Expat Blogging Success and Small Town Grudges: Yay for the internet!

As you probably know by now, this is my personal blog, dedicated to all the craziness that makes up my day-to-day existence.

Recently I ran across a cool looking campaign for expat bloggers living in Japan and figured, what the heck? There's a decent enough financial incentive and I love having the opportunity to: a) get more attention for Tohoku from travelling foreigners, b) get more of my writing out there, and c) have a reason to go and explore to keep me away from the post-GISH funk.

Also, if I play my cards right, I can make enough money in Amazon Japan vouchers to buy a copy of Inside Out for my daughter.
Good times, right?

Actually, BEYOND yes. I thought through lists of places I've been and pictures I have, places I want more foreigners in Japan to enjoy, regardless of their status as visitors just to my area or to the country at large.
I got my first post online on August 13th, guiding the audience through a bunch of pics from the Sendai Owl Cafe in the arcade. You can find it here.
It worked out fine so I spent the next afternoon walking to Shiogama Shrine, playing tour guide to an imagines audience via pictures and videos. This morning, Julia and Tomo slept in so I got that post put together, too.

This evening, we come home from my in-laws house (at sleepy Julia's insistence, which was kind of awesome) to find these statistics:

What?! Almost 500 people have read about the owl cafe? And over a hundred have virtually followed me to Shiogama Shrine since this morning? Have I stepped into an alternate dimension where I am actually allowed to be successful at more than one thing at a time?
I'm joking. And elated. I hope these people liked what they saw, because I'm not anywhere near stopping this train.

Plans for potential future city-cost blog posts include:
A Walk through Matsushima
How to get to: Marine Gate, the ferry-port
What to bring to a Japanese Beach
Entsuuin, The Buddhist Temple in Matsushima
How to Murder Gnats

And that's just for the Summer in Japan campaign!
Afterward, I'd really like to explain the insane cleaning regimen dictated to Japanese housewives, starting with How to Clean a Japanese Bathtub (from the inside out, removing the facing), Did You Know You're Supposed to Clean your AC?, and How to Kill Mold on Curtains.

I could actually be helping other expats figure out what is going on. I could be slowly changing the world.

Something large and strange has just begun.

But don't worry, blogger readers. My personal life still belongs here, with you.

It is necessary to have a place where I don't have to be productive and helpful in that sense, where it is enough just to be me.

That's what Jenny Lawson taught me. Love that woman. That wonderfully crazy woman.

In other news, a girl who once won a Judo tournament by having her older sister threaten to beat me up if I didn't throw the match (and my overly sensitive butt cried instead of fighting because that's how threats work when you're already paranoid) and went on to the Olympics now is a police officer in my home town. Her dad is a (really inadequate) constable, so this isn't exactly shocking, and cops in my home town kid of suck. I will not forget the one who slammed my 120 pound mother into a wall (after she had dual whiplash) trying to get information regarding a non-crime. I was a teenager and we were at a bowling alley. Seriously all I remember is this guy, easily half a foot taller with twice the body weight, getting physically aggressive with a woman he did not properly gauge the age of.

So I am absolutely sure that the Girl who Threatened will fit right in.

In other weird small-town-li-ness, I sat next to her older sister, the one who was going to beat me up, in Japanese Culture and Civilization class at TCU. She didn't remember me and I didn't hold any of it against her, really. Honestly even holding a grudge against her sister for 25 years seems pretty ridiculous.

But it did change the course of my life, not that judo wouldn't have eventually fallen out of our lives anyway. A few years later, we left the dojo for a multitude of reasons mostly stemming from the sensei showing inadequacy and favoritism.

The funny thing is this thing made the papers, and came across my facebook feed, and made me snarl. Now I laugh, because it's all so damned inconsequential.

Now, I live abroad, with no real plan of living anywhere else any time soon, but instead with the ability to help others, whether they've been here for a day or a month or a year. I remember how scary some of it is, especially if you're in a city without a large foreign collective.

In conclusion, yay for the internet!