Christmas

Today was actually really fun!!

I started the day by skyping with my family for the first time in a month... it was broken.  But I discovered the gmail chat thing, so I got to see them again :]

Then lunch [cause it's vacation, and I sleep late.] which was pretty great because it was soba, which is my favorite Japanese food.  I'm not actually going to tell every little detail of my day, I just am mentioning this because it was the second great thing of the day, which also happened to be the 2nd thing that happened for me today.  It was the beginning of a streak of greatness.  [i guess the skype would have been the first, but i think i'm being too analytical.  as usual.]

Host Grandma gave me a pretty snazzy leather jacket.  I've always really wanted a leather jacket, but felt guilty about the wearing-the-skin-of-a-comrade thing.  The problem has been averted by someone else giving it to me.  I still bothers my conscience, but then again, I eat meat now [just this year! and I do feel bad about this on a moral level... perhaps even more for abandoning my ethics, but I really don't want to burden my host family and also I don't want to limit my experience of Japan.  Cultural experience > personal ethics, I guess.]  Anyway, once again being overly analytical.  Simple version:  I like my new coat.  [You can see it below!]

In the evening, I went to Ina and met four of my friends.  We did Purikura for a very long time.  [Purikura=Japanese photo booth.  Not like the US ones at ALL.  I think I put up a picture in a previous post from it.  I'll put up another one now!]
And then we ate ramen at the mall.   I was going to take the train home, but Erika and her mom offered to drive me.  There is an art to accepting an offer.  It's like a game... how long can I refuse without them  thinking I truly don't want it?  Who will give in first?  Whoever holds out the longest is the most polite, but if you actually want what they offer you have to give in first, so you have to push it to the last possible moment before caving in. It was nice not having to wait for the train in the cold :)  And the whole evening was very fun too of course!  It was such a different way to spend Christmas, but still a great day!




Random Note about Great Things:
During my interview with Brown [over the phone, 3 days before I got in...very last minute!] my interviewer and I were talking about Japanese things and shodou came up.  I told her I take lessons, and she said, "Oh really!?  You should see if you can get lessons from a Buddhist priest sometime!  They really are the best!  In Tokyo, [where she lives] I can't get them from the priests-- they're to busy!"  Or something like that.  And I guess I never realized how awesome it is that my shodou lessons ARE from a Buddhist priest.  And my 1st host dad is such a good shodou teacher that other Buddhist priests take lessons from him.  Benefit of living in a small town I guess!

Moments Today

Outside of the mandolin club room, there is a pool of wet yellow house paint.  Nanako and I clean it up with old sheet music.  My instincts are making it hard to resist turning this into a body-painting party.  But as soon as it is cleaned up, we go to wash our hands.  It doesn't come off.  Makonee and Megumi join the hand-washing quest-- they tried to clean up a little more after we left.  We end up going to the nurse's office.  [So different from what I would normally do!]  [Also, it's my first time going to the health room... there are 2 girls snuggling in bed and 2 reading a magazine on the floor.  It seems like a place to just relax.]  When we still can't get clean with the nurse's soap, we end up going outside to the maintenance people and getting it off with paint remover.  Nanako cleans my hands for me, and the others say she's like my mother.  She kind of is, in the mandolin world. An hour later, our hands are pink from the scrubbing and the cold [and the chemicals?], and we finally can return to our instruments.

Suzuka and I get very excited when we discover that Jingle Bells exists in both languages.

Walking home, I show Cassiopeia to Megumi.  I successfully explain that it is a swan without knowing the word for swan.  We look for Orion and can't find it.

It's a good thing I went with culture instead of instincts in the paint situation, because it turns out that what I thought was a casual dinner with my first host family is actually a 7 course French meal at a resort in the mountains with various priests, professional temple builders from Kyoto, and an opera singer.  I discover that though I may be able to explain a swan, I cannot explain the difference between a priest and a monk.




Ok so done being all poetical and stuff like that.  :]
other good moment, though not today:
I was going to a Rotary meeting last Monday, and a Rotarian was driving me there.  His two little sons were in the back seat.  For the drive there, they were very very shy.  They would scream and hide their faces if I just looked in their direction.  On the way back, the 8 year old was very curious about me.  He asked me lots of questions.  The one thing that really freaked him out was that I spoke English.  I hadn't spoken any English in front of him ever, yet he still got really anxious, saying "I completely don't speak American!!  I don't even understand AT ALL!  Don't let her speak American!  I only speak Japanese!  I just DON"T UNDERSTAND!"  It was actually really cute.

Also, in my last post I forgot to mention that I went to Tokyo, which was definitely contributing to my happiness.  It was soooo completely different.  Like a different culture.  But not.  But still, so different.  I'll need to live in a Japanese city sometime if I really want to know Japan I think.  Anyway, I went with Annika, the other exchange student in the district [she's German and very awesome] and the four outbounds.  We spent the first day going to different parts of Tokyo.. Akihabara, Ginza, etc, and the 2nd day at Disneyland!  Funfunfun.

Once again, I know I have about 10 million things I'm forgetting.  Gotta blog more often!!!

Hey Guess What? My Life is Absolutely Perfect.

So much is falling into place/becoming perfect at the same time.

First off, I got into Brown!!!!!  How is that even possible??  I'm ridiculously ecstatic.  I have fits of uncontrollable happiness, and I bet people think it is kind of weird when out of the blue I burst into a huge smile and start vibrating.

Second awesome thing:  Friends.
When I first got here, everyone said "Japanese people are shy!  Don't feel bad if your schoolmates are a little reserved at first!"  And initially, I thought they were wrong, because everyone was super friendly to me.  But there is a difference between being friendly to me and treating me like a normal friend.  So I realized after a while that they were, in fact, a little reserved around me.  And I had to get used to the Japanese style of friendship too.  But now, I feel like I really have become a normal friend to them.  It really makes me happy.  The turning point [I think] was this past Thursday and Friday.  I went to study camp with my whole grade.  We stayed in little log cabins up in the mountains.  Since we were so high in the mountains, there was snow!!  Snow makes me hugely happy.  When we got off the bus, I was soooo excited! [I had slept the whole way there, so I hadn't known there would be snow.]  I immediately started catching snowflakes on my tongue and initiated a snowball fight.  It was the first time my friends had ever seen me really truly unavoidably thrilled.  I think that seeing me being ridiculously happy kind of opened a door... they saw my true self more than usual I guess.  Anyway, I taught them how to make snow angels and we played tag and Japanese Red Light Green Light and slid around on icy hills and just generally had a really fun time.  Also, the meals were all buffet style, which brought back happy ASP memories.  Another good thing was that my Japanese suddenly was good enough that I was essentially uninhibited in social interaction.  All of the things I want to talk about are connected... so I'm going to come back to friends/college/the perfection of my life in a minute.

But now:  the Japanese language update.
For a while I felt like I wasn't progressing very well, but that changed.  And now I can tell I'm on the verge of a new zooom upward [english vocabulary = :[... I forgot the word for "plum" today.]  But this zooooom up is a big one... I feel that it will take me to a level where I can fully interact with people, get the grammar right all the time, and basically be fully functional.  I already am functional, but in a not-grammatically-correct sort of way.  I still need a lot of hand motions and people to say things twice sometimes and often get the grammar wrong.  HAPPY THING:  I had to make another speech for Rotary, and so I wrote it at school.  I had my host mom check the grammar and the whole thing was correct! the only mistake was from reading the dictionary wrong.  legit, ONE LETTER was wrong!!  Before when I wrote speeches, my host mom had to rewrite the whole thing for me.  ALSO exciting: my host mom says my pronunciation is getting really good! After being told for my whole life that no one can hear me and I mumble and generally am terrible at speaking, it makes mer really happy to move past that.

So back to college/friends.
I found out about Brown on Tuesday morning before school.  When I got to school, I was SO excited to tell my friends that this is how the conversation went:
Friends:  Ohayou!!  [Good morning!]
Me: OHAYOU DAIGAKU DAIGAKU DAIGAKU!!!  [GOOD MORNING UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY!!!!]
Friends:  eeeh?
Me: DAIGAKU HAIRU HAIRU BROWN DAIGAKU HAIRU! [UNIVERSITY ENTER ENTER I WILL ENTER BROWN UNIVERSITY!]
Friends: AHH ohhhhYAY Omedetou!!! Sugoi!  [ahh ohhhh yay congrats super]
Haruna: ... Emma Watuson?  [I told her about Brown before... no one here know about it, so I just told her it's where Emma Watson goes]
Me: Hai Hai Issho!!  [yes yes together/the same!!]
Friends:!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH SUGOI SUGOIAHHHHHHHHHHH
*High Fives, squealing, jubilation*
Me: ToDai, KyoDai mitai!  [it's like Tokyo University or Kyoto University]
Friends:  AHHHHHHHH atama ii oOOOOO [ahhhhhhh good head ooooooo]
*jubilation, high fives*
*Continues for quite a bit longer*

Anyway... the point is that they were WAY more excited than I thought they would be.  They really cared and were truly happy for me.  [and were superrrr excited about emma watson.  if i might her, i am required to send them her signature.]  More evidence that they really are good friends, and that they care about me much more than I realized.  I felt for a long time that they just were babysitting me, and I worried they resented me, but now I see that that is completely not the case.  Yay.
Also, this is another instance when they got a peek at my true culturally/situation-independent self.  Which brings us closer.  Being absolutely overjoyed is a good way to make friends, apparently.
Getting into college and all that is obviously a pretty big deal in Japan, so people are always SUPER excited for me when I tell them I got in.  My host mom made me a special dinner!  Pink rice, sashimi [with the fish head and tail on the plate!], clam soup, etc.  My previous host family gave me a fancy pen and mechanical pencil for lots of studying.

Other good friend thing:  My mandolin friends [who are 2nd years... I've talked about them before] went on a class trip to Hiroshima.  My three closest friends brought me back souvenirs!  Yes, the cookies and candies are delicious and the earrings are cute, but the best part to me is that they thought about me while they were on their trip and took the time to pick something for me and remembered to bring it to school and all that.  The 10 minute walk home with them is seriously the best part of my day, and I'm glad they care about me too.

Evidence of exchange success:
Adaptation:  I now apologize when someone else drops something and I pick it up for them.
Being a good influence:
         Me:  *happy happy happy obsessing about college*
        Yuuka: [to Suzuka, but I overheard IN JAPANESE] Burijitto-chan is so happy about getting into                                           university!  It makes me want to study harder!

This is how perfect my life is right now:
I have always wished on stars.  Usually, I wish for a variety of different things, but when something big is coming, I wish for the same thing every day.  [For example, "Star light star bright first star i see tonight i wish i may i wish i might...pass my driving test and get my license... not have any terrible problems during my travel to japan... get into brown...etc].  Last night, walking home from mandolin club, I saw the first star in the sky and just stalled.  I had this strange moment when I had no idea what to do.  I had nothing to wish for... there is nothing else I want.  I ended up wishing to learn more Japanese quickly, because I can always use more of that.  But really, I am so content.

Even though my life is perfect at the moment, I do not feel that this is the high point of my life.  It may be one of the best times so far, but this is only the beginning. If my life has become this wonderful in just 17 years, I can't even imagine what it will turn into in the years to come.  [Especially with Brown as the foundation.  gahhhhhhhhhhhh cannot contain my excitement!]  I have set the bar very very high for myself, and I intend to meet that expectation.  I'm sooooooooooo completely thrilled about my life.

Erika and Haruna.  Yay friends!

I hope you enjoyed this novel-length explosion of rainbows and unicorns.

WWII awkwardness, Racial Differences, Buddhism and Mistakes, Places I Feel at Home

Watching a movie about WWII for 2.5 hours today was a little awkward.  I was worried that after repetitively seeing their people be blown to bits my my people, my friends would shun me.  But it was not so.  Instead of shunning me, they taught me how to say "sunshine."  No one even mentioned that I was from the US.  I actually would have liked to talk about it a little.  The movie was emotionally rough for everyone [lots of people cried] and I tend to want to talk things like that through afterward.  But I realized that the awkwardness was not in the atmosphere, but just in me, and caused by my worry.  No one blames me for what happened, just like I don't hold anything against them.  And I hope that after my year here the first thing that comes to people's minds when they think of the US is that tall confused and friendly girl, and not how their grandparents died or that gory movie they saw in school.


I'm having racial problems in mandolin, in the most non-problematic and amusing way possible.  They keep trying to fix the way I hold the mandolin, but it is just physically impossible.  My limbs [specifically my arms] are too long to hold the mandolin the correct Japanese way.  So they'll kind of look at how I hold it, and then try to adjust it so my elbow is closer to the instrument, but then the pick ends up half way up the neck, so they try to readjust me, and eventually we just all give up.


Today I went back to my temple for a shodo event.  About 80 people came, and we all spent about an hour writing out a Buddhist prayer/chant.  Before and after, there was "Namu Amida Bu"-ing and ceremonial things like that.  Because of where I was sitting, I had to carry up a bowl of flowers and put it on the altar.  I think I managed to do it correctly!!  The shodo part though... I made lots of mistakes.  But part of what I love about Buddhism [I don't know if it is just this area, or all of Buddhism actually] is that no one cares if you make a mistake.  I was worried at first when I started being involved that I would make lots of mistakes and RUIN THE WHOLE CEREMONY.  I saw all these rituals and thought they must be incredibly sacred and must be done perfectly.  Yes, they are sacred, but Buddhists are generally nice understanding people.  And it isn't so serious all the time.   If I do something wrong, I'm not interrupting some fragile channel connecting them momentarily to their source of truth, I'm just making it obvious I'm a foreigner, and the ceremony goes on.  It seems to me that Buddhism in Japan isn't really so much of a religion, in the way I'm used to defining religion, but more of a cultural tradition.   [I didn't wreck any ceremonies today... I just am bad at writing kanji and accidentally skipped a whole line].  I find it amusing that it is now a normal part of my life to have coffee with half a dozen men in big robes and shaved heads.  I also realized that by Japanese standards, I'm Buddhist.  I don't know if I am by my own standards, but I've gone on the trips and I go to shodo every week and other temple events, which is what Japanese Buddhist do.  [this ties back to it being more of a cultural thing than a religious thing].  I guess the real test of my Buddhism would be where I had my funeral, but I don't plan on having that any time soon.  


It was odd for me today going from my current home to my old home.  It seems strange to have 2 places that feel like home [I really don't know why, seeing that I've had 2 homes for more than half of my life].  Also, there are at least 5 people I think of as some sort of motherly figure.  [My real mom, my two host moms, the Spanish woman here, and Cynthia.]  I guess "home" no longer means "where a person lives" but is more along the lines of "a place that a person knows well and feels safe and loved."  And "mother" is no longer "the woman who ejected me from her womb" but "any woman that takes care of me." [Mom... I definitely don't just think of you as a womb. If I was less tired right now I'd make that sound less harsh.  But you know I love you <3].




Random note:


I still get freaked out when I see people eating or reading in the left front seat of cars.  

|>o<| <-- I can make a bow :)

   For a while, I felt frustrated that my friends at school are all younger than me.  I stopped minding a while ago though, because there isn't anything I can do about it, and they're funny.  Then, while walking up to our mandolin concert, I found out one of my best friends in the club has the exact same birthday as me!  After wishing for friends closer to my age, I came across someone precisely my age.

       This is one of the reasons I'm glad the joining-the-rock-band thing didn't work out.  The people in the band are all 1st years.  I wouldn't have met any new people either.  It probably would have been fun, true, but since it didn't work [all the school rock bands are already established and I can't just hop into one midway through the year] I joined mandolin.  Everyone in mandolin was new to me, and they are mostly 2nd years, which is the grade I would be in if I was placed by age.  So this means lots of new friends who are more likely to become good friends.  And mandolin is every day, so it fills up my time much more nicely than weekly rock band would have.  

     

    I was walking to home the other day, near home, on a drizzly cold day.  There was a big gust of wind, and I immediately felt like I was back at home walking to the barn.  I could almost feel the rough wood of the door, the cold metal handles, and the comfort of getting inside and turning on the lights.  And it made me realize that I don't think I'll ever be able to be homesick, because all of my experiences and emotions have never gone away.  Everything I've ever felt or thought is still there.  I agree with the Vonnegut idea of time that everything exists all at once and we just experience one moment at a time.  But just because a moment isn't the one showing up doesn't mean it isn't just as true.  My whole life is inside of me, and so I can never miss anything because it is all there.  I really should start writing when I'm not ridiculously tired.  This sounds so cliche right now, and it was going to be very insightful. :(

   

Oh my!  How have I forgotten to mention this till now!!!  The baby was born a few days ago!!  I am now a host aunt.  The baby [a girl] is sooo cute.  It makes me a little less repulsed by pregnancy [just a very very little bit].  no name yet.  They're still at the hospital, but they're coming home the day after tomorrow.  Its my first time living with an infant [other than myself].  I wonder what it will be like.

I had a funny experience the other day... My family and I were buying curtains, and my parents asked how mandolin was going.  I showed them my new callouses [I'm so proud of them], and my host dad whipped a little spray bottle out of his briefcase/purse and started spraying my hands.  I asked why, he said it was so that they wouldn't hurt.  I asked what it was... it was water.  The whole experience just seemed so strange and unexpected, especially because after ward he started spritzing his hair.  

As usual, I'm forgetting lots of things I wanted to say and the things I'm saying are coming out wrong.  

Sooo pictures instead :)

Concert Garb and Mandolin

My neighborhood.  Cloudy day.

So Japanese :D  [with Annika from Germany and her host sister Yuri]