07.25.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:34 am by Max
Today the kids went to bed just around midnight. These days they are invariably up past 10:00, and they often don’t go to bed until 11:00 or so. I was fading about half an hour ago, playing with my sons and trying to stay awake. I was waiting for them to go to bed so I could eat my last meal and fool around on the computer a bit.
Until two or three months ago, they were going to bed about 8:00 or 8:30, sometimes earlier. Which is odd because a few months before that, they were going to bed a little later.
Nowadays because they go to bed so late they often don’t get up till 7:30—or even later. The norm until recently, however, was Reveille at 5:00 or 5:30. Talk about a change. The kids just ain’t consistent.
Needless to say I don’t feel like doing much after they go to bed.
On the workout front, I’ve been exercising a lot lately. I’ve started jogging around the track at Utsunomiya University, one of the places where I teach. It’s an earthen track so it doesn’t bother my legs much (I’m not one of those people who can run on concrete or asphalt). I am eating a lot and working out a lot (cardio + weights). I like to train that way. I’ve put on a little more fat but proportionately more muscle. Looking not bad. Will try some new supplements, see how it goes, and maybe upload some new pics.
Today’s blog entry sounds kind of terse, staccato-like. That’s a reflection of how I don’t really feel like writing anything especially eloquent. For the most part, pithy observations (and there are a plethora of them floating in my mind) will have to wait until I have more free time before they can be allowed expression in writing.
I think one can accomplish more in one’s life if one is single. There’s always a trade-off. I’d say without hesitation or reservation that having kids was worth it. It’s a joy raising them and they give a lot back. Even if they do currently make a game of scratching, pinching, and biting me. When I shout “Ow!” it only makes my tormentor smile more and often brings the other twin to join in the melee.
I’m big on the dream department—want to help lots of poor people, protect animals and the environment, give more of myself to my friends and family, buy a house on a mountain and another one on the beach—but short in the cash department. Oh well, I keep on dreaming. What I could do if I had a lot of cash. I feel that a lot of rich people don’t know how to enjoy their lucre—certainly there’s a lot more to life than fancy cars, shopping, gambling, partying, and whoring.
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07.14.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:07 am by Max
Today was the last day of French class. We will convene again in the fall. At the university, I teach two ultra-basic courses, back-to-back on Fridays. The atmosphere in the first class is markedly different from that of the second. In the second class, the students are much more upbeat; their liveliness probably reminded me I should be taking photos, because I forgot to take photos of the first class. Anyhow, here are the shots of the kids eating their snacks. I had them share their food, but before they could eat their comrades’ comestibles, they had to say please and thank you and so on in French. Also included are two shots of one student’s outrageous T-shirt.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 12:16 am by Max
I’ve taught the kids how to say a few words. In the past, whenever they wanted something, they would just come up to me and grunt “Mmm, mmm!” But, that wouldn’t do—one has to be polite. So I taught them how to say “please,” and then coaxed out of them the longer utterance “Daddy, please.” Now I’m working on getting them to stick a noun in the middle, as in, “Daddy, water please.”
This morning Milo woke up about 6:30 a.m….And man, do they go to bed late these days, often at 10:30 or later, sometimes even just before midnight. They have a three-hour nap in the afternoon, so they want to be up late. But I’m just crashing when the hands on the clock roll around to 9:00 or so. I’m crashing right now (it’s midnight), but I’ve got to get this entry posted. I laughed last night when I saw on a website that toddlers should be in bed at 7:00. You can coax them but you can’t coerce them into a state of sleep.
Anyway, Milo woke up this morning and came over to my bed, beseeching me, “Daddy, please!” He had a balloon in his hand and wanted me to inflate it—the game being that once I blow it up, I pass it to him without tying it up, he gets a kick as the air whooshes out of the balloon, and then he hands it back to me again with another “Daddy, please!”
Groggy as heck, I dutifully complied. I then changed his pee-pee diaper and gave him some watered-down apple juice to drink, and then hit the sack again—only to be woken up some time later with another cry of “Daddy, please!” This time it was a request for me to play one of the songs on the decommissioned cell phone given to us by Uncle Katsuhiro (Shiho’s youngest brother). Funnily enough, Milo’s name for that cell phone is “Kat-chan” (Kat-chan being a dimunitive form of Uncle Katsuhiro’s name).
Once I had gotten up for real, I began my daily routine and then Mickey came up to the refrigerator and asked “Daddy, please!” What he wanted was a small dollop of whipping cream in a spoon, which he scoops out with his finger and slops into his mouth. Milo wanted some whipping cream too, and two times I had to repeat the process of opening the fridge and doling out some whipping cream. This is a tradition that began on a whim when I was having pancakes with fruit and whipping cream.
Tonight I put Milo into the baby carrier, slung him onto my back, and cycled over to the ATM. It was a nice little ride, and Milo enjoys all the visual stimuli on the way (“Pika pika!” is what he says when he sees bright or flashing lights). I’ve done this kind of journey two times before, once for Milo and once for Mickey, when I took a twin to the allergy clinic to get my monthly meds. Milo moaned a bit for Mommy on both occasions, but after a minute or so when we were well underway, he forgot about Mum and enjoyed the ride.
And today after the twins’ daily summertime water play (while my wife does the laundry, they play with water, scooping it out of and pouring it back into a pot and playing with sundry objects such as rubber duckies and the like), Milo stripped off his diaper and lay nude on the bed. He had grabbed a couple of baby wipes and was wiping his little pee-pee. How cute. And a hint of things to come: the boys won’t be wearing nappies forever.
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07.05.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:34 pm by Max
For some reason, a lot of my university students have problems with using personal pronouns. Specifically, many students substitute “it” for “I” in their written sentences. For example, “It is happy it won the lottery” and so on. Here’s what arrived in my inbox today from a student who had to miss this week’s lesson:
It becomes late or absent because it goes after going to the hospital.
Definitely food for thought.
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07.04.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:44 pm by Max
Don’t let the benign expression on my face fool you. I’m a drill sergeant with these kids. “Hup! Two, three, four! Fall in line!”
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07.02.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:17 am by Max
Thirty-three years on this planet, and so many things remaining on my lifetime to-do list.
Today I saw fireflies for the first time. Coolness, they were. They pulse on and off in the darkness, like those pulsing red lights you can see on tall buildings in Korea and Japan—except that the fireflies are green. The ones here in Japan, at least.
And today I took steps to get my hands on the first episode of The Sopranos. Looking forward to watching that.
Today I also went to Yoshinoya for the first time and got a “beef bowl” to go. I had heard that the Japanese restaurant chain hadn’t offered beef bowls for quite some time; I believe the discontinuation was due to fear of American mad cow. Which reminds me, I do eat a lot of beef and who knows, I could wind up with mad cow. Although we are getting better at testing for BSE, we still, as for as I know, have no clue what the incubation period is. Is it two decades? Or more? Because there could theoretically be a helluva lot of potential braindead beef eaters out there. Time will tell.
But you just have to task some risks in life, because if you don’t take risks you ain’t living. Life is a risk-fraught enterprise. It’s also a disease without a cure. Translation: we all gonna die, baby! I know that statistically speaking, driving my car (especially when I’m in an aggressive mood) is a lot more dangerous than eating beef. Especially since there isn’t even one recorded human case of vCJD in the States.
Yet this brings me to another point. I consume a lot of dead animal. I wonder if becoming a vegetarian would be the more virtuous path. The only reason I’m thinking about this is that I love animals, and I wonder how I can reconcile my meat-eating with my love for them. I would feel a lot less guilty, I know, if I ate only organic. Because while I’m not totally against meat-eating, I am against animal suffering. And call it oxymoronic or whatever you will, but I think that animals raised for meat should be treated well up until the very moment of their dispatch—and that they should be killed as painlessly and humanely as possible.
And sometimes I wonder, even if I became a vegetarian, would I ever be able to live conscience free? I mean, vegetarians eat a lot of soybeans. And Brazil is a big exporter of soybeans, and continues to expand production. Which means lots more slashing-and-burning of the beautiful Amazon jungle. Which means a lot of dead jungle fauna. So vegetarians, you just can’t (and shouldn’t) feel so smug and sanguine about your lifestyle choices. Not that I’m knocking the vegetarian lifestyle. And maybe all I’m doing here is trying to rationalize my own carnivorous tendencies.
For one thing, though, I wholeheartedly agree with my friend Kevin‘s pithy observation that “Killing is part of creaturely existence.”
Well, well. There’s always plenty more to say here on the blog. There are tons of quotes I want to put up, tons of pictures I want to show, and tons of memories and experiences I want to relate.
Before I go I want to say a few words about my Aunt Jean, whom I mentioned in my last entry. I visited Aunt Jean and Uncle Louie about two years before Aunt Jean passed away. They picked me up at the Ontario airport in California and we drove to Mickey D’s for lunch. I was blown away at the poster on the window that advertised 29¢ Hamburger Wednesdays and 39¢ Cheeseburger Sundays. No siree, you can’t beat Mc Dick’s in a price war. For lunch we had the usual fare and I remember my aunt, half blind due to her advanced diabetes, relishing the tasty french fries. “I like them, but they don’t like me,” she quipped several times over the course of the meal.
During my visit, the three of us went shopping together. When my aunt wandered off in the supermarket or department store, Uncle Louie would let forth his distinctive, piercing whistle, which he accomplished with only a couple fingers in his mouth. My aunt’s head would instantly perk up and she would feel better, knowing her husband was around.
Back at their apartment, I noticed how both of them slept quite a bit—uncle about ten hours, aunt ten hours plus daytime naps. More than once, Aunt Jean would awake with a start from one of her naps on the sofa and exclaim, “Where am I? Where am I?” That must have been the Alzheimer’s at work. Uncle Louie lost his patience once and told her to shut the heck up.
I would hold my aunt’s hand on the sofa while we recounted memories. It was weird. She would fade in and out. One minute she didn’t have too much idea who I was, the next minute she was talking about my mother. She definitely seemed to have trouble making new memories. I remember the following litany occurring several times:
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Yes, Aunt Jean.”
“Is she Jewish?”
“Well, no, I’m sorry, she’s not.”
And I’ll round off this post with a couple of recollections from when I stayed with my aunt and uncle, in the house that my uncle built, at the age of six.
I remember Aunt Jean cleaning my face with a rag and some household cleaner: “Now I know why they call this stuff Fantastik!”
And she also dished out some condiment-related wisdom. Reading the label of a bottle on Heinz ketchup, she exclaimed, “Now I know why kids love ketchup so much. It has sugar in it!”
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