Seam(de)stressing

As part of my continuing quest to finish redecorating the living room, I decided I had to do something about the huge black object which is my husband's office chair. It's probably the most offensive object in the room in terms of making it feel too black on one side because of the height of the back.

There's also an additional problem which my husband has had with this chair for quite awhile. The chair is made of black vinyl in a weak imitation of leather and his legs stick to the chair when he wears shorts. In order to kill two birds with one stone, I decided to try and cover it with something brighter.

In order to accomplish this, I investigated web sites about chair covers and found out all of the instructions and existing designs are for dining room chairs. None of them had anything to offer for someone trying to gussy up an office chair so I had to improvise and work out my own way.

When one combines the difficulty of winging a pattern for such a thing with my absolutely horrible sewing skills, it's a recipe for disaster so don't judge my pictures too harshly. In fact, as part of a disclaimer about my skills, I should reveal that I got a "C" in the home economics classes that required us to sew and all we had to make was a simple handbag design (an awful-looking one) and a simple skirt and I was a straight "A" student otherwise. In fact, I think the "C" was a pity grade. I can't even cut fabric straight. Everything always ends up with a ragged edge which is actually worse than most attempts to rip cloth.

I guess I was lucky that I didn't have a pattern to work with since I don't measure anything regardless. I just sort of drape fabric over things and start pinning then hack away the extra. I should also add that I don't know how to use a sewing machine which is okay because I don't own one. I have to sew everything by hand and my stitches are perfect so long as one is aiming for zig-zags and slanted lines.

The "pattern" for the back, as it were, is like a tunic or, more simply, a huge, long pillowcase with slits down the sides. I used a king-size sheet that my in-laws gave my husband when he visited in May. The sheet is one of several and is lovely but too big for our bed (the other ones are queen size) so I decided to re-purpose it. It also has the advantage of being large enough for the chair.


The bottom is a bit like an apron that lies flat on the seat and ties around the back. In fact, the hardest part was the tie because it is between 6 and 7 feet long and I had to sew all along the length of it.


I made the tie by cutting a strip off of the sheet length-wise then folding in the sides and then folding that in half. It was so long that I had to pin as I went (I don't have that many pins).

Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to cover the arms yet. It's important that any cover I attach be removable for washing and I'm not sophisticated enough in my sewing skills to add things like zippers or buttons. I'm sure it'll also look better once I press it at the end of the process. For now, I'm just going to see how well it holds together with my husband's sitting on it. Given my poor sewing skills, I'm more than a little concerned that it'll start falling apart from normal wear and tear.

Despite all the work, dubious results and my stabbed fingers, I found the process of making this rather relaxing. Since marrying, I haven't made much with my hands and that's something I used to do a lot when I was younger. It makes me hope I can start doing some of these types of hobbies again on a regular basis as they really do help alleviate stress.

Oppression

I'm getting tired of this thing coming up looking like a near-win on a slot machine.

There's a typhoon in the air and the air is oppressively humid today. If you could see the water molecules hanging in the air, the world around you would be a nearly opaque cube and you'd be the fly stuck in the middle. When the weather is like this, it feels like the gravity has been turned up and you just don't want to move. It's depressingly gray and it causes one to have the tendency to be crabby for no explicable reason.

After days of rain predictions and holding back on washing clothes, I had to do some laundry and hang it inside today but it's not getting any drier. In fact, the carpet in the room that it's hanging in actually feels moist when I step on it. It is as if the added moisture released from the clothing has joined forces with the ambient humidity and actually caused it to finely rain on the floor. The room also has the type of smell you associate with a laundromat...as if the smell of clean but wet clothes being dried has permeated the air for so long that the scent has penetrated every wall and floor.

One of my students is off to Syria for a few weeks and he told me that he'd rather be there in dry over 100-degree heat than here in 80-degree weather because the moisture soup makes it incredibly uncomfortable here. This is a student who hates hot weather and comes to every lesson dripping with sweat. You know it's got to be bad when someone who loves the cold weather would rather be 20 degrees hotter and dry than endure this humidity.

I know they're an environmental scourge but I'm immensely grateful for air conditioning when it gets like this.

Avoiding the Stink

For Tokyoites, garbage is a rather constant preoccupation. This is not only because there are strict rules for separating trash but also because you can only put trash out on certain days. A lot of people also have experience with "trash Nazis" who police how trash is sorted and hassle those who make mistakes.

All of the sorting and holding back of various sorts of trash until the appropriate day arrives for removal wouldn't be such a big deal if homes weren't so small. There really isn't any place to keep trash temporarily other than in your home for most people and the smell can became a problem, particularly in summer when it's hot and humid as all get out.

My own solution for this is to make sure I wash out anything nonburnable (such as plastic containers) with food residue in it and to separate food scraps into a separate sealed pail which I keep under the sink. If you keep the types of things which may rot separated and sealed off, the smell is contained.

I've discussed this with a few of my students and they've told me some things which explain certain behaviors in supermarkets. For one, there are spools of very thin plastic bags at all markets. These bags are on the smallish size and I always thought they were for putting possibly leaky trays of meat or fruit and vegetables into. However, I see women grabbing hold of the spool and tearing off a good many of them and stuffing them into their shopping bags. Since the bags are thin and small, I never understood what women wanted so many of them for but my students told me they were for putting food scraps into and then sealing them up so they didn't stink up the trash.

One of my students told me she goes a step further in this regard. She can't bear the notion of there being any food scraps rotting in her trash, even inside of sealed bags. She actually stores the food in the bags, seals them, and then keeps them in her freezer until trash day when she takes them out and tosses them in the bin. I told her that I had no space in my freezer for this sort of thing and she said she didn't either but she crams the scraps in there regardless. Personally, I'm not so sure that food scraps in my freezer with my still edible food makes me feel any better than having them in the the trash where they'll decay for a few days before the trash goes out.

It is important in Tokyo to try and reduce the smell of your trash as much as possible though as it will attract roaches (and other unpleasant creatures). It's a good idea to wash your trash cans out regularly with baking soda and plenty of hot water and soap. It's also important to change the liners each time you toss the trash even if they seem relatively clean. It's also important to give recyclable items a thorough cleaning (particularly beer cans) so that they don't start to smell up things and attract unwanted guests.

Anger

When I was growing up, anger was a normal part of my everyday experience. My mother, who loved nothing more than to say I was temperamental because of my red hair, was probably the angriest person in the family. Any small hiccup in the day's activities could set off a screaming fit of verbal abuse. This could be quite irrational at times. For instance, she would be ready to go off somewhere in her car and discover that she'd misplaced her handbag. As her frustration escalated at lightning speed, she'd start screaming at my sister and I saying that we hid it from her to intentionally frustrate her.

My mother's wrath was so frequently let loose on us that I remember an incident as a child which sticks with me to this day. We were camping and she gave me a bar of soap and told me to go down to the river and wash up. She sternly told me not to lose the soap. Of course, if you have soap in a large body of water and you're a child with small hands, the bar slipping from your hand is a very predictable occurrence. After the inevitable occurred, I stood in the river and cried because I so feared the tongue lashing I was going to get. My father asked me what was wrong and I told him I lost the soap. His response was, "it's only a bar of soap," but I was sufficiently conditioned by my mothers verbal abuse over little uncontrollable things that I was completely neurotic about making such mistakes.

My mother wasn't a bad person, mind you. In fact, she could be a wonderful and giving person but she had her problems and one was that her life was very hard and there were many bad things going on which she couldn't control. When just one more thing broke the camel's back of her ability to cope (and that happened a lot because she had so much stress and difficulty), she'd let loose on my sister or I because my father would just walk off and go to a bar to get away from her and we were far easier to intimidate into cooperating or at least offer the illusion of effectively controlling our future behavior with a heaping dose of verbal vitriol.

When I first married (which coincided with when I first came to Japan), my husband experienced some of this type of irrational anger only this time it was coming from me. He'd do something thoughtless or careless to upset me and I'd say he was doing it on purpose because he didn't care about upsetting me. My husband is about as sharp as they come and he knew my history with my mother so he let me know that I was following in her footsteps. He also pointed out something which I knew from my days with my mother. Why would anyone intentionally anger someone who turned into a shrieking harpy when her hackles were up? Anyone who knows how much daughters hate to be the same as their mothers when their mothers have issues that made their daughters miserable can imagine how much of a motivator this was to change my emotional responses.

While I could, with a great deal of self-reflection and effort, learn to control my anger about all the little things in life that tended to send me off the deep end, I couldn't control my anger about a lot of things I experienced early on in Japan. To a limited extent, I still can't. Mainly, I'm talking about the rudeness I experience almost daily which either is because I'm a gaijin or because I live in a metropolis full of dreamy-eyed wanderers who rarely look where they're going and carry on their daily activities as if no one else existed. The staring, pointing, and animated talking as bugged eyes point in my direction or the tittering conversations which are bald-faced conversations about me which I'm not supposed to understand because I'm not Japanese continue to be the hardest part to tolerate though I am getting better at just ignoring it.

After I passed through the honeymoon phase a year or so after coming to Japan, I spent several years saying really ugly things about the Japanese. I'm not talking about racist sentiments but just general angry comments about how "stupid", "ignorant", and "rude" they were. I had a big "me against them" attitude. The thing is that some people can be rude, stupid, and ignorant. It's not as if my feelings had no basis in reality but my anger was disproportionate and my sentiments too generalized. At times, I'm sure that it was also misplaced. If you are subjected to something frequently enough and it makes you defensive, you will eventually start seeing these "attacks' everywhere, even when they're not really going on.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of anger. People commonly feel that anger is based mainly on fear but I'm not so sure that I'd agree it's at the root of all anger. I think some anger is based on feeling out of control and acting out on your anger is a means of attempting to gain control. If you can bully or intimidate someone into ceasing the actions they are undertaking which are causing you distress or pain, then you have gained a measure of control over them. If a Japanese person rudely gawks at me and I can intimidate them into looking away by tossing them a dirty look, an angry word, or an intimidating gesture, then I've taken control of the situation and stopped the behavior.

This sort of control is, of course, an illusion, just as my mother's verbal abuse gave her the illusion that she could control my sister and I by yelling at us. While one can use anger and acting on it to put people momentarily in their place, it won't change the underlying thoughts causing that behavior or prevent future incidents and all it does is end up making you walk around conditioned to react defensively all the time and to have a perpetually sour look on your face. If you read other Japan blogs, you'll sometimes see people comment that they often see foreigners walk around looking very unhappy. I can say that I can understand why those people look the way they do and I don't really blame them. When so much around you is overstimulating you and often rubbing you the wrong way, you've got to cope anyway that you can.

I don't mean to imply that foreigners should walk around mad all the time but just to say that it's understandable. In fact, I think the best thing you can do is develop an understanding and tolerance of the ignorant behavior of people. In some ways, it's a little like learning to tolerate the way children are always screaming and shouting and carrying on in a nerve-wracking fashion. Before someone takes that the wrong way and says I'm saying Japanese people are like children, let me say that I mean that we come to understand that kids don't mean to annoy anyone and are just acting on impulses they can't control and never stop to think about how they affect others much in the same way Japanese people don't really stop to think about how their actions toward foreigners may be perceived when they behave rudely toward them.

I wish I could conclude this post by saying that I've mastered my reactions and allow bad behavior to roll off my back but the best I can say is that it's a battle I consciously fight every time I fail at being sanguine about it. It's been a long time since I tried to intimidate someone into pointing their gaze in another direction but it's been far less time since I've wanted to do so.

Japanese Fast Food

Most of the U.S. fast food chains have branches in Japan but the Japanese also have their own home-grown fast food burger franchises. One of the best known ones is MOS burger but there is also First Kitchen and some other smaller regional franchises like Dom Dom. "First Kitchen", incidentally, is a name resulting from a common mispronunciation/misunderstanding of the difference between "fast" and "first" among Japanese people.


The main difference between home-grown burger shops and foreign chains is that the core menus tend to carry more items based on Japanese eating habits such as burgers served on a few compressed discs of rice. Some burgers also are served with kinpira (root vegetables and other items cooked in a Japanese style).

A few months ago, Mos Burger made a bid to compete with western fast food chains such as McDonald's (who they have been losing ground to) by crafting a "Nippon burger" which includes a mixture of both beef and pork in the burger. Supposedly, this type of burger suits Japanese tastes better than pure beef burgers. If you go by what is available at supermarkets, this assertion is correct. In many markets, only beef/pork mixtures of minced meat are available.

When we first moved in, there was a Mos Burger about a 3 minute walk from our apartment. We probably got food there once a month or so because we try to avoid expensive, nutritiously suspect food. The trusty Mos Burger was close at hand and convenient if we were tired or I had a taste for a chili dog with jalapenos on it. Unfortunately, about two years ago, the place shut down so I guess we weren't the only ones who ate there infrequently.

One thing about the Mos Burger experience which may or may not have contributed to the local branch's demise was the fact that the food was served fresh. You didn't have the sort of pre-cooking and storing in slots that you see at McDonald's. This meant that the "fast" food wasn't so fast but it was often better prepared and didn't have that dried out under a heat lamp texture. The food was also much smaller and slightly more expensive than Mickey D's so perhaps the weak Japanese economy has been a part of its decline.

The thing is that true Japanese "fast food" has nothing to do with burgers, fries, hot dogs, or any of that ilk that you get wrapped in paper or served in cardboard sleeves. Real Japanese fast food is the stuff you get at little food stands like takoyaki (octopus balls) or ramen. Places like Yoshinoya (a chain of restaurants selling bowls of rice with various things served on top of it, mainly beef) and kaiten zushi (conveyer belt sushi) are the real Japanese fast food places. The other types are mainly just knock-offs of western places attempting to compete in a market already dominated by franchises that originated in other countries.