Encore une fois

Il y a parfois des temps où il faut s'arrêter et se faire récupérer. This was one of those times. I have an embarrassing amount of tissues in my room and I'm smuggling them out, so to speak, of my room, and throwing them out in the trash bins on campus. The reason for this is that I fear that if I asked my family to throw it out, I'd have to sort through it for plastic and reassure them that it was all 100% "burnable waste." This is obviously not something I want to deal with. Besides, the amount of tissues is staggering even for a 外人（がいじん = gaijin = foreigner).

Yes, I was pretty sick, but only for about three days. I would be fully recovered now except that now my room is full of tissue dust and ragweed dust, the latter of which I am quite allergic to. I'm getting an allergy test tomorrow, gladly.

Yesterday, I went to see a show at the Takarazuka Revue. Takarazuka is famous for being an all-female performance group that caters mainly to married Japanese women who are totally disconnected from their unromantic and always-working husbands. It suffices to say that the performance was not good.

First of all, they choose one person to be the Big Star, who has the lead male role in basically every show. It seems like they choose that star based on how pretty the person is and not based on how much they actually might sound like a man, because she was trying way too hard to sound like one. It wasn't right for her voice, and the whole thing was just totally awkward, especially because I was still kind of sick and wanted to blow my nose, which is rude in public.

The responses by the audience seemed mechanical. Frighteningly mechanical. I don't understand how everyone knew to start clapping on a fast quarter beat the instant this one song began (and they didn't do this for every song either!). There might have been a lot of people seeing this show for the eighth time. Also, I feel like the amount of clapping didn't actually depend on how good the performance was, because I felt that there were some performances that merited more of an applause than the others, but that got a markedly short applause. I feel like in America this is different--you know when something deserves more applause. Also, there was no wild cheering or whistling or "WOO"-ing, despite that Takarazuka is famous for its die-hard fans that go to great lengths to work for their beloved stars.

The performances weren't spectacular either. I missed a lot, at least in the first play, due to not understanding a lot of what was being said. Nonetheless, it's obvious that this wouldn't appeal to me at all anyway. According to my host mother, the rest of my 時代(jidai, generation) doesn't really get it either. The dancing could be a lot more interesting, especially; the entire second part, entitled "Dancing for You," was all song-and-dance, with more of the latter than the former. Apparently when this troupe performed in London, the critics tore it apart, and I can see why. It just has a very, very specific target audience, and the more that Japan starts to shift into a society where both spouses work, the more its audience is going to dwindle.

The day before was much more fun. I went to this place called 伏見稲荷大社(ふしみいなりたいしゃ, fushimi-inari taisha) with a couple of girls (represent Lou from Tufts!!), and because we went rather late, we were there for sunset and the early, dark evening. That was the most beautiful thing in the world. Fushimi-inari is connu (famous) for its obnoxious amount of orange gates; well, its obnoxiously beautiful amount of orange gates. They are everywhere, and this being a Shinto shrine, it's open twenty-four hours. There are tons of family shrines everywhere; it's rather unbelievable.

There was one point at which I was walking through the woods, and I half-anticipated, as the sun kept sinking in the Eastern sky, that I would suddenly come to find myself in the middle of the Forest in Graafschap, Michigan, or whatever it was called, and then I would find myself behind that huge sandy slope, and then I'd climb it, and find myself in the bowl dune again... and then the beach... on Lake Michigan..

Everything was possible in that moment. And as I continued to walk through that enormous shrine, whose paths winded their way up and along a mountain, the scents and incenses evoked a thousand memories from far away, and I could live them all again, right then and there. I think I'm going again.

Is it better to be home and not be able to relive memories from the past, or to be away and relive them? That was the question I think all of my literature classes asked me last year. I always gave the first answer. But sometimes the second answer, as a vacation, is incredible.

I just had a flash of somewhere I've been before. Where was it? It came from the song I'm listening to. Perhaps it's Sunday River, in Maine. It might've been Whistler, too. Yes, I think it was Whistler.

All those memories are all the same, though, in all their perfection. "Memories that keeps me warm inside [sic]." Thank you, silly dance song that I'm listening to, for helping me out there.

"You are the summer of my life..."