damned if I do, damned if I don't

For the record, me and Kristin get along just fine. But sometimes I feel like I'm just constantly teetering between doing nothing and proactively doing things wrong.

I've spent so much time recently sitting around at my desk accomplishing nothing that I'm eager whenever there's something productive to be done. But when I helpfully (or so I thought) went to tell Ueda-sensei what Kristin and I had planned for class tomorrow, Kristin's response was disapproval that I went by myself instead of organizing a meeting between the three of us. MY BAD. But since Kristin constantly goes to talk to our teachers without informing me, it honestly just didn't occur to me to wait for her.

Well. At least she sounded more on the disappointed side than the condescending "Anna, you're a moron" voice I get occasionally.

too much information

I just had one of those moments that shakes you to the very core, when you find out a shocking and distressing fact about a dear loved one, and for just a moment your entire world seems to tilt dangerously.

According to facebook, my big brother (whom I absolutely idolize) is a member of the group "1,000,000 Strong for McCain/Palin '08."

!!!

I can only hope that it is a ruse, to appease his wife and her hyper-Republican Southern Baptist family. Surely. Surely.

Should I be concerned?

Facebook suggested this ad for me:

"The Tokyo Addiction Group

Meet others suffering from addiction (alcohol, drugs, co-dependance). Study 12 Steps in Osaki Station."

...Hmm.

the Sex and the City phenomenon

I am finally coming to understand the preoccupation of many women in their late twenties and early thirties with finding a good man and settling down. Which is not to say that I am in the same predicament, or that I am in any way complaining; after all, I am still young, still feel young, and am not looking to get married or start nesting any time soon. I am merely beginning to understand.

Because I have reached a point in my life, a curious, post-college dating limbo, wherein a large percentage of attractive men I meet are married.

I find this startling, because apart from the occasional teacher-crush* (which I like to think everyone has experienced at some point), I have never been in a situation where I regularly encountered young, dateable, but ultimately married men. They don't hang out at colleges, so much.

So I find this workplace world just slightly disappointing in that regard, where everyone is responsible and domestic and off-limits. I guess working at a school full of cute teachers is dangerous when you like teachers so much. Whoops. :P

Good for me that I'm in no hurry.




* For the record, Fitz Smith had beautiful golden curls and a voice like poetry and really nice...pants. Really nice. Me and Dan Zeleznik could write a book about just how nice those pants were. ...Especially the corduroys.

I'm only lonely when I'm alone.

I find that loneliness comes in waves that surge and break on the shore of my evenings before receding again for a time. The tide is low during the day, when I am too busy and distracted to be too bothered by distance. But high tide flows in most often on weeknights, when there is no one in my apartment but me, and I feel that all my friends are an impossibly long way away in both space and time. I am not used to being solitary for at least five nights a week; to be perfectly honest, I'm not used to being regularly solitary at all. This is the first time I've lived truly alone, without family or friends or roommates a stone's throw away.

I miss Tribe Rivendarth and our merry band of groupies as if a limb had been severed from my body.

I wonder if the insistent sameness of my too-quiet evenings will become cabin fever as time goes by. For now, at least, I find ways to preoccupy myself, though sometimes I acutely miss the presence of another person. I just don't want to get bogged down in routine.

Kowalski: Routine is the silent killer.
Fraser: I thought that was high blood pressure.
Kowalski: No, we changed that.
Fraser: When?
Kowlaski: When you were on vacation.

Perhaps more disheartening is the lack of closeness I feel with any of the friends I have made in Sonobe. I am growing very fond of my friends in Kyoto city, but can only see them on weekends. I know logically that this is the same jump I made in college, to new surroundings and strange people, but I think it was easier to make friends then, living together in a dorm and being forced to socialize in classes. Constant contact and necessity eventually bred some of the best friendships I have today. I wish there was some easy way to replicate that here! I suppose I'll continue to meet the Kyoto crowd whenever I can, and pick up a few hobbies for the empty hours.

I'm not without hope. I'm just adjusting.

blurring the lines

Wednesday evening I was out walking the streets of Sonobe, specifically along a darkish back lane that runs past a rice field. There was no one around, and the air was just perfectly cool and fresh. I looked up at the beautiful night sky, which was all a-glitter with autumn stars, and its expanse stretched away and away before me until my breath caught in my lungs and I felt that if I took off running, I could leap into the air and fly up into the heavens.

It was a giddy feeling, one that was almost convincing despite the laws of physics, and for a powerful moment I desperately wished that I was asleep and dreaming, because if it was a dream I surely could fly away like I wanted to. I thought my chest might burst with the bittersweet longing of a caged bird. It was simultaneously suffocating and invigorating.

This was the song I was listening to at the time. The beginning sounds of stars and bubbles and Little Nemo. But beyond that, you must listen to the whole thing to understand my perfect feeling of lift off, the liberating sprint down the starlit lane and the exact moment when sneakers leave pavement up into the blue-black-purple night.

tee hee

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