Hi Wyndham! I'm Andre and I'm your penpal in Japan! I'm on a bus in Japan, at the end of the day—or, as they call it chez toi, "five in the morning"! Things, I might've mentioned, are a bit tiring here, but they're pretty good, all'n-all, I s'pose. What about you, Wyndham? Windy City Gal? Wyndemonium? Jean-Claude Wyn Dhamme? On a scale of 1 to classy, how're you keeping it? There's another California girl here in Kobe who reminds me a lot of you. In fact, I think she might become you in the future, by absorbing your thoughts and memories from your brain directly. I mean, she seems pretty normal when you meet her, but then you're like, there's something in that girl's eyes like she would totally absorb a person's memories. Food for thought.
Wyndham come see Japan! Toronto is for d-bags. No, no, I don't mean that—not the second part, anyway. Toronto is the Capitol of Wonderfol. It is the stuff from which bedtime stories are made, and I shivered just now, half from nostalgia and half from the memory of what it feels like to be cold.
Yeah the weather is not so fantastic here because it is really hot, forever. Did your first winter in Toronto suck or are those things I hear about how people from Davis are wusses just stories? Japanese people are huge wusses about cold. Anyway you have to wear two layers here or else you'll sweat through your shirt. Hooray for details, right? But hey I do an armful of laundry in my tiny washing machine every day and I live in a building where everyone has a clothesline on their balcony, including me, and every time I'm out there I want to have shouty conversations with the neighborhood, or call someone below to come up for dinner. If I had a partner in balcony-shoutery we could both pretend we were speaking Italian like in the Lower-East Side in movies. We could ham it up and everyone would think we were actual people from Italy. They warned us when we came here that most people would see us as representatives of our home countries and assume that Canadians always act like we do, so obviously the real fun is stereotype-bombing other nations and ethnicities. Australia's stock in Japan has come way down since August, all's I'm saying.
Bus ride's over gotta go catch a train. Train ride's over, at home now gotta eat a bag of ikafry [PS: Ikafry are chips so delicious they make unicorns themselves drool with joy]. Chips all eaten now, writing you more. Yeah, I started writing on an iPhone, gonna finish on a laptop. Time passes like crazy here! I can't believe it's almost three months since I left. Holy shit, it just got completely dark in five minutes. It went straight from afternooney orangey-purplish glow to black just now while I was in the kitchen eating my amazing goddamn chips. Yikes. Yeah, I am thinking about time a bit here right now.
Wyndham, I'm not gonna lie to you, time is at a premium for me, and space is kind of expensive, too, so I want you to write me back about the two BEST and WORST things in your life over the past three months. Or, the two MOST NORMAL things in your life, but you have to write those like they're really exciting if you accept that challenge.
What keeps time rolling by is that what I do is is basically to teach for about four hours a day, plan for four, read and write for two each, do the cooking, and listen to like eight hours of Mountain Goats, everyday, all of which works because many of those things can get done at the same time. I heard that the Mountain Goats made fun of you when you interviewed him. That is pretty funny, but if I laugh, it's with love, which is more than I can say about a certain Goats to whom I'm currently listening. If you ever second-time interview him, you should ask him only very personal questions. It could be a thing of yours: Wyndham's personal questions for questionable persons. You already start most of your conversations with "how's your sex life," so'd it'd be a cinch.
Now I'm disappearing back into the Internet! Goodbye! Should you write me a letter right now? Should you wait till tomorrow and see whether you even still want to? Maybe you should just compose a response and only tell it to a single stranger at a bus stop, trusting it to reach me through word of mouth! Life is full of big and little choices, but it's the ones we don't make that come back to haunt us!
I haven't high-fived anyone above the age of thirteen in three damn months,
- André
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(the photos look excellent btw. in fact i think the varsity should run a couple of these letters.)
and to conclude, of course kids should be able to read what they want or they wont want to read. what is this guy a jackass?? when i was a child in grade 2 i wanted to read goosebumps to satisfy my reading assignments. i genuinely loved those books and while they had predictable plot lines and cheesy dialogue, i found them challenging enough because, well, i was 8. my teacher, on the other hand, decided that since i was showing such a nice bourgeoning (sp?) interest in literature, decided to assign me the secret of the rats of nimh, which made me very mad and i basically stopped reading and turned to the dark side of video games and tv until i was a bit older.
ps - i am working on the speech right now.