Is your name Campbell? Cause you're mm-mm good...

Mali recently said that she might be looking for guest bloggers at Mali's Travelalphablog. She's making her way through the alphabet a second time and is anticipating trouble with certain letters. I volunteered to be a guest blogger for the letter X, and offered to write about my X-rated stay at a love hotel in Japan. This pricked both Mali's and Indigo's interest, and Mali suggested I write about it now, here, since it might be a while before she gets to X.

So here I am, writing about it here. Which is too bad, because Mali always posts pictures on her blog. If I had written about my X-rated stay at a love hotel there I would have felt impelled to post some visuals. Whereas I never post pictures here, so the description will be limited to text only. I am also sorry to have to tell you that the text will be most un-X-rated. Although we did use the hotel for its intended purpose, we were there primarily as anthropologists. As such, this post will be devoid of any salacious prose describing sexual positions that even the Kama Sutra did not dare to dream of that would bring you to such a degree of ecstasy that you would first think you had gone to heaven but then you would realize that you had actually gone way, way beyond that to some infinite bliss that cannot be contained in any concept as circumscribed as heaven.

No, I'm going to stick to the facts, ma'am. Which are: On a rainy day in September, 1992, my once-upon-a-time own Timbit and I were walking around Shinjuku looking for a love hotel. There are love hotels all over Japan that rent rooms by the hour. They're not as seedy as they sound: many couples use them because they share very small houses with their relatives and don't have much privacy. The hotels, as least the ones we saw in Shinjuku, post pictures of their rooms outside so that, similar to restaurants that post their menus, you can decide if they have anything to your taste. We were looking for a cheesy room: red velvet, round bed, that kind of thing. As soon as we found what we were looking for we walked into the lobby. Love hotels don't have the same type of check-in arrangement you would find at a typical hotel. Everything is very discreet: there's a place to slide your money through similar to what you would find at a bank, but the glass above it is covered so that the clerk can't see who's checking in and vice versa (thereby preventing potentially embarrassing moments if, for example, your grandmother happens to secretly run a love hotel). I guess the person on the other side heard Tim and I talking and realized we were gaijin. Out into the lobby popped an older man and woman who gawked at us. We were in the Mom and Pop love hotel. This was comforting, because it made me feel like the sheets were more likely to be washed between customers. After handing us the room key (which they were supposed to slide under the glass, but the whole anonymity thing had been blown by that time so it didn't really matter) Tim and I went to the room. I honestly can't remember much except that there was no false advertising in terms of the red velvet: the walls and bed were covered in it. There was a VCR and television and a stack of porn videos so, like the dedicated anthropologists we were, we watched them for several minutes. The censors had gone at them with lots of fuzzy spots to cover up the actors' genitalia. After watching for a bit we were both unsure as to how the porn industry actually survived in Japan.

(As an aside, the only real porn I saw in Japan was when I accompanied a friend late one morning to her coworker's apartment, where she was going to housesit. The coworker's wife invited us to sit in the living room, asked if we wanted something to drink, and then as she left the room to get the drinks she told us to sit back and watch the television. What the hell are we watching? I remember thinking. As the camera zoomed out it became very clear what the hell we were watching and Tami and I glanced at each other, mystified and somewhat horrified. Who watches porn movies before noon? And who shows porn movies to people they are meeting for the first time in a non-sexual context? The wife came back and proceeded to tell Tami about the apartment, when the garbage was supposed to go out, etc. The porn movie continued to play. She then offered us some lunch, and served us lasagna that had carrots in it. Tami and I glanced at each other, mystified and somewhat horrified. Carrots in lasagna?* That clinched it--she was definitely a whackjob. Watch as many movies as you want, she remarked to Tami as we were leaving. I hope that wasn't a home movie, I remarked to Tami after we had left.)

That's really all I can remember about the love hotel experience. Well, except for the elaborate sexual positions that even the Kama Sutra did not dare to dream of that would bring you to such a degree of ecstasy that you would first think you had gone to heaven but then you would realize that you had actually gone way, way beyond that to some infinite bliss that cannot be contained in any concept as circumscribed as heaven... but I vowed I wouldn't write about them.

So that you don't feel it was a complete waste of time to read this post, I offer some cheesy pick up lines to try if you ever find yourself on your own in Japan and want to experience a love hotel. (Of course, some of these may get Lost in Translation, which is a very good movie about a gaijin in Japan that doesn't, as far as I remember, contain any scenes involving love hotels or people showing the housesitter porn movies).

Can I follow you home? .......I was always told to follow my dreams.

Damn you turn my software into hardware.

You're so McGorgeous you could work at McDonalds.

There is a party at your ankles, maybe your pants should come down.

What has 213 teeth and holds back a monster? ......My zipper.

How do you brush your hair so your Halo doesn't show?

Do you like magic? Wanna see me pull something outta my pants?

Are you a General? Because my privates are at attention.

*I have since grown to like all sorts of whackjob vegetables in lasagna.

One, two, three, testiness... one, two, three, testiness...

Deloney made a comment recently about my testiness. While he may have been joking, he actually hit the nail on the head. (If anyone tells me that my writing is ripe with idioms I'm going to bop them... and I'm going to bop them twice if they tell me that I should have written “rife” instead of “ripe”.) Even I have noticed how incredibly cranky I am these days. It's not only the things that might irritate anybody that are getting to me--like today, I'm sure someone in the grocery store called me “sir” and yesterday, when I was buying tickets for a concert with a friend who is 12 years older than me and he paid the senior's price and I paid the adult's, they tried to hand me his change as if I was the senior. No, my irritability is all-encompassing; it's sort of like my own personal pandemic.

This irritating state of affairs has arisen only in the past six months. Prior to that I was fairly easygoing. Because I'm turning 50 this year and at the risk of sounding like someone who uses hormones to excuse any sort of behaviour, I can't help but wonder whether my irritability is a symptom of menopause (I don't have any physical symptoms yet like hot flashes or changing periods). Someone described the hot flashes she experiences as feeling like an alien has taken over her body. They make her want to scratch her skin off and run away from herself. That's similar to how I feel about my irritability: it's like something alien has invaded and I want to get away from my mind because it's not mine anymore and it's driving me crazy.

The only potentially beneficial thing about my current situation is that it is forcing me to think about my self and what that means. Can the me I think I am change so dramatically because of some change in my body's chemistry? And if so, is “me” just a bunch of chemical substances? When I look at disorders like schizophrenia or dementia and how bio-physiology can cause such changes in perceptions and personality, I can't help but think that who I am is determined by whatever my body is or isn't producing. Even though I'm not religious, the thought of such soullessness is rather frightening. Or perhaps what frightens me is that it may not be mind over matter but the other way around, which means that, essentially, I'm at the mercy of a meaninglessness of molecules.

I also wonder whether this is the new me or whether it's only a temporary state. And if it's the latter, how long is temporary? I have a group of women friends who are about 10 years older than me. One of them reassured me that women feel great and regain their energy once they are postmenopausal, although she's been waiting and waiting and growing increasingly irritated by how long it's taking her to reach that stage. On the other hand, a coworker reported that her grandmother went through menopause in five minutes. She had a hot flash during the Lord's prayer at church one morning and that was it, done.

Deliver us from protracted menopause...

Flight of Fancy

I used to want to be what used to be known as an airline stewardess. Last week I had a 2-day conference in Winnipeg (I guess the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy couldn't justify holding a conference in Venice or somewhere like that) so I decided to tack on a 4-day visit with a friend in Calgary. My 6-day trip involved 5 flights, 1 flight delay of 2 hours, 0 apologies from the airline for the flight delay, 11.5 hours of flying time (of which I spent 11.25 hours contemplating the possibility of a bomb exploding, someone inadvertently opening the emergency exit and me being sucked out, and/or snakes and/or zombies on a plane), 10 hours of waiting at airports (not including the 40 minutes we had to wait to get our luggage at the end of the 2nd flight because of a mechanical problem, which completely cancelled out the goodwill that was generated by the flight arriving 30 minutes ahead of schedule), 1 scary landing (there was heavy fog in Winnipeg; so, while we hurtled through the proverbial pea soup and I remembered a story about a plane that had to turn back from fogged-in Paris and land in Cardiff because the pilot wasn't qualified to land in fog and wondered whether Air Canada required all their pilots to be licensed to land in fog or whether it allowed them to wing it, the runway suddenly appeared and we thudded down, were briefly airborne again then hit the runway again and swerved, causing several people to scream and me to cry oh shit and grab the young girl sitting beside me), 1 apology from the pilots for the “firm landing”, 3 nights of staying up until 1 or 2 a.m. (mainly because of late flights) and 7 bags of potato chips that were consumed for all the wrong reasons at various airports.

I'm so glad I didn't follow my dream. What a nightmare that would have been.