All the fun I want for awhile

Last Saturday, in the mad flurry of late nights that led up to November 2nd, our last official debate practice ever, I came into school as a coach. As a Sensei my hours are rigid and I hold to them with such inflexibility one would think I’d turn into a stone palm tree if I stayed at school a minute longer. I am out the door like a shot at 4:15, even on Tuesday and Wednesdays when cleaning time has not yet happened. This life in Japan requires extra work and all my mental energy reserves, and when I don’t have that free time in the late afternoon to leisurely ride home and watch all the little first-graders trundling along under their square laquered backpacks, it feels as though someone is taking the wires in my brain and purposefully crossing them, until before I know it I’ve dropped my phone in the toilet and am spending 5th period crying in my car.

For the last three weeks I have more or less been staying at school every night until eight o’clock, running practice debates with the team in which I am the mean ALT who asks them pointed and perfectly correct English questions, and they must fumble around with their pastel-colored evidence cards, looking at each other helplessly. I have earned some serious cache with The Big Kahuna who has seen me stumbling into the teacher’s room when the school song plays at seven o’clock, reminding all the students to vacate the premises immediately. Little vision remains after my hours of reading ink-speared newspaper copies, and so I grope around for my purse and then totter on my hungry legs out of the teacher’s room and home.

Last Saturday, during late afternoon practice, we shared the first floor with the band. It’s hard to really take an argument seriously when a question ending in, “don’t you agree?” is punctuated with the shrill taps of a trumpet. Or the long pauses during preparation time are serenaded by a quartet of flutes. The music was a bluesy/jazzy combination, and so it felt like our debate was taking place in the corner of a cocktail lounge, and all we were waiting for was the candid cameras to pop out of the fake plants like jack-in-the-boxes, to explain why the trombones were doing scales while we were trying to talk about morality in public schools these days. Whomp-whomp-whomp.

After Saturday’s rehearsal we met every day during the week, and my cold, while not a nasty, violent affair, faithfully reared its head each morning so I had to open the car door in full traffic at 8:17 to hawk up a mucus plug on the unsuspecting pavement. I came to school sounding like I had a scarf stuffed down my throat, and then by 10 o’clock I would be clear and fine, able to conjugate verbs in a single breath, my cold having decided it would lie dormant in my sinuses until the next staff meeting. Thursday, though, we had a truncated/abridged/curtailed schedule as the result of it being November 1st! and us having an all-school assembly in the drafty gym. So I took my wad of kleenexes and tried to not offend anyone by blowing my nose, but there were times when it was necessary, and the pomp and circumstance of my cold suddenly seemed so much bigger and more serious when my sneezes were echoing off the rafters and 900 heads kept glancing in my direction. The assembly finished just in time for the 10 o’clock time barrier to roll around, and so during first period I could be all, “what? that wasn’t me? Do I sound sick to you?”

Other than being sick, I really enjoyed the four hours of debate after school. We verbally romped all over that resolution, and even though the kids are in New Zealand this week, I think they will be able to put it all into practice this Saturday at the debate meet. I thought the stress of having no free time and spending all my extra periods during the day writing fake arguments was being incredibly well-handled by my brain who made no complaints up until last Thursday. It didn’t even hint that the wheels were getting worn down by the rocky road of sickness and debate stress. Had my brain clued me in to how I was feeling, I suppose I could have prevented what came next, but as it was it snuck up on me like a slobbering wet dog tongue and left me thinking how gross it was that I was making a pile of used kleenexes in the car and how noble it was that no one had seen me cry.

This is what happened: For a week and a half now, I have been carting in paper and paper to appease the front office ladies into signing my official “May drive to work” paper. They keep coming back for more, and I keep having to run out to the car to dig through our manilla folder, pulling out insurance! repair cards! Name change forms! I have (secretly) been driving to work anyway because there are semi trucks on the road at eight o’clock at night, and Praju’s bike does not have a light. Which means we are being led through the dark streets of K-town with only my weak wheel-powered beam. It is unsafe! is my cry, but the real reason is it’s cold at eight o’clock in what is now November, and we’re tired.

Finally, Thursday, I was down in the office, huddled around an online Japanese/English translator while they tried to tell me “the required insurance person is not.” When I finally got across that I didn’t understand we trooped down to the English room where we comandeered an unsuspecting Gonzo Sensei and then O Sensei into translating, and what resulted was 30 minutes of paper shuffling, questions and fervent hand-throwing on the part of the office lady. It was finally explained that although we have “voluntary” insurance and the car in our name, we need to change the “compulsory” insurance slip over to Johnathan’s name. Normally I’m somewhat easy going about these things. The Japanese have a complicated bureaocracy and I just go along with all the name-stamping and chain-of-command because it’s no skin off my back. The trouble was that Johnathan has taken care of all these papers and stamping and talking to the right people, and so I felt like a helpless fifties housewife. “Well, my husband said…” kept slipping out of my mouth and when they asked me if we talked to so-and-so or did this-and-this I could only shrug helplessly. “These are all the papers I have,” I said, and O Sensei patted my arm.

And then I could fear the tears building up behind my eyes. Later, I suspected it was the car talk, that it brought back memories of this summer’s driving test, of the stress and fatigue and crying jags I had after all those failures. This felt like one more hurdle that my students, with their Japanese, could leap against the backdrop of a pink sunset, while I was still stretching near the soccer net, unsure my hamstrings wouldn’t snap. I gathered my books and waterbottle and trudged off to the bathroom where I planned to let myself cry until I realized with the tile it was echoing back on itself twenty times, and anyone walking by could hear my sniffling wailing coming from the third stall. So I pulled myself together, turned to flush my sopping kleenexes down the toilet, and as I bent to pick up my books I head a noticeable thud. I whipped around, and there in the throat of the toilet was my white cell phone, already being sucked down by the toilet’s whirlpool. I reached down and snatched it, and as I pulled it up I started crying again because not only did I now have to deal with more car problems, but now I’d waterlogged my phone.

So, like a sad person who lives in their car, I went out and sat in the driver’s seat and cried over my wet phone, and my sickness decided to try for a comeback so I blew my nose many times and drank water to soothe my sore throat. Then I got quite sleepy, as one does after such an emotional release, and I would have leaned back my seat and taken a little snooze, but my phone didn’t work after it’s bath, so I had no way to set an alarm to wake me up for sixth period. I cried a little more at the weird twist fate had twirled me into, and then I waited for the redness to leave my face and I went back into the teacher’s room to write more fake speeches.

What does it all mean? I was under debate’s thumb, but now that the students are safely flying across the Pacific Ocean I’m free to imagine other uses for my free time. Green Tea Sensei snuck my to my desk this morning to tell me the flower arranging club will meet this afternoon, but after three weeks of staying late, all I want to do is head home when 4:15 shows up on the clock, to climb into my warm bed and read a book or watch tv on my computer. I want my boring life back. So, in the interest of mundane afternoon tasks, Johnathan and I dumped out a 1,000 piece puzzle on our coffee table last night. We sorted the border pieces from the middles, pulled out of the four corners, and are planning to start a full-scale assembly tonight. That’s really all the excitement I want for awhile.

P.S. Call it a Great Pumpkin miracle, but these days the phone works swimmingly.