Mother's Day Ducklings

Last week, we found the duck, nestled in thick bushes on another part of our rooftop. The bird we’d assumed had decided against close human contact and battling two flights of stairs this year, had returned.

Questions regarding the intelligence of that choice aside, we were stuck with a belated discovery and no way to measure an estimated time of arrival of the ducklings. According to Google, we’d learned last year that mallards will lay an egg every one to two days. Once she has laid her entire clutch, the clock to duckling time starts. During this 28-30 day period, we noticed last year that the duck started to line her nest with downy feathers. Approximately 10 hours after hatching, the ducklings are dry and ready to leave the nest for the closest body of water. This year, by the time we found her new nest, the duck had already lined her nest with her feathers. There was no way to estimate when the ducklings were due.

Google will tell you that ducklings normally hatch at night and thus are ready to leave the nest around early morning. I will tell you that in the past two years, this has not been the case.

Last year, my dad, curious about the duck, wandered up to the roof and found a cluster of ducklings huddled in a corner of the rooftop in the late morning. This year, parental concern for children that are neither human, nor mine, had me checking the roof to make sure that the enthusiastic cawing of crows wasn’t related to a duckling lunch.

I was wrong. I saw a tuft of downy, dark brown fur on the stairs and sprinted up to the roof, anticipating a bloodbath. Instead, I found two giant crows eyeing a mallard that was attempting to find cover in a completely exposed area. With her eleven ducklings. I screamed. My currently hard-of-hearing parents didn’t hear me. I screamed again (and again and again) while making large frantic circles with my arms to shoo away the crows.

Once my parents recognized my screaming, our scant, half-joking preparations, consisting of several pieces of cardboard, were speedily produced. Stairs were navigated much more smoothly this time, even with 11 ducklings trailing behind her. Two neighbors we happened to run into took a piece of cardboard each and helped us herd the duck towards water.

We chose to take a side street this time, to avoid the traffic on the main street that the duck had chosen last year. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, and taking side streets meant children.

I have no beef with children. I think most of them are fun and hilarious. Although I have none of my own, I understand that raising children is a feat in itself and that sometimes, even if the parents are both certified saints, they can end up with a kid with a shitty attitude. I don’t blame the child for whatever antisocial behavior results. I just blame the parents.

 And that’s exactly what I did when some 8-year-old shouted at us that we were “SO MEAN” for “CHASING THAT DUCK.” He repeated it before his mother let her uncontrollable child down off of her bicycle and he proceeded to try to get as close to the duck as possible. Another child, a girl of about 10 to 12, did the same, repeatedly running towards the duck. I asked both to stop, to not get too close and frighten her. They looked at me, like they were testing how much they could get away with, while they continued their shitty behavior. Their respective parents did nothing.

Given that my own mother would have had no problem beating me in public if I actually yelled at the kids, I held my tongue. The duck nearly ran past the bridge, terrified of the press of children crowding her. She finally recognized the river and flew down; we helped the ducklings onto the ledge while the human children reached out, desperate to touch a duckling for no reason than to say that they’d done it. After the ducklings were all safely in the river with their mother, the strangers we had collected along the way made small talk about the ducks. Meanwhile, the children and their respective parents vanished, without so much as a disingenuous apology for the trouble.

“Oh, stop, they’re kids, they can’t help themselves,” my mom said later.

“Can’t help themselves? I didn’t act that way when I was their age,” I said.

“Well, just because you didn’t, doesn’t mean-“ she started.

“Oh that’s funny, you know why?” I said, “because you made sure I didn’t.”

“Ok, ok,” my dad interjected. I dropped it because I knew I was right. My mom dropped it because she either knew I was right but didn’t want to be the bitch I’m not afraid to be, or couldn’t believe the heartless asshole I’d become. Either way, she knew, and I knew that she knew, that it could have been a lot worse. That at the very least, she didn’t raise a shitty kid.

[This is a long video but I got a lot more footage this year and felt it would be a shame to make a shorter one. Enjoy!]

Hot Water Dreams

I recently spent part of an overseas vacation engaging in a passive aggressive electronic exchange with Airbnb. What I originally imagined would be a relaxing, enjoyable pilgrimage back to the U.S. had turned into a first-world nightmare. The space in question was great; it was cozy, relatively private, and located in a safe, wealthy-looking neighborhood. The issue was the hot water in the shower lasted a mere sixty seconds per day. 

I raised the issue with the host, naively believing that this must be some kind of mistake. The second time I asked her about it, she told me that Southern California was under a drought advisory and that “we take short showers.”

 By this time, I had endured three days of showers that started semi-hot, then quickly cooled to the colder side of lukewarm by the time I reached for the bar of soap. In the grand scheme of things, it was a minor inconvenience, just uncomfortable enough to make me miserable. Of all the uncomfortable scenarios I had imagined could manifest during this trip, lack of hot water was not one of them. Plus, hadn’t my host implied that hot water was deliberately being throttled as a forcing mechanism to save on her water bill, at my expense? Had I actually paid her for that privilege?

As I fantasized about letting the “hot” water run for hours and googled the implied warranty of habitability to make sure that I wasn’t going off the reservation, I leaned back in bed with my half-washed hair and did the only thing I could do: I binge watched Hoarders to feel less alone in my lack of baseline utilities.

Hoarders, as always, delivered. My irritation gave way to a grudging admission that at least I had a functioning toilet. But while I normally used the show to redefine the words “cluttered” and “messy,” a woman clinging to impossible dreams caught my attention. Adamant about completing her late husband’s spacious dream home, she had instead filled it up as if to protect herself from the reality of the task and the inevitability of failure. Life and loved ones had made clear that this wasn’t a path that would lead to any kind of happiness, but she refused to accept that fact.

“That dream is the only thing I have,” she said at one point.

“But that’s what life is,” Dr. Tompkins said, “accepting the loss of things that could be.”

When I planned this trip, a stateside visit for the first time in three years, I’d imagined that coming back would feel like home. It’s the only place I could feel normal, I’d claimed, and I had no doubt that the transition from Tokyo to L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco, would be seamless. I’d feel comfortable because, if not for immigration laws, the U.S. was where I was supposed to be. It was where I was supposed to thrive.

Or, so I told myself as I looked fruitlessly for jobs, life, friends, and partners in Japan. I imagined that life stateside would be normal, that my ability to communicate in the same language and understand cultural norms would gift me with some measure of, if not success, contentment. I conjured up an imaginary life where, on balance, things were generally pretty good, a far contrast from the mild discomfort I experienced every day in Tokyo.

Two weeks and several cold showers later, I’ve discovered how uncomfortable things can be here. After three years away, I’d assumed that I’d arrive stateside with blinders and rose-colored glasses strong enough to mask all of the imperfections I’d encounter. Instead – blame it on the cold showers or the piles of human feces on San Francisco sidewalks – I found myself a little less enthused, a little more conscious of the fantastic nature of my imagined stateside life. While I’m currently better equipped to handle emotional discomfort and hurt, would I have arrived at this place in my life without being anchored in Tokyo? Even if everything had gone according to the plan I’d set out for myself, would I have ended up happy? Or would the ease of living where I’m most comfortable only have served to perpetuate bad emotional habits? 

Previously, I would have said that it would all have been positive, because everything in my life in Tokyo had been the opposite. I felt stuck, and therefore, increasingly left behind by my peers who weren’t encumbered by a foreign nationality. Declaring that it was due to being legally tethered to Japan was a coping mechanism; a way to tell myself that there was hope for me somewhere. That I wouldn’t have been a failure everywhere.

But after a pandemic and some extensive therapy, even that definition of myself seems to have worn itself out. The reality is that I’m only a failure according to the dreams I’d set out for myself years ago, when I was decidedly less informed about my own happiness. It’s true, and maybe always will be, that life would be easier for me stateside. But for the first time since I’ve moved back to Japan, I accepted that happiness isn’t confined to specific locations and that clinging to a stateside dream hasn’t made me any happier. That maybe I don’t need to be somewhere to be happy.

That said, once I landed in Tokyo, I questioned whether these thoughts had been fueled by the generously potent legal cannabis in California. There’s comfort and familiarity with staying in the past, to keep identifying with dreams on life support. But like that lady on hoarders who built walls of stuff around her to keep an expired dream alive, the past can ruin any chance of happiness in the present.

I’m ready to let go. But not, you know, of hot water in paid accommodations.

Stand with Ukraine

A lot has happened, I know, but I would be remiss not to mention this incredible speech by the Kenyan ambassador to the U.N.

A Half-Price Brazilian Kind of Year

It’s been a year akin to a half-price wax. After an invisible year holding my breath – literally and figuratively – for a pandemic to pass, I went into 2021 with hope and expectations, feeling justified in my optimism given the creation of vaccines. 2021, I believed, would be a reward of sorts, a return on the investment in misery I’d made the year before. A time to collect on the karma points for masking up and resisting travel.  

Predictably, I’ve barely made it out. That’s not to say there weren’t signs, but waves of Covid, however numerous, did appear to temporarily abate. I clung to whatever positivity I could muster, convincing myself that the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t visible because it was around a corner, not because it didn’t exist. I told myself it was all a matter of perspective.

My newfound positivity was admittedly fueled by desperation and social isolation. I chose to ignore that crucial fact and forged forwards; after all, don’t they say that a positive attitude changes everything? When an email arrived in my inbox for a discount Brazilian wax from the waxing salon I frequent, I saw it as an opportunity. A little high five, wink, wink, from a business to its regular patrons, a co-conspirator who understood the importance of self-care during terrible times.

I should have known: there is no such thing as altruism in a shitty economy. Like the emergence of niche Greek letters into everyday conversation to describe pandemic variants, there were hints that this waxing session wasn’t going to go well. Maybe it’ll get better, I told myself, as if that had worked in 2020, maybe she’ll figure it out. Neither miracle occurred. Optimism slowly sank into disappointment, then dread, then despair as I realized I’d paid someone to give me ingrown hairs in delicate areas. Later, the image of my 5,000 yen bill being fed through a shredder repeated like a gif in my head as I tweezed out stray pubic hairs that would have been visible from space.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this experience would repeat itself for the rest of the year. Hope, defeat, dismay. By September, I was less than enthused to be waking up every day to the same cloistered routine and I’d nearly given up hope of a year that could be salvaged. Yet, ever hopeful when faced with the opposite, even on the afternoon of the 31st, I imagined that something could turn this year around.  

The odds of such a reversal are slim. Like the half-trained aesthetician who was shoved into a small room with my bikini line and a time limit, 2021 wasn’t set up to succeed. This year has been a cluster of time lost, deteriorating mental health, dudes who ghost, and persistent burn out. On the other hand, that aesthetician could have sent me to the emergency room and my labia did live to see another (full price, this time) Brazilian wax. That might not be much, but under the circumstances, I’ll take it.

2021, it hasn’t been fun, but thanks for the memories.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

I’m back at the gym and I have no idea what I’m doing.

There’s a general point to each workout, but other than trying to avoid an expanding waistline, and my need to see other living humans in my peripheral vision, there’s no long-term goal or event I’m lifting for. My split jerk is finally looking halfway decent; yet, I’m not sure if I want to keep chasing the possibility of weightlifting competition.

A pandemic, plus a surge in cases of Covid-19 infections during the summer, temporarily kept me away from the gym. With life returning to an adjusted normal and gyms reasonably safe, the opportunity for safer competition is there. But somehow, the gloss has worn off.

Like The Clash song, I’ve never been very good at leaving. Boyfriends, sports, gyms; I always tend to stay a little too long. It once took my getting dumped three times by the same person before I realized that the relationship may have run its course. You’d think I’d have figured it out by the second time, but my unflagging optimism stubbornly claimed that our happier memories far outweighed the numerous red flags. Compounded by the urge to avoid the loss of time, money, emotions, love spent, I’ve clung to anchors while drowning.

Insecurity has had a lot to do with it, but cycling also set me up for failure in that regard, where feeling like you’re having a heart attack is a package deal with having fun. Although the sport taught me the importance of mental fortitude, there was a constant suggestion that my inability to be better at the sport was due to some lack of dedication. If I’d been committed enough, I thought, I’d be able to lose more weight, climb faster, pedal longer. In an effort to prove my love, I spent too many years chasing an arbitrary number on the scale while my relationship with food went from disordered to out of control. I still struggle with it and the digestive issues it has since created.

The fear also lingers. Lacking absurd strength for my size and weight, serious competition in weightlifting would necessitate a hard weight cut. I can’t definitively say that it would be worth it. It’s not just the risk of spiraling or ending up in a place where I am waiting – desperately and endlessly –  to be happy until I reach some goal weight or lose X number of kgs. With Covid having shrunk our social interactions to the exchange digital emojis, could I pass on a chance to touch, hug, and laugh with friends I haven’t physically seen in too long, because I’m training for a competition? The answer for me, right now, is no.

That said, my workouts continue to center around the snatch and the clean and jerk. Kettlebell movements, pull-ups, push-ups, and even the occasional jog have been added; which is to say that I’m doing CrossFit in slow motion. While I expected my step back from weightlifting to bring about some existential turmoil, it’s opened up the opportunities to fail spectacularly at some calisthenics movements. At times I struggle with how generally aimless my workouts currently are, but there’s a relief and a freedom in choosing not to do the things I’m supposed to do, to not feel the need to prove my love to anyone else.

Last week, I hobbled to the stretching area of the gym after I hit a front squat PR. I joined a few other people, outstretched or contorted on the foam mats, all of us trying to work out our individual kinks.

Happy Halloween!

From your basic Coachella bitches!

(And yes, she hated me for this.)

Tank top pattern is available (for free!) here.

For my dog’s crop top, I used a pattern for a doll’s bikini, available here, and jazzed it up a bit, and made it longer.

The crochet pattern for the roses are heres://moaracrochet.com/easy-crochet-rose-free-crochet-pattern/, for the daisies here (although I modified these a bit).