Driving Lesson

Today, I had a driving lesson.  Though it wasn’t so much a driving lesson as it was my asking questions to a friend while he let me drive his car.  Japan drives on the left, so I wanted to have a practice session before going off on my own on the roads.  Not that I even have a car or anything, but I’m thinking about getting at least a scooter, to help with exploring better, as well as getting around to places with significantly increased ease.

Anyway, it was fun.  It’s magical how our brains can so easily flip-flop the physics for us, allowing me to be on the opposite side of the car, yet still drive well and safely.  Way cool.  ðŸ™‚
Post-a-day 2017

Monkeys!!

Today, a friend and I, kind of for her birthday, went up to Nikko (a city in Japan).  We did several neat things, saw some beautiful stuff, and we had a very good time.  

However, the most odd and somewhat amazing part was when we pulled down a small road in the middle of town to get to the parking lot behind the city information center.  What to our wandering eyes did appear, but a band of monkeys playing in the road!

I halfheartedly attempted a photo as we pulled nearer, but they wandered off as the car got closer to them.  When we walked into the information center, I stopped at one spot next to the wall and hovered my hand over a specific spot where I had seen one of the monkeys perched a few minutes beforehand.

“A monkey was just sitting here!” I declared.  “A monkey’s butt was right here,” I happily exclaimed.  “I want to touch it, so as to have been on the same ground, but I’m not going to touch it, because a monkey’s butt was just here, but how cool is that?!  A monkey was just right here!”

So I was five for a minute there.  It was splendid.  ðŸ˜›
Post-a-day 2017

Love-Hate relationships

Do you ever wonder about why we can be simultaneously angry at and totally in love with someone?

I certainly do.

A friend of mine is kind of a terrible long-distance friend.  Actually, one of my best friends is rather bad at it, but we have been friends for so long, that it always works out wonderfully whenever we do get to talk and to see one another.  But she’s not the point here.  A newer friend is.  

I so incredibly value my friendship with him, that it is hard not being in contact with one another.  However, since he is such a terrible long-distance friend, we regularly have long periods of almost zero communication.  These times result in my growing very angry, even furiously fed up with him.  And yet, even in those moments of extreme anger, I am aware of how much I love him.

I suppose it makes sense, though, seeing has how the only reason I’m mad at his not being around is because I want him to be around (because I love him).  However, I just find it somewhat crazy that I can so easily simultaneously experience both sides of the spectrum – complete love and utter anger – with one single person at a single given moment in time.

It just seems nuts, you know?  While also being totally normal and everyday ‘duh, well, of course.’  ðŸ˜›
Post-a-day 2017

Blonde and Beautiful

Today, I went to a sort of workshop day for students in the international studies program at a very high level high school in my prefecture.  There were nine other ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) helping with the day, as well as myself, and we are all currently part of the JET Programme (Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme) in my prefecture.

The ALT who works at this particular school, John, happens to be from Texas, and is kind of what one might describe as a blonde babe.  He now has a handlebar mustache, but that in no way changes the fact that he almost always looks like he’s in a sort of advertisement, usually of a sort of Calvin Klein style, but with clothes. He is tall and lean and fit, dirty blonde hair, tanned skin, and bright, bright blue eyes.  AKA he is like an unreal dream for Japanese people.

As we were hanging out together this morning, we ALTs, before the workshop day was starting up, one of the guys  asked John how students had reacted when he first showed up at the school, if they hadn’t just swooned at the sight of him, and if they didn’t still go gaga whenever he walked past them, wishing they could have class with him for all six class periods in a day.  While things weren’t quite that dramatic, John assured us, it seems that all the girls certainly were and still are in full-on fangirl love with him and his beautiful eyes and hair, and everything else.

Later in the afternoon, that same ALT who asked John about girls being in love with him, turned a similar question to me.  Are students not totally in love with me at my schools?

Now, I certainly do not see myself to be of a similar quality of model perfection as our friend John, so I asked about the background to his question.  Well, he explained, when I had walked in a bit later than everyone else that morning, for our opening ceremony, the entire population of girls in the room had turned full attention to me, casually finding my spot at the front of the room, facing everyone.  He continued, saying that the gazes that were following me were of a specific nature that suggested young girls looking up to their older sister, who is their own personal embodiment of womanly perfection…  Wow.  Wasn’t expecting that one.

“Well, students are still amazed whenever they look right at me and see that my eyes are blue – they announce it to all nearby students, and get all of their friends to gaze into my eyes for a few seconds.*  I also get a lot of love from kids.  Boys and girls alike tell me on a regular basis, whether passing me in the halls, or saying goodbye after we’ve been chatting, say to me, “I love youuu!”  So I guess they kind of are totally in love with me…”

 

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to go back to being plain white bread after this adventure.  I mean, I still totally am plain white bread.  However, I’m plain white bread in a place that doesn’t really do plain bread in the first place.

 

*How odd is it, that I am totally comfortable with this now?  Seeing as how it has happened consistently for the past seven+ months, how could I not be?

 

Post-a-day 2017

Trains, Phones, and Social Experiments

Riding on the train tonight felt like a sort of social experiment.

In all the trains in Japan, there are signs, and even announcements, informing everyone not only to put their phones on silent mode, but to refrain from talking on the phones.  Therefore, even though almost every single person on the train is using his or her phone, people are usually using headphones, and the train is always rather quiet.  Tonight, therefore, when I heard a noise that was clearly coming from a phone, I looked up immediately.

The girl standing near me seems to be playing a video on her phone.  I wondered what the deal was, seeing as how nobody ever did such a thing, letting the sound play openly from the phone.  After a quick visual evaluation, I realized that although I knew her phone was playing the video on loudspeaker, she likely had no idea.  I watched as she turned up the volume to full blast, even, and had to refrain from laughing.  People around the train car kept looking up from their own phones, clearly wondering what on earth was going on.  (I wonder if they thought I was the one doing it at first, seeing as I was before and are on the train, and then they were surprised that it was a Japanese girl.)  Now I knew that this was kind of a huge sort of social faux pas, but what I really was excited to discover was whether anyone would actually do anything to correct this girl’s utterly unfathomable and inappropriate behavior (as it seems to be for them).

This girl, you see, was wearing headphones.  They just simply were not plugged into her phone.  After the sort of music video ended, I kept an eye on the grill and her phone screen – she was scrolling through some sort of news feed on what looked like a Japanese social media site.  I kept waiting for another video, to test my theory that she had no idea that her headphones were unplugged, and that it wasn’t intentional that she play just the one thing out loud, not caring at all what other people thought.

After a few minutes, I got my chance – a video started blaring from her phone again.  Oddly enough, it was actually the exact same video as before.  So, I’m not so sure what was up with that, but whatever… Perhaps 20 seconds into the video, as I was watching in an attempt to figure out what the video was, the guy sitting facing her right in front of her, who happened to be wearing his own headphones, quickly but casually waved his hand in her frame of view, and then quickly but gently grabbed and handed her the unplugged end of her headphones, which had apparently been just hanging down in front of her the whole time.  In a sort of fluttery panic, the girl took her headphone cord from the guy, attempted multiple times to pause her video while turning down the volume, – she did eventually succeed – and then plugged in her headphones cord to her phone.  I had a huge smile on my face for not the first time with the incident, and I found it incredibly difficult not to burst into laughter right then and there on the newly silent train.  😛
Post-a-day 2017

The Ice Skating & Smelly Socks Affair

One day last winter (not the one that just ended yesterday, but the one from a year ago), my friend Stephanie and I went ice skating.  It was an indoor rink at one of the shopping malls in Houston, and we were both quite excited for the ice skating.  In a packed parking lot that seemed like it would never give us a place to park, we somehow landed a magical spot right by he entrance to the ice skating rink… and we hadn’t even known that that was where the rink even was within the mall.

So, we got our rental skates, left everything but our shoes in the car, and headed out into the ice.  After an amazing time being scared and silly, gliding around on the ice, we returned our skates.  However, upon doing so, we discovered that the skates had clearly not been very clean, as our socks smelled of something awful!

There was no way I was going to put those wretched socks in my shoes, but my feet smelled horrible now, too.  So, what do we do?  A Hannah plan.

We noticed a Target next door to the skating rink when we were coming in.  So, in our socks, we ran across the cold parking lot to the Target.  We bought a pack of socks to share, and found our way – this time indoors – back to the skating rink with its bathrooms.

We washed our feet in the sinks, one foot at a time, and carefully dried each one, before donning a new sock and putting on our own clean shoes.  The floors in the bathroom weren’t so great, seeing as they were designed for people to use while still in wet ice skates, so this was a very special balancing act.  Stephanie in particular struggled just to get her foot up in the sink.  I’m not sure, but we might have been laughing the entire time, making it that much harder to balance.

Eventually, we had clean feet in clean new socks, inside our own (clean) shoes, and we put the dirty socks in the Target bag in Stephanie’s trunk, tied tight.  I forget how she had worded it exactly, but Stephanie had said something to the effect of, ‘Hannah has the most insane ideas, and she makes me laugh.’  I definitely agreed with her, but couldn’t help but feel these sorts of things were somehow a normalcy for me.  ðŸ˜›
Post-a-day 2017

Speed Runner

Once, when I was little (maybe still in elementary school), my mom let me out of the car near the end of our street.  We were heading home, and I don’t know how it came up, but I wanted to know how fast I could run.  So she had me get out to run next to the car, and she would measure my speed by driving next to me.

I didn’t even have shoes on, as I recall, but we went for it anyway.  Perhaps I made it to 17mph.  That number stands in my memory as connected to the incident.  Whatever the speed, though, it has always stood as a favorite memory of mine.  I love the nonsense that my mom and I get up to, and it hasn’t been until recent years that I have begun to notice how much so we really are ridiculous, and how we have been so all my life.  I love my mom.
Post-a-day 2017

Bedtime Stories and Serenades

In college, a few friends wanted to hear me read Harry Potter to them in French one night.  So, I grabbed my book and started reading.  After only a couple or few minutes into it, they all agreed that, while they didn’t understand anything but the names in the story, they still loved it.  Why?  Because they found my voice and reading style to be so comforting.  They said that it was the perfect kind of bedtime story, and so asked me to keep reading.

Within ten minutes, the room had fallen asleep peacefully.

Thus began my days as a bedtime story-reader for others.
And, until last night, that was the extent of my aiding others to fall asleep.

Last night, however, as I was humming some song quietly, getting into my bed at our hotel, a friend asked me, and in a somewhat odd way, if I could sing the opening song to Beauty and the Beast.  After a few moments’ thought, I began the song.

I left out a handful of lines somewhere in the middle, of course, as it isn’t one of my top-known songs, but I made it through most of the song with ease.  When I finished, I thought that I would be going to sleep.  Naturally, since I’m telling this story, that was not the case.

Thirty to forty-five minutes later, I finally dozed off, as the requests had slowly ended with my roommates falling asleep.  I had gone through songs from Mulan, Pocahontas,The  Little Mermaid, and still other Disney musicals in my seemingly endless list of requests.  I felt like, perhaps, it would be a good thing for me to join in the princess parties a couple of my friends do, because I found myself really enjoying this Disney singing.  I wasn’t sure if my roommates particularly liked the singing, or if they just thought it was fun and silly, but I obliged, because I liked music and singing well enough to keep singing at each request, and I was too exhausted to evaluate the situation more clearly.

When hanging out in the room the next day, however, I discovered the answer to my unasked question of their enjoyment at my singing.  One of my roommates specifically mentioned that she has to have my singing again at bedtime tonight.

‘Really?’

‘Yes!  It was so good, and so soothing.  It was just what I needed for going to bed.’

Wow.  Well, okay, then.  I’d be happy to oblige again!

Then, as I was later in coming back than my roommates, I got a slew of text messages, wondering when I would be back to our room.  When I walked in the room, they instantly started expressing relief at my arrival, ‘because we were so worried – we thought we might not get your singing tonight.’

As I’m thinking about all of this right now, I recall two other recent occasions of my singing for people on the phone.  Talking to a girlfriend one night, she wanted to shower quickly, but we didn’t want to bother with hanging up and calling back.  So I said I would just sing to her while she showered.  So, I did, and we both loved it and the silliness of it.

A day or so later, a guy friend called me on his way home from a late dinner and drinks.  When he arrived home, he contemplated a shower, but said that would be too difficult, and besides, he would have to get off the phone for that.  To which I replied with the incident with my girlfriend in which she showered and I sang, for those same reasons.  Not as a suggestion, but simply a factual statement of options for showering while remaining on the phone with someone.  He decided against the shower nonetheless, but requested a song anyway, declaring it unfair that I would sing for another friend and not for him, so I had to sing for him in order to be fair amongst my friends.  Okay, okay.  So, I sang.  And what happened?  He fell asleep.  Completely passed out.  ðŸ˜›

So, I suppose that was actually the first time I sang someone to sleep.  However, last night and tonight were the first occasions of my having someone request for me to sing him/her to sleep.  ðŸ˜›

Anyway, … I know all of that must be a mess, because I’m exhausted and in my phone, but I’m just going to leave it for now.  Perhaps I’ll fix it when I’m back home Tuesday.  Perhaps not.  ðŸ˜›
Post-a-day 2017

an outlook saving the day

Sometimes, there are days when everything seems to go perfectly, and yet I feel dreadful (mentally).  And then there are, on the other end of the spectrum, days when things continuously seem to be going wrong, one thing after the next, and yet I feel, somehow, totally okay (and sometimes even quite good).  Today was one of the latter type of days.

Thing after thing went wrong and went ways I utterly disliked, and I was even borderline crying over some of them (for various valid and ridiculous reasons).  I actually did cry at least a couple times today.  And, somehow, everything worked out such that I’m feeling quite well right now, as I prep for bed at 8:16pm.  I am exhausted.  And I’m doing okay anyway.

One thing I noticed throughout the day, was how I kept honest and open with myself about my frustrations, and I talked through them each time they arose.  ‘This is what I have (this situation).  Now, what can I do with it?”  Sure, I occasionally had the angry and unkind words in response to this inquiry, but I always was able to let them go, and to find an actual remedy to whatever the situation, be it a mental attitude switch or an actual exchange in something regarding my at-the-time circumstances.

So, I am here, freezing my feet and extremities off, wondering if I’ll be able even to function tomorrow after the near-constant beating I received today from my second day ever (first day was about ten years ago) snowboarding.  And I’m okay.

Yeah.  I’m okay.  ðŸ™‚
Post-a-day 2017

St. Patrick’s Day

Today has been St. Patrick’s Day.  In Japan, however, it couldn’t have been a more standard, everyday kind of day.  People hadn’t even heard of it when I mentioned that St. Patrick’s Day was today.  Crazy.  

Still crazy, I guess is better to say.  I know that my holidays and celebrations are either nonexistent or incredibly differently celebrated here in Japan.  That in no way changes this to-the-core experience of oddness, like a cat’s hair being brushed up the wrong direction (but while it sleeps) – it’s just weird, I guess – at the fact that something with which I so strongly identify just doesn’t exist here.  It creates a sort of sensation that, because no one around me knows about any of these things, these things – these holidays and celebrations – don’t exist for them, thereby making it as though a whole bunch of the bits that make up me don’t exist either.  In other words, with these holidays missing, going unacknowledged, it is as though parts of me are going missing, too.  One holiday at a time, ya know?

I wonder if I’ll be a super-celebrator of all of our holidays once I’m back in The States… not only would that make sense, but it would be totally fun.  ðŸ˜€
Post-a-day 2017