Take That! Little Germ Factories!

Ha ha! I've vanquished the cold!

Working with kids means you get sick more often than working-with-adults people do. It is a well-known fact that children, while sometimes misleadingly adorable and precious, are simple little petri dishes of communicable diseases. And the little grubbers are persistently taught to share things with others.

Sneeze, hurk, cough, snort.

Kill me now.

It only took two weeks, three packets of nodo-ame (throat drops; i.e. candy!), and four boxes of expensive tissues to get the mucus to turn from yellow to transparent. It's still flowing like a faucet, but we may attribute this to perpetual allergies, not actual plague.

Others of my acquaintance have been less favored by fortune.

My neighbor, the next-door Kiwi, was stricken with Norovirus and was consequently banned from the school and office premises, days after its disappearance. Apparently very young children can sometimes die from the dreadful pooping and puking scourge. In retrospect, he concedes it might just as easily have been food poisoning brought on by his wife's incorrectly cooked tofu. Either way, it's five days of vacation shot to piss.

Not me! I'm turning Japanese and I insist on attending work while I struggle with infectious diseases. As testimony to how awful I felt on Monday, I wore a semi-permeable cloth mask over my mouth and nose while attending Junior High classes. While masks make Westerners think of terrorists (in Tokyo, I'm sure this train of thought carries some weight), here in Japan, wearing a mask symbolizes your selfless act of putting the group above yourself.

In the west, when you're sick, you call the office and say, I'm working from home. No need to check up on me, I'll be at the golfing range - I mean, in bed all day. Cough, cough.

In Japan, staying home literally means your work will not be done. If it's possible to work from home, I've never heard of anybody doing it. And the simple fact is, nobody can do your job.

Let me repeat that: NOBODY can do your job for you.

You see, business in Japan is so compartmentalized that office workers' responsibilities rarely overlap. This not only means that when the volunteer who oversees Sports Club step out for a ciggy, the secretary has to take a message because no one else can answer questions about the next day's practice schedule. If the volunteer is absent all day, vital questions like the "basketball or table tennis conundrum" might never be addressed. Imagine being absent all week. Your desk is now full of post-it notes with politely urgent reminders to call back every Obaachan in the neighborhood who didn't read the monthly newsletter. (I helped put 2,000 of those @&%^!! things together. Read them, minna-san!)

My boss was in the hospital for almost three months recovering from shoulder surgery. When he came back to work, he spent most of his time sitting at his desk working out the budget, like he does every year at this time. Except this year he was twelve weeks behind. Because nobody could even get information together in his absence.

It's a little ridiculous.

In some cases, it's obvious.

I'm the only person in the Junior High who speaks English, so even though they don't use me very often, I simply can't be absent. What would they do without the CD player?

So I wore a mask.

And happily (albeit groggily) shared my native-speaker knowledge and my foreign-acquired sickness with my students.

Happy to return the favor!

I Can't Hear You, the Post-Nasal Drip Is Too Loud

So now I've been ill for going on two full weeks. Some people will tell you that should read three full weeks, but they are silly. I almost got completely better two weekends ago when I went to Hokkaido. After that, it was all downhill again.

I'll tell you what happens when you're ill and working. You are either super-productive or not at all.

I've actually accomplished a fair amount over the past two weeks. I've done research on TEFL certificates and stalked Craigslist car+trucks as I look for potential 1986 BMWs with over 200K miles on them. (I can drive stick. As long as it still drives.)

Nine of seventeen kids finished their pen-pal letters. We have one more full week (send-off date is March 1st!) and I have been cajoling and harassing every step of the way - except for the over-achievers who already finished and remind me at every opportunity.

I began organizing files on my computer, setting the stage for a smooth transition to the new ALT, beginning in August of this year.

I found a Taiko internship to which I am determined to apply.

I'm 23% of the way through Embracing Defeat by John Dower (John Downer? That can't be right...) and getting ready to discuss it on Sunday with my Japanese teacher who is also reading it.

I've watched almost half of one season of The Big Bang theory and almost laughed a few times.

I've lost my hearing in both ears, only about half-way, but enough to make it difficult to distinguish Tosa-ben through the bubbling mucus-filled cavities behind the ear drum (in front of the ear drum? I really don't know).

Maybe tomorrow, I will go to the clinic and see what they can give me in the way of medicine. This is beginning to drag.

And so are the posts!

Sick

Not like perverted in the mind, sick. I've had a cold for almost two weeks.

Actually, it's not a real cold. I don't have any more of a runny nose than usual (which is considerable, since I am surrounded on all sides by things that bloom all year round) and everything just seems to sit beneath my sternum in the top of my lungs. I've been coughing for a long time and though some of it is real, I think some of it is psychosomatic. Like a limp from a shoulder wound in the war.

Sapporo was fan-damn-tastic. Snow, ramen, and Italian lessons abounded. More on that later.

So this is just checking in to tell you I'm still alive. Barely. Every time I get up to be active, I wish I were back in bed. I don't stand up as I write the blog, of course. But it takes a great deal of mental focus.

Which I don't have right now.