Sean called today. He was a little surprised to catch me at home during the lunch hour, but I usually try to take my lunch someplace other than at work. I think the reasons are obvious. "Why aren't you defending the free world?" he asked me. I get that all the time. No matter how many Commies I killed for Mommie, it'd never be, "Heck of a job! Good on ya!" No, it was "WHAT ARE YOU HANGING AROUND HERE FOR? GET OFF YOUR DUFF AND DEFEND THE FREE WORLD!"
I brought that on myself. Whenever I left the house for work, I would usually say good-bye to everybody by announcing, "I'm off once again to defend the Free World!" Sometimes I'd even pause dramatically in the middle, raise my voice, and add echo for DEFEND END END THE FREE REE REE WORLD! ORLD! ORLD! I stopped after it got old, but they still like to throw it back in my face now & again.
I'm not in that line of business any longer, I reminded Sean. I'm an NCO In Charge of Supply. I'm supplying the defenders of the Free World, which really doesn't have the same ring to it, no matter how dramatically you pause or how much reverb you add. "Not so much the point at the tip of the spear any more," he said, using the motto of the 35th Fighter Wing here at Misawa Air Base. "Sort of just polishing the tip of the spear now?" Touche.
And now, in fond rememberance of the season, we start December with a Christmas song from Nat King Cole:
He's the little boy that Santa Claus forgot,
And, goodness knows, he didn't want a lot.
He sent a note to Santa for some soldiers and a drum.
It broke his little heart when he found Santa hadn't come.
In the street, he envies all those lucky boys,
Then wanders home to last year's broken toys.
I'm so sorry for that laddie,
He hasn't got a daddy,
The little boy that Santa Claus forgot.
Oh, my god! That's a Christmas song? Who the hell thought that one up? Mengele? We let Tim load up the Christmas songs in the CD player a little early this year, about a full week before Thanksgiving. He loves to set up his own play lists, or just hit "shuffle" and let random tunes play while we're eating our dinner together. And whenever Nat starts to croon "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot", we all wince and groan, and wonder aloud why one of us hasn't bleeped it from the play list.
Who thought this downer was going to be an inspiring Christmas song? How'd that pitch go, I wonder? There's this pathetic little boy, he doesn't get any gifts because Santa clean forgot him. He only wanted, ah, two, but he got zilch, and then, just to REALLY tug on the old heartstrings, we'll mention HIS DAD'S DEAD! How's that for a winner?
They probably had a better sell than that.
Here's another Santa Claus story that has had me scratching my head for years: You ever see that animated show, Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, with the singing snowman, the Abominable Snowman, and the misfit toys? The one where Santa stomped around like a grinch with PMS for the first half of the show, and treated Rudolph like a freak? Where the hell did they get off making Santa into a bully? Santa doesn't forget anybody. Even when you're bad, you get a lump of coal. And he doesn't talk smack to his reindeer, or dump misfit toys by the side of the road. Santa knows what the spirit of Christmas is all about, but this cartoon doesn't.
I used to watch this cartoon all the time as a kid, and I let my kids watch it, too, until it really started to bother me. I know, I know, it's just a cartoon, I shouldn't get all worked up, and I don't mean that it bothers me the same way that the problem of AIDS bothers me. It's a little thing, I know that. The kids still begged for it, though, so I asked them about the whole Santa-Claus-as-a-grump angle. After Tim thought it over, and agreed with me, he said, "Thanks, Dad, for ruining a Christmas story for me." Oh, so I'm not allowed to be a grinch, but Santa is?
I think Santa probably knows the names of his reindeer, too — it's Donder, not Donner.
I forget: What is it that you eat that makes your poop turn green? I just can't remember ...
I would've written this drivel much earlier, but Bonkers curled up to sleep in my lap, and he took so much care chosing just the right angle, and settled in just so, and relaxed so completely into slumber, that I felt it would be criminally wrong to wake him up until the moment before my legs cramped permanently into question marks. Even so, I'm sure I'm going to spend some time in kitty purgatory for waking him at all.
It doesn't bother me so much when I rent a DVD, but when I buy one, I feel that I shouldn't have to watch anything but the movie. Right? You feel the same, don't you? I mean, they can load the disk up with as many advertisements and movie previews and as many other extra 'features' as they like, but if I paid twenty dollars to own the DVD, I don't think I should ever have to see that little hand popping up in the corner — ever! Don't tell me I can't skip forward now; I own you! Let's see the opening credits and let's see them right now. It's such a curmudgeonly thing to admit, but I miss VHS already.
It's Friday! And another week of my meaningless existence at the MSOC has come to an end. Now I can concentrate on worthwhile pastimes: eating snack foods, cleaning our bathroom, and reading books and magazines.
Note to self: find a lighter tone.
I was sitting at a red light this morning, watching the person in the car ahead of me, my second-favorite thing to do. (My first favorite thing involves panty hose and a stoat.) She had hair past her shoulders, and she was playing with it the way a five-year-old does, twirling it in big circles, winding it around her wrist, weaving it between her fingers ... and blowing big, pink bubbles with her Double Bubble bubble gum at the same time. I wanted so bad to wait until she had a really big bubble, her hair all twisted in knots, and then PUNCH! the horn.
But I didn't.
Boo has been trying to train me. The last two mornings, she woke up hungry, and a lot earlier than I did, so she crept slowly up the side of the bed toward my head — stalking me — then made a slow loop around my face, just to make sure I was awake. When I shooed her away, she climbed down behind my desk and started rooting through my tool kits, parts, and magazines, making lots of noise. She knows I'll get up if she gets into my stuff.
I didn't realize what she was doing until she did it again this morning. As she crept toward my head, I blocked her way with my arm, so she settled down, and I patted her a bit until I began to doze off. She got up and tried to step over my face again. This time, I raised my hand and gave her a gentle push, so she jumped over to my desk chair and made her way over to the magazines. I started to get out of bed ... and that's when it hit me.
Hey. I'm being trained.
Oh, I still got up. I scooped her out from behind the desk, dropped her in the hallway, and closed the door as I went back to bed. I didn't care if I had only three minutes before the alarm went off, I was going to make sure she knew that I was getting back into bed behind that closed door. And as it turned out, I dozed off for about a half-hour before the alarm woke me. When I opened the door again, both cats were waiting patiently in the hallway, and took off down the stairs toward the kitchen at a fast trot.
That's right. I'm the trainer here. Booyah.
Tim and I went to see The Incredibles last night at The Bong, but it was sold out a half-hour before the show started, which is also when we got there. Tim mocked me. I said six-thirty was plenty early enough; he said, get there earlier, but noooooo...
I guess we'll have to get there at about three o'clock if we want to see it tonight.
I dropped Barb off at the train station this morning at seven-thirty to send her to Tokyo, where she'll take a Japanese language test, and not incidentally bum around town a bit, maybe get me and Tim a souvenir or a tasty treat. She was cramming for hours every day last month for this test, and besides, she's got her lucky polka-dot socks with her, so I'm sure she'll ace it.
So Tim and I will be batchin' it today and tomorrow. Plenty of time to put the house in a state of complete disrepair, the kind of which you'd espect from a couple of slovenly men. Let the wallowing begin!
Tim and I went to The Bong again last night for another attempt to see The Incredibles ... and the damn movie theater was closed for an office party! I don't even wanna see this movie on base any more. We're going to Shimoda!
I'll bet AAFES is going to be really bummed about not getting my $3.50 from that movie.
Right around five-thirty on a Saturday night, our house turns into a free-for-all competition to be the first to snag the newspaper off the doorknob. Delivery is normally after six, the delivery made by a boy hanging the rolled-up paper in a bag on our door, and competition around here to read it first is usually stiff, but on Saturday nights it's especially important to be the first one there because if Tim gets it, you won't see the comics section for hours. He pours over every panel, analyzes every word, studies hue and value in exquisite detail. I haven't seen anybody put that much effort into Beetle Bailey since second grade. There aren't many color funnies in the Stars & Stripes, only eight tabloid pages, so I guess he wants to make them last as long as possible, and he may be the only person on earth who spends more than a half-hour reading them. I'm done in about three minutes, five minutes tops. There's also the possibility that this is one of the ways he pushes my buttons, which makes it all the more important that I get to the newspaper first.
There seems to be a typhoon parked over our heads. It's been raining since yesterday evening, strictly cats and dogs all night long, with lots of high winds thrown in to make the rain sound like gravel spattered across the windows. Like it wasn't already hard enough for me to sleep alone. The bedroom's so big and creepy when Barb's not in it, dreamily sawing lumber all night long. Ahhh, I'm getting all mushy now ...
It's always one more thing. No matter how long you sit there and stare into space, you won't remember the one more thing you had to do until you get up, walk away, usually to another room or sometimes another building, sometimes even another city, before you smack yourself on the head when the memory comes back. I stared at this computer screen ("this" being the one here in my house, not the one you're looking at right now, obviously) for several minutes, trying to remember the one more thing I meant to do before I went to bed. I couldn't remember, though, so I shut off the computer. Usually, I remember just as the computer screen goes dark. This time, I managed to get all the way to my room before I the head-slapping moment came to me. So I went back, turned on the computer, waited several minutes for the thing to boot up, and when everything was running and I had called up a browser window to do a search, I'd forgotten what I wanted to do again! Doctors say this is normal and so common to everybody that it's nothing to worry about ... but I wonder if they're just glad to have one more guy who'll forget he already paid the consult fee and how much.
Tim and I rented the movie Elf from the shopette last weekend. We went back the very next day to pick up some snacks or beer or contraceptive devices or something like that, and on the way out the door I yelled over my shoulder to Tim, "Grab the CD and we'll take it back with us." Wait, it was the night we went to see The Incredibles and everything was locked up for the holiday party, so forget that thing about contraceptives. Anyway, he jumped in the car with the movie, chucked it into the return slot when we got to the shopette, and I didn't think about it again until two days later, when I was folding clothes and went to pop a movie into the DVD player to help pass the time, and naturally there, in the player, was the Elf CD. Okay, I've done that, too. Now Tim owes Barb $3.65 because they hit her up for the overdue charges when she tried to rent The Office Christmas special at the shopette today.
Barb had some of her students over Wednesday for a holiday dinner. She planned for twelve guests, so she bought a huge turkey, the biggest turkey I've ever seen on any dinner table anywhere. The drumsticks alone would've been big enough to feed everybody. The breast was a mountain of meat higher than the candlesticks. It was twenty-four pounds of luscious, juicy Christmas beast. That can't be normal, can it? That's got to be some kind of genetically engineered monster, don't you think? I got a day off from work today to help her out, which was especially lucky for her because, after slaving over her feast all morning long, she wouldn't have had the strength to carve that leviathan into bite-sized servings. I only managed to finish the job by making good use of my lamaze training and taking frequent breaks.
Our traditional holiday dinner left us with a mountain of uneaten turkey and several dishes of stuffing, potatoes, and fruit that we'll be eating our way through it until the week before Christmas, just in time for the next huge turkey dinner that'll crowd everything but the milk cartons off the refrigerator shelves for a week or more. I've had turkey for lunch, turkey for dinner, and Barb's trying to get me to eat turkey omlettes for breakfast. My stomach doesn't know what to do with all this protein. I'm getting muscles in my turds. I'll never survive the holidays.
On second thought, Sean will be home, so the leftovers should last no more than thirty-six hours, forty-eight tops. We sure could use his bottomless appetite right now, though.
While Barb stripped chunks of white meat off the turkey carcass big enough to feed India for a year, and I nibbled on my turkey salad sandwich for lunch, she told me that my suspicions were right – that turkeys like this were genetically engineered to be monstrously large. They're also force-fed, injected with antibiotics, and live in pens that give them barely enough room to step out of their own filth. And in casual conversation with others – the darndest things come up in conversation sometimes, don't they? – I was informed that, not only are dinner-table turkeys genetically-engineered freaks of nature, they're so grotesquely out of all proportion to normal turkey anatomy that they're no longer able to engage in turkey-to-turkey sexual congress. The turkey farmer has to do it for them. And to think, turkey used to be one of my favorite meals.
IT'S FRIDAY! And I'm such a wild and crazy guy that I'm spending it at my desk with my laptop and a hot mug o' joe, rapping my keyboard and wracking my brains for inane thoughts. Here they come!
What is all this noise in the papers about baseball players using steroids? Just what is the problem here? These guys are paid a billion trillion dollars a year to play games, aren't they? It's not like this isn't a ludicrous idea to start with. It's not even a new idea. I used to read a lot of science fiction books when I was a kid – stories, for instance, about athletes who wanted so badly to win that they grafted muscles to their bodies and overcranked their metabolisms with hyperactive synthetic hormones. Ideas like this were stuck in the sci-fi, or "uber-geek" genre, precisely because they were so over the top that they weren't expected to ever be believed. How quaint.
And most professional athletes play games that are so physically demanding that they're often crippling, sometimes even life-threatening. Football players are lucky to retire intact; hockey players are expected to beat the crap out of each other. Even baseball players get into brawls, and we've all seen – over and over and ohmygodoverandover! – what's happening to basketball. What's the difference if they want to crank up their metabolisms and shorten their lives even further? Like it's gonna hurt them, right? Let them.
In fact, demand it. Taking steroids ought to be mandatory for professional athletes! Any player who goes professional ought to be as finely tuned as medical science and the owner's pocketbooks can make him. You've got to admit, it's a guaranteed way to level the playing field. Besides, they're not getting paid millions to "do their best," they're getting paid to win! Players who are in it for the love of the game can go find a nice corn field somewhere and play catch with Kevin Costner while the sun goes down.
Think steroid-using athletes are setting a bad example for the youth of today? I hate to sound cynical – c'mon, that's just a figure of speech; you know by now the sound of a cynical rant is like music to me – but the professional athletes of today were the drug-abusing youth of yesterday. They're not setting an example for the kids; the kids are setting the standard for professional athletes. So write your congressman today and tell him that you realize the multimillion-dollar business of professional sports was built on performance-enhancing drugs, and these so-called doping scandals are threatening to weaken the financial underpinnings of our very way of life. Drugs good! Scandal dumb! Also, boring.
Mom called to wish me happy birthday; she did the math out loud when she was trying to figure out my age. I couldn't help her, partly because I suck at even the simplest math, but mostly because my age isn't something I'm especially keen on counting any longer. The anticipation's just not there, you know? I got out of bed this morning like it was any other day – completely forgot that I was forty-four today until Barb brought me a card and a present, and then it all came back. Barb took me out for a breakfast birthday treat at the on-base cafe. We were hoping for the all-you-can-eat buffet at the club that they have every Sunday, but they cancelled it this weekend. The Air Force has apparently gotten around to finally taking away my birthday. I guess they couldn't close the cafe, though.
While I was waiting in the cafe for my breakfast order, a guy walked past who was maybe a few years younger than me, long hair, casual jacket, worn jeans, and a t-shirt with BULLSHIT written across the front, and the thought crossed my mind: that could be me in six months. I was suddenly a lot less bothered that my french toast was taking so long.
The Air Force is trying to de-glamorize alcohol. Really. For some reason, they don't like it anymore that airmen get really hammered at off-base clubs and kill themselves in car wrecks on the way back to their barracks. Why it took the Air Force this long to try to change military culture is a question that I'm not going to try to answer.
I'm much more interested in answering two questions raised by the ad campaign dubbed, "Short-Term Fun, Long-Term Consequences". Among the consequences mentioned: "illegal death." I suppose there's probably such a thing, but I never heard it called that before. Usually they just say "murder" or "manslaughter" or something along those lines. "Illegal death" is such a geeky way to say it that it makes me guffaw every time I see one of the signs.
Then there's "premature death," which seems to be a much slipperier concept to me. Assuming there is such a thing, how would you know? Maybe it only becomes blindingly obvious to you when there's nobody to meet you at the terminal on the other side, but in all the accounts I've heard about crossing into the afterlife, the receiving end is always waiting for you. I have to assume they somehow know, and if that's true, how could it be premature?
I'm probably thinking way too much about a pretty pedestrian ad campaign. It's weird how little it takes to crank up the old brain box sometimes.
It's Thursday! The Day Before The Day Before I Start Leave! Actually, I don't start leave until Monday, but I'm counting Saturday because obviously I don't work then, either. And mentally speaking I've been in leave mode since perhaps Monday, certainly since Tuesday, which has made me pretty much useless for anything resembling gainful employment. I've been just a total slacker. I should've been fired. Don't tell.
Sean's coming to visit next Tuesday, all the way from Georgetown U in Washington D.C. He's got three weeks off for Christmas and he's chosen to spend it in snowless Misawa, getting festive with the rest of the O-Folk. His mom's been like a nesting hen the past few days, tidying up the extra room in anticipation of the day he drags his suitcase in there and it vomits clothes all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of the shopping list she's been working on for the past three weeks. I wonder what he's getting for Christmas?
Tim asked me the other day what I wanted for Christmas, and I gave him the "Just the love of my family" answer, because I really don't want him spending any money on me for a gift just because I said so. But he wouldn't let it go at that, kept on bugging me to name some kind of actual, physical thing I coveted, so I finally said, "An aircraft carrier." And Barb guffawed and asked, "What would you do with an aircraft carrier?"
That is such a girl thing to say. What would anybody do with an aircraft carrier? Fly aircraft off it! I could do that all day long and not get even a little bored. Of course, it'd be the perfect gift only if I could choose the aircraft. I'd start with a couple of biplanes, probably a Boeing F4B and an early Grumman. I'd have to have a F4B Corsair, and for jets I'd start with an F4D Skyray. Heck, it'd take the better part of a year just to get good at flying those four, and I could name a dozen more airplanes I'd like to fly before I even started on helicopters. How would an aircraft carrier not be the perfect Christmas gift?
We haven't put any presents under the tree yet, because the youngest of the freaking cats has gone just about out of her mind trying to knock every single ornament off the branches, and we're not in the right frame of mind to find out what kind of mayhem she'd get into with wrapped presents. I want to put a box with an actual Labrador retriever out there for the kitten, see how she deals with that, but I never get to play any of the diabolical games I want to play with the cats.
Bonkers, I'm typing here, you can't jump up in my lap now. It won't work. You're between me and the keyboard, you hairball-barfer. You think you can get your way by making those bambi eyes and purring like a maniac, don't you? Maybe you could, if you didn't have breath like the bottom of a well-used garbage can on a sunny day. Oh, all right, then. Geeze, I'm so easy. Always have been. And not just for cats. If only Wendy Wladiczek had known. It was just nerves, Wendy. You could've had your wicked womanly ways with me in a heartbeat.
Ah, there's nothing better when coming home than to find a special treat of chocolate cupcakes waiting for you. I ate two. It seemed to be the right thing to do, especially as I had a giant-sized glass of milk to wash them down with. Seemed a shame to drown just one cupcake in all that milk.
I can't think of anything to write, so this is probably going to be bad. You might want to scroll right past this.
Here's a bright idea whose time has come, and gone: beer and raisins. Yes, this combination is guaranteed to blister all the varnish off whatever chair you're sitting in no more than thirty minutes after you've finished off your tasty treat. Well, "tasty" may be stretching things a bit. I'm still trying to work out a fitting descriptive word for this combination, and I may never figure it out if I don't come up with it soon, because I'm unlikely to try this again. If you ever manage to gather together the fortitude to try it for yourself, and the right adjective springs to mind, I'd appreciate it if you'd write a note and fire it off to me. Thanks.
OK, that went nowhere. Let's try a rant to see if that gets things moving.
Here's one: I go into the bathroom. I wash my hands afterwards. "Mamma taught me to always wash my hands," everybody says – I honestly don't remember Mom teaching me that. Not to say that she didn't, just that I don't remember it, which means all those guys are probably lying. Like they were paying any more attention than I was. Yeah, right. Anyway, I want to wash my hands, but the soap bottle's full of water. The cleaners top off the bottle with a little tap water, apparently because it'd just about wear them out to walk all the way to the closet next door and get more soap. Then I tried to dry my hands, but the paper towels are still wrapped up, on top of the dispenser, so I have to unwrap them with my wet hands, dry my hands, and put them away. Why was that hard?
My kid does this all the time, especially when he's unloading the dishwasher. The Hello Kitty bowl overloads his circuits, I guess because it doesn't look like any of the other bowls, so he leaves it on top of the microwave, instead of putting it in the cupboard six inches away, because he "doesn't know where it belongs." It belongs in the cupboard! There isn't any reserved seating in there! It doesn't have an assigned parking spot! We find Corningware pans, cookie sheets, wine glasses and mugs littering the countertops of the kitchen because Tim can't take a chance that he might put them in the wrong spot. C'mon, Tim! Open a cupboard and chuck it in there! Live on the Edge!
We woke up to snow on the ground this morning. It had all melted away by sundown, which is not to say it's warm outside. Not even close. I've never liked being cold, and winter in Misawa has done nothing to change my mind. What's really going to steam my broccoli, though, is if we have another ice-cold winter and no snow to speak of. Some people get depressed by long nights and deep snow; I can handle long nights, so long as there's some snow to look at. Cold & brown doesn't just depress me, it pisses me off. Gimme a couple big dumps of snow in long, wind-driven drifts that lay around for weeks to brighten things up. Anything less just isn't winter.
The cats woke me up very, very early in the morning today. They were nothing if not subtle, the way cats can be sometimes. Boo gently brought me to wakefullness by playing the beam of a laser pointer across my eyes until I opened them and felt the wrenching pain of retinal detatchment. When the spots began to clear, I could just begin to make out Bonkers standing next to my pillow, pointing his .38 snub-nose revolver at a spot right between my eyes. A crudely-lettered sign at his feet read, "HUNGRY. FEED US" They're so cute. Across the kitchen floor, where they had more room to articulate, their little paw prints spelled out, "WE'RE GETTING TIRED OF TELLING YOU!" I guess I'll set my alarm tonight so I don't forget.
So what do I do when I've fed the cats, I can't get back to sleep, and it's five-thirty in the morning on a Saturday? After wolfing down a bowl of yummy Heart to Heart cereal, I felt a brief desire for some healthy jogging around the neighborhood, but then I remembered how freaking cold it was outside, so I fixed myself a mug of hot tea and sat my butt in front of the computer monitor instead to look for soft porn on the internet. Television could easily take back viewers from the net if it could find a way to combine hard news with women's lingere, the way they do with, for example, the on-line version of The New York Times. Extra! Extra! Get your headlines and half-naked bimbos! Television keeps trying, but they keep coming up with Katie Couric and other misfires.
Katie was on The Daily Show last night (or the night before last; we get it a day later because of the trans-Pacific rip in the sub-space time continuum) flogging the two children's books she penned (or was it 'crayoned?') and snogging with Jon Stewart. Jon seems to be like a lot of guys I know, in that he looks at Katie and sees just the cutest little vixen who ever wore a skirt that's way too short for her. When I look at Katie, all I can do is lie back and think of England. It's not that Katie does nothing for me, it's that she does exactly the opposite of what she apparently does for millions of randy American men, to judge from the way they pant and stamp their feet whenever she smiles. I think I resent that reaction mostly because it makes me feel like I'm way over the hill. If the guys my age all think Katie's a hottie, then I might as well give up sex and start collecting lap cats right now.
Oh, crap, I already am collecting lap cats! I'm going to end up feeding neighborhood cats from the edge of my cot in the garage of my house, which I can't get into any more because it's filled to the ceilings with trash I've collected from all over the city! Damn you, Katie Couric!
Speaking of television, the wrong women as hotties, getting old, and the fair-game rule on celebrities, I ran across America's Next Top Model while I was channel-surfing with Tim the other night. The screen was suddenly filled by a head shot of Tyra Banks, wearing makeup so scary that I wanted to dive under the sofa cushions until somebody hosed her face down with baby oil and toweled her off. Why the hell doesn't anybody tell her that the crap she paints her eyes with makes them look like two piss holes in a snow-covered coal pile? And she had Barbie hair! Not Barbie-straight-out-of-the-blister-pack, all straight and shiny and perfect-looking, but Barbie-who's-been-in-the-toybox-too-long, a tangled knot of cowlicks. (I tried to find a photo of her on the web where she looked like this, but all I could find was pictures of her boobs. She doesn't put makeup on her boobs. She doesn't seem to cover them with much at all, from what I can tell.)
A world in which Katie Couric's short skirts are hot, Tyra Banks's heroin-chic eyes are the shiznit, and Ann Coulter in a leather skirt is supposedly sexy. Sheesh. I guess all I'm ready for anymore is a lineup of Rockettes in bloomers dancing the can-can. I'll watch it on a 9-inch black-and-white television from the edge of my cot in the garage while I share a can of tuna with the cats. Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.
You know what I hate about running? The running part. The part from beginning to end when I'm moving at anything faster than a stroll. After years of experimentation, I can state categorically that my feet, legs, and particularly my knees feel best when I'm strolling, and continue to feel that way after I've stopped. They don't feel that way if I'm running, they even feel a little wobbly when I'm getting ready to run, and they feel like tightly-wrung dish rags after a couple miles at a fast trot. There are all kinds of very good reasons to exercise – I know that, I tell myself that all the time, I psyche myself up with no problem because my mind knows how good this is for me. I'm very aware that I feel better in the long run when I exercise, as opposed to the run-down way I feel when I blow off a workout to blob out on the sofa. At the time I'm running, however, every cell in my body screams This is absolutely pointless! When I'm being chased by a slobbering carnivore or a madman with armloads of weapons, the flesh is willing; otherwise, I'm an utter wuss. There has to be a way to make running feel like you're doing something constructive at the time you're doing it. I dream of finding that secret. Not only would it make the bitter pill of exercise a lot easier to swallow – I would be set for life.
Barb was invited to a holiday party thrown by the English language school she teaches at in Hachinohe, and she brought the rest of the Misawa O-Family along. My contribution to the party was to become a snowman by letting a half-dozen students wrap me in toilet paper and garland. I couldn't tell whether or not we won a prize, though, as they announced it in Japanese. Beyond that, I mostly grinned my way through every attempt at conversation, and from what I could tell, so did Tim. Between the games and my lame attempts at conversation, I stuffed myself on so much delicious food that I took a pass on dinner and felt drowsy enough to have a couple quick little cat naps while I drove home.
Movie Time: Team America: World Police was playing at The Bong. If you knew that this was the puppet movie made by the same guys who thought up the super-popular television series South Park, you might've had a clue that there would be something in this movie to offend everybody. There was also some talk in the news that this movie was originally given an NC-17 rating for an explicit sex scene ... involving only puppets, remember. The directors had to make cuts and re-submit the sex scene a half-dozen times before it was tame enough for an R rating. I'm serious.
I would bet that the guy two rows ahead of us, who brought his eight-year-old daughter and her girl friend, didn't know anything about the cussing or the sex scene or the gruesome violence. His little girls saw there was a puppet movie playing at The Bong and talked him into taking them. "Look, daddy! It's just like Thunderbirds!
The puppets started using the most vile language you can imagine in the first five minutes of the movie. Dad and the girls toughed it out. To up the ante, the American puppets used machine guns, rocket launchers, and kung fu to smash the other puppets into bloody goo. Still, Dad and the girls stayed with it. Then came the puppet sex. It's pretty hard to imagine what they cut out to get the R rating, because those puppets performed every raunchy sex act possible in the sixty seconds or so they had for the scene. I glanced over to see if Dad and the girls were getting ready to leave. Nope. They didn't leave until fifteen or twenty minutes after the puppet sex, probably just because they girls were getting bored with it. The jokes were wearing thin from repetition by that point.
We were down in Hachinohe just about all day long today, first to tape the planetarium show, but also to do a little last-minute Christmas shopping. I don't know what Christmas means to the Japanese in the spiritual sense, but I can tell you they've got the shopping part down pat. The road into the parking lot was bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the shops were jammed buttcheeks-to-bellybuttons with last-minute shoppers. Barb wanted to quickly duck into an electronics store to pick up a gift she'd scoped out for Sean, thinking this would be an easy grab-and-go. She got the gift, but it took considerably longer than she hoped it would.
A surprise cold front moved in to northern Japan from Vladivostok or some other snow-covered wasteland late last night and the snow started coming down early this morning, just in time for Sean to come home. We picked him up at the train station where we had to wait on the platform a grand total of maybe five minutes for his train to arrive. I think Tim actually froze solid, but he was wearing a t-shirt under his coat, so I couldn't generate a lot of sympathy, even though I was pretty cold under four or five layers of sweaters and thermal underwear.
Two days of snow! And it's been so ceaselessly cold that almost none of it has melted! The howling Siberian winds only blow it around a little bit. We might have a white Christmas after all this year. Last night, as the family unit bonded over a game of Monopoly ("friendly" as in: no blood or broken bones), we were trying to remember our last white Christmas — some of us think it was year before last, but my memory's bad enough that I'm just about certain it was when we last lived in Aurora, Colorado.
We went to The Bong for a movie today. Here's how the O-family gets ready to go to see a movie: We pick one, then somebody asks me what time we should leave. I always pick a time about twenty minutes before the start of the movie, no matter what. Then the analysis begins: Is it the first night? Is it Friday night? Is it Saturday night? Is it pay day? Is it an action movie? Are the stars hugely popular? The answer to each one of these questions could add five minutes to the time that we have to leave if we want to make sure we get a good seat, or any seat at all (another consideration). I figure we'll get in if we get in. I want to leave when I want to leave. Why they even ask me is one of the questions not even God is smart enough to answer.
That white Christmas could still happen, but as of right now it's looking pretty brown. Temps are still around freezing, but the sun still managed somehow to melt off just about all of the snowfall we built up in the last two days, so that only dirty little patches are left here and there along the road and sidewalks, and in the patches of shade under trees and along buildings. Stay tuned for further developments.
Tim may be a teenager, but he was still looking forward to Christmas morning so much that he set his alarm clock for six o'clock. And then he reverted to his grumpy teenaged self and hit the snooze alarm for a half-hour. Nothing will put you in the Christmas mood like thirty minutes of a snooze alarm going off every five minutes. Ho-ho-ho.
Sean got the Japanese version of Monopoly, set in a Tokyo district called Roppongi. We've bought so many of these themed Monopoly games, we figure we might as well be collecting them at this point. We bought the London, England, version while we were stationed there. Now we play with it all the time now because our Atlantic City version is so old it's falling apart. Tonight, however, we used the Spanish version that Tim got for Christmas, to give him the chance to use the stuff he learned in school. He did an excellent job of translating the cards, and Sean did a very memorable job of reading them with an outrageously heavy Speedy Gonzales accent.
The BX has a military version of Monopoly, but we haven't bought it yet. We haven't even seen it, although we had a few ideas what it might be like. "Go directly to Abu Ghraib jail, do not wear clothes, do not claim your basic human rights ... " And what if there were a Russian version of Monopoly? What would that be like? You probably couldn't buy any property, because the gangs own everything, and besides, you never get paid.
Then there's Sim City, possibly the most addictive video game ever conceived. Tim got Sim City 4, and they've somehow made it even cooler than Sim City 3. For one thing, it automatically lays down a street grid when you zone a large area. If only it would lay down the water pipes, too. You can fine-tune a lot of the administrative functions, everything looks a whole lot better — but the best thing is: LASER-GUIDED METEORS! Left-click with the mouse, and a meteor comes crashing down on the scene. Hold down the mouse button, and the meteor lands exactly where your mouse cursor is. There's a god-sized flame thrower that works the same way. And Tim found a cheat code on-line that lets you blow up the nuclear power plant. See? The more advanced it gets, the more they try to appeal to your most infantile desires.
The highlight of Christmas day at the O-family's had to be the turkey dinner. We got a nice-size frozen bird at the commissary, and Tim helped Barb fix it up in the morning, after I baked the pumpkin pies. They popped it in the oven before Barb went off to have a nap while the boys and I played Sim City all day long. We usually lay out a spread around three-thirty with mashed potatoes, stuffing, veggies, and cranberry sauce. It's been going off like clockwork every year for fifteen years now. Well, we can't have that, can we?
Around about two-thirty in the afternoon, I was in the living room flipping through television channels when Barb went into the kitchen to check on dinner. I heard her gasp before she said, "Oh, no!" and when she came into the living room she could hardly speak. She eventually managed to tell me, "We're not going to have turkey for dinner."
"Why not?" I asked. I pretty much had to, didn't I?
"We forgot to turn the oven on." The turkey had been sitting in a slowly cooling oven since ten o'clock. We talked about the possibility of cranking up the oven and making sure the turkey was cooked all the way through before serving it later in the evening. Everything might have turned out okay ... but neither of us was comfortable with the possibility, no matter how remote, of food poisoning and a trip to the emergency room on Christmas day. We chucked it. And that's how we ended up eating the O-family's first vegetarian Christmas dinner. Unless we find a way to mess up the stuffing, it just might be the start of a new tradition.
This is what I look like these days, after you get a few beers in me. I have no idea what I'm grinning about. Somebody snapped this photo while we were at a karaoke bar in Misawa, but I could be any dumpster diver bugging commuters for spare change at the bus station. Pass the Mad Dog.
Barb says this is a "very nice" picture of me. Love is truly blind.
We invited our kabuki friends over to our house last night for pizza & beer, then strolled into town to a karaoke bar, where we spent about two hours belting out tunes, most of which I didn't recognize, even some of the ones in English. Everybody had at least one go at the microphone; I committed social suicide by crooning Some Enchanted Evening so horrifically that I can almost guarantee they won't be asking me to sing karaoke with them for quite some time.
Sean went along with us; in fact, we timed our party so that Sean would be here when we went out for karaoke again because Sean loves karaoke. Not only does he love it, he's actually quite good at it. I have no idea which tunes he sang — I didn't recognize them, because they were modern pop tunes that I never listen to. He knew them word for word and sang his heart out.
One of our kabuki friends, Toshi-san, doesn't sing karaoke, but he does run a horse-riding club in Towada that he wanted Barb and me to come visit for an afternoon of fun on horseback, even though I tried to tell him that I can ride a horse about as well as an oyster can fly a plane. "You can ski, right?" he asked me. "It's just like skiing." Well, I can go four and a half kilometers from the top to the bottom of Appi mountain, so maybe an afternoon ride on a horse just might be possible. Barb's trying to translate the rates from the web pages, and you might soon have some comical photos of me falling off horses.
Barb offered me a mint the other day. It's pretty good, but I got to reading the back of the package and I noticed that there's not one ingredient in it that you could find without the help of a trained chemist and a million-dollar laboratory. There's no mint, no cinnamon, nothing that grows on a bush or in a berry. There's just sorbitol, maltitol, malodextrin, gum acacia, magnesium stearate, acesulfame potassium, and soy lecithin. Yum! And I thought I was learning to cook when I figured out that a chicken stew tastes better if I put basil and garlic in it.
Best wishes for a happy new year.
