I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. But I don’t understand the least thing about my illness, and I don’t know for certain what part of me is affected.

More….

Um. Never mind that.

OK, one interview down, four more to go. If I remember correctly, companies in America aren’t allowed to require people to disclose their birthdates. Not so in Japan. In most of the interviews I’ve been to in the last 7 years, these are the kinds of things I’ve been asked.

- What is your birthdate? Where were you born?
- What are your hobbies? Interests? What do you like/enjoy doing?
- What do you do in your free time?
- Where are all the places you’ve lived? How long in each place?
- Do you like Japan?
- Do you like Japanese food?
- What do you like about Japan the most?
- Why are you living in Japan?
- How did you learn Japanese?
- What is the status of your visa?
- Where are your parents from?
- Where do they live?
- Do you have any brothers or sisters?
- What kind of school is this? (Usually asked after squinting a for a few moments at the name of my school, Covenant Worldview Institute College of Christian Liberal Arts.)
- What did you study here?
- Is it an international school? (For whatever reason, they always ask this.)
- What are you future plans/dreams?
- If you get this job, how long do you intend to work here?
- What is your teaching experience? (Well, duh, of course … finally!)
- How many students have you taught?
- What age group do you like to teach the most?

From what I gather, these aren’t exactly the kind of questions American companies ask their prospective employees … or are they?

I have five job interviews in the next three days. Please pray. <runs around house screaming>

At the beginning of my Tuesday morning class, we always study one verse of Proverbs before starting our English reading. We choose one verse from a chapter that’s the same date that we’re on. Today’s the 28th, so we went to chapter 28.

• Proverbs 28:4 •
They that forsake the law
praise the wicked:
but
such as keep the law
contend with them.

When reading, we always use the Authorized Version (aka KJV), so there are almost always new words for the children to learn. After writing out the new words (e.g. “forsake,” “contend”), we simplify the verse to understand it better, and look for parallelisms, synonyms, and antonyms.

We started playing around with the words and talking about what opposites are. Opposition isn’t passive. The opposite of stealing isn’t simply not stealing … it’s being generous. And although cursing may not usually be thought of as the opposite of praise, if you think in covenantal terms, it can be. The opposite of black isn’t always white. It could be blue or green or grey or all or none. In class, we often make charts together of what we’ve learned, and today we got pretty carried away. (And by the way, here’s more fun with Proverbs.)

Non-bloggers often wonder at or ridicule bloggers. “Why write a diary and make it public?” A blog can but doesn’t have to be a diary. It could be about anything, written anytime, anywhere, every day, or week, or even month. Yeah, blogging is probably more often egotistic and exhibitionistic than not. There are plenty of noisy, narcissistic people in real life that we can’t avoid, but one great thing about blogs is that if you don’t like one, all you have to do is not go to it.

I started blogging by accident one late night as I stumbled across some site called blogger.com. I played around with it and thought I’d try it out as a way to keep up with friends and family as an alternative to sending out infrequent mass e-mails. Before too long, I added comments system (thanks, John), my blogroll grew longer and longer, and people started linking to me, too. A number of bloggers in the loose group I fell in with were of the same general theological persuasion. One thing led to another and I found myself heading to the history conference at Moscow to see what kind of place it was and to check if it were someplace I could go to study.

The people I met there changed my life, and I know they will be friends (for better or worse, *grin*) for eternity. Blogging is a blessing and a wonderful way for friends to keep up with each other.

There are a lot of people in India, 966.8 million as of 1998. I don’t know what they want with the atomic bomb. They already have the population bomb and it’s working like a treat.

Nevertheless India, with a population density of 843 people per square mile isn’t as crowded as the Netherlands, which packs 1,195 people into the same space. Nobody comes back from Holland aghast at the teeming masses of Dutch or having nightmares about windmills and tulips pressing in on every side.

Poor people take up room. You may have noticed this when tatooed guys wearing motorcycle-gang insignia come into a bar. And poor people who depend on agriculture for a living, as 67 percent of Indians do, take up more room than Hell’s Angels. If 67 percent of New Yorkers depended on agriculture for a living, someone would be trying to farm the dirt under the floor mats of your Yellow Cab.

Everything is squeezed together in India to keep it out of the picnic-blanket-sized rice field that’s the sole support for a family of ten. Every nook of land is put to use. At the bottom of a forty-foot-deep abandoned well, which would be good for nothing but teenage suicides in America, somebody was raising frogs. The public rest rooms of Calcutta employ the space-saving device of dispensing with walls and roofs and placing the urinal stalls on the sidewalk. No resource goes to waste, which sounds like a fine thing for you to advocate next Earth Day - except in the real world of poverty, it means that the principal household fuel of India is the cow flop. This is formed into a circular patty and stuck on the side of the house, where it provides a solution to three problems: storage room, home decor, and cooking dinner.

Therefore, what makes a drive across India insane (and stinky) isn’t overpopulation, it’s poverty. Except this isn’t really true either. The reason for those ranks of shops and houses along the Grand Trunk [name of the long road P.J. is travelling on], and for the cars, trucks, and buses bashing into each other between them, is that people have the money to buy and build these things. And the reason for the great smoldering dung funk hanging over India is that there’s something to cook on those fires.

P. J. O’Rourke, CEO of the Sofa, p. 231-232

Just got home from teaching a few classes, about to head out in a few minutes for s’more. I decided to take a break from reading about the Fourth Crusade. It’s fascinating, but I can only take so much about stooooopid French and abominable Italians slaughtering Christian brethren and destroying one of the most beautiful cities in history.

So today, on the bus and train between classes, I read P. J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell. I’ve only read a few of his books and articles, but I’m always impressed at how he can deliver hard, hurting truth with a punch and a tickle, so you feel sick at the horrors he relates but can’t stop laughing about them.

The copy of HiH I’m carrying around with me now is autographed by the great man himself, and it’s actually Papa’s, but I’m going to take it with me when I move out of here (shh, don’t tell … if he finds out about it and doesn’t want me to take it, I’ll get down on my hands and knees and beg). O’Rourke is another one of those authors that I like so much that I have a need to own every book he’s written. I’ve already done that with a few authors, and am working my way through some more.

K, gotta run.

I didn’t use to like Kevin Bacon, because I only saw him as a pyscho killer, but wow, oh, wow can he dance!

Long, long time ago, the happiest days of my week were when I went to dancing class. Dancing makes everything fade away except the racing of music and rhythm through my blood. Why hasn’t anybody blogged about dancing for so long? <feels like screaming but sighs instead>

E M E T H H E S E D S M I T H
5 13 5 20 8 8 5 19 5 4 19 13 9 20 8 - as numbers
5 4 5 2 8 8 5 1 5 4 1 4 9 2 8 - digits added
\_________/ \_________/ \_________/ \_________/ \_________/
5 9 2 9 1 - digits added

Thus, “emeth hesed smith” is 59291.

Turn the number backwards, subtract 1926 - the year “Playboy” publisher, Hugh Hefner, was born. The number is now 17369.

Divide by 11, the symbol of judgment and disorder - the result is 1579.

Turn the number backwards, divide by 7 - the sacred number of Illuminati. The number is now 1393.

Multiply it by 6, the smallest perfect number - the number is now 8358.

Subtract 18, the symbol of bondage. The result will be 8340.

This number, when read backwards, gives 0438. This, written in octal, gives 666 - the number of the Beast.

Enough said - QED.

You wanna be evil, too?

“Throughout history poets have written about the pain of a broken heart. It seems that such poetic insights into the human condition are now supported by neurophysiological findings.”

- He’s not a very good student and he can’t concentrate. His violin teacher says he doesn’t have a very good ear. I don’t think he’ll learn to pronounce English very well….

- She doesn’t remember anything in her classes. I don’t think she’s doing very well.

I’ve just about had it with parents who say disparaging discouraging things about their children to me right in front of the kids. The worst part of it is that what they’re saying isn’t really true, at least about those particular kids. The boy is very bright, learns incredibly quickly, but clams up when his mother comes around. The girl has a perfectly normal memory, a beautiful smile, and a heart as pure as a sinful child’s can be.

When parents say such things to their children, or to other people in front of their children, they make their children into the kind of children they describe them to be. I know some parents try to be careful not to make their children haughty, and so cut them down at every opportunity. Others praise their children excessively, trying to raise self-esteem <blech> or make them think they are more wonderful or talented than they are. Those children grow up twisted in strange ways … and then they twist their children, and so it goes.

It’s simple. Children should be told straight. When they’re doing wrong, tell’em what’s wrong and how to stop/change. When they’re doing right, let’em know it’s right and encourage them to continue in it. Be straight, and the children, by God’s grace, will grow up straight.

The mouth of a righteous man is a well of life…. [A valiant woman] openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. Proverbs 10:11a, 31:26