Give me lines to draw.

Today, I finally got to play ultimate frisbee on a real dirt field. Grass was not to be had (in either way), but this marked the first time I've played on real God-made surface since I started playing frisbee on the artificial brick-turf all-purpose field behind one of the academic buildings. Were it not for Dan and a few other people from the Bedford and Concord area, it would probably have been years since I've just played casual Ultimate with a group of friends. I know it's been years since I've played casual Ultimate with you, Ashish---isn't that crazy? How is that possible? Man, I miss those days when we'd play against each other and you'd outrun me on successful cuts. Why didn't I play more back then? Too scared, too fragile... I never had the gusto for team sports.

One thing I'm not too good at is working together with people. I realized that today in relation to something over here in Japan, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is. It was a great example, and hopefully I'll recall what it was and put it here. But for now, it was just one of those brief, passing profound thoughts that you try to remember a day later and you just can't. This one was good blog material, though! It was the example that makes the proof, to put a mathematician's perspective on this. Ugh, what was it...

Ah, yes. It might have had something to do with not going to the 1 PM class that I was thinking of adding. Several of my most awesome friends here at Kansai are in that class, and after seeing an example of a reading that we would have to do, I shied away from entering the room. See, today was the deadline for adding classes, so I'll never have the chance to get in that class again. Furthermore, since I would've had to drop the sociology class I'm taking that's getting better recently, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend an hour and twenty minutes sitting in a class I might not like enough. I did that on Thursday and was reluctant to do it again. So I didn't go to the class. But then, after going downstairs and checking to see whether my credit request for the sociology class was approved (which it wasn't), I decided to go upstairs and enter if people were still entering. But everyone was already there, and though the bell hadn't rung yet, I was too much of a 恥ずかしがりや(hazukashigariya, shy/easily embarrassed person) to go through the introductions necessary for me to take a seat in that class at that time.

This, as you may be expecting, stirred some thought within me. I told myself, "Well, the second half of the semester would've been all student presentations, and you didn't want to sit through that, right?" Then I realized...

B: Yes, but you would've had the opportunity to commiserate and work with your friends in this class, and make it easier to hang out with them as a result.
A: But friends don't become friends through work. Don't you remember that? You believe that friends really feel like friends when there's time to chill and relax.
B: I think you really know who your friends are when you need them the most.
A: I think you need them the most when it's time to chill and relax. And sometimes the time to chill and relax for one person is not the same for the other, and that's when friendship really comes through.
B: True, but...

But what Bさん would point out to Aさん next is that maybe I didn't really want to bother with the work part. Maybe even the thought of working together was something I didn't want, even with friends.

But work can be art. The two are intersecting sets, and for sure the drawing of lines on the dirt of what became our Ultimate field was something I missed dearly from home: the opportunity to make art with other people. Yes, even that is art to me, and for some reason, I feel so much more alive now having played on a real, man-made field, lines drawn out and sunset drawn out to the end of the game.

When I played duets with people or accompanied them on the piano as they sung, that was undeniably art. Sometimes some things aren't as evidently art, but they're undeniably art to me. I think I've finally found a (new) good reason that I do so many random things and don't concentrate on one thing. Each thing, in its own way, is in some way art.

And for me, going to Japan and seeing Japan is not appreciating art. It's drawing a picture within this picture that's appreciating art. It's making it.