Down at the river

A week or so ago I went to the big river and took some photos. There was no story. Sorry. (I have a maybe-story from the little river, but I haven't sorted through all the photos yet.)

At the big river, an egret was practicing for the 100-metre sprint.


A kingfisher posed for me on the path.


Another little bird pretended to be a kingfisher, and I took its photo. It was only after zooming in on the (not very good) photo that I realized that it was not a kingfisher. I don't know what it was, but it was very cute.


There were a lot of gulls.


At one point, the gulls all suddenly took to the air. I took a picture. They looked like the Hitchcock movie.


Then I noticed why they had taken to the air. Poor wee doggie. The river is not very deep at the moment, and he got out quite a way before realizing none of the gulls was going to sit there and wait for him.


After that I came home again. It was a cold, grey sort of day, and my fingers and toes were turning blue.

Ducks

I was going to write another bird story today, but I got busy. Instead, here are some ducks.

These are not the pictures I was going to use for the story, but if you feel some captions coming on, please do share!

Save the world

Today I met a friend for lunch. And dinner, it turned out, because we lingered over lunch (can you blame us?), and then did a little shopping, then stopped for coffee, and then, somehow, it was dinnertime. I guess we talked a lot. The shopping didn't take much time, and was necessary rather than particularly interesting things, although I thought the birthday card my friend bought for someone was rather interesting. The card said, on the front,

Why don't you open me?
This made us both laugh, so naturally she bought it. Inside the card was more conventional (Happy Birthday!). I'm not sure now why it made us laugh so much.

It was a day for amusing and baffling English, and I was sorry I did not have my camera with me. I used my phone camera, and most of the results made me even sorrier. The blurred pictures I was taking were finally explained when I realized I had the phone camera set on close-up mode. I wonder why I did that, and when?

After I figured out the problem I still got two pictures, at least.

One is of a sign in an underground mall in Kobe. Part of the mall is roped off, and inside the roped off area people are, apparently, prepating.


The other is of a clothing store. Please do not ask me to explain this sign. You know as much as I do.

Unfortunately I didn't have my camera

It's a gorgeous spring-like day here. I've just been out in it, and passing a little park near here spotted something that was sad and comical all at once. A pigeon had somehow managed to get a plastic bag attached to its leg, and was flying very slowly across the park, plastic bag billowing out behind. It looked like a parasailor going the wrong way, and had to flap REALLY HARD to make any headway.

I wanted to tell it to stop flapping. The wind was probably enough to keep it airborne, although then it would have been going backwards. Or down, slowly. There isn't much wind today.

If it had landed on the ground I might have been able to try to help, but it landed rather awkwardly on a power line and started pecking at its foot. It showed no inclination to move from there, so after waiting a while I left.

Glue

Today I could not find the glue stick so I could stick down the envelope on a letter I wanted to post. I asked The Man where it was. He thought he knew, but he was wrong. We could not find the glue stick.

"Never mind," I said. "I'll just use tape."

"No," The Man said. "Just go downstairs, open the rice cooker, and take out some cooked rice. Then use your finger to rub it over the flap. It will stick fine. That's how it used to be done."

"Really?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "One grain of rice should be enough."

I didn't believe him. Who would eat something that also functioned as glue? I mean, really! I know you can use flour and water paste as glue, but that's not the same. We don't usually eat flour until it's cooked. After you've cooked something, you would not eat it if it had the same qualities as glue, would you?

I went downstairs to look for tape. Then I thought about Japanese rice, and decided to try The Man's method. Maybe he was right. Maybe 'glutinous' did equal 'glue.'

I took one grain of rice out of the rice cooker. I smeared it over the flap of the envelope. I stuck the flap down, and rubbed it.

The flap stuck wonderfully. How convenient!

Later, when I got to the post box, I checked the envelope again, to make sure it was still sticking. It was.

I posted the letter.

Now I know why Japanese rice always makes me constipated.

The Red Line

Today I taught my last class of the semester at the women's university. I used my general knowledge quiz, as the students had already done their speaking tests, and I knew they had examinations this week and would not feel like studying something that was not for a test. They had fun with the quiz, being the sort of students who are prepared to guess wildly.

At the end of the quiz I give a couple of very difficult but guessable 'bonus questions' worth so many points that the pitifully losing team can suddenly turn into THE WINNERS! WE WON! YAY!!! The answer to one of these questions was 'the equator' (although they answered the red line because they didn't know the word equator), and after the uproar died down one of the students, a sweet girl, said, thoughtfully,

"Sensei?"

"Yes?" I asked.

"Sensei, is the red line only on the map?"

She looked at me hopefully.

I had to think about it for a moment before I understood what she meant.

When I was telling The Man about this question tonight, he was enthusiastic.

"I hope you told her the right answer," he said.

"What do you mean?" I said. "What right answer?"

"Oh, the red line ... it's beautiful," sighed The Man, and his expression went dreamy and unfocussed with the pleasure of remembering. "You should try to see it one day! You look through binoculars from a distance, and ... oh ... the red ... it's so wonderful ... And from a plane, you should see it from a plane! You look down, and you have never seen anything so beautiful in your life ... "

He snapped back to speaking normally. "Like that," he said. "That's how you should have answered."

I stared at him.

"You should have been a teacher," I told him. "You did that much better than I could."

And it's true. For a moment there I had SEEN that red line, glowing on the horizon – beautiful, magical, filling me with wonder. Why had I squashed my student's idea so abruptly? I could have made her dreams so much more interesting!

How rude of me.

Whoops

You know how they say there are two kinds of computer users, those who back up regularly and those who haven't lost any data yet?

It's true.

Sad, but true.

PFFT!

I went for a bicycle ride yesterday. I was planning to go to the river to see how the birds were doing, and decided to approach my ride from the opposite direction I usually go. This took me in the direction of an area I haven't visited for a while, and there is a supermarket there that sometimes has good cheese, so I decided to visit that before going to the river, but before that I got hungry, and ... well, the end result was that I didn't visit the river after all. I didn't even visit the supermarket, I realized on my way home. I got distracted, and forgot. It was that sort of day.

One of the reasons I got distracted was that I decided to eat at one of the coffee shops I used to go to when I was in the area more frequently a few years ago. Only one was still open, though. Unfortunately, although the coffee there isn't bad, the only food on the menu was cake. Another place I went to occasionally had turned into an Indian restaurant, but it was closed. Three others had turned into hair or beauty salons. I could not find an ordinary coffee shop anywhere.

There was a new McDonald's.

While I was cycling along, stomach rumbling, I started thinking about why I didn't even consider going to the McDonald's. I do not think I am a food snob. It is hard to be a food snob while also being a very bad cook. But I find it hard to think of McDonald's as food at all, and as I cycled along wondering why I came up with a theory. As you may have noticed, I have theories about most things. I'm not sure whether this is a very good one, though.

My theory is that for people who grew up with hamburgers on their menu, and have a strong idea and memory of what a hamburger should taste like, McDonald's provides them with the IDEA of a hamburger. Their imagination fills in the gaping holes between the idea and the real thing.

For someone like me, however, who did not grow up eating hamburgers (I had my first hamburger at 21 or 22), a McDonald's hamburger has a baffling lack of food-like qualities, and does not work for me at all. I do not feel satisfied after eating it. Any vegetables in it seem to have the shape but not the flavour of actual vegetables. They are ideas of vegetables, and that does not make sense to me at all. How can something look like a real vegetable and yet not taste like one? The potato fries do not taste like potatoes. The slices of tomato result in no tomato flavour. What happened to it? Nothing tastes like real, actual food eaten by real, actual human beings. It looks like it could be food, but taking a bite destroys that illusion for me.

But if you are very familiar with what a hamburger should taste like, maybe the shape and colour and name is enough for your imagination to fill in the gaps.

I think I'll call my theory the Placebo Familiar Food Theory (aka PFFT).

The PFFT theory falls down when I think of the popularity of McDonald's in Japan, where if people grew up eating hamburgers, it was probably McDonald's hamburgers. I may have to dream up a different theory to account for that.

Collywobbles

One of two prisoners handcuffed together who ran either side of a lamp-post in an ill-conceived bid for freedom has pleaded guilty to trying to escape custody.

He had the collywobbles, apparently. His lawyer said so.

I think they should be let off this particular offense. They provided a great service by performing their stunt on video, thus brightening the lives of people all around the globe.

That has to count for something, surely.

Fickle

A couple of years ago I wrote about the previously cantankerous Henry. Henry, after having what was possibly a cancer removed from his bottom, recovered with a changed personality. He then developed an interest in the opposite sex for the first time, and great things were expected of him. Someone has to keep the family genes going.

Well.

Finally, at the age of 111, Henry has become a father. I was delighted to read this news at first, but then I noticed something rather surprising and, I must say, disappointing:

... he mated with 80-year-old Mildred last July and 11 of the eggs she produced have now hatched

Mildred?

MILDRED?

Who is Mildred?

What happened to Henry's first love, the young and lovely Juliet? How could Henry had forgotten her so quickly? How could he have been so fickle? I could not believe it.

But when I got to the end of the story, I read this:

He lives with three female tuatara "in great harmony", said Mr Hazley, and described the hatching of the eggs as "the completion of a love story".

Juliet's name was not mentioned, but I have chosen to believe that Juliet is his FIRST wife. The other two – including Mildred – are only extras. Henry was being considerate. Juliet is, after all, only twenty. She needs a little time to sow her wild oats before settling down with babies. Mildred is eighty, and is far more suited to motherhood.

So it is all good. Mildred can stay home and take care of the children, and Juliet can go out on the town and live it up. She is too young for the heavy responsibilities that come with motherhood, especially the motherhood of eleven children all at once. After all, there are a lot of dangers out there for the babies, especially from their teenaged relatives.

Also, there has to be some benefit to being First Wife.

Knights of passion

I was marking tests today. A lot of the test was dictation, and I was not too fussy about spelling as long as it was close, as the point of the dictations I did during semester was to develop listening skills rather than writing. One misspelling pulled me up short, though, mostly because of the image that popped into my head. It was a dialogue that came from the unit in the textbook about booking a hotel, and my student had written this:

I'd like a room for two knights.



(I wanted to illustrate this blog post, but I'll need a lot more practice before I can draw a knight.)

Hot morning

"In America, when you eat out," my colleague was saying last Friday, "they don't have the 'set meal' system they have here. You can't get a healthy lunch for about $10 in any coffee shop, like you can in Japan, or get a cheap and simple breakfast."

I thought about the set meal system. I like it, too, and after all these years I'm used to it and would miss it. I like going into a coffee shop before work and having a hot morning. It makes me happy that it is the same price as a cup of coffee would be in the same coffee shop at any other time of day, but includes a piece of toast and a hard-boiled egg. Some places also include jam, or a small salad, or other options, but toast, egg and coffee are the basics. (Hot morning is the Japanese version of what you end up with if you crunch together morning set and hot coffee.')

The coffee shop I have used for years on workdays has not been a place to have a very warm hot morning recently, I must say. Since I started using this coffee shop, many years ago, the old couple running it have been getting older and older (as have I, only not quite so dramatically). The husband is going so deaf that entering the shop and thus setting off a loud, discordant tinkling doorbell tune frequently does not alert him to the presence of a customer, and it takes some artful maneuvering to accidentally get into his line of sight so he knows you are there. This is made particularly difficult because the shop often does not have any other customers, and he is behind his newspaper, squinting at the pages in the semi-dark. His wife, who is usually not there when I arrive, turns up when a customer comes, and does the job of delivering the food and drinks to the customers. In recent years she has developed a tremor in one hand so extreme that you fear the toast is going to leap off the tray. She brings the coffee with her other hand, but it is probably safe anyway because her husband never fills the cup past about a half full. It is excellent coffee, which makes it both worth it and frustrating because you are always left wanting just a little more. But it is strong, so I don't mind too much.

I suspect the old couple are having trouble making the coffee shop pay. Little economies have made in recent years. The salad that used to be included with the morning set has disappeared. That revolting blue stuff in the toilet is no longer used. Quite often, in the mornings, I arrive and the lights are not on. The open sign is up, though, and when I go in they turn on the lights. And this winter, rather to my dismay, the old but very warm kerosene heater also disappeared, probably deemed too dangerous by the old couple's daughter, who occasionally helps out. It has been replaced by a one bar electric heater, which barely takes the edge off the chill. The only reason I continue to go there two or three freezing mornings a week is that I don't want to be yet another disappearing customer, disappointing them with my disloyalty. I am tempted to keep my coat on, but don't. The old lady wears a woolly hat, however.

Most of the other customers, who are few and far between, are also old. They hold shouted conversations with the old guy, accommodating each other's deafness and competing with the TV, which is generally blasting out one of the morning 'wide' shows. Quite frequently my toast is burnt, and a few days ago I didn't get an egg. I had to ask for it. The wife was upstairs, possibly having a nap, so asking involved some shouting. When that did not work, I accidentally knocked a chair over, which did. Once I got the old guy's attention I asked for my egg, and had to bellow. It is, I discovered, difficult to be tactful at full volume. Eventually the message was received, however, and we both had a good laugh.

I think the old couple are probably in their eighties. The Man worries that they will give me food poisoning, but I can't bring myself to desert them at this late stage. I don't know how long the coffee shop will continue, but as long as it does, I will be a regular customer.

Mystery gull

On Monday, down at the small river behind the place I work, I saw a lot of gulls like the ones I usually see. But I also saw another type of gull, standing alone on a rock.


This gull was a lot larger than the usual ones, and I cannot identify it. Is it a Vega Gull (Larus vegae)? A Mongolian Gull (Larus mongolicus)?

The gulls I usually see are easy to identify. They are, of course, Larus Ridiculous, which is probably why the mystery gull did not want to hang out with them.

Bad housekeeper

I just added a new blog to my blogroll, and discovered while doing so that it is at least a year since I changed my blogroll at all. This means that there are probably a few bad links in there, for which I offer a sincere but meaningless apology. My bad housekeeping skills apparently extend to the virtual world. What a sad thing to learn about myself.

But you will be pleased to hear that this discovery has goaded me into action. I have decisively added 'clean up my blogroll' to my current 'to-do' list, and will get to it sometime in the next year or so, if I don't lose the list first.

Which?

1. Life is a roller coaster ride, all ups and downs.

2. Life is a merry-go-round. You go round and round until you get sick and fall off.

3. ?



(I was reading obituaries today, in an old New York Times someone had brought back from their Christmas vacation and left in the teachers' room.)

Pardon?

This sentence (from a book review in the New York Times) puzzled me enormously at first.

To see how arousal alters sexual attitudes, for example, Ariely and his colleagues asked young men to answer a questionnaire — then asked them to answer it again, only this time while indulging in Internet pornography on a laptop wrapped in Saran Wrap.

I stopped reading to think about this. Just how tightly were these young men wrapped? How could they breathe? Wouldn't the Saran Wrap defeat the purpose of the experiment? Or was this some sort of exciting sexual thing that everybody knew about except me? How bizarre.

The mental picture I got was also rather disturbing. I imagined a room full of young men dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap, with laptop computers (on their laps?) and scientists with white coats and clipboards standing behind them.

Then I decided I must have missed something important, and went back to the beginning and read it again.

Is it just me, or does that sentence need some rewriting?

(It seems like an interesting book, though.)

Tufted ducks and friends

Recently I have seen tufted ducks on a little river near here. (Not on the river I usually visit.)


Whenever I have seen these ducks, they are always hanging out with some ducks that are not tufted ducks. I think they are pochards. All of these ducks are diving ducks, and they look like children's toys. They look, somehow, painted.





But there are some mysteries about these ducks. Well, at least to me they are mysteries. Maybe you can help me to understand what is going on.

The first mystery is this: Where are the female tufted ducks? In the Wikipedia pictures, the female is brown. I have never seen a brown duck at the river. There seem to be only males.

The second mystery is why these two types of ducks are always hanging around together. I thought at first they were male and female, but although they are both diving ducks (I know because I have seen them both dive), I cannot find any pictures that show a male and female that look like these ones do.

I did, however, find some pictures that made me wonder whether the pochards are actually hybrid pochard/tufted ducks. But that still leaves the question of why they are all male. Unless, of course, some of them are actually female and I just haven't found the right pictures yet and matched them up.

Also, I wonder why this particular tufted duck (below) has some brownish feathers under its wings? The others are just black and white. Is it also some kind of hybrid?

And finally, did you know before seeing this picture that ducks had tongues? I didn't. Actually, I hadn't ever thought about it, and I suppose if I had I would have guessed that they did. But even so, I find this tongue rather surprising.

No, please don't. That would be cruel.

Rice pudding

I haven't had rice pudding since I was a little girl, when my mother used to make it sometimes. It was always a great favourite in my family. Most Japanese people find the very idea of rice pudding strange, and when I looked it up I discovered that there were rice puddings in almost every cultures except Japanese and Korean, even though both are rice-eating countries. In Japan and Korea rice is made into desserts in other ways, but not as rice pudding.

The Man is unusual (for a Japanese person) in that he likes rice pudding, so I decided to make some for him. I used Japanese rice, because that's practically the only rice you can get here. It's REALLY hard to find long-grained rices here, which is extremely annoying when you want to make any dish that is not Japanese and which includes rice. Japanese rice is very glutinous, and sometimes you don't WANT glutinous.

So I made rice pudding using, in the end and after much Internet searching, a recipe from Edmond's Cookbook, because if any recipe is going to work it will be one from Edmond's Cookbook. Edmond's Cookbook only has recipes that work. It is a very old cookbook.

It didn't work, of course, but that was not the fault of Edmond's Cookbook. It was the fault of the very sticky, glutinous rice I used. The cookbook said how much rice and milk to use, but didn't say which kind of rice. I added quite a lot more milk because I knew that most rice sold in NZ is not so sticky, but I did not add enough. What I ended up with was not rice pudding, but rice brick. When it was warm it was still edible, but when it cooled it was pretty well solid.

I did not offer any to The Man. I knew he would not be impressed. When he thinks of rice pudding he thinks of creamy, soft, heavenly rice pudding, like the sort you get in Turkey (where he first had it). He does not think of a glob of solidified sticky rice.

I was so frustrated with this experience I wanted to throw my rice pudding at the wall. I didn't, though. If I threw it at the wall, it would stay there forever, and I do not want to be reminded of my mistake.

But at least I have some idea of what to do next time. Next time, I will use already cooked rice, and maybe try washing it first to get rid of some of the starch. And I will boil, not bake it, so I can add more milk if necessary while it's cooking.

It might even be easier than the way I did it the first time.

What's your favourite rice pudding recipe?

Okaasan needs a new dentist

When we visited Okaasan this New Year, she gave us a bit of a fright when she opened the door. She appeared to have aged about fifteen years since the last time we saw her. She was OLD. She looked every minute of her eighty-one years.

We went inside, and after a few minutes of chatting she giggled and asked if she looked and sounded funny. "You can't understand me properly, can you?" she said. "My teeth hurt, so I took them out."

She didn't sound funny, or at least no funnier than usual, but that did explain the the way her face had collapsed.

She took her teeth out of a cup, popped them back in, and instantly dropped fifteen years. It was amazing to see, especially because it was only four teeth. Even more surprising was that when she started to talk again, she had acquired a lisp.

Thee told uth that when thee was eating dinner thee kept thome thithorth bethide her plate, to cut up the bitth of food thee was having trouble chewing becauthe her teeth hurt.

We made her promise to go to a new, better dentist.

2009

Happy New Year, everybody!

Stop being saintly

One of the other reasons I didn't blog much for a while is that the Saturday after catching that cold I woke up with another attack of hand eczema. This time I did not wake up with bleeding palms. I woke up itching severely, but not actually bleeding. That was a relief. Perhaps my sleeping brain had remembered the horror story two friends told me separately a few weeks ago, after reading it in the New Yorker. (I just discovered the story is online, here, but I still have not read it. I know enough, from what my friends told me.)

In this story there is something about a woman whose head was so itchy, and she scratched so much (STOP READING THIS PARAGRAPH NOW IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH) she scratched her way all the way through her skull and to her brain.

Can you imagine being that itchy?

I can, unfortunately. This hand eczema thing is, I hope, the nearest I'll get to that, and wasn't that bad but still, it was quite bad enough. When I woke up I was afraid to look. I thought I might find that I had scratched through to bone. And then THROUGH bone. "Look Ma! No hands!" took on a whole new meaning, suddenly, and I wished my friends had not told me about that article.

My hands were still intact, however. They were just itchy. And when I say 'just' itchy, I mean 'REALLY, REALLY ITCHY, I-AM-GOING-INSANE ITCHY, SOMEBODY-PLEASE-CUT-OFF-MY-HANDS ITCHY.'

Like I said, it was a Saturday, and I could not go to the doctor. I suppose I could have gone to an emergency hospital, and if I was in NZ I might have, but red tape is always harder in another language and I didn't think I could cope with red tape and itchy hands both at once. It was taking all my will power already not to scratch. Actually, it was taking all my will power and a pair of cotton gloves.

In fact, that was all I ended up treating it with. Greasy, non-smelly hand cream, and cotton gloves, as I learned last time. I did the hand cream/cotton gloves thing and itched for three days, then the itching went away magically while I was sitting in the skin doctor's waiting room on Monday evening. My hands still did not look good, and the doctor prescribed steroid cream, but I only used it twice. I do not like using steroid cream on my hands anyway. I am afraid I will forget and accidentally get some on my face, or in my eyes.

So my advice to anybody who got here looking for remedies for hand eczema is to use greasy, non-smelly hand cream, avoid soaps and detergents – and indeed, water – as much as you possibly can, and wear cotton gloves at night but also during the day when you can. It is fantastically inconvenient, especially for a chronic hand-washer like me, and it makes typing a little difficult and clumsy, but it can be done. Both times I have had this problem the itch has stopped sometime in the third day. The marks take a little longer to go away, but even those have mostly gone now, too.

Actually, when I was thinking about the bleeding palms thing, I realized that it is highly likely that I did not have hand eczema at all. I had stigmata, caused by being too saintly.

So here is my other remedy, which I also used. Follow the advice above, just in case. But also, swear and shout at your hands. Curse them loudly. Irritate everybody around you by complaining about the itch all the time. Wave your hands in the air and scream blasphemously.

Stop being saintly, in other words.

That's what I did, and it worked for me.

A very bad Christmas pun

It has been a while, hasn't it? I have not stopped blogging, however. I have been blogging like mad. The only problem is that the blogging is happening inside my head, and hasn't made it to the screen for a while. Something happens and I think, "Oh, I'll write about that when I get home." If I am already home, I think, "Oh, I'll write about that later."

'Later' comes, and I sit here wondering what it on earth I thought was worth writing about. Was I going to tell you the brilliant idea of wearing a surgical mask at night when you have a cold in the winter, so that the air around your nose and mouth doesn't get so dry? This does work well, I've found (at least in Japan, where the air is ridiculously dry in winter), except for the morning I woke up and the mask had slipped up over my eyes. I thought for a panicky moment I had gone blind. It was an odd sort of blindness, though. My world had not gone black; it had gone white. Freaky!

But that wasn't really worth writing about. There were some work incidents, but classes finished on Monday and it's Thursday now, which means I have had time to forget almost everything.

Was I going to write about Christmas? But Christmas was today (well, yesterday, now), and I didn't go to the flea market like I usually do. The cold I caught is dragging on and on (it's been almost two weeks) and I didn't have the energy. Also, it was raining, and I thought the market would probably be cancelled anyway. It wasn't, but by the time the sun came out it was too late to change my mind.

In the evening I met a friend at the Hilton for the Christmas buffet. That was lovely. There was only the two of us this year, and it was a chance to catch up while stuffing our faces. The Man did not come, but a small piece of stollen accidentally dropped into my bag while I was eating dessert, and I decided to take it home for him. He likes stollen.

That means that this Christmas I have launched a new career as a criminal, and in the process turned The Man into a receiver of stollen goods.

Merry Christmas!

Codeine

Yesterday was my last working Friday of the year, and I was testing students all day again. Speaking tests are always a little difficult, for reasons I have gone into before. These reasons were multiplied this time because I have a cold and was taking cold medicine, which made me sleepy.

While I was doing these tests in another room, I had to have the students who were not being tested doing something else back in the classroom as they waited their turn. Because of this cold (at least that's my excuse) I was not thinking clearly and for some reason got the idea that I had already prepared something last week.

Ten minutes before class, I discovered that what I had prepared last week was a large, red message to myself in my notebook which said,

Prepare something for next week!!!!!!!

Why did I not open my notebook earlier? And why didn't I care more, when I finally did? How much codeine is in that cold medicine the doctor gave me?

Anyway, I did not panic. Instead, I asked around the teachers' room and someone came up with a Christmas puzzle, which I was able to copy. I used that.

At the end of the puzzle was a sentence the students had to finish. This was the only 'creative' part of the handout, and I found the answers immensely amusing, all day. I thought you might enjoy some of them, too. (If you don't, take some codeine and try again.)

The sentence they had to finish was this:

This Christmas I want . . .

Here are some of the things my second year students wrote. Some of them were evidently feeling tired:

This Christmas I want to rest.
This Christmas I want to sleep well.

Some were tired AND hungry:

This Christmas I want to sleep all day and to eat cakes.

And one was only hungry. Very, very hungry.

This Christmas I want to eat many chickens.

Others had different things on their minds:

This Christmas I want girlfriends.
This Christmas I want to kiss a girl.
This Christmas I want a girlfriend. And I want to play with her.
This Christmas I want to get money. And I want to play with boy.

(These were all written by guys. I had to remind myself that 'play' in Japanese (asobu) is used QUITE differently from the way it is used in English. Direct translations can be disastrous.)

A few students were touchingly optimistic.

This Christmas I want to meet Santa.
This Christmas I want world peace.

And one student had a very specific want:

This Christmas I want a collapsible bicycle.

There was one lout. Why is there always a lout? And why does he have to be the one who is the most likely to get what he wants for Christmas?

This Christmas I want to drink too much.

The speaking tests went well, or at least I think they went well. I do not remember much about them. That does not matter, as I was grading them as they happened. (Probably far too high.) I didn't really expect speaking tests to go well with cold medicine, but they did.

In fact, that was so much less stressful than usual I might try it again next semester.

The mask

Last Sunday I caught a cold. It was a sudden and vicious sort of cold, the kind where you go to bed feeling perfectly all right and wake up feeling as if someone has been stuffing your sinuses with cotton wool all night and shoving bits of broken glass down your throat. I thought I would never recover.

On Monday I was feeling quite a bit better already, but to make sure I didn't pass on my germs to the students, and also because the air is so dry, I wore one of those surgical mask thingies that are commonly worn here in this season. I would not do that in NZ, but I can do it here, because everybody else does.

As it turned out, it was a very clever thing to do. Sometimes I am clever without meaning to be, and Monday was one of those times. My afternoon classes on Mondays are usually very difficult ones. The students are noisy and full of energy but uninterested in learning English, and generally by the time the final bell rings my ears are ringing along with it. We often have fun, but it is exhausting fun.

On Monday, when I went into my first afternoon class wearing my mask, the students all shrieked loudly and demanded to know whether I had a cold.

"No," I croaked. "I have the Ebola virus." Naturally, they were not listening, so did not hear me. This is often the case. I can say what I like.

Monday's task for these students was to prepare for the oral test I'm supposed to give them in January. I had prepared a list of questions for them, and from those I told them I would be choosing four, but they should prepare for all of them. I told them to write their answers, and I would check what they wrote, so that they could practice correct answers over the New Year break. (Most of them won't, of course.)

I told the students sitting nearest the front that I did not have the energy to go around the class checking what they wrote, so they would have to bring it to me when they finished. They nodded wisely and spread the news around the room. (I also reassured the one good student who actually listens that I did not in fact have the Ebola virus.)

After the first excitement they settled down and behaved like angels. They worked hard, frequently stopped to ask me how I was, and looked concerned every time I coughed or sneezed. When they had finished writing their answers they brought them to me for checking, and lined up quietly instead of mobbing me and yelling insults at each other. When there was still half an hour of class time left most had finished, and only three or four were still working away. Their friends crowded around them to help, and I heard one saying,

"Hurry up! Teacher is sick! She needs to rest!"

The slow students hurried up, and class finished early. As they were leaving, all the students told me to take care of myself.

I was touched. They had managed to refrain from shrieking for nearly eighty minutes. They really cared!

The last class of the day was almost identical, and I got home early.

I have come to the conclusion that I should go to those classes masked every week.

Exploding duck

...waving goodbye.

My favourite ever pronunciation mistake

(My apologies for the quality of the illustration. If I had known my future career would require a talent for stick drawings, I would have paid more attention in art classes at school.)

Absent

On Tuesday one of my students gave me a note at the beginning of class. It was from another student, who was writing to explain why he would be absent. It went like this:

Dear Bald Ant (obviously not exactly this, but a similar mangling of my name),

I'm gonna absent, cuz I have to go work. I'll explane that next week. I'm sorry I should have told you immeditary.

It was sweet of him to let me know in advance that he would be absent. Many of my students don't seem to even notice whether they're in class or not. They are surprised when I fail them for missing half the classes.

It was also sweet of him to give me a giggle in the middle of a long day.

The great shrink

Today I was checking homework, and discovered that one of my students had visited the Yasaka Shrink.

There must be something about that place that causes students' brains to become muddled.

How was your day?

Today I was fantastically well-organized. I woke up fifteen minutes before the alarm was due to go off, feeling alert and refreshed. I had time to take things easy this morning. I organized my bag nicely, and made sure all that marked homework was in there and that I hadn't forgotten a single thing. I'd marked and prepared a lot last weekend, and it was all in there. Then I managed to catch an earlier train than usual, and at work had time to relax and chat with colleagues, safe in the knowledge that everything was ready in my bag.

You are waiting for the other shoe to drop, aren't you. HOW DID YOU KNOW?

When I organized my bag nicely and made sure I had everything I needed and hadn't forgotten a single thing, I did a fantastic job – for my Friday classes. And, in case it has escaped your notice (as it did mine), today was not Friday. Today was Thursday.

I do not want to write about how the rest of my day went. I do not even want to think about it. I prefer to focus on the positive. For this reason, I have decided to remember only those blissful couple of hours before my first class started, and to erase the rest from my memory.

I had a lovely day. Thank you for asking.

Kingfishers

I got lucky today. Just as I got to the little river, before my classes started, these two arrived as well. They were having a very serious and somewhat heated discussion about something.

Then they left again.



Although these birds are called Common Kingfishers, they are not very common around here. Today was only the second time I've seen any.

Spicy

Today I started reading a rather wonderful book called Curries and Bugles: A Memoir and Cookbook of the British Raj, about life at the end of the British Raj and the food that went with it. It is full of information about colonial India, reminiscences, recipes, and information about the spices that are such an important part of Indian cuisine. I am learning a lot, and enjoying it very much.

For example, I have learned some things about peppercorns. Peppercorns grow on an evergreen vine. That surprised me. I'm not quite sure why it was surprising. I had never thought about it before and had no idea how peppercorns grew. It just wasn't like that, I suppose.

Also, did you know the difference between black and white pepper? I didn't, but now I do. Black peppercorns are picked when they are unripe and then dried in the sun until the skin turns black. White peppercorns are picked when they are ripe, soaked, and rubbed to remove the skins. Then they are dried in the sun until they are bleached white. In other words, they are the same thing, only different.

Whenever I read about something like that, I wonder who thought of it first, way back in the mists of early culinary history. Who was the first person to think, Hey, I wonder what will happen if I pick these before they are ripe, and dry them in the sun without removing the skin? What made them even think of it? Or did it happen by mistake? Maybe there was a big storm one day and the peppercorns were blown from the vine before they were ripe, and then there was a series of hot, dry days, and then someone, um, accidentally ate a peppercorn? Or what? What would make someone even consider picking up that black, wrinkled little hard thing and tasting it?

It's just as well they did. My favourite spaghetti recipe just wouldn't be the same without the black pepper.

I have also learned some things about nutmeg (and mace). Nutmegs look a bit like apricots when they are growing on the tree. Also, they are not nuts. Actually, I didn't think they were, but I was a bit surprised to find out that they are fruit. At least I suppose they are, although it is the seed of the fruit that is used, not the flesh. Did you know that the nutmeg tree only grows in a very limited area? Because of this, nutmeg has caused wars.

The biggest thing I am learning from this book so far, really, is that I am extremely ignorant about spices. The book is a fun way to remedy this, and I can heartily recommend it.

At least I can heartily recommend chapter one. I haven't started the second chapter yet.

Spider dreams

This morning when I stepped outside I noticed the spider that was silhouetted against the pale morning sky, hanging between the honeysuckle and the power line where it has been for the past couple of weeks. It is a large spider, and its web is enormous. The web is getting a bit messy with bits of leaf and other rubbish stuck in it, and I wondered if spiders ever did housework.

The spider did not move. I have never seen it move, and I wondered if it was awake yet. Then I wondered if spiders actually sleep. Do they close their eyes? Do they even have eyelids? Do they dream? And if they dream, do they dream in colour, or in black and white? What do they dream about? Do they ever have nightmares? What are their nightmares about? Brooms?

I have to go to work now, so I'll leave my readers to answer these questions for me.

Hat

Yesterday I wore my favourite hat to work. I think it makes me look like a spy from a WWII movie. When I wear it I feel all mysterious and glamorous. I was enjoying crossing campus in my hat, with my coat collar pulled up around my ears against the chilly wind and the hat brim pulled down.

Then, in the staffroom, one of the other teachers told me that my hat made me look like Mary Poppins. My self-image was rudely shattered, and my ego deflated like an old balloon.

HOW UNKIND.

Why things are unravelling

Yesterday I received an email from a friend, rather upset about a letter he had received in response to a letter he had sent. In his letter he had asked two questions, only one of which was (insufficiently) answered in the letter he received in reply. He assumed that this meant the sender was not interested in his second query. These were business letters.

I started composing an email in reply to my friend's email, which got longer and longer as I developed a theory that has been lurking in the back of my mind for quite some time. As I was writing, the theory developed further, and it had become almost fully fledged when I accidentally deleted it.

Thus the world came very close to losing yet another of my wonderful theories.

But then I thought that perhaps I could try again, and this time explain it to a wider audience. So, here it is: an almost but not quite complete explanation for the world's current economic crisis.

The short version of my theory goes like this: IT'S ALL BECAUSE OF FEMINISM AND COMPUTERS.

The long version is . . . well, longer. Sit back and prepare to be enlightened.

Once upon a time, back in the early days of the modern business world, women were considered (by men) to be suitable only for breeding and for menial secretarial work. This meant that they either stayed at home and spent their time raising boys to become businessmen and girls to become secretaries or housewives, or they went to secretarial school and learned, ostensibly, how to type and do shorthand. I say ostensibly, because in fact what they were learning was how to be the severely underpaid brains of a business organization while taking none of the credit when things went right and all of the blame if things went wrong. Managers did not need to have brains, or to know what they were doing. That was what secretaries were for. In reality, managers were just decoration. Managers had long lunches with one another while secretaries ran the business world. Managers mumbled drunkenly into dictaphones after their long lunches, and secretaries read the mail and composed sensible replies for the managers to sign. Secretaries from different organizations met in tearooms after work and discussed who pinched whose bottom at the latest office party and the finer details of running the business world without anybody else noticing. Everything worked smoothly, and babies had warm feet.

With me so far?

Then feminism came along, as indeed it needed to, and women said, hey, why am we doing all the work and getting none of the credit (or, more importantly, the money)? So they stopped learning how to be secretaries. At around the same time, computers also came along. Unfortunately, since everybody (men, actually) thought that all secretaries did was to sit around filing their nails or knitting baby booties, and since secretaries were paid peanuts, nobody rushed in to fill the sudden void in the brains department of business organizations. Women started to do other things instead, for which they could actually get real money and even some respect. And men were not interested in becoming secretaries because what self-respecting man cared what his nails looked like, or knew how to knit? Also, computers could do the job just as well, right?

Wrong.

Sadly, a business world without secretaries does not work well at all, and gradually, as the last properly trained secretaries began to retire and leave the workforce, everything began to unravel, rather like a half-finished baby bootie that has slipped off its needles. Recently this unravelling has been more dramatic. It seems likely that there was a 'secretary-boom' at some point in the past which has resulted in a recent mass retirement of secretaries and a sudden catastrophic loss of brains in financial circles. Secretaries were the only ones who actually knew what was going on, and now that most of them have gone nobody has a clue.

Even more sadly, nobody saw this coming. Even now, hardly anybody has figured it out. (Except me, of course.) Managers thought that with the advent of computers you could hire any school-leaver with fingers and put him or her in charge of answering letters and faxes (and, later, emails), and things would be just fine. After all, it's just secretarial work, right? Women used to do it all the time, and still managed to look pretty and have nice nails and/or knit booties for babies. It MUST be easy. Who needs training?

Who needs secretaries?

WE ALL DO. That's who. Feminism is not a bad thing. What is a bad thing is that nobody noticed women were ALREADY doing an extremely valuable job, but were not being valued or respected for what they were doing. And who wants to stay in a job where they are not valued or respected?

I told my friend, in the long email I accidentally deleted (because I do not have a properly trained secretary to take care of these things for me) that his mistake was that he asked two questions in one letter. Asking two questions in one letter was far too much for any organization that does not have a secretary and therefore has no brain. The rule these days is ONE QUESTION PER QUERY, AND KEEP IT SIMPLE. I have learned this from many years of occasionally writing business letters and emails in English for Japanese business people. If the Japanese person has two questions they wish to ask, I need to send two emails, and the second one should not be sent until the first is answered. Most people who are in charge of answering these things cannot cope with more than one question at a time. You need a properly trained secretary for that.

My most memorable experience with the dire results of the world's secretary shortage was the time I foolishly asked THREE questions in one email. It was rash, I know, but I honestly thought that since they were easy questions, it might work if I numbered them clearly. I numbered them clearly.

It did not work, of course. It took exactly fifty-three additional emails (I keep these in a special folder as a reminder to myself) and nearly three months to sort out the resulting confusion, and my Japanese client ended up with the impression that all foreigners are idiots.

So there you have it. If you need fifty-three emails and three months to achieve one small business transaction, imagine how unwieldy really large transactions must have become, and how long they must take! No wonder the world is falling apart!

Everybody has a theory about what has caused the world's current economic crisis, but my theory is the only one that makes sense. If there were still properly trained secretaries, this would not have happened.

Also, there would be fewer babies with cold feet.

Bad timing

On Tuesday (I am behind, aren't I? I seem to have so little time to blog I am just now getting around to Tuesday) I had one of those dreadful experiences at work that you hope will never happen to you. I bumped into one of my bosses in the corridor.

Now, I know you probably think that is not all THAT dreadful, but you have to understand that this is not a particularly nice boss, that I generally see him about once every two years or so, and that I happen to know that he thinks English teachers are a waste of space. He thinks the university would be better off outsourcing our jobs to backpackers, through an outsourcing company. (Which he used to work for. Kickbacks, anybody?) He is the second-in-command of our department. I do not think I have ever met the Big Boss of our department, and from what I have heard, I don't want to.

Anyway, on Tuesday I bumped into this boss in the corridor, in MOST unfortunate circumstances.

It happened like this.

I had given the students homework. From that homework, I selected ten sentences that had common errors in them. I wrote those ten sentences on the board. Then I handed the yellow chalk to the naughtiest student in the class, told him (or her) that he (or she) was in charge, and issued a 'class challenge.' I said that I would leave the classroom for five minutes, and their challenge was to have all the mistakes fixed when I came back.

Then I left the room.

This worked very well in the first class. They used the five minutes well, and most of the mistakes were fixed. I was peeking through the little window in the door at the back of the room (of course), and noticed that they were all very, very serious about it, and quietly concentrating.

In my second class, when I did the same thing, a riot apparently erupted the moment I stepped out of the room. I closed the door, wondering whether I had misjudged the class. But when I peeked in, they had overcome their surprise at their teacher suddenly abandoning them, and were working on the problems. They were VERY argumentative about it, and the temporary 'teacher' was having a grand time ordering them around and telling them to speak one at the time.

I was dithering in the corridor when the door opposite opened and my boss came out. He smiled and said hello. He used my name, which was a bit freaky. How come he remembered my name? He has hardly ever laid eyes on me!

That was the first worrying moment. I realized that I have been teaching right opposite my boss all semester (all year, possibly) and never noticed before.

The five minutes were up, so I opened the door to my classroom. A student immediately rushed up and closed it again in my face. Then he opened it a crack.

"Five more minutes!" he said. "We need five more minutes!"

I shrugged and went back to dithering in the corridor. I looked at my phone, to check the time, and noticed that there was a message. I opened my phone, and started reading the message.

And of course THAT was when the boss came back up the stairs, and saw me again. This time he did not say a word. He ignored me. Pointedly.

That had to be the worst timing EVER.

(The students got all the sentences right, though, and were very proud of themselves.)

Fair dinkum

Today as I was just about to leave work, one of the Japanese English teachers stopped me to ask a question I found myself completely unable to answer. I hate it when they do that. Sometimes I wonder if they're doing it on purpose.

Today's awkward question was this:

"What is a dinkum, and why is it fair?"

To which my answer was, intelligently,

"Er. Um."

I felt less stupid after coming home and looking it up. Apparently I am not the only one without a clue.

In other news, the weather has become cooler, and the leaves have started to turn.

Murder

Today my students were having a very hard time with wh- questions. They always have a hard time with wh- questions, but the worksheet I had prepared for them didn't seem to be helping. I realized after the first couple of classes that I needed to have more exercises for all the question words they'd been practicing, and also that I needed to make the who questions clearer. They always get confused about how to ask such questions as Who called Michael? and Who did Jennifer call? when the original statement was Jennifer called Michael.

In fact Michael and Jennifer ended up having quite an adventure today. The original scenario I had given the students in my worksheet was that Jennifer called Michael. But when I wanted them to ask who Jennifer called, they tended to ask who MICHAEL called. I tried telling them that Michael didn't call anybody – he was called – but that only confused things further.

In my last class I drew a little picture on the board, trying to make it clearer. I changed the sentence to Jennifer kissed Michael. This rapidly confused things even more, because not only was my picture very, very unclear (who was doing what to whom?), anybody can kiss anybody, so it still wasn't clear to them who was the subject and who was the object.

So I drew another picture. This picture had stick-figure Jennifer standing over the prone stick-figure body of Michael, holding a dripping knife. (I even had red chalk, which helped.) Then I wrote under the stick figures,

JENNIFER STABBED MICHAEL.

I thought that would make the subject-object distinction clearer, and it did. It was perfectly obvious which was the stabber and which the stabbee, and this time the students wrote the two questions exactly right.

I overheard a couple of the girls talking about it.

""It's a suspense story," one of them said, shuddering as she stared at the gruesome stick-figures. "Jennifer called Michael, then she kissed him, and then she stabbed him."

"Yes, but ... WHY?" asked the other.

I did not tell them why, but I can tell you. It was because it was the end of the day and I had become tired of thinking up new names for my stick figures.

Yawn

Yesterday I said to The Man,

"Stop yawning me!"

And then I corrected myself.

"I mean, stop making me yawn!"

But actually, it seems to me that yawn SHOULD be a transitive verb. After all, yawns are transitive, aren't they?

Washing

On Wednesday I went to the laundrette, to use the driers. Twice, actually. I had one of those cleaning fits that start off with, "It's time to wash the sheets," and progress to "And that underblanket thingy," then "And the duvet covers and that bedspread that has been in a cupboard for five years," and then suddenly the curtains look dirty. Not that we have curtains, but you know what I mean. Our bedding is now totally clean. I have aired and beaten the crap out of the duvets and the pillows, and I have also beaten the mattress. I don't think beating mattresses actually does anything helpful, but I was in a beating mood by then and didn't want to stop. Also, I had a feeling it was all the mattress's fault.

That wasn't what was I going to tell you about, though. I was going to tell you about the very old lady I encountered at the laundrette.

When I went there the first time, she was sitting on a low stool in front of a washing machine, leaning forward and peering in, her nose almost touching the glass as her washing went round and round and round. She stayed in that position the whole time I was there, apparently hypnotized.

The second time, about two hours later, she was sitting beside a drier, nose up to the glass, watching her laundry going round and round.

I went away, and half an hour later when I came back again to pick up my dried washing she was still there, apparently on to her second load. (She had several piles of laundry sitting around her, in large bags.) I started hauling my things out of the drier, and I guess there was something acrylic in there because I got zapped rather dramatically. I yelped.

This caused the old lady to look up at me, surprised.

"What was that?" she asked.

"Static electricity," I told her.

"Is that dangerous?" she asked, looking worried. "Maybe we should phone the laundrette people. The number's over there."

"No, no," I said. "It was just static electricity. It always happens. It's not dangerous."

"Will it happen to me?" she asked, looking at her drier suspiciously.

"It might," I said. "But don't worry. It won't hurt you. It just gives you a surprise sometimes."

"Oh," she said, looking doubtful. Then she brightened up, "This is the first time I've come here. Isn't it amazing!"

It turned out that someone had suggested the laundrette when she complained about how hard it was to do her washing properly, so she had decided to try it out.

"At first I thought it was a bit expensive," she said, "Three hundred yen for one load of washing, but . . ."

"Well, yes," I said, "But it's a lot easier, and you can do the big things."

"Yes! And the washing is so clean! Isn't it wonderful? I'm going to use it again! I didn't even know this kind of place existed!"

She was wonderstruck by the laundrette. The machines! Those magical machines that cleaned her clothes so well! And then dried them, too! I don't know what she had been using at home before, but I guess it must have been fairly primitive.

We chatted a little more while I folded the rest of my washing. Then I said goodbye, and she went back to watching her laundry go round and round.



I told a friend about this encounter today. She said,

"I wonder if there's something out there for us like that? Something we didn't know existed, that would magically transform our lives the way her discovery of the laundrette has done for her? Something that other people take for granted and we just somehow missed finding out about. . . "

We tried to imagine what that might be, and failed.

(But if there is something fantastically convenient in your life that seems not to be in mine, you will tell me, won't you?)

A lovely woman

Yesterday at lunchtime I went down to the river. I missed getting a picture of the large snake swimming across the river, because I didn't have the camera ready and it was too fast for me. I think it might have seen me coming. That was probably the snake I kicked a few weeks ago. That was probably why it was in such a hurry to cross the river.

I got a picture of the egret, though, who was fishing.


And a butterfly. There were a lot of these butterflies.


Also, there was a cormorant, trying to run on water.


And I took a picture of a duck. There are always ducks. If there were no ducks, it would feel wrong.


In the afternoon after I'd finished work, I was walking out to the bicycle parking lot when I heard some students calling to me from across campus. They were some of my students from last year.

"BADAUNT!" they screeched, excitedly.

"HELLO!" I shouted back. "HOW ARE YOU TODAY?"

They had forgotten how to answer that one. Instead, they bellowed, surprisingly,

"BADAUNT, YOU ARE A LOVELY WOMAN!"

"Er ... um ... THANK YOU!" I replied. I wondered where they had learned that one, and felt rather embarrassed. Why couldn't they just greet me in a normal way?

Then I thought, But of course! It's because I AM a lovely woman! Why wouldn't they want to say so?

And then I blew myself a huge raspberry.

Hard-boiled

Yesterday in one of my better but rather noisy classes, one of the girls started beating up the rather cute guy sitting next to her. I was shocked, and said so.

"What did you do that for?" I asked, as the cute guy picked himself off the floor. She grabbed a handful of his shirt and hauled him back onto his chair, where he eyed her doubtfully.

"I am hard-boiled!" she told me, and started to dust him down vigorously.

"Hard-boiled?" I asked.

"Yes, she is hard-boiled," nodded her victim, with feeling. "She is VERY hard-boiled."

She laughed and dusted him a little more vigorously. He winced and covered his head.

I don't know where they picked up the word, but apparently that's what hard-boiled girls do. They beat up the cute guys.

How to ...

Years ago (three years ago, in fact) I wrote here about the instructional posters in my local bank that used to scare me. Last Friday I was in a bank near the university, with a friend, and saw to my horror that now a similar poster has appeared there.

I took a photo, this time. Unfortunately I took it with my phone, and the quality is horrible. (The phone camera doesn't work very well in artificial light.) Still, you can see what I was talking about.


At least this one has only one picture. The old ones in my local bank had little comic strips showing exactly how to rob an ATM customer, step by step. I suppose this is an improvement, of sorts. Having to read to get the finer details might put off the less intellectually elevated types.

A giant butt with a head

What an unkind thing to call an innocent baby.

Cosmos

Boom!

Today I did some dictation in all of my classes. I have been doing that a lot recently, because my students are so very, very bad at understanding even the simplest English they hear if it is spoken at anything approaching normal speed. I do not dictate word at a time. I dictate sentence at a time, and read each sentence twice. At the end, I read it all again so they can check once more, and then I tell them to go through and make notes where they think they must have misheard something because it does not make sense. I ask them to guess what they think I might have said, judging this time by the meaning rather than what they heard. I am trying to get them to make intelligent guesses.

They are not very good at it, but some of them are getting better.

Today one of the dictations I did was of a conversation. In it, a man is booking a hotel room. He says:

"I'd like to book a room for tonight."

Most of the students missed the for, which was not such a big problem. But I was surprised at how many of them missed book a room, and how bad they were at guessing what it could be, considering that we have just finished an entire chapter in the text about hotels and holidays.

One student had written,

"I'd like a blue moon tonight."

He didn't seem to think there was anything particularly odd about that, even though the man was then asked whether he'd prefer a single or a double. Perhaps he thought I was dictating some sort of weirdly romantic science fiction thing at them.

Another student, as I wandered past and looked over his shoulder, was staring at his paper, pencil hovering, and frowning. He had written,

"I'd like to boom tonight."

I snorted.

"What do you think that means?" I asked.

He looked at me, puzzled.

"I don't know," he confessed.

"Maybe he's a terrorist," I said. "A suicide bomber. You know, he wants to BOOM!"

He looked doubtful.

"No, probably not," I said. "But what do people USUALLY want when they go into a hotel?"

He stared at his paper again, then his face cleared.

"Oh!" he said. He crossed out boom, and wrote, room.

But actually, I think his version was more interesting.

Sorry

I will post again soon. I've been busy, and when I haven't been busy, uninspired. And when I was inspired, it was about something I couldn't post here because it wasn't my story to tell.

But I'll be back!

(Just not tonight. It's bedtime.)

I am going to be intelligent

I was going to tell you about tits and petty one-upmanship, wasn't I? Well, here goes.

Remember the cysts I grow, on my boobs and wrist? Well, I grew another one. When I found it, in my left boob, I was a little puzzled.

"What side was my biggest cyst?" I asked The Man.

"The right side," he told me.

I checked the other side, and discovered that the biggest one was still there, except it wasn't the biggest one any more. My new one on the left side is the biggest one. How did it grow so quickly without my noticing? Of course it is possible that I did notice it before, but just thought it was the old one because I forgot which side it was on.

It would be inaccurate to say that this new cyst hurts. 'Hurt' is the wrong word. It is, however, uncomfortable.

Now I am going to tell you another story, and not a particularly flattering one to myself.

At one of the places I work there is a woman who also works there part-time, but has a full-time position somewhere else. I do not know her very well, even though she has been working there for years. I see her now and again, but she always looks terribly serious and busy and academic, and is often in the boss's office, having terribly serious and academic discussions with him. I don't think I have ever seen her smile, at least not in a spontaneous way. She sometime gives a strained sort of forced smile when somebody greets her, but she doesn't come across as very friendly. She is always far too busy and serious for small talk.

I find this woman slightly intimidating. I don't know whether she intends to make me feel frivolous and silly, but that is the effect she has on me. She makes me feel as though I am not a serious and academic person, and I should not be teaching in a university. Whereas she, on the other hand, is academic and serious and deserves to have tenure.

I know this is ridiculous. I know I am a reasonably good teacher, and that quite frequently my teaching is most successful is when I am being frivolous and silly. I am probably as knowledgeable as she is about the academic side of teaching, and a part of what I have learned from my study and experience is that frivolous and silly is useful in the classroom. I will use whatever works. Sometimes my frivolity and silliness leaks into the breaks between classes, but who cares? Just because I do not have serious discussions about curriculum design with my boss (who cannot design his way out of a paper bag) does not mean that I know nothing about it.

See how I'm defending myself? Why does that woman have this effect on me? Why do I need to defend myself? Am I really so insecure? Besides, she has never said anything to confirm the impression I've managed to get from her. It is entirely possible that she is a perfectly nice person who just happens to not smile very much or be very sociable. Maybe she is not critical of my frivolity and silliness at all. Maybe she thinks I am terrifically intelligent. Her criticism of me is, I will freely admit, all in my head. But I do always feel that she looks down on me.

ANYWAY.*

The only conversation I have ever had with this woman was shortly after my boob cysts were diagnosed. It was a very short conversation. I was telling someone else about my cysts, and she happened to be passing and overheard us, and said something about how she had some too, and how annoying they were.

"I bet mine are bigger!" I said. (Frivolously, I have to admit.)

"Mine are ten centimeters," she said. "They're really painful."

"TEN?" I said. "You win!"

"It's not something I want to win," she said.

"Are they painful all the time, or just at certain times of the month?" I asked.

"All the time," she said, gloomily. (She is always a bit gloomy, come to think of it.)

"So why don't you get them aspirated, if they're so painful?" I asked.

She shuddered. "Let them stick needles in THERE?" she said. "I'd rather have the pain!"

"Oh, yeah, the needle thing," I said, thoughtfully. "I know what you mean."

We both dashed off to class.

But later, when I thought about it, I thought I did NOT know what she meant. If my cysts were painful all the time, I'd get them aspirated. I also have a horror of needles, but would rather pass out and make a fool of myself once than suffer pain all the time. (Is that why she is always gloomy?) Living with the pain because of a fear of needles is not intelligent at all.

I decided that if my cysts ever got that painful, I would get them aspirated. And that would make me a more intelligent person than Ms More-Academic-Than-Anybody-Else.

HA!

I cannot think of a sillier reason to get my cysts aspirated. It is highly likely that all of this is in my head and the woman does not look down on me as a frivolous and silly person. It's probably just her manner, with everybody. But since this new cyst has turned out to be often (but not always) uncomfortable, I have decided I will get it done anyway, to prove how intelligent I am.

I have informed The Man of my decision, and that makes it final. He will not let me change my mind. Well, he will, but if I change my mind he will not let me complain about how uncomfortable my boobs are, and basically that means I HAVE to get it done because I am not capable of suffering in silence. I am not in the least bit stoical about pain or discomfort. I like to whine and complain, so everybody knows how brave I am being.

Now I am worrying about the squeaking thing. One of my friends had a needle stuck in her boob once, and told me that it didn't hurt, really. But, she said, it sort of squeaked. Well, not squeaked, exactly, but felt as though it would squeak if you could hear it. It made the sort of squeak a needle would make if you stuck it into polystyrene. Her description was very graphic, and when I think about it my boobs want to crawl off my chest and go hide somewhere safe.

But I'm going to do it. Maybe next week, even. I'll let you know.




*I taught four brilliant classes yesterday, in which all my students learned how to use the word anyway. They loved it. I don't know why everything went so well. Perhaps it was because yesterday was only the second class meeting of the semester for my Tuesday classes, and they're still keen. I just hope it lasts. At the end of one of the classes, one of the students came up to me and thanked me.

"I could understand everything!" he said (in English!), sounding somewhat surprised. "It was interesting."

"That's good," I said, and smiled at him.

He smiled back. Then he sighed, and said,

"Anyway, I have to go. I have another class."

He started to leave, then turned back. "Was that right?" he asked.

"It was perfect," I assured him.

And it was.

Mother magic

i promised, didn't I?

I'll start with the mother-magic and dreams story. Some of the details (the butterfly, for instance) may not be what my friend originally said (actually she couldn't remember what it was), but the gist is the same.

My friend told me that her daughter started having recurring nightmares when she was about seven or eight. One night my friend was comforting the sobbing little girl, and said,

"You know, darling, you don't HAVE to have these dreams. They're YOUR dreams, in YOUR head. You can dream anything you like. The next time that nasty man is chasing you, you just turn around and turn him into a butterfly!"

"OK, Mom," said her daughter, tiredly.

The nightmares apparently stopped, and my friend didn't think about the incident again for many years.

Fast forward to this summer, and my friend was staying with her daughter, who is now a mother herself. The family were sitting around after dinner, and after a while my friend's daughter announced that she was going to bed.

"I think tonight I'll dream about ... hmm, let's see ... the cottage by the lake," she said as she got up to leave the room.

"What do you mean, you'll dream about the cottage?" said my friend. "You can't choose your dreams!"

"Yes, I can," said her daughter.

"Who taught you to do that?" asked my friend.

"You did!" said her daughter.

It turned out that ever since the nightmare incident my friend's daughter has been able to choose what to dream about.

And isn't that a brilliant bit of mother-magic?

Why?

Why can't I remember all the things I was going to write about?

Why was this week so long? Did someone insert an extra month or so when I wasn't looking?

Why is my last class of the week always my most troublesome one?

Why can't I ever get a humane, civilized work schedule for Thursdays/Fridays?

Oh, I've remembered two of the things I was going to write about. One is about dreams and mother-magic (not mine), and the other is about tits and petty one-upmanship (mine).

Tomorrow!