When It Rains, It Pours

I find that rain is one of those things that's nearly impossible to represent photographically. It can be raining super hard but if you try to take a picture of it you come nowhere close to accurately representing nature's fury. Thus, I have (perhaps wisely) chosen to pursue abstraction rather than mimesis.

As I walked out of my apartment this morning, I noticed a stray cat scuttling away in the periphery. He had been sitting outside of my door trying to avoid the unrelenting rain but little did I know that he was there for another reason; this cat was a textbook bad omen.

My office is situated literally one block from my apartment. The total time it takes me from walking out of my front door to punching my timecard is usually an even two minutes. Despite the duration of the journey and the fact that I was holding an umbrella over my head while on my bike, by the time I arrived at the office it looked as if I had stopped on my way to take a quick dip in the pool. Of course, the moment I sat down at my desk, I realized that my lunch was still sitting on my kitchen table. Luckily, I was to be driven by one of the office ladies today so I was able to avoid trudging back in the rain.

Well, when it rains this hard, it eventually has to let up, right? Right? The rain continued all day, showing no decrease in determination. At the end of the day, the office ladies told me to bring my bike inside the building to be stored overnight so that I could walk home with my umbrella. "That's okay," I said, "I'm planning on going to the supermarket after it stops raining so I'll just walk it home". "But Mehan-San," the oldest office lady interjected, "according to the weather report, it is not going to stop raining today". Of course I doubted the veracity of this statement but since one of the office ladies offered to drive me to the supermarket while I was on the clock, I agreed. Man, am I glad that I took her up on that offer. It is still raining. In half an hour I will have been awake for 12 hours and the entire time it has been raining non-stop. I usually leave my kitchen window cracked and the pots adjacent to it were full of water when I returned home.

I've been teaching junior-high/middle school lately (whatever you call it) and man, does it suck. I know how to deal with kids who are hyper, disruptive, loud, obnoxious, obtrusive, socially inept, daft, a danger to themselves and others, boisterous, uncooperative and even that kid who takes his hand out of his pants only to shake my hand. But what do you do when you're stuck in front of a classroom of kids who are completely apathetic and uninterested? These guys seriously don't give a fuck. No, let's make this absolutely clear; these kids don't even give one-tenth of a fuck. The only time any of them open their mouths is to make fun of me.

You know how Japanese schoolchildren are supposedly unnaturally hard-working and vigorously disciplined into an army of respectful pupils? That is a lie. In one of the classes I taught, half of the boys were asleep. No, they weren't simply dozing, they were sprawled out on their desks with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. What's more, the teacher made no attempt to rouse any of these students. While the rest of the class filled out worksheets, Sleeping Beauty and company remained undisturbed.

Then there's the guy who wears a huge chain around his neck that supports a stolen Mercedes-Benz hood ornament and who refuses to communicate with anyone. If I didn't have my kindergartners to look forward to later that day I might have stopped communicating myself.