Expression

I had dinner at an izakaya tonight with two of my lovely colleauges from the Tokyo University of Science. An izakaya is as close as you'll get to a Japanese version of a pub, unless you want to go to a pub which feels like it was made in an 'English Traditional Pub' making factory somewhere on the outskirts of Birmingham, then flown via helicopter and dumped in central Tokyo. In an Izakaya you can order beer without actually ordering food, but its unorthodox, and even if you dont officially order something from the menu you'll get little side dishy things of unusual bits and bobs. I love how Japanese and Koreans seldom consider driking without food.

Anyway, Phil, Alex and I tried out an izakaya that we've not tried before in our tiny little township of Sakasai. As Alex pointed out, when you tell the students at our uni that we live in Sakasai, they laugh, as thats how small, uncool and inconsequential it is. Cute though, and pretty. Gardens. Miniature old people. Vertical death stairs. Houses hand painted with Disney kingdoms.

Over dinner we chatted about this and that. Good travel experiences, terrible ones, which weirdly always end up, in retrospect, being the best travel experiences. Alex had accidentally, while drunk on absynth, sat on a fat woman who he mistook for a chair, while Phil had been ordered to finish his Stolichnaya vodka by Kashmiri malitia with a mounted machine gun. We then got onto the topic of language, which isn't very surprising for a bunch of language teachers, and that lead into chatting about langauge as a form of self-expression.

Phil was saying that while language is satisfying and allows us to put our ideas out there to be recieved and considered by others, that it's an ultimately limiting experience as we can never really express the true essence of what we feel and would like to be able to say to the people around us. That language doesn't come near being complex enough to match with the things that we feel, understand and question.

My point of view, at the time, maybe overstepped the boundary of what we were actually talking about. I said that if we were able to express exactly what we felt to every person around us, wouldn't we have reached some kind of end point? Wouldn't we have nothing left to do? Without the limitations of languages we would be able to explain ourselves with such perfect clarity that most misunderstandings would cease to occur, and that humans would essentially have nothing left to discover, not only about others, but about ourselves.

There are times when I wake at night and I feel things that obviously I can't explain. I feel things about the world, about space and time, I feel like there are small moments when I grasp really large ideas of what is happening here, in this mysterious place. if I could explain exactly what I felt to someone, and they to me, as I am sure many people feel these profound things at times, wouldn't we have solved the riddle? Wouldn't we have reached the end? What would I have left to wonder about? Einstein would have said `so, e=mc squared, and this means EXACTLY this about life, therefor, i have solved the equation of life, space, time and existence, the end, and goodbye`. And then there was silence. I am sure he probably felt a lot of things that he never found the language for. What a relief.

My inability to express myself perfectly has shaped who I am. Misunderstandings in my life, with myself and with others, has shed light on the way that I view this world and has changed the course of my life. These experiences have made me different from others.

At the end of my mothers life she and I had a really sad misunderstanding. It's something that haunts me still and possibly always will. It was completely to do with language, with a mind shaped by sickness and drugs. If only she and I had been able to share, eloquently, our exact thoughts with one another, she would have died with our relationship at peace, completed, finalized. But that is not how it went. What I have realised slowly, and painfully, is that in someways the most terrible things in life turn into the most amazing. It is from that experience with my mother that I can truely feel what it is to love someone fiercly while they are still alive. I can see my dad with clarity, his fragile beauty and his massive heart and I can love him like I wish I had been able to love my mother at that time.

I wonder if I would be able to do that otherwise. It's impossible to know.

Every man is an island, it's lonely, but it feels right.

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good,
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles, through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.
Tell me about dispair; yours and I will tell you mine;
Meanwhile the world goes on
Meanwhile the sun and clear pebbles of the rain
Are moving across the landscapes
Over the praries and the deep trees,
The mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
Are heading home again.
Who ever you are, now matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,
Over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

New Places

the smell of different puddles
of rain
after
city showers ~
different laundry powder
reminding you
of someone else`s
strange, familiar
mother.

The calls of the
night ~ fights
between lovers under
neon skies,
and the momentary
love of a tryst
between fighters
in dark
night-erased edges
of the city
giant.

Lonley and lost
people in 24-hour bars
feeling like they`ve
reached twilight.
Eternal sunset.
Endless moonlight.

The quiet beauty of
lonliness you feel
when you wake at
3am in your
apartment
full of the beige
grey ghosts of
enduring half light;
the rush of the
massive arms of traffic
thrumming distant faceless
people to unknown other
places;
just dark shadows riding
in dark cars ....
passing passing passing.

And you - full of your
senses
empty of the usual
delusions of family
and togetherness,
vulnerable to the great
drum and throb
of the nothing,
the void.

Teaching in the J

sooo .... I have been here for about two weeks now and in some ways it seems like its been a lot longer, but in other ways a lot shorter than that. i still cant find punctuation keys on this keyboard....(or maybe i just cant be bothered, the more likely scenario).

so, its the evening at about 9pm after another long day at work. we (the other teachers and i) work pretty hard over here, japanese style. its not that its difficult work, in fact its actually weirdly easy. but we just work looooong hours, and have lots of little bitty classes all over our schedules. the classes are only ever forty minutes long, and we teach the exact same lesson about seven times a day. the down side is its boring at times, the upside is that you get a meanly perfected class by about period three of the day.

i do love teaching, while i do manage to keep the class student centred the vast majority of the time, it is a profession which has allowed my inner show-off / wanna-be actress side to come out. i love performing while telling stories using wildely over the top body language and heaps of hyperbole. i love getting them to believe things ..... letting it sink in for a bit, and them telling them its a lie. like i used to do in korea when id tell the kids i was a robot teacher sent from a factory in new zealand, and theyd believe me! professional? maybe not. fun? most definitely. also, the class floors are really slipperly linolium and my heels dont seem to have any traction, so ive taken to skidding over to students when they need me, instead of walking. hhaha. they probably think im mad.

the students here are so so lovely though. i kind of knew that from teaching in nz, but they are just so kind and polite and they laugh at most of my lame jokes. i cant imagine a single one of them ever doing something mean or self centered. i am sure they do .... well, i am not sure actually. the culture here seems very about the `we` and not much about the `me`; none of this `this plate of food is mine, and that one over there is yours` stuff.

and theyre just so cute. i know cute can be a really patronizing word but i dont mean it like that. for example, one of my favourite students, Shouta, (pronounced like a person who often shouts) who is a 25 nano world scientist (i made that up but its something like that) put down that his favourite band were the `funky monkey babies` !! i just love that! no 25 year old in nz would ever admit to liking a group by that name ...... another student put down under hobbies; `my hobby is cleaning my room, also, i love anything that is really small` ... so nice. all of these students are seriously smart. the tokyo university of science is apparently one of the ivy league colleges here in japan. students hope to get into tokyo university, and if they dont then where i am working is the second choice, according to our program coordinator. in a country of 130,000,000 with a highly competitive university entrance system ..... well, yeah. theyre smart as.

anyway, its great!

also, i saw a highschool girl with a mini popple hanging off her backpack today! made me feel all nostalgic for being five years old and having my popple collection. had no idea they were still rocking around.

another awesome day in japan

i went for a mission by myself yesterday. i woke up really early because the sun rises at(or at least it is light by) about 4am here! the one thing i don't feel like doing at all here is sitting around my apartment watching info-meat-mercials. so i was up about six and decided to head into ueno, a large park in central Tokyo. i had no idea it was going to be so awesome!

the first thing i saw was a ventriloquist ..... i am not usually into that kind of thing because it creeps me out quite a lot, but the girl who was setting up her performance in the park was so interesting looking that i stopped and watched. she had these massive crescent moon shaped eyes and wore an old school charlie Chaplin style hat. her doll was about 2/3 the size of a human, wore a similar hat to her and a grey suit, he had a brown face and really blue eyes. she slid her feet into his feet and one hand into the back of his head so she could move his head and eyes. then she kind of woke him up and he peered at the whole crowd as if this was his first time on planet earth and he had just arrived and was being greeted by a hoard of completely unfamiliar beings.

it was pretty amazing. then he started dancing. carefully at first with controlled movements and as time went on he got more and more free. the woman herself danced with him rather than just being the invisible force behind him, when he lent right, she`d lean left. i loved the way she used her eyes, so theatrical and provocative.

after that i watched a kind of b-boy group of jump rope artists! haha. they were sooooooo good at jump rope, i had no idea people even did things like that with jump rope. five of them and two ropes going at once, constantly changing hands while different people did break dancy style stuff in the middle.

anyway, I've just realised i cant be bothered writing about everything that happened! haha. i bought an amazing book about a cat and mouse who fight and then end up friends with the most beautiful Japanese illustrations. there was a huge children's literature market in the middle of the park and i adore children's books. i have a feeling the book was illustrated by a famous Japanese artist but i only understood about 1 percent of what the woman was talking about, and that part was when she asked me `wakari masen?` which means `do you understand?` ..... i lied and said, `yes....a little` and she laughed.

i also wandered through an intensely gorgeous peonie exhibition ..... i started smelling the peonies and wondered why no one else was doing it and before long the whole line of people wandering near me were doing it too! so cute! the smell of peonies is like nothing else, really fresh and lemony.

near the end of my meanderings (i probably walked for four hours and saw about 10 percent of ueno park) i almost completely passed by a saxophonist because i thought he was just pretending to play along to a recorded piece of music, that is how beautiful it was. but he wasn`t. he played `somewhere over the rainbow` which added to my already intense feeling that my body and mind are not as solidly connected as usual. i cried. for the second time that day because i also cried in the ventriloquist's performance, and then i almost cried when i bought that book. hahaha.　i think it is to do with jet lag and stuff, because i also feel like laughing heaps. i love how travel opens up your emotions though, things you forget that you feel when life`s routines kind of numb them over.

anyway ramble ramble. xxｘ

from japan with love

i just thought i would write a quick note to let you know that it is all going really well over here. as you would expect, Tokyo is huge, amazing, overwhelming, exciting and beautiful. i also don't know how to find caps locks on this computer. or any punctuation keys.

my apartment is great, it is like a little dolls house and i sleep on a kind of bunk, the stairs up to my bunk open up to be storage areas and my toilet has a tap which sits at the top of the cistern and you can wash your hands as the tap refills it. ingenious! i also do not have a drier and that is because my entire bathroom turns into a drier when needs be. i simply hang all my washing on the shower rack thingy, close the doors and press a series of buttons and the vent at the top of the bathroom starts blowing out hot air and dries the clothes in about an hour. rather cool.

my neighbourhood is soooooo gorgeous! it is very residential with lots of beautiful houses all of which have the most amazing, well cared for and deeply loved gardens. lovely old Japanese folk are out at all hours of the day pruning their large bonsai, feeding the fish in their little outdoor ponds, weeding and so on. one house near mine is completely hand painted in Disney characters. there are huge huge crows all around the neighbourhood, they fly low along the streets and are rather foreboding. but, i have to say they are magnificent.

everyday at 5.30pm in my neighbourhood there is a `work has finished!!` bell. it is piped out over the community on loud speakers and its like the kind of tune you'd hear in one of those ballerina jewellery boxes!! it is very cute!! and all it means is, lets relax now. so funny.

we had a huge orientation day with all the teachers who are here as part of our program from all the different campuses westgate works for. it was a looooong day and the president gave a speech - he is the ultimate cliche of what you'd imagine a Japanese business man to be like! apparently he was informed that he had to tone down his welcome speeches as his last three speeches included a racist rant against Chinese, an opening line of `did you know i am extremely rich? well i am and i will tell you why!` and another where he said that it was good that he wasn't an actual teacher as he wouldn't be able to stop himself sexually harassing the female staff. his speech was one of the funniest things i have ever seen, and he was intentionally funny, but also unwittingly funny as i don't think he realises how much of a caricature he really is. i had that terrible repressed hysterical laughter thing in a huge silent room full of people. Ive had that quite a bit here in japan .... i think its the jet lag and the late nights but also just the weird funny small things all around.

there is soooooooo much to say and its only been about three days. i cant really fit it all in. i went to a central Tokyo house party last night where within the first five minutes a woman pulled her skirt up to reveal her bum to me in the bathroom to show me her tattoo .... she then went on to tell other people at the party that we were a lesbian couple. that makes it sound like a rather extreme party, it wasn't, it was quite lovely and sedate and i met some really cool Japanese girls and a real estate agent from San Fransisco who just sooooooo looked like a real estate agent from San Fransisco that i told him so about four times. he seemed rather chuffed.


anywaaaayyyyyyyyy - i love all you guys. Qantas smashed my computer on the way over so i have pretty much no means of communication unless i come to a PC room which is strangely harder than it sounds in such a technologically advanced city. so its hard to contact everyone at the moment.

feel free to email me because i am missing everyone to be honest and its weird not having any friends or family to hug ..... makes me realise how much physical contact is necessary!

all my love

magnolia