Die wunderbare Welt des Taryn H.!

4th July 2009

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I'm pretty lazy about writing in this thing.

I’m tempted to take a page from Bridget’s book and start making weekly posts that have actual substance here, but my writing style is generally just to record whatever fragmented thought pops into my mind so I don’t know how long that would last.

This week was decent, my classes were good for the most part.  I even had a few where my homeroom teachers had to leave the room to go do 研究授業 somewhere, leaving every aspect of the lesson up to me.  Granted, for the most part that is not at all different from when they’re in the room, because the majority of my HRTs are about as useful as a head wound.  Whatever that means.  It went surprisingly well, though!  If the HRTs aren’t going to help me at all, I’d almost prefer it if they weren’t in the room, then at least I know they’re not taking any credit for the class.  In any case, I’m pretty proud of myself for being able to successfully teach an entire class to a room full of 6th graders and not have them be completely confused or disinterested.

Yesterday I was having lunch with one of my second grade classes, and they were actually sociable for once.  In Japanese elementary schools, the kids eat lunch in their classrooms.  The classes are usually broken up into about 6 groups of kids, and they use those groups at lunch and when they play games in class or whatever.

One of the other teachers (I don’t have a nickname for him yet so we’ll just call him K-sensei), was eating with the same class, but sitting with a different group than me.  About halfway through lunch, this one girl from the other group comes over to me and is like “How about K-sensei?” and of course I had no idea what she meant because second graders always just say random shit completely out of context.  She elaborated by saying that they were trying to fix him up, and that we were a perfect match because we are both single.  Also that we could get married in the gym.  7 year-olds, such hopeless romantics.  It’s cute how they’re more interested in my love life than I am.  So after I gave her my usual “I’m 24, that’s way too young to be married!” spiel, this little boy from the group behind me turns around and is like “Taryn-sensei.  I don’t think you should marry K-sensei.  Because, like, he’s Japanese, and you’re not Japanese, so if you had kids, they would be half Japanese.” or something to that effect.  That is not at all something I expect to hear from a 2nd grader.  Then I had to do the whole “Now now, it takes all different colours to make a rainbow!” speech, although I think he was saying it more in the sense of “You can’t colour the sky orange, the sky is blue.” than to be racist.  In any case, I think K-sensei is like, 22.  Practically jailbait, and I don’t do JB.  But I digress.

Yesterday evening I was invited by the Board of Education guy to some drinking party (bad translation, I think) for all the ALTs in Urayasu.  My first instinct was to say no, but I figured I’m in Japan and I shouldn’t fall back into my old habits of avoiding being around new people.  And since I didn’t have any other plans for the evening, I agreed to go.  It was 3,500 yen for 2 and a half hours of all you can eat and drink, so that seemed like a reasonable price at first glance.  BUT IT WAS A TRAP.  Yeah, it was all-you-can-drink, but they only had like 4 things on the drink menu!  That was fine for most of the other people there, since they were pounding back draft beers like it was the elixir of life, but I’m far too classy to drink beer.  They had ume-shu, which tasted like a liquid raisin with all of the sugar cane in Brazil dumped into it.  They also had lemon sours, which not only is redundant, but also lacking in flavour and volume of alcohol.  Also some oolong thing, but I hate tea with the passion of 1000 burning suns, so I was shit out of luck.

The only people who even showed up besides me (around 15 people) were almost all really old.  Like over 30.  There was only one other woman that showed up, the rest were all 腐男子 or ojisan with the exception of one guy.  In any case, my fears that it would be very lame turned out to be true, but I’m glad that it didn’t keep me from going.  If nothing else, I get the smug satisfaction of knowing that I was right.  So ha!

In other news, my landlord is kind of creepy.  I wish he would just send me an SMS when he gets here and I could meet him downstairs to pay my rent instead of him actually coming to my room.  I have a picture of me and Shay on my computer desk thing, and he did like a weird double-take when he saw it and was like “Wow, is this your friend?” and I was like “It’s my sister.” and he was all “Very pretty!”.  I’m not sure if I’m offended or relieved that he thinks she’s the pretty one.  Okay, scratch that, it’s definitely relief.

Oh yeah, happy 4th of July!  I hate not being able to celebrate holidays properly over here, but I’m going out drinking with Take later so that’s something.  Time for TF2 now though, so cheers!