a second year in The Life

Crap.

I’ve been so hit and miss on the old bloggerino (mostly miss) that I neglected to commemorate two years of blogdom last week. Thus, inspired by my more timely post last year, here’s a belated, バラバラ sort of update that should cover a number of things in a random sort of manner.

The Art of Destruction

Though I think it's an aspect that Heather finds unsettling, I can often find there to be something awe-inspiring in catastrophe, in horror. Maybe that's the same side of me that often thinks the most interesting stories--the most moving and affecting--are the darkest ones. Whatever it is, it manifests when I try to put myself in the shoes of someone watching Hitler's rise to power, try to imagine what it would be like to have the realization dawn on you that a man you thought to be a charismatic dictator was actually a genocidal maniac.

I try to imagine what fits of imagination were required to assimilate the scale of destruction wrought by the atom bomb when nothing like it had ever been seen before--I try to imagine that watershed moment when the realization sinks in and your view of the world is upended by a weaponized piece of science fiction. I try to flesh that out to wonder what weapons we could never imagine are currently out there in development; I try to imagine what it will be like when they are released and we have to reformat our worlds to make them make sense.

In the midst of madness...

...there is still beauty to be had.

I realize it when I, guiltily, pull myself away from my order-in lunch at the junior high school today, put my suit jacket back on, and file into the school's genkan with the other sensei. We welcome one of our students--the last of the third graders to graduate--back to the school for the first time in months. We all follow her into the principal's office and cram in around furniture to be the witnesses to the presentation of her diploma. In this small office, they do it with all of the pomp and ceremony that they used when the rest of her class graduated "normally" this morning in the cavernous gym. With the exception of the odd setting, there is no mention or recognition of whatever demons have kept her from school these last months. Her homeroom teacher announces her just like any other student, and the principal hands her the certificate just as woodenly as he's handed all the others, and then we teachers--us small posse--we clap like it was the most regular thing in the world.

In the parts of Japan untouched by the recent tragedy, life goes on.

All's Well. I was on the Mountain.

First off: I'm fine. Completely. Didn't know there'd been an earthquake until it exploded all over my Facebook just after 14:50 on Friday afternoon. I didn't feel a thing, and when I turned to my co-worker at the Board of Education to tell her that there'd been a big earthquake down in Iwate-ken, she seemed completely unperturbed. I left work at three like I was supposed to, rode a bus into Yoichi (mostly along the Sea of Japan coast), and then jumped another bus inland to Kutchan where I'd be meeting Mark, Alistair, and Ross for some nightboarding at Hirafu.


The view from a bus in Hokkaido at pretty much the exact time that the world was falling down.

If it hadn't been for my phone, I never would have gotten any indication that anything was amiss in other parts of Japan.

It was that uneventful here. When I spoke to Mark, he told me that he hadn't felt it, either, over in Iwanai. Ross and Alistair had felt it on the mountain, near Kutchan, but they had no idea about the scale of the craziness that was going on down south.