お盆

This string of good fortune cannot last forever. I have not physically been to work since Friday. Today is Wednesday. I was given the first three days of this week off because of the Obon Holiday, a traditional Buddhist holiday which the Japanese celebrate around this time every year. The intentions behind the holiday are to give pause and remembrance for dead ancestors. The Japanese who live in the cramped metropolises that dot the island leave the neon and the noise and return to their families in the countryside, to visit one another and clean the graves of the departed. They must ritualistically burn sacraments or something too because while I was out jogging at sunset yesterday, running along a river path into the red and purple horizon, there were dozens of families gathered outside there homes huddled around tiny pyres of burning matter. I didn't stop and ask any of them exactly what they were doing, but it's no coincidence that I passed a half dozen or so households doing the exact same thing at the same time. According to Wikipedia (which I can freely cite now that I'm no longer a member of The Media, though let's be honest, newsfolk, we all go to Wikipedia to begin the research on every story...), Obon is a shortened and Japanified version of a the Sanskrit word ullambana , which means "hanging upside down in hell and suffering." The purpose of the Obon for the Japanese is to eliminate the suffering of those hanging in ullambana. Or so it seems. This means very little to me, as I'm pretty sure no one I've known is hanging upside down in hell and suffering. Every one I know who's likely in hell are probably drunk and dancing and smoking weed with Kurt Cobain. But whatev. I got three days off work.

But really, who am I kidding? I haven't worked since June 8. That was my last day at the newspaper. I've basically been on a paid holiday ever since. After coming out $2,000 ahead after my car was totaled in a high speed freak accident involving an unsuspecting and stupid deer, I wound up drunk and high on pain killers in the middle of Tokyo. And I was getting paid for this. I've been "on the clock," so to speak since July 29. But I haven't worked a day. I haven't taught anybody anything. I haven't even been to my schools. Since I've been here all I've done as part of the job is sit through various orientations and fill out endless stacks of paperwork. And tomorrow, when this holiday is over, I won't go back to the Board of Education. Instead I'll get on a bus and ride to Fukushima City for yet another two-day orientation.

This can't last forever. But I'm enjoying it while it lasts. One day soon the work will start and I will be surrounded by thousands of screaming children, all of them dying to climb all over me and poke and prod me in inappropriate places. And I will do this for five days a week and come home tired and exhausted. And it will be great fun.