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13 December, 2003 - 22:34
It's Saturday night and I'm all alone. Today was dimsum day. My sister, A, my roommate Jess and I went out to La Maison Kam Phung for what is probably the best dimsum I have ever known. My head feels full today so I've been wondering if it's because I'm getting sick or if it's because I've been drinking coffee in the past couple days. Literally, coffee makes me dim. Or dumb. Or my brain works slower. I know it's supposed to be the opposite. Katrina reworked my diaryland site, it looks amazing. Amazing, I tell you. I'm a big, fat lazypants when it comes to having to spend the time to re-organise things like this. If someone paid me to think about it, no problem, but on my own free time? Nah, I'll just contract it out to someone who likes doing it and likes to make garlic soup. Ah, I miss being around garlic people. People who appreciate garlic for its' innumerable healing and taste properties. Truly, truly, garlic is wonderful and somehow, it's shunned with my flatmates. If you want to laugh, I suggest getting ahold of this song: "They want us to make a symphony out of women swallowing their own tongues" by Le Tigre. 12 December, 2003 - 13:18
Katrina told me to add an entry or else she wouldn't be my little worker bee and fix some stuff on this diary. So I'm not just doing it for that reason. Really. I'm not. ;) You may have noticed that my last entry was in Japan and since then, approximately four-and-a-half months have been diaryland-less. The problem is that I don't actually know if I have any readers. I suppose having readers would give me significantly more stimulation to continue an ongoing project like writing an internet-based diary. So many people I know have quit web diaries. I guess it was a bit of a fad, and to some degree I can understand that there are far other more tangible hobbies to be pursued. But do we actually pursue those other hobbies? I'm one to talk - I told myself that I would write down some figurative bricks-and-mortar for myself and for posterity's sake but here I am still without much to show. Alors, je commence ici! Avec ton coup de main, Katrina je te remercie. Puis, avec �a, on recommence avec notre prochain grand aventure au but ind�termin� mais assez clair pour nous entendre. 04 August, 2003 - 10:14
here i am leaving japan. tomorrow. back to a different life. it really is. i can't believe i was, in many ways, pretending to be an adult for two years. i had the car, the insurance, the investments, the salary. and now, i'm skint again (stretched out over a number of months, of course). i saw radiohead, blondie and devo this weekend. see ya in the canada. 21 May, 2003 - 22:17
even in 2003... all your base are belong to us. sitting at home silently the first night in two months with my head tilted very slightly to one side the side that shows righteousness and blind faith in something i know more and more about it i've not really tried to explain but i've heard it a hundred times and usually it goes against my grain the grain the people supporting the grain got arrested in st louis seed savers food lovers they throw food lovers in jail and mutant producers in padded board rooms might as well be white room with a million square pads on the wall 19 February, 2003 - 19:10
oh my fucking god, i just made the best soup i've ever made. a full head of crushed garlic, carrots, potatoes, leeks, hijiki, fresh shiitake mushrooms, genmai (brown rice) misu paste, basil and coconut milk. please, please, please try to make it. 14 February, 2003 - 14:17
I had a dream last week. [Actually, it was a week of dreams.] This one was mainly about my car. I was driving to school with Matt, Emilie and some other indescribable people when I went through a red light and was chased down by a police officer. He told me that my car would be taken away for six months and that to get it back I would have to pay two thousand dollars at the end of the six months. It was actually quite devastating because my car is my only mode of transportation between my home and school. The last thing I remember is walking to school down the highway while I was caught up in the sky streaming a multitude of colours. I went to an anti-war party at a friend of a friend�s house in Kyoto on Tuesday. My friend prefaced the visit with a short description of Hippie (his name). She mentioned that he was a peace observer in Palestine for a year, is queer and does workshops on men�s healthy sexuality and masturbation. So, of course, I wanted to go. We are also trying to organize an IndyMedia center for the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe triangle) and we wanted to make some contacts in the Japanese community to see who is interested. Hippie answered the door in tight, white spandex pants, pink loose-knit knee-highs, and a pink velour pullover. I thought Hippie was a bunny. It turns out he is a person, indeed. And so cool � he showed me pictures of his travels to Israel and Palestine, visiting the broken, abandoned or seized Palestinian folks� houses in the occupied territory juxtaposed with the lavishness of the Jewish settlements. No fucking wonder they strap bombs to themselves in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The party was great, I spoke to people [albeit broken speaking in Japanese] about things that I haven�t talked about for years. In the middle of the party, someone turned to me and said in English, �So, do you think sexual orientation is a product of gender role?� I felt like I was back in mental business again. 14 February, 2003 - 11:17
My vice principal who sits across from my desk has the worst breath that I have ever smelled in my entire life. I�fm not being dramatic, but rather left wondering what kind of medical problem he has. It�fs like breathing in rotting, wild boar carcass every day. It�fs a constant cursing him for just breathing. It�fs a sick feeling in my stomach when he speaks to anyone within a two metre radius because of the sheer magnitude of its�f strength. It is, hands down, a chemical weapon. Saddam Hussein has no match. Iinan Town in Mie Prefecture in Japan has its�f own weapons producer which must, at all costs, be destroyed and I�fm quite confident that Russia, France, Germany and Belgium would be fast allies. 06 February, 2003 - 15:15
There was some legend that I was going to check out with my car but it couldn�t go into the grassy field to get there because of a steep slope. [In retrospect, it was the slope near my parents� house on the road they live.] So, I had to walk. I was investigating some spooky place where there was a sewage lagoon but it had some ghost -like significance attached to it. [This isn�t the first time that sewage lagoons have been involved in my dreams, and although they aren�t a common appearance, it happens once or twice a year.] There was also a video to watch to understand the legend inside the sewage lagoon which was housed inside the main entrance to the building the lagoon�s works were housed in. I turned on the television and video and was intensely scared by it, and shut it off halfway through. I walked over to the large, garage door and opened it which revealed wide rivers of clear, treated sewage water and a very intricate system of canals, pipes and immense pools. Recognising that this actually was the sewage lagoon, it struck me with fear because of the mysterious ghostly quality that I didn�t quite understand, but I just knew that it was frightening. Shortly after I closed the garage door, some other people entered into the building. Of of them asked me if I had watched the video and I said that I had. He began to ask me questions about it, such as if I saw the ______ and the ______. I had seen both things but not in their entirety, so I had very little information to on � I just agreed with the man. Shortly after, three of us went to a room in the top of the sewage-works area to have sex, of which one person was a very close, very straight friend which I actually didn�t realize until later. All of a sudden, I saw lines of thick, white cum striping the body of one of the guys in the room [I remember thinking at the time that his body resembled a hastily-made Danish or icing-sugared croissant] and shortly after the other straight friend came as well. I was left by myself, trying in vain to ejaculate, and feeling like the whole situation had been far too short. Standing around masturbating, I saw my present third year, graduating student in the room and she saw me but didn�t appear to be disturbed at what I was doing. I grabbed a towel and went to sit in a part of the room where all the furniture had changed to resemble the interior of a Japanese, Kintetsu-line train, red plush seats everywhere and circular hand holds lining the ceiling. The good, straight friend came to sit beside me while I continued to jerk off without success and I sensed he was just humouring, or empathizing with me. 23 January, 2003 - 14:30
I like how sometimes a thought comes to me in full force, when it�fs something I already know. An amazing teacher, Masuda-sensei, gave me a copy of his book called �gNative Peoples and Cultures of Canada�h and it�fs drop dead brilliant. I�fm only a few pages into it, having just glanced at the map of tribal groups and bands. My personal history with native people in Canada is very limited, probably only from the various powwows I�fve been to, and the few silly little smudge ceremonies when I was seventeen and eighteen years old. (Regarding the latter, I�fm a bit embarrassed at my own lack of insight or want of knowledge before doing anything from another culture, especially something spiritual like a smudge. But I�fd do it again probably!) I remember at first how strange and uncomfortable I felt the first time I went to a party at the native friendship center with Joe and Gloria, native Canadian ex-work mates from my social service job. I had an idea of what discrimination was at that point, in theory, but because of circumstance (namely my milk-fed, white-bread background) I hadn�ft the slightest clue what that meant as a shared history. So as I�fm reading this map, and seeing all the places where tribes were located, it occurred to me to think of these different groups as NATIONS. In and of themselves, they are separate nations. Moreover, because of the nature of their structure as nations, they cannot fit into the world in the same fashion as other nations (ie., most nations have a state). Ah ha! So this is DISPOSESSION! It makes sense in very logical, practical terms, finally. There is so much attention (albeit not necessarily in their favor) focused now on such dispossessed groups such as the Palestinians or Roma in Europe and yet there is very little debate or common accord that native people of North America constitute a nation and thus have a legitimate claim to independence. 21 January, 2003 - 13:44
I think it must be ideal to have someone. I keep thinking about relationship and feel like there is so much that I need to catch up on. The women inside of me are all screaming about the time, the time!! My buggery biological clock, and I can hear the spasms of mental and physical readiness. Believe it. I�fm ready for kids. I want them. But it�fs not time for that yet. I want other things first like a steady job, the ability to commit to one person and I think that could happen, but not in this vacuum of people who can only go as far as saying, �gsorry, not my type�h. That was the response from a guy that I�fve been emailing with for awhile. We met on chat, exchanged mobile phone emails and we�fve been texting back and forth for about two weeks. Until yesterday when I suggested that we exchange pictures. So at around 10pm last night, after having just pulled in to my driveway from teaching a group class, I got a text from him with a picture included. So I grabbed my phone, took a picture and mailed it back to him and headed into the shower to warm up. I guess I was expecting a big fat truth or a big fat lie. One of the two. But instead of anything even remotely social, I get a glib, �gnot my type�h in response. At first I was thankful, mainly for his honesty but then I realized that it�fs not honesty at all. It�fs a kind of malice; a boring, boring malice that�fs not really worth the words. I know it�fs in me too, though. I can be just as cutting, just as sullenly vicious to other people if they don�ft fit into my little prescription. But it sucks! It�fs awful and full of awe. The former, because it makes me feel like shit and the latter because of the way of how it happened: over email! Dating on the internet is a bunch of 1s and 0s and I guess you can find something so specific that settling, or negotiation is not part of the set of expectations that people have. �c.10 minutes until I have to teach a class. 21 January, 2003 - 11:03
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. --- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 1749 21 January, 2003 - 08:54
As I woke up in the morning, I began to softly make out with Kris with someone else in bed. Who was it? I softly kissed his neck, and I could feel his breath in my ear. I remember thinking how I would have preferred to get out and have a shower before making love (kind of a typical thought for me � I never fully enjoyed sex in the morning for that reason). But I was in California, our bed was outside perhaps on the roof of a large skyscraper or in a parking lot. I went to start my car and let it run for awhile, hearing a clanging coming from the engine and realized that maybe, finally, my little car was commencing a death rattle. Luckily, when I looked under the hood the noise was a few suitcases that I had accidentally left underneath it from the day before. After getting out of the car, I turned to what had been Kris and saw that it was Jenn Hsu and I had the warmest feeling of love that approximated that which I felt when I was with Kris in Montreal. I understood that she was the only person I will love. * * * * * * It�s a little jarring when two people come together, be it in a dream or just in daily thought, who never would normally share the same mental place. Kris and Jenn, how does that work? They�re so different, almost the antithesis of each other but for a brief moment they shared the same cosmic space in my brain. 17 January, 2003 - 09:13
So here I am back in Japan. It feels normal and regular and biting at my psyche all over again. More and more I can see why Japanese people can live here all their lives without thinking about what�fs outside. Life is totally predictable. Everything happens on time, for a reason and without fail. Day to day, year to year, we can expect that traditions, institutions and customs will occur normally. I�fve said this before, but I always forget how bloody old this country is. That kind of power is something that I would never again want to live under. But it also massages me into a happy stupor that, superficially anyway, I enjoy sometimes. I�fve started to get my water from the mountain spring near my school. It�fs up a long, treacherously winding mountain road about a thousand metres above sea level. There are always silly old men waiting at the spring to talk about things they like to talk about. �gIsn�ft it cold today?�h �gDo you like to make tea? Will you make water with that tea? Or will you make coffee?�h Invariably I reply that probably I will just drink it straight up, to which they laugh in slight disbelief but accept that I might just do that in the way that Japanese people accept the silly things that foreigners do. What a concept: drinking pure water only for the pure pleasure of drinking clean water. I stayed late yesterday to help my graduation thesis lesson students prepare their presentations for the end of the month when they present in front of the school and community. Other students were also there and one in particular, Horiuchi, was making his presentation last. I had him last year for a general English class I taught and his English was so bad that usually he couldn�ft understand even basics like �gHow are you?�h. It�fs fine, English wasn�ft in his bag so last year he moved on to studying physiology. I hadn�ft really seen what he was doing in school since last year�fs anti-climactic English attempt, so I was surprised to find out he was studying something like physiology. Halfway through his presentation, I was attempting to read the power point slide show and noticed he was talking about diarrhea. My supervisor turned to me and said, �gHis presentation is on �eBeing Fat and Having Diarrhea�f�h. So, this kid, who is probably fat because that�fs how his body happens to be, is standing in front of a few hundred people to talk about how fat people suffer from diarrhea on January 31st. To give it some context, Japanese people are almost obsessive when it comes to talking about what comes out of their assholes. Even in Shinto mythology, there are sprites that will crawl inside of an anus to change someone�fs personality. There is the legendary gay fairy who converts people by flying up their assholes. How weird is that? Add to that, that I�fve learned not blush anymore when an acquaintance asks me about my poo, I feel like I have a newfound sense of my scatological self. 16 December, 2002 - 10:57
i just got back from a trip overnight staying in a zen temple in kyoto. it was not as i had thought. there was no morning meditation, nor a buddhist monk slapping your back if you fell out of seiza position while meditating. nevertheless, it is the reality of temple visits in contemporary times. the places that offer a more ascetic version of zen are fewer and fewer. fortunately, the temple itself was zen - the meal was vegan and if you didn't fill your rice bowl with tea and drink the last of it, you were considered to be wasting the grains of life. i fell under its spell for a few fleeting moments but not long enough. seeing the zen accolytes in their barefeet, walking around in geta (wooden shoes with two perpendicular slats of wood underneath) and one layer of robe in 2 degree celcius weather, giving each other full bows when greeting and then breaking out in laughter and being casual was beautiful. knowing that they were up at four o'clock in the morning making their intricate wave patterns in the stones is something that was only mythical in my mind. that said, seeing so many temples and shrines in two days is both daunting and boring. i was overjoyed to return to the world of art cafes, subways and bookshops. i think i can be devout, but only when it's not temple tourism. 07 December, 2002 - 19:18
I'm here all alone after spending the last few days with people whom I should like. This has been my feeling for the past six months to a year. Not all the time. But especially now. I realised in the midst of being with people, being social, that I had no interest in being there. I had no interest in the slightest to talk with them, know more about them, tell them more about me or even have empty small talk. All I wanted to do was to curl up in a corner of the room with some roiibos tea and read to myself. I think I'm turning anti-social. Is that a psychological condition? Why does it happen? Someone analyse me. If I was just a bastard, I think all of this would be unconscious. I wouldn't need to think about it. I've even given up on fake smiling, which was a terrible habit anyway. It's mainly that I feel like I share no intimate history with anyone here... although I know intrinsically that we make our own history, this history-making scene is one that I have no interest in playing. My history-making doesn't include the stimulus-devoid physical world, styromfoam-spray conversation filled moments of living. Academically, socially, emotionally I'm spent. I need new material to work with. 03 December, 2002 - 22:45
walk out the door, just turn around now, cuz youre not welcome anymore. wow, i hate foot cramps. i just spent tonight with my students in the izawa-cho community centre english conversation class. i got them to take an object from my big, green, cloth bag and in pairs they had to sell the object to the other partner. they sold a pair of rubber ears, a seive, a small ceramic gnome, "see no evil, hear no evil" monkeys from the 100-yen store, etc, etc... it was fun, but as usual mr.easter had no clue what we were doing and instead of doing a dialogue he just asked me questions like, "ohhhhh, do you have a sister in canada, mr. saddam?" that's another thing, he calls me saddam. i don't really mind - i consider it a compliment to be an enemy of the president of the U.S.A. just when i thought my little social filter was completely burned out (yes, yes, it has been an awkward social month once again) it made an miraculous recovery this past weekend. i have figured out that all it takes is inspiring people in order for me to be content. not exactly a lightning-bolt theory, but nonetheless one which has helped me understand that i just might not be a complete social misfit. also, going to nagoya to sit the yon-kyuu japanese proficiency test meant that i got to live in a world - albeit temporary - filled with chinese, potuguese, african, korean, vietnamese people. a rare, rare opportunity. retrospectively, i wanted to drink in the atmosphere a bit more, but instead i was concentrating on the kanji, the particles and bloody grammar that i can never remember. what was good, is that susan and ruth were also there, links to something that i need. i just wish i could reconcile the strange tension with C. it's such a sad, sad, unending ball of confusion that simply hinges on me ringing him up and asking what is going on in his head. it's the sort of thing that, really, he should be telling me. 28 November, 2002 - 09:04
I have been having such bizarre dreams lately. Often, unfortunately, I don�ft remember them fully, or at all. Last night, for instance, I was in my car somewhere on a road drinking herbal, raspberry tea when I noticed a small bug inside the cup. I kept drinking the tea and noticed that there was a small bit of white mucous in the bottom which I recognized as mochi (Japanese sweet, squishy rice desert). But then, the bug made itself into sort of a worm and squiggled out of the cup onto the side of my window, or the edge of the cup. (I don�ft remember which) It was much fatter, multicoloured and carried a microphone with it with CBC written on the side. This worm was a CBC reporter from inside my tea. I went over to show my mother who was sitting in the car beside mine but as I showed her the cup it turned into that disgusting shade of milky-brown coffee that you can only buy at Tim Horton�fs or Robin�fs donuts. And that�fs it. 25 October, 2002 - 15:50
I would like to strongly disagree with connecting 's diary from October 24th when she states that her hometown is a "cold dark tundra of land". In fact, there is so much light in winter, summer, spring and fall that it can be blinding. And the tree line does not stop south of such a hometown. The tundra starts at least five hundred kilometres north. Exaggerate much? ;) 15 October, 2002 - 11:12
I find it funny that outside our world is dying and all we can think to do is separate bottles and metals into separate sections. It�s kind of a farce. How difficult it is to not think that everything is a conspiracy! At least George Bush has the transparency of action to allow all the political and economic corruption to be as obvious as my crusty eyes in the morning. Then, what good is that transparency when the vast majority of Americans still can�t see it? Maybe they�re just ignoring it. I could at least understand a conscious ignorance � it would imply that people are not stupid, that they are simply self-centred or scared. But being blind to the corruption in the midst of a grandiose ruse is inexcusable. You may as well not be a human living among other humans. It also makes me wonder how many things I�m making a conscious effort to ignore. Certain moments clarify that ignorance. For example, if I�m in a room talking with two other men and there is one woman, her exclusion from the conversation is often ignored. So, we can carry on a conversation without her participation. Or how about when I buy food packed in white foam trays? That�s such a no-brainer. But the insulation of all the other people who ARE buying it, allows me to indulge in a conscious form of devotion to self-destruction. Am I that nihilistic? If there are any obvious culprits of terrorism on this planet, it�s the small percentage of us that can afford to buy foam package foods while smiling. 17 September, 2002 - 10:29
I have been finding lately that there is so much day-to-day etiquette that I need to work on. For example, when I walk into a public toilet I often rip open my fly even before being relatively close to the urinal. This disturbs some people. 16 September, 2002 - 09:51
god i love languages with glottal clicks (an implosive clicking sound made in your throat). the south african language, khosa, for example. just try saying it with a glottal click, "K*click*HOSA". so beautiful! i wish english had some clicks, all we have are boring germanic sounds. i had a dream last night that cassie was roaming arond a place which resembled disneyworld. she decided to stay there, but all the rest of us were on the bus. we decided to tell cassie (me and the bus driver, who i think was supposed to be my father) that there were cameras everywhere and she couldnt possibly spend the night without being noticed. she ran off. we got out of the bus and ran after her but were left on a patch of grass with a fence and on the other side of the fence, cassie was running by. we knew she wouldnt respond to my dad (the bus driver) so me and someone who was representative of tonya ran after her down the street. we jumped over the fence and began to run down the street and after a while i realised that we were actually flying sideways. flying by a wooded area, there was a small house with a red-carpeted lobby where a heap of middle-class, 40ish people were dressed in black ties and suits and i remember imagining it must be the stratford festival opening. flying was difficult past this place and i had to grab on to the metal and glass door frames (that were 1960s-style with that telltale geometric 60s charm) and push myself past it. subsequently, i woke up. today it's raining and I'm realising how much i need to clean house. or run away! i realise why i feel unstuck quite often. it's not japan that doesn't hold me. it's my job and this town. i think i could quite possibly live anywhere as long as i had 1) a coffee maker, and 2) some kind of responsibility to myself for being there. here, i don't feel responsible. i don't actually really care about my students. whether or not they learn english is not up to a 25 year old (soon to be 26! oh my god! old, old, oldness!) sociology graduate who is only is japan to have fun and make money. in all fairness, i should actually be on welfare. that would make the cosmos more balanced. (i aspire to be like my friend marie from france who, before she left france, signed onto assistance sociale and then traveled around north america. every so often she rang her counselor in france to say she was looking for work.) FOOTNOTES - sometimes i wonder if my shoulders are so irreparably curved from sitting the wrong way that i will always be hunched. - i have hair on my left shoulder. ewwww! i'm turning into deiter, the hairy german dolt! - who was the famous american actress who got coffee enemas regularly?
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