Now that the JLPT is out of the way, I can finally start focusing on preparations for leaving this little isle and going back home. There’s so much shit I need to get done (moving between countries is never easy, even if it is “moving home”), and so little time to do it. No rest for the wicked.
Good thing I can send things via boat from Japan (which you can’t from Sweden, for some reason). Takes months for the stuff to get to the destination but costs nearly nothing.
This blog entry is anti-religious in nature. Sensitive reader discretion advised.
It struck me earlier — and I’m sure I’m not even remotely unique in this — that the evolution of a lie is every bit as real and every bit as applicable to Darwin’s laws as the evolution of a species, if not quite as complex, nor elegant.
To explain this further, let’s look at the points which make a lie a good lie, in no particular order. A good lie,
Let’s take a few (silly, perhaps) examples of lies which fail one or several of the above, making use of James and Hanna, a happy couple who happens to be lying to each other all the time.
James comes home at 1.30 am, and he got off work at 9.00 pm. He smells of alcohol.
James: Honey I’m home.
Hanna: Dude, where’ve you been? Work ended hours ago, didn’t it?
James: Yeah, well, I uh… was working… um… overtime…
The story in its simplicity is like something out of any couple’s lives. James is obviously lying, or hiding something, simply because he is speaking without conviction (#3). Without a background check we can’t say for sure, but there might be a case of breaking #4 (reliable source) as well, if James does this often enough. #2 (is believable) fails simply because #3 and #4 fails, but this isn’t always the case.
James, who in this scenario never, ever lies, comes home and excitedly opens his mouth.
James: Hanna, my god, you have no idea who I just met outside! I just met ELVIS, babe, can you BELIEVE it?
Hanna: Not really, no.
Here we have a more “solid” story, in a sense. It can be elaborated upon (#1), it’s definitely told with conviction (#3), it comes from a reliable source (#4), and it cannot be easily disproven (#5) (I mean, Elvis might not be there when Hanna takes a look, but that might just mean Elvis took off somewhere), it’s probably rather interesting (#6), and nothing is to say that Harry can’t “recall” having seen Elvis on other occasions, or that he might recall having heard someone else say THEY saw Elvis, etc (#7). It does however fail simply because it’s not believable (#2). It’d take an idiot, but I’m sort of excluding idiots from this. What’s more intriguing to me is when large numbers of intelligent people believe a lie, than when a bunch of drooling goons do.
Anyway, let’s look at another example.Here we’re also introducing Harry and Rebecca, and you’ll soon see why.
Rebecca and Harry are eating dinner.
Rebecca: Harry, there’s something I need to tell you.
Harry: What, dear?
Rebecca: Last night, I heard yelling coming from the neighbor.
Harry: Mmhm?
Rebecca: So I went and took a look through the window.
Harry: Oh? Did you see anything?
Rebecca: No, it was too dark, but I think the neighbor beat his wife.
Harry: Oh, really! That’s horrible!
Rebecca: Isn’t it though!
Later, Harry and Hanna at the office.
Harry: So it seems my neighbor is beating his wife.
Hanna: What? You serious? Did you call the police?
Harry: No, not yet, but I’m going to keep an eye out and if I see him do it I’m not going to hesitate.
Hanna: Damn bastard.
Later, at Hanna’s and James’s.
Hanna: Harry’s neighbor is a fucking wife beater.
James: What? This day and age, that kind of shit still goes on, huh?
Hanna: Oh yeah, apparently. Poor woman. And the kids must live a nightmare.
James: No doubt they must. Somebody should do something.
Sort of long, but the point is, we don’t know whether the neighbor is in fact beating his wife or not, since ultimately, Rebecca never actually did see anything. All she heard were yells, and yelling doesn’t equal domestic violence in any court anywhere (that I know of, but don’t quote me on that one). However, Rebecca didn’t really lie to Harry, and Harry didn’t really lie to Hanna, and Hanna didn’t really lie to James, but ultimately it might be one big fat lie altogether, and the neighbor is now painted a fucking wife beater because of it. Let’s propose this is a lie, and see 1) if and/or how it evolves, and 2) whether it “qualifies” according to the 7 rules I dictated above. Let’s start with the latter.
And I believe that’s exactly what we see here. A lie that is evolving. But it’s evolving in a very simplistic fashion, and Darwin has very little to do with things. It’s got much more to do with people simply hearing what they want to hear, and people spicing up a story or skipping boring details from a past conversation just to have a more interesting story.
So with all this said, the life span of the lie in all the examples above is, well, extremely short. It’s a matter of minutes, hours, up to a few weeks, maybe a year at best. A really intriguing phenomenon to look at, however, is the evolution of a lie through years and years, decades, centuries, millennia, and how that lie gradually manifests into one, usually large, comprehensive lie with thousands of intertwined lies keeping its very core alive.
Let’s say that somebody in ancient times suddenly begins to tell people around him that the constellations in the sky are gods. Let’s say his story is very simple. He tells a simple story about how Teur, a god of lightning, lives in the sky and sees the people below. Maybe he tells this to a child who’s misbehaving, saying that the frightening big god Teur will eat him for breakfast if he doesn’t shapen up, and then perhaps others want to hear of the god and so he might suddenly find himself telling about Teur to the entire village by the fire late at night, pointing up at the constellation. The people might be skeptical about it, and give him weird looks, but the longer they look, the more they find that the constellation does indeed look a bit like a big person holding a lightning bolt. They might ask him where he found out about this god that they had heard nothing about before, and he might simply smile mysteriously at them and say nothing.
Then a thunderstorm arrives, and he shouts that the god Teur is angered at the people for not believing enough, and some might believe while others remain skeptical. But it’s so interesting the younger ones think, so they want to believe. As the years pass, and as this somebody who began talking about Teur has passed away, others step up and spin upon the tale, adding new heroes or villains to the story, and pointing their constellations out on the starry sky. This is truly where things become interesting, but I want to take a moment to look at the 7 rules first.
Now is where the true evolution begins. The story is now rather spread throughout not only the village where it originated, but to the surrounding villages as well, and now, people in various places are adding to the story from inspiration or boredom or whatever else. Now, people of ancient times might be gullible in comparison to people of our times — obviously — and one might even argue that people didin’t actually believe in their various gods or the various stories about said gods, but they simply listened because it was the entertainment of that time. I’d argue against that for various reasons* but regardless, the people might be gullible but they weren’t stupid. When someone stood up one evening and started telling about Teur’s pet dinosaur Hagrid the Muffin-muncher upon whom Teur rode about slaying bad people, the listeners most likely ignored the tale, or they might even get a little nervous about the disrespectful manner in which the storyteller lied about the god.
(* but the most prominent argument is simply that there were rules to follow and things to do to appease the gods, and whenever there was a particularly harsh winter or particularly dry spring, and greeds died and people starved, the people were blamed and did blame each other for their lack of faith or lack of sacrifices to their gods — so it doesn’t simply end at “entertainment”)
I’m sure that fairly soon after Teur’s epic tale (from here on referred to as TET) began spreading, people were beginning to be careful about what they said, so as to not upset their audience. Even still, a lot of “branches” of the imaginary tree which we call TET would end up “wilting” before long. They might survive a single night or a week or maybe even years, but as decades pass, and as people keep telling stories regarding TET, the most stable, the most successful, the most evolved stories would be the only ones left, and with time, the weak links would gradually be wittled away from a story that, at this point in time, many years after the last person who heard the very first story from TET told for the very first time had passed away, had become truth — undeniable truth — to the people.
The “truth” is undeniable not only because it is so damn rock solid at this point, with the evolution and refining process it’s been undergoing for, at this point, hundreds of years, but it’s also undeniable because it, in and of itself, requires that the people believe. It contains something outside of the 7 rules I put up above — namely the aspect of “requiring belief, or else”. If you don’t believe and then a week later, your pet pig Punky falls down from the hay stack and breaks his neck, everybody around you will point fingers and tell you, and everyone else, what happens to the disbeliever. Every misfortune, no matter how circumstantial or random, will be seen as a sign from Teur’s great palace up on the sky, that you be careful what you wish for. If, god forbid, a draught or other natural disaster would struck, ill-timed with your thoughtlessly spoken “I don’t really believe in a big dude in the sky holding a lightning and having 5 billion kids and whatever else”, you might find yourself sacrificed to pacify the very god you disbelieve in.
As a side note, one might wonder why a lie like this necessarily requires that people “must” believe or “must” do this and that in the “or else dot dot dot evil omen” fashion, and that’s simply out of two reasons. 1) It’s simply good for the survival of the lie itself — that one must believe in it, and 2) it’s great to make people do things; a parent who’s got an obnoxious kid might say that Teur has a habit of slapping inobedient kids over the head with his lightning bolt, leaving them bold like old men for the rest of their lives, simply to make their kid listen, and a ruler might say that Teur has a habit of slapping disloyal farmers over the head with his lightning bolt, leaving them, well, dead like a rock, simply to make the people more “tame”. Give a bag of candy to a kid and the bag won’t remain closed. Or full. It simply works that way.
Then one day, this undeniable “truth” prospers more than ever, as its grip on the people is stronger than ever, as it, in its natural progression through time, has evolved and evolved into this rock solid fact, is torn down, simply because someone somewhere made some calculation or realization that was revolutionary. But it doesn’t usually go down without a fight, this lie, because with its evolution through time, it’s no doubt encountered countless times where people have “refuted” it or where people have bumped into surrounding cultures with their own lies, wherein a “lie versus lie” epic battle occured and the lie somehow came out top-side. The lie isn’t new to fighting to survive, and it does so using any means possible. So this rather intelligent lass or lad who calculated or realized what would clearly mark the end of Teur’s reign, now probably finds her/him rather unwelcome in most places. People simply don’t want to listen. Even if they do, they would either get angry about the obviously disrespectful tone in which said scholar spoke about the gods, or they would get afraid, or whatever else, but who in their right mind would readily tear down the walls which contain their understanding of the universe, just because some freaking scholar said their universe is wrong. Noone. Not a soul.
But the lie would eventually and inevitably fall, as science took its place and explained what was unexplainable in the past. And this latter part is most likely quite close to how the Greek mythology was “ended” as an actual religion in the minds of the people (I’d have to look it up — it’s possible that the Greek mythology, just like the Norse mythology, was devoured by a more powerful and stable religion).
Even to this day, we see lies that have evolved through the millennia, simply because they cannot be proven in the same manner that Teur being a big giant glowing bunch of dots in the sky could be. Even if parts or huge chunks of one of these lies was frankly and flat out disproven, the core would remain, simply because it cannot with any amount of science or any amount of thinking, be logically or otherwise disproven. It’s a perfect lie, a lie evolved into a form that takes it beyond a lie into something much more, something much deeper — a religion.
But it’s not quite yet time for me to go back home to Sweden. However, the return date has been moved forward a few months — I am now planning on going back in the end of December, instead of the end of March. So suddenly I am at the “only a couple of months (4) left” milestone. Feels weird. Up until now I’ve felt like I had all the time in the world. Since I probably flunked the JLPT back in July, it also means I’m going to have to put some effort into my studies now. Oh well.
… I miraculously managed to fall asleep around 3am, and miraculously managed to wake up at 8.30 am, and then miraculously managed to go to bed around 1 am that day, and even more miraculously managed to get up at 7 am the day after. Well, that would be today. And now I’m definitely ready for bed and it’s 10.30 pm.
This ought to be the shortest blog post I’ve done in years.
Last year around September, Rico, one of my best friends among my Swedish-friends-in-Japan group went back home to Sweden after 6 months here. About a month ago, he came back to Japan to visit, but he went to Nagoya instead of Kyoto, so we couldn’t really hang like we did “back in the days”, but he visited Kyoto occasionally so we did hang a few times. Yesterday, he went to Osaka where Kim, another good friend of mine, is now living, and I decided to go meet them up and hang.
Rico was going back to Nagoya early this morning (the bus left at 7.30 am) so he had decided to simply be up all night partying and then sleep on the bus home. Me and Kim decided that we’d simply tag along until we got too tired, and in the end, we simply ended up staying up until Rico left for the bus.
It started out with us going to Kim’s place together with his girlfriend, where we had dinner and played Wii Sports with punishment game (the loser out of the 4 of us downs whiskey/coke) for awhile until Kim’s girlfriend had to go home. After that we went to Namba and walked around looking for places to hang at, went into some bar here and some other place there, met two guys from Texas of all places. The Texans proclaimed “we know a good place down the road”, so in blind faith we followed them around for about an hour or so before we realized they had no idea what they were doing, so I said “you guys go into this bar. we’ll be there later tonight”, and moved on. We walked around for some more, then went into McD’s and grabbed food, before we moved on to a karaoke place where we spent the remanining 2 hours.
I was originally intending on staying at Kim’s place over the night, but at this point it was 5.20 am, and the trains to Kyoto were in traffic at that point, so I got on the train home instead. For the record, trying to stay awake for a near 1 hour train ride when you woke up 21 hours earlier is tricky business, but I managed to get off at my stop. So I got back home around 7 am, went to bed and woke up at 4 pm. Usually I get up at 7 am every morning, holidays included, summer vacations included, so this was very unusual, and frankly, I’ve felt like the world is kind of glitched throughout the day. I used to do this all the time, but now that I haven’t in a long while, it really does affect me in ways it didn’t use to. Could be that I’m too old for this kind of stuff now, I don’t know. Walking outside and seeing the darkness really shocked me. I woke up 4 hours ago! And it’s dark?
How long will it take before I get my sleeping pattern straightened out again I wonder….
So last Tuesday I somehow managed to forget I had work in the evening. To be honest, it’s not odd, really, because up until now I’ve always gone directly from school to work with no pause in between, since school was in the evening. Now, school has switched for me to mornings, and on top of that, I had spring break so I had no school. On top of the top of that, I was frantically looking for a photograph I’d taken a few weeks earlier because I needed one. For an insurance that I was going to create later that day (my previous insurance was Swedish and was simply put a pain in the ass to use — admittedly, it’s better than the Japanese insurances, but I can at least use theirs by simply throwing them on the counter when I go to a hospital or whatnot — and it expires on the 14th of April and being without insurance is unhealthy for your wallet, and your luck!).
Anyway, it’s suddenly 5.10 pm (I still hadn’t found those photos by the way) and work starts at 6, and this is the point where I go “holy shit I have work today!”, so I rush out the door, jump on my trusty, shiningly red bicycle, and start pedaling away. Shortly thereafter, I managed to run over a bump and the back tire goes “boom”. Which usually means flat tire, but this bike just has a habit of going boom occasionally. I guess it likes fireworks.
In any case, I checked the tire, and there was barely any air left. Well, I happened to know about an air pump thingie just a few blocks away so I carefully pedaled thataway to fill the tire up again. “If I’m lucky, it just got a little scared and went “pooh!” but there’s no real hole,” I surmised, and pedaled the uneventful way there, filled the tire up, and all is well.
Well. Except for the fact I now am in even more of a hurry getting to work. So I hurry.
This is Kyoto. Kyoto is a place that is coincidentally adored by the sun. And I mean Adored. I am wearing sunglasses but the road happens to be going straight west, and the sun happens to be in a position right square in front of me beaming lovingly at me and everything else. Me, I love the sun, coming from a country where the sun is like a chaste virgin going for the first time to a motorcycle gang prom — if motorcycle gangs do have proms — that is, kind of a tentative cautious tip-toedness in general. But here I was facing a problem, because with the sun where it was, and — oh my, my sunglasses sure are dirty — I came to the conclusion that, well, I don’t actually see very much of what’s in front of me. Is that a pillar on the ground in front of me? I better turn. Hm, why am I spinning in the air. Hm. why am I lying on the ground. My iPod.
My iPod is singing away in my ears. How the hell did those little ear thingies NOT fall out during my Olympic Acrobatics Award Winning move just now? In any case, I found myself lying front down with both my hands pushed against the ground as if I’m about to start either break dancing or doing push-ups. As I get up I realize I’ve crashed into like 10 bikes that were parked on the side of where I decided to spontaneously become airborne.
The insurance. That’s honestly the first thing that struck my mind. See, I was pretty sure my Swedish insurance was still valid, but I wasn’t 100% sure. There was this 0.1% chance that the insurance applied to April 5 2008 – April 5 2009, since April 5 is the date of my arriving in Japan (if you think about it, though, they have no idea of the dates so it’s obvious that it would be based on the day the school started, but I didn’t think that far at the time) … in which case I might now need medical care, and I’m without insurance. Lovely.
I hurt my hands pretty bad. Sprained both of them, in fact. But I didn’t realize that until later, so I got on my bike (which was, miraculously, okay) and went to work. At the very least after all this trouble (and .. pain) I was not going to miss work. I got there 15 minutes before work started. And the damn students were late that day! Grr. 
Later on, my girlfriend’s mom suggested I stay at their place for a couple of days so my hands would get a chance to heal up. So I took her up on the offer and crashed there until just now. Hence I’ve been quite gone, in case you wondered (but then again, my online presence these days is sort of like an old man in a wheelchair’s presence at the folk dance hall … it might happen, on a rare occasion, but nothing seems to come of it).
Oh, and in case you wondered, yes, typing this long blog entry hurt there at the end, but I wanted to get it out of my system. Read pain between the lines.
A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to study Japanese. I’m to this day not sure why, but together with my good friend Kenneth (who shortly thereafter jumped ship, whereas I continued forward) began to delve into the mysterious land of the weirdly-shaped squigglies.
During this time, I also got in contact for the first time with my girlfriend. I had decided at some point that the best way to learn is to simply start talking to Japanese people, so I looked around and signed up for this “find friends” web site, saying I was looking for people all over Japan who could tell me about their city. You see, I was planning on going to Japan to study, but I had no idea about where in Japan I wanted to go — I knew I did not want to go to Tokyo, but that was about it.
So shortly thereafter, I got dozens of emails from Japanese people. Or should I say, Japanese girls. The guys seem to have reservations about talking to other guys, for some reason. Even today, 3 years later, I still don’t know what’s up with that, though I have my (qualified) guesses.
Regardless, one of those dozens of people happened to be my girlfriend. We got off on a pretty rough start, to be honest. We more or less got into an argument right after the “hello”, and it kind of continued like that the nextcoming months, with us having our little bouts here and there. Despite these little bouts, the one person I continued talking to for any lengthier period of time was my girlfriend. The others peetered out into nothingness, whereas the relationship between me and her kept growing stronger. I had no feelings beyond friendship toward her at all, at that point.
She came to Sweden for the first time in April 2007, a little over a year after we first started talking (in February 2006), and spent a week touring Stockholm with me. It was during this time that we got together, and the time we could spend to dwell on our newfounded relationship in person, was fleeting. She returned to Japan and neither of us shed a tear. It was when I got back to my apartment that I really felt that something was missing, but it was fleeting. She’d only been there for a week after all.
The months that came, I made a lot of important decisions. In the end, I hadn’t really been inspired by any of the prefectures in Japan, so I decided to send out emails to a buttload of schools that seemed promising. I sent out about 40 emails and got replies ranging from:
“helo
thank u for emial !!!!!!!^.^”
(and nothing else written beyond that, no application forms, etc) to emails that looked like anything a professional native would whip up. One of the latter was from a school here in Kyoto, which I ended up choosing due to the friendliness and helpfulness of the principal.
My girlfriend and I decided that she should come spend a month in Sweden in August (2007), and so we were together for a second time. To be objective about the time is impossible, because it just wasn’t normal. We were living a sort of dream, with no problems, no responsibilities, and all the time in the world to do whatever we wanted — I was having a summer vacation at my school, and had enough money to survive without taking on a job.
At least that was how it was before her return-date came closer. In the end, we found ourselves once more doing the farewell thing, and this time as well, no shedding of tears on her sake, and none on mine. Not that we weren’t sad, mind you. It’s just that, at least in my case, if I started I know it’d just make things worse, and I think she had the same idea. Watching her back as she walked through security, I realized I wouldn’t see her for another 8 months. Presuming my plans to go to Japan actually worked out right.
I will soon have been in Japan for a whole year (April 5th, to be precise), and during this time we have both gone through a lot of things together, some good, some bad, some disastrous, but we’ve somehow managed to get through to the other side, if a bit roughed up. Each time a hardship has come our way, we’ve overcome it and grown stronger, both individually — especially I — but also as a couple. It’s a normal thing, I guess, but I marvel at it sometimes.
Last Sunday (the 1st of March), my girlfriend and I walked around Kyoto and looked at temples, ate lunch at an Italian restaurant, dinner at an exclusive restaurant in Hotel Granvia near Kyoto Station, overlooking the city lights. Afterwards before we went to her parents’ place that night, I asked her if she would marry me, and she said ‘yes.’ And no tears were shed. And the smile on her face was exactly right, somehow.
I felt so terribly old when I walked out of the school building on Friday, last week. Old and tired, like a grumpy old fart. Tired and empty, because I had failed. I had failed in a way more distinct and more defined, more clear cut, than I am used to failing. I can shrug failures off as, if at worst only in part, indirect consequences of outstanding circumstances of which I had no control, or too little control, but this time…
During the winter vacation, we were all given a little notebook with problems for us to solve during our vacation — that’s to be expected from the school I’m attending as they’re quite strict in general. One of the problems was to “write a speech”. We’d done that in the past, but those were restricted to 1 minute only, so there wasn’t a lot of room to get elaborate or advanced or indepth. This one had no such restrictions, which resulted in me not doing the homework at all. Too much freedom confuses me.
When I got back to school after the vacation I was pleased to note that those around me, every single one, had not finished the winter vacation homework. I was not alone. Praise be $deity. The teachers, however, took this in a stride and repeatedly stated for the next following days that we should write the speech and hand that in – if only the speech. So ultimately, I sat down and started writing a speech entitled “少子化” (“Shoushika”), which translates to something like “The low childbirth ratio in some countries which is resulting in a population growing older and older, and few children”. I don’t think there’s a one-word-word for it in English, but feel free to correct me if there is. In any regard, I wrote about this, as I had some thoughts on the subject of my own (namely, briefly, “why the fuck would you want people to have children when we’re on a planet that is already overpopulated galore?” and the surrounding circumstances around why one would want that, and why one shouldn’t want that). Luckily for me, everyone else had written about their first time seeing snow, or how they loved sushi, so I ended up being picked out of my class together with one other guy, whose speech also had “content” (nothing against first-snow-experiences, but it doesn’t make for a very good speech, if you ask me).
Thenceforth, I and my fellow class-mate were now placed with the task of brushing up our speeches, with the assistance of the teachers, after which we were supposed to hold said speeches before the entire school of two-hundred something odd people, including some professor from the Kyoto University, and a few other select teachers and like-minded folks.
In short, it’s one of those occasions where your normal average Joe will get a tiny bit anxious, at the least, and spaz completely out of control, at the worst. I, on the other hand, have this bad habit of simply not feeling anything in particular about getting up in front of a crowd of several hundred people. Which was, partially, my doom this time around.
In any regard, I started tweaking my speech, but wasn’t sure what should go where, and one of the teachers at school did some heavy revising for me, which I am grateful for. It however resulted in me sitting down, finally, to try to memorize a speech which I hadn’t really written myself. Misunderstand me incorrectly though – I did write the content, and the teachers were all emphasizing that the content would be as I had imagined it, but the problem was that what I originally thought about as I sat down writing, and what came out in the end, was something else.
The name of the speech in fact changed as well, to “地球人” (“Chikyuujin” — “earthling”), and its, well, main point was that we, as people of this earth, should stop thinking of ourselves as “whatever-an/-ese/-e” (e.g. American, Japanese, Swede) and start thinking of ourselves as “earthlings”. In short order, some heavy revision had taken place, but it was still “my piece”. Well. It was two days before the speech contest, when I finally sat down to learn the speech by heart.
I had trouble. Sentences which looked similar tended to jump in at the wrong places. Sentences which ended a certain way tended to end in ways they shouldn’t. Sentences simply refused to appear in my head, at the cue of the sentence lined up before them. I tried to learn in my usual way when it comes to speeches — I start at the very bottom, work sentence-by-sentence up until the last paragraph is covered, by reading the speech from where I am and until the end. If I fail to reach the end due to not remembering etc, I wash, rinse, repeat, until it sits. I do this for every paragraph, until I’ve reached the top paragraph of the speech. At that point I start doing the same but for the paragraphs. I read the last paragraph in full. If I succeed, I start reading the last two paragraphs, then the last three, until I am basically reading the entire speech from start to finish without failing a single syllable.
Unfortunately as you might’ve guessed, this proved harder than I had anticipated. By the time it was 1 am in the morning on that day, I hadn’t gotten through the “line-by-line” deal yet. I hadn’t touched the biggest paragraph of the speech yet, and, well, the speech was in two days. I slept. Fitfully.
The next day comes around. I go to school and am requested to hold the speech in front of everyone in class, as a prep for the next day. I fail completely. I reassure myself that “tomorrow it’s everything or nothing,” and the pride I take in my ability to pull things off when I need to… is about to fuck me over.
I get home, and as I return I call my neighbor and ask him for the favor of working as audience as I struggle with the speech. He agrees, so I swing by, give him the speech, and start stumbling my way through it. It goes bad at first, then I actually pull the entire speech off, well, once, but there always seems to be some part where I stumble, or some part where I pause for several seconds to reconsider what sentence comes next. After awhile he decides that I know the speech, which I’m (wisely) a bit hesitant to agree with, but since another neighbor has her birthday this day (Thursday), we go to her place to eat cake. We eat cake, I grab a beer, then I head back to my apartment, study the speech some more, and I feel that, hum, this might work out after all. The speech seems to “be there” in its entirety — no, I know it is there, I just need to lure it out of my head, and fast enough that there are no interruptions. I slept. Unceremoniously.
Everything or nothing. There were 7 people before me holding their speeches. According to the schedule, after the 8th person — me — there would be a short break before the last half of the speeches were held. As I am about to get up, however, waiting for my cue from the announcers, they unexpectedly inform the audience that the break comes now instead. So I walk outside, stare at the sky, and think about nothing in particular for the following 10 minutes. I have this fixed idea about not practicing something “on the day”, unless I absolutely must. I never study for tests the morning of said test. Nor did I this day try to run through the speech in my head. I had confidence in my “everything or nothing” approach, because it has always worked out in my favor. Always.
It was finally my time to hold my speech. Those who’d spoken until that point had been okay — some moreso than others. Some speeches were very interesting while others were rather dull; some people had basically read from the paper, while others had stood there barely glancing down at their speech notes once. I, well, I had no speech notes. I had my speech but that wasn’t really gonna help me if I forgot. I convinced myself that the best thing I could do was to simply leave the speech in my pocket, leave my jacket on my chair, and walk up there with no aid — everything or nothing; everything or nothing.
The start went well enough. I looked at the audience, I got the words out. Then screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I know I need to say something. My brain is absolutely blank. I pick up from some part. I start fumbling with the words. Sentences end the wrong way. I start correcting myself. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I laugh and shake my head, right there, in front of everyone. I hear a teacher whisper one word and I pick it up, because it’s in my speech, to this day unsure if it was the right word at the right place, nor am I sure which teacher whispered that word, but I grabbed it and took it forward, for a while. Screech. Halt. Ponder. Seconds pass. I look down to the side at the teachers and go “Eh… nandattake?” (“Uh… what was the next part again?”) and the audience laughs.
That first pause, that first screech, that first time of so many times when my brain simply shut down, I had given up. I knew then and there that I had failed. I had chosen “everything or nothing” and for the first time in so many times where I have made that choice — taken that stance — I chose, and got nothing. Now, a few mere days later, I feel all right about what happened. I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t because that affair was such an important, vital lesson to me. I know now that I can’t pick “everything or nothing”, because I must not let myself win or fail through rolling dice and hoping to get a 6. I must win through effort and through ambition, and from my preparations for this speech, there was a sore lack of both of those.
I not only learn a language at my school.
In any case, despite my fumbling, despite my screwing my whole speech up, that keyword, “地球人” (“chikyuujin” — “earthling”), was used by almost every one of the judges in their final comments after the contest winners were elected (no, I didn’t win! big surprise there!). A teacher giggled and commented on it to me and I realized that although my speech had been an utter failure, my message had still reached someone, and so it wasn’t all for nothing after all.
I’m still considering what to do next year, since I’ll still be here. I might simply refuse to participate, or I might give it my all and try to win that contest next year, through ambition, through endeavor, through effort, rather than through the roll of a die.
It’s funny how it goes sometimes. Basically since I got to Japan, my girlfriend and I have been doing stuff non-stop every time we meet. Not always useful, must-do stuff, but also things like going to the movies, or sightseeing Kyoto (which has a lot to offer in the sightseeing department, especially temples) or, at that, sightseeing other parts of Japan. We’ve always felt that since we can’t meet that often — I have studies, she has work — we should treasure the time that we can meet.
We’ve had this mindset since I got here, and then we both realized that we need to take time to “nothing” as well. It’s important, that elusive “nothing”, but you easily forget it’s there.
Yesterday me and my girlfriend basically met up around lunch time and then hung at my place the whole day, with no plans or deadlines or things to do other than making dinner, which was fun — I had found a recipe for making potato au gratin in the microwave oven which we tried out together (I have no real oven) and it worked out extremely well. I was skeptical but yes, it did turn out into a gooey mess of goodness (which we’ve come up with improvements for, for the next time we crave that sort of thing). We hung out and had no plans, and it was precisely the thing we both needed. Relaxing and not having to hurry was something that we’ve seen way too little of recently in our relationship.
The deliciousness of our potatoes aside, from here on we’ll be sure to take that elusive “nothing” into account. An obvious thing I suppose, but easily forgotten perhaps.
2008 was probably the fastest year I’ve ever experienced. I had only just gotten used to it no longer being 2007 when it suddenly was 2009. I started 2008 off getting prepared to come here to Japan in April, so the beginning of the year more or less flew by as well. I remember whining about there being something to do every single day there at the end right before I got on that airplane. Things don’t seem to have slowed down since.
In a couple of months I will have been here for an entire year. I haven’t done nearly all the things I wish I’d have done by now, but I still have plenty of time left to play around with, and now that I’ve decided to take it a little easier with my studies from here on, I will have time to do the things I haven’t had time for until now.
I wish everyone a happy new year.
