pants
What a crap week.
Anyway.
In a conscious effort to ward off the impending onset of death that is starting to warn me by making me wheeze when I bend over or making my wallet tingle when I walk past any shop that sells curry donuts, I have decided to make adjustments in my life.
So now, I am no longer just Jon, I am AIKIDOJON, ARM-TWISTING FIGHTER OF JUSTICE, FREEDOM AND OTHER ABSTRACT PRO-SOCIETY NOUN. I have been doing Aikido for about a month and a half now and I’m finding it rather fun in a kind of embarrassing masochistic way. You see, for reasons that probably go beyond my understanding of my own psyche, I really seem to ENJOY being chucked on the floor, having my arm twisted in ways its never (meant to have) been before, and generally being knotted into a guffawing lump of gaijin meat. I’m not sure what it is, whether it is the exhilaration of learning more about ones body or the fact that I’m looking forward to smiting my JHS kids into a dribbling, squealing submission the next day (”I’m sorry Sayuri-chan, you have conjugated the past progressive tense of ’swim’ incorrectly - I’ll have to break your face right off”), but I find myself ACTUALLY SMILING whilst being hurt. Naturally, this makes me feel like an estranged twat. As a foreigner I’m already treading on thin tatami (hoho! Now that’s what we call metaphor localisation! where did my life go) with regards to making small mistakes that end up either reinforcing incorrect stereotypes or simply result in them thinking I am a moronic crackpot, so grinning like a clown who just had a marijuana enema when I am in intense pain probably isn’t helping matters.
Anyway, I do enjoy Aikido. I especially like the informality of the sessions ie. nobody barks at you for doing stuff wrong - which is handy for me seeing as an arthritically crippled pensioner with anvils for hands probably has spades more manual dexterity than me. I also like the fact that none of it is offensive - its all defensive. There is no standing in lines, screaming whilst punching invisible foes, then finishing lessons with back-slapping and saying things like “COBRA KAI! COBRA KAI! man dude we rock!”. Almost everything is done on the basis of “right, so this is what you should do when some git is grabbing you here”, although the actual kata are given slightly more lyrical names than that.
In other news this week, I was stopped on the street in the city and had my photo taken for a ‘fashion’ magazine. Japan has this whole genre of magazines dedicated to “imeji” (image, in the sense of ones appearance). Entire shelves at the bookstore are full of magazines of this type, which invariably have pages and pages of people like me who had been stopped at random in the street, had their photo taken and then asked where they purchased their clothes and for how much. I suppose the point of these magazines is to help the Japanese youth to be as non-autonomous as possible (”he looks cool. I want to look like him”) although the point was slightly lost on me as:
a) I couldn’t really remember where I bought my clothes from, and b) Most of the clothes I was wearing that day were from the UK
So after giving them places that were either in England or places that I had simply fabricated right there on the spot (SHAVEDMONKEYCARROTPUREE store) and seeing their faces gradually stiffen into a blank couldntgiveafrick stare, I detected they had telepathically agreed that I was a really crap person to have stopped. Anyway, they told me I will definitely be in the magazine, so I’ll be buying that next month.
I have new glasses! I can categorically state that until 3 days ago, I had never taken an eye test in Japanese. Japanese eye tests are pretty much exactly the same as English ones, except for the fact that you don’t understand what they are saying and you end up with massively under/over prescribed lenses that make your eyes bleed and your brain implode. In all seriousness though, I was very pleased with the service from my local optometrist, especially seeing as I waltzed in and immediately took residence next to the 10′000-yen and under section (the cheapest), rebuffing all attempts to coax me to the more expensive selections with a polite “haha! I don’t have enough money for those! (frick off)”. When I collected my glasses it wasn’t a simple // of “here you go, now pay me, PAY ME YOU FILTHY TURDBUCKET” as would be the situation in the UK - when I collected my glasses, they actually heat moulded them with a little gas stove so they would fit the shape of my ears perfectly. I was chuffmongered.
Finally, Happy Birthday mum. I’ll send you my best wishes but I know that you don’t really need them seeing as you are on holiday at a beach in Langkawi, which is about as luxuriously far removed from my current situation as you can get without actually slapping me in the face and saying “HA HA” like Nelson from Simpsons.
