By Steven Horowitz and Alexei Esikoff
This is the first attempt at what we hope will be a recurring feature in the JETAA NY Newsletter. We picked a blog written by a JET alum, more or less at random, and have reviewed it in the form of a discussion.
The purpose? Well, to entertain you of course. But also to let you know some of the interesting things your fellow alums are undertaking, and also to help you discern what random accumulations of info may be worth your while.
-
The Blog: Avoidinglife.com
-
Blogger: Jamie Patterson (Aomori-ken, 2003-06)
-
Found it: On jetsetjapan.com, a nice site that has aggregated a lot of JET-related content, including a list of JET alum blogs.
Let’s get things started, shall we?
**************************************
There are plenty of blogs out there with useless crap on them, so it’s important to know which useless crap is actually
worth spending your precious time on. Fortunately, I believe I’ve come across one that has some of the more useful useless crap out there.
Avoidinglife.com is zettai ni a blog worth visiting the next time you’re bored at work. Started by Jamie Paterson (Aomori-ken, 2003-06), now a web producer for CTV (Canada’s largest private television station), it contains many visual posts with a bit of commentary here and there. In fact, he describes himself as one of the original video bloggers in one of his early posts. He also seems to have an affinity for Aomori trains and pro wrestling, and yet it’s more involved than that.
My introduction to the site (via jetsetjapan.com) was his post on Osaka wrestling, and as a non-wrestling fan, I almost made the mistake of skipping past it. But that YouTube play button is so darn easy to click and next thing I know I’m watching a bizarre and amazingly acrobatic version of local pro wrestling, apparently in Osaka, that I’d never seen before. So right off the bat, I’m definitely pleased with this choice of blog.
Next I start watching the Aomori train videos: The first one a sappy video about a high school girl leaving Aomori for Tokyo, rife with snowy, low budget shots of the Aomori train station that made me surprisingly natsukashii for a place I’d never even visited while on JET. The next two were obsessive techno music videos of local trains in Aomori. I’m not sure what was so special about the trains that multiple techno music videos had been made in homage, but maybe it’s something akin to trainspotting in the UK. In any event, I found the sappy video more enjoyable but appreciated exposure to this otaku Aomori train culture as well.
I read some of the non-Japan related entries to get a sense of who Jamie Patterson is, and also found myself drawn in by some of his backstory: how he left his previous job in TV production to go on JET and avoid life for a little while, and how he seemed to be a little ahead of the curve in terms of web development experience. I also appreciated when some of the non-Japanese postings turned out to in fact be Japan-related. Though admittedly from a JET alum perspective, it’s really the Japan-related entries that drew my attention and I found myself skipping and scanning over the Canadian commentary until the next Japan item. And pretty much all of them were worth digging for.
The Holy Grail that I didn’t know I was looking for, however, appears in a post on 2/16/07 – “Weird Al” Yankovic performing “Eat It” on a Japanese comedy show and incorporating Japanese into the song. For this I say, “Honto ni o-sewa ni narimashita” to Jamie.
Now I’ll turn to my colleague, Alexei, for her comments. Alexei, you’re a busy person, and I’m making you look at this random JET alum’s blog. Was it worth your valuable time, or did I just set your career back about five months?
-Steven
**************************************
Well, Steven, like many busy people, I spend a good portion of my day wasting time. Of course, the best way to waste time is to look up things that make you all natsukashii for childhood, and it was your mention of “Weird Al” that did it for me. As an eight-year-old, I spent a great deal of my allowance money on his cassettes, and to this day I still know all the words to “Yoda,” sung to the tune of “Lola.” (“I met him in a swamp down in Dagoba/Where it bubbles all the time like a giant carbonated soda.”) The promised video was so completely wonderful that it justified YouTube‘s existence for me, i.e., that the site is not just a bunch of bored suburbanites who like to film their cats.
I was distracted further from my busy day by the Osaka wrestling. It resembles a low-budget version of the WWF in its glory days, when Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake taught us all how to fight dirty with our siblings. Jamie writes that his favorite thing in the world is music recorded by professional wrestlers, and I’m starting to agree. I definitely appreciated the long-lost single by Crush. To my almost-thirty ears, it’s hilarious, all synthesized beats and random interjections of “If I was back home in Hawaii, I’d be surfing right now.” As a kid I probably would’ve thought the song ruled.
As for the trains set to techno music, to my untrained (ha!) eye, the featured videos seemed like patently uncool trains. There was a real disconnect between the speed of the music and the snub-nosed trains. A phallic Shinkansen gliding through snow would seem more appropriate. (Now I’m going to get all sorts of I’ll-show-you-up emails from train enthusiasts.)
Another of Jamie’s interests is McDonald’s. I can’t even take that one with a kitschy grain of salt. I just don’t dig McDonald’s. Of his four main interests, I could leave or take trains and McDonalds. I predict, however, that many hours in my future will be spent browsing the novelty music and pro wrestling sections, remembering the glory days of entertainment when I had no discernible taste.
Overall I’d say avoidinglife.com is an excellent way to procrastinate.
-Alexei
**************************************
I think you’re too hard on yourself, Alexei. We’re not machines, unlike those sleek and beautiful Aomori trains that you disparage. If avoidinglife.com is a poem, then the train posts add subtlety and depth to much of the light and frothy fare he shares. And if avoidinglife.com is not a poem, then maybe the train videos are just a Freudian guy thing.
Speaking of poetry, the completely-unrelated-to-Japan McDonald’s rap video post (performed by some guy named GoRemy) was one of the best satire pieces I’ve seen in recent Internet history (meaning the past week or so) and just a senbei‘s width below the “Weird Al” video in entertainment value. All that you (and I) find distasteful about Mickey D’s was encapsulated in the extremely clever lyrics. (And on a tangent, I failed to resist the urge to follow the YouTube trail and ended up watching GoRemy’s similar raps on 2% milk, eggs over easy and TurboTax. All interesting enough, but hard to live up to the McDonald’s rap. So if you’re aiming for efficiency in your time-wasting, avoid veering from the path cleared by avoidinglife.com.)
As for pro wrestling, it is my sincere belief that the world would be better off without it, so I don’t share your nostalgia, despite many a Saturday morning of watching the Iron Sheik pummel Bob Backlund while I waited for the cartoons to start. That said, the Osaka wrestling video is an intriguing new genre for me, and all I can say about the other wrestling posts is that they make the other non-wrestling posts more attractive in the same way one might improve one’s own attractiveness by hanging out with one’s less visually appealing friends.
One of the other touches I enjoyed in the blog are his descriptions of attempts to re-integrate himself into life after Japan. Whether putting out omiyage candy for his co-workers, trying to track down Don Tacos in Chinatown, or the August 12 posting about “some of the stuff” he’s been up to, which, if you click the “read more” option, includes doing hanami in a Toronto park and checking out a psychedelic Japanese rock band called Acid Mother’s Temple, his reverse culture shock adaptation attempts resonated with me.
I have to say, Alexei, that as we review other blogs in future issues, we’ve set the bar fairly high with our first choice, and I think avoidinglife.com will be an excellent standard against which we measure other JET alum blogs.
Dou omoimasu ka, Alexei-sensei?
-Steven
**************************************
Truly this blog has something for everyone. If I’m happy listening to novelty songs by professional wrestlers, and you are happy watching techno trains, then we all win.
I went into the archives of the blog to check out Jamie’s ALT years, and was also amused by the more personal stuff. There’s a wonderful series of photos under the heading “Japanese People Hate Spicy Food,” illustrating the day he brought Mama Zuma’s Revenge potato chips to school. View the results for yourself—at least the teachers tried them!
A lot of the photos look like the universal JET experience photos—gaijin friends sprawled on tatami mats surrounded by beer bottles, and lots of uniformed kids giving the peace sign. Oh, and students wearing matching Hitler t-shirts for Sports Day. Jamie wrote: “For me, the most interesting part of Sports Day has always been the unique T-shirt designs that the students come up with for their teams. I don’t know if it’s because of ignorance or what, but teachers never seem to be bothered by what the students put on their shirts, no matter how inappropriate it might seem to be. I thought the marijuana shirts from previous years were something else, but the students at one of my schools really topped themselves this time…” This is followed by said Hitler T-shirt, which is bright pink. Of course.
-Alexei
**************************************
Sore de wa, enough of our jabbering. Time to go see the website for yourself: avoidinglife.com, and perhaps share your own comments below.
Stay tuned for the next edition of BlogLook in the Spring 2008 Issue. Feel free to suggest a blog worth reviewing (or offer to review one yourself) by contacting us at newsletter@jetaany.org.
