toil + toilet

Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.–HEBREWS 12:6

That’s why when I was brushing my teeth last night, the sink fell off the wall and dropped on my feet.

I’ve cleaned the place up pretty well. There’re still lots of drawers, shelves, and cabinets I haven’t swept the cockroach droppings out of, but as I don’t have anything to fill the drawers, shelves, and cabinets with, it hasn’t been a very high priority.
I’m also trying to get over the long lingering illness that the 1st bit of cleaning gave me.

Dust, it turns out, can induce illness, + there was lots of dust. When I moved in, there were sheets of thick white dust and grey and black cobwebs all over the place. I spent the better part of 2 weeks cleaning one room then another. I got sick the 1st week here (from dust or from stress or from 80‘s music?) and it’s been with me since. Every time it seems to have abated, I decide to climb a mountain, cycle along the coast, or finish cleaning, + it comes back…
The 3rd day I was here they had a welcome party for me. They’re good people, + it was really quite fun. They ordered me some tofu without the fish flakes, spring rolls without the shrimp, a buttered baked potato without the butter, buttered corn (also) without the butter, a screw driver made with orange soda and probably not vodka either.

We went to a karaoke bar and I lost my voice, so I couldn’t explain why singing Rick Ashley is a funny thing to do, + couldn’t speak much louder than a whisper for the next 3 or 4 days.
I lost it again after I cycled to Sata town.
I thought it was 21 kilometers to the cape, but it was 27 kilometers to the cape, after the 21 kilometers to the town/ 48k. I would have liked to have known that before going all the way to the town - cycling sweaty in the cold air + losing my voice again.

The cycling is really really nice here. It’s mostly flat and smooth with a view of the bay from most places, and none of the awful stink that was everywhere in my old town.

My old town stank, and my old job sucked.
When the guy down here said he might be able to offer me a job just 40 minutes away from where I was, it was just a passive curiosity that made me go down to hear about it.

It pays about $500 less per month, but the house has better furniture, is $150 cheaper and 20 seconds from the beach. I don’t have to drive 100 kilometers to 3 different places from 10am to 9 or 10 pm everyday. I wake up later, work fewer hours, and don’t have my schedule changed in secret. I don’t have to worry about what and how to teach the kids next. They don’t climb on me or try to poke me in sensitive areas. I don’t have to put up with anyone complaining about how their business is failing because their staff is no good. (I’ve also been told that we charge less than half what my old boss did.)

I don’t miss that guy at all.
I didn’t tell him I was moving nearby, and I didn’t stick around for him to come and inspect my old house before I cleared out. My new boss lent me a car big enough to fit my bike, all my stuff, and a little bit of shopping I did in town - in one trip. I got up early after my last day and left before my old boss could show up. He was looking for a way to take back some of the money he paid me for my last month, and he was gonna’ complain about his failing business again. That house was a pretty good one, though it did have a few problems: In the beginning, he wouldn’t pay to have his old car fixed up, so it was never worth the trouble to tell him that his vacumn wouldn’t suck, his fridge froze everything no matter how you set it, the screen doors had holes large enough for ravens to fly through, the blankets had holes big enough to poke your legs through, and the toilet never stopped flushing. Problems he would probably - suddenly decide to blame on me.

My new toilet, …by comparison, doesn’t flush at all. It’s just a hole with a seat. That hole is pretty drafty when it‘s cold.

It’s been about a month and a half since I left and my old coworker tells me that he too has since been fired. He read his contract and expected to be paid for his one sick day. My old boss likely thought it better to find somebody new than to just pay a qualified experienced person the $130 he’s legally obliged to pay as it‘s unlikely he (or either of us) would feel it worthwhile to try and navigate the Japanese legal system). Our contracts also said we’re supposed to get an extra day off/ extra pay when we work on our days off. I pretty much always refused to work on my days off, but my old coworker lost lots and lots of weekend time to doing favors big and small for our old boss who seemed to rely pretty heavily on his help.
I just got an e-mail today that said that the girl who worked there part time, and the two people who were hired to replace me have all quit.

I love no longer working for a total jackass!
I also love working less.

I have a studio now too.
They tell me that this house used to be a police box/ a station for just one or 2 police. There’s a big front room with lots of windows and a concrete floor where the police used to keep a desk. It’s nice and big and bright. I put some grass mats on the concrete floor so I needn’t worry about dribbling/ splattering paint, but this place is so old and so cheap I really needn’t worry.

With my newfangled extra free time I restretched the canvas I had stretched just before I was fired from my last job. I had wanted to start the painting I have started back then, but at the time I didn’t think I would be staying in the area. Messing with oil paint less than a month before you have to move (to parts unknown) is really ill advised. I unstretched the canvas and gave all its pieces to my girlfriend for safe keeping. Then I had to get it back from her a month after when I knew I wasn’t going too far after all - along with my organic vegan soup stock and some other items I wouldn‘t care to abandon.

I see a lot of cars slowing down when they pass my windows, and people I don’t know tell me they’ve seen me painting while they were driving.
My boss’ wife tells me the old ladies in the neighborhood all tell each other I’m working on something interesting, but I don’t know how they know how interesting it is.
It is - interesting anyway.

I’ve been exploring the area, sick, and inside when it’s raining/ too cold/ too windy/ too dark, so I haven’t painted outside much at all in the month and a half I’ve been here.
I might try to blame Harry Potter for another drop in my productivity…
Because I don’t have the internet hooked up yet, I decided to look at a book for a little while one day. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, etc.

I did get out to do a picture of the beach I live off of, and the craggy peaks just above it, but the weather went from nice to raining in just over an hour.
I did 2 pictures on my way back from my morning classes near my old town one day and got horribly misdirected trying to make it to my evening classes on time. I drove from Aira towards Onetime - I followed a sign that said Onejime, but after 20 minutes of driving straight ahead, the next sign pointing straight ahead said Aira. I saw another sign that said Onejime, but it pointed between 2 roads - at the corner. I tried one of the 2, but it put me 5 minutes from where I 1st started (some 40/ 50 minutes later).

I bought a book of maps for $8., but it doesn’t have half the roads in it.

I painted at a shrine at the side of the big road one day last week. I took my backpack full of heavy tubes of paint with me on my bike, and decided that would be a good time to look for a hiking trail up into the mountains. I found something far away that looks promising, but didn’t have time to hike the whole way up it, as I wanted to get to the shrine in time to get the best bright rays from the setting sun.

I had finished everything but the roof of the shrine in the painting when it got too dark out to continue painting, so I packed up and rode my bike back home.
On the way back home, in the very dim twilight, the sidewalk disappeared. There was a sidewalk, then there was a 1 foot drop with no warning. I had my freshly painted - still wet and susceptible painting in one hand and I was going too fast to stop. Thankfully it landed face up in the same soft grass I landed face down in.
That’s the best bad luck I’ve had since I got fired from that job that I hated.

The luckiest thing that’s happened since I was offered a better job right after being fired from a lousy job was that: I found a TV laying outside yesterday. My girlfriend’s been wanting to get a Wii for more than a year, but they were in short supply and pricey when I had a TV. I tried to win one from a gas station in my old town all through the summer, but I still didn’t have a TV. It has all that black and white fuzz and makes that hissing noise that TVs tend to make when they aren’t connected to anything, so I assume it’ll work when it is connected to something. I just don‘t know if there‘s anything good on… I’ll hook it up when my girlfriend gets here at least. She’ll have the internet set up for us.

That’ll be nice to have. Right now I only get on the internet on my boss’ old computer. There’s always a menu open right in the middle of the screen that we can’t get rid of.