女心ーA Woman's Heart

Curses and hellfire! It seems every time I try and enact my malicious scheme to pollute the glorious journalism of Travelblog.org with uninteresting and uninformative blogs specifically not about travel, some heroic pundit with a silver tongue for epithets places a UN-worthy injunction on my iniquity. If by yogurt-cock, you mean to say that my phallus is white and full of bacteria...that may well be sir, but all I have to say is if you're unsatisfied with the way I represent Tokyo, then perhaps instead of depending on the quality of press on this website, maybe you should...go to Japan yourself sometime? ...Maybe do a little travelblogging of your own? It's easy, here, I'll give you this 7-step guide to writing the "interesting and informative" blogs you crave. However, seeing as I got caught with a spelling error in my response to the criticism of my last entry, I am forced to admit defeat here and shall write a 400 word entry with pictures of a train, what I had for lunch and the gardens around the Emperor's palace, complete with a map of the scenic walk I took to get there.

- -Psyche!! Here's another 4555 word entry about a couple bickering, and deriving my dating-theory with pictures of concrete just to piss everyone off.

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Being outside lightened Soon-Mi's mood immediately. We crossed the tracks east of the station and walked about in the municipal park. This park is amazing for me. I'm 4 for 4 here with a slugging percentage of .667 against left handers. That's only during night games though. We'll see how we match up in broad daylight when can find a good location to take a swing from. I lead her over towards a wooded grove where seniors were playing croquet in the shade. We were there for perhaps 20 minutes talking about Alzheimer's and bug-sex and how stupid people look when they're jogging, before I decided to play ball. Didn't even wait to see where the pitch was. Reminder again, that in Japan we count strikes, balls.
'Soon-Mi, I want you back.'
'...Then why didn't you call?
Call when? Don't swing. That's out of the zone. 'Because I thought you wanted time. I figured you'd call me when you were ready.' 0-1
'I did. I called you the night you were at the bar with Koubaken!'
To yell at me because Koubaken called you a bitch. 'To talk to me about us?'
'Yes.'
'Didn't sound like that to me.'
'Why not?'
'Because you were belligerent, and you didn't ask me a single question.' Overstatement, but got her there. 0-2
'Well- -what about that girl?'
"..." Sh*t. froze me. She's got a mean heater for under-hander. 1-2. '- -I knew that was a mistake from the minute I started- -'
'Then why'd you do it?' Foul ball. 2-2
'...Because. I though you hated me.' Fouled another one off.
'There's no reason to think that!'
'Soon-Mi you called me out to left me on the train. I was crazy. I've been heartbroken for over a week now, and all I wanted to do was get next to you and kiss you again...'
'I'm just having a really hard time believing you, you- -wait. What the hell happened to your eye?' Off topic. High and wide. 2-3
'...I got into a fight last night.' I answered reluctantly.
She sighed in her usual way, letting me know in that passive-aggressive way of hers that she'd given up on me again. This would follow with short series of brisk rhetorical questions before a very heated lecture. I would just keep fouling these off for the most part.
'You shouldn't be getting into fights.' She was saying at some point. 'Why did you do that?'
'He touched my penis, so I punched him.'
She didn't let up an inch. 'Why didn't you try talking first? It could've been by mistake.'
Like her to take the molester's side in an argument instead of mine. 'It didn't feel like a mistake. He grabbed my wang and squeezed it like a tube of toothpaste.'
She didn't like my simile. 'You should've just left. Now you look retarded. That's what you get for fighting.'

I gave up with a shrug and turned away. I didn't want to force the issue. If I kept up she'd probably find out I was drinking. She probably already knew... After a moments she grabbed my chin and turned me towards her so she could examine me. "Itasou... dame yo kenka ha... shaanai naa, anta..." Then she smiled at me for the first time in as long as I could remember. The slowly, she reached outt her hand again and scruffled my hair and flicked my cowlick. "Dasai no ni, kawaikunai to iehen naa." ('Even though you're doofus, I can't say you're not cute...')
Lost me.
I leaned in and planted one on her, square on the lips. Base on balls.

'I love you.' I said. 'I want to stay together while I'm still in Japan, and I want to take you home at the end of summer, I want you to be there waiting when I arrive back in Narita next year.'
"Hontou ni?"

Really?

You're always telling people to live in the now with no regrets, but you yourself Ted Smith, are full of regrets and obsessed with turning everything you've done into listable, laudable sabermetrically-verifiable record for the sake of your own posterity. Keeping track of things: balls, strikes, inside, outside—as if a linescore could tell you about a life lived in the game. If only you could stop worrying for a second about how this is going to look in the morning papers, or how the biographers will commentate on this part hypothetical career not yet hatched. Look at you, you split semantic hairs and go half the distance on either foul-line. Moral enough to feel the pain in your conscience, but not moral enough to stop. So focused on repentance for your crime's of the past, trying to desperately to avoid the same of the future while recognizing your adventurer-heart has something left to prove- -knowing that it's OK to be of two minds, but refusing yourself that refuge when it comes to her. Society's moral codes are not so strict. Why hold yourself to a standard you don't expect of others? You'd not be the last to break her heart, she's young and beautiful and would find someone else to love faster than you can. You won't destroy her. She's stronger than you and you know it, so why worry about her? It's not your responsibility at 21 years old to ensure her happiness for the rest of her mortal life. If you decide you aren't good for her—if you decide she's not good for you...you can always go back later. And you can sidestep the ugly truth and invent the grandest excuses to make it hurt less for her, if not yourself. You own the story.

You like the hurt don't you? It helps you write.




So what to do?

Lie to her.

I knew at that very moment, that the next day I had to spend without her would bring my festering doubt back to haunt me, like a week-old cough after a night of hard drinking. In all honesty, I was being honest. At that moment, with her shy gleaming eyes in front of me I would have stolen, maimed and (providing I already didn't like to person and I had a good contingency plan for avoiding conviction) even killed to hold her naked body next to mine that evening. And then the logical side, making me aware that amount of wisdom I had in my 21 year-old person could give me insight as to how my parent's would take to having her in my home, or how the next tumultuous year in my life would turn out for me. "Long distance relationships are for idiots. It never works out." That was me, every time I had to look at a friend pining over some unknown far away.

But here I was, reinforcing a corrugated-cardboard promise with tinfoil. Do as I say, not as I do. I'm the exception. You know that at least half of what you just said is true, and you know rightly that all of it could be, conditional to how you feel in a month from now- -you felt it before. And sometimes half the truth is all there is, the rest of silence or useless noise. No silver lining for our teenaged coffers. Do what you feel; lie to her.

"Yes."
A school year spent in the corner apartment making parallels between the snowfall and her name; almost full year to the last night that any of us saw her, and the day that we met Soon-Mi, and I had finally re-derived all the formulas: decoded the symbols, redrawn the equation, reconsidered the variables, re-imagined the parameters, reinvented the expression, and came largely to the same conclusion. But instead of feeling depressed or confused, for the first time in a long time, it felt like I was myself again.

I let her go, and she shook her head and said「好きやねん、ださくても。」
(I love you. Even if you're hopelessly lame.)
My reply:「俺も好きやねん。胸ちっちゃくても。」
(I love you too. Even if your breasts are tiny.)

She wound up and beat me in the chest with a closed fist. As I recoiled, she landed another shot on my arm and open-palmed my nose before grabbing my head with both hands and shaking it lovingly with a goofy grin on her face. Got lazy and almost got picked off there. I should be more careful. Sh*t, that hurt...

Soon-Mi said she had to go start setting up, and I had sweat through "that shirt" so I opted to go home quickly and change instead of lounge around campus waiting for the show to start. As she walked me to the trains station, a myriad of worries and great ideas started to spring up in my head. It's about a 20 minute walk from here to her school, alone. That's enough time to change her mind twice over about me and my flimsy promises. If I was serious about getting her back and keeping her (which I was at the moment) I was going to have to do something drastic to prove my love, and the sooner the better. We tried it your way for a while miss Kim, now Imma do it mine.

Most men who are unsuccessful with women, often try to go about changing this by buying a new wardrobe and offering dinner dates or cocktails as casually as possible. If you depend on something as fickle as seasonal fashions that women like, and their daily appetite for food, you'll run out your bank account and your patience and get on base about as often as the Washington Nationals do. There's a saying in Japan, 「秋空と女心」, fallsky and a woman's heart. Things that change quickly. Come September don't expect either to give you a break in your bid to enter playoffs before the winter sets in. Fancy clothes, base-flattery and pricey restaurants never guarantee you anything more than an at-bat. (Although, to be honest, I've never heard of a dinner-date that cost the batter in excess of $150 that didn't end in a home run, but we don't always have that kind of cash at our disposal.) There are plenty of girls who will take the opportunity to eat well at your expense, and pay your suit a compliment so you'll do it again. Some girls will make you think that you need to dress 5th avenue and drop wall-street dime in order to get up to the plate. That's garbage. It's in your head. Don't play their game. Play yours.

It's kind of like when the defense puts a shift on. Just ignore it and focus on playing the game when you usually do. It's like my friend Joe Morgan says,

If you look at this and think 'I'll never get a base hit against this,' you may as well drop your bat and return to the dugout. I always believed that if I hit a solid line drive, it wouldn't be caught no matter how many fielders they stacked against me. Attack this stratagem with confidence. Of course, you can always destroy a shift by dinking a single to the opposite field or bunting, but that's what the opposition wants you to do. They are trying to make yo move away from your strength. Don't fall for it. Take your normal cuts at the plate.
—Baseball for Dummies



Most guys who are new to playing the game take a look at the guys they see as most successful: tall, burly, blonde, designer labels, optional wool-cap, a high-ball in one hand and a bouquet of canned lines in the other—the kind that would make a girl puke if any other man spoke them. Although they despise him out of jealously, they admire the way he's able to do it. Almost effortlessly. So they observe, make notes perhaps. Go out, get tighter jeans, leather shoes (sans laces), maybe a pink-striped Hugo Boss shirt, and hit the scene one night with enough courage to go try and do what he does. Rejection. Rejection. Fake number. What gives? So they conclude that either women are bullsh*t or he's a total dick and nice guys finish last, forever oblivious as to why it works for him, and not for them.

It is effortless for him, that's the thing. If you ask him to try and explain it, you'll get either a load of self-aggrandizement or a vague, unhelpful tip that usually rhymes. If you look at a guy and wonder "what's his appeal?", he probably doesn't have any. Girls find that out, only later. To your dream girl he's that guy from her past that she's always bitching about. The guy that she "thought was amazing" when they first met but later she found out that he was "(only using her/just in it for sex/cheating on her/not serious)" and abandoned her abruptly even though she "gave him everything" and "always did the best that [she] could to keep him happy." If you're also wondering how she "could be so stupid" the answer is probably that despite all our pretensions about civilization and rationality, we're still animals. Women find men like him attractive because before the invention of agriculture, his thick skull and surly build made him a prime candidate for slaying mammoths and fending off saber-tooth tigers. He was cast in the mold of the original alpha-male. The urge to mate with him is programmed into her DNA and released after 3-4 drinks. Don't emulate him. He's an anomaly. By happenstance, he came into possession of the whole package: The set of looks, mannerisms, payroll and voice that convert ordinary sleaziness into charm in the brains of his victims. Next time you're at a bar, take a look around at all the chumps who are a few ingredients short of his mix and expect the same intoxicating effect. You're not going to be him, so don't bother trying. If you wanna be Jeter but you're not Jeter, you'll end up as Chipper Jones. It's that simple. Don't be Chipper Jones. Chipper Jones is a douche.

So how do you win against him when he's got 200, 000 years of human evolution on his side? You have to acquire skills, and build your game around your natural talent. The question you should be asking is not, "what's his appeal?" but "what's mine?" Obviously if you're willing to accept dating advice from some 22-year-old kid on the internet, picking up girls doesn't come naturally to you. But there are certainly things that do. Even the nerdiest, most seemingly uncool and useless talent or cultural knowledge can be an asset to your swing. I've gotten a phone number off a broad after a lengthy conversation about Gundams. I've seen b*tches get picked up by a fat, nearded Tuba player who sports a gaudy bit on "sound and sensuality" and "the sex appeal of bass". It's all how you sell it.

You see, women are in possession of a very complicated and multi-layered emotional mechanism, and there are a variety of unconscious instincts that you can appeal to. The impulse to trust the hunter/guardian is just one of them. She also has a daddy-complex (some more than others), a child-rearing instinct, a self-preservation instinct (which is usually your undoing), but mostly importantly, a functioning ratiocinative cortex that can overpower all of them. Whatever your baseball goals are, be they long term or short term, you are not going to get anywhere if she's not emotionally attracted to you. Nobody has ever crushed a ball out over the fence, or landed a major contract by listing off all the good reasons why it's in her best interest. You can distribute that bulletin among your friends if you need consolation after a strikeout. If you can appeal to her instincts and make that sub-conscious connection at least somewhere, you can convince her to suppress the instincts that are telling her Blondie Big-shoulders over there is a winner, and that you're a lascivious vulture. And yes. I am saying that in order to be successful in this game you are going to have to get inside her head and use her emotions to your advantage. I've told you a million times. Baseball is 90% mental. And I'll explain next how I was about to put this theory to work.


I was on the train home (still Saturday July 19th, 2008) planning my next attack. War, Love, Baseball: the fundamentals of the tactics are all the same. Outthink, outmaneuver, outperform, outlast. I had gambled with a full frontal assault and barely come away with something resembling a victory. The battle, no less the war was not even close to over though. The tying run was on base, the go-ahead run would be was yet to come to the plate. I needed a knockout. At this point, I had no confidence in my rhetoric (something that I'd usually been able to rely upon, even in Japan) and I was saving for my trip—or the still real possibility of buying her a return ticket— so I had no cash to drop. Then failing smooth talking and high rolling, I had to come up with some way of making an assurance of my emotively dredged-up professing and demonstrate enough value in front of her and her friends that neither she or they would be able to talk herself or her out of me. Credibility was the major issue for us. The bottom line was, I was managing this team on borrowed money, and metaphorically speaking, I had two months of bad credit. I needed a win, to get the fans back in the stands and boost revenues to take us past the trade deadline and into the playoffs with a solid lineup. Tonight was do or die. Win, or scrap my current lineup, and start rebuilding for next year. As redoubtable as she looked to strand me on first tonight, I felt in this instance I still had the advantage of surprise. I resolved, right before I got off the train at Hino, that I was going to do something so stupid, so daring and so embarrassing that she would take me back out of pity if she had to. I was going to go straight back to High School Date-Manga tactics.


The week before I left for Japan this time, my mother was harassing me to go buy some new clothes. Initially, I told her that I wasn't planning on attracting a new mate so what was the point. She instructed me that I'd make Soon-Mi happy if I was a good-looking date. Shallow as I deemed that to be, I capitulated and let her dress and accessorize me to her heart's content. I now had at my disposal a variety of mens formal and casual wear which I ambitiously promised myself I'd sport the new digs every day I was out of the house. The minute I stepped off the plane, however, and felt the humidity creep over me like a like a swarm of sweaty insects, I was changed into my gym-shorts and my Seibu Lions T faster than a schoolgirl's panties drop for 東方神起. As the summer got hotter, my nice clothes stayed in the closet more. Even when I bothered trying, apparently I always got it wrong. She thinks I look like an idiot now, I'll show her what an idiot looks like. Because only fools fall in love...

I'll level. I'm no expert on women's psychology, but I do fancy myself somewhat of a critical thinker. I know a lot about myself, and what works for me, which kinds of women are attracted to me and why. Like I said earlier, women have an inborn mechanism to uncontrollably love all things infantile in form. This is why they are willing to devote years of there life to care for those chubby little monstrosities who always hunger, called "babies". This mechanism quite often misfires and triggers to same emotional reaction for kittens, furry rodents, Daniel Radcliffe etc. It largely revolves around this mysterious principle of "cute" that can only be defined in a circular manner. Demonstration of cuteness, even in grown men, can trigger the same instinct and open the pathways to her sympathies and affection. It's possible (depending on nature and nurture) for this instinct to be stronger in some women than others, meaning that if the chemistry is right, she's more likely to go for men who more closely resemble children then, well, men. I believe this is why you occasionally see that odd pair of taller, lean, confident looking woman with a shorter, chubby, bashful husband who has a propensity for inappropriate jokes. He is effectively her oldest child, and she actually finds his immaturity attractive. - -There's usually more going on there. He likely has found in her a proxy mother-figure, whom he can guiltlessly have sex with, and she might even be in possession of some of those testosterone fueled alpha-male instincts to command and conquer. When the psychological peculiarities of these relationships finally surfaces in the consciousness of their members, it will inevitably trigger a mid-life crisis for both parties. I digress.

Soon-Mi's not impressed by the Italian cuts on my suit or my half assed-attempt at Hipsterism, and she wants me to dress-to-impress for her, but she won't tell me how. So what impresses her? I didn't have time to figure it out. But if you can't hit the gyro-ball, don't swing at it. She's not going to show you the strike-out pitch every time. It pays sometimes to do the unexpected and go after that garbage ball, low and away. Think Yogi Berra.

Over the past three years here, I've managed to bat .300 here. My critics would say it's because I'm in Japan and Tokyo-trams go moist for Gaijin. Honestly though, I don't think my appeal is in my whiteness. I'm not tall. I'm skinny. I have a voice that most 4th graders wouldn't turn to with any reverence. I dress like an assh*le, my cowlick is always sticking off the back-right side of my head and I'm always joking about the worst things in life—pretty much the opposite of what most pitchers in the J-league are expecting out of American hitters. Why?



I might not be able to do "sexy" like Yu Darvish, or "manly" like Ken Watanabe, or "charming" like Ichiro, or "responsible" like her Daddy ... But I can sure as hell do "cute".

I slipped into my grey-pinstribe Jinbei and the matching pair of geta—the outfit I bought the day I went to Asakusa with Rie. These clothes are lucky for me. I was wearing them the day that I met Soon-Mi. I lost the black「いろは」 fan (the one that Rie bought me as a goodbye present) in the park when we went to the Yakitori restaurant, and I got her number. I trained it back to Kokubunji, everyone in the car starting at me, and when I arrived at the station, I went straight to the florist and had them arrange a bouquet for me. The plan? Go straight back to what worked for me in the beginning: balls-to-the-wall, goofy, headfirst debonair. I'd waltz into the room in my ridiculous outfit, throw the flowers down on the table in front of her, and say 「会いたかったぜ。」('I missed you baby.') My clothes would make the same statement that I'd been carrying all along without saying: I'm stupid. I dress like an idiot. I love you.



With my Jinbei on my chest, my geta on my feet, a smug grin on my face, insecurity in my heart and a bouquet of yellow roses in hand, I boarded the taxi.

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Special thanks to JayC for sticking up for me in the thread. You're tonight's Fan of the Game.

Batting Stats!!～
At Bats 71
Hits 25
1B 5
2B 4
3B 10
HR 7
BB 5
RBI 20
Struck Out 23
AVG .352

I know I'm not in the best position to be giving clinics when the franchise is slumping like it is, but little tutorials like this can be good for both the players and the kids. These things remind us of the fundamentals that bring us success, and we're hoping that it's just the push I've been needing to finish off the season strong. Big match coming up tonight. I hope the crowd's going to be with me.

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Part of trip: The Summer of Lame

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