I Am Completely Serious

They cannot keep either of my old teaching positions filled for more than a few months at a time. One of my successors at the juku once found my email address and sent me a series of increasingly infuriated emails about the impossibility of the job, leading up to a sort of liveblog of his boarding of a train out of town.

(The circumstances which led to me writing this post are somewhat sadder and less funny.)

#i tried to write dada but wrote dota #i'm tired #i've never even played that game

The dean informs me that the kids traumatized me worse than I traumatized the kids, which is a relief to me, because I'm pretty traumatized.

Thank fuck for kratom; I don't know how I'd have had the energy to get through Thursday and Friday without it. Teenagers with learning disabilities, low self-esteem, and problems with authority are about as physically and emotionally exhausting as you'd expect. I don't know whether to hug them or whack them with a rolled-up newspaper.

I'm still working out how hard I can come down on the loudmouths without upsetting them. I'm forever haunted by the time I made Jerkface cry.

because I am an idiot! Paying for International Express would have been ridiculously expensive, so I didn't do it; I just sent the package normal priority. Mee and Conan are accustomed to my doofusitude in such matters.

It's now Christmas morning in Japan. An hour ago I got an email from Mee saying, "Thank you for your present!" In English, even.

I said, "Mom? What do you think's the fastest a box could possibly get from here to Japan? Because Mee says -"

Mom: "Oh, surely not. She can't have gotten it already."

"Yeah, I don't know how she could have! The delivery estimate was like, early January! I guess she knows I'm sending it because I asked her to confirm her address, and she's just saying thank you in advance?"

Mere moments after we had this exchange, Mee sent another email. It contained this photograph:



THEIR PRESENTS ARE THERE

THEY HAVE ARRIVED IN YUKIGUNI

HOW DID THAT HAPPEN

There are only two possibilities I can think of, and they may both be true at once:

1) The woman I dealt with at the post office upgraded the package to Express out of consideration for the pain my doofusitude might cause Mee and Conan. I know her, we talked for a while the day I mailed the stuff, and she is definitely very familiar with my habit of mailing gifts to Japan in a less-than-timely manner.

2) Random unrelated people at USPS and Japan Post recognized it as a gift for children due to the picture I made for the label:



and thus decided to rush it along. (I drew them both as characters from the books I got them; Mee is Mee, and Conan is the bear whose hat is gone.) Also, in addressing the envelope I referred to Conan as "Coconuts." And I'm pretty sure I told the complete and unvarnished truth on the customs declaration, that being "2 books and 2 origami penguins." Was their present given special treatment... on grounds of cuteness?

Regardless of what actually happened, I clearly need to go by the post office and thank the person next week. This is badass.

Whose great idea was it to have a once-a-year exam, vital to the career and educational goals of many,

1) at an extremely limited number of sites

2) in the winter, when there is likely to be this stuff called "snow" on the roads?

Which is to say that I decided to skip it. I wasn't expecting to pass this year, and the drive would've been sixteen hours round-trip, half the way in snow. I don't really mind, but I do feel a little guilty for letting Mee down - she sent me an email cheering me on, and also giving me a small grammar quiz.

Good luck to anyone who's taking it!

One of my successors has evidently taught Mee to write "see you" like "C~U~(^-^)/~".

Along with some pictures of the cherry blossoms, I added one of a tree with a face tacked onto it, and this helpful explanation:

Did you know? American trees have faces. The trees talk a lot in the spring. (They sleep during the winter.)

Most trees only talk about weather and bugs, so they're boring. There are also trees who know the future, but they're rare. Those trees have bad attitudes, though, so I think that's fine.

Trees' eyes can see ghosts, but in America, autumn is the ghosts' season. The trees can't meet the ghosts yet.

I'm expecting to get a message back that just says "LIES." Also included was a lovely stick-figure illustration I made, but it has her real name in it so I can't post it.

( The Japanese text. (Probably wrong in many places!) )

What Mee and Conan (’s Parents) Sent Me

( Read the rest of this entry » )

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

I am in Tokyo and stuff. The guest house smells funny and one of the other residents is a creepy man who sits silently in the kitchen all the time and doesn’t wash his dirty dishes.

But! Mee has been texting me! I gave her my email address (I gave all the kids a website address, but she asked for my email, too) and she’s actually been sending me stuff! And they are very cute! She had a swimming tournament over the weekend and kept sending me messages about her triumphs - she was competing against much older kids and still placed very high. I want to post the texts here, but that would probably be an invasion of her cuteness privacy. Please just rest assured that they are cute.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)