I went to my son's soccer game yesterday. Actually, it was a practice game. When I was a kid, growing up in America, we called them
scrimmages but here in Japan, they're called practice games.
I don't know what children's sports are like in other countries. I don't even know what they are like in the U.S. these days. In Japan, though, at least in the realm of youth soccer, they often involve mini-tournaments that last five or six hours, with forty-minute blocks here and there where your child and his/her teammates are just sitting around and waiting for their next game.
Yesterday's practice game wasn't a tournament, but it was a three-hour long practice with another team mostly structured in a game format. I don't know about all of you, but for me three-hours is a big chunk of time that could easily be put to use doing other things.
I always have a number of art and DIY projects that I want to be working on, and as much as I want to support my son and watch him play
soccer, when he's not on the field, I can't help but think of all the things that I could be working on if only ...
I brought my latest stencil pattern, my cutting board, and three types of cutting tools to my son's practice game where I set myself up in a folding camp chair and worked on cutting out a new stencil while periodically glancing up at my son's team and occasionally taking videos of my son playing so that I could later show them to my wife.
While doing so, it occurred to me how strange I must look. A middle-aged white guy in a rural part of Japan, sitting in a camping chair at the edge of a soccer field with a box-cutter in one hand and an angled paper cutting tool in another hand slowly cutting out English letters from a thick piece of paper, carefully collecting the cut scraps, and putting them in the inner pocket of his winter coat.
