Calorie

Today was a bit of an adventure. It was an adventure because after eating my delivered lunch at the city hall I felt I just needed a walk. Unfortunately there is pretty much nothing considered a proper destination within walking distance from work (unless you count my apartment which I would be heading to later anyways) so I decided to walk down route 25 to the Family Mart convenience store. I was making this journey when I started thinking about how in olden times when you gave some one a gift from another country it meant that you had traveled all the way there, bought it, then brought it all the way back specifically for that person. But now with globalization and cultural appropriation we can pretty much buy any ethnic product from pretty much any location in the world. I know, I know this is a huge over assumption, for example I can't find cilantro here in Yamagata to save my life, but I think you get my point.

This train of thought originated from a seed in my mind about how I am trying to collect Asahi beer posters (example) because, yes, they feature attractive women holding huge glasses of beer while on the beach wearing bikinis, but also because I just love the downright shameless display of advertising theory laid out as nude as the models used in the photos. Earlier I had asked my friend if she knows a poster store or brewery in Tokyo where I could find these posters that are primarily for bar and restaurant display. She replied, "Posters? How about the internet?" and I thought, yeah why didn't I think of that? So I searched the web and found a few, but much less than I had anticipated and the prices were outrageous. These posters were running about $40 each because I hadn't realized the girls were specific actresses or models with huge fan followings. But regardless of the price, I was more depressed with just the fact that, yeah, I could just go online, click, and have the thing sent to me completely undermining the whole process of collecting something special. Where is the fun in that? Where is the story, or the adventure about how I ended up with the poster? This is interesting because I might have come up with my scheme about the posters before I even was trying to get them. This takes me back further in time (I'm sorry, I will get to the adventure soon enough). The other night a few of us were having dinner at a local yakitori restaurant and before we left I noticed the poster on the wall. Up until that point my collection only consisted of one poster that I received for free from a local alcohol supplier, and I thought this could be my next one! So the four of us took separate and equally criminal roles in removing the poster(which left an obvious lighter patch of wall from the years of built up cigarette smoke), replacing the vacant space with a different poster from another section of wall, and concealing the prize until we had made it out of the restaurant. It was a successful mission until we arrived at the next bar where I fell asleep and then walked home promptly after having been woken up in time to pay for the bill, forgetting my poster in the process. Turns out, next time I went to the first restaurant, the woman has noticed her poster gone and one of my cohorts has already turned me in, fingering me as the main culprit (guilty as charged). But it was all in good fun, she laughed about it and now as a gesture of apology I'll probably have to give her my justly, and thus far only acquired poster as compensation, reducing my total of posters collected to zero. Point being, there are memories, stories and emotions behind those posters. What would I remember about a poster I ordered off the internet in my pajamas at my apartment after work? I'm not knocking the internet or convenient shopping by any means. I often have to go to online sources to find the obscure and niche-fitted books or products I desire. But I have come to believe this should be a last resort. First, I ask, "Is there a local equivalent of the product I'm after?" This also can help cut down on emissions by trying to purchase as few long distanced delivered goods as possible. Second, if no local equivalent is available, I ask, "Are there other means for acquiring a similar or equally effective product?" Or, are there more inventive ways to solve the problem? In some ways it is really about trying to adapt a more conservative (conservation) way of thinking, which seems counter intuitive at first, yet forces creative thinking about how to solve a problem with the resources at hand. Also, this creative path for acquiring goods or information can, and most often will, lead to real human-to-human contact reinforcing the authenticity of the experience, and raising its overall value. For me the value of an experience is not necessarily related to our perception of it as a "good" experience or a "bad" experience but the level of influence or change it creates in our personality or lifestyle, but I'll leave that topic for another day.

And thus concludes my thoughts on material acquisition, globalization, Asahi beer girls, and finally economical and ecological thinking in relation to the value of human experience. This was all in about the first block after I had left city hall down route 25, and it wasn't much further when I discovered a small hawk-like bird peering at me from behind a tree that was planted about waist high in an embankment that runs along the sidewalk. I noticed the bird first because the other ALT in our town, Lily, had recently received a book on birds in Japan from her grandfather and we had spent some time looking through it and reading some of the ridiculous names given to birds by people I can only imagine as having been wearing some outfit reminiscent of a English fox hunter's uniform. Second, I noticed the bird because it didn't fly away immediately like I would have expected and then have thought nothing else. But it just did a little hop behind the tree out of my view and I thought, "Huh, that was weird." So I peeked around the tree to get a better look and could see in its wide and frightened eyes that it was injured and was reassured this fact when it tried to hide further and its movement was inhibited by what seemed to be a broken wing. I continued on my path not thinking too much more about it, and mostly concered with the skinny man wearing black jeans and a black shirt walking on the sidewalk opposite my side of the street at a pace suspiciously even with mine, no matter how much I deliberatly walked faster or slowed down. At any rate, I finally arrived at the Family Mart and purchased my Calorie Mate which is really the McGuffin of the whole story since I didn't even really need it, I just wanted an excuse to get out of the office. But walking out of the store I was struck with a sudden thought that I should do something about that bird. It was a beautiful bird and it seemed like the perfect start to an adventure so I made a deal that if the bird was still there on my return trip to the office, I would do something about it. I'll be the first to admit I commited an act of prejudice in regarding the beauty of the bird, as I saw it, as my primary motives for rescuing it. If you don't quite follow me, here is a link to more about environmental aesthetics and how they relate to environmental ethics. Basically, it hits the core question of "Do we only preserve that which is aesthetically pleasing to us as human observers?" Would I have given a shit if the bird had been a crow, or worse yet (haha), a pigeon? Unfortunately, probably not. So lucky for him, he was a good looking bird. As I came to the spot where I saw the bird before, I saw it hopping around and this time I got as close as I could to really observe him and remember what he looked like (I didn't have my phone on me to take a picture) so I could look him up later in Lily's bird book. He had a gray head, and brown body with black spots and yellow around the base of his beak and around his eyes. I say "his" because after I looked him up I discovered him to be a male common kestrel. Because I didn't have any means to help him then and I didn't really know what I would do if I had him, I ran back to the office, and asked my partner in (office) crime to come give me a hand. He talked to some one one in the environmental department about it, then we were off to save the little guy. But when we got back to the spot, but he was gone. We searched around, but there was nothing. So we headed back to the office, I sat back in my chair and resumed the day with no more thought of it, until the phone rang about a half hour later with some one reporting they had seen the bird near the rice field just outside the city hall. So my friend Sasahara and I were up, tore through the halls, down the three flights of stairs and outside where we found two men who had been keeping an eye on the bird and making sure it didn't get hit by any cars. Sasahara had the net and I took the box and we waded out into the muddy rice paddy in our suits and dress shirts. Luckily it had not been raining much recently so the paddy wasn't entirely a mud pit. I distracted the falcon from the front so Sasahara could creep up behind and gently lay the net over the bird. This actually turned out to be way easier than anticipated and once the bird was under the net, it just calmly stayed put. I place the box in front of it, lifted the net a bit and nudged the bird from behind and it naturally ran into the box. From that point the two other men came, took the box, and I would be told it would be taken to the bird hospital in Nakayama. Well, that's how I came to know my friend Calorie as I've named the bird. I hope he's doing well, and also I hope I can get a chance to see him before he's released.