June 20, 2009
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New blog entry
I dunno why it’s so hard to write.
Most days I see something or hear something or do something that a few years ago would have made it into a blog entry, no problem. Like when I wanted to make a comment to a woman next to me rubbing her bare arms how cold the air conditioning is on the trains, before I remembered that in Japan you never talk to strangers. Or about the t-shirt I saw in Kamata station that, I swear, said “I’m too tired to lie to everyone all the time”.
Maybe Japanese weirdness becomes proportionally less funny with every year that passes. Or there’s such a background level of weirdness that you get used to, so that the exceptional things slip under the radar. Maybe that heightened sense of awareness, that craving for minutia that I had has been dulled with the stimulus of much bigger things like being torn from people I care about, being uncertain about the concrete details in my immediate future, being in love. Or maybe- and this is awful- maybe so much of that analysis, that awareness, that obsessive chronicling of tiny moments was all somehow a part of my single self. Maybe it was all somehow directed at finding someone. How Jr. High.
Its not as though I couldn’t write without that sense; certainly my life is presenting me with much more “material” than I ever had before. But with so much uncertainty, so many audiences, so little resolution, I find it hard to find my way here.
I read about a book a week since I have so much time on the train. The last three, in succession, cut into me deeper than normal. Perhaps the first, “Everything is Illuminated”, left me with so many open wounds that after that anything could find its way in. It’s one of the most unique, most touching, most affecting books I’ve read in a while.
The next, Bitter Sweet was about a lot of things, but I of course glommed on to the story about the giddy young couple in love whose marriage slowly falls apart. Despite the employment of characters named things like “Felicity Trueman” (uh, how about John Everyman, while we’re at it?), I really enjoyed the book, all parts of it.
And lastly, I read Prep, an excruciatingly long novel about an insecure Midwestern girl who attends Ault boarding school on a scholarship. She’s too shy to talk to anyone and instead obsesses about the popular students and one boy in particular. The pathetic amount of scheming, self deprecation and missed opportunities would make you wonder why anyone should feel any kind of sympathy for the narrator, and moreover, why anyone should care about what goes on at Ault boarding school. Except… except for the fact that her scheming, her analysis, her insecurity ring so damn true. The way she describes feeling like a fish out of water is so honest that anyone who’s ever felt out of place even once can relate to it a little. And anyone who’s ever been an insecure teenage girl can relate to it a lot, a lot, a lot. I found myself being able to relate to it so much that it took me a day away from the book to recall where the narrator ended and where I began. I actually had to remind myself that I always had too much respect for myself for what happened to her to happen to me, and I was never without friends in high school, which itself was never as cliquey as high schools are made out to be.
But its probably because of Prep that I’m writing again. I always tend to take on the “voice” of whatever I’m reading at the moment (and if you read “Everything is Illuminated”, you’ll know what kind of acrobatics that would take), and I realized that if I ever wanted to rid myself of Prep’s Lee Fiora, I’d have to do a little writing of my own.
I wonder if my sense of self even exists if I don’t write. My life now is mostly coasting in a place I was finished with, and that dulls me. And Selo and I are too stable to write about, although I wouldn’t post that on line anyway. Falling in love or out of love would engender writing but yesterday we took a break from me lying around coughing and sniffling from my yearly cold to get some fresh air and buy him some shirts. We walked along the glass-lined walkways of Shiodome, jarred by the sight of other gaijin, and waited in line for the dressing rooms at H&M. They wouldn’t let us both into the room at the same time (to prevent theft? tomfoolery?), so I watched him through the small crack between the unlockable doors. In the bright lights I could see his graham cracker skin, the gold glint of his necklace and the blinding white of his undershirt rippling and shifting as he moved. He opened the doors to show me a fitted black polo shirt that made even his ratty zip-off leg khakis look more grown up. I undid his top button and folded down the collar smooth. He looked good.
