Grey Matter Digest: My Fleeting Thoughts

Just a few things that have been on my mind lately.

My new bike came and it's quite a step up from my previous ride. Quite. For one thing it really is lighter despite being aluminum. In fact, it's so light it's almost frightening. If my hands and arse weren't pushing down on the bars and seat, respectively, I think I'd forget it was there and imagine I'm floating down the road at, oh, 50 kph. It's strange that I've ripped down a Nevada highway at 240 kph on my motorcycle and been more or less peachy with it, but when it comes to doing 50 on a flat with this Cervelo my mind gets moving a mile a minute on the lookout for merging traffic while my sweat-drenched hands reach out through the bars, forks and wheels for any twitch or upset in the pavement. I guess this cycling thing's finally ushering in an older, wiser ratcheting down of my youthful thrill lust. Whatever...it's enough for me.

On a somewhat related matter, the bike couldn't have come at a better time because gas prices are shooting up here. OK, so they're shooting up all over the world, I know. What is it now in the States, $4/gallon is a deal these days? I hear Europe has $9/gallon in some places. Here in Japan it's been a real roller coaster ride these past few months. From last August when I arrived the price didn't move one way or the other by more than two or three yen, hovering at 150 for months and months. I recall telling one of my friends (Sara or Pat? I forget who it was) that while you puny Americans constantly see your gas prices rise ours stay forever constant, never adding to the anxiety of the Japanese life that leads so many down the path of train groping, piano wire mutilation and giant robot rampages.

Knock. On. Fucking. Wood. Twat.

What followed was astounding (the good variety!) followed by more astounding (the bad one!). First the legislation that backed up the Japanese equivalent of the much-hated American gas tax expired with nothing to replace it causing a 25 to 30 yen drop in gas prices. When that happened I expected the roads around here to be bedlam as people stocked up on cheap-as-sin gas and headed for weekend family trips in the country (i.e. Kusu, Kokonoe), but it didn't happen. I'm not convinced anymore that a massive drop or increase in the price of gas, maybe 50 to 60 yen, will really change the Japanese driver's habits. Perhaps that goes for all drivers, everywhere in the world. Anyways, that lasted for the better part of a month until, sometime in April I got the word that prices would be going back up the next week. Gas stations turned into scenes from the Great U.S. Gas Crunch of the '70s as people scrambled to fill little Timmy's piggy bank, the urn with grandpa's ashes, the neighbor's ficus plant pot--any available vessel--with petrol. I kinda wanted to join in, because how many times in one's life do we really get to jump on such a sensational, reactionary bandwagon? Alas, I don't drive that much anyways, what was the point.

So the prices went up again, but this time with a vengeance. Not only did the new legislation bring it back up to 150 yen, it added 10 yen to the mix! Prime Minister Fukuda caves to Japanese Big Oil and tells the populace to bend over, yee haw! What a contemptuous prick...can someone tell me how long it's been since a Japanese PM has held an approval rating over 25% for more than three months before he or his hand-picked staff of felonious, sex predator, "thoroughbred", mama's boy cronies jacked something up so bad to expose the incompetence and/or downright shadiness of the entire legislature? Check the history books (yes, I've read two books on the subject this year) and you'll see that post-WWII Japan was riding a unique wave of pacifism, loss, remorse, joy for deliverance from the horrors of war, and a lot of other emotions that most people forget about after that seventh beer, that new and beautiful forms of self-governance were in reach...right up to the point where the U.S. squashed them and decided instead to install a crony government and use the nation as a shield against communist China and Russia. America...fuck yeah!

I am so off course now.

So gas went up again last week another 10 yen to bring the grand total to 170/liter or approximately $6.80/gallon. It's a good thing my new bike came.

Last random thought, the ichinensei are saving my life. What in Jeebus's name is an ichinensei? That would be "first-year student" in English. But whatever language you speak of them in they're still saving my life.

I don't know what happened to many of my old first and second-year students during the changing of the school year this spring--massive inhalation of glue or solvents perhaps?--but when they moved up a level something magical was lost. They haven't turned on me or anything, we're all still super-chummy and all that, but they have turned off their brains and I don't know how to turn it back on. If I could spend more time with them or form an after school English club like what exists at Mori High School with my fellow ALT, Rachel here in Kusu then it's certainly a possibility. But since I'm shuffling around visiting three schools once a week and four schools once every two weeks it's impossible to do it.

But these first-year students...what a breath of fresh air! I think I made a good impression on them right off the bat and, not to get too egotistical, helped them see that yes, there is an upside of learning a foreign language when you can meet all these freaky deaky people like Matt! In fact, and this is blatantly egotistical, one of my students wrote in their application essay for home stay in America that their reason for learning more English was to speak to Matt more. Touching! That girl, Mikako, will be spending a month this summer in Auburn, CA. and I'm really happy for her. She's under strict orders to bring me back a chile verde super burrito, don't skimp on the pico de gallo.

--Matt