D is for Dumbass

Today I assisted with my second "English Salon" - a mishmash of minute-English, jammed down the throats of confused, smiling obaasans. We know them as your everyday Old Japanese Lady.

The moment you've knelt down to the ground, your knees explode from their shackles of skin and blood no longer reaches your feet, instead pooling in your ass, and you begin to resemble a horribly dazed baboon WANTING SOME. Disregarding this mounting collection of silent frenzy, you do your best to entertain the ladies with a series of example dialogues, round robin signature exchange, and glassy eyed smiling fueled only by your coming paycheck, which will ensure that someday you will own a Wii.

You flatter the flock of spring chickens with estimations of age being in excess of four decades short, then begin to notice something. That something is your inner conflict furrowing its brow as you question the right and wrong behind coveting the gold in their mouths.

"I am Johnny Depp," you calmly say to yourself with a frightening kind of self-assurance known only to people in straight jackets. "THAR B GOLD IN THEM CAVES," you begin to shout, as the room falls silent.

And suddenly, your lesson has ended and you are free to eat your lunch in the staffroom.

Being the Squiremaster Supreme Leader69 of english at school, I sometimes lose sight of the real difficulty others are having with learning words and phrases. Wearing the cloak of Culture Shock, my lessons are now done at a helpful volume of triple forte, supplemented by a healthy dusting of froth and spittle.

I've had many language follies of my own since arriving in Japan, though. Two come to mind. My friend Anthony quoted a colleague of his, who said that "the Japanese language is always changing" -- meaning that rules are always being bent, and thus the language evolves. I rely heavily on my dictionary from high school, but sometimes it fucks me over. I thumbed to a page looking for a word to describe the wheelchair-bound boy's condition to his teacher, and I ended up noting that it was in fact "hilarious".

Another teacher wanted clarification on the phrase, "Time is running out". I drew an egg timer diagram and wrote the phrase both in english and Japanese. In walked the oldest teacher in the school, and teacher A thoughtfully handed the sheet to her, saying I had made it.

Go on. You can imagine the look I got.