Books With No Pictures

And it's back to school already ("already" being relative, considering it's been over a month since her last post...)~

This would be the beginning of the end (or is it the end of the beginning?), as this is her Senior year; but since she has it in her head to take a Victory Lap once this year is over she doesn't have quite the sense of dread looming over her that she expected she would. It's actually quite liberating--only taking four classes, two of them focusing on China (a curious sort of land that grows divine teas), one a health psychology course (oh, ethics...) and of course a Japanese Language course. And while these classes of hers continue to increase in difficulty and challenge her to think critically, they leave her less and less time to pursue her love of the written word. Her poor books are going to be left alone for a while with no one to conjure the life and warmth out of them. She's had to trade in her stories of silver-tongued book binders and magical messengers of the King for ethnographies about *gasp* real people. She'd rather have the books without pictures~

But now that she and Val are quite tucked into their hobbit-hole of a room (complete with a low ceiling, folks), perhaps she'll be able to get ahead of things and sneak in a few chapters here and there ;3

(also: She can't wait for fall and the implications it brings!)

The forests changing...

...their beautiful colored leaves...

...under cloudy skies.

Well That's Just Silly (And Other Nautical Expressions!)

Oh Japan. You have been great. She shall surely miss your beautiful mountains that seem to rise right out of the flattened fields; and the way the clouds stir about the peaks as if they are striking and rolling off of the steep wooded surfaces. Every morning's bike ride to school was made that much more bearable to her(despite the suffocating heat >__>) just with the knowledge that she could just turn her eyes up to the mountains and hear the sound of their music (yes, Julie Andrews is in Japan; didn't you know?).

She'll miss biking through Black Veil every morning as well; the over-grown pathway beside the main road on the last stretch before she hits Michigan Ave (yup, that's actually in Japan, too).

And while she doubts she would have survived even one journey through the real Black Veil (READ THE GREEN RIDER SERIES IF YOU DON'T CATCH THE MEANING OF BLACK VEIL.), this one still managed to take its last revenge and cause our ever-so-graceful heroine to tumble over her handlebars and spill onto the cement:

But it's not that bad (considering how bad it could have been; except, the Nythling-like bites that have been appearing lately, and are now on her palms, are quite distressing....) and the crows who haunted there always seemed happy enough to hop out of her way, and the great hawk that hunted for its meals nearby did love soaring quite beautifully on the currents above.

All of the random festivals, like the one pictured above that they ran into during Jenny's first trip to Kyoto, were a delight. She was especially glad to get to go to to festival in Rory's host family's town, Taga, and to spend the evening with their family and neighbors. It was more fun to be with them for the few hours that afternoon than it had been the whole summer with her own perfectly polite host family (who was very kind, but she could never seem to connect with, which wasn't their fault). 

(the right column of text literally says "Nagahama yukata festival")

(Getting to wear yukata to festivals was also a definite plus~)

Engrish. In its spoken form, or on clothing at the department store. Also, Influence such as:

(Text reads "this is the last" or "this is the end")

But for all of its charms (there are so many more than the ones just rattled off), she's very much ready to go back to America: the place where it's cheap and easy to make grilled cheeses with tomato soup! And while she still has no clue what her future holds, she does know for certain that there is a polydactyl blob of soft-fuzzyness just waiting to crawl into her lap <3

Arigatou, Minna-san!

Stuff I (Don't) Own

First off, she would like to make the disclaimer that she is perfectly fine (if that oxy-moronic statement can ever be taken seriously...) and that the following are rambles and musings that have a tendency to flood her mind in search of an outlet. Please do not feel obligated to read this what-so-ever.

Music is a driving force for her, and certain songs and lyrics resonate with different parts of her being: with things she wishes were not real and some things she wishes would come to be true, regardless of their implausibility.
This is the song that slammed her in the face as she was walking up the stairs to her room at her home-stay after painstakingly finishing her home work in the main room of the house with a T.V. distracting her the whole time (...she really does not care for T.V. what-so-ever....):

("What You Own" from RENT)

Since the text for the lyrics if far too long and not the main focus of the post this time, the main parts will just get broken down individually. She's obviously in Japan, and not America, but use your imagination (just like when you read a book with no pictures in it~).

"Don't breathe too deep/ Don't think all day/ Dive into work/ Drive the other way/ That drip of hurt/ That pint of shame/ goes away, just play the game"

"Just getting through today", and "take it one day at a time", or even "don't worry about tomorrow, it will worry about itself" are great mottos and are probably really helpful when traversing the really trying days in life; but when they become the sole functioning program wired into a person's brain (AKA Autopilot) the person stops really living. She feels like she's so busy just trying to get through life that she's not actually living it. At the moment, it sort of just seems like all she has to show for three years and a summer of college is a case of anxiety and a shattered self-image. Not that she'd rather be full of herself or boastful, but having relatively no self-confidence (or even self-respect, a lot of the time) doesn't really seem like it's the right way to being living and cherishing the time and blessings she's been given.

"So I own not a notion/ I escape and gape, content/ I don't own emotion- I rent"

This shouldn't be taken to mean that she doesn't enjoy things or the people in her life: she dearly loves her friends and family and wouldn't want them to be anything but themselves. And yet, she feels that she is completely helpless in her life and the direction it's going in. She knows that she can rely on God's strength and the assurance that He has our paths laid straight before our feet. And as she loves a good intrigue, she wouldn't want to be told the punch line or any key plot elements of her story before it was time for them to be revealed (you DO NOT mess with the Tim-Space Continuum! Spoilers always lead to more unnecessary wibbly-wombly, timey-wimey non-sense...), but she can't help but feel that she's wasting everyone's (God's and her own, included) time just being as she is now. She can strike up a spark of real heart felt emotion sometimes, but more and more that emotion isn't contentedness, joy, or even hope: it's part crippling guilt, part uncalled for frustration, and part despair. And she's not a fool. she knows that "fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering" and that's the path to the Dark Side. In their attempt to help her cope with these violent mood plunges, her friends have taken to giving those moments a new persona that can be blamed outside of herself, "affectionately" called "Dark Ashley" or "Black Ashley" (hmmmmmm, wonder what the Dark Side would think of their new padawan....)

"We're dying in America/ To come into our own"

Okay, so she's not dead yet! And there is nothing in her life that she can complain about considering that she has far too much for any one person to be thankful for, and she doesn't for a second want to make it sound like she's bemoaning her circumstances at all. In the words of one of her favorite characters, Edmond Dantes, from the 2002 film "The Count of Monte Cristo" :

Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you: as Albert Mondego, the man!

(obviously substitute out at the appropriate places. But you understand, I'm sure.)

She doesn't want a life filled with sunshine and rainbows and unicorns (ignoring the fact that for it to truly be her perfect world, there would be thunderous clouds billowing across the sky and pouring down rain as she sat inside with a cat on her lap, a book in her hand, and a cup of tea close by...). She wants to be able to say that she's weathered the storm, and that it's made her who she is. She hopes that she can one day become a person at least a little bit like who she wants to be. And in order to change and grow and to become that person (she knows it doesn't magically happen overnight), decisions have to be made, battles have to be fought, and sacrifices have to be given up. She knows. She just feels that all she's doing is fighting (with herself, school, the world's expectations...) and all she's doing is losing (any self-respect she ever had, time, opportunities...). In "dying to come into her own", she feels as if she's completely lost herself--she doesn't know who "she" is (hello, veiled explanation for third-person streams of consciousness). And unfortunately, all that leaves is the ideal "Ashley"--a young women she desperately wants to be but could never even hope to even scratch the surface. And with only an ideal, well, nothing she ever does measures up.  Even if the storm decided to "do its worst", she would only be able to scramble about, believing that there is nothing she can do, for the best or the worst. And just surviving isn't living; it's a mockery of what a life could and should be.
This isn't meant to sound depressing; she just finds it very hard to articulate correctly what she means most of the time, and hates lying by always saying "I'm fine" or "I'm doing okay". She's not but she is. It isn't anything new, merely an attempt at making a concise observation.

Festivals and Fossils

(Oh the negligence... my humblest apologies...)

The past weekend was a busy one—not that she’s making excuses for not updating, or anything…

*ahem*

On Friday, they made there way over to Shiga University for their Yukata Festival in honor of Tanabata. Tanabata is the celebration of an old folk tale about two lovers in the skies that are separated by the milky way. But on one day a year, the seventh day of the seventh month (even though I'm pretty sure he's not the seventh son of a seventh son... maybe) if the weather is clear a bridge appears and they are able to be together. 

(to the back and right are the two kanji for Tanabata (literally "seven night") and "2011" spelled with candles patrons could buy and color to contribute)

So, naturally, this being a yukata festival, the Gaang (minus a few State-side members) dressed in their finest and had a merry time:

(Photo by Jenny)

(close up of Ashley's yukata pattern)

She even tried plum wine.....(thank you, Katie, for the photo montage ~)

(The Apprehension)

(The Attempt)

(The Tasting)

(The Description)

(The Rejection)

......and she didn't like it much...

The night wore on and eventually she made the long trip back to Nagahama and her home-stay (but she saw a beautiful black cat on the ride home, so she could ignore the fact that her close were sticking most uncomfortably in the 80 something heat despite the fact that it was past 10pm...)

On Sunday was the JCMU field trip! They were to take a bus together to the Lake Biwa museum in Otsu (the sister city of Lansing, MI, and the capital of the Shiga prefecture about an hour away) and then visit an Onsen at a very upscale Japanese Ryokan (Onsen= hot spring bath; Ryokan=tratitional Japanese Inn), and then a shrine that was posted over the waters of Lake Biwa.

The museum had fossils, rock specimens, and an aquarium, so naturally she was thrilled to pieces:

(Mammoth!)

(Oh, Water Temple... You've been plaguing people for a very long time...)

(Washtubs~ So many delightful references come to mind~)

(Awesome)

(we have cookies shaped like these)

(Rory!)

(Katie!)

(Aquarium tunnels are the best; even old Japanese men think so~)

(Being a glutton...)

(BEING GHOSTS D: )

They rushed out and were ushered back onto the bus to take them to the Ryokan. It was so beautiful, and kind of intimidating:

(They passed this lovely hidden lemon tree, and discussed the infinite uses and advantages of having a  lemon tree in one's back yard..)

(Look at all those foreigners...)

(Our very fancy traditional Japanese lunches...)

(Full of delicious creatures with their eyes intact O__O )

(Oh yeah. There's fear in those eyes...)

She and Katie decided not to join everyone in taking a bath; and instead sang free karaoke with another classmate for over an hour~

The JCMU crew boarded the bus once more time and headed to the shrine:

It was a little small, too small for the amount of students swarming it, SO she and Katie left to make friends with the locals on their way to get ice cream back by the bus:

(Sleepin')

("....hey. Who are you?")

("Can we be friends?!")

(So hot and so little shade)

We needed to remedy this situation. The water bowl was in the sun and could have comfortably steeped tea in its hot water. So she bought a bottle of cool water for the poor dear:

(I wish I could just take you to a home in the hills where it's cooler and you could play in the water and lie in the shade...)

Shortly after the rest of the students began swarming the bus and so they returned home, reading Green Rider, no less~