years that answer

not that carving shapes into root vegetables is a high-powered vision

2011-07-23T11:22:00.004+09:00

Last night, I dreamt about different shapes that I could make with potato prints.

This is something, I am sad to say, that I am proud of. I rarely receive creative inspiration in my sleep.

also: a fortune cookie from earlier this week: 'An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.' like it.

body

2011-07-18T01:26:00.005+09:00

i've been thinking a lot about the nature of bodies lately, mostly dredging up things that i've heard somewhere along the way and replaying them in my head over and over and, in a very non-focused way, trying to piece them together. i feel like i'm close to linking them, but haven't quite figured out how they all fit together yet. but i feel like they do, together, make some larger point that i can feel but can't quite articulate yet... maybe this exercise will help, but it may not. it may just turn into a list of things roughly related around the same theme. let's see.

'walking around in this incredible self-contained unit' - thought i had in college that i discussed with pre-med roommate about how everything we need - our hearts, our blood, our brain, everything - is really in this relatively small container, held in by our skin, that's incredibly portable and that we take with us wherever we go. everything about us is contained in this relatively small space, just kept together with skin. that's all we are - just the little bit of space that we occupy and that we carry with us everywhere.

'we are spiritual beings having a physical experience' - bumper sticker

and very related to that:

'You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.' - quote by c.s. lewis

Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

- from "Living in the Body" by Joyce Sutphen. i particularly like the last two lines or so lines: "will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake" there are a lot of notebooks from late college and, now, work trainings or corporate meetings, that have these words doodled in them. our bodies are our passports to this world. they are the things that let us stay here.

an episode of 'speaking of faith' where a paraplegic yogi talked about his relationship with his body after an accident that left him paralyzed. he said something to the effect that he didn't understand when people who were ill said were fighting their bodies. His view, he said, was that his body was doing everything it could to survive and keep him alive. it wanted to survive. It was working in spite of the injuries, trying it's best to heal and keep him alive.

---

i am lucky. i've always been quite healthy, and the trouble that my body has given me has (stereotypically, i know) been related to how my body looks, not how it behaves. except for rock climbing & occasionally giving blood, there is nothing that i have wanted to do that my body wouldn't let me do. but, like so many, i have never been really happy with my body, except for a brief period in 2007 - very brief - maybe 1 or 2 months. other than those 30-60 days, i've identified myself as someone chubby, overweight.

i work for a market research company. last year, one of the surveys we conducted among american men and women showed that people who are within the normal weight range (according to bmi calculations) were more likely to identify themselves as overweight than normal. On the other hand, people who were overweight were more likely to classify themselves as normal. what a clusterfu, well, you know. that's what i thought at the time we released this study. i, who was then technically a normal weight, but who thought of myself as overweight.

fast forward to about a year later, and now, here i am, a living statistic, technically overweight, but still thinking of myself as i was a year ago. 'i thought i was overweight when i was really normal. i thought i was overweight then but i wasn't so i'm probably still normal now so i should go easy on myself.' not so. and weird, how our brains play into all this. i technically KNOW that i'm overweight, but still i can convince at least part of myself that i'm not. just to be clear, that's me, the same person who thought (and thinks) that it was so screwed up that a majority of my countrymen and women have such a non-realistic view of their bodies.

part 1 and part 2 of this post aren't that connected - i didn't even plan on writing part 2 at all when i started. part 1 more about bodies as a positive extension - something that let's us experience this life. part 2 much more petty about the way we define our bodies and what affect their appearances have on us.

no revelation for now, but will keep thinking about this.

2010-08-26T11:14:00.002+09:00

what i'm worried about right now:

...being a know-it-all. acting like i know how to solve everyone's problems when i myself clearly am struggling with the same issues that they are.

...pushing other people's identities and issues onto myself. am i really struggling with the same things that they are? just because we have something in common doesn't mean that we have all the same issues in common, and, even if we have some of the same issues in common doesn't mean the degree is the same. examples: i am not living with my parents. i did not lose my job because of time management issues. i do have friends. i am trying to actively reach out to people in a way that feels genuine and sustainable. one and a half years is not the same as ten years. i am not cynical about people. i am learning to love myself.

...should i go to the wedding? pros: it will be fun to get out of the area. it will be fun to see d. in full-on wedding regalia. it will be fun to go on a mini-roadtrip. it will probably be quite life affirming and inspiring. may regret it if i don't go. cons: might feel like i'm just tagging along, a loser. it will be a long time driving. will have to have neighbor cat-sit muriel. will lose time for canning.

...running. blech. Two 5ks this weekend. woefully out of shape.

...money. need to get in touch with gage.

years that answer redux

2010-08-12T13:35:00.007+09:00

When I started this blog, things were in flux: I was going to Japan, starting a new relationship, dealing with the death of my grandfather. "Years that answer" because I felt that, for the first time in awhile, I was in a phase of life when things were coming together, changing for the better.

Whether those years truly answered anything - I don't know. But now I'm 30, addressed with a bunch of new questions, and, again, for the first time in a long time, I feel like the years that question may be swinging back around to the years that answer.

I'm about to end therapy. I am extremely nervous about this. None of it feels all that tangible, but I've made so much progress in the last year - the last six months even. Honestly felt proud of who I am and what I'm capable of - feelings that I didn't even realize I didn't feel before. It's so exciting to like yourself for the first time. To realize that, no matter what you say, what you do, what you decide to do or not to do, it doesn't change the person who you are at the core - that person is still likable - lovable, even. That person is still cool and exciting and kind and engaged with the world. (And even if my writing vacillates wildly between first, second, and third person, I'm still a fantastic person.)

I'm nervous about continuing to make progress without that structure, without that extra perspective and insight. Will I just backslide and end up where I was 12 months and hundreds of dollars earlier? This is my fear. Because this feeling of self-acceptance is just that - a feeling. And I can't put into words or wrap my head anything that I've done differently, any way of thinking that I've consciously stopped, that makes up for this difference in pretty complete self-loathing to self-love and acceptance. What can I do differently if I start to feel badly again? I don't have a little bag of tricks that I can pull out and rationalize those terrifying, overwhelming feelings away.

I'm a little scared of myself and being alone with myself and with my thoughts.

But I'm not the same person I was a year ago. I know things now that I didn't know then - I look at myself differently than I did then. I still have a ways to go, but the basic structure of how I think about things (well, I guess, specifically about myself) has changed. When I'm in the throes of depression now, feeling trapped by my inadequacy, I can recognize that it's temporary. That, even though I feel like that right now, in this moment, I'll wake up tomorrow feeling better, having a more full perspective and feeling less overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things there are to do and how so few of them I've done and how poorly I've done at the ones I've tried.

Thinking about ending therapy, though, has put me in a state of internal alarm that I'm having a hard time seeing out of.. But, I recognize here too, that I've just felt this way a few hours. But the feeling was so overwhelming, so frightening... I'd almost forgotten how that feels.

Writing about it helps. I feel calmer now, even though I can't really say why. I want to be able to provide a happy ending to this post (why always this constant yearning to make everything okay, everything happy and fine and simplistic, even if it's none of those thing? but why is it not? why should it be not? i am okay. i will be okay.), and I honestly do feel less overwhelmed and underprepared.

now for sleep. sleep and run in the morning. both are good.

life list

2010-08-07T11:43:00.006+09:00

a rough draft...

- support myself - pay the rent and buy the groceries - with my writing
- visit india
- live in a foreign country
- take trans-siberian railroad across russia and see st. basil's cathedral in moscow
- learn to love self/be comfortable in own skin (getting there..)
- finish a quilt
- knit a pair of socks
- knit a sweater
- give back to my parents
- paris
- carry on a conversation with a non-native English speaker in their first language
- make my own shampoo
- own a 'grown up' camera
- hike to the bottom of the grand canyon and camp there
- visit yosemite valley
- go rock climbing
- test fear of water (boundary waters, canoe lessons, surfing)
- make memorizing poetry a regular part of life - keep list of poems memorized, when and why
- try veganism for a month
- fall in love
- learn printmaking
- learn how to operate a printing press
- invest time in meditating
- do the five tibetan rites every day for a year
- visit the himalayas
- learn how to make ice cream that's consistently better than store bought
- make wine/mead
- memorize certain basic facts: circumference of the earth;
- see arcade fire perform live
- see new york city
- see county clare ireland, wander through old irish cemeteries and churches
- find a vocation
- learn how to say 'hello, pleased to meet you,' 'thank you,' 'what's your name? my name is...' in at least the 10 most spoken languages in the world
- quality time in mesa verde and the cliff dwellings in the southwest
- have a skill that i'm good enough at that i can teach other people
- try weaving
- save an animal and improve both our lives by adopting it from a shelter
- invest an entire day at a park in an urban area - sitting and drawing and watching and reading

2009-12-04T11:28:00.001+09:00

What matters most? It's a foolish question because I'm hanging on,
just like you. No, I'm past hanging on. It's after midnight and I'm falling
toward four a.m., the best time for ghosts, terror, and lost hopes.

No one says anything of significance to me. I don't care if the President's
a two year old, and the Vice President's four. I don't care if you're
cashing in your stocks or building homes for the homeless.

I was a caring person. I would make soup and grow you many flowers.
I would enter your world, my hands open to catch your tears,
my lips on your lips in case we both went deaf and blind.

But I don't care about your birthday, or Christmas, or lover's lane,
or even you, not as much as I pretend. Ah, I was about to say,

"I don't care about the stars" -- but I had to stop my pen.
Sometimes, out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside
I glance up and see everything that's not on earth, glowing, pulsing,
each star so close to the next and yet so far away.

Oh, the stars. In lines and curves, with fainter, more mysterious
designs beyond, and again, beyond. The longer I look, the more I see,
and the more I see, the deeper the universe grows.

I have a long way to go, and I'm starting now -
out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside.

- 'Stars' by Freya Manfred

thoughts (ripped off from nike) as we enter this thanksgiving

2009-11-26T06:44:00.003+09:00

"Sooner or later you start taking yourself seriously. You know when you need a break. You know when you need a rest. You know what to get worked up about, and what to get rid of. And you know when it's time to do something that makes you stronger, faster, more complete. Because it's never too late to have a life. And never too late to change one."

- from Nike ad

Not particularly relevant to Thanksgiving, per say, but relevant to - finally - this feeling of hope and acceptance and realizing maybe things will be ok in the end, after all. A tough year, and not to get all pseudo-psychological, but I'm starting to see that things that are trying not necessarily as curses, but as, really, what life is. You do difficult things and it makes you stronger. You have the knowledge that you've lived through something terrible/difficult/terrifying/heart pulverizing. You know it sucks and you'd really, truly rather not do it again, but you know you can live through it. So the small things actually become small and not so worrisome as before. "After all," you can say, "I've lived through xyz, and even though I don't know how I'm going to handle this situation right now, I know I will figure it out and get through it." Maybe this is - finally - growing up. Things aren't perfect, but they could be much, much, much worse. I will be ok. I won't be at soul crushing job forever. I will keep improving and learning and getting better. I will meet more fascinating, kind, intelligent, fearless souls. I will see more amazing things, both grand and small. I am, at heart of it all, ok, no matter what happens or who does or says what. My writing is rusty. I haven't written regularly for years - more than three. There's now a "Monetize" tab at the top of blogger, along with the "Posting," "Settings," and "Template." Oh, world. But, Thanksgiving. I am ready.

2009-11-01T12:47:00.003+09:00

12-word (13 including parenthetical) summary of life at moment:

hurt someone she loved so much.

and still (still) doesn't understand why.

lost.

mostly it.

2009-10-08T11:06:00.003+09:00

Turning Thirty

This spring, you’d swear it actually gets dark earlier.
At the elegant new restaurants downtown
your married friends lock glances over the walnut torte:
it’s ten o’clock. They have important jobs
and go to bed before midnight. Only you
walking alone up the dazzling avenue
still feel a girl’s excitement, for the thousandth time
you enter your life as though for the first time,
as an immigrant enters a huge, mysterious capital:
Paris, New York. So many wide plazas, so many marble addresses!
Home, you write feverishly
in all five notebooks at once, then faint into bed
dazed with ambition and too many cigarettes.

Well, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except
really you don’t believe wrinkles mean character
and know it’s an ominous note
that the Indian skirts flapping on the sidewalk racks
last summer looked so gay you wanted them all
but now are marked clearer than price tags: not for you.
Oh, what were you doing, why weren’t you paying attention
that piercingly blue day, not a cloud in the sky,
when suddenly “choices”
ceased to mean “infinite possibilities”
and became instead “deciding what to do without”?
No wonder you’re happiest now
riding on trains from one lover to the next.
In those black, night-mirrored windows
a wild white face, operatic, still enthralls you:
a romantic heroine,
suspended between lives, suspended between destinations.

– Katha Pollitt

for the first time, 10 miles.

2009-10-06T11:08:00.004+09:00

"The miracle isn't that I finished, it's that I had the courage to start."

.2 hours.2 minutes.2 seconds.

and, for the first time in a long time, something to be proud of. an unexpected rush of accomplishment on the morning of finishing my final training run. in two and a half months, i was committed enough to be able to go from barely being able to run ten minutes at a time to being able to run ten miles (albeit not very quickly or gracefully, but still being able to run that ten miles). in college, someone in a writing class - someone who ran cross country - wrote about running and quoted some statistic that said what percentage of americans were able to run more than ten miles at a time. i wish i could remember exactly what it was (i don't), but it was tiny and at the time i assumed my position in the 90-some percent majority was pretty much locked in. but how simple it was to change that. a couple of months and some willpower and time and perhaps one of the most unlikely candidates for distance running can run herself from minneapolis, down a riverbed, back up a riverbed, across the mississippi, into saint paul, up the riverbed some more, and then, with the help of some shark-shaped electrolyte gummies, amped up soft rock stylings, and familial cheerers, can cross the finish line. another pre-30 goal crossed off the list.

also, school of seven bells = good sounds.

a lovely moment from an unlikely source

2009-01-27T14:03:00.004+09:00

"Breathe deep. Be glad you're alive - and consider all the lonely people, lost in personal sickness who no longer love this glorious world."

from a customer review at amazon.com (review for "The Grace of Grass and Water: Writing in Honor of Paul Gruchow")

2008-07-30T12:37:00.001+09:00

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

-Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

politic

2008-07-22T13:03:00.005+09:00

For some reason I just can't describe or really even understand exactly, standing in line at the supermarket in front of a man in an electric cart who is buying 3 packages of mid-quality bratwurst-style hot dogs with a coupon, 5 or 6 Swanson-style Salisbury steak frozen dinners, and a bag of oranges makes me more confident in my decision to support Barack Obama.

overheard at the record store

2008-04-22T12:00:00.003+09:00

"I don't go to the suburbs to rock."

- clerk at Electric Fetus, on why he choses not to attend shows at the Myth

below the donut

2008-02-06T12:33:00.001+09:00

Overheard on drivetime radio...

"Tomorrow will be cold. ... This weekend, your skin is going to crack and fall off."

Quotes from a night spent Christmas shopping

2007-12-17T12:16:00.000+09:00

"...the power of genuine art to transmit vitality. Just think all these different voices, these stories, these lives, available to us in books as gifts, for less than the price of a tank of gas."
- maureen corrigan, book review on 'fresh air,' 12.12.07

"You're not obliged to swallow anything you despise,
See, those unrepenting buzzards want your life,
And they got no right."
- 'sleeping lessons,' the shins

"Where's the Mariah Carey?"
- fellow Target shoppers, looking at Christmas music

a strange kind of relief

2007-12-11T14:33:00.000+09:00

...when one is watching Lou Dobbs on a large flat-screen television in a fast food restaurant and is starting to feel a certain knowing knotting in the stomach when words about the nation essentially committing suicide if it continues on the same path...

...and then breathing a lot easier when she realizes that it's Pat Buchanan who's being quoted.

excuse my french, but this, this, makes my insides swell and smile and sing 'my country 'tis of thee'

2007-09-13T01:44:00.000+09:00

holy. fucking. cow.

it's been a long, long time since i felt this energized, this excited, this enthusiastic about something: a plan to provide financial incentive for children who are now being born in america to devote a year of their lives to volunteer work when they turn 18... a whole national policy that would encourage and create a common experience of volunteering and service for a whole generation (and then plus) of people. (even though part of me feels like i have no right since i haven't done a year of service myself, but, still, this, this makes me feel good, hopeful, happy, proud to be an american in ways i don't know that i've ever felt before. there is a need a for this. there is a hunger for this - an alternative to a life spend chasing after high-def tvs and pumpkin flavored lattes and that empty, hollow, guilty feeling that chasing creates because one knows that that lifestyle is empty and hollow and there's so many people who are hurting, and they're hurting in part as a direct result of the prosperity you enjoy. i guess i'm using the universal 'one' pretty liberally here when i really mean 'me,' but i want to be a part of this in any way i possibly can.)

oh, america! heart-singing until my brains fall out good.

(also, i'm now back in the land of corn and cows and lakes after walking the streets of japan until i got lost. went to morocco to see donna. unemployed but looking.)

a hundred times

2007-06-29T00:59:00.000+09:00

"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving."

Albert Einstein

omikuji

2007-06-04T23:28:00.000+09:00

Blue sweep of heavens
wide and clear -
might my heart share
their spaciousness!

Asamidori sumiwataritaru ozara no
hirokio onoga kokoro tomogana

- from Meiji Shrine, Tokyo. May 26, 2007. 100 yen.

Also, after an evening of playing wireless bowling, tennis and brain teaser video games, there's something that's especially unsettling and guilt-inducing about hearing an African woman cough in the background of a transcontinental call.

And - good news! Today, found out that the next teacher will arrive on June 30. June 30. That's 26 days from now. Oh, help help help me that nothing truly horrible happens in the classroom in these next few weeks. But that also means that I only have 3 more "regular" weekends left. Odd... strange that this is experience is coming to a close like this. I know I shouldn't feel like a failure because I do feel like I've tried as hard as I possibly could and done everything I could do... but, I still failed. I couldn't do it.

oh, 26 - my endless numbered days.

"Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who loves love?" - Eugene O'Neill, "The Great God Brown"

hello, tokyo!

2007-05-28T23:57:00.000+09:00

this weekend:

---

i am alternately so excited to get out of this country (34 days of class left, and i bought some soy milk today with an expiration date that's after i leave (!) ) and filled with a vague kind of longing, a premature nostalgia... probably because i've been here so long (sort of) and don't feel like i know much the country or the culture and, god knows, the language. i feel like i've wasted a lot of time here, but i also don't know what i would've/could've done differently to feel otherwise.

also, for whatever else the john lennon museum ("john lennon" trademark of yoko ono lennon) may be, at least i got to see the yellow suit he wore for the sgt. pepper album. (adolescent squeal of unquestioned, spontaneous !joy!joy!joy!) hehe, it still makes my heart flip a little think about it: i saw, in the real live 'flesh,' a suit from sgt. pepper! sumo, be damned.
(

)
and john lennon in geta. nice.

harajuku just before sunset and a girl in a panda suit and a sign (written in english) advertising 'free hugs' and young smokers with red and blonde hair slouched against a wall while two guitarists play j-pop acapella and a man creates several variations on the theme of anpanman using balloon animal art and a blimp flies overhead.

and:

(sign in shinjuku shoe store. ... a little blurry, but i think the message still gets across)

and, really, what else needs to be said?

world peace, indeed...

also, i guess, one more: apropos to nothing, i think i've figured out one answer to what songs would be on the soundtrack of my life:

it's not world peace, but it makes me feel better, anyway.

'the simple and lovely miracle of being alive'

2007-05-12T10:33:00.000+09:00

Shiogama Jinja, Shiogama, Japan
April 29, 2007

2007-02-14T22:13:00.000+09:00

you know you're in japan when...

2007-02-06T22:15:00.000+09:00

the most prominent words on your medicine's packaging are "delicious smile."

in lieu of sleep...

2007-01-16T02:27:00.000+09:00

i have decided to set up a youtube account to post some of the videos taken on my camera.

here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=obviousforeigner

(but be advised: these were taken on a camera designed primarily for still photographs by someone who doesn't know a thing about shooting video and who has a tendency to move too quickly and create a whirling picture even when trying to move slowly to avoid whirling effect and who was primarily shooting out of sheer desperation to record and preserve some part of what she was seeing. so far just one, but there will be more, oh yes, there will.)

2006-12-29T21:53:00.000+09:00

'if only i could show them to someone who knows,
this moon, these flowers, this night that should not be wasted.'

- 'The Tale of Genji'

this is not news to millions and millions of people, but...

kyoto is, quite simply, wonderful.

i just want to be surrounded by beautiful things and inspiring, intelligent, caring people constantly. is that too much to ask, really?

photos to come.

what peaches and what penumbras

2006-12-16T01:31:00.000+09:00

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object that he look'd upon, that object he became,
And that object became a part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of year.

- from "There Was a Child Went Forth" by Walt Whitman

included in a book of poems that I got in a birthday package from my grandma in the mail today. I remember the first time I heard this poem, shortly after studying "Leaves of Grass"and introduced by someone I respected so much at an event that still is one of the most beautiful things i've ever been a part of (the whole being greater than the sum of its parts and all that). i hung a copy of this poem on my wall seven years ago, and then largely forgot about it. until tonight and opening the priority mail envelope at the katsu gourmet after an unsatisfying day.

also, across from whitman's 'here is the test of wisdom' in the book from my grandma is a full-color shot of Cannon Beach from Ecola State Park in the early hours of twilight.

and i miss snow on the trees (inbetween stretches of open farmland) in minnesota.

for the first time i've seen

2006-12-09T10:26:00.000+09:00

it's snowing in ishinomaki.

....and i can actually see my breath in my kitchen. i think the time has come to figure out how to use the oil heater without killing myself from carbon monoxide fumes.

snow pictures.

just a bunch of feelings that we have to hold

2006-11-29T23:12:00.000+09:00

for some reason this afternoon, before my first class of the day, hitting a balloon with a small Japanese girl with a red sweatshirt and a ponytail and a high-pitched little eager laugh, i wondered if this would be one of the moments that flashes before my eyes before i die, or if, when i'm in a nursing home someday, i'll confuse some well-intentioned volunteer or nurse's assistant by asking about Sari and if it was she or Hayato who drew the face on the white balloon.

late and trite, but thankful

2006-11-26T20:42:00.000+09:00

for...

- second chances
- 'morning has broken'
- revelations and insights, however quickly they may pass
- a family that loves me despite so many errors and so much whiny behavior
- martin sexton's 'hallelujah' - and a room of people singing those four syllables acapella together - and listening to those sounds while watching autumn color on a japanese hillside go by the train window
- dc
- flashes that illustrate life isn't as complex as it sometimes seems
- instant contentment of animals
- titles of poetry books
- muscle tension and relaxation
- the olympic theme song and lee shwa shwung (spelled phonetically, not accurately - a Korean gymnast during the 1996 - I think - olympics) and kristi yamaguchi and related schwan's ice cream commericals
- 'blade' and kurt browning in leather pants and 'trapped' by bruce springsteen
- 'quiet things no one knows'
- a sister to have private jokes with and who is awesome enough to be in africa working to save this planet of ours ... and also awesome enough to know how 'shiloh you ate my grain' is connected to neil diamond
- walking labryinths in gauzy scarves
- scarves in general
- singing 'you are the new day' on a monday night in a church next to the ocean with a group of inspiring people
- snow
- sheep mittens
- walking arm in arm and all it implies
- confidence
- 'plastic soul man'
- non-arrogant artists
- the first meal after a long hike
- smell of dirt
- genuine compliments
- deserving genuine compliments
- coffee-flavored milk out of a glass bottle after an onsen
- 'both sides now'
- working hard and seeing the results
- hope
- laptop computers and the 'internets'
- so many good memories to choose from
- feeling 'infinite'
- honesty
- unexpected confirmations that you are doing the right thing, that there is a reason why what is happening is happening

earthquake: ok!

2006-11-15T23:03:00.000+09:00

there was an earthquake that caused a tsunami in japan and apparently parts of russia this evening.

nothing bad here. during my adult class, as the students were writing imaginary postcards to "Pat," an American friend, the citywide speaker system went off, and there was an announcement. it's cold out tonight, but so the students could hear the announcement (which, of course, was in Japanese), i opened the window. because of speaker location, there was a big echo, so it was difficult for them to understand, they said, but from what they understood there was a tsunami which would be about 5 centimeters that hit the Ishinomaki area about 8 p.m. (announcement came on between 10 and 5 minutes before 9 p.m.) later, shigeko said she talked to one of the students' parents, who reported that the news reported bigger waves were expected in Hokkaido (Japan's northern-most island), while 50-centimeter waves (later other people said 15 centimeters) waves were supposed to hit Ishinomaki.

in any case, things are fine here. i'm fine. didn't feel a shake or a thing. and my apartment is aways away from the ocean and river, plus on the second floor. here's hoping there are happy endings for places that saw a bigger impact.

tsunami warning on channel 1 during volleyball game. approx. 12:20 a.m. Nov. 16, 2006

an american in wonderland; in which the author demonstrates her belief that there's no such thing as too much autumn color

2006-11-14T00:38:00.000+09:00

from chuson-ji and (primarily) motsu-ji. hiraizumi, japan. taken 11.12.06

in wonderland

a little autumn color

2006-11-13T09:14:00.000+09:00

from chuson-ji temple in hiraizumi, about a two-hour train ride from Ishinomaki. it started raining and the sun started to go down near the end of my trip, but, still, beautiful.

more from yesterday's trip to chuson-ji and motsu-ji (also in hiraizumi) to come, but, now, it's cold here and I need to get a warmer jacket.

also, a list of beatles/beatles-related songs that played in the restaurant where i had dinner yesterday:
- fixing a hole
- sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band (at this point, i thought they were playing sgt. pepper album on shuffle, but that's before i heard what was next...dun-dun-dun)
- 'til there was you
- give me love (give me peace on earth) by george harrison
- honey pie
- within you without you
- if i fell

enough

2006-11-11T20:39:00.000+09:00

from Mitsuo Aida*

While I have so many things
There is this anxiety inside me that says

It's not enough
It's not enough

Why is that?

---

Here
Now
Myself

The sum of these parts
Equals my life

---

Because some lose
Some can win

---

There is no one in this world who can claim that
They do not owe their existence to someone else.
Everything we know,
Everything we do,
And everything we have made in our world,
Exists because of others.

---

I want to be alone
But being alone is so lonely.

---

...I decided to keep that feeling forever deep inside me.
As the fire burned
I saw myself risking my life for love
I felt my blood boil with determination
I could see myself devoting everything to my life's work
And I saw myself living this life that heaven gave me
With passion, pureness and no regrets. ...
...And I realize
This is how I always want to be.
One life, forever learning.
One life, forever young.

---

The type of work makes no difference
Faces of those who live life to its fullest are so beautiful
I want my face to be beautiful too.

---

*i could find very little about mitsuo aida in english on the internet, which is a shame. mari recently lent me three english translations of his books. while assisting with her class several weeks ago, one of the questions i asked was 'what's the date today?' when some classes struggled, she pointed to a calendar on the wall and said 'mitsuo.' i, because of stellar japanese skills, thought 'mitsuo' was the word for calendar. nope, the calendar was done in calligraphy by mitsuo aida. she lent me his books.

i realized, i think, finally, that pursuing the things you think you're supposed to want and the things that you actually do want are two very different things.

happy how are you!

2006-11-05T19:55:00.000+09:00

a belated halloween story...

like snoopy and the peanuts characters here, halloween is almost entirely a commercial phenomenon in japan (not that it has a lot of other purpose in the u.s., i suppose). starting in september, there were jack-o-lanterns hanging in the windows of flower shops, and sweets shops sold pumpkin-flavored desserts and the grocery store i frequent had a display of plastic skull necklaces. But there's no trick or treaters in japan, except, as shigeko explained to me, at English language schools.

at tk study room, one week is devoted to halloween. for children's classes that means the teacher (this year, me) gets dressed up in a ridiculously expensive and outlandish 'traditional' costume. (i was a 'feather witch'... last year adrian was batman, the year before the teacher was a vampire with a pretty incredible make up job, and the year before that the teacher was a black cat. in addition to costume, i had an unexpectedly fun time doing my make up... lots of eyeliner and green eyeshadow and a spider on my cheek and ratting my hair... probably the first time i ratted my hair and used aerosol hairspray since the FHS 7th grade halloween dance. and Shigeko was pleased because apparently the parents were impressed. one told her i had 'the face of halloween.' hehe.. i can only say i wish i hadn't heard that before... at the 7th grade dance.) children also wear costumes; some arrive with their own (a sampling included pirates, bats, Kiki - a witch with a purple dress and big red bow in her hair that's a popular anime character - and something called a 'puppet muppet'... i don't know), others took their costumes from two big bins of masks and clothes that usually get stowed on the school's 3rd floor. (Some highlights from the bins - a buddha mask, a horse mask, pink rabbit ears that tie under the chin and a curly bright blue clown's wig that just about everyone tried on at one point.)

Instead of a regular lesson, during halloween week, we teach some halloween vocabulary (witch, monster, etc. i never noticed that "owl" was a funny sounding word before, but in almost every class students laughed or stumbled on the word), and play games. The main game this year was a haunted house in which students touched "zombie brains" (a mixture of spaghetti and soba noodles), "lizard's blood" (red jello), "mummy's eyeballs" (peeled grapes, of course), and "monster's intestines" (the inside of a squash). Students were so scared - some, i'm sorry to say, even cried. oh, little ones. We made a haunted house under the stairs -- covered in black with scary music in the background and big fake spiders hidden around the room. then, trick or treat!

we also do halloween week at yochien. since classes are only 25 minutes, students don't dress up, but we have a special lesson, and they also learn to say 'happy halloween' and 'trick or treat.' yochien students are very young, kindergarten age, and so are just starting to learn english and don't know many phrases. yochien always starts the same - stand in a circle,
i say "hi!"
they say "hi!"

i say "hi!"
they say "hi!"

i say "kathy" and point at myself.
they say "kathy"

i say "hi kathy!"
they say "hi kathy!"

"hi kathy!"
"hi kathy!"

"i'm fine!"
"i'm fine!"

"i'm fine!"
"i'm fine!"

"hi kathy! (pause) I'm fine!"
"hi kathy! I'm fine!"

"hi kathy! (said in little voice): how are you? (big voice returns): i'm fine!"
"hi kathy! i'm fine!"

Then i go around the circle, saying "hi .... how are you?" to each student. they have to say "hi Kathy! I'm fine!" When I arrived in mid-August, they were just learning "I'm fine," and they only have English class once a week, so it's still pretty new to them.

For Halloween, we added "happy halloween." so, ideally, the conversation around the circle should have gone:
"Hi (tsubasa, karen, yumi)!"
"Hi kathy!"
"How are you?"
"I'm fine!"
"Happy Halloween!"
"Happy Halloween!"

This, of course, is difficult. Halloween isn't exactly an easy word to pronounce, it was only introduced minutes before, and a lot of students get nervous speaking individually. so on the way around the circle, in one of the classes, provided two moments which i want to share with the world wide web at large:
"kathy halloween!"

and

"happy how are you!"

on the subject of holidays, i feel i must mention that christmas (although not really celebrated as roughly 3 percent of the population identifies itself as christian) is already in the air in many commerical establishments here. cards, decorations, etc. are on display in many places, and today, walking past the discount produce store, i heard a japanese cover version of amy grant's 'my grown-up christmas wish' playing over the loud speaker. how about that?

fortunate ones, i swear

2006-11-02T23:25:00.000+09:00

everybody's laughing, everybody's happy

2006-10-17T22:19:00.000+09:00

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

2006-10-13T09:35:00.000+09:00

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

2006-10-13T01:46:00.000+09:00

2006-10-13T00:33:00.001+09:00

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

2006-10-13T00:26:00.000+09:00

...

... 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

2006-10-09T22:40:00.000+09:00

"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

2006-10-09T11:43:00.000+09:00

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.

2006-10-08T19:44:00.000+09:00

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...

2006-10-05T11:15:00.000+09:00

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

2006-10-05T00:52:00.000+09:00

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...

2006-10-01T20:32:00.000+09:00

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

this morning...

2006-09-30T12:32:00.000+09:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29detain.html

(saw this and my morning intentions to finally make a list of places i want to go in sendai so i can go tomorrow were thwarted. follows the hastily written, but well-intentioned letter. i figured it's more important that the letter gets sent than that it's that well-constructed.. volume versus content, etc. what is going on? why in the world could this possibly be an ok thing for america to do?)

Dear Mr. Smith,

I was disappointed to read your name amid the 65 Senators who voted in favor of measure S.3930 yesterday.

Laws that make it United States policy to not allow suspects, even suspects in heinous and murderous crimes, access to basic judicial and human rights do not make anyone safer.

Instead, denying prisoners a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions and allowing interrogation techniques that can be determined by the president fosters a sense of mistrust between the United States and other nations. (And that mistrust is in no short supply already, as evidenced by comments from leaders of Venezuela and Pakistan in the last two weeks. Whether or not these comments were based on truth or not, the fact that they were made indicates that other nations feel that the United States has overstepped its bounds in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting its citizens. And, as you know, opinions like that are what put Americans in danger of violence from terrorism.)

The way to create a safer America – and a more peaceful world - is by "setting a good example" - by embracing, not pushing aside, the important ideals of innocence until proven guilty, a fair trial and human rights and dignity.

I urge you to please reconsider your position on this issue and take steps to prevent the president from signing the bill into law. You're in a position to shape the way people around the world think of America; please use your power to help make "fairness," "freedom" and "human rights" a part of what America stands for.

Respectfully,
.....

"On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your correspondence.
We appreciate hearing your views and welcome your suggestions.
The President is committed to continuing our economic progress,
defending our freedom, and upholding our Nation's deepest values.
Due to the large volume of e-mail received, the White House
cannot respond to every message. Please visit the White House
website for the most up-to-date information on Presidential
initiatives, current events, and topics of interest to you.
In order to better receive comments from the public, a new system
has been implemented. In the future please send your comments to
comments@whitehouse.gov.
Thank you again for taking the time to write."

and, just now, a news story that the Senate approved 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border... i'm going outside.

somewhere to get to

2006-09-28T22:42:00.000+09:00

'i thought i'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then i thought why should i? he never reads any of mine.'
spike milligan

-----
also, when one hasn't paid attention to the world at large for awhile and suddenly starts again, it's pretty astounding not just how many horrible things are happening, but also the magnitude of these things... how can so many terrible things be happening, to so many people, right now, and i'm sitting here, comfortable in my apartment, with the luxury of thinking about these things and these people (or not), knowing that my life will likely continue much the same whether or not i know about what's happening or choose to pay attention to what's happening?

Musee des Beaux Arts
by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;
How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

What happens - in that 'final analysis' - to those who turn away and sail calmly on when they know that there's so much suffering and so many things they could do to help; those who ignore the smallest possible things they could do - those who delete the amnesty international emails without opening them but can spend hours looking at yuppie cooking sites, who ignore those moments where they have this flash of conscience (flash of consciousness?) about real perspective and the real world?

meisties, meisties, fightin' the good fight.

so bloody strong.

2006-09-26T22:54:00.000+09:00

'nobody said it was easy... no one ever said it would be this hard.'

or, alternately: 'we are so strong. so bloody strong.'

...bad.day.today...
three classes, and three groups of students i couldn't control...no promise that tomorrow will be any better. what can i do to make it better? patience, patience, patience. walking the line between not letting students misbehave and not being so strict that they're rooting against you (and they think you're rooting against them)... so difficult. but i think the bigger problem, the issue that has me most concerned, is that when they start to misbehave, i start not to care. and i think about my own teachers who were sad and uninspiring, and they were the ones who didn't care. i don't want to be bitter. i don't want to not like my students. i want very much to like them. how do i make a lesson plan that entices them enough to pay attention? one that's not boring? adrian said after a difficult first few weeks he decided that class had to be fun for him too otherwise he wasn't going to make it... but i don't know what to do to make it fun for me. some things i love. i love the smart little girls (and also feel guilty that i'm letting them down by letting the rowdier boys take over class) and that 10 minutes of hitting the balloon with hayato before class. i love my last class on friday and their drawing of the he/she. i love being over the top and goofy during songs. i love hearing 'wakata!'( 'I get it!') why, why, why do i let myself get drawn into these antagonistic roles with these students? they're obviously testing me, and they're children, of course they're not going to be perfect and quiet all the time. aaaggghhhhh. please help me. help me to be more ambitious to get students involved and really "give it my all" in class.

why do i have to make everything so hard?

to combat bad things, good memories/good things about being here:
- the way shigeko, when she knows who's on the other line, sometimes answers the phone at school 'mushi mush' (instead of the 'mushi mushi' that i had somehow, through some short story or essay or something, remembered or heard about)
- green tea with rice
- japanese pears
- mmmm... ramen
- twisted somen noodles
- pre-mixed convienience store beverages: coffee and milk, and green tea lattes
- crescent bread and honey toast
- discount produce bins at the grocery stores
- the way eggs are sold individually
- all the french patisseries that are so popular and prevalent here
- warm edamame
- arts and crafts magazines
- choco-chan's clip-clip-clip of toenails on the floor, and the way shigeko said he was named 'choco' after that 'choco-choco-choco' sound
- the reality show where seven single girls and guys travel around the world on a bus together, and at least once every episode someone ends up in tears ... and during these intense emotional scenes there comes these 'wacky' commentators to throw in (what i imagine to be) light-hearted barbs about these people's soul confessions
- good lord, going down that roller slide in magiyama with tk
- drinking water out of a spring or a faucet with your hands - on hikes or at yochien
- motorists who always yield to bicyclists and pedestrians
- sunday night sunset walks by the river (the fourth longest in japan, i've been told once or twice): old men in baseball caps riding bicycles or resting on the river bank, a grandchild and grandmother with butterfly nets, a woman in a denim shirt sitting on the concrete steps facing away from the river and smoking a cigerette, the sound of (what i presumed to be a high school) baseball game carried from across the river, a man in a white dress shirt and black suspenders who i pass going one direction and later going the other.
- the ri-fucking-diculous way i tried to explain 'putting all your eggs in one basket' for the weekly idiom in the adults' class, and literally falling down laughing (hey! another idiom) with adrian during class.
- the 'pardon?' boys in mari's class and 'oh no! my cola!'
- darts and 'lite ton' and 'xyz' at 'cannabis'
- the moth on the train back from sendai, and how everyone, from teenage girls in school uniforms to golf shirt-clad middle-aged men, stood up in an effort to get away from or to get the moth out of the car
- first night in the apartment and the feeling of hope and possibility - and spices in the window
- shigeko laughing so hard she made herself cry at the thought of both adrian and i hiding from students at the start of yochien
- sparklers in the drive way, and the feeling that this is what it was all about - why does everyone need to try so hard when it's this simple?
- a certain student's clipped 'su-mi-ma-sen' ('excuse me') when she can't see what i'm writing on the board
- thin-line pens - and in so many colors!
- the 2004 calendar on the wall and boxes addressed to the teacher that left more than a year ago in the apartment (that i haven't yet taken down or taken to recycling)
- there are more, but i feel better now, and it's getting late...

and it wasn't all bad things today. a photo of shigeko, mari and myself fake-eating fish-shaped waffle-like sweets filled with anko (sweet red beans - which tastes better than it sounds). One of the first things i learned about tk was that he's 'crazy' for anko. :)

'what's your favorite subject, judy?'
'do you like spaghetti?'

'seeing is believing...'

2006-09-25T11:41:00.000+09:00

this week, TK (who often, often uses the phrase 'seeing is believing') made a cd of pictures from my first few weeks here. here's one from my first full day in Japan - at TK and Shigeko's home with one of their daughters, Kyoko, TK's mother, Adrian (the teacher who I succeeded), myself and TK and Shigeko's dog, Choco-chan. (the twins hat was then fresh from minnesota as i brought that as a gift.) picture was taken post-sukiyaki.

the week (or so) in pictures (sort of)

2006-09-25T11:38:00.000+09:00

09.15 - Not a pretty picture necessarily, but laundry day at the apartment.

09.16 - Temple in Ishinomaki. Upper right corner: the white things hanging on the tree are folded pieces of paper that contain fortunes. (Outside some temples are boxes like vending machines that one can put money in - usually about 100 yen, the equivilant of about $1 - and get a fortune.) According to TK (my source for all Japan information), some people hang really bad fortunes (as a way of dissiminating the bad fortunate into the big, wide, open universe ) and some hang really good fortunes (as a way of saying thank you and hoping it will come true). The fortunes are on many trees around almost every temple I've seen. (I got a fortune out of a bright red machine outside of Godai-do in Matsushima. Because it was in Japanese, I couldn't read it myself, but, according to TK, it said I didn't have the best fortune, but the second-best. I guess I can live with that. :) )

09.19 - Before yochien (kindergarten classes), Mari (right) and I found costumes used at undokai. (Before coming to Japan, I never liked it when people used foreign words when they were writing in English - I found it distracting and not very useful - "If 'yochien' is kindergarten, why do you need to write 'yochien'? The rest of the article isn't in Japanese, why did you feel the need to translate that one word?". Now I understand. The person writing (likely) didn't include the word to be pretentious or becasue they wanted to teach that one word. Likely there was no extra thought into including that foreign word in the text. That's just what the thing is called, and what they're used to calling it. Like you'd call orange juice orange juice (I'm drinking orange juice), you'd call yochien yochien (not "kindergarten") and undokai undokai (not "a sports festival"). Also the big gray object in the forefront of the picture is the CD player on which the song "Hi! How are you? I'm fine" is played (two times every class).

09.20 - Ikebana class. Gyakugatte - one of the basic styles of skin, one of the most elementary forms of ikebana.

Close up of gyakugatte stems to help me remember...

Hongatte - another basic style of shin (basically gyakugatte reversed)

Work by two other women in the class (their last names are printed on the cards in front of their flowers)

09.22 - Walk to work. A sign on the sidewalk encouraging people to look both ways (I think). The Japanese word for frog is kaeru, which also means "to go home" and as a result there are punny signs featuring frogs urging traffic and traveling safety.

Glory/celestial shot of the 100 yen ($1) store.

Following three picture from the green way: a path in the middle of the street for bikers and walkers. Has flowers and miniature water treatments.

Tombo, or dragonfly, at the house next door to TK Study Room. The black patches on its wings means autumn is arriving, TK said.

TK with tombro. He held up his finger and it flew to him.

09.24 - Kenjo-zan (Mount Kenjo). Cups and bottle by a spring on the way up.

Chestnut on the tree. (It's chestnut season.)

Ishinomaki as seen from the top of Kenjo-zan.

To the east and the Pacific Ocean.

Shigeko and TK with a man we had lunch with at the top of the mountain. He brought a miniature gas heater and made ramen.

Rice fields on the way to Kenjo-zan.

Rice harvest in progress.

Later 09.24 - Past an elementary school and pink elephants on an evening walk.

09.25 - Symmetry: another picture from laundry day. Large spider discovered on balcony when going out to hang out laundry. Spider's current whereabouts: unknown.

mute as the native country that was never there

2006-09-24T15:07:00.000+09:00

... I hear something
and think I remember it
and will know it afterward

in a few days I will be
a year older one more year
a year farther and nearer
and with no sound from there on
mute as the native country
that was never there again
now I hear walnuts falling
in the country I came to

W.S. Merwin, from "A Morning in Autumn"

Today, we went hiking and had boxed lunch picnic on Kenjo-zan, a mountain that's about a 15-minute car ride from my apartment. Pictures to come. Also, I think I may be allergic to rice - not as in eating rice, but in a hayfever kind of way. It's rice harvest season here, and since Thursday night I've had sore throat and stuffy nose; nothing major, but could be my first known allergy, folks...

Life is good. People are good. But, I miss you. (I went to a pet store yesterday, and they had turtles and rabbits and frogs and very expensive cats and dogs. And newts. They didn't have the orange firebelly, but of course I thought of Figgy and company and all the times we found newts fuzzy with carpet residue in the hallway or under the encyclopedias. I hope you can come to Japan. I want to show you things and have mountain-top picnics and laugh together at the ridiculous things one does unintentionally in a foreign country.)

article 9

2006-09-23T17:06:00.000+09:00

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20060923b5.html

verbing nouns

2006-09-23T17:00:00.000+09:00

toothpastefordinner.com

dinner... just because I can

2006-09-17T20:53:00.000+09:00

what a world, what a world... that i can post pictures of what i made for dinner to the entire world in less than the time it takes to fry an egg, as if other people were dying to know what i eat "while out there a whole crazy world." but i can, so here's my sunday night comfort food: okonomiyaki try ii ... much more successful than try i.

technical difficulties; also 'snost and lost'

2006-09-16T20:15:00.000+09:00

for reasons unknown to me (a miracle considering my vast, vast knowledge of all things technical), I had to reset the layout - or "template" - for this website. Minimal information was lost, but I tried for a few days to figure what was wrong and fix it, which is why, my dear, grand legion of readers, there has been no kathy-centric news of japan the last few days.

But here!:
from Mike Doughty's site (http://mikedoughty.com/gallery/MIke-no-longer-lives-life%2C-he-only-photographs-it/tobefilledwithawe_oct22_2004). His "I hear the bells" (which contains the word "ampersand" and the lines "you snooze you lose, well i have snost and lost") has been on repeat for the last three or four days in my house, and this is nice, too.

what a day, what a week... things that happened:
1. I taught a 50 minute class using the wrong material - material from another class. d'oh. The students, bless them, gave absolutely no indictation that anything was wrong or that their teacher was a moron who was teaching them all the wrong material. They responded to cards and played games with reasonable success, and, as far as I could see, didn't shoot each other or me any odd looks of "What is going on? Last week we were talking about 'They went to the park. Where THEY go? THEY went to the park' This week, it's all 'on, under, over.' " I didn't realize what I had done until the end of the class, when I gave them back their workbooks. (Workbooks, what a word. I now operate in a world that has workbooks and where the t-rex puppet means 'he' and the minnie mouse puppet is 'she' and where students have to be watched before class so they don't try to climb the bookshelf. The climbing the bookshelf bit only happened twice, I guess.) Made me realize how much control and responsibility one has a teacher - just how much faith students have in you (and how little control they have; this is all in another language), and, thus, how important it is that you try hard to do the best you can and to present the information as clearly as possible.

(The teaching mix-up, however, actually happened two weeks ago. This week was test week at school. So, yeah, d'oh, I mixed up and taught them the wrong lesson on the week before the test. But the class did very well on the test, and I told Shigeko about what I did as soon as the class was over. She laughed, bless her, and said it's something that every teacher's done at one point. I don't know if that's true, but it made me feel much, much better. But, still, seriously, pay attention lenius.)

2. During an overzealous moment demonstrating "I CAN seee the board. I CAN'T see the board" I got gum stuck in my hair during class. I don't normally chew gum, but TK offered it after our afternoon snack (there's almost always afternoon treats before school actually starts at 4:40 p.m. or 5 p.m.), and I didn't want to say no, and it's not that I'm opposed to gum in any way, I just don't like to chew it regularly. I knew I lost my gum during class, but I couldn't find it after a quick half-second check. Then one of the girls who was sitting two spots away from me sits up and comes over and pulls it out of my hair. Awesome.
3. I went to my first ikibana class. Ikibana is a type of flower arranging, but different from Western style arrangements. It's very specific and there's many rules and outlines of how many flowers and angles at which they be bent and where they should be. I didn't think I was going to like it that much, honestly, but I do. They're flowers so they smell nice and they add a nice aesthetic to the apartment. Plus, I like the thought of displicine and spending time thinking about how to arrange something that nature made beautiful to make it even more so. No one, however, in the class including the instructor speaks any English, and, of course, my Japanese skills (at present) are sort of limited to "thank you," "thank you very much." Still, I think it will be fine. Shigeko studied with this instructor for almost 20 years, and she's teaching something that's based on the physical. She shows you how to do something, you do it, you show her what you did, if she likes it, she smiles; if she doesn't, she moves it around. The instructor was also TK's gymnastics coach, and one of the other women in the class showed me a ikibana magazine from earlier this year that has the instructor's picture and a short story about her. So, ikibana, I'm excited about that.
4. At school, right before the adult class, I stabbed myself with a thumbtack. I didn't think it was that bad, but when we were giving introductions and "how are yous" at the beginning of class, the student sitting next to me asked if I was ok. My finger was bleeding more than I thought. So I went to get a band aid. During class. But now, anyway, I know where the first aid kit is.
5. Twin boys in Thursday's 1A class (6-year-olds) stuck pencils in both of their nostrils and in their ears as the class started the test (this week, as I mentioned, was test week for all the children's classes). Both got up, smiling so big and so proud, to come over and show me. Yesterday, at the onsen after work, I could laugh about it.
-----
Adrian said you have to be able to laugh at yourself to survive here. That's true at school, as it is for any teacher, I'm sure. Culturally, I'm not quite at the point where I can open myself up to laugh yet, I don't think. On the weekends, when there's not a prearranged activity, I still feel pretty lost. I went for a really long walk today. I found the park I couldn't find when I went looking a couple of weekends ago, but I still feel really disconnected and limited because I can't speak the language. No one has been rude because I can't speak Japanese, and I don't think most people expect me to be able too, because I obviously am not Japanese and I don't look like I'm Japanese and most people aren't surprised when I can't understand what they say. And people really have been so welcoming - unbelievably welcoming, actually, going out of their way to help someone who - and it sounds so ridiculous when it's put like this, but this is what happened - came to their country with no idea how to speak the language, and so must be accomodated by them. (Today, it started to rain while I was walking and someone actually pulled their car over to offer me an umbrella.)
But language is so limiting. I feel like I can't go into a restaurant, I can't go to a tea or coffee house, I can't browse in a sweet store (and there are many of those there), I can't buy onsen tickets or take the train, I can't figure out how to get money out of my bank account via the atm. And I realize that these are in part (in large part, actually) limitations that I'm putting on myself. Today I organized some of the Japanese textbooks that I brought and the study notes left by previous teachers. Tomorrow, it is my intention to go to Doutour coffeeshop (they have a pointable picture menu), and get a few basic phrases down, so I can feel a little more comfortable. I also need to study a little so I can ask TK about the possibility of Japanese lessons; I want to have at least put in a minimal effort before I ask him to donate some of his time. I also want to make a list and schedule of places I definitely want to go while I'm in Japan, and then schedule a weekend or vacation when I will go there. I know I'm just starting, but I've also been here a month already, and I don't want to miss out on seeing and experiencing things while I'm here just because I didn't have things together.

Also, maybe a testiment to my state of mind, but I saw this for the first time today, and out of some mix of happiness and longing and gratefulness for the opportunities that are available and the opportunities that I've had and guilt for not being more satisified and brave and taking advantage of those opporutnities, and joy for the all the beautiful things there are, it made me cry. But, it's inspiring, I think. Bless matt, too.
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/

Man, it's still raining. I wish I had some knitting needles.

things that are true today that weren't true yesterday

2006-09-11T23:57:00.000+09:00

was going to write about something at work today, but then thought how odd that i would happen to come up with this title (for something completely unrelated) on the fifth anniversary of terrorist attacks. i always think of julia and her sister and her beautiful email reflection and "all about the fire in your life on the evening news."

ishinomaki

2006-09-11T23:49:00.000+09:00

as long as i can post pictures...

ishinomaki as found on a sculpture outside the train station

undokai pics try ii

2006-09-11T23:07:00.000+09:00

undokai

2006-09-10T22:38:00.000+09:00

today... so much:
1. Five hours of undokai (sports festival) at the yochien (preschool) where we teach once a week. The preschool is associated with a Buddhist temple, and if I had to describe it in one word (which probably isn't a limitation that anyone but I am going to put on myself), it would be "charming." The school by itself is like something from a movie, with bright paintings of cartoon characters and playground equipment that includes an elephant slide, a t-rex slide, and a cow, a dachshund and more animals for climbing on.

Plus, of course, there's the children. First of all, the ones I teach are kindergarten age, so automatically there is an adorable factor with their tendency to stare off into space or cling to your leg and have hair that sticks up or is braided into pigtails and look so darn cute in their miniature clothes. (They wear uniforms and baseball-like hats complete with elastic straps that go under their chins. Baseball hats are color-coded according to children’s classrooms.)

But, because they are kindergarten-age and you are their teacher and you are American (and thus look different and act differently than other teachers and people in their lives and are a novelty), they are also so incredibly happy to see you. We (myself and whoever is assisting with the class... it alternates every week between TK and Shigeko, Mari, and Ai-san) walk by their classrooms on the way to the gym (where the classes are held), and there’s cries of “Kassie-sensai!” and little ones running up to give you a high-five or wave. They’re just so overjoyed to see you. I've only led one class at yochien, plus observed one and co-taught one with Adrian, but already they seem overjoyed to see me, like we’ve already bonded or I’ve proven myself (which I don’t like I have at all. But I don’t want to dismiss student appreciation. Heaven knows I’ll take it wherever I can get it.)

So, that’s the school: surrounded by this wooded mountain with an adjacent temple and in a building that belongs in a storybook and with enthusiastic children. Today, today, though, was just over the top (but not in a bad way).

Shigeko and I represented TK Study Room at undokai, and she picked me up at 8:10 a.m. this morning. This is plenty early considering I’ve gotten into the bad habit of staying up late and sleeping until 10 or (gulp) 11 a.m. since my workday Monday through Friday is 1-about 9:45 p.m. And it didn’t help that last night I stayed up until at 4 a.m. fucking around (for lack of a better phrase) online and with this very blog.

(Freshman year of college, the person who lived kittycorner across the hall from Sarah and me told me that the human body’s sleep cycle naturally repeats at 3 hours. So if you can’t get a full night’s sleep, she said, your body will feel more refreshed if you can something that’s a multiple of three – 3 hours or 6 hours. I still don’t know if that’s true, but I like to tell myself that when I can’t get as much sleep as I should. So 4 a.m.-7 a.m. = three hours of sleep.)

I woke up a little before my alarm, but went back to bed. Alarm went off at a little after 7 a.m., I was up, had those post-dream, pre-full conscious thoughts. As I mentioned in a previous post (yes! self-referencing), at 7 a.m., a song plays on a citywide broadcast system here. This morning, of course, was no exception. Except: shortly following the music today, there was a woman’s voice making an announcement in Japanese that, of course, I couldn’t understand. At that point, I started to wake up a little bit more. After living in Cannon Beach and being prone to worry anyway, I don’t take tsunamis and the possibility of sudden natural disasters lightly. What is this woman saying, is something wrong?, I half-wondered from my futon bed. (From ambulances to fruit salesman to recycling trucks, there are all sorts of recorded voices that are broadcast through speakers on vehicles here, so in a way I kind of tune them out because I can’t understand them, but I was paying more attention from my sleepy state because I could tell this was from the main speaker system, not a vehicle.) Then, when following the announcement, a siren went off, my heart went into overdrive. I jumped up from the floor, pulled on a pair of corduroys and looked out the window. Last night was the biggest and longest earthquake since I’ve arrived (and, again, it wasn’t bad at all. I think it maybe lasted 15 seconds – which probably means it lasted about 5 – and it wasn’t very strong), so I was also kind of primed for disaster. I pulled back the curtains, slid open the balcony door and watched to see what other people were doing - if it was serious and others were getting up and getting out. No one came out, and the siren stopped after two times (stopped after two times doesn’t make any sense to me now. “What do you mean stopped after two times?” Two blasts is nothing, and I know I was up and about for awhile before it stopped, but I never questioned the “two times” until I proofread this, but oh well.), so I figured things were OK, but my heart had been jump started and I was up for the day.

I asked Shigeko about the siren when she picked me up not quite an hour later, she said, yes, the voice means it’s just a test, and that she hadn’t heard it, and had I heard any fireworks this morning? Ishinomaki’s big festival is a fireworks festival, but it’s held in August (early August, I didn’t get to see it this year). However, I actually heard fireworks the night before, and told her so. No, she said, these fireworks would’ve been this morning. It was overcast today, and apparently in lieu of an announcement on the radio or television, to let parents’ know if undokai was still going on or not, they light off fireworks in the morning. One firework means the festival will go on; more means no festival today. Parents list for the fireworks to learn if the event will go on or not.

Man, I’m a tease. I haven’t even started to write about undokai and this is long and it’s getting late and I want to get to bed earlier tonight. But undokai, basically, is a school festival for families. Parents, grandparents, siblings, even cousins and aunts and uncles come to the school to watch students participate in races, dance and do choreographed pom-pom routines to music, play music, play games. There were games for parents (musical chairs which concluded an interview with the winner over the p.a. system) and grandparents (basically a relay using a crochet-like mallet to hit a ball down a line and run back) and parents and students together (making baskets with bean bags – cooler than I made it sound – and children riding on their mom’s shoulders and trying to take off other children’s caps). All the school’s teachers were, of course, busy with their classes, but I didn’t have any official duties than to wave at students, give them thumbs up and say “good job!,” so I sat next to the principle and the PTA president in the main tent under an archway decorated bouquets of at least two dozen balloons and cartoon characters rendered very skillfully from construction paper. It was so much fun. Five hours was perhaps a little long. But I took 118 pictures and four short videos of the action. Students performed to a Disney melody and to “Stars and Stripes Forever” and numerous Japanese tunes. Flags – both nations’ flags and flags with elephants and gators and those mass produced and those made by yochien students – were hung about over the field and along the classrooms. It was cute – or, kawaii. There were parachutes and students who lost one shoe during a race and kept going, and those who cut across the round dirt area where undokai races were held. I joined parents and other teachers for tug of war. I’ve been having some technical difficulties with posting photos on Blogger, and I question the wisdom of posting pictures of children I don’t know on the internet, so I’m only going to put a few pictures from undokai online. If you’re interested in seeing more pics, let me know and I can email them.

After undokai got over and Shigeko and I helped clean up, the sun came out and it was hot, and Shigeko asked me if I wanted to come back to her house to have “frappe” – like snow cone. She and TK are so wonderful. I so want to be a good employee for them. I want to be a good teacher, anyway, but they’re so wonderful to me, I want to do them justice. So, yes, we went back to her house, I had a reunion with their vocally uninhibited dog, Choco, and had shaved ice with maple syrup and condensed milk. TK had come back from his reunion with college friends in Sendai, so we all ate together and talked. I asked them about making ramen. The night before I was in the grocery and wanted to make ramen, but no clue. So, long story short, they asked me to stay for dinner, we went to the grocery, I asked them dozens of little questions about grocery-related items that I don’t realize I don’t know until I’m in the store and I have no way of asking anyone.

So, we had ramen and okonomiyaki (also called a Japanese pancake or Japanese pizza which I had had at their house before and tried to make at the apartment and failed through equal parts burning and having the cabbage and green onion doughy part fall apart) and I got lessons on ramen from Shigeko and okonomiyaki from TK. Dinner was followed by ice cream and sweet German wine and watching a serial samurai movie. Japan makes so much sense when I’m with them. And then I come back to my apartment where I don’t know the language or how to communicate or how to get anywhere or have a comfortable place to sit and read or anyone to talk to, and I feel kind of overwhelmed and lost. But, just because I don’t know the language now doesn’t mean I can’t learn.

Also! Today, heard from the meisties – shout out! – which suddenly made things seem a lot more manageable and enjoyable. ‘Cause, you know, you’re awesome. Love, all-enveloping love. And I’m so glad things are going well for you and healthy and happy and you’ve gone from PCT to PCV.

Thoughts from the Indigo Girls, who I have been listening to for part of the writing of this long-winded entry:

“Oh, the fear I’ve known, that I might reap the praise of strangers and end up on my own.”

“We are fortunate ones, fortunate ones, I swear.”

“maybe that’s all that we need is to meet in the middle of impossibility.”

“don’t you write you it down, remember this in your head. Don’t take a picture, remember this in your heart.”

away

2006-09-09T23:58:00.000+09:00

some scenes from matsushima, japan as observed Sept. 9, 2006

messsges from home

2006-09-09T23:43:00.000+09:00

(a lost file rediscovered on my computer from when i was home this August... accompanied by photos from the same time)

Some clippings found at home:

“If you constantly give, you will constantly receive.” – fortune from fortune cookie tucked in mirror in Donna’s room.

“Anonymous writer, on perspective: ‘Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of top soil and the fact that it rains.’ ” – newspaper clipping, torn around the edges, in drawer in the living room/dad’s desk.

“Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.” – Swedish proverb as quoted in a newspaper clipping on grandma’s refrigerator

“The world stands out on either side,
no wider than the heart is wide.
Above the earth is stretched the sky,
no higher than the heart is high.”
- E. Millay. Printed by Dolores Otto in a high school graduation card to me and noted as lines from one of her favorite poems

Facts

2006-09-08T12:06:00.000+09:00

1. I ride by rice fields on my bike ride to work.
2. I also ride by a 7-11, a life sized (or slightly larger than life sized) stuffed E.T. doll, and a fiberglass dinosaur with sunglasses and a red baseball hat advertising for tires. ***Note. After further inspection of tire-hawking dino, I must correct an error. Dinosaur is NOT wearing sunglasses.
3. I have been in Japan 24 days.
4. I have been in the classroom by myself for a week.
5. I have absolutely no recollection of what I was doing one month ago.
6. At 7 a.m., noon and 5 p.m, a mechanical song (like what a music box might play) is broadcast over a citywide speaker system here.
7. I have had a group of 20-plus students bow to me, call me "sensai kathy" (sometimes pronounced "kassie"), and say in a chant-like manner "domo arigato gozaimasta." I in turn bow and say "arigato gozaimas." They then turn to a miniature shrine ("shrine" might not be the right word) of Buddha at the front of the room and bow and say "domo arigato gozaimasta" to Buddha.
8. I don't know the difference between "gozaimasta" and "gozaimas."
9. I have watched "When Harry Met Sally" approximately half a dozen times since I moved into the apartment 13 days ago and have never seen the final scene.
this will be an ongoing list.

Going to work. Please, fill me with understanding and perspective and compassion and so much love. These are just kids who are going to another school, after regular school, when they could be playing outside or being with their friends, and everything that's said in the classroom is a foreign language to them. Please help me to be understanding and kind and fun, and give me concentration to focus on what we're doing in class and to be prepared to lead a structured, well-organized class. Help me to comprehend that I am the teacher, and that students are paying attention to me and mostly following my lead. Please help me to be enthusiastic and forgiving and unselfish and, really, full of love. Patience and love.

wise words

2006-09-04T22:25:00.000+09:00

"There is some truth in the thought that we teach other people how to treat us."

thanks, mum.

perspective...

2006-08-30T22:34:00.000+09:00

A response from a high school student tonight during the adults' class when I asked her how she was:

"I'm great. ... I can enjoy almost every type of fruit."

I didn't really understand her explanation of why this was important or significant or how this has changed in the past week, but, still...

rainstorm in ishinomaki

2006-08-28T22:31:00.000+09:00

It was thundering when we got done with work and walked out of school today. Tonight is my second night in my apartment here and was my first time riding home from work in the dark on my bicycle. Thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder, pedaling my bicycle for the first time through the Ishinomaki night. There's something so incredibly romantic (in the Anne of Green Gables sense) about riding a bicycle through the streets of a foreign city on a thundering evening after dark. (while singing "Oh Yoko") So, I decided to enhance the romance with a stop for some beer at the 7-11... when I came out, the thunder had produced rain. (Earlier today, when TK and I were driving to my apartment for the mandatory lesson on how to reduce the likelihood of blowing oneself up with the gas stove, he commented on how the fish smell in town meant a south wind and a south wind likely meant rain.)

So, with my messenger bag across my shoulder and the intersection almost deserted because it was leaning toward 11 p.m., I rode through the rain to my new home. What I hope will be my new home.

i now intend to sit and eat a mayonaise-slathered sandwich and sour cream and onion Pringles and drink beer and watch an American movie. ("When Harry Met Sally." It's one of two movies in the apartment. The other is "Dawn of the Dead," and features a critic's exclamation, "Scary as Hell!" on the cover.) No Japanese tv tonight. Although I think Monday night is when SMAP's show (SMAP is a J-pop band) is on. Last Monday at Ai's house we watched their show. It included a "Roulette Bowling" segment in which SMAP members and a rival pop band (I think) threw bowling balls down an alley that was spinning roulette-style. And, also roulette-style, they had to predict a number that their ball would land it. I liked it. It was entertainment that could be appreciated across the language barrier. I've been here almost two weeks, and I think I may actually know less Japanese now than when I arrived, if that's possible. I keep learning phrases (including two words for "thank you" that Japanese people traditionally say at the start and the close of a meal) and then forgetting them. I also think I'm spoiled now because Adrian is here. When he leaves, I will have no native English speakers to converse with.

But now, movie. Later, tales of my first encounter with sushi; or, plots to determine how I can show my face at Sushi Zen again.

go and beat your crazy head against the sky

2006-08-23T10:43:00.000+09:00

"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.

all hail doraemon!

2006-08-17T22:29:00.000+09:00

What some may argue is an irresistably adorable blue cat (who it turns out is apparently actually a robot from the year 2112) = Doraemon.

fresh fish

2006-08-17T22:28:00.000+09:00

I had my first raw fish yesterday.

It was “tarako,” or raw cod eggs which was covered with a spicy red seasoning. Pink (almost a salmon color) and round. Keiko had shown me a picture of it in a booklet/magazine on Sendai which we looked at on the train to Ishinomaki. She came in from the kitchen when we were about halfway through dinner yesterday, cut me off a piece, told me what it was, that it was spicy and a “very Japanese food.” She likes to eat it for breakfast when she’s at school in Tokyo, she said. But instead of eating a biteful of fish with rice, one is supposed to mush up (for lack of better word) the fish with the rice and eat it as a mixture – at least I think that’s how it’s supposed to work. It was spicy (the spicy almost overwhelmed the texture and mental image that one is eating raw fish – raw fish, a whole chunk of it), but not as cold as I thought it was be, and the thing I remember most about eating it was how little round bits of the fish stuck to the chopsticks afterwards. It was so just so different than anything I’d even had before that I’m not even sure if I can say whether I liked it or not. But I’m sure it won’t be the last time I try it.

I knew my first raw fish encounter would happen eventually, but wasn’t expecting it to go down as it did. On our walk yesterday afternoon Keiko and I first went to a 7-11 store (it’s actually called something different on the sign like ‘7-i open’ or something like that) a couple of blocks from their home. I’ve been trying to think of what exactly I mean when I say that I forget that I’m actually in Japan. The 7-11 was a good example. The logo was almost exactly the same as one in America, there were banners with Snoopy hanging above the entry way (people love ‘Peanuts’ here. Keiko loved it when I told her Charles Schulz was from Minnesota. We talked about it on the train ride after I saw she had a ‘Peanuts’ folder and when I pointed out the banner yesterday, she remembered.), yet when I you walked in, what was there was completely different. In addition to the kanji and hiragana and katakana writing, what was in the coolers and on the shelves was different in scale, appearance and variety (although I am pretty sure that I saw some corn dogs in the hot deli-like case at the front of the store). Sweet red bean cakes (I forget what they’re called, but they’re TK’s favorite) and dango (rice flour dumplings shaped vaguely like popsicles and put on sticks) and different types of gum and candy and dried meat products at the end of an aisle which Keiko said were in a classification called “susami” – “good with beer.” We went to the book/cd/dvd store next and were looking at the food/cooking section of the magazines (Keiko’s favorite part of the store), there was a book entitled and dedicated to “susami.” Also looked at travel magazines, fashion magazines (including one called “Crea” which is dedicated to cats and fashion – as in models posing with cats), some of the aisles and aisles of magna, an English-Japanese (NOT Japanese-English) dictionary for me, CDs (which one can rent like movies), and, of course, movies. So many of the movies there were American: “Finding Nemo,” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” “Where’s Waldo,” “Dirty Dancing,” “Winnie the Pooh,” etc., etc. It’s odd to suddenly be pointing to something that one really doesn’t feel that much affinity for (like “Finding Nemo” or “Winnie the Pooh”) with such glee – it’s something that 1. you can recognize, 2. that can serve as a conversation piece for awhile, and 3. it seems to make one’s host feel more comfortable that you see something familiar or there’s something you can both relate to. It’s also odd how, when one doesn’t understand the language or alphabet, how strongly one can suddenly feel comforted and drawn to something romanized letters (romanji), even if I have no idea what it says. Keiko also introduced me to a rotund blue and white cartoon cat (whose name starts with a “d” but I can’t remember what it is even though she repeated it numerous times) who travels through time to help a boy. The cat is universally loved in Japan, according to Keiko, and I can understand why even though I’ve never seen his cartoon. So adorable that I literally reached up to a sign with his image and pretended to tweak his cheek as a way (albeit a very strange, maternally, middle aged, Midwestern way) of showing Keiko how much I liked the cat. Cats, cats, are everywhere here.

The reason for our walk, I thought, was were going to the store to buy things to make a “hamburger steak supper” – which is what the electronic translator said when Keiko showed it to me before we left. But instead of buying things for supper, when we went to the grocery store, we went to the McDonalds inside to bring back food for us and Kyoko and she and Keiko’s grandmother. Thus, my first time eating that quintessential Japanese food was also accompanied by a Filet-O-Fish.

Keiko and I have been using primarily Yahoo’s English to Japanese and Japanese to English converter to communicate with each other (which works very well as it allows one to type in a whole phrase.) TK and Shigeko’s other daughter, Kyoko, doesn’t speak as much English and so our conversations have been generally limited to smiling at each other and occasional interpretations by Keiko. It’s pretty unreal (although I guess very, very logical and rule number one of communication) how the dynamics of a conversation can change based on language. I do need to learn some more basic, basic Japanese because when we go to the convenience store and the grocery store, I have no idea what people are saying and/or what the appropriate response back to them would be. At the 7-11, I bought some candy for Keiko’s grandmother (who lives with the family), and I didn’t know what to say to the person before the counter as I’m sure she greeted me and extended other professional niceties, but at the end of the transaction, she and Keiko smiled at each other when I said “arigato.”

My first real observation about Japanese and culture: food is so important here. Brochures at the book store, tourist brochures for places, all prominently feature food pictures. In TK’s photographs (he likes to take photographs and got at least three of us at the grocery store alone yesterday), he shoots pictures of the food – by itself and also with the person who is eating it. The television was on during dinner last night, and the program that was on featured two teams going around to different restaurants on a scavenger hunt to try different meals. And I feel like I’ve been eating so much here. Last night in addition to tarako and half sandwich and french fries from McDonalds, I had sticky rice, tempura left over from lunch, a fried wedge of potato which TK’s mother (Keiko’s grandmother) made, slices of cucumber with a salty brown paste, and dessert. Keiko really likes a type of dessert that is like fruit cocktail – pieces of fruit in heavy, sweet sauce, but also with cubes of tofu and clear gelatin, and red bean sauce to mix in - but I just couldn’t finish it last night.

My jet lag has been weird, almost non-existent – I slept about five hours the first night I was here even though I had been without real sleep for close to 30 hours. Last night I went to bed early – slightly after 9 p.m. and am up early (5 a.m.) today. The plan, however, is to try to get a little more sleep if no one is up by the time I’m finished with this.

Today will be first time visiting the school, which I’m looking forward to.

zuihitsu

2006-08-17T08:30:00.000+09:00

Post-layover, post-first trans-Pacific flight, post-train rides from airport to Tokyo and Tokyo to Sendai and Sendai to Ishinomaki, post-night time car ride through a muggy Ishinomaki night (the sun sets here at about 6 p.m. as there is no daylight savings time), my first day in Japan.

Last night, the son of the man who owns the school where I'll be working met me at the airport, and his daughter met the Sendai train station and we rode together on toIshinomaki. We communicated using their English skills and electronic translators and my pathetic little Japanese phrase book which has a (very) limited dictionary as I left my "real" dictionary in the luggage that was shipped to TK's house, where I'm staying for the next week. Oh yes, in Japan they have a service in which at the airport you can have your luggage delivered to your door. Also carts to help you carry your luggage are free, which made life so much simpler. My flight was almost an hour early, but it took almost 45 minutes to get through immigration (customs took less than a minute), so TK and Shigeko's son had to wait about 2 hours at the airport, in addition to the hour it takes to the airport from Tokyo, an hour ride back to Tokyo and waiting for about 20 minutes to help me onto the train to Sendai. I ended up getting into Ishinomaki after 10 p.m. and in addition to a night time tour of Shigeko and TK's house, the evening included some food (which was good because I got sick from the first of two meals served on the flight over and as such didn't eat anything else on the flight) and meeting dog Choco-chan. Choco is a dachshund shape and size with coloration and fur styling of a Golden Retriever. When I arrived he had a fake flower attached to each of his ears (he had been groomed earlier this week I found out) and his eyes were literally rolling back in his head he was barking so much and was so upset to see me, a stranger, at his house. (Within minutes, he was my friend after Shikego gave me three bits of food to feed him. He still barks incessently when left alone in a cage in the front hallway, but is so incredibly adorable when out and being admired by people that it's forgiven.)

Morning. This morning started waking up before everyone else and taking a shower, and discovering too late that I didn't know how to turn OFF the water and thus having to wake up Shigeko (actually having Choco wake up Shigeko with his barking) to show me how as the water continued to run. Brilliant. Before breakfast, Shigeko, Keiko and Kyoko and I watched a Japanese soap opera (a woman was dying and I think it was set in the past) and, before we ate, the Yankees game came on. That was before 8 a.m. This international date line thing throws my mind for a loop. Here, it's 14 hours ahead of central time zone in the United States, so as we were having breakfast, it was time for the baseball game to start in New York. First morning here also included decidedly western breakfast of orange juice imported from Brazil, sandwiches with lunch meat and processed cheese, and salad). Then, because today is the last day of Ancesors' Week (which, from what I understand, is when people across Japan return home to be together and discuss and remember and honor their deceased relatives) TK and Keiko and I drove to their temple to lay bamboo boats and flowers in rememberances of their ancestors. They were put on a pile almost as tall as I am and the temple parking lot was very crowded. TK let me put one on the pile (I'm pretty sure he got a picture of it), which was surprising as I didn't know these relatives and they weren't my ancestors, but it was nice. TK said that later priests burn the gifts and that it's believed that the ancestors' souls are released again after they spent a week with their family. I like that idea - the idea of a time set aside specifically for remembering people who were important to you who are dead. There's the Day of the Dead in Mexico, but I don't know if any other cultures or religions have a time set aside for this.

Apparently, at the school, we teach kindergartners at the temple's kindergarten, so I'll be back. And I'd like to go back and walk around.

After the temple, Keiko and I accompanied TK on his daily walk in an Ishinomaki park. Apparently, the first time he went there was when he was on a grade school trip and he and Shigeko had their first day at the area overlooking the park's tiered green tea bushes. We parked at an area in front of a stairway that leads up to a 800-year-old Japanese temple. And on our walk, we passed by a marker which commemorates a woman (the woman who Miyagi, the name of the prefecture that Ishinomaki is located in, is named after) who lead resistance to the emperor's warriors when they attacked the area over 800 years ago. (TK said the emperor wanted to acquire the area to mine it and acquire gold to make pure gold Buddhas.) On the drive up there, I realized that this is just the beginning, this is just the start of a year here. I will likely go up that road and into that park many more times. After the walk, we picked up Adrian (felt a little guilty for speaking so much English with Adrian and also became aware how quickly one modifies speaking her primary language when talking to people who speak the language she's speaking as a second language) and went to the grocery store, which was huge and had peaches that cost $2 apiece (fruit, according to Adrian, is expensive here.)

We had a big lunch, a welcome and thank you lunch, TK said - welcome for me and thank you for Adrian. For lunch we had sukiyaki (stew with beef, onions, cabbage, several types of mushrooms, cabbage and other vegetables) and tempura (which I had always thought was just fried squid, but we had deep fried squid and squash and onions and green peppers and mushrooms. Lunch was followed by dessert of ice cream, custard and/or cheesecake and coffee or tea. Also, these people laugh a lot.

TK and Adrian went to school after lunch, but TK said that I didn't have to go today and I should stay home and "relax," which is what I'm doing (when not on edge by Choco's all-the-time barking). At 5, Keiko and I are going for a walk around town and apparrently dinner is at 6 p.m. School goes until 9:30 or 9:45 p.m., so I have a lot of free time today, which is nice. I still really can't fully believe that I'm in Japan.

One of the last stories I wrote for the Gazette was about a woman who was teaching a class on travel writing for the Haystack Program. One of the things she talked about (but I didn't put in the story) was how sometimes people need to let things sit and settle for awhile, even years, before they write about them. Even though I've been here less than 24 hours and been traveling for less than 48 hours, I can see how that's true. There's so much. So much that's different, so much that happens, so much that one learns and wants to remember that it would be impossible and drive one to distraction thinking about how to write about what happens as something is happening (which is typically what I do, maybe that's from my experience in journalism where you had to think about what details you want to include in a story as you're experiencing an event or a conversation). So, I will not be too upset with myself if this blog isn't a daily account of every little thing that happened or something that has profound insights about Life and Humanity with artful writing. This is just a place for me to record things that I choose during a once in a lifetime opportunity living in a different culture for the first time.

Man, is it hot here. Humid.

Miscellaneous that I know now that I didn't know about yesterday:
* J-Pop: Like Brit pop, but the Japanese version. On our train from Sendai to Ishinomaki, there was a banner advertising a boy band called "Cartoon" (possibly spelled wrong, but it sounds like cartoon.) When talking about music with Kazuhiro, he said one of his favorites was Mariah Carey (which isn't J-pop, but it is pop.) When Keiko brought down CDs to listen to this afternoon, one of the about 10 she brought down to chose from was Mariah Carey's Christmas album.

Japanese words/phrase of day:
- zuihitsu: my dictionary defines as "essay (consisting of the writer's random thoughts)." I like very much, but I am also a comedy of errors. I discovered this word because I got out my Japanese dictionary today, happy to not have to rely on the 10-page section of my Japanese phrasebook anymore, only to discover that I do not own an English-Japanese dictionary as I originally thought, but a Japaneseo-English dictionary - meaning that it has Japanese to English translations of words, but not English to Japanese.

Quasi-Japanese words for the day: Banana, tomato and interneto. Interneto is pronounced pretty much the same as "internet" but with an "o" at the end. Tomato is like pronounced like the second "tomato" in "you say 'tomato,' 'I saw tomato'." Banana is pronounced with the syllables running together.

enroute; or 'first time meeting'

2006-08-16T00:19:00.000+09:00

In O'Hare airport in Chicago, and after months of talking about it, it's finally hitting me that I'm actually going to Japan. To another country. To another country with a different language and completely different alphabet(s) and with things I've never seen before and things I have no idea existed and where nothing and no one will be familiar and after 13 hours on an airplane (13 hours on a plane) I'll be there. For a year. ... And ... I had a little bit a panic attack sitting in gate C11. Panic attack sounds so clinical and serious, but as I sat there, reading my "Culture Shock!: Japan" book (which, really, I wish I would've looked at more closely before I bought because the author made a lot of assumptions when he chose his "voice" for the book and they're not assumptions that I neccessarily want to buy into). But, anyway, I was there, in this empty gate, with my book, not knowing which gate my flight was in because they ahdn't posted flight information yet because it was still five hours until when the flight left, and not knowing where to go to find out where to go to ask about my flight because all the "?" booths were empty, and feeling stupid and silly and incompetent for not knowing where to go to ask and stuffing my carry-ons so full that I couldn't walk comfortably very far. And then realizing that I did have this long, long flight before complete immersion in ... I have no idea. And feeling very out of control and wondering why I did this in the first place and how I would be able to be friendly and open and nice to people if I was feeling so scared and unsure.
But, then a lesson that I'm sure I will need to remind and re-remind myself of over and over again during this year (and likely for the rest of my life): when you feel overwhelmed or sad or too sorry for yourself, it is infinitely good to get up and go out and do something. I walked around. Just to the monitors with flight information, and the flight still wasn't listed, but I remembered the flight status was listed on United's website this morning. So I checked that, and found out I happened to be right across the corridor from the gate where my airplane was scheduled to come in. And then I saw an Asian family speaking a language that I couldn't understand (which, unfortunately, definitely means it could have been Japanese) walk into that gate. Awesome. And then a woman, unasked, saw I was looking for a plug in for computer and pointed one out to me. Again, awesome. So, I don't know if I actually resolved any of the feelings that caused me to feel so unprepared and so overwhelmed, or if I just distracted myself, but I felt better. I feel better. So, don't get caught up in the little sphere of your life immediately surrounding you, and if you do, remember that - get out. And, see? A lesson and a happy, happy ending in the O'Hare airport.

Other things of note:
- Saw the sun rise on the flight from Fargo to Chicago. Reflected red in the lakes.
- Over some PA system in the airport - I don't think it's from the airport-wide system; it might be from the Brookstone across the corridor from my gate - a cover of 'leaving on a jet plane' is playing.

Japanese phrase of the day: hajime mashite. how do you do? (This is apparently a basic Japanese phrase, according to both Culture Shock! and my Japanese phrase book. Somehow it didn't get included in my flashcards of basic phrases. It must be memorized before I meet TK's son at the airport.) Hajime mashite. How do you do? (According to phrase book, it's a phrase that one uses only when one meets someone for the first time. I remember Tony used something that he said literally translated as "first time meeting" and that you only used meeting someone for the first time when he wrote out how to say "My name is..." on a sheet of paper that, somehow, got misplaced during my move.) Hajime mashite. First time meeting. Here we go.

public reflections on arriving, leaving; also, my hair

2006-07-14T15:10:00.000+09:00

today the last paper that i will ever fully participate in (at the paper where i currently work) was published. for this last issue, i wrote a 'farewell and thank you' column. i wanted to preserve that, and the column that i wrote when i first arrived in cannon beach almost four years ago, here. those columns follow.

also, life lesson learned today: it is not, when one is already in an emotional state of mind, a good idea to make a spontaneous, (relatively) radical decision regarding one's appearance. today, i had 8 inches (plus layers) cut off my hair. (enough, as my hairdresser said, to make a small terrier.) i had been growing my hair out since 2000 - that's more than six years - with the goal of eventually being able to sit on it. i actually like my hair cut, and like it shorter. but i was hoping it would look like this:

and i fear it looks more like jennifer aniston circa 1995. too layery and polished and not chunky enough. but i will 'live with it' for the next few days and if it still bothers me, i shall return to see what can be done and if there's anything that i can do with it to make it look fuller.

so... after that pettiness... here is what i wrote reflecting on coming to and leaving Cannon Beach.

Arrival

published in the Sept. 26, 2002 issue of the Cannon Beach Gazette (the second issue I worked on at the paper)

"During the two-and-half days and more than 1,600 miles that separate a car in Cannon Beach and a car in Frazee, Minn., I had plenty of time to think about exactly I was doing.
A little more than a week before I left, I received an e-mail from the Cannon Beach Gazette offering me a job as a reporter. A good thing; a very good thing. 'It sounds stupid,' I told my mom later that night in the kitchen, 'but I kind of knew from the first time I heard about this place that it was right and I'd end up there.'
All I knew about Cannon Beach I learned from the internet. I saw the pictures of Haystack Rock, knew about the galleries and theater, saw from the yellow pages that the city had three book stores. I was excited. Oregon was in my list of 'Top Five States Where I Want to Get a Job" and here was a small city on the ocean with a beautiful landmark, hiking trails and forests galore nearby, an active cultural life and an award-winning newspaper to boot.
After a few days, it occured to me that I was moving to a place that I knew next to nothing about, besides the fact that it was 'beautiful' according to anyone I ever talked to about it. (Despite any pacifistic, poetic tendencies that I may have, I am not yet at a point where I can feel comfortable moving somewhere that I know nothing about just based on the fact that it is beautiful.) I checked out the travel section at Barnes and Noble and read things that matched with what I was increasingly aware was an impossibly perfect image of Cannon Beach that was growing in my mind.
My mom's friend called. 'I heard you got a job in Cannon Beach. I just had to call to let you know how lucky you are and how much you're going to love it!'
Now I was getting nervous: could anywhere be that good? And if it is that good, would I be able to fit in there?
This nervousness stuck with me for the next few days as I packed and finalized U-Haul reservations and said goodbyes to grandparents and friends, but attacked again with a vengence after my dad and I were on the road at 6:30 a.m. Friday morning.
I was the lead car in our two-car caravan, the little black Chevy paving the way across the interstate, the backseat not even filled to the ceiling with things. My dad followed, pulling the U-Haul with his pickup, making up for the car's lack of stuff. As we plowed our way across North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, we were closer than ever to Cannon Beach, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't imagine that this place where we were going was a real town.
I wasn't very tolerant of such thoughts for very long and distracted myself with music and radio. During on particularly isolated stretch of interstate in Montana, no radio stations came in and I popped in a tape of a mock radio show written by one of my college professors.
A collection of music, poetry and humor, the opening lines of one of the show's monlogues struck me as particularly relevant: 'I am studying to be a regular.'
A Cannon Beach regular. That sounded right; not everywhere can have regulars. Regulars have character. Regulars are regulars are definition because they belong in a place. They may not always admit it, but regulars keep returning or stay in a place because they are happy there - they just 'belong' there.
When my dad and I got into town on the Sunday before Labor Day, Gazette owner and publisher Tom Mauldin gave us a tour. As we drove down one street (the street where I currently live), he said something to the effect of, 'You'll find there are two types of people in Cannon Beach: those that have been successful and because of their success can afford to start over and want to come here, and those that love it here so much that they're willing to work three or more jobs to live here. Both groups love Cannon Beach and are here because they want to be here. How many places can say that?' Ah, the regulars.
I don't yet know where I fit in, and I know that I'm not a regular, bur from my week here I can testify that people in Cannon Beach are friendly, outgoing and, above all, truly happy peole who are proud of their community and know that it's something special.
I don't think I ever would have imagined that trait of Cannon Beach when I was in Minnesota trying to picture what it was like here. But this community pride and happiness play an important role of making Cannon Beach the unique community it is and what makes me so excited to be here, studying to be a regular."

Departure

published in the July 13, 2006 issue of the Cannon Beach Gazette

"Four years ago, I had never heard of Cannon Beach.
When I got a job as a reporter for the Cannon Beach Gazette, I had never been west of Montana, never seen the Pacific Ocean, and came only with a vague notion that it would be interesting to live in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest – especially in a small town on the ocean – for awhile.
After three days of traveling from my hometown in western Minnesota, on Sept. 1, 2002, I passed through Portland and started the final leg of the journey west. As my father and I drove down Highway 26, through its towering evergreens that confirmed Midwestern stereotypes about the Pacific Northwest, there was an excitement of anticipating over the next hill, around this curve, might be the turnoff – Cannon Beach, this great unknown, could be just around the bend.
Later this month, I’ll drive down Highway 101 and Highway 26 again, this time heading east and not knowing the next time I’ll return. I’ll go back to Minnesota briefly before leaving for a year of teaching English in Japan.
In the 46 and a half months I’ve lived and worked here, I’ve burned through dozens of legal pads and reporters’ notebooks, written hundreds of stories, and conducted thousands of interviews as reporter, then community editor, for the Gazette. Cannon Beach is no longer the great unknown.
But it’s the people I’ve met that ensure Cannon Beach will never again be just a spot on the map to me.
I want to thank all those who let me into their homes and shared their stories with me. I know that’s not always an easy thing to do. Thank you to my regular contacts over the years at city hall, the fire district and Cannon Beach Elementary School for your time and assistance. To everyone who took extra time to get a picture, who talked to me on their lunch breaks, who responded to an “on deadline” call or who otherwise made an extra effort to get the Gazette and me information, thank you.
I’ve learned a lot in the last four years. I’ve grown immensely as a writer and a journalist, and for that I want to say a special “thank you” to Gazette owners and publishers Tom and Cat Mauldin.
Because of my job, I’ve been fortunate to meet so many people and talk to them about things they care about and why Cannon Beach is special to them. I can honestly say I’m inspired and humbled by the sacrifices and the hours that people put in to improve life here. The word “community” gets thrown around a lot, but I’ve witnessed, been touched by and been the beneficiary of genuine acts of community – people reaching out to help one another and demonstrating what it is to care about people and a place.
As I leave the Sunset Empire to head across the Pacific to the Land of the Rising Sun, I may not know when I’ll be back, but Cannon Beach – opalescent nudibrachs at low tide, cats at city hall, the COmmunity Warning System (COWS), sunsets from Ecola State Park, and the people – will always have a place reserved in my heart.
Thank you. It’s truly been an honor and a privilege."

point and shoot

2006-07-11T15:05:00.000+09:00

first picture taken with digital camera.

ecola point about 6 p.m. June 28.

this week

2006-07-06T13:57:00.000+09:00

...
Part I
:
this week...
- got plane ticket for japan
- took first japanese lessons (learned difference between hiragana, katagana, kanji and made first flashcards since the "matthew arnold" and "victorian age" cards for brit lit ii sophomore year of college)
- spent more than $100 on japanese books in hopes of facilitating learning japanese
- rediscovered fashion (fashion!) with silk fish print skirt and green 'luau' dress at anthropologie (which i couldn't justify buying, but felt good trying on and knowing that, somewhere out there - at anthropologie, actually - such clothing exists)
- got digital camera
- heard from donna for the first time since she arrived in africa: 'arrived safely in nouakchott (new-ock-shot), mauritania last night at 3:00 am from casablanca. casablanca was beautiful. ... everyone has been wonderful so far'
- learned that common murres lay their eggs directly on the rock and don't have nests
- watched bald eagle scatter murres as it flew over chapman point, presumably looking for eggs
- had left coast siesta burrito
-

i got the Fourth of July off. ... went downtown to watch parade and brought digital camera to practice using it. pre-parade flyover featured two f-15s which were sleek and black and super-sonic and flying below the clouds. i don't have the time to do to it justice now, but there was something chilling about the flyover. i was walking down Hemlock Street, camera in hand, smiling at the dogs with flag-themed kerchiefs tied around their necks and children with face paint and headbands with red white and blue pinwheels, and then these planes swooped down. I looked up and then looked to the right across the street and saw a group sitting on white wooden adorandiak style chairs waiting for the parade to start. and it occured to me in a way that it never had before how innocent, how naive most of us are - that i've never seen before that the america that researched, developed, invested in and built those planes for war is just as much a reality as those red, white and blue-clad families. And those planes, those planes which were made for war, are as much a part of our country as those dogs in red, white and blue and tri-colored taffy. Those planes, and the supremacy they represent, are what makes the parades and the strawberry shortcake possible - what makes it possible for me to sit here on my couch with the lights on and wireless internet connected and music playing and be full and comfortable and type whatever ill-constructed thoughts come to me. And how often we don't think of that. How often that's hidden. And how many people across the world think of those planes and that superimposed power - not the smiling people lined up along the street with their families to celebrate together - when they think of america. how many people see those planes and don't know why they're flying and are afraid, rather than inspired by that power, because they've seen planes like them cause harm before. maybe that's part of what people talk about when they talk about recognizing soldiers for the sacrifices they made - not necessarily just the first (and very substantial) things that come to mind: their families, their careers, and, good god, their safety and their lives. But also, they sacrifice that vision of America (assumes the person who has never once considered becoming a military member in her life and really has no idea) as a place that is innocent, instead of the knock-down, alpha wolf, inspirer of fear that we have had to be to pursue our (sometimes altruistic, sometimes not) goals in the world. Drove up to Seaside to watch fireworks on Monday night, and on the way home, a song with the chorus "how can we dance when the world is burning?" (or something similar) came on. i understand that, but at the same time if we don't dance, if we don't celebrate, if we're not joyful, then we're abandoning a part of our country that is good. and if we abandon what's good, then all that's left is bad. but that train of thought may be a self-justifying cop out for someone who feels guilty about not paying enough attention to the world and not doing anything to try to change what she knows is wrong. so, um, yeah, after that i took pictures of the parade and got some taffy, a sour lemon ball and some red, white and blue beads from throwers aboard floats.

on another note (or, "Part II")
:
i heard a cover of bob dylan's 'to ramona' on the radio on the way home tonight, and then the final part of scorese's dylan documentary was on the television when i got home. i forget sometimes how much i love bob dylan.

some thoughts/things overheard:

they showed a clip from joan baez as she was being interviewed and was talking about how most everyone is 'hopelessly passive' - checking with 'mommy' or 'daddy' or school teacher or clergy or senator or president before they decide what they think and/or believe.

dylan by 'protest against the rising tide of conformity' poster

documentary included showing copy of the billboard chart that read like this:
1. Help
2. Like a Rolling Stone
3. California Dreamin'
4. Unchained Melody
what a time to be alive.

line overheard in dylan documentary: 'i'd dance with you, maria, but my hands are on fire.' (as quoted by a woman - maria something, apparently - after dylan's electric performance at 1965 newport folk festival)

'Yet there's no one to beat you, no one to defeat you, except the thoughts of yourself feeling bad.' - 'to ramona'

discovered while cleaning

2006-06-26T03:03:00.000+09:00

a pencil-written note in the margin of information printed off about Olympic National Park campgrounds: "Pay attention, it's wonderful out here."

sunset at ecola state park

2006-06-19T13:51:00.000+09:00

tonight, for the first time in at least a month, i went up to ecola to watch the sunset. it's been a weird weekend; i'm on 'count-down' mode for when i'm leaving. i try not to be because it makes me panic a little to think 'only a month left' or 'only four weekends left' or 'this may be one of your last sundays to drive down to tillamook' - one of my favorite sunday activities. i visit the cheese factory and the petting farm with the bird that sounds like a dinosaur and stop off to walk around on the docks in garibaldi if it's not raining and check out the rocks at bay view and depending on my mood and the weather will drive to cape meares.

it was a good day to see the sunset (i could say that there are no bad days to see the sunset, but tonight the clouds and sun made the last embers of daylight really interesting) - there were big clouds and the sun broke through in crepuscular rays that shone on tillamook rock lighthouse. the sun made a pinkish glow to the east on the clouds that hovered over Arch Cape and on the waves breaking near shore (it was close to high tide). the rest of the sea was a dark blue, teal as it got closer around crescent beach. sometimes the rocks look kind of hazy over the distance from ecola but tonight they were sharp and clear. i walked down to the view point and started thinking about the things i'd done at ecola: the sunday soon after i moved here when i thought i'd walk up to the park even though i was exhausted from walking around cannon beach all day, because i had no idea it was still more than a mile up a steep, winding road to the park; walking down to crescent beach at 7 a.m. in the fall; hiking tillamook head in the pouring rain to get lewis and clark pictures; discovering the world war ii bunkers near hiker's camp; the crows that stole the cheese from our barbeque; the (tiny) chipmunk that stole my (huge) apple at lunch when i hadn't yet taken two bites out of it; the countless times i thought 'this is worth it'because i knew i could go there and see those things on my lunch hour; donna's and mine barbeque with the bag you set on fire; watching surfers at indian beach; looking for the whale vertebrae (which was so heavy it broke the bathroom scale) on the day after election day 2004; visiting the park the first time mom and donna came to visit - walking to the sea lion rocks in the wind and the rain; oystercatcher calls on the beach during an early morning low tide; covering the wedding where the 'aisle' was the pathway to the sea lion rocks; walking down the eroded area near the sea lion rocks countless times; watching elk that congregate on the cliffs and near the entrance; the 'rollercoaster' hill right before the entrance; driving up there on a sunny afternoon on lunch break listening to stories and music on the radio while the sun shone through the trees and not believing how lucky i was to see this and wondering how to measure up to having witnessed this; watching hang glider overhead on the day we decided to go to mcminnville (you know the song) - where donna thought somebody had told her about a 'really big bird' that lived there when it was actually the spruce goose; visiting with uncle ward and not being able to see 10 feet because of fog.

for all the bad things, there are so many good things. and i really want to remember the good things and what i've learned from being here. friday night, i went to the scandinavian midsummer festival, which included a 'hex burning' to symbolically say good bye to problems and welcome summer, and the scandinavian court talking about 'what their heritage meant to them.' saturday was sandcastle day - i feel a little dishonest because i had so much fun and i felt like it really wasn't my event, like i was just using, stealing the excitement of the other people who were there. But it was fun. it was interesting to see the beach crowded, but not have it be crowded - have it feel like all the people who were there were there together, as part of one collective gathering. Kids throwing balls of sand at each other and doing bellyflops into the pits dug to help the builders get water. A group of teenage boys in the braces and not-quite-comfortable-making-eye-contact stage standing and singing about fast food to the tune of 'carol of the bells' in front of the gigantic sandcastle they built. people in beach-accessible wheelchairs and elderly couples sitting on the sand, occasionally feeding their dog a part of their hot dog.

writing is such hard work. i felt so inspired at sandcastle day, so many thoughts running through my head, but i can't seem to do it justice now. i was remembering, at ecola, how i used to narrate things in my head, automatically, writing prose in my mind almost all the time. i don't do that anymore, or i hardly ever do. i wonder if that's because i'm busy now, i have things to do and my job actually requires that i write so i have less free brain power to devote to that. i miss that, though. lately i've been feeling kind of down about my writing and pessimistic about my chances of being the kind of writer that i fantastize about being: like jonathan safran foer or john updike - having that ability to really write something meaningful and thoughtful and unique that i'm proud of and doing it in a well-written and complete way. things are changing: with japan and donna to africa and sarah having a baby and marcie getting married. i look at my writing, my experiences sometimes and i can't believe that i'm 26 years old. i feel like i should have a lot more to show for nearly 26 1/2 years than what i do. but that kind of thinking gets one nowhere. strong. smart. independent woman.

'we don't believe in war, and we don't believe in luck.'

wonder of the day

2006-06-12T04:17:00.000+09:00

(otherwise known as things that awaken the sheer, mad joy)

the sound of mary travers' - of peter, paul and mary - voice and footage of her singing in the march on washington. the sound of the spoon hitting the bowl when cooking.

2006-06-10T14:33:00.000+09:00

taken by donna.

why i'm going to japan

2006-06-10T14:17:00.000+09:00

i sat down to write about why i'm going to japan and how it came about and why i started this blog, and, two hours later, i ended with 1,400-plus words. i don't think posts are usually this long, but i guess this is my blog, and i don't need to worry about word limits. but, welcome, enjoy, and if you have any experience in or knowledge of japan that you'd like to share, i would love to hear it.

I tell people I fell into going to Japan. A year ago, six months ago, teaching children English (although I had considered going back to school to become an elementary school teacher or an English teacher) in Japan (although in my heart of hearts I was trying to figure out how in the world I could be so exotic as to live in another country), would never have occurred to me. I got involved by chance, a happenstance encounter with a woman – a very warm, kind and enthusiastic woman – who my sister worked with when I happened to sit next to her at a volunteer training in February. She happened to ask if I would be interested in teaching in Japan. I didn’t turn her down, but didn’t take her seriously – it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, I just never considered it a possibility. The next Sunday, I was thinking about my future and my current job that would end in less than four months, and what was I going to do. “Why not go to Japan?” something said. “Really, why not go? You want to do something different, you’d like to try teaching, you’re ready for an adventure, you only live once. Why–not–go?”

As a reporter I feel like I’m constantly asking people questions that I myself don’t know how to answer, not about my upcoming international experience, anyway. “Why are you doing this? What do you hope to get out of the experience? What are you looking forward to? What are you afraid of? What is your long-term vision for your life? Ideally, where do you see yourself in five, ten years?” But maybe it’s not entirely fair to say that I don’t know the answers to these questions. Because that assumes that everyone I ask those questions (and when I think about how I don’t know what I’d say, I’m amazed at the insightful responses people often give), just naturally had those answers. That assumes “you have it or you don’t” - not that someone can initially NOT have the answers to those questions, realize that that’s something they’d like to figure and then develop answers – honest answers, answers they feel comfortable with. Just because I didn’t know how to articulate why I feel like this is going to a really great thing for me as soon as I said “yes” doesn’t mean that I won't ever have those answers.

Before Donna left, we talked about interviewing each other about our respective upcoming adventures overseas. When I interview people sometimes and another person they know (significant other, mother, sister, etc.) is also there, I’m really surprised at how often the other person will stop and say “I didn’t know that” during the interview. At first it made me feel like ‘yeah, I’m an awesome (there’s a word I have to stop using) journalist, a fantastic interviewer who knows how to make someone feel comfortable and share.’ Then, I realized that this information that was new to family and/or friend usually came out after a pretty mundane question. And this April when Donna was here and I started listing off the usual questions, I realized that those aren’t the kinds of things (“What will be the most challenging? What do you think you’ll miss most?”) that you usually talk about with people – even the people you’re really close to.

We never did the formal interview, but on our trip down the coast we asked each other a few questions. I can’t remember if it was on the beach at Gold Beach or when we were driving back from "A Winter's Tale," but for some reason I remember the conversation happening under a sort of cloud (of drowsiness from dark and driving, or from sun and surf and seagulls, or neither at all I don’t remember).
When Donna left, we sat on a bench in Union Station, while a line of people who also had tickets for the Empire Builder stood in the center of the building, waiting for boarding to start. We looked at pics on meisties' digital camera, I (innocently but not wisely, it turned out) struck up a conversation with a woman in a wheelchair who had parked herself near us. But, for some reason, it wasn’t until that line started moving – and it moved fast – that we really acknowledged that we wouldn’t see each other again until we had both begun pretty transformative experiences. After Donna got on the train and I walked outside, I felt like I had two choices: I could continue to feel sad about saying goodbye, and think about the fact that our lives are changing and the next time I see Miss D might be a year or more. Or I could stuff up all these powerful emotions – emotions about life events that I’ve envied other people for having – go to Target, buy deodorant, get some high-fat comfort food, and go home and watch “Deal or No Deal.” But the latter, while tempting because it’s safe and familiar (and it’s my fault that it’s become familiar), is not living. Not really. So, after I left Union Station, I drove the Rose Garden, walked around barefoot for awhile, got some Starbursts out of my bag and read. I bought a Mother’s Day present for my grandma and went to Uwajimaya (Japanese market just outside of Portland). I looked around at the tanks full of live crab and cellophane bags of dried fish snacks, selected some ramen from an aisle almost completely dedicated to ramen-related product and bought some gelatinous strawberry cookies. I listened to “This American Life” on the way home, and I felt happy.

And that is one thing that I’m working to change and hope my time living in another country will facilitate: taking advantage of the fact that, right now at this very instant, I'm living and breathing to try new things that I really want to do. I’m going to Japan for the same reasons that most people travel: I want to see new things and meet new people. But I also want to prove to myself that I don’t have to settle, that I can create an exciting and fulfilling life for myself. I want to make a home for myself in the unfamiliar. I want to figure out if I want to be a teacher or if I miss journalism after a year. I want to make friends across the Pacific that I can go visit or will come visit me for years. I want become a better person, break out of the mold that my life has fallen into, prove to myself that I can do it.

About a month and a half ago, I remembered that when I was in high school, one of the things on my “list of things to do before I die” was to learn to speak Japanese. I bought a “teach yourself Japanese” book at Media Play and everything (I’ll bet it’s still in the basement somewhere…). But I lost interest in later high school years and didn't pursue it at all in college. I didn’t remember that one-time interest in Japan when I was considering if I should take the position, or when I learned more about the job and life in Japan, or even when I accepted. I don’t know exactly what prompted that once and future goal to come back to me, but I’m glad I remembered. It makes me feel comforted, like snuggling with the blankets up to your chin or hearing someone that you know loves you say ‘I love you’; it’s like a warm wash of good feelings and reinforcement, like maybe this whole thing wasn’t so random.

I decided to sign up for this blog (my first!) in the hopes that it will serve as a good kind of “scrapbook” for the trip – a place to collect images and thoughts about my first time living in another country and within a different culture. And, of course, it’s also a way to share what’s going on in the life with family and such. But writing for a blog is a bit odd. I feel tempted to write confessionally, as if this was a journal. But, I know, I know, this is for the “world wide web” accessible to any and all who happen to search for “Cannon Beach” or “Japan” or “Ludacris tattoo” (which, really, ask me some time about the “rappers for emergency preparedness” tattoo series). Plus, there’s the issue of writing for the audience, which will likely be people who know me. So there is literarily-sound reason for mentioning Ludacris.