Jesus for President

Was there ever any doubt that God is running the United States? There isn’t any now.

Shetland Tea Shawl

Sometimes it amazes me how the secret to completing something is just having all of the right parts and skills put together. I’m always giving myself a hard time for being so slow on my projects and then everything comes together when some skill that was so agonizing to learn becomes easy, or a particular material finally comes into my hands.

A few things were made more complete in that way today; it was a very good day.

First, I finished the “Shetland Tea Shawl” pattern from Meg Swansen’s A Gathering of Lace; created from handspun Ashland Bay Merino Top in Sage. I knitted this on and off for three years and I realized halfway through that the reason I kept procrastinating completing it was because I knew instinctively that I didn’t have enough fiber, and because lace knitting was hard for me at the time.

I took the project back to Japan with me when I visited home for a week and ordered more of the fiber from Paradise Fibers, an excellent company who shipped very fast. I finally finished the shawl today. Even though there are mistakes in it, I’m quite happy with it; I see it as a chronological record of my improvements as a knitter and spinner, as the stitches and quality of the yarn improves as it fans out (to my eyes, anyway.) The pattern does not include the “Diamond Madeira” panel because I wanted the finished shawl to be smaller.

This is the shawl off the needles:

This is the shawl washed and blocked on my floor. Tatami was a perfect surface to pin to:

I also noticed today, after procrastinating practicing for my upcoming jazz gig, that pizzacato had gotten easier, my right hand has gotten stronger. It made practicing jazz feel fun, not agonizing.

Yay, me.

The Bristles of Guilt

A while ago, I attended a piano recital presented by one of my students from adult conversation class. She is a piano teacher and has a modest studio of students at a variety of levels.

I attended the recital, but was irritated with myself for my inability to stop analyzing the stumbling of a 10 year old.

Performers don’t stop. And yet here was this girl who stopped no less than three times within her first piece, and proceeded to continue the same blunder in later pieces she performed. I was flabbergasted. How can a performer STOP on stage? I realized I had never seen a performer just stop dead in their tracks and stare at the music dumbfoundedly. But then again I had never seen a child’s piano recital.

I was confused by my inability to differentiate this from my audience participation as a college student, to calm down and remind myself that this was a child. But I couldn’t contain myself, the emotion I felt; how can someone just stop without playing something….anything? It was as if she had never learned the music, she was just reading the page. I can’t recall myself ever being such a musician.

I had promised myself I would stay for the whole 2.5 hours. Then I decided 1 hour would be OK perhaps.

In the end, I left after 30 minutes. I told a girl in the lobby, one of her students, that I had some errands to run. I felt awful.

This was two weeks ago. Yesterday at english conversation class, the student who invited me came up to me with a gift and said “thanks so much for coming to my recital!” The waves of guilt washed over me yet again. Perhaps it was this guilt that led me to forget the gift in my car that night.

This morning, I found the gift in my car and opened it. Inside were a package of chocolates and a toothbrush.

A toothbrush??

I am Media

Sometimes when I’m teaching, it becomes very clear to me how much power I hold over the kids just by standing in front of them.

They stare at me, they are curious, and they listen to me even though they don’t understand what I am saying. I often wonder what kind of human I am presenting to them, and just what are they learning from me.

Sometimes I have taught at elementary schools and shared lunchtime with the students. At some elementary schools, they play videos during lunch, usually some sort of animation series with animals or children playing or discovering things. The children sit riveted to the television, the same way they are riveted to me when I stand in front of them; they are curious and inanimate like sponges.

This often reminds me of when I was in junior high and they broadcast a student-aimed television program during our lunch hour, 50% of which was commercials for Mountain Dew. We sat riveted then as well.

I appreciate any kind of long overdue creator concern for the kind of culture they are constructing and its influence on humanity.

As a creator of culture I am very aware of this; I create music, I can create an accompanying image with that music. I hold people curious and inanimate like sponges while they listen to me. I can manipulate people’s emotions without their conscious decision.

I was surprised to see this article about the “Ethical Dilemmas” of computer games in which designer Jason Hill described Warcraft as unethical.

I was surprised because so rarely does a creator of a mass media form finally admit what media really is: Education.

Hairpin Lace

I don’t know why, but I’ve been on a mission to drool over lace patterns today.

First, after wasting hours looking up the history of lace online at work (its birthplace was in Belgium! my birthplace too!), I came home to an email from one of my favorite pattern designers, Stitch Diva Studios, with loads of hairpin lace projects that are absolutely begging me to make them.

Must learn hairpin lace, immediately.

*sigh*

(;_;)

Edible Schoolyard

I really liked this article about Alice Waters and her new book “The Art of Simple Food” that was posted at the New York Times’ website on Wednesday.

Ms. Waters believes that American children need to be taught the value and importance of food, so she pioneered a project called Edible Schoolyard, classrooms where food is the primary tool for lessons in science and social studies. I think it sounds utterly brilliant.

On Friday, I was surprised, but not too surprised, to find that Japanese schools don’t need revolutionary think tanks to teach their children the basics of life. They just do it anyway.

This is a picture of recently completed assignments for the 6th graders at one of my elementary schools.

The students thought up their own lunch menu and made it with the help of teachers. Then they photographed it and wrote about how they made it and what was appealing about the ingredients they chose.

As I was taking this photo, a group of students came up behind me and asked very excitedly, “Doesn’t it look delicious??”

Jealousy is not delicious, unfortunately.

Why Study Japanese

if you live in Japan.

Several months ago, I was lamenting to another English teacher in my city that I couldn’t get my laptop hooked up to the LAN connection at my school. I can barely talk about computers in English, so I had decided rather than stumble through a conversation in Japanese L33T with the tech guy, I would just resign myself to using the public computer for brief intervals.

The English teacher told me, “well, I could get internet at my schools when I hacked into it, but they recently made the connections more secure so I can’t get it anymore…”; this guy has been in Japan for over 5 years and can’t read a word of Japanese, let alone speak a complete sentence in it, not unlike nearly every other English teacher I’ve met in my prefecture.

Yesterday a paper landed on my desk of which this much I could read: “Today at 2pm we will setup the internet connections for your personal computers. If you need help with any of the following: password setting, IP address input, software download, etc. please mark a circle in the following boxes…” Long story short, I get high speed internet all day every day because I can read. Suckers.

Now that I have internet at work, among other things, I have access to all sorts of great study materials. I am currently studying for the JLPT Level 2 which is 10 weeks away. This is how I studied for it today.

—accessed Japanese-English Quiz Website here, specifically worked with links for Japanese Language Proficiency Test-Level 2 (thank you, Yoshimichi Iwata)

—did the quizzes for verbs, adjectives, and nouns for the first 50 words or so each. For words I didn’t know when quizzed, I created a flash card made from recycled construction paper; one side is the kanji, the other side is the reading in hiragana and the detailed english meaning from Jim Breen’s online dictionary

—mixed new cards in with previous cards from earlier months’ study cards, separating into “correctly understand meaning and reading both” and “don’t understand one component” piles

—for words which I consistently couldn’t remember either the meaning or the reading, I searched for the word in kanji on Japanese websites. I then read it in the context of the surrounding words (the webpage) in order to create a better understanding and reference for the word in Japanese, rather than just studying the word and its English equivalent out of context (flashcard is a method out of context)

I have found this kind of practice to be very beneficial for learning to read and boosting my vocabulary, and it takes less time than expected.

I also like to use my time to my benefit, rather than complain about how I sit around my desk all day and have nothing to do, another common pastime of JET Program English Teachers.

Sometimes the secrets to happiness in life are so obvious!

A Two-Lane Road in Japan

I took this video on my way to work one day, these type of roads are the main reason the driving test here is so hard, I imagine. This particular section of the road goes through the “main street” with all of the shops in the town I work. Taken with a low quality camera, but you get the picture.

The other portion of the road, a few miles before this was taken, goes through rice fields and neighborhoods and is equally narrow. I used to take this road to work everyday until several months ago on a Friday, when I don’t work, a kid my age was driving to work the same time I usually do and killed when a truck plowed into him. I decided to stick to the major prefectural highway street after that; lots of stop-and-go traffic but less dangerous, I decided.

More of More

Photos that is….

I snapped this last year on the official day to kick off sending New Year’s greeting cards in Japan. I had just wanted to mail a letter at the post office but was surprised to find cute little grade schoolers singing something unintelligible to a portable stereo in the front lobby. As you can see they seem surprised that a foreigner is taking their photo.

Immediately after snapping this, an old woman in front of me (black hat in photo) thanked me for taking it. I rest assured her that no, I was not famous, and neither would the kids be. Yet.

This is a poster outside of a ramen shop near my place. My friend Sam used to frequent here and every time he brought his friends the restaurant owner would take their picture. It eventually became this poster. The bottom slogan says: “Ramen Takamichi” to the world. It aims at the ramen of which the world consents. (sic)

This is something you will see all over Japan if you live in the country, but this happens to be in Asakusa, Tokyo. They have little dieties called “ojizo-san” who represent various problems or events in life, why they dress them in cute little doll outfits I have yet to understand.

The extent of my knowledge of them extends to a program I saw on TV where various office-workers sat in front of the ojizo-san for long periods of time bitching about why their life was so bad and asking for a sign of how they could fix it.

I suppose Americans do that to their therapist, right? Or their waitress. Or their housekeeper. Or the receptionist at the insurance company. I think I’ve had too many shitty jobs.

This photo was the result of introducing the Spirit of Halloween to the Japanese.

Apparently in England on Halloween, not only do they bob for apples, but immediately after bobbing for apples, they bob for candy in a bowl of flour. This was according to Sam, who is British, and showed us how to do so at a party. Also according to him, I have good timing.

More of Yesteryear

Ok, so I seem to recall promising some photos from last year so here they are.

Little guy going to Meiji Shrine in Tokyo during the shichi-go-san festival (7-5-3, celebrated when kids turn those ages).

“Will listen to your story (for free)” is what’s written on the sign (“for free” didn’t show up well).

This was the first time I had ever seen anything like this; he set up this little thing right in front of one of the busiest train station entrances in Tokyo, Shibuya. Also the first time I’ve seen a guy with yellow hair in Japan.

After taking this photo, I proposed marriage to him (ok, just kidding…)

Yes! I live in Japan!

I was snickering behind the curtain at this salaryman sucking at the taiko game. (all that taiko-ing makes me a snob…) The curtain is from one of those crazy puri-kura photo sticker machines. Taken in a Tokyo game center.

What would Engrish-devoted websites be without you, Homo Sausage???