Well, my attempt to jump-start the blog again didn't work – all it achieved was that I felt guilty every time I got home from work and didn't have the energy to write anything. However, I have been keeping notes about possible blog entries, and here are the notes:
1. Spear ... spear ...
2. Fewmale
3. Of age
4. Integrity
5. Neighbor foot
6. Never foot
7. Jumping the gnu
I'll take these in order.
1. A class was looking at a picture of the Colosseum in the textbook, and I explained to them that it was a stadium built 2000 years ago. They thought about this for a while, and were wondering who would have used it. One of the students suddenly shouted,
"Spear – spear – !"
We all stared at him.
"Spear?" I said, thinking of Christians and lions and gladiators. I supposed some of them used spears, but wasn't sure.
"Brittney Spears!" he yelled. "No, wait ... "
There was an uproar of derision from the other students.
"SHAKEspeare!" he shouted, and after that the only derision left was mine, carefully concealed
"I don't think Shakespeare was around then," I told him.
2. I was giving a dictation in which the word female appeared. The students puzzled over this until one of them decided that it was spelt fewmale, and informed the others. Everybody else nodded wisely and wrote it down.
3. This one came from listening to podcasts on my way to and from work. Why do people say that someone is '20 years of age' instead of saying that they are '20 years old,' or just 'twenty'? I don't know why, but it always sounds clumsy to me. Or perhaps pretentious, although I'm pretty sure it's not intended that way.
4. Why can we only HAVE integrity? Why is there no adjective for this particular noun? Honesty becomes honest. Honour becomes honourable. Why can't we say, She is integrit, or integrable, or something like that?
5 and 6. These are variations of neighborhood my students came up with in another dictation. Is there a bank in your neighbor foot?
I wonder what they thought it meant?
7. I wrote to one of my bosses to ask about whether it would be all right for me to do something (never mind what, it's not important or interesting), and then before hearing back I actually did it, after which I got a reply telling me not to just yet. In my reply to THAT email, I apologized for jumping the gnu.
Some typos are better than others. That was definitely one of the good ones, and I'm keeping it.
I have been watching foreign language YouTube videos, inspired by one a friend sent me: this one (although I'm not entirely sure I should call it foreign language). That led me to the original (which is almost as good! I mean bad!), and from there I moved on to a video which contained a mysterious button-pushing woman with a floating chandelier, a lineup of multi-coloured (but uniformly dull) suits, and an amazing portable music player. Aside from the portable music player, that one left me feeling baffled – but also entertained. (In an intellectual way, of course. Everybody knows that if you enjoy foreign videos you must be an intellectual.)
To finish off, I listened to some foreign music, and was surprised.
Yes, surprised is the right word, I think.
Over six million people have seen that last video since it was uploaded four years ago (and I can totally see why) but somehow it had passed me by.
Had you seen it?
The other night I dreamed I was having a conversation with the Pope. He was doing all the talking. He told me all about his favourite woolly cardigan, in great detail.
I listened politely and thought,
What a silly old man.
It was one of my more boring dreams.
One of the teachers I work with had an eye operation recently, for a detached retina. Today he brought into work the information pamphlet his doctor gave him, which was entitled 'Floaters and Flashes,' which I first read as 'Floaters and Flashers.'
These floaters were not what I thought they were. The pamphlet was about those unwanted bits of stuff that float around in your eye, not in your toilet.
But seeing the title of this pamphlet reminded me of when I first left home. I lived for a short time in an apartment in Wellington, and downstairs from me was a single mother and her daughter. The daughter was five years old, and was my first visitor. We became friends very quickly. She used to come to see me and dress up in my clothes.
One day she ran up the stairs to tell me she had done something amazing.
"Come and see what I did!" she shouted. "Quickly!"
I ran down the stairs, and she took me into the bathroom, over her mother's protests.
"Look!" she said. "I did a big one, and it keeps coming back! Mummy says it's a floater!"
"It's horrible," called her mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. "And it won't go away. I don't know what to do."
It certainly was a big one. It floated like a fat dumpling in the toilet bowl, and looked far too large to have been produced by a girl so small.
"Are you sure that's yours?" I asked.
"Yes!" mother and daughter chorused, and I'm not sure who was more indignant.
"Watch!" the little girl said, proudly, and flushed the toilet.
The floater turned a few lazy circles and dived languidly. We peered into the swirling water, but it had gone.
"Wait!" she said. "It'll come back! I promise!"
I waited.
Sure enough, after a few seconds the floater peeked slyly round the bend. It wiggled a bit, bobbed back to the surface, and bounced gently. It seemed to have become larger. The little girl laughed with delight.
I don't know how many times we flushed before it finally departed for good. That was a VERY PERSISTENT floater, and an amazing achievement for a five-year-old.
I would have been proud, too.
Work started last week, which goes some way to explaining my dearth of posting. (Not all the way. The rest of the way involves a lot of laziness.)
We now have, right after starting, three days of public holidays. This means a five day weekend, which is enough time for us all to get used to being on holiday again, and then suffer the trauma of starting work again, again. (I just used the word again three times in one sentence and I think it even makes sense. Do I get a prize for that?)
Today I went into Osaka to see a friend and inspect her kitten, who is growing fast and apparently turning into a rabbit, or at least his ears and back legs are.
While I was there, I showed my friend my current favourite YouTube video, this one, and she watched it three times in a row and laughed so hard I started to worry she might have a wee accident.
The video makes me laugh too, but it also makes me feel a little guilty, because I used to sleepwalk, too. I know how it feels when you wake up and know something is urgent but can't figure out what, or remember quite what terrible thing happened that made it necessary for you to try to climb into a small cupboard in the hallway. It is bewildering, and being laughed at when you are bewildered doesn't feel good.
So I have some sympathy for Bizkit, who seems to have hideous dreams about being chased, and I'm hoping he doesn't figure out how to watch YouTube videos. It would be humiliating for him to discover that ten million people have been laughing at him. It's bad enough when it's your mum and dad.
I was outside just now trying to see the Perseids meteor shower. The cloud cover meant that I could only see a few patches of sky where stars were visible, and light pollution took care of the rest. It probably didn't help that I had no idea where I should be looking, so was looking where the clear patches of sky were. It seems that those were not the right places. I did not see any meteors.
In fact, the most interesting thing to happen was that while standing in the middle of the road staring up at the sky (probably with my mouth open), my sarong fell off.
Last night the hungry crocodiles under my bed started to sidle out. They thought I was asleep, and wanted to eat me. They were particularly interested in my legs. I KNEW we should have had taller beds. Why did we have to be in a swamp anyway? Everybody had said we'd be safe, but the bed was too low.
Making myself small in the middle of the bed was not working. One crocodile, not even a very big one, had started to climb up. It lunged at my leg. I managed to scramble out of the way, and bashed it on the nose. It fell back, but started to come towards me again, enraged, and then I remembered something someone told me once – that if you screamed right in a crocodile's face it would run away.
It was a huge effort, but I took a deep breath and screamed right in that crocodile's face.
The crocodile reared back, looking appalled. It worked! But my scream also alarmed The Man, who woke up and grabbed my hand, which woke me up.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
Although the crocodiles were beginning to fade into absurdity, I could still see that horrified, toothy grin, and I didn't want to move, because YOU NEVER KNOW.
And for some reason the whole thing was really, really hard to explain.
Near the end of the semester, in the teachers' room at lunchtime, one of the guys asked everybody a question.
"Imagine you are running a race," he said. "You pass the person who is in second place. What position are you in now?"
One of the people who got it wrong reacted by getting astonishingly angry.
"Say the question again?" she said, and when he repeated it, she said, "YOU WORDED IT DIFFERENTLY LAST TIME. YOU'RE TRYING TO CONFUSE ME!"
Then she gave the same wrong answer she'd given the first time. The guy who'd asked the question caught my eye, and we both laughed. She got madder, and kept insisting she was right. Somehow, this question really hit a nerve with her. I had never seen her so worked up.
Other people were asking,
"So what's the answer, then?"
He pointed at me.
"You were the only person to get it right away," he said, and I tried not to look smug. At the same time, I was relieved. I had been trying to figure out why everyone had a different answer from mine. I'd been thinking I'd made some sort of embarrassing mistake, but couldn't figure out what it was.
At home I tried the question on The Man. He answered it wrongly, and when I laughed, he made me say the question again. Then he got mad.
"YOU SAID IT DIFFERENTLY BEFORE!" he said. "YOU'RE CONFUSING ME!"
What an interesting little question!
Today I cycled down to the big river. It has been several months since I went there, and I discovered that all the gulls were gone. I forgot they don't hang around there in the summer. They turn up in autumn, and stay for the winter.
I did not spend as much time there as I'd planned, because while I was cycling along the riverbank I remembered that a friend had moved to somewhere near that area, and maybe he was at home and I could pay him a visit? I texted him, and he answered immediately, saying he'd cycle down to meet me. He brought his dog. I think the dog remembered me, although I hadn't seen her since she wasn't much more than a puppy. She got all excited when she saw me. Or it could just be that I smell good to dogs when I'm all hot and sweaty after a bicycle ride.
We went back to his (very nice) new place for a drink, and after an hour or so I cycled home again along the river. On the way I took some pictures, but not very many.
One picture I took was of a cormorant flying. It was doing its best imitation of a cartoon. I must say the hornbill does it better, but still, that was a pretty good effort. The dangling foot is especially good.
I also saw a lot of crows. They were behaving in the way crows do, flying around and shouting scornfully, except for this one. I think this one is an outcast. 
It was quietly fossicking in the grass, looking normal, but when it turned the other way . . .
I saw that it had a mutant white feather.
How odd. I guess that was why the other crows didn't want to hang around with it. Poor, lonely white-feathered crow.
Before I left the riverside I saw the amazing umbrella bird, hanging from a tree.
This is a baby umbrella bird. When it is older it will open, trundle down to the river, and drift out to sea (unless it is captured and sold into slavery beforehand, that is).
I know this because I have seen it before.
I am going mad. It is the end of semester and I am frantically trying to grade, and being thwarted at every turn. Yesterday things kept happening, and I was busy with other routine chores, and then late yesterday afternoon I had finally settled down to do some serious marking of student papers when the phone rang. It was my brother. I haven't spoken to him for a long time, so felt obliged to continue talking to him even when we'd already said goodbye twice, I had run out of things to say, and he was starting to repeat himself. It was lovely to talk to him, but his timing was horrible. When I finally put the phone down it was time for dinner.
To make matters worse, I have caught a cold. After dinner I remembered to take my medicine, took it, and almost immediately felt sleepy. I don't usually take cold medicine, but I am trying to suppress the symptoms so I can get some work done. This is obviously not working. I went to bed right after writing this. (It is now Sunday.)
But it was not just because I am sleepy. I had had enough for the day. I am not sure what I had had enough of, because I hadn't achieved much, but perhaps it was just that I had had enough of not achieving much.
But on another topic, as I am taking a break from grading, let me tell you about my embarrassing new mobile phone ringtone. Perhaps you remember the frogs I had before, as my ringtone. I hate ringtones, usually, and had recorded the frogs down at the paddy field on the corner so that I could have a sound I liked. That worked worked well. The frogs were not very loud, but just loud enough, and I've been using them for a year. I usually have my phone set on silent mode anyway, but on the rare occasions I didn't, and my phone rang during class, or in a quiet bookstore, or somewhere, everybody was puzzled except me. The frogs worked PERFECTLY.
They continued to work perfectly until summer rolled round again, and the frogs started up again down at the paddy field. Recently, whenever I've been expecting a call or message and had the phone on, I've been scrabbling for it every time I hear frogs. I was scrabbling for my phone far too often, even when it was in silent mode. The real frogs down at the paddy field were confusing me. They don't sing all the time. They start and stop.
So I decided to change my ringtone, and a friend sent me some birdsongs I might like. They were lovely, and I was very pleased with them. I chose the song of the hototogisu (Japanese cuckoo – click on number 10 to hear its song).
I've had my new ringtone for about three weeks now, but for some reason I cannot get used to it. I just can't seem to remember that I have changed my ringtone. I still jump up to find my phone when I hear frogs, and when the hototogisu starts singing I stare around the place like an idiot, looking for the bird. I do this for AGES before realizing that the song is coming from my own bag, or pocket. It is embarrassing, especially when I am in the middle of a complicated conversation with one of the administrative staff at work. I felt like such an idiot.
How long does it take to get used to a new ringtone if you hardly ever use it anyway? I am thinking of restoring the frogs.
Today I stopped in at a little park in time to see a rather gruesome drama involving a mynah (I think) and its overly large lunch, which was still alive.
I think it was a cicada. It's strange, though. I haven't seen or heard any kumazemi yet. That's what it looks like to me, but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps it's some other large insect.
We're heading into our final two or three weeks of semester now, and I have been feeling bad about not posting more, especially since I have had some entertaining classes this semester. But that swine flu week off messed things up a bit. I had a lovely week off at the time, doing almost nothing, but since then it has all been madness. What has made things especially mental is that instead of making up the classes, we were permitted to give our students an extra homework assignment. I did this (as did every other teacher I know) but all those homework assignments have come in at once. This is mostly due to my own bad planning, but partly due to students to whom I had given an earlier deadline not handing in their homework on time. I have also been giving end-of-semester tests, so marking tests and grading assignments has kept me pretty much without the time or energy to write.
It is possible that my schedule this year has made it a bit harder to write, too. Last year I had a hideous schedule, but several times a week I could stay up late without causing meltdown the next day. That's when I wrote my blog. This year, however, I have to get up at five o'clock three days a week. This has not been too bad, I must say, but mostly because I have managed to change my routine so that I am usually in bed by ten at the latest. So I have been doing very well in terms of having energy for work, but blogging has suffered.
Also, my Palm (with portable keyboard) died. I now have an iPod Touch, but with no external keyboard I do not like typing on it for anything longer than short memos. It is too slow.
Why can't the iPod have an external keyboard? That would make it PERFECT.
Yesterday The Man told me that when he was parking his bicycle in the garden he saw a snake. A snake! In our tiny little garden!
It was not a white snake. In Japan it is good luck to have a white snake in the garden. Our snake is an ordinary shimahebi, like the one I photographed down by the river one time. The Man said he thought it was about a meter long, or perhaps a bit longer. He said it was startled and ran away (well, not ran exactly, but you know what I mean) when it saw him.
I did not ask him if he screamed, but I expect he did, and that's why I haven't seen it, although I have been looking.
In other wildlife news, in Australia wallabies have been playing practical jokes on poppy farmers. Crop circles! Naughty, naughty wallabies. Naughty, naughty STONED wallabies.
Also, speaking of practical jokes, tonight I have been enjoying some of the videos on Improv Everywhere. They have been making me smile.
I was watching this wonderful series of videos on YouTube (the link is to only the first one), when I suddenly started laughing. This happened when I got to about the three minute point in part three. At that point the guy (whose name I forget) says to Derek,
"Perfect! Well done!"
and Derek answers,
"Thank you."
The reason I laughed was that all through this series I had been irresistibly reminded of a student I had two years ago who spoke exactly in the way Derek does, and that particular exchange was exactly the same as one my student and I had numerous times. But I didn't even realize I was using those words until the second-to-last class, when I used different words, and caused a wee upset.
What happened was that we had a speaking test, in which my students have 'conversations' with random partners, and I grade them. The weird student (I feel a bit bad calling him that, but he was odd) was concerned about this test, and prepared far too much. By this I mean that he prepared for any possible question a random partner could ask him in the course of the conversation. This was not as difficult as it might seem, as during the 'conversation' part of class over the past weeks he had heard the same familiar questions over and over and over. My students are not very imaginative when it comes to conversations in English. They stick to the language they know. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" they ask. "Do you like sports?" "What's your favourite food?" and so on. But the test is supposed to be of a conversation, not a prepared speech, and that was the problem. Conversations are hard for a person who finds social interaction a challenge.
And it meant that during his test, when his partner asked him a question, my odd student was well prepared. His partner asked him,
"What did you do last weekend?"
And the odd student responded very fluently, and at length, with a prepared speech explaining exactly what he had done last weekend, in great detail and using a lot of words he had apparently looked up in the dictionary. In fact he answered with so much detail and so fluently that his partner couldn't get a word in edgeways, which was probably just as well because I could see he couldn't understand very much anyway. Then the timer went off and the test was over. The odd student's partner hadn't had a chance to speak yet.
The partner escaped as soon as the test was over, looking anxious. The odd student stayed behind, looking at me, waiting for a response.
"Was THAT all RIGHT?" he asked.
"Yes!" I said. "That was very good!"
He continued to stand there. It was clear he was waiting for something.
"You did very well!" I added reassuringly.
This did not seem to help, and I couldn't figure out what he was waiting for. We stared at each other. Finally he spoke again.
"WELL DONE?" he asked.
"Huh?" I said, and then, quickly, "Yes! WELL DONE!"
"THANK you," he said, and left.
I sat there staring after him, and realized what had happened. Every time he did well at something (which was often), and wanted to know if he'd done it right, I had, apparently, said,
"Well done!"
And he would reply,
"Thank you!"
I didn't even realize I was doing it.
But he did, and it bothered him when I didn't say it after the test.
So that is what that video reminded me of. Derek has exactly the same speech mannerisms that my student had. If I listen but do not look at the video when Derek is speaking, that could be my student. And when he said, "Thank you!" in response to someone saying, "Well done!" – well, that made me laugh, because it reminded me of my student and that test. (Incidentally, I gave the odd student's partner an A for the test, and told him so. I had chosen him because I'd heard him often enough in class, knew he was good, and knew he would not panic too badly if things went pear-shaped during the test, which they did. I thanked him for remaining calm and he was delighted to find out he hadn't failed after all.)
You might remember that when I originally wrote about my odd student I said that it was very difficult to describe the way he spoke, although I tried. Well, now I do not need to describe it. If you listen to Derek speaking you will know exactly what I was talking about.
You might also understand why I found my student so endearing.
I have never been very interested in theme parks. I don't like standing in line, and most rides do not tempt me, especially the scary ones. But I may have found one that could tempt me: the Adult Theme Park Ride. If the same theme park also had the Watermaze, and it was summer, I would be a regular visitor.
I guess that means I'm getting old.
(I'm not quite ready for the Carnival Rides for the Elderly, though.)
I have been spending far too much time at the Halfbakery. In fact, I even considered joining at one point, when I was reading the variations on ping-pong and tennis. I wanted to add my own ping-pong variation.
I didn't, though, so I'll tell you about it instead. This is, in any case, a 'baked' idea, because it has been done, numerous times, in our house when I was a child. Our version of ping-pong was called blowball. To play this game you need a large number of children or adults (it doesn't really matter, although heights should be distributed evenly over both teams), a ping-pong ball, a ping-pong net, and a table. (We had a large dining room table, which sufficed.) A cloth is also recommended, to wipe the table occasionally.
You set up the net raised high enough so that the ping-pong ball can roll underneath it. You then form two teams, ranged around the table, and place the ping-pong ball on the side of the team that is 'serving.' The aim is to blow the ball off the other team's side of the table. To do this, you have to all blow like mad. You are not allowed to touch the side of the table, so what you end up with is a bunch of people with their hands behind their backs, stooped over, blowing and yelling and giggling in pretty much equal amounts. It is a good spectator sport, too. It is absurdly entertaining to see so many people exerting so much energy to make a ball move so slowly.
Blowball is a very exciting game*, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly. Also, it is perfect for wearing out a crowd of overactive children without breaking anything.
*It is especially exciting when someone faints, which I remember being not particularly uncommon during this game. It was never me, though. The nearest I ever got was seeing stars a couple of times.
Early this morning I was woken by sudden and violent sound. I lay in the dark with my eyes wide open, and had the bewildering and incoherent impression that my face had just exploded.
My face was still there, however (although a little damp), so I played back the sound in my head, and eventually came to the conclusion that I had sneezed in my sleep.
I didn't even know that that was possible, although I suppose there is no reason why it wouldn't be. It just seems odd. I certainly don't remember it ever happening before, even when I've had a cold.
Actually, would I even know if I had done it before? Would it always necessarily wake me up?
Have you ever sneezed in your sleep, that you know of?
For a while recently I wanted shishito with almost every meal. Shishito is a Japanese pepper which is often described as sweet and mild. I experience them more like a bitter and sweet combination with an occasional hot one, and even more occasionally, a VERY hot one.
The other day I found some in the bargain bin at the supermarket, probably a couple of days old, and very cheap, so I got them. I added them to my spaghetti sauce, which I often do, and because they were a bit old I thought I should use them all instead of the usual three or four.
When I bit into the first shishito I rapidly discovered that I had come across a VERY hot one. I can usually tolerate quite hot food, but not fiery, and this one was fiery. I had the usual reaction I get to fiery food. I gasped, my eyes streamed, and I started to hiccup violently. It took a few minutes to get over the experience.
Then I bit into the second shishito, and it was, if anything, even hotter. The hiccuping was even more violent and longer-lasting, and for a while I couldn't see to find a tissue to wipe my eyes.
I ate the spaghetti after that, avoiding the shishito until the end. The spaghetti was already cooling because I couldn't eat while hiccuping, and I wanted to finish it before it was disgustingly cold. Then I looked at the last of the shishito on the plate. I picked one up, hiccuped reminiscently, and decided I was over shishito. This means I cannot report on the hotness or otherwise of the rest of that packet. I threw them out. I was afraid the next one would send me into convulsions.
(The hiccuping thing is uncomfortable, but also embarrassing if I'm eating out and bite into something hot. It can get out of control, and makes me appear to be drunk and disorderly.)
The Man is a great fan of hot food, and there is a brand of Thai curry mixes that he particularly likes. I have tried two of them. They were very nice, but one of them was very hot and made me hiccup dramatically, so I couldn't eat much of it.
When I came home today The Man told me that he had gone to the website of the company that makes this curry and entered a contest – and won! He has never won anything like that before, and was very pleased with himself. In the next few days 72 packets of Thai cup ramen will be delivered to our house – thirty-six each of Tom Yum ramen and green curry ramen. That is a lot of ramen. (I didn't even know there was such a thing as Thai ramen.)
But this means we now have our emergency food supplies. If swine flu turns nasty and we are afraid to go out, or supermarkets run out of food, we can survive for several weeks on Thai cup ramen.
Hic!
It rained today. When it finally stopped, I went out and took yet another picture of the honeysuckle. It is almost the same as the last one, except there are raindrops on it.
It's funny how honeysuckle looks so lovely in close-up photographs. In real life it is quite a messy-looking plant.
I took some more frog pictures, too. The garden seems to be full of them. They hide under the weeds and ivy most of the time. But after the rain, this one came out to dry off a bit.
Here is a closer picture of the same frog.
After the rain, the mosquitoes also came out. While I was taking pictures, I kept hitting myself around the ears.
I asked The Man about it.
"How come mosquitoes always seem to whine around ears, but they never actually bite ears?" I asked.
"Yes, they do," he said, and all my half-baked theories about mosquitoes having civilized early-warning systems flew out the window.
My lovely unexpected week off is almost at an end. On Monday I have to go back to work to get infected by my germy students.
