They still say "Let's go cleaning!"

Sorry for the lull in posting--I typed up the previous one last Friday night, but it was so depressing that I held off on posting it until I had prepared a more positive follow-up. I'm not trying to conceal the truth or anything--I had a less-than-stellar night, which I believe is adequately conveyed in that post, but on the whole I'm still doing fine. The rest of the weekend was fairly awesome: the typhoon was little more than a thunderstorm, and my water never shut off. (Nowadays, each time I turn on a faucet, I find myself anxiously listening for the sound of water pressure.)

Sunday, Mike and Mitch (the two ALTs who teach in the middle of the island) came and hung out with me in Izuhara. We grabbed lunch together, talked a lot, and drove to Kechi, the next town over.

Kechi's about ten minutes by car, which puts it just out of reasonable walking distance, so I had never been to the stores there. Sprawling between the two Pachinko parlors are three or four full-sized stores. Two of them are grocery stores. One of these sells Mountain Dew. I'd heard this a few weeks ago, but I refused to get my hopes up. Sure enough, there were four bottles sitting proudly on a shelf. Mike grabbed one; I took two. It was later pointed out that we should have bought the fourth, to entice them to order more--now, they'll wait until it gets sold before reordering, and probably the only two people on the island who drink Mountain Dew are Mike and me.

Anyway. One of the stores is a new/used videogame shop, as well as a movie rental store. There were the typical PS2/3 and Wii fare, with even a few Xbox games strewn about. The shock to me, however, was the used-but-looked-new N64 console bundle for $30, the Super Famicom (SNES) console bundle for $40, and even the original Famicom (NES) console for $20. Rifling through the shelves of games, I found original copies of N64, SNES, and NES games. Games like Final Fantasy VI, Tecmo Super Bowl, Mario RPG, and Mother (the prequel to EarthBound). I spent twenty minutes gawking at all of them. I came *this* close to buying an N64--had there been a copy of Smash available, I would've been sold.

As it turned out, however, I bought nothing. What talked me out of it was picturing all my free time disappearing, like it did between ages 5 and 22. For the first time in my life, I'm right where I want to be, and so I have no reason to while away the hours like I did in middle school, high school, college, and while I was at Inoko. I still play games, sure, but I'm at least more resistant to blowing an entire afternoon playing Starcraft.

Next, we drove back to Toyotama, which is where Mike lives, and where my second high school is. Mitch ran back to his place to grab something, and Mike and I tossed around the baseball and the frisbee for a while. That marked my first time doing either of those since I got to Japan, and it felt awesome. By the time Mitch got back, it was getting dark, so we hung out in Mike's apartment. He fired up his Wii, and I realized I'd never played one before. He let me make my little Mii dude, and after five minutes I realized that buying a Wii would consume my every non-working waking hour. That was before I heard it's backwards-compatible with Gamecube games, and that you can download NES, SNES, and N64 games. I thumbed through the catalog one of them had, and found that Smash 64 hasn't yet been ported, probably to keep people starved for the Wii Smash coming out soon. We played some Smash Melee instead, and though it's fun, it's nothing compared to the original. It made me miss the original enough to kill my buzz about the Wii itself.

Evelyn and Aaron drove up from Izuhara, and the five of us went out to dinner and hung out drinking for a couple of hours. All in all, it was a great night.

Monday morning I woke up, brushed my teeth, and turned on my computer. It started up normally, but after a few seconds flashed a message. I can't remember exactly what it said (still being crusty-eyed and mumbly), but it involved an inability to read some file pertaining to windows.exe. I blinked, a lot, and tried restarting the computer. When this didn't work, I asked it nicely, and let it restart while I went to open my second bottle of Mountain Dew. (I had saved the second, saying it was for 'a bad day,' and figured this sort of qualified.) Half an hour of restarts later, it still wasn't able to get anywhere. Not owning anything resembling a Windows repair/restore CD, I weighed my options, took a long draw of Mountain Dew, and concluded there was nothing to do but wipe the thing. I was still half-asleep, so I thankfully wasn't able to stop and think about just how much stuff I was losing.

Basically, any pictures that aren't on my Picasa web gallery or on my Facebook are gone. Of course, that means none of you know how many pictures that is. Even I'm not sure how many, but judging by the agonizing bits of recollection I've had over the past few days, it couldn't have been any fewer than a few hundred. Pictures from all my trips this summer, from saying goodbye to my family in Alabama, my parents at the airport, and the many more pictures from my first few weeks here than those few I posted--all gone. The 20 or so rolls of film from the 2005 Maymester are gone, but the image CDs and the negatives are still back home. Trouble is, they're no good to me in a box under my bed across the ocean.

There's a lesson here, somewhere. I'm sure of it. Something about putting all my eggs in one basket, or relying too heavily on a machine, or trying to download too many Divx movies, or playing too many videogames. Maybe it's just that I should have posted all my pictures to Facebook and Picasa, instead of just thirty or so. No matter what it is, I immediately recognized that it could have been far worse--my computer could have been irreparably damaged. The thought of that scared the bejeezus out of me--while I'm sure there's a way to call my parents from a landline, I haven't learned how, and I much prefer using Skype for free.

At any rate, I'm trying not to cry too much, even though every few hours I suddenly remember something that's happened in the past two years, think to myself "Hey, I took a picture of that," and ten seconds later realize that it ain't there no more. There's probably an even bigger lesson lurking around there, something about living in the moment instead of being preoccupied with photographing it.

Despite the Friday and Monday being awful, like I said, the weekend on the whole was a lot of fun. I had a blast with everyone on Saturday and Sunday.

Tuesday and Wednesday I taught at my second high school, and that's where I have a group of seven third-year commercial-track students. That class is quickly becoming my favorite, as well as the most advanced. Of course, I have first-year students whose English ability and potential is much greater, but this small group of third-years has absolutely no school-related stress. They aren't going to college, so they aren't cramming for exams. That means they don't have any of the shyness or anxiety that so many other students do. This makes the classroom completely relaxed. They don't mind making mistakes, and, which is more, they enjoy correcting their pronunciation.

I've made it a habit to begin all my classes at this high school with a pronunciation exercise. I've started with the /f/ and /v/ sounds, with generally encouraging results, and I moved on to the /l/ sound with the third-years last week. It didn't go so well, due largely to my inability to describe in Japanese what your tongue does behind the roof of your mouth when you make the sound. I found an awesome phonetics website that has Flash animation of all English sounds (as well as Spanish and German ones), and I took screenshots of the important parts. Using that, and fully anticipating abject failure, I tried explaining /l/ and /r/ to them.

They got it.

I don't mean they nodded their heads, smiled, and we moved on. I wrote words on the board, had them repeat after me, and worked with each one of them, fine-tuning their pronunciation until it was correct. They didn't get mad, flustered, or upset--I smiled the whole time, we all laughed about how silly we sounded going "urrrr" and "ullll," and I encouraged and congratulated them when they got it. There wasn't any stress or anxiety in the room at all. By the end, we were working with minimal pairs like law/raw, and they were correctly pronouncing ball, roll, and hall.

Those of you who have ever spoken to a native speaker of Japanese (and, to a lesser extent, Korean, Chinese, and other languages that don't distinguish /l/ and /r/) can appreciate just how significant this is. I don't mean I've stumbled on some miraculous technique--the teaching ability of the instructor in this case was meaningless. All it took for this group of students was a native speaker of English spending ten minutes doing little more than going back-and-forth repeating words. These third-years, like I said, have no interest in going to university, and therefore have no academic need for English knowledge. If they can correct their pronunciation in such a short span of time, surely it can be done with the majority of other students. I'm now bound and determined to work up to /r/ and /l/ pronunciation in all of my classes.

And that was all just in the introduction to that class. We went on to discuss talking on the phone (stopping along the way to pronounce words like "call" and "here"), and played a game at the end. No tears, no anger, no giving up on the lesson--everyone stuck wth it, and laughed along the way.

I'd say that's positive enough to make up for the post under this one. It's 4:06, baby--I'm going home for the day. Woohoo!