burningbright

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that we’re doing a project about the suburbs. What’s going on, in 2010, post housing-market crash? Are poorer people moving out there? Are the people out there just seeming poorer by virtue of lost jobs? Are the houses losing value?

What’s going to happen when the energy for heating, cooling, and commuting gets to be expensive? Really expensive?

My theory is that those houses will be abandoned, or possibly filled with the disenfranchised, living off the grid post-apocalypse style, see California Love. Can you dig it? In a way, this isn’t a totally disagreeable image. There must be a thousand post-apocalypse stories which essentially boil down to a dream of a simpler life, where choices are clearer and there are only two ways to be, a kick-ass survivor or dead. Where the urban landscape, embodying the money and the master plan of people richer and more powerful than you, has become merely a surface to navigate, a derelict playground divested of rules, conventions and the need to share space with a million other people.

An emptier place.

Unfortunately, most of these stories seem to be predicated on one particularly flawed premise, which is that the world will be an emptier place when all of those resources run out. In fact, it’s likely to be a more crowded place, with an ever-increasing need for housing. So while we might not have the resources to maintain all of those suburban homes, chances are they will be occupied anyway. Sound like a recipe for horrible things like rampant violence, disease, injury and fear?

The ability of an elected governing body to create a semblance of order is inextricably tied to its ability to provide a degree of safety and consistency to its constituents. In light of the fact that I’m not alone in the world, it seems like a not-unreasonable sacrifice to give up the illusion of being sole master of my destiny, in favor of being able to access the information, the creativity, the tools and ingenuity and systems that are a product of organized human networks.

With that in mind, it seems to me that something has to be done about the suburbs before they are beyond repair, and beyond the reach of a city’s, a society’s, resources.

It has to be systematic, an intervention at every level, and one of those levels is the individual house. The split-level McMansion cookie cutter snout-house: I think maybe I might have some ideas for what to do about them.

February 9th, 2010
Categories: projects . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

I’m alive, I’m back, and I’m applying for graduate school.

I haven’t been blogging because of above reason, and being out of town visiting my grandmother who does not have internet access, and being on vacation in southern California.

I’ve also been gone because the spam I get in comments was overwhelming, and I haven’t had a chance to upgrade to a later version of Wordpress (this problem should be fixed next week sometime).

Anyway, excuses aside, I’m hoping to make a go of the blog thing again this year. It has become foreign to me, like an uncomfortable friendship where we’re on the phone and I don’t know quite what to say…hoping to remedy that!

And also needing to write two final essays/writing samples to submit with my final application. Somebody throw me a social issue to pontificate about, please.

January 20th, 2007
Categories: happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: 1 Comment

I’m back. Summer sure went fast. It’s cold here these days, carrying my luggage through Tokyo was the last time I’ve sweated in a week (only a week ago?).

The family vacation was good, my mom fell in love with Japan and my brother didn’t exactly (he’s a big old travel wuss, shared youth hostel bedrooms make him uncomfortable and communal bathing was out of the question) but they both thoroughly enjoyed meeting my teachers and friends and seeing the sights. And I enjoyed being their tour guide, I felt like I was genuinely useful in my ability to show them a few things that they most likely wouldn’t have experienced without the benefit of my background knowledge of the country.

Let’s see, I also met the Gaijin Girl, who doesn’t seem to be committing social suicide nearly as effectively as she claims and was actually quite delightful. I think I babbled her ear off. Sorry GG, too bad I missed you on my way out of Tokyo!

After seeing the family off, I met my travel buddy P-chan. We went to Sado Island for two days of a three-day concert series by the Sado native Kodo drummers and a guest group, Tamango’s Urban Tap. Tamango was cool, Kodo was hot. I actually saw Kodo in college when they came to my university, so I knew they’d be hot. Who can resist the pounding of a 10-foot drum that deafens you…by a nearly naked man whose muscles are stagelit most becomingly?

Weary of the sauna-like heat, P-chan and I moved north to begin my first (and her third) WWOOF experience. Willing Workers On Organic Farms is pretty much that–you choose a host based on their self-description in the guidebook, go there, and help them out every day in exchange for room and board and the family experience.

So I started at a horse farm in Aomori. The gig consisted of the expected poo shoveling, and also garden work, traded for riding lessons in the mornings. It had its ups (early mornings, cooking our own food, riding, breathtakingly beautiful night skies) and downs (bugs biting me on the ass, mentally scarring episode involving P-chan on a bucking horse and me on the horse it was bucking at). I don’t really wanna be a cowboy.

The farm’s specialty was therapy for mentally handicapped children through riding, which wasn’t really something we could help with. The garden was not so much organic, so we lived a somewhat afterthought existence in a warehouse as opposed to with a family per se, but got to watch hot chicks do yabusame, or horseback archery, and see the Milky Way every evening, so whatever, it’s all good.

Then we moved on to Nikko, to a guesthouse. We looked forward to yoga in the mornings and aromatherapy every other day. “It says vegan diet on the profile,” I joked to P-chan, “but I bet this guy pulls up in an SUV.” Lo and behold, what should pull into the train station parking lot at that very minute but a gigantic red Ford Expedition.

Driven, as it turns out, by an angry, sarcastic, and questionably insane Japanese man who also doubled as a 35-year veteran of California and conservative fucknut. The first thing he did back at the lodge was ask us about our politics and tell us (without bothering to wait for an answer) that we were spoiled. The next day he refused to feed P-chan the strict diabetic diet that she must eat, and that he had agreed in our email exchanges would not be a problem at all. To make a long, uncomfortable and in the end slightly scary story (that man has a road-rage problem and should not be in charge of a multi-ton vehicle) we told him we would leave the following morning.

Actually we left that very night. In between the blowup wherin we announced our decision to leave, and P’s and my frantic discussion of what to do next, I managed to sneak up to the customers’ computer and steal enough internet time to download a train schedule. There was one more train to Tokyo that night.

I said “come on P, I’m out of here in 15 minutes, are you with me?” She wrung her hands, “I don’t know, I can’t decide so fast, maybe we should stick it out, I can’t pack so quickly!”–but I had never felt more sure and more excited about a breakaway. Moments of my life that I could never get back, wasted in a hateful lodge with a hateful man; I was certainty embodied.

“Just think, we could go to Yoyogi Park on Sunday!” She stopped. “Alright then,” she said “you know, all I needed was a reason.” She started throwing her stuff in her bag, an assembling process that usually takes an hour crammed into 10 minutes, with a few spillover bits that I crammed into the top of mine. Another poor WWOOFer who had been sticking it out for a week already, looked on in dismay at our efficient getaway. We wished the stuck WWOOFer luck, marched up into the kitchen, requested a ride to the station in the sort of polite Japanese tone that left no room for argument, and left Nikko without a backward glance.

Incidentally, don’t ever go to Nikko Park Lodge, it’s a dive, there’s nothing organic in that cheap vegan diet, untrained volunteers (there is no hired staff, the owner is too cheap) do all the sheet-changing, building maintainance, scrubbing and cleaning and the poor yoga teacher who does the rest of the work is probably being held captive.

Tokyo was everything I dreamed it could be. It was the first time I really, truly enjoyed Tokyo.

Alas, our friends left town and we needed one more WWOOF host before our Japan time ran out. This time we went to Ibaraki-ken, on the Pacific coast. The kitchen was deplorably messy and the weeds in the garden unbelievably high (and the “short bike ride to swim in the ocean” was more of a 25 km roundtrip to wade at the ugly beach), but the lady in charge was wonderful inexhaustibly energetic and kind, and her family lovely, and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to round out my two years in Japan.

While there, I was also treated to dinner by a friend from junior high, my neighbor down the street in fact, now a JET. It was by chance that I ran into her at JET orientation in Chicago two years ago, and just barely that I recalled her mentioning a prefecture beginning with ‘I’, north of Chiba. Anyway, she’s staring down a third year…you go girl! What luck, that we could meet up?

Anyway, back to Tokyo, this time to stay with an old Tottori friend, recently promoted from the inaka to Sasazuka. He generously put me up for three nights, and even got me on the guest list to the reopening of the famous Absolut Ice Bar (where I chatted with the handsome Swedish designer of the bar’s icy interior). I spent most of my days in Shibuya, watching the bobbing unbrellas at the “tangle” crossing, worrying about whatever it is that I always worry about these days, anxiety having become the permanent state of my heart and chest. Not wanting to leave, wanting the flight to be over with, shopping with my remaining yen, despising the ambient media overload of Shibuya (I still hate you Beyonce). Feeling like I was losing my best friend when P-chan and I said goodbye. And then saying goodbye.

…
It’s weird to be back in the American Midwest. I feel out of synch with life here, and though the feeling gets less every day it’s nothing I can talk about without sounding like a worrywart and a whiner, dwelling on the past. Sometimes I wish I could express my true feelings, which are usually those of a worrywart and whiner who dwells on the past. Not that I’m the sort who worries about being thought of as a whiner who dwells on the past or anything.

I have to keep reminding myself that, though I was sad to leave Tokyo, I couldn’t have stayed–as GG said, sometimes Japan is what you need, but you gotta know when it’s time to go, before being a permanent gaijin sinks into your soul, before you get jaded and bitter and stuck. It was time.

Now what? Dunno, searching, thinking blah blah. Need to find ways to stay busy here while searching. It is easy to fall into depression when you’re living back at home and your friends are all busy with work (or dating each other, effectively cancelling each other out [or newly gone crazy and dysfunctional, also not useful]) and everyone you know is either married or already almost done with grad school or both.

In any case, “functionally illiterate and loving it” are days gone by, and the times, like this blog, must change.

September 23rd, 2006
Categories: travel, japan . Author: ximena . Comments: 3 Comments

I pack my life in stages; final conference and the suit goes in the suitcase, final classes, in go the work clothes. Final parties, toss in my earrings and heels; all the trappings of my small-town urban life boxed and shipped.

I’m left with my raggedest, ill-fitting, badly matched summer survival gear, sandals, a bottle of DEET, tickets to a concert and reservations for a nice long vacation followed by a month of WWOOFing.

After my family visits me and we travel to Kyoto, Tokyo and Hokkaido, I will check out the Earth Celebration concert on Sado Island, and then move on to Aomori in the north, where I and my friend P will shovel horse shit for room and board for a couple weeks, and then do housework and pick weeds in Nikko. I can’t wait.

No really.

Summer here I come!

July 20th, 2006
Categories: travel, happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: 2 Comments

Tuesday was the day I’ve been anticipating for awhile, ever since I watched the solemn goodbyes of leaving teachers, my first spring here at school.

I knew Speech Marathon Day was coming, so Monday I begged R-chan to help me translate my thoughts. I told her stories, and if she laughed, I had her tell it back to me in Japanese, in simple enough terms that it made me laugh, and wrote it down. First I wrote in kana, but I just couldn’t read fast enough so I cheated and wrote everything out in romaji.

Here’s what I said to the students, at the semester closing ceremony in the morning:

When I first arrived, I thought to myself, ‘I’m actually in Japan’ and I was excited. However, as I waited for the semester to start, I started to become worried. I am not good at public speaking, and I realized that being an English ALT was nothing BUT public speaking, every single day.
Damn, I thought to myself, maybe I signed myself up for the wrong job…but the escape ship had sailed by that point [literally, ã?‚ã?¨ã?®ç¥­ã‚Šã?§ã?—ã?Ÿ. This translates as something like “you missed it but the festival is over so you can’t go back and watch the parade now”].
Luckily, thanks to all of you, I had an enjoyable teaching experience. And especially thanks to the diligent and dedicated students of English here at Y-koko…ha ha, this is a bit of a joke. But truthfully, thanks to the kindness of teachers, and the enthusiasm of students in class. This is the truth.
I’m still not good at public speaking, but now, when I go back to America, I am thinking of continuing my studies to become a teacher.
Now I have a piece of advice. In the future, you will probably never think to yourself, ‘I sure wish I had studied more grammar!’ But the day where you think, ‘I wish I could speak a few words of a foreign language’ will surely come. Next semester, please do not waste this chance, and try your best in your studies.
Thank you for the past two years.

It went well, they even nodded seriously when I complimented their diligence, and then laughed when I told them it was a joke. The teachers just might have laughed loudest.

The final enkai was in the evening. This was my evening speech:

I don’t think I’m going to be nostalgic about everything in Japan. For example, always being the last to laugh at a joke told in Japanese, assuming I got it at all, or the time when I had gained weight and my neighborhood Yakult granny patted my stomach and asked if I was pregnant, were not so much fun.
But seeing beautiful Daisen out the window of the school every morning, and more than anything, being able to work in the Staffroom with all of you, is something I’ll never forget. Being a part of the Y-koko staff for these past two years has been an honor.
Thank you.

K spoke, and Nagai-sensei in English, and then they turned on that damn emotionally manipulative natsukashii music they play during slideshows at high school graduations, and K and I both received flowers, from Nago-sensei my staffroom neighbor (who was looking very kakoii, yum), me getting all teary.

The principal gave me a gift, and shook my hand, and I went back to my seat. I was trying too hard to keep from breaking out into cathartic tears to even feel relieved at having finished speaking. So I started drinking instead. Good party, good day, good night and good luck, and goodbye.

July 19th, 2006
Categories: school, happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: 2 Comments

An article on remystifying the orgasm in response to a book:

It’s not that the sexual revelations and revolutions of the recent past have not brought considerable good. It’s great that men know more about women’s bodies than they did, great they no longer imagine, like the cad in Milan Kundera’s 1972 novel The Joke, that any sexual exchange short of intercourse is emasculating. What’s bad is that now we have books like Margolis’s O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, which insistently and insipidly fetishize orgasms–adding, thereby, not just to our fears in the erotic realm but also, paradoxically, to our boredoms.

Nehring wants to “remystify” the orgasm. She even suggests that we have Christianity to thank for blurring religious and sexual ecstacies, making sex all the more exhilerating a treat for it’s forbiddenness.

I’m with her–not so much in that it needs to be remystified, but in the sentiment that we should not become attached to our orgasms like a cheap junkfood fix.

This is what I always hated about the HBO series Sex and the City. It made the taboo topic of women wanting sex accessible, surely not a bad thing. But it only replaced outdated lady-in-the-kitchen whore-at-night double standards with a high-heel wearing sexually promiscuous “liberated” woman questionable lack of standards.

Shock value was the substance of it. The sexiness of wild, wealthy carefree Manhattan living and daylong vibrator/orgy sessions seemed attractive only in contrast–like the way Siberia gets to sounding good when it’s 100 degrees and humid and they turn off the AC in the staffroom–with my, the viewer’s, comparatively cumbersome life of working and sweating and not EVER being dressed in the latest fashion (and not getting any sex at all at the time I was watching the show).

The actual characters’ lives, even their plentiful sex lives, were hollow shells of emotion-free hooking up, and I found nothing that made me want to trade places with them. They really seemed lonely and the sex seemed empty.

The best sex I ever have is the most emotionally charged. Oodles of orgasms easily had are a fun fantasy, but they are like those mini powdered sugar donuts, fluffy, eaten by the dozen, grounded in nothing and quickly forgotten.

I prefer mine rich and heavy, if somewhat fewer and farther between. With tension and buildup and plenty of time for contemplation of religious taboos I might be flouting (just kidding, Jesus doesn’t do it for me), and a technicolor finish. My best ones come with fireworks. I want tiramisu. Not grocery sheet cake with sprinkles; German Black Forest cake with fresh, juicy cherries.

July 13th, 2006
Categories: feminist, deep thoughts . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

On Thursday I will finish my final lesson at school, and that will be it for my eigo-no-sensei career. I’ve been making stabs at packing and preliminary sorting, but recently it’s gotten so fucking hot that I can barely think.

This week and next will be packed with goodbye parties, making arrangements for the family trip, and for WWOOFing, and moving out of my apartment.

Saying goodbye sucks. I want to take the town with me, and leave the job behind. I’ve really come to like living here, and having finally made some friends it feels crappy to be leaving.

I want the goodbyes over with, or at least the moving part of things. I believe it will help my goodbyes to be able to say them in summer, when Japan can just eat itself. The worst is, I would be less hot if I could wear fewer clothes, but having become somewhat Japanified I just can’t bring myself to go completely sleeveless. Shorts and short skirts are out too.

I want to say pithy things about how the experience has changed me and sushi and kimonos but for reasons of heat my sense of humor is dead and insightfulness slips my mind.

Maybe it’s the full moon.

July 11th, 2006
Categories: happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments

Ever since I turned recognizeably female, somewhere in junior high, I have glommed older men like a piece of gum in a sandbox. As an introduction to the world of being picked up, there was the sci fi convention guy, who upon learning my age (14) mumbled that he must be drunker than he’d thought and walked away, to his credit.

M was 19 when I was 15, he wanted to take me to Chicago for a night of fun in the bars and come back in the morning–from St. Louis.

R was 22 when I was 16, he made me mix tapes and didn’t try to get in my pants. I appreciated it.

It was downhill from there.

RM was 28 to my 17, he showed me his apartment and told me that he and his roommate only ever fucked occasionally when they were lonely. His thesis was about the reoccurring “magical girl” character in Japanese animation. He wanted a magical girl to suck him off. He moved to California.

B, another sci fi convention catch, was 32 to my 18, he just wanted to make out a little “yeah I’m cool with whatever you want” in his hotel room at the convention while we were supposedly watching City of Angels, or was it The Saint. He sent me a high school graduation present. He wanted me to fly to Arizona in his private jet. I didn’t go.

S was 22 to my 18. The age difference wasn’t a big deal, but his burning desire to teach me the ways of womanhood made me sick. He expounded on his theories of how much he just needed to have a lot of sex until I started feeling like I owed him something. I stopped replying to his emails.

V-san from Japanese class was 39 to my 20. He launched a bombardment campaign on the theory that if he didn’t give up for long enough, I would finally hand over the secret crystal butterfly of my virginity like the scared little Asian porn actresses he liked. He stopped calling when I told him I’d had sex.

It took a couple of assholes on my 21st birthday to finally push me over the edge. They teased me about being a virgin until I told them to fuck off and never address me again, and to leave the bar where we were playing pool. They went. It was a revelationary moment for me.

Since then I haven’t had any trouble, at least until last week.

There is this bus driver who drives my route. For two years he has said hello when he sees me, followed by a short conversation in Japanese about the weather. A nice old man, 60ish, could be your grandfather, proud to show off his few words of English.

A month ago I told him I would be leaving in July. Suddenly his demeanor changed. Every time I said goodbye he clung a little bit, he hesitated, gave me puppydog eyes like he was holding something back. I ignored it.

Last week he asked me to have dinner with him. I had been hoping it wouldn’t come to that. And the bitch of it was, this time I was caught. My students were starting to get on the bus, hearing every word we said. I tried to pretend not to understand, so he repeated himself. I tried the Japanese hesitation-implying-no, hoping he’d get the message. He asked me if I understood. I was desperate for him to just shut the fuck up and stop embarrassing me.

He launched into it again and asked for my number and I couldnt bring myself to humiliate him, I was like–YES! okay fine, please don’t say any more. I gave him the number. I am an idiot, okay? We’re not disputing this fact. And polite and respectful of my elders as I am, when he called I couldnt find the heart (or the vocabulary) to turn him down.

We had dinner last night. Sushi at a real sushi shop, it was good and a new experience, I figured I had done my duty both as a foreign representative employed by the taxpayers of Japan, and as an evening of company for an older man without much family. Fine.

We got back to the parking lot where we had met, and I said, well take care A-san…and he started the eyes again. He wanted to know if we could meet before I left again. How about once a week, he suggested? I told him I was busy. How about he take a day off and we could go visit the castle in the next town? Impossible, I said. Can we at least meet again once more? I declined to commit.

His clinging needy manipulations reminded me nightmarishly of another whiney bitch who tears ever deeper with his crying, poisonous, clawed tentacles. It made me near panicky, it made me so angry, I wanted to burn everything I was wearing.

I got home, locked my door with both locks, called the boyfriend. I have a boyfriend. He was drunk and helpfully gave me the diatribe for being a pushover. I guess he only quoted what I was thinking. I went to bed late, exhausted.

June 30th, 2006
Categories: feminist, happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: 1 Comment

Meet George Ouzounian, whose purported girlfriend’s taste I hold in question.

Melissa Lafsky offers a very insightful analysis. I wonder if her writing or lawyering skills are better.

And a reader’s response to her column says what I was thinking.

In the space of a conversation he claims to be educated (went to college and worked in computer science) and admits that some of his less mentally nimble readers might be failing to appreciate juvenile woman-bashing properly as light ironic humor (offering to assemble an army for his command). He even clarifies that he doesn’t treat his girlfriend the way he writes about women (”I don’t expect her to do the dishes”)…despite which he doesn’t seem to draw any conclusions about potential social and psychological damage to others, because of the pointless, gutless vitriol he spews.

After five minutes of thought, which probably couldn’t be narrated as eloquently as Lafsky’s, I realized I’m neither angered nor intimidated by Ouzounian. He’s bitter about–whatever–and women are an easy target for his personal problem. Why would I waste my ire?

June 9th, 2006
Categories: feminist . Author: ximena . Comments: 3 Comments

On Saturday I gave a small salon concert. It was my singing debut, and it went well. I sort of still can’t believe I did it, because singing in front of people was not on my to-do list. Ever.

During the past year I’ve been taking unofficial voice lessons from my friend M, a singer and voice teacher. We met last year preparing for a concert based on music from Les Mis; the music teacher here at school asked me to coach the cast in their English pronunciation, and M was singing a couple of lead roles.

[It just so happened that I was supremely qualified for this task, having sung every song by heart a million times in the shower. How often do you get to put an idle hobby to good use? It’s a rare pleasure.]

M and I hit it off, and we decided to trade voice training for English pronunciation coaching. We continued after the concert, her always offering another lesson and me always trying to find ways to be useful in return, until this spring, when she decided it was time for me to begin performing.

I begged, I made excuses, I dodged with the best of them, but then betrayed myself one evening after an enkai when I dropped by to give back some books, and made the mistake of stopping in for tea. I wasn’t drunk! But I guess my inhibitions were still a little relaxed, so when she put the recital question to me again I agreed cheerfully. The next morning I woke up stone cold sober and thought, shit. What have I agreed to?

We bargained it down from a concert in a rented hall to a small salon performance with M as my accompanist, and I invited the people who have been closest to me during my stay in Japan.

I sang two Italian madrigal love songs, two Schubert Lieder, Summertime from Porgy and Bess (transposed, that song is too high for my range), On My Own from Les Mis, and Kimi o nosete, the theme song from Laputa, Castle in the Sky.

I’m glad I did it. M was right; it did make me work harder, knowing people were going to be listening, and as much as I hate anticipating a performance, I was paid off in the sheer ecstatic relief of having gotten through it, and the happy afterglow of having done something that took nerve and went off as I’d hoped, and having been able to show it to people I love.

Dinner after was also delicious. Yesterday just got better and better.

June 4th, 2006
Categories: happenings . Author: ximena . Comments: No Comments