My Journey

I've started a Peace Corps Blog.

notdowagiac.blogspot.com

Talking About It.

Japan is really fun to talk about, to remember, but it's when you're done talking about it, when it's filled you up, but there's nowhere left for it to go, and no one around who gets it, that it starts to cut and bleed out. It takes a million memories, and a thousand regrets, and a hundred dreams to bleed out. Till you can push it back again behind your eyes.

Nihon Bungaku

I've almost finished my website. It was supposed to be finished about a week ago, but it's just taken a lot longer than I thought to organize everything, and even though I'm sending the link to my adviser tonight, I'll still be updating it throughout the next couple of weeks, and maybe into the summer if I feel ambitious. I'd love to make some silly movies to help describe some of the novels and historical events.

http://nihonbungaku.x10hosting.com

Your confusion is the size of SIX felt-tipped markers.

I'm reeeeeeeeady for school to end. I'm pushing myself forward, of course, always making sure I have a goal to work toward, something to look forward to in the next year or two, but for now I'd like to catch up on family, writing, and sleep. That would be nice.

I have an addiction to the internet. Namely Facebook and Fanfiction.net, but really I could stay online for hours or days even without those websites. I don't always waste my time on the internet, just I only do productive things about 25% of the time. It's a problem I wish would go away, but I've recently discovered that I've been addicted longer than I'd first thought -- about 8 years, in fact. I'm surprised I still have a life. Not bad.

I just like to be brain dead. I like a constant flow of entertainment going into my eyes or ears all the time, and if that's not happening, then it flows out. If classes get too unbearable, lately I draw. I used to write, I used to write really really fast while taking notes in class. Sometimes I'd write in French in case the teacher walked by. Lately it's just jotted notes that amuse or amaze me.

1. My hair always looks shockingly blonde after I watch a Chinese or Japanese movie.
2. What would the teacher think if I left due to a coughing fit and came back with a muffin?
3. I feel half intensely dense and half like I'll float away. Like a balloon tied to a stone.
4. Humans used to live in caves, still do, just make them bigger, better.
5. If a human bites a vampire, does it turn back into a human?
6. Mexicans should use hot sauce packets from Taco Bell to burn through the border fences.
7. Do they have Taco Bells in Mexico?

Sometimes I make lists of all the really amazing things that happened to me while I was in Japan, like talking to the old Japanese man about his obsession with Les Mis, or ordering an ice cream in Japanese in Chinatown from a Chinese woman, or just people watching with Eyrun and David on Bakayama as the sun went down. I wonder if things like these will ever happen to me again, or if it's all passed and I'll just live the rest of my life like I did before.

I wish I was better at making new friends. Something about being in Japan made it easy, way easier than it was before or after. I'm really really thankful to have Michelle; no one else in the world would do with me what she does. That sounds dirty. Nevermind.

gap

She’d received half a dozen messages, some mocking and teasing, some blunt in their insistence that they “see other people,” none sounding like Mark. The messages came from his phone, and were just like the messages from his Facebook account. But they were all in lower-caps, awkwardly worded, distant…and when was the last time Mark used the word “dude”? “other dudes in the see, yknow” he’d written. Someone had written.

So one of Mark’s friends was using his phone, had logged into his Facebook account. That’s what the rational and annoyed part of Phoebe assumed, but the other part, the over analytical and uneasy part of Phoebe was already assuring her that there, in fact, were other dudes in the sea, and that her 3 year relationship with Mark had only been a fling anyway.

Mark (or whoever was pretending to be Mark) hadn’t answered his phone in almost two days. They’d been fine when they’d talked the night before last about Mark’s work and Phoebe’s plans for Thanksgiving Break, and thirty hours later Phoebe is ignoring the poetry discussions in English class and wondering if she should let her parents know that it’s over with Mark when she saw them that weekend. Or drive the 200 miles to Milwaukee to confront him in person.

She tried calling him again on her way home after class, but it rang four times before going to voicemail. Fear and frustration curled into anger as she slammed her phone shut and shoved it into her purse.

“Phoebe-weebee.”

Phoebe stopped mid-march, startled at the familiar voice. She swiveled around and to see a disheveled youthful-looking man in shorts and a t-shirt lying on a hill next to the sidewalk.

“Henry.” Phoebe raised a brow as she carefully approached her brother. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Henry smiled easily, resting his head on his hands and leaning back in the damp grass. “I am watching the leaves change.” Phoebe glanced up to see a young ash tree towering over them, the left side of which had gone bright orange.

“Yeah,” she frowned, almost grimacing, “the leaves are going to start falling soon, huh? The campus grounds crew will come around this week and start pulling off the dead leaves before it makes a mess.”

“How…humanitarian.” Henry crossed his legs and sighed as he gazed up at the leaves.

“I meant, what are you doing here?” Phoebe specified. “What are you doing in this state? At my college?” She hadn’t seen her brother since summer, maybe June, when he stopped by their mother’s house to pick up his summer clothes. Before that, and since then she supposed, he’d been wandering from town to town, state to state. Without phone calls, emails, or even postcards their family had yet to figure out what he was up to between visits; it was as though he didn't exist when he wasn't standing right in front of them.

“I was just wandering through,” he stated as though it explained everything. “I remembered you were still going here and thought I’d stop by, check out the sights.”

“The sights,” Phoebe repeated. Suddenly the annoyance she felt from earlier was back.

He glanced over at her. “You don’t mind if I stick around for a couple of days, do you?”

Phoebe shrugged and it started to drizzle. “I have a couch,” she offered, already making her way across the grass, back to the sidewalk. “But you could have called first.”

Henry was suddenly beside her, still smiling. “No phone.”

“There are payphones everywhere,” she pointed out.

He shrugged. “I don’t know your number. Or anyone’s.”

“You could have….” She struggled to find something to catch him on as he followed her across the street. “You could have found an internet café and emailed me!”

“Ich, computers hurt my eyes,” was his only excuse.

Phoebe rolled her eyes and checked her phone. Mark hadn't called. She went around the sprinklers that her brother ran underneath as she led the way to her apartment.

“My roommate isn't home,” Phoebe informed Henry as soon as they entered her dreary living room/kitchen/dining room. The curtains were all drawn and dirty dishes and used paper plates took up most of the surfaces in the room, but Phoebe quickly cleared the desk and turned on her computer. She didn't know what to say when she turned around in her chair to see Henry piling all the dishes into the sink and bagging up pop bottles.

She shook her head. “What are you doing?”

“It's kind of smelly in here,” Henry 'explained'.

“Well you can't recycle the water bottles,” Phoebe told him as she typed in her password. “Just toss them.”

Henry gently lobbed the empty water bottle into the back of Phoebe's head. Phoebe took a deep breath and ignored him, signing into her email, then to Facebook to see if there was anything from Mark.

After straightening up the kitchen (for whatever reason), Mark bugged Phoebe about taking a walk and looking at the leaves, arguing that she could do her homework at the park. Phoebe patiently explained that all of her homework as on her computer, and he settled for opening the curtains and watching the trees from the couch.

Once the apartment was silent, and she still hadn't received a message from Mark, Phoebe felt she couldn't hold it in any longer and explained the weird messages to Henry.

“He keeps breaking up with me through text messages and on Facebook,” she explained, partly wondering if Henry knew what Facebook was, “but none of the messages are him, and he hasn't actually called me so that I can be sure, and he won't answer his cell phone, and I just don't know what to do.” Henry seemed surprised – and a little confused – at the situation, but he didn't have any advise beyond, “Go ask him yourself.”

Henry watched the sunset from the balcony while Phoebe read an article for Journalism, switching between and Facebook every few minutes. He eventually wandered back in and flopped down on the couch.

“I was in Wisconsin last week,” Henry told her, “but not Milwaukee, I never got to Milwaukee. There's this place called the Wisconsin Dells, and it's kind of a touristy thing; there are amusement parks and water parks and campgrounds full of plastic cabins with faux-wood siding, but beyond all of that, the place itself is breathtaking. There are these cliffs where the forest just cuts off and drops straight down, hundreds of feet into the river. It's like the earth got bored and decided to take a different path. Some of the rock faces are sanded smooth from the water; they look like clay. Anyway, I was there for a while giving private tours for food and spending money, but people don't seem to want things like that anymore. They want the water parks, the ferries, and the tour guide with the megaphone and name tag. It's fine anyway; I want to go further west. The Dells are nothing compared to the Rocky Mountains, jutting up in millions of layers, trying to escape the planet. I think I'll go to Colorado next. After Thanksgiving, of course.” He yawned. “Run up the first towering cliff I can find and see much of the world is reachable from there.”

Phoebe stared at her brother for a few minutes before she realized that he'd fallen asleep, stretched out along her couch still in his faded sweatshirt and jeans. His words echoed in the room even after she refreshed the page. Still no message. Her stomach sank.

She was woken at nine the next morning by her vibrating cell phone: a text from her boyfriend, grammatically correct, period and all: “Call me as soon as you get up.“ She did. He answered.

“I've had the stomach flu the last couple of days,” he explained, “and it got really bad yesterday. I guess my roommate got ahold of my cell. This morning I saw the texts he sent, I'm so sorry.” He sounded sorry, and despite the nervous doubt still fluttering in her stomach, Phoebe accepted his apology. Relief didn't flush her like she'd expected.

She wandered into the living room as Mark described the way he'd payed back his roommate by waking him up at six this morning by blaring speed metal right next to his ear. Phoebe was surprised to find the couch unoccupied. She glanced at the window, curtains still wide open from last night and letting in the midmorning sun. Just down the street, the maintenance crew had begun pulling the dead leaves from the tree branches on campus; she could hear the engine of the cherry picker from where she stood. As she began to move away from the window, Phoebe spotted a solitary figure hunched on the sidewalk in front of the next building. It was Henry, watching the crew work.

Let's Not Be Friends

I've recently decided that I don't like people.

I know that might be something that gets thrown around a bit in jest, but I really believe that I could go live in a cave somewhere alone and be happy.

There are three categories of people: ones I don't know, ones I'm acquainted with, and ones I'm friends with. If I don't know you, 90% of the time I'm automatically annoyed with you. If you're an acquaintance and we only talk about school/work/however we know each other, that drops to 50%. If we're friends, chances are we haven't seen each other in over a month (maybe more than six), and I'm depressed about it.

(Family, of course, is an entirely different category; they're only at 20%).

So OF COURSE I don't want to make new friends. We'll become acquaintances and I'll not hate you for a few weeks, then we'll be close and I'll be thrilled for however long that lasts and after a year or two (five max probably), one or both of us will wander off and I'll be all up night getting nostalgic and punching my pillow. All manly-like.

It's the same reason I can't have pets, really.

Reverse Culture Shock

My credits were transferred a couple of weeks ago and JUST showed up on my transcript, it's so exciting! I have a total of 24 credits of Japanese language, and then 3 credits of linguistics just thrown in there for the hell of it. It's such a relief to have it down on paper, proof of all the work I did (especially in J4, that class killed me). I was so stressed out about credits spring term!

So I spent the summer being stressed out, annoyed, and disappointing people. Yeah, I wasn't into doing things that I did last summer, maybe I didn't act the same, maybe I wasn't around as much as I normally would have been, but...you've got to believe me, EVERY day of the summer (save for the few weeks when I was either working my ass off at Susan's day camp or exhausting myself at Indiana Beach), I felt differently about my experiences abroad and about being back in America. I was processing it, all the time, comparing everything, wondering what my friends were doing, wishing that I was back in Japan (sometimes even back in J4!), and trying to figure out how I could somehow make the changes in me work while I was in America.

SUMMARY: REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK IS WORSE THAN REGULAR CULTURE SHOCK

Before I left for Japan I read pamphlets about culture shock, about how I was supposed to feel during my first four months abroad, and it said that I would wonder, "Why can't they just do it this way instead?" about the Japanese. I NEVER thought that. I think it was easier going in because my expectations were completely open. Whatever weird customs or surprising differences I found, it never bugged me because I expected things to be different. I rolled with all the punches.

But coming back to America, I had expectations. I expected to be able to combine my Japanese life with my American life, to eat katsudon once in a while or make okonomiyaki for my family, that people would WANT to try out these foods, or want to hear me speak Japanese, or want to know more about my friends, or even want to talk about the differences I found between life here and life there. But, surprise surprise, no one wanted to eat Japanese food, no one cared about my friends, speaking Japanese just annoyed people, and every time I pointed out a difference they just looked at me like Japan must have been so horrible if things were like that. It felt like everything I tried to take with me from Japan just slipped away, and I was the only one who knew what was being lost. And THAT was a horrible horrible feeling.

So because of those failed expectations, it wasn't until I was back in America that I thought, "Why can't they just do it this way instead?" Why can't all bikes have locks and baskets built in? Why can't burnable and non-burnable garbage just all be separated? (still feels weird to combine them) Why can't there be a train running from city to city so I don't have to take a fucking car everywhere? Why can't people in the dorms leave their doors open so anyone can walk in and hang out? Why can't boys strip down and play soccer in the hallways? Why can't things be cleaner, closer together, more organized, plain, simple, straightforward???? Things are so complicated here, so messy and full of useless extras, wasted space.

I don't WANT to feel like this, I'm not doing it because I'm some fan girl who thinks anything Japanese MUST be better. It just makes more sense to me, things like they were in Japan. I hope I get used to it again here. It's very frustrating.

So I hope my friends and family will forgive me. I do enjoy being with you, I love you all, but I feel very alone with all these thoughts nagging at me all the time and knowing that no one wants to hear them. No one would get it anyway, I'd just sound annoying.