safety first

Posted as part of an attempt to begin to write on this confounded internet place again. Originally appeared as stream of consciousness, with a brief preface about liking a romantic entanglement due, in part, to it's "safety." I'm doing that thing I just said right now, by the way, so don't start thinking that I practice what I preach.

i hate every time somebody uses the word safe. it sets me off. safe? like that is the top priority? what about all of the other priorities? safe doesn't imply creation at all, in fact, it implies explicitly running away from possible creation if that is deemed the "safe" action. safe is an excuse for pansy-ass.

i don't know how else to say it. "maybe more people would listen to you if you took a while to express what you were saying in a less extreme way." seriously, a peer--no a sophomore or a junior or something--some person who is way younger than me told me this the other day. and heres the thing: NO THEY WON'T. maybe they'll listen, but they won't hear.

because i'm not just trying to make an academic point about this safety obsession. i'm trying to make a very personal point about the safety obsession too. that part of my point is that IT PISSES ME OFF. i've never broken a bone, i've never tried hard drugs, i've never seriously hurt someone and yet everyone is constantly telling me to be safe. i've been safe, i've been so safe that i'm not even afraid of not being safe.

our world is so safe. everything about it is safe. the level of assurance we need to take any piddling action is miles above the threshold that simple practicality would demand of a person living so recently as the 1950's. we can be so sure now that when we're not we are totally paralyzed. when we can't have someone tell us it's ok, when we can't go to the bathroom as a group, when we have to touch an ambiguous area; we first let our fear manifest itself in its brand-new acceptable mask: safety. courtesy.

with the exception of possible economic interpretations: we don't live in a china world. humans are pretty hard to kill, all things considered. humans are in fact resilient, intelligent, autonomous creatures that can adapt and respond to a wide range of situations and sensory inputs. that's why we run (and destroy) this planet. we're virulently good at adapting to our situations.

the problem is that we are adapting to our overly safe new lifestyles terribly. japan's antibacterial craze lead to a greater ability for disease to spread through the populace. our interconnectedness has allowed for a greater ability of fear to spread through ours. it's like the internet finally unfogged the windows for most of us and, in looking out at the world, all we can do is thank god that we are inside our steel box and pray never to leave.

i say no. man descended from monkeys, who don't live under roofs and who don't understand what the word "safe" means. safe is not the most important thing. treating yourself like you are fragile does not make you strong and does not make you safe and able to respond well to threats. it makes you a dependent, cowering, herd animal. dammit, people: go out and do some awesome stuff. safety does not come first, safety just comes at some point before you do something that is going to kill you. that's the only place you need to make sure it goes in the order. there is lots of leeway otherwise.

and here is my suggestion: do some things that scare you. allow just a little vulnerability. let somebody tell you the truth or love you. go and drive fast or drink until you finally say the thing that has been festering in your mind. being trapped inside, whether you are a thought or a human generates a lot of stale air. and the only way to expel that air to open up the doors, just a little. i'm not saying burn the house down.

i'm saying, at the very least: stop telling ME to be so safe all the time. it's just stupid.

Why the long face? I mean...silence.

Dear three audience members,

A while ago I wrote something somewhat controversial that had to be removed from this website. Since the whole purpose of my blog project was to do something as close as possible to saying what I want, it kind of stopped my writing about tour project dead in its tracks. So I have created a new blog that is neither indexed by google nor part of the larger blogger infrastructure. If you'd like to read it, email me and I will give you the address.

drew dot westphal at yale dot you get the picture

China Freedom

Written June 25, 2009 behind Chinese filters blocking blogger access.

In The United States of America, I feel a constant fear of speaking my mind.

I write this entry from China, where google.com has been blocked for the last few days. They don't actively spy on you, and people gripe about the government in private. But you can't write about it, or disseminate your opinions. You cannot publicly disagree with the status quo. Public disbelief is a crime.

We are singing for a marketing firm whose name indicates a need for some marketing. Desiful. Like Desi Arnaz? Like “desirable”?

Desiful has contracted us to sing at the Shanghai world expo, set to kick off in slightly over 300 days. The goal of the expo, in its own words, is to show that China “is able to hold a world class exposition.” And as they did with the Olympics, they've bulldozed neighborhoods and shipping yards and anything else to do it.

We toured their headquarters with our very own guide with his very own agitprop. We saw the 3D animation of pavilions lined with trees, demonstrating their eco-friendly “better city, better life” theme. Up on the roof of the building we looked out over the 4 square kilometers that will be rebuilt, under which 400 new kilometers of subway will run. There is symbolism too: the bell of an old factory that used to mark the beginnings and ends of work days now sits quietly on that rooftop. We got to ring it. A smokestack will be rebuilt, taller than before, lined with lights—and solar powered.

But you can't read the wikipedia article on Tienanmen square. And when you visit the square, plainclothes policemen, armed with umbrellas, make sure that you don't take the wrong photos and hurry you along. They catch your attention by shouting “hello” at you. Mao looks over this scene, his face fat and contented on the side of the forbidden palace.

The United States has no pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010, a fact the Desiful marketing team tactfully reminded us of with a clipart graphic of a man shrugging his shoulders where one would expect to find the picture of our pavilion.

“My advice to you is this: in China, when something big comes toward you, move out of the way.” We were on the fiftieth floor of Beijing's Capitol Club filled with yalies and our host father, originally from Taiwan. He dropped this into conversation the way only people older than you can. We talked about traveling. We sang for them and spoke in English.

When you find a way to circumvent the filters and get to gmail, access eventually slows, then dies. The refresh button doesn't work. Something big has noticed and adapted to you.

We left the expo headquarters on our expo bus with our expo guides. I had an expo knot in my stomach. “It makes sense that we should participate, doesn't it?” Stegs argues with me. Better to participate, right? Since the markets here have opened up, since our capital has flooded in to fill the area behind the filters, millions have left abject poverty. Physical poverty. The expo will bring more money and more credibility here. More people will likely eat. I try to argue back and almost cry and have to stop.

Google.com is a basic human right. And, free markets or not, how free can you be to do or think when
the act of sending a request across the data lines that connect the people of our world is met with silence? When you can feel that something bigger than you has figured you out and stopped what you are doing?

The Chinese government has refused to comment on shutting down google. They claim google won't block porno. Google refuses to comment. Pressures mount.

“I have serious moral reservations about singing this concert tomorrow, guys.” We sat in the vaulted lobby of our five star accommodations.

“The truth is,” (and this is what people say when they are about to tell you their opinion forcefully) he said “that there is nothing we can do now. We are professionals and we are singing this concert. I have moral reservations too. More than you, I would guess.”

We're professionals, I thought, as we met over scotch in between our sets that night. The truth is, there is just nothing you can do about it. I can't even move out of its way.

The people here may have the consolation that, within their minds, they will always be free. That they are no different from the people that form the substrate of any free nation. But to speak freely anywhere requires courage, if not madness. And what good is freedom that can never be made manifest? And when something big comes to stifle you, you had better get out of its way.

Queens in Queenstown

This is a backdated entry about June 1-6, 2009.

The Whiffenpoofs hit Queenstown like a girl hits a tennis ball. It seemed athletic, but the clothes were still pretty cute and there were likely some high pitched grunts. It was in Queenstown that each whiff spent approximately a third of their entire budget for tour and about half of their adrenaline.

We stayed at the St. Moritz hotel, a place designed like a ski lodge, we think. It had the fittings of a US luxury hotel, but the floor plan of a third world maze. The hotel was able to make fantastic pizza and to make you sort of unsure that you should be where you were walking. The lobby had this funny, too homey feeling that made every walk through it feel like an intrusion.

Looking outside the window of any of the rooms, or to the right when you walked out of the hotel was one of the most pastoral, small town scenes one could imagine. Mountains encircled the lake, which led into the frigid shotover river. On one side, a ski village, Queenstown, was built in levels into the mountainside.

Even our flight into Queenstown was scenic, as the group snapped photos out the windows of the snowcapped mountains and verdant lakes below them. I imagined crashing into those beautiful mountains with our plane. I would first go get some shoes out of the cargo hold and then make the heroic trek into town to summon help. This somehow would be a novel idea that only I had. Especially the shoes part. Footwear is an essential part of heroism.

We sang for our hotel in Queenstown, and for an elementary school of children that answered all questions with a resounding “yeees”, which is how they say “yes” in New Zealand. Every child at this school also got an award for some academic accomplishment or another, in a ceremony that we all got to be physically present for. At this point, a cappella has granted me the privilege of seeing many schoolchildren make many important rites of passage. And many unimportant rites of passage, like getting an award for, basically, breathing. It appears the foundationless self-esteem building bug has transferred more successfully across the Atlantic than the swine flu has.

Aside from the delicious chicken, bacon (MITCH MORGAN), sour cream pizza and bottomless breakfast of the St. Moritz, the whiffs gravitated towards Fergburger, a local burger joint slowly putting all others out of business. But there were hungers that restaurants could not satisfy. A hunger for ADVENTURE. Or advintcha, as the kiwis would say it.

Our first morning, Trevor, Joel, Jay Kim and I took a jet boat up the shotover river. None of us had made the calculation: 80 mph plus + open air + inverse seasons = wind chill. It was one of the most terrible things that I have ever subjected my ears to. It was the Bjork of cold wind. Jet boats sit 2 feet deep in the water until they get up on a plane. While planing, they can travel in water that is barely 2 inches deep. And--either our driver really liked this trick or its the fastest way to stop the boat--with a quick lull in the throttle, a spin on the wheel, and a punch on the gas the boat skids around in a tight 180 on the surface of the water, coming to a stop. Once I stopped thinking that we were going to smash into the sides of the river, or the poles that we were going past (our driver was my age), I pulled out the camera and tried to get a few shots of the scenery.

With our body temperatures low (always good for holding your breath for a long time) we were ready to go rafting. Heli-rafting to be exact. Rememher, it's winter. The roads to the top of the river are so icy that they have to ferry you up in a series of helicopter rides. We rode in the chopper with a guy named Chief who didn't talk much and had a very American Indian look about him.

We asked Chief if the pilot wouldn't mind giving us a bit of a wild ride. This is not accepted practice, apparently, as my parents chastised me for it later. But Chief seemed to think it was a great idea. We donned our headphones after successfully entering the chopper without being decapitated. This is the first time in a non-winged flying craft for any of us. The thick headphones mask some of the thumping drone and mic everyone enough that they can talk. The mics pick you up when you are talking and only broadcast that. Otherwise, you would be hearing everyone's ambient noise.

Airborne, the pilot took us toward our destination, the top of a mountain. He banked hard right. Helicopters don't turn like planes, where the g's press primarily down through your spine, perpendicular to the floor. The chopper just turned on its side and the ground fell away and we fell over into our harnesses. The front of the chopper is a bulbous glass window, the better to see the ground as it alternately rushed to meet us and disappeared below us. Combined with the weightless feeling of sudden altitude change, this proved to be quite an exhilarating view. Like riding on Mr. Toad's glass bottomed air-boat.

We had already donned our wetsuits and we sweat in them during our ride up to the top of the mountain. We got a guide, again about my age, who had flipped the last few times he went down this river. His name was Skip or Chip or something else that old people are never called. Maybe its different for Kiwis. Maybe there are bundles of old Skips and Billies and Juniors running around. They would likely be more disconcerting guides than the young ones.

The river was lined with ice and decorated with the rusted pieces of failed mining equipment from the New Zealand gold rush. Yes, they had a gold rush. I sat at the front with Joel, who is frequently intrepid. We set the pace for the rowers behind us. Before going off waterfalls, we tucked in, drawing the oars into our chests and sitting on our knees in the middle of the raft. Otherwise, we sat out on the sides, in order to dig our paddles as deep into the water as possible.

We went through a cave too narrow to paddle in that let out onto 10 foot fall. The cold was scary at first, like we would get frozen through. I never was scared whitewater rafting before, and my newfound fear made me stick in close to the middle of the raft. But falling in is not the worst thing that can happen. By the end, either the ice had disappeared or I found a small reservoir of courage. I paddled like the best tourist in a tight wetsuit who hasn't exercised in months you could imagine.

The next day was our final day of adventure before departing for Auckland. Some tried to skydive, but the clouds were too thick. I went to canyon swing, which is like bungee jumping, but you don't bungee you...swing at the bottom. It is in a canyon, which follows the shotover. We rafted under it the day before, and jetboated to a location somewhat before it on the river. With a swing—contrasted with a bungee—you can jump off the edge in many different ways as there are no constraints on the angles placed by needing to bounce and not break necks. Trevor went off in tails that I packed in my backpack. Joel went off strapped to a chair. I jumped sideways off the cliff, like a pencil dive from 1st grade. I was naked.

They called down a girl, who usually works a cash register, to put on my harness. The men down at the jump were afraid or something. They were very smalltown heteronormative, or macho, or whatever, --some thing I haven't been around in four years--about it. From my second jump, I know that the girl put the harness on a little loose compared to the way the guys did it. I found myself very concerned about whether they were comfortable with my nudity. I shouted a six letter acronym as I jumped off the cliff.

If you want to look flattering naked, wearing a harness that segments the portions of your body on a cold day while doing something terrifying isn't a great place to start. When I came up after my jump they cattle prodded me in the butt. I screamed. Apparently, the cattle prods are a tool of the trade up there. They make people jump off the edge, or help in the jump master's black humor terrorization of them.

Second jump, white tie and tails and gloves. And black BDSM mask. They suspended me over the chasm and I lifted my feet over my head, extended my arms towards the river, and they released me. I rocketed to the ground on my back, looking with a tilted head at the approaching ground. Additional jumps were only 10 NZ, about 7 dollars, but we had a concert in the evening, so we had to get back. We sang them “Time After Time” while they burned DVDs of us.

The next morning, our wallets lighter and our bags heavier with DVDs and picture books of the Queenstown scenery, we boarded a plane to Auckland. International destination 1: complete.

hello michael

even if last night were something that i recalled sequentially, it would best be described as a series of instants. as descriptions of just the things that happened.

being polite is here is very confusing. some of the whiffs were going out, and i asked my host mother what she thought about it. if she had plans. no, no, i was free to go. but...we could do this other thing she had mentioned. she pauses. not so many smiles this time. so i stay.

staying is the best decision that i have ever made.

we go one stop down on the joban line to a salsa bar. called cuba japan or cuba salsa. i have mentioned to here that dancing is one of those things that really embarasses me. i already feel embarassed all of the time here, so dancing just does not seem fun. misato, host sister, comes with. she is really cute. she has a boyfriend.

junko likes to salsa dance. so i decide that i must dance with her, fear be damned. i eventually shuffle ineptly with her, and with a very cute somebody-else who thinks i am a total boob. i cannot dance. and i am wearing baggy white shorts and shoes with black socks.

misato likes to smoke cigarettes. misato's boyfriend yuki likes to smoke cigarettes. misato's boyfriend yuki does not like it when misato smokes cigarettes. neither does mom. mom goes home and we go to misato's favorite bar. there i will have enough drinks to start thinking that misato likes me. and i will have enough of her marlboro menthols to start thinking that i have just brushed my teeth. but that is not the point of the story. and she doesn't like me. not like that. i'll file this under a new people-category i am trying to create for myself. there used to be two bins: people i want to have sex with and people i do not want to have sex with. i dream of a day when i can put people like misato in bin number three: people that i am attracted to without thinking constantly of sex. i'll only have to turn back the whole of evolution.

misato's bar has every kind of bourbon whiskey you can imagine. i assume that it is bourbon whiskey. all the signs said it was boubon whiskey. i had a japanese kind, which was bad. i had another kind that i chose at random by designating the top right hand of the rows and columns of bourbon 0,0 and flipping a matchbook repeatedly to fill out the index, in binary, of my next drink. misato explained to me that there was no wireless at their house because they needed a rooter. she meant router, but it didn't matter. she had already spoken the jargon of my heart.

there was a third whiskey. misato told me that the bartenders were drunk. there was glasses guy, who was sort of the leader. there was other guy, who was the other guy. there was red sweater guy, who got picked on by glasses guy and other guy. g, o, and rs were teasing other. g was making rs shoot tequila. when rs couldn't take it anymore, g gunned three shots in a row. i told g he was superman. they liked that a lot.

g pulled up his shirt at me and made some giggly noise. i threw my shirt at his head.

they gave me a super tight budweiser tank top and kept my shirt. they gave me tequila. they said something in japanese, which i shouted back at them. it meant "more". they gave me more.

they wouldn't stop until i took off my pants. i sat at the bar in my budweiser tshirt and boxers and drank my water. we repeated senseless things back and forth to each other. rs kept saying "hello michael to me". i told them i was a samurai.

i told rs i would teach him to fight like a samurai. he came out from behind the bar, now shirtless, with things written all over his chest. we had a slap fight and jumped up and down. o and g joined us. o was also shirtless. g was completely naked and hiding behind a bar towel. g did a precarious dance with the towel that, surprisingly, did not fail. we all jumped up and down.

we all sang "stand by me". i sang the opening lines of "somebody to love" to a patron at the bar and kissed him on the forehead. we sang the star spangled banner.

i got a knife, made a surgical cut to my budweiser shirt and ripped it off like i was the hulk. the hulk had tried previously to just rip the shirt off, but it was really hard. hard unlike the muscles on my tour arms.

they taught me japanese. or curse words. or nonsense. i cannot remember any of what they taught me.

i told misato about my philosophy for tour or for life or for the next ten minutes. whatever. she was telling me about her being conflicted at ending college, wanting to leave the house, and not having the money. you know camping? you go out into the woods. and you have the things that you bring with you. and you can find things in the woods, resources. you can use them. you just need to combine the things you have, with the things in the woods enough to eat and sleep and drink and have sex. semi-significant glance. we're all camping, misato. don't worry about it.

tonight, after the fifth question with regard to where i was going to be tomorrow that i didn't know the answer to said "you don't know anything." i laughed. "don't worry. i like it."

i almost told misato how sad i was that she had a boyfriend.

it was two am. we had passed two hours together at the bar, jumping up and down and slap fighting each other and saying nonsense back and forth. there was no translation necessary, not back into japanese either. no one questioned or commented on "how funny" what we were doing was.

the day before someone told me that people in japan were not sarcastic. i told her, with the hint of sarcasm you are supposed to use when you are saying something that you are actually more serious about than maybe you should be that i could not handle that. but you don't have to be sarcastic if you can just say what you want.

here people walk into a four story shop full of model power rangers at the age of thirty unattended. they go to maid cafes. they have slap fights with americans. they laugh at a whole lot of things. rather than disbelieve everything and allow slivers of the truth to seep in via sarcasm, they just do what they want. when they want to make sweeping generalizations about a country they have only been in for a few days, they just do it.

those people at that bar knew how to have fun. it sure was strange, but everybody just did what came next. no one judged, no one had to make a joke to assure people that they were doing whatever it was that they were doing with a sufficient amount of inner disdain. i feel embarassed here because when i do something in public, it is my responsibility. people will not judge, but they will not validate either. not unless they actually want to.

"everybody does the same thing in japan" misato said to me. but it seems like that is the case because no one is afraid to. maybe the most honest thing we can do sometimes is take our slice of time and space seriously enough to giggle at it and have a blast. in some ways, this country i have been told is repressed is filled with people freer than almost anyone in the united states.

MARS

i am sitting on a tatami mat, in front of a computer, on mars.

i arrived on mars in a hollowed out metal cigarette that hurtled through the air at barely subsonic speeds. about midway through the cigarette, someone had affixed long metal arms, mirror images of each other, that looked like very squat right triangles. there were noisemaking devices hanging from the metal arms (or at least i believe that is where the noise came from). these noisemakers sucked in air spat it back out again so fast that it was nearly impossible to sleep or think or do anything other than sit there like a fish in a straightjacket.

i was herded onto this thing in a number of elaborate facilities that seemed suited to the task of packing people into the cigarette, like little, blog-having shreds of tobacco. there were lines of us, all the same, all going one place or another. we were identified by scraps of paper, and we only knew that if we lost them, we might never go free. this is at least what we suspected, no one attempted to find out. this is not because they are cowards, but they are. the lines led to a machine or an attendent or both, and afterwards, poured out into numbered hallways, which led to more lines. more specific lines.

as a ritual to indicate that i had successfully passed through the machines and people and stamps and customs of this place, they tore one of my identifying slips of paper in half. gave me one half as a souvenir, and put me on the cigarette.

it is somewhat a propos that the above metaphor, which i now pronounce dead (cigs'll kill you, you know), was to a cigarette. because we were flying JETSTAR. we were flying JETSTAR from sydney and, in the one second that we turned on our TV in our room at the romantic TRAVELODGE, SYDNEY, we saw the CEO of JETSTAR explaining just why it was that the cockpit of one of their planes had set on fire. this caused the plane to land, fortunately, saving the lives of all involved. i would link to jetstar, or the travelodge, both of whom, i'm sure, have websites that will be shitty in just the right way to describe the experience that i had with them, but, even though mars appears to have a lot of technology (and far too many commas), i am sitting at THE SLOWEST FUCKING COMPUTER EVER.****

so jetstar flew us from syndey to cairns to tokyo-narita airport. we were held hostage on the plane and told that, if we wanted to eat, we were going to have to pay for any of a number of their well-branded, pre-packaged nourishment options. everyone cowtowed. some even payed for the little movie box that they were selling, too. it came on a cart and you set it on your tray table and it let you have in flight entertainment. i settled for sleeping off our last night in sydney, which i really will write about someday, and reading slaughterhouse-five. which was amazing. then the book was over, and i was sad. so it goes.

we arrived in tokyo and met jody and yuko 1, some of the college age kids that are attending to us. we were given rental cellphones to communicate, but the cellphones only had voice. turns out that every cellphone except for ours has an email address (so do the ones in the united states, but that is just a kludge--wikipedia--for sending a text message) and people--all people, not just the iphone cogniscenti--send tons of emails between their phones. the craziest thing about this email communication, other than the fact that it takes place in a fascinatingly undecipherable pictoral script the locals use called kanji, i think, is that my host mother at my homestay, who is not a teenage mother, can use it. and does use it. and doesn't think it's weird that she is using it. i do all of the thinking it is weird for her. she also can use the dvd player (when she can't find a button, she looks for it and tries to interpret the other, non-kanji, pictoral language that is inscribed on the player.*) and a digital camera without instruction. these people rock.

so jody and the first yuko (short yuko, as she calls herself--the other yuko is less short, said the jolly white giant) gave us our cellphones and put us on a bus to tokyo station. shohei, my host dad, says that tokyo station is the center of japan (he said it in that epic way that hackers say things in scifi books). i believe him.

outside tokyo station, we met mr. miyajima, whose name is just ever-so-slightly too close to mr. miyagi for me to trust myself when i get into that drunk, everything is a hilarious joke to everyone, including people who can get offended**, mode. we were all busy trying to be incredibly respectful and bowing at people, but not too much because that's what the guidebook says, and letting them initiate handshaking and all that. this show of being incredibly respectful is sort of bullshit, i think. they are not retarded aliens who will shoot you for doing anything wrong. *** the respect is bullshit not because respect is bullshit, but because the majority of the whiffs see the people that we encounter as meat computers executing a complex program that, on termination after successful (respectful) interaction, yields beer.

mr. miyagi (i'm going to hell, it's decided****) begins to speak. a hush immediately falls over the gratiutously respectful whiffs and the actually respectful japanese people. "ladies and gentlemen," he says. drum roll. "i'm drunk." he has three shopping bags filled with cans of beer with names that sound japanese. he hands them out to everyone (program terminated), smiling in that weathered old japanese way that seems like it should need no further explanation. there are no open container laws in japan. you have to smoke in imaginary boxes demarcated by red lines and posters that describe how to be respectful (something america needs), but you can just drink wherever. welcome to tokyo. the bar is open.

my host family's representative at tokyo station is shohei fueki. i was smiling a lot and trying to be very nice and enthusiastic. that made him sweat. he is a programmer for unisys, writes vb script. doesn't talk that much. his daughter, misato, says that he loves to talk after a few drinks. shohei, misato, and wife/mom junko (june co., not junk-o, LOL) live far outside tokyo at matsudo station. on the bus from the airport we were all given 5,000 yen and a suica card with the same amount on it for the trains. as i write, my suica is almost run down from the long treks into the city, but still, i have spent almost no money since my arrival here in tokyo. i would have had a chance to see shohei after a few drinks, i had bought him and his family a bottle of maker's mark at the duty-free. whiffenpoof joel pattison knocked down my bag after customs, though. hello tokyo, clean up my boozy mess.

junko smiles and likes it when i smile. her first question was whether i was hungry. we walked down the street to yoshinoya, japanese fast food restaurant. i got a beef bowl and put the nuclear pink colored ginger on it. that ginger is really good. in a sort of restraint typical of myself, after deciding that i liked the ginger, i put gobs and gobs of it all over all the food in my bowl. like five times more than junko. i also may have wolfed the food down and proven some stereotypes that at least europeans have of us americans.

we talked there and back at home. standard self introduction fare. she speaks very fast, but often goes back and corrects herself and makes little detours in muttered japanese. its surprisingly comprehensible, but there is 3:1 sentence spoken to sentence of delivered content ratio. misato was not back home yet, she just finished four years of school in the states and got in tomorow from them, yesterday from now. its day three in japan. junko showed me how to use the shower. you set the heat on an lcd display, turn it on, wait a few seconds and then take your shower. this is actually something that i had at least five childhood、 future technology related daydreams about. she showed me my bed, in a room that closes itself off with white panels, on a tatami mat, on a little cotton thing about two inches thick. it is really comfortable, but if you sleep on one side for a very long time, your ribs ache for a few minutes after you roll over.

the next day, we had a concert around fujisawa station. it was a monster beast concert. concert stuff started at 11 am and didn't end until 9. in the gaps between the concerts i read franny and zooey, the first salinger i've read. he really likes his books with just text on the cover. i really like the text inside the covers. he talks about the section all-star/section asshole phenomenon (is there a link to describe this?). he calls them section men.

we introduced ourselves in japanese at the concert, which induced a lot of handwringing and fear about how we were going to sound in japanese. this was contagious and i spent the show with a racing heart until i spoke. i read my japanese like an american game show host. my self-introduction was spizzwink(?) meme n-million that i have introduced to the whiffs. hello, my name is drew westphal and i hail from sunny, ojai valley california. i walk like a duck, look like a monkey, and all my friends laugh at me. rex is the best translator ever. i made a big show of clearing my throat before this and making strange noises. the audience seemed to like it.

i road the trains for a few hours to get to fujisawa. my bible was a crumpled sheet of paper with names of stations and times. i got lost and had to call jody on my cellphone. cellphones here don't ring. you just call. and wait. and then there is a voice. it seems more magic that way.

MARS. why is japan mars? take an apple and cut it up the american way. it ends up in wedges on a plate. the apple is life in a technologically developed, rich, internet-connected society. now take the apple and cut, core, dice, spiral, whatever it in a made for tv electric powered, toilet-seat warmed apple slicer. it ends up all cool looking on a plate. with lots of kanji and exclamation points. this is mars because everything is the same but all of the strata, all of the divisions, all of the ways that we have diced up the ingredients to live our cellphone calling, emailing, processed cheesefood eating lives are completely different. everything is here and nothing is the same. when i asked someone how the movie "lost in translation" was they asked me if i had been to japan. i hadn't, at the time. now, without seeing the movie, i can see what they mean, i think. i really want to watch that movie now.

mars vignettes (a sampler):

i went looking for an internet cafe so i wouldn't have to use this porno computer***** from hell, and spied through a door some people sitting in front of some matte black flat screens. i stood in front of the motion sensor on top of the door and the door didn't open. so i waved my hands at the door like a dumbass and everyone saw me. the waiter let me into the restaurant behind the door (you have to press a button and it slides open really fast with a star trek noise). the screens divided tables and were matte black, but there was only one pixel on each screen and it was only the one color i had already seen it being. i wanted to order internet and i ordered dumplings instead. my shit eating foreigner grin is also a dumpling eating foreigner grin.

being the tallest person on the subway.

not being able to read anything except things that are poorly translated. (link to engrish, a website with photos of bad translations)

going to a maid cafe with junko. we went into the tech district and walked around. first we went into a store, four stories, containing only models. like models of godzilla and power rangers, and godzilla. and a robotic cell phone with arms and legs called "phone braver 7". there were maids out on the street and they were advertising their maid cafes. its a cafe and everyone is dressed up in french maid haloween costumes and they wait on you. junko and i laughed and ate beef curry. maid cafe.... maid cafe. i haven't seen the used-women's-panties vending machine yet. but i'm buying some.

vending machines in the middle of nowhere. there was a vending machine in the middle of a field of grass yesterday.

the peace sign in every photo. i've resolved to do the spock sign every time someone in a photo i am in does the peace sign. at the after party for the fujisawa concert i did it and there was a flock of girls doing the spock sign by the end. they all titter like whoah.

does this place have street signs? i cannot tell.

everything that happened last night. more on that later. drew out.



what all those asterixes were about:

*seriously, american technophobes: devices have had eject and play buttons FOREVER. look at the device, assuming that it works by more than just MAGIC, and MAKE YOUR BEST GUESS AS TO HOW TO USE IT. for any of you whose computers i have fixed, this is all that i have done. that and had a computer as a friend for portions of high school. and other school altitudes.

**i am only offended by people who get offended.

***thing that yale has made me 1) believe exists, 2) be afraid of: the sudden anger of everyone that doesn't go to yale. somehow, now, in the outside world, i believe that there are all of these people, protocol obsessed, who--at the slightest slight--will become uncontrollably angry, unable to listen to reason, and will, somehow, kill me. the whiffenpoofs this year have made a tradition of running from these, and other, invisible monsters. as jamie warlick said, "those are the worst ones. you can never tell when they're going to get you."

****whatever, there will probably be much better conversation there. and i'm sure someone managed to bring their flask. we're talking all of the most fun, best deviants ever to have lived.

*****this computer is slow, i learned when i opened the tab to write this blog, because internet explorer (insert nearly any link to a website about this product and it will explain that internet explorer is worse for you than cigarettes--JETSTAR or other--and mcdonalds combined) has been used to watch a lot of porno. i don't know who has been watching the porno, since it wasn't me and it seems to involve men and women and some sites exclusively for just one of the above western-binary-opposition-dependent-categories (wikipedia: deconstruction, again. wikipedia: pretentious).

auckland, episode one: featuring the whiffenpoofs as jar jar binks.

i write from day twelve of whiffenpoof world tour. day twelve according to the calendar (here in new zealand it is june 8th), but actually only the eleventh day (if you count hours) that we have been on tour. the whiffs crossed the international dateline on their flight into new zealand, departing june first and arriving on the third. the second just...disappeared in a flurry of arithmetic. this is really an unimportant detail, but what else is one to blog about? right? seriously, validate me here. why else would i be posting the minutia of my life for you to see.

we are now in auckland (details from our stay in queenstown later), staying with families from st. kentigern's college, which is a high school. yes, apparently kentigern was a saint of some sort. his martyrdom was getting teased for his ridiculous name. i am staying with grandma and grandpa, whose house is very clean, smells like...grandma and grandpa, and who shut down their computer in between uses. they have dialup, so i am writing this from an internet cafe. i tried to load a page there today and had to leave the room. it was horrifying. rodney and kath are very kind and make delicious breakfast. they have become a symbol of life before the internet to me, their 70's house with their two faucet sinks, listening to full albums on their sound system that is unattached to computer or television. in so many ways they have it figured out, it seems: a comfortable life, a boat, a family, a great accent. can you be nostalgic for something that still exists? theirs is a life that i will never have.

last night, our first full night in city was spent singing at the american club. they had been drinking since 4 pm and were a chatty, appreciative crowd. its always a funny experience to go onstage with the whiffs and see how much the audiences love us. backstage the group makes disgusted faces at every chord that doesn't tune right, downplays the abilities of the group's singers, complains about the fact that we have to sing at all. but once the white gloves go on and the marching starts, no one out there seems to notice. i got an email from a friend a while ago saying that i avoided the appearance of cynicism that plagues many public speakers, and the only thing that i could think was "if only you knew". my set of white tie and tails look fine, if not a bit ill-fitting from stage. but once you get in it you realize all the little stains, the built-up bittersweet stench of three years' sweat (these are my tails from the winks), the fact that the arms are too short and the bowtie is fake. i'm writing this from the armpit of those tails right now.

the whiffs have worked their asses off to travel around the world and everyone--even the clients who see us as little more than a novelty from yale with the word "poof" in our name--believes in the product we are offering more than we do.

this morning, we performed for tvnz's (tee vee en zed) tvone breakfast program. we sang a number of thirty second teasers that appeared throughout the show, one full number, and joel and i were interviewed by new zealand's infamous paul henry. paul is a "loose-canon" (some call him intelligent, grandma and grandpa call him a galoot) who once told a female guest that she had a mustache! it was quite a scandal... the clip can be viewed at

http://tvnz.co.nz/breakfast-news/whiffenpoofs-perform-8-36-2772062/video

i guess i didn't quite think through the fact that the 20 dollar haircut i got in san francisco was giong to be appearing on national television a few days after i got it. oh well... as i confided in our host, if something isn't working for you, you can always drop the yale bomb.

i know that the tone of this post makes me sound just like the cynical whiffenpoofs that make this experience so frustrating at times. i am one. every whiff plays their part in this ridiculously lucky, talented, entitled, cynical, grey-eyed group of people who smile as soon as someone is watching. what else are you supposed to do, right?

my answer: jump out of a plane. more on that, and our adventures in queenstown later. the internet i bought is just about to run out.