Yes, that is a Battlestar Galactic uniform and yes, the seams aren't pressed. I only finished sewing it the morning of the wedding >.<
We've been married for five years today, but we've been living together for nine years and friends for seventeen, so it seems a little pointless to fixate on numbers. We spent our anniversary last year driving to another prefecture to get a psychological evaluation as part of our adoption application. We're spending this one begging someone (anyone!) to baby-sit so we can have some time off. Life moves faster than one thinks.
We rarely say "I love you". I like that. The words become overused and lose meaning~ "Can you buy milk Iloveyou?" I get that to some people constant repartition is comforting, but it isn't for me. I want it to mean something, to be said only when dripping with emotion and significance. When you know what your relationship means, you don't need everything to be said.
My husband bought new shampoo recently and I commented that I liked the smell.
"That's why I bought it," he said, "it reminded me of how your hair smelled when we lived on Churchill Avenue." We lived in that house in 2004. The shampoo I loved at the time went off the market that year and hasn't been seen since. He remembered the scent, although he never used it. Who needs "I love you"?
We were ruthless in cutting all mention of love from our wedding vows. I don't make promises I can't keep, and you can't promise to feel an emotion. I promise honesty, kindness, respect, and that I will be here 'til death do us part. If someone promised to love me forever, I'd back slowly from the room without making sudden movements. You can't make promises about how you'll feel, and if you think you can you are either delusional or lying.* I'll take the random email in the middle of a rough week that says "by the way, you are a great mum", the Sunday morning pancakes and the shampoo.
I'm not entirely without romance. At our wedding we had Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" as a reading, and Toccata and Fugue in d minor on an antique organ played by a friend in return for a bottle of whiskey. That's pretty romantic for two one-time goths, right?
This is a random youtube video, not from our actual wedding...
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas
*After writing this I realised that it sounds pretty offensive to people not limited to but including Whitney Houston. I'm just talking about my own preferences and feelings guys, I promise I am not judging you for yours. Honestly :)
This lovely little waterfall is about 5 km from our house
This past summer was my sixth in Japan, and it was (is) by far the driest and longest (and typooniest). In five and a half weeks it will be winter; yesterday was so hot that I wore a tank top and took the dogs to the river for a swim (they swam, I paddled~ it's not that deep!). This autumn has been hotter than midsummer in Tasmania.
Local river
The trees have been deeply confused. Friends who live further north have shared pictures on facebook of cherry trees blossoming. In our neighbourhood the leaves remain stubbornly green, despite the calendar. The neighbourhood association has done the only thing viable given the circumstances: seasonal-corrective treatment. AKA, plastic autumnal foliage affixed with wire.
#onlyinjapan
PS Yo, Brittney! Brittney Dalton! I've been wanted to get in touch but can't find you. Drop me a line :)
I’m a firm believer that children should be taught the correct names for all of their body parts. Teaching weird euphemisms like “Tinkerbelle” or “winkie” is not only detrimental to healthy sexual development but it’s downright creepy. Seriously. To quote a random website (http://www.kidscenter.org/prevention/tips-and-suggestions):
“Teach children anatomically correct names for their body parts. Research shows that when children are taught the anatomically correct names for their body parts, it enhances the pride they feel about their bodies. Just as you teach your children that a nose is a nose, they need to know what to call their genitals. Encouraging kids to use a correct and “universally” recognized word assists in other adults recognizing statements that could be abusive or worrisome. Additionally, providing correct language helps a kid understand their bodies and lets them know it’s okay to talk about and ask questions about all of their body parts.”
I grew up in a Christian, homeschooling family with an overworked mother and four siblings. This combination of factors resulted, by casual neglect rather than parental intention I should add, in my learning nothing about human bodies (including my own). I was in university and had been sexual active for several years when I first learned of the existence of the urethra. I’d never thought about it, but if you had asked me I suppose I would have said that women peed from their vaginas. I invite you to take a moment to think about how appalling that is. Needless to say, my menarche was more than a little traumatic. So, with my adult freedom from religious baggage, I planned matter-of-fact and open discussions about the body and sexuality with my children.
But.
Thinking about wieners
My dogs don’t generally bite other people. One recent exception was a friend who is very tall and slim-limbed but with a little bit of a beer belly. This confused Hayate, who while sitting beside the-afore mentioned friend on the couch, once took a curious nibble of said friend’s tummy. Fortunately the friend was more surprised than hurt, but it did make me nervous about Tiger’s penis. Soon after moving in with us Tiger exhibited enthusiasm for running through the house naked. His crotch is exactly at face height for Hayate. I was concerned that Hayate might be curious about this bounding appendage he hadn’t seen before and take a nibble, so I tried to explain this to Tiger. “Hayate will bite me?” He asked looking scared. “No no, not bite you exactly, he’ll just… You know Hayate loves wieners, right? He might mistake your penis for a wiener and take a bite, thinking it’s food. He won’t BITE you bite you.” And from that day on, Tiger has been in love with the idea that his penis is a wiener and refuses to call it by any other name.
Every two weeks I get the class schedule. I know what he is studying every period of every day.
So this whole blogging thing? Yeah, not going to be
happening in any proper way for a while. Sorry to anyone who has commented or
emailed me lately, I will get back to you but I can’t promise when.
I’m hopping on today just to talk about how much I love
Tiger’s school. I loved elementary schools here when I was teaching in them,
but seriously, seeing them from the “other side of the desk” has just made me
love them even more. They have done everything that could humanly be done to
support us, from loaning us supplies they thought would be too expensive to buy
to extra academic support through to sending walking buddies to our house every
morning to pick Tiger up so he can walk to school with friends. When I need to
buy something and the teacher thinks I won’t know what it is, she prints
pictures off the internet for me. When Tiger didn’t want to go to school one
day the teacher called to talk to him and if he still hadn’t wanted to go she
was ready to come over to our house in the middle of a class to talk to him in
person. When he did get to school, the teacher gave him a huge hug.
The teacher sends me a note every day in this book, and I respond. If anything happens at home or at school, we both know what is going on. It also tells me what his homework is and what he needs to pack the following day.
Over and above all of that, within a week of him enrolling in
the school the board of education sent two staff over to visit him in class and
talk with me, his teacher and the principal and vice principal. Because it was
me, they sent two English speakers (both were my bosses at one time or another)
so that I could speak more comfortably in English and they translated for the
school staff. They asked detailed questions about our relationship, even how
Tiger was getting on with the dogs, and we were able to come to some shared
understandings about how to tackle some of his issues in a unified way with the
greater insight that arose from the meeting. I have never felt that
anyone was not on his side, not even for a moment. The school even said to drop
around any time, just to say hi, because when kids see parents involved at
school they feel like their parents care about their education and don’t just
send them to school to get them out of the house. For a child with abandonment
issues this is even more important, of course, and I am thrilled that the
school sees me as a partner and not as a nuisance. They give me so much information about his day, it really helps me to prepare him (he likes routine and predictability, not so big on surprises). They even mentioned right away that later this year there is a family history project and they are already preparing an alternative plan for Tiger.
Excuse the fuzzy photo... his school lunch menu for the month, complete with calorie count, protein content in grams, and list of nutritionally significant ingredients.
From the first day, everyone has been supporting us. My old
boss even helped us apply for child welfare payments. The principal and the child
guidance center have been in touch to coordinate Tiger’s care in and out of
school. My husband’s supervisor sent him home with a bag full of boys’ shoes
when I called in frustration during a week of rain that the orphanage had only given
Tiger one pair and they were sodden and we couldn’t leave the house to buy new
ones because he was refusing to out the wet ones on. As ALTs we sometimes
question whether we are really part of the community; that question has been
resoundingly answered for our family and we are humbled by the kindness we have
received these past two months.
When I read great blog posts I usually share them on facebook, but this is a nice way to share them all together with a bit more room for commentary. Not all of these posts are from this week by the way; I have been so busy that I am pretty far behind with my reading.
I'm joining Authentic Parenting and Hobo Mama for Sunday Surf. Share your best reading of the week, and link up your post at either blog!
For more great reading, visit Hobo Mama or Authentic Parenting for the latest Sunday Surf and linky. Happy Surfing!
Wise Words (Tim Minchin's Occasional Address at UWA)
Don't seek happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy and you might find you get some as a side effect.We didn't evolve to be constantly content.
http://www.findingmagnolia.com/2013/09/some-thoughts-on-adoption-preparation.html
We had some discussion about whether or not we would have a biological child before adopting. From a health point of view, it would be better for my body to have a pregnancy before I'm thirty. On the other hand, I am so so glad we didn't. We could not give Tiger what he needs with other children in the picture, especially younger children.
I am not here to judge those who have faced very hard choices, because I
know what it feels like to try to get your child to sleep for two and a
half hours, while she screamed and cried and raged, every night for
I-don't-even-remember-how-long, and I know that none of the pre-adoption
training mentioned that possibility. I know what it feels like to be
unable to do anything else for an entire day because the one thing my
child needed was to be strapped on my back and taken for a very long
walk outside, or else she would scream her lungs out. I honestly cannot
imagine what it would have been like to manage that if she had not been
an only child at first, and had I not been able to be home with her. I
know I speak from a position of privilege. But I think that privilege
was something that Zinashi needed and benefitted from, and there was no
way to know before we brought her home with us if she would need more
intense help or not. We need to be preparing families for the
possibility that their child, regardless of age at the time of adoption,
might end up having some very big needs.
http://www.fineandfairblog.com/2013/09/dear-judgey-mcjudgerson.html
I share this humble as a now-reformed Judey McJudgerson. All parents I have glared at in disgust in the past: I apologise. Sincerely. And also that snarky article I once published in a local magazine about people pushing their older kids in strollers because they were too impatient to wait for the kids to walk at their own pace? Yeah, sorry about that too.
Dear Lady Judging Me At The Playground,
You seem to be reading a lot into the very tiny slice of my life that
you see. You see me vacantly tapping on my phone, and are apparently
filled with sadness for my children, whose lives you assume are slipping
away without me noticing. (I wonder what your own kids are doing that
you're missing while you sit in judgment of me?) You see my daughter
twirling in the sunlight. You see my son smiling and cooing. You see me
not noticing.
Would it be okay if I filled you in on some things you didn't see?
You didn't see this morning, when I greeted my waking daughter with a
smile and a kiss. You didn't see when I painstakingly helped her pour
her cereal and milk, then help her wipe up the spills. You didn't see me
cut up her fruit. You didn't see me dance like a ballerina while doing
so. You didn't see me smiling and baby talking to my son while I changed
the nastiest diaper you could imagine. You didn't see me grit my teeth
when he bit my breast, testing out the new teeth on the way, then sing a
silly song about how we don't bite Mama.
You didn't see me do all that before I'd had even a drop of coffee.
http://www.nohandsbutours.com/2013/09/05/dealing-with-grief/
I want to write more about this when I can. I was prepared for some feelings of loss... the loss of the lifestyle we had been enjoying and loss of some of the ideals and plans I had about family life that would necessarily be unattainable when we decided to adopt an older child. I was not prepared for what has been the biggest source of grief though, and that is the loss of the dream of the kind of parent I would be. Put simply, I guess, I thought I'd be better at it. It's hard to accept "doing the best I can" when what I want to be doing is "the very best that can be done".
But one thing that doesn’t get talked about very often is how an
adoptive parent should respond when they find themselves grieving.
Because…no matter how happy the adoptive parents may be or how much they
love their new addition…when a new child enters the family oftentimes a
part of their old life is “lost” for the adoptive family as well.
Suddenly the home that made sense and ran like a well-oiled machine is
thrown into chaos and confusion by things like a grieving child,
orphanage behaviors, attachment struggles, processing disorders, medical
needs, night terrors, or other children in the home regressing due to
the addition of a new sibling. If an older child joins the family, then
things like language barriers and cultural differences come into play.
It can feel like the magic trick where a magician quickly pulls the
tablecloth away…only you’re left wondering how and when the pieces will
fall into place again.
As a feminist, I should make clear that I believe in the true definition
of feminism … “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other
rights of women equal to those of men.” But this assumes that men have
rights.
In the case of Baby Veronica, her father did not have the rights that
her birth mother did. He was misled. Birth fathers should have equal
rights and protections, especially in the welfare of their children.
If a birth mother decides she cannot parent her child, and the birth
father wants to raise his child, he should be given the opportunity to
do so. No other adult should be given that right unless both birth
parents have relinquished it.
Dusten Brown has proven that he loves his daughter. He has provided for
her, cared for her, cuddled her and nurtured her for almost two years.
Baby Veronica knows he loves her, and she wants to stay with him. Her
right in all this is paramount. She deserves the love of her birth
father, the man she will never forget.
Lets [sic] look at incentives Stern (and others) may have for wanting to avoid confronting the realities of the procedure.
Like most circumcised men, Stern probably does not want it to be true
that his circumcision means that he is missing out sexually. Or that as
he ages, he will likely notice diminishing sensitivity in his glans. Or
that profit incentives played a role
in the push to remove his erogenous tissue; or that other people
altered his sexuality in a permanent way when he was still too young to
do anything about it.
But the facts are what they are.
Over 50% of penile nerve endings are removed during a circumcision,
including one-hundred percent of the Meissner’s Corpuscles, the unique
fine touch nerve receptors found only in fingertips and on the ridged
band of the penis.
Mucous membrane exposed to the air for decades does callus.
Many physicians earn sizable compensation for performing circumcisions.
And it is true that your circumcision means that someone surgically
altered your body in a permanent way without first having obtained your
consent.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to believe that all of these
sacrifices were not in vain, that they bought you some greater good? It
would, but we can’t just believe things because they are appealing. We
can’t in good conscience marinate in denial when that means asking
future generations to pay the price by allowing a harmful practice to
continue to play out on their flesh.
According to a recent story in the Japan Times the city’s Board of Ed has recalled a junior high school
textbook due to its “descriptions of the mass lynching of Koreans following the
1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.” During
the aftermath of that massive temblor, fear mixed with old hatreds to create a
tornado of violence that swept up Yokohama’s small ethnic Korean community in a
path of death and destruction. In his book,Yokohama
Burning, Joshua Hammer writes that army commanders “whipped up rumors about Korean well
poisonings.” The lies added more fuel to the fire as vigilantes roamed the
streets, hunting for human prey.
To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone
happy or unhappy in the first place. It comes down to a simple formula:
It's pretty straightforward -- when the reality of someone's life is
better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to
be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy.
And
Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this,
finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong
resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of
oneself." He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a
strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel
entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with
their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the
level of respect and rewards they are expecting."
For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the
interview question, "Do you feel you are generally superior to your
coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?" He says that "if the
candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the 'why,'
there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement
perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and
deservingness. They've been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous
self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow
special but often lack any real justification for this belief."
There's a lot I like about this article, but there's a lot it glosses over too. After-all, every generation this century has bemoaned the terrible failings of the next. It isn't a new story. The following blog post gives a very nice reply:
I graduated in 2008. Remember 2008? Oh, right. The housing market
collapsed. Global stock markets plummeted. The Great Recession happened.
I had $25,000 of student loan debt and a liberal arts degree in English
and Theatre.
In other words: Oh, Hey, Real World. I’m Katherine. I’m HERE! What’s that, you say? We’re all kinda fucked? Oh. Okay. Neat.
And, furthermore
I exist in a world in which I don’t understand what a 401K is all about.
Social Security will not likely exist by the time I will need it.
I will never have a pension.
I’ve never even filed for unemployment. Because as a freelancer, I’m never in one place long enough to qualify.
This is not unique to my job description.
This is unique to my generation.
I live in a world in which the teachers in the city of Philadelphia
are on strike because their budget issues are so rampantly unresolved
that they are returning to work without contracts, paper, or desks. I
live in a world where we’re slashing budgets so that the kids of the
next generation won’t know a childhood with art or music classes.
I’m a woman in a generation fighting insane battles for reproductive
rights that we didn’t even know until recently that we needed to be
fighting, because we had simply assumed that we had already won them.
I live in a world in which we have a black president and yet we say
hateful racist shit on Twitter when an Indian-American woman takes the
Miss America crown. I live in a world in which we give a fuck about
Miley Cyrus.
I live in a world in which we perpetuate the unpaid intern system.
I live in a world in which, since 1979, the average American worker
has seen a 75% increase in productivity, and yet wages remain flat.
I live in a world where the top 1% of earners have seen their income quadruple since that exact same year.
I live in a world that simply seems too crazy for me to handle some
days. I live in a world that sometimes makes me simply want to hide
under the covers and not come out until it’s fixed.
And here’s what’s super fucked up:
I live in a world in which I still believe there is hope for the future.
This is the rather unpleasant skeleton in the closet that the police
would rather keep hidden. A bygone era of intensive, frequent protest in
which mistakes were made on both sides. Scapegoats and quick fixes were
found, and then people were quick to move on. Injustices and false
convictions happen in every justice system in the world. However, the
Japanese state has a lot to lose and will only backtrack and grant
retrials through firmly gritted teeth. It took mild-mannered bus driver Toshikazu Sugaya
over seventeen years to win his freedom in the Ashikaga murder case of
1990. Years of campaigning to get DNA evidence re-examined were only
begrudgingly acknowledged, since the prosecutors knew that then the
truth might come out — that Sugaya’s “confession” had been bullied out
of him. He had been an easy target: divorced and a bit of a loner. Hours
of interrogation and physical abuse, and the police had their
confession. It was not until 2010 that the flawed DNA evidence was
accepted as proof of innocence, in spite of the fact that Sugaya’s
stories of his apparent multiple crimes — made, he said, in order to
assuage the duress from the police — did not concur with the witness
accounts, and that he had failed to identify the sites where other
purported murder victims’ bodies had been found.
Although there have been some vocal scandals recently and a few very
belated victories such as the Sugaya case, the situation remains
essentially unchanged. For one, Hosei University, long a site for
radical student activism in Japan, has recently been suffering under the
fist of the police, who would arrive and pick out the activists they
had already pre-planned to arrest. Campaigners say that over 100 have
been unlawfully arrested in the last few years.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the country
of no crime, the police and judiciary rule supreme. Heaven help you if
you get arrested.
Travel and Adventure
We all have friends we live vicariously through, right? I am currently living out an eighteen-year-old-me fantasy through the travels of an ex-JET friend. You can read the background to his current adventures at http://joshwalden.blogspot.jp/2013/07/introduction-to-gepaq.html
We set out with torn out pages from a Rand-McNally map of the USA
(pre-smart phone days!), tents and sleeping bags on our bicycles, as
well as big packs of Clif bars and 2-3 changes of clothes. Around an
hour before sunset each night, we'd start eying homes for nice yards.
We'd knock on their doors and ask if we could set up a tent, that we'd
be out in the morning. Every night after setting up our tents we'd sip
on some homemade whisky from a mason jar we'd received in Kentucky and
plan the next day.
Five years later I want to have that feeling again.
Milan Kundera has this amazing book called "The Unbearable Lightness of
Being." The main gist is that we feel free and light in certain points
in our lives .. free from the gravity of our decisions... but this lightness is unbearable. We have a need for something heavy,
something dark to anchor us to the world. That is why lightness is
unbearable.
A: Oh, that's cool. (Awkward pause,
look around the room, shuffles feet) Uh,what are you going to do with
that?
I am pretty sure that dialogue is
repeated approximately every 18 seconds on every American campus.
It's trite. Anyhow, three years out of college I found an
appropriate response to this commonplace: “I am going to travel the
world, learn a ton of languages, drink my weight in local beers and
eat amazing food, meet beautiful people and make lifelong friends.
Et toi?”
Plans for after college. Makin' ya proud mom!
I've had a few friends and relatives
ask me about how I am doing it, how I am financing the trip, other
practical details. I was working on a farm in Poland and talking
with my friend Craig from England (Hi Craig!) as we cleaned the goat
stalls. He said a lot of his friends back home had this real wonder
about how he was able to travel, have these experiences. He gets the
vibe from them that it is this unattainable opportunity, this secret
skill that he has.
The Australian School
Your friends will be called Cheryl and Angela. You will drive badly
because you are on the wrong side of the road. You will need a big
enough back seat for the esky and the keg of beer. When you drop your
child off at school you'll hear someone yell out "Hey, bloody sit still
while I tie your shoelaces back up will ya?" There is no embassy, you
will create your own informal embassy in the tuck shop which now has a
bar. It's highly possible a few bottles of champagne will make their way
to the PTA coffee morning and the participants will need to catch the
bus home with the kids at the end of the day. The school is littered
with pictures of Opera Houses, Kangaroos and Aboriginal art. All
fundraising will involve a keg of beer and a sausage sizzle.
The central force behind all profitability is supply and demand, and child exploitation isn’t an exception.
Nobody would buy an “I Heart Nepal” T-shirt knowingly produced by an
exploited child, and likewise, neither should we buy the “product” of
begging children.
This sounds, and feels, inhuman. We want to do the right
thing, we want to help the orphanages. We feel good when we fundraise
from friends and family, when we connect with children and use our
wealth to improve their lives. We want to soothe our conscience by putting money into the hand of a begging child.
This feeling of doing the right thing, however, through the force of a
dark human ingenuity, is precisely the illusion that child begging
rings are selling.
When we hand 500 rupees to a child with a sick baby in her arms,
these guys profit, and then reinvest. They recruit more kids, and earn
more profit.
And Now For Something Completely Different
Love My Neighbor Totoro and Death Metal, but unsure how to enjoy both at once? This age old dilemma has finally been solved!
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