Movies and Marriage

One of the sacrifices (amongst a seemingly unending series of them) that both husbandhood and fatherhood demand is a sharp reduction in the number of movies I get to see. And worse, the type of movies I get to see. Until Cian finally heads off to dreamland around 9:00pm the television is kept off, save for the Mickey Mouse Club House and the local news and weather. Once the boy goes to sleep if we are not too knackered ourselves, we sit down to watch something. That 'something' is usually, too stretch the term, a 'romantic comedy'. She insists we watch a movie together but equally insists that we don't watch any of my choices as they are either too dark, too violent, too obscure, or, in the case of Winter's Bone, all three (and more about this tomorrow when I will write about my movies of 2010. Still your clamoring hearts) .

So, we revert to the 'romantic comedy' genre, and whereas my darling wife has never seen, nor has any intention of ever watching say, Apocalypse Now or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or even The Squid and the Whale, I have seen Bridget Jones' Diary, one and, God forgive me, two; every film Hugh Grant has ever made; the Joe Wright directed, Keira Knightley starring remake of Pride & Prejudice, six times (which is still only approximately a fifth of the number of times Sanae has seen it); and a series of Sandra Bullock movies that subsequently left me cognitively impaired for close on a fortnight and in need of incontinence nappies.

The cumulative effect is disquieting. Watch enough of these movies and your oestrogen levels begin to rise and you find yourself saying things like "Jaysus, what does she see in yer man", "That scarf does not go with those shoes" and making a mental note to google the film to see if you can find out where you could buy those chocolate beige duvet covers.

There have been the occasional lucky breaks - Definitely Maybe, 500 Days of Summer (but Lord, was Zooey Deschanel so miscast), and Music and Lyrics, but the majority of these exercises in do-they-don't-they glib, cuteness have been among some of the loneliest times I have spent with my wife.

And so I have learned that, yes, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Sandra Bullock is from a galaxy, far, far away.

Snow Today

We had our first relatively big fall of snow last night. Over 25cm (or a foot for my metrically challenged American readership). I don't blog about anything under 20cm whereas back home 10cm is enough to lead the main evening news. And now you don't have enough sand and salt to grit the roads.

Jaysus, people. Ye wouldn't survive a March weekend in Hokkaido.

Mind you, the recent 'bad' weather back home has played havoc with the usual self introductory spiel I give to my classes at the start of each school year. After asking students to guess where I come from (answers usually range from the obvious - the US, Canada, Australia - to the geographically and linguistically challenged - Mexico, Brazil and once, rather memorably, Sudan), I tell them Ireland, teach them how to differentiate its pronunciation from Iceland, stress we are no longer part of the UK (and will pound to a pulp with my hurley anybody who says we are), and then wax long and lyrical about the mild and benign climate with which the Emerald Isle is blessed. A lush, green country where snow doesn't fall, merely 'sprinkles', a place where winter sports are unknown, and the paisti go leor run around barefooted, clad only in O'Neills' shorts and a hand-knit wool vest because, really, we have no such thing as 'winter' back home.

Not anymore. Now my introductions are grim accounts of unrelenting cold, akin to Scott of the Antarctic but without the levity and more whining about the feckin county council and its 'Let 'em freeze!' approach to road clearing.

We are currently packing our bags for our impending trip home and after watching the weather forecast for the coming week, it seems the shorts and t-shirts will have to be replaced with our finest fleeces and 900 fill down jackets, not to mention presents of 'Tried-and-Tested-in-Hokkaido' snow shovels for one and all.

Birthday Boy!

Four today! And what a day. First Cian tried to sell off daddy's entire winter's stock of cereal at SuperCian, "Where Cash is King!"

After a bowl of hideously overpriced cereal, it was outside for some snow shoveling. Which he'd better get used to as he will be doing it until next April. And you all whine about your ten day long 'Big Freeze' back in Ireland. Please.

Next presents. This year it is a 'Super Ozara' Express Train. Introduced in December 2002, it debuted on the Hakodate - Aomori run. Reaching a top speed of 140km/h, it 'shoots' through the Seiken Tunnel linking Honshu and Hokkaido. Equipped with convenient, wheelchair friendly doors, a plush, unprecedented, three-rows wide 'Green Car', it is the ultimate in rail comfort. Or so it says on the side of the box.

Exhausted from both the snow shoveling and the extended train play / total destruction of same, the birthday boy sat down to eat his body weight in oven-baked potatoes and fried chicken, as is the tradition here in Japan.

He then realized that he had to eat his birthday cake too.

Start with the strawberries...

Yearra, it'll do.

Meanwhile, Mammy tries to get in a sneaky play with the Super Ozara.

Cian, incensed by the liberties his mother has taken with his birthday present, takes his anger out on Daddy.

And finally, we end the day on a contemplative note, wondering whether to accept that modelling offer from Levi jeans.

A Qualification

It was pointed out to me by my ever vigilant wife (after she'd finished giving me a whuppin ) that my previous post could constitute a form of moral blackmail, particularly as I will be back home in Ireland to celebrate my birthday for the first time in the 21st century.

To which I replied, gleefully rubbing my hands together and cackling with manic laughter, "But of course, my dear. Of course. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

She then gave me another whuppin.

In truth, my wishlist will have to remain just that, a wishlist (with the exception of The Promise. Which I have already ordered from Amazon. Because, damn man, that Houston gig, ya know. It's gotta be seen. Now).

Region code incompatibility rules out the Thin Red Line and the sure-to-have-accompanied-it Blu Ray player; the New Yorker subscription would just result in another pile of unread magazines to go with my already mildewing back issues of The New York Review of Books, Backstreets and Hello magazine. Reading, by professional necessity, is now dominated by books and journal articles with titles like "Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach", or "Acoustic analysis of the production of unstressed English vowels by early and late Korean and Japanese bilinguals".

Oh, I know, the unrelenting glamour of academia. Still your beating hearts.

And, well, Castlebar on New Year's Eve would probably just result in another whuppin.

The Galaxy caramel bars, though...

21 Shopping Days until Christmas

It's a Friday evening after a tiring and imminently forgettable week and I'm feeling a little bit self indulgent. So, what better way to raise the spirits than with some rampant materialism as befits the festive season. Below is a list of what I want for Christmas. There is no place here for world peace, or charitable donations of a bewildered donkey to some fly specked mud hamlet in east Africa. This is a list based on unabashed, unashamed, self satisfying greed - consider it a consumerist slap in the face of a terrible recession.

So, in no particular order we have:

(1) Bruce Springsteen "The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story"

A 6, yes, count 'em, 6 disc set that runs to "8 hours and 33 minutes of audio and video". Sustained Bruce for anything over three minutes tends to drive Sanae up the wall, so eight and half hours of His Bossness may well end up destroying our marriage, but, c'mon, a full three hour 'bootleg' video of the legendary Houston gig from the Darkness tour back in '78. Man, you can't pass that up.

(2) The Thin Red Line (the Criterion Collection) Blu-Ray Disc

Back in the late Autumn of 1998, myself, Ben Graves and Ben Wilson, emerged blinking from a small cinema in downtown Sapporo after spending close on three hours watching this, Terence Malick's first film since Days of Heaven some twenty years previous. The two Ben wanted nothing more than to go for a couple of beers and maybe dance on a table or two at Rad Bros (while scoring some 'hot Japanese chicks' as was their wont back then. They are both happily married now, but Lord, what their wives don't know..). I wanted to immediately go back inside the cinema and watch it again. Actually, 'watch' is too prosaic a word; I wanted to immerse myself in this film again. For me The Thin Red Line epitomizes the pure potential of cinema as a combination of sense, sight and sound, that exceedingly rare film that elevates the medium to an art form worthy of both aesthetic and intellectual admiration. To others, its pretentious shite and no amount of my wide-eyed gosh golly gee rhapsodizing is going to forgive lines like "Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining".

As an aside, as the film ostensibly concerns it self with the fighting between Japanese and American forces on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, three hours of this may also wreck our marriage. Is there an unconscious pattern developing here?

(3) A Blu Ray disc player to play the above. Hell, now that my marriage is on the rocks, I'll even consider Korean brands.

(4) A subscription to the New Yorker. Yes, yes, I know I should be doing my bit for d'auld sod and taking out multiple subscriptions to the Farmers Journal, The Kerryman and Gaelsceal, but God, the sheer parochialism of it all would both rend the heart and shrivel the mind. Better to loose yourself in wistful fantasies about the alternative life you could have lived had you been born Jay McInerney on the Upper East Side.

(5) My body weight in Galaxy chocolate caramel bars. No, wait, that should be my mother's home made bread. No wait, damnit, Sanae's not going to like that either, Christ, there goes my marriage again.

(6) A pair of tickets to the Sawdoctors' New Year's Eve gig in Castlebar and a baby sitter for Cian so me and Sanae can make a night of it and try and salvage our marriage.