Random scribblings for the random crowd

Boxers with buttoned flys sound cool, until you’re rushing to use the bathroom.

Hope you enjoyed today’s panel.  It was early in the morning (well, 10AM was early when I was in university) but the turnout was awesome.  Any feedback about the panel, please let me know in the comments or by email.

In the meantime: http://www.infinitedeferral.com/anime_boston_presentation.pdf

And cook up some linguine.  Then I’ll post the presentation slides.

I see 30 over there in the horizon (28th birthday is tomorrow), so I feel old enough to give you advice should you ever decide to make the jump to Japan.

• Pick your head up. Don’t blindly accept things as people tell you.  The typical English language school management here in Japan will tell you “in Japan we do this” and “in Japan we do that.” They may be right (they have, in fact, been here longer than you), but just in case, look up and see for yourself first.  Don’t take it for granted.  They may be flat out lying to you.  None of them, though, have ever outright lied to me, which leads to the more likely possibility, that they just may not know better.  I’m from New York; do you think I’m qualified to tell people what I think is typical and commonplace for 20 million New Yorkers, let alone 300 million Americans?  So what makes you think the manager from the countryside, two years out of university and looking for marriage by 25, is perfectly knowledgeable about the mannerisms of 100 million Japanese?  Take everything you hear for what it’s worth; it’s not worthless, but it’s not the authority.  Figure it out for yourself first.
• Keep your head down. One weekend, I’ve had the pleasure of being with a group of fellow Westerners, the only blemish of that drinking expedition to Shibuya being one friend of mine looking to wow everyone on the moving train by using the overhead rings to perform somersaults.  Real cute.  Don’t do it.  If you look like a jerk at home doing such a thing, it probably won’t sit too well with the locals over here.  Most of them actually don’t care; well-mannered people in any urban society are equipped to drown out all suspicious activity in order to go on with their happy lives.  But, really, if that’s your pickup routine, something’s seriously wrong.
• Don’t quit. In my opinion, the average lifespan of an English language school teacher here is two years, plus or minus six months.  A handful, however, don’t last one season, plus or minus a few weeks.  The “runners” come here and expect everything to be peachy.  It won’t be.  It’s insanely rewarding and infinitely enlightening to live in a place both different and similar to home.  But only if you can survive the quirks and the challenges.  And the challenges are daunting.  What do you do when your students laugh at your Japanese (or many times, even your English)?  What are your options when the women here don’t give you a second look?  How do you react when locals (and even foreigners) seem to look down on you?  Even if your answers are the wrong ones, and some days you come back to your apartment feeling like a failure, the important thing is to stick with it.  Don’t run.  Learn from your mistakes and try again.
• Don’t settle. I told a former co-worker of mine (a fellow foreigner) that my goal is to exist in Japanese society and pass as just another regular person, just as any foreigner can walk around New York without so much as a hint of rejection from onlookers (note: I understand that this doesn’t apply in the red states).  She replied flat out that it is impossible.  She is wrong. Yes, there will be times that you walk into Uniqlo, ask a question to the staff with perfect Japanese, and get a nervous “I don’t understand English” in response.  The real estate agent will look at you one time and immediately say that the apartment that you’ve been wanting to view has recently been sprayed for foreigners.  Even your friends will think it couldn’t be possible that you would ever like raw fish, never mind that you’ve been frequenting the sushi place near the station since the second or third day you got here.  This behavior is not okay.  Say so.  Do not settle for the childish and the small.  Express surprise at the soft bigotry of low expectations.  You expect the most of your peers because you expect the most of yourself.  Make that apparent.
• Be positive. There’s a difference between being humorously dark (that’s me whenever I say I aspire to be Dr. House) and being consistently negative.  The former are the types that opt to keep half an eye on the lookout for the positive; the latter is the kind that have given up and judged that everything sucks.  Don’t be that guy.  Not here, at least.  Laugh at what is strange to you, but don’t judge it right off the bat (after some experience, though, have at it).  Your students will be apt to think of you as scary, UNLESS you can couch your mannerisms in a positive or humorous (or, I would venture to add, a humorously sarcastic) way, which is not possible if you are outwardly cynical and pessimistic.  Take whatever you deem to be not so great about living here in Japan and find some way to laugh about it, not in the “let’s just accept differences for what they are” kind of junk but more in the vein of “this is totally uncool, why are people silly enough to let it stand like this?” The former gets you nothing, the latter might make others think.
• Above all, confront. The reason people give up the fight is not because they feel they’re wrong or they should show contrition.  The real reason is they just grow tired.  They don’t have the energy to go on waging what they see as hopeless.  To be sure, there’s a strategy and a skill set to confronting things that are wrong, but mistakes in tactics only make progress more difficult to achieve, not impossible.  Pick your battles, find the weak spots, and confront, but whatever you do, don’t accept that you’re wrong if forbearance means betraying your principles or morals.  However long or however short your stay in Japan, how are you going to live with yourself if you accept the bad beats you are dealt as just the way it is?  What does that foretell in all your challenges going forward?  Better to keep at it, until you get what you feel is right or you can’t keep at it at all.  In the end, there is no place in a museum for chumps who gave it up a little too early, or worse, never tried at all.

Beyond all this, when you do come here, enjoy yourself.  The advice in this post is for the difficult and trying times, which varies in intensity and frequency depending on your nature and your circumstances.  Most of the rest of the time, as I said, it’s tons of fun living and working here.  I would never blog about life in Japan if I ever thought otherwise.

Rant over.

It allows you to keep in touch with people you couldn’t otherwise communicate with (namely because, before, it was difficult to find people who fell out of your personal or professional circles without some extensive digging through Google or other activities that may be considered stalking).  And when you don’t, it may serve as a source of guilt over how much you don’t communicate with them.

In the past two years, though, I, for one, have consciously done as much as I could have in order to keep the channels open.  For the most part, it has been hugely rewarding; I have met elementary school friends, high school friends, friends from the old election campaigns, soccer buddies, curling teammates, Japan friends…the list goes on.  Just now I have a friend from Staten Island visiting Japan for two weeks.  She’s having a great time here and I hope I’m doing what I can to make sure of that.  In September, I’ll be going to a wedding of a friend of mine here in Japan.  And in two weeks, I’ll be in New York, watching the Red Bulls (possible strike notwithstanding) with my old friends from the ESC.

Granted, I make a few mistakes every now and then.  When you have 340 people on your list, it is difficult to keep track.  Especially with a job and a non-Facebook personal circle to be part of.  To those people who slip through the cracks, I’m sorry.  I don’t mean it.

On the other hand, I can count four or five people that I am consciously aware of, that fit in neither of the above categories.   It would be petty of me to elaborate.  But I just wonder if there was more that I could do to maintain those friendships.

As well as, given all the energy I expend in these efforts, whether such connections are worth the effort.  It may be cold and pragmatic, but a teacher of mine said this about homework: I’m not going to chase you.  I don’t think that’s what friends should do.  It should not be one-way traffic where only one of us is benefiting.

Lawrence Lessig, when talking about the distinction between personal and economic relationships, said that between friends, no money is given in exchange for friendship (such a transaction resembles prostitution, an economic relationship).  Time and the sharing of experience are the currency of a friendship.  So, Lessig continues, one can demand that the other spend more time with her.  Such an exchange may not end well, but that in itself doesn’t make the demand out of order.  It does demonstrate that one or the other is not benefiting from this friendship.

Maybe I’m too nice, but I don’t make such demands.  I won’t chase people.  Other friends, I have.

So, to all of you, I can say this: you absolutely, totally don’t have to return my emails or pick up the phone when I come calling.  It’s completely fine with me.  I won’t chase you.

But I’ve done as much as I could to make such a connection work.  Sometimes it’s limited by the energy I have left at the end of the day, when work is done and I could otherwise be watching television.  But I sleep fine, knowing I’ve reached out whenever I could.

All I expect is that my friends do the same.  And that includes all 340 on my Facebook.

I can’t do anything if my expectations fall short.  I’m not your mom, I’m not going to scold you or anything.  I just know that I would feel guilty (and I do) when I don’t live up to what my friends think of me.

Done.

Some aimless searching dug up this quote from Thomas Jefferson, someone who hated big government as much as any conservative, but wasn’t crazy about God being any part of the state (as a result, you will soon hear Sarah Palin bashing the third President as a left-wing socialist).  Anyways, what would Jefferson think about those who are keen to impose any one religion on a tolerant American society?

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Absolutely radical.

Liberal Sketches is a series of excerpts from books, essays and other written media from writers – who you wouldn’t easily identify as flaming liberals – depicting American society as a tolerant, liberal society: the sort of center-left community that conservatives fear terrorists and pinkos want to create but already exists.

The first installment (of many, I hope) inspired this series with its message of cultural tolerance embedded in American history – a kind of tolerance that is sorely unapparent today.  Perhaps it’s because this excerpt is about New York, and everything New York is evil to self-professed rednecks who don’t know where the hamburger came from.  Anyways, here we go…

“Sometimes, walking from the Bowling Green up Broadway, passing coffee shops, restaurants, delicatessens, and deliverymen, I try to imagine the place through nineteenth-century eyes.  What is sushi?  What are tacos?  Or bagels?  What, for God’s sake, is pizza?  The most common foods of today’s New York did not then exist.  Neither did so many other things that are now too common, from automobiles to skyscrapers.  And yet this remains that lost city.  The food alone is evidence of the persistence of tolerance.” – Downtown, My Manhattan, by Pete Hamill

Couldn’t stay away.

I decided to kill two birds with one stone: I wasn’t maintaining my personal website and I really hated maintaining my last blog.  So we try again, with Wordpress on the hosted server this time.  I installed Disqus and connected my blog to Facebook through some new-fangled…

It doesn’t matter.  It just looks cooler than the last one.  The wiki is still there, and you can find it through a link on the right side.  In the meantime, I’ll be working on improving this thing in the coming weeks and months, on and off.  Stay tuned, of course.