Two Days Inside the Abode or How I Murdered a Bag of Jiffy Pop

Two days cooped up in this small Japanese apartment where the smell of burnt popcorn lingers and I am experiencing cabin fever. I sorted and cleaned. I resisted the urge to once again reorganize the apartment. I’ve showered twice and now reek of chlorine, which they seem to just pollute the water with here. It smells as though I have just taken a dip in the pool at the Training Institute and am now sitting on a bus going back to school with 30 other kids who smell just like me. Chlorine and burnt popcorn just don’t blend well in aroma, you know, in case you are conducting experiments to find the perfect smelling perfume. I stepped outside a few times, the shoed kind glancing down in disgust at my dirty white soaks (I can hear my mother sighing as she reads that line), just to say that I had gone out sometime within the span of 48 hours. Back home, if it was anytime but winter, you’d find me walking around Ottawa trying to find some new and interesting places I’d yet to discover. If the sun was shining I was roaming. Placing me on foreign soil only magnifies my appetite for exploration and, in turn, elevates my dislike of being stuck inside the house to 11 on the Hate-o-Meter (it’s been awhile since I last saw Spinal Tap. I wonder how my DVD is doing crushed in a box in the corner of my father’s basement). See, I am so utterly mind numbingly board that I am lamenting over circular discs resting safely in cardboard boxes!

As written a few entries back, April first is the start of the new business and school year for Japan and, with that, comes entirely new classes. My schedule has been rearranged and where I still have the same kids they have all moved up on the ladder of learning. Some have been moved to other days, longer days of lessons have been shortened and in a few instances other longer days have been added. Everything I was taught over my two weeks of training has become obsolete as now there are new lessons to teach which I am not very prepared for. I sort of have to scratch my head on this one. Why invest two intensive weeks of training on a curriculum that will be taught for four only to spend roughly thirty minutes per new lesson on the new stuff that will be taught for the next year? Though my training for the new lessons was brief I felt confident enough to teach them with the materials provided. Actual teachers manuals have not been made up yet so we are using photocopies of composites for the books where in some cases we are dealing with stick figures and messy handwriting. Seriously, you’d think a little more organization would have went into all this. Instead it looks as though these books were tossed together by a 12 year-old handing in a project he completed the night before it was due. I thought I had been given the basic training, and I do mean basic, and the photocopies for each new lesson but last week at the area meeting I was handed my schedule to find I had two new classes. I was happy to find that my days looked even more lax then the ones I was currently working but surprised to find that along with the four new lessons I had knowledge of there were two others that I had no idea existed. Orange? Lime? What the hell are Orange and Lime? Those aren’t class names those are tasty beverages! I quickly brought this up with my supervisor who ensured me that materials for these classes would be mailed to me within the week. And so I waited…waited…and waited. My mailbox was filled with Smarties from home, flyers for the Pizza Hut and Jehovah’s Witness propaganda but no teacher’s manuals. Friday rolls around, the last day for the mail, and still nothing so I jingle up my supervisor who is out of town and away from the office and so I jingle up my head trainer as a last resort who would fax me the materials needed the next day. I will not be trained on these two unknown classes and only have these photocopies of manuals to help me stumble through my lesson. I fear the early kids are not going to get their moneys worth as I will be learning the stuff right along with them. I have been told I could expect a phone call a half hour before my lesson on Wednesday in order to “properly” train me but, really, this is kind of like handing a gun to a new recruit and pushing him towards the war with a smile and a mighty “the bad guys are that’a’way!” I took the time to summarize the lessons on handy cheat sheets these last two days where time was moving slow with me confined to the apartment. I’m not 100% but this has to be expected when all you were taught is turned upside and you are tossed into a pit of hungry cannibals with only a blade of grass with which to defend yourself. Am I comparing Japanese schoolchildren to hungry cannibals? You’re damn right, I am! My blade of grass is the photocopy of the manual and with these cheat sheets I feel that it is as sharp as I can make it.

After returning from Yoshino on Sunday I hit up two of the grocery stores near me and I am now well stocked. My gas bill arrived last week and I opened it to find a much lower number then expected leading me to believe that it is not as expensive to cook here as I had originally thought. March was the month of restaurant food and I now have a fairly good idea on what that road would cost me. April will be designated as the month for home cooking and, in the end, I’ll take both costs and see which is the cheaper of the two. I have now overcome my apprehensions on entering Japanese grocery stores although I still want to tote along a shotgun with me so I can blast away, wild and Fudd-like, at those stereos in the produce aisle that play those excruciating jingles every five seconds. To understand my annoyance please strap two large speakers to your head. 500 watt should be just about right. Now plug those babies into a stereo and turn the volume waaaaayyyyyyy up, said in my best Friendly Giant voice. Now pop in this CD here. Yes, the one marked with the entire 20 tracks being Hanson’s MmmBop! Now hit the repeat button and I’ll just lock you in this closet and let you out in a few days. “Sooki…sooki, uh huh…sooki…sooki” I don’t know what it is but I want to kill it.

I have become a bit more adventurous in my grocery shopping and have purchased a few things with directions I can’t read but feel that I can make them well enough without the instructions. Of course, if my experiment with the Japanese popcorn is any indication I am in big trouble. I love popcorn, it is my favorite snack when I am watching a movie. Soaked in butter in sprinkled with powdered cheese, yes, there is nothing like popcorn to bring the experience of the cinema into your living room or, in my case, bedroom and living room. There was no butter or powdered cheese but it was popcorn. True, it was my least favorite of cooking methods, the Jiffy Pop type, but I happily tossed the package into my shopping basket licking my lips. Last night, stomach grumbling and movie cued, I flicked on the gas and waited for the patented Jiffy Pop bubble to grow to near bursting point with popped corn goodness. And waited… Any time now… Errr…any time NOW! Isn’t this supposed to grow? Is the heat not providing enough arousal? Maybe it needed to be cranked higher. Wait, this is Japan, maybe this thing extends UNDER the aluminum pan, keeper of the currently unpopped kernels I so desired. I admit, I have no cooked up much corn using the Jiffy Pop method as I am a fan of straight kernels in the pot and the microwave methods but I remembered the commercial demonstrations that would air back in the 80s, usually during The Cosby Show and Night Court, and I shock the pan over the heat repeatedly slowly and then when nothing popped I resorted to violent shaking that could awe a British nanny. Then came the smell. The horrible, burnt popcorn smell. I removed the pan from the burner and pealed back the foil to reveal my worst fear…dead…all of the popcorn was dead. The corner report says that they died of suffocation when the bag did not rise. My stomach took the loss the hardest and together we buried the departed corn deep into the garbage bag, the smell lingering to remind us of what we had lost.

Trying to put the death behind me I tossed myself into my work. I had wanted to really sink my teeth into my sumo tournament footage for the last week and now I had the opportunity. It struck me as I was cutting the footage together, trimming clips, adding music, overlaying audio, just how much I remembered from film school. In the second year of the program we were allowed to use the computer editing programs to cut together our year end project. My partner and I, a freaky Finnish dude with a similar love for horror films as I, combined our projects to shoot a 20min script I had written. We shot over the weekends that October and the task of editing was handed over to me seeing as how I didn’t want to serve as producer. The editing room was small and loud with the buzzing of equipment. It was lit with dim florescents and the glow from the editing monitors. Our sound room had a collection of sound effect CDs which I brought into the room with me to mine for the perfect effect. I think I spent more time in that room editing the film then it took to shoot it. I remember really enjoying seeing all the pieces come together, removing clips, adding others to see how scenes were changed. We had hired, and by hired I mean found somebody who would do it for free, a person to score our production and things really took shape when his music was added. Our horror film would be called Paranoia and it wasn’t the best production done that year (Megs, I still say your “waiting” flick holds top honors…brilliance) but it did actually scare one or two people during the screen which was all I could ask for really considering our sound was recording with a body mic attached to a broomstick and our actress was a Jody Foster look-a-like with the talent of maybe Mrs. Foster’s daughter….at 2 months old. I remember, though, really enjoying the editing process and now, having come to embrace the movie shooting capabilities of my Canon S2 IS enough to shoot what looks to now be about an hour of footage from various excursions, placing the clips on the computer and loading them into my editing software to spend hours transforming into short little films I can upload online for you folks back home to get a moving pictures view of my life in Japan, I wonder….did I follow the wrong path out of film school? Since that final year I knew I wanted to become a second assistant director but I find myself now rethinking this. When I returned back home and soon there after made the cross country move to Vancouver to continue film it was always under the impression that I would join the DGC and make my first serious attempt at becoming an 2nd AD for large scale productions. But what about editing? Might this be the career my skills are best suited for? While I ponder these career altering choices I present to you the Sumo film, day 10 of the Osaka Grand Sumo Tournament. It runs for about 17 minutes so you might want to go and get yourself some popcorn just please be careful not to kill your snacks like I do.