DAISO アドベンチャーズ #2：ほうきとちりとり

ほうきとちりとり、ほうきとちりとり、ほうきとちりとり・・・

こうやって書くと、呪文か何かみたいです。

ほうきは「箒」と書くそうです。全然知らなかった。ちりとりは「塵取り」で、なんとなく分かる。

今日は日本語の授業で、「鹹」と書くのに悪戦苦闘してしまいました。終いには生徒がアプリで調べてくれた。トホホ・・・

ダイソーで買うと、$1.50 の商品が二つ。ダイソー、ダイスキだぜぃ。おまけにターゲットで玄関マットも買ったので、これから私は魔女になって毎朝アパートの前をほうきで掃こうと思います。

I just received my Kuroneko Yamato shipment from Nagoya, so now I have most of my stuff here with me—which means I've gotta get serious about unpacking, cleaning, and settling in. It's a weird feeling when I have my things scattered in different places—Riverside, San Diego, Tokyo, etc. But now that I've got most of my books and clothes either here are at my folks', I can start refiguring out my library and dusting off books that'd been in storage for over a year.

Plus that "Professional Development Fund"? Book-Off, here I come.

DAISO アドベンチャーズ #1：チョコバナナポッキー

私、引っ越しました。よって名古屋の夜喫茶シリーズはもう（当分の間）更新できないのですが、代わりに（？）新しい近所での、新たなアドベンチャーズを記録しようかと思います。

なーんて言っても、こっちでは一人でふらっと外食する事が少ないので、喫茶店を紹介するより近所のダイソーで買った面白い商品を紹介しようかと思います。（説明になってない。）

そう、ダイソー。今年の七月にオープンしたそうです。アパートから歩いて２０分弱？ラッキー。（現在アメリカには４７店あるそうです。主にカリフォルニア、後はワシントンとテキサスだそうです。へー。）

先日は色々買いましたが、一番気になったのは「チョコレートバナナ味のポッキー」。実際ポッキーはグルテンが入ってるので滅多に食べないのですが、こればかりは気になりすぎました。袋を開けると、あの独特な化学的バナナの香りが・・・で、まぁまぁ美味しい。でもやっぱりポッキーより本物のバナナとクリームとチョコの方が好みかもしれません。

Whoops, or, the Academic Mating Game

I just offended a good friend from college, which reminded me that I haven't posted in over three weeks.

Last week I had an orientation for my new job. It started with free food and ended with free food, so I have nothing bad to say about it.

The orientation did, however, make me consider that which I am calling "The Mating Game". It's a game in which players try to find a mate with whom to build a nest and procreate. It's going on at most times, in most places—but it heats up when players enter into new situations, like starting a new job.

What I was reminded of through the orientation last week was how academics complicate The Mating Game—like they complicate much of everything else.

If you are an academic that is starting a new job, it might be better for you not to be playing The Mating Game (e.g., already have found a mate so that you are no longer playing)—because participation in the game can cause you unnecessary stress.

If you are an academic playing The Mating Game at a new institution, you might find yourself thinking, "Oh my goodness, an entirely new pond...am I going to be able to catch any fish??" You might find yourself being more careful than you used to be about what to wear to campus—not only because you want to give your colleagues the impression that you are tenurable, but also because you never know who might be standing behind you in line at the library circulation desk. You might also notice just how much more intriguing people's left ring fingers are—like they're somehow going to provide you the missing link you needed to support the argument in your next manuscript.

You might also be an entirely rational academic, telling yourself that you have bigger things to worry about than TMG—namely RTP. You might also know from experience that A Mate is not something that you look for, it's just something you stumble upon, like a cute Made in Korea ballpoint pen that someone left behind in the lecture hall. Or you might have the good sense of looking outside of academia for your Mate, knowing full well that one academic in a couple already has too much self-absorption going on.

(Just kidding...it's not like non-academics don't have self-absorption going on...)

But if you are like most academics, you probably realize that, really, dating an academic is so much easier than dating a non-academic. They understand the pressure before a fellowship application deadline. They understand the inanity that is departmental politics. They understand that, yes, it looks like you get a looooong summer vacation, but that's really more time spent on your research and course development, in addition to the nights and weekends that have fallen to a similar fate.

And when you date an academic as an academic, you get an automatic reviewer of your work without having to submit it to a journal. You get someone who'll be straightforward with you about the quality of your teaching and research, because that person wants to see you improve—and thrive—at the thing you most love doing. And you'll have a travel buddy who is genuinely interested in attending that conference with you, if only because it's so much more fun just to go to a conference than to present at one.

But alas...The Mating Game is not so easy for an academic at a new institution, because it turns out most people are already spoken for by the time they start their tenure-track jobs. You realize that your awkward, introverted self is matched by the awkward, introverted others who also populate the various departments across your institution. And even if you swore that you were going to be social and attend various functions across campus, let's face it, once the academic term starts, you're lucky if you make it out to pick up your CSA box once a week. And the more you try to diffuse the stress of TMG, the more you realize that you are simply being washed up in the heteronormative, patriarchal institution that is MATING. ::sigh::

And then you end up being the academic who is no longer at a new institution, because you've been there for a number of years already...and you end up looking around at the annual New Faculty Orientation dinner for someone who seems friendly, attractive, and unmated. But then, in all the wisdom that you have accumulated in your career, you tell yourself: this is the name of the game. Teachers grow old, while the students remain the same age—just like the way you grow old, while the incoming new faculty remain the same age. And the good thing is, you'll never let the stress turn into desperation. After all, writing that journal article is often more rewarding than dealing with the results of The Mating Game.

一年間、お世話になりました。

昨日退職しました。

一年間、本当にお世話になりました。面接に行った時から昨夜の食事会（笑）まで、信じられない程恵まれていました。大学院出て初めての職場として、これ以上の環境は無かったと思います。

I'm excited beyond words about the next phase in my life—the people I'll meet, the books I'll read, the city I'll get to explore. But for now, I'm feeling sentimental about the folks I'm leaving behind...

名古屋、今度来た時もたんとうまいもん食べさせてくれよ〜！（夏はあんまり来たくないけど。）

夜喫茶 #12: 三嶋屋

私はそばよりうどん派です。ついでにキツネよりタヌキ派。そうめんよりうどん派か？と訊かれると、ちょっと答えに詰まります。

先日きしめんの三嶋屋に行ってきました。「三嶋屋本店 瑞穂店」だそうです。（旧）瑞穂区図書館に行く度に前を通っていたのですが、中々入る勇気が出ませんでした。ですが先日星占いでラッキーグルメが「つけめん」だったので、だったらうどん系でいいか、と思って行きました。

（グルテンフリーって結構難しいぜ・・・）

きしめん定食を注文しました。６８０円。安い・・・と思う。しかも美味しい。きしめんに、ご飯と味噌カツが付いてきた。で、卓上には天かすの壺が・・・

天かす・・・大好き。

と言う訳で、三嶋屋は成功でした。もう二度と行かないかもしれないけど、それだっていいじゃない。夢だっていいじゃない・・・

I'm Not Vegetarian, I Just Can't Cook Meat: A Movie Review

The title of this post should come as no surprise to you, if you've read any of my previous posts about cooking (like this one).

What may surprise you, however, is that I don't dislike animals.

Shut up, all my friends who have heard me talk about kicking puppies. I'll have you know that I watched the documentary The Cove (2009) the other night and found myself feeling guilty about the salmon rice bowl I had eaten earlier that day.

But to be honest, I had a total knee-jerk reaction to The Cove. And the reaction jerked my knee so much that I couldn't stop talking about it at a friend that I met up with the next day, who was tired of me talking about it by the end of the day but said to me, "It's OK, I'm just ignoring you".

The Cove tells us some unfortunate things. Apparently in the Japanese town where the film was shot, people kill 23,000 dolphins every year and capture a bunch more to sell to aquatic parks. The Deputy of Fisheries in Japan that was interviewed in the film talked about how great it was that the "time to death" for dolphins had been shortened through improvements in the killing tools. We also learn that a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is like a bad high school Model UN session.

It's true that in my house I don't cook meat. But I do eat meat, and if someone took me to Phil's BBQ, I certainly wouldn't complain. And when it comes down to it, I don't think that killing a cow or a pig is any less bad than killing a dolphin or a whale. I don't buy the argument that dolphins are intelligent, and therefore it's bad to kill dolphins but OK to kill chickens.

But again...I eat meat. So what right do I have to be talking?

I'm sure that the entire cast and crew of The Cove is vegan. I'm sure they don't eat fish, wear leather, or put honey on their sopapillas. I'm sure they love dolphins very much, and they would risk pissing off a bunch of Japanese people to save them.

But what was strange to me was that, the woman who was crying in the film about the killing of baby dolphins didn't seem like she would cry about the death of young men of color who are being shot and killed by police in her own country.

What was also strange was that, despite their earnestness in getting these Japanese people to stop killing dolphins, the crew had no intention of meeting them halfway. The crew, in particular Ric O'Barry, seemed to make little effort to learn Japanese (except for their occasional "doumo arigatou"); and they certainly didn't make an effort to understand the practices of the community they were in conversation with, much less try to understand them from a place of respect.

There was also an unsurprising amount of exoticization—of the town, of the people being shot on camera, of the lodging they were staying at, of the killing practice itself. You name it, it was probably exoticized. The crew complained about the bureaucracy and the amount of paperwork required to do anything, but if they cared to learn anything about Japan, they'd know that bureaucracy was everywhere, not just in the case of hiding a practice of dolphin massacre. And according to them, the Japanese police wake up their prisoners and torture them in the middle of the night, in order to get the confession they want—which is totally unlike U.S. police practice of shooting people or calling them racial slurs. Apparently it was ingenious of Ric O'Barry to lie through his teeth about what he was doing in the town, because, you know, capturing the "truth".

I didn't realize that disrespect and lying were necessary tools of being an activist. I didn't realize that the practices of a town could be generalized to an entire nation, while at the same time, the complicity of the rest of the world that comes to buy meat at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo could be completely ignored. And the problem, apparently, lies solely with the Japanese people who capture and kill dolphins, not the people who (in and outside of Japan) buy the animals and their flesh.

The film points out how, in the aquatic park in this Japanese town, whale meat is sold at the stand near the area where they have whale and dolphin shows (though I'm pretty sure they sell hamburgers in zoos in the States, even if they aren't things like lion hamburgers or giraffe hamburgers). I'd feel a lot more moved by this revelation if I didn't have a sinking feeling that the people in the film also had their occasional tuna sandwiches. I would never say that humans magically had the right to kill and eat animals—but they do kill and eat them. In the film the crew takes to the streets of a Japanese metropolis and asks its denizens if they knew that dolphins were being killed in Japan for their meat. None of them do, of course—and one woman, like the others, says, "Oh my, that's horrible." But then—I got this feeling: the woman seemed to want to ask where she could get her hands on some of that meat. But she just didn't want to say it.

The Cove indicates in its conclusion that a couple of Japanese people who were featured in interviews or scenes were removed from their posts—the aforementioned Deputy of Fisheries and the annoying Mr. Private Space that kept telling the film crew to leave the area. But this is reported as some kind of a "success"—even though it's just a way to ruin people's lives by depriving them of a livelihood (however questionable it may be). Playing heroic World Police, are we?

The film showed the Japan rep to the IWC "buying out" reps from the Eastern Caribbean islands, in order to get them to vote in ways that favor Japanese practices. Atherton Martin, a former IWC Representative of Dominica, described the situation in a way that resonated with my knee-jerk reaction: Japan's actions weren't about economics or politics, but rather about the "remnants of a traditional notion of empire"—Japan doesn't need to be told what to do, certainly not by the United States or any other Western country. And it's a good thing people there eat animal flesh, too, because it just keeps the cycle going.

Yes, tell everyone in the world to stop eating fish. Tell them to stop eating all types of meat! Tell them to stop destroying the planet by their unsustainable ways of living. Tell aquatic parks and zoos to stop putting animals in unnatural cages and close the hell down. It's better to try it than not. But I also don't think the effort will be successful, not the way The Cove does it.

[The image is from a review (?) on Gigazine of a location of Ōshō (of gyōza fame) that serves both potstickers AND sushi. What. (But mmmm look at those delicious salmon eggs...)]

[[I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on the Get Some Scars EP by Lux Lisbon that I got my hands on back in April...but I've been slacking. As a preview of that coming post, I shall just say: I like it, albeit unexpectedly! (And I can explain...!!)]]

夜喫茶 #11: さくとん

食べた食べた、食べました。近所のとんかつ屋さん、「さくとん」。何故もっと早く行かなかったのか、って感じでした。

注文したのは・・・あれ、何だったっけ？おそらくソースかつ定食。たったの６５０円で、とっても良心的。しかも美味しい！何しろ美味しいんだよ。できたてのかつをホクホク、ムシャムシャ。

カウンター席だけでいつも結構混んでるから、行かなかったんだな。で、やっぱりお持ち帰りのお弁当より、できたてが食べたいし。でも、店内で食べると身体中が油の匂いになるんだよね。う〜む・・・ま、家帰ってシャワー浴びればいっか。