Finally!

Well, I finally sat down and made it. The blog is here. Hopefully I'll be a little more dilligent about posting than I am about doing other things... like sleeping or eating. ANyway, on to something interesting... maybe.

I'm now living in Japan. I've been here for four months and have been variously confused, frustrated, awed, disgusted, puzzled, interested, fascinated and virtually any state you can think of besides those ranging into the deathly ill, dead or crimial states. Today, I am anxious, frustrated, lonely and mildly disaffected.

Yesterday, I went to an American Thanks Giving feast. I had intended to help, but my perenial propensity to find other things to do in an intermitently unconscious way leading time to disappear at an alarming and untraceable rate led me to show a mere two hours before D-hour. I moved tables, carried plates and generally conversed with the people already working at creating a feast for 120 people. However, I was feeling that kind of feeling you get when you haven't really had any good community time. I was surrounded by people, but none of them had known me for any longer than four months, and most of them not even that. They had no idea who I really was, because as I sorted out on a walk I took as an escape from that bustle, they were never fully clear, open and honest with me, nor I with them.

The JET programme seems to demand of people that they be relentlessly chipper and outgoing, while at the same time, inciting the most severe of alienated, lonely and lost feelings. People seem to rise to the challenge with gusto, but there's always something going on, people keeping busy, and there's usually a lot of alcohol involved. Not that that isn't pleasant, but it affords limited opportunities to spill your guts to people.

Spilling one's guts, it seems, is often exactly what one needs to feel safe and real again. In reflecting upon my troubled state of mind, I determined, for the third time since coming here, that "indeed, leaving everything you love and care about to go to a place that is filled with things for which you have a subtly deceiving average interest" is hugely difficult. I am adapting, but I miss home a whole lot. I miss the people, the landscape, the language, even the silly politics. I miss my community. I miss Waterloo and my old haunts and companions. I needed to be able to tell someone that yesterday and have them care, but everyone is so close to crying or is so done with that state that you just can't open up. So, we get drunk instead. I know from my donning days that this is indeed a healthy way to deal with issues. No problem is so difficult that a few stiff whiterussians can't help with the perspective... which leads me to this link...

http://www.asahi.com/english/nation/TKY200406180160.html

Anyway, I managed to get through the evening with my pride and reputation intact. However, I've resolved to start paying more attention to the close friends I've developed over the years, and send them all post cards and cards at Christmas.