The Yoko Edict

"My brain is so...," my mom began and then trailed off.

Lately she has been picking up conversations that we had started hours, sometimes days, earlier. This morning, she called up the stairs to me to tell me she had found two more books but they were at least 10 years old, too. You think I'd know what she was talking about and that maybe I had just been asking her about books but our conversations today have not even remotely touched on the subject of published chronicles. My only choice was to let those words settle in and let the natural synapse connection process occur. Eventually I remembered I had asked her the other day if she had any of her old French conversation books still. She'd found one. It had been published in 1968. I decided against using it.

But anyway, back to today. "My brain is so....," we looked steadily at each other, her trying to find the words, and me trying not to crack a smile so as to interrupt her 'thought' process. After a longish pause, she continued, "...not used to being used." What a declaration. What an amazing declaration!

People like that

The technological miracle that is Japan has things that would be useful the world over. For example, our washroom has an overhead light, of course, but the mirror over the sink has its own florescent lighting that allows you to see every flaw in your skin clearly, as well as a heater for the mirror so that it won't fog up. It is brilliance that only costs two light-switches extra. Well worth it.

As some of you know, I've been enjoying James Thurber's short-stories lately. He had a line about an aunt in the story about his various misadventures with cars that I felt, had I been a great writer and able to make good sentences like this one, would have worked well in the June installment of mctm, Wishful Thinking. Here is the line:
"She enjoyed the hallucination, among other things, that she was able to drive a car."

This guy who died almost two decades before I was born surely had a way with words that pummels my funny-bone like a sledgehammer. Anyway last night as my mom was getting ready for bed, brushing teeth etc in the washroom, I read her some of the more hilarious excerpts from this story about cars, "Recollections of the Gas Buggy." One recounted how he had taken his suddenly overheating car to a mechanic who fixed the problem:
I was standing outside the car, staring at the dashboard and its, to me, complicated dials, when I noticed to my horror that one of them registered 1650. I pointed a shaking finger at it and said to the mechanic, 'That dial shouldn't be registering as high as all that, should it?' The garage mechanic looked at me with the special look garage mechanics reserve for me. It is a mixture of incredulity, bewilderment, and distress. 'That's your radio dial, Mac,' he said. 'You got her set at WQXR.'

"The world really does have people like that," my mom tells me. This from the woman who asked me this morning if she could send a fax from our fax machine to our fax machine. "Um, yeah," I think, "you are one of them." I clearly state this fact as she comes out of the washroom laughing lightly, and turns off the overhead light.

But the washroom is still illuminated. I tell her. She goes back, clicks a switch and comes out again.

The light is STILL on, so I tell her again. She looks back in surprise - she'd obviously switched off the defogger but somehow didn't notice the light still on. I think it dawns on her at this moment that she really is one of those people and I swear we've never laughed so hard. She switched off the light (for real this time) and slowly walked past me, doubled over in laughter with wheezing sounds coming out of her throat and went to bed. I then followed suit.

Life is just a bowl of cherries

My mom filled me in on a little secret of hers. Whenever she sees tears, she thinks of the time when she had just come to the US and didn't really speak English and was at a Catholic School, flunking out of some class. When the teacher, a Sister, told her that she was flunking, some tears start to drip from her eyes (her words). The words of consolation given to her by this sister struck her as funny and so now she can't help but get the giggles when she sees tears dripping from someone's eyes. The coveted words of solace: "God gave you tears, dear." I don't know why it was so funny to her, but anyway it's funny to me that it's funny to her. Maybe I'll never be able to cry again.

Oh, the whole 'life is just a bowl of cherries' thing is because it's her favorite song and she's wanted a copy of the Hi-Lo's album with their recording of it since the 70's and just acquired it through amazon.com. I think she is in love with technology.

mctm's Crazy Kyoto Friend

This is Ryohei:


He's probably one of the few people I can say are weirder than my mom. Really. He was impressed that I can play Rock, Paper, Scissors with my feet. Apparently, that makes me super Japanese. "Funny, you don't look like a Japanese!" - this was his catch phrase all weekend. He gives my mom a harder time than I do, probably. They went to the US around the same time and I guess went to Yale together. We talked about how tough the TOEFL test is nowadays and they both mused that they probably would have flunked it if they had had to take such a test and would have never been able to go to college in the States at all. That's probably true.

Anyway, he was telling stories about traveling through the US on a bus in the 60's. This was one of the best stories. He was on tour and his group had stopped at a Howard Johnson's or something somewhere in the Midwest for dinner. "The waitress was staring, you know, because probably she had never seen a Japanese before," Ryohei tells us. "When she came over to take our order, I said, 'I'll have spaghetti.' Then the waitress said to me, 'We don't have that kind of tea here. We don't serve Chinese tea.' You know, because I pronounced it like the Japanese do, spaghe'TI, instead of spagheddy." My mom practically had a conniption. For me, I thought it was as sad as it was funny.

Y.E.S. - Yoko's English? Subversive.

She had joined in on my skype chat with my dad and step-mom. After greetings, she informed them, "Nami is dreading summer in Japan."
Now, it's mid-August. As far as I can tell, we are in the middle of summer in Japan! The linguist in me can't let this slide by unnoticed.
"Dread is about a future occurrence. I can't dread summer. It is summer. You're using the word wrong."
"No, I'm not. I've always used it like that."
"I'm sure you have. But, dread is like about trepidation about something that hasn't happened yet."
"Well, whatever then. Nami hates summer in Japan."

I can't say she's wrong. The constant cry of cicadas are like some audio form of waterboarding to me. It's true that I had just asked her when all the cicadas will die. I'm sick of their screaming. She told this to my dad and Deborah, but she said locusts. I corrected her, but she claimed that it's the same difference. It SO isn't, but she was just confused because I guess "17-year locusts" are cicadas. Whoever invented that name was deliberately trying to stir up future Japanese mother/ Half-Japanese daughter disagreements, I just know it.

Anyway, later we continued our discussion about 'dread' v 'hate' - I can't help that I've become something of a vocabulary Nazi. "Do you really use the word 'dread' like the word 'hate'?" I asked my mom.
"No," she answered. "They don't mean the same thing."
"True," I agreed. "I'm telling you that 'dread' is always about something in the future."
She replied, "I always thought it was when you were worried about something that's gonna happen."
**Long pause as we gaze at each other like high noon (somewhere a tumbleweed is rolling by).
"EXACTLY! Going to happen! Something in the future! You just said it yourself! You knew all along!" She starts laughing like crazy.
"I'm going to go have a cigarette," she announces before she steps out. I don't think it's that she's trying to make me look like the grammar police. I think she just likes riling me up. Argh.

(phrasal verb) - preposition = cute

We are going to Okinawa in November, so I bought a new swimsuit. I bought it on-line after a few discouraging attempts to find one in a store here. Japanese swim wear is either ugly or a billion dollars. Yen. Whatever. Luckily, an on-line store where I'd previously bought a swimsuit was having a sale. Since I knew my size, I went ahead and bought one. It is due to arrive any day now. My mom was shocked at my purchase; she conveyed this to me by remarking, "But, how can you buy one without even trying?" I explained that even using the internet takes a little effort, but of course that wasn't what she meant and I knew it. She's too fun to tease sometimes.

mchjd post 9: Will I ever grow up?

I had a student today, a woman a little younger than my mom but contrarily very proper and polite; a most agreeable student. Today's lesson covered things you might need to know should you need to visit a doctor, with phrases like "the flu" or "food poisoning." Naturally, the word "diarrhea" was also in the text book, but I am enough of a professional at this point that I didn't even crack a smile. Not to say I didn't want to but, proudly, I repressed the juvenile urge to giggle. What happened next made this valiant effort worthless, though.

You see, she had trouble with the word's enunciation. The first time, she said DI-a-rrhe-a. So I corrected her. "The stress is on the third syllable," I said in a teacherly way. di-a-RRHE-a
I felt proud that I was keeping it professional.

Then there was a dialog between a doctor and patient. Of course the writers of this text book couldn't give the patient the flu. Nooo, it had to be food poisoning. At this point, I'm still holding it together, but when my student gets to the line in question, she makes the same error, "I have DIarrhea." So I remind her, "It's diaRRHEa." I'm still holding up.

Here, she begins to chant to get the correct pronunciation firmly into her brain. I'm used to this behavior from students - repetition really does help - but all of a sudden I'm aware that she's saying, "I have diaRRHEa. I have diaRRHEa" over and over again and the second grader in me comes flying out full-force. Tears of laughter begin welling up in my eyes and I can't breathe. She looks concerned and asks me if she's said something wrong. I shake my head 'no' and force myself to think of something-anything!-else. But it's too late; I'm laughing and no longer feeling any pride, but rather that I'm going to get fired if I can't pull myself together. The rest of the lesson was me reminding myself not to remember this incident, forgetting it, then wondering what it was I was trying to not remember, remembering it again and having to quell any hysterics. It was this pattern over and over again, but I managed to survive the remainder of the lesson without incident, though I don't know that 'teaching' accurately describes what I was able to do in those 20 minutes.