Worse Than Coleslaw

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 two years until 1995. A quick glance at the Lok Sabha website revealed—well it revealed a few things, not the least of which that the government of India really, really likes scrolling marquee—but also that the website only hosts electronic copies of debates after about 1995.

I was told that I’d need to go to a law library to find the relevant debates in hard copy. My boss suggested the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in the Teen Murti House, saying that the Indian Law Institute was a terrible place that should be avoided at all costs.

Visit the first (Thursday)

The first thing most foreign visitors will notice about the Nehru Memorial Library is that it is small. The Hillsdale Library that I go to in Portland is bigger, and that is just a branch in a mid-sized city in the United States, not a memorial library named for the George Washington of India in the capital of the second-most populous country in the world. Being in Delhi for any length of time without going crazy requires you to give everything the benefit of the doubt, though, so I justified the disparity to myself by saying that the Nehru Library was geared more towards high-level academic research and rare books and things like that. The fact that they didn’t have a giant section devoted to manga shouldn’t be held against them.

Admission for me to the Nehru Memorial Library required a letter written by my employer explaining why I needed access to the library. I also paid a fee of 200 rupees (about $5 US), which got me access for about two weeks from the date of my initial admission. To put that fee in perspective, a three-course meal at a dhaba near my apartment cost about 30 rupees, and a tuk-tuk ride from my apartment in South Delhi to the other side of the city cost about 100 rupees. So for India, this was a non-trivial amount of money, especially since the word “library” in the West is traditionally associated with buildings full of books that anyone can look at for free. Whatever, stuff costs money to maintain, and it would totally have been worth the five bucks to find the information I needed for my project.

After getting all my documents in order, I was given a slip of paper with dates written on it. I was led by a librarian to the back of the library and through an imposing door marked “Employees Only.” We walked through a large, dimly-lit storage area stacked all around with cardboard boxes and arrived at a door that looked as though it should lead to a meat locker. The librarian opened that door, which turned out to lead to a pitch-black room. A short man emerged from the darkness and said something in Hindi. The librarian turned to me. “No power,” he said.1

“Do you have any idea when the power will come back on?” I asked, thinking that maybe this was a regular occurrence.

The librarian thought for a moment. “Come back at three o’clock,” he said. It was about 11 o’clock in the morning. I had enough work to do for my internship, and little enough time to do it in, that I was not thrilled about waiting around for four hours for something that might not ever actually happen, especially since I was fighting a case of the Delhi belly and was not happy about being so long away from a clean toilet. I left, defeated, and resolved to return the following day.

Visit the second (Saturday)

I called my boss and asked him to call the Nehru Library to check if the power was working. He told me that calling the number on the website wouldn’t accomplish anything, and that I would need to just go there and take my chances. I’d checked the hours of operation of the Nehru Memorial Library when I was there, as the library’s website does not contain that information. The sign out front said that the library opened at 9:00 AM and closed at 5:00 PM, Tuesday through Friday. The day after my first visit I had too much work to do to spend the time messing with what I knew would be a trying and time-consuming experience, so I ended up waiting until Saturday to make the trek out there.

I caught a tuk-tuk to Govind Puri Metro Station, then rode the Violet Line up to Central Secretariat, then another tuk-tuk over to the front gate of the Nehru Museum, and walked from there to the library. The trip took about an hour.

The librarian, a middle-aged woman who looked exactly like you’d expect a librarian to look, squinted at the sheet of paper, then looked up at me, then back at the paper. “Go inside there,” she barked, handing me back the paper and motioning at a closed office door. I went through the door and found myself staring face to face with a short, bespectacled man sitting at a desk covered in loose papers. His hair had been dyed with henna. It was orange.

I gave the orange-haired man a rundown of what I was looking for. I said that I needed to go into the Parliamentary debates section.

“That section is closed today,” he said, in a tone of voice like you’d use on a little kid who was asking why dogs sometimes sniff each others butts.

“Closed? Why is it closed?” I asked. The question apparently struck him as being unreasonable.

“You need an escort to take you back to the room where the debates are held, and we do not have enough staff members to take you back there today.” This statement was problematic for at least two reasons. First, as far as I knew, I was not asking to view the original Constitution of India or some other sensitive or valuable materials. The debate volumes were just books. Second, there were at least three employees working at the library that day—none of whom seemed to be doing anything particularly important—and no library patrons that I could see.

The situation escalated. I handled it poorly. I may or may not have offered him a bribe to let me into the room with the debate volumes.

Visit the third (Tuesday)

Visits out in Delhi were best done with others, if for no other reason than it was nice to have someone there to witness crazy stuff happening and confirm that it was, indeed, happening, and also crazy.2 To that end, on my third trip out to the Nehru Library I brought along a coworker of mine who had just been given a short research assignment to complete which also required the perusal of some Lok Sabha debate volumes.

My coworker’s name was Ryan. Ryan and I lived in the same building in Tughlakabad Extension, along with most of the other interns at our office. We took a tuk-tuk over to the Nehru Museum, skipping the metro. Ryan needed to register with the library office. I waited out in front of the office while he got that sorted. When he came out of the office with his own little slip of paper with dates written on it, he said, “That guy in there just told me they didn’t have any Parliamentary debates here.”

“The guy in there is full of shit, then,” I said. Keep in mind, this wasn’t a case of some underpaid teenager dragging his ass while he made my latte at Stabucks. This was a highly skilled librarian working at a respected academic institution who so could not be bothered to get out of his chair to look some crap up on a computer that he would lie straight to my coworker’s face to get rid of him.

We walked up to the circulation desk again and explained what we needed. The librarian working the desk could not think of any new reasons to deny our request, so she called over another library employee who took us back to the room with the meat locker door. The lights were on this time. The room was drab and musty, with shelves that could be moved right up against each other using a crank in order to preseve space. Librarian guy told us to let him know when we were done and left to go attend to his other responsibilities.

The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was passed in 1985. After five minutes of browsing the debates, I discovered that the index volumes for 1985 were missing. The index volumes were what I needed, as they would allow me to look up the name of the law to figure out where the debates concerning that law were located. I went looking for a librarian who could tell me where the index volumes were.

As I exited the room, a library employee stopped me. He asked me what I was doing. I told him what I was doing.

“Who told you that you could go back there by yourself?” he asked.

“A library employee,” I said. “I asked them where the debates were, and she called up some guy to take me back there.”

“Which employee?” he said.

“I didn’t think to take down his personal information,” I said.3

He looked nonplussed. “Wait here,” he said. He went up to the circulation desk. A few moments later a woman walked up to me and told me she would take me back to the room with the debates to supervise me and help me find what I needed. Once we had passed through the meat locker door, I explained my situation to her.

After scanning the shelves to determine that, indeed, the index volumes were missing, she said, “The index volumes are missing.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said. “Where are they?”

“We don’t have them,” she said.

“So how am I supposed to find anything in these volumes?”

“Just flip through the books until you find what you need,” she said.

The volumes for 1985 occupied an entire library shelf, literally tens of thousands of pages of information organized by date of the debates rather than by topic, making them particularly unsuited for locating specific information without an index volume. “Is there not an easier way to find this information?” I said. She seemed confused at my question.

“All you have to do is look through the books.” She took down a volume and mimed flipping through it. There was a pause as she looked at her watch. “However, it is almost lunchtime, so you will need to leave and come back after lunch when someone can be here to monitor you while you are in this room.”

“What time will lunch be over?” I asked.

“Come back about two o’clock,” she said. It was 11:30 in the morning.

I called up my boss to tell him what had happened. “A librarian mentioned that there was actually a Parliamentary library that should have all the index volumes,” I said. “Maybe I should try there.”

“You don’t want to go there,” he said. “Access to it is very heavily restricted.”

Aftermath

I never did find the information I was looking for. The closest I ever came was a People’s Union for Democratic Rights report entitled “Lawless Roads,” which contained references to the debates I needed but which only cited the source of that information as “Lok Sabha debates, relevant volumes” and was, thus, not helpful. Why any professional organization would think it was acceptable to half-ass their citations like that is beyond me.

It is my sincere wish that this blog post obtain a higher search engine page rank than the actual Nehru Memorial Library website so that all potential visitors to the library have a better sense of what they are getting themselves into. This does not seem like that outlandish of a goal because, as of this writing, only 38,454 people have ever viewed the Nehru Memorial Library’s website according to the oh-so-1995 visitor counter contraption they have at the bottom of the front page. My guess is that almost all of those visitors left without the information they were looking for. Likewise, any person searching for “Nehru Memorial Library” and “hours of operation” will not find what he or she is looking for on the actual Nehru Memorial Library website, which, as I have already mentioned, is terrible and useless.

From what I recall, the hours of operation are 9:00 to 5:00, Tuesday through Saturday.

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, because who besides me gives a shit whether I am tired or not? The job’s going to get done regardless, so the only decision I have to make is whether I’ll do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart or with a head full of cotton balls and broken glass. After all, it’s not like I hate sleep—far from it! As someone who so dead tired all the time due to his own stupid decisions, adequate sleep has an almost mystical quality. I think about getting a good night’s sleep the way some people are constantly thinking about writing a novel or building a treehouse for their kid, something always in the back of one’s mind but so rarely acted upon.

Take, for example, right now. It’s almost 22:30! By the time I finish writing this and checking my e-mail and hitting refresh on Google Reader a couple of times, it might be 23:30 or later. I have to wake up at 6:50 tomorrow so I can make the hour-long drive to the school of rock and teach two 30-minute lessons on how to say “I feel sick” and one 70-minute lesson on “Conversational English,” whatever the hell that ends up meaning…and have this two hours’ worth of work somehow occupy a full eight-and-a-half hours through the space-time distorting effects of the Japanese work ethic. Also, it turns out that the School of Rock is so far away from where I live that it actually has different weather, and that this school is in such a small town that Weather.com doesn’t have any listings for it. So I never have any idea what to expect or how much extra time to allow for icy roads and decreased visibility, except that said different weather is usually inclined towards more snow rather than less.

The impending morning commute is not stopping me from continuing to not go to bed, although this knowledge does weigh heavy in my mind like a prophetic vision of the future that I can’t shake and can’t change no matter how hard I try; I think there was a Greek play whose plot was along those lines. I don’t remember the name of it, probably because I slept through that day of class.

Jet lag actually did me a world of good back at the beginning of my tenure as an ALT, wherein my internal rhythm was so pulverized by a 20-hour journey and a 13 (now 14, thanks to Daylight Savings Time) hour time difference that it reset and I just naturally started going to bed at reasonable times and getting up at also-reasonable times. So there were two months there at the beginning where I really never felt sleepy during the day because I was, for the first time since middle school, maintaining a sane cycle of sleeping and waking. I remember thinking to myself one afternoon at work, upon realizing that it was already lunchtime and I still didn’t feel like murdering every of my coworkers, “Wow, this must be what normal people with better impulse control feel like every day!” I even thought about eating breakfast a few of those days, but in the end an extra twenty minutes of sleep won out like it always does.

As time passed my proclivities for staying up late began to exert themselves more and more as I began to enjoy my teaching job less and less, and I find myself back in a familiar situation: chronically tired and pissed off, my lips chapped and the rings under my eyes resembling those of a raccoon, ready to compose great treatises on the subject of sleep deprivation but steadfastly unwilling to do anything drastic, like,logging off AIM an hour early or cutting back on my caffeine consumption. I guess, in the end, “I am my own worst enemy.” I think it was Kierkegaard who said that.

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 by giving the following quiz to as many foreigners living in Japan as I can find who will talk to me. I used everything I learned while sleeping through Statistics and Cultural Anthropology class to conform to the standards of scientific rigor, so hopefully the results will give me a clearer picture of the tendencies of the ALT mind. I would be interested to see what kind of answers the readers of this blog would give, so feel free to give a response in the comments section. This is based off of something that really happened to me and the wild variation in perception among a group of about five other English-speaking ALTs of what seemed to me like a fairly straightforward descent into madness.

So, here we go:

Say you’re in a restaurant with some other people. Since they are all fine upstanding bohemian types, said restaurant is a little hole-in-the-wall kind of place off of the main thoroughfare, a real “authentic experience.” You go to order food and the menu has no pictures and is written all in kanji, which no one in your group can read because it is obtuse by its very nature and was designed in ancient China to make learning it as difficult as possible in order to elevate the literate class. The proprietor of the establishment regards your inquiries about the food with a nervous smile and a shake of the head. So your order blind, just point at something that doesn’t cost too much and hope for the best. Maybe the food’s good, maybe it’s not. You have no way of knowing what it is until it arrives at your table–and even when it’s in front of you, you still might not know!

How awesome or not awesome would you rate this situation on a scale from one to five, where five is the most awesome and one is the least awesome?

This happened to me when I hung (hanged?) out with other teachers in my prefecture back at the beginning of my stay in Japan, and was in fact one of the early signs that I might have been in over my head. I would not consider this restaurant incident to be any fucking way to live at all, sort of a misguided attempt to expand one’s horizons that strays too far into the realm of lunacy to be a very valuable learning experience. But most of my contemporaries thought it was totally sweet, all “I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that I ordered some food without even knowing what it was!” whereas I was sort of inclined to keep that a secret from all but my very closest and most trusted friends.

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.”

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.