TO: Miako

i had fun in itami! i'm gonna find myself a pool in thewad (eventually) and practice my frog swim. good luck with the move back home. i'm sure i'll see you again on the habitat trip :P

remember to keep me updated on the man-situation! i give it four weeks :).

~ until our next spontaneous shopping excursion ~

one last beer with the boys at our bar in kishiwada, labo. my stomach was hurting, i thought, from excessive drinking but now i realize that my stomach was cramping at the thought of saying goodbye. it's been an amazing JET year and i'll treasure these memories always.

Fw:Mt. Fuji

Fw:Mt. Fuji
Originally uploaded by thechristine.

climbed the beloved fuji-san last weekend. we made it to about 3,400 meters out of 3,776m. it was fun but exhausting. way too many people on that mountain. it was like disneyland without mickey mouse: one long line up to the summit. we did have captain japan, our tour leader, and he was just as ubiquitous as mickey. his somewhat annoying voice with the stretched out vowels (nishiitaanii-saaan! arre?!), ordering us to walk slowly and to drink water. he stopped us from climbing any further up the mountain because the rain and heavy wind made it too dangerous. we were shocked and disappointed but were too tired by that point to put up much of a fuss. slept for a few hours and woke up at dawn to make our way down the mountain.

[[my eyes are sweaty]]

maybe. if. i. don't. move. and. don't. breathe. . . I'll stop sweating like a pedophile in a playground (okay maybe not the most appropriate analogy). it's so freaking hot. weather.com tells me it's 84 degrees but feels like 95 (84% humidity). damn right it feels like 95 degrees!! uck. half the kids are asleep in class because it's too hot to concentrate (nothing but weak fans and open windows to relieve us from the hell-heat). i don't bother to wake them up because all i want to do is pull up a chair next to them and go to sleep myself.

貿易摩擦

(two years of japanese in college and this is the one word that sticks the most in my mind.)

it's really hard to articulate but sometimes i feel like i'm not really living my life. i feel like i'm living in this hazy cloud and i recall memories like i had seen them in an album and not really experienced them. this is actually kind of true because i take hundreds of pictures. which is good and bad. good because i can look and remember otherwise i'd forget. bad because instead of living in the moment, i'm focusing on the angle of a shot. vicious cycle. i had thought it was depression but now i just don't know. it's like i'm not mentally THERE a lot of the time and it's incredibly frustrating. i have to focus really hard to listen to people and to pay attention to my surroundings otherwise my brain just drifts back into its hazy cloud. i don't think i used to be like this . . .