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| my once-upon-a-time rations in days of yore |
“Are you excited to be leaving?”
The nearer my August
departure date, the more often I find myself fielding this loaded question. So
often, in fact, has it come up in the last four months that I’ve unwittingly created
a standardized reply that goes a little something like this:
“Yes, and no. I’m excited to see my family
and friends in Canada, but I’ll be sad to leave. I’ve had a really great
time in Japan.”
However, despite the fact that my two years
in Tottori have been terrific, that I’ve met some incredible people (who I plan
to keep in touch with), and that I’m rarely ready to say "goodbye" to a place I may never see again, I’m always happy to go home.
It’s time.
You know it’s time when:
you’re correcting student notebooks, and
your pen hovers to change the “l” in “English” to an “r.” On more than one occasion.
you find yourself losing the ability to
employ adjectives beyond the requisite “enjoyable”, “beautiful”, “difficult”, “delicious,”
and the ever-popular and all-encompassing “interesting.”
, after a year and a half of “I like baseball” ending the conversation, your junior high school boys are getting brave enough to ask such follow-up questions as, “Do you know Yankee players?” and “What players Red Sox do you know?” as well as what team you cheer for (“I cheer for the Toronto Blue Jays” partly because you’re patriotic and partly because they don’t know any of the players…yet.)
the English-loving music teacher starts quizzing you on the names and locations of the forty-seven Japanese prefectures, and you both quickly realize that, due to your lack of knowledge, it’s less fun and more embarrassing than other conversation topics.
you’ve mastered the art of looking busy. Be it pushing around dirt during 掃除 cleaning time (no point in doing it properly, as five other people have already or will soon clean the exact same spot before the allotted fifteen minutes are up), reading about fascinating and fun English activities your students will likely never get to do, or shuffling papers that will eventually get shredded, it seems to matter less about whether you are, in fact, busy, and more that you appear to be. Especially if others are (or are pretending to be.)
you reluctantly wear skirts to school because your dress pants are in a shameful state, and regularly fantasize about setting fire to your entire wardrobe.
bowing and/or nodding feels
normal. Waving feels weird.
“itai!” (“ouch”), “sumimasen!” (“sorry”), and “arigatou gozaimasu!” (“thank you!”) have become your automatic exclamations.
you, who’ve never been good at saying “no”
in the first place, have substituted the hesitant oh-so-Japanese head-tilted teeth-suck
rather than risk a verbalized refusal.
something as simple as picking up a package or making a phone call becomes an ordeal to be considered, scripted out, and ultimately (except in the most dire cases), left for another day.
every conversation with old Japanese men
concludes with their wish for you to marry a local. To which you
respond, “けど、日本語 は ちょっと…” (basically
implying that you can’t speak/understand/function in Japanese.) To which they invariably
reply, “大丈夫、大丈夫！” (“It’s
alright! No problem!”)*
you rush to your
apartment on a sunny Monday holiday afternoon to escape the celebrity fishbowl
you have no choice but star in each time you step into the street.
the opening lines of “Bohemian Rhapsody” cause you to question how many different cultures and continents you can simultaneously straddle before shizz gets surreal.
you’re running out of granola bars, natural peanut butter, and old cheddar cheese, and have been out of Sour
Patch Kids** for longer than you'd care to think about.
you haven't accomplished everything you set out to do, and are perfectly okay with that.
*This at times awkward at times hilarious conversation topic may shed some light not only on why young Japanese women are not rushing into wedlock, but also on why the population of Tokyo is projected to decrease by twenty-five percent by the year 2050.
**Courtesy of the marvelous Milo and her fantastic folks!
