日本語での日記第３

こんにちは。僕はまだ日本にいる。まだ日本語をマスターしようとしている。前と比べて確かに上達してきた。でも、それにしてもまだ面白い会話に参加するとか、かっこいいに見られるとか、そういうのはまだ無理だ。ただ他人の言葉が分かるようになった。テレビとか。

ソロゾロアメリカに帰るから、最近日本での生活のことをもっと深く観察するようになっている。普段は学校へ通う時にいつも自転車に乗りながら音楽を聞く。でも、日本の音もアメリカにもって帰りたいんだから、耳にイアホンを付け止んだ。それを聞いたらロマンチックすぎると誰かが思うかもしれない。多分そう。ロマンチックすぎる。

そういえば、先週末、同じ大学で勉強する女の子を好きになった。三日間くらいその人と映画を見たり食事をしたり遊びに行ったりして、本当にきれいで面白くて楽しい人だと思うようになった。仲が良くなっていたと思ったからうれしかったけど、ひどい片思いになってしまった。そのほうがいいかもしれない。

タローカードを読んでくれた友だちのルーシが言ったのは「自分の中での自分を探さなきゃならん」だけど、教えてくれなかったからどうやってそれをやったらいいのかまだ全然分からない。頑張る！

a floating stick ready to find other floating sticks.

What will a floating stick do after returning home? It will work just like before, but will read different letters, along with other ones from before. It will dream of the arms of things left aloft in the floating water, things that it never touched but dreamed of touching, it will dream again of that. And friends will appear, more easier. Will a stick pulled from a year of floating soak up the water left on its skin or will it slide off? I, stick taken from floating water, oath: staying slimy.

Mole

A tunnel, imagine one, carved out by an animal without sense for direction or time. So it's long, and you wouldn't be able to tell easily which way to go to get out, but imagine you wouldn't considered it. Imagine that, a tunnel, don't make it dark. Make it like the sun lives just outside the walls everywhere. Of course! But there's more there that you aren't seeing yet. Think of a prism, and now what are you wearing? You're alone and with an astronauts' sense of security be rest assured there are no insects clicking around here either. The shoes you're wearing, your too shoulders, made up to be square and strange, and glass, make thick, paint-thick rainbows cast onto all the places you look! Think of the illustrators of only happy cereal box scenes. Eat most hot colors like pancakes////Drink most cool ones like water. Be educated by violet. Put love in green, laugh looking at orange. Go, go, go, go!

Wet/Hot/Big

The weather today was one. The weather yesterday, half of one. At night I can hear rain falling through the walls. Sleeping outside... How many worlds ago was it when I slept outside in the rain. Maybe, never. When the weather is a one, like today, my body will slow... be, heavy. This morning, I took my guitar case to school in it, 1, but couldn't practice my songs with enthusiasm. The older generation knows the weather patterns. I heard directly from a few of them, from this time of year, every year, the number is doing preparations to get heavier and stickier, and it will make you sweat to stand. Today is still a 1. I must train my body.

If this were a tiny article in the Spokesman Review, the editor would title it, 'Breaking the Silence,' (because it's a code deeper than we realize!)

Today I became a drag queen opera diva again.

I found an empty room in the basement of the club building at the Christian University in Tokyo.

In the practice room hall that I didn't know I could enter so easily, in the basement, I returned to drag queen opera diva form.

Scientist Girl's Do-Nothing Robot

(In a single hour, Scientist Girl will leave the club meeting. A monologue along these lines is being performed inside of Scientist Girl's head) While the rest of the club members are chatting on and on about old things: space shuttles, automatic libraries and the like, Scientist Girl will suggest the development of a standard robot to be used as a presence in homes that have been left dark by families on vacation. The club members will perk their ears upon hearing the idea, but communicate only disinterest with wrist flopping. Six hands will drag the air down with eyes unattached, mouths unattached, and already the beginnings of new segues into less realistic chatter will have begun. Scientist girl will take this as a sign of her own superiority made irrefutably obvious and leave the club room, and return home to build her presence robot.

It will take Scientist Girl a full week of little sleep to complete the robot, but she will work hard, knowing that when the club members see the presence robot worked into being, she'll have changed their thinking, and all at once, become one of them again. She will use expensive materials.

The robot will be named Zen-Ryoku2, standing fashionably on legs and wheels, with a steel head just bigger than the average human head (increasing its presence) and covered with leather.

1 month will pass and Zen-Ryoku2's picture will be posted on the wall for the next hundred club meetings as a show of Scientist Girl's accomplishment. Scientist Girl will feel electric.

2 months will pass and Zen-Ryoku2 will have been tested once. The test will have been a success, but later Zen-Ryoku2 will start acting in unexpected ways. Zen-Ryoku2 will start writing self-empowering poems everyday, and standing in the windows every now and then, even when no one has left the house. The closet that will keep Zen-Ryoku2 will become a mess with scraps of paper taken from the junk drawers in the kitchen, each scratched by one of Zen-Ryoku2's poems. One reads:

MY BODY ASSEMBLED
IN SUPER HEAVEN
HEART OF HUNDRED LIONS PURRING
GROWN GARDEN BATHING IN SUN

Another one will read:

PLEASE, WHY

on an orange Little Caesars' HALF-OFF 10" PIZZA coupon.

Other non-sense:

僕は今
天気を愛してる
乾燥した性格の周りの人
に伝えたい
何を

Zen-Ryoku2 will not stop even after being glared at, even after having been scolded by other body-languages.

If he continues to stand out when it isn't needed, there's something wrong, Scientist Girl will say gravely. Scientist Girl will tell the other club members that and all will repeat it over again, adding the nods of all their long-haired beautiful heads.

Zen-Ryoku2 will disappear from the house.

The night that Scientist Girl will want to make him pretty, with the reasoning 'if it's going to stand in the window all day and be in the way all of the time it may as well have a scent,' she will open the closet and find not even the poems.

Bugs Return to Japan

Japan has been a cold, wet place without curious bugs for a long time. But recently as the temperature rises everyday a little, you discover again spider webs have been made for you to walk through. You leave the house and tear an invisible line and it tickles, and you fear those big cartoon spiders, and one sticking its towering, yellow-green legs into the fabric of your shirt somewhere. But you never find a cartoon spider or even any spider. And so you go out and you come home and you wash your hands and you put your bag down in the room and get on your computer and turn on a fan and try to find the classes you need for the fall semester, and in the meantime that spider whose web you ran into and through when you left the house today, and also the second one you ran into on the way back, well both of those cartoon spiders are in the room now! grown to HUMAN-SIZE behind your back they just flick their tongues, and as if blind-folded face seemingly without intent of doing anything towards directions not worth mentioning, the thoughts of the cartoon spiders are impossible to read, but if you saw even the ease, the tongue flicking would make you scared. But they leave you, they leave the room quietly, leave the house, go into the city and don't come back. Was it you? Or maybe they don't remember how to come back? Regardless, secret webs collide into you at every awning you pass under everyday and you come home and you've never ever met any spiders.