The FIRST POST (いよいよ!)

世界こんにちは！Hello world!

I am proud to say that this is my very first post. Ever. On any blog. I can finally check this off my bucket list! After one year and several hundred dollars (ok maybe not “several” but at least $200 were spent, part of that money going to security, because you know blogs with absolutely no posts and consequently no viewers are so desirable) I have finally made a post. You may be wondering, Steven, what in the world were you waiting for?

I was waiting for a sign. Actually, I wasn’t really waiting for anything – I was just lazy. I don’t have internet in my apartment, so I have to actually leave my apartment. I can’t post from work, because I work hard at work and don’t do silly things like make blog posts (also wordpress is blocked on my work computer). I also had to come up with something to say for my very first post. It’s not like I have any lack of stories.. maybe it’s that I have too many, and so I’m confronted with the whole indecision over having too many options. And you know, the first time you do anything it takes slightly more effort, just to take that first step. So there you go.. that’s why I’ve had this blog for a year and haven’t made a single post. So, why am I posting now?

For that I have my good friend Catherine Vaerewyck to thank. Maybe two weeks ago, Catherine sent me a message about a dream she had, and in this dream she was reading my blog, and it was very entertaining and she was having a great time reading it. So, when she woke up, she asked me, you know, hey did you ever start that blog that you were telling everyone you were going to write? And I said, well Catherine, no I didn’t. But you know what.. I will. I will make your dream come true. Some dreams, they don’t make sense, it couldn’t be possible, or would take too much effort to make happen. But this dream, I can do it. And I should do it, because then I can say that I didn’t totally waste $200+, and I can feel slightly better and don’t have to spend the rest of my life saying to myself, “Hey Steven, remember when you spent all that money and told all those people that you were going to write a nice blog about your fun times in Japan and you never did it?” And I’ll say, “Yes me, I remember, I will always remember.”

So this first post is dedicated to Catherine and making her dreams come true. I’m sure there are many other dreams she would much rather come true instead of this one, but one dream coming true is better than no dreams coming true, and I’m not a miracle worker so I’m doing what I can, okay, Catherine? Jeez.

I have been doing some bug photography, and will be doing much more, now that I’ve got a nice 3.5X-90X Zoom Trinocular Stereo Microscope with Table Pillar Stand from AmScope on the way, and of course I got a camera to go with it, so if you thought it was up close and personal before (and it really was, I’ve hit several bugs with the lens of my camera in trying to get as close as possible) just you wait! I want this to be a space for all my insect photography – Facebook is nice too, but you know.. it’s Facebook.

So.. about Japan. I’m writing this from my friend Nagata sensei’s apartment. She’s a good friend, and she has great internet. We live in the same jyutaku (apartment complex, jyutaku means ‘living place’) and she gorogoros a lot (chills at home) so I can walk right on over and get this sweet sweet internet! Before she moved in, I was driving to the closest conbini (convenience store) (also, is this annoying? Using Japanese words and giving their definitions? Is it interrupting the flow? I’m going to keep doing it for now. You can learn some Japanese it won’t kill you!). The closest conbini is 7 and I. Yes, it’s called 7 and I, because the Japanese are all about groups and inclusion and all that good stuff. So I would drive to 7 and I and sit in my cramped car seat and log-in to that sweet sweet conibini wifi and go ham. Which usually meant making a last minute PowerPoint for class. Man, those were the days. I don’t miss them at all.. but they were good days.

It has been just a little over a year now since I’ve been here. I came to Japan at the end of last July. When I think about all the things that have happened since I walked out of that Kumamoto airport with this strange new woman that would be my supervisor, coworker, and a great source of entertainment, I can say for certain that it’s been a very good year. And now I’m really regretting having not started this blog earlier.. all the good stories. I did write many of them down in my journal, or have them tucked away in my memory, and I will share some of them at some point. Aaaand why not start with one right now!

This happened soon after I came to Ozu. I had just gotten to Shoyo, and was having a conversation with Yamamoto sensei AKA YamaP (cute, friendly, and looks exactly like Edna Mode, the designer that makes the suits in the Incredibles). Seriously, at one of our enkais (coworker drinking parties) she showed up in this red dress and I thought, who does she remind me of right now, there is a woman who looks exactly like her, and then BOW, Edna Mode popped into my mind, although I didn’t know her name and had to look her up, like I did just now once again. She was one of my good friends early on because her English was pretty good and she liked to talk to me. Anyways, YamaP asked me how I’m coming to school. Here is how our conversation went.

“Steven sensei, how do you get to school?”

“I drive.”

“Jog?”

“No, I drive every morning.” (I mime holding a steering wheel and driving – she interprets it as me holding my arms up as I jog)

“Jog.” (She is now miming a jogging motion with her arms)

“I have a car.”

“You’re really healthy!!”

End of conversation.

Nowadays, I do walk to Shoyo. This was before I made the switch. This was also before I was comfortable using any Japanese at all when I could get away with English, so I didn’t clear things up with Japanese, and just opted to let her think that I jogged to school every morning. Which would actually be impossible to do, especially now that it’s tortuously hot and humid, without showing up drenched in sweat, and proceeding to suffer immensely for the hour or so until someone can’t stand it anymore and asks to turn the air conditioning on, and then after that you just suffer lightly, because the temperature will only go down by about one degree Celcius, and it will still be wayyyy too damn hot.  These kinds of conversations happened often, and were always entertaining. I’ll share one more now that I’m thinking about it, another amusing misunderstanding.

Without going into too much detail (I will have to write about him another time) I was visiting my best friend Tamanaga san, who lives in a house next to my apartment complex. I have visited him many times, and it has been bug related almost every time, and every time I visit him I leave with something in my arms. Things I have left with include: a large bottle of Kagoshima shochu (2/3 full), many different kinds of pickled vegetables, 12 small fish, cabbages, melons, caterpillars, books. This time, Tamanaga san gave me three eggs. I was actually halfway back to my house when I heard him yelling for me, so I turned around, thinking he must have found an exciting new bug, and came back to his house. Instead of bugs, he had three eggs for me (the Tamanagas have four chickens, someone didn’t perform). He proceeded to tell me about these eggs, and what I came away from the conversation with was this: Do not eat these eggs raw. Fast forward to a few days later, and I’m whipping up something to eat in the apartment, and I think to myself, like usual, what can I make that requires the least amount of effort and gives me the maximum amount of sustenance? So this time around I settled on eggs and rice. So I take out the eggs, excited to try a fresh egg from the Tamanaga farm, and I go to crack it on the pan, and.. nothing happens. The egg is firm, even hard, and it hardly cracks. Immediately, my thoughts go to a conversation I had with a friend recently (Ryoka, she will show up again, possible many times, so I’ll just name drop her now) about her fear of cracking open an egg and seeing a baby chick. She claims to think about this every time she cracks an egg. I have this fear as well, but it’s more of on the level of, oh you know I wouldn’t like it if that happened, and not, oh my god is there going to be a chick in this egg that would be horrifying. But now that I’ve cracked this egg, and it’s clearly not a normal raw egg, I’m thinking about this conversation, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there must be a chick inside. So, I take a moment, and then I do what I’ve gotta do and I peel back the egg shell, expecting to see baby chick, and what do I see? White. It’s a hard-boiled egg. Maybe you saw that coming, I didn’t. And I started laughing, because I realized, Tamanaga san was not telling me not to eat it raw. He was telling me it ISN’T raw. Whoopsie! The next time I saw him I told him, I thought you gave me raw eggs! And he was like, no! And we had a good chuckle.

So there you go, you got two stories tonight, you lucky dogs!

Tomorrow I’m going to Yamato to see a waterfall bridge with my pals James (big character) and Emily (nice girl). Although Nagata sensei has just told me there will be a typhoon tomorrow so..

And with that cliffhanger, the first post is finished! Until the next one.. will it take me another year?