The First Time I've Slept in a Public Place

I had quite the four day weekend.

It started with morning baseball on Wednesday morning so I got up at 3am and then we had a farewell party for one of our teachers on Wednesday night.  So we had a nice fun Japanese work party with tons of delicious Japanese food and drinks.  Three parties and lots of karaoke later, about 2:30 am, the parties were finally over and I returned home.  I got to my front door about ready to collapse after being awake for the past 24 hours.  I reached in my bag for my keys, and found the bag was empty!  I had left my keys at school! Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

So I walk to school and get there about 3am and of course the front door is locked so I just set up shop in the little entrance way and sleep for 4 hours there, using my camera case as a pillow.  It's funny how comfortable a concrete floor is when it's 3am and you're used to going to bed at 8pm.

I wake up at 7am to the newspaper delivery people who thought I was surely either a robber or a homeless guy sleeping in front of the school.  I was too tired to understand everything they were saying but suffice it to say they were pretty surprised to see a foreigner sleeping in front of the school.  About 7:30 rolls around and it's the first day of summer vacation and it's Japan so of course a few students start coming to school.  I'm still in my work clothes from the day before so I just pretend like I'm ready start a day of work while doing my best to hide my current state. Finally an office worker shows up somewhere around 7:45 and opens the school and I get to the teachers room and find my keys sitting where I always put them.  I get home at about 8 or so and of course I gotta check gmail and facebook and I see folks are playing video games so I start playing this incredibly long and boring and pointless game of MineralZ in Starcraft 2 and it was a complete waste of 5 hours of my life since I didn't even unlock the Archon unit thingy, but it was good to play some games for the first time in nearly two months.  After Mike and Andy and folks went to bed at around 3pm my time, I also went to bed.

I woke up at about 6am the next day, sleeping for a total of about 15 hours and still feeling tired.  The next two days consisted of good games during the day and lots of Japanese studying during the night.  By Sunday night I had played a solid 25 hours of video games (bringing my total for June and July to about 25 hours) and written out every word from the movie 秒速五センチ　(5 Centimeters per Second)  It is definitely the saddest movie I have ever seen but it is currently my favorite movie of all time.  It reminds me of Heather and how lucky I am to have her.

This morning was a sad one.  My last morning baseball game.  However, this means I won't be having to wake up at 3am any more so I guess that's good.  The last game went well except I had a crazy time pitching.  I walked the lead off batter every single inning (5 innings) but ended up only giving up one run during the game.  By the 3rd inning, I was like "wtf, I have only walked 3 batters this year before this game but I have already walked two" then I walked the next guy on 4 pitches.  However, the season did end on a good note.  In the 5th inning I walked the lead off batter on 4 pitches and got really mad at myself and proceeded to strike out the next 3 batters on nine pitches to bring the season to a close with a 8-1 victory.

Heather's Third Visit

In case the pictures weren't enough, here's a video of our exploits.

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久し振り

According to my visitor statistics it shows two people that have checked this site every day and a third person that checks it about 5 or 6 times a week.  I commend you three for sticking with your daily checks of this blog despite me not posting for like a month.

So I apologize for the lack of updates.  I think everyone that reads this is probably my facebook friend.  But if not, here are some pictures that summarize my last 2 weeks pretty well: 


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Now that she's returned home, I'll probably resume my unassuming life where I only do ten things for six months straight:

1) Sleep
2) Check facebook
3) Eat
4) Cook
5) Starcraft 2 related things
6) Study Japanese
7) Bike around town
8) Shop
9) Teach
10) gchat cool people

However, Mama is coming to visit in a month so that will surely prevent me from blogging again for about 2 months.  Big Japanese test in December, and  I haven't learned any Japanese in about a month so I need to start buckling down.

I'm an Idiot

So I was just sitting happily at my desk when my teacher puts a stack of 200 papers to check.  No biggie, he's had a lot of work recently so I think nothing of it.  I usually give a quick glance over to make sure there are no spelling mistakes, each paper only takes a few seconds to grade and it's fine.

However, this time, the assignment was to copy down a story from the book (among other things) and the story is 18 sentences long.  We gave students about 25 minutes in class to write the story out and of course half of the students didn't write anything during those 25 minutes.

So then my teacher says "if students didn't write anything, please write in here...かく　or 書いてください。"　(both of those mean "Please write" in Japanese) So I was like "He just told me to please write wherever the students did not write.  This obviously means he wants me to write in the answers wherever the students didn't write.  Then I was like "What the heck are you serious you want me to write all of the stories in for these students that didn't write anything? THIS IS GOING TO TAKE FOREVER AND THE STUDENTS COULD USE THE WRITING PRACTICE THEMSELVES ARRGGGHH THE STORY IS IN THEIR TEXTBOOK WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THIS AHHH GRRR ANGRY!!!

So all that red pen is me writing in the story.  This is half of the story, the rest is on the back.

So of course I start plugging away on my 3-4 hour task of writing out this 18 sentence story (plus questions and answers) about 100 times.  After I finish about 10 of them he notices what I'm doing and he's like, "umm, no don't write it out for them, just write "please write (in Japanese)" where they didn't write.  And I was like "oh, that makes more sense."

And this is what I should have done; just write かく.

I'm an idiot.

Video

If this isn't the coolest video you've ever seen, then I will swallow a sword.

Kanji Time-Lapse

First Morning Baseball Game

Let me begin by saying that the average player on the other team was around 50 years old, including a left fielder who was in his 80s. They treat baseball much the same way Americans treat slow-pitch softball, it's just a way to get together with friends and have a good time. So with that, I will continue this writeup as if we were up against the 2008 Warhawks.

So the day begins with a 3:30am alarm. I ate a nice traditional Japanese energy meal consisting of rice balls with various things in the middle such as salmon/cheese, egg salad and tuna salad. My ride arrived on time at 4am and we were the first ones to the field to begin warmups.

As people begin to show up they say that I am the first foreigner to play Noheji morning baseball. So seeing as I was the Jackie Robinson of this league, I knew I had to be on my best behavior all the time and the people would stare at me funny. I do a pretty generic jog around the field and stretch out like usual and it's maybe 4:15, first pitch in 45 minutes. I am informed that I'll be the only pitcher today since the other two pitchers on the team couldn't make it. I don't want to throw too much, so after about 10 minutes of playing catch, I start getting closer and closer to my partner to signify that I'm about done.

But every time I got within 60 feet of him, he always said "Toe-masu...back!" and so I would go back and play more catch. This would repeat a few times, I would back up, throw a couple times, then get close and each time I would get closer, he would scream something in Japanese, motion for me to go back and say "Toe-masu...back!" After a good half hour of throwing and the game starting pretty soon, the catcher finally arrives and they have me throw in the bullpen with the catcher. Of course I had to pretend to be superman but my arm was already dead by this point.

Meanwhile, as I'm warming up in the bullpen, I notice some weird gathering of people in the infield. I assume it's a meeting or something, but then I see two people with bats in their hand standing about 10 feet behind home plate and separated by about 5 feet with no L screens or nets anywhere on the field. And then of course they start taking batting practice right there on the field, pitchers maybe 40 feet away not even paying attention when the other teams batter was hitting. Crazy. For those of you unfamiliar with baseball warmups, usually one team bats at a time with a pitcher behind a net that blocks any balls from hitting the pitcher (since during batting practice, the pitcher stands much closer to the batter than in a game) and it would be considered suicide to throw batting practice without such a net.

So anyhow, I've been throwing for 45 minutes straight and the game is about to start, we have maybe 5 minutes of downtime and so I get out my wallet to go buy something from the vending machine in our dugout. As I reach for my wallet, one of the other players was like "ooh Toe-masu...drink?" and I was like "hai" (yes) and he was like "ah, my treat." And so we go and stand in front of the vending machine.

I'm going to take a quick break from the story and teach you a little Japanese. ゴ　is a character that is pronounced "go" and　コ is pronounced "ko." The only difference of course is the little quotation marks above the "go" ゴ　コ. マ　is pronounced "ma" and ン　is pronounced "n"

So back to the action, we're in front of the vending machine and there is a pretty crazy font that I haven't seen before on one of the drinks and I look at it and see マンコ。 He asks me what I want and I had no idea what "manko" was so I said "マンコ。。。おいしいですか？"　(is Manko delicious?) and he gives me an absolute death stare and starts bursting out laughing. Turns out that there were the little apostrophes that I didn't see and so it was supposed to be "mango." マンゴ means "mango" and マンコ　"manko" is about the most offensive thing you can possibly say, it is a slang word for "vagina" and basically translates to "pussy." So our conversation went like this:

"What would you like?"
"Is pussy delicious?"

The team really got a good laugh out of that one. So anyhow, the game starts and I'm on the mound for the top of the first. The opposing batter steps in who was easily their youngest player and probably about my age. He had the eyes of an angry coach Hoefs, the muscles of a young Coach Heiderscheit, the speed of a young Coach Perchinsky and the goatee of Coach Hucke (black instead of red, of course), he was a worthy challenge for my introduction to Japanese baseball. He worked the count full and I didn't want a lead off walk so I gave him a nice meatball down the middle and he slapped it to right for a base hit, there goes my dreams of a opening day no hitter. Luckily by about the 5th batter, there was nothing but 2008 Tom Corcoran's in the lineup (aka not anyone to be scared of), so it was pretty smooth sailing through the bottom of the lineup.

My first plate appearance was also worth noting. I was getting my game face on with my angry-must-hit-ball-hard look and ready to go when suddenly the pitcher yells out "ganbatte toe-masu!" basically "good luck Tom!" And then everyone on my team starts yelling "over the fence" and "ganbatte!" I don't really know how to respond so I just take off my helmet, bow and say "arigato gozaimasu!" (thank you). And so of course this throws me off and I'm smiling way too much to be a big scary hitter so I let the first two pitches go by right down the middle. After working the count full, I go after a high outside pitch and get it up middle and get my first hit and RBI in my first plate appearance. Good start.

Not too much else to note, other than the fact that as soon as we would get of the field and it was our turn to bat, at least 5 people on our team would light up cigarettes and start smoking right there in the dugout.

It ends up not being close, we win 14-0.

My final lines were:
Batting: 2-3 2B BB 4R 4 RBI 2SB
Pitching: 5 IP 7K 0BB 4H

Definitely a great time and well worth waking up at 3:30, can't wait for the next game!

So a quick summary of differences between Royals baseball and Japanese morning baseball.

• Royals are much much better.
• 5 people smoking in the dugout after each half inning.
• Opposing team yells "Go Toe-masu!" Every time I bat.
• Vending machine within arms reach of the dugouts.
• Change balls after each hit.
• They clean balls by running water over them to rub off the dirt.
• Everyone lines up and bows at the beginning and end of each game.
• Everyone plays catch after the game to cool down.
• Warmups consist of the pitcher throwing for 45 minutes straight.
• Both teams take batting practice on the field at the same time and no L screens are used.

Crazy Baseball Stat

Here's something that hasn't happened before in my 20-year baseball playing career.

Over the past two games I had a stretch of at bats where I was 0-5 with 5 official RBIs and 8 runners scored in those 5 at bats.

On Monday, twice I came up with a runner on third, and twice I came up with runners on second and third. The two times with a runner on third, I hit weak grounders up the middle and the runner scored while I got out. The two times I came up with runners on second and third, I hit hard grounders, one at the second basemen, one at the first basemen and each one got by the fielders and I reached on errors, and two runners scored each time.

Monday's batting line 0-4 4 RBIs 2 R 6 Runners scored during my at bats.

Then sure enough, we are the visiting team and the leadoff batter gets a hit, second batter gets walked, and I come up with runners on first and second. First pitch to me is a wild pitch and runners advance to second and third. And of course, I hit a weak ground ball to short and he overthrows the first basemen and two runners score.

So for 5 consecutive at bats, my line was 0-5 5 RBIs 3R 8 Runners scored during my at bats.

Luckily I ended the streak in my next at bat by getting a nice liner to the gap.