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 |  The beauty and horror of what I have seen and felt in 11 years of teaching ESL in Japan. |
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After 11 years of teaching English conversation in Japan for the biggest money-grubbing school, which went bankrupt through very corrupt business practices, I feel the time has come to either share what the beauty and horror of this experience, or sink further into the desperate frustration of the misunderstood. What will follow are descriptions of the students I have taught, my observations and thoughts of them, and tidbits of their conversations with me. Names will of course be changed to protect identities. It is my hope that through reading these descriptions, people interested in learning about Japan and its culture will find new, unexpected insights into its people. So, without further ado, I need to start. But who to start with? The good or the bad? |
| I don’t like to lump students into categories, but I will put these four students into the same blog entry. Maybe because they always took lessons together. Maybe because of their similar backgrounds and world-view. Maybe because they all told me one thing about their relationship with their husbands that still rings in my ear. Like the three others, Reserve was in her late fifties or early sixties when I first met her. She was a tall, solidly built woman of polite demeanor. She and her husband were well-off enough to travel to Europe once a year to taste wines and visit museums. Their two children were grown up and had stable careers. Reserve never spoke in anything but a quiet, level tone, though she would smile if Hunger cracked a joke, or if Titter…well, tittered. Reserve’s biggest regret in life was getting older. “When I was in my twenties, I could walk around in miniskirts. I had good legs, and men would compliment me. Now, men never look at me,” she said with a wistful smile. Leadership of the Four swayed between Reserve and Presumption, with the later often taking the reins by forward-plunging, unsteerable intelligence. Presumption intimidated the staff with her intelligence, her money, and her sheer pig-headed ways. Don’t get me wrong. She was the nicest person. It’s just that she seemed to have so much going on in her head that she rarely finished a sentence, spoke too fast, and would never listen to correction. “That’s not what my high school English teacher told me,” she would always argue if you pointed out a grammatical or usage problem. And she didn’t care that English, like all living languages, changed over time and between cultures. “That’s not what I learned in high school.” OK. So let’s do the math. You are in your sixties, let’s say. It is now the year 2003. So, you would’ve been in high school a little over forty years ago. Erring on the side of generosity would put you a school girl uniform in the early sixties. Based on my observations of the glacial pace of change in the Japanese education system, I would have to estimate that the English your teachers were teaching you could’ve been dated to the late forties or early fifties of America. Hunger was simply that: hungry for new experiences; hungry to learn new things; hungry to meet people from other countries, especially young people, and, in particular young, handsome, Caucasian men. Not so hungry to learn English, though. She talked profusely, animatedly, cheerfully, and, if you were able to follow along and piece together the broken sentences, exclusively about three subjects: English, travel, and crafts (as in Arts and Crafts, her on-again, off-again enthusiasm). Titter smiled and giggled a lot, in a vague, blank-eyed way. Frankly, she was so deep over her head, comprehension-wise, that she could usually manage only about three or four relevant, appropriate responses per session. When she spoke, she accented each enunciation with a sharp karate chop down towards the table, as if she were cutting cord wood. Nice lady, though. In fact, they were all nice ladies. Really nice. I called them The Four Housewives not because they were terrible to teach. They were nice. That was it, really. Just nice. Queens of the school, without lording it about. They’d started when the school started back in 1995. They’d been the first students: housewives, looking for some way to fill in the hours, looking for something meaningful to do with their minds, looking for something they could be better at than others. And they stuck with it, coming twice a week, on average. Reserve, Presumption, Hunger and Titter--they could drive the instructors crazy at times because of their seemingly inability to stay focused on a lesson, but then to later complain if the lessons seemed unfocused. Women who’d all raised children to become independent, contributing members of society. Women who’d come of age in the sixties, when Japan was just beginning to dig itself out of poverty. Women who’d been taught that the best formula for rebuilding the greatness of the country was for husbands to work twelve or fourteen hours a day, and wives to take care of everything at home. Anyway, women weren't being offered a choice. So they'd stayed home and ruled the roost with an iron fist: raising children; managing health, diet and education; controlling the money; making sure their husbands could put in all the time at work the company required, because it was the needs of the company which came first, and it was the company who provided that glittering carrot: the promise of security, the promise of growing old without having to worry. An easy death, in other words. They were just living to die. Shut up. They did some interesting things in their lives. Come on! You know how hollow these middle-class values are. How did you not throw up every time the subject of “safety” came up?? They had hobbies, not pursuits, not callings. They pursued safety, not life. Anyway… One day, the five of us got to talking about stands. Stands, if you don’t already know, are private clubs where men, usually businessmen, can go to drink and talk with young women. A certain degree of prostitution seems to be a normal part of business in these stands. Well, it turned each of their husbands frequented stands. “Don’t you have a problem with that?” I asked, remembering how jealous my wife had been anytime I’d just spoken to a random woman at a bar. They looked at one another and shrugged. “I mean, your husbands are in there drinking with young girls.” “So?” Reserve asked. “Well, what do they talk about?” “Probably problems at work.” “And their wives,” Hunger added, eliciting a round of laughter. “Wouldn’t you rather they came home and talked to you?” “Why?” “Umm…because, don’t get me wrong, but I thought that’s what married people did: talked about their problems together.” Titter tittered. Hunger laughed. Reserve smiled. Presumption leaned forward. “I rather he bothers some other woman with his problems,” she explained. “Not me. I don’t want to hear about his problems.” “They listened to our problems never,” Reserve added. “They just sat at home on the weekends and watched TV.” “Yes, yes. Cockroach husband! He work. I get the money,” Titter joked. “Those girls make him feel important. But…” Hunger said trailing off. And they all nodded in agreement, leaving me confused. But what?? At the time, I couldn’t catch what had been unspoken but understood by all four. Now, eleven years on in Japan, I’ve learned how to fill in that particular blank: “But they aren’t.” |
| Quiet, polite and lacking confidence: a description that could be applied to any number of students at our school, especially to the housewives in their forties, fifties and sixties. This one, in particular, I'd been teaching for about three years before, one day, cracks appeared in that outer veneer. Whether it was due to years of built-up frustration bursting through, or through trusting me, I am not sure. You, dear reader, are probably in just as good a position to judge as I. She sat down across from me, breathing heavy from running. She was fifteen minutes late for the lesson. This was not the first time, there were no other students in the lesson, and I was just sitting there relaxing. No problem. Still, she uttered a hasty-but-heartfelt apology as she sat down. "It's no problem," I smiled, trying to ease her worries. I'd finally come to realize how much Japanese people worry about causing others inconvenience. She set her notebook, pen and textbook on the table. Above her black-rimmed glasses, her forehead glistened with...well not with sweat, because she was always such a reserved, polite woman, but with perspiration. Her English was fairly good, in the upper-mid range at our school, a low level 4. "I'm sorry I am late," she apologized again. "It's really no problem. Don't worry. I was just sitting here. It's just you today. So," I began, thinking of some way to relax her into some general chit chat before beginning the actual lesson, "how are you today?" No answer as she dabbed at her forehead with a purple and white handkerchief. OK. She didn't hear. Try a different question. "Anything interesting happen to you today?" She breathed out heavily and then made a great show of opening her notebook and jotting down the date. Um, you may not be listening to me, Charles, but I think she doesn't want to talk about today. Oh, shut up. I'm just trying to relax her. Don't worry. Whatever. You're just talking to yourself here. And how is that different from 90% of the lessons? Good point. Thanks. Now: shut up and let me get on with it. "So, Kumoko, why are you late today? She fixed me with a stare for just a moment longer than comfortable, and then asked: "If your wife was late leaving for meeting, and you were just sitting watching TV, and you watch TV all morning, and she'd been doing housework all morning, and all day before...and she said you she had a meeting...would you demand her to make a sandwich, a simple ham and cheese sandwich, just bread, mayonnaise, ham, and cheese, because you don't know how?" Her voice never betrayed any emotion during the question--but her eyes...her eyes glinted hard like diamonds, such was her unspoken frustration and anger. She waited patiently for me to answer as I rolled over in my mind any number of possibly replies. But the only one polite enough for me to utter--because in that instant I'd come to despise her husband without ever having lain eyes on him--was: "I've been able make myself a sandwich since I was about five years-old--single mother." "She had the right idea," was Kumoko's ambiguous, deadpan reply. |
| I can see your belly button every time you smile: so low-cut were the shirts and sweaters she wore. And she smiled a lot, but only at the male teachers. She was in her early thirties, attractive, with a nice body she liked to show off. She never took lessons, just sat in the Voice room for several hours a week, flirting with the men. This was during my first months of teaching in Japan. My divorce was still fresh in my mind, I was horny--very, very horny. I can't remember anything she said. I just remember how she smiled and giggled when I was in the room. Oh, and that she was married. Her husband was a businessman, working in Thailand for a year (or was it two?). "You should hit that up," a teacher advised me over drinks. I watched her walk away, at different times, with a couple of the teachers, after the school had closed for the day. I felt no regret it wasn't my arm she wasn't hanging on. I tried not to judge her--tried not to let that strain of Puritanism in my American upbringing reduce me to a finger-waving, resentful hag--but sometimes the angry little thought slipped in: How can you be so selfish? Eleven years later, after hundreds of conversations with various housewives in Japan, though I still cannot condone her actions, I can imagine quite a variety of answers to that question. And so, the next few entries will be dedicated to housewives. Enjoy. |
| 66 years old. One year retired when I met him, and still concerned about how to fill his days. He had salt-and-pepper hair, thick-rimmed black glasses, a big smile, and an accent that other teachers described as "very American," but which put me in mind of a baritone Patrick from "Spongebob Squarepants." Apparently, he got the accent from talking to U.S. Marines at bars in Tokyo. He was a factory man, a steel maker. His hands were spotted with scars. He popped out some English profanities at the most unexpected of times. He and his wife owned a small rice field, which his neighbor was pressuring him to sell to him so the neighbor can join the land and sell it to a condominium developer. He didn't really like to harvest rice every year, but it was his parents' land, so he didn't want to sell. He buried both his parents in the four years since I'd met him, and he had also had to move the family plot to another location, costing him somewhere around $12,000, because his wife was getting too old to climb the hill. The old plot overlooked the patchwork of green fields in the valley where they lived. He had a grandson ("finally"), the first, whom he adored, but who lived in Tokyo, so he only saw the child twice a year. He read English newspapers in his spare and time and played E-Go at a club in town. He taught E-Go to children at the community center near his house. When I first met him, I helped him practice for an English speech contest, working on smoothing out his pronunciation and rhythm. Sometimes I wondered if his sentence had become so encumbered with heavy words and meandering due to age. During his lessons, every student in the school could hear what he said, because he believed in projecting his voice. Maybe he was always practicing for public speaking? Maybe that was from working in a loud factory most of his life? One day, I sat down across from him, and said, "Good morning. How are you today?" And in that booming, Patrick-like voice, he answered: "When I evacuate my bowels, my piles hurt." So, for forty minutes, within hearing of all students and snickering teachers, we talked about British piles and American hemorrhoids, and the relative merits of Japanese squat vs. Western sit down toilets. He never did care what people thought of him. I respected that. |
| Again, sometimes you get a better sense of a student from the comments of other teachers: 2000: OK intros, willing to produce. So worried about mistakes. Start and stay low until confidence grows. 2001: Holy skinkies, Fatman! Not just words...actual sentences, and many of them together! and vocabulary! Actual English conversation, though a bit limited and very hesitant, but using various structures throughout. Yes!!! 2001: Very quiet. Did not participate in role play. Limited use of target structures. Needs drills and repeats. 2002: Overwhelmed. Very low comp. Not bad structure. Increase vocab. Practice simple questions. Home study. 2002: Low comp. Couldn't answer in complete sentences. Had trouble with low vocab and tenses. Keep it low. Get her to write things down. Study. Practice. 2003: Good job today! Good responses. Low comp really hinders her improvement. 2003: Woeful. 2004: Doesn't talk. Comp low. She was an office worker. Liked archery and karaoke. Wanted to learn English so she could talk to foreigners. Had long, straight black hair. Plain features. Tended not to listen to other students. If asked, couldn't tell you what anyone around her said. Made conversation a wee bit difficult. Kept her head down, especially when not speaking. When she did speak--which was rare, and usually only after repeated prompting--she slowly raised her head, but rolled her eyes up into her skull, until only the bottom whites were showing, repeating the first word of her sentence over and over again, sometimes casting it aside if she thought it wasn't the right word (it always was), and then, when she'd finished the sentence, her eyes would snap forward onto you, her head would slowly lower, and hearing your response, but not acknowledging it, she'd continue to lower her head until her chin rested on her chest, and stillness would resume. |
| Early on, I was promoted to the position of Assistant Trainer. Basically, this made me responsible for training new instructors and liaising with the Japanese-speaking staff regarding schedules, complaints, and sales. Unofficially, I took it as my responsibility to run interference between the instructors and what I judged as unreasonable demands by staff and teachers--hence my unpopularity with upper management. Good thing I wasn't bucking for promotion. To give an example, one day the staff approached me about a student they had in the early stages of a sales line. "Can you give him a level check?" she asked. "How much time do you need?" Instructors need to ask that, to see how much time they should take in case the staff are talking to another prospective client at the same time. "The usual: twenty minutes." "What level do you think he is?" "Umm...I'm not sure. He is a little difficult." With that warning, I entered the booth to find a man in his early forties, sporting a plaid shirt, glasses, and a greasy comb-over. Five minutes later, I walked out of the room. "How was he?" the staff asked, obviously nervous by how quickly I'd finished. "Umm...OK. He can't take lessons with other students." "Oh." This was not bad news, as Man-to-Man lessons paid more at our branch given low student numbers. "And no female instructors." "Oh." This was less pleasing: restricting a student to male teachers meant fewer scheduling opportunities and, therefore, lower potential sales. "Come to think of it," I said, looking back at the lesson booth and remembering the last five minutes of insane ranting, "Just me. No other teachers. Not until he's used to the system." Some people are insane and should be locked up for their own safety and the safety of those around them. Some people are functionally insane: they can go through day-to-day things without threatening anyone around them. Some people, on the other hand, are sh*tball nuts, hiding in their homes, working over and over again in their minds the coming Apocalypse, emerging into the daylight only "warn" others, in feverish speech and gesture, of impending doom. MOVA attracted these later examples because we offered an audience (instructors) who couldn't escape. From the company's point of view, it was no problem: money in the bank. For the instructors... This guy spent every subsequent lesson stabbing seemingly random newspaper articles with his finger and exclaiming, "North Korea hit Tokyo missiles! Nerve gas! Nuclear bomb! Mother said. American want Japan! They do nothing! Ne? Ne? Ne?" That was the terrifying part: he always wanted me to agree with him, and I would just sit there, blank faced, explaining I had no idea what he was talking about and couldn't read the articles he'd brought in. When I asked him to explain, he snorted and folded his arms across his chest, offended. He smelled of cabbage and cigarettes. His face glistened with sweat. I am not a small guy, but I felt physically threatened every time he jerked forward when I couldn't understand his long rants in Japanese peppered with broken English. He took five lessons and then, because I couldn't follow his rants, lost interest and never returned. The staff were not happy: lost revenue. Even though they'd head him yelling loud enough to make every other student in the school nervous. I was happy: none of the other instructors had to sit through a lesson with that particular freakin' nutcase. |
| And then there are some people who failed to make much in the way of a rich, complex impression. Sometimes just one sentence burns into the memory, making you wonder: "Do you think before opening your mouth?" January, 2001. I'd just come back from a visit to the U.S., depressed at having found armed military personnel patrolling the airports. September 11th was aching fresh in everyone's minds. I'd grown a beard. Just wanted a change. A student, a man in his thirties, looked at me, laughed, and said to the other students in class, "Look, its Osama Bin Laden." All through the lesson I smiled, but once I reached the teacher's room, I kicked a dent into the filing cabinet. |
| There are no clocks in the lesson rooms. This is to prevent students from catching instructors clock watching. There are no windows. Music plays constant and quiet. The school is more than a little bit like a casino in that respect. The instructors wears wristwatches instead, so we can keep the timing of the lesson stages fairly consistent. It's 2001. I've still got the analog watch with the dirty, faded green strap. It doesn't have a second hand, but I've gotten good at keeping track of the time without it. Okay. I'll give her 30 more seconds to say something. Maybe she's having trouble remembering what she did on the weekend. She keeps her eyes downcast. Her lips move, as if she's about to say something, and then stop. This is your umpteenth lesson with her. You know what's coming up. Give her another minute. Well, another one. She moved that time. Her name was Kanoha. She started at the school in 1998, absolute beginner. She'd been a high school student back then. She'd become a librarian and then, as the government tightened its belt in 2000, a bookstore clerk. She liked movies and rarely spoke. Took about two lessons a week. It is hard to describe her. She was so nondescript, so quiet. At first the quiet was frustrating, and then depressing. Before the bankruptcy, I had the foresight to jot down a few of the comments written by instructors in the students' files. I think you might appreciate a view of Kanoha through other instructors' eyes: 1998: Quick to learn. A little shy, but opened up quickly. Go slow w/ her. 1999: Very slow. Hesitant to produce today. Katakana pron. Needs patience and encouragement. 1999: Katakana endings. Slow/shy. Comp & vocab are ok. Flat intonation. 2000: T/S fine. Quiet, but her grammar was good. Good drills. Watch word endings. Around this time, Kanoha transferred to another school for a brief time. The following comments are from teachers much less accustomed to her demeanor. 2000: What a joyless, unenthusiastic little bundle she is. Says her favorite subject is English. Well you could have fooled me!! Attitude is her main problem. 2000: Charmless. I don't know how to help her. 2001: Awful. Vocab is abysmally low. Fluency & confidence same. She should review all previous lessons. 2001: Silence. Requires a lot of response time. Needs confidence and encouragement. In 2002, she returned to our school. 2002: Solid structure and good production when encouraged. A little shy or hesitant at times. Needs initiation, fluency and free production. 2003: Good use of t/s, but she doesn't recall past lessons or vocab & offers little in the way of explanations to others. She needs to listen to others. Needs to initiate & extend more. Pronunciation is poor for longer words. 2004: Student's responses were generated only very slowly. Maybe listening comp. problems. 2004: Bursts of production & display of emotion, but most of lesson is spent in silence. In 2007, the company closed it doors, taking most students for thousands of dollars in lesson points they wouldn't be able to use, money they would never be able to get back. All the gambles the management had taken fell through. Kanoha works across the street from my apartment, actually. I pass her occasionally as she goes somewhere on her lunch break. She says nothing. In her eyes, I see recognition and a slow, quiet anger. |
| In my previous post, I mentioned inappropriate comments... Sometimes you meet people and, right from the get-go, find nothing but miles and miles of rocky road ahead. Some instructors have the ability (the shocks, to keep to the metaphor) to navigate conversations in such circumstances. Others, like myself, do not, which has caused me to wonder, on more than a few occasions, if I have some mild form of autism--I hope not, because it's more fun to think it's just my unyielding personality that makes me such a joy in conversation. I'll give you an example: Hikoko. Hikoko was a housewife. In her sixties, she'd spent the last five years taking up a variety of hobbies before settling on English conversation. Apparently, she entertained several American Marines and their families once a year at a bar-b-que at her house on the coast. Her first lesson at our school was with me "She says she's about a level 5," the staff member told me. "Has she done a level check?" "She said she didn't need to." And there were two clues right there: Every student, no matter how good their English might actually be, always estimates their ability to be in the beginning range. And no one--no one--refused to take a level check, more so because the staff knew it was necessary so the student could be put in an appropriate level. So, lesson book and empty file in hand, I entered the room, resolving to have a little polite chit chat first off so I could gauge her ability before opening the textbook and beginning the lesson. "Good morning." "Good morning," she said. I noticed she had a bit of a shiner (a black eye). "And how are you this morning?" I tried to give her a non-standard form of the question, just to see if she could catch it. She smiled "Good. A little tired, but not bad." Hmmm. Maybe she is level 5. "So, what did you do before coming to MOVA today?" "My husband hit me." Deadpan expression, monotone production. ... ... ... She has a f*cking black eye! Is she kidding? "Ha ha ha," she laughed. ... She has a f*cking black eye! What kind of psycho jokes about being hit by their husband when they've got a black eye? What do I do? If I join in the joke, and she's not joking, she'll probably freak out. "I'm sorry," I said. "Umm..." Where do you go from here? "Are you being serious?" "Did he really?" "How do you feel about that?" "When was that?" "That's really funny!" "Did you see a doctor?" "When are you going to hit him back?" "I've heard a little anti-freeze in his coffee every morning will kick him off nice and slow and painful." "Who do you think I am? A marriage counselor?" ... "Umm...," I said, lurching forward, trying to continue, "Well, umm, let's look at today's lesson. Please open your book to lesson 15..." So we started the lesson and made it through in stiff necked formality. Later, the staff came to me during my lunch break. "Hikoko complained you weren't friendly to her during the lesson." And so began a series of complaints from Hikoko that I was not fun to talk to, that I was too serious, that I didn't pay enough attention to her. "What did you do today?" I would ask her another time. "Gardening and etcetera." "Oh? Like what?" "What do you mean?" she asked, angrily. "Well, you said you did gardening and etcetera. Umm, I just wanted to know what else you did." "I already told you." "OK. But," said the teacher part of me, overriding self-preservation, "etcetera means you did other things, some of them related to gardening, some not." "No it doesn't." ... ... Another time, in a group discussion about Japanese culture, we got to talking about the Emperor. I offered that I'd read somewhere that many Japanese politicians, after Japan's surrender, pressed to eliminate the Emperor from Japanese life. "No they didn't," Hikoko stated. "How do you know?" "They were Japanese. No one Japanese would do that. You wouldn't understand." Now, there is a line of thought that maintains Japanese people avoid confrontation at all costs. If this stereotype is true, then Hikoko, I offer, was born in the wrong country, and it was only by the most cosmically infinitesimal of chances that she and I ever had the displeasure of meeting. If I had been a smooth talker, I could've possibly made her feel more comfortable and accepted. I could have lied up one side and down the other of her, casting her as the personal star in a little drama focused on her. That would've certainly encouraged her to keep buying lesson points, as the staff were always prompting her to do. But, then again, listening to that devil on my shoulder, we foreign teachers were supposed to be providing students a "real world" experience of speaking English, and I think seeing that your comments and behavior stun others into silence is a valuable, if not necessary, real world learning experience. |
| Male. Age: Indeterminable, maybe mid-thirties when I first met him, but now possibly in mid-forties. Hair: sometimes orange, sometimes purple. Dry skin, chronic dandruff. Small, round glasses. Buck-teeth. He's been taking English lessons since the branch opened in 1995. Started at lowest level, 7C (able to use a few English words to give biographical information). Now, 2011, he's two levels higher, at 7A (able to express a few, basic, error-rich sentences in past, future, and present tense), and that was all because instructors got tired of teaching him the same lessons over and over again, only to have him completely fail. He laughs a lot, but his laughs sound like short, wet coughs. And he leers at girls. Female teachers came out of lessons complaining he kept trying to touch them--not overtly sexual, just reaching out to touch their hands. Female students slowly, but inexorably, scoot away from him during lessons. He lives at home with his mother. Apparently he works in the basement of some local factory. His hobby is making electronic music for video games. I heard he takes violin lessons. Have him Listen and Repeat a sentence, and see how much English he understands: "`Please repeat: Tonight, she will go to a dinner party for cocktails." "She go to dinner COCKtails." Eyes big, he laughs, hoping the instructor will join in. They never do. He subsides. Begins mumbling to himself again. Actually, he never does stop mumbling. He's not paying attention, that's for sure. You can point to a passage in the book for everyone to read, and he'll look away or sneak glances at the girl next to him. It takes him a long time for form any kind of response, no matter how grammatically incorrect or inappropriate. For example: "What did you do yesterday?" "Huh?" "What did you do yesterday?" "I ... house ... house ... home... I go ... work ...after ... job factor ... I work at factory?" "I don't know. Do you work at a factory?" "Yes." "Did you work at the factory yesterday?" "I to Hiroshima tomorrow." After a half-hour of this, the urge to claw out your your own eyes, just so you won't have to look at his amused, buck-toothed face, becomes fascinatingly reasonable. Ol' Orange Hair would laugh at anything, probably because he had no idea what people were saying to him. During my second year of teaching (2003), I found myself across from him soon after the New Year's holidays. "What did you do for New Years?" I asked. "Huh?" "New Years. What did you do?" Reader: Be aware that the following sentence took five minutes for him to piece together. I have attempted to represent that time taken from my life, never to be returned, typographically, but there's no way to get the silent, mental screams in between the words, or the huge OMG! moment of perfect understanding at the end. You have been warned. "Mama...mom...my mom...your mom America?Oh, dear God, get on with it...........like .....doesn't like? Argh. Stop scratching your head. I see snow.... out .... me...............me out? Yes, please. Doesn't like me........ha ha hahahah SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!......................my mom doesn't like me??? no no no.........Oh, please, dear GOD! Out with it! my mom doesn't like me ..... out.....go out............No. My mom doesn't like me to like me to like me to.....go out." "I bet she doesn't," I said, because sometimes there's just no way to not take advantage of indeterminate utterances. He was in the school just the other day. The staff are wonderfully professional with him. Every time he books a lesson, they turn to me and say, "Good luck." But they don't really know what they are saying. They all think he's a new student, joined after the bankruptcy. None of the staff worked for MOVA before the bankruptcy. They have no way of remembering him as I do. I sit down at the table across from him. He smiles at me. I smile at him. "How are you?" "I'mfineandyou?" "I'm tired. Anything new?" "No. And you?" "Nothing." |
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