Hi Jack...

Okay, I'm a slacker writer. Now that I've confessed, this particular blog is for Jack. Blogging is not writing practice. It does not go deep or go quick. It is too easy to delete and edit and patch over the ugly imperfections of my thoughts and actions. It's too easy to spend five minutes fretting over a word and in the end still hating the word you chose.

So without backing up or fixing my typing mistakes here is five minutes of going deep while typing: I'm not sure I like my lifew right now. I feel like some sort of exotic lollipop that stays in a candy shop waiting for someone to buy her. I'm sure there is something freudian in that. The image of meing licked and all that. I 'm just so frustrated and i can't even begin to put into sords all of my frustrations. My husband's work hours, my gaijinity my becoming the local ambassador for all things foreihn in this city. The fact that I like the attention of being different but I hate all the kids at my sons preschool who yell at me to speak english to them like some kind of trained monkey. I 'm also worried that Tak is becoming more attached to grandma than me. On tht eother hand, i'm worried that this doesn't bother me all that much which mieans that I'm a bad mother? I really do want someone to tell me what i'm supposed to be when I grow up and it's already 2008. Whree the hell did 2000- 2007 go? I'm turning 40 this month and i have nothing to show for it. Times' up.

Thanks Jack for all the encouragement. It means a lot.

I had a house in Seattle...

In my best Karen Von Blixen, or at least Meryl Streep's version of her, I find myself saying, "I had a house in Seattle." It comes to me at the weirdest times, this vague mourning of my former life and lifestyle. I can be brushing my teeth and I'll look up at the circular fluorescent light and think, "wow, that is so, NOT, a skylight." Of course, since we live on the fifth floor of a ten floor condominium, it would be quite disconcerting if I suddenly could see the full moon through a bathroom skylight.

I also just thought I heard our hot water heating system clicking on. We had radiant wall heat in our house in Seattle and one wall would make a clicking sound as the hot water started pumping through it. It startled me to hear the same sound and at the same time I was nostalgic for central heating since I sleep in a room that is 52 degrees these nights.

Time for me to go brush my teeth and shiver under the covers and dream of American style comforts.

Sad

Do you ever have one of those painful, poignant, lost in the moment kind of days? Tak is sleeping on my lap as I type this and even though I only want two kids, I'm so sad that his baby days are over. He's a hefty 11 kgs and his hair is starting to get fuller. He's developed a sense of humor and imitates other people, especially when they fart. He's also developed a sense of rage and has been known to whack people in the face when things aren't going his way.

Does everyone have this sense of regret when it comes to their last child? With Kai, I couldn't wait to send him to preschool and for him to be more independent. Even now, I get impatient with him when he says he can't do something that I know he can. He has the power to push my buttons and get me so angry. With Tak, I'm more patient. He's still my baby and I have a hard time getting angry with him when he pulls stunts that I know are age appropriate.

Everything they say about birth order is probably true. Poor Kai bears the brunt of my parenting mistakes. Whereas Tak gets way more freedom than Kai ever did at that age. And lately, I've been a pretty awful parent. I've been caught up in my own frustration over our new lifestyle that I've forgotten how tough it is to be four. I don't want to give Kai any sympathy over his petty frustrations when I have a plate full of bigger ones. Sigh.......

And so I'm sad. Not Heath Ledger kind of sad, but disappointed and deflated sad. And now I need to go pick my first born up from preschool. Maybe this is why some days my mom made us pudding, to assuage the mama guilt. Can't say I blame her. I really only remember the wonderful things she did for us, the pudding must've worked.

Work Avoidance

Tak is napping in our frigid back bedroom and I'm avoiding housework. All told, an excellent reason to blog. I could be watching the Jim Lehrer news hour on BS1, but instead I've been reading all the posts on my "married to a #@$*! Japanese" group. Misery loves company, and women married to Japanese men seem to be especially miserable. That's not really fair, but it seems that the latent lump of Japanese masculinity surfaces when the husband is living in his own country. Which is a nice way of saying I have a sink full of dishes, since my husband no longer even pretends that we share housekeeping duties. After all, he works 12 hour days and I'm a pampered housewife.

I'm chipping away at the boxes of stuff we moved from Seattle. We now have cookbooks, children's books and videos, and office supplies. Now if I could just get art up on my walls. Speaking of walls, I've hit one with the particular post, so I'm going to go take my chapped hands and wash some dishes.

Mind like pudding...

Started the new year off thinking that I will embrace my spirituality and cultivate a mind like water. You know, the whole "if a lake is still, you can see everything in it and reflected upon it."
Instead, I've embraced the "mind like pudding." I see nothing and my thoughts are a mindless confectionery goop.

I've taken to wallowing in self-pity from time to time. Okay, I admit it, quite frequently these days. We have the condo, but I still have no husband in the evenings and I still have way too many boxes to unpack and no place to put things when I unpack them. I want furniture. Of course, I got a free couch from my aunt-in-law, and the best thing I can say about it is that it was free. If I were truly zen, I would stop here and not slander the couch and the taste of the person who picked it out, but I can't resist a good snark. It is an army green pleather sectional couch from the late 80's. It also smells like incense and mildew. I must remind myself, "gift horse, gift horse..."

My mother-in-law is also trying to help with the decorating. If she had her way, everything would be flowers and puppies. I've taken to stereotyping my whole country and telling her that Americans don't like cute things. So far I've limited the design damage to a calendar with puppies and kittens, a bath mat shaped like a small dog and a flowered kitchen mat. I'm hoping that one of my sons will destroy one or all of these things so that I can remove them from my home.

Family Registers and other fun errands

So, if all the moons and stars align, we will be moving this Saturday. It's been a harrowing few days playing "float the money" with our bank in the U.S. while we try and wire the funds to meet our closing on Friday.

I've spent yesterday and today trying to get everything ready for the closing. I had to change our family register to our new address so Kazuya can get our mortgage. Japan still has the same antiquated system that Joseph and Mary had 2007 years ago. My husband is the head of household and his place of domicile is registered in his hometown. If you want to do anything, you need a copy of your family register. Technically, you can't change your address until after you move, but you can't move until you close and you can't close unless you have a family register in your new address. Sound like a Catch-22? I just smiled and lied when the nice man behind the counter at City Hall asked me when the move took place. At least I'm not 9 months pregnant, riding on a donkey and heading to the backwoods of the promised land.

Everything in Japan requires forms. I filled out a ton of forms at City Hall to move our address. Oh wait, that's right, I moved my husband and sons' address. Since I'm a foreigner, I'm not on his family register. I had to fill out a separate form to move my Alien Card address. This is in addition to the forms I had to fill out to get copies of all the new registers. And I had to pay 1200 yen ($10) to get copies of the register and hanko registration.

Because I hadn't had my fill of filling out forms in Kanji (Chinese characters), I decided to go to the bank and transfer the contract money to the construction company. After filling out all the forms in Kanji along with the furigana (phonetic syllabary) reading for those Kanji, I got to take out the big hanko (seal) and spend 840 yen ($8) to transfer the money. I get to do the same thing on Friday, but I get to send a really large sum of money that hopefully is in our account since we are waiting for the wire to go through...

It will all be worth it to have a mosquito free condo with running hot water.

Land Mine

I bought Tak a blue zipper vest at Sun Live (pronounced Sun Lee-bu). He looks like he's defusing land mines in it. Think Princess Di in Africa about a month before she met her maker, and that's the fashion statement my youngest is making.

The vest was my latest effort to combat the encroaching cold weather. After sweating through September and enjoying the nice weather of October, November has decided to turn cold. The in-laws broke out the kerosene heater and my mother-in-law tried to buy Tak a really ugly Winnie the Pooh vest to keep him warm. I ix-nayed that purchase and as a compromise, bought his flak vest.

I'm trying to convince the laws that they need to get rid of the kerosene stove that they use to heat their duplex. It smells, it's dangerous, and it's not that much cheaper than electricity. Problem is, they like to boil water in a kettle on top. Hmmm, nothing says "safety" than a steaming kettle of boiling water on top of a glowing red heater within arm's reach of your toddler. They've humored my overdeveloped sense of safety by turning it off and moving it out of reach when Tak is around, but that won't work in the depths of winter. I miss central heating.

At least the colder weather is slowing down the mosquitoes. I only killed four of them this morning. Three more weeks until we move from the hellhole...