Fall

Today, I fell.

I parked off-campus, a bit far, thinking I needed some exercise. Since I try to bring lunch every day now, I had bought a lunch bag at Target, of a size that can fit a tupperware, an apple, and a water bottle. I held it with my left hand as I got off the car and started to walk. In my right hand was my cell phone. I was trying to check the voicemail. Then the tip of my new shoes, the left one, stumbled on a bump on the asphalt, and I fell.

I rolled onto the ground in slow motion, like an action hero, trying to save my head from hitting the asphalt with my right arm while keeping the cell phone firmly in my hand, and to save my lunch bag because it was minestrone and I didn't want to spill it all over.

I lay there, and looked around. Nobody seemed to have seen me trip. It's kind of nice. No embarrassment. But kind of not nice. Nobody came running to help me up. So I got up on my own. I looked at my right hand. The lower part of my palm and the back of my middle and ring fingers were scratched and bleeding. Other fingers escaped injury. I looked down. A big rip on my left knee--on the H&M jeans I'd just bought. Okay, they were on sale. They cost only $19.99. But it doesn't mean they can be ripped on the second day I wore them. And don't jeans in general have more endurance? It's not like I gave a big diving. Not only the jeans, but my skin was ripped. I could see red in the hole. Red and indigo blue of the jeans rubbed into cuticles.

I had no emergency kit, so I went back to my car, drove to somewhere closer, went to the bathroom to wash and wipe the wounds, and went to class late with the rip. At work, Kathy gave me mother-ly comfort and treatment with a big band-aide. Everybody who noticed the rip or I told the story to looked shocked and, at the same time, almost amused. "Are you okay?" they asked. I was. It hurt a little, but I could walk no problem. But I was mentally affected by the fall. Like my friends, I was shocked, and amused.

It's been more than a decade since I last fell. At least this hard. I hadn't seen what's under my skin for a long time, the redness and wetness, how dirt and fabric gets into it. I hadn't experienced the moment of losing balance and the world turning up-side-down around you before you knew what was going on but with your body already reacting somehow. It felt like a new experience. That newness was what shocked and amused me.

Grown-ups don't fall, and--have I ever thought about this?--I'm a grown-up!

Back to Blogging

So I'm back to blogging. Again. That means I was gone again.

While I was gone, I went back to Japan to see my family. My mother recently had a surgery and was recovering at home, so the main purpose of the trip was to take care of her. Nice thing was that she was doing better than I'd expected and there wasn't much for me to do. So I got to hang out with friends, get drunk, eat good food, and do some shopping of Japanese clothes. Clothes and food is something I can't help spending money on whenever I go back to my country. I know people think Japan is expensive, but actually you can get better food and clothes for less. It's true.

I spent three weeks there, missed the plane on the day of my departure, went home to spend another night, and finally got back here on the next day's flight.

If you're interested in some records I kept on what I did in Japan this summer, please check out the other blog.

After I came back to the States, I read a lot. In Japanese. Because I bought some books in Japan. I read a lot about death, which has always been one of my top interests. After my mother's surgery and being in my mid-20s, the idea of death interestingly felt more familiar and realistic. But then it seems you never know what it's like until it's really there. So even though I've read and thought a lot about it, I'm not really getting any closer to it. Death, you're strange.

So that's what I did while I was gone; going back to Japan and thinking about death. I also tried to write. I'm always trying to write because I feel I'm supposed to, but it's been kind of hard since school started. I'm taking 4 Linguistics classes and they give me so much to do. I miss being an English major, reading novels as textbooks and writing stories as homework. But it's nice to be in classrooms where there are other foreign people. It seems to be even cool to be able to speak another language in Linguistics classes, and there actually are people who are learning my language or are at least interested in doing so. It's interesting after two years in the MFA program.

4th of July

To celebrate the birth of America, I went to visit San Pedro.



I've been to San Pedro a few times, but this time I went to see the sites they shot the movie GHOST WORLD. It's one of my biggest favorites; it makes me laugh and depressed every time I watch it.

But it wasn't the best day to have this short trip. Stores were closed and streets were pretty empty. We didn't get to get off the car.



And yet we got to see some places that appeared in the movie. Yay.



Next time I'll walk in front of the wall and pretend I'm Thora Birch. I think. If I'm not too shy to do so.



There's always IKEA to visit on holidays with not much to do.

We then went to a used bookstore in Torrance and I got a memoir by Kyoko Mori for one dollar. I keep buying cheap used books recently in hopes of finishing them before the summer ends, which usually never happens.

For dinner we were thinking about a favorite Vietnamese restaurant, but, of course, it closed at 5pm, and we ended up getting some food from Famima! and ate it on the beach watching fireworks. It was pretty though it ended too soon.

I always wonder why it's illegal to do fireworks in most cities here. I used to do it all the time in Japan. With friends, sometimes without parents. I feel like such a criminal for having done that.

And there was one thing I noticed about American people on this day; wherever is green is a place to sit and relax for them. Anywhere there's grass, in the park, by the beach, on the sidewalk, in the small grassy areas around parking lots, there were people on chairs they'd brought out, with their drink, food, or/and dogs. How can they relax on the grass around parking lots? But then, why not, because there's grass. That's all that matters.

Thus went my Fourth of July with a new piece of knowledge I gained about American culture.

Umeboshi

Umeboshi is a pickled plum. It's sour and salty at the same time, and really good with white rice. Just looking at this picture makes me drool, because I've been eating it for my whole life and my brain remembers its taste.

Thursday, I brought one for lunch with my rice balls.

"What's that?" Karen asked.
"A pickled plum."
"What? Are you lying to me?"
"No! Not this time. It's a pickled plum."
"It's fruit, right?"
"Plum? I don't know. I guess. Maybe."
"It doesn't look like fruit."
"Well, because it's pickled."
"But it looks like rice in seaweed."
"What? Oh. Yes, I'm eating rice in seaweed."
"What, you said it was a plum!"
"Oh. No, you're talking about my rice ball! That's the rice in seaweed! The plum is this one, on the side!"
"Oh!"

So she was looking at the rice ball I was eating while I was talking about umeboshi on the side. I found it amusing; what I thought was so obvious wasn't obvious at all for someone else. Because we are from different cultures. I was too familiar with rice balls and pickled plums and differences between them and, so naturally, Karen wasn't at all.

It was like what happened when I first visited America (it's almost ten years ago!). When my hostfather's brother asked me, "Do you want a Lifesaver?", all I thought of was those swimmers who are stationed on the beach or by the pool to save people who are drowning, not the tiny colorful candy rings on his palm.

I cherish those confusions and puzzlements because once you know, you cannot wonder how a plum could look like rice in seaweed, why someone is asking you if you want a swimmer that saves people's lives.

Inspiration

I just finished Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and didn't like it very much. It was my very first Marquez experience, and since I heard this book wasn't the best of him, I'll probably try something else, maybe One Hundred Years of Solitude.

What this book did was make me wonder about the meaning of the word "inspiration."

In the winter when I went back to Japan and was looking for some good Japanese books to read, I remembered a friend of mine talking about Yasunari Kawabata's short story, House of the Sleeping Beauties. The way she talked about it, it seemed like really a sensual, good story, so I bought the paperback, read it and loved it. I read it slowly, indulging in such powerful and beautiful sensuality of Kawabata's writing--yup, it was all about indulgence.

So I was very thrilled when, after finishing the story, I learned Marquez wrote a novella "inspired by House of the Sleeping Beauties" and it just came out. I'd always been told Marquez was a wonderful writer--and I do think he is--so the fact one wonderful writer wrote something inspired by a story I really loved was very exciting.

But, as I said, I didn't like the book as much as I did the story by Kawabata. I could see some of the things Marquez must've gotten from Kawabata; the main idea of an old guy spending nights with a sleeping beautiful girl; the description of the sleeing girls, the sourness of her breath; sexuality and the approach of death at the old age. I was disappointed, though, because while it felt "similar," what was in the center felt so different. It didn't have much of what I really liked about Kawabata's story. It felt more sentimental and beautifying love too much.

Of course, it should be different. It's by a different author, and after all if it weren't different it'd be pretty problematic. But when you say you were "inspired," I would imagine you have been inspired by something to the core of the work, which seemed lacking in Melancholy Whores--then again the core of the work could be different for different people?

I Don't Know Why I Wrote This But I Didn't Bleed While I Did

Wednesday I had the worst headache in the morning and couldn't get out of the bed. I missed work and slept for a few more hours, and when I woke up blood was dripping out of my left nostril. It was kind of scary and I had to google "headache" and "noseblood" after I called in work to apologize for my absence without notice. I got webpages that described brain problems and high blood pressure, which also scared me, but because after all I knew my nose bled often and the headache was getting better, I decided not to worry about it.

My nose bleeds, especially the left nostril. I've had it bleed in workshop a few times, and it was pretty embarrassing when it happened. Especially in the first time it did I didn't have cleenex and had to run to the bathroom while one of my workshop-mates was reading his work. When I came back, panting, Ray asked me what was wrong. I whispered my nose was bleeding so that nobody but him would hear me and he replied, in a booming voice, "YOUR NOSE BLEEDING?"

I learned to carry cleenex everywhere I went and to sense the liquidity in my nose that wasn't stoppable by sniffing. And as my nose bled more and more, I realized how it was related to what I was doing at that time. It happened when I was reading something, or listening to lectures, anytime when I was very much in concentration, or when I was emotionally moved; in other words when my brain was working very hard, trying to fully function. It probably brought blood up into my head and it would flood out from, somehow, my left nostril.

So it's very simple; when my mind is pressurred for some reason, that comes out as blood from my nose. I liked to feel the connection between body and mind and decided to take my nosebleeding as a message from my body. And to think about I've been under some stress recently the headache and the bleeding is pretty reasonable.

Thus, everything makes sense and I like that it does.

How to Spell My Name

It was a surprise when I went to Starbucks in the US for the first time and was asked my name. We don't put names on cups at Japanese Starbucks. We just call out the name of the drink you got; "Tall caramel frappuccino!" But then what if four people got tall caramel frappuccinos at once? Writing names on cups makes sense to avoid confusion.

I imagine, though, it must be hard for the people who work at cafes to get the customers' names right. There are all kinds of names and spellings in the US. I know some people with non-English or uncommon names who say they just spell out their names or give fake English names. I've always been attracted to the idea of making up my own English name, but since I haven't done so yet, I usually just give my name as it is, "Kana." Some, not many, get it right, and others don't. It's my secret pleasure to look at the name on the receipt or the cup to see how my name was spelt--HANNA, HANA, CONNA, CONA, KANNA, KARA, KALA.

There's a girl working at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on campus, where I almost always went to get a small iced coffee after lunch on Monday and Wednesday in the spring. She never got my name right; she always put KARA or CARA. Toward the end of the semester, she seemed to start recognizing me. She would smile and nod a little when she saw me.

Yesterday was my first day at work for the summer. I went back to the Coffee Bean to get a small iced coffee and it was her who helped me. She typed something on the register without even asking me. She asked me if I wanted my receipt and I said yes. She tore it off and gave me with a smile. I looked at it. It said CARLA.

Maybe this can be my English name. As I said, I've always been interested in having one!