Life is Hard

Published by Bob Sanchez on August 22, 2008 in Misc. 0 Comments

During a rain delay at a baseball game in the Tokyo area, I chatted with a professional scout from an MLB club. I don’t recall how the conversation got to the price of living in California and its implications for my generation, but it did and he brought about an interesting characteristic of Japanese people that I had known implicitly until he put it into words.

“They do all of the little things you need to do,” he said. No, he wasn’t talking about having the three-hitter bunt with one out. Rather, it was a remark about what they do in everyday life.

They take trains. They ride bicycles into their 90s. They hang their laundry. They walk from Point A to Points B, C, and beyond. They live in their parents’ houses with their own families to take care of the one parent left behind.

I look around Japan and feel like it’s the 1970s. Our Greatest Generation grew up during the Depression, made sacrifices and won the second World War, and worked to transform the United States into the greatest superpower the world has ever known.

Japan’s Greatest Generation, economically speaking, accomplished this in the 1980s, going from “Made in Japan” crapola to selling more efficient cars and buying up the seven wonders of the world and some golf courses.

Subsequent American generations have enjoyed the wealth and prosperity for sixty years; people in Japan my age look to their parents’ generation the way that I do to my grandparents’. They haven’t enjoyed the lavish lifestyle as long collectively and seem to understand the long climb up better than my American peers and I do.

And so, in some ways they are where I think we were 30-35 years ago. I don’t know for sure because I wasn’t there, but if “I Love the 70s” is at all accurate, I think I have a good picture of what it was like.

Rampant consumerism is just as much a problem here as it is in the States, but it takes a slightly different shape. Here, it’s name brand junk and plastic packaging, and in the U.S. it’s gasoline and living above one’s means.

I think the scout’s comment was geared toward Japan’s apparent solutions to Americans’ current housing and energy problems, though in fact the way that Japanese handle housing and energy has been the way it is for a long time.

Japanese people seem to believe that life is necessarily hard and that there’s nothing much you can do about it. Traveling is going to take a long time and cost a lot of money. Housing is going to be ridiculously expensive and cramped. Getting into the best schools and getting the best jobs will require heinous amounts of study and testing.

Yet they live their lives in ways that allow them to get through it. They do those little things that the scout talked about. They organize drinking parties to help them connect and complain about inconveniences, but wake up the following day ready to combat them with a stiff upper lip.

They watch celebrities make the game show circuit, winning prizes and money Lord knows they don’t need. There is no hope of a regular Joe or Taro getting there, which is what makes game shows so fun for us.

Japanese fans watch baseball players receive huge bouquets of flowers and giant checks (on top of their high salaries) for such mundane events as 1,000 games played or being voted the Best Dad in the Central League.

They sigh and wish that life could be that way, but they are firmly rooted in the reality that it is not. Then they smile and continue to air dry their clothes, make lunch for the octogenarians in the house, or arrive at the meeting 46 minutes early because the next train gets them there 1 minute late. True story.

In short, they are much better at bending over and taking it up the tailpipe than we are, collectively and generally speaking. Of course they know about drying machines and old folks’ homes and believe that public transportation in the countryside is awfully inconvenient, but that’s just the way life is.

When I left the States, the housing bust was in full bloom and the gas crisis was just around the corner. Sometimes I feel like I’m hiding out here in Kochi, with no car, no mortgage, and no debt. If I return, I feel like I’ll be able to put myself in a good position to live within my means and be more tolerant of the inconveniences of that lifestyle thanks to my experiences in Japan and the underlying acceptance that life is tough that I feel from Japanese people.

Unfortunately, it looks like friends and family can’t do much about situations that they’re in. Gas wasn’t four bucks a gallon when they chose to live 15 miles from work. Or when they chose to work 15 miles from home.

I hope the situation improves, but I also hope that people in my generation are able to give up things they don’t need (or avoid having them in the first place) and accept a less convenient lifestyle for better long-term happiness and success. I’m very fortunate to enjoy a great lifestyle for less right now.

The Big Snake Tree

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 12, 2008 in Misc. 0 Comments

We’ve just pulled out of a string of national holidays titled “Golden Week,” though “week” is a bit of a stretch. This is my second Golden Week in Japan, and I’m still not sure exactly how many holidays there are or the rationale behind assigning actual days off during the week.

It goes something like this:

April 29 used to be Green Day, but has been changed to Showa Day to commemorate the ruling period of the Showa Emperor (which happens to include World War II and my birth, among other important events).

May 3 is Constitution Memorial Day, in remembrance of the constitution that we made them sign 60 years ago and that officially made the Showa Emperor a figurehead.

May 4 was called People’s Holiday, but is now Green Day. Go figure.

May 5 is Children’s Day.

Some businesses are nice and give employees one or two whole weeks off. Public schools are nowhere near that, they go by the letter of the law. So we got a random Tuesday (April 29) and the following Monday and Tuesday (May 5 and 6). When I lived here a few years ago, the school gave us Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in one of the weeks. That was very stupid.

In any case, when you lump together a bunch of national holidays in a nation where people don’t take Saturdays off, it is inevitable that highways, trains, and planes will be jammed, hotels will be booked solid for a hundred miles around any major tourist attraction, and the prices will be jacked up to match.

Not fun when you suddenly find out that one of your guys is pitching in Hiroshima on the first day of said stack o’ holidays. No tourists there, of course. And I didn’t have to stand up next to an anxious smoker and a redhead with Tourette’s for the entire 3 and a half hour train ride there, either.

I’ve never been smashed into the back of a truck with 20 other people on a treacherous, week-long road to freedom, but it’s easier to imagine now.

Before the Hiroshima disaster, I had a Tuesday off. I awoke with no plans other than to jump on my bicycle and go somewhere. There are some steep mountains behind a beachside town where three English teaching acquaintances live, and I decided to sneak around the backside and barrel down in hopes that the back way had an easier climb.

I was right about the ascent, but the trip was much longer than I anticipated. I found the right roads and wound through tiny mountain communities and pine forests until I got to the end of one numbered road and the beginning of another.

The first road had signs counting down to 0 kilometers, so I thought that I would be in the beachside town by then. I was still looking up a hill when I got to zero, and the new numbered road had a sign in the distance that said “2.4 kilometers.”

That’s what I had hoped, anyway. It was indeed 24 and that was another hour-plus that I hadn’t counted on.

I made it home OK and didn’t ride again until yesterday, my first Sunday ride in weeks due to baseball travels and Golden Week. Everyone showed up and was in fine spirits except the Bike Shops. Mrs. Bike Shop’s mother had been taken to the hospital the night before and the two were concerned and decided not to ride.

We wished Grandma Bike Shop the best and rode off to the Big Snake Tree. Larry had seen an article in the paper about a special wisteria tree that only blooms for a couple of weeks each year. It was in full color at the base of a mountainside campground and we wanted to see it.

I had never been out without the Bike Shops before, and the tone was a lot different. Larry insisted that I ride in the middle of the group and not the back, which put a lot of pressure on me to pedal harder than I wanted to at the beginning of the ride. I usually plan on having enough energy left to get back home.

A vicious crosswind hampered us all the way up the Monobe River, and the guys joked about how much wind I blocked for them. I told them to say their prayers when they try to catch me on my new bike in the future. I like these opportunities to cut up and have a little fun in Japanese.

We turned off the main highway onto the exact same road that I had taken alone on Showa Day. I chuckled and told the other riders, and that got me a turn in the front. Me and my big mouth.

We got to the Big Snake Tree, which wasn’t spectacular, but wasn’t bad. It was a nice little spot with a rushing river thanks to the rain the day before. I had whizzed through there without a second thought just two weeks before, and I’m sure that I would’ve remembered the tree if it had been in bloom.

From there, we passed the 24 kilometers sign and battled tourist traffic all the way out of the valley, over the pass, and down the mountain. Quite a few times we whipped around corners to find two cars at an impasse, and we actually had to scream out at one driver to stop before he drove his car off the side of the cliff!

The final plunge into the coastal town resembled a big snake more than did the wisteria tree, and moist weather and cover of trees had aided the growth of moss on the road. One of our riders went down very hard around a hairpin turn and luckily came up with just a deep scrape on one leg.

Carefully, we continued, and a few more riders slipped and fell, but each subsequent slide was funnier than the last because we knew they were coming and were taking it very slowly. Nobody else hit the pavement, but a retired veterinarian with a huge face nearly wiped out a small shrine sandwiched between the road and the face of the mountain and let out a hilarious scream in so doing.

We gathered at the junction of Kochi’s PCH and took our last break before we would all start to take our own routes home. I leaned over to ask Pretty Guy what his odometer said and was shocked to learn that we had already eclipsed 65 miles. All told, we rode 80 miles to see a tree.

What surprised me even more was that I had done this by myself beforehand and didn’t know how far it was. Or how dangerous. Thank God that it was dry and that tree was sleeping when I went out the first time. I would not have handled the cars and the mossy downhill roads as well without my friends in KCTC.

There’s No Substitute

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 10, 2008 in Misc. 0 Comments

Substitute teaching…oh man, raise your hand if you’ve tried that.

It’s a good precursor to a career in teaching, and equally good for making a little extra money during the day, catching up on reading and crossword puzzles, and trolling the district for young, single teachers.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the junior high and high schools in my home town. The job was never short on surprises or little life lessons. I’d recommend it to anyone who is not in a hurry to join (or re-join) the rat race.

Watching the original Lord of the Flies about fifteen times, conducting a junior high brass band and a high school choir, and tackling gigantic autistic kids are among the highlights of my brief substitute teaching career.

As far as I know, Japan doesn’t have substitute teachers. Quite a few educators are part-time or teach at multiple schools, but I’ve never seen anyone who bounces from school to school, teaching math one day and social studies the next.

This presents a problem when a teacher wants or needs to take a day off. That in and of itself is interesting, because teachers have vacation and sick days, but they are discouraged from using them because of the inconvenience their absence would cause the rest of the staff.

Nobody teaches from periods one through six, and conference periods are many. Teachers aren’t supposed to teach more than four classes a day and usually have about 16 per week. This gives them time to wear the other hats bestowed upon them by the school.

Played tennis in junior high school? OK, you’re the badminton coach. Made the call to a suicide hotline when you walked in on your friend holding a knife to her wrists? Guidance counselor. Constructed a miniature model of Tokyo Tower with nothing but matchsticks, a rotten apple, and a tube of Moroccan toothpaste? Master scheduler.

Then there are the committees. I don’t think they do much, but of course committees have to have meetings and meetings are a very Japanese thing to do.

So when someone wants to take the day off, not only is a math teacher gone, but so is the Athletic Director and the vice chair of the School Rules Committee.

Only one English teacher has ever asked for time off, and it’s usually to take her son to the doctor because he keeps getting ear infections.

The teacher’s classes are covered by other teachers in the department. Even though I don’t have a Japanese teaching credential and therefore can’t legally teach a class alone, I took a few of her classes on those days and handled them just fine.

Some departments only have one teacher. At our industrial school, music and fine arts are just there to keep the PTA quiet about requirements, so there’s one art teacher and one part-time music teacher who is pregnant and misses a lot of days.

Her classes get shuffled around the staff, and I always hope that they’ll ask me to do it because I think I’m up to the task. I drop hints about it and I’m on the piano every day at lunch, but so far no dice. All I’m good for is English.

The responsibility landed on Coach Napoleon last week and he tried hard to pawn it off, but nobody would take it. The usually gruff softball coach showed a weaker side, whining about how he couldn’t read music and didn’t know what to call all of the “toys in the box” (percussion instruments used for teaching rhythm).

I took a peek at one of Coach Napoleon’s music classes, and it was comically awful. He stood before the students with a defeated look on his face and pointed at the blackboard while the students clanked castanets, shook maracas, and lamely tried to produce the rhythms written on the board. I imagined that he could be further out of his element only in an English class.

It’s an interesting system. We have uncertified people teaching classes for the day on both sides of the Pacific in completely different ways.

From the students’ perspective, the Japanese teacher is someone they know and trust, but the students also know that this person isn’t cooking in his own kitchen. The American kids never know for sure just what the sub knows, but also have no idea who the person is. Anyone with a college degree can stand up there and do it - prospective teachers, wafflers like me, or complete weirdos.

This one is too close for me to call. Both ways work, and either way it would be better if the real teacher were there. I don’t like the pressure to avoid taking days off here, and I don’t think that the teachers do, either, but I’m just a temporary guy and they are here for life, so they accept it.

An Intervention

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 10, 2008 in Lessons. 0 Comments

The bikers had a mini-intervention with me recently about getting a new bike. Pretty Guy asked when it was happening, and I gave my usual answer: “When I win the lottery.”

Then Larry stepped in. Larry is about fifty years old with a square, tanned face and salt-and-pepper hair. He rides 150 to 200 miles a week and wins races in and out of his age bracket. He looks exactly like a Japanese version of an American biker and family friend named Larry, hence the nickname.

Larry is so much faster than everyone else that I only see him when he is climbing a slope for the second time in order to keep moving on our Sunday rides. I usually say “good morning” to him and he’s out of earshot before I can say “wait for me!”

So I was surprised that he even knew my name, let alone my situation with The Club of bikes. He said that a new bike for me would be an invitation to the front of the pack. Then the others chimed in:

“It’ll change your life!”

“It’ll change your body!”

“YOU will have to pull US up the hills, Mac!”

Before I knew it they were around me in a semi-circle and I blushed at the attention. My man-crush on Larry increased when he picked up a strawberry I had dropped on the ground during the intervention and ate it, stem and all. What a man’s man.

A new road bike is not in the budget as far as I can see, and I’ve learned to use the tools that I have to keep it fun on Sundays. I accept that I have to try harder and work slower than everyone else and make adjustments to narrow the gap and really be part of the club.

I wonder why I’m OK with that while I’m intolerant of anything of the sort in all other areas of life. My computer is slowing down and twice a day I’m ready to chuck it into the canal. Lesson planning at work is still incredibly inefficient and it takes everything I have not to get upset at the silly system.

Could it be that I’m actually HAVING FUN with something? Trying hard and sweating at something without going completely AGGRO about the tiniest setback? Realizing that something isn’t a competition and detaching myself from the results?

I’m saving up for a road bike, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull the trigger when the time comes. The situation is too good now and I fear that a faster, better bike may introduce some of the enjoyable, fun-for-everyone elements listed above.

Or perhaps I can grow up and leave those in my dust as I pull the rest of KCTC up and down the mountain roads of Kochi.

Bhutanese Buffoonery

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 6, 2008 in Fun Facts. 0 Comments

Somebody said that the Bhutanese sultan or king had two hot daughters, and in thinking seriously about the comment, I realized that I knew nothing about Bhutan and wanted to see what it was all about.

Because, y’know, if I’m going to try and marry into Bhutanese royalty, I ought to know a thing or two about the place.

To my trusty online encyclopedia I turned, and while I got no stats on the girls or their powerful daddy, I did run into this gem:

Bhutan’s national sport is archery, and competitions are held regularly in most villages. It differs from Olympic standards not only in technical details such as the placement of the targets and atmosphere. There are two targets placed over 100 meters apart and teams shoot from one end of the field to the other. Each member of the team shoots two arrows per round. Traditional Bhutanese archery is a social event and competitions are organized between villages, towns, and amateur teams. There are usually plenty of food and drink complete with singing and dancing. Wives and supporters of the participating teams cheer. Attempts to distract an opponent include standing around the target and making fun of the shooter’s ability.

Did I read that correctly? Why on earth would you stand 100 yards away from somebody holding a frickin’ bow and arrow and taunt them? I’d do it right in his face, close enough so that I could punch him or pull his pants down before he could get a shot off.

Far more distracting, I would think, would be standing behind him and yelling PINECONESINYOURASS or pouring a pitcher of lemonade over his head as he draws his arm back.

However idiotic, this is something that I would pay to see, so now I want to go to Bhutan, hot princesses or not.

The Legend of Mac: Quest for Castle Mountain

Published by Bob Sanchez on March 13, 2008 in Bike. 0 Comments

Sometimes life in Japan resembles Nintendo adventure games so much that it’s no wonder the games came from here.

Take for example my first days in Fukushima. All I knew was that Fukushima was an hour north of Tokyo on the Bullet Train, and that was going on the word of my boss-to-be (the same guy who brought me into the country without a proper visa. It took 90 minutes, by the way).

I was plopped down in a fine apartment in the Bakersfield of Japan, but I had taken a night train and it had been raining, so I awoke on my first day in town without the foggiest clue of where I was or what anything looked like.

Kind of like Link in the GameBoy version of the Legend of Zelda where he has to wake up the Wind Fish to make Marin’s dream come true.

The map in that game was a 256-square grid, and you couldn’t look at places you hadn’t been yet. If you tried to look at the map while you were at Marin’s house in the very beginning, you couldn’t see anything at all.

Waking up in Fukushima that day in 2005 was frighteningly similar. I pushed out square by square and got my bearings, and I had to work at it. Different language, little order to the placement of roads and buildings, no street names, randomly distributed rice fields on any inch of undeveloped land - it was in every way a strange new world.

One of the reasons I so enjoy bicycling around Kochi and traveling through Japan is the interesting geography. Japan is basically a bunch of steep mountains sticking up out of the ocean, and Kochi has some of the gnarliest land formations in the country.

My apartment and school are 4 miles away from the Pacific, but you wouldn’t know it for the 1,000 foot mountain range that runs parallel to the shore between us and the ocean. Kochi Bay comes in through a gap in the mountains less than 1,000 feet wide.

About 10 miles to the west, an even smaller opening creates a dragon-shaped bay that stretches 8 miles inland, but parallel to the shore so that the peninsula is literally mountains poking up out of the water. There is very, very little sand and minimal beach area, and the treacherous road that runs the length of the peninsula offers several views of the bay and the ocean simultaneously.

My descriptions don’t do justice to the amazing natural sights, and the numbers probably don’t mean much to anyone with less than a passing interest in geography. To LINK this back to the Legend of Zelda, it’s as if God wanted to cram all of these geographical features into a limited space - much the same way that artists and programmers had to make everything fit onto the limited memory of a game cartridge.

So you get cool stuff like an active, ash-spewing volcano in the middle of a bay next to a city of 600,000 people Or how about another stinkin’ volcano jutting up out of the ocean on one side and overlooking a lake on the other within a span of 5 miles?

While driving on a Kagoshima highway that doubled as a tsunami wall, I saw an island about a half-mile off the coast. A small, sandy boat launch stuck out between the road and the bay, and I pulled the car off the road to read the sign posted in the turnout.

It was talking about Chiringashima, the uninhabited, tree-shrouded island I saw before me. What I couldn’t see, because it was high tide, was a six-foot wide sandbar that leads out to the island only at low tide. Totally natural. How cool is that?

It reminded me of a level in WarioLand where you had to return to one of the beginning stages, which had changed dramatically because the tide had come in. The higher sea level gave Wario access to a secret door unreachable at low tide.

I often have these kinds of thoughts. Nerdy? Yes. Lame? Perhaps. But tell me that you would be prepared for facing down some video game situations in real life.

On to Castle Mountain. In search of the perfect Morning Ride, I decided to take a road that the Bike Shops recommended to me in the fall.

The main road, Highway 33, begins in Kochi City, goes up and around a group of mountains and a river gorge, and ends on the west side of town. Dozens of farming roads work their way up and down the mountains inside the loop, and I wanted to cut through the circle on the road that went up to the peak of Castle Mountain.

This kind of thing wouldn’t be too difficult with a Thomas Guide and a full tank of gas, but, as I mentioned before, Japan doesn’t name streets. There are highway numbers, but to my frustration, nobody seems to use them. If I stop and ask someone how to get to Highway 195, for example, I usually get a blank look and something like the following:

“This road goes up that-a-way, and that road goes over there.”

That suffices in this video game world. Navigating in the city isn’t too difficult as you have buildings and traffic lights to count, but get away from the concrete jungle and you have to start using riverbends, felled trees, Honesty Markets, and abandoned vehicles.

For the Castle Mountain bit, I looked at my big map of Kochi City and tried my best to visualize what the route would look like. I could see where I wanted to go in the overview map in the bottom corner, but the actual roads on the enlarged map were covered by the legend.

Unfazed, I set out at 6 a.m. the following morning with what I thought was a good picture of the adventure ahead. I made the correct turn off Highway 33 and made it up to Castle Mountain without any problems.

Getting down would be the tough part. Four- and five-point intersections greeted me like pitchforks, and while some roads were obviously dead-ends into someone’s cabbage patch, others tantalized with better pavement or a lighter slope. A few times, I actually had to stop and scratch my head to figure out what to do.

I made it back to Kochi, but I had gotten sucked into a loop within the big loop and ended up descending on the same road that brought me up.

I checked the detailed commercial map at school the next day and saw where I had made a wrong turn. I vowed to set out again and make it through to the other side.

The correct road got steep and nasty pretty quickly after Castle Mountain, which, by the way, turned out not to be the highest peak. I guessed at a few forks in the road and found the back side of Highway 33 on its winding trip back toward the west side of Kochi. Yahoo!

The seven-foot wide concrete road was strewn with pine needles and belied its status as a state highway. It looked like it got one car per hour tops.

A few miles later, I was confronted by a surprise junction - it was exactly the same shape as the one I had taken to get back to the highway. The smoother road made a sharp turn downhill while the rougher-looking option continued in the same general direction at the same altitude.

A rusted sign declared that Kochi City was downhill while Ino, the town to the west of Kochi, was straight ahead. I bought that and also figured that the well-paved road better suited a numbered highway, so I turned and started down the slope.

I arrived at an awfully familiar-looking crossroads, and with good reason: it was one of the head-scratchers from the climb up. I had just made another circle!

I laughed and shouted, “DAMMIT!” Fooled again. I wanted to climb the mountain once more and beat the maze, but my energy meter was critically low and time was running out. I hit SAVE and turned the game off to try another day.

Straight to the Bike Shop I went to solicit the advice of this game’s sages. I asked them why this particular area had to be such a puzzle, and why it was that I couldn’t stop thinking about figuring it out. They chuckled; this obviously wasn’t the first case of bike fever or Castle Mountain Syndrome that they’d seen.

Mrs. Bike Shop wrinkled her nose and said, “Mac, you’ve got to get a nose for Kochi. You have to stop at a fork in the road and be able to say, ‘Kochi is THIS way!’” She sniffed like a curious dog as she delivered her local wisdom.

I complained that even my sense of direction wasn’t working. I just couldn’t predict where the twisting mountain roads would go once I made a decision on one or the other.

“Well, if you do it my way, you only have to use your five senses,” she replied. I didn’t recognize the word for “five senses” right away and she saw it on my face.

I caught the meaning a fraction of a second before she started to ask this question:

“Do you guys have five senses, too?”

Mr. Bike Shop looked up from the cruiser he was assembling and his eyes met mine. We struggled to hold back the giggles, and Mrs. Bike Shop realized what she had just asked after two or three seconds.

“No, no, no! That’s not what I meant!”

But it was too late. I had to take a knee to properly hold my sides, and Mr. Bike Shop dropped his tools while guffawing loudly.

Three years ago, I was ready to punch the next Japanese who asked me if there were also McDonald’s in the U.S. or if I was physically capable of eating with chopsticks. Questions like that are still annoying to an extent, and while Mrs. Bike Shop’s question was formed with precisely the same kinds of words, the context was completely different.

————————-

I am going to conquer that uncharted territory up around Castle Mountain. I’ll draw a better map, send it to the map company, and tell them to put their damn legend over the Pacific Ocean instead of over a very interesting network of farming roads.

But not today. It’s raining, and Mario doesn’t come out to play when it rains.

2.08 Horsepower Engine

Published by Bob Sanchez on March 6, 2008 in Bike. 0 Comments

Things are changing in Kochi.

People are putting away their gas heaters, and I’ve turned mine down several degrees. I’ve stopped wearing leg warmers to school and actually felt hot in my layers on Friday!

A brand-new Kochi Station opened up last week, and the town held a massive cleanup day for its 2008 tourism campaign. I’m seeing more and more people outside walking around.

We’re pulling out of this strange thing called Winter. It wasn’t a particularly tough or bitter winter by other people’s standards, but SHUT UP. I’m a pansy from Southern California, OK?

Upon departing from my house for the Sunday Ride, I was faced with a choice - ski mask, or no ski mask. It has never been cold enough to warrant wearing the mask to prevent frostbite and such, but being outside all day for the first time in January tore up my throat something awful, so I had been wearing it to keep my beautiful baritone beautiful.

These silly little incidents are significant to me because I’ve never had to think about them on a daily basis. It’s a pain and I’m learning more and more about why people would pay exorbitant amounts of money to live in Orange County.

I decided against the mask and went with a scarf and earmuffs instead. I applied sunscreen and got blasted by Level 3 Confusion. My fingertips were icicles on my face, but my nose was saying, “HEY, what’s that? It’s summertime! We’re going to the beach! All right!” It had been that long since I had gotten even a whiff of sunscreen and it threw me for a loop.

The scarf came off before we departed from the Bike Shop. Other bikers were taking off their windbreakers and masks. The sun was high and bright and I’m sure it got up to 60 degrees. It was a gorgeous day and we were out there spending it.

Our destination was a mountaintop cherry orchard, but we climbed some other mountains for fun along the way. The first one was Buddha Slope, a long, dark climb that has a much longer, brighter descent into a valley full of apple, pear, and peach orchards.

I made it to the top before a few other riders, and while it’s never a race, that felt pretty good. As Mrs. Bike Shop huffed and puffed through the pass, she said, “Ohhhh, I lost to Mac and his horsepower!”

Opportunities for me to brag about myself in this group are few and far between, so I told her about the time I generated 2.08 horsepower in physics class in high school.

I participated in an experiment in this physics class as a TA in my senior year of high school. The students were studying power and learned that horsepower was a unit of physical work done within a set amount of time.

We went out to the football bleachers to see how much horsepower each of us could generate. We had already calculated the height of the stairs and each person’s approximate mass, so we knew how much work was required to move each person’s mass up the stairs.

From there, it was a matter of how fast that work could be done. Some students jogged up the stairs and others walked, but nobody skipped steps. I asked the teacher if it mattered whether we took every step, and he said that it didn’t.

My turn came up, and I jumped up the stairs as fast as I could. We ran the numbers and I had churned up more than two horsepower. Nobody else had even reached one.

That didn’t sound right, so I did it again. And again. And again. Even tried running all the way to the top of the bleachers, and not once did the number dip below two.

The teacher busted 1.5 but I took home the grand prize with 2.08, the number from the last run.

Of course this doesn’t mean that I’m capable of sustaining that kind of power over any significant amount of time or of doing anything meaningful with it. But I think it’s cool to say that I can generate the power of two horses by somebody’s standard.

I take every chance I can get to relate stories from my past in Japanese because it’s a confidence-builder; when saying something for the first time in Japanese, I do better telling old stories than I do attempting to answer unexpected questions.

I was very satisfied with the way the story came out in Japanese. So satisfied that when we reached the other bikers and Mrs. Bike Shop asked me to tell the story to them, I didn’t disappoint. That was a big mistake.

Everybody laughed at the story and that was fine with me because it was meant to be a freakish and humorous account, but I’m never going to hear the end of it.

Following our break, I switched gears going uphill and heard a strange sound. I stopped after going up and over the hill and saw that my chain had somehow come off the cog in the very back of the derailleur and was passing over a metal clip instead of the cog. I hailed Mr. Bike Shop, and he took a look and had no idea how that could have happened.

I should’ve seen this coming:

“Gee, Mac, must’ve been that 2.8 horsepower of yours.”

The final climb up to the cherry orchard featured a crooked, Lombard Street-esque road whose switchbacks offered great views of the bikers behind and below. Playful horsepower barbs rained down from above as I struggled up the steep incline:

“Come on, Mac, use that horsepower!”

“What was it? 3.5?”

“Unhitch the horse cart!”

These jabs, and the fun in general, have been missing from the Sunday rides since I returned home from Christmas. I am quite sure that the season has a lot to do with it.

Mr. Bike Shop and I endured ribbings about our unkempt beards (pretty much any facial hair appears unkempt here). A Canadian girl who rides with us tried out a local slang phrase, but it sound like “BALLS!” when she said it, so we razzed her about that. We poked fun at Mrs. Bike Shop for communicating so well with the farmers, whom none of the rest of us could understand because of their thick accents.

Laughs abounded and they, coupled with the sunlight pouring down from the sky, made it very easy to keep the energy level high. I peeled back the finger coverings on my gloves and rolled down my leg warmers for the ride home. We traveled nearly 60 miles, and I’m usually broken around 50. Today, however, I finished just a few minutes behind everybody else and felt like I could have continued!

The best part of the day came while we were sitting around at the orchard, eating cherry-flavored rice and mochi balls that reminded me of Cream of Wheat with a hint of cherry. I turned to Mrs. Bike Shop and said, “Man, I can’t wait for spring!”

She delivered the gem of the day, music to my ears:

“Whaddya mean wait, Horsepower Mac? Spring is here!”

Coach Napoleon

Published by Bob Sanchez on February 28, 2008 in Funnies. 0 Comments

Allow me to introduce my favorite member of the staff at our wonderful school. He is the boys fast-pitch softball coach, the vice chairman of the student advisement committee, and a geography teacher. In that order. Which is one of the reasons why I like him so much.

As his name suggests, he’s a small guy with a bit of a complex. He’s about 5-foot-5 with a barrel chest, dark suntanned skin, and a shaved head of black hair. His mouth is quite large for his physique, and from it comes a symphony of snide remarks, abrupt commands, and genuine