Year of the Snake

Words.
I am experiencing a drought of words.

Or, perhaps, it is not for lack of words to string together.
Perhaps it is just that I have yet to successfully saddle and mount time. There is a bridle in place but my hands are caught and twisted in the reins. I'm being dragged around by a beastly stallion and I don't even have the sense to complain.
Is it a poor excuse? Perhaps.

It has almost been one year since I left teaching full-time. I never knew before how very short a year could be.

It has been two years since the disaster in Northern Japan. Two years since a tsunami washed away thousands of lives and my misconceptions of what I wanted in life.

I haven't been writing here because I have been busy elsewhere but without any tangible results to share. I know that this space is more of a process bulletin board but for my own idea of this online record of events, I would like to try and reach my own bizarre standards. Unfortunately, this means that I try to write here when the computer is free (unusual) and when my mind is clear (unlikely). Essentially impossible conditions in a small apartment crowded with littles.

The first post after an extended break is always the hardest. What do I tell and how much of it should I share?

Maybe if I break it into bite-sized bullet points then it will be simpler:

-Nico is graduating from kindergarten on Friday.
-Nico is starting elementary school in April.
-Sebastian will be a fourth grader.
-From April, I will teach part-time, Jason will teach part-time.
-I started a resin jewelry Etsy shop.
-We don't know how everything will work out.
-We don't know where we will end up. Everywhere is lovely and awful. We can no longer search outside of ourselves for utopia.
- I've been obsessed with this idea of Huxley's: "Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
-I cried watching this movie.
-Luca is a full-fledged walker who loves rice and vegetables. He also weighs almost 29 pounds.
-I am not reaching my writing quota. Getting the shop running has taken over all spare minutes. And there were not so many to begin with so I had to make some up. Like the minutes that fall after midnight.
-Jason bought a suit today and was highly disgruntled about it.
-The cherry blossoms will bloom soon. Again.

So, maybe that is good for now. I'll do my best to post at least twice a week from here on. For my own crazy standards, not for you, patient reader. I know that if you are reading this now, you're ready to wait me out.

xoxo

Belated

In one of my discussion classes at the college where I teach, we were talking about the kanji of the year for 2011. One of the students asked the question, what is your personal kanji of the year and this was met with the silence of contemplation (a special Japanese silence that gets some getting used to). Following this hushed lull in the discussion, most of the students said that they agree with the selected kanji, which means bonds. One student offered that she would choose the kanji for 'tear' as she can't remember a year when she cried so much. Naturally this made the rest of us rather sad so we came to the consensus that 'bonds' was the best way to sum up 2011.

After a few days of passive consideration, I have decided that my kanji would be something like this: 手後れ [ておくれ]. It isn't so great since there are two kanji and the hiragana 're' there but it is the rough translation of my word for the year: belated.
2011 has been nothing but a race against the clock. And not just one single race, but multiple races sometimes held simultaneously. We have a poor record this year, I'm afraid. We lost the first one back in January when we forgot to renew Colette's visa on time. Since then, it has really been a struggle.

Take the back-to-back birthdays last month. We are simply lucky that Nico is super understanding and that Colette is too young to complain. We did eventually make it up to them but it was not within the week of their official birthdays.

This is Nico at his school birthday party with the beloved Doraemon birthday crown.

And this is Nico with his girlfriend Miyu-chan. Though don't tell him I called her that. He considers himself simply tolerant of Miyu-chan's exuberant affections.

So, as much as belated is perhaps a less positive way to describe a year, I consider it to be an honest and rather malleable term. It doesn't equate failure but signifies the effort to catch up, despite the odds of winning. We leave this year tired of always being behind but feeling stronger for the effort it took to continue. I hope that next year I will get to choose a better word like 'amazing' or 'crazy successful' but knowing that 76 percent of Americans (according to a recent NBC/WSJ poll) consider 2011 to be either below average or one of the worst years of their lives, I think belated isn't such a bad term to own.