Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

I am uncertain of what I ate for dinner. I bought it at the grocery store and cooked it myself, yet I am still puzzled. It looked like fried tofu. It tasted like fish. It smelled like WonderBread. I hate not being able to read labels. It once took me four tries to buy hand lotion. I'm still not sure what the first three bottles actually contained, but two of them were sticky. The first time I bought laundry detergent, I had to first peel the label off the bottle I found in the back of a cabinet left by a previous tenant who pointed it out to me when he handed me the key, and I took it to the store with me so I could fish it from my pocket and buy the exact same kind. A year and a half later, it's still the only brand I've ever tried.

People can remember almost anything if they sing it first. Last week I spent 15 minutes trying to get a room full of squirmy 4-year olds to remember how to answer the question, "What`s your name?", with mixed results. Today I watched a Japanese teacher teach twice as many children the same thing in five minutes by making a song out of it. I have a 34-year old Japanese friend who will always sing a tune he learned 30 years ago anytime I ask him in English which day something will occur, "Sun-day, Mon-day, Tooos-day...", it's actually pretty catchy. My Spanish has gotten rusty since college, but I know for certain I will always be able to complete the phrase, "Para bailar La Bamba...", although I may not be able to avoid humming while I do it.

I was thinking about this during my drive home today, I have a long commute. The longest thing I've ever had to memorize was the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" in high school, in Middle English. I was wondering whether this task would have been easier if there had been a catchy tune to go with it, maybe something from an Andrew Lloyd Webber production of Chaucer: The Musical. To test the theory, I tried to sing the words of the prologue to the tune of Prince's "When You Were Mine," which was in my CD player at the time. It worked out surprisingly well.

Wow! Thank you Spaceship No Future for this amazing link to a Japanese soy sauce ad (requires Flash). Makes me remember one of the reasons I moved here: virtually unfettered absurdity!

Yesterday or possibly the day before I was sitting in a restaurant catching up on writing a few letters home. There was a table of high-school aged punks sitting adjacent who kept trying to catch my eye, but I was deep in introspective writing mode and ignoring them. They tried out a few tactics from the now-familiar repertoire of Bored But Curious Teenagers trying to get the Foreigner's attention while remaining coolly detached, and I stepped into my role of the amused but not-in-the-mood Foreigner trying to have a day to herself. As often happens, they finally just started yelling out random English. To date, the catalog of random English yelled at or near me in Japan has included "Happy New Year!" in May, "Good morning!" at 9 pm, "Green me!", "12345879...8!" "ABCDEFJ!" and "Elephant!" among others. The restaurant punks began to spell loudly and arbitrarily in English, and then to steal little glances to see my reaction. I continued to ignore them. I've come to really enjoy this game. Finally a very exasperated boy with a Mohawk and a mouth full of fries yelled over the table at his friends, "B! I! O! N!!" This did the trick. The English teacher in me awoke just long enough to wonder if "bion" is a word. The punks and I finally made direct eye contact, and satisfied, they went back to their fries.

My Inner Art Student is currently considering the possibility that Japan has rediscovered Dada, and if so, what their intentions with it might be.