Pooping in Japan is a continuing essay series. To start from the first post, click here: https://steemit.com/travel/@jeunebug/pooping-in-japan
Okay, okay, okay. I hear ya. I’ll wake up!
At this point, you’re maybe scratching your head and asking, to whom am I speaking?
Can’t say I know his name, but it’s that son of a bitch who’s been working on the railroad all the live long day. You know the guy; one of Dinah’s friends.
Let me explain.
In Japan, public service announcements take the public bit very seriously. Vehicles frequently cruise through town, blasting various announcements from loudspeakers propped up on the roof. And every few city blocks, mounted high atop a pole, there’s another stationary set, ready to broadcast whatever message the government deems necessary to relay.
Sometimes, it’s to warn us of the impending landfall of a typhoon. Sometimes, it’s to warn us that North Korea is sending yet another missile our way.
And sometimes- er, no, I’m sorry. I misspoke there.
And every fucking morning at 8 a.m., it’s to play bright, jangling chimes to the melody of I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, to lull any stragglers out of their warm cocoon of sleep and into the day. And that’s about where you caught me on that little intro back there.
This is one of those things that some people will assume I made up, until they ruminate on it for a moment and realize it’s way too random and strange to be a fabrication- not unlike the street sweepers that used to brush down my street in Hunan, blaring a jangling, MIDI-esque rendition of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On (also too weird to not be true).
As I wrote that first bit about the unnamed narrator of the song, I found my curiosity piqued; is there an actual known author for that obnoxious ditty? Or, like so much American folk music, does a trace of its origins simply dead end in some mysterious community tucked away in the Appalachian foothills?
That lead me to the I’ve Been Working on the Railroad Wikipedia page, where I discovered the following section:
Popularity in Japan
“An adaptation of this song is a very familiar nursery rhyme in Japan, with the same melody and roughly the same subject matter, but with a different title and different lyrics. It is known as "Senro wa tsuzuku yo doko made mo (線路は続くよどこまでも)", meaning ‘The railroad continues forever’.”
Well, if that last bit ain’t just the perfect metaphor for starting your workday.
It’s actually a relief to have some validation on this, as previously, the melody caused me an unsettling sensation of dissociation; how am I experiencing something that so obviously doesn’t belong in this culture? There’s a term for this: anatopism, something out of its proper place (related to anachronism, for something out of its proper time). It’s like that feeling you get as a kid, when you see one of your teachers out in public for the first time. Or that feeling I get as an adult, whenever I see Donald Trump in the White House.
In addition to playing this song every morning (read: every morning, including weekends), they also broadcast little jingles at noon and 5 p.m., apparently to communicate that it’s time to eat lunch and time to leave work, respectively. Though since the Japanese are well known for marathon work days that often last well beyond 7 p.m., that last jingle is really more salt in the wound than anything else.
Brandon ver. 29 would have reprimanded me for any complaining. “You’re whining about being woken up at 8 a.m.!? Do you realize I still have to wake up by 4:45?”
Oh, past Brandon. All I can say is: it gets better. And I say that to all past Brandons: the one waking up at 4:45, the one with the bowl cut getting bullied on the bus, the one discussing hidden GF summons in Final Fantasy VIII and trading anime VHS videos with his friends at the lunch table (he’s about to be bullied on the bus, arguably for good reason), the one painting his collection of Warhammer 40k miniatures-
Er, Present Brandon? What are you doing there?
I also say: It’s October! (Editor’s note: well, it was when I wrote it) We should all be sleeping in a little later. If you aren’t up every night, under the covers and reading Lovecraft into the wee hours, you’re missing the point!
Speaking of: I can’t write an October entry without spending some time discussing the quintessential October holiday.
That’s right. I’m talking about Sports Day.
Sports Day is basically what we Americans call Field Day, except for the fact that this is Asia. In Asia, every public event gets turned up to eleven. For those of you only familiar with the typical American assortment of sloppy relay races and a few popsicles at the end, allow me to enlighten you.
The Sports Day celebration of physical activity and athletic prowess is a meticulously scheduled, strictly regimented, and fairly formal affair, though with a few moments of levity thrown in. It is overseen by the school oversight board, all in business attire, and opens with three separate speeches: from the school director, the former school director, and the leader of the PTA. These speeches are followed by words of encouragement from the teachers, the rest of the parents, and yours truly, whom they goaded out on stage at the last second. I fumbled through a phrase I’d overheard earlier in the morning, and am pretty sure I wished the kids good luck in the competition- though considering the piss-poor state of my pronunciation, it’s also equally likely that I exclaimed, “This is an occasion for stomach cancer!”
Before I continue, let me briefly describe this particular school- and I say particular, as I am currently employed as an extracurricular English specials teacher, and travel between nine different schools each week. This particular school is Wakakusa, and is a nursery/kindergarten, with students aged three through five.
Three through five.
I taught kindergarten in the U.S., and know from experience what students that young are doing in school by early October: they’re tottering around, cropdusting the classroom with their milk farts and crying over who’s sitting in whose color square on the carpet, before nodding off and pissing themselves while their teacher reads aloud “The Kissing Hand” for the sixth time.
Meanwhile, in Japan…
Cue the kids.
A snap and rattle of snares heralded the marching rows of three-year-olds, moving in lockstep, their hands planted on the kid in front of them. They snaked through the parents thronged around the field, and as they made their way into the middle, out came the four-year-olds, serving as the school color guard, all smiles and twirling flags.
And then, the five-year-olds arrived, and the snares grew louder as the drum line marched in. At the same moment, four kids broke away from the pack, taking their positions at a line of amped keyboards behind the stage, and began playing a melody in unison.
All the kids, from three to five, were in the same blue and yellow military-style uniform. Except one. His name is Shin, though henceforth I’ll refer to him as the fuckin’ ADMIRAL, because that’s how they dressed him, and damned if he didn’t own that rank with every expert twirl of the baton.
The five -year olds marched around, threading their way through the other assembled kids, never failing to adhere to the sharp, angular path dictated by the white lines pre-painted across the field.
The snares cut off, the keyboards faded away, and the fuckin’ ADMIRAL took the stage, to give a short motivational speech to his peers. After a round of applause, Sports Day was officially under way!
The first event began with a surge of frantic techno exploding from the speakers, and set the tone for the day’s soundtrack. For the next four hours, it mainly oscillated between two types of music: the upbeat synthesizer instrumentals familiar to players of late 80’s/early 90’s arcade side-scroller beat-‘em-ups (particularly the third stage themes, when you’re desperately piloting a vehicle through the endless hazards of some sewer or tunnel or other enclosed space); or, the occasional vocal track, which I’m assuming were television show melodies, as they sounded like someone fed Alvin and the Chipmunks a bunch of meth amphetamines and forced them to sing in Japanese along to cartoon theme songs sped up 2x normal speed.
And of course, in the midst of these oscillations, there was the occasional inexplicable outlier, like the main theme of the Harry Potter films playing during the grandparents’ relay race.
Yes, a grandparents relay! Because while the bulk of the tug-of-wars and hurdle races were competitions for the kids, Sports Day also included plenty of fun for the adults.
This was first made apparent to me when Touko Sensei, the Wakakusa principal, approached me at my seat in the faculty tent.
“Do you want to run?” She asked, pumping her arms wildly at her sides in an imitation of the action. Despite having the best English of all my various employers, she’s seemingly the least confident in her abilities, and always accompanies her speech by animatedly gesturing.
“Me? Oh… do the teachers run, too?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “Come here please,” she said with a smile, and lead the way to a group of men laughing and stretching beside the starting line. I tried to make sense of it. It wasn’t a teacher race; the only other male teacher at Wakakusa is the gym teacher, and he was busy running the show. That meant it was a… dad race? So what the fuck was I doing there? Was Maury about to pop out from behind the podium and exclaim, “Yes, you ARE the father!”
“Here,” Touko Sensei said, pointing at the line.
“Okay, what do I do?”
“Just wait please. They’ll explain.” And with that, she was gone. The other men lined up, three to my left, and the rest behind. Okay, so we’ve got four teams here, but... What was the goal? I surveyed the field, and saw a box of deflated balloons, a blue gymnastics mat, a table with cups and a pitcher of some carbonated liquid, another blue mat, and a succession of hula hoops laid flat.
Thank god they were giving instructions. Because I didn’t have a fucking clue.
That’s when the gym teacher stepped out into the center of the field, and began explaining the tasks. In Japanese.
That was no surprise, of course. I expected nothing else, as I am, after all, in Japan. But I guess I was hoping for a little more of the Touko Sensei-style gesturing to help me make sense of that random assortment. I looked behind me. Why was I in the front? If I could at least move to second in line and watch what goes down in the first group…
But it was too late. The runners beside me tensed, my heart leapt, and, just before he pulled the trigger on the starter gun, the gym teacher locked eyes with me, and smiled. And in that moment, I knew, deep down, that he knew exactly what position I was in. And he knew I knew that he knew, and for whatever reason, seemed thrilled about it.
BANG!
I barreled ahead with the others, then stopped short at the box of balloons, watching what the men next to me did with them. Blowing them up, okay… kinda figured that… Yep, got it, so now I- no, they weren’t tying theirs off, they were… holding them to their butts? Okay, got mine behind me, then- POP! Ah, okay, supposed to sit on them- POP! And we were off again!
And so the race unfolded; me, racing ahead with all the rest of my male peers and blundering into a series of bewildering ordeals, with no idea of how to deal with them other than to emulate the guys around me. It was less a relay race, and more a reenactment of puberty.
I hula hooped, I chugged that strange carbonated concoction, I somersaulted across the blue mat, and, as I leapt across the finish line, solidly in last place, a member of the PTA congratulated me, and handed me a box of tissues.
Solid award, though I personally think that when you ask a group of (primarily) fathers to perform certain physical activities, the consolation prize should be nothing short of a quick check-up with a chiropractor; my back hurt for three days after that goddamn somersault, because I turned 30 in August and I guess that’s the kind of shit that happens to me now.
The rest of the day was the typical series of activities combining the competitive and the ridiculous. Parents and children donned chicken hats and ran parent-child relays. The teachers emptied out a bin of at least two hundred balls, the student body split into two teams, and for three minutes the field erupted in frenetic fire as they all attempted to throw as many balls as possible into one of two color-coded baskets mounted atop a pole. There were piñatas, though not the fragile, papier-mâché things I’m used to; instead, it was two giant metal bowls duct taped together to form a sphere. The kids once against unleashed indiscriminate fire, this time in the form of small bean bags, in an attempt to jostle the sphere enough so that the duct tape worked loose and released all the confetti inside. Now, a piñata is a lot like a game of Monopoly: it’s an activity usually suggested by a bored familiarity disguising itself as tradition, and it always takes way longer than you think it will; even when you manage to finish, it’s more out of necessity than fun.
That said, this piñata took particularly long; I clocked it at just over six minutes. That may not be a long time when everyone is just lounging around, watching one blindfolded kid tepidly swing a stick; when it’s 120 kids running and chucking bean bags as fast as possible, six minutes is a marathon. When the sphere finally broke, the applause was out of pure relief; a passerby catching a glimpse of those exhausted kids splayed out on the field would assume there was either a massive carbon monoxide leak on the school grounds, or the zombie virus had just broken out amongst nursery school kids.
And of course, in between all of these events: LOTS of synchronized dancing.
My experience with pageants and school events in Asia is that they view synchronized dancing as a sort of entertainment sherbet; interspersed throughout the speeches and competitive time trails and occasional sketch comedy, the audience needs a little palate cleanser of spinning and waving children set to song.
Sometimes the synchronized dancing is just kids. Sometimes it’s kids with their teachers. Sometimes it’s kids with parents. Then with their grandparents. Then kids again. Then just teachers.
Sports Day does kinda drag on. That said, aside from the brief foray onto the obstacle course, I was in genuine comfort for most of the day. Touko Sensei caught me early on in the morning, soon after I had arrived. I was mingling about in the crowds of parents, making laborious (Japanese… still not there), simple conversation and high-fiving kids. But she insisted I follow her to the tent, and set me up with a seat just behind the besuited board of directors. And every time I stood to walk around, stretch, or leave the tent, she seemed to find me, gently press a bottled beverage into my hands, and insist I take a rest.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and by noon all the direct sun had made the field damned hot. Parents fanned themselves and sweated on their blankets and canvas camping chairs.
Meanwhile, I sat seated on my cool, shaded throne like the fucking King of Siam, flanked by bottles of green tea and lemon water, half expecting palace sycophants to gather around and start fanning me with palm fronds. A gaunt, lecherous character with a hunched walk and a black hooded robe would approach the throne, bearing news and intrigue.
“Chamberlain, chamberlain!” I’d call, in a nasally, whinnying cadence, beckoning him closer with a limp-wristed wave. “How go the trials?”
This illustrates a greater trend that many foreigners experience in Asia: special treatment. People here take hosting duties very seriously, and on the numerous occasions I’ve been invited into people’s homes, I’ve been treated to lavish dinners, given various gifts, and generally forbidden from anything that would reduce my personal level of comfort. They’ll give me the comfiest slippers, the nicest seat in the living room. They’ll pull out all the snacks, and arrange them closest to me. And if I rise to, say, throw away a piece of trash or transport a dirty dish out of the dining room, there’s suddenly someone blocking my path with the Heisman stiff arm, shaking their head and insisting I relax.
These are very difficult situations to navigate. It’s an obsequious sort of hospitality that, as an American, I am not accustomed to. Additionally, it makes me uncomfortable because I’m generally not one to kowtow to anybody myself; and the older I get, the less willing I am to show deference to anything, be it human, god, or political institution (“Wait, with that last one, you meant human again, right? Because corporations are people.” -U.S. Supreme Court).
Don’t conflate deference with kindness. It’s a pretty muddy area where distinctions are hard, but for me, Americans are plenty hospitable and kind without running into that deferential territory, whereas here, the general style of hospitality seems excessively submissive. I feel like a piece of shit being waited on, as if I’m conceding the fact that, yes, as a foreign dignitary, this is what I require. My genes carry the weight of historical memory; I am that awful combination of the two most despicable groups to ever commandeer the planet: white and man. What, it ain’t enough that I’m running shit back home, with every institution orchestrating my special treatment? Ain’t enough I’ve got the tendrils of my empire slithering across every continent, spreading military bases like herpes and shooting missiles into children’s hospitals in Yemen? (Gotta keep that homeland safe!) Ain’t enough that I can travel most of the world with ease, because most cultures are required to learn my language?
All that, and now I’m gonna come here, sit in grandpa’s favorite armchair and eat all the grapes?
So every time I accept a kindness, it’s with both gratitude and self-criticism. I generally try to accept kindness while also communicating that it isn’t necessary and I don’t feel entitled to it, but with such insistent hospitality you run the risk of having to decline too strongly and thus come off as ungrateful. It’s a tough balance; to quote the great Johnny Cash: “I walk the line.”
To illustrate: some of my schools provide lunch, and on nice days, the teachers string up some tarps for a makeshift cover across the patios, and the kids eat outside. Not Brandon Sensei, though. They guide him into the office, and set down the lunch tray at a table directly across from a fan. And then they go back outside. Brandon Sensei tries to communicate that no, it’s okay, he’s fine sitting outside, but they say no, no, it’s too hot for you. And not knowing how to proceed, Brandon Sensei just smiles, nods, says thank you a few times, and stays sitting at the table. All during lunch, he can see the entire rest of the school outside, managing a meal in the sun just fine. And then the principal comes down the hall from some business upstairs, looks from Brandon Sensei, to the kids outside, to Brandon Sensei again, widens his eyes, and with a smile, says, “Too hot, huh?” And Brandon Sensei feels like the snowiest snowflake in the world.
So next time, when lunch is served, Brandon Sensei is resolved. He helps set up the tents and serve the food outside, and makes sure he snags his own tray before someone serves it to him. He finds a spot in the direct sun, and sits down to a very smiley lunch with the kids, with every facial expression and mannerism hoping to communicate how much he’s enjoying the lunch. And again, the principal finds his way outside from some other business, and on catching a glimpse of Brandon Sensei, gasps, and starts clapping. “Not too hot for you! You okay!” And he gets some of the kids to clap along; soon, Brandon Sensei, a grown-ass man, is being treated to a round of applause for having the fortitude to eat a bowl of noodles in the sun.
And again, he feels like the snowiest fucking snowflake in the whole fucking world.
Lunch, though. Whoa.
When I monitored school lunch in the U.S., it was basically thirty minutes of me watching the kids like a hawk, preventing would-be bag poppers and food throwers from turning the table into a Jackson Pollock painting. It was a cacophony of conflict: she stuck her finger in my sandwich, they stole my Cheetos, he said my momma looks like Rosa Parks! (actual quote) And I can recall my own time as a student, and the chaos of my own school’s lunchroom; wild animals hanging around a Serengeti watering hole tend to have more order.
But Japanese kids? Lunch with them is positively serene.
First, there’s no bitching about food choices, like having to eat a chicken patty because there’s no pizza left; every kid gets the same serving of noodles, and soup, and pear, or whatever is being served that day. As a group, the kids arrange the wooden crates and floor mats that serve as their tables and chairs. As a group, they pass out all the food, carefully, and quietly. And as a group, they all wait patiently, no one touching their food, until the three students elected for duty that day assemble at the front and lead a short, sing-song “prayer” of sorts (still don’t know all its contents, but what I’ve gathered so far generally involves being thankful for having food to eat, and inviting one another to enjoy it).
And after that, everyone begins eating, and the peaceful trend largely continues for the remainder. In fact, there’s really only one aspect to lunch that anyone might find remotely objectionable:
Mayonnaise.
Lots and lots of mayonnaise.
I’m not one to object, because I like mayonnaise. For some reason though, it tends to get other people going; my sister writes a food blog (https://thepotatopantry.com) and recently observed that, for whatever reason, a lot of us have strong opinions about mayonnaise. She’s absolutely right; I can recall a number of times that my own use of it has incited pure, unfiltered revulsion from fellow eaters.
And I really don’t get the mayo hate. I can’t think of any other condiment that allows for such emotional expression. I would never, say, lean over someone’s shoulder and start dry heaving as they squirt mustard along their hot dog, or approach some poor steak eater and remark, “You’re putting A-1 on that? FUCK you.”
But you won’t face any negativity here in Japan. Japanese people love mayonnaise; a quick perusal of any grocery store’s deli and prepared foods section will offer a wide selection of various “salads” which are generally just one or two ingredients drenched in mayonnaise: sliced lotus root in mayonnaise, cucumbers in mayonnaise, noodles and shredded carrot in mayonnaise.
Yes, I’ve tried some of them.
And yes, I liked them.
So sometimes the school lunches also feature a mayo-heavy dish; on that particular day when I bravely faced the sun for the first time, we were treated to what was essentially mayonnaise soup, with some tomatoes and a few other various veggies thrown it.
Hayato, the kid across from me, was literally slurping that shit out of the bowl.
Again, I’m all about mayo, but even I was like, “Whoa there, Hoss, easy on the ‘naise!”
Hmm.
Okay, so I was trying to switch things up, as you can only interchange the words mayonnaise and mayo in a single entry so many times before both become repetitive.
That said, I don’t think ‘naise is gonna happen.
And now I’m about to discuss heaven, and you should take my thoughts with a grain of salt; no, in fact, take them with a pillar. Think Lot’s wife.
You remember, right? God turned her into salt because she had the nerve to look at the city of Sodom. But hey, it all worked out right? Because Lot got to be a free and easy single fella again, and get a lil’ wild from time to time- you know, like that time he got black-out drunk and fucked his own daughters?
-Brought to you by the book that people still actually swear upon during court testimonies and presidential inaugurations
In short, take my thoughts on heaven as what they are: the opinions of someone with no experience or belief in the subject. It’s like interviewing Keith Richards about the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, or asking Joel Schumacher to discuss what makes a great Batman film.
Heaven must have tiers. Even if you limit membership as most believers like to do, and only, say, let the Christians in, one type of heaven still could not possibly satisfy all the various hopes people in that group are pinning on the afterlife. Some hip youth pastor who snowboards for Jesus probably won’t be as stoked on heaven if it turns out to be a dismal monastery with mandated silence, interspersed with periods of fasting and self-flagellation. Similarly, what is a 9th-century Benedictine Monk to do if that eleven-year-old girl who just tragically died in a car accident is right, and heaven is all Justin Bieber concerts and pizza party sleepovers?
That last joke most likely only serves to show how out of touch I am with the actual interests of this current generation of hypothetical eleven-year-old girls who tragically died in car accidents.
Of course, there’s also always the possibility that all of them are wrong, and Belinda Carlisle was right all along: Heaven is a Place on Earth.
Even if you imagine it as a monolithic skyrise or other massive complex divided into thematic wings, it’s hard to imagine a place that could group souls accordingly and still manage to keep them happy. The floor for musicians dead at 27 seems like a sensible arrangement when you think about Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all hanging out, but makes less sense when you realize that illustrious group also includes Reba McEntire’s former keyboardist and a member of the Malaysian pop group SPIN.
Similarly, if there’s a section for those who died young due to reckless behavior, it’s hard to imagine where those dead of a mayonnaise-induced cardiac arrest belong. They have to try and fit in with a group largely composed of base jumpers and freedivers and James Dean.
Making their way along the refreshments table, they may try to start up a conversation with the grizzled, bearded guy ladling out a cup of punch. “Hey, so… What are you in for?”
He turns, and grunts, “Motorcycle accident. Hell’s Angels. You?”
“Er… Hellman’s.”
Right now, Japan has the highest proportion of centenarians in the world. But if these mayo trends continue… well, just keep an eye on those statistics, is all I’m saying.
Which I’ll use to segue into my final topic for today: healthcare.
Now, perhaps you Americans (I don’t think I’m wrong to assume you’re the bulk of my reader base) are uninterested in what healthcare looks like in other countries; after all, you’re surely living the high life now and enjoying that awesome, cheaper, better healthcare that Donald Trump promised during his campaign.
Then again, you may overhear something on the media landscape about “single payer”; or, perhaps you’ll catch a glimpse of one of those statistics floating around, like the U.S.A. has the largest health expenditure per capita of any country in the world, but has the fifth-highest under-five mortality rate among OECD countries, and is ranked 37th by the WHO in terms of overall health system performance. In case any of these ideas make you stop and wonder about the veracity of that congressperson’s hollered claim that our system is the best in the world, I’m going to offer a brief anecdote.
I currently live in a country with universal health care. I pay a low monthly premium based on my last year’s income, and when I visit a doctor, I cover 30% of the costs of any medical service I require; the government foots the bill for the other 70%. My prescription costs 1/6th what it did in America. And I’ve been to the doctor twice, and received some of the best care I’ve ever had in my life.
Bet there was a wait! someone asserts.
Yes; the doctor saw me six minutes after my appointment time on my first visit, and fourteen minutes after my appointment time on my second visit. Not bad, especially considering some of the marathon sessions I’ve sat out in waiting rooms in the past. In an ideal world, I suppose the doctor always sees you right at the appointed time. If you ever visit that world, tell Plato I said what’s up.
Well, if it’s so fast, the quality has to be low.
The WHO ranks Japan number one in the world in attainment of healthcare goals. In terms of overall system performance, it’s sitting pretty at twenty-seven spots higher than America. It has the sixth-lowest rate of under-five mortality among OECD countries, and, as I mentioned before, the largest proportion of centenarians of any country on earth. Sure, correlation is not causation, and other factors, like diet and overall lifestyle contribute to those stats. That said, the healthcare system seems to be serving them all just fine.
For my own personal visit, I found the doctor to be caring and thorough to an almost excessive degree. At one point during our initial consultation, he apologized profusely; he was not a registered spiritual counselor, and could not give me the emotional support that he believed necessary when receiving healthcare. Bowing in an apparent bid for understanding, he promised to give the best pure medical care, and refer me to a specialist who could help with my spiritual journey.
I thanked him excessively, and said I appreciated his concern. It certainly threw me off; I’ve attended church services with pastors who were less concerned with the state of my soul than this medical doctor.
It was then time for the examination. He gestured for me to lie back on the table. All through this visit, he was communicating with me via a slow, stilted, but generally very clear English. I’d been lucky enough to find this awesome non-profit, Japan Healthcare Info (japanhealthinfo.com), that can help you find and set up an appointment with an English-speaking doctor anywhere in Japan, and if you pay for their travel and time, they’ll even send a translator to accompany you on your doctor visit to help you fill out paperwork. Through them, I found my guy, who had spent two years studying in Syracuse, New York.
He looked down at me, waiting patiently. And then, politely, but also as if I was missing an obvious instruction, he said, “Your penis, please.”
“Oh. Uh, right.” So I pulled down my pants and let him go about investigating. He hmmm’ed to himself, walked away, retrieved something from his desk drawer, and came back bearing a ruler.
After lining it up alongside my fella and muttering something to himself, he turned to me. “We use… centimeters. I… don’t know your size in… feet.”
Complete honesty: I haven’t measured that part of myself since sometime back in the final, waning days of puberty. While I could ballpark it (eh?), off the top of my head I couldn’t give a completely accurate measure of what’s happening down there.
That said, I’m still an easy conversion to feet: zero. Doc, if I had a penis that measured in feet, I'd either be a porn star or a murderer- or perhaps some overlap of the two, for those who are into those kinds of films. There is literally nothing else I could be doing.
Wait- quick, quality care, available to everyone, and at a relatively low personal cost? And they even throw in a free dick measurement? Sorry, Charlie, ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. That must be costing the government an arm and a leg.
Sure- but not as much as it’s costing the U.S. government; Japan spends less than half as much as the U.S., and seems to be getting a lot more for it. Turns out helping keep people alive is a win for everybody. Who’d-a thunk, eh?
All of that to say: I get it. I have a fiery libertarian streak in me too, and I can see where the opponents are coming from with their talk of smaller government; when you look at our government’s track record, those people seem to come off as the more sensible types by affording it as little trust as possible.
And a lot of them stick to those principles- even when giving in a little might mean net gains for everyone involved. It’s like that one teacher who has you sweating bullets and studying your ass off for three straight weeks leading up to a brain-crushing final exam. And then, as the test booklets are passed out, your teacher adds, “Also, I’ve decided to make this test open book.” A collective gasp. “With one stipulation: EVERYone has to use their book. Or else, no one can.”
After the applause and cries of joy subside, everyone starts pulling out their textbooks. Except for your one friend, sitting across from you. He stares fixedly at his test booklet, but has not retrieved his textbook from his school bag.
“Pssst!” You whisper. “Hey! It’s open book! Why aren’t you looking at yours? We all have an opportunity here to perform vastly better as a group, with no negative personal cost!”
He turns to face you. “Sorry,” he says, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “It goes against my principles.”
All I’m saying is, in the time it took you all to debate whether the individual mandate infringed on your personal liberty, thousands more Japanese centenarians attended thousands more grandchildren’s fifth birthday parties.
I’m gonna leave it there this month.
Until next time~ <(-)>
