stop, drop, and roll

miki came to school wearing a t-shirt that said "contains small parts and my courage."

first and second periods were blocked. i switched out of hayashi-senseis english class into ms. nguyens. we watched the first half of pleasantville. ms. nguyen said she was planning on running through american pop culture decade by decade. she said the week before they watched the untouchables. i asked why she jumped from the 20s straight to the 50s. she said she likes the mafia. (hi, jackie.) that and she didnt have a curriculum laid out. i said that if she needed any suggestions she could ask me. 10th graders at s!bley spend like an entire semester studying decades in both history and english class. at the end of the year they do hour-long group presentations about one particular decade. my group did the 70s. ms. nguyen said i could be her "teachers aid," even though i would clearly be a service student.

id seen pleasantville before but it was funnier this time around. because i was closer to the tv, ms. nguyen asked me to fast-forward past the part where betty parker masturbates in a bath tub. people were laughing about it. not like, "gasp, masturbation," but, "i cant believe shes making such a big deal over it." especially because ms. nguyen is in her 20s.

we didnt cook in cooking class. instead each group got a stack of cooking books to look through to decide on what wed make next week. at least, thats what i think thats what my group was doing. the teacher gave me an intro to japanese cooking cookbook in english to look at. at first i just looked at the pictures and checked out a few recipes (like how to make steamed rice), but soon it turned into a game to see whether or not i could figure out what id been eating for the past month. i found out that takenoko is bamboo sprout.

after i was done with the cookbook i played around with my electronic translator. id punch in a few letters and see what it came up with. like, the english translation for one word (that i dont remember) was "personal malice." now i cant see whats so funny about that, but at the time i was cracking up. i also learned that saramawashi means plate spinner. this makes sense, because sara means plate and mawashi means turn. i wrote it on my hand in hiragana.

every week mr. nakamura tests us on 2 lessons in our kanji workbook. i forgot to do one of the lessons, which gave me like 5 minutes to memorize 12 kanji. with each kanji theres a meaning, stroke order, japanese reading (kunyomi), and chinese reading (onyomi). some kanji dont have both a japanese and chinese reading, while others have more than one of each. 12 kanji is a lot to memorize in 5 minutes.

i brought my a.p. bio book to biology class and let my teacher take a look at it after school.

i caught the end of the final fantasy movie. i got to see the famous eagle.

i saw a tampon box in the trash can. i felt like an ass. the last time i came to japan on the 2002 summer trip, di couldnt find tampons anywhere, so this time i stocked up. i think i packed like 120 tampons. all those tampons took up an entire pocket in my suitcase. and then i find out that you can actually buy tampons here. ill get you for this, japan.

on tv i saw a married couple sleeping in two separate beds. i dont get that. for me sleeping in the same bed would be one of the highlights of being married. and i hate twin beds. as an adult wouldnt you want a queen or a king?

wednesday, may 12th, 2004

chapel seemed to go on and on forever. i wrote "stay awake, stay awake, stay awake" on my rows attendance pad, again and again and again until there was no white space.

i had calligraphy with ashley 3rd and 4th period. i promised to lend her geisha, a life and kuroi ame (black rain). i couldnt wait for her to read geisha, a life. i dont understand why so many people read memoirs of a geisha and suddenly think theyre experts on japanese culture. memoirs of a geisha is fiction. im surprised arthur golden couldnt keep his facts straight. hes graduated from both harvard and columbia with degrees in japanese art and history. he says that geisha arent prostitutes, but later in the book sayuris virginity is sold to the highest bidder. the geisha who worked with arthur golden on memoirs of a geisha, mineko iwasaki, was really disappointed with the end result and released her own autobiography, geisha, a life, in response. geisha arent prostitutes!

kumahara-sensei gave us tsuri (fishing) to practice. it didnt take long for me to get the hang of it. ashley said she hated me for it. she insinuated that i have a fast metabolism, too, which annoyed me. im slender because i watch what i eat, dont stuff myself or snack in between meals, and i exercise. it has nothing to do with my metabolism. trust me on this one.

during passing time i saw a spider the size of my hand. ashley was the one who pointed it out. then hyemi, susan, and ms. mrozik were there. you know how in dreams people just show up? thats what it was like. we spent a few minutes talking about spiders and bugs (i wish i could just lump spiders and bugs into the same category). to the casual onlooker it mustve been quite a sight. 3 americans, a korean, and an indonesian standing around speaking english like crazy, ten times faster than theyre used to in english class.

there was an assembly during long homeroom. it was put on by firefighters. there was a powerpoint presentation. i dont know why, but chi (blood) showed up a lot. in kanji, chi and sara (plate) look a lot alike. so id hunt down chi and point it out to keiko, lean over, and whisper into her ear, "sara." just to tease her. she corrected me every time. im pretty sure it annoyed the crap out of her.

the presentation never covered stop, drop, and roll. japan is fucked.

ashley convinced me to skip gakupa practice after school. it didnt take much convincing. as soon as short homeroom finished up i went straight to the locker room, changed shoes, and booked it to the front gate to meet ashley.

i fell asleep on the train and woke up JUST as the train was pulling into sannomiya station.

there are lots of stray cats near where the tanakas live. there are signs posted everywhere that say "DONT FEED THE CATS." usually they didnt come out till after it got dark, but on this particular day i spotted one. it was really pretty. cream-colored fur with darker swirls. it looked like hot chocolate with whipped cream that had been left out for awhile. i stopped a few feet away and called to it. it meowed and slinked over and rubbed its face against my legs. it yawned when i scratched its head. then another cat came up and did the same thing.

there were kids playing in front of the apartment. they were blowing bubbles and running through them. the bubbles were all different colors.

my host mother was in the middle of a piano lesson when i walked in the door. her student was playing a song from my neighbor totoro. i changed clothes and washed my face with cold water. i sat down at the kitchen table and my host mother said that someone from school called asking why i wasnt at gakupa practice. i pretended i hadnt known about it. i think she saw through my act. she talked and talked and talked until my head was pounding from concentrating so hard on what she was saying.

moegi had a picture of imazeki-sensei, the teacher she has a crush on, that she often looked at. i think there was an article about him in the school newsletter or something, so there was a picture on the side. just for fun i hid the newsletter under the tablecloth. i wanted to see how long it would take moegi to notice. i told my host mother not to tell moegi. she played along.