Look at me! I'm bein' productive some more! ;)
Yea, so I really don't know what's going on, but here I am again, getting more stories down for you all to peruse as I hurry through my busy September. @_@
...But first, funny thing that just happened ("just" as in, about 15 seconds ago). I started up this page and glanced over to the right where all the ads are...you've all seen the ads. When you join lj they ask you what your interests are so you don't end up with random things you don't care about scarring your blog. I guess I put down pets or animals for mine (among the obvious Japan and traveling), and this one I just looked at on the right here says "New Pets Skin Rejuvenator"...and I totally thought it said "New Pets Skin Refrigerator."
For a second there, I thought the crazed pet-lovers had gone too far...ya know, the ones who love their animals so much that they spoil them, marry them, then stuff them after they die and use them as coffee table props.
Not sure why I feel that I must share that stupidity with you all, but there it is. Maybe I'll delete this paragraph before I get around to posting it. Probably not. 99% of the people who will read this know quite well how forgetful and lazy I am (that remaining extra 1% would be the browsers who wander in and out of random blogs and will probably be getting bored of this one about...now). So there it is.
And in case anyone's wondering, "If Your Pet Has Eczema, Cuts, Sores Or Infected Skin, Derma Ionx Works!" ...or so says the guy who made this ad. Dunno if I'd want to trust my pet's sensitive skin with a product made by a company that can't even understand that EVERY word in a sentence need not be capitalized, but...that's just me. :)
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Here's what I did today.
My JHs had a sports meet today (chutairen), and I of course went along to be a...presence. We had one of these back in...July was it? Basically, how it works is, every school in Japan has sports clubs. All students are required to join a club at their school, and most kids pick the sports ones, or so is my experience. So when the chutairen rolls around, the kids load up into buses and head off to their respective sports meet arenas. For Tairadate, which has only 3 clubs (ping pong, basketball, and baseball), choices are limited. Kanita is almost in the same boat, but the point of this background is that I could either go to watch ping pong, or I could go to something held outside. Last Sunday I walked 5.5 km beneath a lovely, sunless sky that left me with a lovely, lobster sunburn all over my face, except the strip over my forehead where I'd been wearing a bandanna for all 3 hours of the walk. With that memory fresh in my brain, I picked ping pong.
The last chutairen wasn't exactly a whole lot of fun, so this time I came prepared with a camera and a notebook to keep me inconspicuously occupied. The plan was to hide out in some dark corner of the gym and wait the thing out. But as soon as I stepped in the door, one of my Tairadate students bounded up to me, all smiles, and started chattering away. At the end of her cheerful good morning's, she pointed to the Yomogita group of ping pongers and asked, "Do you know that foreigner over there?"
Why yes, yes I did.
So the day was immediately looking brighter. The Yomogita JET is a friend of mine, and I sat with her for the first couple hours of the meet, talking about everything from the upcoming JET Culture Day to our personal views on spirituality (she's a faithful Christian; I'm...something more on the pagan side). After a while, I went to get some pictures and she went to talk to her JTE. Well...I should've known by now that whenever I approach a group of students with ANYTHING in my hand, they'll get it OUT of my hand and start playing with it. So it was that my notebook, my pen, my camera, and my camera case all went in different directions. I'm not sure why, but even the pen was popular. It seems I have unique taste, because even the stuff I buy here in Japan (like this pen) fascinates my students.
Anyway, my notebook, over the course of the day, lost 2 pages to doodles and messages. My camera memory card now has many, MANY pictures of my Tairadate students covering their faces with ping pong paddles, and my camera battery is completely dead. (The last of these being the fault of 3 of my 1st graders who thought it would be fun to take pictures of printed images of their favorite anime characters stuck in their notebooks...and no, I don't get it either.)
Later, I was sitting watching the ping pong (having at this point been stripped of all of my devices to entertain myself), when suddenly one of my 2nd year kids sitting alone on the other end of the row scooted over and started up a conversation with me...IN ENGLISH! I was so shocked! She actually got up and moved over of her own free will and started speaking confidently (though not altogether correctly) in English! She asked me if I liked X Japan, a 10+ year old rock band in Japan, and by some miracle, I actually do. Think, of all the things she could've asked me, it was whether I liked something I actually did! And she looks like about as much like a rock fan as a fluffy bunny, so I was pretty surprised that SHE did. X Japan is pretty hardcore. Quite cool, but as most of you know, it takes young people some time to admit the coolness in anything not fresh and new.
So I ended up spending the rest of the day from that point chatting with her and prodding the other kids to use English, too...with mild success. It was a refreshing moment, seeing them trying to use what they knew, even though we all knew quite well that I could understand them if they just said it all in Japanese.
On the bus ride home, my discreet attempt to pull out my ipod (which is also now charging in the corner) failed miserably when one of my more curious students announced (at the top of her lungs) that there was an iPod on the bus. The next thing I knew, one of the girls from the back had run up the aisle and landed next to me, eying the device like it was a chocolate-coated bar of gold. She has this [mega-obvious] crush on a 3rd year, and he'd told her that I'd let him listen to a Ne-Yo song on a previous bus ride, so now she was begging to hear the same one. After I did, the iPod left my hands completely to get passed around to almost everybody else while I sat in the back trading tongue-twisters with the few who weren't interested in electronic trinkets. *sigh*
Well, that was about it for my day. I intended to write more (my bug story or something), but I'm tired, so I'm gonna go watch Friends for a bit and...maybe eat some of that ice cream that I just remembered I bought yesterday. >:)
Later!