… and Let the Joyful Journey Begin!

Oh goodness, is that July I see peaking from the horizon? I’m going to have to quickly recover the remnants of my deteriorated English before the onset of August, and will attempt to do so… now!

So, a little more than one month left. Now is the junction for where current things start to end and new things start to start. All these goodbye speeches to colleagues and welcomes to the incoming successors have to be written out. The more natural goodbyes to friends must soon be said. All the while, my stuff goes in shippable boxes or back into suitcases or gets handed out and I whittle the past down to a portable size. How did I get here again so fast?

I think it’s a guarantee that once I step off the plane in the states, I’m going to feel like a foreigner all over again. All I anticipate about my future right now is based on the news headlines filtered through my iGoogle account. The economy is getting worse! Housing will stay low! Brace yourself for doom and gloom! Some things to that effect. It’s enough to give an expat cold feet right before touching ground, though the problem is global enough that I wouldn’t avoid these conditions even if I high-tailed it to another English teaching gig somewhere else abroad. Really, the time is at hand to puff up, steer home, and charge straight at that unknown, hollering something at the top of my lungs… like “THAR SHE BLOWS!” because it makes me feel so massive and rolls off the tongue so nicely. Perhaps once I’m surrounded by the daily living conditions of friends and family, it’ll all start looking a bit more realistic, and the anticipated problems should become visibly manageable. Trying to view the U.S. from where I am now still feels like scrutinizing Big Foot through a telescope from the top of a tiny, closed-off tower far away in the forest on the other side of the globe (and in the extended version of this mental image, I also wear a wizard’s hat… and start cackling in a Rita Repulsa villainess-like fashion… and then I’m quickly done with the parenthetic stream of consciousness aside.) Anyway, it’s hard to get a full, or attractive, picture of things to come just from readin’ da papes.

As we know, however, I’ve been asking for a challenge, thus har it blows as requested.

That’s not to insist that there’s been only stagnancy and boredom since any previous rant. Though the choice weighed heavily on me for quite a while, there have been some undeniable benefits to staying the second year here in Japan, and overall I’m glad I made the choice to do so. It’s difficult to gauge exactly when the humps were finally crossed… my friend Austin was right when he told me that initial Japanese comprehension and then fuller Japanese comprehension come in two very separate waves… but language acquisition played a huge part in shifting life towards near-normality. At work, even if I can’t always say exactly what I want to say, just being able to pick up the banter between students or the mumbling of teachers next to me or enough about a school lunch “crisis” of Halloween pudding showdown magnitude to lend a helping hand has, strangely enough, helped me to feel like a real teacher. The other teachers have also conceded to my teacherliness after two years, and we’ve gotten past those points of awkwardness I used to dread in the morning before heading to work. Now it’s more like, “Hello so and so-sensei! How not weird and perfectly typical of us to greet each other as equals today!” Definitely the entire process would have been quicker and easier from the start if I could have studied a little Japanese before flying over, and if there was a way to fast-forward from where I was language-wise then to this point in time, I’d have boarded that temporal express train. Yet it was still worth my time to take the extra year… or at least six to eight months of it… to gain this measurable feeling of improvement that can’t really be experienced as a native speaker.

In taiko, my drumming repertoire recently upgraded to tossing and catching my drumsticks and doing a few ballet twirls in time with the music. Aw man, I can’t just barbarically beat on drums anymore because now I have to demonstrate grace as well. My limbs clearly oppose this change. Last month, our small but mighty band of women got to play our taiko set on stage at the big deal Bunka Hall in Hamada. Stick juggling hadn’t yet been incorporated into our routine, but I successfully if inadvertently added my own impromptu drumstick throw at the crowd for all to marvel at during the performance and on cable television afterward. It didn’t bother me that much really, I thought everything else up till then still looked pretty good, but the audible gasps from the audience made the mishap rather momentous and priceless. Little did they know that a spare stick lay secretly tucked away beneath my drum, all ready to be whipped out with panache. Wha-cha!

Fireflies!

Hotaru season during June was my favorite time of year in Japan in 2008 and won again this year as the all time greatest thing about living in this country. Once the sun completely set, we drove up deep into the mountainside. We parked and then walked along the riverbank, to discover an entire stretch of water lit up by these slightly green, gently flickering orbs that transformed the riverside into a fluid mirror of the star-lit sky above. Even if you turned around, you’d see the glowing dots decorating the forest trees. The fun part is catching a firefly between two hands and seeing the cavern of your palms light up green. Felt pretty damn magical.

Finally,

Got to spend some pleasant nights staying in this week, receiving the birthday greetings from afar (hooray and thanks!) and spending one the evenings watching the movie Proof, filmed in Hyde Park and on the University of Chicago campus. I immediately love any movie that takes me back to the past where I can go, “Hey! I know where that is!”, but stories about families pulling through and going crazy together have an especially special place in my heart. I also ended up liking Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance. While I’d still refuse to hand her an award for any attempt she might make at being a boy, she’s rather convincing and endearing when it comes to playing frumpy, intelligent, and emotionally frazzled. Alright Gwyneth, you got me this time.