Geisha, Interrupted

Am I THAT Self-absorbed??

"Have you ever had a day," a tired-looking T asks me after arriving home last night, "when you can't stop thinking of all the stupid things you've ever said and done throughout your whole life?"

"That's every day!!" I look up at him smiling brightly, sarcastically.  As a general rule, alcoholics tend to be rather self-obsessed creatures.  And so, breaking the cycle of self-centered, circular thinking tends to be an important goal in recovery.

Since getting sober, I feel like I've been on a never-ending quest to Just Get Over Myself Already.  Which is why it's so funny, that according to my friend Kirkus below, my book is: "self-absorbed even by the standards of this genre..."

Haaa! Ha!

My friends and I got a really big laugh out of this specific turn of phrase.  I mean, to be considered self-absorbed even for a memoirist, you just can't get more self-saturated than that.

Of course my book is self-absorbed: it was written by a drunk 25-year-old, who, throughout the majority of the writing process, was still working nights.

I've been 27 for about a month now, and honestly, 27 feels so, so much older than 25.  (In a good way of course!) And yet, as my memoir is released to the public, it looks as if my self-absorbed-25-year-old-self will be frozen in time on its pages for, if not eternity, than certainly for a while.

Amazake Wars

"So you don't drink any alcohol at all?" The mother of my two year old student is practically aghast. One advantage of teaching students in their own apartments, is that the Japanese are culturally obliged to treat any visitors to their homes with immense hospitality. This basically amounts to serving me cake or tea when I arrive, and on occasion, sending me home with department store bags filled with anything from chocolate, to rice, to sweet potatoes.

"No, I quit drinking." On the downside, Japanese offers of hospitality are quite difficult to refuse. In the five years since I arrived in Japan, I've closed my eyes and swallowed fish heads, chocolate-covered grasshoppers, intestines and all sorts of tentacles, simply because a breach of politeness would have been far more painful.

"It's 'amazake,' so it's not really sake. I believe it has less than 1% alcohol." Tomorrow, her daughter will take the 'entrance test' for pre-school. It's an event I've been helping them prepare for since last summer. It appears that the mother would like to drink with me, in order to toast to good luck.

"I'm sorry..." This makes my refusal to partake all the more troublesome.

"You would still be able to drive if you had some, because the alcohol content is so small. You really don't drink any alcohol at all?"

"Not at all."

"But you told me that you used to drink very heavily when you were younger."

"I did."

"So what happenned?"

"I stopped."

The look on her face is too perplexed for words. If we were in another part of the developed world, or more specifically, in a country where alcoholism is generally recognized as a disease, this entire dialogue would just not be happening.

"Ok, I'll make you some hot chocolate instead. You can drink hot chocolate, right?" She jokes.

"Of course I can." I accept the hot chocolate and laugh.

She continues to look puzzled. Her two-year-old meanwhile climbs up and down her mother's back, seeking attention. Though her mother is a kind, friendly and unusually open-minded woman, she is nonetheless a product of her society.

You Rememory Me?

A good part of this weekend was spent answering some questions for the media, about my experiences as a bar hostess in Japan.  Most questions were the same as the last time I was interviewed, some six months ago.  Yet I worry that, as I describe the hostess bar scene in Tokyo as I remember it, my answers lack a certain consistency.

More to the point, I feel like my attitude towards my past is changing so rapidly that I'm not sure how I should describe how I felt in those bars anymore. I'm not sure which few sentences would best describe a few years of total chaos.

And on top of all that, I have to constantly remind myself to keep my memories tightly in line with how I described the hostessing world in my book. 

After all, everyone is obsessed with "the truth," in memoir writing these days.  When I was writing my book, I was often told that my story had to be accurate enough so that no one would ever accuse of lying, yet distorted enough to mask the identity of anyone and everyone involved (especially those who could potentially sue me for slander)...whatever "truth" that amounts to.

Yet memories, I think, are just as much about present feelings as they are about past events.  So my perception of the past is changing, because my present is changing, and that's the truest thing I can tell you right now.   

Restraint of Pen, Tongue, and Email

I know nothing about any of these things. 

I got angry last night, and found myself engaged in a furious email correspondence with an administrator from one of my various English teaching gigs. It would bore you to go into the specific details of our disagreement, but suffice to say that it was over a minor matter, and I was right.  Very, very right.

But that's not the point, sadly.

"Go for a walk," I tell myself, "calm down first, before you reply to him.  If you send the angry words you are thinking right now, you're really going to regret it."

Yet I don't listen.  I can't stop typing long enough to listen to my own voice warning me.  I am too angry.  "How dare he!"  I want to stop myself, I want to make my points more respectfully, but I just can't.  It's as if I'm not myself, but instead, some swirling ball of rage with some fingers and a keyboard.

And then, moments after I click the send button, that rage lets go of me just as quickly as it picked me up.   It feels like I've fallen flat onto a hard floor.   

Just then, a tired T comes home to find a lamentable me, lying face down on our bed.

"You're not gonna believe what I just told my supervisor to do," I groan.

Little Cans, Big Promises

I took this photo of an alcohol vending machine back at the onsen by Mt. Fuji.  I hope it will hold your interest as I continue to drown in translation work. There is an end to these cartoon scripts in sight, however, so I plan to return to your regularly scheduled snarkiness sometime soon.

Go Me

Truth be told, I've had a pretty depressing holiday season.  It was the first time I spent the holidays as a sober alcoholic, and I'd be lying if I said that it didn't totally suck. Maybe the holidays have always been this depressing, I'd just never noticed it so sharply before.  And now that I like my family and don't totally blame them for everything that's ever gone wrong in my life, I have had to deal with how much I miss them sometimes.

I also turned 27 last week.  Again It felt a bit awkward, since I haven't celebrated my birthday without intoxicating myself for as long as I can remember.  Still, I managed to put my piles of translation work aside in order to hit town with my best friend and my T, and it was as fun as it could be.

I was not sad to see these holidays go.

And yet today, January 3rd 2008, right now, I finally feel like celebrating.  As special as my birth was, my 27th natal birthday suddenly feels rather insignificant when placed beside my 1st sobriety birthday on the calendar.

Anyone can be born.  Even Nazis and serial rapists have birthdays.  But a sobriety birthday, the anniversary of the day upon which I chose to take my first steps along a path that lead me out of complete and utter madness, now that is something to party about.

Excuse me while I go break out the grape juice.

Singing Sober

It appears that over my brief hiatus, I've gotten tagged by one Namenlosen Trinker over at Alcoholic Diary.  Trinker, I comply.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven things you're grateful to have learned in recovery.
4. Tag seven people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

**addendum: rules 4 and 5 don't apply to me.  just cuz.

ok...

Seven Things I'm Grateful to Have Learned in Recovery:

1) How to build a website.  Yeah, you're looking at it.

2) That emotional pain really does begin to let up when we acknowledge its existence.  If slowly.

3) That the serenity prayer in itself can prevent me from resorting to violence on crowded trains, on supermarket lines or at the immigration bureau.

4) That other people are much cooler beings than I'd thought they were.  There is something about prograam that brings out the more benevolent and caring aspects of human nature. 

5) That I could have more power over changing my own destiny than I ever thought possible, merely by admitting that I am not in control.

6) Two words: balloon animals.

7) That I am not as good at Karaoke as I once thought.  And yet, I keep going out to the karaoke boxes in sobriety.  No matter how I sound, I never could have anticipated that I'd be singing sober.

Halloween, Now and Then

Last year at around this time, I dressed up as a dead geisha for a Halloween party.  Perhaps I had some intuitive sense that my illustriously embarrassing Tokyo nightlife would be coming to a close in the months to come.  Mostly though, I just thought it would be funny.  I even persuaded T to dress up as a dead samurai to complete the ensemble.

I told myself that I wasn't going to drink anything alcoholic on the night of the event last year, because I was already feeling immensely hungover from my own very private drinking party the evening prior (it was just me and the bottles).  Then however, I realized that the costume party I was attending had an open bar.  I don't have to tell you the rest of the story.

This year, I didn't let my non-drunkenness stop me from going out for Halloween.  Don't get me wrong, I wanted to let it stop me, but it just so happened that my best friend's birthday fell on the same night as a big Halloween party at a Tokyo nightclub.  For the sake of being there for my friend, I had to go out to a nightclub for the first time since I've quit drinking, in costume no less.

We spent quite some time in the nearest train station around midnight, waiting for her group of friends to gather and depart for the nightclub. 

Waiting there, we ran into some interesting characters who were presumably on the way to the same party.

This giant penis should have been my first indication that the night was going to suck.  (Did I really just write that?  Yes I did.)

Halloween 2007 has made me realize that nightclubs are truly intolerable places when you are not too drunk to notice your surroundings.  If it is a "good" party, you should first have to nearly freeze to death in a slow moving line outside the venue for nearly an hour.  And once you get inside, it is hard not to pass out from all the body heat emanated by gross sweaty people who are as tightly packed together as the ingredients in a roll of makisushi.

At the entrance, my friends and I ran into a guy who had an uncanny resemblance to a young Michael J. Fox, dressed as Marty McFly from back to the future.  He insisted we call him Marty, and offered to buy us a round of drinks.  When I told him that I wanted a coke, Marty asked me if I was a Mormon then told me to "Go back to Utah!"

Shortly after the above incident, Marty McFly slipped and fell down a short flight of stairs.  At the bottom, he got up just as quickly and pretended as if nothing had happened.

Soon I noticed the signs that strictly prohibited photography inside of the club, so I began to start taking as many pictures as I could in a futile attempt to get kicked out of the club, thus having an excuse to leave the birthday party early.

My newfound hatred of nightclubs makes me feel old, and yet I also get the feeling that I'm regressing.  I was a pretty shy kid, and since I haven't been drinking I can't help but feel like I'm crawling back into an old protective shell because I've stopped talking to strangers and I no longer try to be everyone's friend. 

But this is not necessarily a bad thing.  And when given the choice between that and falling down a flight of stairs, well, shyness can't be all that bad.

Drinking with the Garbage Bin

This morning I spotted a woman who was drinking with an old pal of mine: the trash bin. 

Garbage bins are great drinking buddies.  They always take your crap without complaint, and they never suggest that you might have a problem.  They even take the evidence of any such problem out of your hands just as quickly as you can down 500 ml.  Which is quick. 

She is an otherwise normal looking woman who appears to live in this exclusive part of town.  The only item in her hand that's not a homemaking supply is the large sized can of Sapporo.

The legality of drinking in public makes for an interesting dynamic here in Tokyo.  Japan is a country in which alcoholism is every bit a spectator sport.  When we are too embarrassed to drink in front of our family or friends, we drink in front of everyone else instead, alone with the trash.

Serenity, on the Bus to Hell

I call it "the bus to hell," and it is perpetually filled with nervous foreigners who are trying not to get kicked out of Japan, for one reason or another.

From the inside, the bus's windows are littered with advertisements for attorneys who specialize in immigration procedure, and who charge hefty consultation fees.

It is the only mode of public transportation that stops at the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau.

Be it in the middle of the city, the bureau is in a rather inconvenient location.  Since it's not located near any of the city's numerous train station, one must take a special bus from Shinagawa station in order to reach the immigration bureau. 

This is to make everything more difficult.  Making life difficult is what Japanese Immigration authorities like best. 

So I rode the bus to hell this morning, in order to hand in my application for a visa extension.  Never has the serenity prayer been said so many times by me on a single bus ride, and never have my simple repetitions (punctuated by the occasional "thy will be done" or "please let that nice Filipina woman who speaks 5 languages be at the reception counter instead of that stiff, constantly suspicious Japanese man") been of more use to me.

Seriously, I got off the bus feeling as if the serenity prayer was created for the explicit purpose of dealing with Japanese Immigration procedures.  What did I ever do without it?  Oh yeah, I drank.  A lot.

Today my application for the extension of my period of stay in Japan was submitted to the proper authorities without any of the glitches I was worried about.  So now there is only waiting.  It is out of my hands entirely whether my application will be accepted or not. I will continue to pray for the serenity to accept this much.