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I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with my cell phone. When I first got it, in the car with Mizuta-san and Nishimoto-kun, I was trying to save Mizuta-san’s number, and in trying to enter the name I got very confused, and couldn’t figure out how to delete characters; I kept saying “ack!” and giggling, until finally Nishimoto-kun offered to do it for me. At that point I had entered pタ as the name. The next time I saw Nishimoto-kun he sort of smirked and said “Keitai wa dou? Naremashita ka?” (How’s the cell phone? Have you gotten used to it?) Heh. I have gotten much more used to it. I know how to take pictures, send and receive email, set all the sound and display options, and even delete characters. Sending email costs money but receiving it doesn’t, so I set my gmail up to forward to my phone, until I have internet in my house at least. So forget whatever I’ve said about sending email to my phone; it doesn’t matter where you send it. I even got fancy and set it so that when I receive a call there’s a little animated panda that waves its arms around, and for email there’s a penguin. And I even gave a few people special email ring tones just because I could. The one annoying thing is that there’s no quick way to get it to be silent for emails but not for calls. I don’t like to be unreachable at night, so I don’t want to put it on silent, but I don’t want to get woken up just because Coldwater Creek sends a coupon to my gmail account. But people have had to do worse things than click through a few menus to change the email receive volume a couple times a day.

And now I have my camera, so I can take a picture of the cell phone without having to set up some elaborate system of mirrors. Which is really a pity, because I quite enjoy elaborate systems of mirrors. But it would seem a little dumb at this point to bring down the mirror from upstairs, set it up in front of the bathroom mirror, and take a picture with the cell phone of the reflection of its reflection...ne? Zannen na; tanoshimi ni shiteta. ^_^

When we were in the 100-yen store the other day, standing near some shelves of small mirrors, I commented that I love mirrors. And then remembered that when I say that it doesn’t necessarily convey the intended meaning, so...”Uh, I mean, not looking at myself in them...just like, conceptually. Philosophically. Artistically.” Then I said something about indirect paths of light, how I like being made to think about all the zig-zags a given speck of light had to take in order to end up in my eye, and the sort of tension between what is “real” and what is just reflected...at this point I think Jarryd was just sort of giving me a weird look. Heh.

I don’t think this post will have any bold in it at all...but that’s okay. It’s been a lazy day; I meant to get up at eight but actually got up at....uh....one. Oops. Well, I figure I needed to catch up on sleep. Did laundry, walked to the store, made myself scrambled eggs and toast (a comfortingly American breakfast...), did laundry, then lay on the couch watching anime for a while, while outside it was raining lightly. Tonight Jarryd’s taking me out to dinner with some friend of his who lives in Kasumi; he’s trying to help me start networking a bit lol. I, being an idiot, had accidentally thought that was happening yesterday. That’s what comes from skimming emails that are in Japanese. (Actually I think my problem was that his email was right next to a previous one whose subject line was “today,” so subconsciously I think I applied that subject line to the new email by mistake. And then glossed over the fact that the first word of the new email was “tomorrow”...) Anyway, he told me to invite people from the kouminkan, but there aren’t very many people there ‘cause it’s Obon, and I felt really awkward about it anyway. He also told me to ask them for a list of people in Kasumi who are interested in English, and I did that, but they told me they couldn’t show it to me. Fair enough, I guess. So I think it’ll just be one other person. Oh well.

This isn’t a very exciting story, but yesterday I made myself spaghetti, intending to put butter on it, and then at the last minute as an impulse I put soy sauce and sesame soy sauce and chili powder on it instead. It was....interesting. Good, actually. One of these days when I’m bored I’ll finally look through the books about being vegetarian in Japan and see if they have any recipes I feel like trying.

In the meantime, I’m quite happy to now have milk and eggs in the house. Maybe I’ll make pancakes for a late-night snack later...

Speaking of food, if the scale in my bathroom is to be believed, I’ve lost like 4kg since I got here. That’s kind of too fast, ne? And I thought I’d been eating quite a lot. I guess some of that could just be normal monthly fluctuation...but not all 8.8 pounds of it. So I guess that’s encouraging? But I’d ideally go at about half that rate lol. Oh well, it’s not like I’ve been going hungry. But if that pace kept up (which it won’t), then in another three weeks I’d weigh less than I have since like sixth grade. Heh.

Once it gets a little cooler I think I’ll walk to Icchu instead of driving; it’s only like a fifteen or twenty minute walk. Of course I could also bike, but that would require, umm, knowing how to bike. And I’m still at the stage of wobbling along the wide, straight, car-less path from here to the grocery store; I don’t think I could navigate my way along the roads to school.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for me will be having no way to reach people instantly. I’m not worried about “falling out of touch,” not with the people I really care about; we’ll always find a way to keep in touch. But I’ve always been able to contact people right at the moment I needed to; and if not at the precise moment, then very soon thereafter. I could always call Andrew’s cell phone and at least hear his voice on the voicemail, and know that if I left a message saying “call me as soon as you can,” he would. I could always call home, and call my parents’ cell phones, if I just had a sudden need to talk to someone, or be reassured or comforted. And of course at college, I had friends living right across the hall, right upstairs, who I knew I could find if I needed them. Yesterday in the car driving home from Muraoka, the area to the right of my right eye started tingling a bit. I ran my fingers along it, and decided it felt numb. Well why would part of my head feel numb? An impending stroke, obviously. I tested out my ability to talk, to move my arms and legs. But when I closed my right eye, I was convinced something felt tight and weird. And then I started noticing little pains, in my right leg, my right arm. And wasn’t I a little lightheaded? I started to feel panicked.

Of course, this has happened to me enough over the years that the logical voice that tells me that I’m being ridiculous has some authority. But not as much authority as my mom, who’s been to medical school. And, perhaps more importantly, is my mom. And it just struck me, as I drove along trying to pay attention to following the curves and wondering if I should be looking for a place to pull over until I came to my senses (or, you know, had a stroke and died...), that it was four in the morning on the east coast, and in any case I have no way of calling home, no way of reaching my parents when they’re not at a computer, when we’re not both at a computer.

Well come on, I’m not nine years old anymore. I shouldn’t need to call my mom just to be told that a bit of tingling on my forehead doesn’t mean I’m about to die, right? And I didn’t end up having to pull over; I forced myself to concentrate on singing to the Malice Mizer CD I was listening to, and on driving, and by the time I got home the panic had passed. So maybe I can do it. Is that part of being an actual grown-up, being able to pull yourself through those moments when you just need to talk to someone, even if you know exactly what they’ll say, just to be comforted? To know how to comfort yourself instead?

Eh, I don’t really think so. I don’t like that vision of “grown-up,” where it’s all about being self-sufficient and independent. I think there’s something to be said for developing the ability to control illogical panic and to find ways to get yourself through times when you desperately want human contact and there’s no way to get it right then. But not so much because it’s more “grown-up” as just because it will help you be happier and more able to deal with life. I think those feelings of needing comfort are legitimate, though. And I think it’s going to be hard sometimes when all I can do is send out emails and wait.

Okay Jarryd’s here, gotta go!!

..............

Back. Tanoshikatta yo! We went to a fancy-ish little restaurant that said “Pizza and Pasta” on a sign outside, and sure enough that had pizza and pasta...all of which had some sort of meat or fish. Well, not technically all: I ended up ordering ziti with “gorgonzola cheese sauce”. It was sort of like alfredo sauce, but not quite. Not bad, actually, although I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat it. We also had spiced french fries, which were quite good (hey now, I thought I was supposed to be avoiding french fries...oops). And I had two small slices of a pizza that Jarryd ordered specially to have a few slices without fish. So it was just asparagus. Also not too bad. And I’m terrible at ordering alcohol, because I don’t know the names of any drinks I like – even in English! – so Yumi said she’d just order me what she was getting. So I had two drinks, the first of which I liked and the second of which I didn’t like so much. But I don’t know what they were.

Right, Yumi: Jarryd’s friend, who lives somewhere around here. She was really sweet! She speaks really good English. On Saturday she’s going to take me to a park near her house that has a little shrine and which she says is the best place to watch sunsets. (Hmm, Wikipedia said the places in AIR that are based on real places in Kasumi include the school, the station, and the shrine, didn’t it? Sono shrine kana...?) We spent a lot of the dinner talking about anime – Jarryd wants to have an Evangelion (sp?) party at my house because I’ve never seen it, lol. He said we should start a Kasumi anime club. That’s fine with me, even though honestly I haven’t seen that much different anime. And I don’t know if the people in Kasumi want to watch Yugioh.....heh. We also spent a while trying to figure out how to write various English names in kanji. My name is hard because there aren’t any common kanji pronounced “re”. All Yumi could think of was the first kanji of “remon”, aka lemon. But I’d say the sense in which that kanji is read “re” is a little...I dunno, contrived. It seems like a case where the kanji and reading are pretty separate. That kanji is 檸. Eighteen strokes. Other than that, all they could think of were kanji whose readings are actually “rei” or “retsu”, which would lead to odd pronunciations of my name. Then for “bekka” there are lots of possibilities. The most obvious for the first kanji would be 別, betsu, which means like, separate. Then there are like sixty or seventy kanji pronounced “ka”. I figured since I’m living in Kasumi I might as well go with 香. Put that all together and...I don’t know what the hell it means.

And Jarryd showed me another trick my cell phone can do: magically beaming information to other phones. It’s pretty sweet. You just tell it to send the information, like my email address and phone number or whatever, and put the phone near the phone you want to send it to, and it transfers. Ahh technology...

Meanwhile it’s 10:19; I woke up really late today, so unfortunately I probably can’t get to sleep for a little while. But tomorrow I need to get up at like 7:45 or something to get down to Muraoka by 9:00, which is when I told my parents I’d be online. (Hear that parents: if I’m so tired that I drive right off the side of the road into a rice paddy, it’ll be all your fault! But if you’re reading this, I must not have died, unless of course you’re reading it on my computer after claiming all my things...well in any case, I’ll be careful. ^_^) I guess I should spend the next couple hours doing math...yeah, we’ll see about that.

But in any case, I don’t really have anything else to say for now, so I’ll think of some lyrics and end this post. How about some Jethro Tull?

Deep red are the sunsets in mystical places;
Black are the nights on summer day sands.
We’ll find the speck of truth in each riddle,
Hold the first grain of love in our hands...