Hey, it's bigger.

I just had a moment: for the first time, I thought to myself, as I tasted a meal I had just cooked for myself, "I learned how to cook!"

Up to now, whenever I made this dish, I had been using this one recipe and sticking to it pretty strictly, but always coming up with a meal that was good but still needing something. Tonight, however, I went out on a limb (~ooo!~) and changed the ingredients and cooking methods I had been using and just made the thing according to whatever way looked best and guiding myself by tasting the work in progress every now and then. And I came up with a meal that was instantly delicious and completely different from the way it had been coming out in the past. Plus, I got it done waaay faster, making it a possibility for a fast, filling, and flavorful dinner! Mmm.

Basically, it was a bed of rice covered with three types of mushrooms (shitake, shimeji, and, in its exciting kitchen debut, eringi!) simmered in shoyu (soy sauce), pure rice grain mirin (I bought a new type, because the one I had been using up to then kept coming out too sweet), and the clincher to this whole new operation, ume hachimitsu kurozu, that is, 梅はちみつ黒酢, or plum and honey black vinegar! I even sprinkled the 片栗粉 (glutonizing powder? just kinda like flour that hardens faster) into the cooking mix with minimal clumping and pretty maximal syrup-izing. Then (since I forgot to put in the tofu), I dropped some tofu cubes on top. The result was a subtly sweet glorious spread of feeling through my mouth and throughout my body. The eringi added a nice, chewy texture, and the cold tofu, which hadn't been covered with the hot mushroom mix but rather placed on top, actually gave a pretty cool cool/hot addition to all the million kinds of stimuli going on in my mouth. A success on so many levels!

So, that is what made me think that, although I've been making my own food most the time for the past 10 months, some of it pretty good, I just now learned to cook! And I am happy about that.

~ ~

This morning I woke up in a clear mood, then set about taking down and cleaning my entire room. I do this every now and then, but today the scale was a lot higher. My room's a lot barer now, and I don't imagine I'll change it much. I like my room with few pieces of furniture, all only as tall as my knees at max, a nice futon setup facing the glass door looking out on the town, and lots of empty space.

Every time I rearrange my room, I feel like I've shed a new layer of skin. It's like a watershed in this long time I've lived here. I've gone through many different phases, states of being, states of mind. Today marked something good. I realized, and felt, as I cheerily put my ulong cha back in my nicely organized refrigerator, that I was finally living a normalized, comfortable life here in my apartment in Japan, on my own. I feel good about just about everything. There are no worries constantly on my mind, and I feel at ease with some sort of continuum that flows through my place of living. Too bad I've only got two months left here, I thought, but then, No, I've still got two months left to live here like this! Two whole months! This is awesome! I get to live in Japan, with a normalized lifestyle that gives me freedom to enjoy myself and do what I want, while working an awesome job that I enjoy and provides me with enough money to do away with most financial limits, and having made friends that I can call up or hang out with on a regular basis.

I've been thinking about the whole leaving vs. staying thing lately. When I teach, and especially when I was at that rural school yesterday (Wow, was that just yesterday?!), I have such an amazing time with the children and teachers that I think, Wow, how could I have given this away? And for the abstract reason of just wanting the freedom to do other things floating through my mind. But it was not a decision I made easily, and I could see that things were only going to get better and better as the upcoming months went on (though that doesn't make everything getting exponentially better any harder to take when the end is in sight and mind). I've wondered, Did I make a mistake?

But today, I had a lot of moments that made me feel like I had done the right thing in keeping my English-teaching life in Japan to a year. Just feelings. I've started to feel the L.A. coming out in me more, and by that I don't really know what I mean. I just feel it. Today, I had a weird sensation like I was on vacation in Japan for two months, after which I would be returning home. This is pretty interesting considering that I think one of the biggest challenges to me getting used to living here was that I was continually thinking of it as a temporary thing - live in Japan, live out my dream of getting into the underground music scene, make money, and go home - and I only started to really enjoy more wholely my time here when I realized I had to just embrace it and settle down as if I was going to be here as long a time as I could conceive. I'm still living like that now, settled down, so maybe that feeling today was just a flash of the situation I'm facing in two months.

That's how it is though. This week especially, I doubt my decision when I'm spending time with the kids, teaching, yes, but even more, all the time I spend playing with them, kicking the ball around, tickling them, picking them up and spinning them around, answering their questions proudly when they ask me, "先生、大根は英語でなんっていうんですか？”　("Sensei, what's daikon in English?"), and feeling how close we've gotten over the year. Even hanging out with the teachers, usually the elementary school ones, I feel myself coming out more and more, finding my place in this society, making deepening connections with "other" adults, and realizing that I can express my thoughts clearly in Japanese. These are times when I feel at home and loving, and in a way prematurely missing, everything around me.

Then I have moments, usually on my own accompanied by lots of thinking, when I feel at peace with my decision and the whole set of events I had put into play by it. I will enjoy my time here, and get so much out of it, on a level I think will be deep and profound. I will be sad in the time surrounding my leaving of this community; I will experience a sadness also so profound that I really have no idea what to expect from it. Then, I will be back in the U.S., where I will set about doing what I love and also almost immediately have to steel myself against the inhibitions and restrictions of life back at home and in my hometown. And from there I will continue on a new path connected to this one I am living right now, or perhaps a new color and part of the same road.

Things are changing in, outside, and around me so fast that I cannot predict what I will be doing in the near future with much certainty, and I've come to feel I would do best to not try to. As has been this past near-year, I cannot help but feel as though my future will not be as I've imagined it to for so long, or so short.

So, this was a pretty introspective look at my state right now, but everyone reading this (I hope) is a pretty good friend of mine so I hope it told you a little about where I'm at right now. I hope everything's going interestingly and good with you all(, too).

In other news (I seem to use that phrase a lot), I heard a new part of the main line in Solomon Burke's "None of Us Are Free": "None of us are free, as long as one of us is chained." I really like that song, but even more I love, "Flesh and Blood." The bassline is just so...ah, man, it just feels so good. So, in addition to that, I've been learning about my rock 'n' roll roots, finally, like a good rock listener is supposed to, I suppose? Does this mean I'm an "adult" now instead of a bratty kid caught up in the current phase of trance-inducing repititious "rock?" Whatever, anyways, that means the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. Yes, I've never ever been into the Rolling Stones, and I'm still not, but this album (I think their first), Aftermath, is kind of cool. Or rather, the first song, Mother's Little Helper, is really, really cool and trippy, while the rest of the songs are mildly interesting. The Kinks I really like a lot. Got that dark, upbeat feel. These albums, of course, were loaned to me by a Japanese friend who knows way more about that era of U.S. music than I do. I also finally downloaded some ? and the Mysterians, which is also really cool. But not just cool, weird. Like, really weird. I would definitely not call their music straight pop, especially for their time, even the super-classic 96 tears. Have you ever heard I Need Somebody?? I rest my case there.

I'm listening to 椎名林檎's 平成風俗 (Shiina Ringo's Heisei Fuuzoku) now. That's an album that keeps coming up in my life. I like it a lot. Not much more to say about that :) She's releasing a new album and single this summer which I'm really looking forward too. I've got to catch up on her music.

For some reason, I just started listening to the Shins again, too! I don't understand. Ever since I suddenly got back into them fall/winter of senior year, or was gotten back into them, they've come up in my life periodically. Before then, I hadn't listened to them at least since the end of my freshman year. Huh, anyways, I made a CD of them to listen to in the car, before I had to take the vehicle back to the dealer to the annual car inspection, where they found a good deal of rust in the back and my temporary car become my permanent car for the next two months. Hey, it's bigger. Yeah, that's good. I think I'll change this post's title from "None of Us Are Free" to that.