Trippin'

Anyone who knows me slightly well has seen me trip, run into a wall or hurt myself with nothing but thin air and my own body parts. Want some embarrassing evidence? Here are a couple of my literally hundreds of stories that won't shame my parents:

Exhibit A: When I was about twelve my mom was chasing me around the house playing tag (I inherited my love for wrestling and playing games as an adult meant for small children that don't break bones when they fall). I tripped on the area rug in the living room, diving straight into a stucco column. I remember seeing tar black and pretty sparkles similar to what Nicole Kidman must see when she opens her limo door at a movie opening. When I gained consciousness a few seconds later my mom was screaming. She says that my forehead was concaved, then it popped back out. Today, I have a dent in my forehead you can especially see when I am frustrated or sad.

Exhibit B: About the same year as Exhibit A, I dove into the pool that I swam in every day since I was in the swim team--star swimmer ironically. I still remember my inspiration for this dumb move: I wanted to dive into the nine foot pool gracefully like the Olympic divers. So, I dove straight down. STRAIGHT DOWN. With my eyes closed. Thank goodness I knew how to dive because I did curve up where I approximated the pool floor was. I underestimated the depth, however, and scraped my face on the bottom of the pool. For a month that summer, a red stripe traced from my forehead down my nose to the bottom of my chin, dividing my face symmetrically. I looked like a red and white Budweiser race car.

Exhibit C: I'm actually a bit proud of this one. In college, my friends and I went to CiCi's Pizza, a popular pizza place at 3am after the clubs and bars closed in Tallahassee since it was all-you-can-eat pizza and fountain drinks for $3.99. With ten slices of pizza and a cup of coke on my tray, I began walking over to our table after I had filled my drink, not noticing the puddle on the floor in front of the soda fountain. I slipped, heels up, back flat on the floor (mind, I was wearing a short skirt), but somehow I managed to keep my tray, with an open cup of soda and pizza, aloft. I screamed out, "Yeah!" proud that I didn't spill my food all over my chest and stomach. The pizza place cheered for me, though probably more because the guys could see up my skirt.

Exhibit D: Today. I was teaching a class of second graders Christmas vocabulary. Walking backwards down the aisle of desks, my foot stepped inside of a loop formed by a student's bag handle hanging from the side of his desk. I fell back on my butt in front of the entire class. My foot was wrapped so tightly in the fall, that I actually pulled the boys desk with my two feet as I fell. The boy just sat there in his chair while his desk was dragged out by the big, tall foreigner dropping like a Sycamore tree. I started laughing, so all thirty-two students and one Japanese teacher (who luckily I am friends with) laughed hysterically while I rubbed my butt, whining "Itai" (Japanese for "Ow!").

Teacher Dress Code

Fashion is more important in Tokyo than eating or sleeping, which is why everyone is so skinny and snoring on the trains. No matter the age or job, no one leaves home without properly dressing. For girls, this means stockings underneath jeans (often times in the summer as well) so that not even the tops of their feet have a skin flaws or discoloration. Since it is winter, the pink scarves impeccably match the pink iPods (I'm talking about the men). Sea foam green gloves clutch a Starbucks cup steaming to the brim with a green tea latte; Or gingerbread latte if one happens to be wearing brown gloves that day.

Elementary school teachers are allowed to wear casual clothes while at work, however the same decorum applies. Teachers wear full suits, ties, stockings, hair styled for an hour in the morning. They come to work either by being crammed on a train or riding their bikes, then go into the school locker room and change into gym clothes. Granted the workout gear they wear are the matching Adidas and Nike track suit sets. Math, Japanese and Chorus teachers look like PE coaches. At the end of the day, they enter the locker room and reemerge into a formally dressed citizen of the runway.

I don't have enough clothes to wear three different outfits a day, so I just come in normal clothes, teach in normal clothes, then leave in my same clothes. Normally, I feel like a slob because I don't have the hair and make-up done that indicates it took me three hours in the bathroom, which is very attractive here. I need to move somewhere beachy after this.

Sunday

Because I have been trying to save money I have been ridden to my house reading books and watching movies perpetually. Given that, yesterday (Sunday) spontaneously sparked into the most fun I've had in a while. I planned on going to Yoyogi Park (Tokyo's version of Central Park where the famous Harajuku girls stand in costumes) for a picnic before winter freezes over entirely. As I was leaving the house, my friend Yoko called me and offered me three tickets to see a football game (soccer) that day, Tunisia versus Mexico. I've been dying to see a professional game, so I jumped on the three free tickets she offered me.

I met Glyn and Phil in Shibuya where they were watching THE boxing match of the year with Floyd Mayweather. I watched the fight with them-- I was the only American in the entire bar I realized as I was the sole person clapping for Mayweather who was fighting a guy from Manchester, England. After, we went to the fairly uneventful football game, although perfecting the timing of the wave synchronizing flow with the audience was worthy of my concentration. We drank a bottle of champagne, then headed to an izakaya. An izakaya is a restaurant that serves very small plates like tapas that are shared with beer and sake.

Yoko, Phil, Trev, Glyn and I played a brainless drinking game that requires Bruce Lee noises. Laughing hysterically, we caught the attention of our neighboring table. They asked if they could join our game; unheard of for Japanese people. They joined us and we played games and laughed; they taught us cheers to degrade your friends in Japanese. The entire restaurant was staring at us. That's the serendipitous instance that made me fall in love with travelling.

Today, I'm back at work and going home soon to be a poor hermit again. :-)

Earthquake Mullet Helmet

This morning while I was cutting construction paper in preparation for Christmas card making, my vice principal started an earthquake drill for the kids to practice. I walked out into the hallway to see what the drill consisted of in case there is an earthquake someday and I need to take cover. What I saw in the halls was something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie from the 1970s.

Most of the kids had been outside playing, so they were still in their gym uniforms: Tiny shorts not even Brazilian girls would wear in public, knee-high socks and -----helmets made of pillows on their heads!! Yes, the kids were sporting a cloth cap fashioned like old knights' helmets that covered their heads and the back of their necks like a mullet. They had them in different colors: sky blue, pink, yellow, whatever they picked out with their moms at the "Useless Things That Will Absolutely Never Save Your Life" Store.

Just in case you have never seen a photograph of Tokyo, the city is a plethora of high-rise office and apartment buildings (ironically called mansions in Japan). In the event of a real earthquake students all over Tokyo are going to walk outside and stand in the street conflagrated by 50 story-high steel and concrete buildings, confident that their pillowed mullet helmets will cushion the impact of buildings falling on them. I'll be the basket case crouched in a door frame too scared to cry or scream.

Train Etiquette

While being smushed on the train at 7 am this morning on my way to work on the Denentoshi Line the most phenomenal thing happened to me--someone was courteous on the train! Really. I wasn’t hallucinating from the stifling heat blowing from the air vents even though the body heat of 5,000 passengers is enough to fry your noodles into yaki soba.

When the train stopped at Mizonokuchi station 600 people stampeded onto the train whose dimensions are designed for about 40 people comfortably. As usual, before I had time to pick my feet up to move out of the way on my own accord I was swept up in the undertow of salary men, being rocked and shoved like a 17th century sailor near Cape Hope. I’ve learned to swim in the treacherous morning train seas, so I didn't skip a line of the book I was reading as the whirlpool swirled me around.

The only difference this morning was that as a Japanese man came barreling towards me from the might of 56 men pushing behind him he said, “Please excuse me.” I couldn’t believe it. I thought for a moment that I was in another country, but the familiar pressing on my ribs of school bags and elbows reminded me that I must still be in Japan. His manners made me feel like more than a cow being crammed into a cargo hold—I felt like a real person that deserved to be given a small apology for plowing into my body.

To the anonymous man on the train who knows at least three English words: Thank for saving my dignity and recognizing that not all people find it normal to be jammed into a narrow train as if testing the number of people to survive with no oxygen.

Global FFFFFFFFFreezing

I read last year in Time magazine that Japan had the cleanest air in all of Asia and the most improved air quality in the world. Living here, there are clear indications as to why Japan is deemed the forefront leader of global warming efforts.

When I lived in Fort Lauderdale, I carried a sweater everywhere I went in the summer because every building, house and car had its air conditioning cranked to sub-arctic temperatures to counteract the 180 degree sunshine outside. Even with perpetual heat-saving grace people constantly complained about how hot it was to walk from the freezing car into their frigid house.

Rotate floors to Japan where the summers are so brutally hot and humid that friends take turns spitting on each other in relay attempts at heat stroke prevention. Summer humidity in Fort lauderdale is a fresh breath of relief compared to the wool blanket suffocating you three minutes after you have stepped outside in Japan.

So, whatever, summer is summer and it's unbearable anywhere. The big difference, however, is that global warming initiatives in Japan mean that you will be publicly shunned for using your air conditioning. Government buildings are not granted to turn them on at all. My elementary school, with four stories and two wings, did not once turn on its air conditioning units located in every classroom installed in the glorious days of pre-global warming ignorance. I had to go to the bathroom every hour and give myself a sponge bath in a stall to survive.

Now it's winter and of course the heat is not being used. I wear a scarf and three sweaters inside the school all day. I was drinking literally three cups of green tea per half-hour to keep myself warm, but had to switch to hot water as my urine was flourescent green like the Hulk's.

I am proud that I live in a country that takes the environment so seriously that it actually takes action to save it rather than simply preach about change from inside an air conditioned building where the trash is not recycled and the lights stay on all night. But knowing that we are one of the only countries in the world actually giving up our comforts for the environment is tortuous.

I have more to say on the subject, but my fingers are frozen. I'm putting my mittens back on now.

My Blogging Debut

Thankfully my job gives me about four hours of spare time a day to create and update this blog site. Since I have already been living in Tokyo for over a year I am going to avoid the cliche travelogue-esque blogs to various temples and run-ins with stinky raw fish. My purpose is to open a (very small) window of insight on my daily thoughts (you don't want too wide a perspective inside my brain--trust me) and experiences living in one of the largest metroplises on Earth.

I intend to diligently blog once a day, but my attention span is the length of a a centipede's foot, so I may occasionally forget. Consider this my official blog for Tuesday, November 27th.