go and beat your crazy head against the sky

"Why do we hurtle ourselves through every inch of time and space?" - Indigo Girls, "Get Out the Map"

About a month before my last day at work for the newspaper, I interviewed an exchange student who was going home (to Japan, coincidentally) after a year studying and living in the United States. The hardest thing about coming to America was leaving her friends in Japan; the hardest about going home was leaving behind friends she had made here, she said.

'Why,' I wondered as I wrote the story and thought about my own experiences - to Japan, to Oregon, to DC so briefly - 'do we do this to ourselves? Why do we rip ourselves away from a place that's familar, with people we know (and most often people we care about a lot) to settle somewhere else, another temporary resting point?' There are good (and obvious) answers - you can't see new things or meet new people or even fully appreciate where you've come from if you don't do something new. In DC, Dameon said that his mother always classified the early and mid-20s as a time in life that is defined by being far away from people one cares about. But why, why, why? Why do we do something when we know it will be so hard?

I've now officially been in Japan a week. I've tried all sorts of food, went sliding down a grass-covered hill (on purpose), climbed (part of - a very small part of) a mountain to see a panarama of Ishinomaki. (At the top of the mountain were miniature monuments with coins in a bowl. The inscriptions on the monuments were ways to honor the earth, TK said.) What's amazing is how much fun it can be to communicate with someone through a language barrier - what a thrill (and relief) it is to recognize a common word, how you can both smile and laugh when you pass along an electronic translator that has just one adjective typed in. Communication becomes so much more light-hearted and consequently the world seems lighter and easier. One of the best parts of this last week was at TK and Shigeko's home last Saturday night. TK's two daughters were there, as was his mother and Adrian and myself. Adrian and I don't speak any Japanese (aside from a stray phrase or food word.) TK and Shigeko speak a lot of English; Keiko a little; and Kyoko and TK's mother hardly any at all. Thanks entirely to TK and Shigego, we were able to communicate at dinner - We had an indoor barbeque with squash and squid and octopus and salmon and onion and more. After dinner and dessert, we went outside to light sparkler - so simple but so much fun. Just sitting in their driveway, laughing about each other's tricks with the miniature explosives. So innocent and so much fun and so uncomplicated with pretensions. At Ai's house (the school secretary whose home I have stayed at for the last several nights), her mother put on I Love Lucy after breakfast Monday morning - it was the first episode I'd ever seen actually, where Lucy and Ricky are in Hollywood and she sees one of her favorite actors at the next table - and it was just so much fun to sit and laugh together at something we could both understand (the scene had almost no dialogue).

Also, teaching is not easy.