Saturday, August 31, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.483

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Cheap clothes are squashed into every closet in my small apartment. I can’t stop buying clothes that are being sold over 70% off, and I can’t throw away my old clothes either, all because I’m too cheap. Lately, more and more online stores have carried a sale and reduced the price by more than 70%. The big price reduction is poured out of a computer and assaults me. As a result, my wardrobe has been getting bigger while there isn’t any more room to store my clothes. It appears that I buy new clothes not because I need them but because I want to get 70% or more off. I pay for the reduced prices not for the clothes themselves and put the cart before the horse, as the saying goes. I love the feeling to have saved a lot of money although I could have saved more money if I didn’t buy in the first place. Whenever I find a rack of clearance items at a boutique in a mall, I walk in straight to the rack and ransack. Clearance clothes are generally what are left unsold because they didn’t attract customers. Unpopular clothes in Japan mean my favorite. Japanese people like dim colors with vague patterns, while I like red and orange with big clear patterns such as flowers. To me, the clearance rack is a collection of treasure. I used to get clothes at a supermarket but now I shop at a boutique, as it has even lower prices. The other day at a boutique, I found a box of free hangers that had a sign saying ‘Take freely’. Without buying anything there, I asked a prim saleswoman if I could take some. “Go right ahead,” she said, but laughing. Her superior attitude made me feel poor. It’s unclear whether or not I improved my social status by shopping at a boutique instead of a supermarket, but I certainly remain lowly either way…

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Saturday, August 24, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.482

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To participate an extracurricular activity at junior high, the students needed to submit the parent’s consent paper. I asked my mother for one since I had decided to join the drama club. When I said that I had chosen an extracurricular activity, she was excited and eager to know which one. She had pictured me in various extracurricular activities and been very interested in my choice. I asked her which one she had wanted for me to choose and she said, “Any activity is fine, except one!” She told me that she had one particular activity she would reject in her mind, but other than that one, she would be willing to agree. “A drama club!” I proudly declared. She was too astounded to speak. Her glow in her eyes quickly vanished and great disappointment replaced it. It seemed I had uttered the exact one she had in her mind. Her particular activity to reject was a drama club. She whimpered, “Why…? Why are you always doing exactly what I want the least?” She couldn’t believe I chose a drama club of all activities. As I asked what was wrong with it, she told me about her schooldays. She had joined every single extracurricular activity of her school, which she was proud because she said she earned large experience by that, while she sounded just a quitter to me. Even then, she said, she excluded the drama club and it was the only activity she didn’t join. According to her, a drama club was a haunt of delinquent students and decent students wouldn’t near it. She refused to sign the parent’s consent paper for me. But she couldn’t change my iron determination and I kept pestering her to sign the paper. A few days later, she was overcome by my persistent, clamorous demand and signed reluctantly. At last, I was no longer an interim member, and now I was supposed to be cool at school as a formal member of the drama club. The thing was, the fact that the star students in the drama club looked ordinary and the activities were boring had spread among other students by then. The fever for the drama club had passed away. On the contrary, they thought only weird students could take sober activities in the drama club. Practicing voice exercises every day as a formal member, I realized this wasn’t the solution to be cool after all. I had to figure out yet another way…

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Saturday, August 17, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.481

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The junior high school I attended had the high school on the same premises. Both students shared most facilities and some extracurricular activities. The school held a welcoming assembly for the first-year students at junior high and freshmen in high school. It was for school’s extracurricular activities to recruit a new member and all activities were introduced on the stage. The main show was a play by the drama club, which was a huge hit. The cast members were the high school students, who performed a dramatic love story so well in glittering dresses. I had never seen a play at a theater before and I was struck by the power of the stage. It was beautiful, glamorous and dreamy. I couldn’t believe this somber Catholic school had a brilliant drama club like that. It was like Hollywood suddenly appeared in my school. Since it was girls’ school, the male parts were played by female students in male attire. They were so handsome and students of the female part were so beautiful. The whole first-year students were fascinated by the play and had kept talking about it in rapture for days after the assembly. The drama club was a joint extracurricular activity of junior high and high school. As I had been searching for the way to be cool at school, I thought I now really found the answer: join the drama club. The club accepted interim members before they joined formally. I took part in an activity as an interim member after class. Almost 100 first-year students were there as the interim members. The senior high school students taught us voice exercises and tongue twisters. Among them I spotted the cast members of the play. Although they had been stars at school, they looked ordinary girls in the school uniform without the costume and makeup. We had practiced voice exercises and tongue twisters for the whole week and almost 100 new comers got down to six. They were just attracted by the glamor of the stage and couldn’t stand steady, inconspicuous everyday training. I was one of the surviving six because I knew there would be long training days before getting on the stage, and also because I believed the drama club was the only hope to become cool. I decided to join it formally…

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Saturday, August 10, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.480

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Since I started junior high, almost every move of mine had invited mockery for a couple of months and I seriously needed to put an end to it. I analyzed the source of mockery. It seemed my unsophisticated looks and my common sense, that had been cultivated in an old-fashioned stingy family living in an out-of-the-way hamlet, were too different from other students’ and that caused ridicule. To stop being laughed, I had to become urbane and cool somehow. One day, a lecture on the school regulations was given by the school morals teacher. He cited two conducts as the most disorderly: to thin a uniform leather bag by pouring hot water in it, and to wear uniform indoor shoes with their ends folded inside. I thought that was it. I found the way to be cool at school. As soon as I came home from school, I poured hot water into my uniform bag in the bathroom while hearing my mother saying to my sister, “Look! She has gone mad at last by going to that weird school every day!” and put the bag under the heavy shelves all night. By the next morning, the leather had shrunk and an illegal thin bag was completed. My fight-back against contempt has begun. I showed up at school dangling the thin bag and stepping on the ends of my indoor shoes with my heels. I was the first one among the first-year students to breach the school rules, and I was thus supposed to be the coolest girl. Oddly though, nothing changed and they treated me the same way as before. I looked at myself carefully and found a big fat vinyl bag beside my thin bag. Because my bag was too thin to hold all necessary stuff for school, I had to put my stuff in my supplementary uniform bag that was filled to bursting as a result. It looked so uncool. The first game plan of my battle failed miserably…

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Saturday, August 3, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.479

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In junior high school, there was an excursion day every six months. All students wore the school uniform every day, but we were allowed to wear plain clothes on an excursion. Although my mother suggested wearing something I already had, I demanded new clothes for the first excursion day in junior high now that I wasn’t in the local elementary school any more but in the privileged school in the city. She reluctantly took me to the local shopping arcade and got me a T-shirt and a denim skirt. I was in a good mood wearing the new clothes on the excursion day, but that good mood dissipated easily at the meeting place even before the excursion started. The school was girls’ school and the students’ plain clothes weren’t plain at all. They were wearing fancy clothes, casual but not inexpensive. I had forgotten the school was privileged and its students were all rich girls. My clothes were plainest, and apparently cheapest. I had never seen other students out of uniform and didn’t know what kind of clothes they would wear for an excursion. I was in a wrong outfit but it was too late. “Is your style some kind of cheap-chic?” a girl mocked my clothes that my mother had thought were costly and had complained repeatedly. I should have bought clothes at a department store in the city not at a mom-and-pop shop in the local arcade. And I also learned that I couldn’t depend on my mother’s sense of money any more…

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