14 July 2004

...and never mind that noise you heard

Welllllllll...I guess I am becoming more accustomed to Japanese culture. I had my first taste of something "authentically Japanese" last night--Amanda and I went to a karaoke joint with the Korean students here. From what I can pick up, karaoke has sort of a seedy connotation to it here, as in "some Adventists might find it offensive" in the same way that many SDAs in the US might frown on going to a pool hall. After trying it once myself, I'm not sure I understand. Maybe it started in Tokyo bars with drunken businessmen singing their hearts out until they soiled themselves, but the place we went wasn't a bar at all. The one seedy thing was the smell--people had obviously been smoking in there and the ventilation was obviously not great. But other than that, it was pretty nifty--the place had several rooms, maybe about the size of the living room in my apartment. You go in there with your party and git down. The Korean girls we were with wanted to sing some Korean songs, which was fine, and they actually sounded good. Amanda was all shy about singing but she did well, too. Well, except that every female singer they had there was out of her range. But she did much better than she seemed to think she would. Maybe I'm biased, though.

As for my songs, here's a list of what I did:
Pet Shop Boys--"Go West" (This went pretty well, but it would have been even BETTER if I had the SF Gay Men's Choir backing me up)
The Monkees--"Daydream Believer" and "I'm A Believer" (Amanda sang with me on this one)
Celine Dion--"My Heart Will Go On" (I'm so not kidding about this one--we were ALL supposed to do this, but I ended up singing mostly a solo by the end. I don't even know the stupid song.)
No Doubt--"Don't Speak" (absolutely brutal, 'cause Gwen Stefani's voice is too low for me to sing in a guy's register, so I had to sing it completely in falsetto. It had the group laughing at first, and rolling around in agony by the end.)

I wanted to do "Enter Sandman" by Metallica, but we ran out of time. Also, the image of me bouncing around a small room screaming "It's just the beasts under your bed...in your closet, in your heaaaaaaaaad..." might have sent the Korean girls scattering all the way back to Korea.

Today's the last day of actual classes before summer break. I hope the students study for their tests--that's an issue with some of them. Okay, a LOT of them. We've been talking about ways to get them to study more, but hey, they're college students and what can you really do? Well, we had an extensive review this entire week. If they fail it's their blood on their own heads.