And Sometimes Why

Author: David

  • Lost in Matsuyama

    The morning after I arrived in Matsuyama, Erin rode downtown with me so I could wander the shopping arcades at my leisure while he practiced the driving test for foreigners who want a driver’s license in Ehime. Ehime, by the way, is the prefecture in which I live. Japanese prefectures function almost exactly like states, but they’re closer in size to American counties than states (unless you count Rhode Island as a state).

    Anyway, Erin left me to my own devices at about 10am. I found a restaurant that looked like it had been plucked straight out of some granola-eating Californian’s dreams, with salads made from vegetables and leafy greens with healthy amounts of avocados, sprouts, and tuna for good measure. Fortunately, I’m a granola-eating Californian, and I smiled at my fortune for not only finding this fantastic hole in the wall, but also for the fact that it had a picture menu to boot (common in Tokyo but rare in Matsuyama).

    After wandering through a video game arcade (the Japanese seem to be peculiarly obsessive over rhythm-based games, BTW), a few overpriced clothing boutiques, and a five story bookstore, I headed for the apartment at around noon. I chose not to go back exactly the way I came with Erin because we took the scenic route down by the river to get downtown. I planned to take what I thought was the most direct route from downtown to the apartment, cutting out the section by the river.

    I won’t bore you with a play by play of what happened next, because I have barely a clue more than you do what my ultimate path was, but suffice to say I became utterly lost in short order. Not “Shoot, I should have turned the other way back there” lost or even “Crud, now I have to retrace my steps and figure out where I went wrong” lost, but “Holy carp I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language and even if I did I don’t know my new address yet and I can’t read the street signs and I don’t know anyone’s phone number even if I had a phone or knew how to use a pay phone why do these streets all look the same and why aren’t they laid out in a nice grid pattern I wish I had a map” kind of lost.

    Most Japanese neighborhoods have a koban (こばん – neighborhood police desk about the size of a photo booth), and I had to remind myself that I’ve never been one to panic when I realized I hadn’t even seen one while wandering around. I was hesitant to ask anyone for directions because between my very limited Japanese and the fact that I didn’t know where I needed to go, I anticipated more awkwardness than productivity, but I eventually stopped at a gas station and communicated the fact that I wanted a “mappu.” The entire five-person shift of recent high school graduates then tried to simultaneously ask me questions using random English words whose meaning they might have known at some point but were mostly senseless as used. I really didn’t even know where I needed to go, but I remembered passing Route 11 at one point while we were riding around the day before, and I know we rode along the river to get downtown, so I pointed to where Route 11 crossed the Ishite River. Makes sense, right?

    So they drew arrows on my map and I started back on my way, quickly realizing that even though my route was marked on my map, I would have to identify the turns by relative sizes and distances of the streets from one another, rather than street names.

    My heart sank when I eventually got to Route 11 and the river – I didn’t recognize the intersection at all. I decided to follow the river upstream and see if I recognized any of the path I’d followed to get downtown, but I hadn’t ridden the road in that direction in the first place, so I still didn’t recognize anything. It wasn’t until I turned around and went the same direction as I had that morning that I recognized a stretch of road I’d ridden with Erin.

    From there, it was sort of a recursive pattern of riding a section of road in both directions for a ways until I found a familiar corner, then go a little further and repeat. I eventually made it back to the apartment exactly at 4pm, which is when my large bags were scheduled to be delivered from Yotsukaido. I arrived as Erin was about to call out the National Guard to search for me; as I arrived he actually had the phone in his hand, about to call the school’s manager to see if she could help search the city.

    Here’s a picture of the note Erin left when he went out to search for me at 2:45. After he finished his driving practice, he returned (just after I left, actually) to where he knew I parked my bike that morning, then went home when he saw that my bike was already gone. He’d spent the last hour searching for me by bicycle, returning home a few minutes before I got there.

    You have no idea what kind of relief I felt sitting down on the couch in the apartment that afternoon. It was one of those situations where I knew I’d ultimately be okay, but whose resolution had the potential to be far more humbling than it turned out to be. I’m so glad the police weren’t involved.

  • Arriving in Matsuyama

    Sorry for the delay. Because I don’t have my own internet access, I never know for sure when I’m going to be able to get online, and this last week added a couple new wrinkles.

    Before I go any further, here’s a picture of the government building I visit to get online. You might notice two things about this picture of the Ehime Prefecture International Center (EPIC) that are pretty typical in Japan- there’s parking for more bicycles than cars, and that parking is covered, while the automobile parking spaces are not.

    First of all, we had some serious rain on Tuesday. Sometimes in Las Vegas, it rains buckets of water but it only lasts for a few minutes at a time. It occasionally lasts an hour or two, and ends up washing away roads in Summerlin or floating cars through the Charleston underpass. I’m not sure if the typhoon off the eastern coast of Japan pushed it our way or what, but it rained like that here on Tuesday. In fact, I chose not to ride through that rain to EPIC to use their computers.

    I thought when it started raining like that in the morning I thought I’d be safe by the time I had to ride my bike to work at 3pm, but that turned out to just be wishful thinking. Steering my bike with one hand and holding my umbrella with the other, I hadn’t ridden 50 feet before I could feel rivulets of water running down my back under my dress shirt. Luckily, I had almost a whole hour to dry off before my first lesson (I was still a bit damp). Incidentally, it stopped raining at about 4pm. Go figure.

    I used to think that the huge washes and moat-like gutters lining the sidewalks here were overkill, or perhaps holdovers from irrigation channels when this area was farmland, but now I see that they serve a real purpose. Lest you think I’m exaggerating the rainfall, here’s a picture I took from one of the windows in my apartment. It may look like dusk, but I took it just before I left for work at 3:00. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to see it on the web, but in the full resolution version you can see coherent streams of water, as if poured from a thousand buckets. I can’t wait for the rainy season to start in a couple of months.

    The other new wrinkle is a previously unscheduled student added to the front of my schedule. Instead of the 2 or 4 pm I’ve been used to, I’ve had to be at work at 1:30 every day this week, which gives me less time to ride downtown and use a computer before work.

    But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

    Despite all my nervousness, my trip to Matsuyama was pretty straightforward. In fact, I was so prepared for one of the many pieces to fall out of place that it was almost a let-down. Buying a ticket for the monorail was a bit sketchy at first when the machine wouldn’t take my money, but I soon figured that you had to put the coins in from high to low denominations. I was also a little unsure of what to do when they were announcing boarding groups for the airborne segment of my trip and I couldn’t understand a word of what was said, but I just waited for what seemed like general coach-class boarding, and got on with everyone else for the half-full flight from Tokyo to Matsuyama. The Japanese transportation system lived up to its clockwork reputation, and I figured out what I was supposed to do through context clues and the occasional English label.

    In Matsuyama, I was supposed to catch a “limousine” bus from the airport to Matsuyama station where I’d be picked up by a school employee. Instead, I was met by the school’s owner at the airport. I had no idea he would be there, but it was quite easy for him to call me out of the otherwise entirely Japanese crowd.

    As we drove away from the airport, the first thing I noticed about Matsuyama was how clear the sky was and how much it reminded me of southern California. We followed Ishite River for a while, then drove through the downtown area and this cute walking street shopping district, and ended up on the street where the school is situated. Except for the fact that everything is in Japanese, it really could be San Diego.

    Here’s a picture of my school and the building that houses it.

    Teshima-san (the aforementioned owner) picked up Semba-san (the school’s manager) from school, and the three of us ate lunch at Bamiyan Chinese restaurant (think Applebee’s with pork fried rice) near the school while getting acquainted. Teshima-san is a busy man, almost never seen at school. Semba-san is also quite busy, but in contrast with Mr. Teshima, Ms. Semba’s life seems to revolve around the school. She preps the school to open every day at 2pm, and sometimes doesn’t leave until after 11pm.

    After lunch, she drove me over to my new apartment to meet Erin Kourelis, the outgoing teacher I was hired to replace. Erin had checked out an extra bicycle from EPIC, and after I unceremoniously dropped my bags near the genkan (げんかん – shoe-changing entrance area) by the front door, we rode around the neighborhood in the waning light to acquaint me with the environ and shop for dinner fixin’s.

    That night, as we talked over beef curry and rice, I got an idea of how much I had to absorb from Erin in the next three days until he left for New York.

    I was to have about fifty students, spread over about twenty classes per week. Of those twenty classes, there are three pairs of classes with matching syllabi and lesson plans. Minus those, I was looking at preparing lesson plans and materials for about seventeen individual classes of varying age and ability levels each week. Oh. Okay.

    When I was riding around the neighborhood and shopping with Erin, I didn’t see as much English as I had seen in the area around Tokyo. I wasn’t entirely surprised, but I need at least some English to make basic shopping and restaurant menu decisions. Erin’s lived in various Japanese cities for six years and learned quite a bit of Japanese, so it was basically a nonissue for him, but he agreed with my assessment, saying that Matsuyama is “pretty bad for English.” Oh. Okay.

    Another thing I realized while riding around is that Las Vegas and its grid pattern are very easy to navigate. Matsuyama is laid out in typical “confuse the invading armies” Japanese style. So… Hey great, you have a map! Is there one with our neighborhood? No? Is there an English map of the city? No? Oh. Okay.

    This last point proved to be an important issue.

  • ALS Training

    Another long post ahead. Maybe I’m making up for lost time. Maybe I’m just long-winded. =)

    ALS new teacher training runs five days. As we were hired at about the same time, I was joined in training by Jonathan Nusbaum, an American teacher already in Japan hired away from Margaret’s English School. Day one (Tuesday, April 15th) was all paperwork and introduction to the company, its history, and its major players, as described and facilitated by HR Director Marie Verlingo, who walked Jonathan and me through all the paperwork and helped us wade through the sea of new names. That took place in the ALS head office in Chiba. Here’s a picture of the room in which I spent the day.

    As you can see, I used my laptop to take notes- nine pages over four days, in fact.

    Day two was in Yotsukaido, the Tokyo suburb where the company guest house is located, this time facilitated by Jack Stearn. Jack Stearn, for those of you who haven’t met him, is an incredible children’s educator. He doesn’t quite have enough notoriety to have a Wikipedia page yet, but he certainly deserves one. Originally from the northwestern US, he’s been teaching English as a Foreign Language in Japan for twenty years, and it shows. His lesson plans are beautifully crafted pieces of art, and his command of children’s psychology should earn him an honorary doctorate. He’s the teacher with the most tenure at ALS, and seems to have a finger in a few other pieces of the business as well. As you may have guessed, we talked about teaching theory, specifically as it applies to children. We also covered lesson planning and why it’s important. Here are a couple pictures of the ALS head office, by the way:

    Starting from the left, there’s Junya Sasaki, the company’s accountant, and a friend of the company’s owner, Mr. Saito. Hired to clean house, Junya (as he prefers to be called) replaced two (three?) other full-time accountants, and works long hours to prove it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure of the woman’s name across from him, but I think it’s Sachiko, who handles internal logistics and travel. The eyes just peeking over the copier belong to Jon Clark. Jon is another excellent educator, though he doesn’t have quite the same tenure as Jack. He’s Canadian, though I promised not to hold it against him, as are Marie and Dominique. Jon’s forte is slightly older children, though I’d be hard pressed to find any student he couldn’t teach to write a treatise on War & Peace if he had a few weeks to devote.

    Standing to Jon’s left is the aforementioned Mr. Stearn. Though I’m not entirely sure, I think Yoko Uekusa is the one closely studying the papers on the desk in front of her. In the back wearing the white shirt and short hair is Marie Verlingo. Marie is the one I spoke with on the phone for my second interview, the one that gave me the official “hire” decision. To the far right side of the frame, head in mid-spin, is Dominique Parker. Dominique is the one I spoke with on the phone for my initial interview. Marie and Dominique are both Canadian, which means almost half of the people that work in the American Language School head office are Canadian. Canadia is part of America too, so that’s okay.

    Day three was also in Yotsukaido. The morning session was with Junko Yoshimoto, and focused on the *really* young children, aged three through five. ALS has an interesting program for kids that young. They call it the “Rhythmic Program,” and it basically consists of playing with the kids in English and singing songs in English, with maybe some repetition of basic English sounds. This happens in small groups with the parents and a Japanese teacher present, in a team-teach setup. I don’t know how much those “classes” cost, but they can’t be cheap. After lunch, Junko stepped out and Jon stepped in.

    I’m going to stop my dry narrative here for a minute to let you in my head a little bit. Like I mentioned before, Jack is a seriously good teacher- intimidatingly so, in fact. Monday and Tuesday nights I was sent home with a video of an example lesson to watch (perfectly planned and executed my Misters Clark and Stearn). Add to that the fact that I’m a little afraid I’m going to permanently mess up some random Japanese kid (think “No more wire hangers!” from Mommie Dearest, but in my nightmares it’s me swinging the classroom pointer screaming “That’s an R, not an L! Are you retarded?!”), and you get a palpable amount of stress. What if little Mizuki goes home and tells his parents how the bottom of the instruction level fell out after I came on board? These are real kids in the classroom, not CPR instruction dummies with faces forever frozen in surprise, no matter how many cardiac “massage” beatings they sustain. No, if the children I’ve seen terrorizing Las Vegas businesses for the last two score years are any testament, you can seriously and permanently mess up a child. I hear they’re surprisingly so, but my problem is that I don’t have enough experience to know exactly how resilient kids are.

    Jon Clark took that fear from me and made the job real and doable. He talked me through lesson planning for Junior High kids, and somehow I felt like I could actually do this. I’m not sure if it was his general pragmatism that did it or his simplification of the whole affair of teaching in the first place (“If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong”), but at the end of the day my head was back on straight. Walking out of school that day was seriously one of those slow motion end of the movie moments for me, where the main character is walking away from the camera and you can hear the music swell and you know the credits are about to roll (I’m thinking Breakfast Club, but just about any John Hughes movie will work).

    That night, we had a new arrival at the guest house. Michael Barker arrived from Thailand and moved in upstairs. He was scheduled to arrive on Monday and start training with me on Tuesday, but because he was flying standby at a peak time of the year (national holiday in Thailand), he was unable to get on a plane until Thursday. While I’m talking about Michael’s arrival, I might as well talk about Jonathan’s situation. He was hired to take over for an existing teacher (Deirdre Porter), as we all were. However, as Deirdre had already rather suddenly returned to Canada due to a surprise diagnosis of leukemia, he was not able to attend the second half of each day’s training because he was actually already teaching. (I hear Deirdre’s doing quite well now, by the way.)

    Anyway, I brought my refreshed perspective to day four’s adult lesson planning, and it went quite well. The second half of the day was back in Chiba, and I had to navigate my way there without any help for the first time. Michael and I spent the latter half of the day with Marie back in the original training room talking about a few dry topics, as Marie apologetically pointed out a few times. We went over our transition schedules from training to teaching including transportation from the guest house to our actual teaching assignment, how to be a good employee, and signed our actual ALS contracts.

    The last day of training was entirely observation of an established teacher in action. As my franchise owner had requested, I was in the classroom with Jack all day. This turned out to be a blessing and a curse, as Jack’s schedule was almost entirely comprised of lessons for young kids, with one private adult lesson at the end of the day. Not awful, but not wholly representative of my eventual solo teaching situation.

    I felt like we should have some sort of celebration on Saturday night to celebrate the end of training, but Jonathan was already moving into his new apartment in the neighborhood (his assignment was based in Yotsukaido) and Michael was doing his own thing, so I was left to pack on my own and wonder if I was going to make it from Yotsukaido to Matsuyama without adult supervision.

    I read and re-read this set of directions, hoping nothing went wrong along the way while I caught two trains, a monorail, a plane, and a bus to get to Matsuyama Station. Wish me luck!

  • Exploring Yotsukaido

    I know I promised a blog entry over a week ago, but I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be for me to get an internet connection. More on that later; for now, let it suffice that I say it’s a pain. Also, long post ahead. I think you should just expect those from now on. 🙂

    Let me start with a followup from my mention of the trash system from last time. At the ALS guest house in Yotsukaido, there are five refuse bins. The “kitchen”/organic/burnable garbage *must* be in a special yellow garbage bag. The other four bins are plastic (except bottles), plastic bottles, cans, and I believe the last one is paper.

     

    Here are the bins and the poster describing the exact details of how you’re supposed to handle different types of trash.

    I heard a rumor that they actually need the separate categories not for recycling, but to determine the temperature of the furnace in which the trash is burned, which supposedly explains why the greater Tokyo metropolitan area is so dusty. I sincerely hope they’re recycling it all and not burning it. Enough trash talk, though. (Ha!)

    On Sunday, April 14th, Justin Ekins and his wife Misato Morita came out to visit me from Tokyo (Koto City, to be exact). We ate a great pasta lunch at a tiny Italian restaurant on the second floor of a building next to the Yotsukaido station. Here’s a picture of the three of us at lunch.


    Then I showed them back to the guest house and walked them over to Ito Yokado, a department store chain in Japan. The parent company is “7+i Holdings”, and if you’re an American looking at the logo, you’ll probably know exactly where the seven comes from.


    7+i logo

    In case you’re not American or it’s not as clear as I thought, it’s from the “7” in the convenience store name “7-11”. Yes, 7-11 runs a chain of successful department stores in Japan. No, it’s nothing like 7-11 in the states. They sell everything from groceries to house wares to electronics to kimonos, and actually have an indoor playground in the children’s section that includes a balloon pit instead of a ball pit, which I thought was a neat idea.


    Here are a couple of pictures of the walk from the guest house to Ito Yokado. The cherry blossoms had just fallen a few days before, and you can see them collecting in drifts along the path. Here’s a shot of the balloon pit.

    While we were at Ito Yokado, Justin and Misato helped me order my hanko. A hanko, as I found out over lunch, is a rubber stamp with a cylindrical handle and the owner’s name written in kanji (or katakana, as the case may be) enclosed in a round circle about one centimeter in diameter, always used with red ink. They’re used in Japan in place of a handwritten signature for everything from initialing the employee bathroom cleaning schedule to signing for packages to signatures on legal documents. Justin had some criticisms of the hanko system, and while I could tell that Misato didn’t really disagree with his point of view, she seemed a little more willing to work with the system as it is. She mentioned that some people use knives to purposely put premature wear marks on their hanko to specifically identify them in case there’s ever a dispute over the legality of a “signature”. I suppose that’s about as hard to fake as a handwritten signature elsewhere, but that still doesn’t prevent someone from stealing the physical stamp.


    Here’s a shot of my hanko (and free plastic case, replete with red ink pad!). It says “Heddo” written vertically. That’s as close as Japanese gets to my last name.

    The next day I spent leisurely wandering around Yotsukaido. While walking around, I spotted someone’s answer to Japan’s dearth of parking spaces. It’s the only one I’ve seen in a private driveway (they’re common in parking lots), and I imagine it’s rather expensive, but I suppose your own parking elevator does double the size of your single-car driveway.


    I spent a few hours walking, and while I didn’t know specifically where I was, I wasn’t truly “lost,” as I always felt like I could retrace my steps to get home without difficulty. I ended up walking in a big clockwise circuit around “downtown” Yotsukaido. I use quotes because it’s kind of like saying “downtown Boulder City.” Yes, it’s the center of the local economy, but is it really “downtown”? I really don’t know if anyone will be interested, but while walking around, I spotted a Nissan Stagea (it’s a wagon version of the Skyline, if you know what that is).


    Anyway, it was one of those beautifully overcast days, where nothing has a shadow. A very fine rain began falling as I got back to the house, and I opened the sliding door onto the deck, sat in the living room, and ate the lunch I’d bought from a local bakery while watching the traffic pass by. It was one of those truly refreshing moments of solitude, where you feel the tension just drain from your body.

    Japan seems to be infatuated with bakeries. They all have variations on a few main themes (standard doughnuts and danishes, hot dog-based breads, prefab sandwiches made from mini-loaves stuffed with sandwich fillings), as well as items unique to each bakery. You have to watch out though, if you don’t like corn or egg salad, because they’ll try and sneak it in there if you’re not expecting it. Seriously, who wants an egg salad sandwich with corn kernels sprinkled on top? Anyway, 90% of the stuff they sell is pretty good, in my humble opinion.

    Something else Japan has a lot of is bicycles. Seriously, the country is supersaturated. Near the train station in Yotsukaido, there’s a two-story bicycle parking garage. No joke. I think they use monthly parking decals on the fenders to identify the bikes allowed to park there. But apparently that wasn’t enough space though, because there’s a three story bicycle parking garage right next door. In case you think I’m making this up, here’s a photograph of the two garages, right next to each other.


    And in case you don’t believe the light grey building in the background is actually another bicycle parking garage, here’s a shot from inside the second story. Note that each story of the building actually has two levels of bikes, placed and retrieved by the use of ramps that pull out for each bike.

    I think that’s it for this entry. Next time, I promise to get to the actual ALS training. I leave you with a snapshot of myself dressed for the first day of training.


    さよなら,

    – ヘッド

  • What language is that?

    There’s a real post about my training in the immediate future, I promise. In the meantime, here are a few pictures.

    Just a second ago, I saw an ad on TV for Full House dubbed in Japanese. It was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. I didn’t think Full House could any get more ridiculous, but I never imagined Mary-Kate Olsen sitting at the kitchen table giving Joey the Japanese “Eeeeeeeeh?” I was rolling. 🙂

    I forgot to mention it in my previous post, but the toilet room right across the hall from my bedroom has one of those crazy Japanese toilets that Shannon likes so much. In Japanese homes, they supply separate slippers for you to use in the toilet room (whose actual name I don’t recall). The slippers supplied for the ALS guest house were apparently either crafted by or for a “VIP FASHION CREATER” [sic].

    I’ll talk about the five different refuse cans in the kitchen in my next post. Dustman is on the side of one of them, and in case you can’t read it, here’s what it says under his picture:

    Dustman’s motto
    1 recicle 2 ecology 3 smile.
    Lets carry out
    housekeeping smartly wisely

  • Japan, Day 1

    The past two weeks have been a whirlwind. Since the first job offer to the time I landed in Japan was fifteen days, which I spent almost entirely packing.

    You might ask “if you knew you were going to move to Japan, why weren’t you packing anyway, even before you got the official job offer?” Well, every time I spoke with a school or visited a job board, I specified that I would need about 30 days to get ready- plenty of time to pack a 1400 square foot home. I was so excited to get the job offer from ALS, the school I actually *wanted* to get into, that I took the position, even though they wanted me to start in just over a week from the initial job offer.

    Moving, of course, is always a pain in the ass. My last two moves were both to spaces that could absorb everything I had, so I didn’t really need to get rid of anything. In the last few days though, I ended up spending some time packing that I’d normally be sleeping, and consequently got about six hours of sleep in the last two nights before I left. I didn’t even have an opportunity to go get the playing cards I wanted to give as small gifts to students and teachers at ALS. I’m so thankful I built an “extra” 24 hours into my move schedule, as it allowed me to do mop up of things I forgot to take care of before then. Canceling my utilities and services, for instance, and spending an additional six hours at my house so my mom could pack up things that interested her that I was ready to just toss as trash (a lot of food from my pantry, for instance).

    After convincing ALS that starting the week after they initially wanted me would be at least as good (really, is eleven days enough to pack a house and move to a foreign country?), my start date was pushed back by a week. Effectively a little less than that though, as they then told me that I should arrive in Tokyo three or four days before training started, so I could acclimate, decompress, and play tourist a little before my class started on Tuesday. At any rate, my last few days were totally consumed by packing, to say nothing of the panicked couple of hours I spent at the very last moment (early early in the morning of the 11th) unpacking, redistributing, and repacking to keep my big bag under 50 pounds. It’s a great suitcase, but it’s a bit heavy by itself, so I need to be more careful about using it on flights with a weight limit. It ended up at 53.5 pounds, but the nice lady at the check in counter didn’t make me pay the $50 to have a bag in the 50-75 lb range (thank god it wasn’t $100 for the 75-100 lb range).

    I had the forethought to put all liquids in my checked bag, so I didn’t have to deal with that fiasco again (ask me about the Helena airport screening sometime). I squeezed my Wii and controllers into some spaces between clothes in my carryon bag (I had originally planned to pad it with the clothes in the big bag, but I couldn’t add the weight). Without my knee brace, I breezed right through security in Las Vegas.

    The flight from Las Vegas to LA was uneventful. To pass the 1.5-hour layover I struck up a conversation with a Korean accountant who was waiting to fly home (whose sister, coincidentally, used to own an English language school).

    The flight from LA to Tokyo was quite long. It seemed much longer than any of the transoceanic flights I’ve flown previously, probably because the in-flight entertainment system was malfunctioning. It only worked for a few minutes at a time, then the system would show static and a message saying the channel was no longer available (which only lasted about a second at a time, but it forced you to change back to your chosen movie or TV show after it reset). At any rate, I have to say the in-flight entertainment system on Japan Airlines is much better than American Airlines. Though they both have individual seat-back monitors, JAL’s system offers true On-Demand programming, where American Airlines had a two-hour (2.5?) block of programming on thirteen channels that looped throughout the flight.

    I was met at Narita airport by an ALS teacher named Chris. Chris is 27, originally from Long Island, and has a degree in psychology. He’s been with ALS for a while now, and helped me get the perspective of someone that actually works in the trenches. Everything he told me jived with what the recruiter said, so I felt pretty good about my decision to join ALS. He also mentioned that he was moving in next door to the guest house, and should I need anything, to feel free to ask. We rode the JR East train from Narita to Yotsukaido, which turned out to be a bit further from central Tokyo than I thought (the fact that we had to take a train instead of a subway might have tipped you off).

    Here are my four bags on the floor of the train. Even though you can see the orange “Heavy” tag on my big green bag, it was only about two thirds full- but still, all four bags together weighed about 135 pounds. The problem with this became very apparent when we arrived in Yotsukaido and I had to carry my laptop, blue backpack, and overstuffed garment bag from the station to the guest house, almost half a mile away. I seriously felt like I was plucked out of a cartoon, wearing the backpack with the garment bag looped over one shoulder and the laptop bag over the other. Chris walked next to me, and we tried to talk over the din of my 53 lb suitcase’s plastic wheels negotiating the rough asphalt road. We certainly weren’t travelling covertly, that’s for sure.

    I was pleasantly surprised by the guest house itself. It has five bedrooms- four upstairs, and mine downstairs. Yes, like all of the homes in Japan, you do need to take off your shoes when you come inside. Just next to the front door is a cabinet to store your shoes and a long shoehorn to help you back into them when you need it.

    The living room, kitchen, and dining areas are one large room. When I looked around, I was pleasantly surprised again- one of my housemates brought his Nintendo Wii, and was playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl. The kitchen is modestly sized, and generally exactly what you’d expect, except for the undersized refrigerator (undersized to my American preconceptions, anyway) and the built-in oven that’s almost the exact same size as a toaster oven. In fact, the only advantage it has over a toaster oven is that it doesn’t use up valuable counter space. The only internet connection in the building is through the one ethernet cable on the desk in the living room, where I’m sitting right now. Also on the desk is a crazy rotary pay phone. It costs Â¥10 for each 30 second increment of local calls, so people generally use it just long enough to tell someone to call them back.

    My room is about the size of a single dorm room. I have a sliding door that affords me an excellent view of the not so excellent rear cinderblock wall and the rear of the neighbors’ house. The bed is a standard bed frame, but uses a futon mattress and pad. The downstairs toilet room is just outside my bedroom, and the shower/laundry room is five steps further. All things considered, I’m completely satisfied with the digs.

    After I put my bags down, Jonathan stopped playing his Wii and joined Chris and I on our walk to Ito Yokado, a department store about a quarter mile away from the guest house. It’s a three (?) story standalone affair with its own internal food court and supermarket, and is a great place to shop for just about anything you need. We each grabbed a pre-wrapped item or two from some waist-high open-top refrigerated cases, and brought them back to the house to eat and talk.

    It’s funny what happens to your concept of “reasonable walking distance” in a situation like this. I’ve walked to Ito Yokado at least once a day since I’ve been here, and I was still shocked when I figured out the distance using Google Maps. It really doesn’t seem far from the house at all, just a few blocks. I imagine this’ll get me in slightly better cardio shape, at the very least. 🙂

    All in all, I’m very happy with my decision to pursue ALS the way I did. Everyone I’ve met from the company seems very friendly and knowledgeable. I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the days to come, as I get into my actual training, I’m sure.

    Signing off,
    David

  • I’m moving to 日本 (Yes, that’s Japan)

    In early December of last year, I applied to the JET Programme, a program sponsored by the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, a Japanese governmental organization. CLAIR places native speakers of English in private and public schools throughout Japan to promote English language skills and cultural exchange and understanding. Unfortunately, after going through the second longest and most arduous application process of my life (Las Vegas Metro Police being the first), I didn’t get an interview.

    I was horribly disappointed but not totally surprised, as each year they get many times the applicants as positions they need to fill. To make it even more competitive, the application deadline was a month or two after Japan’s biggest private English language school, Nova, went bankrupt, so thousands of experienced, native English teachers, already in Japan, found themselves applying for work at about the same time.

    I found out in late January they weren’t going to interview me, so I struck out on my own. I started by earning my TEFL certification in early February in one rather intense weekend from i-to-i International, a British firm that offers accredited TEFL courses in six English-speaking countries. With cert in hand, I started applying to private English language schools in Japan. I posted my newly-revamped résumé on job boards, applied for individual positions, and read as many forums and blogs and tips as I could.

    One of the things I was looking for was a company that provided a good amount of support for incoming teachers. For instance, I would rather someone who knows the area find an apartment for me, so I paid extra attention to the job postings that spoke a few lines about the assistance they provide to incoming teachers. I found that in the company that ended up hiring me, American Language School. They provide a week of training on their particular way of lesson planning, separating students into grade levels, and how to use and integrate the different textbooks, workbooks, and supporting teaching materials that the school uses. After that, incoming teachers shadow the teacher they’ll be replacing for one more week, then they’re on their own.

    I was excited when they offered me a second interview, and absolutely ecstatic when they offered me a job last Thursday, March 27th. The only caveat was that I needed to be in Japan on Tuesday, April 8th. Yes, that’s only a week and a half of notice to move across the Pacific ocean. So now I’m feverishly packing my house.

    I’m really not that worried about teaching. I know I’ll do fine once I’m over there. I have a reasonably strong grasp of the English language, and I’ve taught plenty of classes with absolutely no supporting materials, so I think I’ll do fine with whatever they provide.

    The position they gave me is the one I requested in my initial application, in Matsuyama. Matsuyama is a city about half the size of Las Vegas, and sits on the northwestern part of Shikoku island just across a channel from Hiroshima (kind of near Bunny Island, actually). My company-subsidized apartment is a five minute walk from the school, and I’ll be taking it over from the outgoing teacher, a New Yorker named Erin. The initial contract is a one year commitment, extensible in six month increments. I’m not sure how long I’ll ultimately be there, but it’ll be at least a year.

    I just learned last night that I will be the only teacher at the school. Not the only American teacher or the only foreign teacher even, but the only teacher, period. I’ll have 25 hours of classroom instruction time per week, interspersed with prep time and paperwork time. Erin mentioned that the setup at this school afforded him a remarkable amount of freedom to teach how he saw fit, which is good in that I won’t have someone constantly telling me how they would rather do things, but a little unsettling in that I won’t really have much direction, or the experience to draw on to formulate my own teaching methods in the first place.

    At the moment though, I’m more concerned with getting my crap in boxes and getting it to my mom’s house with my dog, car, and grand piano, so I can get my house rented. It’ll be a fun week, I tell you. In fact, I’ll be getting back to it right now. 🙂

  • The Story of My Leg

    I think I’ll forever associate the summer of 2007 with my right knee. I managed to break it on May 25th, at Greg Lull’s bachelor party on Lake Mead. I was waterskiing behind a Yamaha VX110 WaveRunner, and managed to twist my right ski to the right while moving at speed. I say “at speed” because it felt like I was flying, but really I was probably moving somewhere between five and ten miles per hour- not super fast. I’ve been snow skiing for almost 25 years, and my automatic response to what I felt was too much speed was to turn and use an edge to stop, which, in case you’re wondering, is not the way to stop on water skis. I now hear that “letting go” is more effective.

    What fun! This is the beast we were using to tow the skis, too.

    Anyway, I turned my ski to the right with weight on it and fell forward, buckling my knee to the inside. I didn’t hear a crack or a pop or anything like that, so I didn’t have any immediate feedback that it was broken, but oh my gosh, it hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt. I screamed. I screamed a monosyllabic plea to Greg, who had been piloting the WaveRunner, I screamed to Meredith, who was on a jetski nearby, I screamed to anything with ears. I’ve never felt like life jackets were all that necessary for me, because I’m a very strong swimmer, but the PFD I was wearing really helped me because I could hold my leg with my two arms and just float there. I tell you, it made a real believer in life jackets out of me.

    Something is definitely wrong, here…

    I floated there for some number of minutes while Greg went and got the boat from the cove where we had “parked.” Brad and someone else each grabbed one of my arms and lifted me straight out of the water and set me on deck on my butt, where I crab-walked, dragging my limp leg across the deck to a bench, where I struggled to find a comfortable position in which to assess my leg for damages. I tried to flex all the muscles in my knee and ankle to make sure I could still do so, and I had bent my knee in the water, so I didn’t feel like anything was actually broken, but the pain told me something was definitely very wrong. Because we didn’t have any on board, Greg and Nat sped off via jetski to the marina to buy a variety of pain relievers for me. While they were gone, I decided there was no way I could finish out the day with the pain increasing the way it was. They returned, and I took a dose each of aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen and drank a Smirnoff Ice while we returned to the dock.

    You can see Meredith in Nat’s car in the background, waiting for me.

    Look at the comparative sizes of my knees, already.

    Nat was nice enough to lend his car to Meredith, who drove me to “Advanced Urgent Care” at Eastern and St. Rose. I put that in quotes because I didn’t see anything during my 2.5 hour wait or 20 minute visit that would qualify them for any of those three words. After the physician’s assistant (they didn’t have an MD on site) grabbed my thigh and shin and moved them in various opposing directions to my extreme delight, he said I needed an MRI and sent me San Martin, the new St. Rose Dominican Hospital campus that often has little or no ER wait because it’s so new. So with the assistance of one of their wheelchairs, I got back in the car with Meredith, and packed off to Warm Springs and Decatur.

    What apparently no one knew at the time was that San Martin doesn’t do emergency MRIs, except in cases of spinal compression. What they did do however, was x-ray my leg with a neat portable x-ray machine and tell me for the first time that not only was my leg broken, but that it would take surgery to fix. Fuck.

    You can’t really see much of the break here, but look closely at the angle of the upper right of my tibia, and you can get a sense of what’s going on.

    Here I am in the ER, waiting for my room assignment.

    Next thing I knew, I had a plastic bracelet with my name on it, and was being wheeled up to a numbered room, where they told me to try to get some sleep because my surgery was the next morning. Immediately after I fell asleep, the nurse came back and told me I was going for a CT scan which had been rescheduled to that night because my surgery had been rescheduled for earlier in the morning. Meredith and I met my surgeon the next morning, who seemed very cool, and tried to put me at ease by describing the surgery she was about to perform. They wheeled me into the OR, and I woke up in the recovery room. Actually, “woke up” is too strong- it was really more like I spent the next 24 hours zig-zagging drunkenly across a blurred line between waking and nonexistence. I didn’t dream, time seemed to just fall away from me while I wasn’t paying attention.

    My new appliance. I’d rather have a new dishwasher. Cheaper, too.

    Meredith stayed the night with me again (as she did all four nights I was there), and I adjusted over the next few days to the sight of my new external fixator and figured out how to live around it. I had lessons on how to use crutches on stairs, figured out how to pee in a bottle while sitting upright in bed, and became very acquainted with the little button in my right hand that released a dose of morphine into my IV. I had (and still have) to constantly keep ice on it because of the swelling, and couldn’t sleep very well because of the pain (can’t hit that morphine button once you actually fall asleep). Incidentally, if you have to be hospitalized, I highly recommend San Martin, as they have in-room TV (although no Comedy Central) and internet terminals. I had visitors every day I was there- Isaac came on Saturday, Greg & Nat came on Sunday, as did Isaac (again) & my mom and Marc & Lesley. Jenny & Kyria left a box of goodies for me on Sunday night, and Kyria returned the next day with Mike to actually visit. My mom was also there again on Monday and Tuesday. I was discharged on Tuesday afternoon with a prescription for home health visits from an RN, and an appointment to see my surgeon/Dr. again the following Monday.

    Even as nice as San Martin is, having to stay in a hospital still sucks. The green box on the IV stand is my morphine lock box.

    That’s basically where I still am now, but my staples and sutures have been removed as of Monday, and there’s vague verbage from my Dr. about possibly scheduling the surgery to remove the fixator after my next series of x-rays. If they don’t go well, however, she may want to put a plate on the tibia to further stabilize the wedge that broke off, so I’m still caught in a waiting game. I really hope I don’t need that plate.

    I can’t move my knee (obviously) or rotate my hip because the external fixator goes through my quads into my femur. I can’t put any weight on my leg, but I can still move my ankle, at least. I get around the house on crutches, but if I spend more than a few minutes vertical, my leg and foot balloon up like a gallon of mercury in a surgical glove. I have to keep my leg elevated, and there’s a constant cycle of ice packs from the freezer to my leg, but Meredith tells me it looks like the swelling is slowly going down. Every day, Meredith removes my bandages, cleans the incision and pin sites, and replaces the bandages. She’s been absolutely awesome, basically living at my house and helping me retain some semblance of normalcy (if that’s even possible) while driving me to doctor’s appointments, x-rays, and everything else to maintain the household.

    Meredith and I stopped by my work last week to let them know I was still alive, and Sara took this picture.

    Meredith thinks I look like a cancer patient here.

    Marvin sent me this as a get well gift. He teaches violin to Julia Sweeney’s daughter.

    I have Percocet, Skelaxin, and Keflex to keep me company while she’s at work. I can just barely replace my own ice if she’s not around, but eating anything more complex than a Clif Bar or can of Slim Fast without help is basically imposssible, because I can’t actually carry anything. I’m glad I have a Wii though, let me tell you, and NetFlix seems pretty cool so far too, but I feel like I’m really being unproductive. I can’t wait to get back to work, but I can’t get any firm information out of my doctor until after my visit on Monday. Wish me luck (just don’t tell me to break a leg)!

    Signing off,
    David

  • Appreciation

    Dredged up from my MySpace blog, originally posted 11/21/2005

    *******************************

    I had a long post typed out about what brought me to today’s point; but after reading it, I realized no one would really care about the rambling explanation of my neuron firing sequence. So here’s my point:

    Know yourself.

    I know it sounds obvious, but I think it bears repeating. Too many people are trying to get through life less effectively than they could if they took some time to examine who they really are.

    Know your own behavior, accept and embrace yourself. Don’t hide from the fact that your mother taught you to procrastinate or that your father was an alcoholic. Don’t deny your own strengths either though; exercise your green thumb and your ability to truly listen to others.

    If you discover something that you don’t like, you have two choices:

    1. Accept it.
    2. Change it.

    Did you notice that “Complain about it” was not an option? This process is obviously one of discovery. As you discover your strengths, play to them. No one wants to hear you whine about how hard your life is- not even you. Actively make choices that create situations in which you are set up to win. It’s not “cheating,” it’s “being effective.” Every situation has variables you can effect, even if all you can do is visualize the best possible outcome.