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.

Les Mis

There was a man in Tokyo, a really old man, who I sat down next to one day in the lunchroom on campus between classes. I opened my textbook and started going over -teoku congugations, and he scooted closer and asked if I spoke English.

His English was stunted but he carefully and enthusiastically explained what he was doing there.

The old man had never left Japan; when he was young, he read Les Misérables in English translation, and he cried. He could feel what the characters felt, he said as he pulled out a worn paperback 5 inches thick and, cradling it in his hands, tipped it so that I could see the title. He had never been so touched by anything in his life.

"Is French book," he told me. "English has different meaning. French has original meaning."

He took French classes for years in order to read the original French version of the book.

The man grinned proudly as he emptied one French-English dictionary and half a dozen notebooks out of his bag and flipped one open, angling them toward me so that I could see the tiny English scrawls. He pointed out the date and page number on the top of each page as he explained that he was slowly translating the book from French to English.

"Very slow! You help me!" He laughed as he said it, a self depreciating and overwhelmed grin hiding his eyes.

I laughed with him, tried to tell him that I'd never read Les Misérables, that my French was probably no better than his, but that I would help him with whatever he needed. He just laughed again and showed me the hundreds of pages of translations, notes scribbled into the margins, page numbers only into the 300's for a fifteen-hundred page book. He'd been translating for years.

He told me more about his project and showed me some magic tricks he could do with hair ties. He taught me how to do them, and gave me two of the ties to show my friends.

I saw him often in the eight months after that: in the library, in the cafeteria, in the commons, always pouring over his monstrous volume of Les Misérables, French dictionary at his elbow.

I'm not sure he remembered me. Maybe he talks to all the foreign girls. I don't know how far he's gotten by now, and I never got his name.

Giant Dancing Kittens

"The curry is pimped this time!" ~ David


I experienced a wide variety of prototypical "Japanese" things today that I decided to document, such as a giant kitten dancing to happy parapara music at THE most random "museum (???I don't know if it should be called that???)" that I've ever been to. The first floor was half rain forest filled with massage parlors and half Ghost Town. This floor also included Gyouza Heaven, which made up for any and all confusion and hardship caused by moving from relaxation to terror.

I freakin' love gyouza.

The second floor was slightly more confusing as the themes were less clearly defined; it seemed that half was Random Ice Cream Heaven, and half was the American old west. The old west theme managed to incorporate "Engrish" into my day, which is imperative in any stereotypical romp through Japan, including such famous Old West storefronts as "Restaurant Napalm" (that one made me nervous).

Random Ice Cream Heaven was a nice place to wander through, and Eyrun and I even managed to taste some new and exciting flavors. Ice cream is so overdone as a dessert, so we tried out Beef Tongue and Garlic flavored ice creams. I have nothing more to say about that except that it tastes exactly like you'd think it would taste. And that, yes, there were pieces of beef in the Beef Tongue flavored one.

Leaving the "museum (???)", we wandered by a few stores which bring up another important part of the Japanese experience: foreign imports. No one plays traditional-while-still-incorporating-EVERYONE-else's-stuff like the Japanese, and playing around in a Build-A-Bear Workshop and a GAP really help to put that in perspective for me once again.

Being overly-confident about speaking aloud is also important when in Japan; chances are juuuuust slim enough that no one will understand you that you easily slip into not caring if they actually do. Which is why I called out "My bear is gay," while cruising the Build-A-Bear Workshop, and I am still unsure whether or not the small girl who glanced over at me did so because I spoke Foreigner or because she wanted to see my gay bear.

But the largest part of being in Japan is, of course, being confused. So the most definitive moment of the day really was when, after staring at a size conversion chart in the Gap for about 30 seconds, all I could think or say was, "Hm. Centimeters huh?" It had taken me that long to realize that the numbers in front of my face were useless to me.

Thank you, Ikebukura, for summing up the entire last 8 months of my life into one day.

2 pass 1 fail

So yesterday I got all happy during class when everyone was reading aloud together. I don't remember what the sentence said because I was barely following along, but the verb at the end was something-o shiteimasu, and David next to me (who was also probably not paying attention) said, instead, o shitteimasu. Oh fascinating. Right. So it was such a tiny difference, but (possibly because I hadn't been paying attention to the context) I immediately heard the verb for 'to know' instead of 'to do'. The conjugation makes them sound so very similar that I don't think I would have normally picked it up, but I IMMEDIATELY heard the difference, and then I got all excited about it, but how am I supposed to giggle over something so small? And with David, who would probably be confused and a little insulted that I brought up his mistake.

Then today we were playing a game in class called shiritori, which I've seen on Japanese game shows but never played. One person says a word and the next person takes the last syllable of that word and has to say a word using that as the first syllable and so on, like "shiritori" then "ringo" then "golf" or something like that. Anyway, I realized tonight while I was doing my homework (which includes a small game of it) that while we were doing it in class, with the teacher standing right next to me, I had no apprehensions or troubles coming up with words. My vocabularly is for shit, but it's a least big enough to continue the game, and the two guys I was playing with each lost once while I kept going without a problem. It's nice to know that I can at least do that much in Japanese.

And to bring it all to a point, some Japanese guys came and sat with Eyrun and me today to interview for us for a paper their writing, and during the maybe two hours of conversation, despite the urging of them AND Eyrun, I refused to speak Japanese. I just didn't want to start something I couldn't finish. I understood them when they were talking to each other in Japanese, and the few things they said to me, but not enough to be able to respond appropriately. I am feeling more confident...just not that confident.

Just Like the Brochures...

I think I just realized how much a part of me all of this is now.

I just remembered writing Michelle's name in katakana on her whiteboard and being so impressed and surprised when she revealed that she'd already looked up all of the symbols for it. I think I felt flattered at that moment, like she'd just paid me a compliment by showing an interest in Japanese. I realized that I felt like it was a part of who I was, and then I wondered if I would always feel that way. I had been practicing some kanji.

Will I one day miss the feeling of writing in Japanese?

I think it was a couple of weeks ago that I was moving between writing a word in hiragana and one in English and it stunned me that the sounds the pencil made were completely different. The way I wrote the Japanese word sounded as short clicks against the paper while the English word was rapid scribbles. It's amazing for me to write in two completely different ways within seconds of one another, and with the same hand.

Will I miss that one day?

Miss attempting to write a Japanese word in romaji for the sake of my family and screwing up the first 3 or 4 times and writing こ　instead of k or something. It's happened a few times.

I don't want to give up this knowledge, but I don't think that I'm ready to make the sacrifices required in order to keep it.

Clicky People

I'm learning more and more the difference between relationships of choice and relationships of convenience and how the proportion of each in my life (and everyone's lives) makes such a big difference in the level of contentedness/happiness I have in my life.

I guess that I've just met so many new people in the past five months and ... when you have no base for friendships or any relationships at all and you're starting from scratch it's like each person you meet has the potential to be your best friend or the love of your life. It's exciting on one hand, but on the other hand it makes it so clear how rare it is to find someone you ACTUALLY click with. I had an idea about this before I came to Japan, but it's just so clear now; every day I may talk to a dozen people and visit or hang out with three or for and it's likely that I have nothing more than a relationship of convenience with all of them. They're close to me because they live in GH or on campus or they're in a class with me or they're from the same place as me or something that makes it easy for us to be around each other, but that doesn't make us mesh. I can still spend all night talking to someone and not feel close to them.

I think it's like that for everyone. I think I know people who I was friends with for years without ever clicking with them. I guess it's sad, but I don't regret the time I spent with them. I just wish our relationship had been more real. And I feel that way about a lot of people right now...maybe more and more people every day. But what can I do except continue to meet and get to know more people and hope that something clicks? I mean, what other solution is there?

Fortunately, there are a couple of people who I have clicked with. Even a boy. :D But that doesn't mean that our relationships are perfect, just that I feel closer to them than I do with the people I spend hours with every day. I just hope that they feel the same way.