese children and preteens, and my ideas for my “wacky grad student hijinks!” blog segued nicely into a “wacky teaching English in Japan hijinks!” blog with some occasional very frequently occurring entries where I would focus less on talking about Japan and the teaching therein, and more on complaining about the government and things people do that are irritating to me.

So here we all are. The name of this site is “Worse Than Coleslaw” because coleslaw is just about the worst thing there is. The title is somewhat optimistic by suggesting that, in a world where the most terrible thing conceivable already exists, the condition of the world can only improve; but the title is also pessimistic in that it implicitly acknowledges the possibility of something being even worse than the worst thing. Hope and despair in one convenient package.

I figured the best way to start things off was to reprint the speech I gave at my college graduation as Senior Class Orator, and go from there. It’s been a year, but I’m finally trying to follow my own advice.

Senior Orator Speech, 2007

If you’ve never written a graduation commencement speech, what most people tell you is to always open with a quote.

I’m not an expert in the construction of these kinds of speeches, but I’ve been around enough to have noticed that generally they fall into two structural approaches that pretty much every student graduation speaker I’ve ever heard has adhered to very closely. The first is the traditional approach, where the speaker opens with a quote from George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Voltaire or some other big name in Western philosophical thought. This approach hasn’t actually been entertaining or particularly moving since about 1963. In the second structural approach, the speakers do a kind of post-modern thing where they complain about how they’re supposed to use a quote from one of those aforementioned stuffy, un-cool, old-school establishment type guys, and—since they assure us that they are edgy, rebellious, free-spirited individuals—they give pretty much the same speech, only they quote Bob Dylan or Jerry Garcia instead, and this is supposed to be like their idea of really stickin’ it to the Man.

I’ve decided to try and avoid that trap entirely by not quoting anyone at all. You’re all smart people. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by getting up here at your college graduation and giving you a graduation speech that sounds like someone generated it out of a template in Microsoft Word. You’ve already heard that speech a million times, could hear it at any college or high school in the country. Hey, this is COLLEGE UNIVERSITY. We have more elevated standards here, coming as we do from the legacy of our Jesuit education. Do you think Ignatius of Loyola—he’s the guy who founded the Society of Jesus, for those of you just joining us—do you think he would have gotten up here and been content to spout some trite, platitudinous nonsense? No, of course he wouldn’t do that—and not just because he’s dead. He wouldn’t try to pull that kind of thing because he’s St. Ignatius. He doesn’t quote people, people quote him. I’m just trying to live up to his good example, because I think the world would be a much better place if we all tried to find our own words to describe the things we are actually feeling rather than relying on the words of others to describe how we think we are supposed to feel.

Here’s the thing: Thomas Jefferson is dead, and he has nothing at all to say about our lives or what it means to me to be standing up here and talking to you today. What could he have to say that could possibly hope to begin to describe what all of us are feeling now, the complex, bittersweet ambivalence that characterizes such an occasion? This moment is very precious, and we’ve come too far and worked too hard to waste this truly excellent moment on prepackaged emotions and sentiments assembled in a factory sweatshop.

This college graduation thing is, after all, kind of a big deal, to the point of being almost miraculous. I wouldn’t normally presume to speak for any of you, but, as the Powers That Be were quick to remind me, that is kind of what you all voted me up here for, so I don’t have to feel too bad about that. For me at least, I can say with quite a bit of confidence that the four years I’ve spent at COLLEGE has been the greatest time of my entire life. It meant so much more to me than just a way to increase my future earning potential. In the time I spent at COLLEGE, I went from being that weird kid in the corner to being an actual, viable human being. This school was where I emerged from the shell I’d been in my entire life, where I made some friends who I really love and respect and admire, and had classes with some awesome teachers and expanded my understanding of myself and the world around me. And what could Oscar Wilde possibly have to say about how cool it was to go to a school that was so small that I could actually go to the houses of my professors, to eat dinner at Dr. ENGLISH’s place or drink wine with my fellow English majors at Dr. ENGLISH ALSO’s house, or have Dr. SCIENCE give a bunch of us tarot card readings on the coffee table in her living room?

It hasn’t been all peace, love, and happiness. We’ve seen some pretty heinous stuff these last few years: two major hurricanes, the death of a much-beloved teacher—Dr. CHEMISTRY, who I didn’t know very well, but he liked my newspaper column, which was enough to make him cool in my book. We’ve gotten less sleep than is perhaps recommended by conventional medical wisdom, and have dealt with plenty of personal crises of the small and large varieties. And there are plenty of things that I will not miss: for example, I will not miss driving on the roads in THE CITY, which are terrible—all those intersections that empty into other intersections and stoplights every five feet and those darn service roads that I still can’t quite figure out and all the crazy drivers who seem to become more incompetent as the roads become more convoluted. But do you think Sophocles has anything to say that could possibly console us in our grief and discomfort and annoyance?

Still, in a way all that bad stuff kind of adds to the charm, like. Or maybe it’s better to say that it contrasts with the good stuff and makes the good stuff seem that much better. Even things that used to really bother me seem kind of endearing at this point—all the weird smells in the dorms, or that disconcerting blur effect that affects your vision when you go without sleep for too long. And even all the HUGE. EMOTIONAL. DRAMA. was actually, for me at least, just starting to get interesting, after, kind of, evolving past the “Lifetime Original Movie” type petty underclassman nonsense into some really epic, Shakespearean type tales of love and betrayal and scorn. Heck, I’ll probably even miss that crazy genderless statue.

Now, as the Everyman (and woman!) of our graduating class—and not just of the undergraduates, but the graduate and Lifelong Learning students as well, shout at to all those folks—it’s my job to give you a proper sendoff, a sort of warcry “HOO-ah!” Army kind of thing to encapsulate your experience here while inspiring you to go forth, onward and upward, to do great works with the knowledge you’ve been given. Honestly, I’m not sure I’m up to that task.

All I can say is, you worked hard to get this far. Don’t screw it up by being stupid, and don’t waste it by doing anything with your life that isn’t completely and utterly amazing. Let’s be a generation that constructs our own words, that doesn’t just settle for whatever’s already on the books to get us off and get us by. There’s plenty in this world that needs fixing, and it would be oh so lame if after four years of struggle we all just sat around watching teevee and drinking and becoming jaded, uninteresting, overweight nobodies who use other people’s words to justify all the dumb things they do. Your new lives are just beginning, so be sure to make the most of this amazing achievement.

Anyways, I’d better wrap this up. I’d stay longer, but it’s really hot, and I have to move out of my apartment by five o’clock or I’ll get fined. I love you all. Thank you, and God bless.