Sadly no cycling this past weekend as but there was a visit to Fujiyoshida, near Mt. Fuji. There was coffee, snow, mountaineers, Mt. Fuji-themed cookies and rice balls, Blueberry Cheesecake Kit Kats, and funky trains.
Hope you guys had a great weekend!
9.30 a.m. – My sister and her girlfriend leave for the airport after two weeks of eating their way through Tokyo. [Pictured: my sister. She eats dessert multiple times a day. I cannot believe the bitch is like 95lbs soaking wet.]
11.00 a.m. – My Mom is holed up in her room with the door closed. Email my sister: “Thanks for visiting. Mom is now in some depressed stupor.”
2.00 p.m. – Map out how to get to a new [to me] bike shop to pick up some gloves. Realize that it’s right in the middle of Ameyoko [short for America yokocho, which literally translates into “America alley.” Post WWII, the area beneath the Okachimachi train tracks served as a black market for American products. By the time my mother was in elementary school, the area was no longer limited to illegal products and she has fond memories of getting chocolate and exotic, Western candy there. The area has expanded since then, turning into an open air market encompassing three streets, all selling cheap clothes, dried fruit, herbs, canned goods, fresh fish, and candy. ]. Wander around in denial that I’m kind of lost.
2.15 p.m. – Corner a middle-aged man locking up a pretty Look and ask for directions. He gives me what sound like decent directions.
2.20 p.m. – That guy was totally wrong because I find the store – Art Sports Annex – on the way to wherever he was telling me to go. Or maybe he was right. In any case, success!
2.23 p.m. – Scamper up three flights of stairs. Find and buy gloves. Look around the store. Holy shit, this is roadie heaven…and this is only one floor...!
2.30 p.m. – Mid-lusting after some new [white!] Sidis, start talking about ride routes with the super nice sales guy. I’m still bundled up in a jacket and scarf; upper lip starts sweating [gross, I know]. Wonder about protocol on this one while trying to speak in Japanese and think in English [this doesn't help the sweat situation].
2.45 p.m. – Am told that not many people go looking for mountain passes to climb, women even less so. This makes my day, despite the fact that I’ve been too busy eating to ride my bike for the past two—okay, okay, three weeks. Reluctantly leave because I have no money to spend.
3.45 p.m. – Home again, my Mom is still in her darkened room. Feel slightly bitter because hi, I’m her daughter too.
5.00 p.m. – Find out my Mom has Norovirus, not depression. Email my sister: “Never mind, she just has diarrhea!”
6.30 p.m. – My Dad comes home, goes to check on my Mom.
6.32 p.m. – My Dad steps in dog pee. Walk into the room to find my Dad flailing around with one foot planted in place. Imagine a 60-something Japanese man in a suit and black wool overcoat playing Twister and it’s a pretty accurate mental image.
6.35 p.m. – Clean up dog pee.
6.45 p.m. – Start heating up random stuff for dinner. Promptly drop a plateful of food and watch it shatter all over the kitchen floor.
6.46 p.m. – Clean up bits of glass and food while trying to keep my dog away from both. This is accomplished mostly by staying in Bird Dog Pose.
7.10 p.m. – Eat dinner.
8.30 p.m. – Eat too many prunes [I love prunes, okay? Love. Even if my intestines don’t].
11.00 p.m. – It’s been a long day. PTFO [“pass the fuck out”].
The first day on my new job, I sat next to a woman who heaved an exasperated sigh before starting work. Seconds later, her headset in place, she chirped out a cheerful yet courteous hello into the receiver. The ease with which she flipped the switch was slightly terrifying, her darker mood immediately returning once she hung up. It was my welcome into the weird world of telemarketing.
Currently temping at a small language services company as a glorified telemarketer, I spend seven hours of my day immersed in the constant din of high-pitched chatter. We cajole, encourage, and placate, gesticulating into the air or bowing in front of our computers as we say goodbye, as if, despite the telephone’s long history, we still can’t shed the desire to interact in person. Our unconscious movements imply that the distance is something that shouldn’t be, even if the invention of the telephone has made possible the mere existence of the exchange. Communication seems a distant dream as we cock our heads at our screens or shrug helplessly at whosever eye we happen to catch. We talk and giggle, suck on cough drops by mid-afternoon, and nurse sore throats on the commute home.
And as the falsity of my current telephonic interactions threatens to permeate reality, I’ve taken to glancing in that narrow space between my computer screen and the phone. Nestled there, blending into the unremarkable cubicle wall, sits my gray Ride.Studio.Cafe water bottle, scarred black in places by my bottle cage. It gets refilled, swigged from, and picked up several times a day, its weight and shape a comforting reminder. But it is its simple slogan, to “Ride. Rest. Repeat.,” that has been my saving grace of late.
Because raised in a Japanese family, my parents had always insisted that I take whatever task I endeavor, seriously. “We don’t care what you choose to do [except we really do], just as long as you take it seriously,” they said. And though this primarily applied to grades and other external measures of success, the attitude left me with a tendency to throw my everything into the things I undertake. But when too many hours of my day are spent at a job, which, if taken seriously, could only lead to dementia, I hunger for a spark, a sign, some indication that dreams don’t all die at underemployment’s door.
So my mornings, which start before the sun rises to squeeze in whatever time I can on the bike, have become more desperately meditative than their initial purpose to simply “stay fit.” I push the pedals as if chasing down ambition’s escaping wheel, despite the irony of remaining stationary on the rollers. And even on my “easy” days, I will too easily drive my legs into painful exhaustion, knowing I can relish the burn in my thighs later, when I’m trapped in a chair, counting down the minutes until the end of the day. Because for now, there is nothing I’d rather do, than “ride. Rest. Repeat.”
Viewed objectively, my stubborn focus on riding seems almost silly: the world is on the brink of a global recession, I’m probably drinking radioactive water, and Mitt Romney could be the next President. But it reminds me, too, that I am extremely lucky in having found a passion that I am not willing to compromise. It makes me more selfish and more anti-social than I probably should be, but torn away from friends and [bike] family, I eagerly exit the doors every day to return to two bicycles with some dangerously worn down parts, and a pair of chamois shorts I pray will get me through the winter.
The resulting sense of purpose – of something to go home to, I suppose – also suggests that perhaps my life is not so dispensable. That I am not defined, in any way, by the title of my current position of employment. And when the next day, and the next, and the one after that, only brings with it a mind-numbing, menial job, where the petty politics of the workplace seem to rule, that feeling is a priceless asset.
“You know, when I saw you carrying that, I realized, I haven’t seen a bike water bottle in so long, “my co-worker said as he lay, sprawled across one of the couches in the break room.
“Oh, cool,” I said, before changing the subject, reluctant to discuss cycling. I looked at my bottle again after he left, and traced the words with my eyes for the rest of the day until I scooted out the automatic doors, and exhaled.
I pointed my feet towards a train station and home, to ride, rest, repeat, again.
Wore this [along with my NYC Velo socks] to work today.
Thinking Dreaming of New England, bike rides, and Ride.Studio.Cafe friends. And, of course, CSG.
Miss you guys [like craaaaazy]!
“We’d like you to introduce yourself first in English, then in Japanese,” came the request.
I was facing three strangers in a room whose defining characteristic was that it simply had none. Stark and barren, manufactured and blank, I sat uncomfortably in a similarly indistinguishable suit, and commenced to distinguish myself by choking spectacularly.
Because while mixing the two languages together comes naturally, when asked to switch – in seconds – from rattling off bar certifications in English to doing something similar entirely in Japanese, I start to sound like a drowning child with Tourette’s. My brain shut down, that time, and I spent an eternally slow second moving my jaw silently, groping for words I knew, deep down, weren’t there (though, I figured, it didn’t hurt to look). All while being stared at by people I had met less than five minutes ago.
It comes as a surprise to many that I am barely literate in Japanese. I cannot read a newspaper or write a coherent paragraph about even the simplest concepts, but can converse enough to deceive people into believing I am a “normal” Japanese person. I lack the accent that my sister has developed after too many years away from Tokyo, as well as any external signs that I am not entirely of this country. This has led to numerous embarrassing episodes in which I am forced to stumble, verbally blind, through simple, daily interactions. Most recently, at my local bank, a teller kindly showed me the characters to copy into the relevant spaces as my hand shook, my face flushed in shame. “Look,” I wanted to say, “I’m not really an idiot. Really. I promise. I just never got around to learning my own language. But I’m not useless in English! No, I mean it. I passed the bar…two bars, actually! That means something, right?” But only able to convey so much, I pushed down the peeking tears of embarrassment, thanked her, and walked out into a street that seemed too bright, too crowded, and too overwhelming for my small words.
This struggle to express myself is – putting aside my lack of a scrotum – the more emasculating and disenfranchising because words are my chosen medium. The ease with which sentences can flow from mind to typing fingers, the catharsis of hitting all the right tropes, the allegories articulated by alliteration…all become mangled or nonexistent when I attempt communication in my alternate language. The pressure builds further as I look as if I should belong here – those freckles I work on all summer fail to suggest foreignness and only inspire pity at my blemished complexion – the façade slowly giving way as furrowed brows press together for simple vocabulary and my grammar disintegrates like dampened rice paper.
“Oh, that’s just culture shock,” some people might say. “Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.” And it’s true that we are all allowed some time to hide under this all-encompassing excuse for our respective inability to adjust appropriately to a different culture. But if they are implying that there is some finite period after which one recovers and emerges with an understanding of what has occurred, my linguistic ball gag is more akin to a full-blown case of PTSD. The frustration slips into my decidedly unilingual thoughts, tripping up thought processes with guilt, and translates into even my writing. My usual rote escape, a week or two has slipped by before a comment from Josh forced my hands back onto the keyboard. But the words are now tinged with a measure of guilt because I cannot do even half of this in Japanese. It brings to mind how I once coyly, lightly quoted Sage Francis – “This ain’t a good impression, but I work better on page/They say words are my profession” – only now, unable to mop up after myself, to feel the heavy irony of those lyrics.
And linguistically muted, there has been a companion stranglehold on any desire to push the pedals, my cluelessness as to ride routes underlining another loss of freedom. Hesitant to ask for yet another guided ride, yearning for the lost ability to swing a leg over my bike and head confidently towards a familiar route, I have chosen to [ironically] spin resolutely in place. It doesn’t do much for my legs, or my lungs, but it gives me a brief hour to dream to a sunrise, before facing the perpetual frowns of unfulfilled expectations.
Back in that sterile room, scrutinized further by the glare of fluorescents, my interviewer asked me what I missed most about the States. For a split second, I was chasing Dave N., Jeremy, and Chris through a typical New England summer, the wind softly teasing the robust greenery around us. I could feel myself squinting up at the sun before standing up in the pedals, realizing I was close to getting dropped. “Nature,” I replied, a little lamely, because there was no way to express the sweet smell of bike rides, friends, and a favorite boy. “Good,” came the reply, as if satisfied with my feigned detachment from my former life. I smiled as I kept the door firmly closed on the threatening flood of homesickness, consciously resisting the pull towards a place other than lonely, and feeling – for the first time in weeks – an intense ache distinct from the blunted, dull sensations of my current day to day.
I kept a cautious hand on that emotional door until we all bowed, said our “thank you”s and finished with our formalities. As I boarded the train, I tried to concentrate instead on the straps of my bag digging uncomfortably into my shoulder, on how tired I was, and how I was out of tissues, so crying wouldn’t really be practical, at least not until I got home.
But I still thought of Boston the entire way back.
