everybody's laughing, everybody's happy

there are days when one wills the sunshine to make them feel better. (as in, 'i'm feeling bad. i'm going to go out for a walk.' or 'i'm going to go and listen to grateful dead songs in the sun.')

today i wasn't even trying.

((north korea is threatening war (the 11:30 p.m. news cast tonight opened with an ominous minor chord on piano followed by shots of official-looking documents and the high-pitched feverish notes of violins), the top story here is that some Japanese authorities have warned police to be ready for a terrorist attack (nuclear or otherwise) from North Korea, i can't figure out how to get to here to see the leaves before they fall and i'm worried that i won't be able to get leaves from a japanese maple tree or fully experience autumn here, i don't know how to read the recycling schedule and thus the old television that stopped working almost a month ago is still sitting in the apartment, no matter how hard i try a year will likely not be enough time to be able to read magazines or books or billboards and thus won't be able to fully understand or appreicate life here, i don't know what in the world am i going to do after this year, i still am no closer to understanding how to control the genki students and i think tk is losing patience with me, what in the world am i going to do after this year, i've only written to grandma once, i've only written to donna once, there's so many unanswered emails, i don't know if i made eye contact enough with the girl in the wheelchair when i saw one of my students this weekend, what am i going to do next and why am i worrying about it so much when this is supposed to be my year to relax, what if can't be the person i really want to be - the proverbial "wine taste on a beer budget," as dad says - i worry that i'm wasteful, i'm vain, i'm lazy, i'm foolish, i'm not as artistic or creative or compassionate or kind or thoughtful as i need to be to do what i want to do in this life, i worry that worry so much - stop worrying so much - there's a week-old stack of dishes to be washed in the sink, i don't really know that much about paul simon and art garfunkel outside of their music even though i consider myself a simon and garfunkel fan, and so on and so on... ... ...))

and then, today walking to the grocery and then riding to work - in the beautiful japanese autumn - i wasn't even thinking about or expecting or even particularly wanting to borrow happiness from the sun when i walked down the steps and hit the Ishinomaki street. but there it was, suddenly and unexpected: just a wish that i had a few more blocks to ride, or a few more hours so i could curl up like a cat on the floor and sleep in the sun. life, life must be inherently good if one can walk outside, and, even though completely unprepared for it and without trying, almost instantly feel so at peace and so content and so happy just to ride along in the sun a little longer.



also, today, shigeko told me i was a 'genki teacher' (genki=crazy and sort of rowdy). i like this very much. 'my year as a genki english teacher' 'adventures of a genki in japan' 'tales from a genki teacher' 'the genki teacher writes' ... or something

onward and upward, friends.

"Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that."

- Haruki Murakami, 'Norwegian Wood'

"When will you understand that being normal isn't necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage."

- 'Practical Magic'

the america we believe in

please...(if you're so inclined)

part of me feels kind of hypocritical and silly posting this... as if signing a petition is an easy way to feel that one is doing something (while not really doing all that much)...but small steps are better than no steps, and 'it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,' as they say.

easy

.

more wonderful things about japan...
- language lessons on nhk (which seems to be like equivilent of pbs or the bbc from what i can figure) - just tonight there's been english, spanish, italian and arabic
- another bit of international exposure on television: at night, there's a station that devotes part of its broadcast to showing broadcasts from other news agencies around the world - including the the bbc, and america is usually represented by world news tonight. the shows are broadcast as they were in their original format - you can hear the original language in the background, but it's also dubbed over lightly with japanese. what a great (and obvious) idea, though: to allow people see news from around the world in the original context in which it was presented to its primary audience
- chestnut rice
- japanese pickles (these is next on my list of foods to make)
- rice still warm from the rice cooker
- chopsticks - I love using chopsticks and am good at it (which is probably why I like to do it). when i eat with other people, they almost always comment on my chopstick ability: 'just like a japanese.' :)
- the reading glasses they provide for people to use at city hall
- in the ice cream section of many grocery stores, there's a small bin with those small wooden spoons - how practical! (today, I had a good morning. I went for a short bike ride along the river near the apartment, parked my bike at work, walked downtown and up roughly 125 stairs to a city park, took pictures from the top of a slide, spent about 45 minutes knitting in the park, walked back into town, bought ice cream, and ate it outside. ice cream for lunch. power lunch.)

not even sunlight crossed over

...

... between my present and future
was a wall so big that not even sunlight

crossed over. I felt surrounded by all
I couldn't do, as if my hopes to write,
to love, to have children, even to exist

with slight contentment were like ghosts...
...



from 'Thelonious Monk' Stephen Dobyns

stories and phrases i've forgotten

"I'll tell you I'm something, aren't I?"
"Good night shirt."


The moment in a radio story about a 103-year-old woman when she tries to offer her Meals on Wheels lunch to the person who's interviewing her. I wrote about my grandmother once, right after she died, for a college essays class. There's still so much I want to say about that - so much. It was the first time anyone important to me had died, and it was near the end of college, when I was struggling with the less-than-amiable end of some significant friendships, and questions about what I would do with my life, and where I would go and if I would make it in this great big world, doing what I wanted to do and continuing to grow in the way I wanted to grow. I remember picking up Donna and eating at Taco Bell on the day of the wake, and driving up to Fargo and the hospital on the day she died. It was icy and I listened to "Talk of the Nation" on the radio, and I didn't really take it seriously that this could be the end. I've led a kind of charmed existence - nothing truly bad ever seems to happen, people heal and life goes on. That day, I walked into the hospital room, and she said "Hi, Kath" through an oxygen mask. It was such a shock to see her there like that, voice muffled from the plastic triangle covering her mouth that I didn't say anything. I think that's one of the worst things I've done in my life. It's one of the things I regret most anyway. It was the last thing I ever heard her say. At the funeral, I remember, people, everyone, came up to say what a generous, kind woman she was. She never missed church, she was so good with the children, she was always smiling and didn't let anything slow her down. Over and over I thought about how these things the defined her were not who I was. Outgoing, friendly: these were not me, and for the first time it occured to me that my life was different than my grandmothers' and grandfather's not because I was neccessarily smarter or more ambitious or more talented. I went to college, I got to go to Europe, not because of some innate ability of mine, but sheerly by virtue of me being born at the time I was - and I got to do to these things not in spite of them, but because of them. Some people who seem to have so much less in life, but still seem to be so much more gracious and giving and thankful and conscious of life and other people. Jay crying the last time I saw him - in front the post office. Looking up at me from his "Kidd" minivan with those orange earplugs on the dash and reciting some poetry that he wrote that, even as he was saying it I couldn't pay attention to and was feeling guilty about not paying attention to it.

"I don't want to die, I want to stay here."

There is something that is so missing from my life. Some sense of peace and balance and trust and knowledge of who I am and what's important to me and a sense that those things are worthwhile because they are important to be and how an individual relates to the rest of the world - things that seem so natural to you - second nature. I doubt if you ever wrote a sentence like this in your life, wondering about how you related to the world. "That's silly," you'd say, a waste of time for people who don't have real work to do. But I also know I'm being naive... of course you've thought about that, everyone thinks about their place in the world and if they're spending their life in the best way. Especially since you were relatively old when you got married. I wonder how much of that story is true. About grandpa going for a walk past your house, and you sitting on the porch. You said once that it was your last chance to get married, but you were teasingly cruel like that to grandpa sometimes. And you wore the pink engagement ring at the wake, and cut your wedding photo in half so it would just be him, and not you, on the photo on display on the heater in the front entrance.

I got a package in the mail from my grandmother today - such a happy surprise, sticking out of the mail slot in my door when I came home. (The mail usually comes between 11 a.m. and noon, so I get it before I go to work, and today to walk up the stairs and have something sticking out of the slot - something which is not a massly-distributed flier - was so good.) Inside a red and white checked dish towel and two books: a paperback of "The Day Before Tomorrow" (on which the poorly executed film of the same name is based) and "Memories of Childhood," which I was initially really excited about when I saw the title because I thought it was something she had wrote in with her memories of childhood (when I was home this summer, we talked a lot about the past. I wrote down some, and, unfortunately, I know I forgot a lot), but it's a book of nursery rhymes and the like. A hardcover book with a pink cover and an illustration of a group of Victorian-age folk holding hands in a circle and dancing. The illustration is covered by a pale yellow post-it (also scotch-taped on in the upper left corner) which reads: "thought these nursery rhymes might come in hand in teaching memory work or just reading to the children." I'm barely keeping my head above water with these children - and the curriculum is so tightly planned that there's not a lot of wiggle room for extra stories - plus their vocabulary is not such that it would include (and my capabilities as a teacher are not such that I would be able to explain) Little Bo-Peep or Little Jack Horner. But how would she know that unless I told her? Life is so strange. How can I possibly be the same person who two months ago was at home spending the day weeding the garden and at Perham Crazy Daze with you, who two months before was consumed with worry about a dog bite, who four years before that was in still another place with another group of people who were equally as disconnected from my life before and after?

I want so much to understand you... I know there's something important that I'm missing from our relationship, that I haven't learned that I should. At grandpa's funeral, and afterwards, the comments were about what a "gentle," "kind" man he was. And he was. He was humble and worked so hard.

Here, many people have shrines in their homes. The shrines are focused on Buddha, but most also have with large black and white photographs of deceased relatives suspended from near the ceiling near the shrine to honor that person. They present flowers and their relatives' favorite foods on this shrine. On the first day of autumn, many families come together and go to the cemetery to give an offering to their relatives. I was walking by the gas station on a busy street here on September 23, and there was a small shrine on the curb with a bottle of green tea and a coffee mug. Strange, I didn't think of you, even though I should have.

O'Doules in the downstairs refrigerator and the time I was 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 and I told Donna to "Wait just a god-damned minute" (copying my dad and thinking that grandpa would be pleased) and instead got yelled at and him always claiming the purple Easter egg and me getting so mad that he thought Alissa and I were childish enough that "the girls" would be jumping on the bed when we broke the upstairs bed when we were 13 or 14 and the gumdrops he bought for me right before I flew back to Oregon for the first time.

reporter's notebook

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=19099

three reporters killed in one day. it's so hard to report even in a small town where there's absolutely no danger and one of the most difficult things is getting people from the high school to return your calls and having people not say "hello" to you at the post office. People who can dig and write and truly do it for the common good and the "people's right to know" are so brave. that sacrifice and not quitting when it's dangerous or hard - admirable, so heroic... because it is so easy to just quit or back down or change the wording just so to appease others.

listening to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6188147 while cleaning this morning and felt that stir again... that excitement of witnessing something, asking the right questions and putting together information in a way that recreates and preserves and shares that experience and those people with others who couldn't be there or can't meet those people. But I know now that that's at least in part a fantasy.
Maybe.

Or maybe not.

Sometimes I liked being a reporter for all the wrong reasons, I think. I loved that little reporter's notebook, I loved having a press card in my wallet and going somewhere and instantly having the doors opened and people greeting you. I loved being able to squeeze through to the front of a crowd to take a picture or observe. I loved the challenge of getting the right picture, of asking the right question, of finding the right sentence or two in someone's words that poetically summarizes their view, of circulating and asking, asking, asking, of taking notes of all the details (even if 80 percent of them didn't end up in the story). Sometimes it was so much fun. I'm not that competitive, but sometimes on those occasions where there was another reporter or photographer, I loved trying to ask a better, more insightful question, to find that angle for the picture that was better.
It's a shot of adrenaline right now, even thinking about it.

It is such important work, though, and I don't think I'm serious enough about it and the responsibilities that come with carrying that card, to really go all the way. But I still think my dream job is to be a features reporter for a larger newspaper. One of the most inspiring things in my professional life was going to that writers' workshop, and talking to reporters who had won Pulitzers and were feature writers for large metro dailies, and finding that they weren't that different than me - sort of quiet and unassuming and not all that articulate. Just people who noticed things and felt things and asked questions and presented what they learned as honestly and with as much feeling as they could. And to feel like you belong among people who are doing exactly what you want to do - that is a little piece of heaven.

typhoon, etc.

friday: typhoon!
saturday: at tk and shigeko's house - uniqlo, onsen, 'japanized' korean food, samurai movie
sunday: bunraku, watching kendo practice inside a temple while on evening walk

tomorrow: last week of class before parents' week begins.
-----

'Don't shut yourself in, because once you do, it's sooooo hard to undig yourself. Especially when everyone around you has decided to just leave you be because you appear to be this dullard. Reality and myself know better...you're incredible. Don't you see? You're becoming this person that people would LOVE, but you have sealed yourself in, as some sort of self-inflicted coma... to heal from love, you gotta let people love you dude... don't you get it?'

3.14159265358...

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20061005a2.html

it's such a thin line between being thrilled at the sheer mass and wonderfulness and beauty of it all and being terrified that you're missing something.

but -

- I am taking culture and language classes with Mari and TK once a week
- I just bought a three-month subscription to Rosetta Stone online Japanese lessons

- After ikebana class today, I went to Sakurano to buy knitting needles. Sakurano is a department store in a five-story blushy pink building right next to the train station. And because of its color and location and relative height, it's a kind of an Ishinomaki landmark. It was one of the first places I remember from Ishinomaki (in part because it's located next to the train station and it's top floor holds Ishinomaki's movie theater.)

In a photo of one of the rice fields I ride by on the way to work, you can see its pink presence in the background:

I can't quite figure out the fourth floor of this building. The first time I went, it was a Saturday afternoon and it was filled with people selling pottery and bags made from old kinomos and the like... similar to a street fair or market. On occasions I've been back since, it's held something different everytime, from makeup counters to what looked like regular sale overflow of clothing from the rest of the store. Today, on the escalator ride up, I was partially thinking that it would be really funny (but unlikely) if there was yet again something different on the fourth floor - like a recurring joke from some British comedy that I know probably exists, but don't know enough to reference, where each time a character rides up the escalator or walks by a certain door, some impossibly ridiculous and unpredictible thing is seen in passing. But then, today, as my spot on the escalator approached 4F (as the fourth floor is marked here), I could see the glare of lights reflected in a dessert case near the escalators. Today, the Sakurano fourth floor was a miniature little food market! Yay! Cinematic-worthy oddness and free exotic food samples! I don't know exactly all of what I ate, but some identifyable (or semi-identifyable) foods included several types of fish cakes, fried crab, udon noodles, and a clear something-or-other with green flakes dipped in a delicious mustard sauce.

There's just so much about life here that I haven't communicated with anyone. I'm sorry.

when you travel, it really doesn't change who you are... if you don't change, no matter where you are, your life still isn't going to be much different.

also, honesty is pivotal.

(i'm so cryptic tonight.)

the most of it...

today:
wind in the hair walking across a bridge, crickets at night, children and parents catching crawfish-like animals with office supplies, being served tea by women in kimonos while a boy in an orange t-shirt and white baseball hat clutching a luigi doll tries to pop bubbles, granola with squash, a manga mascot with a lightning bolt hat trying on a boy's LA Dodgers baseball hat before mascot goes onstage.

some thoughts courtesy ipod 'shuffle' mode (including two old favorites that were written dozens of times in high school notebooks that still made me write them down again when i heard them today):
'what do they know anyway you read it in a book.'
'it only happens once in a lifetime, make the most of it.'
'things you could do, you won't, but you might. the potential you'll be you'll never see. promises you'll only make.'
'for he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love god whom he hath not seen?'
'not that we loved god, but that he loved us.'
'celebrate we will for life is short but sweet for certain.'
'and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.'
'nobody's right if everybody's wrong.'
'and in your eyes i see what's on my mind.'
'i saw a shadow touch a shadow's hand.'

(i feel like i might be a little old to be posting lyrics to a song on my blog - 'my blog' said all crazy - but it's my blog, and when this song came on i just wanted to write it all down... so, um, instead I copied and pasted it from lyricsfreak.com.)

'another mystery' dar williams
Get off your cat walk, I want you to talk
To be the seer instead of the seen
There is a flower, a leaning tower
And all of the wonders standing between
I don't want to be another mystery
I don't want to see who's looking at me
I want to be the one to feel the sun
So if you want to see the world with me lets go
The alligator, the God that made her
And all the creatures that got left behind
In Mycenae, ave Maria
And everything you gotta dig harder to find
I don't want to be a vapor of heavenly light
Everybody guess if I'm an angel or sprite
I don't want to be another mystery
I don't want to see who's looking at me
I want to be the one to feel the sun
So if you want to see the world with me lets go
You could pursue it, hell I could do it
I'll just be quiet when I get angry and hurt
I'm stopping traffic, cinemagraphic
With my long black coat hanging down in the dirt
And my hair clinging to my face in the rain
Like a goddess from the cult of beautiful pain
I don't want to be another mystery
I don't want to be another mystery
I could cut you off with a shoulder of stone
Smoke all night and leave the party alone
Screw myself with an inscrutable pout
But I just want you to come figure me out
I don't want to be another mystery
I don't want to see who's looking at me
I want to be the one to feel the sun
So if you want to see the world with me lets go