I’m waxing all sentimental after revisiting a few pictures of little William, who turned two on the fifteenth of October. Life really is a great gift and we shouldn’t take it for granted. Well, I’ll qualify that statement. If you’re in good health and are lucky enough to live under decent conditions, then life can be great. But if you’re a quadriplegic or you’re a young woman living in the honor-killing-prone hinterlands of Pakistan, then I don’t think life would be all that great for you.

Mickey and Milo have started attending elementary school; they are now in Grade 1. They seem to enjoy school quite a bit. They just started school last Thursday and already seem pretty well adjusted. There’s still show-and-tell in Grade 1, which I think is uber-cool. Tomorrow is their first show-and-tell session. Mickey will bring a preserved bee to class. This is a bee that I must have found about 20-odd years ago, which I had kept on a bed of surgical cotton in a small plastic case. Mickey accidentally tore the bee in two tonight, which was OK because Shiho was able to mend it with school glue. But how gruesome, eh? Milo is going to bring a bunch of peelings from a young birch tree. That was my suggestion because it’s pretty cool how birch bark can double as writing paper. I also suggested Milo hand out a little bit of birch paper to each class member, so that they can write down their names on the papers and bring them home as souvenirs.

As the twins get bigger, I can’t help but notice their increasing tendency for independence and individuation, their growing challenges to our authority, and the gradual decay of their innocence. Regarding this last item, sometimes I can only watch and sigh. At one school we visited when we were registering the kids into the provincial education system, recess was starting just as we were entering the building. The twins saw one kid who, upon exiting the building, unceremoniously tossed his perfect, uneaten banana into the trash can.

The twins were somewhat taken aback by this tragic incident, as was I. For one, I got from it that this was something that the kid did on a daily basis: A kid’s capacity to fool his parents would seem to know no ends, and Mom’s efforts to ensure proper nutrition might simply end up being fruitless. However, more to the point is that not only was the banana-tossing a needless, unfruitful waste of food, but to me that little event seemed to be a microcosm of all that is wrong with the human condition in particular and the universe in general. Finally, after coming from food-revering Japan, such an act is simply unthinkable. Which shows you how much I have changed after my forays into East Asia. Twenty years ago, I would have laughed to see a food fight in the high school cafeteria. Now, even watching a food fight in a movie would repulse me. There is much that is unacceptably wanton about our culture; not only will I have a hard time readjusting to it, but I really wish my kids would not have to be exposed to such gratuitousness.

Oh well, you just can’t shelter ‘em forever.

In closing, I know that I do tend to fetishize parsimony. And I definitely abhor waste of all kinds. But I think that these are pretty healthy, life-affirming convictions. The challenge is not to let your convictions become compulsions or obsessions.

Moving back will definitely prove to be something of a mind bender—I was tempted to use a foulmouthed term, but, because I am job hunting, I have to be careful with my reputation—not least because I will have to deal with “re-entry syndrome” or “counter culture shock,” or whatever term you deem most appropriate.

Yeah, going back is always a big shock: “Wow! Big open spaces! Wow! Big people! White people! Fat people! And lots of them!” Me being about 170cm, I feel like a complete midget over there. I remember heading to the local Choices grocery store a couple of year ago and saw this really tall Finnish couple, with a baby on one of their backs. The lady had to have been about 182 or 183cm. Man.

And now that Vancouver has changed so much, I feel even more like a stranger in a strange land. Here’s a sampling of what has changed:

- Security guards at banks. Check.

- A babel of languages being spoken at the airport—by the staff! Check. (When I bought a bottle of water at the Tim Hortons donut shop, the cashier turned around to banter with her co-worker in Tagalog.)

- A whole new light rail network. Check.

- A booming (ridiculously overpriced) real estate market which basically means unaffordable homes for all the hoi polloi. Check.

- Even more petty (and not so petty) crime, which just serves to add to the mountain of evidence that the war on drugs is a lost cause. Check.

Don’t believe that horsepucky about Vancouver being the best city in the world to live in. It ain’t. Want some proof?

1. Theft galore

Where I worked at Utsunomiya University, people can and do leave their cell phones and wallets lying around (in the often empty gym, for instance). On the other hand, when I was attending Langara College in Vancouver, one girl entered the ladies room, put her textbooks next to the sink, and returned from the stall a minute or two later to find her books gone for good.

People in Vancouver will steal anything that isn’t nailed down. Oh, and also there is a huge number of losers who enjoy smashing glass bus shelters just for the hell of it. Vandalism in Japan, by contrast, is a helluva rare thing.

2. Super crappy weather

Yes, the winters are mild, I will hand that to Van. But that’s only a bonus if you can deal with an extreme lack of sunshine. Once, I counted only six or seven cloud free days from the beginning of November until the end of February.

3. Overpriced out the yin yang

How can a place be the best place to live if it is so darn expensive. Nuff said.

Well, I needed to write something after such a long absence. Hope this suffices. Wish me luck! More later.

We have had fun this winter going to various hot springs (for some reason, a lot of my students call them “spas,” which doesn’t quite seem to ring true, so I usually call them on it). Places like Yunishigawa and Yashionoyu. Note, on our visits to the latter, we boys weren’t rewarded with the sight of beautiful, unclad ladies bathing in a hot pool. That’s just what you see on the website. These exotic-sounding names aren’t actually so difficult to understand once you know a bit of Japanese.

For example, 湯西川, or Yunishigawa, is simply a string of three kanji (the Japanese version of Chinese characters) meaning “1. hot water 2. west 3. river.” So you can more or less figure out what it means for yourself. Tonight we went to Yashionoyu and the twins had a lot of fun melting snow and ice in the hot water. I took a couple of plastic basins and filled them with snow from the little yard just outside the pool.  Last time we did this, one of the old men in the hot pool, grumbling to the air, muttered something like, “You’re going to cool down the water!” and I don’t know if he was being serious or just being sarcastic. Anyway, I just ignored him and he didn’t repeat himself. But I mean, was the geezer’s comment worth responding to anyway? The pool is open to the winter air and is continually under attack by the forces of cold. Obviously, there is a powerful heater keeping all that water hot. One or two little basins of snow, in addition to all that cold winter air, ain’t gonna matter a whole helluva lot.

Anyway, it’s time to go to bed soon. My energy is beginning to flag. Here is a nice pic from our trip to Yunishigawa. Hmm, was that in December or January?

Man, why I am going on this bent? I made a promise to myself not to blog on such existential topics. Anyway, the only reason I am up now (it’s 10:56 p.m.) is that Milo fell asleep almost immediately after I tucked him in.

So much is going on in life and there is so much to talk about. The wife just woke up for her quotidian nighttime snack. She has shut the kitchen door so as to be alone with her carbs. She just loves to snarf down simple carbohydrates late at night. For women, this seems to be a form of stress relief.

Recently, I read The End of Faith by Sam someone or other. Let me Google it. Ah, yeah. Sam Harris. Great book, but perhaps a little unnecessarily despondent. I mean, life sucks, and that’s the conclusion many of us reach, one way or another. Which is why I simply avoid reading the daily news. I just don’t need to read about how husband ABC, in a fit of spite, murdered wife XYZ and infant son 123 and mother-in-law DEF, and has now been sentenced to death. I simply don’t need this information. Incidentally, I learned about the above story today while scanning the headlines in the office newspaper. This is why I tend not to read the regular news.

This is why I just like to read business news. Now business is something I have some control over. Granted, I can’t have any control over greedy CEOs who shamelessly pocket investors’ money. But when it comes to the stock market, I can at least control which company’s stock I’m buying. I say Fuck,  an end to this shit about person A murdering person B. I simply don’t need to read about it.

Speaking about carb attacks, I think it’s time to watch a movie and have some instant noodles (spicy Korean). The Wild Turkey in me is goading me towards that angle, I’m sure.

Goodnight.

The first walk was this morning, my usual stroll with Buddy, but I kept it a bit short because I don’t want to overdo things. The second walk was in the park with the kids and the wife. The twins kept their sandals off for much of the time, but I tried to stop them from running on the paved paths, and tried to keep them on the grass instead.* Being kids, they liked imitating their dad (mental note: kids copy what they see, good or bad—but of course, deciding what is good or bad can be a slippery slope), and they were happy to clamber over rocks, scamper across the lawns, and trudge along a wooden bridge. You really can feel—not just in the physical but also in the spiritual sense of the word—the ground better when you’re barefoot. The final walk was just an hour ago. Having had a long nap in the evening, Buddy was a little overexcited and couldn’t sleep even though it was after 10:30 p.m. Seeing that it was drizzling outside, I grabbed an umbrella and took him outside, enjoying the lukewarm wet cement underfoot and the occasional puddle sloshing through my toes.

I still want to keep the house clean so I make sure to rinse my feet off with the hose next to the sandpit outside before I come back in. But I can already see how this new barefoot thing—which, I can assure myself, is not a fad but a trend—is going to make an already against-the-grain me even more counterculture and maverick.

Sorry for the jerky writing (so many parenthetical asides), but I can’t seem to help it. This is just the creative process, neurons firing in all directions and my fingers struggling to lend my thoughts a logical flow, without omitting interesting ideas. I ought to keep writing more. This is really therapy for me. I guess for a long while I have really felt kind of paralyzed, unable to deal with the realities of life and often just wanting one day to bleed into the other, without trying to face or analyze my life too much. I was spending a lot of time engrossed in stocks and finance, often obsessing about these topics. My brain seems to have gotten board with this routine, however. There is only so much research I can do about stocks and finance. It’s too one-dimensional, and I don’t consider myself a one-dimensional person. I’m still interested in finance, but I should let my mind be more creative and write more.

I mean, for a long while, I often felt like life was living me, instead of the other way around. Perhaps this was partly because I haven’t had much mental/emotional down time. It was hard—emotionally speaking—for me to get on here and blog, send photos to friends, or think a lot about my kids’ development, the things our family has done together. I have avoided being too introspective. (This might explain how my new interest in alcohol fits in: booze can deaden the self-analytical thought processes. However, while I want to be more introspective than before, I still like drinking as it helps me relax, and mitigates overly obsessive thinking.) Now however, I feel I want to blog more, remember more, think about my life more. Of course this may change once my schedule gets busier in October. If this all sounds like verbal diarrhea and rambling, so be it. Like I’ve said before, this blog is mostly for myself.

* Dig the irony? Keep on the grass? By the way, me being the usual counterculture iconoclast that I am, whether shod or unshod, I often make an effort to avoid the paved path and walk on the grass instead. Even if that means going out of my way a few meters. This puts me at odds with most of Japan, since everyone seems to stick to the pavement and avoid stepping on the grass. But what’s the point of having grass if you can’t walk on it? Besides, in a nod to Robert Heinlein, I enjoy walking on “living things.”

It was a heck of a summer. A heck of a good one. Good because I was outdoors a lot. I spent a lot of time in the pool of a university I teach at. The family and I also went to a nearby nice clean river a few times. And we also went to the beach five times: once to a beach in or near Murakami, Niigata Prefecture, and four times to Takahagi Beach in Ibaraki Prefecture. I sure got far more than my fair share of solar radiation. I know that more than a little is not good for you, but to me it sure looks and feels healthy. I also know that many East Asian women would disagree with this opinion. I remember looking for soap once in a drug store in Manila, and I couldn’t find anything except “whitening soap.” In other words, a brown complexion can be a much harder sell over here.

Hmm, I think this will be the first blog post where I will make a conscious effort to break with my habit of existentialist ruminations. Or maybe not. Rather, I will try to be more optimistic about life instead of being unconstructively despondent. People often say in day-to-day life that you should enjoy the journey, not just anticipate the destination. For example, if you’re going to take a trip to Hawaii next month, you shouldn’t adopt a mental posture of “I can’t wait for my holiday.” I’ll take the wisdom from this well-known saying one step further. Suffice it to say that if you’re an atheist, then you don’t believe there is any final destination apart from death, and that’s not a destination worth going to. So I’m just trying to enjoy each and every day. I really have to make an effort not to think things like, “It will be great when I’ve saved up this much money.” I think that if you think things like that too often, your life will pass you by even more quickly.

In my short thirty-seven years on this planet, I can’t claim to be a pillar of wisdom, but I will say I think I know mostly what life’s about.  And I will say that I think many people don’t know what life is about. I mean, it seems like there are so many different takes on the definition of morality. Just surf the news and you come across arch conservatives who believe that God hates fags, terrorists who convince themselves that taking innocent lives is justified, and on and on. But basically, if you believe that we live in an amoral, insensate universe that would just as soon crush us as overlook our existence, there can be only one true, universal definition of morality. And that would be simply: don’t cause others pain.  A pretty good rule to live life by, if I may be so bold in saying so.

Little William is now Bigger William, about 10 kilograms or so. Amazing. He is a real pleasure, a wonderful child. Whenever I don’t work in the morning, I like to take Buddy for a walk down the road. I wake up, take a squirt, have some cold water or juice, maybe with some glutamine powder mixed in, pick him up in an arm, and off I go. It’s good exercise for my biceps, too, as  I switch him from one arm to the other only when the current arm gets tired.

But darn! For the last few weeks, I was wearing sandals while walking him, but now I want to start walking barefoot with him. The pavement is cooler now, so it should be easier. But the now lower temperature of the road is not the main reason I want to start walking barefoot. This is not a sudden epiphany but rather the gradual crystallization of a concept I’ve slowly come to embrace: barefoot is good. I don’t care about how I look to other people, I want to feel like I’m in contact with the earth and doing things the natural way. I’m not a rigid fanatic of what is natural; I only seek out naturalness when it is better for you; viz, I take nutritional supplements, because I think that not supplementing—i.e., the natural way—is simply not as healthy.

I’ve been driving barefoot (when it’s warm) or in socks (when it’s cold) for the last two years now. I’m always barefoot at home. Sometimes I even teach barefoot (e.g., kindergarten). Today I walked in the park barefoot (of course I’ve done that before), but in a first for me, I walked into two stores barefoot. Admittedly, the first store, a supermarket, had a floor that looked kind of icky, so I donned my sandals. But not for the second one. I bought my bottle of whiskey without putting on any kind of footwear.

Some reading has influenced the way I feel. First, I remember reading this article a few months back. It’s about how running with shoes can actually be worse for you. Also, I have read dynamite stuff about this Frenchman called Erwan Le Corre. This Men’s Health article is a great read. Or just Google “walking/running barefoot” for some really cool resources.

OK, enough chatter. Time to do some reading and then hit the hay. Over and out.

Felt like writing a bit. I don’t know why. It might have been the red wine, which I have started to imbibe again on occasion, after more than three years of near teetotalism. From what I have gathered, the research shows that moderate drinkers outlive teetotalers. This is probably due to the blood thinning effect of alcohol. I think that red wine, with its resveratrol content, at least partially explains the French paradox. Anyway, I really try to maximize my intake of what I consider healthy foods. Olives, olive oil, walnuts, salmon, avocado, just to name a few. Now adding some red wine into the mix. I only have a glass or two, so there is no excessive indulgence going on. I still feel like I can be a good father if I have a drink at night. Also, I find that some wine really takes the edge off. Lately, I’ve had too much of an edge.

I’ll try not to get existential in this post. In fact, I won’t digress into a depressing monologue about life and death. Unusual, for me. What I will say is that it’s so important for me not to take myself too seriously; not to take life too seriously; to try and enjoy every day, every hour, nay, every moment; to stop and smell the roses; to try not to get caught up in the petty minutiae that really don’t matter in the end; to try and take one life day at a time; to love my family; to remember that money and possessions don’t matter worth a damn; to try not to give a fuck about traffic jams (I can study my Chinese characters); to stop worrying about the transgressions, real or imagined, committed by other drivers; to stop confessing other people’s sins (thank you, S. Covey); to laugh more often. All of this takes a lot of work, which isn’t surprising. A lot of people seem to have taken the gift of life and turned it into a burden they must carry. A monkey on their back. A lot of people seem to spend much of their time walking around scowling, not grateful for what they have. I really don’t want to go through my whole life like that. I don’t want to “burn through” my life as the lead character did in the Adam Sandler movie Click.

Glancing at the news headlines, I see miners trapped in China and marines lost at sea in Korea. There are a lot of ways to go, and you could go at any time. Nothing that I can do for these people, but the deaths of other does remind me to appreciate my life more. And headlines like those are another reason why I don’t watch TV news or read many newspaper articles about random accidents and violence.

You just gotta enjoy the time you have here.

Had a good day with the kids today. We went to the pool, and splashed around for a while. Mickey slipped in the shower room, bumping his head and scraping his bum (it bled slightly). Then we picked up the wife and baby at home and went for beef and chicken at the Flying Garden restaurant. Bought the boys one toy each at the Daiso one hundred yen (plus five yen tax) store. Then came home. The kids were still really energetic, while we parents were pooped. Wife went to bed before the kids. No chance for lovemaking tonight. That’s life. Back to work tomorrow (gotta make the boss rich). Time to hit the hay. I will sleep the sleep of the just (despite all my sins).