blat is a form of "blog and chat" combined.
Friday---now that I am working Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Friday has redeemed itself in my eyes as the most glorious wonderful day of the week. I celebrated today by buying 2 new drinks on the way home. The first was a Tomato/vodka drink in a can. It was a disappointment. I added it to my all veggie lunch (you know, as my liquid veggie) but it barely tasted like a tomato at all. In the future, I will just buy myself an extraordinarily big juicy tomato (no matter what the cost, even out of season) slice it up and pour vodka on top. Then I will throw on a splash of Tabasco. It would be a HUGE improvement on the icky, too sweet, weird cocktail in a can I experienced this afternoon. Next I moved on to drink number two--well, I am on drink number two right now with the plan of completely sobering up prior to Saki's arrival home on the youchien bus. It is a winner. Kuro Cocktail, grapefruit tonic. Veeeryyy smooooooth and bitter. Love it.
I also celebrated today because my husband is back on the island! He has been abroad on business for the past 11 days. (that is 10 nights, 11 days). I don't know why, but just knowing that we are in the same country again seems to have freed up my breathing and made me want to. . . sing? (I never sing. Must be this incredibly delish cocktail in a can) Although even when Masa is here I pretty much single parent--it still feels fantastic to know that there is a "second string" back in town. Great. I can now get run over by a truck and no longer worry over who would look after the kids while I was being scraped off the pavement!
Friday, September 19, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Blogging without a Purpose
I am blogging without a purpose here at the moment. Just because I started to feel like the blog was, well, suffering. Like the fish do when the kids loose all interest in them and start forgetting to fed them and don't even contemplate cleaning their tank.
Maybe a comparison to a virtual pet would be better: My Blog--the Adult Tamagochi.
My kids had those tamagochi things for a while and guess who became obsessed with making sure that the tamagochi went to school, ate regularly, went to the toilet, etc.? ? ? ? Good lord, I even discovered "Tamagochi Town" on line and started taking them on virtual vacations!
Standing next to another mum at Saki's preschool my daughter's tamagochi and her daughter's tamagochi's alarm went off at the same time. So we confided our addiction to each other and laughing about becoming a slave to a virtual pet helped liberate me.
Standing there and commiserating about how embarrassing it was to be constantly chained to an electronic toy and swapping stories about the trials and tribulations of tamagochi transformations--how you have to try so hard in order to get them to transform into the tamagochi you want them to be (example: send it to charm school a zillion times a day and it'll turn into a cute little strawberry looking creature. Forget to send it to school, or send it too infrequently and it'll turn out looking like a little nasty onion creature.) I realized: Oh my God, I have turned into an idiot.
So after that, I let them die off, one by one.
It's a sad ordeal too--those people who design those things know how to pull emotional strings--but die they did and then I refused to get replacement batteries when MONTHS later the girls noticed that their virtual pets had gone feet up in the air.
Any way. . . back to blogging with out a purpose. I have been READING blogs with a purpose. A lot going on out there--people making significant life choices (marriage, moves, job changes) and people celebrating important events (arrival of baby, announcement of pregnancy, the divorce finally came through. . . etc.) and I have been sitting here feeling a bit like a cicada must feel during those years in the dirt. I am going through a lot but no one around me can see it. I am working hard on transformation but it is still all in the dark.
However, I am feeling very. . . content sitting here in the dark focusing on all these inward changes. And honestly, when I poke my head out (to go to work, to go to school events, to go buy milk at the grocery store) I come back rather fatigued and ready to refocus again, on me: in the dark.
Dark does not equal (=) depression. Dark equals me tuning out everything that I feel I can safely tune out for the moment--chatter, bustle, much ado about nothing. If it is not going to do grievous damage to a friendship of great importance, if it is not going to affect my professional career, if it is not going to end up fodder for the psychologist's couch in my children's' futures. . . then I probably am not all that caught up in it at the moment. I am very focused inward and then in graduating degrees on that around me--starting with the closest moving slowly and deliberately to the outer areas of life.
Spontaneous is obviously an adjective that I have rarely met with. If I did it most likely shocked me and sent me scurrying back home.
So the seasonal change suits me quite well this year. Summer is on its way out. Our evenings are finally cool and even chilly towards the early morning hours. The leaves on the trees haven't started to turn yet, but the rice fields are now swollen ponds of gold. This morning, standing on campus looking out at the trees and lawns surrounding the building I teach in, I was delighted to find dragon flies (both blue and red) hovering above the chestnut trees. Fall is coming.
I can't wait until the trees explode in yellow, brown, red and orange and I wake up realizing that I need mittens and a scarf.
And then there will be the snow, the ice, the chill northern winds of Japan. Snow festivals. Hot nabe. Waking up at 5 a.m. to turn on the furnace.
And eventually spring will come, when cicadas dig their way out of the dirt, new creatures, transformed.
Maybe a comparison to a virtual pet would be better: My Blog--the Adult Tamagochi.
My kids had those tamagochi things for a while and guess who became obsessed with making sure that the tamagochi went to school, ate regularly, went to the toilet, etc.? ? ? ? Good lord, I even discovered "Tamagochi Town" on line and started taking them on virtual vacations!
Standing next to another mum at Saki's preschool my daughter's tamagochi and her daughter's tamagochi's alarm went off at the same time. So we confided our addiction to each other and laughing about becoming a slave to a virtual pet helped liberate me.
Standing there and commiserating about how embarrassing it was to be constantly chained to an electronic toy and swapping stories about the trials and tribulations of tamagochi transformations--how you have to try so hard in order to get them to transform into the tamagochi you want them to be (example: send it to charm school a zillion times a day and it'll turn into a cute little strawberry looking creature. Forget to send it to school, or send it too infrequently and it'll turn out looking like a little nasty onion creature.) I realized: Oh my God, I have turned into an idiot.
So after that, I let them die off, one by one.
It's a sad ordeal too--those people who design those things know how to pull emotional strings--but die they did and then I refused to get replacement batteries when MONTHS later the girls noticed that their virtual pets had gone feet up in the air.
Any way. . . back to blogging with out a purpose. I have been READING blogs with a purpose. A lot going on out there--people making significant life choices (marriage, moves, job changes) and people celebrating important events (arrival of baby, announcement of pregnancy, the divorce finally came through. . . etc.) and I have been sitting here feeling a bit like a cicada must feel during those years in the dirt. I am going through a lot but no one around me can see it. I am working hard on transformation but it is still all in the dark.
However, I am feeling very. . . content sitting here in the dark focusing on all these inward changes. And honestly, when I poke my head out (to go to work, to go to school events, to go buy milk at the grocery store) I come back rather fatigued and ready to refocus again, on me: in the dark.
Dark does not equal (=) depression. Dark equals me tuning out everything that I feel I can safely tune out for the moment--chatter, bustle, much ado about nothing. If it is not going to do grievous damage to a friendship of great importance, if it is not going to affect my professional career, if it is not going to end up fodder for the psychologist's couch in my children's' futures. . . then I probably am not all that caught up in it at the moment. I am very focused inward and then in graduating degrees on that around me--starting with the closest moving slowly and deliberately to the outer areas of life.
Spontaneous is obviously an adjective that I have rarely met with. If I did it most likely shocked me and sent me scurrying back home.
So the seasonal change suits me quite well this year. Summer is on its way out. Our evenings are finally cool and even chilly towards the early morning hours. The leaves on the trees haven't started to turn yet, but the rice fields are now swollen ponds of gold. This morning, standing on campus looking out at the trees and lawns surrounding the building I teach in, I was delighted to find dragon flies (both blue and red) hovering above the chestnut trees. Fall is coming.
I can't wait until the trees explode in yellow, brown, red and orange and I wake up realizing that I need mittens and a scarf.
And then there will be the snow, the ice, the chill northern winds of Japan. Snow festivals. Hot nabe. Waking up at 5 a.m. to turn on the furnace.
And eventually spring will come, when cicadas dig their way out of the dirt, new creatures, transformed.
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