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.