glittering blackness

There are no more countdowns.

There are no more goodbyes.

There are no more cold nights alone.

There are no more meals for one.

stand up walk out of the officebe gone for days

Robert Phillips
Found Poems
#1
From a letter by Emily Dickenson

When you wrote
you would come in November
it would please me
it was November then-but the time
has moved. You went
with the coming of the birds-they will go
with your coming,
but to see you is so much sweeter than birds,
I could excuse the spring. . .
Will you come in November, and will November
come, or is this the hope that opens
and shuts like the eyes of the wax doll?

but you can look up how high heaven is and try to count the miles keeps you busy for a while

Just a quick note from the land where bicycles only travel in a straight line when they're headed directly at you.

September has wrapped its big sweaty arms all around me and, at least for a little while, it feels comfortably familiar. Days are beginning to pass by with a bit more speed as work takes on a routine. Nights are much easier to sleep through after exercising through the afternoon.

Plans for the near future are starting to become solidified and flights for December, February, March, and June being booked. People often speak of the light at the end of the tunnel but I'm not there yet. I'm more excited that I'm not freaking out about being in the tunnel anymore. The tunnel sucks, it's full of nights alone and hours on the phone, spending time with people I don't really relate to, living and cooking for one in an apartment that used to hold both of us. The tunnel sucks, but at least there is a light up ahead.

more of the same

Somewhere over the pacific I penned this into the back cover of a book that never was read during my flight.


OK, so I'm on my ninth vodka of the flight and we've been in the air for a scant 6.5 hours. The first two hours of waiting in the airport were spent in a phone booth without a seating assignment sobbing like a small child. Apparently I didn't need 3 hours to check in and I desperately wanted those minutes to be spent with Oriana. Once on the plane I made friends with a concerned stewardess and began to alternate between vodka and tissues. I told her my sob story and she responded with a bag full of tiny bottles of vodka and said, "Go home and drink it away." And now at 36000 feet above the Sea of Shelekhova I've stopped crying enough to take my sunglasses of and come back to reality a little.


And now the jet lag is beginning to take hold as it's 4:12 A.M. but I feel the need to be awake. In a few hours I'll be back at FIS wondering what the hell I'm actually supposed to do there. Thinking back to the spring of this year when I toyed with the idea of breaking my 2 year contract and coming back to the states to live with Oriana, I wish that I had given the finger to my boss and walked away. The school is the same, the boss is still a moron, and it's going to be a long time until I get to see Oriana again.

Our summer together was better than anyone could have dreamed. We traveled well together through Mexico and the Caribbean and spent just about every waking moment happy and content (except for the dengue fever episode). Now the band-aid has been ripped off and she's a distant voice on the telephone line again. I suppose that this will hurt tremendously now but will quickly return to the normalcy of last year.

I can only hope.

happy birthday!

devin - i hope you and orianna are celebrating your birthday well. take a page out of my book and celebrate for the whole month!!!
happy birthday!

the wait is over

according to my clock, which is always off, oriana should be there shortly. i hope that you two have a wonderful time together. i hope she arrives safely and the good times begin. i can't wait for the bbq you'll cook when you get back to slo. take care of each other and be good to one another.
see you super soon ...

sit on the porch in the springgive your tea a sip and I'll smoke cigarettes away

Brendan put together a CD about a year and a half ago with his friend Dan. The song New York has affected me more than I had expected when I moved to Japan. Obviously it was a chance to hear my brother's voice. But more importantly the depressed mood of the song coupled with phrases like the one above gave a voice to the feelings that consumed me being so far away from friends, family, and most importantly, Oriana.

But the countdown has been reduced to a few flicks of my fingers. It is somewhat astonishing to me that as I gave away my possessions and walked away from the comfort of San Luis, I could conjure up dreams of a life with someone so far away. Our dreams seemed far fetched in August. As December approached we both felt a bit nervous that this actually may work. I don't even need to speak about the blissful winter days that passed within these walls in Japan, but it was clear that O's trip to Fukuoka solidified our dreams. Somewhere around February I received an email confirmation for a flight originating in San Francisco and landing firmly for two months in Fukuoka. Could it really happen?

And it is. It's finally happening exactly how I want it to. Sitting on our porch in the spring. Minus the cigarettes.

Lofty dreams.

thank you

just got back from ojai with the reekster. he had a race there this weekend, ... he came in 7th (not too bad). i saw an invitation to your blog and thought you'd kill me if i didn't post. so while this post isn't too exciting, i hope it's just a start to add to your introspective insight. these probably won't be as deep, but hopefully entertaining.

while you thought i was just lazy for not contributing to nightly dinners, i was secretly learning. i have challenged myself with baking and cooking and have your patience, humor, and sarcasm to thank for that. a look at some little projects .... cupcakes from cammy's birthday and a cream puff tower for kari and tony's shower.

Gentle hum of the old machines

I'm home safe from my trip to Thailand and have posted some pictures on flickr. I was planning on writing a bit about the trip but it seems like a chore that I just don't want to deal with right now. Work starts again in the morning and the countdown to O's arrival stands around 19 days depending on which side of the date line you live on.

I enjoyed Thailand but it was nothing like I had expected. I was shocked by how overrun and trampled by the foot of European tourism the place had become. Granted I wasn't hitchhiking through the backwaters, I flew to a couple spots and only had a few days in each to poke my head around. But it took a while for me to get used to the feeling that everything and everyone could be bought there. All you had to do was ask the price and anything could be yours.

The sense of cheap tourism based capitalism made me a bit sick. It was either that or the unidentifiable soup that I found on a street corner in Bangkok.

I flew in this morning and after cleaning up a bit I went for a walk along the river to look at the cherry blossoms that had bloomed while I was away. As I passed the familiar streets of Muromi I experienced the same uneasiness that I felt when I returned from Mumbai. I soon realized that the early Sunday morning streets of Fukuoka were missing the cacophony of the traffic and stench of burning pollution that choked Bangkok.

For an Asian city, this place is very clean and livable. I met some other teachers at the EARCOS conference in Bangkok who were teaching at schools around Bangkok and absolutely loved living in the city. They described the enormous variety of nightclubs and restaurants, the proximity to the southern tropical islands, and availability of western products.

That just isn't enough for me. I need to be able to breathe. I need to be able to look up and see blue sky instead of a greyish haze. Nightclubs will only get me so far.

Look, it's late and I am tired of writing. It was good to get away but it may be a few days before I can look back on the country with nostalgic fondness. Look at some of the pictures if you'd like, otherwise, keep the countdown running.

lips parting like a flag unfurled

Michael unveiled his big secret in August during the first meeting when the school year started. The faculty, parents, and students were going to take a 10-day school trip to Greece during spring break.

Since he is Polish he's naturally an expert and was going to lead the whole thing. You could see how excited the little guy was. So much so that he didn't hear the groans coming from the staff.

Funny, nothing ever came of his little trip. The students were too smart to sign up or show any interest at all. The parents knew it was mainly b.s. As for the faculty, the cost was too high to justify spending your entire spring break working as a chaperone with Michael as leader of the longest meeting of your life.

But just like the kid that throws the birthday party that no one comes to, Michael decided it was time to get revenge on all the people who didn't want to come to his party. He planned a better party, one that was mandatory for the entire high school student body and staff. We were going to take a one-day trip down to Nagasaki.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love to go down there and check it out. It's been on my list for a while and I've been waiting for O to get here so we could take a train down and spend the night.

The problem is that the staff has a mountain of work on the very near horizon. The IB team left us with some pretty heavy tasks to accomplish before the end of April. One of the biggies is that we need to develop detailed two-year plans for each of the IB classes we plan on teaching. The responsibility of creating those plans falls on the head of the department for each subject area.

Most teachers will write one two-year plan. I have to write three.

The school has given us 4 "half-days" to write the plans. Basically, they got a sub to fill our last period classes for two days before break and two days after break. That's fine, we should be able to get it done in that time period but it will be tight.

I swear, I'm not trying to gripe about my workload here, bear with me.

While stressing out this weekend I stumbled upon the idea that if I didn't go on the Nagasaki trip I could spend the day knocking out all of my plans and be done with my task before spring break. It makes sense because I will work hard and then take a break.

This afternoon I presented the idea to the big guy and you could see his little heart breaking. I was telling him that I couldn't go to his party. It was almost too hard, I could imagine him wearing a party hat, with the pinata in the background, a big bowl of chips, a birthday cake and no one else around. I bet he even hired a clown.

He didn't let me back down from my position. He simply said that taking this trip and experiencing a field trip outside of class was more important that getting our job for IB done. "I hired you because I knew that you'd be able to connect with the students. I know you're doing it in the classroom," (he's never observed me), "but you need to go out and have a good time with the students outside of the classroom."

I really wanted to tell him that when I'm stressed out like this I'm a total dick to my students, my co-workers, the people at kadota, birds, elevator buttons, etc.

I'll send some postcards from Nagasaki, signed "Grrrrrr."