Upside Down and Backwards

Hi all, I'm back in Japan again after a very nice two-week trip back to Seattle. I ate entirely too much good food and visited lots of family and friends, so it was quite a fun vacation.

Between the 11 hour flight to Japan and the 12 hour bus ride to my island, I've had lots of time to reflect on my career plans and the decisions I've made in my life lately, and friends, I would like you to know that I have made quite an important discovery about myself. I know that you will find this hard to believe, but please bear with me and read on: I have mystical powers which allow me to control the weather. Behold the indisputable evidence:

# of large windstorms and resulting power outages while I was in Seattle: 0

# of large windstorms and resulting power outages while I was not in Seattle: 1

# of snowstorms while I was in Seattle: 0

# of snowstorms while I was not in Seattle: 2

There you have it. The weather in Seattle was clearly better while I was there. I bet you're even sorrier that I'm gone now, huh.

Thusfar, I have not discovered exactly where the source of my powers lies, although sometimes the big toe on my right foot starts to tingle right before it's going to rain. Rest assured that I will spend the next eight months learning how to harness my powers so that I can better serve you all once I return to Seattle in August.

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I'm surprised at how sluggish my brain feels after just two short weeks of not speaking Japanese. While I can still understand most of the things that people say to me, when I try to answer, I have to think much too hard to fish even the easiest words out of the back of my brain. Everything seems hazy, upside down and backwards. It's a pretty weird feeling to be plunged into and out of English-mode so quickly.

Other weirdness since I've been back:

- On Tuesday afternoon, I ordered a green salad at a restaurant and was served a bowl full of cabbage, more cabbage, egg salad, onions, some sort of sprouts, and french fries.

- On Tuesday night, while waiting for a light to change at an intersection behind the medical school, I had a delightful conversation with a random man on the street corner. This particular man appeared to be going through some sort of midlife crisis (??). He looked about 40, but had long, Japanese pop-starrish hair and was wearing sunglasses at 9 o'clock at night.

Random Man: [pointing behind us at the medical school, and attempting to speak English] sukuuru. sukuuru. (School. School.)

Me: hai? etto, hai, igakubu desu. (Huh? Uh...yep...that's the medical school, all right.)

Random Man: kaeri? (Are you on your way home?)

Me: anou.... (Um...)

[Random Man concludes that I'm hesitating because I don't understand him, and valiantly attempts to switch back to English.]

Random Man: uiru yuu go tsu mai hoomu? (Will you go to my home?)

Me: huh? what? uh... no.

Mercifully, at this point, the light changed and I biked away and left him on the street corner. For those of you who don't know Japanese, the rest of the story will require a little extra explanation so I'm afraid it just won't be funny anymore, but here goes.

It wasn't until I was a couple blocks away from Random Man that I realized I had misunderstood his "English." In Japanese, mai hoomu doesn't actually mean "my home" -- it means "a person's personal home" -- so as it turns out, Random Man wasn't asking me to come home with him after all. He was just asking me if I was on my way home...which is a little less weird, I guess. Yes, I am definitely back in Japan.

- On Wednesday night, I edited another English journal article for one of the internal medicine doctors. As I read the first paragraph, something just didn't feel right to me, so I did a bit of research online. Sure enough, the first two sentences from the Japanese doctor's article were exactly identical to those in an abstract published by a doctor in Ireland. I asked Ikuko what I should do, and she said I should probably mention the sentences to the doctor when I handed back the article.

But when I showed the doctor what I had found, he kind of laughed and said, "Wow, you're good. You found those sentences, huh? Don't worry about it. Everyone copies stuff."

This can't really be the case, can it?

Fortunately for the dirty plagiarist, the Irish doctor apparently wasn't such a good speller -- there were two spelling errors in the first sentence of the original abstract. Since I corrected the spelling errors in the Japanese doctor's version, it will probably be a little harder for the journal editors to do a simple web search and find out that it's plagiarized. Ugh. I have this bad feeling that I unwittingly helped him get away with it.

I just got a phone call from the band mastaa and have to leave for jazz band rehearsal, so I'll have cut this entry short, but stay tuned for two upcoming back issues in which I detail my Japanese Idol appearance and my budding career as a nightclub singer. Bye!