the driving force / or how I got my car repaired.

How is it that an entire city can stink of piggy poo?
When it’s hot, as it generally is all through the summer in a semi-tropical area, …a person wants to open a window - Let in a breeze. - Not choke on those awful fumes - Yes?
I don’t want my home to stink of pig, but short of packing up and leaving already, there’s really nothing to be done about it.

I had hoped to be able to organize a little free time between jobs, but that didn’t work out in my favor.
They needed someone to come quickly, and they never mentioned the odor, the tarantula that guards the toilet, the ankle deep murky water where the dis-functional washing machine sits….
Not a big deal really.

I had to work on my birthday - again.
Last year I was locked in a “supply closet” napping and reading comic books until I snuck out. This year I really had to do something other than just sit there, but I was able to leave freely when I was finished. It’s good to try to do something a little special for your birthday so, after my morning class I followed some road signs to a nice place - where the 1st Emperor of Japan’s parents are said to be buried. I wandered around there and at a nearby park for a few hours, I watched the fish + found a huge snake, then drove back to the center of the city to work more.
After work I went for a short cycle to a spot that would have had fireflies if there were any fireflies around.

I’ve been wanting to see fireflies since my 1st summer in Japan, when I realized that not all places have fireflies like they ought.
It soon became clear that there weren’t any fireflies, so just went to the Indian restaurant in town.
I would have gone there earlier in the week, but I wanted to try and do something fun on my birthday.
I ordered a vegetable curry + nan.
The guy asked me how hot I wanted the curry “from 1/not hot - to 50”/ I can’t even imagine how hot that would be.
I said 9/ the low end of the scale (yes?) and I don’t know how the hell he worked out what number means what because I drank a whole pitcher of water + ordered extra nan + all of my insides were still burning all night and late into the next day - Hot!

I woke up late the next day because, I could, and because my parents had another birthday party for me / without me in New Jersey. I went to an internet café that night with my web camera + talked to a lot of the people there and talked to my girlfriend elsewhere. There is a time difference between here + New Jersey, so I was up until the sun started to rise the next day.

The next day I went back and painted 2 pictures of the place I’d found the day before. It was, after all, the 1st and only nice place I could find then. There were few people there on my birthday, and there were as many people the next day. I hadn’t seen anyone at all pass by for more than an hour when, of all things, I saw a black guy with curly hair.

The guy who’d decided we would go swimming at the waterfall had told me a few days before that there’s a super friendly black guy with curly hair in town. I had only seen 2 people who were not Japanese in as many weeks, and thought it safe to assume that there were not 2 black guys with curly hair.
+ he was really nice. He said he would be leaving town shortly - for greener or more fragrant pastures, I know not. Good for him

Given that I have to drive up to an hour out, several times a day, for classes here and there, I have managed to find some better places than what you see (and smell) in the center of town.

Two days after my birthday I spent almost 3 hours driving around looking for a beach that isn’t made of concrete. I did get 2 more paintings done when I did finally come across a beach. An old guy with a fishing pole stood and watched me for about 30 minutes, then he went off fishing.
I asked him if he knew of any pretty/ prettier places around + he was stumped. I live on a peninsula, on an island - and shouldn‘t have this problem. The sea is on every side of me, but all the roads just seem to connect one pig factory to another.
I forgot how to get back to the waterfall I slid down naked, but during a 4 hour break I drove around near another city I have to work in twice a week. I get 4 hours free time before starting there each Tuesday, so I was glad to find some nice looking mountain peaks not too too far from where the classes are. The 1st week I went up a one lane mountain road to a campsite + hiked around with all my heaviest paint on my back looking for the best vantage point. After about 2 hours of walking I realized I’d had the best view when I was still in the parking lot.

“Up the one lane road near another “city” that I have to drive a long way to.”

I went straight back there the next week and painted a large picture very leisurely. When I was all finished, I looked at my watch to see how much time I had left to do another painting, + I had to check and recheck my watch - because I was 25 minutes away + only had 15 minutes to get to class.
I drove quickly and changed shirts at a red light, and only got there a few minutes late, only a few seconds after the 1st students.

Another time I got to another class 5 minutes early, only to learn that 5 minutes early is really 25 minutes late if you have the starting time wrong.

I had another set of classes in a really small town, really far away, with an hour and a half break between sets. I found a super cool river there where a campsite had been - all covered in vines now. The rocks along the river are all oddly eroded - like green water running deep down in grey swiss cheese.

[youtube=http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=oFUt9NN7fGM]

I don’t love teaching those kids there, but I like that I have a couple hours of daylight after my last class there + I’ve managed to paint 2 pictures there in 2 trips.

I ran low on paint thinner really very quickly, but there was none to be found in my new town, so I had to drive to the capital of the region on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I saw the volcano that always spits ash into the sky sit peacefully/ not erupt, …but it was still impressive. The city itself was also surprisingly nice. There was green grass there. Green grass is even rare on the golf courses here, but it was right there in the middle of their big roads, manicured, with street cars running along side it all. I got one bottle of paint thinner, directions to a branch of my bank, which was of course closed on Sundays, but why do the ATMs need to take the day off?

I had a good walk around - for 5 hours, then got dizzy + needed to eat. I thought I might be able to find a vegetarian restaurant, but I got interested in the menu of an Indian restaurant. I’d gone back to the ridiculously spicy Indian place in my town just the night before, and had a much easier time with a level 6 vegetable curry. The level 6 potato and garbonzo bean curry was just right.
While walking down the street, I heard someone politely ask - in English, if they could talk to me, and he looked like a Jesus hound when I turned around and saw him, but it was just a nice guy from Tennessee trying to get people to go see his band play. I don’t know how successful he getting anyone else to go. I didn’t go to find out. I was mostly glad and relieved that I didn’t have to fend off another: Mormon, Jehova’s witness, or door to door newspaper salesman.

The day after, I finally found the kind of beach that I expected to find everywhere. It was just 20 minutes away. I saw all of 9 people there the whole day. There may’ve been one or 2 more people there in the morning, but I was then busy wading through the murky standing water on my balcony - as I had thought it proper to try and wash some clothes.

It took about 40 minutes to walk from one end of the beach to another. I got tired and painted a picture from the midway point + went swimming. It was warm like bath water + you had a great view of the whole bay + the mountains across the way. There was a shrine built on some rocks at the opposite end of the beach. I swam out to it when I got there. My 1st painting blew over while I was swimming, but not seriously damaged. I smoothed out the scratches in the paint with my fingers, which resulted in larges patches of both my arms, shoulders, and feet turning a Smurf-ish blue (for several days - baked on paint!).
I painted another picture of the shrine on the rocks, the sea surrounding it, and the mountains off in the background.

“Shrine on the rocks in the bay”    

Actually I think it was carrying 2 big blue paintings 40 minutes down the beach at sunset that somehow turned large parts of me blue.

I got back to the center of town around 8:30 + tried out a revolving sushi place I had passed and wondered about. They had fewer vegetarian dishes than the Kaiten-sushi where I’d lived in times past, but they put roughly the same amount of mayonaise on what vegetable dishes they could make.
Everyone was looking at me over their shoulders as if they had never seen a foreign sunburnt man with warpaint drinking lots of water.
I tried to discreetly wipe my blue fingerprints off the counter + think I got it all taken care off.
The inside, door handles, and roof of the car at the mechanic’s is another story.

————————————————

We get time between classes: An hour, two, or five.
+ I’ve noticed… that the time between classes, however long it is, it goes by quicker than the limited time I spend in class and driving long distances to class.

Today, for instance, my car wouldn’t start right away, so I was 5 minutes late for class,

it took about 5 minutes to get them all to come in the classroom,

and I let them leave a bit early,

…and I let them talk amongst themselves for another however many minutes (It wasn‘t enough).

That left about 40 minutes of them kicking, slide tackling, wrestling, pinching, and climbing all over each other (mostly kicking). When I say each other I mean myself as well. You twist a kid’s arm up and he acts all repentant, …but that doesn’t last 15 seconds. The other kids, don’t stop kicking him for 5 of those seconds either.
One kid had like 50 rubber bands on his arm that he kept snapping at the others, I grabbed the lot of them, pulled back and threatened to let them snap at him - which I did do when he tried to kick me. I suspended a pair of them, a leg in each arm to get them to stop kicking each other, and some other little monster jumps on my back. I tripped up a pair of them (lifted their feet) while they were trying to kick me, and that was funny, but the one pretended to cry so that the others would come within rubber band range, and I had to spend another several minutes confiscating them then.
You try and tell a kid that slide tackling someone is a good way to get punched in the face, but stupid kids don’t listen.
It was easier last week when 3 of the 5 of them refused to get out of the mini pool + come in the classroom. I saw/ heard through the window that the little girl took all her clothes off and was yelling at the principle to look at her ass. I didn’t initially know she was the one who was supposed to be in my class.

She had no nametag!
Ha!

I hadn’t thought reading 1 page (5 short sentences with lots of colorful pictures), doing 1 workbook page (trace less than 10 words), then playing a game was a lofty ideal, but you see how quickly it degrades into “No kicking anyone who is down on the floor.”

Like I said, my free time goes so much quicker.

But the driving part is what really concerns me now.
The car is as un-inspected as it was when I was given the key and the “it’s your problem now” from my boss two weeks ago. It seems not to have been inspected for quite some time now, but (perhaps?) only very recently has it started squealing - …like a donkey would squeal, if it were in hell.
When there was a little drizzle of rain for the 1st time, I turned the windshield wipers on, + instead of wiping the windshield (like windshield wipers do), they stuck together. That is to say: they collided and would not work out their differences ( maybe passions?). I had to stop the car, turn my hazard lights on, pry them apart, and repeat the process. Luckily it was not raining hard and it soon cleared up.

I told my boss about it. He said it’s good that it isn’t raining anymore.

Now I don’t want to have to pay upwards of $1,000 plus some hundred dollars to have his old spare car fixed up enough to pass the stringent (costly) Japanese inspection standards, but I also don’t want to get pulled over driving an un-inspected car + paying whatever awful fee that likely entails.
For his part, he didn’t want me to drive around uninsured (or he has a friend that sells insurance), so he called a friendly insurance agent, who came bearing a form with all my information already filled in. Some of the information was wrong. People don’t often get any of my names right, this guy had me down as Shinda Raian. If you translate that 1st part, …it actually means: “He’s Dead”.
Funny mistake from an insurance agent.

I wondered how interested the insurance agent would be to hear that my windshield wipers don’t work, but he still wanted to sell me the auto insurance…

The day after I first/ second/ and third tried to use the windshield wipers - It rained. It rained really hard and, of course, my windshield wipers would not wipe. I tried calling my boss to remind him I couldn’t drive 15 kilometers in a typhoon unless I could see, but he was out of town all morning and I only had his office number - Which nobody was around to answer - Which, I imagine, must have peeved the people at the school I didn’t show up to too.
Although I did show up, (a mere) 25 minutes late + saw a whole bunch of teachers gathered around a telephone looking angry. I don‘t know if they were upset because I hadn‘t died, or because nobody had answered any of their calls to the office.

I bet my insurance agent is happy I‘m not dead though. I pay by the month after all.

When I went out in the typhoon to make sure the wipers still didn’t work, to reassure myself it was safe to go back to sleep, they almost did work, and after a little bit of readjusting them (in the typhoon) - they did seem to work like you‘d expect windshield wipers to work. Somewhat reluctantly, I went back inside and made something to eat, + put dry clothes on, + left my scuzzy apartment when I should have already been there.)

So my boss called me back around lunchtime + suggested we take his/ my car to a mechanic + have the things he’s tired of hearing me remind him about looked at, + I’ll have no reason to not go to work on time.

The mechanic’s wife came out - looked at the wipers and realized that one was much longer than the other. She switched them + it was all fixed within 3 minutes. I told her all the other things that seem to be wrong with the car. She got her husband, who was surprised that a car with so many flaws had been able to pass inspection. My boss said he didn’t remember how much time was left until it needed to be inspected again, but he knew it was okay. I told him yet again that there was no sign of it having ever been inspected. The mechanic asked how much longer it had. My boss looked all over the car (in the rain) for the inspection sticker (which is always in the same spot ( where my windshield has a circle of sticky residue). The mechanic’s wife looked though the papers in the glove compartment and declared it almost 10 months overdue. He was surprised. He said the police would throw me in jail if they caught me driving it; Which is the same thing I had told him 4 or 5 times before.
I guess he realized I shouldn’t be expected to pay to fix up his old car/ or more importantly, realized that I wouldn’t, so he’s said that he’ll pay the mechanic’s inspection fees/ get it up to specs.

I was relieved to hear it. Sort of wished I hadn’t filled the car up just an hour before, but it was on empty. The loner car they gave me drives so much easier than his car, but it was even emptier than mine had been when I filled it up out of necessity.

That’s all seemingly sorted out now. Thankfully.
The other gripe that I have now is his expecting me to work one of my days off each month.

I thought I should make the most of my 2 hour evening break, so I went into the clinic across from the mechanic.
The doctor, and later - the pharmacists were all afraid of me. Well educated medical professionals never want to admit that they’ve never had to deal in insulin and needles before, and they always try to cover up the fact that they’re having their staff telephone every other pharmacy in the area looking for insulin/ needles.

They always give me a form to fill out (all in Japanese), which I do fill in (in Japanese)

, and they always seem to read it over carefully before asking me if I speak Japanese.
Doctors and Detectives are separate professions after all.