Your magic is real.

1:30am is not the best time to start writing a blog entry, but I have been long remiss in updating here; and, since I have spent the entire day in the apartment doing various lazy things, I have had plenty of time to think today.
First off, school is over, over, OVER, until January 15th. Sweet freedom, she is mine. I took an easy final on the 20th and then went to an advisor meeting and the end of the semester school party on the 21st. I am still in a weird state vis a vis most of the people at school, so finding people to talk at parties etc is a little strange, but I have found that I often end up gravitating towards the kids (playing with trucks > talking to people my age?), and the other people who do the same thing make good company. In particular, I was impressed with one guy who spent most of the party playing with someone else's two year old, even going as far as to sit with the toddler on his lap during our school's violin virtuoso's performance. Toddlers, it turns out, are not so appreciative of classical music, but the image of the wee little child sitting wide-eyed, with the boy-student's skinny body bent around him -- it sticks with me.
Before that was a great deal of sitting around in the apartment with dear visiting friend IK, introducing her to chu-hi while she introduced me to the first season of "Veronica Mars". After the last day of school was more of the same, but added to it numerous day trips to Tokyo (plus one to lovely odd touristy Kamakura). I have now been to quite a few more places in the nearby metropolis than I had before -- I probably doubled my time spent there, if not more, in four days of touristing. It was cold, definitely cold, and sometimes expensive and sometimes painful and sometimes boring. Other times, of course, it was wonderful. Particularly great was one evening when the two of us, plus a friend of mine, ended up in a small grill place in Ueno. Behind a main bar, a plethora of fresh ingredients surrounded a grill made of heated iron tubes, over which two chefs were at their work. Although Japan is usually hell on the vegetarian, we were able to order many delicious vegetables one at a time, eating our fill and drinking hot sake. We were sitting right inside the restaurant next to the door, so every time it opened we'd get another wintery chill before going back to stuffing ourselves on grilled potatoes, eggplant, asparagus, japanese mushrooms. I take back what I've said (out loud, and in my mind) about hating the food here.
I also finally went to Harajuku. I wish I had more time to explore all its weird little by-ways, where it seems a hundred tiny cafes and art galleries and independent clothing shops flourish, just a stone's throw away from the goth kid shop-havens.
And of course, I was in Japan for Christmas. Which was weird. Without family and presents, of course, it felt essentially like any other day, to the point where it is almost as if it hasn't happened yet. I went to a Christmas Eve party, I made a nice dinner on Christmas Day, but I don't yet feel ready to start having holiday traditions of my own while my family does their (our) thing on the other side of the planet.
Luckily, except for the price of the plane ticket, I will be going home for a week and a half after New Year's Day. I feel pretty irresponsible about going home on the one hand, because I can't afford it by any stretch of the imagination. But, at the same time, my sisters are getting older and I don't have the best idea of how they're doing right now. And my mom was going to all try and be brave about not having me home, but I felt guilty anyway. So I hope this makes up for whatever bad-daughter karma I need to counteract.
It seems like sleep is upon me. Lately, I have been having strange dreams, particularly about my(male, scholastic) nemesis, but I suppose interesting dreams help make up for days spent in pyjamas watching video clips from The Office, right?
Right.

Here I go, here I go, here I go again!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UKaVBVikysw



Well, let me bring you back to the subjecttttt.

Alone Again Or.

I am, as of a few hours ago, once again living on my own. As of yet, I have not really ventured over to the other side of the apartment; there are a lot of nice things over there, like a real desk and an extra couch and a place to sleep that isn't also a couch, but they don't quite feel like they belong to me.
Besides that bit of sentimentality, I pretty much ditched out of doing the "goodbye" thing. This morning as I was getting ready for school, I found out that my roommate wouldn't still be in the city when class ended, as I had originally thought. I said I'd be willing to go to Tokyo to meet him for a farewell dinner, but my heart wasn't really in it. Instead, after school, I sent him a text message to see what his progress was, then coughed myself into a sleep (I've been sick the last few days) that lasted past the point where he'd still have his cell phone; since it's a rental, he had to return it once he finally got to the airport. I did get a reply text, and I will probably write some sort of email before I go to sleep tonight, but right now all I really want is to not hear from or about him for awhile. At least a week, and possibly much longer.
The reason for that is, of course, that the random trouble with my classmate dating my roommate came to a head last weekend. On my birthday, even. I should sit you down sometime and recite the parade of crap my last four or five birthdays have been. It was last year's birthday letdown that brought this blog into being, after all.
Birthday number 24, which consequently feels far older than 23, seemed to go fairly well. I had lunch with seven other people, at least four of whom I was not expecting to show up for the event, and afterwards went to study with two of my classmates. I bought special 'birthday' coffee and a new pair of earrings, and although I didn't get a lot of homework done, it was more productivity than I usually manage on a Sunday. Little did I know, however, that while I was off wandering about the city searching for things I could buy for myself, my roommate and the girl were having a pow-wow about my various evils. Which, to be fair, I guess I am sort of evil, some of the time, maybe. I did tell my roommate that there was a good chance this girl was emotionally messy/crazy, after all, and that is not a terribly nice thing to say. In my defense, however, I was totally right: anyone over the age of 15 who thinks that Facebook is a good venue for expressing anger is at least a little cracked.
This whole "Amy-sucks-let's-badmouth-her-together" party had, of course, some negative consequences for me. Now, for instance, I am on tiptoes when walking around school, lest I have some awkward run-in in the bathroom or near the fridge with my 'nemesis'. One of her close friends also seems to not like me anymore, which is too bad, because I thought he was a pretty decent guy. I am also sort of nervous about being badmouthed to more people. I don't exactly know how to run an anti-smear campaign. I feel like I should start bringing homemade snacks to school and leaving them in the kitchenette area, just to be on the safe side.
Another wonderful side to this story is that my roommate didn't tell me himself that he had decided he disliked me. Instead, I heard about it 3rd-hand, via text, something like six days after the fact. I was home at the time after having stayed in sick, and my roommate was sitting at his computer. After I read the text and double-checked by calling the sender, I reacted by starting to throw everything of my roommate's I could reach out of the apartment. This ended up just being his shoes, as they were closest to the door. I threw a shoe, looked to see if my roommate had noticed, then threw another shoe or two. My apartment is on the second floor, and I threw eight shoes, so you think he would have heard or seen something. But, no. Talk about the internet degrading the quality of human relationships.
After the failure of my shoe assault, I yelled at him to get out of my house and never talk to me again, but it turns out that that only works if the person is prone to listening to you when you tell them things. This particular boy is not, so instead he stayed in his seat, and we ended up "talking about it". Nothing really kills the joy of a righteous indignation like having to explain yourself.
In the end, he didn't leave, at least not for three more days (which brings us to today). He also promised to try to fix things between me and my classmate, at least to the point where I don't have to fear getting shanked in the school bathroom. He hasn't done that yet, of course, and the mode was downgraded from a face-to-face meeting to an email he promises to send, but.... At this point, would you expect any better?

If there is one positive outcome out of this whole nonsense, it would have to be that I am finding myself much more drawn to boys who seem both nice and as if they have their shit together, rather than the usual "please fix me" types I seem to gravitate towards. It's about fucking time, right?

Over and over and over, again.

The girl at school my roommate was dating now dislikes me so much she deleted me as a friend from both myspace AND facebook. This is serious, kids. Don't even think about laughing at something like that.

Explosion!

A lot of things have happened in the last few days. Most of them have involved a lot of words coming out of my mouth, often angry words, directed at my roommate. In the course of two days, we may have talked for 6 hours or more about the state of our relationship. The end result is that I will soon be living alone again. This is amicable but not simple or necessarily easy, and I do not know what will become of us in the future. I do know that I am ready to be farther away from his life, though. Very ready indeed.
At first in fact I felt incredibly guilty about asking him to leave, even though he had anticipated it. I felt all mawkish, made breakfast and acted nice, even somehow found myself saying that in the future maybe he could move back in. That was pretty foolish of me, because right now, as he is lying in a sleepy heap in his corner of the apartment, back this morning from staying over at my classmate's apartment, I really just want this entire thing over with.

I was deep in a dream and didn't know it.

Two evenings ago, I got back from my first trip to Kyoto ever, during my school's fall break. At the time, as I was walking around the temples and experiencing the city, I kept thinking of how I would need to portray this all later on in my blog. And yet, now here I am, back at the computer but with my memories of the trip muddled enough that I have no real idea what to say, nor how to make it interesting enough to be actually worth reading.
I will try that, I think, tomorrow, and skip forward now to just talking a bit about what's on my mind.

What is stuck in my head most strongly now is that today seems like a day of realizing adulthood, however little I might feel ready to do so. On the one hand, I am still very specifically me, with all of my childishness and un-togetherness that keeps me from feeling as confident and real as I hope my adult self will be. Yet externally, things are shifting, and I can't get around that.

The first notice of this was that my dear old friend in Kyoto, whose floor I slept on this week, turned 30 yesterday. 30 is kind of an arbitrary signifier and all, and our generation has decided 40 is the new 30 blah blah blah. I am ignoring all that slacker generation bullshit for a moment, because holy god, a close friend of mine is 30. And not a friend who was 28 when I met him, either. When we first became friends, I was 17 and in my first semester of undergrad, nine-eleven had just occurred, there was no war on Iraq, there was no invasion of Afghanistan, and I was not allowed into any bars, ever. When it got cold I wore a big black turtleneck sweater I had had for many years that didn't quite fit and made me look like a beatnik. But I also often got caught in the rain dressed poorly in such outfits as in tights and a denim skirt and foam-soled mary janes, shoes that fit so badly I lost both my pinky toenails that year. I do not think I owned an umbrella or knew where to buy one. Once, I tried to make Rice-a-roni in the mircrowave, then tried to eat the uncooked rice and chicken-flavory broth when my cooking experiment failed. I do not know how I managed to live through that year.
My friend was not in the same straits precisely, as he was 23 and had already had experiences with living on his own for some time. Yet looking back it is also strange to think of him as I knew him then, dressed in vintage sweaters and constantly nervously playing with his lip ring, starting college for the second time and trying to get on the path to adulthood. I wanted to be more like him, have opinions on lots of music, wear v-neck grandpa-style sweaters, drink coffee and beer and all the rest of it. I don't know if I realized it then exactly, but I do remember trying to buy similar sweaters and feeling excited and special when he would pass me filled-out punch cards from the coffee shop he worked at so I could get free drinks. Making a friend at all that year, but especially a cool older friend who made fun of my age but would still hang out with me anyway, was a triumph that probably remained unmatched until I made the next big social step and started dating. And though now I have flown the coop twice, to LA and Japan, and though I can now dress myself and feed myself with a relative amount of ease, I still feel a strong connection to that first year of 'freedom', before I had any idea of what was to come after it.

The second notice of my reality of adulthood is marriage, and how even though there is more distance between me and being married than there is between me and the moon, it is an institution I can not get around encountering. My closest friend here in Yokohama, or perhaps a better way to name her would be my confidant/big sister lady, is totally married. And has been, again, since I was about 17 and wandering around in the rain in brown tights and black shoes. Her husband can't be with her for this year in Japan, so I met him last night for the first time, but I felt a bit as if I already knew him. I had heard bits and pieces about him already, of course, but the real reason was that he has almost the same exact voice as the boyfriend of a close friend back home. While I talked to him, it was hard to not point this fact out, even though I knew it would come across as irrelevant and maybe a little creepy. Yet, there it was, the voice of someone I knew coming out of someone I didn't, and as I listened I felt very far from home indeed.
I think until I was talking to her husband, however, I hadn't fully realized that she was married.
That the whole ridiculous backbreaking anxiety-ridden quest to beat loneliness and find a partner had been over for her. Yet, there it was: this man was her husband and she and he had sat down and decided that they were going to be with each other, faithfully, even while they were still young enough to be out partying and working crappy part-time jobs and hating their parents. I think the biggest surprise in all of this isn't the reality of love or faithfulness, but that people I know and have befriended had the ability to make that kind of decision. That is an Adult Thing, and you cannot get around it.

So here I am. I have become something of an adult, and maybe it did not happen until this year, but I am beginning to feel like it happened. Now is a time when I can stop saying that I might, for instance, abandon grad school and go try some other life, to avoid the weird feeling I get from telling people I am going to be a professor. Because, well, I am. I decided that. Think of how many other things I must have the power to decide as well.

Observation.

Today on the train, on the way to school, I listened to Belle and Sebastian's "The State I Am In" and got emotional (in the good way). Hours later, still thinking about the song, I came to the conclusion that the song is a subtle remake of Leonard Cohen's "One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong".
It could be, right?