Short winter, long wait for spring

I think back to February, I mean December, when Titus and I wiped off my new used Japanese Playstation infested with tobacco with Swiffer wipes outside in the snow, in Vancouver, where it never snows, and where generally if I'm ever there in the winter it's February, not December. That was a good brief time.

I miss the days where I was in Japan fearing the oncoming onslaught of decision making that I would have to get done, never really making any decisions except at the last second, never finishing anything until after anyone else would do it, never really getting at what I wanted and finding out after it was already too late to go back what that desire was. I still don't know whether it would've been better to go back to Japan instead of going on to France; is that really a problem, though? Either one would've been good. Either would've brought hard times, and if these times in Paris are especially tough for me, well, I hope they'll reduce my quota for tough times in the future.

I never really faced snowfall in Japan. I think I saw snow, but I can't remember where. I know I heard it snowed in Kobe, but I never went to Kobe. No big loss. But then when I went to Vancouver, it snowed, and then nothing there in Boston. Then snow in Boston, and cold. Then Paris, and nothing. One day of snow, then nothing.

This isn't really winter, or maybe it is. But this isn't the sort of season that forces you to go inside to thaw your nose or threatens the existence of your future children, at least not for me in my experience. The biting pathetic fallacy isn't there. But the hard, lonely times are.

I went to Japanese class today and left it feeling lonely again. Then I realized--and it's important to note (cf Ashish) that you can't really ever get happy instantly after a realization or an epiphany when you're still lonely or sad--that if I left Japanese lonelier than I felt going into it, maybe it's not Japanese that I lack. Maybe it's not the culture or the food. Maybe it's not even my friends over there. Well, no, I think it includes that.

But maybe I can move on from Japan now. Maybe I can. And even if I do return for spring break... I won't feel a hole in my heart going back to France from Japan. C'est ça l'essentiel-- that's the essential part.

Is it a long wait until I feel rejuvenated again? Or is the rejuvenation just beginning? Maybe it is. Maybe I have to undergo a rebirth, but a rebirth in 3000 seeds, 2700 of which don't get planted, scattered away by the wind, and 231 of which get choked in the soil while the other 69 (that wasn't intentional) get what they need. And rebirth in 69 fold: awww yeahhhh.

I seriously might be taking myself less seriously. That seriously could be a seriously good thing. Started.

Home-back // Differences

I am going to establish a Filipino-ism: "Home-back." As opposed to "Back home." You know, you have "Back home," so why you not have "home-back"? Ha?

Home-back: the effect of reminiscing constantly over where home was for the last 6 months. This happens all the time for me, or at least ever since college. I reminisce over all the great times I had in Japan, even over the time I went with my economics class to Nagoya and when, well after that, we had a cake party to celebrate my professor for being so generous to us. I think about 7-Eleven and Japanese convenience stores (LAWSON's!!!), when we went to Lawson at 1:30 AM in the morning, me, Katie, and Tiki... oh... memories..

Red bean bread rolls... want... 食べたい。。。

Even as I was on my way home from the Paris club, I could not help but reminisce over Japan. This time was specifically 'cause they don't have anything, ANYTHING open 24 hours, except for this one little market across from where Melissa lives, God bless the guy who works there overnight despite all of Paris's very intrusive government probably strongly urging him not to. He allowed me to re-hydrate myself, and not for the asinine club price of 9 euros which is probably more than 10 dollars.

There are fundamental differences between French and Japanese culture, but one of them being this: there is something so good about how in Japan you are held back from having what you want for so long, and then you have it and it tastes so much better in the future. It is important to say that this doesn't work under all circumstances. However, in Japan it works so frequently and so well. For instance--almost all those snacks and FRESH PASTRIES in Japanese 7-Eleven stores have very little sugar. Still, find a more delicious snack in the world than the Yawaraka yellow pound cake thing that tastes like a Filipino dessert and nothing like pound cake. Find it. Good luck! French pastries are the shit, yes, if I'm not allergic to them. But they rely on sugar. And trust me, this wears on you when you go to 7-Eleven and have these delicious, filling snacks, but then play frisbee and are so hungry during the game and then you have a 15-minute downhill but still 15-minute bike ride home to your homestay where a delicious dinner is being very quickly prepared for you but is SOOOOO delicious that adjectives just aren't worth the time. I might as well omit "delicious." Just SOOOOOO. It was so wonderful. And that feeling of holding back, of waiting through the W = work = F·d (force times distance) exerted through awesome frisbee on the fuel of amazing 7-Eleven snacks that still provided very little sugar, to have a great dinner that made you feel good for being so healthy and was so delicious at the same time... just, so, good.

In France it's different. You still hold back, but I'm not sure at all that I'm necessarily getting something good for what I'm holding back for. And that's the problem I'm dealing with now. Sometime the slingshot has to snap back. I wonder whether I'm pulling back too far, pulling back just enough and taking a lot of time to do it, or just taking a lot of time to not really pull back very far.

We'll see.

Shallow

I bought cleats today at Decathlon for 35 euro, which is about 45 dollars, what the fuck? I don't care what they say, inflation is not an appropriate band-aid for the American economy. Go ask Iceland.

I bought cleats today at Decathlon for what looked like a really cheap price. I'm pretty happy about it, actually; what matters really isn't the amount it's worth in dollars now but the amount that it was worth before I changed the money. Oops, that's money I took out of my bank account instead of from the paper stack I brought over. So it was really 45 dollars. Fuck.

Oh well, that's fine. I bought cleats today at Decathlon, and that gives me some hope for frisbee. Obviously hope isn't the first thing on my mind right now, if the above indicates anything, but it's a good damn step. A damn good step.

Decathlon was really cheap for Paris clothing; I was really impressed and recommend anyone go there. In fact it was basically cheaper than prices you see in the States, which is what I was the most impressed about.

So shopping therapy did something to soulage my thoughts, my poison thoughts, today. I got a pair of gym shorts, gym pants, yet another thin coat (how many have I bought this year?), and those cleats. Yum. Need more gym-ish t-shirts. Oh, and the best part is jumping on clothes that are at the "end of the line" which is what the French literally is, I think. The ones that need to be sold so they can usher in the new.

I think French class helped just as much today. I finally have something concrete to do, although I don't really want to do it. That's okay.

Now it's time to plan my future for the billionth time in the last two years. I have to decide soon, soon soon where to go for Spring break and before Spring Break and after that. Oh, and let's not forget deciding on housing for Tufts, a wonderful university where res-life just don't understand. Sigh; these... every decision is so arbitrary yet every effect lasts so long, a year or so, a life or so...

I guess I just gotta go with it. Believe that there is only one route out there for me, but don't believe that it's pre-destined: believe that I have the free will to choose it, and yet that there is one will that will shine through from all other wills willing to expose themselves. And don't mince words, and go for it.

Haha, that shit's hard.

Why isn't

Why isn't the protagonist in Murakami's novels ever the one that runs away

I'm here lying in bed. Greg is lying in bed too; he came here to visit me in London and he's sleeping on a makeshift mattress on the floor that had better be really comfortable so that he doesn't wake up to me typing.

A few things on my mind right now
-Why do I walk around all day with people wondering if I'm all right? Am I a vampire? If so, am I alive? (end eurovision joke)
-When my mom came to Japan, she thought that I didn't know Japanese at all before I had come there. I had been studying it for two years. How much do we know each other, then?
-My words are dropping like 5000 pounds. Except for that last sentence. That is, my words are hitting heavier than they normally do, my exaggerations more extreme, my opinions more negative. Why is this happening? Well, I know reasons why. Is this necessary?
-I don't know what my exit is. It's not good to be on a highway and not know what your exit is. Exit from what? From just not being able to express myself, feel like I'm accomplishing something I want to accomplish here rather than that I want to get out of the way. For Japan, frisbee was one of the many exits that just came off. Life is not a highway because in life, you don't really have an idea of which exits are going to come next. Why am I using the highway metaphor? I don't know. I think I'm stepping around the argument.
-How long can I step around things before I start stepping in the right direction? Do I have to get forced in the right direction, as though I were on a street with dog shit spontaneously materializing, nearing 100% of the street, and I eventually were forced to detour onto a street that led somewhere else? At least in Paris other roads always lead somewhere. But my roads, um...

I'm obviously not anywhere that makes any sense to me right now. I am very conscious that my words either make no sense or are going nowhere very fast. So I'm brogging.

Did you know that Japan has the most blogs out of any country in the world, and it's for self-expression rather than for news commentary? See how much I have in common with Japan?

Haha, having something in common with a country. When you start to compare yourself to a commonality in a country (as a lot of people do with American patriotism) you know you're in trouble.

I miss Japan. 日本に戻りたい。 (I want to return to Japan.) Maybe I will.

I've had enough of random places. I need something to go back to. Paris can get visited without me. Unfortunately, I can't leave Paris.

I want to turn "unfortunately" into "fortunately" but how?? ???

Whatever happened to just getting it done
I used to quote random pop songs all the time during junior and senior years of high school in an attempt to figure things out with my life over away messages and profile changes. This didn't eventually help. It was just a bunch of hints. Wait, that doesn't make sense.

Let me be a teenager for a second.
One night stand
I thought I'd let you know
One night stand
I've gotta hit the road
One night stand
You've gotta let me go
'Cause I'M IN LOVE WITH ROCK AND ROLL!!
If I were in Japan or at home or at Tufts freshman year I would sing it. But I'm not.

Dammit.

Wasting my time (default) // 恥ずかしがりや

It's funny that there's a hit song from about 8 years ago called "Wasting My Time" by Default because I'm about to talk about both wasting my time and how it relates to 「default」という言葉(a word called default).

But I'm a weird person. I say I don't like to do things like watch movies because I think it's a waste of time--couldn't you spend those 1.5-2 hours doing something else? In reality, I'm neither thinking nor completely being honest. I completely lost interest in movies when during high school and before that I was too proud to go to movies with my parents or family and when I didn't have the means to go with friends alone to the movies. Or something. I had a weird social situation back then. Movies got left out of my life at one point and they never really made a comeback, or a convincing push for one. That's more like why I don't watch movies that much anymore. When I was a kid, why not? But still, when I watch movies, I anticipate them being over, or try to predict the story, or check how much time has passed.

I stopped playing video games together with my friends during high school, too, or at least the friends with whom I played them switched, which was sad because I had seen those friends all my life beforehand. Because of personal insecurities about being gay and coming out I stopped hanging out with those friends. The era of Goldeneye with three people in particular is long, long gone. But anyway... at that time, correspondingly I lost interest in playing video games by myself. (The lone exception is DDR.)

During high school, I had to read so much for class and do so much homework, and for some reason I threw myself completely 100% into this mess, trusting the school to take care of me as I did all the work for it... well, I got a prize for it and I will never forget giving that speech. But as a consequence I stopped reading on my own for pleasure. I read during the summers, but I still feel like I do it as an obligation when I read. (Haruki) Murakami is the lone exception. I read all of his books after the class I took on him was over--note, that means I only read him because I had to, although I DID choose to take that course--but since then, I have hardly read at all. Murakami, interestingly, writes about this, in a story (is it "Pinball, 1973"? or whatever the year was?) where he describes a girl who talks about how whenever she reads, it's more like an experience where she just wants to finish the task of getting to the next page. I often feel like that when I read. I can be very interested in a book, but I will still look at what page I'm at and tell myself I should be getting further, faster. Gone, maybe, are the times where I can just lose track of page numbers.

What's happened to me? A psychologist would diagnose me with ADD or something. Forget that. My diagnosis is that I'm afraid of wasting time. I'm even afraid of learning; I always ask myself whether I'm learning the right things. Actually, I think that back in high school I could lose the page number easily, maybe; either that or I was just good at motivating myself to go further when I was reading what I was assigned to read. But I think I'm afraid to get lost.

I am lost. When I and a group of people were drunk looking for a club a few nights ago, the other people were getting aggravated (I thought they needed to chill) that I was constantly checking the map and that I made the wrong decision on direction earlier on. No, I just constantly check. (It helps me win math problems. But not life problems.) What this shows is that when you're too afraid of getting lost, you can get lost anyway, and worse yet, you can get your ability to control your path taken away from you. That's actually what happened that night - I had to surrender the map to someone else. But in the larger, more abstract sense, this is what happened during high school. I don't know if it's happening now, but I certainly can't let it. My only choice now is to... get lost.

This is what Nadja does in Nadja by André Breton. Actually, she loses herself in free, in-one-ear-and-out-the-other thought to such an extent that she gets put in an insane asylum at the end, but Breton (as character) complains about it at the end--who can really tell who's insane and who's not insane? Why, furthermore, are the most free called insane? I saw a man reading this book today at the train station. I smiled. One of the more enlightening books I've (had to) read in recent times.

"Read" is a homo-something (homograph? homophone? or just gay?), just like "wind" and "Polish," although apparently that doesn't count because it's a proper noun. Apparently "read" doesn't count either because the two different possible pronunciations are just different conjugations of the same verb, but whatever, maybe it should. There's also "minute"; think about that the next time you see "Minute Rice." Wait, what's so unimportant about your rice? Also think about it when you see a sign that says "Entrance." Whoa, you hypnotized me!

Okay, enough, I'm done. I'm freewritten and I'm smiling.

Oh, the 恥ずかしがりや part- I was thinking about how I would explain to my host mother if the time ever came up (yes I do this sometimes for certain social situations) that I'm a shy person in French. I'm not sure whether embarras or embarrassé is the correct adjective, so I thought of an alternative and, my brain not completely wired right, I thought of the Japanese. 恥ずかしがりや (hazukashigariya) means "shy person," but you note that they get in one word what we get in two words. Either that or I just can't remember the synonyms in English for "shy person." The sense of the word, though, through the waves of Japanese culture, means "easily embarrassed," and not really just "shy person"; or at least that's what I instinctively think. Because in Japan, well, it seems like everyone's shy, at least after they're shamed into not acting like kids anymore. Shyness and being embarrassed are easily linked; it's really your ability to get over your embarrassment that sets you apart from other people. And 恥ずかしがりや is a perfect word to describe somebody who just anticipates horrible embarrassment and will try to avoid doing things as a result. That's me.

Respect

Respect. I haven't been respecting the people I should lately. I haven't had respect for things like traditions or French people or fiancés. And you know why?

It all starts with respect for yourself.

So that's it. I'm going to start making sure I respect myself, and to that end: no more alcohol. No more letting myself be carried away by that shit, and no more allowing it to be bought for me.

No more doubting my capabilities in French. Time to go after every French person with all the conversation I've got. No more "I'm too tired to do this" or "there's too much shit to do." No more "I fear bureaucracy." No more doubting that I can't get what I thought I had somewhere else down the road.

No more scared that if I break the truth and a crisis happens that I'll ruin everything in front of me. No more "I can't wait." No more "I have to wait." Wait, what?

No more waiting for summer to come by - I at least have gotten that right lately. No more I'm not sure what to right--I'm gay, okay? Glad that's over.

But it never is.

In any case, no more where am I. I know where I am, I know that certain crises are bound to happen and that I am an adult; I have no instinct that I can handle them now, but I need to develop one.

Let's get this started. Paris, Part 1. I am who I am and I forgot that worrying about other people's respect for me means I'm not letting me respect myself. Let's go.
Alex

Believe / 信じ

I'm not a nihilist, because I don't believe in nihilism. I believe in things, but I don't know what they are. It's going to take awhile for me to be able to believe again in something that I don't know what it's going to be. Christianity, Islam, Judaism: they all believe in something coming in the future. Is it Shintoism that doesn't?

What a lonely future, or life, then, if you're in Japan and you only believe in Shintoism. That's lonely.

When I was at Hope College, my professor figured out that I don't like talking about religion. This isn't something I have really realized until now. He was like, "You don't really care for religion, do you Alex?" I was like, "Well, technically I'm a confirmed Catholic," and he replied, "Technically I'm a confirmed Catholic, yeah," you and religion don't go together or something like that. Well, no, not really.

My half-Paris-boyfriend-whatever tells me he's completely spiritual but not religious. I am neither. And this is regrettable. I'm not a skeptic either, which leaves me somewhere on open ground, or as fresh meat for whichever school of thought grabs me first. That's a certain vulnerability. This might be part of the reason why I don't feel comfortable discussing religion or spirituality, but it's not. It just frustrates me that for me, the discussion just doesn't go anywhere.

I am in the most secular city in the world except for Pyongyang. But Paris is a world of its own.
I'm in a world without teachers. Most of them are on strike, because apparently that's the only way you can get laws changed around here. Uh... so I have to be my own teacher. But I can't do that. I always have to look for a teacher. Eventually I'm just going to have to look for that part of myself that is submerged in deep slime somewhere in my brain, that has become full of fat as slimy as the slime itself. That leader in me. That lead-er, the lead to my pencil, the lead to my bullet in my uncharged gun. Where is it? No, there's no point in asking that because I'm the only one who knows where it is. Until then I'll just chant nonsense and "a bay bay" while I turn over rocks.

No. Enough "a bay bay." It's time to do something that means something. And I always have to step back and find out what that is.

I won't name the inspiration, but every day I ask myself, "have I been living beyond my means?" And the answer is yes. Very sadly, yes. I have to find something productive, not reproductive, to do before I keep going on and doing things without stopping. The US needs to do the same. And when I can't look to my country for inspiration... well, could the Founders have done that? Haha, no. What a brave group of men and women.

So far behind. Wait,wait,wait,wait

I want to cut the spaces in between the commas. I want to go and get what I want right now. But I can't.

Too bad.

I'm about gone. I need to get my schedule ready for what is basically tomorrow and I really really don't know what I'm going to do about it. I'm pretty stressed out and the fact that I'm sick and that this week's fling is over is not good. I know that all I really really need to do is surf through the information on the web, on, yes, PDFs. I hate PDFs.

I can't even remember the classes I said I liked. I really don't remember. Uh, oh.

This methodology class is killing me and I'm in constant dread of the professor. I don't hate him, I just fear him.

I don't wish I were back in Japan, I don't wish I were home, I wish I were in Paris. I am. But my life here so far has been overwhelming. Too many new experiences and not enough time to catch them all and write them all down. Not enough time to catch up with them all and tie them all down. Not enough time for me.

This isn't easy. This is not easy.