It's all a bit disjointed, but what else is new, right? But here I sit, lesson plans finally pushed aside and laptop in hand...er, lap...and it's time to get some of this thoughts out.
Japanese Boards of Education provide much better medical services for students than you'd think. Last week, the English teacher I sit beside (who I shall call "Auntie" because her left leg and hip juts forward and angles in, just like the namesake character I'm using from "Memoirs of a Geisha." The book, naturally!), approached me.
"We'll have to do something else for a few minutes at the start," said Mrs. Auntie.
"Oh, why?" I asked.
"Well," she said. "The girls are with the doctor."
I was sort of alarmed, Doctor? What doctor? MRSA? But she continued. The girls from the second year class were just having their dental exam.
A dental exam. In public school! I told her I was surprised, that in America, we never have dentists in school. We just have a nurse at each school who checks students' eyes and ears once a year. On special occasion, doctors come and do an exam for scoliosis, but rarely. Mrs. Auntie explained that the BOE provides for actual doctors to go to each school between April and May to do full health exams including dental and chest exams.
"The teeth are very important," she said in earnest. "And if there is something bad, the student has to go to a dentist."
I doubt the BOE provides for that separate service, but I was impressed that the government takes such an active investment in student health. It plays the sieve in the teapot that catches the tea leaves. Rather than letting families that might neglect a doctor visit or not be able to afford exams (as is so often the case in America), the BOE acts as a catch-all and sifts out students who must seek further attention for their own sake.
The cynic in me, however, wonders if there's a symbiotic relationship between the local docs and the BOE. My friend recently had a run-in with a few beers and a ditch and has had to visit a doctor every few days, just to have ointment applied to his bandaged ear. Each visit to a physician is charged in Japan. Hmm...
Thought 2.
My Thursday didn't end well. And it's nothing to get worked up over, but it bothered me at the time.
I was eating my lunch in the teacher's room, having waited until the last minute to grab a tray to make sure no students were going to ask me to their room to eat. I ate my rice, soup, salad and fish and went back to studying my Japanese.
"Eh, he says you ate the school lunch," she said.
"Yes, it was very good," I told her, hoping I wasn't about to get an ass chewing.
"Yes, he says you ate everything," she tittered. "You can leave something, you don't have to eat it all."
The guy started laughing again, talking to yet another teacher, using his hands to gesture a large pile of food.
I acknowledge that I have lost weight since I came to Japan, but that comes with the territory. I don't drink the milk because it makes me feel ill. I eat a lot more vegetables, less fat, sugar and salt. I also exercise a lot more, too. So I've reached what I consider a healthy weight and I'm comfortable with where I am there. End of story.
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| Just this month, I enjoyed Harue's bull calf. He was delicious! |
A. He thought my ability to eat what is placed in front of me wasn't an act of HUNGER or a desire to show my appreciation and economy by not wasting food. Instead, he looked at it as blatant, uncouth, American gluttony and that I should be more like the traditional (and honestly) antiquated ideal of the demure, young, single woman in Japan (Japanese or otherwise) and should eat like a baby bird in order to preserve this husband-alluring young figure.
To which I say, "Go f*** yourself."
B. He simply didn't realize that I was in fact very hungry and do love the miso soup and wakame salads. He simply didn't understand that one of my passions is food: cooking, looking at, smelling and yes, eating.
Exhibit B.
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| "I don't like food. I LOVE it." |
Thought 3.
After a little over year of actually sort of not really kind of teaching, I'm starting to realize this might be my future. Teaching. For years, I thrashed against the very idea, fighting the expectation that I would pursue teaching simply because my mother is a teacher.
News flash: my mother started off as a parole officer. She changed to teaching after she had me and my brother.
What never occurred to me was the missing other half of my struggling: why I would pursue teaching. This past week I realized it's because I needed to come to terms with the idea on my own, not be pressured into it. Whatever I do, I want to do it for myself, for my own motivations and I need the freedom to choose for myself.
I've never been one of those kids in the classroom who could stand up and definitively declare "I want to be a nurse," "I want to be a doctor," "I want to be an architect," "a psychiatrist," "wedding planner," "vet," "astronaut," yadda yadda yadda. I've wanted to do a lot of things, but I've always had a knack for literature and composition.
And now I'm thinking that's the direction I need to go: choose a path down the hill, lean forward and commit.
