Reading is Fundamental

I knew I was going to hate being illiterate, but I thought it would just be my ego suffering, not my flesh. When I decided to come to Japan, my first approach to the language was to start memorizing the hirigana and katakana syllabaries, and I was already then thinking about how to get a handle on the thousands of Chinese kanji characters. A friend who already knew some Japanese advised me not to worry about the kanji and instead to concentrate on the practical, spoken language I'd need to get by on a daily basis. Wise advice, I'm sure, but offered to me in vain.

I remember clearly the day when my fifth grade English teacher began our class with a beaming announcement that I had acheived a perfect score on some big statewide standardized test for reading comprehension that we'd all had to take. It shouldn't take much more than the fact that I'm pushing 40 and still bragging about this gradeschool triumph to explain why being unable to read the language all around me might trigger some insecurity. As any woman can tell you, grown men live with the egos we erected as boys.

And it's true, my ego is wincing. In the lab, I'm stupid, I'm dependent, I can't do basic minor chores or adjustments or calibrations without time-consuming efforts at translation. Worse, even long-familiar contexts are now strange and limiting. The grocery store, the university, the train, they don't work for me any more because I can't extract any useful information from the writing in my environment. So, I have fewer options now; my clothes will be washed and my rice will be cooked on whatever setting seems to work and I'll never know what my other choices might have been. One night, I experimentally pushed a new button on my heater's controls, and suddenly there was no getting the fan to turn on again. There was nothing to do but accept being cold that night, because the the user's manual supplied by the apartment's management company was, naturally, in Japanese. But that's how it goes, and although I don't like it, my pride turns out to be lower on my list of troubles than I would have bet.

I'm hungry.

Under normal circumstances, I'm helplessly stimulus-bound in a grocery store, and if you're in a hurry, it's poor strategy to let me go in on my own. I like to look at the food, and fondle the packaging, and read the ingredients and consider the benefits of competing brands... Now, for the first time since I've been buying my own food, I can't read the ingredients. At first, I feared this would cripple my already-wobbly decision-making capacity when it comes to buying food. Then I realized I had a much more basic decision criterion to fall back on: Can I Eat This? For so much of what fills the grocery store aisles, it's not at all clear what's an ingredient that must be combined with something else, and what's ready-to-eat as-is. I've gambled and lost a few times on this one, but the saddest part is that it's made me conservative in a realm where I'm usually daring. I'm always willing to risk a mouth full of something I don't like, but a grocery basket full of stuff I can't actually eat is another matter.

The most frustrating moment of all came when I was trying to medicate myself against the symptoms of a terrible cold I'd caught shortly after arriving. The headcold passed quickly but then settled so heavily in my chest that I spent a week sleeping upright with my futon leaned up against the wall just so I could breathe, and before long I'd pulled an intercostal muscle from coughing so deeply, so much. I crawled to my corner 7-11 to get some ibuprofen for the pain and an expectorant to start clearing the sludge out of my lungs. Little did I know that this was just the beginning of a quest that would end with my finally getting my ibuprofen -- sold in Japan only under in medicines for ameliorating premenstrual syndromes -- and my expectorant just as my symptoms were subsiding. I'm not one of those people who won't take a pill unless the pain is dire; I don't like to suffer. So enduring this mother-of-all-colds without medications was bad enough without having to make repeated trips to the drugstore, trying to pantomime the act of expectorating without offending the sensitivities of the polite and no-doubt well-meaning gathering of counter staff who would watch with apparent consideration and then send me home with packages of plum-flavored lozenges and Chinese herb pills, but no ibuprofen and no expectorant. Even when I finally dragged Y-san to the drugstore with me to translate, equipped with a list of kanji characters fresh from my dictionary describing my symptoms and the specific drugs I wanted, I only got what I wanted in the end by disregarding the recommendations of the pharmacist, forcing Y-san to read each ingredient on the box to me, and ignoring the raised eyebrow of the clerk who was clearly wondering what business I could have among the remedies for lady problems. It occurred to me at the time that there was clearly an interesting difference in the way that Americans and the Japanese conceptualize and treat sickness but it was hard to develop this thought so I could articulate the difference while I was busy suppressing the urge to strangle the pharmacist, and fantasizing about the next time sickness strikes and I can just walk right up to the drugstore shelf and read the box myself.

Kurisumasu in Japan

Despite the lack of success met by Christian missionaries in Japan, Christmas is almost universally celebrated here. Not as an occasion to mark the birth of Our Savior, but as an excellent excuse to have a party, or, in the case of young couples, an intimate party-of-two of the sort that young couples are best at. In other words, Christmas here is something like Valentine's Day and the Fourth of July combined, with less nationalism and more presents for the kids.

As an adopted holiday, there are a couple of places where the transfer of culture has failed which give Christmas in Japan its own particular flavor.  All of the yuletide action here occurs on Christmas Eve, whether you are an aforementioned young couple or not, and a common tradition for Christmas Eve here is to have cake. There's currently a passion here for all things French; most cheese is marketed under the name Camembert, for instance, no matter what kind of cheese-product it actually is.  Nevertheless, bouche de noel is not the standard, though it's not unheard of. Rather, one tends to get a Japanese-style cake with a few Santa decorations (see above).

One night when faced with my umpteenth meal containing parts of God's creatures I don't normally eat, I asked those of my companions who'd spent time in the U.S. if there were aspects of American cuisine that they found challenging in the same way that an American might struggle with raw octopus. I was disappointed enough in the result of my challenge to launch into the best description of chit'lins I could manage having never eaten them myself, but after more blank looks were exchanged, the only consensus opinion was cake. The color(s), in particular, were a problem. I've seen some unnaturally bright greens and pinks in prepared Japanese food, but I'd have to concede that there's nothing I've seen in the junk food here that would prepare a Japanese innocent for the Lucky-Charms rainbow of artificially colored icing on your average American birthday cake. Having now had Japanese Christmas Eve cake, I can also say that the degree of sweetness expected from cake in Japan and America is altogether different. I have an atrophied sweet-tooth by American standards, which I guess is why Japanese Christmas Eve cake was so agreeable to me, and why the mere mention of American cake elicited tooth-sucking shudders from my hosts.

Another failure of cultural transfer I noted surrounded the name of the occasion. Y-san was astonished, and my choice of that word is not an exaggeration, to learn that the “Eve” in Christmas Eve does not refer to the companion created by God for Adam. The failure of even competent English-speakers here to connect the word “eve” with “evening” is so complete that the translation for the *real* holiday as it's celebrated here is “Eve's night.”

I had a pleasant if low-key christmas holiday consisting of a small house party at Y-san's on Christmas Eve, followed by a late-starting experimental day on Christmas. The big event here, yet to come, turns out to be New Year's.

Fat Cats (a post that has nothing to do with Wall Street)

Disclaimer: I like cats and dogs both and tend to roll my eyes when people start talking about how they hate one or the other. (they're just pets, people; you don't like living with 'em, then don't have one, but taking species-specific animal behavior all personally really kind of makes you a dumbass.) That said, by temperament and experience, I admit I'm partial to cats.

When I went across the street today to the Korean sandwich shop, there was a neighborhood lady walking a morbidly obese pug or some kind of stunted bulldog, and I thought, as one will, Haha, dumb ol' fat dog.

After enjoying the fleeting entertainment of watching this dog waddle by with his skinny white lady in tow on the leash, it occurred to me that I've met a good number of pretty waddly cats in my time, too, yet I haven't had the same reaction; in fact, what I thought was something more like, right on, cat, you go on with your fat self and don't take no stuff from anybody and you can tell them to come to me if they got a problem with that.

And so then it occurred to me -- again with the occurring -- that fat dogs are sort of like guys you see at the mall who have huge beer bellies, but whose t-shirts aren't big enough to cover them so there's some belly sticking out all pink underneath (or brown, I'm not racist) and the t-shirt seems like a nice but insufficient gesture. And these guys trudge through the mall with a look of possibly happy/content simpleminded oblivion on their faces, following their wives or girlfriends wherever, relieved not to have to make the decision. You know, like dogs on a leash. And you see them and think, heh, but not in a mean-spirited way, because frankly, they're probably happier than you are and you know it, you elitist jerk.

(Digression: I once watched my aunt's dog, a fat black lab who looked like a painfully overstuffed sausage, sneakily steal a 1lb block of cheese off her coffee table and down it in one gulp. Besides thinking, wow, that dog's not gonna shit for a week, I had a kind of real sympathy for these poor creatures who are driven to vice and iniquity, and thus inevitably shame -- nobody does shame like dogs -- by the fact that all they really want to do is eat. That dog probably knew it was going to be in trouble with its humans for eating that cheese and yet, there was just no question of leaving the cheese alone. It's almost like looking with knowing pity on a teenaged younger brother who you know is a sweetheart and a good kid, but you might have to mercy-kill him because his penis is making him crazy and not fit for social exposure.  You know, I just now finally understood where the "dogs are guy pets, cats are girl pets" thinking comes from: corresponding stereotypes.  It's still dumb, but I understand it now.)

Fat cats, on the other hand, are more like veeeery voluptuous women who happily stuff themselves into revealing dresses and dare you to look at them with anything but humble desire. Just as said women might think something like, I am a beautiful, NATURAL woman and I know REAL men like something to hold onto when they do the love, not just some skinny shit that might as well be a boy, their cat counterparts might think, if this were nature, I'd be killing things every five seconds to be this well fed, but since this ain't nature, thank jesus, I've got a human to do that shit for me, and since we're talking about it, why aren't you on your feet right now, human, opening me another can of the good stuff?

Maybe all this projection comes down to that the hell YOU looking at? face that cats can pull off as a standard feature, but I think I'll finally make this a real blog by bringing it squarely into oversharing territory and observe here that this may be why I like cats a little better, because they can do contempt and dogs can't, and that's important. I mean, who wants to be with somebody who can't bring themselves to hate you a little bit? I know *I* don't.

Happy Birthday, Cap'n Todd!

Everybody go pay Captain Todd money to ride on his awesome boat. If you do, you'll probably get to see killer whales doin' it*, among many other natural wonders. Go now!

*The Plenty o' Nuttin' legal department has asked me to mention that this may not actually be true. Please do not sue me Captain Todd.

It's "Bring Your Sweaty Clown to Work" Day

Shorts season has definitely arrived in New York and this morning I was happy to put on a pair of wonderfully cool (temperature-wise) red, white, and blue plaid madras shorts I bought last summer. I remember thinking at the time that they looked pretty slick with my black and white "No freedom without dissent" t-shirt. Somehow a clue must have gotten loose in my head in the intervening year because after putting on that very outfit in the zombie fog of morning, I took a look down at myself on the walk to the subway and realized that I was wearing a clown suit to work today. The effect was that much worse because my sandals are in the shop for retreading and so I had to wear my Nike Frees, which are not merely white but actually glowing from the generously-bleached washing they got over the weekend, and I was carrying my lunch in an old Apple-store bag in honor of today's Stevenote at WWDC, and as you may recall, those bags, they're white. I don't know what was in my head last summer when I did this to myself, on purpose, on a regular basis, but I can imagine that maybe if I saw this outfit on, say, a grizzled old african-american guy, it might look kind of badass in a retired-pimp kind of way. On me, it looks dumbass in a dumbass kind of way.

Fortunately, if you're going to go out in public dressed like an idiot, today is just the kind of day to do it. It's a thousand degrees in New York City; when I left the house at 8:00 this morning, there was a guy walking in front of me who had already taken his shirt off just for the walk to the subway. Not a good sign. So, all the people on the street who, on another day, might be wondering if I'm about to bust out a unicycle or a bucket full of confetti, are instead limited to thinking about eating snow or killing someone. If you're going to go out all day looking like a jackass, there's no better time to do it than when everyone else is too absorbed in their own misery to notice.

A Brief Comment

You know, this blog looks like ass.  I have to learn some CSS or something.

Make of it what you will

Now that the iTunes is doing the rentals, you might wonder what's available for your almost-instant-gratification viewing needs.  It's early days yet, the Steve said the magic was sposeda happen in February, but His Steveness did throw us a few scraps to keep us busy in the meantime.

If you go to the iTunes store and use the "power search" function (new to me), you can use an "available for rental" checkbox to find all the rental movies, which number in the low hundreds.  I figured, there wouldn't be much selection yet, and what was there would be your big, dumb, over-promoted Hollywood brain-deactivators, and it's true that Live Free or Die Hard was right there on the front page.  But the one big, dumb brain-deactivator I was actually willing to sit through for the selfless purpose of evaluating iTunes movie rentals and reporting back to you'se all, Shooter, was available for overpriced purchase, but not overpriced rental.  Oh well.

Looking through the search results was kind of fascinating, though, because, if you make a game of guessing what 300-ish movies might be offered right upfront, out of all the movies out there, you will lose that game.

Here's what I'm talking about:

First, there's the obvious ones: Live Free or Die Hard, The Simpsons Movie, Disturbia, A Mighty Heart.  Recent, mainstream.

Also obvious: the old reliables, your undefeatable lowbrow sequels: Iron Eagle IV,  The Hills Have Eyes II,  F/X II, Star Trek several different roman numerals, Alien vs. Predator, etc., etc.

Then, there are some classics for all your octagenarians who are down with the new technology and are chomping at the bit to try out Apple's new download service on their broadband internets... ehh... anyway: Gallipoli, The Magnificent Seven, Man of La Mancha, and even one of The Duke's last movies, The Shootist.  I know my grandmother (Hi, Nana!) will be jazzed about these.

Surprisingly, a few edgier numbers for the movie snobs: Barton Fink, Dogville, Lair of the White Worm, Chuck & Buck.  I mean, Dogville! -- that one really was a surprise, no joke.

But... I kept noticing these few titles jumping out at me... apparently someone at Apple is, like myself, an admirer of the Blaxploitation genre.  I mean, add Sweet Sweetback, Shaft, and The Mack, and you've got the entire cannon here: Coffy, Foxy Brown, Black Caesar, Across 110th Street, and Blacula, for chrissakes.  Can it possibly be by chance that of ALL the first iTunes rentals available, 4 movies of interest *only* to blaxploitation fans are represented?  Brother, I think you can work it out.

And I couldn't fail to mention:  When I saw "And God Created Woman," of course I thought of the 1956 classic that introduced a generation of helplessly randy American men to Brigitte Bardot (who, by the way, has turned into one nasty piece of business in her old age.  But there's no denying she was sex on wheels in '56).  I thought wrong.  Rather, on offer among the iTunes rentals debut selection, is this masterpiece.  I don't want to spoil the surprise, so please -- go to iTunes and watch the trailer.  But hey - same director!