Throes of Spring (the above photo was taken from my bedroom window)
It’s been on my mind to send you a ten minute distraction from living life, but living life got in the way. The trees still look dead although the snow has returned to where it came from. How do people (myself included) live like this? My brother had warned me saying, “If you want to experience winter, put a fork in the freezer for an hour and then try to scrape the skin from your face with it”.
The flowers – domesticated and perfect-looking like their gardeners – are in bloom. While I seek out the Narcissus tazetta daffodils’ sweet aroma, it reminds me of a lady of the night tree a man chopped down from outside his house in the middle of the night because it’s a scent you can tolerate best in passing.
The sun is shining but the wind will still cut through your layers. Nothing makes sense. If this were Barbados we would all be lying around, dead.
Cherry trees blossoming in our faces alongside a gutter
This is the week Cherry Blossom, which many Japanese people think only grows in Japan, appears – thousands of trees absent leaves, displaying flowers in shades of pink and white. (As if seeing snow for the last six months wasn’t enough, but I don’t open my mouth because everyone is smiling and pointing their cameras at them).
I admit to surviving winter this year with only my electric blanket and a space heater which will scorch the hairs off your leg. I fear my body may be adapting in an attempt to keep me here.
Peeping トム
Brother’s Visit & Mouths
Week after next my brother is coming to visit. I’m taking the opportunity to go to Hiroshima (death) and Kyoto (geishas and shrines), but I am done with this place – with its mouths. There’s a student that I have to hurry from in front me when I’m conducting interview tests, fearing that his gingivitis might become airborne. I’ve bought tooth brushes as graduation presents…although the toothpaste is purported to contain sugar.
Hiroshima
“Wait! Dis Store Doan Serve Deer?!”
Samurai me
Intelligence, Personality & Rice
Japanese propaganda would have you believe the people all wear glasses and lab coats. In Barbados we say “head ain’ brain”. Some of my students are as smart as a box of hair (small match box). Of course, I’m not speaking of the subset whose parents are reluctant to admit they have learning disabilities. At my visiting school the students are a mix of autistic, dyslexic, disgraphic, and others. Most students there are unable to write Japanese far less more English. Is it a wonder their frustrations erupt?
H., the one who gave me this fun racist card game:
The losing card in the deck
She has said in a frustrated rant about her academic students: “They’re retarded. The ability to think for themselves bred out of them.” I concluded that, since the society’s core value is conflict avoidance (to facilitate communal rice planting), their personalities had to be weeded out, but, apparently, it’s got to do with post-war attitudes and the commercialisation of culture which benefits the adoption of feminine aesthetics.
H & D
On an unrelated matter, H. and D. are the same – they look like brother and sister on the outside, but I’m unsure about their insides. She confesses being terrified because he has plans which make her feel “claustrophobic”. I think he’s found someone who soaks up everything he says because she thinks he’s super smart. They have to survive redneck-town-America (where he’s taking her) before I’ll say anything else.
*Insert photo of H. (long blonde hair, blue eyes) barefoot, swollen with child – one hanging from the breast, another on the hip, one clutching her skirt – plucking a chicken she beheaded*
What is to Become of Me?
My friends leave this year. The Americans are bound to invade, and, as fun as it is to say things they consider offensive, most are too loud to be tolerable for any length of time without earplugs (I’ve bought earplugs). I’m staying to travel to countries too expensive to access from Barbados, continue saving and do a CELTA, and, because everyone’s saying it, maybe a Masters. The free time as a teacher to pursue other endeavours is ideal. With the recent direct flights between Barbados and Brazil, I’m hoping to teach English for ecotourism voluntarily in the Amazon.
Other
Nice Piece
Leo invited me out citing “not much time left for threesomes” as his reason. I said I’d get back to him and didn’t. I have no time for him since, walking to the train station from dinner with him and other friends, I whispered I’d like to see him again, having seen all of him already. His response was that a woman had to be present. This! When I prided myself, not on being a woman, but on never being that guy who doesn’t know when his advances aren’t welcome. My insides fell out onto the pavement. He does have a great piece, though.
Eye Candy
Nothing else interesting recently…well…there’s Iker with his weasely features that are nice to look at. So I did that at Takefu Higashi school’s English seminar last Saturday instead of skit preparation with the students. No one else there was nice to look at.
Old man watching me go by
Old Man Shovelling Snow
On my way home from school, a bent man with a prune’s skin, shovelling snow looked up at me and almost fell backwards. Then he stared across the road at the house from whose driveway he was clearing the snow. Then he stared at me again. It was a movie scene when a gun has slipped away and come to rest between two enemies! Was he calculating if he had enough time to make a dash for his front door? I quickened my pace past him and looked back (with the shovel in hand, I wasn’t taking any chances). He was studying me so intently he didn’t realise my eyes were on him. Then he broke his neck looking away when he noticed.
I looked back again. He had his eyes on me again. If I had opened my mouth “You loss you murr’?” would have come out, but not really…. I was in a good mood and considered that I mus-be was de firs’ black man he evuh see in real life (if you could call living here that).
Bye!
Conducting interview tests is my life for the next hours. I trust everything is OK. Let me know what’s going on with you. Until then, I’ll imagine you chopping down de Almond tree.
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