Oct 20-21st in 2015

October 20th. As a side note, it occurs to me (after having written that last entry) that I forgot to write something that occurred to me yesterday or the day before. As it turns out, Amber broke up with her boyfriend. I obviously don’t know the details, but it is what it is. I also find it amusing that when she and I were first romancing, before anything was even unofficially settled, I wrote a story where the character who was obviously supposed to be her ended up doing what the real Amber ended up doing. More or less. Once you pop, the fun don’t stop, it seems.
Moving on, it’s now the 21st.
Yesterday, after work, I went home. Obviously. There was not a great deal to report beyond the fact that, yes, I did get 99% of the cleaning done that I’d planned on. There are just a few random odds and ends that I’m not quite sure where to place. I also have a few temporary compromises that I have to make with arrangement due to the fact that I can’t throw away any cardboard for a week and a half. And I have a lot of it to get rid of. Yeah. That’s a thing.
As a side note, Japan seems to be a country without functioning screens. I say this because, in my house, many of the screens don’t seem to fit properly. I also have windows entirely without them. My bathroom and my W.C. both have grated air vents to the outside that are more than wide enough for critters to come and go through at will. I’m terrified every time I go into the W.C.. Well, that’s not true. To be honest, as I’ve said, arachnophobia is getting better now that I have giant spiders to deal with semiregularly, and now that I have to watch the big yellow orb weavers (I think that’s what they’re called) all over town.
I finally got ahold of Klever yesterday. He wants to meet up, and I want to as well, but timing is a problem for both of us. He maintains that Sachiko is overreacting, but I’m more inclined to think that she’s simply being cautious whereas Klever doesn’t quite have a concept of what caution means. We’ll see what comes of any of that. I do like the idea of being in a band, but, as I think on it, now is probably not the time. I need time to get thin, to get integrated into town life, to get better at Japanese, and to get better at music in general. We’ll see if he can be convinced of such a thing.
I had an interesting dream last night that’s sticking with me. Somehow or other Lauren Connley was getting divorced from her husband and she was interested in me. Somehow. And he was also Chinese (I think, he could have been Japanese). It was weird, and I’m left with residual feelings from the dream that was inspired by specifics that I can’t quite recall. It’s frustrating to be left with an echo of something that reveals nothing of the original sound. I suppose that she represents to me the ideal life that I never thought I could live/was worth of/could want. She was perfect. Beautiful, smart, kind, super religious . . . all of the things that I was able to periodically affect without actually being. She just seemed real. She was one of those loved and hated “beautiful ones” that I just cannot influence no matter what I do. I realize, of course, now, that part of it is that I have nothing. I can affect just about anything. Maybe it really is that they see through me? Maybe it’s because people who actually have something are attracted to the same type and the rest of us can’t compete? I don’t know. Still, it’s getting lonely.
Ebihara Sensei needs me to come into work late and help her with something. I started to wonder if this was some kind of set up (It’s not, but the mind, she does wander). I started thinking, what would I want? The slow setup or the whirlwind? I realized that if this were a setup (it’s not) it would be a whirlwind kind of thing, and that that’s really not ideal. But I realized that the slow, gradually progressing, slow growing kind of thing is just . . . unlikely and difficult. Which is not to say I’m giving up, but it’s a realization. A fairly basic one, and one I’ve had before, but something that’s hitting me with a new and more powerful force: A lot of this comes down to pragmatism vs. idealism, and my concept of pragmatism is pretty darned cynical.
I’m not one to wait. I’m not one to go slow. I’m not one to take a longshot on an obtainable wonder. I mean, if I’ve had a girl and lost her, I’ll go to hell and back in a stupid attempt to win her back (hello Courtney, Rachael, and Amber. Kat, if we’d ever met before your wedding you’d be on the list). I can even remember launching convoluted plots in kindergarten to reunite with my one true love, Megan, and how I’d watch in horror and envy as she was with Rob. I remember celebrating every minor victory and scheming incessantly. Freaking kindergarten. Of course, in the meantime, I was also romancing most of the other girls in my kindergarten. So, there is that. Pretty much the story of my life, as I think about it.
The point is, when there’s a girl who I think is truly wonderful, I don’t even try. Andrea Heerema. I was crazy about her. But she was too good. Too sweet. Too . . . good. I couldn’t imagine being with a person like that. I never tried with Lauren, and she was another one like that. Abby is similar, but a bit more nuanced. Who did I go for? The dark ones. The sexy ones. The broken ones. The odd ones. Why am I so scared, so utterly terrified, of a person who is happy and complete, full of nothing but sweetness and light? I realize that I’m oversimplifying and that I’m sure they’re bitches sometimes, but you know what I mean. There are people, simply good people, and I don’t know what to do around them. I don’t know who to be or how to be and I just feel miserable and uncomfortable. I feel like they’ve got something, some thing, that makes them whole that I don’t have and can’t have, or maybe I don’t want it or WON’T have it. I don’t know. I’m also scared of what I’ll do to them. That, somehow or other, I’m so ruined and bad and destructive that simply with me is enough to ruin a person. And, you know, maybe it is? I’ve certainly seen a lot of girls go to shit post me, but, at the same time, look at the girls I’m attracted to. The ones who were already off. Yes, I realize, everybody is “off” to some extent or other, but my meaning still holds when you stop being pedantic.
What is the point of this? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer or a conclusion or a goal to bring from any of this. I can’t say that I’m going to dedicate myself to any new course of action. I can’t say that I’ll hold out for an ideal or that I’ll even really do much in pursuit of it. I can’t say that, if I meet some new, perfect, beautiful person, who wants me, I’ll try things with them. I just don’t know. These are the startings of an analysis. Probably something I’ve thought of before, but I’ve got a lot of thinking to do and a lot of time to do it in. I worked through five years of bad thinking after three months in Japan eight years ago. Now, I’ve got five years to work out . . . a lifetime, I guess. That seems like a reasonable time frame.
I’ve been fascinated with Gymnopedie by Satie lately. I had heard it before, of course. I think it played at the tea shop where I briefly worked in 2008. I started getting into it as it was the second easiest song in my ukulele songbook (not counting the Brahms lullaby, whose arrangement was so offensively easy even to a rank beginner as to be useless). My music tastes seem to be a bit different than before. Brahms doesn’t please like he used to, but part of it could be the recordings. It’s odd. I’m liking sparser, simpler, things. I used to love bombast and flourish. Maybe it’s temporary? Maybe it’s not? Maybe it’s indicative of something? No idea.
Having the opportunity to do so much writing, I hope, will be useful for me. I think that it’s proven to be so far. At forty two thousand words written over the course of a bit under three months, I’ve very nearly written a novel. That’s no mean feat. If I keep writing anywhere near the pace I’ve written so far, I’ll have written in two years more than I wrote in Open Diary over the course of a decade. What’s also amazing me is the length of these entries and the relative ease with which they’re written. Yes, they’re happening over the course of several days, and, yes, they actually reflect the day to day minutiae that makes up most of my life (and everybody else’s), but the average length of a post must have more than tripled. Now, it seems that to write anything, I need at least a full page of Word, and a lot of these are three pages or more. The effort that used to go into writing half a page now goes into writing two or three. I can remember feeling exhausted, mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausted over some of the two parters that would ramble across a measly four pages or so or Word in the past. I also think that, if anything, I’ve gotten less needlessly verbose. I’ve certainly lost my former love for archaic grammar and bizarre expressions. I think I’ve grown more lucid and readable while still increasing the length of what I write. I think it’s interesting. I showed Courtney a story I’ve been working on, and she called it the most readable thing I’d ever produced. Again, maybe this is indicative of something. It seems like it must be. As to what, I’m not entirely sure, though, of course, I’ve got my guesses.
Well, I may write more later, but I feel that this is enough for the moment. It’s the morning of the 21st. I didn’t go on a walk, and I have nothing to do at school today. I checked two boxes of notebooks for English mistakes for Matsumoto Sensei, and tonight I’ll come in late to help Ebihara with a recording. Yesterday I made the recording for Matsumoto Sensei. Today the kids are having tests in the morning and nothing in the afternoon, but they’ve paid for a gaijin, and, by golly, they’re going to get their money’s worth by keeping him around. Hence my strong suspicion that I’ll have more to write later. Well, not that I’ll have more to write. That I will write more. Tonight is Eikaiwa, so that’ll be going on. Diet is going poorly, and exercise needs to resume. I think I have Tennis on Thursday, and that’ll be a good start. Stomach is still bothering me, so I broke into my last box of Prilosec. Shoulders are tense. Want massage, but don’t have time to find a place that’d do one. Man, I never thought I’d miss China, but I’d love some decent fake western food and an affordable massage.
Ending this is hard. Man I’m bored.