George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
I'm interested in reactions here since one of my own sons will be 16 in less than a year. The world was very different in many ways when I was that age, and now certain advice I'd give ("Spend more time with your dad asking him questions. Help him more working on the car.") I couldn't give my own son without sounding like an idiot.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10hr ago
I can't speak for all love hotels, obviously. Emergency exits I believe are always available on each floor, but rooms themselves are locked. I presume in a fire the rooms would auto unlock and the exits are right there. Love hotels typically have no windows or very small ones and so there are no fire escapes of that sort.
Theft and arson here do occur, but crime in general isn't as common as the US at least. Arsons are particularly egregious because it is impossible to contain fire in densely populated areas. When they are perpetrated here the arsonists are usually found to be mentally ill.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
Love hotels ftw.
To lengthen this post past frivolousness, there's still the danger of having one's wallet lifted, or watch stolen, etc. But you can't get out of a love hotel unless you've paid, at least in the modern iteration. That means both parties are shut-ins until the bill has been settled at the little machine on the wall.
Of course the criminal-minded can be creative so this is no guarantee of safety from theft, or, you know having your head cut off, which is considerably more of an inconvenience.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
I agree, it's like somebody picked up his phone and started messaging, like a completely different person.
High school graduate 1986, never did but this was Alabama. Then again Huck Finn and the like came considerably earlier and I vaguely remember my elementary school teacher (white, Mrs. Fletcher) doing so. But memory deceives. I honestly don't remember being exposed to other works in school with that word, at least in class.
Edit: slightly related, once this same teacher was talking about Brazil Nuts for some reason and--again this was a long time ago, how many caveats do I need, hmm--she was hesitant to say out loud the colloquial term (among whom I have no idea) for said seed, and elicited this term from the class, zeroing in apologetically on Steve, one of two black guys in my elementary school class at the time. He said he didn't know, nor did anyone else. Just as she had given up Steve blurted out happily, "Oh, nigger toes!"
I do not recall the general reaction but for me at least it was a pretty weird moment.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2d ago
Probably it was I who was channeling my experience into your own. That is very young for your mother to have died, you yourself must have been quite young also.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
Trade-off. For us the money and lifestyle to which we were accustomed was here, plus safety, cleanliness, and a degree of what for lack of a better term I'll call culture. My home in Alabama had giant yards, lakes, ski boats, big Golden retrievers, and all the high protein meals one could ask for, and of course family, but beyond my parents I don't miss my extended family to any real degree with only two exceptions, and was happy to be far from them. My very close friends are still in touch, some daily thanks to LINE and Whatsapp
I think for many reasons women who have children benefit from their mother nearby, in ways that are not immediately apparent for men. My wife's family is also a plane or bullet train ride away, but that's quite close in modern terms. I mean there's no time zone difference or significant financial hit to connect. Currently flying internationally feels like being robbed at gunpoint.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
Now I wish I could see what this is a response to. (Maybe just the quoted text?)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
What's with the men-only part? I am sincerely asking for clarification because I am not sure of the rationale.
Every year, but only once a year. We lived, my wife and I, with them for six months once, but they were fine-ish then. Cancer was sudden for my mother, and she died far too early at 73. But you never know when shit like that will hit. I went when she was first diagnosed, but by then it was stage IV multiple myeloma.
When my wife had the boys, each time, my mom came over to Japan. This was well before her illness. She, too, seemed fine, and in much better shape than my dad, but she was 11 years younger. Then when the boys were old enough to not be screamers on the plane we took them over each Christmas. My brother lived with my parents at that point and this was something I convinced myself was a benefit, but it turned out to be quite different, as my brother is a slackass. (There's no other way to put it; in fact I'm being generous.)
My dad lived a good five or six years after she died, just past his 90th birthday. The few times we went to visit after her passing were difficult, and each time when we said goodbye I could see in his eyes he was resigned it would be the last time. Then COVID hit, and this irrefutably, escalated the speed at which he deteriorated. Support that should have been there simply wasn't. And in those days just up and flying over was not an option. Even when he died I had to go through all sorts of tedious bureaucratic cartwheeling just to fly over and back (though by then those hoops were predominantly on this side. No one in the US seemed to give a shit, including his nurses prior to hospice whose commitment to a sterile environment did not seem steadfast.)
I also found the distance difficult, as you say, particularly when my sons were their only grandchildren, but their demise seemed far off then, decades away, like my own death seems: unimaginable somehow.
Edit: Apparently MM has only stages I, II, and III, but I am sure I heard someone say stage IV. Anyway, the last stage, the end stage.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
I did not watch my parents die. Well, I did watch my father die, or I got real close to watching it--he died in the night around 3 am, and I got the call in my hotel room at the airport where I was supposed to be flying out that day (I did.) But I had slept in his room and kept vigil when we knew death was very near. We (me, whoever else who also knew but wasn't there, certainly the hospice nurses, probably my brother) knew, we just didn't know exactly when. At the end (not the very end because as I say I did not see the very end) he had been found clutching his shirt (it was only a shirt front, it was for appearances for possible visitors--easier to maneuver him for being washed etc, explained the nurse, or caretaker, or whatever she was by training. A kind woman, or very good at faking kindness.) He had been found, anyway, clutching his shirt up almost above his chest, as if trying to tear it off, with--I was told with merciless accuracy--tears streaming down his face.
My dad had been robust. He had been neither soft nor weak as a man. He had never made a sound that suggested he was owed anything, or that the world was treating him poorly. Never uttered any complaint about anything, at least to my memory And this was a man who had nursed his wife (my mother) through the most degrading stages of cancer. When she died, finally, he once confided in me, he was grateful. He had prayed that God take her. He had said he was grateful that I had never had to see her in her final state (my mother had been an exceptionally beautiful woman in her youth). Age does its thing, though.
I write this to commend you for taking in your husband's parents in this way, for not every wife would. I also write it to hint at what no doubt you already expect, the thought that bleeds through each of your sentences here: It's going to get worse.
This isn't a warning. I am not giving advice. And true enough, I was (and am) 4,500 nautical miles from my home country's coastline, then if you just flew like a crow another 1900 miles. Then I'd be, or would have been, right there in the thick of it, scrubbing carpets out, making dinners and taking them in then taking out plates with food still on them. And the in-between time just stretches of Seinfeld reruns, or watching the frail old man who had once struck fear and respect in your heart fill books of sudoku puzzles, books you'll eventually collect in a Glad bag with every other bit of everyday flotsam and toss in the big green barrel that you'll wheel to the curb for trash pickup and burning. I don't have any high ground here. I was gone. And had I not been gone many, many things might have gone considerably better for my family (my American family, the one who had me the first part of my life.)
So what's my fucking point? You say you don't know how much of her inertia is her body's weakness, and how much depression. At risk of taking a monist stance, I'd say probably both. How can we know the dancer from the dance (apologies to Yeats).
It is what it is. In an upbeat film, she'd remember something or someone from Europe, or a dream she once had of seeing Sagrada Familia, she'd take the trip, there would be many comedic scenes of family frustration bound by love, and then the film would end, or she'd die in her sleep peacefully in the hotel bed. I like movies, too. I should write one. And who knows how close your reality will be to something less dark, more optimistic. I don't, certainly.
Do you have anyone you can lay all this out to besides your husband? (It's possible you can to him, but because it's his mom the dynamic of that conversation may not be ideal.) Mind you I come from a tribe that never talked anything out, and did its best to avoid any talking of any sort that would be in line with the American therapeutic chat up. But for some that helps.
My train is here. Sorry to end abruptly. I wish you good luck.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
You're not going to see the results. Even if you're good. And by "good" a dozen possibilities could be inserted there for your imagination. You're funny. You seem cool. You look like the guy they knew one time. You tell great stories You sing. Whatever. For kids learning language is about making them want to immerse themselves in the language, and they want to do that because something makes them interested. A generation of Japanese girls "love English" because of One Direction, and not because Zayne knew anything about comprehensible input. You're not going to see the results because language teaching and learning is slow, and people get better or don't because of many, many reasons, but a specific method or methodology is way down on the list.
I taught English in the Peace Corps 30 years ago. In a country in Africa. I guess those kids were underprivileged. They seemed pretty resilient though. One girl messaged me on LinkedIn a year or two ago after having become a doctor. I cannot claim responsibility. If you want to teach kids, be interesting. Be amusing. Keep their interest even if it's just playing the lyre. Instill that interest in English and they'll do the hard part on their own. As we all do. Or don't.
If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
In Japan this behavior wouldn't even be noteworthy. The tattoo might be seen as gauche, unless of course it washed off and was applied to your cheek or something. I knew a girl once named Mitsuki because her mother loved Disney--in Japanese Mitsuki is a play on ミッキー or Mickey, where the ッ there represents a pause, unless it's a big ツ in which case it's just TSU, as in Mitsuki. She's a lovely girl, I still follow her on Instagram.
But we were talking about porn, sorry for the derail. It's true a non-Japanese person engaging in this (Disneyphile) behavior would probably be seen as a square peg--probably not a fucking loser though. More like a white girl in a kimono. Noticeable, but not in any bad way (I'm talking Japanese perception here). My former girlfriend (not Japanese) used to walk around Osaka age 25 wearing a Curious George backpack because she imagined she could get away with it here. And true enough, probably she did. But I knew better.
Edit: As for porn, it's illegal here to show genitalia in porn, so there's a giant underground, of course. I think the same stigma on porn buyers that you mention applies here.
2nd edit: After reading the pocket pussy comment below, I reflected on the ubiquity of the Tenga in Japanese drug stores. I've never seen anyone buy one though.
This kind of generalization-based quantitative thinking is I think the undoing of the Motte in some ways. I don't disagree with the idea of academic freedom over censorship, but this bean counting assumption-driven basis of policy is to me patently bad policy.
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