Well hello there dudes and dudettes,

This being the first post on "Classless," I'll only take a moment to clue everyone in on the gradual degeneration of thought as the day progresses and the mind wanders in what is one of the most challenging phenomena in the life of an ALT: the classless day. Sure, the schedule says "meetings" but thats just code for "We wanna watch you squirm in boredom."

Like the Siddha sitting in the cave with his back to the world, there are times when you are so convinced you no longer exist due to the complete lack of human contact that you look down at your hands moving across the keys as you type away about the sheer nothingness of it all, and you realize you can see the keys through your fingers.

"I'm dissappearing!" you softly notice, maybe even stand up and look around the room, ask a question, stand on your head, do anything possible to get some kind of reaction and you are met by silence, blank stares that pass through you, as though your entire pitiful existence in the staff room has been some kind of cosmic joke, an anomoly of which only you have been aware, all these people in the room around you merely props set there by the god of solitude in his infinite wisdom.

And before you know it, an hour has gone by, then two, three, and nothing to show for it but another page of oddly shaped symbols and their definitions scrawled in your notebook, a slight reprogramming of the mind to operate under the OS known as "Japanese", perhaps another grammatical aspect aquired of a language that at times feels more elusive than the purple spotted jaguars that live in the hearts of cities.

Yes, to find yourself alone in a room of people, more importantly to find yourself anywhere, wherever you may be; Kyoto, Tokyo, America, England, (hell, the bottom of the ocean choking on seaweed and a sense of stupefaction); the point is you're finding yourself. It doesn't matter how, where, or what the catalyst is.

The important thing here is the gaining one more notch on the obi, one more ring through the nose of gaman. One more iota of wisdom gleaned from placing yourself in a situation most of your buddies back home have no clue about: sure, we're not ankle deep in bodies like the generation before us who ended up in Nam, or covered in dust and blood from the present days unrelenting desert combat in Iraq. Sure, we may not be digging trenches in third world countries or building houses for undernourished kids or any of the other more taxing and beneficial forms of work we could be doing, but we're here, on our own terms in a world we will never belong in, never truly be allowed to enter anywhere beyond the surface level, and the sick part is we kinda like it, after all, we chose this life of the eternal outsider for a reason.

And yet, in this withstanding, are we not incidentally aquiring a bit of the Japanese culture? The sense of Gaman? Immersed, and yet eternally ignored, ostracized while at the same time mimicing our tormentors. I am reminded of boiling hot onsens and zen masters beating thier disciples until they are enlightened. But that is for another blog. Right now, It's 4:30, my day is over, and I ain't gonna wait in here for another minute.

Till the next classless day, this is MagDef, signing off.