I’ll meet you in the street.

I did manage to stick with my general retreat from social media as intended. I found my days to be fuller, my head to be clearer. And then the inauguration happened. Like most, I was captivated by the news, the constant, jaw dropping, mind-boggling, nonsensical bullshit. My attention was arrested for a full week as…

Extracting Myself

After much consideration, I have decided to wean myself off of social media. The extraction process is not easy, especially since I went the lazy route and had everything logged in through FB. And convincing others to jump ship for direct communication has been an interesting venture. I have engaged in a few rather intimate…

Happy New Year’s

New Year’s in Japan is quiet, somber. The streets are emptied, even in the biggest cities. It’s celebrated internally, within homes and families. There is an elaborate menu to prepare and eat, with foods that serve as talismans. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, the bells at Buddhist temples toll 108 times, washing away all…

Noticing:: っぽい

(Every Friday, I am going to post some aspect of Japanese that I have noticed in the past week. Noticing is part of second language learning related to conscious language learning. You can learn more about this in Richard W. Schmidt’s paper The Role of Consciousness in Second Language Learning. In my posts, I am…

The Year of Realization

“This year, we were women, not brides or trinkets, not an off-brand gender, Instruct your babies. Remind them that the year has passed to be docile or small. Some of us said for the first time that we were women, took this oath of solidarity seriously. Some of us bore children and some of us…

Collision of Griefs

My husband is now on a plane headed back this way. It’s Wednesday night here but we won’t see him until Friday night, due to whole living on an island in the middle of the sea on the other side of the planet thing. We’ll meet him at the ferry terminal and things will be…

Kitsune No Yomeiri: What’s In A Name

In Chinese folklore, there are shapeshifting fox spirits who haunt the mountains with their sleek nine-tailed body, called hulijing or jiuweihu. In Japan, we have the kitsune, also a known shapeshifter. Most people assume that kitsune is an import (like so many things in Japan) that transformed upon arrival. There is a whole complicated debate…

What We Can Do

2016 is not pulling any punches. I have already mentioned some of my personal blows. And I am not really ready to discuss our collective blow this past week without it falling into one of my classic rambling rants (complete with multiple parenthesis and footnotes*). So much that has gone on has been absolutely out…

On Being An Expat In Light Of The Recent National Tragedy

(This was us voting for Obama in 2012 in Nagoya. Look how happy we were.) I am actually in shock. There are those of you who warned me. Just as I was warned with the Gore/Bush election. I just did not consider it a possibility. There are those of you who are telling me how…

Some Rules I Have Drawn Up As A (Suddenly/Temporarily) Single Parent

The kids’ dad is of the stay-at-home variety but with him back in America (for sad reasons)  I was thrown suddenly into the role of a single parent. I teach full-time and already did (ahem, more than) my fair share of housework/school preparation but I was unprepared for the madness that is taking care of four…

The October of Loss

“Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.” Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart At the beginning of the month, I lost one of my best friends. We were both in…

The Radical Choice of Staying Put

During the summer, things got a little tense. In the intense heat, our brains melted into goop, angry, restless goop. We decided to do what we always do when we get restless: move. Staying in Japan is pretty much our only option at this time (for various reasons: economic, scholastic, affectionate) so I frantically applied for…