I may have mentioned before that I'm the least convincing actor in the world. That's not just my opinion, that's an ironclad physical law of the universe, like gravity, or the speed of light. The most gullible audience anywhere would never for a moment suspend disbelief for my acting, but somehow I got signed up for kabuki. Either they're lowering their standards, or they're desparate to find players. I think it may be a little of both.
Tonight was an extra-special kabuki night. We were supposed to practice at the teacher's home, but almost nobody showed up, and I was the only American. Bando-san, the teacher, doesn't speak a lick of English, and when he teaches, he likes to explain a lot. He'll demonstrate a move once — takes about three seconds for him to do it — and then he'll say, "Your turn," and I'll bumble my way through it for the next five agonizing minutes while he corrects every move I can remember to make.
The two women who were there could speak English pretty well, though, and they did their best to make me look like I wasn't completely lame by explaining that I should be turning left when I'm spinning right, or whatever. Then I would turn left and somebody will whack me on the head with a sword. It's a lot harder than it looks.
The one amazing thing I did flawlessly was find my way back to Misawa. I followed one of the women to get to Bando-san's house in Towada, and although I tried to pay attention to the landmarks along the way, it was dark by the time I left. I was sure I was going to be lost forever, but she told me, as I backed out of the driveway, to go to the end of the road, then turn right, and I would be fine. It was too simple. I couldn't believe it, but then I was on the main road, and I found myself at the train station almost like magic.
RETIREMENT NEWS: I got an e-mail from airman Scaramouche yesterday — I love being able to bring up that name in conversation. Anyway, airman Scaramouche noticed that, if I wanted to retire 1 September — oops, September first; better get used to civilian dates — then I would have to extend my enlistment one month. She had the paperwork in her office that I would have to complete.
I went down to the retirements office today. Airman Scaramouche wasn't there, but sergeant Duke was. Duke & Scaramouche sounds like a jazz duo, doesn't it? Anyway, she found the paperwork for me, which was actually a worksheet explaining what I actually needed to do. "Take this to Room 102," she said.
"Room 102?" I asked. "Here? In this building."
She nodded. "Right down the hall."
It was right down the hall. I'd been there many times before to have other work done. The sergeant took my worksheet, looked it over and found everything in order, smiled and told me, "I can have this done tomorrow morning for pick-up." I thanked her and left. My only part to play today was to carry a worksheet about twenty meters down the hall. Excuse me, about sixty feet. Got to get used to that again, too.
ONE OF THE ABOVE-THE-FOLD STORIES on the front page of yesterday's Stars & Stripes was about a football player: "Sanders will join Ravens if he passes physical." I thought that was a little odd. I mean, if there's some question he's fit enough to pass a physical, this team must be pretty lame to even be considering him. But Tim explained that Sanders is a first-rate athlete; what they're checking for is drugs. It's become routine to check all players now, which I think is a good thing, but I think it should be the other way: All players should be required to take performance-enhancing drugs. It's a business, right? Don't give me some noise about the love of the sport; these guys play football to make a ton of money, and team owners pay a ton of money for good players so they can make even more. It's a mystery to me why they don't make use of every technological advantage that's available. The guys are already armored, for crying out loud. The coaches communicate using radio. Some of the players manage to get away with using "performance-enhancing supplements" — you know they do. So why not level the playing field and require them all to use drugs, or steroids, or whatever they're popping? Hell, why not start genetically altering them? Imagine the kind of damage a 350-lb blocker could do if he was solid muscle, not an ounce of fat on him. Let's put some real bone-crushing action into this freak show.
I baked twenty cakes today. Happy birthday to me.
No. I baked the cakes for a fund-raiser. The Japanese love cakes, especially American cakes. You see Duncan Hines cake mixes for sale in Japanese stores for about five and a half dollars a box. No lie. So whenever there's a Japanese-American event sponsored by the base, we can bake a bunch of cakes and sell them to the Japanese for five hundred yen a pop — that's about five bucks. A box of cake mix costs about a buck; we can get two 6x6 from one box of mix; that's about a thousand percent profit, right? It's easily the best money-maker at food booth.
The cakes I'm baking for our senior NCO council came in a big box, all measured out: ten boxes of mix, a bottle of cooking oil, and twenty plastic ziplock bags to package the finished cakes in. I put the box on the kitchen table when I came home from work last night, because I was going to knock out four cakes before I went to bed, to get a head start on things. When I went back to the kitchen after I showered, the first thing I did was double-check all the supplies I'd brought home: no ziplock bags. Where could they be? There are only two other people in the house to ask, and, as sometimes happens around here, neither of them knew anything about the missing ziplocks. No idea at all. Zip about the ziplocks, so to speak. I looked all through the kitchen, and finally found them in the drawer where we keep the ziplock bags! How did they get in there? Still no idea.
"I think you're trying to Gaslight me," I told Barb. She laughed. So I've seen through her little plan after all, her laughter seemed to say. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
THE BBC AIRED INTERVIEWS THIS MORNING of several former Viet Cong who supported John Kerry's run for the presidency. Let's see, what other endorsements could we possibly get for Kerry? Saddam Hussein? Charles Manson? How about we get some special-interest groups involved, too: Pedophiles For Kerry! Maybe I'm a little too pessimistic about his chances, but at this point, given the choices, I think voting for Micky Mouse would be the most effective use of my franchise.
The other night, Barb served us a lovely dinner — or, as it's officially become known in our house, a sumptuous repast — of a Japanese chicken soup with dumplings, and a side of cole slaw. She apologized to me for the cole slaw, another dish she learned to make in the Japanese cooking class she's taking. She knew how much I didn't like cole slaw, but it was part of the dinner.
It's not cole slaw that I mind, actually, but my association with it. I used to work in a restaurant during the summer break during college. Yep, one of those stories. It was one of those all-you-can-eat places, so the boss tried to pinch pennies every way he could. When customers came in, we brought them a pot of coffee and a platter with a dish of 3-bean salad and a dish of cole slaw on it. Most people didn't touch it, so the boss said, put it back in the fridge and serve it again. As if that wasn't bad enough, if the customers did scoop from the bowl of salad or the bowl of cole slaw, we were to dump it in a big steel pot, and recycle it when we made up more platters. I can only assume that other restaurants have similar policies, but you never know because they don't tell you these things. So I don't eat cole slaw. At least, not when I eat out. Barb's was delicious.
This is probably more than you want to know about me, so close your eyes and skip down if you're squeamish: I have very particular needs when it comes to cleaning my ears. As well-oiled as they are, you'd think they'd work better. Each time I shower, I have to remember to thoroughly wash them out — plenty of soap and warm water! — carefully towel out every curly cue, then gently swab the opening, which always reminds me of Orson Bean, thanks to a television ad I saw maybe twice as a child, but which nevertheless managed to uselessly burn itself into a couple of memory synapses. I even have to irrigate the canal from time to time with a syringe. You could say it's part of my aural tradition.
rimshot!
The resplendently redundantly-named Misawa Air Base Air Show took place today. Dozens of military aircraft flew in from all over the Pacific theater. Pilots used the beautifully clear weather yesterday to practice breathtakingly death-defying aerial stunts, and about two hundred thousand Japanese converged on Misawa from all over Tohoku, and possibly farther away than that, to take part in our hospitality.
And, as always happens, the weather closed in, and none of the awesomely-powerful military aircraft on hand were able to put on the show they practiced for us. I wonder why they even show up. The various military units around Japan could save a bundle on gas and maintenance if they just trucked a bunch of cardboard cutouts up here to put on display, because I've never heard of a Misawa Air Show in which the military jet aircraft flew. It's not that they can't fly in heavy weather, it's that they disappear into the clouds as soon as they take off, and all the visitors would be left with is a lot of jet noise. Talk about a lot of bang for their buck.
rimshot!
Our homestay student from last month, Nanae, took the train down from Hirosaki to visit and see the air show. It's a pretty long trip for some snack food and a look at a few jet planes that didn't move, but she seemed to enjoy it all the same. No rim shot this time, just a little extra info.
There's a lot about living in Japan that I like, but you know what I've learned to miss? Going out for a tasty breakfast. I guess living in Denver spoiled me that way. We lived in a Northern Aurora neighborhood that was as quiet as any suburb could be, and still had all the conveniences of living in a metro area. There was never any hesitation if we wanted to go out to get a bite to eat, or a cup of coffee to drink. That's especially cool early in the morning. When Barb took a job delivering The Denver Post for a couple months, and Tim and I helped her out, we would start folding newspapers at about three in the morning, deliver them between five and six, then stop at Denny's or the IHOP for breakfast. I'll admit that a Denny's breakfast isn't necessarily something to miss, but it wasn't the food, it was the occassion.
On a recent trip to the States, while I was visiting my brother and his family in the Dallas area, we had breakfast at the IHOP, and it was a great time. Little Jack flung his crayons everywhere, Dakota had chocolate chip pancakes both times that gave him a wrenching stomach ache, I had a big stack of pancakes that was so rich the whole meal made a beeline for my lower colon and I had to run straight to the potty shortly after I paid the check. Maybe that was more than you wanted to know, but my point was, once again, that it's not the food, it's the occassion.
For some reason, a big stack of pancakes was on my mind all morning today, so I asked Barb to go to the cafe with me, the only place within spitting distance where we could get a meal like that outside our own house. We're in sort of a rural area here; there aren't a lot of Denny's around. Barb loved the idea, so we washed and dressed and jumped into the car to get over to the cafe before they stopped serving breakfast. We were just about to turn the corner into the parking lot when we spied a lame dog trying to avoid being run over in the street. He was a pretty mangy mutt, but he was wearing a collar, so he was somebody's puppy, and he was hurt and running loose. We were about to be delayed from our breakfast. It was Good Deed Time. (And all Barb's idea, I hasten to add.)
Somebody was already trying to call the dog out of the street by the time we parked and got out of our car. The dog wasn't having any of it; he limped off through the schoolyard across the street and disappeared behind the buildings, with Barb in hot pursuit, trying to contact somebody from security forces on her cell phone. I got back in the car and followed. As I drove around the back of the school, I could see that Barb had managed to take advantage of quite a piece of luck: the dog had wandered into the tennis courts, so all Barb had to do was close the gates.
Okay. What do we do now?
Barb volunteers regularly at the base animal shelter. She drove down there to bring back a kennel and some canned dog food, and she put a little food in a dish, set it in the kennel, and left until the dog found the food and ate it up. Then I noisily spooned a bit more food into the dish, backed off, and let him eat again. We were hoping to repeat this enough times, getting a little closer each time, until we could lock him into the kennel, and it was going pretty well, until somebody from the shelter showed up. She wanted to use the "I'll just try to walk up and snap a leash on him" approach, and even though this was about as successful as herding rabid wolverines with a polite request, she wouldn't give up. "Let's go get something to eat," I asked Barb. I knew she was hungry — I could hear her stomach growling, and sure enough, she told Miss Leash-Snapper that we had to go.
By then, it was too late for breakfast. I had a turkey wrap, which was not as satisfying as a stack of pancakes, proving once again that you can't always get what you want. But it's not the food, it's the occassion. Barb and I had a nice time out: followed a dog around, sat down for a nice brunch, and then spent the better part of the afternoon in Hachinohe, where Barb played with electronic pocket translators that had names like InfoLectric and Power Word. Wouldn't Word Monster be a much more catchy name for a pocket translator? GodzillaSpeak would probably be even better.
RETIREMENT NEWS: Today was my first day at TAP class, the Tuition Assistance Program that helps ease the culture shock old military farts like me experience when they retire and move back to the States for good. How does it do that? I don't know. I napped through it.
No, just kidding. I napped through the afternoon class. The morning class actually had a couple parts to it so informative that they kept me awake, and one part that got me so pissed off, I could only sit and seethe through it. The part that pissed me off was about the Montgomery GI Bill, the program that takes about a hundred bucks of a GI's money and, through the kind of creative financing that made guys like Ken Lay famous, turns it into thirty trillion free dollars to use for college education. I'm not eligible for it. Never have been. But any snot-nosed airman who serves a two-year term can get his MBA using the GI bill, become the CEO of some huge energy-trading company, cook the books to inflate the value of the company's stocks, then sell high and laugh as the company goes down in flames because he knows he'll never be convicted of anything harsher than going bald. They won't touch him because he'll have more money in his back pocket than I would ever have if I lived three lifetimes, and he'll get it all before he's thirty-six.
I get the option of Tricare for me and my family. Yay. Okay, I know I should be more grateful. And the nice lady who told us about the health care also said that the Veteran's Administration also gives away piles of money for every hangnail and carbuncle that's documented in your medical records, if you know the password, which she shared with us retirees. I'll let you know how that turns out.
THE TAP CLASS IS JUST ABOUT OVER. We saw our last briefers today, a guy who gave us a quick-and-dirty brief regarding our VA benefits, and a woman who told us about job opportunities in federal and civil service. Why's one "federal" and one "civil"? Isn't federal service civil? Or is it too mean for that?
The VA guy offered me a small ray of hope: He was a retired vet with a 10% disability due to hearing loss and tinitus, a ringing in the ears. I've been trying for years to get the audiologist at the clinic to document my hearing loss and tinitus, but they kept brushing me off, telling me that my hearing was fine. I cornered this guy and asked him how he did it, and he gave me some pointers. Just hearing what he had to say was worth showing up today.
One more class tomorrow, one more briefer.
KABUKI PRACTICE was a little more encouraging than the last. When I showed up at last week's rehearsal, I was the only American, the teacher added a new scene, and I spent most of the night gasping like a goldfish at the top of the bowl. Tonight, I had just about all the moves in my head, which is a first. Usually, I don't remember a thing, so I end up sort of waving the my sword in the air as I gallop across the stage aimlessly. The teacher has nicknamed me Panic — because of the look on my face, I can only assume. But last night, I almost felt like I knew what I was doing, and even knew when to come in and whom to hack to pieces. I must be learning something, in spite of my dazed expression.
AND, FROM BARB, WHO TAUGHT ENGLISH in four different classes today, I offer you this bit of trivia: The Japanese students in her evening class go to school all day long, and for once, I'm not exaggerating even a tiny bit. They go to school at eight in the morning. After school ends in the afternoon, they practice sports, go to music school, or something along those lines. And, by the time they get to Barb's English class, they still haven't had dinner, and the class doesn't end until eight or nine in the evening. She brought them animal crackers, which made them fall on their knees and do everything but build a church in her honor.
Why do we even like cats? I'm speaking in the royal "we," of course, the way I do when, for example, I tell Barb, "We would like a cup of coffee, please," because it commands more respect. Barb usually replies with something along the lines of, "We can just blow it out our bottoms," which would be much nicer than she would've been if I'd just said, "Get me a coffee." See how it works?
I see I've wandered a bit, hardly unusual for this time of the morning. The question I was addressing was cats. Scientists, those experts on pet behavior, tell us that millions of years ago people befriended dogs because dogs were good hunting companions, or some nonsense like that. That sort of implies that cats were good for something, but what the hell was it? They're kind of cute, they're warm, they're soft, and they purr, but I would've thought that having boxes of crap in the house would've put early humankind right off the idea of keeping cats around. The best I can figure is they're pretty dependable alarm clocks. Get a cat used to eating at a certain time, and after a while it'll make sure you feed it at that time every day, so if, for instance, a bunch of the guys go out to kill wooly mammoth at six in the morning, but you're the one who always oversleeps, just feed a cat. You'll never sleep past six again.
I have no idea what to write about today, No Freak & ID'rr. I went to work early this morning — call me an idiot, I guess — in the lame home that I could catch up a little bit, after being at TAP class for the last three days, but didn't even come close to catching up. You know how some people describe work as being like beating your head against the wall? It was like that. I started beating the bricks with my brainbox at six-thirty, and, except for a short break for lunch, didn't stop until I fled the office in a panic at four. I was so flustered that I forgot to get beer on the way home. And my ears are still ringing.
After I'd calmed down a bit, I helped Barb make sushi for dinner. Tim's sworn a blood oath never to eat anything covered in seaweed, after he tried some sushi in a cultural class at school. I was going to make a crack here about how immersion into the world of Japanese cuisine has turned Tim into a cultural hermit, but I had the same reaction to sashimi shrimp, so I don't have lots of room to dis him. He didn't share much in dinner tonight, beyond the salad, and we left it at that. I'm not a huge fan of seaweed myself, but the sushi was good — rice, crabmeat, and cucumber. Just how much of an old hippie weirdo freak have I become when I start eating frou-frou like that?
You may be trying to ignore the latest campaign in the hopes that it will just go away. I know that's my strategy. It's not working for you, either, though, is it? But every so often, a commentary turd floats to the surface of the campaign toilet bowl that almost makes me glad I lifted the lid.
Yesterday, it was the revelation from Dick Cheny that the economy is actually a lot stronger than those doom-and-gloom economists would lead you to believe, thanks to all the people who sell their second-hand crap on e-bay. You could almost hear the collective slap on the head of thousands of supposedly trained economists across the country. "E-bay!" they cringed. "Why didn't we think of that?" And they furiously began the work of re-accomplishing all their estimations of the gross national product, to include e-bay sales, garage sales, bake sales, and every other kind of nickel-and-dime pop stand that invisibly props up the economy. How about crime? Has anybody really considered how much money out-and-out crime brings to the economy? My god, this may lead to a revolution in economic thinking!
The morning e-mail brings us opportunities to get tons of cheap, or possibly even free, drugs, unnecessarily enlarge my already impressive manhood, or gurflargen our nfffrstbvn bqrxplt. Some spamming techniques are pretty impressive, but that last one just puzzles me. Are there really people out there who open e-mails when they see subject lines made up of random letters? "Hey! What's a bqrxplt? Maybe the message itself provides a clearer explanation!" Okay, maybe.
Got one this morning that was almost interesting enough to open: "legally Drive in any country using fake documents". First of all, there was the obvious question: If the documents are fake, then how would using them to drive be legal? I really didn't believe that opening the message would've answered that question, though, so I deleted it. Maybe I acted just a bit too rashly. The random capitalization of the second word in the subject line also caught my eye for about half a second, but that wasn't enough intrigue to keep my finger off the delete key.
We forced Tim to make gyoza today. What some parents won't do to their children.
I forget why, but a bunch of Chinese guest workers were on hand at the Misawa community center today to show us how to make meat dumplings, called gyoza in Japan. I think the same things are called wontons at Chinese take-out restaurants in the States. They're fried, boiled, and otherwise cooked and served in so many ways, but they're always a little glob of meat and spices in a tiny thumb-sized, doughy wrapper.
Tim really, really didn't want to go. He thought it was going to be just another dumb "event" that would drag on forever, like so many of the other cultural experiences we dragged him to in the past. But he's still small enough that I can pick him up and take him there, and that's yes! as Bill Cosby put it so well, so he went with us. And, what do you know, he had fun. First of all, the Chinese guest workers were all girls, and darn cute ones, at that. One of them thought Tim was pretty cute, and started asking him lots of questions. "She's trying to fix you up," her translator said. But they backed off when they found out he was fourteen.
The toughest thing to learn about making gyoza was the little tuck they use to turn the little dumpling into a sort of clam-shaped thing. Barb couldn't quite get it. Tim was pretty good, and, it turns out, I was subarashi — magnificent! But not really. The Chinese girls could show me how to do the basic tuck, but they were turning out gyoza that looked like hearts, flowers, pinwheels — all kinds of delicately-folded designs. It was almost a shame to eat them.
So we shamefully stuffed ourselves on them. They turned them out by the hundreds, and set two big dishes at our table, dishes piled so high with gyoza that we had to laugh — We'll never eat all of that! But we did. Gyoza are so delicious that we lost all self-control, and wolfed them down, one after another. The Americans brought pot luck to the event, and the Japanese and Chinese wolfed that down just as quickly, and afterward we all waddled off, happily full.
North Korea blew up last week. Really. An earth-shattering explosion created a fireball that was somewhere between two kilometers or four and a half kilometers wide, depending on which incredibly wound-up news source you read, and left a crater large enough to be seen from space.
Every news outlet in the world ran with the headline, "North Korea Did Not Test A Nuke."
Hmmmm.
One guy claimed that "it just doesn't make sense" for North Korea to shoot off a nuke, because they'd only piss off China, their only friends in the whole world. Yeh, North Korea is the the country I point to when I'm looking for an example of the one place on earth that makes a lot of sense.
Condoleeza Rice earned the loving cup for the Lamest Explanation By A Government Official Ever: it was "maybe a forest fire of some kind," or something. Whatever.
North Korea made good use of the "We Meant To Do That" explanation when they said today that the shattering explosion and awesome fireball came from a "planned demolition" — they blew up a mountain to make way for a hydroelectric dam. They blew up a MOUNTAIN. And it definately wasn't a nuclear explosion.
Whatever.
Every morning on the way to work, I turn the corner from the housing area onto the road past the gym — roads in Japan have no names, so everybody talks this way, all the time — where I get in line with hundreds of other cars, each of which driven by just one guy. There are way too many cars on this base, and there's just one two-lane road that we all have to travel to get from our houses to work.
But that's not what I wanted to drivel about today. The cars make their way by the hundreds along this two-lane road, absolutely locked bumper-to-bumper, doing that slow-motion accordion thing as we make our way past stop signs, through intersections, and past the kids on their way to school who always act like they want us to run right over them when they jump out into the road. But crazy kids are not what I wanted to drivel about, either.
No, what I really wanted to drivel about is the cop who hangs out along this road on the way to work. He's got a radar gun, but he doesn't get to use it, because we are all, as I said, crawling bumper-to-bumper down this road at about two miles per hour. None of us ever take our car out of first gear. Yet the cop is always there.
Any ideas why? I'm stumped.
Greetings. Time to fire up the ol' news-o-tron to see what's been going on just lately, although I think it's going to be gosh-darned difficult to top North Korea blowing up a whole freakin' mountain.
Whoa. News is pretty disappointing. That is to say, boring. Ivan's been bearing down on Florida for, what, three weeks now? Not only is this the biggest, most powerful hurricane ever, it's the most slow-moving hurricane I've heard of. There must be a blue-haired little old lady behind the wheel, trying to peer over the dashboard. Check to see if the blinker's on.
Not that things are any more interesting around here than they are in the funny papers. Work is a little busy right now, because I manage the purchasing program and it's the end of the fiscal year. Lots of paperwork to straighten out. *yawn* Hey! Wake up in the back! There's going to be a quiz on this!
Kabuki practice tonight. Bando-san finally showed me the kapura, a dance I'm supposed to do with him and a bunch of Japanese at a festival next month. "Don't worry about making mistakes," he told me — and I was making a lot of them. "The dance goes so fast that nobody will notice." Okay. I'm a six-foot tall white guy, and I draw stares from people when I go shopping for groceries. But I'm sure nobody will notice me at the festival.
Just a word about the news today: When I walked into work, the television in the break room was turned to Fox "news," where the anchor was broadcasting the hottest news of the day over the headline FOX NEWS ALERT: HURRICANE IVAN COMES ASHORE Holy crap! There's a hurricane out there! When did that sneak up on me?
BARB THOUGHT THE PHOTO OF THE DOG WAS GETTING OLD, and we both agreed this one would make a good stand-by photo while I'm searching for the perfect replacement: a snapshot Barb took of me with her camera phone as I was slurping up some squid tentacles for dinner. Why would a meat-and-potatoes guy like me have squid tentacles dangling from his lips? I'll have to fall back on an old, but dependable, answer: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I actually have to tell you that fresh squid grilled over an open flame is pretty darned good. Tasted just like chicken. Almost. Well, no. In point of fact, it tasted like squid. But it was tender, and it was delicious, and I ate it, tail, tentacles and all. Yum!
We went out for dinner at a yakiniku place, where they served us plates of freshly-cut, marinated beef, fresh shrimp, and dressed-out squid, and we cooked it on a gas grill in the middle of our table. These places are pretty popular in Misawa, and Americans especially seem to like them. The one we went to was one on White Pole Road we had visited once before, where the menu wasn't in English, and the proprietor wasn't much help translating. Just like last time, Barb and I ordered by picking out the two or three items she half-recognized, and, just like last time, we were pleasantly surprised when they brought us just what we thought we were ordering.
We got two squid on a plate, dressed and marinated, with a little pile of tentacles on the side. It looked sort of like a very large, slimy garden slug with a tail shaped like an arrowhead. The immediate problem for two hicks from the midwest is, as you might have already guessed, that neither of us knew how to cook squid. I threw one on the grill, then kept turning it over so it would cook evenly, but how do you tell when squid is done? I didn't know, and neither did Barb. So after a couple minutes, we poked at it to make sure no part of it looked too slimy, gave it another minute just to make sure, then took it off and nibbled at it.
"Hey, this is pretty good," Barb said, surprised. And she was right. Mine was tender and tasty, almost sweet. It's got a sort of chewy skin all over it (just like chicken!) that gets crispy brown if you leave it go too long, which I did on the second one, but the meat stays tender and moist. The tail's a little weird. Probably that's all in my head. The tentacles are way too chewy, but not bad.
AFTER DINNER, WE VISITED THE MISAWA JAPANESE-AMERICAN CLUB. All they do is sit around and talk. If you've never had to deal with a language barrier before, this is not as easy as it sounds. Most of the time, I was paired off with a young lady from Morioka, whose English was pretty good when she was asking questions, but didn't understand me at all when I asked her anything. I let her do most of the talking. Barb had a great time yakking with everybody, although she wanted to practice speaking Japanese, and the Japanese wanted to speak English, so they were sort of working at cross-purposes.
When the meeting of the Japanese-American Club is over, it's over! And you'd better not get in the way of the people putting the chairs up, or linger in the doorway, saying good-bye to a new acquaintence, because you'll be trampled until you're road pizza. I've never seen any meeting break up more decisively. That's exactly the right word.
WE STOPPED AT PADDY'S FOR A DRINK before we went home. Yep, it's an Irish tavern in Misawa. As if that wasn't weird enough, I willingly paid nine bucks apiece for two beers. Sit me down in a bar with a pretty girl and I'll do all sorts of whacky things.
A STORY ABOUT BLOGGING in yesterday's news points out that bloggers don't make a lot of money for babbling about any stupid thing that pops into their head. Does that mean that some of them are making money to screw around like this?
BARB GOT A POP-UP as she was reading the Japan Times the other day that asked her, "Would you know what to do in the event of an earthquake, assuming you survived?" The ending's kind of unnecessarily bleak, don't you think? If you don't survive, the question's rather meaningless. Nevermind the hint of tragedy it implies. I can see a whole series of pop-ups along this line.
"Do you know how to deal with a road accident, if you aren't messily decapitated?"
"Can you deal with a stock market crash, if you aren't traumatically crushed by a 5-ton bag of nickels?"
"How will you find a new job, after you are fired and reduced to picking through dumpsters, eating rotten food, and sleeping on park benches in threadbare, unwashed clothing?"
I HAVE GRADUATED TO FULL-TIME SLOB. We slobs are not card-carriers, though. Far too slobbish for that. I know I'm a full-time slob, though, because there's a mound of clothing next to my bed, some of it clean and folded, the rest of it in various stages of wear, and I pick from it every morning instead of going to my dresser. Barb's been exceptionally kind about this, hasn't said a thing to me about it. Most women would have just poured gasoline on the clothes and lit a match by now. Right next to the pile of clothes, there's a pile of books, for bedside reading. There must be fifty books in that pile. I'm reading just one of them right now. But this morning they all go back where they belong, invalidating my status as a slob, and giving me room to get out of bed in the morning without crawling all the way to the end before I can swing my feet to the floor. Can I hear you say hallelujah?
THE WEEKEND CROSSWORD IS KICKING MY BOOTY, but I'm still plugging away, because we somehow managed to finish it last week. Took all week, and Barb and Tim had to get in on it, else I never would have pulled it off. The newspaper used to run two weekend crosswords, one from the New York Times, and one from some newspaper where English words don't mean quite the same thing they do in my world, because the clues are all skewed just enough that I can't figure out what the hell he's trying to get at. It's like the whole thing's in pig latin. Then, the Stars & Stripes did a major reorg, the section of the paper where the crosswords hung out was turned into a pull-out magazine, and the New York Times crossword, the one I really enjoyed — because I could finish it — disappeared. Gone. Never to be seen again. You can get it on-line, but the Times expects you to pay for that, and I'm way too cheap. In its place, the Stripes is running the lame-ass comic strip Girls and Sports, the lame but relevant comic strip Ricky's Tour, and the somehow relevant and funny Pvt. Murphy, along with a box of trivia, like the winner of the loogey-spitting championship. I used to get hours of enjoyment out of the crossword. I get ten seconds, maybe a guffaw out of all three comics strips. It was a poor swap.
THE LATEST WAVE OF SPAM we're getting uses the subject line ABOUT YOUR 10:00 APPOINTMENT, which would actually be a pretty clever way to get people to open spam, if the address line didn't show that the e-mail was from cvxvzewqrjkkh@genitals.co.be — sorta gives it away, I think.
FIVE-YEAR DESK CALENDARS — what's up with them? Are there really people so anal that they plan out what they're going to do five years in advance to the day? And if you were that anal, wouldn't you be itching for a new five-year calendar after just one or two years? I mean, if you needed a five-year planner to begin with, you wouldn't be satisfied with a three- or four-year planner, would you? And a two-year planner would drive you right up the wall, right?
KABUKI PRACTICE TONIGHT. I have to drive about thirty minutes on back roads to Towada to get to the community center where we practice, then home again the same way, and tonight there was some kind of festival at the train station, so when I came home at around nine o'clock, in the dark, I turned a corner, or came over a hill, and only just barely missed making road kill out of a couple drunken Japanese festival-goers walking up the middle of the road. They were wearing black clothes, as if they were trying to get me to flatten them. After that happened twice, I crawled the rest of the way home at about twenty clicks. Twelve miles an hour, for those of you in the back. By the time I got home, I'd passed at least a dozen people with too much beer in them, and somehow managed to avoid killing any of them, to my great relief, although I'm at a loss to say how.
NOW THAT I'M LOOKING FOR A JOB IN THE CIVILIAN WORLD, there's something I need help with: How do I ask a potential employer if they play hallway music, and, if they do, what kind, and how loudly? And would I be asking too much, I wonder, to have a clause written into my employment contract that would clear me of all blame in the event that I snapped one day from hearing "Oh Yeah" one too many times? This is something I have to think about, because I'm pretty sure I'll blow up like Jiffy-Pop after three days on the job listening to just about any local radio station on the office PA, especially if they listen to any amount of hip-hop or country. Years of isolation in my military world has ironically left my defenses weakened against an audio assault that has only become more potent with advances in modern technology. I don't live in fear of unemployment; being hired on where the office is wired for sound is what scares the crap out of me.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT RAINCOATS AND UMBRELLAS THAT PEOPLE DON'T LIKE? We had pretty steady rain here all day long today, and I lost count of how many people I saw out in their shirtsleeves, happy to let the rain drench them as they walked from residence to car, from car to work, or just down the road leading their dog on a leash. I'm not looking for another law to protect people from their own stupidity, I just wonder why looking cool trumps staying dry. And why is it cool to walk around dripping wet at work or in school while your shoes go squeegie squeegie squeegie?
OUR SUPPLY OFFICE HAD TO ORDER PATCHES for the squadron. I don't usually like to talk about work, because it's kind of dull, but see if this doesn't strike you as weird: Even though we're out here on the Asian side of the Pacific, where just about everything in the world is made anymore, we ordered the patches from a supplier in California — and, sure enough, they were made by a company in Taiwan, which sent them to California before the patch company sent them across the Pacific again, this time to Japan. When the patches were delivered to our unit, though, they had one of those ATTN: JOE BLOW lines on the address label. As it turns out, Joe Blow had just left the unit and gone back to the States, so somebody at the post office, no doubt trying to be helpful, sent the box back across the Pacific to his forwarding address in the States. He was kind enough to put them in the mail to us. Over the Pacific they went AGAIN. That was one pretty well-traveled box.
"DID YOU LIKE COMING BACK TO THE WATCH?" the lieutenant asked me at the end of the day, with a big, goofy smile, as if maybe it was sort of a sly joke. Instead of my cushy nine-to-five job, I was asked to fill in for one of the watch superintendents, so I was back on a twelve-hour day shift today.
I didn't even have to think much about my answer. "Not a lot, no," I told her. I just didn't have the energy for the gung-ho reply. I must be feeling pretty short already. It didn't suck — I only had to stand one watch, and they let me go to my office so I could try to put some of my paperwork in order. But if somebody asks me which I like better, my office job, or twelve-hour shift work, I've pretty much made up my mind I'm not going to put on a happy face for it.
BARB THINKS WE SHOULD BRUSH THE CAT'S TEETH. He's got breath like the stench from a garbage can full of rotten meat on a hot summer afternoon. Barb says a good brushing every day would do wonders for his hygiene, but I sort of feel that it'd be wasted on a creature that cleans his butt with his tongue. In fact, with that thought firmly in mind now, I'm not sure I want to be in daily contact with his mouth at all.
I GOT A BARBER TO CUT MY HAIR WITH A SCISSORS! That never happens in an AAFES barber shop! Okay, maybe it's happened before, but not in my memory. I didn't get the same barber this time I had before, so I was just a bit worried I'd walk out of there looking like a fuzzy bowling ball. She scared me for a moment when she got out her clippers, but she only used them to carve narrow whitewalls around my ears and block up the back. Then she got out her scissors and layered my hair. You heard right: My hair's long enough to layer now. It still looks nerdy as hell, because it's got to be a military cut, but I can part it and comb it to the side. I haven't worn hair this long in over three years, and it's a little scary how much snow is on the roof.
When I sat down in the barber's chair, the first thing she did was ask how I wanted it cut — I was really impressed that she not only seemed to listen, but that she did what I wanted. Then she wrapped me with an apron, grabbed my shoulders, and pushed down, which confused the hell out of me, because the neck massage usually comes after the haircut. Turned out she wasn't giving me a massage. She was trying to get me to hunch down, because I was too tall for her to reach the top of my head, and the chair wouldn't go any lower.
I PUT CHOCOLATE MILK ON MY CEREAL IN THE MORNING. Is that so wrong? I get the strangest looks from the youngest cereal-eater when I do that, which seems bizarre to me, because when I was his age I would've killed for any chance to pour more sugar on my cheerieos, and because we used to get chocolate-flavored cereal as a treat — about once a month, mind you. It was made of marshmallows and turned the milk chocolatey-brown. Remember those days? Remember when you used to sneak as much sugar onto your cereal as you could get away with? Sometimes there was so much that it couldn't even all dissolve, and you'd end up with mucky sugar sludge on the bottom of the bowl. I'd scrape every bit of that stuff up.
Tim doesn't get a whole lot of sugary cereal. Not that there isn't a lot to choose from — the cereal aisle at the commissary is one long aisle filled with box after colorful box of sugar-coated, sugar-enriched puffy chunks of sugar, and it's all priced higher than its weight in gasoline.
There used to be cartoon advertisements on the television that showed people eating spoons full of sugar while a jingle played that went, Put a little sugar ... in your life!
ONE NIGHT ONLY: RETURN OF THE GYOZA TARDS! Barb wanted to make some gyoza last night, so we rolled out some dough and stuffed it with Jimmy Dean's pork sausage, just the way they showed us at the community center two weeks ago. Well, almost just like they showed us. We're kind of lame gyoza-makers. We didn't roll out the dough thin enough, so they came out really doughy and filling, like dumplings, instead of light and moreish, like snack food for beer-drinking, which is what we were really shooting for. But the sausage made a pretty decent filling, and we had some store-bought gyoza wrappers on hand, which turned out to be excellent, especially when pan-fried in a little oil. There's nothing like a plate full of greasy fried food when you're tipping back a couple bottles of cold beer.
I WONDER HOW THE THUNDERBIRDS LIKED MISAWA? They were supposed to put on an airshow for us today — the USAF precision flight-demonstration team in their F-16s, not the bobble-headed puppets in their technicolor rocket ships, although that would've been pretty cool, too. But the Thunderbirds fell victim to the Misawa Curse that stops everybody who tries to put on an aerobatic show. They were rained out. And it wasn't just any drizzly rain, it was Typhoon Meari. We get a lot of typhoons here, but they usually blow themselves out before they get this far north. Meari, though, managed to bring drenching downpours all the way up to Iwate. As I crawled to work in second gear through curtains of driving rain, the DJ on the radio called the PR guy for the Thunderbirds and asked whether or not the show was cancelled. I would never make a good PR guy, because I would've said, "Dude! Look out your window!"