Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

I'm spending a few days in Kyoto after seeing my mom off at the airport. I have 6.1 minutes left on a public computer, a digital timer at my left watching my every move. I failed the driving test by doing everything perfectly and then running up on the curb which automatically means failure, after not running up on said curb once during my five consecutive practice sessions. Internet solution at home turned out to be internet solution dead-end, but with several days' left of vacation and nowhere to be, I'm ignoring reality for a while. Mom seemed to enjoy Japan, but I expect it will take her a while at home yet to digest, and later I'll try to gather her true impressions. I look forward to them. 2.4 minutes left, tick, tick, tick.

I feel somewhat nearer the bottom of my bureaucratic Internet mishap, please wish me .5% of your luck. My driving test is early Thursday morning, kindly direct the remainder of your luck there, and I'll get you back sometime. There are roughly 20 turns to remember in order on the football-field sized driving course I must memorize, and I think I've got maybe the first 2, maybe 3 down pat now.

Thursday I'll also meet my mom at the airport and try to guide her through her first trip to Japan. At some point early in the trip I'll have to explain to her about Japanese toilets, an awkwardness I'm already dreading a little. I can almost imagine one-hundredth of what she must have felt before giving me her first talk about what happens when a man and a woman really, really love each other. We'll be going to Takayama and Kyoto, and my favorite city in Japan, Nara.

Today and tomorrow are my last days of the school year at two different schools. I have so far received two bouquets of four-year-old-manufactured paper flowers, enough paper chains to be the envy of any paper hip-hop artist, several photographs, and a spontaneous declaration of love from a four-year old boy.

Saturday morning hanging laundry to dry on my balcony, I was surprised to see a costumed twenty-person strong parade carrying a gold-gilted portable shrine and several large taiko drums through the parking lot, and then past the pachinko parlor across the street. They appeared out of nowhere, circled the pachinko parlor several times, wound around the convenience store, and disappeared into a neighboring residential area. Actually, I don't know why I was surprised at all. Just when I think Japan can't get me anymore, it gets me. Last time I had such a presumption, a four-foot long unmanned helicopter flew past my window.

Still no Internet at home due to a spectacular bureaucratic mishap. Generous friends this month provided me with fantastic quantities of macaroni and cheese mix, and I fed 20 Japanese five-year olds the first serving of this of their lives yesterday (thank you, friends!!). It was declared "yummy" by all, I didn't even know they knew the word. The five year olds graduate on to elementary school this week in a stunningly formal ceremony, and I have been on a sort of emotional roller coaster about it all week. I probably won't see them again, unless it is with their parents staring into my shopping basket in an accidental grocery store encounter or somesuch. My mom comes to visit next week, fulfilling a two-years' long wish of mine. So much to write about, so little time sneaked on to my boss' computer.

I am the first foreigner that several hundred Japanese kindergarteners have ever met, and their first introduction to spoken English. There is something vaguely narcissistically satisfying about hearing a schoolyard full of children running around telling each other "hello" and "good morning" with the same weird Texas-California accent as me.

My Japanese phrasebook isn't bad, it helped me the first time I asked a waiter for the check, and when I needed directions to the restroom, but lately I could really use one more specific to my job. A phrasebook for foreign teachers of Japanese kindergarteners could include helpful phrases like, "I can play with you sooner if you'll stop standing on my mop," "Excuse me, but there's a small fish head stuck to your cheek," and "If you try to put your fingers in my butt one more time, I'll have to kill you."

The Internet at my apartment has been intermittently broken all week. This always sends me into a panic. I don't watch television, I have no roommates, and I have no friends in my city that I see on a regular basis. In my Web-less apartment, the silence screams deafeningly. It even makes me eat out a lot more, so I don't have to listen to myself chewing.

I've discovered I also have a sort of post-9/11 paranoia, thinking that some terrible calamity could befall my home country, and I wouldn't know for weeks if I couldn't stretch my arm through that Internet window. Who would tell me, five year old Japanese kids? I first came to Japan just three weeks after the Trade Center fell. If I'd arrived a month earlier, I could have spent that very moment fumbling ignorantly with strange coins, still trying to get a drink out of the vending machine of my hotel, oblivious to anything bigger. Instead, I watched it live on TV as I tucked some last boxes into my parents' attic, and looked at my one-way ticket to Japan suspiciously. Somehow I think my removal from all the events between the collapsing Trade Center and now have left my sentiments and fears trapped in that moment. I wasn't around when we dropped the first bombs, but I heard about it second-hand a week later. I still check the news sites every morning anxiously, relieved to find nothing has happened while I was sleeping.

There is a good side to being so removed -- one of perspective. When I hear about Janet Jackson flashing a Superbowl only one time, instead of from different journalistic angles every 2 minutes as I suspect many Americans heard about it, the event maintains for me the proper amount of unimportance. No one in Japan seems to be talking about it, but they are talking about Iraq and the environment and Kerry, and it's easier to keep track of what really matters. Still, I am relieved when most mornings' news tells me something only trivial, because it means there was no new tragedy during the night.

If you have nothing better to do today, check out the Museum of Online Museums, but plan to spend a few hours. My favorites so far are the "Gallery of Monster Toys," the "International Catalog of Lesser-Known Superheroes," the "Japanese Toy and Candy Museum," and the "Gallery of 70's Weight Watchers Recipe Cards." Educational.

I finally straightened out the paperwork for my driver's license application, and signed up to take the test in a few weeks
.
The written portion is said to be easy, the hardest part of which may be stumbling through the imperfect English and double negatives of the "Yes/No" section. For the driving portion, all I have to do is memorize this:

The red arrowed line above represents the driving course. It does not show that as one approaches station #25, the brake must gently be pumped exactly three times, or that near station 14, one must perform a bizarre and precise trick maneuver involving the parking brake, turn signal, accelerator, and steepish incline, not exactly in that order, but the order of which one had darn well better know. The hardest section lies between stations 10 and 2 (possibly to replicate Japan's building address system, the order is something other than numeric). Here one encounters what one's eyes would suggest is an alleyway for svelte pedestrians, but through which one must boldly proceed anyway, knowing that to run up on the curb on a hairpin turn is to instantly fail.

If one cannot pay the $3000ish for the driving course, practice sessions are offered on a reputedly identical course at the driving school across the street, about $40 for two runs around the course, after a wait of several hours in the lobby. Three or four practices are usually suggested. Saturday was my first.

My co-pilot was surly, as one might expect of a driving instructor, though not of a Japanese. He was short-tempered and a control freak, and told me he didn't speak English. I started the car.

As it turned out, he did speak some English, just in his own special way. It wasn't until the second time around the course that I figured out that "backyard look" meant I should turn my head to check my blindspot before changing lanes.

It was also on the second run that I figured out that, no the car didn't have severe mechanical problems, it was just that my co-pilot had his own hidden brake. That eased my anxiety only a very little, given the somewhat whimsical and harsh manner in which he applied it. Perhaps if he had had his own steering wheel as well, he would have stopped constantly grabbing mine.

My co-pilot talked constantly, not because he was chatty, but because there were simply that many directions to give. The moment I eased into this lane, there was that lane to turn into. He was a constant stream of random prepositions: "Left go line middle in right go single brake brake brake single ten in backyard look right go slow NO NO!" I turned the wheel hand-over-hand, but not with big enough arm sweeps. Driving straight, I forgot to keep my body in the center of the lane as I was supposed to. My turns were never angular enough. The only advice I had received from previous test-takers is that it was a test not of driving but of obedience and memorization. My driving practice made me only badly want to drink. Next weekend is practice #2.

Want to stencil some big-ass words across the back window of your car, but can't decide what to say? May I suggest, "Crazy Instruction!"? Sure it's taken already, but it's in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. Who's ever gonna know?

Kyoto flea market

Toji temple near Kyoto Station holds a monthly flea market. I bought the white kimono, the red ones were more expensive. Click on the photo for more detail.

President Bush has said many times that marriage is a "sacred institution." Compare these two contemporary visions of marriage. One is legal, the other is not:

Vision #1, from the "Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel":

"Intergalactic Themed Wedding Package:
Stardate, your wedding day. Your special day is presided over by the one and only Captain James T. Quirk or Captain Schpock, in the Starship Chapel. Surrounded by life-size cutouts of your favorite space characters, you enter into your new life, going places no man has gone before.

"This wedding comes complete with one Minister, Transporter, one illusion entrance, Captain Quirk or Schpock as your minister, theatrical lighting, and plenty of fog."

Versus vision #2, from a Salon article by a woman who recently married her partner of 25 years in San Francisco:

"After 25 years, after sharing everything that married people share -- children, failures, disappointments, illnesses, successes, adventures, mortgages, intimacy, boredom, in-laws... I looked at my dearest one and promised trust and honor and loyalty, gifts long ago given freely, gifts openly given for decades. A gift here, finally, consecrated and witnessed. 'I thee wed, partners for life.'"

Which of these visions is more "sacred"? Why?

I find it interesting that while the White House ponders a Constitutional amendment assuring that marriage remains sacred, huge numbers of American television viewers recently tuned into a wedding-themed program. On February 18, while hundreds of couples stood in the rain in San Francisco hoping for the chance to get a marriage license, over 16 million people watched My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance on TV, its ratings beating out 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Frasier.

The show hasn't made it to Japan, but according to the Fox website, the premise is this:

"After months of ordinary TV weddings, the real fun is just beginning when FOX rings the wedding bells to sound off the ultimate practical joke... Over six episodes, Steve... will test the limits of his recently engaged girlfriend's family and friends through shocking behavior. Our 'bride'... must make it all the way through the wedding ceremony and final 'I do's ' in order to win a million dollars."

When is something too sacred to be offered freely to a sizeable portion of the population, but not so sacred that it can't be the subject of a televised practical joke? Was Britney Spears' 55-hour long marriage to a man inherently more sacred than Rosie O'Donnell's recent marriage to her girlfriend of six years? Would a couple's Star Trek or Phantom of the Opera-themed wedding in Las Vegas be more sacred because they were straight?

California led the country in 1948 by having the first state high court to declare bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional. I hope their example can lead us again. As it stands, the federal government recognizes Star Trek-themed weddings by heterosexual couples in Las Vegas, but questions ceremonies in its own courthouse just nine hours' drive away. Aren't equality and justice sacred too?