Throw Down a Yo-Yo and Memories Come Back Up

It isn’t often that you are reminded of your yo-yoing past. Playing with a yo-yo is one of those things that you easily forgot you did until you are reminded that, yes, you too once practiced a completely useless skill for hours until you could look cool for your elementary school peers. Reminding me of all of that was this video, posted on the page of a Facebook friend.

The guy is obviously a sham who has no skills in yo-yoing whatsoever, but at least he tries. And he got on TV, which is more than my yo-yoing ever got me.

I bought my first yo-yo when I was in third grade, a scrawny little white kid in a suburban Japanese elementary school. Yo-yos were the hot new toy in Japanese youth culture, with the accompanying TV shows and manga series and how-to books that come with every new marketing scheme. Mine was a purple and black Yomega Steal

th Fire, a wing-shaped yo-yo good for doing string tricks but lame if you wanted to do any serious looping. Soon I added a glow-in-the-dark Duncan and a Yomega Stealth Brain (the type that automatically retracts after a certain time) to the stable. These were all pretty cheap yo-yos, with solid bodies and plastic bearings. With lots of practice I could soon do all of the beginner tricks, almost all of the intermediate tricks, and a few advanced tricks. I was still behind my best friend, though, who could ‘yo’ like nobody’s business.

Despite my relative ineptitude I kept up yo-yoing until seventh grade, when it was just not cool to do that kinda stuff anymore. The year before I had bought a Yomega RB2 that had a metallic ball-bearing axle - a huge step up from the plastic ones. I could throw that yo-yo down like a crazy man and have it spinning harder than a cordless drill in the hands of Michael J. Fox. It unlocked a few more advanced tricks for me, but soon ended up in a box in the closet.

I still have that yo-yo and know where it is, now ten years later. I can still do some of the tricks - tricks that I couldn’t teach anyone else but can still do because my hands move automatically from the countless hours of practice. I pick the RB2 up once in a while because it’s a fun reminder of childhood. Playing with a yo-yo was something I genuinely enjoyed doing, regardless of how useless a skill it was. That’s still all it is - a fun diversion - and certainly not a way to get infamous on Wisconsin local television.

_DZ

The Fleeting Value of Professional Sports When Viewed Through The Lens of a Traveller

As a kid, I was a huge sports fan. I watched sports whenever possible, played sports, and talked sports to whoever would listen. During my kindergarten and early elementary years I liked Japanese baseball, and followed teams like the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, Orix Bluewave, Seibu Lions, and Kintetsu Buffaloes with enthusiasm. Unlike in American sports, where a city or state owns a team, Japanese sports are sponsored by companies - the Yomiuri is a major newspaper, Orix is a financial firm, and Kintetsu and Seibu are both railway conglomerates. Sumo was another favorite sport, and for the first two weeks of every other month my family and I would crowd around the TV during the 5-6pm hour to watch the great wrestlers duke it out with one another. Participation in soccer during my later elementary years paved the way for interest in the Japanese soccer league, or J.League for short. Favorite teams included the Yokohama Marinos, Kawasaki Verdy, and Kashima Antlers. Sometimes my private soccer club would play the elementary prep teams of these clubs, who were always formidable opponents.

During this time I also followed American basketball with a passion, the Chicago Bulls being my favorite team to follow. Every morning I would tear through the newspaper to find the sports section and read up on the happenings in the NBA, halfway across the world. If the paper happened to run a picture of MJ, it was a glorious day for my scrapbook.

Card-collecting was another way I was in-touch with sports. I collected baseball, basketball, and occasionally football cards throughout elementary, but only basketball card collection continued throughout middle school. Basketball cards were a way for me to stay close to my American roots, and I took great pride in my collection. A far as I knew, the Japanese card-trading scene was non-existent, and I saw trading cards as a uniquely American thing.

Interest in following sports slowly waned beginning in high school. I still played sports, but just didn’t care about sports as a whole as much. I had other interests, I guess, like music, cars, and computer games. I went to see the occasional game, but as far as memorizing stats and removing newspaper articles, that had ceased.

I had a brief love affair with European football (Arsenal woo!) in the past few years, but for the most part I have avoided following sports too closely. This year I tried to follow the international Formula-1 racing circuit, but lost interest half-way through June.

All this to say, really, that the more I think about it the more I can’t help but opine that following sports with enthusiasm is merely a construct of increased proximity - a mild form of nationalism, as it were. Right now I live in Minnesota, whose Vikings are 9-1. I don’t really care about the Vikings, yet find myself caught up in all the excitement over their new-found success. Come Monday I inevitably wander over to NFL.com to see how they fared the previous weekend. ‘They’re in MY city, and them doing well reflects well on me,’ I poorly rationalize. Why should I care?

If passionately following sports is indeed a mild form of nationalism, then it all seems very silly to me, a third-culture kid. I’ve seen kids crazy about J.League, teens going nuts over the NBA, college kids raving about their favorite English footy team, and adults getting uproariously drunk and high-fiving over a touchdown against those worthless Packers. It’s all the same everywhere. And what difference does caring about sports make, if indeed you’re only excited about the sport because of it’s proximity to your residence? When you move a lot, like I have, it becomes rather tiring to have to start all over again with a new sport or team to match each new city. Teams win, teams lose, and over the long run it seems pretty pointless and of fugitive disposition to get excited over the present state of a team. Equally useless is reminiscing over how good your football team was ‘back in the day’ (pre-2000 for Detroit. Zing.) Are there not better things to spend time on?

Obsessing over a sports team is revealed to be the hollow joy that it is when you confront it a set of eyes that have spent time examining it’s evanescent qualities regardless of the home culture. The only logical choice to make is to either follow sports passionately wherever you are, which quickly becomes exhausting, or to disregard sports almost entirely, by which you risk potential alienation at the water cooler. This is not to say that following sports is bad; sports, all sports, are exciting, electrifying, and, hopefully, God-honoring. But you don't need to follow any kind of team to enjoy it. I simply think that knowing beyond the simple “Yeah the Vikes played Seattle last weekend and won” is not worth it. It is simply too broad a world out there to narrowly focus on one little corner .



_DZ

The Three Dragons

I sighed as I walked into my bathroom. It had been a long day at the mahjong tables. I had spent all afternoon pon-ing, kan-ing, chii-ing and ron-ing, and had returned home with five dollars less than I had upon departure. But I didn't mind. On the contrary, I had walked home with a beaming smile on my face, ecstatic that eight hours of continuously fantastic competition had only cost me five dollars. Mahjong was such a joy to play. The four of us with our green polo shirts and jeans, chain smoking cheap cigarettes while busy strategically arranging out hands, yelping at victory and groaning at defeat. Such was the game that united blue and white-collar workers alike under one roof at the local YMCA. Yes, it had been a good day indeed!

I stripped off my clothes and stepped into the shower. The steam engulfed me as the hot water streamed over my body. I quickly rubbed myself down and reached for the shampoo. A red dot suddenly appeared on my forearm, and another on my foot. Another burst forth onto my hand, and one more came after that. They kept appearing; another and then another and another, following one anther in a regimented sequence. I smiled and turned my face into the shower stream. My nose was bleeding. I poured shampoo into my hand and went about washing my hair. I let my hands down after a good lather and let the fluffy foam coating them absorb the rogue blood droplets. The crimson soon calmed to a rosy pink and was washed away, its anger assuaged. As I soaped up, more droplets, their impish aura about them, rocketed past my ankles onto the tile, where upon impact they burst into ghosts and chased each other down the drain, their solace to be found in perpetual gridlock with one another amid the copper labyrinth of the underground. I continued my routine. They were no threat to me. These beads of blood, these excited erythrocytes, had long since become something of a neighbor rather than a distant visitor. They came and went as they pleased. And just as one with a visitor must be chained to the entertain in the living room, so I had to be wary of my guests until they left. They bothered me for but a little while, and then, just as abruptly as they came, they were gone. I turned off the water and stepped out of the tub. I dried, dressed, and traipsed off to bed.

All this socializing had tired me out, and it was time to climb into my clean white sheets and dream of rounds in which I could collect nine or more Dragon tiles.

Waterloo, IA, '08

The highlight of hanging out in Waterloo was spending all of Wednesday participating in flood cleanup with Samaritans Purse Disaster Relief. We set out at 7:30 am and were home by 6pm. The majority of the day (all but about an hour) was spent at this little house. I cut and removed drywall from the first floor until lunch, and the entire afternoon was spent washing and bleaching the walls of the basement, upon which quite a bit of sediment had built. The day ended with myself and two others removing soaked insulation and cleaning mica and gravel sediment out of a cubby hole.
The view of most of the appliances removed.
The sediment and insulation we removed.
My buddy Steve and I after a hard days work.
Another highlight of my stop was rediscovering Lite-Brite. Originally selling for $6.99 (without lightbulb), this is one of those toys that always seemed a staple at any host family's house at which I stayed while traveling during my early elementary years.
This is apparently supposed to look like Mr. Potatohead, the policeman.

I also went put-putting at 9pm one evening with Steve, who trounced me.

On to Des Moines!