Freud would have a field day with me and I have a field day with my middle school

This weekend was not a weekend for relaxing. It was a weekend to continue the Grand Performance that is Kate the American starring Kate Russell. We are usually dark on Saturday and Sunday, choosing to give mainly matinee shows during the week with the occasional encore performances in the evening, but this weekend was a special treat for the casual viewer and a real development for regulars. And all for the very low ticket price of my pride and self-conciousness.
On Saturday, some yukatas (traditional Japanese summer wear) showed up on my door with the message that I was required to wear them in the town festival.
I hate wearing yukatas.
Every specifically designed female traditional wear is universally uncomfortable. Making women suffer is cross-cultural. I could say 'when it comes to clothes' but we both know that qualification really isn't neccesary or even correct in it's implication. So, there I am, whisked away far earlier than I wanted to be on a Saturday to be trussed like a turkey at a stranger's home. Of course the yukatas are lovely, the stranger is very pleasant and very kind to offer to truss me and invite this strange boy/girl into her home, but it was a real highwire act for gritting my teeth and not acting like a complete American asshole while I was being made to look even fatter than usual, in comparison to the Japanese women who are the size of my left boob, by having my yukata stuffed with ordinary household objects such as newspaper and towels. You see, it is best to have your chest be in proportion with your torso and your ass in proportion with your back and while this may work for a Japanese women who has maintained her birth weight into adulthood, for anyone with, in the eternal words of another Seattle wordsmith, a skinny little waist and a round thing in your face, it just makes you look rotund. And, not to have this convo keep coming back to my breasts (though most usually do), but I would never want a C-Cup sized belly. So, now I am essentially wearing a beautiful fatsuit.
Guess what, fatty? It is time to dance for the people.
Yes, like a lumbering, captive bear I am expected to dance in said festival. And, like this dancing bear, I have no idea what the people want me to dance and I am merely being tossed around and laughed at for the peoples' amusement.
If I sound too negative, I apologize. It is not my intention. In the end, I had a good time and looking back on it, I will probably keep it as a rueful and interesting memory but there was a real moment in there where I wish someone could have empathized with me. There was a real moment when no one was showing me the dance that they had been practicing all day and merely laughing heartily at my clumsy imitations where I wish someone could have seen me as what I was in that moment: a young girl, in a foreign country being forced to do something she had no idea she had to do 20 minutes earlier, in a costume she was even more of a spectacle in, in a town she had stayed in for only a month with a crowd of drunk men standing around her and laughing their ass off at her. All in another language. Yes, there was a moment where I was a sad girl all alone on the verge of tears. As Kat said to me then: there was absolutely no reason for them to set things up the way they did other than to laugh at us and perpetuate stereotypes about American grace or lack thereof. This is a culture where if I ask a girl a direct question about something she told me 30 seconds earlier in front of a class in the warm belly of academia, there is a 50/50 chance she will burst into tears. The fact that people can casually do this to me makes me feel even lonelier than I do usually.

That was a serious sidenote guys. It almost got too heavy too lift. Luckily, I have been working out.

Before you get the wrong idea again, let me reiterate that this was just a moment. I have spent some time expanding it, so it might seem like it was the mood of the evening, but it wasn't. By the time we got into the arena area, Kat and I had figured out the steps well enough to fake it and we nearly got the hang of it by the end of the second hour. Overall, it turned out to be fun, especially once we stripped and changed back into our real people clothes in the parking lot and Jonathan bought me some corn. Then we watched fireworks and I got to see many of my students in their real people clothes too as well as talk to some other ALTs I don't see that often.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. The previous Sunday I was supposed to go to a Sports Day at one of my middle/elementary schools but it was cancelled because of a fairly heinous thunderstorm. So, it was back on on the following Sunday. We teachers are expected to participate in various sports competitions during the day as well, thus proving our virility to the school also, I guess. I played golf, danced (yeah, again. And if you know me, you know I can find a way to fall down while laying on the ground. So, think the epitome of grace...) and ran the 800 metre against 20+ 8th and 9th graders.
Oh, yeah.
I have a certain reputation in the area. It borders on noteriety. (Think Bellingham and Canada-- the border is that close.) My small amount of fame is that I am a runner. A very serious runner by all accounts and, apparently, fast according to sources in the know. This being the word on the street, the people who walk the beat wanted to put my skills to the test and see just what kind of runner I am.
Now, I don't know about you, but I was probably in the best shape of my life in early high school around 9th or 10th grade. It was that magical time before laziness and procrastination when my body hadn't sexually matured enough to be a hindrance (back to the breasts again, I see) and my lung capacity was excellent thanks to mandatory after school sports. So, I am up against that. Also, they have been practicing for months for this day. Seriously taking whole days off of school to just prepare for this sports day.
And me? Well, let's just say I haven't been practicing for this day that hard and leave it at that. Also, my body has seen more than it's fair share of cake in the intervening years between 9th grade and now and the 800 metre was never my race to begin with. I am a seriously long -distance runner. In high school and college I ran the 3200, the 1500 and 5k. I just came off a jag of marathon training (and doing--hell yeah I did that marathon) and the 800 metre is honestly the worst race all around for any specialized runner. It is basically an all out, balls to the wall, fucking long-ass sprint for as long as you can maintain it. Most sprinters hate it because it is too long and most long distance runners hate it because it is too short. It falls into the no man's land of sprint/long distance running; straddling the DMZ between the 400 metre dash and the mile.
So here we go.
Like earlier, it occurs to me the symbolism of what I am about to do. This occurs mainly at the waterfall start line where I am waiting underneath a garland string with flags on it and I look up to see the American flag waving in the breeze above my head. It occurs to me that I have to run this as fast as I possibly can. I have to run this race not for fun...but for my country. I am Jesse Owens at the Olympics.
I know this sounds grandiose, but bear with me.
I am the only white person in the area. I am the first American who has been interested in sports at this school and I have been touted as a great runner. I am in a part of an extremely insular country that is so far past insular that slapdash opinions become crystallized and dug up so many times in the intervening years that were they amber and this was Jurassic Park, they would be recreating Americans from a passing thought about the way I dressed to go to the grocery store on Friday evening. The best story I heard detailing this was one Kat told me about an American woman teaching at a Japanese university who took a physical at her school. The physical required a urine test but the woman was on a medication that turned her pee blue. She put the cup on the tray and left. Later, another teacher told her a couple weeks afterwards that he was puzzled by the amount of students in his cultural studies class that had begun their essay about cultural differences between Japan and the US as something akin to "There are many differences between Americans and Japanese people. For example, Americans have blue urine."
Yeah.
Now you are staring to get it.
I have to run not just for me but for every person who is foreign who comes after me. For every person's opinion in the tri-state area about what an American can and can't do for the next 50 years.
Luckily, I have something up my sleeve. I. Love. To. Fucking. Run.
I love to run. It is the thing that keeps me sane. You know when your uncle at Christmas parties with the family needs to go zone out in the other room with the TV on to maintain his sanity? I go for a run. In the snow, in Arizona in the middle of summer, at 4am in China, in a typhoon--I am going for a run.
I take off at the starting gun and am gratified by the students cries of "Uso" and "Haiyai" which mean "Liar" and "Fast" respectively. I kick middle school ass, and while I don't win, I do place and my time is under 3 minutes. This means I can still run a sub-6 minute mile. Bam. I felt pretty good about my performance and so should you, America.

There is definitely more to this weekend (as there was an after party that went on for three hours) but I think that is all that anyone reading this could take from me right now. Also, all my teachers this school can probably take of me bogarting the only computer here, too. Mata ne.