The BOE

I officially started work this week, which so far has entailed sitting in the Board of Education office and staving off boredom by surreptitiously reading Freakonomics for 6 hours a day.

Don't look at me like that. My lessons are already planned for the rest of the month.

Not that anyone at the BOE seems to mind. Most of them don't speak English at all, so beyond some friendly greetings they rarely interact with me. They have done their best to help me, however. They even sat down with me to go over my schedule and present me with a map of the schools I'll be visiting. A map that is as big as I am. I doubt I'll be able to use it in the car, unless I use it to wallpaper the windshield and cut two small holes to watch the road through. I finally settled for tacking it to the wall in my apartment in the hopes that its enormous presence would somehow make me more familiar with the area, perhaps through osmosis.

Continuing in this helpful vein, my coworkers took me to lunch at a traditional restaurant and  considerately ordered on my behalf. As I've mentioned, this practice has led to some interesting meals, like the little white fish (which Mogi-san now presents to me all the time, because she thinks my reaction is funny). I know enough Japanese to ask for considerably tamer options; but I'm afraid that if I'm honest about my tastes I'll offend everyone in the vicinity,  because traditional Japanese food always includes my worst fear: meat-that-looks-like-what-it-used-to-be.

You all know that feeling when the sight of something wrenches your guts into a knot, however irrationally. For some people it's blood or heights; for me, it's meat that has failed, through some egregious error, to be beaten beyond recognition. If I can look at something and see a general outline of its original form or--God forbid--a limb, it's all over. I blame my mother for informing me how to prepare lobsters (I think it's cruel and morbid, even for what is essentially a sea cockroach). Now whenever I see meat I can hear the anthropormorphized wails of Flounders and Bambis and Wilburs--at least until they're thinly sliced and hidden between two slices of bread and a little barbecue sauce quiets my conscience until the next encounter.

So you can all imagine my woe when the waiter brought me a very large, very intact shrimp. I know; I can hear all of you scoffing at my wimpishness (I was almost in tears, by the way). But "large" does not do this thing justice. It was the length of my forearm, from elbow to fingertips. I imagine it could have been frolicking around with Godzilla for eons before some Japanese fisherman dragged it from the frigid depths just so it could be deep-fried and presented to the last person on earth who would want to eat it. Its head--HEAD. HEAD. HEAD.--was as large as my palm, sparing my eyes not the slightest detail, from bulging translucent eyes to individual whiskers.  I put off the encounter for as long as I could, delicately munching some "ice plant" (a mountain fern with unique skin that makes it look like it's constantly shrouded in crystalline dewdrops) one leaf at a time. Eventually, however, I had to face the beast; and enthusiastically, too, or the nice people surrounding me would feel bad. At least the main body was shrouded in tempura, I thought. But my rudimentary skills with chopsticks were no match for the massive creature; it kept slipping into the dipping sauce and all the tempura began to slide off, leaving me no choice but to outmaneuver the deteriorating batter by shoveling the whole thing into my mouth in 3 bites. An ungainly victory was mine, and all that remained was to smile and say, "Oiishikatta"--"It was delicious."