Ox Cars

Briefly:

I hate the Oscars, and always expect the worst. Having said that, --

I'm glad the Academy took a big, steaming dump on James Cameron by giving his ex nearly every award they could. He has everybody's money, he doesn't need our approval, too. Also, I always like it when the lady wins.

I'm glad Jeff Bridges won, even though I didn't see the movie, and won't, because I don't give a shit about country music. Jeff Bridges is unarguably a great actor, and this sounded like a plumb role, and so why not give him a best actor for it. I loved Colin Firth to pieces in A Single Man, but if I were Colin Firth, I don't think I'd even feel bad about this.

I'm glad Christoph Walz won for Inglorious Basterds, because that was a genuinely good movie that Academy types weren't officially allowed to like, and it needed to win *something*. And although it was good for many reasons, Christoph Walz was the biggest one. I mean, damn, he was good.

I'm glad that The Cove won for best Documentary, because, seriously? Japanese people? What the fuck. You deserve the bother.

I'm glad that Avatar won a couple of awards that nobody outside the industry cares about, because I suppose it probably needed to win something, and it makes it harder for James Cameron to cry about how he was robbed.

I'm not at all glad, not one little bit, that Sandra Bullock won any award for anything that she was up against HELEN MIRREN and MERYL FUCKING STREEP for. I don't have anything against Sandra Bullock, I even kind of like her even though she's never in good movies, but come on. Helen Mirren is awesome and deserves Oscars for movies she wasn't even in. Meryl Streep is awesome and deserves Oscars for being alive, and for playing Julia Childs. Actually, anyone who can get casted to play Julia Childs in anything deserves an Oscar for awesomeness, because *Julia Fucking Childs.*

Also, you can't give Sandra Bullock an Oscar against Gabourey Sidibe who deserves one for being a better-than-anyone-in-the-academy-or-the-audience-for-that-matter human being. Come on. Helen Mirren. Meryl Streep, and Gabourey Sidibe, and you give Sandra Bullock the award? Oh. I don't even know who Carey Mulligan is.

I'm glad he's dead.

A normal person of my age cohort would typically have learned to either love or hate Michael Jackson as a pop persona -- sorry, in my case, it's probably worth mentioning that I'm talking about the musician and not the beer guy -- either in the 80's, from Thriller, or if they were really, really culturally precocious, in the late '70's, from Off the Wall.

Being not-normal, I was not interested in either and didn't think much at all about Michael Jackson until sometime in the late 80's when I was listening with geekishly ferocious omnivorousness to music of all types, and discovered Motown, including the Jackson Five. I still really like the Jackson Five numbers I discovered then, but I mostly watched Michael over the years since with a raised eyebrow, and so on this fateful day I can't claim to feel a loss related to cherished childhood memories.

What I do feel is a lot of pity for a man who was obviously terribly damaged by his history, and relief that we were not all required to witness its dénouement. On several occasions in the recent past, when MJ came up in the news because of a trial, or an auction of his worldly possessions, or some other sort of personal nightmare made public, I thought to myself that watching this man grow old while penury and obscurity gathered around, always being compared to the startling heights he'd reached decades before, would be the most unpleasant thing I could possibly find on the teevee for the remainder of his/its run.

And so I'm saying right here that I'm glad Michael Jackson died today at the age of 50, not because I'm a bastard (I hope) who wishes death on someone, or disappointment on his fans, but because Michael Jackson's continued existence in a world that wasn't actually Neverland was bound to bring suffering to us all, and none more so that Michael himself. I don't really believe in an afterlife but I sincerely hope this poor, lonely man experienced enough joy when he was performing to have made his 50 years on Earth worth the bother.

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.

We Now Return to Our Previously Scheduled Programming

All right, all RIGHT.  Between the settling-in, and the worst flu I've had in 10 years, and getting used to the insane Japanese science work schedule, I'm a little behind in the promised posting here.  

Shut up.  Stop nagging me and read the next post.

Japanese Bureaucracy

Japan is infamous for a dense and arbitrary bureaucratic culture, and from my limited experience so far, I can report an unusual attention paid to paperwork, and a fondness for seeing it multiply.  Virtually everyone who's touched my passport here, which is pretty much everyone who's stood on the other side of a counter from me (except the cafeteria ladies), has made at least one photocopy of it: two at the airport, one at the university, two at city hall (I had to register as a resident foreigner -- they like to keep tabs on us here), one at the bank, one at the hotel.  It would have been three at the apartment company, had Y-----san, my sponsor, not grown impatient and refused on my behalf.

True fact: it is unlawful in Japan to photocopy a passport.

And when it actually comes to the cherished activity of filling out forms, official persons always get a pained or anxious look on their faces when Y-----san explains that I can neither read nor write Japanese and perhaps it would be easier for everyone if I could just use romaji?  Easier, of course, is not really the idea, so usually there can be no romaji.  It is also not to be permitted that I allow Y-----san to fill out the forms on my behalf.  I must do it myself while official person watches.  So I've now several times been through the exercise of standing there while Y-san writes down the Japanese characters for me, and I copy them into the blanks on the forms.  And yet!  While it won't do to have Y-san write in information like my address, etc., the bank official today was perfectly happy to take my signature stamp away from me, go to another room, and use it to sign my name 5 or 6 times out of my sight, on legally binding agreements that she knew I could not read.

But at least there was no cheating on the address part.

There's Plenty of Nothing in Japan, Too

Holy crap!  I'm going to Japan tomorrow!

The biggest cliche in life Blogistan is weepy apologies for not posting more often and promises to be better in the future.  So, fine, this is one of those, but with a qualification that means you should take it slightly more seriously than usual.

I am, indeed, going to Japan tomorrow for a not-completely-known period of time (probably 4 months) and since:

1. I speak next to no Japanese, and get the sense that most Japanese people don't speak loads of English, and therefore I will have no-one to talk to;
2. Being on a bit of an adventure will give me something to write about for a change;
3. I've made all sorts of promises I'm not likely to keep about keeping in touch while I'm gone

... this blog is likely to be updated more often and resume its once marginal, as opposed to null, level of interestingness, at least while I'm gone.  The point will, as always, be to record the trivial and pointless, since the important and consequential can be recounted one-on-one at appropriate times without losing anything.  Also, to keep the keeping-in-touch a little more lively, my next project here is to finally start taking advantage of the Flickr page for pictures, and I think I'll even use my iWeb gallery, finally, for pictures that would violate the semi-anonymity I try to maintain here.   Finally, if there's anyone who reads this thing who doesn't pay any attention to the linklist (linkblog? delicious list? I don't know what you call that) on the right or the tumblog (top right), that's where most of the action has been lately.

Imperial Indian Summer Ale

The end of November is pretty late for a "what-I-did-this-summer" kind of post, but since significant adventures are about to ensue, and since I did not post for shit this summer, I feel like a catch-up post is called for before moving on to What Happens Next.  So, among the interesting things I did this summer:

• Went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone, which may not be an option next summer.
• Watched movies in McCarren Park Pool, which also may not be an option next summer.
• Dated a ridiculously great guy, which I hope will generally remain an option in many future summers.
• Ate at the all Mac-n-Cheese restaurant.
• Drank the very best IPA I think I've ever had right nearby at the Brooklyn Brewery.
• Cought a few Sunday afternoon barbecues at the Metropolitan.
• Saw a bunch of friends from times past and places distant.
• Saw the production of Hair in Central Park and got a good taste of why people fall in love with New York City.
• Spent a lovely day at the DIA Beacon, which was nice even for art-grumps like me.
• Spent a lovely day sailing around the New England coast.
• Got myself a jailbroke, busted-ass iPhone (but its busted-assedness only makes me love it more).
• Got a lot of good news about friends makin' babies.
• Gave up, once and for all, trying to learn to fold fitted sheets.
• Learned my way around Korean food.
• Got myself a black president!  (Okay, didn't really happen this summer).
• Last but not least: learned a little (a very little) Japanese.

And no doubt, a whole bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment.  I also, for reasons I can't explain, wrote several posts which I never actually posted.  I've decided to go ahead and post them where they would have gone had I posted them at the time, and link back to them from here.  I kind of want to tidy the place up before moving on, because this place is about to get busier... (see last item!)

On the other hand

At latest count, Californians, on the same day, have voted:

• 59.5% - 40.4% to transcend the dark past of America's history of racism and elect a black man as president
• 62.3 % - 37.7% to grant farm animals a marginal improvement in the quality of their short, miserable lives
• 52.5% - 47.5% to rescind the already-granted right for homosexuals to marry the people they love

I loved the time I spent living in California, and I'm glad that Californians, as an electorate, are cool with black people and chickens and cows. I admit, however, that I'm really disappointed to hear that, turns out, they're less okay with fags than they always seemed to let on.

I hope my readers will forgive me for making some targeted asides:
Dear California: I'm never moving back.
Dear Mormons: Fuck you. Seriously. I'm not a violent person, but I am going to punch a mormon in the face before I die.
Dear Straight, Liberal Friends: Thank you for voting my way, although I have to admit, I still find it unsettling to hear you talking about gay marriage as an abstraction.
Dear Straight Everybody Else: WTF is wrong with you?
Dear Florida: Don't even. I do not want to hear a fucking word from you. Sshh, freaks. Just sshhh.

Black people in the White House!

Just came back from voting for the first black president.  Took a picture of the line which I'll put up later, but for the moment, a few observations:

1. Long line; the line outside the building moved with deceptive speed.  My polling place is a school, and once you get inside, the line breaks up into separate lines for each district.  These lines move veeeeeeery slowly.
2. All the official signs were printed in English, Chinese, and Korean.  Weird there was no Spanish, but there were a couple of volunteers there helping Spanish-speakers.
3. I don't know why everybody went all crazy for the touch-screen voting machines.  The old mechanical ones they use here work just fine, and make a really satisfying "ker-chunk" sound when you pull the arm at the end.
4. I always heard Williamsburg was chock full o' homos, but I never saw a lot of evidence for it when out & about in the neighborhood.  But!  The homos - they vote!  Next time around, I'll take a shower and shave before I vote...
   

With Deep Regret

After sharing this morning's commute on the L train with a group of teenaged girls talking and laughing loudly, and last night's commute home with a young couple who were teasing, laughing at, and tickling each other over the duration of the ride, and yesterday morning's commute with two schoolboys excitedly recounting stories to their mother, I am sorry to conclude that on the subway, normal and healthy affiliative interactions constitute antisocial behavior.

Thus, my dear fellow New Yorkers, in the future I would ask that while riding the subway, that you please remain in a state of psychic isolation and refrain from reality-testing, gestures of physical affection, and other forms of life-enriching social intercourse until you have exited the train, and ascended the station stairs.

Thank you.