Mother's Day Ducklings

Last week, we found the duck, nestled in thick bushes on another part of our rooftop. The bird we’d assumed had decided against close human contact and battling two flights of stairs this year, had returned.

Questions regarding the intelligence of that choice aside, we were stuck with a belated discovery and no way to measure an estimated time of arrival of the ducklings. According to Google, we’d learned last year that mallards will lay an egg every one to two days. Once she has laid her entire clutch, the clock to duckling time starts. During this 28-30 day period, we noticed last year that the duck started to line her nest with downy feathers. Approximately 10 hours after hatching, the ducklings are dry and ready to leave the nest for the closest body of water. This year, by the time we found her new nest, the duck had already lined her nest with her feathers. There was no way to estimate when the ducklings were due.

Google will tell you that ducklings normally hatch at night and thus are ready to leave the nest around early morning. I will tell you that in the past two years, this has not been the case.

Last year, my dad, curious about the duck, wandered up to the roof and found a cluster of ducklings huddled in a corner of the rooftop in the late morning. This year, parental concern for children that are neither human, nor mine, had me checking the roof to make sure that the enthusiastic cawing of crows wasn’t related to a duckling lunch.

I was wrong. I saw a tuft of downy, dark brown fur on the stairs and sprinted up to the roof, anticipating a bloodbath. Instead, I found two giant crows eyeing a mallard that was attempting to find cover in a completely exposed area. With her eleven ducklings. I screamed. My currently hard-of-hearing parents didn’t hear me. I screamed again (and again and again) while making large frantic circles with my arms to shoo away the crows.

Once my parents recognized my screaming, our scant, half-joking preparations, consisting of several pieces of cardboard, were speedily produced. Stairs were navigated much more smoothly this time, even with 11 ducklings trailing behind her. Two neighbors we happened to run into took a piece of cardboard each and helped us herd the duck towards water.

We chose to take a side street this time, to avoid the traffic on the main street that the duck had chosen last year. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, and taking side streets meant children.

I have no beef with children. I think most of them are fun and hilarious. Although I have none of my own, I understand that raising children is a feat in itself and that sometimes, even if the parents are both certified saints, they can end up with a kid with a shitty attitude. I don’t blame the child for whatever antisocial behavior results. I just blame the parents.

 And that’s exactly what I did when some 8-year-old shouted at us that we were “SO MEAN” for “CHASING THAT DUCK.” He repeated it before his mother let her uncontrollable child down off of her bicycle and he proceeded to try to get as close to the duck as possible. Another child, a girl of about 10 to 12, did the same, repeatedly running towards the duck. I asked both to stop, to not get too close and frighten her. They looked at me, like they were testing how much they could get away with, while they continued their shitty behavior. Their respective parents did nothing.

Given that my own mother would have had no problem beating me in public if I actually yelled at the kids, I held my tongue. The duck nearly ran past the bridge, terrified of the press of children crowding her. She finally recognized the river and flew down; we helped the ducklings onto the ledge while the human children reached out, desperate to touch a duckling for no reason than to say that they’d done it. After the ducklings were all safely in the river with their mother, the strangers we had collected along the way made small talk about the ducks. Meanwhile, the children and their respective parents vanished, without so much as a disingenuous apology for the trouble.

“Oh, stop, they’re kids, they can’t help themselves,” my mom said later.

“Can’t help themselves? I didn’t act that way when I was their age,” I said.

“Well, just because you didn’t, doesn’t mean-“ she started.

“Oh that’s funny, you know why?” I said, “because you made sure I didn’t.”

“Ok, ok,” my dad interjected. I dropped it because I knew I was right. My mom dropped it because she either knew I was right but didn’t want to be the bitch I’m not afraid to be, or couldn’t believe the heartless asshole I’d become. Either way, she knew, and I knew that she knew, that it could have been a lot worse. That at the very least, she didn’t raise a shitty kid.

[This is a long video but I got a lot more footage this year and felt it would be a shame to make a shorter one. Enjoy!]

Operation Mallard

I recently applied for a job that required a timed cognitive test that was supposed to discern how quickly I could reason and solve problems. “Reason,” in this case was defined as the ability to calculate percentages and add large numbers without a calculator. It was probably not a great idea to aspire to intellectual heights on a random Wednesday, but a delusional sense of optimism won out.

It went relatively badly. Seconds evaporated as I attempted to remember how to add, divide, and multiply. The test told me I wasn’t nearly as smart as I’d hoped.

The uncomfortable amount of stress sweat dampening my armpits affirmed that I probably wouldn’t enjoy a position where I was required to calculate 34% of 620 within five seconds. At the very least, I was now free to work from home and avoid stressful situations.  

Less than twenty-four hours later, I was standing on the second flight of internal stairs leading to our rooftop, surrounded by leaping ducklings running towards a distressed mother honking angrily one flight down. The Internet had informed us that mallards will depart from their nest around sunrise; an earlier morning check had confirmed no ducklings were present. My father went to take a casual look around noon and found six ducklings and their mother stuck in on our enclosed rooftop. Chaos then ensued.

“Get them!” my own mother said, shoving a cardboard box at me.

As I scooped the adorable, fluffy, helpless things into the box, they leapt out of confinement, scattering along the staircase. They ran towards each other, huddled, then tumbled down the remainder of the stairs where their mother was frantically pressing herself against a window looking out to a balcony. Outdoor access was still one more flight down.

The problem with ducks is that they apparently cannot descend stairs. The mother mallard would hop down one step and look back to have her children follow. She would hop down another step, lose her balance, then half fall, half fly down the stairs. The ducklings would rush to follow and launch themselves head over tail.

Once outside, another issue presented itself. The duck went the wrong way. Spooked by a passing truck and admiring pedestrians, she walked in the opposite direction of the nearest body of water. She only agreed to leave after a couple of crows made their appearance in the lower branches of nearby trees. My mother pointed her umbrella at the nearest crow as my aunt and I used our bodies to direct the duck towards water.

Finally on the right path towards the river, we relaxed. Until we noticed that the storm drains situated on the side of the street were just slightly bigger than a duckling. Scrambling together and over each other to keep up with their mother, the ducklings seemed unconcerned with this obvious danger. Three minutes later, two fell in.

Stressful situations are useful in that they show you the character of a person. First, we all gasped. Next, my mother immediately said we had no choice but to leave them. My aunt agreed. The duck stopped in her tracks, realizing that she was two ducklings short. I looked down the storm drain and saw two ducklings staring upwards, chirping for help.

The storm drain wasn’t deep, the bottom was within arm’s reach. I had to try. I inserted my hands into the two slots and pulled. The lid shifted, then rose off the street. Then, to my mother’s horror, I laid down and dived head first into a cloud of mosquitos to scoop up two squirming distressed baby ducks.

I am convinced that ducklings are heart-meltingly adorable to ensure that humans will be less likely to drive over them. We stopped cars whose drivers’ faces lit up at the subjects of our exhausted escort. By now on the main street in my town, couples holding hands, older ladies on bicycles, kids coming home from baseball practice, all stopped to take pictures. It was only several days later that I realized I’d never seen a mother duck strutting along the street with her young, in Tokyo. For about fifteen minutes, we navigated around a parking lot where, at one point, the mother duck hid in some bushes, panting and stressed. It was a convenient hiding place from pedestrians but it didn’t lead to water. My aunt managed to inadvertently get it out of its hiding place by trying to “cool it off” by pouring water on it.

Another 100 meters of public sidewalk populated by too many people, and we were able to push the duck gang into a side street that led straight to the river. With less people on the street, the mother duck seemed to perk up and waddled forwards more confidently. A car slowed behind us and when it finally passed, almost motivated the duck to turn into another, unrelated side street. I blocked it by standing in the middle of its path; it eyed me with frustration before proceeding to the bridge just up ahead.

The Kanda River is the kind of river you’d expect to see in central Tokyo. Greenish-brown, shallow water flows between tall concrete banks. There are shrubs and cherry trees planted on the tops of the concrete banks, but the river itself appears more like a man-made canal contained for the sake of real estate development. You’d never want to swim in it, but it looks like it has enough creepy crawly things inside to keep water fowl well fed.

The duck stopped at the middle of the bridge and looked at the river, almost pleased at the view. Honking again, she launched herself into the air and down to the water. The ducklings looked on, huddling on the edge of the bridge. It was a good ten meters down. As I stood up to get a picture of the ducklings before they forever left us, one leaped over the edge and dropped into the water, immediately bobbing up to the surface like a cork. The others prepared to take the plunge when I saw my mother’s hand shove them off the edge. She would later claim that it was to keep them from returning towards the street. In reality, I think she was just tired of dealing with them.

They swam away, all six ducklings with their mother, down the river. We cheered, our faces red from the heat and sun. Since then, my mother has said she doesn’t want it to come back, that she doesn’t want to worry about another duckling parade again.

 Deep down, though, she totally does. A couple days ago, she asked me where we should keep the trellis guard in the meantime, while we wait for next year. She’s been sharing videos of the ducks with friends and neighbors. As for me, I’d happily welcome this kind of yearly aptitude test. 

[For a video I put together of the adventure, see below!]

Sliding into Self-Sabotage

It’s been quiet around here lately.

With the pandemic still raging – despite the Japanese government’s assurances that everything is really ok, at least until the Olympics are over – I just haven’t been doing much. This means that the most exciting part of my day occurs every morning when my willpower to live gets sucked out from my buttchecks via a stone-cold toilet seat. I do have a warming toilet seat, but like coffee shops in Japan, it doesn’t appear to open for business until the late morning hours. 

That’s not to say that I’ve been doing nothing. As the days have blended into one long slog towards whenever we can physically interact without guilt, work had initially been a great distraction. Working was one activity that I could generally control and use to fill the time that I would otherwise spend over coffee with a friend. “If I can’t hang out with friends, I’ll just work,” I reasoned. I was making – and saving – money; I was being productive. It felt good.

Until it didn’t. The continued, year-long discouragement of social interaction translated into a self-imposed obligation to work all the time. On weekends, presented with more free time than I would have liked and hobbies that required thought, I chose to either work or stare blankly at my computer. I burnt myself out about four months ago but dealt with it by stuffing down feelings of guilt and stress with cookies and carbs. I clung to work because it seemed like the one thing that didn’t feel so fruitless. The general sense of loss of control was extrapolated in my mind to a complete loss of control over my circumstances. “Jesus, take the wheel,” my self-control said, and self-sabotage jumped into the driver’s seat.

Rather than enjoying my workouts, eating food that my GI system wouldn’t hate, or doing things that would keep me relatively sane, I either did nothing, ate junk food, or both. While I reasoned that the predictable weight gain had saved me the purchase of a weighted vest or a dip belt for pull ups, there was also the somber reality that my bottom half has become markedly heavier. And bigger. Cellulite, my personal red flag of weight gain I’m going to regret if I keep eating, has seemingly taken up permanent residence on my thighs. With one more thing to worry about, I ate more in response.

“But, the pandemic,” I’d say around a mouthful of donuts, when presented with the mental reminder that this wasn’t actually helping me in the long run. Besides, hadn’t my therapist advised me to “turn off” once in a while?

I understand that my behavior and logic – or lack thereof – requires a special blindness to accountability. The constant self-sabotage has essentially been a muted temper tantrum where I displaced the blame for my own actions because self-care is the harder thing to do. Instead of “turning off” from work, I checked myself out of all responsibility.

But like that one person who uses a second cousin’s in-law’s distant relative’s tragedy to garner sympathy, it’s a stretch to continue to use the pandemic as an excuse to be shitty to myself. Self-care and disconnecting can be exhausting and expensive (I’ve spent more money than I’d like to admit on books in the last two months) but at the very least, my eyebrows look better for it.

As usual, progress hasn’t been perfect. A key takeaway from this most recent period of self-sabotage has been that they really shouldn’t trust me to portion out chocolate bars. (When the entire thing is wrapped in one foil packet, do they really expect me to take some and put the rest back? And have you noticed how the foil is always very thin and rips, thus forcing you to take another portion…? And then another…and another…?) More important ones have been that I haven’t lost control of my entire life, that devouring books instead of chocolate is more effective when I need to get out of my own head, and that the urge to mindlessly snack indicates a need to de-stress.

 Which is to say, I’ll probably be busier going forward, but hopefully, I’ll be a less stressed person for it.

Tokyo in a Time of Corona

“Put on a mask before you go out,” my mother insisted, “people are getting punched in the face for not wearing one.”

I paused at the front door, about to argue that punching someone in the face seemed like a good way to get a viral disease, or least a bad bacterial infection, and that in the unlikely event that an unusually aggressive Japanese person punched me, that I’d just spit in the person’s face with my mono saliva. Instead, I put on the flimsy mask that was a little too small for me, resulting in large gaps on the sides. I braced myself for the discomfort of feeling my breath condense onto my face for the next few hours.

Tokyo has been a strange place recently, made even stranger by the global panic that hadn’t seemed to affect this particularly densely populated city until approximately 48 hours ago. While entire countries went on lockdown, Japan seemed to be doing what Japan does best: pretending that what’s actually happening, isn’t. That’s not to say nothing changed: cafes and stores were emptier on weekends, my local grocery store now has a limit per person on certain products, and bakeries started to individual wrap their breads and pastries. This raised the question of how many people’s saliva I had been consuming with my chocolate croissants until this point in time.

Yet, while Covid-19 ravaged the rest of the world, Japan’s number of cases had stayed at suspiciously low numbers, most likely due to the delusionary dreams of holding the Olympics sometime in 2020. Once that dream was finally killed off by Norway, Canada, New Zealand, and the fact that large numbers of people around the world were dying, a measured panic has ensued. We have currently been advised by the mayor of Tokyo to try to stay in this weekend.

It’s stupid. It’s stupid and frustrating that the politics and projected financial loss of the Olympics has discouraged a policy of more stringent social distancing here in Japan. Even with the large number of seniors that make up the Japanese population, bars, restaurants, and gyms remain open and people commute to work in crowded trains as usual. They just have more masks on now.

It’s also scary, made more frightening by the fact that governments are not incentivized to be transparent with information about the spread of the disease. But if the grocery store shelves becoming bare the night of the mayoral weekend semi-lockdown announcement are any indication, it seems people are concerned, and that’s comforting. Because we all should be a little more worried than they tell us to be.

Working virtually means my daytime routine hasn’t changed much; but as I live with my relatively elderly parents, one which has a lung condition, I’ve stopped going to the gym and have been refraining from regular social interaction since I survived mono. A week or so ago, caving to the basic human need to interact with someone not my parents, it resulted in a fit of first-world isolation anxiety. I began to ruminate on how deep my depression could go in these Covid-19 times and preemptively panicked because there was no way calculate the time I had left until my sanity unraveled. Would it be weeks, or days? I wondered. I half-heartedly started to flip through one of the piles of used, cut-up magazines on my floor with the hope of retiring a few to the recycling bin. An image caught my eye and brought back fond memories. The background blur of an ad sparked an idea.

The thing that’s easy to forget is that isolation doesn’t put your life on hold. It doesn’t make you any less expressive or creative; instead, it provides the unexpected gift of more time. It’s a time to create, learn a new skill, take online classes, or simply find a hobby. Because based on age and pre-existing medical conditions, even if chances are you low you won’t die from Covid-19 if you go out, you might spread it, and ultimately, someone else might.

So be safe everyone, and kind, and remember to wash those hands

Get me to the Greek: Weighlitfting at Uesaka

A short distance from Tokyo Skytree, in a neighborhood full of manufacturers, there’s a small, fairly unremarkable factory. To the unfamiliar, it would most likely look strange and curious. To those who those who lift weights over their heads for fun, however, the facility produces the best weightlifting equipment in the world.

Uesaka is a mecca quietly churning out barbells, plates, weightlifting blocks, dumbbells, and weightlifting belts in the center of downtown Tokyo.

Earlier this month, I packed my gear and shoes and headed there, almost missing the small metal door next to the announcements of past Olympic sponsorship on the windows. I reached out a hand to knock when the door was opened by a large Greek hand. I was at Uesaka and I was there to lift with a former member of the Greek national weightlifting team.

By lucky chance, I’d virtually met Anastasios, an employee at Uesaka and a weightlifting coach at another Tokyo area CrossFit box, a couple years prior. Brought closer by our mutual love for weightlifting and intolerance for bullshit, we’d built an Internet friendship over the years with promises of meeting up peppered between discussions of dream/next tattoos and box gossip. It never quite happened until a few weeks ago, after approximately a month of dreading going to the gym and losing the confidence to lift anything over 25kg.

You know how they say knowledge is power? What they don’t tell you is that that adage is only true after you get your self-confidence crushed by said knowledge. Unfortunately, I am currently in possession of enough information to understand that my lifting form is awful. Despite constant tweaks and frustrated form practice, nothing appeared to be working. I interpreted this to mean that I would be doomed to forever lift with the kind of form that makes people visibly wince. It was completely demoralizing.

But on a custom lifting platform located in a small room off the main Uesaka factory, surrounded by custom lifting plates, I lifted for the first time this year without a knot of anxiety and fear in my chest. As I flung around the bare barbell, Anastasios made me sit down after three reps (“Sit! Rest!”) and groaned in horror when I described my squat routine which requires a total of 60 reps. We discussed our aversion to cardio, Instagram lifters, and the split jerk.

“You’re not as bad as you think,” he said after watching me fling the bar away from me during every snatch attempt.

“But, I don’t know,” I said, “maybe weightlifting…it’s just not for me. I used to be so excited about it and now I’m crying after every class.”

“You’re just in a bad situation,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the brand new Uesaka barbell in my hands, “yeah.”

After another hour of hanging out, which included a tour of the half-darkened Uesaka factory, we packed up and walked to the subway station. For once, on the walk to a subway station after a weightlifting session, I wasn’t trying to keep my shit together until I parted ways with whomever I was with so I could wallow in my self-pity. I actually felt kind of excited to learn more.

As they say, knowledge is power.

Remembering to Forget with Adam Hansen

“I don’t remember the negative parts of a relationship,” he said.

“Aren’t we supposed to remember stuff that hurts us?”

He looked at me.

“Like, for human survival?”

I searched his face for affirmation as I imagined some ancient version of him attempting to survive in the wilderness: repeatedly running through thorn bushes, trying to touch fire, getting nearly stomped to death by a mammoth. I sighed and looked at him, his face by then overtaken by a big, bright smile, apparently oblivious to the pain of past heartbreak.

Normally, I’d suggest therapy for the self-flagellation, but I suspect it’s what makes him a world-record-holding, WorldTour cyclist. I shook my head in exasperation and took another bite of one of Adam’s sweet potato wedges: crispy sheaths of gooey potato served with a generous sprinkle of lavender salt. It was June and we were at Elle Café, where there is an entire page of vegan nibbles, snacking on those fries before diving into tall glasses full of mango and melon and soy whipped cream. We’d just finished off bowls of vegan ramen at Afuri.

To be fair, Adam suffers from the kind of generosity and masochism that has lost wars. It’s most likely benefited him as a super domestique but has also meant that he has remained – certainly to his detriment – a close friend throughout my multiple meltdowns. His phone has been the recipient of all of my life dramas: family feuds, heartbreak, underemployment. Over the years, I’ve sent book-length emails weeping over people I’d largely forget by the time I saw Adam next, been the sole member of the entourage who tags along to professional engagements as if I belong there, and once got so mad I called him a shithead. He still messages me to tell me he’s in town, makes time to catch up in person, and passes on all the pro peloton gossip.

It’s conduct worthy of a Purple Heart – or whatever the Australian equivalent is (a lifetime supply of ANZAC cookies?) – and was most recently repeated a few weeks ago. He was in town for work related to Leomo; I was nursing the sting of a failed non-relationship. The timing, for me, was perfect.

Over almost-scone-like vegan pancakes at Ain Soph. Ginza, vegan burgers and tiramisu at Ain Soph Ripple, and cups of coffee consumed around the city, Adam told me about the usual: plans for next season and overextending himself by taking on way too much in his brief off-season. In return, I related my most recent misadventures as a super domestique of life: bending over backwards to try to make relationships work and the unfortunate realization of being the only person doing CPR on dying conversations on Tinder.

It’s not like life couldn’t be worse; I can think of several ways, off the top of my head, how it could be. But it’s not exactly made better by my tendency to bring a deliberately honed capacity to endure pain and bullshit for extended periods of time from a sport I used to love into every other area of my life. Unfortunately, I have discovered that there is no tangible reward or cardiovascular benefit to blowing myself up for someone else, lending a wheel when I don’t have to, and falling on swords. It’s actually just exhausting.

“Adam,” I’d said over those pancakes, “I’m tired.”

As the only cyclist to have completed 20 Grand Tours in a row, and one prone to play domestique on and off the bike, I’ve often asked Adam’s phone how he keeps going. He’s never really given a clear answer other than vague encouragement to be more positive. This doesn’t answer my question, I’d thought, but assumed that it was due to some misunderstanding, on his end, of course, from spending too much time in an eastern European country where the English language is apparently scarce.

It never dawned on me that he simply forgot about all the bad stuff. When he divulged this information to me back in June, I was appalled and concerned. Voluntary, selective memory loss seems like a terrible way to avoid future hurt and heartbreak. In fact, that is absolutely the kind of altruism that has led to my texting exes and watching my emotional well-being burn to the ground with the match in my hand.

In the intervening months, I’ve realized that what Adam was referring to wasn’t the stupidity to repeat past mistakes but rather the indefatigable conviction that someone else’s emotional turmoil – and the pain that may have caused him – weren’t going to affect his future choices. It’s a weird yet refreshing optimism that can be misconstrued as naïve or foolish, but in practice requires the healthy ability to remain open and vulnerable no matter how bad the prognosis for lasting love may be.

“So how do you not go back to some awful ex?” I’d asked, just as food was served and our conversation moved on to more important things like vegan omelets. I answered my own question later on, when Adam pressed me to message a super cute Australian guy who had started following me a few months prior.  

“He looks like he’s in his mid-twenties,” I’d said.

“Just message him,” Adam had said, “I dated a girl who was ten years younger than me once.”

“Yeah,” I’d said, “and if you forgot what that was like, let me remind you because I remember.”

He laughed a little and I rolled my eyes again. But I suppose that’s the secret: to choose friends who will remember your heartbreak so you don’t have to, and to hope that when the time comes, they’ll keep you from running into thorn bushes, touching fire, or torching yourself with an ex.