It's Thursday July 11, 1991.
I'm totally exhausted. I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock twice and then sit in the bathroom for 30 minutes. I don't shave - I'm more mentally tired, I suppose, otherwise I would care what I look like. I still manage to look better than I feel, but it ain't easy.
At Nozaki Chu Gakko (Nozaki Junior High School) my first class with Nagashima-sensei is cancelled--too few students due to a swimming event.
Good. Period 2 with Nagashima-sensei is spent watching parts 1 through 6 of a video for our New Horizon English text book. It's boring for me. I can only imagine what it must be like for the kids!
Periods 3 & 5 are with Ishihara-sensei (Noriko). She's about my age, reasonably pretty and has a boyfriend, but likes me for my honest advice re: men and women. Like I knew anything about that before August of last year when I finally lost my virginity here in Japan to my then-girlfriend Ashley (from Georgia).
Our classes are more interesting and we play games with the students. in fact, it's always a game.
Period 6 is CLUB activity time. Since I'm not directly involved with a club at this school, I pick one. I go out into the 31C sun and play softball with the girls softball club for 50 minutes. Fun!
Then it's clean-up time.
This is something every school does everyday. No janitor's that I'm aware of. Just the students who are each responsible for different parts of the school.
I don't have to clean-up and certainly don't volunteer. I do enough of that back in my apartment - which is usually spotless.
Instead, I head back outside and work on my tan. If you've never seen me, I'm already brown, what with being of Indian descent. Uh, dot, not the feather.
I find a ball and toss it up in the air and then do mock wind-ups as though I'm a baseball pitcher. It amuses the students - perhaps too much as they get yelled at by the teachers to stop looking at me and to keep working. Oops! My bad!
After school clean-up... it's again CLUB time... so I go and play softball again for another hour. These girls are good. I got struck out once, but pounded one over the fence for a homerun. They seemed impressed that I could hit one like that... as I was told no one had ever hit a homerun of this pitcher before. Geez... give the girl a break. She's 15. I'm 26 and I can hit a ball very well. I led my softball men's league in homeruns two years in a row before coming to Japan. We didn't have fences... so the trick was to hit it long enough for it to get to the road and then let it roll!
I help the team out by hitting the ball around to each position. I'm only surprised that I'm whacking the heck out of the ball at half power and that I don't get blisters.
When club is done, I say my goodbyes to all the teachers. Nothing fancy. I'm glad that everyone seems happy that I'm back for another year.
I head home on my bicycle (it's about a 30 minute ride, and I don't mind that I'm not getting a ride, because it's nice out.). I try to make myself dinner, but Matthew and then Ashley call. Ashley invites herself over for dinner on Saturday night, which excites me, because it means another opportunity to try and re-seduce her. Just like old times! I guess she likes her toes being sucked. No one taught me that... or maybe I read it in an old Penthouse magazine.
I go my English Conversation class... it's just okay. We break up into groups of three and talk.
I go home and do some laundry, vacuum and do the dishes. The place looks nice and neat again, which makes me feel good.
A nice neat place is for others to think I'm neat. Generally, I like clutter.. but here, I'm reinventing myself. So I'm anal-retentive neat. I've also cultivated a new ideaology whereby I don't stop doing what I'm doing until I'm done. It's something I still do in 2011.
I watch the video of the 1991 baseball All-Star Game held in my home town of Toronto. If I was back home, I'm sure I would have been there for that one. But if I was there, I wouldn't have been able to play softball with a group of high school girls... in Japan.
Somewhere hitting a homerun,
Andrew Joseph
Today's blog title is by Alice Cooper, who just so happens to be playing 30 minutes west of Toronto on the 17th of May 2011 at the Hamilton Place Theatre. SUMMER
I'm totally exhausted. I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock twice and then sit in the bathroom for 30 minutes. I don't shave - I'm more mentally tired, I suppose, otherwise I would care what I look like. I still manage to look better than I feel, but it ain't easy.
At Nozaki Chu Gakko (Nozaki Junior High School) my first class with Nagashima-sensei is cancelled--too few students due to a swimming event.
Good. Period 2 with Nagashima-sensei is spent watching parts 1 through 6 of a video for our New Horizon English text book. It's boring for me. I can only imagine what it must be like for the kids!
Periods 3 & 5 are with Ishihara-sensei (Noriko). She's about my age, reasonably pretty and has a boyfriend, but likes me for my honest advice re: men and women. Like I knew anything about that before August of last year when I finally lost my virginity here in Japan to my then-girlfriend Ashley (from Georgia).
Our classes are more interesting and we play games with the students. in fact, it's always a game.
Period 6 is CLUB activity time. Since I'm not directly involved with a club at this school, I pick one. I go out into the 31C sun and play softball with the girls softball club for 50 minutes. Fun!
Then it's clean-up time.
This is something every school does everyday. No janitor's that I'm aware of. Just the students who are each responsible for different parts of the school.
I don't have to clean-up and certainly don't volunteer. I do enough of that back in my apartment - which is usually spotless.
Instead, I head back outside and work on my tan. If you've never seen me, I'm already brown, what with being of Indian descent. Uh, dot, not the feather.
I find a ball and toss it up in the air and then do mock wind-ups as though I'm a baseball pitcher. It amuses the students - perhaps too much as they get yelled at by the teachers to stop looking at me and to keep working. Oops! My bad!
After school clean-up... it's again CLUB time... so I go and play softball again for another hour. These girls are good. I got struck out once, but pounded one over the fence for a homerun. They seemed impressed that I could hit one like that... as I was told no one had ever hit a homerun of this pitcher before. Geez... give the girl a break. She's 15. I'm 26 and I can hit a ball very well. I led my softball men's league in homeruns two years in a row before coming to Japan. We didn't have fences... so the trick was to hit it long enough for it to get to the road and then let it roll!
I help the team out by hitting the ball around to each position. I'm only surprised that I'm whacking the heck out of the ball at half power and that I don't get blisters.
When club is done, I say my goodbyes to all the teachers. Nothing fancy. I'm glad that everyone seems happy that I'm back for another year.
I head home on my bicycle (it's about a 30 minute ride, and I don't mind that I'm not getting a ride, because it's nice out.). I try to make myself dinner, but Matthew and then Ashley call. Ashley invites herself over for dinner on Saturday night, which excites me, because it means another opportunity to try and re-seduce her. Just like old times! I guess she likes her toes being sucked. No one taught me that... or maybe I read it in an old Penthouse magazine.
I go my English Conversation class... it's just okay. We break up into groups of three and talk.
I go home and do some laundry, vacuum and do the dishes. The place looks nice and neat again, which makes me feel good.
A nice neat place is for others to think I'm neat. Generally, I like clutter.. but here, I'm reinventing myself. So I'm anal-retentive neat. I've also cultivated a new ideaology whereby I don't stop doing what I'm doing until I'm done. It's something I still do in 2011.
I watch the video of the 1991 baseball All-Star Game held in my home town of Toronto. If I was back home, I'm sure I would have been there for that one. But if I was there, I wouldn't have been able to play softball with a group of high school girls... in Japan.
Somewhere hitting a homerun,
Andrew Joseph
Today's blog title is by Alice Cooper, who just so happens to be playing 30 minutes west of Toronto on the 17th of May 2011 at the Hamilton Place Theatre. SUMMER
