As some of my friends know, when awakened by the phone, I will agree to almost anything in the interest of getting off the phone and going back to sleep. I awoke with horror yesterday morning, realizing that, in order to get the Foreign Personnel Office off the phone, I'd agreed to work a double-shift at the language school. Who takes advantage of a sleeping man like that? A single shift is bad enough, as that gang of heartless manipulators should well know. The work day at a language school is a process of gradual derangement. Everyone you meet speaks fragmented English, and basic concepts of proportion and order do not exist ("My hobby is reading newspaper and climbing mountain", said Nakao), leaving you as the sole bulwark of the reason you remember existing in a land and a life far away from this tiny classroom. You have to keep reminding yourself that these are grammatical errors, not pronouncements of fact. Eight lessons leaves you at your limit but able to walk away under your own power. Anything beyond those eight is a serious risk to your long-term mental health. As I expected, things grew strange as the day wore on. My eyes were glassy, my tie half-cocked. A student, asked why he wanted to learn English, gave a ten-minute, non-stop, completely incoherent dissertation on the study of law throughout Japanese history. Another student announced that she wanted to learn English so she could "marry a foreigner and bear half-Japanese, half-foreigner babies". The usual list of questions - where am I from, do I have a gun, do I have a girlfriend, what do I think about Japanese women - seemed to be coming from somewhere above me, spoken simultaneously on the high-end and the low-end of the audio spectrum, but not the middle. Another woman, dressed seductively, named Mami, announced that she wanted to be a screenwriter, but when she tried to write a scenario, she couldn't sleep because she was always thinking of ideas, so she gave that up and started working at a tire company.
Although I had my umbrella with me, I left it at school and walked home in the rain.
