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[17 Dec 2010|03:22pm] |
Last night I drove down my long driveway into the woods where my house is. Three or four deer were running through the field, and I slowed down to look at them more closely. More and more came running out of the woods on the right and across the driveway, into the field on the left. There were nine by the end. They stopped running and turned around and faced me. We looked at each other. I was very curious about them. I don't know what they were thinking, because they can't think. It would have made more sense for them to continue running away. It would've made more sense for them not to have turned around. If I looked away for a second and then looked back toward them, I had to scan the field for a second before I found them again: they blended in that well. The brown of their hide is the same as the brown of the dead field weeds sticking out of the snow. The white of their tails is the white of the snow. When they twitch their tails, it looks like a branch waving in the cold wind. It made my gleaming turquoise car feel ridiculous. Mobb Deep was playing on my radio. I drove forward slowly to see if they would run. They only twitched their tails more furiously. I was trying to see how fast I could go before spooking them. Finally I gave up. I don't know why anyone would want to live anywhere else.
Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire. I find his noticing of details and his compassion for the world beautiful and excruciating. He is who I wanted to be before I wanted to be Atul Gawande. Atul Gawande is a surgeon who also writes about the medical field for the New Yorker. His essays are insightful and impressive in the way they pull disparate threads of a subject together into something that seems obvious and clear and yet unknown before. I can't handle the world according to Chris Jones. It throws me into a depression for days. Why do I think all beauty is so sad? Exquisite writing is what makes me the saddest.
I'm going to school to become a doctor. I don't have any doubt this will happen, although there is no reason it should. It is extremely difficult to become a doctor. People who are much more qualified than I are turned away all the time. Everyone else is pretty skeptical of it. To me, it seems like something I will do and then will have done. The thing I think I would never be able to do is become a writer like Chris Jones. When I read an article by Atul Gawande, I'm filled with admiration and a desire to write such useful, interesting words about a timely, pertinent topic. This to me feels like resolve. When I read an article by Chris Jones, my heart speeds up and I become a little bit breathless. I sweat. This to me feels like desperation.
For example: To be devastated, there's "The Things that Carried Him" by Chris Jones; there is also several more of his articles here.
To be interested, there's this article by Gawande on letting patients die, which made me more dedicated to the work I do with hospice, and this article on why we itch, which made me so excited because I've been waiting for an answer to that question for at least a decade.
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[15 Jul 2010|11:02pm] |
I think I've passed the threshold of "young" to "whatever." 23 to 24 did it. I'm used to being the youngest all the time, but now everyone is all, "Well, you're 24, you know what you're doing..." I used to wonder when this day would come--being younger than everyone else was such a big, oft-mentioned deal that I used to think about how strange it would be for my age to be completely unexceptional. What cemented it was last week when my boss told me my new haircut made me look younger, and I took it as a compliment. I seem to have a slightly better idea of what I'm doing and how to do things than I did a couple years ago, but it feels very external. It's hard to explain. I am going through all the right motions and everything is logical, but I'm constantly surprised that I'm doing it. It's like the dealing-with-shit part of my brain is right on track for a 24-year-old, but the part that identifies as me, the emotional part, the identity part, this is still a child, watching in amazement as I do something right or get something done. (I've never liked that word, "shit"; I always thought that might be a word I'd start to use when I was a hardened adult. I still didn't feel comfortable typing it, but what other word would you use there?) Um-- like the part of me that deals with the world is a juggler at a circus keeping like twenty flaming sticks in the air, and the part of me that dreams and thinks internally and feels like my real true private self is a child watching the juggler in amazement, wondering if maybe she could ever be that skilled one day? I don't know--I'm exhausted; when I get stressed out, I use too much punctuation and I see bugs where there aren't any. I see cockroaches and ants and spiders out of the corner of my eye, and I jump in fright, sometimes I yelp. Isn't that strange? It's always embarrassing when I see there's nothing there. Sometimes I think I see snakes. Tomorrow is Friday, though.
In the end, I decided to go to Uganda, and plus Rwanda for a few days.
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[13 Jul 2010|08:41pm] |
Monday was my first day back to work after a two-week vacation. In the morning, I was so eager to start riding my bike the hour each way again that I did it even though the it was cloudy and it was strangely windy for 6 am. Predictably, half an hour through the bike ride, the sky opened up and the wind tore through me. I went half as fast with twice as much effort and I am still sore the next day. Still, I was happy. I love riding my bike. I was having fun.
Bicyclists are encouraged to ride on the sidewalk in Japan. In a bad decision, I veered onto the shoulder of the highway in order to pass some slower cyclists. When I turned to get back onto the sidewalk, I miscalculated the height of the curb and crash. I scraped up one side of my shin, the knee of my other leg, an elbow, and cut up my palm when I extended it to break my fall against the asphalt. After a minute or two, the pain became manageable, and I was happy again. I thought, What if I broke my arm and couldn't go to Uganda! God that would suck. I better be careful. I only have two more weeks. Maybe I shouldn't ride my bike to work anymore.
Like I often do when I ride to work, I was thinking of various projects and was writing a pitch to a radio show in my head. I couldn't wait to write it down on paper. I went over each sentence carefully, so that I could write it down the first chance I got, nine hours later when work was finished.
The day was exhausting. Kids sap energy and creativity.
On the walk home, the words for the pitch were lost. I was slightly glum about that: I had forgotten, after two weeks free, how difficult it is to do anything when you have to work full time. I couldn't think: I only wanted to go to sleep.
But still, as I walked to the train station, I had the thought: I am so happy to be alive. I am so lucky to be safe right now. This might seem like a strange thought. But it's one I have kind of often. I am always amazed at how happy I have been over the past couple years. It feels like I'm looking at someone else's life when I think about it.
Walking along, I saw one of my co-workers across the street, a guy who is currently now on vacation from our school but lives in the neighborhood. "Hey!" he said. I waved but didn't take off my headphones because I prefer not to talk to my co-workers unless it's during salaried hours. "Did you hear about Uganda?" he yelled from across the street. I took off my headphones. A car drove past us. "There's been a bombing! Terrorists! Everyone's dead!"
"What?" I said. I walked the next couple of blocks and paused on the only corner in Tokyo where I can get WiFi. I checked the Internet. It's true, he was right. I'm supposed to leave to go to Uganda in two weeks. I've spent a lot of money on plane tickets. I've made arrangements, contacts, plans. I've been talking to people there, became casual friends, made plans to meet up. But then I am reading an article about the bombing, and reading about the 70 people killed, and see the bloody bodies being carried out of a restaurant, and the pale, lifeless-looking American NGO girl in the hospital bed, and the saucer-eyed 14-year-old American missionary splattered with blood, and read about the 24-year-old American man dead, who was a member of Invisible Children, a group I considered working with originally.
Now I'm very stressed out about this decision to go or to not go. I want to go, because I would be staying in the rural areas, and no terrorists are going to bother with bombing the countryside. But I would be flying into the biggest airport in all of East Africa, a huge target, and I will be making a connecting flight in Ethiopia, which means some extremists could board. But cities aren't usually struck twice--i.e., New York on 9/11; people didn't stay away from NYC because of that attack (or did they?). The American government hasn't issued a travel warning other than people are encouraged to avoid from large gatherings. The Ugandan government, of course, issued a press release that it was still entirely safe for tourists. But I can't send that article to my parents, who become sick when they think of me going, because it includes a large picture of a terrified American recounting his experience being wounded when the bomb went off. My father doesn't want me to go and doesn't want to discuss it further. He said he would rather personally reimburse me the almost $2,000 I've spent on the trip than have me go. My mother doesn't want me to go but wants me to make the decision. I want to go but I am also nervous.
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[08 Jul 2010|09:15pm] |
I had promised myself before I went to Korea that I'd take notes endlessly, make nightly journal entries, try to come up with a few articles that could later recoup some of the cost of my trip. This is always my plan, and it is always a failure. Here, in complete, are my notes from a week in Korea:
KHABAROVSK TAE KWON DO
In my notebook, the phrase is scribbled and barely readable, so great was my excitement to write it down. I had been waiting for my backpack at the Seoul airport's luggage carousel, looking around at the other people waiting. The flight had been from Tokyo, and everyone was Asian except for me.
Suddenly, from behind me, I heard the guttural growl of Russian. It was a man's voice, and it sounded strict and demanding as a sergeant's. I turned around and saw that the voice was actually coming from a child, a blonde boy of maybe 12, walking with about nine other young Russian boys. A third of them were beautiful in the sinister, angelic way of pre-adolescent boys, another third of them wore mullets with tendrils curling down their backs, and the last third of the boys were both beautiful and mullet-headed. Two men walked just ahead of them, one with his own mullet that he had clipped just below the collar. A tired mom, wearing a leopard-print tank top with the type of cleavage that will always lock my eyes, no matter how pockmarked and sunburnt the breasts are, straggled behind. The adults were pale and washed out, barely there, but the kids were buzzing with excitement.
All of them were walking while surrounding one single boy, a short kid with black hair and dark sunglasses that reflected the airport's fluorescent ceiling lights, the group's only Asian. The boys talked to him and were talked to by him. They walked past the carousel, the Asian boy with his head cocked, giving a moment to the kid with the rough voice. After they passed, I saw the thick black letters that had been ironed on to their white gym shirts: KHABAROVSK TAE KWON DO.
It was then that I became fully excited to be in Korea, on a trip, on vacation, away from home, and I decided to not stand outside the bubble of energy generated by all of this weird new exotica--which is what happens when you take notes, when you're observing--but to enjoy it all and to not take a single moment to reflect on any of it. I had so much fun.
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[08 Jul 2010|08:42pm] |
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My favorite thing about my neighborhood is The Girl Who Rides A Unicycle. She is maybe 7 or 8, with stick limbs and black hair that hangs straight to her shoulders. She wears pastel colors: lavender t-shirts, sky blue shorts. She walks out of her house seriously, leans her unicycle against a telephone pole, and then steps on a pedal to boost herself up onto the banana seat. Then she takes a breath and pedals furiously, forehead furrowed above her glasses, mouth grimacing, torso teetering, zigzagging to the next telephone pole. She sticks her arms out straight in front of her to avoid crashing into it. There she rests, breathing heavily, head down. She only stops for a few seconds, just long enough to make the decision to keep going. She looks up, straightens her back, and pushes off the wooden pole, jerking on down the street.
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[12 Jun 2010|06:52pm] |
I went down to the beach by Yokosuka, the marine base. It was the most Americans I'd ever seen outside of America. "How you doin', darlin'?" one of them asked me. Then he kept on walking by. I'd like to know what goes into raising a man who can say "darlin'" so offhandedly. It might be the kind of man I'd like to marry.
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[29 May 2010|03:22pm] |
A week or two ago, I was volunteering at a nursing home, stringing clear plastic beads on a silver pipe cleaner to tie around the wrist of a mean-mugging old lady. Another girl was there, and I kept trying to look at her out of the corner of my eye, because she was so pretty. She looked like a young flight attendant on a tourism poster for Thailand: pleasant, accommodating, sexy, exotic. She was my age or slightly younger, and dressed very fashionably but casually. She had long black hair that framed a face that never stopped smiling. She was making origami with some of the friendlier old ladies, and the Japanese she spoke was high-pitched and childish, which meant she sounded adorable and available, which meant she had mastered the Japanese female accent.
We were both heading in the same direction on the way home, and we began talking. There was a little bit of an Australian accent to her English, which she said she never studied except for the regular classes in high school--she said she learned English from approaching tourists on the street in Bangkok. I can imagine being a guy on vacation in Bangkok, and having this small, beautiful girl approach me at the bus stop, with her pure and friendly smile, her long and tousled hair, and asking me if I need help, and me just wanting to cry for all the beautiful girls in the world who don't belong to me.
For years I've wanted to go to Thailand, but I never have. I was going to go before I left Japan, but then all that ruckus started happening. Last month, a Japanese journalist was killed while covering one of the riots.
"Is everything ok there, I mean, with everything...?" I asked the girl. She shook her head, and kept the same soft tone, and the same smile on her face, and told the truth: "No," she said. "No, it's terrible. I have friends there, my family...nothing is good now."
We fell into silence, but I couldn't let it go. "Will it ever be the same, Bangkok?" I asked.
"No," she said, still smiling. Her smile wasn't fake or creepy: it was like she was trying to make me feel comfortable. She didn't always understand all of the words I said, but she tried not to let on, and just kept smiling encouragingly. "It will never be the same," she said. "It's ruined, it's completely gone." She turned away to look out the window.
Last night, I went out to dinner with a Nigerian man, Simon. He is a man who is constantly unsure of himself and always worried I am not telling the truth about things like whether I'm hungry or whether I'm cold or whether I want to walk or sit. When we wait for a table at a restaurant (we've been to three), he will not sit down, because he is worried the hostess will forget about him. He is always soft, always seems a bit childish, a bit unready to be an adult, although he is very successful in Japan.
The only time he scratches his veneer of innocence is when he talks about the government of Nigeria. It is rotten to the core with corruption. There are two sides of the country constantly fighting: the Muslim north and the Christian south. They should be two countries, but they were made one by England, and the north won't secede because there is oil in the south. And to make this conflict worse, the government is completely untrustworthy. But Simon knows how to fix it all. He knows what Nigeria needs.
I expect him to say "change," because that's what he's already said several times, invoking the name of Obama here and there. But what he says is not a change at all.
"I know what Africa needs," he says.
"What does Africa need?" I ask.
"Bloodshed."
I'm so surprised that I can't help but laugh. "Really?" I ask. "Africa needs bloodshed? It doesn't have enough now?"
"Not between the Christians and the Muslims," he says. "Religion, the people need to forget religion. They need to rise up against the government."
If there were to be a coup in Nigeria next week, I asked him, would he go back and fight?
No, I'm a businessman, it's not my place, I expect him to say. "Absolutely!" he says instead, banging the table. "It is my country, of course I will go! I don't want to be here, the only why I am here is the government is not good there! They are criminals!"
But there must be another way, I said, in a flimsy way. "I just hate thinking about all that blood, all that dying."
"Look at Thailand," he said. "They are fighting against the government, and they are winning. They are doing what they need to do. It's what we need to do. It's what needs to be done."
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[24 May 2010|07:04pm] |
I always feel I'm a little in over my head. I've been writing an article about Nigerian immigrants in Tokyo. I've been working on it for weeks. It's nearly finished. One of the men I've been interviewing, I gave him the article to read before sending it to my editor. Journalists aren't supposed to do that, but I'm not a journalist, and I don't trust whoever made up those sacred rules of journalism that I found by Googling "how to be a journalist." I gave it to him because I felt guilty.
I have been telling him--I've been telling all of them--over and over again, I am a writer, I am writing about you, I am interviewing you, this is an interview, I am writing in my notebook right now as you speak, but still I know in my heart that they don't believe it, that they think it is some kind of ruse for me to spend time with them. And they are lonely. And they are foreigners, and I am a foreigner. I am American and they are African, but in Japan we are just foreigners. It's rare. So I let one of them read the article. He is the most innocent seeming out of all of them. He's 29. He owns a clothing store. He has a tense forehead above large, searching eyes, so that he always looks like he's trying to figure something out. He is bewildered by my interest in him, and confused by my constant questions, has only a blank look when I explain once again that there is a magazine in America that is interested in the situation of African immigrants in Japan. To his "Why?", I can only shrug my shoulders and say, "I don't know, some people think it's interesting." I asked him if I could take his picture, and he becomes even more confused, and then a bit scared, and then impatient: "I don't understand your plan, what are you doing? What do you want? What is your plan?" So I showed him the article, where it talks about all the ugly stereotypes of Nigerians in Tokyo, that they are criminals, that they prey on drunk tourists, that they lurk and thieve and lack remorse. After I gave it to him, I imagined him reading it in his shop, surrounded by the hip hop clothes he sells, and blushed with shame and apology.
He read it, and then he called me, speaking with a tone I had never heard him speak with before: he was furious. In the article, I tell his story as a Nigerian and contrast it with the story of another Nigerian, and it is kind of like a good guy/bad guy thing, and he is the good guy, but he was furious to be even in the same article as the other guy, and became desperate: "Please, please, you have to fix this, this has my family name, it is too personal deep, it is too deep in my personal, please, please, this is not my country, I just want to do my business, I don't want any trouble for my business, please." And he felt unfairly judged: "I am Nigerian, yes, but I am not like the other Nigerians, we are not the same, I don't do the things you say!" And he also felt betrayed: "I talked to you because you said you wanted to interview me, I thought you wanted to learn the business, here you are talking about my father and my life, I talked to you about these things as a single man, from my heart."
I felt terrible. I thought, this is nothing more than meddling. I'm meddling in this man's life. He was just standing on the street, doing his business, trying to get people to come to his store, and he approached the wrong person: me.
I told him I would change his name, and I told him the article said nothing bad about him, and that I respected him, and I didn't want any trouble to come to him, and that I was sorry to anger him, and I understood he was not like the other people, the people who I show in my article committing crime right in front of me, living up to the stereotype that people hold of Africans here.
One point was particularly regretful. I called the article "The Men on the Street," because it is about the Nigerian men who stand on the street and try to get people to visit different bars and shops. He said, with stung dignity, "I am not just some man in the street."
But then, before the conversation was over, he seemed soothed, seemed to trust me again. I was sincere. I want no harm to come by him. I think what I did was kind of dirty, even if I did play by all the rules--I told him I was a journalist, all of it was being recorded, all of it was for an article, constantly reminded him I had no romantic interest in him (at one point he asked if I were a lesbian), constantly wrote everything in my notebook in front of him, asked if I could write down the things he said.
I guess I should have been more clear. I should made sure he didn't forget I was there, recording everything. (He didn't even say anything you wouldn't say in a normal conversation--but it is jarring and unpleasant to have a normal conversation and then to see it all typed up in some impersonal, omniscient magazine narrative.) But I don't know. I wanted just to get an agreement from him that I could use anything he said, and then have him forget that little agreement and say anything he thought of. But it made him feel used, I think. And it's not like he's ever considered any of these questions before--he's just some guy, he's never thought about being interviewed or the consequences of his words in print before. Why would his words ever be in print? Why would he ever be interviewed?
I feel dirty, meddlesome, nosy, out of my place. Also, like it's a great story and the best I've ever written.
Loneliness outweighed his sense of betrayal in the end. Before he hung up, he assured me that he wasn't angry, that I just needed to change his name, and I couldn't have a picture of him, but was I free Friday night? Would I like to go out, have some drinks?
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[29 Apr 2010|09:49pm] |
When I was a kid, my father sometimes roasted hogs for people for extra money. I don't even know how to talk about this without it sounding hokey. I was thinking about one specific instance today, but I have some beer to drink before bed, so I will just mention that it takes all night long. You have to sit with the pig roasting over some coals in a very small "hog roaster" that, at least in my family, is on wheels and transported behind a truck like a small trailer. (In his teenage years, my brother spray-painted WHITE TRASH 4 LIFE on this trailer as it sat behind the barn halfway in the woods, unused and rusting over.) One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was roast pigs with my dad, because it always happened in the summer time, and we would set up a tent in some place that you're not normally allowed to set up tents--in someone's private back yard or a corporation's front lawn--and I would run around in the grass all night til it got slippery with dew and watch as the pig turned from white-pink to a shiny, carbon black, its ears crisp as charcoal. I can't remember whether an apple was put in its mouth. I can never remember little details like these that seem crucial because when these things happened, I had no idea about the standards of the world. Everything was happening for the first time.
Even at this time I did not eat pork, although I had no problem watching a pig's skin turn to pencil lead, and I myself probably helped butcher the pig or at least watched it being done. Have you ever made a tinfoil dinner, where you put a bunch of vegetables and meat into a tinfoil packet and then cook it over a camp fire or a grill? And then you tear open the tin foil and a bunch of steam and moisture comes billowing out? That was what it was like once the pig was finished. Its skin was brittle and unreal as tin foil, and it cracked open to allow tufts of steam to tumble out. I vaguely remember my father taunting me and ordering me to eat the eyeballs. He used to make me sit at the table for long hours until my mother finally felt sorry for me and allowed me to hide my steak in my napkin. Imagining eating meat aroused in me the same emotions that might be associated with imagining eating erasers. (Although, thanks to McDonald's McNuggets, which I used to daydream about having to eat my way out of a room of in elementary school, I have always eaten chicken.) My brothers often tortured me by taking frozen meat out of the freezer, still in its plastic wrapping from my grandparents' slaughter house, and hiding it in my bed before I crawled in to go to sleep at night. To this day, it is the main topic of conversation at holiday dinners with extended family: "Here Ammer, ya want summa dis prime rib? 's good for ya y'know. Or you prolly want summa them to-fu curds they got o'er der in Jaypan, donchu." Which is true, I do. I love tofu. Not any of that stuff I used to try to choke down in Michigan, but the aisles and aisles of ridiculously nuanced, handmade, centuries-tradition tofu they got over here is probably what I'll miss most about this country.
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[24 Apr 2010|11:49pm] |
I can't really remember the time I met Tony Mekson, because I was already half way drunk. It was the kind of buzzy drunk that comes when you decide to "grab a drink" with a friend and have no expectation of getting drunk. Getting drunk is so far out of your mind that no matter how much you drink, it seems preposterous that you could actually get drunk. It's just not on the agenda. The friend I was with was Sonia, who lives in New York and was on vacation (a great exacerbater in the leap from "grabbing a drink" to "what's your name? where're my panties?"). Sonia is one of the most patient girls I know, and the definition of a good sport. In college, when most of us were staying up all night numbing our faces and blacking out over toilet seats, Sonia was always in the background, calmly drinking a martini, idly watching the men in the room fall in love with her, and taking out loans to pay for her own wisdom teeth extraction.
I love Sonia. I love Sonia because when we ended up sitting at Kingston, a reggae bar, with a Bangladeshi Muslim begging to buy her a Coca Cola and asking her phone number on one side of us, and a Nigerian named Eddie giving us incredibly erotic hand massages on the other side, all she did was laugh and order another glass of champagne. Every so often, another Nigerian would come into the bar and stand behind us with his arms on our shoulders, shouting in our ears: "And how are my ladies doing, everything is all right? You need another champagne?" And he would use a fascinatingly unnecessary hand signal, like a baseball umpire, to signal the woman working behind the bar to pour us another glass of champagne.
We were, in fact, not only his ladies, but the only ladies period. Like all the bars in Tokyo, Kingston is tiny, with about five or six stools at a bar and a dance floor that could fit about as many people as could fit in a VW Bug. We don't care about reggae. At least, I don't. Sonia, in the beginning, claimed to like it, but after four songs, she agreed with me that it was almost as boring as chamber music. The DJ was a bashful kid named Oliver with a movie-like British accent, who chain-smoked awkwardly and had a miniature little turntable with two iPods nestled in it. When the real DJ, with real records, suddenly started up from the other side of the bar, he drowned out the techno-laced Bob Marley Oliver was bobbing along to. Little Oliver sighed and slipped his iPods into his pocket and glumly sat down with a beer to watch the hired DJ. The only reason we had come into this bar was that the tout outside, the one who then came in every few minutes to see how his ladies were doing, said the first drink was free.
I'm going to end this story another day. I can barely remember two nights ago, when I went out to have dinner with this man in order to learn about the business of (legally? illegally? it's all so hazy) exporting car parts from Japan to Africa. I am terrible at writing, at telling stories, and having stamina for anything other than marathonic sleeping. Today I had dinner at the Senegalese guy's house: awkward. Today I paid $22 to see Alice in Wonderland with a co-worker: boring. Today I woke up and immediately went running: sickening. Everything's great, actually, just fine, I just wish I hadn't written the last three paragraphs in a weird style that isn't mine at all. I don't have a style, I mean, but I'd rather it not be so obviously someone else's style. Also, I'd like to write something without getting bored with it before the story even starts. Also, should I trust this guy Tony Mekson? Word on the street is, don't trust Nigerians. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying that's the word on the street. Also, all the Africans I meet always want to make me dinner. Not take me out to dinner, they are very insistent that I come to their house and they cook for me. I don't really know why this is such a big deal. Sometimes I worry this is some kind of wedding ritual in their culture (remember on Full House when DJ walked around the kitchen table three times with that foreign guy and then they were married?) and then I worry that I'm being racist (I am but I can't help it, how am I supposed to know the answers before I know the answers).
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[19 Apr 2010|11:03pm] |
A couple weeks ago, I was waiting in a very busy area of town to meet up with this Senegalese guy who I somehow, gradually and then suddenly, became friends with. He is a very high strung guy, and always seems very excited to be hanging out with me, almost like he's buzzing with electricity, and sometimes he will kind of reach out impulsively and touch my arm or shoulder and then quickly and hotly retract, like he felt a static shock. Anyway, the main problem with this guy is that he is always very late. So I was waiting for him in this busy area called Shibuya, at a famous statue near the train station where people always agree to meet each other (which makes it an incredibly crowded and inconvenient place to meet). It was a sunny day, and I was squinting against the sun. I don't mind waiting in this area because there are always young people dressed in a way that makes you wonder very deeply what's wrong with the world.
Across from me were two foreign men, and I thought maybe they were Iranian or Turkish. There are a few of both here. But they were very well-dressed and had expensive cameras and guidebooks, and so they seemed like regular tourists rather than immigrants. I could tell one of them was taking my picture, which sometimes happens here. You might think this is creepy, and it is. I think the normal thing to do would be to walk away, or shrink back, or, if you're someone who I wish I were, confront the person taking pictures. At the very least one might be nervous. I didn't really care though, because I also often take pictures of strangers, and so it feels like something I deserve and should put up with calmly. The only thing that makes this incident unusual is that after a while, after the two guys discussed it between themselves in that weird Hebrew-Frenchy language of Arabic, and giggled at each other like two girls on a class trip, the picture taker came over and asked, belatedly, if he could take my picture. His name was Ahmed, and he's from Saudi Arabia.
"I hope you haven't heard bad things about my country," he said, a statement I immediately glossed over like I always do when people from the Middle East find out I'm American, because it can get awkward, even though usually neither of us really know what exactly we have to be awkward about. Anyway, now we're friends on Facebook, and he sent me the pictures. There are about 12 of them that he took without me knowing. First I am sitting there, and then you can see me getting an idea, and then I'm pulling out a pen, and then I'm holding a pen and searching for paper, and then I'm writing, and then I'm staring off and thinking again. It's a pretty accurate portrayal of how I spend my time. But it's weird, because you never really expect to see truly candid street pictures of yourself, and without posing, without the instinctive posturing of looking at yourself in a mirror, and I realized how really ugly I am. My face is practically deformed. At the very least, it is certainly unfortunate. This knowledge is actually kind of liberating, because now I know I should give up on the whole avenue of physical beauty. I better start developing my mind before it's too late.
And,
Ever since I had that nervous breakdown, I've been trying to be more social. I guess that's an integral part of life or something. So like I mentioned in that last post, I went to a book club meeting, which, score: the organizer sent me an email after I had to leave early, saying, "We were all talking about how nice you are and your amazing cookies." Thank you Michigan, thank you Mom, thank you Midwest.
I went to a meeting of a vegetarian and vegan society and where they just sit around eating food, which is pretty much what I'd like to do with my life career-wise. I sat with these three Australian girls and kept imagining making out with one of them because she was so pretty, and I sat with this Indian-British guy who I also kept imagining making out with because he was so small, and then these two Japanese guys who I tried my best to ignore because I don't want to see another Japanese face for the next five years.
I went to a meeting of a writer's workshop and it was the best workshop I have ever been to. These people were so mean. By "mean," I mean the kind of meanness that everyone is afraid of in workshops, but really is just incredibly honest and constructive. They were all very nice, and then they told the truth: This has no point, this has no structure, why did you write this, what are you trying to do, this pisses me off because it's almost good but you fail miserably, the writing at sentence-level is so good but overall it's a big mess, oh you're clever but a little too clever, aren't you?
This week, I'm having dinner with a guy who I think is a little older than my father and keeps poetry and the good old days of sex and drugs a little too close to his heart, and the next day going to a tofu restaurant with this one girl, and then the next day meeting with the only Nigerian man I've found out of a dozen who will tell me about the shady business of importing and exporting car parts from Asia to Africa, and then after that with the habitually late Senegalese who wants to make me his native food.
My problem in life is when I make a decision, I go at it way too fanatically. I've been isolating myself for like a year, all this interaction is like trying to run a marathon after months of McDonald's.
This post is in reply to the comments of Alex and Ms. Shadows on the last post. All of this might sound exciting, but I only want to go home. I worry when I get home I will be really bored and miss this kind of strangeness. But there's always drugs in America, which pretty much guarantees I'll end up in situations a lot stranger than these. Just kidding, I ddd (don't do drugs). I miss my friends so bad, and living here is like being stuck at a sleepaway camp. Also don't even get me started on the fucking lame, pale ass manga freaks here from New York and the Japanese girls who don't realize how pathetic they are.
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[17 Apr 2010|01:06am] |
Everything makes me laugh so much to myself. It's already 1 am and I came home after attending Tokyo's monthly "vegetarian/vegan expatriate meeting" (ha, ha) and drank half a bottle of wine and so I'm worried I won't wake up in time to bake cookies for my first meeting of a book club tomorrow.
We're reading Nabokov's autobiography and we have to bring an "autobiographical food" (zucchini cookies, obviously, but no zucchini at the store, so molasses cookies). I've only finished half of Nabokov's autobiography, mistakenly referred to on the book's cover as "the best autobiography of our time," and already I've learned 37 new words. They will be posted here forthrightly.
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[03 Apr 2010|10:34pm] |
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Today I had a panic attack! I grew up with the viewpoint that mental disorders are for lazy people and panic attacks are about as real and self-indulgent as claiming to have a deathly fear of cotton balls, so I told myself I was overreacting the entire horrible train ride home. But actually it was all there: incredible chest pain, inability to breathe, dizziness, feeling of being outside the body, and then feeling being inside the body but drunk. The chest pain is incredible with these bad boys, feels like someone's tugging all your nerves out of their proper places and making a giant rubber band ball with them! The last time I had a panic attack was two years ago, in December, in the morning, on the way to work. Like this one, it was completely unexpected, and I wasn't feeling terribly bad before it happened. I had no idea what it was and was so scared that I went to the hospital, where doctors said it was an asthma attack and told me to cut down to half a pack a day. The time before that was probably in college, and it would have been hard to tell if it was a panic attack or a bad reaction to some drug. The times before that was when I was 15, but even with all the horrible things happening at that time, they were never as bad as these last two. Tokyo has produced the worst. I want to go home so badly. Instead, I came back to my house, and watched The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and cried, and drank wine and ate ice cream and strawberries and cookies and basically acted like (1) a high school girl who has just been called fat by her crush or (2) the female boss who's a domineering bad ass at work but is spending Valentine's Day lonely and miserable. I want to go home. A guy I met through interviewing Africans about their lives in Japan had texted me and invited me to go to one of his Senegalese gatherings, and I agreed but then texted him back an hour later and said I "suddenly felt very sick" and was going home to lay down. He texted back: "Is it a panic attack? I myself have been having one since last week." I was shocked that first of all, he knew what a panic attack was (why was I shocked? I am ignorant) and second of all, he knew immediately that that was what it was from the words "suddenly sick," and third of all, that he had been having one since last week, damn, poor guy.
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[28 Mar 2010|01:21am] |
I don't really think pictures of dogs or cats or other pets are ever all that cute.
Today I woke up miserable and wore a suit jacket out of my house. A black like, women's sports coat, that was tight. A black skirt that was short and tight. Gray leggings. Black socks up over my knees. I never got such good responses from street interviews in my life.
I decided to dress like a grown up from now on. No more bright colors. No more sequins. Sports coats. A color palette. The color palette being black, gray, and nude.
So I went to the store and spent $110 on a gray silk sports coat, a nude tank top, a blue tank top, and a gray silk cover-up.
I don't really spend a lot of money (or drink, or take drugs, or smoke, or have sex out of boredom) anymore, so it made my heart beat quicken. I used my credit card. I was so excited my hand shook when I signed the receipt.
Today I talked to two Nigerians, two Saudi Arabians, hung out with a Senegalese guy. Every day I think, is this real? This is so weird. Can I keep this, this life? Is it mine? I like it all right.
But it's just because I've had a week's vacation from work. I got to do exactly what I wanted for a week. It was this: interviewing, reporting, writing, drinking a lot of wine, reading, hours at the library. It turns out, that's what I would do, if I could do anything in the world. I'd be a journalist. I've never been so happy, so pleasantly stressed out, so alternately terrified and ecstatic, in my life.
I work at it until I go to sleep, I dream about it, I wake up in the middle of the night to see if sources have emailed me back, I wake up and immediately start working on my stories again, I take a break for breakfast and coffee, I put on make up and clothes, I go out to interview people, I get discouraged, I get excited, I drink lots more coffee, I tell myself no alcohol til I'm home at night, I scheme on how to get criminals to talk to me, I work it out so they approach me first, they never seem like criminals to me.
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[05 Nov 2009|04:02pm] |
I'm home sick from work, again. I read the friends list on my Live Journal for the first time in a couple months. Individually, I love a few of you, and like the rest of you. Collectively, you're all a bunch of downers. Damn. For real though. I wrote a story, will someone please read it? I'll probably never write another one again, and I just want you all to meet the characters in this story, because they're the only friends I talk to anymore. I'll send it to wherever you want me to.
I live with a guy who I can barely communicate with because we speak different languages, but we both have been able to get across the idea to one another that we feel taken care of by this world and we are continually shocked by it and grateful for our luck. Recently it was discovered that we have this mysterious feeling of support because we actually take care of each other, in small ways, but are too daydreamy to notice the other person's help. And when we are the helpers, we do our best not to be noticed. He keeps bringing me juice and tea and fruit (sliced up, the skin peeled off), and I keep thanking him awkwardly, and we can't look each other in the eyes or it'd be weird: we're practically strangers, really, just very close strangers.
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[11 Aug 2009|11:43am] |
Public domain books--I'll probably never leave my room again.
It's been almost a year and a half. I'll never stop wanting a cigarette. I'm in a constant state of chiding and denying myself.
But people who smoke look weak and insecure to me now, and also they smell much more unpleasant then they could ever guess, even for hours afterward.
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[05 Aug 2009|12:01pm] |
August makes you remember that Japan is a tropical island. Any other time, especially the winter, everything is gray and towering; you could be anywhere, New York I imagine, or a less spacious Berlin. Today it's 80% humidity. I just walked my best friend, Andres, to the train station. He's returning to the United States to live in San Diego. The Japanese word for this situation is "samishii." The English word is "sad."
I love Japan after coming back from a long trip somewhere else. It's fun, and clean, and increasingly manageable. I'm becoming less shy in my old age. A new man is moving into our apartment for a few months: he makes classical guitars for a living. He's opening a shop where he will sell the guitars that he makes. It takes one month to make a guitar.
I live with a guitar-maker, a pizza chef, an architect, and an artist who's barely home, always traveling around the world funded by art collectors and donors. He lives alone in an apartment in Berlin that used to be a nightclub--it still has a giant palm tree growing in the middle of it--and just spent a couple months working in the rice fields of a monastery in rural India for no reason, really. He's charismatic but unnerving; I'm always uncomfortable around him and barely say anything, but I always want to be around him.
I'm the writer of the house, but since none of them can read English, I'm more known as just the Foreigner. It's not a bad role; there's not much to live up to.
Yesterday I ran into my roommate at the public baths, and sat side-by-side, naked, lathering our hair with shampoo and discussing our new roommate, the guitar-maker, who is named Kon, which is pronounced "Cone."
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[21 Apr 2009|08:34pm] |
The day after I returned from a trip around the world, my computer crashed. The screen in black and there is a cryptic message in Portuguese. I've never been to Portugal and I never used a computer in Brazil. I took it to Akihabara: they can fix it, but all my pictures and other data will be completely lost. I'd be upset but it's just too much. I just keep laughing hysterically whenever I think about it.
Things broken or stolen that I used to rely on: ipod, cell phone, computer, camera. My hard drive with years of data was lost in the mail.
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| My Hometown |
[13 Jan 2009|10:58pm] |
East Leroy, Michigan
Total Population: 2230
White: 2173
Black: 0
Asian: 17
Pacific Island: 0
Native American: 0
Two or more races: 22
Other: 18
I'm interested to know why "Hispanic" isn't an option;
I always hate it when people talk about being from small towns. Get over it!
Also, this is not true because there was one black family.
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[27 Dec 2008|09:13am] |
This is from an email from my brother, who is 24 and who just got married in November and who has no job and whose new wife is a bartender:
"Now we're back in Grand Rapids with Amanda's crazy family. Her drunk uncle is here so I'm sure there will be plenty of drama. We didn't get a lot of presents for anyone b/c we sponsored two less fortunate families. We got the one family w/ 2 teenage boys an Xbox 360. I wish I could have saw their faces yesterday morning! Well I hope you're doing well."
He is my hero, basically.
Also, I'm about to go volunteer for an organization that hands out food to homeless people in Ueno Park in Ikebukuro, Tokyo (and I'm about to be late). What kind of kids did our parents raise???
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yugoplastika's journal