Exploring the Novelty Pash

Yukki told me last week that she is planning to follow me to New Zealand when I leave. I would have been more amused if I was sure she was joking. I told her it was six weeks and she shook her head and said “Shocking ....oh, shocking! Shocking!” She has also begun the passive aggressive threats of a clingy girlfriend during our Skype conversations. The number of crying faces in one message has reached double digits. Last night, I accidently got drunk on sake and danced around my apartment playing ‘Little Bird’ by Annie Lennox on repeat while cooking dinner. On learning this, mainly through the little dancing black man symbol available on Skype, Yukki sent me a beating love heart and this video delight, accompanied by the phrase: “Please...it dances!!!”




I danced alright.

Cryptic messages are perhaps the best part about being adrift in the sea of Japanese speakers. The boy in the tattered grunge jeans whom I ‘novelty pashed’ in Odori Park last week has begun getting in touch. At first, his messages were all in hiragana. When we exchanged numbers, he asked me if “Japanese message ok?” and, being drunk and not really caring, I nodded which was a blatant lie. I can’t read any Japanese at all, except for the kanji for ‘male’ and ‘female’ and useful food things like ‘ramen.’ It’s really all you need.

I ignored the first three kanji messages he sent me and as they continued and the number of exclamation marks grew, I sighed and emailed back a message entirely in English and a kissing face. I think this offended him as he sent me a reply which read: “If it is a kiss it does even times too many” and a picture of what looked like an exloding mushroom cloud. It didn’t seem like a good sign.
However, an hour later, I received another cryptic message. “Do you have wanting do something ???” Confused more than anything else, I chucked him a reply about being in Sapporo for the weekend.

There was no way I could make sense of any of this. Japanese boys are notoriously cautious about treading in the gay pool. The manly baseball players hold hands as they walk to school. The straight ones carry handbags and paint their nails. And this boy, dressed like a Pearl Jam groupie complete with Timberlands, had told us that despite the five second pash we shared, he liked girls. I had tried my best to sway him, blowing my cigarette smoke out in a seductive stream while he awkwardly coughed and grudgingly complimenting his Timberlands. I even told him (through Moraya, my fellow ALT and the only one who could speak bridge the language gap) in a bout of drunken desperation that I back in New Zealand, I was the crown prince and that I had my own castle. His eyes widened but then Moraya, bored with playing the amenable translator, added that my last girlfriend in New Zealand had been a sheep.

And so, were these messages more in the direction on a ‘whats up homie’ or a booty call? Did I even care? Even after being stranded for almost a year in a sexual desert, I just couldn’t see him in the box marked ‘option.’ His teeth were just too wretched to be taken seriously. And yet I kept replying. He kept offering me quotes from The Silence of the Lambs: “If it is a kiss, it does a lot.” “One knows a thing that some should sometimes quiet.” And my personal favourite, which I assume was some attempt at a dinner invitation: “The meal also puts the feedbag on.”

I have come to the conclusion that there is a lot more to the ‘novelty pash’ than people realize. It is the desire to lock lips with someone which, although awkward, embarrassing and frequently regrettable, will leave you with a good story to tell. The ‘novelty pash’ can be ethnic based, religious based, or height based. It can include puppeteers, celebrities, people who look like celebrities, people who work at your local cafe, people you secretly hate, goths, drag queens, break-dancers and angry feminists. You may be repulsed and disgusted, but you force yourself on just so that you can come stumbling into your flat at 3am and scream: “Oh my god I just hooked up with that guy from the library whose head looks like a mop!”

The trouble comes when you try and move your novelty pash to the next level. All too often people attempt to move into onto a ‘novelty date’ stage so as to keep the novelty value alive. Sadly this never works, as the novelty factor dies almost instantly. I believe I have fallen into the novelty pash trap with Mr. Pearl Jam. I have to be strong and tell him that I cannot put my feedbag on and accompany him to dinner. I should really just tick off the ‘straight Asian boy who speaks no English’ box on my pash list and move onto something else.

Sexually confused rabbi perhaps?