It's Tough to be a tadpole: or The Circle of Life our Family's Style

It's really tough to be a tad pole at our house. Reno and Saki have been marauding through the local rice fields and have taken captive a dozen or so poor little wanna be amphibians. Those that have now succeeded in sprouting legs are currently being rounding up in a Barbie house in the drive way. I just gracefully exited the scene saying, "When they stop moving, they're dead."

Not that I am a callous cold woman--I was trying to shock Saki and her friend into listening to me. I had just spent a good three minutes trying to explain that today is very hot and sunny and that these are just little bitty baby frogs with soft wet skin. I was cautioning that they really shouldn't be handled too much or forced to jump for say over a minute or so. But Saki and her little friend Yuki went right on screaming at the little green blobs that were desperately trying to escape Barbie's dream house.

So, my youngest, who is currently torturing frogs in the drive way, surprised me last week by locking herself in the bathroom to weep over the death of one of our goldfish. (All the gold fish have by now departed this planet--some kind of deadly fish fungus.) What surprised me was her completely sincere solemness about it. She cradled the dead fish in a piece of tissue, holding it gingerly to her chest. She moved in a slow stately march to the bathroom. She took a deep breath. "I am going to close the door now and I want to be alone."

Hmmmm. I stood outside wondering what exactly she was up to. When the door opened a good five minutes later I asked, "What were you doing? Did you flush the fish?" She nodded quickly and left to go play at a friend's house.

When she came home I found her standing in the genkan staring at the empty fish tank. She looked up at me. "I was crying in the toilet. For the fish. For the poor fish." And I could see her eyes glistening and threatening to fill with tears again.

Now, why was I surprised? Because I have gotten used to pets being unceremoniously chucked once they have given up the ghost. I remember gearing up and readying myself to break the news of the death of Reno's first pet to her. I was so worried and tense. It's such a blow to lose a beloved pet--so senseless, so raw so, well, emotional.

But Reno at the age of three, when told that her hamster Hannah chyan had died, blinked at me intently and responded with, "so can we get 'nother one?" No tears. No remorse. No singing songs in honor of the dear departed little fuzzy companion.

Me? I would have been gathering flowers and elaborating laying them on my pet's grave for MONTHS. In fact, that is what I did when I was three. I was in the fourth grade when I started bringing flattened snakes (road kill) home to bury in our backyard. I had a plot for all the poor departed creatures that I happened across. I wept for them. I prayed for them. I loved them beyond their life spans.

Now, when an actual REAL family pet died--I was inconsolable for LOOOOONG periods.

So when Reno greeted the demise of her first pet with a quick, "can we get 'nother one?" I was flabbergasted. Then I got disturbed.

Fish came and went and no matter how pleased she seemed with them at the time, still, death raised only one question in her mind, "Can we get another one?"

Her ojiichyan (Japanese grandfather) died and thankfully, she was content to just sit quietly through the funeral without posing the dreaded question. I expected her to be upset about losing a grandfather but she seemed a little more intrigued with gaining a portrait at the butsudan to light incense for, to put out little ceremonial cups of sake and leave tiny bowls of rice for. She was only five-year-old at the time, so perhaps I just expected too much. She was just still too young to wail and beat her chest yet like her dramatic mother.

Reassurance came on an attempted flight back home from the States later that same year. We had to de-board the flight home due to Saki suddenly spiking a fever just before take off. In the airport, clutching a screaming and feverish Saki to my chest I looked down to see Reno sobbing uncontrollably. "Oh honey, what's the matter?"

"Melon. Melon is waiting for us, but we aren't going to be coming home to her!"

Melon was a one-year-old American short hair cat, our current (and happy to say still currently alive and well) family pet.

Reno continued to sob--tears welling up in her eyes and pouring down her cheeks while her chest heaved. Saki wailed, although for a completely different reason--Otis media in both ears.

All the way to the local ER Reno continued her mournful monologue about Melon the abandoned cat. She had been missing her the whole three months in America but had always told herself to be strong, she would see Melon soon. She missed petting her; she missed watching her eat. Now she wasn't going to get to see Melon soon.

Normally a crying five-year-old and a shrieking one-year-old in the back of a taxi that was taking a good 45 minutes to get us to the ER that was supposed to be just 15 minutes from the airport would have pushed me over the edge. However, this time I was happy. My eldest daughter had a soft spot for her pet cat. The universe was back in alignment.

If there is one thing I want my daughters to learn from me it is a respect for life--for all life. I get upset when I see little boys pulling the leaves off of trees-stripping branch after branch nude. I want to take in each and every stray cat and kitten that I see, I want to save the whales, the harbor seals and rain forests and everything in them. I'm a bit of a bleeding heart really. But it is one weakness that I am not ashamed of. Seeing connections between all the living organisms in my life--from the towering dandelion weed in the front yard to the soft grey cat curled up at the foot of my futon, to my daughters, our neighbors, the world--makes me feel safe and whole. We are all in this together. Albeit my beloved daughters may spend half their time together locked in near mortal combat, and that weed at the front of the house really needs to be whacked down and ripped out by the roots--still, we are all on the same ride.

So I want my kids to learn to respect that and to learn that when someone gets off this ride it doesn't take anything away from you to pause and recognize and mark the loss. In fact, learning to mark the connections between the universal "you" in all it's varied forms strengths the individual you. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

Of course, those poor little tadpoles stewing in their portable interrogation box, I mean bug catching cage, are probably wishing that they could be disconnected from my family. But last year, I remember taking the fully developed frogs back to the rice fields with the girls and watching my girls' faces as they let each bright green frog hop off a finger tip into the tall rice--I celebrated that connection present on their faces. And don't worry, the seige on Barbie's Dream house ended before the little guys "stopped moving."

Why I Wish I Were a Fiction Writer

I have never been very talented at writing fiction. I took a seminar in it once at university and while I passed the class, I found it to be exceedingly difficult to weed out my life and my experiences and perceptions and use them to infuse a sense of reality into my fictional stories and still keep the stories fictional. I tried my hand at writing fiction again in graduate school and encountered the same problem. My stories that were best received by the professor and my peers were inevitably those in which my name and the name of others had been changed, the location modified and events fiddled with.

But now I find myself in a weird ethical bind. I want to continue writing creative non-fiction prose. And I know that creative non-fiction prose isn't necessarily the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth but . . . Why do I feel this insane urge to go public with all my deepest innermost thoughts and turmoils? Why do I feel like to write from any position but the one in which I find myself mired in is a lie?

Obviously when I write, now and in the past, I choose what to omit and what to include. Omission isn't lying, at least not outright lying and many times you have to decide what to omit to help strengthen the emotional or artistic impact of a piece of writing. Just as what you decide to include is important, to me what you leave out is of nearly equal importance.

I always think of Virginia Woolf and her struggle in her quest to write a true stream of consciousness. Trying to represent reality in all its complexity is beyond our reach. Even now, sitting here at the computer typing I am not aware of everything going on at this exact moment. Yes, I am listening to my ipod (to Gwen Stefani). Yes, I am drinking a Starbucks Ice Latte (venti size--I have young children so I need the caffeine). Yes, I am trying to decide what word to write next and what word should come after that word and mostly I am struggling to repress the urge to just delete it all. And I just left out at least 20 other things going on in my mind and in my environment and they have all changed or been modified in some way in a 100 different ways already so I have already lost the ability to transmit them exactly as they occurred to me.

I guess the gist of it is that not only did a profound life changing event happen to me but it has changed the ground from which I experience my life. When I walk down the street now, I have different impressions of people, different thoughts flit through my mind than previously. If I were a telescope either someone has swung me round and pointed me at a new star field or they have tampered with my lens and my whole outlook has changed.

And that leaves me puzzled about how to write. I always just wrote from here, from me. While I always had to consider what to omit, what to reveal, what to elaborate on, what to hint at. . . I never had to consider where to write from. I knew the center of myself and I knew which perspective I was writing from. My filters were established and fixed.

It's silly really. If I write, "I took off my youngest daughter's training wheels yesterday. It felt like releasing a hawk--off she sped down the street, pedalling frantically and triumphantly away from me, her mother." You still read it the same, don't you? But the person saying it has changed dramatically. The insecurities that watching my five-year-old speeding away from me stirred up in my maternal chest were augmented by the other insecurities incubating there.

I define myself as a mother. I define myself as a wife. I define myself as a foreigner. I define myself as a woman. I define myself as a teacher. I define myself through my experiences. I'm a big believer in life shaping and molding us. If we choose to react to an event or if we choose not to react to an event we have been changed by that event. It forced us to make a decision and that decision leads us along our individual path of life to the next event awaiting us.

So I used to be strolling along, narrating bits of my experiences and observations about what I saw along the way, when suddenly my path disappeared. I'm still finding my way, testing the ground at it were, looking for my footing, watching each step. And writing on this hill side of broken rock just seems foolish. I miss the solid ground. I miss the safety of knowing where I stood, knowing exactly where I was positioned in life.

Of course that was probably just an illusion. But like a night light left on in a child's bedroom it gave me the peace and the illusion of security. No monster dares enter a room where a night light is on.

Just can't blog/write

Well, I constantly think that the ability to write will return to me so I put off admitting that it has left. However, I feel guilty when I get those reports from the site meter telling me that people are still dropping by--probably expecting to find something to read.

What can I say? Write? Obviously nothing.

I basically have gone through a life changing event and it has left me changed. Unfortunately, it has left me wordless, unable to put any of myself on paper.

However, it hasn't left me hopeless. So I'm keepin the blog for a bit longer. Hoping that maybe, just maybe, a new writer will emerge from the mess that is me.

Cheers.

WTF?????

I'm sorry, but WTF is up with the Japanese criminal courts? After reading this I'm still sitting here. . . wondering. . . WHY? They got him in 2000 for killing and "mutilating the corpse" of one Filipina and now he's gone and done it again? WHY was this guy let out in the first place? How long was his previous jail term and since when did murder and twisted, warped, seriously sick behavior(corpse mutilation/body dismemberment) merit just a turn in the slammer?

Okay, someone out there more up to date with the criminal system in Japan please answer the following question: If he had killed and dismembered a young Japanese bar hostess the first time around, would he have been let out to do it again?

Of Doctor Fish and Ika

Our family seems to have a personal goal of visiting as many aquariums as possible through out the world. We've been to aquariums in America. We went to aquariums in Australia. We went to the aquarium in Singapore. We went to the aquarium in Osaka. Several times. We have been to the aquarium in Masa's home town now several times too. In February we went again.

I am really sick and tired of looking at fish, sharks, octopus, sea anemones, brine shrimp, sea stars, anything with gills that lives in the water. Otters I still like. They are like the ocean's cats: frisky, cute, playful. Seals stink and penguins are overrated. Dolphins are cool but I am bored watching the dolphin shows--you'll have to slap me in a wet suit and dump me in the actual tank with them before they regain my interest.

My youngest daughter, Saki however is fascinated and thrilled by the sight of a dolphin. Which is why on our recent visit to the Kagoshima City Aquarium she kept rushing into the otter viewing room and tugging at her older sister's, Reno's sleeve and shrieking in her extremely I'm-so-excited voice, "IKA! IKA! IKA show! COME ON!"

Now "ika" in Japanese means "squid." While I find them tasty, I don't particularly fancy looking at them alive and swimming around with their large eyes perched next to their tentacles. . . Disney knew what it was doing when it made that bad guy in Pirates of the Caribbean II look like a squid face. I prefer otters to palatable monsters of the deep.

Saki however would not give up. She continued to race back and forth between the "IKA SHOW" and the otter viewing room until suddenly it dawned on me what she was saying. Ika SHOW? What the hell kind of SHOW can ika put on? My interest aroused I directed Reno to follow her agitated sister to the show pool of the aquarium. As soon as we entered it I realized what was going on. There were no trainers holding up hoops with squid jumping through them. No one was standing next to the pool blowing a whistle and directing two lines of squid to dance on the surface of the water with their tentacles.

It was a dolphin show. In Japanese, dolphin is "iruka". Saka had mixed up squid for dolphin. We stayed and the kids were overjoyed to leave dripping wet from the fabulous full belly flops that the dolphins performed with the express purpose of dousing the crowd--or at least those silly enough to sit in the front rows.

We then proceeded to look and gawk at every other sea creature that the aquarium had to offer. None of them particularly interested me and I was letting my thoughts wander to how much more interesting the afternoon would have been if we had just wandered around the downtown streets of Kagoshima when something in the lobby on our way out snapped me out of it.

First it was a display that you can touch. I may be 41 years old, but things that you can touch rather than just look at still get me kind of shrieky excited. I rushed over. It was a tank of tiny little fish, they looked like minnows, with holes in the lid so that you could stick your finger in. I stuck my finger in. Suddenly, at least 40 of the fish swam eagerly over to my finger and started, well, sucking on it. It tickled. The girls shrieked with joy. Reno stuck her finger in another hole. Saki wailed in distress until I picked her up so she could stick her finger in and have the fish suck on it too.

We stood there and stuck our digits in the tank for about 20 minutes at which point Masa approached us to say in a quiet disgruntled voice, "What are you doing? You're embarrassing me." Startled, I thought he meant that we were hogging the sucking fish and should give other people a chance at them so I corralled the girls over to a rest bench across from their tank. While we sat there Masa pointed to the tank of sucking fish and said, "Watch what normal people do."

I watched for about 15 minutes and it appeared that normal people approached the tank, apprehensively stuck in a finger, squealed in fright when the 40 or so fish began to eagerly suck on their digits and then quickly withdrew their fingers and proceeded to a sink to wash their hands with soap and water. It didn't mater what age they were, young couples, grandparents, mothers and fathers, high school children, grade school children, they all pretty much proceeded in the same way. Babies cried.

There was a lull in traffic past the sucking fish tank and Reno and Saki immediately raced over to thrust their fingers back in. Masa sighed. "You guys haven't even thought to wash your hands, have you?"

I left Masa to his canned coffee and cigarette and went back over to the tank of sucking fish. This time I paused and tried to read the sign above it. Apparently these minnows were called "Doctor fish " and they are actually used to treat people with skin problems and diseases. The "sucking" sensation" is actually their little teeny mouths feeding off of old skin. There are onsens (hot springs) in Japan that have imported them and cater especially to eczema suffers. I immediately wanted to whip off my shoes and socks and stick my feet in the tank. The tank was about three feet off the ground though so I had to admit defeat. It was impossible not to mention against all propriety to stick my winter calloused feet into that tank.

On the drive home the kids and I touched each other's fingers and marveled at how smooth and soft they were.

Next vacation I want to hunt up one of the onsens in Japan that boasts of having "Dr. Fish" in their hot springs.

This is not a post

This is not a post. It is a note about why I am not posting. I am not posting because life is very difficult at the moment and my mind is consumed in a fire of thoughts that have to do with things "not of the blogging world". The good news is that my family and I are all okay. So, it is not a death or serious injury or anything. No one got fired. No one got hit by a freak meteorite. No strange and poisonous snake made it through the toilet pipes to bite any one's ass. I'm just preoccupied with a personal matter.

And I am reading everyone else's blogs. . . but can't find the stamina to read and actually comment. Forgive my silence here and there!

S is for "Sucks"

Well this totally sucks. I was going to use my "s" post to talk about sex. . . and then our home computer goes and DIES on me. Well. It was my fault. I took the battery out of it and apparently, laptops need the batteries in them, even when running on the outlet. . . something about overloading the networks inside and basically frying the poor little things inside out. Oops. But here I am, using a computer with a Japanese operating system and all the manuals in Japanese and me illiterate in Japanese. . . I panicked over the news earlier this year (last year?--stalwart little computer, I apparently applied nasty torture devices to it for quite a while before it gave up the ghost) about laptop batteries spontaneously bursting into flames.

So I whisked our laptop's battery right out.

Now, it's broken little shell has been whisked out of the house off to the electronics store. Where they sternly lectured us on our stupidity for quite a while. It was really embarrassing and completely sucked.

But that wasn't nearly as funny as the cable t.v. man this afternoon who responded to our desperate "something-is-wrong-with-the-cable-t.v.-come-as-soon-as-possible" call to discover that we had. . . unplugged the cable booster. So he plugged it back in and charged us about 13 U.S. dollars.

Our technological abilities suck.

Hopefully we will get another laptop or they will do some sort of transplant on the old one.

Right now I am using a laptop from Masa's work place. It will have to go off to work with him tomorrow. What keeps a mother of young children up past midnight on a weeknight? Internet addiction. I feel like a 16 year old with a cooler full of beer and parents gone for the weekend! Too bad it will all be over tomorrow at about 8 a.m. Which just sucks.