Spare Spare Parts

Top Ten Things You Don’t Want to Experience Whilst Sick With The Dreaded Japanese Super Flu*

10. Those idiots who push onto the train cars as you are trying to step off. Have the damn courtesy to wait your turn instead of turning it into a rugby match. You Japanese are far from primitive and are normally quite polite. I mean, this isn’t FRANCE!
9. Turning a corner and finding yourself ambushed by a wave of school kids. A sea of matching uniforms storms towards you and in your flu hazed state all you can do it freeze and hope that you will not be trampled.
8. Small kitchens. Cooking in my tiny kitchen area is normally a chore because of lack of proper prep space. When you are sick, mind clouded and fumbly, you find yourself wanting to toss your gas burner out the window. In fact, as an aside here, I’d kill a kitten for an actually oven in which I could cook a turkey. Actually, I’d kill a kitten if I could find turkey in Japan.
7. Anybody outside of a train station this week trying to impede my progress better be wearing a bullet proof vest! Mormons, tissue hocking women in short skirts, that strange man with the picture of the horse hanging around his neck and once more MORMONS! Just let me get to the train or choose which part of your body you will no longer be in need of.
6. Company Fax Machines. Christ, these things are a pain in the ass. Paper never loads right and you get jams and it crumples and you toss it and start again and then the machine is placed up against a wall and you have to bend in strange positions to actually use it and then you come to work to find about 300 Faxes in Japanese and one of them in that crumbled mess up papers behind the machine is some asinine company fax for you and so you dig and you tear and you dig and then the Faxes keep coming until you feel you will be buried by them and then somebody who was there last messed up the machine settings and so everything comes out triple the size and you can’t fix it because you don’t know the language! I HATE HATE HATE COMPANY FAX MACHINES!
5. Cheesy Christmas Music is everywhere! I can’t escape it. My holiday music listening end with A Charlie Brown Christmas and The Pogues Fairytale of New York. There is something about being in another country that makes the music far more unbearable.
4. Being in a country that doesn’t sell Habitant Pea Soup when I am sick is a harsh blow. There is some sort of rejuvenating ingredient in Habitant Pea Soup and I would be consuming bowl-fulls of the stuff if I were home. Instead I am looking at noodles and rice and enough cans of corn soup to sink a battleship. I see myself gorging on all this stuff I lacked for one year when I return home in March. It will be a strange site seeing me at a table with a couple of bowls of pea soup, some pizza, tacos, a box of Turtles and ketchup potato chips.
3. In the lessons for the younger kids we have what are called Packets. These Packets are language prompting activities, some of them good, some of them ludicrous, but usually always often fun…fun when you are actually doing them with the kids. The prep work is a pain. Often you have to spend an hour sticking tape on pieces of these things so that they are ready for the kids and normally if I have some music going and a drink by my side this isn’t a bad gig but when you’d rather be under the sheets at home this becomes a colossal pain in the ass.
2. The damn crosswalk clanging! ! ! Over the course of the year I’ve managed to tone it out but everything becomes amplified when you are sick and the sound now is like the train rolling right on through the living room. I come home from a day with the kids and I just want to drown in sheets and fall instantly into sleep. The train ensures that this is impossible until midnight. Each clang is like a nail in the temple. Hammering and hammering. I’m debating puncturing my ear drums. Though I’d never get to hear the beauty of a Maria Callas solo again I would also never get to hear those bitches from The View clucking again so it is pretty much worth the sense loss.
1. And for our number one thing you don’t want to experience when sick I was going to just write: a small room full of kids. Though this is still true there is one kid in the bunch that sticks out. Nope, not the bad kid. Dealing with bad kids is much easier when you have no patience. Plenty of windows in our classrooms to toss them out of. I hear kids bounce from the right angles! The kids that really grates on you in times of sniffles and coughs is the kids who needs you, as their teachers, validation over everything that they do! You get the kids for an hour. This is about as many of these whiney squeaks these guys can get out in that time frame: “Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei…“ AHHHHHHHHH!!! Yes, yes…that color. Yes, you stick it there. No, the stamp is on the other page. The number seven. It’s Q. Yes, you can put your shoes there. Yes, sit there. What? English! Sure, whatever, use red! The crayons…get your crayons. Yes, those crayons are alright. Well stop tearing off your nametag and then I wouldn’t have to keep putting it back on. Huh? Sure. Okay. Yes. No. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! “Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei… Sensei…” Children show us that even cute can be mind numbingly annoying!!!

*This post has been brought to you by the I’m Sick and Bitchy Council (ISABC) and the number 7.