when you wish upon a smoke

My campaign to get my mom to quit smoking failed within a week, though now she does smoke outside which is nice. I need to go to Shinjuku today and she's been hemming and hawing about whether she wants to come with me. I've been waiting for about 2 hours for her decision. She is still undecided. She finally just went out to "Think on a smoke." I hope I'll get my answer soon.

my japanese is not improving...

I've started reading this comic that was written about my great-grandfather's life (it's weird, I know) and already on the first page there are vocabulary words I don't understand. The book is meant for kids, so the pronunciation of the complicated kanji characters is written next to it, but that helps not at all if you don't know what the word means. So, what that means is basically I'll have to look them up in the dictionary. Boo. But, anyway, I was telling my mom about this, and gave her as an example this word geneki. I couldn't even figure out its meaning from the context. So my mom says to me, "Geneki means, like, I am geneki," pointing to herself as she says this. I start laughing because of course I still don't know what it means and her example makes no sense.
She tries again, "Geneki is what I'm right now doing."
Now I'm laughing hysterically and still am no clearer about what this word means, so she adds, "but soon I won't be." I think it might have something to do with work since she's retiring soon, but I'm still not entirely clear. Guess I'll have to look it up in ye olde dictionary. (boo)

akkapajio

There was a police detective at our house today and all of a sudden my mom calls me down stairs. Apparently this detective speaks English because he spent time at the police academy in Davis (of all places!) learning about being on an american bomb squad, but now he gets most of his English from cop shows like 24 and movies like Columbo and Lethal Weapon. He also liked the show "Twin Peaks" and was asking my mom about this phrase, which in Japanese-English sounds like "akkapajio." So, my mom asks me what this is. Of course I draw a blank. Then he tells they said it a lot on Twin Peaks, like when they'd enter the police station or at a diner, "Gimme akkapajio" - then it hits me like a ton of bricks: A cup of Joe. My mom spent 37 years in the States and claims never to have heard this expression. Considering how much coffee she drinks, this is a big shocker. One time she was complaining to me over a cup of coffee about how thirsty she is all the time and I told her that caffeine actually makes you more dehydrated, so she should drink water when she feels thirsty. She mused, "Maybe I shouldn't drink so much coffee in the morning." I asked her how much she drank, and she told me, "Oh, usually just one pot."

One last thing about the detective. In the States, he'd always wanted to use the phrase: You're under arrest! but has had a chance to use it a few times here in Japan apprehending foreign petty criminals in gaijin-heavy areas like Roppongi. I just think it's hilarious to imagine this Japanese detective screaming "You're under arrest!" Maybe you had to see him to understand...

my abbott-and-costellian existance

N: I'm teaching pronunciation tomorrow using tongue twisters and need a few hand mirrors so they can see their own mouths.
Y: I have a whole bunch of them in that drawer right there.
N: Really? That's great. How many do you have?
Y: Oh, I have tons! (she indicates mountains with her hands)
N: Well I only need a few. Are any just small hand mirrors?
Y: I thought you were talking about tongue twisters. I don't have any mirrors.
N: Oh, okay. I've been looking on-line for good tongue twisters and found a few new ones.
Y: I have a big one that's like this (she makes a round shape with her hands).
N: What's like that?
Y: The one I have.
N: What the hell are we talking about? The tongue twister is shaped like that? I don't know what that means.
Y: I thought you were talking about mirrors. I have one big hand mirror, that's what I was talking about.

I try to keep up with her but always fall behind somehow. It's like I take a step forward and she takes two steps back.

Our conversation ended like this: Y: If I find any mirrors...you won't want to use them.

I don't know if the '...' adequately marks the change in tone that occured after this pause. The first part was with the tone of "If I find some, I'll let you know" but then I think she realized mid-sentence that any mirrors she might discover would be so old and dirty that they shouldn't be used any more. So she just suddenly switched gears. Because that's how my mother rolls. Consistency is the least of her worries.

Did you catch all that? I finally did, but now I'm behind on the next subject.

another post for mchjd

So, another post for mycrazyhalfjapdaughter.blogspot.com, had it existed. This post would have begun with the story about how I got my first black-eye in the 5th grade. It wasn't anything cool, like a fist fight or anything. No. I gave it to myself. Running into a pole. Yup.

This imaginary post would continue to tell the story about my second black-eye, acquired tonight. I wish that its story would redeem me from the first one, but it doesn't. In fact, I think it only makes my case worse. Thus the appropriateness for appearing on the thankfully non-existent mchjd.blogspot.com. So, this black-eye I also gave to myself. Not a pole this time. Instead, I caught the window corner of a closing car door. Yes, it was my own door. Sad. There were many extraneous circumstances that led to the occurrence, but none of them really justify the actual incident. But luckily my glasses took the brunt of the force so the black-eye isn't too horrible (the glasses flew off my face but somehow made it through the ordeal intact. You can breathe your sigh of relief for the glasses). If you want to know the whole story, I will give you all my excuses in private.

Department of Redundancy Department

I asked my mom this morning about the family who live on the corner of our alley because I saw someone I assumed to be their son working on his motorcycle last night and I considered going over to see what he was working on, but decided it was too cold to be hanging around outside speaking broken Japanese about something I know nothing about to begin with. Anyway, she told me that they have two sons, "An older brother and a younger brother."

As opposed to what? I don't know.

context is everything

I was tidying up the dining room to get ready for my students who are due to arrive any minute now, when my mom, on her way out the door, tells me to "Just shove it." She knew what she meant (just shove her papers to the side) and I knew what she meant but of course I was laughing and so to clarify she added, "I meant it literally," which only made me laugh harder.

"Just shove it. Literally." This may be a new phrase in my ever expanding archive of Yokoisms.

brain mapping

Do you ever start doing something that takes concentration but is something you'd rather avoid? Ever get sleepy in such a situation? I do, and my mom does, too. She was telling me that, no matter how rested she is or how early in the day it is, when she goes to practice her shamisen and learn new pieces, she always gets sleepy.

Here is her scientific reason: "I think that I use the same part of my brain to memorize and to go to sleep. It's the only reason I can think of." I like this for two reasons. One, I like that she thinks that it is not because it is difficult or boring that she feels sleepy. Two, I like that she uses part of her brain to fall asleep. Personally, I need to not use my brain to fall asleep, though it's hard and I can't always make that work, either. Hmm, maybe I need to take a clue from my mom and try a new method.

...that's what she said...

We were on our way home and we passed by this building that had an office on the first floor. It was very nondescript and small, but there was a man in a police uniform pacing in front of the building, so I asked my mom if that was a police station, and she said, "Yes, it's a police station, not a whore-house."

As you can imagine, I started laughing immediately. Obviously, I was only paying attention to the man in uniform out front, but apparently all police stations (even if it's just a little office like this one) are marked with a red light out front and Europeans who've visited my mom thought that it meant they were in a red-light district. So that's what she assumed I was talking about. Confirms the old adage of what happens when you assume.

Some things you just can't leave out

I was asking my mom about this area called Ebisu and she said that I'd been there before.

"You know that place where Baba (my grandma) used to go? Where they lay you?"

Before you start thinking things about my grandma, you must know that when my mom said that, she also made a horizontal motion with her hands. I knew where she meant - it was like a physical therapy place for your spine... anyway I was laughing so hard, obviously she knew that she had said something funny.

"Lay you down?" she added.

"You HAVE to say 'down'," I told her. "Have to!" It was too weird to talk about the implied meaning of the partial phrase, but in any case we both had a big laugh.

Grammar, sense notwithstanding

This morning, my mom discovered that she'd forgotten about a student that's coming for a lesson. But, she's not worried because this student, as my mother expressed it, "She tells what I do."
"She what now?"
"She does what I...tell her." It's in these little moments that I begin to see the blueprint of how the cogs in her mind turn, and it all makes a little bit more sense. Luckily there were no articles in that sentence to be flubbed.

To anyone who thinks that my ardent noting of these tiny errors in my mom's language usage verges on cruel, know that I also make such mistakes (frequently) in my Japanese, to the point where I'm sure that my mom, if she knew about the miracles of blogs and the internet, could certainly have one: www.mycrazyhalfjapdaughter.blogspot.com. Actually, I'd better check that it doesn't exist...I'm in the clear.
An example? I recently misread a sign as we drove past a pet grooming store. The error? I misread ペット ベル (Pet Belle) as ペット ヘル (Pet Hell). You look at it and tell me it wasn't an honest (yet hilarious) mistake?

I'm still laughing.

Story-telling skills, organizational skills

"The other day, about two years ago..." is how my mom's story began this morning. She didn't get much farther because I just started laughing...

Anyway, the story was about her friend who'd had her wallet stolen but was able to contact her credit card company and all the fraudulent charges on the card were taken care of. I told my mom that she should at least make a list of all the cards she has so that if something were to happen, she would know who to contact and what cards she has (this area is pretty gray). I suggested that we could just lay all the cards out on the copier and make a photocopy, and then she could keep that with her important financial type papers. Then I asked her if she HAD a place where she kept important papers, and she just answered, "Everywhere."

I told her I didn't understand how she could live like that. She responded, "Neither do I."

Clarifications

Last night my mom's friend came over for dinner and during dessert we were talking about my various plans and schemes for while I'm here. My mom's friend was saying that it might not work so cleanly to leave after 1 year, that I might have to be more flexible. I agreed, but said that I'm sure it will work out somehow. At this point my mom looks at me and says that she won't be my something-in-Japanese. I assumed it meant that she wouldn't clean up my mess if I left one. But just to be sure, I asked what that phrase meant. She looked at me with her crazy eye and said, "CLEAN YOUR ASS." Once the meaning was clear, I was able to deduce that what she'd said literally translated as 'she won't be my butt wiper.'

Nice.

Technology 2

My mom just called technical support for the company that made our heaters to ask them how to put the heater in her room on a timer. She tried to figure it out from the manual but couldn't do it. So, apparently the guy tried to talk her through it but got frustrated and said that it would be faster if he just came here and showed her in person. She asked how much it would cost, and he said even if he has to do it for free, it's easier for him to just come over and do it rather than try to explain it to her over the phone. Somehow this is funny to me.

on rejection

We were trying to leave the pay parking lot and my mom was at the kiosk trying to get the machine to take her bills. It kept spitting them back out at her - I think it didn't like getting anything other than 1000yen bills. Anyway, when she finally got in to the car she seemed pretty bummed, and she said to me, "You know, you really feel rejected when a machine rejects your money."

i'm sure it's good karma

My mom has a housekeeper that comes once a month. As my mom describes her, "She's not very good, but she's fast!" At lunch she told me a story about how one time she'd asked this lady to help her with the garden and asked her to weed. To my mom's surprise, when she came back out, the woman had pulled out all the plants into a pile so that the garden was completely bare. That's still the funniest story I've heard in a while. When the lady left, my mom went through the pile replanting the real plants and now only has her help weed around the little shrub in front of the house. Why does she still employ her you might ask? In my mother's words, "Well, she's a good person." That's good enough for me.

efficiency

Okay. I just went down stairs to make some tea and my mom was organizing her vitamins and whatnot for the week. She was putting them into one of those plastic pill boxes that have the days of the week marked on them, and one little fancy pill box made from two sides of a clam shell or something. I asked her what the special shell box was for, and she looked at me and said, "So it's for 8 days." I don't know if that's hilarious to any one else! Maybe I'm crazy, too...I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Technology

So, I ended up fixing the photo in photoshop and putting it on a CD for my mom. I handed it to her, and she holds it upside down, then right side up asking me "which way?" I looked at her blankly and then remembered once having had a conversation with her about which side of a CD the information was written on. She always thought that the information must be on the side with the printing on it since each CD had a different picture or words printed on it, thus - in her mind - different music and digital information. I think at the time the conversation was about how she should put CDs upside down if she was just going to leave them out so that they wouldn't get scratched. This is what she was asking me when she said "which way;" just double checking that she wasn't going to accidentally scratch the important side.

The best damn card ever

My mom's been bugging me since I got here to take a picture with her and the cat that she can use for her New Year's greeting card, so finally this morning we set up the camera and took a bunch of self-timed pictures with us and the cat. One of them was okay except for the glare on the cat's eyes from the flash, but I figured I could just fix it in photoshop. But as it turns out, she planned to just print it out and send it to the card makers as a physical photo. So I suggested darkening the glare with a marker or something. What she did blew me away. I literally almost peed in my pants. I hope you will enjoy this picture as much as I did.

ethics

So, we had a party here for Thanksgiving last night. As you might expect, there were some smokers and my mom was complaining since I've pretty much forced her to quit since I arrived. The guests were all students of my mom's and some of them didn't know she even smoked since they don't allow it on their school campus. I was half listening to their conversation and my mom was saying that sometimes she would go with the smokers to the 'ko-en' to smoke. This word can mean either 'park' or 'playground' - so I asked which, not that either is a particularly good place to go smoke really. Anyway, these adults who aren't allowed to smoke on their college campus would walk to a local playground to light up. I'm not kidding. My mom said that sometimes there were even kids on swings and stuff. This from the same culture that has 20 people standing on either side of a single lane, one-way street waiting for the signal to say 'walk.' So, apparently it's okay to go smoke in front of little kids on what is essentially their turf, but jaywalking in any form is a no-no. Of course, at the crosswalk in question, my mom jaywalked anyway. I asked her if people don't jaywalk EVER in Japan, to which she replied, "Only on bikes."

about a Canadian Ex-pat

Really, this should have been part of the first post since it happened like the day I got here. We were watching this popular TV game/quiz show and there's a 'stump the chump' type segment where they make two ex-pats face-off. One is always the same - he's this hefty Canadian guy that seriously knows every freakin' thing about Japan, whether it's history or pop culture. Anyway, my mom really likes him because, well, I guess because he's a freak of nature and knows more than the Japanese do about their own culture. So she's telling me this, and then says, "But he's fattanug..." I'm all, "What the hell is that." She starts laughing a little and says, "Fat and ugly."

"When it makes this sound, does that mean it's paper?"

She was crinkling up a piece of cellophane, like the kind that greeting cards are wrapped in. It was making that crinkly sound that fresh paper kind of makes when you crumple it up. I tried to tell her that if it's clear, it's probably not paper. You have no idea how surprised she looked. "oh, REALLY?" I dunno, maybe she's trying to undermine the Japanese recycling empire. Why, I may never know. Sometimes the things she says or does makes me think that she's really some secret agent with a subversive plan. Sometimes that's the only explanation that makes any sense.

“When it comes to throwing away paper, how far do you go?”

I just started laughing when she said this, because, do you know what she meant? Apparently she was wondering what I shred and what I just throw out – she has a friend who shreds any mail that has her address on it. I think that’s pretty extreme. I told my mom that I shred things with account information on it, but that’s about it. She said she’d like to do that, too, and pointed to a huge stack of papers on a chair that apparently need to be shredded. I asked her if she HAS a shredder, and she made a cranking motion with her hands. Apparently, she has a manual crankshaft shredder. “If I spent all day and night shredding my papers that way, it would take me a month to get through all the papers I have to shred.” Apparently, having stacks and stacks of papers all through the house is a viable alternative.

First Post Stress Disorder

As far as this blog goes, the idea began as mostly a joke, but now Ashika is telling me I should really do it, so: here it is. I haven't even been here a week and already the hilarity is ensuing. I will try to post them as they happen, but cut me some slack because a) I'm sure it was funnier when it happened, b) sometimes things were funnier in the Japanese in which they happened, and c) I've never claimed I could actually tell a good story anyway.

Yesterday I discovered that my penchant for parking in tight parking spaces in arid parking lots is likely genetic. We were going to get some sushi and stopped by a store to buy a turkey for the upcoming thanksgiving feast. My mom drove around to the front of the lot passing up loads of open spaces and parked between a car and the payment kiosk - the space was so tight, I had to climb out the driver's side. I didn't question this decision, because I decided that, even though it was a Tokyo parking lot and fit like 10 cars anyway, maybe she really wanted to park as close to the front as possible so that we didn't have to carry the turkey so far...or something. But then, when we went to the sushi place, she did it again! An empty lot with two cars, one space between them and she headed right into the tight spot. I was amazed that she did this thing I've been made fun of so many times for doing. So I asked her, "Why do you always park in the tight spot when there's so much room?" She claimed to not even notice that she does it, but when I pressed her for an answer, she said that maybe it was so that she didn't park on the line. Well, I guess that's a logical answer, but it doesn't explain why I do it. I still think it's probably genetic. This is the same woman who was complaining about the amount of junk email she gets, and comments, "Who has time to send all this junk mail any how?" It's almost impossible for me to comprehend that in her mind actual people named Hope E. Esparaza and Hilario P. Mooney were busy sending emails with subjects like "Tiny dic'k can never attract woman's attention" and "This offer will make your s'e_xual dreams come true." Anyway.