I Survived October. Now Nano

October was challenging, guys. Not every hour of every day, but overall, pretty damned challenging.

While I should have been working on Halloween Party things like costumes and fun, I was instead having an anxiety attack some of my least-favorite my part-time employers pushed me into and were shocked to find that I wasn't willing to call them back afterward. I waited a few days and quit the job. it only happened 9 times a year anyway. As much as I love teaching little people, if having to work with the people to teach the class leaves me too wounded to care for my own little person, it just isn't worth it.

So I am doing my other jobs and enjoying them. I've been more sensitive to stress since the anxiety attack though and I didn't realize how stressful living here is.

It's great, too. Don't get me wrong. I am all about the free health care for my kid and fantastic gun control. I love not wondering if some unstable person murdered my husband on his way home.

But I am more aware of the staring these days, and of the pressure to fit into molds that were not built for me. I can't clean this home perfectly nor speak this language well. I can't read the forms that come home from my daughter's school nor all the instructions on any of the seasoning packets. There's a lot I don't know, but I am always learning something new and I am actually excited about things like making art, so I'm just going to keep going and it is going to be okay.


I'm excited/terrified for the election this week. There's a pop song on the airwaves in Japan these days that goes like this:

And my brain keeps making up new lyrics.
C'mon baby America. Choose something other than fascism.


In other news, I am making the executive decision not to try to host/set up a write-in this year for NaNoWriMo as just getting the first day's words into my computer (while my daughter watched Umizoomi loudly in the same room) exhausted me to a point that I fell asleep while typing...and kept typing. I have no idea what this book is going to look like in the long run and I don't think I did enough researching but I'll be damned if I read more about skinwalkers now.

The sad thing is that there are 3 people interested in trying to have a get together near Sendai, but one only wants to do it on Thursday evenings, an hour's train ride from where I live. It isn't doable with a five-year-old. The other two want to meet up on the weekend, but the first one hasn't responded to those requests.

But this isn't something I can master. All these people seem to be young, single and childless. Free time is their thing. I got nothing there.
In addition, a surprise trip from one of my high school friends is happening in about 2 weeks, so I've got enough going on.

But I did get my word count for today, so yay!!

All of the September Things from This Week

September! Yay! Temperatures are starting to ease up. The problem with summer up here isn't the heat (it barely hits the 80s!) but the humidity, which makes anything over 70 feel like you might be trapped on the underside of a dead animal decomposing in the bright sunlight.

No really, that is how it makes me feel. I realized in Michigan that the humidity is why my hair is always in a pony tail now. It used to fly free almost always, but this is not doable when a walk from my front door to the elevator of my building causes neck sweat.

We got a great mattress pad after I found out how badly we needed one, and now I just never want to get up. I do, because someone has to and giving everyone else a chance to wake up on their own means my kid misses school, my husband misses work, and I'll have to do some stupid thing to balance the household finances like going back to full-time teaching which at this point would be soul crushing.

Don't get me wrong, I like teaching an I like my students. I specifically like the control I get to have over the situation. If a student and I don't get on, we don't have to. Waiting for people to ignore me because it's better for the company at large is not the name of the game anymore and I am really okay with that not being my life again anytime soon.

I recently realized that one of the reasons I was so unhappy with my in-laws' choice to chop off all my daughter's hair is based on being harassed in public school with I was a six-year-old girl that no one knew with short hair and boys hand-me-downs from my older brother and even older cousins. The girls in that elementary school thought opening the stall door on what must have been a boy was completely excusable. So yeah, on some level deep down, they not only lopped off one of the very few traits that was obviously from me but also made her more vulnerable to the embarrassment I suffered as a kid.

That said, it doesn't really matter. My kid likes her hair short, mostly because grandma likes it, and maybe someday I'll find a tactful way of letting my mother-in-law know that she helped to trigger a fairly major depressive episode, but for now, none of it matters enough.

Last night, my daughter said she was sick and asked for a forehead cooling sheet, which is a weird Japanese thing. Here, they fight fever with ice, which always makes me less comfortable when sick but whatever. Her fever was low-grade so we went to bed and when we woke up, she was a lot hotter. Luckily, since they are also parents, my bosses for today's classes understood why I needed to cancel lessons. We went to the hospital, got seen to by a doctor, got medicine for the next five days next door, and did not even have to pay for parking.

The rest of the day was split between sleeping and trying to get my kid to eat and take medicine. She's better at the later than the former.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm exhausted or depressed. More likely exhausted, but who knows. I just need this kid to get well so that she can enjoy school this week and I don't have to cancel more classes during the final weeks heading up to my first decent paycheck since we left for Michigan.

The most exciting thing that I can talk about publicly that happened recently was a woman in one of my facebook groups asking broadly about a framed piece of calligraphy she had found. Was it Chinese? Japanese? What did it mean?

It looked...complicated. 4 characters, two of them each easily more than 20 strokes, and only one of them really recognizable to me. So I took apart the stroke order for the least understandable one and entered it into a dictionary, finding out quickly that it was a character of traditional Chinese that had been replaced and simplified in the 1930s. I went on to look up the remaining characters and by googling the lot together found the text the framed excerpt had been taken from. It was the poem Summer Breeze by the eighth emperor of the Song Dynasty, who was known more as a poet and artist than a politician. He abdicated and his progeny lost the dynasty, but he's still known as having been great with calligraphy. The excerpt was taken by someone who didn't really know what they were looking at, so they chose a few pretty or interesting looking characters, not unlike someone quoting Shakespeare in a tapestry by choosing any 4 words that happen to be in a line together and look nice. Only if you did that in Latin, since traditional Chinese is to simplified Chinese as Latin is to English.
(See Dr. Worthing? I remembered something!)
((Oh yeah, that TCU education is really coming in handy these days.))

The characters wound up reading, according to the work of an awesome history-enthusiast and calligraphy geek, something along the lines of "Lost along the fragrant path, fluttering" which is a weird bit of writing to have in your home without any context, but unless you invite lots of Chinese scholars to dinner, it's more likely that no one will ever be the wiser. Just pretty words in a frame. Just strokes of black on gold.

I do almost want to print and frame this bit now, as a trophy regarding the brain work necessary to decode the message of strange, old characters. But where to put it? Being lost and fluttering with fragrance cannot go down in or near my bathroom. It wouldn't look bad in the hallway though...

That was such a fun puzzle to solve and I was so lucky that there was a blog post by Hyatt Carter about the original poem scroll in its connection to the greater works of the poet-emperor.

But now I have been awake for too long so at least I have some confirmation for mood. I still might be depressed, or not, but I am definitely exhausted.
Yay! Time to go back to bed!

GISH Roundup 2018

I went into GISH this year having stifled my expectations from previous years. Every year I try to get into the coffee table book or the hall of fame and every year I get nothing, so this year, the goal was ambivalent to recognition. The goals that I put down in a notebook pre-hunt, included:

Fun Julia Memories
Learning New Skills
1 Frame-able Photo
Something Good for Shiogama/Miyagi
Something I'm Afraid Of

And we did that. Julia helped me have a pillow fight with a bunch of kids at a park, remember the magic of beach time, and record interesting audio to play behind our short video submissions.

I learned how to tie a tie (so I could be Mr Rogers), how to do needlepoint, and re-learn how to use a basic loom.

We have many lovely photos, the best of which I will include here somewhere.

I cleaned up the area around my block while dressed as Mr Rogers.

I talked to strangers. I messaged a former student and met with her, eventually using her garden in a few of our submissions. I even finished and modeled a knit dominatrix outfit (you cannot see this. I do not want your eyes to bleed. Suffice it to say I did not look like in angry pig in the picture, and that's enough for me.)

So many little things I was afraid of. There was an item about that, but you had to have 3 people all doing something they were afraid of, and I don't know that any people with that many little fears.

Overall, we had a really amazing time.

Now I need to get my kid up so we might race out to Sendai's Tanabata festival before the weather turns to absolute crap.
If you want to watch out video submissions, check this out.

All the Things.

So the last month has been something of a whirlwind.

First we got ready and ran off to Michigan to hang out with my dad and extended family. Mostly my dad. I had previously assumed his new space was way off in the countryside where no one could hear you scream or help you if you needed it. I found this was not the case. He has neighbors he gets along with and who check on him regularly. They help each other out through the seasons and it seems like a fine group. Living further from an urban center has helped my dad relax and enjoy his retirement, I think. He put an extension on his deck and built a gazebo (from a kit, but still, a heck of a lot more than I could do on my own) and really seems to enjoy his space.

He has a nice amount of land that is mostly left to nature. Wild deer and turkeys walk across his lawn. There is a small pond in the back where the fish bite like mad. My daughter caught a few blue gill back there and loved every minute of it.

My revelations from Michigan are as follows:

1) My dad is mostly happy where he is and is not likely to go missing or get eaten by his cat.
2) My dad's extended family is actually a rather fun and wholesome bunch, despite my feeling awkward with them when I first visited them alone at the age of 14. That was me being 14, not them making me feel weird.
3) My kid lacks my naturally occurring empathy for the fish. I felt bad for setting a hook into their lip. My daughter rejoices in seeing them up close and letting them go.
4) My kid loves fishing. I don't know how many she caught while we were there. They were mostly small but feisty. She loved every minute.
5) Kids' fishing had become more gender neutral. I think, back in the 80s, my brother and I had the same mickey mouse fishing pole. Now there's Frozen and Moana. Julia has a Moana fishing pole at Grandpa's house now.
6) Everyone deserves to be spoiled once in a while. I cannot tell you how freeing it was to walk through Walmart and just throw anything in the cart. I still found myself putting things back, but I bought a lot of whatever I wanted and didn't think twice about it.
7) My kid is not entirely a spoiled brat. She knows she cannot have every single thing she wants. Ever. So when she'd already picked at least 8 things she didn't need and only wanted, when Grandpa said no to number 9, she put it back without sulking. She already knew she was getting good stuff.
8) Relaxing on the porch is underrated. I do not have a porch and I find it difficult to relax. Once I clean up the balcony though...
9) I met up with my awesome NaNMoWriMo friend Kiri, who is amazing and really badass as a mom and friend.
10) Amish quilts are not cheap. I feel personally lied to by Weird Al, but it could also be that the situation was different 20 years ago.


I could probably keep this list going for a million years. The most important thing really was that my dad wants to like my husband. Maybe that doesn't make sense to other people, but I find it really important. More important than happening to like or not like, my dad wants to like him, and this means forgiveness of small blunders and working toward an enriched understanding of each other.

Also, my husband, the British-accented, boarding-school-attending, fancy funeral director man, can apparently catch a fish. He seemed to really enjoy the trip as well, and even put up with me pointing out all the prices in Walmart so he can see why I cannot abide spending $16 on 2 boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios at our Costco in Japan.

We really did have such a wonderful time.

And then we came back and raced through Tokyo, coming home sometime after dark. I was falling asleep while jotting down blogging ideas in my notebook while my husband was suggesting that we get home and then I figure out what to cook, to which I responded with a suddenly awake and unpleasant look.
"Or we could order pizza."
yes. Yes we could. And we did. And it was great.
Then came Julia's recital the next day, and it was great. She even made a point of slowing down instead of rushing through the last half of the song. It's only hot cross buns. But still. She's 4!

Then came GISH, and that's a whole new post.

Weather, Soccer, Strange Political Revelations

Hey guys!

This week has been somewhat exhausting but I'm in better spirits than I have been recently. Part of that is because my body and the weather are not attacking me quite as fruitfully as they were earlier in the month. Last week was unpleasant.
Rainy season + menstruation - (cartilage + estrogen) = Crappy Week.
I wanted to put in the subnotation "of a 20 year old" on the parenthetical but have no idea how to do that on this or any computer, so instead I write an equation in which I lack all cartilage and estrogen and leave it there. Meh.

 I wrote about it on my Japan blog and some of the other ladies there had similar troubles, so at least I had some solidarity. I don't know how much good solidarity against the weather and aging works, but I did feel a bit better to know it was not just me.

The behavior of the US government terrifies and frustrates me. We're heading out in just over a week to spend a couple of weeks with my dad and I am so excited but also more nervous than I've ever been about going home. I know my kid has a US passport and would likely be returned to Japan if necessary and we're not entering illegally or attempting to claim asylum so we're likely safe, but I'm going to be nervous until it's over.
That said, we're pretty excited, too, but my nervousness about taking a nearly-5 year old all the way to Tokyo, then all the way to Detroit, then getting us all back here in one piece may be what is triggering the same lack of appetite I was scared about a few weeks ago. Even so, I have developed a better battle plan for this problem and am now more or less enjoying a morning protein shake because I can. Despite my lack of enthusiasm regarding food, this shake is nutritious enough to keep me going without my stomach trying to shut it out. Nice and easy. And I get to live. Woohoo!


In other news, last night I was laying next to my slumbering daughter, reading a book to myself. She's apparently grown out of wanting me to read her to sleep, which is fine. Saves me energy.

Suddenly I was summoned tot he living room by a resounding chorus of God Save the Queen and I emerged to find my husband eagerly singing the national anthem of the country where he spent puberty.

My dude is not much of a sports nut, but in his boarding school he was co-opted into the junior varsity soccer team despite not knowing the rules and not having played the game previously. The same thing apparently happened with rugby, but that we don't usually get to watch and I really do not understand that sport. So my quiet husband spent a good portion of the game telling me how he cheated at soccer, smashing the other boys in the knees when he could and aiming at their heads when he tried to pass around them. I couldn't blame him. Being a skinny, short, 13 year old Asian kid, the only Asian kid on the team or in his classes....yeah, cheating makes more sense than trying to play fair against boys who have been playing this game and working on their skills for at least three to five years previous.

My soccer experiences were different, of course. Girls' soccer in high school in the late 90s, early 2000s was alright, but I've never been good with people. I didn't mind running to death though so I wound up at midfield, passing up to the forwards so they could score, running back to help out the defense, occasionally marking a player and just annoying the crap out of the other team. Hey, at least I could explain off-sides to my husband. It was actually really wonderful to spend 90 minutes sitting with my overworked and exhausted husband, half-reminiscing and half-cheering.

Watching England win their quarterfinal bout against Sweden was really great. The Swedish team swarmed well, coming together really quick when needed, but it wasn't enough to stop the Brits. It was clearly a great level of play, though that didn't stop the drama of injuries (real or fake?) nor our desire to watch the team from the country we were more familiar with win.

I also realized something else. I have the natural tendency to trash talk the other team, wanting to shout things like, "Stop those rotten-fish eating bastards!" or "If you're all the vikings have to show for their progeny, all their raping and pillaging was for nothing!" which gets more and more weirdly xenophobic and offensive during international games.

I'm not xenophobic and I actually have nothing against the Swedish team or their heritage or whatever, but the more important thing here is what it says to me about Trump supporters.

Because they see "the game" as God-fearing, red-neck, working-class republicans versus rich, well-educated, hippy communists and this just is not true. Those aren't even the teams, and it's not a two team structure or at least it shouldn't be. Decency is on the line, and all we can say for ourselves as humankind, and they are blindly following their leader as if he were Christ-incarnate. That's an issue I have had with the reasoning skills of the uber-religious for some time though. There is a tendency to see exclusively as us vs them, with "us" being easily limited to one branch of one church against the rest of the world. It's also hard for them to accept that their chosen leaders are not as theoretically perfect as their chosen religious figures.

And they cheer their side on with the blind fervor of any adamant sports fan, never speaking ill of their own side while attacking the other with anything they can think of, mostly ad hominem nonsequitors, but that's what they know. And for 90 minutes I could be the same, against a team of well-trained professional athletes from a proud and noble country. But then the game ended and I went back to being sane and collected and realized that maligning the other team's goalie for have a vaguely neanderthal-like brow was not kind, polite, or justified.

So when is the game over for the trumpsters? How much damage has to ensue to show them this isn't a game anymore? How do we wake them up? What has to happen for working-class America to figure out that the powers that be as they are today are not benefiting them and are in fact turning what was a wonderful country into something unimaginable? How do we break the cognitive dissonance? How do we get them to see that it doesn't matter if a kid was brought down by a UFO, it does not belong in a cage?
How do we help?

That I do not know.

Scavenge, much??

This is my fifth year doing the GISHWHES, this year known only as GISH: the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt. It's an awesome, amazing fun time. It's also a little stressful and chaotic as everyone tries their best to make something out of the one-week-long, 200+ item scavenger-hunt-a-palooza.

And I have exhausted my friends' list. Even with the couple of relatives that should be signing up in the next few days, we'll only have 7. Minimum group size is 9, and as much as I hated my first year doing GISH with resentful, angry strangers, it looks like I am back to that state of waiting for the GISH gnomes to grant us some random weirdos who may or may not choose to participate at all.

Is that better than known people who choose not to participate at all?

I have no idea, but anything is better than the stress of trying to get more people interested. I think there are more reasons to be bogged down this year comparing to years before, and more reasons to be semi-permanently exhausted. At least that's what I am shouting back over my natural paranoia, which is running through its thousandth chorus of hateful-schoolyard-brat singing: "No one wants to play with you."

So, if you read this and think: what is that GISH thing? Would I maybe like to participate?
Here's the info:

1. Entry fee is about $20, excess to running costs paid to Random Acts charity.

2. List items include the wacky, the wild, the kind, the fun. Not everything is fun for everyone. That's why there's 200 items. If you look through an old list and can find 3-5 things you could easily do and would want to do within a few days using materials you have or people you know, you should sign up.

3. Item submissions take the form of photos or videos you shoot, edit if necessary (but there are rules on the usage of Photoshop) and upload, now to the app unless otherwise stated in the item. Some things wind up on social media as part of the task but otherwise nothing gets shared publicly until after the end of the hunt. Videos usually go to Youtube, unlisted or public.

4. It's a lot of fun. You should try it.

5. Winning team gets a trip to New Zealand. We're not going to win. We're going to enjoy ourselves. But if you look at the lists of old and only shake your head, perhaps it's not your game.

6. But really, try it out.

Mental State Much Improved: Thank You!

This is a bit of a shout out to anyone who messaged, replied, commented or liked my post from last week when I was in the middle of a new eating crisis.

I am fine now, by the way. I am taking it a little easier on myself and encouraging myself to at least have a protein shake or piece of fruit at meal times, even if I am not especially hungry or enthusiastic. I realize that, as a 200 pound, 5.5 foot woman, I am not what most would call an ideal weight, but I think my current shape, while a bit flabby, is manageable. Starving myself (literally) to cause thin-ness is more likely to have dire ramifications later in life. I am not currently in a state of morbid obesity and even if I was, just not eating for days is not a healthy answer.

The thing is that this eating issue I have isn't really usually driven by the need to be thin. My senior year of high school was not plagued by my own fatness. I was quite thin and what US society considered a healthy shape. I also did not enjoy the consumption of food. Not because I would gain weight but because it gave me no joy. Even things I liked to eat didn't make me happy. When eating is joyless, life is a bit sad, but up to that point, that was all I had known.

Last week, I got a couple of days off with my husband, during which we both relaxed and regrouped and I remembered how I came to be overweight. Something about him, and don't ask em what because I do not care to identify it, makes me feel calm in such a way that my stomach ceases to rumble and my appetite awakens. When we started dating, I suddenly realized that I could eat all of the food. So I did. And now I am a bit on the heavy and less-firm side of things, but this is survivable.

That's part of what worries me when my appetite disappears though. Is this a warning sign of impending depression? Is it just nerves? What am I so nervous about anyway? What has changed to cause this? And worrying about the answers to these questions causes more tension that drives the appetite further away and suddenly I am skipping 4 meals in 2 days. So...yes. I am choosing life today. And it's an easier choice today than it was last week.

Depression the way it works in my head is sometimes like someone's controlling all the color in the world with a dimmer switch. When it kicks into high gear, the world is a dismal grey-scale and numbness overwhelms. When things are okay, it can still get toggled slightly, but being aware that the switch is in play helps me to fight back against that instead of just watching everything fade away and then wondering where it went.

I am not currently suffering though. I am working on self-care and making better choices for myself and my mental health.

In other news, part of my brain is totally ready to get started on having another baby. The rest of my life? Not so much. We don't have the money saved to offset me being out of work for about a year (at least 6 months of stupid cervix bed-rest and the rest of tiny baby time). Nor do we have a clean house, nor any of my books, edited and ready to be sent toward publication. All the goals I had for Julia's first year of school and my first year of getting to work on the house are shot, but hey, I am still doing this living thing, and that is a hell of a lot better than it could be.

Mental-State: No Food, Just Sleep

I'll be honest. I'm having a rough week. It's not a direct causal thing, not even really a lot of little things either. Just stuff. Just me. Just muck.

My appetite is gone. I actually do not care about eating. Hunger pains are fleeting nuisances that I can't be bothered to handle properly. It's not as severe as it was when I was in my late teens and the intensity of my stress destroyed all appetite and induced nausea. I'm not feeling like eating, and I am not forcing myself to eat, but I am also not feeling like I might vomit, so I guess that's good? Better than it could be.

This is the first time in ten years I have completely lost enthusiasm for food of any kind outside of physical illness. Even if I'm skipping meals, I am still eating popcorn and other snacks with my daughter in the afternoon, and I am not a small woman, so it's not as if I'll waste away anytime soon.

I had half a mind to post this on twitter as: "I just discovered this new diet-- Depression!" but thought it might be too glib.

Still it isn't a good sign, I know that, and it's usually something I would keep to myself and suffer through alone, but I think I have a good enough, respectful enough support network these days to hear it, be concerned, know to be careful with me, but not force feed me or try to take the place of a savior. I do not need that. I have had those friends/frenemies before, the ones who are so insecure that they see any weakness of mine as an opportunity to force help upon me, but without any regard for my personal needs, wants, or comfort. I may be a mentally ill person, but I am still a person.

So I am still alive. I haven't felt this drained in months and haven't had these depression symptoms since high school, but I am okay. I am still here. Luckily I have 10 years worth of eating more than necessary than balance things out for however long this specific thing lasts.

In the meantime, I am going to run self-care via sleep because it is something the rest of me actually wants to do.
I really need to write more, clean more, do more, be more...and instead I think I am just going to sleep. It is what I can do.

Until next time, here I am on the far side of the world, continuing to exist.

Clumsy, Etc.

Two blog posts in one day? What is going on with me?
I know. It's weird, but my brain wants things to be known, so I'm letting things be known.

So I was listening to Clumsy by Our Lady Peace in honor of today being the 21st anniversary of its release, and lots of things made sense to me in ways that they didn't when I was younger and listening to the song and memorizing every frame of the music video and such.

Now I know several things I didn't know then. 1) I am not attracted to many people, so when I am attracted to people, I am not great at discerning their actual talents. For instance, I am aware that David Tennant is likely a fine actor. I can't tell you for sure. I just know he's terribly attractive.
As such, several lines from these songs that were just words from Canadian rock stars when I was 14 are now more...startling? I want to tell my pubescent self that some guy singing, "I'm watching you!" loudly in a video that closes up on his huge eyes at the same time is a bit creepy. You should be a little creeped out, girl-person. The words and images are important.

2) I know that you cannot save everyone. You can't really save anyone, but you can provide outside assistance and counsel. Bottom line, you can't fight the battle for them. In the song, the main refrain starts with, "I'll be waving my hand, watching you drown..." which I heard many times explained as one of these moments when you have to watch someone battle one of these things you can't fight for them, so you stand by and wave, letting them know you support them as much as you can. I didn't really get it then, and that line stood out as something I wasn't quite sure of before. The complexity of these situations escaped me, and the fine details have only recently become fully formed for me. Sometimes, you can only wave.

And sometimes people are clumsy-- clumsy with words, with situations and such. Anyone who knew my teenage variation would immediately remind me of the thousand or so things that got simplified incorrectly in my head before they came out of my mouth dead-wrong. More embarrassing than pain-inducing, but regrettable all the same.

I've recently, after a poorly worded altercation, come to a certain conclusion. I endure to be kind, accurate, or both as much as possible in my words and to some degree I expect the same. I know some of my friends will be more accurate than kind, and occasionally neither but very rarely or I wouldn't call them friends. When someone chooses to be neither, I choose not to be around them.

But maybe I should be more forgiving. Sometimes. We can all be clumsy sometimes.

Ready for the End of Spring Break

There are about a million things I need to do right now, mostly having to do with cleaning my house so my friend can come crash on my couch for a few days without feeling terribly uncomfortable. The up side? This is someone I've known for almost a decade, and she's lived in japan before (it's where we met) and we talk weekly, so she has some idea what's really going on in my life and brain.

The down side? I still have a lot of little cleaning to do and Julia is uniquely skilled at destroying it, and my sense of calm, and the last of my patience. Yay for school.
I do love my kid. I also need a little me time to be the mom I want to be and didn't get a lot of that during her 2 week vacay.

One thing I love to pieces right now is the social norm of kids her age going to school in Japan. I have a feeling that, if we were doing this whole little family thing in my homeland, I would feel social pressure from every person I encounter regarding something I may be doing wrong. If she's home with me, I'm a drain on the economy for not going back to work, and I'm wasting my abilities and life away being a stay at home layabout instead of a contributing member of society. If she's in daycare, I'm a horrible parent who did not put my family first, and maybe they're all child molesters or abusive or whatever and I'm paying to let them to have access to my kid. Either way, a parent is somehow wrong. There is no right answer accept the right answer for you and your family. I know that, but it is easier to know that without people talking at me.

Here, kids usually go to daycare or kindergarten around age 3. Some moms go back to work. Others don't. Many engage in the full-time job that it is to maintain a Japanese home. I don't. Some go back to work earlier and there are daycare centers that accept kids as young as 6 months old. It's not as normal here for moms to work at all, but it is becoming more normal. I chose to stay home with my kid and work part time as a means of making ends meet, so I guess on some level I am comfortable here because my choices fit in somewhat with the societal standards.

Really, I like living here because I am an automatic outcast and don't have to try to fit in. I don't feel compelled to listen to someone enthusiastically lecture me about Jesus in a Walmart parking lot because I am not quite irritated enough to scream at them or storm off. No one thinks I'm just as "normal" as they are here, in whatever that means to them. The standard "normal" for someone who looked like me in Texas when I was young involved a lot of labels I do not subscribe to and drove a lot of my adolescent pretentiousness into overdrive, trying to find the most effective ways of showing them before they talk to me that maybe they should not bother, but doing it in such a way to not provoke worse or put myself in a position of constant discomfort. I failed at all of that, mind you, but I tried.

Here it is different. They do not know what to make of me. I'm alright with that. At least they are quiet about it.

So I don't get too-friendly advice from everyone-under-the-sun regarding my child-rearing or our choice of school, though a neighbor was surprised that we weren't sending out little one to the Catholic kindergarten in town (long story short: Buddhism is normal and I'm more than okay with that ) and weirdly this schooling thing wound up being the way we got the one confrontational religious group to leave me alone. I cannot remember what they were now, but it wasn't the Mormons, though they shared a fear of medicine. One lady from the group kept happening upon me in town and talking at me, and I was the same as I was back home, only with less confidence in my verbiage and without a way to accurately express my thoughts in a way I found satisfactory. So I smiled and nodded and ran away. That was all that happened, literally over the course of years, with the woman calling me by a number of western names, a different one every time she saw me, and once running into me at my apartment lobby, which was the most terrifying.

Then the most amazing thing happened. She ran into me shortly before Julia started school and asked what day care we had chosen (since obviously no one following her cult-like pseudo-Christianity would be able to tolerate Catholic or Buddhist kindergartens) and recoiled when I told her the name of the school we had chosen. "But it's Buddhist!"
"Yes, I know."

And that was the end of that.

So maybe the rest of the society still has the same judgmental ideas that I'm hiding from and it is only that I am not engaging with it. Maybe that's all of it. I don't know but I also do not have more time to worry about it today.

I'm currently listening to A Handmaid's Tale. I'm almost done. I really want to finish it. An emotional book, and a good adult-level vacation from the chaotic child-land of the vacay living room.
Also kinda scary. Not great to pair with Malala unless you're wanting to freak out over the modern state of American politics and what it could mean for our future generations for a while. I guess you could get the same effect by watching any major news channel these days, though.

March Musings

This is my attempt to feel accomplished today. It's almost 9PM and I feel like I have done nothing.

Logically, I know that isn't completely accurate. I fed myself and my daughter. I coordinated a long chat via internet video with some of my friends back home. Our kids squealed at each other. Lunch was had, as was a massive and necessary on the part of both my daughter and myself.

We didn't clean the house, which is the one thing we should be doing and I wanted to get done early this week, before I am so exhausted by my lacking alone time that I cannot focus enough to clean. We didn't make it happen, and I'm annoyed with myself. I gave in to exhaustion and let us rest instead, which we needed to do, and the hints of a narrowly avoided migraine attest to this being the right course of action. But I still feel like nothing is happening.

After our nap, we did run to the grocery store, and while we were there, Julia wandered around a little, occasionally getting in the way of other customers, most of whom were happy to smile at my four-year-old, perhaps remembering their own little people at the same age. There were two professionally dressed people who thought casting me a dirty look was a better option, and whether those looks were meant to indicate a need for my kid to be tethered or dismay at our nearly-6PM shopping trip, I'll never know.

As a teen, I spent a lot of time at some friends' house (They're twins. They're both my friends. I'm not just being clumsy with my apostrophes or noun agreement.) and their dad tended to point out parents with children at Walmart after 6PM, if we happened to be there at that time, saying that it was practically child abuse to have a kid out so late and that those kids should be in bed. At the time, I agreed, but now I see it in a little bit different light. What if the only parent works a job that doesn't allow for them to hit the grocery before/during work hours and with shifts that don't end immediately at 5? What if they can't afford a babysitter for something like a trip to the store, or they need to get that kid new sneakers or supplies for some last minute school project they only found out that evening? I can come up with a dozen reasons that don't involve people just being unreliable or horrible, and that's with my brain half-exhausted. I think it's a bit judgmental.

And that's not just because I get a lot of side-eye when my kid and I make a grocery stop after 5PM. But I do live in a country of quiet bigotry and low-level English understanding, so I get to pull my daughter to me and advise her to stay close so the mean old bats stop staring at us. And I can say this loudly. And if they understand me, they are far too restrained to take it up with me. I'll have to nip that in the bud before our trip to Michigan this summer. I need to not instigate crap.

Otherwise, this month has been a lot better than last month. I blogged on city-cost a bit, bought a bunch of random Chinese knock-offs at Wish.com instead of the 100 yen store, and generally had an OK time.

I have become obsessed with audiobooks and listening to one or another while I wash the dishes or do some basic chores is how I am making the lack of alone time up to myself. Ready Player One was a lot of fun, Old Man's War interesting, and Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology compelling. Now I am listening to Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, which is interesting and a bit creepy. Also more compelling than I thought it would be. I've got three hours left in it and can't wait.

The other day, Julia had her first over-eating induced tummy ache ever, and her response to this new sensation was to cry, "Mommy! I want to go to the doctor!" to which I wanted to immediately compliment her on proper sentence structure but instead had to focus on trying to help her. I explained to her (three times) that there were no emergency pediatrics in the area (there aren't) and going to the hospital wouldn't mean that we could see a doctor who could help with this anyway. Slowly, I convinced her to calm down and wait it out, and within an hour she was back to normal and happy to be feeling better.

So now the big challenge is figuring out how to get her to eat enough to be full without giving herself a stomachache. I'm mostly just limited snacks and stressing meals as eating time.

As for me and this evening, I am happy to report that writing this blog update has helped me feel more accomplished.
9PM. Next, bed time! As I found out yesterday, letting Julia sleep in leads to evening craziness, as the excitement of the later hour propels her over the threshold between exhaustion and nutball. Then it's all chaos and anarchy and headaches. So better to go with an earlier bed time.

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise. I can't attest to all that but kid in bed keeps pain from my head, so we're going this way.

Exhaustion and Foreign Opinions: A Rambling

My kid is sick, but it is just a cold with a bit of a fever. It will be okay. We already got a checkup and medication yesterday, so at least that is taken care of for now. We'll see how it shapes the coming week. On the upside, I did get to work yesterday so my paycheck won't be quite as screwed as otherwise.

Also, this gives a better reason for our delay in setting up the Girl's Day dolls, a yearly Japanese tradition that I suck at preparing for as it requires an entire house deep cleaning session and I am a hoarder.

I've been working toward the clean house goal over the last few weeks but failed to take out the recycling this week so I am still staring at a large box filled with compacted cardboard boxes. I know I am supposed to see a pile of garbage or at best a pile of recycling waiting to go out. Instead, I see raw materials for any number of great projects, and just looking at it, my mind starts to wander. If I could get my hands on a small jigsaw, wood glue, dowels, and appropriate fabric coverings, I could build a massive, wall-sized dragon-shaped shelving unit and it. would. be. beautiful!
And the good thing now is that I have been around long enough to know that the vast majority of these massive project ideas are not possible for me to realistically accomplish. I do not have the time or space required for this task, much less the rest of the materials. In the end, this would wind up being yet another box of rubbish taking up more space than it should be allowed to in the back room of my apartment until one day I get fed up and take it out finally or die and someone else takes it and everything else to the curb.

So there's that. Despite being in a bit of a slump, I managed to get 5 blog posts written last month and will work toward getting nine out this coming month. I'm already toying with ideas for this month's incentivized posts on my Japan blog over at City-Cost.

The other thought I had today with some level of interest was in regards to whether or not we're "allowed" to have opinions about foreign cultures and customs and how our unique position changes that. Specifically, someone mentioned how weird Groundhog Day is and I responded with the weirdness that is Setsubun, which happens this week in Japan. Today actually. Then someone told me that that was why we should respect foreign cultures and that she thought my custom was interesting.

That was a fine reaction, and there was nothing wrong with that except that it isn't my custom. It's my husband's and his culture's and just really not mine. In Japan, I am essentially Jack Skellington in Christmas town, if he'd decided to just live there after he passed through the tree in the forest. Nothing here is really allowed to be mine and yet it is. It isn't my culture but it is my life and the course of my experience.

And this goes back to a debate from ages ago that isn't really worth commenting on except to get it out of my head. I was told by some random-internet-white-chick that I was a bigot for using the term Engrish to describe mass-produced products with English errors. The point she had was it sounded racist to her, having visited some parts of Asia a few times in her short life, and Asian languages are hard so we shouldn't make fun of others for not knowing English. I agreed that we shouldn't make fun of people for not knowing English and further explained that as an English teacher and expat living in Japan, I have to say that companies that employ copywriters can easily get these things checked by a native English speaker for a small fee. Instead of doing that, they assume their grasp of a language they refuse to note the complexity of must be good enough to forego that small charge. Then we wind up with weird bits that I think everyone should have a chance to laugh at. I'm not knocking down the doors of the copywriting office, accusing people of speaking "Engrish" but instead buying the products and sending them to people who will enjoy them all over the world. So the companies are still getting paid for their sub-par work and the patrons of my second Patreon get to enjoy silliness. Me calling it Engrish doesn't seem to hurt anyone's feelings, not even those of my Japanese husband.

What bugs me most about this interaction is probably that the woman refused to listen to me and just kept calling me a bigot. Her methods were flawed but when I tried to work with her to better our mutual understanding anyway, she revealed that she wasn't capable of operating at that level. I thought she was giving a corresponding theoretical analogy. She was actually just trying to accuse me of being a bully like some real-life bullies she once knew. When I pointed to the errors in her logic, her responses became even less logical. That was the day I learned that it isn't just the conservatives who plug their ears and ignore whatever makes them uncomfortable. Liberals do it too.

I'm not saying we should all engage in hate speech or that Engrish itself is a universally OK term. It is in a gray area, as it could conceivably be used to hurt others, so it depends on how it is used. The way I use it is not racist, as confirmed by my Japanese husband and multiple Asian and Asian-American friends. The companies that produce these products have a chance to fix these errors and not assume lingual superiority despite their inadequacy. They do not. Either they do not understand the nuances of language, as almost any foreign language media should be checked my a native speaker to ensure quality, or they do not care. Either way, it is their failing, and an easily correctable failing, so we get to laugh at the results. They still get paid for making the silly things. Who is losing here?

But this also speaks to my time abroad. I no longer consider anything that could theoretically in some way be considered somewhat racist as definitely racist and unusable. There is more to it than that and at the end of the day, any Caucasian American person deciding what other cultures and races can consider offensive is inherently wrong. We don't get to say what they must or must not consider offensive. Some terms are patently offensive while others are currently considered innocuous, and those definitions do change over time.

One must have an informed opinion, and no one speaks for an entire race, but calling someone in an interracial marriage with an Asian man racist against Asians shows a level of willful ignorance I am not comfortable with engaging. And I shouldn't feel bad about leaving the conversation after the one Asian person in the conversation confirmed that Engrish as it is used by me is NOT racist.
Some part of me keeps bringing this back up though, like I need to feel constantly under attack by strangers who know nothing about me. I think it's the inner-teacher-brain, wanting to have better taught this person about the realities of the world around her despite the fact that she would never have been able to understand them without living them.

But that leads me back to my point for today, which was along the lines of this: Living in Japan means I get to have an opinion about some Japanese things. I'm not a tourist, fresh of a plane, gawking at the maid cafes. Nor am I an expert, fluent in the language and well versed in the content of every newspaper. I know some things from classes I took in college and some things from my personal experiences in living here long term. In a few months, I'll have been living in Japan for a decade. Ten years of watching these seemingly bizarre cultural elements and figuring out some while others continue to baffle me; ten years of changing inside and out while struggling to find comfort in a country where I will never be allowed to own property or become a citizen; ten solid years of studying this culture from the inner outside and analyzing the living hell out of it...Yeah, I'd say I get to have an opinion.

And those are my thoughts for today.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year people of the internet! I hope 2018 brings you some wondrous and awesome things and alleviates some of the crap that may have been dealt to you in years previous. Whoever you are, I wish this for you.

For us, it has meant one day of hanging with my in-laws at their home, with me catching more of the conversation than usual, but most of that was about my father-in-law correcting his father-in-law's word choice for fear of Julia using weird old words at kindergarten and getting laughed at. Now I know another (weird, old) word for using the bathroom. Huzzah!

I did take some time scouring the advert section in the newspaper, searching for a good washing machine. Our old one is semi-functional. Still an upgrade from the first one I had in Japan, which was so old and small that the load had to be transferred by hand from the soaking area to the spin dry, which would also be rendered noisily ineffective by the slightest variation on weight. I called it a communist washing machine as it so earnestly believed in the redistribution of filth.

Har har. No really, I still think that's a little funny.

Anyway, the current machine is six years old and past its warranty and we've been looking to upgrade to a fully functioning model for a few months. First, we were waiting for our anniversary, so we could save up for it. Then it was put off for the New Years Sales.

New Years in Japan is sales time. Many shops put together grab-bags of the previous season's goods and shell them out cheap. Others just offer a discount on certain models in-store. Others now offer the same sales online, which is new to me. In any case, I had been waiting months for this opportunity and we had even gone out to 3 shops the other week to check our options and get an idea of what is available in our price range.

To replace our previous model exactly with its new variation would cost twice what we can afford, so we were planning to scale down on size and ability. The current machine has more than a dozen options, and I have only ever used 3 of them. What we know we need is a 5 year warranty and free delivery with a drying option. It may sound impressive to say our washing machine is also our dryer, but the drying function is not 100%, even on a brand new, top-of-the-line model. The best I have seen or experienced is a 70% drying rate, meaning you could fill 70% of a full load to wash and dry and have it come out dry. On our machine, it was closer to 50%, which still isn't bad. It seems you are meant to hang up most large things, drying mostly underwear, towels and socks. Fine by me.

I found an ad for a machine with better capacity in both washing and drying, 5 year warranty and free delivery at one of the electronic stores we had checked out before. The ad said they only had five machines offered per store. I suggested we might go early to my husband, who blew me off, saying it wasn't necessary.

These things always seem like Black Friday to me and I forget that our largest close city, Sendai, has about the same population as Dallas and Fort Worth averaged out according to recent google data. that said, we're not shopping in Sendai, and there are several of these stores around the area.

Still I was surprised today when we got to the store, were ushered to a parking spot by friendly parking attendants, found the machine with 4 sales slips still attached, waiting to be taken. Tomo snatched one before talking to the staff about the various machines and their performance factors. I caught more of it than I thought I would, but Tomo clarified anything I didn't get afterward. Then we bought the nice cheap one I saw in the advert and we headed off to lunch. We wound up having a curry buffet at Namaskar near Sendai station followed by The Last Jedi at the movie theater in the same building and a little bit of game center mischief to pass the time between the two.

There are so many more modes to things like Tekken and basic racing games now and my lack of Japanese ability means I inevitably panic and pick the wrong thing, leading my husband and I to have to waste some extra coins and time trying to play together. I am bad at this thing.

At the end, we raced and had fun and enjoyed the movie and all else.

This year, I am going to get better at Japanese and actually try to study on a regular basis, whatever that looks like. It would be different if the payoff were more obvious or easy or if there were normalized steps between where I am and the complete fluency expected of me. I get why most people with Japanese spouses speak Japanese well. Most of them needed that to get their foot in the door with their intended. Mine sounds fancy in English. I have no interest in speaking to my husband in Japanese. So instead of wanting to show off that I learned a little, I feel more like my Japanese ability and my Japanese husband have nothing to do with each other.
This is lame and I am going to fix it, but not today.

In the meantime, my husband actually really helped punch my depression in the face today, and for that I am grateful.

Happy 2018 everyone!!