Jack Daniels meets Juicy Juice

News In Briefs
WYWS Edition

* In the manner parents might treat a toddler who didn't know better, drunks in Japan are treated much the same. Just like toddlers, they're easily forgiven, and regardless of where their infractions may occur (in the street, on the train, outside my 711, outside my apartment, etc), they're allowed a pretty generous "get-out-of-koban-free" card, instead being simply tolerated, or playfully chided for their unintentional ineptitude.

So I guess the logic for putting sake in a juice-box carton is pretty much airtight.

Wonder who's got the lower standards now?

* Most recently, the first graders have caught wind that the American teacher has a tattoo "on his left arm that he covers with a wristband." When confronted with this startling revelation, and asked provide proof of the delicious rumor, I simply told them that I had forgotten to wear my tattoo today, and that I'd try harder to remember wearing it on Wednesday.
They ran off shouting "he said he's bringing it tomorrow!" before I could even bust out the punchline.
Oh well. Mustn't forget to add "bring tattoo" to Wednesday's all important 'to-do' list.

* Now that school is back in full swing, I guess I'm glad to be back in my regular schedule again, or rather, as glad as one could be without having fundamental human rights in the workplace (eg: the right to have one's tentative "day off" not falling in the middle of the week). Updates on the DI have slowed recently, I know. Drafts saved in backup have grown more ironicly in tune with the site's moniker, if that makes any sense. Too much of either to bother posting, anyway. The other excuse is that my time in front of the keyboard has been recently monopolized by a stubborn wall of text that I expected to have stopped its cancerous growth 6 months ago. But it hasn't. It's become this burgeoning, itchy tumor on my flash drive that goes with me everywhere; to work, to Mr. Donuts, to Starbucks--anywhere that has coffee and a flat place to set the compy. Still don't have enough confidence in it for an announcement, but I'll keep you posted if that ever changes.

Most likely won't.

Learned helplessness

Working at a school is a frustrating experience. In the most juvenile sense, it's like spending hours and hours stacking and interlocking intricate towers of Legos. Crenellated battlements, soaring peaks, and strategically placed portcullises. The medieval masterpiece had a distinct start, and now has a clearing finish--a goal. While it may be not soon completed, it slowly takes shape with unprecedented care, spilling into the adjacent hallw--ey what the shit!?

And just like that, your tireless work is gone. Knocked over without a second thought.


I've always been too painfully shortsighted to see the current product being cultivated--all I see is the time sacrificed toward the final outcome where the pile of blocks have been scattered across the floor.

My mother used to love Legos. Used to always say that the great thing about Legos was how they could inflict mortal wounds in unsuspecting feet whenever we left them lying out--professionally transforming any dimly lit living area into a Vietcong-approved barefoot deathtrap with just a few well-placed blocks.
Actually no. She never said that. Plastic axles and sports car windshields embedded in her heels got her mad-raging pissed. What she did say though, was that Lego creations were great because if something broke, you could always just build it again.
It's true, but the worst thing about building something all over again, is that you have to toil through the same steps, and surrender the same amount of time to risk producing a potentially inferior second version of the same original outcome.

If this shitty metaphor serves to illustrate anything, it's that we begin a new school year on Monday, and I have to start all over again. Nothing but these Legos in my heels to prove I did anything redeeming with last year.

Teaching sucks.

What dreams may dumb

I'm never sure what to believe when someone tells me about a dream they had. As I sit there listening to them relive horrific details of snakes, bears, lightning strikes, shipwrecks, broken parachutes, and that one ball-buster about parachuting off a lightning-struck ship into a pit filled with snakes riding polar bears. Raging ID suppressions, my ass. These are deliberate fabrications to elicit sympathy and wonder in the listener. Parachutes? Polar bears? Woe be the depths of one such shattered mind! In such an exchange, there always comes a point in the conversation when I begin to suspect one of two things: they are either carefully re-calculating, overanalyzing, filling in the blanks, and reading too much into their dreams, or the drugs I often busy myself with are not powerful enough. Sadly, if my sub-conscience ever does get its rocks together enough to drum some soupy regurgitation up, the cognitive leftovers are often too bland; filled with holes, and entirely banal to bother re-telling. Like this morning. I woke up, and faintly remembered dreaming I was in a band, there were helicopters (aircraft?), some snow...babies maybe? I can't be too certain on any of that though.

Oh wait, something's coming back! Now I remember!

My band New Found Glory and I were having beers and setting up for a show when a Blackhawk filled with crying mothers landed in the middle of the White House lawn, so we all jumped on and flew up to this active volcano where we roped down to save all these babies that were rolling over the sides of the cliffs. When it was all over, we jumped into this hot tub suspended from a gondola passing over the Swiss Alps and got hammered with the grateful mothers who all turned out to be members of the Iceland women's professional tanning team.

Shit yes. While you're busy interpreting feeling sorry for me, I'll be over here grinding up pills in my new garlic press.

My karma ran over my dogma

There is a God, and he is laughing at me.

Just hours from one of the biggest releases of the year for me, a critical component in my Playstation 3 has unceremoniously failed, leaving me stranded with an irreparable, nonexchangeable machine, and little choice other than to place it in early retirement...


...as an exceptionally proficient, six hundred dollar doorstop.
The "critical component" at fault being, whatever selective and diabolical elven black magic that reads disc media upon insertion. Adding the delicious sting of unleaded soy sauce to the wound, is how the elven's timely send-off for my faithful roommate's permanent holiday occurred just moments before a glorious vessel bearing such saviors as Guitar Hero 3, the aforementioned R&C, Uncharted, Rock Band, and pretty much every other piece of software, long-awaited version update, and legitimate reason to own a goddamn $600 doorstop (which should handle multi-tasking as a functional gaming platform), was scheduled to make triumphant and historical landfall on my pitiful deserted island of irony starting today.

Early adopters always get screwed. Apple is living proof of this. But early adopters are not supposed to get screwed by a cactus butt-plug lubricated with Icy Hot, and dipped in wasabi. Granted,I'm fully aware of certain risks that come with embracing new technology, but they should never be associated with slipshod or rushed craftsmanship, of which there is no. Goddamn. Excuse.
This would be easier to stomach if such incidents were more isolated, but certain frustrated PSN threads are starting to suggest otherwise.

No, that acrid stench in your nostrils isn't the rectal destruction.
That would be the smell of more rotten Sony PR.

For a year, I've tenderly loved the hell out of the system's only flagship games: Resistance and Warhawk, along with a small handful of other downloadable titles, and patiently waited for November '07 when we were promised our ship. The time has finally come, and...yes.
This.

This deplorable, reprehensible, shit.

The very kind that's only funny when it's on somebody else's porch.
In a sack. And on fire.

Eye of the Badger

Next Sunday is the Hiruzen Marathon in northern Okayama. My first ever competitive footrace, and I'm so nervous, I chewed off all my fingernails just in writing this. My concerns are not in my ability to finish (as often the case with amateur pre-race jitters), but rather in how fast. I want to place well enough to justify continued training for the possibility of a full marathon early next year. Furthermore, I need to prove to myself that I'm not better off in a rocking chair on some porch, screaming for the personal nurse to change my colostomy bag.

But have I trained hard enough? Have I sucked down enough raw eggs? Have I run up enough sets of stairs to warrent air-humping to Eye of the Tiger? The race is held every year on the same mountain (5k up, 5k down), so fair enough. I've been training on my commute route--which, if you remember, requires ascending a goddamn mountain every morning. I've done sprints, I've done stairs, I've ran quick 5k's, I've ran 5k's in sets, I've ran 10k's, and I've ran the 16k loop to and from the shrine every Sunday morning with the team for the last month. I've run backwards and forwards, with weights, and without, in the rain, and in the blazing sun. Sometimes even, backwards with weights in the rain.

My fastest 5 and 10k times are not total shit, but I'm still nervous. I'd rather not be ready, for readiness implies an acceptance that I have reached my limit--that I cannot possibly run any faster. The problem, is that I'm sure I still can. I'm just not certain how to tap into this measure of speed; a measure which I had always believed required first being chased by a shotgun-toting badger riding an angry bear.

Shit. How the hell am I going to legally acquire both a shotgun, and a bear in just a week?

Zero 7 Yamato: Putting the "super" in "superstitious"

News In Briefs:
WYWS Edition
* I know, I know--I'm not supposed to fall prey to trailers advertising blockbuster movies that we all know will inevitably be shit.
But this one has robots.
And Robert Downy Jr.

* The Mayday Parade and Paramore show that I played hooky from work for, was pretty awesome. Getting drunk and then waiting 6 hours for the trains to start running again was most definitely not. Crappy photos are up somewhere else. May I warn you that certain images might need *ahem* explaining.

* A mere 15 days after its mysterious demise, my neighborhood 711 is back up and running, and I couldn't be happier. The only major noticeable difference I've picked up on is the front entrance is now an automatic sliding door. Oh, and they moved the porn rack to the far side of the ice cream fridge. Not that I knew where it was before the explosion or anything.

* To the poor bastard in #305:
Bro, you just gotta know you're in #304.


Sucks to be you, riding the J-train down to unlucky town.






Wait... So if I'm in #205, does that mean...

...Oh.


Son of a bitch.

Prose Before Hos

"How tall are you?"

"Is your hair natural?"

"...American size?"


All questions I'm used to hearing, but the one that really boils my blood happens when some rotted snaggletooth at the bar ashes his fifth cigarette of the hour and leans in close. I'm not sure what's worse; the expectant question burning on his one-track mind, or the greasy fried fish and cheap shochu on his breath, staining the smug grin spread across chapped, smoker lips.
Aww shit. He asks anyway.

"Dsu yuu raiku zha Jyapaneezu gyaru?"

I've come to accept that this creepy old fart, and others like him aren't putting in an inquiry to my personal opinion, as their tone does not belie their intentions; rather, they are making an affirmation-seeking question that Japanese girls are somehow different and therefore better than the women from anywhere else in the world. Sure, I know they're often just curious about what I think, or that they may have a "cute friend" who is "interested in studying English" blah blah blah. But come on Japan, kind of a stupid question isn't it? I mean, what do you think of American girls--with their long legs and pointy noses? Well then, what do you think of Mexican girls or Russian girls? Or what about mermaids or female blood elves? I mean, cripes people, what do you expect me to say? And since when did my opinion on something so trivial ever matter? Would you be so disappointed to hear that I think they're just regular girls? Contrary to the stereotypes you've led yourselves to believe, Japanese girls are not all that different from the girls anywhere else on this planet. Some of them are infinitely sweet, and some of them make Ann Coulter look like Mother Theresa. Some of them are fashion divas, and some of them think that Versace is a hidden character in Kingdom Hearts. Some of them are a bit chubby, and some of them wouldn't know a curry doughnut if it bit them in the ass. Some of them are 40 year-old virgins, and some of them already have a steady boyfriend. And point cards for his dad's friends. Some of them are under 5 feet tall...and uh...some of them are uh...hmm...Well, never mind.
Anyway, you get the idea. Your women are not anomalies of the spectrum, they are just a part of it, like everybody else. Ad nausem.

So, with the exception of the outdated uniform practices (which is more likely than not, directly related to a certain 'societal' epidemic), I shouldn't be expected to have more of an opinion on Japanese girls than I do for canned cafe mocha, bamboo staves, sticky notes, or arroz con pollo for crissakes.

But for every drunken salaryman, every sneering college kid, and every well-meaning buddy back home, rather than give them the satisfaction of the answer they so desire, I have compiled a short list of ambiguous and generic responses based on a small sampling of firsthand cultural experience, which I plan to employ the next time one of you reprobates deem it necessary to hijack my worthless opinions. Interpret at will.


So Japan, you wanna know what I think? Fine.
Well, for starters, I think...

* I think "cute" is great fun to admire from afar. But also, the hollow shell on the seed of vapid attraction, and thus is not an acceptable epicenter of fashion, or beauty.

* I think the best way to meet a girl in Japan is to either teach her English, buy her a drink in some pathetic gaijin bar, or to run her over at a crosswalk with your bicycle. I think these are not acceptable options.

* I think brown hair is a neon billboard for insecurity.

* I think powder blue pumps are a stupid choice for a girl to wear with red overalls. Actually, I think anything is a stupid choice to wear with overalls, unless you're a plumber, or planning to attend a benefit dinner for the blind.

* I think the train is not an appropriate place to put on one's face--regardless of how much makeup is used.

* I think each Cecil McBee mini-skirt purchase should include complimentary designer pepper spray, because if your trendy women aren't going to take responsibility for dressing to a 'role', they need to at least be aware that Japan is not as safe as everybody wants to think it is.

* I think a smile is a terrible thing to waste behind a handkerchief. I know it's a modesty issue, but 1707 was like a million years ago.

* I think oral communication via shrieking, chirping, whimpering, squealing, or any other form of auditory diarrhea not found in a proper dictionary, is for dolphins.

* I think there is more to life than Disneyland.

* I think there is more to life than babies. Especially those from a foreigner.

* I think one should learn how to properly speak one's own native language before setting foot in a foreign language.

* I think I could die a happy man if I never had to hear pigeon-toeing high heels echo down a hollow subway stairwell again.

* And lastly, I think it's sad when a disproportionately large proportion of a certain demographic opt to value superficial status in handbags, kawaii, boyfriends, English, English-speaking boyfriends, kawaii English-speaking boyfriends, kawaii English-speaking boyfriends that buy them handbags, etc., over sexier alternatives like one's own 'personality', 'opinion', and 'creativity'.



Yes Japan, that's right. And no, you can put that away--I don't think "oh snap" is going to be in your electronic dictionary.

But as a whole Japan, while I agree that you and all the residents on your tiny island are very uniquely Japanese, I think all these stereotypes ('moe' and 'OL' expectations, anyone?) you expect me to buy into are very uniquely bullshit representations of a greater global populace; your girls are still just girls, Tokyo is still just a city, and your island is still just an island.
So, as I hop down from my soapbox, how about we get your girls off their ridiculous pedestals and go back to ordering me another gin & tonic eh?
Yes, with lime.

C-c-c-combo breaker!

Sorry, your princess is still in another castle

About a month ago, as I was comparing apples to oranges at the Marunaka grocery store, I bumped into a moderately cute girl who suspiciously acted as though she knew me. Even though her face was only vaguely familiar, I still exchanged pleasantries in Japanese for several minutes before she went off to buy whatever Japanese people buy when they're not bowing or riding trains. The rest of the day week month I wondered just who the hell she was--I've met a lot of people since I've gotten here, but can usually at least paste a face with a place. And trace the straight-faced sack race to first base. Meh.

Anyway, only a few days ago, did it suddenly just click. Bowing and apologizing. Three-quarter pants. Asshole gaijin mode. The Queen of Apologies!

Oops.