I get around

This post is a bit long. Not really worth the read. It's just old (originally from july 13 2005) and needed to be posted. Oh but check me out in the NUPACE ad below.


So what, you may wonder, did I do with all my time in Japan? Well, at least pretend like you have some interest; after all, you are reading my blog. Aside from going to Japanese lessons, studying Japanese culture, and pretty much being an all-around lousy student, I enjoy a uniquely Japanese lifetsyle I will dearly miss when I go back home. Let me paint you a picture of a typical day.

Most mornings I wake up, almost too sore from exercising the day before to even move. I manage to turn and look at the clock and realize either I've slept through 2 of 3 of my alarms, or the sun has woken me up long before my alarms are set to go off. In the latter case, it must be a day I don't have an 8:45 class, so I stay in bed a little longer, enjoying the peace and qu...

「みんなさん、おはようございます。今日、シーツなんですけど、blah blah blah blah」

ARGH, stupid intercom system. I want to just shut off power to my whole room from the circuit breaker. But then my robotic air conditioning arm wouldn't continue to pacify me through its hypnotic swing. Besides, today is the sheet washing service day, which is much more convenient than washing it on my own, especially given the amount of quality time I spend in bed (NOT NEARLY ENOUGH).

So, on go some clothes, off go the sheets, and we'll skip the rest of the morning routine. Anyway, more often than I'd like to admit, I'm nearly out the door of my building, having reached the lobby from the 5th floor, when I realize I'm still wearing my indoor slippers. These are necessary because the Japanese custom of removing shoes in certain rooms of the dorm is a real pain when you have to unlace and lace them every time you want to grab something from the refridgerator, watch TV, etc. So anyway, back up to the 5th floor to swap out my shoes, and I'm off to school.

Of course by now I've had more delays than I accounted for despite setting my alarms earlier, so I'm late to Japanese class. Every day of the week has a different concentration. For example, Monday is reading day, where the teacher just ignores me because, unlike the rest of the class (with the exception of the perfect Indonesians), I'm not Chinese and can't just skim all the kanji (Chinese characters used in higher level Japanese writing) to get the message of the passage. Perhaps my favorite day is the conversation grammar day, where we learn 3 ways to say everything. For example, the key phrase to forward a message a friend gave you is ～てって, unless you are talking to superior, in which case you have to make it longer to make it more polite. In the case of a senior student, or 先輩, you say ～ように言われたんですが. In the case of a professor, you have to say ～ていただけないかとおっしゃっていました, which has to be the longest jargon of meaningless kissing up I've ever heard. All three of these phrases basically translate to "said".

After Japanese, since I've exhausted the supply of English-instruction engineering courses offered, I go to a random culture course, be it a comparison of American/Japanese cultural perceptions, a course on cross-cultural training, or even a Japanese history class. But that's not as exciting as is the fact that western professors get absolutely no feedback from the Japanese students in these courses unless they are directly called upon. Through these courses, I've also been exposed to a lot of West meets East films, such as Gung Ho and Tampopo.

Ok I wrote most of this stuff a year ago... so I'm gonna go ahead and post it. Nobody really cares about day-to-day life in Japan (except for our all-you-can-drink self-introduction parties every week). After all, most of my fun "getting around" involved the Korean... incident. I know what everybody REALLY wants to read: the Billy/Lily updates. Oh yes, by popular demand, they may be posted here. I just have to sort through and see if there's any offensive content first.

Unconditional Love

In honor of Valentine's Day...
no... In honor of White Day....

OK, so it's been a while since I've had the time to work on this thing. Truth be known, I have errands I should be doing right now. But I have 3 half-written blog entries that need to be posted. One is dated as far back as July 2005.

I've been thinking a lot about love, and so I started writing this entry on Valentine's Day. Short on time, I thought White Day (Pi Day here) would be a good chance to post it. In Japan, Valentine's Day is a chance for women to give gifts to men. One month later, White Day is an obligation for men to give something to every woman who gave him something for White Day. I guess this is a way to encourage Japanese to get past their shyness. (HAHA from now on, Super Mario Shy Guys are "Japanese Masqueraders" in my book.)

What's been on my mind lately is the ideal of unconditional love. Raised in a Christian home, I heard this term a lot, and it's hardly exclusive to any one religion. (Grace may be the one thing exclusive to Christianity.)

Is unconditional love pracical in today's society? Jesus said if a man asks you to walk a mile, walk two. If anybody asks you for something, give it to them without question. I'm thinking, children who follow this advice will go without lunch money on a day to day basis. A few greedy gluttons will be able to live a very happy life.

With some obvious reservations, I still try to demonstrate unconditional love as much as possible. Unfortunately, I've tried to be loving to a lot of people who maybe aren't used to the attention, so they in turn think they've fallen in love. Hard thing to do, tell somebody "you're not in love with me". Hard thing too, when some of these people expect sex, only to hear me say "not interested". In the end, how am I expected to be loving without eventually hurting somebody?

I'm not especially interested in having a foreign girlfriend, but if I am fair to everybody, equally loving to everybody... the foreigners notice it more. It's not a fetish; it's just statistics.

Free? Free?! It must be a scam!

I know I've talked about having left a lot of money and store credit behind in Japan, but what little I had left in my bank account here at home has just been consumed by a company that goes by Vital Basics, Inc. I had serious difficulties with this past semester's courseload, getting the worst grades of my college career thus far, for all sorts of reasons:

• my natural auditory deficiency -- I can post more details on this, but you might compare this to ADD or dyslexia in terms of contribution to study difficulties
• fatigue from going straight into the fall semester from my summer semester in japan
• inability to sleep due to my roommate and his girlfriend arguing every night at the top of their lungs until 3am
• reverse culture shock
  

So, it occurred to me that I could use some extra help focusing in class. Every day my roommate wuld turn on The Daily Show or just leave the TV on while making dinner and I'd see commercials for this supplement, Focus Factor. The original Focus Factor TV ad went something like this:

Free? Free?! You're giving it away free?

Hi I'm Rob Gray; I'm the president of Vital Basics, and I wanna give you a bottle of Focus Factor, one of our best-selling supplements, absolutely free. Why would we give away a free bottle of Focus Factor? Because we know that if you'll try it, you'll buy it. Focus Factor contains nutrients that work with your natural brain chemistry to support focus, concentration, and memory. Simply call ... and we'll you a full-size bottle of Focus Factor, absolutely free. You simply provide $4.95 to help cover the cost of shipping.

They let you try it FREE?! It must be good!

After seeing this ad for over a month, I thought I'd give it a try. Sure enough, it turned out to be similar to one of those trial magazine subscriptions where you get a few free before they start charging at the normal rate. The woman on the phone explained to me "If you want to continue receiving bottles of FocusFactor, simply do nothing and we will send out your next shipment in 3 weeks."

One week later, I receive the bottle of Focus Factor. Those pills are huge, impossible to swallow, and have no noticeable affect (unless I can blame the pills for the headaches I got at that time). Just 3 days later, I get a credit statement that I've received two charges from Vital Basics already -- one for $4.95 and one for $69.95. A few days later I try to call, but customer service doesn't have the same hours as the 24-hour promotional number to buy the pills. So I wait another few days and call during their service hours and the guy tells me the next shipment of bottles is on its way and so he can't refund any money until I send them back. So I send back the pills and check my bank statement. An additional $159.85 has been charged to my account. Now nearly a month has passed and still no refund. All I have from Vital Basics is the one "free" bottle, and yet they have not refunded a dime of the $234.75 charged to my credit card.