Ah!

I just had an awesome idea for a year plan that would lead up to studying something really cool in grad school!

Problem is it involves staying in Japan teaching English another year...

And I just looked on my prefecture's JET message board and saw a message from a new 2009 teacher moving to a "small inaka-esque town called Shisou" and froze. There are only two people leaving my town, Shisou, this year so...The Board of Education hasn't given me any contact info yet but...man, weird, uncomfortable feelings. This is starting to look like an unreversable thing.

Well, I suppose sometimes the best ideas don't come until it's too late? That's not a very good lesson of the story...Maybe, think on ideas that hit you as exciting in depth when you first get them?...Maybe there is no lesson to be learned, but just life to live.

Shrine

I saw a beautiful jinja today.

Oh no

I've got this sinking feeling I made a biiig mistake.

All the reasons I had for deciding to come back after one year now seem so shallow. What my reasoning boiled down to was the desire to have the freedom to do anything I might want - maybe live in Latin America, maybe do music in L.A., do research in libraries to figure out what to do next with my education - without being locked into another year-long contract. I thought, perhaps naively, that, 'Hey, lots of people live their whole lives doing jobs they don't love. Since I know I don't want to be an English teacher, I might as well move on and start looking for a job I can be passionate about right away.' But what I eventually came to realize over the next couple of months was that I actually love the job I have right now. I love the kids I work with everyday with a love I've never known before. By now, it's not even uncommon that I find myself looking forward to work. Perhaps, it's not about going through jobs to find the 'right one,' but rather knowing when you have found something you love to do and sticking with it and enjoying it while you can. My life now is uncomparably more exciting than any thoughts I once had of 'really focusing' on music with a band or going back to L.A. (Most notions I once had that 'Japan is good, but I'll always have to go back to L.A." are gone from my head by now.). And now I find myself questioning the importance impressed upon me of going to school as soon as possible and 'getting that education out of the way while you're young.' Aren't there so many other paths? And after all, where are we headed if we don't follow the feeling we have inside of what will really make us happy? (Problem is I thought I was following that feeling when I decided to end this job after one year.)

Possibly the scariest thing, though, is the thought of going back to 'my room' back at 'home' where I will have to constantly exert all my energy like I've never done before to avoid being sucked completely back into the numbing, floating space of everyday life there. I feel like I've made so much progress in myself over the past year, living on my own, away from all that is familiar and stagnating. The thought of leaving all this, and the environment in which I was able to achieve it, to return to the way things were before is nearly unbearable.

Over some time I've come to have my own rhythm of life, my own routine, my own schedule here. Last week my parents came to visit me, and since then my way of life has all but instantly come crashing down like a train about to reach top speed when suddenly snags tied around its wheels and axles snap tight and pull the whole thing under. It goes without saying I love my family, but I think at least some of the people reading this understand what I'm saying when I talk about overprotective parents, especially in Latino, and probably other non-mainstream U.S. culture, families. With the best intentions, they can pull a child so high out of the sky and nail them back down to the ground where dwell neuroticness and the killers of any initiative.

It was only today that I realized if I leave Japan, I'm not just going to be going back home. I'm going to be leaving a life I love, and for which I can see such a future of personal growth, and going back to the limbo which I just described. The thought of braking completely, going from speeds approaching flight to suddenly moving at a snail's pace with almost no vision, is scary. Today I thought, 'Maybe I'm not ready, or strong enough, to go back home and change it yet.'
This would have been really nice to realize half a year ago.
What the hell man.

Up For Bid!:

Ownership Over My Display of Filial Piety Today When I Set Out Three Cups of Tea for My Parents and our Visitor This Afternoon

Bidders seem to include...
growing up Mexican from the time I was born to now,
living in Japan for a total of one and a half years,
and perhaps...a little bit of U.S. influence, or the uniqueness of my own family, for me feeling obligated to do so before my mother.

Going to bed early tonight

(Joe Bataan, Brenton Wood, The Cookies)

I was just looking at the back of this calendar JET sent out to its English teachers for free some months ago. It always catches my eye when I'm looking through my piles of papers, cleaning up, and this time I took some more time with it. It's basically a picture of a whole bunch of Japanese kids on a large, colorful playground that looks like it'd be any 4-year old's dream come true. For a while, I just looked at that picture, at the the bright, smiling faces on all the kids' faces. Then, the feeling that I've so often gotten looking into that picture blossomed into a thought with the extra time I gave it: 'and all these kids are different from the ones I teach every day.'

It's amazing. Every one of these kids is beautiful and unique. Each one has their own personality, things that make them happy, people they love, and people who love them. It is amazing that there are so many beautiful children in the world.

Though it is a little more selfish to say, each and every one of these children has the ability to change another person in amazing ways. In the time we've spent together, the children in my town have changed me incredibly. Maybe our society needs children to keep healthy and sane.

Trippy

Dude, this stuff is f'ing trippy!

Think Animal Collective and Abe Vigoda came up with the ultra-fast delayed guitar? Listen to "Baby Sittin'" by Bobby Angelo, 1961 (not too mention the pretty, uh...sketchy lyrics...I'd call 'em bold, but I mean...telling a girl to come with you babysitting so you can hook up while the baby's asleep?...I won't judge, I suppose, I didn't live back then...).

How 'bout continuous layering of weird, reverberating percussion and weird-sounding guitars being sung over by an undeterminable number of swooning voices harmonizing with each other? Try "I Have a Boyfriend" by The Chiffons, 1963.

When I was little, I used to always think it was funny how that guy in "Runaway," 1961, made his voice go so high and that it was weird the way the song changed so jarringly from happy- to sad-sounding (which I now know is major to minor...but still call happy- to sad-sounding), but just assumed that's what music was like back then and it was normal. No!! That was weird as hell back then, too! And new! (In the U.S. pop music scene, that is).

I have a feeling I can, and am going to, learn a lot.

P.S. I just heard "Surfin' Bird," 1963, by The Trashmen for the first time in a while (I didn't actually know who did it before, I thought it was the Big Bopper. If you don't know, just think: "Buh-buh-buh-bow-bow-bow-buh-buh-oo-ow-ow! Bird's the word, buh-buh-buh-bird's the word." You've probably heard it before.). Has anybody reading this actually listened to this entire song before?! Including the middle section where it's just the singer freaking the heck out?? I can't believe this song even got played on the radio.

Good Morning Sunshine

Just came out of a car's radio four stories below.

I noticed the other day a unique kind of peace in the air that I had never before experienced in my life at home, and that was: there were no helicopters flying in the air above me. Back in L.A., I had come to think of police helicopters flying above me no matter where I was - my backyard, a show, my grandma's house - as something that just was (though I had never stopped being bothered by it). Last night, as I walked around a dark, people-less river area looking for fireflies, I noticed that I had slipped into a very special, thin sheet of silence in which the only man-made sounds were the low roars of cars as they sped down the nearby road. There were no helicopters flying above me, chopping the air, shining their floodlights, and hovering over people. I thought, Wow, I could get used to this; this is really nice. I woke up today and feel very at peace.

Man

I remember hearing about this right before I came here last year:

Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district marked on Monday the first anniversary of a vehicular and stabbing rampage that left seven people dead and 10 injured.

Cry, cry cry cry

Oh, who're those charming, young Chicanos playing that crazy new dance music?



Now, this video shows that a rock band 40 years later can be just as weird, cool, and badass as they were the day they started.

Video

This is a really good video for Abe Vigoda's "World Heart" I think.



Now, Silver Daggers. I appear to be in a Los Angeles music nostalgia dimension.

Clangy

(The Kinks - "Sunny Afternoon")

Today's a beautiful day.

I went to my most rural school's principal's house for lunch today. It was really great. He lives way up in the mountains in this awesome, small complex of a residence with his parents and wife. We talked about what I should do when I got back to the U.S., his travels around Eastern Europe and the U.S., and a blog and webpage he's working on. He told me about how he thought it would be better if there were tours for tourists in Japan that covered nature walks and stuff in the inaka (countryside). He said people come to Japan and just see big cities like Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, which is nice, but that they don't really get a sense for what normal, everyday life is like for the rest of the country. In the same way, he said, Japanese people who travel to Los Angeles, go see Universal Studios, Hollywood, and Santa Monica, ride around in a bus full of other Japanese people, then go fly back home to Japan don't really know what it's like to live in the city. They need to go to other places, like Downtown and Chinatown. For his vacation to California, he rented a car with his family and drove down the coast from San Francisco to L.A., then all around the city on his own. It was really cool to hear about. It's just really inspiring to hear the stories of, and be around, people who don't fit in exactly with the rest of society.

I ended up exchanging blog addresses with him, too! 今日はありがとうございます、藤原先生！

I came home and made my signature tofu dish again. I'm getting it done in record time now, somewhere around 25 minutes. I mixed in the sauce-thickening powder (? 片栗粉) today really well today, too, and didn't have any clumps! It was a nice, circular, quick yet graceful stirring motion! I also added some chopped up ginger, which was a good idea. I'm just working on the details now, like how to make the green onions look more apetitizing (add them in later so they're still bright green when everything's finished). Yes!

I'm ending this post on the same song on which I began it.

Hills (When I Looked at the Moon It was so Beautiful (and I Felt Like a Maniac))

Some of the old, and some of the new.

(I was in deep concentration editing this song and when I clicked play again I actually scared myself for a moment. I don't mean startled; I mean I was frightened.)

I make music until the energy drains from my body.

(It's interesting I've been listening to a lot of The Plugz and "This Life Makes Me Wonder" lately...I don't know, see if you can find it...)

(Email me if you want it.)

Hm...

(Los prisioneros - Porque no se van)

I'm really tired. I had some things I was going to write about today, though.

Forgot 'em.

Or don't feel like writing about 'em now.

I'll just say this for now:

Doing what you want to do,
"What do you have in your bag?"
Work culture here and how I'm experiencing it,
Getting used to new music, how every new album that is released is a completely new existence, how I realized you have to grow with your favorite bands/artists,
I downloaded Los prisioneros Grandes éxitos and The Mysterians, the music that inspired the name of ? and the Mysterians (check out the plot; it's interesting and possibly full of historical parallels and human rights commentary??),
I'm really into Linval Thompson's "Dread are the Controller" and Delroy Wilson's "This Life Makes Me Wonder," does anybody have any more of their stuff?

Not much to hoot about. Hoot! How's everyone doing? I hope well.

Veckatimest

P.S. I'm listening to the new Grizzly Bear album and it
is
awesome.

I was a little bit not expecting too much because I didn't really like the direction they moved in with their last EP, Friends. I thought they were moving too much towards rock and away from the psychadelic folkiness that made them so awesome up to now, especially with Yellow House. But no, that is not right at all. This album (at least up to the first two songs, haha) is like an awesome blend of 50s (R&B?) style chord patterns with the amazingly perfect (so perfect you didn't even know they could exist) harmonies, dull-headed and also eerily beautiful guitar parts, dumpty-dump snap-necking drums, and old Disney cartoon feel (in a darkly colored and somehow creepy in retrospect forest - creeping with long, slow legs hunter in one cell, a tall rabbit doing the same while stealing looks back in the next) that are so signature Grizzly Bear. At least to me. So, let's listen to this album everybody. Come all, let us enjoy this sound that was made for our ears!

Oh, this is how you put labels on posts.

The Ramen Man

(Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One)

Karate practice was really good today. The senseis moved the time up so it's at 6pm now instead of 7:30, which is nice because, if things keep going like they did today, it means I can make it through the intense, all-body workout on the energy from lunch, rather than have to squeeze in dinner to make sure I survive. Plus, now I have more of a night left after practice ends in place of an hour and a half period of anticipation (I hate that kind of stuff. 'Cept maybe with cross country. I kind of love-hated that period right before a race). So, this is good.

Practice went really well. Another black belt guy was there (he comes sometimes) and we did blocking and attacking excercises on each other. I bent my thumb kind of out of shape though, I guess because I wasn't making tight enough a fist, and when he blocked it - ow. But I feel like I'm making a lot of progress, which is really encouraging. One of the senseis, this friendly, cheerful, older man, asked me at the end, "Is that fun??" and I unequivocably, unhesitatingly, and completely genuinely responded with an enthusiastic, "Yes!"

There's also this point, I realized, in every workout, which today in my head I called the center-point. You gauge when you're at the center-point, or around the middle of the lesson, because you're tired as hell, your body feels light, though not completely or evenly, and at the same time heavy, you feel like you're going to fall over, your vision is blurry around the edges from the sweat dripping from your eyelids, and you're putting every single bit of energy into keeping up with the sensei as he leads you through round after round of punches and kicks across the dojo floor. That's the part when I'm really in it. That's when I feel like I'm in the mode. And then, the rest flows naturally.

Today, with my new extra hour, I rode my bike down to the nearby ramen shop, which I patronize every now and then. I was craving some warm ramen after that intense workout. So, I went on in. The place was empty. I ordered my meal, wrote a little bit, and waited in silence. Whenever, I go here, I usually don't talk with the owner-cook, and there's almost always another 50-60-year old man at the counter, too, in laid back conversation with him. I was pretty tired, so I just let things sink by into silence and move along lightly from there. Once served, I lustfully devoured my dinner, also in silence. After a bit of mutual t.v. watching, a clip came on about a plane running out of air on its way from Rio de Janeiro to France and both the shop owner and I found ourselves pretty fixed to the story. The whole time, I was trying to figure out what had happened and if anyone had died, and once the story ended I roused myself to ask the owner, "死亡者は？" ("Did anybody die?"). He answered by explaining that the newscasters were saying the plane just disappeared off the map and they think it crashed in the water because no one can find it. Wow.

That's when I realized. This man is not a person to talk to without significant mental preparation. His local accent was so thick in nearly every way I could fathom in the instant I took it all in - vocabulary, pronunciation, the whole deal. That plus, as I soon found out, he loved talking. But, I just went along with it, "Uh huh, yeah, ohh maan. Yeap. Really??" I suddenly had the impression that my life was a video game and talking to this man was a high level challenge, one which you do not take on until you have earned some serious experience points. But I kept talking to him and actually understood more and more as the conversation went on. Then a little bit less. But then, a little bit more and hey I basically got what we were talking about.

The Ramen Man talked about how GM was " もうあかん" ("done with") (news about GM's further plunge had followed the story on the Air France flight...). He said how Japan's banks were in a bunch of trouble now, too, and how there was this expression a few years ago that went, "When the U.S. sneezes, Japan catches a cold," but then went on to say that not only that, but now when the U.S. gets the new type of flu, Japan gets that too! Haha. He was a pretty funny guy, the Ramen Man. He spoke about how twenty years ago, he would put out ads for part-time jobs for his shop, but no one would respond because they didn't need the work, or if people did respond it was all old people (Upon saying this, he does this awesome "old people" impression basically consisting of hunching over and making a face. We seriously laughed at that one for a good while. It was a good, genuine, full laugh. Keep in mind this guy's probably in his 60s, haha.). Now, the Ramen Man explained, people come looking for jobs, but he can't hire them anymore. Before, he was called a "金の卵" ("golden egg") by whatever workplace he joined because he had graduated from high school. Back then, it didn't matter if you were smart or stupid, though, he said, as long as you worked hard and said, "はい、はい" ("Yes, yes") you could expect to receive a good salary. Now, if you don't have a certain degree of ability or talent...

Things were very different 20 years ago when he first opened his shop.

But he's still doing it. He's been running his place for the past twenty years and he saw the country's collapse into economic recession. And he's joking about the whole thing to a foreign teacher who lives in his town.

The Ramen Man never used the typical, "Oh, you're so good at Japanese," upon hearing me order a meal, to start a conversation. Nor did he say this when I asked him if anyone had died on that seemingly horrible airplane tragedy. He didn't even pause for a second at me suddenly addressing him in Japanese after having eaten at his restaurant silently so many times before. He just started talking to me. Because that's what I had wanted to do when I started the conversation. And that's what he had wanted to do when he responded to my question. We were just there to make that connection with each other.

And when I told him thank you for the meal and got up to pay, he asked me if I lived close and I told him yes, I had moved from the nearby city and lived in a nearby neighborhood. Oh. That was 700 yen, right? Yeah. Here you go, then, thank you! Thank you! And a "また来ますー" ("I'll come again.") as I walked out the door and past the curtains.