Vindication

Yesterday, I decided that I was going to start playing with girls' heads.

By this, I mean that I decided that whenever I saw a girl that was sufficiently cute in my estimation, that I would look at her eyes as she walked by or steal lengthy glances at her if we were standing around somewhere. If they looked back, I would meet their eyes, keep staring, and after three to four seconds, smile just slightly.

This is colloquially known as "the green light glance".

I'm justifying this rakish behaviour to my conscience by taking the following stances: I have no ill intentions (to be precise, I have none at all, other than perhaps to appreciate a pretty face), and I would personally be very flattered, and my day brightened, if one of these self-same girls were to do this to me.

So yesterday, I started tossing out the hooks.

Today I got my first bite.

I was standing around the Billings Bridge bus station waiting to transfer, and noticed a cute asian girl coming up the stairs; offhand I'd call her a 7, maybe 7.5. She glanced toward me as she topped the stairs, our eyes met, and I kept staring as she walked past.

She kept her eyes locked to mine as she walked by; I don't think her head could have turned any further over her shoulder. (Suddenly the one scene from Memoirs of a Geisha pops into my head. I don't think I'm just that good yet.)

After about four to five seconds I smiled, and so did she, in that oh-so-cute and mildly sheepish way, before she went and sat down across the room (proceeding to steal long glances at me for the next five minutes).

I tread the moonlit path.

~~~~~

On the other side of things, I made my Japanese Sensei laugh so hard she almost fell out of her chair today.

I'd can't really recall ever having seen an asian person actually turn visibly red in the face, but after I made my class presentation, she was the color of beets.

This in hand, I predict that her teaching me Keigo is the worst thing she could have ever done. It's not that I now end everything I say with de gozaru. No, no, that would be too simple.

Let me give you an example of how I unloaded the Keigo Combo at the end of my presentation:
"After that I found out about the JET Programme. I moved in with my sister in Ottawa and started attending university studying linguistics."

How I could have written it:
"Sono ato de, JET Programme wo hakken shimashita. Ottawa e hikkoshite, oneesan to sunde itte, daigaku de gengogaku wo benkyou shite haiteimashita."

How I actually wrote it:
"Sono toki no ato de, JET Programme wo hakken itasun de gozaimashita. Ottawa e ohikkoshi itasun de gozatte, aneue to sunde orite, to daigaku de gengogaku wo benkyou itasun de gozattekara ohairi itasun de gozaimashita."

My Sensei could not speak after I delivered this finish.

I nearly got a standing ovation for it.

After class ended, I caught Sensei in the hallway and called out "oshitsurei itasun de gozaimasu!".

She turned around, walked back to my end of the hall, and we ended up chatting about the bit for five minutes as she took the long way to her office. I was that awesome.

Just thought I'd share.

Ja de gozaimasu ne!

Turn The Page

You’re plodding merrily along one day and then you get struck by a fully-loaded, speeding Pepsi truck. Three to one odds say you fly more than sixty feet.

Alternately, you’ve got a smile that competes with the sun for brightness; like the five year old that just climbed the biggest hill they’ve ever known for the first time, and then a strong gust of wind sends you sprawling down said hill, rolling you through thorn brambles, until you splash to a stop muddy, bruised, and bleeding in a cold stream at the bottom.

Now that we have something in common, I can introduce myself.

My name is Masaru Atsureki, or it would be (or may end up being) if/when I turn fully Japanese. This is the name I would choose for myself, if given the option; it means “to rise above adversity”.

Odds are you know who I really am anyway if you’re reading this - unless you’re starting at the beginning, reading this from six years in the future, wondering how it came to be that western-world celebrity uber-culture and the Chinese Communist Party were both single handedly torn apart by one man. If so, well, then you should also know my name already, now that I think about it.

The phenomenon with which I have opened this journal is a happening which has perpetually defined my life. I have long since stopped trying to count the number of times I’ve been blown off of a hill I’d just managed to climb, down into the cold painful ditch at the bottom by an unforgiving wind. If I were to guess, I would say 73.

It was not until recently, however, that I finally discovered the single word which encapsulates the entirety of this event: Otome.

It is a word in the Japanese language. If you peruse a typical J<->E dictionary, you will find that it carries the meaning “maiden”. This is because a dictionary doesn’t tell you whether the word you’re looking for is conjugated or not; this meaning, however, is not entirely unrelated to what I’m about to explain.

You see, in the world of the aspirant Geisha, before they even become Maiko, they are Shikomi. During this period a girl will be taught the arts; song, shamisen, and if she’s particularly promising, the lovely fan dancing for which Geisha are so well known. It is with the fan dancing training with which we are concerned.

While learning a dance, if a girl begins to make too many mistakes or fails to grasp it in reasonable time, her teacher may say to her “Otome!”. If this occurs, the student immediately stops, bows to her teacher, and silently leaves the school. The thing about it is, though, that she is not allowed to return; receiving an Otome is tantamount to expulsion. Her oneesan and other patrons have to arrange to meet her teacher and quite literally beg her to take the student back.

This “Otome” is the imperative conjugation of the verb “Otoru”, which means to be inferior. Yes, Japanese has a verb-form of “to suck” – this is one of the reasons why we love it. Under the connotations of this use, the direct translated meaning of the word as “maiden” oddly fits, as the aspirant girl is basically declared to be a hopeless, unskilled, unexceptional girl by receiving the word.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, we can really dig into it.

~~~~~

I recently received one hell of an otome.

The specific context is unimportant, because it has occurred to me that this happens to everyone at least once, and I imagine they don’t go through exactly the events that I did in order to reach it. The effect it has on a person, however, I expect to be far more relative.

Something will happen to you. The what, why, and how are likely unique to you; I’m not going to get into it.

The key is that it will wake you up. Suddenly, you’ll realize that your life is a faded, colorless shell of what you thought it was. You’ll realize that you’re not actually happy at all. You’ll note that something is missing, or has been lost. But there’s more, you see.

It’s not that you realize that you’re unhappy. You’re not unhappy; you’re just not happy. On a scale of -1 to 1, you’re at 0. But this is alright; most people in the world today are. Hell, most of them have been taught only to strive for a zero-state, that it’s the best they can hope for or all that they deserve out of some misguided zealotry towards self-affliction or some wrong in the past over which they owe someone they’ve never known.

This is why, when a lot people get this wake-up, they sit up and blink a few times, then go back to sleep. Other people wake up and fly into a panic because their comfy bubble has been burst, and they start flailing around for the first thing they can grab hold of. Call it a life crisis, if this gives you a clearer idea what I’m talking about.

Some people try to fill the hole with money. Some people try to fill the hole with God. Some people try to fill the hole with the filling of holes, if you catch my drift. More rarely, some people don’t try to fill the hole at all, instead opting to jump into it; sometimes they succeed, sometimes not.

I’m not passing judgement here; at least, not this time. I’m just fluffing the context pillow.

Some other people, however, do none of these things. Rather, when they wake up, they shake their head clear and then do something very, very crazy.

They start to use it.

Bear in mind that this is “rare” under a subject pool of nearly seven billion. It’s entirely possible that you’re one of these people.

Really, the fact that you’re reading this speaks to your insight already.

Only half of the preceding sentence was bull%$&# pretension; the other half is incontrovertible truth.

I happen to know intrinsically that I’m one of these people. You may not be as lucky as I am, or then again, you may be more so. Most of the universe is subject to interpretation.

So, you may be asking yourself; if I’ve awoken from my social robotics and become truly ‘self-aware’ rather than panicking and buying a new corvette, what the hell am I supposed to do with it?

It’s a good question.

I don’t have your answer.

Well, I could always suggest one, but it would only be partially informed; and besides, my telling you what to do with yourself isn’t much better than your just chugging along as you were to begin with (though it is a little). I have a saying: when you start to believe that you need to make someone else’s decisions for them in order to help them, you have become the problem.

What I will do, however, is smack you upside the head if I see you just trying to go back to sleep rather than making a path towards your true ideal potential. Contrary to popular misinformed belief, not making a decision is not in fact a decision. Put a more analytical way, dividing by zero doesn’t equal zero; it leaves what you tried to divide unchanged.

Granted, this smacking assumes you’re someone I know. If you’re reading this from Australia, then you need to work on that reach or buy yourself a tennis racket.

~~~~~

I, however, have decided to tread the Moonlit Path.

Well, that is, once I find the damn thing. (Cue Zen: “You have been walking it all along, Grasshopper.”)

The ironic part of my search, however, is the two people that I’m taking my initial guidance from to start on the way.

On the eastern side, we have Mineko Iwasaki; the greatest Geisha Japan has had since the Second World War. After apprenticing directly under the Iemoto, pretty much the highest authority the Geisha have, she became a legend by her mid-twenties. She then turned around and retired at 29, the height of her career, in order to force change upon that world. In doing so, she wonders whether she may have accidentally set the world of the Geisha to its doom.

On the western side, we have Neil Strauss; the greatest Journalist / Pickup Artist…well, to date, I suppose. After learning from all the top gurus of the world of pickup, he became a legend after less than two years in the game. He then turned around and started writing books about it, in order to bring salvation to loveless men the world over. In doing so, he wonders whether he may have accidentally set the entire world to its doom (after a fashion).

When it comes to using two people as signposts for the Moonlit Path, I figure I could do far worse.

For good or ill, I’ll try to put to words the important happenings here. I don’t claim that this journal will always hold great philosophical insight or spiritual truth (at least not the way I do in person). I do promise it to be full of snark, perhaps the occasional bit of drama or rage for flavor. I will try not to let it be boring.

So, we’re off to the races. Hajimemashite, ne?