i’m just so terribly tired. i’m terribly tired from work and marking and all the little admin duties that are simple in themselves but terrifying when piled up. i no longer dare to check my email; i can’t face it without a sense of dread. i want to throw in the towel and say, look, i can’t do this. i can’t live like this, constantly worrying, fretting, double-guessing and over-thinking. i’ve made so many errors and mistakes and i’m so tired but i can’t sleep at night because i dream of work and i wake thinking of the things i need to do and have yet to do. i want to do well because part of me feels responsible for what happens although everyone tells me that i don’t figure much in the grand scheme of things and a mediocre teacher never really causes harm- but is that true?

though i know a little (a lot) of it is pride- i can’t settle for mediocrity and it’s really my own fault that i drive myself crazy thinking and over-thinking. it’s this constant push-pull; something goes well i become complacent; something goes wrong and it’s a reminder that i’m awful, i’m awful and i’m nothing special.

i dream of too many things at once and nothing gets done. can i do this forever, no- but what is out there that i can do? good days; bad days; bad term.

two more weeks then i can rest and maybe sleep and maybe stop worrying and going crazy in the car and just sitting there because if i get out then it’s back to the world and the grind and the errands and reminders and emails.

i know it’s just another sign of weakness and that i’ve spent so much of my life thinking i’m something special and if i quit it just shows that i can’t take setbacks and obstacles and if i can’t do this then i’ll never succeed at anything life.

two more weeks.

and at the same time, i’m reminded that one day i’ll be doing this on my own, when my family is gone- and the horror intensifies. how can you eradicate a whole life embodied in possessions? what will you do with everything; how can you clear a house of everything? it terrifies me.

days like these i feel particularly misanthropic- humans are awful, wasteful pests that just flagrantly waste the earth’s resources and our lives are wretched and meaningless, and so is everything we own. burn it, just burn it all.

this is my life now, that was my life then- in some ways it felt like he was living my life and that is why i feel so mysteriously shaken by this. it is weird to hear about a life (lives?) encountered hazily so long ago in a somewhat random and haphazard manner, and to hear about its premature ending. i find myself googling to know more, to understand who and what and why and where but the facts occlude more than they reveal.

out, out brief candle? yet there isn’t any tragic splendour in life, only a meaningless and random static.

—

comic soft-launches on friday. i don’t know what will happen, or what will come out of it. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t hope for at least some sort of bigger deal to happen, and i’d love to get a series deal (from somewhere, anywhere) but the whole process has taught me that i have some ways to go (a long ways, really). i don’t even know how this story will be received (i have long ceased to be able to look at it objectively; all i can think of are plot holes and shaky transitions). but i’m… cautiously optimistic.

and on the grand list of things to fret about in 2010:

1) deadlines

2) new job

3) wedding hoo-has

4) house rehauling (it’s been 15 years so our apartment is a little worse for wear)

5) new job

i need to believe in the fullness of God’s timing, and the the perfection of his plans and the places he has  prepared for me. i am, and have always been, largely powerless in many things, and i have to learn to stop drowning myself in the Overthink and trust trust trust.

tomorrow i meet derrick to complete the circle of goodbyes with the tomioka alts and once that string is cut i will make my way to narita (extremely early, but there is a typhoon threat and possibility of flooding, so it’s best to get there early). throughout the day i shall flog whatever last use there is in my mobile phone before i cancel its contract at the airport and i shall attempt to squeeze into an electronic message just how much you all mean to me, how i love you and i will miss you and i hope in my broken japanese that you will somehow, distantly understand.

Ms. Hamana: i think you are one of the most sincere, kindest people i have ever met. i have unlimited amounts of respect for you; that you work with special needs kids with a doggedness and earnestness and LOVE that few people are gifted with; that you are unceasingly kind to anyone and everyone; that you are insanely talented at all things related to cooking. i love talking to you, i never feel pressured, or lame, or that i have to keep an unceasing flow of talk. thank you for all the patience and help you have shown me (in all my cooking-in-school endeavors). i pray for the helath and happiness of your children and that your pregnancy will be smooth and without glitches.

Mr. Matsui: i love talking with you. you’re also unceasingly kind, and your wealth of knowledge and experiences knows no bounds. you know so much about the world and talking with you is always thought provoking. thank you for all your gifts that show so much thought in them. i don’t deserve half the kindness that you show me. thank you so much.

Mr. Sasaki: thank you for the warmth that youve shown me. thank you for always trying to talk to me even when you think (or know) that i don’t understand. thank you for always trying to explain whatever i don’t understand when it’s easier to just give up the topic. thank you for always, always trying in english. thank you for your love, for the bouquet with the pink roses and gerberras that was entirely spontaneous and unasked for, for caring that i shouldn’t walk home alone and wanting to bother your wife to give me a lift, thank you for thinking that i am the sort of girl that you would want your daughter to be friends with and to be influenced by– i think that is one of the highest compliments that i have ever received. i pray for your family. i pray for your wife’s health, and for tomomi– that even as she gives up things in her life for her family, she be constantly aware of what a great dad you are. i pray that you will always be financially provided for, and that your children will grow up to be as great a person as their dad is. i pray for the health and happiness of your whole family.

mr. ono: thank you for your kindness, and for always trying to speak some english to me. thank you for being the first teacher to ever ask me to go watch your club’s matches. if not for you, i would never have tried. you’re insanely good-looking– true to how mr. ebara introduced you, you are pretty close to being the perfect man. ;)

mr. mitomo and ms. kobayashi: thank you for always showing an interest in my life and trying to start conversations. i know i’m useless at continuing japanese small talk, but i understand the heart behind it, and i appreciate it very much.

and there are just so mnay things i wish i could adequately express to you all. i love you all, and i pray for your happiness. i never assume that anyone should be nice to anyone– but you all have been so unceasingly kind and patient to me when you really have no real need to be. i wish i could tell you how much these two years in nishi chu have meant to be, and how much i wished i could communicate better and understand you all, and tried to let you understand me too. i hope that somehow in my broken japanese and and choked little voice you can intuit just how much you all mean to me.

the weird, the wonderful, and the occasionally woeful

1) beijing was a place of strange and serendipitous meetings. after we landed and waited (for a very long time for our baggage to be spat out onto the conveyor belt) we spied a little japanese boy reading his itinerary. the logo printed on it was the same travel company that tsuchiya-san had bought our tickets from. because we paid a bit more for our tickets than we would have liked, we immediately started murmuring about accosting the small thing and asking him how much he had paid, but it came to naught as we were sidetracked by our baggage. so we put the little boy out of our minds and went on with our trip. on the 2nd day of the trip, we were traipsing towards tiananmen square and grabbing lunch along the way in a dinky little chinese canteen (like a zha cai fan stall). so we sit down and eat our various meals and who should walk in but the japanese boy! only d recognised him at first though, b and i were initially sceptical, but after we saw the boy miming out what he wanted and resorting to writing kanji in the air, we were convinced he was the boy. and he was. and what a fascinating boy he was. firstly, his name was asuto– the kanji of which is 飛人. yes– that does mean ‘flying man’. then it transpires that it’s because his father is a bit of a science and space geek, and names him after the katakana word for ‘astronaut’ (i.e. asutoronotto). which is pretty awesome in itself. and then, he goes on to mention that during the space race in the cold war, the americans were astronauts and the soviets called their space travellers ‘cosmonauts’. so his father goes on to name his sister kozumi (i.e. kozumonotto). her kanji is (fortunately, for her,) much more normal and you wouldn’t have realised anything was amiss unless taken in conjuction with her brother’s name.

so there you go. a little boy named ‘flying man’.

there are other adorable little details about him; how he confides in us that he just broke up with his girlfriend (who’s his junior from high school. he’s currently a sophomore in college); how he’s swinging by akihabara to buy some models for himself and his otaku father, and when pressed, embarrassedly refuses to elaborate on what sort of model figurine he wants to buy; how he really wants to go to germany, but everyone told him to aim for somewhere less ambitious, like China, where he can at least read and write if not speak. we took him around with us and aided and abetted his underage (in japan, not in china, so it wasn’t illegal) drinking.

2) that same day that we met our little space otaku friend, we had all just toured the forbidden city (exhausting) and d wanted to head up to the hilly park just behind called jingfeng park to get an aerial view of the palace. so we traipse up 330m above sea level to the top of the park, where a little pagoda sits on a flattened peak. as b takes photos of the palace, a notice a chinese policeman staring at her. worried that he might accost her (or arrest her) i stare at him staring at her– this goes on for awhile, till he seems to tire of waiting for b to adjust her focus and moves on. as he eases past b, he turns around and looks squarely into my face. and i stifle a scream.

IT’S THE POLICEMAN FROM THAT MAD ABOUT ENGLISH DOCUMENTARY BY PEK SIOK LIAN. the one who can speak many languages, and do various accents, including the new york one? the one who hilariously sounds like he learnt his new york accent from nypd blue? THAT ONE.

of course we took a photo with him. he coerced a tout in taking it for us. for free. hnah. i also have his namecard, if anyone’s interested in emailing him.

3) i think my first experience crossing a junction in beijing might have taken a few years off my life. and that was when there was a green man, mind you.

4) i think when i think back, i’m constantly amazed by our luck with taxi drivers. we were pressed for time to get to the station for our overnight train to shanghai (we boarded with less than 5 minutes to spare. pretty much every gantry we passed, the ticket staff shouted at us to run. fast.) but the taxi driver we got was really good about getting us there. he was concerned for us and repeatedly checked the time on his mobile phone and told me to take care as we sprinted away from his cab towards the station. we made the train, but i think that took a few more years from my life. my goodness, chinese train stations are like mazes. not straight-forward at all like english train stations. there are waiting rooms to go into, baggage scans to undergo, and countless gantries and passages before you even get to your platform.

5) God was also really good at providing us with people that gave us good, valuable advice. and this advice always came in pairs so you knew it was sound. in hangzhou i’d forgotten to take the wikitravel printouts i had, so we were pretty much wandering around blind. after a few fumbling attempts to find the bus, in the bus queue, a little hangzhou auntie strikes up a conversation with me, despite my initial misgivings, she seems to be sincere and helps us squeeze onto the bus, gives me smaller notes in exchange for my 100 yuan note (all the while reminding me to count twice to make sure she gave me the right amount), and outlines this detailed walking tour of the west lake area. after we get off the bus to change buses, another hangzhou lady accosts me and delivers nearly identical advice and walks us through the first leg of the trip and leads us to a longjing tea farmer that she herself buys from and we buy some tea (grown from the same plantatons emperor qianlong owned all those years ago). my only regret is that we had not enough ready case with us, and they couldn’t take my foreign credit card so it deeply limited the amount of tea i could buy and i think made the lady lose face, cos the business she brought couldn’t deliver. still the anger and disappointment were never directed at us, merely at the credit card machine so i think things were still pleasant and cordial. but that was a great shame.

i would definitely recommend taking that trip out to the tea fields around the west lake. it’s wonderfully serene and very picturesque, and the path crosses 9 springs and a waterfall. it’s definitely less trafficked than the city bordering parts of the west lake.

later at suzhou we had another problem where we were booked into a hotel in suzhou itself, and i had thought that our domestic flight to xian from shanghai would leave from hongqiao (being the domestic airport), but instead it was leaving from pudong (we didn’t know this till we got the tickets in shanghai). the flight took off at 8.15 in the morning, meaning that we had to get there by 7. but how to get to shanghai that early in the morning? the two taxi drivers we had in suzhou were super helpful with their advice and they really, really helped us think through all the options. in the end we took a taxi all the way from suzhou (because the less expensive options were just not working out; like the early train to shanghai having only standing tickets), but it worked out to only 560 yuan– which is 30 sing dollars-ish per person. and we also came in with good advice on how much the trip would cost.

6) that taxi ride from suzhou to shanghai pudong was another example of provision– because at 4am in the morning, night shifters do not want to take a 3hour trip to the airport in shanghai. but our hotel got rejected by many cabbies before the bellboy got hold of a cabbie who knew another cabbie who would just be starting his shift and would be willing to take us into shanghai. we were really lucky to have gotten that.

7) interestingly, nearly all the chinese people we interacted with– taxi drivers, hotel staff, boatmen, friendly aunties– thought i was a mainland chinese person bringing around some foreign folk. i was usually thought to be their local colleague or their personal tourguide. i guess china’s so big there’s room for all sorts of accents, so even an accent like mine must exist somewhere in this sprawl. i usually got associated with the biggest city around though, so if we were in hangzhou, i’d be thought to be from shanghai; in xian they thought i was from nanjing. it was a pretty big confidence boost to my mandarin, though it’s still not quite as fluent as i’d like it to be.

it was really nice to be treated like an insider for once, after a year and a half of living in japan– you get information or perks or even just a friendlier disposition from people much easily. a really young taxi driver (he looked 18! though i am sure he had to be older) in xian gave me his number and told me to call him if we needed a ride to the airport, he was willing to charge 20 yuan cheaper than the market asking price. but after a while, it got tiring and i hated being duplicitous and/or vague and uncommitted in my answers that i really felt like i had to leave china. it’s a nasty feeling straddling both sides and knowing that you don’t really fall into either– and that any moment now, someone might catch onto that.

8) this was also the first trip i’d been on where relationships had gotten really strained– but somehow we rode that out, and it was, i suppose, a learning experience, if little else.

9) but i’m proud i learnt how to handle touts, vendors, waiters and taxi drivers by myself. i often let my parents do the bargaining and snubbing in china, and it wasn’t as terrifying as i’d thought it to be– or perhaps by now it’s less of a learning curve than it was a few years ago.

10) i thought i’d round it off to 10 since 9 seems a bit abortive. one of the greatest things i took back from china was perhaps an appreciation for chinese poetry. especially this little gem i rediscovered (i’d heard the teresa teng song before and loved it, but it had receded into the recesses of my head for a long time)

明月几时有？把酒问青天。
不知天上宫阙，今夕是何年？
我欲乘风归去，又恐琼楼玉宇，高处不胜寒。
起舞弄清影，何似在人间？

转朱阁，低绮户，照无眠。
不应有恨，何事长向别时圆？
人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。
但愿人长久，千里共婵娟。

it’s the perfect poem for this time, particularly the last two lines. there’s always parting and meetings, just as the moon waxes and wanes– nothing has ever been perfect. these are the last 3 months i have here in japan, after that another round of goodbyes, and friends scattered across the world. but we all look upon the same moon, and i suppose there is some comfort to be had in that.