Towel

The toilets in this country have little sinks on top of them- to wash your hands or whatever. When you flush, water comes out of the little spout at the top.

I’ve always felt that pants – are towels that we wear on our legs; Some people even go so far as to wear those intriguingly textured terry cloth pants…,

but I thought I should perhaps splurge on a hand towel to hang over some of the exposed pipes that run across the wall to my toilet.

I wasn’t doing it to impress the guests I had coming, but to help keep anyone in a nylon track suit feel comfortable – if and when they decided to wash their hands from the top of my toilet.

There is a towel/ blanket shop under my apartment. I had gone there once before, but in the meantime, forgot why I never went back. I assumed it was because of my here to fore – limited towel/ blanket demand.

The hand towels were pretty cheap there. The face towels were larger, prettier, and cheaper than the hand towels. I grabbed a hand and a face towel, which – together – would have been 100 yen and took them to the register and I waited for anyone in the shop to notice I was there. When the guy did come and notice me he said I couldn’t buy those towels. “Why?” I asked. (It was a towel shop after all.)

He said that you can’t buy 1 face towel and 1 hand towel, you have to buy 5 of each, or none.
He folded them both up and walked away.

That was 2 weeks ago, and it still stirs me up to think about it,

Not least of all because I only have 1 face!

How do they stay in business? What does he expect me to do with the other 4 towels?

It’s a good place to shop if you like clerks who go out of their way to be unhelpful, …and you’re married and have 3 kids/5 people in your family, and you need precisely that many towels/ blankets, but who else would go there otherwise? What if you were going to the beach with 6 sexy girls?
Would you have to buy 10 beach towels/ or 35?

Japanese towels suck anyway – you can get more water off of you with a thick napkin,
but that could add up to several trees worth after a year or so.

I explained all of that to my guests when they came, and perhaps – not coincidentally, some of them forgot their bath towels when they left.

(You might be interested to know that bath towels here are nearly twice the size of a standard handkerchief.)

I didn’t, however, say anything about needing any toothbrushes, and now I have 5 of them, so it may’ve just been by accident that they left all that stuff.

When they were here we went snowboarding. They picked out a cool place to go, and we all got up early and waited for the girls to put their makeup on. I’ve been asking girls for years if they really need to pay such attention to the fine details of their eye-makeup, when they always wear ski goggles on top of it; They always say yes.

When they did, eventually - finish, we got into my old roommate’s friend’s brand new car. It was very impressive! It still had plastic on the seats, and a computer that counted down the distance to your destination. It must’ve had the wrong kind of tires though, because we couldn’t get up the hill.

I don’t suppose anyone would have wanted to leave it parked in the road 6 kilometers from the ski-park and walk that distance. At any rate, we didn’t. We found an adequately non-steep place to go not too far off; + the steeper slopes there were closed off due to lack of snow.

The next week some other guests came and we tried to go to the ski-park right next to the one we had to go to the previous week. There was no longer enough snow there though, so we wound up going to the one we couldn’t make it up the hill to, the week before.

That place was much much better. The snow wasn’t really ideal for skiing/ snowboarding, but you couldn’t ask for better snowball snow. No one asked me to stop throwing snowballs at them, but nobody threw them back at me as exuberantly either. (They wouldn’t have had to, my aim is pretty bad.) I had a great time, and would definitely make an effort to go there often, …if I still lived here.

You see, the manager of my company called me this morning. He was driving, someone else in the car with him was talking, and it was a long (often interrupted) story, but it seems that: all of the teachers at all of the schools here like me a lot, they think I’m doing a wonderful job, they think I have a good character / nice personality, and they prefer me to certain predecessors, but someone somewhere (who is completely mental and has a father - who works for the board of education) disagreed with the general assessment loudly enough that the head of the Board of Education decided they may as well try to see how someone else would do in my place, and I have to be put somewhere else.

That just goes to show that one person can make a difference, …though not necessarily to anyone else’s benefit.

I often felt it my responsibility, as a reasonably intelligent human being, to help this one sorry individual pull their head out of their own ### / “see the light of reason”, but thought it better to do it gradually

– and indeed, most people will resist change/ resist anything uncomfortable/ and pass blame wherever else they can.

I know I used to, but now I really try hard to get to the honest truth of things. It’s hard to see through “how you want things to be”, to appreciate “how they actually are”.

Anyway, I’m glad I won’t have to teach those ackward adult classes with the one cranky/ drooly old man here anymore. It’s nice to know that the articles which I had to write for the town paper will no longer be creatively: ”edited” to a degree that they come to mean something entirely different.

Otherwise I really liked this town/ this area a whole lot. My girlfriend was thinking/ and seemed to have decided to come to live up here – closer to me, so it’s good that I have to leave before she accepted any job in this area. The head of my company said that they can get me a job somewhere in the dead concrete city suburbs very easily, but I would hate to have to live someplace without lots of trees.

Really, what I’d like to do is stay in Nagano and not teach an adult class, but changes do keep things interesting.

So, as it was 2 years ago, when I had 2 weeks to pack up everything I own and move to someplace far off and away that I didn’t want to go to: I again have 2 weeks to pack up everything I own, and move someplace -?- ….