A Happy New Year To Alll Our Readers

[poliphilo]

I overslept by an hour- I guess that's traditional- but I wasn't late to bed. I stood at the upstairs window and watched the fireworks and then- at about five past midnight- turned in.

2005 already. It only seems moments ago that we were counting up to the millennium.

I've been noticing this recently - how I'll call up a memory and it'll seem like something I've only just done. For instance, I was packing up the Christmas tree decorations yesterday and I thought, hey, why am I doing this again so soon?

It's like we can fold time like paper. The present moment and the remembered moment touch and the time between is off to one side- disregarded.

I spent the dying minutes of the old year watching a couple of minor celebs get transformed- by the magic of prosthetics- into persons of the opposite sex. At the end of the process they looked like burns victims who had had their faces patched up with skin off their backsides- distinctly weird. They then had to go speed dating and fool a room full of people. I guess the
moral is that speed daters don't look too hard at the people sitting opposite.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

A quiet night here: Kate spun wool on her new spinning wheel as we watched fifth season episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation. (An interesting juxtaposition!)

I'm so glad to have met you and Ailz in 2004, and I wish you both a happy new year.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I am so glad to have met you too.

Happy 2005

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Each year, Time moves faster. Each year, it's over before it even really began. My life is so dull, for the most part, that I cannot even remember much of what came between January 1st and December 31st.

I've never been good at marking milestones anyway, really. People ask me "When" questions, and I am never sure of the answers at all. I think they must think I am senile, but it's really just that Time has never been something to quantify or try to capture.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I am hopeless at dates and anything with numbers in. I just about remember my own birthday.

But even when I was a vicar (and this is quite true) I couldn't ever get it straight whether Christmas Day was the 24th or the 25th.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

2005 already. It only seems moments ago that we were counting up to the millennium.

I wrote a check this morning, and it seemed like just the other day I was checking my checkbook to see if it was Y2K compliant. How can it have been that long ago?

Folding time. Sounds like an episode of Dr. Who...

Happy New Year.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think there's a theory that we might one day be able to reach far-off star systems not by travelling the distance (which would take ages)but by folding space (and time.)

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Tesseracts!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Erm...yes.

I just googled 'em and had a Homer Simpson experience. You know, where someone is explaining something to him and you see this bubble above his head full of cartoon animals. I was always terrified of mathematics. :)

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I should have said that the only reason I know what a tesseract is, is because of Madeleine L'Engle's book "A Wrinkle in Time". The concept is basically as you described, folded space. (Thus, the wrinkle in time...)

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

your weird feeling about doing things so soon- i keep getting a similar kind of feeling, but it's about places. i keep thinking- haven't i been here before? but it's always like- i'll be walking up the road to my house, surrounded by japanese junk, and i'll get the weirdest dejavu thing that it's kinda the same as walking home in bolton was. or i'll be watching a movie in my room and i'll be expecting joe or al to call up to me from downsairs or something.
hmmm.
it sounds kinda freaky but it's actually really nice. it feels like ghosts. of places, and people. surrounding me and making stuff warmer and comfortable.
hmm.
actually not all that similar to yours- but- i guess- the mind playing tricks, eh?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Straaange.

I guess your mind is trying to make sense of these new experiences in terms of older, familiar ones. Also there's probably a little home-sickness stirred into the mix.

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

mmm- it's funny cos i never had this here before. part of it feels like- familiarity, cos i'm used to it. and the other part is like- this could be astley bridge, or dunscar, or anywhere. the fact that it isn't doesn't stop it from having that feel sometimes.
yeah- weird.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there's a part of you that still expects Japan to be foreign and exotic and is surprised to find that it isn't.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

This was my big discovery: you have to empty the garbage everywhere you live.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

What a neat way of putting it!

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

The last time I was in Japan, in 1988, I went to Tokyo for the first time with a boatload of college students determined to get into trouble.

On the bus from Narita, their eyes were SO BIG. I felt like I was visiting Boston. Not that it really felt like Boston, but because it felt vaguely familiar, like Boston does. (I used to visit friends there several times/year, but haven't been for a long time.)

It was so exotic to my students and felt so normal to me, I was sad to be so jaded.

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

i felt the same way when i first arrived here. that's over a year ago now. like- it was just the same as any other nondescript american city. i'd come wanting it to blow my mind but it didn't come close.
hmm.
it never did, really. not in that kind of way. and in the meantime? it's just been getting more familiar. just another place to live.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I think the key is to stay out of Tokyo. I never lived there--I lived in Kyoto and in Nagoya. Also, I first went to Japan in 1976, and it was a different place. I never lived in an apt. with hot running water, or a bath. One apt, I couldn't even get a fridge into (stairs too steep, ceiling too low), so I lived without for nearly three years. The first place I lived (a house in Kyoto) didn't have a flush toilet.

I spent two weeks walking the Nakasendo (the inland road from Tokyo to Kyoto), and that certainly gave me a taste of true isolation.