Fitting In

Cu Chi, Vietnam'Writers are introverts by nature.’ So went the opening statement of the article I read recently. (Yes, the article; I’ve definitely got to ramp up my efforts in the self-education department.) Immediately upon reading this I felt a deep, suppressed urge to start screaming at my laptop. ‘Faceless coward! Who do you think you are? What do you know about me and my vert? I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs twice and both times came out an Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving EX-trovert!’ Boy was I about to explode.

But I am a grown man, so instead I snuck past the wife, preoccupied with keeping my sons from stabbing each other with Buzz Lightyear pencils, and into the kitchen to grab a piece of anger management chocolate.

I’ve been an extrovert all my life. This includes my childhood, most of which I, as a skinny soccer player, spent in constant fear of ridicule by a neighborhood full of football players. On the outside I might have seemed like a loner of sorts, but this was not at all the case. I had plenty of friends: Pac-Man, Tony the Tiger, the entire Yankees lineup and Christie Brinkley, to name just a few.

In the past couple of years, though, I have been subjecting myself to just the kind of writer’s introversion I suspect that person was going to tell me about had I kept reading. For a while there (a while meaning the twenty-year stretch from freshman year in college to the birth of my first son) the weekend was for me a chance to turn off my brain and let a few otherwise suppressed biological processes take over for a while. Now, starting Friday afternoon (or Thursday evening, or sometime Wednesday, depending on how effectively I’ve been able to avoid picking up more teaching jobs) I am thinking only about spending those once-hallowed days of debauchery punching out that long overdue blog post or cranking out the next chapter in the upcoming novel or continuing my wayward search for the holy grail of literary notoriety.

Once upon a time I’d be falling into Happy Hour even as I was pulling back into my apartment complex after work. ‘Hey Kevin (or some unprintable nickname), we’re heading to the Oasis, let’s go!’ ‘Okay, (unprintable retort), let me just change my shirt.’ And the rest of Friday would take care of itself. And life was good. Now, getting my weekend off to a good start is a matter of how fast can I convince the kids to go to bed so I can sit down in front of the laptop. This is going to get harder once the little monsters learn how to tell time.

I’m lucky in a warped sense; anti-social tendencies are rather easy to cultivate in Fukushima, Japan. If and when people go out here, the basic dynamic is to remain for the duration of the evening within the little group you started out with. People go out with their co-workers, mostly, like this: Get together at an agreed time (and no later as this will throw the punctual Japanese into a tizzy), sit around at a table together, no one getting up except to use the bathroom until it’s time to move as a unit to a new establishment; sit around together at the new table, occasionally switching seats if the group is feeling particularly jiggy; eventually move on to a karaoke bar and sing and drink in a private, sound-proof room with whoever hasn’t already bailed and gone home. Talk about culture shock. This is nothing like the States; stuck with the group all night (as wandering off will cause the rest of the group to wonder for the next month what is wrong with you and them and the world), it’s impossible to get away to find a girl to talk to and get shot down by. Maybe it is the culturally-ingrained aversion to individual failure that has directed the evolution of Japan’s idea of socializing. Such justification, unfortunately, does nothing to assuage my growing ennui about the whole situation.

There is actually an impressive number of western style bars here in quiet Fukushima, ostensibly set up to induce the same brand of social engagement so prevalent in the States (i.e. talking to girls and getting shot down). But here, no one seems to know how to use them. The few that venture into these joints just end up sitting at a table with their companions anyway. The more affable types might sit at the bar, but in Japan affable is often regarded as suspect (trust me on this one) and these folks too remain in their culturally-mandated bubble. Regardless, by and large most of these pockets of opportunity remain empty. I am in awe that they manage to stay in business. Or maybe they don’t and I don’t know it because I never go out anymore.

I do have friends, actually, both Japanese and expat. But getting more than one or two of them together at a time is oddly, excruciatingly difficult. Japan seems to have this mystical power to convince you that there are more important things to do on Friday night than going out and drinking beer. I can testify to this, because as valiantly as I try to beat back the ennui, it has gotten to the point where trying to round up a small crowd to go sit around at a table somewhere just isn’t worth the effort and it would be much more worthwhile to pound out another thousand words. Which I can do if the kids to go to sleep and the wife keeps it down.

So for this extrovert, my social outlets are confined to the occasional beer with a couple of friends (as Japan will occasionally, mystically allow a couple of your friends to be simultaneously available and motivated), teaching (yes, the longest conversations I now have with other living human beings take place in a classroom, covering the challenging issues facing us, i.e. pointing out some of the differences between the pictures of John’s and Jane’s bedrooms and please use today’s grammar point), and the Internet.

First off, let’s get the de facto tar pit of social media out of the way. Facebook is different things to different people: a way to reconnect with old friends; a source for keeping up with the latest news about friends’ new jobs, new kids and new adventures; a platform to offer up and trade ideas; an opportunity to share some good bits of humor; and, of course, an avenue through which one can finally announce to the world on a daily basis what he or she had for dinner. As an expat in a country that will most likely still not know how to party like it’s 2099, I place particular value in being able to walk into a virtual room where there is, to use the term generously, a party going on 24/7.

Unless facebook goes 3-D with revolving holograms of all of us to replace the present newsreel format this is the closest I am ever going to get to a real party as long as I am in Fukushima. Not that I am complaining. It’s great to be able to walk into a room – silent and unobserved I might add – and see all these people I know talking to other people I know. And of course there’s also the bonus of making new friends by hanging around and waiting until something clever pops into my head so I can come off as a real sharp-witted character (which is better but eons more time-consuming than going out and getting shot down). But what strikes me about this virtual party is how it reminds me off how removed I still am.

I don’t follow professional sports anymore. The most recent first-run movie I’ve seen was, I think, The Pianist (2002). I’ve never seen a single episode of Lost. And besides being a singing organism of some sort or another I have no idea who or what Lady Gaga is. (I’m not sure why, but I feel a measure of satisfaction in this.) Running down the newsreel, I come across a lot of conversations on things I am clueless about – albeit quite comfortably so.

And far outside my personal sphere of interest are the ubiquitous comments along the lines of ‘It’s snowing!’ , ‘My dog looks as tired as I feel.’ and ‘Cheez curls and cocoa, sooooooooo good!’ While I’ve had experiences with all these things, either directly or in some derivative form or another, I don’t think I’d stick around the party very long if this was the intellectual extent of the ongoing conversation. Fortunately there are plenty of people whipping up and tossing around some pretty snappy humor out there, which not only keeps me coming back to the party but keeps me on my toes. (I’d like to give a shout here to fellow Hoya Patrick Kutac for his interminably creative wit and to longtime friend Chris Russo, who gets my vote for the ‘Quality, not Quantity’ award.) And of course there are plenty of good folks out there sharing stuff that actually pertains to living well. This is particularly important for a guy who is letting his hours and his weekends slip away under the shroud of advancing his so-called writing career.

Which brings me back to the conundrum of being a writer and an extrovert, coupled for me with the added double-edged sword of existing not in the bubble, even, but in one of the cluster of tiny and separate bubbles, of Fukushima’s fragile social make-up. The answer to easing my woes, obviously, is to meld my penchant for writing with my desire to continue to interact with the world beyond John and Jane’s bedrooms (so to speak).

But how?

This was my question a year and a half ago. The answers have been slow in coming.

For a while I’d check out a feature or a news-ish piece on Yahoo and then scroll through the comments to get a feel for the world’s general take on things. This proved to be the equivalent of watching Beavis and Butthead.

I started my own website, for the purpose of letting the world read of my worldly travel adventures. While the process has been both fun and a sort of self-administered tutorial on writing, it seems the world has not quite gotten around to reading my stuff. Once, about a year ago, I did have a stranger contact me through my site. This was exciting – my first ripple in the waters, my first step toward meaningful (re)integration with the global party going on.

Turned out some girl wanted to know if I was the same Kevin Kato who had dated her college roommate Sarah.

To add insult to injury, I wasn’t.

I’ve not been contacted since, by anyone.

Then a year and a half ago I took an unwitting step toward, perhaps, finding my place as a writer and a cyber-extrovert.

I knew absolutely nothing about blogging. I began only with the notion that people were out there saying important stuff and I too, if I wanted to participate, had to find important stuff to say. Failing this, I wandered into the endeavor of making incisive observations about life here in Japan. This also went less than spectacularly, but it was good fun. And from the sprinkling of feedback I received, it appeared my ideas came out best when tinged (tainted?) with a bit of what I saw as humor. Eventually I more or less abandoned trying to say anything of import. Why not? It worked for Dave Barry and Jerry Seinfeld, it works for Joel Stein and Sarah Palin (though she isn’t really trying to be funny).

And now here I find myself linking up with The Inductive.

There is a plethora of intelligent, educated, highly-insightful people plugged into the blogosphere. Some of them are right here. I am not one of them. Nor do I have any discernable area of expertise I can bestow on the greater public, even if that was what I wanted to do. (I suppose I could finally put my Master's Degree in Forensic Science to work but that Dexter seems like such a nice guy and I hate to rip his blood-red carpet out from under him.)  No matter, I feel my extroversion coming to terms with the writer in me when I put something down that I think someone else out there might enjoy. And if, in this way, I find my place, my niche in the virtual world, all the better.

At least until I move back to the States and can get to a real Happy Hour.

Thanks for inviting me to the party, guys. I hope I fit in.