(no subject)
I happened across a book on travel writing today and got really inspired to write something - anything. So here it is, my first foray into what I guess you could call my travel writing.
Decisions, Decisions
One bitterly cold night, while I was frozen in thought, it came over me like the darkness: Everything is connected in the personal world wide web of Life. I would later realize that I had unearthed a gem of immense personal gravity, but at the moment, it was simply not enough to compensate for the Scolding of the Century that my host mother just administered me.
In morning homeroom a few days before that, Takuto asked me what my favorite Japanese word was. “偶然 Guuzen (chance),” I replied, “because when you think about it, everything in life is up to chance, don't you think?”
“That is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in the seventeen years I've walked this Earth.”
I heard that, and knew I was on to something. That particular train of thought probably got caught up in the delays that had begun to plague Japan Railways' once-flawless reputation, but suddenly started up again a few nights later, when my host mother (Mao Zedong's estrogenized Japanese counterpart) began to rant and scream irrationally about my “rude” habits.
There was no language barrier to hold my seething anger back from retaliating, but I decided to play the humility card instead and sheepishly admit what a “rude” devil I was for leaving my clothes on the drying hanger and not folding them, or for not detaching myself from the computer when she talked to me up the stairs from the floor below, or for the countless other crimes I committed repeatedly without ever having been warned about them. After she finally relented and marched back down the stairs, I resigned to my room, my third-floor sanctuary overlooking the Obusa neighborhood, tears welling in my eyes.
My spirit raised the white flag, but that did not halt the oncoming army of questions. Why am in this mess? Why do I live here with these cold, cold people? What is the purpose of anything, what am I doing here? What is the meaning of my life?
The answers came slowly, but accumulated steadily, like the snow of a western Japanese winter. I am here because I wanted to come to Japan. I wanted to come to Japan because I've been studying Japanese for a long time. I started to study Japanese because I checked out a book on it from the library when I was a kid, just for fun. And then I thought about the people who helped me down the path I was taking: friends, teachers, and most of all my adoptive parents who nurtured my restless curiosity about the world. I traced it all the way back, and all the way forward again: Had my parents not adopted me, I wouldn't be in Japan right now, and if my Korean father had never thought, “Wow, she is a beauty!” then I wouldn't be here at all.
I reasoned that if my parents' decision to adopt me changed my life completely, then any decision anyone makes, simple or not, could potentially affect someone else's (or some other animal's) life; and if the six billion people on this planet, consciously or unconsciously, are making their own thousands of decisions a day, then everyone is inherently held together by the glue of life.
My cheeks, however, were still moist, and the words and ideas running the track between my two battered ears were a little too big for bedtime. I thought about packing up and heading home right then and there, calling it quits on the grounds that I can't live with such callous folks, but I could hardly even figure how I was going to get to sleep that night.
Decisions, Decisions
One bitterly cold night, while I was frozen in thought, it came over me like the darkness: Everything is connected in the personal world wide web of Life. I would later realize that I had unearthed a gem of immense personal gravity, but at the moment, it was simply not enough to compensate for the Scolding of the Century that my host mother just administered me.
In morning homeroom a few days before that, Takuto asked me what my favorite Japanese word was. “偶然 Guuzen (chance),” I replied, “because when you think about it, everything in life is up to chance, don't you think?”
“That is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in the seventeen years I've walked this Earth.”
I heard that, and knew I was on to something. That particular train of thought probably got caught up in the delays that had begun to plague Japan Railways' once-flawless reputation, but suddenly started up again a few nights later, when my host mother (Mao Zedong's estrogenized Japanese counterpart) began to rant and scream irrationally about my “rude” habits.
There was no language barrier to hold my seething anger back from retaliating, but I decided to play the humility card instead and sheepishly admit what a “rude” devil I was for leaving my clothes on the drying hanger and not folding them, or for not detaching myself from the computer when she talked to me up the stairs from the floor below, or for the countless other crimes I committed repeatedly without ever having been warned about them. After she finally relented and marched back down the stairs, I resigned to my room, my third-floor sanctuary overlooking the Obusa neighborhood, tears welling in my eyes.
My spirit raised the white flag, but that did not halt the oncoming army of questions. Why am in this mess? Why do I live here with these cold, cold people? What is the purpose of anything, what am I doing here? What is the meaning of my life?
The answers came slowly, but accumulated steadily, like the snow of a western Japanese winter. I am here because I wanted to come to Japan. I wanted to come to Japan because I've been studying Japanese for a long time. I started to study Japanese because I checked out a book on it from the library when I was a kid, just for fun. And then I thought about the people who helped me down the path I was taking: friends, teachers, and most of all my adoptive parents who nurtured my restless curiosity about the world. I traced it all the way back, and all the way forward again: Had my parents not adopted me, I wouldn't be in Japan right now, and if my Korean father had never thought, “Wow, she is a beauty!” then I wouldn't be here at all.
I reasoned that if my parents' decision to adopt me changed my life completely, then any decision anyone makes, simple or not, could potentially affect someone else's (or some other animal's) life; and if the six billion people on this planet, consciously or unconsciously, are making their own thousands of decisions a day, then everyone is inherently held together by the glue of life.
My cheeks, however, were still moist, and the words and ideas running the track between my two battered ears were a little too big for bedtime. I thought about packing up and heading home right then and there, calling it quits on the grounds that I can't live with such callous folks, but I could hardly even figure how I was going to get to sleep that night.