there are cards to express condolences when you lose someone to death, when you fail a test, etc. There need to be cards specifically designed for when you break up. Seriously. Why don’t people jump on this market???? They certainly jump on the opposite side….valentine’s, i love you cards, etc.

Life has major ups and downs. Today had both. Good time talking with M. Bad times on trying to hold the rest of my life together at the same time.

But I watched HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH and that made me feel a lot better. Kinda puts your own life into perspective I guess. And it’s all about forgiveness and working through pain, too….

I wonder if it’s time to start polishing off another bottle of alcohol. IM me, maybe I’ll be interesting to talk to. :)

Does ANYONE ELSE remeber this “Murphy In The Morning” bit from Q101 in Chicago, circa 1990? With the music from Wild WOrld of Sports from ABC and “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat…” with the buzzing sound? And winning a nooner at the Sybaris hotel????

Yes, I know, I am not supposed to be interested in them. But sometimes I am. And I must say that I found one special one that takes the cake.

It’s Xander’s Penis (lj user xanderspenis).

WARNING — NOT WORK OR UNDER 18 FRIENDLY. (Well, I think under 16 is the cutoff. But the government doesn’t agree.)

Piece by piece, it’s all coming apart, being put into boxes, and being stored away for another day. I keep thinking of the future, when it’s like a big Christmas day, opening each box and savoring its contents again. It will be at least two months before I see any of these things again…learning to live without these tangible representations of desire, emotion, dreams, and goals achieved is a reminder to live in the moment.

The delivery boys came this morning and took the bed away, a parting gift to Mercy’s mother for being so nice to me and her as long as I’ve known her. I really like the woman, and have always found her to be a fantastically cool parent. :)

Hello, back pain…

(Whoops, comments were disabled! Not intentional! :( )

Doing some great work on Mercy’s new website. Hopefully online by the end of the week…

What I’ll miss for today: POLITENESS. Even if it’s culturally enforced and people are inflexible, people here are actually very nice. I will really miss it when the sushi chef behind the counter asks me how my day is, or when the woman at the cash register thanks me for my purchase and offers me a special nice tote bag for my stuff to take home. VERY elegant and very nice.

Last night, the train emerged from the tunnel and everything was different.

Like a giant incandescent bulb, the sky lit us all with an orange glow. Every movement seemed magnified, as if I was on a giant sound stage. Suddenly I was in control. Everything moved according to my will. Cars rolled, traffic lights changed, even shadows strengthened or weakened merely from whim.

Halfway home, Noah passed by me and parked in the 15 minute parking lot.

The storm’s just beginning.

You Are a Henna Gaijin!

You’re not Japanese, but you wish you were!
You can use chopsticks with your eyes closed, and you’ve memorized hundreds of Kanji.
You even answer your phone “moshi moshi.”
While the number of anime videos you’ve seen is way higher than the number of dates you’ve been on, there’s hope.
Play the sexy, mysterous gaijin, and you’ll have plenty of Japanese meat.

What’s *Your* Japanese Subculture?

Right on.

Working on the website for Mercy, it’s going smoothly but a bit slowly, as everything I learned about Photoshop I had forgotten and had to start all over again :( I’m not a graphic designer or anything, but I think I’m doing a pretty good job anyway. Typography still comes naturally to me.

We saw tonight and had a nice izakaya dinner and karaoke box evening, followed by some intense-then-slowly-dying Scrabble game where I almost finally beat Mercy (grrrrrrrr….)

NOT looking forward to the office. AM looking forward to leaving. AM falling in love all over again. :) *mwa*

Last night Mercy and I did a big photo shoot. It’s sort of a year-anniversary thing…a while ago we got dressed up but we didn’t go out dancing. I think it was raining too hard, or we got the day of the week wrong for the party. So we took a bunch of really awesome pictures of each other. It was a great save to a wasted evening.

So last night I got some awesome pictures of Mercy (she’ll do pictures of me in a week or so.) We got an incredible number of great pics of her, but her new webserver’s misconfigured, so she can’t quite show off just yet. Keep an eye out… After going out for dinner, we just didn’t feel like dancing, so we come home, watched “Lolita” and had a great time anyway. It’s so nice to salvage a potentially crappy evening with movies and picture-taking.

I decided that I’ll miss the ability to speak on the subway in English and presume that 95% of the rest of the people there can’t understand me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my life and where things are going. I have realized that the strength I have lost in Japan, whether it was from dependency, losing the Spike job, not speaking the language, or just my own psycho-trauma, was and is my strongest defining characteristic. I’ve been through a lot of things in my life, a lot of relationships, a lot of pain — and I grew from each one until, sometime last year, my head spun round and stuck on backwards.

It’s in no small part because of Mercy’s constant reminder to me to be constant and secure in myself before being secure in others that convinced me to really search my soul. While it has not been an easy struggle back up, I am proud of how far I have come already. I also know I’ll never really be “done” — but I can already feel the old Joan is nearly back. watch out!

(In fact, I was already hit on once last night while in the video store alone picking up stuff. Nice US Navy guy from Atsugi, but I’m in a good relationship, thanks. :)