Hatsugeiko

On my way back to Japan from Kansas I stopped in L.A. and saw some friends. One is Tristan, who has a little airstream trailer and is building a tea space inside it. We had our first Tea of the year there as the sun went down over Los Angeles.  I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.

Hours

After a good 6 to 8 years of getting a good, healthy amount of sleep regularly, I am slipping back into college sleep habits. I am up late and up early, averaging more like 6 to 6.5 hours, despite my best intentions. I was better than this for most of the autumn too (at least until Christmas chakai), even when everyone else was already losing sleep hours. I am kind of wondering if it's the amount of scheduled time--just like in college, there is someplace I *have* to be for most of the day, and generally in the evening. In college, it was a full schedule of classes and then play rehearsals; now it's prep, school, cleanup, evening chores, and regularly scheduled practices in the evening (we have big new procedures coming up, and we want to prove ourselves so we can do some unusual stuff in February).
It seems to me that leisure time is actually a necessary part of my life, and if there isn't time made for it during the regular 16 hours of the day, I just automatically take it out of my sleeping time. Thinking back to college, I know I did social things and I had internet access already, but either I am romanticizing my own work ethic or there were fewer distractions that had become "necessary" to my leisure time (I'm looking at you facebook.)  And yet, I am not going to bemoan facebook. I am also rather better informed about both current events and my beloved friends far away due to it. Plus, I have a lot more beloved friends on more continents and in more countries than I did then. No apologies for caring about them (you).
Sorry if you haven't heard from me lately. I've been busy. Really.

Seriously.

There are fewer hours in the day at Midorikai than anywhere else. I presume this has to do with being 15 minutes early everywhere we go and also having to stop everything everynight at 9:30 and rush for home.
I'm getting an average of 1.5 to 2 hours less sleep many nights a week than I was before. I suppose this might also be proof that I was insufferably lazy as a mere PhD and slothfully sleeping 8 hours a night.

Reasons to love Japan #786

Back in Kyoto and tomorrow is Hatsugama! We get to wear extra fun kimono tomorrow if we like (and have) them, and Sarah and I were downtown looking for stuff.

So, at the time to catch the bus back home, we saw a 12 as we reached the street, so we ran for it-- really too far to run for a bus, like two or three blocks-- and I really nearly made it--the bus was at the stop, and so to show that I was running for the bus and not just, I don't know, the foreigner running down Shijo for fun, I quickly checked my blindspot then jumped over the curb into the road as I reached the bus, so they could tell I was running to the 12.  Well, Mr. 12 didn't care and pulled out just as I could basically touch the bus with my hand.  So that made me unhappy as Sarah caught up to me and asked if I lost something, because she thought she saw something fall as I was running.  I'm looking around in my bag, and I think my handkerchief is gone--- when a tall man in a suit walks up to me

with my wallet in his hand.

Yeah. Good thing we didn't catch that bus after all. I thanked him profusely. And then we walked back to the corner, and I'd dropped my handkerchief too.  But mostly I'm so glad I didn't lose my wallet. And thank you again stranger who picked it up and just handed it back to me.

A friend sent this quotation in reference to the theme of my blog:

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”

― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Sayonara 2012

For 2012 my New Year's resolution was to write one haiku every day.  I did miss a few days, but I did much better than the last time a few years ago when this was my resolution and I failed to write any from January 2 through 8.
So, I'm actually a little surprised that this experiment is coming to an end. I think I may continue it. And in honor of the end of the first year and the fact that I'm leaving my book (one of those "daily diary" books that has a little inch wide space for each day) in Kansas when I return to Kyoto, I'm copying out some of the haiku that I actually like.

These are pretty loose haiku usually, many don't have seasonal references and anyway the official Japanese lists of seasonal words are actually secret (!?!) and in Japanese. I also usually follow the modern English haiku format of 2 stressed syllables, 3 stressed, 2 stressed, instead of 5 7 5 syllables, which doesn't really work with the form of English.

Over this year as I was writing them, I mostly felt like they were all really bad. Sometimes I just wanted to fall asleep and resented having to think and compose right before bed. Now, looking back though, I like a much bigger proportion of them than I remembered being interesting. I mostly thought that I hadn't written anything memorable and sorrowfully thought that rather than coming up with a larger number of decent haiku because I was writing an exponentially larger number of them than in previous years, instead I was writing roughly the same number of good haiku, and an exponential number of bad because-I-had-to haiku.  So I'm pleasantly surprised looking back and reading them all now to think that a larger number of them than I remembered resonate with me.

The other thing that's surprising me is how absolutely recent, right now, present some of them make me feel. Reading many of them, I remember the moment, the day, I wrote them on and it feels like it was just yesterday (and I've only read up to the beginning of February as I type this intro!)  January wasn't long ago at all. Something about these little forced verses brings it back with a surprising immediacy.

So, I suppose with a fondness for a year that feels so now, I will share with you some of the now of 2012, just in time for it to become then.

in Kansas.

Happy Christmas everybody. We wrangled babies all day, then as it quieted down, I continued with my exciting new project of resizing one of my kimono to fit my long monkey arms. 

Tomorrow: the serious work begins of finishing the diss edits in order to file before I go back to Japan.

Today: it was the last day of my defense/Christmas holiday vacation.

Sol's first Christmas

Solomon in full Chinese baby novelty drag.

Mimi & Yeye still keeping it real.

Greg and Nigel have a father son moment.

fyi: this is apparently not how you get the sleeve lining reattached to the exterior sleeve. But don't worry, I figured it out. I think.