George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
This is interesting. It's well-written in the sense that it flows and sticks the landing, even though I agree with almost everyone who has commented that your behavior (and subsequent dismissal of this woman) were oddly tone-deaf to the way polite society works. And slightly, to my archaic worldview, ungallant. But that point has been made repeatedly--to the point where you invoked Satan no less--so I'll change tack.
In Japan I generally avoid Starbucks because I don't enjoy their simple black coffee, and I am not interested in all the milkshake-type drinks which are considerably more popular, as well as time-consuming to make. Thus I have found myself waiting in line for up to 15 minutes just to have hot beverage poured from urn to cup because the three people in front of me ordered the dessert drinks. Also, although I haven't been to a US convenience store in years, here at least the Family Mart coffee machine grinds the beans as you're standing there, and that's like a minute wait tops. This is a tedious preface to my point that, at least here, Starbucks workers are efficient, on-task, and professional--which is to say very good at customer-facing friendliness. Also often young and pretty (the males and the females). Yet I cannot imagine how I could ask your question without creating a shit storm of awkwardness. Unfortunately awkwardness is routinely expected from foreigners (in a society built around avoiding awkwardness) so anyone brave and reckless enough to interact with a foreigner would probably be unfazed. This wouldn't be a good thing, as they'd probably be equally unfazed if I suddenly took off my shirt in the shop and began applying deodorant to my armpits. "Foreigners, what can you expect?" etc. So I am probably routinely viewed, despite my best efforts, as a relatively tame chimpanzee by many. And chimps can suddenly lose it, as we know.
Your posts sometimes seem exasperated--with people, with the Motte. Because of this (in addition to your username) I have assumed you are drinking booze while posting. But maybe it's something else. General misanthropy? I'm not trying intentionally to be satanic.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3mo ago
This is the law in Japan for any non-Japanese. You must carry proof of your status at all times--the 外国人登録証 or popularly-known "gaijin card," which indicates your visa status. Everyone here who stays longer than 3 months gets one (students, those employed, etc.) except maybe diplomats. This is in lieu of carrying your passport, which visitors (under 3 months) are required to do. In the US, if I'm not mistaken, visitors can carry a paper photocopy of their (foreign) passports. Those who are born here but are not Japanese (e.g. Zainichi Koreans) have a 特別永住者証明書 card or "special permanent residency" card that they also must carry.
That said, Japanese nationals are not required to do this. The fact that all Japanese do not look exactly alike aside, it is obviously different in the US to some degree--American citizens cannot be easily dentified simply on what they look like (though jeans and a t-shirt isn't a bad profiling protocol). I would personally be at least wary of a law that by default would require everyone to carry not just ID but proof-of-citizenship.
"Reassessing the realities of the present situation" is a vague pronouncement, of the kind that is not your habit. It's also not a phrase that engenders trust. We should at least acknowledge the fact that all manner of shackles can be added in the name of "realities of the situation."
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11mo ago
You're not wrong, but the words "possibly" and "shooting" or something similar are meat and potatoes for clickable headlines. This just seems dubious. Plus fuck CNN for a thousand other reasons. I was at a place recently that for some reason had CNN running above the cashier counter. I don't think any Japanese person was paying attention as it was just the sound of talking heads in fast English for them and easily ignored. For me it was like a bombardment of progressive propaganda packaged so matter-of-factly that I literally couldn't stand there and listen to it. And I've voted Democrat in every election I've ever voted in. It's just mind-boggling how partisan they are.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
You asked for it.
I had a thing in high school where, when faced with the attention of females, I would become so emotionally fraught that I would vomit. You may feel that this is unrelated to what you've written here, and I realize I am being somewhat vague when I say "attention of females," but just give me a minute.
The neurosis--if that's what we can call it, and maybe we can't--plagued me for some time. I can remember exactly when it started, when it ended, and when it threatened to return, which is the part of the story relevant to your situation, probably. But let me try and tell this properly.
I will begin, or, rather, continue, by making a statement that will probably come across as extremely arrogant and un-self-aware. Moreso than even the usual Motte dude waxing philosophical about women. That statement is: I am an attractive man.
Okay now that you've done your spit take, let me qualify: I know that I am not everyone's cup of tea, I cannot imagine I am anyone's version of a 10, and I am not particularly wealthy. Plus, now, I am older, or, relative to many on the Motte, just old. Nevertheless, I in my life I have turned heads, caused women to get nervous and awkward just by my speaking to them, etc. I have been on television and modeled for magazines as the "cool guy," blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. All this prelude to suggest that I have had, in some ways, an advantage over many males. But in the days of which I am writing, none of this mattered in any way.
The first time I felt the slow-rising bile was not the first kiss of youth, or any similar situation where you might imagine a callow young manboy might get bent out of shape. No. It was a rather benign moment where I was sitting at the bar counter of my then-girlfriend's kitchen, being served a plate of I think Stouffer's spaghetti. Why that dish, memory does not reveal. But I remember she served me a single portion (she herself wasn't eating) and I sat there and ate it. It probably tasted fine or at least not so bad that I would have wanted to immediately regurgitate it. Let's even say it was good, for after all she served it to me and why be ungrateful? The same is true of the apple crumble she served me as dessert. I believe her mother had made that herself. A nurse, she was, the mother, which isn't important but informs what happens later.
So I ate the crumble. It was good. Hot and very sweet and something I have never had since, though I had always liked it. But something about the sensation of fullness in this moment collided with whatever else was going on in the warring of my para- and sympathetic nervous systems, and I knew immediately what was to happen. I managed to croak out "excuse me for a second" and may have even said "I need to go to the bathroom." I remember she, my girlfriend, a lovely green-eyed stawberry blonde daughter of a university professor, looked at me with an expression of confused worry, but said simply "Okay" and turned back to her mother, who by now had come into the kitchen to perhaps see how I liked her apple crumble.
I made it almost all the way to the toilet. The key word is of course almost. What happened next is disgusting to relate (this isn't askreddit, after all) so I won't. Suffice to say I threw up, albeit quietly, there in front of the bathroom door. They had hardwood flooring, I recall. Oddly--well, the whole thing was odd--but oddly now that my stomach had relieved itself of its contents I was no longer nauseous. Which of course did not mean that I now had any idea what to do next. After a moment of standing there in baffled shock in the hallway, I stepped over it, rinsed my mouth and face, and returned with as much dignity as I could summon to the kitchen, saying "Can I possibly have a paper towel or something? I just sort of threw up."
They were kind people. As a nurse, the mother's instinctive, first reaction was to stabilize. They sat me down, they fetched me a glass of water, they adopted furrowed brows. There was no lip-curled disgust. No "Eeww" or similar. The mother instructed her daughter to lay me down on one of their couches in a dim room, and dispatched herself to the hallway for the unenviable task of cleanup.
They both seemed to suspect illness. My temperature was taken. I was worried over and pampered and urged to just relax, sip the water, don't worry about a thing. Only I knew the unspeakable truth, one that I dared not tell--the truth all males in such a situation know and have known throughout time: I was not physically impaired. I was just fucking scared shitless.
Now. While I say men throughout time have realized this about themselves, it's true that they have had such moments of purging panic fear in extremely different circumstances: When confronted unexpectedly with a woolly mammoth, or at the call of "Charge!" or in the ball-turret at 30,000 feet, or when about to storm a fucking beach under mortar fire. These men have puked in abject fear. And so be it. I, though, maybe because I had never been tested, maybe because I wasn't much of an athlete, or maybe because I had just watched too much goddam TV--I puked in the warm kitchen of a beautiful girl serving me comfort food. The heart is a lonely hunter.
Fast forward weeks, months, to prom night. She was wearing one of those strapless dresses where her shoulders were bare, as if she were rising up like Aphrodite out of it, and the moment arrived when I was supposed to do my thing as we lay there on yet another dark couch, and pull the dress down. I mean even in my state of chode-hood I wasn't incapable of reading signals. And so what, then, gentle reader, do you imagine I did?
At least I made it to the bathroom this time.
Let me be clear here in my description of what was happening: I was not revolted. There was no feeling of disgust, which is what is usually associated with vomiting or the urge to do so. Quite the contrary. The cause, as I have suggested, was panic fear. A normal reaction to stimuli thrown into bizarro world.
I lived with this for some time. I eventually broke up with the kind green-eyed girl. She married a close friend of mine. Then divorced him. Anyway the experience of wanting to puke any time I felt a tingling in my loins or flutter in the heart did not just go away. I was to feel this in many instances as I got older. Probably I should have drunk alcohol or ingested some other substance to lubricate my social self, but I was raised in a teetotaling household and wasn't equipped with the wherewithal. And although I came to drink eventually, and, eventually, even get high from time to time, this was always in a very specific context with a specific friend (who I've written about in a separate, equally rambling post).
I can remember moments poised over the porcelain dry-heaving, praying audibly as we are said to do when at the end of our respective ropes: "Please, make this stop." And it didn't, and wouldn't, for a long long time. Until it did. A time for all things, I suppose.
Now we move in time. Now in the story I am early twenties. I am still a virgin. I have left home and moved to Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. In my training group I meet a leggy brunette with bookish glasses and doe eyes, and I fuck her in a tent as we camp in a dark gorge away from our training group. Accidentally. She laughs that I am a virgin, but not in a mocking way. I am, to her--she a wild artist a few years older from Huntingdon Beach--I am like someone from a Harper Lee story. I embody a southern gentlemen fetish she never knew she had. And she shepherds me patiently through my belated sexual awakening--and Christ looking back on it how insatiable are young men, or at least we were then. Surely it wasn't just me.
So what does any of this have to do with your question or issue?
After I returned to the US I had changed. Many events far too numerous to write out or even summarize occurred in the interim, but suffice to say I came of age, whatever that phrase means for you. I left a boy and returned a man. I began to be the guy who threw parties. I organized social functions. I became gregarious, at least for a time. And in short order I met a new girl (the woman in tent I had long ago left behind, and then she had quickly moved on. Other entanglements had followed.) This new young woman I have also alluded to in these threads. She was a very attractive, confident, intellectual Jewish girl (not that that last part matters except that she was the only Jewish girl I was ever intimate with.) And we had sex and then she stopped answering my calls. And then the old familiar feeling returned.
In those days we still used answering machines. I'd call hers and leave messages I hoped were funny. And some of them probably were. It didn't matter. I saw her in a Camaro next to some buff dude who looked like his idea of good conversation was talking about Bama football, or bong types, or titties. And she was hanging on his side like a nymph to his Apollo.
Next time I saw her was at a bar. Two seconds later I felt like hitting the toilet. I didn't . Instead I spoke to her, had a laugh, and took my leave . I decided I wouldn't care about anyone enough again to be that worried what they thought. This required a considerable amount of bootstrapping for me to convince myself. But apparently, I did. A time for all things.
Is there any advice in here? God knows. But it's an anecdote, and you asked. Good luck man. I'm rooting for you.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2yr ago
As a resident and homeowner in Japan one of the small aspects of daily life I miss most are yards. In which I might play with my sons, or keep my dog if we had one, or mow and rake as therapeutic look-this-thing-I-did-has-immediate-results. As it is we have pavement, and in one small section, gravel, and a few potted plants. There is a small dedicated neighborhood park adjacent to our home, and for a time I used to busy myself with its upkeep, until it was gently suggested to me that this was accruing undesirable on on the part of the rest of the neighborhood, to whom my behavior could only be seen as odd but then what-can-one-expect-from-foreigners.
I am not sure if lawns in particular are your bugbear, or a general disdain of people. Lawns are arguably not the sole domain of the suburban middle class. You use the term Karen-y which puts you square in my mind in a certain youthful angry nihilistic demographic that is alien to me. Though I could be wrong. The snark may be clouding your greater points.
To some degree this is cultural, and the vehemence here on both sides can be attributed to cultural assumptions.
In Japan the school is very much (I was going to put a percent on it but that would be pushing it) charged with raising the children. If you see a kid out in the world pulling some jackass stunt, the question "What is your school and who is your home teacher?" is enough to chill their veins. You don't ask "Who's your dad?"
Enculturation in the Japanese sense cannot occur outside the context of the group, so it is within the group (i.e. the school group[s]) that this process occurs, year by year, from a very very young age.
To some degree this is how one can understand the term "bullying" in Japan. There are of course exceptions, but bullying here is largely when you have a kid who for whatever reason just doesn't toe the line after years of having the rules dinned into his or her brain. (There could of course be all sorts of reasons for this.) So you have an entire class, not just one punk, turning against a student. Bullying here is not one monster terrorizing a class, but a class "terrorizing" one individual.
Teachers here, in particular in primary and secondary education, for the most part (of course I am writing generally) take the job of raising the children (子どもを育てる) as an explicit part of their jobs. In the cases of troubled students (think fighting in school, but also just basic withdrawal) meetings are held, and there is a great deal of discussion and handwringing, often in absurd ways and resulting in very odd strategies. If a kid makes up his or her mind to just rebel, schools will eventually go through with expulsion. And compulsory education only lasts through age 15, or the first year or so of high school.
I've probably overwritten this. I am aware it's different in the US, where people have specific ideas of parenting, self-expression, individuality, and personal choice.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7mo ago
The reddit link has its top post reading "Removed by Reddit." God I hate what that site has become.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
As I sit here of a Friday evening and reduce the bolognese sauce (avocado salad, a kind of coleslaw, buttered garlic baguette--these are the other parts of the dinner not the makeup of the sauce) I reflect that I have gained much from my time on the Motte. I don't know or interact with any of you on a personal level, but then I am in an environment where apart from my family I interact with precious few in that way (there's something called tatemae in Japan that means basically "outward face that you show to the world" that I keep on most always.) I probably express myself on this site more than anywhere else, in some ways. Though to be honest am probably polite here to an effete degree that belies my face-to-face persona, where I am an unremitting ass.
This to say I appreciate everyone here, even the wackadoos whose opinions I disagree with vehemently. Everyone here, regardless of viewpoint, seems really intelligent and talented at expressing themselves in writing. So thank you. And I mourn those who've left, or who rarely post for whatever reason, in particular a few people who I won't name.
Once again, not fun. But I appreciate all y'all's input and I value the active participation here. I disagree with those who've said this place has ossified.
Happy Friday, all.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2mo ago
Does Trump "dislike" LGBT? One of my pet peeves is the usage of that term, which I find to be baldly political and rather deceptive in its lumping of so many groups together. Just another subtle linguistic way of saying "straight" or heterosexual behavior somehow puts one in a political camp that isn't "LGBT."
But Trump doesn't seem to have any particular problem with homosexuals, either gay or lesbian, nor have I seen or heard him say anything about bisexuals. Arguably he disapproves of the progressive push of transsexuals in sports, but has he made any statements that he "dislikes" the T?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
Face tattoos signify a rather fundamental disengagement with the norms of greater society such that I can't imagine becoming great buddies with anyone who has one. This is true to a lesser degree of full sleeves, etc. This is true in or out of Japan.
Sensible shoes or sneakers worn with business attire on commutes suggests a comfort in the wearer with his/her social standing. (Dress shoes on the same commute could suggest the opposite but context is relevant).
Anyone 24 or younger on my early morning commute is going home, not to school or work (unless of course they are in athletic gear in which case it's off to sports practice before school). Exceptions include regulars, or people with large roller bags (small roller bags could still be going home.)
Within Japan, expatriate women from North America (US and Canada) or Europe are either: 1) Divorced 2) married to or the consort of a Japanese man. 1) Will be politically progressive 2) will be neutral, disinterested, or conservative
Women with crewcuts are lesbian.
Guys with little hair but big bushy, Zeus-like beards will eventually annoy the shit out of me.
The likelihood that females with long, really done-up fingernails working at afternoon retail fashion outlets in Umeda are also moonlighting as call girls is non trivial.
The bigger and more expansive the menu the more likely the food is mediocre but probably not terrible. (Depending on your definition of terrible.)
The allure of the smell of ramen shops is inversely related to the hour of day-- meaning in early morning the smell is revolting. Late night, enticing.
The degree to which an American male tends to adhere to modern fashion trends is a reasonable predictor of how politically left he leans.
If I close my eyes before being introduced to your American female cousin visiting Japan, I will predict that she: 1) looks older than her age 2) is overweight by 20 or more pounds 3) leans politically left 4) eats more than I at lunch and dinner.
People who keep their calendars updated and full are higher achievers than those who don't. Not always true of artist types.
Creative, artistic people are creatively artistic in multiple ways.
Guys with houses that are like pig pens do not get laid. Unless they are extremely rich.
The chance that the Rolex watch on the dude riding the train is fake is at least 50%. The Omega is probably real.
New acquaintances who are overly friendly want something from me.
Women who are obsessed with and routinely post on social media about the plight of animals do not themselves have children.
Criticizing a woman directly about anything is a mistake that will not produce favorable results.
I don't know how helpful what I'm about to write will be, but I do write it in an attempt to be helpful and I'm not trying to be an ass.
Stop thinking about it. I know, that is really shitty advice, but let me expand on it.
When I was growing up in the 80s the prospect that we would all be annihilated by a nuclear strike was very real. It was spoken of by newscasters, it was the main plot line of many t TV shows and films , it was the subtext in many others.
And do you know how my generation dealt with that? We just didn't think about it. At all. We did not hold that fear in out minds, regardless of perhaps how much the popular media wanted us to do so. "In Europe and America there's a growing feeling of hysteeeria." sang Sting, But all we talked about was the way he pronounced hysteria.
There was a large white structure in the middle of nowhere out in the bumfuck area of the county north of mine, like way out in the Styx. I found it because I had a convertible and used to go on inordinately long drives. My friend and I convinced ourselves this was a missile silo, making us both inhabitants of a town at the center of liftoff and probably a target of a blast. And then we got a pizza and ate it in an unused parking lot.
I don't think we truly believed it was a silo. Or maybe we did. I know we didn't care that much. It didn't matter. If it was, it was, and if the bombs fell, they would fall. But it's always been like that. At least we weren't living through the 30s and 40s. I mean it could have been far, far worse.
What I'm saying is that I am not saying the issues you reasonably bring up are not reasonable. (Edit : Wha? I can't believe I wrote that sentence.) I won't try to argue you out of believing them. I will suggest that diverting yourself into the people and world around you (not in this Mottespace, but around you in what I still call the real world) may be helpful.
As usual my train has arrived and I have to book it to get to my next one. Sorry. If this is helpful, great. If not, I hope you work through this ennui, this, well, pondering.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
I may have another commercial. Have I mentioned I am sometimes in commercials? I am. This is no big deal because if they need a foreigner and you are available, cha ching. Early on I was in mostly web CMs (as they are called here) and overdubbed. Yes that's me, fuck it. It was 11 yrs ago.
Anyway the new one is a bank/credit card so maybe they'll drop the cash. Will update. My burgeoning celebrity continues... /s
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4mo ago
Congratulations!!! Fantastic news.
To you, as the wife: Don't change, as much as possible, from the woman he married. Some change is inevitable, but he shouldn't look at you some day and think "Who the hell are you?" He probably still will.
Avoid becoming a complainer like you would avoid getting bubonic plague. You needn't be always positive all the time, but a nice rule is: The first thing you say to him on meeting after any time apart should be something positive. If he can depend on you for positivity, you will be worth to him more than Africa's ivory and Asia's gold. This is true even if you complain together about things.
Let him have his downtime, alone time, whatever he does to have that, and almost all men do. It's nothing personal.
Finally, and this isn't an exhaustive list but I'm in the bath and it's past midnight: When and if you do have kids, remember that he is not one of them
I wish you many healthy happy years together. Mazel Tov!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6mo ago
Might I suggest that you, while clearly a very intelligent guy, may not be as bigger-brained than the rest of us as you often wish to portray. I learn things all the time here, I learn things from your own posts, even. That is not to say I believe everything that's posted here by you or anyone else (though I do admit I don't have the expertise many here have in various subjects and often weigh that against what I perceive are their historically expressed biases in deciding how far to believe them.)
You clearly have biases and often mix them with facts in an attempt to either gather likeminds or subscribers. This isn't by any means unusual but I also think that if any point you wish to make is worth making, it's worth making without resort to knee jerk insulting dismissals. I personally found your insults to Indians rather immature, and I remember posting, if not a rebuttal, less than a ringing endorsement. Some of us can't be bothered to engage with a zealot who we know will never ever give ground, and more and more that is what I perceive in you.
I will say that your posts, and sometimes even your rants, are often very fun reads, and that you add a lot of color to the Motte (perhaps not the word you'd prefer?)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7mo ago
It's not just political subs. Reddit is a web of lies, misrepresentation, shills, fraud, and trolling. Believe me I wish it weren't the case. I mean I have a long train commute.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10mo ago
I don't mind political humor as long as it isn't laser-focused to sway my vote because of some misperceived social responsibility to be both funny and have the high ground. I think I'd like Steven Colbert as a man, like if I knew the actual guy, but he seems to be almost religiously democrat (unless he's changed recently) and that really prevents me from enjoying his comedy as I'm just waiting for his next hymn to Biden/Kamala (or whoever).
I remember Stewart in an interview chiding the later-year members of Crossfire (Tucker Carlson and I think Bob Novak) that their polarizing rhetoric was "destroying America" but then his own whole schtick became extremely partisan. My last straw was when he dialed back and accused his past self of "shitty and reductive" views on transgender issues, to wild applause. Know your audience, I guess.
I enjoyed the linked clip and once again feel like Twitter and its ability to raise my blood pressure (by reading responses) must in the end be a net negative for at least the Western world, maybe everybody.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11mo ago
Let's turn it around and say you're the prole dum-dum and she's the elite status genius. How would you feel if she harboured these doubts about you? Called it off because although you click on every level, she just doesn't want her kids to be stuck going to a state school because they inherited your midwit genes?
I can't imagine the feeling is good. Or maybe you're just that kind of pragmatist. My (less snarky) take: If you are lucky enough to meet a woman you love, then further that luck when that same woman loves you, and then you show yourself to be among the truly blessed and manage to be healthily and happily married, and then, miracle of miracles, get her pregnant and she carries the child to term and has a boy or girl with no complications, then you've really had an amazing good fortune that many in history have not. If you then have further children, then you're lucky beyond measure. To be sure, so are a lot of people, but then that's for lack of a better term survivorship bias.
My opinion here should be clear. HBD may be observable and to some degree predictable. Unlike many here I am not particularly interested in or swayed by that idea. Plus I'm probably more a romantic than not.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11mo ago
To me this is a foreign perspective. To say that a politician being compelled to address difficult questions signifies weakness doesn't value intelligence, or the ability to reason, to say nothing of dignity, honor, or ethics--it valorizes the effectiveness of, for lack of a better word, the bully or charlatan. Which, hey, the bullies best at their role always have a nice following of toadies. Followers who, outside his presence (and it's usually but not always a him) try the same strategies but less effectively. And bullies can get things done, but then so did Charles Taylor, Papa Doc Duvalier, etc etc. But once they're gone, regardless of whether you liked their policies (which they themselves probably didn't care about except in as much as they kept them in power) there's suddenly a big hole that will not be filled. Because what to fill it with? Not ideas, surely. Not policy, or vision, or core values. No one agrees in what these are, they just agree they want that hole filled so they and theirs can hang on to power. I'm not saying this is your perspective, necessarily.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
So Morgan Spurlock has died of cancer. I don't mean to "speak ill of the dead" but is it not widely known that his biggest splash, namely the documentary Supersize Me, was based on fudged data and is considered fraudulent? Probably some obits include this, but the few articles I read were all just praise. I certainly didn't wish the man ill and I am sorry for his family.
I guess it's bad form to criticize people when they've died relatively young of a horrible disease. I just think of the legions of people who continue buy into popular pseudo-smarties like Spurlock and Malcolm Gladwell and whoever is currently big on TED, and it seems wrong to just ignore the shoddy thinking.
Alas, that sub is not defunct and still has users by the bucketload. I, too, watched that interview, and was appalled. I am more appalled that on its heels the sub seems to have continued firmly on its dubious rails, at speed.
On a related note, does anyone feel reddit has changed in the past few years, possibly since COVID but maybe after? I deleted the redditisfun app from my phone about six months ago but reddit used to be a site I hit nearly every morning on my commute and enjoyed reading through.
Part of it may be that I began surfing reddit around 2014, nearly ten years ago, and the five year olds of that era are now posting on reddit as militant teens. As I turn into an old man the whole world seems to become younger. I am grateful on a regular basis that there was no internet when I was a teenager; God knows what tripe I would have been posting regularly with smug arrogance.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2yr ago
Integrity here suggests you don't wear the orange shirt. You've made the argument yourself and if you're looking for validation/affirmation, you now have it. Go forth, and fret no more.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1mo ago
How can a person be both a- and trans-gender??
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3mo ago
Seconded. This sounds like bullshit.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
9mo ago
Sometimes on weekends I go for long walks. We live near a big park with a giant pond, and Americans I've known who have walked this park say it's one of the finest parks they've seen, rivaling Central Park in NYC. I've never been to NYC (which is weird) but I have my doubts. The park is good though. It serves me well. I used to take walks with the boys when they were little; in the summer I'd take them for soft cream and french fries at the little hut that sells these for two months out of the year. In the fall I remember I once made them ham and cheese sandwiches and thermoses of corn soup and they wore big jackets and swished kicking through the bunches of leaves. We played baseball using pine cones for balls and broken limbs for bats. That memory will die with me, I expect, as they were too young to now remember it. They don't now take walks with me. Parents of young children, take note: Every season is different, and the joys you have now you should savor, for they will someday be gone, replaced. I won't belabor the point.
The park has cranes, turtles, great orange and red and dun-colored carp, big rat-like nutria, many many various-sized and -colored cats who make their home in the thickets and bamboo, and, once, I saw a fox. My wife does not believe this story ("What would it eat?") but I know what I saw. All kinds of pigeons and crows. You can see ducks floating out on the pond (more of a small lake). Once my youngest boy took his birthday present fishing rod out and practiced casting from the big rocks at the pond edge.
In certain times of the year there are fireflies, and you go and all the lights are off and you walk in pitch black by the creek that trickles down up the hill into the pond and the fireflies--hotaru in Japanese--bloom suddenly in that amazing bioluminescence and float up and back into the dark of the trees. Again, something we took the kids to a few times, years ago. My wife took my hand, as she sometimes--rarely, but sometimes--does, revealing what often seems a lost romantic streak. Women are magical. They do piss me off, yes.
I go for long walks sometimes but now alone--people have more important things do do--but I don't mind going solo, and probably prefer it sometimes. I do not listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks. You can see retired Japanese on bicycles with a bank of phones set up across the handlebars to play Pokemon Go. I do not know how it works. The local Filipino dudes fishing off the bridge, expressly against the signs which say "No fishing off the bridge," but I guess they can't read Japanese. (橋上での釣り中止).
People run in the park, and walk, and kids ride their bicycles through. In season, people spread out their light blue tarps and do cherry-blossom-viewing parties in the area with the cherry and plum trees. I walk all through the park and sometimes out the other end, where there is a trail along a narrow river, and across and down a hill through rice fields and into a cemetery. There are stone altar koro with candles or incense sticks. The other day I unwrapped one from the plastic bag in the little box and opened the drawer there where there were matches and lighters. I lit a stick and prayed for the dead, then added a prayer for the living for good measure. It is a Buddhist ritual, and my ex-girlfriend, a Catholic, used to say she felt Buddhism and Catholicism had a lot in common. I didn't know what she meant then and I still don't, but I suppose in very superficial ways the trappings are the same.
I could sprawl this out into a winding yarn even longer than it is. This makes my life sound very sedate and somewhat boring, and probably compared to many of yours my days are probably pretty dry. I write this in a way as a counterpart to this post and this other post, both of which made considerable impressions on me. I typically don't imagine I live in some idyllic wonderland--certainly if I wrote about my wife's hometown, which is like the Shire, only Japanese, I could make it seem as if I do. But I don't fear assault, and I am not routinely plagued by crime or filth or discomfort beyond a couple of guys fishing off the bridge.
As I write this my son is complaining about the fish eggs in the maki my wife brought home. She is insisting it's not ikura but he is having none of it. He is eating without his shirt on, something my own mother never let us do. They're all speaking Japanese, and I'm on beer #2. I just made a slip and when my wife said "You can't see your father's clavicle" I said "You used to could." This has caused a realization that I am actually not a standard English speaker. You can take the boy out of Alabama.
I'll try to improve my posting style to have more structure. I expect someday I'll miss these times, too, by which I mean this family table but also this, just posting on the Motte.
Well, it might be reasonable to give Kennedy a pass on his response.
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