Trying so Hard to NOT Have an Agenda

Hello all,

I would very much like to write about my usual trivial little things, such as the shiny Black Toyota van I saw yesterday that was called the "VELLFIRE", which amused me for a variety of linguistic reasons.

The Toyota Vellfire.  I mean, it was a superb van, quite new.  Nothing against the awesomeness of Toyotas.  It was the name "Vellfire" that got me.

I would also like to write about the chocolate chip cookies I saw for sale that were evidently imbued with an entire cup of coffee's worth of caffeine.  In each cookie.  Quite honestly, I'd rather drink the cup of coffee.  At least it would warm up my numb hands.


You see, linguistically hilarious  car names and caffeinated cookies are amusing and trivial.  And I'd love to be able to concentrate on these things because I believe there are deep hidden truths in apparently trivial and indisputably hilarious nonsense.

But as we've nudged our way closer and closer to various December holidays and the new year, I've been reading things on Facebook and in news articles that get me  all frustrated and itchy to write and rant.  Then I stop myself because really, who wants or needs to hear me rant?

 
So in lieu of a bunch of lengthy rants, I would like to share some mini rants in the form of   my TOP THREE   RESPONSES TO STUFF HAPPENING NOW.  (I had approximately 26 responses to stuff happening right now, but for your sakes--as well as for the sake of my numb fingertips--I limited it to three)


1. GUNS.    

I will freely admit that guns do not shoot themselves.  I would definitely not want to have guns start to sprout arms and opposable thumbs with which to pull their own triggers.  Yes, people are required to pull the triggers of guns.  Fair enough.

However guns are not multi-purpose objects.  Guns are not Transformers.  They don't morph from being guns into being Ice Cream makers, for example.  Guns are made to go bang, are made to shoot bullets into things.

People who want guns so they can shoot at paper and cardboard targets or clay blobs  are fine with me. These people go to specifically prepared  places to shoot at inanimate objects. Dandy.

People who want guns so they can wear day-glo orange vests and red fuzzy hats and hunt legally for animals to eat are also fine with me, provided they aren't going out there to shoot endangered species, or to shoot things just for the disturbing visceral pleasure of blowing away living creatures.

What scares me to bits is the current situation: (1)   people with or without mental problems who procure guns to do horrific things (for the record, I classify war as a horrific thing.  But shooting guns in the name of war is a different issue that I'm not going to address here) and (2) the apparently large number of fear-filled folks who feel that our only choice as a society, in order to protect ourselves, is to arm ourselves  in the name of self-defense.

Fear is a terrible thing.  Fear awakens the  "even up the score" neurons in our brains.  Fear convinces us that the way to stop violence is to carry with us the tools for more violence.  Fear inspires our 'fight or flight' response to the point that we shut down critical thought and reasoning and just dash off to our nearest gun-selling retailer.

I propose that if we can stay strong and withstand our initial fear response, our brains might start letting those critical thinking and rational thought neurons fire up again, and we can then work together to not only protect ourselves, but also work to prevent more horrific things.

This is simple.  Arming everyone out of the fear that someone will come along and shoot us is kind of an act of war to me.  It is the first step towards creating  a battle ground.  However, applying  reasonable, rational and legal controls  to gun ownership and use (NOT banning guns  entirely folks.  Stop yelling at me)  AND working together to build a community instead of a battleground are acts  of peace.  Well, as peaceful as we are capable of right now at least.....

You guess which option I choose.


2. HOLIDAY HULLABALLOO

Okay.  This is sort of like the "I say 'to-may-to', you say 'to-man-to'" controversy.

You can call your chopped down, electric light-festooned tree a "Christmas Tree" and it is your Christmas tree and it is beautiful and good and meaningful  and all yours.

Someone else can call your Christmas Tree a "holiday tree", but just because they call your chopped down, electric-light-festooned tree a "holiday tree" does not make it a "holiday tree" for you. You can still call your tree a "Christmas Tree".  The labeling and/or opinions of others can not and should not change the  delight and personal symbolism  embodied for you  in your tree.

I could visit your house and call your table a toilet tank.  Just because I called your table a toilet tank does not make your table a toilet tank.  Your table is still a table.

People do this with cars all the time.  My first car was a beloved and high-strung 1980 Mercury Capri that I named "Gwenaveer" (intentional spelling) . However just because I named my car "Gwenaveer" did not make my car the wife of King Arthur.

In the end,  the only set of beliefs that we can impose demands upon are our own.  And whether these beliefs involve how we approach religion or how we deal with people different from ourselves, they are OURS alone.


3. PEOPLE IN PAIN

People are in pain folks.  Everywhere.

There are people suffering and starving.  People who are freezing from the cold.  People who are burning from the heat.

There are people who have lost homes and family and vital parts of their own lives to natural and human-made disasters.

There are people struggling to be free, to be educated, to be healthy.

There are people struggling to be allowed to love and marry whom they choose.

In a world so full of suffering and struggle, it is especially important for us to add something to our lives.

We must add compassion.

Because we may be busy working and studying, cooking and commuting and eating and paying bills and posting pictures of grumpy-faced cats, caring for kids and lending out our strength to our places of worship or our kids sporting events,  and meanwhile typing out our heated opinions and posting pictures of cookies and sunsets.....

but we can also fit in compassion.  And every act, big or small, counts.

Try to do the big things.  But if all you can manage are the small, then do those.

Donate your time or money.  Volunteer. Start a movement or a website or a company that helps make the world better.

 But if what you can manage is buying a cup of hot coffee or cocoa for someone whose house is a cardboard box, then do that.

And if you can't do this, then there is still something you can do.

Educate yourself.  Read and watch and listen.  Open your mind and your heart to all the different people and beliefs and creatures and wonders and problems there are.

In the end you'll be strong enough to know who and what  YOU are, and intelligent  and educated enough to embrace  who and what others want and need to be.

Interestingly enough, I would bet that along with your newly opened mind, will come the desire to reach out with compassion......

Ha ha, full circle.

Ironic, no?



Until next time....

Living in a World of Lock and Load

Hello all...

I must admit I was chewing on this week's blog entry all weekend.
It wasn't for lack of amusing anecdotes or pithy musings about my little Kyoto world.

I honestly didn't know how to put my thoughts into words.
(A first for me, no doubt)

As my Facebook update stated, I woke up Friday morning to Bob telling me about the shootings in Connecticut.  Half an hour later I read on-line about students being stabbed at a school in China.

And a little piece of me twisted a bit tighter.

This little piece of me continued to contort itself, twisting and tightening as I read people's Facebook postings in response to the Connecticut shootings.  The internet turned into a writhing cacophony of opinions and demands.

I know that most of these postings--as well as the newspaper comments, radio phone-ins and tweets--were no more or less than a cathartic scream.  People feeling angry and helpless, hollering into the void to try to feel better.

And after the hollering, came the battles.  The sides were drawn:  demands for increased mental health support and study squaring off against the demands for stricter gun-control.  Demands for stricter gun-control butting heads with the "meet force with force" folks.

But one posting in particular hit me with a special stab:

It suggested that the answer to school shootings was to arm the teachers, staff and administration.

Meet the force with force.

Uh....

No.

Call me a hippie.  Call me a sprout-eating liberal.  Call me whatever the heck you want.

But I believe that the ultimate shining goal of school, and even more importantly of education, is for it to be a sanctuary in every sense of the word.

A place of safety for those who feel threatened.
A place of learning when surrounded by ignorance.
A place of peace when surrounded by violence.
A place of hope in a swirl of pessimistic hate.

As a classroom teacher, I try to live this goal.
As a homeschooling parent now I try to instill this goal.

When a child comes to me hungry, I feed her.   Even if it means handing over my own lunch, I do it happily.  Her need trumps mine

When a child comes to me discouraged, I do whatever it takes to rebuild his belief in himself.

When a child comes to me hurt or abused, I take the steps to protect her.

When a child comes to me angry and defiant, I take the time to look inside him to find that spark of humor, or sadness, or fear....whatever spark I can grab on to....to begin breaking down the walls.

But the moment we turn schools and learning  into a battleground, we have destroyed this goal.  We have undermined what education  can and should be.

We live in a world where schools, where students, where teachers and where real learning  are being sacrificed on a daily basis.  Poor countries struggle to build and operate one single-room school while we squander our intelligence and resources, allowing what we could have to slip through our fingers.

And my insides twist ever tighter.

I not only mourn the victims of the shootings in Connecticut, the students stabbed in China.
I mourn the survivors.

For the surviving students and teachers, for the terrified parents who must watch their children go to school each day from now on......for them, school has turned into a battleground.

And I can tell you that  putting guns into the hands of teachers will not make it less of a battleground.

As the saying goes....

     "An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind."




Until next time....

How to Vanquish a Winter Cold in Japan

Hello all,

I have officially made it to the ripe age of 46, and to celebrate my return to even numbers (and remember, I may be 46 chronologically, but I act half my age, which makes me 23)........

I caught a cold.

Dealing with a cold here in Japan is and isn't exactly like dealing with a cold back in California.

For one thing, I can read all the writing on the medicine containers in California.
I cannot easily read the writing on the medicine containers here.
So I have to engage in a sort of Charades approach to puzzling out medicines.

1.  Look for any drawings or decorations on the box that would indicate what the medicine is designed to treat.  Drawings of stomachs or people grimacing and holding their stomachs would indicate that it is stomach medicine.  Drawings of people with bright flashes of red emanating from their heads would indicate headache medicine.   Etc.  Etc.  Etc.

2. Look for katakana.  Katakana is the Japanese writing system reserved for non-Japanese words.  I can read Katakana.  So I look for Katakana, read it, and then try to match it  in my brain with known medicine-related words in English.  This approach actually works fairly well.

3. Last resort:  ask.  Now this would seem to be the step I should have pursued first.  However there is a hidden danger in asking, namely that if I ask for help finding a medicine to treat a symptom, say, a cough, the friendly neighborhood pharmacy person will invariably start rattling off advice at the speed of light--in Japanese of course.  Speed of light Japanese is rather difficult to understand, at least for me.   And invariably the discussion breaks down into me buying whatever they are holding out to me.

I often end up with stomach medicine to treat my runny nose, or headache medicine to treat my cough.
My life is funny that way.

But dealing with a cold in Japan isn't all medication. Oh no!  It is also LEMON DRINKS.  I have never in my life seen so many Vitamin C packed citrus beverages in my life.  There are vitamin c enhanced lemon and orange waters, carbonated and non-carbonated, hot and ice cold.  There are packets of powdered lemon drink to mix with hot water.  There are glistening jars of yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit) to mix with hot water and honey.  Then there are lemon teas and sports drinks and tiny bottles of vitamin boosted elixirs designed to save you from your own folly of working too hard or drinking too much beer.  There are even....wait for it....LEMONS.

It's amazing.

So once I have my medicine and my lemon drink of choice, I'm usually good to go.

Except for the weather.

Which is COLD.

Kyoto has a reputation as having hotter than average summers (true) and colder than average winters (also true), due to its location in a wide bowl between several lovely mountains.

Let's put it this way:  when I go upstairs, I can see my breath.

I can also see my breath when I leave the living room (the only room we heat, by the way.  Last winter we tried heating 2 rooms and nearly needed resuscitating  after we got the electric bill), although not as alarmingly as I can see it upstairs.

Whoever said that heat rises was wrong, I tell you.  Wrong.

So during the winter I am usually sporting at least 3 layers of clothing, along with an ever-so-stylish electric blanket as an accessory, if I'm lucky enough to be sitting down.  If I'm not lucky enough to be sitting down, then I take any opportunities for warmth that my daily activities offer.  Heating water for soup?  The stove is a handy hand warmer (as long as I keep my finger tips out of the flames).  Washing dishes?  Only the hottest water will do.


The last part of dealing with a cold in Japan is the face mask.

It's a lovely thing , really.  When people get sick here, they quarantine their own faces by wearing disposable face masks.

And face masks are sold everywhere in all sorts of styles and shapes and thicknesses.
And all of them are a pristine, blinding white.
Which makes all of us wearing them look like particularly tidy bandits.

And they are all designed to help all us sickies keep our nasty germs to ourselves.
So while the trains and buses in the wintertime do sound rather like infirmaries, it's nice to know that all those coughs and sniffles are being captured and held at bay.

And so I begin my slow drift away from 45, taking medicine which may or may not treat my sore throat and throbbing head, a cup of steaming lemon drink in my hand and a gleaming white bandit mask sequestering my germs from Bob and the kids.

Life is.....weird.

Until next time.

Nanowrimo...oh....ohhhhh

Hello all,

For the second year in a row I have spewed forth 50,000 words (this year it was 60,000 words) for National Novel Writing Month, nicknamed "NaNoWriMo".

For those of you who use words as purely the means to an end--that end most likely being to get/go/do/find/finish/achieve/communicate what you want--will probably rightly consider me to be insane.  There absolutely IS something a bit worrisome about a person who just writes for the sake of writing.

Which I do.

Which probably means I'm insane.

But I already know this.

The very nice thing about NaNoWriMo is that it gives me explicit permission to (nay, dare I say DEMANDS that I) write as if my fingers were on fire and the keyboard were made of water.  Type type.  Splash splash.  Ahhhhh.

Not that I need permission to write.  I ALWAYS have a notebook or journal with me.  Always.   I scribble away in all the free moments I can find, when I'm not inspiring/nagging Patrick and Aya to finish work, doing lesson planning, teaching, TED-ing, cooking....etc etc, ad infinitum.    15 minute coffee stop before a class? Writing.   10 minute wait for a train, sitting in the wind on the train platform? Writing.   Waiting for the pasta water to boil?  Writing.

However, inside my obsessive, responsibility-driven little pea brain, I do need some sort of compelling reason to sit and just write for hours on end.

Or maybe I just need to justify it to myself.

At any rate, NaNoWriMo gives me the justification/reason/excuse/permission to sit and write...and write...and write.     I can spend long swaths of stolen time letting a story fall out of my head and trickle through my fingertips onto the keyboard.   I forget to eat and I postpone stopping to use the bathroom.  The sun rises, slides across the sky and sets again and I'm none the wiser.

It's lovely.

Last year I wrote 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo and was utterly pleased that I wrote that much and utterly fed up with the story.  

This year, however, I wrote something in which I see a glimmer---a tiny glimmer mind you--of potential.

So I am now editing the thing.  Or as I like to call it, "The Mess".

Where will all this NaNoWriMo madness take me?
Who knows?

For now I am enjoying the warm, full feeling of finally having a story move from my imagination onto paper.

Such a feeling is increasingly rare these days I believe.  People need NEED personal outlets for their inspiration and creativity, yet so many believe they have no creative spark to make it happen.

Newsflash folks:  You've got the spark.  I've got the spark.  We ALL have the spark.

But somewhere along the line someone told you that your skills followed another path.  Somewhere along the line  your drawing was laughed at or your poem was pooh-poohed and you walked away from nurturing something within yourself that might have added utter bliss to your life.

My 60,000 word mess may never be read by eyes other than my own. In spite of my last 40 years of writing pointless nonsense, I may never see my name on the cover of a book  (unless I write it there with a Sharpie pen).

And that's okay.

Because the joy is in getting utterly lost in the wilderness of my own mind. ....
Perhaps the best gift I could give myself.


Until next time....