A Day's Happenings, Random

Rugby?!


Last night, I went over to Ben's to watch the Aussie rugby finals. I'm not the least bit interested in rugby generally, but Ben just had to have someone to watch the game with, so I volunteered. I arbitrarily picked a team (Go, Tigers!!) and brought up a 1.5 liter of diet Coke and a box of some crackers called "Pick Up" or something (the box assured me that they were "fresh cheese" flavored). Ben had what he called "dodgy pizza" from Shop QQ and an Asahi and his own 1.5 liter bottle of lemon soda (also Shop QQ brand, which is the Japanese Shasta). And actually, the game was quite interesting. I found it both more gentlemanly and more violent than American football, an ingenious combination. At one point, I commented on the gratuitous hand-in-the-face move (made after a tackle--or whatever a tackle is called in rugby), and Ben said, "My mom always comments on that, too."

As the players ran out onto the field, I commented, "Man, I have been in Japan too long, because those guys look like bulls." Seriously, they looked massive, like the bulls that get paraded around the ring before bullfights. They were like refrigerators with muscles. Ben laughed, said of one player who was all shoulders and neck, "Looks like he's kept his Konami membership up." (Konami is the gym we go to here in Higashi-Mukojima.)

The other thing I noticed last night was a poster that hangs on Ben's wall. "Benji," it had scrawled across it, "Come home and buy a bike." The poster, an action shot of a woman on a motorcycle, was of Ben's sister, who is apparently number one in Australia in women's motorcross racing. Go figure.

We All Try. You Succeed.

Today was a bit of a strange day around The Kaisha.

One of my favorite students, Takahiro, showed up unexpectedly. I don't see Takahiro very often--he's a photographer who travels to take landscape photots, but today, there he was, all sly smiles. (He looks a bit like Sylvester Stallone, if Sylvester Stallone were a young Japanese man). I don't know why I love this kid--probably because I can't, for the life of me, figure him out. He's got an incredible vocabulary and a tremendous knowledge of grammar, but he also has this body language that is all protection. He leans back in his chair and crosses his legs and arms and smiles (which the students do when they are completely lost). When I ask a question, he answers perfectly, and I'm, like, okay, you're not lost. It must be that he hates me, I think. But then, whenever he's in town, he shows up for his lessons and we talk after about photography. Tonight I told him about a show at the Mori in Roppongi, a retrospective of a photographer named Hiroshi Sugimoto. Takahiro told me he'd go check it out.

I also turned the corner tonight into a classroom and found myself in a conversation with this incredibly fluent student. In fact, since I had never seen him before, and because he was so fluent, I had to listen very carefully to realize that he wasn't a substitute teacher. His name, he said, was Kazu, and he spent ten months in London and a year in New Jersey, working for his family's shipping business. Then, in a very un-Japanese-like manner, he said that he didn't like his job but that because it was the family business, he was stuck. "That stupid Japanese way of thinking," he said to me. I asked him what he would rather be doing. "Furniture design," he said. "I'd be a designer."

A student made me laugh (and herself too) today when we had to ask each other "Are you _____?" questions. "Are you from Tokyo?" I asked. "No," she anwered, "I'm from Saitama. Are you from Tokyo?" I burst out laughing and she did too. "Do I look like I am?" I said. She shook her head and laughed, covering her mouth with her hand.

My handsome businessman showed up tonight, just unexpectedly, as he didn't have a class. I cornered him in the lobby and asked him jokingly where he was on Friday, the night he was supposed to be in my class. (I say jokingly, because he is a very high-level speaker and I had informed him that, though Kaisha policy is that I call students who don't show up without cancelling, that he was an adult and I wouldn't be calling if he decided to skip class.) When I chided him for missing class, he said, "I am very popular." I laughed. "Of course you are," I said. "So you were out drinking?" I asked. He said, almost surprised, "No--I had to work!" I said, "Oh, really?" and he explained that he really was working on a technical problem at work. Then he said that he was there to buy a workbook, as he decided to renew his contract so that he could take my class...Ahhh, it's nice to be popular among the very handsome--very married--businessmen.

Gym Beam

I'm just home from the gym, where I'm trying to work off some of Ken's birthday cake and a few of my own Shop QQ dodgy pizza dinners. There's enough time for some laundry before I reach my absolute collapse setting. Maybe.

Goodnight, all!