[8/8]

I have a cell phone! I have a car! I am two thirds of the way toward being connected to the world.

...Being connected to the world is expensive, I have discovered.

I don’t think I’m going to come home with tons of money. I’ll certainly have enough to live off of here. But when it came down to it, even though I managed to resist getting an international plan for the cell phone, I didn’t manage to resist email. I think the cell phone, in total, will be closer to 4000 yen a month than 2000, which is what I was originally aiming for. Plus the 16800 yen I’ll have to pay when I break the two-year contract. The car is also 5000 yen a month more than I’d been told, because I’m only 22 so insurance is high. Hmph. I am an excellent driver. Maybe tomorrow or Sunday I’ll sit down and work out a real budget, given exactly how much will come out of my salary. Estimating in my head, I think that if I can limit monthly food costs to around $400, and if electricity and gas aren’t too terribly expensive, I should have about $1500 a month to play with. And then when I leave I’ll magically get back about $4000, so I guess paying that $170 won’t feel so terrible. So even if I only manage to save, say, $700 a month, I should come home with about $10,000. That’s not terrible.

And it will certainly be worth having a car. I mean, I need a car. I couldn’t get to Nichu without one. Of course, I’m spending money on safety: the yellow-plate cars are a few hundred dollars a month cheaper. And much smaller. I love my car. It’s one of those almost van-like cars, a cube I think they call it, or something? It’s white. Its license plate has Japanese characters on it as well as numbers. It is beautiful. I drove it back from Toyooka and it drives beautifully. The hardest thing for me to remember intuitively so far is that the turn signal is on the right. Other than that, I had no problem with the right/left thing. The drive there was a blast; Mizuta-san and Nishimoto-kun went with me, and we spent most of the time going through some English vocabulary and pronunciation, and making fun of Mizuta-san. Mizuta-san kept saying that on the way back (when it would be just me and Nishimoto-kun) I had to speak only in English, and Nishimoto-kun kept saying if I did he just wouldn’t say anything. He’d prepared a little paper for himself with the English words for left, right, straight, stop, and so on. It was really cute. Of course, I know all those words in Japanese anyway, but he seemed worried that if he didn’t say it in English I wouldn’t understand. Before we got in the car, he said “okay, I entrust my life to you now.” Heh. Brave guy. But then he said I was a good driver. I think being a young woman somehow I’m expected to have a lot of trouble driving. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m really okay with it.

This morning I walked to the store and bought some food, and then to the bookstore where I bought a card to give Miura-san. I wrote a little note in Japanese thanking her for the cracker things she gave me yesterday, and decorated the envelope with flowers like I used to draw in middle school. I think she liked it. I’m sad that once I start school I won’t see the people at the kouminkan very much. I’m really starting to like everyone there. I’ll miss Miura-san especially. Although she’ll be taking maternity leave pretty soon anyway I’d assume. But hopefully we can stay in touch and maybe have lunch together sometimes or something.

Oh, two things before I forget them: 1) As a little addendum to previous discussion, I noticed a little Anpan Man cushion in a baby bicycle seat (you know, those ones people attach to the back of their bike) today. It was cute. And 2) the pan-ya that Miura-san and I ate at last week, it has some weird pseudo-English name like Coo’s Conservo or something, but on the side of the building it also says “Café Pain”. Now, can that really be quite what they were going for...??

The party that the BOE threw for me and Alisa tonight was a lot of fun. Unfortunately most of the kouminkan people couldn’t go, and had previously told me so apologetically. Only Murashima-san could go. So it was mainly people from the Muraoka office I guess. We went to a little private dining room in some hotel, and there were big things on the table with various seafood and sushi, and one with only vegetarian things, and even one with vegetarian sushi. It was really sweet. (I mean, yasashii, not amai lol.) I had about half a glass of beer and a full glass of some sort of sweet, fruity drink that they randomly brought me and Alisa, and about a shot of sake. I got somewhat giggly and then kind of tired, but it wasn’t a very strong effect in either case, really. I passed on the Wild Turkey stuff that was like 50.5% alcohol. Mizuta-san made the discovery that his cell phone has a Japanese-English dictionary, and spent a good deal of time playing with that. And people chatted about various things: differences between dialects in America, and hand gestures between America and Japan, and what Japanese things are famous in America, and tattoos, and just random things.

One thing that’s nice about Japan is the complete absence of tolerance for drunk driving. The fines are huge, and you can even go to jail for a first offense I think. And the legal limit is zero. And if someone is driving drunk, the people they’re with can get in trouble too. So there’s pretty much no chance of being peer pressured into getting into a car with someone who had a glass or two of wine and swears they’re fine. You don’t even have to suggest that you don’t trust their driving: you can point out that if they got pulled over, you could get in trouble even if you’re not driving. And I think very few people are stupid enough to drive drunk (although I’m sure it does happen). So anyway, that’s one thing less to stress about.

I meant to make more progress on cleaning the living room today, but it doesn’t look like that happened. Oh well, I barely have anything to do until Kobe orientation on the 20th, so I might as well put things off, right? Tomorrow Alisa said some people might be going to some beach, and since I have a cell phone, they can call and let me know! Not that I really want to go to some beach, but I might as well try to be sociable. Even though I haven’t felt any sort of soul-mate-y feeling from any of the nearby JETs yet. I mean I like them, but not in a way that has very much to do with who I am...if that makes any sense. But hell, I don’t know them at all. So I’ll make the effort.

Even though the main effect will be to make me think of all the people in the world I would be wonderful friends with who I’m not hanging out with, who I’ll never know.

I know by now that the feeling must come from me, because it can’t be inherent to every different social situation I’ve ever found myself in. The feeling of being dispensable, of being well-enough-liked but not sought after, not needed, not particularly missed. I know it comes from me but it comes anyway. I know if I were in therapy we’d trace it back to fourth grade, to middle school, to when I never even mattered enough for anyone to dislike me, or that’s how it felt. Anyway, that’s how it felt in middle school, in high school, even for parts of college. At my REU. And it’s already coming to me here. The certainty that the other ALTs are forming deep bonds that don’t involve me, that when they plan weekend trips they’ll say “oh, we better make sure Alisa can come!” or “Man, if Jarryd can’t come that would suck...” or whatever, and if I’m even informed, it will be as an afterthought. Of course, this is bull. It’s bull in two directions: 1) I’m sure everyone else has similar insecurities, and 2) I am perfectly capable of forming real bonds with people. But the paranoia comes anyway.

Especially when I’m somewhat cut off from all the people who actually know me and like me or even love me.

Lying in bed this morning I had a good idea for an activity to do with elementary school students and now I forgot it.........oh! Giving them simple words and having them physically form the letters, like on the floor. Then taking a picture, which could be put up on the wall or whatever. I mean I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this, but it seemed like it would fun and a good way for them to remember letters and even words – if you’ve been the horizontal line of the A in CAT, aren’t you more likely to remember it than if you just copied it down a dozen times? For slightly older students, I also thought of that game where you have small, one-syllable objects, and you say, for example, “this is a pen.” “a what?” “a pen.” “a what?” “a pen.” “oh, a pen!” And you can do it with everyone in the room at once and it gets very loud lol. Sounds boring but when you actually play it there’s something appealing about the repetition and the movement.

It had never explicitly occurred to me, though it’s rather obvious, that when you breathe in, you become less dense. I also have no conscious memories of floating in bath tubs. When I pictures baths, I picture people pretty solidly grounded on the bottom of the tub. Today I took a real bath for the first time. It was absolutely glorious. I floated in the tub. And when I breathed in, I would rise.

It’s 11:48; I’m getting on a dangerously late schedule. This morning I set the alarm for nine but lay in bed until 9:30. When work starts I’m going to have to get up every day at like six. :-/ Well, after a few days of that, hopefully I’ll start getting tired earlier at night. And probably nervousness/excitement will keep me going for the first few days, even if I haven’t gotten much sleep.

Internet mo areba ii no ni.....

Because Mizuta-san was singing it at the party today:

Country road, take me home,
To the place I belong.
West Virginia, mountain mama,
Take me home, country road.

Or, in Japanese...

Country road, kono michi,
Zutto ikeba,
Something something....wasurechatta....
Blah blah blah, country road.

Ha ha, I’ll have to watch that movie again...I just remembered that “zutto ikeba” line for some reason; it struck me as amusing. ^_^ (“that movie” = Whisper of the Heart aka Mimi o Sumaseba (which does not mean whisper of the heart, but what can ya do...))

Oh yeah, and I found in this house English versions of Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. What the hell.

Okay, bye!!