Can't... disconnect... and [something else I forgot]

A song completely pervasive to my head recently has been "Miss Independent" by Ne-Yo. What's the song like? In short, Ne-Yo fails again. This is yet another one of his songs that's catchy, but completely fails to meet its potential, with a bridge and a chorus that don't really go anywhere, and yet another instrumental track produced by StarGate, a Norwegian pair that manages to sound the same all the time. You know them from managing to release three huge similar-sounding hits in the USA in way too short of a span of time, considering how obvious it was that they produced the tracks: "Irreplaceable" by Beyoncé, "Tattoo" by Jordin Sparks, and "With You" by Chris Brown. All masterpieces of mediocrity. That trifecta is my go-to example for how to characterize American music nowadays and explain why I'm disappointed in it.

And yet, I constantly go back to Ms. Independent in my head. She's just there; I don't know. And you know, sometimes it's those tracks I'm really disappointed in at first that I come to really cherish. This might be one of them. But listening to it on Youtube with headphones right now, I'm still a little disappointed. Maybe--maybe I turn it into something else entirely in my head, and that's what I enjoy hearing. Or maybe the repetition of the relatively ho-hum melodies is extremely satisfying for some reason, extremely relaxing? I don't know. Maybe I'm just addicted to going nowhere, since this song repeats and goes nowhere...

Let's speak about going nowhere.

In a lot of ways, I have become completely disconnected from the world I knew; that is, America. I've realized how much more I care about things like the principles of the American Revolution and the original Constitution of the United States than do people like, for instance, our President and the Congress which surrended its powers to him. I speak to my friends and family at home at most once a week, if once every two. In reality, those friends and family are separated too: Some are in Massachusetts, back where I was from (wow, "was from"; I'm still from there, but you'd use the past tense for this in Japanese, and in fact it's gone to this reality in my head, perhaps), but the rest are separated all over the country, and let's not forget about Canada too. They're in Missouri, Oklahoma (actually, a couple of my aunts and one of my uncles went with my grandmother to visit my uncle down there this week), British Columbia, New York, North Carolina, and Western Massachusetts might as well be considered a separate state altogether. But if we gauge the potential for feeling separated from one's friends and family by the distance separated, and we call that a sort of potential energy, well, it shows that the amount of potential energy I have means I better not fall. Ahh, if
you're not much for physics you won't get that.

But there's a part of me that wants to disconnect and see what happens. I mean, that's what studying abroad is all about, right?

I don't think I've done that yet. I've gone back to frisbee, I've hardly hung out with Japanese people I know, and I've gone back to fearing my next midterm, even though it doesn't affect my GPA. And I've gone back to listening to American music. Headphones can't make the effect than a car stereo can make on your mind. But yeah, I'm back to American substitutes, just like some people go to sugar-free things that should never have ever been sugar-free.

The amount of energy I (don't, as you'd say in French) have is rather low. I don't know why biking takes so much out of me. Also, either my hamstring or my hip flexor is just waiting for an opportunity to go bust on me, and I'm really scared of what would happen if it does. There have been a few times at frisbee where I've feared turning on my right leg because of what it could do to whatever the hell part it is up there that isn't doing so great. And yes, I will admit I haven't the slightest clue about anatomy, so the terminology I just used might have been a little out of place. Well, picture whatever the correct thing is being out of place. There you go.

At least "Here I Am" by Rick Ross has been a relatively adequate song lately to groove to and to reinvent in my mind. Every superwoman needs a superman-- here I am!!! Even though Rick rhymes "financial aid" with "financial aid" and "mom" with "mom," it's still a great song, and Nelly helps it out a lot. Hmm, the scary thing about listening to headphones is not hearing your host family when they're calling for you and being surprised when they open the door; that'd be an oops. Hasn't happened.

We went to Osaka today to see this Sky Tower thing and Shinsaibashi, which was absolutely amazing. They had a haircut place there for only 1000 yen!! That's amazing in this country! But by 7:00 I was so tired I could not function. I went somewhat　バナナ (banana) in my head for the remainder of the trip, so I was very anti-me and felt bad for that. I needed either dinner or an intense sugar overdose. Actually, it's the sugar that I really need to intake much more than I currently do. And fruits. Fruits.

I saw this shirt a month and a half ago that said this:
WEEKEND PASSION
SELECT THE FRUIT
Yeah, I need that kind of fruit too.

My 絶対たぶん fight to get Claritin in Japan

I, awake, can't imagine I'm leaving this place. But that's what I do every night.

That's what my subconscious does to me while I sleep. Last night, I dreamed I was back home again, but the details I've forgotten. All I know is that it felt like it was too early and that I should've extended my stay. The night before that, I dreamt I had lost 20 pounds after having come back to Japan. (That, sirs and mesdames, would've made me 116 pounds or so. For the layman that's 52 kg, about.) But after that the focus was more on me being back home. I skip Vancouver in my dream and go directly to Boston, or rather to my hometown; no, it's actually some faraway land that just isn't Japan. And I thought this was faraway enough.

Should I stay another semester? I really shouldn't. But when you're having such a good time, and living such a good life (I knock on wood as I say this), can you imagine it otherwise?

Tonight, I met a guy whose name was Yuuta. He wore a cap that said "Fuck The World" and sang a song called "Million Films" by コブクロ. A group of high-school or college girls walking by burst out into a part of the song as he strummed it out on his guitar. It was pretty clear that he was partially playing to get stress out of his system, but he was still doing a good job of making a pretty song out of it. After he was done, I biked over from the somewhat distant spot where I'd been listening and complimented him on his performance. I told him よかったですね　and 上手ですね and asked him what the song and artist were. My main intention, though, was to try to find out how or whether I could get a chance to hear the girl with the amazing voice sing again. He'd been playing in the same spot. Unfortunately, he didn't know the girl, but he was aware of two girls that sing where he does, so that means I do have a chance of hearing her again. Oh God, please. That would make my day, whatever day it happens to be. And, recalling that it was either a Saturday or a long-weekend Sunday night that I saw her, I'll try to ride there on such nights again.

Now that I think of it, she's the only girl I can recall seeing performing in the whole area downtown. Most of the musicians there are guys. Yuuta, like that girl, didn't have a basket for people to throw money in either.

Sigh. It's so good here. When I say "here," you can't forget about time. There's no time like college time, so when you think about actually working in Japan later in life, well, it looks more and more difficult to see this experience being possible to relive. And why not stay here and make it longer? I've got some good friends here, and a few of the closest ones are staying the whole year. Wow; I almost ended that sentence with "as well." What's going on?

As for the title, I can go over that stuff later, but this is the stuff that has just come to the top of my mind. For sure I don't want to try to "max out" my experience by living on the edge, getting less sleep than I should and trying to do everything and go everywhere and party and drink too much. I shouldn't try to "max out" the moderation, however. And by "moderation" I mean trying to live a moderate lifestyle that has both some of the crazy and some of the safety. Pardon the Engrish; actually, no. That's exactly what I mean. I don't want to have to constantly correct my situation here like I would with grammar in my sentences. Part of me wants to just let things play out the way they are, and that's how I've learned to roll, and that's why most of this experience has been so easy for me. I try to fix a few mistakes, and I realize that some mistakes can just be left mistakes and I go on. That's how you communicate in a language when you're not fluent in it. Unfortunately, I am fluent in English, so leaving sentences uncorrected like that would ordinarily bug and distract me from thoughts more important. But not tonight.

Tonight I want to try to sleep easy. Again. That is, I want to try again. At least with sleep you get so many chances to get it right. Ah, sleep. Oh, and I did sleep easy last night.

Time to let the thoughts float... perhaps tomorrow (today) I will talk about my trip to Kyoto... or my 絶対たぶん fight to get Claritin (or its equivalent) in Japan...

Also, today, I saw a shirt that said "I DON'T MISSING YOU" with a tiger on it. It was a hilarious shirt, but I decided it wouldn't look good on me (especially not in the lounge at school with Japanese people that would understand that the shirt is bad English and I'm making fun of it by wearing it) so I didn't buy it. I probably should've, and I might do that if I go back there. Shit, why didn't I take a picture?

Never mind. Next time. Until then, I don't missing you. (じょうだん。[translation: it's a joke.])

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..."

September ended, you woke me up and I need to sleep

"The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to William S. Smith, sent from Paris, Nov. 13, 1787.

Shays's Rebellion-- a rebellion against messy taxes and the debt that these guys had to pay off as a consequence. And where did it happen? M-A-S-S-A-C-H-U-S-E-T-T-S know what that means man

I read the article for that rebellion on Wikipedia, which seemed to focus too much on the idea that the federal government was too weak. The main focus should've been how messy the taxing was, and how people who fought for the nation couldn't live because they were being taxed way too much to pay for the debt incurred by the war. Sam Adams, forgetting what he'd fought for in the first place, drew up the Riot Act, which eventually got passed, suspending habeas corpus. How's that for too many beers?

Apply this story to the bailout bill that just got passed by the Senate, whose name, by the way, is H.R. 1424: The Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007. I, in Japan, feel somewhat like Jefferson did over in France, and I'm waiting for the (hopefully and most likely nonviolent) rebellion that'll slap the government in the face.

I would like to apologize to Ann for shoving this stuff in her face yesterday. I was kind of emphatic about it, and I shouldn't have ranted. Also, I made two blog post rants about the government and got too tired, of ranting and of not sleeping, to post them, and I'll add "thankfully" to that. Thankfully, because they really don't have anything to do with this blog, except now I have something productive to say.

I was asked whether I was homesick today by a Japanese girl who was doing a survey assignment for her class, and I said, somewhat but not completely emphatically, "No." She didn't ask me whether I was sick, which I most clearly was. This is my first cold in Japan, and it showed up about a week ago but went away temporarily. But now it's back. It smells like the U.S. bailout. In fact, this bailout is one of the things weighing heavily on my mind recently. There are other things on my mind, but only subconsciously; I don't know what they are. But the bailout I have on my mind consciously. Furthermore, I have not yet requested my absentee ballot. I will do so as fast as possible, since it might perhaps relieve the underground stress I have over the future of our nation as a result.

Enough of that. I'm sick now, and why? I'm not sure. I felt pretty healthy after playing some pretty good frisbee yesterday, but when I came back, I definitely knew I was sick. However, I can name two other people who are also sick. Still, I feel kinda weak seeing as how very few other people are sick, and it's not great being sick seeing as blowing your nose in public はだめなそうだ。(I heard it's rude to blow your nose in public.) I'm managing, and I'm about to go to bed, since 9:30 has been a really great time to go to bed.

But let me let you in on something. I'm listening to a song called "Want You Bad" by the Offspring. I don't think I've even thought of this song in so long, but there's a reason it came to my head recently. Could I be more obvious?

My nose is stuffed. I can't think anymore. I hope I'll be able to go to karaoke tomorrow night, to Kyoto Saturday night, and to Takarazuka Sunday night. But all may fail.

Sometimes, life needs more breaks, though. Wake me up when October ends.

And I'm spent.
Alex

病院 and desire and the G-muffin

Sometimes when you're here, you feel so alone, but these are only moments. Soon after, you have so many options, so many thoughts, and so many different people to talk to. And to think I'm going to be leaving in only three months???

One day this week, it got colder, and I got sick. For one day. I told people, 気分が悪い(kibun ga warui, I feel sick), and that was enough for me to get asked several times that day and the next whether I was feeling okay. Yeah, I'm fine! I used that phrase (note the translation) because I didn't want people to equate my sickness with disease-spreading or bed-ridden connotations. The next day I felt fine, after nine and a half hours of quality sleep, despite that there is still enough dust to which I'm allergic on my blanket to circulate around the room and into my nose. Sleep can ignore the hell out of that. Sleep is one of the most marvelous things available to mankind, and I have learned to respect it more than anything in recent years.

When I asked one of my Japanese friends here where his friend was going, he said "Oh, he's first going to the hospital" and I was initially like, "the hospital??" Then, I remembered what my host family told me: the word for "the doctor's" and "the hospital" is one in the same. They are not separate from each other, even though in the US you know there's a pretty big difference between the two. That word is in the title of this post, and it's pronounced "byouin". "Biyouin," as pointed out by my Japanese textbook and probably all the others, means the hairdresser's, so you better make the "byo" part quick. But yeah, sickness and injury are a big deal here. Maybe this is my father's fault or the fault of whoever it was that told me that people here over-medicate, but I'm going to be sure to tell nobody that my wrist hurts because of frisbee today. You know that throw I can whip out where you backhand on the same side of your body as your throwing arm? Don't do it. It's useless and dangerous because the defender won't see it coming, and since you need it to be closer to the inside of your body to get all your strength, there's no way to get it around the defender and still have it be a strong throw. Unless you're really good. Oh well.

I seriously can't believe I'm going to be gone in three months. I think I'm the only person who's realized how true this is now, and make that less than three months. Geez, that's crazy! I don't know if I'm going to be able to make the parting happily. You know what I mean. I mean, what's in Paris besides the language? Ah, mais c'est beau...

I'm totally zoned in now on Japanese: speaking it, living it, hearing it. Also, I can't wait for the seasonal allergies to subside so that I can totally live in my house without having a sharp hay fever reaction to something in my room all the time.

Also, the best way to not get homesick (and to not suffer from allergies in your room) is to go to bed early. If it weren't for the fact that I'll probably be hanging around with Japanese friends later tonight, that's exactly what my schedule would be on this beautiful Friday. I hope it's not raining now, though. I still have to go back.

Lastly, sometimes desire hits me like a brick here. The best remedy for that, as non-sequitur as it may seem, is frisbee. Making every day a frisbee day makes every day a really awesome day. Man, there's this girl here who is so good at getting open and sooooo gentle and delicate that she kind of just flutters about. She gives the softest handshakes and high-fives ever. Man, I hope whoever she's in love with or whoever she falls in love with takes care of her and treats her right. She's the one I inadvertently smacked in the face when I made a high backhand throw right in front of my body instead of to the left side as it should've been. I'm so glad the bruise is gone or never got there! Also, I think she's stronger than she puts on; she certainly doesn't make that impression with any physical gestures. She's fantastic. And she's only one of the many cool people I've met here. Frisbee is the topping on the Gaidai blueberry muffin: you don't need the rest of the muffin, for one thing, and if you have desire, the Gaidai blueberry muffin is there. I love this place.

^____^