Yesterday, I was proper exhausted after teaching all day; so spent in fact, that I couldn’t muster even the craziest of ramblings. Crazy ramblings are the easiest in the genus Rambulae to articulate, I reckon.
Today though, I feel on top of my game; so on top in fact, I’m on top of your game too!
Yesterday, I had six classes of elementary school kids to fill with knowledge. They went well, each and every.
At lunch I ate with some 6th years and we played Shiri-tori. Shiri-tori is a language game in Japanese were you connect words together in a group of people. The Japanese alphabet is made up of syllables instead of single roman style letters (in the way English speakers think of our “letters” as singular, the Japanese think of their syllables as single “letters”). The only letter they have that consists of just one roman style letter is “n”. This single letter is the key to the game. One person starts by saying a word, ex: ringo (apple). The next person must start their word with the last letter of the previous word, ex: in this case “go”. Ringo is spelled ri-n-go. The person chooses “Gotanda”, a city near Tokyo. Gotanda is spelled go-ta-n-da. The next person starts their word with “da”, ex: Daisuke (a name). Daisuke is spelled da-i-su-ke. The next person starts with “ke”, and so on. The person who says a word ending with “n” loses because there exists no word in Japanese that begins with “n” by itself. All Japanese words beginning with the roman letter “n”, actually begin with one of a few Japanese letters: “na”, “ni”, “nu”, “ne”, or “no”. This game can be very fun and can include as many people as there are in attendance. It can even be played solo if you are trying to work on your vocab. I lost the first round with “Nihon” (ni-ho-n). The word means “Japan” and I was trying to be patriotic.
Fail.
We played a few more rounds and they lasted longer, plus I didn’t lose any more! I had so much fun playing with the elementary school kids, I told myself I was going to try and play with the middle schoolers today.
Teaching classes today was fun, but I think I might be getting sick. My body aches and I have a frog in my throat. It looks like I might be spending a nice quiet weekend at home resting. That will be a nice change of pace, since I have been going out every weekend.
Saving money and relaxerating, so nice!
Lunch was had in the class room with the kid that taught me to dance for the Undo-kai. He had me sit at a desk across from him so we could chat during lunch. Inadvertently, he sat me right next to a girl that has a crush on me! She keeps staring at me and tells me she thinks I’m cool every time she sees me. She didn’t really talk much during lunch but after lunch, things got a little weird.
During lunch, I got a game of shiri-tori started, but it died after only one round. The kids seemed interested in playing at first but then they started giggling about something in Japanese and, almost choking on their noodles, they gradually lost interest in playing.
After lunch the kids change from their formal clothes into their P.E. clothes. The boys go out into the hall and the girls change in the class room. They didn’t really wait for me to leave the room before they started changing, and the girl with the crush decided to start asking me many questions as she began to take her jacket off.
“Maybe she is taking her jacket off because she is warm” me thinks.
Another question later and she is beginning to undo her shirt buttons!
Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! Abort conversation! Abort! Abort!
I beat a hasty retreat.
In the hall, the boys were in their underwear.
Goodness me! What’s going on in this school?!
After lunch I had no classes so I had to spend my last 2 and a half hours trying to look productive. I was approached by a teacher to be a voice actor, so we went off to a deserted room to record some phrases for an upcoming test. I did my part flawlessly and we began a conversation about language. She feels her pronunciation isn’t up to par and told me the Japanese think American English is the “correct way” to pronounce words. I told her it might be a nice way, but it isn’t the only way. British English is another, as well as Australian, and Canadian. We talked about the difference between the sounds of words in California, New York, and the South. Also in the mix was a lesson on the “Chinese Language”, or lack there of. “Chinese” isn’t a language because there isn’t a country-wide language in use in China. She was unaware of the distinction between Cantonese and Mandarin, so I tried to help explain things with an attempt at saying “Happy New Year” in both languages. She understood and feigned shock at my “ability” to speak a different language.
The nodes in my neck were swollen and I was feeling a little weak. I didn’t want to tell any teachers because I didn’t want them to send me home early.
We don’t have cicadas in the Bay Area, at least not to my knowledge (what am I, a Park Ranger now?). Outside the teacher’s room window, across the courtyard, on a wall next to the open window of a class busy studying so hard, a cicada was perched and barely visible to my naked eye. It was singing its song of attraction/joy/anger at the top of its lungs/legs/abdomen. So freakin’loud, yet the kids paid it no mind. The chirping got stranger and stranger until the bug just gave up and the sound died, much like when you stop a lawnmower, a gradual fade out and sputtering. Then, Mr. Cicada gave us leave.
I spent the next hour repeatedly falling asleep at my desk and hoping no one noticed each time I jolted back awake. I made it to cleaning time and got busy sweeping. During my sweep, I found a false tooth hanging out on the floor. I had no idea whose it was, but Kyoto-sensei thought he might. All the kids that were cleaning in the teacher’s room had a good laugh when they saw whose desk the tooth ended up on. I’m not so sure Kyoto-sensei got it right, but he probably knows better than I…
I had a nice dinner of rice and contemplated going to Kashiwa to see some friends. I decided against it because of my impending sickness and I felt like relaxing tonight. I watch “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and am currently watching “The Taking of Pelham 123”. Zack and Miri was pretty good, Pelham is good so far.
I don’t know if my taste in movies is changing or if movies are actually getting better. I have a feeling my standards have dropped since I moved to a country where I can’t understand most of what is on T.V..
I watch a lot of American films on my computer and they have almost all been very entertaining. Maybe that is the problem, maybe I’m confusing “Excellent examples of cinematographic exposition” with “I didn’t feel like ripping my eyes out halfway through the mindless dribble that was vomited from the screen”. I hope I can keep the two feelings separate so I don’t start expounding on the virtues of Paris Hilton’s latest opus and how her acting was on par with Lawrence Olivier’s and how she is surely an Oscar contender. If I ever write that sentence again, call the authorities because I have been murdered and someone else is using my computer.
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