The Red Balloon, etc.

My kindergarten teacher played this movie for us just before summer vacation at West Kearns Elementary in June 1988. I was six years old. Today I taught Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Creative Writing to girls 13-17 years old. Some of them still suck their thumbs when they are at the group home reading David Sedaris and they think no one is looking. One of them has to carry a ratty, torn blanket covered with Disney princesses to symbolize her depression. Today I let them run around outside and write haiku underneath the volleyball net and on the grass in front of the horse pastures. She wrote hers from a swing, inspiring girls around her to write about the oscillating rhythm under a fish-eye blue sky, the blanket dragging in the dirt beneath her.

Half the girls announced to me that they hate school, hate pencils, hate readingwritingrythmatic, hate thinking and learning and doing, and ohbytheway, I have ADD/ADHD which pretty much makes me moot to anything you ever have planned, so don't take it personal, k? (They are also my best poets so far. Quirky, but good. They don't have enough vocabulary to hide behind fancy crap yet.)

The other half claim they have yet to be challenged in school. They've been reading Shakespeare since they were five and they are bored of teachers who grade merely on participation and completion of assignments. They are too brilliant to be normal and all of their wounds come from being too aware, too awake, too advanced. Their hands are constantly raised and I both love and fear them. They are who I was when I was 14. Lost, dazed and confused (sans marijuana), but oh-so-brilliant. I knew it all. Calculus=cake. AP English was a breeze. I yawned dramatically for teachers I felt were babying us. I could spell any word in the dictionary and hated spellcheck for stealing my thunder. I learned to read when I was four and got sent out of class in elementary school to read with the older kids. I figured I'd be an astronaut someday, or a writer.

And here I am now, dumber than ever, with a year of desert brainrot that has affected even the most simplistic grammatical equations. One girl circled a typo in my horrible getting-to-know-you sheet (something I promised myself I'd never make a class do), and I suddenly feared I'd become just like all the other English teachers I knew were faking it and probably preferred television over reading, too.

I am 26 years old. Just over a quarter of a century. My kindergarten teacher is likely in a nursing home and I don't even remember her name. But I remember her face, and I remember the Humpty Dumpty dot-to-dot we did on the first day. I lost it on the bus because I didn't have a backpack. So there you go. First and last day of kindergarten remembered.

Haunted Carnival: Straight from the Mission Journal (be kind to my immature, ethnocentric missionary self)

FIRST: I've been meaning to post this for some time. But I don't want it to reflect the full experience of my time in Japan. I'm a bit embarrassed of this entry and how we acted. At the same time, why hide how it really went down? My district lived far away from each other. We'd heard about the abandoned carnival and finally decided to meet there, as it was halfway between us all. Please be forgiving for how horrible we were and if anyone takes offense to this, the comment box is all yours. I'm sure I deserve any hand smacks and I'll try to make up for it by offering better missionary experiences in the future. But, without any further ado:

(oh, and click on pictures to enlarge. You knows the drill.)

May 25, 2005

I really will continue that entry later... it was a way good day with super fun lessons... Momoko Shimai came w/ us to Tsuda San's and Naito San's & then we ate at Bikkuri Donkey & went on 3-some splits where we visited Mori San who came home, avoided us, and left again, and Takamiya Shimai who showed us her origami & gave us really gross vegetable drinks & then I listened to the Legacy soundtrack in the car while we rode around in the members' car trying to find these places.


But TODAY......holy canoly. The abandoned haunted carnival at Kaya Onsen. Wild and crazy times, I give you that. We rode rusty spidery cobwebbed rides by having some of the elders push the cars/boats/things around.....it was really eerie & really fun. We went through the beat up & broken into haunted house and Moriyama and Fox jumped out at us in the room of mirrors.



Then we went into the eating part & past that through the pool locker rooms & out to the pool area that had maybe an inch of murky water left and fat tadpoles everywhere. It was there that we had DDM [district meeting] which included the Senso P.R.S. game by Morishige Shimai & training by yours truly (everyone had to write letters to themselves which they would receive in 5 years after I send them out in 2010. How cool is that going to be? (when I'm 28!!))





Anyway then we went & saw the game room & there were hundreds of boxes of statues and we were going to take some but then Fox chickened out so he and Moriyama went up to ask the guy watching TV if they could take them & the guy got upset but then sold them nicer ones for 500 yen a peice. So I gave my statue up (but accidentally took 3 golf balls).


Anyway, the craziest part of the trip (if you can believe it gets crazier) was when we went to over to a building....the temple part...and jumped over a wall and reached our hand through the broken glass door to unlock it and Elder Moriyama led us into thes room FILLED with golden Buddha statues as tall as me.....thousands....back to back in long lines with bigger Buddhas in between & one GIANT Buddha in the middle with colorful warriors on the sides. Everything was gold & all lit up and there were huge mirrors that made them seem even more huge and varied. We were way quiet and I think we were all a little scared. What did it all mean? There were SO many of them. It was really eerie.

Then we walked into another room where there were huge statues representing the various eras of Buddha's life, I think. But the scary part to this one was that the entire room was filled with sand and someone had set up little villages & palaces and SHEEP in the sand so there would be nothing but sand and then a little house off by itself, or some sheep. The whole ROOM was this way.

Tsuchiya Chourou got a little somber at the end when Moriyama took a picture of a Buddha statue kekkoing [rejecting] him offering an EIKAIWA chidashi [English class flyer] and Tsuchiya felt we were making a mockery of Japanese Gods and he would hate it if someone treated the things we hold sacred like we were doing to them. I agreed and immediately felt a different respect for the things we had seen and wondered at how I could have forgotten so quickly.....and then I started to feel guilty that I had been so afraid by what I had seen and had laughed and belittled the daibutsu holding a baby. But then I recalled the amusement park and just how strange and false and appearingly heartless the place was and fell into kind of a morose confusion about the whole day.


Then we went to Makudonarudo [McDonalds] and went home. By then it was evening and Sis. Morishige and I went to Priesthood Mtg. and talked about baptismal dates and inactives.

Oh and I met a Canadian girl today who will meet w/ us again but has no real interest in religions because she doesn't feel like we need a certain religion to be able to pray to and love God.

I agreed. But there's more to it.

It was a strange day..........