This place is haunted.

I have been remiss in posting for the last week. I am back in the States, at my parents' house, with a cold and without any particular responsibilities.
The flight back from Japan was in coach and difficult. I did not have the vast array of sleeping pills with me that I had taken on the flight out, so I was awake for most of the 9+ hours, reading Ibuse's Black Rain. After all, the one thing you want to be doing while you're 3000 feet above the Pacific ocean and trying to fall asleep is read about the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima. I am a smart woman.
Once I arrived at LAX, I had to go through agricultural customs and throw away two grapefruit I hadn't wanted to throw out in Japan (fruit, after all, is expensive). Amanda picked me up, and from there, I spent most of the next two and a half days asleep on a bed I had made out of the cushions of her love-seat. When I was awake, I walked around her neighborhood looking for food, and had the odd experience of being honked at by men in cars. I felt like an observer, taking data as to what "Los Angeles" was like. Apparently in Los Angeles, men will try to hit on me, and the 7-11 will have a gigantic "Coffee Station" with at least 8 different types of coffee available for purchase. That last part really puts the US convenience stores back in the running against the Japanese stores.
In LA, I also saw my advisor, and tried to make him laugh at my stories as I always do. He offered me a bit of extra funding, which I took despite feeling guilty about it. I fled two large debts in Japan, after all, that I'd like to settle before I have to return to the country. If everything works out, I might be out of debt for the first time in years, come September. We shall see.
On the way to my parents' house, I read A Moveable Feast for the first time, and fell back into love with Hemingway, despite the cliche-ness of it. Next came Didion's Play it as it Lays, which is biting and sad and uncomfortable. Both novels made me dislike the verbosity of my writing (and speaking); their words are sharp, and both leave out anything in their stories that is not absolutely essential. I like that; it leaves the stories feeling clean and presses the mind to create the details of each scene on its own.
Anyway, now I'm at "home", spending my time eating, sleeping, and ransacking my stepdad's music collection. I now have a lot of George Harrison and John Lennon solo works added to my music collection, and Beatles rarities, and an anthology of the Yardbirds, just to name some. I finally have a reliable internet connection here, and have been dling a lot of random things as well (to offset the Beatles' slant). Stocking up, I suppose, for the future. Pity my poor computer's hard drive. There are also a lot of cats here, who like to poke around while I'm typing and use the corners of my laptop to scratch their cheeks. Cute, until your laptop is coated in cat fur and your eyes start to itch. My years away from home have made me weak where pet dander is concerned.
I still have over a week of family time, but I've started already to become anxious about returning to Ann Arbor. Won't it be so sad, after all, to see all these places I remember so well, without so many of the people I associate with them? I feel like the nostalgia is going to beat me with a hammer. When I think of the town, I think of drinking outside on someone's steps and feeling lonely. On my own front porch last summer on the phone with George, or on Sara's with B drinking some fruity mess, feeling scared and strange in the back of my mind even in company. Or at the bar, sitting in a mess of peanut shells, laughing and happy but afraid to go home and be alone again.
At this rate, my sentimentalism will be the death of me.

In-betweentimes.

Summer school is over. I passed, it seems, as I was awarded a certificate to that end at the Center's end-of-the-program party. I also have a finished final exam, sporting a higher grade than I have ever received on a test related to the Japanese language, to serve as supporting evidence. At the same time, I wouldn't be very surprised if tomorrow morning found me rushing at 9:25 to the train station yet again, since I don't feel as if I have any purpose being here without classes.

On the last day of school, and half the students' last full day in Japan, I somehow ended up spending around 9 hours "partying" with my classmates. For the first 4 of those hours or so, I mostly felt out of place (and, at times, oily and/or sweaty) but, after the second half, thanks to drinking, I began to have a good time. This still somehow resulted in me and my one-friend-in-Japan whispering to each other, in the middle of one party, that we felt completely out of place, and then using centrifugal force to swirl around on the barstools to show that we could make our own fun without social interaction. And really, it makes me quite sad, when I've seen some of the ridiculously intense friendships that have sprung up between some of the students in the program over just a month and a half, and compare that to my own general hermitly habits. I suppose this is a good experience to keep in mind when the fall program starts -- bond quick, and bond early.

In a way this same experience is mirrored when I find myself bored and wasting time on Facebook. Scanning through other people's enthusiastic wall posts and suchlike often makes me feel envious of people who make more, and stronger, friendly bonds with the people around then than I do. Yet that feeling is rarely accompanied by some big desire to make a renewed effort to become close with whoever's profile it is I'm looking at. . . . This sort of thing makes me really wonder just what magical set of kin-like relationships it is I'm envious of in other people, and hoping to find in the future.

I should point out, though, that once I did hit some critical stage in my being-around-people + drinking, I did have a good time. I actually sang karaoke (and paid for the privilege), taught someone how to make fried rice, did an assortment of stupid dances while sitting, and got to do a great evening-ender sing along to "Hey Jude" with ten other students (all of whom whose names I actually know). At the end of the night, I ended up letting a drunk fellow student who had missed his last train sleep on the floor of my room (+futon and blanket), which I suppose nominates me for sainthood. He made up for the fact that I couldn't much sleep through his snoring and a fear he might die of alcohol poisoning in his sleep by saying a lot of nice things about how he couldn't believe we hadn't become friends earlier in the program. So, at least +alcohol, there must be a little charm left in me somewhere.

I suppose I will have a lot of time to mediate on my random desires and failings over the next three weeks, though, as I will be spending a hell of a lot of time airborne. And at home, which nearly guarantees that I will have to spend hours after everyone else has gone to sleep scanning through late-night television and feeling out of place. Even if the trip home goes well, which I am not expecting of this one, the feelings of boredom and lost freedom while I stay there are enough to kill me dead (at least mentally). This results in a lot of insomnia, or at least a lot of falling asleep at 4am to a terrible infomercial, and generally doesn't do much to make life seem more worth living.

Oh, and, since it wouldn't be my life if this weren't true, I also somehow once again owe a lot of people money that I may very well not be able to deliver on. At least this time it's UCLA's fault instead of mine.

Now I should probably be about the business of putting everything that isn't coming back to the States with me in a series of boxes, I suppose?