Inappropriate Things

This is my training group in Omiya, back in the days when I first went to work for an English language school called Aeon. (I always called it The Kaisha--kaisha means company in Japanese--when I wrote about it before because I was working there and I didn't want any casual surfers to find my blog. Of course I was "found out" by one of the trainers, an experience I documented.)

But that's not what I intend to write about.

So this is my group:

I'm in the middle, at the back. The guy in the light blue shirt to the left of me in the photo was named Joe Lo. We called him J. Lo. The guy to the right of me was named Simon. He grew up in Brooklyn and despite his happy little smile, he was pretty tough. Someone tried to mug him once in Japan, two Japanese guys with knives, and he fought them off. The two jokesters at the bottom of the photo, the guy in the dark blue shirt and the woman in the powder blue shirt, are Brandon and Juvanka. Brandon was very, very religious and something about Japan rubbed him the wrong way almost from day one, I think. Juvanka, while walking down the street one day, was stopped and questioned by the police because they thought she was a prostitute. The woman to the right of Juvanka in the photo, this woman:


...God, what was her name? Ugh. I can't remember. I roomed with her (along with Anita, the blonde woman at the far left in the group photo). It was such an unpleasant experience that I made a point of not getting her contact information when training was finished.

Okay, I just went back and searched some old group emails to find her name. It's Tia.

Let me tell you about Tia.

Tia was from San Francisco and she carried a picture of her deceased pet parrot in her wallet, the wallet that was stolen from her the first week in Japan when she went clubbing and picked up some JP guy and went to a love hotel with him. He took her wallet, leaving her a thousand yen bill (about $10) on the nightstand, about enough for a train ticket back to Omiya from Tokyo. She came back to the training house the next day, our day off, and decided that she wanted the room to herself to sleep off her hangover. Anita and I grudgingly vacated the room. Later, when she was up and Anita and I were going to bed, Tia decided that she wanted to play some music. Anita asked her very politely to turn off the music and Tia turned off the music but she got very angry, angry enough that she started crying, saying that all she wanted to do was listen to some music and why was that so wrong and boo-hoo and all that kind of crap. Anita was, like, thanks for turning off the music. Goodnight.

Tia. Well. She obviously had no real ideas about boundaries. She once asked to borrow my deoderant. Yes, my deoderant, that thing that makes you not stink when you rub it in your pits. She had forgotten hers and didn't want to spend the money on a new one. I declined her request, but I had the feeling that she waited until I left the room and then used it anyway. She was that kind of person.

She lasted about a month at her new school. One day, on her break, she decided to take the train somewhere and go shopping for shoes. She caught the wrong train back and was over an hour late. She had missed a class that she was supposed to teach. When the manager of the school confronted her and told her that her behavior was inappropriate, she got upset and quit.

I was reminded of Tia today because I was telling Judi about the upcoming nuptuals for a couple of Dave's work buddies and how I’m really just Dave’s plus-one for this wedding but that I still have to buy a dress and shoes and send a gift. That led me to tell her about the Japanese wedding I attended (the bride was our eye-candy of a receptionist named Akiko) and how the appropriate gift to bring to a Japanese wedding was thirty-thousand yen ($300) in brand new bills. That was if you were going stag. If you were going as a couple, the cost rose to, I think, fifty-thousand yen.  The after-party cost another six-thousand five hundred yen ($65). I think, after the gift and after party and transportation and so on, I probably spent close to $600 to attend Aki's wedding, but that was fine because it was like $600 tuition for a culture lesson.

In for a penny, in for a pound was my eventual Nihon motto.

So that was not necessarily inappropriate, just unusual. Judi's inappropriate story? Well, she and Paul were once invited to dinner at a "friend's" house. It was clear, Judi said, that the "friends" had had a party the night before, a party to which Paul and Judi had not been invited. For dinner the friends served leftovers of those deli party trays--still on the trays. Judi was just insulted by the whole thing. And who wouldn't be? Ick.

Other inappropriate things? Hmmm. A "friend" once invited me and Dave out to visit her in El Paso and once we were there, we found out that basically we were The Help for a birthday party she was having for her mother. That was back in the days when I was too polite to say anything, so of course we ended up helping her cook and serve the food and drinks at the party. Luckily, the live-in maid (a Mexican woman who was begrudgingly paid one hundred dollars a week) did the clean up.

Classy.

Appropriate/Inappropriate is something that I struggle with all the time, wont as I am to speak my mind in all situations, even when it would be better for everyone (but most importantly me) if I remained silent. But when I measure my penchant for that against the everyday inappropriate behavior of others, it seems like not such a big deal.

Just now, for example, I was at Whole Foods with Kelly First and this clueless blonde hippie wannabe blocked the entire produce aisle taking her sweet fucking time turning her cart around while simultaneously perusing all the little veggies in the vicinity. I finally said, rude as I could make my tone, "Excuse me." (If Dave had been there, I would've said to him, within earshot of that woman of course, "It must be nice to be the only fucking person on the planet." Because I majored in aggressive, but I have a minor in passive aggressive.) And the woman's response? She blankly said, "Oh....uh..." and I just rolled my eyes and moved past her.  But then I noticed the two children (one perhaps three, one perhaps four, dirty little tow-headed, hemp-clothes-wearing hippie children with unkempt hair and crusty nostrils) at the other end of the aisle, pushing one of those fucking annoying carts for little kids, just careening around, getting in everyone's way. And who do you think those children belonged to? Yes, that's right. GRRRR.

Yes, it's true: I think in general that reproducing is inappropriate. But if you do decide to spawn, do the rest of us a favor and get a goddamn crate, like a dog crate, to leave your filthy spawn in while you go out shopping. Thank you.