You've made me VERY desperate

When I called my parents on Saturday night, I had had a headache for three days.

Or was it four? The details had become vague and I was cranky. 

A heat wave has engulfed Sapporo for the last two weeks, sending the temperatures into the humid 30s which might have been tolerable if anyone had believed in air conditioning. 

The problem --I complained to my parents-- was that this headache wasn't bad enough to stop me in my tracks, but it was sufficiently painful to make looking at a computer screen or book genuinely difficult. 

While I was deeply glad not to be rolling around in agony, it had become plain that if you took away my laptop and reading material, I had no other interests.

So far that weekend, I had cleaned the main room, bedroom, toilet and shower, brushed the cat six times and played dead on the sofa. In short, I was bored. 

"Well, I think we've run out of our news," my Dad said after we'd been chatting for a while. "And I don't think much of yours."

"I have to whine to you," I responded, matter-of-factly. "I don't have the depth of vocabulary in Japanese to go on about it to anyone else."

"How about going to see a film tomorrow?" Dad suggested. "Cinemas are usually air conditioned and you'd be far away from a large screen, so it shouldn't hurt your eyes."

And that was how I ended up going to see 'The Avengers' on Sunday afternoon.

The arrival of Western blockbusters in Japan varies from that of 'Harry Potter' (released the same day as the rest of the world) to 'The Hunger Games' (still waiting). Both dubbed and subtitled versions are usually shown, so the trick is to: 

(a) recognise the movie title in Japanese

(b) get tickets for the showing with the original sound track.

Western words --which extends to foreign movie titles-- are typically written in katakana; the phonetic script for words not originally Japanese. The majority of these words are originally English but reading them is like walking into a parallel universe in which Samuel Johnson was a crack addict. Fortunately, it's an acquirable skill made easier when presented with a limited list of options... although occasionally, mean tricks can be played such as when 'The Iron Lady' was released in Japan under the title 'Margaret Thatcher'. Fortunately, the 'Avengers' was written as literally as possible:

アベンジャーズ
(or 'abenjaazu' in roman letters: trust me, that's pretty good)

leaving me only to worry about subtitling versus dubbed editions. 

At a 50/50 bet, the odds here were reasonable. Plus, 'Avengers' was a movie with an optional plot: there were special effects, a bunch of familiar looking good guys (none of whom you'd select for your side if the alternative wasn't Armageddon), a bad guy with a magic stick and a cube clearly stolen from the 'Transformers' movie. What more do you need? 

In fact, I picked the correct showing due to a tip from a friend who told me to look for the Chinese character for 'knowledge' when hunting for subtitled movies. The same character is also in 'university' so it's an easy one to spot.  

I also therefore got the rather awesome one-liners from the bad guy, which can't have translated well into Japanese since I seemed to be the only one laughing. Alternatively, I was the only person present who was handling the heat quite that badly.

Mercifully, the cinema was air-conditioned. In fact, the multiplex resembled a cinema anywhere else in the world except that the popcorn and soda options on the concession stand menu were listed in katakana. In typical Japanese style, there was the odd, isolated sign displayed in bare English:

"Theatre 4"

Um. Thanks. 

Due to a love of order, you get to chose your seat at the ticket counter and the plastic cups of soda are more sensibly proportioned than their American counterparts. The number of trailers is also much shorter and you are not allowed into the theatre itself until five minutes before the time shown on the ticket. Still, since you already have a determined seat, there isn't the need to get there early. 

I picked up a coke and examined the movie posters for the other showings that day. There was a mix of the usual Hollywood blockbusters alongside Japanese movies starring brooding hot Samurai warriors. 

Damn.

I need to work on my language skills. 

Open wide

"Open really wide."

There are occasions for which such request would lead to great, likely unbloggable, things. This, however, was not one of them. I inhaled and squinted as light bounced from the mirror being inserted into my mouth. It was the day before I was due to leave for a month in Japan and I was having my first tooth filling. 

This rather ill timed event had been instigated by a conversation with my advisors the previous Friday. They had pointed out that since I would no longer be their postdoc once I officially took up my position in Japan, all my employee benefits would cease. The most important of these, my health coverage, was exempt since Canada's socialized medicine meant that it was tied to my residency and not my employment. This would end with my visa in October. I therefore waved the information away... until it occurred to me I hadn't seen a dentist in about three years. 

Whoops.

The reason I hadn't been to a dentist was because I hated them. All of them. They had drills and needles and scalpels and you couldn't even pretend it wasn't happening because they were RIGHT THERE in your face. Literally. What was more, I hadn't really needed much in the way of said drills, needles and scalpels and therefore I was irrationally scared. And there was really no point in trying to talk me out of that.

Prior to this particular Tuesday, the only time I had needed more than a clean at the dentist was when my top two wisdom teeth were removed. That procedure had been triggered by an infection in one of the teeth and --after a transatlantic flight where I failed to perform the extraction myself with Virgin Atlantic's plastic cutlery-- neutralized all concern regarding drills and needles and scalpels. Plus, each tooth only took two minutes to remove. 

I actually needed two fillings. One was so small that no anesthetic was needed. The other was going to require more work. I shuffled along the corridor at work, expressing my highly legitimate concern to those I met.

"It's not really a drill, it's like a sand paperer." One of my friends assured me.

Clearly this was lies. It was going to be a HUGE PNEUMONIC DRILL probably supported by two other dentists as it was lowered into my mouth. 

.... I'd had all weekend to think about this, can you tell?

It was probably a good thing the dental surgery was only across campus. If it had been further I'd probably have run for the hills and even now be living a life as a toothless hermit in the foothills of the Rockies. They were also extremely kind to me. The dental nurse held my hand while they gave me the injection (I might be 30, but at that moment I felt about three) and after that I couldn't feel anything so it really didn't matter what they were doing. In fact, the hardest thing was to hold my mouth open for half an hour, but the dentist gave me a block to bite down on so I could rest my muscles. 

The anesthetic wore off after a couple of hours and the following day I wasn't able to see or feel where the work had been done. Pretty amazing really. 

Oh and the drill? Totally a sandpaperer. Didn't actually require multiple people to lift it. I knew you were wondering too.