22 posts tagged “good memories”

You're the DJ: what are the next five songs coming up after the break?

Well, it's classic night here in my basement, and it's time to RAWK dudes.  Oh, feedback, baby.  Turn it up!

1.  Sonic Youth, "Catholic Block" 
2.  Jane's Addiction, "Had a Dad"
3.  The Pixies, "Is She Weird?"
4.  NIN, "Get Down, Make Love"
5.  Mudhoney, "Here Comes Sickness"

What a fun trip down memory lane.  Ah, now you know exactly how I wasted my youth.  I remember the first time my parents made the mistake of asking me to play some NIN for them--my mom couldn't comment at all, and my dad could only come up with, "Boy, he sure uses the F-word a lot, doesn't he?"  Yeah, dad, he's subtle that way.  Thank god they never heard "Closer."  I think my mom would be forced to commit hara-kiri upon hearing such things.

Hey, it's time for a commercial, but stick around.  When I come back, I think we'll rock some Cypress Hill and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who are the people you've worked with over the years that you'd list as your Coworker Superstars? Why'd they make the cut? 
Submitted by bodhibound.

Wayyy back in university, my main job was working for the university catering outfit.  We were a branch of the university "dining services" and catered all the events held on campus--alumni coffees, football player breakfasts (oh, every fucking Saturday during football season, at 5 am, I had to feed those fucks--most of the time I had not slept between whatever party I went to and showing up at work, which meant I was still partly drunk and dead tired), all the backstage crap at the various concerts, and so on.  We also catered dinners at the President's and Provost's homes and, occasionally, some event unrelated to the university.  This job paid well, had strange hours that were very easy to arrange around class schedules, and the best damned coworkers I ever found.  I loved that job.  I would still be doing it if I hadn't, like, graduated.

Our first boss had multiple sclerosis and smoked a lot of weed to manage her disease.  She was really cool, even aside from the weed thing.  She hated doing the Sunday-morning, old-lady socials, too, so she would make sure we had plenty of Bloody Marys and mimosas for staff to drink while we were suffering.  Hair of the dog and all that.

Our leader was a fella named John Thaggard.  He was handsome, tall, ripped, charming, and amazingly efficient.  He could set up tables and place settings in the blink of an eye, like one of those cartoons where they're moving so fast it's just a blur.  He was always happy and excited to...just to be alive,  I guess.  He was infectious.  I called him "cap'n" and frequently recited the Whitman poem to him.  Because catering is just like the Civil War, actually. 

Then there were the Malaysians.  I especially remember JAMES! WONG! and Lee Man Hoe.  I was totally in love with JAMES! WONG! (sorry--that's how I said his name every time I saw him, with great emphasis, and it always made him blush).  He tried to teach me Chinese (uh, Cantonese, maybe) and told me it was never going to happen because my tones sucked.  He was a kung-fu stud and a computer geek with shiny! black! hair!  Lee Man Hoe used to make the rudest comments behind our guests' backs and crack us up.  He thought just about every white woman he ever saw was grotesquely fat, and he did not hesitate to say so.  One time, he and JAMES! and I were in the van coming back from some event, and he sighed and told me how he regretted coming to Missoula because it was full of hippies:  "I hate hippies.  They are so dirty."  Oh, Lee, you were the grumpiest duck around.  All the Malaysians (there were others; they run in packs) were super efficient and never bitched about the work, either.  The work was actually kind of hard--a lot to remember, a lot of multitasking, a lot of responsibility since our boss was always smoking weed, the pressures of dealing with the bovine public, and a lot of heavy lifting.  Not everyone was cut out for it, but the Malaysians were terrific. 

Oooh, and Heidi, light of my life, fire of my loins.  Heidi was double majoring in dance and physics, and it showed.  Both of them.  She moved like an oversexed panther, and then she'd stop and look at you with pure nerd in her eyes and start talking about, I don't know, vectors or some shit.  She was insane.  She may still be.  She was the one who introduced me to the League of Evil Physicists.  She was also extremely loud and also shouted at JAMES! WONG! every time she saw him, much to his eternal embarrassment.  I don't think the poor guy was prepared to come to America and have girls constantly shouting at him and recklessly coming on to him.  Anyway.  Heidi would also shout other completely inappropriate things--like, occasionally, she would shout (and I mean shout) at Thaggard, "No, Daddy, no!"  Or she would grab me and tell me how much she wanted me while massaging my breasts, and she didn't care who saw.  Inappropriate!  She always made me think of that Morphine lyric, "She had a way of making people feel good to be around her, as it should be."

Ha.  And Sudhir who was drop-dead gorgeous, but never felt certain that he was, and so he would ask me and Heidi  to assess his current state of hotness.  I don't know how you can complain about being asked to stare and grope and judge the tightness and adequacy of a beautiful man's body.  He was also funny and a gentleman, despite his stated desire to be an asshole. 

And we had two guys named Chris, too, because you need multiple Chrises.  One time, one of them was being pressured by our boss (not the stoner one, the new, high-strung one) because the event was running late, and he said, "Hey, lady, I'm just a cog in a wheel.  A cog.  It'll get done."  That lady had no control over us whatsoever.  By the time she got the job, when our other boss was too sick to continue (er, I think that's why she quit), we were a self-contained unit of catering efficiency.  We had our own rules, our own hierarchy, and it really couldn't be breached, no matter how hard she tried, and she did.  But as a unit, we were tight and we closed ranks, and the bitch never could gain any authority.  We were like Fight Club.

We were also apparently very hormonal--go figure.

Let's see--oh, yeah, Heidi also brought her love triangle with her.  That would be her boyfriend Tim and her girlfriend Erica.  Erica was very pretty and sweet but really ditzy--like, drama major or something.  Tim was insanely jealous of Erica but also kind of turned on by the whole thing.  And Heidi just acted like it was totally normal to have this love life going on while she's in the back room assessing Sudhir's pecs and mine as well.  Ha--and Tim set a tree on fire one Fourth of July if I'm not mistaken.  Fuckin Tim--he was really not very together.  Then he just hopped drunkenly and ineffectually around the tree, hooting and asking the rest of us (also drunk, obviously) to put it out, but we were all laughing too hard.  Only when it started to threaten to migrate did someone do something.

Man.  Catering.  Best damn job in the world. 

Aside from the free alcohol (technically prohibited, but who's doing the inventory here?), we also got other nice freebies from time to time and, of course, we got into the events free (a very cool thing if it was a concert--I saw most of the university concerts for free) and got to hang out backstage with the performers.  That wasn't so cool if it was REO Speedwagon, who reminded me tremendously of Spinal Tap, and I kept expecting them to declare the olives a complete disaster.  But it was awesome if it was Les Claypool or Sonic Youth or George Clinton (yeah, we do want the funk!). 

And then one time, after a wedding, most of the wedding cake was left along with some crappy hors d'oeuvres that I scammed.  I called up my friends and said, "Hey, I've got a wedding cake here.  Wanna party?"  It doesn't take much more than that.

Why did I graduate?  Can someone tell me that?  Why would I have wanted to give all that up?  Fine-looking people, confusing love triangles, uber-hormones, and free cake and beer?  I'm having a hard time understanding why we left all that.

What story from your wild-and-crazy youth would nobody believe about you today?

I think it's a safe bet that there are plenty of them.  Most people couldn't believe them even at the time, because I do not and have never dressed wild or crazy or anything.  I dress like a class-A square.  I have no piercings other than on my ears; I have no tattoos.  While I did have Doc Martens, I was never prone to wearing them with those horizontally striped stockings or anything.  There were few outside indications of my wildness, and I liked it that way.  Cops don't mess with you as much as if you dress like what you are.  Now that I am to all appearances a totally average 30-something mom, I seriously doubt anyone thinks I've done the things I've done. 

Ah, but I have.

I mentioned in my last post that I laid my "theory of Japan" down on my husband, and he agreed.  He agreed, laughing because he couldn't believe it, believe that I had seen this Japan. 

This post--man, I've been trying to come up with a way to write it.  To tell the whole story, I would really have to do it anonymously, I think, or in a "fictional" setting.  But, when my "novel" comes out (haha!), you'll all know that some of it, at least, is true.  I'm going to try to keep this out of the "too much information" realm, and actually it's not as bad as I'm making it sound right now, and my husband knew that...oh, fuck it.  On with the story.

I did see a Japan that was not the Japan most foreigners see, and that is why I came away with a much different idea of Japan.  For one thing, I went to Japan without any previous knowledge or interest in any aspect of Japanese culture (besides thinking Koizumi was terribly yummy).  One thing that immediately struck me about the expats in Japan is that a very large number of them went to Japan because of a previously held interest (or obsession, really) with some aspect of the culture, usually either anime and video games or Buddhism--much the same, really.  Most of the expat fellas are there also specifically looking for a Japanese woman, primarily in the stereotypical vein of Japanese women.  And those people see in Japan what they are primed to see by their interest.  The wannabe Buddhists will spend hours meditating over cinnamon trees and visit shrines in Shikoku.  Those looking for a stereotypical Japanese girlfriend will find one.  If they're looking for anime girls, they'll spend a lot of time in Harajuku and find them.  And so on.  They will find, in other words, exactly what they want to see and not much else.

Also, and my husband found this hilarious but true, most expats make few Japanese friends, and those that they do make are a specific type of Japanese person, the type I call the "gaijin hanger-on."  These are the Japanese who seek out expats, frequently by hanging out in Roppongi, and who have many gaijin friends.  These are not normal Japanese people.  I mean that they are literally not normal, not that they're somehow wrong.  Normal Japanese people rarely if ever befriend a foreigner and do not encounter foreigners in their daily lives and, most importantly, want to keep it that way.

It is notable that my husband was not one of these Japanese, but he is also not a normal Japanese person.  He hung out with Koreans, and he went to the high school that is reserved for those unruly students who will not submit to the tests, to the kiritsu, to the droning lectures.  He was, in other words, a pariah.  But he was not a gaijin hanger-on, as I was the only one he ever knew until he met me, and he met me in a very Japanese location.  Fuck Roppongi.  Roppongi is my worst nightmare, but that is totally off topic.

Anyway, back to my Japan.

One night I had gone to Kawasaki to see my boyfriend, and he abruptly broke up with me.  I couldn't get a train all the way home (I lived in Shizuoka-ken at the time, so it was far by train), and anyway I was due to meet friends in Tokyo the next day.  I couldn't afford a hotel (well, I didn't think I could--I didn't yet know about some of the cheaper hotels in Japan).  It was late December and cold.  I had no idea what I should do.  The first thing I did do was go and buy a notebook and Three Essential Pens so that I could keep a record of anything that I did end up doing...and, man, did I.  That notebook makes for some fabulous reading these days.  Anyway.

The very next thing that happened, as I was standing there admiring the pens, was that two well-dressed and fairly sober Japanese salarymen approached me.  "Nomi ni ikimasu ka?" one asked--"would you go for a drink?"  They were of a typical size and build for middle-aged Japanese men, so I figured I could easily beat them up if necessary, and they seemed harmless enough.  So, I smiled and agreed. 

This is how I discovered that if you are youngish and pretty-ish and foreign and apparently without anything better to do, you need not ever buy your own drinks.  But it isn' t what you're thinking.  In America, if this had happened, you would assume I was essentially a prostitute, but there was never any sex expected in return.  What these men want from you, in return for all the beer you can drink (which is, ahem, quite a lot) and even dinner and taxi rides and karaoke is very simple and yet was almost incomprehensible to me:  They want to have a girl talk to them and listen to them and laugh at their jokes and just be companionable.  Sure, sometimes they do want sex, and let's face it, sometimes so did I, but it was never demanded of me.  It was never an unspoken assumption. 

I didn't know, at the time, what went on in hostess bars--that essentially hostess bars are set up exactly for this purpose, to provide men with a way to have companionable interaction with those of the opposite sex.  I also didn't yet know that the geisha existed for a similar purpose, although they were also artists, which the hostesses are mostly not.  Geisha, though, in addition to their arts (shamisen, traditional dance and song) were required to be excellent conversationalists. 

But how terribly sad, I always thought, that Japanese people have never figured out how to talk to members of the opposite sex, how sad that they do not go home to a friend.  The typical Japanese wife does not expect companionship from her husband, and he does not expect it from her.  I don't know if the wives ever get male companionship (it would seem not, although there are now "host bars" as I discovered one cold night in Kabukicho), but the men do, when they pay for it.

My husband, of course, knew all of this.  He knew that Japanese husbands and wives live like this, and I suppose that is why he had decided never to marry (obviously, he changed his mind when he met me).  He was startled to hear that I knew it and amused to hear how I came to know it, and I say 'amused' because he did also know that I was not a hooker but just someone who was fascinated by this new culture and also always looking for free beer.

So, that weekend when my boyfriend broke up with me in Kawasaki, was the weekend also when 2001 became 2002.  I spent part of it very respectably at a friend's house in Chiba, making osechi ryori with his mom and drinking umeshu and laughing riotously at my friend's 14-year-old brother, Kazu, getting slyly drunk off of stolen sips.  But New Year's Eve found me in Kabukicho (to find it, I had to call one of my Japanese friends, a man, who knew me well enough to just laugh when I asked him for directions instead of lecturing me on the many dangers and perditions to be found there--I'm a girl who can handle rather a lot of perdition without ever getting chafed).  I met Africans there, the only Africans I ever met in Japan, who were working as touts for the strip clubs.  I met hordes of Chinese guys, also working as touts.  I found myself in various bars, being bought drinks by various men of all nationalities, and then somehow I lost all of them and ended up back on the street and accosted by a roving gang of "hosts" from one of the host bars.  All of them scared me very much as they had bleached blonde, feathery hair and blue eyes (contacts) and thus looked like the ghost of Luke Skywalker more than anything else--except one, Nobu, whom I talked to for quite a long time.  He continued talking to me even after I had assured him that I didn't have enough money for a fine fellow like him, but he did regale me with ribald tales of rich, bored Japanese women.  He earnestly wished he could buy me a beer, but business had been slow.

See?  Even the hosts are lonely.

And that's why I didn't see the same Japan as most foreigners do, and that's why I don't think about Japan in the same way.  I spent a lot of time with lonely salarymen and hosts and wannabe yakuza and tattoo artists and a whole gang of construction workers in Numazu whose girlfriends would not have sex with them except in a scheduled monthly performance and sometimes not even then.  I spent a lot of time getting to know Japanese bar owners and allowed myself to be fed raw horsemeat and fish sperm (the fish sperm were? was? fed to me by a gay man, no less).  I hung out with lots and lots of Japanese soldiers, too, of course, once I was shacked up with my boyfriend.  To nearly all of these people, I was their sole foreign friend, and a completely unexpected one.  We never went to expat bars.  We never spoke English.  They were not, by and large, interested in learning English.  And to meet many of these people, I wandered around alone late at night and let myself be drawn into conversations with strangers, followed them to a drinking establishment, and toasted them vigorously (most of my friends actually toasted with "otsukaresama" instead of the typical "kampai") with shochu.  That's not necessarily recommended behavior or the behavior of a completely nondubious, morally upright young lady or whatever the fuck, and that's why most gaijin won't ever see it. 

I suppose it's presumptuous to call it "my Japan," this Japan I've described, but I kind of feel that way, because no other foreigner seems to know what the hell I'm talking about.  There are plenty of Japanese people who don't even know what I'm talking about.  Hardly anyone who doesn't have to will sit in the freezing cold, in the middle of the night, sharing drinks from various flasks and bottles hidden in paper bags, huddled around a fire in the alleyway, talking to men who work in strip clubs.  What foreigner has been so stupid as to have missed the last train to Tokyo and be stranded in an unknown city and thrown herself on the mercy of the aforementioned band of construction workers, who gave me food and shelter and drink that cold night?

The thing is, of course, that this was the Japan I loved.  I loved these people, even the salarymen who just desperately wanted female companionship, though I felt sorry for them a bit too.  That was my Japan.

[Two things:  The boyfriend in Kawasaki was not T.  It was a different boyfriend.  Also, when I say "the kiritsu" I am referring to the entire ritual that takes place at the beginning and ending of (apparently) every goddamned class period in Japanese public schools.  The class leader shouts 'kiritsu' (stand up) and everyone stands.  This is followed by 'yasume' (at ease), 'ki o tsuke' (at attention), 'rei' (bow--during the bow, a greeting of some sort is usually monotonously groaned by the class in unison), and 'chakuseki' when everyone sits down.  Kiritsu means stand up, but it isn't how you would say "stand up" in a less formal (less fascist) setting.]

Today was pretty good, much better than the past few days.  Tonight, as I was scanning my hard drive yet again to get rid of the evil fuck known as Vundo, I found myself flipping through an old photo album from my first year in Japan.  It includes the photos from my serendipitous and entirely enjoyable mini-vacation to Taipei. 

When I first went to Japan, see, my life was in shambles.  I owed money to everyone in the world with the fortunate exception of the mafia.  I had not finished my MA because I totally wussed out on my thesis (does anyone--but anyone--care about the morphosyntax of Snchitsu'umshtsn aka Coeur d'Alene Salish?  No?  Good, because it's a dead language anyway, and I didn't finish my thesis, OK?).  Just--it was all a mess.  I had been working for minimum wage as a cook/dishwasher at a Vietnamese restaurant and had been, well, living in my car.  Things weren't good.

So, I got a job in Japan and went there, very spontaneously, on a 3-month tourist visa.  Let's skip over some of the trivial details here and get to the meat of the matter:  My three months was up, I still didn't have my working visa, and thus...well, I had to leave Japan, but only for a weekend.  I had to be back to work on Monday, and anyway a weekend was enough to get me a new tourist visa to hold me over until my work visa came through.

I didn't have a lot of money.  I went to a travel agent and told her, in pidgin basically, that I had to leave Japan.  Naturally, she thought the destination was important.  I said, "Listen, just get me the cheapest plane ticket out of here, as long as I can be back on Monday."  Japanese people apparently don't travel this way, and she was very flustered by it all, but as it turned out, the tickets to Taipei that weekend were cheap and available.  So, Taipei it was.

And, oh how fortunate.  I went to Taipei on Saturday.  I had no guidebook, no phrasebook, no hotel reservation, no knowledge of Taiwan at all.  I did have my charming smile, my wits, and an unceasing curiosity.  Oh, I did also--and this came in handy a few times--have my Japanese-English dictionary.

I took a bus from the airport to the city.  On the bus, I started chatting with two gentlemen, one foreign and one Taiwanese, who were business partners or something.  They took a liking to me, got on the mobile, found me a hotel room, and took me there by taxi.  The foreign one--American, I think--asked me to go out with him, which led to hushed conversation between the two of them; as it happened, the Taiwanese had, erm, engaged an escort for his American friend, so the date was off.  

Before they left to meet their escorts, they did let me know where the fun things to do and see were and let me know that this weekend was the Lantern Festival to celebrate the Chinese new year.  Awesome!  I set out on foot to find the party.  I was careful to take a business card with me so that I could get back to the hotel.

And I walked my ass off, let me tell you.  I went to a street market and had all this amazing food.  I bought myself a wee teapot that I still have in an unbroken state.  I saw men wrangling snakes.  I ate a durian fritter sold to me by a very friendly man.  I bought beer (don't remember what kind) and KinderEggs at a convenience store and got drunk, there on the street.  One of the KinderEgg toys was a sort of crabman, which eventually led to the saying:  "For all I know, I rode the crabman home." 

The next day I woke late and left the hotel.  I had in mind to see the National Palace Museum, and I had a sort of tourist map.  I again set out walking. 

Now, you know that some silly white girl from Montana can't just walk across Taipei and happen across the National Palace Museum.  But what I did happen on were two fetching young men playing ball in a parking lot.  They recognized the "damsel in distress" look on my face and rushed over to help, offering their services to me in rapid and intense Chinese, a language of which I speak exactly one word:  xie xie (and my Chinese friends say I pronounce even that horribly).  They spoke even less English, and so I showed them the map.  When they realized my destination and how bloody far away from it I was, they offered to take me in their car, a car so small I thought a thousand clowns would leap out of it.  I got in the backseat, such as it was, for a perilous journey during which we communicated via...yes, the Japanese-English dictionary.  Kanji are a wonderful thing.  If I wanted to say something, I pointed to the appropriate Japanese word, and by recognizing the kanji they could more or less get my point.  They were very chipper and excited to have a new American friend.  They dropped me off at the museum, we ceremoniously exchanged business cards, and they left. 

I never actually entered the museum.  Oh, sure, I strolled the grounds and took lots of pictures, for it is impressive, but I was too cheap to pay to go inside--that money was much better spent on street food and beer.  On the way out, I saw a model posing on the steps, bottle of whiskey in her hands, camera crew and stylists swirling about. 

I stumbled my way back through the mean streets of Taipei, stopping occasionally to take pictures, sniff durian, and buy smoked goose flavor potato chips.

I finally got back to my hotel and almost immediately set out again to find the famed Lantern Festival.  I'm not going to bore you with a whole lot of details about it.  Suffice it to say there were lanterns--lots and lots of lanterns.  Then a light show.  It was the year of the horse that year.  The floats in the parade, though, were all kinds of things--my favorite was two dragons playing go.

The next day I was scheduled to leave on an early flight.  I overslept from being out too late at the festival.  The desk people gave me a wakeup call, even though I had not requested one, and told me to get my butt on the bus, or I would miss my flight.  I barely made my flight, barely made the shinkansen out of Tokyo, barely made it to work on time.  But I did.  Because I had serendipity on my side.

Share a story about your sibling(s) or a family member from when you were a kid. 
Submitted by Jenny Marie.

Well, I never had any siblings.  What I had were cousins.  Our parents skillfully managed to dump us all at our grandmother's house at the same time for a couple of weeks many summers, so we grew up with each other and were all quite close.  Every time we get together, we still laugh at some of the stuff we used to do.

Individually, we were not especially bad kids, but when we got together, we could be pretty rotten.  I blame this all on jenifer.  She was usually the oldest cousin present (we have one who is older, but she was often not around) and, thus, our ringleader.

One time, our parents for some reason sent us off to a children's event unsupervised.  I have no idea what they were thinking, but there was going to be a Christmas movie and then Santa would appear and so forth, and they took us and left us with no supervision other than the paid chaperones at the event.  That was a mistake on their part.

I don't remember now what the movie was, but I do remember that there were 4 of us, and that was trouble.  Three of us were girls, and one of us was our crazey cousin Josh.  Josh was possessed of the kind of genius crazey that constantly had him in trouble with all manner of authority figures, but to us he was awesome. 

We were restive through the entire event, if I recall correctly.  We made loud, obnoxious comments to spoil the Christmas cheer of all around us.  Josh began peppering those in front of us with our refuse.  I don't like to point fingers, but I believe Jen joined him.  Jen's little sister, whom we all affectionately called Gwee, may have as well, and I am fairly certain Gwee did sprinkle people with the icy backwash from her soda.  Note how I fault the other three and take no blame myself.

The chaperones came over to give us a stern warning.  But this, my friends, was in the dark days before cell phones, so they could not have reached our parents, who were no doubt all out getting drunk, if they'd tried.  So, a stern warning was all they could really do, and it had no discernible effect on our behavior.

Gathering steam, we prepared for the arrival of Santa.  When the other children cheered, we booed.  Santa began handing out gifts, allegedly at random.  We received none (how very odd), so we instantly began yelling, "Santa's a gyp--Santa's a gyp," which I must say confounded the poor man.  In all his years, I doubt any child had called him such names.  Eventually, the chaperones herded us out into the lobby, but I daresay we confounded them as well.  I don't think they were prepared for children so bent on making other children cry and ruining Christmas for the assembled.  I daresay they were not prepared to meet The Dark Side in the smiling faces of four children that December day.

At some point, our parents did return, as we were sulking in the lobby and plotting our takeover of the popcorn machine.  We put on our angel faces and escaped before the chaperones could gather words to tell our parents just how horrid we were.  It was many, many years before our parents found out. 

Ah, good times, good times. 

It's funny, because I was thinking about my own childhood in light of the recent behavior of Alec Baldwin.  I was told I was a rude, thoughtless little pig a few times.  I was also told I was a little shit, a lazey little shit, an ungrateful little shit, a know-it-all little shit, etc.  The thing is that the people telling me those things were quite right at those moments; I was sometimes a rude, thoughtless little pig, I was most certainly a little shit.  I would dispute the lazey part, but I was without question a know-it-all little shit.  I think the above story likely demonstrates that.  My parents and/or the chaperones would not have been out of line to tell me so.  I probably also needed a good, swift kick in the ass, but that's another kettle of fish.

Well, tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of my first date with my husband.  No, he doesn't remember.  Every year on the first Sunday in April (I don't know the actual date--I could look it up, but the "first Sunday in April" seems fine to me) I go up to him and tell him it's our first-date anniversary.  And he says, "Sou ka ne? [Is that right?]" without a hint of being interested.  And he goes about his business.  So, I sigh and tell him again, because men are so dense.  And he looks at me and says, "Mada aishiteimasu yo. [I still love you.]"  And then he goes about his business.

In the spirit of the occasion, here are some things I love about my husband:

He's mysterious.  The man is laconic to say the least.  When I was in graduate school, we learned about a language--I think it was Malagasy--in which the pragmatics of conversation are such that you do not reveal any more than is directly asked.  The theory is that because new information is relatively rare, and thus precious, you release it only drip by drop so that it can be fully appreciated and dissected.  So, it might take all day to find out, for example, the price of rice in China or that your neighbor is sleeping with the goats.  My husband acts exactly like this, like every piece of information that he has on a given subject--say, the fence we are building to keep the dogs out of the vegetable garden--is a delicate morsel that needs to be fully digested before he gives another.  Actually, he would never give another except that I hound him mercilessly.  He just always assumes I know what he's talking about, I guess.  But I don't.  I never have a freakin' clue what he's talking about.  And thus our conversations are inordinately long and complicated, full of pregnant pauses and vexation.  I love it.  My husband is also mysterious in that, being laconic, he sometimes just does things without telling me or discussing it at all, and often, I have no idea what he's doing.  It's like a game.  Just the other day, he apparently started building another fence (!!) across a different part of our yard.  We had actually discussed putting a fence there, although I didn't think we had decided to go ahead with it, and his current design is quite unique.  But everyday it's like a new adventure, trying to figure him out.

He's absurdly manly.  Seriously, it's like the dude never heard of postmodernism.  Actually, he hasn't.  I mean, of course, that he is manly in a traditional sense, without any irony about it at all.  He fishes and hunts.  He loves to dig holes.  He putters in his garage and saves all of our coffee cans to put his hodgepodge of screws and nuts and nails into.  He squints into the sun to determine our geographic position and the current time and temperature.  And it's so awesome.  I'm a giddy schoolgirl in the face of such manliness.

But he is also the most polite, gentle, even tempered, generous person.  He rarely gets angry.  He used to speak such polite Japanese to me (he never said "ore" or even "boku" for example--always "watashi" for a long time) that I thought he might be gay? or a transvestite? or ......?  He still speaks to me politely.  It's hard to explain without going in to some Japanese grammar, but he doesn't use the young, tough guy Japanese to me.  He talks more manly to our son.  And he is so generous that I aspire to be more like him.

He is a terrific father.  And when I first got pregnant totally on accident and he was only 23 and still just a PFC in the Self-Defense Force, the first thing he did was express his commitment to me and to the child.  Now that we have a child, he spends so much time with him with such patience and grace.  Sometimes I watch them playing together in the yard and see how much they love each other, and it makes me cry just a little.  Just a little.

He's dead honest and kinda boring.  The first time I met him, when we were making strained "conversation" via phraseboooks, I asked him what his hobbies were, and he said, "Nothing.  I don't have any.  Except walking around aimlessly [bura bura]."  That is the reply of an honest (and boring) man.  Men don't say things like that unless they're more concerned with being honest than getting into your pants.  There have been so many times through the years when he said exactly the wrong thing, but because it was the honest thing, I respected him and felt respected by him.  He lived in Osaka when he was 18 (he just up and left home and moved to Osaka to be on his own, which takes some guts in Japan), and I asked him what he did for fun there, what his life was like there.  He said on his days off he would just walk down to Osaka Castle, look at it (from the outside--he never once paid to go in it), then turn around and walk back home--a 3 hour stroll.  He would still be doing that had I not come along.

And he loves me.  That's nothing to sneeze at, there.  He says he loves me mainly because I'm crazy.  His word.  He says he never knows what I'm going to do or say next or what kind of mood I might be in, so it makes his boring life more interesting and exciting.  He also thinks I'm gorgeous.  Also his word.  And that is also nothing to sneeze at.

Five years, and still crazy in love.

Shit!  It just occurred to me:  Last Sunday was the first Sunday in April.  Damned April Fool.  See?  Now it's all ruined.

Jeez.  I just found out Jean Baudrillard died last week. 

Jean, you and me, we had some good times.  Le systeme des objets, sadly, was not one of them.  I loved the way you were so fiercely and unmistakably French.  I loved the way you did not hesitate to say outlandish things, not even bothering to worry--or so it seemed--that you would be misquoted and misunderstood, and you often were.  In that you were much like our dear Friedrich.  Indeed, you had aphoristic moments.

Your arguments, the substance behind your absurd quotes, were complicated and occasionally unwieldy (when one is taking 21 credits, one can only take so much), although usually, I thought, quite elegant (once they were understood, if such time ever came to pass [and I will here reveal that, sometimes, it did not]).  I did not always agree with you, and I often threw your books (particularly those I was forced to read untranslated) down in vexation.

It is a sad thing to live in a world without you, although you will continue to be nearly as present as ever you were (via the text).  The world feels suddenly less French.  It feels as though America has taken one step closer to fulfilling its manifest destiny of turning the entire world into Disneyland.  You, my dear man, were meant to prevent that.  It wasn't you who failed, of course, but nevertheless we continue on, the same, in the society of the hyperreal and covering over the rest.

Ah, Jean, I will drink to you tonight, my friend.  For anyone else reading this, I leave you with a brief collection of memorable bits of Baudrillard:

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.

Yes, Jean.  Fun times indeed.

I frequently get to pining for Japan.  I actually miss Japan more than my (Japanese) husband does, and I think that is because I wasn't really confined by Japanese society the way he was.  That's a topic for another day. 

When I get to missing Japan, my nostalgia/homesickness often focuses on a few, recurring themes.  Ramen.  Love hotels.  Train station soba.  Papaya Suzuki.  The total hotness of the men there.  My much loved Mt. Fuji.  Pickles.  Oden.  OK, so lots of food.

But today I'm missing the love hotels.  The love hotels of Japan are one of the greatest inventions ever.  They could be Japan's gift to the world, if only the rest of the world would wise up. 

Love hotels have become so popular because there is no privacy in Japan.  People tend to live with their families until they are way, way into adulthood, and the walls are made of fucking rice paper!  Not in the love hotels, though--no, those are serious concrete bunkers.  Yes, yes, certainly love hotels are used for adulterous trysts and for hookups with prostitutes.  But they are also regularly used by legitimate couples, even husbands and wives who just want to get away from their extended family and that goddamned rice paper.

Love hotels are often the cheapest accommodation available if you're a couple (except some hostels).  Of course, you have to be out in the morning, because the room is also rented (for "resting" in, usually, 2- and 4-hour time blocks) during the day. 

Love hotels are very anonymous.  In many of them, you will see no person.  Frequently, there is a board in the lobby that shows pictures of all the rooms; the vacant rooms are lit up.  You choose one based on what you want to pay and what, erm, accoutrements you desire (some of them come with outlandish S&M equipment).  Sometimes you then proceed to pay a set of hands, apparently human, but who knows?  Sometimes you pay a machine.  You go to your room.  The room will nearly always have a huge bathroom, Japanese style, with a deep tub for two (usually with jets) and a large shower.  Sometimes the shower has a see-through wall so that your honey can sit in bed and watch you shower, because nothing is sexier than watching a girl shave her legs.  Sometimes they take this a step further and put odd disco lighting in the shower and so forth.  The room will also have video games, a huge TV (or two), a large bed (yes, a bed rather than a futon), frequently karaoke machines and/or slot machines, and a complete array of toiletries and grooming products, in case this love hotel thing was spur of the moment, and you didn't bring your toothbrush. 

Heh.  When we just moved, my husband and I found a large--but LARGE--collection of toothbrushes saved from various love hotels.  They are all marked with the name of the hotels, so we reminisced a bit.  Or I did.  My husband remembers none of them, although he seems certain that we had a nice time there.

Not that we ever stayed in any love hotels.  No.  Certainly we are chaste and completely not into any love at all.  Yes, my name is Mary.

Anyway, so you can play some videos, watch a big-screen movie, pomade your hair, and gamble.  There will also be condoms there, because the Japanese are nothing if not condom users. 

What I love about them is--oh, all of the above, really, but also that the better love hotels (and, yes, there are definitely better and worse) have a theme.  Because this is Japan we're talking about, the theme is usually totally insane.  There is a chain of love hotels (and it was once my goal to stay at each of them, but we have not yet) called Snowman's.  Each Snowman's has snowmen everywhere.  But each Snowman's also has a subtheme.  One in Osaka is a Casablanca Snowman's and has a gangster theme and red-and-black polka dot wallpaper in all the hallways and feels bordello-ish.  I'm a fan.  I have a picture somewhere of me standing in those halls.  Another Snowman's--I think it is in Otsu--is Spaceman Snowman's or something like that, and there are black-light neon snowmen floating through outer space on all the walls.  There are also plenty of love hotels with a Christmas theme, and I thought that would be righteous, but the one we went to was kind of lame.  Sure, there was a Santa in the lobby, but the room had no Christmas kitsch at all, and so then it's just a big, comfortable room with a huge bath and a vast bed.  It's good, but not really thrilling. 

One of the first love hotels I ever stayed at had some kind of funky neon stars revolving on the ceiling, and, honestly, I thought it was going to give me epilepsy.  But it was still cool.

I haven't really ever stayed in any of the "special" rooms, i.e., those with S&M and bondage gear at the ready, and, to be frank, it skeeves me out to think of using bondage gear that is used by approximately 15 total strangers everyday.  Snowman's also has special rooms that are not bondage oriented but have a sub-sub-theme, like a giant racecar bed or something.  We have never managed to get one of those either.  I think you have to wait in line.

Speaking of which, most love hotels also have a very discreet waiting area, in case your room of choice is occupied when you come (or all the rooms are).  There are all these plush booths where patient lovers can hide away until the glorious time that they can finally go up and feed their money into a machine.  A lot of love hotels also have programs where return customers can get special goodies.  I got this grooming set (again with the grooming)--a couple hairbrushes and whatnot--from the Circus Hotel in Nagoya.  God, the Circus Hotel (or Circus Resort?  something like that...I can still remember exactly how to get to it, and I remember the little dancing elephant mascots) was awesome.

[Heh.  Now, thinking of the Circus is reminding me of this one time, back when ours was still a long-distance relationship, that we couldn't find a room in any of the Sakae, Nagoya, love hotels, so we just ended up walking around all night.  Just walking.  Oh, we got exhausted, but we talked so much and had such a good time.  That's really one of my best memories from Nagoya.  Now that I think of it, we walked all the way to Osu, and then I think we got breakfast there.  It was in July, after the Nagoyako festival, so of course there weren't any rooms.  Man.  Just to walk around with him all night, my future husband--what a sweet memory.]

Ah, love hotels.  I miss them almost as much as I miss the spicy nozawana pickles from Marugen. 

How did you meet your current, or most recent, significant other?

It totally was kismet.

Did I already write about this?  If you already know the story, by all means, visit someone else's blog.

It was a sunny spring day in Shizuoka Prefecture, April 2002.  I had been in Japan for about four months and was living in Fujinomiya.  I was the happiest I had ever been in my life.

I had arrangements to meet a friend in Numazu, a city about a half-hour away by train, every Sunday.  Ostensibly I was giving him English lessons, but mostly we just talked and drank either his very good coffee or his very good whiskey.  Anyway, he paid me for the lessons.  So, I was in Numazu on a Sunday with some time to kill before I had to meet him.  Numazu has this street, as most Japanese cities do, which is a pedestrian shopping mall.  I can't remember the name of it--I think it was Nakamisedori or something.  I used to go there a lot to watch people.  They had places to sit there and the Freshburger place had great lemonade, so it made for a nice, relaxing day.

That particular day I had gone to eat Chinese food at one of the restaurants on a side street.  I left the restaurant and turned left into Nakamisedori and found walking by my side this handsome young man.  Hottt!  He looked at me.  I put on my best smile and said, "Konnichiwa."

See?  Kismet.

I tried talking to him a little bit, but I had only been in Japan for four months and spoke very little Japanese.  He was a little shy and not at all used to talking to foreign girls (or foreigners of any sex), and he got flustered when I couldn't understand a phrase he used.  It wasn't in my dictionary, either, because Japanese-English dictionaries don't have all the pseudo-onomatopoeia that Japanese people use.  Very annoying.  The phrase was "bura bura" which has now become something of a joke with us.  It can mean to dangle and swing back and forth, but in the context he meant he was just wandering around aimlessly, which is what he usually does with his free time.  He's a bura bura sort of guy, and I've come to love that about him.

So, after the mutual frustration at misunderstanding, we parted ways.

Perhaps a half-hour later, I had wandered over to watch some street performers, jugglers and whatnot, and was sitting on one of the chairs.  I spotted my earlier quarry.  He had apparently used the intervening time to fortify himself with liquor to better withstand the fits and starts of bilingual romance.  He approached, very red-faced (from alcohol), and we made more attempts at chatter.  We relied heavily on the dictionary and phrasebook I had with me.  Eventually we agreed to go have coffee together. 

I found out he was a soldier, in a tank battalion.  Just like my father had been.  I also found out he had no hobbies to speak of, except walking bura bura, and he was 21.  I was, oh, goodness, 27 I guess.  I also found out his birthday was only two days (and six years) after mine.  How's that for your kismet?

I asked him for his phone number.  Actually I asked him for his phone so I could use it to call the guy I was supposed to be meeting, and he did let me use it, but I got his number, too.  Not that we could speak over the phone, given the linguistic barriers, but what the hell?

Somehow we agreed to meet the next Sunday, Sundays being the only days he was allowed off base, and we met.  Then he moved to Aichi Prefecture, and I followed him.  And the rest is history, destiny, and luck.  We have been together for nearly five years, married for two, have one child, and are currently buying a house together.  He is giving up bura bura in favor of puttering in the garage and ice fishing.  I don't care what he does as long as he stays away from the gold-panning shows.  God.  Listen to me.  We have totally already become old people together.  It's so awesome.

This is the long-overdue Heidi issue.  Heidi Junkersfeld and I met when we both worked for the catering service on campus at Laughingstock University.  It was a bizarre job--weird hours, weird coworkers, forced exposure to Kenny G and Paul Anka in the same night.  I have a lot of fond memories from that job (including being given a leftover gallon of organic carrot juice by George Clinton), and so many of them involve Heidi in some way.  We were partners in catering.  We were good friends.  We were intimidated by each other.

Heidi, this is for you.

Heidi, who always reminds me of that lyric from Morphine:  "She had a way of making people feel good to be around her, as it should be."

Heidi, who made (probably still makes) everyone--man, woman, or child--hot in the pants with her raw, molten sexuality.  She was easily one of the sexiest people I have ever known.  And a great kisser.

Heidi, who double majored in physics and dance.  Because she is insane.  Or something about her intellectual side and her creative side.  Insane.

Heidi, the only caterer who was routinely louder and more unsettling to guests than I was.

Heidi, who is a great dancer and choreographer and is now a driving force behind a multimedia dance production group in our old hillbilly college town.  And she has a day job, too.

Heidi, who just never did conventional things or accepted the status quo.

Heidi, who taught me how to just make fun of how fucked up everything and everyone was.

Heidi, full of energy and grace and boundless joy.  Heidi, who first introduced me to the wonderful, if moderately pretentious, League of Evil Physicists.  Heidi whose brain worked totally different from mine.  Where mine was always a big mess of words and arguments, hers featured clean equations, vectors and force.  Somehow we managed to communicate. 

Heidi, I have missed you and your joie de vivre.