A drive...

"Hey, where is it exactly that we're going?"

"Huh? What? What do you mean?" My question must have startled her, almost as if she was surprised I was even in the car.

"I mean, we've been driving for a while now and you haven't mentioned where it is we're going."

"Oh, that...Sorry. I guess I haven't thought that far."

"Then why did you ask me to come on this trip?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know why exactly. I just know I wanted your company. I enjoy your company."

We stayed silent for a while, with her last sentence lingering in the air like the mist floating around the hills we were driving through. Put aside the ambiguous questions of purpose and it truly was a scenic route. Rolling green hills wrapped around us with expansive snow-topped mountains to the east. 30 minutes more towards Yamanashi-Ken and a still lake sitting blue and quiet and fresh awaited us. Film a movie here and the director would probably win an award for Best Cinematography.

Perhaps if we could transport ourselves two years into the past or two years into the future the unsettled air in the car would've better matched the tranquilty of the scene.

---

I thought about the carefree life of the fish in the lake, never an intended destination in mind.

Fish truly are dumb creatures.

---

She drove with her left hand on the top of the steering wheel while her right arm rested on the door handle. I watched her movements as she manuevered the car, her actions deliberate and with purpose. No wasted motion, no movement unplanned: flash the signal, turn the wheel with the palm and the car followed smoothly the intended course--not a second of indecisiveness. But the more I watched her, the more I noticed the unsettled disposition of her eyes. They seemed unfocused and glossed over, as if she had been crying alone for the last hour.

She seemed truly lost.

"I want to get off," I told her.

"What? Here? We're in the middle of nowhere."

"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry, but I want to get out."

"And you don't want me to come along, I take it."

"Sorry."

She pulled the car over to the side of the road. I could hear the pebbles on the ground rustle underneath the weight of the the car. A cloud of dust picked up. The car rolled to a stop.

"How are you going to get back?"

"I'll find a way. I think I saw a restaurant a few kilometers back. I can call for a taxi there."

But neither of us made a move. I thought about opening the door but couldn't summon the will to do so. She had both hands on the steering wheel never once looking my way. For a while we both stared at the road in front of us looking for an answer that would never come.

---

Finally, I turned my body towards the door ready to leave, but before I could get a grip on the handle, she took a hold of my right arm. Her hand was cold and slightly damp. Her grip probably a bit stronger than she had intended.

A sense of relief washed over my body as I realized it had been a long time since we had last touched.

"You know, things are going to be different after this."

"Yeah, I know."

"And you're okay with that?"

"I'm not sure I can be anything else."

And in saying so I got out of the car and closed the door behind me.

---

But I had lied to her. I hadn't seen a restaurant.

I had no idea how I was going to get back.

Good things on a sleepy Wednesday morning...

And she actually did "cook" them cookies. They were sweet and delicious and animal shaped.

---

---

Typhoon-Bob came through town during the holiday (thank you, Japan and your random Tuesday off), and as usual, wreaked havoc on my peaceful, mundane life. We went to Ohana, drank too much, laughed too loud, sat in a room and stared at one another, ate like prehibernation beasts, and today in the wake of Bob there excudes from my core the dim life force of a broken man.

Assessing my damages this morning I see a broken wallet, a damaged liver, two diseased kidneys, and a total loss of energy reserves.

However, the skies are unusually clear and the day seems free from haze.

(I like it when Typhoon-Bob whips my life into his all-consuming frenzy)

---

Making matters worse (I would have written "exacerbated" but I can't take that word seriously for obvious reasons), whereas Typhoon-Bob only strikes every once in a blue moon, Kanbara-Sarah has now managed to bring her mini-tempests into my life on the daily. The storms are smaller and more subtle in scale, but where Bob gives me a month to fully recover until the next wave of drinks, Sarah strikes constantly, waring me down at an imperceptible pace, chipping away at my rigid no-drinks-on-a-weeknight life slowly and deliberately like a small river forming a canyon.

"Another drink, Pin?"

"Wine tasting in Yamanashi, dude?"

"Let's do Tequilla shots, man!"

"Get the eff off the floor, holmes!"

(She looks innocent here, but girl is an assasin)

---

And when those two get together like they did this past week--bringing all that alcoholic rain into me life--well, it's like that Mark Walberg movie...

You know, The Basketball Diaries.

Graphs for Days...

I like numbers.

Numbers make it easier for me to understand the world. If everything that happened in my life was as consistent and easy to understand as a statistics book, I'd probably never have to call my friends out for a drink at Ohana again.

I don't have to be clairvoyant to make heads or tails of a packet of numeric data. It's tangible, unchanging, consistent, and makes total sense to me--which is to say, numbers are the total opposite of, say, how a woman might feel from one day to the next.

If I could, I'd round off the diameter of my living room and square root it tonight before dinner.

Then I'd make a bar graph from the data in four cool colors so it's easier on the eyes.

---

About once a month a speaker from B corporation (a kind of Pre-SAT drilling company) will come to give a presentation about the students' results. All the teachers are required to attend (me included) and the speaker focuses on the performances of each student at the school in their practice exams for university. 1300 kids, one test a month, that's a lot of data. Logicially you'd expect the speaker from B Corporation to punch the numbers into some Excel Spread Sheet and highlight the significant information and generally make it easier for a room full of sweaty, irritated (not to mention busy) teachers to understand a mountain of data. But the speaker (a young man in his 20s), instead prints out a quarter inch booklet with 50 pages worth of bars, line graphs, and tables of numbers. In black and white. Not one colorful, fun pie chart to be seen.

Whenever the Vice Principal anounces that the homeboy from B Corporation will be making a presentation that day, I can hear the low rumbling groans from all the teachers around me. The hate is palpable. (Seriously. you could spoon the liquid hate dripping from the teachers' swear words into a cup and drink it for breakfast.) Because we all know that for 90 minutes in the heat of the afternoon we'll all have to sit through some guy reading 50 pages of numbers to us exactly as they are printed, like some kind of personalized hell we're being made to go through for not being better students ourselves when we were children."This class' average was 28.5, and when compared to the class average from the other class of 27.3, it is 1.2 points below what we'd like them to get. However, that is still 5.3 points better than the other high school in the city. Blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam."

And to top it off, the speaker always wears a shirt and tie and his blazer even though he is sweating profusely. Why he doesn't take off his jacket or bring a hankerchief with him, I have no idea. Maybe because he knows that if he talks enough about numbers then all the teachers in the room will eventually fall asleep and no one will notice him square rooting an escape route out of the building, thus never needing to take off his jacket.

He makes me like numbers a little bit less.

Happenings at school...

The kids are practicing for the Sports Festival now. On some days the girls and boys are split, with the girls practicing some kind of dance outside on the grounds and the boys in the homerooms making posters and flags and so forth. At least that's what the boys are supposed to be doing.

Yesterday as I was walking around the homerooms checking on the kids I noticed that all the boys in 11 homeroom were gathered around the window staring out onto the grounds instead of making their flags.

"Yo, Yoshinao-kun, what are you boys doing?" I asked one of my favorite students. I was expecting him to lie to me and he and his boys to scatter like cockroaches in the light and get back to work but...

"Oh, Pin! Dude, we're looking at girls. They're dancing!" He told me matter-of-factly, not scattering.

"Hey, don't do that! Don't you have work to do?" I was giving my best stern-face.

"No, no. It's okay. C'mon, Pin, let's watch the girls together."

All over the world boys are disgusting, raging balls of hormones.

---

"Sometimes I think you're wasting your time here," Sano Sensei said to me.

"What do you mean?" I replied.

"Well, you're talented. So I think you can do more."

"Oh...okay...thanks..."

This conversation followed my telling Sano-Sensei about some of the grad schools I was interested in. I like this teacher a lot (she's a motherly type, the kind that holds your wrist when she's embarassed and laughing), and though I'll take a compliment whenever I can get one (even if it's a back-handed compliment) I was surprised to hear her say those words. It's definitely a thought that's crossed my mind, but to have my reluctant inner-monologue be given a voice like that...I was taken aback.

I wanted to tell her that I enjoyed my job in its current capacity and didn't have any desire to make gobs of money or be weighted with tons of responsibility, but the bell rang and class was about to begin. Maybe that was for the best, because I don't think that's what she was thinking, either.

Sano-Sensei knows me well.

---