Right Hand Drawn by Miki Huynh

Peon’s Paean

Today is Sports Test day at my school, so all the students and teachers have gathered outside to bake in the sun, swing their limbs around, and await judgment on the demonstrations of their physical abilities. No suggested bitterness in that sentence, is there? Or lingering memories of presidential fitness awards either? I’m currently staging my sit-in protest and watching proceedings from the cool of the teacher’s room. Man, it’s so anti-authority it hurts. I’m not particularly fond of the word sport when it’s passed through the concept of P.E., and far less thrilled when it’s attached to a word like test, especially given its weight in this country. Just gotta wait till September rolls round again. At least, so far, no one seems to have noticed. I’ll count that as a successful rebellion.

I Dream of Dreaming…

As those slippery slopes go… sigh… I haven’t been so productive of late during my weekday evening hours outside of Japanese, taiko, and ikebana because I’ve now been sleeping. Recently, I’ve been having these long sequences of dream that, for once, play out with actual beginning and ends and a semblance of a plot running everything in between. Maybe it’s got something to do with me watching the 1st season of Arrested Development and having a rather good model for continuity within fragmented, episodic stories (I think the show works best watched in order with no commercial interruptions). Anyway, the dreams are quite clear now though the memories afterwards are not… argh! Need to start writing this stuff down. Even still, I’m waking up with that sort of feeling that you get after you finish a movie in a theater. Kind of groggy, but genuinely entertained. Like I got my full R.E.M.’s worth. The venue of sleep is truly underrated.

The Heat is On…

Summmer is approaching, and I’ve tapered my traveling plans in hopes of providing opportunity later when funds are replenished, more friends are free, and I’ve got a bit more sketchwork done. Just two more months and it’ll be a year since I moved to this country. Then one more year of incubation left. I’ve the sneaking suspicion this next year’s going to fly by even faster than the first. Time to get down to business.

Puffery

I experienced flashbacks of high school and the Santa Clara DMV yesterday when I had to reapply for a driver’s license to legally drive in Japan before my international license expired. Luckily, ten years later, it only took the first time to pass, despite a few failed moments to honk my horn on cue (who ever though big blue signs with lightning bolt looking sound wave drawings were so easy to miss?) and some needed reminders from the examiner to turn the keys in the ignition. Oh, hah, right! Oops. Though I’m proud to say I kicked some obvious ass on the super narrow S-shaped and Z-shaped courses where you have to do some tight maneuvering to keep your tires from slipping into the dips running along both edges of the road (3 drops, you’re out!) and your car from　bumping into yellow foam beams that hang along the sides and are meant to swing (and deduct your points) when you tap them. Helps to live in a hood with narrow streets like mine where you’re dodging old people, children, bags of trash, and other cars, mostly with old people inside them behind the wheel, on a daily basis anyway. Life in Japan is just one big constant video game, really.

Mind those roadside gaps.

Afterwards, there was cheer and applause and issues of congratulations, and I greedily pocketed my new piece of plastic. Then it was straight back onto the granny bike for another day of junior high.