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. :)