Entries this day: Dream Early blarg whew

Dream

6:29am JST Saturday 26 April 2003

I was with the guys from my old work at the Wolf Shop and there was a new cat there who said he appreciated how respectful I was of him after I asked him before leaning back against his boots while we were all piled into the back of a truck.

Early

7:03am JST Saturday 26 April 2003

For some reason I seem to be up early. Last night I told myself to get up the first time I woke up because I knew I couldn't finish two full sleep cycles before I had to get ready for work and I chose to experience a gentle transition from sleepin' to awake instead of shattered out of bed by my alarm.

Then I asked for the blessing of waking up at the exact right moment. Here I am, groggy but awake.

comments

Email: bhyllx@ *redacted*

Subject: Hello

Comment:
Hey to the Rob man,
I just wanted to take a brief moment to tell you that I met your Mother this past weekend at Spring Con at All Souls Tulsa. What a delightful person. We talked quite a bit and I must say that I was completely taken by her. I can see that you and Fred come by your wonderful ways naturally. Just to repeat myself, what a delightful person. Hope everything continues well in Japan, hope you havent lost your phone again, hope you havnt lost any of your innocents, I think I lost mine but it was pretty small to begin with. Good luck with your great adventure. Love,Bill(thats really bhyllx)permalink

blarg

10:14pm JST Saturday 26 April 2003

Just blah fuckin' blah today.

My emotion-meter fell and fell as I woke up this morning. Just feeling fucking pissy about everything and about nothing and what seems like all this shit I've got to do and how the FUCK is that possible if I have completely recreated my life so that I don't have YRUU, don't have a car, don't have *any* responsibilities except to work and I choose to study Japanese.

So what else is there? Okay, my debt, but I lump that in with work; I can't do anything about it until I get paid (in 2.5 weeks, baby!) (holy fuckin' shit in less than 24 hours, I will have been here one month).

There's letter writing. I enjoy getting letters. Shit, I *love* getting letters. And I know a good way to get them is to send them. I am so lucky that I've received far more letters than I've sent (mostly from janette) but I wish to return the favor. I realistically can't possibly keep up with the number of things Janette has sent me, but the rest would be doable. Jackie's letter was so awesome that I replied to it within 24 hours. But my mom's letter waited some days (weeks?) before I replied.

I've been really good at studying and I bought my dictionary, and I've allowed myself to be more bold in talking to people, but I still quickly fall back to broken English instead of trying to muck through in Japanese. But fuck what am I going to communicate using only hello, good morning, good night, how much is that?, where is that?, how old are you? and what's your phone number?

It's coming together. It's coming together.

Today at work I started out PISSED but I think it was really just anger resulting from stuffed down bottled up seething sadness because I'm like here all alone in this fucking country and I have not hugged anyone one single time. I've barely *touched* anyone and god I miss that so much. But I can't seem to be all, "hey man, will you hug me?" even to a non-male type person cause it's either A) too weird (like at work) or B) too weird (like with any of my friends who are not really great friends yet that I can just hug) or C) too expensive (like with a prostitute) (and I'm not just talking cash expensive; that would destroy my integrity with Janette and even more critically with myself)

And why are there no fucking paper towels in this country????? These Japanese motherfuckers wrap *EVERYTHING* in plastic I can buy one fucking tiny item at the store and they'll fucking put it in a bag!! Only *ONCE* with me asking has a clerk simply put tape on the items barcode to indicate it had been purchased. I mean check this shit out when Andrew and I were walkin' around Tsunashima he got a thing of FRENCH fries and they put them in a little french fry thing like always. Then they put it in a paper bag. Okay, fine. It was to go. But on *top* of the fries in the bag, they put a piece of like blotter paper to soak up the oil and *THEN* they put the paper bag into a plastic bag!! It's like dear holy fucking shit (sorry Marcel) if you're so concerned about recycling DON'T USE SO MUCH SHIT! Fucking country is the size of California and they won't use paper (read biodegradable) towels because of landfill problems, but they put *everything* into useless plastic bags.

Every time I pee at work, I have to dry my hands on my pants (or not wash them at all) cause there's no paper towels (and no air dryer)

So then during my first

wait

I arrived at work at like 8 fucking o'clock because for some weird reason I got up that early and just went cause I had told myself the night before to get up at the right time and just go, and for the life of me (shit I hate using cliches) I can't see the silver lining on that fucked up cloud hanging over my head but I try to see the bright side of things so I still trust there's a method to the madness and that I'm better off for having stuck to my guns and followed my original plan.

So I was in a pissy mood and couldn't focus on my flashcards cause they were just too many and all the wrong things to learn anyway and I didn't want to make any more so I just took a nap and basically got to sleep 5 minutes before people started arriving to begin the day.

But no one with a key arrived until 9:15 and in 45 minutes we had like 6 people all crammed into one little room all in each other's way because of the way shit is set up there and I've made some suggestions on what I think are pretty small things that would *REALLY* help the traffic flow around the place (one of the *first* things I thought is that we needed to have a system like in a doctor's office cause they've got a million files and before the day begins, they pull all the files they need and put them in a pile for easy access during the day and put them up when the file is complete. I didn't suggest this because I had been there 2 days, but lo, Guy suggested it (he's been there a couple years and suggested it before) and it got done. I was pretty mad at myself for not having spoken up; I'm going to be more vocal about the other suggestions that I think would really help the work flow. But I often keep shutting myself down with imagined responses (especially from motherfucking Steve who is so ingrained in the way things currently exist it's like he's just caught in this moldy stagnation and I think he likes it because he knows all the answers to the questions that come up and it makes him look smart when really he's just a perfect non-critically-thinking Nova clone that does all the things the beauracracy wants him to do or some shit like that) but as I get more comfortable with shit then... man fuck that I should just tell them what I think when I think it.

Anyway, we were all like bees buzzing into one another to crowd around (1rst) the schedule where everyone MANUALLY WRITES DOWN WHAT HAS BEEN PRINTED BY A COMPUTER which (and this is my first suggestion that I made to Cory, but I'll make it more vocally to everyone I see) leads to transcription errors and wastes a lot of time cause whoever prints this copy could just print two copies when they print this copy. You know what arguments were against it? (1) wasting paper (I USE AN ENTIRE SHEET OF PAPER to write my day's info down (whereas I'd only be using a strip otherwise)) and (2) sometimes the schedule changes. THE SCHEDULE CHANGES ANYWAY!! We still have to fucking go back to the master copy and look for changes and note them on our handwritten versions; we'd just write them on the printed versions! and (2econd) into the big file drawers to pull our files. It's bad enough that we are all bumping into one another on one row of files, but the files are arranged in three rows stacked vertically

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So we are bumping to people next to us *and* bumping into people above slash below us. It's easily arguable that there's no room to fix this, but what we need is to knock down the wall that's behind the files and split the two most commonly used rows away from each other vertically.

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The wall behind them is just for a closet that's mostly dead space anyway, with a bunch of old dusty shit that needs to be thrown or stored in some less valuable real estate. People (including Steve) were suggesting that the wall be knocked down, and when I lay on them this idea of splitting the rows, they've *got* to see how much easier it would be.

(3ird) is that we all crash into one another in the drop box area after pulling the files.. See.. seee... because there are only 10 minutes between classes to write down our thoughts on up to four people, put the files away slash give them to the next instructor who needs them (not that it's particularly simple to know who may need the files), and get the next files from the drop box slash shelves slash previous instructor, we are forced to basically pull all the files in the morning to plan what lessons we will teach that day. And because students usually come for 1 or 2 consecutive timeslots, and because we are not (usually) given the same student twice in a day, there are one or two or three instructors all looking for intersecting subsets of files, with no good way to communicate who is looking for (or has found (much less where they've placed (in the drop box, back in the main files, or on a table somewhere))) the same files except say/listen for things like "has anyone got any level fives?," but since we're all focusing on our own numbers: (!1!) Levels (7C, 7B, 7A, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2) and (@2@) four digit student numbers (e.g. 6540, 7204, 8399) (and some student's numbers have *changed* (this is a whole nother complication that I hardly yet have a good solution because I don't yet grok all the reasons the problem happens) so the computer printout might say 6324 but that file doesn't seem to exist and we look in the "pink book" (only 1 copy of this; it might be helpful to have 2) and find the number to see it's the student's *new* number in the computer but their file is still under their old number (maybe a solution is to relabel the file when the student gets a new number (though I don't know *when* students get new numbers--are the files readily available at that time, etc)) which means we might have two 4-digit numbers to deal with per student (and if we just forget about the old number, then when some instructor mentions it (the old number) we won't remember to tell them "oh the new number is ....")) and (#3#) numbers representing what room the lesson will be in (thankfully this doesn't usually change during the day, but it does change from day to day), and ($4$) what timeslot the lesson is in, and (%5%) the level of the students in the lesson, *and* (^6^) the lesson number we're choosing for the lesson (the algorithm for such choice is to open all the students' folders (if we have found them!), trying not to let pages fall out of up to four different folders and look at the summary sheet to see what lessons were done on what dates and trying to find a lesson in common that none of the students in the class have done at all or at least not done recently), we can hardly listen to multiple people uttering what files they are looking for "level five? anyone, level five, number six five seven nine for Tatomi Jiuku?" And because we've all at some point been using the same numbers, so it's not like we can easily say "okay brain, for the next five minutes if you hear 'level seven A', perk up" because we've only got a precious few minutes to parse *all* those numbers...... It's just fucked.

And (4rth) is that there's hardly enough room for everyone to work all at the same time. (pulling files, analyzing files, writing files, filing files)

- - - -

Jeeze pease Louise I've written enough about the fucked uppedness at work.

So anyway, I was in a piss poor mood at work to start because *no one* could find any of their files.. well a couple people did, but I sure didn't and I had just gotten up early and was tired tired tired and pissy and

Fuck.

Anyway, I made a conscious effort not to just flip out and go postal cause all I really want is a hug and for everything to be okay and for me to maybe *have* my files when I want them (shit no more about the files!) and I went to my first lesson and started out mad and consciously didn't take it out on the student (thank god it was a man to man (still dislike that term) and I did have his file) but paid attention to him and answered his questions happily and helpfully and basically cheerfully...

Short version is that my mood improved throughout the day (a lowpoint was realizing I hadn't brought to work the phone number to recover my bike) and it was great to see Laura in such a spritely mood (she's only got one more week in the hell hole of work and then goes back to her boyfriend in England) that's she's exuded for the past some days (we're having a party for her tomorrow after work; maybe I can get a hug under the guise of wishing her well (how fucked up that I'm thinking this way like it's so subversive to just get a hug) on her new adventures) and her happiness helped pull me up some (though I'm pretty sure there's still sadness sqwushed down in my somewhere) but then it went poopy again on my way home and I can't even really point to a reason why, but it just did.

I wandered around looking for the "other" internet cafe that is supposed to be cheaper and offer free drinks (and I finally found it (I spoke to someone, asking in Japanese "where is the internet cafe?" but then being totally lost when he told me where, but he took me to it, god bless him)) and lo, it is cheaper (320 first hour then 50 yen per ten mins, instead of 380 first hour then 50 yen per ten mins), plus they *do* have free drinks (but just tea and coffee), and they have free sweeteners and creamer and little "syrup" packets of sweeteners designed for tea, *and* they have more room instead of teeeny little cubicles into which I can barely squeeze, so I stayed for a couple hours once I found it.

Felt okay after that, but then after the nine million mile walk home, I was all pissy again and found myself looking at *every* bike to see if somehow I've been overlooking it for these two days, but no, none of them seem to be mine... but it irks the crap out of me the number of bikes that are parked right where mine was parked... I'm trying to see the light; to just Be in the moment without a bike... not without a bike, but just with my feet.

Once I got home I wanted to destroy something again and I ate a box of cookies (208 grams) and drank a liter of OJ that I bought at Lawson on the way home. That was my destructive behavior of the evening - self destruction.

I'm thankful that I was able to direct my energy into the project of writing this entry.

263 lines and 14,294 characters of ranting goodness.

12:11am JST Sunday 27 April 2003

comments

Name: j

Email: dreamon *redacted*

Subject: geez us

Comment:
rob!!!!
i read your entry and i'm exhausted. good grief.
1st- what made jackie's letter so awesome? (i want to know what constitutes an awesome leter in your estimation- it's an aries thing- you wouldn't understand)
2nd-i appreciate you coming out in print that we have a committment of some sort with one another, with your item about not wanting to destroy your integrity with me. wow
3rd-wow. i wish i could hug you. it would do me alot of good ,too. what is the deal?
4th-i forgot- o! hahaha- the papertowel rant!!! that is so funny. i hope this doesn't offend you, but you are so cute and funny as hell when you go off on shit like that.
5th-i got dizzy with your description of efficiency strangulation. damn! and don't you hate it when you come up with a good idea and someone else says it before you? ouououou seeth, gnash
D). no wonder you felt poopy! i'm afraid i would have cried and let snot run down my nose and ruined the files and discorporated right there. all you did was allow yoursef to be helped and ate a box of cookies. that's not a 10 on the self destruct-o-meter (i think you're great. but you know that>)
permalink

whew

12:13am JST Sunday 27 April 2003

Oh gosh.

I *thought* I had finished my liter of OJ. I grabbed the carton, but it was heavier than I thought (i.e. not empty) and I almost dropped it.... but I caught it before glushing its precious contents onto the floor, which woulda really soured my mood (and carpet (pun intended)). I'm thankful that I caught it. So thankful that I finished the carton.