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

Get Your Sexy Name

like a butterfly wing in a summer rainfall

Thunderstorm outside. It's the first real good rain I've seen in weeks. Atlanta is in a big-time drought, and this is a literal and emotional relief. It looks like the rain itself is slackening off, but just a minute ago it was cascading from the eaves, in a broad curtain that sparkled like a bank of icicles in the light from the ceiling fan. I've missed this.

The other day I had a long and involved dream about being Peter Pan. It is probably tied for first place as my subconscious' least subtle dream message. Three weeks before my first real career job, I'm fantasizing about the boy who never grows up - refuses to, in fact. I'm shaking at the lack of time left to me.

(The other least subtle dream has also been this summer, perhaps a month ago. I won't name names, but it boiled down to someone I know chasing me through a variety of landscapes, quite literally preventing me from finding happiness with anyone else. When I woke up, I couldn't help but regard the whole thing as mournfully appropriate.)

The icicles are back. Narrower this time, but still beautiful.

I want to go to a waterfall. Or live near a waterfall. Or live in a waterfall.

beauty and the blitzkrieg

I often enjoy misreading phrases.

Missouri was a good time. A better time than I was expecting. I think, these days, that I adore my brother over all things. Maybe I'm putting him on a pedestal some, but Reid really strikes me as everything that's good and worthwhile about humanity. I would die for him.

Essentially, the trip was nonstop shenanigans. Promotion, promotion pizza party, Scarlett's birthday luau / 4th of July barbeque, the Soldier Show, extra-patriotic fireworks, Hancock, board games, schusting, Bones. Despite some of their (ultra-conservative) craziness, I think that I genuinely like my brother's in-laws. They're good people.

Today was also good. Was marginally productive, took a dose of Jane Austen (I know, I know, but I'm kind of a sap), watched the girliest movie EVER with Juli 'Doctah' Jones, via cell phone. Also discovered the answer to an important, life altering question:

Q: How many Madlibs can you do in three and a half hours?
A: A lot.