Writing introductions is a bit tedious so....just take a look at my first post if you want to know more....

....and if you get curious about the name of this World or my posts, check out the second one.

Fang & Sting

I am done with Naruto. If Kakashi is dead I'm not reading it anymore.

This weekend was Halloween. It's my favorite holiday and I didn't celebrate it at all. I think I felt the same way last year at this time, but I'm rather unfulfilled here lately. Sometimes I look around and think what am I doing? I go to work, I go out, I sit on the internet. It's no different than when I lived in the US. It's not because I don't have it good here, it's much better here than anywhere else money wise, friend wise, health wise....you name it, it's better in Japan. It's no different here, because I'm no different. All this time I've sat around thinking I'm getting stronger and I can do things, but I can't. There are things I want to do that everyday I tell myself I will do, and yet I don't.

So right now Beth and I are talking about being in a rut. I've thought of a good analogy. When you're looking up from the bottom of the well the walls are steep and slick. It seems impossible to ever escape from that deep hole of misery. What you don't realize is that if you'd just stop trying to scale the slimy walls and look behind you, you'd see the door that leads to the marble staircase up and out. Easy as pie. I never got myself into a situation I couldn't get myself out of.

Symptom of Synesthesia

I've come to realize I like the countryside. I never thought I liked big cities of course, but since living in Japan I've found oh so many reluctantly calming things out in the inaka. Yesterday, I went to an elementary school with a total of 35 students in 1st-6th grade. There's so few kids in each grade that they have combined classes. I was meeting with the 2nd-3rd grade class's teacher in the morning so of course he'd left the kids (all 11 of them) to do their own work. We didn't get very far into our conversation before bright lights started dancing around the room and flashing in our eyes. When we looked up his only 2 3rd graders, 1 a girl and the other a boy were standing outside the window with the mirrors he'd given them to do science research and laughing their little heads off. When I looked at their faces I didn't see the malicious laughter of a child who's given one to his teacher, or even the silly giggle of a trickster who knows she's doing something bad. Instead it was all joy and wonder and "look what we can do! Isn't it fun?" Only in a tiny mountain town do 8yr olds with hearts like that still exist.

Today I went to a preschool with about the same amount of kids split between 3 clasess by age. They had four pets, a black rabbit, a big shy turtle, a little river crab, and a pure white chicken. As soon as I was introduced to the kids 6 or 7 of them dragged me over to see the animals. They were all so proud it was their turn to feed them, and talked on and on about their good points. Then, one little girl handed me the chicken, which she'd been cradling in her arms and said in her best grown up voice, "Hold it carefully, ok?" Her concern was genuine even though I was the adult there, because she obviously loved the animals. And then the damn thing shit on my sweatshirt. I thought I was done with that kind of thing when I left Florida! But oh well, you win some, you lose some. Back in the classroom the kids were asking me questions about different foreign things and I was reminded of why I've always thought the youngest ones were the smartest. One little girl shyly raised her hand about halfway through the question time and spoke softly so her teachers could barely understand her, but after getting her to repeat her question it turned out to be this: "Why are we the same kind of human, but we speak different languages?" And once again the scholars of the world are put to shame by a four year old. She thought of that all on her own.

If you rise from the ashes

Sometimes, people get lazy. It's an easy thing to do. When you stop doing something you're supposed to do though, there's always that little uneasy feeling in the back of your mind that says, "you know it'd be good if you did it....", but of course it's also harder to restart something that it was to pick it up in the first place. Had you just kept on it would have been easier in the long run. However, the effort it takes to go back, to recommit, is ultimately more satisfying. The knowledge that you overcame your own will and did that good thing anyway. Tonight I'm returning to my Japanese class for the first time in nearly a month.

Continuing with yesterday's happy little things....I went to one of my favorite schools today. There's a 4th grader there who fancies himself my boyfriend and always hangs around the staff room talking to me between classes. On the way home I saw one of my old favorite junior high students on her bike. She's graduated to high school now so she's changed a bit, but it was still really nice to run into her. The teacher who sits across from me at today's school is married to the vice principal of my old student's jr. high. I like how sometimes the world draws a line for you like that.

Don't forget till you die

It's amazing how much a little taste of home can make you happy. Even when it's as small as a cucumber. A while ago Pin and I were grocery shopping together (randomly) and talking about vegetables. For some reason I remembered one of my favorite childhood snacks: sliced cucumbers soaked in vinegar. My mom always put them in a bowl in the refrigerator with ice cubes so I could eat them when I got home from school. I'm not really sure what purpose the ice cubes served since they were in the refrigerator, but I always thought it was a nice touch. Pin thought it sounded disgusting, but I've been scouring the stores for vinegar ever since. Eating them today after work was just about the best thing ever.

Sadly, there was more I wanted to say, but I've forgotten it after spending 2 hours on the phone with Sarah, aka the Mistress.

Corrosion of Conformity

I really like Bleach. It's been a staple in my manga reading habits for years now, but sometimes I fail to appreciate it's finer points I think. One thing that has stood out to me since moving here and being able to get the real thing, raw and original every week is that the chapter titles actually are written in English. Albeit sometimes very poor and grammatically incorrect English, but it's all the more interesting to wonder just what was he driving at with that particular title? I think Kubo-sensei is actually a little unstable. After reading Zombie Powder and doing some research on it's rather abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, I feel like I can kind of relate to the guy. The pain his characters are in, the lengths they go to, the things they say, it makes sense in a creepy sort of way. That being said, my post titles are, until further notice, Bleach chapter titles.

So a great thing about living in Japan: $3 a week for Shonen JUMP. A not so great thing: reading, speaking, hearing, and sometimes even writing Japanese non-stop has a detrimental effect on my dexterity with my own native language. Old people talked about how they were forgetting English so much when I first got here, but I thought either they were exaggerating or just plain stupid. Yesterday Pin and I were discussing the merits of humans potentially having tails along with a girl we like to call my "wifey". Inevitably, the tailbone we all possess was brought up and we couldn't think of the word to describe it. The word that means something which has no function, but is a vestige of prior species evolution. The two of us just stared at each other in horror for a while. The wifey decided to take a nap, and we went back to our usual, more perverted conversations, but neither of us forgot. Eventually I came up with "prehensile" but that, of course is completely wrong because it refers to tails that can grab things, like a monkey's. Ironically, it also means "gifted with mental grasp or moral or aesthetic perception", which we apparently are not.

So do you know what it is? There's a hint in the beginning of the description. Vestigial. Left over. Completely useless. Blame it on the all night dancing in Tokyo, or the year of reading nothing but manga in it's native format. Either way, I'm forgetting things I'm going to need to make my future as a writer possible. The night before that I couldn't think of the word "translucent". I knew what it meant, I knew opaque, I knew I didn't WANT opaque to describe the partition between the train cars, but translucent was nowhere to be found. Conversely, I've just misspelled that word about four different ways, but I'm not a bit bothered by it. That's been happening for 25 years. Then again, maybe I'm just stupid.