… that I haven’t written in this thing in nearly a year. A year! Even by my lax blogging standards, that’s pretty embarrassing. In my defense, though, I have spent the last year working on my Master’s degree as opposed to, say, sitting around eating bonbons. Well, maybe occasionally sitting around eating bonbons, but only occasionally. Really. Gah.

Anyway, to sum up the last year, I’ve been studying at the University of York, working on my MA in Comparative Politics. I’m about a week away from turning in my final dissertation right now, so of course I’m sitting here writing a post instead of, say, resolving the last few issues that need taking care of before I can print this thing out, proofread it one last time, and turn it in for binding. I’ll also refrain from adding that I’m going off to Liverpool on Friday for a night before coming back to turn my dissertation in to be bound on Monday.

Actually, I’m feeling fairly good about the dissertation. Not ecstatic, and I don’t want to get my hopes up or anything, but it’s pretty much written, just a few things to add and tweak. I’m finishing up revisions on the final chapter tomorrow, and I plan on printing out a copy and doing the proofreading either on the ride to or from Liverpool, as I find it’s easier to find mistakes if I set the whole thing aside for a day and then look at it with “new eyes,” as it were. For anyone who cares, my topic is an examination of the Troubles in Northern Ireland from the perspective of rational choice theory. Really, it’s fascinating. I’m sure you’ll all be e-mailing me in the next ten minutes asking for a copy once it’s finished.

You’ll have to excuse my apparent lack of enthusiasm; at this point, I think my relationship with my dissertation is best described as a dysfunctional marriage that’s been going on for about fifty years. We’re at the point now where the spouse who spent all of their waking hours at work has retired, is home all the time, and we’re both looking at each other and saying things like, “I don’t even know who you are anymore! I’m going to sleep on the couch!” I can only imagine that trying to write a PhD thesis is the academic equivalent of that Stephen King book The Long Walk. Write or die, bookish geeks! All of that said, I’m sure the feeling of finally turning this thing in will be worth it in the end. By “it” I mean the dissertation; I’m not entirely sure whether it’ll be worth the $30,000 in student loans this MA has cost me. Hopefully, that’ll pan out all right, too.

Super (Mario) Cake

Originally uploaded by alt text.

This is the cake I want. Absolutely amazing. My mother, of course, would probably kill me, but tough for her. You can’t beat a Mario wedding cake.

I actually will get around to giving a proper update on what’s been going on since the soccer tournament I wrote about in… uh… June. Ahem. In my defense, I have been kind of busy, what with moving a few thousand miles and all.

Anyway, ganked from Ren:

Meme:

1. Three things that scare me:
Death
Being alone (like, forever, not on a trip to the bathroom)
Finding myself trapped long-term in a job I hate

2. Three people that make me laugh:
Ren
Monty Python (yes, I know it’s more than one person, but, uh, the name sounds like one person)
David Hyde Pierce/Niles Crane

3. Three things I hate the most:
My feet (because they always hurt these days and just aren’t serving me very well at the moment)
My government
Willful ignorance

4. Three things I don’t understand:
Calculus
Christian fundamentalism
Organic chemistry (though that’s not for lack of trying)

5. Three things I’m doing right now:
Trying to get sleepy so I can crash
Typing this
Dreading work tomorrow

6. Three things I want to do before I die:
Travel (particularly to Israel, but almost anywhere will do)
Write a novel
Something worthwhile

7. Three things I can do:
Write
Recall random and incredibly useless bits of trivia
Read Hebrew

8. Three ways to describe my personality:
Cynical
Intellectually curious
Misunderstood

9. Three things I can’t do:
Speak Arabic
Paint
Sing

10. Three things I think you should listen to:
Shake Off the Dust: Arise! (Matisyahu)
Revolver (The Beatles)
Eye To the Telescope (KT Tunstall)

11. Three things you should never listen to:
The religious right
Kenny G
Drug Company advertisements

12. Three things I’d like to learn:
Arabic
Horseback riding
Gardening

13. Three favourite foods:
Pasta with pesto
Crab rangoon
Matzo ball soup

14. Three beverages I drink regularly:
Water
Mountain Dew
Cranberry juice

15. Three shows I watched as a kid:
Fraggle Rock
Mysterious Cities of Gold
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Or… “My Weekend Playing Soccer In Nagano.”

So last weekend saw me going to Nagano with eight other members of the Inter-Hyogo womens’ team (along with two of the guys who came to offer their support and coaching) to play in the six-aside womens’ tournament that they hold there every fall and spring. The good news was that we had a strong team in terms of offense and defense and a reasonable number of subs. The bad news? We were short one goalkeeper.

(more…)

Ganked from Ren.

Known as: Allison, Faustus, Gaijin Monkey
Born: 23 August, 1982
Haircolor: Boring brown. Occasionally with blonde highlights.
Eyecolor: The driver’s license says green, but depending on what I’m wearing they can look more blue-gray.

(more…)

At least, that was what it felt like when my friend Stephanie and I elected to go to Taiwan for Golden Week.

Taiwan was not our originally-intended destination. Initially, we had been planning to go to Thailand (to the point where I actually purchased the Thailand volume of Lonely Planet, which I’m sure will be of great use to me should I ever go). There were some worries about heat and rain, but ten days in ultra-cheap Thailand, bumming around looking at various wats and gorging ourselves on spicy food seemed like the way to go. Or it did until we started trying to book tickets.

(more…)

So it’s been quite a while since this has been updated; things have been just incredibly busy for the last couple of months, so I just haven’t had much time to post. Rather than go into detail on every single thing that’s happened since early March when I last posted, a brief rundown:

• I did participate in (and finish) the town’s 5K run (well, in my case, run/stagger). I actually managed not to come in last, thanks to the disabled man behind me, and wound up twelfth in my age group of seventeen or eighteen people. So while I was hardly burning up the course, I wasn’t actually too disappointed with my performance. The three of us ALTs came in one right after the other, so from this we learn that our various training regimens were about equal. My final time was 35:24, which is pathetic for a 5K, but under the forty-minute time limit I’d set for myself, so not too bad. I’m actually wanting to run in another one, just to see if I can improve my time. I still don’t particularly like running, but I can see how people get really into it.

• Ren came, she saw, she ate copious amounts of beef with me at the local yakiniku joint. Our trip to China went pretty well, and we are now experts at spitting loudly, haggling for better prices and not taking shit from Beijing cab drivers. More can be found here (hopefully this will be updated further as a sort of retrospective).

• Ken Hirai is hot. Or else he seems hot because he’s actually a Japanese man that looks… well… manly. You don’t get enough of that around here. Of course, I also hear he’s gay, which shouldn’t be a surprise after viewing this video. Still love that video, though (it reminds me of Paul McCartney’s vid for “Coming Up”), and the song’s catchy. Ah, Japan, land of contradictions.

• After spending several days bored out of my skull at work (nonexistent class load courtesy of the new school year starting up), I got permission to decorate the spare room that we use for split English classes. Whipped up what I hope will be at least a mildly entertaining bulletin board- at the very least, it’ll give me something to look at while I’m standing there for fifty minutes waiting to read my two sentences from the textbook. Upon looking at my calendar, I discovered that I only have twelve weeks of actual classes left before the school year is over. Sheesh… time flies.

• My vice principal is awesome. I bought a slew of DVDs in China, and was killing some of my down time at work by watching them. Amongst the collection were all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. So one day, the VP asks me if I like Star Trek. We get into a conversation, and it turns out he’s a big Trekkie, himself (he prefers Next Generation, which I unfortunately don’t have on DVD). He used to be an English teacher and is looking for English stuff to watch, so I offered to lend him some DS9, along with Michael Palin’s Around the World In 80 Days (fantastic- I highly recommend it), a season of The Amazing Race and some other stuff. He said he was interested, then gestures toward his office computer and goes, “I’ll watch them here while no one’s looking.” Heh. Yet again, I’m reminded of how much more enjoyable my current situation is now than it was last year.

• In the same vein, I was invited out to dinner with the other female teachers in the office, which was really nice of them. I had a hard time keeping up language-wise, but it was still cool to be included.

• Less than two weeks until my Golden Week trip to Taiwan. Guess I’d better book a hostel or something. Sheesh.

See for yourself.

Have to admit, that made me laugh. As did this. Jewish Girls Gone Wild. Notable quotes:

“It’s so hot in here!”
“Luckily it’s not too bad humidity-wise.”

“Who’s your daddy?”
“He’s an orthodontist… in Cherry Hill.”

I found out yesterday that one of the JTEs (JTE = Japanese Teacher of English) here in town was killed on the way home from school in a car accident. Apparently he was driving along a road that leads to Kobe- one that all of us ALTs drive a lot- and was hit head-on by a truck that had drifted into his lane. The JTE was taken to the hospital and died there.

I didn’t know him personally- I’d probably met him a couple of times, at town Englishy-type things, but I never taught with him. The ALT who was working at his school had just seen him the day before yesterday, and he was one of her favorite JTEs. Obviously, she’s pretty shaken up- I’m sure the kids at her school are shattered; he was a homeroom teacher. He was also a school friend of my supervisor’s.

I found out talking to my vice principal that what happened, evidently, was that the truck driver was a bit old (sixty-one) and was looking down at a map or something that was on the seat next to him. He probably didn’t even register that he was in the wrong lane until he hit someone. I want to say that it’s just evidence of what horrendous drivers Japanese truck drivers are (which they are), but let’s face it, we’ve probably all done something stupid like that at least once. Most of us just manage to do it without killing anyone (and probably only through dumb luck in most cases). It’s pretty awful- I found out today that he had a kid in senior high school. To lose your father so suddenly like that, and for something as stupid as some old fart zoning out while he was looking at his map….

It’s just a stupid fucking waste.

I have to say, that Russian figure skater, Evgeny Plushenko, is really blowing me away. Aside from having a pretty flawless routine technically, he skated to the theme from The Godfather. Doesn’t get much cooler than that.

That said, I’m not sure why the American guy got such a low score despite not falling at all, while the Canadian who looks like a 12-year-old (sorry, it’s hard to get all the names when they flash them up on the screen in katakana) fell at least twice and was bumped into third place. Guess I wasn’t the only one who thought something was off, though, since the audience was booing.

At least it’s live (I think) so the Japanese station is being forced to show everything and not do the usual bit where they show the Japanese athlete’s performance forty times over, then cherry pick five second spots from the other athletes’ routines.

Apparently this is a fairly universal constant, as I found out today (not that I really thought any differently).

Today, the third year students received the results of the high school interviews they went on last week. The high school entrance process, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a huge deal in Japan. Huge. Compulsory education ends with the third year of junior high school (the equivalent of the ninth grade in the American educational system), so there are no guarantees in terms of high school- it’s not like in most places, where as long as you’re going to public/state school, you just go to the local place, and that’s it. Here in Japan, all of the kids apply, and it’s a long, stressful pressure cooker of a process. Approximately 98% of kids go on to high school, so it’s not really a question of if they’ll go, but where- where you go to high school is extremely important, as it plays a big part in determining where you’ll go to university.

So in my area, all of the kids apply to two schools- the public school of their choice (there are four in the area- two are considered very good, one average and the third pretty bad) and a private school in case they bomb out on the public school entrance exam. Private schools here are either very good and extremely competitive, or pretty bad and a holding tank for kids who flunked their entrance exams. All of my students took their private school entrance exams last week. This week, they had their public school interviews. The interview is like a pre-entrance exam; committees from the school interview the kids, and afterwards they send an evaluation out either recommending that the kid go ahead and take the written exam or saying, “Yeah, don’t bother.”

High schools here sometimes have special programs- sort of like magnet programs within the school. One of the local public high schools has a special “English Communication Course,” which has a very good reputation. There are also math courses, science courses, nursing courses… different stuff depending on the school’s strengths. The application proces for these is usually a bit different, with the interview serving as a way to decide whether the kid should apply to this specific program, or just apply to the regular high school course.

Anyway, two of my students applied to this English communication course this year. I’ve been coaching them for a couple of weeks, trying to get them ready for the interview. One was pretty good to go from the beginning- her English wasn’t perfect, but she has a really friendly, bubbly personality, clearly enjoys speaking English (comes up to me in the hallway to have a conversation, and that kind of thing) and has quite good listening/comprehension skills. The other I was a bit worried about- I didn’t even really know her before we started working together. She’s pretty shy, doesn’t talk much- which, in an interview, is obviously a problem. But she worked really hard to do better with that, and she takes criticism well- her eye contact was much better and her answers way more confident after a couple weeks of work, which I took as a good sign- she clearly wanted to learn and was willing to do the work.

So today we get back the results of their interview: the bubbly girl passed, the shy one didn’t. I feel awful for the shy girl- I’m sure she was disappointed, and the kids are under huge pressure from their parents during this whole application process. I haven’t gotten to see her yet (the kids had already left when we found out about the results), but… yeah. I’m really disappointed for her. That’s such a tough rejection to take at fourteen or fifteen years old. I mean, I remember feeling completely crushed and shitty getting cut from a sports team, and that’s not exactly something that was determining what university I might go to.

I want to talk to her, but I really don’t know what to say. I hope that this doesn’t sour her desire to learn English. It’s particularly a shame, because I think this program would have done her a lot of good- she would have been forced to speak more English, which would have built up her confidence, which is what she needs.

Sometimes teaching really sucks.

It just doesn’t get any better than mixing Swedish curling with heavy metal.

Rock!

It doesn’t get any more wild than this, folks. The Olympics are usually a great excuse to trot out the old Nihonjinron. Problem this year is that Japan, having seen pretty much all of its medal hopefuls go down in flames with various ridiculous excuses (the speed skaters’ loss is being blamed on too-tight skates- you people train for this for years, and you expect me to believe you don’t know your own shoe size?), is being reduced to egging on its curling team and hunting out half-Japanese athletes on other countries’ teams for its news to cover. Why they can’t just, say, show a whole event, I don’t completely know. Apparently the Olympics are just an exotic even featuring only Japanese teams against occasional foreigners held in various locations every four years. Ahem.

Really, the only bad thing about all of these losses is that it means that they keep cutting away mid-event, because clearly if Japan loses, there’s no reason to show who actually one. Bastards.

Anyway, choice quotes from this evening’s curling coverage:

「ええ・・・えええ・・・ええええ！」 “Eeh… eeeh… eeeeh!” (Repeat during course of entire event in which any Japanese participate)

「ブルーン！ブルーン！」 “Broom! Broom!”

「ええええ！すばらしいショット！」 “Eeeeh! Wonderful shot!”

「アー！アー！これいたい！これはいたい！ざんねんです！」 “Ahh! Ahh! This hurts! This hurts! Bad luck!” (Upon the inevitable trouncing of the Japanese curlers by the Russians- this might not have been quite as funny had the announcer not sounded like he was in genuine agony at the time)

I’ve gotta say, this wasn’t quite what I was expecting when I filled in this particular quiz, though these days, getting rid of government flunkies entirely is starting to sound pretty good. Really, though, if I was going the “less is more” route where government is concerned, I’d go more with the Libertarian thing, I think. Basically, anarchy just isn’t at all practical- I saw Mad Max and while we might be headed that way with the whole impending oil crists/climate change thing, no need to hasten our arrival at Thunderdome.

No surprises at all on the number two choice, of course. Although… not to be picky or anything, but shouldn’t it say, “You scored as an Anarchist?” Getting rid of the government is no cause for abolishing the rules of basic grammar, people.

What Political Party Do Your Beliefs Put You In?
created with QuizFarm.com

Mr. Pavarotti, you’re a very good opera singer, but anyone who isn’t Helen Keller can tell that you’re dying the hell out of your hair. Please stop it- a little gray hair would make you look quite distinguished, I think.

Yoko Ono to show up at the Olympic opening ceremony (though it made the Japanese announcers trés happy, of course). And dear me, this is one of the most depressing versions of “Imagine” I’ve ever heard. Not that I disagree with the message, but did it have to sound like a dirge? Yeesh. It’s a song, not a spoken-word poem.

Still, can’t really go wrong with telling everyone to get over themselves and stop killing each other.

Also, someone didn’t put very much thought into the fact that neon green and bright orange outfits clash pretty terribly with the orange, yellow and black of the German flag. Ouch.

A couple of prize quotes from the coverage here on Japanese public TV:

“There’s a big book!”

“Speed skating and soccer are popular sports in the Netherlands.”

“Here come the ballerinas!” (Though admittedly, ballet to techno music strikes fear into my heart, as well.)

Oh, and does anyone know what the story was with the Korean team? I was surprised to see just “Team Korea,” with the outline of the whole country on a white flag, rather than North and South Korean teams. Is this the way it’s always been done, and I just haven’t noticed, or is this a new thing?

“Chinese Taipei” didn’t escape my attention, either. Looks like someone had to undergo a name change to avoid getting the mainland all stroppy.

For anyone who was wondering, waking up because your face was slowly freezing really isn’t a great way to start the day. Nor is going out to your car only to find that it’s snowing. Ugh. It’s been flurrying off and on all day, and what did they do in the staff room? Why, they turned off the heater, of course! Perfectly logical- I know that whenever it’s snowing and -1º outside, my first thought is to turn off the lone source of heat in a cold. uninsulated building. Sort of like yesterday when I ventured into the classroom area to teach… and found every hallway window wide open, with all the kids carrying on about how cold they were. Well of course you’re cold, you silly fools! It’s zero degrees outside and windy, and all the windows are open!

I swear, I’ll never understand this country.
And just as I managed to get rid of my first cold, it looks like I’m coming down with another one. These kids are completely disease-ridden, it seems. Lovely.

On the good side, I did manage to successfully upgrade my WordPress installation, without any noticeable side effects, so that was cool. I’ve been having a tough time getting my FTP client to play nice with my webhost, though- not sure why. It could be something to do with the school network, since uploading and downloading stuff is frequently difficult/impossible here. Weird. The new version of WordPress looks pretty spiffy, though.

And only five weeks and a day until Sussy gets here and I get to escape for three weeks! Thank Christ for that.