In the previous post, I wrote I had a dream and fell out of bed. It reminded me of another dream I used to have all the time--being unable to move. I wrote about it a long time ago, back on October 31, 2003. The following is a partial edited repost.

Kanashibari

Have you ever dreamed of being awake but not being able to move? I have. In Japanese, its called kanashibari, or bound in chains. The first time I experienced it, I thought that I was somewhere in a parallel universe. I was in my bed and I recognized the outline of the pulled shades in my dark room, but I couldn't move. With great effort I tried to will myself, but my feet and hands wouldn't budge. I was beginning to panic. I'm paralyzed! I thought. I tried to scream but couldn't. After struggling with my body, I slowly was able to gain a modicum of control, until finally I woke up completely. At this point, I was breathing heavily. What the hell was that?!?

I had a few more similar experiences, and I realized that it usually occured when I was exhausted or completely stressed out. I even figured out how to get myself out of it: take deep and deliberate breaths. I had discovered that the one thing I could control when I was "in chains" was my breathing. Long deep breaths that take in lots of oxygen for the brain.

Eventually, I figured out what was happening--at least, as far as an amateur sleepologist like me is able to diagnose such an experience. I had found myself in chains as I was watching a rerun of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, suddenly unable to move my body. Huh, what the heck? I'm still watching the show, I can see what's going on, the room is the same, everything is the same! What the heck is happening? I proceeded with my unchaining regimen, taking deep breaths and finally waking up. But it struck me: I must be sleeping with my eyes open. My body is asleep and cannot move, but since my eyes are open, I am still taking in stimuli from the outside world and it gives the effect of being awake.

Indeed, I often go to sleep with my eyes open, as my sister would gladly atttests, for she finds it creepier than hell. She realized this when she once began a conversation when I was watching TV in my sleep. My lack of response pissed her off and she was about to tell me of when I began snoring. She thought I was putting her on, but she eventualy realized that I actually was asleep. When I told her later that I vaguely remember her in the room, she told me that this was simply one more reason to label me a freak. Im sure you can tell my sister and I are close.

Now I'm no sleep expert, so what I have just described above is definitely a layman's diagnosis. But maybe, just maybe, someone knows more about this phenomenon and can tell me something definitive.

Query: Have you ever been in chains?

I don't really remember the dream except for that I was running away and I began to stumble. The next thing I knew, I was falling and bumped my knee on the floor next to my bed. It was early morning and M, who was already awake and brushing her teeth, was surprised by the sound and ran in from the bathroom.

"What happened? Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I said dazed still holding onto the stand of the floor lamp next to our bed. I had instinctively grabbed onto the pole as I tumbled out of bed. I suppose this was an instictive act, but fortunately prevented me from hitting my head anywhere.

M started giggling. "That was quite a thud. I thought the bed broke or something."

All I could do was shrug my shoulder, half in embarrassment, half in bewilderment. It's been a while since I had fallen out of bed. Over forty years, I think, when I was eight or nine years old. But for whatever reason, I can still remember that dream. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was chasing me through the streets of a metropolitan city and then I fell off a cliff, falling onto the floor between my bed and desk.

I had heard somwhere that if you actually hit the bottom in a falling dream, you'd really die. This is probably an urban legend, but I'm not the type to test death theories. I'm a firm believer of the adage, "Better safe than sorry." Although, admitedly, it's not as though I could force myself to wake up in a dream. But I am glad I sorta woke up before I hit the floor.

Query: Have you ever fallen out of your bed? When was the last time you fell out of bed?

Yesterday, the LA area was hit by an earthquake. I haven't experienced one in a long time, and the 5.4 magnitude would seem to be strong enough to scare many, but it wouldn't cause much damage except to old structures and outdated infrastructure. Indeed, except for the items falling off store shelves, the damage I saw on TV was mostly limited to old unreinforced brick walls and the water lines in older areas in town, like City Terrace. I'm not trying to make light of the situation. I'm just glad that nothing catastrophic happened.

Born and raised in California, I have had my share of earth moving experiences. The first big one I felt was the Sylmar earthquake of 1971, which was a 6.6 magnitude jolt. It woke me from bed and many things from my shelf fell to the floor. We called school and good ol' Loyola High School said there would be classes as scheduled, but when I got there I was told to go home as they found cracks all over the old main building and city engineers needed to inspect the building before they'd allow anyone in it. Finally, our tax dollars at work, my dad had said.

I also lived through the big one in San Fransisco. Actually, the epicenter was closer to Santa Cruz and is known as the Loma Prieta Quake. This is closer to where I was at Stanford, and it was humungous. My then-wife had gone the pick up our daughter from daycare when the 7.1 quake struck and she told me that cars parked on the street literally rose and fell in waves. My sister lived in the Divisadero section of San Fransisco, a landfill area created for the 1915 World's Fair. As you probably know, landfill reacts like quicksand in a major earthquake and many of the homes in the area were utterly destroyed. I went to pick up my sister and it looked like a war zone. I remember going with her to an evacuation center at a local elementary school to find out the status of her flat. We walked over the sidewalk that had buckled everywhere, and walked by classrooms in which the elderly apparently in shock were lying in army cots or sitting, eating bologna sandwiches distributed by the Red Cross. My sister received a yellow card, meaning that the status of her building had yet to be determined--this was three days after the quake. Fortunately, her apartment was deemed safe, but it took three weeks until she was finally able to move back in, and even then she had no water and electricity.

As for me? Well, you sports fans will remember that it was the opening day of the World Series and I was getting ready to watch the first pitch. I had the beer chilled, and got the chips out. And not wanting to have to run to the bathroom between innings, I decided to take a dump right before the game. So there I was, sitting on the can on the second floor of our student housing residence--it was like a mini-faux-townhouse--and the place jumped up and down with a jolt, then started rocking left and right. Not to get detailed, but I was only halfway finished and I didn't know what the fuck to do. I heard books falling and dishes crashing to the floor--Shit! Was that the Doritos?!?. I opened the door to the bathroom and from the throne, I could see the ceiling lamp that hung above the staircase landing swinging like a pendulum in a 90 degree arc. I was in panic mode, trying to think of a course of action--What should I do!--but all I could do was think, Fuck. Is this how I'm gonna die? Taking a shit? They're gonna dig through the rubble and find my body with my pants bunched around my ankles?!? Fuck, what a way to die!

Then it stopped. The walls did not come tumbling down. The floor did not collapse. And I survived with my dignity intact: Ass wiped, pants pulled up. Whew!

FYI: I often embellish my personal stories for "dramatic" (read: humorous) effect but this story is pretty much exactly as I remember it.

Back in 1972, my grandparents informed my mother
that they were willing to have me come to Japan for the first time in an
attempt to nurture a relationship that was on again, off again, due to the
physical distance between us. Back in the 1970s, going to and from Japan was
not an inexpensive journey, and my siblings and I rarely saw our grandparents.
In fact, the first and only time I had seen them until I became an adult was in
the summer of 1968, when I was 12 years old, in Zurich, of all places. But in the summer of
1972, I had already been working at a Japanese confectionary in J-Town for
about two months, and I enjoyed it so much that I didn't want to quit. I
convinced my mother that my sister should go in my stead and that, in fact, she
was the better candidate to "meet the grandparents" as she was much
more studious and therefore more highly valued as a  grandchild in the
eyes of the grandparents. My mother bought into it, and I was free to continue
my adventure in J-Town enveloped in an excitingly new environment at a Japanese
confectionary shop, the place where I first started to break out of my Good
Lil' Oriental Boy shell and learned that I didn't have to live up to the
expectations of my parents and my JA school/church circles, a process that I
detail in a rather long yet still incomplete autobiography-post. One person
I got to know at the sweet shop was SJK, a guy who didn't even work there.

I used to work six days a week after school, 5 PM to
9 PM, 10 PM on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and SJK used to drop by the store
almost everyday after his work at some government job. He usually arrived having already had a
drink or two at a bar near his office, then moseying on down to J-Town around
6-ish after the day crew had gone home. The first few times I saw him, I
couldn't figure out who he was. He'd just walk in and say "Hi," sit
at the soda counter with his half-lit cigar and start reading the newspaper or
commence small talk with the owner, Mrs. H, or my work colleague, Billy. Nobody
bothered to introduce me to him; he just seemed to be an evening fixture--the
counter glass gets wiped down, the store front lights get turned on, and SJK
walks in to visit. As the new guy on the job, it wasn't my place
to inquire in depth or detail, but after a whle SJK revealed enough of himself for me to piece
together who he was.

SJK was a nisei who spoke Japanese
relatively fluently--bera bera
as he would say--and served in the 442 during World War II. He was a medic and
used to tell me how he hated it, because he always felt like the red cross on
his helmet was a bull's eye. He enjoyed drinking in the neighborhood which he
did virtually every weekday night before he came to the store and after he
left around 7 PM. He was very familiar with Mrs. H, her daughter, KZ (the legal
owner), and nephew, Mikey. He was very familiar with Mrs. H and her daughter,
KZ, and nephew, Mikey, but I am to this day uncertain of how his relationship
with the sweet shop started.

Over the years, I got to know
him fairly well. Indeed, he was one of my more corrupting influences--mind you,
I mean that in the most affectionate of terms. He would occasionally take me to
his favorite watering hole, the bar at Horikawa Restaurant. Over Jack Daniels
on the rocks with a glass of water, he would talk about girls, his work
sometimes, then more about girls and finally about girls. He loved
women but was not married and proud of it. He told me once that he'd never
get married because, as he put it, "That'd be stupid." He had his
friends and his bourbon and he needed little else. He would often bitch about
how the bar girls at Eigiku or Kawafuku would get too cozy in and attempt to
sweet talk him into leaving large tips, but if you saw him at the bars, you'd
never kow that he had any complaints. He'd be talking with them, laughing and
giggling until 9 PM, when poof
he'd vanish. He had work early the next morning and would always leave
promptly, although it took me a while to get used to his disappearing act.
Unless you were a faithful drinking buddy of his--which we became after a few
years--he would never tell you he was leaving. One minute he'd be there, the
next he'd be gone.

But in the summer of 1972, I had
not yet gotten to know him that well. All I knew was that he visited almost
every evening to say "hi" before he went drinking around J-Town. Much
to my chagrin, Billy decided to quit early in the summer--I had developed quite
a crush on her and had been following her around the store like a puppy dog
wagging its tail. But more seriously, summer was a busy stretch for the
store--in J-Town, tourist season--so without my senpai (elder, more
experienced work/classmate), I had to focus on learning my duties which
involved, among other things, serving customers, stocking trays of rice cakes, mopping the floor and
closing shop. It was not particularly hard work, and it did give me the
glorious opportunity to learn Japanese. But it kept my attention from the more
extraneous happenings around me. By August, I had learned the ropes fairly
well, and was able to take care of business without supervision. I had become
familiar with my fellow workers and the regular customers, and was able to tell
the difference between them and the frequent visitors who just dropped by to
chat. During this time, SJK's visits increasingly became infrequent. He told me that the tourist
were hogging up all the prime bars stools--SJK rarely sat at a booth or
table... come to think of it, neither do I. So he went drinking elsewhere
with his buddies. By the time Nisei Week arrived in August, he had stopped
coming completely. 

I hardly noticed, the store was so busy.

Nisei Week was a large
celebration for the Japanese American community that actually lasted two weeks.
There were exhibitions and parties, as well as a Miss Nisei Week Pageant. The
finale was a weekend carnival and on on the climactic Sunday, a parade featuring Obon dancing, JA pioneers, local politicians and of course Miss Nisei
Week and her court. Parade day was so crowded, that you couldn't walk a
straight line anywhere in town, and during the parade, the crowd on the
sidewalk was so thick you could barely walk through--which actually gave us a break from making non-stop sno-cones. It was a pretty big deal for the community and the tourists flocked
to J-Town, a few short blocks from downtown and the civic center. It
was definitley good for for Japanese American pride and a sense of community, and it was certainly good for business in J-Town. But not for guys like SJK. It wasn't surprising I
had not seen him at all during Nisei Week.

When
things wound down a few days after the parade, my sister returned from Japan. I
learned that I had made the right choice to stay in LA. Grandma was nice, but
perhaps too unfamiliar with American kids. She was very controlling and
demanding, and my sister rebelled in Japan. My mother was rather upset
at the whole ordeal--which I hardly noticed since I was too involved in my first part time job--and my sister ended up spending quite a bit of her time with
our aunt in Hiroshima rather than with grandma
in Tokyo. Sis
discussed in detail the horrific standards and demands placed on her and I
felt like I had dodged a bullet--I was a young seventeen and rarin' to learn to
be my own person, away from the demands of my own parents and the enormous
expectations on a good little Japanese American boy. I certainly didn't need to
be with Grandma. But after Sis gave me the lowdown, she changed the topic and told me of someone she met on the plane who knew me.

"Me?
You met someone who knows me?!?"

"Yeah, a Japanese
guy was sitting next to me. He started drinking and was talking to me, asking
me questions about what I do and where I live. He asked me if I go to J-town, and I said 'no' of course, but I said you worked there. He asked where, and I said at the sweet shop, and he said he went there all the time, and that he knew you. It was kind of creepy, like he
was trying to pick me up."

I thought about my friends who might have gone to Japan
but couldn't think of anyone, let alone someone old enough to drink. "I
don't know anyone who went to Japan."

"He
said he knows you really well."

"By name?"

"Yeah."

I swore I didn't know who she was talking about.
I kept thinking that it was some random dude, maybe? A customer, maybe? I had
no idea, but my sister was not attacked and she did not seem particualrly
traumatized by the encoutner so I left it at that. The next day I went to work
and around 6 PM, SJK walks in for the first time in a long time, sits at the soda fountain counter and points his
cigar at me.

"Hey, Ray, your sister's pretty
good looking. What happened to you?"

I learned
that SJK went to Japan
annually to see his relatives in Hiroshima.
According to Mrs. H, he went every August for a couple of weeks, right during
Nisei Week. Did someone not think
to tell me this? Not that it would have done any good. I mean, what
was I supposed to do? Tell my sister to avoid being assigned a seat next to
someone who drinks Jack Daniels on her flight back from Japan?
Seriously, what were the odds of that happening?

Have you ever encountered someone you haven't seen in a while at the most unexpected place? When M came home from Japan last month, she ran into the grandmother of one of students/clients at Narita airport. Actually, she didn't really run into her. M had forgotten to fill out some kind of form for the ANA and they had been paging her throughout the airport. Apparently the grandmother heard the name and deduced that they were going to be on the same plane home. Can you imagine M's surprise when the grandmother came up to her in flight? Hi. Long time no see. I'm the kind who would have freaked out.

This seems to occur frequently within the "Japan" community--and probably in other Asian communities as well? I don't necessarily mean Japanese Americans either. I have had students--who are not necessarily of Japanese heritage--who have met classmates randomly in Roppongi or Ginza in Tokyo. I met a student of mine from UCLA at a hardware store in Tokyo once. That was really weird. I even met a former elementary school-mate and boy scout patrol member on a bus in Mitaka. It was was really random so we celebrated by doing what most people do in Japan when they meet an old buddy: Get shit faced.

I had gone to visit a girl I used to date in Mitaka--near Kichijouchi--but she wasn't home so felt rather  rather sad. As I sat in the bus to the station on my way home, some called to me in English.

"Ray? Is that you?"

"JU? Woah1 What are you doing here?"

"I'm a ryuakusei at ICU."

"Man, I haven't seen you since when? Boy scouts? Karate?"

"About six years, I guess, huh."

"Man,
no shit." Kinda lonely about not being able to see an old flame, I thought it
would be fun to hang with JU, who was a couple of years younger than
me. He was in the same patrol--the Firebirds--in our Boy Scout troop
and we also took Shotokan Karate together at our church. "So what you
doing now? Got a date? Going to work?"

"No, I was just going to go to the station and do some shopping."

"Screw that. Let's go to Shinjuku and get a drink. My treat."

"Yeah, alright!"

Well, we went to Shinjuku and work our way to Takadanobaba, and found a small dive outside
the station. We ate
lightly but imbibed rather heavily in o-sake. I think we finished more
than a bottle (one bottle = 1.8 liters)... I think. I don't really
remember much after reaching the bottom of the first bottle. What I do
recall is paying 18,000 yen--pretty hefty for 24 years ago--and helping
my friend throw up onto the tracks from the platform of the Chuo line.
I sorta recall being warned by someone to take care of him as he seemed
pretty bad off. I was pretty drunk, but I guess I can "appear" more
sober... Anyway, I couldn't send him back to school in this condition,
so I brought him home... much to the displeasure of my cousin. Hahaha.
He was really put out. Alvin is a really square dude; naive as naive
gets--even in Tokyo--and he couldn't wait to call Australia to report
to my grandparents. All i could do was put my friend in a futon and let
him sleep it off. Next morning, I wake up to find my cousn gone to
school. I wake up with JU and he's still groggy as hell, but he
insisted that he had to go back to school, so I went with him as far as
Mitaka Station to make sure he got on the right bus.

But the funniest random meeting I know didn't involve me. Well, at least not directly.

Cont'd next post.

Query: Have you ever encounter someone you haven't seen in ages in the most unexpected places?

Given the content of the previous post, I can't figure out why I rented the DVD, Ratatouille. It's a Pixar animation about a rat that finds his way from the countryside to the City of Lights and becomes--get this--a chef at a famous restaurant. Ugh. Rats shit where they eat, and this one is cooking in the restaurant? There are a couple of scenes when there were dozens of rats in one shot crawling through the kitchen pantry. I think M almost fainted.

What was I thinking?

They should have shown the rats shitting around the kitchen, then having the droppings get people sick. That, at the very least, would have been a public service to educate kids that rats are not cute furry little animals but disease carrying vermin.

Lately, I have been cleaning up my old posts, giving them titles I hadn't before and re-entering them. this might explain why my name may appear at the top of your subscription list even though I had not posted anything new. Sorry to mislead any of you. But as I have been cleaning up my archives, I have come to some conclusions concerning my blogging experience.

I had been posting a significantly fewer times for quite a while. In the beginning I was totally addicted to blogging. A look at my archives will reveal that I posted no less than 20 times a month for two years from the summer of 2003 except for a couple of months. Some months I even posted more than 30 times. Where did that energy go? Where did the time to blog go? Of course, much of it was just inane shit, writing a review of a movie or filling out lists. Ho-hum.

As I look back on some of my blogs from around 2005, I notice that the posts had become even more inane than before. I talked about sports and UCLA--my favorite--but in hindsight, it was all very personal and trivial to those who are not interested in college sports. It is too bad, I think. I wish I had focused more on my own past, my own history, to somehow put it together into a coherent personal history. Not that my history has merit or worth in the greater scheme of things, but it perhaps has some relevance to an Asian American in the US, that my life might reflect others or perhaps provide a backdrop of whence we came. I do so hesitantly because I do not speak for an entire generation Japanese Americans, let alone Asian Americans, but I do think that there is a dearth of social history depicting the Asian American experience. Today, many of you are young and vigorously log your niche in life. JAs of my generation did not have the medium of the Internet and blogging at their disposal.

Now I have written a number of posts about my life already, such as life in J-Town in LA (which has been linked to by a number of Japanese/Asian American sites), the stupid antics of a teenager, and personal accounts like my very first slow dance. But I have sorta gotten away from this. Perhaps I became to self-absorbed in my current life. Maybe I was too busy with grading to be bothered with revealing the more intimate portions of my life--especially since many of my students know about this blog. But then, most of them know these stories as I am a story teller with the bad habit of repeating some stories repeatedly ad nauseam. I had one student who told me that at her house, her father had the same habit so they embarked on the insulting practice of raising their hand every time he started a story they had already hear. I say insulting because that is what this group of students began to do. Ugh.

Anyway, since I have the time this summer--actually I don't but I will make time--to ponder my past and perhaps present it in a meaningful way, I will write about some of the other things of my past that i have yet to share.

Stay tuned, if you are so inclined.

Living in Northern Virginia, in a suburb of Washington DC, has it good side and it's bad. It is, to be a sure, beautiful country. When I first visited DC, I came on a business trip from Japan. I had imagined Virginia as a rural land of tobacco, plantations and a bunch of hayseeds. Boy, was I ever wrong. The taxi ride from Dulles International to the city revealed a country that was quite arboreal. There was no mistaking the suburban housing, the office buildings and shopping centers, but it was beautifully arranged, mixed in unobtrusively with the natural greenery of the area.

When I landed my current teaching gig in DC a few years later, I knew I wanted to live and commute from Virginia. A lot of people prefer to live in the city, but most of these people are the true hayseeds. I was born and raised in LA, lived near San Fransisco for three years, and in Tokyo off and on for about ten years. I know metropolitan when I see it, and DC is not metropolitan. It has its monuments and its government buildings, but the city is basically dead by 12 midnight. Yes, Georgetown is rockin' 'til the wee hours, especially on the weekends, but Georgetown is to DC what Westwood is to LA, a fun dynamic college town within the city proper.

Of course, Virginia is not very metropolitan either. But it doesn't pretend to be. The bars close at 12 midnight, there are lots of police on the road making it a rather secure area, and young men and women I do not know will greet me with a "Good afternoon, sir" when I walk by them on local streets. Yes, Virginia is a part of the south, nice and quaint, but as I said, it doesn't pretend to be urbane, which is all nice and comfy for M and me, with one exception.

Wildlife.

I live near the Vienna Metro station, in a community of townhouses that is next to a county park, the same park where Robert Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence
agent, made drop-offs to Russian spies. But this not the kind of wildlife that bothers me. This area is chock-full of critters, from deer and possums to cardinals and blue jays. And in general they stay on their side of the street. Except for squirrels. I have come to view them as rats with furry tails. They climb on our roof, chew on the ledges and drain pipes and even made a hole into our attic causing hundreds of dollars of damage. Grrrr.... No feeding the squirrels, please.

Field mice are also an issue. They usually stay in the field, but when they smell food--like when young people in the neighborhood have parties and don't clean up after themselves as well as they should--they will come to investigate. And, man they know how to find a hole. I found mice droppings in our basement next to the washing machine recently. M wanted them out immediately, of course--you never know what disease rodents might harbor--but when I suggested traps, she wanted humane traps, one where we could catch the critter and release it safely back to the woods in the park. I tried to convince M that mice are smart and persistent, and that the only good mouse were dead one, but she wouldn't hear of it. First I plugged up every hole and crack I could find inside the walls and outside. I used a thing called Great Stuff that is a foam-like compound that sprays from a can, expands and hardens to a consistency that feels like really hard styrofoam. I had hoped that the mice traveled in and out of the house and that I had sealed them out, but I still found fresh mice droppings the next day. In fact, there seemed to be more than before. Ugh! I wondered if I had trapped the mice in by sealing the holes, a thought I soon confirmed when I caught my first glimpse of a mouse scurrying away from a hole I had sealed when I turned on the basement light. It was probably trying to find the original hole.

So we went to buy a humane trap at Home Depot that trapped mice in an enclosure from which they cannot escape. Or so the box said. I found out the next day that a little peanut butter--as the instructions explained--will quickly attract a mouse, but the trap door was another story. It was tossed to the side as if the mouse was taunting us--Hah! You think this puny door is gonna keep me in? This mouse checked in but it still checked out of this little rodent motel.

Convinced that I was right, M relented and I set up four small snap traps baited with chunky peanut butter in the basement along the walls where the mouse or mice were obviously travelling. M was lamenting a bit, but I assured her that it was either them or us. And since we pay the mortgage, it was them. The very next morning I found three very dead mice. M was having a fit, so I quickly wrapped the mice in sheets and sheets of newspaper, shoved them into a plastic bag, then into a plastic bag, and then finally into a plastic bag, which I then tossed into the garbage can. I must have washed my hands for about eight minutes. The good news is that I have not seen another set of mice droppings since--its been almost a week--so I think we are rid of our rodent problem for the time being.

Unfortunately, M is now developing a relationship with a rabbit that visits our backyard every morning and late afternoon. I don't think its a wild hare, but rather an escaped pet, for it's too fat to have grown in the woods. She feeds it lettuce, cabbage and the occasional carrot. Some days, she will feed it a variety spring greens, including arugula and basil. It's no wonder that Pyonkichi--yes, M has given it a name--keeps coming back. On a hot day like today, it was stretched out like Cleopatra in our backyard, relaxing after a fine meal of greens. Pyonkichi is obviously getting very comfortable. I keep telling M to stop feeding it because it will start leaving pellets around our yard, and the vegetables she leaves out will only attract a new set of unwanted critters. She acts as though I can no longer speak Japanese.

I'm now hoping some mice will show up so she'll realize the problems of feeding animals that don't belong to us. Well, almost hoping...

I went to campus recently and experienced again something I wrote about previously.
I was  going to provide a link but couldn't find the original post on Xanga. Then I remembered that I posted it elsewhere when I had gone on hiatus due to some issues that arose about my online identity. Technically, it is not a Xanga "repost", but it's still a rerun as I'm sure some of you may have read it previously. And yet here it is because, well... it's just plain disgusting.

I went to work today as I always do. I take the train into town, and
for me it is an easy commute. I lived in Japan for a number of years
and now truly appreciate mass transportation: no wear and tear on the
car, lower insurance premiums, no headaches of sitting in a car stuck
in a two-lane parking lot (route 66). A five minute skip from my house
to the station, 25 minutes on the Metro to DC, then a 3 minute walk to
my office. Not a hard commute at all.

Now,
I usually run a little late, what my friends used to call JST (Japan
Standard Time) which means about 20 minutes later than everyone else.
As a result, I always end up running to the station and walking up and
down the escalators. Which brings me to my point: There is such a thing as escalator etiquette.
In DC, anyway. The standard unwritten rule is "stand to the right, pass
to the left." When I'm with Mus... uh, I mean, the wifey--geez, now
that I think of it, what should I call her now?--anyway, when we're on
the escalator, we will usually stand behind each other to allow others
to walk up to our left. But when I'm by myself, I am the one passing to
the left. Many out-of-towners are unfamiliar with this rule and I
usually don't say anything. I just stop behind them unless I'm really
late: "Excuse, I'd need to get through." I have had people roll their
eyes. "Look, Herman. They're all show-offs, walking up escalators." Or,
"Geez, what's his rush?" I want to say something like, Look Harriette, not all of us are on vacation.
But I usually think better of it, and just ignore them. Another basic
rule is to take the elevator when you are lugging around a large
suitcase or stroller or bicycle. Not only does it block the entire
width, it is can be dangerous trying to balance something oversized on
the steps of the escalator.

But the one rule of etiqutte that
everyone must absolutely follow was ignored today, by a middle aged man
walking up the escalator in front of me. He obviously didn't realize
that one must never, absolutely never fart on the escalator. Walking up the escalator as I usually do, my face is around butt level of the person ahead of me. I get the first whiff... Oh man! Who cut the cheese!
But I'm caught in no-man's land. I want to avoid this malodorous chunk
of air--man! my nose hair was curling--but I can't step to the right,
as the people who are not walking upstairs are standing on every step.
I can't just stop because there are others walking up behind me. Even
worse, I can't help but think that the person behind me probably thinks
I cut the cheese! I wanted to turn around and appeal, It's not me! Ugh, I hate it when people are so inconsiderate...

I should be working. I should be reading on the distinction between visual and aural in terms of cognitive learning. I should be boning up on some post-structural theory for a paper I plan to submit to a journal... um, last month. But noooooo.... It's summer. After a long academic year, I'm tired. So while I do intend to some of this work--in fact I am obliged to do the cognitive learning thang or return some grant money--but I wanna do something I haven't done here for a while: a Senryu salon. As many of you know, senryu is the short Japanese poetry that is structurally similar to haiku but has a completely different goal: To capture a universal human truth in a funny, sarcastic or ironic verse.

Here are some links that explains what senryu is:

November 10, 2003, May 07, 2004, and July 23, 2004

Here is a sample of my comments if you want to participate.

Senryu Results for July 2004.

Anyway, I don't have a topic yet, so don't leave senryu poems willy nilly. I was just wondering if any of you would be interested in the senryu. If there is enough interest, I might hold a salon. As with previous salons, submissions are limited to subscribers or RBJ buddies only, must be in English and must be funny.

Query: Senryu anyone?