2012.

“New Year”

When the ball drops,
A million particles are displaced.
When the sand settles, nothing can ever be
Exactly the same.

As I’m being driven home for the first time in eleven months,
The new sign over the QEW isn’t as insignificant as I’d like to believe.

Tell me how to start again in a new place
Dreaming, awake, and with music that will move my body,
And not my heart.
It needs to be stationary (though all the more fragile for it).
I’ll commit to these lines,
My blood will be my ink;
Red on red.

Tell me again,
If there is satisfaction in repetition.
I trip over new things, and I
Can’t keep my cool for all my shaking.
I’ve got to shed old skin.

Ten nine eight seven six five four three
Ten nine eight seven six five four three
Ten nine eight seven six five four three

heart.

For the first time during my stay in Japan, someone – another English teacher – actually told me that he wishes he had somewhere to go back to like Canada. As I told him about having been home over the holidays and how it reminded me of all the things I really miss and talked about (most likely) returning for the fall, he actually expressed a hint of jealousy. Finally, I thought. Someone who isn’t going to talk about how they never want to go back home. Oh, it’s such a drag and Japan’s so interesting. Why would you ever want to leave? Someone who could appreciate my sentiment. He doesn’t want to go back to his home because England, he says, is just all terrible weather and zero job prospects. But he’s thought of moving to Canada.

Home is where the heart is, and there’s no place like it.

things I thought I knew.

From October 2005:

“Selfish altruism”. Take for example two altruistics dating each other. They continually do things only for the other person, and in turn, all of their selfish (ego) needs are satisfied. However, an altruistic in a relationship with a non-altruistic results in an unhealthy relationship. The first one gives and gives, getting nothing but companionship in return. The latter gets consistent, whole-hearted attention, but is never aware that s/he needs to give a little as well (or a lot). Neither individual can grow, or change with the other. Both’s weaknesses (if you want to call them that) are emphasized. The altruistic never realizes or accepts the importance of getting something in return and the non-altruistic never realizes the importance of giving back.

green ii.

art that is hurtful, but honest, I think, is far better than art which is sweet, but an utter lie (Emi Morimoto, Twitter, 19 December 2011).

“my friend, the environmentalist”

He was a mentalist, alright.
I mean, picture this:
a person who keeps all  his stuff – his mugs, his t-shirts, his milk, his stale bread, his stale memories, his worn-through socks, his cassette tapes and VCR’s, his past relationships, his old habits – lined up on shelves, stuffed in drawers “just in case”, for “future use” that will never come to fruition.
I’m not describing him, exactly, but it’s how he was with his words – old dusty words, seemingly novel on the basis of their being so unexpected, out of context, out of date. Not completely irrelevant, though, like that old copy of some 1970′s novel that was at a time, highly acclaimed by someone somewhere, with the cardboard-like bounding that’s been passed down through generations of high school students. You’re never too sure why you should care, but you feel obligated to anyway.
I mean, imagine:
a person who tries to cut down so much on what they own in an effort to have less stuff to the point of them actually having not enough. One plate isn’t enough to enjoy a meal in with anyone else. That one pair of jeans quickly develops holes around the knees. The one tablecloth will gradually become an imprecise map of all the meals that have ever graced your table.
I’m not describing him, exactly, but it’s how he was with his relationships.
I mean no disrespect – he’s still a good friend of mine. If you meet him, be kind and forget what I’ve told you. But, be careful, because:
when he listens to you, he’s collecting the best of your thoughts and words to later scatter them about like a flock of wild birds as he puts them to use in his isolation, in his art, and my friends, here’s the worst part: oh, he knows he’s using you and the subtly disguised abuse, it reduces you and when you think you know what’s happening, when you you think you understand, the desire he evokes, it recycles you. Oh, do what I couldn’t, break out of the cycle before he can reduce, reuse, and recycle you too.

(July 2011)

it doesn’t quit you.

There are days that being here feels like being in some kind of suspense/horror movie. The way that time doesn’t feel like it exists. The feelings of isolation from everything back home. The inability to communicate properly with people here. A friend here who’s from the States commented the other day that she doesn’t really miss her friends and family all that much. She had a reasonable explanation for it, but it made me a little sad. Anyway, it’s like Japan is this place where foreigners come to do some sightseeing and living and never escape because they get sucked into all the fun things there are to do here and the beauty, and there’s something weird in the atmosphere that makes you forget about everything back home. It’s a strange feeling sometimes.

Which is not to say I’m forgetting about everything back home. You can be sure of that.

A good friend of mine here quit smoking for his 34th birthday, back in early July. He’d tried several times before, but it just didn’t stick. As we played tennis the other morning, I asked how that was going, and he said it was going really well – no problems, in fact. I asked what was different this time around and his reply, “I was ready to quit. Every other time before, I just wasn’t committed to the idea”.

Committed to the idea of quitting. It’s conscious. I was thinking about this yesterday and it’s painfully obvious, but so applicable to other things: smoking will never quit you. Our bad habits are indifferent to the problems they cause us. We are responsible. It’s easy to think that it’s out of our control, to blame it on other things, to blame the problems on the habits themselves, when it’s our own commitment to those habits that create the problems in the first place.

There are things I often hope will change. I want to be more upfront with people, less passive. I want to stop putting up with things that bring me down, and stop putting myself in situations that make me uncomfortable. I often hope that I will wake up one morning and that will be the morning. The morning that I’m committed to the idea. The morning that I make a conscious decision and stick to it. As if I want to wake up and the conscious decision will have been made un-consciously for me in my sleep.

I’m beginning to better understand that it doesn’t work like that.

ramble.

One of the people I met here was from Montreal, and I can already talk about her in the past tense because she went home in August after only being in Japan for eight or nine months. One of the last times I saw her, I commented that I’m glad that she’s leaving. I went on to explain that I didn’t mean it negatively, but that I also don’t want to be in Japan for a long time, but it’s so easy to get caught up in being here. She gave me hope that when I wanted to leave, I would be able to leave. She’s back in Montreal. She was just tagged in a few pictures on Facebook and she looks right at home.

In one of my poems about being in Japan, I say, “I went half way around the world because I couldn’t confront my problems”. I was stuck in jobs I didn’t really want. I wanted to be living on my own. I didn’t know what I was doing. I mean, a lot of these problems could’ve been solved if I didn’t have the dream of coming to Japan in the first place. I would’ve looked for a teaching contract, I would get a job and move out, and maybe I’d even have been able to find a relationship that would eventually go somewhere. But Japan. The possible cause of my problems and what I hoped would be the resolution to those very problems.

In a conversation with another half-Japanese Canadian this past weekend, I said I’d be happy living in Niagara. I love the place. Ultimately, I’d be happy living anywhere. Like I said, it’s easy to get caught up in being here. It’s beautiful. I’ve got a decent, well-paying job. I’ve met some great people. But Canada and the States are beautiful too. And I can find a decent, well-paying job there too. And my favourite people are there. My friend commented that it’s just important to be somewhere else and seeing that for yourself, before getting that good job and settling down. See other places and learn for yourself that you can be happy anywhere (or, I guess, that you can’t). He’s from Toronto and he learned that, but then he got married here and he’s been here for awhile.

I’m not going anywhere with this.

green.

There are a lot of feelings of jealousy that happen, especially as we approach my favourite season. What I wouldn’t give to be at home decorating the Christmas tree, baking cookies, making gingerbread houses, listening to Christmas music with my family, anticipating the candle light stroll, getting excited about snow (it’ll probably be awhile yet til the first snow in Osaka), watching Christmas movies.

It is nice to see pictures of everyone back home getting into the spirit of things, tweeting about Christmas things, Instagramming, Facebooking, and whatever else. But it evokes these terrible feelings. I just want to be at home with my family and friends.

dream sequence.

In the continuing cinematic-like dream sequence that is sometimes my life, I had a number of interesting encounters this weekend. I sometimes feel so passive, as though I am standing still and everything is happening to me. I’ve felt like this for years, really.

I was standing in front of a bar that my friend Mats had been doing an acoustic set at, deciding if I should leave or not, when I ended up in a weird half hour conversation with a guy from Western Australia and a guy from California. Deciding I’d better not leave alone straight from a conversation with two strange men, I went back in.

At the poetry reading on Sunday night, a Japanese man I’d met at an improv workshop read a short story he likes. He’s a nervous older man. He shook so much the whole time and he seemed to get progressively more nervous the longer he read. He gave me some beautiful ceramic tableware as a gift for inviting him. He didn’t say much the whole night, but he was so grateful to be there.

Before the poetry reading, I was an improv practice. I sat around with a good group of people for awhile playing games, acting, and goofing around. When I first got there, there was just three of us – all Canadians. We sat around talking in ridiculous Canadian accents.

On Friday night, I stayed in with a couple of good friends. One of them, a sweet Japanese girl, cooked us gratin. We sat around watching animated movies, hiding under a duvet, eating chocolate and drinking Coke, and eventually all fell asleep.

Sometimes I’m certain that I’ll shortly wake up and find out it’s all been a strange, wonderful dream.

geography.

A trip to the Osaka Regional Immigration Bureau the other day introduced me to a part of town I’d never been before: Cosmo Square. It’s located right by a big port, along which is a long walkway, akin to what you might find in some places around Lake Ontario, or alongside the canal. It was beautiful. The sky was a perfect blue, with perfect white clouds. The air was brisk. The smell of the water. I could’ve stayed there forever.

The last time I really looked at Lake Ontario was Sunday, January 16th. It was my last day of work at the Breakfast Corner, and I always parked my car on a side street of Port Dalhousie that, if you looked north, had a great view of the lake. It was a clear day, and the water was a very dark blue. I was back in Port Dalhousie before I left, but everything in the last couple weeks was so rushed, I didn’t take much time to really look at things, except the faces of my friends and family. When my family drove me to the airport in February, it was too dark out to see the lake.

I didn’t expect to miss the geography, the landscape, so much. I miss living a five minute drive, a fifteen minute bike ride, from the lake. Walking alongside the Niagara River on a summer evening or fall afternoon. Driving over the canal at night.

Once a month, I work in this town called Higashi-Kaizuka. It’s far removed from the city, and there are a lot of farms and rice fields. When I’m walking down a long road to the kindergarten where I teach, all the rice fields have a hilly background, and every time I’m there, I think of the escarpment.

Once I left Cosmo Square and came back towards my apartment, through the hustle and bustle of Tennoji, I quickly forgot about the water and the sky. But while I was there, I ached for home. I ached for a meaningful geography, and familiarity.

&hearts.

I think it’s nice when people say “I love you”, or a more brief “Love you”, without inhibitions.