Note: This recollection dates to June 2010, when I traveled to Adelaide, Australia for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop. At the time our school’s governing body, officially Ritsumeikan, but semi-affectionately known around town as “Keichimeikan,” (the cheap school) had begun investing heavily in International Baccalaureate training, and for a brief but memorable stretch I found myself traveling widely across the Asia-Pacific region attending workshops and conferences. Adelaide happened to be the first stop on that circuit.
The encounter described here took place midway through that week. Like many moments that occur while traveling, it was both ordinary and oddly memorable — a short conversation, a near-comic personal embarrassment narrowly avoided, and then a small gap in memory that I still cannot fully explain.
For privacy I refer to the person involved simply as “M.”, and a few identifying details have been softened. The strange behavior of my phone afterward — messages arriving out of sequence and the device occasionally insisting it was in Adelaide or Nagoya — was quite real, though I have never had a satisfying explanation for it.
In Japanese there is a phrase that captures the mood of such moments perfectly: cho fushigi — very mysterious.
Epigraph
Half hours on earth
What are they worth?
I don’t know.
David Berman
I. Adelaide
I was in Adelaide for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop, sometime around June of 2010. In those years our principal had suddenly decided that IB travel was a worthwhile investment, and so for a brief and glorious period I was dispatched all over the Asia-Pacific region like a slightly rumpled educational attaché. Workshops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and, in this case, Adelaide.
The school hosting the workshop was one of those extremely well-appointed Australian private schools — immaculate rugby grounds, manicured lawns, a cafeteria that would have put many universities to shame. The workshop itself was perfectly pleasant. TOK people tend to be reflective types and reasonably good company, though after two days of epistemology everyone is usually ready for a drink.
Which is how, on the second evening, a small group of us ended up at a bar a few minutes from the hotel.
II. M.
At some point the table thinned out until it was just the two of us talking. She was from San Francisco. Let’s call her M.
We were sitting close, leaning in the way people do in bars when the music is slightly too loud and the conversation slightly too interesting to abandon. I told her about my small blog, Classical Sympathies, which at the time was still young and full of ambition. She told me she wrote long travel essays and posted them on Facebook where, she said with a shrug, they had gathered a modest but loyal readership.
Like a complete peon, I offered to host them on my site.
She smiled politely and said she’d probably keep them where they were for now.
Which was entirely reasonable.
The conversation moved on. We started talking about family — fathers, specifically — and the strange emotional weather that tends to gather around that subject. It was one of those unexpectedly intimate bar conversations that sometimes appear between near-strangers and then vanish again.
III. A Minor Emergency
There was, however, a complication.
Let us say that during the course of this conversation Young Mr. Johnson began to make his presence known.
Nothing dramatic. But enough that standing up suddenly would have created a situation. So I employed the classic defensive maneuver familiar to men everywhere: crossed legs, careful posture, strategic angles.
A small but significant crisis was unfolding beneath the table.
Eventually the situation resolved itself through patience and good fortune. When the moment seemed safe, I made my exit with what I hoped was dignity intact. We exchanged Facebook information, said our goodbyes, and I stepped out into the alley behind the bar on the way back to the hotel.
At that moment I felt something close to relief.
By the grace of God, I had narrowly avoided making a spectacular fool of myself.
IV. The Missing Ten Minutes
And then something strange happened.
I remember stepping into the alley.
The next thing I remember is being back in my hotel room.
Fully clothed. Completely sober. The evening still early — maybe ten-thirty, eleven at the latest.
What I did not remember was the ten minutes in between.
No walk back to the hotel. No elevator ride. No keycard in the door.
Just a small, clean gap in the record.
V. The Phone
The truly odd part came later.
For the next year and a half my phone behaved as though it had lost its grip on reality.
Texts appeared months after they had supposedly been sent. Messages from April surfaced in October. Time stamps were wrong. Location data wandered.
Sometimes the phone seemed to believe it was still in Adelaide.
More often it insisted it was in Nagoya, a city I had visited only once for a consulting visit to a school in the hills.
It was never anything dramatic — just enough small glitches to make me raise an eyebrow every now and then.
VI. Cho Fushigi
I never saw M. again.
We remained distant Facebook acquaintances for a while. She became, I believe, an English teacher back in San Francisco. Her essays continued to appear occasionally in the feed, and then eventually they stopped.
The phone eventually sorted itself out as well.
Technology, like memory, tends to repair its own small fractures over time.
Still, every once in a while I think about that short walk down the Adelaide alley and the ten missing minutes afterward.
And the only phrase that really fits is the one the Japanese use for such things.
Cho fushigi.
Very mysterious
Dedication:
For Molly. Thanks for the half hour baby.
Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may enjoy the two essays linked below, both of which take up similar themes or charged, fleeting, and romantic encounters.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 