Nice Shot

One nice thing about having a better camera is the ability to write blog posts with no real content, just a nice photo:

 

100 Years

Puffs of cottonwood seed, warmly backlit by an afternoon sun, floated lazily in the air like fat chunks of snow. Outside of my dad’s office I stood by his car and waited in the parking lot for him to check his email before heading to the hospital. We had a phenomenal dinner a few minutes before at a new restaurant in town that I’d found on Yelp.

Pretzel evidence from the dinner in question.

“You want to go with me up to the hospital and get dessert? There’s just a couple of things I have to sign off on; it’ll just take a second.” he’d asked a few minutes earlier.

“Um, I could walk Maggie here if that would be more helpful…” was the answer I came up with as the best way to say “no thanks.”

“Nah, let’s just go; it’ll be just as quick.”

“Sure… sounds good.” And it was decided. My reluctance was based on the fact that the hospital in question was about an hour away and “it’ll just take a second” were words you learned quickly never to hold much merit to, coming from my dad.

Really I didn’t have anything else to do, and the idea that I was moving from this place in less than a month gave a haunting pall to all the choices that I made, like this could be my last chance to go to the hospital as someone other than a patient.

When I was a kid I would sometimes tag along with my dad to the hospital while he did his rounds. After arriving there was the usual “you’ve gotten so big” and “you probably don’t remember me” from all the doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff who I didn’t remember, and I would find a corner in the staff waiting room and entertain myself quite contentedly with Pokémon. But on this trip the hospital struck me in a different light. [Will write on this soon.]

On the way back we drove by a historical district of the city that I’d never seen before. Never knew existed. Rows and rows of enormous old Victorian houses, each different from its neighbor and bearing rich colors that stood out like fruit among the green thick of Michigan trees in the early summer. Middle-aged people sipped white wine on their front porches and watched as the sun sank lower and filtered through the sugar maples that lined the street.

We drove by with the windows open, and I wondered what it would be like to live in a house like that. Warm summer air filtered through my fingers and my hair; the kind of air that, being at almost perfect body temperature, sinks past your skin to stir up memories of summers past. You close your eyes and you could be five, you could be fifteen, you could be twenty-two….

On dad’s playlist came up 100 Years, by Five for Fighting. Back in December, 2004 was the last time that it’d peaked (or so Wikipedia tells me), just around the time I turned fifteen. Back then I remember listening to the song and thinking how appropriate it was, since I was fifteen for a moment.

Six years later and now I’m twenty-two, for a moment. And fifteen wasn’t all that long ago. My fifteen year old self was in high school, engrossed in musical theater and set on a career in medicine and never thinking for a minute that I would end up in the place I am now.

Both under the summer spell of nostalgia my dad stopped at a flashing yellow light, caught in a reverie as he looked at the setting sun. An irate honking from behind us broke the serenity though as a couple in a vintage Jaguar blared erratically and repeatedly like somebody who’d found a scorpion in the cup holder.

…On the drive back the sun had dipped down below the tree line and the sky began to deepen, and unlike the way up, the trip back was spent without music. We really didn’t need any.

With only three weeks left before I head off, I think I’m looking at my hometown just a little differently than I had before.

Welcome Home

EDIT: The following story is from early March. Once it has a chance to be out in the blog-o-sphere I’ll move it back to its proper place in time. Over the next few days I’ll have a series of stories from my spring break trip which I’ll do the same. Stay tuned. :)

Spring break was amazing. We throw the word “amazing” around a lot to describe stuff that’s even sort-of fun, but it really was incredible.

Tokyo from Roppongi Hills. Taken with my Rebel before it died. 

Takeshi and I explored a side of Tokyo I’d never seen before and took our first “Asia” trip to Seoul, South Korea. While Seoul was more of an adventure and Tokyo more of a vacation, we had a great time in each, mostly in the small things we did together: Going to Starbucks to try an orange flavored latte (tasted like a creamsicle), or taking the train 45 minutes in the wrong direction, or savoring nothing other than McDonalds in Seoul after we were too tired and too timid to try something from the food vendors in Myeoungdong… We packed more into 10 days than I’d done in month of study aborad in Japan. But to spend every day with someone you love and who loves you; you can’t wish for anything more.

The view from Seoul’s N. Tower at night.

Which made coming back all the more difficult. Like, I-can’t-believe-this-is-my-life kind of difficult. Anger and self pity that was extremely detrimental for my transition back to real life. Like Harry Potter at the beginning of The Chamber of Secrets. But instead of an obese cousin and absuve relatives I have roommates with whom I have an at-best-neutral relationship with. With whom I can’t hate, but instead spend forever in a purgatory of passive aggressive female behavior.

At midnight, after 24 hours of traveling from Narita to Chicago to the Amtrak that took me five hours back to Ann Arbor, I finally hauled my enormous suitacse in my room.

And on my desk that was previously cleared off from packing, there laid disassembled smoke detector. My disassembled smoke detector, just…there. After some thought, I knew that since I didn’t put it there, and it probably didn’t magic its way over to the table and pull itself apart, one of my roommates must have removed from the ceiling and scattered on my once-clean desk. Discovering a gaping hole in the ceiling and a family of rats would have been an equally as surprising, but far more logical discovery, because the idea of somebody doing this was outside of my standards for human behavior.

My investigative powers of deduction concluded that the battery in the smoke detector must have been low and beeping to be changed. One of my roommates was courteous enough to come into my room, take it from its place in the celing and remove the battery, leaving the pieces on my desk as if to say “this was annoying so I stopped it. Change the battery? kthx! :)” though a note saying that would have been helpful.

Welcome home.

With an exasperated sigh I swiped the pieces of the smoke detector aside, placed my suitcase down and started to unpack. My hands first touched a folded shirt that Takeshi’s mother had expertly folded for me. I covered my face with it and slowly drew in the smell. Warm wood and clean laundry and slightly grassy smell filled me, and I closed me eyes and I was back in the room floored with tatami I had slept in just a night before…drawing it it the smell heated me from the from the inside like a shot of something strong,  and reminded me so much of “home.” Really the only home I felt I had since the move in November.

And I opened my eyes, and exhaled, and it was gone as fast as it had come. A kind of magic, I felt so far away from where I just was.  You don’t notice the smell of family until it’s not there anymore.

Some Complications

EDIT: At the moment it’s 4:03 AM; I went to bed at midnight and have been unsuccessful in falling sleep. Sorry if there are more errors than usual in the word-spew that’s below.

My life has been better.

On Monday after an hour of doing one-man-karaoke to Lady Gaga on the way to and from my doctor’s appointment, almost an hour away, my heart was nearly bursting at the seams in fullness of newfound self-confidence and courage. So much so that I was ready to start something new, to start the path I knew was meant for me, and so called and emailed the art department of my “old” school to ask about admission into the school as a duel-degree candidate. A few hours later I got this response:

The University’s policy for second degrees is that there must be two years in between your graduation and the enrollment for your second degree. That means you are not eligible to apply for and enroll until Fall 2014.

If you choose to do so, you will need to follow the transfer application instructions. You should know that you would be required to be here a minimum of 3 years to complete a BFA.

Or in other words “don’t bother.”

The email took me so off guard I just sat for a moment and stared at the screen, feeling the assuredness evaporating out of my pores and dissipating into the air, gone. Just the day before I researched and compiled a list of art schools in a Google doc, probably for the better part of six hours, until I had a pretty comprehensive list of schools that I was interested in and their respective programs…. that is before I took a closer look into the details of  attending and got emotionally blindsided for a second time. Other promising schools, particularly one outside of the San Francisco area, have a price tag of about 18,000 a semester. Just for tuition.

Before art school, which is an idea probably only a few weeks old, I was set to go out to California with my mom and take classes out there (maybe on web design, maybe in pre-med, who knows?) doing the same amount of research on the internet of what my options were. After that was the art school thing, and as of yesterday my game plan changed again to returning to Japan to be with my boyfriend and working on the side to save up money, maybe with an ESL company like NOVA that would sponsor a work visa. I submitted three applications to different companies in the span of a few hours, and got a response from one asking for a cover letter and resume just a few hours later.

A little Googling into the ESL business in Japan revealed however that working for one of these companies really sucks in general, and is really only a means of obtaining a work visa until you can quit and find something else to do. Also the idea of teaching salarymen one-on-one creeps me out and makes me even more apprehensive to go back to Japan than I already felt with my most recent idea of going back for a year.

My ideas are radical and changing constantly, almost daily, and I obsess over thinking about them until I cannot sleep at night and I spend the better part of my days in front of the computer, opening tab after tab and scanning, clicking, scanning, compiling my findings and thoughts in a Google doc, weighing my options, and then at the end of the day realizing why it maybe was never that great of an idea to begin with.

Post-grad so far is a solid D-: My life is tumultuous and not in a cool or inspiring way, like this photo I took a few days ago. (Nice segway, right?).

Normally I try and avoid whining and expressing too much self-pity on my blog, but if I don’t express it in some way these thoughts will keep swimming in my mind until I’m emotionally spent past the point of quick recovery, ready to retire to a simple life of painting colorful abstracts, taking pictures of backlit grass, and writing a better version of the next Hunger Games.

…at this point it sounds better than anything else I’ve come up with.

My Celebrity Friends

Normally I don’t devote entire blog posts to a YouTube video that I found but I felt like this had to have special mention: Robbin Williams and his daughter, Zelda Williams talking about their love for the Zelda series:

She’s exactly my age, which is kind of strange to process, watching the video, and apparently totally into the Zelda games, but without going too far into the “gamer girl” stereotype that makes that “awkward barrier” from which people shy away from you or you shy away from those kind of people for fear of association.

Zelda’s dad (should I call him Robin?) also seems to be genuinely having fun in the CM, which in a more personal light makes me a little sad to realize there’s no way in hell my dad would ever play a video game with me, or do anything that I like to do for the matter. Sure, we share a fondness for Redbox, but even then, the movie has to be something so non-offensive that it takes 90% of the films made today out of consideration… We don’t really have any mutual interets.

But I digress. Anyway throughout the entire four minutes and eight seconds my train of thought was something like, What a cool voice…She’s so cute… What a cute haircut, I should cut my hair short again… Seriously I don’t friend-crush over a girl too often but in another life we would be BFFs. Zelda Williams, and Emma Stone, who know nothing about but just from voice and demeanor seem like a genuinely cool person.

Maybe I just have a thing for girls with husky voices.

EDIT: Forgot to add Emma Watson, who on my YouTube escape this morning I heard say “The difficulty of me is that I’m interested in so many different things… I want to be a Renaissance woman. I wanna paint, I wanna write and I wanna act… I just want to do everything.” Preach, Emma, preach.

 

First Shots

My new camera is a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a piece of machinery I’ve been coveting and saving up for about a year. All those hours of tutoring paid off, plus a little help from graduation gifts. She’s an expensive one, but oh-em-gee I don’t think I can ever go back.

My first shot. Doraemon was a good model for me.

Auto-mode helps in that it’ll usually take a good photo for me when I would mess it up in manual, but I’ve been experimenting with the Av and Tv modes as well as working with ISO. Sadly I don’t have a tripod, and it’ll be awhile before I get one, but I’m happy to learn with a camera in-hand and get used to everything before I move up. An f-stop of like f/4.0 makes almost anything look cool, but don’t forget to crank it back up for landscapes. Not a lot of blurry landscapes end up with a great reception, judged of course from the number of responses on facebook.

Small flowers on the side of the road.

My cold still persists, but I’m hoping that today’s bout of unproductive lethargy will be one of my last for a while. Nothing else to write about, but I guess that’s the nice thing about having some good pictures in a blog post: nobody’s looking at the words. ;)

Post-Grad Begins

Since graduation and then getting sick I’ve been spending my days scourging the internet in hopes that the answers to my career indecision lies in opening another tab on Chrome until my browser is a cluttered mess or I end up far more frustrated and confused than when I started. Not all of the research is a waste of time though I suppose; I have a good idea of what options I have and where I can go from here.

• Pre-med classes for two years before taking the MCAT and applying to med school, doing that for four years followed by another three of residency for a total of 10 years of more schooling. Other health-related careers may take slightly less time.
• Undergraduate studies in fine or graphic arts. Commence into the unknown.
• Graduate studies in Asian Studies, TESOL, or a related field in hopes of getting a Ph.D and then later teaching at the college level.

Working on my painting has been good solace though; it’s going to be pretty when it’s all finished.

My new camera came, and if badass were manifested in camera form, this would be it. She’s about as heavy as a baby and I treat her like one. My dog Maggie isn’t the most cooperative when getting her picture taken, preferring to watch the ground in hopes that a light will appear. I did get one “money shot” of her yesterday:

No Photoshop necessary. I think I’m in love.

Community softball tonight and I’m hoping for more camera practice under the lights. Post-grad, or at least my summer vacation isn’t as relaxing as I hoped when I’m worried about what I’m going to do, but I’m working on it, and I know something will work out for me.