05/28 - Chatting Shit

The daily commute

can be a definite chore

but not with Aykut




In your head all day,

bringing smiles against your will

like a catchy song


Here in Japan my commute to the University takes almost an hour. It begins with a fifteen minute walk from home to the train station, then a 30-40 minute train ride, depending on which train we catch, as there are different levels of express (i.e. different amount of stops cut out), and finally a ten minute walk to our building, the majority of which is through the massive station. You can make an attempt to get outside as quickly as possible and not walk so far through the station, but with the heat it is usually not the best option. On the hotter days I try to bring the ice pack from my freezer to keep me cool on the fifteen minute walk to the station. Yes, it's that hot even at eight in the morning. The train can also be hot, though it is air conditioned. The more "express" the train, the more packed it tends to be. Sometimes people have to be pushed in by the train employees just so the doors can close.

This all probably sounds slightly awful to people who are unused to this sort of commute. It certainly is arduous compared to my seven or eight minute bus ride across Burrard Bridge from Kits to downtown Vancouver. However, I can't say it has felt all that rough any day so far. The biggest reason I have to thank for this is my friend and colleague Aykut. Every day one of us rings the other's doorbell (usually this is Aykut and he has to watch me brush my teeth from the doorway before we leave) and we set off on our journey. Even though it is morning and Aykut has been having problems sleeping a lot of nights, we manage to entertain each other the whole way. Or, as he puts it, "chat shit".

A couple of the other teachers asked me what we usually talk about and it was really hard to answer. I had to say everything from rap music, to cultural differences, to moral relativism, to global politics, to absolute nonsense. No topic is really too big or too small. We never seem to run out of things to talk about and I can't say there's any negatives to spending so much time together daily, except maybe for the fact we end up developing a lot of inside jokes or just end up acting quite silly and repeating the same things over and over. I find that I have phrases or songs stuck in my head all day after joking around with them in the morning.

A few of our favourite comedy bits:

We like to say <reshito des> all the time, as that's what the cashiers in every store like to say as they hand you a receipt. It simply means "it's a receipt" so for some reason we find it hilarious. It's probably more akin to "here's your receipt", but the direct translation makes it funny. Along the same lines, I like to say the station names and desu at the end in the same voice as the announcements on the train.

We have a character named Hank, after Hank in the textbook. The character is basically just me saying easy Japanese phrases in a Texan accent, which makes them virtually incomprehensible to anyone but us. There's been talk of a comic strip.

Planning to produce a song which is just "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys with the lyrics rewritten by me using the names of prominent Tokyo train stations instead of vacation places. Aykut will be responsible for the musical arrangement. Aykut loves making plans. I also have the idea to rewrite the scene in Gladiator  where Russell Crowe says "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife..." in Japanese.

Deciding what roles people we know would play in movies of specific genres.

The second haiku for today references things being stuck in my head. Which is a reference to Aykut and I's jokes, but also to just loads of other things getting stuck in my head here. I've had a few songs stuck in my head for weeks on end. Different phrases I'm learning in Japanese. And more recently, the first line of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. I started reading the novel last week and have long remembered one of my creative writing professor's at UBC, Steven Galloway, highlighting it as a brilliant opening sentence to a novel. It's a fabulously crafted sentence, which keeps running through my head.