In spite of having had many weightier and more meaningful ideas and events to report since the start of my de-facto blogging hiatus of so many months, I have decided to briefly interrupt my silence with such an underwhelming announcement as the following: Contra 4, a game to which I have made various significant technical contributions, has been released. And though I a) have a developer's copy of the game, and b) I get a free official copy, I'm thinking this one might be worth a trip down to the local game store for a purchase.

These are my friends:

Last Saturday we got together for the annual SF Treasure Hunt, which was four or five hours of walking around Chinatown and North Beach and solving little word games and trivia riddles.

The way it works: you're given a map, an index of street names, and a list of eighteen clues and questions. Each clue contains a puzzle which, when solved, takes you to a particular location on the map, at which point you are to search around for a particular word or number, usually something written on a street sign or engraved on a statue.

They scheduled the hunt late in the afternoon so that we'd be walking around during the evening's Chinese New Year parade, which was a nice touch, but made for slow going when we had to cross the path of the parade. We were about two-thirds the way through when the hunt officially ended, but we walked around for about another hour before turning it in and meeting up with Jim for milk tea.

That's Dan.

That's me, enjoying what I enjoy.

Chelsea introduced us to "Shaky Face" photography when we were somewhere near Telegraph Hill. The photographer gives a three-count before taking the shot, and on two the subject starts shaking his or her face from side to side as fast as they can. The results are appropriately entertaining.

The Shaky Face makes Emil look like he's gotten a solid right to the jaw.

Awesome.

Dan's Shaky Face is particularly atrocious.

---

Nights like those make it impossible to feel good about leaving Berkeley and my friends. I decided to move back to LA a while ago, when it was safe to decide things like that without worrying about what regrets might come of them. Now it's two weeks before I go, and I'm already missing what could have been, in this special place and among these people who mean so much to me. As with a lot of decisions I am facing now, I am starting to wonder if going home is the right thing to do.

When I got back from Japan I told myself I wasn't going back to LA, that I was going to figure out some terrific arrangement where I'd be just getting by, scraping out an economically workable existence, with enough time to be able to meet people, to do volunteer work, to work on my creative projects. I suppose it was a miscalculation to expect the work situation to fall into place so easily, and to think I could just conjure a social community for myself without the institutional trappings of work or school or JET or whatever. I think, though, things really began to unravel as I started to have doubts about my long-term plans. With that kind of uncertainty I feel like there's no ground underneath my feet, like I have nothing upon which I can base my smaller decisions. I thought maybe I'd feel better when classes ended in December and I had some perspective, but I have not been able to shake certain feelings of loneliness and confusion. All the while I've been getting poorer, but not wiser. It makes sense on some level to go home to be with my family; it will shake things up a little and it will simplify things for me, financially at least, but it's also a tactical retreat: the idea of it is sort of disappointing to me for a few different reasons, and the move won't help me solve any of the fundamental issues directly. I think I will feel less under the gun at home, I guess.

(Let me take this aside for a minute and acknowledge exactly how aware I am that I may not deserve or have not met the sufficient conditions to feel as dissatisfied and put off as I claim to be. I am specifically concerned with whether or not I've earned the right to be unhappy. Here is an immensely privileged, highly educated, well-fed young fellow, living in the best place on the planet, and yet he still somehow manages to trip over his own ego and wallow nose-bloodied in privations over a vague sense of not having his shit together. Are my expectations just too far divorced from reality? Am I just totally ridiculous? Of course it bothers me that the answer to those questions is probably yes, but it bothers me even more to think that my friends and family would think so too. The idea that everyone is just humoring me when I list my complaints and they nod--that idea just kills. It's fucking dynamite. I imagine everyone thinking to themselves, So what's Jeff's deal, anyway? or Jeff just needs to get over himself!, and holy shit! I guess I mention this because I am being slightly snarky. I am proposing to fill the space that follows with some detailed account of the sort of things that have been getting me down, way down, in chronic fashion over the past six months, and at the same time I am trying to compensate for the negative and personally-damaging response that it will probably evoke by pre-empting reader criticism with a scathing but mostly accurate-to-real-emotion self-criticism of my own. I am trying to have it both ways at once. I want the satisfaction of saying what is on my mind without the consequences that saying so might entail. It's your stock-standard manipulative rhetoric, your little finessed white lies. I mention that, in turn, because I suppose (or rather I hope) it's possible to do a little better than that. It is probably pointless to worry about justification when the problem exists regardless. You don't convince someone to cheer up by saying it's somehow wrong or logically inconsistent to be gloomy, by making it a moral imperative. I think one has to reach that conclusion from another angle, on one's own. Anyways.)

---

Here is my problem:

• I do not know what to do with myself.
• I feel the need to decide what to do with myself.

These are the characteristics of my situation:

• I have a bachelor's degree in history, a subject that I find interesting but unspecifically so.
• My most marketable skill (although it is losing earning power year by year) is that I know how to use, fix, and program computers. I like it okay, but it bothers me on a pretty deep level that I might spend most of the rest of my future days doing those things.
• My other most marketable thing (really this should be Number One, maybe) is that I did good in college and on particular standardized tests and it is generally expected in a non-spiteful and totally well-meaning way (sometimes even by me, or just parts of me) that I become a professor or some equivalently prestigious and well-compensated know-it-all.
• So, I applied to Prestigious Graduate Programs in a subject (economics) sort of foreign to me, one that I had a vague but good-intentioned desire to study but has not, upon closer inspection, inspired much in me. Barring any harm done by a particular professor who submitted his recommendation letters probably past the last minute (or potentially not at all, in the worst-case scenario that he is even more disorganized, forgetful, indifferent, and prevaricating as I have feared up until now) (oh and also any harm done by the lack of recommendational enthusiasm that such delays imply), I will be given offers to attend two or three of the Prestigious Graduate Programs.

I have thought about doing these things, seriously even, but they defy common sense and are, at best, extremely difficult to do, requiring much paying of dues and tolerating of poverty; and, at worst, quixotic, opiating fantasies of the most pathetic sort, maybe even worse than a midlife crisis pleasure binge:

• Writing. As a -er, I'd do observational nonficton, novels, long essays, and screenplays. I am energized and inspired when I read something which I regard as pure shit, and am close to completely discouraged when I read anything that I believe is worth a damn. Really, though, I haven't got the imagination or empathy for human characteristics that'd be necessary for fiction, nor the assertiveness and flexibility to be a journalist, nor the patience generally required for any of this bullshit in the first place. I am nearly allergic to poetry, and with this I feel as if I have mortally failed some prerequisite already.
• Rock and roll. I have issues being regarded as a "musician," as it would imply that I'd be just as happy writing jingles for radio commercials or being in a Beatles cover band that plays weddings. As if. I want to be a fucking rock star, but my voice is weak, my songwriting doomed to be amateur and uninspiring, and worse, I refuse to pander to the egos of my audience, which is exactly what weak-singing, uninsipring "artist"-type rock stars do, and they probably don't even realize it. Seriously though, I enjoy doing this kind of thing, making stuff up, playing it back, jumping around, twiddling knobs, but the idea of me doing it is so patently absurd and so against the grain of my ostensible talents that it grates the mind, body, and soul. Also, at the age of 25, what's my lease on this particular lifestyle? 15 years at best, after which point I would wish I'd become a college professor or computer programmer or something.
• (Additionally: I'm writing my first album anyway in participation with FAWM, yet another one of my arbitrary tricks to get me to work on shit instead of just talking about it all the time. See more on this come April, when it is hopefully recorded and mixed.)

Conflicts and urges, purely abstract and therefore of no particular value to decision-making and so exist to just make me feel shitty about myself:

• Overwhelming desire to take the beaten path, to long-term stability and prestige. Really overwhelming, but not enough to erase the doubts, and for this fact I should be thankful actually, or else I'd be a total asshole, and the academy is just bored to tears with those.
• Disturbing, constant, haunting sense of dissatisfaction, throughout college and professional career, that Things Will Be Better When I'm Finally Grown Up (though exact opposite feels many times more likely as I approach Grown Up).
• Related: the feeling that maybe, just maybe, I could end up doing something creative and cool, you know, and maybe it'd be okay, but you never know unless you try, you know?
• Wanting very badly to push forward, integerate, follow-up, and make good on what I perceive to be prior "investments" in life, as if this life were an accumulating pile of achievement and skill. These include speaking Chinese, analyzing and criticizing arguments, programming computers, doing math, writing in an engaging and competent voice, playing the guitar, the occasional leadership role in things I have cared to be associated with, experience with living abroad, a healthy imagination, and a slowly dying sense of humor. Maybe I mean quickly dying.
• Money. (But in the financial security, take-your-kids-to-school-no-day-care, mom-and-dad-will-be-happy sense. I don't give a shit about the rest. Except for maybe travel, and 20-hour work weeks.)
• Irritating but consistent lack of initiative when it comes to things that matter such as money and job-finding, in spite of showy demonstrations of elbow grease regarding things that sort of don't matter or are just taken that way, like recording 4-song EPs, and making attractive flyers, and doing web sites.
• More vaugely, but there: irrational but undeniable fear that in my capacity as [choose: business manager/advisor to the World Bank/influential think-tank and/or university researcher] I will end up saying something with no more surety than the flip of a coin, but due to my stature this will be acted upon, and bad things will result of this.

Immediately though, here's the deal:

• Suppose Harvard calls me next month, despite my late recommendation letters and despite my lack of economics background and despite my sorta shitty essay, and offers me like twenty-five grand plus expenses to study with them. Jesus fucking christ. I've been the groomed student all my life, and that would basically the glowing door in the sky. Get in your time machine and ask me five years ago, and I'd say I'd be a goddamn raving lunatic to say no.
• I would not mind so much doing economics, but then I would not mind so much being a high school teacher, or a banker, or a doctor. I guess I could do any of those and I guess I'd do a pretty good job at it if I pulled up my sleeves and got to it. Doing any of those things I listed would seem totally arbitrary to me right now, except that I've spent the last six or so months and a bunch of money and effort getting ready to the first thing and not the others. Here's what has happened though: I don't really remember my original motivation for doing this, or rather that what I thought before was incoherent and airy and quite removed from what I know now. I sometimes worry that I've never had a conversation over the topic of economics that has really absorbed me, that reading summaries of the nation's economic status excites me like reading the N section of the white pages, that I kind of don't like the idea of turning every social analysis into a formula like X (probability for event X' to happen) = A^2 (probability of factor A' which contributes to X') + log B (ditto) + C (a constant C, which is calculated as an unexplained residual that makes the theory appear less bullshitty than it will be revealed to be in 5-10 years' time). The excesses of literary theory and philosophy in the more texty social sciences turn me off intensely, but the monomanaical mathness of economics greets me like a jab to the solarplexus. Also, I like stuff like learning languages and talking about the influence of art and wondering how ideologies affect institutions and vice-versa, and the meaty, angular world of economics, broad as it is, has little room for that sort of fairy treehugger crap.
• Now forget the prestige aspect and focus on something more meaningful, like what would make me happy. The big problem with saying "no" is it just begs another question, which is why not just go and do what you want instead. I have proposed to myself that I just pass up Harvard, get a full-time job to pay off the loans, save up a little, buy a car, enjoy LA, maybe record some music and do some writing, apply for a Master's in East Asian Studies. Painted this way, it seems a pleasing alternative, and tempting. BUT:
  • Just as I expected to have some kind of life direction after three post-baccalaureate years messing about and was subsequently dismantled by the realities of my utter cluelesness, it is completely possible that spending two years doing a general East Asian studies thing will give me no surer direction, and I'll be back to exactly this spot right here right now, only with debt from the MA program, and I'd be about 30.
  • My mom and a very nice professor of mine hate the idea, for differing reasons, and all of which I have considered myself before anyways. According to them, it would be costly and purely exploratory, of no professional value, and essentially redundant and inferior to a PhD. I don't know if I entirely agree, but I don't directly disagree. I like the idea because I can keep doing languages and I can get some general exposure without committing to a particular discipline, but they are older and their opinions carry a lot of weight with me. It is scarier to move on in their disapproval.
  • Plus, the non-committal aspect of this is pretty prominent. I keep telling myself this is not a good reason, since A) Why am I in a rush?, and B) Why commit when I'm not sure?, but then again C) it may be a way to avoid thinking about commitment altogether.

This is all nowhere near as tangled and complex and tautological as it all exists in my head, and so you might imagine it makes me miserable every now and then. Alongside is this occasional desperate feeling of not wanting to make any choice at all, and it may be the worst feeling I have ever had, like I don't particularly care to see this life played out. Like there isn't any point.

---

These last few weeks in Berkeley I was supposed to enjoy wholeheartedly, but even as I went to visit Chelsea at her place in Folsom I couldn't really shake these feelings. I really let her have it. Yesterday night we went to a club in downtown Sacramento and danced really hard to rock music and then we went to Lyons at midnight and I ate some eggs and told her how I was feeling. I told her as much as I've told anyone. In the end, she just told me to eat up. I wasn't expecting her to say anything about it, but it was good to voice all my grief, imperfectly and inarticulately as it was. Actually, putting it into type helps too--it is totally inaccurate and the relief is temporary I think, but it sort of abstracts and organizes and virtualizes the issues in a way that makes them manageable and rational, and therefore trivial. When all you have is quiet and time, then they become real monsters in your head. Maybe, then, the short-term goal is to ignore the long-term, to keep busy and distracted, as a moving target, so that there is no way the shit can settle down and collect and fester. LA will be good for that.

My loopy supervisor from the Nabari Board of Education came by unannounced right as I finished my lunch. She wanted to help me clean out my apartment in anticipation of my impending departure and my replacement's impending arrival. My original plan for the afternoon was to enjoy some coke and then finish reading a book Chelsea had let me borrow, and then half-ass cleanup detail by chucking a bunch of things into a plastic bag at the last minute. Instead I stood around feeling sort of annoyed as my supervisor whirled around my apartment rummaging through the cupboards. I felt kind of bad, half the time standing there with my arms at my hips, but there was no system to what she was doing and in some sense I sort of disapproved of the entire interruption. But she actually got things done fairly quickly and was out of my hair with some time left before dinner.

One weird thing she did was take all of my jars of hot sauce and vinegar and soba tsuyu and soy sauce and rice wine and salad dressing and dump their contents into the kitchen sink. This was to prepare all the glass and plastic for disposal. In Japan they collect different types of trash on different days, depending on whether they want to burn, bury, or recycle what's being thrown away. In the past few months I'd given up the habit entirely and you can bet that I had no interest participating in such a fastidious ritual with so much stuff to get rid of. Anyhow, my supervisor speedily emptied about a dozen variously-filled jars of stuff into my sink, to the primary effect of filling my apartment with a powerful stench. When I got home from meeting some friends for dinner my apartment still had this sharp stench to it.

I hate to say it, but I am definitely relieved to move beyond my boss's supervision. She is extremely hard-working and caring, and is always very concerned about what needs to be done. Any time I ask for help, she's right on the money. But she is also a bit unreasonable and probably a little insane. Both Chelsea and I are always incredibly stressed out when we talk to her, for fear of saying something that she might misinterpret and freak out about. She is strung tighter than a guitar and her English is just bad enough to make grammatically-correct sentences that communicate exactly the opposite of what she really means. I also get the feeling she is pretty unhappy, since she almost always punctuates our meetings with little asides about how busy she is, how her husband won't take her out (he is kind of an asshole I gather), and how her current position was not voluntary but rather assigned to her. I remember when I first met her and I first experienced her bubbly speech and hyperkinetic manner, I thought "Ah, so this is your average Japanese person." Then it occurred to me pretty quickly that everything that was weird about her wasn't cultural but individual. I also remember observing Chelsea's way of dealing with our supervisor--telling her only what was necessary and putting on a front that everything was sparklingly okay--and thinking it very cynical. I believe I even told Chelsea as much. I thought, if you've got problems, you just be honest and deal with them like adults with common sense. That is a lot harder than it sounds, I've learned.

---

A lot of my stories of Japan are a little gloomy, and I believe I've come upon a nice summary of why that was: in essence, I did very, very little here that would differ significantly from my life in America. Add on top of that the inconvenience of the language barrier, geographic isolation, and a lack of mobility, and you're looking at the foundation for an uninteresting and rather lonely existence. It was pretty lucky that I got a band going and that I was able to meet some excellent people in the JET community, but also really sad that I was basically restricted to those things.

This last weekend, about three days before my flight back to LA, will leave me with mixed feelings. Without question it was the best 48 hours I've had this year. I had time to relax a little, and then I met up with the band, jammed and recorded music for four hours in an awesome-sounding local studio, and then went to a really comfortable bar that played John Coltrane on the stereo. Then the next day I played a show, walked around in the summer heat, and drank smoothies. The guy who invited us to play also got us each spots as torch-bearers in a festival procession that evening. So at the very end of my stay in Japan, I got to parade triumphally through crowded Nabari streets carrying a flaming bundle of wood as random students in the crowd shouted my name. It was a completely unique experience, and it was a more perfect good-bye to my friends in the band than I ever could have asked for. I'm going to leave Nabari remembering the fireworks and the torches and my students, out of their school uniforms and looking happy and young. And all that in the company of my good friends.

It only gets depressing when I consider why I didn't have more times like it. There's no smoking gun but there are a lot of contributing factors to that, many of which make me feel bad about myself and my tendencies. But it is also a bit of luck. You can't really set yourself up for those experiences because what makes them special is that they are completely out of your expectation. You find people that you care about and make you feel at ease, and just see what happens. In that sense, I'm leaving one successful experience and hopefully going on to another.

Next up: California. With me, it's always going to come back to California.

Last weekend I went with a bunch of fellow JETs to a campground in Miyama, which is about 3 hours southwest of where I live by train. It's one of the wettest parts of Japan, if not the wettest, but absolutely green and gorgeous as a result.

What we did was camping in name but luxury in practice. The cabins we stayed in had air conditioning, stoves, refrigerators, and some of the nicest showers I've ever seen. The best we could muster for outdoor activity was driving to a good part of the river and having a swim for an hour or so. The rain kept us indoors the rest of the time, so the entertainment got pretty generic: gossip, singing songs, scrabble, drinking games, and shit-talking. I must've had the same conversation about life and career about 50 times. That actually bothered me a little, for a couple different reasons: was I really so unable to detach myself from that one concern, or was I really so uninteresting that I had only one subject to talk about? Maybe I just suck at engaging small talk--if you don't know me very well, you can pretty much bet that I'll hit exactly these talking points:

• So where are you from?
• Oh really. I knew someone from there/I hear the weather there is crazy/I was once there before.
• What do you?
• How are you liking that?
• I've been in Japan for a year.
• Yeah I lived in Taiwan for a year.
• I'm going to China for 2 weeks.

After that I'll have completely run out of subject matter.

Anyhow, that was probably the last time I was going to see a lot of my friends on JET. I don't feel like those moments ever carry the sense of gravity or ceremony that I expect them to have. Actually, they always feel very plain. They end with a wave and a smirk from across the room as you step out, or with an impatient hug in the middle of somebody else's conversation. I suppose the last time I really felt that good-bye really meant something was when my family left me in my dorm at the beginning of college.

You could say moving on simply might not be that big a deal, but that's really a result of taking too many things for granted. I take it for granted that the people that really matter will keep in touch with me, and I take it for granted that I'll have new friends to replace the old. More disturbing to me than actually leaving is how easy it is to forget the things that you've left behind.

---

I actually felt glad that there was no farewell ritual at Akame Junior High my last day there. There were no speeches or official meetings or parties or awkward public goodbyes. I think anything of that sort would have been founded on the false pretense that my departure would actually upset someone or change things at school. I hadn't really gotten to know anyone that well, so there wasn't much I could announce to my co-workers except something exceptionally vague about my job in Japan being a good experience. I would not promise them that I would keep in touch, nor would I assure them that I'd made friends that I would never forget, nor could I claim that I would come back to Nabari to see everyone again. I just pulled aside all of the English teachers before I left for home and told them that they were lucky to have such nice kids as students. On the way out of the half-empty staff room, I said "sayonara", to which I got a typical end-of-the-day see-ya-later-pal response. I'm not sure if anyone realized it was my last day. But I'm not disappointed by the way things ended so much as I'm just a little depressed about how things were the entire time, and anyhow, I had a camping trip to go to.

Well, maybe there was one little thing: I told Yuki, the leader of the wind ensemble, that I'd visit them in practice that afternoon. When I went up all of the kids had arranged their indoor shoes in two parallel lines, making a path leading from the stairwell to the band room. From the doorway the path continued, this time with pom-poms intead of shoes, to a raised platform where they'd put a chair.

When I stepped off the stairs, all of the kids started screaming for everyone to quit fooling around and to get ready to play. They sat me down on the chair in the middle and then played me two songs. Before each one they took about two minutes to tell one of the braver girls to introduce the songs in English to me. When it was over I applauded and complimented them, and then I just kept sitting on the chair in the middle of the room, which was actually pretty awkward. There was no host of the show to shoo me off or anything. Normally I'd fall back on talk as a defense mechanism: I'd crack a joke or say something vaguely positive and then sneak myself out of everyone's attention. But in this case I had almost nothing to say that would be understood, because bullshit is entirely lost in translation. So I just told them exactly what I wanted instead, which was to let them go back to just hanging out while I milled about for a few more minutes.

That, bar none, was the best part of this gig: the kids like you for no good reason at all. It's not even that they like you for who you are, because for the most part they don't know who you are. They like you no matter who you are. They just like you.

---

Now I'm on for my last week of teaching at Kikyogaoka Junior High. I really mailed it in for all three of my classes this morning. For one class, I took a very long time sketching a large 5x5 grid on the board with white chalk. After evaluating it for 5 full seconds, I realized I needed a 6x6 grid, so I erased it all and drew another one, also very slowly. The class was totally silent the entire time.

For the last class of the day, I really, really mailed it in. Half of what I said out loud to the class was purely for my own sake. "You guys are KILLING ME here," I said after nobody would raise their hand. After that activity was over, I said, "Oooookay, everyone is bored as hell. Let's just get to the next thing." That Next Thing was a quiz game where teams of students answered multiple choice questions. I noticed one team was always waiting to see what the other teams were going to answer, and so at one point I looked in their direction and said, "Oh, you SANDBAGGERS! Unbelievable!" I tend to make incomprehensible noises in class anyways, so to them it was probably nothing out of the ordinary.

That class I taught with Takeno-sensei, a cherubic, gayish, thirtysomething who coaches the soccer club and never has any ideas for class. Each time we plan a lesson together he chuckles and says he has no good ideas, which I think means, despite his friendliness and ever-smiling demeanor, that he doesn't give a shit. Of course, I allow myself to get upset about this every time I teach with him. Sometimes I talk to him for like 5 full minutes trying to elicit a smoking-gun admission that he has no ideas, even though I'm sure he has none from the moment he walks up to my desk. I also go through the motions of asking him what he needs to teach for our lesson together, a question to which he usually has no specific answer. I like the guy a lot but I think I am starting to hate his guts. Do you know what I mean?

Today wasn't so bad as far as Mondays go, but I have an intense forboding feeling towards the rest of this week. My classes were canceled in their entirety for Tuesday and then moved to Wednesday, and there is the outside chance I still might have to show up and sit at my desk on Tuesday, which is just awful. Then the next day I can look forward to four straight classes, when I had originally been scheduled for just one. That would normally be just fine, but I'm teaching with Imaginitive Faculty, my least favorite teacher and so nick-named to compensate for his various failings.

Once again he has us executing an activity straight out of the published ALT companion guide to the textbook. I am convinced this guide was the product of one or two individuals, insulated by many, many layers of bureaucracy from the actual workings of a Japanese junior high school classroom, working feverishly without sleep for six or seven consecutive days. Every lesson follows the same predictable format, beginning with the laughable warmup "Free Talk with Students" (Ha Ha! We are being mocked.), and always ending with some kind of logistically-unsound dialogue activity in which the students are made to write a few sentences and then read them to random speaking partners around the room. As for the latter I am consistently amazed at how shamelessly and yet creatively the exact same activity is re-used, and how they unfailingly have at least a couple of logical design errors that end up becoming huge problems when you get to class. Sometimes those activities just make no sense at all. I attempt to correct for these errors before class begins, but it is incredibly difficult to get Imaginitive Faculty to deviate from the written plan, and so I fall back on my extemporaneous bullshitting skills when the shit hits the fan (and it almost always does). I come out of these classes glad they are over.

But when it's good, it's good. The classes that are cool are when I walk into class, everyone gets excited, and I am just making an idiot of myself (instead of the students) and laughing my way through the lesson. I feel it necessary to remind myself and others of this fact every time I get negative about my work, because I think it is my nature to wallow in the problems, upon the slimy rocks and in the deep brine.

So with that in mind, I have to say that even a good day on the job isn't as good as this:

Up Up Down Down had their first gig last Friday. It was a sloppy musical mess, but I'm pretty sure everyone got rocked and rocked good. Our drummer Ewan had to play on this ghetto Yamaha drum device, but he was an exceptionally good sport about it. Thanks to a broken power socket, the thing would constantly reset itself, and of course that would happen in the middle of a song. On the plus side it had an awesome dog barking sample that found its way into nearly every item on our set.

Band-related stuff, from rehearsal to practicing guitar solos to looking for gear online, has been taking all my free time lately, so much that it has been all too easy to take for granted all the things that have worked out so well. The band members all get along so well, and with little exception we are excited to spend our money and time to go to practice. It is definitely the bright spot every day and every week for me, so we should just declare it official: rock and roll is saving my life.

Despite the hair-splitting, catty controversy instigated by the last post, I'm going to update you guys on the 3rd-year composition story just a little. Well, not much at all really. I just want to share some of the rare gems that I found in these essays.

This was all in the same composition, by a kid named Yusuke. I think I know who he is.

• I have become intimate a girl friend is very cute for school life. This is awesome.
• Have a bowel movement. He's really dirty-minded, isn't he? "a breast" Yusuke That's verbatim.
• I'm going to be a famous soccer player. Look for me on TV. I certainly will.

Apparently this is a popular goal among Japanese youth. Yusuke's classmate also requested that we "Look for me on TV."

There were some obvious computer translations thrown in there, in the classic style of unintentionally humorous Babelfish results, but unfortunately I forgot to record those. I did manage to recover this cryptic but otherwise well-formed message:

• The zebra fell prey to the lion.

We were doing skits the past few days with the 3rd-years. Most of the kids just did a slight variation of a dialogue in the book about going to the doctor. Thankfully, some of the more creative kids went to town with it. They seem to really love misdiagnosis jokes; at least four or five skits I've seen this week had the doctor tell the patient he (it was always a he) had cancer. Then they'd say, "Ha ha! American joke!" I thought it was pretty funny.

I swear to god every time I heard one of the kids say "I have a fever" I wanted to scream "AND THE ONLY CURE IS MORE COWBELL!", and it took every ounce of willpower I had to get through class without saying it. At least twice I almost started laughing to myself in the middle of class when I thought about doing it.

After one class I found this on the chalkboard:

There's always one chalkboard off to the side that lists the classes for each day. This is very useful because students have about 8 or 9 different courses a week, and these are rotated through the daily schedules in an inscrutably byzantine fashion that I will never begin to understand. Anyhow, this time my name (in katakana) made it on to the schedule, complete with multicolored hearts. I'm a goddamn rock star.

Seriously, I am. I've been playing in a band now and we have a name: Up Up Down Down. I'd originally thought of this while playing Contra with Dan and Jim back in LA, and a while later I brought it up on the way to band practice. Then we stopped talking about names for a while, but when the topic came back up, "Up Up Down Down" was sorta the name everyone had just settled on. Everyone except me. I was already talking about why it might not be the greatest name when Ben, our other guitar player, told me everyone was cool with it. So I shut up.

Here is one half of the band:

From left to right, it's Ben, our guitar player; Mike, our bass player and currently the face of our band on the website; and Jenni, our singer. At this time we were eating at the much-maligned Sato, which is more the Denny's of Japan than Denny's itself (as there are several Denny's in this country).

Here is a more representative photo of the behavior of the band:

That's not red-eye. Mike is just really trying to kill Ben.

My final photo for today is the view outside my front porch Tuesday morning:

Since bearing witness to this awesome scene, I have taken to wearing the following: boxer shorts, long underwear over those (you get used to it), a pair of pants for work, socks, a pair of Sketchers, a t-shirt, a thermal, a sweater, a fleece zip-up jacket, an outer ski-jacket, double-layered gloves, a scarf, and a beanie. The bike ride to work is a 30-minute icy bitch, and to add insult to insult (or maybe injury to injury), the wind has been blowing against me literally the entire way to school. Every morning I get to work and I'm just waiting for someone to make a comment about how bundled-up I look, and I'm going to say, "GRAAAH! You try riding your bike thirty minutes out there and see how you like it, you car-riding whore! Fuck you!" I actually haven't had the opportunity to whip that one out. Hasn't felt right yet.

My teaching partners for the third-year students at Akame Junior High have passed a quality buck my way this time. For the next few days I will be grading five-sentence compositions about the students' memories of junior high. There are five classes of students and about thirty-five students in each class, and at maybe 30-60 seconds per paper, I estimate I will go insane by Tuesday.

I've been given a grading standard that begins with C and ends with A+, with no "minus" grades in between, for a total of six possible grades. To help me differentiate between compositions, they have provided me with several criteria:

1. The compositions must be more than five lines.
2. If a composition is only five lines, the highest grade is a B.
3. The content is most important.
4. A few mistakes are okay.

They handed me a stack of papers to grade about ten minutes ago. Before they left for class they pointed out that some of the students had more or less copied the example essays the teachers had distributed. They showed me some offending samples.

One student had a diligently precise copy of the example essay, plus a few gamey modifications as a demonstration of his cleverness. I present these elecutionary masterpieces here, in their entirety:

• Because I like track and field. [sic]
• If I don't see them, I was going to study in English. [sic]
• Because I don't like English. [sic]

The latter two were written in succession, riveted together with some sort of queer Oriental grammar logic presupposing a high degree of interpretive empathy in the reader. Despite the presence of "because", there is actually no cause-effect relationship between those two statements. I'm a sport, though, so I was willing to file this under the "mistakes are okay" rule. His punctuation was excellent besides.

My teaching partners informed me that this sort of product, so shamefully pilfered from the examples, in no way could receive an A or A+. I asked them what grade they would give to this student.

"Maybe a B+."

I then asked them what they would give to an essay that had only three sentences, but those sentences were completely original. They chattered back and forth over this for maybe twenty seconds before I interrupted them.

"I just don't think it's fair that a student who just copies your example gets a higher grade than somebody who writes three original sentences."

To step back and put perspective on this, as many as two out of the six teachers that I work with would not have comprehended the above sentence, even if spoken at a slow conversational speed, and would have forced me, by look of polite and vacant confusion, to repeat myself many many times. In this particular instance I was understood immediately. Things were looking up. My teaching partners returned to chatter again. There was slight teeth-sucking.

"Look," I said, pointing to the grading sheet they gave me. "The 'B+' is right here. There are only two grades higher than this. If a copied essay is a B+, then what is a C?"

After conferring lengthily once again (surely for the duration of this, they were considering all possibilities and exceptions, weighing and comparing and synthesizing them), one of them said it may be okay just to stick with the criteria they had given to me originally. Then they promptly went to class, verbally pondering the ugly conundrum I'd dredged up.

"This is pretty tough, ne?" they said to each other as they walked out of the staff room. They had not answered my question at all.

I will now proceed to mark papers.

Yesterday and today were my last lessons with the 3rd-years at Kikyogaoka Junior High, so I got the green light to do whatever I wanted to do for 50 minutes. So I gave a seminar on how to speak like a SoCal Dude (in other words, how to speak like me) and then pissed the rest of the time away playing trivia. I used to love playing trivia games when I was young but then that interest faded away when I realized I was not so very smart after all. But I've been doing a bit of trivia since I've been here and I find myself really enjoying it.

Anyhow, here's the quiz I wrote up for my kids. If you're an American and have gotten past junior high, I trust you'll do well without having to look any of these up. Maybe.

1. What is the most popular travel destination for Japanese tourists?
A. Korea
B. China
C. The United States
D. Australia
E. Hong Kong

2. What is the capital of Canada?
A. Ottowa
B. Chicago
C. Toronto
D. Vancouver
E. None of the above

3. Which state is NOT on the east coast of America?
A. New York
B. Virginia
C. Florida
D. Texas
E. None of the above

4. Singapore is _____ of the equator.
A. North
B. South

5. In which country is English NOT an official language?
A. Hong Kong
B. The United States
C. Pakistan
D. Ireland
E. None of the above

6. Which is heavier?
A. 10 pounds
B. 5 kilograms
C. They are equal

7. As of today, which is worth more?
A. One US dollar
B. 100 Japanese Yen
C. They are equal

8. Which is longer?
A. 5 miles
B. 10 kilometers
C. They are equal

9. Which is larger?
A. One trillion
B. One quadrillion
C. They are equal

10. On average, what is the driest continent on the Earth?
A. Africa
B. Australia
C. Antarctica
D. Asia
E. None of the above

11. Of the following, which country has the highest population?
A. Japan
B. Bangladesh
C. Germany
D. Mexico
E. Brazil

12. Which is NOT a commonly-used word for food in America?
A. Teriyaki
B. Cappuccino
C. Pan
D. Cola
E. None of the above

13. (MLB) What team did the first Japanese Rookie of the Year play on?
A. Seattle Mariners
B. New York Mets
C. New York Yankees
D. Los Angeles Dodgers
E. None of the above

14. (MLB) What team did the only Japanese MVP play on? (same options)

15. (MLB) Which American city does NOT have a major league team?
A. Kansas City
B. Houston
C. Washington, D.C.
D. St. Louis
E. None of the above

16. (NBA) Which American city does NOT have an NBA basketball team?
A. Seattle
B. New York
C. San Francisco
D. Phoenix
E. None of the above

While I expected a more laid-back atmosphere in this lesson, some of my classes got as unruly as I've ever seen them. There are these sliding doors that separate classrooms from the main halls. This one guy in 2-kumi kept getting up and sliding the door open just wide enough for him to lean back and stick his ass out into the hall. I couldn't tell what his friends were saying to him, but I think he was actually farting into the hallway. I didn't really care, but it is one of the dumber things I've seen someone do in class, so now I feel like I should have stopped him and made him do fifty pushups.

I brought my camera along and forced my students to learn how to do devil hands.

This is Shinji, this kid who keeps coming to talk to me. I try very hard to think of things to say to him but we often have awkward silences, but he keeps coming back. I appreciate it, but in general I get the impression these kids think I'm way cooler than I really am.

The weekend is almost here, which means more band practice (Fucking Awesome) and eating fried chicken and drinking ginger ale at a pub (Fucking Awesome). Though I better try to get some more sleep. With the snowboarding trip last weekend, I was dog tired this entire week and it made things less fun.

It is Monday and it is devastating. Most of my limbs are sore and I imagine I look a little frumpy and disheveled in posture. I am sitting in the office not wanting to be here and merely because I am not at home, laying in bed and doing nothing.

Last weekend of course was gay and merry. I'd agreed somewhat begrudgingly to go snowboarding in Nagano and at first I didn't plan on enjoying it for the sport. I'd gone snowboarding once before a long time ago and that went down as one of the worst vacations in memory, and since then I've had an irrational distaste for any manner of gravity-inspired winter activity. Mostly it seemed a good way to bond with some of the other JETs. Much to my surprise I had a terrific time falling around in the snow. As usual Jim was right. If you dress properly you will have no issues directly involving the snow or the cold. More importantly, though, you need to have along a group of good-humored, resilient, and incompetent first-timers to accompany you on the lifts and of course to eat shit with you when you are all learning not to fall (a procedure which involves, above all else, lots of falling). After executing one spectacular earthbound 1080-degree unintentional cartwheel, I looked up to see my friend John behind me. "I saw that, hah!" he shouted. Actually that felt really vindicating. By the end of the second day I was turning with a small amount of confidence, if not consistency, and I could almost make it down the beginner runs without falling. I very much look forward to the next ime.

I have this Ben Franklinish idea that if you want to salvage your work week, your weekends ought not to be too exciting. Too often I come off of exciting times only ram headlong into Monday. Almost certainly you don't get the rest you need when you play hard on the weekends, but the really crushing aspect is the contrast in mood. You go from laughing at interesting things with interesting people in interesting places to riding your bike up a cold hill to a concrete building and your steel desk with the sticky drawers. I had a very similar sensation a week ago when I was effectively getting back into the routine after three or so weeks off.

Very recently I have been charged with the task of conducting speaking tests with approximately 100 eighth-graders over the course of 6 non-consecutive 55-minute class periods distributed throughout the week. Most likely this will take place in an unheated hallway or in an unheated empty classroom. Based on similar experiences in the past I predict that various individuals related to English education at the school will marvel at the cold and then apologize profusely for having me out there. They'll still have me out there, though.

This week also has the awesome prospect of no classes or meetings on Wednesdays, leaving me in the office with nothing to do for 8 hours straight. I will surf the Internet, I suppose, and I will catch up on my Economist reading, and I will impress myself with attempting to study Japanese, but it is a long time to remain idle in the same place. This is especially so since I do not feel comfortable breaking out with headphones and listening to music. Perhaps in the spirit of banishing old bogeymen such as snow-covered mountains and snowboards, I will listen to lots of rock n' roll and dare my peers to say something about it.

This morning was unusually cold but it didn't hit me until I was three or four minutes out of the door and in the middle of a crosswalk. "I forgot to put on my gloves!" I thought. They were sitting on my dresser, and since this is the first week I've had them, I'm not in the habit of putting them on unless they're sitting somewhere in plain sight somewhere between the kitchen table to my front door. I thought about all of this as I rode across the street. Then the upper left part of my body spun around in an attempt to double back for the gloves, while the rest of my body kept riding my bike. I was probably moving at 2 miles an hour and I bailed in ultra-slow motion in front of a whole row of cars waiting at the red light. All the shit in my front basket--bike lock, empty plastic bottles, some trash--spilled out into the street, and I hastily gathered it all up and kept riding. The option of getting really angry appeared before me but instead I chose not to think about it all. I just rode to work and my hands were cold the entire way.

Even though it was so very cold outside today I had the idea of taking the long way across town to get home, because Chelsea had told me about an outdoor, unfenced, paved basketball court near her place and I wanted to find it for future reference. I did not find it. But I did find the route home from that particular spot blocked off by road repair work, so I had to take an extra detour. There were no less than four instances where the sidewalk on either side of a busy road totally ended and I had to pull over and wait for a break in traffic to move forward. At each of these moments I sucked in the cold and elected not to think about it.

I rode to the other junior high that I work at to get ready for the year-end teacher's party. It was already dark by the time I got there. Before stepping into the front hall, I stopped near the bike racks to check my text messages. Then, while putting my cell phone away into my pocket, I moved forward into a thick cluster of decorative bushes placed immediately next to the bike rack. I nearly doubled over. I collected myself and refused to think about it.

At the office party there was all-you-can-eat sukiyaki and all-you-can-drink oolong tea. I explained many times to many people about how I did not drink, how I was born in California, and how I came to Japan to experience its culture. My Japanese has improved to the point that I can say "if", "maybe", and "have to", allowing me to dig myself into even deeper conversation holes when I inevitably hit the limits of what I am able to express.

For example, I told them I was probably going to graduate school and study law or economics after I got back to America. This was not entirely true nor entirely false, but it was the most respectable answer I could come up with right away and therefore requiring the least amount of further explanation. I somehow decided to add the further explanation anyway. "I don't want to be a lawyer though," I announced. I somehow chose to keep going. "Because Americans don't like lawyers." They asked me why. Many explanations came to mind. I wanted to say that being a lawyer was a prestigious, high-paying job but largely the domain of intelligent sell-outs and tools. I wanted to explain that Americans are very litigious and untrusting, and yet self-concious and ashamed of these tendencies. I also wanted to say that I was uncomfortable by the sophistry and the fundamental deception of the legal process. "Lawyers lie a lot" was the best I could do. They nodded in understanding. I think they got the point.

There was a gift-exchange at the party. I had initially bought a Pokemon-styled Pez-like candy dispenser as my gift, but thinking it inappropriate I went back to the store and got a tasteful wafer snack gift pack of slightly greater value. I seriously underestimated the good humor of this event. I myself received a combo pack of laundry soap and what I think is either fabric softener or stain remover, and also five small boxes of tissue. It was really funny, but I don't actually mind getting kleenex as a gift. It is comparable to receiving batteries, good-quality printer paper, CD blanks, or guitar picks as gifts, such items that have immediate practical value and always seem a tad too expensive when you want to go and buy them yourself. The cultural lesson of the evening is that when there's a gift exchange with an explicit spending recommendation of around $5, anything goes as long as you're not too risque, and even then it might be okay. There were some other really funny gifts, like a little cherub with a crank-powered rotating stand, and a Winnie the Pooh ink stamper, the ink for which you have to buy separately. I am fairly certain--or maybe I just really, really, really hope--that even my Japanese companions were aware of the laughable tackiness and consumer excess of these totally useless things. If there's a next time, I have decided I will give an assortment of 100-yen Nerf toys, for immediate use in the party, or if I can find it, a little keychain that emits an assortment of expletives and profane utterings at the press of a button. I love those things.