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

[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.