Thursday, September 29, 2005

please note:

1. not feeling so negative as i might come across when i write in here.

2. fall has FALLEN. sigh of cool relief.

3. yesterday i was given a little furry charm critter as a gift, purportedly for kissing power. look out.

4. attended a fashion designers & agents show and got a press pass. realized upon entering that i have no idea how to write about fashion when i know nothing about said topic except what i happen to think is 'pretty.' proceeded to feel even more unhip than usual, which is pretty damn unhip, but that was balanced out by my french fashion rep housemate telling me i 'look so cute today!' it is sad that not having heard this is approximately six weeks, plus being in hyper-image-conscious tokyo equals me loathing myself for looking like an awkward, filthy slob.

5. skype rules.

6. someone who has the french translation of my book asked me to autograph his copy this evening. (!)

7. tomorrow i'm heading to the hot springs of hakone. i'm going to slap a band-aid over my tattoo so i don't get kicked out of the bathhouses (tattoos are associated with the yakuza, the japanese mafia). then a weekend with auntie and cousins.

8. my little brother turns 30 today! good god.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

tokyo random walk

there's a bookshop called 'tokyo random walk' whose name cracks me up because that is what people do here. the tokyo random walk. girls in their stupid, stupid shoes – which are not made for, ya know, walking – totter or shuffle or mince slowly up the street; disaffected, yellow-spiky-haired punkabilly boys charge on by looking disgusted with this pathetic existence; salarymen in business suits continue their serious conversations; high school girls gossip and giggle; old folks somehow manage to carry their groceries home; EVERYONE text-messages away on their pastel-colored, sparkly, jingly phones and NO ONE no one noone walks in a straight line.

tokyoites never seem to bump into each other. meanwhile i've tried everything from being extra careful and trying to predict where people are heading (um: impossible) to barreling ahead with daggers shooting out my eyes, and yet i am always the one confusing people by being in their way. my conclusion is that there are magnets under the street controlling the steering of these people, perhaps run by the bureau of transportation. maybe you get one implanted when you receive your alien registration card? i only have a tourist visa, so. this tokyo random walk, it drives me insane. (but what doesn't?)

so today i honor this phenomenon with the tokyo random post. watch out, i will change directions when you least expect it! no magnets!

you know you've got it bad when you're dreaming about work. i wake up with fabulously wrought sentences on the brain but then realize upon waking that they make no sense. i write in invented grammar and language. or i dream that i'm typing words upon my screen and they begin to rearrange themselves and float off the screen completely. these dreams are frustrating.

t-shirt of the day, from a couple of days ago: EVERY JACK HAS HIS GILL

i have a korean housemate who, everyone living here agrees, is crazy in the best way. she speaks extremely little english but having lived in japan for about ten years, her japanese is excellent. so because there are a few people who are here to study university-level japanese, and a few who speak almost none at all, and one (OK, me) who speaks like i have lived in a cave since the age of three, she uses a lot of facial expression and physical gesture to communicate, all the while speaking bera bera bera bera* in japanese. she has made almost everyone in the house take bites of the chilis she eats every morning, dipped in a little miso. they have produced flames on the tongues of every person who has bravely tried them, and i know when she's ignited another victim because i can hear them in the kitchen making loud hyperventilating noises for about ten minutes while laugh-crying. i've eaten some hot chilis in my day, but ow. she is hilarious and makes friends everywhere she goes and i wish i could have deeper conversations with her – but am limited by the sad extent of my language skills.

weekend after next i'm going to visit my aunt, who lives near the base of mt fuji. her four two-year-old grandchild died suddenly two years ago from some type of meningitis, i think, from how my mom explained it to me and how the big R diagnosed it from that story. my cousin who lost this son bore her second son recently, and the weekend i'm visiting i will meet him for the first time and commemorate the passing of his older brother (whom i never met), on the second anniversary of his death. this cousin was unable to come to tokyo last year when my family surprised me by meeting for dinner en masse. so despite the sort of complicated circumstances, i'm looking forward to seeing her for the first time in several years.

tonight i had a macrobiotic japanese dinner at a place where STEVIE WONDER has dined. afterwards he played the piano for an hour. they still talk about it in the neighborhood, says the owner.

oh, and soy ice cream: blech.



* japanese onomatopeaia for talking a lot, really fast.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

komai mono *

we must cross deserts alone and often perish along the way, we must move to where we can start our lives over, and when we get there, we must keep on knocking at the gate, shouting and pounding with our fists, until those who happen to be keepers of the gate are also moved to admiration and open the gate. we are the planet, fully as much as its water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle. – russell banks

you know how when one of the most historically intriguing, musically vibrant, architecturally pretty, and culturally unique cities in the US gets slammed by a hurricane and sits underwater and its people abandoned for days by its own government, and you think HOW could this happen in one of the richest countries in the world in 2005? me too.

i've been spending most of my waking hours working (though some days are measurably less productive than others). and working on two concurrent and somewhat overlapping spy assignments means: i got no life.

however, the last week or so has had me reassessing what having 'no life' means, and what i've got certainly fits the conventional definition of 'life.' so i took a day off of roaming the streets and slow-roasting my brains in the hot, hot heat, and instead stayed in, pondered and mulled, and got some writing done.

it rained in the afternoon, that warm summer rain that dumps out of the sky here like someone slapped a huge cloud so hard that it burst into liquid. in the late afternoon i went across town to look for a natural foods restaurant. which experience revealed to me again how lucky i am to be alive, and in tokyo, and having someone pay me (peanuts) to go eat traditional japanese food i want to eat anyway, and zigzag down back alleys with narrow café shopfronts framed with noren (doorway curtains) and potted plants, and stumble upon a sale at a contemporary art museum's shop where i can pick up a 1989 anthology of essays on post-pop art and also a hand-printed handkerchief.

restaurants that represent themselves as 'healthy' around tokyo – even though most traditional japanese restaurants are pretty inherently healthy, what with all the seaweeds and the thousands of soybean products and the fermented foods for promoting good bacteria in your guts – aren't necessarily vegetarian. they might serve vegan dishes as well as macrobiotic meals and free-range, organically-fed chickens or cows. i arrived at this place just as it opened and was the only customer in the house. after ordering one of their set dinners, i cracked my new-old post-pop book, and then, like a cartoon, all the staff in the restaurant piled out the door.

they'd gathered outside to ooh and ahh at the sky changing colors through the summer haze as the sun set. my sweet elfin waitress came back inside to wave me towards the window so i could look, too. isn't it pretty? she breathed, her eyes wide in a smile. then she told me how the floor-to-ceiling windows faced west, so every evening they could see the sky sometimes turning pink, and purple. to be honest, at first i found the view a little depressing because it was an orangey smoggy backdrop behind concrete buildings and a bland urban skyline. but as we watched, the sun started shooting its light out in that way it does as it sets, making the clouds and haze look metallic, almost, and magical and mysterious and more than just water droplets and pollution in the atmosphere as the earth made another turn.

then dinner came, on a square white porcelain platter bisected with some stalks of straw. bowls and dishes arranged on the platter held steaming brown rice, miso soup in a lacquer bowl, natto (fermented soybeans), mustard and chopped green onion, sweet green beans in black sesame paste, tofu mixed with root vegetables. a shot glass filled with slightly sweet, cloudy white sake. later, one of the chefs came out to talk with me; he spoke english, had lived in seattle to study but mostly snowboarded. everyone who worked there was so gentle, and open and unpretentious – exactly what i needed just that evening.

funny how one smoke-free, solitary meal can be so restorative. today, feeling grateful to simply be alive.


* little things

Saturday, September 03, 2005

katrina errata

just a note: if you've got US$5 to spare, that's the minimum donation you can make to the american red cross. you can do it through a secure credit card transaction; it took me about thirty seconds to donate from tokyo. (obviously, the more you can spare, the better.)

hope everyone you know is safe. this new orleans TV station has set up message boards for people searching for friends & family, or for people saying they're OK.