around

Japanese food had to grow on me. When I first got here, my opinion of washoku (和食), or Japanese cuisine, was "curious but un-optimistic." From what I had been able to tell, washoku  was rice-heavy; involved a lot of bowls and cups and complicated eating rituals; and was made up almost entirely of unknown spices, grains, vegetables, and cooking techniques. When people--Japanese people--asked me what I thought of washoku , I answered with 50% false sincerity, "I like it!" But it's grown on me. Two years of force-feeding myself nutritionally-approved school lunches, grabbing snacks at the konbini  (convenience stores), making uneducated guesses at the grocery store, and ending up with unexpected plates when I ordered out at restaurants, and I'm starting to figure it out. Patterns have begun to emerge. Flavors have become familiar. Certain textures no longer startle me. I've had people--mostly kids--teaching me the names of foods and how to eat...

This past winter, when I was working at three elementary schools in Ibaraki and spending my free time sending out resumes and cover letters to every half-decent open English Teacher position in Tokyo I could find, I got an interview with a private girls' school. I took a train down to Tokyo on Friday night after work and spent the night in a small hostel. Then, Saturday morning, I changed into the most professional attire I could (black skirt with black stockings and kitten-heeled shoes, and a black Ann Taylor jacket over a white button-up shirt) and headed to the school. The interview went well, I thought. They told me about the school, I told them about my experience in Taiwan and Ibaraki Prefecture. They asked questions, I answered, and vice versa. Then I left the school, left Tokyo, and went back to my life in Ibaraki. On the Tuesday of that week, I had a free period during which I was utterly exhausted. To keep myself awake, I wrote. I wrote about job hunting, about ...

Now that the Board of Education in Hitachinaka has finally told my schools the unfortunate news, I feel like I can publicly say this without accidentally informing someone who shouldn't know. So, big news: I am moving to Tokyo. This wasn't an easy decision. Well, in some ways it was, but in others, it wasn't. What was easy was the realization that, for my own wellbeing, I need to be back in the city. The tranquility of simple suburban life has always made me stir-crazy. What others find reassuring about it, I find stifling and maddening. Suburbs are good places to settle down, invest in stability, raise kids, and live peacefully. Maybe someday, that will be a good life for me. (Sans the kids part; I want a dog.) Right now, though, I still feel like my life is in motion. I still feel like I'm growing rapidly as a person, evolving, becoming. The idea of trying to settle into a peaceful space long-term before I've gotten the need for rapid evolution out of my syst...

I've never cared about sports before. I hail from Ohio, where the entire state is obsessed with the Ohio State University football team and annually works itself into a frenzy over the progression of OSU games. Serious fans will joke that they "bleed scarlet and gray," the team colors. I've spent half my life being surprised every year when football season crops up, because even after fifteen years I've paid it so little attention that I couldn't even tell you when it starts and when it ends. It was always around, but I was never enticed to learn more. For me, football season in Ohio is like winter in Ohio: a natural cycle of the seasons that is recognized only for how it consumes the entire state, confronting me every time I step outside, and making me long for it to be over. Volleyball sneaked its way into my life via anime called  Haikyuu!! The show, which centers around a fictional  high school volleyball team working to reclaim its former glory as...

I'm doing an experiment. Last September/October, my anxiety kicked into high gear. Like, really high gear. Now, maybe it was the culture shock sinking in, maybe it was the return to school after summer break combined with the much colder (and darker, and more miserable) season. But .  September/October 2014 is also when I stopped jogging as a form of exercise, because it was getting cold out and I didn't want to spring money for a gym membership. (Still don't.) Bike by my apartment complex in Taiwan. But exercise is supposed to be good for combating anxiety. It has the side effect of making me hungry, so even on bad days where I get so anxious that eating is a chore and food taste like dirt, I crave real food and end up devouring it. I've been doing Pilates, but Pilates involves a lot of mental work. Keeping a stance, changing exercise moves, focusing on form, that kind of thing. Whereas jogging is mindless; do the same motion continuously, for as long as...

"Ohio" gozaimasu. Because I'm in Ohio. Get it? It's hilarious. And it's gonna be hilarious every morning that I say it while I'm here. Reverse culture shock is possibly the weirdest thing to experience. Because when you leave the West and go live in the East, you expect things to be baffling. You expect your impulses for polite social conduct to be wrong. You expect the common language to be overwhelming and strange. You expect to hesitate when counting out money because you're not used to the shapes, colors, and amounts. You expect to be struck by the cacophony of millions of small details being radically different  from what your mind expects. When you return to your home country, the place where you've been raised and indoctrinated into the culture since birth, and find that your impulses for polite social conduct are wrong, it's really strange. You find that the language you speak fluently and understand perfectly to be overwhelming ...