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It's a typical December day in western Japants.
The wind-chill is below freezing, my sliding door and window are open to try and suck out some of the dust from my very unfiltered living space, and I look like this -->
That's a warmfuzzysweater underneath my Dinosaur Comics hooded sweatshirt. I would have another full layer underneath my warm corduroy pants, except I am washing just about every piece of cold-weather underthings and overthings that I own.
Why? 'Cause for Hokkaido adventures commence in 72 hours \o/ And after THAT? Touhoku adventures. And then Chubu adventures. I'ma wandering down the local train network (well, starting off on the expresses because I realized there's no feasible way to get from Sapporo to Akita in a single day otherwise x.x durrrrrrdurrdurr I fail geography), stopping off at a few of the larger cities on my way back down to Kansai.
I initially had no plan whatsoever but to maybe try a couple of the inns / hostels I happened across in the metropolises, and take refuge in 24-hour internets cafes if that didn't work out. But as departure day approached I got to thinking maybe my spirit of adventure would be less dampened if I had an actual sleeping room for sleeping times. To that end, I joined this couchsurfing / international exchange network a Siberian dude at a dinner party told me about, and sent off one request for crashspace for each of my stopoff points, not expecting to have much luck given that it's the holidays and most people are off having their own fun travels.
The morning after I sent the requests, I'd gotten affirmatives from all three peoples :D These are vouched-for and peer-reviewed experienced hosts, with confirmed identities / addresses and so on, so safety factor is high. The network is very efficiently self-regulating in that respect, to minimize on creepers. PLUS they all sound like for-seriously awesome people! Two of the three have been around the world and back again, one of 'em is actually a current JET, and one is a BRAIN SURGEON. SUPERNIFTY.
I am all kinds of excited about this trip ~/o/ (that is me running around with my arms out making whooshing noises)
...is not celebrated in the J-pan, but Monday was some sort of national holiday, so I went to Nagoya to see a couple people I'd met at the art show. It was pretty much the best day ever, and since I ended up eating tons of food in a cozy home with a lovely family it was almost kinda like Thanksgiving, only lunch was curried potatoes and beef kebabs.
I haven't done much of the giving-thanks thing for some time, so I would just like to say THANKS MOM & DAD ♥
Thank you for the pre-Christmas Christmas gift, he is stupendously shiny and I have named him Lucian :D
Thank you for investing so much time and effort into securing the education and opportunities that have gotten me hop-skipped around the world a couple times over.
And thank you for making sure I made it to 18, as Dad likes to say, while at the same time letting me keep some basic faith in humanity and trust in my own gut reactions, such that when a large Pakistani man stopped by my art show and after some polite small talk about art and culture and the British occupation of India invited me to eat at his house & meet his wife and five children, I did not immediately think "oh my god, potential abductor." That thought came maybe third or fourth, was duly weighed, eventually proved quite wrong, and by the end of the day on Monday I was very saddened that it had sprung up at all. I cannot remember the last time I felt so welcomed and loved by near-strangers.
"Lunch" stretched out to four hours as I was urged to second and third helpings and we talked about many things - our home countries, Japan's education system, Islam and Christianity and religion in general, The Da Vinci Code, and how we all agree that Vegemite is about the grossest "food" ever synthesized by man (sorry Australia). Then Mr. S and his wife presented me with a small patch of beautifully hand-woven carpet from Pakistan, drove me to the subway, insisted on paying for my subway ticket to the main city station, and asked that I call them to let them know I got back to my apartment okay.
By which I mean, please to enjoying my arts exhibition pictures very much yes! ~/o/
First off, lemme just say that all the other exhibitors at the Nagoya Foreign Artists Exhibition are amazazing artists and superfantastic peoples. There is a core circle of folks who've been showing their stuff there since the first one 24 years ago - I heard a couple veterans marveling at the fact that this was the first year they had a few participants who were younger than the event itself (that would include me <.< but only by a few months!)
On opening day (Tuesday) it was a bit slow in the morning, but a big rush hit around lunchtime and a few of my friends showed up in the afternoon (it was a public holiday, so everyone was off work) Here are a couple Japanese ladies enjoying the artstuffs. Check out that wicked pencil portrait of Billie Joe Armstrong! And the pretty birds as well c: And the dood in back there is a German photo-journalist living in Nagoya who just started a new English-language magazine with his friend. How awesome is this show?! The answer is purty awsum, guys.
And of course, here is my stoof.
A bunch of people had name-cards next to their artist profile, so I decided even though I don't have a website or anything yet I may as well make my own. Y'know, for poops 'n' giggles. There were 14 left when I departed on Tuesday night, so we'll see how many are remaining on Sunday.
And finally, proof that I was indeed there. A lovely volunteer coordinator by the name of Jan kindly took some pictures for me, as well as chattin' with me during the lulls and gently funneling people past my panel (n___n) 
It is worth noting, too, that perhaps organic forms are beautiful to us and the systemic biologist can find aesthetic satisfaction in the differences between related organisms simply because the differences are due to modulations of communication, while we ourselves are both organisms who communicate and whose forms are determined by constellations of genetic messages. This is not the place, however, for such a revision of aesthetic theory. An expert in the theory of mathematical groups could make a major contribution in this field.
--Gregory Bateson, "The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia," Steps to an Ecology of Mind
...If I let words like that kindle love for a dead man, does that make me something of a necrophiliac?
The sky SPAT on me today as I walked up the hill to school after buying lunch. And the wind was one big raspberry in my face. All that was missing was that PBTHBSBTHPBP!!! noise. ...I find it no small tragedy to the English language that we have no way of codifying that wet-sloppy noise within our writing system such that our brains can actually interpret it as onomotapoeitic. There has to be some language out there that can. And I bet the people who speak it find it easier to laugh when the strung-out monkey of life flings some poo in their direction.Do you ever have days when your head is just bursting with thoughts and you can barely track one partway as they fly out and spin away in all directions? Today's one of those days. It started this morning. Well, it started long ago, but this particular day started this morning around 8, walking up the hillside road behind my apartment building. Some trees are flowering already, and though I could swear they were orange trees back in the fall, they bear a striking resemblance to sakura (cherry blossoms). I've been advised by many people in Isobe and elsewhere to go see the sakura blossoming in the spring. In fact I can remember being sorely disappointed about not staying in Nagoya for spring semester two years ago, partially because I would miss out on cherry-blossom-viewing. I didn't follow the thought any farther then, because that was then and I was a different person. One thing I DID get to do in the fall, though, was go autumn-leaf-viewing in Kyoto and Nara. The leaves turn brilliant reds and golds and firery oranges and make the gloomiest, sunless day look like high noon in midsummer, such is the warmth of their colors. And in spring the cherry blossoms (among other trees which apparently feel compelled to imitation) appear and even after they've fallen, they're still magic because they blanket everything like pink snow or pixie dust. This happens every year. And that was not only me talking just now; it was the collective wonder of the crowds. Every year, autumn and spring, they go to the same sites to witness the same transformations. Autumn and spring and leaves and flowers happen in many countries, but it's an institution here at a level that in some ways surpasses the religious significance of the shrines where most of the viewings take place.I won't go into Shinto or cultural genealogies - I'd be sitting here all day - but all this made my brain jump to change and fluctuation and our fearful fascination with it. The nightly news mentions that some trees are blossoming earlier this year, and I sometimes get the distinct impression that this is an affront to decorum on the trees' part, or at least pointedly inconsiderate. If they change their flowering pattern, people may have to change their travel plans, change their traditional calendars, change their expectactions, and we won't have any of it. I think it largely true that anticipated changes bring more satisfaction than unexpected ones. At the very least, for the large part we seem to have equipped ourselves to deal better with a totally predictable world. It says a lot about us as a species, that we have this need to be able to anticipate, to constrain, if only in our minds, the fluctuations that patterns of change are allowed to display to us.Oftentimes it means we deliberately blind ourselves to larger-scale developments or refuse to place ourselves within a wider frame, a less centralized system. This occurs at all levels, from macro-economics to interpersonal relationships. I catch myself doing it a lot. Of course the other side of the coin is that we still strive to understand, to know how all this great mess of STUFF works, even and especially when we realize just how futile a venture that really is. It means that all the silly nihilists can go terrorizing bowling enthusiasts with their ferrets, screaming that life has no meaning and you can't believe in anything, and the rest of us can still sit back and say "Yeah, alright, cheers. We'll figure something out then, shall we?" ...I like to imagine The Human Spirit as having a posh accent...given how pathologically dreary the upper-middle-class English population can be, I really have no idea why.Um, anyway. Time for lunch. And then one more class and then I've gotta get some detail work done on the painting I started a couple weeks ago.
It makes me indescribably happy to know that there is more than one other person in the world who thinks about things like this.
On my way home from work today, I stopped by a little school supplies shop. It's run by an older woman, and sits on the corner where I turn off the main road and down a narrow back way that takes me to the Ise road by my apartment.
I gave the lady who owns the place 660 yen for two pens and a couple packs of stationary, and she gave me a good 15 minutes out of her day, a little jingly cow charm, and her sincere wishes for my dreams to come true. Every time I answered a question she would exclaim that I'm exactly like her own daughter - early 20's, only child, working in a foreign country before going to graduate school - and that even though my mother lives far away in America, she knows exactly how she must be feeling. She frequently patted my arm in a quite maternal fashion. It was like we had known each other for years, but we never even exchanged names.
Today was chilly, dreary, and really dragged towards the end since I'd only had 4 hours of sleep & the office was nearly deserted. But it's days like today that make me feel a bit better about living in the inaka for another year.
The wind-chill is below freezing, my sliding door and window are open to try and suck out some of the dust from my very unfiltered living space, and I look like this -->
