Most nights...

I stay up until ridiculous hours pondering existentialism to teach and have it make sense and wonder how you can translate the Oregon State Standards for Language Arts into a usable form.

I feel crazy. God is dead.

Entartete Kunts and Punk rock.

I went to Dennis Dread's (legendary Portland artist) art exhibition that featured very important punk and metal artists from around the world, such as: Rob Miller (Amebix), Nick Blinko (Rudimentary Peni), Kristian Wahlin (Emperor, At the Gates) and himself (Darkthrone, Engorged).
Check out his blog and website at: www.dennisdread.com

Weird mood.

I know why people get married. It's for selfish reasons, but I get it. Friends can be unpredictable assholes. They flake on you. They randomly call you out on shit. They don't always call you back. They can be masters of passive aggression. The fact is, they aren't legally bound to you. No one takes any oaths or declares their undying friendship to you in front of witnesses.
When you're married, there is a lot of obligation that goes with that, both emotionally and legally. Oaths and promises are recorded in front of witnesses. It's a legal-binding document.
All I have now is friends. I have a dog and 2 ferrets that need me and they fill a lot of my voids. My family lives far away and my friends have been unpredictable assholes.
Things were looking up for a while, but I wasn't ready to take any types of plunges into life-long obligations. Maybe it was because it was too easy. Maybe it was because it was too soon. Maybe it's because I am too young. I feel old. Maybe it was because, I don't know. In the end, all you really have is yourself.
I have Piper and the ferrets, but unfortunately, I will outlive them and they will be gone.

My lack of posts, end of year, etc.

This year has been crazy. I will write more soon, but here is a short story that I have been working on/worked on this past year and a bit before that. I remember back to November when I shared it with my students and principal and almost cried. It was hard to read.

Since I am pretty sure that only Jeevan and Julia follow my journal, I hope you like the story. Miss you both.

...

"Okasan"

My mother was born and raised in Japan, and although she has been here for nearly 30 years, you wouldn’t know it. She surrounds herself with Japanese grocery stores, Japanese-speaking friends, Japanese language news, a Japanese garden chock-full of persimmons, Asian pears, ume plums (small Japanese plums she makes her own type of Japanese “moonshine” out of), and an array of Japanese herbs and vegetables.
My sister and I most times referred to her as the “angry, crazy Asian lady” that we lived with more so than we referred to her as our biological mother. Other than the cesarean scars, she resembled little of what mothers usually resemble. Her prime concerns are: education, money, keeping up appearances and keeping her Japanese heritage rather than integrating with her white family. Of course, things have changed since I last lived with my mother 6 years ago. She has grown to be less of a yelling fuehrer and has returned more to the absent-minded and sweet foreigner that she was years before my sister and I were born.
Despite her efforts to remain as Japanese as she could, she did fall in love with some American things (besides my father, once upon a time ago), such as capitalism, the network television show “Friends” (although she always hated Chandler’s sarcastic humor, and being a literal thinker, this hatred carried into anything the actor ever touched even after “Friends” had long made their last episode. She would scoff and say underneath her breath, “Ugh, Totemo Baka Chandler” which roughly translates to “Ugh, very stupid Chandler.”), McDonald’s coffee and buffet/all-you-can-eat restaurants.
Naturally, my mother was beside herself (although never showed it) when I got the job at the local Sizzler by her house while I was still in high school—it combined two of her favorite things: free/cheap stuff and buffet restaurants. The only way my family would get a discount is if either my sister or I were working, so they would only come in while one or the other was serving or hostessing. Family dinners at the restaurant either meant 3 of us sitting while the other was serving the table, slipping extra salad bar plates to mom and dad, the forbidden to-go boxes for the salad bar, napkins, plastic utensils, fountain drinks, and bread rolls, or it meant that my sister and I would be buzzing around the restaurant while our parents enjoyed a nearly free meal, comped by Jerry or “overlooked” by one of the cashiers. On nights that my parents did not come in, I was instructed to grab as many free things at the end of the night that could fit into a couple of to-go boxes.
On my birthday or my sister’s birthday, my sister and I would beg my parents to go somewhere else other than Sizzler for a meal.
“Do you get a discount somewhere else?”
“No, mom,” we said simultaneously.
“Then we go Shizzlu-lah.”
One time, my mom suggested going to another type of family-restaurant in another strip mall across town. Excited that it wasn’t Sizzler, my family loaded up in the car and drove to it. As we walked in, my heart sank as I saw the long, depressing line of salad toppings, fried chicken, and soup—she had deceived us. This was just another buffet and low and behold, as we went to pay for our dinner, my mother presented the cashier with 4 coupons that had come in Camarillo’s Sunday paper.
She was just like that—wanting the most at the cheapest price. My sister was the first to truly go against her philosophy when she decided to go to an expensive, private university instead of opting out for the cheaper public institution.
When I started secretly working for the Sizzler in Goleta, I was caught in my attempt to keep it a secret. I gave my parents’ number as my only contact number and when another server called it to see if I could cover their shift that week, my parents caught wind of what I had been doing for the past month and forgave me when I came to them with straight A’s on my first term of college.
Realizing that I could no longer be punished because I was living off of financial aid and the money I had saved up from working 7 days a week in high school, I never returned home for longer than two days at a time and did whatever I wanted. There was no Japanese dorm mom to keep me from getting tattoos, piercings, staying out late, and hanging out with what she perceived as "yakuza"-type friends.
Maybe that’s why I overdid it so much my first year or two in college—it was the classic scenario of a caged bird that is let free; the bird will fly further away than they ever would if they had not been caged so long in the first place. By the time I was 20, my left arm and back were slowly being taken over by tattoos of whatever was appealing and free to me (including skulls, and an M-16 gun across my back) because I was dating a much older tattoo artist that my mother has conveniently, to this day, not known.
My face alone could make any metal detector go off from a mile away—I had 3 nose piercings, stretched ears, 3 neck piercings, tongue, lip and ear piercings. I would take them all out or hide them very well whenever I went to work or would see my parents. Despite my mother’s utter disgust at my appearance, she and my father would still make it out at least once a month to come for a free dinner at the Goleta Sizzler.
While other students’ parents were busy taking their kids to Costco or Trader Joe’s for food and much-needed supplies for school, my parents were getting a free meal from their waitress-daughter and leaving a very impressive $5 tip that, of course, my mother would always call up about later to make sure I grabbed it off my table and counted that, in fact, all 5 of the ones made it into my hands. She didn’t trust the busboys, or really anyone in that regard.
I spent almost every single holiday at Sizzler for almost 5 years, because it is one of the only restaurants that I know of that has a hard and fast rule to be open 365 days a year, and even 366 every leap year. There was no shutting down. Two Christmas Eves in a row I spent serving my parents, who would then wait for me outside to grab extra food for my sister, clock out and then we would drive back to Camarillo where we could all celebrate Christmas quickly, so I could make it back up to Goleta to make it for the dinner rush on Christmas night, where often times, my parents would enjoy another free meal. Mike would waltz in and dazzle them with compliments about me that I had never heard come from his mouth before.
For some reason, it never really occurred to me that other kids my age were having entirely different experiences in their first couple years in college. I just learned to live with it and I think I was deep-down, trying to prove my independence and rebellious nature to the rest of the world, which at that time, was purely my mother. My father was just as strict, but in that fatherly way. My mother never struck me as motherly.

She grew up in the late 40’s and 50’s in a Japan that was torn apart by war. I only met my grandmother once, right before she died. My mother, sister and I went to Japan for 3 months when I was just 5 years old. I remember very little of what my “Obasan” (Japanese for grandmother) was like, other than wrinkled, bitter and dying. When I think back to the small apartment in Kobe, I can smell the death that plagued the place. I remember not liking my grandmother very much and the language barrier made it so that I could never know her the way any American child could get to know their sweet American grandmother. But, again, even at that age, I didn’t realize that other kids were having completely different experiences than I was. I didn’t think I was anything special.
Obasan showed little to no love to my mother at all. After we came back to the states after our 3 month vacation, I don’t recall any long or intimate telephone conversations between my mother and Obasan. But again, I didn’t think it was out of the ordinary to be so cordial and distant with your immediate family. When Obasan died, my mother did not cry, but rather stood there like an impervious golden pavilion, guarded by a difficult and forgotten past. She made Mabadofu and rice that night for dinner, as my mother ate in silence with us, her white family.
I have looked back onto that day a million times in my head and I still wondered what she could have been thinking. Sometimes, I wonder how I will react when my own mother dies. Will I think of only her crazy obsessions with coupons and buffets, or will I remember her unconquerable nature and her gift of a refusal to completely assimilate into America?