Evoking the Himalayan

I let out a heavy sigh. My breath condenses before me, freezes and forms an icicle that nicely hangs off my face complimenting my silver earrings. It’s the staffroom and winter has set in completely ignoring the fleeting autumn. “Japan has four seasons.” The prosaic phrase echoes in my ears and I internally scoff. “We seem to have missed one.”

The curious thing about the Japanese is that they do not seem to take into account which of these supposed four seasons they are currently experiencing. They will tell you time and time again about how beautiful the cherry blossoms are in the spring, or how vivid the leaves are when autumn sets in, but their life style and clothes do not reflect the drastic changes that accompany each “distinct” season. This indicates that they are clearly not right in the head or have anti-freeze running through their veins.

For me, setting out for school now involves a bit more preparation. My delicate little hands, which suffer from inadequate circulation and are now constantly cold, must be stuffed into mittens and my lovely puffer, fit for an Eskimo Queen or a baby seal poacher with a fuzzy faux-fur lined hood, has emerged from the closet.

While I arrive to school looking like a lost sherpa, the kids and teachers are wearing the exact same thing that they were wearing two months ago. The only conclusion I can draw is that after devouring fish head upon fish head, salmon eye upon salmon eye and halibut innard upon halibut innard, Japanese people have, themselves, turned into fish. You are what you eat.

As cold-blooded vertebrates devoid of emotion they are able to withstand the seasonal changes without ever changing their daily attire. I still see girls riding scooters in stilettos and skirts up-to-here and the grandmothers down the street all walk hunched over ostensibly not wearing any extra layers under their T-shirts.

The girls come to school wearing their usual skirts with no leggings. Had I been required to go to an unheated school in the dead of winter wearing a skirt I would have laughed and promptly dropped out. Unacceptable learning conditions as far as I’m concerned - even the Amish have pot-bellied heated stoves. I’m sure somewhere in the Constitution in fine print Thomas Jefferson guaranteed fully heated classrooms for his nation’s uneducated. Our forefathers wouldn’t have it any other way.

Animals handle the cold in a variety of ways: Birds fly south, chickadees puff up and shiver, the geriatric crowd heads for Florida, painted turtles take deep breaths and hold it for five months becoming almost lifeless lumps, winter flounder bury themselves in the mud. Since burying ones cold-blooded self in a layer of mire and slime would likely be frowned upon in Japanese society, school kids, instead, buy packets of chemicals that heat up for twelve hours. They shove these little precious packets of bliss into their pockets and afterwards toss them away, thus corrupting the ozone layer even more.

To further validate my hypothesis: Cold-blooded animals require small amounts of food during the winter. Instead of eating they gain their energy by sunbathing like a solar battery. For example, a snake can feed once a week and get by just fine, so long as a there’s not a prolonged solar eclipse. Given this, the miniscule, cold-blooded, Japanese food proportions make complete sense.

As much as I would like to huddle up like an insect in diapause or sleep for months on end like a groundhog, evolution has not endowed me with such powers yet. Mother Nature is a cruel shrew. She has unfairly granted the wood frog the mystical ability to turn himself into a solid ice cube until the sun thaws him out in the spring, whereupon he may go mate. Meanwhile, the Japanese have not come up with anything more effective than tiny packets of chemicals (which, if ingested by a kitten would likely boil it inside out) to heat its schoolchildren nationwide.

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Published:
11.24.06 / 6pm
Category:
what i call life