Postcards From Honshu

Imagine my surprise when I logged into the admin page of http://postcardsfromhonshu.com and saw that I had 867 unmoderated comments (of which, at least 864 are bound to be spam and the other three are going to be filed in the “It’s not that I’m lazy, I just don’t care” category. If you, dear reader, are the owner of one of those three comments that has been lost in an abyss of weight loss supplements, erectile dysfunction, and Nigerian princes trying to send you their money, I apologize profusely. Please comment again in hopes that the same thing won’t happen (and embrace the delusion that I may actually keep on top of moderating from now on).

Believe it or not, a few things have changed since the last time I updated. First and foremost, I’ve moved from my less-than-desirable apartment in Northern Tokyo to a smaller (what?!), more expensive (ehh!?) apartment on the west side. I am now a mere six-minute train ride away from Shinjuku, a place that will make your brain explode unless you douse said brain in copious amounts of conbini (convenience store) alcohol before embarking down the brightly-lit corridors of Kabukichō. Things I’ve seen in Kabukichō in the last month include: Countless salarymen passed out in the middle of busy streets (one of them was carried out on a stretcher due to what I presume to have been severe alcohol poisoning), a lonely woman trying to wine and dine a host by buying him a giant bowl of curry and naan at a sub par Indian restaurant (it didn’t pan out, the host dined and dashed), and a life-size wax statue of Barack Obama holding a pillow in the shape of a derriere wearing sexually suggestive underpants in front of a karaoke parlor.

This city never ceases to amaze me.

I’ll update soon with something of actual substance. To tide you over in the meantime, here are some pictures of me being completely professional and utterly ridiculous.

Never before has learning English looked so good.

Muh. Feel sorry for me.

Today marks my 441st day in Japan. A blog is in order!

There are actually several blogs that I have started that aren’t yet ready to be posted (e.g., my Yakushima trip that happened 1.5 months ago… Sigh, I have dropped the ball on that one…), but I felt compelled to write something this evening due to massive peer pressure from several impatient blog readers. Now that I know that people actually read this thing, I may be motivated to update it more often. (Author note: In no way are the previous words aimed at belittling the devoted, yet silent fans of my blog (e.g., my mother and Matthew Hooper — Shout out!).

In all honesty, I have a bad habit of assuming that the things that happen to me on a day-to-day basis are not interesting enough to warrant a blog. I sometimes forget that other people can’t see and hear and smell and taste and touch the same things that I experience every day. When I was younger (a spry 6-year-old), I didn’t even like retelling the same story to different people because I got bored with repeating myself. I always felt like if had told an anecdote more than once, no matter whether or not my current conversation partner had heard it, he or she would feel bored by my words because they were stale, unoriginal. These days, it’s still one of my worst fears to retell the same story to the same person, but I have done it once or twice (which made me want to stomp on my own toe). I still don’t particularly like recycling stories, either. I can’t help but feel unoriginal in my material.

Regardless. As most of you know, I am an English teacher in Tokyo. I haven’t written much about my job, which is more due to issues of decorum rather than to my job being dull. Although I do have more than enough inspiration from my students to write a captivating book of short stories (a la James Joyce’s “Dubliners”), I most certainly must refrain from publishing such decadent details in the public domain. Those stories will just have to wait until I can find a suitable ghostwriter or someone willing to pay me exorbitant amounts of money to turn my life story into a made-for-TV movie. My fingers are crossed on both counts.

Anyway, the point of this blog isn’t to dish on the salacious particulars of the Tokyo Eikaiwa (Japanese for “conversation school”) scene’s seamy underbelly (even though that would probably be substantially more interesting than what I’m about to write). Instead, this blog is going to focus on a fragment of my perceptions about teaching. For the past few months, I have been earnestly focused on pedagogy and becoming a better teacher. Like many things in my life, I have always been somewhat baffled by what differentiates the good teachers from the bad, and what makes the superstar teachers outshine the good ones. Moreover, ESL teaching presents a special layer of problems on top of the preexisting hurdles to becoming a fantastic teacher: Obviously, not speaking the same first language as one’s student presents a plethora of opportunities for cultural misunderstandings and hilarious follies that can interrupt the target of the lesson. But more importantly, not speaking the same language or understanding the culture of my students makes it especially difficult to influence (gerrymander?) my students’ motivation. This is something that I constantly battle with at my job. And motivation, I believe (as do many experts in this field, so it must contain a grain of truth!), is at the root of what separates the men from the boys. The superstars from the “meh’s.” Watching a teacher who can engage a classroom, who can have students on the edge of their seats from the start to the end of the lesson, and who can stimulate creative thought even in students who have limited abilities in the language is like watching the most talented conductor navigate his orchestra through a movement of Mussorgsky. It’s elegant. It’s breathtaking. It’s the type of teacher I have always wanted to be.

But, at the same time, it’s difficult. It’s oh-so-grueling. I have lost sleep over it on several occasions in the past 441 days (and before that, when I was teaching in Canada). Trying to understand the mechanisms of motivation is like trying to understand what really happened after Naomi Watts looked inside of that blue cube thing in the middle of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Due to the nature of my job, I have a very limited amount of time to contemplate the idiosyncrasies of each student’s individual motivation. Therefore, I have to resort to a set of motivational magic tricks that get the job done when it’s game time. Call them… heuristics (that sounds more professional than magic tricks…).

And here’s one, if you’re interested:

One of the most powerful motivators, I’ve found, is the “a-ha!” moment. Almost nothing is as satisfying as the “a-ha!” moment — The brilliant moment of insight that is experienced after moments, hours, days, or months of fretting over a baffling puzzle or problem. Humans crave these moments, as we perpetually search for meaning among complex puzzles of seemingly incoherent information. We are motivated to find meaning, to make sense of what has been presented to us, and to incorporate it somehow into our preexisting knowledge base. Call me an crazy old cognitive theorist, but nothing feels better to a person than a nice dose of fluency. In my classroom (and come to think of it, in life), I thrive on the “a-ha!” It is so utterly satisfying to see a person’s eye’s light up with recognition when they achieve a moment of insight. I purposely (but gently) confuse my students to let them experience the “a-ha!” during every class. It works wonders.

All too often, it is tempting to skimp on creativity in the ESL classroom. Of course, this is especially true in a profession (in a country) where the majority of its workforce are uncommitted 20-somethings who are merely temporarily living overseas to binge drink and scam on chicks (who said anything about me being in the minority? Woo! Spring break!). Whether I’m busy with paperwork or just weary of coming up with new and brilliant ways to derive excitement from otherwise inanimate grammar points, the seductive lure of simply telling the students to open up the course book and read is sometimes difficult to resist. But if I get lazy, I run the risk of losing the ability to elicit the feeling for which my students have come to depend on me. If I become boring, I transform into that person who I was afraid to be when I was 6 years old. And I simply cannot let that happen. I know that the experiences that I gather from teaching will be undeniably valuable in the future, so becoming a superstar at an early point in my career definitely cannot hurt.

Goodnight.

Tonight, I finished work late and didn’t really feel like going home because there’s nothing to do at home except listen to my washing machine and read books, and my ears and eyes weren’t really up for either. I took my usual “I-don’t-want-to-go-home-just-yet” route from school to Ningyocho station, past Gindaco (a takoyaki standing bar that is always packed full of drunk businessmen no matter what time I walk past). Usually when I take that route, I run into at least one person that I know, but tonight I came up dry. It’s a shame, because I kind of wanted to eat takoyaki. I thought briefly about going and eating asparagus salad at the Spanish bar near the station, but then I remembered that dad advised me not to drink anymore Mouton Cadet while I’m on my eye medication, and sitting alone at a Spanish bar without red wine didn’t really seem all that appealing, either.

I guess tonight was one of those nights where I was reminded just how lonely a city of 12,000,000 can really be.

After getting back to my home station, I decided to do a little bit more walking around. I put some Rufus Wainwright on my headphones, and walked through the Friday-night-bustle of Takenotsuka, which consisted of middle-class-Tokyoites in unremarkable suits stumbling out of karaoke rooms and into mediocre hostess clubs. A middle-aged man approached me while I was standing at a street light. He looked as though he had been working for 36 hours straight — His clothes were wrinkled, his hair was unkempt, and the smell of alcohol was radiating from his pores.

Him: “Foreigner!”

Me: “Hello.”

“Oh, English!”

“Yeah.”

“Do you drink? Let me buy drink.”

“Sorry, no thank you.”

“One drink! Please!”

“Thanks, but no.”

“I want girlfriend.”

“You’re married.”

“I make mistake to marry her.”

“That’s too bad. Goodnight.”

I waved and walked away, in the opposite direction of my house. He stumbled toward the station, presumably back to his terrible wife. Poor them.

I suppose, even in a city of 12,000,000, even the people who shouldn’t feel lonely still do more often than I’d originally assumed.

Oh well.

Last week, I went half-blind.

I was sitting at home, minding my owns, watching a little television and eating some ice cream. All of a sudden, the bottom of my left eye started getting grey and spotty, like I had been staring at a solar eclipse for too long. The greyness spread into most of my eye, to the point where I couldn’t see anything. Eventually, the problem subsided after about 10 minutes, and I assumed that it was a weird mix of not getting enough sleep plus watching too much YouTube that day, so I didn’t think anything more of it.

Then, on Wednesday, the same thing happened, but for about 30 minutes.

And on Thursday, 2 hours.

And then on Saturday, all day. On Saturday, the problem had morphed from a minor annoyance into a “hey, there is probably something wrong here.” I actually couldn’t see at all out of my left eye, and that was about the point when I decided to make a trip to the eye hospital. Nearly falling down the stairs and walking right past my students who were on the left side of my peripheral vision was starting to seem a bit excessive. Unfortunately, the eye hospitals had all closed for the weekend and I had to wait until Monday, but that gave me a nice excuse to laze around on Sunday and attempt to “recuperate.”

Sadly, I chose a bad day to go to an eye hospital wearing a summer dress. A typhoon had hit Tokyo that morning, and the resulting winds and torrential downpours left me, my beautiful dress, and my loafers soaked and chilled to the bone. I got to the hospital at around 7:45am, fumbled through my sorely-lacking Japanese language arsenal to ask for an appointment, and sat down getting ready to have the doctor tell me that everything was okay (just like every other doctor usually says to me).

The doctor hummed and hawed and asked me to look left and right and up and down and top right and top left and I was worried that I was doing it wrong because he hummed and hawed some more and then asked to see my left eye again and again, and by this time I was starting to get a little worried. Sigh. And then the doctor said, “you have an inflamed optic nerve.”

And then he said, “This is typically associated with brain tumors or multiple sclerosis. We will need you to get an MRI immediately.”

The problem with being a mild hypochondriac (well, an overly anxious Ukrainian is a better label, I suppose) is that after all of those benign symptoms that you interpret as being horrible signs of doom, one of them will eventually creep in and be an actual horrible sign of doom. So, as the doctor said those words in his broken English, I translated it into, “You’ve got terminal brain cancer, start saying your goodbyes.”

And then I asked him for a Kleenex. And then I sent a panicked email to my manager with my good eye, upset and wondering how the heck I would pay for an MRI on my English teacher’s salary. I had no idea how much it would cost, but images of Michael Moore’s “Sicko” flooded my memory. I wondered, would I have to choose which part of my brain to get scanned if I couldn’t afford the whole thing — kind of like a “Magnetic Russian Roulette Imaging”?

After a few more kleenexes and more panicked emails, I boarded the train to get to the next station, where I had to walk 10 minutes in the typhoon-esque rain and ridiculous winds to get to the neurological hospital. As I was tromping along in my already-soaked shoes, I wondered, “how could this day possibly get any worse?”, and no lie, at that moment, my umbrella did that awesome thing where it turns inside-out and upside-down, leaving me wet and looking more foolish than a man who had just slipped on a banana peel. I suppose I should’ve known that would happen.

As I burst into the neurological hospital looking like an escaped and dangerous patient from the psychiatric ward, the weight of the situation really hit me. Is this really happening? Why couldn’t it have just been migraines like I thought it had been? I had always wanted an MRI, but not to check for brain tumors or multiple sclerosis. Sheesh.

I sat in the hospital waiting room, shivering and waiting for my name to be called. At around 1:40, they called me in. Very few people in the hospital spoke English, and so the MRI techs had a detailed list written by somebody who spoke “Japanglish” (as I like to call a really poor hybrid version of Japanese and English). First, the tech asked me to please remove my jewelry.

Check.

“Please take off shoes.”

Check.

“Sound will be very loud. Earplugs for you.”

Okay.

“Uhhh… (giggle, looking at other tech) please remove… Brassiere… (embarrassed look, red face, more giggling)

Fine. I laughed, too, because the word “brassiere” is funny.

I hopped into the MRI machine, and believe it or not, it was the best part of my day. After getting over my whole fear of brain cancer thing, I realized that I was actually quite excited to have an MRI done. After looking at hundreds of MRI scans in university, I always wanted to see what the inside of my noggin looked like. I told that to my neurologist (this sounds strange to me… having a neurologist…) and he actually got a little bit excited about my nerdiness. He told me that after the scan, he would walk me through my brain to show me all of the cool stuff happening in there.

Inside of the MRI room, next to the daunting machine, the tech told me to lay still for 40 minutes, gave me a blanket, asked if I was okay, and gave me an emergency button to squeeze in case something horrible happened. Because Japanese signs tend to be a little melodramatic (one of the signs next to the machine said, “NO O^2!!!!” with a skull and crossbones, meaning… “If you forget to breathe, you will turn into a ghost,” I presume), I was a little bit worried as they imported my body into the giant white, presumably oxygen-deficient chamber. After I took a few deep breaths, however, I found the clicks and whirs of the machine a bit reminiscent of a hip hop riff. I started making up music in my mind and thinking about happy memories, hoping that the MRI would be able to see them. I imagined the doctor would commend me on my beautifully active frontal lobe, and be thrilled with my amygdala (it’s so… almond-shaped!).

The time went by extremely quickly and I even caught myself drifting off a few times, but I quickly stopped myself when I realized that I tend to move a lot when I sleep and that movement would make for a blurry scan. All in all, however, my first MRI experience was a load of fun. Like a 40-minute trip to the spa, with more magnetic resonance.

The MRI finished, and I went to the changing room to put on my “brassiere,” only to hear the techs giggling with embarrassment once again. Oh well. I walked out of the chamber and found my manager sitting in the waiting room, waiting for me. I was so happy. She had wet feet and the look of “if you die, lots of students will be upset. Please don’t die. I need you.” This is precisely why I like my manager so much. She needs me.

So we sat in the waiting room, talking about work and chimps who have pet dogs and exercise together when the neurologist called me into his room. We took a deep breath and headed in together. The doctor, determined to impress me with his MRI skillz, walked me through all of the different cross-sections of my brain.

“See, this is your pituitary gland! But you know that already….”

“But, can you see? You have a big hippocampus! Just like a normal Caucasian!”

Part of me was reveling in the sight of my grey matter, but another part of me was scouring the scan for anything that looked abnormal. After 10 minutes of 3-dimensional rotations, the doctor finally told me that I was cancer-free. I high-fived my manager, paid for the MRI (which was roughly the same price as my typical haircut… I really should find a cheaper hairdresser) and headed back to the eye hospital for one more round of, “cancer = no; please fix me?”

The ophthalmologist gave me a prescription for anti-inflammatory medication that has a side effect of causing ulcers, and anti-ulcer medication that has a side effect of….. I don’t know. It’ll be a surprise. All I know is that I am looking forward to being able to see with both eyes again. It could take up to 8 weeks, and I choose to ignore the fact that I am at an increased risk for developing MS now that I have this stupid disease. I figure it’s a bit futile worrying about whether or not I will get it in the next 10-15 years, considering there are a plethora of other diseases that I can worry about contracting in the interim.

Happily, my brain isn’t broken. Somewhat unfortunately, however, I now have to blame my lack of organizational skills, my laziness, my incapacity for learning new languages, and my bad memory on something else. That’s okay, though. I think my non-brain-abnormality-related laziness is pretty darn cool.

Sorry for the extended blog, mum and dad. I hope you found it more amusing than worrying.

Goodnight.

There have been a lot of earthquakes in the last week:

A big one, a 6.9 magnitude, which I grocery-shopped through without feeling.

Another big one, 6.6. magnitude, which I slept through because I’m a top-notch sleeper.

And one this morning, a 6.7 magnitude, as I got ready for work. It was 200 miles away, but, I felt it! Finally. That’s all I really wanted — To feel one. It felt like I was swinging in a hammock on a breezy day.

And now I hope they stop.

But, according to the Internet (my one-stop source for all things information superhighway), Japan experiences a tremor every five minutes and around 20% of all earthquakes in the world measuring 6 on the Richter scale or higher hit the Southeast Asian country.

Boooooooo.