a second year in The Life

Crap.

I’ve been so hit and miss on the old bloggerino (mostly miss) that I neglected to commemorate two years of blogdom last week. Thus, inspired by my more timely post last year, here’s a belated, バラバラ sort of update that should cover a number of things in a random sort of manner.

Alpha Tomamu and Anniversaries

Better late than never...

How was your weekend?

Ours at Alpha Tomamu was a fit of fantasy thanks to our over-generous Japanese teacher friends springing to put Heather and I up in that mad suite with the jacuzzi and the sauna and the three rooms.

a year in The Life

Well, it’s been a year since I started this thing. I figured I’d commemorate it with some updates. This is the pretty straight forward, year-of-blog update. I've got something a little more linguistically interesting in the offing, but it will have to come a bit later.

First, I ain’t coming home

Despite thinking I was pretty clear on my decision in the Christmas cards I sent to most people, as well as in my six month post, it appears that there are some folks who are still getting surprised by my news that I recontracted with JET and will be hanging on in Furubira as the ALT until July 2011 at least. So here it is; one more time:

I’m not coming home in August 2010.

Right now I’m scheduled to be back in August of 2011, but there is always the possibility of extending my contract for a further year.

That being said, I’m coming home soon

Sorry to be contrary, but I’m coming home for a visit to Canada this July. The first bit will be in Vancouver for Amy’s birthday (that’s two years running, Thede. I hope you’re keeping track…) and Amanda’s wedding, and the second bit will be in Toronto to catch up with the family and all you mad city rats. However, for reasons of paid vacation limits and planning to work at Tokyo Orientation (even though they decided I wasn’t genki enough >:( ), it will be a very short visit. Therefore, I’m really hoping I can set up some kind of mass do so I can make sure to see everyone.

So where is Furubira, anyway?

I took a look back at those first posts and realized that I got the location of my town pretty wrong. So, though Amy’s likely the only one to care, here are some revised maps to show where I’m at in this mad archipelago.

Further, Furubira is a small fishing town of 3,800 souls—far less than the 14,000 it boasted at its prime, back when we had movie theaters and herring mansions, back before a change to off-shore fishing laws started a steady bleed of our fisherman population. I’d love to make a romantic comparison to the outports of Newfoundland, but the reality is that the fish processing our town is still engaged in seems to keep us running.

The Schools

The junior high school second graders who used to alternate between telling me to leave and telling me to die are now third graders who tell me I’m cool and that I should stay. They’re also entertaining themselves by yelling “hige!” at me from time to time and laughing as I stroke my beard in epic fashion. The junior high first graders who used to be the apple of my predecessor’s eye have slowly degraded into junior high second graders who are only now discovering the joys of telling me to die. Thankfully, my new junior high first graders became far less straight-jacket insane in their transfer over from sixth grade at the elementary school, and there are some among their number that completely blow me away with their level of English acumen.

The Elementary students are angels, like always. Well, the new fifth graders have inherrited the manic mantle from the old sixth graders, complete with the dubious honour of having their homeroom teacher leave on undisclosed, yet surely unrelated, indefinite leave. The new sixth graders are developing some attitude, but it can’t get the better of their genuine interest in learning. The new fourth graders continue to prove themselves to be wunderkind in the interest and ability they demonstrate in our twinning with my mother’s second grade class. The third graders are as fun as third graders should be, the second graders are suffering bit from a possible Sensei-Importance of English disconnect, and the first graders are the light of any day. God, that I could spend my every day trying to come up with new and creative ways to make them explode into those uninhibited peals of laughter. I’m convinced exposure to my first graders could cure cancer, those kids are so cute.

The High School is as a slowly closing High School should be, I guess. Since the year change in March-April, the third graders have graduated and moved on, the seconds have become thirds, the firsts have become seconds, and the first year class is no more. With only two classes to teach there now, I spend even less time at the school, and when we go through the whole process again next March, I’ll have only 50 minutes to teach at the high school, once every two weeks. It will be worth it, though, as the now-second-and-then-third graders at the high school have always been my very favourite students, and my Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) there is unquestionably my most manic, most entertaining teacher. He makes mad things like this on the regular.

The BOE

The other half of any ALT’s job: The Board of Education. Or, perhaps, the Bored of Education when we have to report to it on days when the schools are out and make work to do as our coworkers seem just as confused about what we’re doing there as we are. Thankfully, my BOE seems to be better than most: it is just the right mix of invested in my well-being while not being overbearing in my life. The people there are also as muppet-like as I am.

I’ve got hair

Didn’t say all these updates were going to be particularly interesting, but I’m thin on material, and this is the most hair I’ve had in a while, so deal.

And I’ve got a lady.

Which seems like a fundamentally impersonal way to talk about it, but just like with the recontracting thing, people still seem to be surprised by the news. I guess my less-than-subtle implications could have stood to be far less subtle. Her name’s Heather, and she’s from the UK. She showed up over here in the same JET group as I, and we’re placed not too far apart up here in Hokkaido, with Sapporo as a convenient meeting point between us. To quote the Barenaked Ladies, “she loves me, and her body keeps me warm…”

And since it's what started all this off, here is my own, snowier take on that photo by that Bassguitar guy on Flickr; the one that was my first image of Furubira. I'd been meaning to photograph these rocks for a while, and I finally got the chance in early April. Back then, I said that the picture had convinced me that Furubira was the kind of place I wanted to be. Now, twelve months later, I'm still thinking the same thing.

Here and Now

Pedalling through the park, after I'd told you my dream about losing you in time, we sat up straight on our bicycles, and we started to put the pieces of us together. We realized that there were just too many coincidences: Too many congruencies, too many parallel tangents. We were too right. We were too goofy, and we were too mad.

And suddenly it all made sense:

Time travel.

It had to be time travel that conspired to bring you here when here was the last place you'd ever want to be. Time travel that landed us in this right place, at this right time.

It was likely me who sprung it: ever the grandiose romantic. In my greying years, I popped out of a temporal singularity, all pinstripes and bowler hats and walking canes, all monocles and curly moustaches and intricate pocket watches. I must have strode into that office, and pinned that dragon of a co-ordinator to her chair, telling her in a faux british intonation, some four decades wrong, that Okinawa couldn't have you, that you were meant for the frozen north.

And stepping back off her, I adjusted that pocket watch and winked off back to the future.

She, for her part, was left agog, wondering why an apparition so similar to her decades-dead daddy should come to her over a matter so minuscule as the appointment of exchange English teachers.

Adventure the Third: Words, words, words

This is the third instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series. It's about the HAJET winter conference in Furano. However, it's also one for Craig, who asked for his brother to send him some words (“as many or as few as you want”). What I wrote him was far more elegant than any of the stilted, formal stuff I tried to bang together as a summary for an excellent weekend. Call it brotherly love; call it the inspiration that comes from unconditional fraternal faith.

I found a new word for family this weekend:

HAJET.

It describes a force that pulls you out of your cold little corners of the countryside and forces you into warm spaces with people who were only mere acquaintances before. It feeds you and it entertains you and it makes evident your commonalities so nothing can stand in the way of meeting and greeting. It describes a degree of responsibility as you are elected to the role of Social Coordinator in this family, and it falls to you, now, to make sure the reunions happen, to make sure that all the distant relations are invited and attending. In the end, it describes a support structure for when you’re in distant lands, living in the future of all you used to know—when all of the people you once counted on now seem to live only behind windows in computer monitors.

I found a new word for beauty this weekend:

Furano.

It describes a sunny, blue-sky day, where the blizzards from yesterday have assured that all of the trees in the alpine have come to curves under bulbous, weighty clouds of snow. It describes taking in the width and breadth of a grid-paper agricultural valley from on high in a ski lift, climbing the back of a mountain you’d prematurely decided wasn’t worth it. It describes the thick grey of snowclouds just skirting before the sun, enough so that they can release the first crystalline trailers of their vast loads of snow, and yet they can still let that sun shine through to gild the flakes as they fall: vibrant stars on a sea of blue mountain shadows.

I found a new word for grace this weekend:

Snowboard.

It describes a condition of having your feet securely fastened to a plank of metal and fiberglass and plastic. It describes how you hook the thing into your very bone structure at the ankles, making it one further extension of your spine, so that you can eventually control it like an appendage of your self. On this thing, you ride mountains with control and ease unlike anything ever accomplished on two planks, and should you hesitate and fall it is only the beginning of your next rise, your next ride. It is a word that provides so much confidence as to be consummate; a word that avows that your only obstacle is yourself.

I found a new word for inspiration this weekend:

Yoichi.

It describes a place that is so void of people and spirit on the surface as to be the perfect hiding place for dreams and ideas. It is a terminal for words, and ethereal, Ghibli-esque cat-trains pull up to disgorge walking, talking metaphors and smiling similes. The ghosts of poets and philosophers haunt the rafters of it and call forth images from your weekends with phantom voices. As you sit, immobile, in such a place, if you have eyes enough to see them, the ideas pile in around you: standing one on top of the next so thick that they eventually have to suck in their guts to squeeze a few more in through the sliding doors. In this place, you feed on all of them like a verbiage vampire: typing them all into that little touchscreen keyboard in a way that builds momentum until your fingers are firing across it at the speed of thought. As your bus pulls up outside, and you’re forced to leave the place, you hasten to cram all the words you can into your Tupperware containers and your Ziplock bags, trailing them out behind you like cigarette smoke as you bolt through the doors.

And I found a new word for affection this weekend:

It describes a book that is all illuminated with bright illustrations of kindness and caring and love for all things, and yet you can’t make out the text worth a damn. It describes fingers that will crawl over and entwine with yours like tarantulove, seeking out your prints and lifelines with a dexterity and dedication that only you yourself ever seemed to espouse. It describes unexpected revelations, set in formal, theoretical languages that only amount to so many arbitrary letters when you’re speaking in tongues. This new word speaks of voids between arms and the forms that fill them; of the earthquake, gooseflesh shivers that can be set off by the most tentative of brushes; of soft, butterfly kisses that resound with the force of avalanches.

But that’s the word I can’t share with you; not here, not yet. For you see, brother, these words of ours, they have power. The Allfather hung, and died, and was reborn on The Tree, a sacrifice to himself, for but a handful of words.

So some of these words I’ll give you, but some I keep for myself. Regardless of whether I share them with you or not, these words are my words, and if you ever tried to use them, they'd be my words still. However, if you need words of your own for these things, then take heart because they’re out there, and you’ll find them.

Mountain Days 5, 6