Originally posted 2009-09-24 at https://inpixels09.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/%e5%a4%96%e5%9b%bd%e4%ba%ba/

My host sister, Misaki, stayed with a mexican family (mother) when she lived in the U.S., which she loves to talk about. maybe, she will study spanish in the future.

i asked her if she wanted to go eat mexican food, (loves taco bell…) and she was into it. we went and found the only one in this valley and the next one over, had a solid coupla neatly prepared burritos, and got on the train home…

now, i have been surrounded by nothing but japanese folks for about 5 weeks. on the train, i spotted some nice looking white folks, got excited, and wasnt sure where they were from, but goaded misaki into starting up a conversation with ’em. (you dont quite do that… in japan)

we had a great, trainride long conversation about japan with a pair of honeymooning canadians, just graduated from college and spending 3 weeks walking, training and busing all over japan. as we were weaving through the mountains, from one valley to the adjacent one, misaki and i attempted to explain country japan vs. city japan. if you look out the window, it comes pretty easy.

when i started the conversation, it was in japanese. but that was short-lived. just to make sure.

and, as it turns out, canadians are a lot like americans, but with better manners and, according to them, less fast food. i learned quite a bit from talking to people from a country 45 minutes away, and it felt great to speak in english.

it feels great to remember that you speak a language, well, and that you can make your ideas known, unrestricted.

other than that, i dont see many foreigners these days… if i do, i make every effort to catch their eyes and start a conversation, which doesnt happen often enough. except for reading, i spend my entire day in japanese… im succumbing…

people in my dreams speak to me in japanese, asian or not.

the characters in my book, though clearly having nothing to do with japan, have put on japanese faces and mimic the way people here move through the japanese aether.

I decided i would write about this the other day, when i saw myself in a mirror, at school, and was excited for a moment.

I like to think that the universe is large, very large indeed.

you know that line at the end of transformers, where plasmatron or whatever the hell his name stands on a cliff, with the sun shining epic on his metal plates, and says

“this is a call to autobots roaming the stars”

(if i am incorrect, excuse me. if you correct me, !?)

yeah, so imagine me, paler than when i left and sitting, with the lamp-light reflecting smeared in my hair, surfing the internet for some semblance of foreign life.

-J

Comments (1)

janhack — 2009-09-25

OMG you are transforming! I feel like sending you a blimpie burger fedex just to remember your roots! Must be time for another jar of peanut butter, maybe you could stream the UM game tomorrow on the internet? xox